Like David, I’m still not clear that we have a satisfying explanation of just why the last week on Capitol Hill happened. For the moment I’m just glad it happened. Ukraine will now get a major infusion of military aid which should at least stabilize the Ukrainian war effort. But even if we don’t really know why Mike Johnson did what he did, there are some other takeaways worth noting.

I’ve been having an ongoing exchange with a TPM Reader and friend about the simple question: Why is Mike Johnson doing this? Like YOLO Johnson, sure. But why? He’s been kind of dragging along for six months and yeah, it’s kind of embarrassing, but it’s always been embarrassing. Why the “Let’s Be Legends” vibe now?

My friend asked if I thought it might be some sudden shift in the intelligence about the situation in Ukraine. Maybe, I said. But that didn’t seem right to me. Far more likely it was that the parliamentary dynamics simply hit a breaking point, perhaps spurred on by the sudden pressure to move Israel aid. If you’ve got one foot on the dock and another on the ship and the ship starts to pull off you have to make a choice. Stay or go. Equivocate and you fall in the water.

But this article from Politico suggests that new intelligence actually did play a key role.

I don’t pretend to even understand the moving parts of how this is supposed to work. But almost out of the blue Speaker Mike Johnson has decided to go all-in on an aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. As this started to come into view over the last two or three days, I’ve had a number of TPM Readers write in to say, why is this happening? What’s the catch? Or, why is he walking the plank like this? What is he sacrificing his Speakership for? And I don’t have a really good answer.

Now that we’re getting a view of the dynamics of Donald Trump on trial — not indicted, not awaiting trial, not the first of this or that, but actually on trial — with the requirement to be there and, well, be on trial, it’s worth revisiting where we may be this fall. As we know, SCOTUS decided to do Donald Trump a massive solid by first refusing to take up Trump’s immunity appeal without it first being heard by the DC circuit court. Then they really piled on the favors by agreeing to take up the case in full after the circuit court emphatically shot it down. SCOTUS oral arguments are next Thursday and realistically we may not get a decision until June or July. That puts the beginning of the trial in late summer at the earliest and quite possibly into September.

Set aside for the moment that the appeal itself is baseless and out of sync with American law, and that few think there’s any chance of Trump actually getting any relief even from this Supreme Court. It’s been treated as a scandal that the Court has taken upon itself to delay the trial anyway from four to six months. It very much is a scandal and not one that can be explained by any sort of apolitical weddedness to procedure or practice. But sometimes getting what you want may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

Commentators have been going for months debating the merits of the New York/“hush money” prosecution of Donald Trump. Is it “serious”? Is it serious enough? How does it match up against the three other criminal prosecutions still looming over him? Does it lower the average level of seriousness when the independent seriousness of each is added together and divided by four? In the most general sense the entire conversation is an example of what we might call the Trump Reality Distortion Vortex. One of Trump’s great powers is that he is like a heavy magnet of distorted thinking. When he comes into proximity people start thinking stupid things, asking stupid questions. What opinion should we, who are not prosecutors, have toward a chronic lawbreaker who is charged with breaking the laws he broke? Will it make him stronger? Were the laws broken enough?

On the simplest level the first question has always seemed easy to me. People don’t just go to jail for crimes like this. One of Trump’s accomplices literally already went to jail for this specific crime. Indeed, he did so on charges brought by the Trump Justice Department. That speaks for itself.

As you can see here and here, I did a few posts over the weekend trying to make sense of just what was happening in the skies over Israel. As I noted, I initially thought the fusillade was essentially performative. The Iranians fired off a mix of drones and missiles they knew would be shot down, so they can make a big show of striking back while being confident that the damage would be limited enough to avoid the risk of further escalation. But as more information came in, that seemed less credible.

It is bracing, remarkable and simply amazing to watch the sheer panic among Republicans, and especially Donald Trump, in reaction to the Arizona Supreme Court decision which put the state back under the near-absolute 1864 abortion ban. We talked a few days ago about Kari Lake’s desperate attempts to get out of the way of the backlash. Today Donald Trump went on Truth Social and demanded that Gov. Katie Hobbs and the Republican state legislature “remedy what has happened.” But if you look at what he says he doesn’t seem willing to call for anything more than adding rape and incest to the list of possible exceptions under the 1864 law? “We must ideally have three Exceptions for Rape, Incest, and the Life of the Mother.”

OJ Simpson’s death today at 76 seems and by all rights should be a smallish blip on the news horizon. He hasn’t been a public figure of any consequences in more than 26 years and he hasn’t been a truly public one in the sense of being successful or beloved in 30. But it’s still some milestone because of what a seismic event his killing of his estranged wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, and his subsequent trial truly were.

There are so many dimensions of this event you could write whole books about — a good half a dozen meta-topics spring to mind without even giving the matter much thought. Though it was essentially a pre-internet story, it was unique to the early cable news era, a kind of progenitor of today — CNN, national tabloid culture, the birth of commentator culture. In a way it created each. The story had this criss-crossed relationship with racism and the country’s racial politics and the state of the criminal justice system, one which was upended, hopelessly upside down and yet somehow deeply true. It was at heart of horribly ordinary story about chronic spousal violence which finally escalated to murder. There was the DNA, the glove, the perjurious racist cop. The whole thing was like a universal text.

Over the coming months we’re going to see a lot of articles about some secret plan Republicans have to totally undermine or destroy Democrats, like this one in the Times. These will all of course be pitched by Republicans eager to spread the word about their devious secret plans, pump up their partisans and demoralize Democrats. The one I’m flagging here has some of that. But it’s worth reading because it is what this campaign will almost inevitably come down to — third party candidates and whether Republicans will be able to elevate them enough to allow Donald Trump to win.

One thing we should expect is for all of the “major” third party candidates — Kennedy, Stein, West — to be funded in part by ultra-high-net-worth Republicans. That’s already happening to some degree.

I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to be too focused on polls more than six months before a presidential election. But since polls have had such a big impact on the political mood and almost everything about how Democrats see their candidate, their coalition and the election itself I think it’s important to keep an eye on them. Or rather, since you’re inundated with them via commentary, it’s worth actually looking at the polls themselves, especially when they’re in flux.

All to that end, for months President Biden has been between 2 and 4 points behind in the polls — basically since late summer. But over the course of March that’s reversed and the average of recent polls puts him either tied or slightly ahead.

Let’s look.