Tonight in Independence, Missouri, hometown of Harry Truman, city councilman John Perkins got absolutely rocked, losing a recall election with 68% voting to end his term immediately over his vote for a big data center. Construction is already underway on the 400 acre, $150 billion Nebius AI data center. The city council apparently gave the data center a 90% tax abatement, according to the linked TV story. So you get the sense that Perkins was flying a bit close to the sun.

Five council members voted for the data center. One lost reelection and another failed in a run for mayor. Now Perkins is out. So three down out of five apparently.

Thanks to TPM Reader BC for letting us know.

Over the last week, there have been a number of examples popping up on social media of Republicans, often very conservative Republicans in red states, removing President Trump from their campaign websites. It’s not terribly conspicuous. It usually amounts to taking an “endorsed by Trump!” button down and replacing it with some other innocuous tagline, or taking Trump out of a campaign biography. It’s very different from attacking Trump or doing anything publicly. But it still speaks volumes about the political moment, one in which Trump and everything about him if not everything he stands for is politically toxic, even in very conservative states and districts.

It allows us to look a bit over the horizon. What we see won’t surprise us. We probably know it already if we think about it. But it’s worth thinking about. If the midterms go more or less as expected, a lot of Republicans are going to be really, really pissed at Donald Trump. No, I’m not predicting some anti-Trump rebellion or reversion to the pre-Trump GOP. But it will be more than the standard disgruntlement after a bad election cycle. Because a Democratic wave won’t just be the expected thermostatic sloshing back and forth of modern politics. We’re still in a deeply sour public mood in which incumbents are always in some level of trouble. But in this case, Trump has taken step after step almost inviting a major backlash. The tariffs, the disastrous Iran War and resultant high fuel prices, the late fourth quarter trade war with Canada.

I note Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in the title of this headline mostly because controversies tied to his campaign are the immediate space in which we’re again seeing arguments about Israel, Zionism, American Jews and the Democratic party. This has cropped up again because of streamer Hasan Piker’s comments about how Jews need to ditch Israel or Zionism or whatever. My own sense is that El-Sayed is well on his way to defusing the wariness or opposition of many in Michigan’s Jewish community. (As I’ve written elsewhere, to the extent it matters for someone outside of Michigan, I’ve supported him from the moment he won the primary.) But there’s something that’s become more and more clear to me in recent weeks as I’ve had various conversations and arguments about this issue. One is that I increasingly hear from left-leaning non-Jews is a fairly confident declaration that Zionism doesn’t have anything to do with or isn’t the same as the “Jewish faith.” This is at best a rather total statement about a much more complicated reality — especially when stated by people outside the community in question. But it’s not only that side of the equation.

At the end of today’s Morning Memo, I tucked in a remembrance of Wendell Berry, who has died at 92. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you should.

Last week, after the death of Dolly Parton, I wrote about how Parton had aggressively and carefully preserved her various royalty rights through her life and how that was the foundation of her fortune, much of which she gave to charity. I also noted a story which figured prominently in many obituaries and commentaries: how Parton had refused to hand over a chunk of her royalties in exchange for Elvis Presley recording “I Will Always Love You” — a song which Parton herself had had a country number one hit with in 1974 and would later become a global mega-hit for Whitney Houston in 1992.

This reminded me of something I’ve wondered about for a long time, because it was tied to a bundle of interrelated minor interests of mine. To set the stage, the guy who actually put the squeeze on Dolly was a guy named Colonel Tom Parker. And yes, “Colonel” could easily have been mistaken for his first name. Parker was technically Presley’s manager. But that greatly understated the nature of the relationship, along with his role in Presley’s rise to fame and arguably his slow downfall. Parker was a kind of cigar-chomping, hard-charging good ole boy, someone out of central casting or perhaps a comic book. Maybe one part Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan’s early manager, and one part Boss Hogg — one of a long line of impresarios who both have some claim to making their charges into stars, but also then cocooning them, cheating them and cutting them off from other channels of advice, contact and more. And he wasn’t really one in a line — he was arguably the archetype, at least in the post-war era and in the history of Rock ‘n Roll and late 20th century popular music.

Rep. James Clyburn (D) of South Carolina said today on Meet the Press that he supports adding four new Justices to the Supreme Court. This would bring the total to 13. That is a common number people have focused on since there are 13 judicial circuits. In the distant past, the two numbers were kept in line. “13 is a pretty good number,” said Clyburn. “A baker’s dozen would be a good number to have on the Court.” This is a big deal. The particular number doesn’t really matter. I see adding four to get to 13 as sort of the minimum acceptable goal. But the point here is that rapidly (in time for 2029) establishing Court expansion and reform more broadly is becoming the consensus Democratic position. We don’t know if Democrats will get a trifecta in 2028. But it’s the first plausible opportunity to expand the Court.

After the bruising Michigan Senate primary, a new Fox News poll was published showing Abdul El-Sayed four points behind Mike Rogers, with Rogers himself at 51% (Rogers 51%, 47% El-Sayed). That was just one poll. But it crystallized for many Democrats and confirmed for many of El-Sayed’s critics that Democrats had just nominated a man who couldn’t win a general election in Michigan. Today, EPIC-MRA, usually seen as the leading Michigan pollster, released a new poll showing El-Sayed at 47% and Rogers at 43%. In this case, we have another poll from EPIC-MRA released about exactly a month ago which showed the reverse: Rogers 46% and El-Sayed 43%. So we’re able to make an apples to apples comparison which shows El-Sayed’s standing in a pretty strong light.

And those aren’t the only polls. Since the election, four polls had been released before the new EPIC-MRA poll. Two of those were partisan polls. One from the (Democratic) Senate Majority PAC (El-Sayed +6), one from the Trump-aligned and cringely-named League of American Workers (El-Sayed +3), and then two independent polls. One was from AARP (El-Sayed +1) and another from Susquehanna, a respected pollster but generally seen as GOP-aligned or at least mostly working for Republican candidates (El-Sayed +7).

This is a touch meta. But indulge me because I think it could have real world effects. When real world players start acting on new perceptions, beliefs, prognostications, those beliefs become meaningful and consequential even if they’re absurd or unsupported in themselves. Because they are driving actions.

As a general matter, people who write about or strategize about politics greatly overestimate our collective ability to shape how an election will play out, the extent to which clever ideas can pivot the course of an election in any new direction. We’re more small sailboats on a big ocean than some kind of latter-day Neptune actually changing the waves or the wind. But, all that said, Trump may have handed a unique card for Democrats to play against Republican candidates, especially those bordering Canada, which include key states like Michigan, Alaska, and Maine, as well as states with strong trade dependencies like Iowa and Ohio. This part requires little explanation. Heading into an ugly midterm cycle with one damaging and needless war underway, it boggles the mind that he thinks it’s a good idea to start a trade war with America’s second-largest trading partner. Trade wars raise prices; and the cost of living is the largest single issue in the election.

But there’s an additional dimension to the politics.

When some stars or legends die, they spur outpourings and commemorations that appear to transcend the mere mechanics and scaffolding of their fame. Dolly Parton was clearly one of those stars. For many reasons, with her this isn’t surprising. It was predictable and for very good and understandable reasons. But it still hits a certain way when you watch it unfold. It’s certainly not her greatest or hundredth greatest accolade. But I saw someone point out that in the hours after her death she was lauded on the social media feeds of the Democratic Socialists of America and Donald Trump’s — an emblem of her ability to transcend some of the most acidic divides in contemporary American society.

Music has always played a central role in my life. And I have an uncannily strong aural memory, despite having until quite recently virtually no technical knowledge about music theory at all — which tones are associated with which alphabet letters, chord progressions, etc. What I’ve studied pretty closely through my life is popular music history. And if you study the history of the production, composition and performance of music starting around the beginning of the 20th century, you know that one of the biggest throughlines separating the happy stories from the sad and tragic ones is rights and royalties and songwriting credits. Which will bring us back to Parton in a moment.