About a week ago, both Matt Yglesias and Jonathan Last at The Bulwark had pieces up arguing different electoral strategies for the Democratic Party. Yglesias argued that while the current Democratic Party is at least competitive in national majority votes (good enough for bragging rights and probably the House) they are at a decisive disadvantage when it comes to winning the Senate in 2026 and in a challenging position when it comes to the Electoral College. What’s necessary, he argues, is a major repositioning on issues like guns and fossil fuels (among other issues) to make Democrats competitive in Senate contests in states like Iowa or Texas, states that often seem like they might elect a Democrat but then don’t. For the purposes of this conversation, we might slot in immigration and trans rights for Yglesias’ fossil fuels and guns. In a way, the arguments were captured by a series of speeches freshman Senator Elisa Slotkin (D-MI) started giving around the same time, in which she argued that Democrats needed to shed their reputation for being “weak and woke” in order to battle and defeat Trump.

At least for the moment this hasn’t gotten much attention. So let me point your attention to a new part of the White House Signal chat story which is actually a pretty big deal. You likely saw that yesterday Reuters published a photo of a Trump Cabinet meeting in which Mike Waltz could be seen using Signal on his phone. That was pretty unbelievable. You could see several of the chats, though mainly who he was chatting with more than the contents. Embarrassing, etc. But 404 Media, a newish tech news site, noticed that there was more than that. He wasn’t actually using Signal at all. He was using a third-party Signal knock-off which allows you to use your Signal account but with additional features.

There’s been an emerging scandal in Florida for a few weeks now that directly affects not only Ron DeSantis but also his wife, Casey DeSantis, who is weighing a run to succeed Ron as governor. The gist of the scandal is the state of Florida settled an over-billing case against a major Medicaid contractor and then laundered a portion of the funds from the settlement through a series of foundations until … well, until somehow over $10 million ended up in the bank account of the Florida GOP and another $1.1 million ended up in Ron’s personal political committee. It’s good to be the king, right?

This story has been percolating for a few weeks. It got new life when a Republican state lawmaker, Rep. Alex Andrade (R), who has been leading a state House investigation into the issue, accused two top DeSantis associates of money laundering and wire fraud. What got my attention this morning is that the Miami Herald talked to four former federal prosecutors, of both political parties, who told the Herald that by normal standards there’s more than enough evidence to start a federal criminal investigation at least into the associates who directly made the relevant transfers if not the DeSantises themselves. (One of the associates who directly arranged things is then-DeSantis chief of staff and current Florida AG James Uthmeier.) The former prosecutors the Herald spoke to say that the question of whether this meets the bar for a federal investigation is not remotely a close call.

Here’s my latest hobby: looking at just how many constituents House Republicans, especially the so called “moderates,” want to strip of their health care coverage. Congressional Republicans are currently in hard negotiations and a game of chicken for how to pay for their big tax cut, which seems to be getting bigger by the day. They want to pay for it by taking away people’s health care coverage. But just how that gets done is the key. As Nicole Lafond pointed out this week, moderate House Republicans are saying they may not be willing to support $880 billion of cuts to Medicaid. But they might be willing to cut one of the major provisions of Obamacare, the so-called Medicaid expansion system, which pays 90% of the cost for states to substantially expand their Medicaid coverage to more people. This is a big part of how Obamacare dramatically reduced the number of people without coverage. It’s not just about the exchanges and the subsidies.

There are a number of you who simply don’t agree with me about the role of public opinion in the battle against Trumpism, which I sketched out in yesterday’s Backchannel and in other posts over recent months. And that’s great. Because, among other reasons, you keep me on my toes. And TPM isn’t a community that has any one point of view, in any case. But I note this because I have to again whack this same hornets nest today. So apologies in advance, probably mostly to myself. But this time it’s not with an argument, not some proposition I want to convince you of. It’s more a personal interpretation, my perception of events.

Quite simply, I think Trump’s already lost.

As I noted over the weekend, the arrival of Trump’s 100th day in office (April 30th), has been greeted by a raft of terrible polls. Most of the premium pollsters have fielded a poll to coincide with the 100 days milestone. The results range from approval in the low 40s to the very high 30s. Two put Trump’s approval number at 39%. His disapproval ranges from the mid to the high 50s. In response, there has been a predictable chorus that polls, or public opinion itself, simply doesn’t matter anymore. That’s either because Trump won’t face the electorate again, or because there won’t be elections again, or that there won’t be fair elections if they’re held, etc. The overarching argument is that public opinion doesn’t matter anymore because we’re no longer in the “normal” political space we’re used to.

This is categorically false, a basic misunderstanding of what politics even is.

This morning, the White House announced that trade talks with China continue, albeit at a staff level. This came after a flurry of reports that Trump is planning to unilaterally ramp back the embargo-level tariffs he imposed on China earlier this month, advance notice that cheered Wall Street. Then Chinese officials said that the White House is wrong. There actually are no talks. And Trump must take the first step, unilaterally undoing the tariffs he had already imposed.

He appears set to do just that.

This comes just three days after the CEOs of Walmart, Target and Home Depot met with Trump at the White House and reportedly told him that his tariffs would result in empty shelves and product shortages in as little as two weeks.

All of this is, to put it mildly, a humiliating climb down for the President. He upended the global economy and seems to have massively damaged the perception of American assets as a safe haven during times of economic uncertainty. The goal was to go toe-to-toe with China and see China blink. But it’s the U.S. that’s blinking. And that’s after the earlier reciprocal tariffs blink that already happened.

I wanted to point your attention to this recent article from the Times on the battle between Trump and Harvard University. It captures the Times’ feature quality. It contains good factual detail, but it radiates what I can only describe as a Chernobyl-level condescension and contempt, not so much for anything “liberal” but anything not conservative, or not in line with what it terms the “rightward shift of the country” — anything that can be construed as a posture of opposition to Donald Trump. The Harvard board is portrayed as reflexively and out-of-touchedly liberal, repeatedly shocked in a weak-kneed sort of way and yet also, paradoxically, headstrong in its inability to resist outmoded Trump I-era “resistance” thinking. In a few words, weak, out-of-touch and contemptible.

I’ve been gratified at just how much response and interest I’ve got to my proposal for a DOJ-in-Exile project. I’ve heard from so many people either wanting to volunteer their time or work for such a project or help get it off the ground that I haven’t even been able to respond to everyone yet. But I’m very encouraged by the interest. As I said yesterday, this isn’t something I am envisioning running. I don’t have the expertise and I’m already doing something. I’m trying to bring together interested people and potentially funders and thus hopefully play some role in bringing it into existence.

To help bring the idea into more focus, I thought I’d try to flesh out the concept.

Since January 20th, and actually back into November, I’ve had a series of projects I’ve desperately wanted to see done. My first was a simple but clean and easily shareable site to track core economic statistics from the end of the Biden administration through Trump’s presidency. Simple, objective, core economic data — here’s where Biden left off, here’s where Trump is. At the time I envisioned a different start to the administration. I figured it would be like 2017 where Trump took the quite good economy he inherited, mostly left it alone, maybe juiced it with tax cuts and rebranded it as his own. I was pretty confident this was a good bet since most of the Biden numbers were about as good as they could be. For employment, inflation, growth they would be pretty hard to top. So there wasn’t much chance Trump would end up looking much better than Biden. You simply can’t get unemployment much lower than 3%. I saw it as a way of deflating what I figured would be the standard Trumpian rebrand, where he talked constantly of the catastrophic Biden economy and his own era of prosperity with data that was actually marginally worse.