Sort of a minor point of interest. But still notable. The Italian government of Giorgia Meloni has now become the longest lasting government in the country since World War II at 1,413 days. Since the Italian Republic began at the end of World War II — specifically in a June 1946 national referendum on whether to maintain the monarchy or become a republic — it’s the longest lasting government in the 80 year history of the Italian Republic. Silvio Berlusconi is still the longest-serving prime minister. But he did that non-consecutively and over four separate governments. The average length of a government since World War II is about 13 months — a somewhat notorious parliamentary, if not political, instability for which the Italian Republic has long been known.

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Don’t miss Layla A. Jones’ piece this morning, which details a kind of census corollary to Trump’s 2020 big lie. Republicans and assorted social media influencers are claiming bureaucrats used the 2020 census to hand seats in Congress to Democrats. That is, of course, not true. The conspiracy theory is nonetheless important, because it is now making its way into Census Bureau policy. Layla looks at where it came from, and how it is animating the administration’s war on the census.

Longtime election analyst Charlie Cook has a piece up on his Substack looking at the fast-approaching midterms. It’s an interesting piece, an artifact of the moment, not simply because of what it predicts but because of the nature of the writing in which Cook seems to be grasping for metaphors about just how bad a situation Republicans face — a bit more stream of consciousness and performance art than one is used to in election analysis.

Let’s start with the lede …

With 64 days before Election Day (although the first mail-in ballots will go out in a matter of days), Republicans should brace themselves: The three most plausible outcomes are that it will be bad, really bad, or truly horrible. 

A few sentences later he describes what he considers the most likely scenario.

Let’s start with the most likely scenario: that this is a “really bad” election for Republicans, losing between 26 and 35 seats in the House, and either four or five seats in the Senate. 

He then describes a less drastic and merely “bad” scenario in which aggressive gerrymandering on both sides keeps House losses in the 15 to 25 range. But he thinks that this scenario still nets Democrats four to five Senate seats. He calls the GOP’s worst-case scenario the same 26 to 35 House seats lost but “at least six” Senate seats gone too.

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Maria Bartiromo is out at Fox News and Fox Business. And apparently with so little advance warning that they barely had a chance to line up guest hosts for her various shows across the Fox ecosystem, let alone permanent replacements. As is so often the case in our current media environment, the news is both pretty significant as well as being fundamentally stupid. Bartiromo was once a big and reasonably well-respected business news anchor/reporter. But in recent years she banked very hard in the direction of hardcore Trumper and fairly big conspiracy theory yakker. I’ve never known the precise logic of her trajectory. But I’m not sure that matters that much.

It’s safe to say these things — this kind of zero-notice, one sentence press release defenestration — don’t happen without brass discovering something very, very bad. “We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 ½ years and wish her all the best on her next chapter.” And since being a crazy nutball isn’t bad at Fox News it points in the direction of some hard to ignore rule-breaking or reputational stinkbomb. Of course, we can’t rule out Bartiromo waking up this morning and deciding to spend more time in Connecticut … forever. But I’m leaning against that.

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In response to my post about this data center backlash outside of Kansas City (specifically Independence, Missouri), I’ve been fielding the range of ideas people have about hyperscale AI data centers. As you’d probably expect, the vast majority of people are against them and excited to see this kind of backlash through the architecture of local government. But there’s a small but vocal group saying: no, this is all a kind of NIMBY moral panic driven by anger at Big Tech when a lot of these deals, maybe most, actually are good deals for the local communities.

The last part isn’t totally crazy. Or at least they’re certainly on to something that a big part of the punch behind the data center backlash is fueled by a broad politico-economy anger about tech platforms, AI, and nascent oligarchy which in this one set of circumstances people can actually fight back against. I discussed this in a post at the end of last month. Part of the big sour mood that seems to pervade every nook and cranny of our society today is focused on Big Tech, the central and most visible moneyed power in the U.S. today. Everyone has this sense that these guys can simply do anything and there’s no accountability — no democratic control — over any of it. It’s their world and we’re just living in it. But here you have a case where you need to build a super big data center, where finally you have to come and ask permission from some sleepy town council or county commission. And all that pent up powerlessness just comes out as, No! Or, really, Fuck no! And along with that is comment that amounts to, I don’t even care what you’re doing. The answer’s still no. Because you guys have way too much power and someone has to say no to you.

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As you can see in my most recent post, yesterday evening TPM Reader BC flagged this news out of Independence, Missouri, best known as the hometown of Harry Truman. A city councilman, John Perkins, got canned in a recall election over a data center and by a massive margin: 68% of the town’s residents voted to end Perkin’s term immediately. It’s all backlash from the town’s approval of a major hyperscale AI data center on which construction is now already well underway.

While this is just one city council race, the broader metastory and this particular development sounds like one of the ur-stories of the 2026 midterm cycle. It coincides with and is related to the backlash against Donald Trump and all his corruption and wrongdoing over the last 18 months. But it’s only in the last three or four months that the AI data center story has fully broken into the national headlines. For all these reasons, I wanted to dig in and find out a bit more of the details. It’s really quite storybook in a kind of made-for-TV-movie dystopian kind of way.

Here’s the story as I understand it.

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Tonight in Independence, Missouri, hometown of Harry Truman, city councilman John Perkins got absolutely rocked, losing a recall election with 68% voting to end his term immediately over his vote for a big data center. Construction is already underway on the 400 acre, $150 billion Nebius AI data center. The city council apparently gave the data center a 90% tax abatement, according to the linked TV story. So you get the sense that Perkins was flying a bit close to the sun.

Five council members voted for the data center. One lost reelection and another failed in a run for mayor. Now Perkins is out. So three down out of five apparently.

Thanks to TPM Reader BC for letting us know.

Over the last week, there have been a number of examples popping up on social media of Republicans, often very conservative Republicans in red states, removing President Trump from their campaign websites. It’s not terribly conspicuous. It usually amounts to taking an “endorsed by Trump!” button down and replacing it with some other innocuous tagline, or taking Trump out of a campaign biography. It’s very different from attacking Trump or doing anything publicly. But it still speaks volumes about the political moment, one in which Trump and everything about him if not everything he stands for is politically toxic, even in very conservative states and districts.

It allows us to look a bit over the horizon. What we see won’t surprise us. We probably know it already if we think about it. But it’s worth thinking about. If the midterms go more or less as expected, a lot of Republicans are going to be really, really pissed at Donald Trump. No, I’m not predicting some anti-Trump rebellion or reversion to the pre-Trump GOP. But it will be more than the standard disgruntlement after a bad election cycle. Because a Democratic wave won’t just be the expected thermostatic sloshing back and forth of modern politics. We’re still in a deeply sour public mood in which incumbents are always in some level of trouble. But in this case, Trump has taken step after step almost inviting a major backlash. The tariffs, the disastrous Iran War and resultant high fuel prices, the late fourth quarter trade war with Canada.

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I note Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in the title of this headline mostly because controversies tied to his campaign are the immediate space in which we’re again seeing arguments about Israel, Zionism, American Jews and the Democratic party. This has cropped up again because of streamer Hasan Piker’s comments about how Jews need to ditch Israel or Zionism or whatever. My own sense is that El-Sayed is well on his way to defusing the wariness or opposition of many in Michigan’s Jewish community. (As I’ve written elsewhere, to the extent it matters for someone outside of Michigan, I’ve supported him from the moment he won the primary.) But there’s something that’s become more and more clear to me in recent weeks as I’ve had various conversations and arguments about this issue. One is that I increasingly hear from left-leaning non-Jews is a fairly confident declaration that Zionism doesn’t have anything to do with or isn’t the same as the “Jewish faith.” This is at best a rather total statement about a much more complicated reality — especially when stated by people outside the community in question. But it’s not only that side of the equation.

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At the end of today’s Morning Memo, I tucked in a remembrance of Wendell Berry, who has died at 92. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you should.