I wanted to share two-and-a-half follow-on thoughts about the murder of Charlie Kirk and everything that is coming in its wake.

We are now seeing an escalating campaign of valorization of Kirk, one that a lot of non-partisan media and certainly everyone in the conservative movement is contributing to. Quite a few of his opponents are getting carried along with this. At the same time, you have the more extreme members of the right calling for violent and/or legal retribution against the “left” based on essentially nothing. As usual, the call is led by none other than the president of the United States. Yesterday we noted that political violence and terrorism is the antithesis of civic or liberal democracy. Because of that, civic democrats have the greatest interest in opposing it. But the gist of the matter is that we oppose civic violence targeting anyone regardless of belief, regardless of the qualities of the person. It applies to everyone. We don’t need to elevate someone or pretend they were something they weren’t to express our opposition to political assassination. And we shouldn’t. Kirk was a hyper-aggressive partisan who advocated a lot of deeply retrograde beliefs. That is just a fact. Let’s not pretend otherwise. His murder is at the same time deeply wrong and a disaster for the country.

Kate Riga and I just finished recording this week’s edition of the podcast. We’ll add a link when it’s published. We devoted most of the episode to the coming budget showdown, what should happen and what’s going to happen (not necessarily or perhaps likely the same things). There was one point we discussed that I wanted to share with you here.

We have a whole debate about what Democrats should to with this continuing resolution. A lot of that debate centers on what even Democrats would be trying to achieve — make a point, get specific policy concessions. But there’s an entirely different question that informs a lot of it for me. What kind of Democratic leadership you have right now is the best indication of the type you’ll have in divided government in 2027-28 if Democrats win control of one or both houses of Congress in the midterms. It’s the best indication of what kind of governance we’d see in a Democratic trifecta in 2029, if such a thing came to pass.

I was very pleased to see that Ezra Klein has joined the ranks of those who think that Democrats need to gird themselves for a fight in the budget showdown coming at the end of this month. I have various disagreements with Klein, some rooted in policy and others more attitudinal, temperamental. But his influence within the Democratic elite is unrivaled. His words really matter. They matter enough to make me think Senate Dems may actually shift in time to make a difference here. His essential point is irrefutable. None of the arguments for standing down from back in March, which were at least arguable then, hold up anymore. (It’s this column at the Times that I’m talking about in case you haven’t read it or read about it.)

There are a couple of follow-up points I’d like to make about this. One is the idea that the Democrats are making a decision to “shut the government down.” In a sense this is a semantic point. But some semantic points are extremely important, and this is one of them. You really need to get this right. If Democrats do what a growing number of outside observers say they should and indeed must, they’re not making a decision to shut the government down. In fact, they would very much like to avoid that. Sometimes when there’s a shutdown standoff a lot of Republicans really do want to shut the government down in and of itself because they’re hostile to most of the things government does. None of that applies to Democrats. They’d much prefer that Trump agreed to their demands and the threat of a shutdown never materializes.

I wanted to return one more time — hopefully just one more time — to the question of what Democrats should demand in exchange for their votes on a continuing resolution.

Over the years, I’ve mentioned in various posts that Trump’s world isn’t just winning and losing. It’s the dominationist world in which the only kind of winning is if the other guy loses. Trump’s whole concept of “deals” is based on this idea. The notion of a deal that works for both parties is alien to him. His version of deals is one in which he wins, in which he puts something over on the other guy or forces or pressures him into an unequal bargain. It’s the key to understanding his whole career in business. And as we know much more vividly, it’s the essence of his politics. He wins and you lose. Or to put it more specifically, any working arrangement is one in which he dominates. He’s in charge.

This isn’t a great way to run a civic politics. But as I say in the headline to this post, for the moment, we’re living in Trump’s world. And Democrats need to operate within it.

I agonized for a bit about the point I’m about to discuss. But I didn’t agonize for long because I decided there was not much to agonize about. The topic is the September federal budget showdown, essentially a replay of the March “continuing resolution” drama in which Democrats had their first shot at real leverage against Donald Trump. As you’ll remember, Democrats under Chuck Schumer’s leadership decided to hold out for nothing. This was not only a missed opportunity. It’s fair to say it drove a catastrophic collapse of confidence in the Democratic Party’s elected leadership in Washington, DC., an impact that has been reverberating through national and opposition politics ever since.

Now we have a literal replay of that moment. The White House again needs Democrats’ vote in the Senate for a continuing resolution to keep the government open. Democratic leaders have been insisting they won’t make the same mistake again, and recent reports suggest President Trump’s increasingly aggressive attempts to seize budget authority from Congress all but assure a government shutdown at the end of the month. But a closer look suggests that Senate Democrats will insist on no meaningful brakes on Trump’s lawless actions and may, perversely, help him hold Congress next year.

One big threat that looms over free and fair elections for president is that a tie in the Electoral College or a disputed race gets thrown to the House. That could be a real dispute or, far more likely, a manufactured dispute as part of stealing the presidency. Critically, in this situation, the House does not vote as a majority. It votes by state delegation and the assumption is that the GOP holds the majority of state delegations because of their advantage in low-population Republican states. That’s all true and it leads to lots of bad scenarios. But it’s worth focusing on because it’s not a total done deal. This 2023 piece from the Kyle Kondik at the Center for Politics at UVA goes through the different delegations and the possibilities in each one. A bit of luck and focus could close off this path to a stolen presidency.

I’ve written a number of times about the central role of state sovereignty in resisting Trump’s growing tyranny and the critical fact that states control the administration of elections. With that in mind, I want to flag what I think is a key part of that equation. It’s not meant to be alarmist. It’s simply a matter of preparation.

As we’ve discussed, states control the administration of elections, subject to Congress setting standards for the administration of elections. This critical fact isn’t just a matter of law. It’s about the machinery of government. The states are there and the federal government isn’t. Trump can dash off a million executive orders but that doesn’t make them real or meaningful. More dangerous, he might try to use Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents or federal troops to create a climate of intimidation at the ballot box. That threat is real. But because of the structure of our elections, the key danger point likely comes later. Let’s assume the 2026 election or more likely the 2028 election goes more or less unmolested. Now in January 2027 the new representatives and senators show up for the new Congress. Are they seated? Or do congressional Republicans somehow refuse to seat them, arguing that their elections were somehow illegitimate, that they didn’t follow one of Trump’s legally meaningless executive orders?

I want to focus in on two news items today.

The first is the report that Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) will soon announce she will not run for re-election. This isn’t a total surprise. There were signs this was coming. But it’s still an important development and one that signifies something larger. She’s now the second Republican senator up for reelection next year who has opted to retire. The first was Sen. Thom Tillis in North Carolina. Not long after this Ernst news was reported, we learned that conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley is also opting not to run for reelection next year. It’s hard for me to imagine that Ernst’s final decision wasn’t impacted by Tuesday’s blow out win by Catelin Drey in an Iowa state senate special election race, in what is normally a strongly pro-Trump district.

It goes without saying that both Ernst and Bradley likely realized that these were at least going to be difficult races — Democrats have won four of the last five Wisconsin court races. And quite possibly they’d lose. But this also reminds us that one of the usual factors in a blow out or wave election cycle is that a non-trivial number of incumbents see what’s coming and retire. That tends to magnify the wave party’s advantage because the in-party has an even harder time holding a seat without the power of incumbency.

Now I’m not predicting a wave election. Iowa certainly will still be a very challenging race even without Ernst in it. My point is simply that a lot of the building blocks of a wave get determined well before any votes get counted. The people who speak with the most credibility and authority about the political environment going into 2026 are Republican incumbents. And they’re starting to speak pretty clearly. It started with the Spring town halls, or the lack thereof.

I’m by no means the first one to note this. But it’s so important that I want to make sure it’s at the top of your mind. Have you noticed that out of the blue all of Donald Trump’s enemies seem to be getting investigated for mortgage fraud? Letitia James, Adam Schiff and now Fed Board member Lisa Cook; and it’s the pretext for her purported firing by President Trump?

Well, it turns out there’s a reason. Bill Pulte is Trump’s Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, an agency created as part of the Global Financial Crisis reforms. From that post he finagled his way into being the head of Fannie Mae and Sallie Mae, the quasi public institutions which back a huge percentage of American home and student loans.

We’re seeing lots of news today about the occupation of Washington, D.C. and the president’s takeover of the Metropolitan (D.C.) Police Department, as well as clear signals that he plans to expand this program to other big blue-state cities. I want to step back from the particulars to try to see the situation as a whole and consider the political ways to react to it. This builds on the point that grew out of my conservation with a TPM Reader a week and a half ago which is that the narrow issues of legality are mostly beside the point — not irrelevant, but at best secondary. The president views states and municipalities controlled by political opponents as something akin to conquered territories which must be bent to his will by force. This includes budgetary coercion and as close as he can get to military occupation. This is un-American, outside the constitutional order and, not least in importance, unpopular.

He has done this by exploiting various loopholes, taking advantage of a compliant and corrupt Supreme Court and resorting to expedients in which his power is most un-reviewable despite his actions clearly violating the plain intention of the laws in question. None of these technicalities change the fact that these are all violations of the liberties Americans are entitled to.