I just got home after what feels like a very long last few months, and I am very glad to be here.
Going to leave you tonight with a picture of my brother-in-law’s boat from the kayak, in the midst of the choppy seas and the low light of autumn, and will pick the outside world back up again tomorrow.
Sleep well, everyone.
To read this letter, click here:
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
You can also find Heather at:
YouTube
Bluesky
Instagram
Facebook
Threads
TikTok
President Trump has not taken the idea of investigations of his administration lightly. On Saturday, November 7, he posted on social media that he was ordering the Department of Justice to investigate Democrats’ promises to investigate the administration’s corruption and mismanagement, calling those promises “criminal.”
On Monday, November 9, White House counsel Will Scharf, the top lawyer in the White House, sent a letter to Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA), who is expected to take over the House Oversight Committee, warning that the Democrat’s promise to investigate the actions of the Trump administration “may cross the line into blatant criminality.” Scharf leaned on the requirement that Congress’s investigations must have a legislative purpose—a requirement that current Republican chair James Comer of Kentucky ignored—and charged that Democratic lawmakers are issuing “abusive and capricious threats…to intimidate and to interfere with the lawful functioning of government.”
Then, on November 11, Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, wrote to Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who is in line to chair the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations after January, claiming that Blumenthal’s plans to investigate who donated to Trump’s ballroom and other pet causes, and under what circumstances, was an unconstitutional attempt to prevent free association. He continued, suggesting that Blumenthal was trying “to intimidate citizens for engaging in philanthropic practices that will benefit our nation for generations.”
Threatening Blumenthal with “significant legal consequences” for “you, your staff, employees, agents, consultants, campaign personnel, and any other person acting on your behalf or in concert with you,” he demanded Blumenthal preserve all records “relevant to your intent to deprive citizens of their core constitutional rights.”
Garcia and Blumenthal were having none of it. Garcia told A. Martínez and Majd Al-Waheidi of NPR, “We’re not going to be deterred, and we’re certainly not going to be intimidated by Donald Trump or anyone in the administration.” Garcia said that among the committee’s top priorities would be investigating Trump family corruption, including a $2 billion investment in Jared Kushner’s investment firm, and looking into allegations of corrupt contracts involving former Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and former DHS advisor Corey Lewandowski. “Our job is to investigate, to take issues to the courts, to make criminal referrals, and to write good legislation so that this kind of corruption doesn’t happen again,” Garcia said.
Blumenthal wrote back to Reitz, saying that his letter was “just the latest in a series of unlawful actions on the part of the Trump Administration attempting to intimidate Members of Congress for engaging in constitutionally protected activity” and adding, “Your implied threat of an investigation is baseless.” He warned: “I will not be intimidated.”
Blumenthal told Reitz to preserve records himself, writing: “The public deserves to know the terms under which dozens of American companies were persuaded to donate millions of dollars to the President’s vanity projects, and whether lawsuits were dismissed, contracts were awarded, or regulations went unenforced in exchange for that money. The public deserves transparency about whether the White House and the corporations it cajoled extracted favors at the expense of American taxpayers. Not only are these appropriate subjects for congressional oversight, but such inquiries are among the constitutional duties that Members of Congress must undertake to become informed about matters on which legislation may be necessary.”
When it appeared bullying wouldn’t work, Trump turned to rage and self-pity. Yesterday morning, at 5:50, he tried to insist that it was the Democrats, not him, who are corrupt. “The Democrat Party, lead [sic] by one of the most Corrupt and anti-American groups of political leaders and hacks in the history of our Country, and even the World, is doing everything in their power to get away from MASSIVE BLUE STATE CORRUPTION by saying, over and over again, that the Trump Administration is corrupt,” he posted. “THE DEMOCRATS ARE CORRUPT AND EVIL, and I am the exact opposite!” Then, echoing the words he used at his rally at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, before he urged the crowd to move to the U.S. Capitol, he added: “Fight hard, Republicans, or you won’t have a Country left!”
He continued to rage post about Democrats’ corruption through the morning. But by the afternoon, Attorney General Todd Blanche was walking back the suggestion that Democratic lawmakers’ promise to conduct oversight had been criminal. “There can come a point when a criticism becomes a threat, and then when a threat becomes something criminal and…I never said that that point has been crossed. I haven’t said that,” Blanche told reporters. Scharf, too, backpedaled, saying on Newsmax that all he had asked for was “that everybody follows the law.”
Even as the administration suggests congressional investigations into its behavior might be criminal, a monumental scandal has erupted in the administration. The chief executive officer of Nvidia, the maker of the highly advanced chips at the center of AI development, resigned yesterday after news broke that he has been engaged in an extramarital affair with a woman believed to be a Chinese spy.
On October 29, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Ana Swanson, Paul Mozur, Tripp Mickle, and Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported that about a year ago, intelligence agents had informed Trump that Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was engaged in an affair with Alice Huang, a woman assessed to be a Chinese intelligence agent. But Trump “chose not to do anything with the information.”
Ms. Huang worked for Megaspeed, a company that buys Nvidia chips and then provides computing power to Chinese companies. It has been suspected of being a cut-out company that smuggles chips to China. According to the New York Times journalists, intelligence agents thought Ms. Huang was funneling information to Beijing.
On Thursday, November 5, House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Brian Mast (R-FL), House Select Committee on China chair John Moolenaar (R-MI), and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chair Rick Crawford (R-AR) wrote to Huang requesting that he appear before their committees to brief them on his interactions with Ms. Huang, “a publicly reported People’s Republic of China (PRC) intelligence asset, and NVIDIA’s security protocols against foreign adversary espionage.”
“Recent reports raise significant national security concerns regarding the PRC’s access to sensitive U.S. technology and information,” they wrote. “It is vital that Congress determines the extent to which U.S. national security has been placed at risk.”
On Sunday, November 8, Huang admitted the affair and Nvidia’s board announced it was opening an independent investigation into whether Huang was the “target of a foreign intelligence effort.” On Monday, November 9, Nvidia’s stock began to drop, and on November 11 the New York Times reported on a second affair. On November 12, Nvidia’s stock price dropped from $151 billion to $135 billion.
As Maureen Farrell and Rob Copeland of the New York Times reported, with Huang at the helm, Nvidia has bankrolled much of the nation’s AI buildout, and his support for it has kept the money rolling in. Huang has boosted AI as important to the national security of the United States and key to the nation’s future. After Huang resigned yesterday, just hours before news broke of a third relationship, Nvidia’s value fell again. Over the course of the week, the company lost nearly $493 billion in market value.
The crisis is dividing the administration. As Ian Duncan, Zach Dorfman, and Warren P. Strobel of the Washington Post reported this afternoon, Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, along with Huang, wanted to let Nvidia sell chips to China in exchange for a 15% cut of the revenue going to the U.S. government.
In contrast, the journalists explain, “a bipartisan group of government officials, lawmakers and think tank analysts…view Nvidia’s chips as a vital asset in the rivalry between the two nations and one that the U.S. should strictly control.”
When Trump, who as of November 9 owned more than $12.5 million of Nvidia stock, told reporters he had not been informed about Huang’s relationship with Ms. Huang, sources told Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Julian E. Barnes, Ana Swanson, and Tripp Mickle of the New York Times that he had indeed been informed: Secretary of State Marco Rubio had told him, and the president had nonetheless brought Huang with him on a trip to China.
On CNBC today, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent blamed Lutnick for failing to put Megaspeed on an export blacklist. Luke Fountain of CNBC reported today that Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm Lutnick used to chair and which his sons now run, has extensive ties to Nvidia.
On Fox Business today, host Stuart Varney summed up the scandal during a discussion of its national security implications: “[W]e have to ask if anyone in the administration had a financial interest in getting those chips through to Beijing. That’s what this is all about, really, isn’t it?”
Trump was nowhere to be seen this afternoon when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) abruptly grounded all planes in the U.S. for about five hours forcing 6,600 flights to be canceled and another 8,600 delayed, stranding passengers across the country. Trump’s only communication with the public was a long post about the entertainment industry. When Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy held a press conference about the crisis, he blamed Congress for not fixing the system and demanded $50 billion to update it.
“Cut the crap,” Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted. “Trump and Republicans have controlled Congress and could have funded the system. The public needs real answers and immediate action.”
But it wasn’t going to get them from the president. When a reporter said to Duffy at a press conference, “You say this is a priority for President Trump. Why have we not heard from him at all on this issue since it happened?” Duffy answered: “The two of us have talked to him.”
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stepped in to explain that “the system has many redundancies in it, so that normally, if there’s one point of failure, something else can catch it.” During his tenure, the most extreme disruption to air travel lasted about an hour and a half when a system failed, he said, but “there were actually four different systems, and when one of them went out, another one could be brought online to cover that. So it is not clear to me why that redundancy did not prevent an outage of this magnitude in terms of scope and duration. This is the biggest nationwide ground stop since 9/11. But again, we don’t know much. I certainly don’t want to speculate.”
Asked about Trump administration officials’ charge that the Biden administration hadn’t upgraded the system, Buttigieg answered: “Well, we did a lot to upgrade the system.” He added: “When we had an outage, I didn’t stand there complaining about the Trump administration. We got to work, and I’m certain that that’s what the career officials and the career day-to-day employees at FAA and USD[epartment] O[f] T[ransportation] are doing. This should not be about politics.
“What I will say, of course, is that there needs to be answers, and there needs to be transparency about what happened. I imagine there will be a lot of interest on Capitol Hill. Obviously, there’s a lot of interest in the public. And again, as a member of the flying public, as well as somebody who cares a lot about what goes on in the national airspace, I will have a lot of interest in getting answers to it.”
—
Notes:
https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2026/11/Garcia-Letter-Signed_11.10.2026.pdf
blumenthal.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/20261111_letter_from_rm_blumenthal_to_aaron_reitzpdf.pdf
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/12/todd-blanche-justice-department-democrats-oversight
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/us/politics/nvidia-china-jensen-huang-trump.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/11/technology/jensen-huang-nvidia-affair.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/13/business/jensen-huang-nvidia-wall-street.html
https://money.usnews.com/investing/articles/stocks-owned-by-donald-trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/10/us/politics/trump-china-trip-nvidia.html
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/13/politics/bessent-lutnick-nvidia-megaspeed-blame
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/13/howard-lutnick-nvidia-jensen-huang-china-cantor-fitzgerald.html
Trump’s Truth:
X:
USAttyReitz/status/2120632462686711838/photo/1
Bluesky:
anthonymkreis.bsky.social/post/3n23d2npobc25
atrupar.com/post/3n27vcwl3gk2h
flightradar24.com/post/3n27uz5p42c2d
nothoodlum.bsky.social/post/3n2agqqqkzs24
govpritzker.illinois.gov/post/3n2agxnrb7c2d
thebulwark.com/post/3n2agskodwb2s
Watch today’s live recording here.
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
Get full, free access to Letters from an American here.
You can also find Heather:
YouTube
Bluesky
Instagram
Facebook
Threads
TikTok
So eight months ago I sat down in Orange with J.J. Galvez, the perky-yet-longshot Democratic candidate in the State Assembly District 71 race. His odds of beating (or even challenging) incumbent Kate Sanchez seemed long, but folks kept raving about his oomph, his spunk, his sparkle.
They were correct.
J.J. wound up falling short, but the race proved shockingly close, and the 34-year-old gunslinger has to be considered an up-and-comer in local political. J.J. posted this on his Substack, and I thought it worth sharing (with his approval).
I bring you J.J. Galvez …
•••
Team, we did not win this race.
However, we achieved a historic overperformance. We’re at 46.4 percent of the vote and on track for nearly 100,000 votes. In 2024, the challenger in this district got 38.5 percent with about 92,000 votes. We cut a 23-point gap to under eight, and we’re on pace to earn more total votes in a midterm.
We did that despite only raising about $120,000 (six times less than my opponent). Of the roughly $720,000 my opponent raised, only about $12,000 came from individuals. I’m proud that we accepted no corporate donations.
And we’re not done. We’re still helping with ballot curing so every valid vote counts for other local candidates. This isn’t about me. It’s about a movement that believes we can build a better future for all.
Unity was a major theme of this campaign. At a time of so much division, we need to remember that there are no “red” or “blue” areas, only American areas. Let’s turn the page and start working together again. Let’s have debates about solving problems, not about insulting each other.
This was my first time running for office. As an immigrant, I felt it was important to stand up for a community being attacked and dehumanized. But immigration wasn’t the center of my campaign. The American Dream was. The Dream means you can build a life through your work, regardless of the circumstances you were born into. That Dream has been breaking for decades. Work alone is no longer enough to keep up with costs, so people have stopped believing in a better future. That loss of faith, and the daily struggle just to survive, amplified by stressful and misleading messages on social media and TV from all sides, is at the core of our division and the rise of extremism.
To the incumbent, I mean this sincerely – I wish you success, and I’m ready to help. Representing this district means representing all of it, including the many who didn’t vote for you. Skipping debates and missing votes leaves a large share of your constituents unheard, which is the same thing you criticize Democrats for doing in Sacramento. Whether it’s the imbalance between costs and opportunities, corruption, the rise of AI, a changing climate, there is an infinity of problems to address. Don’t sit on the sidelines. Don’t fall into the temptation of waging battles that only build a political brand for yourself, without solving any real problems... Build a legacy by getting to work. Work for all of us.
To all my supporters – thank you. YOU. ARE. AMAZING.
I’m not going anywhere. Whether through running for office or driving change as an active citizen, I want to be useful to my community and to building a better world.
Thank you,
JJ
This is so goddamn good. Both informative and hilarious.
(She made a fun bonus reel that’s right up my alley too — but watch the main review first.)
Jason Snell:
The hardware is solid and coherent, the screen a pleasure to touch and tilt. In terms of software, though, the HomeView feels like a peculiar amalgam of numerous other Apple products. Its main interface makes it look a bit like an overgrown Apple Watch, complete with customizable “faces” that sometimes resemble actual Apple Watch faces and other times resemble the iPhone’s StandBy mode. Its apps sometimes feel like they’ve escaped from the iPhone or iPad, but at other times they feel more like they’re right off of an Apple TV. And still other “apps” resemble what you might see in your car, since Apple is also using CarPlay to project interfaces from apps running on your iPhone.
Given the fact that this product’s tech stack feels like it was created in a blender, it’s remarkable that it holds together as well as it does — but there are still places where the seams show.
I’ve been testing a review unit HomeView for a bit over a week, but haven’t had much time to devote to it. So in a lot of ways my HomeView experience thus far has been much more like that of a casual user than an expert. I plugged it in, set it up, got my wife and son to do what they needed to do to become recognized fellow-family-member users, and then we all collectively have had a week of “Well, now what?”
What Snell writes above succinctly and sharply describes my take: the hardware is top-notch but the software is like bits of iOS, WatchOS, tvOS, and CarPlay cut up and assembled into a ransom letter. The software lacks cohesion and vision and polish. If you open a web page you can select text, with the iOS touch interface, but there is nothing you can do with a text selection. You can’t copy it or share it. So why can you even make a selection? That’s the least of HomeView’s software problems, but perhaps most emblematic of its “created in a blender” state.
Patrick McGee (author of Apple in China; my guest on The Talk Show last May), writing on X in response to Semafor’s reporting that Nvidia is “considering” Johny Srouji:
Apple hardware chief Johny Srouji would be an incredible choice to lead @nvidia — and I believe he’d accept it.
He’s hit the ceiling at Apple and won’t ever be CEO; obviously competent; ambitious as hell; has long wanted chip designs to dictate Apple product launches/timelines.
I wrote about this a few days ago, that my money is on Srouji having no interest in the Nvidia job. It’s true that Srouji will almost certainly never be CEO at Apple. But it’s wrong to assume that Srouji would consider CEO of Nvidia to be an upgrade from CHO at Apple. There’s no way Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi, or Greg Joswiak would leave Apple to be CEO at another company. Most of Apple’s leadership genuinely bleeds six colors. There’s a certain approach to product that drives them, motivates them, and literally only Apple does that type of work. Tim Cook surely turned down numerous CEO offers to leave Apple while he served as COO under Steve Jobs, and he’s always been clear that he hoped Jobs would stay a few steps ahead of his cancer and could remain at Apple until, well, probably around now. (Jobs would be 71.)
I’ve never met Srouji and don’t have a read on him like I do other leaders at Apple. But I do have a read on Ternus and Cook. I’ll stick with my bet from earlier in the week:
Another scenario is that Srouji meant what he said, loves his job at Apple, and truly is John Ternus’s trusted and trustworthy hardware lieutenant. In this case, Nvidia’s board leaking that they’re considering Srouji to replace Huang is like someone in hell saying they’re considering ordering some ice water.
Aside from Srouji’s loyalty to Apple (and to the Apple Silicon chip architecture that’s been his life’s work), there’s also the question of whether he’d take the gig at Nvidia in particular, even if he is open to leaving Apple. Jensen Huang has left the company with a $4 trillion market cap, yes, but it was $5 trillion just a week ago. It now seems 20 percent of Nvidia’s sales in the AI era have been in violation of U.S. national security export controls to China. The company has no internal leadership hierarchy. And Huang placed bets that have leveraged the company’s future on OpenAI and the overall data center mania not being a bubble. Srouji has been a senior leader at the one tech company that conspicuously avoided those bets entirely.
Microsoft, yesterday, in a statement on X:
This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents. The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions.
As the dust settled on the 2026 midterm elections, a number of stories were published noting that states now fully under Democratic control include enough electoral votes to make the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact a reality. To review, this is the plan, devised in the aftermath of 2000 presidential election, that would allow an end-run around the Electoral College. A sufficient number of states agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote regardless of how their own voters voted in that particular state. Once a sufficient number of states agree, it’s done. The effect of the Electoral College disappears even as its architecture remains.
Now this is actually within reach because of Democratic trifectas in a handful of states. When I heard this subject come up again, my reaction was both negative and baffled. Given what we have seen in the last decade, who could ever have confidence that a state would honor this process when push came to shove? We’ve seen now how little is truly binding. This is especially the case when you’re expecting courts not to interfere in a case where the laws being enforced really are genuinely non-constitutional if not quite anti-constitutional. If JD Vance wins Wisconsin in 2032 but Wisconsin says it has to award its electoral votes to Pete Buttigieg, some version of this Supreme Court is going to uphold that law? Please.
For me this settles the matter. I would never trust such an expedient to work. Meanwhile, this piece in Vox notes how one of the originators of the whole concept, Yale Law Professor Akhil Amar, notes that the whole system could lead to a massive constitutional crisis because states might disagree about who actually won the popular vote since there’s really no federal arbitrator of that. He notes various other ways the system could implode because of a law of rule-setting and overseeing entity.
That may seem a little silly. Unless the whole country comes down to a lead of a few hundred votes, how is there going to be a dispute about the popular vote? Read the Vox article. It explains how there are a number of scenarios where it can spin out of control very quickly. But I want to focus on the issue that is implicit in Amar’s argument and his latter-day critiques of his own idea, but don’t get discussed in the Vox piece.
Since early 2025 I’ve been arguing that the sheet anchor of any resistance to Donald Trump is the fact that the states are subordinate but distinct sovereignties whose executive power is untethered to federal executive power. Critically, the Constitution unambiguously assigns the administration of elections to the states under federal law. Everything that has happened over the last 20 months has confirmed that verdict. Donald Trump wanted to subvert the electoral process but he mostly couldn’t because of that central feature of the constitutional architecture. That obstacle mostly wasn’t the work of judges, who we’ve learned are the thinnest of reeds to rely on. It’s the architect itself. Across so much of the federal government the president holds the machinery of government. He can be restrained in that power by a resolved Congress or by judges. But with both the Congress and the judiciary largely subservient we’ve learned a constitutional version of the old adage that possession is 9/10ths of the law.
Can the president just fire independent agency heads or abolish whole departments without law or warrant? Who’s going to stop him? He’s the president and the executive branch is run by the president. But a president no matter how powerful can never fire a governor or a mayor or even a cop on the beat. He also can’t issue them orders. It’s a separate sovereignty. It’s not a matter of a judge’s say-so. There are simply no tendons or muscles or connective tissue connecting the flow-chart of the federal government to those of the states. That proved critical to the integrity of the 2026 election.
Which brings us back to Amar’s points about the weakness of the whole National Popular Vote Interstate Compact: the lack of any governing or oversight body to determine basic things like who actually won the popular vote. Read through Amar’s points and it’s clear that making the national popular vote work — either by abolishing the Electoral College by amendment or through the Compact — would require a significant federalization of elections. Given the experience of the last decade and especially the last two years, that seems like an unquestionably bad idea. Imagine how the last two years might have played out had national — inevitably executive branch — agencies held real governing power over the conduct of elections. Everything plays out very, very differently.
The fact that some peoples’ votes count more than others in presidential elections, the fact that the candidate who gets fewer votes can win — these things all remain national and constitutional embarrassments. But we’ve seen in practice that state administration of elections is simply too core an obstacle to autocratic takeovers to give up so lightly. When civic democracy itself is on the chopping block you’ve got to pick your battles, make some hard choices.
Earlier this evening, I was exchanging notes with TPM Reader NH and I told him this: “I’ve had a very hard time today trying to put all of this into a coherent whole. Part of me thinks you’ve got a bunch of highly questionable stuff happening, at least semi-corrupt, very questionable behavior on NVIDIA’s part vis a vis China, some intentional slow-rolling from Commerce for very questionable reasons. And a lot of it is at least loosely known to a lot of people. Then the Times publicly confirms the relationship and U.S. assumption that Alice Huang is a spy. And then everyone runs for cover — even though a lot of the stuff surrounding that relationship was at least semi-known. I don’t know if this is a plausible way to look at it. But in a way I’m not sure she even needs to exist for a lot of this stuff to happen?”
This evening the Post published this article. You should read it. But the gist is that Marco Rubio and other China hawks in and out of the administration have been unhappy with what NVIDIA has been doing and Huang’s influence over key administration players who were allowing it to happen. Rubio, by whatever level of indirection, was able to get the story of the Alice Huang relationship into the Times. And that, in a matter of days, brought the walls crashing in on Jensen Huang. And yet quite a lot of this was known. To Trump, Rubio and other top administration officials it was apparently known in its entirety.
As I said above, it’s not clear to me that Alice Huang even needs to exist for a lot of this to happen. She seems more like a cog in the subversion of national interests to commercial interests than a well-placed spy pulling one over on other key players. Maybe more of an intermediary between China and Jensen Huang.
Links for you. Science:
Doctors in Ukraine Try Treating Infections Like Biological Warfare Attacks
A Man Had Brain Surgery. Now He Sees His Cat’s Eyes on People’s Faces—and Vice Versa
Why the simple flu shot could be a surprise weapon against cancer
What I Learned at a Drunk-Math Party
Low-income parents can’t afford to take chances with nutritious food their picky eaters might reject
The U.S. is staring down the barrel of a measles crisis, with no end in sight
‘A complete repudiation’: public health won big in US midterm elections
Other:
Forget the Leadership Fights—Everything Comes Back to the Filibuster
What the Logan Circle Shooter Told Me. In a series of interviews late last year, Matt Lambert obsessed about his condo’s problems — and the man he killed.
Some thoughts on the 2026 midterm from TPM Reader TS (Theda Skocpol)
Janeese Lewis George Promised Change. Will the Job Change Her?
Centrism Fail: Osborn/Bengs/Bodnar Edition
Firm Linked to Trump’s Sons Got Nearly $40 Million in Federal Contracts to Screen for Ebola and Other Diseases
Alito warns Congress can ‘turn off the lights’ at Supreme Court
The Scandal Is Bigger Than Jensen Huang
Chris Van Hollen says he will challenge Chuck Schumer for Senate majority leader
Sex Crimes, Lies, War, Money: MAGA’s 2026 ‘Self-Immolation’ Keeps Getting Worse
Cracks emerge in Trump’s Reflecting Pool – hours after he stood in front and told Americans about his great renovation
Horny Nvidia CEO No Longer CEO, Possibly Still Horny
The Democratic Leadership Fights Are Missing Something
The Real Reason Chris Van Hollen’s Challenge to Schumer Is a Big Deal
Alice Huang-Linked Firm Procured Banned Nvidia Chips in China
Why Democrats Can’t Quit the Spam
At the Tomb, Hegseth broke the silence. A sentinel spoke up for the dead.
David Sacks Speaks!
Sarah McBride didn’t give them the fight they wanted. She won anyway
Trump proposed a ‘secret weapon’ to police colleges. It will soon become reality
Leading Chabad Rabbi Legitimizes Killing Jewish Politicians Cooperating With Arab Parties
The Worst Thing Democrats Could Do Right Now
Team Van Hollen
A 124-Year-Old Voting Ban Designed to Silence Black Virginians Is Finally Gone
Baghdad’s first Jewish museum draws crowds to rediscover Iraq’s Jewish past
Sen. Baldwin proposes lowering Medicare eligibility age to 50
Right-wing influencer retracts fraud allegations against Seattle grocery
Lutnick should have prevented the diversion of sensitive Nvidia AI chips to China, critics charge
“Car brain” contributed to House failure to impeach Hegseth
The D.C. spaces that feature local artists
Links for you. Science:
Incredible Coral 100 Buses Long Discovered in The Indian Ocean, Could Be One of The World’s Largest
Power Grids on 5 Continents Pulse Every 60 Seconds. Scientists Think They Finally Know Why.
The American Brain Drain Claims Another Scientist
Democrats Plan Investigation Into Climate and Science Cuts Under Trump
US poised to lose measles elimination status—what does that mean?
One dead in E. coli outbreak linked to California pumpkin farm
Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed on restoring trust in science, the state of public health, and RFK Jr. (good, except I don’t think “Too often the way that scientists speak is about speaking to other scientists to make themselves sound smarter rather than speaking to the public, to help the public feel as smart as they really are” is a correct explanation for much of the distrust)
Other:
Never Let Trump’s Elite Enablers Forget What They’ve Done. Universities, scientists, law firms, and many other powerful institutions are about to start pretending they never rolled over for the president. But we know better.
The Clean House Compact: Four Anti-Corruption Reforms House Democrats Can Adopt on Day One
Scott Colom Wins Mississippi US Senate Race, Will Be State’s First Black Senator in 146 Years
Thanks to American oligarchy, Jensen Huang’s midlife crisis is a problem for all of us
New House Minority Leader Still Faces Old Questions On Ohio State Sexual Abuse
Why Black Voters Abandoned Trump: A shift toward the Republican Party didn’t survive contact with the president’s agenda.
Scott Colom Is Mississippi’s First Black Senator in 150 Years
Donald Trump Jr. Defends Russell Brand After Rape Conviction, Claiming Bias, as Police Praise Witnesses’ ‘Bravery’
The Evangelical Vote Will Return in 2028. Those writing obituaries for Christian nationalism need to hold off. (Yes, indeed)
How the Bluenami Swept Away the Christian Right’s Texas Stronghold
D.C. Council Moves to Lower Bills by Limiting Guaranteed Profits for Utilities
Why Did U.S. Marshals Kill Julian Bailey? Nine months after the 43-year-old husband and father was shot nine times by federal officers in Northeast D.C., his family is still searching for answers.
D.C. Council Members Vote Down Self-Driving Cars, for Now
Trump wants an immigration deal. He could start with caregivers.
Whistleblowers Tell Democrats the Trump Administration is Destroying Documents
As Cedar Hill Hospital flounders, residents ask why D.C. is still struggling to deliver healthcare in Southeast
Federal Judge Dismisses a DOJ Lawsuit Challenging Montgomery County’s Gun Ban
An American Furniture Maker Tried to Bring Jobs Back Home. It Didn’t Work.
Mississippi didn’t flip. Mississippians flipped it.
A Tool Built by Election Deniers Said These Voters Were Dead. We Found Them Alive.
The Blue Tsunami Was Built on ‘Corruption’: Senate Majority PAC started mapping out a new strategy almost two years ago. It paid off massively in the midterms.
What the legal battle over ticket resales could mean for D.C. concertgoers
Mr. PRESIDENT, TEAR DOWN THIS BALLROOM
Maryland Lawmakers Rebuke High School Valedictorian’s ICE Detention
The Amigos Park saga in Mount Pleasant is reaching its conclusion. Pretty much no one is happy with the results.
House Democrats Blame Traffic for Missing Key Hegseth Impeachment Vote
The grifters are tearing each other apart
The Week They Stopped Getting Away With It. First came the midterms. Now comes the meltdown.
The Blob
Florida Residents Lose It After DEI Law Backfires and Takes Their Beloved St. Patrick’s Day Parade Down With It
STARBASE, Texas—Starship lifted off right on schedule Friday from South Texas, making its 15th test flight in more than three years.
The largely successful launch took place in the early evening; as the massive rocket rose into the atmosphere, the Sun sank toward the western horizon. Conditions were ideal for the launch, with the atmospheric winds so calm the rocket’s white plume did not dissipate for many minutes. The weather in South Texas is not always comfortable; summers are long and hot. Friday evening was perfect at Starbase.
The first stage ascended toward space flawlessly, releasing the upper stage above the Gulf of Mexico. From there, the Starship upper stage ignited its Raptor engines and powered its way into a nominal orbit. This was the second time SpaceX has flown Starship into low-Earth orbit.
Below is my latest culture briefing. I’m making this available to everyone—so no paywall.
Enjoy!
AI tried to imitate Beethoven this week, and got almost one million views on social media in just three days. But the results were more pathetic than Pathétique.
For a start, the so-called sonata wasn’t really a sonata, lacking any thematic development. But that was the least of the problems with this mish-mash of clumsy harmonies, dead-end phrases, ridiculous anachronisms, and pompous gestures.
When I heard the major scale in bar 18, I actually started laughing. But there’s no indication that this effort was intended as a joke.
I was reminded of the Beethoven bio that tells how he continued to compose after his death. Hey, even zombies should be able to do better than this.
The New York Times now worries that “culture feels so monotonous.” My response is that the Times might want to consider its own policies—such as downsizing cultural coverage, eliminating reviews of live music, and serving up shallow overviews of timeless art in five-minute soundbites.
But the Times does have some interesting evidence to share. They interviewed Substacker Lauren Leek, who recently published some horrifying charts on cultural flattening.
The graph below shows what happens when an algorithm measures people’s choices among forty options, and then shows them more of what they like. Then it repeats the process, over and over—the same way real algorithms do.
The result is a dramatic shrinkage in the range of offerings. Soon there are no viable alternatives, just a boring monoculture.
Here’s her analysis of song lyrics—which draws on a database of four thousand hit tracks released over a 65-year period. During this time, lyrics relied increasingly on a smaller vocabulary, and more repeated lines.
Dumbing down fed on itself.
Leek blames streaming. “Streaming has created very concrete incentives,” she told the Times. “Pay starts after 30 seconds. A repeated hook in a song is the rational response.”
But too much rationality is death to creativity.
On the other hand, musicians are lucky. It could worse—they could be authors.
Or consider the case of writer Rachel Kadish.
Another media outlet died last week. This time the victim was Salon—once an influential online periodical. But they did try one last Hail Mary pass before disappearing.
Here’s a new scam.
Journalists lose (or leave) their jobs, but media outlets continue to use their names—attaching them as bylines to AI-generated articles. The publishers are brazenly adding bios and even fabricated author photos.
“That is my name associated with my former publication,” journalist Ken Downey Jr complained. “That is a bio that looks pretty accurate about myself, but that is not my picture….I haven’t been associated with the company in almost a full seven years.”
If AI really is so great, why are they hiding it? I can only conclude that:
Media outlets are ashamed of using AI, otherwise they would admit it—or even brag about it;
Readers obviously prefer human writers, or publishers wouldn’t go through this charade; and
The whole system is broken, built on deception and manipulation—unfair to everyone, especially the writers whose names are exploited in this way.
Back in April, I predicted a resurgence in movie theater attendance (but for the worst possible reason)—and we now know that 2026 will almost certainly show double-digit growth in box office receipts. We are returning to levels not seen since COVID.
But here’s a surprise. The biggest boost in attendance is coming from teens and young adults. They now make up 40% of the audience, and many of them are turning to classic films from the past.
The New York Times offered a profile of one young moviegoer:
Growing up, Gregory Santana, a Bronx resident who works in the automotive industry, sometimes went to the movies with his family — superhero franchises, the usual stuff. But at 26, he has moved beyond the multiplex to the land of cinephiles. He’s now an avid theatergoer who will spend a Friday night rewatching Francis Ford Coppola classics.
“Letterboxd pushed me in a direction to go to older movies,” he explained one evening as he caught a double feature of The Godfather and the 1974 thriller The Conversation at Film Forum, the Manhattan independent theater. The night was not over, he added. “After this, me and my friends are going to see ‘The Departed,” which was released when he was in elementary school.
The dominance of older offerings is happening in every idiom. I’ve written about the trend in music, but now the same thing is happening with TV shows.
The most popular TV series right now, according to culture analytics guru Daniel Parris, is a sitcom from 2007—and it’s “surpassing the 2026 viewership of Stranger Things, The Pitt, The Bear, and just about every other buzzy program you can think of.”
He’s referring to The Big Bang Theory, which stopped airing new episodes back in 2019. But that’s not the only old show that’s thriving right now—Parris also points to the ongoing popularity of The Office, Monk, and Suits.
What an odd turnabout. Not long ago, we were living in a golden age for TV, with exciting new shows drawing huge audiences. But now more people are binging on stale reruns.
The popularity of old sitcoms is especially interesting. Parris shares this chart—which shows how streamers have walked away from sitcoms during the last decade. If the audience is watching older comedies, you might think that the industry would take notice, and launch new ones. But they don’t.
“Audiences can’t get enough of a format that Hollywood has largely left behind,” Parris concludes. He goes on to wonder whether The Big Bang Theory might be the “last great sitcom: the closing chapter of a format that once dominated television.”
Why is this happening?
Maybe Hollywood’s abandonment of the sitcom is the result of a growing crisis of confidence at the heart of comedy in every sphere of society. I’ll be the first to admit that I have no idea what kind of jokes are acceptable today—and we all know that one poorly chosen joke on social media can end a career. I’m even less certain that I can anticipate what kinds of humor will be allowed in the future. In a world where you can be punished retroactively, that’s a real problem.
In such an unstable environment, only a fool would try to launch a new comedy franchise—far better to stick to drama or sci-fi or romance.
There are so many curious angles on this phenomenon. Horror, for example, was once heavily censored. But now there’s zero backlash no matter how much violence and bloodshed is depicted. So the same studios that fear to serve up a joke will happily showcase serial killings and dismemberments.
I must kill you, my dear—because I’m not allowed to tell you a joke.
On the other hand, there’s this:
If there’s any logic here, it’s beyond my ability to grasp.
If you’re looking for more interesting classical music than AI Beethoven, let me suggest another option.
The final performance in the debut run of Lincoln in the Bardo—a new opera by Missy Mazzoli based on George Saunder’s celebrated novel—will be live-streamed for free by the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday at 8PM (ET).
I haven’t heard this work yet, but I admire both Mazzoli and Saunders, and look forward to the performance.
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
Get full, free access to Letters from an American here.
You can also find Heather:
YouTube
Bluesky
Instagram
Facebook
Threads
TikTok
To read this letter, click here:
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
You can also find Heather at:
YouTube
Bluesky
Instagram
Facebook
Threads
TikTok
Mississippi has a new U.S. senator-elect.
Last night, the Associated Press called the race for Democrat Scott Colom, district attorney for the 16th Judicial District of Mississippi. Shortly afterward, Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith conceded the race, saying she respected the decision of the Mississippi voters. She congratulated Colom and wished him well.
Colom thus becomes the third Black senator from the state of Mississippi and the first ever elected by the people, as his two predecessors became senators in the years immediately after the Civil War, when state legislatures, rather than the people, still chose U.S. senators.
In 1870 the Mississippi legislature chose Hiram R. Revels, a minister who had been born free in North Carolina to free people of color, to finish the term of a Senate seat left empty in 1861 when the man who held it left with the state upon Mississippi’s secession from the United States. Over the opposition of Democrats, who were then the party of the Confederates, Revels became the nation’s first Black senator, serving for a little over a year, from February 25, 1870, to March 3, 1871.
The second Black senator from Mississippi was Blanche K. Bruce, who was born into slavery in Virginia and in 1868 moved to Mississippi, where he became a large landholder and was active in the Republican Party. The legislature elected him senator in 1874, and he served from March 1875 to March 1881, working closely with New York’s machine politician Roscoe Conkling, for whom he named his son. During his tenure, he presided over the Senate for a day, becoming the first Black person to preside over the Senate and the only formerly enslaved person to do so.
The backlash against Black political power was ferocious in Mississippi, where Black people outnumbered white people in 39 of the state’s 75 counties. In 1889, when Republicans began to talk about federal protection for Black voters in the South, lynching, which had been declining, rose again dramatically.
The next year, a convention rewrote the state constitution to enforce white supremacy by making it virtually impossible for Black people to vote. They required voters to pay a poll tax of $2 and to be able to show receipts for the two previous elections and to be able to interpret a section from the complicated state constitution chosen by a polling registrar. Because jurors were drawn from voting lists, being purged from them meant Black Americans couldn’t sit on juries, either.
Northerners, worried about the political power of new immigrants, cheered on Mississippi’s educational qualifications for voting, and by 1903 every southern state and many northern ones had rewritten their constitutions to adopt similar limits to suffrage.
Mississippi became the center of voter suppression in the United States, making it the state on which voting rights activists focused in the years after World War II, especially after the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett TIll in the state in 1955 in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision requiring the desegregation of public schools.
Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran and the Mississippi field officer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), urged the national organization to get involved in calling for justice for the child. As part of his civil rights work to combat segregation, Evers led voter registration drives in the face of growing white resistance. On June 12, 1963, Byron De La Beckwith, a member of a white supremacist Citizen Council, shot Evers in the back.
In one of the most powerful ads of the campaign, Colom told the story.
“There’s a house in Jackson every Mississippian ought to walk through once,” Colom says, as he stands in front of Medgar Evers’s home. “It looks like every other house on the street, except for it isn’t. It has no front door. You come in through the carport, where the walls give you some cover. The children slept on the floor, below the windows. Their father taught them that if they ever heard gunfire, they should crawl to the bathroom. He made it a game.”
“I’ve been a prosecutor for ten years,” Colom said. “Unfortunately, I’ve stood in a lot of houses where something terrible happened. This isn’t any house. This isn’t any tragedy. This is where Medgar Evers died. He fought for this country at Normandy. He came home to Mississippi, and they wouldn’t let him vote.
“So he organized, helping other people register. Just after midnight on June 12, 1963, he pulled into here with an arm full of T-shirts that said, “Jim Crow Must Go.” A man hiding across the street shot him in the back. Two juries let that man walk. His wife, Myrlie, never stopped. It took 31 years, then a Mississippi prosecutor reopened the case, and a Mississippi jury, both Black and white, convicted him.
“In Mississippi, no one is above the law, and no one should be outside its protection. He was killed for helping Mississippians vote. On Tuesday, use your vote, and honor everyone who died for that right.”
Mississippians heard Colom. They went to the polls and made him the first Black candidate elected to the United States Senate from Mississippi.
In his victory speech, Colom reached back to minister Hiram Revels to anchor his journey to the Senate in the faith that he called a Mississippi tradition. “For me, this journey started with a prayer,” he said, “and in Mississippi, our prayers have often changed the course of history.” He called out Medgar Evers and voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer for their faith in Mississippi, but added that “in Mississippi, it’s local people that make the difference. Not just the names that are recorded in history, but people that do the work without any expectation of recognition.”
He continued: “I’ll tell you, it’s local people that had faith that Mississippi can make progress, and it’s local people like the people out here who had faith that we can win this election. So God bless you. But as my mom would always tell me, faith without work is dead, and we worked this election, y’all. We worked. God didn’t want us to get it the easy way, he wanted us to get it the Mississippi way.”
“For months and months, I’ve been telling everybody, everywhere I go, that we’re going to win this election,” Colom said. “I was saying that eight or nine months ago, and recently, I’ve been saying it on the news. But every time I said it, I pointed out that people were going to give me too much credit for it, because it’s not something that I did; it’s something that we did.”
“All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this,” Colom said. “I had the courage to believe in Mississippi. I had the courage to understand that we could show the country that Mississippi matters.”
—
Notes:
https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/constitution-of-1890/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/emmett-impact-emmett-tills-murder/
https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/civil-rights-leaders/medgar-evers
Bluesky:
sahilkapur.bsky.social/post/3n235m4zwe22g
YouTube:
As you’ve surely seen/heard/experienced by now, the FAA has grounded every flight. Wanna see Grandma this weekend? Nah. Wanna catch the big Hillsdale-Ohio Dominican football game this weekend? Bad news. Just wanna get away for, oh, your honeymoon? Might not happen.
Luckily, we have two people in charge calling the shots.
One is Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary and former Real World contestant.
And the other—my personal favorite—is former Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, now overlord of Homeland Security.
Here’s Markwayne, discussing the issues …
“Out of abundant of caution.”
“OUT OF ABUNDANT OF CAUTION!!!!”
Bruh, I have low standards these days. Fuck some hookers? Fine. Snort some coke? Reasonable. Worked as a crack-dealing pimp back in 2022? People change.
But when a guy with a hugely important job cannot string words together?
We’re doomed.
PS:
Hey folks! Another gap week this week as this week featured some other very substantial demands on my time (once again, Patrons will likely guess what those demands were).
But so that I don’t leave you with nothing to go on, here a few links to cap out the week:
Over at The Partial Historians (always worth catching for the Roman History fans), Alexandra Sills, author of Gladiators in the Greek World stopped by to talk about gladiators, particularly their place in the Greek East.
Also in ancient history news, there’s been a new Pasts Imperfect newsletter, always worth a look.
Over at the Ancient World Mapping Center, Tobin Smith, Gabriel Moss and Henry Gruber have unveiled a wonderful interactive map of all of the attendees of the Council of Chalcedon, a major church council in 451 called by the (East) Roman Emperor Marcian. The map is interesting on a number of levels – informative as to the Council itself (an important event in the formation of Christian religious doctrine), but equally an interesting barometer of the presence of important Christian communities (through their bishops) at the time and also of the reach of the Eastern Roman Emperor.
November 13, 2026— Washington, D.C.—The Commercial Space Federation (CSF) is pleased to welcome CesiumAstro as its newest Associate Member. A global leader in advanced connectivity solutions for the space and […]
The post Commercial Space Federation Welcomes CesiumAstro as a New Associate Member appeared first on SpaceNews.
AST SpaceMobile executives expressed confidence in the company’s ability to field a new reusable launch vehicle in just two years despite widespread industry skepticism.
The post AST SpaceMobile presses case for developing own launch vehicle appeared first on SpaceNews.
Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica:
A global outage taking down a wide range of Microsoft 365 services remains ongoing Friday morning.
The outage started midday Thursday, impacting users of Microsoft email, cloud, and AI services. Microsoft has documented the full list of services impacted by the error, while moving early Friday morning to protect customers around the world from losing emails during the extended disruptions.
“Recovery actions are ongoing,” the Microsoft 365 Status account confirmed on X. “To help preserve delayed mail during this event, we’ve extended email timeout to 48 hours.”
So it’s more like Microsoft 363 at this point.
David Sacks, on X:
Bombshell story. The spy narrative is collapsing already.
Is there clear & convincing evidence that Alice Huang was a Chinese spy?
- AG says no. (“no conclusions reached”).
- CIA says no. (“not yet convinced”).
- DNI says no (“not entirely accurate and over-torqued”).
- Ranking Democrat on House Intelligence (incoming Chairman) says no. (“today, at least, I don’t know”). This was immediately after he was briefed.
Who argues otherwise? Anonymous officials tell CNN “it strains credulity to believe that she was not acting as an agent of the Chinese government — simply by virtue of the fact that she is a successful Chinese businesswoman working with one of America’s most powerful companies.”
First, as for “who argues otherwise?”, the U.S. State Department is who. But more importantly, the degree to which Alice Huang worked for or with China’s MSS is almost a footnote on this scandal. It’s not central to the story at all.
It’s bad enough that Jensen Huang was having a yearslong affair with an executive from any Nvidia client. But Megaspeed was apparently a shell company dedicated to circumventing U.S. export controls for AI hardware to China. Alice Huang is, apparently, a criminal smuggler working to circumvent U.S. national security policy. If she was also cooperating with or taking direction from MSS that’s just icing on the cake.
I wrote in a post earlier today that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is being teed up to be scapegoated — deservedly — for the ails of the Republican Party and Trump administration. Sacks, I think, is going to be right there with him — also deservedly. This whole “Maybe she’s not a spy so the whole story is a scam” argument is drenched with flop sweat.
Sacks originally joined Team Trump 2.0 as “AI czar”. In that capacity he was the leading proponent in the Trump administration for a hands-off approach to AI regulation generally, and specifically a look-the-other-way policy regarding Nvidia’s 20-percent-of-revenue side hustle selling banned-for-sale-to-China hardware to smugglers.
Sacks might not just get sacked. If this goes south and people wind up being convicted of crimes, Sacks will be at the front of that line too. The pardon from Trump will cost Sacks real money.
Ana Swanson, Tripp Mickle, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan, in a long deeply-sourced profile of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (gift link):
There is broad agreement among most senior Trump administration officials that the United States should more aggressively tighten controls on Nvidia’s advanced chips to keep China from using them to catch up in the race to dominate artificial intelligence.
Then there is Howard Lutnick, who runs the Commerce Department. [...]
Within the Commerce Department, Nvidia is treated differently than other firms, current and former officials say, with its issues given high priority and sent through specific channels.
Mr. Lutnick frequently calls and messages with Mr. Huang, and the department prepares carefully for their private meetings together in Mr. Lutnick’s fifth floor office. All Nvidia matters are routed through Jeff Kessler, a top deputy to Mr. Lutnick, who is said to rarely take any significant action without the commerce secretary’s approval.
Nvidia’s general counsel has also been given direct access to shape new rules, including leaving comments in draft regulations affecting the company.
Here’s a photo from the Times story, taken this July in the Washington D.C. Cheesecake Factory, with Lutnick telling Jensen Huang, “Dude, seriously, smell my finger...”
Republicans as a party, and the Trump administration in particular, need scapegoats for the historical disaster of their election losses last week. Huang and Nvidia are going to be one of them. Lutnick is another. He’s cooked.
The attempt to pin the NVIDIA-Huang spy scandal on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is galloping forward. Earlier today Treasury Scott Bessent went on CNBC and squarely laid the blame on Lutnick for slow-rolling and loosely enforcing export controls on NVIDIA chips. This is no different from the accusations we’ve been hearing about from unnamed sources in numerous reports. But going public and laying blame on CNBC is a whole ‘nother thing. This Journal article goes deeper into the specifics of the accusations, Lutnick’s apparently fairly close relationship to Jensen Huang and other details of this internal administration battle.
This is a complicated picture. Lutnick does have his finger on the export control enforcement spigot. He is, among the high administration officials without the Trump surname, unquestionably the shadiest character — cash on the barrel, there are no laws, etc. He also appears to be closest to Huang and to have introduced him to Trump. Just because Trump is crooked and indifferent to national security when there’s money to be made doesn’t mean Lutnick couldn’t have out-crooked him in this particular case.
All this said, earlier reporting suggested that to the extent he was going easy on NVIDIA, he was responding to guidance from Trump. We have pretty tight reporting suggesting that Trump first learned about Huang’s affair with a suspected Chinese spy a year ago and then again in May. He did nothing. He’s also been supportive of Huang’s push to ease restrictions on his chip selling to China. In other words, there’s lots of evidence that Lutnick was either following Trump’s guidance or that Trump was at least on board with what Lutnick was doing.
What it all amounts to is that the sharks are swirling to make Lutnick the scapegoat, make good on sundry intra-administration vendettas and wall the scandal off from Trump. But the details of who really did what remain unclear. And even if Lutnick was in some sense the driver of giving Huang a pass to sell into China, Trump’s fingerprints are all over it.
TPM’s Untitled Live Show (Name TBD) returns today at 1 p.m. ET. If you think you’ve read all there is to be said about the Nvidia boss’ sex scandal, resignation and the ways in which it makes the Trump administration look wet behind the ears, just wait.
I hope you’ll join Joe, Hunter, Derick and myself this afternoon on YouTube. Come Huang out.
I went back and forth with a number of people yesterday about the filibuster and the leadership contest in the Senate Democratic caucus yesterday. You want Van Hollen because among other reasons, some contended, he gets you closer to getting rid of the filibuster. Don’t be so sure of that. I want to show you something that popped up yesterday in my Twitter feed that is a good example of why. TPM alum Sahil Kapur posted this clip of Bernie Sanders getting asked about the filibuster. The answer isn’t great. I’m not picking on Sanders here. I’m flagging this precisely because Sanders is a key player making this leadership contest possible and people imagine, with some good reason, that Sanders is most willing to upend conventions, take on establishment thinking, etc. It’s an example of how deep filibuster thinking runs.
In case you don’t get a chance to watch, the gist of what he says is this: There are some good reasons for getting rid of the filibuster, majorities should govern, etc. But then he says that the filibuster is also key to protecting the rights of the minority. Having given a pretty equivocal response he then kind of dismisses the question by saying he’s confident the Democrats can pass a pretty good reconciliation bill. In other words, a big omnibus bill which has to survive the budgetary impact “Byrd” rules and ends up having a million different things in it and no one really knows what they are.
Again, this isn’t a criticism of or picking on Sanders. His reply is notable precisely because Sanders is presumably going to be among those most willing to upset the apple cart (though this can also be more generational than ideological). But even he’s pretty resistant.
One TPM reader just told me it’s crazy to get into a big fight about this now when President Trump’s veto makes this mostly moot. That is a credible argument; but I disagree. With the filibuster in place, you’re not going to be able to pass a bunch of popular bills that President Trump is forced to veto. And you’re not going to be able to put Senate Republicans on the spot and force them to vote against popular bills either. So a lot of what people want Democrats to do out of the gate next year isn’t actually going to happen. It’ll peter out in parliamentary minutiae.
The good news is we don’t really have to settle that argument because the argument in favor is the same either way. You’re not going to be able to hit the ground running in 2029 (if there’s a trifecta) if you haven’t laid the groundwork in 2027 and 2028 — precisely because support for this anti-majority relic runs a lot deeper than people like to think. Whether you think it’s critical in 2027 or 2029 you’ve got to start identifying who is on what side today.
What makes the filibuster so hard to ditch is that the conversation about it is murked up in these vague and equivocal answers — being kind of against it but never quite ready to get rid of it. This is how the Senate works — really, how both legislative bodies work: members always want to keep their positions vague because it preserves their freedom of action. If you take a moment to think about it, it’s remarkable that even for people who follow this closely, it’s extremely difficult to name any senators who are definitively and publicly in favor of killing the filibuster or keeping it.
That vagueness is by design. As long as the Democratic caucus is an amorphous blob when it comes to the filibuster, sort of against it but not in a specific or definitive way, it’s impossible to grab on to, impossible to start dividing the caucus into supporters and opponents and begin pressuring or convincing members to shift from one column to the other.
If you’re serious about ending the filibuster — and almost everything depends on it — you have to change that: you have to start identifying supporters and opponents, get them on the record. And you have to start doing it today because if you don’t you’ll roll into 2029 in the exact same situation, with this intractable barrier to progress which isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
Andrew Sharp, in an excellent column at Sharp Text:
I have a variety of thoughts after spending the past several days reading and recording podcasts about these (figurative and literal) affairs, but let me express one unpopular sentiment at the outset: what happened to Jensen Huang this week is tragic and depressing.
I have a disease that makes me sympathetic to almost anyone who ends up on the wrong end of viral outrage and panic, and unfortunately it’s flaring up again. Huang is one of the greatest CEOs in American history. He’s still hyper competent, he’s been incredibly important to the growth of the AI ecosystem, and frankly, he’s among the most sane of the contemporary tech leaders we have on offer. His fall from grace has been not only stunning but seemingly coordinated.
It is sad. But it’s also funny. Many tragedies are also hilarious. (That’s a key to Shakespeare’s enduring fame — his tragedies had funny scenes and his comedies had painful themes.)
But I think it’s now a very open question whether Jensen Huang was even a vaguely responsible CEO, let alone “one of the greatest CEOs in American history”. What’s undisputed is that he’s one of the greatest technical innovators in history. Nvidia technology is world-beating in several regards. But that doesn’t make him a great CEO. If Nvidia falls apart because he — by his own admission — rejected the notion of succession planning and structured the company with no hierarchy other than himself at the center, that’s an abject failure. Ignoring the fact that he himself knew the risks he was taking with his sexual escapades, he could have been hit by a bus on any given day. The leadership structure Huang cultivated is like being the sole breadwinner in a family and not having a life insurance policy. If that breadwinner dies in an accident and leaves their family destitute, no one’s going to call them “one of the greatest parents in history”. Maybe it’ll all work out for Nvidia though. We don’t know yet. Only time will tell. But I don’t think it looks good at the moment. If I owned Nvidia stock I’d sell it all right now.
The above doesn’t even touch upon my belief that Nvidia’s meteoric rise to the top market cap in the world was fueled — to some extent — by a circular financing racket. If my side of that argument is ultimately proven correct — that the AI bubble is essentially an elaborate, complex Ponzi scheme — Huang’s plaque in the CEO Hall of Fame will go in the Infamy Wing alongside Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling, Elizabeth Holmes, and Sam Bankman-Fried. Maybe I’m all wet about that. But I’d say it’s at least an open question at the moment.
Sharp, nearing his conclusion:
Huang repeatedly belittled those people with both his rhetoric and his company’s behavior, and indeed, he questioned the patriotism of anyone who dared to object. In so doing, he was waging war with not only large swaths of the U.S. security apparatus, but also the realities of Xi Jinping’s China that would inevitably make it impossible to sustain his position without looking naive, selfish, and unforgivably reckless.
Read the whole thing, and Sharp ends up making the case himself that Huang, ultimately, was a terrible CEO, not a great one.
Drake Bennett and Ian King, reporting for Bloomberg (gift link):
At the end, Jensen Huang looked broken and shattered, his legendary energy depleted. After weeks spent denying the allegations of infidelity and fighting to remain in his job as Nvidia Corp.’s chief executive officer, his surrender late Wednesday night was unconditional. Huang’s usual take-charge demeanor had evaporated, according to a person familiar with the situation, and he’d started using phrases like “whatever” and “I don’t care.”
For the decades he spent building Nvidia into a multitrillion-dollar AI chip behemoth, Huang was famous for his attention to the tiniest of details, from chip architecture to the compensation packages of even the most junior employees at the company. Now, in the eyes of the people in the room, he had given up.
According to people who’ve spoken with him in recent days, Huang has already taken a penitent turn, castigating himself as a “piece of shit.”
It really is sad. No joke here. It’s sad.
As I’ve noted, these leadership challenges don’t mean a lot if they don’t include abolishing the filibuster. This afternoon Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), who just announced what remains a fairly longshot challenge to Chuck Schumer, says he supports getting rid of it.
“My personal opinion is that we need democracy in the United States Senate and that means allowing ultimately a majority of senators to answer the call of the American people, so that means 51 votes … My personal view has been all along that the filibuster is an anti-democratic — small “d” — provision. It’s not in our Constitution. It was put in there by senators to enhance their power over the power of the people.”
As you can see he’s framing this as his personal view. But that goes without saying. As I explained, a parliamentary leader isn’t a “decider,” as George W. Bush famously put it. He or she steers where their caucus wants to go. So it’s not a matter of him saying I will do this when I’m leader. But him pretty unequivocally supporting it is a big, big deal.
Let me add a few additional points of context. You’ll note that Van Hollen says “ultimately” the majority should get its way. This is a key point since many people say they support restoring the “talking” filibuster in which the minority actually has to hold the floor without interruption to prevent a vote on a bill. That old system is more a matter of movies than reality. It never worked quite that way. But the concept has merit.
As TPM Readers know, the filibuster has been a big issue for me for many years. I’ve generally avoided getting into these different flavors of filibuster since it tends to overcomplicate and confuse the issue, which is getting rid of the absolute requirement of 60 votes to pass most laws (the exceptions being high level judicial appointments and reconciliation bills.) If I were deciding this on my own I would choose a system in which the minority could meaningfully delay a vote on a big issue but never indefinitely. Many parliamentary systems have versions of this with multiple “readings” of a bill. Say perhaps that the minority could hold up a vote for two or three weeks. That would be reasonable.
What’s the point? Two really. The Senate is supposed to be more deliberative. You can’t just bang through a bunch of laws in a single day with no debate. The standard argument is that the filibuster drives compromise. But that’s demonstrably false based on the record of the last quarter century. It creates gridlock. Majorities, even large ones, can’t pass the legislation they promised on the campaign trail. But there is a logic to saying that really important legislation shouldn’t barrel through the Senate before the public has gotten a chance to know what’s happening. The best argument for some kind of slow-rolling mechanism is that it gives the minority some time to draw public attention to something the public may not really support. It’s a complicated question, how necessary this is. My point in raising this is only to note that an ability for the minority to slow or stymie legislative is workable as long as it is not absolute and the minority has to affirmatively do something to accomplish it. A few weeks seems like a reasonable timeframe.
This is just a general observation. When I first started following the NVIDIA scandal, I had the sense that Jensen Huang was either duped by these cut-out companies sending NVIDIA chips (physically or virtually) to China, or perhaps he was beguiled by Alice Huang, the suspected Chinese spy. But it’s very hard to square that basic take with the various reports we’re seeing.
Huang was a very hands-on CEO. But the kinds of transactions we’re talking about require lots of people to be involved. There are multiple examples of what seems like NVIDIA taking affirmative steps to conceal what it was doing. And a decent amount of this seems to have been an open secret. A short seller (Culper Research) published a report all the way back in May that set forth the broad outlines of Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang and the mammoth amount of NVIDIA production that was going to China through these cuts-out and backchannels. There are a lot of boutique investment research products out there. But a lot of this, or a lot of smoke about this, has been out there for months. It kind of seems like all the key players knew just what they were doing, who they were helping. You can even see a bit of this in the sharks swirling around Howard Lutnick. Bessent isn’t saying “I can’t believe you were doing this.” It’s more like, “we’ve been telling you not to do this all along and you wouldn’t listen.” I’m not clear what all this amounts to. But the evidence is running significantly ahead of what seemed like the original storyline.
SpaceX launched it’s most ambitious Starship flight to date, hoping to demonstrate its revolutionary rocket is fully reusable by recovering both its first and second stages, but although the Ship upper stage reached orbit and deployed 26 Starlink satellites, the booster diverted to a fiery splashdown off shore in the Gulf.
The Starship vehicle lifted off from Starbase in Texas at 4:47 p.m. CST (5:47 p.m. EST / 2247 UTC) on Friday, Nov. 13.
The flight plan called for Super Heavy Booster 22 to return to pad 2 at Starbase about 6.5 minutes after launching from there but it diverted to a splashdown offshore.
“GNC [Guidance, Navigation and Control] triggered that abort. It was doing what it was supposed to do, basically detected that the booster was not in the place that it was supposed to be to proceed with the catch, did an automated abort, and then headed out to that offshore splashdown location,” SpaceX commentator Dan Huot said in an update about 16.5 hours into the mission. He clarified an earlier update he gave on the SpaceX webcast: “I did a disservice to our booster GNC guys last night. It was not a GNC issue that caused us not to come back.”
The vehicle exploded and disappeared from view before appearing to rise back out of the sea as remaining propellants burned off. Three previous boosters were caught by the launch pad tower but Version 3 of the Super Heavy is yet to make a successful return.
Following the successful deployment of 26 Version 3 Starlink satellites, Ship 42 entered what, if all goes to plan, will be a long coast phase of up to 14 orbits of the planet. If all systems remain healthy it is scheduled to return to the launch site, 22.5 hours after launch or at around 3:20 p.m. CST (4:20 p.m. EST / 2120 UTC).
SpaceX has options to end the mission early with splashdowns off Hawaii and Chile if there is any doubt about the safety of a landing attempt at Starbase, which will take the craft over Mexico and South Texas.
And that includes this week’s Logan Circle mass shooting, leading to one murder. As of 9am Friday, there were three homicides in D.C. this week, bring the total to 86* homicides this year. Last year, during the same time period, we had 119 homicides, and in the surge year of 2023, there were 239 homicides during that same time period.
Both violent and property crimes declined this week, which is a bit of a bright spot.
2026 will be the first year since the last year of Biden’s presidency where homicides don’t decline by 33%.
Hoping for a much better week next week.
*Three of the 89 murders reported this year actually occurred in other years (e.g., a missing persons case from 2023 turned into a homicide case this year with new evidence).
Welcome to Edition 9.19 of the Rocket Report! Will something historic happen this weekend? No orbital rocket has ever been fully recovered with the intent of reusing all of its components. But that's just what SpaceX is going to try to do with a Starship launch on Friday, and an upper stage landing attempt 22.5 hours later on Saturday afternoon, local time. Ars will be on hand in Starbase, Texas, to provide coverage of it all.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Electron set for milestone launch. The next launch of Rocket Lab’s Electron vehicle is due to lift off from the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand on November 14 at 5:30 UTC. This mission will serve as Electron’s 100th overall mission—a notable milestone for the small rocket that first flew in 2017, NASASpaceflight.com reports.
Update: Launch has now slipped to Sunday at 12:11 p.m. EST (1711 UTC) due to a network communication issue between the ground and the rocket that could not be resolved in time for Saturday’s launch window.
United Launch Alliance will try again Saturday to launch its Vulcan rocket after a power interruption at a nitrogen plant scrubbed Friday’s attempt, further postponing the 215-foot-tall vehicle’s return to flight after solid rocket booster nozzles failed on two of its first four missions.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is now scheduled for 12:32:30 p.m. EST (1732:30 UTC) Saturday, Nov. 14. ULA said the rocket and the 40 Amazon Leo satellites it carries remain healthy.
“The launch of a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket carrying the Amazon [LV-01] mission is delayed due to a power interruption in the Air Liquide gaseous nitrogen plant which resulted in the loss of their high-pressure pumps,” ULA said in a statement Friday morning. “Without confirmation of sustained commodity flow, the team has decided to realign the launch to the back-up opportunity.”
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage Saturday beginning 30 minutes prior to liftoff.
ULA announced the delay at 8:41 a.m. EST, a little more than four hours before the originally scheduled Friday liftoff and after the launch team had begun loading liquid oxygen into the rocket’s Centaur 5 upper stage, according to the company’s live mission updates. Gaseous nitrogen is used to purge and pressurize systems on the rocket and launchpad.
The one-day delay extends a nine-month wait since the most recent solid rocket booster malfunction prompted the U.S. government to pause its use of the non-reusable rocket for national security missions.
The now-delayed mission serves a private customer, Amazon, which has tasked ULA with ferrying 40 broadband internet satellites to expand its Leo constellation. It’s the first of 38 Vulcan launches Amazon has purchased.
ULA has not said how long Saturday’s launch window will last. The rocket will fly on a northeasterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
The U.S. Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron is forecasting a zero percent chance of rain Saturday at the launch site with winds of 10 to 15 knots.
Should the countdown hit zero come Saturday, Vulcan’s first stage and side-mounted boosters will power it above Florida’s Space Coast, and two burns of its Centaur upper stage will propel it higher; Amazon’s Leo satellites will begin separating about 70 minutes after liftoff, roughly 285 miles up, in 16 separation events over about 25 minutes, according to a ULA mission diagram.
The launch will be the first flight of a redesigned booster nozzle and comes as an investigation into the most recent failure, which occurred Feb. 12 during a Space Force national security mission, is still open.
The launch will also be the first flight of a Blue Origin-manufactured BE-4 engine since the Jeff Bezos-owned space company saw one of its New Glenn rockets explode on the pad during a test in May. The New Glenn and Vulcan both use BE-4 engines, the latter employing two to power its first stage, producing more than 1 million pounds of thrust.
Ahead of the launch, ULA officials said Blue Origin had installed a retrofit kit for the rocket’s BE-4s, which Blue Origin qualified through hot-fire testing.
“Every flight generates data and every flight teaches us something,” ULA President and CEO Mark Peller said in a statement released by the company. “And we’re going to look to this flight to get some more useful data in a flight environment on the effectiveness of the corrective action that we’ve implemented.”
The Vulcan rocket at the ready to launch from SLC-41 will fly in a configuration ULA calls VC6L, referring to its use of six side-mounted solid rocket boosters built by Northrop Grumman and a 70-foot-long payload fairing. It will be the first Vulcan to fly with six boosters and the first to use a shorter version of its Centaur 5 upper stage built for low Earth orbit.
ULA says the rocket will carry more than 50,000 pounds of payload, a company record.
During the Feb. 12 Space Force mission, dubbed USSF-87, one of the Vulcan’s four solid rocket boosters appeared to suffer a burn-through of its nozzle — the bell-shaped exhaust outlet at the bottom of the motor — about 20 seconds after liftoff. Despite the malfunction and the rocket appearing to roll more than usual as it climbed, its main engines and upper stage compensated, and the mission’s payloads reached their planned orbit.
But it was the second such failure in four Vulcan flights. In October 2024, a nozzle came off one of the boosters on Vulcan’s second certification launch. ULA later traced that problem to a manufacturing defect in an internal nozzle part.
“Until this anomaly is solved, we will not be launching Vulcan missions,” Col. Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s portfolio acquisition executive for assured access to space, said two weeks after the February launch.
ULA said the subsequent investigation by the company, Northrop Grumman, the Space Force and other government agencies included laboratory materials testing and a full-scale test firing of the Graphite Epoxy Motor 63XL solid rocket booster utilized by Vulcan.
The team identified three credible causes and took steps to mitigate all of them, the company said, through changes to the nozzle’s design and to how it is built. ULA has not said what the causes were. The investigation will continue after the flight, and the Space Force will weigh its results.
“They’ve publicly stated that they want us to get through this first commercial flight and they want to review the data before they make a decision,” Peller said with regard to the Space Force pause on Vulcan’s use for national security missions.
On May 28, a New Glenn — which uses seven BE-4 engines — exploded during a static-fire engine test, heavily damaging its Cape Canaveral launch facilities. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp later said the failure “originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines.”
“That BE-4 engine and main oxidizer valve are common to the BE-4s we fly on Vulcan,” Peller told Aviation Week this month.
In that same interview, Peller acknowledged that “what we do here is not without risk.”
New Glenn remains grounded. In early November, Blue Origin submitted a filing to the Federal Communications Commission listing the operational window for “preflight” checkouts and the “launch” of a New Glenn rocket from Launch Complex 36 as beginning Jan. 15. The window, which also includes postflight work, extends through April 15, according to the filing.
The 40 satellites atop the Vulcan in its VC6L configuration are the largest batch Amazon has launched at once. The company has rocketed nearly 400 Leo satellites to orbit across 14 missions since April 2025, using a mix of Atlas 5, Falcon 9 and Ariane 6 rockets, but none since July.
That still leaves Amazon far behind SpaceX, which boasts more than 11,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, according to statistics maintained by astronomer Jonathan McDowell. The FCC expects Amazon to have its first-generation constellation of 3,232 satellites in orbit by July 2029.
“Vulcan will launch close to half our first-generation constellation, making it our primary workhorse over the next several years,” Melissa Wuerl, Amazon Leo’s director of launch systems, said in a statement.
The Vulcan set to fly Saturday was assembled in a new Amazon-funded hangar south of the pad that enables ULA to prepare two Vulcans at once. Amazon has said its second Vulcan mission could follow within weeks. Peller has said he eventually wants to see ULA launch Vulcan twice a month.
In another step toward serving Amazon’s long-term requirements, the mission makes use of what ULA calls a “second Vulcan Launch Platform,” which the company “dedicated and customized for Amazon Vulcan missions.”
“With a height of 179 feet, the platform includes more than four miles of pneumatic tubing, 24,000 feet of electrical cabling and 44 ordnance devices that fire to release the rocket at liftoff,” ULA said in a statement Thursday as its Vulcan rocket began a successful rollout to SLC-41.
To read this letter, click here:
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
You can also find Heather at:
YouTube
Bluesky
Instagram
Facebook
Threads
TikTok
Paresh Dave and Zoë Schiffer, reporting for Wired:
Some Nvidia employees are calling for Jensen Huang’s return even after his multiple reported extramarital affairs and abrupt resignation, according to internal correspondence reviewed by Wired.
An internal “suggestion box” post submitted before Huang’s resignation by a longtime engineer at Nvidia urged the company’s board to take employee sentiment into consideration prior to taking any action. The submission has attracted more than 1,600 comments since then, with several asking board members to find a way to bring back Huang.
“If you believe in the mission, bring back THE boss,” wrote one anonymous commenter.
Nvidia has over 42,000 employees (for now). The 1,600 who commented on this petition might just be the ones Huang was shtupping.
