This is one of the most amazing stories to come down the pike in I don’t know how long, published over the weekend in The Washington Post. The short version is that Tim Sheehy, probable Republican nominee for Senate in Montana, is a comical liar and is trying to cover up that lie with a story so preposterous that it’s kind of a joy to run through because it’s so hilariously bad.

Seriously, I’m not overstating the case.

Let’s dig into the details.

One of the abiding themes of election coverage this year is that if there’s a second Trump presidency it will be more extreme, more organized and ideologically coherent and more prepared. There’s some level of psyching out the opposition going on here. But it’s still mostly correct. The major guideposts in the storyline are first that the various forces that went into Trumpism came into 2016 and 2017 not really realizing Trump was the guy. And that’s not surprising. He was Donald Trump after all, something our whole political system has difficulty remembering. Trump also staffed most of his administration with what for him were the equivalent of Hollywood leading men: ex-generals, legitimate multinational corporation CEOs, Wall Street sharks. They weren’t people Democrats like but they weren’t ideologues or even very in line with the goals Trump was pursuing by the end of his term.

The part of the story that is still too little articulated is how Trump’s personal and legal challenges galvanized and really created the whole thing. Trump’s desire for dictatorial power, to control the government in depth, to have the entire state mirror and obey his will grew from his frustration and fear of the various legal probes that stalked him. He thought when he became President that he had managed a hostile takeover of a rival company. The state and the country was his. So he could do whatever he wanted. But it didn’t turn out to be that way. And that’s how the drive to vanquish the “Deep State” was born. In other words, the kernel of Trump’s dictatorial, strongman ambitions were there from the start. But it was only the shock and ego injury of being faced with the difference between owning and governing that set him on the track, for entirely personal and self-protective reasons, of transforming the state to make it serve him in the way he wanted.

We have a cluster of new national polls out today. And they continue to show a bumpy and uneven but still clear movement in Joe Biden’s direction. Polls are complicated these days because there are so many different ones and more importantly the quality and reliability of those polls vary greatly. So we have five polls out since the 25th. And those are Marist (Biden+2); Data for Progress (Biden +1), Big Village (Biden +2); Morning Consult (Biden +2) and Trafalgar (Trump +3).

Do you remember Joe Flaherty? He died yesterday at age 82, according to this obituary in the Times. I only half remembered his name. But I definitely remembered him, his various characters and even more the show he was part of, Second City TV. Did you watch this show either at the time it aired (1976-1984) or since? I’m not sure how well known it is today. But I watched it as a little kid when it first ran and even today I can remember my uncontrollable bouts of laughter. It was the kind of stuff I’d remember or play back in my head the next day in school and just start giggling in a way I couldn’t control and then get in trouble for disrupting class. Eventually I came up with a list of really sad things I would have on hand to think about if some part of the last episode popped into my mind during class or even worse during a test. Like that funny.

Along with seven or eight other papers, which tend to be in swing or swingish states, I subscribe to The Cleveland Plain Dealer. So I get various emails from them. And one is an email that comes from their editor, Chris Quinn. I glance at these occasionally but they normally deal with local issues or issues about the paper that are more for local residents. But one came Saturday that grabbed my attention. The headline was “There aren’t two sides to facts” and, as Quinn explains, it’s an answer to Trump supporters who complain that the paper judges Trump and Biden by two separate standards.

In this post I’m going to suggest something that is possible but still unlikely. But it would be a big enough deal that I think it’s worth having in the back of your mind as we move into the 2024 election season. It’s become a cliche that House Republicans are beset by division, dysfunction and general comedy. In a way this has been the story for years and yet, despite the antics, total indifference to doing the actual work of governing and more, they still seem to do okay. And yet, I think there’s some argument that this Congress is in a different category. The entire 118th Congress has been one long-running shutdown drama. Mike Johnson is now effectively running the House with Democratic votes. Then there’s the indicator which is harder to brush off: a non-trivial number of Republican representatives are just quitting. In a couple cases, we’ve seen them quit without even having a new gig lined up. Apparently more may go.

We seem to have moved on, for the moment at least, from the Replace Biden!/Thunderdome Convention discourse. But a new poll out today reminds us of a key issue about Biden. Earlier this year a lot of people were operating on the assumption that the Democratic policy agenda is more popular with Americans and that President Biden is unpopular and old, both literally and metaphorically. So basically any other Democrat under 60 who’s got a little electoral success under their belt would be on course to defeating Trump, or at least doing substantially better than Biden.

In response to yesterday’s post on Ronna X TPM Reader JG said I may be missing the true elephant in the room, and by that he means something a number of others have suggested over the last 48 hours or so. That idea is that this doesn’t have anything to do with having Ronna on the air at all. She’s there to prepare for Trump’s possible return to power, an insurance policy, as it were. There’s an additional layer of this. NBC is a big corporation with a bunch of channels and entertainment brands. But it’s part of Comcast which is a huge media and telecom conglomerate with interests across various sectors of the economy. If you’re Comcast this isn’t just a matter of NBC News or NBC. You have to worry about whether Trump is going to go to war with Comcast itself, which is vulnerable on numerous business and regulatory fronts, if he gets mad at NBC News.

I guess I thought this was implicit in what I wrote yesterday. But it definitely wasn’t my emphasis. What I was focused on yesterday was how this works when you don’t have a lawless authoritarian in the White House. But when you do, well … yes, that introduces a whole new dimension to it.

We’re seeing an ongoing — and to me, pretty comical — garbage fire at NBC News over the hiring of Ronna McDaniel (or who I guess we might call Ronna X, since her last name may be subject to ongoing contract negotiation) as a paid contributor. I’ll assume you’ve seen at least some reports on the controversy. I want to add three things. First a personal aside, second a guess about what happened and third something about the structural roots of “bothsidesist” news coverage.

As we can see, the New York State civil judgment against Donald Trump, totaling roughly $450 million, and Trump’s seeming inability to post a bond for the amount in order to appeal the judgment, is the real deal. But it has also reminded us, brought us back to the Russian nesting doll, the infinitely layered onion of Donald Trump not being real. The effort to collect the judgment spins us right back around to why there is a judgment in the first place. Trump is now fundraising off threats to “seize Trump Tower.” The New York Post is headlining the same basic idea. But as a friend reminded me yesterday evening, Trump doesn’t own Trump Tower.