Top White House officials and elected Republicans tell us the same thing in private: They no longer even try to persuade President Trump to do or not do something, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a "Behind the Curtain" column.

• "Why bother?" a longtime adviser and admirer told us. "He's the boss."

Why it matters: For nearly a decade, Republicans acquiesced to nearly every Trump demand and idea — and rationalized it by saying his instincts proved smarter than theirs. Now, many no longer trust those instincts. But they find it just as futile to push back against virtually anything he wants.

Start a war without an endgame? OK.

• Post a cartoon of you — wielding a hockey stick and sporting a Trump-branded USA jersey — towering over Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, sprawled on the ice, and telling him to "GET UP"? On it.
• Toss together an egocentric, first-ever Republican midterm convention that many endangered candidates don't want? Sounds like a good plan, boss! (Gavels in today in Dallas at 4 p.m. ET, in fact.)
• Oh, you want to speak both nights? Done!
• Make ads featuring you when your popularity is near its all-time low? You came to the right place, sir.
• Make the midterms a referendum on you? Check.
• Spend precious time obsessing about ballroom construction, and gilding and marbleizing the White House? You are the new Caesar Augustus.

👂 What we're hearing: Many aides and confidants have been worn down by Trump. They know they can't stop him, and they don't even try.

• More and more, they humor his whims.
• "He's an 80-year-old man who did it his way," said a donor who recently met with the president. "What he wants, he gets."
• White House insiders insist there's a semblance of structure and reason, and that the president doesn't act on every impulse. They declined to provide examples of times he resisted.

🔎 Between the lines: Republicans are pessimistic about keeping their House majority in the midterms, and worried about the Senate. Regardless of the outcome, Trump will officially be a lame duck 56 days from now.

• On Nov. 4, the day after Election Day, attention will start turning to the 2028 race — and to the Democratic leaders who are likely to have new juice on Capitol Hill.

Trump, a top adviser emphasized, is no lame duck: "Discount Trump at your peril."

• "He wields enormous power in the party, in politics and culturally," the adviser said. "Anyone who thinks he's going to retreat into the shadows is either stupid or has bad political instincts."

The bottom line: Trump insiders calculate they lived by Trump and so will die by Trump, rather than break with Trump.

• "He's going to remain the dominant political figure even after his term ends," the adviser said. "And everybody knows it."

Share this story ... Marc Caputo contributed reporting from Dallas.

Three Anthropic researchers went public last night with chilling concerns about out-of-control AI, warning it could destroy humans this decade.

• Anthropic AI researcher Jacob Coxon wrote on X, after resigning yesterday to sound the alarm: "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger."
• Anthropic alignment-science lead Evan Hubinger responded: "Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to." (When I went to bed, this tweet had 1 million views. When I woke up, it had more than 10 million, and still soaring.)
• Samuel Marks, Anthropic scalable-oversight lead, added: "AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes). This could happen in the next few years. In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are."

Why it matters: They're hardly alone. Their warnings came just days after top OpenAI leaders, including CEO Sam Altman, said AI is speeding into a scary, uncontrollable phase.

Warnings from inside the AI giants point to an epic shared dilemma: Slow down and risk falling behind, or press ahead and risk losing control. The companies are full speed ahead, even as they practically beg for regulation or a global pause, Axios' Maria Curi, Madison Mills and Ina Fried report.

The big picture: Calling this unprecedented would be a gross understatement. You basically have the fastest-growing companies in human history warning their products could harm or even destroy humanity.

• Critics say Anthropic and OpenAI are hyping their products to raise their valuations and invite regulation that would benefit them alone as the dominant incumbents. But we've been talking with dozens of people inside these companies for months, and they've sounded increasingly spooked and concerned. Given they see models not yet released to the public, it seems reckless not to take them seriously.

🏛️ Context for readers from Mike & Jim: This is self-evidently scary stuff — and these vague warnings are impossible to validate or appraise. But we think readers, especially members of Congress and those in relevant federal agencies, need to be aware that the AI creators themselves see potential catastrophic outcomes absent a shift in how America, China and others review and release more powerful AI models.

💡 How to think about this: Nobody is warning AI is an imminent high-level threat. What they're saying is that the technology keeps improving faster than they thought possible and will soon be able to self-improve (recursive self-improvement). Once that happens, it gets even better, faster ... and much harder to predict or control.

• Go deeper.

DALLAS — A secretive donor network closely aligned with Vice President Vance drew Cabinet members, lawmakers and major GOP donors to a "cowboy-chic" bar last night for a marquee pre-party ahead of the Republicans' midterm convention, Axios' Alex Isenstadt reports.

• Why it matters: The donor group, Rockbridge, has become an influential hub for conservative donors and operatives as Vance prepares for a likely White House run in 2028.

👀 Inside the room: Between 200 and 250 people attended the private welcome reception at The Rustic.

• Attendees included Dallas businessman and major GOP donor Ray Washburne, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HUD Secretary Scott Turner, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), Trump 2024 co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita, former Trump White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, investor Hal Lambert and professional bareback rider Rocker Steiner.

💰 Trump today will host an RNC fundraiser where admission to a "roundtable" is $250,000 per person, according to an invitation obtained by Axios. A photo with Trump will cost $88,600.

• Share this story.

👉 You heard it here first: Paige Willey, the top deputy to National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, is leaving the White House for a private-sector job at month's end, Axios' Marc Caputo has learned ... Go deeper.

📈 Oil hit $100 a barrel this morning as the war with Iran inflames tensions across the Middle East. Go deeper.

Home heating oil bills are likely to be massive this winter in the Northeast, Axios' Matt Phillips writes.

• Benchmark U.S. home heating oil futures have leapfrogged highs hit in late 2022.
• U.S. heating oil futures are up just shy of 30% over the last three months.
• And they're up about 120% since the start of the year.

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President Trump said the U.S. will ban Canadian alcohol, some dairy products and large motorcycles, sharply escalating a trade war largely fought with tariffs, Axios' Courtenay Brown writes.

• Why it matters: The measures deepen the economic rift between countries that have spent decades interlinking commerce, threatening disruption for businesses and consumers on both sides of the border.

The import bans take effect Sept. 29, effectively cutting off U.S. market access for the targeted Canadian goods rather than simply making them more expensive.

• The White House said it'll also expand the existing 50% tariffs to dozens of additional Canadian products — including some steel and aluminum goods, furniture and paper — effective Sept. 15 (next Tuesday).

Keep reading.

Elon Musk's super PAC has entered the midterm campaign fray with a heavy dose of anti-trans messaging, Axios' Mike Zapler writes.

• Why it matters: America PAC isn't running a traditional persuasion campaign. It's undertaking a massive get-out-the-vote operation, with targeted ads designed to get GOP voters to the polls.

In a series of just-launched ads, America PAC goes after Democratic Senate candidates in four competitive races over transgender athletes, gender-transition care and other trans issues.

• The PAC's emphasis on trans issues is striking because that's been a much less prominent theme in GOP Senate ads so far this election cycle, according to AdImpact, which tracks political advertising.

💡 The intrigue: On its face, the strategy is at odds with what voters say they want candidates to talk about. Concerns about the economy dominate; trans and LGBTQ issues barely register.

• But Republicans remember how lethal the Trump campaign's "Kamala is for they/them" ads were to Kamala Harris' campaign in 2024. Musk, whose estranged daughter is transgender, has also become an outspoken critic of transgender policies.

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Apple will unveil its first foldable iPhone today (1 p.m. ET) — the biggest single design change in the device's nearly 20-year lifespan, Bloomberg Apple guru Mark Gurman writes.

• The $2,000+ product emerged from years of internal debate. Early concepts focused on a foldable iPad rather than an iPhone.
• Tim Cook, better known for his command of finance and supply chains, personally pushed the project toward a phone after watching foldables take off in Asia. "Tim was the earliest and biggest champion of this," an Apple insider said.

The announcement will be the public debut of new CEO John Ternus, who replaced Tim Cook on Sept. 1.

• Go deeper: Apple's foldable iPhone was a decade in the making (Bloomberg gift link).

The NFL season starts tonight — Patriots at Seahawks, 8:20 p.m. ET on NBC — with football by far the country's favorite sport to watch, according to a Gallup poll released this morning.

• The catch: The 31% share of Americans who named football as their favorite is the lowest since 2001.

🧮 By the numbers: Soccer just hit its highest-ever share (9%) in Gallup's polling on the question, which dates back to 1937.

• The sport is closing in on basketball (11%) and baseball (10%).

🦘 Above: The San Francisco 49ers practice in Melbourne, Australia, before their game tomorrow night (8:35 p.m. ET, Netflix) against the L.A. Rams at the Melbourne Cricket Ground — the first regular-season NFL game Down Under.

• More from the poll.