A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Seizing on Kirk’s Killing to Pull Off a Power Grab

In the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Trump administration and its MAGA allies have launched a new project to target Kirk critics, threatening their employment in government and in the private sector.

On the government side:

• DoD: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has dispatched underlings on a hunt for service members and DoD civilians who have mocked or condoned Kirk’s killing on social media so that they can be punished. “Several service members have been relieved from their jobs because of such posts,” NBC News reports.
• DHS: The department has taken action against at least three employees, Government Executive reports.
• VA: Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins warned of punishment for department employees who were caught “justifying, celebrating or mocking” Kirk’s death, per Government Executive.

While the government’s internal campaign seems mostly focused (I say this with a skeptical eye still intact) on those condoning political violence, in the private sector, the purge has broadened to include criticism of Kirk and his extremist right-wing politics:

• At least a dozen employers have put staffers on leave or dismissed them over remarks about Kirk, the WaPo reports.
• Universities — including Ole Miss, Middle Tennessee State, and Austin Peay, among others — have fired or suspended employees over online comments about Kirk.
• A public school teacher in South Carolina was fired for a post on Facebook: “Thoughts and prayers to his children but IMHO America became greater today. There I said it.”
• DC Comics cancelled a new series after the author called Kirk a “Nazi b*tch.”
• WaPo columnist Karen Attiah said this morning that she was fired by the newspaper for Bluesky posts that it deemed “unacceptable” and “gross misconduct.” By her account, Attiah’s posts condemned political violence. The one post she shared that directly mentioned Kirk quoted Kirk disparaging Black women.

You might reasonably find some of the social media posts in question offensive, but to get caught in a debate over randos on social media is to lose the bigger picture. The tribal, political, and power imperatives of Trump’s MAGA project mean the right wing must seize on his death and hold it up as a totem of loyalty among the faithful while at the same time making it an un-passable litmus test for the institutions — corporations, universities, media — that Trump was already targeting. They can’t pass the test because either they refuse to take it, in which case they are targeted anew, or they play along and in doing so capitulate and prove what Trump wants so desperately to believe: that they are all just as craven as he is.

Headline of the Day

Reuters: Charlie Kirk’s allies warn Americans: Mourn him properly or else

Seems Like This Should Be Big News

Reuters reviewed a document that showed Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook told her lender that the Atlanta property at the center of the Trump administration’s bogus mortgage fraud claim against her wouldn’t be used as her primary residence. The Financial Times similarly reported that Cook listed the home as vacation property.”

Trump Admin Pushes to See How Cruel It Can Be

Another weekend with emergency court proceedings over Trump anti-immigration policy.

Given the current state of law, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan seemed reluctant to step in to prevent migrants who were removed by the Trump administration to Ghana from being sent by Ghana to their home countries, where they face persecution, including torture.

But despite her reluctance, Chutkan in an emergency hearing on Saturday still wasn’t buying the Trump administration’s argument that it had no control over what Ghana did, even if it reneged on diplomatic assurances it made not to turn around and send the migrants to their home countries.

“I have not been shy about saying that I think this is a very suspicious scheme,” Chutkan said.

Chutkan suggested it was no accident that Ghana was reneging and that the administration was getting the outcome it wanted.

This so-called chain refoulement — illegally using third countries as middlemen to handle the transfer of migrants to countries that the U.S. is legally prohibited from deporting to directly — has been an ongoing issue for several months.

Still, after a flurry of weekend filings and extreme gamesmanship from the Trump administration of initially refusing to give the other side in the case a copy of a key filing it made, Chutkan had not ruled to protect the migrants.

Expect a ruling from Chutkan as soon as this morning.

Clean up on Aisle Five

President Trump clearly realizes he screwed up with the raid on the Hyundai plant in Georgia, setting off a diplomatic row with South Korea, who saw dozens of highly trained workers handcuffed and shackled by immigration officers during the highly-touted operation. On Sunday, Trump posted what amounted to a lengthy “oops” on social media, and the No. 2 State Department official “expressed regret” over the incident.

Pritzker Successfully Fends Off Trump’s Deployment Threat

It does seem like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s big public pre-denunciation of President Trump’s threat to send the National Guard into Chicago succeeded in blunting that effort.

President Trump is turning his attention to blue cities in red states, namely Memphis and New Orleans, “after advisers warned him that sending in troops to help with local law enforcement without buy-in from the state’s governor could create legal headaches they want to avoid,” CNN reports.

“Legal headaches” is doing a lot of work there. You might read it as political blowback.

Are Kash Patel’s Days at FBI Numbered?

After the embattled Kash Patel spent some of the weekend playing golf with President Trump at his Bedminster, New Jersey club, Fox News reported that contingency plans are being formulated for removing Patel as FBI director and giving him another role in the administration.

DOJ Is Sharing State Voter Rolls With DHS

The Trump administration confirmed that the Justice Department is sharing the voter rolls it demanded earlier this year with the Department of Homeland Security for it to use to search for noncitizens.

Quote of the Day

U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco, ruling Friday that the Trump administration’s mass firing of probationary federal employees was illegal, but that the Supreme Court’s decision to let the terminations proceed while the case was pending leaves workers with no way to get their jobs back:

[T]he Supreme Court has made clear enough by way of its emergency docket that it will overrule judicially granted relief respecting hirings and firings within the executive, not just in this case but in others. And, too much water has now passed under the bridge since the Supreme Court stayed this Court’s preliminary injunction reinstating probationary employees. The terminated probationary employees have moved on with their lives and found new jobs. Many would no longer be willing or able to return to their posts. The agencies in question have also transformed in the intervening months by new executive priorities and sweeping reorganization. Many probationers would have no post to return to.

A Big Week Ahead for Vaccines

The CDC vaccine committee stacked with vaccine skeptics by Robert Kennedy, Jr., is set to meet this week. It’s unclear how far the committee will go in using pseudo-science and their own biases to upend vaccine recommendations, especially for children. Public health experts were horrified when the WaPo reported Friday that Trump officials were planning to abuse data in presenting to the panel a misleading picture that connects the COVID vaccine to the deaths of children.

‘I Apologize for That Extremely Callous Remark’

Over the weekend, Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade apologized on the air for his comments last week on Fox & Friends calling for euthanizing mentally ill homeless people. “Or involuntary lethal injection, or something,” Kilmeade said on Wednesday’s show. “Just kill ‘em.”

Fox News host on mentally ill people who commit crimes: “Just kill them”www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/…

— Media Matters for America (@mmfa.bsky.social) 2025-09-10T13:42:01.900Z

Two days later, President Trump went on the same show and announced that a suspect had been apprehended in the death of Charlie Kirk.

Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Trump Revealed the Arrest on Fox News

After two different people were mistakenly nabbed as suspects in the assassination of right-wing extremist Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump revealed Friday morning on Fox & Friends that the alleged assailant was finally in custody:

Trump claims Charlie Kirk's shooter is in custody: "Can I always say I think just to protect us all and so Fox doesn't get sued and we all don't get sued and everything else but I think with a high degree of certainty, we have him in custody."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-09-12T12:06:25.168Z

The bizarre spectacle of the president of the United States dribbling out news of the arrest and calling for the death penalty on a morning news show came after his FBI director had spent two days live-tweeting his own investigation and touting his relationship with the victim.

A couple of hours after Trump’s appearance on morning TV, law enforcement on the scene in Utah held a press conference announcing the arrest of a man suspected in the shooting and identified him as 22-year-old Utah resident Tyler Robinson.

“We got him,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox declared.

Few details were immediately available about Robinson or his motives. The press conference in Utah was still underway as Morning Memo was published.

The arrest reportedly came late Thursday night in St. George, Utah, more than 250 miles away from where Kirk was killed Wednesday on the campus of Utah Valley University. Law enforcement had released new images and video Thursday of the alleged assailant fleeing the scene of the shooting. Investigators recovered a bolt-action rifle in a wooded area near campus.

The investigation under FBI Director Kash Patel has been marked by an even greater degree of confusion and chaos than is typical after a major incident, according to various reports. Patel and his top deputy, Dan Bongino, held a tense and desperate-sounding online meeting with some 200 agents Thursday morning: the NYT reported:

They expressed themselves with such fierce urgency that, in the view of some participants, it hinted at another motive: to prove they were up to the task.

The director wasted no time before calling out subordinates that he said failed to give him timely information …

Mr. Patel said he would not tolerate any more “Mickey Mouse operations,” an official on the call recounted. It was one of his few utterances without profanity, the person added.

Trump Leads the Way in Post-Shooting Vitriol

President Trump continued to lash out wildly in the aftermath of the Kirk shooting, before an arrest was made in the case or a motive established. “We just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics,” he said on the White House South Lawn.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller similarly poured fuel on the fire, posting on X:

There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless.

A Trump State Department official, also posting on X, suggested that visitors to the U.S. would be screened for social media comments “praising, rationalizing, or making light” of Kirk’s death.

Sign of the Times

A false report of an active shooter on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Academy led to an altercation between a midshipman and a law enforcement officer in which both were injured:

Amid the initial chaos and confusion on campus, the midshipman mistook a law enforcement officer for the shooter and struck him in the head with a parade rifle. The law enforcement officer then fired at the midshipman, wounding him in the arm, the officials said.

Appeals Court Judges Publicly Rip Supreme Court

In an extraordinary display of dissatisfaction with the Roberts Court’s unprecedented use of the shadow docket during the first few months of the Trump II presidency, the full 4th Circuit Court of Appeals publicly questioned during oral arguments Thursday how they’re supposed to follow the high court’s cryptic and often unexplained decisions.

Quote of the Day

“It has been observed that individual Americans are putting up more fight than many institutions. Those individuals are also smaller targets for the authoritarian president and his allies. They are less powerful. But that’s obviously why it’s more important for the institutions to engage and not to succumb to the climate of fear. That climate, after all, only exists if it goes unchallenged. There is no climate of fear without capitulation.”–Philip Bump

For Your Radar …

There’s a busy weekend ahead in Federal Reserve Board Lisa Cook’s legal challenge to her firing by President Trump. The D.C. Circuit ordered emergency briefing on whether to block the lower court order that temporarily reinstated her to Federal Reserve Board. An appeals court decision could come as soon as Sunday night, and the case could be at the Supreme Court by Monday.

Rare Oversight From the Senate GOP

Senator Michael D. Crapo (R-ID), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, sent a letter this week to the Social Security Administration following up on explosive revelations by the agency’s former chief data officer that DOGE had mishandled a database containing the confidential personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans. Crapo’s letter did not include a demand for documents.

Dem Senators Try to Stop Military Funeral for Ashli Babbitt

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) tried to block the Pentagon from giving military funeral honors to Ashli Babbitt, the Jan. 6 rioter killed by law enforcement in the Capitol, but was stymied this week by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).

How It’s Done

Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for couping to overturn the 2022 election.

Pro-couping Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the outcome: “The United States will respond accordingly to this witch hunt.”

Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Desperate to Keep His Job, Patel Did the White House’s Bidding

A new lawsuit containing devastating allegations about the clownish politicization of the FBI calls into serious question whether the bureau — under the nominal control of Kash Patel — is up to the task of investigating a major case like the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Hours before Patel befooled himself by live-tweeting the serial apprehension then release of two different people mistakenly believed to be Kirk’s assailant, three fired senior FBI officials described in vivid detail a bureau nearly crippled by the social media obsessions of Patel and his top deputy Dan Bongino.

The three men — former acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll Jr., Steven Jensen, and Spencer Evans — sued in federal court in D.C., claiming their terminations were political retaliation in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments and unlawful under other various protections for FBI employees. The named defendants are Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi, the FBI, the Justice Department, the Executive Office of the President, and the United States.

The entire complaint is worth a read to appreciate the buffoonish of Patel and Bongino, but also of a White House that variously:

• used an inexperienced 29-year-old staffer to vet candidates to lead the FBI;
• refused to fix a clerical error that made Driscoll the acting director instead of the acting deputy director.

But the overall impression left by the lawsuit is far worse: an FBI supine to the Trump White House, led by feckless loyalists who easily wilt under pressure from the likes of deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

With striking specificity that suggests Driscoll kept contemporaneous notes, the lawsuit recounts numerous episodes in which Patel and Bongino claimed they were under pressure from the White House and MAGA trolls on social media. Patel even went so far as to admit that the purges of FBI officials are illegal, will result in lawsuits, and force him to be deposed, the lawsuit alleges.

“Patel explained that he had to fire the people his superiors told him to fire, because his ability to keep his own job depended on the removal of the agents who worked on cases involving the President,” the lawsuit alleges.

Putting pliant doofuses in charge of the FBI strengthens White House control of federal law enforcement, which Trump has long threatened and has now begun to use to exact retribution against political foes.

Kirk Gunman Still on the Loose

A manhunt continues this morning for the gunman who assassinated 31-year-old conservative activist Charlie Kirk on a university campus in Utah. Two different men were initially detained in connection with the shooting but were later released. Video from the scene appears to show the gunman on the roof of a nearby building immediately after a single shot struck Kirk in the neck.

Trump Threatens Broad Retaliation for Kirk Killing

The mix of public and social media reaction to the Kirk assassination is nearly unbearable to observe. Outside of the hotheaded reactions, it was striking that some mainstream news outlets veered into lionizing Kirk despite his extreme politics. At MSNBC, commentator Matthew Dowd was fired for inartful on-air comments that noted Kirk’s extremism, despite his apology that he hadn’t intended to blame Kirk for his own shooting.

All of that, though — even the wave of right-wing threats of retaliation — paled next to the president of the United States making a televised address from the Oval Office attacking the “radical left” and suggesting he would use the power of the federal government to go after his political foes as payback for Kirk’s death:

Trump: "For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism we're seeing in our country & it must stop right now. My admin will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-09-11T01:08:53.259Z

One Trump dynamic on display here is that when bad things happen on his watch he reasserts some semblance of control by raging louder. Powerless to events, he projects power with anger, reactivity, and threats. Even when he is the one in charge, he becomes the complainer-in-chief, Karen-ing his way to the front of the line to see the manager. It suits the media of TV and social media, even if in the real world it tends to emphasize weakness and ineptitude.

Trump DOJ Retreats From Bogus Claim in Court

When Kirk was assassinated, I was listening in on a federal court hearing in D.C. on the Trump administration’s aborted Labor Day removals of hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children. The most newsworthy development to come out of the hearing on a preliminary injunction was the Trump DOJ retreating from its prior position that the parents of the children had requested their repatriation.

In what is now a predictable pattern from the administration, DOJ official Drew Ensign made certain factual representations during an emergency hearing over the Labor Day weekend. Those representations later turned out to be false, misleading, or incomplete. A different DOJ lawyer showed up in court with a modified position so the judge can’t take Ensign to task.

In yesterday’s hearing, U.S. District Judge Tim Kelly noted how the government’s representations have “evolved.” Kelly didn’t immediately rule, but he seemed inclined to issue a preliminary injunction barring removals of minor children without giving them the due process required under the law. He seemed mostly interested in determining how broadly he can legally craft such an injunction.

More Bad Facts in U.S. Attack on Venezuelan Boat

The NYT (and later the WSJ) reported that in the moments before the U.S. Navy attacked an alleged drug-running boat off the coast of Venezuela it had appeared to turn back toward shore, further undermining the shaky legal claim that the United States was acting in self-defense.

There was already enough wrong with this incident, as Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman writes in a new piece for Just Security: The Many Ways in Which the September 2 Caribbean Strike was Unlawful … and the Grave Line the Military Has Crossed.

Quote of the Day

“This situation brings us the closest we have been to open conflict since World War II.”– Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, on the first time NATO planes have engaged Russia over allied airspace

Purge Watch

• On a 2-1 vote, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the district court and reinstated Shira Perlmutter as the register of copyrights at the Library of Congress while the appeal of her case continues.
• Greg Sargent: The judge used Trump’s own tweet against him to buttress the case that he unlawfully fired Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook.

Bari Weiss in Line for Major Role at CBS News

Indebted to the Trump White House for facilitating its acquisition of CBS, the merged company’s new owner is poised to buy Bari Weiss’ Free Press and give her a prominent role as editor in chief or co-president of CBS News, the NYT reports.

The Topsy Turvy Epstein Scandal

The first casualty of the renewed, through-the-looking-glass version of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal ends up being … the British ambassador to the United States.

Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!