https://www.profitableratecpm.com/f4ffsdxe?key=39b1ebce72f3758345b2155c98e6709c
Hello, it’s the weekend. It’s The Weekender ☕️
A Missouri anti-gerrymandering activist group, People Not Politicians, is facing a barrage of threats from the state’s Republican Attorney General, Catherine Hanaway. Hanaway recently launched an investigation into the group after making baseless claims that they were collecting signatures for an anti-gerrymandering referendum from “illegal aliens.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
She pointed to Washington D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying that a disgruntled Trump would lash out at the city’s national government. And her popularity rating, although little questioned, returned to positive territory when she was tested last May.
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
Bowser, in the face of fierce and vocal criticism, chose negotiated conciliation, voluntarily demolishing the Black Lives Matter plaza and applauding federal law enforcement assistance that sparked citywide protests.
She pointed to Washington D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying that a disgruntled Trump would lash out at the city’s national government. And her popularity rating, although little questioned, returned to positive territory when she was tested last May.
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
The writing may have been on the wall in how she dealt with President Trump’s intense — if classically short-lived — passion for meddling in the District. With both a personal animosity for and unusual power over one of America’s most liberal cities, Trump has taken a sporadical interest in DC’s internal affairs, from the renaming of the Washington Commanders to the RFK Stadium deal to the “beautification” of public spaces.
Bowser, in the face of fierce and vocal criticism, chose negotiated conciliation, voluntarily demolishing the Black Lives Matter plaza and applauding federal law enforcement assistance that sparked citywide protests.
She pointed to Washington D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying that a disgruntled Trump would lash out at the city’s national government. And her popularity rating, although little questioned, returned to positive territory when she was tested last May.
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
Acknowledging that she could be characterized as a “crisis management mayor” in an interview with The Washington Post before her public announcement, the end of her term was marked by attacks from the Trump administration, including DOGE layoffs that hit the District’s core federal workforce and a months-long incursion by the National Guard.
The writing may have been on the wall in how she dealt with President Trump’s intense — if classically short-lived — passion for meddling in the District. With both a personal animosity for and unusual power over one of America’s most liberal cities, Trump has taken a sporadical interest in DC’s internal affairs, from the renaming of the Washington Commanders to the RFK Stadium deal to the “beautification” of public spaces.
Bowser, in the face of fierce and vocal criticism, chose negotiated conciliation, voluntarily demolishing the Black Lives Matter plaza and applauding federal law enforcement assistance that sparked citywide protests.
She pointed to Washington D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying that a disgruntled Trump would lash out at the city’s national government. And her popularity rating, although little questioned, returned to positive territory when she was tested last May.
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced she would not run for reelection on Tuesday, a decision that has generated buzz since the summer when she missed her self-imposed deadline to announce her intentions.
Acknowledging that she could be characterized as a “crisis management mayor” in an interview with The Washington Post before her public announcement, the end of her term was marked by attacks from the Trump administration, including DOGE layoffs that hit the District’s core federal workforce and a months-long incursion by the National Guard.
The writing may have been on the wall in how she dealt with President Trump’s intense — if classically short-lived — passion for meddling in the District. With both a personal animosity for and unusual power over one of America’s most liberal cities, Trump has taken a sporadical interest in DC’s internal affairs, from the renaming of the Washington Commanders to the RFK Stadium deal to the “beautification” of public spaces.
Bowser, in the face of fierce and vocal criticism, chose negotiated conciliation, voluntarily demolishing the Black Lives Matter plaza and applauding federal law enforcement assistance that sparked citywide protests.
She pointed to Washington D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying that a disgruntled Trump would lash out at the city’s national government. And her popularity rating, although little questioned, returned to positive territory when she was tested last May.
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced she would not run for reelection on Tuesday, a decision that has generated buzz since the summer when she missed her self-imposed deadline to announce her intentions.
Acknowledging that she could be characterized as a “crisis management mayor” in an interview with The Washington Post before her public announcement, the end of her term was marked by attacks from the Trump administration, including DOGE layoffs that hit the District’s core federal workforce and a months-long incursion by the National Guard.
The writing may have been on the wall in how she dealt with President Trump’s intense — if classically short-lived — passion for meddling in the District. With both a personal animosity for and unusual power over one of America’s most liberal cities, Trump has taken a sporadical interest in DC’s internal affairs, from the renaming of the Washington Commanders to the RFK Stadium deal to the “beautification” of public spaces.
Bowser, in the face of fierce and vocal criticism, chose negotiated conciliation, voluntarily demolishing the Black Lives Matter plaza and applauding federal law enforcement assistance that sparked citywide protests.
She pointed to Washington D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying that a disgruntled Trump would lash out at the city’s national government. And her popularity rating, although little questioned, returned to positive territory when she was tested last May.
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
He pointed out, however, that given the recent “vigilantism” we’ve seen from ICE, Hanaway’s mere threat to involve ICE creates an atmosphere of intimidation that, in this case, may have been Hanaway’s intention all along.
—Khaya Himmelman
Muriel bows out
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced she would not run for reelection on Tuesday, a decision that has generated buzz since the summer when she missed her self-imposed deadline to announce her intentions.
Acknowledging that she could be characterized as a “crisis management mayor” in an interview with The Washington Post before her public announcement, the end of her term was marked by attacks from the Trump administration, including DOGE layoffs that hit the District’s core federal workforce and a months-long incursion by the National Guard.
The writing may have been on the wall in how she dealt with President Trump’s intense — if classically short-lived — passion for meddling in the District. With both a personal animosity for and unusual power over one of America’s most liberal cities, Trump has taken a sporadical interest in DC’s internal affairs, from the renaming of the Washington Commanders to the RFK Stadium deal to the “beautification” of public spaces.
Bowser, in the face of fierce and vocal criticism, chose negotiated conciliation, voluntarily demolishing the Black Lives Matter plaza and applauding federal law enforcement assistance that sparked citywide protests.
She pointed to Washington D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying that a disgruntled Trump would lash out at the city’s national government. And her popularity rating, although little questioned, returned to positive territory when she was tested last May.
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
As things stand, the group, Von Glahn told TPM, has not been contacted by ICE.
He pointed out, however, that given the recent “vigilantism” we’ve seen from ICE, Hanaway’s mere threat to involve ICE creates an atmosphere of intimidation that, in this case, may have been Hanaway’s intention all along.
—Khaya Himmelman
Muriel bows out
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced she would not run for reelection on Tuesday, a decision that has generated buzz since the summer when she missed her self-imposed deadline to announce her intentions.
Acknowledging that she could be characterized as a “crisis management mayor” in an interview with The Washington Post before her public announcement, the end of her term was marked by attacks from the Trump administration, including DOGE layoffs that hit the District’s core federal workforce and a months-long incursion by the National Guard.
The writing may have been on the wall in how she dealt with President Trump’s intense — if classically short-lived — passion for meddling in the District. With both a personal animosity for and unusual power over one of America’s most liberal cities, Trump has taken a sporadical interest in DC’s internal affairs, from the renaming of the Washington Commanders to the RFK Stadium deal to the “beautification” of public spaces.
Bowser, in the face of fierce and vocal criticism, chose negotiated conciliation, voluntarily demolishing the Black Lives Matter plaza and applauding federal law enforcement assistance that sparked citywide protests.
She pointed to Washington D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying that a disgruntled Trump would lash out at the city’s national government. And her popularity rating, although little questioned, returned to positive territory when she was tested last May.
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
“When it turns out that the attorney general is completely wrong and has done nothing about it, it doesn’t matter, she will have succeeded in her intention, which is to sort of confuse and manipulate.”
As things stand, the group, Von Glahn told TPM, has not been contacted by ICE.
He pointed out, however, that given the recent “vigilantism” we’ve seen from ICE, Hanaway’s mere threat to involve ICE creates an atmosphere of intimidation that, in this case, may have been Hanaway’s intention all along.
—Khaya Himmelman
Muriel bows out
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced she would not run for reelection on Tuesday, a decision that has generated buzz since the summer when she missed her self-imposed deadline to announce her intentions.
Acknowledging that she could be characterized as a “crisis management mayor” in an interview with The Washington Post before her public announcement, the end of her term was marked by attacks from the Trump administration, including DOGE layoffs that hit the District’s core federal workforce and a months-long incursion by the National Guard.
The writing may have been on the wall in how she dealt with President Trump’s intense — if classically short-lived — passion for meddling in the District. With both a personal animosity for and unusual power over one of America’s most liberal cities, Trump has taken a sporadical interest in DC’s internal affairs, from the renaming of the Washington Commanders to the RFK Stadium deal to the “beautification” of public spaces.
Bowser, in the face of fierce and vocal criticism, chose negotiated conciliation, voluntarily demolishing the Black Lives Matter plaza and applauding federal law enforcement assistance that sparked citywide protests.
She pointed to Washington D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying that a disgruntled Trump would lash out at the city’s national government. And her popularity rating, although little questioned, returned to positive territory when she was tested last May.
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
“The truth is not what matters,” he said. “This is part of a trend we’ve seen increasingly over the years where MAGA-aligned elected officials, ruled by press releases and tweets, aren’t actually trying to get to the truth about anything that matters.”
“When it turns out that the attorney general is completely wrong and has done nothing about it, it doesn’t matter, she will have succeeded in her intention, which is to sort of confuse and manipulate.”
As things stand, the group, Von Glahn told TPM, has not been contacted by ICE.
He pointed out, however, that given the recent “vigilantism” we’ve seen from ICE, Hanaway’s mere threat to involve ICE creates an atmosphere of intimidation that, in this case, may have been Hanaway’s intention all along.
—Khaya Himmelman
Muriel bows out
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced she would not run for reelection on Tuesday, a decision that has generated buzz since the summer when she missed her self-imposed deadline to announce her intentions.
Acknowledging that she could be characterized as a “crisis management mayor” in an interview with The Washington Post before her public announcement, the end of her term was marked by attacks from the Trump administration, including DOGE layoffs that hit the District’s core federal workforce and a months-long incursion by the National Guard.
The writing may have been on the wall in how she dealt with President Trump’s intense — if classically short-lived — passion for meddling in the District. With both a personal animosity for and unusual power over one of America’s most liberal cities, Trump has taken a sporadical interest in DC’s internal affairs, from the renaming of the Washington Commanders to the RFK Stadium deal to the “beautification” of public spaces.
Bowser, in the face of fierce and vocal criticism, chose negotiated conciliation, voluntarily demolishing the Black Lives Matter plaza and applauding federal law enforcement assistance that sparked citywide protests.
She pointed to Washington D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying that a disgruntled Trump would lash out at the city’s national government. And her popularity rating, although little questioned, returned to positive territory when she was tested last May.
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
In an interview with TPM, People Not Politicians executive director Richard Von Glahn called the allegations against the group “absurd.”
“The truth is not what matters,” he said. “This is part of a trend we’ve seen increasingly over the years where MAGA-aligned elected officials, ruled by press releases and tweets, aren’t actually trying to get to the truth about anything that matters.”
“When it turns out that the attorney general is completely wrong and has done nothing about it, it doesn’t matter, she will have succeeded in her intention, which is to sort of confuse and manipulate.”
As things stand, the group, Von Glahn told TPM, has not been contacted by ICE.
He pointed out, however, that given the recent “vigilantism” we’ve seen from ICE, Hanaway’s mere threat to involve ICE creates an atmosphere of intimidation that, in this case, may have been Hanaway’s intention all along.
—Khaya Himmelman
Muriel bows out
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced she would not run for reelection on Tuesday, a decision that has generated buzz since the summer when she missed her self-imposed deadline to announce her intentions.
Acknowledging that she could be characterized as a “crisis management mayor” in an interview with The Washington Post before her public announcement, the end of her term was marked by attacks from the Trump administration, including DOGE layoffs that hit the District’s core federal workforce and a months-long incursion by the National Guard.
The writing may have been on the wall in how she dealt with President Trump’s intense — if classically short-lived — passion for meddling in the District. With both a personal animosity for and unusual power over one of America’s most liberal cities, Trump has taken a sporadical interest in DC’s internal affairs, from the renaming of the Washington Commanders to the RFK Stadium deal to the “beautification” of public spaces.
Bowser, in the face of fierce and vocal criticism, chose negotiated conciliation, voluntarily demolishing the Black Lives Matter plaza and applauding federal law enforcement assistance that sparked citywide protests.
She pointed to Washington D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying that a disgruntled Trump would lash out at the city’s national government. And her popularity rating, although little questioned, returned to positive territory when she was tested last May.
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
A few days later, in another post, Hanaway announced that the “matter” had been referred to ICE.
In an interview with TPM, People Not Politicians executive director Richard Von Glahn called the allegations against the group “absurd.”
“The truth is not what matters,” he said. “This is part of a trend we’ve seen increasingly over the years where MAGA-aligned elected officials, ruled by press releases and tweets, aren’t actually trying to get to the truth about anything that matters.”
“When it turns out that the attorney general is completely wrong and has done nothing about it, it doesn’t matter, she will have succeeded in her intention, which is to sort of confuse and manipulate.”
As things stand, the group, Von Glahn told TPM, has not been contacted by ICE.
He pointed out, however, that given the recent “vigilantism” we’ve seen from ICE, Hanaway’s mere threat to involve ICE creates an atmosphere of intimidation that, in this case, may have been Hanaway’s intention all along.
—Khaya Himmelman
Muriel bows out
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced she would not run for reelection on Tuesday, a decision that has generated buzz since the summer when she missed her self-imposed deadline to announce her intentions.
Acknowledging that she could be characterized as a “crisis management mayor” in an interview with The Washington Post before her public announcement, the end of her term was marked by attacks from the Trump administration, including DOGE layoffs that hit the District’s core federal workforce and a months-long incursion by the National Guard.
The writing may have been on the wall in how she dealt with President Trump’s intense — if classically short-lived — passion for meddling in the District. With both a personal animosity for and unusual power over one of America’s most liberal cities, Trump has taken a sporadical interest in DC’s internal affairs, from the renaming of the Washington Commanders to the RFK Stadium deal to the “beautification” of public spaces.
Bowser, in the face of fierce and vocal criticism, chose negotiated conciliation, voluntarily demolishing the Black Lives Matter plaza and applauding federal law enforcement assistance that sparked citywide protests.
She pointed to Washington D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying that a disgruntled Trump would lash out at the city’s national government. And her popularity rating, although little questioned, returned to positive territory when she was tested last May.
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
The state AG also provided no evidence to support his claims.
A few days later, in another post, Hanaway announced that the “matter” had been referred to ICE.
In an interview with TPM, People Not Politicians executive director Richard Von Glahn called the allegations against the group “absurd.”
“The truth is not what matters,” he said. “This is part of a trend we’ve seen increasingly over the years where MAGA-aligned elected officials, ruled by press releases and tweets, aren’t actually trying to get to the truth about anything that matters.”
“When it turns out that the attorney general is completely wrong and has done nothing about it, it doesn’t matter, she will have succeeded in her intention, which is to sort of confuse and manipulate.”
As things stand, the group, Von Glahn told TPM, has not been contacted by ICE.
He pointed out, however, that given the recent “vigilantism” we’ve seen from ICE, Hanaway’s mere threat to involve ICE creates an atmosphere of intimidation that, in this case, may have been Hanaway’s intention all along.
—Khaya Himmelman
Muriel bows out
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced she would not run for reelection on Tuesday, a decision that has generated buzz since the summer when she missed her self-imposed deadline to announce her intentions.
Acknowledging that she could be characterized as a “crisis management mayor” in an interview with The Washington Post before her public announcement, the end of her term was marked by attacks from the Trump administration, including DOGE layoffs that hit the District’s core federal workforce and a months-long incursion by the National Guard.
The writing may have been on the wall in how she dealt with President Trump’s intense — if classically short-lived — passion for meddling in the District. With both a personal animosity for and unusual power over one of America’s most liberal cities, Trump has taken a sporadical interest in DC’s internal affairs, from the renaming of the Washington Commanders to the RFK Stadium deal to the “beautification” of public spaces.
Bowser, in the face of fierce and vocal criticism, chose negotiated conciliation, voluntarily demolishing the Black Lives Matter plaza and applauding federal law enforcement assistance that sparked citywide protests.
She pointed to Washington D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying that a disgruntled Trump would lash out at the city’s national government. And her popularity rating, although little questioned, returned to positive territory when she was tested last May.
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
“Out-of-state signature collectors are allegedly employing illegal aliens in an effort to undermine the will of the people’s elected representatives,” Hanaway wrote in an article on X last week. “We have launched an investigation into Advanced Micro Targeting. Advanced Micro Targeting is the signature gatherer for People Not Politicians, a dark money group seeking to subvert Missouri’s constitutional order.”
The state AG also provided no evidence to support his claims.
A few days later, in another post, Hanaway announced that the “matter” had been referred to ICE.
In an interview with TPM, People Not Politicians executive director Richard Von Glahn called the allegations against the group “absurd.”
“The truth is not what matters,” he said. “This is part of a trend we’ve seen increasingly over the years where MAGA-aligned elected officials, ruled by press releases and tweets, aren’t actually trying to get to the truth about anything that matters.”
“When it turns out that the attorney general is completely wrong and has done nothing about it, it doesn’t matter, she will have succeeded in her intention, which is to sort of confuse and manipulate.”
As things stand, the group, Von Glahn told TPM, has not been contacted by ICE.
He pointed out, however, that given the recent “vigilantism” we’ve seen from ICE, Hanaway’s mere threat to involve ICE creates an atmosphere of intimidation that, in this case, may have been Hanaway’s intention all along.
—Khaya Himmelman
Muriel bows out
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced she would not run for reelection on Tuesday, a decision that has generated buzz since the summer when she missed her self-imposed deadline to announce her intentions.
Acknowledging that she could be characterized as a “crisis management mayor” in an interview with The Washington Post before her public announcement, the end of her term was marked by attacks from the Trump administration, including DOGE layoffs that hit the District’s core federal workforce and a months-long incursion by the National Guard.
The writing may have been on the wall in how she dealt with President Trump’s intense — if classically short-lived — passion for meddling in the District. With both a personal animosity for and unusual power over one of America’s most liberal cities, Trump has taken a sporadical interest in DC’s internal affairs, from the renaming of the Washington Commanders to the RFK Stadium deal to the “beautification” of public spaces.
Bowser, in the face of fierce and vocal criticism, chose negotiated conciliation, voluntarily demolishing the Black Lives Matter plaza and applauding federal law enforcement assistance that sparked citywide protests.
She pointed to Washington D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying that a disgruntled Trump would lash out at the city’s national government. And her popularity rating, although little questioned, returned to positive territory when she was tested last May.
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
“Out-of-state signature collectors are allegedly employing illegal aliens in an effort to undermine the will of the people’s elected representatives,” Hanaway wrote in an article on X last week. “We have launched an investigation into Advanced Micro Targeting. Advanced Micro Targeting is the signature gatherer for People Not Politicians, a dark money group seeking to subvert Missouri’s constitutional order.”
The state AG also provided no evidence to support his claims.
A few days later, in another post, Hanaway announced that the “matter” had been referred to ICE.
In an interview with TPM, People Not Politicians executive director Richard Von Glahn called the allegations against the group “absurd.”
“The truth is not what matters,” he said. “This is part of a trend we’ve seen increasingly over the years where MAGA-aligned elected officials, ruled by press releases and tweets, aren’t actually trying to get to the truth about anything that matters.”
“When it turns out that the attorney general is completely wrong and has done nothing about it, it doesn’t matter, she will have succeeded in her intention, which is to sort of confuse and manipulate.”
As things stand, the group, Von Glahn told TPM, has not been contacted by ICE.
He pointed out, however, that given the recent “vigilantism” we’ve seen from ICE, Hanaway’s mere threat to involve ICE creates an atmosphere of intimidation that, in this case, may have been Hanaway’s intention all along.
—Khaya Himmelman
Muriel bows out
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced she would not run for reelection on Tuesday, a decision that has generated buzz since the summer when she missed her self-imposed deadline to announce her intentions.
Acknowledging that she could be characterized as a “crisis management mayor” in an interview with The Washington Post before her public announcement, the end of her term was marked by attacks from the Trump administration, including DOGE layoffs that hit the District’s core federal workforce and a months-long incursion by the National Guard.
The writing may have been on the wall in how she dealt with President Trump’s intense — if classically short-lived — passion for meddling in the District. With both a personal animosity for and unusual power over one of America’s most liberal cities, Trump has taken a sporadical interest in DC’s internal affairs, from the renaming of the Washington Commanders to the RFK Stadium deal to the “beautification” of public spaces.
Bowser, in the face of fierce and vocal criticism, chose negotiated conciliation, voluntarily demolishing the Black Lives Matter plaza and applauding federal law enforcement assistance that sparked citywide protests.
She pointed to Washington D.C.’s unique vulnerabilities as an explanation, publicly worrying that a disgruntled Trump would lash out at the city’s national government. And her popularity rating, although little questioned, returned to positive territory when she was tested last May.
Bowser’s approach clashed with the aggressive tactics of blue-state governors — Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker — targeted by Trump, but known to have an eye on high office and eager to show the base some fight.
As Bowser leaves, she highlighted an unfinished goal of her term: statehood in Washington. The fight for the representation of the 700,000 inhabitants of the district will be entrusted to his successor.
-Kate Riga
MAGA International faces some responsibility
Brazil’s Supreme Court this week ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for his involvement in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 election, which he lost.
I’ve been interested in this story for years, partly because of the obvious similarities between it and the recent US coup – and, partly, because of its differences.
On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s coup plotters went further than Trump’s Stop the Steal movement, planning to assassinate the president and vice president-elect, as well as a Supreme Court justice, and explicitly requesting support from the military. Then there is the fact that Brazil’s young democracy, reestablished less than 50 years ago after a tumultuous history of coups, stood firm and saw justice served. Our much older country was much less agile when it came time to deal with its first, less than peaceful transfer of power.
It is of course possible to exaggerate the similarities between January 6, 2021 and the Bolsonaro plot, which culminated on January 8, 2023. But the tonal overlap – a deeply serious attack on democracy that was also quite funny – is hard to ignore. There was a general aura of clowning around Bolsonaro’s efforts that, at this point, will be familiar to most TPM readers from our coverage of American extremists.
This clownish attitude has continued throughout this month: after a period of house arrest, Bolsonaro was arrested last weekend for tampering with his ankle monitor and attacking him with a soldering iron. The former president claimed his medications, which include drugs to treat surprise bouts of vomiting resulting from a 2018 knife wound, made him paranoid that the ankle monitor was listening to him, prompting him to attack the device. He said he had no intention of escaping. But Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes (the justice advocates targeted by Bolsonaro’s assassination) found this unconvincing given the former president’s tendency to disappear for days or weeks, including hiding in the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, apparently hoping that his ally Viktor Orbán would grant him asylum.
-John Light
The Republican Party is fighting itself to sell its products to AI billionaires
Someone in the Trump coalition desperately wants to ban states from regulating AI, legalities of such a policy be damned.
Other strong voices within Trump’s coalition see the effort as a power grab by tech moguls.
For months, these two factions have been engaged in a fierce struggle.
The latest chapter opened this month, when news began circulating that an executive order was being drafted to crush attempts to regulate AI at the state level. Among other things, it would “direct the Justice Department to sue states that pass laws regulating artificial intelligence,” according to the Washington Post, which first published a report on the project. A post-mortem of the rumors by The Verge presented the project as the work of — and a massive power grab by — South African-born venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s special adviser on AI and crypto. Around the same time, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Punchbowl that lawmakers were considering writing a preemption of state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act.
Populist Trump voters panicked (as did many Democrats). During a podcast discussion, legal MAGA bomb-throwers Mike Davis and Steve Bannon lamented their efforts, denouncing the “tech bros” behind them. “I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism and crony capitalism.”
The divide emerged in almost exactly the same way when, in June, congressional Republicans inserted a similar preemption provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and then, almost unanimously, disavowed it, with Republicans joining Democrats in removing it.
The draft decree would now be suspended. But the tension between Trump’s power-hungry tech supporters backed by Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing, nationalist and intermittently populist base remains an important and sometimes amusing fault line in a movement that, at least for now, is increasingly fractured.
-John Light
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