From TPM Reader AB …

I am but one anecdotal data point from Wisconsin, but as a politically engaged liberal in Madison, I’ve had plenty of conversations in the last week that align with your suppositions of how Crowley won.   

While I don’t really identify as a Socialist, I am highly motivated to support ‘socialist’ projects and see them implemented.  I put ‘socialist’ in quotes, because public education, fire dept, and public libraries are all socialist projects — but also pretty basic services. 

That said, for much of the primary, I was all in for Hong — she campaigned relentlessly and leveraged social media deftly, and she was meeting the moment with the piss and vinegar and fight that so many of us crave in this moment. She was also the first and only candidate on the Dem side to take a stand on Data Centers, calling for a 1 year moratorium (ironically, the only candidate in the gubernatorial race to support a 100% ban on data centers was Tom Tiffany’s opponent in the Republican Primary, Andrew Manske). 

Top congressional Democrats on Tuesday pushed back on a new memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) arguing that President Donald Trump can assert executive privilege over communications with advisors even if they do not work at the White House or within the government at all.

“Executive privilege can apply to presidential communications with private advisers so long as the communications relate to official presidential decisionmaking, involve or reflect communications with the President or his direct advisers, and are confidential,” the OLC opinion, published on Monday, reads.

Letters of Marque???

Back in June, The Guardian had a confounding story about drone attacks on Ecuadorian fishing boats for which the Trump administration disclaimed any responsibility. Given the administration’s eagerness to distribute and promote snuff films of its strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, its denial can’t be dismissed out of hand.

Now comes the NYT with a follow-up story with quite a few tantalizing new details and the suggestion — though unproven — that private military contractors, perhaps operating under letters of marque from the administration, may be carrying out the strikes.

In its main advance of the Guardian story, the NYT tracks the movement of a maritime patrol plane based at a military base in El Salvador and registered to a company that lists its address as a private mailbox in a UPS store in Richmond, Virginia. Flight data reviewed by the newspaper showed the plane “flew in the direction of” three Ecuadorian fishing boats in the days before they were attacked . One boat was lost at sea in January, with eight crew still missing and presumed dead.

Air traffic control recordings captured the pilots speaking English with American accents. Fisherman who survived one of the two strikes in March recount being targeted by English-speaking “gringos” wearing matching uniforms with American flag patches who rescued (or captured, depending on your perspective) them and eventually turned them over to Salvadoran authorities.

Unlike the sophisticated drones used in the well-publicized strikes by the Pentagon, the weapons used to attack the Ecuadorian fishing boats have been crude drones fitted with explosives, according to survivors’ accounts.

The real eye-opener in the story is the NYT seriously entertaining the notion that the Trump administration may have issued letters of marque to modern-day privateers who are responsible for the strikes:

The letters, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions, were circulated among various agencies for their input in May and were supposed to complement the Pentagon’s boat strike campaign in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea.

Discussions around letters of marque seemed to stall around June, and the Pentagon would not say whether any have been issued. When asked about the attacks on the fishing boats, it said, “We have no knowledge of, nor were U.S. Southern Command forces involved in, the incidents described.”

On this basis, the NYT sought comment about the Ecuadorian strikes from Erik Prince, of Blackwater fame. “[N]either Erik Prince nor any entities affiliated with him have any relation to these events,” a Prince spokesperson said.

First at TPM: Abrego Garcia Wins a Point on Appeal

This is a small development, but it’s not been previously reported. Yesterday, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals granted Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s motion to dismiss one aspect of the Trump DOJ’s appeal of his case.

The reason it’s worth noting is because of what the Trump DOJ had tried to do: impose its own deadline on U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis for her to rule on two of its pending motions in the case. If she didn’t rule by the DOJ’s own deadline, it would deem the motions constructively denied and appealed this. Xinis took umbrage at the Trump DOJ trying to set her court’s schedule, but DOJ appealed anyway on the basis her not ruling fast enough for its liking.

With minimal comment, the appeals court granted Abrego Garcia’s motion to dismiss this part of the DOJ appeal because it lacked jurisdiction since there was no final order from Xinis to be appealed.

In a period when appeals court judges have not always had the back of district judges confronting Trump administration lawlessness, this is one exception.

Mass Deportation Watch

• ICE plans to outfit officers with special gloves called Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter (G.L.O.V.E.) that can deliver painful electric shocks intended to gain compliance from combative individuals, the AP reports.
• Virginia: An ICE agent brandished a weapon at a U.S. citizen while falsely claiming she had tried to run over federal agents in her vehicle, the woman’s videos show. In response, DHS fell back on its usual refrain, claiming she “attempted to harm officers by weaponizing her vehicle against them—all in an attempt to help illegal aliens get away.”
• Texas: Bulldozing underway within Big Bend National Park for border wall construction.
• Illinois: A batch of 10 criminal complaints against federal agents stemming from Operation Midway Blitz were filed this week with Chicago police.

MUST READ: Trump’s New Census Scheme

TPM’s Layla A. Jones and Josh Kovensky: A New Draft Rule for the Census Seeks Sweeping Changes to How Political Power Is Allocated

TL;DR: John Light has the key takeaways from the TPM exclusive.

2026 Midterms: Generational Change

Rep. John Larson (D-CT), 78, who has served in the House since 1999, lost his re-election bid in the Democratic primary to former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, 47.

“Bronin’s win makes Larson the seventh Democratic House incumbent to lose reelection this year; six lost to younger challengers,” the WaPo notes.

Trump DOJ Watch: Jeanine Pirro Edition

• Reflecting Pool: The White House is pressing the Justice Department to bring a new misdemeanor case against David Hearn on bogus charges of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, the WSJ reports, even though D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro already dismissed the original case against Hearn and told a court that it wasn’t vandalism but a botched job by the pool-lining contractor.
• D.C. Special Grand Jury: In an unusual move, Pirro has empaneled a special grand jury to be overseen by one of her own loyalists, Steven Vandervelden, the WaPo reports. It is unclear what the new special grand jury will be investigating, but the ability of a special grand jury (unlike a regular grand jury) to issue a report at the conclusion of its investigation means it could be used as a tool to “name and shame” Trump foes, offering a way to placate the president in instances where there’s insufficient evidence to bring a criminal case.

Trump Contests Sanctions in IRS Case

President Trump, two of his sons, his business, and his lawyers have asked the 11th Circuit to block the sanctions imposed by the judge who oversaw his collusive lawsuit against the IRS, which spawned the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund and the unlawful grant of IRS immunity.

In a scathing overnight filing, the Trump-related parties savaged U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams of Miami for sloppiness, haste, legal error, and exceeding her sanctions power:

The Sanctions Order was riddled with multiple errors. It materially misquoted Cooter & Gell v. Hartmarx Corp., misidentified both the court and dissenting judge in Keepseagle v. Perdue, used the wrong docket number for Jackson v. United States, gave the wrong citation for Trump v. Clinton, cited the syllabus rather than the majority opinion in Seila Law, misidentified a Wall Street Journal author and URL, and repeatedly mangled case names, government titles, and source attributions.

They are seeking to put the sanctions order on hold while their appeal proceeds.

$900 Million and Counting

WaPo:

The Trump administration plans to spend at least $900 million for construction projects on the White House grounds, a significantly larger price tag than has been previously reported and one that would be covered primarily by taxpayers, according to records reviewed by The Washington Post.

Instead of securing money directly from Congress, the records show, the administration has pieced together funding from other agencies and private donors and directed it to a little-known account that typically holds a few million dollars for routine maintenance of the executive mansion.

Unpacking the Air Force One Debacle

Garrett Graff, the preeminent reporter on continuity of government, calls Trump’s secret flight out of Turkey “a Russian nesting doll of scandal, one that exposes at least five levels of scandal, ranging from foreign influence to corruption to national security compromises to inappropriate geopolitical gambles.”

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Having discussed the results and prediction markets, let me address a different question I saw brought up last night. If the polls have been this wildly off in Wisconsin and Michigan, how can we be confident that Democrats are set for a banner showing in November?

The best answer to this is that you shouldn’t be confident, or, at the very least, certain of anything. But the comparison is mostly apples to oranges. Midterm elections are fairly high turnout affairs and we have lots of historical data about turnout patterns. So the composition of the electorate is fairly predictable. Fairly. Primaries are quite different. It’s a bit like saying you have a hundred kids who are going to be in the school lunch room — a table with the jocks, one with the nerds, one each for the goths (dating myself), the richies and the stoners — and they’re going to vote for student body president. But now let’s say only 20 students are going to show up. It’s a very different result if it’s the goths and nerds who show up vs. the jocks and the richies.

Now-failed Minnesota gubernatorial candidate and prolific 2020 election denier Mike Lindell lost his bid for Minnesota governor on Tuesday night to the state’s Republican House Speaker Lisa Demuth, who received 44.7% of the vote. Predictably, however, Lindell now has some questions about the results of his primary loss, and what he claims could be “anomalies” in the results. 

We went late into the evening waiting for absentee ballots in Milwaukee County last night. But Milwaukee County executive David Crowley will become the Democratic nominee for governor in Wisconsin, despite it seeming like a certainty that Francesca Hong would be the winner. As of yesterday, every recent poll had shown Hong at least 20 points ahead. The two most recent public polls had her 22 and 25 points ahead. (The most recent poll from Crowley’s own camp showed Hong 19 points ahead!) We’ll come back to the question of why these polls have been so wildly off. But there was a different casualty from the night’s results that I personally enjoyed witnessing because it’s a hobbyhorse or pet peeve of mine — and it seems to be as well of the numbers crunchers/data nerds whose Twitter feeds I watch on elections night. I’m talking here about the “prediction markets.”

John Light has a run-down of results from last night’s major primaries in South Carolina, Wisconsin and Minnesota in this morning’s Brief. The evening saw DSA-backed progressive Francesca Hong lose her bid to become Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate in an upset, prominent election denier Mike Lindell lose his own gubernatorial bid in Minnesota, and more surprises.

Check out John’s post for the TLDR on a busy primary night.

A Very Important Story (With Some Wonky Details)

TPM’s Layla A. Jones and Josh Kovensky published a major story yesterday outlining a new, draft Commerce Department rule that is circulating within the Trump administration. Our story includes documents that TPM is the first outlet to make public.

The rule aims to do two things: exclude undocumented immigrants and other types of non-citizens from the census (in violation of the Constitution), and stop the census from collecting most demographic data on Americans.

These changes would have several impacts, the enormity of which is hard to overstate:

• They would likely change allocations of power in Congress, shifting it toward red states. After the decennial census, the federal government apportions congressional seats to states. A census that doesn’t count many categories of non-citizens would see fewer congressional seats apportioned to blue states, and, as a result, more apportioned to red states.
• They would likely change the Electoral College, again shifting power toward red states. The Electoral College is based on each state’s congressional allotment. Fewer seats for blue states in Congress would mean blue-state voters have less power to elect the president.
• They would eliminate a crucial source of data. By not collecting data on race and other demographics, the administration would eliminate information that is critical both for the government, as it distributes congressionally allocated funds to various communities meant to receive those funds, and to researchers trying to better understand America.
• They would make it harder to challenge maps that are gerrymandered based on race. Data on race is a critical tool for plaintiffs looking to prove that state governments have illegally carved up their congressional districts to dilute the power of minority voters. “You have to prove discrimination, you have to prove the fact that you have been discriminated against,” Walter Schwarm, a California state demographer, told TPM. “But if you don’t have race and ethnic data on the ground, how can you prove that you’re being discriminated against?”

Another Big Primary Night

Last night saw voters pick candidates in several states, including Minnesota, South Carolina, and the swing state of Wisconsin.

• Primaries are very hard to poll, in part because pollsters try to model a comparatively small and shifting electorate. It’s effectively taking a guess about who might vote in the primary, which can change a lot from year to year. Even so, this year has seen some headline-grabbing polling misses, including in Michigan last week, where Haley Stevens came much closer to Abdul El-Sayed than polls were predicting. Last night saw that phenomenon repeat again, in the closely-watched Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary, and also in the Minnesota Republican gubernatorial primary.
• In Minnesota, Mike Lindell lost his bid for governor! More on that below.
• In Wisconsin, Milwaukee County executive David Crowley squeaked out a victory in the Democratic gubernatorial primary over the DSA-endorsed Francesca Hong, who has become a kind of media obsession. Gov. Tony Evers (D) campaigned for Crowley, believing him to be a more competitive candidate against Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI), the very right-wing member of Congress Republicans are running for governor. The race, in which over 600,000 votes were cast, came down to about 3,000.
• Rebecca Cooke, a Democrat endorsed by figures in both the party establishment and the left, won a primary to face Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R) in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, which covers a large, western chunk of the state.
• Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), the man who called for “Marshall Law” after Jan. 6, yet has had a hot and cold relationship with Trump, beat out a very crowded field and advanced to a runoff against Sen. Darline Graham (R) in South Carolina.

Tabs

• A U.S. District Court judge expanded a ruling blocking the Trump administration from implementing one of the president’s executive orders on voting ahead of the midterms. Judge Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts had previously ordered the administration not to move forward on figuring out how the U.S. Postal Service would implement the directive that it only send mail ballots to administration-approved voters. Her initial order applied to 23 states that were plaintiffs in the case; yesterday she expanded it nationwide. Trump has appealed this case to the Supreme Court, which should weigh in any day now.
• The MIT Technology Review has a fascinating deep dive on how conspiracy theories about the “censorship-industrial complex” became endemic among right-wing influencers and the Trump administration.

Man of the Hour

It’s Mike Lindell, who polling showed to be a strong contender in his bid for Minnesota governor, even as state Republican leaders strongly opposed his candidacy. Alas, he wasn’t. We’ll see if he understands a global conspiracy to be at fault here.

Are We at War?

Yes, with Iran preparing for the long haul.

Pillow magnate and election denier Mike Lindell lost a high-stakes Minnesota GOP gubernatorial primary on Tuesday, despite receiving an endorsement from President Donald Trump last month. He also lost the Minnesota Republican Party’s endorsement in the race in June to former health care executive and army veteran, Kendall Qualls.

The Democratic Wisconsin governor’s primary is looking a bit like a replay of the near upset in Michigan but with a twist. It looks like the more conventional Democrat (Crowley) is going to beat the progressive insurgent (Hong).

It’s too close to call. But as of about 10:15 p.m. ET it doesn’t look like Francesca Hong is getting the number of votes in the counties she needs them in to win. The current totals show David Crowley with less than a one point margin. But if you look at where the votes are coming from and how many have been counted, it’s probably not that close. One potential wildcard is that if this is really close, Milwaukee County, counts its absentee ballots last, and a non-trivial number were likely cast before Crowley even got back into race. So who knows how that would play out. Assuming Crowley wins this is going to launch a complicated debate about the degree to which this was a pretty gargantuan polling error vs. whether there was just a big, big consolidation of the vote for Crowley in the final days. Either way, the odds currently seem to favor Crowley.

Meanwhile, and as expected, the Trump-backed election denier Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI) — who was really a major over-achiever about his 2020 election denialism, both voting against certifying President Biden’s win in key states and signing on to a failed lawsuit to overturn the results in his own — easily won the Republican nomination for governor in Wisconsin tonight. Khaya Himmelman has more on his devotion to the cause here.

Update 10:31 PM ET: The current results and where the race is likely to end up have tightened a bit. But what looks to be the remaining vote still seems to favor Crowley, just less clearly.

Update II 11:03 PM ET: This race has gotten much, much tighter. The result is much more in doubt. It looks like it will come down to absentee ballots in Milwaukee County, with the uncertainty created by Crowley briefly not being in the race.

Late-Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) sister Sen. Darline Graham Nordone (R-SC) and Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) will both advance to an Aug. 25 runoff to determine which Republican will appear on the ballot in November to replace Graham after his unexpected death earlier this summer. The Associated Press projected Graham’s sister would advance early in the night, but it was unclear if Norman or Rep. Russell Fry (R-SC) would clear the hurdle until moments ago when the AP determined Norman would advance as well. None of the candidates were able to secure the majority of the vote to avoid a runoff.

Nancy Mace Mixes Her Faux Feminism With Fresh Islamophobia

In today’s edition of Where Things Stand, I want to unpack a few examples of the Republican midterms messaging strategy that we’re tracking as the party grasps at increasingly dangerous and racist threads to campaign on in lieu of any cohesive policy platform.

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Just a short time ago TPM reporters Layla Jones and Josh Kovensky exclusively published the new draft rule by which the Trump White House aims to violate the Constitution by changing who gets counted in the federal census and thus the number of representatives allotted to each state. It aims to drastically shift power to smaller and more rural states — in other words, the MAGA heartlands.

It’s a great piece and builds on topics TPM has followed closely for 25 years.

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The Trump administration is planning to dramatically reshape the data the Census Bureau collects, setting the stage for an audacious effort to curtail crucial information used in voting rights complaints and revive a right-wing effort, pursued in Trump’s first term, to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count used to determine how many members of Congress represent each state in Congress. 

It’s sitting right there in front of us. But it’s still worth noting. The political stories of the moment are heavily geared to the long-tail effects of Donald Trump’s antic and ego-driven escapades: the decision to make the Reflecting Pool “American flag blue”; the eagerness to get a plane as a present (which he could take home with him after his presidency) from the royal family of Qatar. There are countless examples. In each case, the initial driver is the president’s personal cupidity and grandiosity, things which have no relation to any aspect of public policy or really any public support. They begin unknown and pretty quickly end up unpopular. He does them because he can, with the Supreme Court having removed basically all of the immediate brakes on a president’s power. But those initials gambits — the hunger for gifts and cash prizes — lead to bad news stories, legal impediments, or often technological snafus. Those in turn lead to embarrassment, anger, outbursts which repeat the process of bad news stories, legal impediments or technological snafus.

Air Force None

By now, you’ve likely ingested many of the details from the bombshell Washinton Post report on the elaborate security operation and public misinformation campaign to spirit President Trump out of Ankara, Turkey, following last month’s NATO summit in order to avoid a credible threat to his life from Iran.

The entire ruse is remarkable by the historic standards of security theater and continuity of government protocols that have hovered over our political consciousness since the peak tensions of the Cold War nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union.

Especially striking is that White House staff and the press pool who remained on the older model Air Force One that everyone thought Trump was aboard ended up serving as decoys — sitting ducks for whatever scheme Iran had conjured up but ultimately failed in or decided not to execute.

The image we conjure in our minds of Trump boarding Air Force One on one side of the plane before secretly exiting the other side into a waiting catering truck is indelible. But I’m just as taken by what happened after Trump’s secret flight landed in the U.K.

Once on the ground, Trump had to be secretly returned to the older Air Force One, then make a show of disembarking from it before boarding the new Qatari Force One that he took across the Atlantic to Joint Base Andrews. As you may know, the Air Force One call sign only applies when the president is aboard the aircraft, but I’m taking some liberties with the term here for the sake of clarity.

“It’s not clear how Trump moved from the C-32A to the legacy Air Force One after landing,” the WaPo noted.

The NYT has a more robust account of this part of the operation: “Before that, unbeknown to reporters, Mr. Trump was brought by vehicle from the third plane that he had arrived on to the older Air Force One, boarded it through a different entrance and strode down the step from the upper left-side door as he would typically do, according to the U.S. official.”

Here is he pretending to have just flown in on the older Air Force One:

Here he is walking between the old and new Air Force One aircraft:

This entire episode would be notable in its own right, but the NYT’s subsequent reporting on the ostensible version of what happened — the old Air Force One was used because the new Qatari-gifted one lacked sufficient defense capabilities given the Iranian threat — gave rise to a leak investigation and highly controversial subpoenas to NYT reporters.

Those subpoenas have since been withdrawn, but it’s a bit of a mindfuck to try to piece together that related saga in light of this new information. Was the administration, for instance, agitated not just that the new Air Force One was being denigrated by the NYT’s reporting but that the NYT was onto the secret mission to extricate Trump from Turkey? We don’t know if the NYT had additional information on the ruse that it didn’t publish, though its followup to yesterday’s WaPo exclusive didn’t betray any previous unpublished knowledge of the operation.

The Corruption: Trump DOJ Edition

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis sharply criticized principal associate deputy attorney general Trent McCotter in dropping criminal fraud charges against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani and several of his co-defendants.

Judge Garaufis largely (but not entirely) granted the Trump DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case, but, in a withering 47-page order, he shellacked political appointee McCotter for pushing the dismissal through without consultation with investigators:

On the current record, McCotter appears to have eschewed the professional opinions of innumerable officials from various federal offices and replaced them with his singular judgment. The fact that McCotter came to this decision largely in collaboration with defense counsel, and seemingly without input from the FBI and SEC agents who investigated the alleged misconduct, or the attorneys from the Department, SEC, and U.S. Attorney’s Office who brought the case, appears to be highly unusual.

Garaufis also flamed McCotter for claiming the indictment was the handiwork of a politicized Biden DOJ:

McCotter appears to be accusing officials across four different government offices of bringing a detailed 54-page, 5-count indictment out of spite. However, he has not provided a scintilla of evidence to suggest that the timing of the unsealing of the indictment, or the charging decisions, in this case was politically motivated. McCotter’s baseless assertion is unbecoming of his office.

The dismissal of the case against Adani, essentially a foreign bribery case of the kind that the Trump DOJ has de-emphasized pursuing, came after Adani retained Bob Giuffra and Jamie McDonald (who Trump later nominated as Manhattan U.S. attorney) of Sullivan & Cromwell (which is representing Trump personally in other matters). In a presentation to McCotter at the Justice Department, Giuffra reportedly said that Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy if the charges were dropped, according to CBS News.

Trump DOJ Watch

• ICYMI: The Southern Poverty Law Center’s motion for vindictive prosecution was denied Friday by the trial judge, who declined to look past federal prosecutors in Alabama to Main Justice or to the White House in assessing improper motives for bringing the politicized case.
• Reflecting Pool: Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) will make an effort to extract information from the Trump DOJ about the charging decision in the since-dismissed Reflecting Pool case against David Hearn, Greg Sargent reports.
• OLC Dramatically Expands Claimed Scope of Executive Privilege: The president can assert executive privilege over communications with “private advisers … so long as they relate to official presidential decisionmaking, involve or reflect communications with the President or his direct advisers, and are confidential,” the Office of Legal Counsel asserts in a new memo flagged by Punchbowl.

Photo of the Day

Former Trump lawyer Emil Bove swears in former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche as attorney general in front of President Trump in the Oval Office, Aug. 10, 2026:

🇺🇸 @AGToddBlanche has officially been sworn in as the United States Attorney General today in the Oval Office. pic.twitter.com/0PfeWYLDqT

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 10, 2026

Painful Flashback Alert

NYT: How a Counterintelligence Inquiry Into Trump’s Russia Ties Was Derailed by Rod Rosenstein’s Appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel

Mass Deportation Watch

• Politico: Families, lawyers and judges describe a year of frantic emergency cases after a Trump administration memo reversed decades of interpretation of federal law and allowed ICE to begin detaining without bond hearings people who have lived in the U.S. for years. Federal judges have since ruled against the Trump detention policy more than 16,000 times.
• Arizona Daily Star: “Conditions are deteriorating to dangerous levels at a decommissioned hotel in Equatorial Guinea, where dozens of immigrants have been imprisoned since the U.S. deported them to the African nation, without warning or due process, the immigrants and their attorneys say.”
• The American Prospect: An anti-sex-trafficking nonprofit in Utah whose founder resigned in 2023 after multiple women accused him of trafficking and sexual abuse has won a $244 million no-bid federal contract to provide legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children in government custody.
• NYT: New Evidence Shows Agents Using Slurs, Bolstering Profiling Claims

Quote of the Day

Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, writing about President Trump’s new birthright citizenship executive orders:

The Citizenship Clause was indeed written to repudiate Dred Scott, the 1857 Supreme Court decision holding that Black people could never be citizens. But the Reconstruction Congress did not swap one caste rule for a narrower one; it extended the promise to “every free-born person in this land.” The idea wasn’t just to retroactively protect “the babies of slaves”; it was to prospectively forestall all future efforts to deny citizenship based on whatever other non-sovereignty-based criteria might be politically popular in any given moment. 

The Pyrocene Keeps Pyrocening

July was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous United States, nudging past July 2012 and July 1936. The average temperature of 76.9F was more than three degrees above the 20th century average.

In completely unrelated news, the Swiss Re Institute warned today that wildfire risk is the fastest-growing weather peril globally. 

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Mike Lindell’s Big Moment

Amid the wall-to-wall coverage of Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong’s personal evolution or possible lack thereof on the topic of Thanksgiving, you may have missed that the Republican Party is on the cusp of picking two quite extreme gubernatorial nominees on the same evening.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI) faces little opposition and will become Republicans’ nominee for governor in his home state tonight. As Khaya Himmelman writes for TPM, he is an election denier who has put in the work, not just objecting in Congress against certifying the results of the 2020 election and signing onto Ken Paxton’s lawsuit that year to throw out the results, but continuing to insist that the 2020 election saw “improprieties.” (If you’re curious where he stands on such “Woke I” issues as “Thanksgiving,” he was also one of only 14 Republicans in Congress to vote against making Juneteenth a federal holiday.) This is, to be fair, why Democrats in the state are so concerned about the fate of their own ticket.

I am really here, however, to talk about Minnesota, where Mike Lindell, the man who visited Trump with a proposal for martial law in the days after Jan. 6 and who continues to boost the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the year in which our politics has become forever trapped. Tonight, Lindell has a real shot at becoming Republicans’ Minnesota gubernatorial candidate.

This is in part the result of the field splitting three ways. Minnesota state House Speaker Lisa DeMuth has the money behind her, but the state GOP endorsed another candidate, businessman Kendall Qualls.

Trump, however, endorsed Lindell, and primary voters’ hearts appear to be with the pillow salesman and conspiracy theorist. Poll after poll has shown him ahead, though it is unclear how reliable each of these surveys is. Lindell has faced a series of bizarre and sometimes dumb scandals given that he is, after all, Mike Lindell. The latest is an accusation that he violated campaign finance law by handing out MyPillows on the campaign trail. More seriously, the state GOP continues to question whether Lindell, who previously lived in Texas, even meets the residency requirements for the ballot.

“We’ve never had a party challenge the residency of one of its serious candidates,” Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College, summed it up for the local ABC affiliate. “And then you add the fact that this candidate has been endorsed by the president of that party. It’s really an extraordinary situation.”

Whoever wins this race will face Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) after current governor Tim Walz (D) decided not to run again. The Minnesota primaries so far have seen record-breaking turnout, the secretary of state said yesterday.

Darline Graham Gets a Challenger

South Carolina will hold a special election today to replace Sen. Lindsey Graham (R), whose sister, Darline Graham Nordone, has filled his seat after his death and is running to fill it for a full term. She faces a crowded field of other candidates. Two — presumably the Trump-endorsed Graham and one other — will advance to a runoff. The field contains some familiar names.

• Ralph Norman, who — TPM broke the news — privately urged the White House to invoke “Marshall Law” following the 2020 election, is one. He was crushed in his bid to become the state’s governor earlier this year.
• Former state governor, congressman, and hiker Mark Sanford is also running.
• As is Rep. Russell Fry, who in 2022 unseated Rep. Tom Rice, a Republican critic of Trump who was among the 10 to vote to impeach him.
• Whoever wins will run in November against Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who has previously run against Rep. Nancy Mace (R).

Tabs

• Donald Trump was smuggled out of a UK-bound plane and onto another in a catering crate, leaving Turkey in a military jet last month amid an attempt on his life from Iran.
• After supporting some industry priorities last year, a handful of pro-crypto Senate Democrats have balked at its latest demand.
• The DOJ’s bid to get states’ voter roles has lost in court 21 times in a row, Reuters reports.

Man of the Hour

It’s Max Miller, who we’ve covered a lot here, and who, in the face of abuse and domestic violence accusations is now running in a seat that the Cook Political Report has shifted all the way from “likely Republican” to “toss up.” Democrats are now spending seriously on his opponent, Brian Poindexter. The White House urged Republicans not to criticize Miller after it became clear he wasn’t going to quit, Politico reported yesterday.

Are We at War?

Yes, with Trump attempting to one-up Iran by demanding it pay damages to the U.S.

Of Course Dr. Phil Is Involved

There hasn’t been a ton of new reporting on a suspiciously-timed and blatantly Trump-linked project unfolding in a remote area of Greenland, so I wanted to use Where Things Stand today to help pull some of these threads together. It’s a convoluted story, of which we don’t have the entire picture, but it involves a Texas oil company with close ties to Trump’s imperialist visions in Greenland and, somehow, Dr. Phil.