The following is adapted from a paper I wrote for SECOLAS in 2023 (in fact, the last conference paper I ever gave, and perhaps my last ever?).* I thought of it in response to a comment by Dave Schuler in my previous post. He noted Duverger’s Law (to be defined below) as explaining the American party system. However, while I do think that electing legislative bodies in the US via single-seat, plurality elections definitely constricts the number of parties, just as proportional representation would expand the number of parties, it is worth noting that Duverger’s Law ends up not being much of a law. Further, the US truly is exceptional when it comes to how rigid our two-party system is (as I noted in this post). I am of the view that our primary system reinforces our bipartism (as I argued here).

At any rate, let’s dive in.

It is a well-established fact that the electoral rules of a given country directly affect the development and behavior of political parties.  One of the earliest such observations was made by Duverger (1959), and it is an idea that has been well-developed over time.[1] A key question is the manner in which the electoral rules affect the number of parties in a system. Duverger posited what came to be known as “Duverger’s Law.”  Specifically, he stated that “The simple-majority single-ballot system favors the two-party system.” Indeed, he went so far as to claim that “Of all the hypotheses that have been defined in this book, this approaches the most nearly perhaps to a true sociological law” (Duverger 1959: 217).  Duverger also suggested that proportional representation systems were more likely to produce multi-party systems.

In fact, it is not unusual to find the US’s dominant bipartism as being explained by the Law. For example, Clarke in 2020 stated “American representation is thus constrained by Duverger’s Law” (452).  Other examples include Abramson, et al. 2000 and Burden 2007.

The problem is that Duverger’s Law does not hold up to empirical scrutiny, at least in terms of being law-like.  For example, if we look at several single-ballot plurality cases (i.e., first past the post in single-seat districts), we find that the only case that appears to conform to Duverger’s Law is the United States.  The table below provides the major cases all the way back to the early 1940s.  This includes New Zealand, which shifted from FPTP to a type of proportional representation after the 1993 election.[2]

Nv is the effective number of vote-winning parties, and Ns is the effective number of seat-winning parties. In simple terms, the higher Nv, the more parties in the system winning votes, and the higher the Ns, the more parties there are winning seats. The indices take into account the relative size of the parties (see here for a more complete explanation).

If Duveger’s Law were really a law, the effective number of seat-winning parties should be close to 2.0 in all cases (and, really, the number of vote-winning parties over time should approach 2.0 as well). The UK has actually seen increases in these areas over time. The main structural differences are 1) a larger chamber and 2) they don’t have primaries (and, to the conversation from my previous post, stronger parties that can oust you if you misbehave).

Mainly, this seemed like a far more useful way of explaining this than a mere comment. It is also, in part, missionary work on behalf of my friend and sometimes co-author, Matthew Shugart, who bristles every time someone makes an assertion based on Duveger’s Law. But also, it is part of my ongoing argument that something else is up in the US beyond merely FPTP and single-seat elections. I think that the main something is primaries, but I am open to additional arguments.

[1] To avoid an extremely lengthy parenthetical, I will note some of the major works in the field that followed Duverger in chronological order:  Grofman and Lijphart 1986, Taagepera and Shugart 1989, Lijphart 1994, Gallagher and Mitchell 2005, Taagepera 2007, Shugart and Taagepera 2017, and Herron et al. 2018.  These works are foundational, including some of the most recent work in the field.  It is by no means an exhaustive list.

[2] Note that in Table 1, New Zealand has an effective number of electoral parties of 3.38 and an effective number of electoral parties of 2.90—that covers a period of time that includes FPTP (as in Table 3) and post-reform.  If we look at 1996 onward, the numbers are 3.43 and 3.11, respectively.

Works Cited

Abramson, Paul R., John H. Aldrich, Philip Paolino, and David W. Rohde. 2000. “Challenges to the American Two-Party System: Evidence from the 1968, 1980, 1992, and 1996 Presidential Elections.” Political Research Quarterly 53(3): 495–522.

Burden, Barry C. 2007. “Ballot Regulations and Multiparty Politics in the States.” PS: Political Science and Politics 40(4): 669–73.

Clarke, Andrew J. 2020. “Party Sub-Brands and American Party Factions.” American Journal of Political Science 64(3): 452–70.

Duverger, Maurice. 1959. Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State. Second English Edition. London: Methuen.

Gallagher, Michael, and Paul Mitchell, eds. 2005. The Politics of Electoral Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Grofman, Bernard, and Arend Lijphart, eds. 1986. Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences. New York: Agathon Press.

Lijphart, Arend. 1994. Electoral Systems and Party Systems:  A Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies, 1945-1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shugart, Matthew, and Rein Taagepera. 2017. Votes from Seats: Logical Models of Electoral Systems. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Taagepera, Rein, and Shugart, Matthew Soberg. 1989. Seats and Votes:  The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems. New Haven: Yale University Press.

*Taylor, Steven L. 2023. “Candidate Selection Processes and Party System Dynamics: Lessons from Colombia and the United States.” Presented at the 2023 Meeting of the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies, Antigua, Guatemala.

St Andrews strategic studies professor Phillips Payson O’Brien explains why “Putin Can No Longer Hide His Catastrophe.”

Regimes that go to war usually work hard to convince their population that the decision to fight was justified and that any sacrifices will be manageable. In this spirit, Russian President Vladimir Putin has tried for more than four years to protect the population of Moscow from the consequences of his invasion of Ukraine. Festivals and other events have gone on much as they did before, and the effects of supply shortages in the capital have been limited. Even though more than 1 million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded, the government has apparently avoided enlisting too many from Moscow or St. Petersburg, preferring to take its cannon fodder from faraway Russian imperial possessions.

But Putin can no longer lull Muscovites into thinking that his war does not involve them. Earlier this month, the annual parade commemorating the defeat of Germany in World War II was startlingly short and devoid of most of the usual military hardware, because the Russian dictator was terrified of Ukrainian drone attacks. A week later, Ukraine launched hundreds of drones and cruise missiles on the Russian capital. The action, an audacious counterstrike to a mass Russian attack on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities two days earlier, showed that multiple rings of air defense around Moscow have been thoroughly compromised. The narrative that Putin has constructed—about a mere “special military operation” that need not trouble Russia’s elites or middle class—is now unraveling completely. Any pretense that Moscow itself can stay out of the war has vanished.

In armed conflicts between nations, major momentum shifts occur when one of the combatants loses control of events—when its rulers can no longer convincingly tell themselves or their public that their side is on the cusp of victory. Although the 1968 Tet Offensive by North Vietnam and the Vietcong was a military failure, the attacks along the length and breadth of South Vietnam made many Americans conclude that the U.S. effort to prop up the Saigon government was doomed.

[…]

How the news of Ukraine’s growing strength—and Moscow’s exposure to future attacks—will alter public opinion in Russia is difficult to judge, not least because of censorship. To keep the population ignorant, Putin’s government has tightened restrictions on the use of the internet. But in recent days, videos have circulated of Russians expressing shock at their capital’s vulnerability. Russian newspapers have been forced to write stories about Ukrainian capabilities. One even referred to the drone attack as “audacious.”

Ukraine previously struggled to deploy accurate long-range-weapons systems but now appears to have improved its targeting capabilities and production capacity. In the counterstrike on Moscow, Ukrainian systems undeniably hit a range of strategic targets: an electronics-component factory, oil infrastructure, and other facilities. Even Moscow’s main airport shut down for a while because of the attack. Having penetrated Moscow’s defenses once, Ukraine will almost certainly do so again. President Volodymyr Zelensky is signaling as much.

If Zelensky is correct, Putin will have to be more honest with the Russian people about the catastrophe he has unleashed on them. More than four years into what was supposed to be a three-day campaign, Russia is not on a trajectory to victory.

Scholar-practitioners Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, William B. Taylor, Cedric Leighton, and Steven Tian take to Time to explain, “How Ukraine Found the Cards To Win, Without Help From the U.S.“

On the battlefield, drones have been useful to Ukraine in three ways. First, they are effective at striking deep into Russia, penetrating supply lines, energy infrastructure and munitions factories; second, they save Ukrainian lives by reducing the military personnel at risk; and third, they shake Russian arrogance and confidence.

Some question whether this is a sustainable advantage as Russia plays catch-up, but we are told by senior Biden and Trump Administration sources that Ukrainian drone and anti-drone defense technology are heavily reliant in part on unparalleled U.S. technology, which Russia does not have access to, such as Motorola’s Silvus infrastructure-less solutions, which are utilized by Ukraine to operate its drones. All of which suggests that Ukraine’s technology, innovation, and cost advantages are durable. In fact, it has been reported that the U.S. has directed billions of dollars in direct investments into Ukraine’s drone industry across both the Biden and Trump years.

It is hard to overstate just how transformative drones have been for Ukraine’s position on the battlefield. First, with these powerful drones, designed and produced in Ukraine, it is now systematically striking high-value military and industrial targets located over 1,000 kilometers inside the Russian Federation, wreaking havoc on the logistics and supply chains that sustain the invasion. Recent operations have successfully targeted aviation bases in Voronezh and executed precision strikes on the VNIIR-Progress plant in Cheboksary—a facility nearly 1,000 kilometers from the border that manufactures vital electronic components for Russian Su-34 fighter-bombers and S-300 air defense systems. Furthermore, by methodically striking offshore Lukoil platforms in the Caspian Sea and major refineries in Saratov, as well as repeated bombardments of the Tuapse oil export terminal on the Black Sea, Ukraine is physically dismantling the energy infrastructure that funds the Kremlin’s war effort. Indeed, these drones have enabled Ukraine to bypass misguided restrictions from both the Biden and Trump administrations alike about using Western missiles to strike deep into Russia.

Second, Ukrainian drone strikes are severing crucial logistics chains within Russian-occupied territory, while preserving Ukrainian lives and precious military personnel, with technology enabling Ukrainian counterattacks to liberate those regions. Ukraine recently liberated over 400 square kilometers in the southern theater and recaptured significant sectors near Kupyansk, with independent military assessments reporting that Russia is suffering a net loss of occupied territory for the first time since 2024, simultaneously imposing catastrophic human costs on the invading forces. Total Russian casualties have now eclipsed 1.35 million personnel since the start of the war, according to Ukraine’s count, with Moscow losing upwards of 1,000 soldiers daily and, in the first five months of 2026 alone, sustaining over 141,000 casualties.

Third, Ukrainian drone strikes are catalyzing profound morale issues within Russia itself, methodically shattering the illusion of domestic security cultivated by the Kremlin, as the Kremlin tightens its grip over society, including through the suspension of popular messaging apps such as Telegram.

As Jake Sullivan, former National Security Advisor to President Biden, told us, “Something is clearly happening with respect to the Russian authorities and security services. They’re feeling the pressure, which is leading them to crack down on the internet and popular messaging apps”.

In the first months of the war, we all marveled at Ukraine’s resilience. As the war has dragged on, it has been coupled with admiration for their remarkable ingenuity. They are now arguably the world leaders in both drone and counter-drone technology.

It certainly appears that Russia is losing the war. There is simply no plausible way for them to achieve even tertiary political objectives at this point. Putin is likely even beyond being able to declare victory and go home.

As CSIS analysts Seth Jones and Riley McCabe (“Russia’s Grinding War in Ukraine“) described it back in January:

First, Russian forces have suffered approximately 1.2 million casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) and as many as 325,000 killed since February 2022. No major power has suffered anywhere near these numbers of casualties or fatalities in any war since World War II. Second, Russian forces are advancing remarkably slowly on the battlefield. In the Pokrovsk offensive, for example, Russian forces advanced at an average rate of just 70 meters per day. This is slower than the most brutal offensive campaigns over the last century, including the notoriously bloody Battle of the Somme during World War I. Russian forces have gained less than 1.5 percent of Ukrainian territory since the start of 2024. Third, Russia is becoming a second- or third-rate economic power. Its economy is showing strains because of the war, though it has not buckled. Russian manufacturing is declining, consumer demand is weakening, inflation remains stubbornly high, and the country faces a labor crunch. Economic growth slowed to 0.6 percent in 2025, and Russia continues to fall behind in key technologies such as AI.

And that’s to say nothing of the loss of international prestige or the fact that NATO added two quite capable new allies as a result of the war.

But Russia losing is not necessarily the same as Ukraine winning. Jones and McCabe estimate Ukrainian forces suffered somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties, including killed, wounded, and missing, and between 100,000 and 140,000 fatalities between February 2022 and December 2025. The UN has confirmed 60,000 total civilian casualties, which includes some 15,000 confirmed deaths, but cautions that the actual totals are likely considerably higher. While Russian territorial gains have been slow, they have not been nonexistent.

As has been the case throughout the war, I am unable to conjure an end state that will allow the fighting to stop so long as Putin remains in power. He’s clearly willing to sacrifice many more Russian lives to avoid the humiliation of admitting defeat. Nor can I see Zelensky accepting Russia holding an inch of Ukrainian territory after inflicting so much death and destruction.

Given that our readers tend to be news junkies, I expect that many are aware that the Democratic National Committee created a minor kerfuffle over its lack of release of the “autopsy” of the 2024 election. The controversy was generated because DNC Chair Ken Martin promised to release the report publicly if he was elected Chair, and then decided to withhold it once he was in office. This created what was, to me, a tempest in the tiniest of doll-sized teacups (because I don’t really think these kinds of “autopsies” tell us much). Martin claimed he wanted to be forward-looking, not backward-looking, but understandably, when an organization is actively withholding things it promised to share, it makes people wonder what they are hiding.

Let me pause and note that I am a weirdo who consumes way too much political news and has written about it daily in public, for free, for over twenty years. I am a political scientist by training who has been increasingly academically focused (since at least 2010) on the role and behavior of US political parties. I note this because I could not have told you Ken Martin’s name until late April. I note this to suggest that knowing who the DNC Chair is and what they are up to might not be as important as some people think it is (nor are consultant-drafted autopsies).

Still, if you want to get annoyed, if not even a bit angry, check out Martin’s appearance on Pod Save America from April 28 of this year. Spoilers/a summary: he does a remarkably terrible job defending his choice to withhold the report and does that thing that people in his position do, which is pretend like all wins are because of his leadership. I will add that I am more concerned about his loan strategy and the DNC’s lackluster fundraising than I am about the autopsy issue, but even that does not concern me all that much, given all of the other ways money flows in our politics.

Indeed, I think that the interview underscores the fact that the DNC is not as important or consequential as people think that it is. Our electoral campaigns are candidate-centric, and the party out of power always lacks a central message because there is no actor empowered to be the central messenger (although we often talk like such a central figure/leader/organization exists). To be as blatant as possible: without a presidential nominee, there is no organizing voice for a party (and that voice becomes even clearer when a party elects a president).

I could go on about all of that, but let’s get back to autopsies! Apparently, the pressure on the DNC became great enough that it has been released! Calloo Callay! Let me run off and read it so as to mine its depths! Or, not. But if one so desires, PBS doth provide: Read the DNC’s full post-election autopsy for the 2024 campaign, and The Hill summarizes, if you prefer: DNC’s Ken Martin faces backlash after release of 2024 autopsy: 5 takeaways.

Rather than going too deep down that rabbit hole, I would instead suggest consulting G. Elliot Morris: The real reason Democrats lost in 2024. Long-time readers are likely to be shocked at what he has to say:

When we boot up the data, it’s obvious the main reason Harris lost — and the reason I am going to explore here, at this website, it being a data-driven website — is that 2024 simply had too much inflation-induced anti-incumbent sentiment for the incumbent party to overcome. This is curiously missing from its main diagnosis. The word “inflation” isn’t mentioned in the autopsy a single time (except in the context of inflation-adjusted ad spending).

[…]

The reality of the 2024 election is that it was going to be hard for a Democrat to win, regardless of who they were or how they campaigned. The broader economic and political conditions were so favorable to Republicans that you would have expected Trump to win about 90% of the time, regardless of campaign or candidate effects.

Crazy, right?

He goes on to cite several political scientists on this topic, and even provides a chart! He then notes.

In 2024, Kamala Harris received about 49.3% of the two-party vote. The model — fit on data from 1956 through 2020, with 2024 held out — predicted she’d get about 48%, with an 80% prediction interval of 46.6% to 49.9%. Harris’s vote share lands on the upper end of this range, but still squarely inside of it.

In a sense, then, the surprise of the election is that Harris did as well as she did, considering the prevailing factors against her. Given Biden’s approval rating in June (deeply underwater, in the high 30s) and two straight years of the worst consumer sentiment readings outside of a recession, the Democratic nominee was on track to lose the popular vote by 4 points. She lost by 1.5.

This comports with something I have oft-noted, which is that for all the understandable hand-wringing over “how did the Democrats lose to him?” I think that the reason the race was as close as it was (and why Harris could be seen to have overperformed) was the poor candidate quality of the Republican nominee. I still think a normie Republican would have won the landslide that Trump confabulates about on the regular.

Consultants don’t like this kind of analysis (nor does the broader “messaging” pundit class) because it means that consultants have less to consult about, and pundits less to fume about (“if only Harris had done this!”).

As Elliot notes:

Another reason consultants don’t focus on structural factors more often is that they can’t sell you any services to solve that problem, because there’s nothing you can do about them.

This is a reminder to me that we frequently get what might be called the Causation of Political Genius Theory backwards (I need to workshop that). To wit: the best way to be proclaimed a Political Genius, and thereby claim a sinecure in the newspaper, on cable TV, or on a podcast, is to have managed a winning presidential campaign. The operative theory is that if your candidate wins, it must be because the campaign was managed so well. You know, kind of like coaches in the NBA. But unlike Phil Jackson, James Carville only has the one ring with the one team. In other words, rather than Political Genius —> Winning, the causation direction is actually Winning–> (people think you are a) Political Genius.

I mean, if Caville hadn’t sussed out that “It’s the economy, stupid,” Clinton would have lost, right?

Back to Elliot and the autopsy:

The autopsy’s diagnoses — Democrats didn’t define Trump, didn’t go negative enough, didn’t engage male voters, didn’t show up in rural areas, didn’t invest enough in digital ads, didn’t have a “permanent campaign” strategy — could all be simultaneously true and roughly irrelevant to the 2024 outcome. They might matter at the margins in a future election where the fundamentals are neutral. But they probably didn’t matter much in 2024 because the fundamentals weren’t neutral.

[…]

The deeper problem with the autopsy is that it imagines a voter who doesn’t exist. The kind of voter the report’s recommendations would persuade — someone weighing Harris’s issue positions against Trump’s, watching campaign ads carefully, updating their beliefs in response to messaging frames — is essentially a Washington consultant, not your grandma who can’t afford to pay her bills because gas is up 50% and electricity subsidies just ended. One of the problems with autopsies is that voter psychology takes a lot of work to understand well, but the people who have that skillset largely aren’t the type of person the DNC is hiring to audit their choices.

It is easier, to be sure, to come up with a list of action-oriented bullet-points (A permanent campaign! Motivate the males! Define the candidate!) than to do social science.

But as Elliot reminds us:

then there is the low-information voter, who decided 2024 more than any other group. The voters who broke hardest for Trump in 2024 were the ones who paid the least attention to politics. These are voters who, in our surveys, cannot name the party in control of Congress, don’t follow the news regularly if at all, and make decisions mostly based on vibes and what their social groups are saying. The DNC autopsy spends pages on messaging strategy aimed at engaged voters and almost no time on the people who actually moved.

These simply aren’t people who are going to be moved by the right messaging. If you don’t have enough political information to know which party controls Congress, what possible campaign strategy is going to penetrate?

This is what strategists miss when they treat campaign choices as the dominant drivers of vote choice. But you can’t ad-target your way out of an inflation problem. You can’t define your opponent if your opponent’s main appeal is that he is not the person currently in charge while gas is $5 a gallon. And you certainly can’t run a 107-day campaign aimed at low-information voters and expect them to suddenly start paying attention to your six-point plan on housing. Whether you “defined your opponent early” has no bearing on the dominant force in politics.

Side note: this is yet another reminder that American campaigns are way too long. We may rationalize that they provide a year’s worth (or more) of information for the public, but the reality is that most of us already likely know how we are going to vote in 2028 (and 2032, etc), and those who truly don’t are more likely to be the types influenced by the structural forces Elliot notes in his piece.

Elliot notes that one of the things the autopsy does not do is examine the nomination process in 2024 (and the lack of contested primaries). I agree that it is kind of striking that that topic is not in the report, and ultimately, although I think Elliot and I agree on its ultimate effects. But first, let me harp on this paragraph because it hits on my “weak party” point from above, and also tickles a part of my brain about how Americans, even smart ones, continue to talk about our parties.

By letting the party nominate Biden without a primary or convention, party bosses closed themselves off to those paths to November that ended in victory. The party had years, not weeks, to coordinate a graceful handoff to a successor who could have built a real campaign around economic reform, distanced her/himself from the Biden era, and had a fair shot at competing against an incredibly flawed opponent.

I am struck here by the way in which “the party” is discussed (and the evocation of “party bosses”). “The party” did not stop a contested primary from taking place. There was no contested primary because there were no serious contestants (with apologies to Dean Phillips, whom I had to look up).

It is possible that Elliot meant to say “Harris” instead of “Biden” in that sentence, but even so, at the time, there did not appear to be a serious anti-Harris faction of the party that would have created a contest. More importantly, there is no authority (“boss” or “bosses”) to have been able to dictate the process. The closest thing to a central leader that the Democratic Party had in 2024 was Joe Biden. That’s how our parties work. There is no “the party” that is in charge of all of this. Note, as a reminder, while yes, some party elites, most notably Nancy Pelosi, made appeals to Biden to step down, it was Biden’s choice.

Elliot continues:

The autopsy mentions the truncated timeline for Harris’s campaign in passing, but does not engage with the actual decision-making chain that produced the truncated timeline at all. That omission tells us a lot about the Democratic Party as an institution — about who has power, who exercises it, and who is ultimately (not) being held accountable for 2024.

Agreed.

You can argue that even a hypothetical Democratic nominee who entered the race in 2023 would have lost given the fundamentals. I think that’s probably true! 

Agreed!!

 (I might argue that the soul searching about 2024 — the notion of an “autopsy” in general — to explain a 1.5-point defeat is all a bit dramatic anyway, but your mileage may vary.)

Agreed!!!

There is more at the link, including Elliot’s arguments that the Democrats need to swing big policy-wise to change the current cycle. I have thoughts on that that may come up in the future. He also notes that the fundamentals aren’t going away and that Democrats need to understand that as soon as you win, you start getting blamed for things not going the way people want.

Democrats are about to be handed a win in 2026–28 by voters who are angry at the party currently in power. If they mistake that for vindication of a new strategy that fiddles around the margins — instead of the same structural anti-incumbency that buried Harris — they will spend the 2030s out of power and wishing they had thought bigger when time was still on their side.

Indeed.

• Via Politico: Ballroom won’t be funded after Senate GOP drops $1 billion Trump security request. What a shame.
• By Michael Wagner writing at Can We Still Govern? Colbert, courage and capitulation. He notes that things like pressuring CBS to fire Colbert, among other actions by the Trump administration, are quite unpopular. To which I would note: indeed, because authoritarians don’t care about popular sentiment, in the main.
• Via the MIT Technology Review: A new US phone network for Christians aims to block porn and gender-related content.
• Via The Atlantic: The House of Representatives Is Turning Into the Electoral College.
• Via the AP: Trump administration to force foreigners in the US to apply for a green card abroad. This is just further evidence that the policy goals here are not about people immigrating “the right way,” but is instead about making legal immigration even more difficult. This is just a way to increase the cost and friction associated with people who are doing all of this “the right way.”
• Via the AP: Trump’s Justice Department scrubs its website of news releases about Jan. 6 defendants.
• Via Axios: Even Republicans are souring on Trump’s economy.
• But, of course, it was a “financial decision.”

• And, a little fun:

NYT (“Trump Weighs His Options in Carrying Out New Strikes in Iran“):

President Trump was in the Oval Office on Friday morning with his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, in what appeared to be a review of military options for potentially resuming the bombing campaign against Iran.

The existence of the meeting was revealed by Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a graduation ceremony at the Naval Academy. While he said nothing about the substance of the meeting, the timing was notable, as negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program and its blockage of the Strait of Hormuz appear to have hit a dead end.

There is no shortage of targets, should Mr. Trump, in coordination with Israel, decide to resume the assault on Iran that paused on April 8. There are energy facilities left untouched after about 38 days of bombing, the deep underground nuclear storage site at Isfahan where Iran’s supply of near-bomb-grade uranium is already under rubble, and missile sites that were attacked back in March but appear to have been dug out.

And after weeks of declaring that an agreement was near, and then that the Iranians were “dangling” him, negotiations seem to be at a standstill. Mr. Trump announced on Friday that he was skipping the wedding this weekend of his son and namesake, Donald Trump Jr., because of “circumstances pertaining to the Government, and my love of the United States of America.”

For Mr. Trump, the risks of resuming combat operations appear far greater now than they were in late February, when he ordered the first strikes in Operation Epic Fury, in coordination with Israel.

Now he has to deal with the reality that after five weeks of war and six weeks of cease-fire, he has failed to force Iran’s leaders to relent. Mr. Trump frequently notes — accurately — that Iran’s navy has been sunk and its air force destroyed, and that many of its missile sites and military bases have been reduced to rubble or badly damaged. But the destruction has not translated into victory.

Crucially, the near-bomb-grade nuclear uranium remains where it has been since Mr. Trump ordered a bombing raid on three nuclear sites nearly a year ago, deep underground at Isfahan. Iran’s missile capability has been degraded, but not destroyed. And the Strait of Hormuz has fallen under Iran’s control, even as the U.S. Navy intercepts shipments headed into or out of Iranian ports.

If Mr. Trump orders new combat operations, the political risks are high. Already gas prices are over five dollars a gallon in some parts of the country, and renewed military activity could send them even higher. Popular sentiment is clearly against the war, a range of public opinion polls show, and Mr. Trump’s approval ratings have plummeted to around 37 percent.

Still, he remains under countervailing pressure not to give in. “Further pursuit of an agreement with Iran’s Islamist regime risks a perception of weakness,” Senator Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on Friday. “We must finish what we started.”

CBS News (“U.S. prepares for new military strikes against Iran“):

The Trump administration was preparing Friday for a fresh round of military strikes against Iran, according to sources with direct knowledge of the planning, even as diplomacy continued.

No final decision on strikes had been reached as of Friday afternoon.

[…]

Some members of the U.S. military and intelligence community canceled their plans for the Memorial Day weekend in anticipation of possible strikes, several sources said.

Defense and intelligence officials began updating recall rosters for U.S. installations overseas as tranches of troops stationed in the Middle East rotate out of theater, part of an effort to reduce the American military footprint in the region amid concern about possible Iranian retaliation.

[…]

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told CBS News that Mr. Trump has “made his redlines abundantly clear: Iran can never possess a nuclear weapon, and they cannot keep their enriched uranium.”

“The President always maintains all options at all times, and it is the job of the Pentagon to be ready to execute any decision the Commander-in-Chief could make,” Kelly said. “The President has been clear about the consequences if Iran fails to make a deal.”

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned Wednesday that any further strikes against the country from the United States or Israel could widen the conflict beyond the Middle East, promising “crushing blows … in places you cannot even imagine.”

The United States is in precisely the same position as it was when the ceasefire was announced six weeks ago, only worse.

Iran has no incentive to end its nuclear program or give up control of the Strait of Hormuz. They have absorbed the deaths of much of their senior leadership, the enormous destruction of their conventional military, and remain standing.

The United States and Israel hit all of the major military targets on their list and then some during the first phase of the conflict. The options now are to either hit dual-use infrastructure, notably energy facilities, that radically complicate postwar reconstruction, and/or sending in ground forces. The latter option, considered highly undesirable from the start, has been complicated by the fact that the Marines sent to execute that eventuality have been sitting idle aboard ships for an additional six weeks, becoming less fit and ready for a fight.

An excellent CSIS report by Mark F. Cancian and Chris H. Park details the magazine depth issue that has concerned analysts for some time. Their bottom line: “Analysis of seven key munitions shows that the United States has enough missiles to continue fighting this war under any plausible scenario. The risk—which will persist for many years—lies in future wars.” Still, critical interceptors, notably Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), Patriot, and Standard Missile 3 inventories are being stretched thin.

But President Trump is in a fraught political dilemma. The war is already unpopular. It appears to be the one issue Congressional Republicans are willing to defy him over. Restarting the war will only intensify the pressure. At the same time, ending it without achieving any of the stated goals from the outset of the conflict would be a humiliating defeat.

NYT (“Tulsi Gabbard Resigns as Director of National Intelligence“):

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence and an advocate of a more restrained foreign policy, submitted a letter of resignation to President Trump on Friday, saying that she was stepping away to support her husband after he recently was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer.

The departure will bring an end to Ms. Gabbard’s rocky tenure overseeing the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, during which she had been largely sidelined by the White House on significant national-security issues, including military operations in Iran and Venezuela.

Mr. Trump assembled a second administration last year with an unusual mix of foreign-policy hawks in one corner and critics of American entanglements overseas like Ms. Gabbard in the other. But Ms. Gabbard and her wing found themselves increasingly marginalized in recent months, and her departure marks the most significant exit yet from the coalition of restrainers.

In her letter Friday, Ms. Gabbard, 45, said she would remain in her post as the nation’s intelligence chief until June 30.

“My husband, Abraham, has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer,” Ms. Gabbard said in her resignation letter, a copy of which was released by her office. “He faces major challenges in the coming weeks and months. At this time, I must step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle.” Ms. Gabbard has been married to Abraham Williams, a cinematographer, since 2015.

[…]

Mr. Trump did not force Ms. Gabbard to resign on Friday, according to people familiar with the matter, but her standing and influence within the White House had continued to erode in recent months.

In a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump thanked her for her service in the administration. “Tulsi has done an incredible job, and we will miss her,” he wrote.

[…]

Ms. Gabbard had been a controversial figure in the Trump administration. She was seldom seen in the room when Mr. Trump made major national-security decisions and was widely viewed within the administration and by lawmakers in Congress as not a key member of the president’s team.

Her problems began soon after she was narrowly confirmed to the job last year following an especially contentious confirmation hearing. Several Republican senators joined Democrats in aggressively questioning her about some of her past views, including her defenses of the former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden and Bashar al-Assad, the former Syrian dictator.

As a fierce critic of the war in Iraq, Ms. Gabbard was closely aligned at times with Vice President JD Vance. But that put her out of step with Mr. Trump and many of his most influential advisers, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who pressed for an increasingly aggressive foreign policy in Latin America and Iran.

Reuters (“Gabbard resigns as Trump’s top US intelligence official“) contradicts the NYT report:

A source familiar with the matter said that Gabbard had been forced out by the White House. The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but Davis Ingle, a White ​House spokesperson, said on X that Gabbard was departing in light of her husband’s diagnosis.

Trump has hinted in the past at differences with Gabbard on their approach to Iran, saying in March that she was “softer” ​than him on curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

In April, several sources told Reuters that Gabbard could lose her role in a broader cabinet shakeup.

A senior White House official said then that Trump had expressed displeasure with Gabbard in recent months. Another source with direct knowledge of the matter said the president had asked allies for their thoughts on potential replacements for his intelligence chief.

[…]

Signs of tension with the White House appeared when Trump in June suggested she was wrong in assessing there was no evidence that Iran was ​building a nuclear weapon.

She has been absent from deliberations between ​Trump and his top national security advisers ⁠on major foreign policy issues, including the U.S. military operation that deposed former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the Iran war and Cuba.

She was pushed out by the White House,” the source familiar with Gabbard’s departure told Reuters. “The White House has been unhappy with her for quite some time.”

The person said among other reasons for ​the displeasure with Gabbard were the activities of her taskforce known as the Director’s Initiatives Group. The group has worked to declassify documents related to the ​death of former President John ⁠F. Kennedy, investigate the security of election machines and probe the origins of COVID-19.

Another source of friction, the person said, was Gabbard’s revocation last August of the security clearances of 37 current and former U.S. officials that exposed the name of an intelligence officer serving undercover overseas.

WaPo (“Tulsi Gabbard resigns as director of national intelligence“) is also reporting she was pushed:

A person familiar with the situation said that Williams’s diagnosis notwithstanding, Gabbard had been pressured to depart by White House officials increasingly unhappy with her actions, which had brought unwelcome publicity or diverted attention from Trump’s messages. The person, like some others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration dynamics.

[…]

Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran who has long voiced opposition to U.S. intervention abroad, never seemed to click with the president or his top security advisers. She was not included among key decision-makers for critical meetings with Trump on military action against Iran or the raid that seized former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

An oft-repeated administration joke was that DNI, the abbreviation of her title, stood for “Do Not Invite.”

On other matters, she took actions highly unusual for the U.S. intelligence czar, a position that generally focuses on foreign threats. In at least two domestic instances — in Georgia and Puerto Rico — she and her office were involved in the seizure of voting material related to the 2020 presidential election, which Trump falsely claims he won.

For months, senior administration officials speculated about when Gabbard would depart, because of widespread frustration within the White House about how ODNI has been run under her leadership. Among the early frustrations was a messy declassification process surrounding files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which resulted in the dissemination of people’s private information including Social Security numbers, said a senior U.S. official.

Obviously, one wishes her husband all the best in his recovery from cancer. He’s only 37 years old.

Gabbard was rather in over her head as DNI. Most of her predecessors had been career diplomats or intelligence officers. Her main experience consisted of eight years as a House backbencher. She had no intelligence experience, but did sit on the Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees.

Most were skeptical of her appointment, with some going so far as to call it “clownish.” Her tenure didn’t disappoint. My favorite moment was her declaration before the Senate Intelligence Committee that, “It is not the Intelligence Community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat.”

It’s noteworthy as well that, a mere 16 months into the second Trump administration, an inordinate number of high-level officials have been fired, reassigned, or resigned. Gabbard joins Attorney General Pam Bondi, DHS Secretary Krist Noem, National Security Advisor Mike Walz, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer at the cabinet level. And there have been many, many more in senior posts, including FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and Navy Secretary John Phelan.

NPR’s Mandalit del Barco (“Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ ends with a swan song and a giant wormhole“):

Satirist Stephen Colbert ended the late night show he hosted for nearly 11 years on a whimsical and joyful note.

During his finale, he invited his audience, his crew and famous friends to dance with him onstage as he sang Hello, Goodbye with former Beatle Paul McCartney. Joining them was singer Elvis Costello, and musicians Louis Cato and Jon Batiste, the current and former band leaders for Colbert’s show.

And in the end, Colbert and McCartney together switched off the lights at New York’s Ed Sullivan Theater, where the Beatles made their American debut in 1964 and where the Late Show franchise was taped in front of audiences for close to 33 years.

Through the magic of visual effects, Colbert’s entire show and the theater were sucked into a giant green interdimensional wormhole that at times looked like the CBS logo to this reporter.

Joining Colbert for a bit earlier in the show were his late night host buddies Jon Oliver, Seth Meyers and the two Jimmies – Fallon and Kimmel – aka “Strike Force Five.”

“We came to say, we’re going to miss you,” Kimmel said. “Late night is not going to be the same without you.”

Meyers added, “Yeah, without you. Where will Americans turn to see a middle-aged white man make jokes about the news?”

NYT chief television critic James Poniewozik, whose first piece in that role was a review of Colbert’s “Late Show” debut, completes the circle (“End of a Colbert-a“):

When the CBS “Late Show” dies prematurely on May 21, Stephen Colbert will have been a late-night host for over two decades, long enough that this feels like the end of a cultural era. But what era exactly?

I’m loath to frame Colbert’s cancellation as “the death of late night” — that funeral has been going on for decades. The monoculture is long gone, the ratings smaller, the productions expensive. Yet the end of “The Late Show” still leaves us roughly where we were before David Letterman began the franchise in 1993, give or take a Jimmy Kimmel and sundry basic-cable shows.

[…]

But while his run lasted, Colbert presided over an era when political TV comedy could take a side and still succeed. Or actually, two eras, which almost perfectly coincided with his two shows: one that parodied politics, one made in a time when politics became a parody of itself.

COLBERT ARRIVED AS HOST of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” in October 2005, with an eyebrow pointed like a javelin and a fully formed thesis statement.

“Stephen Colbert,” the conservative commentator Colbert had originated on “The Daily Show,” was the real Colbert’s own Bizarro reflection, a telegenic blowhard who knew nothing and said it as loud as he could. His first monologue introduced “truthiness,” a generation-defining coinage for the idea that it is more important for something to feel true than to be true.

[…]

In 2014, when Colbert was named to succeed Letterman at “The Late Show,” it seemed like one of those cultural handoffs in which the alternative goes mainstream. He would leave basic cable for the major leagues, becoming a normal host of a normal show in normal times. One of his first guests, it was announced, would be the early Republican presidential front-runner Jeb Bush.

But when late-night comics make plans, God laughs hardest of all.

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED while Colbert was between shows: Donald Trump rode down an escalator in Trump Tower and transacted his hostile takeover of the national spotlight. The run of Colbert’s “Late Show” would coincide with, as he described it on a recent episode, “10 years of Donald Trump worming his way into our brains.”

[…]

When he debuted in September 2015, Colbert resisted going wholeheartedly political.

[…]

Who could blame him? He’d spent years marinating in partisan commentary to satirize it. “To model that behavior, you have to consume that behavior on a regular basis,” he told me at the time. “It became very hard to watch punditry of any kind.” He seemed good and done with it, ready to show another side of himself as an entertainer and a person.

Besides, the wisdom of TV for decades was that political points of view were deadly on big-network late night. People liked “equal-opportunity offenders” like Johnny Carson or Jay Leno, but if you took a side, you’d lose half your audience — especially on Middle America’s TV home, CBS.

But for the first year or so, Colbert’s “Late Show” felt rudderless, avoidant. It wasn’t for the host’s lack of talent as a performer or interviewer. The show was upbeat and playful, but it lacked a focus.

President Trump gave it one. By early 2017, he was the star of every late-night show’s monologues. But there was a difference between Colbert’s jokes and his “Tonight Show” competitor Jimmy Fallon’s. Fallon seemed desperately to hope everyone could just laugh about the president’s hairdo and move on. Colbert’s jabs had a take guided by a moral compass. (That, incidentally, also helped define for viewers the “real” person hidden for years behind a persona.)

And that’s when another funny thing happened: “The Late Show” pulled ahead and away from “The Tonight Show” in the ratings. Credit Colbert’s talent but also a shift in the culture and media environment. The idea that political stances were poison in late night, it turned out, was a holdover of pre-cable, pre-internet TV. Carson could speak to everyone because there was an “everyone” to speak to.

[…]

If “The Colbert Report” was a lampoon of pundits who took themselves insufferably seriously, then “The Late Show” proved the right vehicle to make comedy of a politics of trolling and taunting. It was an old-fashioned talk show — with celebrities, musical guests and a band — taking on an era whose rhetoric was so extreme and aesthetics so garish as to be almost beyond parody. (Today, the White House social media regularly posts A.I. slop that makes the “Colbert Report” screaming eagle seem tasteful.)

[…]

Colbert began his “Late Show” analogizing Trump jokes to a sleeve of cookies; now we’re all like Homer Simpson in Hell’s Ironic Punishment Division, being force-fed doughnuts for eternity.

I was a regular viewer of The Colbert Report from maybe 2006 through its end in 2014. Despite being on the other side of the political aisle at the time, I found the show simultaneously funny and fair. The jokes were rarely cheap and, even in his fake blowhard persona, Colbert’s genuine decency shone through. His taking his show to Iraq in the summer of 2009 was a prime example. (And OTB made a cameo appearance in a March 2012 episode.)

Like the audience writ large, I’ve long since stopped watching the late-night shows. I gave Colbert’s initial few weeks at “The Late Show” a try, but gave up before he really found his footing there. But by that point, the entire enterprise was fraught. Donald Trump’s personality is so outsized that satirizing him is next to impossible. And the country is so polarized on him that even traditional comedy really doesn’t work: the jokes are just too easy and either get mean or redundant in a hurry.

Still, I hope this isn’t Colbert’s last act. He’s an enormously talented guy who, at 62, surely has more to give.

“Life on Venus”

July 15, 2025

Pike Road, AL

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”-George Orwell.

For previous entries, click here.

Trump’s new “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is the latest example of the ability of this administration to treat the federal government and taxpayer dollars as a personal plaything. It is a massive and utterly corrupt action that is happening right out in the open. And the degree to which enough people will care remains to be seen. But for a candidate who claimed to care about his voters, this is just another example of how everything is all about him. Let’s just say this slush fund is not going to bring inflation down, nor will it end the Iran War. But it will likely reward those who engaged in insurrection in Trump’s name.

Here are the basics from the NYT: Justice Dept. Sets Up $1.8 Billion Fund That Could Funnel Money to Trump Allies.

The fund was announced shortly after Mr. Trump withdrew his lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service demanding at least $10 billion in damages for the unauthorized disclosure of his tax information.

In addition to withdrawing his suit against the I.R.S., Mr. Trump will also drop separate administrative claims. Those include his demand that the government pay him $230 million for investigations into his 2016 campaign’s potential ties to Russia and into his handling of classified documents after he left office.

[…]

Mr. Trump’s decision to drop his suit against the I.R.S. appeared to be intended to strip Judge Kathleen M. Williams, who had been overseeing the I.R.S. case in the Southern District of Florida, of her appointed role in approving a formal settlement agreement. By dismissing the case in its entirety, Mr. Trump was able to reach an agreement with his own appointees without risking the rebuke of an impartial and independent arbiter. Judge Williams, tacitly acknowledging her hands were tied, accepted the president’s dismissal of the suit and formally closed the case by the end of the day.

[…]

Money for the fund will come from a special, unlimited account available to the Justice Department for settling lawsuits. That pool of money gives the department the authority to make monetary settlements without needing approval from Congress. A group of five people, selected by Mr. Blanche, will oversee the operations of the fund, though Mr. Trump can fire its members at will. It will stop processing claims on Dec. 15, 2028, weeks before Mr. Trump leaves office.

Moreover, all this will be done without any transparency or legal review. Instead, the five appointees, all of whom serve at Trump’s pleasure, can do what they want, how they want. As Tad DeHaven and Molly Nixon explain in a piece from the Cato Institute: Trump’s Anti-Weaponization Fund Is a (Another) Slush Fund.

The fund determines its own procedures for submitting, receiving, processing, granting, or denying claims. It may make those procedures public “in whole or in part,” at its discretion. It’s required to provide confidential reports to the Attorney General identifying claimants who receive relief and the nature of that relief. But the agreement does not establish anything like normal public reporting, independent review, or transparent standards. 

The settlement also says there shall be “no appeal, arbitration, or judicial review” of claims, offers, or other determinations made by the fund. A denied claimant may still seek relief elsewhere if otherwise allowed by law. But the AWF’s decisions are insulated from review. 

And Trump gets to decide where any leftover money goes:

Then there’s the matter of leftover money. The fund stops processing claims by December 1, 2028. Any remaining balance after December 15, 2028, must be transferred before January 1, 2029, to the Department of Commerce, the Department of the Interior, or another “appropriate” federal government account designated by the president. 

That provision is hard to square with the claim that the fund is merely compensating victims of unlawful government conduct. If the money is truly tied to the projected value of future claims, unspent funds shouldn’t be diverted by the president to another government account. The timing only reinforces this concern as the redirection would occur in the final weeks of Trump’s second term.

So the settlement creates a nearly $1.8 billion fund, gives executive-branch appointees broad control over eligibility and procedures, allows opacity, blocks review of fund determinations, and lets leftover taxpayer money be redirected to another account chosen by the president.

That is not how neutral legal redress should be structured, but it is how one would design a political slush fund. 

In addition, the settlement bars the federal government from prosecuting Trump or his two eldest sons for any tax case in the past, which is not only a preemptive pardon of sorts for any past financial crimes linked to taxes, but it likely saves Trump at least $100 million in IRS fines.

Not only is all of this grotesquely corrupt as a general matter, and clearly provides a gateway for any number of corrupt practices, such as using the fund to bribe, say, election officials and other political actors, it is clearly going to be used to further reward people who did violence in his name on January 6, 2021. As CNN reports: ‘This is long overdue’: Jan. 6 rioters and election deniers celebrate Trump’s $1.8 billion compensation fund.

Such a fund could be used to pay off rioters and insurrectionists who attempt to disrupt the midterms.

Ultimately, given the opacity of the process, what stops this group from giving anyone any amount of money for any reason as long as they file a “claim”?

All of this is truly staggering, but it is also the kind of thing that is hard to get people to understand, and worse, it all appears technically legal despite the obvious self-dealing of it all.

In “Trump Gets His Payback, but It Comes at a Cost in Congress,” veteran NYT chief political correspondent Carl Hulse reinforces a point I’ve been making here for a while.

Republican senators, boiling mad over President Trump’s intervention in G.O.P. primaries that has cost one incumbent his seat and left another hanging by a thread, say Mr. Trump has chosen personal revenge over governing.

Six months out from a midterm election in which their majority is at stake, Senate Republicans face a difficult legislative path with a rising number of restless lame-duck senators and a growing sense that the president cares much less about accomplishments that could boost them in November than about protecting himself and settling his political scores.

It comes as Republicans already face a grim political environment made worse by Mr. Trump’s decisions to pursue a war in Iran that has driven up gas prices and impose tariffs that have led to higher costs for companies and consumers — all while continuing to demand loyalty from lawmakers whose political survival may depend on distancing themselves from him.

The tradeoff has always seemed obvious. Granting that many of the Republican incumbents whom Trump has helped oust are in “safe” seats, it’s a huge waste of resources. Any President in my lifetime holding a razor-thin margin in both Houses would be laser-focused on protecting Republican incumbents and nominating the Republican most likely to be able to defeat Democrats in winnable contests. But, of course, most Presidents care mostly about enacting their policies into law. Trump has done almost none of that this go-round.

Further, as was also obvious, he’s done himself harm in the short term, creating bitter enemies who have nothing to lose the rest of this Congress.

“I’d say the mood is pretty sour,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said as she digested Mr. Trump’s late-stage decision to snub Senator John Cornyn, the veteran Texas Republican and former member of the party leadership who faces a challenging primary on Tuesday, and endorse his opponent.

Ms. Murkowski, who herself has broken from the president in the past, noted that Mr. Cornyn and Senator Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican defeated in Saturday’s primary at the president’s behest, will remain senators until Jan. 3 no matter what. That means the White House must still contend with the current Senate, not the more MAGA-infused Republican conference that Mr. Trump hopes to see seated next year.

“There are still many, many weeks, many months, before the election, and this president is going to have to continue to deal with and partner with or battle with this group of lawmakers,” Ms. Murkowski said of herself and her fellow Republicans. “The president may have just opened some opportunities for people.”

Indeed, it’s already happening.

The first evidence of such a change in course emerged immediately on Tuesday when Mr. Cassidy — who had drawn Mr. Trump’s ire with his 2021 vote to convict him at his impeachment trial — for the first time voted with Democrats challenging the president’s power to wage war against Iran without congressional approval.

Numerous Senate Republicans, including Mr. Cassidy, also raised objections to the $1 billion in federal funding sought by the White House to secure Mr. Trump’s pet White House ballroom project, prompting leaders to drop it from their major immigration crackdown bill in a defeat for the president.

Some Republicans are also questioning the Justice Department’s plan for a special fund to compensate Mr. Trump’s allies, people whom the president claims were unfairly punished for participating in the 2021 assault on the Capitol and pushing election denialism.

This is often the fate of lame ducks, which Trump officially becomes after the midterms. But he’s sped up the process.

Top Republicans called Mr. Trump’s moves particularly ham-handed considering he needs his party almost entirely unified in the coming weeks to accomplish the bulk of what Senate Republicans are trying to do: muscle through contentious immigration enforcement spending on party-line votes as well as confirm executive branch and judicial nominees without Democratic help.

They say he is getting his retribution at the risk of legislative success.

But, again, he doesn’t seem especially interested in passing laws. With the notable exception of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” he’s largely governed as though Congress doesn’t exist.

Should Mr. Cornyn lose on Tuesday, he would join the informal free-agent Republican caucus with Mr. Cassidy and Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who decided not to seek re-election last year after coming under withering assault from Mr. Trump. He has been a thorn in the president’s legislative side ever since.

Other charter members of the group include Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who is in a difficult re-election fight and, like Ms. Murkowski, frequently weighs breaking from her party. It remains to be seen whether the unrest with the president within the G.O.P., where lawmakers have often expressed discomfort with Mr. Trump only to accede to his wishes, is enough to cause a rash of dissent. But in the Senate, four defections on any party-line issue are enough to defeat it.

Senators said they would have to see how Mr. Cornyn’s primary plays out next week, as well as the willingness of senators to defy the president, to gauge the true ramifications of his intervention.

But they said Mr. Trump could carry the day in checking names off his enemies list only to see his victory backfire when it comes to getting his way on Capitol Hill.

“It goes back to the old ‘be careful what you wish for,’” Mr. Tillis said.

He predicted that those no longer encumbered by the need to placate the president could alter their voting patterns.

“I think there will be fewer political calculations going into people’s decision-making process,” he said. “Look, we want to support the president every time it is good policy and good politics and never when it is either bad policy or bad politics or both.”

Allies say that Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican and majority leader who sought to persuade Mr. Trump to either endorse Mr. Cornyn or stay out of the race, was steamed by the turn of events given that a primary win by Mr. Cornyn’s opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, could put the Texas seat in danger.

Still, Mr. Thune said he hoped to hold Republicans together in their common cause.

“We are a team and you win as a team, you lose as a team,” he said. “And the sooner you figure that out, the better off you are.”

That, of course, works both ways. The President needs every Republican vote to continue his policies. Many of them, including the war and the various vanity projects, are wildly unpopular.

TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez proclaims, “Google Search as you know it is over.”

The era of the “ten blue links” is officially over.

At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.

Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.

The resulting experience will no longer look much like how people envision Google Search, which has long been defined by ranked links to websites that have the information you need.

With the revamped Search experience, the new search box simply expands to accommodate longer, more conversational queries, rather than making you decide what type of search experience or mode you want to choose at the start of your query. It will also have a new AI-powered query suggestion system that goes beyond autocomplete to help people craft more complex and nuanced queries, Google says.

Google’s AI Overviews will also allow users to ask follow-up questions in AI Mode, beginning Tuesday, the company noted.

She goes into considerably greater detail, but you get the gist. I have mixed feelings about the move, as I prefer curating my own experience using trusted sources. But Google has already been moving in this direction in recent months. For example:

I suspect many, if not most, casual searchers would prefer this bulletized summary to actually having to comb through search results, click links, and read articles.

But it also highlights another concern that immediately came to mind. Perez addresses it late in her piece:

Combined, these changes will likely further decimate Google referrals to publishers, which have already been suffering from declining referrals due to AI Overviews. This has put some ad-dependent media operations out of business, and now things will likely get worse.

There’s little time left for publishers to adapt. The new search box is arriving this week, and generative UI is arriving this summer. Both are free. The mini-app-building feature and information agents will roll out first to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer.

You’ll note that my search for “is google search going away” is already an AI summary of Perez’s report. While the report goes into greater detail than the summary, few searchers will bother to go through the trouble of finding and reading it.

On the one hand, Google is providing a transformative service here. Millions of people will get the information they need, quickly. On the other, it costs money to produce that information. TechCrunch, presumably, is paying Perez and others to do reporting and analysis. But Google and other AI-driven businesses are taking that information, without paying for it, and profiting from it. That, rather obviously, is not a sustainable model.

We’re already seeing reputable publishers relying on young, poorly paid staffers and removing editorial supervision in order to cut costs. Given the pressure to crank out large amounts of context, the quality is often quite low. And they’re already turning to AI to help them do it.

Soon, the Internet will be AI-generated summaries of AI-generated content.