Since I haven’t written about this here, I wanted to share a few thoughts about Zohran Mamdani’s big Democratic mayoral primary win in New York. If you’ve been saturated by coverage of this race, these won’t strike you as terribly original points. I’m just sharing my perspective.

First, I see three reasons why Mamdani won.

The first is the simple fact that Democratic voters are angry and dissatisfied with the incumbent Democratic political class. We see this everywhere. It’s much less about ideology than it is often portrayed. We live in an angry, distrustful, populist age. Since the greatest expression of this mood has come from the right, Democrats have often been in the uncomfortable position of leveraging against this tendency, holding the line for institutional continuity, preservation over destruction and many other situationally understandable impulses. But the twin effects of Trump’s comeback victory and the often fractured and feeble response to it by the Democratic leadership in Washington has washed all of that away.

I wanted to update you on the story I flagged yesterday in which the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Scott Turner, decided to bogart the offices of the Trump-beleaguered National Science Foundation (NSF) at least in part to build a Sky Mansion for himself on the building’s top floors. Stories like this have always had a special fascination for me. You can’t say it’s a bigger story than the US going to war with Iran or the US military low-fi occupying a major American city. But in addition to its immediate impact on three or four thousand people — the employees of HUD and NSF — it captures so much of what 2025 Trump-era Washington is about. As probably goes without saying, there appears to have been no formal process behind this at all. There’s a very Sopranos feel to the whole caper: ‘Nice place you got here. It’s mine now.’

With the President’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” there’s been a general assumption. It’s super, super unpopular. And, also, it doesn’t matter. It’s going to pass anyway. That assumption is very likely true. Perhaps they’ll hit some speed bumps that prevent the bill from passing in time for July 4th, as Trump wants and has demanded. But these kinds of bills tend to be “failure is not an option” type affairs. You have obstacles but they get crumpled like things that go under a steam roller or mashed up in an industrial trash compactor. That’s particularly the case in Trump’s second term, where hints of the old ungovernable GOP caucus get flattened when word comes from Trump that it’s over. But here we see again the central tension point of the Trump presidency: he owns, dominates and controls everything but public opinion.

That much of it is almost conventional wisdom at this point. The bill thing is really, really unpopular. Even the inside-DC sheets say as much. So Republicans are starting to do something we’re used to seeing Democrats do with some of their more aspirational policies. Which is basically this: You think it’s unpopular. But that’s just because you’re not polling it right.

Famous last words.

Donald Trump’s latest meltdown in response to “ceasefire” violations by both Iran and Israel but especially Israel brings out the uncanny quality of everything that has happened over the last week — the simultaneous existence of a very real hot war with what amounts to a social media campaign. They’re both happening. They’re clearly interacting with each other. But the dynamics of the two are so separate, distinct, operating according to totally different rules that watching the two together looks deeply unreal.

Subsequent reporting by The New York Times and other publications seems to confirm my initial assumption, which was that the entire U.S. involvement in this conflict was driven by especially Fox News’s reporting of Israel’s onslaught against Iran’s military infrastructure and nuclear program. Israel was “winning” and Trump wanted in on that winning. And that was really the entirety of it. But Trump’s decision to escalate the crisis to a level of destruction of underground facilities that only the U.S. is capable of had a very real result. And it’s not just whatever level of destruction those bunker buster bombs created — which appears substantial but not total.

I wanted to flag your attention to a story bubbling up in the MAGA world that may amount to something or may be merely entertaining. It turns on a guy named Sergio Gor, a 38-year-old who is in charge of the Presidential Personnel Office. He’s in charge of vetting presidential appointees, but with an apparently very Trumpian emphasis on evidences of political loyalty as opposed to more conventional kind of reviews. But it turns out that Gor himself has yet to submit what is called an SF-86, the standard form for appointees who need a high level security clearance. So the guy in charge of vetting political appointees has yet to submit his own materials to be vetted himself. Not great, but the kind of mix of incompetence and probable sleaze that’s pretty standard in Trumpland.

But now there’s a bit more.

The idea that Trump or MAGA is in any sense “anti-war” is something between an absurdity and a misunderstanding. Kate and I had a good discussion of it in this week’s podcast. At one level it’s a simple fraud. Trump claimed he’d always been against the Iraq War at a time when the U.S. had been bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan for years. It was a helpful attack line and it was completely false. Trump wasn’t in politics in 2002 or 2003 and to the extent he said anything, like a lot of people, he was for it when it was popular and against it when it wasn’t.

During his presidency he signed off on the assassination/targeted attack that killed Qasem Soleimani; he heavily involved the U.S. in the Saudi war in Yemen; he maintained or expanded the U.S. fight against ISIS in Iraq/Syria. Those are at least a continuity with the Obama years and in key respects an expansion of it. The one arguable exception is the deal Trump made with the Taliban to leave Afghanistan — a bad deal which Joe Biden was saddled with and followed through on and was endlessly criticized for, by Trump more than anyone else. Afghanistan captures Trump perfectly — his one notionally “anti-war” position was continuity by definition. And he turned against it as soon as he was unpopular. Trump has gotten “anti-war” mileage out of his opposition to Ukraine aid. But that’s pro-Russia rather than anti-war.

I haven’t had a lot to say about Israel and Iran because I haven’t had a lot to add. But I want to suggest something about the possible entry of the United States into the war. These aren’t conclusions, more questions I’ve had and questions that help me frame how I’ve looked at what’s happening.

In the first couple days of this hot conflict, the conventional wisdom and reporting went from Israel doing this more or less entirely on its own, perhaps even interfering in U.S. diplomacy, to the idea that the apparent rush of diplomacy between the U.S. and Iran was actually a ruse concocted by Israel and United States to lull the Iranians into letting their guard down. At first this seemed to be what they call in the online world right wing “cope,” shoving Donald Trump back into the center of the story as He-Man hero when he had actually seemed marginal to the action. But then it started showing up in news reports. And from what I can tell at this point, it’s almost treated as a given, just part of the reported story.

This certainly may be accurate. But I’m not sure that it is. I think it’s also possible that the initial attack was fabulously successful in tactical terms (no one would deny that) and Trump basically wanted in on it. Because he likes success. In a normal administration, reporters might get a clearer read on what was real or what wasn’t. But this isn’t a normal administration. Much of “what the plan is” is an unknowable thing in Donald Trump’s head and a feature of the Trumpian personality cult is that once there’s an approved story, that is the story. Period. I could be right or wrong on my supposition here. But I’m not even sure if the people inside the administration actually know. In any case, I think there’s a pretty good chance the whole ‘we were secretly working together to lull Tehran into complacency’ is a complete fiction, an online MAGA speculation that the White House and Trump glommed onto and made real because it was convenient and helpful.

On Saturday, watching the President’s birthday celebration/Army parade, I commented that it seemed like it was going so poorly and Trump seemed so grumbly that I was afraid he might occupy a few more cities with the tantrum he was going to throw as a result. Of course, “going poorly” can mean a lot of different things. I didn’t watch a lot of the parade. But the moments I did catch gave me some reason for confidence in the durability of the America I know. The soldiers manning the tanks trundling down the city streets were all smiles, waving at the admittedly sparse crowd, saying “hi” to kids. I don’t think that’s the kind of parade Trump wanted. That’s not what a strongman’s military parade looks like. The soldiers are impassive. Their eyes are fixed on El Jefe. This wasn’t that.

And I wasn’t wrong about the tantrum.

My wording in this title is one part provocation. But there is a serious point to it.

American political debates use the term “elite” in a fairly impoverished way. Its use is pejorative rather than descriptive. The elites are the bad guys. And the good elites aren’t actually elites. We’re all familiar with this and perhaps it’s inevitable in a political culture so rooted in the imagery and ideology, if not always the reality, of popular rule and the power and valorization of the ordinary American.

But the elite, in a more descriptive and non-evaluative sense, has been perhaps the biggest reveal of this live subject experiment we’ve been a part of since late January. Law firms, universities, big business, news publications and a million other examples. We’ve all been amazed, disheartened, aghast, whatever you want to call it, by the subservience of the prominent and the powerful. Even those who haven’t adopted a posture of subservience have generally adopted one of silence. I hear it from reporter after reporter. The kind of people they used to go to for quotes — a lot of those people don’t want to give them anymore. And, beyond moral evaluation, we know why: they have things on the line. A rogue President has vast untapped and illegal or unconstitutional but still usable power to come after really anyone who puts their head up. The challenges to Trump have much more been waged by ordinary Americans.

I was driving when this afternoon’s events in Los Angeles took place. So I didn’t know about them in real time and only found out what had happened a couple hours later. (Appropriately enough, I was listening to the audiobook version of a Raymond Chandler novel.) Secretary Noem is now claiming that she, along with everyone else there, didn’t even know who Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) was. This is even more absurd than you might imagine. The press conference was in Los Angeles and he’s one of the state’s two senators. More than that, he’s the ranking member of the Judiciary subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration. Of course she knows who he is. If she doesn’t remember his face, she’s an even dumber degenerate punk than I already thought.