I wrote a few days ago that Ron DeSantis’s long campaign collapse was likely the most ignominious and vertiginous in the presidential primary era, which dates in stages from the 1960s and early 1970s. Some skeptics pointed to Jeb! in 2016 or Rudy Giuliani in 2008. But on a closer inspection neither flameout measures up to Ron’s. As evidenced by his legendary “Please clap” mix of exhortation and lament, Jeb! had an uncanny degree of self-awareness about the impending collapse of his succession plans that would cheat him of the prize. Giuliani had the political press in his hands. But his attempt to corner the 9/11 market was never enough to overcome his heterodoxy on issues like gay rights or serial-philandering in an earlier version of the Republican Party where those things mattered. His strategy of sitting out the early primaries and waiting until Florida, while a nice foreshadowing of Florida’s future as the home of Trumpism, was always correctly identified as a way to post-date the end of his campaign. Even the 9/11 brand was too long in the tooth by 2007. Joe Biden was able to make him a punch line with his famous one-liner.

The truth though is that DeSantis never had a chance. His humiliation was preordained and basically certain. Professional Republicans were at least a bit soured on Trump after the 2022 election, which seemed to make clear what 2018 and 2020 had strongly suggested: that Trump is an electoral loser. For professional Republicans there’s a bit more to it though. They’re completely down with Trump and Trumpism, as the last seven years have shown clearly enough. But they’re always going to have an eye out to move on. Part of what it means to be a political professional is to have a wandering eye for the new political horse, the new candidate, the new rising star, which is the usual path to professional advancement. More generously, it’s why you get into political work in the first place.

A Republican Party ruled by Donald Trump is one in which true advancement and greatness is always stymied and, to the extent it exists, always subject to his whims.

It’s been clear for some weeks that there is growing division in the Israeli war cabinet. Now it appears to be breaking into the open, with indications that a new election could come sooner than later.

First a bit of stage-setting and context to explain the moving pieces and what this all might or might not mean.

On October 7th, the day of the Hamas massacres in southern Israel, Israel was led by a narrow and very right-wing coalition government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel had been embroiled for most of the previous year in a highly polarized fight over the government’s effort to dramatically curtail the power of the country’s Supreme Court. The massacres shattered the public’s confidence in Netanyahu, which had kept him in power since 2009 with only one intermission in 2021 and 2022. Soon after the outbreak of the current war, Netanyahu was able to bring one of the two main opposition parties, National Union, into his government.

Over eight years Donald Trump has made it clear that if you cross him your career in Republican politics will be over. With Ron DeSantis’s campaign flatlining, Donald Trump seems to be moving ahead with settling the family’s outstanding business. What jumped out at me here was that his target is not a Mitt Romney (one of the only exceptions to the rule) or Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney. Next up appears to be one of the diehardest members of the rump of the Freedom Caucus, Rep. Bob Good of Virginia.

From Northern Virginia we have another one of those stories about significant election irregularities that you’ll likely never hear about since they don’t fit into the MAGA storyline that is all most political reporters seem to care about. I didn’t know about it myself until I got a note from longtime TPM Reader LB.

Our story starts in November 2020 in the Northern Virginia county of Prince William. The General Registrar in Prince William was Michele White. She resigned at some point in 2021, possibly because of the feral Trumper harassment that led so many election officials to quit during that period. She was replaced by a new registrar, Eric Olsen. Olsen found irregularities in down-ballot races in the 2020 election — but not ones great enough to affect the outcome of any race. Olsen then reported those irregularities to newly elected Republican state Attorney General Jason Miyares.

For something like a year I’ve been predicting that Donald Trump is absolutely positively going to be the 2024 nominee. I was predicting that back when a lot of people really thought that Ron DeSantis was going to at least give Trump a run for his money. I don’t make confident predictions unless I’m certain there’s little chance of being wrong. But I must tell you that this result simply isn’t the victory most reporting makes it out to be.

The Republican version of the Iowa caucus is simply a vote, carried out by less formal means. Each participant writes down a name and that gets counted — no real caucusing. The final result shows Trump getting 51% of that vote.

That is not just a plurality win, the metric customarily used to judge this contest. It’s actually an absolute majority. Barely. (DeSantis has 21.2% and Haley 19.1%.) But everyone now recognizes that Trump is running as the de facto incumbent. Certainly he’s running as the universally recognized leader of the GOP. And yet he has only barely managed a majority in a state which — unlike, say, New Hampshire — is pretty tailor-made for his politics. To put that characterization into context, while Iowa is today is a fairly red state, it has long had a reputation as a state which has a very liberal Democratic Party and a very conservative GOP. The Iowa GOP caucus electorate especially is made up of a high percentage of conservative evangelical voters. It’s overwhelmingly rural. By any fair measure, 51% of those voters is underwhelming.

I wanted to flag a couple issues in the background of the ongoing Israel-Hamas War.

The first is a potential deal to end the war proposed by Qatar. After I describe that potential deal, I’m going to come back to note that just today Qatar has disputed that it floated such an idea. But I’m not sure we can take that denial at face value. So let’s start by describing the proposal, as reported by numerous sources.

Here’s the proposal.

Israel would, in stages, end its campaign in Gaza and withdraw the IDF from the Gaza Strip. Hamas, in stages, would release all Israeli hostages. Critically, Israel would then allow the top Hamas leadership in Gaza safe passage to go into exile abroad.

A couple of days ago I wrote “that the withdrawal from Afghanistan remains one of Biden’s shining moments even though I know absolutely no one agrees with me.” Since then I’ve gotten a steady stream of emails from TPM Readers saying, “No, there’re at least two of us!” So perhaps, in the words made famous by Arrested Development, there are dozens of us. In all seriousness, it’s good to hear. And I won’t ever stop believing this. As I wrote in that post …

The United States remained in Afghanistan for ten years after anyone had any good explanation for why we were there. Obama wanted to leave. But he got rolled by the Pentagon. Biden knew that the only way to really leave was to leave. Someone had to bite the bullet. He bit that bullet and paid a big price and didn’t look back.

As I thought about this this morning, I wondered: does anyone really think today that it would be better if we still had a couple thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan? Being completely out of the country is so obviously better that barely anyone would actually say this. Thus, the standard retort — that of course it was the right decision to get out, it just wasn’t handled well — is a dodge. The idea that you were ever going to completely withdraw from a country you’d A) been policing for two decades with a nominal government that B) had little ability to maintain itself without things getting ugly was a fantasy.

It’s a classic example of continuing to invest more in a failed investment not because there is any hope of getting a return but simply to put off ever having to write down the loss.

I had been planning to write a post today about a shift in the news coming out of Israel-Palestine and a shift in attitudes among the various countries which have been supporting Israel’s war effort, either openly or tacitly. But as I thought about it, the connections I intended to draw were too tenuous or perhaps too premature to really sustain the argument. Instead, I’m just going to share an anecdote and a quote which capture one element of this shift.

First, a bit of stage setting.

As I’ve argued in earlier posts, there are two overlapping but very distinct stories unfolding within Israel. Israel’s devastating onslaught in Gaza in retaliation for the October 7th massacres has broad, really overwhelming support within Israel. But it’s being led by a prime minister whose personal credibility and political standing were shattered by the massacres that triggered the war. As the intensity of the fighting has decreased, this contradiction comes more and more to the fore. As “day after” questions become more urgent, he is more openly toadying to the demands of the settler extremists who keep him in power even as they propose horrific new policies which at best complicate Israel’s position with its top allies and the Arab countries it still seeks to conclude peace deals with.

I wrote this post over the weekend about the continuing importance of the January 6th insurrection and the attempted coup it was a part of. I wanted to follow up on that post with some additional thoughts. One TPM Reader wrote in to tell me that, while she agreed with all the points I made, it was still a major error that the Department of Justice took so long to really get the bit in its teeth over January 6th. This can seem a bit out of whack today since Jack Smith is clearly all in on both Trump prosecutions. But that reader is right.

We’re now waiting to see when — almost certainly when — the Supreme Court will take up ex-President Trump’s appeal of Colorado’s decision to strike his name from the presidential ballot. As we’ve noted, there are many unknowns about just how the Court might respond, though it seems almost inconceivable that the Court won’t make a decision which forces Trump’s name back on the ballot.

But let’s at least consider the possibility that it doesn’t, that the Court allows Colorado and presumably Maine to keep Trump off the ballot. What then? Does this really have practical significance for the 2024 election?