When the Republican-controlled Texas legislature, at Donald Trump’s urging, first pushed through a plan to do a highly unusual mid-decade redistricting, Democrats hoped they might overplay their hand — that in carving up Democratic-held districts on what is an already heavily gerrymandered map, they would be unable to avoid diluting Republican districts, making them more winnable for Democrats.
Continue reading “Texas Starts a Nationwide Gerrymandering War”Experts Say Foreign Governments Are ‘Playing Trump’ on Tariffs
President Donald Trump on Thursday night signed an executive order applying blanket tariffs to scores of countries. In announcing tariffs ranging from 10% to 41% levied against around 70 countries, Trump began a new chapter in a volatile, months-long saga that reached a fever pitch over the last couple weeks, during which he also announced hundreds of billions of dollars worth of so-called trade deals with the United Kingdom, Japan, Indonesia, the European Union, and South Korea, among others.
Continue reading “Experts Say Foreign Governments Are ‘Playing Trump’ on Tariffs”Trump Relocates Ghislaine to Texas Club Fed as Negotiations Continue
Going back to my Backchannel on not being surprised when President Trump pardons Ghislaine Maxwell … Trump has now moved her from her Florida prison to a Texas “club Fed” prison camp (Camp Bryan) near Houston, a low-security facility which currently houses prisoners like disgraced Theranos chief Elizabeth Holmes and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Star Jen Shah.
Continue reading “Trump Relocates Ghislaine to Texas Club Fed as Negotiations Continue”Inertia, Rage and Netanyahu’s Never-Ending War
While we watch the horrific and increasingly senseless immiseration of the civilian population of Gaza, it’s important to look clearly at why it’s happening. “Why” may be too big a question. It may be better to try to answer not that big “why” but, in a more focused and discrete way, why this war hasn’t stopped. Prime Minister Netanyahu has managed to lose even President Trump now on the question of whether people are starving in Gaza. More significantly, Netanyahu some time ago lost even fairly hardcore Israeli hawks who are not members of his governing coalition on why the war is still going on at all.
You’ll remember that for about a year, between 2021 and 2022, Netanyahu was actually out of power and Naftali Bennett was Prime Minister. Bennett is from the “religious Zionist” world and political camp, and from almost every perspective that’s a very right-wing and nationalist world. But he was heading a coalition of basically every part of the Israeli political world which wasn’t behind Netanyahu. That stretched all the way from his own religious Zionist political party right through the center and left of Israeli politics, such as it is, and all the way to one of the Arab Islamist parties. A few weeks ago Bennett said again: we need to end this. Stop the war. Get the hostages home. We’re not going to have a final victory over Hamas. It would be great if we could, but that’s not going to happen. Leave that for another day.
Continue reading “Inertia, Rage and Netanyahu’s Never-Ending War”Senate Democrats Estimate DOGE Caused Billions of Dollars In Government Waste
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
What DOGE Cost Us
Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations yesterday released a jaw-dropping report attempting to document the scope and scale of financial waste, personnel upheaval, and human suffering caused by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk’s giddily uninformed strike force of Peter Thiel acolytes. In all, the Democrats, led by Richard Blumenthal (CT), estimated DOGE cost the government $21.7 billion.
“DOGE-generated waste could also have easily funded monthly food assistance for the 5.3 million families losing an average of $146 in monthly food security assistance ($9.3 billion per year) under the new budget; or it could have been used more broadly to support the 40 percent of taxpayers that will see a net increase to their taxes as a direct result of the Trump tax plan,” the report contends.
Major news coverage focused on the cost of the government paying over 150,000 federal workers who accepted the Trump administration’s deferred resignation incentives, under which they had to stop working but are continuing to be paid through September or even December. The minority’s report, which estimated that 200,000 workers took these buyouts, calculated that paying workers for not working cost the government $14.8 billion.
Neither the buyouts nor paying workers while on administrative leave (costing an additional $6.1 billion) increased government efficiency, as was always obvious and predictable. The report details many other costs, from the petty and pointless (millions of hours of wasted employee time writing the Musk-required email listing their weekly accomplishments) to the catastrophic (the elimination of the United States Agency for International Development, “projected to cause millions of additional deaths globally while simultaneously endangering domestic public health by reducing essential medical staff and programs.”)
As it rampaged through the government, DOGE destroyed valuable assets, wasting money already set aside to be spent, or depriving the government of income-generating programs. Product spoilage of USAID supplies of food and medicines cost the government nearly $10 million. DOGE’s elimination of the Internal Revenue Service’s Direct File program, the report estimates, wasted a more than $33 million investment in it, not to mention that taxpayers no longer have a free electronic filing option. DOGE caused the loss of more than $263 million of interest and fee income by shutting down Department of Energy loans from a program to modernize the electricity grid. The actual cost of the mass cancellations of medical research grants at the National Institutes of Health has yet to be fully calculated.
This summary represents a fraction of the entire report, and much is still not even known about the scope of the DOGE destruction. Yesterday, Blumenthal wrote to the inspectors general at 27 agencies, requesting they “initiate a comprehensive review of DOGE’s activities within your agency in order to determine the full scope of costs that DOGE’s careless actions have imposed,” particularly “the financial impact of the reorganization of federal agencies through mass layoffs, the canceling of grants, contracts, and other projects for partisan reasons, and the stifling of income-generating activities.”
Is MAGA Turning on Trump over Israel?
I spotted two stories this week in the inside-the-Beltway press, one in Politico and the other in Axios, suggesting MAGA is turning on Trump because of his continued support of the Netanyahu regime and its assault on Gaza that even Israeli human rights organizations have called a genocide. The Axios piece even suggests a “GOP realignment” on the issue may be underway. The Politico piece is more measured on that possibility, but neither piece mentions the critical role of Christian Zionists — that is, evangelicals who vigorously support Israel’s far right, like Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee — in the Trump coalition.
It is hard to know now this possible coalitional split will play out. In the meantime, can we talk about how the MAGA figures turning against Israel are saying things that have gotten foreign students detained and universities’ funding cut off?
Federal Trial Judges Speak Out About Violent Threats, Fueled by Trump Tirades
At a panel discussion hosted by Speak up for Justice, a group advocating for the safety of an independent judiciary, federal judges who have ruled against the Trump administration described the violent threats they and family members have received as a result. Judge Esther Salas, a federal judge in New Jersey whose son was murdered by a litigant in 2020, described the increase in threats as Trump has escalated his invectives against the bench. “I’ve often referred to it as a bonfire that I believe the current administration is throwing accelerants on,” Salas told the Associated Press.
D.C. Bar Panel Recommends Disbarment of Jeffrey Clark, Who Promoted Overturning 2020 Election
The D.C. Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility singled out his dishonesty as the core reason for recommending the most severe punishment for Clark:
Respondent was prepared to cause the Justice Department to tell a lie about the status of its investigation of an important national issue (the integrity of the 2020 Presidential election). Lawyers cannot advocate for any outcome based on false statements and they certainly cannot urge others to do so. Respondent persistently and energetically sought to do just that on an important national issue. He should be disbarred as a consequence and to send a message to the rest of the Bar and to the public that this behavior will not be tolerated.
Justice Department Inspector General Claims to Have Lost a Whistleblower Complaint Against Emil Bove
After Senate Republicans confirmed top DOJ official Emil Bove for a lifetime judicial appointment this week, it came to light that the DOJ’s inspector general failed to act on a whistleblower complaint, filed against Bove in early May. Libby Liu, the chief executive of Whistleblower Aid, which represents the whistleblower, told the New York Times she was “stunned,” adding, “Clearly the inspector general failed in their basic function here. If they don’t even open whistle-blower complaints, then what is going on?”
Homeland Security Heresies
Brian Kaylor, an expert on Christian nationalism and an ordained minister, has an excellent post on the Department of Homeland Security’s manipulation of Bible verses in social media posts to glorify its militarized, terrorizing crackdowns on immigrants. One grotesque video shows gun-toting agents in tactical gear storming buildings in nighttime raids. It is accompanied by the King James translation of Proverbs 28:1: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth; but the righteous are bold as a lion.”
Your Questions About the Texas Gerrymandering Scheme, Answered
From the indispensable elections news site Bolts, a reader Q & A with Brennan Center legal counsel Michael Li, about Texas Republicans following Trump’s orders to gerrymander congressional districts to enhance the GOP’s chances of holding the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms. It’s extremely informative.
Appeals Court Skeptical of Trump Tariff Arguments
The full 11-member panel of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit “took turns questioning a top US Justice Department official about Trump’s argument that the nation’s persistent trade deficit qualified as a national emergency under the law, allowing the president to bypass Congress and hit countries across the globe with tariffs,” Bloomberg reports. A decision is expected in weeks, with an appeal to the Supreme Court likely. Meanwhile, Trump went ahead with announcements that he will impose massive tariffs on dozens of countries around the world come August 7, triggering a global stock slump.
Trump Family Corruption Watch
Eric Trump’s holdings in a Bitcoin mining venture formed in March could be worth $367 million in an anticipated initial public offering.
MAGA Podcasts Can’t Stop Talking About the Epstein Files
An analysis by the Wall Street Journal found that right-wing podcasters discussed Jeffrey Epstein in over 3,000 episodes of 125 podcasts this year, and that these discussions “grew more than eightfold in the last three weeks despite Trump’s admonishment that MAGA drop the issue.”
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President Trump Actually Paved Over the Rose Garden
The iconic White House Rose Garden is now more of a rose display area after President Donald Trump paved over the grass expanse.
Continue reading “President Trump Actually Paved Over the Rose Garden”Is the Government Still Collecting Inflation Data? Well …
Whether it’s AI or Social Media, for me at least, the routine is pretty similar. I look to see if something seems interesting or interests me. And if it does, I try to reproduce it or verify it with a human brain, i.e., my own. This morning I saw a tweet claiming that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was moving from collecting the pricing information that goes into building government’s canonical inflation numbers (CPI) to relying instead on a higher percentage “imputed” numbers, i.e., estimates. “Estimates” aren’t all bad. A few years back it became a topic of pretty intense partisan warfare with the Census. As I recall it, the Census was combining data collection with statistical models to get more accurate counts for more marginal and transient populations where underreporting is chronic. (As you might imagine, undocumented people aren’t terribly eager to fill out government forms.) In any case, was it really true that BLS is cutting back on data collection?
Actually it is.
Continue reading “Is the Government Still Collecting Inflation Data? Well …”The Legal System Should Not Give Trump the Benefit of the Doubt
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published by Balls and Strikes.
On Monday, the Department of Justice filed a misconduct complaint against U.S. District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg for the offense of telling colleagues that some judges worried the Trump administration would violate court orders. According to the DOJ, his private comments “eroded public confidence in the judiciary.”
The complaint comes on the heels of The Federalist reporting on a memorandum recapping the March 2025 meeting of the Judicial Conference, the national policymaking body for federal courts. According to The Federalist, the memo states that at this judges-only event, Boasberg “raised his colleagues’ concerns that the Administration would disregard rulings of federal courts leading to a constitutional crisis.” The Federalist contended that these comments revealed an inexcusable “anti-Trump bias” and “clear disregard for the presumption of regularity—a presumption that requires a court to presume public officials properly discharged their official duties.”
The DOJ then said the same. “Federal courts must begin from a presumption of regularity—the settled doctrine that executive officials have properly discharged their official duties absent clear evidence otherwise,” reads the complaint, signed by Chad Mizelle, who is the chief of staff to Attorney General Pam Bondi. “By predicting non-compliance, Judge Boasberg turned that presumption on its head, contradicting both the evidence of past compliance and the governing law.”
A recent Washington Post analysis shows that the Trump administration has defied roughly one-third of rulings against it. Among the disobeyed directives is an order Boasberg issued a couple days after the Judicial Conference, instructing the administration to stop secretly renditioning American residents to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center.
Mizelle and The Federalist got one thing right: The “presumption of regularity” does refer to the notion that courts should assume public officials are lawfully discharging their duties. But as the Supreme Court put it twenty-odd years ago, “the presumption perhaps is less a rule of evidence than a general working principle.” It is also nigh impossible to reconcile with an executive branch that is openly contemptuous of the law and brimming with people who find it easier to lie than to breathe. To the extent that Trump was ever entitled to a presumption of regularity, he has forfeited it. Courts should regard both the president and the administration’s invocations of the presumption with skepticism.
The exact contours of the doctrine are nebulous, and it may not apply here to begin with. Historically, it has been used to fill small gaps in evidentiary records in a given case—for example, in a 2001 case that involved disciplinary action against a Postal Service employee, the court presumed that the agency’s underlying process for reviewing alleged misconduct was fair. The presumption does not, in other words, require judges to assume that the government will always behave perfectly. Nor does it prevent judges from discussing interbranch constitutional challenges with their colleagues behind closed doors.
To justify this novel application of the principle to out-of-court conversations, the DOJ’s complaint points to United States v. Chemical Foundation, a 1926 case in which the federal government sued to set aside its sale of various patents to a private company. In that case, the government argued in part that the sales were “procured through the fraudulent deception” of the president and other government officials. But the Court figured it was safe to presume the officials knew what they were doing and “acted upon knowledge of the material facts,” and declined to invalidate the sales.
Basically, in Chemical Foundation, the Court decided that if it heard hoofbeats, it would assume horses and not zebras unless given reason to do otherwise. The DOJ’s complaint is thus attempting to transform a principle about rebuttable inferences in court cases into insulation from even private critique.
The Trump administration has tried to use Chemical Foundation to avoid scrutiny before. On appeal in Trump v. Hawaii, the 2018 case about Trump’s Muslim ban, the Justice Department complained that it was inappropriate for the lower court to take note of Trump’s comments at the signing ceremony, at which Trump had read the formal title aloud—“Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States”—and then said, “We all know what that means.”
Challengers to the Muslim ban suggested this showed the policy was not actually motivated by national security, and the government objected strenuously. “At a bare minimum, the presumption of regularity that attaches to all federal officials’ actions, as well as the respect due the head of a coordinate branch, should have foreclosed the Fourth Circuit from invalidating a presidential proclamation based on an uncharitable interpretation of an offhand, six-word comment made in connection with a prior directive,” said the DOJ’s brief.
Then and now, the Trump administration treated the presumption of regularity as an all-encompassing permission slip. With slip in hand, Trump argues, no one can look at his actions too closely, speak about him too harshly, or judge him at all. Such an expansion of the presumption is especially dangerous in a time that is far from “regular”—when the government is summarily sending people to be tortured abroad and suing anyone, up to and including judges, who get in its way. The DOJ’s complaint pays lip service to the idea of accountability for Boasberg, but its actual goal is plainly to bully the judiciary into submitting to Trump’s authoritarian rule.
Trump and Allies Flounder on Epstein Files While Senate Dems Forge Ahead
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Dems Push for Release of Epstein Files
Under pressure to quell the firestorm over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, last week President Donald Trump told the Justice Department to ask the courts to unseal grand jury testimony from criminal investigations of the child sex trafficker. A Florida court has already denied one DOJ request. In a filing ordered by a judge in New York, the DOJ revealed this week that the two grand juries that indicted Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell heard from just two witnesses in total — neither of them victims. The New York Epstein grand jury only heard testimony from an FBI agent who summarized his interviews with Epstein’s victims. The Maxwell grand jury heard from that same FBI agent and a New York City police detective.
All of that means that even if the DOJ were to convince the New York judge to override grand jury secrecy rules and release the transcripts, they would not be particularly informative. Although Trump has used his request to release them as evidence of his supposed transparency, now it is clear his DOJ knows they would be of limited revelatory value.
Amid this gaslighting, Trump’s allies are also attempting to create an atmosphere of conspiratorial panic about other issues to divert the public’s attention from the administration’s refusal to release the files Trump’s own supporters have long sought. Yesterday. Fox News Digital published an anonymously sourced article claiming that FBI Director Kash Patel has just “found a trove of sensitive documents related to the origins of the Trump–Russia probe buried in multiple ‘burn bags’ in a secret room inside the bureau.” Asked about it later by reporters, Trump appeared to not understand the question and meandered about his desire to release the Epstein files.
Some simple questions: If he really wants them released, why hasn’t he done so? Trump then digressed to “it’s gotta be stuff that really doesn’t hurt people unfairly” — however that’s defined, and certainly “people” here means him. He then veered to “the whole thing is a scam — it’s a scam set up by Democrats.” If that is true, why wouldn’t it benefit Trump to release all the files and prove his case? Finally, Trump offered, “it’s getting to be very old news.” If it’s actually dull and boring, what’s the harm in letting it all out in the open? When a reporter asked a substantive question about Epstein — what he thought his friend “stole” women from him for — Trump left the room.
While House Republicans beholden to Trump shut down the chamber early rather than holding a vote on releasing the Epstein files, the Senate is still in town, and Democratic lawmakers are getting creative. They are relying on a little-known 1928 law that authorizes the minority party to compel a federal agency to provide information if five members of a committee request it and it is relevant to the committee’s jurisdiction. Here, five Democratic members of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee are invoking the law to force the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent has all the details.
‘Fuck the Justice Manual’: A New Trump DOJ Assault on the Rule of Law
The Justice Manual is the DOJ’s internal handbook of rules on prosecutorial conduct. According to a damning Bloomberg Law piece, Bill Essayli, Trump’s interim US Attorney in Los Angeles, said “fuck the Justice Manual” in response to questions from line attorneys about his pursuit of indictments against anti-ICE protesters. (Morning Memo has previously discussed reports of LA-based grand juries not returning indictments against protesters and prosecutors being forced to drop felony charges because of false evidence presented by arresting officers.) Bloomberg sourced the quote to four current and former prosecutors in the office.
Trump’s Tariffs in Court Again Today, With His Brazil Retribution in the News
The legal challenge to Trump’s tariffs brought by small business owners is in court again today, before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. Trump has held that by declaring a national emergency, he is able to impose sweeping tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The small businesses won an injunction before the U.S. Court of International Trade this spring, arguing that Trump had exceeded his authority under the law. The appellate court stayed the injunction pending the appeal.
Legal experts tell Reuters that Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Brazil, because he is angry that his friend Jair Bolsonaro is in legal jeopardy for attempting a coup, is likely to come up in oral arguments. Daniel Esty, a professor at Yale Law School, called the Brazil tariffs “so clearly outside the bounds of the law as to be shocking.”
New Reporting Sheds More Light on Suspect Activities of DOGE Staffer ‘Big Balls’
A new report in Wired, based on documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, shows that the 19-year-old DOGE staffer Edward “Big Balls” Coristine rapidly obtained access to sensitive personal payroll, human resources, and government contracting data in the early days of Trump’s second term. Under intense pressure, federal officials made a blitz of decisions to give access to someone who would not have received it under normal channels. Coristine thus got into Small Business Administration data as well as that of the payroll system for federal employees covering about one-fifth of the federal workforce, including the Department of Justice and the FBI. The data included Social Security numbers, banking information, addresses, dates of birth, and more.
Senate Democrats, led by Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), Elizabeth Warren (MA), and Ron Wyden (OR), have introduced the Pick Up After Your DOGE Act, which would require security and performance audits and fixes of federal computer systems and networks accessed by DOGE personnel.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Gets Sued…for Discrimination
FreeState Justice, a pro-LGBTQ rights legal services nonprofit, has sued the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for seeking to dismiss discrimination complaints brought on behalf of transgender workers. “The cases that the EEOC sought to abandon concerned transgender workers who had been subjected to egregious conditions in the workplace: slurs and grossly derogatory statements, graphic sexual comments and unwanted physical touching, misgendering, unfavorable shift changes, and termination after disclosing their gender identity — often in combination,” the lawsuit alleges.
Russell Vought Loses Bid to Cut $15 Billion for Medical Research Grants With a Footnote
Office of Management and Budget Director and foe of the federal government Russell Vought tried to bring down medical research with a footnote in a budget document. The footnote maintained that for the rest of this fiscal year, no funding to outside sources — that is, to scientists studying cures for diseases like cancer and diabetes at universities and other institutions — could be dispersed from the National Institutes of Health.
There was a big backlash on Capitol Hill, and also, according to the Wall Street Journal, inside the Department of Health and Human Services. “This outrageous decision to prevent NIH from spending the funding that Congress has explicitly provided for medical research must immediately be reversed — life-changing cures and patients’ prognoses hang in the balance,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) said. Very shortly after that, the decision-by-footnote was reversed. If the past is any guide, though, Vought is likely to try to find other ways to accomplish his goals.
No One Is Safe From the Wrath of Laura Loomer
Pressure from the conspiracist right-wing influencer Laura Loomer has forced the resignation of Vinay Prasad, the top vaccine official at the Food and Drug Administration. Prasad, who attacked vaccines and masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, would seem to be acceptable to Trump’s base. But Loomer unearthed old social media posts in which he praised Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), identified as liberal, and mocked Trump — and her ire could not overcome even the support of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
What is to be done about the wreckage that Trump acolytes have made of HHS? The 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that Kennedy abruptly fired now urge setting up alternative structures outside of government to mitigate the harm to vaccine policy. In the New England Journal of Medicine, they wrote yesterday: “No viable pathway exists to fully replace the prior trusted and unbiased ACIP structure and process. Instead, the alternatives must focus on limiting the damage to vaccination policy in the United States.”
Southern Baptists Pressure Trump to End Mail-Order Distribution of Mifepristone
Led by the Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, 40 Southern Baptist leaders have sent a letter to President Trump, urging him to impede or stop the sale by mail of the FDA-approved abortion pill mifepristone. They want the FDA to require patients receiving the drug to have an ultrasound first, and to revisit its approval of the drug. Even more ominously, the letter urges Trump to “instruct the Department of Justice to enforce the Comstock Act to protect states’ rights to uphold pro-life laws.” To understand what invoking the Comstock Act actually means, read this.
Bessent Admits Big Beautiful Bill Has “Backdoor to Privatizing Social Security”
At a Breitbart event yesterday, the Treasury Secretary discussed “Trump accounts” included in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, that will give parents a one-time payment of $1,000 per child born between 2025 and 2028. Parents then can contribute as much as $5,000 per year until the child’s 18th birthday (that is, if they have that money). “I’m not sure when the distribution date should be, whether it’s 30 and you can buy a house, should it be 60,” said Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager before Trump tapped him for a Cabinet post. “But in a way, it is a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.”
More Havoc From Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill
CNN reports that the new law’s draconian cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) could imperil independent grocery stores, given “the program’s role as an economic anchor for grocery stores and communities, particularly in rural areas.”
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Sic Transit
I’m not sure I’ve seen in six months a better capturing of the second Trump administration. I write this just as I saw that the White House just produced a fact sheet about the US-European Union trade deal which contradicts and asserts different terms than what the EU says it agreed to. That’s pretty redolent too. But this one is even deeper in it.
A few moments ago I got an email alert from STAT News that reads: Top White House pandemic preparedness official resigns, officials say, in sign of broader disarray. But it’s the summary of the story that really captures it.
Continue reading “Sic Transit”