President Trump is threatening a defamation lawsuit against the left-leaning think tank, Center for American Progress, over its new report that found National Guard deployments didn't reduce violent crime. Neera Tanden, the think tank's CEO and a former adviser to former President Joe Biden, joins "The Takeout" to discuss.
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THE ENEMIES LIST
Trump finds three targets this month: a think tank, a news anchor, and his own statistics agency.
As it ran on the front
The count starts in July, with a report. The Center for American Progress found that National Guard deployments in Washington did not reduce violent crime. By August, a lawyer for President Trump had turned that finding into a threat: retract, or face a defamation suit. That's target one, and it isn't resolved — on September 4, CAP's CEO, Neera Tanden, told CBS the report stands and the retraction isn't coming.
Five days before that answer aired, target two showed up in a different building. On August 30, the president said he would report Meet the Press host Kristen Welker to the FCC "for rebuke or punishment" after she reportedly noted that Trump-endorsed candidates had mixed results this election cycle. The FCC does not exist to referee whether a poll number flattered the White House. It licenses broadcasters to operate in the public interest — a phrase now being tested against a Sunday-show host who read a poll out loud.…
…(cont) Target three has no face and no ratings. On August 31, NPR reported that after the Census Bureau issued a report tied to a Trump-aligned think tank, the bureau's parent agency cut the language banning political interference from its own scientific integrity policy. Not the data — the rule against leaning on the data. The one federal office whose entire job is arithmetic quietly lost the sentence that kept the arithmetic honest.
Three targets in one month: a think tank that measured a policy, an anchor who repeated a poll, an agency that counts the country. None of them are accused of a crime. None of them printed a lie. What they share is simpler — each one produced a number the White House didn't clear first.
The next day, September 1, roughly 150 civil society groups put that pattern in writing, condemning the pressure on CAP. That's the running total now: three institutions, one month, and a hundred and fifty organizations who did the math before the fourth target gets picked.
Nobody has to call this a crackdown. You just have to keep counting, because they clearly are.
“Count 'em: a think tank, a news anchor, and the Census Bureau, all leaned on in the same month, and none of it costs a dime in campaign ads. You don't need a law against arithmetic if you can just get the agency that does the arithmetic to erase its own rule against getting leaned on. That's not something you can sue over — that's knowing which knob to turn before anybody notices there was a knob.”
“Nobody's suing anybody — it's a letter, and CAP is still free to publish whatever they... they said they won't retract, so I guess the letter didn't work, which honestly is proof the system's fine. And reporting an anchor to the FCC for citing a poll number is just accountability — did I say accountability? That doesn't sound like me, but sure, let's go with it.”
The receipts
· 100+ Civil Society Groups Condemn Trump Attack on Democratic Establishment Think Tank from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
· Trump promises NBC's Welker will be reported to FCC 'for rebuke or punishment' from the morgue, 30 Aug 2026
· Trump officials cut political interference ban after unusual Census Bureau report from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
· Who Is Natalie Harp? NYT Reporter Maggie Haberman on Trump's Aide & His Attacks on Women Reporters from the morgue, 18 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.