I wanted to share a few thoughts with you about this email from a TPM Reader from Maine which I posted last week. It crystallized a few thoughts I had about the Maine Senate primary and politics more generally. In general, I’ve always been pretty against purity tests in politics, though the label “purity tests” somewhat prejudges the question. TPM Reader JU tells us that she didn’t rank Graham Platner first (Maine has ranked choice). But that she wasn’t disappointed that he prevailed. She also believes that most of the morality tale interpretations of what happened in the primary miss what’s driving Maine voters. It’s not that they don’t care about Platner’s baggage, or that they’ve adopted some Trumpian cynicism. They just have a different understanding of character tests in politicians mount to. (You can read the post here.)
Basically I agree with JU. But I want to abstract this out, to at least a degree, from Platner’s specific issues because I know people have strong feelings about that race and the specific accusations that were made against him. Possibly the argument I’m making is valid but I’m misapplying it to Platner. But I’m trying to articulate a more general point rather than relitigate the Platner primary.
I’ve mentioned a few times that in addition to everything else Trump’s Iran “deal” is an electoral disaster for Benjamin Netanyahu. What I’ve been wondering is what the deal would do to Israelis attitudes toward Donald Trump. On its face that shouldn’t be complicated. If Israelis are mad at Netanyahu for getting boxed into Trump’s deal and coerced into honoring a treaty Israel wasn’t a party to, presumably they should be far angrier at Trump himself. After all, he made the deal. But Israelis’ attitudes toward Donald Trump don’t allow it to be quite that simple. Pains me as it does to say, many Israelis really like Donald Trump. Like really like Donald Trump, in a way that transcends Netanyahu’s to-date iron hold on Israel politics.
As part of his round of media appearances JD Vance was asked today about critics of Donald Trump’s Iran deal in the Israeli government. He said …
Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time. If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.
Just on the facts it’s pretty hard to disagree. This is not only an example of how fast things can change for you in Trumpworld. It is also a perfect illustration of how your own loyalism, your own Trumpiness almost always gets wheeled around and used against it as soon as you zig when you were supposed to zag. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has left Israel marvelously exposed and isolated. And he seems increasingly likely to pay the price for that in October.
And what is Israel going to do now? Leverage its relationships with Democrats to push back against Trump’s diktats? Good luck with that.
I wanted to zero in on something that was mentioned mostly in passing in the latest set of filings from the former Broadview Six defendants. The DOJ, through the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s office, told the defense on June 5 that they would not contest the defendants petition that Judge April Perry rule that the government must reimburse the defendants’ legal expenses. (David mentioned this yesterday in Morning Memo.) It’s true that this agreement in principle leaves undetermined an exact dollar amount that the defendants would be reimbursed. But it’s difficult to overstate how rare it is for the government ever to agree to reimburse defendants’ legal fees or how unheard of it for defendants to succeed in these requests, even though there is a law — the 1977 Hyde Amendment — that provides for it.
We seem to be in one of those very MAGA interludes in which members of Donald Trump’s base are not so much rebelling as in a process of mourning. They are struggling to find a path to discovering that up turns out to be down, or that the things that they have always professed to care about do not matter because Trump has announced they do not matter. Lindsey Graham seems to be maybe 3/4s through the process. Ted Cruz is working on it. But some of his supporters, especially a number of those who aren’t in elective politics are having a harder time, at least for now. The dynamic, the level of shock is very straightforward. Most of MAGAworld has gone along with the premise that the war in Iran, or Trump’s management of it, has actually been going great all along. Trump is underestimated, the Lamestream media, etcetera. Wait to see the final deal. Trump won’t let Iran get away with anything.
A lot of these folks are now coming into contact with the reality of the situation, from zero to 60 in two or three seconds. It’s pretty jarring. The deal as structured, from what I can tell at least, contains more or less exactly the details that Iranian state media has been reporting for weeks and which the White House claimed was IRGC propaganda. Maybe the U.S. isn’t contributing to the $300 billion Iran rebuilding fund. But it’s overseeing and guaranteeing its creation. So it’s a fairly minor distinction. There are also some odd signals from within the White House that they might pull the plug on the whole thing. For instance, JD Vance agreed with Megyn Kelly that the deal could be scrapped if Trump’s supporters had an “utter meltdown.” Trump has hinted that he might scrap the deal too but has mainly focused on attacking those who are pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, perhaps not even an agreement.
The DOJ is attempting to strip a Somalia-born Minneapolis man of his citizenship, citing actions he took after he became a citizen. To do so, it’s relying solely on a McCarthy-era law. Its a first, experts told Josh Kovensky.
TPM is the first outlet to note the DOJ’s novel use of the 1952 law, alone, for this purpose — to denaturalize someone who had already become a citizen. Read our story here.
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