I’ve gotten a number of helpful responses to my post from earlier today about the necessity of escalating the question of whether the White House will try to deploy ICE agents to interfere with the 2026 midterm elections. In the course of following up on a few points readers had made, I found a piece of model legislation published on March 9th by the Brennan Center. (If you don’t know about the Brennan Center, they operate at the pinnacle level in terms of competence, expertise, reliability. They are perhaps a bit more conventional in their thinking — in terms of the law — than I am. But that’s not a criticism. You need people working in many different lanes to save a country.) Model legislation is a generic piece of legislation that state legislatures can pass whole or pass with their own fine-tuning. A lot of the drafting legwork is done by the creator of the model. So it can then be implemented quickly and well, so long as the model legislation is good.

This seems very good to me. Let me explain.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio today made some extraordinary comments after briefing G7 leaders about the progress — albeit difficult to call it that — in the U.S.’s Iran War. He seemed to say that the U.S. won’t be able to reestablish freedom of transit through the Strait of Hormuz even as a final war objective, let along doing so in the short term by force or threat. He said he told the G7ers that one of the post-war challenges will be Iran setting up a tolling system for passage through the Strait. In other words, Iran will be so empowered after the war that it will be able to assert or seriously contest sovereignty over the Strait.

This is such a remarkable statement that I want to quote it at length. I had seen more garbled and clipped versions of it. These are from a report in The Hill.

Emine Yücel has those details, and others, as the Senate attempt to pay TSA falls apart in the House, and Trump (seemingly extralegally) orders that the officers be paid.

In recent weeks there’s been a recurring story, albeit with different players. This or that DHS or White House official gets asked about sending ICE to the polls in November. Will they disavow it, promise it won’t happen? The general answer has been no comment, no answer. It’s Tom Homan, or Kristi Noem or Stephen Miller. Yesterday, it was Todd Blanche at DOJ. There’s a general mood of a drip, drip, drip story, with all the vibes of looming danger and the hammer-fall of that danger being in the other guy’s hands. This is all a mistake. It’s a Trumpian sort of conditioning that is being perpetuated even though Trump himself, as far as I can tell, hasn’t addressed this particular question in some time. It’s a kind of watchful waiting in which all the power is being ceded to the hands of the White House when that is not necessary at all.

Being in a reactive mode, having the other guy holding the cards and waiting to know what they’re going to do and reacting when they do it is enervating, demoralizing, even paralyzing. And that’s always Trump’s personal angle: ‘I 100% can do it. Everyone agrees I can do it. But we’ll see what I decide,’ is more or less what he’s said about countless future crimes he’s dangled in front of an often-cowering opposition over the last decade.

A fascinating illustration in this Times article and the included chart of what has happened over the last four weeks. In essence, oil has shot up; equities markets have declined. That trend has been interrupted a handful of times when President Trump has created what are essentially fake news moments. Those temporarily capture markets’ attention before reality set back in. It’s a powerful illustration of the both the power and the limits of what I yesterday referred to as Trump’s “drama-of-the-day spell.”

Donald Trump’s threat last night to sign an executive order to pay TSA workers was, perhaps, a signal of where things were headed. “If the White House believes they have the authority to pay these workers, then every day for the past 41 days, they have been making a conscious decision not to pay them,” House Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) said last night, which was about right.

Overnight, as Emine Yücel reports, the Senate followed suit, approving a Democratic bill to fund all of DHS except ICE and CBP. Notably, that means funding the TSA, giving away Republicans’ only point of leverage, airport chaos (a dubious point of leverage, to be sure).

I had a moment of insight or perhaps revelation early in this war when the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz first became central in the news and President Trump was publicly debating whether he would use the U.S. Navy to escort ships through it. Would he, won’t he? Will it happen tomorrow? What will he decide. Then I was watching a YouTube show about maritime shipping. In passing the host, Sal Mercogliano, noted that, at that time at least, there weren’t any U.S. naval vessels in the Persian Gulf at all. And the kind of ships you need, in the numbers you’d need, were hundreds of even thousands of miles away. That made perfect sense since for the kind of war the U.S. is currently fighting we don’t need naval vessels anywhere near that close to the combat zone, and when they are that close they become much more vulnerable to attack. But the point is that the whole debate about whether Trump was about to do that any time in the near future was entirely contained within Trump’s Truth Social world. It wasn’t connected to any of the hard realities of whether any of that was even possible.

Due to popular demand, we’ve increased our ticket allotment for the Austin event on April 8.

Remember: If you are a member, you get discounted tickets. If you missed the discount code, just shoot me an email at joe@talkingpointsmemo.com and I’ll get you the goods.

If we sell out, please add yourself to the waitlist. Sometimes people drop out.

You can find more info about the event and get your tickets here.

Kate and Josh talk airports in crisis, Trump’s bewildering political calculus and, believe it or not, an optimistic vision of what a post-Trump world could look like.

President Donald Trump is planning to bring the UFC into the White House later this year. But the brawl on the South Lawn is not the only way mixed martial arts has become a part of his administration.

Trump, like many other right-wing leaders before him, has a long history with combat sports.

Yesterday afternoon, John Light, Hunter Walker and Joe Ragazzo got on Substack Live to talk about how martial arts has become right coded. It’s a cultural phenomenon with troubling effects that stretch from D.C., to Saudi Arabia, and the white supremacist fringe.

Check out their full conversation below.