As I was writing this, the House actually passed a war powers resolution. This is from NBC News:

The House offered a rare rebuke to President Donald Trump on Wednesday, passing a Democratic-led measure to end his war with Iran over objections from Republican leadership.

It was one of two Democratic-led measures opposed by the White House that advanced in the GOP-led House. Lawmakers also passed a motion that would unlock a vote on sending aid to Ukraine.

The Iran war powers resolution, offered by Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, had been heading for a vote before the House left for its Memorial Day recess May 21. But it was abruptly pulled from the floor when it appeared too many Republicans were absent to defeat it.

On Wednesday, it passed 215-208, with four Republicans joining all Democrats in voting yes: Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Tom Barrett of Michigan and Warren Davidson of Ohio.

The resolution directs Trump to remove U.S. armed forces from hostilities with Iran, unless Congress votes to declare war or authorizes using military force against it. It would not force him to end the conflict, however; it is a symbolic expression of disapproval of the war with Iran.

I don’t understand why this would be only symbolic if Congress has the power to declare war and Trump does not. But that takes us into my next topic —

Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times is one of the best political commenters anywhere. His current column is America Broke Something When It Gave Trump a Second Chance. It’s worth reading, and not just because of what it says about Trump

Much of the disruption and destruction of the past year and change is downstream of the revolutionary orientation of Roberts, Vought and the other alumni of Project 2025 who have taken up places in and around the Trump administration. To observe the aggrandizement of power in the executive, the decimation of the federal bureaucracy, the destruction of much of the nation’s medical, scientific and public health infrastructure and the broad attack on racial and gender equality is to see the many faces of a furious effort to restructure the existing nation to match the one envisioned by these far-right ideologues.
If this is all true, and it is, then any plausible response to Project 2025 must include a larger vision for the future of the American Republic. A Project 2029 cannot be a collection of Democratic Party agenda items. It must articulate a broad new conception of the nation’s political order — one that will guide the way a future Democratic-led government might wield power. Above all, Democrats must have a plan for reconstruction — for building something new on the wreckage of what President Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party have wrought — not for restoration of what was.

But can the current Democratic Party do that? Can they move beyond proposals for better supporting child care and breaking up utility monopolies?

As it happens, several Democratic groups are drafting the equivalent of a Project 2029. And so far, unfortunately, it is not the reconstruction agenda the country needs. It is, instead, just another Democratic Party policy document: a grab bag of ideas stitched together with the usual slogans and gestures toward economic populism.

This reminds me of one of my biggest complaints about Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign against Trump — there was no vision. She went on and on about how qualified she was. To do what? She said she would “fight for us.” To do what? If you went to her website she did indeed have lots of proposals, most of which would have improved existing programs. If there was anything genuinely innovative or groundbreaking I’m not remembering it. Trump, on the other hand, made lots of grandiose promises he didn’t keep. Notice who won.

This is not to say voters are all idiots, necessarily. Hillary Clinton promised a well-managed status quo, and Trump promised change. People were in the mood for change. But Trump didn’t know how to deliver on what he promised. He had establishment people around him, keeping him in check, and he wasn’t able to do anything too stupid and screw up Obama’s economy (for which Trump took credit). And if it weren’t for Covid, voters might not have noticed how incompetent Trump truly was. Too bad they forgot.

Too much of the Dem establishment has spent entire long careers trying to not stick out too much and becoming a target of the Right.  Now we need them to stand and be bold and directly address all the weaknesses in the system that Trump exploited. As Jamelle Bouie wrote,

Item one: Trump has appointed an acting director of national intelligence. Bill Pulte has been as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and the chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since 2025. I understand he is still going to hold those positions while serving as director of national intelligence. Sure he will. Pulte has absolutely no background in intelligence, national or otherwise. His background appears to be in home construction and private equity.

Obviously Pulte was put in the DNI position because Trump trusts  him to be loyal. David Frum at The Atlantic:

In every other respect, the appointment is baffling. Pulte has no intelligence background; no national-security expertise. He’s an ultra-partisan with a highly quarrelsome personality and great inherited wealth. Beyond that, there’s not much to say about his record of public or personal achievement.

Yet Pulte does have a disgraceful record of putting the prosecutorial powers of government at President Trump’s vindictive service. In his role as director of the Federal Housing Financing Agency, Pulte referred Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James for criminal prosecution for mistakes on mortgage documents so commonplace that they were also committed by Trump Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent.

Bessent and Pulte are said to not get along well, BTW. There’s a story that Bessent threatened to punch Pulte out at some fancy dinner.

I’m hearing the bobbleheads on television say that Pulte will be in a position to do a lot of mischief in upcoming elections. He and Kash Patel can fabricate all kinds of accusations that will allow them to interfere with honest voting. “In Bill Pulte, [Trump] has the perfect tool for any improper goal,” writes David Frum.

Watch this space.

Item two: You may have heard the slush fund is dead. Guess again. See David Kurtz, TPM, Fool Me a Thousand Times … All that reporting that Trump had to have decided to stop the slush fund and the stipulations attached to it appears to have been a feint. It’s not dead yet.

A confusing mishmash of reporting Monday afternoon inadvertently revealed that Donald Trump can still play Congress and the press like fools.

The flurry of reporting, mostly from Capitol Hill, was about whether the political heat around the corrupt “Anti-Weaponization Fund” had become too much to stomach, especially for GOP senators. The vague news, largely attributed to unnamed White House sources, was that Trump was signaling he “plans to drop,” “pause,” “retreat,” “backtrack,” and “back off” from the slush fund.

Adding an absurdist twist to the afternoon, the Trump DOJ put out a meaningless statement that it would abide by a court order blocking the slush fund.

Note that all the uproar yesterday only dealt with the slush fund — and only with the political furor over the slush fund. That represents only part of the corrupt scheme to settle Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, which has three main elements:

The three elements are the taxpayers’ money claimed by Trump for his own purposes; the stipulation that Trump and his offspring be spared audits by the IRS; and the appearance that this whole thing is an attempt to defraud the courts. And the feint is intended to stop Republicans in Congress from doing anything about it. Trump intends to go through with this when the coast is clear. There are other obstacles, of course, and Kurtz provides more details. Note that Bloomberg is running a headline that says Trump to Get Audit Immunity as $1.8 Billion Fund in Doubt, but the story is behind a paywall.

Item Three: Today there are primaries in California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, South Dakota and New Mexico. Fingers crossed that a Democrat moves on to the California general.

As I predicted a couple of days ago, Trump decided the most recently announced peace deal wasn’t good enough. He has sent it back to Tehran with edits. It’s still not clear to me whether the unedited deal was a deal Tehran had approved. It appears Trump is just cranking out performative peace deals and then shooting them down without input from Tehran, just so there can be headlines about peace deals.

At The Atlantic, Karim Sadjadpour explains why there will be no deal, at least with the current negotiators.

America under Trump is the attention-deficit superpower, pinballing from isolationism to interventionism in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, having hollowed out the State Department. The Islamic Republic is an obsessive-compulsive revolutionary state—a regime with a half-century fixation on resisting America, rather than advancing the welfare of its own people. Fighting America is not the regime’s policy; it’s the regime’s identity.

The deadlock is both ideological and structural. To justify the immense costs of conflict to American taxpayers, Trump must demand far more from Tehran in any deal than he would have before the war began. Conversely, having lost hundreds of billions of dollars and its top leadership, Iran’s theocracy must demand far more—and concede far less—than it ever would have previously. Neither side can afford a deal that the other might accept. And in a zero-sum negotiation, Iran’s monomaniacal focus is a greater currency than American military power.

And a bit later it says,

U.S.-Iran negotiations yield zero trust and zero closure. A win-win scenario does not exist. Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, threats to close the Strait of Hormuz, regional proxies, and missile programs will menace the Middle East so long as the Islamic Republic is in power.

This is worth reading all the way though. But it seems to me Trump is not going to concede anything as long as the stock market continues to soar every time he announces that another (probably fake) deal is on the table. Why the stock market jumps on command for Trump makes no sense to me, but it does. I seriously doubt there will be an end to anything until Congress steps in and stops it. Maybe next year.

I was intrigued by this headline– Does Trump Want to Lose the Midterms? This is to an Ezra Klein podcast; here is the transcript. The short answer is that he’d probably prefer to win the midterms, but what really worries him is losing control of the Republicans. I suspect he thinks that as long as he controls them, especially Republicans in Congress, he’s safe from facing consequences.

But then the question is, if the GOP is slaughtered in the midterms, will Trump still control it? or will Republicans finally start to break away?  Already there’s a lot of focus on the YOLO caucus — Republicans who will not be returning to Congress in January, either because they lost primaries or were already planning to retire. And this crew is already turning into a thorn in Trump’s side. Senators Mitch McConnell and Thom Tillis both spoke out strongly against the infamous slush fund to reward Trump thugs, for example.

So it’s all a matter of how long Trump can keep screws turned on his own party to keep them in line. I honestly don’t understand why Republicans in purple districts haven’t broken away already. But my congressman Mike Lawler recently held a rally with Trump himself, attended by about 4,000 people, which given the population density around here isn’t that impressive. He’s vulnerable, so he’s going more MAGA in a district that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024? That makes no sense. Maybe it’ll get him more campaign money for television ads, somehow. Otherwise I am not seeing the point.

Trump is allegedly meeting with aides right now to decide whether to agree to the latest cease fire deal with Iran. The catch is that it’s not clear to me if Iran has agreed to it. Al Jazeera reported earlier today that Iran hadn’t agreed to anything. Want to take bets that Trump will decide the “deal” isn’t good enough yet?

Also as I was typing, a judge temporarily halted the closing of the Kennedy Center and ordered that Trump’s name must be removed from the building. The judge said “the board’s decision to add President Donald Trump’s name to the center was unlawful and ordered that it be removed from the building and its website.”

This morning a judge temporarily blocked the creation of the $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that Trump plans to use to reward his minions.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia paused any action on the fund while the case proceeds on an expedited briefing schedule that she issued simultaneously. She set a June 12 hearing for arguments on issuing an injunction in the case brought by a group that includes a former Jan. 6 prosecutor, Common Cause, and the National Abortion Federation.

In pressing pause, Brinkema delineated in her order exactly what she doesn’t want happening between now and next month’s hearing. She barred the administration “from taking any further action pursuant to the creation or operation of the Anti Weaponization Fund, which includes the transferring of money to the Fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the Fund; and the disbursing of any funds from the Fund.”

I think it’s likely the court will kill this beast. But then it will go to the Supreme Court.

I haven’t written nearly enough about all the grift and self-dealing going on in the Maladministration. But Jen Psaki gave a good update on what’s going on last night, so here’s a video.

Perhaps there is no harsher gauge of the sorry state of Trump’s presidency than this: Yesterday the White House released names of the featured artists scheduled to perform at Trump’s 4th of July festival on the National Mall. Among those artists was (were?) Milli Vanilli. I’m serious. I’m not sure this is the original Milli Vanilli, but that’s the name on the program. (Update: Only one of the pair is still alive, and he’s assembled a band with the same name, but it’s not the same act.)

And today Milli Vanilli and several other people on the program announced they won’t be performing. Most of them said they had no idea that this was a White House event when they agreed to it, and they bailed because they won’t be associated with Trump. Most of these artists I didn’t recognize, but I’m reading a lot of them were big in the 1990s. The only performers whose names I recognized who haven’t dropped out are Vanilla Ice and Garth Brooks.

Yesterday Josh Marshal posted Trump’s Weakness Is Becoming the Political Story of the Moment.  In brief, Trump’s calculated stunts and tough guy act are losing their effectiveness.

We’re seeing this now because the evidence in front of us has become so overwhelming. On another level, though, his political weakness has taken the juice out of his constant razzmatazz of political domination — the stunts, the takedowns, the cartoonish public choreography, the ritual slayings of former allies. Trump has always used these spectacles of power to keep alive the idea that he always has the last say, that he’s always the strongest, toughest guy in the room. He punishes; others endure, as sure as gravity pulls objects down rather than up. But the scale of the unpopularity and political weakness is just too great. They’ve reached a critical mass where the whole carnival of power isn’t resonating in the same way, or maybe not at all. The change is both being driven by and driving his deteriorating hold on Capitol Hill. These stunts and antics are a kind of ideational gerrymandering, aimed at holding perceptions of Trump’s power — and thus to a real degree the reality of his power — in place. But like an electoral gerrymander, in the face of sufficient unpopularity they become brittle and can break suddenly. And that’s what appears to be happening.

Trump is unpopular, and popular culture can be cruel. The hard-core base is still with him, but a whole lot of other people who voted for him in 2024 now consider him to be a bad joke. And Trump lacks the self-awareness to turn that around.

Allegedly we’re getting close to a peace deal again.

U.S. officials are closing in on an agreement with Iran that could extend the cease-fire, lead to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and set the table for more substantive talks, according to three U.S. officials with knowledge of the discussions.

The “memorandum of understanding” still needs approval from President Trump and Iran has not yet confirmed any commitments. Details of it emerged on Thursday after the fragile cease-fire between the United States and Iran was shaken by military skirmishes this week, and after Mr. Trump asserted that he felt no political pressure to quickly achieve a peace deal.

This sounds like what was predicted — the deal would involve the U.S. backing off and the strait being opened, but there would be only continued talks involving Iran’s nuclear fuel. But Trump seems to be trying hard to not appear to be to eager. But see The TACO Equilibrium by Rogé Karma at The Atlantic.

For the past three months, the global oil market seems to have been operating under the assumption that, before too long, the Strait of Hormuz will reopen and oil will start flowing again.

That assumption is rooted in a deeper underlying belief: that Trump will inevitably back down once the economic pain gets high enough. This is the so-called TACO theory of Trump’s decision making, as in “Trump Always Chickens Out.” “The market has correctly realized there’s an audience of one who will determine the outcome of this, and that’s Trump,” Arnab Datta, a managing director at the think tank Employ America who specializes in energy markets, told me. “Among traders, the assumption is that the pain can only get so high before Trump retreats.”

That logic turns out to be dangerously circular. Prices are low because investors expect Trump to end the war before prices get too high; but because prices are low, Trump faces less pressure to end the war. In fact, the president seems to have figured out that he can calm the oil markets simply by gesturing at the prospect of a peace deal every so often. Of course, a peace deal or a new cease-fire could still be announced at any moment. But the dynamic between Trump and the markets—call it the TACO equilibrium—is what has kept the war going longer than almost anyone expected.

I can’t even imagine what is going on in Trump’s head here, other than he  wants to avoid looking like a loser. Meanwhile, one of his most recent projects is spending taxpayer dollars to cover some bronze statues in D.C. with gold leaf. Like I said, he has no self-awareness.

Do see Paul Krugman, The Dumpster Fire of the Vanities. He addresses the phenomenon of Trump worship; the hard core base who even now can’t see what a loser Trump is.

Trump isn’t the first public figure to seek self-aggrandizement in an attempt to fill his inner emptiness. The important question is why the American right — not just his pathetic cabinet, but the whole movement, including the 6 extremistsRepublicans on the Supreme Court — has been so willing to empower him. And that’s a question much bigger than Trump himself.

The truth is that the right wing attempt to build a cult of personality around a deeply unpresidential figure, while it has reached new levels of absurdity under Trump, isn’t new. Republicans tried to do the same thing for George W. Bush. Remember this?

The comment was followed by a photo of Bush looking studly in a flight suit. I’ll spare you. Krugman continues, “And readers of a certain age may recall that the right’s canonization of Ronald Reagan began while he was still in office.”

During the Watergate scandal there was a lot of wagon-circling around Richard Nixon, as I recall, but nothing like the adoration offered to Reagan or the deification of Trump. So I’m going to postulate that this need to find a heroic figure who will save us from [fill in the blank — scary minorities? libtards? vegetarians who do yoga?] is something coming from the U.S. Right that I don’t think was around so intensely in earlier times. McCarthyism came pretty close, though.

The social psychologists tell us that conservatives value party loyalty more than liberals do, and that’s a factor, but what’s going on with Trump is not just loyalty. It really is a cult of personality with no basis in objective reality.

And then beyond the base we have the elected officials and Supreme Court judges who bend the Constitution and sometimes their own prior opinions to give Trump more power and more protection from the consequences of his incompetence. Whether they do this because they are in the cult, or because they are afraid of the cult, or because John Roberts’ head lives in an alternative universe, I do not know.

The recent pushback from some Republicans against the slush fund and tax money for the ballroom gives me hope that a few are beginning to break away. And today the South Carolina Senate killed the redistricting attempt that would have eliminated Rep. James Clyburn’s seat. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a trend.

Krugman concludes,

The point is that the dire state we’re in — the leader of the free world has turned against freedom, the greatest power the world has ever known is self-immolating before our eyes — isn’t just a matter of Donald Trump’s personal failings. It’s the culmination of decades of right-wing sabotage of everything that made American great.

That much is certainly true, and IMO this has roots in the “pseudo conservatives” Richard Hofstadter used to write about. I’m not sure what to do about it, though.

Other good stuff to read – see Tax Me If You Can by Jeffrey Winters at Mother Jones, about the growing oligarchy in the U.S. and Paul Waldman at The Cross Section, Trump is Haunted by Barack Obama. I especially recommend The Hard Truth My Party Needs to Face by Sen. Chris Van Hollen at the New York Times. the Hard Truth is that “The Democratic Party has provided reflexive and unconditional support to Israeli governments, even as their actions have increasingly undermined American interests and values.” And this has to stop.

I’m not seeing anything new about Iran since this morning’s performative strikes by Trump. The word for the day, boys and girls, is quagmire.

For the past three or four days Trump has been teasing a new “deal” that would end the Iran War he started. Since there was silence from Tehran I wasn’t taking it seriously. Today Iran is saying no deal is ‘imminent,’ which I take to mean Tehran has no interest in making any concessions.

Instead of an arc de triomphe, Trump should be building an arche de la défaite. (I do want to talk to whoever is in charge of French as to why “defeat” is a feminine noun but “triumph” is masculine.)

Last week  Robert Kagan published a piece in The Atlantic headlined Trump’s Endgame Is Surrender. It begins:

The outlines of President Trump’s endgame in the Iran war are now emerging. In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, Trump reportedly explained that the United States was negotiating a “letter of intent” with Iran that would “formally end the war and launch a 30-day period of negotiations” on Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The purpose and effect of such an agreement should be clear: The United States is walking away from the crisis. Trump may launch another limited strike to look tough and satisfy the demands of the war’s supporters, but it would be a performative gesture. Endgame in this case is a euphemism for “surrender.”

And then a it later he writes,

Trump’s repeated threats to resume attacks since then have proved to be bluffs. The leaders in Tehran have been calculating for two months that Trump would not launch another attack, and for this reason they have made no concessions despite the damage they suffered from 37 days of relentless strikes. On the contrary, their terms for a settlement are those of a victor: They demand war reparations, no limits on uranium enrichment, recognized control of the strait, and an end to sanctions.

For Trump to respond to this defiance by now calling for another 30 days of cease-fire and talks is a tacit admission of defeat. If he does launch a performative attack in the next few days, the Iranians will understand it for what it is. No one believes that he is going to resume a full-scale war a month from now. Among other reasons, with 30 more days to heal, rearm, and fill its coffers with tolls, Iran will be a more formidable adversary.

Kagan goes on to say that Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz is already becoming “normalized,” and several nations are negotiating with Iran about how they can get their ships safely through the strait. And I’d already read this before Trump started teasing that there was about to be a deal, so I was more interested in what Tehran did. And it’s no deal. They are telling Trump those are our terms, take it or leave it.

A couple of days ago Trump was posting that “An Agreement has been largely negotiated.” Just hours later he said he would not “rush into a deal.” Obviously, there was no deal. And today we know there’s no Agreement, capitalized or not. Marco Rubio said a deal is still possible. Trump is threatening fire and brimstone if a deal doesn’t happen soon. I take it Tehran didn’t give him something he could call a “win.”  Talks are continuing, however,but it may be the only “win” Trump can get is an agreement to keep talks about Iran’s nuclear capabilities open a bit longer. No agreement, mind, just talking.

Yesterday David Sanger and Tyler Pager wrote in the New York Times,

The temporary agreement that the Trump administration announced with Iran this weekend isn’t a peace deal. It isn’t a nuclear deal. It isn’t a missile deal.

Those may yet come — perhaps in a few months, though a senior United States official said there was no agreed time limit for nuclear talks, or perhaps far longer if the history of negotiations with Iran holds. But for now, Mr. Trump has described an arrangement that could extend a cease-fire and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, relieving the greatest energy disruption in modern times.

And it’s being said Bibi Netanyahu’s hair is on fire at the thought the U.S. might withdraw. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like we’re quite there yet.

There are some in the Republican party and among Trump supporters (example) who still think Trump can “win” if he drops more bombs, or something. And he’s getting an earful from some of those people now. Tom Nichols, one of my favorites at The Atlantic, writes Trump’s War Is Staggering to an Incoherent Defeat. He describes what the war hawks are saying.

Many of those most alarmed about what Trump might end up accepting to get out of this dead-end conflict in Iran are not his critics, but his supporters. Trump’s enablers may not have access to the details of an agreement, but they’re clearly worried: Senators Lindsey Graham, Roger Wicker, and Ted Cruz were all posting expressions of shock and dismay on social media. Graham said that any deal that caves to Iran “makes one wonder why the war started to begin with”; Wicker said that a possible 60-day cease-fire would be a “disaster.” Cruz gently suggested that the tsar does not know what his devious boyars are up to, describing the deal as “being pushed by some voices in the administration.”

Even Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser, posted a long screed warning Trump not to make a deal. “I know you want to get out of this mess,” he said. He then counseled the president to “give it some thought.” Trump’s former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo weighed in as well, comparing the possible outline of a deal to the kind of thing Barack Obama’s team might have come up when designing the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and warning that it could mean that America would end up paying “the IRGC to build a WMD program and terrorize the world.” 

So Trump is being pulled in two different directions now. But there’s more. There’s so much more. There are “Trump Loses War” commentaries bursting out all over the Web. See, for example, Phillips O’Brien, There Is Only One Remaining Question–How Badly Has The USA Lost This War?

How did we get here? Well, other than giving in to Iran, Trump’s only options were, first, to either wait a long time for the US blockade to do so much damage to the Iranian economy that the Iranian government would soften its demands or, second, to escalate dramatically by returning to the direct use of military force.

The problem is that neither of these options were likely to achieve anything better. The Iranian government seemed more than set to outlast the blockade, knowing that upcoming US elections were going to force Trump’s hand and as for the military option—that had already failed had revealed how desperate Trump was not to use ground troops.

The bottom line is that Trump has no viable options to force Tehran to give him anything. He never did. My only question now is — does he get that yet? David Frum, in Why Trump Lost, points mostly to Trump’s many character and other flaws — his arrogance, his recklessness, his gullibility. Paul Krugman is not a military guy, but in Donald Trump’s Ego-Driven “Excursion” Has Crashed Into Reality he makes much the same case. It was an unwinnable war. What career military are left in the Pentagon knew that, but Trump and his people didn’t believe them. “And it’s reasonable to infer that any officers who tried to warn of the dangers were treated as defeatists and silenced,” Krugman writes. Arrogance, recklessness, etc. Krugman continues,

Finally, success in modern war depends crucially on out-thinking one’s enemies. But MAGA is all about deprecating hard thinking and valorizing belligerent ignorance.

On Saturday Hegseth addressed the graduating class at West Point. In war, he declared, “you can’t throw your pronouns at the enemy.” He congratulated the cadets on being “fit, not fat.” Despite humiliating failure, Hegseth still has his job — and is still asserting that eliminating DEI wins wars and that bulging biceps can beat drones.

Somebody should put posters up at the Pentagon saying THINK FIRST. FLEX LATER.

There may be a few more twists and turns in this plot before we get to the dénouement — maybe we can erect an arch for that — but at this point IMO a big humiliation for Trump is inevitable. I’ll let David Frum have the last word.

Trump’s vision of the presidency is authoritarian and kleptocratic: Issue orders, grab money, luxuriate in flattery, erect monuments to oneself. That’s no way to lead a nation through the hazards and difficulties of war. Now the war is ending on disadvantageous terms for the United States. Trump’s old methods will be turned to a new task: trying to deceive the American people and the world into believing that the war he lost was really a big win, the biggest ever, so big you cannot believe it. He’s likely to discover that, indeed, nobody does believe it.

Tuesday update: As Robert Kagan predicted (see above), Trump has initiated some performative strikes in Iran to try to shake the regime loose from its position. It won’t work.

Democrats are in widespread agreement about something — that the DNC “autopsy” of the 2024 presidential election released yesterday is a mess. It’s full of typos and doesn’t explain anything. I tried skimming through the thing and decided it wasn’t worth it, since it seemed more interested in reviewing the last 20 years of politics than looking hard at 2024. It’s so bad some people are calling for DNC Chair Ken Martin to resign.

According to Politico, the only people who liked it are the bleeping centrists.

Prominent centrist groups that argue the party has drifted too far to the left found validation in the report.

“Ken Martin’s autopsy of the autopsy was excellent!” said Liam Kerr, co-founder of the centrist WelcomePAC. “After spending a decade accepting all edits from every progressive interest group, better to just delete all DNC strategy docs and admit we need to start from scratch. Admitting incompetence is much better than denial.”

Jonathan Cowan, president of center-left group Third Way, suggested the report was shelved because it would anger progressives. “I think it’s very clear why this report was buried, because as it says in the opening, it calls for Democrats to return to the vital center,” Cowan said. “Now I understand why a lot of very Twitter-friendly, super liberal DNC staff didn’t want this to come out.”

Naturally, this makes me hate the report I haven’t read even more.

As soon as the autopsy was released (or possibly leaked; it doesn’t seem to have been finished) I started seeing alerts that the word “Gaza” doesn’t appear in it anywhere. It also leaves out any mention of Joe Biden’s decision to run again, which led to the last-minute switch to Kamala Harris as the front runner.

Then the “Strength in Numbers” guy, G. Elliott Morris, wrote a post headlined The real reason Democrats lost in 2024 that is worth reading. After dismissing the autopsy as “a lot of pundit conventional wisdom” he wrote,

But the biggest problem is that the autopsy straight up ignores the major reasons Harris lost in 2024. Yes, it’s bad enough that the report doesn’t mention that party bosses failed to coordinate an early exit for Joe Biden, who was too unpopular to win. And there is no mention of Israel/Gaza, low turnout in the cities, and nothing on Harris’s race or gender. But this is a data-driven site, so I want to really focus in on what the numbers can tell us.

When we boot up the data, it’s obvious the main reason Harris lost — and the reason I am going to explore here, at this website, it being a data-driven website — is that 2024 simply had too much inflation-induced anti-incumbent sentiment for the incumbent party to overcome. This is curiously missing from its main diagnosis. The word “inflation” isn’t mentioned in the autopsy a single time (except in the context of inflation-adjusted ad spending).

He then presents a lot of data, with a chart I don’t entirely understand, that argues you could pretty much have predicted the last several presidential elections based on two factors. “Political scientists have been pointing out for decades that you can predict presidential elections reasonably well using just two pieces of information: how voters feel about the incumbent president, and how voters feel about the economy,” he wrote.

I confess I didn’t pick up on the discontent about the economy in 2024, since it seemed to be coming mostly from the Right. I’m not sure most Americans realized that the post-Covid inflation was a global phenomenon that Biden didn’t cause. And I knew that bringing down inflation isn’t easy, especially bringing down inflation without causing a recession. And Biden, with the help of the Federal Reserve board, was doing it masterfully. In October 2024 The Economist really did call the U.S. economy the envy of the world. But I guess not that many voters read The Economist. They weren’t seeing enough improvement fast enough, so they put Trump in charge.

And it’s also the case that I had no idea how frail Joe Biden had become until that June 2024 debate. But surely other people had seen it. To those who now say that Kamala Harris ran a bad campaign, G. Elliott Morris  writes that she actually did a bit better than the data predicted. “In a sense, then, the surprise of the election is that Harris did as well as she did, considering the prevailing factors against her,” Morris wrote. But it might be that by 2024 the die was cast.

Regarding Gaza, I have read that the the Muslim vote did tip Michigan to Trump, after several Muslim leaders foolishly endorsed Trump. I wonder what they think of those endorsements now. Whether Gaza made any real difference in any other state I do not know; possibly not.

I have noticed there is a subset of Democratic activists for whom Gaza is The Only Legitimate Issue, however.

I’m watching the primary campaigns in my congressional district, NY 17, for the House seat currently held by Republican Mike Lawler. There are three front-runners for the Democratic nomination, all women. I don’t have a sense that any one of these is the favorite. But the arguments for and against these candidates in social media boil down to “We have to vote for X because she’s the most electable, as the others are too far left” versus “We have to vote for Y because she’s the only one not taking money from pro-Israel groups.” What I’m not hearing is how any of these candidates stand on the economy and health care. Lawler made a lot of noise last year about how  he wasn’t going to vote to cut Medicaid and other safety net programs, and then he voted to cut Medicaid and the other programs. Hello? .

And as much as I hate what’s happening in Gaza, the Gaza purists are starting to annoy me as much as the centrism worshipers.

In other news:

Tulsi Gabbard is out as National Security Director. No big surprise. Reuters is reporting that she was pushed into resigning, but that story is behind a paywall.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is in the news again. This is the Associated Press:

A federal judge on Friday dismissed a human smuggling case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, finding that the Justice Department’s pursuit of criminal charges was designed to punish him for challenging his mistaken deportation to El Salvador last year.

The ruling amounted to an extraordinary rebuke of a Justice Department that under President Donald Trump has repeatedly been accused of targeting defendants for political purposes. The Trump administration touted the charges against Abrego Garcia last year at a press conference in which then-Attorney General Pam Bondi declared, “This is what American justice looks like.”

“The evidence before this court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power,” U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw, in Nashville, Tenn., said in his ruling granting Abrego Garcia’s motion to dismiss for “selective or vindictive prosecution.” Without Abrego Garcia’s “successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the government would not have brought this prosecution.”

So will Trump’s DoJ leave the poor guy alone now? Or will it come up with some other bogus charge?

An interesting comment I heard yesterday from one of the teevee bobbleheads is that Trump is getting more and more of less and less. For example, Trump’s wackadoodle nominees have been taking out GOP incumbents Trump doesn’t like in the primaries. This shows us that the base, who care enough to vote in primaries, are still with him. More and more. In the meantime, his support among the general public is falling like a rock. Less and less.

In some places the wackadoodle nominees are not going to do as well in the general election. Add to this the gerrymandering that reduces Republican margins in previously safe GOP districts. This could result in a massive backfire. And if Trump’s endorsement of Ken Paxton helps Paxton win the Senate runoff next week against incumbent John Cornyn, this could make a Dem flip a tad closer to reality.

And I don’t see Trump getting any more popular in the next six months.

See David Graham at The Atlantic, The Price of Trump’s Primary Wins.

Trump’s hold on the MAGA base is still powerful, but the same actions that help him maintain it also help erode his standing with the broader public—and threaten to lead Republicans to defeat in November’s midterm elections.

Primary voters—and especially primary voters in Indiana, Louisiana, and Kentucky—are not representative of the general electorate. (Trump won those states by 19, 22, and 31 points, respectively, in 2024.) They aren’t even necessarily representative of the Republicans who vote in the general election, a group that is likely to be less engaged, less ideological, and less politically extreme overall. As a result, votes in November are more likely to hinge on issues such as inflation or the Iran war.

Graham goes on to say that, at the moment, Republicans facing re-election are more likely to want to not cross Trump than to stand up to him. But one of these days that could change. And, ironically, Trump’s desire for personal glory would have been better served by a more adversarial Congress that kept his worse impulses in line.

Speaking of which, it’s a bit too soon to see public reaction to Trump’s new slush fund reflected in the polls. But see Trump approval sinks to record low among Republicans in stunning Fox News poll at The Independent.

The survey, conducted by the Trump-friendly conservative news network, found a seven-point rise in the number of self-identified GOP voters who now say they disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, with just 36 percent of non-MAGA GOP respondents saying they approve of his economic record compared with 74 percent of MAGA Republicans who say they approve.

But the supermajority of MAGA voters who still back his handling of the economy still wasn’t enough to keep his approval rating on the issue from plummeting to just 29 percent — a full 5 percent lower than what the same poll recorded a month ago.

This trend is likely to continue, and the way Trump has been behaving I don’t think he’s capable of turning it around.

I’m reading the slush fund will be really hard to stop. Several lawsuits have been filed, but this Reuters article explains why, for legal/technical reasons, it will be hard for them to succeed. On the other hand, Greg Sargent writes that some Republicans in Congress are opposing the slush fund. Probably not enough, but some. However, even if it’s reversed eventually, the $1.8 billion may have been dispersed by then.

Of all of Trump’s many corruptions, among the most brazen is his suit against the IRS claiming personal damages because an IRS contractor leaked his tax returns during his first term. This amounts to Trump just reaching into the Treasury and helping himself to the People’s money, because he can. And considering that presidents since Richard Nixon have made their current tax returns public, it seems to me that claiming he was “damaged” by the leak amounts to an admission of guilt, that there is something in the returns that would damage him if it became public. But let’s go on.

The original claim was for $10 billion. Then late last week ABC News reported that Trump had decided to settle with Trump for $1.7 billion — $1,776,000,000 to be exact. And this money wouldn’t go into Trump’s pocket, according to Trump. Trump’s Justice Department would set up a slush fund managed by Trump appointees who can be fired by him at will, and this slush fund would be used to pay off people Trump wants to reward for doing him favors. In particular, he wants to be able to compensate people who face legal consequences for breaking the law in his behalf. Or, as David Kurtz puts it, “to pay out ‘damages’ to his allies who purport to be victims of the Deep State, including the Trump-pardoned Jan. 6 defendants.” This is just the thing to possibly compensate a volunteer paramilitary of Brownshirts set on bullying whomever Trump wants bullied.

I also like the way the New York Times puts it:

The Justice Department said that it had created a $1.8 billion fund that could compensate supporters of President Trump who contend they were mistreated by Democratic administrations. The announcement came as part of a settlement with President Trump of his $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S.

The new “settlement” was filed in advance of a court deadline. The judge hearing the original suit wanted the “defendants” to explain how they are not just an extension of Trump. No responses had been filed yet. And here’s a twist that I just learned about this morning, Again, David Kurtz at TPM:

Trump’s latest filing is a notice of dismissal with prejudice, meaning the case cannot be refiled, but most importantly it contends that the right to dismiss the case is not subject to judicial review under the procedural rules since neither the IRS nor the Treasury Department had yet filed an answer or other responsive motion to the lawsuit.

“Accordingly, voluntary dismissal under Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) is available as of right, and requires neither leave of Court nor the consent of any party,” Trump’s lawyers argue. They go farther in a footnote, in telling the judge that they are filing a notice of dismissal, not a motion to dismiss, because she has no say in the matter under appeal court precedent: “dismissal is self-executing, terminates the action upon filing, and divests the district court of jurisdiction.”

The bulk of the notice is dedicated to telling Judge Williams to back off: “Upon the filing of this Notice, no judicial analysis is appropriate, and any ‘subsequent order purporting to dismiss ‘all claims’ . . . [would be] a nullity,’” it contends, citing case law.

I wondered last week if a court would have to sign off on Trump’s settlement with Trump, and I couldn’t find an answer. So the answer seems to be, I guess not.

And today the DoJ announced the establishment of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

Yet this isn’t over. Today House Democrats filed an amicus brief with the original judge, asking her to put a stop to this blatant exercise in self-dealing. Rep. Jamie Raskin has been arguing that the creation of the slush fund is unconstitutional, since only Congress can appropriate funds to be used by government (in this case, the DoJ). So there may be a court challenge after all, although who knows how that will turn out.

And if you (like me) are struggling to remember what was learned from Trump’s tax returns, see Key takeaways from six years of Donald Trump’s federal tax returns from CNN and 18 Revelations From a Trove of Trump Tax Records from the New York Times.