I’m mildly fascinated by this piece in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer section. It’s the review of a new biography of Andrew, Duke of York, by a guy named Andrew Lownie. (The piece appears to be free for a limited time.) What sparked my interest is the major if not central role of Ghislaine Maxwell and thus Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, the upshot of the whole thing is to make Maxwell much more central and dominating figure in the Epstein story than perhaps even Epstein himself, certainly in Andrew’s life and perhaps in Epstein’s as well.

At one level I could not care less about any of these people. As I’ve noted in my other Epstein posts, I’m interested in the story because of the way other people are interested in it — lots of people — and how that interest both intersects with our politics and in some material ways explains our politics.

After Friday and Monday’s Backchannels, full of the ominous progress of the Trump White House, we can see again today the dual nature of Trumpism, both predatory and absurd, methodical and feckless. The key to grappling with Trumpism is recognizing that both are simultaneously true and neither reality invalidates the other. Trump’s federalization of the DC Metro police is a case in point. The President can take control of the DC police for up to 48 hours. With notification of relevant committees of Congress, the president can maintain that control for an additional 30 days. After that he requires Congress’s authorization to continue to control the DC police.

Can Trump clean up the DC crime hellscape in 32 days? It seems unlikely. Will Congress allow him to continue past 32 days? Possibly. But by no means certainly. Trump’s margins remain razor thin and it’s the kind of issue where at least a few Republicans might refuse. Will the President remained focused on becoming the DC police chief and mayor or will the whole effort go by the wayside? Was any of it more than an excuse for a news-cycle-driving press conference?

President Trump’s decision today to federalize the DC police and deploy National Guard troops to the city is a good reminder of the importance of what we discussed Friday: the necessity for the political opposition to narrate Trump’s abuses of power and the contents of the U.S. Constitution, to be crystal clear on what will be reversed when Democrats are back in control of the government and how they’ll provide civil and criminal accountability for those who have broken the law. It makes it even more relevant to review and remember the critical importance of the consent of the governed.

It’s part of American civic culture to marvel at the process of the peaceful transfer of power. We hold an election under a specific set of rules. The winners of those elections inherit a vast array of powers. The president gains control of the military and a vast federal bureaucracy. The president has a huge array of prerogative powers. What he or she says goes, in specific realms. Legislators make new laws. Judges make rulings on imprisonment, people’s redress of harms, etc. etc. The marvel is that a whole population of more than 340 million people freely accede to this power. We have ordinary criminal conduct which is policed and punished. But focus in on the fact of that free compliance. The vast majority of us never come into real contact with the coercive power of the state. And yet virtually everyone, even the most diehard opponents of this administration, recognize that this president has a whole bundle of legitimate powers and we will comply with them.

Why is this?

I’ve told you a few times of my difficulty launching the DOJ-in-exile project. Such is life. But there’s another set of actions, much easier to do, not requiring any organization or concerted action, which is just as important. We hear a lot of Trump administration actions decried, denounced and so forth, as they should be. What I would like to hear more clearly is that with this or that criminal or unconstitutional action, the next time Democrats control the government the actions will be reversed and those who acted criminally will be prosecuted. This also applies to bad policy. So, for instance, with the absurd expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Democrats should be saying clearly that once they are back in power, that whole expansion is going to be reversed. People signing up for all those new jobs should know that now. Democrats couldn’t reverse those things as long as Trump’s in power and has a veto pen. But they might be able to deny more funding as soon as 2027.

We’ve got more from Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL), the avatar of post-law Washington DC, where they let you do it if you’re a Republican.

Remember all the way back in February DC police were called to Mills’ apartment over an alleged assault of a woman who was not his wife. (Mills’ wife lives back in his home district. She’s a kind of Schrodinger’s Wife, but we’ll get back to that.) Subsequent news confirmed that the woman was Mills’ DC girlfriend, and when we last checked in on this story a couple weeks ago she still appeared to be his girlfriend, notwithstanding the alleged assault. (She soon recanted her accusation after the incident.) DC law being under the management of Jan. 6 attorney Ed Martin at the time meant Mills skated on that incident, though there was some question of whether the DC police might also have botched the initial arrest and investigation in ways that might have made prosecution difficult even if Republicans were still required to follow the law in DC.

Then three weeks ago we learned that Mills was in the process of being evicted from his $21,000-a-month DC apartment, which he appeared to stop paying rent on right after the alleged assault.

I wanted to flag for you what I think is an important shift in the assumptions and behaviors of key institutionalist or middle-of-the-road Democrats. Here I don’t mean ideology so much as behavior, the critical spectrum between fight and norms.

Four days ago, Chuck Schumer or, most likely, someone on his social media team, posted a screen shot of an AP headline that read “Senate heads home with no deal to speed confirmations as irate Trump tells Schumer to ‘go to hell.'”

The White House has been making noises about President Trump being concerned or unhappy about starvation in Gaza. After his comments over the weekend, Axios reported today that the U.S. is mulling a “take over” of aid provision in Gaza because Israel isn’t up to the task. But there are no specifics and no timeline. VP JD Vance also made some generic comments that Israel should increase the pace of aid. But the issue really has nothing to do with increasing the pace of aid or getting more money from donor countries in the region. The issue is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a U.S.-based non-profit created back in the February to take over food aid from the United Nations and the various NGOs that work with the UN. It wasn’t in addition. The UN and the existing NGOs were booted out and the GHF took over. It’s executive chairman is Johnnie Moore, a U.S. evangelical leader and businessman who started his career as the campus minister and senior VP at Liberty University.

In that interval of a few hours between the release of the Friday jobs report and President Trump’s decision to fire of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I had a few people ask me whether I thought it was possible that the books for May and June had initially been “cooked,” since they ended up being revised dramatically downward. That question seemed a bit quaint after the subsequent firing of Erika McEntarfer. But the answer I gave is relevant in a few ways to the situation going forward.

What I said was that in the Trump era we can’t really rule anything out. (More than cooking, I noted just a few days ago that DOGE-cuts have forced BLS to rely more on estimates relative to data collection in its inflation calculations.) But we should go in with a strong assumption that that is not the case — that there isn’t any cooking — for a number of important reasons.

For me, trust figures very little into this judgment. The first of those reasons is that it would simply be very hard to do. BLS is staffed by career government economists and statisticians, very apolitical people in their work, who are just not the kind of people who are going to go along with anything like that. To the extent they were ordered to do so or Trump found a compliant statistician willing to cook for him, that fact would almost certainly leak out in short order, either through leaks to the press or people resigning.

While we watch the horrific and increasingly senseless immiseration of the civilian population of Gaza, it’s important to look clearly at why it’s happening. “Why” may be too big a question. It may be better to try to answer not that big “why” but, in a more focused and discrete way, why this war hasn’t stopped. Prime Minister Netanyahu has managed to lose even President Trump now on the question of whether people are starving in Gaza. More significantly, Netanyahu some time ago lost even fairly hardcore Israeli hawks who are not members of his governing coalition on why the war is still going on at all.

You’ll remember that for about a year, between 2021 and 2022, Netanyahu was actually out of power and Naftali Bennett was Prime Minister. Bennett is from the “religious Zionist” world and political camp, and from almost every perspective that’s a very right-wing and nationalist world. But he was heading a coalition of basically every part of the Israeli political world which wasn’t behind Netanyahu. That stretched all the way from his own religious Zionist political party right through the center and left of Israeli politics, such as it is, and all the way to one of the Arab Islamist parties. A few weeks ago Bennett said again: we need to end this. Stop the war. Get the hostages home. We’re not going to have a final victory over Hamas. It would be great if we could, but that’s not going to happen. Leave that for another day.

Whether it’s AI or Social Media, for me at least, the routine is pretty similar. I look to see if something seems interesting or interests me. And if it does, I try to reproduce it or verify it with a human brain, i.e., my own. This morning I saw a tweet claiming that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was moving from collecting the pricing information that goes into building government’s canonical inflation numbers (CPI) to relying instead on a higher percentage “imputed” numbers, i.e., estimates. “Estimates” aren’t all bad. A few years back it became a topic of pretty intense partisan warfare with the Census. As I recall it, the Census was combining data collection with statistical models to get more accurate counts for more marginal and transient populations where underreporting is chronic. (As you might imagine, undocumented people aren’t terribly eager to fill out government forms.) In any case, was it really true that BLS is cutting back on data collection?

Actually it is.