At a press conference today, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that Friday's nationwide ground stop ordered by the FAA was related to work replacing outdated copper wire with a fiber optic line at a "remote FAA facility." The secretary said that this was "routine maintenance," rather than the result of a major modernization effort. He told reporters that it was "such an old wire that it was being discontinued, meaning that line was going to get shut down," necessitating the upgrade.

What wasn't clear, according to Secretary Duffy, was the root cause of the problem. He said that it could have been faulty hardware, a misconfigured rout …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Europe’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has called on Israel to protect civilians in Gaza as severe flooding batters the enclave, saying an airstrike on the Nasser Hospital on Thursday was “deeply alarming.”

“The severe flooding and winter conditions that have struck Gaza are further aggravating the living conditions of an already exhausted population, exacerbating unsafe conditions and human suffering,” Kallas said in a statement Saturday.

Kallas also called on Israel to comply with international law and allow the United Nations and humanitarian organizations unimpeded access and to reopen all border crossings into Gaza.

“After a year since the ceasefire was announced, military strikes continue and shortages of essential items, including suitable shelter, medicine and medical equipment, caused by the existing access restrictions persist, resulting in the absence of acceptable and dignified living conditions,” Kallas’ statement said. 

Israel denies breaching international law and blocking humanitarian aid. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended the amount of aid allowed into Gaza. He said Israel was supporting winter preparedness in Gaza but wouldn’t allow terror group Hamas to exploit humanitarian supplies. 

Israel’s Foreign Affairs Minister Gideon Sa’ar severed ties with Kallas in June after a media report alleged she compared Israel to apartheid South Africa. Kallas has long backed a push from several member countries to pressure the European Commission to ban trade with territories illegally occupied by Israel.

Israel’s mission to the EU was reached for comment.

Israel launched the war in Gaza in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack that killed about 1,200 people and in which 250 people were taken hostage. Since then, more than 70,000 people have been killed in the Palestinian enclave.

The U.S. has floated the idea of Ukraine joining NATO in exchange for withdrawing from its eastern Donbas region as part of negotiations to end the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Friday.

“The Americans raised a question: ‘What if Ukraine joins NATO? Would Ukraine withdraw from Donbas?’ This was the first time this had been raised,” Zelenskyy told reporters on Friday, a day after he met with U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Dublin. 

The Donbas region in Ukraine’s far east borders Russia, and Moscow declared it had annexed the region in 2022 after its full-scale invasion. The vast majority of the region is occupied by Russian troops.

Giving up Donbas has long been part of the proposals put forward by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, including the 28-part plan for a peace agreement proposed by the White House in 2025. Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously demanded that Ukraine abandon its efforts to join NATO and accept strict limits on the size of its military.

“I have said repeatedly: Ukraine is not retreating and is not giving up its land to terrorists,” Zelenskyy told reporters.

The White House and U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Zelenskyy said he was discussing a “comprehensive security package” with partners that would include specific guarantees from NATO and the EU, a strong Ukrainian army with adequate troops, weapons and financial support for a set period and a recovery plan with clear funding attached. 

“If the American side confirms precisely this to us, together with other NATO partners, then I will ask our Ukrainian society what it thinks: do we accept it or not? I have no right to make that decision on my own,” Zelenskyy said. “Of course, this would be without any recognition of the occupied territories as Russian,” he added.

“But we need specifics, and we don’t have them yet. All of this is still under discussion,” the president said.

Veronika Melkozerova contributed to this report.

Finland has rejected a reported Russian demand that it leave NATO as part of Ukraine peace talks, with Defense Minister Antti Häkkänen saying its membership in the alliance wasn’t up for negotiation. 

“Such matters are in no way a matter for negotiation. Russia knows that. This is absolutely outrageous to even suggest such a thing,” Häkkänen told reporters on Friday, according to Finnish broadcaster Yle. Finland, which shares a 1,340-kilometer border with Russia, joined NATO in 2023 in a foreign policy U-turn prompted by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

German newspaper Bild reported that a Russian proposal made during talks in Abu Dhabi this week included Moscow keeping occupied Ukrainian territories, gaining control of new swathes of land, demilitarizing ports in Ukraine, removing NATO bases from the Baltics, and Finland leaving NATO.

Russia proposed withdrawing its nuclear weapons from Belarus and refraining from stationing intermediate-range missiles there in exchange, Bild reported. 

But it remains unclear which proposals Russian President Vladimir Putin would support after discussions between intermediaries, according to the report. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a new security framework for Europe for after the war raised by the Americans “can be dangerous.”

“Russia certainly cannot make decisions on behalf of all the societies that are members of NATO,” he told reporters on Friday.

Zelenskyy’s comments were not in direct response to the demands reported by Bild, but came after a meeting between Zelenskyy and U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner on Thursday in Dublin. 

“Putin’s desire to change borders in Europe is a fact. I am sure this is part of his concept of revising security guarantees in Europe. This is dangerous because, in my view, it is precisely things like this that lead to wars or escalations,” Zelenskyy said.

On Wednesday, Mississippi’s Senate race was officially called for Democrat Scott Colom, who will become the first Black person to represent the state in the US Senate since Reconstruction, more than 140 years ago. Colom’s win is a stunning, historic upset — and for many Black Democrats, like Rep. Bennie Thompson, it’s been a long time coming.

Thompson, who also won his race last week, has represented Mississippi’s majority-Black Second Congressional District since 1993. Over the years, the 78-year-old lawmaker has frequently invoked the story of his father, who was never able to cast a vote because of racist Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation until the mid-1960s.

I sat down with Thompson for Today, Explained to talk about Colom’s run for Senate, how he won, what it means for Thompson personally. 

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Your dad was never able to cast a vote during his lifetime because of Jim Crow laws. And I wonder, growing up in Mississippi, what did you learn about who was allowed to participate in democracy?

You were a second-class citizen. That means you could go to school, but you couldn’t go to school with the white kids. Or the one swimming pool in town was for white kids, and the Black kids had to swim in the creeks or the ponds around the community. No lifeguard, no anything. My mama and daddy paid taxes, but they weren’t allowed to vote. My uncle fought in World War II; defended democracy all over the world, but when he came back home, he had to ride a segregated train behind the white German prisoners.

Jesus. 

So you had the white soldiers, the white German prisoners, and the Black soldiers. And that was the order of the day. It was something that we grew up with. 

When you were young, I wonder, did you associate the right to vote with the ability to change things? Like, if we get to cast a ballot, then we get to fix this mess? 

The best thing that I can say is I went to Tougaloo College [near Jackson, Mississippi]. And on that college campus, I met Martin Luther King Jr., I met Stokely Carmichael, I met Harry Belafonte, I met Sammy Davis Jr. — all of the major civil rights icons of the day. 

That was how we cut our teeth into civil rights and voting rights. The first campaign I worked on was Mrs. Hamer’s campaign for Congress. 

Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights icon. 

And I now represent that district. 

But I remember telling my mother that, oh, I had gone to Ruleville, Mississippi, to help register Black people to vote for Congress. And my mama said, “Well, I don’t know why you way up there.” Said, “Black people don’t vote here in Bolton.” And so it hit me. And Lord have mercy. In my own hometown, you know, I was in the same situation. And we did voter registration. We did all kind of things. 

“For me, having gone through those life experiences and now to see a Scott come along, you know, it not only brings tears to your eye, but it also says that there’s hope.”

We brought Head Start to the community, and started understanding that real freedom comes with political freedom. And so we started holding meetings about what we wanted to do. We decided to run three people for the board and the three African Americans won.

But it really wasn’t a good four years on that term because the current mayor didn’t want any progress. So we ran an all-Black slate: mayor, clerk, alderman. We won every position. 

We’re talking about 50 years ago, and all these challenges that you faced, all these challenges to being able to vote, being able to assume office, being able to function as a mayor in a town that is so segregated. Fifty years later, Scott Colom is winning in Mississippi. 

I want to ask you to reflect on when you became aware of his candidacy and what you thought about the potential there.

One of the challenges that I’ve had to deal with is that every time I run for public office, I’ve always been the first. But I wanted to create some kind of vehicle to get other people engaged. So we formed the Mississippi Black Leadership Institute. Well, Scott Colom was in the first class. And he really said, “I want to run for something. I don’t know what it is.” He said, “But there’s a district attorney’s position that’s available. It’s three counties.” 

We helped Scott put his campaign together. We hooked him up with various people, and he beat a 28-year incumbent as district attorney. 

Why do you think he won? 

Well, because he had the fire in the belly. And he never met a stranger. And so we prepared him, and he’s one of our star pupils of that class. And look, uh, when the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee would not support him, they—

They would not support him.

They would not support him. But this was my — Bennie Thompson’s position is that Northeasterners were still looking down on Southerners.

Well, did you call them up and scream at Chuck Schumer or somebody and say, “Guys, I am telling you, we got one here who can win?”

Look, we did everything that the system says you should do. We gave the demographics. That district [Colom] represented was not a majority-African American district. He beat that sitting district attorney in a majority-white district because he had a plan and he had a message. We had a rich message, but a poor campaign. Because we couldn’t get our DSCC to help. 

Have you called any of those people in national leadership and said, “I told you so?”

Oh yeah. All of a sudden, the week before the election, they’re going to say, “Well, we’re going to be able to do this, but we’re going to shoot the spot and we’ll send it to you.” So you really didn’t give us the money. You know what I’m saying? 

So that’s all right. We’re going to keep doing our low budget, social media-attractive thing. And so it took off.

You are 78 years old? Do I have that right? 

Yep. 

This has been most of your life. The fight for this has been most of your life. 

Yep. 

You sit here today, we sit here today. Where is your head at in all of this? Did you lock yourself in the bathroom and cry for 10 minutes?

No question. I’m happy for Scott personally. His trajectory is tremendous. But you know, it’s been a tough journey. We had a poll tax put on us that we had to pay money to be a registered voter. We had to interpret sections of the Constitution. In many instances when my mama registered — my mama had a college degree, she was a teacher — but the person who asked her to interpret the Constitution was an elementary school graduate. You see what I’m saying? 

I sure do. 

And so for me, having gone through those life experiences and now to see a Scott come along, you know, it not only brings tears to your eye, but it also says that there’s hope. There’s hope for young African Americans that at some point, the choice will be, do I stay or leave? It won’t be, “Well, when I get an education, I have to go somewhere else to seek a career.”

And so that’s the exciting part. I’m just really happy. And for a guy who’s been in it over 50 years and been called everything but a child of God, because I’m trying to elevate people who look like me to where I know if they have it, they’ll do a great job. So for Bennie Thompson, Scott’s victory is a dream come true.

Nach etlichen Stunden Verhandlungsmarathon im Haushaltsausschuss bleiben zentrale Konflikte um Stromsteuer und kalte Progression ungelöst. Während die SPD entspannt zuschaut, wächst der Frust über leere Versprechen zur Schuldenbremse und einen teils scheinbar abwesenden Kanzler. Gordon Repinski und Rasmus Buchsteiner analysieren, warum die Koalition im Klein-Klein feststeckt und Friedrich Merz unter Druck gerät.

Außerdem geht es um die Unions-Kandidatin für das Bundespräsidentenamt, Ilse Aigner. Die pragmatische Politikerin genießt auch bei politischen Gegnern hohes Ansehen und positioniert sich als verbindendes Element in Zeiten der Spaltung.
Repinski und Buchsteiner besprechen, wie Aigner einen strategischen Sieg errang und was ihr Aufstieg für die Machtbalance bedeutet. Die Parodie von Angela Ascher „Ihr habt die Ilse vergessen“ gibt es hier zu sehen.

Zudem geht es um eine mögliche politische Erschütterung: Ein vom BSW angestrengtes, anstehendes Urteil aus Karlsruhe zu einer Neuauszählung der Bundestagswahl könnte Mehrheitsverhältnisse im Bundestag beeinflussen. Ein Ausblick auf entscheidende Tage.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.

POLITICO Deutschland – ein Angebot der Axel Springer Deutschland GmbH
Axel-Springer-Straße 65, 10888 Berlin
Tel: +49 (30) 2591 0
information@axelspringer.de
Sitz: Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg, HRB 196159 B
USt-IdNr: DE 214 852 390
Geschäftsführer: Christoph Eck-Schmidt, Carolin Hulshoff Pol, Mathias Sanchez Luna

**(Anzeige) Eine Nachricht von YouTube: Verlässliche Finanzierung für Qualitätsjournalismus: Damit unabhängige Berichterstattung im Netz wirtschaftlich tragen kann, braucht es faire Erlösmodelle. Laut einer Studie von Oxford Economics geben 76 % der Medienunternehmen mit YouTube-Kanal an, dass die Plattform eine wichtige Einnahmequelle für ihr Geschäft darstellt. Hier klicken für mehr Informationen zum wirtschaftlichen Beitrag von YouTube.**

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

Hi readers, happy Friday! Today, we’re saying farewell — for now — to “Democrats in array.” Not quite two weeks after winning the 2026 midterms by a historic margin, the party has a leadership fight on its hands. 

On Thursday evening, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, made it official: He’s challenging current Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer for the title of majority leader next year, promising a bolder and more aggressive agenda for the party. 

“It is about answering the call of the American people,” Van Hollen told MS NOW host Jen Psaki when he announced his candidacy on her show. “The call was really to reject the status quo and to reject business as usual. And to do that, I think we need new leadership.”

Newly elected Democrats Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI) and Peggy Flanagan (D-MN), each of whom defeated more leadership-aligned Democrats in their Senate primaries, are backing his bid. But Van Hollen will have an uphill climb to win the job, which is set to be decided in a closed-door vote early next month. Schumer, 75, has led Senate Democrats for nearly a decade, starting in 2017, and says he’s confident he will have the votes to be reelected in December.

Searching for “fighters”

The Senate is the only chamber currently dealing with an active leadership fight, but it’s not the only one with some leadership angst. In the House, current Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries is the overwhelming favorite to become the new speaker in January (he currently lacks any Democratic challengers). But not everyone is happy about it, as my colleague Astead Herndon reported on Thursday. 

The divide, he argues — both in the Schumer-Van Hollen showdown and frustrations with Jeffries — is not really about progressive versus moderate. Instead, he says, it’s about an energized, angry Democratic base looking for fighters to lead the party into what’s almost certain to be a combative final two years of the Trump administration, and a sense that neither Schumer nor Jeffries are ready to meet the moment. 

It’s not just a problem for this cycle, either: Democrats won so widely last week that they’re very likely to hang onto their majorities at least through the 2028 election, Eric Levitz points out. 

There’s nothing to say that Democrats will have the same leaders in two years (particularly Schumer, who’s up for reelection in 2028 but may either retire or face a serious primary challenge). 

But the intra-party debate that we’re watching play out right now is effectively a preview of the higher-stakes fight to come in 2028, when Democrats could also have control of the presidency — and their freest legislative hand since the 2008 election. 

As Eric writes, that will come with some real challenges, not least that Democrats currently appear to be facing an impossible trio of economic promises, one of which they’ll likely need to break. But it will also be a moment of opportunity — if the party’s leaders are ready for it.

One link for later

➨ Science fictional: Vox’s Unexplainable podcast spoke with best-selling author Emily St. John Mandel about her new book, Exit Party, how she uses science to inform her fiction, and why she’s so fascinated with the idea of “counter life,” for people and countries alike. Plus: How she finds hope in Exit Party’s dystopian universe(s). You can read an excerpt of her conversation with Unexplainable host Byrd Pinkerton here.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that table tennis, of all sports, is a fixation for many online gamblers? But unlike simple sports bets, Jack Meserve reports for Vox — things like “who will win the game?” — gambling companies have transformed table tennis into something approximating a slot machine.
• Today’s trivia: Which 19th-century infrastructure project was derided as “Clinton’s Big Ditch” during its construction? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you what type of nymphs live in trees, as opposed to water, caves, or clouds. That would be dryads, a type of spirit that in Greek myth were specifically affiliated with oak trees. 

Former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s sudden downfall is in a sense shocking, considering his wealth, global fame, and role leading what was until recently the world’s most valuable company.

But Huang’s immense influence in Washington — and particularly in President Donald Trump’s Washington — has long been intensely controversial among a surprisingly diverse cross-section of the political, business, and tech advocacy world. And his ouster not only drives a wedge through Trump’s second-term coalition, it could usher in a major change in how the US steers the AI revolution.

Huang — who resigned this week after allegations he’d had affairs with two Nvidia employees and one Chinese businesswoman who some US officials claim was spying on him for the Chinese government — has been crucial in helping shape the Trump administration’s AI policies. That’s perhaps no surprise, given that Nvidia’s advanced chips are crucial to the AI revolution.

His many critics, however, say Huang’s influence has been deeply harmful. Their main objection? They believe the Trump administration hasn’t been doing enough to stop China from getting or accessing advanced AI chips — in part because of Huang’s lobbying and sway with the president.

This coalition of Huang critics spans the political spectrum. It includes right-wing China hawks and the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, who want to win an AI race against China. It includes economic populists in both parties, who resent China’s economic sway. It even includes some leading members of the Trump administration itself — Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have reportedly pushed for tighter chip restrictions.

It also contains some even odder bedfellows. The coalition includes people who want to slow down the AI race, like the tech safety advocates who warn that advanced AI could cause human extinction. Yet it also includes two major US frontier AI companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, who hope to impede the growth of Chinese competitors by limiting their access to chips. 

All of these disparate groups come together around the core idea that the US urgently needs to do more to stop advanced chips from getting to China. Selling AI chips to China is like “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said.

Standing against them all — and often getting his way with Trump — has been Jensen Huang.

Beyond the obvious — Nvidia’s business is selling chips, and Huang wants to be able to sell more chips in more places — Huang is associated with a camp in the AI policy debate that some have dubbed with “let it rip.” Along with former White House AI czar David Sacks, Huang has scoffed at warnings that AI could cause human extinction, calling them “irresponsible” and “doomsday narratives.” He’s also dismissed some national security concerns, saying that being a “China hawk” was a “badge of shame” and said that the bigger risk to American influence over AI would be US companies losing market share around the world.

So Huang’s ouster and the claims of Chinese espionage around it have opened up an opportunity for a shakeup in US policy — and a rare chance for those China hawks to potentially investigate, undermine, and push out their rivals, while seizing the policy reins around chip exports. 

Trump administration officials who want tougher restrictions have their knives out for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a frequent ally of Huang’s. There’s a bipartisan push in Congress for new export controls legislation before the end of the year. Congressional Republican committee chairs are demanding Huang and Lutnick come in and testify in the coming weeks, before Democrats take over Congress.

Plus, there are the partisan incentives for Democrats to dig into the question of what Trump knew about all this (he was reportedly briefed on the spy concerns last fall). And there are political incentives for ambitious Republicans to find an issue on which they can distance themselves from an unpopular administration without antagonizing their conservative base. 

With so many different forces invested in the outcome, you can bet this topic will continue to dominate headlines for months to come — with unpredictable results for both the new Democratic Congress, the future of the GOP, and the AI boom.

The many critics of Jensen Huang’s influence on the Trump administration

In Washington itself, the most influential faction opposed to Huang is the bipartisan national security establishment, most of whom strongly believe in the necessity of competing with China for global influence. 

These “China hawks” were influential in the Biden administration and have historically been dominant in GOP administrations and on GOP-controlled congressional committees. And many of them have been flabbergasted at Trump’s policies toward China and Chips this term.

“I don’t think we should be using any American technology to uplift China’s capabilities in AI given how era-defining this technology will be in national security and in our economy,” Vivek Chilukuri of the Center for a New American Security, a center-left think tank, told me. “A company’s going to argue for this, that’s what companies do. But the interest of any one company should not be trumping the national security of the United States.

Moving further right, there’s a MAGA-aligned faction that is skeptical of foreign wars such as Trump’s conflict in Iran — but even some of them are still quite antagonistic to China.

Take, for instance, Trump’s onetime campaign manager and White House adviser Steve Bannon. He’s been furiously protesting Huang’s influence on the administration for more than a year — in September 2025, he argued that Huang should be arrested for being “an agent of influence of the Chinese Communist Party,” and argued we needed to “shut down” China’s “access to technology, chips, and training.”

Advocates and politicians focused on economic issues and reining in corporate power also have long criticized Nvidia. Oren Cass of the center-right group American Compass wrote an article titled “Break up Nvidia” last year, arguing that “its excessive concentration of power is exactly what antitrust law intends to combat.” 

Meanwhile, the left, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a longtime critic of Big Tech, has frequently suggested Huang was corruptly influencing the Trump administration. At a hearing in June, she mentioned that Huang or his company had donated to Trump’s inauguration and his White House ballroom project. “If it’s not plain old-fashioned bribery, it sure smells like it,” she said.

Many in the AI safety advocacy world have also long criticized — and feared — Nvidia. That’s in part because they hope slowing down sales of AI chips abroad could slow what they view as a dangerous race to superintelligence. Additionally, after AI safety fears hit the mainstream in September due to Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s resignation and viral warnings, Huang took an increasingly public role in dismissing such fears.

Other AI safety advocates cite the company as having a chilling effect on public debate. “For months now, I’ve heard about widespread fear among think tank researchers and policy experts who publish work against Nvidia’s interests,” AI safety researcher Steven Adler wrote last year. “If you speak with people in-the-know at AI companies, fear of retaliation from Nvidia is a major concern when staking out policy positions.”

Indeed, OpenAI and Anthropic are highly dependent on Nvidia for its chips, so open criticism of the company is not common. Yet those big two US AI labs have been at odds with Nvidia in urging the Trump administration to do more to crack down on Chinese access to advanced chips, and to more heavily scrutinize Chinese “open source” AI models.

But to Huang and others in his camp, the growth of Chinese AI is a feature, not a bug. Sacks, for instance, has repeatedly argued that “open weight” or “open source” models — which make their parameters publicly available, in contrast to the proprietary models of OpenAI and Anthropic — would help avert “an unsafe and dystopian future where advanced AI capabilities are centralized and controlled by only a few hands.” The leading open weight models are currently from Chinese companies.

Huang has also used a more straightforward argument: that what’s good for Nvidia is good for the United States of America.

“American technology has to win across the world at every single layer,” he said in May. “If we can export chips, we should.”

Now it will be left to Nvidia’s interim CEO, Colette Kress, to carry that message, instead of a rock-star founder with a global cult following that’s drawn comparisons to Steve Jobs at his peak at Apple. Her first task: taking stock of all the powerful actors across the political, advocacy, and business world rooting for her to fail. Perhaps DeepSeek could help make a list? 

Republicans weren’t the only big losers in last week’s midterms: Across the country, voters also backed restrictions on data centers and elected candidates promising tougher oversight of AI companies. Out of 41 local ballot initiatives limiting the data center buildout, 40 of them passed, according to the New York Times. 

The AI industry knows it was a tough cycle: Chris Lehane, the chief global affairs officer for OpenAI, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that “I could take my shirt off and show you my [metaphorical] bruises if you want.”

Now, OpenAI is figuring out how to move forward. Lehane talked with Sean from rural Texas, where he said he was on a “listening and learning” tour of communities around the site of a massive OpenAI data center. They discussed the lessons of the midterm election, why OpenAI would prefer that we call data centers “compute campuses,” and why Lehane thinks the 2028 presidential election will largely revolve around AI — just not in the same way that 2026 did.

“I just don’t think it’s going to be good enough for a candidate from either party to emerge from their primary by simply being the person who’s against things,” Lehane said. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You guys at OpenAI, in the wake of this shellacking, put out this big document saying that you’re going to be listening, you’re going to be learning, you’re going to be empowering local people and bringing jobs.

You’re also, in this document, rebranding data centers to “compute campuses,” which when I say it, I have trouble not laughing because it sounds like a bit of a joke to meet everyone’s concerns with a rebrand. Please tell us why you think this could work or why it’s a good idea.

We were very intentional in actually using that phrase. And we did it with the full knowledge that people would potentially be skeptical of it. But I do think there’s an intent behind provoking this conversation. 

Data centers have existed for 20-odd years and at some level they’re the proverbial empty box in a pasture. And they’re called data centers because that’s in fact what they were. When people talked about the cloud, this is actually where the cloud was housed, where you would load data if you were streaming a video, if you were ordering something from a delivery service. These AI facilities are really fundamentally different.

What is being generated at these facilities is something called compute. And compute is just the raw computing power that it takes to train AI systems and then run AI tools and products when you’re using them. 

Second of all, they’re different because [of] the amount of jobs that do get created directly. This is not half a dozen people in that empty box. These are real jobs, these are six-figure jobs. They are also huge opportunities for economic transformation if a community approaches it in a really strategic way and companies like ours do our part to work with those communities. We’re not just building in the communities, we’re building with the communities.

You’re out there in Texas because essentially, data centers and artificial intelligence have a PR problem. Seventy percent of the country, maybe more than that, says that they’re against data centers, or “compute campuses,” as you’re now calling them. 

Why do you think it is that data centers have such a public relations issue in this country right now?

There’s a variety of factors, but before even jumping into those, I do think it’s worth noting and worth emphasizing that we have roughly six of these projects up and running in the country. They’re in different stages of being built out and developed, but each and every one of them is moving forward. I do think that there is a right way to build these and perhaps a wrong way and we can get into that.

Do you think that you guys were doing it the wrong way before?

This goes to why I think we’ve actually been able to get approvals for each of the projects that we are doing. 

I think each of the individual projects themselves have been some version of a laboratory of democracy, where you actually learn from each project and apply those learnings to the next project. But I do think we got the fundamental insight right at the beginning, which is to actually go on the ground, listen, learn, hold yourself accountable and take the feedback and build your facility with the community.

I think that for a lot of communities, folks were coming in, they were building data centers, they were then transferring the electricity costs to the public, they were potentially impacting their water, they weren’t necessarily doing the type of community investments that you should do if you’re going to be building with a community. 

Where we’ve really tried to differ ourselves — and again, we’re not perfect, we’re learning every step of the way — but I do think that we have successfully applied the baseline as we’ve gone through this, which is, we make sure we’re paying for our own electricity, our own energy.

Point two is that we make sure we’re preserving water. We have something called closed water loops. I know this is getting a little bit technical, but think of these as sort of large radiators. You fill it up once and therefore you’re able to preserve the water.

One thing that seems clear from the election results is that there’s just not a lot of trust. Now there’s going to be a new Congress, and various components of said Congress are pledging to do more to regulate AI and tech. 

It wasn’t so long ago that the head of your company, Sam Altman, was calling for Congress to get more involved. Does that call still stand now that it’s a different Congress that might be more inclined to come down hard on AI?

When it comes to data centers, these are typically state or local issues. We envisioned that as state legislation that would actually make these requirements for folks who are building data centers to help give the public confidence that there’s going to be a real material benefit for them.

I think what you’re referring to was our call as OpenAI for there to be national-level mandatory safety requirements for the frontier labs who are building AI. We thought about that and called for it before the election. We think it’s more important than ever. 

Back in early September, I had a blog post out there that talked about this idea that the policy window was opening up to create a real opportunity to pass those mandatory safety requirements. And the reason I talked about the policy window being opened up is that you could clearly see where the politics were going, what was likely to happen with the election. 

You’re in Washington, DC. At some level, you have to be a romanticist to believe that you can actually get legislation passed. But what is happening is the politics are coming into alignment with the policy. I actually think both parties do recognize the importance of having mandatory national safety standards that would be good for the country. It would also put us in a position to be able to create international standards, which we also think is very important.

It’s funny, because we just had New York [state] assemblyman Alex Bores on the show. He was trying to be a congressperson, but a super PAC partly funded by OpenAI co-founders and some other Silicon Valley tech types spent a lot of money — millions — to defeat him. 

We asked him, if Democrats in Congress could do one thing to regulate AI, what would it be? And he said banning full recursive self-improvement, ban the practice of letting AIs build the next AIs without any human in the loop. Would OpenAI be open to that kind of regulation immediately?

The version that we have talked about is some version of broadly defined speed limits. I’ll use an analogy: As we were building out the automobile, ultimately we built out speed limits. Now, those speed limits changed over time, but the idea was to make sure that humans could actually have both hands on the wheel and be able to control the car and the car should not be able to go at a speed where a human would not be able to control it. 

Our north star in everything when it comes to AI is that people should be in control of this technology. The technology itself is accelerating, the capabilities are becoming stronger. And so I think there is a world here where we do need to build out a framework, potentially a regulatory framework, through legislation that effectively imposes some version of a speed limit.

If you think of speed limits being applied in the context of your question about recursive self-improvement, that’s a place where you could see the speed of the technology getting so strong that actually humans do lose control over it. 

I’m not sure it’s quite as binary as saying you do or do not do RSI. But I think spiritually, a similar concept, which is making sure that at the end of the day we have a lot of confidence that humans are actually in control of this, able to monitor it, able to make sure that it is not getting out of their control.

Before you worked with companies like OpenAI or Coinbase or Airbnb, you worked in government and you worked specifically in [the] Clinton White House.

I wonder, in the wake of this election — which people are calling the first big American AI election, and are saying that AI is going to be an even bigger issue for the presidential election in 2028 — what do you think companies like yours and all the other big-frontier AI companies need to be doing to flip the script in the United States, maybe around the world?

I think of 2026 as the trailer to 2028. AI was an issue. It wasn’t a top issue, but it was certainly an issue and an issue that was moving up the charts as we got closer and closer to the election. I think there is a decent chance, maybe even a strong chance, that AI is the issue in 2028. 

First and foremost, how do we make sure that people are actually in control of this technology? Who’s actually putting out an idea and a vision and approach to give people confidence that they’re going to actually be able to control this? 

I do think the 2026 election now sets up 2028, frankly for both parties, to have a conversation that I just don’t think we’ve had in this country for a long, long, long time. And that is, what does this social contract look like? Who actually has a big idea about how we’re going to make sure that the American dream actually exists in this country? And as part of that big idea, what is the role of AI going to be in that?

I just don’t think it’s going to be good enough for a candidate from either party to emerge from their primary by simply being the person who’s against things. I think they’re actually going to have to have some real ideas of what they are for. And at the core of that is, how are they going to address this anxiety that the American people have? And at the center of that anxiety is their ability to control their lives and make decisions about their lives.

They came to discuss AI, but EU leaders spent most of their time during a summit in Dublin on Friday grappling with questions about Ukraine — namely who should represent them in future peace talks.

Despite plenty of disagreement about whether it should be a single person (and if so, who) or a collection of them, they managed to strike a deal: Future talks would involve national security officials from Germany, France, the U.K., Italy and Poland — the so-called E5 powers — plus representatives from the European Commission and European Council. A classic European compromise.

“It is essential to have a team and to speak with one voice,” European Council President António Costa said after the summit, noting that Donald Trump had also tasked two envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with conducting negotiations.

Ireland, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency and hosted the informal gathering, had billed the meeting as a rare chance for a high-level discussion on how to develop artificial intelligence in accordance with European values.

But the question of how to secure peace in Ukraine — and who should negotiate on Europe’s behalf — quickly dominated discussions, as leaders sparred over the format of future peace negotiations and warned about the risks of a potential deal brokered between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Indeed, a meeting next week between the U.S. and Russian leaders has set Europe on edge, prompting warnings about a possible Yalta-type agreement in which superpowers would decide on European security questions over the heads of countries directly concerned, reminiscent of talks toward the end of World War II that divided Europe up between the four allied powers.

“That is why I want to make our message to the U.S. very clear: Please, no surprises!” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said regarding the Trump-Putin meeting, scheduled to take place during an APEC summit in Shenzhen, China, on Nov. 18-19. “Continue to play on Team Europe and on the same team as Ukraine. And let’s work together for genuine peace in Ukraine.”

The question of who should represent Europe in future discussions about Ukraine and the post-conflict security order was added to the summit’s agenda at the last minute, following a request from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

Earlier in the day, Merz had voiced preference for a narrower group made up of officials from Berlin, Paris and London, while Kaja Kallas, the EU’s chief diplomat, argued that she was best placed to lead discussions.

“I know that the Russians don’t want me, but do we have a say on who is representing Russia? No, we don’t,” said Kallas.

“We have a really strong team,” she went on. “I’m ready to do this work with foreign ministers.”

AI jockeys with Russia fears

It wasn’t all about Ukraine. Over a lunch of baked salmon fillets and crushed Ballymackenny potatoes, EU leaders grappled with the question of how to make AI more “sovereign” — that is, less dependent on U.S. and Chinese technology providers. 

“Our independence cannot be outsourced, it must be built here at home,” Macron wrote in a post on X in which he also announced that France and the Netherlands would host a meeting of “Tech Creators” on Dec. 2. 

Amid a global outage of Microsoft software (since resolved), Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch urged leaders to direct some €260 billion currently spent on foreign technology toward home-grown tech infrastructure, research and development. While the bloc has solid foundations on which to build AI solutions, Europe needs “speed, financing and a strong coordination between member states,” said Mensch.

But the AI discussion quickly ceded ground to existential questions about Ukraine, including how the bloc would finance Kyiv in coming months and whether Europe would get a seat at the table in upcoming rounds of Ukraine-Russia talks brokered by the U.S.

Just as leaders including Ukraine’s president were gathering in Dublin, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was open to Europeans joining the talks, reversing Moscow’s previous opposition. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov quickly followed up with qualifications, however, stating that Europeans must first demonstrate “genuine intention and readiness to contribute to the peace process” before being admitted — a condition that Kallas quickly dismissed as a “trap.”

“If we start to talk about what Russia is asking regarding the security architecture, we actually walk into the traps that Russia is setting us, which is that we divert attention away from that there is no ceasefire,” she told reporters in Dublin.

Other officials said that Russia’s preconditions for allowing Europe to join the talks would mean concessions to Moscow’s war demands, namely a withdrawal of NATO from European states bordering Russia, the lifting of sanctions and a ban on foreign troops in Ukraine.

Giorgio Leali, Pieter Haeck, Sebastian Starcevic, Caroline Hug and Shawn Pogatchnik contributed to this article from Dublin.

LONDON — Some European leaders wanted a superhero negotiator to take on Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, secure a fair peace deal for Ukraine, and safeguard the continent’s own security, as ceasefire talks gather pace. 

They were never going to find one. 

That had already become the view of diplomats and officials close to the discussions, granted anonymity to comment on the sensitive Ukraine peace process that’s dividing opinion in European capitals, even before the EU decided on Friday that it would have to be a team effort. 

The push to identify one representative to speak for Europe was understandable. The appeal of having a single, respected leader taking the reins is largely based on a desire to project European strength and unity — as well as an interest in making negotiations with Russia, the U.S. and Ukraine efficient and effective. 

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself said this week he wanted Europe to identify within days who will take its place in the talks, and suggested he’d prefer it was one person (he even indicated that he had a preference, though would not reveal a name).

He didn’t get his way. Instead, leaders at a summit in Dublin on Friday, decided that the “E5” made up four big EU countries ― Germany, France, Poland and Italy ― and the U.K., plus officials from the European Commission and Council, would take the work forward as a team.

Technical discussions

The search for a top representative to fill Europe’s seat at the negotiating table at the next round of peace talks had become a political obsession in Brussels that missed at least two big points. 

The first is that the leadership level is not currently where the negotiations are at. Talks this week in Abu Dhabi were technical discussions between senior officials. The big political players like Putin and Zelenskyy were not there, never mind Trump. Russia sent a Kremlin aide to lead its team and Ukraine tasked its intelligence chief with making its case. 

If these officials make progress toward a deal, leaders will no doubt want to get involved. Ultimately, it will be leaders who sign any peace agreements that follow — and there’s no limit on the number of EU presidents or prime ministers who could join such a meeting as signatories or guarantors of the final deal. 

The next thing that needs to happen, according to both Ukraine and the U.S. envoys mediating the talks, is for Europe to join the discussion with Russia — at this technical level. 

‘Not a superstate’ 

The second point some member states and Brussels insiders were missing is structural: There are just too many European stakeholders with equally important but very distinct interests and remits, making consolidation of all the different strands under one person impossible. 

The Commission can’t negotiate Europe’s future security architecture — that’s for NATO members and national capitals to decide. But equally NATO, Paris and Berlin cannot negotiate EU sanctions or Ukraine’s accession to the bloc — these are in the Commission’s remit. 

And the idea that the “E3” — Europe’s big economic and military beasts of Germany, France and the U.K. — would let either the Commission, the European Council or NATO do it all on their behalf is not realistic. 

As one EU diplomat put it: “The reason why Europe hasn’t found one person who can represent the whole of Europe is that Europe is not a superstate.” 

In the context of the Ukraine talks, European interests encompass many EU member states but also countries like the U.K., and Norway, as well as Turkey and Moldova, the diplomat said. “Who can promise troops on the ground on behalf of the rest of Europe? Who can offer billions in financing? It’s difficult.” 

The conclusion some officials involved in the Abu Dhabi process reached was that Europe would have to be represented by a team, much as it has been already, albeit at one step removed from the main negotiating room so far. Different members of that team will own different issues. 

What Putin wants

Then there’s the question of content: What will be discussed and what will Team Europe’s collective position be? 

“What we actually say is more important than the exact configuration of the people in the room,” Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on his way into Friday’s meeting of EU leaders.

The reason why American and Ukrainian officials want Europe’s participation is because they believe beginning a discussion about reshaping the continent’s security structures could unlock a more cooperative approach from Russia. 

Russia’s top negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said Europe’s security framework was the main topic discussed in Abu Dhabi this week: “The conflict in Ukraine showed that the entire security system operating after Yalta and Potsdam is working poorly, and an abscess broke through in Ukraine,” he said. 

Ukraine’s team noted that the hardline Russian approach softened a little when Moscow’s representatives saw the chance to talk about their wider demands on European security.

But Europe itself wasn’t part of that conversation.

Timing is still everything

The first thing to resolve will be on the sequencing of the negotiations — most significantly, when should Europeans allow themselves to discuss Russia’s demand to overhaul regional security? This is a critical and potentially existential question for European countries. And it is already a subject on which top EU officials are weighing their positions with care. 

Those close to the talks believe a clever way can be found to offer Russia a conversation about regional security as part of careful sequencing of the negotiations, without binding the issue completely into the final peace agreement for Ukraine. 

But different EU spokespeople are saying different things on this sequencing point, in what is either a clever strategy, or a sign of continuing disarray.

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top centrally contracted diplomat, said there must be no discussion of wider European security architecture — such as NATO configurations, troop deployments and working forums for consultations with Russia — until after the peace deal is finalized. 

But in Abu Dhabi, EU officials signaled their readiness to allow parallel tracks in the talks,  so Ukraine’s peace settlement and Europe’s future security structures could be discussed at the same time. 

Officials in national capitals also agree that the “sequencing” of the negotiations on this point is key. Behind the scenes different countries and factions have different views on what the right strategy should be, just as they struggle with the question of whether it’s right to engage directly with Putin at all. 

And of course the question of Europe’s role may yet be moot. The U.S. envoys said on Thursday night that Putin had consented to letting Europe join the talks, but the Kremlin called this into question on Friday. 

After the negotiations in Abu Dhabi concluded this week, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior envoy, acknowledged the twin problems he faces. “If Europe could identify one person to speak on their behalf, that would be a bigger achievement than getting the Russians to include them in the negotiation,” he said.

PARIS — Far-right leader Marine Le Pen said she would be prepared to hold talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Brussels, in the wake of her promises to stop French financial aid to Ukraine.

Speaking on the sidelines of a trade fair in Paris, Le Pen said a meeting in Brussels would be “justified” because “the topic of Ukraine financing is rattling Europe.”

“The German chancellor is starting to threaten people, it’s starting to be an issue in Europe and it would be interesting to discuss this,” she said in a reference to Friedrich Merz’s threats to cut EU funds for countries who refuse to support Ukraine financially.

Le Pen said she would offer to hold talks with Zelenskyy when she meets the Ukrainian ambassador in France on Monday.

The far-right leader is the front-runner ahead of next year’s presidential election and has repeatedly said France can no longer afford to keep financing Ukraine’s war effort. She has estimated that French aid amounts to €6 billion per year, a figure Zelenskyy has challenged. He said the military partnership with Paris is “a win-win” relationship.

Zelenskyy also invited Le Pen to Kyiv, telling French weekly l’Express that Le Pen would “change her mind” if she met Ukrainians.

Financial aid to Ukraine has become an issue in next year’s presidential election amid difficult budget negotiations. This month far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon also courted controversy when he said that a post-war referendum on the future of the Donbas should be held in the area, which is mostly under Russian occupation.

EU countries are set to announce a deal on Monday to send rejected migrants to a deportation hub in Rwanda, three people familiar with the scheme confirmed.

Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece and the Netherlands have been meeting regularly to lay the groundwork for a deal with to set up centers outside EU territory to which they can deport migrants without a legal right to stay in the EU. The deal is part of a broader push by the bloc to gain greater control over who enters the EU — and who gets to stay.

The anticipated deal, which is set to be announced in Vienna, would only apply to asylum seekers who have already run through all of their options for securing legal residence in the EU and were rejected.

The countries previously confirmed that they aim to close the first deals to set up the off-shore centers in 2026, with plans to make them operational as of next year.

The deportation hub in Rwanda would function as a pilot project and deals with other countries and involving other EU countries are likely to follow.

A recent reform of EU rules made it possible for EU members to cut deals to set up such deportation hubs with other countries on the condition that they meet international human rights standards.

Specifics of the scheme, including the nationalities of the people that would be moved to the hubs, their living conditions there and oversight of the deal, all depend on the agreement countries cut.

But human rights groups have warned that the hubs risk opening the door to human rights abuses, far removed from EU oversight or recourse.

Plans by the Conservative British government plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda were slapped down by the U.K. Supreme Court in 2023, which ruled the scheme unlawful. After coming into power in 2024, the Labour government shelved the plans, with then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer calling the Rwanda plan “dead and buried.”

The U.K. had aimed to move people to Rwanda to process their applications remotely, whereas the incoming deal of the EU countries would target people who have been ordered to leave the bloc’s territory.

Seb Starcevic contributed to this report.

One of the most eye-opening aspects of last week’s midterms was the new cohort of religious politicians it sent to Congress — many of them part of a wave of Democratic-leaning Christians.

Another striking feature was the dramatic shift among many religious voters.

For years, American politics has seemed stuck on a partisan track, with religious-identified voters shifting more firmly to the right, and the nonreligious tacking to the left. There are a few exceptions, of course — Jewish voters, Latino Catholics, and Black Protestants, who have stayed firmly Democratic — but the broader tide has flowed clearly one way.

The 2026 vote, for the first time in a while, makes that picture look less certain. Based on exit polls, county-level data, and some post-election analysis, we already have a handful of intriguing signs of change. The data is still early and patchy, but it appears that Catholic voters around the country moved left, evangelical Christians stayed home, and some Jewish voters dug in against the anti-Israel rhetoric and moved rightward. And in Utah, generational differences, particularly among Mormons, may be starting to change the political makeup of a rock-ribbed conservative state.

There are caveats: Wave elections, especially when they’re of the historic proportions of last week’s Democratic tsunami, can obscure and cloud these changes. When everyone moves in one direction, it can be hard to distinguish specific storylines. And with religion, as with any single voter attribute, it can be difficult to tease out just how much faith and religious identity influenced vote choice, as opposed to working in combination with race, class, and concerns about issues like affordability and immigration.

And better data is still to come; the gold standard of voter roll-validated studies, like the Pew Research Center’s, won’t be available until next year.

Yet that combination of factors also suggests a new possibility for our politics: that religious voters of all creeds can come to function as swing voters too, cracking up old alliances, like on the religious right, and offering the hint of new winning coalitions, as Catholics and mainline Protestant Christians seem to have done for the Democrats.

The largest shift: Catholic voters swung against the GOP

Catholics play a special role in American politics. They spent much of the last century operating as a solid Democratic bloc, reaching a peak in the 1960s when John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, won about 80 percent of their vote. Since then, they’ve gradually become more Republican, due to assimilation of former European Catholic immigrants, the rise of conservative activism over abortion and social issues, and the rise of the religious right.

In the last two decades, Catholics have tended to reflect the views of the median American voter, evenly split in the 2012, 2016, and 2020 presidential elections. But that changed in 2024. Across different polls and surveys, Catholics shifted decisively to the right: backing Trump 59-39 according to exit polls, and 55-43, according to the Pew Research Center.

Now, in a year in which Trump and Republicans frequently clashed with Pope Leo XIV and his bishops — over the Iran war, mass deportations, and immigration policy — Catholic voters again turned into a wild card.

This year, according to exit polls, they swung left, with the margin shifting by more than 20 points. Democrats narrowly won the Catholic vote this time, 50-49. As a subgroup, that put Catholics up there with Asian voters, Latinos, urban and suburban voters, Gen Z and millennials as being the top groups that swung to the left this year.

Other estimates from the religion and politics scholar Ryan Burge show particularly noticeable shifts among white Catholics, swinging about 9 points toward Democrats, even if a majority of them still voted for Republican congressional candidates. In Texas, his analysis showed that counties with higher shares of Latino Catholics were much more likely to support the winning Democratic Senate candidate, James Talarico.

The results were even more dramatic in the most Catholic House districts. Of the 12 districts with the highest share of Catholics, the average swing in the vote was about 15 points, and Democrats won eight of these seats, while gaining in all 12.

Catholics have tended to basically operate like the median voter — swinging in the same direction as the overall popular vote. That makes it harder to pinpoint any unique motivators that caused Catholics to move against the GOP: Trump’s fights with Catholic leaders, the lack of a mobilized anti-abortion movement this year, or the affordability concerns that moved all voters.

One notable exception here are Latino Catholics, who tend to be the most Democratic of the Catholic electorate, and most opposed to Trump’s immigration and deportation policies this cycle. It’s no coincidence that they’re concentrated in the Southwest, including those parts of Texas that swung toward Talarico and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa over both economic stress and anger over immigration enforcement.

Does this all suggest the rise of a new Catholic swing vote? Potentially — combined with the decline in abortion politics in the US, and a more active Vatican. For the first time, the Church has an American pope, one who isn’t afraid to get involved with current affairs and push harder on Catholic social teachings (which align more with the Democratic Party’s views of society and the economy). That could have meaningful repercussions heading into 2028.

Though still very blue, some Jewish voters broke with the Democrats

Jewish Americans, though they only make up about 2 percent of the American population, became a huge focus of political attention this year — in large part because of how central they are to Democratic coalitions (along with Black Americans, they are some of the most loyal Democratic voters), and because Israel became a flashpoint in American politics. 

As Democrats made a dramatic shift in the last two years in how they talk about Israel and AIPAC, with increasingly open criticism of the Israeli government’s actions, some Jewish Democrats and Republicans responded with charges of antisemitism — and some Republicans started leaning into overt Islamophobia, particularly in Michigan. In turn, Republicans made bold predictions that Democrats would see a large drop in support this year, especially in Michigan (with an anti-Israel Senate candidate) and New York, where they counted on Jewish voters to rally to the more pro-Israel party.

In the end, there was no mass exodus of Jewish voters — but the exit polls did report a slight shift toward the GOP this year: 68-31, compared to 78-22 in 2024. Other post-election surveys show similar dynamics. (The numbers can vary, in part because different pollsters use different metrics for measuring Jewish support and identity, and also because exit polls can be imprecise.) The Jewish Electorate Institute’s polling from the Mellman Group, for example, shows that while Democrats still held a large, 44-point advantage at the end of the day, (69 percent to the 25 percent that backed the GOP) that was smaller than the margin in 2024, and nearly 20 points smaller than their margin in 2018’s blue wave. That’s an anomaly, given the scale of the tsunami this year.

Even the most Democratic-friendly poll, from GBAO Strategies, had a kind of rightward signal, though a longer-horizon one: It showed nearly identical levels of Democratic support among Jewish voters this year as in 2024 — but both those figures, about 70 percent, are lower than Jewish Democratic support in 2022 (74 percent) and 2020 (77 percent), noted The Forward.

This shift away from Democrats looked especially dramatic in Michigan, where The Forward also noted last week that the winning Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed underperformed other Democratic candidates in precincts with large Jewish populations. In another piece of data, a Michigan exit poll from the NORC-Civic Health and Elections Project, there was a more dramatic result, albeit with a tiny sample size of about 100 people: Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers winning a majority of Jewish voters, 52-47, a much worse result than it found for House Democratic candidates, who won the demographic by more than 30 points. Though small, it adds to other evidence of Democratic underperformance with Jewish voters in the Senate contest.

In surveys about their views, Jewish voters are sending signals that should put both parties on notice. A quarter of Republican Jews in the Mellman Group’s poll reported being concerned their party is “too accepting of antisemitic rhetoric within the Party” while a third said it’s “becoming too much of a home for White nationalists and the far right.”

More than a third of Jewish Democrats, similarly, said they worry the party is becoming “too accepting of antisemitic rhetoric within the Party,” while a quarter think it’s “becoming too much of a home for socialists and the far left.” Given how much larger the Jewish Democratic base is than the Republican one, and how central it is to winning coalitions in battlegrounds, these concerns pose a bigger electoral risk for the Democrats, particularly if the anti-Israel left grows into an even larger and more vocal wing of the party.

Protestants, and evangelicals, showed weaker Republican support

When it comes to evangelical Christians, the data suggests there was a different change afoot in the electorate.

They are perhaps the most important, or at least influential, religious group in American politics, given their strong and stable support for the Republican Party for the last 50 years. That loyalty has delivered them tremendous influence within party politics, while Trump, in particular, seems to have had a unique ability to turn these voters out during presidential elections. And at least in this year’s elections, that level of support for the GOP did not drop: they backed Republicans 82-16, consistent with their support for Trump in 2024.

What they didn’t do in 2026 is show up.

Exit polls suggest they made up a smaller share of the electorate when compared to 2026. That suggests a combination of lower turnout and lower enthusiasm may have contributed to Republican losses — even if those who did vote remained firmly Republican.

Still, the national results obscure one other notable trend that Burge, the religion scholar, noted from the 10 congressional districts with the highest share of evangelical voters — notably concentrated in the South (Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Tennessee). Each of these districts swung left, by an average of 23 points — more than in Catholic or nonevangelical mainline Protestant districts. This suggests stronger turnout and enthusiasm from the non-evangelical portion of these local electorates, which skews more Democratic — and in turn a weaker ability by Republican candidates to turn out evangelical voters in the way that Trump seems like he uniquely can.

In sharp contrast to evangelicals, the oldest but least-healthy strain of American Christianity — the mainline Protestant denominations like Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists — seems to have delivered a more politically interesting result this year. Many of the House and Senate seats that flipped for the Democrats this year were won by mainline Protestants in Iowa, Kansas, and Texas. They represent what used to be the dominant Christian electorate — which this year demonstrated it could still be a decisive part of a winning Democratic majority.

Heavily mainline districts swung by an average of 15 points toward Democrats, and each of the top eight districts ended up flipping to the Democratic column. The exit polls showed a Democratic gain among Protestants and nonevangelical Christians in general — moving from backing Republicans 63-36 in 2024 to 60-39 this year, a 6-point swing on the margins that can explain these flips.

As these numbers suggest, this is a demographic that seems more ripe for moderate Democratic appeals in the future — though they have been neglected by the establishment left over the last few decades.

We have less data and reliable post-election polling so far on what happened with other parts of the electorate, like Muslim voters, Hindus, and Mormons. What data we do have suggests they all played a part in forming the tidal wave that carried Democrats to their stunning victory last week. But above it all, this year’s results suggest that religious voters can function as swing voters in the post-Trump future, play an influential role in forming winning coalitions, and are not solely the domain of the Republican Party.

Usually, we'd be offering to answer your questions about a news event, but honestly we don't really have any answers about what the hell is going on over at Nvidia. I can't speak for Nilay but at the rate Jensen Huang's new mistresses are dropping, I am concerned we are approaching an affair Singularity. If things don't decelerate soon, we may be looking at existential risk. Maybe the future of AI really does depend on Jensen's sex life, but not in the way I was thinking!

As much fun (?) as we are having with all the assorted ladies, it's important to stay focused on what's really important: Chips and China. President Donald Trump was repor …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Jean Guerrero, Stephen Miller’s biographer, sees him as “a case study in oligarchic capture”—and as a way for Donald Trump to double down.

BRUSSELS — Some 71% of Europeans want the EU to have its own army, according to new polling results seen by POLITICO that reveal growing unease about Washington’s reliability and deep divisions over Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The 2026 Trends report by security think tank GLOBSEC found that support for the European Union to have its own army was strong across the member countries surveyed, reaching 82% in Romania followed by Lithuania at 78% and France at 75%.

Even in countries traditionally wary of European defense integration, majorities backed the idea with some 70% of respondents in Poland and Bulgaria in support of an EU army, alongside 69% in Germany.

The findings come as European governments debate how to strengthen their military capabilities amid Russia’s continued aggression and growing uncertainty over the United States’ commitment to European security.

GLOBSEC surveyed respondents in 14 countries across the transatlantic space, including 11 EU member states, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The enthusiasm for European military capabilities did not appear to be a rebuke of NATO. Some 77% of respondents in the NATO countries surveyed said they would vote to remain members, while 78% of respondents in the EU countries surveyed supported developing the bloc’s own defense capabilities alongside the alliance.

There was also strong support for the most direct form of contribution to national defense: a draft. Among respondents in countries without compulsory military service, 64% favored its reintroduction, according to the report, with the highest numbers found in Czechia, France, Germany and Slovakia.

German exception

Attitudes toward Washington revealed a growing transatlantic divide. More than one-third of respondents across the European countries surveyed now consider the United States a security threat. Around half of respondents in Germany, France and Britain held that view, compared with roughly one-third in Central and Eastern Europe.

Germany was the only country surveyed where a majority regarded Washington as a security threat.

The country also stands apart for attitudes toward Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Some 40% of German respondents agreed with the claim that Ukraine’s treatment of Russian speakers justified the invasion, while 39% believed the West provoked the war.

Those views coincided with softer support for Kyiv. Just over half considered Ukraine’s fight important to German security, while nearly six in 10 would accept Ukrainian territorial concessions in exchange for peace.

The findings appear to highlight a political paradox — voters want a stronger European military, but remain committed to NATO even as confidence in its most powerful member erodes.

This story is also available in English.

Xavier Poussard n’est pas venu à Nashville les mains vides. Lorsqu’il débarque dans la capitale du Tennessee, le 20 janvier 2025, le journaliste a entre les mains ce qu’il décrira plus tard comme “une mine d’or” — le manuscrit de son livre, intitulé Becoming Brigitte, qui fait la promotion sur 340 pages de ce qui est en réalité une vaste théorie du complot : l’idée fausse selon laquelle Brigitte Macron, l’épouse du président de la République, serait née homme.

Poussard est ici pour en discuter avec Candace Owens. L’influenceuse américaine d’extrême droite, ancien soutien de Donald Trump reconvertie en podcasteuse, l’a contacté avec l’idée de faire de son travail un phénomène planétaire.

Owens ne découvre pas le sujet : elle en a déjà parlé sur sa chaîne YouTube, qui abrite l’un des podcasts les plus regardés au monde, et a été frappée par l’engouement de son public pour cette histoire, racontera Xavier Poussard dans un entretien à POLITICO. Elle est maintenant prête à passer à la vitesse supérieure. 

Le duo est aussi improbable que complémentaire. Poussard — alors guère à l’aise face aux caméras, avec un look d’intellectuel tempéré par d’épaisses lunettes à monture plastique — a couché sur le papier tous les détails de la théorie dans un style dense, donnant parfois le vertige. Owens, rompue à l’exercice médiatique et massivement suivie sur YouTube, a, quant à elle, la communauté et le savoir-faire nécessaires pour donner à l’histoire une dimension mondiale. C’est elle, relate Xavier Poussard, qui a suggéré de s’inspirer de Becoming, le best-seller de Michelle Obama, pour le titre et l’identité visuelle du projet.

A peine trois semaines après son arrivée, l’auteur français publie donc Becoming Brigitte (Devenir Brigitte, en français), un livre auto-édité “présenté” par Candace Owens. Au même moment, l’influenceuse diffuse une série de huit vidéos sur sa chaîne YouTube, qui dépassent aujourd’hui les 30 millions de vues. Interrogé par POLITICO, Xavier Poussard a refusé de dévoiler le nombre précis de ventes, précisant cependant que le livre s’est écoulé entre 50 000 et 100 000 exemplaires— un chiffre qu’il n’avait jusqu’ici jamais rendu public. 

L’histoire en question a pourtant un problème de taille : elle est mensongère. Brigitte Macron ainsi que son mari, le président de la République française, décident de porter l’affaire en justice. Dans une plainte de 250 pages déposée dans l’Etat du Delaware, ils accusent Candace Owens d’avoir propagé des récits “extravagants, diffamatoires et farfelus” doublés de “mensonges dévastateurs, portant sur des faits [facilement] vérifiables,à l’égard des Macron”. 

Les poursuites intentées en juillet 2025, très médiatisées, ont marqué une nouvelle étape dans la lutte que mène le couple présidentiel contre cette théorie du complot qui a vu le jour dans l’ombre en France, en 2018, avant de gagner une plus vaste audience outre-Atlantique via des relais médiatiques d’extrême droite.  

L’histoire de la plainte contre Owens et celle des procédures en France met au jour le cheminement d’une théorie conspirationniste à succès, des tréfonds de l’internet français à des chaînes YouTube à l’audience planétaire. Elle raconte aussi les limites du pouvoir à l’ère des réseaux sociaux, où même les personnes parmi les plus puissantes au monde peinent à endiguer la propagation d’une fake news, où l’audience devient profit et le marché de l’attention une manne pour les théories les plus extrêmes. 

La naissance d’une théorie du complot 

10 décembre 2021. Depuis son appartement à Angers, Amandine Roy, médium et influenceuse en herbe, présente à sa modeste communauté sur YouTube une invitée de choix. Nathalie Rey, 51 ans, a déjà passé trois ans à tenter de mettre au jour ce qu’elle pense être une vaste supercherie impliquant la première dame de France. 

Amandine Roy, de son vrai nom Delphine Jegousse, se présente comme une “médium, lanceuse d’alerte et journaliste”. Elle a les cheveux décolorés et porte de grandes créoles. Son activité est éclectique : des consultations de voyance — dont une formation en cinq séances baptisée “atelier du crâne de cristal” — et ce qu’elle qualifie d’“information authentique”. Depuis son studio improvisé, elle entame l’entretien pendant que Nathalie Rey, connectée à distance, semble peiner avec son iPhone. 

Nathalie Rey est impatiente de faire connaître ses recherches mais ne veut pas montrer son visage. Elle parle caméra éteinte, sous le pseudo de “Natacha”. Seule l’icône de sa photo de profil, où elle porte des lunettes de soleil et un grand chapeau noir, apparaît à l’écran. Sa thèse : “l’histoire officielle” de la vie de Brigitte Macron est un mensonge. Selon elle, la première dame n’est autre que son frère, Jean-Michel Trogneux, qui aurait transitionné pour devenir une femme — l’intéressé a pourtant été photographié aux côtés de sa sœur, lors des cérémonies d’investiture d’Emmanuel Macron en 2017 et 2022. 

La théorie de l’apprentie enquêtrice, telle qu’elle est exposée dans la vidéo, repose principalement sur l’apparence de Brigitte Macron. “L’étrangeté de son physique me dérange depuis le début”, explique-t-elle dès les premières minutes. Elle s’appuie aussi sur des hypothèses à propos de l’histoire familiale de la femme du président, dans laquelle Nathalie Rey assure avoir détecté de “nombreuses anomalies”. 

Elle a commencé à s’intéresser à la vie de Brigitte Macron en 2018, peu après la première élection de son mari en tant que président. Après avoir perdu son emploi dans une petite entreprise, ses doutes croissants sur la biographie officielle du couple sont devenus sa principale occupation. Partisane du mouvement des Gilets jaunes, Nathalie Rey nourrit une profonde méfiance envers les élites politiques, méfiance qui n’a fait que se renforcer sous l’effet de son isolement social et de ses heures passées sur Internet pendant la pandémie de Covid, raconte dans L’Affaire Madame (StudioFact, 2024) la journaliste Emmanuelle Anizon.

Nathalie Rey était notamment motivée, relate la journaliste, par la conviction que les riches et les puissants bénéficient d’une “impunité”, y compris lorsqu’il est question des crimes les plus horribles. Elle a ainsi suivi de près l’affaire Jeffrey Epstein, ce financier, aujourd’hui décédé, connecté aux élites mondiales et condamné pour avoir mis sur pied un réseau de prédation sexuelle. 

Pendant trois ans, Nathalie Rey a donc mené sa petite enquête. Mais les journalistes qu’elle a approchés n’ont pas montré grand intérêt pour ses trouvailles. A l’exception de Xavier Poussard. Il avait lui-même commencé à travailler sur ce sujet pour “Faits et Documents”, une publication d’extrême droite alors soutenue par Alain Soral, le polémiste multi-condamné pour ses propos antisémites et négationnistes.

Xavier Poussard a couché les suspicions de Nathalie Rey sur le papier, y ajoutant ses propres recherches et une touche de storytelling. Ce qui a donné lieu, en 2021, à une série d’articles truffés de “et si” et de points d’interrogation. Il y développe l’idée selon laquelle la prétendue identité de Brigitte Macron ne serait que la pointe émergée de l’iceberg. La théorie de Nathalie Rey, amplifiée par Xavier Poussard, affirme en effet que les médias ont non seulement dissimulé le passé présumé de la première dame, mais aussi ce qu’ils considèrent être un détournement de mineur d’Emmanuel Macron par sa future femme, lorsqu’elle était sa professeure au lycée. L’auteur y décrit les Macron comme un “couple pervers”. 

Ses écrits sulfureux restent à l’époque confinés à un lectorat confidentiel d’extrême droite. C’est la vidéo d’Amandine Roy sur YouTube qui, en touchant un plus large public, propulse l’histoire dans une autre dimension. 

Pendant les quatre heures d’émission, Nathalie Rey s’en prend vivement à la “caste politique”, et aux “médias manipulateurs et propagandistes”. Selon les deux femmes, les journalistes sont soit complices, soit contraints de garder le silence sous la menace.  

En quelques jours, la vidéo atteint les 500 000 vues, imposant le hashtag #JeanMichelTrogneux en top 10 des tendances Twitter. Ce qui a commencé comme l’obsession d’une femme isolée est en train de devenir un phénomène viral. 

Et ça n’a pas échappé à Brigitte Macron. 

Effet Streisand 

La première dame agit vite. Moins d’une semaine après le buzz de la vidéo, son avocat annonce son intention de porter plainte contre les personnes à l’origine de la propagation de cette infox. Quelques semaines plus tard, elle est interrogée sur la polémique sur le plateau de TF1. 

“Bien évidemment, c’est un mensonge”, indique alors Brigitte Macron dans un entretien où elle revient également sur son combat de longue date contre le cyberharcèlement. “Je crains la violence […] Je crains la haine […] Je crains cet espèce de crescendo permanent”, déclare-t-elle aussi dans une référence plus large au climat politique, alors très tendu. “Je pense qu’on ne s’est pas assez protégé de cela et qu’on a laissé passer beaucoup trop de choses.”

La première dame, qui a décliné notre demande d’interview pour cet article, parle de sa plainte comme d’une décision de principe, dans la lignée de ses engagements. Voilà des années qu’elle s’exprime en faveur d’une plus forte régulation des réseaux sociaux, notamment pour lutter contre le cyberharcèlement.

“Si je ne fais rien alors que cela fait quatre ans que je lutte contre le harcèlement… je ne suis pas audible”, déclare-t-elle aussi sur RTL.

Mais sa démarche a des effets collatéraux : les poursuites engagées donnent du grain à moudre aux partisans de la théorie du complot. Ces derniers voient dans la contre-attaque du couple le plus puissant du pays une confirmation qu’ils ont quelque chose à cacher. 

Des années plus tard, une dynamique similaire se met en place avec la plainte déposée aux Etats-Unis contre Candace Owens, qui n’en est encore qu’aux premières étapes de son parcours judiciaire. 

“Le moteur de l’affaire, c’est Brigitte Macron”, déclare Xavier Poussard. “C’est une boomeuse qui ne maîtrise pas l’effet Streisand.”

L’effet Streisand désigne le phénomène selon lequel les tentatives visant à contrer une fausse information finissent par attirer davantage l’attention sur celle-ci. Mike Borowski, animateur d’un talk-show alternatif devenu l’un des principaux relais de la théorie en France, constate que ce phénomène s’est mis en œuvre. 

“Ce sont eux qui ont créé le buzz en fait”, explique-t-il dans un entretien avec POLITICO. “Je veux dire, Natacha Rey, Amandine Roy, moi-même, ou tous les autres, Xavier [Poussard] … Sans les interventions de Brigitte Macron et d’Emmanuel Macron, ça aurait été une affaire internet.” 

“Tout se sait”

Au moment où sort Becoming Brigitte, cela fait déjà plus de trois ans que le couple Macron se bat contre cette théorie conspirationniste. 

La première plainte en diffamation a été déposée, en janvier 2022, par Brigitte Macron et son frère, Jean-Michel Trogneux, contre Nathalie Rey et Amandine Roy, les deux femmes à l’origine de la vidéo virale sur YouTube. 

Les autorités françaises ont, de leur côté, engagé des poursuites pour cyberharcèlement à l’encontre de personnes accusées d’avoir répandu des accusations malveillantes sur la première dame. Xavier Poussard, qui vit en Italie, a été interrogé par la police dans le cadre de cette procédure, mais il n’a à ce jour pas été mis en examen ou entendu par un tribunal. 

Pour les Macron, les allégations revêtent un caractère particulièrement sensible. Elles touchent à un chapitre délicat de leur histoire personnelle : les origines de leur couple. 

Emmanuel a rencontré pour la première fois Brigitte lorsqu’il était au lycée, à Amiens. Elle était de 24 ans son aînée et mariée à l’époque. La plainte déposée par les Macron contre Owens rappelle que c’est lors du cours de théâtre dispensé par l’enseignante que les deux ont “noué un lien intellectuel profond”, le futur président développant à cette occasion des “sentiments forts pour sa professeure”.

Leur relation amoureuse, qui a prospéré dans les années qui ont suivi malgré le départ d’Emmanuel Macron d’Amiens pour étudier à Paris, a déchiré leurs familles respectives et mis fin au premier mariage de Brigitte Macron avec André-Louis Auzière, le père de ses trois enfants, mort depuis. 

Dans une interview donnée à Paris Match en 2024, la fille de la première dame, Tiphaine Auzière, a décrit cette période comme “douloureuse” pour sa famille. Macron était un camarade de classe de sa sœur, Laurence. “Ce n’était pas encore l’ère des réseaux sociaux, mais on était dans une petite ville de province. Tout se sait”, relate-t-elle alors. 

Les Macron n’ont livré que quelques détails soigneusement choisis sur cette période de leur vie. Les adeptes de la théorie du complot, qu’ils soient de bonne ou de mauvaise foi, se sont chargés de combler les trous. Jusqu’à analyser les moindres détails des photos de jeunesse de Brigitte Macron, de la forme de ses oreilles à sa ressemblance avec son frère. Un élément central du livre de Poussard est une analyse visuelle réalisée à l’aide d’un outil chinois de reconnaissance faciale, censée documenter l’évolution des traits physiques de Brigitte Macron au fil du temps. 

“C’est ce qui caractérise les théories du complot :  à partir de rien elles font quelque chose”, déclare le célèbre avocat et homme politique Eric Dupond-Moretti, qui occupait le poste de ministre de la Justice d’Emmanuel Macron lorsque ces allégations ont commencé à circuler.

Tiphaine Auzière a témoigné, lors de l’un des procès qui s’est tenu en France, des conséquences qu’ont eu ces allégations sur le bien-être de sa mère. 

“Elle est contrainte de faire attention aux tenues qu’elle porte, aux postures, car elle sait que son image peut-être détournée”, a-t-elle dit. 

Les publications sur les réseaux sociaux relayant la théorie ont pris l’habitude de mettre en avant des gros plans du corps de la première dame, spéculant sur la silhouette de Brigitte Macron ou sa façon de bouger. 

“On sent qu’ils ont été meurtris individuellement, très profondément”, assure un homme politique proche du couple, qui a demandé l’anonymat afin de pouvoir s’exprimer librement sur ce sujet sensible. 

Liberté d’expression 

En janvier 2026, le tribunal correctionnel de Paris a condamné dix personnes, dont Amandine Roy, pour cyberharcèlement contre Brigitte Macron après avoir été reconnus coupables d’avoir relayé des allégations malveillantes sur son genre et sa sexualité. Les prévenus ont reçu des peines allant du stage de sensibilisation à de la prison, pour la plupart avec sursis. 

Mais la procédure en diffamation intentée contre Amandine Roy et Nathalie Rey s’est retournée contre le couple présidentiel. Après une décision favorable en première instance, la cour d’appel a en effet estimé que les deux femmes avaient agi de bonne foi, en dépit de l’utilisation de sources dont “la neutralité et le sérieux sont contestables”, et que leurs propos relevaient de la liberté d’expression. 

Les magistrats ont également considéré qu’accuser Brigitte Macron d’avoir transitionné ou de cacher son identité de naissance ne pouvait être considéré comme de la diffamation, d’après l’arrêt que POLITICO a pu consulter, dans la mesure où être transgenre n’est pas un acte répréhensible en soi. Par ailleurs, même si Brigitte Macron avait changé de sexe, le fait de dissimuler cette transition ne serait pas considéré comme un acte répréhensible, a fait valoir le juge, car cela relèverait du droit à la vie privée.

La cour a reconnu que l’accusation de détournement de mineur sur Emmanuel Macron, visant la première dame, a pu porter atteinte à sa réputation. Mais, là encore, elle a fait valoir le principe de bonne foi. Selon la décision, les informations disponibles publiquement sur les débuts de la relation des Macron constituaient “une base factuelle diverse et suffisante” pour étayer les allégations portées par Nathalie Rey (la cour ayant souligné que les prévenues “ne sont pas des professionnelles de l’information”). 

Dans leur plainte déposée aux Etats-Unis, les avocats des Macron affirment que “la relation enseignante-élève entre Mme Macron et le président Macron, est toujours restée dans les limites de la loi”.

Cette décision a provoqué la consternation dans le camp de Macron. “C’est une conception pour le moins étendue de la liberté d’expression”, estime Eric Dupont-Moretti. “Imaginez que des gens disent que vous êtes un homme et que ceux qui tiennent ces propos soient déclarés innocents. Cela ne vous laisserait pas un goût amer ?” 

Brigitte Macron et son frère, Jean-Michel Trogneux, ont formé un pourvoi devant la Cour de cassation, la plus haute juridiction française. L’examen sur le fond, initialement prévu à l’automne, a été repoussé au printemps prochain après le décès de Nathalie Rey d’un cancer en septembre 2026, selon un arrêt consulté par POLITICO. 

Mike Borowski, l’animateur du talk-show alternatif, qui l’avait rencontré, la décrit comme une “une petite dame toute menue, assez chétive, qui se transformait un peu quand elle parlait de ‘son’ affaire”. 

De part et d’autre de l’Atlantique

Candace Owens a exposé pour la première fois la théorie à sa communauté le 11 mars 2024, dans un épisode de son podcast, en ne promettant rien de moins que “le plus grand scandale politique de l’histoire de l’humanité”. 

Son émission a été diffusée seulement quelques jours après qu’Emmanuel Macron se soit exprimé pour la première fois sur l’affaire. Interrogé à l’occasion de la journée internationale de la femme, le 8 mars 2024, le président de la République a décrit cette campagne de désinformation comme l’une des pires expériences politiques de sa vie, générant ainsi de nouveaux gros titres sur le sujet.

A l’époque, Candace Owens, autrefois figure de proue du mouvement MAGA, est critiquée par de nombreux conservateurs américains qui l’accusent de relayer des clichés antisémites et des théories conspirationnistes infondées. En 2023, YouTube a démonétisé plusieurs de ses vidéos, estimant qu’elles enfreignaient ses règles contre les contenus haineux et dénigrants, notamment l’interdiction de mégenrer délibérément les personnes transgenres. 

Durant le printemps et le début de l’été 2024, Candace Owens, qui n’a pas souhaité s’exprimer dans le cadre de cet article, publie plusieurs posts à propos des Macron. Mais son intérêt a pris une autre ampleur après avoir regardé la cérémonie d’ouverture des Jeux olympiques de Paris 2024, d’après Xavier Poussard. 

La cérémonie et sa scène de banquet représentant le dieu grec Dionysos sous les traits de Philippe Katerine, nu et intégralement peint en bleu, choque dans les cercles religieux conservateurs, où la performance est interprétée comme une parodie de la Cène, le dernier repas du Christ. 

A l’issue de l’événement, Candace Owens, une fervente catholique, reçoit de nombreux messages indignés des quatre coins du monde. Elle dira plus tard à sa communauté qu’elle a vu dans cette scène l’un des nombreux signes que “quelque chose de très sombre et démoniaque se passe” en France. 

Peu après, elle contacte Xavier Poussard. “Elle me dit : ‘Ecoute, j’ai des tas de courriers qui arrivent, des tas d’emails, de trucs sur les réseaux sociaux’”, relate-t-il à POLITICO. “Et donc là les gens lui disent : ‘Est-ce qu’on peut acheter l’enquête sur Brigitte ? Est-ce qu’il y a quelque chose qui existe en anglais ?’”

Les deux décident alors d’unir leurs forces. Ils se voient d’abord à Londres, où l’influenceuse a loué un appartement pour les vacances de Noël de 2024 (son mari, George Farmer, est un homme d’affaires et activiste conservateur britannique), puis dans la maison du couple, à Nashville, en janvier. 

Xavier Poussard, qui rédige alors son livre, l’a tenue informée de l’avancée de son travail, lui faisant parvenir les chapitres au fur-et-à-mesure. Il lui a aussi raconté nombre d’histoires sur les Macron et leurs relations au sein de l’élite française, de quoi alimenter son podcast. “Elle découvre qu’il y a une mine d’or”, raconte-t-il. 

De son côté, le Français découvre auprès de Candace Owens la création de contenus à l’américaine et sa monétisation. Il dit avoir été impressionné par l’efficacité de sa petite équipe, qui travaille dans les locaux aménagés au sein de sa propriété, à Nashville. Son livre, devenu selon ses mots un “succès d’édition”, lui a permis de rembourser intégralement le prêt de sa maison, à Milan où il vit. Il propose désormais l’ouvrage à la vente en quatre langues sur son site. 

Xavier Poussard nie avoir été guidé par des motifs idéologiques ou financiers. Sa motivation, affirme-t-il, est journalistique : “L’affaire existe, et elle est couverte.”

Alors que Poussard et Owens peaufinent leur projet fin 2024, les Macron intensifient leur contre-attaque juridique. En décembre, ils adressent à l’Américaine une mise en demeure lui demandant de revenir sur ses précédentes déclarations. 

Mais cela ne fait que l’encourager. “Ce qui est marrant, c’est que si Emmanuel Macron ne m’avait pas envoyé cette lettre de menace, nous n’aurions fait qu’un seul épisode”, a déclaré plus tard Candace Owens sur le podcast de Tim Dillon, un conservateur lui aussi. “Ça m’a tellement mise en colère… Je me suis dit : maintenant, on va vraiment s’y mettre.”

Dans leur plainte déposée au Delaware, les Macron décrivent leurs multiples démarches auprès d’Owens pour contester les allégations. Elles seront autant de munitions retournées contre eux dans de nouvelles publications, où Owens se présente comme la victime et continue “de moquer les tentatives des Macron pour rétablir la vérité”, peut-on lire dans le document. 

Macron v. Owens. 

Les Macron accusent Owens d’avoir sciemment diffusé des fausses informations afin d’élargir son audience et de gagner de l’argent. “Les clics ne cessaient d’affluer, alors Owens a continué, saisissant chaque occasion pour promouvoir ses allégations scandaleuses”, peut-on lire dans la plainte pour diffamation déposée en juillet 2025 par le couple présidentiel contre Owens et ses sociétés. 

La série de vidéos fait partie du business multiforme monté par Candace Owens. Outre la publicité diffusée pendant les épisodes, l’influenceuse propose des abonnements premium à son « Club Candace », des produits dérivés et des interventions publiques payantes. L’agence AAE, qui promeut Owens en tant que conférencière, indique que ses honoraires varient entre 50 000 et 100 000 dollars pour des événements en présentiel.

“Elle fait de l’audience, elle vend ses produits dérivés. Nous vivons dans un monde où la notoriété fait vendre”, explique Dan Nardello, dont le bureau d’investigations a été engagé par Clare Locke, le cabinet d’avocats prestigieux mandaté par les Macron, pour documenter les activités d’Owens et enquêter sur ses motivations.

Dan Nardello, barbe grise et lunettes sur le nez, est un familier des théories du complot. Il a travaillé sur le procès intenté contre le conspirationniste Alex Jones, qui a longtemps présenté comme une supercherie la fusillade meurtrière de l’école de Sandy Hook, intervenue en 2012 dans le Connecticut, qui a fait 26 morts dont 20 enfants. L’homme s’est entretenu avec POLITICO dans le bar d’un discret hôtel parisien. Sur le canapé en velours vert, à côté de lui, repose un exemplaire de Regime Change, un livre consacré au second mandat de Trump.

L’enquêteur souligne que Candace Owens place environ trois publicités à chaque vidéo consacrée à “Becoming Brigitte”. Selon une estimation du magazine Fortune, sur laquelle il s’appuie, le podcast de l’influenceuse générerait entre 2 et 10 millions de dollars de revenu annuel, uniquement via les sponsors. Ce chiffrage n’a pas pu être vérifié de façon indépendante par POLITICO et les gains liés à l’exploitation de l’affaire concernant les Macron reste difficile à déterminer précisément. 

Pour le couple présidentiel, la décision de poursuivre la commentatrice conspirationniste aux US, avec les coûts et le processus éreintant que cela suppose, n’allait sans doute pas de soi, souligne Dan Nardello. “C’est une question de principes pour eux”, ajoute-t-il. “Il faut du courage pour se mettre ainsi à la merci du système judiciaire américain. […] Je suis sûr que, sur le plan politique, le conseil était ‘N’y va pas’’’, conclut l’enquêteur. 

Candace Owens a maintenu ses accusations et demandé à ce que la plainte soit classée. Le mois dernier, un juge du Delaware a restreint la portée des poursuites dont elle fait l’objet. Selon la décision, les Macron peuvent uniquement attaquer les entreprises d’Owens, domiciliées dans l’Etat, et non l’influenceuse à titre personnel, celle-ci dans le Tennessee. 

Candace Owens s’est félicitée de la décision dans un post publié sur X. Elle y dénonce “l’un des abus juridiques les plus flagrants commis par un dirigeant étranger dans l’histoire de l’humanité — la tentative d’un président en exercice de ruiner personnellement une simple podcasteuse depuis l’étranger”. 

Elle a également accusé les Macron d’avoir recours au “forum shopping”, une pratique consistant à choisir la juridiction qui leur serait la plus favorable, estimant qu’il aurait été trop tard pour engager une action en diffamation contre elle en vertu du droit français.

L’équipe juridique des Macron a déclaré qu’elle “gardait toutes les options ouvertes” afin qu’Owens “réponde personnellement de ses actes”. Le 4 novembre, comme l’a révélé POLITICO, ils ont engagé de nouvelles poursuites en diffamation contre l’influenceuse, cette fois dans le Tennessee.

Les Macron sont prêts à fournir des preuves scientifiques permettant de réfuter les allégations, a indiqué l’avocat américain du couple. Mais gagner un procès en diffamation aux Etats-Unis contre une personnalité publique constitue un véritable défi juridique. Ils doivent pour cela démontrer l’intention malveillante : le fait qu’Owens a tenu des propos diffamatoires en sachant qu’ils étaient faux ou en ignorant sciemment les arguments en faveur de la vérité. 

C’est pour cela que Tom Clare a engagé Dan Nardello : pour passer au crible les déclarations de Candace Owens et découvrir ses motivations potentielles. Son équipe s’est penchée sur son parcours, ses intérêts commerciaux et les avantages financiers qu’elle aurait pu tirer de la diffusion de ces allégations. L’objectif est d’établir non seulement qu’Owens a tiré profit de la promotion de cette théorie du complot, mais aussi qu’elle a sciemment ou par imprudence ignoré les éléments de preuve contredisant ses affirmations. 

“Tout cela est assez clair. Ce qui m’échappe, c’est comment elle pense pouvoir s’en tirer”, a déclaré Nardello.

Pourtant, ces années de procédure judiciaire illustrent à quel point il est difficile d’endiguer la progression d’une infox une fois qu’elle s’est largement répandue. 

Dans une petite librairie de la rue Duquesne, dans le très chic 7e arrondissement de Paris, Jean-Christophe Gruau, 63 ans, et Alain Vauthier, 76 ans, ont suivi tous les rebondissements de cette saga.

La boutique, où le premier travaille et dont le second est un habitué, vend des auteurs ultra-conservateurs et des pamphlets d’extrême droite. 

Les deux hommes connaissent bien le travail de Xavier Poussard. Ils ont vu ces accusations faire le tour du monde et saluent Candace Owens pour son “intérêt pour la vérité”, selon les termes de M. Gruau. “En tant qu’homme de 63 ans, je ne peux tout simplement pas croire à une histoire d’amour durable entre une femme approchant la quarantaine et un jeune homme de 17 ans”, lâche le libraire aux cheveux gris, qui s’anime au fil de la conversation.

Ni les démentis publics des Macron, ni les éléments avancés dans les procédures françaises ne semblent avoir ébranlé sa conviction que les secrets les plus sombres du couple présidentiel n’ont pas encore été révélés. “S’ils voulaient régler cette affaire, il leur suffisait de montrer quelques photos. Pourquoi ne l’ont-ils pas fait ?”, s’interroge Jean-Christophe Gruau (de nombreuses photos ont été publiées, y compris de Brigitte Macron et son frère).

“Il y a des questions sans réponse, des choses pas claires”, veut-il croire. “Rien n’est net dans cette affaire.”

Cet article a d’abord été publié par POLITICO en anglais, puis a été édité en français par Nicolas Cossic.

Ein historischer Paradigmenwechsel für die deutschen Geheimdienste steht im Bundestag zur Abstimmung. BND und Verfassungsschutz sollen künftig nicht mehr nur beobachten, sondern aktiv in IT-Systeme eindringen und Cyberangriffe stören dürfen. Anouk Schlung analysiert, warum diese neuen Befugnisse außenpolitisch hochriskant sind und weshalb nun sogar Wohnungseinbrüche durch den Auslandsgeheimdienst drohen.

Die Linke kämpft auf offener Bühne mit ihrer Haltung zu Israel und dem Umgang mit radikalen Strömungen. Cedric Looks beleuchtet, wie die Führung versucht, die tiefen Gräben zu kitten und welche personellen Konsequenzen der Dauerstreit für die künftige Ausrichtung der Partei hat.

Wie die Berliner SPD, die sich ja mit den Linken in Koalitionsgesprächen befindet, zu den Querelen bei der Linken steht und ob Landeschef Steffen Krach womöglich doch noch die Reißleine zieht, darum geht es unter anderem ⁠hier im neuen Video-Podcast „Inside Links“ von WELT und POLITICO.

Im 200-Sekunden-Interview stellt sich der Co-Parteivorsitzende der Linken, Luigi Pantisano, der Frage, wo die roten Linien seiner Partei beim Existenzrecht Israels verlaufen. Zudem erklärt er den Widerspruch, warum die Linke Wohnungskonzerne enteignen will, aber Mieterhöhungen bei Vonovia zustimmt. Außerdem: Warum der neue Online-Shop der Bundeswehr ausgerechnet an einer Badeente mit Sturmgewehr scheitert.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.

POLITICO Deutschland – ein Angebot der Axel Springer Deutschland GmbH
Axel-Springer-Straße 65, 10888 Berlin
Tel: +49 (30) 2591 0
information@axelspringer.de
Sitz: Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg, HRB 196159 B
USt-IdNr: DE 214 852 390
Geschäftsführer: Christoph Eck-Schmidt, Carolin Hulshoff Pol, Mathias Sanchez Luna

**(Anzeige) Eine Nachricht von YouTube: Verlässliche Finanzierung für Qualitätsjournalismus: Damit unabhängige Berichterstattung im Netz wirtschaftlich tragen kann, braucht es faire Erlösmodelle. Laut einer Studie von Oxford Economics geben 76 % der Medienunternehmen mit YouTube-Kanal an, dass die Plattform eine wichtige Einnahmequelle für ihr Geschäft darstellt. Hier klicken für mehr Informationen zum wirtschaftlichen Beitrag von YouTube.**

Shabana Mahmood is the latest home secretary to try to reform Britain’s complex immigration policy.

Her latest proposals on so-called ‘indefinite leave to remain’ are designed to assess migrants based on the extent of their contribution to the country — by taking account of their skills, salary and what kind of job they are able to fill.

As MPs in the Commons consider Mahmood’s plans, this week on Westminster Insider host Sascha O’Sullivan tries to find out who Britain really sees as its ‘perfect’ immigrant, reflecting on the very different perspectives of the Home Office, voters and economists.

Sascha is joined by Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University and interim chair of the Migration Advisor Committee, which advises the Home Office.

Keralan-born Labour MP Sojan Joseph tells Sascha his story of coming to the UK to work as a care worker, and reflects on how he tried to navigate British society amid its various and often contradictory demands for the ‘perfect’ immigrant.