This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Each December, the New York Young Republican Club’s gala offers a preview of the next season’s conservative provocations. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke at the gala near the peak of her stardom in 2021; in the audience was another up-and-coming shit-stirrer, the newly elected, pre-scandal George Santos.
At the club’s most recent gala, however, elected officials were notably absent. Making headlines instead were an assortment of controversial livestreamers who roamed the event reciting inflammatory remarks into cameras.
After Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, commentators opined on influencers’ role in shaping new voters. As the 2026 midterms approach and Gen Z ages into power, those figures are increasingly becoming the party itself: Republican campaigns and org charts are increasingly populated by figures from the world of political streaming. At the NYYRC gala, on the campaign trail of a Florida gubernatorial candidate, and in national youth Republican offices, streamers and their strategies are shaping the way the Grand Old Party speaks and the policies it promotes.
It’s been reported that former Attorney General Pam Bondi was fired because, although she spent much of her time as AG trying to carry out President Trump’s retribution agenda, she was not successful enough — both in speed and outcome — at investigating and prosecuting his political opponents. There were also reports that Bondi gave Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) some sort of advance notice about the potential release of investigative files on a past FBI inquiry into his relationship with a Chinese spy 10 years ago. In light of recent events … who knows what was going on there.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Major League Baseball (MLB) likes to congratulate itself for being a civil rights trailblazer. Jackie Robinson Day celebrations are held at every ballpark on April 15, the date Robinson first played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Since 2009, all players, managers, coaches, and umpires wear Robinson’s iconic number 42 to commemorate his impact on the game and society. At every game played that day, teams feature on-the-field ceremonies and show clips of Robinson. Winners of the Jackie Robinson Foundation’s college scholarship program show up to discuss how his legacy changed their lives. It is a feel-good day for sport.
Though Robinson was a fierce competitor and an outstanding athlete, the aspect of his legacy that often gets glossed over on Jackie Robinson Day is that he was also a radical.
Baseball has had its share of iconoclasts, dissenters and mavericks who defied baseball’s and society’s establishment. But none took as many risks — and had as big an impact — as Robinson.
The celebrations of Jackie Robinson Day downplay his activism during and after his playing career. They don’t delve into the forces arrayed against Robinson — the players, fans, reporters, politicians and baseball executives who scorned his presence in a major league uniform and outspoken views on racial segregation. (In 1946, at least 14 of the 16 major league owners opposed ending baseball’s apartheid).
As soon as the Supreme Court struck down many of President Donald Trump’s tariffs in February, his administration imposed a new, sweeping 10% tariff on a broad swath of products and countries under a different law, called Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.
The Trump administration is being saved again from its flagrant contempt of court in the original Alien Enemies Act case, this time by two Trump-appointed judges on the DC Circuit.
In the aftermath of Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary, a typically shallow conventional wisdom has already emerged that unless President Trump gets the economy turned around, Republicans are going to have hell to pay in the 2026 and 2028 elections.
The NYT quotes the right-wing commentator Rod Dreher, who decamped to Hungary to work for an Orbán-funded think tank, as explaining the election result thusly: “When all boats aren’t rising, everybody looks at who’s on the yacht. In terms of MAGA, populism is great, but if you can’t deliver on the economy, none of it is going to matter.”
That is abundantly true and yet terribly misleading because the economic mess we’re in is entirely of Trump’s own doing. He’s not the usual American president held hostage to the vagaries and cycles of an economy largely beyond his control.
In historic fashion, Trump has torpedoed key pillars of the global economy by launching unprecedented trade wars and an unjustified elective war in the Middle East that has bottled up world oil supplies to such an extent that it threatens a recession. At home, he has dramatically throttled back the economic engine of immigration, targeted America’s world leading universities, and decimated its vibrant scientific and biomedical research base.
Except for the racist assault on immigrants, all of these moves are not driven by ideological imperatives but by corrupt impulses. The economic damage Trump has done was crafted purposely to create opportunities for self-enrichment for him and his allies. It generates its own currency which can be used to perpetuate his political power. What he dispenses he can take away.
The family real estate business is undergoing the fastest overseas expansion since its founding a century ago, each deal potentially shaping everything from tariffs to military aid.
Led by Eric, and his brother, Donald Jr., the family business has expanded into cryptocurrencies with ventures that brought in billions of dollars but raised questions about whether some big investors received favorable treatment in return.
The brothers have also joined or invested in a number of companies that aim to do business with the government their father runs. Last month, they struck a deal giving them stakes worth millions in an armed drone maker seeking contracts with the Pentagon and with Gulf states under attack by Iran and dependent on the U.S. military led by their father.
It always sounds a bit earnest to deplore corruption, but one of the practical reasons for eschewing corruption is because at best it acts like an invisible tax on economic growth. At worst, it corrodes the economic engine to the point that it doesn’t properly function any longer. Before Trump, the United States was a world leader in combatting corporate and political corruption abroad for the unapologetically realpolitik reason that American companies could win on a level playing field. Under Trump II, the DOJ has explicitly stopped enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and we’re now in a grubby race to the bottom.
Any notion that Trump can get the economy “back on track” or dampen the economic shockwaves he has unleashed ignores the substance of what he’s done. Not only are Trump’s second term attacks on economic growth hard to reverse, let alone quickly, they’re deeply wired into who he is and what he’s about.
The Economic Warning Signs
The Middle East conflict is causing oil scarcity and rising prices that are contributing to significant “demand destruction” which could lead to the steepest drop-off in demand for oil since the COVID slowdown, the International Energy Agency is forecasting in its latest outlook.
The International Monetary Fund warns that the Middle East conflict will slow economic growth, fuel inflation and raises the possibility of a global recession.
Latest on the Middle East Conflict …
Israeli and Lebanese officials gathered in D.C. for rare direct talks — the first in a decade — as the Netanyahu government has seized on the wider conflict to advance Israel’s position on the ground in Lebanon.
Bitter irony alert: Talks between Iran and Trump administration are complicated by “the risk that any agreement that emerges may resemble the 2015 nuclear accord” that Trump abrogated in his first term, the NYT reports.
House Republicans have again abdicated their oversight roles by pushing off until at least May testimony originally scheduled for next week from senior Pentagon officials on the war in Iran.
Lawless Boat Strike Death Toll: 170
The U.S. attacked an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Eastern Pacific on Monday, bringing the campaign’s overall death toll to at least 170. In announcing the attack, the U.S. Southern Command introduced new Orwellian language: “Applying total systemic friction on the cartels.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is waging a pressure campaign against the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to squash a potential investigation into the boat strike campaign, The Intercept reports.
Must Read
TPM’s Josh Kovensky reports from Frisco, Texas, the country’s fastest growing city and a haven for South Asian immigrants, which far-right activists are seizing on as “proof” of the Great Replacement Theory.
Thread of the Day
Trump has cut legal immigration more than illegal immigration, as I predicted. While illegal entries have fallen, they continued a prior trend, falling more before he came back. Meanwhile, Trump has drastically cut legal entries, reversing the prior upward trend. www.cato.org/blog/trump-h…
Local authorities in St. Paul, Minnesota have launched a criminal investigation into the notorious ICE detention in January of Hmong American ChongLy “Scott” Thao. They’re investigating the warrantless raid on an American citizen’s home as a potential kidnapping, burglary, and false imprisonment.
American law is built on a simple rule: The government cannot get around legal limits by creating a new structure to do the same thing another way. The Posse Comitatus Act reflects that rule. It exists to prevent the federal government from using a large, armed force for general policing inside the U.S. But by tripling ICE’s size, giving it $75 billion in multi-year funding insulated from normal oversight, and deploying it far beyond immigration enforcement — from neighborhood operations to general airport security — the administration has achieved in practice what those restrictions were designed to prevent.
Swalwell and Gonzales Both Resign
In a rapid-fire combo of scandal-fueled resignations, Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Tony Gonzales (R-TX) both announced last evening that they would resign their seats — though neither gave a date certain for their departures. Depending on the exact timing, the resignations should be a wash and not effect majority control of the House.
Two Big Wins
In the lawsuit over the removal of the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument, the Trump administration has reversed course and confirmed in a new filing that it will reinstate the flag and not remove it again.
The American Library Association and a union of cultural workers have reached a settlement in their lawsuit against the Trump administration that saves the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, the NYT reports: “The Trump administration reaffirmed that it had reinstated all previously canceled grants, in keeping with a separate legal ruling last year, and reversed all staff reductions. It also promised not to take any further steps to reduce the agency.”
Good Read
Wired: Government Workers Say They’re Getting Inundated With Religion
Pope Making Everyone Look Dumb
The senior senator from Ohio:
Bernie Moreno on Trump’s comments about the Pope: “I was incensed to watch the Pope's comments. I think what the Pope is doing is a disgrace.”“It's a shame that the Pope has made the Catholic Church political. Thank God my mom’s not alive to watch that.”
Congress is back in town from their two-week Easter recess and Senate Republicans are trying to execute on a second reconciliation package as Congress continues to be consumed by a 58-day Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown, resignations and potential Democratic-led war powers votes.
As Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) explained it on Monday night, leadership is hoping to keep the reconciliation package “very, very skinny — anorexic-like skinny.”
“To execute on it and do it with any kind of speed, you’ve got to keep it really tight,” Thune told reporters Monday night.
FRISCO, TEXAS – Far-right activists are seizing on a new example of the America they fear. It’s a booming, Texas city home to the Dallas Cowboys’ practice facility and a PGA golf resort.
Most hardcore evangelical Christians can reverse engineer a case for why any given politician or influential emerging world leader is probably the antichrist. What’s rare is when the hysteria sticks, and there’s a consensus around why — as seems to be the case with growing sinister feelings about President Trump this week.
Facing expulsion vote, Swalwell resigns from Congress.
Quite apart from the gravity of the allegations, I simply cannot remember a more rapid and total campaign and, it would now seem, career implosion. Usually loyalists and especially senior staff hold out a bit longer. Just stunning in every dimension.
