You’ve likely seen a lot of write-ups about Elon Musk having a temper tantrum last night and banning a group of journalists. It’s gotten a lot of attention in part because he banned ones that were in some sense covering him and his acquisition of Twitter, and because he banned reporters from some of the most prominent news organizations in the country, including CNN, the Times and the Post. In most cases (it’s hard to know because there’s been no clear explanation of why any of this happened) the bans were based on tortured readings of a new rule Twitter put in place the night before based on a different temper tantrum on Wednesday. Perhaps fittingly enough for a neo-Gilded Age tale, the episode starts with Musk’s private jet, a 2015 Gulfstream G650.

On the issue of whether Trump is “done,” as I put it below, the primary itself really isn’t the question. There seems little doubt that another Republican could defeat Donald Trump for the nomination, though I’m skeptical of whether that person is Ron DeSantis. The more operative question is what you do with Trump after you beat him. Normally you have a primary battle and one candidate comes out on top. It may be a cakewalk or a brutal slog. But one candidate gets the most delegates and the others fall in behind that candidate.

It’s very difficult, though, to imagine Donald Trump losing a hard fought primary struggle and then just gracefully falling in line as a surrogate for the guy who beat him. In fact, it’s basically impossible to imagine that happening.

I’ve treated it as a given that Trump is the nominee in 2024 if he wants to be. But today’s “Major Announcement” from Trump, which ended up being a new set of NFT playing cards with Trump in a bulging Superman suit, crystalizes my growing doubts about whether he still has the juice to go another round. We’ve also seen a couple polls this week which show a clear majority of self-described Republican primary voters prefer Ron DeSantis over Trump, albeit with DeSantis continuing Trump’s policies. But polls can change. Nor does a poll more than a year out from the first primary capture all the kinetic dimensions of an actual primary battle. What is less changeable are the growing signs that Trump is just a loser.

One of the most bracing, bizarre aspects of Mark Meadows texts with members of Congress is the fact that many truly seemed to believe the most absurd claims and conspiracy theories. This wasn’t just red meat they were tossing out on Fox and Newsmax. They were saying this stuff, in earnest, in the privacy of text messages with longtime colleagues. But even this, I would say, isn’t the heart of the matter. There’s something else we see in the very first texts, before the TV networks called the race but when the writing was clearly on the wall. It can most easily be summarized as: Trump can’t be allowed to lose. On Nov. 6, 2020, Rep. Brian Babin tells Meadows that they “refuse to live under a corrupt Marxist dictatorship.”

One of the most consistent findings of years of audience research at TPM is that people in education and especially higher education (college and graduate) are our largest single audience. That’s certainly true of representation vs the population at large but it’s also true (though definitions became more complicated here) in absolute terms. Perhaps this isn’t surprising given that the site was founded by a lapsed academic. But among many other things it means that there are quite a lot of physicists among you. And you’ve been helping me with lots of feedback about this fusion announcement apparently coming shortly from the Livermore Laboratory.

For the non-physicists and innumerate among you, everything I’ve heard confirms the gist of my second post on this from this morning: this is, unfortunately, not a game changer for the possible future of fusion as a source of population-level power generation. The key is to distinguish between two questions: a breakthrough achievement in scientific and engineering terms? Yes. A breakthrough in terms of fusion produced energy being any more part of your future than it was a week ago? No. Sadly, no. But still no.

Now all the rest of the American media is reporting on this apparent breakthrough in fusion research at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. Courtesy of TPM Readers and a bit of reading on my own I’ve had a bit of a crash course on what this news means. Unfortunately, I think it means less than it may seem. I’m not going to try to explain or discuss the science. But from what I can tell the following is true: This is an important breakthrough in fusion science. But for most of us the question is whether this is a breakthrough on the road to fusion as a viable source of clean and abundant energy. From the conversations I’ve had, the answer to the latter question is no.

We’ve discussed at some length in the past how there’s a far-right alternative universe in which pedophilia and child sexual exploitation are not those actual things but cudgels to be used against political enemies, “globalists” and anyone even proximate to supporting the rights of the LBGT community. This is the wellspring of things like the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory and much of what is now labeled QAnon.

For years on the far right of anti-Twitter “free speech” activism there have been hate campaigns targeting Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former General Counsel, and Yoel Roth, head of Trust and Safety. Since Roth is gay and Jewish he’s been a particular target for the far-right spaces which have been the foot soldiers of this variety of “free speech” activism.

I’ve already written about the narcissism/radicalization cycle that took hold of Elon Musk at some point for whatever reasons and has been accelerating at a rapid pace since he finalized his acquisition of Twitter six weeks ago. It keeps accelerating, and in two distinct but interrelated ways I would like to note.

The first is that Musk is now in near constant dialogue with the most rabid conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites in the digital space. He’s jumped head first into the “globalist”/pedophile vortex which was at the heart of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory and later the entire QAnon movement. He now accuses former Twitter management of intentionally allowing the platform it to become a breeding ground of pedophilia and child sex trafficking. He claims he’s shutting the offending accounts down after previous management refused to do so. These accusations have become so totalizing that yesterday Musk drew a rebuke from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who has been one of Musk’s bigger supporters during the takeover.

Let me return again to what I think is the key point with Kyrsten Sinema, something I think most of D.C. press misses. The conventional wisdom here is that Senate Democrats need Sinema’s seat to have any hope of holding the Senate. They have a one-seat majority and three Democrats are up for reelection in clearly red states. There’s no margin for error. So they need to swallow their misgivings and line up behind her. I don’t have a good read on where the Senate Democratic leadership is on this or the various stakeholder groups that are involved in this kind of decision. But I don’t think I need to. Because I don’t think it will be their call. Sinema is simply too reviled by Arizona Democrats to make this work.

An Arizona TPM Reader checks in on Kyrsten Sinema. Along those lines, a new poll out today shows her current favorability rating at 18%–5% among Democrats, 25% among Republicans and independents. She wouldn’t clear 10% in a three person race.

From our reader …

What’s good about writing to you about this topic is that I don’t have to do the work of convincing you that Sinema’s antics were not working among any voting group. You figured this out months ago.

One of the things that frustrates me about the self-appointed smart guy conversation about politics is that there are too many commentators who think that there is an untapped majority of voters out there that matches their exact degree of social liberalism and fiscal conservatism. You’d think the rise of Trump and a lot of what’s gone on in politics would have disabused them of that, but no such luck. I haven’t had a lot of time to delve into the commentary on this morning’s news, but I’m imagining there are blog posts being written about how brilliant this is despite the obvious signs that it doesn’t seem to have earned her fans among actual Arizona voters.