On Monday I saw a bunch of people on Bluesky mentioning and praising this essay by Andrea Pitzer. It’s quite good. I recommend reading it. It’s about the recent podcast discussion between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates. And that conversation turns a lot on the much-derided column Klein wrote about Charlie Kirk and how “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.”
Regular readers know that I have a number of enduring disagreements with Klein. They’re actually more and less than disagreements. They’re more like dispositional disagreements. Pitzer says up front that a lot of people are dumping on Klein now and she’s not trying to do that or at least not add to that. (And I second that for what I write below.) What she sets out to do is explain why she thinks Klein is “lost” in the present moment (a point Klein actually agrees with) and, secondarily, why Coates, whether you agree with him specifically, is not. Again, it’s worth reading Pitzer in her own lucid words rather than just my synopsis. But I would summarize it thus: Pitzer says that Klein has something called “bright-kid syndrome”, by which she means the idea that a smart and hyper-educated young(ish) person like Klein can and should come up with a prescription or fix to the ills he sees in front of him. It’s not quite like the “one weird trick” of memeland. But it’s kind of like that, inasmuch as it rests on the assumption that the intractable and overwhelming can actually be solved if you think about it hard enough, if you have enough cleverness and ingenuity.
Join To Read MoreI can’t go into too much detail without revealing my sources. But I wanted to share that I’ve heard from sources in multiple departments and agencies that the groundwork you’d expect to see in advance of wholesale firings — as promised by Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought — simply are not happening: lists for who gets fired and who doesn’t, the reduction in force paperwork, etc. Those things aren’t happening. At least not in the places where the people I’ve spoken to work. At least not yet.
Of course we’re one day in. MAGA isn’t known for good order and process. So it might change. But it is an early signal, by no means definitive, that Vought’s threat of a DOGE 2.0/large-scale firings is one they’re hesitant to carry out … In this Times newsletter, Jess Bidgood relays Karoline Leavitt’s threat that the layoffs are “imminent” and Vought is cueing them up. Trump holds all the power, she continues. “The question is merely how far [Trump] wants to go.” But again, under the hood, in the boiler rooms of personnel policy rather than official statements, it looks different.
I write fluidly across different venues. Here, on social media, in emails with readers … and I sometimes lose track of where I’ve said what. So I wanted to agree with something TPM Reader XX1 says in this email I flagged. I’m skeptical the White House will follow through on their threats to carry out a new wholesale round of firings, as Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought is threatening. I’m not saying they won’t. They totally might. So this isn’t something I’m relying on or telling you to rely on. I’m just skeptical for two reasons. The first is that this White House doesn’t need a shut down to fire people. Despite the law-breaking it entails, they’ve made clear that, with the Supreme Court’s assistance, they can fire as many people as they want. If they thought it helped them to fire more people, they’d be doing that already; the shutdown provides zero new legal power to fire anyone.
“Want” is the key word here.
Join To Read MoreFrom a federal employee. TPM Reader XX1, initials anonymized and portion of letter which notes government agency removed for obvious reasons …
I’m writing here to concur with your last couple blog posts on the shutdown. You put into prose accurately what I’ve been trying to get across to so many local political allies who overthink irrelevant minutia. They focus on the timing of the fight, on the details of the substance, etc. None of that matters, as has been apparent to me all along. This is, in fact, an arm-wrestling match, purely a battle over power. The Democrats’ goal should be to extract a material concession that resonates to the broad masses as a “public good,” and they are doing that with ACA subsidies. Successfully extracting a concession is a material victory that slightly restores just a little bit of balance of power, and blocks Trump’s effort at totalitarian control.
None of us knows how long this will go, and it can easily take on a life of its own where in a couple weeks we still have no off-ramp for either side, and it’s beyond what anyone involved intended. THAT’S OK. Congressional Democrats’ responsibility is to embrace that, and improvise on the fly on the politics and substance in working toward a final resolution. If this is a weeks-long battle, that’s OK. Finally, there is nothing more self-damaging Trump can do than to carry out his threat of mass layoffs. This, too, is something to many of my local political compatriots fail to read correctly, as they fear it, just as Trump intends. I keep pointing out that this is a disaster for him, because it’s immediate blowback in his face as transparent damage to the public purely out of personal vengeance. Too many people have let themselves become hypnotized into irrational fear…incluidng, for the entire year until now, Congressional Democratic leaders.
We need a climactic fight to establish a new equilibrium. This might not prove to be it. But it’s one required step.
Early this afternoon, multiple federal departments and agencies sent out an email to employees blaming the impending shutdown on the Democrats. I didn’t see one from every department and agency. (I saw with my own eyes the versions at Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Justice and the National Science Foundation. TPM’s Emine Yücel separately saw one from the Department of Commerce.) I saw enough to see that they were going out government-wide. They were all identical. So, unsurprisingly, they were produced at the White House or possibly the General Services Administration. It was a top-down decision. “Unfortunately,” it says, “Democrats are blocking this Continuing Resolution in the Senate due to unrelated policy demands.” The website of the Department of Housing and Urban Development currently has a pop-up message claiming that the “radical left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people …” This is hardly surprising. Legalities mean nothing to the Trump administration. So following the Hatch Act would almost be quaint.
Meanwhile, as you’ve likely seen, at the much-anticipated convocation of general officers at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Hegseth encouraged generals and admirals who don’t agree with Trump administration policy to resign. In his speech, President Trump announced that he wants to make American cities the “training ground” for the U.S. military.
My take on that is similar to the Hatch Act-violating emails. This isn’t a surprise. It’s exactly what we expect, exactly where we know we already are. There’s a certain sense of foreboding some people have right now about how this shutdown drama, this confrontation, is going to go. And the truth is we don’t know. As I mentioned yesterday, this is why all those general theories of shutdowns don’t make a lot of sense. Each one involves a unique set of players and specific context, what it’s actually about. There’s no such thing as a “shutdown” in the abstract any more than there is an “election.” What matters is who the players are and what’s being fought over. They’re highly dynamic and unpredictable.
All we can really know is why, I at least think, Democrats need to do this. The doctrine of the second Trump administration from its first day has been to dismantle the architecture of the American Republic, annihilate independent sources of power outside the reach of the president. They’ve already succeeded at quite a lot of that within the executive branch. But in the broader national mood, it’s different. They’re rushed, impatient and seeing increased resistance — both in semi-symbolic fights over stuff like bringing the TV networks to heel and even more in the drift and hardening of public opinion, which has turned solidly against them. The message in the areas where they have the power is consistent: We have the power. You don’t. Too bad.
Given all this, the opposition — to be an actual opposition — has to find the sources of power it has at its disposal and use them to their absolute limit. Most of that power, as we’ve discussed, is in the independent sovereignties of the states. The need for votes for “continuing resolutions” to fund the government is basically the only locus of power for the congressional opposition. They not only have to use that power for whatever they can get with it, they need to show there is an opposition out there willing to fight the imposition of a presidential autocracy. If they’re not, who else will have the courage or inclination to take any risks and fight? An opposition requires morale to remain in the fight and endure while its opponents are holding most of the power.
The one point that has resonated most strongly with me in recent months is that there is a consistent pattern with autocratic takeovers that succeed. They are imposed by presidents or prime ministers who, for contingent reasons, are actually very popular. Fujimori in Peru, Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey, Bukele in El Salvador. The pattern is the same. Either they tamed inflation or a crime wave or removed a deeply unpopular government. They did it in a window of overwhelming popularity. Trump is not popular. He’s actually quite unpopular. So I don’t think he can manage this if the opposition is concerted. So this is the right thing, really the essential thing, to do. A necessary but not sufficient condition of turning back this threat. So it’s essential to fight this. And what happens happens.
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I have a growing sense of optimism about the political situation in the United States. But it’s not necessarily because I’m more confident about the outcomes, though I am that too. It is more that on a number of fronts the actual fight is coming into the open. Who knows who wins or gets the better of it. But the things the Trump opposition is actually talking about are getting put on the table. And they’re at the center of the table, with everyone watching. They’re fights to get attention and attention outside of the normal political space.
The Jimmy Kimmel Brouhaha is one example of this, which I discussed earlier this week. The impending budget fight is another. I’m also seeing more and more examples of Democrats telling corporations, laws firms and others that Trump won’t be in power forever, and that when that time comes they’ll need to answer for conspiring with President Trump against the American people. Minority Leader Jeffries made clear that when Democrats are in power they’ll hold people accountable for participating in Trump’s pay-to-play schemes.
Join To Read MoreKate and Josh talk Kimmel’s return, the corruption of the White House and how regular people keep smacking down Trump’s authoritarian attacks.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
For the last 48 hours or so, Trump’s toadies and martinets have been putting on a performance which is one half gaslighting, one half effort to create a bit of distance between FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s extortion and ABC’s decision to (now-temporarily) pull Jimmy Kimmel off the air. Then, late last night, President Trump busted all of their knees by insisting it was him doing it all along and says now he’s going to go to war even harder against ABC/Disney for having the temerity to bring Kimmel back after (Trump claims) telling him they canceled his show.
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Tickets for TPM’s 25th Anniversary Celebration — a two-day event featuring a live show Thursday, Nov. 6th and a big party Friday Nov. 7th — are on sale now and going fast. Get yours now! Included in the price of admission is a live show, admission to our 25th anniversary party, food on both nights, and open bars on both nights. If you’re a fan of TPM, you won’t want to miss it.
Read MoreThis is a post about TPM. So that’s just as a heads-up. It’s not about the news of the moment. It’s inwardly looking about this website.
On Friday, I did an interview tied to our 25th anniversary celebration. It should be out closer to the date of the anniversary in mid-November. Toward the end of the conversation, the interviewer asked me if I thought TPM had stayed true to the vision I originally had for it and, if so, what that was. I began by referencing a point I’d made earlier in the interview which was that it couldn’t be true to the original vision because I didn’t have any clear sense of what I was trying to do at the beginning. But pretty quickly I did. When I thought about the site and its continuity I realized there are three things that make up TPM. Oddly, in the interview, I only mentioned two of them. I probably just lost my train of thought. It was toward the end of an hour-long interview. But I wanted to share with you what those three things are.
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