I see we’re back to the question of whether Donald Trump should be allowed back on Twitter, whether Elon Musk will allow him back, what it will mean? All I can add to this debate is that getting hung up on this question is undignified and unwise. Put simply, it makes the supporters of civic democracy and Americanism sound weak, helpless, lacking the courage of their convictions and beliefs, afraid. (As I was writing this post, I heard that Elon Musk had announced he was reinstating Trump on the platform.) Much of this stems from the really wrongheaded idea that Trump leapfrogged to the commanding heights of American politics in 2015 because he got so much TV coverage or because people engaged with his tweets on Twitter. That was never true. All sorts of bad conclusions flow from that misapprehension.

Many of you are asking me what I make of Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint Jack Smith to serve as a special prosecutor to oversee the investigation into Jan 6th (he won’t take over current cases) and the Mar-a-Lago investigation. I think it’s fine. I strongly suspect, though here I’m talking more hunch, that it’s also bad news for Donald Trump and probably various associates.

We’ve discussed this before. But The Miami Herald now fleshes out the story. When Ron DeSantis’s administration hired Vertol Systems, a defense contractor, to run its migrant flights program, Vertol insisted on being paid up front for a package deal. That’s not how Florida works with contractors. But Vertol insisted and eventually the politicals in DeSantis’s administration overruled the state employees who manage payments to contractors. (It seems likely that that was done by the appointee running the program, Larry Keefe, who recommended Vetrol and used to be the company’s lawyer.)

Its such a bizarre thing. Elon Musk has owned Twitter for roughly three weeks and as of this morning the site seems to be limping forward, with widespread but inconsistent outages, because the inner functioning of the company has essentially imploded. Or rather Musk blew it up. Pretty much on a whim. Musk had already fired roughly half of the company’s workforce and at least temporarily scared off many of its corporate advertisers. Earlier this week he issued the remaining staff an ultimatum in which they had to choose between becoming truly ”hardcore,” working longer hours and weekends, or taking a small severance and leaving.

Apparently an unexpectedly large number chose to do the latter. Last night hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand of the remaining employees signed off for good, often with messages on Twitter itself, toasting their former workplace in a digital equivalent of a New Orleans funeral.

Kyrsten Sinema has been a thorn in the side of Democrats for the last two years. Unlike, co-thorn Joe Manchin, there’s no obvious reason why she insisted on being one. (As Eric Levitz notes, Mark Kelly’s victory is an indictment of Sinema’s politics.) Manchin is from the most pro-Trump state in the country. Sinema’s not.

In recent weeks, Rep. Ruben Gallego has been signaling more and more clearly that he may challenge Sinema in a primary in advance of her reelection campaign in 2024. Normally in such circumstances partisans try to find a balance between disciplining or displacing an errant elected official and the risk of losing the seat altogether. But that mistakes the challenge Democrats actually face. Because Sinema is already unelectable.

Let’s start with the fact that 2024 is going to be a very challenging year for the Democrats to hold the Senate. The pick-up opportunities are challenging at best. Democrats must defend seats in Ohio, Montana and West Virginia. In other words, Democrats can’t afford to lose a seat in Arizona if they have hopes of retaining Senate control.

I watched Donald Trump’s special announcement speech last night. I don’t think it was quite as low energy as some have suggested. I’d describe it more as a greatest hits show from an old band. Some have noted that the crowd seemed not always to know when to clap. They were into it but not overwhelmed. This raised a question in my mind. This is not really Trump’s crowd. Trump’s crowd is at those red state rallies. He did himself a disservice by not holding the event at one of those venues. It’s possible that his handlers thought this was a venue where they could keep him more on script. More likely, he’s reacting in a panicked fashion to the DeSantis boomlet and didn’t have the time.

But let’s set the atmospherics aside. I think this is likely the beginning of the end of Donald Trump. But I say this with a different emphasis from most. When I say “beginning of the end” I put the emphasis on “beginning.” There can be a long time between the beginning of the end and the end of the end. I suspect in this case it may play out over a few political cycles.

Yesterday Kate Riga and I held a TPM Newsmaker Briefing with Brendan McPhillips — a lot of very interesting details about how the campaign unfolded from the inside. Did it seem like a jump ball in the last week on the inside? Apparently so. What happened with that NBC interview? What about the debate? We get into all of that. If you’re a member and you weren’t able to join us live yesterday, you can watch the whole thing after the jump.

NBC News and now all the other networks have called the Arizona Governor’s race for Democrat Katie Hobbs. Hobbs defeats arch-election-denier Republican Kari Lake.

This was a pretty close race, according to the polls. But Lake was expected to win this one. She had been consistently running two or three points ahead of Hobbs. There was also a lot of Democratic backbiting about Hobbs’ decision to refuse to debate. That can make sense to stigmatize and deny legitimacy to an opponent, to say this person is too outside the norm for me to validate them by agreeing to debate.

But that rings kind of hollow if that opponent who lacks legitimacy as a potential governor is actually beating you. Whatever the merits of that, Hobbs won. So either it was a good strategy or if it was a bad one then she got away with it. Democrats now hold the governorships in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona, four critical states going into 2024. Republicans hold them in Nevada and Georgia.

Kate Riga and I just did our TPM Newsmaker Briefing with Fetterman campaign manager Brendan McPhillips. We got a lot of fascinating details. One was that the idea that the race looked basically like a jump ball in the final week of the campaign wasn’t just an artifact of spending too much time refreshing 538. It looked really tight based on the internal polling and other data that the campaign had on the inside. Another was the difference between in-state media’s reaction to Fetterman’s debate performance and the national media’s. A fairly stark difference, as he described it. McPhillips also told us that focus group reactions to Fetterman’s stroke recovery tended to be pretty sympathetic, even to a degree which was perhaps a little surprising to his own campaign. So we got the sense that the Fetterman team was able to have relative confidence that Pennsylvania voters were seeing Fetterman’s stroke recovery through a more sympathetic prism than most in the national press assumed or shared.

If you’re a member and you didn’t get a chance to join us live, we’ll be published the video here tomorrow in the Editor’s Blog.

One regular refrain of the last month of the 2022 midterm was that abortion and Dobbs had faded as a driving issue in the face of economic concerns. Another was that “democracy” was, for most voters, an abstraction without much relevance to more immediate concerns like inflation. That first bit of conventional wisdom always seemed overstated at best. But the election results point to something different that many observers missed in the narrow and perhaps over-literal way these issues were siloed in polls and election commentary: abortion, election denialism and other elements of GOP whackery melded together into a broader fear of Republican extremism that was larger than the sum of its parts.