Ex-President Donald Trump is equivocating over the possibility of a second debate with Kamala Harris after his dud display in their first showdown prompted his team and conservative media allies to mount a frantic cleanup operation.

It’s far too early to say whether the tangle in Philadelphia substantially changed the race as Harris beseeches remaining movable voters in swing states to ditch the chaos of the Trump era. But in the aftermath of Tuesday’s debate, both campaigns are surveying the impact of a critical clash before more than 60 million viewers eight weeks from Election Day.

Trump, who took multiple victory laps following President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance in late June, found himself facing the kind of inquest endured by his erstwhile rival. While the ex-president’s campaign will not suffer the same fate as Biden’s shuttered reelection effort, the debate was the latest sign that Trump is still failing to focus on the new challenges posed by Harris and make his own best case.

Poll question
Who was more at fault?  Tyreek Hill or Miami cops

67 Million Watched Debate, Deadline
According to Nielsen, more than 15 million more people viewed the September presidential debate between Trump and Harris than the June debate between Trump and Biden. ABC News, the moderators’ network, grabbed the most attention.

Ohio Governor Pushes Back on Trump, CBS News
Trump joked that he would flee to Venezuela if he lost the election, claiming it would be safer than the U.S. under Harris and inviting Elon Musk to join him for a meeting and dinner there.

Fact-Checking Harris, New York Post
ABC moderators did not fact-check several of Kamala Harris’ claims during the debate, including statements on U.S. troops in combat zones, fracking, and the Central Park Five.

Trump Media Plummets, CNBC
Trump Media shares plunged over 10% to a new post-merger low following Donald’s debate performance, raising concerns about the company’s dependence on his political success.

Betting Odds Shift, USA Today
Offshore betting odds shifted in Harris’ favor after her debate with Trump, with bettors on Betfair and Polymarket giving both candidates nearly even chances of winning the election.

The mission tested lots of new technology for future, longer missions.

SpaceX’s current mission is supposed to be the first of three Polaris missions, all funded by Isaacman and SpaceX, Elon Musk’s aerospace company.

The goal of the Polaris mission series is to help SpaceX develop the skills and technology needed to achieve its longer term goals of sending humans to Mars. The company hoped this first mission would be a useful test of the spacecraft and its instruments’ ability to survive the extreme conditions of space, particularly as it passes through the Van Allen radiation belts, regions in space that encircle the planet and are highly radioactive. They were detected on the first US space mission in 1958, and their highly charged, energetic particles can damage spacecraft instruments.

The crew traveled through the Van Allen belts on their way to the furthest point in their journey, and, so far, the tech aboard the capsule — and the astronauts — seem to have withstood that radiation.
 

In claiming to be a champion of the residents of Springfield, Ohio, Trump and his acolytes have ripped them apart.

This point bears repeating. What do many residents of Springfield itself have in common with Bill Hagerty, a random shill from two states away? They’re all just repeating nonsense they saw on the internet. Not a single person who has lost a pet of their own has come forward with their story. But plenty of Springfield natives are now convinced that Haitian immigrants one subdivision over are snatching dogs and cats by the truckload.

Has there ever been a better microcosm of our Trumpified politics? A small town, strained by a wave of new migrants, thrust into the national spotlight by opportunistic politicians and conservative hucksters, churned through a balkanized media ecosystem that lets false rumors spread like weeds. Trump says he wants to protect these communities. He ends up dividing them, inflaming tensions within them, all while using them as political pawns.

If entrepreneur and researcher Gary Marcus is known for anything, it’s for his fierce critique of the burgeoning industry around generative AI.

Marcus has played a major role in informing Washington’s thinking on AI, speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee alongside OpenAI’s Sam Altman in 2023 about why, in his words, “we are… facing a perfect storm, of corporate irresponsibility, widespread deployment, lack of adequate regulation and inherent unreliability” around AI. In POLITICO Magazine he subsequently offered his own menu of big ideas for how Congress sholud tackle a full range of AI concerns.

His new book “Taming Silicon Valley,” publishing next week by the MIT Press, is a sweeping polemic about how, he says, Big Tech will run roughshod over consumers and American democracy itself absent regulatory intervention. Earlier this week Marcus and I discussed why he approached the book with such urgency, and his vision of an American populace who understands the technology well enough to know when it’s being misused. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows:

While another debate could be different, it likely wouldn’t be. Harris would continue to antagonize Trump. Trump would continue to fall for it. The outcome would be very similar to what we saw on Tuesday night.

Which is why, as of today, I would be surprised if there was another debate. Trump will cast himself as a victim of a biased media — and insist that he can’t get a fair shake and so he’s not going to debate.

Now. This is Trump we are talking about. He is utterly changeable. He could announce on Truth Social today that he accepted the NBC debate later this month!

I’ve long admired prediction markets as an epistemic tool. They allow individuals to leverage the wisdom of crowds in the same way stock markets do. Prediction markets anticipated the serious prospect of President Biden dropping out of the election significantly before most experts did, to name a recent notable example. The latent intelligence embedded in prices has been understood for a long time now, though it remains underrated.

And what if other LLMs also surveyed the broader media environment and placed their own bets? If you think of my writing and thinking (or yours) as a kind of one-man intellectual hedge fund, these latter groups would be something like funds of funds.

What if we could simulate financial markets for every question about the future that concerns us? And what if it cost next to nothing to do? What if, after the work of setting it up was complete, all this just carried on each day, in a way that few humans had to devote much time to maintaining or thinking about?