Editors’ Blog

We flagged it down in Livewire. But I just have to mention it. Following last week’s blood letting, Ron DeSantis is now canning more than a third of his campaign staff as his campaign continues to bleed out.

A couple days ago I got this email from TPM Reader PT. I was sort of delaying responding because it’s a really complex question. So I’ve decided to post the question and reply here. I preface by noting I’m not an expert on Israeli politics. I don’t live there. But I have followed it closely for many years. So I put it forward on that basis.

From PT …

It feels like this whole year I’ve been trying to understand the situation in Israel — specifically the fact that the governing coalition wants to make a fundamental change to the country’s political organization and is facing furious pushback from the citizenry. My first thought was that it had a certain “Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party” energy to it: Netanyahu’s overriding priority is to ensure that he isn’t prosecuted for corruption, which means that his overriding priority is to destroy the court system in Israel; hence if you elect a governing coalition that includes him and makes him PM, destruction of the court system is a given. So how do we arrive in a place where everyone knows that Netanyahu’s goal is to destroy the court system, the electorate elects a government that will make him PM, and then the electorate protests when he does what everyone knows he’s going to do.

After thinking about it some more, I have a somewhat different take:

The retired school teacher who ultimately survived an expulsion vote brought by her Republican colleagues in the Tennessee state House earlier this year — part of an effort that did ultimately expel two of her younger, Black colleagues — is reportedly planning to challenge Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) for her seat next year.

No Democrat has won a statewide race since 2006, when then-Gov. Phil Bredesen secured his reelection. But a face-off between Blackburn — who has a history of staunch opposition to tightening gun control — and state Rep. Gloria Johnson, (D) whose expulsion vote was predicated on her support for children and parents protesting lax gun laws in the state legislature, could test the energizing power of gun reform in a state recently racked by a deadly school shooting.

You’ve probably seen coverage of the firestorm over Florida’s newly updated African-American history curriculum. Most of the coverage has (understandably) focused on the quote that suggest that slaves were taught skills which they could use for their own benefit. (“Slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”) I read the entire updated curriculum. So I wanted to share my take. As most of you know, I have a PhD in American history, with a focus on the colonial period but covering the full sweep of American history. I haven’t been professionally engaged with the literature for about 25 years. But I generally keep up.

Overall the text isn’t as clownish as that one quote might suggest — a low bar. But there are still pretty major problems. As is usually the case with educational standards, they tend to be ones of emphasis and omission rather than outright fabrication. Along the way, there’s a decent amount of general sloppiness and a hard-to-miss affirmative action for right-wing Black intellectuals. I want to focus on three points. These are by no means exhaustive. They’re just the ones that struck me as most glaring and also illustrative. 

As we continue to watch the ignominious collapse of Ron DeSantis’s campaign (predicted many months ago by yours truly but not like I’m focusing on that or anything), there’s a curious bit of backstory I’m reminded of. But before we get to that I wanted to flag this weekend New York Times article. It’s so passively devastating I think DeSantis’s estate might have a plausible wrongful death claim against the authors.

Most of the attention to this article has focused on a scooplet about that infamous gay/trans-bashing video. The story was that it was put together by some unknown fan in the DeSantis-o-sphere. The campaign simply picked it up and amplified it. The Times reports that in fact it was produced by a campaign staffer who then gave it to a Ron fan site to release so that the campaign could then pick it up from the fan. In other words, the campaign laundered it out for some plausible deniability.

My takeaway from the piece was different: The campaign appears to be trapped in a sort of people-hating, private-jet-taking death loop. We learn from the article that Ron and wife Casey really, really like flying on private jets, which of course cost a ton of money. I confess that I’m not a huge fan of flying. But if I were, a private jet would probably be pretty cool. But it’s also not hard to see their extreme attachment to private jets as part of or at least a symbol of not liking being around regular people. Maybe not liking being around anybody at all. Some people just want the privacy to unwind with a handful of pudding.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the potential, looming Donald Trump indictment in Jack Smith’s January 6 case and House Republicans’ torpedoing of the government funding process.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

As you can see, Trump Judge (in every sense) Aileen Cannon has scheduled ex-President Trump’s documents case trial for May 2024. This wasn’t as soon as prosecutors wanted. But Cannon rejected Trump’s request for an indefinite delay until after the 2024 election. I wanted to share some thoughts on what this all means for the rule of law generally as well as for the 2024 election.

I was corresponding this morning with a former federal prosecutor who sees this decision as a significant win for Trump on this reasoning: We assume that in the coming days or weeks federal prosecutors will indict Trump for felonies tied to January 6th. Now we have two federal trials in addition to the state trial in New York and a likely one in Georgia. By scheduling the trial in May, Cannon has left very little time to schedule a January 6th trial prior to the May/documents trial. A federal judge in D.C. would be quite unlikely to schedule the two federal trials at the same time. That leaves it highly likely that the January 6th trial gets scheduled after the May 2024 documents trial.

Not that it matters. But needless to say there’s no such thing as expunging an impeachment.

We’ll be recording and posting this week’s episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast later this week.

Yesterday I noted that January 6th remains radioactive for the GOP in a way that Trump’s other crimes simply don’t. It keeps coming up again because they’ve never dealt with what happened. And they haven’t because that would mean dealing with Donald Trump. And, let’s be honest, they haven’t because a substantial minority (or more?) of their supporters are in fact insurrectionists and unreconstructed ones.

The preference at all times is to ignore January 6th. The next line of defense is to offer general condemnation but say it’s time to move forward. If that doesn’t work the defense moves to “politicization” and general arguments that the Justice Department should never bring charges against the man the incumbent defeated or the one he’ll face in the next election. But defending Trump’s actions on and around January 6th remains basically impossible for all but the most authoritarian and criminally minded Republicans. Because January 6th is simply indefensible. What I wanted to note today is that the insider sheets, the ones generally inclined to say that in fact this is good news for Trump or, more seriously, that Republicans have a plan for this, are generally saying the same thing. This Axios update from last night is a good example. January 6th is different. There’s no denying it.