The insider DC sheets this morning all have news of a coming deal to reopen the government. The outline of that deal is an agreement to hold a future vote on Obamacare subsidies (a name we should really drop), which there’s no certainty Democrats would win, in exchange for another short or medium term continuing resolution. The catch to these reports is that, if you look closely, they seem to be overwhelmingly sourced to Republicans. That, however, doesn’t mean they’re not accurate — though you wouldn’t go too wrong being suspicious. Another dimension of this story is that the Democrats doing informal negotiations — and the potential crossover votes — are heavily stacked with soon-to-be retirees, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Gary Peters (D-MI) among others.

Tomorrow we’re going to get our first widespread read on what actual voters think of the Trump presidency. Of course, Trump isn’t on the ballot. Nor is it a federal election. But, more than at any other time in our lifetimes, all political questions revolve around Trump and whether you’re for or against him. We’ll get indirect reads on how perceptions of Trump are affecting voting behavior. We’ve also just gotten a series of new national polls, timed for release just before Tuesday. They show Trump almost as unpopular as he has ever been, not only during his second presidency but at the most feral and unhinged moments of his first. FiftyPlusOne shows his average approval numbers underwater by 15 points, with approval at 40.9%. If there’s anything “new” here, it’s that his high disapprovals are breaking more ground than his low approvals. He’s wringing the final undecideds or not-paying-attentions out of the electorate.

But the picture is different on the generic ballot — the standard measure of a congressional election. There, it is a kind of choose-your-own-adventure. The FiftyPlusOne average here have Democrats up by 3.5 percentage points — 45.6 to 42.1. That’s okay for the Democrats but it’s far closer than you’d expect with a president this unpopular. The most recent numbers are fairly scattered. NBC and Verasight have the Democrats with an eight point advantage. CNN gives them a five point advantage. But Washington Post/ABC have it at two points. NewsNation (whose pollster I can’t identify) says it’s essentially even.

As you’ve probably already heard, Donald Trump went on Truth Social late last night and announced that the time had come for his senators to pass a clean “continuing resolution” to reopen the government with a simply majority vote by abolishing the filibuster. The only proper response to this is “bring it on.” It’s never good to cower, of course. “Give it your best shot” is always the proper posture. But if Trump is able to accomplish this (I’m skeptical — more on that in a moment), that’s great news.

I still have some relative confidence that the Gaza ceasefire deal will make its way through the current flare-ups. That’s because the deal itself has very powerful stakeholders behind it, ones who can apply overwhelming pressure to the warring parties if they choose to. But what we’re now seeing all the reasons you’d expect a deal like this with Donald Trump to go south.

First is attention. The best argument against this deal sticking has always been that Trump will get bored and lose interest. It’s pretty clear that’s already happened. We heard his press secretary say only days ago that his main priority is building the new White House ballroom.

I’ve made versions of this argument here in the Editors’ Blog and on the podcast many times. But it’s so critical and so beyond dispute I wanted to state it here as clearly as possible. There is no future for civic democracy in this country without reforming the Supreme Court. Putting that more specifically, the only way to recover from Donald Trump’s rapid lunge into an authoritarian American future is a future point at which Democrats regain control of the federal government — a trifecta — and institute a series of laws which cut off the channels Trump has exploited to get us to this point. That doesn’t solve the problem of Trumpism. The core issue is that very large minority of Americans who support his style of autocratic government. But that cuts off many of the paths Trump has used to build a presidential autocracy under the thinnest cover of law. You need, among other things, a federal law to place strict limits on partisan and racial gerrymandering. It’s only one example out of many – you need laws re-instituting true independent agencies, drastically limiting the use of military forces on US territory, barring president’s from claiming budgeting authority, et al. I note this example because it came up today when Kate and I recorded this week’s podcast. But even this comparatively uncontroversial federal statute would certainly be overturned by the Republican justices.

In the last couple of weeks, the questions about Jews, Israel and Zohran Mamdani have rushed back into the news. It began with a dramatic speech from the pulpit from the rabbi of a prominent New York City synagogue, Elliot Cosgrove, and its been kept in the news by a public letter signed by 600 or so rabbis and cantors. I don’t know how much this has broken through into the mainstream press but it’s been on a loud speaker in Jewish communal publications. Cosgrove began his speech (you can call it a sermon if you want) saying he believes “Zohran Mamdani poses a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community” and a “danger to the Jewish body politic of New York City.” The public letter hit similar points and is generally the same message.

I don’t have anything unique or new to add but since I’ve written here and there over the last two years about Israel and Jews and Gaza, as well as once or twice about Mamdani, I thought I should share my opinion. More specifically, a growing number of TPM Readers have asked me to address these accusations, either from the perspective of agreeing with them or wanting me to denounce them.

So with that introduction out of the way, these claims not only strike me as wrong but as borderline absurd. Like absurd as in, What the fuck are we talking about? absurd. And I say this notwithstanding the fact that I disagree with Mamdani on numerous points tied to Zionism and Israel.

Yesterday, for me, was a mixed visual and reported tableaux. There were the visuals: Donald Trump literally bulldozing about a third of the White House complex. It’s not the main house itself, which goes back more than two centuries, albeit with a rather intense renovation. It’s not the the West Wing where most of the post-war history is. But still, Good lord, he brought in a bulldozer and tore the thing down. Then I saw the news reports that Trump is demanding that his toadies at the Justice Department cut him a check for $230 million. I couldn’t tell whether this was notionally to repay his legal expenses or to compensate him for the tort of being indicted for the crimes for which the Supreme Court let him off the hook. He didn’t seem clear himself. In an impromptu press availability yesterday he said he needed the quarter of a billion for “the fraud of the 2020 election”.

Here’s a funny little nugget about the Pat Fitzgerald/James Comey relationship.

You’ll remember that Pat Fitzgerald first came to be known by the broad politically-attuned public when he was special counsel investigating and eventually convicting Bush White House advisor Scooter Libby over the disclosure of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity. James Comey first became known to this broader politically-attuned public because of a series of actions he took during the Bush administration, stuff like the so-called “hospital bed” showdown over the admin’s domestic surveillance program. Now move forward to early 2007 and we at TPM were in the thick of the so-called US Attorney firings scandal, for which TPM eventually won a Polk Award.

The turnout and character of the weekend’s No Kings demonstrations speak for themselves and at great volume. But I wanted to say something about the naming and the focus of No Kings, which is emerging as something between a protest and a protest movement. It is a great good fortune for the country and the anti-Trump opposition that it has emerged in the way that it has, by which I mean the name itself, a deceptively resonant name and slogan with the deepest possible roots in American history. This brings with it a critical inclusivity, which grows out of the name itself and the lack of those specific and lengthy sets of demands that often characterize and ultimately fracture such movements.

I’ll say a few things here that favorably distinguish No Kings from what we might call “traditional” liberal or left-leaning protests. That includes some of those that featured prominently during the first Trump administration. I’m not disparaging those. It’s simply that this is a specific moment in history and requires an especially broad tent. Its purpose and specific character must be different.

I first encountered Niall Ferguson in a real way when I was writing a review essay for The New Yorker at the end of 2003. The editors had sent me a small stack of books about what we might call the “neo-imperial” moment that took hold of Washington, D.C. in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. One of these books was by Ferguson, a fairly rousing and unabashed celebration of the British Empire. If anything it was among the more indirect and implicit versions of the story told by the various authors, celebrating the glories of empire and leaving it to the reader to draw the conclusion it was time to bring them back. As I’ve read columns of his here and there over the last couple decades, the historianness has receded as the tendentious provocateur has moved to the front. But something different struck me about the piece he published in The Free Press earlier this week (subscription required) about Trump’s Gaza peace plan: that was how much it matched in key outlines the piece I wrote on the same topic last week. If you recall, I wrote that the Trump plan was actually a fairly big deal and one that for a variety of reasons only Trump was in a position to pull off. The basis of the agreement is the common authoritarianism and corruption that now knits together Washington, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and other regional capitals through the personal relationships binding together Trump family and the princely families of the Gulf.