Send us your photos of what you saw at the No Kings protest in your neck of the woods.

Kate and Josh discuss the upcoming No Kings “terrorist rally” and the latest from the corrupt Supreme Court.

I first encountered Niall Ferguson in a real way when I was writing a review essay for The New Yorker at the end of 2003. The editors had sent me a small stack of books about what we might call the “neo-imperial” moment that took hold of Washington, D.C. in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. One of these books was by Ferguson, a fairly rousing and unabashed celebration of the British Empire. If anything it was among the more indirect and implicit versions of the story told by the various authors, celebrating the glories of empire and leaving it to the reader to draw the conclusion it was time to bring them back. As I’ve read columns of his here and there over the last couple decades, the historianness has receded as the tendentious provocateur has moved to the front. But something different struck me about the piece he published in The Free Press earlier this week (subscription required) about Trump’s Gaza peace plan: that was how much it matched in key outlines the piece I wrote on the same topic last week. If you recall, I wrote that the Trump plan was actually a fairly big deal and one that for a variety of reasons only Trump was in a position to pull off. The basis of the agreement is the common authoritarianism and corruption that now knits together Washington, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and other regional capitals through the personal relationships binding together Trump family and the princely families of the Gulf.

I read a group email from Capitol Hill yesterday essentially predicting the extinction of the Democratic Party after what is predicted to be a decision from the Supreme Court overturning what remains of the Voting Rights Act. A less apocalyptic but still daunting version of this argument appeared in an evening piece published by Nate Cohn in the Times. Before getting to the partisan and vote count implications, let’s first discuss what this means, which is essentially ending African-American political representation in the states of the old Confederacy. Most if not all majority-minority districts disappear and Republican state legislatures are free to draw up districts which spread/dilute African-American voters into safely Republican districts. Cohn thinks it’s plausible that Democrats could permanently lose (as much as anything can ever be permanent) 12 House seats. And this is on top of the strong-arm restricting happening in a number of states across the country. The overall scenario is one in which the House becomes an even bigger electoral challenge than the Senate, one that is possible to win but only in a generational wave style election.

Is this plausible? Is this true?

I titled a recent Editors’ Blog post The Age of Monsters. I’ve been thinking about that post and theme again because I keep seeing more confirmation, more evidence of this dimension of the world we are currently living in. I stress again that the idea here is not that these “monsters” are bad people, though I would say that most of them are in varying degrees. The issue is their gigantism. They are so much more powerful than ordinary people, mostly but not in every case because of wealth, that they distort the whole fabric of society and politics. They are like big, clumsy and lumbering oafs who nonetheless have power that make if not the whole game than all the center of gravity be about them.

Here’s an update on Russ Vought’s “mass layoffs,” following through on the threats he and Trump made in advance of the shutdown. From what I can tell, this seems to be a version of what we described yesterday: a comparatively small number of layoffs aimed mainly at allowing the White House to say it followed through on its threat (call it counter-TACO praxis) and tightly focused on a few agencies or departments President Trump is personally aggrieved at. The most concrete number I’ve seen refers to 4,200 employees across seven departments and agencies. That’s a big deal for the people losing their jobs. It’s also a very small number compared to what we saw in the spring. The New York Post suggests (famous last words, I know) that as many as a third of those layoffs may come from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has been a focus of Trump’s anger since 2021 when its then-director Chris Krebs disputed Trump’s claims of cyber-election hacking in the 2020 election. I’ve gotten more concrete reports that at least a quarter of these firings are at the CDC alone, focused on core public health work. STAT News reports that almost the entire staff of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report have been fired. (That is essentially the publication that the CDC uses to communicate the latest information on disease circulation in the country.) Other targeted offices seem tied to clean energy projects and other bêtes noir. As one source put it, these are not ‘reductions in force’. They are ideological firings targeting specific offices and parts of the government Trump has long been mad at.

You’ve probably seen that Russ Vought went on Twitter today and said “the RIFS [government speak for permanent layoffs] have begun.” Obviously, I can’t know directly what this means or what they’re doing. But since I’ve written about this a few times, I thought I should share my reaction. I remain skeptical that this is actually happening in a substantial way.

It could totally be happening. But I think the driver here is that Trump was getting hit increasingly hard for having flinched on this threat. And as of yesterday, they started backing off on the threat not to pay backpay to federal workers. So I think the press about this was getting to the White House and both angering Trump and making them look like they’re flailing. I would say I’m certain that this is why they’re doing this (reaction to that bad press). The only question is whether they’re actually going to follow through to really undo that impression.

We’ve always been very cautious about doing any reporting from war zones. But here’s a report from TPM Reader TB …

I am assuming (or hoping) that TPM has received reports from others here in Portland regarding the huge gulf between the way the Administration is describing things and what is happening in reality. Either way, I feel compelled to share my observations because I am completely flabbergasted that the Administration continues to so blatantly manufacture this “warzone” imagery. I’m used to the hyperbole they use, but this goes so far beyond hyperbole, I can barely find the words.

Kate and Josh analyze the oddly muted shutdown, as well as the alarming escalation of state violence in Chicago.

Has Trump brought peace to Gaza? Ended the war and cycle of killing that has now been going on for two years? I’ve had a number of TPM Readers ask me different versions of this. And in those questions is a lurking undercurrent, sometimes more or less explicit, of “does this malevolent clown actually get credit for this?” I wanted to address this question. And my answer is that this is perhaps the first time when Trump’s frequent and degenerate boast — I alone can do it — has a very real element of truth.

I don’t think Trump expended any great amount of energy over this and I don’t think he really cares greatly about any of the people on either side of the conflict. Let’s remember that a few months ago he backed a plan to “voluntarily” depopulate Gaza and remake it as a series of mediterranean resorts, sort of Monaco only 150 times the size.