By Carlo Versano

Copyright newsweek

Editor’s note: This is a preview of The 1600, Newsweek’s daily newsletter where politics and culture director Carlo Versano makes sense of Beltway politics for people outside the Beltway.

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The Insider’s Track

Good morning,

My favorite story of the week is this drip, drip, drip of leaked videos showing Rep. Katie Porter, the California Democrat leading in the race to replace Gavin Newsom as governor, acting like a complete narcissist and spoiled brat to her staff and journalists. This will probably end her campaign because it’s the kind of political scandal that affirms what was already widely believed. Porter has always had a reputation for being cruel. A bully. Her defenders said that was sexist criticism, and she was just tough and uncompromising. But you can watch these clips and make up your own mind. Lesson: Never treat people like crap, especially your employees. What goes around comes around.

So President Trump is said to be in an ebullient mood today after pushing the first phase of this deal between Hamas and Israel over the finish line last night. Nothing’s over ’til it’s over, but the agreement calls for the immediate release of the 25 or so living hostages in Gaza. Trump says they’ll be home Sunday night or Monday morning. In return, Israel will pull back to an agreed-upon line and aid will start flowing into what remains of Gaza. POTUS said he’s probably going to fly to Israel this weekend to see this through and take a victory lap at the Israeli parliament.

For everyone who cannot see through their hatred of Donald Trump to give credit where it’s due — and there are a lot of you — I just ask this. Put yourself in the shoes of these families who have been working for two years to get their loved ones home. God willing, they are going to be able to hug their fathers, mothers, sons and daughters in just a couple days. If your hatred of the Israelis — and there are a lot of you, too — makes that impossible, imagine you’re a starving Palestinian kid in Gaza City who can finally walk to get food without fear of an IDF sniper taking you out. In terms of whether this will be the building blocks for a lasting or even temporary peace, who the hell knows. Probably not. I’m sure Hamas will regroup. But this is still a profoundly good thing that Trump accomplished through sheer force of will. He deserves immense credit for it, along with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Two NY finance guys with no real diplomatic experience got done what Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan — with their decades of service and miles-long list of credentials — could not. There is a lesson in there, too.

In less ebullient news, there are now Texas National Guard troops operating on the ground in Chicago — without the consent of the governor of Illinois. (And no offense to these troops, they’re just following orders, but they don’t exactly look like the “lethal warfighters” Pete Hegseth keeps crowing about. More Gravy Seals than Navy Seals, let’s say.)

That is a very bad Rubicon we crossed this week. The White House is activating the propaganda machine to make this about “cracking down on Antifa” in places where the local leaders will not. Trump did a big “Antifa roundtable” at the White House yesterday — interrupted by news of the hostage deal — and his minions in the right-wing press are doing their part. Here’s a headline in the NYPost today, from administration mouthpiece Miranda Devine: The Dems are letting Antifa take over their cities — Trump is right to send federal troops to maintain order.

What is this woman talking about? Antifa is not taking over anything. There are street protests in cities where federal agents are carrying out increasingly unprofessional and undisciplined immigration enforcement. The administration wants these protests to get out of hand to justify the use of more force, but they have not. Not in Portland, not in Chicago. Not anywhere. When you see headlines like the above, you are being spun. The Trump-MAGA-Murdoch media nexus wants you scared so they can continue normalizing these scenes of the military in cities. DON’T BUY IT.

I wanted to hear a different point of view on this, so I interviewed a retired ICE agent and longtime cop for the show yesterday. We didn’t agree on much but I found it valuable to hear the law-enforcement perspective on what’s happening on the ground right now and specifically the tactics being used by these ICE officers. That video will be up on YouTube later and I’ll link to it tomorrow. I’m excited to show it to you guys.

The Rundown

Nobel Peace Prize: The odds-on President Donald Trump winning the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize have surged after Israel and Hamas agreed to a U.S.-backed…