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Here’s a brief follow up on yesterday’s Israeli election now that the actual vote count and results are coming into view. We began with exit polls suggesting that the “change” bloc had secured slightly more seats than the Netanyahu bloc — 52 to 50 seats — with the two Arab parties getting a historically high 18 or 19 seats. Then the exits started to shift to the Netanyahu bloc and Likud officials were claiming he had been dramatically underestimated and would get upwards of 60 seat and perhaps even a majority. The actual results were lopsided in Netanyahu’s direction but as they’ve been counted they’ve trended down. Now with 86% of the vote counted it’s down to 53 seats Netanyahu bloc, 48 for the “change” bloc and 19 for the two Arab parties. If the trend continues, the Netanyahu bloc might fall one or two seats lower but I have no insight whether the votes that remain will continue that downward trend.

Earlier today I discussed how the initial exit polls show an inconclusive result of today’s Israeli election. Roughly 52 seats for the change bloc, 50 for the Netanyahu bloc and perhaps 18 for the two predominantly Arab/Palestinian parties. So what’s the story with those 18 additional seats, which could, in theory, provide either bloc with a comfortable majority?

This is a complicated question, but I’ll try to give as simple an overview as I can.

There is a big taboo in the Jewish Israeli body politic on governments relying on the votes of the non-Zionist or anti-Zionist/predominantly Arab parties. Depending on how you want to look at it, this is either the ingrained nationalism/racism of Israeli society or the fact that these parties don’t accept the foundational idea of the state. I think the best answer is that there are strong dimensions of both. It’s fair to note that the Arab Druze population of Israel serves in the IDF, is integrated into society and votes overwhelmingly for the various predominantly Zionist parties. Other Zionist parties, especially on the left have, or have had, Arab Knesset members and Arab voters. But the simple reality is that Jewish and Arab/Palestinian voters in Israel vote overwhelmingly for predominantly Jewish and predominantly Arab parties.

So here we are. So much of the last 24 months has been about the Trump opposition rebuilding its energies, pacing its morale, marshaling its resources, building walls as firm against autocracy as possible with no power in Washington and preparing for the shot at reclaiming as much of that power as possible. In a week and a day we’ll get the first measure of the results. And we’ll get our first look at how the table is set for the next two years.

I wanted to return to the topic we discussed at the end of last week — the Democratic email and text fundraising colossus — but now from a different perspective. I wrote a response to Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach’s piece in The New Republic about all the problems with the system. While I don’t agree with every point, it’s a very valuable article and points toward at least two straightforward if challenging-to-implement reforms. But we also shouldn’t lose sight of what an amazing accomplishment and how incredibly needed Democratic small donor fundraising is. It is a genuinely mass-based, non-oligarch system of funding political campaigns at a time when the Supreme Court has given billionaire oligarchs free rein to buy campaigns and offices at scale.

The New Republic has a new piece out by Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach called How the Consulting Class is Eating the Democratic Party. It’s a very interesting piece and I recommend it to you. The following is a series of comments, responses, thoughts, not necessarily in any particular order. That’s in part because this is a big article and in a several different articles bundled into one, some parts of which I agree with more than others.

The basic gist is that you have a Democratic consulting industry based on profit maximization which is burning through Democratic Party patience, commitment, money rather than cultivating them for the long haul. That expresses itself through high-pressure, doomy fundraising asks and by SuperPACs, fundraising vendors, consultants, etc. who spend a huge amount of fundraising dollars on fundraising itself. Here’s one key passage from the piece …

Meta got hit this week with its biggest fine yet, the latest in a mounting pile of court-ordered payments.

Here is one of those things we can see on the horizon and it will be important to be ready for. It will become especially important if Democrats take both the House and the Senate.

It’s a given that even with only the House under Democratic control, we’re in for a period of pretty intense inter-branch conflict. Just how intense, whether Democrats will fight as much as their partisans demand … those things we can’t know. But this basic feature of the next Congress is pretty clear. What I’d like to discuss here is a wrinkle in that fabric that hasn’t gotten enough attention.

One interesting dimension of the “Wedgewood Polls” story I discussed last night is that Republican leaders are latching on to it as evidence that all the polls are fake or at least wrong. Normally you might see this as part of election denial or setting the stage for questioning results. Maybe it’s some of that. But this looks much more like trying to prevent the bottom from falling out in an already bad situation. If your core partisans think the election is already lost a chunk of them just won’t show up to vote at all. And that’s how you can take a bad election night and turn it into a disaster.

Here’s a tweet from this afternoon from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) …

I corresponded with a TPM Reader from the tech world recently who marveled at the political salience of data centers when data centers have been around since the late 90s. Many data centers today are orders of magnitude larger than their pre-AI relatives, gobbling up much more energy, making more noise and physical pollution. But he noted that the bulk of them aren’t nearly that large. These points each have some truth to them, though I think it understates the real-world impact of hyperscaler data centers. And, as I’ve noted, a lot of our collective social angst about data centers and AI is really focused on oligarchy — the way that it appears to be the tech oligarchs’ world and we’re just living in it. The ability for town and county councils to say no to data centers is irresistible precisely because it’s the one case where democratic self-government is in a position to say “NO!” and that’s so contrary to all our other experience these days. But there’s an entirely different vantage point on this question I want to focus on.

The impact of particular data centers in particular places is one issue. But the macro-story is even bigger and more jarring. Axios has a piece this morning about how the housing sector is getting hammered by the hyperscaler AI boom, both buildings and buyers. And as you may have heard the lack of affordable housing is a rather pressing issue in American society today. This applies to everything from inflation/scarcity of the physical building blocks that are used for building housing to the scarcity of capital to fund it. If that sounds overstated look at this chart from a study we discussed late last month and which got written up in various publications.

In my earlier posts on the Habba-Grenell mutual self-immolation spectacle, I’d told you that while Ric Grenell is as nasty as they come, I was skeptical that he was quite dumb or reckless enough to be involved in what Alina Habba and her new husband were alleging.

But I may heve been wrong!

There’s a new report out in Axios that adds a bunch more detail to the story. But before getting to that report, there’s some important context and caveats. I wouldn’t see this new Axios report as quite a “report” in the sense of new reporting that advances the story. It’s better to see this as three players (the White House, Grenell and Habba/Mildon) each of whom are trading a very hot potato back and forth between the three of them and hoping not to be the one left holding it when the music stops. But instead of a literal potato, that lashing out is taking place through new batches of leaks. We need to be clear that each batch of new leaks is from an interested party, with its own goals and agenda. And it may include some false details or more likely ones that are misleading. But on balance each batch of leaks is probably mostly true, helps fill out the emerging picture and sinks both adversary parties (Grenell and Habba/Mildon) deeper into the quicksand.

Democrats’ prospects across the board look about as good as they have at any point in the 2026 election cycle, and about as good as could have reasonably been imagined at any point since late November 2024. House, Senate, governorships, state legislative races, really just about everything is looking pretty rosy. The point of this post isn’t to rain on any of that. But for the last week or so I’ve been wanting to write a post about just how close many of the frontline Senate races are, despite the fact that it’s plausible that Democrats could come out of this election with a majority in the low or even mid-50s. What I’m talking about here is no more than the inherent uncertainty around all polls and all elections. But it’s still worth absorbing.

MIT professor Sherry Turkle warns that people have become dangerously enmeshed with chatbots.

Earlier this week, we saw former Don Jr. fiancé Kimberly Guilfoyle summarily canned because she became a scandal lightning rod, in a particularly pitiful way, right when Donald Trump doesn’t need any scandal headlines — not just going into the midterms in a couple weeks but also into 2027 when it seems highly likely that at least the House will be in Democratic hands. Then yesterday, we had this new MAGA war break into the open which pits Alina Habba and her new Turkish oligarch boy-toy husband against Trump fixer Ric Grenell. Habba claims that Grenell either pocketed or misdirected a $6 million check her now-husband wrote as a contribution to the Kennedy Center. I suspect that Habba may be out over her skis on this one. Grenell is the worst. But he’s not stupid. I’m skeptical he’d try something quite that reckless.

In any case, today we have yet another new story just kind of breaking out into the open out of nowhere.

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Kimberly Guilfoyle, the recently defenestrated and soon-to-be-former Ambassador to Greece, has that stench about her of third-string corruption, the type that is hated by the righteous and sneered at by the corrupt. In Trumpworld setting up your own bribery-faucet meme coin and making billions is a baller move. Begging a MAGA-adjacent huckster to settle your Amex bill on the strength of once being Don Jr’s fiancée is sad. “Steal a little and they throw ya in jail / Steal a lot and they make you king …” But we seem quite suddenly to be seeing MAGA world become quite leaky. That’s not what we’re used to — what we’re used to is mammoth kinds of Trump and MAGA corruption more or less in plain sight. But now various MAGA capos are accusing each other, or dropping dimes on each other, as the reality of a possible Blue Wave or more comes into view.

Another only-in-MAGA corruption story hit this afternoon. Or, I guess, alleged corruption story since it’s not altogether clear which player in the story is the crook or more of a crook.

I couldn’t think what to say about this beyond simply reposting the first two grafs of this Washington Post article …

The White House on Tuesday scrambled to answer questions about the legal credentials of President Donald Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, who made a brief and halting debut in the briefing room and later said she had passed a bar exam in China, a country where noncitizens aren’t allowed to practice in courtrooms.

Trump called Zacharia “an attorney” in his Friday announcement of her appointment, and her LinkedIn profile says she served as general counsel for Fix California, a nonprofit founded by Ric Grenell, a high-profile Trump adviser. Asked Tuesday where she had been admitted to the bar, Zacharia said China — not a U.S. state or D.C., where one would need to have been admitted to practice law in the United States.

I’ve been in a conversation over the last few weeks about a possible piece I might write for another publication about Democrats and the politics of masculinity and power, particularly how this relates to how young men have shifted to the right in the Trump era. I mostly think that this is an issue that affects Democrats generally, and is not just narrowly about this or that demographic group. This has been a theme in lots of conversations at TPM over the last 20 months when it comes to the extra-ideological division among Democrats between “fight” and accommodation and civility. Going back even further, to late 2004, I’ve been writing about what I call “dominance politics,” or, originally, “bitch slap politics.”

I thought of this this weekend because there was a blip of attention to comments from David Brooks on The Newshour. “The insinuations that El-Sayed is involved in terrorism because he’s Muslim, ridiculous. Jon Ossoff, my advice to him is, if you start calling your political opponents Nazis, maybe it’s time to shut up. That’s just not what we do here in this country.” There are a slew of problems with this. Not least of which are false equivalence and appeals to ethnic hatred and bigotry. Ossoff didn’t call Mike Collins a Nazi. What Brooks is referring to is Ossoff’s debate swipe when he told Collins, “You’ve hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office and you have promoted neo-Nazi content online.” This isn’t some random swipe. It’s been one of the biggest stories of the campaign season that week after week reporters keep finding members of Collins campaign, political operation or family who are associated with far-right or neo-Nazi individuals and organizations or who distribute anti-Semitic propaganda. This is merely an aggressive statement of facts that are unambiguously in the public record. But it’s not the specifics of Ossoff’s attack or Brooks’ tut-tutting I want to focus on here. It’s the more general and more important issue of tut-tutting, elite gatekeeping and how this relates to how Democrats operate in the public sphere.

Apple’s original music player got many things right. Chief among them: It didn’t connect to the internet.

This is an update to my post from Tuesday about the “existential risk” panic. A good friend of mine reached out to me and said, in so many words, yes, all that techno-babble is weird. But that doesn’t mean these risks aren’t real. And as I tried to make clear in my piece, I agree with that, at least to the extent that if Group A isn’t made up of reliable narrators, I’m not clear who the reliable narrators are. He pointed me to this recent report put out by the Rand Corporation, which is kind of the original think tank and has always been closely tied to the U.S. government and for lack of a better word the U.S. military-intelligence-industrial complex. It’s an interesting report. Or at least I found some interesting and I think sensible prescriptions in it once I got through the first half or two-thirds of it, which contained very Randian decision trees, definitions and a lot of what seemed like assumptions about existential risk and coexistence with AI that I didn’t understand. It eventually sets out a sensible if hard-to-execute approach which generally amounts to a safety-first regime of governing AI (make sure new things don’t endanger us before we build them or make them widely available) and, critically, open the decision-making up to public institutions with public accountability.

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Donald Trump’s manic building and naming spree has been a core feature of his second term in office. And that’s saying something. Because if nothing else, you can’t say Trump hasn’t been active. There are wars, blowing up the international trade regime, the on-going attempted authoritarian takeover of the state, the bust-out rush to wrest as much money out of the presidency as he can, his significant role energizing the AI boom (and possible bust). But with all these things, the building and naming spree stands out, especially in 2026. I focus on this today. I return to this today because of news that Trump wants to turn his West Palm Beach golf club into a new Camp David, a permanent presidential retreat.

The details here are important. If Trump had some secluded property he wanted to donate to the federal government for this purpose, there might be some logic, though it’s hard to imagine Democrats wouldn’t put it up for sale at their first opportunity. What he wants to do is different. His plan is to donate a parcel of land at the private club for the Florida Camp David. So it’s really that future presidents would have there own private bungalow at Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach. As an additional, rather comical, sweetener the club’s legal counsel, who is presenting the idea to Palm Beach County officials, says that future presidents will even be offered comped memberships to the club.

For years, and especially in the last month or so, we’ve been collectively inundated with an AI industry which, uncannily and bizarrely, tells us simultaneously that AI is essential, inevitable and runs a significant chance of exterminating all of us in as few as two or three years. If you’ve dipped into this debate at all, you’ve quickly come upon discussions of so-called “rationalists” or “long-termists” or supporters of “effective altruism” who are simultaneously ubiquitous among those developing AI and in the AI safety (i.e., the folks sounding the alarm) community as well. (For the sake of simplicity and brevity, I’ll refer to these folks as the “REL nexus”: rationalists, effective altruists and long-termists. This is my coinage since I don’t know a better one.) I’ve spent a fair amount of time familiarizing myself with this world and how it relates to current debates about AI. So I wanted to share my basic impressions.

It’s hard to know what to say about former Republican Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, whose death at the age of 84 was reported this morning. Few if any political leaders in modern American history have experienced a fall quite so ignominious and total. The obvious point of comparison is Richard Nixon. But post-Watergate Nixon was never without his defenders and supporters. All but his most adamant critics granted significant successes of his presidency. And by the time of his death in 1994, he’d made significant progress in being treated by many as a sage elder statesman, albeit a greatly tarnished one. Hastert remains almost a test case of a top political leader whose fall was immediate and absolute. He came as close as one can come to have to having zero public defenders (though a significant number of former colleagues wrote leniency letters on his behalf at sentencing in 2016).

What stands out in my mind are two moments, one from his moment of ascent to power and another at the denouement but certainly not the nadir of career. Go back to 1998. The so-called Lewinsky scandal had been trundling forward for most of the year. Republicans are giddy about the Red Tsunami that was about to supercharge the existing GOP majority. Predictions of a 30- or 40-seat pick up were common and assumed. (I was one of few people I knew to basically predict no wave at all; it was simply a matter of watching the polls rather than the bipartisan hype.) When Democrats ended up gaining five seats, House Speaker New Gingrich was summarily tossed overboard — a mix of the failure of his wild overpromising and slowly building frustrations with his erratic and high drama leadership style.