We’re over a decade into the Trump era. To assess the damage his two terms have wrought and how, exactly, we got here, TPM’s David Kurtz was joined on Substack Live by friend of TPM and charter member of our DC bureau, Brian Beutler, who now writes the Off Message newsletter.
In a wide-ranging conversation, David and Brian discussed Trump’s propaganda campaign around his war in Iran; how the Democrats could act as a true opposition party; and what the U.S. could look like come Jan. 2027 or 2029 depending on how the next two rounds of federal elections shake out.
I long ago moved away from leading Morning Memo with crazy shit Trump says, but over the last 48 hours he’s become so unhinged, erratic, and cartoonishly bombastic about an ongoing regional war in one of the cradles of civilization that it feels worth noting for posterity’s sake.
This morning’s social media effusion has all the elements of the late-stage Trump: violent, over the top, ignorant, wishful … while still leaving himself plenty of room to TACO:
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!
The arbitrary deadline of tonight to reach some kind of deal that let’s him stand down on Iran, which doesn’t seem particularly interested in a deal, is a set-piece of Trump’s own making. Most of his rhetoric over the past few days has been puffery to make the risk of failing to bail him out look intolerable to the Iranians. But if Americans can see through the smokescreen, surely the Iranians know what’s up.
It’s hard to get past the civilization-destroying threats by an imperial superpower, but once you do, most of the rest of the social media post reads like the tongue-in-cheek cliffhangers at the end of Rocky and Bullwinkle, which were themselves spoofs of older forms of broadcast entertainment. Ever the narcissist, Trump is the announcer and would-be hero: “Tune in tonight to see if I will destroy the world … or NOT!”
Tilting at Windmills
During his press conference yesterday, President Trump threatened jail for the unnamed reporter who leaked news of the missing U.S. airman downed over Iran unless they divulge the source of the leak — except that no one quite seems to know what Trump was talking about. The news of the downed aircraft that carries a crew of two was widely reported, as was the rescue of the pilot. The inference that the second airman remained missing wasn’t hard to make. The White House did not respond to a New York Times question about which news outlet Trump was referring to.
The Hubris
I am as susceptible as anyone to a good rescue story, especially of the leave-no-one-behind variety, but when the Christian nationalist defense secretary explicitly turns a downed airman’s Easter weekend rescue into the passion play, it’s gross:
Hegseth: "Shot down on a Friday — Good Friday — hidden in a cave, a crevice, all of Saturday. And rescued on Sunday. Flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter. God is good."
“The United States is unpredictable. It’s not a reliable partner anymore for the Western world.”—Roderich Kiesewetter, a member of the Bundestag from Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union party
ICYMI
VIDEO: David Kurtz and Brian Beutler on What a Real Opposition Party Could Look Like by TPM
NY Mag traces the mind-blowing path of former FBI agent Jared Wise from Jan. 6 defendant still on trial when Trump re-took office to working as a senior adviser in the office of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and assigned to the so-called Weaponization Working Group.
A WSJ profile skewers Robert Keenan, 60, as “one of the longest-tenured and least-productive federal prosecutors” in Orange County, California, who was repeatedly passed over for promotions and “still handling low-level cases typically reserved for first-year federal prosecutors” when suddenly the Trump DOJ elevated him into a “key courtroom warrior” and “go-to guy.”
Big Oops …
The Blaze has fired reporter Steve Baker, the author of the story it had to retract that falsely identified a former Capitol Police officer as the Jan. 6 pipe-bomber.
A Thankless Task
A deserving profile of the indefatigable Aaron Rupar, whose 24/7 work clipping Trump’s public comments is an invaluable public service.
Dugan Conviction Upheld
The trial judge in the federal criminal case against Wisconsin state judge Hannah Dugan — convicted of obstructing a DHS proceeding by interfering in the courthouse arrest of an undocumented immigrant — denied her post-conviction motions for acquittal.
2026 Ephemera
Senate Republicans’ main super PAC — the Senate Leadership Fund — revealed its view of the midterms map, as it unveiled a $350 million plan to hold its majority. It’s focused on:
defending five seats: Alaska, Iowa Maine, North Carolina*, and Ohio
targeting three Democratic seats: Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire*
*open seats
Gonzalez’s Pattern of Preying on Staff
Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-TX) has already decided not to seek re-election after being exposed for having an affair with a former staffer who later took her own life. Now hundreds of text messages obtained by the San Antonio Express-News show him allegedly propositioning a campaign staffer four years earlier, during his 2020 campaign.
“He obviously pursued, pursued, pursued her like he did with me,” the former campaign staffer told the Express-News, referring to the later affair. “I never took him serious. … It wasn’t until this poor girl died that I thought, ‘No, this guy is pure evil.’”
As the NYT notes, the newly revealed texts create a new bind for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), “who is dangerously close to losing what is left of his tiny majority and cannot afford the resignation of another Republican.”
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
A day after dropping the f-bomb on Truth Social in an Easter Sunday post where he threatened to attack massive swaths of Iran’s infrastructure if the “Fuckin’ Strait” is not opened, President Trump doubled down on those threats from the White House podium on Monday, again threatening to bomb the country back to “the stone ages.”
We have a piece up this morning that looks at one of the less noticed side effects of Trump’s draconian immigration crackdown: bond. The Trump administration has, since last year, been attempting to deny detained immigrants bond, though hundreds of federal courts have rejected that policy. It is likely bound for the Supreme Court. In the meantime, Bryce Covert covers for us the considerable evidence that those who do obtain bond are paying enormous sums that were uncommon just two years ago. This looks to in part be the result of the Trump administration’s effort to purge the ranks of immigration judges of any who were, by their definition, too lenient on the detained.
I frequently get asked what people can do to get involved or play some role in fighting for the future of their country — where to donate, what kind of activism has a real impact. Some people have always been activists. But many others aren’t and haven’t particularly wanted to be but now feel they have no choice. And yet the scale of the problem is overwhelming, and the range of organizations and movements calling on your time and money are almost equally so. Critically, if you’re semi-new to these things, you don’t want to find out you were wasting your time or at least not using that or your money most efficiently.
TPM is a news and commentary site, not an activism site. But at least here in the Editors’ Blog we’re not so finicky about that that we feel we can’t share our opinions, hopefully reasonably well informed and perhaps with additional reporting, about what is a good use of your time or money. So with that in mind, and after a friend suggested it, I wanted to do a series of posts on the idea of “What Can I Do?” And here I would love your participation, your suggestions via email. I have my own views of the matter but I certainly don’t have all the answers and, by design, I don’t get directly involved myself. So give me your ideas, and I will try to share my thoughts on practical ways we individually can try to save our country and, as I will explain in a moment, build a new one. What actually makes a difference and what is more like scattering seeds on the wind?
In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States.This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
On Easter Sunday, I received an email “alert” from the National Faith Advisory Board (NFAB), an organization led by the televangelist Paula White, a longtime friend of President Trump who is also the senior advisor to the White House Faith Office. The “alert” came six hours after Trump’s Truth Social post threatening war crimes against Iran if the “crazy bastards” did not “Open the Fuckin’ Strait.” While the NFAB email delivery might have been scheduled in advance, it nonetheless was jarring in the context of Trump’s vulgar and violent morning. “Dear Faith Leader,” it read. “This sacred weekend from the greatest platform in the free world and beyond, President Trump proclaimed the Gospel to all that could hear.” The email linked to a short video, establishing that the platform in question was not Truth Social, but the Oval Office. From there, Trump robotically read (and at some points strangely shouted) an Easter message about Christ’s resurrection. At points, he sounded like someone who was hearing about John 3:16 for the very first time.
We may be increasingly mired in a war Trump started and doesn’t know how to end, but for the NFAB, which seems to exist as a communications arm of the White House, portraying Trump as a divine leader of a Christian revival is central to every missive. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants every American to pray for the troops “on bended knee” and “in the name of Jesus Christ,” and has cast Trump’s Iran war as a holy crusade. But for Trump’s evangelicals — who are more likely to adopt Jewish rituals and symbols as a sign of their supposed love for Israel than the crusader iconography favored by Hegseth — the real savior in the Iran war is Trump himself.
The New York Times has obtained fleeting video footage of the Jan. 14 incident in Minneapolis during which an ICE agent shot a fleeing Venezuelan immigrant and then claimed he had been attacked.
The newly surfaced video, acquired via a public records request for a city-owned camera at a intersection half a block away, offers a limited view of the incident but some of what it shows further undermines elements of the original account by the federal agents involved:
The video contradicts the agent’s claim that three assailants had beaten him with a shovel and broom for roughly three minutes before he opened fire. Instead, the confrontation depicted in the video lasts about 12 seconds and shows two men struggling with the agent. It shows no sustained attack with a shovel.
The incident led to felony charges against Julio C. Sosa-Celis, the fleeing man who was shot, and one of his housemates, Alfredo A. Aljorna. But within weeks, the Trump DOJ dropped the criminal case, the two ICE officers were suspended, and a perjury investigation was launched against them. DHS did not answer the NYT’s written question about the video.
The NYT report questions why it took so long for the Trump DOJ to drop the case. The federal government had access to the video within hours of the incident, the Minneapolis police chief said. Prosecutors did not watch the footage for nearly three weeks, a DOJ official told the NYT. Instead, for purposes of filing criminal charges, they relied on the ICE agent’s statement and an FBI agent’s affidavit describing the footage. Later, when dismissing the case, a DOJ prosecutor would refer to the video as “newly discovered evidence.”
“It sounds like an unarmed person got shot running away,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said after reviewing the video and other evidence.
Punishment for Political Views
The arrest of pro-Palestinian mosque leader in Wisconsin came after Secretary of State Marco Rubio found him to be a threat to the U.S. foreign policy interest of combating antisemitism, the NYT reports.
Mass Deportation Watch
El Paso Times: ICE inspectors have found 49 standards violations at Camp East Montana, the largest detention center in the country.
Habeas tracker: Lawfare has compiled a database of the Trump administration’s non-compliance with court orders in some 300 habeas cases around the country.
Third Country Deportation Watch: A handy tracker of the Trump administration’s dramatic increase in the use of third country deportations
ICE v. US Military
Keeping in mind the recent outcry over the Marine Corps reportedly allowing ICE to check the immigration status of the family members of new recruits attending graduation ceremonies at the end of basic training, here are other recent developments along the same lines:
NYT: ICE entered Ft. Polk in Louisiana to detain the new wife of an Army staff sergeant as they settled into base housing.
AJC: Georgia Army veteran deported by ICE after 50 years in U.S.
ICYMI
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has taken steps to block or delay promotions for more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four branches of the military,” NBC News reports.
Latest on the Middle East …
To the extent there was any “logic” to President Trump’s crazy-ass Easter Sunday tweet threatening to commit war crimes in Iran, it appears to be another example of his simplistic negotiating style of shooting for the moon, this time in back-channel ceasefire negotiations.
Advisers, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, are reportedly telling Trump that civilian targets like power plants and bridges are fair game in Iran, despite legal and ethical restrictions that considerably narrow the circumstances in which such infrastructure can be legitimately targeted, the WSJ reports.
President Trump will hold a White House press conference today at 1 p.m. ET to tout the weekend rescue of a downed U.S. airman.
We are seven months away from the most consequential midterm election in the history of the United States. Meanwhile, we are fighting a war. These are the structural conditions for a coup attempt in which a president tries to nullify elections and take permanent power as a dictator. If we see this, we can stop it, overcome the movement that brought us to this point, and make a turn towards something better.
Say It Ain’t So, Holocaust Museum
The Holocaust Museum in D.C. quietly removed from its website educational resources about American racism and canceled a workshop about the “fragility of democracy,” Politico reports, in what two former employees said was a preemptive attempt to avoid Trump administration scrutiny. The museum issued a denial of the article’s claims: “The allegations made by the two former employees that we have retreated from this content are false.”
Down the Memory Hole!
The preposterous Office of Legal Counsel memo that declared the half-century-old Presidential Records Act unconstitutional is always posing real-world problems at the National Archives, according to Politico:
Archives personnel rely on the records law daily to review, redact and make public the documents and digital records of every president since Ronald Reagan. Since Office of Legal Counsel opinions are typically treated as binding throughout the executive branch, the legal framework archivists have followed for decades is now in doubt. …
The impact of the Justice Department opinion could be felt quickly by historians, scholars and journalists who regularly access presidential records and make requests for their release.
Trump DOJ Watch
In the chaos of the Trump era, thing can always get worse and often do.
It looks like Harmeet Dhillon, the utterly unqualified Trump loyalist who oversees the DOJ Civil Rights Division, is going to get bumped up to the No. 3 slot in the shakeup that cost Pam Bondi her job. That’s bad news for the current No. 3, Stan Woodward, the MAGA lawyer who repped a bunch of Jan. 6 defendants.
Substack LIVE!
Join me and my former TPM colleague Brian Beutler, now the proprietor of the newsletter Off Message, at 2 p.m. ET today for a Substack Live where we’ll chat about the news of the day and jump into some deeper questions about how we got to this point.
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Join me for a casual conversation with Brian Beutler, the proprietor of the newsletter Off Message and a former TPM colleague. Brian and I will use the news of the day as a jumping off point to chat about the Trump II era. We’ll be biting off some small topics like:
How did we get to this point?
How much worse will things get before they get better?
Are we still being too optimistic?
What does rebuilding American democracy look like?
After a run-in with the police that ended in his arrest, Andry’s husband was supposed to be released from a New York jail in November 2024. Instead, he was transferred into ICE’s custody. The couple had come to the United States 18 years ago from the Dominican Republic. Her husband was incarcerated for all of last year.
In December, Andry (who asked not to use her last name to protect her family) seemed to catch a break: an immigration judge granted her husband bond, the only way to get out of immigration detention. The decision was far from a given: the second Trump administration has tried to make broad swaths of immigrants ineligible for bond, detaining them with no ability to get released, and even those who are eligible for a bond hearing might not be granted it. But the amount Andry was told she had to pay in order to secure his freedom was $25,000. Unlike in the pretrial bail system, where defendants can usually pay a fraction of their bail to get released, immigration courts demand the entire amount.
Andry had nothing like that kind of money sitting around. For over a year, she had been raising their two daughters alone without her husband’s income, running their remittance business while driving for Uber as much as she could in between. Beyond making $900 rent payments and covering their family’s expenses, she was using any extra funds to send her husband money so he could make calls or go to the commissary. “¿Qué voy a hacer?” she asked: What could I do?
You’ve certainly seen or heard about President Trump’s morning threat to destroy Iran’s civil energy and bridge infrastructure if the country doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday. To quote him: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.” (That’s not my arch summary. That’s a direct quote.) I will set aside that these would appear to constitute war crimes as going without saying. The man is careening from one day to the next, from ‘the strait doesn’t matter,’ to (alternatively) ‘not our problem/it will open itself’ to ‘I give you two fucking days or you’ll be living in hell.’ Of course, then, he has then repeatedly “postponed” the day of destruction after encouraging talks with Iran leaders, talks which we then learn a few days later never occurred. But now he says, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran.” (This time I really, really mean it!)
In other words, talk like an insane person and carry a really small stick. He thinks these outbursts make him look stronger but each threat and retreat makes him look weaker and more clearly not in control of the situation. These are the words of a man who has spent a lifetime either TACOing or bullshitting his way out of messes suddenly coming up against an immovable object and at a moment when he already appears to be under some mix of extreme psychic strain and a more general senescent decompensation.
