The Great American Runaround

SCOTUS freezes democracy in Texas, Cop30 freezes climate ambition in Brazil, MTG freezes herself out of Congress, and Trump briefly thaws for Zohran Mamdani.

Good morning! Marz has declared today a “low-stress, maximum-treats” operation and I’ve agreed to follow his example, meaning today’s roundup is a bit shorter as we catch up on projects and reclaim a sliver of peace. Fortunately (or unfortunately), the news cycle refuses to do the same.

We begin with the latest plot twist in America’s ongoing experiment in minority rule: Justice Samuel Alito swooped in Friday night to throw Texas a legal life raft, pausing a lower-court ruling that would have blocked the state’s new congressional map. The map, engineered with all the subtlety of a Rube Goldberg machine designed by Karl Rove, would hand Republicans five additional House seats mid-decade, a maneuver only possible because the Supreme Court’s 2019 Rucho decision basically told states, “Draw whatever you want, we wash our hands of it.” The lower court called the Texas map a racial gerrymander backed by a DOJ memo so on-the-nose it might as well have come with a highlighter. Texas insisted the court should do nothing because deadlines are approaching and “chaos” might ensue, an argument roughly equivalent to torching your living room and then warning the fire department not to spray water since the guests have already arrived.

Speaking of chaos: Cop30 in Belém continues to operate on the principle that if you can’t agree how to save the planet, you can always agree to stall. Negotiations dragged into the weekend as the world’s leaders split into two enormous blocs, one willing to consider drafting a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, and another, led by petro-states with economies welded onto oil rigs, insisting that even mentioning a roadmap is a breach of decorum. The draft text released Friday didn’t just sidestep ambition; it politely escorted ambition to the exit. Small island nations, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, the voices literally fighting for survival, are now openly declaring that the process is failing them. Meanwhile, the EU is muttering that no deal is better than a bad one, civil society groups are calling the summit the “deadliest talk show ever produced,” and Brazil is trying to mediate by holding more meetings, because when the house is on fire it’s important to schedule one more planning session about the hose.

Back home, the slow implosion of MAGA’s B-team continued with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation announcement, effective January 5, 2026, exactly one day before the anniversary of the insurrection she spent years sanitizing. The timing is impeccable, as is the melodrama. In a sprawling four-page resignation letter and a late-night video, Greene painted herself as a tragic heroine betrayed by Trump, hunted by the “Political Industrial Complex,” and driven from Congress by threats she says intensified once Trump turned on her. Her break with him, spanning Israel, foreign wars, Obamacare subsidies, H-1B visas, AI regulation, and, most inconveniently for Trump, the Epstein files, has now metastasized into full-on operatic bitterness. Trump, ever gracious, called her resignation “great news for the country.” Greene maintains her only crime was standing up for the teenage girls Epstein and his friends preyed on, a sentence that hangs in the air like a reminder of everything Trump is trying desperately to bury.

But let it not be said that Trump can’t pivot. Mere hours after publicly dismissing Greene, he held a bizarrely warm Oval Office meeting with New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist Trump was calling a “little communist” not long ago. Suddenly, the president couldn’t stop gushing about him, praising his unexpected victory and insisting there’s “no difference in party” between them, sending half of Congress into involuntary eye spasms. Mamdani stood calmly nearby, radiating the vibe of a man who knows full well he’s in the room with a political weather system that can turn on a dime. Whether this détente lasts past Mamdani’s January swearing-in is unclear, but for one magical moment, Trump and a democratic socialist managed to coexist without combusting, a rare achievement in 2025.

So that’s where we leave things today: a Supreme Court justice propping up a racial gerrymander in Texas, world leaders at Cop30 debating whether to acknowledge the concept of fire while standing inside a burning building, Marjorie Taylor Greene exiting Congress like a Shakespeare character left alone onstage, and Donald Trump declaring brotherhood with a democratic socialist he was trashing just months ago. Marz and I are taking the rest of the day to do something saner than all that, which, frankly, could be anything.