Josh Marshall

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Josh Marshall is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TPM.

Returning to Big Pile of Money and the Battle Against Trump Lawfare

Ten days ago I wrote about the need for a big pile of money and good lawyering that would not only defend Trump’s self-proclaimed “enemies list” from civil and criminal legal harassment but affirmatively take the fight to Trump and MAGA’s legal corruption and abuses of power. Today I want to return to that topic. There’s good news and bad news, or good news and suboptimal news. Your mileage may vary.

Let’s start with the good news. There actually are some groups mobilizing to do this kind of defense. I’m not going to get into particulars or names of the groups for reasons I’ll explain in a moment — but groups or consortia that are organizing to be the place that Trump targets can go when they get their subpoena or their lawsuit or whatever other form the harassment or abuse it takes. And it’s not just Trump. It’s a more general effort to defend civil society. So perhaps it’s the immigrants rights group which is targeted by a state attorney general. Or it’s the independent press outlet being targeting by the federal or a state government or your run-of-the-mill billionaire. This is happening and it involves a lot of pre-existing groups coordinating their efforts to this end, but also umbrella operations getting commitments for pro-bono work from law firms and much else.

But there’s a catch. For very real reasons these groups don’t want to draw a lot of attention to themselves. They don’t want themselves to become the targets of harassment and lawfare when they’re trying to defend others from it. If they themselves get run out of business who’s going to be around to help everyone else? So I can’t give websites for these operations that you’d want to look up if you’re a target or show you how to contribute money. They’re not set up that way and they don’t want the attention.

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Entertainment

Here’s some Christmas Eve entertainment for you. By perhaps making Mike Johnson unelected as speaker (not a done deal but a real possibility), last week’s Trump/Elon drama may leave Republicans Jan. 6ing themselves this year this time. Ironic! This Roll Call article gets into the details. But the gist is that if they can’t elect Mike Johnson (or someone else) between January 3rd and 6th, they can’t properly constitute themselves to officially receive the electoral votes. There won’t be a properly constituted or sworn-in House, at least not in the way it’s been done for the couple centuries-plus. The Roll Call article makes clear there are probably workarounds, maybe, largely because the constitution leaves it to the House to make up its own rules. So the House can probably, maybe(?), make up a new rule to resolve the problem. But it won’t be pretty.

Springtime for Billionaires

As of Friday evening it appears that the Trump/Musk GOP has managed to put out, or at least move to “controlled” status, the wildfire they lit for no particular reason earlier in the week. We will soon see that this three or four day drama is a microcosm for most of what is going to unfold over the next two and likely four years: an always chaotic and often destructive jostling between different versions of far-right state transformation. Here on the one hand is Trump’s autarkic and transactional MAGA, seeking to channel power, adulation and beak-wetting all toward the person of Donald Trump. There you have Elon Musk with his more chaotic and futurist/Randian version of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” culture. What unites them is their personalist character, something Donald Trump and his politics brought to the national dance. We shouldn’t doll either of these variants up too much as ideologies. They’re just different versions of post-civic democracy America from the world of billionairedom, each guy’s particular wants and needs, etc., and also with some broader constituency beyond them personally.

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State of Play on Capitol Hill Prime Badge
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I admit I’ve been saying mostly the same thing in my last few posts on events on Capitol Hill. I must think that if I keep writing it it will finally be clear. Oh well. I just noticed someone say they were surprised that almost 40 House Republicans defied not only Trump but Elon Musk as well.

I don’t think that’s what happened. Was Musk for this Trump/Johnson clean up effort that went down to defeat last night? That doesn’t seem clear at all. It’s way over-literal, over-determined. He wasn’t really for it or against it. He blew the deal up and then just moved on to something else.

Here’s the chain of events I see.

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Musk Shows Trump That He’s the New Chaos in Town

If you haven’t seen the details, the meltdown on Capitol Hill went from bad to worse this evening. Or awesome to awesomer, depending on your perspective. Let’s review. Donald Trump wanted a smooth ride to January 20th. He allowed the leaders of the congressional GOP to negotiate a government funding extension to smooth that ride. That was about to pass before Elon Musk stepped in with a tweet storm and blew up the whole thing. That sent Speaker Johnson and Trump back to the drawing board to come up with a new GOP-only plan to meet Musk’s objections. To get it through today it needed a 2/3rds vote in the House. It didn’t come close to 50%. For the next ten days or so the Senate is controlled by the Democrats. So the House isn’t even the only problem. Trump told House Republicans today they had to vote for this new plan. Then 38 House Republicans voted against. Now they’re barreling toward a government shutdown.

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Get Them While Ye Can!

If you’re thinking about joining us for our first live-audience version of the podcast on January 15th down in DC, definitely get your tickets now. We’ve got 200 seats/tickets and we’ve already sold half of them in the first 36 hours. As noted, it’s a live-audience version of the podcast followed by a Q&A and then drinks, with your first drink included in the price of admission. Join us. It’ll be fun. Tickets are $75 if you’re not a member and $50 for Prime and Prime AF members. For Inside members, the ticket is included in the price of your membership. If you’re a member you’ll already have gotten the discounted link sent directly to your inbox. Seriously, we can’t wait to see all of you.

Trump’s Trump Prime Badge
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As you’ve likely seen, things kind of went off the rails on Capitol Hill. Speaker Mike Johnson had assembled one of those big spending packages to avoid a government shutdown. Then Elon Musk went off on the bill and started a stampede for the exits among House Republicans. Then Trump turned against it too. Then JD Vance. By the end of the day, it was clear not only that the bill was dead, there was a real question about whether Johnson’s speakership will survive the vote for speaker coming up on January 3rd.

But none of those points are the critical ones. This is about Elon Musk.

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Some Thoughts on the Dylan Biopic Prime Badge
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I got the opportunity to see the new Dylan movie at an advance screening a couple nights ago. And I wanted to share a few thoughts about it. I don’t know how to write a movie review. And I don’t know enough about movies to write one anyway. These are just some of my reactions.

First, for a tl;dr: I liked it. I recommend it. Especially if you’re at all a fan of Bob Dylan.

I’m a difficult audience for this kind of film. I know every detail and anecdote from the history the movie chronicles — each meeting, plot point, verbal exchange, performance. That’s not bragging. It’s an admission. I’m way too deep into this stuff. What that means is that it’s really hard for a biopic to recreate or dramatize these events in a way that does not seem, at least for me, sentimental, cliched, overdone. Even if you don’t know all the details as an obsessive, this material has been discussed and mythologized endlessly. How can it possibly be fresh? Biopics such as these often have a stations-of-the-cross air to them, with the hero floating from one iconic moment to the next. So there’s like a Sword of Damocles of cliché and treacleiness hanging over a project like this.

But for me, Like a Complete Unknown managed to avoid this pitfall, which surprised me. The sword doesn’t come down.

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Come See Us Live On Jan. 15

Folks, we’re really excited about this. We’re hosting the first live, in-person version of The Josh Marshall Podcast Featuring Kate Riga on January 15th in Washington, DC. Tickets just went on sale. They’re $75 per person and $50 for members. If you’re a member you’ll already have gotten an email with a link to get the membership pricing. We’ll do a live version of the podcast with the audience, followed by a Q&A and then a bar with drinks for chatting and discussion afterwards. We are really looking forward to it and we really hope you can join us.

Cash bar and every ticket comes with a coupon for your first drink. Tickets are free for TPM Inside members (again, you’ll have gotten an email). If you’re a member and for some reason haven’t received an email just drop us a line at memberships at talkingpointsmemo dot com.

A Big Pile of Money and Lawyering to Defend Trump’s Legal Targets? Prime Badge
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In the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory and promised revenge tour, a number of individuals have proposed the creation of an organization or fund which would take on the job of defending the various lawsuits, prosecutions and generalized legal harassment Trump will bring to the table in the next four years. It’s a very good idea. It’s a necessary one. Over the last six weeks I’ve had a number of people reach out to me and ask who is doing this. Where should they send money to fund this effort? This includes people who are in the small-donor category and also very wealthy people who could give in larger sums. So a few days ago I started reaching out to some people in the legal world and anti-Trump world to find out what’s going on, whether any efforts are afoot and who is doing what.

What I found out is that there are at least a couple groups working toward doing something like this. But the efforts seem embryonic. Or at least I wasn’t able to find out too much. And to be clear, I wasn’t reaching out as a journalist per se. I was explicitly clear about this. I was doing so as a concerned citizen, not to report anything as a news story but as someone who wants such an entity to come into existence. The overnight news that Trump is now suing Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register over her final election poll for “election interference” makes me think that these efforts aren’t coming together soon enough or can’t come together soon enough. (If you’re not familiar with the details, Selzer is a pollster of almost legendary status and in what turned out to be her final public poll, dramatically missed not only the result of the election but the whole direction of it.) So what I’m going to write here is simply my take on why such an effort is important and what shape it should take.

Let’s start with the practicalities.

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