Political disgrace isn’t as constraining as it used to be. Andrew Cuomo, whose public career was thought to be dead just three years ago, is back in the spotlight as a candidate for mayor of New York City—and he is topping polls. Mr Cuomo resigned as governor of New York state in August 2021 amid multiple sexual-harassment allegations (which he denied). On March 1st he announced his comeback.

EVERY DAY, President Donald Trump gives fresh reasons for Democrats to rue their election loss in 2024. The failures of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris mean that everything they professed to care about—the transatlantic alliance, the state’s capacity to improve society, the rule of law—is being unwound. Democrats spent years declaiming that a second Trump presidency would be catastrophic, an existential threat to American democracy. And yet more Americans preferred him to the alternative the Democratic Party set before them. Understanding how it all went so wrong would seem to be a priority.

AT A HEARING on February 28th in one of two dozen lawsuits targeting DOGE (Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency), Judge Theodore Chuang grew frustrated. A lawyer from the Department of Justice had just repeated the head-scratching claim in the Maryland courtroom that Elon Musk—despite all appearances—was not running DOGE. Mr Musk, the lawyer insisted, is just a “senior adviser to the president”. The real head of DOGE, he said, is Amy Gleason, a former healthcare executive who was on holiday in Mexico when, on February 25th, the administration named her to that position.