I still have some relative confidence that the Gaza ceasefire deal will make its way through the current flare-ups. That’s because the deal itself has very powerful stakeholders behind it, ones who can apply overwhelming pressure to the warring parties if they choose to. But what we’re now seeing all the reasons you’d expect a deal like this with Donald Trump to go south.

First is attention. The best argument against this deal sticking has always been that Trump will get bored and lose interest. It’s pretty clear that’s already happened. We heard his press secretary say only days ago that his main priority is building the new White House ballroom.

As you’ve probably already heard, Donald Trump went on Truth Social late last night and announced that the time had come for his senators to pass a clean “continuing resolution” to reopen the government with a simply majority vote by abolishing the filibuster. The only proper response to this is “bring it on.” It’s never good to cower, of course. “Give it your best shot” is always the proper posture. But if Trump is able to accomplish this (I’m skeptical — more on that in a moment), that’s great news.

Tomorrow we’re going to get our first widespread read on what actual voters think of the Trump presidency. Of course, Trump isn’t on the ballot. Nor is it a federal election. But, more than at any other time in our lifetimes, all political questions revolve around Trump and whether you’re for or against him. We’ll get indirect reads on how perceptions of Trump are affecting voting behavior. We’ve also just gotten a series of new national polls, timed for release just before Tuesday. They show Trump almost as unpopular as he has ever been, not only during his second presidency but at the most feral and unhinged moments of his first. FiftyPlusOne shows his average approval numbers underwater by 15 points, with approval at 40.9%. If there’s anything “new” here, it’s that his high disapprovals are breaking more ground than his low approvals. He’s wringing the final undecideds or not-paying-attentions out of the electorate.

But the picture is different on the generic ballot — the standard measure of a congressional election. There, it is a kind of choose-your-own-adventure. The FiftyPlusOne average here have Democrats up by 3.5 percentage points — 45.6 to 42.1. That’s okay for the Democrats but it’s far closer than you’d expect with a president this unpopular. The most recent numbers are fairly scattered. NBC and Verasight have the Democrats with an eight point advantage. CNN gives them a five point advantage. But Washington Post/ABC have it at two points. NewsNation (whose pollster I can’t identify) says it’s essentially even.

The insider DC sheets this morning all have news of a coming deal to reopen the government. The outline of that deal is an agreement to hold a future vote on Obamacare subsidies (a name we should really drop), which there’s no certainty Democrats would win, in exchange for another short or medium term continuing resolution. The catch to these reports is that, if you look closely, they seem to be overwhelmingly sourced to Republicans. That, however, doesn’t mean they’re not accurate — though you wouldn’t go too wrong being suspicious. Another dimension of this story is that the Democrats doing informal negotiations — and the potential crossover votes — are heavily stacked with soon-to-be retirees, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Gary Peters (D-MI) among others.

The clearest read of what happened last night is that, as far as I can tell, Democrats won every race that was in meaningful contention anywhere in the country. That’s not just high-profile races in New York, New Jersey and Virginia or the redistricting proposition in California. It goes way down into races only obsessives or local observers were watching in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Mississippi and a bunch of other places. Democrats won everywhere, and just about everywhere they won by larger margins than even optimists were expecting.

As I noted last night, some of these were surprises against low expectations which were not realistic. But Democrats did well against realistic expectations too.

One of the most important things to understand about politics is the danger of literalism, assuming the straightforward meanings are the important ones. You can be following the libretto but the real action is in the score. Closely related to this is the danger of assuming that politics operates by a kind of Newtonian cause and effect. Object A moves when it’s hit by Object B. That’s logical and straightforward. But that’s often not how things work. You can see some of this this morning in the DC insider sheets that distill conventional wisdom.

This morning’s Punchbowl newsletter runs with the headline “Political winds whip the MAGA movement.” The movement is rocked by an argument about antisemitism, good or bad? Trump’s tariffs, his central policy, are on the rocks. Trump’s out of sync with the congressional Republicans on the shutdown. Republicans are losing the shutdown. He’s unpopular. Their policies are unpopular. Costs continue to rise. It all sounds pretty bad, and the Punchbowl editors add in the bad election night too. What’s notable though is how much of this was the case before Wednesday morning, before which they were generally saying that things were going great for Trump and the GOP.

I want to thank everyone who came out for our TPM 25th Anniversary show in Manhattan last night. Kate Riga and I did a live version of our podcast (it should be in your feeds soon). But before that we had a panel/oral history of TPM featuring three members of our current team — John Light, Nicole LaFond and David Kurtz — and three alums — Paul Kiel, Evan McMorris-Santoro and Katie Thompson. I loved this discussion. I’m not sure precisely what my expectations were, but whatever they were, it exceeded them.

Before this panel, we did a Q&A with a small group of readers and then after I was doing the podcast with Kate. Those were the things I needed to be on for. I decided in advance that I wanted to be as invisible as possible for the panel/oral history. I had some idea of wearing a hat and sunglasses. But it turns out I don’t own a pair of sunglasses. So I settled on a beanie and sitting as far back as I could. I wanted to watch as much as I could as an observer, not being in any kind of eye contact with the people on the stage and as far to the back of the venue as I could get so as few people as possible were aware of me being there. It’s hard for me to get outside of TPM, to get some distance to see it from the outside, and TPM probably has similar feelings about me.

I have what I suspect is a somewhat counterintuitive take on the deal Senate Democrats’ Team Cave made with the Republican Senate caucus tonight. This is an embarrassing deal, a deal to basically settle for nothing. It’s particularly galling since it comes only days after Democrats crushed Republicans in races across the country. Election Day not only showed that Democrats had paid no price for the shutdown. It also confirmed the already abundant evidence that it has been deeply damaging for Donald Trump. But even with all this, I think the overall situation and outcome is basically fine. Rather than tonight’s events being some terrible disaster, a replay of March, I see it as the glass basically being two-thirds or maybe even three-quarters full.

Over the last couple days I’ve argued both that the denouement of the shutdown standoff was a flub and an embarrassment and also that the overall situation is going reasonably well. This isn’t defending the members of the Democratic caucus. I don’t need to defend or attack them because I’m mostly indifferent to them. I’m looking to a half-dozen year or more time horizon in which almost all the current senators need to be convinced to take a dramatically different approach to politics or purged from the ranks of elected office. Let’s call it Change or Purge. To me, from March to now was a big step forward. The way of operating during this shutdown was very different from what happened in March. And the way it ended — here I know many disagree with me — doesn’t negate what happened during the last five weeks, either in terms of the changed behavior or what was accomplished. This is a multi-course treatment. The results of the first course were encouraging. So, on to the remaining nine.

Since I’ve focused on this Change or Purge framework in this post I’d like to flesh out some of what that means. Of course a lot of this is either characterological or a way of using power. That can be hard to capture in bullet points or outside the context of a specific political situation. But there are a series of things senators support or don’t support that gives a clear indication of whether they are serious about confronting the challenge of the moment or battling back from Trumpism.

TPM’s Khaya Himmelman has a report here on the state of the Trump White House’s national gerrymandering campaign. The upshot is that it’s not going great. Republicans have had a series of reverses of late, each with its own backstory ranging from legal difficulties to lack of legislative votes to resistance from established officeholders in very conservative states. Meanwhile Democrats’ counteroffensive is going surprisingly well. All told, the whole thing may end up as a wash.

There’s a second order part of this story I want to highlight. If you’ve been watching politics for a long time you know of a basic feature or pattern of American politics. Republicans are generally willing to act more boldly, audaciously, or even borderline criminally than Democrats are willing or able to do. The examples are legion. Because of this difference in how the parties operate, Republicans are almost always rewarded for this norm-breaking behavior. That’s how their strong-arm gerrymandering push looked likely to turn out. But now it looks like it won’t. Most analysts figure it will end up as more of a wash. Some of this is due to these contingent setbacks, the most recent of which is an apparently decisive court reversal in Utah. But the game change is how aggressively Democratic governors have moved to gerrymander their own states.