Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he will begin “winding down” FEMA after this year’s Hurricane season and, perhaps the more significant statement, that he will begin distributing disaster aid directly from the President’s office. In other words, disaster assistance will be the President’s personal gift, an assist for friends and those who display loyalty. It’s part of the broader pattern we can see across the horizon: Trump takes the policing and military powers of the United States and the national tax revenues (drawn disproportionately from the blue states) and uses it to make war on states he considers enemies.
Continue reading “Funding The War on Yourselves”How Some Very Bad Luck Has Made It Even Harder To Rein In Trump
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Coming Up Snake Eyes
In a deeply unfortunate roll of the dice, the only three Trump appointees on the 16-judge D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ended up being randomly selected for June’s three-judge motion panel. That means they get the first bite at the apple on various emergency motions that come to the court and a chance to shape dramatically the procedural posture of some of the most important cases against the lawlessness of the Trump administration.
Yesterday, the three judges – Gregory Katsas, Neomi Rao, and Justin Walker – issued an administrative stay blocking a major order from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in the original Alien Enemies Case. The stay came as the Trump administration faced a deadline of today to propose to Boasberg how it would provide the due process that the Alien Enemies Act detainees at CECOT had been denied when they were removed in March.
If you want to get a little deeper into the history and procedure of the appeals court move, Chris Geidner has you covered. But one point he makes that I want to highlight is the administration’s foot-dragging for almost a week since Boasberg’s ruling, and then rushing to the appeals court at the last-minute while concurrently asking Boasberg to stay his own order. It looks like a tactic designed to add as much delay as possible into the calendar.
The temporary administrative stay won’t be the last word from the three-judge panel. They still must decide whether to freeze the order while the entire appeal proceeds, but the odds aren’t good. For what it’s worth, there’s no reason to believe the selection of the three Trump appointees for this month’s motion panel was anything more than random chance.
Still Waiting …
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is still blocking Judge Boasberg’s contempt of court proceedings in the original Alien Enemies Act case. Because the appeals court entered what was supposed to be a temporary administrative stay, Boasberg has been unable to move forward since April 18, a “temporary” delay of almost two months now.
Pure Gaslighting
The Trump administration is trying to bring a swift end to the contempt of court proceeding in the Maryland case of the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, arguing that the case is moot now that he has been returned to the United States.
In a new filing yesterday, the Trump DOJ didn’t just ignore the history of the administration’s repeated brazen defiance of court orders in the case. It pretended none of that ever happened: “In the face of Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States, [plaintiffs] baselessly accuse Defendants of ‘foot-dragging and ‘intentionally disregard[ing] this Court’s and the Supreme Court’s orders,’ when just the opposite is true.”
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers are fiercely resisting the case being dismissed, urging Judge Paula Xinis to continue her inquiry into whether the administration was in contempt of court. Given her prior dismayed reactions in-court to the government’s misconduct, I would expect her to continue her inquiry if she finds a legal basis for doing so.
Trump Admin Still Drags Its Feet In Cristian Case
Still no word on the court-ordered return of Cristian from El Salvador in the other Maryland “facilitate” case. The Trump administration filed an update Friday that for the first time confirmed that Cristian remains at CECOT. But the administration has erected a fictional wall between DHS and State, with DHS (a party to the case) responding to the court that it’s up to the State Department (which is not a party) to negotiate Cristian’s return. I would anticipate the court or plaintiff counsel making moves at some point to get answers directly from State.
Trump’s Military Move: Live Coverage
TPM continues to run a liveblog with the major developments on President Trump’s military escalation in Los Angeles.
Gitmo Back In Play For Holding Migrants
The Trump administration could resume sending undocumented immigrants to Guantanamo Bay as soon as today. The planned operation, reported by Politico and the WaPo, would be dramatically larger than the short-lived effort a few months ago to use Gitmo as a detention facility for migrants.
The migrants targeted for transfer to the base in Cuba come from a range of countries that includes U.S. allies in Europe. The home countries of the foreign nationals are reportedly not being notified of the transfers to Gitmo.
First Amendment Under Siege
I keep going back to the Trump memo calling up the National Guard equating protests – even absent violence – with rebellion. It wasn’t an accident or one-off, as this threat towards any protestors of his military parade this coming weekend in DC shows:
Terry Moran Gets The Boot From ABC News
ABC News, which kicked off the spate of dubious post-election settlement agreements with Donald Trump, has sent 28-year network veteran Terry Moran packing over his social media post critical of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. Moran’s contract was reportedly set to expire Friday and will not be renewed.
Back To The Future
Here’s the key thing to note about President Trump’s decision to revert to the Confederate names of U.S. military installations: He’s re-naming the bases ostensibly in honor of people with the same names and initials as the original Confederate honorees in order to get around the law mandating the removal of Confederate symbols from the military. So it’s a squirrelly way to have all the racism without having to repeal the law.
Smithsonian Bends The Knee
In an Orwellian irony, the board of the Smithsonian Institute has bowed to political influence from President Trump and ordered a full review of its public-facing content to make sure it contains no … political influence.
Meanwhile, In The Climate Space …
The Trump EPA is poised to announce the easing of a Biden-era regulation limiting mercury emissions from power plants and the elimination entirely of the limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
Elon Musk Watch
In 2022-23, DOJ and DHS were sufficiently concerned that Elon Musk was a vector for malign foreign influence that they were actively tracking the foreign nationals coming and going to his properties, the WSJ reports.
Trump Tariffs Will Remain In Place For Now
“A federal appeals court on Tuesday granted the Trump administration’s request to keep the president’s far-reaching tariffs in effect for now but agreed to fast track its consideration of the case this summer,” the WSJ reports.
Quote Of The Day
“It is clear that the bureau’s current leadership has no intention to enforce the law in any meaningful way. While I wish you all the best, I worry for American consumers.”–Cara Petersen, the acting head of enforcement for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in a fiery farewell email after she resigned her position
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Big Fans Of State Sovereignty Except When California Does It
As I mentioned in yesterday’s edition of Where Things Stand, there is an element of campaign-promise fulfillment intertwined in the Trump administration’s aggro deployment of National Guard troops to inflame an already tense standoff between LA protesters and local law enforcement. Trump’s spent much of his political career vowing to punish his perceived enemies (in this case, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and, more generally, a state that won’t give Trump its Electoral College votes). Before he was even back in office this year, he was already formulating a plan to punish states and municipalities that dare to be led by Dems.
Continue reading “Big Fans Of State Sovereignty Except When California Does It”A Hellscape Miscellany: Finding Sweet Spots of Leverage Amidst the Chaos
We’ve discussed in a number of posts over the spring that Donald Trump’s effort to build a dictatorial, autocratic presidency is fundamentally a battle over public opinion. I’ve also noted in a series of posts that the states and their separate sovereignties are a key, defensive source of strength in the effort to defeat Trump. Since they are a source of strength, they are by definition also a target. We’re seeing both these realities play out in the chaotic situation in Los Angeles.
Let me start with a few observations about the general situation.
Continue reading “A Hellscape Miscellany: Finding Sweet Spots of Leverage Amidst the Chaos”Stephen Miller Demanded ICE Target Home Depots
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Indiscriminate Numbers Games
President Trump’s dream of mass deportations has always suffered from logistical and practical obstacles that make the entire exercise part cruelty, part performance, and part salve of his fragile ego.
It falls to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to keep all the plates spinning, a role he happily embraces, but which comes with the inherent challenge of putting the “mass” in mass deportations.
And so it was that ICE officials found themselves being berated by Miller in late May that their arrest numbers weren’t high enough and the rhetorical focus on the worst of the worst needed to shift on the ground to focus on all undocumented immigrants, the WSJ reports:
Agents didn’t need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, a longstanding practice, Miller said. Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away.
That kind of indiscriminate enforcement action has had the effect of sweeping up documented and undocumented, citizen and noncitizen, workers and criminals in a Kafkaesque crackdown that was sure to enflame tensions in immigrant and minority communities that were hardest hit.
The WSJ report on the indiscriminate and aggressive nature of the ICE sweeps is worth your time. No one anecdote captures the entire picture, but repeated over and over across the country, a pattern emerges – and the grievances associated with it.
It’s not hard to draw a straight line from reckless roundups to civil unrest to military action from Trump.
In other developments:
- In federal court in San Francisco, California sued Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth over the deployment of the National Guard over state objections.
- Some 2,000 guardsman and 500-700 marines have been deployed to Los Angeles, and the Pentagon said Monday night that another 2,000 National Guard troops were being mobilized.
- Attorney General Pam Bondi said violent Los Angeles protesters will face federal charges. At least nine have been charged so far.
What’s The End Game Here?
With unclear rules of engagement for the military and a vague, open-ended mission, it’s not clear what the path to deescalation might be – or if that’s even the plan.
As Politico reports about Trump’s troop deployment:
Trump’s stated rationale, legal scholars say, appears to be a flimsy and even contrived basis for such a rare and dramatic step. The real purpose, they worry, may be to amass more power over blue states that have resisted Trump’s deportation agenda. And the effect, whether intentional or not, may be to inflame the tension in L.A., potentially leading to a vicious cycle in which Trump calls up even more troops or broadens their mission.
The Brennan Center’s Liza Goitein cut through some of the legalese with a good thread that makes this important point: “But it would be a mistake to focus too much on which statutory power is being used here. What matters it that Trump is federalizing the Guard for the purpose of policing Americans’ protest activity. That’s dangerous for both public safety and democracy.”
For The Record
Pete Hegseth Watch
While overseeing a historic deployment of U.S. troops on American streets, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is, well, still Pete Hegseth:
- The White House is struggling to find qualified people to fill roles as senior advisers to Pete Hegseth because they either don’t want to work for him or don’t fit the bill politically, NBC News reports.
- The Pentagon inspector general looking into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Signal group chats is focused on whether the details of a military operation he shared were classified and if anyone ordered texts to be deleted, the WSJ reports.
- The Pentagon was allegedly “duped” by a DOGE staffer who falsely claimed to know of warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) that had identified DoD leakers, The Guardian reports. The DOGE staffer denies the allegation.
Anti-Immigration Cases: Rule Of Law Update
- Alien Enemies Act: U.S. District Judge David Briones of El Paso ruled on the substance that President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to target the Tren de Aragua gang was unlawful.
- CECOT detainees: The Trump administration is appealing U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s ruling last week that it violated the due process rights of Venezuelan nationals when it deported them to a prison in El Salvador without notice or hearing.
- South Sudan: The detainees originally slated to be deported to South Sudan remain at a military base in Djibouti, the Trump administration told a court yesterday, and have been given attorney contact info and will be given access to telephones.
The Corruption: DOJ Edition
The White House dismantling of the crime-fighting capabilities of the Justice Department in the white collar realm is going to end up being the defining issue of this decade, with a cascading series of consequences ranging from simply more unbridled public corruption to the dire risk of a culture of corruption developing and implanting itself in American life. (I’ll concede that there’s a good argument such a culture already exists and produced two Trump presidencies.) Here’s the latest:
- Reuters goes deep on the Trump White House’s crippling of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section: dismantling its staff, bypassing it on charging decisions, and stripping its authority to file new cases.
- The Trump DOJ will only pursue a parred down range of foreign-bribery cases, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced. This come after a Trump executive order in February essentially froze cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
IMPORTANT: Déjà Vu All Over Again
The Trump White House is pushing hard for a rare and super controversial midterm redistricting in Texas to try to redraw the congressional map and give it a few more GOP seats so that it can hold on to the House majority.
In a sign of how serious the move is, the Texas House GOP delegation held an emergency meeting on the Hill last evening, the NYT reports. There’s a natural tension in such a scheme because drawing a map more favorable to the GOP overall means narrowing the partisan margins in the districts of GOP incumbents, which makes them more vulnerable.
You’ll recall that former Rep. Tom Delay (R-TX) muscled through a hugely controversial midterm redistricting in Texas in 2003 that shaped the national political landscape for years.
RFK Jr. Watch: Anti-Vax Edition
In an extraordinary move, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced in a WSJ op-ed that he has fired all 17 members of the committee that advises the CDC on immunizations. The decision directly contradicts a promise Kennedy made to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the decisive vote during his confirmation hearings, when he said he would not alter the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the NYT reports.
The Last True Fascist
John Ganz on the recent passing of Michael Leeden:
Ledeen might appear like a mere callous political opportunist, a dirty trickster, and he was, but it seems to me he was also a secret idealist, holding on to a dream of a non- or even anti-Nazi fascismo vero, something he took very seriously as an ideological project as he strenuously rejected the “opera buffa” interpretation of Italian fascism.
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Punishing Blue Cities Was Always On The Agenda
The Trump administration’s decision to federalize the California National Guard to crack down on protesters demonstrating against ICE detentions in the city, absent a request from the state’s governor — and even despite assurances from local law enforcement that things were, for the most part, under control — is itself the convergence of two threats Trump made on the campaign trail.
Continue reading “Punishing Blue Cities Was Always On The Agenda”TPM Adds Two New Members To Our Team
TPM will have a new editor and a new reporter next week. This is very exciting for us, allowing us to expand our coverage capacity and, hopefully, reach new audiences during what is a wild moment — both for democracy and for journalism — with new stories and unprecedented events flying at us by the hour.
Continue reading “TPM Adds Two New Members To Our Team”Why Is Tom Homan Going Full Fidel?
“Border Czar” Tom Homan has been, along with Stephen Miller, the public face of Trump border enforcement and anti-immigration politics going back to President Trump’s first administration, when he was briefly acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But in recent days, in a series of increasingly belligerent and menacing interviews, he’s appeared in either faux military uniforms or, in most cases, civilian garb clearly meant to appear like military-style fatigues along with a ever-changing run of camo or olive drab baseball caps.
Continue reading “Why Is Tom Homan Going Full Fidel?”Digging Into Trump’s Attack on the State of California
National Guard troops are mobilized fairly frequently for domestic purposes, usually during natural disasters. Having them federalized isn’t that uncommon. But having them federalized over the objections of a state’s civil authorities is extremely uncommon and hasn’t happened in more than half a century. As this was unfolding over the weekend, I knew generally that this had last happened under LBJ as a part of enforcement of federal law during the Civil Rights Era. But I didn’t remember that the last time was specifically during the Selma-to-Montgomery March in March 1965. I was reminded of this this morning by a piece in NOTUS. This 2016 piece in Politico gives the specific details of how and why the federalization took place, which are interesting in themselves. A federal judge ruled that the march was protected under the First Amendment and that the state was responsible for ensuring its safety. Wallace refused to use state police power to do that, thus deliberately forcing Johnson’s hands (Johnson was pissed), figuring that he would gain politically if federal troops got into violent in encounters with anti-civil rights counter-protestors. As it happened, the larger spectacle was a key part of building momentum for the passage of the Voting Rights Act that August.
Continue reading “Digging Into Trump’s Attack on the State of California”Trump Has Long Been Itching To Use The Military On American Streets
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
What A Weekend
We come into the new week with more weekend news to process than we’ve had since February or March, so I’m going to jump right into it. I tried to condense it as much as possible, grouping like things together, in roughly descending order of importance. One note: I wrote extensively about the return of Abrego Garcia on Friday so I didn’t include it here given the volume of other news, but we’ll come back to this, especially the news that the criminal division chief in Nashville resigned over the Abrego Garcia indictment. In the meantime, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers filed a flaming retort last night to the Trump DOJ’s attempt to end the original case and sidestep the contempt of court proceeding entirely.
Civil Unrest As A Pretext For Presidential Lawlessness
We can’t talk about the protests in Los Angeles against mass deportation and President Trump itching to send in the military without a quick reminder that we all knew there was an extremely high risk that if Trump were re-elected he would provoke civil unrest in order to use it as a pretext for lawless actions he was already determined to take.
It’s too early to say whether this particular incident ends up being the defining episode of the erosion of the line between the military and domestic law enforcement. But it’s understandable why everyone has a hair trigger about Trump sending in the National Guard over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).
Two things in particular:
- The President’s memo was concerningly open-ended. It didn’t specify Los Angeles or California; it applies anywhere. It empowered the defense secretary “to employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary.” It broadly defined protests as rebellion: “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”
- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a big deal over the weekend about a detachment of 500 Marines at Twentynine Palms being ready to provide backup to the National Guard.
A former acting vice chief of the National Guard Bureau told Fox News: “This is an inappropriate use of the National Guard and is not warranted.”
National Guard Call Up: Legal Analysis And Discussion
The most astute analysis:
- Law professor Chris Mirasola, who used to work in the DoD Office of General Counsel, unpacks the presidential memo.
- The NYT’s Charlie Savage on the various legal issues implicated.
- Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck on what the presidential proclamation did and did not do and why it remains alarming.
- A helpful thread from Carrie A. Lee, a former associate professor at the US Army War College:
Quote Of The Day
“I’ll say it over and over again; you can’t build the mass deportation machine without first building the police state machine.”–Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council
‘He Eats His Hate’
ABC News suspended veteran newsman Terry Moran for a blistering tweet about White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. Here’s the tweet:
IMPORTANT
A great visualization from Amanda Shendruk and Catherine Rampell on the people Trump doesn’t want to exist:
This is part of a broader campaign to delete the statistical and visual evidence of undesirables, or at least those who may not fit into President Donald Trump’s conception of the new American “golden age.” Entire demographics are being scrubbed from records of both America’s past and present — including people of color, transgender people, women, immigrants and people with disabilities. They are now among America’s “missing persons.”
The Purges: FBI Retribution Edition
The Trump administration has forced out two senior FBI officials and punished a third for his friendship with former FBI agent Peter Strzok, the longtime Trump target.
Two Time Losers
Damian Williams, the former U.S. attorney in Manhattan, is leaving Paul Weiss, which cut a deal with President Trump, and joining Jenner & Block, which in contrast sued over Trump’s executive order against it and won.
Proud Boys Sue Over Jan. 6
Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio, Zachary Rehl, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Dominic Pezzola – all convicted in the Jan. 6 attack then given clemency by President Trump – have sued prosecutors and FBI agents in federal court in Florida over their prosecutions, demanding $100 million in punitive damages.
A Mother Lode Of Extremist Materials
An alleged series of thefts of combat equipment from an Army Ranger regiment in Washington state led to the arrest earlier this month of two veterans at a home full of Nazi and white supremacy paraphernalia and a stockpile of stolen weapons, the NYT reports.
What Happened To The ADL?
The Forward: ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt compared pro-Palestinian student protesters to ISIS and al-Qaeda in an address to Republican attorneys general.
DOGE Watch
- A 6-3 Supreme Court granted DOGE access to confidential Social Security records, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson blasting the decision in a written dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
- Over the objections of the three liberal justices, the Supreme Court cut back the scope of discovery the watchdog group CREW can seek from DOGE.
- Frank Bisignano, the new head of the Social Security Administration, declared himself to be “fundamentally a DOGE person.”
Trump’s Ban On AP Reinstated
In a widely panned decision, two Trump appointees on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals largely reinstated the Trump White House’s ban on the Associated Press in retaliation for not using “Gulf of America” in its stories.
Federal Judges Are Begging Us to Pay Attention
Adam Bonica used computational text analysis to examine judicial decisions in nearly 300 cases involving the Trump administration and found what he called an “institutional chorus of constitutional alarm“:
The sharp language from the bench isn’t judicial activism; it’s the sound of democracy’s defense mechanisms under unprecedented stress. These interventions span the political spectrum. Judges were responding not to partisan disagreement but to actions that crossed fundamental legal and constitutional lines.
The alarm is being sounded by conservative and liberal judges in a range of cases, many of which you’ll be familiar with from Morning Memo.
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