Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence: Trump's Big Mouth

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. Its incompetence sometimes compounds the harm it does, but it sometimes tempers it.

MIA MCCARTHY, CALEN RAZOR and BENJAMIN GUGGENHEIM  at POLITICO:

One week into the shutdown, Republicans are trying to stay on message — but President Donald Trump is making that difficult.

Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune want to show Democrats there’s no daylight inside the GOP: Republicans will only negotiate a deal to extend expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies once the government is back open.

But Trump is causing major headaches by going off script, Dasha Burns and Jordain Carney report. On Monday, Trump pointed to health care negotiations with Democrats that didn’t appear to exist, but would have contradicted Johnson and Thune’s red line about no ACA talks until the shutdown ends.

On Tuesday, the White House further complicated matters by sending a memo stating some federal workers might not receive backpay after the shutdown’s over. Republicans scrambled to refute that message. After all, Trump himself signed legislation in 2019 guaranteeing all federal workers would be paid following a shutdown — and many Republicans voted for it.

Erica Orden at POLITICO:

President Donald Trump is deploying the Justice Department to punish and prosecute his perceived enemies and advance his political agenda. But his color commentary — and that of senior members of his administration — about the cases is threatening to derail them in court.

Public comments by Trump and high-ranking officials including Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have already become flashpoints in high-profile cases. Judges overseeing criminal proceedings against Luigi Mangione, charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man who was illegally deported by the Trump administration, have warned the administration to stop making remarks that could prevent the defendants from having fair trials, or have suggested they may already have violated rules against doing so.

In two other criminal cases — against former FBI Director James Comey and against alleged Charlie Kirk shooter Tyler Robinson — remarks by Trump and others are all but certain to show up in court filings as the defendants argue their cases should be thrown out. The defense lawyers in all four cases would need to convince the judges that the comments prevent their clients from receiving a fair trial because potential jurors have been prejudiced.

And as the Justice Department, at Trump’s urging, pursues the potential prosecution of Trump foes Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), John Bolton, John Brennan and others, Trump’s tendency to proclaim the guilt of an unconvicted defendant or publicly pressure prosecutors to bring charges will likely continue to create significant legal headaches.

Cash Homan Update

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments.  Trump and company are also covering for their friends.

Whitehouse: What became of the $50,000 in cash that the FBI gave to Mr. Homan?

Bondi: The investigation of Mr. Homan was subjected to a full review They found no evidence of wrongdoing.

Whitehouse: What became of the $50,000? Did the FBI get it back?

Bondi: You're welcome to… pic.twitter.com/9mFjRTkJrS

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 7, 2025

Untethered

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

BREAKING: Judge issues 2nd order blocking National Guard deployment to aid ICE in Portland, OR, after Trump sends CA Guard in & moves to send TX Guard, too. Judge Karin Immergut cites actions 'in direct contravention' of earlier ruling. w/@kyledcheney https://t.co/2wLz6IkcEV

— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) October 6, 2025

Mark Berman and Derek Hawkins at WP:

A federal judge on Saturday blocked the Trump administration from deploying troops in Portland, at least temporarily thwarting President Donald Trump’s push to send the military into Oregon’s biggest city.

Oregon demonstrated that such an action would violate the state’s 10th Amendment right to control its National Guard, U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut, a Trump appointee, wrote in her decision granting a temporary restraining order.

“This country has a long-standing and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs,” Immergut wrote, later adding, “This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: this is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law.”

Immergut said her restraining order will expire Oct. 18, though she suggested it could be extended. She scheduled a hearing for Oct. 17 to address that question.

In her order, Immergut wrote that a president is entitled to deference, but that is “not equivalent to ignoring the facts on the ground.” She said Trump’s determination that the situation in Portland required a federal military response “was simply untethered to the facts.”

The judge's order confirms that  Trump's language undercuts his actions:

]The] President’s own statements regarding the deployment of federalized National Guardsmen further support that his determination was not “conceived in good faith” or “in the face of the emergency and directly related to the quelling of the disorder or the prevention of its continuance.” Newsom II, 141 F.4th at 1051 (emphasis in original) (quoting Sterling, 287 U.S. at 399–400). Despite the “minimal activity” outside the Portland ICE facility in the days preceding September 27, 2025, Hughes Decl., Ex. 22, ECF 46-22 to Ex. 26, ECF 46-26, President Trump directed Secretary Hegseth “to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” Marshall Decl., Ex. 12, ECF 9-12. Two days before that directive, the President claimed that Portland has “professional agitators” who are “paid a lot of money by rich people,” “anarchists,” and “crazy people” who try to “burn down buildings, including federal buildings.” See Marshall Decl., ECF 9 ¶ 26. Whatever the factual basis the President may have for these allegations, nothing in the record suggests that anything of this sort was occurring “every night” outside the Portland ICE building or in the City of Portland in the days or weeks leading up to his September 27 directive. Id.

 

Coins of the Realm

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments. 

Military officers sometimes hand out challenge coins. Tom Nichols at The Atlantic:

FBI Director Kash Patel has created such a coin for himself that he’s now handing out, and Americans can only wish that he’d take them all and lock them in his desk, never to be seen again.

The coins are, to put it gently, ridiculous. On one side, they have what appears to be the symbol of the Punisher, a Marvel character. The Punisher is a vigilante who does … well, vigilante stuff, killing evildoers at will as revenge for the death of his family. The symbol is popular with a lot of people, including criminals, law-enforcement officers, soldiers, and some extremist groups such as the anti-government Three Percenters. None of this is good, especially because the character’s creator long ago admitted that the symbol was partly inspired by the Nazi SS’s Totenkopf, or “Death’s Head,” uniform insignia. (The author of the series also notes that the Punisher hates cops, something the police officers wearing the mark don’t seem to get.)

This is illegal on its face. Changing the design of coins requires Congressional legislation, which won’t happen while the Senate filibuster remains in place. Trump coins would be counterfeit. /1 pic.twitter.com/szBNWFfoir

— Jeff George (@webdevjeffus) October 4, 2025

Trump's Hatred, Continued

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments. Trump has literally claimed that God is on his side.

Tom Latchem at The Daily Beast:

President Donald Trump declared Democrats “the party of hate, evil, and Satan” in an unhinged Truth Social tirade as the shutdown dragged into a second day.

His outburst came amid a flood of memes and AI-crafted videos that Trump has used to bludgeon political opponents during the funding crisis.

In a string of posts, including one in which the president falsely claimed he had overseen “record Black employment,” he also posted a meme that labeled Democrats “the party of hate, evil, and Satan.”

Shutdown Politics

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments.

Eleanor Mueller, Burgess Everett, and Shelby Talcott at Semafor:

President Donald Trump’s budget guru wants to use a shutdown to slash the federal government in the same vein as Elon Musk’s now-quiet Department of Government Efficiency.

But even pro-DOGE Republicans are warning Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought to go slow.

“Russ is less politically in tune than the president,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., a member of the Senate DOGE Caucus. “We, as Republicans, have never had so much moral high ground on a government funding bill in our lives. … I just don’t see why we would squander it, which I think is the risk of being aggressive with executive power in this moment.”

 Less than 24 hours into a government shutdown, some of the same political faultlines are reappearing in the GOP after billionaire Elon Musk launched the administration’s effort to streamline the federal government. This time, amid the added chaos of a shutdown with little end in sight, Republicans have to be mindful to not overplay their hand in the broader funding talks with their opponents.

Trump embracing Project 2025 (after distancing himself during campaign) and vowing to implement deep cuts envisioned by Russ Vought amid shutdown. pic.twitter.com/JjZEqNd7lk

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) October 2, 2025

 

Washington Post:

How concerned are Americans about the partial shutdown of the federal government and whom do they blame for causing it? The Washington Post texted a nationally representative sample of 1,010 people on Wednesday to ask.

The Post’s poll found significantly more Americans blame President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans for the shutdown than Democrats, though many say they are not sure. People express moderate concern about the shutdown’s impact at this early stage, with “somewhat concerned” the most common answer. A large majority support Democrats’ call to extend federal health insurance subsidies in general, though just under half support the party demanding this if it extends the government shutdown.

Trump Tuesday

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments.

Hegseth insisted that generals and admirals fly in from all over the world to hear lectures from him and Trump.  Tom Nichols at The Atlantic:

As comical as many of Trump’s comments were, the president’s nakedly partisan appeal to U.S. military officers was a violation of every standard of American civil-military relations, and exactly what George Washington feared could happen with an unscrupulous commander in chief. The most ominous part of his speech came when he told the military officers that they would be part of the solution to domestic threats, fighting the “enemy from within.” He added, almost as a kind of trollish afterthought, that he’d told Hegseth, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military—National Guard, but military—because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor.”

This farrago of fantasy, menace, and autocratic peacocking is the kind of thing that the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan evocatively called “boob bait for the Bubbas” and that George Orwell might have called “prolefeed.” It’s one thing to serve it up to an adoring MAGA crowd: They know that most of it is nonsense and only some of it is real. They find it entertaining, and they can take or leave as much of Trump’s rhetorical junk-food buffet as they would like. It is another thing entirely to aim this kind of sludge at military officers, who are trained and acculturated to treat every word from the president with respect, and to regard his thoughts as policy.

But American officers have never had to contend with a president like Trump. Plenty of presidents behaved badly and suffered mental and emotional setbacks: John F. Kennedy cavorted with secretaries in the White House pool, Lyndon Johnson unleashed foul-mouthed tirades on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Nixon fell into depression and paranoia, Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden wrestled with the indignities of age. But the officer corps knew that presidents were basically normal men surrounded by other normal men and women, and that the American constitutional system would insulate the military from any mad orders that might emerge from the Oval Office.

Aaron Pellish at Politico:

President Donald Trump posted another deepfake AI-generated video of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Tuesday hours before the federal government is expected to shut down, further signaling the significant divide between the two parties.

On Monday, Trump posted a vulgar AI-generated video of Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speaking outside the White House. The video portrayed Jeffries wearing a mustache and a sombrero while mariachi music plays in the background.


Jeffries condemned the deepfake as “bigotry” in a social media response and called it a “disgusting video” in an MSNBC interview later Monday evening.

On Tuesday, Trump shared a clip of Jeffries’ MSNBC interview criticizing the original video, again adding an AI-generated mustache and sombrero. The latest video features four depictions of the president playing mariachi music as Jeffries speaks.

Trump’s repeated antagonization of Jeffries sets the tone for what may be difficult and drawn-out negotiations over a government-funding solution as lawmakers on both sides continue to dig into their positions.