In line with our recent theme, the Times is out today with a poll that is absolutely devastating for Ron DeSantis. But in truth it is devastating for every Republican candidate not named Donald Trump. It is only devastating for DeSantis inasmuch as he is the only candidate who appears to be in the race at all rather than running what amounts to a novelty or lifestyle campaign. According to the Times/Siena Poll, nationwide Trump has 54% of Republicans supporting him compared to 17% for DeSantis. The next five runners-up either have 2% or 3%. As I said, in practical terms, they’re not even in the race.

Is the fractured field preventing DeSantis from breaking through? Not really. If all the other candidates dropped out and gave DeSantis a clear one-on-one matchup, Trump would still be disemboweling him by a 62% to 31% margin.

I want to recommend you listen to this interview Josh Kovensky did with Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar. It’s very interesting stuff. We’re going to be doing more podcast interviews in addition to the weekly episode Kate Riga and I do. That weekly episode will continue with the same format. So I want to encourage you to check out all of these new episodes. But this is a recommendation especially about this episode. It gave me a lot of new insight into Vladimir Putin’s obsession both with the U.S. and with Ukraine and how the two intersect, long before the triangular relationship between these three countries became such a central feature of U.S. politics. Much of it I knew in a very general outline. But many details were knew to me, as was the discussion of Putin’s relationship with George W. Bush and how the collapse of Bush’s domestic support and eventual departure from the White House was a prelude to what came after. Really fascinating stuff.

If you subscribe to the podcast through whatever service you use it will be in your feed. If you don’t subscribe, please subscribe. And if podcasts aren’t your thing you can listen to it on the site right here.

We hear a lot about Joe Biden’s age. And it’s not just Republicans endlessly going to town with out of context videos or clips of Biden looking down momentarily. When I talk to civilians — by which I mean people not immersed in the daily scrum of news and politics and all the commitments that go with it — they often tell me something like, “I like Biden. But I am concerned about his age.” 

So it’s an issue. It’s certainly an issue at the level of perception. And there’s simply zero question that Biden is a much older man that he was when he was Vice President. That’s true in the obvious chronological sense, as it is for all of us. But it’s true in a more specific one as well. Nancy Pelosi is two years older than Biden. You can see some signs of age in her face. Her skin is a bit more drawn. But overall she doesn’t seem much different to me than she did a decade ago. Age affects everyone differently. That’s literally life.

But you know what? Get over it.

In today’s episode of the ongoing collapse of the DeSantis campaign, we have a new moment which we might see as the severed segments of Dead Bounce Ron roiling and twitching around, much like a worm that has been cut into pieces but continues to wiggle and move about almost as if nothing had happened. Yesterday in response to a question about ersatz candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., DeSantis said that while he wouldn’t choose Kennedy as his vice president, he would consider him to run the FDA or CDC.

This is of course a ridiculously inane suggestion. But the key is that it was immediately attacked even by many of DeSantis’s erstwhile allies or the kinds of Republicans he needs to gain the support of to remain in the race.

There are two issues to discuss.

TPM Reader OM responds to my post on the running constitutional crisis in Israel …

One question you discuss is whether the protests are trying to block an elected gov’t from doing what it was elected to do. The campaign that Netanyahu and his far-right allies ran was focused heavily on two things: (1) soaring cost of living, and (2) rising crime, especially in the Arab sector of Israeli society. They promised to crack down on crime, return a sense of security, the usual thing right-wing parties promise. They said not a word about “judicial reform” (i.e., the anti democratic regime change). 

Let’s cut to another scene from the ongoing death rattle of the DeSantis for President campaign. Yesterday, along with firing a third of the staff because it’s running out of money, the DeSantis campaign fired a staffer who made a campaign video, laced it with far right and Nazi imagery and then farmed it out to a fan site to obscure that it was produced by the campaign. Do you remember this story? Didn’t we hear about this a few days ago? About how the crazy ad supposedly made by a fan was actually cut in-house? At first I was confused too. Actually the same thing had happened all over again. A few weeks ago there was that gay and trans-bashing ad that over the weekend we learned from the Times had actually been produced in house by the DeSantis campaign. Then, over the weekend, a now-fired staffer named Nate Hochman produced an aesthetically comparable ad and farmed it out to a DeSantis supporting Twitter account called DeSantiscams so that the campaign could then amplify it.

We flagged it down in Livewire. But I just have to mention it. Following last week’s blood letting, Ron DeSantis is now canning more than a third of his campaign staff as his campaign continues to bleed out.

A couple days ago I got this email from TPM Reader PT. I was sort of delaying responding because it’s a really complex question. So I’ve decided to post the question and reply here. I preface by noting I’m not an expert on Israeli politics. I don’t live there. But I have followed it closely for many years. So I put it forward on that basis.

From PT …

It feels like this whole year I’ve been trying to understand the situation in Israel — specifically the fact that the governing coalition wants to make a fundamental change to the country’s political organization and is facing furious pushback from the citizenry. My first thought was that it had a certain “Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party” energy to it: Netanyahu’s overriding priority is to ensure that he isn’t prosecuted for corruption, which means that his overriding priority is to destroy the court system in Israel; hence if you elect a governing coalition that includes him and makes him PM, destruction of the court system is a given. So how do we arrive in a place where everyone knows that Netanyahu’s goal is to destroy the court system, the electorate elects a government that will make him PM, and then the electorate protests when he does what everyone knows he’s going to do.

After thinking about it some more, I have a somewhat different take:

You’ve probably seen coverage of the firestorm over Florida’s newly updated African-American history curriculum. Most of the coverage has (understandably) focused on the quote that suggest that slaves were taught skills which they could use for their own benefit. (“Slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”) I read the entire updated curriculum. So I wanted to share my take. As most of you know, I have a PhD in American history, with a focus on the colonial period but covering the full sweep of American history. I haven’t been professionally engaged with the literature for about 25 years. But I generally keep up.

Overall the text isn’t as clownish as that one quote might suggest — a low bar. But there are still pretty major problems. As is usually the case with educational standards, they tend to be ones of emphasis and omission rather than outright fabrication. Along the way, there’s a decent amount of general sloppiness and a hard-to-miss affirmative action for right-wing Black intellectuals. I want to focus on three points. These are by no means exhaustive. They’re just the ones that struck me as most glaring and also illustrative. 

As we continue to watch the ignominious collapse of Ron DeSantis’s campaign (predicted many months ago by yours truly but not like I’m focusing on that or anything), there’s a curious bit of backstory I’m reminded of. But before we get to that I wanted to flag this weekend New York Times article. It’s so passively devastating I think DeSantis’s estate might have a plausible wrongful death claim against the authors.

Most of the attention to this article has focused on a scooplet about that infamous gay/trans-bashing video. The story was that it was put together by some unknown fan in the DeSantis-o-sphere. The campaign simply picked it up and amplified it. The Times reports that in fact it was produced by a campaign staffer who then gave it to a Ron fan site to release so that the campaign could then pick it up from the fan. In other words, the campaign laundered it out for some plausible deniability.

My takeaway from the piece was different: The campaign appears to be trapped in a sort of people-hating, private-jet-taking death loop. We learn from the article that Ron and wife Casey really, really like flying on private jets, which of course cost a ton of money. I confess that I’m not a huge fan of flying. But if I were, a private jet would probably be pretty cool. But it’s also not hard to see their extreme attachment to private jets as part of or at least a symbol of not liking being around regular people. Maybe not liking being around anybody at all. Some people just want the privacy to unwind with a handful of pudding.