Good Riddance

It takes a lot to be among the most odious Republican members of this Congress. Let me reacquaint you with Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN).

What makes Ogles special is that he managed to be a virulent Islamophobe, Christian nationalist, and fabulist — really the trifecta of qualifications for current House GOPers — and still alienate his fellow Republicans.

Ogles went down to a stinging defeat in the GOP primary in Tennessee last night, losing 53%-47% to former state agriculture commish Charlie Hatcher.

While Ogles maintained an endorsement from President Trump, many state Republicans were done with him. Gov. Bill Lee (R) and former Gov. Bill Haslam (R) had endorsed Hatcher.

Ogles was a piece of work in so many ways.

“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” he tweeted in March.

“America and Islam are incompatible. Time for a muslim (sic) ban,” he posted in another tweet around the same time.

He posted AI-generated images of himself and senior Trump administration officials in front of the Capitol dressed as Crusaders.

He had campaign finance issues and resume-inflation issues.

Ogles’ nemesis back home was the relentless investigative reporter Phil Williams, of Nashville, who unearthed much of what we’ve come to know about Ogles and to whom I defer on cataloging Ogles’ sins:

• Ogles had claimed to be an economist; he was not.
• He had boasted about being trained in investigating international sex crimes; he had not.
• He had claimed to have done graduate work at Vanderbilt and Dartmouth; that was a lie.
• His resume showed he had served on the board of directors for the city of Franklin, Tennessee; Franklin does not have a board of directors.
• He claimed to have personally loaned his campaign $320,000 in his first run for Congress in 2022; he did not have that kind of money to lend.
• The FBI opened a criminal investigation into those fraudulent campaign disclosures, but that investigation was canned by the Trump administration.

In a fitting end to his losing campaign, Ogles banned Williams and select other news outlets from an Election Day event — and Williams got ahold of the blacklist.

What gives Ogles’ primary defeat a little extra boost of schadenfreude is that he was running in a pretty dramatically re-drawn district thanks to state Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting. Call it a small (but inadequate) consolation prize for the elimination of the state’s only majority-Black district in Memphis.

BREAKING … Court Halts Trump Ballroom

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals halted Trump’s vanity ballroom project in a ruling just out:

We are aware of no instance in American history in which a President unilaterally and using privately collected funds demolished substantial portions of the White House that Congress authorized to be built and American taxpayers paid for. Until now.

The ruling was 2-1, with Judges Patricia Millett (Obama) and Bradley Garcia (Biden) in the majority and Neomi Rao (Trump) in dissent.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Blanche nomination: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) announced early this morning that she’s a “No” on Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general: “The country needs an Attorney General who will check the worst impulses of this administration. I hope Mr. Blanche is able to achieve that, if confirmed, but I simply do not have confidence that will be the case.” I want to very careful not to pump this up into a suspense-filled drama because the GOP conference is usually very strategic about parceling out the “No” votes to vulnerable or marginal members without jeopardizing the final vote — but Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) is thought to be the only remaining holdout and the final vote Blanche needs to win confirmation. Late Update: Cassidy just announced his support for Blanche’s nomination on the Senate floor.
• IRS immunity: A revised legal challenge to the unprecedentedly corrupt “settlement” of Trump’s IRS lawsuit — which is what’s nearly sunk the Blanche nomination — is now also targeting the gift of IRS immunity that Blanche gave Trump. The case in the Eastern District of Virginia spearheaded by the Democracy Forward Foundation had already succeeded in winning a preliminary injunction in June blocking the “anti-weaponization” slush fund. Yesterday, DFF filed an amended complaint seeking to block Blanche’s order granting Trump immunity from the IRS.
• Reflecting Pool: The bogus vandalism case against former Olympian David Hearn was officially dismissed by the judge yesterday, but he punted on the question of whether the dismissal should be with or without prejudice until he receives additional briefing from the parties and holds a hearing. He also held off ruling on Hearn’s alternative request for access to the grand jury materials that could potentially make D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro squirm even more than she already is. Stay tuned on this one.

Headline of the Day

Politico: Hellbent on putting Fauci in jail, Rand Paul wants to skip a Senate vote

Paul Threatens Nom Over ICE Shootings

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is threatening to hold up the confirmation of Lance Schroyer to lead ICE unless he gets more information about the fatal ICE shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Worth noting that Paul has multiple interests here. Schroyer, an Oklahoman who led the security detail of DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin when he was a senator, is Mullin’s pick for the job. Mullin is a well-known Paul nemesis.

Trump Orders New Leak Probe

Embarrassed by news reports of U.S. munitions shortages, President Trump has ordered another leak investigation, the WSJ reports. His previous reactive leak probes have immediately focused on journalists and pushed the bounds of the law and the First Amendment. Stay tuned …

Trump Avoids Giving Financial Info to BBC

A Trump-appointed federal judge in Miami granted the president’s emergency motion to delay having to turn over his financial information to the BBC in his defamation lawsuit against the broadcaster. To avoid implicating his own finances, Trump wants to amend his lawsuit, and the judge found it to be a “compelling argument” that the new lawsuit may moot the BBC’s need for the financial information.

New Lawless Birthright Citizenship EOs

Despite losing on birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court less than six weeks ago, President Trump rolled out two new executive orders that, taken together, run afoul of the high court’s recent decision.

U.S. Intel: Putin Could Provoke NATO

The steady drumbeat of warnings like this from Europe and from here at home continues, according the WSJ:

The U.S. had previously assessed that Putin wouldn’t provoke a North Atlantic Treaty Organization country while he is still fighting in Ukraine. But that assessment changed earlier this year, the U.S. officials said, as Putin is squeezed in Ukraine and under pressure at home to secure a victory.

If Putin is going to do this, I don’t see why the optimum timing for him would not be between now and the end of Trump’s term, when official U.S. resistance will be at its lowest ebb since NATO was formed — and that’s roughly the same period U.S. intel is most concerned about: “The time frame for any move by Russia is estimated to happen between this fall and 2029, according to the U.S. intelligence assessments.”

Help Us Wrap Up the Journo Fund Drive!

With a big final push, we can hit the $500,000 mark in our annual drive for the TPM Journalism Fund — and I won’t have to keep pitching you into next week. Let’s get ‘er done!

See Ya Monday

Before Elvis … before Willie … before the Pet Shop Boys … Gwen McCrae was the first to release “Always on My Mind“:

In case you missed it last week, I created a couple of Morning Memo playlists of the music I’ve shared: Spotify and Youtube.

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

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) said he will support Todd Blanche’s nomination for Attorney General in a Senate floor speech Friday morning, effectively guaranteeing Blanche’s confirmation. 

“Mr. Blanche is not perfect, and he will tell you this,” Cassidy said. “But the choice is not between perfection and Mr. Blanche. It is between Mr. Blanche and another acting attorney general who may not run the department effectively under President Trump and who indeed may not be as good as Mr. Blanche. This puts at risk the progress made fighting violent crime, human and drug trafficking and fraud, and this does not serve the American people well.”

I mentioned this in my morning post today, but one of the weirdest, Trumpiest, vehemently anti-immigrant and scandal-plagued members of Congress lost a primary yesterday. Goodbye Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN). Those seeking to pass legislation denaturalizing Zohran Mamdani or giving Trump a third term will have to find another congressional champion.

In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

With a potential midterm wipeout just three months away, Republicans have been recycling past conspiracy theories to an epic extent, mining the greatest hits of a decade of paranoid plots both to please the president and to invoke memories of the “good old days.” 

From the Senate’s contentious hearings that saw Dr. Anthony Fauci grilled with lockdown-era conspiracy theories to President Trump’s continued evocation that the 2020 election was stolen, Republicans are both replaying the past and actively rewriting it, trying to distract their voters from current crises and rally them around Trump’s brand one last time.

It’s impossible to look at the run-up to the 2026 midterms without examining the repackaging and reuse of the conspiracy theories that got us here. The midterms might be the last chance we see some of them used with any real efficacy, and nobody is missing their shot.

Russ Vought’s Power Play Sows Legal Chaos for Administration

Last month, the New York Times reported that the administration confessed, in federal court, to having blocked grants in October 2025 for clean energy projects in blue states simply because they voted against president Trump.

TPM discovered that the administration has in fact conceded this point in court multiple times.

Our story, by Emine Yücel and Josh Kovensky, does a few things. First, it notes that a negotiations tactic deployed by Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought during the government shutdown last year — declaring that he was withholding grant funding to blue states in an effort to exert leverage over Democrats in Congress — has backfired, with the administration’s lawyers forced to make damaging admissions before judges and, in two cases, ultimately losing their case and being ordered to restore the grants.

Second, we know that the Trump administration regularly withholds funds to blue states, sometimes mustering an excuse about why it’s doing so — vague claims of “fraud,” perhaps. But while talk is cheap, our story shows that in court, DOJ lawyers were not able to muster a fig leaf for these October 2025 grant denials. They were, simply, political.

Third, our story shows that these concessions were made as part of an effort by administration lawyers to avoid discovery, which raises the question of why the administration was willing to go to these lengths to avoid discovery. What emails were sent, and what discussions were had, within the White House as these grants were withheld that lawyers hoped to keep out of the record?

There are big elements of this story still to come.

• First, the Trump administration has proposed a new rule to make it so that political appointees have final review over grants, and that grants can be more easily terminated, making standard the kind of control the administration has exercised over federal funding since the days of DOGE — and continuing through the example of the October 2025 grants that formed the core of Emine and Josh’s story. This assault on the separation of powers and federalism has led to urgent warnings, particularly from the scientific community, where researchers say it could decimate the U.S.’s advantage.
• As Emine wrote earlier this week, the Senate has for now proposed a temporary halt to this rule, which Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the appropriations committee and in a tight reelection fight in Maine, is touting as her work. Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the committee, said Republicans would not support a more fulsome ban on the rule. A fight over this legislation, which is part of a Senate effort to fund the government through December, will ensue when members return in September.
• We may also get some insight into what the administration was hiding as it sought to avoid discovery. This could come from the continuing, ongoing lawsuits in this space, from other litigation, from congressional oversight by a future Democrat-controlled legislature, or another avenue.
• In the meantime, there is a nascent effort in the House to impeach Vought over his October 2025 decision to withhold these grants.

Trump Comes for Birthright Citizenship Again

Trump is taking another run at restricting birthright citizenship through executive order.

• He signed EOs Thursday specifically targeting the children of parents deemed to be an “alien enemy” — a concept that has become a favorite of this administration — and purporting to end “birth tourism.”
• Targeting alien enemies plays on an idea that the administration has sought to get great mileage out of: that immigrants within the U.S. are actually representatives of an invading army.
• This justification was core to early administration efforts to render Venezuelan men to a Salvadoran prison camp, and to its attempts to send the National Guard and the military into American cities. Both encountered skepticism at the Supreme Court.
• The “birth tourism” thing loomed large during Supreme Court oral arguments for Trump’s last executive order on birthright citizenship. Justice Samuel Alito in particular latched onto it. Despite the insistence of right-wing media that there is a booming industry of foreigners coming to the U.S. to have their kids, the Washington Post notes data showing that “in 2024, fewer than 10,000 babies were born in the U.S. to people with foreign addresses, out of 3.6 million total live births.”

Tabs

• Trump has ordered a leak probe into reports that munitions were running low amid the Iran War, the Wall Street Journal reports.
• Will Sommer has a fascinating look in the Bulwark at a group of right-wingers who feel burned by the Trump administration and who are mulling establishing a third party. They include Tucker Carlson, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep. Thomas Massie, and former counterterrorism official Joe Kent. Carlson seems perhaps the most invested in the project, and recently gave a long speech describing the ideas such a party should push.

Man of the Hour

Anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, scandal-plagued and performative pro-Trump representative Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) lost his primary fight last night to former state agriculture commissioner Charlie Hatcher. Hatcher won roughly 53% of the vote.

Are We at War?

Yes. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who gets it, accused Trump in a speech yesterday of “gaslighting” Americans on this topic. “The essential gaslight,” he said, “is that the war is about to end. Don’t worry. Yet it appears that there is no end.”

Census Bureau officials last Sunday conceded that a new rule banning certain privacy protection methods will make it impossible for the agency to publish data that it has historically released, a development that could especially harm minority groups. Representatives of the bureau, however, denied that the policy change had political objectives, though experts and advocacy groups believe it does.

President Trump and other Republicans have been struggling to land on any sort of uniform messaging as they seek, ahead of the midterms, to spin their recent legislative effort as making life more affordable for working class Americans when it has, in fact, largely done the opposite. This is, in part, because Trump has forced congressional Republicans to spend time tending to his election fraud delusions rather than using their trifecta to move legislation: he refused to sign a bipartisan bill aimed at increasing housing supply as he tried to force Republicans to pass the impassable-in-the-Senate SAVE Act, for example.