It was the week that Democrats had been waiting for. 

Former President Donald Trump, on the precipice of locking down the Republican nomination, was causing chaos everywhere, while the members of his party in Congress were cutting each other’s throats.

Blundering, cynical, weird, shady, and anxiety-inducing as ever, Trumpworld was back at center stage. The former president’s festering legal troubles were on display as an appellate court tanked his claim of “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution and the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether he was even eligible to appear on the ballot. Meanwhile, Trump himself was shoving out his party’s elected chairwoman in the kind of petty, vindictive move that defies logic in an election year.

In Congress, the selfish, media-obsessed disunity of a Republican Party that put the speaker’s gavel in three different sets of hands in less than a year erupted again with vesuvian force. 

House Republicans united behind the idea of killing a Senate compromise deal that would have traded increased border security for new funding for Ukraine’s effort to repulse Russia’s invasion and Israel’s war against Hamas. 

Populists in the GOP wanted cover to vote for what many of them acknowledged was badly needed aid to Ukraine, opposition to which the right-wing media has made into a litmus test for ambitious nationalists. So the Senate GOP tried to oblige them, crafting what would have been the toughest border measure in memory and winning enough support from the Democratic majority to get it passed.