A short time ago I got email from a TPM reader with a version of this question: Josh, are you sure there’s going to be a November election? Because everything I’m seeing tells me they don’t think there are any consequences, even political consequences, coming from any of this. It wasn’t a challenge so much as a question: are you sure? I have no way to predict the future. But yes, I am as confident there’s going to be a November election as I’ve ever been. I’m not trying to get in an argument about that. This is my opinion. You might have another.

A couple months ago, I said that we were starting to see a pattern. As Trump grew less popular and less powerful at home, he would need to compensate to maintain his psychic equilibrium. He’d lean more and more into the presidency’s prerogative powers that are untrammeled and unrestrained regardless of what’s going on at home or how much support he has. He’ll be increasingly aggressive and violent in those realms of power as he becomes more constrained and limited in others. In Trump’s world, there is dominating and there is being dominated. For him, the latter is a psychic death. So leaning hard into these prerogative powers where a president is, in effect, all powerful amounts to a kind of grand and bloody self-care.

It’s the perhaps tired refrain of foreign policy and defense professionals that wars are easy to start (if you’re still, mostly, the preeminent global military power) but much harder to finish. They are unpredictable. They quickly spread in directions you don’t anticipate. As the still preeminent global military power, you tend to be on the line for other sorts of instability that your war of choice creates. And yet Donald Trump has mainly been able to engage in what we might call impulsive unilateralism without generating too many problems for himself in the short run. He decapitated the Venezuelan regime through what amounted to a dramatic raid and is now, improbably, running the country as a kind of American presidential subsidiary through the mechanisms of the Chavista regime itself. He assassinated Qasem Soleimani in 2020. He launched a massive but brief bombing raid against Iranian nuclear facilities last year. In each case the U.S. was mostly able to end things quickly and on its own terms.

We’re used to Americans, at least as judged by polls, going into wars generally supportive and then trailing off quickly as the complications and fatalities mount. Some of that is a rally-’round-the-flag effect. In some cases there’s been a precipitating event which the public wants vengeance for. Here we are seeing none of that. The public was very skeptical going in. And the attack itself seems to have done nothing to change that. A new CNN poll has the familiar 59% of Americans disapprove of the attacks and expect things to get worse. What is most interesting to me, however, is not so much public opposition but the disconnect between elite and popular opinion.

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.