What Trump’s ‘Very Fine People, on Both Sides’ Has Wrought a Decade Later

Posted on September 14, 2026September 14, 2026 by David Kurtz

Charlottesville Still Reverberates

If you read one thing today, make sure it’s Christopher Mathias’ exclusive for TPM on Marshall Rawson, the Republican nominee for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives who marched alongside neo-Nazis at the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, according to video and a photo we unearthed.

Rawson isn’t publicly touting his presence at the “Unite the Right” rally, but he’s not exactly distancing himself either, telling TPM: “Over the entire span of my adult life, I’ve been very active defending historical monuments from destruction or removal, and I feel that way about almost all monuments, not just those associated with southern history.”

Rawson’s successful GOP primary campaign against the son of the term-limited incumbent received significant financial support from a number of figures in the white supremacy movement. I’m not sure that’s enough on its own to make Rawson some kind of Manchurian candidate of right-wing extremism, nor does it mean they represent him, but it does suggest they think he represents them.

This is the fruit of the permission structure President Trump created for right-wing extremism. After Charlottesville, President Trump rolled out the “very fine people, on both sides” false equivalency. It was a precursor to his “Stand back and stand by” in 2020, which became a catalyst for the Jan. 6 attack.

Trump has been feeding this fire almost uninterrupted for a decade now. We see it in congressional staffers turned Groypers, in campaign staffers toying with Nazi imagery, and in the sheer delight in transgressive behavior as a tribal marker.

Each of these incidents not only sows seeds for future division, hatred, and extremism, but does so without shame or opprobrium. It is open and brazen and unapologetic. Each incident gives birth to new legions of supporters who are steeped in the common experiences of their movement.

Detect a Pattern?

Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) fired his re-election campaign’s political director after the WaPo revealed he had once used a photo of Nazi SS soldiers as his Facebook photo

Today in Overt Racism

Bo French is the GOP nominee for statewide office in Texas:

Election Interference Watch

The WaPo has good roundup of why the biggest threat to the midterm elections is the Trump administration itself.
Late Sunday, a second federal judge more fully blocked the Trump administration from ‌proceeding with the new USPS rule on mail-in ballots. The order came from U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee in D.C.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is siding with the Trump administration against Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, also a Republican, who is fending off federal demands for private voter data under threat of criminal prosecution.

Great Read: War on Women Edition

A great NYT piece on the extraordinary lengths Republican men in Utah have gone to restructure government to curtail the power of Republican women, especially judges.

Hmmm …

Joe diGenova abruptly resigned from the Trump DOJ the day after he signed a grand jury subpoena for the testimony of former CIA Director John Brennan in the sweeping “grand conspiracy” investigation, according to a new filing this morning by Brennan’s attorney in his preemptive lawsuit against the Trump administration.

If the account offered by Brennan attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein is accurate — and he’s no slouch — then the DOJ confirmed to him what’s been generally reported already: that that there are two investigations involving Brennan, the “grand conspiracy” case in south Florida and a lying to Congress case in DC:

A reminder that Kurt Olsen came straight to DOJ from the Trump White House, where he was the president’s “Director of Election Security and Integrity.”

Another Wrinkle in Slush Fund Case

I just can’t let it go that the Trump DOJ engaged in a new bit of brazen gamesmanship to do the president yet another solid in his lawsuit against the IRS — even though it’s a bit in the weeds.

After failing to even enter an appearance in defense of Trump’s lawsuit, let alone defending against it, and then reaching a collusive settlement that gave Trump IRS immunity and created the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund … after ALL OF THAT … the Trump DOJ notified U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams on Friday that it is now appealing her order that found the settlement to be “non-adversarial, collusive, and jurisdictionally improper” and imposed sanctions on Trump’s lawyers.

While the notice of appeal filed by newly installed acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter was still timely, it comes more than a month after Trump and his lawyers appealed Judge Williams’ order. It’s all part of maintaining the charade that DOJ is not on the same side of the case as the president.

Unlawful Deportations Start to Add Up

Nearly 30 people have been unlawfully deported since Trump returned to office, either in violation of court orders, legally mandated due process protections, or immigration court orders, an analysis by Politico shows.

Criminalizing Dissent Watch

Prosecutions of protesters flop: The Trump DOJ has failed to secure felony convictions against most of the 102 protesters arrested in Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Oregon, and Washington, D.C. last year on charges of assaulting federal immigration agents, the AP reports.
Joint Task Force Vanguard: Under orders from President Trump to target left-leaning ideology, the Trump DOJ is going after randos online.
Thread of the Day:

Canada Yokes Its Future to the EU

I find it so painful to watch Canada, abandoned by the United States, seek deeper ties with the EU, including a possible “associate member” status envision by Prime Minister Mark Carney.

The Most Important News Today

The Trump administration is expected to announce today that the federal government will no longer regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants — dooming for the foreseeable future efforts to rein in carbon pollution even as the metastasizing effects of global warming are becoming abundantly clear.

As the NYT reports:

The power sector is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the United States. … if the U.S. power sector were its own country, it would be the fifth-largest climate polluter in the world after China, the entire United States, India and Russia.

To remove greenhouse gas emissions from the protections of the Clean Air Act, the Trump administration has to conclude that they do not endanger human health or the environment.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

NSPM-7 Directed Trump’s DOJ to Target Left-Leaning Ideology. It’s Going After Randos Online.

Posted on September 14, 2026September 15, 2026 by Josh Kovensky

National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, the Trump White House’s memo directing federal law enforcement to consider progressive beliefs as indicators of domestic terrorism, has done a lot of things. It’s brought a broad conspiracy case against nonviolent protestors in Minneapolis, netted half-century sentences on terrorism charges for a Texas anti-ICE protest that turned violent, and sparked what one former counterterrorism prosecutor described to TPM as a COINTELPRO-like law enforcement war on opposition protestors.

It’s also causing trouble for those extremely aggressive and extremely online people who might be inclined to make extremely inadvisable social media posts.

Continue reading →

Exclusive: He Marched With Nazis in Charlottesville. Now He’s Expected to Join the Florida Legislature.

Posted on September 14, 2026September 15, 2026 by Christopher Mathias

The Republican nominee for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives marched alongside neo-Nazis at the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a new Talking Points Memo investigation can reveal.

Continue reading →

Trump and His Adviser Describe Criticism of AI as a Shadowy Plot

Posted on September 14, 2026September 14, 2026 by John Light

Trump Wants Full Speed Ahead on AI

Even as tech CEOs cast AI as a kind of runaway train, Trump is urging full speed ahead. “We’re leading China in AI, we’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins,” he said over the weekend.

It’s an increasingly rare position, even within the Republican Party. Chair of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology David Sacks, however, also remains bullish — and went so far as to claim on Fox last week that criticism of AI was an “op.”

“The truth is, this was a well-orchestrated media op,” he said of warnings by Jacob Coxon, the Anthropic safety researcher who quit last week. “And it was designed to scare the public about AI — so they implement their preferred approach to AI, which is a government takeover, to have a very heavy hand in government regulation of AI.”

Trump seemingly echoed that over the weekend. “I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up,” he said.

The base isn’t necessarily in the same place. Steve Bannon is set to speak at an event this week to call for greater controls on the technology, alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — the loudest elected, Democratic-aligned AI-skeptical voice — and Coxon. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), too, sounded the mildest note of caution over the weekend, while effectively shrugging off his own role, urging the companies to self-regulate.

Democrats, meanwhile, are noting voters’ concern about this topic, though they, too, are not yet speaking in one voice. Barack Obama, at a fundraiser, urged congressional Democrats to present a clear message on the dangers of the technology.

“If I were running for president next year, this would be one of my central agendas, and I would have a very clear plan, and I would talk about this, and I would say, ‘Here’s our plan for safety, here’s our plan for making sure our kids are not corrupted by this,’” he said, per NBC News. “‘I would be thinking about the economic impacts in very concrete ways and understanding what does it mean if there’s going to be job displacement.’”

AI is often compared to nuclear proliferation, but in Congress’ reluctance to grapple with it, I find comparisons to climate change — a more recent abject failure by the U.S. government — more useful. Oil and coal companies were able to defuse political action in the U.S. with similar talking points — if the U.S. didn’t burn fossil fuels, other countries would, they claimed. Climate change was a fringe issue pushed by activist groups, not a topic for serious-minded politicians, they said.

By the time the U.S. government did take action, it faced structural impediments, with support for regulation of greenhouse gas emissions only rarely having majority support in Congress. Obama’s Clean Power Plan — implemented through executive action — was struck down by the courts. The Democratic-supported climate provisions in the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act — arduously passed through the budget reconciliation process to avoid the filibuster — were immediately scrapped by a new, Republican Congress once Trump retook control of the White House. Nearly 40 years after Congress was first warned about climate change, it has done virtually nothing on the topic.

Now, too, there’s a new dynamic in the mix — a Republican-controlled legislative branch that views itself, from issues of war to spending, as subordinate to the executive branch, and, specifically, to Trump. That, coupled with Trump’s dismissiveness toward those who urge caution around the new technology, does not bode well for the U.S. government leading the way on reining in AI.

Bo French’s Latest Anti-Immigrant Post Gets Some Mild GOP Pushback

MANSFIELD, TEXAS – APRIL 15: Tarrant County Republican Party Chair Bo French speaks during a rally, on Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Mansfield. (Shafkat Anowar/The Dallas Morning News via Getty Images)

During a reporting trip to Texas earlier this year, TPM’s Josh Kovensky took note of the tremendously toxic force that is Bo French, now the Republican nominee for the state’s railroad commission, which, in Texas, is an important office, regulating the state’s oil and gas industry and pipelines.

To give just a taste of who this guy is, last year he posted a poll asking his X audience, “Who is a bigger threat to America?” The options were “Jews” and “Muslims.”
On Sunday, he posted a picture that appears to show young people of South Asian descent celebrating in a stadium. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” he wrote. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
Texas Republicans, as Josh Kovensky saw during his trip, have leaned hard into demonizing both Muslim Texans and South Asian Texans, apparently calculating that doing so will help get xenophobes amped to vote in the midterms.
French’s post prompted some pushback from elected Republicans in Texas, though Governor Greg Abbott qualified his criticism of French by stating that Texas should have the “toughest immigration laws of any state in America” and to call for “freezing H1B visas at our universities.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton, asked by Politico for comment on French’s post, did not mention French but attacked James Talarico, his opponent in the Senate race, per Politico.

Tabs

The political director for Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) left his reelection campaign after the Washington Post reported that he had posted pictures of Nazi soldiers to his Facebook and participated in the creation of a public playlist that celebrated Rhodesia, a white-governed breakaway state in Africa admired by white supremacists.
Trump does not yet appear to be spending money to defend Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, the Washington Sun reports.

Man of the Hour

DOONBEG, IRELAND – SEPTEMBER 13: Donald Trump Jr. talks with his wife Bettina Anderson on day four of the Amgen Irish Open at Trump International Golf Links in Doonbeg on September 13, 2026 in Doonbeg, Ireland. (Photo by Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)

It’s Donald Trump Jr., whose wedding was, reportedly, “heavily funded” by a Russian oligarch close to Putin.

Are We at War?

Militias in Iraq allied with Iran have struck Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline as the not-war expands in the Middle-East.

Charlie Kirk Takes Manhattan

Posted on September 12, 2026September 13, 2026 by Hunter Walker

[Essay]

We Carry the Flame

You can hear it in the viral and almost certainly AI generated refrain: “We are Charlie Kirk. We carry the flame.”

That bit of digital slop has never proved more true than over the past week when our total Kirkification was on display in the beating heart of the American empire.

For a brief moment this week, New York City’s Times Square played host to a misshapen monument to Charlie Kirk. The statue was part of a half-baked plan to raise a million-dollar sum that was cooked up by Sergio Furnari, an eccentric artist and self-described scientist. The statue’s unveiling was a gaudy display of scams, attention seeking, and hatred that was truly in keeping with Kirk’s real legacy.

And, when I sought out the spectacle, it was clear the grift and grotesqueries were not confined to the makeshift memorial.

Thursday marked one year since Kirk was shot while doing the thing that made him famous: Trying to draw college students into the far-right culture war. Kirk was a walking internet comments section who became rich and loud thanks to a dark money war chest. Among other things, Kirk pulled in clicks and dollars by staging live versions of the angry, misinformed, and pithy sparring that has defined our digital discourse. He was arguably shot down by the very forces he riled up: his alleged shooter was an extremist with apparent left-wing leanings who was enraged by Kirk’s trolling and took the fury offline with scrawled references to memes on the bullets.

Since that moment, President Donald Trump and others on the right have tried to use the awful circumstances of Kirk’s death to turn him into a martyr and talismanic proof their movement, which has taken over national politics for the better part of a decade, is somehow entitled to victimhood. As we have already chronicled in this newsletter, the disingenuous veneration of Kirk has spawned a wave of AI slop souvenirs and songs. It also inspired a purge in which dozens of people who dared to point out that Kirk was a hatemonger who almost certainly encouraged violence were doxxed and fired from their jobs.

Online, young people have responded to the awkwardly forced (and painfully enforced) efforts to sanctify Kirk by turning him into something else: a meme. They’ve made their own avalanche of AI slop with bizarre caricatures, inserting exaggerated versions of Kirk and his prodigious forehead into other scenarios and celebrity bodies. The phenomenon has been dubbed “Kirkification.”

Sergio Furnari’s sculpture reveal in Times Square was ostensibly a more earnest tribute to the slain right wing activist. It proved no less absurd.

Furnari calls himself a “master in sculpture and painting.” Based on his website, his signature projects include ornately painted swimming pools. Furnari also has some kind of vision to help Elon Musk get us to Mars based on his supposed expertise as a “scientist of thermal tile surfacing.”

Furnari’s Times Square event was apparently part of a broader effort to bring in cash. According to an online fundraising page, Furnari hopes to raise $1 million to erect a “colossal monument” to Kirk.

“Sadly none of the politicians/entrepreneurs/supporters have contacted him,” the page says. “Sergio has sold his own apartment to fund this project.”

Faced with these issues, Furnari seems to have downsized. His fundraiser has currently set a more modest $150,000 goal and the statue, that he showed off in Times Square on the anniversary of Kirk’s death is a smaller version of his dream Kirklossus.

That prototype features Kirk sitting at his debate table as he was in the moments before his death. While the setting is clear, the attempted likeness evokes the warped memes of Kirk’s face more than it does the man himself. As of this writing, the distorted Kirk and its associated fundraiser have only raised $12,950.

At the event, Furnari was joined by Jake Lang, a far right influencer, Jan. 6er and erstwhile Republican candidate with a fondness for giving Sieg Heil salutes who has spent the past couple years staging theatrical demonstrations targeting Muslims and Jews. Based on his own social media, Lang and the band of “crusaders” at Furnari’s Kirk event were in the Big Apple for a Sept. 11 march to “stop Zohran Mamdani from going to Ground Zero.”

Lang provided a vivid example of the types of people who see Kirk as a fellow traveler and icon for their cause. He also showed how much Kirk and the supposedly more respectable, official side of MAGA share an agenda with extremists. The blatantly Islamophobic push to exclude Mamdani from the annual commemoration 9/11 Memorial was also amplified by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a close Trump associate, and a slew of MAGA media outlets.

TPM’s invitation to the event was lost in the mail. I tried calling Furnari a few times right after the event as clips were spreading online. It didn’t exactly yield a coherent conversation. First, he told me the statue was in Rockefeller Center, adjacent to Times Square. I rushed there to see the Kirk for myself. Upon arrival, I called Furnari again. He couldn’t tell me where he was but promised to share his location. About a half hour later, he called back and said he didn’t know where he was.

At that point, I gave up.

During that fruitless wander through midtown Manhattan, the streets were filled with heinous AI merch. Walking through the Diamond District, I overheard dubious entrepreneurs taping podcasts. As I passed through the center of Times Square, it was clogged with passersby taking pictures of themselves. Vendors hawked more elaborate photo opportunities with vintage cameras and polaroids. Dingy costumed characters including superheroes and at least one Labubu ambled around offering to join the shots for a price.

Everyone wants to be part of the feed. America’s heroes have been reduced to shoddy renditions of themselves. Our world has been Kirkified.

Like it or not, now, we are all Charlie Kirk. We carry the flame. And everything is on fire.

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By Hunter Walker

[Report]

Making the Falklands Great Again

Argentina’s wild-haired “anarcho-capitalist” president, Javier Milei, has in recent months been getting a lot of help from Donald Trump. His effort to conduct a full overhaul of his country’s government and economy — think DOGE, but ongoing for years, not months — has hit some rough patches. His current approval ratings are similar to, but not quite as bad as, Trump’s. Perhaps their experiences of governance have prompted some fellow feelings between the two men, with Trump doing Milei such favors as importing tons of Argentinian beef, pissing off American cattle farmers in the process.

They’ve also decided to restart the Falklands War. I’m joking — or, rather, they’re joking … but also maybe not.

The Falklands War began in 1982 when Argentina, then under a military dictatorship, invaded the Falklands, an archipelago in the Atlantic 300 miles off the coast of Argentina and 750 miles north of Antarctica. The islands have been a territory of the UK since the mid-1800s. The war ended after 74 days in a humiliating defeat for the Argentines, a key factor in the collapse of its autocratic government and the return of democracy to the country.

Now, Milei, whose administration has winked and nodded in various ways to last century’s junta, is stirring the pot again. The islands are ”Argentine, by history and by right, there is no debate about it,” he said last week. His government then barred oil companies that operate in the Falklands from also drilling in Argentina, and sued at least one.

But, oddly, Trump is also getting in on the action — seemingly not because of any true interest in the Falklands dispute and more out of a desire to troll the UK, and liberal governments in Europe more generally. Last week, he complained to a British news outlet that the UK and NATO were “not there to help me” when he declared war on Iran, and suggested he likewise would not help the UK were Argentina to invade. The U.S. then sold Argentina some Black Hawk helicopters.

The whole thing feels a little bit like a weird joke sustained by the two eccentric right wing leaders, reminiscent of Trump’s Greenland news cycle. But the line between trolling and official policy can be thin in the U.S. in 2026 — a fact the British, perhaps, recognize, as they are taking this all very seriously. Milei’s position “tells us more about domestic politics in Argentina than it does about the Falkland Islands,” the UK’s Secretary of State for Defence said on X. “The Falklands are British because Falkland Islanders choose to be British. Our commitment to the Falklands is absolute and unshakeable.”

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By John Light

[Words of Wisdom]

The RNC Midterm Convention in One Word

“ruuuuuUUUUUP” — RFK Jr.

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[TPM Trivia]

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

Rep. Chris Pappas (D), who this week won the New Hampshire Senate Democratic Primary, hails from Manchester where his family owns the Puritan Backroom restaurant. Which popular pub food does the Puritan claim to have invented?
When he was working as a doctor, Kansas senator Roger Marshall (R), took what action against more than 700 of his patients, leading to 81 arrests?
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” decided to place its interview with this Senate candidate on YouTube instead of airing it during the broadcast — the latest sign of a network muzzling itself in the face of FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s pressure campaign to punish networks that broadcast things Trump doesn’t like.

Answers below

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[This Effing Guy]

The (Pet) GOAT

When President George W. Bush was first informed of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, he was famously sitting in an elementary classroom in Florida. The president listened and followed along as the children read aloud from “The Pet Goat.” When White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered into Bush’s ear that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center, Bush stared like a deer in headlights and waited a full seven minutes for the children to finish reading before taking action. Whatever he was thinking in those seven minutes, the moment would become an indelible image of his presidency, and his subsequent actions would lead Americans on a disastrous course of war, surveillance and xenophobia.

Now, 25 years later and having retired from public life to pursue his passion for painting, W. is unveiling a new collection of paintings reflecting on the anniversary of 9/11. In one of the paintings, he depicts that moment in the classroom with Card leaning over him. It’s a faithful enough depiction, but no more a window into what he is thinking in this moment than the original imagery was to what he was thinking in that moment. Maybe W. painting one of his more embarrassing moments is a sign that he is doing some soul searching; perhaps he is contrite, sees the role he played in leading us to this current moment and wishing he could go back and do things differently. However, if we learned anything from his presidency it’s that “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.'”

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[Good Posts]

The Other Post Warning That AI Will Be Humanity’s Ruin

Frank took us on a real roller coaster here pic.twitter.com/jIJlrRs26O
— Vince Mancini (@VinceMancini) September 10, 2026

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[TPM in the Wild]

WNBA Culture Wars and the Overblown Panic About Leftists

Kate Explains Why the Right Is Pretending to Care About Women’s Sports

Kate joined the excellent Cancel Me, Daddy podcast to talk about the intersection of her two main interests: reporting on the far right and obsessing over the WNBA. As a five-year season ticket holder for the Washington Mystics, Kate has been closely tracking the bad-faith anti-Black and anti-trans crusade that right-wing media is waging against the W.

“I think these ‘culture war’ kind of issues are necessary to keep their base in marching formation with a party that has always primarily sought to enrich the wealthiest Americans,” Kate points out. “You’ve always kind of needed the bigotry to keep these camps together.”

Hunter Wishes Everyone Would Chill About Hasan Piker

Hunter joined MS Now’s The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi to talk about the New Hampshire primaries and how the two parties are faring in the final countdown before the midterm elections. He expressed frustration with the ongoing media obsession over podcaster Hasan Piker’s support for a handful of progressive candidates, pointing out that, “the top donor in the GOP, Elon Musk, is a man who is basically spewing white nationalism every other day on Twitter.”

@huntersfeed
Last night’s New Hampshire primary showed the panic over the DSA and @Hasanabi is overblown. #newhampshire #politics #democrats #washington #washingtondc
♬ original sound – Hunter Walker

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[No Words]

25 Years Later

JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY – SEPTEMBER 9: People watch and take pictures as a drone light show depicting the twin towers appears in the skyline during testing of Tribute in Light installation in lower Manhattan on September 9, 2026, as seen from Liberty State Park in Jersey City, New Jersey. The twin beams shine from dusk on September 11 until dawn on September 12 every year. (Photo by Jeremy Weine/Getty Images)

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Trivia answers: 1) Chicken tenders 2) Sued for outstanding bills 3) James Talarico

YouTube Live: Join Joe Ragazzo, Nicole LaFond and Kate Riga at 1 PM ET

Posted on September 11, 2026September 11, 2026 by Allegra Kirkland

Our publisher Joe Ragazzo is going to be hosting biweekly YouTube lives with members of our team, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Join him at 1 p.m. ET today for a conversation with editor Nicole LaFond and reporter Kate Riga on the 25th anniversary of 9/11; the start of the NFL season; President Trump’s bribe offer/proposal to give Americans $5,000 if Republicans win the midterms; and Vivek Ramaswamy’s widely-mocked batting cage campaign video.

We’ll see you then!

The (Latest) diGenova Saga

Posted on September 11, 2026September 11, 2026 by Josh Marshall

David Kurtz has a good run-down of the overnight Joe diGenova story in today’s Morning Memo. DiGenova went rogue, then resigned or got fired, then publicly went rogue (essentially claimed that Trump Main Justice wanted to bring evidence-less indictments) and then tried to sort of un-rogue, I guess so as not lose his seat on the Trump gravy/TV hit train. DiGenova is no innocent; he’s a GOP partisan knife-fighter going back to the early ’90s. He made the still-significant shift to team Trump basically at the first opportunity. And here we are.

10 Thoughts on the Abrupt Resignation of Joe diGenova

Posted on September 11, 2026September 11, 2026 by David Kurtz

Say It Ain’t So, Joe!

Joseph diGenova, the Trump loyalist and conspiracy promulgator put in charge of the sweeping DOJ investigation into an imagined grand conspiracy against the president, abruptly resigned yesterday reportedly under pressure for not having secured indictments quickly enough.

For a brief moment last night, diGenova looked like he might effectively turn whistleblower against the Trump DOJ. “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he told the New York Post.

But a short time later, diGenova backtracked somewhat, telling the AP that his comments were taken out of context: “There’s plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution. It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others — and you can’t do that.”

Victoria Toensing, diGenova’s wife who was also part of the prosecution team, is resigning, too.

What to make of all this?

We don’t have perfect visibility into how it all came down, but the Trump track record on retributive prosecutions is pretty clear and diGenova’s departure fits into the general pattern:

Trump just wants indictments. More than anything else, President Trump is eager to stain his foes with indictments. What about actual convictions? That would be icing, but they are almost beside the point. This approach of indict first and try to build a case later is so at odds with how legit prosecutors operate that it remains a cognitive obstacle to analyzing what is going on in the Trump retributive prosecution cases. (You’d also expect a genuine tyrant to want his foes jailed, not merely indicted, so having convictions be an afterthought is confounding on many levels.)
Trump Sends Underlings Into the Buzzsaw. Indicting first and then trying to build a case later puts the onus on Trump DOJ prosecutors on the front end and exposes them to the full wrath of the judiciary on the back end. It is a no-win situation for them. We’ve seen this again and again, with judges excoriating prosecutors for not being ready with discovery, slow-rolling cases after indictment, and generally still working to compile their case as it barrels towards trial.
Churning Through Underlings. To get around putting prosecutors in impossible positions with judges, the Trump DOJ frequently churns through junior prosecutors in the same case. It makes it hard for judges to hold prosecutors to account when they’re no longer on the case. Senior Trump DOJ officials have in some cases had to step into the breach themselves. It’s further reduced the capacity of the Justice Department, often leaving political appointees on the front lines in big cases, a nearly unheard of rarity at DOJ.
Todd Blanche Knows the Score. Blanche became attorney general because President Trump wasn’t satisfied that Pam Bondi was moving fast enough against his foes. Blanche used his time as acting attorney general to ramp up the second prosecution of James Comey over the seashells arrayed to say “86 47” and to take other aggressive steps on Trump’s behalf — including appointing diGenova to jumpstart the grand conspiracy investigation — and thus lock down the nomination to the permanent position.
Blanche Brought in diGenova. Bondi was gone by early April, and by late April Blanche has installed diGenova in a much-touted move to bolster the languishing (and bogus) grand conspiracy investigation, which is being run out of the Miami U.S. Attorney’s Office.
diGenova Wasn’t the First Prosecutor to Quit this Case. Before diGenova arrived on scene, career DOJ prosecutor Maria Medetis Long had withdrawn from the case, reportedly over concerns that the evidence was insufficient to charge former CIA Director John Brennan in a companion case.
diGenova is No Saint in all of This. A staple of GOP politics since he served as D.C. U.S. attorney in the 1980s, diGenova had taken an opportunistic turn toward the Trumpian right over the past decade. He was an attractive option to lead the grand conspiracy investigation because he’d been touting various MAGA conspiracy theories publicly as a Trump surrogate on TV and privately as a legal adviser to the president on matters related to the Russia probes.
diGenova Saw the Writing on the Wall. His resignation came after clashes with higher-ups at Main Justice, including reportedly being told that “he had lost the confidence of his superiors,” CNN reported.
diGenova Gives Defense Attorneys a Gift. diGenova’s comments to the NY Post will be damaging in any subsequent prosecution that arises from the grand conspiracy investigation. It is more evidence of vindictive prosecutions by the Trump DOJ, and could be used as an example in other unrelated prosecutions as an example of the pattern of DOJ misconduct.
diGenova Beats Hasty Retreat. DiGenova’s walkback to the AP of his earlier remarks is still somewhat damaging to DOJ, but it also shows diGenova hastily returning to the fold, where it’s easier to stoke conspiracy theories, gin up Trump, and overpromise results than it is to actually build a viable criminal case that can win a conviction and withstand appeal. That requires real evidence, professional prosecutors, hard work, and adherence to the standards of legal ethics.

Trump wants what he wants: the stain of indictment on his foes, the same as he was stained. He doesn’t care if he breaks the Justice Department, ruins prosecutors careers, churns through appointees, or fails to obtain a conviction. That’s it. It’s not that complicated.

One for the History Books

President Trump’s insane closing flourish at last night’s GOP midterm convention will be the kind of historical artifact that I cringe imagining trying to explain to future generations:

DHS Deletes Super Racist Post

The Department of Homeland Security has taken down a post that featured Optimus Prime of Transformers fame wearing the DHS seal on his armor and telling a Sikh man to “Self Deport or Find Out.” DHS said the post was referring to Harjinder Singh, an Indian trucker who has been demagogued by the Trump administration for his involvement in a fatal highway crash last year in Florida. Hasbro, which owns the Transformers brand, was not happy about the DHS post either.

The Post-9/11 Tools Now Used At Home

On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, The Washington Post’s Warren Strobel picks up a theme that has been a key part of TPM’s coverage of Trump II: “[P]owerful agencies and vast legal authorities created to stop another terrorist catastrophe are being turned inward, with the Trump administration using many of those powers to round up immigrants, battle drug traffickers and target political dissent.”

AI-pocalypse Now

The latest developments on the AI front:

Stephen Witt: The A.I. Threat Is Real. We Need to Act Now
WaPo: For years, they warned AI could kill all humans. Now people are listening.
NYT: Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons

Detectorist Finds Hoard of Viking Coins

I am a sucker for these kinds of stories every single time.

An amateur with a metal detector last week found the largest hoard of Viking Age coins ever unearthed in Finland.

The stash of silver coins has not been cleaned or counted yet, but it weighs about 10 pounds. That’s more than twice the weight of Finland’s previous largest Viking Age coin hoard, which was found in 1895 and contained some 1,700 coins.

The newly discovered hoard was really three discoveries in one. Kalle Lappinen, the detectorist, first found one cache, then another about 40 feet away. Each cache was buried about a foot and half below the surface inside of its own birch-bark container, an interesting find in its own right.

The NYT has reaction from professional archaeologists.

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Census Quietly Changes Charter for Key Policy Committee, Opening Door for Political Interference

Posted on September 11, 2026September 15, 2026 by Layla A. Jones

As the Census Bureau wades deeper into politics, governance changes at an agency committee that handles data privacy, scientific analysis and stewardship issues have opened the door for Trump administration interference, current and former agency staffers told TPM. Some of the most significant changes have put President Donald Trump’s political appointees in leadership roles on the historically nonpolitical committee, just as the Bureau has emerged as a hot-spot for right-wing-driven policymaking.

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Monitoring the AI Apocalypse

Posted on September 11, 2026September 11, 2026 by Josh Marshall

We’re now flooded with articles about the threat of AI. Here’s another one from the Times op-ed page by a tech journalist, Stephen Witt, who’s written a history of Nvidia, the chip maker powering a lot of the AI boom. Witt describes a few possible approaches to legal intervention. Interestingly, he points to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) as two legislators pitching new laws to get in control of the situation. Casar has a quote that captures it all and illustrates how absent “externalities” are to anything about how we regulate tech: “If the A.I. companies understood that their products have to be safe before they can advance, then they will make the kinds of investments that we need.” Of course, having two left-wing legislators from the party which isn’t even in power as the two guys on the case doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence that anything is going to happen any time soon.

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