Axios C-Suite: What Jim learned for the week of July 18
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Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
🤬 The Hate Election: Trump and Republicans privately fear a bloodbath in November. One thing can prevent it: getting swing voters to fear and hate Democrats.
- "It's going to be a hate election," a Republican tied to President Trump's political operation told Axios' Marc Caputo. "Voters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us. And we have material to work with."
- That explains Trump's new obsession with socialism, communism and China election meddling. It's going to get even uglier than you think.
👀 Vance's Sanders play: You've got to listen to VP Vance on Joe Rogan. Fast forward to the 2:32 mark and tune in through 2:49. Vance is way more obsessed with working-class voters than his boss, and spends nearly 20 minutes talking up stronger unions and holding up European ones as a model.
- He'll run as pure MAGA, backed by the Tucker Carlson wing (they talk often) and more skeptical of business. Vance told Rogan the government should have broken up tech companies earlier and be more aggressive with antitrust enforcement.
🏛️ Socialism watch: Michigan's Democratic Senate primary on Aug. 4 will provide the clearest sign yet of socialism's appeal beyond charismatic Mamdanis or super-liberal cities like D.C.
- If Abdul El-Sayed, backed by Bernie Sanders and AOC, beats establishment favorite Rep. Haley Stevens, backed by Chuck Schumer, pro-socialism will surge. Stevens leads in polls. So a loss or tight win will tell us a lot.
💥 The next freakout: Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are all hiring or assigning safety experts to prevent their products from creating biological or chemical weapons.
- This is the next cyber-level panic to hit, officials at all three tell us.
💰 AI eats you: Big AI created and sold the best AI. Then it unleashed new cyberthreats and turned around and charged you to use the same AI to prevent it from damaging your company. Now, both Anthropic and OpenAI want to help run all of AI for you.
- Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman launched Ode this week — a standalone company that installs AI inside other companies — after OpenAI announced its own Deployment Company in May.
- This is a play to do what Accenture, Deloitte, PwC and others do for you.
🇨🇳 China's rise: Pew is out with some startling data, showing that China is increasingly seen more favorably across the world than the U.S.
- Of the 12 NATO countries polled, only Hungary and Poland preferred America.
💰 Good news: Millions of kids should be getting a lot richer, thanks both to Trump Accounts and wealthy benefactors depositing money for specific, often low-income groups.
- The new Trump Accounts app briefly cracked the top five of Apple's App Store. The White House says more than 6M accounts have been requested.
- Hedge funder Brad Gerstner, a top booster of the accounts, thinks private donors will contribute $100B over the next year.
Go deeper: How to sign up for a Trump Account
