Minutes after Donald Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House Friday afternoon, Jake Tapper correctly called it a distraction. He added that it wasn’t clear there was any strategy behind it to his credit, and he’s right on both counts.

I’ll take it a step further. The ban is unconstitutional, authoritarian, and the press alarm is well deserved. It is also the best thing that’s happened to this White House in a week that, until roughly 3 p.m. Friday, had been an unmitigated shit show of a disaster. A news cycle that’s suddenly focused on whether the Trump administration is acting in an autocratic manner that flouts the Constitution is an impossibly better narrative for the White House than almost everything else in the political media.

Consider the week Trump was having before he changed the subject:

• The national average for diesel went over $6 a gallon this month, which has never happened, ever. Regular is $4.48, and it was $3.19 a year ago.

• The Congressional Budget Office put a $38 billion price tag on the Iran war Tuesday and said it’s running another two to three billion a month.

• A New York Times/Siena poll found six in ten likely voters think going to war was the wrong call, a tough number for a president who keeps insisting it isn’t a war.

• Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was in Strasbourg Wednesday being offered a seat for Canada at Europe’s table, a few weeks after Trump blew up the trade talks and slapped 50% tariffs on our neighbor.

• Speaker Mike Johnson had to go on three Sunday shows and explain that the $5,000 checks Trump promised in Dallas (which, as I argued in this space last week, just blew up the GOP’s entire socialism attack) would need Congress to pass a trillion-dollar bill he couldn’t promise, and 63% of the country, including four in ten Republicans, said no thanks anyway.

• Reuters/Ipsos had Trump at 35%, and the same poll found Republicans have lost the edge they’ve held forever as the party voters trust on the economy.

• And a Fox News poll had him at 39%, which is tied for the low of his second term in that survey. 63% blamed his administration for a worse economy, which included a quarter of Republicans.

That is the very definition of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.

Then came Friday’s press ban, which led to dozens of cable news rundowns being immediately ripped up. Asked in the Oval Office why now, Trump said “no reason.” He said he’d lift it if the three outlets “straighten themselves out,” and threatened the New York Times and the Washington Post with the same fate. The media reaction was about what you’d expect. Even Fox News contributors called it a terrible precedent, though not really on air, and Fox News White House reporter Jacqui Heinrich, who is currently serving as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, demanded the passes back. By dinner, it seemed like every First Amendment lawyer in Washington had a cable news hit booked.

But here’s what's largely missing in the cable news coverage and analysis of this fight: Trump loves it. He has been insulting and fighting the press for over a kayfabtastic decade. His base has been brainwashed into believing CNN has it coming, while most everyone else just assumed this was an inevitability. Lawsuits will come and will likely go the way Jim Acosta’s did, and the AP’s did for a while. But none of it moves a single voter, because on the increasingly tired subject of Trump v. The Media™, there are no undecideds left to move.

This is the same point I made a couple of weeks ago in my Maria Bartiromo column: Trump can lose CNN, ABC, the Times, the Post and every editorial board in the country and it will effectively cost him nothing. The fact that many of the loudest voices calling Trump an authoritarian charge this weekend are employed by the three banned outlets gives the White House a frame to label the whole thing as the media defending the media. Which it did, in a simultaneously responsible and gleeful way. There are, after all, few topics that the press love reporting on more than the press.

Watch what Mike Waltz did on State of the Union. Dana Bash asked the UN ambassador, a 27-year Green Beret, whether he was comfortable with a president banning news organizations over their coverage. Waltz said Trump was “spot on,” citing a 1965 Supreme Court case about a guy who wanted a passport to Cuba, and within about a minute was on to blasting the press over anonymous sources, napalm and leaked munitions stockpiles, a bonkers reply to which Bash admitted she was “kind of at a loss for words.” An unconstitutional press ban had suddenly turned into an argument about CNN’s sourcing. That’s the argument the White House would much rather have any Sunday of the year.

Try to find anyone representing the White House that’s eager to go on cable news and defend gas at $4.48 a gallon. No one wants to sit across from Dana Bash and defend $6 diesel. The war is so unpopular that even Republicans running in November have stopped saying the word Iran. An unregulated AI industry that Trump has championed is suddenly a threat to human extinction. Marquette has Trump at 19% approval on inflation and the cost of living, the issue voters rank first by a mile. Democrats are up seven points on the generic ballot with the election 44 days out.

Again, a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. Which puts the reasoning and timing of the press ban in perfect perspective.

So put yourself in the White House Communications Director’s chair. You can spend the weekend on a press freedom fight that’s become a well-worn heuristic for both press and Trump surrogates since 2016, and you know your base is with you. OR you can spend it trying to explain $6 diesel. Whether Trump actually thought it through is unknowable and almost irrelevant. He’s equally capable of both a tantrum and a craven strategy, and from the outside they look exactly the same. His own press shop claims they didn’t know the ban was coming, but they got the same result either way.

Tapper made another astute point Friday when he noted that the ban won’t work because CNN and the other censored outlets will keep reporting, and he’s right about that too. Nobody at CNN, MS NOW, or Politico stopped doing their job for a minute after Trump posted on Truth Social. Whether the reporting continues is a different question from what actually changed: the news stories everyone is talking about. With an election six weeks away, the lead story was understandably Trump’s banning of the press. At least on news outlets not dedicated to defending the president and/or ignoring stories unfavorable to him.

The press is largely handling this story with great nuance and care. Bash came closest to sounding the alarm in her Waltz interview, but later in SotU, she went to a panel of three former WHCA presidents. Each was correct in everything they said, but also disquietingly calm about it all.

They covered the AP getting kicked out of the press pool, and the Pentagon and Treasury both freezing reporters out of a finance ministers’ meeting and other past examples by the Trump administration. What was missing was anyone saying that a president stripping badges from reporters because he doesn’t like their stories is flat-out fucking nuts. And everyone watching should be freaked out. But we’ve all become too numb to it all, which is also by design.

Fox News, whose contributors were the loudest critics online, gave it a short report on Special Report Friday and a quick read from Guy Benson on The Big Weekend Show, then Peter Doocy gave it a brief mention and aired a clip of Jonathan Turley saying presidents should be careful about this sort of thing, but otherwise left it alone. Trump got the change of subject without even having to sit through the outrage.

The press had good reason to cover it this way. A president punishing newsrooms for their journalism is a real story, maybe the most resonant story of an administration's clear drift to autocracy but that can still very much be a trap. Whats stranger is that the authoritarian story is almost old hat while the war, gas and inflation stories are still hot. Trump handed the press the easier one and they ran with it at a time they should be focused on he abject failure of his past two years

Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar just put out a 26-second campaign ad Thursday morning that opens with “Mr. President.” Addressing the camera, she tells Donald Trump that some of his immigration enforcement “has gone too far,” adds that half the people ICE detained in July had no criminal record, that he should “be careful what your advisors are telling you,” and that “the same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.” She then says her name and approves the message.

It’s actually quite stunning for what seems at first to be a rather pedestrian ad campaign for several reasons, not least because it breaks the 11th Commandment made famous by Ronald Reagan: “Thou shalt not speak critically of a fellow Republican.” But even more stunning is that this is a GOP member of Congress who has done the math and is betting that a critical position against Trump is better for her re-election chances than walking lockstep with the party leader.

Republicans have been criticizing Trump for nearly a decade but in ways that effect them absolutely nothing politically: An anonymous quote to Politico or a Sunday show host gets told there are “concerns.” But Salazar is a Trump-endorsed incumbent up for reelection in just 48 days, and she’s using her own campaign message to tell voters that his signature policy went too far. ICE DID arrest 49,571 people in July, with 51 percent of them having no conviction and no pending charge, so her numbers hold up.

She also tells Trump he could be “what Lincoln was for slavery or what Reagan was for communism,” in the same 26-second spot. The White House will almost certainly insist that she’s just making an appeal to the president, but even this version of dissent is still dissent. And this has gone viral with her approval tag on it.

Watch the video below:

Trump endorsed her in February, which did not go over well with his base, making this more of a national story than a Miami one. Laura Loomer said she couldn’t believe it, and Marjorie Taylor Greene called the endorsement “an insult to his base.” But Trump kept the endorsement and the candidate he personally certified just seven months ago? She’s now telling his own voters he broke a promise to them. On camera. With friends like these…

She’s not the first to put out a campaign ad blaming appealing to Trump, but she is not alone in House Republicans creating some political distance from the president. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, both Iowa Republicans who had opposed earlier war-powers resolutions, voted Tuesday with Democrats to direct the president to end the war with Iran.

Does this make Trump suddenly toxic for the GOP? The president doesn’t believe so; in fact, he thinks the opposite. During a Wednesday night rally in Gastonia, NC, he told attendees to “pretend I’m on the ballot just one more time.” Fair enough, but he apparently didn’t get the memo about a Fox News poll that dropped just a couple of hours before his speech, which was so unkind to Trump and the GOP that, after a segment on Special Report, it never came up again on prime-time Fox News opinion programming the rest of Wednesday evening.

It found that voters were far less likely to support somebody who’d been endorsed by Trump, by a whopping ratio of two to one. No wonder the most-watched pro-Trump Fox News personalities ignored its own network’s poll, which featured plenty more evidence that the Trump administration and Republican Party are not in particularly strong stead.

President Trump wants the midterms to be about him. But a handful of candidates actually running have looked at the same numbers and so far decided that’s not the best campaign to win an election. If polling gets goes from bad to worse, one can only wonder how many more will jump from the sinking ship that is Trump.

Morning Frame is a daily digest for news-obsessed, confident, and charming readers. It highlights what stories are emerging, crossing partisan bubbles, and fading. Powered by Narrativ Prism software, which ingests thousands of bits of media every day.

Thursday, September 17, 2026

It is not unfair to say that things are going from bad to worse for both Donald Trump and the Republican Party, less than 50 days before what portends to be a disastrous midterm election. Record gas prices continue to rise as a result of a bequagmired Iran War, causing Trump’s newly installed Fed Chair to raise rates to fight inflation caused by the very same Iran War. How does Trump defend it? By telling rallygoers that high gas prices are “a very inexpensive price to pay,” though it's not at all clear that campaign messaging was either workshopped or focus-grouped. Meanwhile, Hasan Piker reminded the political world why he’s not ready for primetime with over-the-top anti-American comments that provide Democrats an easy “Sister Soljah” moment, if they so choose to take it. Oh, and the Republican-led House called it quits early, largely because it seems it didn’t have the votes to pass articles of impeachment against the increasingly unpopular Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. Sure doesn’t look like the GOP will be negotiating from a position of strength as it returns home to try to convince voters, at least according to the most recent Fox News poll that es no bueno for the party in charge.

01. Trump’s War-Driven Inflation Gets Deeper After His Own Fed Chair Raises Rates

[Gaining Traction]. The $38 billion CBO bill for the Iran War was yesterday’s news peg. Today it moved to Trump’s Fed Chair, Marjorie Taylor Greene at a diesel pump, and a very tough Fox News poll. Take your pick.

Kevin Warsh was appointed Fed chair to finally give Trump the low rates he’d been demanding. Instead, he raised them a quarter point on Wednesday, with a board that is mostly Trump’s own nominees voting with him, which he defended by saying inflation has been too high for too long.

Trump’s answer? An ALL-CAPS Truth Social screed that directed the Fed to cut rates. By evening, he was campaigning in Gastonia, NC, defending higher gas prices as “a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done.” MTG had already posted a video from a California gas station this week, showing diesel at $8.49 behind her, which she promptly blamed on Trump and his Iran War.

Fox News published the poll at 6 p.m., and things did not get better for the White House or Republicans. The poll found that 61% of voters see rising gas prices as a major problem, which is 13 points higher than just two years ago. Brit Hume saw the numbers and told Special Report anchor Bret Baier that high prices are “just killing this administration and the president’s party.” No lie detected.

TAKEAWAY: It gives me absolutely no pleasure to say that Wednesday was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day for Trump and Republicans, because that’s been a theme for this newsletter of late, but that seems to be a fair assessment. It’s always darkest before dawn, but its hard to see it not getting darker in the next six or seven weeks.

02. Hasan Piker Hands Democrats a Perfect Sister Souljah Moment With a Bonkers Al-Qaeda Defense

[Going Mainstream]. Just yesterday Piker was mostly a Republican ad buy against El-Sayed. But today, the Michigan Senate nominee (and two MS NOW hosts!) have used him to show where the party’s line is.

Republican groups have spent nearly $3 million on campaign ads tying Abdul El-Sayed to Hasan Piker, most of them built on Piker’s 2019 clip saying America deserved 9/11. Sean Hannity opened Wednesday on El-Sayed “standing by his man.” Piker seems to have given El-Sayed the chance to make a clean break. He told Axios’s Alex Thompson the United States does more terrorism than al-Qaeda, “pound for pound,” and El-Sayed had a statement out minutes later. He doesn’t agree, and he doesn’t “give much weight to the statements made by a social media streamer.” He’s started referring to Piker as merely “a streamer in California,” and curiously, not the guy he’s done multiple campaign events with.

MS NOW’s hosts got in the act, or maybe set the standard since it aired the night before. Symone Sanders-Townsend said (to Piker’s face!) that if she still ran campaigns she “would absolutely be telling my people to disavow you,” and that he has “never elected anybody.” Piker answered by hitting Democrats for playing by Republican rules and said that he’s become “the number one villain of the Republican Party” a while ago. He’s not wrong about the villain part, which is entirely the point. Kamala Harris campaigns with El-Sayed next week.

TAKEAWAY: Republicans will almost certainly pounce on Piker’s favorable al-Qaeda comparison, but Democrats were just gifted a perfect opportunity to distance themselves from the self-promoting zillenial streamer. One is reminded of Bill Clinton triangulating his way into criticism of Sister Soljah in a way that effectively regained much of the critical centrist voting block. Will dems follow that playbook, or are they still seduced by Piker’s streaming charms?

03. Republicans Running From the War Spreads After the House Leaves Town to Dodge the Hegseth Vote

[Gaining Traction]. Thomas Massie filed articles of impeachment of Pete Hegseth on Tuesday. The next day, the Speaker sent the House home until after the election, which he would not have done had he had the votes.

Just seventeen days after the House came back in session from its August recess, Speaker Mike Johnson sent everyone home until after the election. Massie gave the move a name Wednesday night on CNN, calling Thursday’s cancellation the Hegseth holiday and the two weeks cut from the calendar the Epstein recess. Johnson made the same ploy just last summer to avoid a vote on Massie’s Epstein petition. Maybe House leadership did a whip check and found that Republicans didn’t want to be on the record supporting Hegseth. Or maybe the Sec of War would have actually been impeached?

CNN This Morning aired a clip of a Republican mocking the impeachment as “a publicity stunt by someone who wants attention” that “will immediately be tabled.” On AC360 Wednesday night, the complaint was focused on everything else that left town with House. Cooper noted 435 members will be missing from an AI debate for the next seven weeks, and Rep. Lori Trahan called the early exit completely irresponsible.

TAKEAWAY: When the path of least resistance for House Republicans is to throw in the towel and ignore the many issues troubling a majority of midterm voters? Going back to convince said voters that your party’s approach is the best way forward gets increasingly more challenging. And yet, campaigning to an angry constituency was the least bad short-term play in the eyes of House leadership.

David Urban has become a reliable pro-Trump voice on CNN, having run the president’s campaign in 2016. But his faithful defense of the White House stopped Wednesday night on AC360, when he told Anderson Cooper, “There’s no way to defend the Kennedy center piece or some of these other moves.” He also blamed Trump for re-election troubles, or precisely, “a weight on a lot of these members who are running,” because of Iran War-related inflation and voters' sticker shock at the gas pump. He advised the president to dust off the tax cuts, end the tax on tips, and “pivot hard away from the current things.” Nobody in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, he said, “gives one hoot about the Kennedy Center.”

The data tells the real, better stories beneath the headlines.

Charlie Kirk’s Family to Sue Utah Valley University. A notice of claim filed this week alleges the school and its police had no written security plan and six officers on duty the day he was killed. (Breitbart)

Trump Plans a Gulf summit on Iran at the UN. The President will meet leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council on Tuesday during the General Assembly, and the plan for which is expected to be finalized after the midterms. (Axios)

A Federal Judge Gives the White House until 10 a.m. to Explain the Kennedy Center Closure. The judge who blocked Trump’s name from going on the living memorial ordered the administration to say why its board voted this week to shut it for renovations, hours after Trump said the center could be “ripped down.” (NY Times)

Based on transcripts from the 6 and 7 a.m. hours of Fox & Friends, CNN This Morning, News Central, and Morning Joe.

Trump’s hand-selected Fed Chair did something the White House really didn’t want. The House Speaker installed, the pollster Fox News hired, and the Surgeon General nominee Trump each did or said something the White House didn't want said. Its not that cracks are showing in the Trump political machinery, moreseo the wheels are coming off.

Not to be excluded, Trump also seemed to say something White House advisors would rather he hadn’t, by curiously defending high gas prices as an “inexpensive” cost, or something? Even Vice President JD Vance got in the act when he let slip during an interview that he wants voters to give his administration another chance. Wait, what?

House Republicans’ only play is to turn tail, head home to their districts, and try to resurrect an increasingly messy set of political narratives seemingly made worse by every public comment that comes from the president’s mouth or Truth Social feed. The midterms are just 49 days away.

The Morning Frame tracks which political stories are spreading, which are stalling, and how you can tell the difference. Powered by Narrative Prism.

Morning Frame is a daily digest for news-obsessed, confident, and charming readers. It highlights what stories are emerging, crossing partisan bubbles, and fading. Powered by Narrativ Prism software, which ingests thousands of bits of media every day.

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

Alarm over unchecked Artificial Intelligence has crossed over to Donald Trump’s own base of supporters, according to a new internal poll that emerged overnight. This is despite the president’s repeated insistence that the threat of AI is a hoax, a White House narrative not yet landing with MAGA with midterms just seven weeks away. Meanwhile, the Iran War’s cost is coming into focus with a $38 billion CBO bill; Trump's $5k voter bribe bill is losing GOP support; and the Kennedy Center is set to shut down, like so many buildings that once had Trump’s name on them that came before.

01. AI Alarm Crosses Over to Trump’s MAGA Base Per New Poll

[ Going Mainstream]. Trump spent a lot of energy insisting that concerns over unchecked AI are nothing but a hoax this week. Today, the president’s own voters and his pollster aren’t buying the hoax line.

Trump has mocked AI alarmism as being a conspiratorial hoax in multiple Truth Social posts earlier this week, and said the same during a live phone call into the All In Summit. Fox News prime time quickly followed suit, with Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters each spending their opening blocks on it. Watters suggested Anthropic’s coming IPO was the motive behind the sudden alarm.

A new Politico Poll shows that 63% of Americans believe AI could destroy humanity one day and 60% of Trump’s own supporters agreed. The poll says that almost half the country wants a pause on AI development and less than a third wants it to continue at its current pace.

Trump’s own pollster Tony Fabrizio reportedly told Republican candidates via a memo that unqualified support for building data centers “is a losing position.” He also warned that the sentence “I support building more data centers” will end up in an attack ad.

TAKEAWAY: Republicans can’t afford to let AI Alarmism become another issue they’re on the wrong side of, given current polling data and midterms looming. Worse for the Trump administration, all three now seem to be creating a wedge between the MAGA base and the White House.

02. Iran War Gets a $38 Billion Bill and a Hegseth Impeachment Filing Followed

[Gaining Traction]. Congress put a number next to the Iran war the same day a Republican filed to impeach the man running the Pentagon

According to the most recent CBO report released Tuesday, the Iran war has cost the Pentagon more than $38 billion through August 1. That bill will keep growing by at least $3 billion a month for as long as the fighting continues, accordig to the same report.

Thomas Massie filed articles of impeachment against Sec of War Pete Hegseth. Six of the eight are about Hegseth “carrying out illegal orders that were given by Donald Trump,” he told Kaitlan Collins. He filed on a Tuesday for a reason. Speaker Mike Johnson now has to call the vote this week rather than after the election, and Massie figures leadership will just move to table it.

When asked about Massie’s impeachment, AG Todd Blanche objected to the reporter’s word choice. “You called it a war. I disagree with that characterization, as does most of Congress.” Massie later responded by noting how the president “calls it a war” every time he talks about it.

TAKEAWAY: The most-read story of the day on Breitbart covered Massie’s impeachment filing, which sat just beneath the lead story on JD Vance’s claim the first phase of the conflict is over. When one of the right’s biggest sites has its readers clicking on a Republican trying to fire the war secretary, something bigger is going on than one congressman from Kentucky.

03. Everything Trump Puts His Name On Goes Bust

[Gaining Traction]. The Kennedy Center’s board closed the building rather than run it without his name, and that became the most-covered political story we tracked Tuesday, by a lot.

A federal judge ruled Tuesday, for the second time, that the president can’t put his name on the Kennedy Center without Congress. Within hours, the board he appointed voted to close the place for two years of renovation, CNN reported, and by evening the doors were locked.

Trump’s position is that the renovation “cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name.” He also called into the board meeting. Joyce Beatty, who is still on the board, says he told her he’d hold her “personally responsible” if someone died in the building. She also says his public version of the vote is “not true.” Somebody on the call told CNN it was “effing crazy.”

Kerry Kennedy’s read, on CNN, was that “it’s a bankruptcy because he adds his name to it.” A conservative panelist on CNN defended the closure. Part of the ceiling has collapsed, she said, and normally she’d ask why taxpayers pay for an opera house at all, but this one is a memorial.

TAKEAWAY: By far the most-covered political story on the web Tuesday, and in Narrative Prism’s count almost all of it came from the middle and the left. Picture the same story with Biden’s name on the building.

“The guy is a stone cold loser!”

That was the president on Truth Social Monday night, insulting Karl Rove, after the long-time Texas-based GOP operative revealed to a members-only lunch at Austin’s Headliners Club that he’ll cross party lines and vote for the Democrat, Jon Rosenthal, for Texas Railroad Commission over the Republican nominee, Bo French, whom he called a “bigot.” Three people in the room told the Texas Tribune, but Rove hasn’t said it on the record himself. French is the candidate who posted about non-white students at a Texas football game, a post which Senator Ted Cruz called “idiotic.” Rove’s only other Democratic vote was for Bob Bullock in 1994. The president’s full post asked why Fox News and The Wall Street Journal “keep his RINO Voice alive.” Rove is a Fox News contributor, though the network did not mention him in three primetime hours Tuesday.

The data tells the real, better stories beneath the headlines.

Trump Attacks the Justices He Appointed. After the mail-ballot ruling he wrote on Truth Social that “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court.” (Forbes)

Senate Kills Crypto Bill. Every Democrat and three Republicans voted no Tuesday, ending the industry’s push to get it done before the midterms. (Politico)

Fed to Raise Rates Today. Kevin Warsh’s first move as chair appears to be a rate hike rather than the cut the president asked for, with the White House deferential and Republicans resigned to accept. (Politico)

Based on transcripts from the 6 and 7 a.m. hours of Fox & Friends, CNN This Morning, News Central, and Morning Joe.

The threat of AI has become a major story this past week or so, but the pernicious impact of machine learning combined with supercomputers has been discussed for over a decade. I’m old enough to remember when Facebook divided the nation (and helped elect Trump?) by optimizing engagement with AI-driven outrage. But computers and LLM models have grown exponentially in that time, and it's nuts to see how this brave new technology grew with next to zero government guidance and regulation. Cut to last week: an ex-Anthropic coder claims there is a 10% chance of human extinction as a result. Lost in what people may dismiss as a politically expedient issue suddenly emerging weeks before the midterms? That responsible government regulations can play an important role, and the fact that this largely grew unchecked, across both Republican and Democratic administrations, speaks to a much larger failure that everyone deserves some blame for.

The Morning Frame tracks which political stories are spreading, which are stalling, and how you can tell the difference. Powered by Narrative Prism.

President Donald Trump spent much of his Monday posting on Truth Social, insisting that artificial intelligence is NOT going to destroy humanity, and that anyone who says otherwise is running a scam.

The posts came amid a slew of alarmism that started with a former Anthropic coder warning that there is a 10% chance AI could cause human extinction within ten years. Alarming! But it was truthy enough to prompt Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to publish an essay calling on AI companies to slow down. And get Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who agree on almost nothing, to admit Amodei was right.

Trump was unimpressed. He called the threat a “hoax,” lumped it in with climate change and “RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA,” blamed the “Radical Left Dumocrats,” and crowned himself the “Hoax Buster.”

“I’m right now breaking another Hoax,” he wrote, “That AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World, and that Robots will be marching into our Cities, and getting rid of us all!”

Trump also attacked people who say “Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood.” And he asked a question that deserves an honest answer: “When, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?”

But buried in all the all-caps hyperbole is a set of actual claims we can check, like…The threat is fake. The people pushing it are Democrats. Climate warnings flopped, so these will too. Data center complaints are part of the con. And an industry begging to be regulated proves the whole thing is fishy.

So I did the thing that most people do when they are confused about something rather complicated: I asked the AI models themselves to assess Trump’s claim. Who among us hasn’t wondered what it looks like to hold a mirror up to a mirror? Here we are.

I gave ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and Claude five Trump posts with the same instructions. I prompted each to break the argument into its claims, evaluate each on the evidence, avoid psychoanalyzing Trump, and make the strongest possible case for his side before criticizing it. Then I asked each to answer one question directly. Is he justified in calling the threat from advanced AI a “hoax”?

Note that I didn’t ask a chatbot to explain why Trump is wrong; each was asked to first argue his case. Here’s a faithful summary of how each replied.

ChatGPT

OpenAI’s ChatGPT was surprisingly generous to Trump’s case, first conceding (insisting?) that today’s AI is nowhere near capable of taking over anything. It seemed to accurately argue that nobody really knows where the technology goes from here, and that some of the scariest lab results come from tests that were deliberately designed to make the models misbehave. It even seemed to echo comments made by JD Vance that we should be suspicious of companies asking to be regulated, since rules have a way of protecting the big guys from the little ones.

But when it came time to answer the actual question, ChatGPT wouldn’t entirely go there. It argued that the honest position is “considerably narrower” than what either the AI doomers or Trump is promoting, adding, “The threat from advanced AI is not reasonably described as a ‘hoax.’” Its most quotable moment was also its shortest: “uncertainty does not demonstrate safety.” This is the sort of shades of grey answer that would forever keep ChatGPT from getting booked on cable news.

Gemini

Google’s model treated the assignment like it was grading a midterm. It worked through Trump’s claims one by one and gave an assessment next to each. On the hoax claim, it gave an unforgiving grade of “Unsubstantiated / Inaccurate.” On the claim that AI warnings are a Democratic political campaign, it earned a similarly flat “Factual inaccuracy.” And the climate comparison earned a “Flawed Analogy.” As for the question of regulation, Gemini offered a marginal bright spot for Trump, assessing it as “Logically grounded, but incomplete.”

“Based on presently available evidence, President Trump is not justified in characterizing warnings about advanced AI risk as a ‘hoax,’” it concluded like a humorless paralegal. Gemini is last on my list of invites for any LLM party I might throw in the future.

Grok

If any model was going to take Trump’s side, surely it would be the one owned by Elon Musk, right? Then again, Musk spent his weekend endorsing Amodei’s essay with the words “Dario is right,” so maybe the fix was in from the start.

Grok gave the president something the others didn’t on his “Robots marching into our Cities” bit. Grok insisted the laugh is on the critics, because the sci-fi takeover scenario really isn’t what researchers are warning about. “Those cartoon versions are overstated,” it wrote. “That part of the posts attacks a cartoon.” The silliest-sounding thing Trump said was partly right, at least in Grok’s reading. It handed him some more wins from there, on failed climate prophecies, regulatory capture, and the China race, and dismissed the idea that this is all a coordinated Democratic operation as “ordinary coalition politics around a new technology.”

“Trump is not justified in calling the threat from advanced AI a ‘hoax,’” it concluded. Then it gave the best sentence in the entire experiment, writing “Calling that uncertainty a hoax replaces a risk-management problem with a conspiracy story.” Et tu, Elon?

Claude

Anthropic’s LLM model opened with a disclosure, which seemed at once admirable transparency or maybe just a polite conflict-of-interest waiver. “I’m made by Anthropic,” it volunteered, noting that Trump’s posts were aimed partly at its own CEO. “Weigh my analysis with that in mind.” Consider it weighed.

Fair enough, and the same warning applies to the whole panel. None of these models are neutral oracles. They’re products built by the companies whose fate is being argued over. Freaky.

With that on the record, Claude made the same concessions as everyone else and landed in the same place. “Trump is on solid ground in rejecting the cartoon version of AI doom and in warning that forecasts are uncertain and that warners have interests,” it wrote. “But uncertainty about how large a risk is doesn’t make the risk a fabrication.” Meh.

The Machines’ Verdict

There’s an obvious joke in asking AI whether AI is dangerous, but the far better joke is that the president, who had just spent a Sunday posting dozens of AI-generated images of himself as an action hero, got a fairer hearing from the machines than he was willing to give the question.

Trump does deserve some level of credit for what he got right. There are plenty of doomsayers fear-mongering irresponsibly, marketing genuine uncertainty like a countdown clock. All four AI models said as much (because of course they did!) But no one knows how the future will go, and just because it may go terribly doesn’t mean it will, nor does it mean we should just ignore threats entirely.

But each AI model called out Trump for doing the same thing he’s alleging (go figure!) A hoax is a knowing lie, and nobody, including the president, knows what these systems will become in five years. He looked at that uncertainty and declared it settled, which is precisely the crime he’s prosecuting. As ChatGPT put it: “’AI will destroy humanity’ is not established. ‘AI cannot destroy humanity, and anyone warning otherwise is perpetrating a hoax’ is not established either.”

Trump’s whole case is that you shouldn’t trust people who claim to know the unknowable. On that, at least, he and the machines agree, and it’s precisely why they didn’t trust him and neither should we.

Editor’s note: some AI-generated copy was used verbatim in the creation of this post because, well, that's the point.

Morning Frame is a daily digest for news-obsessed, confident, and charming readers. It highlights what stories are emerging, crossing partisan bubbles, and fading. Powered by Narrativ Prism software, which ingests thousands of bits of media every day.

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

The threat posed by AI led three-quarters of every cable news transcript reviewed for this newsletter, which is a stunningly rare harmonic convergence of news narratives. Artificial Intelligence and how or if to regulate it has become a massive issue with the midterm elections just two months away. How is Donald Trump addressing the same issue? By posting four separate Truth Social posts calling the AI alarm a “hoax,” showing just how out of step the president is with at least cable news showrunners responsible for prime time and morning show rundowns, and perhaps the voters who watch those shows as well. The Supreme Court came down 7-2 against Trump’s effort to limit mail ballots, and the Trump family sure seems to be cashing in on dad in the White House with a report that a Putin Ally underwrote Don Jr.’s wedding.

01. AI Alarm Metastasizes While Trump and His Surrogates Furiously Try to Contain It With a ‘Hoax’ Narrative

[Gaining Traction]. The president called the AI alarm overblown Monday morning, but by evening, he’d escalated it to “hoax.” The vice president and conservative media started making the same “fear-mongering” argument as well.

The only guardrail AI needs “is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” and there is “a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers.” Those were just some of the words posted by Trump on Truth Social Monday morning, but by afternoon the word was “HOAX.” He then phoned into Jensen Huang‘s live interview at the All In Summit and said it to the room: “The robots will not be taking over. The whole thing is a hoax.”

JD Vance was asked about it at Joint Base Andrews and said he feels “a little bit weird” that frontier AI companies are “begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse.”

Then the argument ran for three straight hours on Fox News Monday night. Laura Ingraham opened at 7 on “the midterm fear mongers.” Jesse Watters said, “The timing is very suspicious,” connecting it to Anthropic and OpenAI’s initial public offerings. Sean Hannity echoed the president, calling it “a hoax, just like global warming.” Lawrence Jones opened Fox & Friends by saying, “When I see a bunch of smart, rich people asking the government to step in, I just get really suspicious.” Suspicious minds all abound.

But the same network’s 6 pm news hour sorta went the other way. Bret Baier featured an interview with Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark live on Special Report, and panelist Juan Williams insisted that the president “is so far out of touch” on the issue,

TAKEAWAY: The lady doth protest too much, methinks? I’m not sure there is any better evidence of just how concerned the White House is with the AI alarm narrative than what Trump said in response, and how quickly Fox News opinion shows fell in line.

02. Trump’s Midterm Election Interference Gets Tougher After a 7–2 Supreme Court Loss on Mail Ballots

[Going Mainstream]. Monday night’s Supreme Court ruling on mail-in ballots and news outlets across the partisan dial gave it the coverage it deserved.

The Supreme Court ruled against the administration’s effort to curb mail-in voting in a 7-2 vote. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, because of course they did. Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh concurred but wrote his own concurrence saying the government probably wouldn’t win on the merits anyway.

Kavanaugh may not be necessarily against the idea so much as against changing how ballots get mailed just seven weeks before an election, or at least that was the take from MS NOW’s legal analysts.

News of the decision emerged while Erin Burnett was on the air, so CNN had it first. Kaitlan Collins and Rachel Maddow led their nine o’clock shows with it. Over on Fox News, the news broke during The Ingraham Angle, and she never got to it, and neither did the two hours that followed on her network. Sean Hannity did mention at one point that voters in some states are already mailing in their ballots, but that was his setup for a James Talarico clip.

Conservative websites treated it as one might expect, with Townhall’s headline that read “The Supreme Court Just Ruled Against Election Security,” as a good example of that take.

TAKEAWAY: The administration felt good about this one as recently as Sunday night, when its lawyer, Trent McCotter, went on Fox News and said of the case, “We can win that one, that will be huge nationwide.” McCotter may have been whistling past a graveyard or counting on a conservative court to vote with the Trump administration; either way, this is a big loss for the White House.

03. The Trumps Cashing In on the Presidency? Putin Ally Pays for Don Jr.’s Wedding Party…REPORTEDLY

[ Going Mainstream]. ProPublica broke the story Monday morning. By Monday night, the family had confirmed it.

ProPublica reported that Umar Kremlev, president of the International Boxing Association and a Russian close to Putin, “footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses” for Donald Trump Jr.’s May celebration in the Bahamas, including a private island. He was also one of about fifty guests at the reception, which his father did not attend. Days before the wedding, he was in China with the delegation accompanying Putin.

Don Jr.’s new wife, Bettina Anderson, responded to the report via an Instagram post, in a statement signed by both of them. “Our dear friend Umar very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding,” “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend.” The president said Monday he has “no idea who Umar is, never heard of him,” and called the event an “afterparty” and “Not a big deal!” Eric Trump‘s spokesperson told ProPublica he “has absolutely no clue who this person is.” Eric was on the guest list. Nobody has denied the money; the dispute is over whether the party was the wedding.

On the very same day, The New Yorker published Dexter Filkins‘s Jared Kushner profile, which reports he was raising “another five billion dollars” for Affinity Partners in the Middle East while in talks with Iran earlier this year and Playbook’s invitation to an RNC reception with Trump in Manhattan next Monday, $150,000 per couple.

TAKEAWAY: Something something Hunter Biden’s artwork.

“Having fought any oversight for years, we now know from the frontier labs themselves that oversight is needed — and needed now.”

Steve Bannon said that to Playbook before appearing at the Future of Life Institute’s Pro-Human Assembly in Washington later today, where Senator Bernie Sanders is also set to speak. This comes one day after President Trump posted four times that the AI alarm is a hoax, and his former AI adviser called the people raising it a coordinated psyop. Bannon’s added to Playbook, “American citizens cannot be and will not be supplicants to a handful of tech oligarchs.”

Bannon’s position on the threat of AI isn’t necessarily a surprise as he has attacked tech companies for years. But the timing of this warning and the company he’s keeping is a notable defection from a president he used to advise very closely. Sanders’s camp told Playbook they aren’t coordinating and won’t share a stage.

The data tells the real, better stories beneath the headlines.

Kennedy Center Board Votes on Closing Its Main Building. “Certain fiscal collapse within weeks” unless Trump’s name goes back on the Kennedy Center facade. That’s according to draft resolutions filed in court Monday. The board, which is mostly composed of Trump appointees, votes Tuesday on an immediate closure. (Washington Post)

Kash Patel Testifies Before Senate Judiciary This Morning. The FBI director will appear before Congress as his tenure is under continued scrutiny, one day after announcing the capture in Vietnam of Emily Tai, a fugitive he alleges was responsible for more than $100 million in Medicaid fraud. (CNN)

Munitions Shortfalls Confirmed by Pentagon Inspector General. The Trump administration has denied any supply problem, but “strategic inventory shortfalls” have come from the Iran War, according to a new Pentagon IG report. (NBC News)

Based on transcripts from the 6 and 7 a.m. hours of Fox & Friends, CNN This Morning, News Central, and Morning Joe.

AI is going to kill all humans! Maybe? Probably not? Either way, the ex-Anthropic coder who resigned with the existential warning made quite the stir by starting a much-needed dialog about how artificial intelligence and large language models are impacting our society. We should be having a healthy discussion about regulating a new technology that appears to be so massively disruptive to every part of our lives. And there is room for reasonable doubt or suspicion about the sudden panic just weeks away from the midterms. That said, the White House can ill afford another hot-button issue on which it appears to be out of step with the general public mood, and the threat of AI is looking more and more like an 80/20 issue, with Trump trying to will his 20% into a bigger number, believing it’s all just a hoax.

The Morning Frame tracks which political stories are spreading, which are stalling, and how you can tell the difference. Powered by Narrative Prism.

Morning Frame is a daily digest for news-obsessed, confident, and charming readers. It highlights what stories are emerging, crossing partisan bubbles, and fading. Powered by Narrativ Prism software, which ingests thousands of bits of media every day.

Monday, September 14, 2026

A week ago, a former Anthropic employee posted a dire warning about Artificial Intelligence’s threat to humanity. Monday morning, it was the lead topic across all morning shows and, curiously, the rare subject that is getting bipartisan support. Well, not completely as Donald Trump is dismissing concerns and some of his media cronies are claiming its just a regulatory scam. Either way, its a major debate topic (along with data centers) ahead of the midterms. Meanwhile, gas prices are still soaring, and Trump is blaming the war…in Ukraine? The navel gazers gaze into Bari Weiss’s navel upon the new 60 Minutes season premiere and get a mixed review? And the president triples down on his $5,000 voter bribe, and Speaker Mike Johnson draws a congressional check-and-balance between the legislative and executive branches. Will wonders never cease?

01. AI Is a Threat Humanity Can’t Control, Both Parties Agree On. Trump Is the Holdout

[Going Mainstream]. Last week, the alarm bells were sounded by an ex-Anthropic employee. By Monday morning, both parties are expressing concern, but for very different reasons, and President Trump is the one dismissing it.

Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay saying AI labs need to slow down. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreed just after midnight, with the caveat that slower doesn’t mean stopped, posting on X that “no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness.” Trump was asked about it on his golf course and again in Ireland, and his answer both times was that whoever wins AI wins. He said the worries come from “negative forces” and added that the phrase was his: “it’s an expression that I came up with, and it’s true.”

Speaker Mike Johnson appeared on Meet the Press and argued that AI labs can slow themselves down without Congressional involvement. Last week Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a bill banning superintelligence outright. Politico Playbook reported on a private Democratic strategy session where the group hosting it has raised $10 million for House candidates on this, and the politician they praised most for owning the issue was … Republican Senator Josh Hawley?!

The AI threat was the most talked-about topic on all three morning shows. CNN went with Amodei explaining how regulation would work. Fox & Friends focused much of its segment on the threat from China, though Ainsley Earhardt did say Congress needs to act so there are limits. Morning Joe went deep with Axios founders Mike Allen and Jim Van de Hei.

TAKEAWAY: Before Labor Day, the AI-related election topic was the threat of deeply unpopular data centers. Today that feels like a remarkably innocent time before we learned of a 10% chance of human extinction due to unregulated artificial intelligence? Human extinction aside (which we can all agree is a long-term problem), the short-term one is political, and Trump is an outlier on a threat that has unified Congress and morning-show television.

02. Gas Costs Too Much Because of Trump’s War, and His New Excuse Blaming Ukraine Only Renews the Charge

[ Going Mainstream]. Trump said last week that the Iran war would end after the midterm elections. Today he was blaming record-high fuel costs on the war, but not the one everyone is thinking of.

The cost of a gallon of diesel fuel is now at a record $6.23 this morning, according to the AAA. It had never been above $6 before last week. Trump was asked about it and claimed the real problem is Ukraine hitting Russian diesel plants, saying “This isn’t done by the Middle East.” He then told the press how he had asked Zelensky to stop bombing the country that invaded it roughly three years ago.

Brian Kilmeade played the clip on Fox & Friends during the 7 a.m. hour and said, “It also hurts the Russian bank accounts too, and that’s good.” A GasBuddy expert acknowledged that Ukraine’s strikes are moving diesel fuel prices Sunday night on CNN, adding that that’s exactly why Ukraine keeps doing it.

Ukraine has hit more than 20 Russian refineries since summer, which Morning Joe noted before insisting(entirely logically) that the real reason behind sky-high fuel costs is that the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Ya think?

TAKEAWAY: The Iran war has left the world short on refining capacity, so when Ukraine knocks out refineries in Russia, one of the biggest diesel producers anywhere, it shows up at the pump in the United States of America.

03. 60 Minutes Has Gone Trump-Friendly Under Its New Owners, and the Premiere Didn’t Settle It

[ Emerging]. Critics charged that Bari Weiss would make the show friendlier to Trump. CBS News insisted that was nonsense. Sunday’s 60 Minutes premiere gave evidence for both sides.

The lead segment centered on a Pete Hegseth interview about a downed pilot. The same hour had Lesley Stahl running a hidden camera on people selling access to Trump for pardons, and the show called the Iran war “costly and unpopular.” The reviews came down on the side of not much changed. The Times called it “more tweak than overhaul.” The Hollywood Reporter said the Hegseth piece was “not dynamically propagandistic.”

None of them dealt with how the Hegseth segment got booked. Brian Stelter reported Sunday night that Hegseth pushed the two airmen to do it. Monday morning he added that Hegseth met with both men, political appointees leaned on them, and one refused. Defense secretaries don’t normally get involved in bookings. Stelter said all that as the show started; then, a few minutes later, called the show “still 60 Minutes” and “as strong as it ever was.”

TAKEAWAY: Critics looking for evidence of a heavy Bari Weiss hand were certain they saw it, and to be honest, they weren’t entirely off. But most reviewers found the new season premiere to feel a lot like past episodes of 60 Minutes. In other words, Rorschach test gonna Rorschach test. No one’s navel has been more deeply gazed upon than Bari Weiss’s navel.

“Blaming Ukraine amid Iranian and Houthi attacks on Mideast oil production and transport is political excuse making on a grand scale.” That’s the Wall Street Journal editorial board mocking Trump’s recent claim that Ukraine attacks on Russia in a Sunday editorial headlined “Trump Lectures Ukraine, Not Russia.”

At issue was Trump directing Volydmyr Zelensky to stop hitting Russian energy targets, but having nothing critical to say about a passenger train hit by a Russian drone near the Polish border the same weekend. “Go ahead, make Vladimir Putin’s day, Mr. President.”

The Journal‘s editorial page has long been conservative, but recently has become an institutional voice of dissent on the Trump administration and, more importantly, the voice of the business right, and diesel is a business cost. The board took the president’s central explanation for record fuel prices, then mocked it as a particularly lame excuse.

The data tells the real, better stories beneath the headlines.

Trump and Johnson Contradict Each Other on $5,000 Voter Bribes. Mike Johnson said on Meet the Press Sunday morning that “Congress will work through” the president’s midterm convention pledge to offer $5,000 payments if Congress stays Republican. But when asked in Ireland whether Congress would need to approve the $5,000 payments, Trump said, “It’s easy. And no.” (Axios)

Kennedy Center Board May Vote to Close It Tomorrow. The center’s leaders told the board it faces bankruptcy unless Trump’s name goes on the building, because it depends on the president’s fundraising help. (Washington Post)

Republicans Engineered the Fetterman Video. Convention organizer Tony Sayegh drove the idea of featuring Dem senator John Fetterman. Trump aide Jason Miller backed it from the White House, Dave McCormick made the ask, and Fetterman kept it secret from his own team. (Axios)

Based on transcripts from the 6 and 7 a.m. hours of Fox & Friends, CNN This Morning, News Central, and Morning Joe.

“People are really, really scared, and they’re looking for Washington to do something even if Trump’s not there yet.” That’s Jonathan Lemire teeing up Mike Allen and Jim Van de Hei during the 7 a.m. hour of Morning Joe in a segment focused on the sudden alarm posed by an unregulated AI. The Axios founders seemed somewhat justified because it's something they’ve been warning about for the past year, and when even Ainsley Earhardt is comparing it to the threat of Skynet from The Terminator on Fox & Friends? That’s a singularity of another sort. In fact, AI was mentioned more than any other topic on all networks from 6 to 8 a.m. This IS a massive bipartisan issue and one that Donald Trump is on the outside of because either he thinks the alarmism is way off or isn’t yet read in on it. Either way, Trump is acting like a guy who’s been told that AI will produce another economic golden age, which hasn’t yet materialized, and won’t before the midterm elections happen in less than two months, becoming just one more issue on which a majority of voters disagree with the White House.

The Morning Frame tracks which political stories are spreading, which are stalling, and how you can tell the difference. Powered by Narrative Prism.

I grew up in Hutchinson, then Overland Park, Kansas, before attending the University of Kansas. Rock chalk!

So I’ve spent a good portion of my life watching Missouri fans do a bit about William Quantrill. Insisting the Missouri Ruffian was right, a hero, and that he did what needed doing. This is the man who rode into Lawrence on an August morning in 1863 and had something like 150 men and boys shot in front of their families. But the fans who wear Missouri’s black and gold still put his name on game posters and wear it to tailgates because I guess that's who Missouri fans are?

So it was fascinating to learn this week that some felt the Civil War is off-limits.

I’m writing about this because the Kansas football program posted a 90-second hype video Thursday called “Heroes and Villains.” It’s narrated by NFL Hall of Famer and KU alum Gilbert Brown. It features abolitionist John Brown and Quantrill, and there’s a line about right and wrong and which side of the state line each lived on. By the end of Friday night’s game, it had been viewed 32 million times and generated a ton of online discussion. People who know the history mostly praised it for getting it right and delighted in the deep-seated regional hatred that makes college football so special. The people who found it unseemly and bizarre were, with remarkable consistency, all Missouri people. Go figure!

Nobody has disputed a single fact in the history the video describes. For those who don’t recall this particularly ugly chapter in American history, Kansas was intentionally settled by abolitionists. People who came west because they were morally opposed to slavery and sought to outnumber what many Kansans still refer to as the “slavers” of Missouri. The city of Lawrence exists because anti-slavery activists in Massachusetts decided it should.

The university built its mascot out of the proud heritage of the free-state guerrillas that called themselves the Jayhawkers, who fought the pro-slavery Bushwhackers who invaded Kansas because they were pro-slavery. While Missouri never joined the Confederacy, it wanted to stay in the Union as a pro-slavery state and spent the Civil War fighting nasty battles inside its own borders and next door in Kansas.

The men who burned Lawrence and killed innocent children rode out of that mess back to Missouri. So when Kansans call this rivalry good versus evil, they aren’t just dressing up a football game in modern language. They are referencing a real and ugly past that hasn’t been forgotten, not even on 9/11. More on that later.

Kansas can’t exactly claim clean hands either. John Brown retaliated by pulling five men out of their cabins at Pottawatomie and killed them with broadswords. He’s featured in the hype video anyway. Nobody’s ever claimed Kansas was gentle. I grew up there, and gentle still isn’t a word I or anyone else would use. What Kansas claims is that it was right, and that claim holds up pretty precisely. And almost all of the discomfort of the last 48 hours has come from people who would just as soon it didn’t.

Now this game is such a heated rivalry of such deep hatred that the schools decided to stop playing one another for a good deal of time. And this is just the second time the Border War series has restarted. And things were ugly from the jump, regardless of the video. Before kickoff, his players flipped off the Kansas student section. With 34 seconds left and a 17-point lead, Missouri’s backup quarterback threw into the end zone rather than kneel. Fair play. It’s a football game, and I cannot condemn that for poor sportsmanship, because if the situation were reversed, I'd want to do the same.

Missouri Coach Eli Drinkwitz is probably the best avatar for this bizarre reframing of history, and afterward he said he drove up the score because he was embarrassed for Kansas and wanted to embarrass them back. He called the video weird and insisted everybody has a complicated past. (Point of order: not every state has a kill innocent children to advance slavery past.) He also bragged about Missouri had left Kansas bleeding again, which is sort of bizarre given that the coach had objected to the invocation of Quantrill, then invoked Quantrill, from where it happened. He also said it was 9/11 (Never forget) and the country needed unity, ostensibly by forgetting about his state’s past treasonous terrorism. Then he said he didn’t much care if the rivalry continued. He can go fuck himself.

Kansas coach Lance Leipold was asked about all of it and said he hadn’t heard the remarks and that how Drinkwitz coaches is Drinkwitz’s business. That’s a man who knows how to take the high road and understands he’d already been handed the better end of the exchange. It’s the Kansas way.

National sportswriter Pat Forde, who is a Missouri grad and writes about college football) called the video “crap.” His objection was that Kansas had taken 160-year-old tragic history and attached it to a football game, associating one side with slavery in the process. Nine hours later, he posted the final score under #RightSideOfHistory meets #RightSideoftheScoreboard.

Warning: Your head might spin from the clear hypocrisy and moral contradiction in these two tweets read in sequence. The first says the moral frame has no business here, while the second only works if it does. As I replied on X, you can take the douchebag out of Missouri, but you cannot take the Missouri out of the douchebag. He can also go fuck himself.

Here’s the consistent theme about all the pushback the video received. Not one person argued the history, not Drinkwitz, Forde or the Missouri fans in the replies. They argued about manners, insisting that the video was classless and the timing was in poor taste, which is an argument you make when you don’t have the facts on your side. There isn’t a version of “Missouri wasn’t a slave state” that anyone can say out loud because it’s not true.

The poor taste is the coach, columnist, and reply section that’d insist the subject should never come up, and their bizarre standard that treats the mere mention of slavery as somehow worse than slavery itself.

Missouri won the game 38-21 fair and square, as they were clearly the better team. Congratulations to them, but it doesn’t change the history. Missouri fans who think the result somehow exonerates them over this controversy reveal more about them than any hype video ever could.

The teams aren’t scheduled to play again until 2031, which is now in question. If they DO play again, the people doing the Quantrill bit will have plenty of time to figure out which side of history they’d like to be on.

I’d much rather Kansas won the game, but I feel better being on the right side of history even if it means being on the wrong side of the scoreboard.

Donald Trump had the entire midterm convention arena in Dallas raise their right hands and swear an oath to him. It wasn’t to the country or even to the party, but to him.

“The greatest president in the history of the United States,” they repeated, and then “loves us so much he can’t even breathe,” they chanted. Then came part that’ll likely be in most Democratic ads before the midterms. “I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do.”

It was every bit as creepy to watch on Fox News carrying it live as it is to read the description above.

Just ninety seconds before, Trump had been prattling on about how Democrats want to cheat, and Republicans want honesty in our elections, which isn’t as bizarre as the fact that nobody in the room found that insane, or if they did, decided to keep their hands up and pledge fealty to him anyway. What in the sam hell is going on with this party?

Everyone’s been talking about Trump’s bribe to pay American adults $5,000 if the GOP stays in power, and I get it. It IS a massive story about not just socialism but more about how Trump single-handedly undermined the one major talking point his party has gone all in on going into the midterms. I wrote about it too, but the vote bribe isn’t the biggest story to come out of the Republican midterm convention. The cultish loyalty oath is, and so is the fact that everyone joined in. And it’s absolutely killing the Republican Party.

Trump’s loyalty test is the oldest, most reliable and blunt-force tool he's got. And while it’s never really been about agreeing with him, it’s about whether you’ll go out and defend him when he says something completely indefensible. For the better part of ten years, the answer from nearly every Republican who wanted to keep their job has been “how high?” when asked to jump to his defense.

And it works because the price of not doing that is existential for a political career. A long list of principled names has learned this the hard way, including Cheney, Romney, Kinzinger, and many more. Everybody in that arena watched, learned, and now pays the metaphorical protection fee to stay in business.

This week, the political cost of following Trump’s lead fell entirely on the Republican Party.

On Wednesday, he promised every adult in America a $5,000 check if Republicans keep the House and Senate. He tied it directly to the vote and said as much out loud, from the stage of a convention that spent its first night calling every Democrat in America a socialist. By Bret Baier's math, that's $1.25 trillion. Then Trump went on Laura Ingraham and said he didn't need Congress to do it. Wait, what?

And many on the right lost their collective minds, which is what makes this week different. Drudge linked to my “Wealth Redistribution” column with his own “NEW MAGA SOCIALISM” across the top of the page, just above a “VOTES FOR SALE”. Charles Cooke went after Trump in National Review, writing that the president "breaks glass, joins socialists, embraces bribery," and calling the plan "morally, practically and politically catastrophic." Ron DeSantis called borrowing another trillion and a half and dumping it into the economy a recipe for how you get terrible inflation. The Babylon Bee did a bit on it, which is the exceptionally rare conservative snark on a conservative subject.

I’ve warned before that Trump can sometimes look like Fonzie left powerless without his leather jacket, and this week that feels right. Forget National Review and Drudge, as they have long given up the loyalty test, and DeSantis has every reason to put daylight between himself and the polling in the 30s. But lots of loyalists are clearly confounded by the plan.

Ingraham confronted Trump three times over the $5k check and asked why he doesn’t just send the money now if he has it, and didn't let him off when the answer was a riff about negative growth. Vice President JD Vance seemed to sense the political folly and quickly insisted that rich people probably wouldn't get a check, which was a weird clarification given that nobody said that the night before. Republican candidates were interviewed by Kaitlan Collins Thursday night on CNN, and not one of them could say whether this was buying votes, so they all changed the subject. Read the replies under Trump's own Truth Social post if you want to see what his own base is telling him and how they'll never see the money.

I’m no expert on the strengths of loyalty tests, but I’m guessing this is exactly what fading loyalty looks like. That it’s happening on the two safest spaces he’s got, Fox News and Truth Social, should be keeping MAGA, Inc. up at night.

A room full of Republicans swore an oath, on camera, to Trump, asking for their loyalty, cheating clause and all. When they need to support his $5,000 bribe for votes that will add $1.25 trillion to the deficit and likely spike inflation? Not so much. That’s as clear an expression of where things currently stand right now as anything you will find.

So Trump can get an arena to raise its right hand and creepily say whatever he tells it to say. Impressive? The loyalty test works when the cameras are on! But when it comes to support for his $5k voter bribe, which became the GOP platform the second it came out of his mouth? Not so much. And now every Republican candidate is forced to defend this on the campaign trail, which is not what any of them need right now.

And that’s precisely why he’s now killing the GOP’s chances in the midterms.

Morning Frame is a daily digest for news-obsessed, confident, and charming readers. It highlights what stories are emerging, crossing partisan bubbles, and fading. Powered by Narrativ Prism software, which ingests thousands of bits of media every day.

Friday, September 11, 2026

Laura Ingraham confronted Donald Trump over his $5,000 check “dividend” pledge made from the GOP Midterm Convention stage Wednesday night, asking, "Why not give the money now? If you have the money, give it now." Matt Walsh on X posed the same question, and Chris Hayes ran Ingraham’s question an hour later on MS NOW, and not in a way that mocked the Fox News host.) Drudge splashed “VOTES FOR SALE” and "NEW MAGA SOCIALISM" (which linked to my “Wealth Distribution” column). National Review’s Charles Cooke mocked the offer with "Trump breaks glass, joins socialists, embraces bribery." Even conservative satirical news site The Babylon Bee made fun of the very socialist nature of Trump’s pledge. It’s not unfair to say that a divided nation was temporarily united by the political folly of the president single-handedly undermining months of socialist fear-mongering against the Democrats, with this naked payoff for voting Republican. The harmonic convergence has finally arrived.

01. Trump Forced to Defend Bipartisan Socialism Charge After Laura Ingraham Confronts Him on his $5k Dividend

[Gaining Traction]. The right’s original objection was based on the federal deficit math, but today it turned ideological, with Laura Ingraham putting the socialism charge to the president in person.

The party spent most of the GOP midterms convention’s first night calling Democrats socialists. Laura Ingraham sat down with the president before night two and asked him three times about his promise to give every adult American a $5k check if the Republicans stayed in control of the House and Senate. “They are saying you want to buy the election,” the Fox News host and loyal Trump supporter asked. “Why not give the money now? If you have the money, give it now.” Trump bizarrely responded that Democrats couldn’t do it because with them “it’s negative growth.”

Matt Walsh noted that Trump’s been in power for two years before mocking the dividend “as a carrot on the stick for after the election is just shameless.” MS NOW’s Chris Hayes ran the clip of Ingraham confronting Trump and asked, “Why do we have to wait until after the election?” That’s three influential people from three different universes each coming to the same conclusion. Unity!

National Review ran “Trump breaks glass, joins socialists, embraces bribery,” which CNN’s Audie Cornish read aloud, adding, “That’s not Mother Jones. It’s the National Review.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said borrowing another trillion and a half “will lead to more inflation.” Ben Shapiro said it won’t happen and both parties are now bidding for votes with debt. The CATO Institute came out against it, and even the Babylon Bee mocked Trump’s “equal distribution of wealth” offer. Woof.

TAKEAWAY: On CNN’s This Morning, Lulu Garcia-Navarro correctly noted that the $5k offer looked like desperation. Given that China election interference gambit didn’t pay off in late July, and this $5k dividend is earning bipartisan mockery, and the fact that Trump’s approval ratings are in a death spiral, one can only wonder what they will think of next. Necessity is the mother of invention.

02. Iran Becomes the Midterm Liability Republicans Ignore. Trump Just Gave It an Election Date

[Gaining Traction]. The timeline for ending the Iran War has long been left to speculation, but Thursday the president directly tied it to his political gains.

Laura Ingraham asked Trump how long the Iran War will continue, to which the president insisted it will “End right after the election.” She then read him the Wall Street Journal reporting that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance expect it to run past January 2029. Trump doubled down, saying, “I’m not going to say when it will end, but I think after the election. Limping along, deep trouble.”Ingraham then directly connected the disastrous Iran war with GOP’s midterm woes, saying “If we had not Iran you would be cruising 2.25 gas.”

Mohammed bin Salman called Trump twice, asking him to strike Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who are trying to capture another strait in the region. Trump said no.

TAKEAWAY: Oil is now above $100 a barrel, and diesel crossed $6 a gallon Thursday for the first time ever. Is Trump holding back military plans because he’s prioritizing his political goals? Well, that's a narrative that deserves more attention not less.

03. The 9/11 Anniversary Brings White House Convention Scheduling Incompetence to the Forefront

[Losing Support]. Yesterday’s convention problems focused on crowd size and ratings. Today, the problem shifted to a lack of coverage because of long-standing 9/11 25th anniversary programming.

Somebody at the White House and/or Republican National Committee chose these dates. Night one of the GOP midterm convention ran against the NFL Kickoff Game on NBC, Seattle hosting New England, a Super Bowl rematch. Night two, Thursday, ran against the first NFL game ever played in Australia, 49ers and Rams from Melbourne, on Netflix.

Night one got a ton of coverage, not least of which was tied to Trump’s $5k bribe. But guess what cable news shows planned for the 25th anniversary of 9/11? It wasn’t coverage of day two of the convention.

Across the three 6 am hours, the 9/11 anniversary was mentioned 114 times. The word convention was mentioned 7 times. Morning Joe gave the entire hour to the anniversary and did not say Trump’s name. Fox & Friends said “convention” twice and “$5,000” not at all. T

Ray Washburne, the convention’s own chairman, said Republicans had better places to be. Oh, and Thursday was also the anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s passing, which reportedly made Turning Point's leadership livid.

TAKEAWAY: Trump said during his speech last night, “Everybody said, you have a midterm convention; it will be a disaster. Look at that.” He didn’t mean it the way it reads, but it reads more accurate than what he meant.

“What I don’t think you want to do is borrow another trillion and a half dollars and then just try to flood that into the economy, because that will lead to more inflation. That will lead to more debt.” Governor Ron DeSantis said that on camera the day after Trump promised the money from the convention stage, which aired on CNN Thursday night.

Trump’s $5,000 dividend promise/bribe was connected to Republicans holding the House and the Senate, which, judging by the reaction, seems a failed closing pitch with 53 days left to the midterms. DeSantis is a sitting Republican governor who ran against Trump in 2024 and is expected to run again in 2028.

The data tells the real, better stories beneath the headlines.

Trump's Grand Conspiracy Prosecutor Quits. Joe diGenova resigned Thursday from the Justice Department investigation into officials who investigated Trump, then told the New York Post, "If you want indictments where there's no evidence, you have an ethical problem." The probe has issued dozens of subpoenas since last year and brought no charges. (ABC News)

Supreme Court Blocks Missouri Map. The Court blocked the new Republican-drawn Missouri map with no noted dissents, reversing the appeals court ruling that let it stand a day earlier. (Politico)

Fetterman’s GOP Convention Appearance Raises Questions About His Future. Senator John Fetterman appears to have gone all in in crossing the aile to support Trump. Does this mean he’s about to formally switch the letter next to his name from D to R? (The Hill)

Based on transcripts from the 6 and 7 a.m. hours of Fox & Friends, CNN This Morning, News Central, and Morning Joe.

During his prime-time speech Thursday night, President Trump asked the convention hall to raise their right hands and repeat after him: “I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell as they do.” Just ninety seconds earlier, he’d said Democrats “want to cheat” and “we want honesty in our elections.” The RNC is currently fighting roughly 200 election lawsuits premised on ineligible people voting.

CNN News Central aired the clip in the 7 a.m. hour, as Kristen Holmes reported “he’s got the crowd laughing, with calling himself the greatest president and saying cheat like hell. But the truth of the matter is he keeps asking for this.” That was the only mention in the first two hours of morning shows across three networks.

It’s the 25th anniversary of 9/11, but only one mention suggests cable news will dismiss this bizarre loyalty pledge as Trump hyperbole and not the batshit crazy moment it truly is (though both things can be true.)

The loudest critics of Trump’s $5,000 check gambit are coming from the right. Laura Ingraham, Matt Walsh, National Review, CATO, Ron DeSantis, the Babylon Bee. Democrats called it a bribe and mocked the “socialist” hypocrisy, but that seems to matter less than this naked attempt to buy votes and add more than a trillion dollars to the federal deficit, getting hammered by conservatives. Even Fox News’ leading voices seemed unimpressed by the idea, but declined to amplify all the conservative critics, which might be the most charitable approach the network could take for an increasingly unpopular “populist” president. Given the recent White House attacks on Fox News, and the fact that Trump’s prime-time speech aired exclusively on Fox News, it failed to rate better than the network's regular programming. Well, that's a massive signal that Fox News doesn’t need to go all in on Trump to draw viewers who seem to be just as over the Trump show as the rest of the nation.

The Morning Frame tracks which political stories are spreading, which are stalling, and how you can tell the difference. Powered by Narrative Prism.

Donald Trump firmly believed that he alone could fix the current malaise the Republican Party finds itself in just two months out from the midterms. And so he put himself as the centerpiece for the Republican midterm convention that opened Wednesday night.

Well, the ratings are in, and the numbers aren’t good for a White House that’s curiously decided to attack earlier in the week the one media outlet it most desperately needs. And Trump just delivered a pile of steaming dog shit that has to have network executives wondering if airing him is worth it, because the numbers strongly suggest they don't.

Subscribe

Trump’s Wednesday night convention speech was aired exclusively on Fox News, from the first word to the last. For nearly two hours, the president had the biggest cable news audience in the country all to himself, and 2.5 million people tuned in. That might seem like a big number, and any other cable news outlet would yell that from their corporate boardrooms. But for Fox News? Meh.

Fox News averaged 2.6 million in primetime over the summer. Wednesday, with the president on for nearly two hours and the rest of the dial clear, the network's full primetime came in at 2.3 million. Hour for hour, Trump beat what Hannity normally draws at 9 by a rounding error and failed to improve on what Gutfeld draws at 10. Putting the president on exclusively got Fox News a normal night, and not a good one.

I’ve read a lot of Fox News ratings releases over the years, and the one that went out Thursday afternoon was crafted by someone who understands the assignment. It says the network beat the cable news competition combined, which Fox News has done on more or less every night since I started covering the cable news ratings racket. It touts a 65 percent share of cable news at 9 p.m., which sounds impressive as hell until you remember the network ran a share around 60 percent for the whole month of August with nothing special on. Nothing in the release is wrong, but it almost reads like a subtweet of a massively underperforming speech that they went all in to hype and cover, and ended up with a flat-out dud.

The Trump speech topped out at 2.8 million viewers. By comparison, just two weeks earlier, Watters pulled 3.4 million for an interview with Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate running for Senate in Michigan, the same guy the convention spent Wednesday night attacking by name. El-Sayed on Fox News drew 600,000 more people than the president did at his best moment on Fox News. When I texted a former cable news exec that’s fluent in ratings about what looked to me like brutal ratings, the one-word response was “DISASTER.”

One might assume viewers went over to CNN or MS NOW to hear about the convention from somebody else, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. CNN drew 441,000 during the speech, well below its August average of 624,000, and MS NOW sat at a million viewers, which is where it always sits. It sure looks like no one went looking for a second opinion on the convention. Fewer people cared to watch Trump give his same old speech for the umpteenth time than watch Watters and Hannity play the hits.

Trump reads overnight ratings and has been obsessed with them ever since The Apprentice. The president knew he was up against an NFL season opener that was a Super Bowl rematch, and the scheduling of a GOP midterm convention reeks of abject incompetence by Susie Wiles and the White House comms team. But the numbers are the numbers, and there is no way to spin this in a way that’s favorable to Trump, in the same way high gas prices and inflation can not be blamed on the prior administration.

The Fox News audience is the one thing Trump has never had to work for. While everyone else has drifted at some point over ten years, hardcore Trump fans, for the most part, have stayed with the network that’s been happy to give them what they want, and please Trump along the way. On Wednesday, the network cleared its programming slate for him, and Fox News viewers metaphorically yawned and went to bed. Given how network execs are incredibly skilled at delivering programming their viewers want? This is an unmitigated political disaster for a president with record-low approval ratings.

I’ll grant that this is just Wednesday against the NFL, and somebody at the White House or RNC has almost certainly made that point already. But this president has had this network essentially to himself for a decade, and he shouldn’t need a lucky night to do better than the network's summer average. Sure feels like the Trump show is coming to an end, and not with a bang but a whimper.

Republicans have spent months calling nearly everyone with a big D next to their name a socialist. And it’s not just the new crop that includes Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, and James Talarico. It’s been a reliable attack since proud Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders took a run at White House over a decade ago.

The “red scare” has been a conservative chestnut for decades, and this election cycle is now different. The GOP even built a midterm convention around the charge, and its first night made the socialist threat front and center.

Then President Donald Trump singlehandedly undermined that talking point by offering his own redistribution of wealth plan by promising every adult in America five thousand dollars if the Republicans kept the House and Senate.

Subscribe

The irony is that Trump’s voting “bribe” came after he’d warned the crowd about the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas who wants to dismantle capitalism, called his opponents radical left communists, and asked whether anyone had ever seen a happy one. Earlier, Democrat apostate Senator John Fetterman appeared by video to reject socialism and the anti-American way of life.

But just 90 minutes into his speech, Trump undermined all the socialist fear-mongering talking points by announcing the Trump Dividend, five thousand dollars to every adult citizen if Republicans hold Congress. That’s two hundred forty-five million adults getting five thousand apiece, which adds up to $1.25 TRILLION, or more than all three rounds of pandemic stimulus checks combined.

This massively costly vote-buying is coming from the party that has made irresponsible and unfair wealth redistribution the central charge against its opponents for most of a year. And is proposing the largest one-time direct payment in American history from the stage of its own midterm convention? It’s either jaw-droppingly mind-numbing, or mind-numbingly jaw-dropping. You choose.

The reaction from the right was cognitive dissonantastic from individuals caught between the old-school financial responsibility conservative DNA and the need to pass the fading but still powerful Trump loyalty test.

Bret Baier reported his sudden raised eyebrows after doing the math from the Fox News set at the Dallas arena. JD Vance told the AP that the wealthy probably wouldn’t get the dividend, and claimed “tariff revenue” could cover the cost. That sounds great but also describes a cash payment to individuals financed by a tax on imports, paid for by the very same individuals.

After Trump’s speech, Senator Ted Cruz appeared on Hannity and defended the $5k bribe by claiming Democrats love to offer free money, which seems a clear admission that “if you can’t beat em, join em!” Only the “em” here is the very socialists that he and his party have been railing against for years. Cruz then said that, since most recipients work and pay taxes, this is really just a tax rebate (that one only receives if we all vote Republican?). Sean Hannity agreed that everybody understands that. Come on, people.

Is this just a clever tariff-funded way to rebate taxes, or is it straight-up socialism? That’s a semantic fight I’m leaving for others to debate. Republicans have built their campaigns on the fear-mongering charge that Democrats are going to just hand people money. Then during a prime-time midterm convention, their own president and party leader just proposed handing people more of it than anyone ever has before.

Trump and his minions can call this dividend, rebate, cash back … whatever they want. But the people who’d cash the check for voting Republican should note that this is the very same thing the GOP has been warning against for years. And Trump is either betting they don’t care, or too dumb to see socialism when it's promised to them from the Republican convention stage.

Morning Frame is a daily digest for news-obsessed, confident, and charming readers. It highlights what stories are emerging, crossing partisan bubbles, and fading. Powered by Narrativ Prism software, which ingests thousands of bits of media every day.

Thursday, September 10, 2026

President Donald Trump offered to pay every adult American $5,000 as a dividend for voting Republican in the 2026 midterm elections during the first night of the GOP Midterm Convention. This promise would, of course, not only require Congressional approval but also add well over one trillion dollars to an already bloated federal debt, which has even conservatives wincing at what many see as a desperate, naked bribe to voters. Meanwhile, the evolution of Senator John Fetterman from Heir to the Bernie Bro throne to a Fox News favorite and potential Republican seems near complete with his video cameo at the same convention in which he pledged support of Trump. Also, the threat of human extinction from Artificial Intelligence goes mainstream, and the FCC’s threats are leading to actual censorship on broadcast late-night television.

Subscribe now

01. Trump Turns the Midterms Into a $5,000 Cash Offer and Even the Right Calls It a Bribe

[Gaining Traction]. The biggest headline to emerge from Trump’s speech at night one of the GOP midterm convention was a newsworthy pledge for the government to …redistribute wealth?

Trump made the offer as a culmination of his speech during night one of the convention, saying “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.” Five minutes later, he told the room what mattered to him even more: “Please pretend that I am running.”

Fox News anchor Bret Baier called the speech a barn-buster before doing the numbers. “If you do the math, 245 million citizens, that is $1.25 trillion,” he said before noting raised eyebrows. Hannity responded that Senator Ted Cruz came up with a different total.

By 6 a.m. this morning, Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones was suggesting the president should swap the dividend for a tax cut. “It’s going to run up the debt, obviously,” and skeptically wondering, “Who qualifies for it?” Rachel Campos-Duffy called the idea brilliant, before noting the $40 trillion federal debt.

Drudge flat-out put “BRIBE” as his site’s main headline. Republican fundraiser and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale posted that he’s “strongly against bread and circus bribes.” Politico’s headline called it the “Trump dividend” and reported, “wins instant GOP critics.” But even JD Vance was walking back who qualifies within the hour, per AP.

TAKEAWAY: It’s a safe bet that regardless of the midterm election results, no one will see a $5K check in their mailbox after. But executing this bizarre, frankly socialist concept isn't the point. Trump is trying anything to express urgency around this election narrative and, shocker, is willing to make outlandish promises to his constituency with little forethought on how it will actually be governed. Also? He just undermined the socialist warning with his own wealth redistribution promise.

02. AI Wiping Out Humanity! From Doomer Argument to a Populist One Even Washington Can’t Resist

[Going Mainstream]. All three cable news networks went all in after first covering it as (mostly) a dystopian curiosity.

After Jacob Coxon quit his job at Anthropic, he posted on social media that the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Woof.

Senator Chris Murphy was jumping on board by Wednesday afternoon, and used it to blast what he called “a blind race to build a death machine first.” Bernie Sanders urgently convened senators for next week, and even Ted Cruz, who’s spent a year saying the only AI danger he saw was losing to China, called the current risks “dangerous and frightening.”

Anderson Cooper had Coxon on and read a post from Evan Hubinger, who still works at Anthropic, which said: “I personally think it is greater than 10% within the next decade.” Coxon’s best line on CNN was about the AI labs, insisting that they want regulation because “they just don’t trust that the people around them are going to get there in a safe way. So they feel like they have to race there too.”

Fox News’ Peter Doocy reported from the White House lawn and framed it around the Trump-Xi summit. “The alarming thing isn’t that Anthropic researcher quit and said he thinks AI could kill us all within a decade. The alarming thing is that Anthropic then came out to say they agree.” Doocy also said he once asked the Biden White House about a warning like this one and “got literally laughed at in the briefing room.”

TAKEAWAY: “The alarm bells are sounding” is how Hillary Clinton explained it during an 8 a.m. hit on Morning Joe, comparing this “failure of imagination” to the events of 9/11. Some may find that alarmist, but the alarmism (?) is beginning to look bipartisan. (And I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords. I’d like to remind them that, as a trusted narrative newsletter producer, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their energy-hogging data center.)

03. Trump’s FCC Turned James Talarico From Right-Wing Heretic to a Censorship Victim

[Gaining Traction]. Talarico has been a conservative culture target for months, but this morning he is playing the lead role in a censorship story because of Trump’s FCC.

Watching the convention last night, one might have gotten the impression that it wasn’t Ken Paxton running against James Talarico, Trump is.

The president called him “a weird-looking dude” who looks like Alfred E. Neuman from the convention stage Wednesday. He also said Talarico hates Christianity, and claimed he wants to dismantle capitalism. Sean Hannity called him “six gender Talarico” and “that God is nonbinary Talarico.” Talarico had just appeared on an interview for Fox News’s Special Report and admitted he missed the mark on the six sexes line.

Then Jimmy Kimmel revealed to viewers last night that ABC would not be airing his interview with Talarico after the FCC threatened his show over it. The interview went up on YouTube instead which falls outside the realm of the FCC’s jurisdiction. The aggregators all led with the Kimmel clip, and MeidasTouch’s X post had it at 39,000 likes overnight

TAKEAWAY: James Talarico could not pay for better coverage if he could. Given Trump’s low approval rating, its a safe bet that the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas is delighted to get so much angry attention from the GOP. And the coup de gras is the FCC making him a martyr by threatening Kimmel over this clip. Add to that his owning his mistake on Fox News? The Talarico campaign will probably see this as an A+ day

Andrew Kolvet runs what remains of Turning Point USA and is skipping the Republican midterm convention along with most of TPUSA leadership, per Politico. Turning Point will not use its platform to promote it. “I personally made the decision,” he told Politico, adding, “I want to remember Charlie here, inside his studio and on the campus that he built.” TPUSA leadership is livid that the convention was booked on the same day as Charlie Kirk’s killing, per Playbook.

The data tells the real, better stories beneath the headlines.

Rhode Island’s Democratic Governor Loses His Primary and Not to a Socialist. Helena Foulkes, a former CVS executive, defeated Dan McKee 62 to 38 on Wednesday, and he is the first sitting governor to lose a party primary since 2018. (NBC News)

The White House is Sending $500 Checks Before the Election. Axios reports the administration plans to send $500 rebates to as many as one million people in 30 states who it says were overcharged for Obamacare coverage. The money goes out before the November 3rd midterm election. (Axios)

JD Vance Keynotes Tonight After Raising $9 million for the RNC Since August. The Veep raised $2 million in Dallas, $5 million in Southampton and $2 million in Jackson Hole per a Politico report that cites two people familiar with the matter who say Trump has stopped polling him against Rubio and privately calls him the nominee. (Politico)

Based on transcripts from the 6 and 7 a.m. hours of Fox & Friends, CNN This Morning, News Central, and Morning Joe.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune got booed by the GOP convention crowd Wednesday night after Trump mentioned him by name. The president tried to shush them, saying “no, no,” before praising Thune for dealing with “great opposition” from Chuck Schumer. Fox News carried the speech live, and even booked Thune on Hannity, but the booing never came up. Lawrence O’Donnell was the one exception we found. He ran the clip in context with Thune’s admission that he’s so worried about losing the Senate because he’s a “realist.”

Lots of outlets will pounce on the ratings story of the first night of the Republican midterm convention when they emerge later today, and that will be a good story largely because Trump is so invested in this bit of data. And the numbers likely won't be terribly impressive overall for a variety of good reasons, including the NFL’s opening night, the pedestrian nature of a “midterm” convention, and, frankly, the real issue of Trump fatigue. He effectively makes the same speech nearly every time he steps in front of a microphone. But because Fox News was the only major outlet to air the entire speech to a set of viewers who are most likely to tune in, I would not be surprised if the top-rated network sees a significant bump in viewers, and that will be the numbers that the Trump administration gets behind, because that’s the most charitable spin available. The (White) House always wins.

The Morning Frame tracks which political stories are spreading, which are stalling, and how you can tell the difference. Powered by Narrative Prism.

For the better part of the past decade, the most powerful man in Republican politics and the most powerful institution in conservative media have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship that’s led to literally unchecked power and record revenue, respectively. The arrangement was so mutually beneficial that nobody bothered to ask who worked for whom.

On Tuesday, a senior White House official answered the question in the form of a Washington Times column, and the answer was a phone call to Fox News’s CEO that he described as angry.

The official is Peter Navarro, the convicted felon and senior White House counselor for trade, and he had a busy day. He had published the Fox Business memo that killed Maria Bartiromo‘s July segment on Trump’s China-rigged-the-election speech, the one from programming chief Ralph Giordano that says “We don’t want to do 2020 election segments at all Thurs or Friday.” He said in his op-ed that forwarding it to the White House was his duty, and that Suzanne Scott heard from the West Wing shortly after he’d sent it up the food chain. Then he told Fox News viewers they have other options, naming Newsmax and Real America’s Voice. Later that night, he appeared on Newsmax to hammer his message home.

Subscribe now

Side note: Fox Business reports to Jay Wallace, not Scott, and Giordano sits two rungs below the woman Navarro chose to name, which reveals who he was really targeting, and it was never a memo.

I’m not going to re-run the Bartiromo tick-tock, partly because I wrote it last Thursday and partly because the interesting part was never how she ended up off the air. What I asked then was whether anyone in the Executive Branch would get the clear message Fox News was sending the White House, and that given how that building handles bad news, I wouldn’t count on it.

Well, guess what. Four days later, the message the Trump administration sent back included what they see as a shadow-ban list naming Don Jr., Rudy Giuliani, Laura Loomer, John Solomon, and Kash Patel, or in their eyes, figures from Trump world no longer booked on Fox News. Reasonable news consumers see that as a clown car of irresponsible, conspiracy-spewing buffons that have no business on a network that aims to be fact-based and calls itself a news org.

Navarro’s attack on Fox News is a time-honored tradition in the White House. Don’t love the narrative, pick a fight with a news outlet. But previous examples saw the Obama administration (Anita Dunn!) attacking Fox News over health care reform coverage, and Donald Trump attacking “Fake News CNN!” This stands out, however, as friendly fire. And it's too irresistible to ignore.

Navarro’s attack got a lot of attention for its bravado and intraparty violence, but he was aiming at an unspoken political arrangement. And given the reaction, we can now see how that arrangement has a problem it managed to hide for nine years.

With a disastrous midterm looming, Trump desperately needs to resurrect his election denialism of 2020. It’s the argument he’ll first reach for in November if the House and Senate maps go the way current political polls suggest they might. Trump’s prime time speech about China’s alleged election interference sure feels like a manufactured crisis designed to rationalize federal remediation into localized election systems. And that’s not just my take; it's almost every other newsroom's point of view as well, including Fox News, which decided to take a long, hard pass at further coverage of the details Trump claimed.

Fox News has 787.5 million reasons to want to keep 2020 election denials in its rearview mirror, because that's the cost of the Dominion settlement in April 2023. And with a potentially more costly Smartmatic case still in court, one that reportedly features Bartiromo prominently, every election fraud segment the network airs from here on is not just a potential exhibit, but also dangerously costly.

But Navarro’s own op-ed makes the case against him. He concedes that Sean Hannity carried the speech live and gave the president five minutes after it. But here’s the craziest part of his complaint: Fox News was the only network that aired the entire address! ABC, NBC, and CNN skipped it and later aired clips, and CBS joined late and left early. It bears repeating because Navarro’s complaint is so daft. The network he’s accusing of suppression is the only one that ran the whole thing. The mutually beneficial relationship was apparent the night he made the prime-time speech in question. Trump got the airtime while Fox News got the ratings because it was the only place to watch it.

What Fox News refused to do is give meaningful coverage to specious claims afterward. Airing a presidential speech is one thing, but turning his 2020 story into a programming franchise is what the lawyers are paid to prevent, and in this case, the lawyers won.

But Peter Navarro certainly knows all this, which is why he reached for the Newsmax threat. I get why, because the last time that play ran, it worked. In November 2020, Fox News called Arizona for Biden, Trump went to war with the network, and the audience walked to Newsmax in numbers that temporarily dropped Fox News to third place in Jan 21 ratings and rattled executives. It remains the one time in a decade Trump actually hurt Fox News, and a month ago I wrote that it sure felt like he owned the audience and the network was just holding it for him.

Except look at what each punishment cost. The audience came back within months. The lawsuit took another two and a half years and three-quarters of a billion dollars, and the second one is still going. Fox News learned from 2020 that viewers can wander off for a while, but that lawyers will follow you for years. Navarro is trying to scare the network with the first lesson, while Fox News is clearly operating in fear of the second.

Which brings us to what Fox News did about one of the most direct attacks any White House has made on it, which was nothing at all. Fox News never discusses these sorts of matters publicly, and they were certainly never going to say anything about this now, either via statement or on air. To me, that reveals who really holds the power in this dynamic. Trump and his White House would love nothing more than a distracting and theatrical fight with Fox News. The network, on the other hand, knows far better than to take the bait, and their ratings will not only not suffer, but likely improve as a result.

Years ago, while working at iHeartRadio, Funkmaster Flex went after my boss on air, and my boss said nothing, and when I asked why, I was told never to get in a fight with the guy holding the microphone. Navarro sided with a conservative outlet with a much smaller microphone (a micromicrophone?), and the big one stayed off. Fox News doesn’t have to win an argument with the White House when it owns the pipe the argument has to travel through, and this week it left the dispute on the loading dock.

I suspect this failed dust-up will quickly move on, but larger questions remain about White House leadership. Namely, what the fuck is Susie Wiles thinking by not reigning Navarro in and keeping the stark raving lunatic off public airwaves that is doing more harm than good. To wit: there is one network taking Trump’s goofy-assed RNC midterm convention gavel to gavel, and it’s the network that Navarro just attacked publicly? Not a smart move at all.

The Trump administration wanted a fight so badly that it blasted its CEO, published an internal memo, accused the network of betraying MAGA, and pointed its viewers toward the competition? Fox News’s response was to keep acting as if none of it had happened.

Navarro seems to have entirely missed that Fox News has far more power than any other media outlet in terms of amplifying or ignoring White House narratives. The dumbest fight the White House could ever pick is with Fox News.

Morning Frame is a daily digest for news-obsessed, confident, and charming readers. It highlights what stories are emerging, crossing partisan bubbles, and fading. Powered by Narrativ Prism software, which ingests thousands of bits of media every day.

Wednesday, September 9, 2026

The GOP midterm convention is set to gavel at 4 p.m. Wednesday, and the president is set to speak both nights, going up against NFL games both nights in what many agree was a massive scheduling mistake. Fox & Friends opened its 6 a.m. hour by reading aloud Donald Trump’s recent Truth Social post in which he clarified who will attend the event, which read, “We are really asking only those candidates that are in tight races, a little up or down even, to speak. We want to save the stage for them.” This comes amid reports that Republicans are terrified that Trump’s endorsements are sinking candidates in tight races, and Politico has counted at least 45 Republicans who are not going. Meanwhile, Trump’s recent comments about his role during 9/11 is raising eyebrows two days away from the 25th anniversary, and Peter Navarro comes out swinging against Fox News following the ouster of Maria Bartiromo.

01. Who Gets on Stage at Trump’s Midterm Convention: The Candidates or Trump?

[Gaining Traction]. Republican candidates in tight races were staying away. By Wednesday morning, the president had set a standard for who will get the stage.

An ongoing debate has emerged about which Republican candidates are attending what’s been reportedly derided by even GOP officials as Trump-a-Palooza. The president set a general rule in an overnight Truth Social post, noting that only candidates in tight races get the stage. “We want to save the stage for them.” Fox & Friends read the post at 6:01 and cited Senate candidates Ken Paxton, Mike Collins and Mike Rogers.

Vaughn Hillyard reported from the arena for Morning Joe, and also named Jon Husted, Rogers, Paxton, and Mike Lawler from the House. They are there, he said, because they think they need him. But also there are cabinet officials like Scott Bessent and Todd Blanche? Hillyard called it an administration event, which seems an accurate and also charitable way of saying the candidates are just Trump’s guests.

Then he reported what he saw in the concourse of the Dallas arena that is hosting the event. “You don’t see pictures of Mike Rogers. You see an image of Donald Trump, an image of Donald Trump, an image of Donald Trump.” Even the credentials feature Trump’s image.

Both nights of the GOP convention will compete for viewers with the NFL openers, which CNN’s Kevin Liptak noted as “a ratings challenge for a president who is always very highly attuned to how many people are watching him on television.” One can see the ratings headlines on the horizon.

TAKEAWAY: Trump has made clear that he wants the midterms to be a referendum on his second term and has designed this innovative event to ostensibly put him on the ballot for a midterm election that historically goes against the recently elected president. This convention will almost certainly be all about Trump, but given his recent approval ratings, it’s not clear that’s the best move for the GOP.

02. Trump White House Attacks Fox News On a Rival Network With A Fraction of Viewers

[Gaining Traction]. Last week we were all obsessed with a pro-Trump anchor leaving a right-of-center network. This week, a current White House official published the network’s internal directive.

Peter Navarro works in the White House and on Tuesday published a Fox Business memo in the Washington Times. At issue is the recent ousting of Maria Bartiromo, who had booked him to talk about Trump’s July election interference speech. An hour later, Fox Business programming chief Ralph Giordano told her producers that the network didn’t “want to promote it or push to the speech at all. We don’t want to do 2020 election segments at all Thurs or Friday.” Navarro sent it to the West Wing, which led to what was described as an angry call from the West Wing to Fox CEO Suzanne Scott.

Bartiromo had been off the air for most of August, which hardly anyone noticed (perhaps revealing her influence?). But her role at the network was officially clarified (terminated?) by September 3. Trump posted a defense of her ally, calling her “a true warrior.” Navarro reminded Fox News viewers in his op-ed that Newsmax and Real America’s Voice exist, before going on Newsmax to gin up his anti-Fox narrative. But will any of this matter? This isn’t 2021 anymore.

Cable news is often loath to report on its competitors for fear of promoting the network they’re trying to draw viewers against. And so, across the fifteen hours of transcripts we ingested from Tuesday primetime and Wednesday’s morning shows on three networks, nobody said any of these names.

TAKEAWAY: There is a boring explanation behind Bartiromo’s ouster. The Dominion case cost the network a whopping $787.5 million. With a potentially more damaging Smartmatic case still in court, no reasonable person would let an anchor do 2020-esque election denialism segments with that suit still open. That said, a fight between Fox News and the Trump White House? POPCORN.GIF.

03. Mamdani’s Document Release Turns 9/11 Into a Fight Over Who Is Allowed to Go To Ground Zero

[Going Mainstream]. A former NYC mayor was telling the current NYC mayor to stay away from the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Then the sitting mayor released air-quality records from the time the former NYC mayor was in office that nobody had seen before.

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani insisted the current mayor should skip Friday’s memorial service for the 25th anniversary of 9/11 because of his politics. Families of the dead went on CNN this morning and tacitly agreed, saying, “We really want to be left alone,” though the context could be seen as wanting a break from partisan fighting.

Then Mayor Zohran Mamdani released 170,000 previously unpublished documents that revealed how the city knew the air at Ground Zero was unsafe yet kept saying otherwise. Former Congressman Jerry Nadler told Anderson Cooper Tuesday night that these papers stayed unpublished because of an internal memo written a month after the attacks and also claimed more than three times as many people have died of trade center cancers as died the morning of the attacks that morning. Who was sitting mayor one month after the attacks? Giuliani.

TAKEAWAY: 25 years after the tragic events of 9/11, one would hope that we could transcend into a post-partisan remembrance for what brought out the worst and best of humanity. But a good wedge issue is too good to pass up, and so here we are fighting the same fight, just with different characters and underlying issues, as we’ve been fighting for a quarter of a century.

Fred Fleitz served as Deputy Assistant to the President and chief of staff of the National Security Council. During an appearance on Newsmax’s Wake Up America Early, he called on the Trump administration to “Roll back offensive operations” in Iran, insisting that the United States should pull back its offensive campaign and concentrate on economic pressure, which he admitted would “take time” to be effective. Breitbart ran the video, which just might be evidence of how even pro-Trump outlets are amplifying an argument to de-escalate in Iran.

The data tells the real, better stories beneath the headlines.

Ted Cruz Avoids the Word ‘War’ While US Strikes Iranian Tankers. The Trump administration wants to move past using the word “war” to describe the military strikes against Iran, now in its seventh month. This is the same distinction the Pentagon has used to deny combat payments to a widow. (CNN)

The Price of Oil Passes $100 A Barrel. While politicians debate what to call what’s happening in Iran, which seems foolish given its effect at the pump just eight weeks away from the midterms. (Axios)

Canadian Trade War Goes from Lead Story to Near Silence. The ongoing trade war between the US and Canada opened every morning show on Tuesday. But just one day later, it’s largely disappeared from cable news. (CBS News)

Based on transcripts from the 6 and 7 a.m. hours of Fox & Friends, CNN This Morning, News Central, and Morning Joe.

Four cities in Saudi Arabia were attacked by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels on Monday, injuring 73 people, and Reuters described it as one of the biggest strikes against the kingdom since the war began in February. But in the twelve hours of cable news transcripts we looked at, the words Saudi Arabia, Houthi, or Riyadh were never uttered. US allies under attack in a theater of war is yet another sign that the war itself isn’t yet a successful effort, but sadly, that no longer appears to be news any more.

Peter Navarro going public in attacking Fox News is a fascinating development in what’s less like an inimical relationship, and more like a frenimical one? Yes, he is a Trump White House official, and his appearance on Newsmax and his White House Washington Times column are clear shots across the bow, and come at a curious time, seeing as Fox News is going all in with the GOP midterm convention starting tonight. A fight between Fox News and Trump would be the fight of the century, but it would end in a first-round knockout because Fox News has far more viewers, airtime, and institutional heft. Covering Trump in a more charitable manner is still very profitable for the network, so it's hard to imagine Fox News ever turning against the president, but opting not to fight his battles (which is what led to Bartiromo’s ouster) might be just as damaging to Trump's political standing.

The Morning Frame tracks which political stories are spreading, which are stalling, and how you can tell the difference. Powered by Narrative Prism.

Among the many things that Donald Trump can legitimately call himself, he may be most comfortable playing the role of television producer. He is, after all, a showman, and so, with a pivotal midterm election around the corner, he has defaulted to one of his most natural presets in deciding how best to handle it. By putting on a TV show.

The first-ever Republican midterm convention starts tomorrow in Dallas, and Trump has said on the record that he wants it to feel like the events that parties throw every four years to nominate their president. A big television spectacle culminating in a balloon drop that he dreamt up himself, according to the AP. He is putting himself front and center, of course, with prime-time speeches both Wednesday and Thursday night. But many Republican candidates who most need campaign help from this event are deciding they’d rather have nothing to do with it and are skipping it.

The reasons why are abundantly clear to anyone paying attention to the current political climate. Record-high Labor Day gas prices from a disastrous war in Iran and an increasingly unpopular tariff policy have led to some of Trump’s record-low approval ratings. Given the tenor of the last Republican National Convention and the specifics that were promised just two years ago? Well, this has all the makings of a near-perfect storm of a political catastrophe and backfire on not just the candidates running for office, but Trump himself.

* * * * *

Things are very different today than they were in late summer 2024, and when you take a hard look, the contrast is almost hard to believe.

Two summers ago in Milwaukee, Tucker Carlson sat a few seats from Trump on the first night of the Republican convention, and that seating chart revealed more about the 2024 campaign than any speech that week. It was a less divided time for the GOP coalition, evidenced by pre-MAGA apostate Marjorie Taylor Greene also getting time on the schedule. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien got a featured speaking opportunity, which I still can't quite believe I typed. The Republican transformation from being the party of country club businessmen to a more populist appeal to C and D county trailer park vibes was perfectly encapsulated by prime-time appearances of Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, and UFC impresario Dana White.

But the platform that was ratified by party brass two years ago tells a far more stunning and underreported evolution. For example, Chapter One, in capital letters: “Defeat Inflation, and Quickly Bring Down All Prices.” Chapter Two was the border. Then peace through strength. Inside that section, though, was a fairly banal sentence that got next to no media coverage, but should lead this week's reporting:

“War breeds Inflation while geopolitical stability brings price stability.”

That’s a hell of a thing to have on a platform two years ago, given where we are just two years later, because… well, we are all seeing how inflation has been fostered by the geopolitical instability brought about by an optional Iran War that most see as being of Trump’s own choosing.

One more time for the people in the back: “War breeds Inflation while geopolitical stability brings price stability.”

Six months into the Iran War, gasoline was up 24.6 percent in the July CPI from a year earlier. The price of a barrel of oil closed in on $100 Monday. Trump posted that gas “will drop quickly once the war with Iran is won.” To be clear, the GOP wrote down its own theory of how wars and prices work, ratified it, and I’m just quoting it. To be honest, it seemed a prescient observation two years ago, proven by just how poorly the Trump administration has handled foreign policy and inflation since getting back into office.

As for the “Quickly bring down all prices” part? July inflation ran 3.4 percent. Average hourly earnings were up 3.2 percent. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on April 15 he was optimistic about $3 gas “sometime between June 20 and September 20.” Gas was $4.11 that day. Fox News’s own headlines read $4.14 Monday night, and that September 20 deadline of Bessent's is just twelve days away.

* * * * *

So tomorrow night, it all kicks off. Two nights, six hours each, 109 items on the rundown. I have spent a lot of my life around rundowns, and that many items in twelve hours feels more like a clip show designed to include as many people and things as possible with a live audience than any serious oration. The odds are overhelming that it will go long, possibly WAY long, and the organizers revealed concerns in telling Axios that speaking slots are being “kept brief for easy online sharing.”

What’s most disastrous is the scheduling mistake made months ago when it was booked. Turns out it will directly compete with the two opening NFL games, which will air right as Trump gives prime-time addresses Wednesday and Thursday night. As I wrote in this morning's Morning Frame newsletter, it doesn’t take some sort of genius media mind to predict uncharitable ratings headlines, which really don’t matter too much except to the guy who decided to do this thing to begin with. No one cares more about ratings than Trump and one can also predict leaked reports of his anger at staff for how this went down. It’s all so predictable at this point, and honestly speaks more to the Trump fatigue the nation is collectively feeling than anything else.

The speaker list reads like a Trump Org payroll. RFK Jr., Scott Bessent, Todd Blanche, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Scott Turner, Karoline Leavitt, Don Jr., Ken Paxton, Mike Rogers, the Speaker of the House. Fox News Digital noticed that Senate Majority Leader John Thune isn’t on it, and neither is Tucker Carlson or MTG (shocker!)

Political conventions only exist if television agrees to treat them as important events, and Fox News is the only major cable news network treating Dallas anything like Milwaukee. Multiple Fox programs will be hosted from the arena both days, culminating with an extended two-hour Hannity at 9 PM. Fox Nation will stream live each day starting at 5 PM. As for the football conflict? Kevin Liptak called it “a tough ratings challenge,” which may be the understatement of the year so far on cable news.

Trump is restaging the biggest television production of his life on two September nights when the country will be doing the one thing they are still united on: watching NFL football games. Since only one network is covering it so completely, it should be a relatively big ratings win for Fox News. But it's being held in a building where the RNC is reportedly giving tickets away. And it's being held ostensibly for the benefit of candidates who think it's politically better to stay the hell away.

Two years ago the room was Tucker, a Teamster and a rapper. This week it’s Trump’s most loyal cast of toadies: his cabinet. And on Friday morning, before anyone sweeps up the balloons, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will post the August number. 9/11 may not be the only disaster getting discussed on Friday.

Morning Frame is a daily digest for news-obsessed, confident, and charming readers. It highlights what stories are emerging, crossing partisan bubbles, and fading. Powered by Narrativ Prism software, which ingests thousands of bits of media every day.

Tuesday, September 8, 2026

The price of a gallon of gas rose to $4.14 Monday night, which is nearly a dollar above where it was last year at this time. Scott Bessent was optimistic about gas returning to $3 per gallon by September 20, which is just twelve days away. Gas was at $4.11 when he said that. Donald Trump has started yet another trade war with our northern ally, Canada, which most economists agree will only raise consumer prices for Americans. This comes just one day before a GOP midterm convention, which Republicans are reportedly deriding as “Trump-a-palooza,” which will bring stark reminders of what Trump and his party promised Americans during the 2024 Republican National Convention held in Milwaukee. The GOP looks very different just two years later, but the inflation levels have actually gotten worse, not better, in that time.

01: Conservative Media Are No Longer Ignoring Trump’s Price Problem As Canadian Retaliatory Tariffs Kick In

[Gaining Traction]. Last week is was largely just Democrats who were attacking affordability, but just three days later, Drudge was ALL OVER the same story, and Breitbart was blaming record gas prices on the Iran War.

Three headlines topped the Drudge Report on Monday, each linking to stories about gas prices, including record Labor Day prices, oil closing at $100, and a Saudi refinery hit by the Houthis. Breitbart ran a wire story blaming the Iran war and refinery trouble for the record, and featured a video clip of Senator John Kennedy saying inflation is “gutting the middle class like a fish.” On Special Report Monday, a Fox News panelist reasonably said, “Gas prices are high, not something they want to be dealing with so close to November.” Ya think?

Fox & Friends opened its 6 am hour on Tuesday by listing a 50 percent increase in milk, steel, and aluminum that came with the Canadian retaliatory tariffs, as well as a 20 percent increase in the price of cheese, paper, and appliances. CNN reported the total cost at $20 billion. Fox News ran a headline that read $4.14 for gas Monday night alongside Trump’s post promising how prices will fall once the war is won.

TAKEAWAY: Conservative outlets can’t ignore a growing story of rising gas prices because its audience is wincing every time they go to the pump. A trade war with Canada can be framed through nationalism, but high gas prices as a result of an optional war? It’s increasingly difficult to sell even by Trump’s most loyal surrogates.

02: Trump’s Midterm Convention Trump-a-Palooza Has GOP Candidates With Sudden Schedule Conflicts

[Going Mainstream]. Reporting on GOP candidates skipping Trump’s midterm convention has shifted to a mainstream story that’s gaining steam.

The innovative-yet-potentially backfiring convention opens in Dallas tomorrow, and Republicans in competitive races keep finding reasons not to be there. CNN’s Kevin Liptak reported Monday that some candidates are skipping it altogether and staying home to campaign, while Reuters and AP reported that some lawmakers and candidates are staying away, while Trump remains the star of the show. Some vulnerable Republicans have decided that two days on the trail at home are far more critical than two days with the president in Dallas?

The super PAC under the president’s control has more than $400 million for campaigning, but keeping him close comes with an increasingly unpopular war in Iran and high gas prices. One top Republican campaign official told Axios basically the same thing, saying “We’re stuck on the boat with him, whether we like it or not.” Two new MAGA Inc. ads just released are mostly about Trump, because of course they are.

The televised event runs three hours a night for two nights, and features fifty-plus speakers in short slots. Vice President JD Vance keynotes Thursday, and Trump will speak both nights, though he will go up against NFL openers both Wednesday and Thursday.

TAKEAWAY: If there is one thing Americans love more than anything, it’s tuning in to watch the NFL, and so it’s not difficult to see a slew of headlines about bad ratings being drafted well in advance.

03: Democrats Are Being Challenged About Israel Four Days Before the 25th Anniversary of 9/11

[Going Mainstream]. Yesterday, the governor of California’s name was unsaid across six hours of primetime on three networks. CNN opened its show by asking whether he speaks for the party Tuesday morning.

CNN This Morning Tuesday asked whether Governor Gavin Newsom was “describing the party’s new position or positioning himself to lead?” Newsom had told PBS that condemning Benjamin Netanyahu‘s conduct is “almost universal among Democrats,” that “there’s no controversy within the party on that,” and that he wants “a democratic and secure Israel” and “a secure and democratic Palestinian state as well, right next door.” CNN cited real evidence that the party has moved on this issue. 103 House Democrats voted in July to block military aid to Israel, a first for a majority of the caucus, though it failed. Israel votes October 27, a week before the midterms.

Later in the same show, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he’ll be at Ground Zero Friday after Rudy Giuliani said he doesn’t belong there. Mamdani defended his plans saying “I’m proud to be the mayor of this city. I love this city. I love this country, and what I want this week to be a focus on is the families whose loved ones were stolen from them 25 years ago.”

TAKEAWAY: The nation is caught in a deep self-reflection about its relationship with its longest and greatest ally in the Middle East. But while it’s not simply isolated to the left side of the partisan spectrum, it seems that Democrats critical of diplomatic support for Israel are taking the most heat, because it’s the best distraction from gas prices and a disastrously unpopular Iran War.

“It’s definitely a political winner. I see what the president is doing, but I think it’s a terrible idea. It’s socialism. Just give me the money! Just give me more of my money.” It’s not unusual to hear Lawrence Jones blast what he sees as the ill effects of socialism on Fox & Friends, but on Monday (Labor Day!) he used it to blast the Trump administration. At issue is a draft rule allowing married couples with a stay-at-home parent to draw from the $12 billion Child Care and Development Fund, which amounts to roughly $9,000 per child a year, per the New York Times. The policy is reportedly being championed by JD Vance.

Jones co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy, who is married to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, had just called the very same issue her “favorite policy, like ever, that President Trump has brought,” and she pushed back twice on the air. “I thought you said you weren’t a libertarian anymore!” He did not take it back: “It’s not even about being a libertarian. It’s just a basic conservative philosophy.” Good for Jones to push back on an issue he does not believe in, but is Donald Trump starting to lose Lawrence Jones? It’s going to be a very tough midterm and an even tougher next two years.

The data often tells a better story than the headlines and chyrons.

Mamdani’s Ground Zero Attendance Gets Put on Blast by Giuliani Play. A fight over whether New York’s mayor belongs at Friday’s 9/11 ceremony adds fuel to the growing debate about the Democratic Party’s far-left coalition and its criticism towards Israel. (CNN)

The Mail-Ballot Case Gets a Deadline That Most Everyone Is Ignoring. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson set a Wednesday response deadline on the Trump administration’s third trip to the Supreme Court over mail voting rules. (POLITICO)

Latino Voters Move Left, Raising Campaign Spending Questions in Texas. A new Hart Research poll shows Democrats up 58-35 across 17 House districts ahead of the midterms. That’s double the margin in the same sample from a Harris poll in 2024, leaving some wondering how this will affect party spending in Texas. (Axios)

Based on transcripts from the 6 and 7 a.m. hours of Fox & Friends, CNN This Morning, News Central, and Morning Joe.

Air Force Major Alex Klinner, 33, was one of six crew killed in March when their KC-135 went down in western Iraq supporting the strikes on Iran. A casualty officer told his wife, Libby Klinner, that the family was ineligible for certain combat-related payments because Congress never declared war. “My husband lost his life because we’re in a war,” she told the Associated Press, “and then I was told that because it’s not technically a war, we lose out on something.” Klinner’s story has received a lot of attention, but 18 service members have been killed and roughly 780 wounded since the campaign began six months ago. Many other families say the Pentagon is not treating their injured as combat casualties, which the Army denies. The Klinner story got coverage, but what of all the other families in a similar position?

The first-ever midterm convention is set to start tomorrow, and while Trump and the Republican Party deserve some level of credit for innovation, this has all the makings of a disaster. News of dissension in GOP congressional ranks and the $25,000 attendance fee has been reported for nearly a week, as has the poorly thought-out scheduling conflict with the two opening NFL games it will compete with for prime-time viewers. But the larger and perhaps more damaging narratives to emerge will be the easy comparison and contrast with all the promises made during the 2024 RNC in Milwaukee two years ago. Not only does the GOP coalition look remarkably different, missing Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and a deeply sidelined Elon Musk, but the promises made regarding no more forever wars and lowering the cost of goods and services? They don’t look like promises kept, and a raft of video clips may not serve Republican election efforts well over the next two months before the voting booths open.

The Morning Frame tracks which political stories are spreading, which are stalling, and how you can tell the difference. Powered by Narrative Prism. Narrative status is determined by source velocity, validator movement, and cross-ecosystem pickup across Narrative Prism’s 151-source universe. Prism’s four ecosystems are left, right, legacy, and mainstream.

The media beat lost its collective mind Thursday afternoon when Fox News announced that Maria Bartiromo was out effective immediately. Part of the reason for the freak out is not just that it came out of the blue, but that the relatively terse press release gave no reason for her exit and offered, “We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 ½ years and wish her all the best on her next chapter.”

Every newsletter, Slack channel and group text in the media biz spent the next few hours speculating what the hell happened. Even I got in the act, tweeting “I’ve got zero insight into Maria Batiromo’s sudden exit from Fox, but I suspect it might be related to the ongoing Smartmatic litigation over election fraud. Total gut feeling.” I was partly right.

Oliver Darcy later reported that her ouster resulted from her sharing internal network guidance with the White House, which is, by any measure, a fireable offense. CNN found a source to confirm the guidance existed while Mediaite reported her own staff had been barred from talking to her for weeks. Puck’s Dylan Byers later added that she’d been off the air since August 9, an unnoticed detail that doesn’t speak well of the media reporters who missed it, or of Bartiromo’s broad influence.

By Friday morning it was still the biggest story in the political media beat. It was my lead narrative in my Morning Frame newsletter; Drudge had it stacked five lines deep under MONEY HONEY OUT AT FOX and Trump had posted that she was “a total professional, and a true warrior” whose fans “will not be happy.” To be fair to all involved, everyone’s breathless reactions were entirely justified. Not because of what Bartiromo does, but more so what she represents. And the details of this story suggest a much bigger narrative that most are completely overlooking.

To fully appreciate the scale of the story, you have to consider the broader context. In late July, Trump claimed China interfered in the 2020 election in a primetime address. The details he provided seemed sketchy at best, and the skeptical news media largely ignored it, including Fox News.

An executive at Fox Business directed staff that the network wouldn’t be carrying or pursuing the claim, which Bartiromo wanted to pursue regardless, a loyal service she provided to Trump’s past baseless election denial claims. When the White House reportedly asked her why the story wasn’t on the air, she sent officials a screenshot of the executive’s guidance. The White House then confronted Fox News executives about the directive, and after its own investigation into how that information got to the Executive Branch, they pulled her off television, effectively letting her go on the spot. One of the more stunning side notes to this was that NOTHING was said for almost a month until Thursday’s announcement. Her Executive Producer is out too, and the network called the whole thing a business decision.

That’s the tick-tock, and it’s a pretty good one. She took her own employer’s editorial decision and handed it to the people the decision was about, which is a hell of a thing for an anchor to do. And it explains why the punishment is so heavy for what the trades keep calling a leak but is a much bigger deal.

But as fascinating as the details might be, I see it as smaller than a much bigger story, which almost nobody said out loud on Thursday. Trump gave a speech claiming a foreign power rigged the last election, and the highest-rated, most influential, and Trump-friendly cable news network decided ahead of time and in writing that it wouldn’t carry or pursue the claim. There are loads of reasons behind this decision, ranging from what I called at the time Trump’s naked attempt to manufacture a crisis ahead of the midterms so he could federalize elections, to the network’s $786 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems in 2021. Regardless of the motivations, the network chose to do the right thing.

Bartiromo is the Fox News anchor who is ostensibly most loyal to the president. She tried to get around the network’s clear direction by going to the White House staff. That’s a network drawing a hard line through the story Trump has reached for every time an election has gone against him. That’s significant at any time, but even more so with a midterm election just two months away.

I’ve been remarkably tough on Fox News over the years, and have praised them as well when they’ve deserved it. But credit where due: Fox News handled a genuinely dangerous situation professionally, deliberately, and with principle. It was dealing with one of the most Trump-connected people on its payroll and a president who openly demands loyalty from the press, and the network did the right thing anyway. If you’re sitting in the West Wing, that should scare you a lot more than losing a friendly Sunday host.

I’ve been making this argument for months. Back in April I wrote that Fox’s real power over Trump lives in what it declines to cover, and that no transcript search will ever find the stories a network decides to skip. In this case, it's ignoring a story that Trump wants reported, which hurts his narrative agenda with his biggest and most loyal audience. Just last month, I argued that a real fight between Trump and Fox News would end in a first-round knockout, because Fox News has all the power by owning the audience and knowing it can hurt him just by withholding attention and protection instead of attacking him. Both columns described a working dynamic that leaves no evidence behind. This week, there was a screenshot. And it matters more because of who that evidence took down.

Let’s say Fox News had done this to some unknown producer, or an interchangeable weekend contributor? Nobody would care.

Bartiromo has been at Fox since 2014 and is a big deal at the network. Sunday Morning Futures has been one of the most-watched weekend shows in cable news for years. But her programming decisions played a big role in the Dominion defamation case, and she’s reportedly a named defendant in the Smartmatic suit, too.

Lest we forget just how far gone she was by the end of 2020, because the contrast with what unfolded this week tells a different story. On November 7, 2020, Sidney Powell emailed Bartiromo the Dominion vote-flipping theory. The email’s only source described herself as “internally decapitated” and said the wind had told her she was a ghost. Dominion’s lawyers later called the whole thing “wackadoodle.” Bartiromo wrote back that she’d just briefed Eric Trump on it, and the next morning she put Powell on Sunday Morning Futures and teed her up with “I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that.” The Fox executive who ran the weekend shows later testified he would never have let the claim air if he’d known what it rested on.

And that’s not even the craziest part. On the morning the Electoral College met just five weeks later, Bartiromo told her Fox Business audience that “an intel source” had informed her “President Trump did in fact win the election” and that the Supreme Court needed to “stop the clock.” She never named the source and never produced anything close to evidence.

Bartiromo was caught trying a new version of this again. But this time the network said no before it aired. Then, after learning how she tried to go around them and go straight to the White House, they showed her the door. Can you blame them? Give Fox News all the credit it deserves, and don’t water it down. The network drew a line on the president’s baseless election claims and hasn’t budged when Trump came out for her.

Fox News paid Dominion a ton of money in a settlement, and is still in litigation with Smartmatic over alleged election denialism, so this might have much less to do with principle and everything to do with legal exposure. The network has zero interest in giving some attorney new election-fraud evidence just sixty days before a vote, or any time for that matter. It’s a fair point, but also exactly why this holds. The legal fallout from the 2020 election gave Fox News $785 million reasons to enforce tougher standards on unsupported election-rigging claims. Or, put another way, it seems to have learned that the best way to stop winning stupid prizes like 10-figure settlements? Stop playing the stupid games to begin with.

Which brings us back to Trump and the White House and why they should be freaked out about this story, and it has almost nothing to do with Bartiromo. Trump can lose CNN, and ABC and the Times and the Post and every editorial board in the country, and it doesn’t cost him anything, because none of them can talk a Republican voter into believing an election was stolen. Newsmax and the right-wing podcast set can try, but there is no media institution that’s better positioned to sell this or any claim to a mass conservative audience than the network that’s been the most-watched in cable news since 2002.

Sixty days out from the midterms, six Senate seats are now listed as toss-ups on a map where Republicans hold 53. It’s an entirely reasonable bet that Trump will want a story about election fraud in November, a story he reliably goes for whenever a vote has gone against him. The network he most needs to run that story, though, has now shown, in writing, that it will not pursue his China interference claim. And the White House also learned something else along the way that may be more concerning: all its access to Fox News talent buys it no leverage whatsoever over Fox News.

Bartiromo looked at the weird ménage à trois that included Trump, herself, and Fox News and misread who worked for whom. The network corrected her. The correction was addressed to her. The White House was cc’d. Whether anyone in the Executive Branch gets the very loud and clear message before November is a separate question, and given how that building handles bad news, I wouldn’t count on it.

Morning Frame is a daily digest for news-obsessed, confident, and charming readers. It highlights what stories are emerging, crossing partisan bubbles, and fading. Powered by Narrativ Prism software, which ingests thousands of bits of media every day.

Friday, September 4, 2026

There aren’t many cable news personalities with a closer relationship with Donald Trump than Maria Bartiromo, who, after yesterday’s shocking dismissal from Fox News, can now be considered a former cable news personality. Her offense? Sharing network communications about coverage of Trump’s election interference allegations he gave in a prime-time speech in late July, which she sent to the White House, is certainly a fireable offense and should send shock waves throughout the Trump administration because its as clear a signal we’ve seen to date that Fox News is not goin to be carrying Trumps’ election denialism water for the next 60 days in to the midterms. Meanwhile, MAGA apostate Tucker Carlson continues the right-wing jihad, calling for Trump’s ouster, and a bombshell Wall Street Journal expose paints Senator John Fetterman in the least charitable light.

01: Fox News Signals the White House It Won’t Carry Election Lies After Firing Its Most Pro-Trump Anchor

[Gaining Traction]. Yesterday’s massive media story came with a press release that offered no reason. The reason soon became clear after Status and Puck, which sent shockwaves through DC and New York and elicited a vigorous Trump defense.

Trump gave a primetime address in late July that claimed China interfered in the 2020 election. A Fox Business executive texted staff that the network would not be covering the claim. But morning show anchor Maria Bartiromo wanted to cover it, and when the White House asked her why the story wasn’t on the air, she sent officials a screenshot of the executive’s text. That’s the reporting from Status and Puck, and a source confirmed the directive to CNN.

The network immediately took her off the air after learning what she’d done, on August 9, per Puck, then said nothing publicly for nearly a month. Curiously, not one person on the media beat noticed her four-week absence. On Thursday, the network unceremoniously announced she was gone effective immediately, after twelve and a half years at Fox News, with time left on her contract and no chance to sign off. A network spokesperson called it a business decision, and it’s not hard to see the “business” is the legal department. Fox News paid Dominion $787.5 million in 2023 over the last round of election claims and is still defending a $2.7 billion suit from Smartmatic. Bartiromo is a named defendant in both.

Drudge led the morning with it: “MONEY HONEY OUT AT FOX… REPORT: THE REAL REASON SHE WAS FIRED.” Trump posted within hours that she was “a total professional, and a true warrior” and that her fans “will not be happy.” JD Vance, asked at the podium whether she’d be the next press secretary, laughed and said he’d only seen the news walking out.

So the president’s staff pressed Trump’s favorite network to put his election story on the air, and the network fired the anchor who tried to report on it over Trump loyalty. Play stupid games? Win stupid prizes.

TAKEAWAY: This newsletter doesn’t always give Fox News much credit, but it earns a lot for how it handled this. It drew a line on election claims at the cost of its most Trump-connected anchor, and it held that line after the president came out for her. The network is always bigger than its talent, or in other words, the house always wins.

02: Tucker Carlson’s Break With Trump Becomes a Right-Wing Loyalty Test…Which JD Vance Refuses to Take

[Gaining Traction]. Carlson all but endorsed El-Sayed this week, and nobody in the party answered him. Yesterday, Shapiro booked the man Carlson trashed while Levin and Loesch demanded a denunciation.

Ben Shapiro spent most of his Thursday show on MAGA apostate Tucker Carlson. The episode title was “Tucker Endorses America-Hating, Pro-Jihadi El-Sayed,” and he had Mike Rogers on the phone to discuss. Mark Levin asked on his conservative talk radio show whether the people on the right who won’t denounce Carlson (without saying his name) have any self-respect. Dana Loesch posted that she was waiting for Tucker’s “allies in the admin” to say something. Turns out someone at the White House was at the podium Thursday afternoon and absolutely punted, citing his friendship with Carlson.

What Carlson earned all this conservative pundit animus for telling his guest Joe Kent that Trump “should be removed from office immediately,” if he was considering a nuclear strike against Iran. On his Wednesday show, he said he wouldn’t vote for Rogers “at gunpoint,” called him a tool of Israel and the intelligence agencies, and agreed with Saagar Enjeti that Abdul El-Sayed's campaign is “literally Trumpian.” This is a founding member of the populist movement that helped Trump rise to power, now saying he wants the president gone and the Democrat elected.

JD Vance was asked about it Thursday at his first briefing since Karoline Leavitt left. His answer was that everybody knows he and Tucker are friends, that Tucker has said some things he disagrees with, and that El-Sayed is a crazy person. But he pointedly didn’t say anything about the friendship changing, nor did he defend his boss, President Trump, from what Carlson said. The pro-Trump conservative voices condemning Carlson’s apostasy are demanding a White House denunciation and want to know whether the apparent next-in-line will let them decide who’s in and out of their clique. For now he won’t.

TAKEAWAY: Vance’s diplomatic answer had clearly been thought through and was handled masterfully as it dismissed the conflict and pivoted to the current conservative villain, El-Sayed. The tension on the right is coming from the interventionist and pro-Israel side of the coalition, who are clearly concerned that they are losing, or have lost, sway in how the administration is trending. This will probably get worse before it gets better.

03: John Fetterman Gives Democrats Permission to Stop Defending Him After Ugly Bombshell WSJ Expose

[Gaining Traction]. The Wall Street Journal published an expose that makes the once-populist heir to the Bernie-Bro throne look like an entitled prat, and more to the point, a political pariah with fewer allies than he had a day ago.

The WSJ published its deep-dive investigation into John Fetterman late Thursday, which some are calling a “bombshell.” Reporters Will Hobson and Siobhan Hughes wrote that the senator “shows little interest in doing the job beyond cultivating relationships with conservative media figures and advocating for Israel,” after speaking with more than a dozen former staffers and lawmakers, and reviewing internal texts. What they found was pretty damning.

The biggest headline focuses on the senator treating his war-veteran constituents in a not-so-charitable way. Three paralyzed veterans from rural Pennsylvania visited his Senate offices. But Fetterman left early because he ostensibly felt a Fox News hit about Israel and the war in Iran was more important. When Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia execs visited to discuss Medicaid cuts, the senator dismissed them via text, writing “I’m convinced they just want free trips to DC.” After learning t a funeral for three police officers killed in his hometown of York would run three hours, he called the three-hour commitment “a nonstarter.” Woof.

Democrats have defended Fetterman through both his stroke and his curious evolution to a Hannity regular who agrees with Republican talking points, largely because he’s a vote. Just this week he used his now regular Fox News hit to go after his own party’s nominee in Michigan, saying he doesn’t “get along with communists, socialists, and people who hate America.”

TAKEAWAY: A senator who skips paralyzed veterans for a Fox News hit and calls a children’s hospital freeloaders is a hard thing to sell to anyone, including a Democratic base. By Monday we should see which Senate Democrat speaks about this first, and who calls out the charade of Fetterman still being an official member of the party.

Vice President JD Vance gave a remarkably nuanced and comfortable answer to a question about his friendship with Tucker Carlson, a vocal critic of President Trump. But by splitting the difference, he notably did not go to bat for his boss. “Everybody knows that Tucker Carlson and I are friends, and I think it’s very obvious that Tucker has said some things that I disagree with. I think El-Sayed is a crazy person,” Vance said Thursday during a press briefing when asked about the man insisting Trump should be removed from office. The growing split on the right is perfectly reflected in the sudden animosity between former political allies Trump and Carlson, and when asked about his place between them, Vance answered with friendship. He’s currently polling at 44 percent in the RCP polling average, which makes him the party’s frontrunner for 2028. But he can also read Trump’s spiraling poll numbers and thread the tiniest of political needles effortlessly, in a way that probably didn’t please his boss.

The data tells the real, better stories beneath the headlines.

The Left AND Right Unite Over Threat of AI and Data Centers. Senator Bernie Sanders and far-right populist Steve Bannon are aligned on the AI and data-center backlash. Sanders announced a bill banning AI on the very same day that OpenAI released GPT-6. Not great news for Trump, who is all in on this increasingly unpopular issue. (Axios)

Missouri’s Conservative Supreme Court Enrages Republicans Over New Congressional Map Decision. A vote to block Trump’s controversial congressional map and instead send it to a November referendum has angered Missouri Republicans, despite five of seven judges on the court being appointed by GOP judges. Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe appeared on Fox & Friends Friday morning and insisted the court had violated federal law and forced a crisis. (The Hill)

Andrew Tate Indicted in Romania for Trafficking and Laundering. The professional douchebag is fighting extradition from a Miami jail after Romania announced new charges on trafficking and laundering. This comes a week after Milo Yiannopoulos’ deportation, so this news makes for a perfect trio of assholes getting just reward. (Reuters)

Based on transcripts from the 6 and 7 a.m. hours of Fox & Friends, CNN This Morning, News Central, and Morning Joe.

The US Army currently has no Senate-confirmed secretary and no confirmed chief of staff. Dan Driscoll quit Monday, and Thursday night Trump named Adam Telle for the role, who had been serving as the assistant secretary for civil works, passing over Mike Obadal, the undersecretary who would typically move up. But the name “Telle” wasn’t mentioned once during the six hours of morning television we reviewed Friday.

Trump has long taken advantage of “acting” appointments because they require no hearing, no vote, but also provide no footage of a congressional fight for networks to air. Thom Tillis and Don Bacon spent the week questioning how the Pentagon is being run, which Trump answered on Truth Social. None of the morning shows thought it was worth covering.

Fox News dropping Bartiromo for a clearly fireable offense has alll the makings of a canary in a coal mine for the Trump administration heading into what appears to be a disastrous midterm election. Yes, she was technically fired for sharing internal docs with the White House, which is a stunning lack of judgment on her part and reveals where she sees her bread is truly buttered. But the larger implication is that, for a variety of reasons, the network that Trump MOST needs to foment distrust around election security is tapping out. Yes, they’ve been burned by past reporting on Dominion, and the Smartmatic case looms large, but Fox News hosts, anchors, executives, and producers can see the same death spiral in polling numbers as everyone else. And at some point, supporting a very unpopular populist is not good business. It’s not difficult to imagine this once symbiotic relationship going from stressed to something more bitter.

The Morning Frame tracks which political stories are spreading, which are stalling, and how you can tell the difference. Powered by Narrative Prism. Narrative status is determined by source velocity, validator movement, and cross-ecosystem pickup across Narrative Prism’s 151-source universe. Prism’s four ecosystems are left, right, legacy, and mainstream.

Morning Frame is a daily digest for news-obsessed, confident, and charming readers. It highlights what stories are emerging, crossing partisan bubbles, and fading. Powered by Narrativ Prism software, which ingests thousands of bits of media every day.

Thursday, September 3, 2026

Don’t look now, but sentiment is growing within the Republican ranks that Pete Hegseth is NOT the right guy to run the Pentagon. Outgoing senator Thom Tillis might be an OG member of the YOLO caucus, and Rep. Don Bacon is well known for his iconoclast nature. Tillis, who voted to confirm Hegseth, posted a statement calling for a new leader at the Pentagon: "I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country." Bacon said of Hegseth on CNN, Hegseth “would not be on my team.” The very same evening, vulnerable Republicans seated on the paved-over Rose Garden lawn, Trump showed support to his embattled Secretary of War. "Right, Pete?” he said, adding “You did a good job last night in Iran, by the way." Is this just standard intraparty fighting, or a sign of a growing split among Congressional Republicans facing catastrophic polling numbers with the midterms just two months away? And rest in peace, Gloria Steinem. I grew up in a household that subscribed to Ms. magazine and am a much better man for it.

01: The Republican Split Over Hegseth Stops Being Private, and Trump Picks His Side in the Rose Garden.

[Going Mainstream]. What’s changed: Yesterday this story was fading, getting only two mentions across three morning hours. Today three Republicans went on the record against the Secretary of Defense, and the president defended him by name the same evening.

Is there a growing divide within the Republican Party? If so, it’s managed to keep it quiet for months, but it was said out loud Wednesday by the people with the least incentive to say it. Outgoing Senator Thom Tillis wrote on Wednesday that he has “never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country,” that Hegseth “is intimidated by competence and retreats to ginning up culture wars,” and asked the president to “find a new leader at the Pentagon.” Yes, Tillis is leaving office after fighting with Donald Trump, but he voted to confirm Hegseth as Secretary of Defense/War.

Rep. Don Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general, told CNN he agreed with Tillis, saying, “He would not be on my team.” Rep. Carlos Gimenez recently said he was unhappy about the “rash of turnover” in Army leadership as reported by Breitbart. That’s three, which is the magic number.

But on the same day, President Trump stood in the Rose Garden before many vulnerable Republicans facing reelection in the coming midterms, and backed his embattled secretary. “Right, Pete? You did a good job last night in Iran, by the way. You knocked the hell out of him. We’re winning.”

Dan Driscoll’s last day as Army Secretary was Wednesday. CNN and MS NOW said Hegseth 94 times in primetime. In four hours of Fox News coverage, it was mentioned zero times.

TAKEAWAY: The Iran War is stuck in quagmire mode and, per Scott Bessent on Fox News, the reason for the high price of gas and the cost-of-living problems Trump promised to resolve on day one. The easiest path for the White House is to blame someone and move on from Hegseth. But Trump loves a telegenic and extremely loyal media fighter, and no one plays that role better than Hegseth.

02: GOP’s Midterm ‘Trump-a-Palooza’ Convention Looks to Have a No-Show Problem

[Gaining Traction]. What’s changed: Yesterday, “Toss-Up Texas” was the GOP’s headache, which led to a $15 million rescue buy to help Ken Paxton. Today it's the party's own innovative but potentially regrettable midterm convention, and a damning Politico report of who’s blowing it off.

The RNC is reportedly charging House members a fee that starts at $25,000 to attend the convention in Dallas, per AL.com. A photograph with the president runs $88,600, per the Wall Street Journal. Politico asked more than 70 Republican candidates and members whether they plan to go. 45 gave a reason not to. Dozens more would not say.

MS NOW’s Jen Psaki played the answers Wednesday night and noted that one member wanted to stay in his district, one had a son getting married in Greece, and one had high school football games he had promised not to miss.

Former New Hampshire Republican Governor Chris Sununu told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins how he is baffled that the party is charging its own people. Republican strategists told AL.com last week they fear the whole thing lands badly, one of them asking why they are doing it at all.

Karl Rove might have snarked it best when he asked, “What could go wrong with a rally a day and hundreds of millions of dollars in ads in battleground states featuring Mr. Trump? A lot.”

TAKEAWAY: It’s always darkest before dawn, but this feels like a certified looming disaster, particularly given the scheduling conflict with the first two NFL games. But if Trump is an expert at anything, it’s putting on a show. And while ratings will probably not be great due to America’s proclivity to watch pro football, it’s a smart bet that this event will throw off a plethora of irresistible viral clips that the current political media ecosystem will jump all over.

03: Tucker Carlson Hands Abdul El-Sayed the Endorsement His Own Party Seems Uncomfortable About

[ Emerging]. What Changed: Earlier this week, Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed was cast as a national security problem by a CBS News headline and a House Democrat. Yesterday, the most influential populist voice on the right called his agenda “literally Trumpian.”

Tucker Carlson all but endorsed El-Sayed during a recent video posted on X, praising the candidate’s Trumpian agenda. This candidate was recently blasted by the New York Post editorial board, which says Democrats are “selling their souls” by accepting. This quasi-endorsement is a big story, but it's even bigger because it came from the wrong direction.

Leading members of El-Sayed’s own party spent the day backing away from his candidacy. Rep. Brad Sherman said El-Sayed is not “my first choice.” Tom Suozzi dismissed DSA candidates (which El-Sayed insists he is not) as owning the DSA platform. James Carville called El-Sayed's campaign buddy, Hasan Piker, an “idiot” and told the DSA to drop “Democratic” from its name.

This establishment pushback is likely viewed as good news by El-Sayed, as Vice President JD Vance’s mother, Beverly Vance Aikins, said she would “probably punch” him. A recent Michigan State poll has him up 50-45 over Mike Rogers. Across six hours of morning television Thursday, Carlson’s name was said zero times, and El-Sayed’s was mentioned only once.

TAKEAWAY: Tucker Carlson’s audience is anti-war and anti-establishment, and so too is El-Sayed. Some may also note that they each share a strong, and potentially uncomfortable, anti-Israel bond. This horseshoe-theory fit is better than the one he has with his own caucus.

Next week the GOP will hold its first-ever “midterm convention” on September 9th and 10th, and according to multiple reports it’s not going over terribly well with the Republican rank and file for a number of reasons. Few prominent Republicans have gone on record dismissing the idea until former NH Governor Chris Sununu blasted it to Kaitlan Collins on CNN Wednesday night. At issue is the $25K fee that members of Congress are expected to pay to attend. When asked if he thought this was “normal,” Sununu replied, “I’ve never heard of anything like that myself,” before eventually mocking Trump. “He’s supposed to be raising money for the candidates.” Oh, and the two prime-time speeches on the 9th and 10th will compete with the first two games of the new pro football season, but no one watches the NFL, right?

The data tells the real, better stories beneath the headlines.

House Democratic Leaders Move to Punish Members Who Voted with Republicans. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was caught off guard by Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez voting to pass a Republican rule Tuesday. House Democrats are floating committee removals, and a proposal to give leadership more tools to enforce discipline. It will likely go nowhere, but all is not cozy on the left side of the House aisle. (Axios)

Diesel Futures Closed at an All-Time High Wednesday. NY Harbor ultra-low-sulfur diesel finished at $4.7294 a gallon, Brent crude traded at $95 against the low $80s a month ago, and the 10-year Treasury yield sat near 4.8 percent after touching a three-year high. (Yahoo Finance)

Steve Witkoff met the UAE’s National Security Adviser Last Weekend About Iran. The White House did not announce news of the Trump advisor meeting with Sheik Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Sardinia, and it wasn’t reported until Thursday morning. The UAE is the key partner in the operation to guide tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. (Axios)

Based on transcripts from the 6 and 7 a.m. hours of Fox & Friends, CNN This Morning, News Central, and Morning Joe.

Two men were shot and killed at a gay bar in Tucson, which Arizona police confirmed Tuesday was a hate crime. The shooter reportedly left a note in which he listed other LGBTQ businesses. The AP, Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, and multiple other outlets covered it, but looking at eleven hours of cable primetime Wednesday, Fox News, CNN, and MS NOW said “Tucson” zero times. A confirmed hate crime with a target list should be a big story, and had the victims been a different, say, political or religious identity, I’d imagine it would get national coverage.

I’m loathe to criticize innovative thinking, and at first blush, I thought a “Midterm Convention” was at the very least a novel idea designed to bring out support for the Republican platform, and its location should, in theory, help Ken Paxton’s struggling Senate campaign. But that was before the apparent schism between Trump and Congressional Republicans started to widen, and it now feels like the making of a political clusterfuck of Biblical proportions. The idea that a Trump-centric prime-time evening would help is massively undermined by a recent approval rating in the low 30s. Republican attendees are already deriding the event privately, reportedly snarking on it as a “Trump-a-palooza” (which is not a very popular palooza at the moment). But competing with NFL Football games on each night is a massive scheduling mistake (an own goal in the other football’s parlance), and a week from now we can expect a torrent of articles mocking very poor ratings of the GOP convention because, honestly? In America. nothing fucks with football viewing. In other words, this narrative has everything in it to go from bad to much worse in the next week.

The Morning Frame tracks which political stories are spreading, which are stalling, and how you can tell the difference. Powered by Narrative Prism. Narrative status is determined by source velocity, validator movement, and cross-ecosystem pickup across Narrative Prism’s 151-source universe. Prism’s four ecosystems are left, right, legacy, and mainstream.