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.
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.
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.
