There is a lot that has Republicans divided right now. Is it actually good to demand the pope stay in his lane? JD Vance thinks so. Catholics aren’t so sure. Is it actually good for the president to post a picture of himself as the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? Evangelicals aren’t so sure. Is there some irony in a president who campaigned on opposition to forever wars launching attacks that kill the leadership of a powerful country of 93 million? There may be. Are young Republicans and right-wing influencers too antisemitic, or, in fact, not antisemitic enough? Opinions among the increasingly Groyperfied class of up-and-coming GOP staffers vary.

It’s against this backdrop that we have Josh Kovensky’s piece this morning, which finds Republicans in Texas doing a hard pivot to Bush II-type freakouts about “Sharia law” as a way to get the base energized and juice turnout in Texas’ Republican primaries and runoffs — and, they hope, ultimately in the midterms. With so much dividing Republicans, Ken Paxton, Greg Abbott, activists throughout the state and beyond have found it prudent to take their bigotry back to the basics and focus on ginned up claims of a fake Islamic threat. Texas’ Muslims are the collateral damage.

This piece follows another, related Josh K. dispatch from Texas, looking at conservative influencers’ attempts to stoke panic around a growing Dallas-area Indian community. (To support more of this on-the-ground journalism, become a member!)

I wanted to make sure you had a chance to read this piece TPM’s Hunter Walker published over the weekend about “challenge coins” being distributed at the mass deportation hub in Minneapolis celebrating operating “metro surge,” the ICE invasion that resulted in the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in addition to longer litany of abuse, violence and general predation. As you can see, the visuals are some mix of first person shooter and Aryan Nations rally. As we note in the piece, it’s hard to know at just what level of officialdom these trinkets were produced and signed off on. But they’re artifacts of the violent and degenerate culture that spawned those two murders. If you didn’t get a chance to read it this weekend I hope you will now.

In addition, there are cases like this from ICE offices around the country. So we are looking for more examples. If you’ve been privy to similar instances — maybe you’ve seen similar challenge coins distributed around other ICE or CBP operation — please let us know. You can contact us through our normal tips line or by secure channels, all of which are described here.

It’s not hard to look around America today and see signs of decay, corruption and decline. I thought of this yesterday when I saw this Semafor article on Egypt’s ambitious push to transition its electrical grid to renewables. The gist is that Egypt is trying to move from getting 10% to 45% of it electricity from renewables in two years. That’s a mind-bogglingly ambitious goal. But it’s not based on ideology or high-minded goals about limiting climate change or the situation you have in the U.S. where renewables — wind and solar — are somehow considered “woke.” Egypt doesn’t have that luxury, notwithstanding being geo-politically aligned with the major fossil fuel exporters. Fossil fuels are not only pricey, they make especially developing economies vulnerable to constant price shocks, whether it’s the Ukraine War, Iran War or the inflation spike coming out of COVID. Egypt is focused on wind power. And there’s no way to hit that ambitious two-year schedule without China, building China’s soft power and economic reach at the same time the U.S. seems determined to throw ours away.

The Trump administration is being saved again from its flagrant contempt of court in the original Alien Enemies Act case, this time by two Trump-appointed judges on the DC Circuit.

Facing expulsion vote, Swalwell resigns from Congress.

Quite apart from the gravity of the allegations, I simply cannot remember a more rapid and total campaign and, it would now seem, career implosion. Usually loyalists and especially senior staff hold out a bit longer. Just stunning in every dimension.

This post at Axios gives us the benefit of Barak Ravid’s reporting on the state of the U.S.-Iran negotiations. His sources suggest that the core hold up was the Iranian nuclear program, with the U.S. insisting on a 20 year moratorium on uranium production and the Iranians countering with something in the single digits. Note that this isn’t that different from what President Obama got with the JCPOA — a longterm but by no means permanent cessation. There’s also no mention in the Ravid piece about the Strait of Hormuz or the sanctions regime. Perhaps I’m wrong in what I noted here and the demand for sanctions relief is merely a bluff. But other reports say that Hormuz was in fact a major stumbling block, as one would expect. While I don’t question Ravid’s reporting as such, this article in the Times, I believe, captures the dynamic more precisely: Iran and the U.S. are now moving into a battle of economic privation, testing which player can endure more economic pain.

Conspiracy theories have become an inescapable part of American politics and political culture. I talked to Mike Rothschild, a journalist and conspiracy researcher who writes TPM’s Rough Edges column, about why some conspiracies endure, and what happens when fringe ideas are legitimized by some of the most powerful people on earth.

We got into the long tail of QAnon; just how many central banks the Rothschild family supposedly owns; and why MAGA conspiracy peddlers are turning on President Trump.

Check out our conversation below.

I wanted to share a few more thoughts on the current ceasefire and negotiations between the United States and Iran. As I noted earlier, there’s something so rich about sending JD Vance to lead the negotiations since the vice president has bent over backwards to signal to everyone who will listen (or write stories) that he was absolutely, positively against the war in the first place. President Trump has sent Vance to conduct and really own negotiations that almost certainly wouldn’t go well for the United States.

This cannot be an accident.

I started this post before the news broke that the first attempt at negotiations had broken down or, at least for now, had failed. That news just tightened the box into which Trump placed Vance. If the war resumes, Vance owns that continuation because he walked away from the negotiating table. It’s almost as though he gave the original order. If the negotiations fail, that’s on Vance too.

So where are we now?

There may never be a Trump quote this perfect, this good: “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime…”

Savor it.

We have a new Cafe piece from an expert on the country’s authoritarian movement.