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Get in Line or ‘Pay the Price’

In a scathingly-written regulatory filing posted on the Federal Communications Commission’s website on Thursday, ABC’s lawyers tore into Trump administration FCC head Brendan Carr for “attempted censorship” and accused Carr of helping President Trump in his retribution campaign against media that criticizes him.

“The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: accommodate the Administration’s view of what news coverage should look like or pay the price,” the network’s lawyers wrote in its latest response to Carr’s efforts to conduct an early and unprecedented review of the broadcaster’s TV broadcasting licenses for eight of its stations.

As I’ve documented rather closely in Where Things Stand over the past year, Carr has emerged as one of the most successful sycophants of Trump II when it comes to carrying out Trump’s revenge on his perceived enemies — in Carr’s case, the media, the OG adversary of Trump’s political career in Trump’s eyes. Carr has threatened broadcasters relentlessly throughout his time as chair and the downstream effects have been crushing for some of late night’s top comedians, for daytime talk shows like “The View” and, now, could ultimately spell disaster for ABC’s affiliate news stations in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, San Francisco, Raleigh-Durham and Fresno.

After Trump launched a war no one asked for in Iran earlier this year, Carr began threatening to conduct early broadcast license renewals for the nation’s top broadcasters’ local TV stations. It’s an unprecedented move that Carr claims was birthed out of an FCC investigation into the Disney’s — which owns ABC — hiring practices, even though he essentially admitted in a post on X that the threat was related to how stations were covering Trump’s war in Iran.

“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions — also known as the fake news — have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr wrote in March, alongside a screenshot of a Trump Truth Social Post criticizing media coverage of his war with Iran. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

Pro-Trump groups have asked the FCC to deny license renewals for eight Disney-owned TV stations and Trump himself has called for ABC and NBC to lose their licenses because they did not air his conspiracy theory-laced speech about election fraud earlier this month.

“Across the government, regulatory and contracting carrots and sticks have been trained on other disfavored speakers,” lawyers for the network wrote. “The tools vary; the objective does not: a media industry too fearful of official reprisal to report the news freely.”

“There is no question why the Commission is singling out these eight stations,” they continued. “Each is owned by ABC, and the Administration has openly and repeatedly called for the revocation of ABC’s licenses, because it dislikes the content and viewpoints expressed on ABC network programs.”

In the new filing ABC entered into the record 140,000 comments that have been “received from the Stations’ local communities— from individual viewers to local police and firefighters, charities, businesses, and schools—and over 95% support the Stations. These supporters span the ideological spectrum but share a fundamental commitment to free speech and press freedom.” They went on to ask the FCC to dismiss the petitions from the pro-Trump groups calling the license renewal into question.

“The Commission cannot rest a renewal decision on the content of a station’s programming,” they said. “Nor may it condition renewal on whether a broadcaster gave sufficient airtime to particular viewpoints, covered particular stories, featured particular guests, adopted particular interview formats, or framed public issues in a particular manner.”

Dem Women Call for House Ethics Investigation Into Max Miller

The House Democratic Women’s Caucus has officially asked the House Ethics Committee to look into recently unearthed and sickening domestic violence allegations from Rep. Max Miller’s (R-OH) ex-wife Emily Moreno against the lawmaker. Moreno has said the Ohio Republican “scalded her chest and stomach by throwing hot water from a skillet at her body; held a gun to her head; pushed her against a wall and hit her head; and fractured their daughter’s collarbone and bruised her shoulder,” in the New York Times’ words, citing court documents. Miller has denied the allegations.

“The recent reports of domestic violence and child abuse against Representative Max Miller are deeply disturbing and Congress can’t ignore them. Allegations of violence against women and children have to be met with the utmost seriousness,” Reps. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM), Emilia Sykes (D-OH) and Hillary Scholten (D-MI) wrote in a statement.

“We therefore call on the House Committee on Ethics to swiftly and thoroughly investigate these allegations. Every woman and child deserves to live free from fear of violence, especially within the sanctity of their own home, and we will not stop fighting until that’s the reality,” they said.

Trump Would Rather Pull Blanche Nom Then Kill Slush Fund in Writing

My colleagues John Light and David Kurtz have chronicled most of the latest today in the drama surrounding acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation vote as Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) continue, for now, to resist Blanche’s nomination until a deal is reached over how to kill off Trump’s corrupt slush fund.

The latest this afternoon: Trump, in a Truth Social post threw some kindling on the situation.

“I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd’s name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office,” he said.

While the DOJ and Cornyn have reportedly been working toward some sort of agreement that would kill off provisions in Trump tax lawsuit settlement agreement that created Trump’s (now-defunct, sorta) slush fund for his political allies and gave Trump and his family sweeping tax audit immunity. The committee vote scheduled for this morning was delayed and now it is unclear how things may move forward.

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A handful of blue states are suing the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA for withholding funds, arguing its a coersion tactic to try to force states into allowing the federal government to overreach on states’ rights to administer their own elections. Khaya Himmelman unpacks all this in this week’s edition of The Franchise: Blue States Sue DHS and FEMA Over Coercive Election Changes

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By now, you may have seen the headlines about Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) dragging former Trump and Biden administration health official Dr. Anthony Fauci before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — during which he berated him for pleading the fifth and kicked Fauci’s attorney out of the hearing.

While the senator is not exactly an orthodox MAGA zealot, Paul has been fixated on Fauci — as many MAGA-aligned conspiracy theorists were back in 2020 — for years. Fauci became the target of far-right meltdowns over mask mandates, social distancing guidelines, quarantine procedures, vaccine requirements and questions about the virus’ origins — and more generally a scapegoat for any and all political angst with the nation’s response to and handling of the sweeping global catastrophe.

It’s been clear for some time that various components of the MAGA movement are out for blood when it comes to Fauci. Republican fixation with the doctor is part of why President Biden issued Fauci a preemptive pardon at the end of his term.

During his opening statement to Paul’s panel on Wednesday, Fauci outlined his intention to “invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions” due to Paul’s “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me” and Paul’s recent decision to release Fauci’s personal diary publicly.

“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something — anything — that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words — quote — ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said.

“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he continued. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

At one point during the hearing Paul had Fauci’s lawyer removed from the hearing room for trying to speak. That attorney, David Schertler, later told NBC News that all he was trying to say was that Fauci “has a valid Fifth Amendment privilege, and he has the right to assert it.” During his line of questioning, Paul also suggested that Fauci would face “repercussions” for pleading the fifth during his testimony.

“The committee will have to consider after this hearing what appropriate action should be taken against you for the failure to testify after being directed to do so,” Paul said. “It’s against the law to obstruct an investigation of Congress. There will be repercussions to your refusal to testify today.”

Paul’s obsession with Fauci may border on pathological, but dragging Fauci before his panel, now, just a few months out from the midterms, is in line with a broader phenomenon among elected Republicans: they’re rolling back the tapes to the glory days of the MAGA movement, when Trump’s fervent base of supporters had plenty of time to indulge his conspiracy theories.

In 2020, Americans had not yet been slammed by the waves of inflation the pandemic set off. There was no new, extremely unpopular war. 2020 was a time when MAGA was united amid the anger and chaos of a global pandemic, an ultimately short-lived reckoning with systemic racism, and Trump’s attempt to steal an election. It was an environment in which conspiracy theories thrived, and which elected Republicans now seem to miss.

Absent any other coherent midterms strategy — which Trump is denying Republicans by living and dying by his attachment to the SAVE Act passing before the midterms — the president, more than anyone, is returning to the past of 2020.

“Many more people died of Covid under the Biden Administration than under the Trump Administration,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Wednesday morning, lending his support to Paul’s plans for antagonizing Fauci. “‘Operation Warp Speed’ was a SPECTACULAR SUCCESS, in fact, many say, one of the most successful things ever done by an American President. I overrode Fauci on this. His ideas were CRAZY! Also, I said from the beginning that the Virus came from the Wuhan Laboratory in China. Fauci strongly disagreed, always trying to protect China.”

Of course, it’s not just COVID grievances that Trump is hellbent on resurrecting. While he is throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks in terms of disenfranchising millions and trying to unconstitutionally exert federal power over election administration before the midterms — he is primarily focused on using his administration’s investigative latitude to re-litigate the 2020 election, and his conspiracy theories that go along with it. His DOJ has sent grand jury subpoena for election records to one major county that was a hotbed for Trump’s 2020 conspiracy theories, and the FBI has raided Fulton County, Georgia. And his billed-as-major primetime speech supposedly meant to present new evidence to the public about election fraud ended up being, mostly, a rerun of all his 2020 election grievances.

Six years later with his approval rating the lowest it’s ever been, Trump appears to be yearning for a simpler era when he — and his delusions — were at the height of their influence and relevance.

Speaking of That Unpopular War

Some key findings from a new Quinnipiac University poll on President Trump and his detested war with Iran:

Thirty-four percent of voters support the U.S. military action against Iran and 60 percent oppose it, which is the lowest support of the U.S. military action against Iran and the highest opposition to it since Quinnipiac University first began asking this question in early March after the U.S. – Iran war started.

And:

Thirty-two percent of voters approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president, while 58 percent disapprove, with 10 percent not offering an opinion.

Trump’s 32 percent approval is an all-time low approval rating for him in a Quinnipiac University poll.

Odd Bedfellows

The Alex Jones conspiracy theorist community and Democrats continue to agree on some things. Similar to the Tucker Carlson following recently breaking with Trump over his war with Iran, Alex Jones has been beating this drum for a bit too.

While ominously warning his viewers that Trump is supposedly preparing to launch a national draft to put boots on the ground in his ongoing campaign against Iran, he said that Trump should be impeached. (Earlier this year Trump’s White House did not rule out the possibility of a draft, which is what, it appears(?), Jones is referring to with this.)

“The big issue is how to stop Trump. And we have to have Congress go for the war powers. They’ve tried three times to vote on war powers — they’re supposed to authorize a war. This is a war; they’re getting the draft ready. If this isn’t a war, nothing’s a war. I mean, this is absolutely out of control,” Jones said during a live broadcast on Twitter. “And so I’m calling for it right now: 25th Amendment, impeachment, whatever needs to happen to get this front and center, to get control of our country.”

More to Read From TPM Today

Emine Yücel has the details on the canceled meeting that was scheduled between Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and acing Attorney General Todd Blanche that appears destined to delay the Senate Judiciary Committee’s planned vote on Blanche’s AG nomination, set for tomorrow morning: Sen. Cornyn Cancels Meeting With Blanche as Confirmation Vote Hangs in Balance

In case you missed it last night, Khaya Himmelman writes on Jay Clayton’s confirmation as DNI and what it could mean for the office as Trump hijacks the foreign intelligence position for his election delusions: Jay Clayton Confirmed As DNI — A Position Trump Warped to Feed His Election Conspiracy Theories

John Light writes on how the SAVE Act has become “a force for chaos, with Trump’s monomaniacal fixation on it leading to a far less effective Republican trifecta than we might have predicted in the early days of his second term”: The Brief: Trump’s Fixation on the SAVE Act Has Become a Defining Force in American Politics

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Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told reporters on Tuesday that there’s a chance the confirmation vote to move Todd Blanche’s attorney general nomination out of committee may be postponed — or it may not.

Cornyn said a delay in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s scheduled vote (set, for now, for 9:00 a.m. ET Thursday) is “being discussed but hopefully … won’t be necessary,” Politico reported. That delay is being discussed because Cornyn, it appears, has not reached an agreement with the White House about how to edit the settlement agreement that created the (for now) defunct $1.8 billion slush fund.

“If there’s not enough votes to confirm him, then Senator Grassley might decide to postpone it. But I don’t think that’s the No. 1 goal right now,” Cornyn said.

If there are not enough votes to move acting AG Blanche’s nomination to serve in the position permanently it will, presumably, be because Cornyn has decided to not support his nomination — and potentially Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), too.

Both have made their distrust of Blanche over the supposed “Anti-Weaponization Fund” and the settlement agreement that shielded Trump from tax audits clear for weeks now. Tillis indicated during the confirmation hearing that he would be satisfied with Blanche weighing in on legislative language for a bill that would officially render the cartoonishly corrupt fund dead. Cornyn has remained unconvinced, demanding that changes be made to the settlement agreement in writing in order to secure his vote. But Republican senators’ “undecided” theatrics are often little more than that — and even supposedly ardent demands from Cornyn have appeared flexible, as my colleague David Kurtz noted in today’s Morning Memo:

Last week, Cornyn said he wasn’t just interested in making sure the bogus anti-weaponization fund was dead, but also nixing the tax immunity Trump received when he settled his lawsuit against the IRS. To do this, Cornyn wants the settlement documents amended because by their own terms only the parties can modify the documents. But yesterday in remarks to reporters, Cornyn’s own description of what he was after seemed more narrow than at first appeared.

It appears as though Tillis is also potentially back in the undecided camp, per ABC News:

Tillis also said he wasn’t ready to commit to voting for Blanche’s nomination, telling reporters Monday that he, too, is still waiting to see changes made to the IRS settlement.

Cornyn says he has been clear about what he wants from the DOJ, telling reporters on Tuesday that “they know what they need to do,” referencing the Justice Department.

“They just don’t want to do it.”

Ohio GOP Guv Warns Trump Against Mass Deportation of Haitians in Springfield

“This is a very, very big mistake.”

That’s Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine telling reporters that he does not think it would be a good idea for the Trump administration to carry out some mass deportation operation in Springfield, Ohio. After the Supreme Court ruled that Haitian refugees in the U.S. no longer qualify for Temporary Protected Status, the Trump administration has been signaling plans to descend on the city, which is home to tens of thousands of Haitians, and send them back.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is reportedly planning to begin arresting Haitian immigrants as soon as this week, CBS News reported.

“The Haitians who apparently are going to be kicked out of Ohio are people who are working,” DeWine told reporters Monday. “This is a very, very big mistake.”

Please Consider Supporting TPM

It is so normal to see a headline about a once-thriving newsroom having to lay off devastating portions of their staff just to survive that it’s easy to gloss over headlines like the one from the New York Times today about BuzzFeed laying off a third of its staff; some 180 employees, which includes people at HuffPost’s news site. (Of course, BuzzFeed News as we knew it in the mid-2010s has been a ghost for years nows.)

Journalism as an industry is a shell of what it once was. I did not do anything special to land a stable career, writing and editing a publication that has remained true to its values since it first launched as a blog 25 years ago. But I’m grateful that I am lucky enough to be at TPM with a loyal base of readers — the only reason my colleagues and I have been able to stick to the careers we began as young journalists, naive about the horrors ahead for both our industry and country.

We’re closing in on the last stretch of our goal of raising $500,000 for the TPM Journalism Fund this summer. This money will help us continue doing what we’re doing. If you like our work, or are a fan of the First Amendment rights that we’re striving each day to protect, please consider making a donation today. Every single dollar matters 🖤

Stunning New Texas Senate Race Poll

Per Texas Tribune:

The latest survey of the U.S. Senate race from Texas Public Opinion Research shows Democrat James Talarico leading Republican Ken Paxton, 45% to 40%, marking the Austin state representative’s largest lead in any public poll taken during the general election period.

Since Paxton locked up the GOP nomination in late May, polling of the contest has found a neck-and-neck race with neither candidate able to break 50%. But TPOR’s poll found Talarico leading among voters who do not have a college degree — a group that has consistently favored Republicans in Texas and across the country — and dominating among independents, less than a quarter of whom said they planned to vote for Paxton. The attorney general also had weaker Republican support than in other recent surveys, with nearly one in five GOP voters saying they were undecided or would vote for Talarico.

Here’s More From TPM Today

Emine Yücel has the latest on Gov. Andy Beshear’s (D) demands that Sen. Mitch McConnell make some sort of public remarks to show that he is still able to serve out the rest of his term: Kentucky Gov. Demands McConnell Give Verbal Address as Proof He Can Serve or Resign

Kate Riga is tracking the various legal challenges to Trump’s spring executive order attempting to severely restricting mail-in voting, among other things: While One Challenge to Trump’s Election Order Reaches SCOTUS, He Notches Early Win in Parallel Case

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) is not taking Trump’s SAVE Act pressure campaign too seriously, for now, John Light notes the The Brief this morning: The Brief: Majority Leader Thune Tries to Dismiss Trump’s Latest SAVE Act Demands

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‘We Have Seen Them Weaponize It’

It appears as though New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) will not comply with the Justice Department’s demands for the identities of the 6,600 noncitizens who were, through no fault of their own, placed on the voter rolls in 2023 and 2024.

The whole episode was the result of a software error. At the time, Phil Murphy (D) was New Jersey’s governor; Sherrill publicized the error last week when she announced that about 400 of those noncitizens who were mistakenly added to the voter rolls did, in fact, vote, without knowing they could not. Sherrill made it clear that her office was conducting an investigation into what happened during the previous administration, broke ties with the software company and has said that none of those 400 votes had an impact on the results of elections in her state.

As we unpacked last week, the incident has been hijacked by the Trump Justice Department as a cudgel in its legal crusade to try to force New Jersey and other states to hand over their voter roll data. Trump and his allies are also using it as a new weapon in their effort to spread the lie that noncitizens voting illegally en masse for Democrats is the only reason Democrats win elections. It’s become part of his effort to try to jam through the SAVE America Act ahead of the midterms — which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, with an added bonus of disenfranchising millions through new voter ID laws.

In a letter to Sherrill last week, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division and former Trump campaign legal advisor Harmeet Dhillon demanded the identities of those who were placed on the rolls within five business days — and indicated in public remarks that the DOJ may want to use the episode to make a big show of deporting or bringing criminal charges against the noncitizens on the rolls.

“It is not a surprise to me that the federal government, that the Trump administration, wants to weaponize this against people as opposed to focusing on making sure that we’re running free and fair elections,” Sherrill said late last week. “We are not in the practice of turning this kind of personally identifying data over to the federal government because we have seen them weaponize it.”

Her spokesperson, Sean Higgins, followed up with a statement to the New York Times saying Sherrill “will use all the legal tools available to her to protect New Jerseyans’ personal information.”

While it is unclear how or when Sherrill will formally respond to the letter, presumably rebuffing Dhillon’s demands, Dhillon has continued bashing the governor publicly, claiming she has been hypocritical in criticizing President Trump for spreading his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

“When the president came out with his Primetime speech last Thursday, I believe on the sequencing of events that has been laid out, she already knew that this revelation was forthcoming,” Dhillon told Fox News Digital Monday. “She knew it, and she still went online and called the president a liar and said he was exaggerating. Shame on you, governor.”

As I wrote last week, the whole episode is demoralizing, as it gives the Justice Department one datapoint — though an ultimately inconsequential one! — rooted in reality to point to as it tries to force states to hand over sensitive voter information that it is not entitled to. And more broadly, it gives Trump something to point to to support his delusions about the myth of noncitizen voting.

On the same day it sent the letter to Sherrill last week, the DOJ filed a notice as part of its pending lawsuit against New Jersey to try to seize voter data from the state, claiming the incident bolstered the DOJ’s case for why the court should force the state to give it the sensitive voter data.

We will continue tracking this saga both here and in TPM’s weekly newsletter on the Trump administration’s attacks on voting rights and election administration by reporter Khaya Himmelman, The Franchise.

For his part, former Democratic Gov. Murphy has denied knowing about the error, though Sherrill has emphasized that it took place under his, not her, administration.

“Prior to Tuesday, Governor Murphy had no knowledge of any software glitch at the Motor Vehicle Commission that resulted in non-citizens being inadvertently added to New Jersey’s voter rolls,” Mahen Gunaratna, a Murphy spokesperson, told Politico in a statement. “He applauds Governor Sherrill for initiating a review and looks forward to the findings.”

Amazon and Walmart Rely on Billions in Taxpayer Dollars to Meet Employees’ Basic Needs

Judd Legum is out with a new analysis on Popular Information today, dissecting data on exactly how much some of the country’s richest corporations are relying on tax payer dollars to fund health care for their employees instead of doing it themselves or paying workers a living wage. He found that American taxpayers are spending about $1.04 billion to fund Medicaid costs for 156,000 Walmart employees and about $927 million for Medicaid costs for 123,000 Amazon employees. All the while, the CEOs and top shareholders for each company are raking in millions and billions:

As taxpayers keep their workers afloat, the wealth of the two companies’ largest shareholders is increasing exponentially. The Walton family, the largest shareholders of Walmart, saw their collective wealth increase from $238 billion in 2021 to $513 billion at the end of 2025. Meanwhile, Amazon founder and current executive chairman Jeff Bezos saw his net worth increase from $187 billion to $255 billion over roughly the same time period.

More here: Taxpayers spend about $2 billion annually on Medicaid for Amazon and Walmart employees

Fetterman Changes Tune on Filibuster

In a new Washington Post op-ed today, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) — who, while he denies it, is acting a lot like how someone might act if they’re going to change political parties — said he was “wrong” about his previous support for changing filibuster rules so Dems could actually pass legislation during Biden’s term. An excerpt:

I thought ending the filibuster was necessary to deliver results for working families. I thought it was unlikely for Republicans in the minority to find common ground on legislation Democrats were proposing. I thought Democrats were not being ruthless the way Republicans were, and we needed to be on that level if we were going to relieve the anger that voters were feeling.

Upon reflection, the pursuit of those short-term wins clouded the bigger picture and lasting impact of a Senate without the filibuster — a Senate that ignored the voices of the minority and everyday people.

This is, of course, coming up again because Trump is trying to get Senate Republicans to abolish the filibuster in order to pass the only legislation he seems to care about: the SAVE America Act, which doesn’t have the votes in the Senate, even among Senate Republicans.

McConnell’s Staff Shares Another Proof-of-Life Photo

Amid swirling conspiracy theories and memes and rumors online about the actual state of the Kentucky senator’s health, his office released another photo and update on his health journey today:

More to Read From TPM Today

Kate Riga has the latest on Trump’s legal efforts to try to enforce his executive order from this spring — seeking the creation of citizenship lists and an overhaul of mail-in voting before the midterms — which has been repeatedly blocked by courts. He’s appealed to SCOTUS: Trump Asks SCOTUS to Let Him Mess with Mail-In Voting Before Midterms

Emine Yücel covers Trump’s demands this morning that Senate Republican leadership cancel the upcoming August recess in order to get the SAVE Act passed (it won’t pass without a blown up filibuster and more Senate GOP support for the voter suppression bill): Senate Poised to Once Again Collapse Into Chaos Over SAVE Act

John Light unpacks the Trump administration’s latest admission, in court, acknowledging its motivation for withholding congressionally appropriated funds from blue states is political: The Brief: Trump Admin Concedes a Blunt Truth About Russ Vought’s OMB

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‘Working Very Hard to Protect Them’

The Trump administration has been salivating for something — anything! — that could help feed President Trump’s belief in the myth that noncitizens are illegally voting en masse for Democrats. The unfortunate situation in New Jersey this week, involving a software error at the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission during Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration, sadly gives them at least one datapoint rooted in reality to point to to justify Trump’s singular fixation with the otherwise widespread conspiracy theory. And perhaps also offers a new rationale for his attempts to try to jam a voter suppression/documentary proof of citizenship bill through Congress to throw the midterms — and hope of Dems taking back power — into chaos.

His Justice Department was never not going to seize on the moment, especially as the DOJ faces loss after loss after loss in its crusade to try to force states to give their voter rolls to the federal government, supposedly for the purpose of purging noncitizens from the rolls, something that states already do themselves and an occurrence that is vanishingly rare, even in light of the news from New Jersey this week.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) announced Tuesday that her administration had found that a software glitch at the MVC had allowed 6,600 noncitizens to be added to the New Jersey voter rolls. About 400 of them have voted in at least one election since 2023. Sherrill said the people had disclosed they were noncitizens while trying to get a license or ID and were mistakenly registered to vote. The people were removed from the voter rolls, likely had no impact on overall election results in the state, and the state is cutting ties with the software company behind the error. Sherrill placed blame for the issue on her predecessor and said her administration was “working very hard to protect” the people who were placed on the rolls through no fault of their own.

Nonetheless, and of course, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, and Trump’s former personal lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon sent a letter to Sherrill on Tuesday demanding that she hand over the identities of the 6,600 noncitizens who were placed on the voter rolls within five business days. She requested the names, nationalities and residential addresses for each of them, Politico reported.

Dhillon reportedly said that she was interested in the information as part of a DOJ investigation into whether New Jersey was following federal law, but she has since hinted publicly that the DOJ might want to make a big show of deporting or bringing criminal charges against the noncitizens on the rolls.

“The consequences of voting when you’re not allowed to in a federal election can mean removal to your home country and worse — it’s a crime,” Dhillon said during a conversation with far-right influencer Benny Johnson Wednesday. “And you know people need to just stop cold in their tracks and not enable it. And shame on New Jersey for its sloppy and incompetent handling of this issue, or worse.”

Additionally, the DOJ is trying to use the incident to bolster its genuinely unbelievably disastrous campaign to seize voter records from states ahead of the midterms. The DOJ has lost every single case that has made its way through court thus far after suing 44 states and Washington, D.C. to try to obtain these records. In fact, in dismissing the lawsuits, every judge has shot down the DOJ’s legal theory, as TPM has reported. Per Politico:

Separately, the DOJ is also using the disclosure of noncitizen voters to bolster its case in court to obtain New Jersey’s unredacted voter registration files. The Trump administration is suing New Jersey, seeking access to the state’s full voter file which includes nonpublic information like the drivers license ID numbers and partial Social Security numbers of New Jersey voters.

Seems Like Thune’s the One Whose ‘Patience Is Running Out’

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) got testy when presented with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s recent remarks — that President Trump’s “patience is running out” with Senate Republicans, who both don’t have the votes to pass the SAVE Act or the interest in nuking the filibuster in order to jam through Trump’s voter suppression bill ahead of the midterms.

“Maybe she or somebody else ought to get on the phone and get the votes. Right? It’s 50 around here,” Thune said, when reporters asked him about Leavitt’s remarks.

“Instead of pointing the finger at Republicans, they might think about going after the people who are stopping it on the floor, which is the Democrats,” he continued. “And if there are Republicans they think are gettable, get on the phone.”

Obviously, Thune is one of the few roadblocks standing in the way of Trump having his delusions fulfilled by fall, but it’s not just Thune and Senate GOP leadership’s disinterest in changing filibuster rules for the sake of disenfranchisement. There are several other Senate Republicans who are not on board with the legislation, one of whom has been very vocal about the fact that it would be impossible to implement Trump’s documentary proof of citizenship and voter ID laws just months out from a major federal election.

Even Fox News Poll Finds Trump’s Approval Rating Won’t Stop Tanking

New stats from a new Fox News poll conducted between July 17-20:

Several findings in the latest Fox News Poll show voters are unhappy and want major change, which bodes well for Democrats in November: President Donald Trump’s job approval remains near a record low, more Democrats are motivated to vote, Republicans join Democrats and independents in rating the economy negatively, and 4 in 10 voters want “dramatic” or “revolutionary” change. Plus, more view the GOP as tied to elites than the Democratic Party.

More From TPM Today

Kate Riga covers the latest fallout from Callais: A panel of judges blocked Black Tennesseans’ attempt to challenge Republicans’ racial gerrymander in Tennessee where, after the Supreme Court ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act, state Republicans moved to carve up the state’s one Democratic district: Tennessee Gerrymandering Challenge Fails, Just as Supreme Court Intended

In this week’s edition of The Franchise, Khaya Himmelman digs in on election denier wins in Arizona’s Republican primaries this week and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin escalating the admin’s threats against state election officials: Election Deniers’ Grip on the Republican Party Strengthens in Arizona

“A new and ironic development in the first-of-its-kind legal challenge to President Trump’s U.S. attorney scheme gives me a chance to pull back the lens a bit to show the full scope of the corruption involved and why it matters,” David Kurtz writes in today’s Morning Memo: What’s Really Behind Trump’s Corrupt US Attorney Scheme

Yesterday’s Top Story

New Attack Launched Against Trump’s Corrupt US Attorney Scheme

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Freshly sworn-in Sen. Darline Graham Nordone (R-SC) made her loyalty to President Trump and the rest of the MAGA movement known with a simple post on X this week when she announced the SAVE America Act would be “the first bill I am cosponsoring in the Senate.”

Trump has, of course, made his monomaniacal fixation with getting the SAVE Act — a sweeping voter suppression bill — passed before the midterms known for months, often derailing his own agenda and torpedoing Republicans’ efforts to accomplish anything legislatively ahead of the midterms in the process. In the wake of Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) death earlier this month, Trump had few words for his late friend beyond bragging publicly that one of his last conversations with Graham was about the SAVE Act, as TPM has reported:

“He literally called me about the SAVE America Act,” Trump told Meet the Press, describing his last call with Graham, which came hours before his death. “Think of it: He’s traveling for many, many hours — thats a long flight, that’s a long trip. And he calls me about SAVE America Act.”

“He thought we were going to get it passed,” Trump continued. “This is a big blow to the SAVE America Act, let me tell you.”

In the hours after Graham passed, Trump made it known that he wanted Graham’s sister to serve out the rest of this term while an election is held for his replacement. She recently announced that she will run for the full six-year term as well.

In the days after she was sworn in, Graham Nordone tried to make her political independence from her brother and his policy priorities known, raising eyebrows among some of Trump’s most fervent supporters.

“I am not Lindsey. I have my own way of doing things,” she wrote on X. She also has indicated that she would be more focused on domestic issues, a shift away from her brother’s focus on foreign affairs.

But with the SAVE Act post, she blotted out any questions about her allegiance to Trump, who has said he has given her his “complete and total endorsement.”

“These reforms are common sense and need to be enacted quickly. I look forward to working closely with @POTUS to get the SAVE America Act signed into law,” she said.

In That Vein

House Republicans have reportedly attached provisions of the SAVE Act to a defense bill that’s being sent over to the Senate, despite the fact that nothing has changed in the upper chamber and the legislation does not have the votes to pass there. Here’s the latest gymnastics House Republicans pulled to try to take some sort of action on the voter suppression bill to appease Trump’s demands, per NYT:

Under a complex maneuver the G.O.P. engineered on Tuesday, if the defense bill passes, it will be merged with major pieces of the voting restriction legislation, which the House passed in February, before being sent to the Senate. The budget plan includes $10 billion that could be used for enforcing new voting requirements, which is aimed at allowing Republicans to try to include the SAVE Act in a party-line, filibuster-proof budget measure they want to push through Congress. And the stock trading bill includes an unrelated provision requiring photo identification when casting a ballot in person or by mail.

Trump Voters Losing Patience With His War

A new Politico poll run by the independent polling company Public First has found that support for Trump’s war with Iran is falling among his base of supporters, specifically due to economic reasons.

Per Politico:

Half of President Donald Trump’s MAGA base thought the Iran war was worth its economic costs in May. Now, just a little more than a third do.

That precipitous, 13-point drop in just two months, according to a new POLITICO Poll, reveals how the president’s most die-hard supporters are starting to agree with the majority of Americans who have long opposed the U.S.’ involvement in the war.

What Else to Read From TPM Today

Josh Kovensky and Emine Yücel write on Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-TX) threats to block Trump nominations over PEPFAR funding that the Trump administration has not released — only to retreat after receiving “assurances” from the White House: Cornyn Threatens to Block Trump Noms Over Unreleased PEPFAR Funds — And Quickly Relents

“Weeks after the Iran War began, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) predicted to TPM that it would become a billion-dollar-a-day “mess.” Now, with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth taking to Capitol Hill to request almost $67 billion in supplemental war funding, Morelle says his fears have been confirmed.” More from Hunter Walker’s exclusive conversation with Morelle here: A Key House Dem Breaks Down the White House’s ‘Unfathomable’ Iran War Funding Requests

Layla A. Jones gets us up to speed on Keith Sonderling, Trump’s nominee for labor secretary, ahead of the vote on his nomination this week: 5 Points on Trump’s Loyal Labor Secretary Nominee

Yesterday’s Top Story

Conceding Major Screwups, DOJ Pauses NYT Subpoenas

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Donald Trump Jr.’s Investment Firm Posts Staggering Returns of 200 Percent

French modelling scout linked to Epstein found dead

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Republicans Can’t Afford to Lose Votes

The White House is being forced to court a Republican senator who President Trump has labeled a “loser” and another whose political career Trump ended to advance acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s AG nomination to the Senate floor.

Both departing senators have used their lame duck status to mildly criticize the Trump administration over its cartoonishly corrupt creation of a $1.8 billion slush fund — which is defunct for now, per Blanche — but was forged out of a shady settlement agreement between Trump and his own Internal Revenue Service. A judge recently found that there genuine case or controversy to the lawsuit that Trump brought against a department within his own government over the leak of his tax returns, years ago.

During Blanche’s confirmation hearing last week, both Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and John Cornyn (R-TX) made a point of pressing Blanche on the so-called anti-weaponization fund and whether or not it is actually “dead,” as he has been claiming. During his round of questioning, Cornyn pushed Blanche to admit that the fund was not actually defunct because President Trump had not “not agreed in writing to delete” it, and there remains a chance that Trump or other plaintiffs in the IRS lawsuit case could bring a “breach of contract lawsuit in the future” to raise that issue.

Tillis, on the other hand, seemed satisfied with Blanche’s explanations for why the fund is dead, and asked the acting AG to help him draft the legal language for legislation that lawmakers could pass that would officially “stick a fork in this turkey of a 1776 fund.” The senator also got Blanche to commit to meeting with victims of Jeffrey Epstein — something Blanche has reportedly already done. (Trump also recently called Tillis a “loser” for saying he wanted Blanche to more forcefully denounce the Jan. 6 attacks).

Republicans cannot afford to lose votes on the Senate Judiciary Committee to advance Blanche's nomination out of committee. The White House is reportedly not taking any chances. It’s actively courting the two senators, Politico reported, and Cornyn and Tillis confirmed from Capitol Hill Monday night. Per Politico:

“Well, does he want to get confirmed or not?” was Cornyn’s response when asked whether he would be able to extract concessions from Blanche given his previous reticence to amend a controversial settlement agreement he entered into on President Donald Trump’s behalf.

…

Cornyn said Monday he is currently discussing with the Trump administration two main components of that settlement Blanche, in his capacity as deputy attorney general, brokered with the IRS: one shielding Trump and his family from IRS audits, the other launching a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” critics believe could operate as a slush fund for the president’s allies.

“Those are the issues we’re continuing to discuss with the administration to see whether we can get a modification of the settlement agreement,” said Cornyn.

And while Tillis has made it clear that he will likely be satisfied with some sort of legislative declaration that the fund is dead, Cornyn has said that such a move would be “much more problematic.”

You’ll recall that shortly after Trump ensured the end of Cornyn’s career in the Senate via political backstabbing, Cornyn predicted a “miserable” final two years for Trump in an interview with the New York Times. We’ll soon see how much of that was just talk.

Guy Who Wouldn’t Say Who Won in 2020 Moved Out of Committee

During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week, Director of National Intelligence nominee Jay Clayton repeatedly refused to directly say that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, as TPM reported. Why was the guy Trump wants to lead the foreign intelligence office being asked about a presidential election six years ago? Because during Trump II that position has been transformed into little more than an investigative arm of Trump’s 2020 election delusions.

Nevertheless, Republicans advanced his nomination out of committee today:

Navarro Still Could Not Prove Exec Privilege Claims

Blast from the past: White House trade adviser during Trump I, Peter Navarro’s conviction for defying a congressional subpoena was upheld by a federal appeals court on Tuesday. Navarro filed an appeal after serving a four-month sentence upon being convicted for contempt of Congress. The House January 6 select committee that investigated the insurrection issued a subpoena in March 2022 to turn over documents and appear for a deposition. He did not comply, claiming executive privilege.

A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a decision on Tuesday, saying Navarro still could not prove that Trump had somehow shielded him from having to comply with the subpoena.

“In short, Dr. Navarro has acknowledged that even if executive privilege had been invoked, that would not have excused his categorical failure to comply with the Select Committee’s subpoena,” D.C. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett wrote.

More to Read From TPM Today

Mike Lindell tells Khaya Himmelman that he actually is registered to vote in Minnesota, touting the state’s automatic voter registration laws that election deniers like him love to criticize. The temporary ID he sent us expired at the beginning of the year: Mike Lindell Is Not Registered to Vote in Minnesota. He Claims His Temp ID Registers Him.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) attempted to question Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about a theory TPM covered extensively at the start of the Iran war about the administration’s potential argument for backdoor congressional authorization. Hegseth dodged the question. Emine Yücel has more here: Hegseth Sidesteps Murkowski Question About Backdoor War Authorization

“The Trump administration’s Air Force One leak investigation targeting the New York Times is encountering severe turbulence already,” David Kurtz writes in today’s edition of Morning Memo: Conceding Major Screwups, DOJ Pauses NYT Subpoenas

Yesterday’s Top Story

Trump Comes to Terms With the Fact That the Entire SAVE Act Can’t Be Stuffed in Budget Bill

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Spain Edits Trump Out of Instagram Post

Ahead of the World Cup’s Round of 16, President Donald Trump literally interfered with the U.S. team’s run as he called FIFA boss Gianni Infantino and argued for a controversial red card to be reviewed. And, on Sunday, as the quadrennial tournament came to its conclusion, Trump crashed the stage during the final celebration.

After the Spanish national team defeated Argentina at MetLife stadium in New Jersey, Trump, Infantino, and the leaders of the other host nations, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum and Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, presented the winners with medals. The Spaniards then came together to lift their trophy and pose for photos, but Trump stuck around at the edge of their celebration.

At one point, Infantino seemingly tried to pull Trump away, but the president lingered on the stage. All of the other world leaders (including the King of Spain, who was also on hand for the festivities) managed to stay off to the side and let the winning team have their moment. But, of course, that’s not Trump’s way.

This whole scene — which I broke down in visual detail on TikTok and YouTube — wasn’t even the first time Trump crashed a soccer champion’s party. Almost exactly one year ago, after West London’s Chelsea won the Club World Cup at the same venue, Trump opted for a similar photo bomb.

The Spanish dealt with Trump’s participation in their big win by editing him out of their Instagram post showcasing the ceremony. Meanwhile, on the Trump campaign’s Instagram page on, they operated in another reality and posted shots of the celebration that featured the president along with captions giving him credit for the whole tournament.

“AMERICA HOSTED AN INCREDIBLE WORLD CUP THANKS TO PRESIDENT @realdonaldtrump!” one post on the “Team Trump” page declared.

On the field, particularly after Argentina’s loss, many will debate whether or not that country’s star, Leo Messi, is truly the greatest of all time. However, after Sunday, there can be no question about who is the GOAT when it comes to stealing the spotlight and making everything about him.

— Hunter Walker

Of Course These Are the Guys Behind the Trump Gas Stations

A few weeks back, we covered the White House’s social media posts announcing the opening — or rebranding — of a dozen-plus gas stations across Philadelphia that are selling gas a little bit below market rate on Trump’s behalf — aka to make it seem like President Trump is doing anything to lower gas prices. Or something.

The Freedom Fuel Network of gas stations and convenience stores is selling gas for $3.47 per gallon in honor of Trump. The White House maintains that Trump does not have any personal ties to the company. “The Administration is not involved in the company, nor has the Administration given the company any funding. There is no other entity or person subsidizing the lower gasoline costs,” the White House said in a statement.

But new reporting from the Associated Press and the American Prospect this week shows that Trump has $25 million worth of stock in Blue Owl Capital, an investment firm that reportedly owns about a third of the Freedom Fuel locations.

The real kicker is the biographies of the guys running this operation. Per the AP:

Untangling exactly who is behind the Philadelphia-area venture has proven difficult. Records indicate the chain, which was launched last month, is run by a disparate collection of businessmen that includes an NFL kicking coach, a GOP fundraiser and a New Jersey entrepreneur who this year was ordered, along with his brother, to pay civil damages for unlawfully taking more than 200,000 gallons of fuel.

More from the American Prospect here: The Kleptocrat Nesting Dolls Behind Trump’s Potemkin Gas Stations

— Nicole LaFond

Trump DOJ Wants Phone Records of NYT Journos and Their Families

The Trump Justice Department sent subpoenas to third-party phone companies trying to access the phone and text message records of several journalists and their family members, including the mother of one reporter and the spouses of two of the reporters, the New York Times reported Monday. It’s all related to the DOJ’s effort to find out who the Times’ sources were in the newspaper’s coverage of the security concerns surrounding President Trump’s new Air Force One plane gifted by Qatar. The DOJ issued subpoenas earlier this month to try to compel Times reporters to testify before a federal grand jury about their sources.

An excerpt from the Times, reporting on the publication’s lawyers’ motion seeking to quash the subpoena, filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Saturday:

The Times said that two of the government’s subpoenas sought phone records dating back to Jan. 1, many months before The Times reported on the Air Force One security concerns. “That time frame strongly suggests that the department is using this investigation not to focus on any purported concerns arising from the July 8 and 9 articles, but instead to forage for information about the journalists’ source relationships more broadly,” the newspaper wrote.

The Times also raised concerns about the government’s attempt to extract the phone records of its journalists’ relatives. The news outlet said that one reporter’s mother was a mental health professional, and another reporter’s spouse was employed in a senior role at a major law firm.

— Nicole LaFond

More to Read From TPM Today

In case you missed it over the weekend, Allegra Kirkland took a closer look at the beneficiaries of President Trump’s pardon spree in the latest edition of The Weekender: Fraudsters, Politicos and Trump Pals: Ranking Trump’s Most Egregious Pardons

Emine Yücel reports on Trump’s acknowledgement today that the whole SAVE Act simply cannot be stuffed into a reconciliation bill, a reality that House Republicans have been quietly navigating as they try to make it seem like they are doing something to act on Trump’s demands that the voter suppression bill be passed ahead of the midterms: Trump Comes to Terms With the Fact That the Entire SAVE Act Can’t Be Stuffed in Budget Bill

In related reading, Charles Tiefer — the former assistant Senate legal counsel and acting general counsel of the House of Representatives — writes in TPM Cafe today about House Republicans’ attempt to twist the SAVE Act into a budget issue that could be included in a reconciliation package: The Outrageous House Republican Move to Enact Trump’s Vote Suppression Proposals By the Backdoor of Budget Reconciliation

David Kurtz writes in today’s edition of Morning Memo: “President Trump’s mass deportation operation continues to embody all of the worst elements of his second presidency: the retribution, the destruction, and the corruption, a lawless trifecta that subjugates immigrants while eroding the rights of American citizens.”

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Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) is re-arousing suspicion that he may intend to switch parties, something he’s tepidly denied he’ll do in the past.

He said at a summit Wednesday that, “If our party ever becomes — and just makes it official — the anti-Israel party, that’s when I would leave because that’s been a moral clarity for me,” adding that he has “no plans” to leave the Democratic Party.

Fetterman cited a House floor vote Wednesday on Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) amendment to eliminate $3.3 billion in currently planned military aid to Israel and block any funding directed to Israel from being included in the appropriations bill for national security and the State Department. It failed by a large margin, but over 100 Democrats — including establishment figures like Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) — voted for the measure, a clear statement of Democrats’ increasing alienation from Israel.

Earlier this month, Fetterman teamed up with Sen. David McCormick (R-PA) to form a joint fundraising committee — something that virtually never happens between politicians of opposing parties. It remains unclear which candidates the joint PACs would support.

McCormick told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson this week that “a very conservative, very strong supporter of the president,” “a very big donor for the president and a donor for me” had approached McCormick and asked if he could donate to both him and Fetterman, prompting the creation of the JFC. McCormick added that the benefactor’s name will “become public soon enough.”

Harlan Crow, the Republican billionaire known for lavishing Justice Clarence Thomas with luxury trips and free tuitions, maxxed out donations to Fetterman in June, per the Intercept.

Fetterman has broken with mainstream Democratic positions of all kinds, including through his aggressive support of Israel, support for the Iran war, approval of President Trump’s ballroom and vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security amid ongoing ICE abuses. He also became the first Senate Democrat this term to submit a blue slip on a Trump judicial nominee, waiving his right to block a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.

He has typically said that he doesn’t plan to leave the party — often adding that he’d be a “lousy” Republican, and would still vote with Democrats most of the time — but has never completely closed the door to the possibility.

Approval numbers-wise, Fetterman has entered the politically perilous terrain last occupied by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), so despised by Democrats that she left the party then did not run for reelection in 2024. In a recent Quinnipiac poll, a whopping 69 percent of Democrats disapproved of the job Fetterman was doing, making it virtually impossible for him to win the primary when he’s up for reelection in 2028. Similarly to Sinema, he polls great with Republicans who are delighted by his frequent bucking of his party. That support is unlikely to translate into electoral success, though, as Republican glee at his leftward punching would not necessarily compel them to choose him over a more orthodox Republican candidate.

— Kate Riga

Republicans Would Like Trump to Talk About More Pressing Matters in National Address

Politico has a new piece out today platforming anonymous Republican operatives and ex-administration officials who are concerned that Trump is misusing the moment with his national address this evening that will reportedly be focused on his various election fraud conspiracy theories. The sources claim that even his own officials in the White House want him to be talking about the economy ahead of the midterms, not giving a stage to his grievances. A few key quotes, per Politico:

“The people I talk to are scared shitless,” said a former Trump administration official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “It’s not scared shitless about the text of what he’s going to say, it’s, what does he add to the text?”

And:

“From the White House, they would prefer to be talking about economic conditions improving,” the former official said. “And any second of the day that’s not spent talking about that right now I’m sure frustrates many in the administration.”

— Nicole LaFond

Tillis Won’t Let House Republicans Quietly Appease Trump on SAVE Act

Republicans in the House are considering trying to stuff some provisions of the SAVE America Act into another reconciliation package in order to show Trump that they’re trying to pass his voter suppression bill, or at least elements of it, ahead of the midterms. As TPM has reported, the passage of the SAVE America Act has become Trump’s singular focus, even though the bill in its current form does not have the votes needed in the Senate, and his vote-by-mail restrictions don’t have the support needed in the House.

Retiring-Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) very loudly called out House Republicans’ scheme, shouting during a speech from the Senate floor on Thursday about how he will block any efforts to pass this legislation in the Senate.

“If I see a reconciliation bill come from the House with another failed attempt to confuse this election, I will use every device I have available to slow down the wheels of government until people cop a clue and do the math,” Tillis said.

“I have been trying to explain for nearly a year that the SAVE Act, whether it’s the SAVE Act, the SAVE America Act, the new SAVE legislation that’s being proposed in the House, SAVE goes to Hollywood, SAVE goes to Hawaii, whatever the sequels are, all of them are fundamentally flawed and impossible to implement by this election,” he continued.

Tillis has been outspoken about how it is the wrong time to try to pass the SAVE Act given how difficult it is to implement voter ID laws with so little time left before the midterms — not because he’s opposed to the sweeping disenfranchisement that would come should some provisions of the bill become law.

— Nicole LaFond

More From TPM Today

Hunter Walker has a new piece out this afternoon, taking a look at the campaign of smoke jumper Sam Forstag who is running for Rep. Ryan Zinke’s (R-MT) seat on a progressive populist platform, which some see as a test of the recent blue wave: Can the New Progressive Wave That’s Reshaping the Democratic Party Win in a Rural Red State?

Layla A. Jones tries to get Georgia Republicans to respond to new revelations that their Senate nominee, Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), has a white nationalist influencer for a son-in-law: Georgia GOP Silent Amid Revelations About Senate Nominee’s White Nationalist Son-in-Law

In this week’s edition of The Franchise, Khaya Himmelman previews what’s ahead in Trump’s speech tonight. Hint: we’re expecting a rehashing of all his favorite conspiracy theories: Get Ready for a Conspiracy Theory-Laced Speech From Trump Tonight

Morning Memo author David Kurtz reflects on acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing: What Happened Outside the Blanche Hearing Was More Important Than What Happened Inside

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There was no question heading into Wednesday’s confirmation hearing for acting Attorney General Todd Blanche that Blanche would receive little to no pushback from Republicans about the inappropriate nature of the work he has done to help transform the Department of Justice into President Trump’s personal law firm.

Only two Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee dared to question Blanche over the creation of the so-called “anti-weaponization fund” — the cartoonishly corrupt slush fund that Trump created to dole out compensation to his political supporters, which is now defunct due to outrage expressed by some Senate Republicans behind closed doors. And one of those two lawmakers suggested during his first round of questioning that the fund would have no real impact on his vote to confirm Blanche as AG.

Blanche is set to appear before the same committee again tomorrow. There is no delusion in this writer’s mind that Republicans might step up and do anything but rubber stamp Blanche’s corrupt leadership, giving him the green light to continue running the Justice Department as Trump’s political retribution machine. Even Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) indicated post-hearing that, though he was unsatisfied with Blanche’s explanation for why we should all just trust Trump when he says the slush fund is dead, he would likely still vote his nomination out of committee.

Democrats, however, did try to question Blanche on his role in eroding the longstanding firewall of independence that existed between the DOJ and the White House. His responses were cagey.

During his time to question Blanche, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) asked point-blank: “Is the Department of Justice that you’re running independent from the White House?”

“The Department of Justice, like every single department in the executive, is part of the executive,” Blanche replied.

He employed this, let’s call it … innovative rhetorical spin, before, perhaps mistakenly (?) stating that the Constitution gives President Trump specific authorities.

“I mean Article 2 of the Constitution give the power of the executive to President Trump,” he continued “We certainly operate with integrity. We certainly operate in the single mindset to serve the American people and do the right thing.”

“If confirmed, I will be a member of the Cabinet,” he continued. “And President Trump can fire me whenever he wants.”

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) got into a heated back-and-forth with Blanche about who was telling the truth about their private meeting before Padilla, fed up, asked: “So the Department of Justice should be independent or not?”

“I think — as I said earlier, the Department of Justice is under the executive branch. If confirmed, I will be a member of the president’s Cabinet,” Blanche said. “So absolutely, my obligation is to the American people and the rule of law. So that being said, I am a member of the Cabinet of the President of United States.”

It’s a creative way to sidestep engaging seriously with questions on the damage he has wrought in transforming the DOJ into a cudgel to carry out Trump’s personal revenge and delusions.

Hegseth Encourages Gender Affirming Care

President Trump banned trans service members in the military and his Department of Defense Secretary has all but banned women from serving in combat and getting promotions. But cis men need not fret! In a new video — heavy on the machoism and warrior ethos he’s injected into the department — out today, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the department will provide soldiers 30 and over with “testosterone deficiency” screenings.

“If treatment is recommended, it’s entirely your choice to receive testosterone replacement therapy,” Hegseth said.

Randy Fine Didn’t ‘Invent How We Use Language,’ Okay?

Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) had an insane response to being backed into a corner by a News Nation host. After advocating for an end to political violence, Fine was reminded that he has written social media posts accusing his political foes of being terrorists.

His response? Well, maybe I’ll stop calling people terrorists when the media stops acting like white supremacy and Christian nationalism are bad words. (I’m paraphrasing, watch for yourself below.)

What Else Should You Read From TPM Today?

MAJOR new scoop from Josh Kovensky: EXCLUSIVE: Trump DOJ’s Top ‘Antifa’ Prosecutor Marched with Crowd on Jan. 6

Khaya Himmelman covered the confirmation hearing for Trump’s pick for the Director of National Intelligence, during which Jay Clayton refused to answer questions about whether President Joe Biden won the election in 2020. Not concerning at all at a time when President Trump is trying to repurpose the foreign intelligence position into a tool for investigating his domestic election fraud delusions: DNI Nominee Clayton’s Answers on Election Integrity Are Too Cute by Half

David Kurtz writes on the weakness of Senate Republicans who appear poised to green-light Blanche’s leadership in “hijacking the criminal justice system to use it as a tool of political retribution”: What Price for the Soul of Democracy?

A deep dive from Bryce Covert on the epidemic of immigrants having no legal representation with which to navigate their immigration proceedings: ‘A Complete Devastation of Due Process’: What Really Happens Inside Immigration Court

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There is an ever-shrinking gulf between the right-wing fringe and elected Republicans in their certainty that even easily explainable events must be the work of a shadowy cabal.

Conspiracy theories have bubbled up around both the sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), 71, and the prolonged illness and absence of 84-year-old Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), about as normie a Republican that still exists in public life (until November, anyway), told reporters Tuesday that he wants to see Graham’s full autopsy “to rule out any foul play.”

“We, you know, I saw the initial diagnosis of a dissected aorta — which is terrible, I mean, obviously, that could cause his death — but given where he was and the sorts of things he was advocating for, I think we just ought to resolve all those questions by seeing what the toxicology reports show,” Cornyn said.

The usual wingnuts — Laura Loomer, Benny Jonhnson, Marc Thiessen — all have their pet conspiracy theories, ranging from assassination by Russian President Vladimir Putin (Graham had just returned from Ukraine the day he died) to Democrats trying to thwart his plan to pass the SAVE Act, President Trump’s most beloved voter suppression bill.

FBI Director Kash Patel inflamed these suspicions with his initial statement following Graham’s death, in which he wrote that: “The FBI is assisting local authorities and has made every necessary resource available.”

FBI agents were also seen at Graham’s home following his death.

McConnell’s absence, which stretched nearly a month before the public got any explanation, prompted such a flurry of speculation that prominent officials including Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (R) publicly called for an explanation.

In defense of the tin hatters, the McConnell camp’s response was just odd. Republican Senate leadership and CNN gadfly Scott Jennings all reported having had “20 minute calls” with the senator, during which they allegedly chatted with the very ill man about everything from Graham Platner to the Iran war.

McConnell’s office then put out a statement and a photo, in which he’s holding the front page of the Washington Post sports section hostage-style.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), in an interview with Real America’s Voice, said that he had “heard from some sources” that the proof of life photo was actually an “older photo.”

Johnson walked back those comments later, saying “just discount all that” in an interview on NewsNation.

This ambient distrust is a hallmark of the Trump era and a consequence of the movement both Cornyn and Johnson support. It’s what happens when the man who leads the government lies about everything from winning elections to having the perfect physique (even though he has dismissed the Graham conspiracy theories in this instance). It creates a field of distortion where roughly each half of the country is living in an entirely different reality. If reality is subjective, a concept like “trust” loses all meaning. Layer atop that the stunning advancements in artificial intelligence and bottoming out of confidence in institutions.

Trump’s worldview is a contagion, and none of us is immune.

— Kate Riga

ICE Temporarily Halts Vehicle Stops

After ICE agents killed two people in Texas and Maine in the past week alone, the Trump administration has ordered ICE officers to stop doing most types of vehicle stops as part of their immigration enforcement work, the New York Times and others reported on Tuesday. The order is reportedly temporary. In both of the recent events, the people were shot when agents tried to stop their vehicles, the Department of Homeland Security has said.

It’s unclear how long this freeze on vehicle stops will last. Trump is eager to deliver on his mass deportation promises ahead of the midterms, despite how unpopular his immigration actions have been among Americans for months and months now. But the move was made after Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) put out a statement calling on DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to “cease all non-urgent vehicle stops” after the killing in her state.

The killings by ICE officers this past week are hardly the first of Trump’s second term, as he uses his mass deportation agenda to flood blue cities and states, and even many red parts of the country, with ICE agents who have terrorized communities — all under the guise of removing dangerous and violent criminals from the country.

Per the Times:

At least 22 people have been fired on by agents involved in Mr. Trump’s deportation crackdown since he took office for his second term in January 2025. Six people, including three U.S. citizens, have been killed as a result of those shootings, nearly all of which involved officers firing at people in vehicles.

Related reading from my colleague Josh Marshall: Fine-Tuning the ICE Murder Machine

— Nicole LaFond

Trump Finally Pays E. Jean Carroll

Writer E. Jean Carroll finally has the $5 million in damages that Trump was ordered to pay out years ago after a jury found that Trump was liable for sexually abusing her in the 1990s and for defaming her on social media when she came out with the allegations years later.

A transfer of $5,625,005.48 was made to Carroll’s legal team on Monday, according to multiple reports and court records. This comes after Trump fought both the jury’s decision and the payment to Carroll, including as recently as last week.

“Three years ago, a unanimous nine-person jury found President Trump liable for sexually assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll. Today, we are pleased to report that she has received the damages payment the jury awarded her as a result of that verdict,” Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, told MS NOW.

— Nicole LaFond

More to Read From TPM Today

John Light has the details on President Trump’s planned primetime address Thursday night when it appears as though he will follow through on recent reporting that the admin plans to do a document dump of their supposed findings about the 2020 election results in Fulton County: The Brief: Get Ready for Trump’s 2026 Disinformation Deluge

More from David Kurtz in Morning Memo today, looking at new signs that the Trump administration might be backing off of its stance of refusing to cooperate with state investigations into ICE killings there: The Federal Cover-up of the 3 Minnesota Shootings Finally Unravels

New in TPM Cafe: How Lindsey Graham Built the Trump Supreme Court

Yesterday’s Most Read Story

Trump Shoots Messenger for Exposing His Risky New Air Force One Fiasco

What I’m Reading

Todd Blanche Has Run Wild With DoJ. Now He Must Answer for It.

French soccer team arrives in Dallas on an ICE deportation jet

Mahmoud Khalil Accuses Trump Officials of Conspiring Against Him

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A judge has reached the same conclusion as many others about President Trump’s attempt to loot the Treasury to line the pockets of his supporters and political allies. Her findings were outlined in a scathing new decision Monday.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams — an Obama appointee in Miami — slammed Trump’s settlement agreement with the IRS, saying the lawsuit was filed for an “improper purpose” and describing the whole arrangement as a practice in self-dealing.

“After a review of the record, and the Parties’ statements, the Court declines to adopt or accept the credulous exercise of divorcing President Trump’s current job title from an understanding of what happened here,” she said.

“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” Williams wrote in her decision.

Williams found that Trump essentially tried to manipulate the court system when he sued the IRS, a federal agency of his own government, and therefore ultimately settled with himself. Williams said Trump failed to prove the baseline adverse interests necessary for a lawsuit to move forward. As part of the settlement agreement with his own IRS — which he sued over the leak of his tax returns years ago — Trump created the “anti-weaponization fund,” a cartoonishly corrupt $1.8 billion slush fund the administration initially said it would use to compensate people who felt they’d been targeted by federal law enforcement during the Biden administration. Elected Republicans and Democrats alike raised concerns about whether the fund would be used to compensate Trump’s allies and friends who may have had a role in storming the Capitol, including those who were charged for assaulting law enforcement.

The settlement agreement slush fund sparked such widespread condemnation from within the Republican Party that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declared in Senate testimony in June that the slush fund was dead. But haziness has lingered around whether Trump himself actually agreed to scrap the plan and abide by court orders temporarily blocking it — or whether the DOJ would attempt to somehow resurrect it, or find a new way to accomplish the same thing. There was so much outrage about the fund among Senate Republicans that Republican leadership was considering placing guardrails on the fund via amendments in the ICE-funding reconciliation package that they passed earlier this summer.

In her decision on Monday, Williams also referred some of the attorneys involved in the settlement agreement, including Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, for potential discipline. She wrote that a copy of her findings would be sent to bar associations in New York and Washington, D.C., “where disciplinary proceedings are currently ongoing” against Blanche and Woodward.

“Acting Attorney General Blanche’s apparent capacity to speak for both Plaintiffs and Defendants, sign a ‘settlement’ document on behalf of all Parties to this action, and then repudiate part of that agreement, demonstrates that there was only one party whose interests were being represented throughout this case,” she wrote.

It’s a less than ideal series of events for Blanche on a big week, when he is probably desperate to get lawmakers to focus on anything but the slush fund — the main Trump admin action he’s taken, thus far at least, that is giving Republicans enough pause that it could jeopardize his confirmation. Both Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) are on the Senate Judiciary Committee and on their way out the door. Both have suggested that they see Blanche’s role in the creation of the fund as a vulnerability for his nomination.

DNI Is Involved in Some Sort of White House Election Task Force Doc Dump

President Trump has been hijacking the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the purpose of feeding his 2020 election delusions for months now. Back when the FBI raided Fulton County for its 2020 election records, Trump sent then-DNI Tulsi Gabbard to the scene of the raid for unclear reasons. She ended up serving as a conduit between the agents seizing the materials and Trump, even putting him on the phone with them at one point.

MSNOW reports this morning that there is a new White House task force that will be reviewing and releasing classified intelligence and documents from federal law enforcement in coming days and weeks that will, apparently, show the fruits of their search for “irregularities” in the election system, in MSNOW’s words. Bill Pulte, whom Trump appointed as acting DNI despite having zero intelligence experience, will apparently have a role in this effort.

The apparent coming release of these documents comes as the FBI recently enlisted backup to help it comb through the records it seized from Fulton County in an attempt to drum up some sort of evidence of the supposedly rampant fraud that Trump believes is behind his loss in 2020. This new data dump is potentially part of a strategy to continue degrading Americans’ trust in their own state election administrators’ ability to run elections, per MSNOW:

Election security experts and election officials have long expected the Trump administration to release more government documents in an attempt to flood the information ecosystem with false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election — all with an eye toward sowing confusion about future elections.

Come Hang With TPM

TPM is hosting a discussion on July 29 at Crystal Lake Brooklyn centered on how independent media is faring in an era when billionaires are buying up legacy media outlets and journalists across the nation are losing their jobs. My boss, Josh Marshall, will discuss this with The Handbasket founder Marisa Kabas.

I’m also going to host some trivia with my co-editor Allegra Kirkland ahead of the discussion — so come on out, have a few drinks and show off your political genius, too.

Get your tickets here!

Some More to Read From TPM Today

John Light notes that Trump is so obsessively fixated on the SAVE America Act getting passed in a Congress it won’t pass, that some of his first remarks on the unexpected death of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Saturday were about the SAVE Act and how it’ll be even harder to pass now: The Brief: Trump Says Graham’s Final Conversation With Him Was About the SAVE Act

The kooks, the state politicians and the Trump golfing partners — Emine Yücel has all you need to know about the race to replace Graham that is taking over Republican circles across South Carolina: The Unofficial List of Republicans Who May Throw Their Hat in the Ring to Replace Lindsey Graham

Layla A. Jones has a new piece out this morning unpacking the Trump administration’s ban on privacy protections at the Census Bureau: Right-Wing Groups Just Got a Big Win on the Census

Yesterday’s Top Story

Lindsey Graham Always Needed a Daddy

What I’m Reading

Trump sends authoritarian signal by extending D.C.’s National Guard presence

Lindsey Graham and the rot of modern conservatism

The Republicans’ Congressional Mess Just Got Even Worse

This article has been corrected to more precisely describe details in the judge's ruling.

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The Christian right has been gaining traction in Washington, D.C. under President Donald Trump. And now, one Trump-aligned religious group has their sights set on the moon.

“Cross on the Moon Coalition” says they are “on a spiritual mission to send a cross to the lunar surface to consecrate the heavens and remind humanity that God is the King of the universe.”

They say they want to do this by 2030 and have created animations and images showing a robotic cross unfolding from a lunar lander. On Wednesday, I published a video showing some of these incredible Moon Cross videos and also detailing the group’s connection to Trump.

@huntersfeedThese people have a plan to put a giant cross on the moon. #space #religion #scifi #technology #moon

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(You can also check out the clip on my Instagram and YouTube pages. We would greatly appreciate if you would subscribe and follow along. There will be more TPM videos to come!)

I came across the “Cross on the Moon Coalition” when researching Freedom 250, the Trump-backed organization that redirected funding from the bipartisan group planning America’s anniversary celebrations and turned the event into a MAGA morass of corporate conflicts of interest, questionable conservative retellings of history and right-wing Christian nationalism.

The Freedom 250 website prominently features another initiative, “America Prays,” which largely seems to consist of an online platform where people can share their semi-anonymized prayers. Recent offerings have included things like; “Please pray 🙏 for my Son Dwight and I that we win our upcoming court case,” “open the eyes of the pastors of churches in the US to the importance of praying for Israel,” and “God bless President Donald J Trump, our great military and God bless America the beautiful.” “America Prays” also features an extensive list of “partners” that includes major right-wing Christian groups, individual churches, religious media companies, the “influencers” Jack Posobiec, Alex Bruesewitz, and “DC Draino,” and the “Cross on the Moon Coalition.”

Justin Park, founder of the coalition, gave an interview to the Catholic Messenger, a church-backed publication in his home state of Iowa. In it, Park talked about the group’s lunar ambitions and how it hopes to achieve this galactic goal.

“(The cross) sits on top of a lunar lander, and yeah, it’s got a little high-gain antenna on top,” Park said. “There’s also a drill … It augers into the lunar (surface) because we also don’t want to get knocked over later on … (We’ll) have a video stream of the earth, and in front of it will be Jesus Christ.”

Park says he carries a miniature moon cross lander almost everywhere he goes. According to the coalition’s website, the group hopes to make “millions” of similar models to give to “believers around the world.”

Of course, all of this will not be cheap. Park said he hopes the Moon Cross can hitch a ride on a commercial spaceflight craft. He knows that will cost well over a million dollars and, as of last month, Park told the Catholic Messenger the coalition had “raised about a quarter of a million.” But Park has a plan for how to get the rest of the cash.

“The idea is really to find a big space advocate who hasn’t found the Lord yet. Ideally, we would want to convert someone like Elon Musk. The world would just be a whole lot better if we could, evangelize Musk and then make him into an evangelist,” Park told the Messenger.

Earlier this week, I emailed Park to see how all of that is going. He told me they “are actively fund-raising and working towards evangelizing the tech community.”

“Reaching Elon and others is an ongoing process that our team works on and prays for every day,” Park wrote.

I also asked Park about the political aspect of his coalition. He told me that the group is “definitely aligned with Trump’s efforts to bring more prayer to America.”

“I have volunteered at multiple Freedom 250 events and applaud his participation in honoring our Savior Jesus Christ,” Park wrote.

Overall, the Moon Cross, America Prays, and the various religious displays at Freedom 250’s “Great American State Fair” are examples of how the Trump administration and its allies are increasingly doing away with any notion of the separation of church and state while bringing Christianity into official public events. In this MAGA era, the cross is all over DC. Will the moon be next?

— Hunter Walker

Platner Decides to Gift Us All One Final Bout of Anxiety

Graham Platner reportedly told his staff that he doesn’t plan to officially file paperwork to drop out of the Maine Senate race until Monday — the last possible day he can do it in order for state Democrats to replace him.

He published a video to social media Wednesday night announcing his decision to suspend his campaign, framing the sexual assault allegations against him as establishment sabotage of his insurgent candidacy.

“We went toe to toe with one of the most entrenched political systems in the history of the world, and we won. We beat them on June 9th in overwhelming numbers,” he said, adding: “And now, they are not going to let us have it. Not if it’s me.”

The executive director of Maine Democrats said this week that the Platner camp was trying, unsuccessfully, to influence the party’s choice of replacement. The party will hold a nominating convention to select the new candidate.

— Kate Riga

One Republican Has Questions About Kash Patel’s BMWs

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has sent a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel about some of his lavish spending of taxpayer dollars on personal perks. Specifically, Grassley reportedly has taken issue with the FBI’s purchase of BMW vehicles and his use of the official FBI plane for personal travel.

“For each trip where you used an FBI aircraft for personal travel, have you reimbursed the FBI as required by law? If yes, please provide the records,” Grassley wrote to Patel, according to MS NOW which exclusively obtained a copy of the letter.

He reportedly acknowledged in the letter that he understands that Patel has to use the FBI jet for security reasons, even for personal travel, but insisted that Congress deserves to know how he’s used the aircraft.

“Please explain why you decided to purchase BMW vehicles instead of Chevy Suburbans,” he also said.

Democrats have been trying to get Patel to answer for some of his demands for special perks while on traveling on official business — like snorkeling around the wreckage of the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor.

— Nicole LaFond

More Good Stuff to Read From TPM Today

Khaya Himmelman is out with a new edition of The Franchise, TPM’s voting rights newsletter. This week, we’re focused on the expansion of the Fulton County probe as the FBI recruits analysts to help it find something, anything to back up Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud in the the 2020 election: FBI Demands Backup As It Tries to Substantiate Trump’s 2020 Delusions

David Kurtz has the latest on E. Jean Carroll’s payout after a judge forced Trump to pay up this week: E. Jean Carroll on the Verge of Forcing $5M From Trump

Here’s a rundown of all the various Big Lie-era election deniers who are running for elections where they could actually become in charge of election administration: All The Places Election Deniers Could Be in Charge of Elections After the Midterms

Yesterday’s Top Story

A Response to Matt Yglesias About ‘Fight’ in Democratic Candidates

What I’m Reading

Texas ICE Killing Darkens: Rep Says Witnesses Pressured to Self-Deport

A New Poll Shows a Tight Fight for Platner Replacements

Security Precaution Led Trump to Use Old Air Force One in Leaving Turkey

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Buying Himself Time

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) went on Fox News on Sunday to speak to an audience of one.

During his brief remarks he waxed eloquently about his new, sophisticated plan to try to pass elements of the SAVE America Act before the midterms by stuffing portions of it into another reconciliation bill that House Republicans are somehow going to pass before the end of the term.

As my colleague Emine Yücel points out, this plan is neither novel nor sophisticated — and almost certainly will not work. The idea of stuffing portions of the SAVE America Act, the sweeping voter suppression bill that Trump is obsessed with, into a reconciliation package has been floated before; just a few months ago, in fact. The plan did not go anywhere then because it was shut down by the Senate Parliamentarian for not meeting the requirements needed for it to be included in the budget package. Far-right members of his conference have also already made it clear that passing just a few provisions of the bill set to disenfranchise millions would not satisfy them, or Trump.

But the idea that we’ve been here before or that Johnson’s grand plan is actually lackluster when it comes to satiating demands from those he needs to pass the measure matters a lot less than the time it buys Johnson, who is scrambling to make it seem like he is doing something for Trump.

He walked a similar line on Sunday when discussing what Congress can do to address the supposed damage wrought by the Supreme Court’s recent decision on birthright citizenship — another hit to Trump’s ego that Johnson is desperate to show he is smoothing over.

“If there’s some legislative fix, we’ll advance that immediately,” Johnson said during the same Sunday interview on Fox News, while simultaneously warning that beginning the process of enacting a constitutional amendment would take “a little more time.”

“We’ve got to address this. It really is a serious, serious issue.”

Johnson knows as well as the rest of us that Congress, especially not in its current form, does not have the desire or the votes necessary to begin the process of ratifying a change to the Constitution — and that’s without even approaching what such a change would require at the state level.

And while Politico is out with new reporting today on Johnson’s thought process on a potential “legislative fix” — Johnson “is exploring whether to put legislation on the House floor that would end the ability of pregnant women to enter the United States legally to gain citizenship for their children” — he also is well aware that this might also be a messaging maneuver, at best. Details, per Politico:

The possible vote, described by four people granted anonymity to share details of private conversations, would be a way for Johnson to appease hard-liners who are demanding a vote to end birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court ruled against Trump administration efforts to undermine it.

House passage of a measure to crack down the practice would be largely symbolic, as it stands no chance of overcoming the Senate filibuster. But Johnson’s most conservative members are also continuing to agitate for the chance to vote on legislation to crack down on legal immigration in the U.S., and Johnson needs a way to respond to those demands quickly.

For a Second, It Seemed Like Trump Was Doing a Socialism

The details are sparse but it appears President Trump has announced the opening (or rebranding?) of “Freedom Fuel” gas stations across the Philadelphia area, which are selling gasoline at an apparent below-market rate of $3.47 a gallon. (USA Today points out in its coverage that the national average for gasoline was $3.79 on Tuesday, citing AAA data. The cost of diesel, which affects shipping costs, was $4.77 per gallon on Wednesday.)

“The FIRST Freedom Fuel Network gas station has LANDED in Philadelphia, lowering the price at the pump to $3.47 for our 47th President,” the White House announced on Twitter Wednesday.

There are apparently 25 of these “Freedom Fuel” gas stations in New Jersey and Pennsylvania now.

Upon first reading the news, I was struck by the irony. What a move for his administration to open (what at first appear to be) government subsidized gas stations as Trump and his allies rage against the godless “communists” taking over the Democratic Party — doing spooky things like recommending a/c temperature settings to avoid a blackout during a heat wave, proposing city-run grocery stores in New York City, and using taxpayer dollars to fund popular programs like universal childcare. But it seems as though this might actually be one of Trump’s buddies or fans doing him a solid. Per CBS News:

A White House spokesperson told CBS News on Wednesday that the company behind the Freedom Fuel Network is private and owns 25 filling stations across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The spokesperson said the Trump administration is not involved with the company and is not subsidizing the gas stations, adding that the stations can offer lower prices by reducing their profit margins.

So perhaps this is all a stunt aimed at alleviating a problem Trump created when he dragged the U.S. to war with Iran, causing energy prices to spike ahead of the midterms. We’ll keep you updated as we learn more.

DOJ’s Sly Broadview Six Move

What You Should Read From TPM Today

Emine Yücel covers Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s (D) call for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to give the public an update on his health, amid wild online speculation that’s emerged in the wake of little transparency from his office: Kentucky Gov. Requests McConnell Update the Public on His Health Amid Weeks Long Hospitalization

In case you missed it last night … Josh Kovensky exclusively obtained Detroit election officials’ response to the Justice Department’s recent announcement that it intends to send election monitors to three blue cities in Michigan: READ: Detroit Responds to DOJ Sending Election Monitors to Three Blue Michigan Cities

John Light has the latest on Graham Platner, who has still not dropped out of the Maine Senate race despite mounting calls for him to do so: The Brief: State Party Wants Platner to Have ‘No Role’ in Picking Replacement

Yesterday’s Most Read Story

ICE Takes on New Role in Suppressing Online Dissent

What I’m Reading

How Local Cops Are Running With Trump’s NSPM-7 Attacks on Antifa

The Low-Key Lawyer at the Center of the Search for a Platner Replacement

Gavin Newsom wants to make seizing ballots a felony

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A ‘Government of Laws, Not of Men’

The Justice Department alumni group, Justice Connection, has sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee urging senators to reject acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s nomination to be AG ahead of his confirmation hearing next week.

The letter is signed by 1,200 former DOJ employees. Signees’ experience spans 14 administrations, both Democratic and Republican, and includes “dozens of U.S. attorneys, component heads, and other senior leaders, many of whom led major offices across the department and FBI. They also include signatories who worked in 77 U.S. Attorney’s Offices, dozens of whom worked in Blanche’s former office in the Southern District of New York,” Justice Connection said in a statement.

The letter focuses primarily on Blanche’s disastrous leadership at the Justice Department, and the part he has played in dismantling the longstanding firewall between the Justice Department and the White House that Trump has taken a sledgehammer to during his second term. They call out the nominee for his role in the “degradation of DOJ’s apolitical career workforce.”

The letter helps unpack the crucial role of civil servants at the DOJ and Blanche’s role in carrying out Trump’s retribution against them, often for politically motivated reasons. An excerpt:

Of the more than 100,000 employees at the Justice Department, 99 percent are career civil servants. Anyone who’s worked there, and through administrations of both parties, knows they are the department’s backbone. They’re the ones who keep us safe by prosecuting violent crime, investigating drug trafficking, and countering terrorism and espionage. They keep us prosperous by enforcing antitrust laws and holding financial fraudsters accountable. They protect our fundamental freedoms by upholding civil rights laws, and they keep our elected officials honest by pursuing public corruption.

Todd Blanche knows this; he served as a career DOJ prosecutor for almost a decade. But that hasn’t stopped him from demonizing career employees, undermining their work, and driving them out of the department.

Under Blanche’s leadership, approximately 16,000 employees have left, and departures aren’t slowing down. They include FBI agents and analysts in field offices across the country, and more than a quarter of the department’s attorneys.

Blanche has fired or overseen the firings of hundreds of these employees – usually without notice, and for improper, unlawful reasons. Some were terminated for having worked on cases the President didn’t like; for being relatives of the President’s foes; for adjudicating immigration cases in accordance with due process; for declining to initiate vindictive prosecutions; or for refusing to lie in court. These terminations violate the very civil service statutes designed to prevent corruption and political purges.

“The culture of fear Blanche has instilled within DOJ’s workforce must end,” the former DOJ employees concluded, before urging members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject Blanche’s nomination.

“DOJ Respect for career professionals must return. Would-be job applicants need to believe the Justice Department lives up to the virtue in its name. And instead of exhibiting fealty to the president, the Attorney General must heed John Adams’ admonition that our republic remains a ‘government of laws, not of men.’ For the sake of the institution where we once proudly served, we urge you to reject Todd Blanche’s nomination,” they wrote.

While Republicans make up the majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee — the panel that will have to vote to bring Blanche’s nomination to the Senate floor for a final vote — Blanche’s confirmation in the Senate is not guaranteed at this point. It’s not even guaranteed that his nomination will move out of committee.

That’s, in part, because two lame duck Republican who either have beef with President Trump or have made it clear they’re not always a rubber stamp for his agenda in recent months, sit on the committee: Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) (Trump recently ended his career in the Senate) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) (recently retired, sometimes takes issues with Trump’s corruption).

After meeting with Blanche last month, Cornyn posted on X saying he had a positive “interview,” but that he would not make a decision about how to vote until Blanche gave Senate Republicans a more robust briefing on his role in the creation of Trump’s comedically corrupt slush fund, which Blanche has shut down, for now. More from me last month:

Cornyn is, of course, one of 11 Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Blanche’s nomination will have to advance out of this panel with a simple majority vote before reaching the Senate floor for a full confirmation vote. If all nine Democratic members vote against Blanche’s nomination, Republicans can only afford to lose one vote on their side of things. Republicans on the panel include staunch President Trump loyalists, like Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Ted Cruz (R-TX) and John Kennedy (R-LA). But Cornyn’s nod in the direction of a potentially showing some backbone, coupled with Sen. Thom Tillis’ (R-NC) newfound retirement-era reputation as a wildcard, does raise some questions about Blanche’s ability to be confirmed.

View Article

From: Cornyn Suggests He’s Undecided on Blanche After Predicting ‘Miserable’ Final Two Years for Trump

By Nicole LaFond | 06.16.26 | 6:39 pm

Another Loss in the DOJ’s 2020 Conspiracy Theory Investigation

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the DOJ cannot have access to a list of all of the names and personal contact information for the people who served as election workers during the 2020 election in Fulton County — the county that is home to Atlanta, Georgia and many of Trump and MAGA’s delusions about the 2020 election.

The DOJ obtained a grand jury subpoena back in April in an attempt to compel the county to hand over this info for all the county employees and volunteers who helped with administering the election six years ago. A federal judge sided with the county in its legal efforts to block the subpoena. More from the Associated Press:

Fulton County asked a judge to quash the subpoena, arguing it was meant to “target, harass and punish the President’s perceived political opponents” and that it was “grossly over broad and untethered to any reasonable need.”

“Given the low need for the subpoenaed information and the highly burdensome nature of the disclosure of the same, the Subpoena is unreasonable and must be quashed,” U.S. District Judge William Ray wrote in his ruling.

The Latest on Platner

• Bangor Daily News: Troy Jackson files paperwork to explore replacing Graham Platner

• NYT: Abandoned by Allies, Platner Faces Pressure to End Senate Campaign

• TPM: Bernie Sanders Advises Platner to ‘Step Aside’ After Rape Allegation

• The TPM Show With Josh & Kate: F*ck Graham Platner

• Politico: A majority of Senate Dems say Platner should drop out. Here’s where they all stand.

More to Read From TPM Today

John Light outlines the stakes in Maine and what would need to happen if Democrat Graham Platner actually listens to the chorus of Democrats pulling their endorsements and calling for him to drop out in the wake of a sexual assault allegation: The Brief: Graham Platner’s Exit Would Set Up a Busy Few Weeks in Maine

Kate Riga covers a ruling today from a federal judge in Massachusetts who denied the Trump administration’s request to stay her ruling blocking key sections of Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballots while the Trump admin appeals. The Trump administration has filed an emergency appeal of the stay request to the 1st circuit court of appeals: Judge Denies Trump Request to Interfere with Absentee Ballots While Case Against His EO Plays Out

Christopher Mathias writes on what the far-right really means when it talks about “Remigration”: When You Hear ‘Remigration,’ Know That It Means Ethnic Cleansing

Hunter Walker has a new piece out this afternoon looking at how some mainstream Republicans waded into the waters of fringe conspiracy theory this weekend with Patriot Front’s unsettling visit to Washington, D.C.: Elon Musk And GOP House Members Weigh In On Deep White Nationalist Conspiracy Beef

Yesterday’s Most Read Story

‘I’m Mad at Trump’: Even Trumpers Can’t Stand How Shoddy the Great American State Fair Is

What I’m Reading

👀 🤔Republican Leaders Say They’ve Spoken With McConnell Since Hospitalization

Federal court strikes down Florida’s Stop WOKE Act in higher ed

Maryland plans August special session to set up 2028 redistricting

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Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr has been one of the most successful sycophants of Trump II thus far, as he increasingly finds creative ways to use his post as head of the communications commission to clamp down on free speech and punish and threaten those in the media whose coverage and commentary President Trump does not like. It’s a story TPM has been covering for months, since Carr’s first attempts to try to get comedian Jimmy Kimmel fired in September of last year.

We’ve got a new datapoint that feeds that hypothesis, courtesy of new reporting from Semafor today.

The daytime talk show “The View” reportedly turned down an offer from the office of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to have two of the Democratic socialist candidates he endorsed ahead of the Democratic primaries on the show for an interview, alongside the mayor.

Show bookers were reportedly open to having Mamdani himself on the show for a discussion, but turned down an opportunity to interview candidates Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, who both went on to win the Dem nomination in their respective races. The reason they declined to have the candidates on was related to the threats that Carr has made against the program, per Semafor:

Among other reasons, the show’s staff noted that it was proceeding cautiously with political candidate bookings while the FCC’s equal time inquiry was progressing.

Back in February, Carr announced that his agency was investigating whether “The View” violated a 1930s era FCC regulation, the “equal time” rule that requires broadcast shows to provide equal airtime to a candidate’s opponent if the program decides to have one candidate on for an interview on public airwaves. Historically, though, daytime and evening talk shows, like “The View” or “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” have been exempt from these regulations.

Ever since Carr threatened “The View” with an investigation, it has not had “a single political candidate running in a competitive midterm race,” according to Semafor. You’ll recall, Carr went after the view right after it had Texas Senate candidate James Talarico on the show for a discussion.

As TPM documented in real time, it was right after this that lawyers for CBS, which had broadcast Colbert’s show, advised the comedian and now, former, late night host against broadcasting a live interview with Talarico. So Colbert defied the network and did the interview with the Democratic candidate — who will face Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in November for Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-TX) seat — anyway, and streamed it on YouTube, raking in millions of views.

Colbert also called out the Trump administration and Trump’s efforts to crack down on dissent live during the broadcast version of the show. Colbert’s show was already canceled at this point, and he had been spending the last few months of its run hosting politicians and guests who spoke directly to Trump’s power grabs.

A spokesperson for “The View” declined to comment to Semafor further than to say that the show is a “bona fide news program” and should be exempt from the equal time rule. That’s a claim that is backed up by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Even one fellow member of the FCC, commissioner Anna Gomez, has called out chairman Carr for his various attempts to intimidate the media into capitulating to the Trump administration’s agenda.

“Let’s be clear on what this is. This is government intimidation, not a legitimate investigation. Like many other so-called ‘investigations’ before it, the FCC will announce an investigation but never carry one out, reach a conclusion, or take any meaningful action,” Gomez told Mediaite when “The View” investigation was announced.

Carr remains unmatched in his efforts to use his post to carry out Trump’s retribution for him.

Planned Parenthood Can Access Medicaid Funding Again

Republicans in Congress did not bother extending a measure included in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill that defunded Planned Parenthood this year — likely because they can’t even get on the same page about their own priorities as Trump demands they pass the SAVE America Act.

So, starting yesterday, Planned Parenthood can once again bill Medicaid for reimbursements for non-abortion procedures and services for low-income patients, like STI testing and prescribing birth control. Planned Parenthood had to shut down 30 clinics around the country after Republicans blocked its access to Medicaid in the reconciliation package last year.

Anti-abortion activists are losing it on Republican leadership for quietly letting the defunding expire, per TPM alum and Politico reporter Alice Ollstein:

Conservative lawmakers and activists are furious with GOP leadership for prioritizing other issues in the summer’s budget battles — including immigration and military spending — over keeping taxpayer dollars out of Planned Parenthood’s hands. In recent weeks, they have sent a barrage of angry letters to Capitol Hill, pressured the White House to intervene, and picketed outside the RNC headquarters in Washington.

Lockheed Martin Feels Bad

While there are a million examples of the blatant corruption running rampant within the Trump administration as political donors and corporations try to curry favor with President Trump, this one is just cartoonish. Trump announced to reporters today that Sikorsky, a subsidiary of defense contractor Lockheed Martin, is going to pay $5 million to $6 million to build a new granite helicopter landing ​pad on the White House South Lawn, as Trump complains about the mess during landings.

“They didn’t ⁠tell us how powerful these helicopters were and they felt ​a little bit guilty,” Trump said Monday.

Sexual Assault Allegation Against Platner

The account from a woman who has come forward with allegations of sexual assault against Democratic Senate candidate in Maine Graham Platner is deeply disturbing. Platner has denied the allegations.

More from Politico here and WSJ here: Platner Reassesses Maine Senate Bid, Denies Sexual-Assault Allegation

Bangor Daily New: Graham Platner postpones multiple events this week

What to Read From TPM Today

Emine Yücel reports on House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) desperation to pass the SAVE America Act as Trump’s demands and a blockade from far-right members over the legislation grind the House floor to a halt: Johnson Has a Not So New Plan For Passing GOP’s Voter Suppression Bill

David Kurtz is back at the helm of Morning Memo with a new dispatch this morning, reflecting on his two-week trip to Denmark and the positives that flow out of a nation that actually invests in its public infrastructure: It Doesn’t Have to be Like This

John Light kicks off the day with a dystopian tale of the Trump administration deleting its own Department of Energy’s guidance on energy-saving settings for AC so that it can call Zohran Mamdani a communist: Trump Admin Appears to Delete Air Conditioner Guidance Amid Right-Wing Freakout

Yesterday’s Most Read Story

‘I’m Mad at Trump’: Even Trumpers Can’t Stand How Shoddy the Great American State Fair Is

What I’m Reading

He was Trump’s boyhood friend. Now he’s pushing Trump to declare a ‘national emergency’ and seize control of the midterms

ICE’s Internal Watchdog Is Now Investigating Online Critics

Mitch McConnell’s Office Won’t Confirm If He’s Conscious

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‘Going to Do Everything I Can’

Politico has a new piece out today reporting on a quiet, but apparently universally known, concern among Republicans in Congress: that the mail-in voting restrictions that President Trump is attempting to bully everyone into passing ahead of the midterms do not even have the votes they need in the House, let alone the Senate.

I’ll get into the details of the Politico piece more in a moment, but the reporting reminded me of a coverage point that TPM was on earlier this year, just after the SAVE America Act passed the House back in February.

There have been several versions of the SAVE Act. The legislation was originally written by Republicans during the Biden administration as then-candidate Trump’s allies in Congress looked for ways to manufacture a voter fraud-related rationale to point to if Trump lost the 2024 presidential election. The Republican Party regularly invoked the myth of en masse non-citizens voting, the hysteria-inducing narrative that stuck as Trump’s allies prepped for a possible Big Lie 2.0 in the event of another Trump loss in 2024.

That, of course, did not happen. But House Republicans still passed the original version of the SAVE Act during the Biden administration to make a point. It did not go anywhere in the Senate and when Trump won the election, all the non-citizen voting delirium fell by the wayside, along with any other claims of rampant voter fraud. How could there be fraud in 2024 if Trump won?

But now that he is back in power and out for vengeance, Trump has used a lot of his time back in office re-litigating the 2020 election, including tasking several officials, across various departments, to investigate different aspects of the 2020 election. That’s why we’ve seen a raid on the election hub in Fulton County, Georgia and other federal law enforcement actions in other areas of the country that were the target of conspiracy theories in 2020. He’s also worried about the midterms and is trying to bully the Senate into passing another version of the SAVE Act that does not have the votes to pass the upper chamber — and he’s derailing his own agenda in the process.

As I mentioned, earlier this year, TPM was closely covering the aftermath of the House’s passage of the SAVE America Act and Trump’s early efforts to try to convince Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to blow up filibuster rules in order to get the legislation over the finish line.

The SAVE America Act is an updated version of the SAVE Act. It comes with all the same documentary proof of citizenship provisions as the first form of the bill and also mandates photo ID for casting a ballot. It calls for states to give their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security to be run through the department’s faulty citizenship verification system. The bill also calls for the overhaul of online registration systems for enrolling to vote by mail. (Another voter suppression bill that has been introduced in the House, the Make Elections Great Again Act, also calls for new prohibitions on universal mail-in voting, and would require people who want to vote by mail to apply in order to receive a ballot.)

All of this is to say that Trump’s demand for “NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS (EXCEPT FOR ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY, OR TRAVEL!)” is not included in the SAVE America Act that passed the House. After that legislation passed the House in February, Trump began posting on Truth Social about the need to stuff the above ban on mail-in voting, alongside two unrelated anti-trans provisions, into the SAVE America Act.

As House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) navigates the havoc that far-right members of his party are wreaking (confusingly, to try to force the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act that it sent to the upper chamber in February?), one option he’s been mulling is stuffing some of the photo ID and proof of citizenship provisions of the SAVE America Act into other unrelated bills, like the annual defense bill. He’s focusing on those aspects of the SAVE America Act specifically because he knows he does not have the votes for Trump’s mail-in voting bans. Per Politico:

Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged as much this week, appearing to concede he does not have the votes to move forward with a drastic crackdown on mailed ballots that Trump has repeatedly demanded this year.

Instead, Johnson and other House leaders have stuck with an older version of the SAVE America Act that focuses on proof-of-citizenship requirements but otherwise lets states run their elections as they see fit.

“I’m going to do everything I can with the vote tallies that we have,” he said when asked by a POLITICO reporter if a Trump-style approach to mail voting could come to the floor.

“We all do” want to follow Trump’s lead on the issue, Johnson added. “But the mail-in ballot, he’s acknowledged, is a very difficult thing to regulate at the federal level, because different states do it differently.”

This is all a long-winded way of saying, Trump is derailing his own legislative agenda to try to force the Senate to pass a piece of legislation that does not even include all of his demands. Meanwhile, his demands don’t even have the votes in the House.

Doesn’t Matter Bc SAVE America Act Is ‘Dead’

That’s according to retiring lame duck Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who has used his waning days in the Senate to sometimes mildly criticize Trump and some of his Republican colleagues. Criticism of the president by an elected Republican has been rare, to say the least, throughout Trump’s second term.

“Unless they do the work to get to the 60 votes, they know it’s dead, and so all this is theater,” Tillis told The News & Observer. “And honestly, here in North Carolina, or in virtually any state, the ability, if we go back to when we implemented voter ID in North Carolina, it took a year to get everything in place with adequate funding.”

He continued on, calling it a “joke” that anyone (aka Trump) would believe it would be possible to institute such sweeping changes before November:

“Let’s assume you only allow early voting in the month of October,” Tillis said. “Then do you honestly believe that we can have this thing up in 50 states? There’s no funding. There’s no specific implementation instructions … it’s become a joke, in my mind for somebody that’s actually implemented voter ID law, how anybody can look the American voters in the eye and suggest that it could be implemented in time without just causing a huge impact on the elections, and ironically undermine the confidence of it.”

FBI Orders Analysts to Atlanta

In a potential escalation of the administration’s investigation into the 2020 election in Fulton County that I mentioned above, the FBI is sending orders to field offices around the country seeking analysts to come to Atlanta to help evaluate records there, CBS News reported:

According to a memo sent to all field offices and reviewed by CBS News, the Directorate of Intelligence requested “surge support” to Atlanta to assist in what it called FBI Director Kash Patel’s “priority” investigation. The memo did not explicitly discuss the nature of the investigation, but multiple sources confirmed to CBS News the subject of the memo is the 2020 election probe in Fulton County.

Here’s What You Should Read From TPM Today

Kate Riga wraps up her coverage of a Supreme Court term that gifted Republicans most of what they were after: The Supreme Court Let Trump Do Pretty Much Everything He Wanted — Except Mess with the Money

Josh Kovensky reports live from the Great American State Fair. What it lacks in visitors in makes up for in Trump administration grift and corruption: The Great American State Fair’s Main Exhibit Is Trump’s Corruption

Morning Memo examines the congressional inquiry into Trump’s takeover of the 250th celebration of America: Congressional Report Alleges Fraud in Fundraising for ‘Christian Nationalist’ Freedom250

Trump’s executive order attempting to place sweeping and, likely, lawless new restrictions on mail-in voting ahead of the midterms faces another loss in court, per John Light: A Second Judge Blocks Trump’s Attempted Federal Takeover of Vote by Mail

Yesterday, I wrote about how bad Republicans are at pretending they care about the financial pressures that most Americans are currently facing thanks to Trump’s policies and swelling inflation: Surely a Winning Strategy: Republicans Are Trying to Be as Tone Deaf as Possible on Affordability

Yesterday’s Top Story

JD Vance Says the Midterms Will Determine the Future of Birthright Citizenship

What I’m Reading

Olympian Is Indicted After Arrest at Washington’s Reflecting Pool

Trump Shows New Signs of Midterm Panic as Brutal Polls Hit

The Onion’s new parody of Alex Jones’ Infowars starts with $100,000 to Sandy Hook families

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‘Affordability? What Are You Talking About?’

It would be difficult to miss President Trump’s remarks this week about what a “yawn” fest the bipartisan housing bill that is sitting on his desk is — the one that Republicans members of Congress are begging him to sign so they have something to campaign on for the midterms.

The bill — which may be the only bipartisan success story of his second term — is the single largest overhaul of federal housing policy passed through Congress in decades, designed to encourage new construction by removing restrictions, making it cheaper and easier to build across the country. It includes no new spending, speeds up environmental reviews for new construction and, the sexiest part of the bill that Trump himself has touted, places limits on how many single-family homes private equity firms can snatch up.

It won’t solve the housing crisis in America — home prices have increased by more than 50% since the COVID-19 pandemic — but it would give Republicans and Democrats alike something to point to on the campaign trail to show they’re listening to Americans’ affordability concerns, even while Trump’s tariffs and war make everything else more expensive.

But Trump won’t sign it. He’s been holding it hostage to try to get Senate Republicans to pass legislation that will not pass the upper chamber; legislation that would disenfranchise millions ahead of the midterms and fuel Trump’s delusions about the 2020 election.

“It hasn’t been sent to me yet. It’s coming, I understand, and then I’ll make the determine — Look, here’s what I’d like to say,” he said of the housing bill on Monday. “Much more than a bill that — big deal. It’s a yawn … somebody would say, ‘it’s wonderful.’ To me, compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a Big Yawn.”

But it’s not just wildly off-message statements about the housing bill. Trump has made his real feelings about Americans’ financial struggles pretty clear in recent weeks. He’s called “affordability” a “hoax,” confessed he wants to “drive housing prices up” for some reason, declared to reporters “I love inflation” and made it clear that he does not think about Americans’ financial concerns when he has Iran to attack, an extremely unpopular war that he started.

“The only thing that matters, when I’m talking about Iran, they can’t have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: You cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

His right-hand man, VP JD Vance, has been killing it in the messaging department as well. In a recent interview with Fox News, Vance accused Democrats of doing nothing to address the nation’s affordability issues.

“I would love it if Democrats were willing — not that they are gonna agree with Republicans all the time — but if they were willing to work with us on lowering housing prices, on lowering gas prices, on actually making the lives of American citizens better, you know, we could have some real bipartisan compromise,” he said.

I’ll state for the record, again, Democrats and Republicans voted to pass the housing bill that everyone is waiting on Trump to sign.

It’s a stunning message for the administration to send at a time when congressional Republicans are looking for ways to bolster their chances of maintaining control of Congress in the fall. But Republicans themselves are not doing a great job of appearing anything other than patently?? tone deaf?? on the issue of affordability.

Here’s Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) today, refusing to answer a reporters questions on affordability and bragging about the lobster tails and steak he’s gonna eat back home in Texas, while defending Trump’s war in Iran and downplaying skyrocketing energy costs as Americans head into a holiday weekend with a brutal heat wave on the horizon.

Reporter: “Do you think the 60% of Americans who are living paycheck to paycheck can afford lobster tails and ribeyes and all of that?”

Nehls: “Maybe not, maybe the 60% of America don’t work as hard as I do either, I mean, I don’t know.”

If you’re moved to dismiss voters in favor of lobster dinners, don’t let us stand in your way.

The campaign messaging could not be simpler for Democrats. At least one person who runs the DNC’s Twitter account gets it.

A Sign of GOP Desperation in Texas

Trump announced yesterday that the Republican National Committee will host its first-ever midterm convention in Dallas, Texas in September to rally voters ahead of a crucial Senate race for Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-TX) seat. The Republican Party is reportedly nervous about GOP-nominee Ken Paxton’s baggage; he is, of course, up against the charismatic Democrat and theologian James Talarico. Trump is the one who got them into this mess in the first place when he chose to endorse Paxton instead of the incumbent to somehow bully Republican leadership into finding a way to pass the SAVE America Act in the Senate.

RNC Chair Joe Gruters told Fox News Digital on Wednesday that the event will be Trump-centric, a “Trumpapalooza,” if you will, that he predicts the RNC will knock “out of the park.”

“It gives us a chance to highlight all the wonderful things this president has done in our effort on this great American comeback to highlight the ideas, policies and people that’s making it happen,” Gruters told Fox.

The desperation is palpable both in the scheduling of such an event and as the party tries to make the race, which is objectively not about Trump, about Trump.

The Scramble to Keep Trump From Flying Off the Handle Over SCOTUS Birthright Citizenship Ruling

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling upholding birthright citizenship and overturning Trump’s executive order — which sought to deny birthright citizenship to children born on U.S. soil who do not have at least one parent with citizenship or permanent legal status — Republicans in Congress and members of Trump’s administration scrambled to show Trump that something will be done about this. The Justice Department was no different. Per Reuters:

The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday directed federal prosecutors to prioritize investigations of so-called birth tourism schemes after the Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict birthright citizenship in the United States.

A senior ​Justice Department official, Colin McDonald, told employees in a memo that people who ​come to the United States under “false pretenses” to give birth and secure ⁠citizenship for their child could be criminally charged under laws barring visa fraud, money ​laundering, identity theft and wire fraud.

Great Stuff to Read From TPM Today

Kate Riga sifts through the MAGA menty b after the Supreme Court did not side with Trump’s attempts to negate the Constitution on birthright citizenship, ranked by levels of grotesque delusion.

In today’s Morning Memo, Sarah Posner walks us through the Christian right’s reaction to the Supreme Court’s anti-trans rulings on Tuesday. Spoiler: after the fall of Roe, marriage equality was always next on the docket.

Come hang out with TPM’s NYC team in Brooklyn later this month!

Click: PHOTOS: Behold the Assorted Weirdness and Sparse Crowds at Trump’s Great American State Fair

Yesterday’s Most Read Story

Johnson Follows Kavanaugh’s Lead, Says Congress Will ‘Deal With’ Birthright Citizenship

What I’m Reading

DOGE Cut Off Small Town America’s 250th Birthday Money

Trump Remakes Washington, D.C., Into a Maze of Fences and Guard Members

Whatever happened to Sean Duffy’s road trip series?

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Johnson Acknowledged That Kavanaugh Did Not Have Majority With Him

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) agreed to try to find a congressional path forward for the right-wing’s fever dream of ending birthright citizenship after a divided Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked President Donald Trump’s attempt to do so by executive order. Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh, in particular, left open the door for Congress to act in his concurrence — and Johnson suggested he would, before he even had a chance to read it.

Reacting to the news in real time moments after the Supreme Court knocked down Trump’s order based on the Constitution’s birthright citizenship clause, Johnson agreed that Congress should correct what the high court did not.

“Well, I need to read the opinion, okay? But I — obviously you can say that’s a textualist, originalist view, however, I do think this has been grossly abused in recent years,” he said, elevating popular right-wing birthright citizenship grievances about “birth tourism” and suspicions about the allegiances of children of non-citizens, which Justice Sam Alito also aired in his dissent.

“Birthing tourism, they call it: a trend where people come and you just come on to the soil and have your child and then they’re able to avail themselves of the welfare state and everything else,” he said. “It’s been abused. It’s one of those things that was intended to serve a noble and important purpose and has been thwarted and overused and abused, and so I’m sure that we’ll continue to look at that.

Johnson, however, acknowledged that Kavanaugh did not have the majority with him — Congress alone could not fix through laws what five justices found to be unconstitutional.

“I’m sure that the conclusion from this opinion is you have to amend the Constitution to fix that,” he said, which would be, he conceded, a “challenge.”

“We’ll see,” he concluded.

“I will say I’m very disappointed in that outcome. I think it subjects the country to serious challenges going forward, and we’ll have to deal with it as Congress,” he said.

As my colleagues Kate Riga and Josh Kovensky reported today, in his concurrence, Kavanaugh suggested that Trump’s order violated the law, but not the Constitution. It raises an obvious option: changing the law.

Unfortunately for conservatives heartened by Kavanaugh’s reading, a majority of justices did not agree.

Eager to not paint the ruling as another blow the high court has dealt to his agenda in the last few days of its term, President Trump posted a screed on Truth Social exulting the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday in Slaughter, which gave the president power to fire civil servants from independent agencies.

Tucked into the lengthy post was a directive to Congress that Johnson had seemingly already accepted without being asked: “We also had the birthright citizenship loss, which we will work with Congress to correct.”

Far-Right Influencers Salivating for Even Harsher Immigration Crackdown in Wake of SCOTUS Ruling

The response from the far right to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Trump’s executive order has been nothing short of hysterical, with White House deputy chief of staff for policy, and the Trump administration’s resident nativist, Stephen Miller calling it “one of the most destructive and outrageous decisions in the long history of the Supreme Court.”

Republican members of Congress are already calling for legislation that would block the children of undocumented immigrants from receiving birthright citizenship.

Other far-right MAGA influencers are melting down, using the ruling to call for an (even further) escalated crackdown on Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda. Right-wing influencer Matt Walsh suggests using “whatever force is necessary.”

‘A Win for Billionaire Donors’

The Supreme Court also on Tuesday further loosed campaign finance restrictions that have been in place since after Richard Nixon resigned. In a 6-3 vote along ideological lines, the high court overturned a 2001 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act as constitutional. That law placed limits on how much money political parties can raise and spend on its candidates. It is expected to give candidates direct control over huge, new sums for their races.

Vice President JD Vance and the National Republican Senatorial Committee had challenged the law as unconstitutional. Trump’s DOJ argued that while the law was designed to prevent corruption, it has not prevented it. Here’s some of the backstory, per NPR:

This decision overturns a 2001 Supreme Court case that declared the limits on party spending to be constitutional. It’s the latest in a series of rulings since then that have unraveled campaign finance regulations.

The saga began in 2010, when the court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have a First Amendment right to unlimited spending on elections. The following year, the court dismantled Arizona’s public election financing scheme, which gave money to less-funded candidates in order to equalize spending between politicians. And in 2014, the court struck down limits on how much money an individual can donate in national elections. All of these decisions were ideologically split votes, just like Tuesday’s ruling, and in each case, the court overturned the regulations for burdening the First Amendment right to spend on elections.

The decision is expected to be beneficial to Republicans who tend to have more large singular donors versus Dems, who tend to have more small-dollar donations. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee bashed the ruling and their Republican colleagues: “Republicans’ scheme to overturn campaign finance law is a clear and blatant effort to rewrite election rules for their own benefit and spend more money from billionaires to prop up their candidates.”

TPM Has Covered a Lot Today. Here’s What You Should Read

I’ve already flagged Kate Riga and Josh Kovensky’s coverage of the Supreme Court birthright citizenship decision above, but here are those links again:

Kate: Supreme Court Upholds Birthright Citizenship

Josh: Dissenting Conservative Justices Signal that Ending Birthright Citizenship Is Their Movement’s Next Goal

More from Kate here as well: Supreme Court Lets Red States Force Trans Girls to Play on Boys’ Teams

Meanwhile, Emine Yücel was tuned in to Russ Vought’s testimony before the House Appropriations Committee’s Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee today, during which he barely tried to give assurances that his office wouldn’t again try to stamp out Congress’ authority to appropriate federal spending: Vought Claims OMB Won’t Try to Force Congress to Approve More Rescissions This Year — But Leaves Door Open

Morning Memo: MAGA Melts Down at SCOTUS Over Its Insufficient Voter Suppression

And then, this morning, John Light expands on Josh Kovensky’s exclusive reporting yesterday on the right-wing blogging background of one of the prosecutors tasked with operationalizing NSPM-7 for the DOJ: Trump’s Directive to Crack Down on Dissent Gets a Task Force

Yesterday’s Most Read Story

White House Religious Liberty Commission Releases ‘Embarrassing’ Report

What I’m Reading

🙄 Gavin Newsom urges a national ‘billionaires’ tax’ while fighting one in California

Trump Urges Congress to Take Up Birthright Citizenship. Here’s Why It’s Unlikely.

House floor is frozen after GOP holdouts reject Johnson’s election-bill plan

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Being Anti-SAVE Act Now = ‘Communist’

There is little that crosses the president’s desk these days that he won’t try to weaponize to continue bullying Senate Republicans into passing the SAVE America Act before the midterms — a logistical impossibility unless Republican leadership decides its a task worth nuking the filibuster or firing the Senate Parliamentarian over. As my colleague John Light noted this morning, so far, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has not been swayed to such an end. Nonetheless, from unrelated legislation to unrelated court decisions to his own nominees, no one and nothing is exempt from being turned into his cudgel to pass the SAVE Act — which he apparently now needs because of the “communists.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling this morning rejecting the Republican National Committee’s attempt to place sweeping restrictions on which mail-in ballots can be counted was no different. Trump called the decision a “tremendous loss” “concerning Voter’s Rights, and the fact that ‘people’s’ votes are allowed to be counted LONG AFTER an Election is over.” He once again called on the Senate to pass the bill, which is expected to disenfranchise millions if passed by mandating documentary proof of citizenship and photo IDs for voting.

“There is no excuse for a politician, or otherwise, to be against the above three requirements. There is only one reason to oppose — CHEATING!” he declared, before launching into a tirade revealing of the actual reason he wants the legislation passed before the midterms: he’s worried his unpopularity will result in major wins for Democrats in November.

He previewed this messaging point during a particularly incoherent — even for him — and graphic speech at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority Conference in Washington, D.C. Friday. Perhaps spooked by a handful of progressive victories in primary elections in recent weeks — across New York City and elsewhere — Trump has started talking about the Democratic Party in apocalyptic and McCarthyist terms, perhaps a sign of his desperation to get the SAVE America Act passed. During his speech on Friday, he painted an ominous vision of a nation in decline, filled with “slums” and godless “communists,” while calling for the legislation to be passed.

During a Fox News interview this morning before the SCOTUS decision came down, his White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt spoke in similarly feverish tones about the future that lies ahead if Democrats are able to take back either chamber of Congress — an outcome that would, of course, only be the result of cheating.

“These are radical marxist ideas that have never worked in the history of the world and I think it’s a choice coming up between communism and common sense — that’s how the president views it and that’s why Americans need to vote for this president and the Republican Party and the common sense ideals that make this the greatest nation in the history of the world,” she said.

Trump pushed the message harder during his post-SCOTUS ruling meltdown on Truth Social Monday, before calling out Republican senators who have qualms with the SAVE America Act by name — seemingly trying to equate their opposition to the voter suppression bill with support for communism and war and foreign terror attacks on Americans?

The House of Representatives has approved this vital Act, THREE TIMES. The United States Senate seems unable to do so. In a time when there is a powerful Communist Movement taking place in our Country, one more dangerous than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or September 11th, all Dumocrats, and our five Republican Senate Hold Outs, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, and Mitch McConnell must vote to SAVE OUR COUNTRY. There can be no more excuses!

It’s a sign of the Trump administration’s fears on a number of fronts: that working class Americans fed up with the nation’s affordability crisis — who may have joined the MAGA movement during earlier elections — might now, disillusioned by the rising costs of Trump’s tariffs and war in Iran, see more hope in the progressive populist movement. And also, the more immediate fear: Republicans may not be able to hold the House and Senate unless they enact drastic voter suppression laws in the 11th hour to stop potential Democratic gains in November.

Bipartisan Housing Bill Is Now Also Radical … Bc Elizabeth Warren?

Speaking of the SAVE Act and President Trump’s self-defeating routine of torpedoing his own priorities to try to pressure Republicans to pass it …

Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) is laying the groundwork for President Trump to veto the bipartisan housing bill that he was suppose to sign into law last week — before he canceled the signing ceremony last minute to continue his SAVE America Act pressure campaign. By painting it as legislation filled with Democratic priorities — rather than a rare good faith effort to address skyrocketing housing prices that Republicans could campaign on ahead of the midterms — Fine is giving Trump the runway to kill the legislation all together if he wants to.

MAGA Groups Prep to Ask Carr to Revoke Disney License

As if he needed any encouragement — Trump-aligned groups are reportedly preparing to ask Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr to pull the broadcast television licenses for Disney-owned stations, something that Carr has already been threatening to do as part of his full-scale retribution crackdown on Trump critics in the media.

One of the groups that is expected to file a petition with Carr to encourage a review of Disney’s broadcast licenses is the right-wing Center for American Rights, Politico reported. That group has previously filed complaints with the FCC against NBC over “Saturday Night Live” and CBS’ “60 Minutes,” alleging favoritism in its coverage of former Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential election.

More details from Politico:

The Media Research Center, a watchdog group devoted to countering perceived liberal bias, also plans to file a petition Monday urging the commission to deny Disney’s ABC license renewal, a spokesperson confirmed to POLITICO. The Article III Project, a legal organization led by Trump ally Mike Davis, submitted an early petition to deny last week over Disney’s diversity initiatives.

The reporting adds to a scheme that Carr has already threatened to carry out, and one that TPM has been following quite closely over the past year. Earlier this spring he called in license reviews for eight ABC TV stations, which are owned by Disney, years ahead of schedule. At the time Carr openly admitted that the reviews were being conducted because of unfavorable coverage of Trump’s war in Iran.

Must-Reads From TPM Today

Kate Riga’s coverage of two major SCOTUS rulings today is unmatched: SCOTUS Officially Kills Precedent that Protected Agencies — But with Special Federal Reserve Carveout

And also here: Supreme Court Rules Against Republicans’ Attempt to Restrict Vote by Mail

Layla A. Jones captures experts’ — and Trump’s — reactions to the Slaughter and Cook rulings: SCOTUS’ Narrow Protection of the Fed Means Cook, and Fed Independence, Still at Risk

Catch up on today’s edition of the Morning Memo: White House Religious Liberty Commission Releases ‘Embarrassing’ Report

My colleague and TPM’s executive editor John Light has soft launched a new morning newsletter to help get you up to speed on the storylines that TPM is tracking on any given day. Give today’s debut edition a read: The SAVE Act Self-Owns Will Continue

And finally, a big SCOOP from TPM reporter Josh Kovensky, who has really important new details about the two prosecutors the Justice Department has tapped to help orchestrate Trump’s directive to crack down on its dissent: Exclusive: DOJ Taps Gang, Terrorism Prosecutors to Crack Down on Political Groups

Yesterday’s Most Read Story

Josh Marshall: Google, AI, Oligarchy and the End of the ‘Open Web’

What I’m Reading

Supreme Court Lets $5 Million Sex Abuse Verdict Against Trump Stand

Fired F.T.C. Commissioner Warns of Potential for Presidential Abuse of Power

The Court Sides With Dictatorship — and Chaos