Americana

1. “Abundance” wars heat up
2. GOP pushes trans care ban
3. Dems stump in South Carolina
4. Political AI fan-fiction
5. Tuberville’s big switch

Also: Sixty excruciating minutes with Anthony Weiner

You don’t hear much about the “big, beautiful door” anymore. During Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, when some Republicans were queasy about building a 1954-mile border wall, he liked to add a caveat. There would be a wall, but it would have a door — big, beautiful, and sometimes even “fat” — for the people “coming in legally.”

That never happened in Trump’s first term. Running again in 2024, after the Biden-era backlash to millions of new asylum-seekers, Trump never mentioned the “door.” The closest he came was an interview on the “All In” podcast, when co-host Jason Calacanis asked if Trump would “promise” to “import the best and brightest around the world” once he closed the border. Trump agreed. “You graduate from a college,” he said, “I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country.”

The campaign walked most of this promise back, limiting it to the “most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America.” But that didn’t happen, either. Right now, any aspiring foreign student who didn’t already have a visa can’t get one; the president, conducting an ad hoc war on Harvard, is spitballing potential caps for how many foreign students the private university should be allowed to take. Eventually.

In the elite media, tech, and business conversations, this is an obvious outrage, totally self-defeating, a threat to an American advantage that everybody took for granted. In Republican politics, it just makes sense: There is no issue that doesn’t cut their way if framed as a choice between American citizens and non-citizens.

They’re selling the “big, beautiful bill” around its impact on immigration: Half a billion dollars in new immigration law enforcement, and cuts to Medicaid funding in states whose plans cover non-citizens. They’re delighted to see Democrats defending Rep. LaMonica McIver after she was charged for allegedly assaulting ICE officers. Most of the DOGE cuts that the administration will ask Congress to approve next month were to foreign aid, another fight Republicans love having.

To mass confusion from Democrats, Republicans are offering both zero-sum scarcity and endless abundance. In that story, Chuck Schumer’s party wants to keep you poor. Every dollar, job, or university spot that doesn’t go to a non-citizen can go to an American — and Democrats don’t like that. Cryptocurrencies will create endless wealth for Americans with zero downsides or risk — and Democrats don’t like that, either. This is all more popular than the wall-with-a-door compromise Trump used to run on. Democrats, unsure how to counter this, are waiting for it to stop being so politically effective.

Democrats fight about polls and language

Centrist Democrats will gather in DC next week for their second “WelcomeFest,” where pollsters, moderate members of Congress, and a co-author of Abundance will discuss how to “regain voters’ trust” before an audience of around 600 progressives. Unlike last year, when progressives largely ignored the group, they are taking heat from the party’s left. And they welcome their hatred.

“Progressives have done a good job building an esprit de corps, a sense of community, and a sense of superiority,” said WelcomePAC co-founder Liam Kerr. “They’re trying to enforce middle school cliques, and we’re trying to be grown-ups.”

The success of Abundance, and the authors’ multiple invitations to speak to Democrats, has irritated progressives who see the project as a way to undermine them and move the party to the right. A quick read about the need for progressives to de-regulate and make it easier to build homes is seen, in these circles, as a railgun aimed at the left.

Earlier this week, the left-leaning group Demand Progress released polling that tested a “populist” message that identified “big corporations” as the “big problem,” against an “abundance” message that identified “bottlenecks that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy production, or build new roads and bridges.” Among Democrats, 72% said they’d be more likely to support a candidate with the first message, versus 33% who were excited by the second.

“What these voters want is clear: a populist agenda that takes on corporate power and corruption,” said Emily Peterson-Cassin, Demand Progress’s corporate power director, in the poll release.

But Kerr and other centrists didn’t see a simple choice between populist and abundance messaging; speakers like Wisconsin congressional candidate Rebecca Cooke and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez were expected to talk about corporate power, too. “The beautiful thing about that poll and that attitude is that progressives enforcing false binary choices on the party is deeply unpopular,” said Kerr. 

GOP tax bill targets trans healthcare

A last-minute change to the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act would ban Medicaid funding for “gender transition procedures,” after an amendment expanded language affecting minors to include adults.

That was a coup for social conservative groups like the American Principles Project, which urged House Republicans to make the change, sharing a poll that found 66% support for it. But it has not been a major focus of Democratic opposition during the recess, as they made a broader case against changes like work requirements that would remove people from state-run Medicaid coverage entirely.

“Government should never insert itself between patients and providers. Insurers, whether public or private, should cover all medically necessary care, including for transgender Americans,” Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Del., the first transgender member of Congress, said in a statement to Semafor. “Just as I have done my entire life, I will continue to fight against discriminatory bans on coverage of gender affirming care, which every major medical association calls medically necessary.”

There’s no official estimate of transgender Americans who use Medicaid; studies from UCLA have pegged the number at a little more than 200,000. Coverage for gender medicine, including hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery, was first implemented under the Obama administration, and Trump ran in 2020 on rolling it back. And the new provisions worried even some Democrats who had been advocating for their party to find a compromise on some trans rights issues. Jonathan Cowan, president of the centrist Third Way think tank, argued for those compromises this week, but told Semafor that the coverage ban was simply cruel.

“What’s next — a federal health care registry in which you have to get the Trump Administration’s approval for any and all of your family’s medical treatments?” Cowan said. “It’s not thoughtful or nuanced but extreme and Democrats should be criticizing Republicans for trying to take away parental choice and for denying basic health care rights to trans adults.”

Democrats head to South Carolina

The long road to the next presidential primary goes through South Carolina this weekend, where Democrats will hear speeches from Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Both will speak at the party’s convention in Columbia, and at the annual fish fry held by Rep. James Clyburn.

“People should get very used to me going all over the country bringing business back to Maryland,” Moore told reporters this week, insisting that he was not running for president in 2028.

Dozens of Democrats are considering a 2028 campaign, and they fit into two camps. There are the higher-profile electeds, like Moore, who are frequently asked about it and say no. (This is possibly the least binding promise in politics.) And there are Democrats like Rahm Emanuel, who’ve talked openly about running in order to climb into the conversation.

Emanuel is already booked to speak to Des Moines-area Democrats in Iowa this fall, though it will be more than a year until the party confirms its primary calendar. On Joe Biden’s orders, the DNC moved South Carolina to the front of the 2024 calendar. That helped scare off challengers, but was sold as a tribute to diversity and the party’s most loyal black voters.

Democrats looking at the White House are acting like that may change. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker keynoted a New Hampshire Democratic Party dinner last month; Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) will speak at a Flag Day event in the state next month. And this month’s VoteVets town hall with Pete Buttigieg, in Cedar Rapids, was the biggest event any Democrat had held in Iowa since the 2020 caucuses.

Political AI fan-fiction takes off

Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, kept herself busy on Tuesday. She confronted Elon Musk in a closed-door meeting, got Supreme Court justices John Roberts and Clarence Thomas arrested, ended the career of Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and humiliated Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert.

Crockett’s busy — and fictional — day unfolded on “Mr. Noah’s Stories,” a YouTube channel that inserts the names of public figures into lengthy fanfiction videos. It’s one of many accounts, across social media sites, that serves the appetite for dramatic, partisan stories by making them up.

With little fanfare — maybe “with jaw clenched,” as these overwritten stories often put it — Crockett’s gotten a few of the fakes taken down, and ignored the rest.

“Clearly the algorithm loves my name, so people do stuff with my name,” Crockett told Semafor. “I’ve just told people at this point, if it’s an AI-generated voice, it’s probably a lie.”

College coach floated for Senate

Auburn men’s basketball coach Bruce Pearl is being floated as a replacement for Senator Tommy Tuberville, who entered the Alabama governor’s race on Tuesday, Semafor’s Shelby Talcott and Burgess Everett scooped.

Pearl chairs the US Israel Education Association, and stopped by Capitol Hill just last week. Pearl’s X feed is a collage of his players’ highlight reels, and clips of Israeli diplomats slapping down criticism at the UN, punctuated by his own frequent calls for the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program.

“Hamas … Release the hostages,” Pearl posted on March 27, hours before his number-one ranked Tigers were set to face Michigan in the Sweet 16. “Now!”

Others are skeptical, given Pearl’s success on the court: “The compensation is a little bit different,” Tuberville told Semafor on Tuesday (Pearl’s set to earn $6 million next year, in addition to potential bonuses). “I wouldn’t let him do it because he did such a good job” at Auburn, Tuberville said, where Pearl was honored earlier this year as the Associated Press co-coach of the year, having led his team to the Final Four.

Adam Friedland represents a new kind of comedian: He rose up through podcasting and now hosts a late night-style weekly interview show on YouTube. This week, Ben and Max bring him on to ask him why he’s reviving a 1960s Dick Cavett-style talk show for the Internet, if podcasts have become too dumb, and whether he’s the long anticipated Joe Rogan of the left. They also talk about why he thinks phones are making people weirder, how Trump legitimized podcasting, and his fateful run-in with Swifties.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Polls

Since Eric Adams quit the New York Democratic primary, and Andrew Cuomo entered it, the former governor has led every poll and won every modeled ranked-choice vote. This is the first time any other candidate — Mamdani — has kept the final Cuomo win margin under double digits. The socialist state legislator wins white voters, and he consolidates the progressive vote as candidates are eliminated, winning over Lander’s supporters by a 2-1 margin. The non-Cuomo candidates have gained ground since putting up TV ads; there is no evidence, right now, of Cuomo being helped by reporting that the Trump DOJ is investigating him. One factor to watch is who keeps running after the primary, and who rules that out. Cuomo has set up a party line that he could run on, if he loses the Democratic nomination; the Working Families Party, a constant thorn in Cuomo’s side, could give its line to Mamdani.

The one-time GOP Senate whip is the most endangered incumbent in his conference, polling well below 50% in a state that requires a runoff if no candidate gets a majority in the primary. Among likely Republican voters, his net favorable rating is 22 points — that’s less than half of Paxton’s, whose campaign is built around his own support for Trump and Cornyn’s belief that Trump couldn’t win in 2024. One in four Republicans say they could never vote for Cornyn, and just one in six say that of Paxton, who was impeached in 2023 and beat a long-running felony charge the next year. Hunt, who holds a safe seat near Houston, is considering a run, and a nonprofit and a pro-Hunt PAC have already run ads to build his name recognition. The theory: Cornyn’s vulnerable, but Paxton would be a weaker general election nominee, and this poll shows the attorney general only narrowly leading any Democratic nominee.

Fourteen years ago, for the first time, a majority of Americans told Gallup that they supported legalizing same-sex marriage. In 2022, support peaked at 71%. It has been falling since then, driven by Republicans, whose acceptance of same-sex marriage has dropped to its lowest level in nine years; their acceptance of “gay or lesbian relations,” is even lower, at 38%. This change isn’t due to Donald Trump, who supported legal same-sex marriage in all of his campaigns, and appointed a married gay man as his Treasury secretary. Some down-ballot Republicans do still oppose it, and in Virginia, Democrats are already using Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears’ opposition to it against her.

Ads

• Buddy Carter for Senate, “Offended.” Other Republicans are still considering a challenge to Sen. Jon Ossoff, but Carter, the congressman for Savannah, has grabbed early attention with a focus on trans politics. Ossoff’s vote against a “protect women’s sports” bill, a focus of Carter’s launch ad, gets 30 seconds to itself here, as an actor playing a “trans woman” worries about Carter’s MAGA cred, caresses trophies won “competing in women’s sports,” and marches to her Honda Fit with an Ossoff sticker. Ads on this theme are in vogue after their success last year, but Republicans don’t have the material that made 2024’s gender ads most effective: Sound of the candidate himself, talking about the topic.
• America Works USA, “Steady Leadership.” The Democratic Governors Association runs this spinoff group, funded by labor unions, spreading the word about incumbents’ accomplishments before they go back on the ballot. The quick pitch for Maryland’s Wes Moore, set in a Baltimore microbrewery, is that his budgets “made some smart cuts” and included “middle-class tax cuts.” There’s no mention of any of Moore’s progressive accomplishments; this is messaging that would work in a swing state, or a race against ex-Gov. Larry Hogan if he is enticed to run again next year. (Republicans would like to damage Moore’s image in case he runs for president, but have no strong 2026 contenders after Hogan.)
• One Giant Leap PAC, “Protect.” This super PAC, built to help Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) win next month’s gubernatorial primary in New Jersey, is on clean-up duty. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka went after Sherill for donations she’d previously gotten from SpaceX employees (which she gave to charity) and family stock trades (which she had halted after negative attention). On The Breakfast Club, asked about the ad, Sherrill got tongue-tied and gave a halting defense. This ad doesn’t really deal with the content of the attack, either, saying only that “independent news sources” have praised her integrity, and that her opponents are lying “for political gain.”

Scooped!

I keep muttering that we’re heading into our first post-literate election, one where anything not communicated in a short video will be missed by every winnable voter. Counter-point: Maybe we’re not. Lauren Egan’s read on “the Substack election,” in the Bulwark, catalogues the Democrats who’ve started free newsletters on the service, ending the brief period when progressives wanted to punish the company unless it got rid of racist pages. “The platform seems ripe not just for personal essays and reflections,” writes Egan, “but for 2028 primary candidates to post their policy platforms and engage in nerdy debates in the comments section.” It could be so much worse.

Next

• 11 days until primaries in New Jersey
• 18 days until primaries in Virginia
• 25 days until primaries in New York City
• 158 days until off-year elections
• 521 days until the 2026 midterm elections

David Recommends

The Adam Friedland Show returned this week with an Anthony Weiner interview, sixty minutes of crosstalk, contempt, and one-upping. “You’re like the Lee Harvey Oswald of stories,” Weiner snaps after one of Friedland’s many interruptions. He yawns when the host tries to make a serious point about how his genitals changed “western civilization,” and mocks his “translucent” knowledge of politics. When Friedland gets a laugh out of him, there is an aura of shame, familiar to anyone who watched one of his apologetic press conferences; when Weiner lands a line he wants credit for it. “I would have been a better mayor than de Blasio,” he insists, after Friedland gets him talking about life on a sex offender registry.

Between 2011 to 2016, the 10 million-plus Americans watching CBS Thursday nights were given a tutorial on the emerging field of artificial intelligence, courtesy of Jonathan Nolan’s Person of Interest, Semafor’s Ben Smith and Reed Albergotti reported.

“For a very long time, AI has felt like the story of our time,” Nolan said; even a decade ago, “the pieces of it were right there if you cared to look at them.” He started thinking about the subject when he began writing Interstellar in 2006, speaking to luminaries like Elon Musk and DeepMind co-founders Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman for source material. With Westworld, Nolan is influencing the next generation of AI research.