The Chief AI Officer of America, Elon Musk
How will Elon Musk shape the future of Artificial Intelligence in 2025 and beyond? Let’s dive deeper. A new kind of Government is forming.

The Morning: Democrats’ brand problem
So What, Chris Cillizza
People thought Kamala Harris was too liberal for them. “Liberal” was the most common word mentioned about Harris. It was “strong” for Trump.

Hey, Some Swallows!
William Kristol, The Bulwark
In any case, it does seem that some of the Senate Republicans may be planning to take seriously the Senate’s responsibility for advice and consent. Matt Gaetz’s withdrawing his nomination was a good start. We’ll see if it begins a trend in the cases of Gabbard and Hegseth.

Bulletin Number Five: Sinister and Stupid
Harry Litman, Talking Feds Substack
Even if it were otherwise, there would be no valid claim by the government against Smith’s team. No one has ever suggested that working on a case that department leadership wrongfully greenlighted constitutes misconduct, much less grounds for discharge.

Eastern Europe Is In The Crosshairs
A deal in Ukraine seems all but inevitable. That puts Eastern Europe in real danger.
Michał Kranz, Persuasion

But this moment is, above all, a crucible for Europe. For decades, Western Europeans have been able to bask in the security blanket the United States offered and to indulge in pacifistic visions. That illusion ended first for the states bordering Putin’s Russia, but Europe is now facing the same fork in the road—either make security a priority and forge an independent path forward on defense, or let Putin continue to have his way.

A Third World War?
Timothy Snyder, Thinking about…
Precisely because Ukrainians have made matters easy for us, we can take their sacrifice and their suffering for granted.  Ukrainian resistance creates the world in which we can listen to our own fears rather than attend to strategic realities.  Their courage enables us to choose cowardice.  But imposing our hysteria on the courageous people who make us safe is the most dangerous thing we can do.  Nobody in their right mind wants a third world war.  So let’s not bring it about by abandoning the people who are holding it back.

Trump’s bad-boys fixation
Mike Allen, Axios AM
The big picture: Trump’s instincts on power are on full display with his pick of Fox News’ Pete Hegseth for Defense secretary and his impulsive (now withdrawn) choice of former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) for attorney general. Both were highly controversial picks for jobs that countless people with more experience would kill to get.

AM Headlines

Axios AM   Smerconish  The Hill Morning Report   CNN Breaking News

PM Headlines

Axios PM    Politico Nightly

Associated Press   Digital Future Daily (Politico).   NPR Politics

Presidents often claim mandates − especially when they want to expand their power or are on the defensive

Julia R. Azari
Here are some specifics from my research:
1. Mandate claims accompany expansions of presidential power
2. Presidents use mandate claims when on the defensive
3. Conservative and Democratic mandate claims diverge in focus

As Trump touts plans for immigrant roundup, militias are standing back, but standing by

Amy Cooter, Middlebury
Some militia groups may see it as their duty to assist with immigration-control efforts. Some may even be deputized for this purpose by local law enforcement agencies.

Opioid-free surgery treats pain at every physical and emotional level

Heather Margonari, University of Pittsburgh; Jacques E. Chelly, University of Pittsburgh; Shiv K. Goel, University of Pittsburgh
Surgical patients are opting out of opioids due to concerns about side effects and addiction. Combining methods to manage pain can take these fears into account without compromising on care.

Here’s the deeper truth: When democratic institutions fail to address everyday struggles—from crushing housing costs to vanishing economic mobility—that vacuum gets filled with cultural grievances. The much-discussed backlash against “wokeness” isn’t primarily about ideology. It’s what happens when kitchen table concerns go unaddressed and unheard. Most people don’t organically wake up angry about pronouns or bathrooms. They turn to these battles when no one seems to be fighting for them and what keeps them up at night.

My Big Three Takeaways
#1: A new way of listening
#2: Delivering change you can see
#3: Building authentic connections

They’re the party of government. They should start acting like it.

This month’s election was not just a defeat for the Democrats. It was the end of the Democratic Party as we know it. The one conclusion that everybody seems to share in common is that the Democrats, to reconstitute themselves, need to make some bold moves. But almost nobody has any idea what those bold moves are.

The main reason that the Democrats have been unwilling to flag corporate giveaways as their core issue is that the party is hopelessly indebted to corporations as their donor base. But the 2024 election demonstrated the limitations of money in elections. The Democrats outspent Republicans by $460 million in the presidential race and it got them nothing. A coherent message is well worth a sacrifice of funding.

For my money, a better approach is to be found in the writing of people like Michael Lind, a journalist and writer at the University of Texas at Austin, and Sohrab Ahmari, editor-in-chief of the online magazine Compact. One of their key points is that other countries—as America did at the height of its prosperity—have “stakeholder capitalism,” in which corporations are answerable to wage boards, labor, and elements of society: to “stakeholders” broadly construed. In the late 1970s, however, the Anglo-American world made a radical departure to “shareholder capitalism,” in which shareholder value—or the very dubious morality of “shareholder ethics”—became the sole economic determinant. It always was questionable as an economic theory and, as Jack Welch, one of the architects of shareholder value, later put it, “Strictly speaking, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.”

No shortcuts, no ceilings, no hiding from the media and other key findings from the race for the White House

1. Campaigns: There are no shortcuts.
2. Strategy: Don’t accept that you can’t grow the electorate.
3. Tactics: You can’t run from the media if you’re running for office.
4. Issues: Even post-Dobbs, the economy and inflation ruled.
5. Values: They still matter, but framing matters more.
6. Culture: Trump’s 10-year realignment is complete.
7. Polls: Pollsters did a great job learning Trump, less so on Harris.
8. AI: Still early, generated content runs against authenticity.

Democrats need to stick with simple messages and then repeat, repeat, repeat.

We care about you. We hear your concerns. We feel your pain. We are fighting for you.” Look people in the eye and say it. Over and over. Let them know you care.

Then let them know this: “Republicans are trying to hurt you. They only care about their Mar-a-Lago millionaire and billionaire friends. They hate you. Republicans hate you. Republicans think you are scum. Republicans treat you like crap.” It’s true. So repeat it. Over and over. We care. They hate you. We fight for you. They scam you. Over and over and over.

In a general sense, this should be the economic policy of the Democratic Party. The Party slogan should be “Deregulate and Redistribute.”

Deregulation allows the pie to grow. Democrats should join with Republicans in cutting government red tape. Housing would be much more affordable if zoning laws were streamlined and to some extent nationalized. More clean energy sources would be coming online if localities could not block them.

Redistribution is what people need. That is, people need money, not government programs. Social Security basically works that way.

Progressive activists can’t conceive of a problem that can’t be fixed by talking about ‘billionaires and corporate greed,’ but that’s what Democrats have.

My contention is not that messaging against “corporate greed” is unpopular. I know that certain progressive economic messages test well — unlike a lot of centrist commentators, I wrote multiple defenses of Kamala Harris’s choice to run against “price gouging.” My point is that talking about “billionaires and corporate greed” does nothing to address a voter’s concern about crime or migration.

In spite of all these problems, Democrats continue to have a lot going for them, issue-wise. They’re the party with the more popular stance on abortion. They are the party that defends popular old-age entitlement programs. Even the Affordable Care Act is popular now. And yes, there are definitely ways that Democrats can get mileage out of their position as the party that prioritizes programs for the middle class over tax cuts for billionaires. But those advantages are not substitutes for being trusted on crime, immigration, and the cost of living — indeed, the substantial fiscal burden that migrants are imposing in certain parts of the country goes a long way to undermine the Democratic Party’s image as the party that makes the American dream affordable for US citizens.

But to me, there’s one leading factor that Democrats absolutely need to respond to as quickly as possible to avert this kind of electoral disaster in the future: the media environment unequivocally favors Republicans.

That speaks to the reality that most of the country is awash in right-wing propaganda all the time. For the olds, it’s Fox News, conservative radio and Sinclair-owned local news; for the youths, it’s the right-wing manosphere podcasts and streams that Trump so assiduously courted all campaign long (plus soothing TikToks promoting retrograde gender roles, evangelical values and distrust of government regulation — think the trad wives and crunchy so-far-left-they’ve-looped-around-to-the-right content — aimed specifically at women).

“This is not a cultural war that you can win just by doing fucking podcasts” + Meat Loaf’s wikipedia drama, eating disorder Twitter turns on Trump, DDG on Kai Cenat

The acknowledgement crystallized an alliance between Trump and a vast network of online influencers. Joe Rogan*, Adin Ross, the Nelk Boys, and the myriad content creators who Trump collaborated with during his campaign played a key role in amplifying conservative messaging and helping him reach audiences that traditional right-wing outlets simply never could. You can read more about Trump’s influencer strategy in an article I wrote for The Hollywood Reporter today.

While the right has spent years fostering a symbiotic relationship with alternative media, the left has failed replicate anything like it. There are simply no progressive content creators with Rogan’s cultural impact and online following, and a quick look at the podcast charts or trending channels on YouTube shows the disparity between conservative vs progressive creators’ reach online.