The Israeli daily Haaretz published a big and consequential exposé today alleging that weeks before the October 7, 2023 massacres in southern Israel the head of the UAE, Mohamed bin Zayed, warned Prime Minister Netanyahu in a direct phone call lasting some 45 minutes that something big was coming from Hamas. For additional context, Israel holds elections on October 27 of this year. And as it has for the last three years, Netanyahu’s degree of responsibility for what happened remains a central question in the election. So while it’s not explicitly noted in the article, the electoral implications are clear. The investigation itself appears to be essentially an excerpt from a soon-to-be released book. So it’s not precisely a Haaretz story, more one that they’re publishing, though that’s fine print. The article is long and detailed and I think quite credible. But it’s paywalled. So I wanted to walk you through the key details and provide some general analysis.

It’s best to think of this piece as three separate revelations. The first is that — all according to this article — Israel and Hamas in 2023 were pretty close to finalizing a semi-normalization of the situation in Gaza in a longterm truce, or “hudna,” between Hamas and Israel. The details of this aren’t fully sketched out but basically an end to the blockade, freer commerce and travel through Israel and Egypt, etc. Second is the warning from MBZ in the weeks before the attack. Then, finally, it claims that in the immediate aftermath of the attacks Hamas, was willing to free most or all of the hostages, probably excluding military-aged men in or out of uniform, with few if any conditions.

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As part of their overarching plan to reduce the power of blue states and promote myths about noncitizen voting, the Trump administration is pushing all types of changes to how the census operates. TPM reporter Layla Jones will talk to publisher Joe Ragazzo and executive editor John Light about what these schemes involve and what’s at stake.

Join them live at 2 p.m. ET on YouTube Live.

Yesterday I was kind of randomly rereading some details about Spain’s transition to democracy after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, as one does. And I noticed that Spain had finally released the last classified documents tied to the attempted coup of 1981. The non-disclosure of these documents had helped maintain various conspiracy theories and counter-narratives about whether King Juan Carlos played quite the heroic role history has assigned him. In brief, Franco groomed Juan Carlos to succeed him believing he would maintain the Franco-ist dictatorship. But Juan Carlos quickly set about putting Spain on a path to democracy and when Francoist dead-enders in the army mounted a coup in 1981, Juan Carlos famously went on television, denounced the coup, thus leading to its total collapse. The counter-argument or claim is that Juan Carlos knew about the coup or perhaps even supported it and only pulled the plug when it looked like it was failing.

The release of the documents was just this last February. And they basically confirmed the established story, that there was no reason to believe Juan Carlos knew about the coup in advance and acted decisively to undermine and bring it to an end. But it was a small note in the Times article I read about this that got my attention: one of the reasons for the release, overseen by Spain’s current center-left government, was to combat historical revisionism and growing nostalgia for Franco among young men.

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Over the last day or so, a number of the big inside DC sheets have run pieces striking a skeptical note about the GOP’s 2025-26 redistricting — Axios and Politico, for examples. It’s not just that they maybe aren’t strong enough to withstand a Democratic wave (no gerrymanders are impregnable) but that they are fundamentally based on the assumption that the 2026 electorate would look basically like the 2024 electorate, as Axios put it. That’s not quite the same as saying “as popular as.” It’s more the shape of the electorate. And that’s why it’s not quite as silly as it might sound, though not wholly unsilly. And one example of this is that Republicans made a bet that things like the big Hispanic shift toward the GOP, especially in places like Texas and the Southwest, represented a kind of realignment as opposed to just a really bad year for Democrats.

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Sort of a minor point of interest. But still notable. The Italian government of Giorgia Meloni has now become the longest lasting government in the country since World War II at 1,413 days. Since the Italian Republic began at the end of World War II — specifically in a June 1946 national referendum on whether to maintain the monarchy or become a republic — it’s the longest lasting government in the 80 year history of the Italian Republic. Silvio Berlusconi is still the longest-serving prime minister. But he did that non-consecutively and over four separate governments. The average length of a government since World War II is about 13 months — a somewhat notorious parliamentary, if not political, instability for which the Italian Republic has long been known.

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Don’t miss Layla A. Jones’ piece this morning, which details a kind of census corollary to Trump’s 2020 big lie. Republicans and assorted social media influencers are claiming bureaucrats used the 2020 census to hand seats in Congress to Democrats. That is, of course, not true. The conspiracy theory is nonetheless important, because it is now making its way into Census Bureau policy. Layla looks at where it came from, and how it is animating the administration’s war on the census.

Longtime election analyst Charlie Cook has a piece up on his Substack looking at the fast-approaching midterms. It’s an interesting piece, an artifact of the moment, not simply because of what it predicts but because of the nature of the writing in which Cook seems to be grasping for metaphors about just how bad a situation Republicans face — a bit more stream of consciousness and performance art than one is used to in election analysis.

Let’s start with the lede …

With 64 days before Election Day (although the first mail-in ballots will go out in a matter of days), Republicans should brace themselves: The three most plausible outcomes are that it will be bad, really bad, or truly horrible. 

A few sentences later he describes what he considers the most likely scenario.

Let’s start with the most likely scenario: that this is a “really bad” election for Republicans, losing between 26 and 35 seats in the House, and either four or five seats in the Senate. 

He then describes a less drastic and merely “bad” scenario in which aggressive gerrymandering on both sides keeps House losses in the 15 to 25 range. But he thinks that this scenario still nets Democrats four to five Senate seats. He calls the GOP’s worst-case scenario the same 26 to 35 House seats lost but “at least six” Senate seats gone too.

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Maria Bartiromo is out at Fox News and Fox Business. And apparently with so little advance warning that they barely had a chance to line up guest hosts for her various shows across the Fox ecosystem, let alone permanent replacements. As is so often the case in our current media environment, the news is both pretty significant as well as being fundamentally stupid. Bartiromo was once a big and reasonably well-respected business news anchor/reporter. But in recent years she banked very hard in the direction of hardcore Trumper and fairly big conspiracy theory yakker. I’ve never known the precise logic of her trajectory. But I’m not sure that matters that much.

It’s safe to say these things — this kind of zero-notice, one sentence press release defenestration — don’t happen without brass discovering something very, very bad. “We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 ½ years and wish her all the best on her next chapter.” And since being a crazy nutball isn’t bad at Fox News it points in the direction of some hard to ignore rule-breaking or reputational stinkbomb. Of course, we can’t rule out Bartiromo waking up this morning and deciding to spend more time in Connecticut … forever. But I’m leaning against that.

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In response to my post about this data center backlash outside of Kansas City (specifically Independence, Missouri), I’ve been fielding the range of ideas people have about hyperscale AI data centers. As you’d probably expect, the vast majority of people are against them and excited to see this kind of backlash through the architecture of local government. But there’s a small but vocal group saying: no, this is all a kind of NIMBY moral panic driven by anger at Big Tech when a lot of these deals, maybe most, actually are good deals for the local communities.

The last part isn’t totally crazy. Or at least they’re certainly on to something that a big part of the punch behind the data center backlash is fueled by a broad politico-economy anger about tech platforms, AI, and nascent oligarchy which in this one set of circumstances people can actually fight back against. I discussed this in a post at the end of last month. Part of the big sour mood that seems to pervade every nook and cranny of our society today is focused on Big Tech, the central and most visible moneyed power in the U.S. today. Everyone has this sense that these guys can simply do anything and there’s no accountability — no democratic control — over any of it. It’s their world and we’re just living in it. But here you have a case where you need to build a super big data center, where finally you have to come and ask permission from some sleepy town council or county commission. And all that pent up powerlessness just comes out as, No! Or, really, Fuck no! And along with that is comment that amounts to, I don’t even care what you’re doing. The answer’s still no. Because you guys have way too much power and someone has to say no to you.

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As you can see in my most recent post, yesterday evening TPM Reader BC flagged this news out of Independence, Missouri, best known as the hometown of Harry Truman. A city councilman, John Perkins, got canned in a recall election over a data center and by a massive margin: 68% of the town’s residents voted to end Perkin’s term immediately. It’s all backlash from the town’s approval of a major hyperscale AI data center on which construction is now already well underway.

While this is just one city council race, the broader metastory and this particular development sounds like one of the ur-stories of the 2026 midterm cycle. It coincides with and is related to the backlash against Donald Trump and all his corruption and wrongdoing over the last 18 months. But it’s only in the last three or four months that the AI data center story has fully broken into the national headlines. For all these reasons, I wanted to dig in and find out a bit more of the details. It’s really quite storybook in a kind of made-for-TV-movie dystopian kind of way.

Here’s the story as I understand it.

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