The Trump Presidency Reboot Suffers From Predictable Plots

Posted on by David Kurtz

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

Performative AND Substantive

When his presidential reality show was cancelled after one season in 2020, Donald Trump was determined that the show’s 2025 reboot wouldn’t suffer from the same lack of consistent plot lines and poor story development.

Every week of the new season has Trump confronting a clearly defined villain who taps into racist, misogynistic, and/or xenophobic stereotypes. Trump is cast as vanquishing the invented villain, often while outperforming and dominating a quisling Democrat who is portrayed as inept in the task. In perfecting the formula, Trump has seized on Black women mayors — first Karen Bass in Los Angeles and now Muriel Bowser in D.C. — as the perfect foil for the MAGA base.

And so it goes with the Monday launch of what will be at least a weeklong episode: the purported federal takeover of D.C. It’s bad, yes. But there are also real limits to Trump’s seizing federal control of D.C. police, deploying the D.C. National Guard, and assigning federal law enforcement to fight street crime.

For Trump, the performance is what matters most. For us, it’s important to recognize that it is performative and that provoking our outrage is part of the point. That doesn’t mean the performance doesn’t have substantive implications or isn’t outrageous. One of the very real dangers of Trump is this reckless disregard for the substantive consequences of his performative flourishes. In the end, we don’t have to choose. It’s both/and.

Some of the smartest analysis of this week’s Trump plot line:

Steve Vladeck: “The upshot of all of this is that the President does have two important authorities when it comes to ‘local’ law enforcement in the District of Columbia: He can use the (small) D.C. National Guard in circumstances in which he probably couldn’t use any other military personnel; and he can require the use of MPD ‘for federal purposes’ for up to 30 days. That’s not nothing, but it also isn’t anything close to some kind of federal takeover of the nation’s capital.”

Brian Beutler: “But the upshot is the same. Trump has asserted political control over the city’s police force and flooded streets with various other federal law-enforcement officers, supposedly to drive homeless people out of sight, and further reduce crime. But the overwhelming majority of us will experience it as a sucker punch — his way of proving he can provoke us without consequence.”

Justin Glawe: “While the reality of crime in America doesn’t comport with the narratives being pushed by the White House, it’s no surprise that the American right has glommed onto two random incidents in order to further their authoritarian goals.”

Quote of the Day

“The most benign interpretation is that this is an attempt to gain a public-relations victory by claiming credit for the already historically low crime rates in D.C. The worst-case interpretation is that it is a test run for more legally dubious uses of military forces in other American cities.” —Carrie Lee, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and a former professor at the U.S. Army War College, on President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in DC

Breaking …

A new WaPo exclusive:

The Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

The plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour, the documents say. They would be split into two groups of 300 and stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with purview of regions east and west of the Mississippi River, respectively.

New Modern Record: 60,000+ In Immigration Detention

The number of people in immigration detention has risen from about 39,000 in January to more than 60,000 today, exceeding the previous record of 55,654 set in August 2019 during Trump’s first term, the NYT reports.

Harvard Close To Coughing Up $500M To Settle With Trump

Ongoing negotiations between Harvard University and the Trump administration to settle trumped-up claims of antisemitism on campus are closing in on the structure of a extortive deal that would include the university paying $500 million to free up billions in frozen federal research funding.

Judge Blocks Trump Funding Freeze

U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich of D.C. – a Trump appointee – ordered the Trump administration to restore frozen federal funding for the National Endowment for Democracy.

Judge Calls Out Trump DOJ In Ghislaine Maxwell Case

In rejecting the Trump DOJ’s request to release grand jury materials in the Ghislaine Maxwell case, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer of Manhattan called out the administration for misleading the public into thinking the Jeffrey Epstein-related materials would contain new information:

Insofar as the motion to unseal implies that the grand jury materials are an untapped mine lode of undisclosed information about Epstein or Maxwell or confederates, they definitively are not that. A “public official,” “lawmaker,” “pundit,” or “ordinary citizen” “deeply interested and concerned about the Epstein matter,” Motion to Unseal at 3, and who reviewed these materials expecting, based on the Government’s representations, to learn new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes and the investigation into them, would come away feeling disappointed and misled. There is no “there” there.

Blast from the Past

The right-wing extremist Ammon Bundy cannot use bankruptcy to erase a $52 million defamation judgment won against him by an Idaho hospital system, a court ruled last week.

Only the Best People

President Trump plans to nominate the woefully unqualified E.J. Antoni, currently the chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Antoni, a strident BLS critic, would replace Erika McEntarfer, who was fired by the president after he baselessly claimed that the jobs numbers were “rigged.”

Chart of the Day

A new analysis from the Congressional Budget Office shows how regressive President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is:

Average Annual Change in Household Resources as a Percentage of Income in CBO’s January 2025 Baseline, After Transfers and Taxes, 2026 to 2034
Data sources: Congressional Budget Office; staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation. See https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61367#data

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How the Rapid Spread of Misinformation Pushed Oregon Lawmakers to Kill the State’s Wildfire Risk Map

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

This story first appeared at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

This is how misinformation gets accepted as fact.

A year after Oregon endures its most destructive fire season on record in 2020, state lawmakers order a map estimating the wildfire risk for every property in the state. It’s the kind of rating now available on real estate sites like Zillow. The state wants to use the results to decide where it will apply forthcoming codes for fire-resistant construction and protections around homes.

Around the same time, insurance companies start dropping Oregon homeowners’ policies and raising premiums to limit future losses, much as they have done in other disaster-prone states. Insurers have their own sophisticated risk maps to guide them, but some brokers instead tell homeowners the blame lies with the map the state produced. The belief gets treated as fact both on social media and in mainstream news — even though insurers and regulators say it’s not true.

The anger quickly spreads. Not only is Oregon’s map seen as at fault for higher insurance premiums, one conservative talk radio host calls it an attempt to “depopulate rural areas.” People in an anti-map Facebook group start musing about “Agenda 21,” a conspiracy theory implicating the United Nations in an effort to force people into cities so they can be more easily controlled.

By the time the state pulls back the map and starts over, the myths about it have gained so much momentum there’s no stopping them. Oregon’s hotter, drier climate isn’t the problem; the map is.

Christine Drazan, the Oregon House Republican leader, joins more than a dozen other Republicans in February 2025 behind a sign that says “REPEAL THE WILDFIRE HAZARD MAP.” She calls the state’s map “faulty, defective, harmful” and says it, along with related fire-safe building and landscaping rules that are in the works, is “a heavy-handed bureaucratic takeover” that’s kept rural residents from insuring or selling homes.

“This map is destroying their property values,” she says.

In the end, what’s most remarkable about the campaign against Oregon’s wildfire map isn’t that misinformation found an audience.

It’s that it worked.

Chris Dunn, a wildfire risk scientist at Oregon State University and a former wildland firefighter, thought Oregon had a chance to be a national model for adapting to wildfire risks when he was asked to make the statewide map in 2021.

Oregon adopted a unique set of land use laws in the late 1960s and 1970s that helped curb urban sprawl. A coalition of farmers and conservationists formulated the legislation to preserve farmland and keep cities compact. To Dunn, protecting homes seemed within reach because the state had maintained agricultural buffers around cities, helping to serve as firebreaks.

At the time, Zillow hadn’t yet come out with risk ratings. By building its own map, Oregon could use local input and make adjustments as it went along.

The map results would help Oregon decide where to require a tool proven to save homes from wind-driven wildfires: “defensible space.” Owners would have to prune trees up and away from their houses; they would need to keep their roofs clear of leaves, needles and other dead vegetation. The idea was to deny wind-borne embers fuel that can burn down dwellings — a problem fresh on lawmakers’ minds after Oregon’s devastating 2020 fire season destroyed more than 2,000 homes.

Dunn knew public communication would be important. Before the map was released, a private property rights group had warned its members in a letter that the map and its rules were worrisome. Gov. Kate Brown’s wildfire council, advising state leaders about the map’s rollout, knew about the letter and the potential for pushback, according to emails Dunn provided to ProPublica.

Dunn said he was clear with Brown’s wildfire director, Doug Grafe, and others on the council that the map needed a significant, coordinated and effective communications campaign starting months before its release. Dunn said all the state developed was a one-page document on the roles of each government agency.

(Brown and Grafe did not respond to ProPublica’s questions. Grafe told Oregon Public Broadcasting in 2022 that “we are committed to ensuring people understand what they can do to increase the likelihood their homes and properties will survive wildfires.”)

Without state outreach, many homeowners learned their homes were in “extreme risk” zones from a July 2022 letter in the mail. It gave them 60 days to appeal the designation or face complying with new building and defensible-space codes the state was developing.

Dunn could see that an uproar was building around his work. One community meeting where he was scheduled to present was canceled after state officials received threats of violence.

On Facebook, more than 6,000 people joined a private group, ODF Wildfire Risk Map Support, a base of opposition. ODF stands for the Oregon Department of Forestry, the state agency overseeing the map’s creation.

One member warned that state officials would snoop around their rural properties to tell owners what to do.

“Guys this is a agenda 21,” said the member, referencing the conspiracy theory promoted in part by former Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck.

Along with 31 thumbs-ups, eight angry faces and several other emojis, the post got 24 comments.

Oregon can’t stop firestorms with regulations, conservative talk show host Bill Meyer told listeners, “unless you just get people off the land, and people wonder if that’s what the intent of all of this is ultimately.” Invoking a phrase associated with the Agenda 21 conspiracy, Meyer said rural residents would wind up having to move into “stack-and-pack” housing in Oregon’s cities. (Meyer did not respond to ProPublica’s emails.)

State officials’ lack of communication with the public “led to really significant challenges,” Dunn told ProPublica. “We don’t know if we could have well-communicated and sort of avoided those conspiracy theories and misinformation. But it was just so propagated in the media that it just took over.”

Jeff Golden, the Democratic state senator who helped draft the bill creating the map, said rural residents were understandably upset. The impacts of climate change were abstract to many people, Golden said, until they started getting those letters — at the same time insurance companies were dumping them.

“It’s a really hard adjustment,” said Golden, chairperson of the Senate’s Natural Resources and Wildfire Committee. “This is a very big chicken coming home to roost.”

Misinformation stoked people’s anger. “It makes a conversation that would have been difficult at best almost impossible,” Golden said.

State officials withdrew the map just over a month after its 2022 release, saying that while they had met the legislative deadline for delivering it, “there wasn’t enough time to allow for the type of local outreach and engagement that people wanted, needed and deserved.”

After homeowners blamed the newly released risk map for insurance cancellations and premium increases, Oregon’s insurance regulator formally asked insurers: Did you use the state risk map?

Companies filed statements, required by law to be answered truthfully, saying they had not. Oregon’s then-insurance commissioner, Andrew Stolfi, announced the industry’s response publicly at the time.

“Insurance companies have been using their own risk maps and other robust risk management tools to assess wildfire risk for years in making rating and underwriting decisions,” Stolfi said in a news release.

Stolfi told consumers to submit any documentation they received from insurance companies showing that the state’s map had been used to influence underwriting or rating decisions. Jason Horton, a spokesperson for Oregon’s insurance regulator, told ProPublica the agency has not substantiated any complaints.

For good measure, lawmakers in 2023 passed a bill explicitly banning insurers from using the map to set rates.

But as Dunn reworked the map, the cloud of misinformation continued to swirl on social media.

After Zillow and other real estate sites began posting wildfire risk ratings on properties nationwide last year, participants in the anti-map Facebook group alleged the state was behind it.

“Who would decide to move out here after seeing that?” one asked.

Zillow uses data from the research firm First Street, a Zillow spokesperson told ProPublica. A First Street spokesperson also said the group doesn’t use Oregon’s map.

Andrew DeVigal, a University of Oregon journalism professor who has studied news ecosystems around the state, said places where news outlets have shrunk or closed down have grown particularly reliant on such Facebook groups. These community watercoolers help confirm participants’ biases. “You surround yourself with people who think like you, so you’re in your space,” he said.

A ProPublica reporter identified himself to the group’s participants, asking in June for evidence that they’d been harmed by the state’s map. None provided definitive proof. Some acknowledged that they couldn’t demonstrate that the map had affected them but said they suspected it lowered their homes’ values or their insurability.

Among the respondents was Chris Dalton, who lives in La Pine, south of Bend. Dalton described spending about $2,000 trimming trees and another $500 putting down gravel to create defensible space.

However, Dalton said, the house’s location had been designated as being at moderate risk. That means it was not subject to the state’s defensible-space requirements. And even if Dalton’s property had been designated as high enough risk to be governed by the new regulations, they had not been finalized at that point and were not being enforced.

“I guess you could say we used common sense to get ahead of future problems,” Dalton said.

Oregon officials decided to give the map another try last year.

They re-released it, this time doing more outreach. Following California’s lead and aiming to make the map less confusing, Oregon also changed its nomenclature. Properties weren’t in risk classes, they were in hazard zones. The highest rating was no longer “extreme,” it was “high.” Dunn, the Oregon State scientist, said he thought the map had survived the effort to kill it.

But the backlash continued. Of the 106,000 properties found to face the highest hazard, more than 6,000 landowners filed appeals. At least one county appealed the designation on behalf of every high-hazard property in its borders — more than 20,000 of them.

In January, a new Oregon legislative session kicked off and wildfire preparedness was once again a top priority for the body’s Democratic leadership. Gov. Tina Kotek ordered a pause on decisions about homeowners’ appeals until the session ended, giving lawmakers a chance to decide what to do with the map.

Drazan, the House minority leader, led fellow Republicans in opposition.

She told ProPublica she “can’t know for sure” that the map caused homeowners to lose insurance or have trouble selling, as she’d asserted at February’s news conference. “I am reflecting what we were told,” she said.

Regardless, she said, the mandates on protecting properties went too far. “We’re not looking for the state to be the president of our homeowner’s association and tell us what color our paint can be,” Drazan said.

Even Golden, who’d helped shepherd the original bill mandating a map, began to waver.

Golden described conversations with homeowners who struggled to understand why work they’d done to protect their properties from fires didn’t lower their state risk rating. He said the map couldn’t account for the specific characteristics of each property, ultimately making it clear to him that it couldn’t work.

“I got tired of trying to convince people that the model was smarter than they were,” Golden said.

Dunn told ProPublica that the map was not intended to reflect all the changing conditions at a particular property, only the hazards that the surrounding topography, climate, weather and vegetation create. It wasn’t about whether homeowners had cleared defensible space — just whether they should. The work they do makes their individual homes less vulnerable, he said, but it doesn’t eliminate the broader threats around them.

By April, the map was on its way out.

The state Senate voted unanimously, Golden included, to repeal the state’s defensible-space and home-hardening requirements as well as the map that showed where they would apply.

Ahead of a 50-1 vote in the House to kill the map, familiar claims got repeated — including from a legislative leader’s office.

Virgle Osborne, the House Republican whip, lamented in a May press release: “These wildfire maps have cost people property values, insurance increases, and many heartaches.”

Osborne told ProPublica he stood behind his comment even though he had no evidence for it. Osborne said he believed Oregon’s maps helped insurance companies justify rate increases and policy cancellations.

“I can’t give you, you know, here’s the perfect example of somebody that, you know, did it, but no insurance company is that foolish,” Osborne said. “They’re not going to write a statement that would put them in jeopardy. But common sense is going to tell you, when the state is on your side, the insurance companies are going to bail out. And they have.”

With or without a map, former California insurance commissioner Dave Jones said, Oregon lawmakers could require insurers to provide incentives for homeowners to protect their properties. Colorado, for instance, ordered insurers this year to account for risk-reduction efforts in models used to decide who can obtain insurance and at what price.

Jones nonetheless called Oregon’s decision to kill the wildfire map “very unfortunate.”

“One of the biggest public health and safety challenges states are facing are climate-driven, severe-weather-related events,” Jones said. “Not giving people useful information to make decisions on that, to me, is not a path to public health and safety.”

During the June vote in the Oregon House, the lone person who voted to preserve Oregon’s wildfire map and its associated mandates was Dacia Grayber, a Democrat from the Portland area who’s a longtime firefighter and worked a brush rig during the 2020 wildfires.

She told ProPublica that by training, the first things she looks for while defending homes in wildland fires are the types of hazards the state intended to target: firewood under the deck, cedar shake siding, flammable juniper bushes growing close to homes.

Grayber said she was disturbed by the sentiment in the Capitol as the repeal vote neared. The decision to kill the map and eliminate home-hardening requirements, she said, had become a “feel-good, bipartisan vote.”

“We are walking away from a very clear decision to build safer, more resilient communities,” Grayber said.

The tragedy of it, she said, is “that it was 100% based in misinformation.”

Kotek, Oregon’s Democratic governor, signed the repeal on July 24.

Blue State Dems Are Having an Overdue Reckoning With Their Own Power

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

When Texas Republicans announced plans for a mid-decade gerrymander to net them at least five more U.S. House seats, it set off a chain reaction. Texas Democrats left the state to break quorum. Democratic governors began discussing countermeasures. And former Attorney General Eric Holder, chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, reversed course after a decade of vocal opposition to partisan redistricting and called for Democrats to embrace gerrymandering in blue states, at least temporarily.

The immediate headline is about redistricting. But the more significant story is the growing willingness of blue states to use power more forcefully in an era of declining federal reliability and rising authoritarian threat. If gerrymandering is now back on the table, then the real opportunity lies in something broader: a more serious and strategic approach to wielding blue state power.

Gerrymandering is one tool — controversial, and of uncertain consequence — but it points to a larger truth: states are powerful. For decades, progressive politics has been ambivalent, even resistant, to using that power assertively. But if state leaders are finally ready to wield it, we need more than tactical redistricting. We need a deliberate and coordinated strategy to use state authority to defend democracy, shift national dynamics, serve communities, and re-engage the electorate.

In the aftermath of the 2024 election, a consistent theme that emerged was that too many voters on the left sat out. Fear and warnings weren’t enough. What’s needed now is a clear, values-driven demonstration of public interest governance — of leaders fighting visibly and unapologetically for us and for democracy. 

This is a break-the-glass moment. So let’s talk about all the glass available, not just congressional maps.

State governments possess an extraordinary range of tools that can be deployed in bold, coordinated ways. And power can be pooled across states for even greater impact. Conservatives are masterful at this. Just recently, 26 right-wing state financial officers signed a joint letter to BlackRock, urging the firm to abandon environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing principles or risk losing state business. And following Trump’s Executive Order last week directing banking regulators to stop “debanking” conservative-led or aligned firms or industries like crypto, the same group issued coordinated support. Such coordinated actions are routine in the tightly-knit conservative governance ecosystem.

Progressive state leaders can also coordinate responses — not as retaliation, but as a legitimate exercise of public power in response to federal dysfunction. The purpose should not be to punish the people living in red states, but to protect democratic institutions, safeguard communities, and improve people’s lives. In the short term, states can do much to counter the unraveling of protective federal programs and unchecked federal overreach. Many of these tools are already in use, though rarely presented as part of a broader strategic vision.

For instance, states can enter into memoranda of understanding and interstate compacts to harmonize policy, share resources, and strengthen their collective power. Although interstate compacts may seem obscure, they’re commonplace: more than 250 exist today, and states participate in an average of 25 each. States can also use their collective purchasing power to influence corporate behavior and shift markets. And large states like California — the world’s fourth-largest economy — can enter international agreements on climate, trade, and human rights, forging alliances that bypass federal paralysis.

States can go further. Maryland and New York are proposing legislation to withhold federal taxes remittances from state employees while the federal government remains in arrears on pledged funding. New York legislators are considering revoking state tax credits for Avelo Airlines, which contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation flights — offering a model for leveraging state incentives to pressure federal contractors that defy public values. State attorneys general investigate extremist networks operating within their jurisdictions, and coordinate with counterparts in other states to scale those efforts. 

Legislatures also have powerful oversight functions that can surface abuses and create visibility. Even in red states, lawmakers can demand access to detention facilities and sue when denied, as Florida lawmakers did after Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration blocked their oversight of Alligator Alcatraz. Legislators in multiple states could organize joint hearings to investigate federal overreach and misconduct, as well as right-wing influence operations. 

Some states are also refusing to cooperate with ICE, as Delaware did when it became the seventh state to pass legislation prohibiting local collaboration with federal immigration enforcement. Others, including California, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, and Michigan, are advancing “No Secret Police” bills to unmask federal agents operating anonymously in communities. In Boston this week, more than 20 state legislators from across the country held a joint press conference to highlight these efforts. 

States can also limit military cooperation. Vermont’s Republican governor recently declined a federal request for National Guard deployment. Washington has barred out-of-state Guard units from entering without explicit permission. States can reject politically-motivated Justice Department requests for voter data and protect sensitive state-held records from federal misuse. Illinois is protecting autism-related health data, while New Mexico and Washington are refusing to share SNAP benefit records.

These actions are already underway, but often in isolation, with little coordination or public visibility. That’s a missed opportunity. These efforts rarely make national news or come together into a story the public can recognize: a story of state leaders using every tool at their disposal to protect rights, lives, and the future we all deserve.

Wielding state power in a sophisticated, multi-pronged response to federal disintegration and anti-democratic threat may not flip the House map before 2026. But it does something equally important — it creates a visible, coherent story of urgency and public leadership. It demonstrates capability, and a willingness to act. It helps rebuild trust and energy among voters who have grown disillusioned or disengaged. It builds capacity and strengthens the collective muscle of state-level governance. And it inspires civic engagement, from neighborhood organizing to voter turnout.

If we’re serious about confronting the threats facing American democracy, then it’s time to fully embrace blue state power. Not as a fallback, not to punish the people of red states, but as the confident exercise of power in the public interest — to make people’s lives better. Now is not the time to shy away from the power we have. Now is the time to wring it dry.

Gaby Goldstein is Founder + President of State Futures, which supports communities of practice for state policymakers. Through working groups, policy research, and strategic support, State Futures empowers state leaders to learn from each other, innovate together, and take coordinated action across states. 

Some Thoughts on the Consent of the Governed

Posted on by Josh Marshall

President Trump’s decision today to federalize the DC police and deploy National Guard troops to the city is a good reminder of the importance of what we discussed Friday: the necessity for the political opposition to narrate Trump’s abuses of power and the contents of the U.S. Constitution, to be crystal clear on what will be reversed when Democrats are back in control of the government and how they’ll provide civil and criminal accountability for those who have broken the law. It makes it even more relevant to review and remember the critical importance of the consent of the governed.

It’s part of American civic culture to marvel at the process of the peaceful transfer of power. We hold an election under a specific set of rules. The winners of those elections inherit a vast array of powers. The president gains control of the military and a vast federal bureaucracy. The president has a huge array of prerogative powers. What he or she says goes, in specific realms. Legislators make new laws. Judges make rulings on imprisonment, people’s redress of harms, etc. etc. The marvel is that a whole population of more than 340 million people freely accede to this power. We have ordinary criminal conduct which is policed and punished. But focus in on the fact of that free compliance. The vast majority of us never come into real contact with the coercive power of the state. And yet virtually everyone, even the most diehard opponents of this administration, recognize that this president has a whole bundle of legitimate powers and we will comply with them.

Why is this?

Continue reading “Some Thoughts on the Consent of the Governed” →

How Judges Held One of Their Own Out to Dry in Historic AEA Case

Posted on by David Kurtz

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

A Capitulation for the Ages

It’s hard to overstate the significance of Friday’s appeals court ruling by two Trump appointees short-circuiting the criminal contempt of court proceeding in the Alien Enemies Act case.

For everyone closely monitoring the federal courts for signs they would cave to the Trump II onslaught, the ruling by Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao (Obama appointee Cornelia Pillard dissented) was the manifestation of a worst-case fear: Namely, that higher courts will not backstop trial judges when they are faced with utter defiance from the Trump administration.

The Alien Enemies Act case was a prime test case for how far the judiciary would let Trump go. It pitted Chief Judge James Boasberg of D.C., a skilled and respected jurist, against some of the most egregious conduct by the administration thus far, including its blatant refusal to comply with his court orders and its extraordinary obfuscation and gamesmanship to try to obscure what it was actually doing.

The case ripened even further into a historic constitutional clash when a fired DOJ attorney turned into a whistleblower and started releasing internal DOJ communications that provided astounding new evidence of the department’s contemptuous conduct, implicating the very highest levels of government.

The two Trump judges’ craven effort to make Boasberg’s contempt inquiry go away doesn’t just eliminate accountability for the misconduct in this case, but risks undermining any check to the Trump administration in other major anti-immigration cases and all of the other cases where the White House is seeking to run roughshod over the judicial branch.

For these reasons, the case is primed for review by the entire D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose 11 active members are split 7-4 in favor of Democratic appointees. From there, the Supreme Court will be asked to weigh in. Confidence that the Roberts Court will defend Boasberg and trial judges is already low, which makes the capitulation by appeals court judges even more alarming.

But in some ways it’s even worse than all that. Had the Trump administration complied with Boasberg’s order, the 200+ Alien Enemies Act detainees would have never ended up imprisoned at El Salvador’s CECOT facility, and the course of history would have been changed. A whole series of subsequent legal battles fought on the heels because the AEA removals were already a fait accompli would have been waged from a different posture. The administration would have been denied the opportunity to defy courts in new and inventive ways in those subsequent cases, avoiding a whole round of challenges to the judiciary’s constitutional powers.

That’s a long way of saying that this was the ultimate contempt of court. If it goes unpunished — and the appeals court ruling means it’s likely to go not just unpunished but uninvestigated — then it will be open season on the judicial branch by the White House.

No other case right now carries the historical weight of this one. Stay tuned.

Don’t Soft Sell It

Oddly neutral language from major news outlets to describe the Trump Justice Department abusing the powers of its office to exact retaliation and retribution against the president’s perceived political enemies Letitia James and Adam Schiff (emphasis mine):

  • NYT: Justice Dept. Abruptly Escalates Pressure Campaign on a Trump Adversary
  • AP: Justice Department escalates scrutiny of Trump foes with probes of Letitia James and Adam Schiff

Good Read

Asha Rangappa: The FBI As We Knew It is Gone

Why Was Billy Long Ousted From IRS?

WaPo:

The Internal Revenue Service clashed with the White House over using tax data to help locate suspected undocumented immigrants hours before Trump administration officials forced IRS Commissioner Billy Long from his post Friday, according to two people familiar with the situation.

The Department of Homeland Security sent the IRS a list Thursday of 40,000 names of people DHS officials thought were in the country illegally and asked the IRS to use confidential taxpayer data to verify their addresses, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Paxton Asks Texas Supreme Court to Expel Dems

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is asking the state Supreme Court to expel 13 Democrats from the state House after they fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum in the mid-decade redistricting scheme.

Appeals Court Defends Congress From Trump Rampage

Led by Bush I appointee Karen Henderson, the D.C. Court of Appeals defended Congress’ prerogatives by ordering the Trump administration to restore an Office of Management and Budget website that tracks the apportionment of federal funds.

Trump Attack on Higher Ed: UCLA Edition

The Trump administration is seeking to extort more than $1 billion from UCLA — under the guise of enforcing civil rights law — to restore its federal research funding.

The Long Reach of the Roberts Court

A very accessible overview from Adam Liptak of the myriad ways the Roberts Court has and continues to undermine democracy through election law cases:

Taken together, the court’s actions in election cases in recent years have shown great tolerance for partisan gamesmanship and great skepticism about federal laws on campaign spending and minority rights. The court’s rulings have been of a piece with its conservative wing’s jurisprudential commitments: giving states leeway in many realms, insisting on an expansive interpretation of the First Amendment and casting a skeptical eye on government racial classifications.

So Dangerous

At the start of Trump II, Morning Memo noted that a crucial question was whether corporate America would hold the line against Trump or capitulate to a MAGA-branded crony capitalism that substitutes toadyism and favor-seeking for free markets. It’s not going well.

Quote of the Day

“This is the sort of thing only the worst populists do in the worst emerging economies.”– economist Phil Suttle, on President Trump’s Aug. 1 dismissal of Erika McEntarfer as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics

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5 Points On the Court Cases That Could Undo Trump’s Tariffs

Posted on by Layla A. Jones

After months of rigamarole beginning with the April 2 threat of widespread “Liberation Day” tariffs, President Donald Trump’s administration finally levied import taxes against more than 70 countries on Thursday. Now it’s up to the courts to decide whether those tariffs will stay in place.

Trump launched his assault on global trade using a 1977 law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, because he claimed America’s trade deficits constituted a national emergency. U.S. tariffs on other countries now range from a high of 41% levied against Syria to 10% for nations including the United Kingdom. Including the hazy handshake trade deals announced by the administration, about 90 countries now face import tariffs from the U.S. with the new 18.6% average tariff rate at its highest since the Great Depression. 

And for what?

The Trump administration claims the decades-long retrenchment of the U.S. manufacturing sector, so-called counterfeit goods imports laced with fentanyl, and the nation’s reliance on foreign supply chains constitute a threat to national security. Experts told TPM the president is completely off base — “You can’t make sense out of it because it does not make sense,” said economist C. Fred Bergsten. Already, Trump’s tariffs are having devastating international effects. 

In Lesotho, a country in south Africa of more than 2.3 million people, Trump’s threat of 50% tariffs and the 15% tariffs ultimately levied by the Trump administration decimated the nation’s garment industry, which had long been buoyed by a free trade agreement with the U.S. Trump called the country a nation “nobody has heard of,” and Lesotho’s Deputy Prime Minister Nthomeng Majara declared a state of economic emergency, citing massive unemployment and job loss. 

Closer to home, shoppers are feeling the strain of rising inflation as companies begin to do what economists warned they would: pass tariff expenses down to U.S. consumers. The most recent Consumer Price Index found inflation up 2.7% year over year. 

It’s against this backdrop that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington D.C. heard arguments on July 31 from plaintiffs suing the Trump administration for an end to the tariffs, and from lawyers for the government arguing to keep them in place.

What’s at stake is whether Trump has managed to successfully wrest control of foreign trade policy powers from Congress  and reposition that authority squarely at the feet of the executive.

Who’s suing the Trump administration?

Companies, states and private citizens launched lawsuits against the Trump administration after the president declared a trade deficit-based national emergency under IEEPA to launch his oppressive tariff regime.

At least five cases were filed in April and May, and two are being heard before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit now. 

One is an April 14 case filed by V.O.S. Selections, a small, New York-based wine and spirits importer, and four other import companies to the U.S. Court of International Trade. Plaintiffs argued the administration exceeded his authority under IEEPA, and that Congress is the entity that sets tariff rates. The second case filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade was brought by the attorneys general of 12 states: Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Vermont. Notably, while Trump won Arizona and Nevada in the 2024 presidential election, the AGs in both states are elected Democrats.

The International Trade Court consolidated the cases, ruled the president overstepped his authority by imposing blanket tariffs, and issued a permanent injunction against future tariffs. As expected, the administration appealed the decision, and the federal appeals court has stayed — or paused enforcement of — the injunction while it considers the appeal.

The Trump admin claims the trade deficit is a national emergency

In its fact sheet about Trump’s national emergency declaration and IEEPA trade powers, the White House made its case that tariffs would make the U.S. more competitive, protect the country’s “sovereignty” and strengthen national and economic security. 

The deficits Trump hates so “have led to the hollowing out of our manufacturing base,” the fact sheet said. Further, it claims, COVID and an attack by Houthi forces, which impacted shipping in the Middle East, exposed the U.S. to supply chain disruption, while drugs being smuggled into the country pose additional dangers. Finally, the administration said the U.S. doesn’t have enough stockpiled military equipment.

The question before the court is whether the issues the White House lays out  rise to the level of a national emergency and give the president unilateral authority to authorize and impose foreign trade policy at will.

The courts don’t seem to be buying it

Politico called it a “frosty reception.” ABC news said judges “voiced skepticism.” Those unflattering summaries describe the tone of questions and answers given by the panel of 11 federal appeals court judges during the July 31 hearing.

“One of the major concerns that I have is that IEEPA doesn’t even mention the word tariffs anywhere,” said Obama appointee Judge Jimmie Reyna. 

Another, Clinton appointee Judge Timothy Dyk, noted the intended role of Congress in setting tariffs.

“It’s just hard for me to see that Congress intended to give the president in IEEPA the wholesale authority to throw out the tariff schedule that Congress has adopted after years of careful work,” Dyk said, “and revise every one of these tariff rates.”

Watching live, Inu Manak, a trade fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations told TPM she felt good hearing judges ask “very pointed, direct questions, trying to establish whether there are guardrails or limits to the president.”

Trump is stretching IEEPA emergency declarations in an unprecedented way, said economist Bergsten, who said he helped negotiate IEEPA during his time at the U.S. Treasury Department in 1977.

“To implement policies like this under IEEPA, you have to rely on the existence of a national emergency that’s a threat to national security,” Bergsten said, “and it’s very hard to argue that any of this trade stuff falls in that category.”

How has the IEEPA been used historically?

Trump tried during his first administration to use IEEPA to levy tariffs against Mexico when he declared a national emergency for illegal immigration in 2019. But before that, the statute had been used more for sanctions than as a foreign economic policy tool, Georgetown law professor Kathleen Claussen said during an episode of NPR’s Planet Money podcast.

After Congress passed the law, President Jimmy Carter first used it in 1979 in response to the Iran hostage crisis, according to a Library of Congress publication detailing the history of the act and how presidents have used it. Carter used his IEEPA powers to lock Iran out of the U.S. finance market and to freeze Iranian government assets here. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan used the act to punish South Africa for its violent racial apartheid regime, revoking and prohibiting loans, military-related technology exports, and nuclear-related exports to the nation’s government.

Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama declared a national emergency and blocked property and transactions  in North Korea, in response to North Korea’s nuclear program.

“I think it’s pretty clear that president Trump has overstepped his powers as articulated in IEEPA,” said Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist and economic adviser during the Obama administration. 

A Trump-stacked SCOTUS means ‘it’s a 50-50 bet’ what’ll happen

Experts expect the case is heading for the Supreme Court.  The conservative court, which features three Trump-appointed justices, has issued a number of rulings exponentially expanding executive powers. But, Bergsten noted, SCOTUS hasn’t always gone with the administration.

“It’s a 50-50 bet,” said Bergsten. “Under an objective look at the law, [IEEPA] should not extend to this activity.”

If the court strikes down Trump’s tariffs, there are other, less flexible and more time consuming methods Trump could use to enact his isolationist economic agenda. But in the meantime, the U.S. government would have to pay foreign exporters back, and it seems like that process would be a mess, according to an article from the Peterson Institute of International Economics, where Bergsten serves as director emeritus.

Bernstein, currently a policy fellow at the Center for American Progress, says he has little faith in the nation’s highest court not to simply bend to Trump’s will.

“The Supreme Court majority has time and again just rolled over and allowed the president — and has allowed the executive branch — to go way beyond historical precedence,” he said. “So my hope is that the International Trade Court’s decision will be ratified, but my fear is that the Supreme Court will ultimately overturn it.”

We’re Going to Get There

Posted on by Josh Marshall

No big push from me today. But I am really happy to see and really happy to report that we’re now highly likely to reach our goal in this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive. We needed/need to raise $500,000 this year. And we’re currently at $458,443 after three and a half weeks. It looks like we’re probably get there early next week. I thank you; our whole team thanks you. We really appreciate it.

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