Axios C-Suite: What Jim learned for the week of April 18

• She's torn, people who have talked to her say. Some weeks, she's leaning toward ousting Schumer, gaining more experience, and running for POTUS later. After all, she's only 36.
• Other weeks, she's doing what presidential candidates-in-waiting do, like hyping a trip to the Munich Security Conference to bolster her foreign policy credentials. (The trip didn't go as well as her team hoped.)
• Either way, there's a clear lane for an anti-AI socialist candidate, and AOC would be the clear leader to fill it. Interestingly, the far left doesn't think she's lefty enough. And she's fuming in private that the socialist wing is impossible to fully please.
• She's the only serious '28 contender to sign onto Bernie's data center moratorium bill. And the Bernie-affiliated outside group More Perfect Union just set its sights on stopping Waymo.
• What to watch: Polls routinely show Democrats favor socialism over capitalism. With young Ds, it's not particularly close. Anyone who thinks America would never elect a socialist learned nothing from President Trump.

🔥 Next Cabinet victim: Turns out, Trump booted Pam Bondi as attorney general and then wanted to oust Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer — and give Bondi her job. I'm told Bondi politely declined. Chavez-DeRemer's days seem numbered ...

⏱️ Meta's moment: Don't sleep on Meta in the AI race. Muse Spark, Meta's first new model since hiring Alex Wang, is good — though not OpenAI or Anthropic-good. But an AI-competitive Meta, coupled with the company's growing audience and ad dominance via Facebook and Instagram, is a powerful duet.

• Meta will soon displace Google as the world's top ad platform. Interestingly, they're the two companies with existing products continuously improved by their own AI that also have triple-A credit ratings to finance endless compute.
• Internally, execs boast Meta's next model will finally make the splash Zuck paid billions for. We shall see.

‼️ New vulnerability: U.S. officials fear China might cut us off from rare earth minerals again, just as our supply of rare-earth-dependent smart weapons dwindles.

• Our killer weapons systems deployed in Iran — Tomahawks, JDAMs, Predator drones, the F-35 — all depend on rare earths in some capacity.

• The danger: China controls roughly 70% of rare-earth mining, 90% of separation and processing, and 90% of magnet manufacturing — the exact magnets that make precision guidance systems work.
• Why it matters for CEOs: Your China calculations are getting trickier. The U.S. and European public are warming to the country. Hell, its favorability has doubled in the U.S. since '23. This mirrors Trump's mood: He heads to China feeling accommodating. But our reliance on China's supply chain remains a massive risk.

🤷‍♂️ Trump's shrug: Trump doesn't seem to really care if Republicans lose the House and Senate this fall. We've heard this from countless people who've broached the topic with him — even before the all-consuming Iran war.

• This seems nuts. But if you look at how he governs — and views power — it makes more sense. He hates the slow pace of actual lawmaking. That means he almost always picks executive power or public threats. Or he simply does things the Constitution designates as congressional powers, like tariffs and spending cuts.
• He doesn't care if he gets impeached (been there, done that) and plans to pardon most of the people Dems will investigate.
• 👀 This chart says it all — Trump in just over a year, compared to all others in four:

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