Let me start by noting the obvious: What we saw yesterday with Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension by ABC News was a brazen and unabashed attack on free speech in the United States in a way that was unimaginable until a few months ago. It manages to be both shameful in its audacity and criminality while also absurd. It’s not a newspaper being shuttered or a political party being proscribed. It’s a comedian’s show being taken off the air. But dictators and authoritarians never like comedians. They are jesters, not warriors. So their lance strikes and ripostes are oblique in their approach and more difficult to react to.

I don’t want to participate in the, “How bad is this?” discourse. It’s bad. We know that. An apolitical person told me yesterday this whole development was “frightening.” I agreed. So why don’t you seem more upset about it? this person asked. Because I already knew we were here.

All I have time for is what one does in response. So a few thoughts on that front.

Neither of these deals have been realized. But I want to flag something on the horizon that is potentially a very big deal. Yesterday, the Wall the Street Journal broke the news that the White House has negotiated a purchase of TikTok by a consortium that includes Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz. The deal hasn’t been finalized yet. And it’s a whole other issue that you have the White House organizing something like this. The key, for our purposes, is Oracle and the Ellison family. This potentially takes TikTok out of the hands (indirectly) of the Chinese government (though the details there remain to be seen) and places it into the hands of key allies of President Trump. Meanwhile Paramount and CBS are now owned by Skydance, under the nominal rule of David Ellison, son of Oracle kingpin Larry Ellison. And Skydance/Paramount is now making a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.

We’ve now heard the first official word about the murder of Charlie Kirk as part of the official charges brought against him today. I want to reiterate a point I made yesterday. Despite the concerted effort to portray Tyler Robinson as a proponent of “left-wing ideology,” as Kash Patel put it, that’s really not clear at all from the evidence contained in the charging documents. What we have in there are mostly statements from Robinson’s mother to the police that he “had started to lean more to the left” over the last year and become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.”

I want to point you to a report from Ken Klippenstein, who got access to parts of the much-discussed Discord channel that Robinson and fellow gamers spent time on. Klippenstein’s report sheds more light on Robinson and his milieu than basically anything that’s appeared in the mainstream press over the last week. I really recommend you read it. There’s no bombshell. Just a general impression of the guy. But still very revealing.

I’ve written several times over the last few days not only about the scourge of political violence which we must not only denounce but be genuinely against in every way. Notwithstanding my own personal inclination to say little of the dead for a respectful period, I want to note a particular dynamic that the right is creating in the reign of firing terror it’s unleashed in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. On X over the last few days, countless numbers of high-profile right-wing accounts’ feeds are made up almost entirely of screen grabs of random people’s reactions to Kirk’s murder and demands that they be fired from their jobs. In many cases the demands are heeded and then that fact is triumphantly posted as well.

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.