Join me for a casual conversation with Brian Beutler, the proprietor of the newsletter Off Message and a former TPM colleague. Brian and I will use the news of the day as a jumping off point to chat about the Trump II era. We’ll be biting off some small topics like:

• How did we get to this point?
• How much worse will things get before they get better?
• Are we still being too optimistic?
• What does rebuilding American democracy look like?

We’ll be talking on Substack Live at 2 p.m. ET. See you then.

Kate and Josh talk Pam Bondi’s ouster, Trump’s Iran stemwinder and the birthright citizenship oral arguments.

I want to reiterate all the points I made about Trump’s speech last night. Just for the sake of his own political standing, the whole idea was a mistake. It wasn’t a good speech. It wasn’t delivered well. And it didn’t either make favorable news or actually address the issues that have the public or energy markets upset. I didn’t realize as I was watching the speech that his vague “two to three weeks” prediction of when the war will end was really just a restatement of what we might call the Trumpian Constant, the prescribed duration after Trump will, purportedly, always have gotten things worked out and awesome. The time before the Obamacare replacement plan is released, when infrastructure week will finally arrive. I mean, two weeks is genuinely a cliche with Trump or, in more modern parlance, a meme. Trump just tacked on another week. As you might have seen there are lots of charts floating around showing how the price of oil and oil futures spiked pretty dramatically during his speech.

I wanted to share a few thoughts on questions that are adjacent to or secondary to the question the Supreme Court is being asked to take up today. That is in part because there is no real question they are being asked to take up. Birthright citizenship is the clear, intended and unambiguous law of the federal constitution. One might as well try to complicate or question whether the document creates a federal senate. I have a source and correspondent deep in the federal bureaucracy who is a specialist in a specific area of federal law unrelated to citizenship questions. And even though I’ve written about this at length over the years, by going over developments in this person’s area of law with them it has helped me crystalize my own thinking on this topic.

Almost all of these cases are based on the premise, the working assumption of what can the U.S. Constitution mean if we decide that words or established phrases simply have no meaning and we can simply piece the individual words together based on their dictionary definitions? So what does the “law of the land” mean? Well, it turns out some guy who did a stint at the Claremont Institute and now teaches at some obscure law school has written a bracing new law review article about how it refers to agricultural policy, mineral and agricultural rights and the law of farming. That’s really where we are here.

Over the weekend I noticed an example of one of the most significant features of the last decade-plus in American politics, though it’s one that still remains too little remarked upon. Lauren Egan writes a newsletter covering the Democratic Party for The Bulwark. Sunday night’s edition was about pundit and political analyst Stuart Rothenberg, “He Was a Legendary Independent Pundit. Then Trump Arrived.” Basically, How did Stuart Rothenberg come down with, as MAGA puts it, Trump Derangement Syndrome? Toward the end of the piece, Egan gets at what I think is the underlying issue here and some of the commonality I’m about to note.

Let’s start this story in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At the time, there were a handful of men — pretty much all men, as I recall — who played a very specific role in the political-journalistic ecosystem. They were rigorously, perhaps obsessively, non-partisan and were go-to people on basic questions of politics. They’d appear on shows, be on call for quotes for journalists at the big papers. Rothenberg and Charlie Cook played that role in the electoral analysis and predictions space. Larry Sabato also occupied that space, though he also played in the political analysis one. In the latter space were Norm Ornstein (AEI) and Thomas Mann (Brookings). I think they were on PBS Newshour for a long time as a pair. Their analysis was on the mechanics of governing, less the explicitly political stuff and generally not electoral stuff.

The U.S. is approaching a newly dangerous phase of its war against Iran. The administration is signaling that it will likely soon commence ground operations in Iran that will yet stop short of a full-scale invasion. Obviously, certainly to many TPM readers, this whole situation and war of choice are very bad things. But I want to point your attention to something specific.