This has gotten very little attention, as far as I can tell. But it sounds quite sleazy and another example of the US government becoming a de facto investment arm of the Trump Corporation/TrumpaNostra. Lukoil, the Russian oil company, put up for sale most of its foreign assets outside of Kazakstan about a year ago. This was in response to new US sanctions. Carlyle Group and a couple other bidders have wanted to purchase these assets but approvals have been stalled in regulatory approvals in Washington. Now a group lead by billionaire financier Todd Boehly is close to securing the deal. Partnering with him are, according to The Financial Times (paywall), a group of “Gulf power brokers with ties to the Trump family” and … the US government itself, in the form of the US International Development Finance Corporation.

The current CEO of the DFC is Ben Black, son of Leon Black, a decades-long Trump pal and business associate, who is deep, deep into the Epstein saga and controversies.

The Trump-connected families are …

Here’s our text for the day on the LLM/AI “boom”, which is now the center of the US economy and to a great degree the center of political power as well.

Four years into the AI boom, the companies selling it are cutting prices. Microsoft, Amazon, Workday and Figma are offering discounts and free access to hold on to customers drifting toward Anthropic and OpenAI, and the two labs cut prices on their newest models by as much as half.

The discounting has a plain explanation: EY says only one in 10 companies can show AI’s return on its income statement. The cost of building AI kept rising. Anthropic is negotiating a single data center lease that would require at least $40 billion, and Blackstone concedes no one has mapped out who will buy all the debt.

The takeaway: AI is getting cheaper to buy just as it becomes more expensive to build. How that gap closes, whether through vendor margins, credit markets or Anthropic’s coming IPO, will shape the boom’s next phase.

I want to flag your attention to this note written by computer scientist and AI researcher Yoshua Bengio. It was sent to me by TPM Reader LG. Bengio is one of the most cited and highly regarded AI domain experts in the world. I have no independent ability to judge his views. But I believe this characterization is objectively true. I note this simply to establish that Bengio isn’t some random or obscure person. Right or wrong, he’s a major voice in the field.

You should read the note yourself. It’s concisely written, short and accessible with a basic layman’s familiarity with AI.

Let me highlight a few points. One is an issue that has resonated most with me in my recent speed-run self-education about LLMs. In the news we often hear that researchers told the LLM to X but it did Y. So it went “rogue” or disobeyed. There are several levels of problems with this framework.

Here’s a secondary issue we’re currently seeing in a number of races in red states. Take the Kansas Senate race. Who knows if this is really in play? But the last two polls of this race actually show Democrat Adam Hamilton with a nominal lead (+1 or +2). But there’s an issue here with Sen. Roger Marshall (R), the incumbent senator. And it goes beyond Marshall. In a lot of solidly red states you’ve got a generation of politicians who’ve never seen a contested partisan election. If you get the GOP nomination, you’re the senator. Period. And in some states, getting that nomination can have a significant machine dimension to it.

Yesterday, after a federal court forced the White House to readmit three news organizations to the White House, Donald Trump ordered the Secret Service to bar CNN from a flight today to a college football game in Knoxville. Right-minded people get infuriated and understandably so. But I would like to encourage you to see it in a somewhat different light.

Trump went to war against Iran because he was upset, disequilibriated by his declining popularity and power at home. Now he is boxed in by, defeated by Iran and pouring all his energy into a fever run of monument buildings and renamings. The news organization bans are just another part of that same storm of acting out. More failure, more ego-soothing. The guy is doubling down on what actually accounts for a larger part of his unpopularity and likely midterm drubbing than people realize. Yes, gas prices, diesel prices are driving him lower and lower. Just as much, I would argue, is Trump’s constant performance of “People Care About X, Trump Cares About Y”. His enemies can claim he only cares about himself. He’s far more convincing when he says it himself. Everyday. Through his own actions. You’re more spun up about the particular offenses. Most voters are seeing his priorities, and attempted demonstrations of power that look increasingly silly, often pitiful and cringey. He’s in a regressed feedback loop. It’s turning the people whose support he needs against him more every day.

Here is a short update on the so-called Broadview Six case — one of the high-profile prosecutorial abuse cases coming out of ICE/CBP Midway Blitz occupation of Chicago in the fall and winter of 2025-26. To catch everyone back up, this was a case involving four candidates or elected officials, one campaign staffer and one activist. It was tied to ongoing protests outside the ICE Broadview facility outside Chicago. Federal prosecutors took a situation that involved protestors briefly making contact with a vehicle unexpectedly trying to drive through a protest line and jacked it up to a felony case. As one of the lawyers on the case told me at the time, the facts supported at best a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, and even that would been a wild overreaction to what actually happened.

Throughout the case, it was clear that the case was part of the Trump administration’s larger strategy of targeting peaceful protestors with wildly excessive charges. Eventually the case fell apart when major prosecutorial misconduct was uncovered on the part of the prosecutors in the case. All charges were eventually dropped in May with prejudice, just before the trial was to take place. The remaining mystery was tied to the original prosecutor in the case, who committed the misconduct securing the indictment the previous fall. (There was other misconduct tied to turning off doctored transcripts of that grand jury session.) That prosecutor, Sheri Mecklenburg, had a generally apolitical reputation and certainly was no right-winger. Defense attorneys had the impression she didn’t have a lot of confidence in the government’s position. She left the case with little explanation for a DOJ assignment working on the Senate Judiciary Committee under Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) in February. Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois — Andrew Boutros — and Mecklenburg’s replacement — William Hogan — were both known to be strongly onboard with the Trump/ICE program. (Hogan also had a tattered reputation on the professional ethics front.)

There’s an article (gift link) out today in The Wall Street Journal about infrastructure spending on AI and data centers. We know the stock market is fueled, dominated by the AI boom. We know about the politics of data centers. But the details here, largely based on a recent Brookings study really boggle the mind. I’m going to share two charts to illustrate the story. But the gist is that AI is already year over year the biggest infrastructure build in American history, dwarfing the US highway system, the data transmission build out for the internet, canals and being substantially bigger than the railroad buildout in the years after the Civil War. And by many measures the entire economy is now dominated by AI spending. Not only is the non-AI economy doing pretty poorly, at least showing less spending than before. But to a great degree that’s because AI spending is crowded out other spending and driving up prices. (If you’ve tried to buy a computer or computer memory recently you knows this.)

I’m going to share a few charts.

In case you’ve missed it, we relaunched our Weekender newsletter earlier this year, adding some fun recurring segments (trivia! “This Effing Guy!”) and refocusing it on the “funny, surreal, and strange in U.S. politics and culture.” I joined publisher Joe Ragazzo this afternoon for a little preview of tomorrow’s Weekender, which will categorize the different ways Republicans are trying to cope with their grim prospects in the midterms.

We also touched on kid stuff (I’m about to have my second), tattoos, the prospect of an AOC 2028 presidential run, and some other fun topics. Check out the full live below, and see more TPM conversations on our YouTube channel.

I promise not to be writing a post about every new theory or hot take about contemporary polling. And I’ll make this one quick. Nate Silver has a post up today (I think paywalled) in response to a new batch of polls released by Times/Siena. These polls are broadly in line with other recent polls, with the exception that they show Susan Collins a few points ahead in Maine. But Silver notes something interesting: in Blue States November looks like a wave while in Red States it looks like a Tsunami. Is that odd? Not necessarily. There are three or four very concrete reasons that explain that why would be the case – stuff with shifts in specific constituencies, etc. But it’s also true that when we talk about poll misses in recent cycles some of the most extreme ones were in Red States. So perhaps the Tsunami is a mirage? My best guess is that that is not the case. And Silver doesn’t really seem to think so either. But I think it’s worth keeping in the back of our collective minds. As I noted in yesterday’s piece, the best evidence that a big storm is coming is that Republicans themselves are telling us one’s coming. They’re telling us with their actions. I think they know. Of course, at a more fundamental level none of us know the future.

We don’t know what’s going to happen in the midterms. But we know for a fact that today you can watch the hilarity of the collapse of so many of Trump’s plans and cheap, or corrupt, midterms gambits. Even the inside D.C. sheets can sense the energy. Here’s a piece — Trump officials weigh rolling back beef import plan as GOP midterm panic spreads. A picture of an angst-ridden, wayward Trump adorns the article. This is the plan Trump rolled out last month to institute a 90-day import bonanza of foreign beef that was apparently some kind of sweetheart deal with a Brazilian beef lord named Joesley Batista. The Wall Street Journal has a good story on that part of the tale. Here’s a New York Times op-ed questioning the safety of what was first called Trump’s mystery meat. In any case, the point was to engineer an extremely short-lived drop in the price of hamburgers. But it drove beef producers — an extremely GOP constituency — crazy since, of course, the whole point was to lower the price of the product ahead of the midterms. Now they’re getting so desperate at the White House they’re apparently considering scrapping the whole plan, with, I guess, a sort of mass deportation of beef.

Meanwhile the White House seems to be hurtling toward a 90-day ban on exports of diesel fuel despite the fact that no one seems to think that will reduce prices and actually stands a very real chance of hiking them. There’s an international market in diesel fuel. The regional U.S. markets are also international. So, at best, the plan seems likely to reduce imports rather than prices. And U.S. refinery capacity is already maxed out. The whole policy seems driven by GOP candidates extremely short-term need to say, something, anything about prices even if it’s stupid and might be discarded after a few days.

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This won’t come as huge news to most. But I’m getting asked about it a lot: can the polls be wrong? What do you think?

So let me put an answer here. They can obviously be wrong and you should be prepared for them to be wrong. If you’re running a campaign or SuperPAC, they can give you intel about where to deploy resources. If you’re just observing, they’re more about human nature and anxiety management. But whether you get excited or pushed into despair, we’ll know the actual results in about six weeks. Watch them or don’t. It’ll will be fine either way. There are no poll hubris gods. They can’t strike you down.

Let’s talk specifics.

The polls we’re seeing now are almost certainly directionally accurate. But they could be overshooting on their margins, which are quite large now. If they are we should expect to see that most in red states. (Even for someone like me who’s been bullish about this midterm cycle since mid-2025, some of these numbers are hard to believe.) States have partisan muscle memory that polls can miss. So for instance, yesterday Sabato’s Crystal Ball changed the Kansas Senate race from Likely Republican to Leans Republican, an astonishing development. The polls there are pretty close given that it’s Kansas, and the most recent, an Emerson poll, has Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton up by 1 point. But this is a classic case where you have to weigh a substantial amount of GOP muscle memory into the equation. Polls can miss that, or it can simply mean that undecideds break heavily for the state’s dominant party. To be clear, if I were a Kansas Democrat canvassing I’d be pretty pumped right now. A win is possible. But this is the cautious/realistic way to look at it. The same applies to the handful of other seemingly competitive races in deep red states.

Daniel Drezner says we are now in the Wile E. Coyote phase of the 2026 midterm, the phase of six weeks or so in which everyone knows the GOP is toast but we pretend we don’t. Some of this is simply the political press’s collective suspension of disbelief. It’s neither fair nor fun to act as though the outcome is mostly known. Nor is this new. G. Elliott Morris notes that election odds makers consistently overstate the odds of the president’s party in the midterms, which is sort of another way of saying the same thing since the president’s party is usually on the losing end of the proposition. I would argue that a significant amount of this remains the structural, though not necessarily ideological, bias in favor of the Republican party — two decades on, Washington, D.C. remains wired for the GOP. But what all of this really reminds me of is the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and what was then referred to as the “vibe shift” — both the hidden reality Donald Trump’s narrow but clear victory had purportedly revealed but also the shift in attitudes about cultural power and the future driven by that victory.

In elite circles the argument and belief went something like this. We thought that MAGA was a movement of reaction fueled by those left behind or discarded by the forward march of history and culture trying to wrench society back to an imagined 1950s. Not at all. In fact, it was the movement of the young and the most vital elements of the culture and the future. It was even expanding in the non-white constituencies which were supposed to be the anchors of the political left, the communities which were supposedly the targets and victims of MAGA, not its latest converts. Most of all, MAGA now had cultural sway to match its electoral power. And both were growing.

One of the key arguments for a great power — other than the great power itself wanting to be one — is that they act as a guarantor of stability and the status quo. That is far from the only public or global good. And a great power will ensure that status quo on its own terms and mostly to its own advantage. But if you have any acquaintance with history, you know you can do a lot worse than relative peace and the status quo. Trump’s Iran War has been a bracing illustration of all these realities. Once the great power starts letting things break, those breakages can start multiplying very fast. Eventually you’ll find a new equilibrium, of course. But eventually can take a long time. And again, even a passing acquaintance with history tells us that things can suck without end for extended periods of time.

There’s an interesting New York Times piece from over the weekend that illustrates all these things. We know the outline. But it provides new details. As a knock-on effect of the U.S. war with Iran, the ongoing battle between Saudi Arabia and the Houthi rebel government in Yemen has again become hot. In recent weeks, the Houthis have partly cut off Saudi Arabia’s other path to the ocean. Put simply, the Saudis can export oil through the Strait of Hormuz or the Red Sea. The former has been mostly closed for months. Now the Houthis are in de facto or near control of the second. That’s a big crisis for the Saudis. This is part of the larger U.S.-Iran battle because the Houthis are clients of Iran. And Iran’s core strategy has been to create enough pain for the U.S.’s regional allies that they will force the U.S. to end the war. Remember, each time the U.S. attacks Iran, they respond by attacking the various Gulf emirates.

I want to flag this poll for you. It’s a poll of the Florida Senate race by St. Pete Polls, a mid-tier regional pollster. It shows appointed incumbent Senator Ashley Moody (R) and Democratic nominee Angie Nixon tied at roughly 45% of the vote. There’s not much polling of this race. There are two other recent polls, one by Change Research a respected but generally Democratic-aligned pollster, and another from Quantus Insights, a GOP-aligned pollster with an iffy reputation. Change Research had a tied race a week ago. Quantus had Moody up by eight points a bit less than a week ago.

I want to be clear that I am not predicting or expecting Nixon to win this race. What I do expect is that Republicans will likely need to fight to hold it. And that is significant in itself. There are other signs that Republicans are facing a rough political environment in Florida this year, at least one that looks very different from where Florida has been trending since 2018-20 when the state went from a GOP-tilting purple state to something approximating bright red. Yesterday, Nicole LaFond highlighted the video put out by South Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) which basically had Salazar telling Donald Trump: We didn’t know you meant mass deportation when you promised us mass deportation.

We can joke about the the substance of Salazar’s video but it speaks for itself as a measure of the political climate in the state.

Another weird week in American politics is coming to a close, and TPM investigative reporter Hunter Walker joined publisher Joe Ragazzo to talk about it. Hunter and Joe got into Don Jr.’s lavish Bahamas wedding that was bankrolled by a Russian oligarch; the, uh, not-so-triumphant return of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to Capitol Hill; what’s going on with Major League Baseball; and the forthcoming “To Catch a Predator” movie starring Robert Pattinson.

Check out their full conversation on YouTube Live below.

As I’ve suggested in recent posts I’m finding it quite challenging to make sense of this roiling debate about AI safety. When I write about American politics, American history and a few other topics I have a body of knowledge that I draw on and try to share with readers — explain how it might illuminate present-day questions. I may be right or wrong. But I’m speaking from a background of some real knowledge and study. When I delve into questions like AI or AI dangers I’m seldom trying to come up with definitive answers. I lack the qualifications or foundational knowledge. What I’m trying to do is first try to educate myself, but in my writing I at least try to frame the basic questions, provide a framework for considering the issue, point to what are at least good faith and knowledgable voices if not necessarily people who are “right.” But while I’m still uncertain about dangers posed by the companies doing the most advanced and often reckless research on artificial intelligence I’ve been increasingly stuck on the prominence in the AI world of people who are in the overlapping communities of “effective altruism,” “rationalism” and “longtermism”.

Just to point to the latest examples, the Journal has a write-up on Jacob Coxon, the AI researcher whose Twitter thread quite literally triggered the current freakout/reckoning. It turns out his formative years were spent in the various parts of the “rationalist” subculture in London before he migrated to the U.S.

I’ve been loosely aware of the first and the second for a while, but didn’t have much pressing need to learn more because they didn’t seem connected to much that I care about. But they’re very big in the AI world and maybe even bigger in the AI will wipe out humanity worlds. So given the global freakout getting a handle on this becomes more pressing. Just as an aside, I will note that I don’t know how the dorks operating under the “rationalism” label secured exclusive branding rights to that term. Like, rough day for Descartes and quite a few other philosophers. But I digress. What I’m going to argue here is that at least the popularized versions of what I’ll call ERL (“effective altruism”, “rationalism” and “longtermism”) is made up of a mix of absurd and nonsensical ideas. The fact that so many AI doomers are part of that world gives me a lot of pause. But we can’t go from ERL is absurd to AI is fine.

So let’s get down to it.

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I just noticed this Politico piece which contains a poll they just conducted about AI and the odds that AI will lead to the extinction of humanity. 63% of Americans think there is at least a “moderate risk” that AI means our species is toast. 20% see a “significant risk” and an another 17% think our demise is “almost certain.” As with data centers, there’s little difference between Republicans and Democrats.

Needless to say, this is not an issue on which we want to assume that majority opinion is a good proxy for reality. But it is a potent reminder of the almost unfathomable depth of negative opinion about AI, ranging from hate to fear and basically all the other negative emotions in between. Meanwhile, this question seems pretty distinct from the even more overwhelming opposition to data centers. They’re not two expressions of the same animus but two distinct channels of opposition directed at the same thing.

If you’re a subscriber to Wired.com I want to suggest that you read this piece: Why the Postpandemic Tech Bust Sent Billionaires to Trump.

It’s interesting enough that I’d suggest it would be worth whatever one month free or first month for a buck offers they might have to sign up. (Of course, I’m all for subscribing to every publication. Some of you will decide to keep it long term.) And if you can’t, it’s actually an excerpt from a book which, I think, is out today, titled: Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry.

The piece published in Wired doesn’t cover any terribly surprising new ground for people who’ve followed this story closely. But it does add new layers of detail and a more coherent narrative. In so many words the pandemic created a situation in which both the Democrats and Big Tech’s own employees turned against the owner founders. And that sent the owner founders running toward the right and Donald Trump. For a variety of reasons the tech giants went on a hiring spree during the pandemic — cheap money, Zoom life, work from home, everything bought online and delivered to your home. But then they got spooked and the markets didn’t like it. They’d overextended themselves and they decided that the problem was that they weren’t efficient enough and that their employees were lazy. The authors note a key point that layoffs went differently in tech than in traditional manufacturing, where layoffs have a direct impact on revenues, even if they may make good profit and loss sense. In tech, a lot of your value is already banked in the code. Layoffs probably won’t catch up with you for a while.

I wanted to share a few more thoughts with you about this roiling public debate about AI and the dangers of rogue, uncontrollable “agents.”

I start with the quite predictable conclusion that a lot of the contending theories we were talking about are true at the same time, at least to some degree. It is impossible not to see how a controlled deceleration of AI development serves financial purposes for the frontier AI labs. A regulatory pause sort of freezes their current lead in place, at least to a degree. It also allows them to focus on the massive returns of what we might call “meh” AI/LLMs while deprioritizing the kind of cutting edge research that costs a lot, has various risks and doesn’t have clear returns within the time horizon of your IPO. (The two top U.S. “frontier” labs are in their final preparations for going public.) It has also become increasingly clear to me that significant chunks of the AI world are in the thrall of a self-styled “rationalist” subculture which spends an inordinate amount of time postulating future human extinction events — dressed up in a lot of “rationalist” language but about which no one really has any idea — and then devising often quite sinister strategies for averting these imagined futures. (AI was a big focus of theirs before the last few years, but they have several storylines about future extinction events in the distant future.) It is finally the case that a lot of the people sounding these alarms have little acquaintance with how the world works outside of the computing domain and speak on issues of intelligence, sentience and self-awareness while knowing little or nothing about the scientific fields where these topics have been studied for decades or even centuries.

Needless to say, none of these facts inspire a lot of confidence.

Conventional wisdom holds that a midterm election only fully comes into focus after Labor Day. That’s when a critical slice of the electorate starts focusing on the election and the choices before them. More or less in line with that, we’ve had a spray of polls out in the last few days showing the congressional generic ballot shifting decisively in Democrats’ favor. Looking only at generic ballots fielded entirely in September by pollsters the New York Times rates as trusted we have D+7, D+9, D+9 and D+11. If that trend or average is representative, it shows Democrats opening a big lead on this measure where the earlier average had been in the 5-7 point range. As Ron Brownstein notes here, history also tells us that in the final weeks of a campaign, this generic ballot measure will bend toward the president’s approval number. That appears to be happening. One of those, from the Times itself, was released today (D+9) with an accompanying write-up which, simply because it’s the Times, will probably draw attention to this trend even though the Times poll is only one of several.

Polls and trends can of course be wrong. But these numbers are extremely bad for the GOP, and if anything in this ballpark is accurate Republicans will likely lose the Senate as well as the House. Indeed, the variability in possible outcomes may be even higher in the Senate since it’s not amenable to gerrymandering. Even the Times, usually eager to find possible downsides for Democrats, frames their poll with declarative statements like this: “Voters see Republicans broadly as more extreme, more elitist and more corrupt than Democrats, according to the poll. And while voters continue to have doubts about both parties, they aligned more with the Democratic Party on both cultural and economic matters than the Republican Party in the survey.”