This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
Generally, a common-law principle known as sovereign immunity prevents the federal government from being sued, unless the government chooses to waive that privilege. In 1946, Congress laid out a few exceptions to this rule by passing the Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows people allegedly injured by the government to sue “in the same manner and to the same extent” as they would be able to sue anyone else. But first, the law requires any would-be plaintiff to file an administrative claim with the relevant agency, outlining their legal case and making a formal request for money damages. The idea here is to give the government plenty of time and space to negotiate a settlement before it has to face a jury in federal court.
Although there are currently not enough Indiana Republicans on board with the Trump administration’s midcycle redistricting pressure campaign to move forward with the redrawn maps, those who support President Trump’s midterms scheme are now bullying their colleagues to get in line.
By its own admission, the Trump administration has expanded its lawless attacks on supposed drug-smuggling boats from the Caribbean to the Pacific.
The U.S. military has conducted two strikesthat we know of in the Pacific, bringing the total number of attacks since the campaign began to nine, with a reported death toll of 37. The Pacific attacks took place in international waters, and at least one of them was off the coast of Colombia, according to reports.
An October 15, 2025 map of the region. (Photo by Yasin Demirci/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Throughout the weeks-old campaign, nearly all of the publicly available information about the attacks has come from the notoriously unreliable Trump administration. The campaign has also happened in parallel with an administration purging of the reporters who usually cover the Pentagon, most of whom gave up their press credentials rather than accede to a restrictive new media policy. What remains to cover the Defense Department on-site is a hodgepodge of mostly right-wing media outlets that agreed to sign on to the new restrictions.
The combination of fewer reliable reporters at the Pentagon and compromised news outlets taking their place could hardly come at a worse time given the administration’s own struggles with truth-telling. Well before Trump, the national security realm was one of the hardest to cover for journalists, and the structure and traditions of American government gave overwhelming deference to secrecy and security at the expense of transparency and accountability.
Even now, the campaign is being waged on the basis of a secret memo from the Trump DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, and the president has issued a secret presidential finding authorizing the CIA to conduct covert operations in and around Venezuela. Congress and the American public have been kept in the dark about the legal basis for the attacks, their ultimate goal, the larger strategy, and the endgame.
Similar practices in past administrations have created enormous historic tensions between democratic processes and military/intelligence operations. But no past administration has launched military operations at the same time it is conducting a vigorous, sustained, and broad-based attack on the rule of law, the constitutional order, and the professional military like President Trump is.
It’s a bad combination at a bad time … something earlier opponents of government secrecy, deference to the military, and extrajudicial killings warned would eventually come back to bite us.
The Corruption: $230M and Counting
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) is warning that President Trump may be able to settle his own $230 million claim against the federal government for the criminal investigations of himself without immediately divulging the settlement publicly.
“Our reading is that, even though this is a private settlement, it doesn’t have to be disclosed anywhere until there is an accounting of where all the money has gone at the end of the year,” Raskin tells Greg Sargent.
Raskin also cites the Emoluments Clause — which proved to be a weak tool in Trump I — as barring any compensation to the president from the federal government other than his salary.
CONFIRMED: East Wing Demolished
WASHINGTON, DC – OCTOBER 22, 2025: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks holding a photos of the new ballroom during a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on October 22, 2025. (Photo by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
After a few days of weak dodging and poor deception, the Trump administration — first via an unnamed senior official and then by President Trump himself — confirmed what photographic evidence had made undeniable: It is demolishing the entire East Wing of the White House to make way for the president’s ballroom pet project.
Facing a groundswell of backlash over the unannounced demolition of one-third of the White House complex, Trump took to holding up mockups of the ballroom during an Oval Office press availability with the NATO secretary general.
Philip Bump writes of the demolition of the East Wing:
The metaphor of Trump crushing a portion of the White House as he aims bulldozers at democracy itself is almost too obvious to note. But it’s not just a symbolic parallel: both are rooted in the same indifference to what these American institutions mean to Americans and to America. Both are rooted in Trump wanting to treat those things as his own and now feeling empowered to do precisely that.
Also Demolished: CISA
“The Trump administration has effectively closed the division of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that coordinates critical infrastructure cybersecurity improvements with states and local governments, private businesses and foreign countries,” Cybersecurity Dive reports.
Wahoowhat? UVa Capitulates
Under pressure from the White House, Mr. Jefferson’s University of Virginia became the first public university to strike a deal with the Trump administration, agreeing to the imposition of certain race-based policies in order only to pause ongoing federal investigations.
For the Record
On Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) concluded a marathon 22-hour floor speech in which he warned it was time to “ring the alarm bells about authoritarian control.”
He’s Telling Us He’s Going to Do it Again
Trump: "We can never let what happened in the 2020 election happen again. We just can't let that happen. I know Kash is working on it, everybody is working on it. And certainly Tulsi is working on it. We can't let that happen again to our country."
Late yesterday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declined to rehear en banc a decision that paused a lower court order that blocked National Guard troops from being deployed in California. A total of 11 judges joined in a powerful dissent by Judge Marsha Berzon, TPM’s Kate Riga reports.
To make sense of the three big National Guard cases — California, Oregon, and Illinois — and the current legal status of each case, I’ll defer to Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck who does a bang-up job this morning of sorting out the various moving parts.
ICYMI …
During oral arguments this week, a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals appeared deeply skeptical of the Trump administration’s effort to detain and deport pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University student being punished for his political views.
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I hope you’ll pardon our undisguised pride at having made it through 25 years of political and industry turmoil, a small boat in a raging sea of chaos, uncertainty, and re-invention. We could not have done it without you. Thank you.
The full 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declined to rehear a panel’s order allowing National Guard troops to deploy to California, prompting the dissenting judges to pen lengthy warnings about the danger the United States now faces.
Writing about the failure of patron-supported journalism is itself a kind of confession. It hasn’t worked for me, and I struggle to weigh my guilt around that (should have worked harder!) against what I know is a structural problem. Patron-supported journalism (including newsletters) is both a throwback to the earliest mode of media production and, as it exists today, the newest way for capitalism to suffocate dissent.
A panel of appellate judges spent considerable time Wednesday prodding at whether the National Guard troops currently deployed in American cities are subject to the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) — a worrying sign of the ambiguity around what power the Guard has.
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New York Times columnist Bret Stephens devotes his column to attacking New York Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for his views of Israel and the Palestinians. I don’t want to assess Mamdani’s views except to say that mine are somewhat different, but that I share his opposition to what Israel has become and what it has done to the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel proper. What I want to comment on is a certain kind of criticism that Stephens makes in attacking Mamdani’s views — a criticism that is sometimes made of my own views.
Stephens writes, “One of the ways anti-Zionists tend to give themselves away as something darker is that the only human-rights abuses they seem to notice are Israel’s; the only state among dozens of religious states whose legitimacy they challenge is Israel; the only group whose suffering they are prepared to turn into their personal crusade is that of the Palestinians. What gives?” The question is: why has Mamdani focussed so much on the plight of the Palestinians? The answer, I’d argue, is fairly obvious: Mamdani is a Muslim, and the preponderance of Israel’s victims in Gaza and the West Bank are Muslims.
The Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature approved a new gerrymandered congressional district map this week, making North Carolina the latest state to cave to the Trump administration’s mid-cycle redistricting pressure campaign.
