TPM – Talking Points Memo

‘Corruption Unparalleled in American History’

Democrats in the House and Senate are sounding the alarm about the $1.776 billion “slush fund” that Trump’s Justice Department is creating for his supporters and political allies in exchange for President Trump, his two eldest sons and the Trump Organization dropping their $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, an agency he oversees as president. It’s a legal challenge that has long had legal experts up in arms about the potential for corruption, as Trump sues his own government, demanding damages over the 2019 leak of his tax information. And that was before today, when Trump’s lawyers purported to dismiss it — news swiftly followed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announcing billions to pay off Trump’s allies.

Minnesota state prosecutors charged a second ICE agent on Monday with assault over incidents that took place during the Trump administration’s winter occupation of the city.

Thousands marched and protested this weekend in the southern states where Republicans are silencing Black voters — with some, including Louisiana and Alabama, throwing out legal votes to do so.

South Carolina will press on with its special redistricting session — over the reluctance of its Senate majority leader and governor — and Alabama awaits a court decision on the racially discriminatory map it wants to use in the midterms.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has thrown other, seemingly unrelated voting rights questions into flux.

Follow our live coverage here.

The more I speak with people both in the political world and in what I’ve called the legal academic-judicial nexus, the more I see just what a sea change is underway about Court reform. It’s come in successive waves: Dobbs, the immunity decision, Callais. There are various models of reform. But I don’t know anyone who has seriously considered the matter who thinks that you can have serious reform without expanding the Court. In these conversations, a few people have raised the question: what if the Court rules that a Court expansion law is itself unconstitutional? To put it slightly differently, what if the Court decides that the limits on its authority the Constitution creates, the paths for accountability it creates, are themselves unconstitutional.

This is question that is once absurd but also in a certain specific way important to prepare for.

The key, overriding and singular point is that the Court has zero jurisdiction over the number of judges who serve on it. The Court might as well decided that going forward it will appoint members of the Court itself. The Constitution clearly and explicitly gives Congress the power to choose the number of Justices who will serve on the Supreme Court. Congress first chose that there would be six. It then expanded it to 7, 9 and finally ten before changing it back to 9. The very existence of the Court as currently constituted, that it is nine Justices rather than three or one hundred, is the product of the Congress’s power which this scenario would have the Court questioning. That’s the simple answer. The Court lacks any jurisdiction.

That’s where I left the question the first few times it was raised to me. But of course this Supreme Court is steeped in the deepest anti-constitutional corruption and abuses of power imaginable. We couldn’t be surprised if this Court did manufacture new text in the Constitution that allowed its current members to appoint their own successors. And it would be folly to assume they might not try to review such a law, despite lacking any power to do so. For this Court the fact that it’s laughable, admittedly, doesn’t mean much.

The answer is to make clear in advance that the law is fully un-reviewable and not even entertain the discussion. As I said, if the Court decided it could appoint its own members no one should entertain that as a serious claim. This is identical. The Constitution gives Congress this power clearly and explicitly. The Court can’t review the legitimacy of the basis of its own existence. That is simply a matter of logical principles.

The answer is to pass the law (with a trifecta), nominate and confirm the justices (with the same trifecta) and send them over to the building. If Roberts and Alito want to barricade themselves in the building, sure, why not. They’re coming. Get used to it. Congress and everyone involved would have to make clear in advance that the whole question will not be entertained and that the matter will be settled solely and entirely with the legitimate power of Congress, in concert with the assent of the president. The new justices will show up up at the building. Pull up new chairs at the table or they’ll bring their own. Either way, end of story.

If anything the whole episode would be a salutary demonstration of the Court’s illegal conduct. The attempt would be illegal, unconstitutional and illegitimate and thus a good illustration of the Court’s corruption. It doesn’t count. Don’t engage with it. Pass the law and nominate the judges and send them over.

BREAKING …

In a new filing this morning, President Trump attempted an end run around a federal judge by purporting to dismiss his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns.

The move comes just days before this week’s deadline set by the judge in the case for Trump and the government defendants to explain how they are truly adverse, rather than all on Trump’s side.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams of Miami had expressed concern that without a true dispute between adverse parties she lacked jurisdiction to hear the case. With no one to argue the other side, she had appointed highly regarded outside attorneys as friends of the court to advise her on the legal issues involved.

Late last week, perhaps anticipating an effort to end-run the judge, they submitted their memo more than a week ahead of their deadline, making a compelling case for why “President Trump enjoys ample actual and practical authority to control the Defendants.”

Trump’s latest filing is a notice of dismissal with prejudice, meaning the case cannot be refiled, but most importantly it contends that the right to dismiss the case is not subject to judicial review under the procedural rules since neither the IRS nor the Treasury Department had yet filed an answer or other responsive motion to the lawsuit.

“Accordingly, voluntary dismissal under Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) is available as of right, and requires neither leave of Court nor the consent of any party,” Trump’s lawyers argue. They go farther in a footnote, in telling the judge that they are filing a notice of dismissal, not a motion to dismiss, because she has no say in the matter under appeal court precedent: “dismissal is self-executing, terminates the action upon filing, and divests the district court of jurisdiction.”

The bulk of the notice is dedicated to telling Judge Williams to back off: “Upon the filing of this Notice, no judicial analysis is appropriate, and any ‘subsequent order purporting to dismiss ‘all claims’ . . . [would be] a nullity,’” it contends, citing case law.

The notice also cheekily purports to assess fees and costs: “Each party shall bear its own attorneys’ fees and costs.”

The dismissal comes after significant new reporting over the weekend that built on ABC News’ blockbuster on Thursday that the case was on the verge of being settled through a unprecedentedly corrupt agreement where the U.S. government would set up a $1.7 billion slush fund under Trump’s purview to pay out “damages” to his allies who purport to be victims of the Deep State, including the Trump-pardoned Jan. 6 defendants.

In a followup story, ABC News reported that the exact settlement amount would be the historically resonant figure of 1,776,000,000 to be overseen by the “President Donald J. Trump Truth and Justice Commission.” It would be composed of five commissioners, four of them appointed by the attorney general, all of whom would be subject to removal by Trump without cause. “The commission would also be under no obligation to disclose the process for awarding the nearly $2 billion,” ABC News reported.

In another dark and cynical twist, the Trump DOJ modeled the proposed slush fund “on a landmark $760 million settlement fund the Obama administration created to compensate Native American farmers and ranchers who were deprived access to federal subsidies for decades,” the NYT reported.

It has been apparent for a couple of weeks that Trump officials were racing to settle the IRS case (while bundling two other Trump claims against the government into the settlement agreement) before Judge Williams could weigh in. “A compensation fund for Trump allies but not for the president himself would offer a short-term fix, allowing the president to receive a deliverable benefit from the lawsuit before the judge could dismiss it, according to officials briefed on its details,” the NYT reports.

Now that Trump has dropped his lawsuit, it’s not clear that Judge Williams has any remaining power to probe the terms of the settlement agreement. It’s also not clear-cut who might have standing to challenge the settlement agreement in court.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) raised one potential avenue of attack in an interview last week with The New Republic, arguing that the 14th Amendment bars the federal government from assuming any “obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” 

“Raskin said that if this fund hands money to the January 6 rioters, Trump will be ‘using federal taxpayer dollars to compensate people who participated in insurrection,'” TNR reported.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

I doubt Morning Memo readers need the point driven home for them, but there is a tendency to see some of the developments of the past 72 hours as discrete events rather than as a singular story of a post-coup reckoning that is pushing a revisionist history of Jan. 6, subverting the rule of law, and setting the stage for future attacks on democracy.

The creation of “The President Donald J. Trump Truth and Justice Commission” funnels public funds to former insurrectionists. The GOP primary defeat of incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) is payback for his voting to impeach President Trump over Jan. 6. The commutation of the sentence of former election official Tina Peters by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) on state charges related to her actions in support of the Big Lie comes after Trump retaliated against the state and threatened further adverse action.

It’s all of a piece, and unfolding in broad daylight.

The Corruption: Trump Stock Trades Edition

A sampling of some of the better coverage of the President Trump’s newly disclosed stock trades from the first quarter of 2026:

• Bloomberg: Trump’s More Than 3,700 Trades Astonish Wall Street Insiders
• Judd Legum: The smoking guns in Trump’s new financial disclosure
• CNBC: Trump touted Palantir on Truth Social after buying the company’s stock, records show

The Great Whitening

• South Carolina: Sitting in special session, the legislature will begin debate this week on eliminating the state’s sole majority-Black House district, held by Rep. James Clyburn (D).
• Virginia: With no noted dissents, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected state Democrats’ long-shot bid to pause the Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling that threw out their voter-approved redistricting plan.
• Tennessee: After state Republicans redrew the congressional district map to eliminate his majority-Black district, longtime Rep. Steve Cohen (D) decided not to run for re-election this year.

Quote of the Day

“People are expecting overt violence and clubs and fire hoses and pitbulls. You don’t need that when you have the current Supreme Court that we have, when you have legislative bodies that do not want Black people to have representation.” —State Sen. Natalie Murdock (D-NC)

ICE Protestors Go on Trial in Spokane

In a closely watched case that prompted the acting U.S. attorney to resign, the Trump DOJ is bringing to trial this week three ICE protestors on unusual conspiracy charges, a move that legal experts says threatens to criminalize political dissent.

Televangelist-in-Chief

Sarah Posner, on Sunday’s nine-hour prayer marathon on The National Mall:

Trump’s evangelical supporters, who falsely contend America was founded by divine providence as a Christian nation, are trying to turn the anniversary of our independence from a king into a spectacle of worship of their wannabe king who compares himself to Jesus Christ. If there was any “rededication” going on at Sunday’s marathon on the Mall, it was not to the divine, but to the grift of Trump as the God-anointed savior of the “real” Christian America.

Trump Ballroom Funding in Jeopardy

The Senate parliamentarian ruled Saturday that funding for Trump’s vanity ballroom as currently written cannot be included in a reconciliation bill, meaning it cannot pass with a simple majority vote. Republicans are working on redrafting the ballroom funding language.

Greenland Talks

The NYT has a grim progress report after four months of talks in D.C. among the United States, Denmark, and Greenland over President Trump’s demands for a greater role on the island territory: “The American demands are so steep, Greenlandic officials fear, that they amount to a major imposition on their sovereignty.”

U.S. Conducts Military Strikes in Nigeria

A joint U.S.-Nigeria operation on Saturday killed a senior ISIS leader. Followup strikes on Sunday killed additional Islamist militants.

WHO Declares Ebola Emergency

On Friday, the World Health Organization announced an ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. By Saturday, it had declared ebola to be a global health emergency, with two cases confirmed in Uganda’s capital, Kampala.

The re-emergence of the ebola threat comes after the Trump administration dismantled USAID, cut funding for the CDC, and withdrew from the WHO — all of which play significant roles in monitoring, containing, and responding to infectious disease outbreaks around the world.

An undetermined number of American citizens on the ground in the DRC have been exposed to suspected cases of the virus. The U.S. government is reportedly arranging transport for them out of the country to be quarantined elsewhere, though where remains unclear.

Most ebola outbreaks are small, but this one has been spreading for weeks, experts say. “The first known case was a nurse who developed symptoms on April 24,” according to the BBC. “It has since taken three weeks to confirm an outbreak is happening.”

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

For nine hours in steamy Washington, D.C. on Sunday, President Donald Trump’s most ardent evangelical supporters gathered on the National Mall for a “historic” event to “rededicate” America to God. The Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise and Thanksgiving was part of Freedom 250, a series of tacky Christian nationalist semiquincentennial festivities orchestrated by the Trump administration. But as much as Trump berates other people for being insufficiently patriotic, or for being “anti-Christian” for failing to follow the edicts of his Christian nationalist supporters, he could only be bothered to send in a very strangely presented video. He then spent the afternoon golfing.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) was defeated in a three-way primary against two Trump-aligned challengers tonight. Emine Yücel has our story.

Rep. Julie Letlow (R-LA), endorsed by Trump, and Louisiana’s state treasurer, former congressman John Fleming, will proceed to a runoff next month. Cassidy, with about 25 percent of the vote, will not.

The Republican primary race for Sen. Bill Cassidy’s (R-LA) Senate seat is headed to a runoff next month. But Cassidy won’t be a part of it.

A couple days ago I found myself in a brief online (social media) argument with a Court-reformer member of the legal academy insisting that, contrary to my claims, it’s totally false that there are no reformers in the academy. Of course I never said there were no reformers in the academy. What I said, what I think is undeniable, is that the legal academy as a group or a community, and especially its most powerful voices, have been deep in the SCOTUS-reverencing camp. And for more clarity here we’re talking really about the liberal+mainstream academic legal community. It goes without saying that this applies, on a contingent basis certainly, to the conservative legal movement which not only participates in the corruption of the Roberts Court but is in effect its deep root structure, from which the Roberts Court is simply the degenerate, swaggering oak dominating the canopy and blocking out the sun which civic democracy needs to flourish.

[Essay]

The Soft Power American

Bryson DeChambeau has a lot of power. If you’re unfamiliar with him, then, as The Dude says: “obviously you are not a golfer.” He has won two US Opens, famously the hardest test in golf, but is most known for being able to hit a golf ball farther than just about anyone on the planet and for his YouTube channel which has nearly 3 million followers. He plays on the LIV Golf tour — a breakaway league bankrolled by the Saudi Public Investment Fund and thought by many to be an attempt by the Saudi government to “sportswash” the country’s image and poor record on human rights — where he is far and away the most popular player. He is also close with President Trump, and was appointed chair of the president’s fitness council. Just last week, DeChambeau was competing in a push-up contest on the White House lawn and joined the president in the Oval Office to announce the reinstatement of the Presidential Fitness Test — an event that occurred coincidentally only a few days after the Saudis announced they would no longer be funding LIV Golf.

If Trump, who famously eschews physical exercise because he believes in the battery theory of the body, seems an unusual champion for the Presidential Fitness Test, that’s because fitness is unlikely to be where he is focused. Tellingly, in his first term he signed an executive order to move “sports” ahead of “fitness” in the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition — the administrative body charged with promoting healthy lifestyles and, until Obama retired it, administering the fitness test. Few know better than Trump what connections in the sports world can do to bolster your reputation and expand your business opportunities. And while Trump’s dalliance with the UFC might have helped put him back in the White House, his true love has always been golf. In DeChambeau, he may have found the perfect playing partner.

Known early in his career as a mad scientist for playing the game according to calculations that broke with golf’s orthodoxies, DeChambeau’s approach to the game both intrigued fans and players and rubbed them the wrong way. Unable to break through in the biggest tournaments due to what he saw as a lack of distance, he radically transformed his body and swing to become the longest hitter in the game. These changes drew increased attention and helped him win the US Open in 2020. However, while more people were certainly watching, he didn’t seem to be winning many of them over. Speaking with reporters after his US Open win, he seemed unable to articulate what the achievement meant to him and instead took the time to thank his many sponsors. When a reporter asked what the word was on his father’s shirt, DeChambeau said, “volition”, which appeared to be a profound moment until he went on to explain that it was part of Puma’s Freedom line. 

After his US Open win, DeChambeau was the biggest name in golf. He was like a real life Happy Gilmore who had all the shots — and could putt. But unlike Happy Gilmore, the huge crowds that followed him seemed more interested in taunting him than cheering for him. Frustrated with his life and image on the PGA Tour, DeChambeau started posting behind-the-scenes content to YouTube — a move that apparently ruffled the feathers of some of the Tour’s higher-ups. When it was announced that Saudi Arabia would be bankrolling a new tour designed to highlight the more fun aspects of the game over stiff country club traditions (“Golf, but louder”), DeChambeau was among the first big name players to leave the PGA tour and join — reportedly signing a contract worth $125 million.

Players who left for LIV became pariahs to the PGA Tour and were questioned by the media about the morality of accepting such enormous sums of money from a country known for its human rights abuses. Most players would avoid the subject, instead repeating the litany on the importance of “growing the game.” DeChambeau did his best to defend his employer. In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, he called reports implicating Saudi Arabia in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi “unfortunate.” He went on to make the case that the Saudis are trying to be better allies and ended by suggesting that “nobody is perfect.” For DeChambeau, the partnership with the Saudis was working. He was allowed to focus on his YouTube channel where he promoted LIV Golf and had started building a large following by leaning into the tactics used by popular social media influencers. When he won the US Open again in 2024, he was the crowd favorite.

After the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, Trump too found himself a pariah in the world of traditional golf. And like DeChambeau, he found a home in LIV. When the board of the PGA Championship voted to move the 2022 tournament away from Trump’s Bedminster golf club, he invited the upstart LIV to host a tournament there instead. Trump has since been a vocal proponent of the league, helping them break into the American market by hosting and attending a number of tournaments at his golf courses along the East Coast. It is somewhat ironic, then, that the financial impact of the Iran war Trump started might have been a factor in Saudi Arabia finally deciding to pull the plug on the league.

It’s estimated that the country has already sunk $6 billion dollars into the league and profitability, if that was ever the goal, is nowhere on the horizon. Despite this, DeChambeau was rumored to be seeking a contract extension in the ballpark of $500 million dollars. While preparing for last week’s LIV event at Trump National Golf Club in D.C., DeChambeau told ESPN reporter Mark Schlabach that he was “shocked” by Saudi Arabia’s decision. When Schlabach asked DeChambeau what he would do if LIV folded, he said he would focus on growing his YouTube channel rather than try to rejoin the PGA tour.

To get a sense of what it might look like for one of the top golfers in the world to forsake his legacy to pursue a career as a content creator, you can go to DeChambeau’s YouTube page. His top video is one he filmed last year with President Trump at Bedminster. It’s part of a series where he and a guest play a round of team golf, each hitting a shot from the same place and taking the better of the two shots until the hole is finished. In the video, Trump proves himself a capable golfer. DeChambeau regularly commends the president for his drives and approach shots, while, with a few notable exceptions, the pair decide to take DeChambeau’s shot on nearly every occasion. Riding around in a presidential golf cart, the two talk about Elvis, trees, and their love of golf. On the 18th hole, after Trump sinks a long birdie putt to tie the all-time series record, DeChambeau falls on his back smiling up at the unexpected result. He can’t believe what just happened. He’s just hoping that you can. 

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By Derick Dirmaier

[Report]

The Trump Admin Flexes Its Storytelling Skills to Sidestep Iran War Authorization

Since President Donald Trump started to wage war against Iran more than two months ago — seemingly without much logistical or financial planning — the administration has been sidestepping seeking congressional authorization for the war they started by continuously changing the narrative.

President Donald Trump did not ask for congressional authorization before initiating hostilities. Congressional Republicans explained away the absence of an authorization, saying the 1973 War Powers Resolution makes it so that the president does not need to ask for permission for up to 60 days. When the 60-day clock was about to be up, the administration started claiming a supposed ceasefire with Iran stopped the 60-day clock, therefore, they said, making an authorization request irrelevant. That’s a legally dubious claim that experts called “absurd.” 

Seemingly, in an attempt to continue evading the 60-day clock, the Pentagon is now reportedly planning to rename the war with Iran “Operation Sledgehammer” if Trump decides to restart major combat operations. 

The existence of an ongoing ceasefire is also very much a question mark. The Trump administration has claimed over and over again that Iran has agreed to a ceasefire even as the U.S. continues its naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, two weeks ago Pentagon officials estimated the cost of Iran to be $25 billion in total. This week, the war that the Trump administration is claiming to have ended, is estimated to cost around $29 billion.

Meanwhile, other estimates have indicated a much higher cost of the ongoing war.

The price tag is closer to $50 billion — almost double the estimate Pentagon publicly shared at the end of April — according to officials familiar with internal assessments who spoke with CBS News. Other independent tallies have found even the $50 billion estimate to be more than $20 billion short.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sneered at the idea that he’d need to provide “formal accounting on the cost” of the war in a congressional hearing this week — just another attempt from the Trump admin to ignore and stomp on Congress’ power of the purse. It is, of course, Congress’ job to oversee federal spending.

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By Emine Yücel

[Essay]

Why Are We Surprised That Gen Z Doesn’t Like AI?

Gloria Caulfield certainly didn’t seem to expect the reaction she got during her commencement address. In a booster-y May 8 speech that quickly went viral, she told an audience from the University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media — fields that are acutely threatened by the rise of AI — that AI will herald “the next industrial revolution.” Caulfield, who works as a VP at a real estate firm, was met with raucous boos. “AI sucks!” one audience member called out.  

“I’m embarrassed to have had to endure the most embarrassing, unskippable, tone-deaf, ad-like commencement,” Houda Eletr, one of the graduating students in attendance, later told the Orlando Weekly. “Boo to AI and boo to your agenda.”

Maybe Caulfield should’ve talked to a college student before writing her speech. As Blood in the Machine’s Brian Merchant points out, since the uptick in AI use began in earnest with the rollout of ChatGPT in 2023, polling has consistently shown that Americans are more concerned than excited about the technology, and their view of it has dimmed as their use of it increases. While young people are more likely to say they use AI, engaging with chatbots, for schoolwork, or at their jobs, they also harbor particular antipathy towards it. A March 2026 NBC poll found that AI’s net favorability rating among respondents aged 18-34 was -44.

So why are young people using this technology they say they dislike so much? At the risk of becoming TPM’s resident Youth Defender, it’s worth pointing out that AI is being force-fed to young people from a very early age. EdWeek’s Research Center reports that more than half of teachers are incorporating AI into instruction in some way. As she moves to dismantle her own department, Education Secretary Linda McMahon is working to expand AI use in classrooms, making it a grantmaking priority. WIRED reports that “Google, Apple, and Microsoft have competed for years to get their tools into schools in hopes of turning children into lifelong users.” We’ve all read stories bemoaning today’s lazy youth for using it to write essays for them or cheat on schoolwork, but I personally blame the multi-billion dollar tech behemoths forcing this technology into our curricula and the school districts rushing to adapt it in elementary and middle schools more than your average student.

And outside the classroom, AI is becoming unavoidable. It’s integrated into so many platforms and so much technology we use. Social media is drowning in AI slop. Google Docs and Gmail push Gemini autocompletes on you, and you’re served a potentially incorrect AI summary every time you do a basic Google search. 

Meanwhile, Gen Z is acutely aware that they will be affected by AI-related job loss. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and Stanford University show that AI is erasing entry-level jobs, especially in fields like software development, consulting, accounting, finance, and customer service, eliminating opportunities for Gen Z to gain essential experience. Students and graduates are watching major employers like Amazon, UPS, Target, IBM and Meta slash thousands of jobs as they embrace automation. 

So, yeah, Gloria Caulfield, the kids can see what’s happening! As BITM’s Merchant succinctly puts it, “The more people use AI, the less they like it, and the more concerned they are.” 

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By Allegra Kirkland

From TPM’s Group Chat

Things are going well at Daily Caller.

— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) 2026-05-15T16:49:33.974Z

I demand strict historical accuracy in my movie about witches, gods, and cyclopses.

— Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) 2026-05-15T16:28:08.877Z

Katie Miller's podcast has about half as many YouTube subscribers as this random channel that's just AI jazz music with cartoons of cats www.youtube.com/channel/UClK…

— Drew Harwell (@drewharwell.com) 2026-05-15T01:20:46.090Z

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No Words

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This Effing Guy

Of all the Southern politicians vying to erase the Black vote in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry may be emerging as the most ghoulish. He was the first lawmaker to call for new maps, just hours after the ruling came down. He has, with a straight face, talked about Louisiana now being “unshackled from the decades of litigation,” and breezily dismissed concerns about tossing out 42,000 primary votes that were already cast in Louisiana as “not my fault.” And then the guy had the gall to ask for “civility” and “respect” from protesters as the legislature moved forward on votes for new maps that will obliterate Black voting power in the state.

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Words of Wisdom

“The fertility crisis for women began in 2007; for men in 1970. Men had twice the sperm count as our teenagers do today. This is an existential crisis for our country.”

– RFK Jr. 

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Trivia Time

Which top Trump administration officials (yes, plural) resigned this week?

What leisure activity did FBI Director Kash Patel engage in while he was definitely not on vacation in Hawaii last summer: a) jetskiing b) snorkeling or c) parasailing

Which Southern state determined it would not move forward with plans to redraw its map before the 2026 midterms, then abruptly reversed course? 

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TPM in the Wild

Kate Riga and Josh Marshall joined the Heather Cox Richardson for a live conversation on the past and future of independent media and what it’s like to cover politics now. Some fun tidbits: Kate’s first journalism job was as a reporter for the East Hampton Star and Heather has been a TPM reader since Day 1.

Kate also joined the Brad Friedman show to talk about the need for Democrats to engage in some norm-breaking if we ever hope to restore and repair American democracy. As Kate put it, “The ultimate aims of the parties are diametrically different. So if you have to do some of this norm-breaking and act a little Republican-y on the route to restoring civic democracy, I think that has to be worth it. Because again, what is the alternative? Just the authoritarian slide, right?”

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Trivia Answers: 1) FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks 2) Snorkeling 3) South Carolina

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Amid mounting pressure from President Trump, Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis commuted the sentence of Tina Peters on Friday.

Peters is the former elections administrator of Mesa County, Colorado who went rogue and was convicted for breaching her office’s own voting equipment in her quest to find non-existent evidence of election fraud in the 2020 election.

TPM has a new Youtube channel. It’s right here. Can you click that link and just hit the subscribe button? That’s it. Takes like five seconds. And it helps us A LOT build out our new channel.

The Corruption: IRS Edition

A corrupt agreement is in the works between President Trump and his underlings at the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service that would settle his pending personal claims against the U.S. government by creating an unchecked $1.7 billion discretionary slush fund to pay his allies who have been “victims” of the Deep State, including the pardoned Jan. 6 defendants, according to an ABC News report.

The “expected” settlement agreement — whose final terms are not yet set — would resolve (i) Trump’s $10 billion claim over the criminal leak of Trump’s tax returns by an IRS contractor who was convicted and sentenced to jail time; (ii) his $230 million claim arising from the 2016 Russian collusion investigation and the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago.

News of the potential settlement comes after the New York Times suggested this week the parties were racing to settle the IRS claim ahead of a May 20 deadline in federal court in Florida to file briefs showing that the case is legitimately adverse. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams of Miami has raised concerns that Trump and the IRS are essentially on the same side, which would mean there’s not a real legal dispute for her to adjudicate (more on this below).

A spokesperson for President Trump’s legal team did not deny the ABC News report on the terms of the agreement, which would include a public apology from the IRS.

The reported terms of the settlement agreement are mind-boggling in their corrupt resolution of the underlying claims, but the pending agreement, as described by ABC News, opens up a whole new avenue of corruption by placing $1.7 billion under Trump’s purview to dispense to his allies without any oversight, accountability, or recourse.

The commission overseeing the compensation fund would have the total authority to hand out approximately $1.7 billion in taxpayer funds to settle claims brought by anyone who alleges they were harmed by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as well as potentially entities associated with President Trump himself.  …

The arrangement would be an unprecedented use of taxpayer dollars with little oversight. Under the terms of the potential settlement agreement, President Trump would have the authority to remove members of the commission running the fund without cause, and the commission would be under no obligation to disclose its procedures or decision-making process for awarding more than a billion dollars, the sources said. 

Trump would reportedly be barred from personally receiving compensation from the slush fund for the pending claims being resolved, but ABC News’ sources said “entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims.”

All of the flaming red flags associated with this settlement “has led some administration officials to raise ethical concerns about the arrangement,” ABC News reports. Ya think?

Court-Appointed Lawyers Weigh In

Judge Williams appointed a panel of distinguished lawyers not involved in the case as friends of the court to brief her on the issue of adversity. They filed their memorandum last night: “This case is unprecedented: A sitting president seeks monetary damages for alleged harm to his personal interests from an executive agency that he controls.” Only 16 pages, it’s worth a read.

The amici don’t ultimately take a position on whether adversity exists but they compile a compelling case that it does not, concluding that “President Trump enjoys ample actual and practical authority to control the Defendants.”

In advising the judge on the particular circumstances of this case, they start with the extraordinary power Trump has exerted over the executive branch compared to past presidents. They cite, among other things:

• Trump fired IRS commissioner Billy Long “without providing a reason.”
• Trump “significantly expanded the President’s oversight and control over the Attorney General and DOJ, including in ways that blur the line between fidelity to the President’s policy priorities and fidelity to the President himself.”
• Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi “expressed an expectation that DOJ attorneys demonstrate personal loyalty to President Trump.”
• The Trump administration “has taken the position that it has unreviewable authority to terminate high-level officials deemed insufficiently aligned with the Executive. … Some terminations of DOJ attorneys have already occurred on this basis.”

Then they get to the heart of the matter, whether in fact Trump is controlling the defense of his own litigation. Their assessment is striking: “There is also reason to believe that the President is, in fact, exercising his control over the Defendants in this litigation. President Trump’s own statements suggest that he believes he has control over the Defendants and the DOJ lawyers charged with defending this case.”

They contrast the handling of Trump’s claim with the vigorous defense DOJ has mounted in related litigation, circumstances which “raise the specter that Defendants and their attorneys may … be operating at the President’s direction.”

They suggest to the judge that there are numerous factual inquiries she could potentially make into DOJ’s handling of the Trump case and related cases to help her nail down the issue of adversity.

It’s not clear if settling the case before Judge Williams rules would leave the judge with any authority to review the settlement, and it’s a tricky legal question whether any outside parties would have legal standing to challenge the settlement. All of which is why the parties seem to be rushing to settle the claims before the May 20 briefing deadline.

“There’s a certain irony here,” notes former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman. “The point of the lawsuit was to treat the federal court as a spot to launder a collusive deal and gain a judicial imprimatur. Now that a judge is actually doing her job, actually probing whether the whole enterprise is constitutionally void, they want to withdraw.”

Trump DOJ Watch

• CNN: Todd Blanche was told last year when he was still deputy attorney general that he would have to recuse himself from DOJ matters involving President Trump in his personal capacity, an ethics requirement that the department says Blanche has complied with.
• The Trump DOJ is planning to drop fraud charges against an Indian billionaire after his attorney — a former personal attorney to President Trump — made a Power Point presentation at Main Justice last month that included an “unusual offer,” the NYT reports: “If prosecutors dropped the charges, Mr. Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy and create 15,000 jobs, echoing a pledge he had made in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election.”
• The DOJ told a federal judge in D.C. that citizenship lists compiled under a Trump executive order and to be shared with state election officials are likely to be incomplete and unreliable for determining voter eligibility, the NYT reports.

Abortion Pill to Remain Available

TPM’s Kate Riga: Supreme Court Keeps Mifepristone Available For Now While Alito and Thomas Seethe in Dissent

The Great Whitening: S.C. Edition

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) did reverse course and call a special session of the legislature, but he stopped short of directly asking for a new congressional district map that eliminates the sole majority-Black district.

The tension here, as best as I can tell, is more over math than it is principle. Cramming the state’s Black voters into Democratic Rep. James Clyburn’s district makes the other congressional seats safely Republican. Eliminating Clyburn’s district runs the risk of putting some of those seats more in jeopardy.

It’s not hard to imagine the governor and Republican Senate majority leader, who opposes redistricting before the midterms, having a better grasp of their state’s math than the Trump White House.

13 U.S. Boat Strike Victims Identified

A joint effort by 20 journalists, led by the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism, has identified 13 of the more than 190 people killed in President Trump’s lawless campaign of high seas attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats.

Another One

The House Ethics Committee confirmed that it is investigating sexual harrassment and hostile workplace allegations against Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC).

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Not ‘Even a Little Bit’

President Trump told reporters this week that he does not care about Americans’ financial situations “even a little bit” when it comes to ending the war he launched with Iran earlier this year.

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” Trump told reporters Tuesday, before diving into a screed about how much he does care about making sure Tehran does not have nuclear capabilities.

The Supreme Court will keep mifepristone available as usual, it ruled in a Thursday order, blocking a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that would reimpose in-person dispensing requirements and prevent the drug from being mailed.

The majority was unsigned. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas wrote separate dissents.

Read the order here:

This story is breaking and will be updated.

I want to share with you a letter from fellow TPM Reader DA. He makes a point I fully agree with but didn’t make clear enough in yesterday’s post. I fully agree there is such a thing as legal expertise. I’ve made that clear in my actions over a couple decades by paying for some of the very best (and priciest) legal counsel — mostly though not exclusively on 1st Amendment and libel law. It of course goes beyond this. Law, in its largest scope, is a complex set of rules and practices that we as a society have agreed on — sometimes explicitly, usually implicitly — to govern ourselves by and through which we resolve the countless range of disputes — civil and criminal — that arise among us. But it is in the nature of any specialized and professionalized craft to cast a penumbra of authority beyond its actual area of expertise.

Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling earlier this month that struck down Louisiana’s second Black-majority congressional district in Louisiana v. Callais, red states across the South jumped at the new opportunity to gerrymander away the majority-minority districts in their states, in a blatant scramble to severely cut back Black electoral power. This week the Republican race to redistrict ahead of the midterms continues at a dizzying pace, with some states that initially appeared hesitant now jumping into the fray. 

Here’s the latest.

Judges Rein in the Administration and …

I want to give you the flavor of a handful of new smackdowns of the Trump administration from federal judges across the country in an array of cases, involving violations of the law, defiance of court orders, and assorted shenanigans.

All of these are from the last day or two, so a particularly notable cluster, even if ultimate accountability to the rule of law continues to be slow in coming:

Rhode Island: Anti-Trans Subpoena Quashed

In a sharply worded order that bristled with disdain for what the Justice Department has become under President Trump, U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy of Rhode Island blocked an administrative subpoena of Rhode ‌Island Hospital for its records on gender-affirming care for transgender ​youth.

McElroy lets it rip right from the top:

This is the first two paragraphs!!!

— Kendra Albert (@kendraserra.bsky.social) 2026-05-14T00:04:45.609Z

She concludes: “[T]he discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling. The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word—with
little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes—no longer holds.’”

This is the case that has played out in parallel in Rhode Island and Texas, where DOJ went to Trump-friendly U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor to enforce the subpoena against the hospital. O’Connor granted the administration’s motion the same day it was filed without giving the hospital a chance to respond and then denied the hospital motion to stay while it appealed.

While McElroy stepped in, she made clear she wasn’t purporting to overrule O’Connor, which she doesn’t have the power to do. “What this Court holds is that the subpoena itself lacks a congressionally authorized purpose, was issued for an improper purpose, and demands the production of records that cannot be obtained consistent with the constitutional privacy rights of Rhode Island children.”

For the full backstory on the case, the always-on-it Chris Geidner has you covered.

DC: A New ‘Facilitate’ Case

Citing Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s case, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of a Colombian national it has deported last month to the Democratic Republic of Congo after the DRC refused to accept her because of her serious medical issues.

The DRC government told ICE in a letter it could not accept the 55-year-old woman because it could not provide her with adequate medical care.

“The government sent her to the D.R.C., anyway. …. Sending plaintiff to the D.R.C., therefore, was likely illegal,” Leon wrote.

Colorado: Injunction Violation

U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson of Denver found that ICE has “materially violated” his preliminary injunction barring warrantless arrests without first establishing probable cause they are a flight risk. Jackson imposed a host of new reporting and training requirements on ICE.

DC: First Amendment Violation

In another ruling Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon found that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment when it sanctioned United Nations official Francesca Albanese over her calls for war crimes charges against Israeli officials.

“Albanese has done nothing more than speak!” Leon wrote. “It is undisputed that her recommendations have no binding effect on the ICC’s actions — they are nothing more than her opinion.”

… The Administration Pushes Back

At the same time the administration was taking it on the chin in the case above, it made two aggressive new moves:

DC: Jan 6 Never Ends

In a major escalation of its attack on state bars, the Trump DOJ filed suit to block the DC bar from disciplining Jan. 6 coup plotter Jeffrey Clark as an unconstitutional infringement on federal power. The lawsuit, which was signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward but no career attorneys, also comes to the defense of U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, who faces disciplinary proceedings in DC.

Rhode Island: New Attack on Judge

In a column at the right-wing Federalist, DHS general counsel James Percival launched a new attack on U.S. District Judge Melissa R. DuBose of Rhode Island, accusing her of being a “radical” and “activist” who is “engaged in a political public affairs battle and intimidation campaign against DHS” after she referred a DOJ lawyer for possible discipline. This is the case where the DOJ, at ICE’s request, withheld from the judge the fact that an ICE detainee was wanted on murder charges abroad, and then DHS attacked her for releasing an alleged murderer.

The Great Whitening: An Update

• South Carolina: Despite GOP opposition in the state Senate, Gov. Henry McMaster is expected to call a special session of the legislature to redraw the state’s congressional district map before the midterms and eliminate the sole Democratic seat, held by Rep. James Clyburn (D). The special session could start as soon as tomorrow, after the regular session ends today. McMaster’s move was a reversal from his previous opposition to a special session and came after pressure from President Trump and his allies and just days after the state Senate failed to pass a measure that would have led to a special session.
• Mississippi: Gov. Tate Reeves (R) will no longer call a special session of the legislature to redraw the state’s Supreme Court districts and seemed to take off the table any monkeying with the state’s congressional district map until after the midterms.
• Maryland: Maryland state Senate President Bill Ferguson (D), who blocked a push last year to redraw the state’s congressional district map and eliminate the state’s sole GOP seat, held by Rep. Andy Harris (R), is “talking to allies about a path forward on possible redistricting,” NOTUS reports.
• Georgia: Gov. Brian Kemp (R) called a special session of the legislature to redraw the state’s congressional district map for the 2028 elections, keeping his commitment to leave the map alone for the 2026 election but making sure the map is redrawn before he leaves office in January while Republicans still control the statehouse.

It’s Always Black Women

While Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) isn’t pushing to change the state’s congressional district map before the midterms, he did sign into a law a sneaky GOP bill targeting the Democratic-heavy Atlanta area.

The new law takes party affiliation off the ballot for county elected offices in five metro Atlanta counties, including plurality-Black Fulton County, so that Republicans have a better shot of winning without the “R” by their names; but it retains party affiliation for county elected offices in Republican-heavy rural areas.

“All five counties covered by the law have Black Democratic women serving as district attorney,” the AJC reports. That of course includes GOP target Fani Willis in Fulton County.

This is exactly the kind of nonsense that pre-clearance under the Voting Rights Act was intended to scupper before it disadvantaged minority voters. But Chief Justice John Roberts famously torpedoed pre-clearance in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder decision.

Quote of the Day

Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill:

[T]he effort by Trump and Republican state leadership to gerrymander Black representation out of Congress must be understood as not only an attack on Black people, but on democracy itself. If the Republican racial gerrymandering effort is successful, the U.S. will lose any claim to democracy for a generation or more.

And the forces that stand today against citizenship and political representation for Black people won’t stop there. They will not tolerate meaningful political representation for any group that opposes their oligarchical Christian nationalist ideology. They seek a one-party political system in a country ruled by authoritarians. The political oppression of Black people is not the end. It is the conduit.

CIA in Mexico: The Plot Thickens

This is the first time I’ve linked from Morning Memo to my own social media post, and I won’t make it a habit, but this thread is an efficient way to catch up on this week’s important developments:

"CIA operatives inside Mexico have directly participated in deadly attacks on several mostly mid-level cartel members…The level of CIA involvement …varied…from more passive intel sharing and providing general support to direct participation in assassination ops." www.cnn.com/2026/05/12/p…

— David Kurtz (@davidkurtz.bsky.social) 2026-05-12T23:27:46.633Z

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

The Trump administration has been using amorphous and sprawling allegations of widespread fraud, and the feverish rumors spread by right-wing influencers online that animate these claims, as a pretext to target blue states and cities for months now.

From an Anonymous TPM Reader …

Apologies for the extremely lengthy response, but your post today hit upon a perennial hobby horse of mine!

It strikes me that in addition to their own self-image, law professors (and elite lawyers generally) aren’t able to be honest brokers in discussions about court reform because of the enormous quid pro quo and tight knit social ties created by judicial clerkships.  The number of students that obtain clerkships plays a big role in law school rankings. Partly as a result of this, having clerked at least for a circuit clerk is now seen as a de facto requirement to be hired as a law professor, barring a PhD in another field (and even then, most still clerk).  Professors who clerk help place students with their judges and so on and so forth.  There is an *enormous* professional taboo against quitting a clerkship or criticizing the judge that you worked for no matter how bad the experience.  It’s viewed as professional suicide, some law schools will effectively ice you out of their career services as you do it, and certain firms will effectively be closed to you for the entirety of your career.  Conversely, stay close with your judge and you can expect them to be a letter of rec and introduction-maker for life. All of this adds up to elite law school faculty and elite lawyers having a sizeable material professional and social stake in revering judges, in addition to their psychological investment in feeling learned.

Black people in America did worse economically in 2025 than at any time since the Federal Reserve began its financial wellbeing survey in 2013, according to some measures published Wednesday.

More notable than the depressed financial situation of Black respondents is the gap between Black people and, in some cases, every other racial and ethnic group recorded. The Federal Reserve’s report, Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2025, is the latest data set revealing the ways and extent Black Americans suffered tangible economic harm under the first year of President Donald Trump’s second presidential term, wherein the president took myriad steps to hack away at racial progress at the federal level as soon as returning to office. And as the U.S. residents are generally experiencing actual wage declines, the sharp jump in inflation fueled by the war in Iran, and a sluggish job market which saw the unemployment rate climb before flattening more recently, Wednesday’s Fed report exposes how some groups are bearing the brunt of Trump’s economic policy choices, while others are thriving.

The Fed’s economic well-being findings draw on a survey of nearly 13,000 U.S. adults taken in the fourth quarter of 2025. It asks questions about job loss and employment situation, emergency savings, and concerns about price increases, as well as more general survey questions about one’s perceived financial stability. Black people recorded the largest decline in financial stability measures in nearly every category compared to Asian, Hispanic and white respondents.

Black adults were the only racial group who reported a notable jump in concerns about price increases, the Fed wrote in its report, up 6% year over year.

The percentage of Black people “doing okay” or “living comfortably” declined by 5% from 65% in 2024 to 60% in 2025, the largest drop recorded since the Fed began collecting this data, including in 2020 during the COVID-era recession. The percentage of Hispanic respondents “doing okay” or “living comfortably” declined 1% from 63% to 62%, while Asian people’s situations stayed flat with 82% feeling comfortable. White people reported an increase in financial comfort, up from 77% in 2024 to 79% in 2025.

While a larger share of Hispanic people reported doing worse off year over year, Black people netted the largest jump in this category, up 7% to 28% of respondents. White people were the only racial group who felt their economic situations’ improved, with 26% reporting doing worse off year over year, down from 30% in 2024.

Black people saw the biggest drop in the share of respondents with three months worth of savings, and a smaller share than last year have even $400 to cover an emergency. A declining number of Hispanic respondents could foot an emergency $400 bill, but white and Asian people, who are more likely to have this cash on hand, improved in this category, both by 2%. 

The Fed’s figures further outline what months of federal and independent economic data has shown: Trump’s economy is bad for Black people. Because Black people usually bear the brunt of economic downturns first, the data could also signal something ominous for everyone else, including people who may feel they’re well-off under this regime.

“I think it’s going to be just a matter of time,” Gbenga Ajilore, chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told TPM in September after a jobs report showed Black unemployment spiking. 

“It’s going to hit everybody at some point. It just hits Black people earlier.”

Black unemployment earlier this year reached rates not seen (outside of the COVID-era recession shock in 2020 and 2021) since 2016, during the first Trump administration, when Black unemployment was equalizing from the global financial crisis, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report. Unemployment for white, Asian and Hispanic workers remained comparatively flat, though employment information for Hispanic people is likely skewed because of the disproportionate impact of the administration’s mass immigrant removal campaign.

Trump’s gutting of more than 300,000 federal jobs likely had a disproportionate impact on Black people, who were overrepresented in the federal workforce. Trump’s dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives included the abolition of federal programs and decrees pressuring private business to follow suit. An analysis from the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance found more than half of the companies listed on the S&P 100 made material changes to their DEI policies to avoid legal risk. Fewer companies reported workforce demographics at all, the study found. Taken together, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies declared in January Black people were facing a recession. This was even before a series of unimaginable Supreme Court decisions and subsequent state actions that have laid the foundation for the decimation of Black political power across the south and nationally. 

If you’re not a regular listener to our podcast, I hope you’ll listen to the episode that will come out later this afternoon. It was, I think, a particularly good episode, in large part because we had such critical issues to discuss: Callais, the wave of emergency redistrictings across the southern tier of the old Confederacy and what seems to be a sea-change moment on Supreme Court reform among establishment Democrats. I want to expand today on some points about Supreme Court reform, offering some of the historical background for this present moment.

Every current member of the Supreme Court comes out of what we might call the elite academic-judicial nexus, which is to say they’ve been law professors at elite universities and judges in the federal judiciary. I believe this applies to all the current justices. It didn’t used to be this way. It used to be relatively common to have justices who had never served as judges before and had never been law professors. Frequently they were ex-politicians. Famously, William Howard Taft was an ex-president when he became chief justice. Earl Warren was a popular Republican governor of California who had never served as a judge until president Eisenhower nominated him as chief justice. If you go further back, many justices never even went to law school, though this was more a matter of the evolution of legal education. The last non-law school justice was James F. Byrnes. (In earlier history, you generally learned the law as a kind of apprentice and then passed the bar to practice.) There was a brief boomlet of chatter when Bill Clinton was elected that he should or would try to re-inject this “politician on the Court” tradition back into the system. Of course that didn’t happen. The idea has scarcely been entertained since.

In the Southeast right now, we are seeing a no-holds-barred push to obliterate Black electoral power following the decimation of a law for which generations of activists marched and sometimes died. In service of this goal, state officials are going so far as to cancel elections in which voters have already cast ballots.

Yet many news outlets are talking about what’s happening using terms like “political gamesmanship,” noting white Republicans “looking for every advantage.” These terms were already a stretch for describing the mid-decade gerrymandering blitz pre-Callais. They are wildly inapplicable now.

There’s a frog-in-boiling-water quality to it. Its a mode of coverage unmoored from national and global history, which we ignore at our peril.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Estelle, who’s long held permanent resident status in the U.S., is a veteran at navigating the reentry process when she returns from visiting relatives in her native France.

But on her most recent trip through customs in mid-March, officers detained the 57-year-old Lawrence, Kansas, resident for 30 hours, forced her to spend the night in a holding cell on a concrete slab and threatened her with deportation.

Why? Because she acknowledged under questioning by customs officers that she’d once voted in a local election, despite not being a U.S. citizen. A small number of cities in the U.S. allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, but Lawrence is not one of them. Kansas and federal law both require U.S. citizenship to register to vote.

Welcome!

Hello to the 300+ new Morning Memo readers who have signed up after seeing Josh Marshall and Kate Riga interviewed by Heather Cox Richardson.

A quick word on what to expect: a rundown of the day’s essential political news in your inbox midmorning on weekdays. Over the past year, that’s meant mostly chronicling the worst depredations of the Trump II presidency. No fluff or bullshit, but some occasional whimsy to leaven the serious times in which we live.

The current moment can be hard to face, but if you’re feeling a civic duty to stay informed, I try to make Morning Memo sufficient for you to check off that box. I hope you find it useful.

Liberia or Bust

I was in the federal courthouse in suburban Maryland for a hearing yesterday in the civil case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The case is deep in the procedural weeds at this point, but it continues to produce moments I’ve never seen in court.

The context is that the Trump administration is still trying to deport Abrego Garcia to Liberia, and U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis has blocked his removal, which the Trump DOJ is currently appealing to the 4th Circuit.

Nothing was resolved in yesterday’s hearing, but Xinis took the opportunity to upbraid DOJ lawyers for misrepresentations it made about the case to the appeals court.

To take one example, Xinis said it was “sticking in my craw” that the Trump DOJ told the appeals court she had not made the requisite findings before issuing an injunction in the case. She demanded to know who wrote the filing that was submitted to the appeals court (it was a more junior attorney at the government table), at which point she read in open court from the transcript of the earlier hearing showing that she did make the required findings as she issued the injunction.

“It’s important to read,” she chided.

Then she turned to the more senior DOJ attorney: “It is not accurate to tell the 4th Circuit that I did not make findings. Do you disagree?”

“Based on what you just read,” he said, “you have made findings.”

Then why did you tell the 4th Circuit otherwise? she asked.

“I’m sure it was a mistake regarding where the appropriate responses were being looked for in the docket,” he said, in weak defense of his colleague. “It may be that that … was not looked at.”

Xinis remains particularly irritated that the Trump DOJ took it upon itself to decide she hadn’t ruled fast enough on one of its motions and therefore deemed it denied and appealed that denial. She walked through the many points in the case when DOJ either asked for more time, including to brief her on its motion, consented to delays, and voluntarily agreed not to remove Abrego Garcia, and she pressed the DOJ lawyers why they had not shared that context with the appeals court.

Then things got more awkward.

“On what authority can you dictate a court’s schedule on a motion like this?” Xinis asked.

After some hemming and hawing from the lead DOJ attorney, Xinis asked for a specific case that would allow the DOJ to deem its own motion denied. “Cite your best case,” she urged.

The DOJ attorney had nothing, at which point Xinis deftly distinguished the cases DOJ had cited in its notice of appeal.

Both DOJ lawyers in court yesterday were career employees, not the political appointees who previously took the lead in the case, and the kind of errors and omissions that Xinis focused on were different in kind and degree from the brazen defiance that the Trump administration exhibited in this case for most of the past 14 months.

But in a sign that the Trump DOJ is still playing fast and loose in the notorious case, it refused to say whether it would dismiss the criminal case against Abrego Garcia in order to remove him to Liberia. “It’s a fair question to ask what about the criminal indictment,” Xinis said, but the lead DOJ lawyer would not engage.

Whether intended or not, the hearing ended up being a chance for Xinis to preview for Abrego Garcia’s attorneys the arguments she would make to the appeals court, where briefing isn’t due until this summer.

Despite Court Order, Patel Disparages Abrego Garcia

In the kind of performative verbal combat that has become de rigueur for Trump officials in congressional hearings, Kash Patel disparaged Abrego Garcia as a “convicted gang-banging rapist” and a “felon” in possible violation of a court order in his criminal case.

this is absolutely BONKERS behavior from the director of the FBI. it's a disgrace to his position and the entire US government.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-05-12T19:00:10.725Z

Back in October, a district judge found that Trump administration officials had already “made extrajudicial statements that are troubling” and directed prosecutors to provide all DOJ and DHS employees with a copy of his court order reiterating the local rule against statements about “the prior criminal record … or the character or reputation of the accused.”

The judge warned at the time: “With knowledge of the Local Rule, any future statements that pose a clear and present danger to Abrego’s fair trial rights may subject the speaker to sanctions.”

Mass Deportation Watch

• The DHS inspector general has launched a probe into the $38 billion warehouse-to-detention program championed by former Secretary Kristi Noem, the Wall Street Journal reports.
• David Venturella, a former career ICE employee and private prison company executive, will be tapped as the new acting director of ICE.
• An exhaustive analysis by Politico shows that federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration’s unprecedented mandatory detention policy more than 10,000 times, which represents 90% of the habeas cases challenging the no-bond detentions.
• The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday became the latest appeals court to reject the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy, mirroring similar decisions by the 11th and 2nd circuits. The 5th and 8th circuits have upheld the policy, and the 7th Circuit deadlocked on it. The Supreme Court will ultimately have to resolve the circuit split.

The Corruption: IRS Edition

Trump DOJ officials are having internal discussions about settling President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for leaking his tax information, which might include dropping any audits of him, his family, or his businesses.

What caught my eye is the suggestion in the the NYT story that they’re trying to settle the case before a federal judge weighs in on whether there’s a sufficient adversarial relationship between the parties to make it a legitimate lawsuit. The judge has ordered briefing on the matter by May 20. “White House and Justice Department officials have in recent days been exploring ways to potentially settle the suit before that deadline, according to the people,” the NYT reports.

Trump DOJ Watch

• The FBI has begun interviewing current and former CIA officers as part of the Trump-driven investigation into ex-CIA Director John Brennan’s role in an intelligence assessment that found Russia sought to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, NBC News reports.
• A team of FBI agents specifically put together to handle Trump’s retributive cases is being referred to internally as the “payback squad,” NOTUS reports.
• Former acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, who is suing over his wrongful termination, recounts to Anderson Cooper some of the more bizarre moments of his brief tenure in the early days of Trump II:

Quote of the Day

“I’m unaware of anything like this, with this involvement of senior government officials, on this scale, trying to paint this false picture of the United States as a quote unquote Christian nation. Trump’s rhetoric in the past 18 months is how he’s ‘going to make America Christian again,’ that it’s his job to push religion. This is all part of that piece.”—Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, on the nine-hour-long prayer festival planned Sunday for the National Mall using some public funds for the America’s 250th birthday and expected to feature Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA)

Thank You!

With a big boost at the end from Heather Cox Richardson, we blew the doors off our goal of adding 1,000 new members during TPM’s annual membership drive. As of this morning, we’re at 1,600+ new members. Thanks to everyone who became TPM members, especially Morning Memo readers who took the plunge. You can join TPM at any time, of course, but I’ll be laying off the membership pitches for now. Again, many thanks for your support.

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A bright spot for Democrats, as Republicans’ scramble to gerrymander the old confederacy plows forward: Over in Nebraska, the path is cleared for an independent who supports things like strengthening the social safety net and taking on corporate power.

Dentist Dr. Tara Prasad thinks a lot about the logistics of homelessness — how difficult it is to brush your teeth when you don’t have a place to store a toothbrush, or how to protect a life-changing set of dentures when you’re sleeping and someone may steal your belongings. Prasad is the dental director at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, where she often sees patients who have delayed dental care for a long time. 

Prasad and oral health providers in several states are bracing for impact as the fallout of HR1, also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, descends upon state legislatures. The budget law’s cuts to Medicaid — to the tune of over $900 billion over the next 10 years — are now being passed on to state legislatures. 

“This is a movie we’ve seen before,” said Alex Sheff, senior director of policy and government relations at the advocacy group Health Care for All Massachusetts. In lean times, optional Medicaid adult dental benefits have often been the first on the budget chopping block as states search for ways to make up for shortfalls. But history has shown that these cuts are a fool’s bargain, with dire consequences for both states’ budgets and their residents’ health.

While administration officials went from side-stepping the question to openly embracing the potential that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers might be being deployed (illegally) to polling places in November, President Trump himself has yet to speak on the topic — whether by design, as ICE’s popularity plummeted earlier this year, or not.

“We are the most gerrymandered Republican state in the country already,” said South Carolina Sen. Majority Leader Shane Massey (R), announcing his opposition to a new post-Callais redistricting effort which went down to defeat, for now, a short time later. Massey made both political and moral arguments against the move. We shouldn’t underestimate the political motivation. Democrat Joe Cunningham won the 1st district in the wave election of 2018. Nancy Mace defeated him by less than a single percentage point two years later. Her district then had to be significantly fortified with Republican voters to help her keep her seat. Point being, there are a lot of Democratic voters in Jim Clyburn’s 6th district. Spread them out into neighboring districts and you’ve spread the gerrymander so tight it can just snap. And those snaps happen in wave elections.

Some of the most consequential and trust-shattering Supreme Court decisions of late have been ones that could have been predicted decades ago. Certainly that’s the case with the Dobbs decision. Callais doesn’t have quite as long a history, in terms of attempts to overturn the precedent. But certainly it’s been in the cards for at least a decade. Still, it’s some of the smaller decisions that tell us just who and what this corrupt court is. Kate Riga notes one of them here: Conservatives on the Supreme Court have previously invoked the “Purcell principle” to rule that a change couldn’t be made to districts on the “eve” of an election. Now it’s fine to do so in states like Louisiana and Alabama where primary elections are actually already underway and tens of thousands of cast ballots must be invalidated.

The message is simple: there are no rules. Only power. It reminds me of my hand tool woodworking shop. There are a big selection of tools. And it’s just a matter of what helps the GOP and the Court in that particular moment. In a way it’s clarifying. Even helpful.

This story was originally reported by Shefali Luthra and Barbara Rodriguez of The 19th. Meet Shefali and Barbara and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Food and Drug Commissioner Marty Makary’s resignation creates a new opening for anti-abortion activists to push for national restrictions on the procedure — and in particular, limit the availability of a key abortion drug. The move comes as anti-abortion groups became angry over what they viewed as his agency’s failure to curb access to the drug. 

Makary’s resignation, which multiple outlets reported Tuesday, followed reports of Trump’s growing dissatisfaction with the commissioner. According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump was frustrated by an FDA decision not to approve multiple flavored vape products, which Makary worried might particularly appeal to children. Trump pressed Makary to approve the products, calling flavored vape availability a key issue for younger supporters. After Trump’s intervention, those products received federal approval.

After what may go down as the most controversy-laden confirmation process in Federal Reserve Bank history, conservative economist Kevin Warsh was confirmed Tuesday to a 14-year term as a Federal Reserve Governor, clearing the way for his appointment as chair. Democrat Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) joined Republicans in a 51-45 vote. Current Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s term ends on Friday.

Warsh’s arduous journey included a blockade from a member of his own political party, deep skepticism about his own independence from Trump, and ongoing questions about his vast personal wealth and obscured investments. His candidacy was shrouded in distrust, mainly from Democrats, because of Trump’s open attempts to force the U.S. central bank to enact monetary policy based on his desires to lower borrowing costs rather than on economic data and inflation risks. 

And some economists and other experts have highlighted what they view as Warsh’s flip-flopping stance on monetary policy as Warsh’s signal to Trump that he’ll be an amenable central bank head.

“He, more than others, has a set of policy views and macroeconomic views that are very correlated to, call it, political, presidential, electoral outcomes,” Skanda Amarnath, who leads an economic policy organization called Employ America, told TPM in February.

Representing an unprecedented threat to Fed independence, Trump has, so far unsuccessfully, tried to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook, and let his Department of Justice launch a sham investigation into Powell for criminal misconduct pertaining to costs of a Federal Reserve building renovation project. Because of that investigation, retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a member of the Senate Banking Committee, refused to vote to confirm Warsh until the DOJ dropped its investigation. During Warsh’s first Banking Committee hearing, Trump’s words were repeatedly used against him as senators from both parties pressed the nominee on whether he could operate independently from the president. Warsh said he would. 

And when U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro kind of dropped the case — adding in a social post that she would not “hesitate to restart a criminal investigation” — Tillis dropped his blockade and Warsh’s path to lead the central bank was clear. 

Notably, current Chair Powell has said he will stay on the board as a Fed governor after his term as chair ends. Powell’s governor term lasts until early 2028, and he said he will remain on the board until the investigation into the Fed building renovations are “well and truly over, with transparency and finality.”

On the first day of his second-term in office, Donald Trump issued an executive order that caught many off-guard: all foreign aid would be subject to an immediate review. 

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.  It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

President Donald Trump berated Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett on Sunday, in another social media rant in which he accused the justices of being insufficiently loyal to him. “They were appointed by me,” said Trump, yet they “voted against me” in the tariffs case—and, he predicted, they “will be ruling against us on Birthright Citizenship,” too. 

According to Trump, Republican justices on the Supreme Court “often go out of their way” to oppose him in order to show how “independent” they are. He considers this a mistake. “It’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to ‘almost’ the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court,” he wrote.

Acting Department of Defense Comptroller Jay Hurst on Tuesday said the cost of the Iran war is now closer to a total of $29 billion.

“The joint staff team and the comptroller team are constantly looking at that estimate, and so now we think it’s closer to 29,” Hurst said as he testified in front of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee. 

‘Treason’

Rattled by leaks from within his own administration about the Iran War, President Trump has directed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to target reporters and news organizations who are the recipients of the leaks, according to new reporting.

“In one meeting, Trump passed a stack of news articles he and other senior officials thought threatened national security to Blanche with a sticky note on it that said ‘treason,'” an administration official told the WSJ, which was itself the recipient of a grand jury subpoena in a leak case.

Rather than abide by longstanding DOJ policy that journalists should only be subpoenaed as a last resort when other investigative tools have come up empty, Blanche has been eager to follow Trump’s direction.

“If it means sending a subpoena to the reporter, that’s exactly what we should do and that’s exactly what we will be doing,” Blanche said in a press conference last month. It came the day after Trump had complained about news reports on the rescue of a U.S. airman downed in Iran: “We’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say, ‘national security; give it up or go to jail.'”

The combination of Trump accusing reporters of “treason” for exercising their First Amendment rights and eagerness to see them jailed with Blanche’s willingness to go along strongly suggests that they are using leak probes in part as a pretext for targeting independent media.

More Questions Than Answers

The reporting so far is rather murky on the scope of the Trump assault on press freedoms.

The WSJ revealed for the first time yesterday that it and its reporters received grand jury subpoenas dated March 4 for records related to a Feb. 23 story it published titled “Pentagon Flags Risks of a Major Operation Against Iran.”

But despite its self-reveal, the WSJ story raised as many questions as it answered, among them:

• When did the WSJ receive the subpoenas? If it was back in March, why did it wait more than two months to disclose the existence of the subpoenas?
• Did all three reporters on the byline for Feb. 23 the story — Alexander Ward, Lara Seligman, and Shelby Holliday — receive subpoenas? The story implied they did, but didn’t say so explicitly.
• Is the WSJ seeking to quash the subpoenas? Even that wasn’t clear, with a spokesperson for the WSJ’s parent company Dow Jones saying vaguely: “We will vigorously oppose this effort to stifle and intimidate essential reporting.”
• Did Axios and the WaPo, which each published similar stories on Feb. 23, also receive grand jury subpoenas? When asked, neither outlet would comment to the WSJ.
• Did the New York Times receive a subpoena over its April 7 article that also reportedly angered Trump? When asked, the NYT would not comment to the WSJ.

In a follow-up story that didn’t address whether it had also been subpoenaed, the NYT reported that the WSJ inquiry “is one of multiple leak investigations being conducted by the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia.” The story did not indicate whether other news outlets had been targeted in those leak investigations.

The WSJ article leaves the impression that it’s not alone in being targeted: “In recent months, prosecutors have sent subpoenas to media organizations as well as to email and phone providers seeking information in leak inquiries, according to people familiar with the requests.” (The other high-profile leak case involving journalists is that of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, which went further than a subpoena to include a search of her home, car, and phone.)

The WSJ did not say whether its email and phone providers had been subpoenaed, though might not know if they had been.

Trump DOJ Watch

• John A. Sarcone III, the top federal prosecutor in the Northern District of New York, has been found to have engaged in professional misconduct by a committee of the state appeals court. Neither the details of his misconduct nor the sanction against him were made public, but the disciplinary action came in response to a complaint by a watchdog group. Sarcone was at one point last year the acting U.S. attorney in Albany until the district judges declined to extended his term. In one of the Trump DOJ’s clashes with the judiciary over U.S. attorneys, Sarcone has been running the office as first assistant without a U.S. attorney in place.
• Former FBI Director James Comey took the relatively unusual step of doing a national TV interview while under indictment, ostensibly to promote his new crime novel. He didn’t comment at length about his new indictment, but provided extensive commentary on the weaponization of the Trump DOJ, including the concocted investigation in Florida of a “grand conspiracy” against Trump: “They found an 81-year-old guy, Joe diGenova, to come back to government for the first time since Duran Duran was on the charts and lead an investigation.”
• Alabama Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall has seized on the Trump DOJ’s politicized indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center to launch his own investigation of the civil rights group. He sounds very measured and sober about it: “Thanks to the U.S. Justice Department’s action to deal with the S.P.L.C., the state’s efforts have now received a shot in the arm,” Marshall said in a statement. “We look forward to learning more about the inner workings of an organization that we have long believed was rotten, but until recently, has been impervious.”

SCOTUS Goes From Bad to Worse

The Roberts Courts’ hypocritical, inconsistent, politicized, and unexplained decision yesterday to effectively allow Alabama to eliminate at least one of its majority-Black congressional districts and run House elections on a new map was the cherry on top of the shit sundae of Louisiana v. Callais.

The timing, just a week before the scheduled primary, was especially egregious considering the court’s erratic history of applying the Purcell principle — its own oft-cited maxim that federal courts shouldn’t intervene too close to elections — but there’s lots here that further delegitimizes the court:

• Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck (writing yesterday before the Supreme Court acted in the Alabama cases): “[G]ranting emergency relief in the Alabama cases, in particular, would bespeak blinding hypocrisy on the Court’s part—not only because it was this same Court that agreed with the district courts three years ago that Alabama had violated both the VRA and the Equal Protection Clause (in a majority opinion by Chief Justice Roberts), but because Justice Alito’s majority opinion in Callais labored mightily to distinguish that ruling—not to overrule it.”
• Reporter Ari Berman: “This is absolutely outrageous. SCOTUS reinstated Texas gerrymander 15 weeks before primary because they claimed it was too close to election to block it but now allowing Alabama to gerrymander one week before primary after trial court found map was intentionally discriminatory against Black voters.”
• Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, on how the court’s decision doesn’t just turn the Purcell principle on its head, it turns it on its head in this case: “Despite Black Voters’ win three years ago, which meant the Court found that the maps the state legislature had drawn illegally discriminated against them, the state went through an additional election cycle using those maps. Alabama had argued that any changes, sought in February ahead of a June primary, came too close to the election and violated the Purcell principle. … Meanwhile, the Supreme Court just made the mother of all changes in Alabama one week before the primary.”

Another Problem With Louisiana v. Callais

At the core of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion eviscerating the Voting Rights act is a statistical error that “would get your paper sent back to you with lots of red ink in statistics 101,” G. Elliott Morris writes:

The six Republican-appointed justices on the United States Supreme Court have found a magical solution to political polarization. All you have to do is take a partisan election result and subtract out the effects of party loyalty on the result.
…

The problem is that in modern America, party isn’t a variable that operates independently of race. Rather, political party is largely downstream of one’s race. If you subtract the effects of political party from the analysis of polarization, you are subtracting away the very evidence of polarization you are trying to study!

The Shadow Docket for Dummies

Only the Best People: Kari Lake Edition

President Trump is nominating election-denier and VOA-destroyer Kari Lake as ambassador to Jamaica.

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a stay on an old Alabama map that had been found to intentionally dilute Black voters, likely setting the state up to eliminate at least one Democratic district. 

Democrats are mulling their options to try to overturn the Virginia state Supreme Court decision invalidating the recently passed redistricting amendment.

Meanwhile, unleashed by Callais and urged onward by President Trump, southern states are racing to eliminate their majority-Black, majority-Democratic districts before the midterms. Alabama in particular awaits a Supreme Court response to its effort to unlock a whiter map previously found unconstitutional.

Follow our live coverage below.

As Virginia Democrats take their map fight to the U.S. Supreme Court, Virginia Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell (D) is flatly rejecting Democrats’ reported musings about how to undo the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision overturning a recently passed redistricting amendment. 

Independent media can feel like an isolating place. Most of us operate as individuals or in small newsrooms with limited resources, throwing spaghetti at the wall to try to reach new audiences and get our stories in front of people in an ever-more-consolidated media environment.

But we’re in this together, as celebrated historian and writer Heather Cox Richardson reminded us in a generous live interview with TPM’s Kate Riga and Josh Marshall this afternoon. 

HCR had Josh and Kate on to talk about what it’s like to report on today’s frenetic politics; the founding and future of TPM; and what independent media will look like in the years to come.

Kate Riga has a good summary of the stakes Democrats currently face in Virginia. There’s a way to reverse the state Supreme Court’s decision tossing out the majority statewide vote supporting the new Dem-friendly districts. It involves intense political hardball. But it’s the same kind of political hardball Democrats will need to embrace at the national level in 2028-29 with a trifecta if there’s any hope on turning the tide against Trumpism. So Virginia will give us some view into what kinds of fights Democrats are ready for.

Again we see that, contrary to numerous press reports, the U.S. and Iran remain lightyears apart in their on-again, off-again negotiations to end their war. Iran’s demands, its response to Trump’s latest proposal, amount to a maximal package of winnings for a war Iran won: an end to the decades-long sanctions regime, sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, reparations. It is true that antagonists can sometimes seem very, very far apart and then suddenly arrive at an agreement. But these two sides seem really, really far apart.

TPM’s own Hunter Walker has won a 2026 New York Press Club award for his seven-part investigative series delving into the impact of President Trump’s mass deportation agenda in New York, the U.S. city with the greatest population of immigrants, and which has seen the highest number of violent courthouse detentions. 

Over two months in New York City’s federal courts, churches, and safe houses, Hunter spoke to more than 50 migrants, organizers, ICE agents and lawmakers, including then-mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and Reps. Dan Goldman and Nydia Velasquez (D-NY). At the heart of the series are the New Yorkers, many of them volunteers, operating in secret to protect and serve their immigrant neighbors. 

The Tilted Playing Field

The impact of the redistricting decisions by the U.S. and Virginia supreme courts is beginning to get factored into analyses of the 2026 House elections, but let’s start with this top line: their effects on the Mid-Decade Redistricting War, since that sets the structural conditions on which the election will be run.

Just a few days ago, Democrats had edged into a small lead over Republicans, largely thanks to the Virginia redistricting. With the setback Friday in Virginia, the Republicans now have what is widely considered an 8-seat advantage over Democrats that could grow to as many 10 seats depending on how aggressively Republicans target majority-Black districts in Louisiana and Alabama.

Much of the discourse over the past few days immediately pivots to what the structural changes mean for the 2026 elections, with exhortations for Democrats to overcome their disadvantages by maximizing turnout or questioning whether these are true pickup opportunities for Republicans. Unfortunately, the GOP’s anti-majoritarian advantages often end up baked into people’s expectations in ways that obscure rather than illuminate. It’s as if we have come to accept the tilted playing field as normal and just try to build a team that’s fast enough to outrun the opponent if though they’re running uphill.

The assessments of which seats are pickups for redistricting purposes give us a good sense of what the baseline map is. It’s not the same as predicting election outcomes using the same map, but it’s a marker for the field of battle. And some of the structural changes are permanent or at least semi-permanent. Democrats can’t count on wave elections every cycle to overcome those structural disadvantages, and it wouldn’t be fair to expect them to. I’m reminded of the line about Ginger Rogers: She did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards in heels.

With one-a-decade redistricting now seeming to be a thing of the past, it’s important to keep separate scoring on the redistricting fight, which is likely to resume again ahead of the 2028 election, especially in blue states which didn’t have time to respond to Louisiana v. Callais this cycle.

How It Shakes Out for 2026

The analyses of prospects for winning control of the House in the November quickly get very technical, especially with the fluidity of the redistricting battle creating multiple scenarios to factor in. So I’m going give you a sampling of topline numbers and assessments.

• “To win the House, Democrats could need to win the House combined national popular vote by around four percentage points, according to our estimates,” Nate Cohn assesses.
• Leaning on the Cook Political Report, the NYT summarizes it as a 10-seat swing toward Republicans in just the past 10 days:

At the end of April, the Cook Political Report, which handicaps political races, listed 217 House seats as at least leaning Democratic — meaning the party would have needed to win just a single “tossup” race to seize the majority. As of Friday, Cook rated 208 seats as at least leaning Democratic — meaning the party would need to win 10 of the 18 “tossup” races.

• G. Elliott Morris goes deep into the numbers, projecting different scenarios, to come up with a GOP advantage that’s closer to +6 seats, with the potential loss of two more majority-Black seats in the South making it a +8 advantage for Republicans. Morris similarly calculates that Democrats will need to win the national popular vote by 3-4 points to win control of the House:

This does not mean that Democrats cannot win the House this November, only that they will have a more difficult time doing so. The recent gerrymandering in Florida and Tennessee, plus likely losses of Democratic seats in Alabama and Louisiana, gives Republicans a real shot at holding their majority, of which they had very little hope just a month ago.

This century has already witnessed Democrats twice win the popular vote but lose the presidency and get shellacked in the post-2010 census redistricting war. As Cohn observes: “If the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision and Mr. Trump’s mid-cycle redistricting campaign allowed Republicans to win the House while badly losing the national vote, it would be yet another blow to the credibility of American institutions during a time of bitter division.”

The Great Whitening: Southern Edition

Virginia

In the aftermath of the state Supreme Court decision voiding the voter referendum that approved the Democratic redistricting plan, the state’s Democratic attorney general told the court he will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Election law expert Rich Hasen calls it a “quixotic effort” since the decision was based on state not federal law. But, in an ironic twist, Virginia may press its case to the Supreme Court on a version of the independent state legislature theory most recently popularized by Republicans.

On the ground, potential House candidates scrambled to react to the changes to the Virginia map. “With the stroke of a pen in Richmond, some campaigns effectively went poof, other candidates suddenly were in far tougher districts and one went from on the verge of dropping out to gearing up for a long-shot battle in a deep-red part of the state,” the NYT reports.

In a phone call Saturday that included Virginia’s Democratic House members and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the lawmakers considered responses to the state Supreme Court decision that ranged from making do with the old map to a far-fetched proposal to lower the mandatory retirement age for state Supreme Court justices from 73 to 54, replace the existing court justices, and re-enact a new map.

Alabama

In light of Louisiana v. Callais, the state filed an emergency application on Friday asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow it to use a 2023 congressional district map with only one majority-Black district — even though the Roberts Court has already upheld the injunction that bars Alabama’s use of the map. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion “goes out of its way to purport to distinguish” Alabama from Louisiana, as law professor Steve Vladeck notes, but Alabama argues that the earlier court rulings against its preferred map are “irreconcilable” with Louisiana v. Callais.

Meanwhile, in an alarming sign of how far and quickly the Overton window is shifting, the speaker of the Alabama House in a Friday press conference appeared to call for the Supreme Court to “overturn the 14th Amendment.”

South Carolina

On a 3-2 party-line vote, a state legislative panel advanced legislation Friday to push back the state’s congressional primaries from June 9 to August 11 as state House Republicans set the stage to eliminate the sole majority-Black House district in a potential special session this summer.

Great Watch

I didn’t get a chance to watch this segment until this weekend, but civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill does a superb job of breaking down for laypeople the ruling in Louisiana v. Callais and the Supreme Court’s history of dismantling the Voting Rights Act:

Trump DOJ Watch

• CNN offers new details on the bogus “grand conspiracy” against Trump being investigated out of the Miami U.S. Attorney’s Office and why the career prosecutor leading the case was jettisoned in favor of Trump loyalist Joe diGenova, who has now ensconced himself in Ft. Pierce, where U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon presides.
• “More than a half-dozen prosecutors have been demoted or pushed out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia due to fallout from the Justice Department’s push to prosecute former FBI director James B. Comey, leaving a key prosecutorial office understaffed and weakened,” the WaPo reports.
• Former President Joe Biden is expected to challenge in court the Trump DOJ’s decision to release 70 hours of partially redacted audio recordings of interviews he conducted in 2017 with a ghostwriter for his memoir that were turned over to Special Counsel Robert Hur. The conservative Heritage Foundation sued last year to access the materials.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

• The FBI is in the preliminary stages of “investigating” the 2020 election in Wisconson, including interviewing a high-ranking state election official in recent days, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.
• Republicans who took leading roles in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election appear on track to win the GOP nominations for governor in several battleground states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the WaPo reports.

Lawless Boat Strike Death Toll: 192

A U.S. strike Friday on a suspected drug-smuggling boat killed two people — and left one survivor adrift at sea, fate still unknown — bringing the known death toll in the lawless Trump administration campaign to at least 192.

Quote of the Day

“Trump’s most lethal policy will almost surely be his 71 percent cut in humanitarian aid from 2024 to 2025. A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide in their first year. A recently published study in The Lancet, the British medical journal, forecast that at present rates the defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030, including 2.5 million children under the age of 5.”—Nicholas Kristof

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais probably closes the book on the use of the Voting Rights Act to ensure Black voting rights in the South. The decision is being taken as a blow to Black voting rights — and even as indicative of the court’s racist leanings — but I wouldn’t jump to those conclusions. The redistricting effort that Callais ends may not have been of unequivocal benefit to the Southern Blacks it was designed to aid. And while it could damage Democratic prospects in 2026, it might help them in the longer run.

Young Voters Never Liked Trump All That Much

As the dust settled in the days after the 2024 election, one of the narratives that quickly took shape was that young people had helped elect Donald Trump to a second term. As The Independent put it at the time, “Democrats may no longer be able to rely on young voters to boost numbers, as Harris appears on track to have the lowest support among voters aged 18-29 in this century.”

Here’s what actually happened. According to data from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University (CIRCLE), young voters preferred Kamala Harris over Trump 52% to 46%. Young women supported Harris 58% to 40%; 75% of Black voters under 30 supported Harris; 58% of young Latino or Hispanic voters backed Harris; and 72% of young Asian voters backed Harris. The supposed youth swing towards Trump was predominantly among young white men, who backed him by 14 points (56% to 42%). Overall, CIRCLE’s staff found, while Trump saw a “10-point jump (36% to 46%) in youth support for Trump compared to 2020, young people were still the age group with the highest support for the Democratic candidate this year.” (Emphasis mine!)

Ahead of the 2026 midterms, we’re getting a round of articles about how Gen Z has once again decided to reject Trump and the GOP. Politico Playbook this week highlighted the results of a new survey showing that “economic concerns are pushing 18- to 34-year-olds back to the left for the midterms,” and the headline on a TIME feature blared that “Young Voters Are Turning Away From Trump.”

This narrative boomerang can be attributed in no small part to treating 2024 as just another presidential race versus a bonkers aberration of an election cycle. I mean, the 81-year-old Democratic nominee dropped out of the race less than four months before Election Day! Young people were on the record as deeply disliking both Trump and Biden, and Harris, as Biden’s VP, was inextricably tied to the president’s record in office. 

But since Obama’s first election, voters under 29 have consistently tilted left. They’ve voiced support for abortion, opposition to foreign wars and deep concern about the climate emergency. A percentage of young white male voters shifting towards Trump in one election cycle does not mean that young people, as a whole, ever swung significantly to the right. And framing this as a trend among “young voters” erases the views and votes of the millions of young women and young people of color who supported Harris and have campaigned, volunteered, and voted for Democratic candidates in election cycle after election cycle, not to mention engaged in other forms of civic activism. 

On that note, it’s true that overall turnout among young people is disappointingly low. In the 2024 presidential race, it dropped to 42%, compared to 50% in 2020, according to CIRCLE. What I heard from young people during the six years I spent as the politics director at Teen Vogue is a deep disillusionment with electoral politics as a path for change and the rejection of a system that they see as hopelessly corrupt and unrepresentative of their interests. (Can you blame them? Just look at what’s happening with the Supreme Court’s VRA ruling and the GOP’s redistricting power grab as we speak). That is not the same as apathy or disinterest. And these voters will turn out with bells on for candidates who speak their language and campaign on issues that matter to them, like the housing crisis and income inequality. (See: Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign and Zohran Mamdani’s winning mayoral bid.)

The political media loves a new narrative, but the youth swing for Trump was always overblown.

—Allegra Kirkland

Alito Says the ‘Atmosphere’ in DC Gave His Dog ‘Mental Illness’ 

Fresh off of gutting the Voting Rights Act, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito headed to Texas where he told a bizarre story about his dog. 

Alito was in Austin on Thursday because his former clerk, Kyle Hawkins, was one of two judges being given a ceremonial swearing-in for their appointment to the Lone Star State’s highest civil court. Before administering the oath to Hawkins, Alito offered what began as an anecdote about friendship.

“You do need friends … as a judge. You do need people who will tell you sometimes you really did the right thing in that difficult case,” Alito said. “Now, when I went to Washington, I heeded Harry Truman’s advice: If you need a friend in Washington, get a dog. And we did have a dog.”

Alito then launched into a well-worn quip that he’s previously used for speeches where he suggested his springer spaniel, Zeus, was a source of canine counsel. 

“After I had been pondering a difficult decision when everybody else was in bed, Zeus and I were the only ones up. I would ask Zeus about the decision, and whether I had done the right thing,” he recounted. “And Zeus agreed with me 100% of the time.”

We’ll skip the psychoanalysis of what it means for one of the nation’s most powerful jurists to seek constant, uncritical agreement because Alito’s comments got even weirder from there. 

“Poor Zeus, however, was afflicted by the disease that tends to strike so many people when they move within the Washington Beltway. There is something in the atmosphere of the Beltway that drives people crazy,” Alito said. “And Zeus is the case study — proof of this.”

Alito claimed his dog was “perfectly sane” when they lived in his home state of New Jersey. He said the pet even worked as a “certified therapy dog” and made visits to nursing homes alongside his wife, Martha Ann Alito. 

“He loved the people there, the people there loved him,” Alito said of the pup. “And no sooner did we move to Washington, he became afflicted with mental illness, with a very severe case of separation anxiety.”

Alito’s suggestion that everyone in the nation’s capital is unwell came just as some of his other conservative colleagues were trying to assure people the Supreme Court is not politically prejudiced. He went on to describe how he and Zeus both needed to work on themselves because of the crazy-making DC vibes. 

“Zeus and I had to go to a special behavioral vet to undergo the treatment that we, the two of us, needed to adjust to — to have him adjust — to the atmosphere in the Beltway,” Alito said. 

We can’t help but wonder if there are other things that may have freaked out the dog, particularly since Alito’s wife has a documented history of associating herself with paranoid and angry political movements. Alito did not say whether he has completed his course of treatment with the doggie doctor. For all of our sakes, we hope the judge gets the help he needs. 

—Hunter Walker

Democrats Can Still Win the House — But Courts Have Made It Harder 

As southern states race to draw Black people out of voting power following the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, experts are all over the map in their estimates of how many seats Republicans will ultimately net. 

This is because: a) each of these maps has been/will be sued, so some of them may be struck down or at least bogged down too long to be used in the midterms and b) by decimating these majority-Black districts, Republicans will be forced to draw some fairly competitive seats (this will especially be the case if states go maximal and eliminate all of their Democratic districts).

As of now, the high end of those predictions seems to be around five seats — unfair, but not insurmountable for Democrats in a wave election. 

—Kate Riga

Has Anyone Figured Out What Tucker Carlson Believes Yet?

In the roughly 25 years that Tucker Carlson has occupied a space in American culture, journalists from our top publications have been attempting to pin down what he believes. This pursuit has been so dogged that it has spawned something of a microgenre in American media — a phenomenon that media reporter Parker Molloy has documented not once but twice over the last five years. The need to understand what Tucker Carlson believes has so preoccupied the minds of certain journalists and editors that their colleagues’ attempts to understand this obsession has itself become a microgenre. What Tucker Carlson believes is like a perpetual motion machine inside American journalism, an ouroboros of “what” chasing “why” ad infinitum. The trick seems to be never to find the answer.

The latest entry was published last weekend in The New York Times Magazine, an interview from journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro perfectly titled, “What Does Tucker Carlson Really Believe?” As Parker Molloy pointed out, it ups the stakes from a 2019 article in The Atlantic that merely asked: “What Does Tucker Carlson Believe?” Knowing what he really believes is obviously better than knowing what he believes, but does it get us any closer to really answering the question? How does it compare to the many, many past attempts at answering this question? 

To help you sort this all out, here is a non-exhaustive ranking of Tucker Carlson profiles based on how close the journalist comes to discovering what Carlson really believes.

5. Tucker Carlson has sparked the most interesting debate in conservative politics (Vox, Jan. 10, 2019)

What Tucker believes: “All I’m saying is don’t act like the way things are is somehow ordained by God or a function or raw nature.”

4. What Does Tucker Carlson Believe? (The Atlantic, Dec. 15,  2019)

What Tucker believes: “I hate litter.”

3. What Does Tucker Carlson Really Believe? (New York Times Magazine, May 2,  2026)

What Tucker believes: “[I]f you had to sit across from Ted Cruz — it’s just there’s something about him. It’s just repulsive, disgusting. Like if you entered a men’s room and Ted Cruz was there, you would be like, I can hold it, I’m leaving.”

2. Tucker Carlson’s Fighting Words (The New Yorker, April 3,  2017)

What Tucker believes: “I like bow ties, and I certainly spent a lot of time defending them.”

1. The mystery of Tucker Carlson (CJR, Sept 5. 2018)
What Tucker believes: “There is not a lot of shouting. I do the show every night. I know what’s on it.”

— Derick Dirmaier

Programming Note

Starting next Saturday, a revamped version of The Weekender will be landing in your inboxes. We’re launching some fun new recurring segments, and refocusing our essays away from the news of the week and towards the entertaining, strange, surreal elements of our politics and political culture that we don’t always get to cover on-site. (It’s the weekend, after all!) It will also have a fancy new layout.

I’ll be leading up the new Weekender alongside our Head of Product Derick Dermaier, and you’ll also still regularly hear from our other editors and reporters, including the indefatigable Nicole LaFond, who has often anchored this email. She’ll also be helming Where Things Stand for you Monday through Thursdays. Please give me a shout at allegra@talkingpointsmemo.com if there are things you love/hate about the look or content of the new Weekender. 

— Allegra Kirkland

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