The Trump Presidency Reboot Suffers From Predictable Plots
INSIDE: Muriel Bowser ... Ghislaine Maxwell ... Ammon Bundy
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Performative AND Substantive
When his presidential reality show was cancelled after one season in 2020, Donald Trump was determined that the show’s 2025 reboot wouldn’t suffer from the same lack of consistent plot lines and poor story development.
Every week of the new season has Trump confronting a clearly defined villain who taps into racist, misogynistic, and/or xenophobic stereotypes. Trump is cast as vanquishing the invented villain, often while outperforming and dominating a quisling Democrat who is portrayed as inept in the task. In perfecting the formula, Trump has seized on Black women mayors — first Karen Bass in Los Angeles and now Muriel Bowser in D.C. — as the perfect foil for the MAGA base.
And so it goes with the Monday launch of what will be at least a weeklong episode: the purported federal takeover of D.C. It’s bad, yes. But there are also real limits to Trump’s seizing federal control of D.C. police, deploying the D.C. National Guard, and assigning federal law enforcement to fight street crime.
For Trump, the performance is what matters most. For us, it’s important to recognize that it is performative and that provoking our outrage is part of the point. That doesn’t mean the performance doesn’t have substantive implications or isn’t outrageous. One of the very real dangers of Trump is this reckless disregard for the substantive consequences of his performative flourishes. In the end, we don’t have to choose. It’s both/and.
Some of the smartest analysis of this week’s Trump plot line:
Steve Vladeck: “The upshot of all of this is that the President does have two important authorities when it comes to ‘local’ law enforcement in the District of Columbia: He can use the (small) D.C. National Guard in circumstances in which he probably couldn’t use any other military personnel; and he can require the use of MPD ‘for federal purposes’ for up to 30 days. That’s not nothing, but it also isn’t anything close to some kind of federal takeover of the nation’s capital.”
Brian Beutler: “But the upshot is the same. Trump has asserted political control over the city’s police force and flooded streets with various other federal law-enforcement officers, supposedly to drive homeless people out of sight, and further reduce crime. But the overwhelming majority of us will experience it as a sucker punch — his way of proving he can provoke us without consequence.”
Justin Glawe: “While the reality of crime in America doesn’t comport with the narratives being pushed by the White House, it’s no surprise that the American right has glommed onto two random incidents in order to further their authoritarian goals.”
Quote of the Day
“The most benign interpretation is that this is an attempt to gain a public-relations victory by claiming credit for the already historically low crime rates in D.C. The worst-case interpretation is that it is a test run for more legally dubious uses of military forces in other American cities.” —Carrie Lee, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and a former professor at the U.S. Army War College, on President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in DC
Breaking …
A new WaPo exclusive:
The Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
The plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour, the documents say. They would be split into two groups of 300 and stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with purview of regions east and west of the Mississippi River, respectively.
New Modern Record: 60,000+ In Immigration Detention
The number of people in immigration detention has risen from about 39,000 in January to more than 60,000 today, exceeding the previous record of 55,654 set in August 2019 during Trump’s first term, the NYT reports.
Harvard Close To Coughing Up $500M To Settle With Trump
Ongoing negotiations between Harvard University and the Trump administration to settle trumped-up claims of antisemitism on campus are closing in on the structure of a extortive deal that would include the university paying $500 million to free up billions in frozen federal research funding.
Judge Blocks Trump Funding Freeze
U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich of D.C. — a Trump appointee — ordered the Trump administration to restore frozen federal funding for the National Endowment for Democracy.
Judge Calls Out Trump DOJ In Ghislaine Maxwell Case
In rejecting the Trump DOJ’s request to release grand jury materials in the Ghislaine Maxwell case, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer of Manhattan called out the administration for misleading the public into thinking the Jeffrey Epstein-related materials would contain new information:
Insofar as the motion to unseal implies that the grand jury materials are an untapped mine lode of undisclosed information about Epstein or Maxwell or confederates, they definitively are not that. A “public official,” “lawmaker,” “pundit,” or “ordinary citizen” “deeply interested and concerned about the Epstein matter,” Motion to Unseal at 3, and who reviewed these materials expecting, based on the Government’s representations, to learn new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes and the investigation into them, would come away feeling disappointed and misled. There is no “there” there.
Blast from the Past
The right-wing extremist Ammon Bundy cannot use bankruptcy to erase a $52 million defamation judgment won against him by an Idaho hospital system, a court ruled last week.
Only the Best People
President Trump plans to nominate the woefully unqualified E.J. Antoni, currently the chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Antoni, a strident BLS critic, would replace Erika McEntarfer, who was fired by the president after he baselessly claimed that the jobs numbers were “rigged.”
Chart of the Day
A new analysis from the Congressional Budget Office shows how regressive President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is:
Thank you David.
I still don't get how Grump can freeze billions already appropriated by congress for Harvard or any other university, for that matter? I thought "rescission"-ing already appropriated funds was blocked pending another unconstitutional greenlight from SCOTUS? Anyway, I can't keep up. And this is not the way to run a country remains my carefully considered opinion. Thanks for keeping me posted about the unfolding disaster.