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Tag: inner loop

  • Democrats Did Much Better Than Expected

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    If you’re like me, Steve Kornacki is just as adored by your aunt as he is in your group chats. He’s become a staple of Election Day coverage, putting in long hours at the big board and copious amounts of prep beforehand.

    His granular knowledge of key counties and voter turnout trends made him not just indispensable for many Americans on election night, but also a full-blown celebrity. I caught up with him bright and early this morning to talk about Tuesday night’s election results.

    We broke down what the returns mean heading into the 2026 midterm elections, where Democrats currently hold an 8 percentage point advantage over Republicans in the latest NBC News poll, and what they say about President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda. We also spoke about what surprised him in the New Jersey governor’s race, whether Trump’s base is weakening, and, of course, New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s historic win. Heading into the midterms, Kornacki is taking on an expanded role at NBC News following parent company Comcast’s decision to spin off its cable TV properties, including a soon-to-be rebranded MSNBC.

    Kornacki is not someone to put too much stock into an off-year election, but the breadth and depth of Democratic victories suggested a political environment that’s radically changed in the year since Trump’s election—and if anyone can find some important details to follow going forward, it’s Steve.

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    WIRED: Steve, thanks for joining us after a long night. Before we get into the meat and potatoes here, let’s start with a quick lightning round: How many hours of sleep were you shooting for, how many did you get, and can you tell us if you have any election night superstitions?

    Steve Kornacki: Well, I shoot for zero, so I’m not disappointed and therefore I’m pleasantly surprised with whatever I get, which I think was about two and a half last night.

    There we go.

    So that’s not too bad. Superstitions? I don’t know about that. My challenge is to just tune out all the anecdotal turnout data on Election Day. I just think it’s a ton of noise that starts messing with your head.

    What surprised you from last night?

    What surprised me was—it’s probably not the most original observation this morning—but New Jersey. [Representative Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee, won with more than 56 percent of the vote.] The margin there for Sherrill, which is about 13 points, is much more than expected. I mean, I was talking to Democrats right up through Election Day who were telling me some version of: “She’s run a terrible campaign, she’s not been a good candidate. Maybe she’ll still win because of Trump, but this is going to be closer than it should be.” I mean, that was a widely shared view between the two parties, that Sherrill had run a bad campaign and was in danger of even losing, and that was not the case at all.

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    Jake Lahut

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  • Donald Trump Is the First AI Slop President

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    President Donald Trump, a septuagenarian known for his general avoidance of keyboards and computers, has somehow become America’s first generative AI president.

    The most infamous example of his experimentation with AI-generated videos came ahead of the No Kings protests earlier this month. In the clip, the president is decked out in full Top Gun gear, piloting a fighter jet bearing “KING TRUMP” on its side. Instead of a traditional pilot’s helmet, however, the president is wearing a literal crown, just in case the rest of the visuals were too subtle. The plane succeeds in its mission: dumping inconceivable amounts of shit upon fictionalized No Kings protesters in New York’s Times Square.

    This is just the latest AI slop Trump has posted. He’s also shared a racist depiction of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries wearing a mustache and sombrero, a highly dystopian, bizarre “Trump Gaza” video, and more.

    You have to wonder—how do these videos end up on Trump’s official account in the first place?

    The president of the United States, I’ve learned, is at the very least capable of posting AI videos on main: According to a senior White House official, there are times when Trump will come across a video he finds particularly funny or amusing—either on Truth Social or through other unspecified channels—save it to his camera roll, and release it into the world. Most of the time, though, it’s staffers who identify a clip and gain approval for it to be posted on the president’s main account. Either way, Trump isn’t making the actual videos himself.

    The White House remains cagey as to how the fighter jet video, specifically, ended up happening, and who, exactly, hit the button to post it.

    As a general trend, it appears Trump is typing away on social media less than in his peak posting days, a former Trump campaign official tells me. He has long relied on dictation and annotated printouts, while still being prone to the more than occasional covfefe-esque typo.

    Long before his descent into the AI slop trenches, Trump saw the value in having a team manage his Twitter presence. Trump would go on to strike fear into Republican politicians and business executives with his news-making and market-moving tweets throughout his first term in office, before getting suspended from the platform after inciting the January 6 insurrection. In the social media wilderness, he founded Truth Social in October 2021.

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    Jake Lahut

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  • Federal Workers Are Being Used as Pawns in the Shutdown

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    Federal workers have grown accustomed to a specific kind of dread over the past year. 2025 has been nonstop: First came the “fork” email from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, followed quickly by numerous layoffs from the Trump administration.

    As of July, more than 150,000 federal workers had resigned from their roles since president Donald Trump took office for the second time, according to The Washington Post. Tens of thousands were also fired.

    For the past few months, it seemed like this bloodletting was over—but that all changed on Friday.

    Thousands of employees at eight government agencies were subjected to RIFs, or reductions in force—the government’s formal process of laying off federal workers. According to a court filing from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Friday, this latest round of firings has affected more than 4,000 federal employees. The court filing also claimed that the administration targeted the Treasury and the Department of Health and Human Services the hardest, hacking away at a combined 2,500 jobs across the two agencies and the entire Washington, DC, office of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Department of Education culled nearly its entire team handling special education, CNN reported on Tuesday. At the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, cuts ranged from a few dozen to several hundred jobs, according to the same filing.

    Every Day Is an Adventure

    “People are scared. Who says their goal is to traumatize people?” says one IRS worker, referencing private speeches given by Russell Vought, the head of OMB and a key architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 who has been the public face of the job-cutting. ”If any normal human said ‘My goal is to traumatize families’ there should be police at that person’s doorstep.”

    “It’s pretty demoralizing,” a Food and Drug Administration employee tells WIRED. “It’s clear this admin will act illegally to try to make agencies or offices they don’t like suffer more.” (The Trump administration has used government resources, like websites, to place blame on Democrats for the shutdown in what critics claim is a violation of the Hatch Act, a law forbidding the use of public assets for political messaging.)

    “Every day is an adventure: new EOs, new memos,” says one Department of Homeland Security worker. “It’s constantly being on watch on where to pivot and what to stop, start, and sustain.” (All of these employees have been granted anonymity so they can speak candidly about their experiences.)

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    Makena Kelly

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  • The Post-Chuck Schumer Era

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    For a while, it seemed like McConnell was single-handedly blocking the entirety of the US government from his vantage as the minority leader, an arrangement Schumer just hasn’t been able to crack. It’s not impossible, however: Unlike in the House, which only requires a majority vote among its 435 members, the Senate has a 60-vote threshold for most items to pass its 100-member body. This gives the minority leverage. While Republicans may have a trifecta, they can’t pass a single piece of legislation without Democratic votes. With the Democrats out of power, it’s the only area of the government where they can exert any influence.

    Instead of wielding that power, my Senate source says, Schumer instructed members to not make any demands back in March, “because he wanted Republicans to take the blame when the government shut down.” At the time, Schumer was losing support from members to support keeping the government open, even though our reporting showed a frightening alternative.

    “You don’t get credit for things you prevent from happening,” Frank says of the averted shutdown.

    At the very least, Democrats would like Schumer, or Schumer’s successor, to take a page out of the Nancy Pelosi playbook, back from when she was House speaker. She was known to encourage candidates in competitive districts to run against her as Speaker—even pledging to vote against her for the role—if it gave them a better shot of winning, as long as she could count on them for tough votes once they arrived in Congress.

    “He doesn’t just need Michigan and Maine and Texas,” the campaign consultant says of Schumer. “He needs Missouri and Kansas and places where they should be running specifically against Schumer in ads.”

    Jentleson points to Reid, his former boss, as an example of how this can play out. Early in his tenure, Democratic candidates in red states would run against him as leader.

    The rub for Schumer, whose office did not return a request for comment, is that this would involve people saying mean things about him.

    “Again, this comes down to Schumer being congenitally incapable of being criticized by anyone,” the Senate aide says. “He wants everyone to love him all the time.”

    This is an edition of Jake Lahut’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

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    Jake Lahut

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  • The Magic Phrase Behind Donald Trump’s Power Grab

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    Hi, I’m Tim Marchman, WIRED’s director of politics, science, and security, and I’m filling in for Jake this week.

    On August 7, the White House issued an executive order giving political appointees authority over federal grant-making. This made the nonpartisan experts who have long decided how agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation direct funds subordinate to, well, commissars.

    Nestled in the order was a phrase that’s become increasingly familiar to me over the past seven months as I’ve read piles of boring documents issuing from the administration, trying to figure out what it’s doing.

    “Discretionary awards must, where applicable,” it read, “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.”

    This phrase, and variants, come up a lot. It has popped up everywhere from the White House’s description of the Office of Presidential Scheduling (it works to “create an agenda that strategically advances the President’s priorities,” apparently) to a website where the Coast Guard explains that its secretary is assigned to “fully align the Service to execute the President’s priorities.”

    “It’s become a sort of all-purpose catchphrase from this administration,” says Zachary Price, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, “and they’re also particularly assertive about claiming this power of the unitary executive branch to direct how different agencies perform their functions. So it fits into the general style of this administration, of wanting pretty strong top-down control.”

    Examples abound. A February executive order, for instance, said that going forward, the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would “review independent regulatory agencies’ obligations for consistency with the President’s policies and priorities.” An April memo from the acting administrator of the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) offering guidance to bureaucrats at affected agencies on implementing the order explains what happens when a significant regulatory action is submitted to OIRA for review: “Executive Branch reviewers review the materials for consistency with the President’s priorities, adherence to statutory requirements, and analytic cohesion.”

    What exactly the president’s priorities are go unstated; the emphasis the president’s paper pushers put on them, though, raises questions about what happens when they conflict with those of others—including the authors of the Constitution.

    The Importance of Showerheads

    Talk about the president’s priorities certainly didn’t originate with President Donald Trump. His predecessors, including in the Biden and Obama administrations, used the phrase, and setting priorities for the part of the federal government they oversee is a central part of the president’s job.

    That doesn’t mean there isn’t something new in the expansive use of the phrase and its variants, though, or that there aren’t issues with defining the job of officials throughout the executive branch as intuiting the priorities of a man who on a given day may be focusing on the Cracker Barrel logo, Roger Clemens’ Hall of Fame case, or his long-standing feud with Rosie O’Donnell.

    “Agencies like the Coast Guard have a strategic priority-setting process,” says Jody Freeman, a professor at Harvard Law School. “It isn’t normally a bunch of officials sitting around and wondering what the president thinks today. It’s a really weird instruction.”

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    Tim Marchman

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