President Donald Trump has made no secret of his desire to exert control over the Federal Reserve’s economic policy. His primary demand? Cut interest rates. 

A New Republican Bill Brings Efforts to Meddle With Apportionment Into Focus

TPM has covered apportionment for years — in part, because right-wing activists are so intent on meddling with it, and in part because of the impact that meddling could have. As we’ve been reporting, the Census Bureau is currently attempting to exclude many categories of immigrants from the count used for apportionment, a violation of the 14th Amendment’s clear mandate that apportionment must count “the whole number of persons in each State.”

That, yes, is a set of phrases that might make the average reader’s eyes glaze over, but what it means is this: Republicans are trying to claim more power in Congress and the Electoral College by counting fewer people in blue states and regions. That power would shift to red states and regions. This plan violates the Constitution, though right-wing lawyers have mobilized a set of arguments they will use to argue before the Supreme Court that it does not. This is another power grab, albeit a wonkier and more statistics-focused one than such things as Stop the Steal. Unfortunately, the planning for this power grab within the executive branch involves terms and concepts that put most Americans to sleep.

Fortunately, President Trump’s allies in Congress are helping to make it all more explicit. Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) this week introduced the “Make Apportionment Great Again (MAGA) Act.” It, too, would do what the Census Bureau is attempting to do: exclude categories of immigrants from apportionment. Clyde gave Fox News an exclusive heads up that his bill was coming. “‘MAGA Act’ could rip House seats from Dem states ahead of next presidential race,” Fox’s headline declared, perfectly accurately.

Super helpful in amplifying this drum we’ve been banging.

“While we wait for the Senate to finally take action on the SAVE America Act, we must also recognize that the ballot box is not the only way non-citizens can impact American elections,” Clyde said in a statement. “Counting all residents regardless of citizenship in the U.S. census allows non-citizens, including illegal aliens, to influence the makeup of congressional seats and the distribution of Electoral College votes.”

“Republicans have long warned that Democrats’ intentional illegal invasion and sanctuary policies are rooted in a desire to boost blue states’ power,” Clyde added, a nod to a version of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.

To clear up something you might be wondering: non-citizens are not allowed to vote in federal elections (and incidents of non-citizens voting are vanishingly rare). But, again, the Constitution explicitly states that the “whole number of people” in a state must be included in apportionment, which determines the number of seats each state gets in the House and, as a result, the number of votes each state gets in the Electoral College. Under the Constitution, members of Congress represent the people who live in their area, including immigrants — they do not, solely, represent their voters. Clyde’s bill distorts those constitutional realities.

It would mandate reapportionment ahead of the 2028 election.

Trump’s Fed Chair Goes Rogue

The Fed raised rates yesterday, despite Trump’s repeated demands that it lower them, attempts to exercise control over the Fed, and efforts to take U.S. trade policy hostage in order to force his preferred outcomes.

• “LOWER THE RATE OR I’LL STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT… BE PATRIOTS for a change,” Trump had threatened the Fed earlier this month. He is also attempting to fire one of its board members, Lisa Cook.
• Nonetheless, the board, chaired by Trump-appointed Kevin Warsh, voted unanimously to raise rates one quarter of a percent.
• Warsh, who has reportedly spoken with Trump often, refused to comment on those calls in a press conference after the rate decision.
• Trump responded on Truth Social, invoking his threat to “stop trading,” sentiments he echoed almost exactly at a rally in the midterms swing state of North Carolina last night.

The Federal Reserve opted to raise interest rates by one-quarter of a percent, or 25 basis points, in a unanimous vote on Wednesday. It’s the first rate hike since 2023, when the Fed was responding to pandemic and supply chain disruption.

Trump Asserts (Without Evidence, of Course) That the Biden Administration Tried to Murder Him

One thing I would not have expected President Donald J. Trump to be spending his time on with just weeks to go until Election Day is creating new conspiracy theories about Tom Crooks, who shot at him in the summer of 2024 from a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania. But here we are.

The president yesterday asserted on Truth Social that Butler “was all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed.”

That the assassination attempt was the work of Trump’s political enemies is a baseless claim that the White House has leaned into for some time. In early January, the White House published a revisionist history of Jan. 6 that, TPM’s Hunter Walker noted at the time, included the following line: “Despite relentless Deep State efforts to imprison, bankrupt, and assassinate him … President Trump emerges triumphant.”

The website suggested, without any shred of evidence, that what happened in Butler was the work of the “Deep State” — the catch-all term for any government bureaucrat who might be behaving in a disfavored way, from slowing deregulation to, apparently, plotting a presidential candidate’s murder.

But Trump himself blaming it directly on a “Democrat Plot” takes the claim to another level. He then went on to castigate former FBI Director Chris Wray, claiming materials about the assassination were “missing, altered, corrupted or gone” and declaring Wray should “pay a price for the way he handled this assassination attempt.”

It’s unclear what Trump is gesturing toward here, if anything. The New York Post reported yesterday that “a trove of documents” was provided by law enforcement to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) as part of his investigation into the assassination attempt. But the documents sound like they simply add details to what we already knew: Crooks was really into guns, and didn’t talk to people much.

Grassley himself seemed to tell NBC yesterday that there wasn’t new information about a plot. “We don’t know anything about the motivation [of] why [Crooks] wanted to kill Trump,” he said.

FBI Director Kash Patel yesterday also seemed to throw cold water on the idea of any plot. “We found no evidence that [Crooks] was literally even speaking to any other human being other than his parents who he resided with,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Among the few things we do know about Crooks, in fact, was that his desire to create a spectacle appeared nonpartisan. He went to the gun range a lot, and didn’t talk very much. He googled the dates of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. He researched school shooters, and Lee Harvey Oswald, to whom he is now often compared.

“Neither Oswald nor Crooks were the kind of people who make history, not like Kennedy and Trump,” wrote Mike Rothschild, who writes about conspiracy theories for TPM, around Butler’s second anniversary. “But somehow, these two losers found a way to write their names into the fabric of American lore. Something greater had to be at work. There had to be a conspiracy — who was behind it and why would have to be filled in later.”

A significant portion — 24% — of Americans now believe Butler was staged, polls suggest. An additional 32% don’t know what to think. These conspiracy theorists, however, tend not to believe it was the work of Democrats. Rather, they think it was a plot orchestrated by Trump himself.

Bigotry and Corruption

As Republican senators lost their primaries to Trump-backed opponents or opted not to run again, some reporters at news outlets that cover Capitol Hill closely rubbed their hands together, predicting that now Trump would really have a problem on his hands. The results have been … underwhelming. Honestly kind of lame. Thom Tillis’ (R-NC) red lines are confusing, shifting, and often meaningless. Same — but even more so — for Bill Cassidy (R-LA). John Cornyn (R-TX) too.

But, despite the lack of a substantive shift in GOP legislating, it has been interesting to see these senators critique their own party with insiders’ knowledge.

• Here’s John Cornyn, speaking to veteran Hill reporter Igor Bobic about racist tweets by Texas candidate Bo French and all the Nazi staffers in the GOP: “I think too many people are tolerating conduct that in the past would have been disqualifying when it comes to politics, and what’s happened, I think people’s sort of public standards have eroded to where a lot of things that, like I said, that would not have been tolerated before, or normalized.”
• He continues: “Some of the anti-Semitism, some of the bigotry like Bo French’s comments, and some of the corruption, and I think those are those are the death knell for a political party.” Sounds right! Except for the “death knell” part — plenty of political movements worldwide (and through U.S. history) have built their ascendancy on hate.
• Josh Kovensky has a look at the imbroglio around French’s racist and anti-immigrant posts, which is somewhat confusing, as he’s been doing this for months. More broadly, the Texas GOP has built its midterm strategy around fear-mongering about Indian-Americans and Muslim immigrants.