Editors’ Blog

There it is.

Six months after Election Day, Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin has conceded the North Carolina Supreme Court race to Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs.

A note from TPM Reader MA on biomedical research. I’m sharing it because it’s a good simple explanation not only of the nuts and bolts reality of “your cure isn’t going to be there when you need it” but the massive hit to global competitiveness and economic advantage …

I’m racking my brain trying to figure out why Trump would want to kill funding for curing cancer/Alzheimer’s etc. I guess, as is often the case, with Trump, the simple explanation is the most likely. He sees the university as the enemy and wants to use whatever federal leverage he can to attack them, even if it ends up destroying one of the areas in which the US has a huge comparative advantage. There are significant economic consequences to spiking medical research in the universities: this subsidizes the training of people who will work in the industry, and it drives the types of blue sky research that industry doesn’t want to do, but that it benefits greatly from. It creates a vacuum that other countries will rush to fill. If it persists, the comparative advantage that the US has gained by attracting top global talent will collapse.

Donald Trump’s Truth Social recently started a streaming service for MAGAs and “pro-family” Christians called Truth+. Hunter Walker was surprised to find that among the top ten most watched movies featured for viewers was a “documentary” about how alien lizard people secretly rule the earth. And that was only the beginning of the fun.

Politico Nightly has a very interesting observation tied to Trump’s latest fever-dream about a tariff on movies produced outside the United States. Studios are spooked about it and the idea even pushed down entertainment stocks. (As I’ve noted a few times, the current hiatus on the law mattering has a lot of people jumpy.) I’m pretty sure this is yet another idea the President more or less randomly came up with on his own. There are a few problems with it, not the least of which is that movies aren’t physical goods. They are intellectual property. To put it in different terms you might put a tariff on physical books produced in the Philippines and shipped on a boat to the US. But you couldn’t easily put a tariff on the ideas in the book or the text itself. I actually heard in one conversation that there is a specific law preventing any effort to place tariffs on intellectual property in this way. Regardless of all that, the Politico Nightly piece makes a different and really interesting point. It’s been widely discussed that the notional statutory basis of all Trump’s tariffs is quite weak. There’s a small business lawsuit challenging them which is backed by Koch and Leonard Leo-funded groups, interestingly enough. There’s also a state attorneys general challenge. There have been recent signs that the court in question is looking very seriously at this challenge. And Politico notes that a threatened movie tariff, based on the same weak statutory basis and now claiming a national security threat based on “imported” movies might be flaunting the legal absurdity of the President’s actions at just the wrong time.

Governor Brian Kemp (R) just formally announced he’s not going to run for Senate next year against Senator Jon Ossoff (D). It’s difficult to convey how big a coup this is for Democrats and how big a setback it is for Republicans for the 2026 midterms. Candidate choice is always important but seldom decisive. This is an exception. Ossoff was (and is) a favorite against everyone but Kemp. Kemp is a popular two-term governor who has managed what has eluded virtually every other Republican in the country: not being labeled “Never Trump” or anti-Trump and yet defying Trump at a critical moment. You don’t need to valorize that to recognize that that is a big selling point in what remains a tipping point state like Georgia. My own read is that Kemp recognizes the political power of that needle-threading and wants to keep it intact to run for President in 2028 or possibly even 2032.

This is something I’m still trying to get my head around — both the technical legislative details as well as how all this plays in political terms. The details are still fuzzy to me, but I want to get the outlines in front of you. At the end of the summer we’ll be coming to the end of the fiscal year. DOGE has canceled tons of NIH grants and done various other things to make it really hard for NIH and other grant-making parts of HHS to do their work and spend the congressionally appropriated money. So by late August a very large pot of money will have built up and you will be coming to the end of the fiscal year in which Congress mandated that it be spent.

I had not seen that David Horowitz died. He was 86. I have said many harsh things about Horowitz over the years, going back to one of my earliest pieces in The American Prospect in the late 90s. I even had a few personal run-ins with him. I stand by all the stuff I wrote but it’s not the moment to rehash the specifics. You can peruse our archives. Horowitz was actually the first person, very early in my career, who was verbally confrontational with me in person. I wasn’t a victim here: He was reacting to highly critical and dismissive things I’d written about him in that Prospect article. I note it because it was just my first experience with fights you pick in print coming to life in person. He seemed to seek out those confrontations. That acidic and aggressive personality you saw on TV was him off camera too.