Yesterday President Trump met in the Oval Office with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and, in the midst of defending him over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, said that MBS “knew nothing about it.” Last night Rep. Eugene Vindman (D-VA) went to the well of the House and gave a brief speech in which he said that the two most troubling presidential calls he had reviewed while serving on the National Security Council staff were the infamous one with President Zelenskyy and another heretofore unknown call with MBS. Vindman then goes on to imply that the call showed Trump not knew MBS ordered the murder but likely supported it. Vindman first posted the video on Twitter last night. This morning he posted the same video on Bluesky. But in the caption he writes in the post — as opposed to the video — he zeroes in specifically on Trump’s claim that MBS “knew nothing about it.”
A few TPM readers responded to yesterday’s post about Trump as the “weak horse” arguing that Trump’s waning power makes him more dangerous, not less. I agree. Mostly. What’s “more dangerous” is a subjective question, with different kinds of dangers, different time horizons. Overall it’s clearly a good thing since Trump’s loss of power and the eventual defeat of his movement are good things. Though that’s far from a certainty, it is getting more likely. But Trump won’t go quietly. We know that from Jan. 6. No president wants to see their popularity wane or the loss of power that goes with it. But Trump’s binary mental world puts a sharper, more draconian focus on everything. In his world, you are punishing or the punished, dominating or the dominated. Loss of power means personal political peril. That’s how it works in his own head, and to a significant degree Trump’s own actions have made that all-or-nothing world a reality around him.
UPDATE: The wider issue seems resolved, and we’ve restored member services.
Original post: An internet-wide Cloudflare issue has made access to TPM a bit shaky this morning. While the wider issue is being resolved and to ensure you can access TPM, we’ve disabled member services temporarily. Don’t be alarmed if you can’t sign in to TPM; you should still be able to read TPM. We’ll restore member services as soon as the underlying issue, which is outside of our control, is resolved.
I try not to share ideas or theories that I suspect, by the odds, are not likely true. But sometimes I’m curious enough about one that I want to share it with that proviso. Here’s one. Like almost everyone else, I’ve being trying to make sense of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent arc. Mostly I’ve come up totally dry. I can’t make sense of it. I’ve seen various theories, that she’s making a long play for the future leadership of the post-Trump MAGA movement or other cunning and ambition-driven theories. But none of them really explain what I’ve seen.
One of my instrument panel watchwords for understanding politics is that all power is unitary. In the case of presidents, you don’t have one bundle of power in one area and a siloed, distinct and unaffected bundle in another. A president’s power is a uniform commodity wherever he reaches. What boosts it or drags it down in one area affects it everywhere else. That’s the best way to understand President Trump’s position 10 months into his second term. It’s hard to know whether it was the five-week government shutdown which focused public attention on draconian cuts to health care, the election night shellacking, the first signs of MAGA diehards defecting from the president, the grotesque and absurd Epstein cat-and-mouse game or a dozen other comparable examples. What makes it both hard to pick apart the different drivers of a president’s decline and perilous for the president himself is that the different drivers feed on themselves. They become both cause and effect in a mounting spiral.
After I wrote this “status interview” piece on Tuesday, I heard from TPM Reader AP who said, amidst general agreement, that he would either add to the list or replace DC/PR statehood with expanding the House of Representatives. I’m just seeing now that I hadn’t had a chance to respond yet to AP (I thought I had). But my response was going to be that I basically agree. And as I suggested in the original piece, despite presenting it as a checklist of five questions/agenda items, everything after the first two (filibuster and Supreme Court reform) might have been reclassified as ‘super important things that really need to be done.’ And to that list many more could be added. To go back to the original concept, the thinking behind that list wasn’t that it would be exhaustive but that it was a good list for determining who was serious and who was not, who is worth supporting and who needs to go.
But this potential addition gives me an opportunity to expand what a future era of reformism would need to accomplish because the House of Representatives is a good case study of a number of key trends that got us to this moment. The number of representatives was capped at 435 members in 1929 when the U.S. population stood at roughly 122 million people. That’s about a third of the current population. House districts now average a population of just over 750,000 of a million people. That’s a lot of people. The number was fixed when House districts had a bit over over 250,000 of a million people. Now it’s 750,000. That’s a huge difference and it matters since the House is meant to be the body closest to the people.
WASHINGTON, DC—After months of delays, a federal judge is prepared to swiftly proceed with a contempt of court inquiry in the original Alien Enemies Act case.
Take a trip into the Wayback machine in this bonus episode, as part of TPM’s 25th Anniversary! Executive Editor John Light and Deputy Editor for News Nicole Lafond co-moderate a panel with current and former TPMers, including TPM editor-at-large David Kurtz, ProPublica reporter Paul Kiel, NOTUS reporter Evan McMorris-Santoro, and The Cut feature editor Catherine Thompson. They provide a kind of oral history of the past 25 years of TPM.
