Talking Points Memo

If you've opened at least one of these emails, you know that we send them hoping we can persuade you to become a TPM member. If you read these emails regularly, you also know that we rarely cut to the chase and ask you to join. 

The reason for this is that if you take the time to open one of our emails, we feel we owe you more than just a transactional request. If we can inform or delight you in some small way in exchange for your continued readership, that seems like a fair trade. Sure, we want you to become a member, but we understand that it might take some time. And in most cases we're happy to wait, to build a rapport; after all, we don't plan on going anywhere. 

But this month, to mark the start of our annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive and in celebration of TPM's 25th anniversary, we're coming to you directly with the biggest discount we have ever offered and asking that if you've ever considered joining TPM, you make now the time to do it. 

The TPM Journalism Fund drive is a critical part of the year for TPM where we raise money to support our journalism and to support free memberships for those experiencing financial hardship (if this applies to you, click here). But each year during the drive, we tell readers who are not yet members that rather than make a contribution to the fund, the best way to support us is through a membership. However, we realize that not everyone is able or willing to pay the full price of a membership; some of these readers may still want to support our work in some way. While we are grateful for any amount of support, we also want to give as many of our supporters as possible something in return. 

So for a limited time we are offering one year of TPM Prime for only $25. If you've thought about joining in the past or were thinking about making a contribution to the Journalism Fund, we encourage you to take advantage of this offer and become a member today. 

Otherwise, we'll try you again next week.

Every year around this time I watch two movies: Jaws and Independence Day. Both feel relevant in different ways today. In Jaws, you have a scientist who arrives at a small town and, while trying to warn about a threat, is stymied by a politician who has his own agenda. Independence Day is about an alien invasion and features one of the all time great movie speeches delivered by President Thomas J. Whitmore (played by Bill Pullman), which, despite my best efforts, still gets me every time. Especially the ending.
 

"We will not go quietly into the night!

We will not vanish without a fight!

We're going to live on!

We're going to survive!"
 

Is it corny? Yeah, of course it is. It's 10/10 corny. But it still gets me fired up, especially when Pullman says, "We will not go quietly into the night." It's a simple but surprisingly apt rallying cry for a newsroom. On some level, it's the whole purpose of our existence, to ensure that when those in power do bad things, the general public and you, our readers, know about them. It's quite literally our job, our raison d'être, to not go quietly into the night. We're gonna be loud as hell.

As the Trump administration pushes forward with increasingly undemocratic, authoritarian, and frankly, anti-American efforts to suppress speech, redefine citizenship and undo foundational institutions, we have to collectively push back by whatever means are at our disposal. For a news outlet like TPM, that means documenting and contextualizing as much as we possibly can. It's the essence of public service journalism.

Being ashamed of what the regime is currently doing does not preclude one from working tirelessly to change the course we're on. At its absolute finest, journalism doesn't just stand on the sidelines and note things for future generations — it assists those who are fighting for change today. The second sentence of our about page says: We are particularly focused on reporting on abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust. That was the case 25 years ago when Josh was blogging by himself and it's the case now with a team of four editors, six reporters and a Josh Marshall. Journalism is not mere stenography, it's aggressive and often intrinsically confrontational. Because we will not go quietly into the night. And we hope you come with us and support us. We can always get a bigger boat.

You may or may not know that today is voting day in New York City and we use rank-choice voting. 

So, what we did here in honor of voting day is take five different membership offers and rank them according to what we think would be the most popular. 

Will we be correct???? Only you can decide by becoming a member using one of the offers below.

This week — as ICE continues arresting Democrats, Trump and his inexperienced band of minions contemplate joining Israel's war on Iran, and Senate Republicans scheme up ways to gut Medicaid — TPM welcomed another editor and another reporter to its ranks. 
 

We will need them.

Our executive editor wrote about the recent hires, editor Allegra Kirkland and reporter Layla A. Jones, earlier this month. I encourage you to check out John's post. But I'd like to draw your attention to a couple more meta points. 
 

First, TPM is a news organization that is hiring as many are downsizing or closing altogether. While we at TPM are proud of sustainability, we don't think of our industry as a zero-sum game with winners and losers. We'd prefer there to be many more organizations doing journalism, at all levels. 
 

Second, we're able to add journalists because of reader support. We now have over 35,000 members. The more members we have, the more journalists we can add. It's a very simple calculation. We are a lean business without a lot of overheard. It makes our investment decisions pretty straightforward. This is why we're open about our finances. Transparency is one of our strengths, both editorially and business-wise.
 

Supporting TPM means supporting journalism and journalists. We hope you'll consider joining our ranks as well.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that Elon Musk really does care about the size of the government and that Elon Musk, the world's richest man, is genuinely upset that the grotesque and cruel Big Beautiful Bill doesn't cut enough federal spending. Let's assume this is true.

Well, If Elon Musk had spent more time reading TPM and less time pretending to be good at video games, wantonly fathering children, and playing with chainsaws, he would have been aware that, despite insisting otherwise, the GOP has no interest in actually reducing the deficit. He might have chosen his political alliances more wisely, and saved himself the disappointment. 

In 2020, a week after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump, our Tierney Sneed and Josh Kovensky wrote about how the incoming Biden administration would do well to avoid what Barack Obama had come to deride as the "mindless austerity" pushed by GOP budget hawks such as Paul Ryan that stifled policy during his term. As Sneed and Kovensky noted, Trump certainly did not even pretend to care about the deficit then:

Within days of Trump being sworn in as President, Republicans were already backing down from their budget belt-tightening crusade. When Congress' GOP leaders were asked by a reporter at the Jan. 2017 GOP retreat to commit to not adding to the end-of-the year government deficit, no such commitment was made, beyond general platitudes about their commitment to being "fiscal conservatives."
 

The biggest legislative achievement of Trump's first term, the 2017 tax cuts, cost the government $1.5 trillion in revenue while benefiting primarily the rich. Vows that the tax package wouldn't add to the deficit were set aside for vaguer predictions that over the course of several years the tax cuts would  prove to be revenue neutral. Promises that it would pay for itself eventually disappeared as well.

In December, TPM Executive Editor John Light noted how the debt ceiling is regularly used by the GOP as a prop for performative concern. It's possible this sort of fiscal cosplay fooled Musk, a political neophyte who is unaware people aren't laughing at his jokes because they are funny.

Going back more than a decade now, Republicans have regularly used the debt ceiling as hostage-taking exercise, risking national default and credit downgrades in a performative effort to look like budget hawks, or what they imagine budget hawks would look like. Because Republicans will start next year in control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, there are no hostages to take except themselves. Couple that with their initial 217-215 margin in the House — barely a vote to spare — and there's plenty of opportunity for inflicting Republican-on-Republican pain.

In April, Emine Yücel reported on the GOP's current fiscal hardliners caving on a key vote after being assured by human smarm Mike Johnson that they'd find another $1.5 trillion in cuts somewhere. Alas, they did not and they will not. 
 

So, it's unfortunate for Elon that he was bamboozled into thinking the GOP is the party of fiscal responsibility. But, in his defense, they have this act down. They've been putting on this show in one form or another for decades.

By joining TPM, you can avoid Elon Musk's mistake.