Tess Owen: “When I started to listen to the much-hyped new podcast from Katie Miller, I’d hoped to learn something, anything, to justify the many irreplaceable hours of my life I had already committed to it. I wanted a salacious tidbit or quote from one of the nearly 20 episodes that have dropped since August. I wanted moments that might help me understand the kind of person who would be married to Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and architect of many of the Trump administration’s harshest and darkest policies.”

“I did not get any of these things. The podcast, I’m afraid, is eye-wateringly boring—void of a single revelatory moment.”

President Trump’s media company Trump Media & Technology agreed to merge with fusion power company TAE Technologies in an all-stock deal worth more than $6 billion, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The deal intends to combine Trump Media & Technology’s “access to significant capital” and TAE’s “leading fusion technology” to supply power for the artificial-intelligence technology boom.

Jonathan Bernstein: “Donald Trump may have finally killed off the presidential prime time address with his lecture at the American people Wednesday night.”

“For better or worse, it’s a ritual that no longer makes much sense. It worked during the era (roughly from Dwight Eisenhower through Ronald Reagan) when most voters were watching television at night and tuned in to one of the big three networks. Once that eroded, it became essentially impossible to assemble huge audiences – or to signal, via the TV networks breaking into the regular programming that everyone (almost) was watching, that the president’s words were important.”

The final Emerson national survey of 2025 finds President Trump with a 41% job approval rating and 50% job disapproval.

The president’s approval and disapproval numbers have flipped since his inaugural survey, from 41% disapproving to 41% approving, and 49% approving to 50% disapproving.

New York Times: “Mr. Trump, always more comfortable with what he calls his ‘weave’ of free association rather than reading from a teleprompter, raced through his talk as if he was late to an important dinner. There were no digressions, unlike his speech in Pennsylvania a week ago when he repeatedly veered from the topic. At times he seemed to be yelling — almost as if he didn’t believe he had to take the time to convince his audience of how well his first 11 months had gone.”

Washington Post: “Trump crammed his usual 90-minute rally routine into 18 minutes of prime-time broadcast television on Wednesday, perplexing ‘Survivor’ finale viewers and his own allies alike.”

“He spoke more than 2,600 words in that time, markedly faster than his usual plodding pace at the teleprompter. His purpose was to ease concerns about the economy and to persuade Americans that he gets it. Afterward, even his own allies puzzled over whether the president did more harm than good with his rushed delivery and harsh tone.”