The White House has been making noises about President Trump being concerned or unhappy about starvation in Gaza. After his comments over the weekend, Axios reported today that the U.S. is mulling a “take over” of aid provision in Gaza because Israel isn’t up to the task. But there are no specifics and no timeline. VP JD Vance also made some generic comments that Israel should increase the pace of aid. But the issue really has nothing to do with increasing the pace of aid or getting more money from donor countries in the region. The issue is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a U.S.-based non-profit created back in the February to take over food aid from the United Nations and the various NGOs that work with the UN. It wasn’t in addition. The UN and the existing NGOs were booted out and the GHF took over. It’s executive chairman is Johnnie Moore, a U.S. evangelical leader and businessman who started his career as the campus minister and senior VP at Liberty University.

I wanted to flag for you what I think is an important shift in the assumptions and behaviors of key institutionalist or middle-of-the-road Democrats. Here I don’t mean ideology so much as behavior, the critical spectrum between fight and norms.

Four days ago, Chuck Schumer or, most likely, someone on his social media team, posted a screen shot of an AP headline that read “Senate heads home with no deal to speed confirmations as irate Trump tells Schumer to ‘go to hell.'”

We’ve got more from Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL), the avatar of post-law Washington DC, where they let you do it if you’re a Republican.

Remember all the way back in February DC police were called to Mills’ apartment over an alleged assault of a woman who was not his wife. (Mills’ wife lives back in his home district. She’s a kind of Schrodinger’s Wife, but we’ll get back to that.) Subsequent news confirmed that the woman was Mills’ DC girlfriend, and when we last checked in on this story a couple weeks ago she still appeared to be his girlfriend, notwithstanding the alleged assault. (She soon recanted her accusation after the incident.) DC law being under the management of Jan. 6 attorney Ed Martin at the time meant Mills skated on that incident, though there was some question of whether the DC police might also have botched the initial arrest and investigation in ways that might have made prosecution difficult even if Republicans were still required to follow the law in DC.

Then three weeks ago we learned that Mills was in the process of being evicted from his $21,000-a-month DC apartment, which he appeared to stop paying rent on right after the alleged assault.

I’ve told you a few times of my difficulty launching the DOJ-in-exile project. Such is life. But there’s another set of actions, much easier to do, not requiring any organization or concerted action, which is just as important. We hear a lot of Trump administration actions decried, denounced and so forth, as they should be. What I would like to hear more clearly is that with this or that criminal or unconstitutional action, the next time Democrats control the government the actions will be reversed and those who acted criminally will be prosecuted. This also applies to bad policy. So, for instance, with the absurd expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Democrats should be saying clearly that once they are back in power, that whole expansion is going to be reversed. People signing up for all those new jobs should know that now. Democrats couldn’t reverse those things as long as Trump’s in power and has a veto pen. But they might be able to deny more funding as soon as 2027.

President Trump’s decision today to federalize the DC police and deploy National Guard troops to the city is a good reminder of the importance of what we discussed Friday: the necessity for the political opposition to narrate Trump’s abuses of power and the contents of the U.S. Constitution, to be crystal clear on what will be reversed when Democrats are back in control of the government and how they’ll provide civil and criminal accountability for those who have broken the law. It makes it even more relevant to review and remember the critical importance of the consent of the governed.

It’s part of American civic culture to marvel at the process of the peaceful transfer of power. We hold an election under a specific set of rules. The winners of those elections inherit a vast array of powers. The president gains control of the military and a vast federal bureaucracy. The president has a huge array of prerogative powers. What he or she says goes, in specific realms. Legislators make new laws. Judges make rulings on imprisonment, people’s redress of harms, etc. etc. The marvel is that a whole population of more than 340 million people freely accede to this power. We have ordinary criminal conduct which is policed and punished. But focus in on the fact of that free compliance. The vast majority of us never come into real contact with the coercive power of the state. And yet virtually everyone, even the most diehard opponents of this administration, recognize that this president has a whole bundle of legitimate powers and we will comply with them.

Why is this?

After Friday and Monday’s Backchannels, full of the ominous progress of the Trump White House, we can see again today the dual nature of Trumpism, both predatory and absurd, methodical and feckless. The key to grappling with Trumpism is recognizing that both are simultaneously true and neither reality invalidates the other. Trump’s federalization of the DC Metro police is a case in point. The President can take control of the DC police for up to 48 hours. With notification of relevant committees of Congress, the president can maintain that control for an additional 30 days. After that he requires Congress’s authorization to continue to control the DC police.

Can Trump clean up the DC crime hellscape in 32 days? It seems unlikely. Will Congress allow him to continue past 32 days? Possibly. But by no means certainly. Trump’s margins remain razor thin and it’s the kind of issue where at least a few Republicans might refuse. Will the President remained focused on becoming the DC police chief and mayor or will the whole effort go by the wayside? Was any of it more than an excuse for a news-cycle-driving press conference?

I’m mildly fascinated by this piece in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer section. It’s the review of a new biography of Andrew, Duke of York, by a guy named Andrew Lownie. (The piece appears to be free for a limited time.) What sparked my interest is the major if not central role of Ghislaine Maxwell and thus Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, the upshot of the whole thing is to make Maxwell much more central and dominating figure in the Epstein story than perhaps even Epstein himself, certainly in Andrew’s life and perhaps in Epstein’s as well.

At one level I could not care less about any of these people. As I’ve noted in my other Epstein posts, I’m interested in the story because of the way other people are interested in it — lots of people — and how that interest both intersects with our politics and in some material ways explains our politics.

I just belatedly read this piece by TPM alum and all around reasonably good fellow Brian Beutler wrote on the question of resistance to the Trump administration. Voting, organizing, protesting — those are all pretty straightforward. But what about when those aren’t enough? He starts from that saying we hear a lot now: No one’s going to save us. We’re going to have to save ourselves. Well, what does that mean exactly, Brian asks. How do people protect themselves from manifestly illegal, tyrannical government actions or the violent paramilitaries they are working to cultivate? When does opposition and resistance need to move into extra-constitutional or extra-legal actions? These are harrowing, frightening and perhaps quite literally perilous questions to ask.

Brian starts by discussing whether DC should loosen its fairly tight gun laws. He’s quite conflicted about it. He also discusses the possibility and difficulties tied to blue states withholding taxes from the federal government. Very much by design, the federal government collects taxes directly from individuals. But he suggests some creative ways to square that circle that are floating around. Read Brian’s piece if you can.

There’s a long way to go before November 2026. The pace of malign events just keeps increasing. But even with all that I want to mention some significant shifts on the 2026 Senate recruiting front. It’s an article of faith for very good reasons that regaining control of Senate is an almost impossible hill for Democrats to climb given the map in play. Democrats have two challenging holds in Georgia and Michigan. Their best pickup opportunities are in states that have repeatedly eluded them, Maine and North Carolina. Beyond that it’s all reliably red states. All that, alas, remains basically the same. But there are a series of shifts that make Democrats taking over the Senate look more plausible even though the odds remain against it.

Let’s run through some details.

Yesterday (in this post which didn’t go up as a BackChannel) I discussed the idea of “strategic depth” as a way of thinking about the sovereignty of the states in the battle against Trumpism. I want to expand on that. Because it’s become pretty central to my thinking about how the United States is going to survive the next three and a half years and begin the process of battling back. “Strategic depth” is primarily a concept for military studies. It refers to the shape and arrangement of the physical territory a country controls and how close its borders, which may be vulnerable to military attack, are to its concentrations of population, political and industrial centers. If all a country’s key stuff is right near a vulnerable border that’s a big problem. But in addition to where its key stuff is, does it have a lot of territory to fall back on if it suffers early defeats?