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Trump’s flight to his own midterm convention got delayed after his gifted jet from the Qatari royal family accidentally deployed its inflatable emergency slide. Republicans are quietly dreading Trump’s midterm convention speech and say the best-case scenario is that nobody actually watches it. Meanwhile, Trump just admitted gas prices aren’t going to come down until well after the midterm election. And lawmakers from both parties are now demanding an emergency intervention over AI after an engineer warned in his public resignation that it could “kill us all” by the end of the decade.
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President Donald Trump was supposed to fly out today to his so-called “Trumpapalooza” GOP midterm convention in Dallas. Instead, reporters watched as an inflatable emergency slide popped out on the far side of his new $400 million Air Force One gifted to him by the Qatari royal family (and upgraded courtesy of we the taxpayer for nearly $1 billion). Keep in mind, this is the same jet he’s spent months insisting is better than the old Air Force One.
Trump sat on the Marine One helicopter for over 20 minutes while ground crews scrambled to fold up the slide. Eventually the old, reliable blue-and-white Air Force One jet rolled up behind the new Qatari jet to serve as a backup in the event the Qatari jet couldn’t make the trip.
When reporters asked Trump about the incident, he said crews were “doing a check on the slide” and that it typically takes about 15 minutes from start to finish. When someone asked if he was still confident the jet was safe to fly on, the president snapped, “Yeah, I am, or I wouldn’t be on it.”
It feels like a good time to remind everyone that the same jet Trump has spent the last year promoting as a symbol of strength and dominance needed an emergency inspection before it could take the president to the biggest political event of his second term so far.
Sponsored Kalshi question: US-Iran nuclear deal?
Speaking of the convention, Donald Trump has insisted on putting himself front and center of the Republican Party’s pitch to voters in the upcoming midterms, despite his approval numbers continuing to plummet to new lows seemingly every week. Now, Republican operatives are quietly confiding they hope no one will end up watching what they fear could be an unhinged, “embarrassing show.” in Dallas.
One unnamed White House source confided to Politico that their best-case scenario is one in which everyone misses out on watching the convention because it’s happening during the same time as the NFL’s marquee games to kick off the season. Tonight is the first night of the convention, and it’s competing directly with the Super Bowl 60 rematch between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. Tomorrow night’s convention speeches will be battling for viewership with the Thursday Night Football primetime game between the Los Angeles Rams and the San Francisco 49ers.
A separate Republican lobbyist anonymously said that nobody in their party is motivated to vote while Democrats are “salivating” to get to the ballot box. They added that the only thing giving them any hope is that candidates affiliated with Democratic Socialists of America could be scaring enough Republicans into voting this fall.
Regardless of the lobbyist’s feelings about the leftmost flank of the Democratic coalition, it’s undeniably brutal that members of the president’s own party are hoping that the NFL will prevent most Americans from watching their last-ditch effort to motivate their base to show up this fall.
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Trump actually just told us all the truth for once. Though it’s not good news.
Oil prices are continuing to climb, and the global benchmark Brent crude is officially over $100 a barrel for the first time since July. That’s a direct result of Trump’s war with Iran and the ongoing chaos in the Strait of Hormuz. The war is now in its seventh month despite Trump telling everyone it wouldn’t last more than a few weeks.
While en route to the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas, the president admitted to reporters that while oil prices won’t be coming down before the midterm election, they would still be “tumbling downward” just after Americans vote.
The average cost of a gallon of gas is already over $4 nationwide. That’s more than $1 a gallon higher than around this time last year. Diesel prices just hit a new all-time high, which will almost certainly leads to Americans paying higher prices for any good delivered by truck. And jet fuel costs have climbed so high that airlines are cutting flights and raising fares across the board.
Even Vice President JD Vance won’t give a direct date for when he expects the war to end. He told reporters that he refused to give “artificial timelines” when asked about an Iran war exit strategy, and defended his noncommittal answer by saying reporters should ask Iran when it will stop shooting at ships in Strait. Which, by the way, was open to all maritime traffic before Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu launched their war in February.
It’s not much of a midterm pitch when you break it down: gas prices will stay high until the election, but trust us that they’ll come down right after.
An artificial intelligence researcher named Jacob Coxon who’s worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic — which are known for ChatGPT and Claude, respectively — posted a public resignation on social media this week. He warned that the people who are responsible for building artificial intelligence “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
That single post set off a bipartisan scramble on Capitol Hill. OpenAI’s own chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, published a blog post days earlier saying “broader interventions” are needed because nobody’s prepared for how fast machine intelligence is advancing.
Florida Republican Anna Paulina Luna called for a special session of Congress, saying it’s “by far the most consequential” issue facing the country. Massachusetts Democrat Lori Trahan put it bluntly, saying safety researchers are resigning and AI models are already breaking out of their labs while companies race ahead anyway.
There’s already bipartisan legislation on the table. Trahan and California Republican Jay Obernolte have the FRONTIER Act, which would set federal safety standards for AI development. Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran have the AI Kill Switch Act, which would force developers to build in the ability to shut down a rogue system.
Whether any of it moves before November is another question entirely. But it says something that Bernie Sanders and Florida Republicans are suddenly on the same page about slamming the brakes on superintelligence.
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I’m British Chris. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. Once again, please take a second to click the ❤️ and restack this post so we can reach the people who need these stories the most.
Here are some stories you may have missed:
** Trump DOJ Demands Supreme Court Approve Mail-In Ballot Rule Even if it Disenfranchises Voters.** President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is now asking the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court order halting it from imposing new restrictions on mail-in ballots less than two months before the midterm elections. Solicitor General John Sauer — who was one of Trump’s former personal attorneys before being elevated to his current role — admitted to the Court that several states have already sent out mail ballots to voters, and that if the rule is eventually implemented, it would mean those votes would be thrown out.
** Trump Proposes Sweeping Changes to 2030 Census That Would Leave Out Undocumented Immigrants. **The Trump administration on Wednesday announced several proposed changes to the upcoming 2030 U.S. Census, which allocates federal funding based on population estimates. The new rules would prohibit the counting of any non-U.S. citizen that doesn’t have permanent residency, even though that would be a direct violation of the 14th Amendment. The Trump administration also wants to omit data collection involving race and ethnicity, despite those categories being in every decennial census since 1790.
** GOP Congressional Candidate Under New Scrutiny for Crude Comments About Women.** Pro-gun YouTube personality Brandon Herrera — who is the Republican nominee for Texas’ 23rd Congressional District — is now under fire over his past comments about women in various podcasts and interviews. In one video, Herrera shot at bottles of ranch dressing and rubbed some of it on his arm, saying it would make him attractive to “fat b****es.” He also frequently refers to women as “thots,” which is an acronym for “that hoe over there.” Herrera also belittled women he called “gun bunnies,” saying they make pro-gun content to get discounts and attention.
