The Journal has an article today about the increasing unreality of the strategy, if one can call it that, the U.S. is using to approach Trump’s war with Iran. The headline tells the story: Trump is Losing Patience Over an Iran War with No Clear End in Sight. The article appears to be based on accounts from various advisors who’ve been present at planning meetings with Trump. It’s filled with quotes about how he’s out of patience, mad, fed up, has lost confidence in diplomacy, etc. One advisors says he’s moved into “revenge mode.” He’s telling advisors he thinks he can “break the Iranians’ will through an aggressive bombing campaign.”

A constant through-line in the article (and based on this account of Trump’s private White House rants) is that the Iranians can’t be trusted and that Trump keeps making deals with them that they simply break. I certainly don’t see the Iranian government as very trustworthy either. But this whole set of claims is a fantasy. Trump has never had any agreements or deals with the Iranians. What he’s had is a series of notional ceasefires in which nothing of substance or consequence is actually agreed to — you might sum them up with the famous Bill & Ted’s maxim to “be excellent to each other.” The point of these deals has been to calm international oil markets and give Trump space to moonwalk away from his totally self-inflicted debacle. But since these ceasefires are only “deals” to begin negotiations the actual war aims and demands of each side eventually seep through. Then they go back to fighting. Each deal really amounts to a temporary or contingent U.S. surrender. Trump needs them to calm oil markets and lower the U.S. price of gas. Iran wants it to consolidate its gains and get a break for aerial bombardment.

A few days ago I wrote about popular constitutionalism and Slate’s new podcast series on that topic. This is a critical civic topic because it is probably the only and certainly the proper path back from systemic corruption of the current Supreme Court and the broader problem of judicial supremacy. (If this is fuzzy or if it’s unclear what I’m talking about see that earlier post.) But what that Slate discussion quickly arrived at is that to have that kind of popular constitutionalism, the ability of the people to make decisions about what the U.S. Constitution requires or forbids, you need robust and functioning political parties. And one of the key features of American politics over the last 50 years is that parties really don’t exist anymore in the sense they did for upwards of a century and a half in American politics.

With the United States and Iran now clearly back to “war” from “ceasefire,” we’re seeing a host of stories arguing that President Trump, despite all his promises, has found his own “forever war.” It’s a tempting claim, especially for Trump’s critics. But we shouldn’t jump too easily into it without recognizing how profoundly different the situations are. For the United States, Iraq and Afghanistan were fundamentally occupations. In both cases, existing governments were rapidly shattered or melted away. The U.S. began occupations in which it stood up new, friendly governments which it hoped would eventually be able to stand on their own with the pro-U.S. friendliness intact. The U.S. eventually tired of the conflicts and withdrew its forces. Mostly.

The present situation is entirely different. The Iranian government is wholly intact and continues to fight the U.S. in an asymmetric but still conventional manner. Early U.S. hopes that the shock of the conflict would lead the Iranian government to crumble were quickly dashed. The U.S. has made no effort overthrow the Iranian government by force or even to occupy any of its territory. Even now, with the two sides back in active conflict, there is little evidence that the new attacks have any strategic goal beyond inflicting pain to shape some future negotiation. Both sides appear to be inflicting damage and pain with the hope that the other side will relent, soften their negotiating position or give up, but with little evidence either will.

Donald Trump has announced that he will impose in 30 days a new round of tariffs on Canada. Those tariffs are at best of dubious legality. They are justified under the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which has quite likely been superseded by subsequent post-war trade legislation. But questions of legality, while critical, tend to obscure the more elemental question of why? There are at least arguments as to why the U.S. might want to impose protectionist measures against China or other countries with far lower wages and workforce protections. There are other weaker but still arguable rationales for protectionism targeting Europe. One can even make arguments about Mexico since wages south of the border are still much lower than in the U.S. (To be clear, I mostly don’t agree with these arguments, though I also disagree with a doctrinaire free trade approach.) There’s really no economic or strategic argument for these tariffs on Canadian goods at all. Canada has comparable living standards and regulatory regimes to the U.S.; key U.S. industries like autos are woven across the U.S. border. The anchor of U.S. prosperity has always been the way it amounts to a massive free trade zone. And Canada only extends that to the north. And yet tariffs against Canada appear to be the White House’s near or entire focus.

I wanted to direct your attention to this podcast episode from Slate. It’s actually the first episode of a series Slate is doing on popular constitutionalism. (The page linked above is paywalled. But, I’m told, the ‘By the People’ pod series itself is not. So you should be able to find it on podcast platforms.) It brings together in a engaging and coherent way a number of themes we’ve been discussing over the last couple years about the problem of and the corruption of the U.S. Supreme Court. And it frames the question around a 20-year-old book on popular constitutionalism by Larry Kramer (The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review).

In press conference comments today, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened that state election officials could face jail time if they fail to cooperate with the White House’s purported efforts to “secure” the midterm elections, which seems to involve a range of illegal demands from the White House, Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department. The specific demand is for states to feed their voter rolls into the federal “SAVE” database which purports to identify noncitizens on the rolls. Mullin seems to be saying that if states refuse to bend to these illegal White House demands, the federal government will then scrutinize those states’ election returns (by seizing ballots?) and hold state election officials criminally responsible for any illegal voting. (Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has already sent out threats all 50 states and D.C. along these lines).

We have here again the old story. States run elections in the United States. This is guaranteed and mandated by the federal Constitution. Congress can set uniform rules for administering elections. The executive branch plays no role at all in setting rules for elections or administering them. The White House’s strategy is to use illegal means (threatened criminal punishment against state officials) to assert power or compel authority the Constitution simply doesn’t allow. This isn’t how anything works. A president cannot legitimately create by force powers that the Constitution specifically denies him.

As many have noted, opposition to AI data centers is one of the very few issues that cuts across political and ideological lines in the U.S. Everyone hates them. Many hate them on first principles — opposition to AI “hyperscaler” centers, environmentalists, electrical grid lovers. Others hate them because they don’t want them in their neighborhoods or rural counties. But the scope of the opposition is notable because so few things these days generate grassroots opposition on both sides of the political aisle.

Earlier this afternoon, President Trump posted a long screed attacking New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) who just announced a statewide moratorium on the construction of new data centers in New York state. But the post is really a broad and totalizing endorsement of data centers everywhere, with the claim that they generate tons of tax revenue and jobs. The former is highly debatable; the latter is clearly false. “They are big, strong, bold and Money Machines for the state in which they are built … Both the Taxes and the Jobs amount to LIQUID GOLD!,” wrote the president and creative capitalizer/punctuator in a Truth Social post today.

As I noted yesterday, after the killings of Good and Pretti in Minneapolis last winter, ICE/DHS shifted strategy, trying to keep up the pace of arrests and predation, while also keeping it more under the radar. Then the recent push to up the number of daily arrests began to upset that apple cart with two brazen killings of two motorists in just one week. What was notable yesterday was that ICE didn’t use its standard excuse for killing a civilian — weaponized vehicles, an agent feeling his life was threatened. They simply said the agent shot Joan Sebastian Guerrero because of a vague belief he posed a danger to the community. This seemed odd since ICE has manufactured cover stories with abandon in the past. Why not now? And why go with an excuse that actually provides a much less robust defense in court? Sure it’s good not to lie. But again, they’ve done it so consistently for 18 months.

Now we’re hearing that DHS has ordered ICE to stop most traffic stops around the country, though this claim is being put out by the administration with no one actually saying it on the record. It’s just “sources.” This also looks like an effort to get Susan Collins out of a jam. She claimed credit today for the shift in policy.

We’re now in the midst of one of these now and again collective Democratic meltdowns, filled with dooming laments, drama, intra-party attacks and insults, rending of clothes, “reckonings” and more. But there’s a fact, little discussed and under-appreciated, that is nestled in these collective freak-outs. This may sound nonsensical or perhaps a semantic point with no real meaning. But it’s foundational to how the Democratic Party functions and why it functions differently and often disappointingly compared to the GOP.

We hear lots of arguments in Democratic politics that the party’s base is its left wing. There’s a certain logic to that. It’s a center-left party so it’s left wing is its base and it’s filled out by more fair-weather voters or less ideological ones. In a sense it’s really their party or they’re the legitimate owners of it as soon as corporate interests and softies and other interlopers can be kicked to the curb. But it’s not. The most obvious reason is that are just too few of them. But they are also very different, sociologically, ideologically, demographically from the rest of the party. This isn’t just a dig on the left. The same applies to white liberals. There are dramatically more of them. But they are still really, really different from much of the rest of the party.

This morning on Bluesky Politico’s Josh Gerstein flagged to me and others a piece by Matt Yglesias in which, he said, Matt “says progressive Dems [are] too obsessed with fighting Trump rather than winning in marginal states/districts [and] picks fight with Josh Marshall over it.”

It turns out Yglesias is responding to a piece I wrote a couple weeks ago entitled “Centrists, This Is on You.” I sat down and read Matt’s piece and found myself kind of baffled because he has me saying perhaps not the diametric opposite of what I wrote but pretty close to the opposite of it. I always try to be sensitive to the possibility that when someone so thoroughly misunderstands what I wrote that it may be that I just wasn’t clear. There’s the additional factor that I usually write assuming familiarity with the stream of posts I’ve written on the same topic in recent days and weeks. People read a single post and some of my meaning might not be clear. Here though I can’t help but think that Matt zipped through the post in question, zeroed in on a few buzzwords like “fight” and then just plugged those into his existing framework and didn’t actually pay attention to my argument. Because, as I said, he’s just arguing against these stock arguments that I never made.

Still, there are some illuminating things that can be drawn from the misunderstanding and/or disagreement.