I’m thinking this nephew guy has turned out to be a problematic figure … The story here is about a deal to sell arms to the police in Haiti and the company in question, Fencebridge, was founded by “Daniel Nozell, Parton’s longtime manager, and Bryan Seaver, one of Parton’s nephews who was also her head of security.”
A private security firm founded by two people close to late country music legend Dolly Parton is at the center of an unusually complex arms deal in Haiti that several sources with knowledge of the matter say was worked out with little due diligence.
The security firm, Fencebridge Strategic Risk, entered into a multimillion-dollar agreement about a year ago to supply the Haiti National Police with semi-automatic rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition, as the agency struggles to combat violent gangs that have claimed the lives of more than 25,000 Haitians since 2021.
Fascinating nugget of data from an Economist deep dive cross-referencing polling data with the location of datacenters: “Voters across the country are shifting towards Democrats, but for those living within 2km of a data centre the veer has been even sharper. Americans who live near a data-centre site are around six percentage points more likely to support the Democrats than those who live further away (see chart 2). Six months ago there was no such difference.” Link (requires sub).
One collection of data people obsess over in the weeks before a big election is the early vote – a relatively new feature of American elections. You can’t know who people voted for but you can know who is voting by different metrics and you can draw inferences from that. Take all this early vote data with a huge, huge grain of salt. On the one hand it’s just way to easy to interpret the numbers through the prism of one’s hopes. But there’s a bigger and more immediate reason for skepticism today. To understand what early numbers mean you need to have some theory of who is going to vote early and who late. And basically, I think, we don’t. Or not a good one.
There’s a scene in the classic 1997 horror film “The Devil’s Advocate” where Charlize Theron finds herself in a changing room with the other wives at the high-powered law firm that just hired her husband. A darkness lurks behind all of the luxury and hospitality since the founding partner of the company is actually Satan in the form of Al Pacino. As the women try on couture and sip champagne, they reveal themselves as demon hellspawn when their faces begin to morph and twist into distorted grimaces.
It’s truly a fantastic movie, and I have thought of the shopping scene many times over the years when attending various Trumpworld parties in Washington and New York. There is, of course, a darkness lurking among the very ‘90s rococo, dated, black tie fetes popular with President Donald Trump and his cronies. It is beyond disturbing to find yourself clinking glasses and sharing hors d’oeuvres with the people who are dropping bombs, disappearing families, persecuting their political enemies, and looting the public coffers on a daily basis. The prevalence of “Mar-a-Lago face” and garish pancake makeup among the women (andmen) at these ghastly events only makes the resemblance to Pacino’s demonic hordes hit harder.
In today’s Washington, these types of hellish scenes seem to be playing out at one of the capital’s most terrifying places: the home of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and his wife, Katie.
Earlier this month, Vanity Fair published a fascinating look into how Katie is “becoming MAGA DC’s premier hostess” at the couple’s home. The story noted their parties have featured Cabinet secretaries, law enforcement officers, and other White House staffers. Recent bashes included a celebration of the confirmation of ethically challenged Attorney General Todd Blanche and a birthday-slash-farewell party for outgoing White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt before she dipped out through the administration’s revolving door into Fox News. Leavitt’s grand goodbye at the Miller manse featured cookies decorated in icing that spelled out MAGAworld’s aversion to transparency, reading “No More Questions.”
Katie Miller has refashioned herself as a podcast momfluencer after stints working for Trump’s Department of Homeland Security — which oversees ICE — and for race-obsessedbillionaire Elon Musk. She has also seemingly used her party-planning cachet to land guests and distribution for her show despite its middling traffic numbers. The spectacle of all the dealmaking and schmoozing against the backdrop of rampant corruption and cruelty that has defined Trump’s second term is made all the more grotesque since the Millers are two of the most extreme figures in the president’s orbit.
Stephen Miller has long been known as the mastermind of many of the sickest aspects of Trump’s mass deportation agenda. He is also one of the White House advisers who most frequently and openly engages in borderline white nationalist rhetoric with bromides about the supposed cultural supremacy of native-born Americans. Just this week on X, Miller posted that low school test scores in the Golden State were due to children who were not “California kids.” That type of comment suggesting there is some population inside America that is inferior and un-American is something of a MAGA and Miller specialty. It is almost certainly an attack on minorities and immigrants that’s stated just indirectly enough to offer the thinnest degree of plausible deniability.
Since stepping into her new role as an influencer, Katie Miller has gotten far more explicitly racist. Along with dabbling in the debunked New Age conspiracies that have become a staple of the MAHA wing of the Trumpian right (Vanity Fair pointed out the Millers’ parties have featured chefs that cater to the pro-raw milk and anti-seed oil preferences of the RFK Jr. set), Katie has used her platform to espouse blatantly white supremacist “Great Replacement Theory” rhetoric.
“In America, foreign-born women … they’re having 25% of the births in the United States. Foreign born have more children than that of native born,” Miller said in one appearance this week where she railed against the “rape of Europe” and “unfettered migration” both here and abroad.
“That is what happens when you have this replacement of civilization,” Miller added. “For societies to grow and societies to flourish and for there to be bonds to be between you and I … it has to have this common culture and, unfortunately we’ve lost that.”
The accounts of the festivities at the Millers’ home shows how common and accepted these racist views are in the upper echelons of the Trump administration.
To add to the dystopian vibe, Vanity Fair noted the Millers are among the Trump officials who have taken to living on military bases around Washington, D.C. These moves have been made to avoid public anger, protests, and the threats that come along with them. As a result, all of the crudites, Hibachi chefs and pizza trucks being enjoyed at Katie and Stephen’s parties are being shared behind barbed wire.
This article exposed the sick world of extremist parties taking place under high security in America’s center of power. Even some of the old elite seem turned off by the scene. Whenever there is a discussion of Washington society, reporters tend to seek out a quote from the quintessential Georgetown doyenne Sally Quinn. In this story, the famed hostess once again espoused the perhaps mythical idea of a bygone bipartisan party scene in the city.
“When the five o’clock bell rang on the Hill, in the old days, that’s when they’d get out the bottles of bourbon and start drinking together,” Quinn said.
Even Quinn, whose desire to paint the ancient political class as a bastion of civility has always seemed out of touch, recognizes things have changed now.
“When Trump got elected the first time, that’s when the whole thing fell apart,” Quinn told Vanity Fair. “That’s when people stopped talking to each other.”
Things are different at the Miller home. It’s spooky season. The people sipping champagne are demons. Their faces are morphing and distorting before our eyes.
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By Hunter Walker
[Essay]
The Rise of Rationalist Media
The day after federal agents raided Ilhan Omar’s D.C. residence, I received an email from the prediction market Polymarket with the subject line: “World War Eleven.” If your brain hasn’t been fizzled by X fumes, “World War Eleven” is a reference to Omar’s misreading of the roman numeral in World War II while promoting the “Neighbors Not Enemies Act.” Naturally, it became a right-wing meme and then, of course, the Trump admin’s nickname for its operation targeting Omar’s immigration status. That Polymarket would use provocative right-wing framing for its daily newsletter was hardly surprising. The previous day, their newsletter’s subject line was: “The Texas Flu” — a reference to the MAGA conspiracy that Texas Senate Candidate James Talarico had been absent from the campaign trail because he was in a mental hospital in Ohio after a nervous breakdown (in fact, he had the flu). The body of the email featured a post from a user named Gaetan Dugas (not even going to attempt to unpack that one) who claims to be a top 1% trader on the prediction market Kalshi and whose tweet jokingly promoted the mental hospital conspiracy. To the extent that Polymarket editorialized the issue, it was to explain that regardless of whether Talarico had the flu or had suffered a mental breakdown, the big news was that a few points had been shaved off his lead in the Texas Senate race.
For months now I have been receiving Polymarket’s newsletter, Polygraph, and the examples above are far from outliers. Likewise, on X, Polymarket has been semi-secretly running accounts like NewsWire which often features headlines designed to excite a right-leaning audience. While it’s tempting to dismiss Polymarket as part of the online right’s milieu of gambling apps, crypto schemes, conspiracy culture, and try-hard transgressive politics, it might not be that simple.
As with gambling and crypto, prediction markets depend on a certain amount of what writer Max Read calls “suckerification,” where young men who hang out in right-wing spaces like X aren’t just the target audience, but the mark. What makes prediction markets, and particularly Polymarket, different from gambling and crypto is that they appear to have an objective beyond merely separating (primarily) young men from their money. As many before me have noted, and Katie Knibbs reported recently in Wired, Polymarket has clear ambitions to expand into a media company. And although they regularly post right-coded headlines to drive engagement to their markets, the push into media isn’t about promoting right-wing ideology, but rather the new ideological bogeyman on the block: rationalism.
By now you’re probably tired of hearing about the rationalists — the Silicon Valley pseudo cult best known for its embrace of polyamory, furry conventions, and believing that AI is a sentient God that may end humanity yet spending billions of dollars to be the first to build it anyway. That much of the recent discourse has focused on their weirdness (an understandable impulse when a group of people keep telling you they are building a doomsday machine) unfortunately misses the more salient point that a large and growing part of the population has already adopted the rationalists’ core concept of making decisions based on probabilities. While few of us are likely to think that software could have a soul or that effective altruism is the best way to deliver live-saving aid, many of us are comfortable making choices probabilistically. This may seem natural, and in some cases, it is. Statistical analysis has obvious social benefits, and plenty of industries and services couldn’t function without it. But we also need to draw a line between acting instinctively or according to internal values and/or judgement and opting to outsource our decisions to applied mathematics. Rationalists want us to keep blurring that line, and that’s where the prediction markets come in.
It’s not a coincidence that prediction markets align with rationalists’ values. While the rationalists didn’t invent them, they’ve played a central role in building and popularizing modern iterations. Each year, the rationalists hold the Manifest conference at their Lighthaven headquarters in Berkeley, where they discuss the state of prediction markets and debate things like whether sports should have any place in them. Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan has deep ties to the rationalist community and describes the prediction market as a “truth machine” that uses a wisdom-of-the-crowd mentality to overcome personal or media biases (a big no-no among rationalists). He has also cited as inspiration the rationalist-endorsed concept of “futarchy,” in which the government essentially operates on the precepts of prediction markets. But in order for prediction markets to be useful at the scale necessary to run something as big as the government, you need considerable engagement from the populace.
One way the prediction markets looked to drive engagement was to take a page out of the gambling industry’s capture of sports media and partner with legacy news outlets desperate for new funding to replace the ad revenue gobbled up by the tech industry. This may have worked to mainstream the prediction markets, but the portion of the population most likely to speculate on essentially a new form of gambling has mostly tuned out traditional news media. To reach this demographic, as John Herrman at New York mag explained, prediction markets filled the news and information vacuum created when traditional media left X. Using provocative right-coded headlines to garner attention, Polymarket then pushed the idea that prediction markets were a method of news consumption where you could have “skin in the game.” In practice, this meant that you could bet money on the outcome of a news event like whether the Strait of Hormuz would open by the end of the year. At a deeper level, it appealed to a desire prominent among young, alienated men on the internet not to be a passive observer or non-player character (NPC) in events they mostly engage with by scrolling on their phone. The darkest interpretation is that it teaches people to only care about news that can be understood, and bet on, through probabilities. And while consumers of traditional news media dwindle, adoption of prediction markets is increasing rapidly.
As with most things coming out of the rationalist community, it’s hard to know how much true belief there is in the promise of prediction markets and how much is motivated by good old-fashioned profit motive. But considering that the primary obsession of the rationalists is aligning AI with human interests, it’s not crazy to think that if the rationalists can’t figure out a way to make the machines think like humans, they might try to get humans to think like the machines instead.
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By Derick Dirmaier
[Good Posts]
Kacey, 1. Kristi, 0.
I don’t think you have a dog in this fight but if you did you would have shot it. https://t.co/bI50bahJZu
Which Trump ambassador was forced to resign this week after a series of damning reports in the Wall Street Journal?
How many days did White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia last? a) 5 b) 4 c) 3
Which single individual has spent the most money on the 2026 midterms elections, and how much has this person spent?
Answers below
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By
[TPM in the Wild]
We’re Begging You to Stop Mainstreaming Christopher Rufo
From Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets to the Great Replacement theory, there’s hardly a far-right anti-immigrant talking point that conservative operative Christopher Rufo won’t contemplate. Yet he’s welcomed on New York Times podcasts and given Big Serious Profiles as a conservative thinker — someone whose ideas should be given real consideration.
TPM’s Chris Mathias doesn’t see it that way. In an appearance on On the Media, Chris said, “I don’t believe that you can do a polite sitdown interview with someone like Rufo without him really advancing his agenda, and I would argue that that agenda is a white nationalist agenda — and that he is someone who deserves, I think, a lot more of our disdain and scorn than he does our respectability.”
Listen to the full interview below and check out Chris’ recent coverage of Rufo’s fretting over the so-called “Indian question,” i.e. whether Indians can ever really assimilate to American society.
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By
[Galaxy Brain]
Beware the Witches of TikTok
I guess he’s hoping no one watches the clip. Ty Masterson, president of the Kansas State Senate and Republican nominee for Kansas governor, accused his Democratic opponent of engaging in “witchcraft” in her bid to win the election. “They’re doing witchcraft spells on TikTok so she can win the governorship,” Masterson said of Sen. Cindy Holscher (D) at an event at Praise Chapel Wichita. “It’s like demonic stuff that they’re doing. Just in your face that way.”
He was apparently referring to a TikTok video in which Holscher’s smiling 21-year-old daughter waves her hands around to a trending audio clip talking about “brujas” while her mom looks on indulgently. The text on the screen reads “Summoning a spell so my mom wins the governorship.” According to Masterson, this is evidence that the race is a “spiritual battle” in which “evil is maturing.” Think he’s onto something.
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By
[This Effing Guy]
When Even Trump Thinks You’ve Gone Too Far
It’s hard to stand out as particularly ghoulish in the second Trump administration, but Pete Hegseth is doing his damndest. The defense secretary championed the idea of livestreaming the execution of the Army officer convicted for the 2009 Fort Hood shootings. “People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said in an interview promoting the broadcast of Maj. Nadal Halik Hasan’s execution. The proposal was met with bipartisan disgust, and even vice president JD Vance expressed skepticism. President Trump eventually intervened to cancel Hegseth’s gruesome Pentagon ceremony, saying, “Many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device. He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.”
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By
[In the Cafe]
A Hideous Precedent
Donald Trump’s ability to jail millions of people without even a bond hearing depends on what the Supreme Court thinks about one man’s case. TPM alum Matt Shuham returns to explain the Trump admin’s ghoulish mass detention policy, and how it goes beyond even the Japanese internment camps and 19th-century law requiring hard labor from Chinese immigrants found to be in the U.S. illegally.
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By
[No Words]
Caption This…
Now that is quite a photo.(Credit: Doug Mills / New York Times)
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.
Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise! We are starting off with some good news for a change — and, potentially, the end of one of the Trump Justice Department’s egregious overreach campaigns. For now.
For transparency reasons, I like peeling back the curtain on any changes we make to Morning Memo — but doing so always runs the risk of creating some confusion. So let me be really clear upfront: The change I’m about to mention doesn’t require you to do anything differently on your end.
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, it will still come to you the same as usual, but it will come directly from TPM instead of from Substack. It might look a tad different in your inbox — and the email itself will look more like TPM — so I wanted you to be aware in advance.
You’ll still be able to read Morning Memo in the email version or on Substack or at TPM. Your choice.
We’re making this change because in this deeply fractured media world, we’re trying to build out the TPM ecosystem and not be overly reliant on outside platforms. Better to live and die on our own merits than be subject to the vagaries of third parties.
OK, let’s get to today’s news.
A Hugely Important Distinction
As I feared, the developing story on the Trump DOJ targeting actual ballots in Los Angeles County is creating some confusion.
I tried in yesterday’s Morning Memo to make clear that this was different in kind and degree from the Trump administration’s previous efforts to purge voter rolls in advance of the election. But the reactions I’ve seen since, both to what I wrote and in the larger coverage, suggest that’s still not coming across entirely clearly.
Ironically, the Trump DOJ turns out to be helpful in this regard because it’s now admitted to NBC News that this is in fact different from a purge of voter rolls: “A DOJ spokesperson said the department is asking California to sequester ballots, not change their voter list.”
Now, the Trump DOJ has its own reasons for making that distinction, among them trying to get around the federal statute that bars the mass purging of voter rolls in the 90 days before the election. But in this instance what the Trump DOJ is saying also happens to be true — and the truth is even more damning. Its election interference is no longer hypothetical; it’s happening now while real ballots are being cast.
Once you make the category distinction between voter rolls and actual ballots already cast or soon to be cast, the seriousness of the threat from the federal government becomes a lot more obvious. The Trump DOJ is demanding that a specific batch of ballots be sequestered and not counted until citizenship is confirmed — an additional step in the tabulation process not provided for by law and which experts say would lead to a rushed and sloppy process that likely to disenfranchise legal voters.
The threat is serious even if the Trump DOJ is unable to cite any lawful authority for its demand to California and even if there is no legal basis for it to order states to sequester ballots of people the Trump DOJ claims to have identified as “likely noncitizen voters.”
With that framework in mind, let’s run through the latest developments and the big questions still outstanding …
The Latest From California …
READ: The Oct. 13 demand letter that acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter (the No. 2 official at DOJ!) sent to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber.
READ: McCotter sent a virtually identical letter to Dean Logan, the top election official in Los Angeles County.
A “Sticky Note”!?! In a statement, Secretary of State Weber revealed that the “password-protected thumb drive” containing the Trump DOJ’s list of “likely noncitizen voters” that McCotter references in his letters was accompanied by … wait for it … a sticky note with the password on it. Top notch information security going on there at the Trump DOJ.
Say More About “Election Integrity”: Popping an unsecured thumb drive (see sticky note above) into a USB port in your election office is just not something election administrators not named Tina Peters would dream of doing. “We have not accessed the drive because doing so would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols,” Logan, the Los Angeles County election official, said in a statement. “We do not consider the device a secure medium.” This is not the first time that the “election integrity” crowd has revealed how little regard it has for actual secure processes and procedures.
JUST IN: Trump DOJ List Challenged in Court
This morning, the UCLA Voting Rights Project, on behalf of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and a Los Angeles resident, sought a temporary restraining order to preempt the Trump DOJ’s actions in California.
The requested TRO, filed in an existing case in D.C. against Attorney General Todd Blanche and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, seeks to block the Trump DOJ from coercing California officials into using its purported list of “likely noncitizen voters” to withhold ballots from voters or to segregate and not count ballots already cast.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan did not immediately scheduled a hearing on the TRO but set a deadline of 5 p.m. ET Friday for the parties to file a proposed briefing schedule.
What We Still Don’t Know
The big outstanding questions include:
How many people are on the Trump DOJ list? Since McCotter doesn’t say in his letters and California officials haven’t even opened the file, we don’t know how long the Trump DOJ’s list of “likely noncitizen voters” actually is. A DOJ spokesperson allowed to the LA Times that the number is “in the thousands.” That’s a pretty big range.
Did all or just some California counties receive a similar letter from the Trump DOJ? Similar letters were mailed out to other California counties, CBS News reports, but it’s not clear if it went to all or just some of them.
Has the Trump DOJ targeted other states with similar demand letters? While the thrust of the Trump DOJ’s election-chaos has been aimed at blue states, there are tight House races in red states, too, where chaos might serve to delegitimize election results unfavorable to the GOP. Also worth noting that red state officials might be cooperative and not as quick to go public as California officials were.
If you know of similar efforts by the Trump DOJ in other states, please get in touch with me via the encrypted methods here.
‘Amateur Hour at the Department of Justice’
UCLA election law expert Rick Hasen, in a not-so-succinct headline: “DOJ’s Threat Letter to California Voting Officials with a 48-Hour Deadline is Amateurish Political Theater Aimed at Sowing Chaos, Not to Mention a Demand That Likely Violates Federal Law and Election Security Practices”
The Retribution: Ilhan Omar Edition
The one-two punch of retributive investigations of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) by both the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice is looking worse the more that comes out:
Denaturalization Is Trump’s Goal: The WSJ confirms that the investigation of Omar is “aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her.”
Flashback: D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who touted her office’s role in the DOJ investigation of Omar during a Fox News appearance this week, was suspended by the same network in 2019, when she hosted a show there, for on-air comments about Omar: “Omar wears a hijab, which, according to the Quran 33:59, tells women to cover so they won’t get molested.” Pirro said at the time. “Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?”
Speech or Debate Clause: U.S. Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh of D.C. did in fact limit the scope of the search warrant for Omar’s D.C. home after a protracted back and forth, CNN reports. In doing so, Sharbaugh reportedly cited precedent that preserves the protections for member of Congress contained in the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. Nonetheless, Omar’s phone was among the items seized during the search of her home, NBC News reports.
Trump: Execute the Leakers
Trump: "In my opinion, leakers should be shot. In the old days we used to shoot leakers."
“Democrats have been way too timid and modest in their expectations in the past. There’s a real chance for something big happening with this election, and I’m kind of old. So why not see if you can if there’s anything you can do to help?”
That’s a quote from Steve Pajcic, who was a politician himself decades ago and appears to have made a bundle of money over the years and has become a fairly prodigious philanthropist. There’s a Times write-up of him today — that’s where the quote comes from — and it’s about his and his children’s decision to drop about $7 million late dollars in the longshot quartet of southeastern Senate contests in Florida, South Carolina, Mississippi and the no-longer-so-long-shot race in Kansas.
Back in August I did a write-up on a deep dive on polling error put together by Republican consultant/pollster Pat Ruffini. When it comes to Ruffini’s work, I have a funny mix of assumptions and impulses. Ruffini’s a data guy and not a bullshitter. His numbers and analyses are real and solid. He’s also a Republican partisan. So he’s not above looking for the most favorable possibilities in the numbers. And I think it’s fair to say the series he’s done on this is generally aimed at Republicans and trying to send the message, “It might be okay” or “It’s not as bad as it looks.” At the same time, I am eager for it to be as bad for Republicans or worse than it looks.
Take that for what you will. Just a little truth in advertising and transparency for all involved. Ruffini just did a follow-up on this deep dive where, amazingly, there’s a new reason to think it might not be as bad for Republicans as it looks! Again, though, Ruffini’s a smart guy with a lot of data up his sleeves and he might be right.
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