Since President Donald Trump returned to office, he has moved aggressively to leave his mark. Many of his most visible legacy projects are not pieces of legislation, though. They’re part of a campaign to reshape Washington, DC, itself. 

Last year, Trump knocked down the East Wing of the White House to make way for his massive new ballroom. He tried renovating the Reflecting Pool, which did not turn out well. He regilded four large statues near the National Mall, paved the White House Rose Garden, and drenched the Oval Office in gold and golden appliqués.

Other Trump plans are still in the works: He’s proposed building a 250-foot triumphal arch in a traffic circle between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, just across the Potomac River. He now says the arch would double as a “military complex,” housing drones, snipers, and ammunition.

And, of course, there’s the ongoing fight over the Kennedy Center, which Trump has threatened could be “ripped down” if he doesn’t get his name on the building in some capacity (he already tried once, and was ordered by a court to remove it).

It’s all a lot to keep track of. Luckily, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with New York magazine’s Ben Terris, who recently spent time with Trump touring the ballroom construction site. Terris explains what ties all the disparate projects together and what they reveal about the Trump’s effort to reshape the nation’s capital — and his own legacy.

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. 

What is up with Trump’s obsession with physical landmarks? 

Before I even talked to him, I did a lot of reporting about why he seems to be so obsessed with all this stuff. And it’s really like a legacy for him. He’s trying to build something that will last beyond his time here, both his time here in the White House and probably his time here on Earth. He wants to actually have physical monuments to himself. 

Somebody who’s close to him told me that the president doesn’t care that much about legislation. He doesn’t care that much about the kind of nuts and bolts of being a president. He cares a lot about buildings and prizes. If he has buildings and prizes, then he feels like his legacy will go on forever. That’s why he wants the Nobel Prize. That’s why he’s building an arch for himself in Washington. It’s really about a legacy that will withstand the test of time in his mind.

Which is to say, he doesn’t really realize that the right legislation could get him more prizes.

Most presidents try to be very successful presidents and have other people build monuments for you. He’s trying to honor himself, basically. It’s something I asked him about actually when I sat down with him in the Oval Office. There was a viral moment a few months ago from Senator Jon Ossoff, the senator from Georgia who may run for president. And he said at a rally that the president is building monuments to himself because he knows that nobody will do it when he’s gone.

I asked the president this because I thought maybe he’d take a shot at Jon Ossoff or deny it, but I was very surprised. He just said, “Yeah, that’s true. Nobody will do it when I’m gone. When I’m gone, nobody will do it.” 

It feels kind of self-aware, surprisingly, of Donald Trump to not take a shot at Jon Ossoff, but to just agree with him and say, “Yeah, that’s exactly my motivation.”

Part of me though — okay, here’s a guy who recognizes that when he’s gone, history may not necessarily look fondly upon him. But also there was a part of me that thought that that’s not actually what he was saying. 

What he was maybe saying is, “I’m the only person in the world capable of building something as beautiful and important as these monuments. I alone can fix it. I alone can build it.” Nobody else has the ability to do this the way that he has. So on the one hand, possibly self-aware that he won’t be recognized the way he wants to be. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a kind of egomaniac talking about how he’s incredible at things and nobody else can do it. I think it’s all kind of tied up in that he’s not the most introspective person I’ve ever talked to, let’s put it that way. 

But even the least introspective person in the world, when he gets to be 80 years old, might start thinking about what’s left of him after he’s gone.

Tell me about the tour President Trump gave you. 

I thought I was going to get 20 minutes with him in the Oval Office. I ended up getting 45 minutes in the Oval Office and then almost a 45-minute tour of the White House grounds. 

He showed me the Rose Garden, where they put statues and they turned it into a kind of paved-over terrace that looks like Mar-a-Lago. He showed me the Presidential Walk of Fame, where they have all the pictures of the presidents and then the autopen for Joe Biden, and a room called the Palm Room where he put down a new marble floor that he was very proud of. 

The helipad was still being constructed. He walked me over there and introduced me to the construction workers as they were building this helipad. And then he took me to the ballroom itself and showed me this behemoth building. 

“Legislation can be rolled back, executive orders can be reversed. This is something that he feels like can last forever.”

There’s steel rising 70 feet in the air. It’s the size of one-and-a-half football fields. He was bragging about how there’s more steel there than in the Washington Commander stadium that’s being built. It’s this enormous thing that you can’t really see anywhere in Washington unless you go up the Washington Monument and look at it from afar. And I was just in the middle of this thing and I couldn’t really believe how huge it was. 

He wanted to show me this is where the entrance is going to be, [where] the chandeliers will be. He told me he could picture it all already because this is, quote, “What I do.” 

He’ll gaze out the window in the morning first thing in the morning from the residence to see the work. He’ll look out the window at night to see the work. He is monitoring this very closely.

One thing that the ballroom especially shares with the Kennedy Center is that it feels like this administration is doing its darnedest to outmaneuver the courts, to get around any legal questions concerning the work. Did that come up at all while he was giving you this tour?

When I was getting the tour, the Supreme Court had not yet ruled that they could keep going. There was a kind of pause on their ruling where they were allowed to keep doing construction while the Supreme Court figured out how they were going to rule on it. And so clearly they were racing against the Supreme Court to get as much done as possible. They really wanted to become like a fait accompli. They wanted it to look like the whole thing was done. It was beyond going back. 

I was asking the president, “Are you worried that the Supreme Court is going to rule that you can’t keep doing construction unless you get permission from Congress?” Congress does have the right to decide what happens to federal buildings, so it would make sense that they would be able to make a decision on this. And he said he wasn’t worried about it at all. He said, “the Supreme Court’s going to make the right decision. The people want this.”

He’s like, “If I needed to get Congress’s approval, I could do it, but it’s not going to happen.” And he ended up being right. He doesn’t need Congress’s approval. The Supreme Court’s letting him do it.

But Congress may get shaken up in about a month and a half. Is that on his radar?

Yes, and certainly Democrats are aware. I talked to a bunch of Democrats for this story mostly about what happens next. Are they going to start investigating the ballroom? Are they going to start looking at subpoenaing donors and looking at the contracts and figuring out if there’s a pay-to-play scheme, if there was illegal construction happening? And Democrats are champing at the bit for that. 

They’re calling it a target-rich environment. They’re ready to get subpoena power. And they’re also talking about in 2028, what do we do if we get the White House ourselves? Will we tear this down? 

[Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] says she wants to turn it into a soup kitchen. There are all sorts of ideas for it. I asked the president about that too. I said, “Are you worried that Democrats will get the White House in 2028 and they come and they tear down this ballroom right after you built it?” And he basically said, “I’d like to see them try.” 

He said, “We’re building this ballroom with nuclear concrete.” That’s what he called it, nuclear concrete, concrete that can withstand a nuclear blast. He’s like, “If it can withstand a nuclear blast, I’d like to see Democrats try to take it down.” 

He told me somebody could go to the ballroom with a jackhammer and spend two days straight jackhammering one column and it wouldn’t even leave a mark. And so he’s basically daring them to try to tear it down because he’s building something that he feels like can withstand a nuclear blast so it can withstand Democrats.

At the end of the day, all of this is just about his legacy. That’s what you learned by hanging out with him and talking to him about it. Do you think by spreading his efforts across DC, he’s ensuring that at least something stands and that his legacy is ultimately secured? 

He definitely thinks that these buildings can withstand more than anything else. Legislation can be rolled back, executive orders can be reversed. This is something that he feels like can last forever. 

I do think there’s a world in which Democrats tear down some of the stuff. The arch is a good example. I mean, the ballroom is hard to tear down, right? First of all, it’s super expensive. It’s huge. It also has to be replaced with something. You can’t just tear it down and then leave a hole in the ground. You have to then build another ballroom, which would be kind of a crazy thing to do and take all this time and then become another story about how Democrats are spending all their time building a ballroom. 

Is it possible? Sure. It just seems a little bit harder to imagine, but the arch, you could see that thing getting dynamited on some Fourth of July and then just leaving it as a traffic circle. So I could see a world in which maybe some of these things get destroyed in a kind of, I don’t know, epic fashion. Why not?

It feels like he might be onto something, which is that it would be very controversial to just tear something down for the sake of it out of spite.

Absolutely.

There’s also two years left in his term. Do you get the sense that this is slowing down or ramping up?

It’s hard to say. I have a hard time believing it’s going to end, especially if he becomes a lame-duck president and there’s even fewer things he can do legislatively.

Why not just keep building things and putting your name on things because there’s nothing else to do with your time? 

He said that in the first term, the reason he didn’t do a lot of this stuff is because he was too under siege, that it was a difficult time to build a ballroom because of the Russian investigations or the impeachment trials and stuff like that.

Maybe he gets tied up in all that same kind of stuff if Democrats take charge, but I also feel like he’ll have an easier time just trying to ignore subpoenas. It’s going to be a really messy time. And so maybe he’ll just hole himself off into a room somewhere designing more buildings, because what else is he going to do?

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 proposed triumphal arch is going in a new direction: drone port and sniper platform.

What’s happening? Trump has been pushing to build a 250-foot-tall “triumphal arch” near the National Mall since at least this January. Relative to some of his other projects, however, it’s been slow going, and now he has a new plan.

Trump announced the updated design in a Sunday morning post, writing, “At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert” the arch into “a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch.”

In addition to drones, Trump said, the new arch will have “snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”

Really? Maybe. We don’t yet know if this version of the arch will happen, or even if the military actually requested it.

For that matter, we don’t know if the arch will get built at all — though the administration appears prepared to move forward, despite a National Park Service determination that the arch would harm nearby historical sites, including the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

What’s the big picture? Trump’s plan for a “Military Complex/Triumphal Arch” sounds an awful lot like his “Ballroom/Military Complex,” which got a stamp of approval from the Supreme Court last month after multiple lower courts ruled against its construction without permission from Congress (which Trump also does not have for his arch).

Like the arch, the ballroom acquired its “military complex” label after running into obstacles (though unlike the arch, there’s a clear connection: The ballroom does in fact sit on top of a secure bunker).

The unifying theme, though, is Trump’s instinct to reach for “national security” as a cudgel whenever he’s thwarted. He also accused the media of being a “threat to our National Security” on Monday amid backlash to his press ban.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers — I could not have been more thrilled to read this story from DC’s Capital Weather team this morning declaring the start of fall and some much-needed cooler weather. I hope you’re getting the same, wherever you are. 

Plus, it’s September 21 — don’t miss this now-venerable NPR story on the history of the Earth, Wind & Fire hit “September” and why it continues to resonate. Have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

It’s time for yet another United Nations General Assembly meeting in Manhattan — just one year after President Donald Trump appeared at it and asked, bluntly: “What is the purpose of the United Nations?”

Every year around this time, roughly 130 leaders from around the world convene at the UN to deliver speeches, hold diplomatic meetings, and debate issues like AI, climate change, and the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran. Trump is scheduled to speak this week, as are Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (…despite New York’s chilly reception). 

Even more important than those big public speeches, however, are the one-on-one talks between foreign leaders. Trump has a packed meeting schedule on Monday and Tuesday, featuring the likes of Zelenskyy, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

In Trump’s famously bizarre speech last year, he attacked several US allies, called climate change a “con,” and suggested the UN itself was irrelevant. Increasingly — as we’ll get into below — that’s an accusation echoed by many UN critics.

Go a little deeper

This week’s meeting comes at a moment of crisis — or at the very least, inflection — for the United Nations. 

The UN faces a severe budgetary shortfall this year, caused largely by Trump’s refusal to pay America’s full dues. At the same time, the UN has battled searing criticism of its inability to end conflicts in places like Ukraine, Iran, and Gaza. 

Under the organization’s founding charter, any of the five permanent members of its Security Council — the body responsible for maintaining international security — can block important resolutions unilaterally. In 2022, Russia controversially used that power to torpedo a resolution condemning its attempted annexation of parts of Ukraine. Three years later, the US similarly vetoed a demand for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an increase in unrestricted humanitarian aid.

Critics point to impasses like these as evidence the UN no longer works; even UN Secretary-General António Guterres has said the Security Council needs reform. But it would be a mistake to conclude the UN is somehow irrelevant or newly ineffectual. 

For one thing, Security Council gridlock isn’t a recent development — it’s the historical norm. (Check out all the Cold War-era vetoes in the chart above.) The UN is also far more than its Security Council — it’s a sprawling humanitarian apparatus that provides food, cash aid, medical care, and other assistance to millions around the world. 

In Gaza last year alone, for instance, the UN says it provided clean water to 1.6 million people, operated dozens of makeshift schools for Palestinian children, and distributed almost $55 million of humanitarian cash assistance.

Those efforts probably won’t make headlines this week. But they help answer Trump’s 2025 question.

One link for later

➨ Put yourself first for once. A striking new poll finds that healthcare challenges prevent a sizable plurality of women from having the careers, social relationships, and family lives they want. The problem is overwhelmingly structural, of course. But in an exclusive interview with Vox, the philanthropist Melinda French Gates warns that women are also “often taught to put themselves last,” especially when they’re caregivers.  

Before you go…

• Did you know…that crows can solve puzzles as well as 5-year-olds? In one study, they were observed bending a piece of wire to fish a treat out of a tube.
• Today’s trivia: Which classic Broadway star — the most successful of her generation — debuted the songs “I Got Rhythm,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the US Supreme Court justice who succeeded John Paul Stevens. That would be Elena Kagan, an Obama nominee who was confirmed to the court in 2010.

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: Donald Trump is escalating his fight with the media. 

What happened? Trump announced he was banning three media organizations — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — from the White House, “effective immediately.” 

In a Truth Social post Friday afternoon, Trump wrote that the ban was “a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” and that other outlets would follow. 

Why is Trump doing this now? We don’t know, and other than his blanket statement alleging “FAKE NEWS,” it seems like Trump doesn’t either. In the Oval Office on Friday, Trump said that “it’s really just cumulative stories of the last two years. You get sick of it.”

That complaint — “fake news” — is a long-running Trump attack that generally refers to unfavorable but true stories about him and his administration. 

Can he do this? Probably not, though it might take a while for journalists to get their access back. The ban sure looks like a First Amendment violation, and also like the White House’s attempt to ban the Associated Press last year as part of a dustup over the Gulf of Mexico, which a judge ultimately blocked. 

At the time, US District Court Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, ruled that “Under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists — be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere — it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints.” 

What’s the big picture? Trump has been flinging around “fake news” accusations for a long time now, but his attacks on the press and other media — like late-night shows — have grown more serious in his second term. 

The Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, banned press from its press office earlier this year and has tried to force reporters covering the building to sign a restrictive new press policy (that move was struck down in March).

Trump has also repeatedly threatened broadcast licenses for networks like ABC and NBC; last month, ABC sued over an FCC review of its licenses.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, before we log off: For a limited time, you can now get a 30-day free trial of a Vox Membership! You can sign up here to enjoy all of the great content my colleagues produce, including ad-free podcasts and unlimited access to Vox articles.

Plus, some weekend viewing: Did you know there’s a “sheepdog Olympics,” and it’s happening right now in the Scottish Borders? I did not, but I was delighted to learn. You can read more about it and see some of the dogs here. Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday!

As the heads of leading artificial intelligence companies came together last weekend to warn that runaway AI development could lead to catastrophic outcomes, momentum briefly seemed to be building for regulatory action from Washington.

But one connected and influential tech industry figure has become the leading voice opposing many proposals for government action — on his podcast, in media appearances, and in his private advice to President Donald Trump, who now calls AI doomsday fears a “hoax.”

David Sacks is a venture capitalist and part of the “PayPal Mafia” who, in recent years, has exemplified the rightward shift of some in the tech sector. He advised Elon Musk on his takeover of Twitter in 2022, and regularly unleashes a stream of scornful commentary about Democrats on social media and on the podcast All-In, which he co-hosts with three other venture capitalists. 

And for anyone wondering why Trump seems so newly dug-in against AI safety warnings — and against government action that might slow down the runaway technology before people might get hurt — Sacks is right at the center of the conversation. When Politico asked this week about Trump’s newly vocal hostility to AI safety, a senior White House official said: “David Sacks. It’s all coming from him.”

Yet Sacks’s role in the debate is an unusual one. Though he champions the AI industry, he’s no fan of the US’s two biggest AI companies. In his years in the tech industry, he’s made powerful allies, as well as many enemies — technology investor Paul Graham once posted that Sacks may be “the most evil person in Silicon Valley” (in response, Sacks called him a bully and made insinuations of antisemitism). His role, and ideology, are a window into how complex the politics and geopolitical stakes of the AI race really are — as well as how Trump administration policy is often shaped less by agency policy processes than by who has the president’s ear.

After endorsing and fundraising for Trump in 2024 — “I love David’s house, what a house,” Trump said after a fundraiser at Sacks’s $20 million San Francisco mansion) — Sacks was rewarded with a job as the White House’s “artificial intelligence and crypto czar.” There, he helped steer policy until stepping down this past March. He still co-chairs a presidential technology board, and his influence persists — in May, the Washington Post reported that a phone call from Sacks to Trump temporarily derailed the planned signing of an executive order on AI. (Vox reached out to Sacks for this article, but he declined to comment.)

Sacks is not the only Trump adviser thinking about AI: Other top administration officials, like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles have reportedly been more concerned about the risks of new AI tools for hacking, and have been trying to establish a government body that could help oversee the industry and address these risks.

But, so far, Trump has rejected this approach, and stayed much closer to the Sacks position. In a flurry of Truth Social posts Monday, he argued that AI would be “the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History,” said that the US had to “win” against China in the AI race, and dismissed concerns AI would “destroy the World” as a “hoax.”

To understand the implications of Sacks’s influence, you have to understand his position in the Silicon Valley AI ecosystem. In conversations with AI policy insiders, it becomes clear that many view his position through the lens of both his history as a tech investor, as well as his sharp-elbowed and take-no-prisoners style.

The split he embodies isn’t just about AI safety, but a fundamental divide over which business model of AI should succeed — one that pits Sacks directly against the biggest AI companies driving the safety debate.

Sacks is pro-AI — but he’s at odds with Anthropic and OpenAI

Sacks has generally been opposed to new regulation of AI companies by the government. His preferred approach, he’s frequently said, is to “let them cook.” He wants to let tech companies march ahead, and argues that government intervention would squelch innovation. “It’s this very libertarian approach to America winning in AI,” said Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at Council on Foreign Relations who worked on tech policy for President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, of Sacks’s approach.

That puts Sacks in opposition to AI safety advocates, who argue that regulation is necessary to rein in an increasingly dangerous technology. Indeed, even the leading AI company CEOs — Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and even Sacks’s friend Elon Musk — have called for a slowdown in advanced AI development because of these dangers.

But Sacks has tended to dismiss warnings such as that of former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon as “doomer histrionics.” Of late, he’s also argued that if Anthropic and OpenAI are worried that their products are dangerous, that’s on them. “If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible,” Sacks posted on X on Saturday. 

Indeed, though Sacks is often shorthanded as pro-AI, he’s in some key ways been quite critical of the leading AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, themselves.

That’s partly because he’s aligned with a different faction in Silicon Valley. Sacks and key allies like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg want much more AI development from many more places, by way of models that are “open weight” or “open source.” These models make their parameters (“weights”) publicly available, in contrast to the flagship proprietary models of OpenAI and Anthropic. 

“Keeping innovation decentralized and accessible is the key to avoiding an unsafe and dystopian future where advanced AI capabilities are centralized and controlled by only a few hands,” Sacks posted on X earlier month. He has accused companies like Anthropic of trying to “kneecap open source” with regulation.

Proponents of open models hope advanced AI becomes something more like a widely available resource that individual users and companies can download, run themselves, and customize to their internal specifications — rather than having to go through a handful of companies that control access. “The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards,” Zuckerberg wrote in August. “Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?”

There’s a lot of money riding on this bet. Huang’s Nvidia manufactures chips used to train AI models and would like more customers (and just this month agreed to buy Hugging Face, a repository of open models). Zuckerberg’s Meta has hoped to be the US leader in open model development. 

More broadly, software startup founders and the venture capitalists who fund them can benefit from powerful open weight AI being widely available, since it’s a cheaper alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic’s expensive products. Sacks, as a co-founder of the venture capitalist firm Craft Ventures, and host of a popular podcast with three fellow venture capitalists, is more closely tied to this part of the tech ecosystem than any other.

Many believe that capable open weight AI presents a serious threat to the Big Two AI companies’ current dominance of the AI frontier, and thus their business model. The flip side is that some have argued that the Big Two present an “existential threat” to the software industry, predicting the frontier labs’ products could take over much of what today’s software companies do.

But regarding safety concerns, advocates have warned about the dangers of both closed “frontier” models and open models. “On the open source side in particular, it’s easier to have a bad actor — a terrorist group, a rogue nation, an extremist political group that wants to cause chaos,” said Brendan Steinhauser of the Alliance for Secure AI, an AI safety advocacy group. “They can strip out safety features and guardrails, they can do some fine tuning to basically make the models even more dangerous, and get them to help them develop biological weapons.”

The open weight AI faction argues, though, that intrusive government regulation on AI would end up mostly hurting open models and the companies that use them — entrenching the dominance of OpenAI and Anthropic, who would be better able to comply with onerous safety requirements given their size. They’ve publicly pooh-poohed AI’s existential risks, instead playing up what they say are the dangers that AI’s power will be controlled by a privileged few. Less regulation, Sacks argues, will let more flowers bloom.

These concerns aren’t only held by those with financial stakes. There’s also a school of thought on the left that is deeply suspicious of OpenAI and Anthropic’s intentions, and particularly around the companies’ desire for an exemption from antitrust enforcement, which they say will let them work together to address safety. 

Commentator Matt Stoller has argued that those warning about dangerous “superintelligence” are playing into the hands of tech “oligarchs.” And a recent American Prospect article said policymakers should “avoid codifying the preferences of the very companies who are generating the panic.” On the right, Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) have expressed similar concerns that large AI companies’ demands for restrictions are a cover for consolidating market dominance. 

At a Politico event Wednesday — and to give a sense of just how strange the bedfellows can be around this issue — Sacks stressed that he agreed with former Democratic FTC chair Lina Khan that existing liability law already applies to AI companies. But while Khan said she was open to adding new legal restrictions, Sacks is arguing that existing law is perfectly sufficient for addressing safety risks. “These CEOs are going to be subject to massive civil and criminal liability if they put out products that are unsafe,” he said.

In other comments at the event, Sacks did appear to have softened his tone a bit, saying he was “open to ideas” about AI safety, and that “we should have an intelligent conversation” about how to manage risks. The problem, he argued, was that “what’s going on right now is a fear campaign” that makes such an intelligent conversation impossible.

Former Rep. Brad Carson, who heads Americans for Responsible Innovation, an AI safety advocacy group, said that Sacks has been the one preventing such a conversation. “When it comes to AI policy the Trump administration has, through their unwillingness to even talk about reasonable guardrails, brought things to such a crisis point that the industry is in jeopardy,” Carson said. “In many ways, David Sacks is the author of that ill-fated intransigence.”

Sacks, for his part, has pointed to Anthropic’s funding of much of the AI safety advocacy world — for instance, the company has given $40 million to an advocacy group founded by Carson — and said the company is “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.”

If we’re in an AI race with China, why are some of Trump’s policies friendly to Chinese AI?

The influence of Sacks and his worldview could help explain another seeming mystery of the administration: If Trump thinks it’s so crucial that the United States beats China in the AI race, why has he been so willing to bless the sale of AI chips abroad — including even to China?

National security hawks both inside and outside the Trump administration had warned against these sales and hoped to impose stringent controls on the export of Nvidia chips, fearing that if too many got out, the US would squander its AI lead over China.

Huang lobbied intensely against this, hoping to sell Nvidia’s most advanced chips to Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — and trying to resume sales of a less advanced but still sophisticated AI chip to China itself. Sacks became Huang’s biggest champion inside the administration — and they won over the president. Sacks publicly argued that blocking US chip sales to China and other countries would provide an opening for Chinese companies like Huawei to dominate their domestic market and gain a greater global market share with competing chips, putting the US on weaker footing in the long run.

National security-minded critics disagreed, arguing that Sacks’s particular vision for AI will likely, in practice, strengthen China’s AI sector. “I think we can have a reasonable debate on domestic policy,” said McGuire of the Council on Foreign Relations. “But when we start from the premise that the American AI stack — models, cloud, and chips — should be dominant globally, then selling China the technology to advance its own capability obviously undercuts that.”

China also looms over the cause of open weight AI that Sacks champions — because it’s Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Moonshot that produce some of the leading open weight models that US software startups currently use.

OpenAI and Anthropic argue that these Chinese models present national security risks, claim they rely heavily on copying or “distilling” their own models, and want the US government to scrutinize them. Some Trump officials have reportedly been sympathetic to their concerns, but the administration hasn’t restricted these Chinese models’ use in the US. Sacks argues that a US ban on Chinese open weight models will just end up enshrining the OpenAI-Anthropic duopoly he so loathes.

Overall, though, on both national security risks and AI safety risks, Sacks and Huang still seem to have the president’s ear. 

On Monday, Sacks was onstage with Huang at the live All-In podcast event discussing the “doomer hoax” when a purportedly impromptu call came through for the Nvidia CEO: It was Trump. 

“The robots are not going to be taking over the world,” Trump said on speakerphone. “That’s not going to happen.”

Then, after speaking for several minutes, Trump added: “David has done an amazing job.”

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: With fewer than 50 days until the midterm elections, President Donald Trump is hitting the campaign trail. 

What’s happening? Trump was in North Carolina last night for his first major post-primary season rally of the 2026 midterms (setting aside the GOP’s unusual midterm convention last week, which wasn’t not a Trump rally). 

Republican Michael Whatley will face former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper in November for an open US Senate seat.

Speaking near Charlotte, Trump urged voters to “pretend I’m on the ticket, because essentially I am.” It’s becoming a familiar refrain for the president, but not necessarily a promising one — polls suggest Trump is deeply unpopular with voters right now, more likely to drag a ticket down than boost it.

How else is Trump getting involved in the midterms? Last week, we noted that Trump was beginning to spend from his vast super PAC account to support Republican candidates. Now, we’re getting a better idea of what that spending looks like: As of earlier this week, Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC and related entities had booked ads to the tune of $138 million, a number that could continue to grow.

MAGA Inc. has around $400 million in the bank, though as the Washington Post reported earlier this month, Trump has a long list of other things he could choose to spend that money on instead of the midterms (such as legal fees, travel, or even his eventual presidential library).

Will it make a difference? It’s a whole lot of money. But with not much time left until voters go to the polls and some mail-in ballots already going out — North Carolina voters began receiving theirs earlier this month — the map is looking fairly dire for Republican hopes. 

Trump, meanwhile, isn’t doing himself any favors. The fuel shortages caused by the Iran war are only getting worse, as my colleague Caitlin Dewey explained today. Polls suggest he’s picked the wrong side of the AI issue. And voters are still extremely mad about inflation.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

It’s not every day we get to write about a new cat — in fact, it’s the first time in more than 100 years. But that’s just what scientists found in the Bolivian Yungas Forest, according to a new study published today. The cat, Leopardus tilcayo, is a type of tiger cat, smaller than your average house cat. It’s also quite cute, and you can see pictures of it here.

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

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 Fed gambit has officially failed. 

What happened? On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve voted to raise interest rates by a quarter of a percent, citing ongoing inflation. The rate hike was widely expected, and normally it would be largely unremarkable (at least for this newsletter, which doesn’t generally cover monetary policy). 

In this case, however, it’s also a direct rebuke to Trump, who has spent the last year-and-a-half-plus demanding rate cuts — and plotting a Fed takeover to get them. 

How has Trump gone after the Fed? It’s a long list, but the two most significant episodes are Trump’s efforts to force Fed governor Lisa Cook from her seat to stack the Fed board in his favor (still ongoing) and the Justice Department’s coercive criminal investigation against former Fed chair Jerome Powell (since ended). 

Neither succeeded, but Trump likely thought his goal was in reach when the Senate confirmed his nominee for Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, in May. On Wednesday, however, Warsh — several months into a four-year term as Fed chair — bucked Trump’s persistent demands by voting for the rate hike.

Why does this matter? Trump successfully exerting political control over the Fed would be extremely bad news for just about everyone. Lowering interest rates is a great way to juice the economy in the short term — exactly what he might want as his party faces down a potential midterm wipeout. But it could seriously damage the economy’s long-term health too, which is why the Fed is designed — successfully, as it turns out — to be insulated from partisan politics. 

What else should I know? So far, Trump’s response to the hike has been muted, at least by his standards. 

He’s threatened to take more drastic action, however: Earlier this month, he said he would suspend trade relations “WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT” if the Fed went through with its rate hike.

It’s not clear whether he’ll make good on that threat — but one way or another, we likely haven’t heard the last of Trump’s Fed vendetta.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Here’s a small bit of good news from New York: After an announcement by Mayor Zohran Mamdani earlier this year, the city is rolling out new, free public restrooms this week as part of a pilot program to address a longstanding complaint by New Yorkers. 

Have a great evening and we’ll see you back here tomorrow! 

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 can’t put his name on the Kennedy Center — so he’s closing it, effective immediately. 

What’s happening? On Tuesday, the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted to close the building indefinitely, shortly after a federal judge rebuked efforts to engrave Trump’s name into the facade.

According to the board, the closure is because the center is in bad financial shape and the building itself is in a dangerous state of disrepair. Without Trump’s support, they claim, a renovation will be impossible — and Trump has made clear he won’t support it unless his name is on the building, even though Congress already approved $257 million for the project last year.

How did we get here? Trump has been obsessed with claiming the Kennedy Center — a memorial for an assassinated president — and its cultural cachet for himself ever since he returned to office last year. He quickly stacked the Kennedy Center board with his appointees, then installed himself as chair. 

In December, he had his name added to the building’s facade and its official title, temporarily making it the Trump-Kennedy Center. A federal judge ordered him to undo the renaming in June, and the administration complied — but the facade has remained covered since then, obscuring the removal.

In August, Trump also threatened the center with demolition if he didn’t get his way; he sounded a similar note in a Truth Social post Tuesday, writing that “the Building is destined to doom.” 

What’s the context? Trump and his handpicked board have both portrayed the Kennedy Center as a destitute, derelict institution in need of rescue. In reality, the Washington Post reported last month, he’s done his fair share to drive it into the ground: Ticket sales and fundraising both plummeted after his December renaming, resulting in a nearly $100 million shortfall. 

What’s the big picture? The Kennedy Center was doing just fine before Trump returned to office. Now, its doors will close because he can’t turn it into a monument to himself.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I loved this recent episode from my colleagues over at Vox’s Unexplainable podcast, who went looking for the oldest story ever told — with some help from an astrophysicist and a cognitive anthropologist. You can listen here, or you can now find Unexplainable on Netflix. 

As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The recent history of mail voting in the United States has more twists and turns than an Emmy-winning drama. But for the cause of democracy, at least, yesterday’s ending is a happy one.

On Monday, the Supreme Court definitively blocked President Donald Trump’s many attempts to sabotage voting by mail — opining, in a three-sentence brief, that Trump can’t implement his new rules for the 2026 midterms. Or for any election, probably. 

Those last-minute rules, you may recall, would have required states to adopt new ballot envelopes and upload absentee voters’ names and envelope barcodes to a still-nonexistent online platform. Many officials argued they couldn’t possibly adopt the new measures before midterm voting starts, which would essentially cancel mail-in voting in their jurisdictions. 

The Supreme Court, of course, has been broadly sympathetic to Trump’s legal antics, even when they appear to clearly flout law or precedent. But shutting down voting just before the midterms? That’s one bridge too far for them.

Go a little deeper

Hobbling vote-by-mail was just one of Trump’s plots to meddle in the midterms, however — and several of the others are still underway. Here’s where some of the president’s most significant election maneuvers stand today: 

How worried should you be going into the midterms? That, my friend, is a question to answer in your own little heart. But I’m taking my cues from Vox’s politics editorial director, Benjy Sarlin, who recently reminded listeners of our America, Actually podcast that there are many, many institutional and logistical barriers to many of Trump’s more concerning legal machinations. 

“We’re taking it very seriously here…and nothing’s guaranteed,” he said. “But it is still a very difficult path [where] so far he has had zero success.”

One link for later

➨ Skip the shrimp. A new analysis by researchers at the University of Bath and Faunalytics, an animal welfare group, attempts to quantify the amount of animal suffering required to produce different factory-farmed foods. They concluded that eating smaller animals = causing greater suffering, simply because you have to eat — and, by extension, farm and kill — so many more of them.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that American founding father Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with mastodons? It’s actually one of the reasons that he sent Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition.
• Today’s trivia: Which English-language remake of an older French film won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2022? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the former pro hockey player who founded a major Canadian restaurant chain. That would be Tim Horton, whose eponymous cafes have occasionally gotten snarled in the trade spat between Canada and the United States.