Here’s an interesting little detail behind the headlines. The medical news website StatNews has a whole package of pieces out today about the new NIH policy restricting so-called “indirects” (see this post) to 15%. One of their pieces is about 22 states going to court today to block that new directive. Unsurprisingly, the 22 states are all either blue states or ones that currently have Democratic governors or AGs. Again, no surprise. But as I discussed over the weekend, those grants are very important, for example, not just to the University of Alabama but the State of Alabama generally. The state’s junior senator Katie Britt talked to local media over the weekend saying, albeit in the politest terms to President Trump, that it’s super important to keep these funds flowing and that she looks “forward to working with incoming HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to accomplish this vital mission.”
I only knew knew about Britt’s velvet pushback because of a tip from a TPM Reader. I’m pretty confident there are similar reports from other senators and representatives in similar positions. As Philip Bump notes here, NIH funding in red states is more likely to go to colleges and universities than in blue states. But it’s the pattern I want to highlight: blue states going to the courts and red states (or at least their political stakeholders) trying to work directly with the administration. As I said, I don’t think this will survive as an across-the-board policy. There are too many pro-Trump or Trump-adjacent stakeholders affected. But it’s a view toward a different kind of politics or state we could be heading toward: cash and prizes for supporters and nothing for opponents.
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This is kind of a secondary issue. But it’s important to focus on for a number of reasons. In the past, generally speaking, you could use formal communications and background briefings from federal law enforcement, within important parameters, as a guide to the state of an investigation. It’s a given that they would be sure to make you think that whoever they thought was guilty was definitely guilty. They could also be relied on to speak in the institutional interest of their department or agency. But for a general understanding of what an investigation had uncovered, you could learn a lot from it, so long as these critical points of skepticism were borne in mind. Federal law enforcement, certainly off the record, could also often provide some constraint or filter on what the administration was saying. My point isn’t to romanticize the old system. But it was, from a journalistic perspective, often a key source of information.
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I’ve written several times over the last few days not only about the scourge of political violence which we must not only denounce but be genuinely against in every way. Notwithstanding my own personal inclination to say little of the dead for a respectful period, I want to note a particular dynamic that the right is creating in the reign of firing terror it’s unleashed in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. On X over the last few days, countless numbers of high-profile right-wing accounts’ feeds are made up almost entirely of screen grabs of random people’s reactions to Kirk’s murder and demands that they be fired from their jobs. In many cases the demands are heeded and then that fact is triumphantly posted as well.
Needless to say, when people do this they’re not only trying to get these individuals fired but are also unleashing a wave of harassment, doxxing and possibly worse. It’s all intentional. Sometimes the reactions they’re highlighting are legitimately gross, even awful. More often they’re just rude or unkind. And in many cases they’re simply not sufficiently reverent or respectful. I’ve seen a number of cases where it’s simply saying explicitly that the killing was wrong but also all the very real reasons why Kirk’s role in our public life was bad, malignant, destructive, etc. It runs the gamut.
JoinThis 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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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.
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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.
JoinKate 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.
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.
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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.
JoinFrom 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.