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.

The defeat of Viktor Orbán is a big, big deal. He’s not only a core symbol of the global authoritarian movement. His regime was also its laboratory, its rallying point and a source of funding, a location to operate from. It’s important to note that he was defeated by what is essentially a center-right party, led by a defector from Orbán’s party. But from appearances, at least, it’s a center-right party that plans to operate within the structures of civic democracy. I wanted to note that, perhaps in spite of himself, Orbán, bad as he is, managed to again illustrate just what a weak and fraudulent man Donald Trump is. He managed to do what Trump has never been able to do: concede defeat.

This is a big and consequential defeat for global Team Strongman.

I’m no Trumper. I hate what they represent. But I can occasionally appreciate their approach to ritually humiliating their own. In this vein, it’s sort of a nice touch that they’ve made JD Vance — who’s been leaking to basically every news outlet that will listen that he was 100% against this war and it’s totally not his fault — own it outright, wrap himself in it really, in Pakistan.

Chef’s kiss, as they say.

We need to talk about the president’s 2027 proposed defense budget. It’s not like there’s been a shortage of reporting about it. But even with all that, I don’t think people have really absorbed the extent of it, it’s significance, the scale of growth. The president wants to increase the defense budget by more than 40%. That comes on top of his request for $200 billion to fund his current war with Iran.

Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán has become a kind of godfather of competitive authoritarianism, an autocratic visionary for the 21st century that right-wing parties around the world are seeking to emulate. Trump’s second term draws directly from his model, with the various thought leaders of that movement making their admiration plain. Orbán’s is a system in which elections continue, giving the country the appearance of democracy, but it is just that: an appearance.

Or so the thinking has gone. There is some irony in the fact that, according polls, Orbán is on track to lose reelection on Sunday to a former member of his Fidesz Party, Péter Magyar, who has won voters over by denouncing the regime’s corruption and incompetence. While it is no longer a question whether the country’s democratic mechanisms are fair, Sunday will test whether they are rigged enough to withstand the overwhelming backlash Orbán is now facing. JD Vance and Vladimir Putin are, in various ways, scrambling to save their ideological ally.

If Magyar’s party, Tisza, does win on Sunday, it could become the first step in a long process of de-Orbánization, which we have a great piece up on this afternoon. Political scientist Gabriela Greilinger walks through what will have to happen to unwind the prime minister’s grip on power. He and legions of his loyalists have burrowed deep into the mechanism of Hungarian government, and extracting them will not be quick or easy.