Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️

An anti-gerrymandering activist group in Missouri, People Not Politicians, is facing a barrage of threats from the state’s Republican Attorney General Catherine Hanaway. Hanaway recently launched an investigation into the group after baselessly claiming that they are gathering signatures for an anti-gerrymandering referendum from “illegal aliens.”

“Out-of-state signature collectors are reportedly employing illegal aliens in their efforts to undermine the will of the people’s elected representatives,” Hanaway wrote in a post on X, last week. “We’ve launched an investigation into Advanced Micro Targeting. Advanced Micro Targeting is the signature collector for People Not Politicians, a dark money group seeking to hijack Missouri’s constitutional order.”

The state AG has also not provided any evidence to back up her allegations. 

Days later, in a separate post, Hanaway announced that the “matter” had been referred to ICE. 

In an interview with TPM, executive director of People Not Politicians, Richard Von Glahn, called the allegations against the group “preposterous.”

“The truth of it isn’t what matters,” he said. “It’s part of a pattern that we’ve seen increasingly over the years where MAGA-aligned elected officials governed by press release and by tweet, don’t actually try to get to the truth of anything that matters.”

“When it comes out that the Attorney General is completely wrong and hasn’t done anything about this, it doesn’t matter, she will have succeeded in her intent, which is to sort of confuse and manipulate.”

As it stands now, the group, Von Glahn noted to TPM, has not been contacted by ICE. 

He emphasized, however, that given the recent “vigilantism” we have seen from ICE, the mere threat from Hanaway to get ICE involved creates an atmosphere of intimidation, which, in this case, may have been Hanaway’s intent all along. 

— Khaya Himmelman

Muriel Bows Out 

Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced that she won’t run for reelection Tuesday, a decision buzzed about since the summer when she missed her self-imposed deadline to announce her intentions. 

Acknowledging that she might be known as a “crisis management mayor” in an interview with the Washington Post before her public announcement, the end of her tenure was pockmarked by attacks from the Trump administration, including DOGE layoffs that struck to the core of the district’s federal workforce and a months-long incursion by the National Guard. 

The writing may have been on the wall in the way she dealt with President Trump’s intense — though classically ephemeral — passion for interfering with the district. With both personal animus for one of the most liberal cities in the United States and unusual power over it, Trump took sporadic interest in D.C.’s internecine affairs, from the renaming of the Washington Commanders to the RFK stadium deal to “beautifying” public spaces. 

Bowser, to some fierce and loud criticism, chose negotiated amenability, willingly ripping up Black Lives Matter plaza and applauding the assistance from federal law enforcement that triggered protests throughout the city. 

She pointed to D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying about an antagonized Trump going after the city’s home rule. And her approval rating, albeit sparingly polled, was back in positive terrain when tested this May.

Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of the blue state governors — Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on higher office and eager to show the base some fight. 

As Bowser exits, she pointed to one unfinished goal of her tenure: D.C. statehood. The fight for representation for the district’s 700,000 residents will be handed off to her successor.

— Kate Riga

MAGA International Faces Some Accountability

Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year sentence for his involvement in an attempt to reverse the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.

I’ve been interested in this story for years, in part because of the obvious similarities between it and the U.S.’s own recent brush with an autocoup — and, in part, because of the ways it is different. 

For one thing, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement did, planning to assassinate the president- and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly asking the military for its support. Then there’s the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, held strong and saw justice served. Our much older one was far less nimble when it came time to contend with its first less-than-peaceful transfer of power.

It is, of course, possible to overstate the similarities between Jan. 6, 2021, and Bolsonaro’s plot, which culminated on Jan. 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap — a deeply serious assault on democracy that was also kind of funny — is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clownishness surrounding Bolsonaro’s effort that at this point will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of U.S. extremists. 

That clownishness continued straight through this month: After a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was taken into custody last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor, attacking it with a soldering iron. The former president claimed that his medicine, which includes drugs to address surprise bouts of vomiting stemming from a 2018 knife wound, had caused him to become paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting his assault on the device. He claimed he was not planning to escape. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice Bolsonaro supporters targeted for assassination) found that less than convincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks at a time, including hiding out in the Hungarian embassy in Brasília, seemingly hoping his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum. 

— John Light

Republican Party Fights With Itself Over Selling Out To AI Billionaires

Someone in Trump’s coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legal practicalities of such a policy be damned. 

Other loud voices in Trump’s coalition see the effort as the tech-mogul power grab that it is. 

For months now, these two factions have been engaged in a tug of war. 

The latest chapter unfolded this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted that would crush state-level attempts at AI regulation. Among other things, it “would direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which published one early report on the draft. An autopsy of the rumors by the Verge cast the draft as the work of — and a massive power grab by — the South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special advisor for AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering sticking a preemption of state AI laws in the National Defense Authorization Act. 

Trump’s populist constituency freaked out (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, MAGA legal bombthrower Mike Davis and Steve Bannon unloaded on the efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “This is not capitalism. This is corporatism and crony capitalism.”

The rift emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, then, virtually unanimously, disowned it, with Republicans joining Democrats to strip it out. 

The draft executive order is now, reportedly, on hold. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry, Curtis Yarvin-pilled tech backers and his right-wing, nationalist, intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured. 

— John Light