Everyone is rightly shocked, disgusted, outraged by Trump’s Truth Social meme threatening to turn Chicago into a war zone. But where’s the National Guard exactly? Trump said he was doing this a couple weeks ago. He said they were “going in” right away a week later. Maybe he’ll do it tomorrow. I’m certainly not promising he won’t. But where are they?

Let me connect a few dots for you that may be a key part of the Trump-Epstein drama and may even be what Trump has been trying to keep hidden in those files. I’m not sure quite what we’re dealing with here. But I think this is significant.

Yesterday Speaker Mike Johnson was on the Hill talking to reporters running Trump defense on the Epstein files. It sounds like pretty standard stuff — and then he says this: “When he first heard the rumor he kicked [Epstein] out of Mar-a-Lago. He was an FBI informant who tried to take this stuff down.” It’s an odd moment. Because Johnson says it in this kind of off-handed way and without explanation like it’s just one in a litany of talking points. But he clearly suggests that Trump played some role bringing about Epstein’s downfall, that he was an FBI informant who presumably told the authorities about Epstein’s sex crimes. The clip got a lot of attention on social media, unsurprisingly. One of Trump’s top surrogates is suggesting that far from being implicated in Epstein’s crimes, Trump is some secret good guy in the shadows, the guy who out of the limelight helped the authorities bring Epstein to justice.

Total fantasy, right?

I wanted to return one more time — hopefully just one more time — to the question of what Democrats should demand in exchange for their votes on a continuing resolution.

Over the years, I’ve mentioned in various posts that Trump’s world isn’t just winning and losing. It’s the dominationist world in which the only kind of winning is if the other guy loses. Trump’s whole concept of “deals” is based on this idea. The notion of a deal that works for both parties is alien to him. His version of deals is one in which he wins, in which he puts something over on the other guy or forces or pressures him into an unequal bargain. It’s the key to understanding his whole career in business. And as we know much more vividly, it’s the essence of his politics. He wins and you lose. Or to put it more specifically, any working arrangement is one in which he dominates. He’s in charge.

This isn’t a great way to run a civic politics. But as I say in the headline to this post, for the moment, we’re living in Trump’s world. And Democrats need to operate within it.