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.