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In my recent writing about LLMs and AI, I’ve mainly focused on what it can do, what it is, what its potential dangers are. I haven’t focused as much on the pretty substantial evidence that we’re in the midst of an AI bubble. The entire U.S. economy is heavily dependent on the AI boom. Much of the rest of the economy is in a slump. That boom is based on cheap money and very high expectations for AI profits, just as the Fed is facing irresistible pressure to raise interest rates, which is to say, raise the cost of money. This whole question of an AI bubble gets talked about a lot. You probably know the basic outlines. What’s caught my attention is how just in the last week or so these questions, verging into assumptions about unsustainable spending, are bleeding into the tech and the Beltway political press.

This afternoon I saw an ad being run by a SuperPAC supporting Dan Osborn (“Nebraska Values PAC”) against Sen. Pete Ricketts (R) of Nebraska. It’s a brutal ad about a brutal crime. (You can watch it here.) A woman identified as “Jody S.” speaks over a montage of a crime scene imagery explaining that in 1993 an intruder broke into her home, tied her to her bed and violently raped her while her children listened to everything. A man named John Arias was arrested, pled guilty, was convicted and sentenced to prison. We then fast-forward to then-Gov. Pete Ricketts casting the deciding vote as the member of a pardon board that ultimately pardoned Arias. Jody S. notes that Arias told her she would never be safe from him and that he was now off the state sex offender registry and allowed to own a gun. She also notes that she wasn’t even informed about the pardon until after it happened.

I tend to be hard-hearted about political ads. I watched this one a few times to make sure I had the details right. It’s hard to watch; in a way it’s more hard to listen to. The ad has stark black and white imagery and has audio of Ricketts announcing, in an uncomfortably chipper tone, his vote during the hearing: “But with that you’ve got your pardon.”

This morning the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on whether the Trump administration will be subject to a contempt of court inquiry for not stopping and turning around the deportation flights in the original Alien Enemies Act case, which began way back in March 2025, when the Trump administration sent more than 200 Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

Each side — the Trump DOJ and the ACLU — was given 30 minutes, but the oral arguments ended up lasting nearly three hours.

The top line: The en banc court is likely to rule against the Trump administration and allow U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to proceed with a contempt of court inquiry.

As I noted a week ago, we can’t know whether the current polls will be predictive of the November election results. But the polls themselves are at least speaking with a clear voice. I want to note two things that appear to be moving in unison: consumer confidence and the Republican position on the national generic ballot.

Here’s the trend line from Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin …

The House has already left town. The Senate is heading home this week. With the midterms just around the corner, GOP lawmakers are giving up on doing any more legislating and skipping town to try to mobilize their demoralized voters.

TPM’s congressional reporter Emine Yücel has chronicled all the drama for us. Emine joined publisher Joe Ragazzo on YouTube Live at 2 p.m. ET to talk through what Congress has actually done — and failed to do — this session.

Check it out:

I’m figuring this will end up as a big mistake. You probably know about the big NYT expose about Sen. Roger Marshall’s record as an OB/GYN suing hundreds of his patients over often very small delinquent bills and having a significant number of them arrested. Democrat Adam Hamilton is now running an ad on Youtube which describes one of those cases, a woman named Meischa Zimmerman who was arrested in 2011 and, according to her, handcuffed while eight months pregnant and in front of her two year old child. Marshall just sent Hamilton a cease-and-desist letter calling the ad false and defamatory and demanding it be taken down.

This seems like it will be a textbook case of what has come to be called the “Streisand Effect,” in which the effort to block some kind of publicity or attention simply has the effect of calling more attention to the original issue.

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.