District Club: Trump & AI Leaders Sign Accord, Hegseth Makes Sweeping Changes, and Key Issues Weigh on Midterms

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Just a little more than a month to go until the midterms, and the political landscape is only becoming more volatile under added pressure from policy shifts at home and a war abroad.

The war in Iran enters its eighth month with no end in sight, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio sends Iranian negotiators packing after they rejected US terms for a deal.

President Trump hints there may be more bombing after election day, but how will growing fatigue over the war weigh on Republican voters at the ballot box? And major changes at the Department of War, as Secretary Pete Hegseth announces sweeping reductions in the number of senior officers and plans for the future of war fighting. We'll look at how Hegseth's speech is playing with the public. Plus, the Supreme Court's new term begins Monday. The High Court has agreed to review Trump's ICE detention policy as Democrats once again put ICE in the hot seat. In just a few weeks, voters get to weigh in on all that and more. They've got a lot to decide, and we've got a lot to discuss. This is The District Club.

Ben Domenech (2:25)

Welcome to The District Club. I'm Ben Domenech, happy to be joined, as always, by my colleagues, Tim Rice, DC. Bureau Chief, White House Correspondent, Mary Margaret Olihan, and happy to welcome back to The District Club, Ameshia Cross, an Obama, former Obama advisor and Democratic strategist. Great to have you back, Ameshia. There's a lot to talk about today. I think that we can get into all of the different things that have happened on the foreign policy front, on the Department of War front. But to me, it seems like the biggest story that was dominating things here in Washington was really built around this attempt by the administration to reestablish a more comfortable attitude toward AI.

They brought in all of the different key figures into the White House for this luncheon that got a ton of attention. They signed on to this morally binding agreement, which is to say not so much. Everyone was there except for Apple.

And the president issued an executive order rebranding everything for official purposes as super intelligence instead of artificial intelligence. Given that AI emerged as a major issue in this election that I think nobody really saw coming a year ago as something that would be a major factor, do you think that any of the things that this administration did this week on the AI front will assuage the concerns that voters have had, that we've heard in a lot of different fights and in the context of data centers and in the context of all these other things that have really created some problems for Republicans?

Ameshia Cross (3:49)

No, I think that we saw the president try to do a good faith effort. However, there has been nothing that has come out of it. Nobody really knows that the argument from the American public was guardrails. They wanted guardrails for safety. They wanted guardrails when it came to some of the price gouging we're seeing at places like Walmart and other places, where AI is deciding by zip code how much it can charge people, what extra pricing that they can add to make you buy more things. They are determining the children's ages within your household. There are a lot of things that are going on even outside of the data centers, outside of corporations saying that they are not hiring because of AI. We've seen the slashes and the issues that people have with actually getting employed at this point in time. But none of that has been alleviated by the conversations held at the White House. It seemed like a party for AI.