One stage in ending the conflict in Gaza is over; another begins. And as the New York Times notes this morning, the hardest questions may be the ones that remain outstanding: whether Hamas will give up its weapons, whether the Palestinians will agree to demilitarize, what the ultimate governance structure of the strip will look like.

For Trump, this is all stuff to hash out later. “I’m talking about rebuilding Gaza,” he told reporters last night. “I’m not talking about single-state, or double-state, or two-state . . . A lot of people like the one-state solution. Some people like the two-state solution. We’ll have to see.” Happy Tuesday.

Fake It Till You Make It

by Andrew Egger

Yesterday, we briefly mentioned Trump’s weekend Truth Social claim that the “BIDEN FBI” had “PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6.”

“What a SCAM,” the president raged. “DO SOMETHING!!!”

I regret glossing over it. Not only because it was an objectively insane thing to tweet—given it was Trump, not Biden, who was pretty famously president on January 6th—but because the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me to be a keystone text of Trump’s second term.

Start with the double standard here. Imagine that last year, during the perennial (and understandable!) news cycles around Joe Biden’s age and fitness for office, Biden himself had claimed in passing to have been president during the January 6th attack. It would have been a field day for the opposition and a multi-day story for the press. Reporters would have demanded answers for how the president could be laboring under such a delusion.

Trump, too, is very old—older than Biden was when he took office in 2020. He, too, plainly seems less sharp, less aware of his surroundings than he did in the past. And yet he has set the bar so low for his own conduct and speech that drilling into individual loony pronouncements like this starts to feel like an exercise in futility, a waste of everybody’s time. He could be misremembering—but he could also just be lying for political benefit, throwing the usual low-vitamin, high-calorie chum to his base. He is perversely helped by the fact that you can’t tell whether you should attribute a specific Trump claim to his melting brain or his melted soul.

But there’s more than just a simple double standard going on here. The post is the core of how Trump sees the world: Trump people and Biden people, heroes and villains, patriots and terrorists, angels and demons. All political actors are sorted into two great camps, and what matters aren’t any of the actual relevant facts about their behavior, or their motivations, or their leadership. All that matters is whether Trump perceives them as loyal allies or outside agitators. He may have been president on January 6th. But an FBI that wasn’t jumping to do his will at that given moment was a Biden FBI, in his brain.

It isn’t just the tweets—Trump now runs the whole government this way. It’s the belief that underlies freezing half-finished green energy infrastructure projects, or purging law enforcement agents because they happened to work on January 6th cases, or carrying out firings at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency because he’s still mad at Chris Krebs. These people are the demons—they’re Biden-coded—so all you can do is root them out. On the flip side, there’s the pledges he has made to police officers not to prosecute abusive behavior, his firings of a host of internal government watchdogs, his dead-lettering of the Hatch Act and of corruption laws. All these things only exist to constrain him and his allies—the good guys.

During the Biden days, questions about the president’s awareness and fitness for office tended to boil down to whether it was actually him calling the shots. Was the president being shepherded through the motions of basic sane governance by the people around him?

Nobody’s asking that question today. At any given moment, Trump may be lying or he may be hallucinating. But he’s clearly calling the shots. The task for the rest of the apparatus of government is to get to work turning that lie or hallucination into reality. When he type-shouts “DO SOMETHING!!!”, there’s no question: They do.

Saying Yes to No Kings

by William Kristol

I’ve been around politics quite a while, but I’ve always tended to avoid large demonstrations or mass protests. It’s not that I’m particularly hostile to crowds. I like crowds at baseball games. But I’m inclined to prefer political activity that’s filtered through organized elections and representative bodies.

I’m sure my aversion to mass demonstrations comes in part from the fact that the New Left was the source of such events when I was young, and I was anti-New Left. But I also had enough sense, even then, to be put off by some of the counter-rallies on the right. So though I was an (extremely lowly!) White House intern in the summer of 1970, I remember skipping the proto-Trumpian Nixon-backed July 4th “Honor America Day” celebration on the Mall.

Later that summer, though, I did attend one political demonstration. I went with a couple of fellow young anti-Communists to Central Park for a rally for Captive Nations Week. We were demonstrating for the freedom of the peoples subjugated to Soviet rule. Most of the attendees were émigrés from those nations. I recall find