Washington, DC

1. Thune talks reelection
2. Vance vs. neocons
3. Mamdani wing’s wins
4. WH hosts defense firms
5. AI news trust problem
6. Prediction markets polling
7. Europe’s China surrender

PDB: House sends bipartisan housing bill to Trump’s desk

Trump meets Rutte … Hegseth briefs House Republicans … Fed releases results of bank stress tests

Thune wants to run it back as GOP leader

Senate Majority Leader John Thune told Semafor’s Burgess Everett he’s leaning toward running for another two years as GOP leader — welcome news for Republicans this morning as they prepare for a crucial meeting with President Donald Trump at the Capitol. “Hopefully we’ll have a good outcome in November. But my expectation would be, yeah” to another term as leader, Thune said. He faces the difficult task of telling Trump that the Senate lacks the votes to pass his SAVE America voter ID legislation or kill the filibuster, while the two sitting GOP senators Trump worked to oust — along with other retiring senators — flex their independence. Thune said sometimes his “53-seat majority is more like 46 now,” which makes his job more challenging. He hopes for more bipartisan wins on top of this week’s housing bill before the midterm elections, including on college sports and the farm bill.

Vance takes on hawks over Iran deal

Vice President JD Vance and his allies are casting his advocacy for Trump’s Iran deal as a contrast with the GOP’s neoconservative establishment, Semafor’s Shelby Talcott reports. The deal faces opposition from skeptical conservatives who have blasted it as a loss for the US — and a potential handicap for Vance’s future. But Vance’s allies see a political upside in his role, pointing to polling that consistently finds the war unpopular with Americans. “Ironically, the hawks attacking the Vice President for this peace deal have unwittingly helped solve the biggest potential political problem that he was facing should he run in 2028 — the unpopularity of this war,” said one Republican who is supportive of the Trump administration’s efforts to end the four-month conflict that Trump started. Even so, the bet has its risks, as skepticism of the deal’s details rises.

Mamdani allies sweep New York primary

Left-wing challengers ousted two House Democrats in New York on Tuesday, a victory for Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his faction of the party. Rep. Dan Goldman lost in a landslide to Brad Lander, who told supporters that their movement could “vanquish Trump’s fascism,” while Rep. Adriano Espaillat was narrowly defeated by Darializa Avila Chevalier, a pro-Gaza activist who’d never sought office before. State legislator Claire Valdez, another Mamdani ally who rallied last week with him and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., easily won an open seat over Brooklyn’s borough president. “Solidarity forever, abolish ICE, free Palestine, organize your union, and join DSA,” Valdez said at her victory party. Left-wing Democrats struggled outside the city, with veteran Cait Conley winning a swing-seat nomination to challenge Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y. And in Utah, former Rep. Ben McAdams won the party’s nod in a district newly redrawn to be safely Democratic.

— David Weigel

White House weighs weapons challenge

The question of how to refill the US’ dwindling cache of munitions will take center stage at the White House today, as Trump gathers defense companies to talk about juicing production. “We’re really in a big strong economic push to do the weapons,” Trump said Monday, adding that car companies with “excess capacity” would also help produce missiles. The meeting follows one in March with defense contractors and is expected to include similar participants. The Iran war has eroded stockpiles of expensive weapons that take months to build. The Pentagon offered no details about the meeting itself, but chief spokesman Sean Parnell said the military “has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President’s choosing.” Meanwhile, Congress is looking at barring defense contractors from executing stock buybacks or paying dividends without Pentagon approval, an extension of a January executive order.

— Morgan Chalfant

Americans aren’t using AI for news

Americans are resisting using artificial intelligence to get their news, new Gallup polling suggests. Only 7% of US adults said they rely on AI tools “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to get news and information, according to the May polling, while a majority — 57% — responded that they don’t use the technology for news at all. The trend extends across age groups, though adults under 50 years old said they were slightly more likely to use AI in their news consumption. When asked to rank their regular news sources, Americans were least likely to name AI chatbots and assistants as a top choice for news; social media was the most common source. And as media outlets increasingly adopt AI in their work, a larger trust problem looms: A plurality of 39% said they would lose trust in information if they knew that AI was used to produce it.

Voters’ views on oversight of prediction markets

Voters in both parties prefer federal oversight of prediction markets to state oversight, according to a pair of polls commissioned by the industry’s Coalition for Prediction Markets and shared first with Semafor. That breaks down to 48% of Republicans who favor federal oversight versus 27% who prefer state oversight, Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio’s firm found, while 45% of Democrats favor federal oversight and 35% prefer state oversight, according to the Democratic firm Global Strategy Group. The Democratic firm also found that 8% of all voters think prediction markets should be banned; 67% think adults should decide for themselves whether to use them; and 52% under the age of 35 have used them. The polls come as Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Mike Selig squares off with states and tribes that are trying to ban prediction markets or regulate them as they do gambling.

— Eleanor Mueller

View: US and Europe face a China dilemma

Western politicians complain that China achieved its meteoric technological rise through “forced technology transfer.” In reality, the handover was mostly voluntary. US and European CEOs willingly traded know-how for the promise of market access. In the early years, they used the Chinese market as a dumping ground for obsolete technology. Indeed, Western multinationals happily seeded entire industries in China, which outplayed them all. It did so by negotiating the wholesale transfer of Western industrial blueprints on astonishingly generous terms, then by absorbing the knowledge, and now by rapidly iterating on Western inventions — all in the span of a single generation. That’s the central dilemma now facing policymakers in the US and Europe, as they struggle to respond to a deluge of Chinese technology exports that threaten rapid deindustrialization. The US chose tariffs; Europe, by contrast, appears to be debating the terms of its own industrial surrender.

Blindspot: Cuba and Reflecting Pool

Stories that are being largely ignored by either left-leaning or right-leaning outlets, curated with help from our partners at Ground News.

What the Left isn’t reading: The US imposed sanctions on a Cuban bank and a state-run mining company, in an effort to pressure Havana.

What the Right isn’t reading: President Trump claimed that vandals damaged the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, but internal documents raise doubts about those assertions, The New York Times reported.

The world around us is changing, and technology is at the heart of the story. As artificial intelligence transforms how businesses operate and compete, Semafor Technology unpacks the ideas, innovations, and power shifts driving the AI revolution. Penned by Tech Editor Reed Albergotti, each edition delivers clarity on the forces reshaping industries, markets, and society.

Beltway Newsletters

Punchbowl News: House Speaker Mike Johnson is optimistic about a third reconciliation bill succeeding, saying: “I’m very bullish about it… We got some things that we really need to do, must do, everybody wants to do. So we put together the magic combination, I think we get it done.”

Playbook: “The Democratic establishment better wake up — because the left is winning, they are on the outs, and it’s time for us to retire a few more members of Congress,” said Usamah Andrabi of the progressive group Justice Democrats.

Axios: “People who do not support the [Democratic Socialists of America] wring their hands at cocktail parties, while the DSA is organizing,” said Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y.