The Information is reporting (paywall) that regardless of what multiple investigations unearth about NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with a suspected Chinese spy, the scandal is likely to spur Congress to impose tighter export controls on the advanced processors used in AI data centers. There’s been a big bipartisan push for this in Congress for a while but it’s largely been headed off by White House resistance. That resistance seems to center on Trump himself and the small coterie of Silicon Valley advisors who run AI policy at the White House. As I noted in this post, the argument for tight export controls seems pretty strong to me, certainly if we’re operating on the premise that US superiority in AI development is a critical national security interest.

The Times’ Maggie Haberman is currently appearing on CNN to discuss the Jensen Huang story. She confirms that, according to Times reporting, Trump was first briefed on Huang’s relationship with suspected Chinese spy Alice Huang (no relation) late last year. She said about this time last year. So the key details here have been known and seemingly ignored for a whole year.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take the Pete Hegseth impeachment vote in terms of its eventual outcome. Are we actually going to have a trial? Will he resign? Now outgoing Speaker says he may not send the impeachment article to the senate? What stands out most is what’s not happening. There’s no real defense from the White House or anyone else in the GOP/MAGA sound machine. The White House posted a couple videos on social media. Obviously they’re on record saying they don’t support it. But that’s really about it. You can imagine the thermonuclear (maybe literally) response to anything like this at almost any point in the last two years. But now? The vibe here is something like “rough what happened to Pete. I guess not everyone makes it after a rough midterm like that.” Oh well …

If you missed it this weekend, check out my piece on the remarkably part-time, almost non-existent Cindy Hyde-Smith campaign. Quite stunning.

Last month I had a conversation with a high ranking AI executive who told me that the fundamental reason for the U.S. lead over China in AI development was U.S. access to high-performance NVIDIA processors. The Biden administration placed export controls on those chips targeting China back in 2022. The Trump administration sort of loosened those controls though, for a variety of reasons, that shift in policy hasn’t translated into that much actual change in practice. This struck me at the time: this is a wildly anti-China administration; it’s a wildly pro-AI administration which premises everything on the need to maintain a strategic AI edge over China; but it’s more open to allowing China access to these chips that are central to U.S. dominance in AI? How can that possibly make sense?

This conversation has been on my mind for the last couple weeks as we’ve learned more and more about the spy scandal enveloping NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang. To bring you up-to-date, yesterday, NVIDIA’s board announced that it would investigate Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang (no relation), who U.S. intelligence believes is a Chinese spy. This came shortly after Jensen Huang admitted in an email to NVIDIA employees (immediately made public) that he had carried on an extramarital affair with Alice Huang.

Some thoughts on the 2026 midterm from TPM Reader TS (Theda Skocpol) …

After two or three days of stupor and disorientation Donald Trump has reverted to form, as predicted, and has reacted to his historic repudiation by leaning into the powers of the presidency to reassert power and dominance. So far, they are mostly assertions and visual, thin performances not so much of power but of aggression, which seem more risible because the power is so clearly draining out of him. Trump appointed Stephen Miller as his new White House chief of staff. Today he has offered the press secretary position to Dana White, CEO of UFC, the mixed martial arts promotion company, who Trump lauds as “the Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior.” Trump is asking him to take on the press secretary role with a series of MMA fighter “assistants,” one or more of whom is associated with a Chechnyan warlord. We say “offered” because Trump seems to have offered White the job and then asked him via Truth Social to accept the job.

It now seems pretty clear that Scott Colom (pronounced c’l-O-m or like ‘cologne’ but with a final m instead of an n) is going to be the next senator from the state of Mississippi — not called yet but getting close. He would be the first Democrat elected from Mississippi since 1982 and the first Black senator since Blanche K. Bruce who served from 1875 to 1881. But one striking thing about the claims of victory from Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, which manage to be both aggressive and half-hearted, is that as far as I can tell she has yet to appear in public since Election Day. I’m not even sure she’s done any media call-ins. Her first Twitter comment was written in the third person, as though the staffer who wrote it couldn’t even bother to pretend it was Hyde-Smith writing it. This turns out to be a through-line continuing from the campaign itself.

We’re already wise to the way the building Blue Wave in 2026 exposed a number of Republican incumbents who simply weren’t ready for prime time as candidates but had gotten by pretty much unchallenged on Republican dominance of their states. Outgoing Senator Roger Marshall is the poster-boy for this dynamic. But Marshall at least mobilized late and mounted a campaign — a really comically bad campaign but still a campaign. Reviewing the wreckage of Hyde-Smith’s apparent defeat, it really seems like she was at best a part-time candidate and that really over-states her involvement in the election.

President Trump’s decision to replace Chief of Staff Susie Wiles (a rare beacon of competence if not good values) with Stephen Miller confirms the predictable Trump storyline. Always double down. For maybe 48 hours Trump seemed stunned and drifting. Now he’s coming to from the smelling salts of ambient chatter about his political legacy concluding in disgrace and failure. We can’t know the future. But this is why Democrats can have realistic hopes of a second strong election in a row in 2028. Trump is making the characteristic decision of force feeding the country what it just spit up. We know this about Trump: he reacts to being dominated, owned and mocked by casting around for ways to assert power and dominance. It’s as predictable with him as night follows day.

Yesterday, I wrote about JD Vance’s push to make the 2026 midterm a referendum solely about the Iran War. Things were going great, he claims, substantively and politically, until the Iran War brought everything crashing down. We’re seeing that a number of Democrats, albeit for different reasons, want to push this line too. Yesterday Eric Levitz at Vox interviewed data guy David Shor who said something similar. If you’re not familiar with him, Shor’s in the group who argue that Democrats need to jettison hot-button social and cultural issues that make them unviable with big parts of the electorate — immigration, gender and sexuality, guns, policing, etc. This is one of these claims that is demonstrably accurate to a significant degree in electoral terms, but more complicated when it comes down to applying it to the practicalities, commitments and mutabilities of the actual world. In this case it leaves him wanting to place overwhelming emphasis on the Iran War since Democrats put up the biggest midterm landslide in half a century and mostly didn’t avoid hot-button issues, or at least not as much as people with this viewpoint said was required, for most of the 2026 campaign.

Here’s the discussion of this issue …