POLITICO – Politics | Politics & Government

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — When you fly into this summer destination, Up North in Michigan parlance, you arrive at the Cherry Capital Airport. Drive over to the shores of Grand Traverse Bay, and there's a flower bed designed to appear as three cherries hanging from a branch. And you want to take in a minor league baseball game? Well, you'll be going to see the "Pit Spitters" (the cherry logo is spitting out a baseball, not its own pit). So you'll be not at all surprised to learn that when I came to Traverse last week to chat with Pete Buttigieg for the latest episode of "On the Road," we indulged in the local delicacy. We hit the vaunted Moomers for some Cherries Moobilee — a decadent mix of cherries, chocolate and more cherries. It met the hype. That, of course, is the question hanging over Buttigieg himself: If he goes for a second Pete for President campaign — can he match the hype again? It is, Buttigieg suggested, not easy to capture lightning in a bottle twice. He'll never be a thirtysomething mayor who vaults from nowhere (no offense, Domers!) into contention. Experience, though, has its advantages. Running for president once and running a major federal agency, as he did at the Department of Transportation, has expanded his network, deepened friendships and opened his eyes to how politics works at the highest levels. That's part of his challenge, however. Buttigieg is a bit like a doctor able to diagnose himself. The last six years, combined with his native grasp and long study of the political game, present his obstacles in stark relief. One of those is whether his measured manner works in an era that rewards provocation. Buttigieg's bet seems to be that his dedication to a suite of structural reforms will elevate his candidacy — and that his party and the country crave two sorts of change. There's the substance he's promoting — expanding the Supreme Court, for example — but implicit is the break from bombast to a calm, articulate and multilingual Midwestern striver by way of Harvard and a Rhodes. It would be, to borrow the formulation of David Axelrod, one of Buttigieg's early mentors, the ultimate remedy-not-a-replica succession to Donald Trump. Whether that bet pays off is an open question — and one that shaped much of our conversation. We also discussed if he was… [TheTopNews] Read More.

“I think that the Democrats could use a little education about the middle of the country,” Elissa Slotkin said.  It was November 2025, a year after the Democrats lost a presidential election to Donald Trump for the second time, leaving the party rudderless, leaderless and seemingly without a plan. Now, the senator from Michigan had a message for her party. In the Midwestern suburb of Overland Park, Kansas, she walked out on stage in front of a massive American flag and threw out some red meat to a crowd of nearly 500: “A little education that there is something between New York and California — and, actually, the Midwest has a lot to teach our party, right, if you’re a Democrat.”  She cut every bit the figure of a presidential candidate but led with a patter that made her sound more like a stand-up comic. “They call it my stand-up schtick,” she told me earlier this spring in one of our many conversations over the last year.   Over much of that year, Slotkin has been on something of a Midwestern safari, visiting out-of-the-way locales and mining their voters for insights. In Kansas, she ticked through a “quick litmus test on how I know I’m in the Midwest.” Some of those items were more banal: You people understand the art of the tailgate, right? It is totally fine if someone hands you a beer at 10 in the morning as long as it’s gameday. … You understand sports rivalries with neighbors. … How you feel about Missouri is how we feel times 10 about Ohio in Michigan. … You’re from the Midwest if you have shopped at Bass Pro or Tractor Supply.… The routine usually kills, but not always. In Indianapolis in June, when she was speaking to roughly 2,000 Hoosier Democrats, she improvised some new material about Michigan geography, and how Michiganders “point to the hand to show you where we’re from. I understand, Indiana, you also do such a — a little bit of a palm situation? Do I have that right?” The crowd murmured. She did not, indeed, have it right. “Oh, jeez,” she said.  Then there was Pittsburgh, where she traveled last October. “I pulled into a parking lot to do a canvas kickoff in Pittsburgh with Josh Shapiro, and it was all Ford F-150s backed into their parking spaces,” she told me. “And I'm like, ‘You guys… [TheTopNews] Read More.

MEMPHIS, Tennessee — When Justin Pearson sits at his desk, he looks at a polluted orange sky. It’s the backdrop of a haunting painting that hangs opposite an American flag in his home office. In the foreground, a figure wears a gas mask while reading the Bible and sitting on a stack of books that include George Orwell’s 1984 and W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. The painting tells the unseen story of this South Memphis neighborhood, with its windy roads dotted by modest, mostly one-story homes: Westwood is sandwiched between two of what have been Memphis’ biggest polluters, both of which are owned by the richest man in the world. A 10-minute drive to the northwest is Elon Musk’s Colossus 1 data center. A 15 minute drive to the southeast is Colossus 2 and the army of 69 methane gas turbines located just over the state line in Mississippi that currently power the supercomputing hub — most without any of the pollution controls typically required by federal rules. Multiple environmental groups who are now suing xAI have estimated that the machines could emit more than 2,500 tons of smog-forming pollution annually into an area that already leads Tennessee in rates of emergency room visitsfor asthma. Generative artificial intelligence wasn’t even widely publicly available back in 2021 when Pearson bought the painting. At the time, he was a community organizer hot off his first victory rallying locals against a crude oil pipeline that threatened to bisect Memphis’ underground drinking water source. The painting reminded him of what had been at stake in that fight, and how Black American history and the Good Book are balms for every struggle. Now a Democratic representative to the state legislature campaigning to represent Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District, Pearson says he fears the dystopian future of the painting “isn’t as far off as it seemed.” “AI is controlled by people,” Pearson tells POLITICO Magazine, sitting in his home office in July. “Data centers are built by people. And those people and how they exist and operate in the world are a threat to humanity.”XAI’s Memphis-area data centers are two of thousands that have been built across the country in just the past few years in support of the nation’s burgeoning artificial intelligence industry. Four of the nation’s biggest technology companies are projected to spend some $670 billion this year alone building more facilities.… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The grownups are worried. In group chats and at happy hours, some GOP veterans fret about the rising generation of young staffers in their party. The recurring complaint: The pipeline that feeds young conservative talent into government jobs is defective — if not broken. This isn’t just the standard middle-aged lament that the kids aren’t all right. It’s a criticism aimed at institutions like the Heritage Foundation that purport to identify and train the party’s future governing class. To conservative critics in and out of government, many of whom ascribe to more traditional, pre-MAGA Republican beliefs, some such institutions have spent the last decade selecting for rigid conformity to Trumpist ideology over more typical markers of expertise. Maybe that helps for enforcing the party line in the new GOP. But these critics fear a decline of merit and skill, along with a tolerance for darker ideologies that could cripple the party’s ability to govern in the long run. Conversations with four senior Republican congressional staffers, as well as think tank scholars, Heritage expats, academics who study think tanks and up-and-coming young Republicans reflected a widening generational split and mutual distrust over the issue. “Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” said a senior GOP congressional staffer, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel issues. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.” Of specific concern are those labeled groypers — technically, followers of the self-described “White Identitarian” Gen Z streamer Nick Fuentes, though it’s also used as a catch-all term of abuse for young, anti-establishment right-wingers, akin to the usage of “neocon” in the other direction. Fuentes, who has millions of viewers and a deeply antisemitic and misogynistic worldview, gained celebrity among young conservatives as a pro-Trump internet personality and far-right campus agitator. He has since turned on the president for his handling of the Epstein files and his support of Israel and the war in Iran. (Fuentes did not respond to a request for comment.) Prominent conservative commentators have alleged that groyperism is spreading among younger members of the GOP, including in government — a view seemingly backed by examples like the young Trump administration lawyer who admitted to a “Nazi streak” in text messages revealed by POLITICO. Others point to social-media posts from official government accounts that… [TheTopNews] Read More.

LA GUAIRA, Venezuela — Cristian knows that his mother lies lifeless beneath the rubble. The only question is where. The boyish 22-year-old uses his hands to show how the 12-story building where he used to live collapsed when a double earthquake struck Venezuela in late June. First, it tipped sideways. Then, it folded in on itself, “like a flower closing,” he says, curling his fingers inward. He was less than an hour’s drive away in Caracas when it happened. By the time he arrived on the scene, both the building and his mother were gone. With no rescuers in sight, he started to dig. He’s still digging. “My mom's trapped in there. And nobody has helped me get her out, you understand?” Cristian said. “There’s been no help.” Like some other survivors, he did not want to give his last name for fear of reprisals for criticizing the government. For many Venezuelans, the disaster has been a crystallizing moment, reminding them that despite the U.S. capture of former dictator Nicolás Maduro more than six months ago, they are still living under the same inept regime that they blame for decades of decline.The disaster marks a “before and after,” said Trino Márquez, a sociology professor at the Central University of Venezuela. “From here on out, it'll be much harder to contain public discontent.” According to the government’s latest figures, more than 5,500 people were killed and 16,700 more were injured in the June 24 quakes; many people believe that is likely an undercount. NASA satellite data suggests some 58,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed. A World Bank report released last week estimates the damage to physical assets at nearly $20 billion. Together, those tallies make the earthquakes the deadliest and most economically damaging disaster in Venezuela since the Caracas earthquake of 1812. Hardest-hit has been the state of La Guaira, which is dense in government-built housing as a result of another deadly disaster: catastrophic mudslides in 1999 that killed an estimated tens of thousands of residents. Survivors were eventually moved into apartment blocks built under a flagship housing project touted by the government as a symbol of the socialist revolution. But many see the extensive damage those buildings suffered in the quake as evidence of something else altogether: corruption, poor oversight and a disregard for individuals’ lives. Five weeks after the twin quakes, the coastal area still resembles, in the… [TheTopNews] Read More.