Forget the would-be Cabinet secretaries, the Beltway power brokers, the wannabe senior White House advisers. If you want to remake the federal bureaucracy in your own image, you don’t start at the top — you start at the bottom. Legislative assistants, press aides, junior staffers. “The loaf has to go in the oven and bake for 10 years so that the class of credentialed experts — the people who know the system and know where the levers of power are — are your people,” says Saurabh Sharma, the 25-year-old co-founder of American Moment, a small but scrappy organization quietly reshaping the conservative establishment in Washington. “The way you make senior staff is by making junior staff 10 years earlier.”

“Founded in 2021 with the backing of now-Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, the group is part of a broader movement that’s underway in Washington to recruit right-leaning staffers to help the next Republican president — whoever that may be — wage war on the ‘deep state’ and entrench the populist political revolt that began with the Trump administration,” writes Ian Ward in this week’s Friday Read.

Finding internships for young, Trumpian true believers may sound like a small endeavor, but American Moment is trying to play the long game. “The junior people that they’re investing in now … are going to be the mid-career and late-career senior officials of a presidential administration in the 2030s and 2040s,” says Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. “That hasn’t happened ever in the conservative movement.”

Read the story.

“Last night, the House saw its shadow. Unfortunately, this means there will be two more weeks of Santos.”

Can you guess who tweeted this about New York Republican Rep. George Santos yesterday? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**

Will College Flunk the Dems? … Once upon a time, journalist John B. Judis and scholar Ruy Teixeira wrote a book called The Emerging Democratic Majority that now reads like a fairy tale. In it, they predicted that an enduring, winning Democratic coalition would redefine American politics. So, what the hell happened? That’s what they try to answer in their new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, which posits that a Democratic Party now defined by the whims and sensibilities of college campuses has eroded the New Deal-style economic messaging that once led the party to triumph. Do they have a point, or is this just more “those darn kids” messaging? Michael Schaffer breaks it down in this week’s Capital City column.

This week, after a year of frantic hand-waving about the risks of artificial intelligence, the White House actually did something! Unfortunately, the “something” is a 111-page executive order stuffed with technical details about AI, and oof, you haven’t even read the summary of the summary. No worries — here are your cocktail party talking points to sound in the know (from global technology editor Steve Heuser.).

- Cover your left flank: “Incredible speech by Kamala Harris in the U.K., yeah? Algorithmic discrimination, she really called it out. Just hope the president isn’t hanging her out to dry.”

- Cover your right flank: “Honestly, I’m a little worried it doesn’t go harder after China. But at least there’s no real handcuffs on industry. I mean, honestly, it’s like Google wrote the thing.” (Chuckle, light cigar.)

- Hint that you’ve got some AI stock: “Bro, no licenses, no enforcement? We’re getting some skilled workers into the country? And it doesn’t even COVER the biggest models? We’re good.”

- Joke that you fed it into ChatGPT: “Yeah, I had it summarize it in 100 words and sent it to everyone on my Substack. Guess who just got invited onto MSNBC?”

These Boots Were Made for Campaigning … Of all the issues at play in the GOP presidential primary, the internet has seized on one question of vital importance: Is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wearing height-boosting inserts in his cowboy boots? Rather than relying on those viral TikTok posts, menswear critic Derek Guy reached out to three master shoemakers at the top of the field. All of them told him that DeSantis does look like he’s wearing inserts. “There’s no doubt,” said Houston-based boot-maker Zephan Parker.

Biden’s AI Warrior … With the announcement of an executive order regulating AI this week, the Biden administration took a major step toward reigning in a tech industry that had largely enjoyed an amenable, hands-off relationship with Democrats. CEOs can thank — or blame — Bruce Reed for that. The 63-year-old White House deputy chief of staff and longtime policy whiz has been sounding the alarm on the potential dangers of runaway AI growth, and now, in a rare set of extended interviews with Nancy Scola, he reveals Biden’s thinking on Big Tech, an industry he views as responsible for — and insulated from — the negative consequences of the explosion in social media. “It’s about time that policymakers try to keep up,” Reed says. “We can’t just sit back and watch to see how this all turns out.”

**Who Dissed answer: It was Arkansas Rep. and fellow Republican Steve Womack.

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