If there’s one thing that Americans can unite behind, it’s anxieties over artificial intelligence.

According to a recent NBC News/Decision Desk poll, 70 percent of adults say they are personally more worried than excited about the technology; it’s basically underwater in every area of society with one notable exception: its use in scientific research and medicine.

According to Dr. Dhruv Khullar, a physician at Weill Cornell Medicine and writer at the New Yorker, that optimism is well-founded.

Khullar uses AI tools in his own practice as a physician and writes about their advancements in the medical field. He says that “right now, at least, there’s a generally optimistic view of how AI will change healthcare going forward.”

AI in medicine is nothing new. In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was given to researchers who developed an AI model that enabled breakthroughs in predicting protein’s complex structures. As it becomes more ubiquitous, it’s also emerging as a resource for doctors to get second opinions and as a tool to take notes on patient-doctor interactions.

On top of that, Khullar says, it might help unlock new medicines to treat diseases. 

Khullar joined Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram to discuss the ways that AI is transforming drug discovery and research, as well as what it still can’t do. They also discuss how to think about AI’s potential in healthcare at the same time as top AI researchers are increasingly warning about the technology’s risk.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You’ve been thinking about lifesaving AI innovation. Has AI already started saving lives?

I think it has. This is the fastest I’ve ever seen healthcare take up a new technology. Part of that might be that the healthcare system is so messed up that there’s an appetite for some type of change. It’s unaffordable, it’s inaccessible, it’s inconvenient, the quality is uneven. 

There’s at least a hope that AI is going to help with all of these things, and I think it’s already starting to make its way into the healthcare system. Now it’s our responsibility to figure out how to make the most of it without also promulgating some of the downsides.

For those who are unaware, tell us how it’s working its way into the system.

It’s helpful to categorize it into a few buckets, at least for healthcare. 

The most rapid uptake, and I think the place that it’s already starting to make a difference, is on the administrative side. Many people who have gone to a doctor recently might have noticed that there’s an AI scribe that’s taking notes now. And people seem to really like it, at least so far. Doctors are able to look their patients in the eye in the way that they weren’t able to when they were poring over their computers and just typing what the patient was telling them. 

The second big area is patient navigation. When is your next scan? When’s your next appointment? Do I need to take this medication on an empty stomach or not? There’s a huge opportunity for people, let’s say, who are diagnosed with a serious illness like cancer or heart failure to navigate the system more seamlessly. 

The third big area that I’m really excited about is drug discovery. AI is making a huge dent in the early parts of drug discovery. 

The last thing that I’m excited about and that I use every day when I’m in the hospital is [AI] as a second opinion. Now instead of having to get a consult or turn to a textbook, AI can be a very, very helpful clinical decision support. It’s not to say that I never consult someone, of course, but that first pass — I’m not sure what’s going on. What are some recent trials that might influence my decision here? Is there something I’m missing? Is there a test that I should be ordering that I’m not ordering? — all those types of things, they start to help with.

The biggest chunk of this positive view of AI and medicine is drug discovery. Tell me more about how that’s going so far and how it might be going in a year, or five, or 10.

I don’t want to leave this conversation and say that we’ve solved the cure for cancer because of AI, but I do want people to know that at least for the early stages of drug discovery — figuring out the very basic steps of is this an interesting molecule? Does it have potential biological applications? — AI is already very helpful for that. 

They’re trying to take, basically, what is an infinite number of drug-like molecules that are theoretically possible to be drugs and they’re trying to match that to some disease that’s going on inside a human. And human biology is incredibly complex as well. There’s tens of thousands of genes, hundreds of thousands of proteins, trillions of cells, and you have to match a potential molecule to a potential target within a human. 

In the past, a researcher might take years to study a disease or a biological pathway and figure out, okay, this protein seems to be involved. And actually, it might not be involved, it might be involved, it might be disrupted, but not be the causative agent. There’s a lot of uncertainty there, so now AI can take enormous amounts of data, and it can rank various potential targets that seem to be the most likely to be causing a particular disease and give you that short short list of potential targets that may have taken months or years in the past.

So now you know what to attack, but you have to figure out what to attack it with. So you need a molecule, you need to generate a molecule that’s going to fit into that target or disrupt that target in some way. 

Now again, AI can scour vast chemical spaces and give you a list of the things that seem to be most likely to be able to disrupt that target. And then it can actually help you generate that molecule in some cases. 

So now we have the target. Now we have something that we’re going to attack the target with. And then you have to do something called lead optimization, and that’s the third thing. Lead optimization means you have this lead and you have to optimize it.

Now we have to figure out, of all the molecules that seem to be good at potentially affecting this target, which ones are able to be absorbed in the body, which ones are going to get to the right tissue. AI models can predict the most likely molecule to give you that Goldilocks set of properties that’s needed for a safe and effective drug.

As we all know from anyone who’s asked AI to write an email for them or Googled a question, these tools have a certain degree of certitude, even though these tools can just be flat out wrong about stuff. Are you guys worried about that in the field?

Absolutely. And so this is why I think the narrative around AI just replacing scientists or doctors or other workers is incorrect. Because you still need a lot of judgment. 

You need to be able to adjudicate the output of these models to figure out what is most promising and what is potentially dangerous. That is going to require wet labs and scientists and reasoning based on prior experience and understanding the context. There’s all sorts of issues around, can you manufacture some of the drugs that are being proposed by these models? So just because it’s set, it dreams something up doesn’t mean you can actually make that thing in the real world.

Some of the drugs that it proposes might actually be toxic in certain ways that it didn’t predict. And of course, then you have to take this thing into clinical trials. You have to recruit l people who are willing to put this medication in their bodies. You have to find out who might benefit, you have to put it through the regulatory process. 

That’s why I said that the first part of drug discovery, where you’re trying to figure out how do we get the right drug candidates, what seems most exciting to test further, that’s going to be really accelerated. That whole second half where we actually have to figure out if it works in human biology, that is still going to be in some respects an analog process.

It doesn’t sound like you’re terribly scared that we are like ceding control of our hospitals, of our research facilities, to AI. This is very much in the sort of assistant bucket?

For now it is. And I think one of the challenges is to maintain our agency as these models become more and more sophisticated. As you lean more on these machines, if you’re a doctor, inevitably some of the skills, the critical thinking, the reasoning that we put into coming up with the diagnosis that we honed over the course of years, that can start to atrophy. 

These are the types of things that we still need to sort through as we’re implementing more and more AI into the healthcare system.

For the people who just say, shut it all down, this is too dangerous, the risk is far too great, we don’t actually need this, this isn’t doing anything for society, would you make a counterargument?

I would make the counterargument that healthcare is ripe for disruption and you don’t even need the frontier frontier models to make it a lot better with AI.

Even if we wanted to “slow the pace of the frontier,” fine. But there are models from a year or two years ago that could be very helpful in the healthcare setting. When we’re talking about slowing the pace of the frontier and the most sophisticated and potentially dangerous models, fine. 

But if we’re talking about shutting down AI and not using it in biotechnology or not using it in scientific research or not using it in clinical care delivery, that’s where I would push back pretty hard.

Lisa Marie Wilson matched with a man on a dating app who claimed to be 5-foot-10 and to live on the beach. Only one of those facts turned out to be true. When she showed up to the date, Wilson observed that she and her date were the same height — and she isn’t 5-foot-10. She wasn’t planning to mention it, but her date did: “He told me I wasn’t really 5-foot-9,” Wilson, a 51-year-old author, told Vox.

Even though he accused her of lying about her height before he even said hello, Wilson told Vox she still gave the man the benefit of the doubt. But as they continued on with their planned walk along the beach, Wilson sensed her date was suspicious of her. “The whole time it was like he was an investigative reporter asking me questions, but kind of like if you were interviewing someone you didn’t like,” she said. 

By the end of the date, Wilson was sure she didn’t want to see this guy again, so she turned down his offer to give her a massage and left. She couldn’t get past his accusatory comment about her height. “I was like, ‘I’m not a liar,’” Wilson said. “But I think he was — because he obviously wasn’t as tall as he was saying he was.” (To add insult to injury, Wilson’s date emailed her the next day breaking things off with her.)

If you’ve been on a date recently, the phrase “love is a battlefield” might seem a fitting descriptor for the sordid state of romantic affairs. 

According to this year’s Kinsey Institute Singles in America Survey, the percentage of singles with a “checklist” of what they’re looking for in a partner rose from 25 percent in 2021 to 34 percent in 2026. Dating has also become even more partisan this year, another survey found: A date’s political affiliation, especially if it conflicts with their own, is a major dealbreaker. This year, traditional gender roles and values have made a return, hardening some people’s idea of what romance looks like — a dynamic where a woman is pursued by a man with an absurdly strong jaw — and warping the expectations that women have of men and vice versa. Daters are also increasingly using AI to chat with matches on apps and bots’ infiltration of dating apps might have you questioning who you’re even chatting with in the first place. 

It stands to reason that we’ve forgotten how to be human — and some of the basic rules of human decency — in our love lives. Relationship experts, historians, and critics agreed: Dating feels different now.

TikTok has only added fuel to the fire. A popular outlet for singles to share their gripes, the platform has given rise to new dating vernacular — rosters, breadcrumbing, goblintimacy. These new dynamics seeped into the dates themselves, with people openly antagonistic and confrontational from the jump. 

Experts say that if your goal is to find love, or even just have a night of fun, assuming the worst of others — as so many seem to do right now — isn’t an effective strategy. “If you’re eternally suspicious, that tends to be a boundary to attraction,” Paul Eastwick, a psychology professor at the University of California Davis and author of Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection, told Vox. 

The consequence of such hostility in dating is less tolerance — for ordinary friction, for learning lessons, for romance itself. So, what’s a single in 2026 to do?

The problem with dating right now

Most of modern dating followed a predictable pattern: Two singles met at church or at school or at work or at a party hosted by a mutual friend or through family. They might continue to see each other in social settings, gradually growing accustomed to one another’s personality, quirks, interests, until one person (usually the man, if they were straight) asked out the other on a date. Because they had mutual friends or coworkers in common, there was someone to vouch for them, to give some context to their life. 

Since the early 2010s, the most popular way to meet a potential romantic partner has been through online dating. App users are exposed to swaths of people they might not have ordinarily met without having to leave the comfort of their homes, meaning they are going on dates with virtual strangers. The sussing-out phase — where your perception of a person grows from simply “hot woman” to “Amy, the funny blonde from my dodgeball team” — has been condensed or eliminated altogether. “It’s not like, I got to know this person naturally,” Eastwick, also the co-host of the podcast Love Factually, said. “When somebody is a stranger, it’s maybe a little easier to come in with whatever negative assumptions you’ve gleaned from these online spaces.”

Life as a whole in the US has become more combative and tense in the past decade, from political polarization to increasingly rude behavior. At work, our labor and time is extracted until we’re laid off; at home, we’re suspicious of our neighbors. And dating is inherently vulnerable, rife with rejection and negative consequences. 

Dating apps have played a huge role in this dramatic shift in tenor. While effective at connecting users with multiple eligible singles, apps don’t encourage slow-burn connections, which is how humans have historically grown attracted to one another. And when a date goes awry, terrible tales can be mined for engagement online, where commenters are quick to validate a unique experience as universal, often reinforcing gendered stereotypes, like “all men are toxic” and “all women are shallow.”  

People have historically commiserated over their romantic lives as a way of bonding: Think of men in bars with their buddies bemoaning the old ball and chain, women lamenting their husbands not shouldering their share of household labor. During the feminist movement of the 1970s, women gathered to validate each other’s experiences and consider political responses to sexist issues, according to Rebecca Davis, a professor of history and women and gender studies at the University of Delaware. Social media now fulfills many of the same functions as these in-person conversations, Davis told Vox; people can take to TikTok or Reddit to share their frustrating or traumatic experiences, and comment sections are populated with others sharing their own similar stories. But unlike in the relatively private spaces of the past, these gripes now spread from individual to individual with little context, follow-up questions, or nuance.

Instead, posts beget more posts. Algorithms reward extreme content and creators may embellish details to encourage engagement. Whether intentionally or not, TikToks about how coffee dates signify low effort and Reddit threads parroting misogynist language perpetuate harmful stereotypes. “People are good at finding a reason to externalize the difficulty of dating,” the writer Asa Seresin told Vox. It’s much easier to assume the people you date are altogether bad than it is to assess your own actions.

In a viral essay published in 2019, Seresin gave the outward disdain with heterosexuality a name: heteropessimism. Since then, dating culture has only gotten more dismal, he said, in large part due to a national regression toward conservative views of gender and sexuality. The overturning of Roe v. Wade, contentious debates over transgender rights, and a generation of young men who believe a woman should obey her husband have become a dark cloud over the world of romance.

Some of these more traditional beliefs have filtered into 33-year-old Brittni Kristine’s dating life. After only a few weeks of dating, a man Kristine had met on an app asked her to be exclusive, but his actions suggested he wasn’t fully invested. Whenever Kristine inquired about their plans for the week, the guy would get irritated. “His defense mechanism was essentially like, ‘Well, I didn’t tell you I wasn’t seeing you next week, so why would you assume?’” Kristine told Vox.

Over the course of the month they dated, Kristine and the man got into multiple arguments of this nature until she’d grown exasperated with his stonewalling. His antagonism, Kristine suspected, stemmed from a puritanical view of sex and romance, where casually dating is seen as a moral failure. “I’ve had so many people tell me, ‘If I go on a first date with you and I find out that you have gone on another date in the past two weeks, basically I would never talk to you again because you’re promiscuous,’” she said.

These off-putting experiences fuel heteropessimism. A key aspect of heteropessimism, the pervasive embarrassment with which some young women express being attracted to men, only adds to a cycle of shame that makes people feel guilty for who they’re attracted to, Davis said. This has led some to internalize the idea that queer relationships are easier or more ideal. “When women talk about division of labor…it makes sense that there’s a longing for a relationship where the gender division of labor isn’t at play,” Seresin said. “I actually do think that is one way in which queer relationships are a lot easier, but I wouldn’t say that overall queer relationships are easier.”

Negative stereotypes and preemptive defensiveness plague queer relationships, too, Seresin said. “A lot of gay men also say, ‘I wish I wasn’t into men,’ and will blame a culture of very casual intimacy on being unable to find a boyfriend,” Seresin said. “A lot of lesbians will blame there not being enough queer women out there or enough of their type.”

The result is a population of singles, regardless of who they’re attracted to, walking into dating scenarios with strangers who they might already be suspicious of.  

Dating with walls up

As soon as his date walked through the coffee shop doors recently, Alex Alberti told Vox he sensed an air of negativity. “Literally from the jump, he kind of felt on the defensive and a little bit guarded from just buying coffee,” the 35-year-old education researcher said. Even a change of scenery on their walk around a nearby lake did not help matters. Alberti remembered his date venting about his dating troubles: how shallow and rude and awful the men were. About halfway through the get-together, Alberti decided there would not be another.

It was clear to Alberti that his date was letting past negative experiences color his current one. But instead of protecting him, drawing attention to bad behavior only pushed Alberti away. “I think people believe that if they can just beat the bad thing to the punch by calling it out, they’re going to make themselves safer,” he said. “When someone approaches a first date being highly skeptical and highly guarded and even a little bit combative, they think that it’s going to serve as a helpful filter.”

When you approach other people with distrust and ire instead of openness and curiosity, forging genuine connections turns into a monumental undertaking. People tend to like folks they feel comfortable opening up to, and the gradual revelations and bits of your interior life you show each other are what foster attraction. Fearing someone will weaponize your vulnerability against you turns dating into a surface-level endeavor at best, or, at worst, a contentious battle no one can possibly win.

The walls people put up are meant to be protective: You can’t hurt me if I never let you in to begin with. And the youngest prospective daters are dating even less in 2026: One recent study found that more than half of single young adults, ages 22 to 35, said past breakups made them more reluctant to pursue new relationships. Those are just the ones who’ve had previous romantic experiences. A Pew Research Center survey found that about a third of singles who have never married have never been in a committed romantic relationship to begin with.

When daters lack experience and are primed to see the worst in each other, the very normal aspects of courtship — negotiating boundaries, establishing trust, navigating conflict — are seen as dealbreakers. “There’s a growing discomfort with the normal friction, that if you say or do the wrong thing, it’s cringe, it’s disqualifiable; there’s no appetite for any kind of misstep,” Daniel Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life and author of Generation Uncoupled: America’s New Gender Divide and the Crisis of Human Connection, told Vox.

This is an impossibly high bar to clear and runs contrary to how many relationships form, Eastwick, the psychology professor, said. Most people’s affection for another person grows the more they get to know them. But if you’re meeting a stranger from an app who you assume has nefarious intentions, that first date isn’t likely to turn into a second.

Letting your guard down

Trauma and past negative experiences, both your own and others, can be a helpful teacher, a useful framework for what to avoid, and what lessons could be gleaned from pain. But it can also be distorting, Seresin, the writer, said. One bad relationship or date doesn’t mean all future relationships and dates with a similar type of person will be doomed. “It’s almost like if you’ve had a bad experience and you want to protect yourself, that’s almost morally good,” Seresin said.

Instead of focusing on avoiding any bad feelings (an impossible task), singles should question their own assumptions and operate from a place of curiosity. Resist the urge to cast judgment based on what little you know of someone. Even couples who have been married for decades can still discover new things about their partner. “It’s very easy to think, ‘I know exactly how this person thinks. I know what they want. I know how they’re trying to manipulate me,’” Seresin said.

The process of getting to know someone is a risk. All relationships come with potential disappointment; there will always be a person who ghosts or makes a bad joke or minimizes your accomplishments. But it doesn’t mean that person represents all men or all women, that they’re the enemy, that these connections are inherently toxic or not worth pursuing in the first place. 

To find love, we have to turn down the instinct to protect ourselves and open ourselves to the possibility that the person across the table might also be a flawed human who’s been hurt before. And they might want the same thing, too.

Sebastian Marset allegedly smuggled tons of cocaine to Europe — but not a single gram to the U.S. Now, he's challenging his federal prosecution, alleging misconduct by DEA agents and arguing his charges should be dropped for lack of jurisdiction.

With the midterms just under six weeks away, more Republican candidates are coming to the belated realization that, if they want to save their seats, they could perhaps use some distance from the very unpopular president whose approval is reaching new lows.

Now, after a decade in which President Donald Trump has demanded — and increasingly received — near-total loyalty from his parties’ candidates and congressional delegation, and used his bully pulpit to launch harsh personal attacks on Republicans who don’t provide it, such distancing attempts remain cautious and limited.

But they are growing more common. And this isn’t just in the toughest blue territory — even Republicans in states or districts Trump won overwhelmingly are now rushing to emphasize how they don’t agree with the president on some of his most controversial and unpopular agenda items. 

“It’s only natural that candidates would seek to create distance from Trump, especially on issues — like the Iran war — that are unpopular,” GOP strategist Douglas Heye told me. “That doesn’t guarantee success, and can be a hard needle to thread, but it’s the natural play.”

For now, the primary motivator is political. But today’s election-year cracks could be signs of larger breaks later, especially as Republicans look toward life without the singular figure who’s dominated the last decade-plus of party politics. 

A party running away from major parts of the lame-duck president’s agenda today might be repudiating parts of his legacy tomorrow — with potentially major implications for governance. And if Trump’s record is truly deemed a failure by Republicans, the GOP’s future will be wide open.

Where the general election cracks are starting to show

The boldest break in recent weeks has been from Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Florida, who represents a heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade County district that Trump won solidly in 2024. 

Last week, Salazar released a campaign ad in which she spoke directly to the camera and addressed Trump, saying: “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.” She added: “The same Hispanics that helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

The ad was the most dramatic sign yet that Trump’s ongoing polling collapse with Latino voters — a critical component of his 2024 coalition — is showing up for Republican campaigns as well. As Salazar’s ad suggested, many swing voters interpreted Trump’s “mass deportation” talk as a promise to clamp down on border crossings and remove dangerous criminals — not to patrol the streets with militarized operations going after otherwise law-abiding migrants, many of whom have established ties to the community. If the backlash proves real in places like Florida and Texas, it could affect how future Republicans approach the issue.

That same week, two incumbent House members in Iowa in tough races decided to let their votes tell the tale. Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn both voted for a resolution to end Trump’s war in Iran, and each posted on social media that they opposed an “open-ended war.”  

Vice President JD Vance, who reports suggest was privately opposed to the decision to launch the military operation, mentioned at the Republican convention in Dallas that slain conservative activists Charlie Kirk “hated war,” but stuck with Trump even when he disagreed — an apparent plea to wavering Trump voters to do the same.

Polls show strong opposition to the war among the public, and if it continues to be a drag on GOP candidates, that could strengthen the currently embattled faction of the GOP that urges caution about foreign entanglements. On Tuesday, two more Republicans — Rep. Tom Tiffany, running for governor of Wisconsin, and Sen. Jon Husted, running for Senate in Ohio — publicly said it was time to bring the war to an end. (Husted caveated this by saying that ending the conflict would require a deal with Iran, and that he wouldn’t vote for the congressional resolution to end the war.)

Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is the GOP’s Senate nominee in Iowa, has also been cautiously seeking a bit more distance from Trump by, for instance, opposing his plan to cut tariffs on foreign beef imports since it would increase competition for local cattle ranchers, the New York Times recently reported.

Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas, facing a reelection race that polls suggest is surprisingly competitive, has publicly criticized Trump’s tariffs on aluminum and steel, saying they hurt businesses in his state.

Even two members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus who are both running for governor — Tiffany in Wisconsin and Rep. Byron Donalds in Florida — are making similar rhetorical adjustments. 

Tiffany disagreed with Trump renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” an action taken as part of Trump’s overwhelmingly unpopular trade war with Canada. And Donalds removed many mentions and pictures of the president from his website this week, the Miami Herald reported (replacing a pledge to “Enact the Trump Agenda” with one to focus on “affordability”).

This isn’t entirely a new phenomenon. Some Republicans in blue states or districts — like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania — have long tried to play up their disagreements with Trump, to position themselves as independent voices. 

But many other candidates are still clinging tightly to Trump. “I am still with that guy,” Michael Whatley, the GOP Senate nominee in North Carolina, said at a rally with Trump last week. Ken Paxton, running for Senate in Texas, is similarly sticking by Trump (despite Trump’s constant digs at how Paxton dresses). It doesn’t hurt that Trump’s super PAC could be a critical player in theirs, and others’, races.

And when GOP candidates do try to stress their independence, it typically comes in the form of saying they disagree with the president on a particular issue that’s going over poorly in their state or district — most often either tariffs, the Iran war, or immigration.

The GOP candidates’ double bind

Through much of the Trump era, Republicans have faced a powerful incentive to minimize openly breaking with the president — because they feared Trump would be vindictive enough to use his bully pulpit against them, as he has against his GOP critics in the past.

Strategically, candidates face a double bind, as stressing their independence from Trump can theoretically help with swing voters who have soured on the president, but it also could hurt turnout among the Trump-loyal base.

“It’s a fine line to walk,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me. “You don’t want to look like you’re being disloyal to a Republican president, because you could end up with a Truth Social tweet that would destroy the support of Republicans who like Donald Trump for your campaign.”

For Republicans in redder states or districts, Trump’s engagement could still be their candidates’ greatest asset — he could help spur them to go to the polls and help frame the midterm contest in purely partisan terms.

“Motivation in midterm cycles matters a lot,” Patrick Ruffini, a pollster at Echelon Insights, recently posted on X. Ruffini’s argument is that, due to the Senate map and gerrymandering in the House, many more competitive seats this cycle are in states Trump won big. So, he argued, “raising Republicans’ motivation to vote will go further than it did in 2018 because of the political terrain this election is being fought on.”

But if Trump’s approval is reaching new lows, that calculus could change — even in redder areas. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday found Trump’s approval at 32 percent, the worst result in that poll since Trump entered politics.

That could explain the new round of distancing we’ve been seeing in recent weeks. And if the polling bears out and the party does end up suffering substantial losses, it could potentially hasten that trend, as Republicans grow more wary of tying themselves tightly to an 80-year-old who won’t be on the ballot again. 

Should Democrats regain control of the House, Senate, or both, there would be no shortage of votes they could call to test just how far Republicans are willing to break with Trump on issues like immigration, tariffs, and the war. It could also create a difficult position for the next Republican presidential nominee — especially if it’s Trump’s own vice president — as they seek to incorporate lessons from the backlash without offending Trump.

For his part, Trump has been relatively restrained in response to all this, perhaps recognizing what a difficult political situation his party is in. Asked by reporters about Salazar’s ad Friday, he called her “a nice person” but “a little bit softer on the border.” 

But he couldn’t resist adding: “Without me, she wouldn’t have gotten elected.”

The forum, led by Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), included the mothers of Renee Good and Ruben Ray Martinez, and the woman who filmed Alex Pretti's death.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s campaign to take over Greenland has reached a peaceful end — for now. 

What happened? Trump signed a new security agreement with the leaders of Denmark and Greenland while at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, outlining an expanded US military presence on the island. 

The deal is the result of months-long negotiations between the two countries and Greenland, which is a semi-autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. Crucially, it reaffirms the “sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Denmark and Greenland, something Trump has spent the last year-and-a-half-plus threatening to sweep away. 

What’s the context? Trump returned to office last year proclaiming that US “ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity” for US national security, even though Denmark — and by extension Greenland — is a NATO ally. 

That rhetoric quickly escalated, and by this January, Trump was suggesting that the US could even use force to take the island. “If we don’t do it the easy way,” he said — buying Greenland from Denmark, or perhaps bribing its residents to secede — “we’re going to do it the hard way.” 

This, understandably, freaked Europe out, prompting multiple countries to deploy small numbers of troops to Greenland. 

Does this mean Trump is done trying to take over? We can always hope. It’s possible Trump will claim this as a win and move on, even though Tuesday’s deal doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of the US-Greenland relationship. (Last week, he referred to it as “a dream come true” for the US.)

That being said, Trump’s desire to own Greenland always made more sense as an attempted legacy move than anything else, whatever his professed justifications. So while he might be happy to take the win for now, with the war in Iran still on and the midterms fast approaching, it shouldn’t be surprising if he’s clamoring for ownership again before his term is up.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, happy fall equinox! In addition to the start of astronomical autumn, it also marks the recurrence of “Chicagohenge”: As this NPR story explains, for a few days each year, the sun aligns with the city’s rigidly gridded streets to create a stunning view. (It happens in other cities as well, but not always on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.)

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!