In the convoluted, never-ending saga of the wrongfully deported and then indicted Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a federal judge in Maryland this morning ordered his immediate release from ICE custody — on grounds that are tinged with the bitterest of ironies.
In case you missed it, we kicked off Golden Duke 2025 voting last week and the competition is heating up. Some of you have reached out with your complaints about the exclusion of ne’er-do-wells such as President Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) from this year’s awards. We hear you! They suck! They can re-earn their places in the Duke competition when they start sucking in a less demonic and more lighthearted way ❤️
If you haven’t had a chance to participate in selecting 2025’s most admirable vermin please follow this link and vote before time runs out! As you’ll see, we’ve added some new categories this year to meet our uniquely maniacal moment 🙃 Early voting shows that Trump’s $300 Million White House Ballroom might easily take the cake for Best Scandal but the competition to win a Meritorious Achievement in Grifting or Best Supporting Hatchet Man remains tight.
P.S. If you submitted the nomination we ended up publishing for Lindsey Halligan, Tom “Cashbag” Homan or Signalgate, please reach out! We don’t have your email address and want to send your complimentary TPM merch.
I’ve noted many times the central role of Supreme Court reform to any civic democratic future. If you’re a regular reader, you know my arguments. So I won’t recapitulate them here. I’ve also noted how very few Democratic officials seem at all ready for this and a huge amount of work is required to get them here. Luckily there’s time: The first chance to do anything like this is 2029. But there’s another, even more critical, underlying need. A lot of the Democratic public still sees the idea as disconcerting or extreme. And we shouldn’t run away from this perception. Because it is extreme. It is a remedy only justified and really necessitated by a basically unprecedented development in American history which is robbing the public of its right to self-government. (The question is whether there is any precedent is complicated. There are arguably two similar instances in American history. But we can return to that later.) The point is that there is a lot of work to do. Inherently resistant Democratic politicians certainly aren’t going to be brought along if a substantial number of their own voters, perhaps a majority of them, are spooked by the idea.
So this requires a substantial campaign of public education — activist/political groups dedicated specifically and focusedly to the issue, ones that are political activist in nature, ones that draw from the elite legal world. An entire language of explanation is required.
A friend of mine ran an analogy by me which really resonated. Perhaps others have drawn the comparison. I don’t know.
In the late 18th century what would later evolve into the British Raj was coalescing into full British domination of the Indian subcontinent — especially after two key battles in 1757 and 1764 waged not by Britain but a private company called the British East India Company. That made it possible for what were often British men of relatively modest origins to build almost unimaginably large fortunes. Life in India was a matter of extremes for British operatives of the East India Company, a joint stock company which owned what were in effect or sorta Britain’s Indian colonies. Countless young Brits went out to India and died in short order. But if they could avoid dying in a relatively few years they could build these unimaginable fortunes. None of them wanted to stay. Virtually no Britons died of old age in India at the time. The whole point was to make as much money as possible in as little time as possible and get back to Great Britain while they were still alive. Then they would pour that money into an estate and land.
They were called “nabobs,” a corruption of “nawab,” a title in the Mughal Empire which originally referred to a provincial governor but evolved into something more like a hereditary lord as Mughal rule disintegrated.
Simply extraordinary stuff coming out this morning about the battle over what used to be Time Warner and now goes by the name Warner Bros Discovery (which includes CNN in addition to the more lucrative media stuff). The company had agreed to be acquired by Netflix. So Paramount — now the vehicle of the Ellison family successor and a Trump state media entity-in-the-making — has launched a hostile takeover effort to swoop in and gobble up WBD for itself. In its public pitch, it has openly advertised to shareholders that it is the better acquirer because the Ellisons are tight with Trump, and the White House will never let a Netflix deal go through. Trump, in comments yesterday, as much as agreed. Trump has refashioned antitrust oversight to be little more than a personal veto for the Trump family. Friends can do mergers; foes can’t. Indeed, the indifferent and uncommitted can’t either. You need to get right with the Trump family.
When you ask why so much of corporate America is beholden to Trump now, this is why. A big diversified corporation simply cannot compete and thus, in practice, can’t exist with a determinedly hostile administration.
I’ve written a number of times over the years about the fact that Americans mostly believe that the post-World War II world order is the normal state of things. Of course, it is not. The last 80 years are unparalleled in global history for their general prosperity, lack of great power wars, a fairly predictable system of global rules. One has to say the obligatory caveats about all the ways the United States honored its values and rules in the breach, the slow run of proxy conflicts it participated in or fomented around the world. But these caveats only serve to illustrate the larger point in a paradoxical way. Things can always get worse and getting worse — conflict, instability, mass death — are the normal order of things in world history. Even a thin appraisal of the American ascendency shows its close to uniqueness in this regard.
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Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) prepared a letter in recent days asking Israel’s president for a favor.
Kate and Josh talk the Tennessee special election, a new Dem running for Chuy Garcia’s gifted seat and the Nuzzi-Lizza-RFK trainwreck.
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