By now you’ve likely seen new reporting from the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman: Former President Trump is telling people that he expects he will be “reinstated” to the presidency in August.

With Texas Democrats refusing to attend a state legislative session in an effort to block the state’s election crackdown law it reminded TPM Reader MR of a similar instance 18 years ago. It was a story I covered closely at TPM, and MR dropped me a note this morning reminding me. It’s more than just a trip down memory lane. What happened in 2003 in Texas was a preview, prologue to almost everything that would happen over the subsequent two decades. It presaged the debt ceiling hostage taking; it presaged Merrick Garland; and it presaged Donald Trump.

As we know from looking forward to the 2022 midterm, once a decade there’s a federal Census, a reapportionment of congressional seats and redistricting in every state that has more than one representative. It happened in 2010, setting the ground work for Republicans storming back into the majority in the House. Democrats rightly fear something similar will happen next year.

Are you having trouble keeping up on the press discussion of a ‘lab leak’ theory of the origins of COVID? Here are a few pointers.

Broadly speaking, there’s seldom been an example of a more rapid shift in public opinion or rather elite conventional wisdom in the face of so little changing evidence. A bunch of right wing or right-adjacent columnists are running around high-fiving each other and patting themselves on the back about how “the media” got it wrong.

On balance, this isn’t true. What happened is that from the outset China-hawks who were largely out to defend Donald Trump made a series of baseless accusations about COVID either being a bioweapon or the accidental release of a Chinese biological warfare weapon. When that got shot down (there’s strong genomic evidence against this), they retreated to a more conventional lab accident as their pet theory. The best one can say is that most journalists became reflexively skeptical to all such claims since they were mainly coming from people who are professional liars with obvious axes to grind.

A few prominent Republicans and Trump allies opted to celebrate one of America’s more patriotic federal holidays by hanging out with QAnon supporters and promoting the big lie.

Never say never and all that. But it looks like Benjamin Netanyahu’s dozen years as PM may be on the verge of ending. He was on the same precipice two weeks ago when his erstwhile ally and protege Naftali Bennett was negotiating to form a government with opposition leader Yair Lapid. Then the outbreak of inter-communal violence within Israel and another shooting war with Gaza led Bennett to foreswear that option and go back to negotiating with Netanyahu. Now Bennett is back to apparently finalizing that deal with Lapid.

Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) continued their tour of terribleness last night.

As arguably the most Trumpy and scandal-plagued lawmakers in the House, the two have been holding a series of weird MAGA rallies around the country in recent weeks for unclear reasons — perhaps to prove their fealty to the master, to burnish their brand, or just because the two have nothing better to do. One has no committee assignments because she threatened violence against her now-colleagues on social media in the past. The other is under federal investigation for the possible sex trafficking of a minor. As Trump maintains — only the best people.