Editors’ Blog

If you’re interested in how TPM functions as an organization and a business and the history of the operation, including the radically changed business model, you’ll want to check out this special episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast. My cohost Kate Riga and I were joined by Publisher Joe Ragazzo to discuss how the place operates, what moved us from an advertising to a subscription business model and some ways that may not be obvious in which we differ pretty dramatically from other media organizations. Along the way I even discuss a few things I haven’t gotten into before: like how exactly do I know so much about how the advertising economy is the taproot of bothsidesist journalism? And what was I thinking when staff came to me and said they wanted to form a union? You can listen to the episode here on the site or on your device if you already subscribe to the pod through one of the standard services.

Jeffrey Clark, the man who sought to become attorney general in the tail days of the Trump administration so that he could steal the election, has teamed up with another former Trump administration official to put forward a plan to remake the DOJ the next time we have a Republican president.

Now that Miami Mayor Francis X. Suarez has filed paperwork to seek the Republican presidential nomination, I’m finally going to write about something that’s been bugging me and making me laugh for a few weeks. Just to keep up on things, I subscribe to a number of papers in swing or swingish states around the country. One of those is the Miami Herald. For several weeks the Herald has been advancing a story about Mayor Suarez and his relationship with one of the city’s rising real estate developers, Rishi Kapoor. In these cases “relationship” usually means a shadowy and uncertain series of ties. But in this case it’s not shadowy: the mayor is literally on Kapoor’s payroll. It’s started with people raising questions about the fact that Kapoor had been working to get a series of accommodations from the city for a major development project and had also been paying Suarez $10,000 a month for vaguely defined consulting services.

We’re approaching a key milestone: halfway to our goal in this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive. We started this year’s drive on Wednesday June 7th. Today, one week later, we are coming up on $250,000, halfway to our critical goal of raising $500,000. As of this moment we are at $243,034. That total is made up of contributions from fully 2,172 TPM readers and supporters. We’re just $6,966 from the halfway point.

If you’ve been considering doing so please take a moment to make your contribution today by clicking right here. Thank you.

Late Update: Now $3,432 to go!

For now I’ll put this out there simply as an impression, an intuitive or atmospheric one. I think Donald Trump is going to have trouble keeping up the unified support and defense facing these indictments. To be clear, I’m still very confident that Trump will be the nominee. The basic dynamics are the same. The indictments all but seal the nomination for him; they hurt him in the general. But look close and the ship is taking on water, hemorrhaging a bit at the seams.

In the upside-down world of Trump the day he gets indicted, gets called into court and taken, albeit briefly, into custody is the high point. It’s the day of maximum unity.

But it wasn’t quite perfect.

While former President Donald Trump makes plans to excise the so-called “deep state” that supposedly formed in the bowels of the DOJ before he took the White House in 2016, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is vowing to act against it with a blunter instrument.

We will have wall to wall coverage today of the significant developments in the prosecution of Donald Trump. But please give me two minutes of your time. It’s really important, particularly this year. We need to keep making progress on this drive. As a chronic procrastinator myself I’m sure many of your are planning to contribute but haven’t found a moment yet. Can you take a moment right now and do it? It allows us to bank critical progress and focus on the news. But it’s important, so if you can just take two minutes from your routine right this moment that would be great. Just click here. And thank you.

Despite intense security, the Trump militia turnout at Trump’s New York arraignment was fairly low energy. I suspect it will be the same in Florida today, too, though I hope and assume federal law enforcement is planning for the worst. To be clear, when I say low energy, I simply mean legitimate. There might be a big crowd of supporters saying nasty things. That’s their right. But I don’t think there will be violence.

One thing we need to remember is that Jan. 6 was, in a key way, a perfect storm. There was a specific operational thing the mob and the people who’d organized it were trying to do: stop the certification. Stopping the certification would give time for the fake electors scheme to work. If you stormed the courthouse and disrupted Trump’s arraignment, who cares? They’d just do it the next day somewhere else.

Juliette Kayyem made the point on Twitter that the big national right-wing paramilitary-type groups have been significantly disrupted by the Jan. 6 investigations. The temperature is possibly higher now. But the organization is lower. Lone wolves are the big danger now.

But there’s another factor worth discussing. Last night I was reading an email from TPM Reader JS (not the one from a couple days ago). He asked: “Could it be that perhaps the reason that only a few people showed up to protest the Manhattan indictment and this latest one seems to be producing a lot of Tweets and little action is because … the justice system prosecuted the perpetrators of January 6th, causing a deterrent effect?”

Comments from Nikki Haley this afternoon on Fox are getting some attention as a possible pivot away from the uniform and fulsome defense of Donald Trump we’re seeing from every Republican candidate aside from Asa Hutchison. It’s less than advertised but it’s not nothing. It’s also a bit of an incoherent mishmash. She’s going to purge the Deep State DOJ/FBI. Also Trump was reckless and endangered America and the American military. Also, can’t we just nominate me since he’s probably going to get indicted a few more times and it’s all getting to be a bit much and a distraction.

Watch the comments and decide for yourself.

In the two years since members of the Proud Boys participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, members of the extremist, anti-government group have switched their focus a bit away from Donald Trump and toward making a fuss at the local level.