A short time ago I got email from a TPM reader with a version of this question: Josh, are you sure there’s going to be a November election? Because everything I’m seeing tells me they don’t think there are any consequences, even political consequences, coming from any of this. It wasn’t a challenge so much as a question: are you sure? I have no way to predict the future. But yes, I am as confident there’s going to be a November election as I’ve ever been. I’m not trying to get in an argument about that. This is my opinion. You might have another.

A couple months ago, I said that we were starting to see a pattern. As Trump grew less popular and less powerful at home, he would need to compensate to maintain his psychic equilibrium. He’d lean more and more into the presidency’s prerogative powers that are untrammeled and unrestrained regardless of what’s going on at home or how much support he has. He’ll be increasingly aggressive and violent in those realms of power as he becomes more constrained and limited in others. In Trump’s world, there is dominating and there is being dominated. For him, the latter is a psychic death. So leaning hard into these prerogative powers where a president is, in effect, all powerful amounts to a kind of grand and bloody self-care.

The Friday jobs report just came in and it recorded a major downward miss. The U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February and unemployment ticked up. It’s always important to remember that these reports are fairly noisy on a monthly basis and, especially recently, they’ve been subject to major revisions. Having said that, a lot of politics and economics commentary for the last month or two has been based on other single-month reports which are ripe for narratives but don’t necessarily tell us a lot. The political calculus is perhaps clearer than the economics one. The White House needs a good macro-economic trend to come into focus pretty quickly. Because from an electoral standpoint you need several months of favorable or at least “moving in the right” direction numbers in order for those shifts to show up in public attitudes.

Here’s another video I recommend to you, following up on the shipping one from last night — but on a different topic. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D-RI) office sent out the video this afternoon. It’s a speech the senator gave on the Senate floor today. It’s about Trump, Russia and Jeff Epstein. Among other things, it reminds us of how Bill Barr bamboozled most of the U.S. press into thinking the Mueller investigation came up empty on Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia. But this is a broader story. The speech runs almost an hour long. But it’s worth it. There’s so many details in the speech it defies easy summary. The best overview is to think of all the ways Donald Trump was and is connecting to the Russian government and the oligarch para-government. Whitehouse then shows that Jeff Epstein is right there at almost every point of contact. It’s a mix of old information, new investigating and a pretty close analysis of emails in the Epstein Files that wouldn’t really jump out at you on their own but become quite interesting when lined up with other outside information which places them in context. Whatever that “thing” is, Epstein is just as tied up in it as Trump —mand at a lot of points he seems to be a connecting tie. You can watch the speech after the jump.

Humiliation is Donald Trump’s calling card. It’s the other side of domination. It’s an expression of domination. When I heard the news today of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s ouster, which has certainly been telegraphed for weeks, it seems exquisitely Trump that he allowed her to go to Capitol Hill and get pressed on the entirely predictable question of whether she is having sex with her notional top aide — Corey Lewandowski — when she had only one day left on the job.

We’re on Day Three of this year’s Annual TPM Membership Drive. It’s simple. If you’re not already a member we need you to sign up and become a member of our community.

That’s what allows us to publish this site for you every day. There’s no big corporation behind us that makes this possible. It’s just our readers. And we need our active readers to become members. Please click right here and join us.

Kate and Josh talk election returns and Trump’s new war with Iran.

We’ve been getting reports all morning that Trump is about to fire DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and has been asking around about what various allies think of the idea.

Just minutes ago, he broke the news on Truth Social (where else?) that Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) will take over for Noem, “effective March 31, 2026.” Presumably that means he is Trump’s nominee to be Senate-confirmed.

Noem will be shuffled into a new “special envoy” position.

Here’s another post following up on the earlier one about free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the pinched off little turn in the Persian Gulf where the waterway is at its narrowest. On Bluesky, in response to my earlier post, one user pointed me to this video, a daily ~30 minute update on a YouTube channel called What’s Going on With Shipping.

I want to start by stating clearly the basis upon which I’m sharing this video. I’d never heard of the channel before a couple hours ago. It’s run by a guy named Sal Mercogliano who says he’s a former merchant mariner and historian who teaches maritime history and also consults on the topic. In other words, he appears to be a merchant shipping and tanker professional/nerd. And he runs this shipping news channel. I can’t independently vouch for his credibility. However, I watched today’s episode and a number of factors — subscriber count, reliance on credentialed news articles and industry data sources, tone, meticulousness and more — make me think that it’s at least legit enough to get a beginning overview of the situation in the Gulf. I found it fascinating. It reminds me — sadly — of reporting on the supply chain breakdowns at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. You suddenly had to come up to speed on the complex but to most of us little-understood world of global supply chains, the underbelly and machinery of how the modern interconnected world actually runs.

A big thanks to everyone who signed up to become a TPM member on the first day of our Annual TPM Membership Drive. If you’re not currently a member, please take a moment to sign up today. Membership fees are what make TPM possible. We need to add members to keep TPM thriving and expand our reporting on the second Trump presidency.

We’re also offering a 25% discount on new memberships. If you’re not currently a member, please click right here to join us.

Out of the blue we learn tonight that U.S. Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) isn’t running for reelection. Montana is one of those states that is certainly a tough challenge for Democrats. But it’s not impossible. So this adds to Republican challenges in holding the Senate. But we also seem to have a replay of what Dem Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia caught grief for last year. Garcia waited for the very last moment under the filing deadline to announce his retirement, leaving only enough time for his hand-picked successor, Garcia’s Chief of Staff Patty Garcia (no relation), to file her candidacy papers for the election. Since Garcia’s is a solid Democratic district, allowing Patty Garcia to run in the primary unopposed means that she is basically guaranteed to be elected. Daines appears to have done the exact same thing with a heads up to current Montana U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme.