In recent days, I’ve seen a number of comments or editorials which focus on a dichotomy between reacting to the crisis of the moment (which is portrayed as the ICE raids, military deployments and general attacks on democracy) and focusing on issues like Medicaid (which is portrayed as politics-as-usual and an inability to recognize a national crisis). I agree with the sentiment behind this, but it’s wrongheaded and I want to explain why.

For those who are attending “No Kings” events today in your areas, I encourage you to send photographs. They don’t need to be striking or unique. We’re just looking for what you’re seeing.

I of course know about the assassination and attack overnight in Minneapolis in which Rep. Melissa Hortman (D) and her spouse were killed.

My wording in this title is one part provocation. But there is a serious point to it.

American political debates use the term “elite” in a fairly impoverished way. Its use is pejorative rather than descriptive. The elites are the bad guys. And the good elites aren’t actually elites. We’re all familiar with this and perhaps it’s inevitable in a political culture so rooted in the imagery and ideology, if not always the reality, of popular rule and the power and valorization of the ordinary American.

But the elite, in a more descriptive and non-evaluative sense, has been perhaps the biggest reveal of this live subject experiment we’ve been a part of since late January. Law firms, universities, big business, news publications and a million other examples. We’ve all been amazed, disheartened, aghast, whatever you want to call it, by the subservience of the prominent and the powerful. Even those who haven’t adopted a posture of subservience have generally adopted one of silence. I hear it from reporter after reporter. The kind of people they used to go to for quotes — a lot of those people don’t want to give them anymore. And, beyond moral evaluation, we know why: they have things on the line. A rogue President has vast untapped and illegal or unconstitutional but still usable power to come after really anyone who puts their head up. The challenges to Trump have much more been waged by ordinary Americans.

I was driving when this afternoon’s events in Los Angeles took place. So I didn’t know about them in real time and only found out what had happened a couple hours later. (Appropriately enough, I was listening to the audiobook version of a Raymond Chandler novel.) Secretary Noem is now claiming that she, along with everyone else there, didn’t even know who Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) was. This is even more absurd than you might imagine. The press conference was in Los Angeles and he’s one of the state’s two senators. More than that, he’s the ranking member of the Judiciary subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration. Of course she knows who he is. If she doesn’t remember his face, she’s an even dumber degenerate punk than I already thought.

As many of you have probably noticed, TPM had significant downtime this afternoon. It turns out it wasn’t just us. Cloudflare had a series of broad outages this afternoon and TPM was downstream of that. About 20% of all websites use Cloudflare for core site functions (things like DDOS mitigation, proxying, DNS, caching, and some other things I’m sure I’m forgetting).

We’re back now and closely monitoring the situation. Our apologies for the interruption, and thanks as always for sticking with us.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the L.A. protests and Trump’s big boy birthday parade.

We’re getting a bit more information about that hideous rally when President Trump ripped into his political opponents at Fort Bragg to the cheers of soldiers arrayed behind him. Now we learn that Army commanders at the base pre-screened soldiers at the rally for ones who support President Trump. They also made sure to exclude any soldiers who are, in the words of base commanders, “fat.”

Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he will begin “winding down” FEMA after this year’s Hurricane season and, perhaps the more significant statement, that he will begin distributing disaster aid directly from the President’s office. In other words, disaster assistance will be the President’s personal gift, an assist for friends and those who display loyalty. It’s part of the broader pattern we can see across the horizon: Trump takes the policing and military powers of the United States and the national tax revenues (drawn disproportionately from the blue states) and uses it to make war on states he considers enemies.

We’ve discussed in a number of posts over the spring that Donald Trump’s effort to build a dictatorial, autocratic presidency is fundamentally a battle over public opinion. I’ve also noted in a series of posts that the states and their separate sovereignties are a key, defensive source of strength in the effort to defeat Trump. Since they are a source of strength, they are by definition also a target. We’re seeing both these realities play out in the chaotic situation in Los Angeles.

Let me start with a few observations about the general situation.

TPM will have a new editor and a new reporter next week. This is very exciting for us, allowing us to expand our coverage capacity and, hopefully, reach new audiences during what is a wild moment — both for democracy and for journalism — with new stories and unprecedented events flying at us by the hour.