This School District Has Received Death Threats for Standing up for Immigrants. It’s Not Backing Down

Posted on June 10, 2026June 8, 2026 by Allegra Kirkland

This story about Winooski was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

WINOOSKI, Vt. — The day’s class started with a writing prompt: Do you feel safe in school? Why or why not? The students — whose families hail from across the globe and speak languages including Arabic, Nepali, Spanish and Somali — wrote their responses before reading them aloud.

“I feel safe in school because I saw the school doors are locked every time,” one student said, “and I heard ICE is not here.”

“If ICE comes to school, they are not allowed to go in,” said another.

“ICE can’t come in,” said a third teen.

The sense of security students feel in this multilingual learner class at Winooski High School is hard-won. Since the start of the second Trump administration, the federal government has investigated schools for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, rescinded a policy protecting students on school grounds from Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests and threatened school districts with the loss of federal funding. Administration officials have also encouraged states to challenge a decades-old Supreme Court decision guaranteeing undocumented students’ right to public schooling, which conservative activists say takes resources from American children.

While many districts have chosen to go quiet or self-censor out of fear of being targeted, the Winooski school system and its superintendent, Wilmer Chavarria, have taken the opposite approach.

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Reps. Ralph Norman and Nancy Mace Lose to Trump’s Pick in South Carolina Governor Race

Posted on June 9, 2026June 9, 2026 by Hunter Walker

Two erstwhile allies of President Trump who gave up their seats in Congress to run for governor of South Carolina failed to make it into a runoff election on Tuesday. Pamela Evette, the Trump-endorsed lieutenant governor, came in first place, followed by Alan Wilson, the state’s current attorney general. The two colorful members of Congress, Ralph Norman and Nancy Mace, lagged far behind.

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The Trump DOJ Grand Jury Scandal Transcript is Out

Posted on June 9, 2026June 9, 2026 by Josh Marshall

Be sure to see Josh Kovensky’s write-up of the grand jury transcript from the Broadview Six case which was released today. It’s as bad as predicted. A federal prosecutor, clearly under instructions to get an indictment no matter what, committed repeated instances of prosecutorial misconduct to get an indictment. That included telling the grand jurors to simply take her word for it that it was a good case and not worry if they didn’t actually have evidence that showed that. She also ejected two grand jurors who seemed adamant that they didn’t have a case. “I heard this case like last week and I thought it was a crock of shit then and I still think it is,” one hold-out grand jury told prosecutor Sheri Mecklenburg. Check out Josh’s piece which includes the transcript itself, which you can read.

‘A Crock of Shit’: Amid Misconduct Allegations, Broadview Six Transcripts Offer Rare Window into Grand Jury

Posted on June 9, 2026June 10, 2026 by Josh Kovensky

Grand jury sessions are among the most tightly held elements of the criminal justice system. But thanks to the collapse of the federal case against Chicago’s Broadview Six, transcripts from the proceedings were released into public view on Tuesday.

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The Supreme Court and California’s Election Deniers Are on the Same Page About (at Least) One Thing

Posted on June 9, 2026June 11, 2026 by Kate Riga

Republicans Ramp Up Election Denial in California Just Before Suspiciously Related SCOTUS Decision Drops

Two things are happening at the same time: 1) President Donald Trump and his stooges are becoming increasingly shrill about the “election fraud” that they insist explains a very liberal city advancing two Democrats to the general election and 2) the Supreme Court is going to release a decision that’ll likely curtail voting by mail nationwide any day now.

Coincidence?

While election denial is depressingly old hat for Republicans by this point, the fixation with the Los Angeles mayoral race is odd. Yes, Republicans ran an attention-attracting candidate in reality television star Spencer Pratt, and yes, California takes forever to count its ballots. Conservative media covered Pratt in the runup to the jungle primary as if he stood a real chance of defeating the Democratic candidates. But Los Angeles County has three times more registered Democrats than Republicans — it’s a poster child for a big, lib city. It’s like feigning disbelief about Curtis Sliwa losing to Zohran Mamdani — if Sliwa was a proud Trump sycophant.

Republicans are training their denialism on a race their party hasn’t won for over 30 years.

This very plausibly could boil down to the fact that some gullible but influential people online thought Pratt could win, and cynical Republican electeds are weaponizing their naïvete to further the election denying agenda, softening the ground for a future attempt to steal a more important race. California could be crucial for determining control of the House.

But it also sets them up very nicely to be “vindicated” by the Supreme Court in the coming weeks.

We’re awaiting the Court’s ruling in Watson v. RNC, an odd bedfellows case where national Republicans are trying to outlaw Mississippi’s (and 30 other states’) grace periods, during which ballots mailed by Election Day but received afterwards can still be counted.

Here’s Justice Brett Kavanaugh at the March oral arguments picking quotes from a 2020 article by New York University Professor Richard Pildes: “If the apparent winner the morning after the election ends up losing due to late-arriving ballots, charges of a rigged election could explode.” “…The longer after Election Day any significant changes in vote totals take place, the greater the risk that the losing side will cry that the election has been stolen.”

Funnily enough, he quoted the same lines in his 2020 concurrence with the Court’s ruling not to reinstate a court-ordered extension of the deadline for receiving mailed ballots in Wisconsin at the height of the pandemic.

“If you have an election and the election is going to turn on late arriving ballots in a way that means what everybody kind of thought was the result on Election Day ends up being the opposite a week later, 21 days later, the losers are not going to accept that result,” Paul Clement, attorney for the RNC, said during the Watson oral arguments. “Full stop. They won’t. And that is bad for our system.”

Compare that to Trump’s Truth Social: “Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had. 3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections!”

Lacking any proof of fraud in voting by mail — because they are making it up — Republicans from Kavanaugh to Trump argue that the mere “perception” of fraud justifies making it harder to vote. Losing Republicans are the only ones perceiving this fraud, creating a pretext to allow fewer voters (who they assume to be Democrats, or at least more Democrats than Republicans) to cast a ballot.

Elected Republicans/influencers and those on the Court are in a perfectly symbiotic relationship here. The Court will almost certainly rule in their favor at some point in the next two months, perhaps even pointing to the hysteria Republicans have whipped up in recent days as evidence of the need to cut off voting earlier. Republicans, in turn, will point to the Court’s ruling as “proof” that their denialism was correct.

It’s hard to imagine that the LA mayorship is the real race they’re gunning for in perfecting this system.

A Dull Maine Senate Primary Becomes Interesting

We’ll be watching Tuesday night for the first big indicator of how badly, or not, Democrat Graham Platner has been wounded by the recent dribble of scandals. Platner will almost certainly win the ranked-choice primary, but by how much? If his numbers come in precipitously low — Democrat Sara Gideon got 71 percent of the vote in 2020 Senate primary — calls to replace him will grow louder.

Bari Weiss Fails Upwards to New Heights

The Trump toadying editor-in-chief of CBS News is reportedly in line to also take over CNN’s editorial operations, should Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. go through, per Axios. She is failing in her tenure at CBS — ratings are dismal for both the morning and evening shows, and she’s gutted 60 Minutes, a unicorn in profitable broadcast journalism — if you consider her job to be running the network. But since her job is actually to grease the skids for the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal, withering CBS and CNN in the process, she’s succeeding beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

In Case You Missed It

Church, Merch and State: What the Pentagon’s Snub of Mormons Was Really All About

Morning Memo: The Most Important Nomination the Senate Has Ever Considered

On the midterm primaries so far: Trump Sees The Primaries As Proving His Strength. He May Come to Regret It.

TPM Cafe: Why Are Any Democrats Supporting a Bill That Was Championed by the Crypto Industry?

Photo Gallery: Behold the Freedom 250 Celebration Prep in All Its Tacky Glory

Yesterday’s Most Read Story

DOJ to Courts: Don’t You Dare Touch the Already-Dead Slush Fund — David Kurtz

What We Are Reading

‘Unbelievable how accurate’: How paid influencers hype Polymarket’s odds — Jason Beeferman, Maya Kaufman, Jessie Blaeser and Declan Harty, Politico

Somali Referee Says His World Cup Dream Is Dashed After U.S. Denies Entry — Matthew Mpoke Bigg, New York Times

Under the Trump crypto playbook, the family always wins. Investors don’t — Tom Bergin, Michelle Conlin, Koh Gui Qing and Tom Wilson, Reuters

Trump Sees The Primaries As Proving His Strength. He May Come to Regret It.

Posted on June 9, 2026June 9, 2026 by Layla A. Jones

So far, a clear media narrative has emerged from the 2026 midterm election primaries: Trump’s unprecedented reshaping of the Republican Party in his image over the last decade is nearly complete, and his influence remains as strong as ever.

He’s repeatedly succeeded in unseating his political enemies in Congress and in state legislatures. He vanquished state legislators who defied his redistricting push in Indiana, defeated now-outgoing Sen. Bill Cassidy in Louisiana, and booted Rep. Thomas Massie in Kentucky. In Texas, he backed scandal-laden election denier Ken Paxton, who ousted longtime senator John Cornyn (R-TX) in a runoff. His candidates mostly prevailed in Georgia, where the governor’s race is heading to a runoff between Trump’s pick and a billionaire who wanted to be Trump’s pick. Cornyn, in a post-defeat speech, lamented what he characterized as low voter turnout for his runoff. “Another reminder,” said Cornyn, “that those who show up decide for those who do not.”

Georgia Republicans also gave voice to their fears about Democratic enthusiasm after the open primary there saw a drop in people who voted in the Republican contest and a jump in those who voted in the Democratic one.

But it all raises another question, with Trump’s popularity reaching historic lows: Are general election voters going to choose these new, victorious, Trump-preferred candidates?

Experts who spoke with TPM weren’t surprised about the ultra-MAGA outcomes of most states’ GOP primaries so far, even in spite of the unpopular Iran war, painful gas prices, and surveys that show Trump losing support on the economy, the one area where Republicans tend to enjoy unshakable voter confidence. Recent polls show Trump’s approval rating on the economy is worse than his overall approval rating. The opposite was true in 2018, said Kyle Kondik, managing editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, and that prevailed throughout Trump’s first term.

“I don’t think there’s really any conflict between these two realities,” said Kondik when asked about the president’s recent success in the primaries, “because even though Trump’s overall approval rating is poorer, the numbers amongst Republicans are still pretty decent.”

But given polling that shows overall voter dissatisfaction with the president specifically and Republicans more broadly — especially on economic issues, and among independent voters — the wisdom of selecting candidates who have built their entire identity around Trump is questionable at best, election analysts and experts in public opinion told TPM. That may be what Republican primary voters want. Is it what America wants?

The primary season four years ago offers a cautionary tale.

GOP ‘Pulling Defeat from the Jaws of Victory’

MAGA’s coalescing around Trump picks, no matter how extreme or embattled, could contribute mightily to the party’s downfall, several people who spoke with TPM said. They pointed to several 2022 races that saw Trump favorites win primaries, even defeating sitting GOP officials who voted to impeach the president, only to lose the general election in what in hindsight looks like a rather predictable turn of events.

“In 2022 there were multiple instances of Republicans pulling defeat from the jaws of victory by nominating candidates that were too far right for their electorate,” Matthew Baum, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, told TPM. “And I think there’s certainly a possibility of that happening here.”

Former GOP New Hampshire Senate candidate and MAGA conspiracy theorist Don Bolduc parrotted lies that the 2020 election was stolen and continued to support the unfounded belief that widespread election fraud compromises U.S. elections. He earned Trump’s nomination but lost the GOP primary in 2020, then came back in 2022 with Trump’s praise to win his party’s Senate primary against a more moderate Republican candidate. Bolduc lost the general election in a race Cook Political Report rated as “leans Democrat.”

Fellow conspiracy theorist Blake Masters was endorsed by Trump in the 2022 Arizona Senate race. His primary-winning candidacy was funded by billionaire Trump ally Peter Thiel, for whom Masters had worked. Neither Trump’s stamp nor Thiel’s $15 million could secure Masters’ victory. He was defeated in the general election by incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ).

In another Arizona statewide race that year, Trump’s endorsement of gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake over Karrin Taylor Robson could’ve been the factor that cost Republicans the Arizona governorship, said Kondik; given the narrow margin by which Lake lost to her Democratic opponent. Lake at the time said it was “disqualifying” that Robson wouldn’t support the Stop the Steal conspiracy theory.

And in Michigan, Trump successfully ousted Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI) in the 2022 primary after the latter voted to impeach the former following January 6. Meijer lost to election denier John Gibbs, who also expressed the belief that Hillary Clinton participated in a satanic ritual. Gibbs then lost the general election to Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI).

That year also saw the Trump-backed candidacies from Herschel Walker in Georgia and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania; both lost their purple states.

Comparing this year’s general election to 2022 based on the primary season is “premature,” said David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at The Cook Political Report. 2022’s candidates were uniquely extreme, though Trump-backed 2026 candidates in Georgia and Texas are giving them a run for their money.

But then, as now, Trump getting his pick could be a flashing warning sign to Republicans at large.

“It’s just very clear,” Robert Shapiro, professor of political science and international and public affairs at Columbia University, told TPM. “His candidates he’s supported have been performing well. And of course the danger here for the Republican Party is that doing well in the primary may not be indicative of what’s going to happen in the general election.”

“We’ve seen too many cases of that happening.”

On the Issue of Turnout

It’s worth noting that no one who spoke with TPM for this story suggested lower primary turnout numbers among Republican voters and higher engagement among Democrats represented much more than the typical dynamic: voters use the primary to lash out against the party in power. Midterm turnout among a president’s party is historically lower than among the opposing party, and Trump’s magnetic pull inside his own party has done nothing to impact this age-old pattern.

Midterms bring out only the most engaged party activists and ideologues, said Baum. And runoffs, like the one Cornyn lost, attract only a fragment of that already narrow population. The 2026 GOP electorate’s most energized voters are those far-right MAGA conservatives who won’t break from Trump for anything — not even the sky-high gas prices, the rising consumer inflation, or the White House’s denial of peoples’ real-world economic situations, which ignited voters against Biden.

“Trump enjoys more rock-solid support than his predecessors inside his base,” said Baum. “His base is probably a little larger and probably somewhat stronger in their conviction. But if you look at the overall aggregate numbers, it isn’t by that much.”

While low voter turnout is a fact of U.S. primary elections, Wasserman said Trump’s stronghold on his party is also the result of the weeding out of non-MAGA Republicans.

“The voters who would be inclined to defect, they left long ago during 2015 and 2016 or in subsequent years,” Wasserman told TPM.

The Most Important Nomination the Senate Has Ever Considered

Posted on June 9, 2026June 9, 2026 by David Kurtz

How Far Is Too Far?

By formally nominating Todd Blanche as attorney general, President Trump set the stage for a late summer tableau in which Republican senators — in the midst of a midterm election — will be asked to ratify the unprecedented corruption of the DOJ by the Trump White House.

It fits a pattern of the Trump II presidency: move quickly, break things, and then get the compliant GOP Congress to paper it over later. But Trump has never asked his GOP allies on the Hill to bless misconduct as wide-ranging and extreme as that which has taken place at DOJ since Blanche became deputy attorney general, the department’s No. 2, in March 2025.

If, as I have argued, the politicization and weaponization of the DOJ is the single greatest threat to democracy of the Trump II presidency, then the Blanche confirmation hearing is arguably the most significant nomination that the Senate has ever considered.

Sanctioning everything that has happened up until now at the Justice Department would be a clear go-ahead from Republican senators to continue full steam ahead, or worse, for another 2 1/2 years. No accountability, no roadblocks, no pumping the brakes.

Blanche’s nomination comes immediately after he single-handedly purported to absolve Trump, whom he still treats as his client, from some $100 million in liabilities to the IRS. It follows the not-quite-dead-yet boondoggle of the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund.

Confirmation of Blanche wouldn’t just ratify the damage he has done in his two-plus months as acting attorney general — targeting, among others, James Comey (again), the Southern Poverty Law Center, John Brennan, Fani Willis, and Cassidy Hutchinson — but would serve as a stamp of approval for all the depredations of the Trump II DOJ.

The list is nearly endless:

the attempted retributive prosecutions (Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Adam Schiff, Letitia James, Eric Swalwell, LaMonica McIver, and six sitting members of Congress);
the defiance of court orders in cases involving the original Alien Enemies Act, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and countless other immigration cases;
the coverups of the fatal ICE shootings in Minnesota;
the vindictive purges of hundreds of prosecutors and FBI agents;
the scheme to avoid the Senate confirmation process by lawlessly installing U.S. attorneys semi-permanently in some blue states;
the unprecedented levels of prosecutorial misconduct, lack of candor, and basic incompetence that has wrecked the presumption of normality the government once enjoyed;
the corruption and abandonment of the pardon process;
the subversion of DOJ independence and allowing the department to be run out of the White House, including installing White House aides like Lindsey Halligan and Kurt Olsen in prosecutorial positions.

There’s no use in clutching pearls over what GOP senators will or will not do with the Blanche nomination. They have proven themselves time and again to be complicit at best as Trump rampages across civil society. But the Blanche confirmation process does give Democrats, who cannot by themselves block Blanche’s nomination, an election-year opportunity to publicly hold Blanche to account for the worst DOJ abuses, lawlessness, and grift.

Still, the urgent question is not how bad things have been at DOJ under Blanche, but how much worse things will get between now and January 2029 if he is confirmed.

Trump DOJ Watch

Sun-Times: Controversial DOJ official Aakash Singh eyed by ‘Broadview 6’ was involved in Chicago deportation blitz, source says
Democracy Docket: Dem senators “raise the alarm” over DOJ pullback on voter protections
ProPublica: Trump Administration Killed Criminal Investigation of GOP Senator’s Coal Companies

Pentagon Dodges Its Mormon Issue

After outcry from Utah’s two Republican senators that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was not designated a Christian faith in a new Pentagon policy, DoD responded not by adding the “Christian” designation to LDS but by removing the Christian designation from the list for all denominations. Nonetheless, that seemed to satisfy Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), who was the most vocal about the designation decision.

Mass Deportation Watch

$100K Visa Fee: U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin of Boston blocked President Donald Trump from charging employers a $100,000 fee if they hire foreign workers for specialized roles, ruling that it amounted to a unilateral tax without proper congressional approval.
Denaturalization: The Trump administration moved to strip citizenship from 17 naturalized U.S. citizens accused of concealing previous crimes or committing fraud during the naturalization process

The Corruption: Don Jr. Edition

ProPublica: An Indian Billionaire Was Targeted by Trump. Then He Poured Money Into a Startup Secretly Backed by Donald Trump Jr.

Thread of the Day

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

What the Pentagon’s Snub of Mormons Was Really All About

Posted on June 9, 2026June 9, 2026 by Sarah Posner

In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), an ardent Trump loyalist, recently got a taste of what it’s like to be a disfavored religion in the Christian nationalist world of MAGA. He was triggered by the news, broken by the defense news site Military.com, that the Pentagon had eliminated 180 recognized religious faiths in order to “streamline the DoW [sic] collection of religious preferences collection [sic] for service members to enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy.” The Pentagon’s new list of what it calls Religious Affiliation Codes classified a number of religions, like Methodists and Baptists, as Christian. But Lee’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was not listed among the “Christian” faiths. He demanded — on X, of course, because United States Senators have no other means of either commanding attention or acquiring information — “why The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was left out of the list of Christian churches.”

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JD Vance Gets in on the California Conspiracy Theorizing

Posted on June 9, 2026June 9, 2026 by John Light

Where Things Stand last night covered what seems to be the beginning of the 2026-specific flooding of the “zone” with “shit,” to use Steve Bannon’s infamous terminology. (I am distinguishing these state- and primary-specific attacks from the more general muck of election conspiracy theories we have been wading in daily for the better part of a decade.) The conspiracy theory machine is off and running, fueled by conservative dismay that reality TV star-turned-dilettante politician Spencer Pratt (R) will not advance to the November general election against LA Mayor Karen Bass (D). Perhaps making it more painful is that he was in recent days supplanted in second place by Nithya Raman, a DSA-backed Democrat. The AP projected Monday that Raman and Bass will face off in November.

JD Vance is the latest person to get involved with spinning false narratives from conservatives’ ire. “Do you trust this election?” a grinning Jesse Watters asked Vance last night on Fox, teeing him up.

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Why Are Any Democrats Supporting a Bill That Was Championed by the Crypto Industry?

Posted on June 9, 2026June 8, 2026 by Allegra Kirkland

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

In May, the crypto industry won big as the Senate Banking Committee advanced the Clarity Act. It passed largely along party lines, but two Democrats with crypto-friendly records, Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), broke with their colleagues to support the bill. Last September, Alsobrooks and Gallego partnered with 10 other Senate Democrats to articulate their wishlist for the Clarity Act; their demands are more permissive than the hardline anti-crypto politics of Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and the party’s progressive wing. However, they did pay lip service to consumer protection, strong regulatory agencies, and a provision to limit the Trump family’s crypto-powered corruption.

Unfortunately, the Clarity Act will not achieve these goals. Instead, as Senator Warren observed, “Nothing made it into this bill that wasn’t approved by the crypto industry.”

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