ABC News reports: “President Trump is expected to fire the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after his office was unable to find incriminating evidence of mortgage fraud against New York AG Letitia James, according to sources.” This would make the Bush U.S. attorneys scandal of 2006 look quaint!
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but every red light is blinking at once. Happy Friday.
The Threat That Worked Too Well
by Andrew Egger
You almost wonder: Is FCC chairman Brendan Carr the dog that caught the car?
When Carr appeared on Benny Johnson’s podcast Wednesday1 to float retaliatory regulatory action against Jimmy Kimmel for having done Charlie Kirk Wrongthink, the threat yielded astonishingly quick results. By evening, Disney (ABC’s parent company) had folded like a cheap suit, and Kimmel was off the air indefinitely. Big win, Brendan! Very based!
Johnson spent yesterday morning spiking the football, taking credit for booking the interview that had led to Kimmel’s firing. “Mean tweets are great. But they can be ignored,” he wrote on X. “What can’t be ignored are your paying customers organizing against you and FCC investigations.”
Oddly, though, Carr seemed less inclined to luxuriate in the moment. Having spent the prior day sending celebratory gifs to reporters asking him about the entire episode (again, very based), he grew notably skittish. Yesterday, he showed up on Dana Loesch’s show2 to argue he had actually played no active role in Kimmel’s suspension at all. In his telling, that suspension had really been the work of the fearless grassroots local broadcasters: “It was the local TV stations that said, ‘I’ve got to look out for the needs of my local community. I don’t want to run this Kimmel stuff.’” It wasn’t government pressure, Carr insisted, but rather a “market correction.”3
In a bizarre way, the speed and zeal with which Disney bent the knee left Carr and the administration in an awkward spot. There aren’t that many truly universal rules in U.S. politics—way fewer than we thought a few years back, it turns out!—but “the government can’t openly punish your political speech” is supposed to be one of them. The Democratic reaction has been white-hot, with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes summing up the mood well: “This is the most straightforward attack on free speech from state actors I’ve ever seen in my life and it’s not even close.” Even Sen. Chuck Schumer stirred his stumps enough to call for Carr’s resignation: “He is one of the greatest threats to free speech America has ever seen,” he wrote on social media.
The usual crop of reliable GOP partisans is brazening through it. “For all the concerns about the First Amendment,” former Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Fox News last night, “what about all the amendments Charlie Kirk lost, because Charlie Kirk has no amendments right now.” But you get the sense this is pure, grinding, grim duty that nobody’s having much fun with. Carr himself has more of a personal interest in sidestepping what he did to Kimmel. He spent the Biden administration explicitly arguing that “the FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.’”
The irony, of course, is that Trump himself is perfectly, serenely unconcerned about all this. The Stasi may insist it is playing no role, but he’s gonna just go out there and illustrate the entire playbook. “Great News for America,” Trump wrote. “The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. . . . That leaves Jimmy [Fallon] and Seth [Meyers], two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”
Sometimes this administration’s swerves toward open fascism look like deliberate strategy. Other times they read more like a klutzy accident. But with Donald Trump in charge, the dial only turns one way.
A Military, Unconstrained and Trumpified
by William Kristol
The weaponization of the Justice Department, mentioned briefly at the top of this newsletter, and the assault on the First Amendment, described by Andrew above, are important parts of the authoritarian playbook. So is the attempted politicization of the military.
Unfortunately, that too is proceeding apace.
From the very beginning, when he fired senior general officers and removed the judge advocates general, it’s been clear that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been determined to do two things: turn the United States military into Donald Trump’s military, and loosen legal constraints on, and avoid oversight of, Trump’s use of that military.
On the first front, every week seems to feature some attempt to turn military education into MAGA propaganda, or of imposing Trumpist cancel culture on the military.
Most recently, for example, Hegseth has ordered that actions be taken—including suspensions and firings—against members of the military who may have made comments that could be understood as negative or unsympathetic about the late Charlie Kirk. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is reportedly considering a campaign aimed at recruiting supporters of Kirk to join the military.
According to NBC News, “possible slogans that Pentagon leaders have discussed include ‘Charlie has awakened a generation of warriors.’” Kirk never served in the military. But “Pentagon leaders are considering using chapters of Kirk’s political organization, Turning Point USA, at schools across the U.S. as military recruitment centers,” according to NBC.
This would fit a pattern. We’ve already seen explicitly political recruiting campaigns for ICE. That’s dangerous enough. But it all gets that much more dangerous when this spreads to the uniformed military. It’s not so much what kinds of hyperpoliticized people such a campaign would induce to sign up for military service, it’s what kinds of people it would deter from doing so. How much does all of it contribute to a sense that one is joining not the United States military but Donald Trump’s military, or a MAGA military?
This is obviously not good news. The worse news is that Trump and Hegseth have more than three years to continue pushing every part of the military, from the most senior officers to the most junior recruits, in this dangerous direction.
Meanwhile, responding to Trump’s orders, the military is killing foreign civilians aboard fishing boats with no clear legal authority or justification. Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a member of the Armed Services Committee and a moderate Democrat with close ties to the military, relayed that, “We have uniformed military asking their chain of command for letters that ensure that they don’t have personal liability for any illegal action in these operations.”
The Pentagon has chosen to share almost no information on or justifications for these killings with Congress or the public. Instead, we have chest-beating statements from the president on down celebrating them while offering no legal rationale for the actions. The Trump administration wishes to operate in a system where they have no obligation to offer one.
Even John Yoo, the George W. Bush Justice Department official who was, to say the least, aggressive in justifying far-reaching government powers in the war on terror, is appalled. Yoo explained the danger of the Trump administration’s claim that the U.S. can simply kill anyone the administration labels terrorists, saying: “There has to be a line between crime and war. We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.”
When you’ve lost John Yoo in the exercise of unilateral executive power, let’s just say you’re way beyond the bounds of what can reasonably be defended.
So we are getting both an increasingly Trumpy military and an increasingly unconstrained military. And I haven’t even mentioned the attempt to normalize the deployment of the U.S. military by the president at home. We are only eight months into the Trump administration. Where will we be three years from now, in the runup to the 2028 election?
AROUND THE BULWARK
The Trump Admin Appointees Who Love Buchanan and Bukele… A leaked Project 2025 questionnaire database appears to reveal the books, thinkers, and dictators some Trump appointees most admire. CHANCE PHILLIPS reports.
The Brutal MAGA Civil War Over Charlie Kirk’s Legacy… Podcasters, pastors, and plutocrats, all duking it out. WILL SOMMER explains in False Flag.
Republicans Set to Give Jan. 6th a Trump-Like Makeover… Plus, why we all should prepare for a government shutdown, JOE PERTICONE reports in Press Pass.
Worst Case Scenario… On the flagship pod, JVL and BRIAN STELTER join TIM MILLER to break down the Kimmel saga, the cozy merger politics behind it, and JD Vance’s newest made-up conspiracy about the Kirk assassination.
Quick Hits
CHAOS REIGNS: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s newly antivax-curious Advisory Commission on Immunization Practices voted on Thursday to recommend against administering a combination measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox (MMRV) vaccine to kids younger than 4, citing the small risk of febrile seizures.
The change was not quite as major as that might make it sound. The MMR vaccine—a longtime target of Kennedy’s—remains authorized, as does the chickenpox shot. The committee was “only” pulling the plug on a particular vaccine cocktail in which shots for all four diseases are administered at once. Adding to the confusion, the panel decided not to remove the MMRV shot from a subsidized program for low-income kids, Vaccines for Children. Though—and we can’t make this up—our colleague Jonathan Cohn told us on Slack this morning that the panel decided to change course this morning and no longer recommend a combination vaccine dosage even for this program.
Actually, “confusion” was the key word for much of the meeting. As Cohn reported, many members of the panel seemed baffled about the precise nature of the changes they were considering; one member abstained from the VFC children vote because, he said, he wasn’t sure what they were voting on. “A remarkable display of organizational disarray,” Cohn tweeted.
But that wasn’t even the craziest bit. ACIP was supposed to consider whether to recommend the hepatitis B vaccine to newborns. But it put that decision off to today. And when it convened this morning, it decided to just punt all over again, leaving the hep B call “to a subsequent date.”
What a way to set health policy.
UN-DOGED: The federal employees who took DOGE’s “Fork in the Road” offer earlier this year, resigning their posts in exchange for months of paid leave, will reach the end of that leave at the end of this month. Now, however, Bloomberg Law reports that some Department of Labor employees who took the leave have been brought back as full-time employees:
Three current DOL employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Bloomberg Law that colleagues who took the Department of Government Efficiency’s “Fork in the Road” offer earlier this year have returned as full-time workers, after collecting their full pay and benefits for months without performing their job duties.
The agency’s internal website for processing employee IT requests also has a banner reading “Welcoming Back Returning DRP Employees,” according to a screenshot shared with Bloomberg Law.
The rehiring effort demonstrates the whiplash federal workers face when President Donald Trump’s directives to shrink the government collide with the demands of an agency’s day-to-day work. At least one other agency, the Internal Revenue Service, made similar decisions to claw back staff lost to the DRP.
For at least some federal employees, then, the “Fork in the Road” buyout appears to have ended up being nothing but a long and particularly surreal paid vacation. As more than one fed employee emailed us in response to the news: “Peak efficiency.”
Cheap Shots
Dumbest timeline.
Dumbest timeline.
Maybe I don’t have to tell you this is mostly nonsense. When Carr referred to “local TV stations,” what he meant was the media conglomerates Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group, each of which owns nearly 200 stations across the country and both of which pledged to pull Kimmel’s show off the air on their shows until further notice. In particular, Sinclair demanded that Kimmel apologize to Charlie Kirk’s family and suggested he make a personal “meaningful donation” to Turning Point USA. At any rate, Sinclair and Nexstar likely played a role in ABC’s decision—but if you think those decisions weren’t partially downstream from Carr’s earlier threats, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Sorry to tell you all this, but my friend - who was born and raised in Soviet-controlled Poland - says this is all very, very familiar. "How do you resist?" I asked. "Believe nothing from the officials, but pay attention to what people are quietly saying amongst themselves." The good news is that Poland was able to (eventually) throw all this shit off. Solidarity!
Just we what we need: a bunch of racist, misogynistic, homophobic undereducated , cultist-like Kirk bros in the military with a secdef who is already on record as pardoning war criminals. It’d almost be like having Proud Boys in ICE. Oh wait……