As we move into the third week of this year’s annual TPM Journalism Fund drive, I wanted to remind you of one thing the Fund does. Your membership fees account for the overwhelming percentage of our revenues. But we also give free memberships to readers in financial need (part of our program since we introduced membership in 2012) as well as all registered students, full-time or part-time (since 2017). Your contribution to the TPM Journalism Fund is what makes those no-cost Community Memberships and Student Memberships possible. It’s how we square the circle of funding our operation through member fees while not excluding people whose finances may be under strain. Our annual TPM Journalism Fund drive is critical to keeping TPM vital and moving forward. But our free membership program is one key part of that. If you’d like to help us fund these memberships and keep TPM strong and vital, please consider contributing to the drive by clicking here.
In It Together
This note from TPM Reader MW made my day …
Continue reading “In It Together”I was reading Josh’s post about No One Left Behind. My wife (now deceased) and I have benefited from your program for a long time. This is something I am very grateful for. It isn’t that we could not get good news somewhere else. It is very much about the quality, the people involved in making it work, the connection you have with the readers, the fellowship between the readers, and even something beyond all of that. The dream Josh and you all have brought forward with this project is infectious.
When I mentioned this before to Josh I am not sure he understood how or why readers would become so involved with what TPM is. TPM is inclusive of all people and not just members. That is the best part. But the quality and drive behind the reporting is unmatched in my opinion. And that certainly is not just my opinion. I am sure since then that others have said the same thing. I think you all realize you have a lot of people cheering you on and if you don’t you should.
Movement
If you look at the 538 national average, Harris went from a .2 percentage point lead on July 28th to a 1.9 percentage point lead today. That is a substantial move over one week.
Annals of Fed Misses
It’s not easy running the Fed. For years Jerome Powell got a lot of credit for navigating the U.S. economy with an unexpectedly loose monetary policy, through the COVID crisis and with a lot of “soft landing” credit during the Biden years. But through 2024 there’s been a backdraft of criticism that, having waited a bit too long to react to the inflation surge, he’s now holding the brakes too long, even after inflation has fallen pretty close to the central bank’s target rate. Last Friday’s jobs report was interpreted as providing key evidence that the Fed had in fact waited too long and that the U.S. economy now faced a real risk of recession. Today there’s a big market sell-off apparently kicked off by fears of slowing U.S. growth.
A couple quick thoughts on this.
Continue reading “Annals of Fed Misses”Judge Chutkan Has Trump’s Jan. 6 Case Back And Is Ready To Roll
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
What SCOTUS Hath Wrought
After its ponderous sojourn at the Supreme Court, the Jan. 6 case against Donald Trump was officially returned Friday to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, D.C., and she immediately picked it back up again and started moving it forward.
Among her initial actions, notably undertaken over the weekend, Chutkan:
- set a Friday, Aug. 9 deadline for the parties to submit a proposed scheduling order for pretrial proceedings;
- set a status conference for next Friday, Aug. 16,
- denied a pending Trump motion to dismiss the case on statutory grounds, but gave him the chance to re-up it once the immunity questions in the case are resolved.
- denied a pending Trump motion to dismiss the case on the grounds of selective and vindictive prosecution.
And just like that, the case was up and running again. But don’t hold your breath that this will go to trial before the election. Time is simply too short at this point.
The elephant in the room is the Supreme Court’s expansive ruling in this very case on presidential immunity, how much that narrows the indictment, what kind of evidentiary hearings Chutkan needs to address presidential immunity, and the still-unknown ways in which the high court’s unprecedented ruling effects this and the other Trump prosecutions.
Hanging over all of that will be at least one more trip to the Supreme Court to give it a chance to weigh in on whether Chutkan properly jumped through all the hoops it has put in her way. Again, there’s no way for all this to happen before Election Day.
In her order denying Trump’s motion to dismiss for selective and vindictive prosecution, Chutkan used some of the same direct and no-nonsense language that had marked her earlier handling of the case:
At the outset, the court must address—as it has before—Defendant’s improper reframing of the allegations against him. … At this stage, the court cannot accept Defendant’s alternate narrative.
Chutkan went on to find that most of Trump’s arguments were speculative or conclusory and that he “proffered no meaningful evidence” that would justify a hearing on his motion to allow him to try to develop a factual record.
Under Chutkan’s scheduling order, we may get legal fireworks right off the bat. Don’t expect the parties to come to any kind of substantive agreement on a pretrial schedule; the parties are too far apart, so Chutkan will likely have to weigh in there. But we’ll get our first taste of the legal posture Trump will be taking in this case, knowing the Supreme Court has his back.
Rudy G Officially Booted From Bankruptcy Court
Rudy Giuliani’s attempt to use the bankruptcy process – but not actually comply with it – to avoid creditors like Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss has failed. Giuliani, in addition to his pre-existing debt, is now also on the hook for $100,000 in professional fees arising from the now-dismissed bankruptcy case. His Upper East Side apartment and his Florida condo are now at risk of sale to satisfy that obligation, though apparently not immediately.
On The Trail
- Trump pulls out of presidential debate: Donald Trump reneged on his commitment to a second presidential debate rather than face new Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Trump proposed instead a debate hosted by Fox News in front of an arena audience, to which Harris responded: “It’s interesting how ‘any time, any place’ becomes ‘one specific time, one specific safe space.'”
- News coverage fail: Some outlets failed to grasp the real dynamic of Trump’s debate withdrawal, but none more egregiously than the NYT, which later revised its headline.
- Trump v. Kemp: While on a Georgia campaign swing, the former president reactivated his long-running feud with Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) at the very moment Kamala Harris may have put the state back in play for November.
- All Dem Hands On Deck: Harris campaign brings aboard former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe and veteran Democratic operatives Stephanie Cutter and Jennifer Palmieri.
Veep Watch
- Kamala Harris’ announcement of her decision on a running mate is imminent, with a video announcement reportedly expected Tuesday ahead of a planned rally in Philadelphia that will be the Democratic ticket’s first joint appearance.
- Harris met in person Sunday at the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory in DC with three contenders for the veep nod: Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN). She spoke with other contenders, but not in person.
- Harris was briefed Saturday by former Attorney General Eric Holder on the results of the process he led of vetting the veep contenders.
‘Our Own Democracy Is Being Tested’
Bloomberg: DOJ Boosts Effort to Avoid Election Mayhem
Trump Shooting Watch
WaPo: Radio traffic shows failed search for Trump rally shooter
Be Careful?
Promoting a new book, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch was asked on Fox News about President Biden’s proposal to reform the high court: “I just say: Be careful,” he warned.
Trump Congratulates Putin On ‘Great’ Hostage Swap
After promising that only he could free WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich from an unlawful Russian detention, Donald Trump spent the weekend dumping on the deal Biden struck for Gershkovich’s release.
WTF?
A truly stunning turn of events in the case against the alleged 9/11 plotters held at Guantanamo: Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin abruptly canceled the plea agreement reached only two days earlier and reserved to himself the power to oversee the case. The NYT provides a limited tick-tock of the dramatic reversal.
Among the biggest questions, and there are many, are:
- How could there be such a colossal breakdown in communications and decision-making in the highest profile detainee cases the Pentagon has ever handled?
- How did a plea agreement get struck in the first place in such a monumental case without sign-off from the highest levels of the Pentagon?
- What possessed the defense secretary to renege on the plea agreement and undermine the entire process, apparently without consulting with the White House?
Rough Day Ahead For Equities Markets
Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 12% overnight, its biggest one-day drop since the Black Monday crash of 1987. European markets were also sharply down, but not nearly as dramatically. Ahead of the opening bell, U.S. stock futures were off by 2%-6%.
Headline For The Ages
If you made up the wildest RFK Jr. headline your imagination could possibly conjure, it would still fall well short of the real thing:
And yet … the headline still doesn’t do justice to the video confession gave to … Roseanne Barr:
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
Campaign Status Check, Two Weeks In
Two weeks into Kamala Harris’s campaign for president, I wanted to give you a polling and campaign-status gut check. The short version is that Harris is now slightly but measurably ahead in the Blue Wall states. She remains behind but now only barely in the southern tier states of Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. The margins in both directions are mostly between one and two points. Those are nominally margin of error numbers. But when they’re based on multiple polls they become a bit sturdier than that. (I’m following 538’s averages on this. They have Nevada tied.)
What this means is that Harris now has very small leads in the states she needs to win the election. Just as critically she’s now in shooting distance in all of the southern tier states, now including North Carolina. Together these represent a pro-Harris shift of 3 to 4 percentage points which is more or less matched by the shift at the national level.
Continue reading “Campaign Status Check, Two Weeks In”We’ve Been Calling Them Weirdos For A While
When I wrote in a February issue of the Weekender about The Weirdness Threshold and the ways in which Republicans were approaching it through Taylor Swift hysteria, I didn’t think “Weird” would become a Democratic Party rallying cry. I was mostly reacting to two things at the time: First, I saw a gap between the fixations of the new, very online, right and conservatives I know in real life who are barely online at all and who were not talking about crazy Taylor Swift conspiracy theories. (I had a unique window into this because I’m from Cleveland and we love Travis Kelce.)
Continue reading “We’ve Been Calling Them Weirdos For A While”The Racist War On Drugs Has Come For Abortion Care
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
You would be hard-pressed to find an American who lived through the 1970s and doesn’t remember the launch of President Nixon’s War on Drugs, a thinly veiled crusade against his political opponents and Black Americans. Presented as the cornerstone of Nixon’s purported public safety strategy, it’s now commonly acknowledged to have been nothing short of a social, economic and human rights disaster — with repercussions Americans are still experiencing today. But what does it have to do with abortion rights?
Louisiana’s governor recently signed into law a bill criminalizing the most common form of abortion care in America: medication abortion. This extreme new law categorizes mifepristone and misoprostol — the two medicines most commonly prescribed to induce abortions — as Schedule IV ‘dangerous and controlled substances,’ alongside Xanax and Valium. While the bill contains an exception for pregnant people found in possession of the medications, anyone else without a prescription can be charged with a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
This near-total abortion ban pushed through by far-right local politicians will only exacerbate Louisiana’s dire maternal mortality crisis, which has seen low-income Black Lousianians suffer a disproportionately high rate of preventable deaths. In effect, this ban has ushered the War on Drugs into the realm of abortion care, sentencing pregnant people—particularly Black pregnant people—to profound, preventable harm.
When Nixon first rolled out his infamous anti-drug campaign in 1971, he used it not as an effort to curb drug use, but for political purposes: associating leftists and Black communities with drug use and then criminalizing and marginalizing them in the public mind. He was horrifically successful at achieving these objectives, but the campaign’s reach didn’t stop there.
Empowered by Nixon, federal and state governments created drug categorization schedules deeming certain drugs highly dangerous, and then attached sometimes egregiously long prison sentences to their illegal use and distribution. Prosecutors possess total discretion when it comes to who they charge with what crime and how aggressively a defendant should be punished. And some prosecutors across the U.S. took that power and ran with it. Between 1980 and 2008, state prison populations for drug offenses increased by a whopping 1,216%. Black people have borne the brunt of this incarceration explosion: Black people are incarcerated for drug offenses at nearly six times the rate of white people, despite similar rates of drug use.
The War on Drugs taught us that once a certain behavior is criminalized and incarceration is accepted as the solution, it’s extremely difficult to change course—no matter how devastating the consequences. Prosecutors empowered to treat certain behaviors as criminal don’t surrender that power lightly, and state legislatures have been slow to reform state drug laws.
Consider marijuana. Despite nearly 70% of U.S. adults supporting the legalization of marijuana, which has recognized medicinal uses, it’s only been legalized for recreational use in 24 states — and often via ballot measures initiated by voters, not legislative reforms. Although the federal government recently moved to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, it will still be highly regulated and remain illegal for recreational use. According to the most recently available FBI data, police made over a quarter of a million arrests for marijuana in 2022.
Now, let’s bring it back to Louisiana. The far-reaching consequences of outlawing abortion care in this state have already been well-documented. The mass confusion, chaos and legitimate fear of legal sanctions have led medical providers to either delay abortion care to the point where a patient’s life is at risk, or to deny care altogether. Categorizing safe and effective medication as a Schedule IV controlled substance will have chilling consequences for pregnant patients — including those with desired pregnancies.
First, this bill will create complex logistical and financial barriers to both prescribing and obtaining medication abortion for lawful uses like miscarriage management. Providers are already taking drastic measures, like choosing to perform C-sections to avoid medication abortions. Initial prenatal care is being delayed, leaving pregnant patients without critical information about their health in a state with some of the highest maternal mortality and morbidity rates in the nation.
Under this new ban, like with marijuana, police officers and prosecutors hold full discretion regarding who is arrested, charged, fined or even incarcerated for possessing abortion medication. For many, even an arrest can have devastating consequences. These two medications will now carry the stigma of being “controlled and dangerous substances,” and access to them will undoubtedly shrink due to the increased regulatory requirements.
Louisiana’s policymakers have proven their willingness to exploit the criminal legal system to enforce social, moral and racially biased visions of society. The state has long been near the top of the world in incarceration rates, imprisoning Black residents at more than three times the rate of their white peers. Earlier this year, Louisiana’s leaders rolled back modest criminal legal system reforms, signaling their appetite for an even more punitive approach. Now, they’re poised to adopt a carceral strategy as part of far-right Republicans’ and the religious rights’ campaign to eliminate all abortion care, with pregnant people bearing the risk.
Many more Louisianans will be caught up in a vicious cycle of incarceration and criminal punishment as a result, unless state leaders come to their senses and repeal this draconian measure that has brought the War on Drugs to reproductive care.
Old Man Trump
Here’s one thing that’s been in the back of my mind for some time and with a greater focus since Joe handed the football off to Kamala. Donald Trump is old. If you look, he’s much older than in 2016 and 2020. People say these kinds of things as part of the rather dismal “who’s older?” scuffling that’s been going back and forth all year between the two candidates. Here though I mean it in a basic descriptive sense. The difference between being 70 and close to 80 is a big one. It happens to everyone.
Trump doesn’t get held to these standards as much because his raging gives a feeling of focus and edge that Biden lacked. But just in a basic sense, he is not the candidate he was in 2016, not even the one he was in 2020. This was hidden in a way so long as Biden was the nominee and it was hidden or perhaps rendered meaningless as long as Trump was ahead. If your candidate is old but he’s winning … well, whatever. If Joe Biden had spent the last year sitting on a five point lead, the whole campaign, clearly, would have gone quite differently.
Continue reading “Old Man Trump”Amazing
Even now I never cease to be amazed when we find out years later about some new Trump scandal that despite all the scrum and fury managed to remain secret for all this time. The investigation into the President of Egypt trying to put some cash into Trump’s pockets is yet the latest example. How many stories like this will we only find out about a decade from now, or never?