Following up on the MAGA-under-pressure, intra-MAGA knife fights breaking out, whack everybody front. From this morning’s Politico Playbook …
PLAYBOOK IN PRINT:Natalie Harp printed a copy of yesterday’s Playbook about Susie Wiles’ future for President Donald Trump, according to two people with knowledge. It caused a “freakout,” as three people described it to Playbook. The president “blew up” over more bad headlines about his chief of staff, and Wiles and allies “burn[ed] up phones around town” trying to quell the situation.
Democrats’ prospects across the board look about as good as they have at any point in the 2026 election cycle, and about as good as could have reasonably been imagined at any point since late November 2024. House, Senate, governorships, state legislative races, really just about everything is looking pretty rosy. The point of this post isn’t to rain on any of that. But for the last week or so I’ve been wanting to write a post about just how close many of the frontline Senate races are, despite the fact that it’s plausible that Democrats could come out of this election with a majority in the low or even mid-50s. What I’m talking about here is no more than the inherent uncertainty around all polls and all elections. But it’s still worth absorbing.
TPM editor Nicole LaFond, investigative reporter Hunter Walker and Head of Product Derick Dirmaier and I wanted to discuss if we are living in a golden age of grifting. But, we were interrupted by some breaking news: Katie Zacharia’s very, very special time as press secretary has come to an end.
We’re asking readers to help us with something important as well. If you’ve been reading The Brief, you know each day John Light selects a Man of the Hour. If you can’t guess who won this week, well, I doubt you really read the site.
Beginning next week, we’re going to be using a new email provider to send out Morning Memo each day. If you already receive Morning Memo by email, you don’t need to do a thing. Morning Memo will still come to you the same as usual, but directly from TPM instead of from Substack. You’ll still be able to read Morning Memo in the email version or on Substack or at TPM.
Trump DOJ Sues California
I’ve had my hair on fire the last three days on the Trump administration’s unprecedented new interference in the midterm elections because it represents a high water mark in its effort to intrude in state-run elections.
Sequestering and not counting already-cast ballots — on the dubious grounds that the Trump administration has identified alleged noncitizens who received mail-in ballots — is a dramatic escalation of its month-long attack on state-run federal elections. (It also fits perfectly into the thematics of a GOP campaign largely being run on racist and xenophobic themes in the absence of any affirmative arguments for more of the same.)
But we haven’t really talked about the administration’s end game here, which has now become a little more clear.
At this stage, the administration doesn’t appear to be advancing a strategy to tilt the outcomes in particular elections by disqualifying a significant number of ballots or by suppressing the overall vote. Even if that was its goal, the numbers involved at this point just aren’t big enough.
We learned yesterday in the lawsuit that the Trump DOJ filed against California that its list of “likely noncitizen voters” contained in the vicinity of 20,000 names. I had assumed that the DOJ list was specific to Los Angeles County since acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter sent his list on an encrypted thumb drive (along with a sticky note containing the password). But the lawsuit says the 20,000 names is a statewide list — “with many addresses listed in Los Angeles County.” (That’s down a wee bit from the 190,000 noncitizen voters that the Trump administration previously claimed California had.)
Even if you account for the atmospherics of the DOJ suing to weed out alleged noncitizen voters having some dampening effect on minority voter turnout, the number of alleged noncitizen voters aren’t anywhere near big enough to have either a significant or predictably pro-GOP effect on election outcomes in California.
So what does that leave as plausible goals for the administration?
Goal #1: Get a federal court somewhere to rule that the law provides a role for the federal government in making sure noncitizens don’t vote
Given what the law says, including the Constitution, legal experts insist it’s a long-shot bid. But it’s a gambit with a high upside and not much political downside. You don’t make shots you don’t take, etc.
That being said, I’m struggling with why the Trump DOJ would pick California as the venue for this gambit versus a reliably red state in a federal circuit that is more obviously MAGA-tilted than the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers California.
(For what it’s worth, the Trump DOJ is trying to get the California case in front of the Trump-appointed judge who presided over Hunter Biden’s tax fraud conviction, arguing that this case is related to an election case he’s already hearing. But there’s nothing about U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi that marks him as a radical MAGA-coded judge. Already fighting back, California wants the case assigned to a Clinton-appointed judge who is already hearing a election case that it claims is more related than Scarsi’s is.)
Ultimately prevailing in the California lawsuit — or in yet-to-be-filed cases in other states — would open the door wide to the Trump administration being able to intervene in the election in much more robust ways under the guise of policing the virtually nonexistent problem of noncitizen voting.
But with less than three weeks until voting ends, it might make more sense to view this as a long-term bid with bigger potential impacts coming after the 2026 election — except in one regard, which brings us to the next goal.
Goal #1A: Create election chaos
In the short term, with Republicans almost certain to lose the House and the Senate increasingly at risk, sowing chaos has mostly upside for the GOP. In that sense, the California lawsuit is less a legal strategy than a political one.
Noncitizen voting is the Big Lie of 2026, so think of this as a prelude to a post-election refusal to accept the results, fights over close individual races, and desperate attempts to salvage a majority in either chamber. Conflicting court rulings, emergency appeals, and a last-ditch bid to get the Supreme Court to decide the election somehow all gin up a crisis atmosphere that’s then used to justify extraordinary interventions of one form or another.
The point isn’t to fear-monger here, but just to note that chaos favors the sure loser desperate to do anything to avoid their fate.
Goal #2: Delegitimizing a Democratic win
Regardless of the outcome of the California lawsuit, the Big Lie of noncitizen voting will inevitably be sustained past the election into the new Congress — as a GOP hand-wave to minimize its own losses, dismiss the Democratic mandate, resist a post-election narrative of MAGA’s demise — and soothe the wounded ego of a certain former reality TV star.
The lawsuit in California helps to fortify that rhetorical argument, even if the Trump DOJ ultimately loses. Time and again, MAGA has seized on setbacks and losses as proof of is own victimhood.
One caveat to all of the above: California may not be the only place that the Trump DOJ decides to do battle on noncitizen voting while voting is underway. It laid the same groundwork in some two dozen states as it did in California by requesting voter information over the past several months in its pursuit of the mythic noncitizen voter, ultimately losing repeatedly in court. If you see evidence of this happening in other states, please let me know. My contact info is linked at the bottom of this post.
And now the Trump administration is attempting to strip Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia, of her citizenship so as to deport her. This is more than just another persecution of one of Trump’s political enemies. Rather, his government is tacitly declaring the citizenship of all foreign-born people provisional, their Americanness something that can be revoked. It’s a frontal attack on the idea of constitutional equality.
Uneven Playing Field Alert
Your occasional reminder that U.S. elections are, by law, tilted in favor of monied interests to a greater extent than at any point since at least the Gilded Age:
NYT: Avalanche of G.O.P. Cash Keeps the Party Competitive Despite Its Problems
Politico: Megadonors are powering Republicans’ spending advantage
NYT: Most of Ken Paxton’s Money Can Be Traced to One Man: Elon Musk
See You Back Here Monday
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Some 86 years ago, Missouri voters enshrined a system for selecting top judges that would remove political influence from the courts. And almost immediately, it came under attack.
Under what has come to be known as the Missouri Plan, lawyers help choose a slate of three candidates from which the governor must make an appointment for the state Supreme Court, appeals courts and, in some populous areas, the circuit courts.
In the first years after adoption, it faced pushback from party bosses who had historically used judicial seats for political patronage. They said it gave too much power to the lawyers. Voters, though, decisively defeated a repeal measure in 1942.
More recently, the conservative activist Leonard Leo, who viewed Missouri as a crucial battleground, tried in 2007 to persuade Republican Gov. Matt Blunt to reject a slate of Supreme Court candidates — part of a broader effort to weaken a judicial selection system that had become a model for some two dozen states around the country.
Blunt resisted and picked one of the three judges from the approved slate.
Then, in 2012, GOP lawmakers put a proposed overhaul before voters that, if approved, would have given the governor more control. Voters, by a 3-to-1 margin, turned back the plan.
Now the attacks are back, driven by a new grievance.
This week, this dark, very American story advanced to its inevitable next chapter, as a young man who police have described as unstable targeted a Hindu temple west of Chicago for a mass shooting.
However, when 19-year-old Alexandros Paporakis showed up at the temple in Aurora, Illinois, his gun jammed, police say.
He texted a colleague at Taco Bell, where he worked, about what he was up to. The colleague called the authorities.
“I think we were very fortunate that something much, much worse did not happen,” Palatine, Illinois’ police chief, Bill Nord, told press. “The seriousness of this alleged threat cannot be overstated,” he said later.
Police found tactical gear and hundreds of rounds of ammunition at the 19-year-old suspect’s home, as well as white nationalist material. They also found a manifesto titled “Why I Fought: A.K.A.: (Aurora Shooter’s Manifesto).” The manifesto targeted South Asian, Jewish and Black people, per local reports.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) was at the temple on Sunday when Paporakis turned up, he said, and on Thursday called on the feds to get involved.
“We know this type of hate is coursing thorough social media online, it’s exploded,” Krishnamoorthi told a local news station. “We can’t rely on luck, that’s why we have to condemn the hatred. We can’t stay silent, or worse, condone it or fan the flames.”
“Secondly,” he continued, “we have to redirect the FBI’s focus to domestic violent extremism and trying to uncover these plots.”
The FBI, under Trump, has largely abandoned efforts to track neo-Nazi extremists, in some cases repositioning resources toward targeting the president’s critics and political enemies.
Trump’s Long-Brewing Effort to Oust Ilhan Omar From America
WASHINGTON, DC December 10: U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) poses for a portrait in her office on Capitol Hill on Wednesday December 10, 2025. (Photo by Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The Trump administration effort to eject Muslim representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the country is the culmination of a years-long fixation.
Way back in 2019, TPM reporter Christopher Mathias noted this week, attendees at Trump rallies were chanting “send her back” when the president mentioned Omar.
That year, the Washington Post reported yesterday, a “political appointee in the first Trump administration” demanded that DHS scrub Omar’s immigration records for any indication of fraud. It ultimately did not find what it needed to to move forward with a case.
In its second term, the Trump administration is increasingly attempting to make use of denaturalization, an extremely difficult outcome to achieve legally. That, however, is the goal with its latest investigation of Omar, per the Wall Street Journal.
To successfully denaturalize someone, “the government needs to show that there was an omission or falsehood on the naturalization paperwork of such magnitude that it would have prevented the person from getting citizenship had the truth been shared with immigration authorities,” writes TPM’s Josh Kovensky, who has been covering the administration’s denaturalization efforts for us since 2024.
The administration appears to specifically be looking into whether Omar’s father filed immigration paperwork claiming she was 17 when she was actually 18, a theory that has been pushed on the right for years, most prominently by a QAnon-supporting candidate who once challenged Omar in a primary campaign, Josh reports. A 17-year-old minor naturalizes with their parent when their parent obtains citizenship, while an 18-year-old adult must apply for citizenship independently.
“I think her citizenship is solid and there wasn’t any fraud there,” one former official involved in the 2019 investigation told the Washington Post.
Tabs
The White House is denying that Trump himself gave the order to restrict Ukraine’s access to Starlink, Bloomberg reports. But the order came “from inside the White House,” Reuters reports. “The officials said leaders at the Defense Department received a message that the SpaceX Starshield service for the Ukrainian military needed to be slowed,” the Reuters report says.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has run out of patriot missiles, CNN reports. The U.S. seems to be withholding them as Trump punishes the country’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, for criticizing his pre-midterms diesel deal with Russia. Patriot missiles, which are used as interceptors, are in extremely short supply more generally thanks in part to the war with Iran. As a result, Russian missiles are more easily striking Ukrainian targets.
Hunter Walker profiles Bobby Pulido, the Tejano singer who, thanks in part to a GOP Texas gerrymandering effort that appears increasingly to have been misguided, stands a real chance of flipping his district from red to blue.
Man of the Hour
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 17: Paolo Zampolli (C), who was appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump to the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts stands on the stage of the Opera Hall with fellow board members following a meeting on March 17, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
It’s longtime Trump friend and now-former State Department Special Envoy for Arts and Culture Paolo Zampolli, who, Politico recently reported, has been in a bizarre, long-running, sprawling feud with his boss, cc-ing a dozen-plus people as they snap at each other over email. Among other issues, Zampolli blamed said boss, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, for, he thought, being the source of a New York Times article that said Zampolli got his longtime girlfriend deported by ICE as part of a custody battle over their son. (Yes, it’s messy.) The girlfriend, in turn, threatened to reveal details she said she knew about Trump, Melania, and Jeffrey Epstein. (Messy.) Anyway, Trump — who, as Josh Marshall observes, suddenly seems to have no taste for drama — canned Zampolli yesterday
Are We at War?
No, says Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA).
“Right now we are defending U.S. assets there, so there is no war as we speak,” Wittman told HuffPost Thursday.
The famed Tejano singer is trying his hand at politics in his home state of Texas, which is a crucial part of Democrats’ pathway to a potential House majority in Washington. And the blue wave that has made those lofty ambitions more and more realistic has been partially fueled by Latino voters’ shift away from President Donald Trump amid mounting anger with ICE and his mass deportation agenda.
Earlier this week, we saw former Don Jr. fiancé Kimberly Guilfoyle summarily canned because she became a scandal lightning rod, in a particularly pitiful way, right when Donald Trump doesn’t need any scandal headlines — not just going into the midterms in a couple weeks but also into 2027 when it seems highly likely that at least the House will be in Democratic hands. Then yesterday, we had this new MAGA war break into the open which pits Alina Habba and her new Turkish oligarch boy-toy husband against Trump fixer Ric Grenell. Habba claims that Grenell either pocketed or misdirected a $6 million check her now-husband wrote as a contribution to the Kennedy Center. I suspect that Habba may be out over her skis on this one. Grenell is the worst. But he’s not stupid. I’m skeptical he’d try something quite that reckless.
In any case, today we have yet another new story just kind of breaking out into the open out of nowhere.
Of Course a 2020 Fake Elector Is Involved in This Saga
As key members of the Trump administration refuse to give straight answers about whether they intend to send armed federal agents to polling places in a few weeks — which is against federal law — Wisconsin election officials are grappling with the vacuum that that ambiguity has created.
For more than a year, we’ve been covering the wishy-washy responses from Trump administration officials like Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to serious questions about the matter. President Trump has remained vague on the issue as well. The reason executive branch officials are facing questions about whether this is something they’re considering is twofold. The Trump administration has made it clear it has every intention of pulling out all the stops to interfere in states’ rights to administer their own elections, and Trump’s election denying allies outside the administration (e.g. Steve Bannon) are agitating around the idea. Trump himself has also expressed profound regret about not enlisting members of the military to seize voting equipment in 2020.
Hegseth has creatively dodged on the matter repeatedly in public, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee back in April that he has “never been ordered to do anything illegal, and I won’t” when questioned about deploying service members to voting sites. Patel and Mullin have been a bit less slimy about it by essentially admitting its something they’ve thought about doing. Patel recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he plans to have agents and intelligence analysts stationed at FBI field offices during the election in case there are any election security-related issues that need to be investigated. And Mullin has walked a similar line that leaves the door open for armed officers at polling places in particular (if far-fetched) circumstances.
“The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” he said last month.
Election officials are now being forced to step in and address the potential for disruption should the administration concoct some sort of emergency justification for sending armed federal officers to key precincts. Federal law prevents the government from sending any armed troops, agents or officers to polling place unless it is to “repel armed enemies of the United States.”
Members of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission voted on Thursday to sign off on guidance that will be sent to local election officials to help them navigate such a situation. Here’s what the guidance says, according to the Associated Press:
The memo tells Wisconsin’s roughly 1,800 clerks who administer elections what to do if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, Department of Homeland Security officials, FBI agents or local law enforcement shows up at the polls.
If officers arrive, the guidance says the head of the polling site should inform the municipal clerk, who should then tell the county clerk and the state elections commission. If the agents are there to observe, they must check in like any other observer and be subject to rules governing them, the guidance says.
Only one member of the board, a Republican, reportedly voted against sending out the guidance, in comments that actively diminished the threat and potential for major disenfranchisement in key parts of the country.
“I personally think this guidance is unnecessary because we have not seemed to need it the past 201 years,” Republican Commissioner Bob Spindell said, per the AP.
The Trump administration has flailed at each of its major priorities. That includes, so far, its attempt to instill effective authoritarian rule: the Alien Enemies Act removals, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the occupations of Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and others — they’re all marred by the same incompetence.
The buffoonery on display would be funny were it not so dangerous: it’s left lives ruined, and people killed. In the case of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), it’s threatening to strip naturalized citizens of basic constitutional rights.
This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
President Trump has in recent days doubled down on a September executive order, rebranding Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Super Intelligence (SI). Those unwilling to embrace his preferred terminology — “the highly accepted new and more accurate term,” as he described it on Truth Social — would be deemed “THE ENEMY!” The whole thing may seem on first glance to be silly or innocuous. In reality, however, the rebranding of AI to SI isn’t just about nomenclature.
Trump has waded into a debate on what the ultimate outcome of AI may be: one in which the world, because of AI, becomes a utopia, or one in which the world becomes a dystopia due to AI.
Beneath the debate over artificial intelligence sits a bigger question about where the technology is going. “Superintelligence” marks the point where AI stops merely matching or beating humans at specific tasks. It describes machines that outthink the best human minds in nearly every field, from reasoning and planning to scientific discovery and problem-solving.
Silicon Valley has broadly divided into two schools over what that transition would mean. On one side are the techno-optimists and accelerationists, represented by figures such as Marc Andreessen and, in a more qualified way, Peter Thiel, who see increasingly powerful AI as a means of breaking technological stagnation and producing extraordinary advances in science, productivity and human prosperity. Andreessen has gone so far as to describe AI as a “universal problem solver,” while Thiel has argued that AI could finally reaccelerate technological and economic progress after decades of relative stagnation. In this view, AI, as it becomes superintelligence, means we are, in simple terms, moving towards a utopian society.
The other school sees doomsday. Its clearest voices are Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, whose recent book carries an intentionally unambiguous title: “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.” They argue that creating an intelligence vastly greater than our own before solving the problem of controlling it could result in human extinction. That concern extends well beyond them. Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two pioneers of modern artificial intelligence, are among hundreds of researchers and technology leaders who have publicly warned, as I recently did, that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be treated alongside threats such as nuclear war.
The underlying fear is remarkably simple: humanity has never created an intelligence greater than its own. If a superintelligent system develops goals that diverge from ours — or simply pursues objectives in ways its creators never anticipated — we may discover too late that being its creator does not make us its master. For this school, “superintelligence” does not evoke abundance or technological liberation. It evokes the possibility of doomsday.
At September’s United Nations General Assembly meeting, President Trump shunned the idea of global standards and regulations. In doing so, he has firmly planted himself in the camp of the utopians who see regulation, especially by a multilateral organization, as choking off the possibility of a utopian techno-state. There are several implications of Trump’s push towards superintelligence but three are especially important to consider.
First, preemptively rebranding AI as “superintelligence” normalizes the danger. When the White House, federal agencies, and the largest tech companies talk about superintelligence as something America should build and lead, the debate shifts. The question is no longer whether to build it. The question becomes how to win the race.
Second, it speeds up that race. Trump says America cannot “stifle” AI because it is ahead of China and must maintain that advantage. For anyone who believes uncontrolled superintelligence could end civilization, this is the nightmare: two great powers convinced they cannot afford to slow down.
Third, it takes some of the force out of the warning. AI safety advocates spent years using “superintelligence” to describe a future threshold carrying potentially existential risks. Trump now uses it as an optimistic label for technologies that already exist. Indeed, his executive order temporarily defines “Super Intelligence” as the very technologies already covered by the federal definition of artificial intelligence. If that usage sticks, saying “superintelligence is coming” no longer sounds quite like an alarm. The president has already declared that its era has arrived.
And then there is Elon Musk. Few people illustrate the tension better. Musk has spent years warning that advanced AI could pose an existential threat to humanity. Yet when Trump inaugurated his “Era of Super Intelligence,” Musk was standing right next to the president. In October, Musk went further, pledging to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI.
That does not necessarily mean Musk has abandoned his warnings. But it does illustrate how dramatically the politics surrounding those warnings have changed. The question for the doomer camp may no longer simply be whether humanity should create superintelligence. It may be what influence their warnings can retain now that the United States government has made achieving utopia through superintelligence a matter of national ambition.
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