News came today that Warner Bros Discovery decided that Paramount-Skydance’s bid ($111 billion) to acquire the company was superior to that from Netflix ($82.7 billion). WBD told Netflix it had four days to up its offer. Little more than an hour later Netflix said it didn’t need four days. It was bowing out. The deal was no longer economic at the price Paramount was offering. An additional fact is that Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos was at the White House while these things were happening, apparently trying to see whether Netflix had the thing any major company needs for a merger in 2026: the personal approval of Donald Trump. Apparently they didn’t have it. That’s the autocracy playbook. And at the federal level, that’s the game we’re playing right now.

The Post has an article today, an exclusive they say, about a draft executive order purportedly being circulated between the White House and various conspiracy theorists and right-wing extremists in its broader circle. The proposed order claims that China has been found to be interfering in U.S. elections — specifically rigged the 2020 election in Joe Biden’s favor — and that as a result of that the president, as commander-in-chief, can and must directly take control of U.S. elections for the midterms and the 2028 presidential elections.

Two points merit saying on this. The first is that these are the rehashed, insane theories that were literally and figuratively laughed out of court in 2020. These are all absurd. Everybody knows they are absurd and false. The legal theory is what demands our attention. The authors of the order believe that if something is an emergency the president can invoke a kind of hidden dictator clause in the Constitution which allows him to assert powers which the Constitution explicitly forbids to him. This is not so. They secondarily believe in what we might call a “because” or “therefore” logic or clause. So because we have found that Threat X exists, the president can do whatever he wants to combat that threat. And as commander-in-chief, he can do anything he wants. This is also not so.

You’ve probably seen some hints of it. But I wanted to focus your attention on a genuine piece of news out of the Epstein Files, even weeks after their original release. In 2019, a woman came forward and spoke to the FBI claiming that Donald Trump had assaulted her in the early 1980s. In her allegations, Jeffrey Epstein essentially provided her to Trump. Other files in the Epstein trove say that the FBI conducted four interviews with the woman. But only one of them was released in the larger trove — one that detailed her accusations against Epstein. Meanwhile, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, says he went to view the unredacted version of the files that members of Congress can access and the missing interviews aren’t there either.

There have been other accusations against Trump in the files. But this one appears to be more specific and detailed. And there are various signs and reasons that the FBI took the allegations seriously: those reasons and details about the accusations are discussed in this NPR article once you get past the first few paragraphs. The accuser, according to one FBI note contained in the files, eventually refused to cooperate with the investigation.

With Trump’s first official State of the Union of his second term upon us, I wanted to share a few previewing thoughts. First, who knows the particulars we’re going to see in this speech. We start with the degenerate unpredictability of Trump and added to it we have whatever mix of senescence or loosening we’ve seen so clearly in the last year. And there I am really open to either possibility. I think sometimes that in term two he has kind of maxed out on all his desires for power, for adulation. And getting everything we want has a way of undoing many people, at least putting a lot of slack in the inner chords that give us quickness and alacrity. In any case, we start with Trump and all the additional feralness and distention we have in this second term. So who the eff knows what to expect.

But this is the prism I think we should be looking at the speech through.

A culture of impunity or at least a culture of elite impunity is now so widely discussed that it has become almost a cliché of American political discourse. But clichés and caricatures have power when they contain a strong or recognizable element of truth. And we are in the midst of a kind of performance of impunity which is revealing and bracing to behold. A few days ago, the former Prince Andrew, now Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, was arrested and questioned in an investigation of alleged crimes tied to his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew is the first prince to be arrested in 400 years. (Technically, he’s the first British prince ever to be arrested. The last example, Charles I, was king of England. This was before the Union Treaty of 1707 which created Great Britain. Charles was tried and executed.) Today, police in the United Kingdom arrested Peter Mandelson, now a Labour party elder (he made his name under Tony Blair) who was until September the British ambassador to the United States. The investigation that led to his arrest was spurred by the release of the Epstein Files. His earlier resignation as ambassador was also tied to his relationship with Epstein.

The depth of the Supreme Court’s corruption has forced us to find new language to describe its actions. Today’s decision, undoing Trump’s massive array of tariffs that upended the global financial system, is a case in point.

We say the Court “struck down” these tariffs. But that wording is inadequate and misleading. These tariffs were always transparently illegal. Saying the actions were “struck down” suggests at least a notional logic which the Court disagreed with, or perhaps one form of standing practice and constitutional understanding away from which the Court decided to chart another course. Neither is remotely the case. There’s no ambiguity in the law in question. Trump assumed a unilateral power to “find” a national emergency and then used this (transparently fraudulent) national emergency to exercise powers the law in question doesn’t even delegate. It is, among other things, an example of the central tenet of current conservative jurisprudence: to determine what law or constitution would require if words had no meaning. We could go into the further digression over whether Congress could “delegate” such powers, given the Constitution’s clarity on congressional authority over tariffs or whether any purported ambiguity in the law invokes yet another of the corrupt Court’s made-up doctrines. But doing so would be nothing more than ceding to the Court an authority to compel us to expend time exploring the vaporous logical intricacies of its bullshit doctrines.

I mentioned the other day that the insider D.C. sheets are helpful guides to when a new idea or bit of news is breaking into the elite D.C. conversation. I saw another example of that today, and it’s a window onto a critical topic, a critical part of the restoring democracy to-do list in the coming years. Semafor’s Liz Hoffman has a piece on the shifting “political pendulum.” What she’s referring to in this context is all those corporations who moved decisively in 2025 to get on the MAGA bandwagon. We think mostly about the tech monopolies. Their leaderships are high profile. In many cases, their structure ensures that the founder maintains total control over the corporations, despite being a public company. So when Mark Zuckerberg starts showing up a UFC matches with Trump or Don Jr. you know where Facebook is placing its bets. But for anyone paying close attention, this corporate shift goes way beyond the highly personalized leadership of the tech monopolies.

President Trump got some decent news on the inflation and jobs front in the January data. There are signs that the January jobs number may just be a positive blip in an overall downcast trend from 2025. The cooling inflation numbers may be offset by price hikes from manufacturers who have been holding off on passing on tariff costs until the new year. Still, for a president with sinking popularity, those numbers are better than nothing. And yet, despite some nods to affordability, there’s really little evidence that Trump is in any way shifting course or doing anything likely to shift the downward pressure on public support which threatens to wash away Republicans’ congressional majorities in November. They made some nods to that in Minneapolis. But we can be confident now that it’s window dressing on a mass deportation program that remains intact and bounding forward. On the contrary, everything we see suggests a pedal-to-the-metal, double-down approach. The main effort focused on the election is not one focused on increasing public support but putting a thumb on the scales with the administration’s so-called SAVE Act to suppress the vote. Everything points to a collision between these two forces, Trump and the American public, in November.

I got a number of fascinating replies to yesterday’s post about the federal calendar and presidential holidays, specifically whether we should ditch Columbus Day in favor of a national holiday celebrating Abraham Lincoln. I also learned a bit more about how Lincoln never got a national holiday originally because the states of the old Confederacy, whose representatives and senators had outsized seniority throughout the 20th century, simply wouldn’t hear of it. Indeed, the 1968 federal law which clustered federal holidays into long weekends and which in effect though not formally consolidated Washington’s birthday into “President’s Day” was still under the shadow of southern resistance to anything commemorating Abraham Lincoln.

When I was a little boy in the Southern California school system in the 70s and 80s, there were separate holidays for Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays. Or at least this was my recollection. Both were celebrated. Then Martin Luther King Day became a federal holiday in 1986. I thought at time and for many years after that Presidents Day was created out of a consolidation of Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays in order to make room for Martin Luther King Day, on the reasoning that there’s a limit on the number of federal holidays. A number of years ago I looked into this and it turned out that this wasn’t true. I can’t remember the exact details. Lincoln’s birthday was never a federal holiday but it was celebrated in California. There was also a shift beginning around the same time to rebrand Washington’s birthday as Presidents Day. (Officially, it’s still Washington’s Birthday.)

In any case, my interest in this is that Abraham Lincoln should really have a national holiday. Some of this is a matter of him just really being a great president quite apart from the revolution brought about by the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments. Sometimes great iconic figures aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. But the twin presidencies of Washington and Lincoln are if anything more powerful and important on close examination than they seem, though Washington’s role isn’t limited to his presidency. You have to see it in the context of his military and de facto political leadership during the Revolutionary War and his role in the period between the Revolution and his presidency, including his role at the constitutional convention. In any case, point being Washington and Lincoln are both critical figures in our national history. The holiday problem is that we have a logjam of birthdays, with King’s in January and both Washington’s and Lincoln’s falling in February. I guess there’s some reason why we can’t have that many national holidays right after each other. Fine. I don’t make the rules.