To Justice Samuel Alito, Tuesday’s 6-3 decision upholding birthright citizenship is both “one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court” and a “serious mistake.”
Continue reading “Dissenting Conservative Justices Signal that Ending Birthright Citizenship Is Their Movement’s Next Goal”Supreme Court Upholds Birthright Citizenship
The Supreme Court preserved one of the most important tenets of the Constitution Tuesday, upholding birthright citizenship despite the Trump administration’s unprecedented attempt to shred it.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Upholds Birthright Citizenship”Supreme Court Lets Red States Force Trans Girls to Play on Boys’ Teams
The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that neither Title IX nor the Equal Protection Clause forbids schools from keeping trans girls off of girls’ sports teams, an inflection point in a years-long campaign by the right, particularly the Trump administration.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Lets Red States Force Trans Girls to Play on Boys’ Teams”MAGA Melts Down at SCOTUS Over Its Insufficient Voter Suppression
MAGA Rages at Barrett
The Supreme Court’s decision yesterday, upholding a Mississippi law permitting state and local election officials to count mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but received up to five days later, has triggered the president into yet another round of unhinged demands that the Senate pass the SAVE American Act lest the country descend into communism. It also sent some of his supporters into an uncontrolled, disproportionate tailspin of attacking the decision’s author, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and forecasting new attempts to manipulate the midterm elections based on fabricated claims of voter fraud.
Donald Trump is so fixated on forcing Senate Republicans to take up the Save America Act that he called the housing bill he has yet to sign a “big yawn,” just to make sure everyone understands that he believes affordability is boring and voter suppression is a thrill. On X yesterday, MAGA influencers raged at Barrett, who Trump nominated to the court in his first term to much Republican adoration, calling her “a gigantic fucking disaster of a Supreme Court appointment,” among other insults. “WTF,” tweeted former Fox News host Megyn Kelly. On her radio show later, Kelly complained, “It’s very annoying, especially in a case like the Mississippi one where now we’re talking about whether we can ever trust election results because post-COVID, the Democrats are really enamored with this mail-in balloting thing.” Her guest, Mike Davis, a right-wing lawyer and social media troll who reportedly has Trump’s ear on judicial nominees, replied to Kelly, “we’re going to have Third World elections.” He falsely claimed that because of the Mississippi decision, Democrats will use Election Day to “figure out how many votes they’re behind, they’re going to be able to go find those votes, fill out ballots, have the their postal workers postmark those ballots, and then apparently Election Day under Barrett’s rationale is the number of days it takes for Democrats to steal the election.” (Davis has floated the prospect of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon as a possible Supreme Court nomination for Trump.)
Because there is not a sliver of evidence that mail-in ballots are susceptible to fraud, or that allowing them to be counted upon delivery after Election Day is suspect, the MAGA obsession with them is escalating into a frenzy of conspiracies that are getting more convoluted and difficult to comprehend, unless, of course, one is fluent in the lingua franca and the cast of characters of the online far right. On his podcast, Steve Bannon mused about grand juries, voter databases, “manipulated” voter rolls, supposed Chinese interference in the 2020 election, and a possible “emergency order” that would somehow lay out a “national security” reason for voting restrictions in the midterms.
Bannon was characteristically cagey and rambling about how all of this would be carried out, and hinted that John Solomon, the conspiratorial journalist who the White House made a “special government employee” last month to run a “task force” on “transparency” would be involved. (Solomon has previously claimed to have inside knowledge of an FBI investigation into supposed voting irregularities in Maricopa County, Arizona, and Trump’s Department of Justice has used articles published on Solomon’s site Just The News in its decisionmaking.) On yesterday’s podcast, Bannon said Solomon is “restricted on saying exactly what they’re doing. But also Pulte, this is why they’re trying to stop him at DNI,” referring to Bill Pulte, Trump’s acting Director of National Intelligence, who Trump installed to carry out investigations into “rigged elections.” Last week, Pulte appointed as his chief of staff Christina Norton, a former Republican National Committee official who directed the RNC’s “election integrity” efforts, which involved Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec and other right-wing conspiracy theorists.Top Democrats on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees blasted the move.
Another L for Trump on Getting State Voter Rolls
U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante, who was nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush, is the 11th federal judge to dismiss a Trump lawsuit to obtain a state voter registration database, this time in New Hampshire.
Trump Secretly Awarded a $500M No-Bid Contract for His Ballroom
That is, he secretly committed $500 million of taxpayer money for his vanity project, while lying that he was building the ballroom with private donations, according to new reporting in the Washington Post. He had even once claimed that Clark Construction, the company to which he awarded the no-bid contract, had offered to build it for free. “Records also show that President Donald Trump was directly involved in negotiating some costs for the East Wing project,” the Post reports.
Talarico and Paxton Tied, NYT Poll Finds
In one of the most scrutinized Senate races this year, a New York Times/Siena poll finds a tie between Democratic state legislator and seminarian James Talarico and scandal-plagued Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. “A majority of likely Texas voters see Mr. Talarico as having good character and the right moral values, but not Mr. Paxton,” the Times reports, and “Paxton has failed to attract some voters who otherwise said they would like to see a Republican-controlled Senate.”
Hegseth Stacks Defense Policy Board With MAGA Loyalists and Billionaires
After purging the Defense Policy Board last year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth yesterday announced new members, including MAGA theorist Michael Anton; Peter Thiel protege, conspiracy theorist, and failed Senate candidate Blake Masters; and billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, whose firm has massive investments in companies doing business with the Pentagon, including OpenAI and SpaceX.
Hegseth’s Vaccine Blunders Persist
Because of the delay caused by Hegseth’s two-month-long effort to end flu vaccine mandates for basic training recruits, now the Pentagon has been rushing to provide the vaccines before they expire today. New vaccines will not be available until August.
More History Erasure From Trump’s National Park Service
The Philadelphia Inquirer finds mentions of slavery have been removed from sites in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, in addition to the National Park Service’s removal of a larger exhibit at the President’s House in Philadelphia last year. It is yet another sign that “that the administration is not letting any stone go unturned when it comes to ridding or softening even smaller mentions of slavery at Philadelphia’s most iconic historic sites ahead of the 250th anniversary.”
Trump to Ruin D.C.’s Fourth of July
District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser predicts D.C. families will stay home from the Fourth of July fireworks celebration, given the 40-minute spectacle planned by Freedom 250 to display the 851,000 fireworks is slated to start at 11:00 p.m. Trump is scheduled to speak at 7:00 p.m., and temperatures are forecast to be in the mid-90s to low 100s.
Peak 2026 Headline
MAGA Man Arrested For Masturbating At Trump’s America 250 Spectacle, via HuffPost.
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Trump’s Directive to Crack Down on Dissent Gets a Task Force
NSPM-7 Becomes Operationalized
In the days after Charlie Kirk was killed last year, the political right sought to seize the moment for its advantage. The White House rolled out a suite of directives, including National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7. That document audaciously called for prosecutors to scrutinize a sweeping array of vaguely left-wing ideas, including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” incredibly common sentiments that the memo nonetheless cast as contributing to violent activity and the “‘anti-fascist’ lie” that “has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists.”
TPM broke the news yesterday that, as of March, the memo has been operationalized by the Justice Department through a team called Joint Task Force Vanguard. The task force has already been involved in multiple prosecutions, including of Minneapolis-area activists earlier this month, and is led by two prosecutors with experience tackling gangs and terrorism cases who report directly to acting attorney general Todd Blanche.
The prosecutors’ experience “means that they’re looking at group criminality, conspiracy, racketeering, and what that means is that they’re going after tough charges,” Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Georgetown Law School, told reporter Josh Kovensky, who broke the story. “To the extent that that makes sense for the mafia or for violent street gangs, it makes less sense for political protesters.”
One of the two prosecutors leading the task force has also dabbled in right-wing blogging, opining during the early days of COVID, for example, that “the media will stop at nothing to prevent President Trump’s re-election in 2020, even if that means financial ruin for a sizable portion of the American population.”
Bill Pulte’s Ominous Choice for Chief of Staff
How far will the acting Director of National Intelligence go to meddle in the midterms? Its one of the big questions surrounding the president’s decision to install as acting DNI Bill Pulte, a construction industry scion who, as a housing official in the second Trump administration, made a name for himself leveling baseless allegations about mortgages at the president’s perceived enemies. The outgoing DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, of course, turned up at the FBI raid of Fulton County, providing an indication that the president hoped to use the job for something other than its intended role.
We got one possible indication Pulte will be picking up where Gabbard left off in recent days, when the New York Times broke the news that Christina Norton, a former Republican National Committee official who has also worked with Pulte at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, will serve as chief of staff at DNI. Norton oversaw a GOP poll watcher program in 2024 that, among other things, brought Jack Posobiec, the conservative influencer who rose to prominence as a promoter of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, to speak to a group of volunteers; she also, in that job, spoke at an event organized by other right-wing conspiracy theorists.
“We recruited and trained over 230,000 poll watchers and poll workers across 18 battleground states,” she said in remarks posted to her Instagram account and later deleted, but reported yesterday by investigative journalist Mike Isikoff. “That meant for the first time in history, a Republican was standing guard to ensure the law was followed in every single precinct and mail ballot center in every major city across every battleground.”
Man of the Hour
It’s John Yoo, the conservative law professor known for authoring memos supporting some of the George W. Bush administration’s most dramatic excesses. Politico reported yesterday that he’ll bring his grand vision of executive power to a role “as a consultant” on Joe diGenova’s DOJ probe of a supposed grand conspiracy by Trump’s enemies to tie him to Russia in his first term.
Coming Up
The Supreme Court will issue its final opinions of the term, including on birthright citizenship, at 10 a.m. ET. Join us for coverage of that.
Colorado holds its primary today. Josh Marshall offers some thoughts on the Democratic contests.
Tabs
Rep. Tom Kean (R-NJ) is going to address his mysterious months-long absence in a speech today.
Alan Dershowitz has failed in a bizarre attempt to get the Supreme Court to throw out the Times v. Sullivan standard for defamation claims. Tossing it would have made news outlets far more vulnerable to lawsuits from the rich, the powerful, and the annoying.
Some good news
Readers wrote in in response to my call for feedback yesterday asking that I make a point of including small victories in the fight to maintain democracy — good news, in other words — here. I’ll do that.
Here’s one: The Trump administration has lost, again, in its effort to obtain states’ voting rolls. This time in New Hampshire.
Send me your thoughts on this nascent morning thing I’m doing. (Also, if you’re not a TPM member but got to the bottom of this post, you absolutely should become a member! We need those memberships to keep doing what we do.)
For Most of Its History, the Supreme Court Didn’t Pretend to Be Apolitical
Today’s Supreme Court justices insist that they are not “politicians in robes” and merely act as umpires calling “balls and strikes.” But for the first 100 years of the nation, members of the Court were actively and openly involved in partisan politics. Justices penned newspaper articles and pamphlets, wrote or consulted on congressional legislation, campaigned for friends, and even ran for political office themselves while on the bench. Some were candidates for local or state office, but the presidency was often the most coveted prize; more than a third of sitting Supreme Court justices were presidential candidates in the nation’s first century.
Continue reading “For Most of Its History, the Supreme Court Didn’t Pretend to Be Apolitical”Some Thoughts on a Possible Big Primary Upset(s) in Colorado
We’ve got more primaries coming up tomorrow night, specifically in the state of Colorado. I must confess that it was only in the last couple days that I realized that incumbent Senator John Hickenlooper (D), the former mayor of Denver and governor of Colorado, stands a real chance of going down to defeat. Needless to say that would be a very big deal since incumbent senators, or at least incumbent Democratic senators, all but never have that happen.
Sen. Michael Bennet (D), who is trying to become the nominee for governor, as well as Dem Rep. Diana DeGette, might also be toast. But it’s Hickenlooper who I want to focus on here. Bennet is running against State Attorney General Phil Weiser, whose politics aren’t that distinguishable from Bennet’s; he’s challenging Bennet on the “fight” front. DeGette is being challenging by Melat Kiros, a more questionable figure. But that’s the House and it’s an overwhelmingly Democratic district. Again, I want to focus on Hickenlooper because that has more properly national implications. (To get a detailed rundown of all the races in Colorado, here’s a good piece at The Downballot.)
Continue reading “Some Thoughts on a Possible Big Primary Upset(s) in Colorado”Samuel Alito Is the Supreme Court’s Leading Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theorist
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
Months before the 2020 election, as tens of millions of people prepared to vote by mail in the midst of a deadly pandemic, President Donald Trump was already laying the groundwork for challenging the result if it did not go his way. Mail ballots, he said in April, are “very dangerous” and “fraudulent in many cases.” In July, he warned that 2020 would be “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.” In August, he told his followers that the “only way” he could possibly lose the election is if Democrats “rigged” it against him.
After the election, which Trump indeed lost in decisive fashion, his warnings only got more shrill, more dire, and more vaguely messianic. In December, he delivered a speech railing against the scourge of “corrupt forces … stuffing ballot boxes,” and blamed Biden’s victory on “fraud and abuse…on a scale never seen before.” His efforts to contest the outcome, Trump said, were “about ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election and in all future elections”—a task that he said might prove to be his “single greatest achievement.”
Unfortunately for Trump, neither his initial legal challenges nor his subsequent efforts to incite a violent coup were sufficient to get him what he wanted. But as I predicted at the time, in Republican circles, Trump did manage to mainstream the belief that states that allow mail-in voting are at least facilitating cheating, if not outright encouraging it. Today, adherence to Trump’s stolen-election conspiracy theories remains table stakes for anyone who aspires to be relevant in the Republican Party and/or the conservative legal movement.
Continue reading “Samuel Alito Is the Supreme Court’s Leading Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theorist”Trump Stokes Outrage at SCOTUS, Tries For New Red Scare as Part of SAVE Act Pressure Campaign
Being Anti-SAVE Act Now = ‘Communist’
There is little that crosses the president’s desk these days that he won’t try to weaponize to continue bullying Senate Republicans into passing the SAVE America Act before the midterms — a logistical impossibility unless Republican leadership decides its a task worth nuking the filibuster or firing the Senate Parliamentarian over. As my colleague John Light noted this morning, so far, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has not been swayed to such an end. Nonetheless, from unrelated legislation to unrelated court decisions to his own nominees, no one and nothing is exempt from being turned into his cudgel to pass the SAVE Act — which he apparently now needs because of the “communists.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling this morning rejecting the Republican National Committee’s attempt to place sweeping restrictions on which mail-in ballots can be counted was no different. Trump called the decision a “tremendous loss” “concerning Voter’s Rights, and the fact that ‘people’s’ votes are allowed to be counted LONG AFTER an Election is over.” He once again called on the Senate to pass the bill, which is expected to disenfranchise millions if passed by mandating documentary proof of citizenship and photo IDs for voting.
“There is no excuse for a politician, or otherwise, to be against the above three requirements. There is only one reason to oppose — CHEATING!” he declared, before launching into a tirade revealing of the actual reason he wants the legislation passed before the midterms: he’s worried his unpopularity will result in major wins for Democrats in November.
He previewed this messaging point during a particularly incoherent — even for him — and graphic speech at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority Conference in Washington, D.C. Friday. Perhaps spooked by a handful of progressive victories in primary elections in recent weeks — across New York City and elsewhere — Trump has started talking about the Democratic Party in apocalyptic and McCarthyist terms, perhaps a sign of his desperation to get the SAVE America Act passed. During his speech on Friday, he painted an ominous vision of a nation in decline, filled with “slums” and godless “communists,” while calling for the legislation to be passed.
During a Fox News interview this morning before the SCOTUS decision came down, his White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt spoke in similarly feverish tones about the future that lies ahead if Democrats are able to take back either chamber of Congress — an outcome that would, of course, only be the result of cheating.
“These are radical marxist ideas that have never worked in the history of the world and I think it’s a choice coming up between communism and common sense — that’s how the president views it and that’s why Americans need to vote for this president and the Republican Party and the common sense ideals that make this the greatest nation in the history of the world,” she said.
Trump pushed the message harder during his post-SCOTUS ruling meltdown on Truth Social Monday, before calling out Republican senators who have qualms with the SAVE America Act by name — seemingly trying to equate their opposition to the voter suppression bill with support for communism and war and foreign terror attacks on Americans?
The House of Representatives has approved this vital Act, THREE TIMES. The United States Senate seems unable to do so. In a time when there is a powerful Communist Movement taking place in our Country, one more dangerous than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or September 11th, all Dumocrats, and our five Republican Senate Hold Outs, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, and Mitch McConnell must vote to SAVE OUR COUNTRY. There can be no more excuses!
It’s a sign of the Trump administration’s fears on a number of fronts: that working class Americans fed up with the nation’s affordability crisis — who may have joined the MAGA movement during earlier elections — might now, disillusioned by the rising costs of Trump’s tariffs and war in Iran, see more hope in the progressive populist movement. And also, the more immediate fear: Republicans may not be able to hold the House and Senate unless they enact drastic voter suppression laws in the 11th hour to stop potential Democratic gains in November.
Bipartisan Housing Bill Is Now Also Radical … Bc Elizabeth Warren?
Speaking of the SAVE Act and President Trump’s self-defeating routine of torpedoing his own priorities to try to pressure Republicans to pass it …
Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) is laying the groundwork for President Trump to veto the bipartisan housing bill that he was suppose to sign into law last week — before he canceled the signing ceremony last minute to continue his SAVE America Act pressure campaign. By painting it as legislation filled with Democratic priorities — rather than a rare good faith effort to address skyrocketing housing prices that Republicans could campaign on ahead of the midterms — Fine is giving Trump the runway to kill the legislation all together if he wants to.
MAGA Groups Prep to Ask Carr to Revoke Disney License
As if he needed any encouragement — Trump-aligned groups are reportedly preparing to ask Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr to pull the broadcast television licenses for Disney-owned stations, something that Carr has already been threatening to do as part of his full-scale retribution crackdown on Trump critics in the media.
One of the groups that is expected to file a petition with Carr to encourage a review of Disney’s broadcast licenses is the right-wing Center for American Rights, Politico reported. That group has previously filed complaints with the FCC against NBC over “Saturday Night Live” and CBS’ “60 Minutes,” alleging favoritism in its coverage of former Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential election.
More details from Politico:
The Media Research Center, a watchdog group devoted to countering perceived liberal bias, also plans to file a petition Monday urging the commission to deny Disney’s ABC license renewal, a spokesperson confirmed to POLITICO. The Article III Project, a legal organization led by Trump ally Mike Davis, submitted an early petition to deny last week over Disney’s diversity initiatives.
The reporting adds to a scheme that Carr has already threatened to carry out, and one that TPM has been following quite closely over the past year. Earlier this spring he called in license reviews for eight ABC TV stations, which are owned by Disney, years ahead of schedule. At the time Carr openly admitted that the reviews were being conducted because of unfavorable coverage of Trump’s war in Iran.
Must-Reads From TPM Today
Kate Riga’s coverage of two major SCOTUS rulings today is unmatched: SCOTUS Officially Kills Precedent that Protected Agencies — But with Special Federal Reserve Carveout
And also here: Supreme Court Rules Against Republicans’ Attempt to Restrict Vote by Mail
Layla A. Jones captures experts’ — and Trump’s — reactions to the Slaughter and Cook rulings: SCOTUS’ Narrow Protection of the Fed Means Cook, and Fed Independence, Still at Risk
Catch up on today’s edition of the Morning Memo: White House Religious Liberty Commission Releases ‘Embarrassing’ Report
My colleague and TPM’s executive editor John Light has soft launched a new morning newsletter to help get you up to speed on the storylines that TPM is tracking on any given day. Give today’s debut edition a read: The SAVE Act Self-Owns Will Continue
And finally, a big SCOOP from TPM reporter Josh Kovensky, who has really important new details about the two prosecutors the Justice Department has tapped to help orchestrate Trump’s directive to crack down on its dissent: Exclusive: DOJ Taps Gang, Terrorism Prosecutors to Crack Down on Political Groups
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
Josh Marshall: Google, AI, Oligarchy and the End of the ‘Open Web’
What I’m Reading
Supreme Court Lets $5 Million Sex Abuse Verdict Against Trump Stand
Fired F.T.C. Commissioner Warns of Potential for Presidential Abuse of Power
PHOTOS: Behold the Assorted Weirdness and Sparse Crowds at Trump’s Great American State Fair
The “Great American State Fair” kicked off last Thursday in Washington, D.C. While the event was ostensibly a celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, like so much in President Donald Trump’s second term, it became bogged down in concerns about politicization and questionable execution. Reports and photos from the event’s first weekend reveal a mix of sparse crowds, bad weather, and utter authoritarian weirdness.
We have compiled some of the best shots and eyewitness accounts so you can take it all in from the comfort of home.
Continue reading “PHOTOS: Behold the Assorted Weirdness and Sparse Crowds at Trump’s Great American State Fair “