The Trump administration’s unrelenting anti-trans crusade has many familiar Trump II elements: performative cruelty; using the powers of the state to bully a vulnerable, marginalized, disfavored group; and outrageous misconduct in pursuit of poisonous policy objectives.

TPM Editor-at-Large David Kurtz was joined by Chris Geidner, publisher of the Law Dork newsletter and the leading American journalist covering these issues, to talk about this sweeping assault on transgender Americans.

Check out the full video below.

The U.S. and Iran have drifted back into active combat and President Trump is on Truth Social promising again to rain destruction down on the country and now more explicitly promising the outcome which triggered this conflict in the first place: the idea that Trump would duplicate in Iran what he has, kind of amazingly, pulled off so far in Venezuela. It’s a good moment to remember what’s going on here — what we’re doing here, big picture.

This war has been going on for almost four months. But most of that time has been under one or another kind of ceasefire, albeit often honored in the breach. A friend recently compared it to the so-called “Phoney War”, the eight-month period in 1939 and 1940 when Germany, France and Britain were nominally at war, though full-scale combat didn’t begin until the invasion of France in May 1940.

I want to share a few more thoughts about yesterday’s news out of the defunct Broadview Six case, specifically the all-but-unprecedented release of the transcript of the grand jury sessions from which the indictments came. This was always a case of wild over-charging at a minimum. And that raised the question of just how prosecutors managed to get the case through a grand jury, even with how low a bar that usually is. Well, now we know. They cheated. They wouldn’t take no for an answer.

As David Kurtz notes here, this case seemed fuzzier than most of the other Trump retribution prosecutions. While the indictments singled out a Democratic candidate and lawmaker and those closely associated with them, none of those were high-profile Trump “enemies” like Tish James or James Comey. The prosecutor who initially led the case showed no signs of being especially Trumpy. Defense attorneys tried from the beginning to pry free evidence of White House and/or DOJ interference or direction in bringing the case. But prosecutors said they looked and there was no communication about it. The judge accepted that statement at face value.

It was almost certainly false.