Remarkable. Ex-President Trump appears to have had a tantrum and shut down his blog. This appears to come after news reports that it was receiving only a tiny amount of traffic. It ran for about 30 days. Sad.

According to Maggie Haberman and Byron York, ex-President Trump is telling associates he expects to be reinstalled in the White House in a coup some time this summer. This is best seen as an open invitation and encouragement of more January 6th style political violence focused on the late summer of 2021.

With Texas Democrats refusing to attend a state legislative session in an effort to block the state’s election crackdown law it reminded TPM Reader MR of a similar instance 18 years ago. It was a story I covered closely at TPM, and MR dropped me a note this morning reminding me. It’s more than just a trip down memory lane. What happened in 2003 in Texas was a preview, prologue to almost everything that would happen over the subsequent two decades. It presaged the debt ceiling hostage taking; it presaged Merrick Garland; and it presaged Donald Trump.

As we know from looking forward to the 2022 midterm, once a decade there’s a federal Census, a reapportionment of congressional seats and redistricting in every state that has more than one representative. It happened in 2010, setting the ground work for Republicans storming back into the majority in the House. Democrats rightly fear something similar will happen next year.

We had an Inside Briefing this afternoon with Paul Krugman where we talked about Biden’s agenda, inflation, under-investment, deficits, infrastructure, the fed and a lot more. I was really looking forward to this discussion because … well, we’re on totally different policy and economic terrain than we were two years ago. And I’ve been trying to get my head around new debates about inflation, distinguishing between nonsense and scare talk on the one hand and concerns which may be overblown but are also reasonable. We also talked about Paul’s concern that Biden’s medium to long term spending policies may not be aggressive enough.

Anyway, fascinating conversation, I think. If you’re a member, we’ll be posting it tomorrow here in the Editor’s Blog.

Also, for podcast listeners, this week’s episode will be dropping Thursday rather than Wednesday this week.