Has Trump brought peace to Gaza? Ended the war and cycle of killing that has now been going on for two years? I’ve had a number of TPM Readers ask me different versions of this. And in those questions is a lurking undercurrent, sometimes more or less explicit, of “does this malevolent clown actually get credit for this?” I wanted to address this question. And my answer is that this is perhaps the first time when Trump’s frequent and degenerate boast — I alone can do it — has a very real element of truth.

I don’t think Trump expended any great amount of energy over this and I don’t think he really cares greatly about any of the people on either side of the conflict. Let’s remember that a few months ago he backed a plan to “voluntarily” depopulate Gaza and remake it as a series of mediterranean resorts, sort of Monaco only 150 times the size.

I titled a recent Editors’ Blog post The Age of Monsters. I’ve been thinking about that post and theme again because I keep seeing more confirmation, more evidence of this dimension of the world we are currently living in. I stress again that the idea here is not that these “monsters” are bad people, though I would say that most of them are in varying degrees. The issue is their gigantism. They are so much more powerful than ordinary people, mostly but not in every case because of wealth, that they distort the whole fabric of society and politics. They are like big, clumsy and lumbering oafs who nonetheless have power that make if not the whole game than all the center of gravity be about them.

I read a group email from Capitol Hill yesterday essentially predicting the extinction of the Democratic Party after what is predicted to be a decision from the Supreme Court overturning what remains of the Voting Rights Act. A less apocalyptic but still daunting version of this argument appeared in an evening piece published by Nate Cohn in the Times. Before getting to the partisan and vote count implications, let’s first discuss what this means, which is essentially ending African-American political representation in the states of the old Confederacy. Most if not all majority-minority districts disappear and Republican state legislatures are free to draw up districts which spread/dilute African-American voters into safely Republican districts. Cohn thinks it’s plausible that Democrats could permanently lose (as much as anything can ever be permanent) 12 House seats. And this is on top of the strong-arm restricting happening in a number of states across the country. The overall scenario is one in which the House becomes an even bigger electoral challenge than the Senate, one that is possible to win but only in a generational wave style election.

Is this plausible? Is this true?

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.

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. But 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.

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.

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”.

Members of America’s founding generation had an ambivalent and evolving understanding of the role and importance of public or civic “virtue.” In the 1760s and 1770s, many of them were caught up in a kind of republican idea world which made this kind of virtue the cornerstone of any republic. The anchor of republican government wasn’t well-designed constitutions or legal accountability. It was the virtue of the free citizenry. By the late 1780s, many were developing a more pragmatic and jaded view of human nature and focused more on creating systems in which greed, the drive for power and other unlovely parts of human nature could be placed into some kind of enduring counterbalance. That was the basis of what became the federal Constitution and the driver especially the two young ideologues, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, both men in their thirties, who pressed the project forward.

I was thinking about this this morning when I saw a post by Leah Greenberg, the co-founder of Indivisible. She commented on the “utter moral failure of the elite of this country” when referring to a passage from an article by journalist Ed Luce who recounted talking to numerous leaders throughout the American power structure, all of whom said how critical it was for powerful public figures to set an example by speaking out and defying Trump, and none of whom agreed to speak on the record.

Luce concluded by saying “it has felt like trying to report on politics in Turkey or Hungary.”

This got me thinking about the question of civic virtue.

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.

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.