Trump Meets a Friendly Audience in Court as He Seeks To Deploy Military Wherever He Wants

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Oct 09, 2025

(Photo by MATHIEU LEWIS-ROLLAND/AFP via Getty Images)

Thursday saw dueling hearings related to President Trump’s push to deploy National Guard troops in blue states that don’t want them there.

In a San Francisco courtroom, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel dominated by Trump appointees sounded so amenable to his case that a certain familiar reporter wondered whether the arguments were doubling as a Supreme Court audition. The hearing centered on a district court’s order blocking the Guard from deploying to Portland.

“The President gets to direct his resources as he deems fit and it just seems a little counterintuitive to me that the city of Portland can come in and say ‘no, you need to do it differently,’” Judge Ryan Nelson, one of the Trump appointees, said Thursday. “Now, I understand there’s a statute here and we’re going to have to review that, but this goes to the level of deference that I think the president is entitled to in these circumstances. And it’s not all driven by what we see on the streets, it’s also driven by, to some degree, what’s going on behind the scenes, and you don’t have full view into that.”

And over in Chicago, the city and state made their case to reject Trump’s deployment in district court (in a courtroom with no remote access — to which we say boo). During the hearing, Biden appointee Judge April Perry called referring to the city’s protests as a “rebellion” — one of the criteria for sending in the Guard under Title 10, the law the administration has cited — “audacious,” per NBC’s Chicago affiliate.

“What if the DHS folks are not tethered to reality? Does that matter?” she said, asking “who are the rebels” and “are they well armed?”

She also reportedly pressed DOJ officials on where exactly the Guard would be stationed.

Perry declined to immediately block the Guard deployment when she got the case, and troops have arrived in the city.

Samantha vs. Mike Johnson

A caller identified as Samantha from Fort Belvoir, Virginia confronted Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) while he took calls on CPSAN Thursday, telling him that her military family — including two “medically fragile kids” — will suffer enormously if her husband misses his paycheck due to the shutdown.

“If we see a lapse in pay come the 15th, my children do not get to get the medication that’s needed for them to live their life, because we live paycheck to paycheck,” she said, adding that her “kids could die.”

“As a Republican, I am very disappointed in my party, and I’m very disappointed in you, because you do have the power to call the House back — you refuse to do that just for a show,” she said. “The audacity of someone who makes six figures a year to do this to military families is insane.”

Johnson responded that stories like hers “keep him up at night,” pivoting to blame Democrats for the shutdown.

“Chuck Schumer and the Democrats are preventing your family from getting the care they need, not Republicans, and my heart goes out to you,” he said.

Dozens of House Democrats are signing onto a letter to Johnson, demanding a standalone vote on military pay, per Politico.

Katie Porter’s Self-Inflicted News Cycle Of Hell Continues

Gubernatorial candidate and former Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) is continuing to pay for her on-camera freak out in response to fairly lame but anodyne questions from a local CBS reporter. After being asked in a clip aired Tuesday night about how she’d win over Trump voters in the state, she got annoyed.

“I feel like this is unnecessarily argumentative, what is your question?” she snapped, before saying, “I don’t want to keep doing this, I want to call it.”

She did end up staying for the rest of the interview, per her campaign.

The episode was particularly dumb because when she briefly stopped critiquing the questions and actually answered them, she had a perfectly fine response. She said that her experience representing Orange County has given her bona fides in winning Republican voters that her primary challengers from bluer pockets of the state lack.

I understand that on the meta level, it is intensely annoying that a gubernatorial candidate in, say, Texas, will never be asked how he “intends to win over Harris voters” — it’s a classic example of the baked-in news bias that Democrats are expected to be conciliatory grown-ups to the opposing party, while Republicans are free to dismiss and rain invective on them. But come on. Threatening to storm out of an interview while on camera only increases the incentives for reporters to ask these kinds of questions.

And now the faucet has opened. Someone leaked Politico a clip Wednesday in which she berates a staffer while on a video call to “get out of my fucking shot!”

How Operation ‘Steal The House Before A Vote Is Cast’ Is Coming

VP J.D. Vance is being dispatched to Indiana to put fire under the rears of a state legislature reluctant to redraw the congressional maps to guarantee Republicans more seats, per the Indiana Capital Chronicle. The delegation of the state is currently 7-2 Republican.

Vance visited in August to convince legislative leadership to get behind the push, but they didn’t make any firm commitments after the meeting.

They don’t seem to share the conviction of Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN), who told Politico in September: “They killed Charlie Kirk — the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine to zero map.”

Meanwhile, in Missouri, there’s an effort to get a referendum onto the ballot in 2026 so voters can weigh in on the newly rigged map, and it’s getting some Republicans nervous, per Punchbowl. The delegation is currently 6-2 Republican, but the new map would make Rep. Emanual Cleaver’s (D-MO) Kansas City-area seat a safe Republican district.

While Missouri’s legislature passed the newly gerrymandered map, it also passed an amendment to make it more difficult for citizen initiatives to appear on ballots in the future, in a wild coincidence.