A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
A Snapshot of America in the Summer of 2025
I returned last night from a weeklong trip paddling down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. No phone signal. No news. No real contact with the outside world.
As I flew home yesterday and started trying to catch up on what I’d missed, I was quickly overwhelmed — as we all have been all year long — not just by the volume of news but by the peculiar dynamics (I’m still not sure I understand the Sydney Sweeney thing) and the distorted information ecosystem of the Trump era.
So if you’ll indulge me this morning, I’m going to offer a few snapshots of the current moment that caught the eye of someone who managed to escape the news cycle completely for a week. Distance from it restored me in some ways, but not necessarily in the ways I had expected.
I had hoped a week of marveling at geological time scales would make me more prone to see Donald Trump as a passing fad in the larger sweep of our political history. But I came back instead a bit more sensitive to how far we’ve fallen in such a short time.
WTF Is THIS?
Bringing Back Confederate Memorials
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the reinstallation of a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery that had been removed in 2023.
‘Defend Your Culture’
The Department of Homeland Security’s new recruitment push — dubbed “Defend the Homeland” — includes the nationalistic blood and soil call to “defend your culture!”
Quote of the Day
“It’s difficult to overstate how dangerous this moment is. Using the machinery of criminal justice to pursue manufactured charges against political predecessors is the stuff of strongmen and collapsing democracies. … It corrodes trust in democratic transitions, chills dissent, and redefines political opposition as criminal subversion.”–Harry Litman, on Attorney General Pam Bondi ordering a grand jury investigation into former President Obama and officials in his administration
EXCLUSIVE
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard overrode CIA officials’ concerns to release a classified House GOP report that challenged the intel community’s assessment of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, the WaPo reports.
Census Citizenship Question Redux
A lot to unpack here, but for now suffice to say that President Trump is making another bid to exclude non-citizens from the census for apportioning House seats and Electoral College votes, after the courts blocked the ham-handed effort of his first term:
Good Read
Thomas Zimmer attempts to answer the difficult question of why right-wing ascendancy in America is happening now.
Trump’s Attack on Higher Ed: UC Edition
The University of California System is entering into talks with the Trump administration to try to restore half a billion dollars in federal research funding for UCLA that was suspended over trumped-up allegations that it fostered anti-semitism on campus during pro-Palestinian protests last year.
Trump Strips Federal Workers of Union Protections
The Department of Veterans Affairs became the first federal agency to purport to begin terminating union contracts, which effect some 400,000 workers, despite arguing in court that it would refrain from doing so.
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Speaking of Paddling …
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers increased the normal water releases from a dam on the Little Miami River in southwestern Ohio this month to accommodate a canoe trip by Vice President JD Vance that coincided with his 41st birthday, The Guardian reports. In the Guardian piece, there is a tension over whether the extra water was used to make the river more navigable for Vance’s Secret Service detail or to create a more ideal water level for the vice president’s personal recreation.
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