The Daily Brief
Today
Good morning. The heaviest story is the slow collapse of Donald Trump's second administration. [Democrats say the Iran war, high prices and Trump's sinking popularity give them a real chance of congressional majorities](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/09/18/democrats-are-feeling-increasingly-bullish-about-controlling-congress), and the base can feel it — a Jon Ossoff rally now feels therapeutic to Democrats who have lived every fresh horror of the never-ending Iran war. Even the friendly press is cracking: [Fox News is struggling to cope with the terrible stories piling up, from the Iran debacle to a report of a Russian oligarch funding Don Jr.'s wedding, and with its own poll hitting Trump](https://newrepublic.com/article/215566/fox-full-meltdown-network-poll-hits-trump-brutal-news).
Abroad, Vladimir Putin is staging an election that matters to almost no one but himself and his inner circle — proof that even autocrats need the appearance of consent. The machinery is failing on cue: numerous electronic voting machines malfunctioned on the first day of Russia's parliamentary elections.
Capital keeps moving regardless. Anthropic and OpenAI are hunting smaller data-center deals as they race to deploy AI capacity, while the same titans line up to attend a White House dinner for Xi Jinping's Washington visit next week — the tech barons courting two governments at once. Washington lets them: a bipartisan corruption of inaction shields AI oligarchs from accountability, even as Republican lawmakers concede AI's threat to humanity is no hoax. In energy, oil fell for a third day even as Morgan Stanley argues crude is tightening.
Working people still pried loose real gains. [The Postal Service killed Trump's voter-vetting system after the Supreme Court rejected his effort to limit mail-in voting](https://www.rawstory.com/trump-mail-in-voting-order-2677881226), and [South Korea is set to approve abortion pills next year, after long maintaining one of the strictest anti-abortion policies among developed countries](https://time.com/article/2026/09/18/south-korea-abortion-pill-mifepristone-misoprostol) — rights expanded where the state had long refused them.
Zoom out: The day adds up to a besieged Trump administration losing ground in the polls, the press and the courts, while Putin stages a hollow election and AI capital courts power on both sides of the Pacific.