{"id":221550,"date":"2026-01-05T12:02:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T12:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/221550\/"},"modified":"2026-01-05T12:02:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T12:02:13","slug":"six-questions-for-washington-in-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/221550\/","title":{"rendered":"Six questions for Washington in 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

1. Can Susie Wiles get her groove back?<\/p>\n

Susie Wiles is the only member of Trump\u2019s inner circle wholly focused on the looming 2026 midterm elections. The men around her have foreign policy goals, government-led commercial deals, and social media wars to fight \u2014 not to mention family crypto portfolios. But Wiles closed the year on her heels from indiscreet conversations with Vanity Fair<\/a>, in which she noted that voters would prefer more domestic policy and fewer Saudis on their screens. Trump\u2019s decision to begin 2026 with the announcement that the US will \u201crun\u201d Venezuela is the White House political operation\u2019s worst nightmare.<\/p>\n

\"SusieEvelyn Hockstein\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Though early, most members of both parties (and online bettors) expect Democrats to take the House next November. Those expectations are prompting Republican retirements and\u00a0energizing Democrats. Wiles\u2019 job is to focus the president on, at least, stanching the bleeding Vice President JD Vance\u2019s very public commitment<\/a> to the midterms is good national politics and may help candidates raise money, but the Republican Party has lost since 2016 when Trump isn\u2019t on the ballot \u2014\u00a0much less when he\u2019s not paying attention. Wiles\u2019 nightmare scenario: a competitive Senate cycle, where a Democratic victory would rely on upsets in places like Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, and Texas.<\/p>\n

2. Will the bubbles burst?<\/p>\n

The federal government and US private sector are making the same big bet on artificial intelligence. And the huge investments \u2014\u00a0in data centers, energy, and other infrastructure \u2014\u00a0are keeping the US economy humming, keeping foreign and domestic investors pouring billions into the country, and keeping Americans\u2019 stock portfolios healthy. Everyone has a different theory on how a bubble like that bursts,\u00a0but rarely has an investment cycle been so deeply intertwined with the political moment, and if one bubble bursts, they all burst.<\/p>\n

But the fact that every bubble bursts at some point doesn\u2019t tell you anything about the timing. Semafor\u2019s Reed Albergotti thinks we\u2019ve got at least another year of growth, writing that \u201cthere\u2019s too much demand to sink the AI boom<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

3. Were tariffs really a non-event?<\/p>\n

Trump, Peter Navarro, and pretty much nobody else defied the professional economic consensus on tariffs. Trump\u2019s \u201cLiberation Day\u201d break with America\u2019s trading traditions even rattled his loyal treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, as Bessent later acknowledged. Trump then chickened out, chickened in, and ended the year with an effective tariff rate<\/a> of 16.8%, up from 2.4% in January and the highest since 1935.<\/p>\n

So were the economists all wrong? Or are we just in one of those funny middle periods of American economic analysis \u2014\u00a0remember when Biden aides argued that spending wouldn\u2019t drive inflation? \u2014\u00a0that ends with the grim laws of economic gravity reasserting themselves as businesses pass tariff costs through? We may never know: The Supreme Court will rule any day now in a group of lawsuits challenging Trump\u2019s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs, and their ruling could end or alter Trump\u2019s great economic heresy.<\/p>\n

4. How much more can Beijing get out of Washington?<\/p>\n

The Washington China hawk became an endangered species last fall with the realization that the US really is dependent on elements of the Chinese supply chain. Trump then reversed some tariffs, suspended port fees on Chinese ships, and approved sales of Nvidia\u2019s powerful H200 chips. And yet a promised trade deal has yet to materialize.<\/p>\n

\"DonaldEvelyn Hockstein\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Of course, that\u2019s not all Chinese leader Xi Jinping wants from the US, and there are more deals to be made, Semafor\u2019s Andy Browne notes<\/a>. China-watchers speculate that Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick could negotiate Chinese investments into the United States on the model of deals struck with Japan. They could relax rules on the export of chipmaking equipment on the same logic \u2014\u00a0maintaining Western export markets \u2014\u00a0that re-opened China to Nvidia. And of course, there\u2019s Taiwan, where even a slightly softer US line would move Xi closer to retaking the island.<\/p>\n

5. Can you run against AI?<\/p>\n

A wave of candidates right and left have begun to define their political identities around criticism of AI. The campaigns have shifted away from warnings of killer robots to blaming AI (with varying degrees of accuracy) for all kinds of ills: rising energy and water prices; sprawling data centers; teen mental health issues; declining educational standards; and association with the Antichrist. The issue has migrated from local races<\/a> to a high-profile New York congressional primary<\/a> and the Arkansas governor\u2019s mansion, and you\u2019ll hear dark denunciations of the technology from Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders.<\/p>\n

The tech industry learned from the last \u201ctechlash\u201d that they can mostly ignore the noise, at least in the US: For all the denunciations of big tech and social media, Congress still hasn\u2019t acted meaningfully on the issue. Americans are historically optimistic about technology. But this bet will face its most serious test in the brewing Republican presidential primary. Vance\u2019s tight ties to the Silicon Valley right are one of his greatest political assets and an obvious attack surface for one or more of his likely challengers for the 2028 nomination.<\/p>\n

6. Can Zohran Mamdani govern?<\/p>\n

On Saturday, Zohan Mamdani spent 45 minutes discussing traffic<\/a> in Queens; then he mentioned a conversation with Trump about Venezuela. Mamdani and his allies in the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America are intensely aware of the need to succeed in the mundane work of governing, and his early appointments are experienced hands from the city\u2019s permanent government. <\/p>\n

\"ZohranJeenah Moon\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Four days in, he\u2019s getting good reviews: Mamdani may be trying to \u201cnormalize previously radical ideology on top of basic municipal competence,\u201d writes<\/a> the Manhattan Institute\u2019s Nicole Gelinas. \u201cBut if we get the basic municipal competence part in some city departments as a byproduct of this cleverly wicked strategy, that is actually … good.\u201d<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean Mamdani\u2019s ambitions are any less revolutionary. The socialist podcaster Daniel Denvir recently described the plan as to beat Trumpism \u201cand then build a social democratic and then socialist order to permanently displace it.\u201d The DSA sees itself as a new national party<\/a>, operating like a coalition partner to Democrats \u2014\u00a0but without a ballot line. In the meantime, traffic and rats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"1. Can Susie Wiles get her groove back? Susie Wiles is the only member of Trump\u2019s inner circle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":221551,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-221550","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221550\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}