During a Cabinet meeting at Camp David on Friday, President Donald Trump touted growing “investment” into the U.S. since he took office.

“There’s never been anything like it from the standpoint of investment into our country,” Trump told reporters and members of his administration. “It’s five to six times higher than anybody has ever seen, than any other country, not just us, has ever had.”

Part of a diatribe about the economy which included a segment about his tariffs, the president was likely referring at least in part to the several trillions of dollars in foreign investment commitments his White House announced beginning last year after Trump leveraged threats of historically high tariffs as a bargaining chip with various countries. (The president employed equally aggressive tactics to elicit financial commitments and expensive gifts from U.S. companies including tech giants Apple and Nvidia.) There’s even a whole page on the White House website titled, simply, “Investments,” touting $10.7 billion in U.S. and foreign investment commitments beneath pulsating text that reads “The Trump Effect.”

The webpage frames the numbers as if they’re dollars already spent. But in many cases, they aren’t. 

“The Trump approach remains to be seen,” Ryan Mulholland, a senior international economic policy fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, told TPM. 

A year ago, international trade experts and economists told TPM that many foreign governments were playing Trump. Today, some investment agreements are already underway, while others have virtually no mechanism to be executed at all. It remains to be seen whether Trump’s stick approach to foreign economic relations will send real dollars flowing to U.S. companies and workers — or whether it’s just one more way for Trump to enrich himself, his family and companies allied with the president.

‘Where do these deals leave us?’

New money coming from foreign governments to the U.S. is up compared to last year, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. And commitments for 2026 made in 2025 are much higher than those made in 2024. But they’re not the highest in history. New foreign investment commitments were nearly $20 billion higher under former President Joe Biden in 2022. And their impact on U.S. prosperity is much more of a mixed bag.

There’s no indication that new foreign investment in the U.S. stems from Trump’s trade deals, according to available federal data. And most deal-related boosts won’t show up in the most recent figures from the BEA. What is apparent in the data, though, are high-tech investments into the AI industry — new investments that are separate from Trump’s trade policy agreements, a late June research paper from the Federal Reserve showed.

The economic hallmark of Trump’s second presidential term are his tariffs, which his administration has said are aimed at correcting long-running imbalances between the U.S. and its trading partners. One of his attempts at correction — to levy blanket tariffs using a 1970s era law — was struck down by the Supreme Court. A second tariff scheme using a different provision was blocked by a lower court, too. Small businesses are suing Trump right now to overturn his administration’s third attempt at reordering global trade through tariffs, which SCOTUS ruled were a tax on the American people. All the while, Trump and his officials are hammering home the idea that the president’s savvy salesmanship has saved a failing American economy.

“I think other countries have largely figured out that they can give Trump a sort of headline that he likes, and in exchange win all of the details of a trade deal,” Mulholland said. 

“Where do these deals leave us? Are we in a better position to create prosperity for everyday people?
Are we in a position to work with our partners and allies around the world to solve the challenges that impact people’s lives? I think on both of those scores,” Mulholland continued, “Trump’s very sort of short-term, zero sum kind of view of trade relationships has hurt us.”

Trump is prepared to act if foreign governments fail to uphold their agreement terms, White House spokesman Kush Desai told TPM in an email.

“President Trump means what he says, and he has never hesitated to leverage the might of the American economy to hold trading partners accountable to their agreed-upon commitments,” Desai said.

Meeting Trade Commitments Will Prove ‘Very Difficult’ for Most Countries

Japan agreed to invest $550 billion in U.S. manufacturing sectors including semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and the shipbuilding industry with special financing provisions that mean Japan will pay for the projects at little cost to America. That deal, along with commitments on U.S. tech and manufacturing investments from Taiwan and shipbuilding from South Korea, has progressed the most.

“I guess the only place where we’ve seen some action is really on Japan’s commitments. “The conditions are [once] the project is approved, the Japanese government is obligated to provide financing for it,” Greg Auclair, a statistician and researcher at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told TPM. “That’s a very small list right now.”

Already, Japan and Taiwan have poured about $75 billion into the U.S., Auclair said,  though he noted that opaque commitment terms and novel financing mechanisms make it harder to know whether those investments are one-to-one correlations with the trade deals.

Auclair co-published a report suggesting foreign governments will have a hard time financing their commitments to the U.S. Auclair showed that even if some countries with commitments to Trump tap significant portions of their investment capacities and turn them toward the U.S., those nations would still struggle to fulfill their pledges over a 10-year timeline.

“I don’t think they will all be fulfilled,” Auclair’s co-author Adnan Mazarei told Politico in January.

Countries would essentially have to rob Peter to pay Paul — reallocating import schema to benefit the U.S. at the expense of other trading partners, selling foreign assets to purchase more American ones, and bumping up against their own debt capacities.  

“Putting everything together,” Auclair told TPM, “it would be possible for them to meet the pledges but very difficult.”

An update to Auclair’s January report will show that the first year of Trump’s presidency saw foreign investment in the U.S. align with the long-run average, he said, pushing back on Trump’s narrative of historic inflows of foreign cash.

In some cases, Trump’s overbearing tactics have pushed countries to take the opposite tack, reducing exposure to the U.S. economy while creating historic trade agreements with other countries. 

The European Union in January closed a deal with several South American countries that’d been more than two decades in the making. The bloc of 27 European countries also closed a “landmark” free trade deal with India in January to protect against growing U.S. trade volatility. A bloc of South American countries are now in talks with Japan, and Canada is diversifying its economy away from the U.S. as evidenced by a recent electric vehicle deal with China.

“So there are a lot of instances where governments are seeking to reduce their exposure to the United States, and that is a direct result of Trump’s belligerence on the world stage,” Mulholland said. 

Future U.S. presidential administrations, he added, will be limited as a result.

“[Other countries’] ability to negotiate kind of new things with the United States,” Mulholland said, “is going to be hamstrung by commitments that they’ve already made to each other in the deals they did to reduce their exposure to the Trump administration.”

This article has been updated to include a statement from the White House.

This article has been updated to correct the amount of new and planned investment from Japan and Taiwan. It is $75 billion. TPM regrets the error. 

ICE’s Round-the-Clock Digital Dragnet

About a month ago, it emerged from upstate New York that the Department of Homeland Security was targeting online critics of ICE by trying to force them to sign a heretofore unheard of “Warning Notice” admitting that their criticisms were unlawful.

Now the Wall Street Journal reports that those cases are just the tip of the iceberg of a larger DHS surveillance program targeting social media users nationwide. As with the previously reported cases, the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility is taking the lead — a dramatic departure from its previous role as internal affairs bureau investigating wrongdoing by ICE agents.

DHS has used, with varying degrees of success, administrative subpoenas and grand jury subpoenas to unmask social media posters, according to the new report.

There are, of course, some actually concerning threats online — and some subsequent convictions — but the scope of DHS surveillance program seems to go well beyond true threats. The WSJ attempts to put some numbers to it (emphases added):

• “To unmask anonymous online critics, DHS has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social-media companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Its agents have tracked down Americans at work and on the road, asking them to sign letters acknowledging their online speech about ICE ‘may’ be a crime.”
• “The notice for OPR’s new threat initiative calls for the monitoring of nearly 20 social sites, including Reddit, Discord, Snapchat and LinkedIn, and the use of public documents such as DMV records and police reports to identify and map key relationships of users who have been flagged as a ‘threat originator.'”
• “OPR has investigated at least 131 incidents of doxxing and threats towards agency personnel between January 2025 and March of this year, according to a court declaration …”
• “DHS sent administrative subpoenas to Reddit for the information of 11 accounts that had posted ‘content critical of federal actions.’ … Reddit determined that these users were engaged in protected activity under the First Amendment and objected to each, the person said, and DHS eventually withdrew the requests.”
• “The Wall Street Journal identified 10 people—nine Americans and one Canadian—who pushed back against DHS’s attempts to unmask them through the two types of subpoenas. Of those, judges have upheld four grand jury subpoenas. No charges have yet been filed in these cases. The agency abandoned three cases, while three more are pending.”

Funding is another tell.

A WSJ analysis found that ICE spending on surveillance technology and consultants surged by 57% year over year to $258 million during Trump’s first full year back in office.

Lawyers told the newspaper that the spike in subpoenas for information on online critics began to spike in September, which coincided with when a new $8 million contract took effect between OPR and a software development firm called Amivero, which subcontracted the work to the global consulting firm Guidehouse.

Both of the previously reported upstate New York cases are apparently products of OPR’s new surveillance program. As Morning Memo noted last month, one of the targets in those two cases, David Streever, filed a lawsuit in D.C. with help from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression alleging that ICE’s OPR violated his First Amendment rights when it went to his home in June and then tracked him down while he was traveling to issue him a “Warning Notice” for a non-threatening but critical email opposing Operation Metro Surge that he sent to then-acting ICE Director Todd M. Lyons.

Streever refused to sign the “Warning Notice.”

Mass Deportation Watch

• Ohio: With their Temporary Protected Status withdrawn, Haitians immigrants are being outfitted with ankle monitors by DHS, the WaPo reports.
• New York: U.S. District Judge Mae A. D’Agostino of Albany struck down the state’s law banning federal officers from wearing masks as a violation of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.
• D.C.: Democratic officials from 24 states and D.C. sued to block DHS from viewing personal details about millions of people receiving anti-poverty aid, Politico reports.

Senate Judiciary to Vote on Blanche

After a few days of delay, Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general looks likely to make it through the Senate Judiciary Committee today, which will stand for all time as a ratification by Senate Republicans of President Trump’s evisceration of the Justice Department and of Blanche’s lawless award of IRS immunity to Trump personally.

One more footnote on the IRS immunity, via the NYT: While the retroactive immunity is limited to the parties to Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS — himself, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization — the lawsuit defines the Trump Organization as the Trump Organization, LLC, and 418 other entities that are not specifically identified. Let that sink in.

More Reflecting Pool Cases Dropped

D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, whose job is in jeopardy for dismissing the highest profile of the bogus Reflecting Pool “vandalism” cases, has also moved to dismiss three other similar cases related to the peeling liner from what she now admits was a  “hasty and botched” renovation job.

MAGA’s Crony Capitalism Comes With A Socialist Twist

The Trump administration has now taken ownership stakes in at least 30 corporations, according to the libertarian CATO Institute, which is closely tracking the new practice:

What is remarkable is that federal corporate ownership is becoming routine under a Republican administration, while a Republican-controlled Congress is not just letting it happen but may even enshrine the practice in statute. 

Republicans warning that communists are taking over the Democratic Party might first ask why their own administration is so eager to have the government acquire pieces of private companies.

As CATO notes, the Biden administration awarded funds to private companies under the same CHIPS and Science Act provisions that the Trump administration is using but without taking equity interests in the companies.

Just $85,000 To Go

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Ethereal Phenomenon

I‘ll stop posting timelapses of the aurora from the @Space_Station when I’m tired of looking at them . . . so basically never! Another unforgettable display of this ethereal phenomenon as it danced beneath us last night, this one even more special as it was shared with… pic.twitter.com/zwVRUHAYzq

— Jessica Meir (@Astro_Jessica) August 3, 2026

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

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

On Tuesday, voters in Kansas will decide whether to make a dramatic change to the process for filling vacancies on the Kansas Supreme Court. For the last 68 years, under state law, a nine-member bipartisan commission has assembled lists of three potential nominees for the governor to choose from. The commission consists of both lawyers and nonlawyers, and it is far more transparent than most systems in place for selecting high court judges: Its interviews of aspiring justices, for example, are livestreamed for the public.

This is a real problem for the state’s Republican culture warriors, who in recent years have become increasingly angry with the court’s decisions on, among other things, abortion access: Back in 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion holding that the state constitution protects residents’ right to access abortion care. In response, the GOP-controlled legislature concocted the Kansas Elections for Supreme Court Justice Amendment, which is, as the name suggests, a constitutional amendment that would abolish the nominating commission and allow the legislature to institute partisan judicial elections instead. 

Supporters of the amendment say it would return political power to the people: Voters, not “attorneys and political insiders,” they argue, should decide who sits on Kansas’s courts. What the amendment is really about is Republican politicians’ desire to restrict abortion rights, and their frustration with both the Kansas Supreme Court, for refusing to let them do so, and also with Kansas voters, who in 2022 ratified the Kansas Supreme Court’s decision by emphatically rejecting a GOP-backed anti-abortion constitutional amendment. 

The legislature’s bet is that in a state that President Donald Trump won by 16 points in 2024, transforming state supreme court seats into explicitly partisan prizes—and infusing the judicial selection process with millions of dollars in dark-money spending—will yield a more conservative Kansas Supreme Court that will do what right-wing activists want.

Republican frustration with the Kansas Supreme Court’s insubordination reached its zenith seven years ago, when the court held in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt that abortion rights are protected by the Kansas Constitution’s guarantee of “inalienable natural rights.” In its opinion, the court emphasized its power to interpret the Kansas Constitution’s promises “independently of the manner in which federal courts interpret corresponding provisions of the United States Constitution.” 

For reproductive rights advocates in the state, both the holding and its legal basis were huge. Only a year earlier, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court had created a solid majority of five anti-abortion justices primed to overturn Roe v. Wade. The result in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt meant that even if Roe fell, Kansans’ abortion rights would remain safe from the conservative legal movement.

Almost immediately after the court decided Hodes & Nauser, Republican lawmakers began pushing to amend the Kansas constitution to explicitly state that it does not protect abortion rights. Eventually, they got a proposal on the ballot in the form of a referendum known as the “Value Them Both” Amendment, which went before voters in August 2022.

Their timing could not have been worse. In June, just two months before Kansans headed to the polls, the U.S. Supreme Court indeed overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. (Kavanaugh indeed joined the five-justice majority.) Support for abortion rights spiked across the country, including in Kansas, where voters responded to Dobbs by turning out in record numbers to defeat the “Value Them Both” Amendment in an 18-point blowout. 

Now, four years after failing to change voters’ minds on abortion rights, Republicans have pivoted to a new strategy: changing the composition of the court that protected those rights in the first place. One group that opposes the current amendment goes by “Vote No (Again) Kansas”—an attempt to remind voters that they already decided the substantive issue, and to urge them not to be fooled by anti-abortion politics repackaged as judicial selection reform.

Republicans, for their part, have not been shy about their motives. In 2022, then-attorney general candidate Kris Kobach called judicial elections “another path” to restricting abortion, and predicted that instituting them would allow conservatives to “slowly and quietly” overhaul the Kansas Supreme Court. In November 2025, gubernatorial candidate Ty Masterson told anti-abortion voters that supreme court elections were the “solution” they’d been waiting for, as long as they had the good sense to play it cool in public. 

“You can’t go out there and say it,” Masterson said, according to the Marion County Record. “Because they’ll say that if you elect your Supreme Court, you won’t have any right to abortion anymore.” 

To give you a sense of the stakes here, spending on the amendment—again, just on the question of whether to hold supreme court elections—has topped $12 million, per the Sunflower State Journal. Given that spending on the 2025 race for a single Wisconsin Supreme Court seat topped $100 million, $20 million of which came courtesy of the reactionary billionaire Elon Musk, it is a safe bet that if the amendment were to pass, the volume of anti-abortion money that would start pouring into Kansas would dwarf that $12 million figure in a hurry.

The amendment’s supporters love extolling the virtues of democratic accountability. But the democratic process has already yielded an unambiguous result: Kansans support their state supreme court’s decision to protect the right to abortion access, and overwhelmingly repudiated politicians’ (initial) hamfisted attempt to take it away. The legislature’s crusade for partisan supreme court elections is reactionary politics in its purest form. Republicans in Kansas do not actually care what voters want. They are upset about a policy choice that voters made, and want to reshape the legal system to shut them out of the process.

President Trump is now demanding that Iran reach a deal with Oman on the Strait of Hormuz as soon as today or face devastating attacks from the United States. On its face, you can put this in the same bucket of Trump’s last six months: threats about ending Iranian civilization or committing various war crimes or whatever. But this is actually an example of how deep a hole the U.S. is now in, and how rapidly it’s sliding into conceding a system of post-war Iranian tolls on the Strait as a given.

What Iran and Oman are negotiating is an interim agreement in which they will jointly manage a system of tolls (calling them “service fees”) over what is an international waterway. The White House would certainly point out that this is a temporary rather than a permanent deal. But something so fundamental conceded in a provisional or temporary agreement is seldom withdrawn in a final accord. The mix of control and revenue this provides to Iran amounts to a massive strategic gain from the war Trump began back in February. But it seems well on the way to becoming a given in U.S. post-war plans.

In response to last week’s post about AI data centers, I got this fascinating response from TPM Reader RK. Very interesting details and nuanced. But mostly I find it fascinating because it complicates the storyline by placing the data center rebellion in a line of continuity with earlier opposition, in the same or similar communities, to efforts to build wind turbines or solar arrays — stuff liberals obviously think is great.

Intrigued by this post, as I’ve spent the past 2+ years lurking at township halls in Michigan, working on a book about the rising backlash against big companies with big plans to transform how land is used in rural communities. 

It didn’t start with data centers. I was originally interested in how rural communities are pushing back hard against solar and wind farms. In Michigan, you have Gov Whitmer pushing a clean energy agenda, which requires vast swaths of open land. It takes a lot of real estate to replace an oil or gas plant with a solar or wind farm, and that much open space is not available in cities or suburbs. So you wind up in rural areas where voters lean conservative, are skeptical about climate change, and would prefer to see their pleasant landscape left alone. Lots of yelling, recall elections, angry rhetoric as formerly sleepy town halls turn into sights of intense conflict.

Two Elections to Watch Tonight

One critique of Democrats that has stuck with me — lodged by fellow Democrats against their colleagues and themselves — is that they vote in primaries not for who they want to elect, but for who they think their neighbors will elect.

In the face of crushing increases in the cost of living and the rise of right-wing authoritarianism, left-of-center voters’ desire to engage in such mental gymnastics has stated to fray in recent years. Today is the key one for the biggest such experiment this year.

As you’re no doubt aware, public health official Abdul El-Sayed will face Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic primary for Senate. Stevens has many of the party’s endorsements, but, as Josh Marshall noted last night, the energy in the primary appears to be with El-Sayed. Polls show he may well trounce Stevens this evening.

The outcome then sets up a test for the general election, the result of which, Kate Riga wrote last week, we’re going to be hearing about for years. Mike Rodgers, the Republican candidate, is a fairly run-of-the-mill figure in Trump’s Republican Party, and he’s lost this race before, in 2024. (He of course baselessly claims it was stolen from him.) If El-Sayed wins tonight, and Rodgers wins in November, cable news pundits will harangue Michigan’s Democratic primary voters about their choice until the next such test emerges. If Stevens pulls off an unlikely upset tonight only to lose to Rodgers, the left’s ascendancy in the Democratic Party will, no doubt prematurely, be declared all but assured.

At the end of the day, the voters pick who they pick. It’s then the campaign’s and the party’s job to consolidate the electorate and win.

Tuesday will also see primaries in Virginia, Missouri, Kansas, and Washington State.

We’ll have our eye on a Republican-backed ballot referendum to switch Kansas to judicial elections, the first of what both supporters and opponents see as a growing conservative push nationwide to remake courts so that they are more likely to support Republican policies. Its the latest effort by right-wing operatives in the state to undo a 2019 decision by the state Supreme Court protecting abortion — a wall they’ve been banging their heads against in various ways ever since.

Time Is Running Out For Republicans to Swap Out Max Miller

Trump on Tuesday declined to publicly call for his staffer-turned-member of Congress Max Miller (R-OH) to resign in the face of multiple allegations of abuse and violence, including domestic violence against his wife and two-year-old daughter. But on Monday night, according to an Axios report, Trump called him to share the insight that things “aren’t looking good.”

• Miller would need to drop out by tomorrow in order for Republicans to be able to replace him on the ballot. If he does, a special election would be held to pick a new candidate.
• Miller has insisted he is not dropping out.
• The situation invites comparisons to Democrats’ imbroglio with Graham Platner in Maine, though Platner was never accused of domestic violence. A difference, of course, is that Democrats, including most of Platner’s high-profile allies, spoke in a nearly unified voice to pressure the candidate off the ballot in the face of a sexual assault allegation.
• By contrast, the task of muscling Miller off the ballot has largely fallen to Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), the father of Miller’s ex-wife. The handful of Republicans who have also called on Miller to quit have framed their perspective as support for Moreno, not a policy of zero tolerance for the kind of allegations repeatedly made against Miller.

Tabs

• TPM’s Emine Yücel looks at a new attempt by the Trump administration to tighten its control over grants distributed by the executive branch, and a nascent attempt by the Senate to (at least temporarily) stop it.
• A second man in less than one year has died at Delaney Hall, a federal detention center in Newark, New Jersey, the New York Times reports.
• NPR looks at the Trump administration’s use of a charge that was most recently widely used to prosecute January 6 insurrectionists to go after the left: conspiracy to impede or injure an officer.

Man of the Hour

It’s Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC), who, in a Congress full of men accused of doing awful things, has become the first in years for whom the House Ethics Committee has recommended censure. That’s in part due to the extensive evidence of sexual harassment mustered against him, including odd gifts and reams and reams of corny messages documenting what appear to be attempts at romance with his subordinates. Kate sifts through it here.

Are We at War?

Trump called off strikes this weekend claiming their will be new negotiations, but both sides now say none are planned.

Tomorrow is primary day in a number of states. Michigan is the state that will get the most attention. There are several big primaries but the Senate one on the Democratic side will get by far the most attention. It pits Abdul El-Sayed against Rep. Haley Stevens. Unless the polls are wildly far off the mark (not impossible in a primary election), El-Sayed will win handily. About a half dozen polls conducted over the last two weeks show El-Sayed winning by 10 points or more, many in the mid to high teens. Meanwhile the balance of general election polls show Stevens very narrowly beating former Rep. Mike Rogers while El-Sayed very narrowly loses to him.

President Trump spent the weekend raging on Truth Social against Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, after the Justice Department wrote in a motion to dismiss the case that issues with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool were the result of bad refurbishing work — and not the product of vandalism, as it had previously alleged. Trump still insists vandalism is to blame.

In the Friday court filing, the DOJ acknowledged that Trump’s $14 million Reflecting Pool renovation was “hasty and botched.” In the filing, the DOJ said it was dropping its case against former Olympian David Hearn, whom the Justice Department accused of vandalism around the time that the renovation was getting bad press, including reports that the new lining was coming off in floating chunks. Hearn pleaded not guilty to the felony vandalism charges in D.C.’s Superior Court before the case was dismissed last week.

Trump has, aggressively, not reached the same conclusions as his DOJ and brought his online anger with Pirro to the airwaves on Monday during an unrelated Oval Office meeting, during which he suggested Pirro “choked” in building a proper case against Trump’s perceived enemies for the supposed sabotage.

“Frankly, I think she choked, because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department, and I guess she choked,” Trump said.

Shortly after Trump’s Oval Office outburst against Pirro, CNN published a report this afternoon that Trump is considering removing Pirro over the filing, citing two people familiar with Trump’s thinking. Per CNN:

The president is “furious” with Pirro, one of the sources said, telling CNN that he fumed about her all weekend. They added that based on his criticisms of her, they find it “highly likely she’s removed from her job.”

The other source, a senior administration official, said Trump was “blindsided” by Pirro’s court filing: “The president did not know beforehand that she was going to do that.”

Trump reportedly spoke to Pirro on Saturday and she blamed career officials in her office for the Friday filing (though her name is on the bottom of it). It was the around the same time that Trump was publicly unleashing on her via Truth Social.

“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM,” he wrote.

Up until this point, Trump has had no reason to question Pirro’s work. As TPM reported earlier this year, Pirro was one of a group of U.S. attorneys who met with Trump earlier this year and received a verbal lashing from the president for not acting fast enough to carry out his personal retribution crusade. Shortly after that meeting, the Federal Reserve received grand jury subpoenas from Pirro’s office, related to testimony that then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — one of Trump’s favorite perceived enemies — gave Congress last summer about a Fed building renovation.

Shortly after, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) told the New York Times that she received requests for an interview with Pirro’s office; the FBI and others within the DOJ were at the time looking into Slotkin and other Democratic lawmakers who participated in a social media video aimed at reminding military service members that they shouldn’t obey illegal orders. Trump suggested that the Dems should be arrested and charged with “seditious behavior, punishable by death.”

Seems like the retribution-inspired honeymoon between the two might be over.

MAGA Melts Down Because Mullin Admits America Needs Farm Labor

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has attracted ire from Trump’s base of supporters because he more or less conceded that the American farming industry needs migrant workers in order to survive. It’s a fact that played a political role in Trump’s decision early in his second term to flood blue cities with his Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to carry out his mass deportation clampdown in urban areas — largely avoiding, at least initially, rural parts of the country where immigrant labor is often what keeps farms running.

During a bipartisan National Governors Association meeting in Oklahoma on Saturday, Mullin spoke about changes that need to be made to seasonal work visas to accommodate the year-round farm work demands of the agriculture industry.

“If we’re looking to grow our economy, then we need to look at making more permanent solutions on this,” Mullin said, reportedly adding that the “narrative” that immigrants steal Americans’ jobs is “not true for all industries.”

“It is America First. We want to take care of Americans first. It’s our economy. It’s our homeland. But there’s a way to utilize labor where we’re not having the participation rate where we need to. And we can plug those holes,” he said.

Mistake on his end, per The New Republic:

These remarks triggered extraordinary offense among MAGA figures. Fox News personality Tomi Lahren raged that Mullin is out to “appease liberal media.” Laura Loomer called on Trump to fire Mullin immediately. Podcasters Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec both told Politico that MAGA wants Trump to replace Mullin with someone who, as Posobiec put it, “puts deportations first.”

Crowdsourcing His War

Per new reporting from CNN today:

“We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” an officer in US Central Command’s intelligence branch wrote in a message sent Wednesday to a broad group of military analysts, according to a source familiar with the message. A second source also said that a senior US military officer sent the message last week soliciting new ideas for how to deal with Iran.

More to Read From TPM Today

Hunter Walker unpacks Trump’s bombastic remarks from the Oval Office today, during which he publicly let slide his disgust for blue cities: Trump Launches Into Extraordinary Rant About ‘Disgusting’ Blue Cities: ‘Their Trees Are All Gross’

The House Ethics Committee put out a report recommending the censure of Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) over his treatment of and behavior towards two young women on his staff. Kate Riga digs in here: Bizarre Texts, Gifted Guns, 30 Types of Ice Cream: Rep. Faces Censure Following Sexual Harassment Allegations

New from Sarah Posner: How Netanyahu’s MAGA Evangelical Backers Are Grappling With Backlash Against Him

Yesterday’s Top Story

The Low-Energy Response to the GOP’s ‘High-T’ Politics 

What I’m Reading

She protested ICE raids. Then agents showed up at her door 

Trump still really wants a slush fund 

The right-wing bubble seals in the GOP with Max Miller 

President Donald Trump went off on a long, strange tangent where repeatedly expressed revulsion at the state of “blue cities” during an event in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon.

“What do they have in common? They’re all dirty. They’re filthy, dirty,” Trump said, adding, “Their streets are dirty. Their streets smell. Their storefronts are broken. Their trees are all gross. Everything about the place is dirty.”

Trump went on to specify that he didn’t “want to mention any specific city.”

“It’s really all of them,” he said. 

Trump’s attack on the homes of a large segment of the American populace came at an event that was ostensibly about a commission for military spouses. After signing an executive order establishing the group, Trump took questions from reporters. His tirade about “blue cities” came when he was asked about the ever-shifting state of talks to end the Iran War. Trump said he is “under no time constraints” to conclude the conflict that he initially predicted would end months ago. He contrasted this with his Republican colleagues who are currently facing elections and said they are running against a “sick ideology.” He rattled off various leftist proposals including Supreme Court reform and abolishing the Senate that he predicted would “destroy the country.” From there, Trump totally went off. 

“These are sick people,” he said. “When a country goes bad, like, look at the blue cities. What do they have in common aside from massive crime? Much more crime. The Republicans have very little crime. But what do the blue cities have? … And also you can see this with nations when they go bad — the blue cities have something in common — crime, high crime, vicious, violent crime.”

Earlier on in the event, a reporter from one of the right-wing outlets that the Trump administration has added to the press corps praised the president’s redecorating efforts in Washington, D.C., which have included the controversial White House ballroom and the algae-plagued Reflecting Pool renovation. 

A reporter also asked Trump if he would consider trying to “federalize” the capital city. Trump mused about the idea while praising his own work in the district. 

“Would I federalize basically, you’re saying federalize D.C.? Well, I’m allowed to do that. Would I do that? If they wanted,” Trump said before trailing off and turning to the changes he has made in the city. 

“We took something that was in deep trouble. It was a graffiti-filled, crime-filled mess.We turned it into Shangri-La. We turned it into a great place,” he said, adding, “Look at the grass in front of the White House being all replaced with the top stuff. … Scott’s Miracle Gro. They’re doing it. … Got to give them a plug because they did the White House for free.”

Trump returned to D.C. later on when he reiterated his disagreement with U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s conclusion that damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by shoddy contracting work rather than vandalism. The president repeated his highly questionable claim the pool was targeted and argued Pirro had “choked” by dropping the Justice Department’s case against a former Olympian for allegedly damaging it. He also brought up the capital city during his rant about the “blue cities.” 

“They’re like Washington, D.C. was a year and a half ago with graffiti all over the place, with crime all over the place, with people afraid to be here. You had to be ashamed of your capital,” said Trump. “Some of the most beautiful buildings built in the real time. Like, you look at the Supreme Court building, and they put graffiti on it. The most beautiful columns I’ve ever seen. … You look at those columns, how magnificent and then you see graffiti on the side of the building.”

Data actually shows red states have higher crime than blue states on average. Large cities in red states, many of which have Democratic local governments, have the highest murder rates. However, it’s not as though Trump was doing any kind of detailed analysis. He concluded his screed by declaring the blue city ideology is “not going to happen in our country.”

“The one thing they all have in common: crime. Two things, crime, but they’re disgusting. They’re filthy, dirty,” Trump said, adding, “The streets are dirty. They have people lying all over the street doing you know what.”

The bipartisan House Ethics Committee on Monday recommended that Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) be censured for his behavior towards two young women on his staff.

This is not a large point but it’s one worth articulating explicitly.

Politics, like life, isn’t fair. One of the surest examples of this is that presidencies rise and fall with gas prices. Those presidents usually didn’t really do anything to make them rise or fall. And it’s quite difficult for a president to pull them lower, except on the margins. Donald Trump’s recent, ongoing slide tracks closely with gas prices, repeating a decades old pattern — even down to this later (?) part of the Iran War in which faux ceasefires and collapses drive short term ups and downs. But Trump is close to unique in being more or less 100% to blame for them. Current gas prices are almost entirely because of the war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump started that war. And, as I argued last week, he started it more or less out of the blue.