Americana

1. MAGA beats Musk
2. The centrist Dem insurrection
3. Joni Ernst fuels Medicaid fight
4. Whither the South Carolina primary?
5. Wes Moore on beating Trump

Also: Geniuses, explained.

The story of Joe Biden, which he’d hoped would end differently, was going to include a chapter of historic firsts. He was the first Black president’s running mate; he put the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. When he won the 2020 election, standing next to Kamala Harris, he celebrated how she’d “make history as the first woman, first Black woman, first woman of South Asian descent, and first daughter of immigrants ever elected to national office in this country.”

That was Biden’s gift, which turned out to be a poisoned chalice. Biden has since argued, several times, that he could have won the next election, had his historic vice president not replaced him on the ticket. Democrats were just getting over their irritation at this when Karine Jean-Pierre, the first Black woman to serve as a president’s press secretary, announced that she was leaving Biden’s party and selling a new memoir. Mostly anonymous, veterans of the Biden-Harris administration began telling reporters that Jean-Pierre “created more problems than she solved,” and was cashing in on her incompetence.

“The real problem with Karine Jean-Pierre was that she was kinda dumb,” wrote former White House tech policy advisor Tim Wu, in an X post he quickly deleted.

The Biden legacy question is mostly interesting, right now, to the ex-president’s immediate family and to House Republicans who will continue investigating his administration this month. But it came up when I was reporting from South Carolina for this week’s stories. Black voters rescued Biden’s candidacy; he rewarded them with the first presidential primary, which he wants them to keep in 2028. “That’s gonna be a part of my legacy,” Biden told former DNC chair Jaime Harrison.

That legacy includes the fate of Harris and Jean-Pierre. Internally bad-mouthed throughout his presidency, undermined by the doomed campaign to deny the nomination to next-in-line Harris, mocked by the failed effort to find a private sector landing place for Jean-Pierre.

Were some Republicans always going to dismiss them as “DEI hires,” over-promoted because Biden wanted to reward the most loyal Democratic voters? Definitely. But they now have Democratic company — not people who think that Harris or Jean-Pierre didn’t earn their jobs, but that they weren’t any good at them. In 2024, they were lost in the doomed project of re-electing Biden.

“Don’t just be grateful, show your gratitude,” Jean-Pierre wrote in her previous memoir, published before she joined the 2020 campaign as Harris’s chief of staff. “It can be very difficult for former powerful movers and shakers to recede into the shadows of retirement as they grow older.”

The MAGA-Elon fight over the future

The Donald Trump-Elon Musk alliance ended like it started, 11 months ago: two of the world’s most influential men, on the social networks that they own, posting about each other.

But on Thursday afternoon, as Musk mused on X about supporting Trump’s impeachment, launching a third party, and exposing his supposed ties to Jeffrey Epstein, nationalist conservatives celebrated the self-exile of a tech billionaire they never trusted. Their man was in the presidency.

A South African immigrant who posted cringe, dreamed of microchipped brains, and didn’t understand the importance of halting mass immigration was going to become irrelevant.

“Trump is a hero, and Elon Musk is not,” former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said on the Thursday episode of his War Room podcast. Musk’s eight-figure support for Trump in 2024 was “deal baggage,” and the deal had been completed months ago.

Democrats were unsure what to do with their political gift. Party leaders in Congress used Musk’s term, “abomination,” to describe the bill. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Ca.), a personal friend of Musk who represents Silicon Valley, was arguing in public and private that the party should welcome back a one-time Obama supporter. Other Democrats just rooted for injuries.

“What’s interesting is whether he starts going after people like Derrick Van Orden,” said Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman Ben Wikler, who believed that Musk’s humiliation in the state’s April supreme court election began his decline in Trump’s circle. (Van Orden is a Democratic target who narrowly won his southwest Wisconsin seat last year.) “If Musk decides to train his fire on vulnerable Republicans, he could kill.”

Centrist Democrats want to fight the left

Centrist Democrats picked a fight with their party’s left wing on Wednesday. And the left was happy to punch back.

“Places like City Hall and Albany and even Washington, DC, are more responsive to the groups than to the people on the ground,” New York Rep. Ritchie Torres said at WelcomeFest, held at a downtown Washington hotel and billed as a forum to help the party find more electable candidates and messages.

Seconds after Torres’ shot at “the groups” that have become intra-Democratic shorthand for excessive left-wing influence, protesters from Climate Defiance charged on stage with signs reading “GAYS AGAINST GENOCIDE” and “GENOCIDE RITCHIE,” attacking his support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

As the activists were yanked out of the room, conference organizers played Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain on the loudspeakers.

Democrats find a Medicaid villain

Democrats tried to keep Medicaid at the heart of their fight against the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, struggling to get media coverage during last week’s House recess and this week’s session. They got an opening from an unexpected place: rural Iowa, where Sen. Joni Ernst’s blithe answer to a town hall question in Parkersburg became a days-long story.

India May, a Democrat who came to oppose the legislation, shouted “People will die!” when Ernst defended it. “Well, we are all going to die,” said Ernst. Within a day, Ernst recorded a non-apology video, in a graveyard, comparing the denial of death to belief in the Tooth Fairy; within a week, May announced that she was running for the state House, where Republicans have a supermajority.

Ernst, who’s won 52% of the vote in both of her previous races, also drew a new challenger. Knoxville mechanic and broadcaster Nathan Sage had already been running against Ernst, with the media team that worked for Bernie Sanders; Iowa state Rep. JD Scholten, who twice ran for Congress and lost in its reddest district, jumped in on Tuesday.

“This race wasn’t on my radar at the beginning of the year,” Scholten told Semafor. “Seeing those tech billionaires at the inauguration, the tariffs hitting this place and DOGE, that got my juices flowing. Then, the town hall comments hit different when I was on my way to a funeral for a family friend. That was the game changer.”

Democrats debate the primary that Biden put first

COLUMBIA, S.C. – Over the weekend, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore quoted Martin Luther King Jr., ate fried fish with hot sauce, and thanked the state’s Democratic voters — most of them Black — whose primacy in Democratic politics is part of Joe Biden’s ambiguous legacy to his party.

But while Biden’s Democratic National Committee put South Carolina first in part to shut down any possible challenge to the aging president, the state may not fight to keep the privilege.

“We had nothing to do with being number one,” Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., told Semafor at his “world-famous fish fry,” flanked by Moore and Walz in matching CLYBURN t-shirts. “That’s something that Joe Biden decided to do, for whatever reason.”

But during his last days in office, when Biden flew Air Force One to Charleston to thank Black voters and Clyburn for their loyalty, he told outgoing DNC chairman Jaime Harrison that the new schedule should stay in place.

“He said to me: Listen, I’m proud that we chose to put South Carolina first,” said Harrison. “He said, that’s gonna be a part of my legacy, and I’m gonna fight like hell to make sure it works.”

Wes Moore on immigration, reparations, and the Democrats

COLUMBIA, S.C. – Wes Moore is not running for president. The governor of Maryland will say that anywhere: In a TV studio, at a press conference in Annapolis, at a Democratic Party gathering in an early presidential primary state.

After a roaring response from the crowd at the Democrats’ Blue Palmetto dinner and Rep. Jim Clyburn’s (R-S.C.) “world-famous fish fry,” Moore skipped the party’s all-day convention, which might have fueled even more 2028 speculation; he met instead with an early 2008 supporter of Barack Obama at his home in the suburbs.

Moore did take time, during the trip, to talk to Semafor. His speech had urged Democrats to take a page from Donald Trump and act boldly and quickly, not get bogged down in studies or meetings. We followed up on that, as well as local criticism of how he’d vetoed a study of reparations for the descendants of slaves, and how the deportations and asylum cancellations affected Maryland and every other state.

And Moore described an active, faith-based liberalism that could respond effectively to the Trump administration, now and when it’s over.

Top Chef, which airs its 22nd season finale next week, has been shaping how we think and talk about food for the past two decades. This week, Ben and Max talk to longtime judges Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons about how Top Chef has influenced the restaurant industry, how food media has evolved, and why the show has gotten nicer over the years. Plus, they share the social media food trends they hate the most.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Polls

Disgust with both major parties is the theme here, giving Democrats small or no advantage on the topics they’re most focused on. The parties are tied on which one stands for the “middle class,” and a third of voters say that neither does. By 11 points, voters see Republicans as more “extreme,” but they see Democrats as ineffective. They are not any more trusted on the economy than they were at