I think this was pretty much in the cards. But now it’s official. Former Gov. Roy Cooper (D) enters the North Carolina Senate race, which is now an open race after Sen. Tom Tillis (R) announced his essentially (Trump) forced retirement. Nothing is a sure thing for Democrats in North Carolina. But this is about the best case scenario they could have hoped for — no incumbent, one of the most if not the most popular Democrat in the state running. (I heard from someone that the new Gov., Josh Stein, may be slightly more popular now.) Of course it is an absolute must pick up for Dems to be in contention to take hold of the Senate. So they’re at least laying the groundwork if the winds are moving just right next November.
Hulk Hogan and the Lawsuit That Changed Journalism and America
A few days ago I got in a back and forth with someone on Facebook about the Jeffrey Epstein story. This person insisted it’s a non-story and criticized the Times — that’s what was important to him — for devoting so much time to it. It was a “pseudo-story” as the journalism argot has it, a kind of pent-up story with no substance or consequence or even existence beyond journalists pretending it’s real. I said that this was a category error. As journalists, our job is to cover and explain what is actually happening, not to act as gatekeepers deciding what’s up to our standards of substance or policy-seriousness or whatever else.
Now, it’s very true that “what’s actually happening” is carrying a lot of weight here. Lots of things are happening all the time. The Kardashians are happening. Reality TV shows are happening (a complicated topic we’ll return to). Fad diets are happening. But in political news when we say that “something is happening,” I mean chains of events which are driving public opinion, changing the dynamics of political power, shifting policy in ways that affects people’s lives, etc. When a sitting president is facing a significant rebellion in his political coalition, having his presidency consumed by efforts to contain the cause of that rebellion and so forth that is a major story. The fact that the essence of what is happening — the beliefs, conspiracy theories, etc. — are, in many ways, absurd does not change that fact. Indeed, if you can’t wrestle with the heavy amount of absurd at the heart of our political moment you will simply be lost or be having an irrelevant conversation with other gatekeepers.
I’ve argued at various points that TPM was ahead of the curve roughly during the Obama years because we paid a lot of attention to what was then sometimes called The Crazy — the subterranean world of GOP and far-right politics; the colorful, weird and almost-always super racist congressmen (and sometimes women) from obscure rural districts. That was portrayed as a sort of moving circus, cheap laughs, click-bait — not real politics. We were often criticized for giving it so much attention. I never thought that was right. And unfortunately the Trump presidency itself vindicated our read of that era. The Crazy was the reality of Republican politics. It was the John Boehners and Paul Ryans who were a kind of respectable veneer placed over its true engine of power and motive force. From the outside, it appeared that these leaders had to run the GOP while wrangling the far-right Freedom Caucus. In fact it was the Freedom Caucus that ran the GOP through a tacit collaboration with presentable and ultimately tractable figures like Boehner and Ryan. Trump’s intuitive political genius was to see that you could ditch the front man and run the GOP directly from the Freedom Caucus, which has been the story of the Trump Era.
Continue reading “Hulk Hogan and the Lawsuit That Changed Journalism and America”Trump Targets NGOs to Dismantle Civil Society
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
An Existential Threat to NGOs
As President Trump continues his onslaught on centers of power he can’t directly control — higher education, media, and law firms — I want to zero in for a moment on NGOs. We don’t usually think of nongovernmental organizations as having much overt political power, but collectively they form a safety net of sorts for democracy.
NGOs collect and analyze data, advocate for and against public policy, provide crucial social services, and, perhaps most importantly in the current moment, they litigate in defense of democracy and the rule of law. Collectively, they serve as a bulwark of civil society.
Trump targeted NGOs in one of his early anti-DEI executive orders, but we’ve seen the administration use the pretense of “anti-discrimination” to root around in all manner of internal operations and functions of universities and other targets, so the threat is broad and existential. No NGO is safe, whether they’re legal advocacy groups fighting the important court battles of the Trump II era or aid organizations dependent on USAID funding to fulfill their civic missions.
In one especially glaring example, the administration has brought Media Matters to its knees, helped by serial civil lawsuits against it by Elon Musk, as the NYT reported in detail over the weekend. A liberal advocacy group with a two-decade track record of pillorying outlets that traffic in right-wing propaganda and steadily raising substantial funds from donors is now facing an existential threat from the ongoing attacks, including from the White House and Federal Trade Commission.
Vanita Gupta, a civil rights attorney who comes from the legal advocacy NGO world and served as the No. 3 in the Biden DOJ, wrote in a NYT op-ed over the weekend:
All of this suggests a bigger, more fundamental goal: to shut down debate, cut off services to disfavored communities and dismantle civil society. These actions are unconstitutional, un-American and harm us all.
The history of the first six months of the Trump II presidency will be written with a heavy emphasis on the role of NGOs. The ACLU, labor unions, and other legal advocacy NGOs have won decisive victories in courts against lawless mass deportation, funding freezes, and the dismantling of government agencies. Even when they’ve lost in court, they’ve exposed new information, forced courts to draw lines, and mitigated some of the worst Trump impulses.
I’m often been asked since Jan. 20, Why isn’t anyone doing anything? I gently point to NGOs. These are real people doing important things with minimal resources and a lot of guts.
AEA Detainee Describes Being Raped at CECOT
An openly gay Venezuelan men who was among those removed to El Salvador under the Aliens Enemies Act and is now free after being repatriated recounts being forced to perform oral sex on a guard at CECOT.
Good Read
Former TPMer Matt Shuham: I Watched 20 Arrests In Trump’s America. Here’s What They Looked Like.
Quote of the Day
Former U.S. Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer, who continues to speak out after being fired by the Trump administration:
Those in the legal profession are facing hard and often costly choices at the moment. This is not a lecture or a judgment. It is a sincere plea to my colleagues to look beyond the short-term costs of standing up and speaking out, and to consider the longer-term consequences of staying in the shadows and bearing witness silently. If you are alarmed by the damage that has been done in just six months—if you are afraid of where we may be in year—please consider sharing your name, showing your face, and voicing your concerns.
It Just Gets Worse
The Trump administration gave sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell limited immunity to answer questions from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, CNN reports. Meanwhile, Trump is playing not-very-coy about pardoning Maxwell:
The Corruption: New Air Force One Edition
The latest developments:
- CNN got ahold of the agreement between Qatar and the Trump administration for the “unconditional donation” of a 747 to the Pentagon for short-term use as a replacement for Air Force One before it’s given to the Trump presidential library for his personal use.
- The NYT reports that the money needed to bring the plane up to Air Force One standards — a process that may be too time consuming to complete before Trump leaves office — appears to be hidden away in a $1 billion Air Force transfer to an unnamed classified project.
Only the Best People
Darren Beattie, fired during Trump I for attending a white nationalist conference, is the Trump II pick to lead the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Make America Gruesome Again
WSJ: RFK Jr. to Oust Advisory Panel on Cancer Screenings, HIV Prevention Drugs
How Long Before Hegseth Gets Canned?
WaPo: Hegseth Team Told to Stop Polygraph Tests After Complaint to White House
Now’s the Time to Contribute to TPM
We’re deep into the annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. Hitting our $500,000 goal is critical to sustaining the work that we do. If you haven’t contributed yet, I urge you to give it serious consideration. We need you. It’s that simple.
Since January, we’ve had a swell of new Morning Memo readers. Some of you may not be as familiar with TPM, so I wanted to offer the perspectives of some of my colleagues on TPM and why it’s worth your support:
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See Ya Next Week
I’m off for a few days to raft the Colorado River through the lower Grand Canyon with my three brothers. I’m a little leery of the hike down Wednesday, where the bottom of the canyon is forecast to be 110 degrees Fahrenheit, especially since I clumsily broke a toe last month. It’ll be fiiine.
Sarah Posner will be covering Morning Memo for a few days.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
These Are the Communities Most Likely to be Hurt By Hospital Closures and Medicaid Cuts
As Congress negotiated the details of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a parade of independent analyses warned about the impact it would have on millions of Americans’ health care. Noting those findings, a handful of Republican lawmakers expressed alarm that the Medicaid and Medicare cuts contained within the bill would directly harm their constituents, decimating funding for rural hospitals. Majorities in both chambers voted the bill through anyway.
What members were warned about is now coming to pass.
The hospitals most at risk of closure because of the bill’s massive cuts to federal spending on Medicaid and Medicare are located in communities that are mostly white and poorer on average than the rest of the nation. They’re also more likely to have supported President Donald Trump, and are mostly represented by Republicans in Congress, according to a Talking Points Memo analysis of a new report on rural hospitals from the University of North Carolina.
The Democratic National Committee is launching a messaging campaign “to show how Trump’s policies are hurting the people who voted for him the most,” putting up billboards outside rural hospitals that have had to close or cut back services. Per the DNC, at least 10 rural hospitals have announced full or partial closure since Trump took office. Among those hospitals were at least three that explicitly cited uncertainty around the future of federal funding in announcing their imminent closure. While some facilities decided to close before the federal spending bill passed, experts said hospitals — which plan their budgets several years out, rely on Medicaid accounts for one-fifth of hospital care spending — likely saw the writing on the wall.
“I’m deeply concerned about my rural constituents, folks in small-town Georgia,” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) told TPM.
“Even in the instances where the hospital doesn’t close,” he continued, “many of them will have to cut services — labor and delivery, for example, which is dangerous and potentially deadly for women who are trying to bring a child into the world.”
The legislation, which President Trump signed into law on July 4, is expected to slash $1 trillion in Medicaid funding over the next 10 years and lead to 10 million people losing their health insurance.
“In a lot of these rural communities, in mine, it’s true, 70% of these people voted for Republicans, voted for Trump,” said Rob Davidson, an emergency physician in rural West Michigan who serves as executive director of the Committee to Protect Health Care. His organization equips physicians with tools to explain to communities that their GOP legislators are responsible for Medicaid and Medicare cuts.
“I think it’s important that they at least understand this is why this hospital is going away. Because of these cuts,” he said. Davidson said his organization is “flooding the zone with the realities of this kind of legislation… and making sure [community members] understand who did this.”
Even before Trump’s bill was signed into law, many rural hospitals were under intense financial pressure. In Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R) state of Missouri, one hospital’s complete closure, announced in June, cost the community more than 300 jobs. Hawley voted in favor of the bill and its accompanying gutting of Medicaid before introducing his own legislation attempting to reverse cuts. (His new bill stands little chance of passing.)
Arkansas Valley Regional Medical Center in a deep red Otero County, Colorado — represented in Congress, until recently, by Trump ally Lauren Boebert’s (R-CO) — announced plans to lay off 5% of its staff in June. A top hospital official told Colorado Public Radio that the Republican budget bill would “absolutely hurt” the hospital and other rural facilities. “Cutting Medicaid funding would have dangerous, real-life consequences,” the official said.
Davidson said he’s glad some impacted hospitals are pointing the finger at policy and, by extension, politicians.
“In some ways it’s refreshing to see that they’re willing to put a name to the reason why they’re doing it,” he said.
While the budget bill did include $50 billion specifically for a rural hospitals fund, that sum is only a drop in the bucket compared to what these hospitals stand to lose, said Zachary Levinson, a hospital costs project director at KFF, a health policy organization.
“Overall, the $50 billion fund would cover a little over one-third of the estimated reductions in fed medicaid spending based on KFF estimates,” said Levinson.
Robinson put it more bluntly.
“I think we — probably all of us — need to stop saying that it’s a rural health fund,” he said.
“It’s $1 trillion in cuts over a decade and $50 billion to help try to shore it up,” Davidson said later. “That’s 5% of the problem in a 5 year span. That math doesn’t work out.”
More than 330 hospitals were highlighted in the University of North Carolina report, which was commissioned by four Democratic senators and published by the school’s Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. Sens. Edward J. Markey (D-MA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Jeffrey Merkley (D-OR) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) sent a letter to Trump and other members of his administration detailing the study’s findings.
The report flagged hospitals that are either among the top 10% in terms of the proportion of patients on Medicaid,or which have reported negative margins for at least three consecutive years, or both, for their vulnerability to changes in federal health care spending.
Only eight hospitals were both top Medicaid providers and had longer-term negative margins. Six of them are in states Trump won in the 2024 election. Five are in congressional districts with Republican representatives. All but one have higher rates of poverty than the 11.1% national average, and all but one were in majority white congressional districts. That trend continues when you zoom out. Six of the top 10 states with the highest number of at-risk hospitals elected Trump in 2024. The list is led by Kentucky, which has 35 vulnerable rural hospitals, and Louisiana, which has 33. Heavily Democratic California ranks third, with 28.
Leadership at the eight most at-risk hospitals cited by the Sheps Center didn’t respond to TPM’s requests for comment.
Congressional districts with rural hospitals skew even more Republican. All but one of the top 10 are represented by a GOP congressperson, and each of the Republican representatives backed, and even celebrated, Trump’s spending bill. One such representative was Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA).
None of the Republican members of Congress who represented the most vulnerable rural communities responded to requests for comment from TPM.
Cuts to individual Medicaid coverage conveniently aren’t slated to begin until immediately after the 2026 midterm elections.
Emine Yücel contributed reporting.
DHS’s Endless Trolling
Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
In the early weeks of the Trump administration, DHS started a media campaign. It would feature Secretary Kristi Noem, the former North Dakota governor eager to wear the uniforms and gear of ICE, the Coast Guard, and DHS’s other constituent agencies as she staged seemingly perpetual TV hits.
Continue reading “DHS’s Endless Trolling”Correction: Here We Are
I’m leaving the original version of this post up, below, as published. But it is incorrect. The “bias monitor” mentioned below does not report to the President of the United States but rather the President of Paramount, or at least that’s what the actual FCC agreement says. I was going on the article from Gizmodo which I linked below. I believe it was edited after I wrote this post. Because just what “president” they were referring to was something I tried to make sure I was clear on and the article seemed clear that they were referring to the President of the United States. In any case, what’s important is to correct the record. The broader corruptness of the deal notwithstanding this is an internal watchdog at CBS who reports to the President of the company which owns CBS.
…
Even today this is quite astonishing. FCC Chair Brendan Carr is making the rounds of conservative media bragging that to allow the Paramount/Skydance merger the company agreed to put in embed a political commissar at CBS (dubbed a “bias monitor”) who will report directly to Donald Trump on whether the news content is acceptable. This is Skydance, which is a creature of the Ellison family. So I would imagine it didn’t require that much pressure. But that’s where we are.
How Anti-Affirmative Action Crusaders Are Escalating Their War on Inclusive Democracy
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published by Balls and Strikes.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which the six conservative justices barred the consideration of race in college admissions, conservative activists have developed a new legal strategy: leveraging the post-SFFA climate to challenge facially neutral, class-based policies that seek to remedy longstanding educational inequities. Across the country, schools and universities are now getting sued not for using race—but for trying not to.
Last week, activists filed two new challenges to policies that they deem insufficiently friendly to straight white men. In Boston, the Pacific Legal Foundation—a conservative law firm best known for targeting affirmative action—filed suit against the city’s exam school admissions policy, which allocates seats across ZIP codes based on neighborhood income levels to promote geographic and socioeconomic balance. The plaintiffs, the Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence—a group that previously sued over the district’s ZIP code-based admissions policy—claim the tiered system is a racial proxy designed to reduce the number of white students admitted to these competitive schools. Because this system yields greater racial diversity than prior approaches, they argue, it must be unconstitutional.
Around the same time, in Baltimore, the conservative group America First Legal, which was founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller in 2021, filed a Title VI complaint against Johns Hopkins University over its tuition-free medical school program for students from families earning under $300,000—a move made possible by a $1 billion gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies. America First Legal seizes on the university’s stated goal of increasing “socioeconomic diversity,” casting it as a backdoor attempt at racial engineering: Citing Census data on racial wealth gaps, the complaint asserts that the tuition-free program “masks racial preferences behind income thresholds.”
The legal attacks unfolding in Boston and Baltimore reflect a strategic escalation in the conservative war on inclusive democracy. The goal is no longer merely to dismantle affirmative action, but to reframe even facially neutral measures—those tied to income, ZIP code, or opportunity—as constitutionally suspect. At the core of this effort lies a distorted theory of equal protection: that a policymaker’s general awareness of racial disparities, or the existence of racially uneven outcomes, transforms lawful governance into unconstitutional discrimination.
Neither the Equal Protection Clause nor the case law interpreting it supports this inversion. If left unchecked, this strategy risks transforming equal protection into a tool for preserving existing racial and socioeconomic hierarchies, punishing even racial-neutral efforts to expand opportunity while shielding exclusionary structures from scrutiny. That’s not what the Supreme Court has held, and it’s certainly not what the Constitution requires.
In Students For Fair Admissions, the Court made clear that institutions may not consider an applicant’s race as a factor in deciding who receives access to selective educational opportunities. But it also explicitly preserved institutions’ ability to use facially neutral criteria—like income, geography, or personal adversity—to pursue broadly inclusive outcomes. “[A]s all parties agree,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
In other words, under Students For Fair Admissions, universities can no longer treat race as a formal category in admissions decisions. But they may still consider students’ lived experiences with race—so long as those experiences relate to personal attributes or contributions that admissions offices evaluate, such as resilience, leadership, or intellectual curiosity. The decision thus left intact the constitutional space for policies that seek to expand access and foster more diverse educational environments through facially neutral means.
Students For Fair Admissions did not mark the first time the Court embraced this principle; for nearly five decades, the justices have rejected the notion that a policy is unconstitutional merely because it leads to different outcomes across racial groups. In Washington v. Davis, a landmark 1976 decision, the Court made clear that “we have not held that a law, neutral on its face…is invalid under the Equal Protection Clause simply because it may affect a greater proportion of one race than of another.” The following year, in Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation, the Court reiterated that “official action will not be held unconstitutional solely because it results in a racially disproportionate impact.” And in 1979, in Personnel Administrator v. Feeney, the Court reaffirmed that “purposeful discrimination is the condition that offends the Constitution”—underscoring that even a government’s awareness of disparate impact, standing alone, does not establish unconstitutional intent.
This narrowing of fairness also clashes with the controlling opinion in Parents Involved v. Seattle, the 2007 case in which the Court struck down voluntary integration plans that assigned students to schools based, in part, on their race. Writing separately, Justice Anthony Kennedy rejected the plurality’s ban on diversity goals and affirmed that schools may respond to racial isolation with race-neutral strategies, like site selection or drawing attendance zones. “The aspiration to achieve a diverse student population,” he wrote, “is not constitutionally impermissible.”
Though formally a concurrence, Kennedy’s opinion in Parents Involved supplied the fifth and deciding vote, and has since guided how courts interpret equal protection in this context. It underscores that facially neutral, inclusive policies do not automatically trigger strict scrutiny so long as they avoid classifying individuals by race.
The legal campaign that has taken shape since the Court’s decision in Students For Fair Admissions seeks to destabilize this deeply rooted equal protection principle. Even modest shifts in racial composition are now framed as evidence of unlawful intent, particularly when they disrupt durable patterns of advantage. The result is a quiet but consequential reframing of constitutional harm—one that elevates perceived injuries over the real and enduring barriers to opportunity faced by marginalized students.
If courts adopt this theory, equal protection will no longer function as a shield for the vulnerable—it will serve instead to further entrench advantages enjoyed by the privileged. And the implications would verge on the absurd. If the Court were to deem tuition subsidies for low-income students constitutionally suspect simply because they may yield incidental benefits for Black and brown families, then—by the same logic—charging tuition should raise similar concerns, since the burdens fall disproportionately on those same communities. This line of reasoning operates asymmetrically: It casts suspicion on facially neutral policies that promote inclusion, while remaining silent on those that have long excluded.
The result is a narrowing of the very concept of fairness. If even race-neutral, broadly inclusive policies are legally suspect, the Equal Protection Clause is no longer protecting substantive equality—it is preventing it. If this political project succeeds, it won’t be because inclusive policies defy the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise, born of Black struggle and designed to dismantle racial subjugation. It will be because these inclusive policies disrupt the social hierarchy that the conservative legal movement seeks to preserve.
She’s Baaack! Trump Re-Installs Alina Habba as U.S. Attorney
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Habba’s Nomination Sacrificed for a Workaround
We’re not rid of Trump’s utterly unqualified former personal lawyer after all.
By withdrawing her nomination to the permanent position, President Trump was able to reinstall Alina Habba as the interim U.S. attorney in New Jersey, where she can serve another 210 days. This maneuver allows Trump to bypass the choice of the federal judges in the district: a career prosecutor who was promptly fired by the Trump Justice Department when the judges elevated her. It also allows Trump to avoid having to get a nominee through the Senate confirmation process for what will end up being at least 330 days.
The workaround is a bit complicated but probably legal. The key thing to know is that there are multiple legal bases for appointing an interim U.S. attorney. Habba’s 120-term, which ends today, was under one legal authority. Under another law, the chief deputy U.S. attorney is automatically elevated to the top spot for 210 days … but only if they themselves are not the nominee to the permanent position.
So after Trump withdrew Habba’s nomination, Attorney General Pam Bondi made her the chief deputy in the office, which means as soon as Habba’s 120-day term expires, she is elevated to the permanent position. It’s a merry-go-round of Alina Habbas. Or a Russian nesting doll of Alina Habbas. Either way, it’s too much Alina Habba.
A system that produces this outcome is, shall we say, problematic. And yet it’s another example of how holes in the system may be innocuous for years or decades until you get a bad faith rogue actor exploiting the system for their own gains with a powerful cult of followers unwilling to hold them to account.
Former DOJ Personnel Sue Over Their Firings
Three notable career DOJ figures who were fired by the Trump administration are now suing, alleging they were wrongfully terminated in violation of federal law. The plaintiffs are:
- Michael M. Gordon, an assistant U.S. attorney who had been senior trial counsel in the Capitol Siege Section, prosecuting Jan. 6 defendants;
- Patricia A. Hartman, who was the spokesperson for the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office and for a time was the chief spokesperson for the prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters
- Joseph W. Tirrell, the most-senior career ethics official in the Justice Department.
Sheer Madness
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will continue his interview of Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell for a second day today.
I can’t believe I typed that sentence.
The deputy attorney general runs the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department. They don’t run out and interview witnesses. And under no circumstances do they put themselves in the kind of compromised, weakened, and supplicatory position that Blanche has. He’s virtually begging a convicted sex trafficker for information in a high-profile, politically charged case that implicates his own former client, Donald Trump.
It’s an insane conflict of interest in an untenable negotiating posture that cannot possibly yield reliable information.
Making matter worse, Blanche released a statement last night that promises to share the information Maxwell provided, effectively conceding that this isn’t a normal investigation where the Justice Department speaks through indictments and court filings: “The Department of Justice will share additional information about what we learned at the appropriate time.”
Seems Obvious?
In the lawsuit brought by Stephen Miller’s former group, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts asserts that it is the judicial branch — not the executive branch — that oversees the administration of the federal courts.
Quote of the Day
“They should take precautions or not come to Florida. You should take extreme precautions when you come to Florida.”–Juan Sabines, the consul of Mexico in Orlando, in an interview with TPM’s Hunter Walker, warning Mexican nationals about the risk of “Alligator Alcatraz”
Dem Redistricting Gambit Faces Structural Impediments
While House Democrats seem serious about trying to counter GOP mid-decade redistricting efforts in red states with their own new maps in blue states, the pick-up opportunities aren’t as robust or as straightforward legally for structural reasons that go back years.
The Losses Keep Piling Up
Stepping back for a moment to consider Trump’s larger unraveling of the fabric of American civic life, it’s things like this that cut deepest for me:
New Orleans’ Amistad Research Center, one of the country’s largest repositories of artifacts on Black history, has laid off half its staff and cut its hours after it lost four grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency which President Trump has targeted for dismantling.
The TPM Journalism Fund Needs YOU!
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Thanks for Coming Out Last Night!
We hosted the TPM Happy Hour in DC for the first time last night at the Dew Drop Inn, one of my favorite bars and one of the few remaining legit dive bars in the District. A great crowd came out to hang and talk politics with me, Josh Marshall, Nicole Lafond, Allegra Kirkland, Emine Yücel, and Layla A. Jones.
Federal government workers were well represented in last night’s crowd, and it was a good reminder that we can never have enough sources inside of government. You can find my encrypted contact info here.
One thing I hear a lot is “I almost sent you something …” or “I thought about reaching out …” but for one reason or another you don’t because you’re not sure that what you have is very valuable. But if you’ve seen, heard, or been involved with something directly yourself, it may plug a hole in the information we already have and fill out a more complete picture of what’s really happening. So don’t hesitate. Even if it’s not useful information to us now, it could end up being useful down the road.
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The Trump Admin Gets Ready to Seize Congress’ Power of the Purse
The Trump White House is planning to send a second rescissions request to Capitol Hill in the coming weeks, hoping to extract a legislative stamp of approval for its efforts to impound funding that was previously authorized by Congress.
Continue reading “The Trump Admin Gets Ready to Seize Congress’ Power of the Purse”Thanks, DC
I want to thank everyone who came out to our D.C. happy hour tonight. Great turnout. It was wonderful seeing some old friends and meeting a bunch of readers who’ve been with us almost since the beginning but who I had never met before. We’re going to be doing more events going forward, not only in our home bases of New York and D.C. but in other cities around the country as well. We had a great podcast event in Chicago in the spring and we have another event coming in Boston in the early fall. Thanks to everyone who joined us.