Just one minute before the White House distributed via email a new executive order further dismantling collective bargaining protections for U.S. federal workers, President Donald Trump’s Department of Labor made another, somewhat surprising announcement.
Continue reading “The Trump Administration is Investigating Workers’ Rights in Mexico While Demolishing Them At Home”‘Active Clubs’ Are White Supremacy’s New, Dangerous Frontier
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Small local organizations called Active Clubs have spread widely across the U.S. and internationally, using fitness as a cover for a much more alarming mission. These groups are a new and harder-to-detect form of white supremacist organizing that merges extremist ideology with fitness and combat sports culture.
Continue reading “‘Active Clubs’ Are White Supremacy’s New, Dangerous Frontier”A Labor Day Call for Action From the States
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Last week the White House staged a pre-Labor Day Cabinet meeting to celebrate the administration’s supposed victories for American workers. Cabinet members took turns offering fawning, sycophantic praise of their boss in a display of precisely the workplace dynamics the labor movement fights to eliminate. It was an apt symbol of this administration’s approach to workers.
Continue reading “A Labor Day Call for Action From the States”Texas Redistricting Fight Has Been Testing Ground for the Trump Admin’s Latest Legal Strategy
This article was originally published at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
On July 7, the Justice Department sent a harshly written letter threatening to sue the staunchly Republican state of Texas, notwithstanding its efforts to help elect Donald Trump and the fact that the president had singled out its leaders as key allies in his immigration crackdown.
Continue reading “Texas Redistricting Fight Has Been Testing Ground for the Trump Admin’s Latest Legal Strategy”Have We Seen the Last Of ‘Alligator Alcatraz?’
Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
The last detainees inside the grim “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention camp spearheaded by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) are reportedly set to leave the facility.
Continue reading “Have We Seen the Last Of ‘Alligator Alcatraz?’”Trump’s Tariffs Are Illegal, Appeals Court Finds
An appeals court ruled 7-4 Friday evening that most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, a series of which he imposed by executive order under emergency powers granted by The International Emergency Economic Powers Act, are unlawful.
Continue reading “Trump’s Tariffs Are Illegal, Appeals Court Finds”Tea Leaves Are There for Reading
I want to focus in on two news items today.
The first is the report that Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) will soon announce she will not run for re-election. This isn’t a total surprise. There were signs this was coming. But it’s still an important development and one that signifies something larger. She’s now the second Republican senator up for reelection next year who has opted to retire. The first was Sen. Thom Tillis in North Carolina. Not long after this Ernst news was reported, we learned that conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley is also opting not to run for reelection next year. It’s hard for me to imagine that Ernst’s final decision wasn’t impacted by Tuesday’s blow out win by Catelin Drey in an Iowa state senate special election race, in what is normally a strongly pro-Trump district.
It goes without saying that both Ernst and Bradley likely realized that these were at least going to be difficult races — Democrats have won four of the last five Wisconsin court races. And quite possibly they’d lose. But this also reminds us that one of the usual factors in a blow out or wave election cycle is that a non-trivial number of incumbents see what’s coming and retire. That tends to magnify the wave party’s advantage because the in-party has an even harder time holding a seat without the power of incumbency.
Now I’m not predicting a wave election. Iowa certainly will still be a very challenging race even without Ernst in it. My point is simply that a lot of the building blocks of a wave get determined well before any votes get counted. The people who speak with the most credibility and authority about the political environment going into 2026 are Republican incumbents. And they’re starting to speak pretty clearly. It started with the Spring town halls, or the lack thereof.
The Specter of Town Halls is Haunting the GOP
GOP Rep. Jeff Hurd of Colorado was apparently just a no-show at his own town hall on Wednesday. Technically it wasn’t a town hall but rather a public meeting in which Hurd would meet with members of the Montezuma County Commission. Point being, it wasn’t one of these things where Democrats put on a town hall because the member won’t call one. It was one he was involved in organizing. Anyway, apparently Hurd found out shortly before arriving that more than a hundred people had shown up because just after the event began, Montezuma County Commission Chair Jim Candeleria announced that Hurd wouldn’t be able to make it because an aide he was traveling with had a “medical emergency”.
No word on how the dog is doing after it ate Hurd’s homework.
Democrats Predict Shutdown After Trump Tries to Snatch Congress’ Most Important Power
Congressional Democrats point to skyrocketing odds of a government shutdown Friday after President Trump announced that he’ll unilaterally take back money Congress had already appropriated for foreign aid, according to multiple outlets.
Continue reading “Democrats Predict Shutdown After Trump Tries to Snatch Congress’ Most Important Power”RFK Jr.’s FDA Denies COVID Vax to Millions of Americans
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
News You Can Use: COVID Edition
I’m a little surprised that the refusal of CDC Director Susan Monarez to go quietly and the resignations of other top CDC officials seemed to eclipse rather than to amplify the FDA anti-science decision to restrict the access of healthy Americans to the annual COVID booster.
The shift away from mass immunization for COVID by making healthy people under 65 ineligible for it without a scientific basis for doing so and outside the normal process has adverse health implications for millions of Americans.
What’s it mean for you and your family? Here’s an initial survey of landscape:
- Are you eligible for the annual COVID booster?
- CVS is holding back on rolling out the annual COVID booster in 16 jurisdictions that require approval from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which isn’t scheduled to meet until next month and was stacked by RFK, Jr., with vax skeptics. The jurisdictions are: Arizona, Colorado, D.C., Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.
- If the CDC ratifies the FDA decision, as expected, then insurers and employers will not be required to cover the annual COVID booster for those under 65 without an underlying condition. The uninsured out-of-pocket cost for a COVID vaccine is about $225.
More Fallout From The CDC Massacre
- Politico: Monarez would not cross ‘red lines’ before she was fired, confidant says
- WaPo: CDC leaders who resigned said RFK Jr. undermined vaccine science
- NYT: Inside the C.D.C., a Growing Sense of Despair
Susan Collins Is Fucking Alarmed Again
Maine Sen. Susan Collins (R), who voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as HHS secretary, is a parody of herself:
Sandwich Thrower Charged With Misdemeanor
After a D.C. grand jury refused to indict the Subway sandwich thrower, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office charged him with a misdemeanor. While that is a more appropriate charge, it is still part of a larger pattern of pursuing federal charges during the Trumpian occupation of the District of Columbia rather than handling them in D.C. Superior Court.
Quote of the Day
Journalist Radley Balko:
[T]hey’re going to have to hire the kind of people who are going to be looking at these videos that are coming out of ICE — terrorizing families, arresting children and pulling grandmothers out of their homes. They’re going to be hiring people who look at those videos and say: That’s what I want to do for a living. …
What I think we are seeing right now is Trump is attempting to build his own paramilitary force. They want people whose first and ultimate loyalty in this job is going to be to the president.
Good Read
Anna Merlan at Mother Jones: “The Most Transparent Administration In History” Refuses to Say Who’s Behind Their Batshit Social Media
The Authoritarian Checklist
Political scientist Don Moynihan: “The consolidation of Trump’s power has happened very quickly, more rapidly than we have seen in other examples of competitive authoritarian systems. His success is driven by two factors. First, Trump learned a lot from his first term and had personnel with detailed plans in place for his second term. Second, people in institutions decided to accept the new arrangements.”
The Fed’s Lisa Cook Sues to Block Her Firing by Trump
U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb of Washington, D.C., will oversee Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook’s lawsuit seeking to overturn her firing by President Trump.
Judge Overturns Kari Lake’s Ouster of VOA Director
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth of Washington, D.C., ruled that Kari Lake did not have the authority to remove Michael Abramowitz as the Voice of America’s director and issued a permanent injunction blocking his removal.
For the Legal Nerds …
This is very in the weeds, but important. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals did some very unusual maneuvering late yesterday that seems to have reversed its own course and re-opened the door to challenging the Trump administration’s unlawful freezing of foreign aid. That’s as simply put as I can make it. For a deeper dive:
- Chris Geidner: The D.C. Circuit’s realpolitik orders in the foreign aid funding case
- Bloomberg’s Zoe Tillman: Appeals Court Keeps Fight Alive Over Trump Foreign Aid Freeze
- Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman: “This was an extraordinarily shrewd *and* principled resolution by the en banc court, in a case in which the various arguments in the trial court and on appeal were *almost* hopelessly entangled and hard to parse.”
Meanwhile … Carbon Emissions Continue to Soar
- Susan Crawford: If we’re serious about risk assessment, two recent pieces of climate news should be grabbing at least as much attention as the AI bubble on Wall Street.
- Grist: The Trump administration is trying to revive the climate change “debate.”
- American Meteorological Society: The Trump Department of Energy’s recent attempt to synthesize climate science has five foundational flaws.
Hard To Believe It’s Been 20 Years
My own sense of the passage time used to be detailed, sequential, and reassuringly clear in my own mind. Then COVID hit, and I still haven’t been able to reconstitute the mental file drawer of life and world events. So I was dumbfounded not just that it’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans but also that it’s been a decade since we published this piece by my high school classmate Cheryl Wagner on Katrina’s 10th anniversary. Cheryl, who wrote a book on her post-Katrina experience, captured the mix of ambivalence, aversion, and avoidance that some survivors feel about remembering. It holds up well as an antidote to the onslaught of anniversary content.
See You Back Here Tuesday
No Morning Memo on Labor Day, but we’ll roar back from the summer lassitude starting on Tuesday.
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