The Trump Presidency Reboot Suffers From Predictable Plots

Many things have happened. Here are some of the things. This is the morning memo of TPM. Register For the e-mail version.

Performative and substantial

When his presidential reality show was canceled after a season in 2020, Donald Trump was determined that the program restart in 2025 will not suffer from the same lack of coherent conspiracy lines and bad stories.

Each week of the new season, Trump has confronted a clearly defined villain who draws from racist, misogynist and / or xenophobic stereotypes. Trump is considered to be defeated the invented villain, often while surpassing and dominating a quistling democrat who is portrayed as incompetent in the task. By perfecting the formula, Trump seized the mayors of black women – first Karen Bass in Los Angeles and now Muriel Bowser at DC – like the perfect leaf for Maga’s base.

And so it goes with the launch of Monday of what will be at least an episode of a week: the alleged federal takeover of DC is bad, yes. But there are also real limits to the seizure of Trump’s federal control over the DC police, to deploy the DC National Guard and to assign federal police to combat street crime.

For Trump, performance is what matters most. For us, it is important to recognize that it is performative and that provoking our indignation is part of the point. This does not mean that performance has no substantial or scandalous implications. One of Trump’s very real dangers is this reckless contempt for the substantial consequences of his performative fulfillment. In the end, we don’t have to choose. It is both / and.

Part of the most intelligent analyzes of this week’s intrigue Trump:

Steve Vladeck: “The result of all this is that the president do Having two important authorities with regard to the “local” police in the Columbia district: he can use the (small) National Guard DC in the circumstances in which he could probably not use any other military staff; And it may require the use of MPDs “for federal purposes” up to 30 days. It is not nothing, but it is not closer to a kind of federal redemption of the national capital. »»

Brian Beutler: “But the result is the same. Trump affirmed political control over the city’s police forces and flooded the streets with various other federal law officers, supposed to bring out the homeless, and further reduce crime. But the overwhelming majority of us.”

Justin Glawe: “Although the reality of crime in America does not behave with the stories pushed by the White House, it is not surprising that the American right has developed two random incidents in order to pursue their authoritarian objectives.”

Day quote

“The most benign interpretation is that it is an attempt to obtain a victory for public relations by claiming credit for the already low crime rates historically low to DC, the worst interpretation is that it is a test for more dubious uses of military forces in other American cities.” –Carrie Lee, principal researcher at the German Marshall Fund and former professor at US Army War College, on the deployment of President Trump of the National Guard at DC

Break …

A new WAPO exclusivity:

The Trump administration assesses plans which would establish a “rapid reaction force of civil disturbance” made up of hundreds of troops of the National Guard responsible for deploying quickly in American cities confronted with demonstrations or other disorders, according to internal documents of the Pentagon examined by the Washington Post.

The plan calls 600 soldiers to expect at any time so that they can deploy as little as a hour, depending on the documents. They would be divided into two groups of 300 and stationed in military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with a ready in the east to the east and west of Mississippi, respectively.

New modern file: 60,000+ in immigration detention

The number of people in immigration detention increased from around 39,000 in January to more than 60,000 today, exceeding the previous record of 55,654 established in August 2019 during Trump’s first mandate, reports the NYT.

Harvard nearly coughing $ 500 million to settle with Trump

The undergoing negotiations between Harvard University and the Trump administration to settle anti -Semitism allegations on the campus on the structure of an extortion agreement which would include university which pays $ 500 million to release billions of dollars in federal frozen research.

The judge blocks the frost of Trump funding

The American district judge Dabney L. Friedrich of DC – one appointed by Trump – ordered the Trump administration to restore frozen federal funding for the national endowment for democracy.

The judge calls Trump Doj in the Ghislaine Maxwell case

By rejecting Trump’s Doj’s request to release Grand Jury equipment in the Ghislaine Maxwell case, the American district judge Paul Engelmayer of Manhattan called the administration to have misleaded the public thinking that the equipment linked to Jeffrey Epstein would contain new information:

Insofar as the dispensation motion implies that the materials of the large jury are a bit of a bridge of information not disclosed on Epstein or Maxwell or Confederates, they are definitely not that. An “civil servant”, “legislator”, “expert” or “ordinary citizen” “deeply interested and concerned about Epstein matter”, motion to a this 3 years, and who examined these documents by expecting, on the basis of representations of the government, to learn new information on the crimes of Epstein and Maxwell and the investigation, which would take up disappointed and erroneous. There is no “there” there.

Explosion of the past

The right -wing extremist, Ammon Bundy, cannot go bankrupt to erase a defamation judgment of $ 52 million won against him by an Idaho hospital system, tried a court last week.

Only the best people

President Trump plans to appoint the EJ Antoni, unreservedly, currently economist of the Conservative Heritage Foundation, to direct the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Antoni, a Stident BLS critic, would replace Erika Mcentarfer, who was dismissed by the president after having founded baseless that the figures of the jobs were “rigged”.

Graphic of the day

A new analysis of the Congressional Budget Office shows how the great bill of President Trump’s regressive president is:

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