A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

New Jingoism Same as the Old Jingoism

The last 30 years or so have been a relative retreat from more than a century of jingoistic U.S. interference in Latin America, but it increasingly appears that the Trump administration is eager to resurrect the old U.S. playbook. If history is any guide, it’ll be a return to paternalistic interference in internal affairs, destabilizing existing regimes, and generally creating a political, economic, and social mess before washing its hands of it all and walking away … before repeating the cycle.

While the recent lawless U.S. attacks on alleged drug-running boats on the high seas have serious legal implications, I’m afraid it’s part of a larger more important story of trying to turn Venezuela into a villain country in which Trump (not unlike many American leaders before him) fancies himself as savior, local sheriff, and bad ’80s movie tough guy.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is leading a Trump administration push to turn Venezuela into a pariah state, including amping up military pressure to try to force out President Nicolás Maduro, the NYT reports:

The U.S. military has been planning potential military operations targeting drug trafficking suspects in Venezuela itself as a next phase, although the White House has not yet approved such a step, current and former officials say.

Those operations would be aimed at interfering with drug production and trafficking in Venezuela as well as tightening a vise around Mr. Maduro.

Two senior figures in the Venezuelan opposition movement claim there have already been talks with the Trump administration about a post-Maduro future.

Semantic games are already being played to tout the operation not as regime change but as a “counternarcotics operation.”

“The U.S. is engaged in a counterdrug-cartel operation, and any claim that we are coordinating with anyone on anything other than this targeted effort is completely false,” a State Department spokesperson told the NYT.

Not How the Chain of Command Is Supposed to Work

White House deputy chief Stephen Miller has taken a leading role in the directing the unlawful U.S. attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats off Venezuela, The Guardian reports.

The strikes have been orchestrated through the White House homeland security council. which Miller leads, according to the report.

Are Military Lawyers Being Sidelined?

Former Army JAG Dan Maurer, now a law professor, writes that the unprecedented U.S. attacks on alleged drug-running boats “raise serious questions about the availability and effectiveness of government lawyers throughout the chain of command who would have—or should have—raised red flags before this operation commenced.”

Trump Sending National Guard to Illinois Over Objections

A small contingent of 100 National Guard troops has been called up in Illinois by the federal government over the objections of Gov. JB Pritzker (D).

How Fox News Used Old Portland Footage to Snooker Trump

The proximate catalyst for President Trump’s announcement that he was deploying National Guard troops to Portland appears to have been Fox News segments the day before that used B-roll footage of civil unrest there in the summer of 2020.

Good Read

TPM’s Josh Kovensky: DHS Had a Program to Stop Political Violence. Trump Largely Abandoned It.

DOJ Purge Totals Start To Add Up

At least a third of senior career leaders have left the Justice Department since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, at least 107 out of roughly 320 career leadership positions, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis.

Trump DOJ Ratchets Up Project To Snag State Voter Rolls

TPM’s Khaya Himmelman takes a closer look at the Trump DOJ’s lawsuit against eight states seeking to force them to cough up their voter rolls.

Trump’s Attack on Higher Ed: Still Gunning for Harvard

It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on the Trump attacks on higher education. I regret to inform you that the performative assaults, structural dismantling, and anticipatory obedience continue apace:

• Harvard: The Department of Health and Human Services has informed Harvard University that it has initiated the process of “debarring” the school from receiving federal grants over the trumped up claims that it abetted anti-semitism on campus. “Debarment is the government’s formal way of blacklisting contractors,” the NYT notes.
• “The White House is developing a plan that could change how universities are awarded research grants, giving a competitive advantage to schools that pledge to adhere to the values and policies of the Trump administration on admissions, hiring and other matters,” the WaPo reports.
• Texas Tech: Faculty were informed Friday that they “must comply” with President Trump’s executive order recognizing only male and female genders

Painful to Read

WaPo: Children died while waiting for life-saving drugs due to Trump’s suspension of USAID foreign aid.

Trump Moves to Further Defang Inspectors General

Last week a federal judge in D.C. declined to reinstate the eight inspector generals fired by President Trump earlier this year even though she agreed the terminations were unlawful.

This week comes word that the Trump OMB is cutting off funding as of tomorrow for the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, the umbrella organization for the government’s 72 inspectors general.

Judge Rips Into Kari Lake

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth temporarily blocked the layoffs of more than 500 employees of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, most of them from Voice of America, while warning that the Trump administration’s defiance of his orders could have been sanctionable.

Lamberth ultimately declined to pursue contempt against officials, but he ripped Kari Lake, a senior official at USAGM, writing that “her brazen disinterest in the unambiguous statutory obligations implicates her competence to implement the President’s directives in a manner consistent with fundamental tenets of administrative law.”

YouTube Kisses Trump’s Ring

YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle Donald Trump lawsuit against it for suspending his account after the 2021 coup attempt that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack.

Trump’s $22 million share of the settlement will go to the nonprofit Trust for the National Mall for the construction of a Mar-a-Lago-style ballroom at the White House, the WSJ reports.

Better or Worse Than You Expected?

As a thought experiment, Jonathan V. Last compares how bad he was expecting things to get back in November with how bad things have actually gotten in the first eight months of the Trump II presidency. His conclusion: We are in the worst-case scenario.

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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Removing the Few Remaining Guardrails

While the Trump DOJ has been hijacked to target Donald Trump’s perceived foes with criminal investigation and prosecution, it continues to undergo a slow-motion purge of career professionals that is flying a little bit under the radar.

The purge of career people — in many cases in violation of laws and procedures meant to protect them from untoward political influence — is important in its own right. But it also contributes to the larger scheme of removing roadblocks and guardrails that might prevent or slow down even more radical abuses of office by Trump and the political appointees at the Justice Department.

Among the latest purge developments we’ve learned over the past few days:

• DC: A group of agents photographed kneeling with protestors in D.C. during the June 2020 Black Lives Matter protests over the police killing of George Floyd have been fired en masse. It’s not clear how many agent were fired, but it could be as many as 20. Some of them had already been reassigned earlier this year in what amounted to demotions.
• Miami: Attorney General Pam Bondi summarily fired an up-and-coming assistant U.S. attorney in Miami reportedly over blog posts critical of President Trump written during his first term, before the AUSA joined the Justice Department. Will Rosenzweig was fired via email from Bondi while he was observing Rosh Hashanah; he didn’t notice anything was amiss until the next day when his office-issued mobile phone wasn’t working.
• Sacramento: The acting U.S. attorney in Sacramento says she was fired by President Trump shortly after warning Border Patrol honcho Gregory Bovino that a court order prevented him from arresting people without probable cause in the Eastern District of California. Michele Beckwith was fired July 15 less than six hours after her warning to Bovino, according to documents reviewed by the NYT.

Trump’s Fave Border Patrol Guy Admits to Racial Profiling

Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander who is now running the Trump administration’s mass deportation operation in Chicago, admitted during an interview to detaining people on the basis of how they look, the Sun-Times reports:

“You know, there’s many different factors that go into something like that,” Bovino said. “It would be agent experience, intelligence that indicates there’s illegal aliens in a particular place or location.

“Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?” he said to the reporter, a tall, middle-aged man of Anglo descent.

You’ll recall that Justice Brett Kavanaugh in one of the Supreme Court’s recent emergency docket rulings earlier this month condoned using apparent ethnicity and race as a factor in deciding which people to stop.

Quote of the Day

“I spoke to the governor, she was very nice. But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place … it looks like terrible.”–a befuddled President Trump, feebly trying to square the difference between the real world reports from Orgeon’s governor on a peaceful Portland and the propaganda he’d been fed before announcing a plan to send troops to the city he described as “War ravaged”

Picking Through The Comey Indictment

A few new tidbits:

• WSJ: “Tensions over the case came to a head … after some administration officials, including Ed Martin, a Justice Department official pursuing cases of interest to Trump, privately told the president that the Justice Department was slow-walking cases against Trump critics, people familiar with the discussions said.”
• Acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, with no prior experience as a prosecutor, stumbled through securing the Comey indictment, the NYT reports: “At one point, she entered the wrong courtroom. When she found the right one, she stood on the wrong side of the judge, then appeared confused about the paperwork she just had signed.”
• Politico: “[T]he case against the former FBI director and longtime Trump nemesis may quickly end in disappointment — and even humiliation — for the prosecutor who was conscripted by the president to bring the charges.”

New Trump Targets Alert

With President Trump making threats to broaden the abuse of the Justice Department to target his political enemies with criminal investigation and prosecutions, two new targets stand out:

• President Trump has turned his ire on former FBI Director Christopher Wray, his own appointee to the post who resigned immediately before Trump took office for a second term. In a Sunday phone call with NBC News, Trump sicced the Justice Department on Wray: “I would imagine. I would certainly imagine. I would think they are doing that,” Trump said when he was asked whether DOJ should investigate him. Trump connected his complaint about Wray to a bogus conspiracy theory that the FBI instigated Trump supporters to attack the capitol on Jan. 6.
• In a social media post over the weekend, President Trump threatened the private sector job of former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, who is now a top executive at Microsoft. The president said Microsoft “should immediately terminate” her employment. Monaco oversaw the two criminal investigations of Trump while she wa No. 2 at DOJ during the Biden administration. She has already been a named target of a Trump executive order stripping security clearances from people he perceived as enemies.

The Never Ending Jan. 6 Revisionism: False Flag Edition

In a weekend social media post, President Trump embraced and reiterated the bogus claim that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was fomented by the FBI.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) apparently got the memo and spewed the baseless conspiracy theory Sunday on national TV:

MIKE JOHNSON: We have to ensure that the rule of law applies to everyoneTAPPER: Does the rule of law apply to people who stormed the Capitol on January 6?JOHNSON: Apparently there were 274 FBI agents in the crowdTAPPER: They were sent there to do crowd control. It wasn't a false flag operation

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-09-28T13:20:12.467Z

Johnson’s comment comes as he has created a revisionist Jan. 6 committee to rewrite the history of the attack, saying in the same TV interview that it’s “a committee investigating the previous committee.”

SCOTUS Hands Trump Huge Win on Lawless Rescission

In a stunning win for President Trump, the Supreme Court on Friday used its emergency docket to clear the way for him to continue to withhold billions of dollars in foreign aid despite congressional authorization of the monies. The decision implicitly ratified the president’s use of a pocket rescission, the refusal to spend the money before it expires tomorrow at the end of the fiscal year.

In the second fiery-for-her dissent of the week, Justice Elena Kagan noted that the court’s decision meant the foreign aid monies will now never reach the intended recipients and castigated the administration’s position that it would suffer irreparable harm by … following the law:

[T]hat is just the price of living under a Constitution that gives Congress the power to make spending decisions through the enactment of appropriations laws. If those laws require obligation of the money, and if Congress has not by rescission or other action relieved the Executive of that duty, then the Executive must comply. It cannot be heard to complain, as it does here, that the laws clash with the President’s differing view of “American values” and “American interests.” That inconsistency, in other words, is not a cognizable harm, to be weighed in the equitable balance. It is merely a frustration any President must bear.

Against Hopium and Doomerism

Thomas Zimmer:

Binary categories of “Winning/losing” – or “weak/strong” – are just not very helpful right now. They tend to reproduce mood swings more than they help generate plausible analysis. Every Trumpian embarrassment (remember the “Liberation Day” tariff debacle?) is destined to cause a new round of “Trump is weak, he is losing” pieces; every authoritarian escalation is accompanied by a chorus of “Democracy is dead, Trump won” post-mortems. My point is not merely to say that the truth lies “in the middle” (it might be far closer to one end of the spectrum than to the other) – but to remind us all that we must consider the bigger picture and how the many different actions and reactions are connected.

New Banned Words

The Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy has added “climate change,” “green” and “decarbonization” to its “list of words to avoid,” according to a Friday email obtained by Politico.

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