Since I was revising the post below as I got more information, here’s the latest on White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia’s apparent claim to have taken the bar exam in China.

Judd Legum revealed yesterday that notwithstanding Trump’s and Zacharia’s claim that she was an attorney, it doesn’t appear that she ever took or passed the bar in the U.S. Today reporters pressed her on whether this was true. Had she passed the bar? In what state? Zacharia responded that she took it “when I moved to China.” Reporters took that, understandably, to mean that she took the Chinese bar exam when she lived there between 2011 and 2013. The Washington Post reported, for instance, that Zacharia “said she had passed a bar exam in China, a country where noncitizens aren’t allowed to practice in courtrooms.” But it’s more than that. Foreign nationals are not allowed to take the Chinese bar exam or practice law in China under any circumstances. Her LinkedIn bio says she worked at a Chinese law firm, Zhong Lun, while living in China. And that is possible. I assume it’s true. Foreigners can work at Chinese law firms but only for the purpose of advising on the law in the countries in which they are licensed to practice law. They are specifically barred from advising clients on Chinese law. I don’t know whether not having passed the bar in the U.S. would have been an issue on that front or not. Bottom line: In her first day on the job Zacharia gave everyone the impression that she took the bar exam in China. But that’s not true. Because she would not have been allowed to.

As I noted in the earlier post, new Press Secretary Katie Zacharia claims she passed the bar exam in China and to thus be an “attorney” despite never having passed the bar in the U.S. A Post article said that foreign nationals aren’t allowed to appear in Chinese courts. And I took that to mean that perhaps you could take the bar exam but not appear in court. (Many U.S. attorneys never appear in court. That’s only one part of practicing law.) But it looks more stringent than that. And it looks like Zacharia’s claim is likely false. It’s difficult to confirm a technical point like this about a foreign country. But numerous websites which provide information about practicing law in China say that foreign nationals can’t take the bar exam under any circumstances. Starting in 2021 there appears to have been a pilot program which would allow foreign national to take the patent bar. But even that required foreigners to have permanent residence which is apparently quite difficult to get. Foreign lawyers can work in Chinese law firms, but only to provide guidance about the law in the countries in which they are licensed to practice. (She appears to have worked in that capacity.) They’re specifically barred from interpreting Chinese law or acting in the capacity of a Chinese lawyer. So it’s pretty tight.

Again, maybe there’s some technicality that made this possible for her which doesn’t come up in any of the explanations I’ve found. But it seems like a pretty across-the-board ban.

Perhaps Zacharia was being cagey. She was asked at her appearance today where she’d passed the bar, in what state. She responded, “When I moved to China.” Reporters understandably took that to mean that she took the Chinese bar exam. But perhaps she was trying to hoodwink them.

More to come.

Late Update: This just-published article in the South China Morning Post says definitively that at the time Zacharia claims to have passed the bar in China foreign nationals were barred from taking the bar exam.

Eligibility rules for China’s national judicial examination in 2011, when Zacharia reportedly began working in Beijing, required candidates to hold Chinese nationality.

Foreign nationals were therefore ineligible to take the examination, a step towards qualification to practise mainland Chinese law.

Employment at a Chinese law firm does not, by itself, establish that someone holds a licence to practise Chinese law. SCMP has asked Zhong Lun to clarify Zacharia’s role and qualifications. The firm did not immediately respond.

Elon Musk is dumping heaps of money into the midterms and the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. waited til the final stretch of the election to make its big ad spending push. But does any of it actually matter?

On this week’s episode of The Polltober Show, Kate and Josh break down the spending disparity between the parties, and dig in to why Democrats might be better positioned than they appear. Plus, they talk through an exclusive memo with new House and Senate odds.

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I couldn’t think what to say about this beyond simply reposting the first two grafs of this Washington Post article …

The White House on Tuesday scrambled to answer questions about the legal credentials of President Donald Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, who made a brief and halting debut in the briefing room and later said she had passed a bar exam in China, a country where noncitizens aren’t allowed to practice in courtrooms.

Trump called Zacharia “an attorney” in his Friday announcement of her appointment, and her LinkedIn profile says she served as general counsel for Fix California, a nonprofit founded by Ric Grenell, a high-profile Trump adviser. Asked Tuesday where she had been admitted to the bar, Zacharia said China — not a U.S. state or D.C., where one would need to have been admitted to practice law in the United States.

I’ve been in a conversation over the last few weeks about a possible piece I might write for another publication about Democrats and the politics of masculinity and power, particularly how this relates to how young men have shifted to the right in the Trump era. I mostly think that this is an issue that affects Democrats generally, and is not just narrowly about this or that demographic group. This has been a theme in lots of conversations at TPM over the last 20 months when it comes to the extra-ideological division among Democrats between “fight” and accommodation and civility. Going back even further, to late 2004, I’ve been writing about what I call “dominance politics,” or, originally, “bitch slap politics.”

I thought of this this weekend because there was a blip of attention to comments from David Brooks on The Newshour. “The insinuations that El-Sayed is involved in terrorism because he’s Muslim, ridiculous. Jon Ossoff, my advice to him is, if you start calling your political opponents Nazis, maybe it’s time to shut up. That’s just not what we do here in this country.” There are a slew of problems with this. Not least of which are false equivalence and appeals to ethnic hatred and bigotry. Ossoff didn’t call Mike Collins a Nazi. What Brooks is referring to is Ossoff’s debate swipe when he told Collins, “You’ve hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office and you have promoted neo-Nazi content online.” This isn’t some random swipe. It’s been one of the biggest stories of the campaign season that week after week reporters keep finding members of Collins campaign, political operation or family who are associated with far-right or neo-Nazi individuals and organizations or who distribute anti-Semitic propaganda. This is merely an aggressive statement of facts that are unambiguously in the public record. But it’s not the specifics of Ossoff’s attack or Brooks’ tut-tutting I want to focus on here. It’s the more general and more important issue of tut-tutting, elite gatekeeping and how this relates to how Democrats operate in the public sphere.

As we have this ongoing discussion about AI, I want to return to the question of scale and externalities and how they are the defining feature of the Silicon Valley economy. We can’t make any sense of today’s discussion of LLMs and AI without placing it in that context.

“Externalities” are all the byproducts and secondary effects of, in this case, a business enterprise. If you make paint or industrial solvents you create various kinds of pollution in the process. How is that dealt with? Specifically, are you, the paint or solvent maker, responsible for dealing with those consequences? Even more specifically, do you have to pay for dealing with those consequences or are they absorbed by the society at large while the profits of the enterprise go exclusively to you? “Absorbing” those consequences can mean accepting levels of illness, diminished quality of life or simply having society at large pick up the tab for various kinds of remediation. The externalities are really just costs, but often semi-hidden ones. A huge amount of public policy deals with properly or improperly bringing costs and externalities into alignment.

I’ve mentioned a few times that I think Democrat Angie Nixon, just based on my watching her in campaign appearances and interviews, is a very strong candidate — certainly the most canny and able of the DSA-affiliated major race candidates I’ve seen this year. Being a strong candidate, to be clear, is a different metric from whether you’re a good match for a state or district. But I also think her winning isn’t impossible. Same story we’ve seen in other places: bad bad climate for Republicans and an at best meh GOP incumbent. Ashley Moody is a DeSantis crony who was basically gifted the seat when Marco Rubio became Secretary of State.

I need to start these kinds of posts by saying: No. I absolutely do not believe Tom Cotton will lose his reelection campaign. But even races that aren’t in contention can give you a read on the partisan climate. The Cotton campaign just released an internal poll showing him 11 points ahead of Democrat Hallie Shoffner — 50% to 39%. A Libertarian candidate has 4% support and 7% are undecided. That’s a solid lead. And a result any candidate would be happy with. Except when you remember that Trump won the state with 64% of the vote two years ago and Cotton won reelection with 67% of the vote in 2020. In 2022, John Boozman won with 66% of the vote. Cook appears to list Arkansas as an R+15 state. And they’d know. But in terms of actual election results, it certainly seems more like an R+30 state. In any case, the point is clear: This is a big level of underperformance in an extremely red state.

Today on TPM’s Untitled Friday Show (Name TBD), I was joined by one of my oldest colleagues (and friends) Derick Dirmaier. TPM’s Head of Product. We’ve been in the digital news game a long time. We’ve seen some things.

We talked about how the online world, which once seemed separate and distinct, has encroached on the so-called real world. At the center of this transformation are, of course, the tech moguls. These guys have amassed insane amounts of power and often when the speak, sound totally insane. They also have legions of sycophantic admirers. What should we make of all this?

We spent some time trying to sort through it all. Thanks for joining us!

Yet another update on the running AI discussion.

Here’s an interview Ezra Klein did with a guy named David Robinson. And that interview is about a piece Robinson, a member of the Open AI safety and safety documentation team, wrote in The Atlantic announcing his resignation from OpenAI — a decision and announcement he is self-aware enough to note has become something of a cliche. I found the interview interesting and edifying, largely on the front I mentioned earlier about finding reliable narrators.

Robinson isn’t a data scientist or a programmer. His role at OpenAI was essentially being the conduit between the teams building the LLMs and the knowledgable and interested public, specifically the people who write the documentation — what does this model do, how does it work, what are the possible safety risks. As is usually the case in any highly technical space, the people doing the work aren’t going to be writers and they’re usually not going to speak a language outsiders can necessarily understand. So you have people who are close enough to the work and the workers to understand what is happening and also able to speak human so they can communicate it to everyone else. Robinson led the team that served in that role.

This is an update to my post from Tuesday about the “existential risk” panic. A good friend of mine reached out to me and said, in so many words, yes, all that techno-babble is weird. But that doesn’t mean these risks aren’t real. And as I tried to make clear in my piece, I agree with that, at least to the extent that if Group A isn’t made up of reliable narrators, I’m not clear who the reliable narrators are. He pointed me to this recent report put out by the Rand Corporation, which is kind of the original think tank and has always been closely tied to the U.S. government and for lack of a better word the U.S. military-intelligence-industrial complex. It’s an interesting report. Or at least I found some interesting and I think sensible prescriptions in it once I got through the first half or two-thirds of it, which contained very Randian decision trees, definitions and a lot of what seemed like assumptions about existential risk and coexistence with AI that I didn’t understand. It eventually sets out a sensible if hard-to-execute approach which generally amounts to a safety-first regime of governing AI (make sure new things don’t endanger us before we build them or make them widely available) and, critically, open the decision-making up to public institutions with public accountability.

If you ever spend time on YouTube, I hope you’ll take a moment to subscribe to our YouTube page, which you can find right here. We have a couple great podcasts with video versions as well as various conversations and interviews we’re publishing. But even if this isn’t for you, simply clicking the subscribe button on our page helps more new people find our videos, find out about what we do at TPM and potentially become new TPM members. That simple button click helps us a lot. If you could take 30 seconds right now, go to this link, and hit subscribe I would be so appreciative.

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Donald Trump’s manic building and naming spree has been a core feature of his second term in office. And that’s saying something. Because if nothing else, you can’t say Trump hasn’t been active. There are wars, blowing up the international trade regime, the on-going attempted authoritarian takeover of the state, the bust-out rush to wrest as much money out of the presidency as he can, his significant role energizing the AI boom (and possible bust). But with all these things, the building and naming spree stands out, especially in 2026. I focus on this today. I return to this today because of news that Trump wants to turn his West Palm Beach golf club into a new Camp David, a permanent presidential retreat.

The details here are important. If Trump had some secluded property he wanted to donate to the federal government for this purpose, there might be some logic, though it’s hard to imagine Democrats wouldn’t put it up for sale at their first opportunity. What he wants to do is different. His plan is to donate a parcel of land at the private club for the Florida Camp David. So it’s really that future presidents would have there own private bungalow at Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach. As an additional, rather comical, sweetener the club’s legal counsel, who is presenting the idea to Palm Beach County officials, says that future presidents will even be offered comped memberships to the club.

You have questions, we have answers. Since TPM readers are as obsessed with political minutiae as our reporters are, we’re launching a special limited-run bonus version of the pod in this final month before the 2026 midterms. Introducing: the Polltober Show.

Every Tuesday from now until Election Day, Josh and Kate will get into the weeds on all things midterms, drawing on questions that you — our lovely readers — will submit! If there’s anything you want to know about specific races, candidates, chamber control, the courts, the polls, whatever, just drop your queries in the YouTube comments on the latest episode of the TPM Show or the Polltober Show itself. I will scoop them up and pass them on to Josh and Kate to mull over.

This week, Kate Riga and Josh Marshall dig into the first listener mailbag, breaking down key races in Florida and Georgia as well as decoding Democrats’ generic ballot lead.

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For years, and especially in the last month or so, we’ve been collectively inundated with an AI industry which, uncannily and bizarrely, tells us simultaneously that AI is essential, inevitable and runs a significant chance of exterminating all of us in as few as two or three years. If you’ve dipped into this debate at all, you’ve quickly come upon discussions of so-called “rationalists” or “long-termists” or supporters of “effective altruism” who are simultaneously ubiquitous among those developing AI and in the AI safety (i.e., the folks sounding the alarm) community as well. (For the sake of simplicity and brevity, I’ll refer to these folks as the “REL nexus”: rationalists, effective altruists and long-termists. This is my coinage since I don’t know a better one.) I’ve spent a fair amount of time familiarizing myself with this world and how it relates to current debates about AI. So I wanted to share my basic impressions.

You have questions, we have answers. Since TPM readers are as obsessed with political minutiae as our staffers are, we’re launching a special limited-run bonus version of the pod in this final month before the 2026 midterms. Introducing: the Polltober Show.

On Tuesdays, Josh and Kate will get into the weeds on all things midterms, drawing on questions that you — our lovely readers — will submit! If there’s anything you want to know about specific races, candidates, chamber control, the courts, the polls, whatever, just drop your queries in the YouTube comments on the latest episode of the TPM Show or the Polltober Show itself. Our producer Jackie Wilhelm will scoop them up and pass them on to Josh and Kate to mull over.

Look forward to getting into the weeds with you!

It’s surprising to see Donald Trump campaigning in Texas a month before a midterm election, as he will this week. Far more surprising to see him snubbed by the incumbent Republican governor who until as recently as a month ago appeared to be in an all but nominal reelection campaign against state Rep. Gina Hinojosa. Houston Chronicle reporter Ben Wermund caught up with Greg Abbott who told Wermund he wouldn’t be able to show up because of “other campaign events already planned.” Said Abbott: “Whenever he does show up, it leads to excitement with the base. He does a good job with getting the base organized and turning out.”

He “does a good job.” lol …

While I am certainly not predicting Abbott’s defeat, recent polls have shown a genuinely competitive race. Fox and Siena polls both take in the last week of September showed at Abbott +5 (Fox) or Hinojosa +4 (NYT/Siena). A Marist poll a week earlier showed Hinojosa +3. A few lesser known or GOP sponsored polls have leaned more toward Abbott. An additional concern for Abbott is that Ken Paxton seems to be running genuinely behind. So Abbott could also pick up some some of the downdraft from that race.

Hard to know quite what to make of this, or how much to make of it. But we’re getting what may be a preview of elements of a new era in the Middle East. According to a just released communiqué, Turkey and Pakistan will be sending troops to Saudi Arabia under the three countries’ new “Mecca Pact” to assist with fighting the Houthis in Yemen. The statement is very short on details. So it’s not clear whether this is a meaningful deployment of manpower and resources or something more nominal and symbolic. Nor is the timing of any deployment clear.

It’s hard to know what to say about former Republican Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, whose death at the age of 84 was reported this morning. Few if any political leaders in modern American history have experienced a fall quite so ignominious and total. The obvious point of comparison is Richard Nixon. But post-Watergate Nixon was never without his defenders and supporters. All but his most adamant critics granted significant successes of his presidency. And by the time of his death in 1994, he’d made significant progress in being treated by many as a sage elder statesman, albeit a greatly tarnished one. Hastert remains almost a test case of a top political leader whose fall was immediate and absolute. He came as close as one can come to have to having zero public defenders (though a significant number of former colleagues wrote leniency letters on his behalf at sentencing in 2016).

What stands out in my mind are two moments, one from his moment of ascent to power and another at the denouement but certainly not the nadir of career. Go back to 1998. The so-called Lewinsky scandal had been trundling forward for most of the year. Republicans are giddy about the Red Tsunami that was about to supercharge the existing GOP majority. Predictions of a 30- or 40-seat pick up were common and assumed. (I was one of few people I knew to basically predict no wave at all; it was simply a matter of watching the polls rather than the bipartisan hype.) When Democrats ended up gaining five seats, House Speaker New Gingrich was summarily tossed overboard — a mix of the failure of his wild overpromising and slowly building frustrations with his erratic and high drama leadership style.

The New York Times and Siena released another batch of polls this morning across a swath of red states. The general picture is the same as its been for weeks. Many of these races are close. But Democrats are ahead in almost all of them. The exception in this batch is Iowa where Ashley Hinson is up by a single point over Democrat Josh Turek. That’s essentially a tie and it compares to Sherrod Brown +3, Mary Peltola +7 (first round) and James Talarico +6.

Some have posited at least the possibility that Democrats are benefiting from poll bias in the reddest states. But I think the real story here is another we’ve discussed: candidate quality. Hinson has run in and won a number of competitive races over the last decade. And she’s objectively a solid if not necessarily a terribly candidate. She’s a former newscaster and those always benefit from some level of familiarity and trust based on many voters feeling they know them. The others range from meh (John Husted in Ohio) to catastrophic (Ken Paxton). Again and again we’re seeing cases where Republicans have been able to run passable and even sub-standard candidates in red states. And there’s a good chance that will continue to be the case when there’s no Cat-5 Hurricane year. But it’s when a big storm comes that you find out the levee ain’t very strong.