This morning Axios leads with an “Exclusive”: “Donors fret over Scott’s single status.” As they look for the best challenger to the supremacy of Donald Trump, top GOP donors have been skittish about ponying up big money for South Carolina Senator Tim Scott because the 57 year old South Carolina Senator is unmarried. Back in May Scott told an on-stage interviewer he had a girlfriend but didn’t name her. The story says that the Scott campaign’s discussion of the issue has been “vague” while making clear that, at least according to one source, even if many donors have concerns it’s definitely not a majority of them.

This is simply an odd story on many levels. It feels a tad archaic to put it mildly. As Scott himself put during that May interview with Axios, “it sounds like we’re living in 1963 and not 2023.”

The Scott campaign says it will be addressing the issue in the coming weeks.

This morning while reading your emails I got this question from TPM Reader EG: “How has your experience of politics in this country over the last six years changed your understanding of this country?  Do you sense a secular before and after that we are transitioning to?”

That’s a very big question and I don’t know what my answer is. But I do have a few observations to share, which maybe are part of an evolving answer.

First a few preliminaries.

Implicit in this question, I think, is one of national decline. Basically, are we moving into a new reality in which things are getting worse, in which the American democratic order is under permanent threat or even on the way out. I don’t think everyone’s a pessimist. But it’s hard for me to imagine many people asking this particular question in the present national context and meaning, “Don’t we seem to be entering a new age in which everything or most things will be more awesome than they were previously?”

In a political world where florid and manic are the emotional baselines it’s hard to imagine anything more boring than whether former Rep. Mike Rogers (R) is running for Senate in Michigan. But a lot turns on these fairly prosaic questions. Rogers is expected to announce shortly that he’s running for the seat opened up by the retirement of Sen. Debbie Stabenow. His likely opponent is Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D). Since leaving office on the cusp of the Trump era in 2015, Rogers been a CNN commentator. He was the House Intelligence Committee Chair before it was taken over by the notorious Devin Nunes.

This morning we’re covering a key hearing in the prosecution of Donald Trump, an important moment for the future of the country as well as the 2024 election. I also try to devote time to making sense of or simply identifying the big trends driving global history today. One which has fascinated me for years is the relative eclipse of state power in the favor of private corporations and individuals who in various ways act with the power we associate with states or become so powerful that they put themselves significantly beyond the power of states to control.

If you read any of the business, publishing or entertainment press you’ll see stories about hard times in streaming world. This means Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Max, Hulu et al. This is undoubtedly true. You’ve likely seen this in the rising prices you pay and the declining offerings your subscription gets you. I don’t write to dispute any of this. But it’s nothing new under the sun. It is more or less exactly what we’ve seen in the digital new industry. The same pattern.

Entrants raise large sums of money (or use cash on hand from other business lines) and then spend substantially more than your subscription merits. They lose money in order to build market share. At some point the industry becomes mature and then they have to convert the business to one that can sustain itself and make a profit. That means substantial retrenchment. Inevitably that means spending less on the product and charging you more.

There’s a new poll out from Politico Magazine/Ipsos the results of which are straight out of Obviousville. But surprisingly few people ever go to Obviousville. So those results are worth discussing. The central finding is that the parade of criminal charges against Donald Trump are not in fact good news, politically or individually, for Donald Trump. More specifically, majorities (albeit bare ones) of Americans want his trials to be held before the election (61%), believe he’s guilty (51%) and believe he should go to prison if convicted (50%).

Critically, Politico notes that a substantial minority of the population (between a quarter and a third) says they’re not that familiar with the charges against Trump. Since the charges – especially those in the Mar-a-Lago case – are quite strong as an evidentiary matter that suggests there’s plenty of room for things to get worse for Trump.

How did we get here? How did we not get here? By which I mean how many were the overlapping layers of bad acts, transgressions, crimes, lies that got us here? Looking back over the span of Trump’s presidency and post-presidency it’s not just one stream of actions building to this moment. There are so many, each of which might have gotten us here. It is almost as if — and perhaps this is the best way to look at the matter — Trump was determined to get us here even as we collectively, as Americans, resisted it.

Numerous American presidents have lost power at the ballot box. Every American president, save the eight who died in office, has voluntarily ceded power to his successor. There is no evidence that it so much as occurred to any of them not to do so.

Until Donald Trump.

The Miami Herald’s headline this morning had it that the state’s governor “fights for attention” in the first GOP presidential debate. Instapolls and betting markets says it was a big win for Vivek Ramaswamy who as I put it last night “comes off as a cocky little shit” and thus will “probably be rising in the polls.” For a good rundown of what happened you can listen to Kate Riga and my overnight insta-pod, in which we provided our initial reactions.

Kate Riga and I just recorded a quick debate recap insta-pod which should be showing up in your feed a bit later in the evening if you’re a Josh Marshall Podcast subscriber. If not, we’ll post it here on the site too. Our first impressions were pretty similar: surprisingly strong showing by Mike Pence. We debated today on the regular episode whether Hutchinson or Christie would be the one who brought the fight to Trump. Pence was also possible but he simply didn’t seem to have it in him. But as it turned out, it was Pence who took up that challenge and he managed to wrestle applause from the audience for doing it. There’s a strong element of “not that it matters.” But in the context of this debate, it was Pence.

10:23 p.m.: Needless to say this debate is a total mess. The way that this cranked-up weirdo Ramaswamy basically takes over the whole debate with his inane claims is the story in microcosm of the contemporary GOP.

10:11 p.m.: Pence helped himself with that little speech that he gave when he briefly took over the debate.