A TPM Reader pointed out to me that the “Big Beautiful Bill” budgets fully $40 million dollars through what’s left of the National Endowment for the Humanities to the President “for the procurement of statues” for the President’s “Garden of Heroes.”

Since I haven’t written about this here, I wanted to share a few thoughts about Zohran Mamdani’s big Democratic mayoral primary win in New York. If you’ve been saturated by coverage of this race, these won’t strike you as terribly original points. I’m just sharing my perspective.

First, I see three reasons why Mamdani won.

The first is the simple fact that Democratic voters are angry and dissatisfied with the incumbent Democratic political class. We see this everywhere. It’s much less about ideology than it is often portrayed. We live in an angry, distrustful, populist age. Since the greatest expression of this mood has come from the right, Democrats have often been in the uncomfortable position of leveraging against this tendency, holding the line for institutional continuity, preservation over destruction and many other situationally understandable impulses. But the twin effects of Trump’s comeback victory and the often fractured and feeble response to it by the Democratic leadership in Washington has washed all of that away.

From Politico …

On the federal employee pension plan: In order to pay for the megabill, Senate Republicans are considering substantially hiking “federal employees’ retirement contributions to 15.6 percent of their salary — compared with the 9.4 percent required in the initial version of the bill — while carving out an exemption for members of Congress and their staff,” POLITICO’s Lawrence Ukenye reports.

I think “substantially” manages to understate the hike here.

I wanted to update you on the story I flagged yesterday in which the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Scott Turner, decided to bogart the offices of the Trump-beleaguered National Science Foundation (NSF) at least in part to build a Sky Mansion for himself on the building’s top floors. Stories like this have always had a special fascination for me. You can’t say it’s a bigger story than the US going to war with Iran or the US military low-fi occupying a major American city. But in addition to its immediate impact on three or four thousand people — the employees of HUD and NSF — it captures so much of what 2025 Trump-era Washington is about. As probably goes without saying, there appears to have been no formal process behind this at all. There’s a very Sopranos feel to the whole caper: ‘Nice place you got here. It’s mine now.’

Politico says there’s the beginning of a Big Beautiful Bill mutiny. I’ll still place my chits on they’ll find a way to make it work. But the key states where Senators are up for reelection face crushing cuts to the funds that keep rural hospitals going. Enough? Probably not. But definitely real enough to keep an eye on.

I’m still trying to find out more about this. But as I do, I just wanted to put it on your radar because it’s completely crazy and epitomizes the Trump presidency. The National Science Foundation is already in the process of being gutted — in perhaps a not quite as drastic way as its peer biomedical agencies such as NIH and elsewhere. But out of the blue yesterday, word emerged that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is taking over the NSF’s building, evicting all of its more than 1,800 employees. Multiple NSF employees leaked word of this yesterday to journalist Dan Garisto. After Garisto reported the information on Bluesky I independently got word of this from NSF employees and now it’s been officially announced at a press conference by HUD Secretary Scott Turner, Gov. Glenn Youngkin and GSA Commissioner Michael Peters.

Adding to the wildness, the top floors of the building are, according to the AFGE Local 3403, going to be retrofitted into a kind of executive mansion for HUD Secretary Turner, including an executive suite, executive dining room, reserved parking for the Secretary’s five cars, exclusive use of an entire elevator, special space for his various assistants and a planned gym for the Secretary and his family. Turner wouldn’t be the only Secretary with nice office space. But this does sound like it’s on the extreme end of the spectrum. Equally eye-catching, there appears to be no plan for where the NSF staff will go.

With the President’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” there’s been a general assumption. It’s super, super unpopular. And, also, it doesn’t matter. It’s going to pass anyway. That assumption is very likely true. Perhaps they’ll hit some speed bumps that prevent the bill from passing in time for July 4th, as Trump wants and has demanded. But these kinds of bills tend to be “failure is not an option” type affairs. You have obstacles but they get crumpled like things that go under a steam roller or mashed up in an industrial trash compactor. That’s particularly the case in Trump’s second term, where hints of the old ungovernable GOP caucus get flattened when word comes from Trump that it’s over. But here we see again the central tension point of the Trump presidency: he owns, dominates and controls everything but public opinion.

That much of it is almost conventional wisdom at this point. The bill thing is really, really unpopular. Even the inside-DC sheets say as much. So Republicans are starting to do something we’re used to seeing Democrats do with some of their more aspirational policies. Which is basically this: You think it’s unpopular. But that’s just because you’re not polling it right.

Famous last words.

As you may have seen, since I wrote today’s BackChannel, CNN has reported the first initial U.S. intelligence assessment of the bombardment of the Iranian nuclear facilities. These results seem even more limited than the skeptical take I assumed in that post, putting the program back only months and dealing generally limited damage. I want to stress that these initial assessments are initial for a reason. The Iranians themselves probably haven’t fully assessed the damage yet. But if we assume this assessment is directionally correct, it changes the small picture but not the big one. You shouldn’t do this by tweet storm.

Donald Trump’s latest meltdown in response to “ceasefire” violations by both Iran and Israel but especially Israel brings out the uncanny quality of everything that has happened over the last week — the simultaneous existence of a very real hot war with what amounts to a social media campaign. They’re both happening. They’re clearly interacting with each other. But the dynamics of the two are so separate, distinct, operating according to totally different rules that watching the two together looks deeply unreal.

Subsequent reporting by The New York Times and other publications seems to confirm my initial assumption, which was that the entire U.S. involvement in this conflict was driven by especially Fox News’s reporting of Israel’s onslaught against Iran’s military infrastructure and nuclear program. Israel was “winning” and Trump wanted in on that winning. And that was really the entirety of it. But Trump’s decision to escalate the crisis to a level of destruction of underground facilities that only the U.S. is capable of had a very real result. And it’s not just whatever level of destruction those bunker buster bombs created — which appears substantial but not total.

A few points on the effect rather than the wisdom or possible fall-out of these attacks.

The President has repeatedly said the Fordow nuclear facility was “obliterated”. Clearly that is a party slogan rather than any kind of factual analysis. We’re now getting the first after-action reports out of the Pentagon and Israel which speak of the Fordow facility appearing to have sustained “severe damage” but not being destroyed. One thing that struck me last night was the US assessment that helped prompt this attack which, reportedly, was that the entirety of the Israeli assault had pushed Iran’s program back roughly six months. That’s pretty paltry in terms of any great change in the strategic outlook. I note that because we should wait a significant period of time before we conclude – if the evidence ever merits it – that the US has somehow put the Iranians back to square one in their ability to build nuclear warheads.