Many Democratic leaders and donors are panicking about Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist who won the party's nomination to be the next mayor of New York City, Axios' Alex Thompson writes.

• Why it matters: Establishment Democrats looking to recover from 2024's losses fear Mamdani could hurt the party's brand nationally. Young progressives believe his formula could spread beyond New York.

Most Democratic leaders had backed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral primary. Mamdani's shocking victory Tuesday was the latest example of the party's establishment being disconnected from many of its own voters.

• "This was very much Pickett's Charge of what's left of the old establishment," a New York City Democratic strategist said, referring to the failed effort by Confederates at the Battle of Gettysburg. "It was the same result."

🔭 Zoom in: Many Democratic lawmakers and officials either denounced Mamdani or notably declined to rally around him yesterday.

• Republicans — including President Trump — crowed about Democrats embracing a democratic socialist who has called for reduced police funding and sided with Palestinians in the Gaza war.

🏛️ The top two Democratic leaders in Congress, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, both New Yorkers, declined to endorse Mamdani even as they applauded his victory.

• Major Democratic donors — who poured tens of millions into a super PAC for Cuomo — were having private discussions about whether to back an independent run by Cuomo in November's general election — or rally behind unpopular incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who's also running as an independent.

The big picture: Some Democrats see the young, energetic Mamdani as a breath of fresh air in a party full of elderly, out-of-touch leaders.

• They also see him as an unapologetically progressive voice who speaks to the anger among voters whom elites have been slow to recognize.
• Mamdani's platform — particularly his emphasis on affordability in one of the world's most expensive cities — also appeared to resonate far beyond the activist class of Democrats, according to election returns.

Other Democrats see Mamdani — a state assemblyman with a history of controversial comments about Israel and policing — as politically toxic for a party whose national success depends on its ability to attract votes in less progressive places nationwide.

👓 Between the lines: Some New York Democrats think that establishment leaders sleepwalked their way into this situation by backing Cuomo, who had significant baggage and ran a risk-averse campaign.

• "The full-on freakout by the establishment is entirely predictable — they do no introspection or soul searching, and instead just lash out," said Lis Smith, a longtime Democratic operative who used to work for Cuomo but has become a critic.
• "This is an outcome of their own creation," Smith added. "If you don't want to lose to a socialist, don't run a fatally flawed candidate like Andrew Cuomo."

Share this story ... What to know about Mamdani.

• Detailed results map (NYT gift link).

President Trump is going to extraordinary lengths to defend his claim that U.S. airstrikes "obliterated" Iran's nuclear program, determined to cement the operation as a defining victory of his presidency, Axios' Barak Ravid writes.

• Why it matters: Trump has staked his credibility — and major parts of his foreign policy legacy — on the success of Saturday's military intervention, which punctuated decades of U.S. debate over the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Trump has treated the leak of an initial Pentagon battle damage assessment as an act of sabotage, and launched an aggressive campaign to discredit the report as preliminary, inaccurate and already outdated.

• Critics have accused Trump of politicizing intelligence and pressuring officials to make an assessment that may be premature — or at least more nuanced than the president claims.

What's happening: Trump announced that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and top Pentagon officials will hold a "major news conference" at 8 a.m. ET today to laud the "Great American Pilots" who carried out "a perfect mission."

• The administration has accused the media of unpatriotic behavior for reporting skeptically on the Iran strike, even while acknowledging the initial assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency was real.

🔎 The FBI has launched an investigation into the breach, and the administration plans to limit sharing classified information with Congress to crack down on leakers, as Axios first reported.

• At Trump's NATO press conference in the Netherlands, he publicly reprimanded the analysts who prepared the report — claiming it "wasn't finished" and should have been withheld until they actually "knew the answer."

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Silicon Valley's on-again, off-again cycle of engagement with the U.S. military is swinging hard toward defense work, Axios' Scott Rosenberg writes.

• Why it matters: The Trump administration has opened the door to big defense spending, the Pentagon is pushing modernization and a new era of instability and flash wars has engulfed the world just as AI is remaking the entire tech industry.

🪖 The Army announced this month that four tech executives would become lieutenant colonels in the new Reserve Detachment 201: Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, OpenAI product head Kevin Weil, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar and Bob McGrew, a Palantir and OpenAI veteran.

• The Detachment 201 project, whose genesis predates the second Trump administration, aims to fast-track the introduction of Silicon Valley expertise into the vast defense bureaucracy.

These new commissions put a human face on an epochal shift of tech industry energy into defense work.

• Hardware firms are pushing aerospace projects, satellites and drones, autonomous vehicles and VR and AR headsets.
• Software providers bring data collection, management and analysis tools for everything from Defense Department supply-chain management to cybersecurity to real-time battlefield decision-making.

🔭 The big picture: Everyone is promoting AI as the all-purpose answer to taming the Pentagon's vast, unwieldy systems and unlocking a competitive edge for the U.S. in its global conflicts and rivalries, most urgently with China.

• Last week, the Pentagon awarded a $200 million contract to OpenAI to "develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains."

Google and Anthropic are also working with the Pentagon.

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More than two dozen U.S. states have trigger laws that would limit marriage equality if the Supreme Court overturned its legalization of gay marriage, Axios' April Rubin writes.

• Why it matters: Today is the 10th anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges. Access to marriage equality faces increasing opposition.

🧮 By the numbers: 32 states have constitutional and/or legislative bans on marriage equality, currently unenforceable because of the 2015 Supreme Court ruling.

• So about 60% of LGBTQ+ adults live in states where access to marriage equality would change if Obergefell were struck down, according to the Movement Advancement Project.

Share this story ... More on today's anniversary.

Ten years ago today, former President Obama says, two events captured the "mourning and sadness" of America's divisions, as well as a "celebration of who we could be," Axios' Russell Contreras writes.

• On June 26, 2015, Obama delivered a eulogy — and sang the opening lines of "Amazing Grace" — for the leader of a Black church in Charleston, S.C., one of nine victims of a shooting there.
• Hours earlier, his team had lauded the Supreme Court's landmark ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.

Why it matters: In an interview with social media influencer Garrison Hayes, out today, Obama calls that day a defining time for him and his administration.

Zoom in: Taken together, the events seemed to reflect some of the nation's racial and cultural divisions that many hoped Obama's presidency would bridge.

• But in a video of the interview previewed by Axios, Obama tells Hayes that he was inspired by the examples of "courage" he saw that day, and the challenges it represented for the nation.
• "I think what pulls it all together is that no one person did any of that. It was just a bunch of people figuring out how I can make something better," Obama says.

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One of the easiest ways to minimize AI's environmental impact may be to move where the processing is done, Axios' Ben Berkowitz writes from new academic research conducted with Qualcomm.

• Why it matters: Running AI on devices instead of in the cloud could slash the power consumption of queries by about 90%, the study finds.

The big picture: The AI boom is creating huge demands for power. One oft-cited rule of thumb says querying an AI model consumes about 10 times the power of a Google search.

💡 How it works: Researchers at U.C. Riverside ran a series of experiments comparing the performance of various generative AI models.

• Running any of six different models on the phones consumed anywhere from 75% to 95% less power, with associated sharp decreases in water consumption and overall carbon footprint.

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Of Alabama's largest cities, only one is consistently increasing in population: Huntsville, Derek Lacey writes for Axios Huntsville — which debuted Monday.

• Why it matters: Huntsville's population growth is driven by low cost of living, high quality of life — and a strong jobs market buoyed by the massive federal presence at Redstone Arsenal, a military base that houses workers from NASA, the Justice Department and the FBI.

Since 2020, Mobile, Birmingham and Montgomery have slowly declined in population as Huntsville soared into No. 1.

Huntsville is our 34th Axios Local city!

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Snagging stuffed animals from finicky claw machines is all the rage in Houston — and across the country, Axios Houston's Shafaq Patel writes.

• Why it matters: It's fun. On weekend nights, crowds pack claw machine arcades almost shoulder to shoulder. Dozens of people can be spotted with clear bags shaped by the squished plushies inside.

Dozens of arcades are opening across Houston with the same formula: rows of machines with plush toys waiting to be captured by the metal claw.

• Such arcades have been a hit in Japan for years and started popping up all over the U.S. recently, including the Phoenix metro area, Tampa, Chicago and Salt Lake City.

Keep reading.