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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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, scary.” 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.

We live in an age of monsters: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the Ellison family, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, the sundry billionaires who don’t own apps. This may sound like a caustic and dramatic comment coming from me. Some of them are genuine monsters: Musk, Trump, probably Thiel. In other cases, like with Zuckerberg, they are probably more or less normal and might even be okay to have lunch with. But functionally, in the role they play and power they wield in our society, they are monsters. And the function of the Trump era has been to wind them all together into a single formation, first by allurement and then by force.

This realization first started to dawn on me in the years after Citizens United, the court decision that essentially ended meaningful campaign finance law in the United States. It came in the first reactions to Citizens United or more specifically the spending it made possible. Billionaires and centi-millionaires started gaining publicity and critical reactions to the scale of their spending and the impact it had on elections. Political giving at scale by the extremely wealthy wasn’t new. It had just taken a half-century hiatus. Perhaps the difference was the internet. Whatever it was, the years after 2010 spawned the idea that the very wealthy and the extremely powerful needed to be afforded more protections, more privacy for their giving then ordinary people who might donate $50 or even $5,000 up near the candidate donation limit.

Over the weekend we had a confluence of three stories which together illustrate where the federal government is eight months into the second Trump administration. 1. The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was either fired or resigned under pressure (probably the latter) for his refusal/inability to prosecute designated Trump enemies like New York Attorney General Letitia James. 2. We learned that last fall, Tom Homan was the subject of an investigation in which he had accepted a literal bag of $50,000 cash for corrupt actions during the second Trump administration should Trump again be elected. Investigators were waiting to see if Homan, who is now Trump’s border czar, would follow through on those promises once in office. (If you stiff the folks who bribed you it’s still a crime but it’s a lesser offense.) However, the Trump DOJ shut down the investigation. 3. Finally, NOTUS reports this morning that Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section has gone from 36 “experienced attorneys assigned full-time to investigate corrupt politicians and police officers” to two. That’s two as in double of one. The departures are a mix of firings, pressured or forced resignations, resignations on principle and reassignments.

There are many threads surrounding the MAGA right’s ongoing martyr-making and canonization of Charlie Kirk. We know about the tendentious rewriting of history both from Kirk’s stalwarts and his fellow travelers; we know how his death is being used as the pretext for various crackdowns on free speech and domestic enemies. But the part of this saga that is most interesting to me is the part that is based on a fairly simple and lazy misunderstanding. It’s not a terribly large part of the story but it contains some interesting dimensions.

Ezra Klein, rather notoriously, eulogized Kirk as someone who was doing politics right. He wanted to debate everyone. He was a master of persuasion, Klein claimed. California Gov. Gavin Newsom made similar points. Each of them made slightly better points than their one-line quotes that have gotten the most circulation. But in those comments and in their penumbras an idea got hatched that Kirk was an example of people debating their disagreements, engaging rather than retreating to their echo-chamber bubbles.