DL Open Thread: Tuesday, November 10, 2026

Delaware House R Caucus Chooses Leadership.  They’ve dusted off Danny Short again:

Long-time State Rep. Danny Short (R-Seaford) replaces State Rep. Tim Dukes (R-Laurel) as Minority Leader. Short is the longest-serving current member of the House of Representatives – Democrat or Republican. He previously served as Minority Leader from 2013 to 2023.

According to House GOP Caucus Director of Policy & Communications Joseph Fulgham, Dukes was initially interested in continuing in his caucus leadership role, but fell ill several weeks ago and has been under going treatment.

Short will lead the smallest GOP House Caucus in Delaware ever – with just 11 members. Democrats now hold a supermajority in that chamber, meaning they can pass most money bills and constitutional amendments without Republican votes.

State Rep. Valerie Jones Giltner (R-Georgetown) replaces Jeff Spiegelman (R-Clayton) as Minority Whip.

Personal To Speaker Mimi: There is no way this diminished Caucus should retain the amount of committee spots they’ve previously had.  Accordingly, committee membership should be adjusted to reflect the Democrats’ new super-majority.   Yes, even on the money committees.  The Senate should do the same with the money committees.

I know you’re all wondering about this Nvidia story, including Trump’s role in it.  Read this:

Imagine this for a moment: An alleged Chinese spy seduces the leader of the world’s second-biggest company in order to help her country beat the U.S. in a contest to master the future’s most important technology. The president of the United States is aware of the relationship.

I’d read that thriller on a long-haul flight, absolutely.

Except U.S. intelligence officials say it’s not a fiction. Over the weekend, Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, the company that dominates the market for A.I. computer chips, admitted that he had an affair with a Chinese businesswoman, Alice Huang, who U.S. spy agencies said was a cutout for Beijing. (They’re not related. This isn’t a George R.R. Martin novel.)

There’s more to all this than romantic scandal and corporate espionage. The United States and China are in a race to control the future of artificial intelligence. Nvidia makes the chips that have for now put the United States ahead. To keep it that way, Washington bars Nvidia from selling chips to China.

Enter Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen who is an executive at a Singapore-based data-center company called Megaspeed. It’s unclear when she first met Huang from Nvidia, but in 2024 they were photographed together at a bar in Taipei as Megaspeed prepared to spend $2 billion on Nvidia chips. Investigators from the U.S. Commerce Department were interested in that: Was Megaspeed helping China sidestep American export restrictions? Whom did she really work for? (Alice Huang has not responded to multiple attempts to reach her for comment in recent days.)

U.S. officials concluded she was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security to gather information on the American C.E.O. and potentially to influence his company to funnel chips to China. That’s not how America wins the global competition for dominance of A.I.

Did I mention Trump?:

There could be political fallout as well. Huang is a close ally of President Trump. He is also friendly with the Chinese, whom he told Bloomberg are “not our enemies.” Last year, he persuaded the president to roll back some of the ban on chip sales to China, after which Nvidia sold its second-most valuable chip there. (The U.S. government took a 25 percent cut of the sales.) And Nvidia has given at least $20 million to Trump’s ballroom fund.

Yep.  Absolute corruption.  You were maybe expecting something else?

Congress To The Rescue On This?:

The Information is reporting (paywall) that regardless of what multiple investigations unearth about NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with a suspected Chinese spy, the scandal is likely to spur Congress to impose tighter export controls on the advanced processors used in AI data centers. There’s been a big bipartisan push for this in Congress for a while but it’s largely been headed off by White House resistance. That resistance seems to center on Trump himself and the small coterie of Silicon Valley advisors who run AI policy at the White House. As I noted in this post, the argument for tight export controls seems pretty strong to me, certainly if we’re operating on the premise that U.S. superiority in AI development is a critical national security interest.

When I say “to me” I’m noting the fact that tech export control policy is way outside any area of expertise for me. So I’m leaving open the possibility that there are good arguments I’m not considering. But I’m at least skeptical. The Information article notes that NVIDIA’s arguments against tighter restrictions is that blocking China from using these advanced chips will drive them to develop their own advanced chips and that future export of those chips to other countries will mean a lot of global AI doesn’t run on U.S. hardware and standards. With the same caveat that I’m new to this topic, that at least sounds a lot more like an argument for defending NVIDIA’s global market share than safeguarding U.S. security interests.

One additional point on this which goes to assumptions and premises. We’re told that AI development poses severe — and at least to some people, existential — dangers to society, economy, maybe even the species. But a major argument against any slowdown on development is that slowing down AI development in the U.S. means risking that China will catch up to or surpass the U.S.

I don’t see how you can have this both ways.

Questions For The Capitulators:

The tech and media moguls who lined up behind Trump in the heady days of January 2025 may want to disappear, Homer Simpson–like, into the bushes. But it won’t be that simple. Media watchers will not forget the way ABC settled, rather than contested, the libel suit over George Stephanopoulos’s characterization of E. Jean Carroll’s successful defamation claim against Trump. Or the way Jeff Bezos has meddled in the Washington Post’s editorial decisions and gutted its newsroom. Or the fawning of the Ellison family, with its gala “honoring the Trump White House” and its attempts to remake CBS News. It should be obvious following the midterms that Trump never had a mandate for ICE agents to shoot people in American streets, or to start an illegal foreign war that drove up living costs, while enriching himself and his family and arresting journalists and protesters. The easy capitulation of media moguls always smelled rotten; now it also stinks of absurdity. 

Absurd or not, much of the damage to journalistic institutions cannot be reversed. Even if Bezos withdraws his diktat that the Post only run opinion pieces that foreground “personal liberties and free markets,” which is doubtful, a third of the newsroom will still have been laid off—a mindless act of institutional self-harm that the Washington Post Guild said disproportionately affected journalists of color. We’re more likely to see a thawing of the frosty relationship between David Ellison, the chief executive of Skydance, and Democratic lawmakers, given that he previously donated to Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. (He won’t be able to shrug them off, as he was accused of doing earlier this year, if he’s served with a congressional subpoena.) But the fact will remain that the Ellison media empire now controls CBS and CNN—alongside all manner of other Hollywood and TV assets—and has already changed how the first of those news organizations runs.

Elsewhere in conservative media land, there are signals that Rupert Murdoch, who has had a complicated relationship with Trump, is ready to move on now that the MAGA fever has broken. On Wednesday, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal announced the arrival of “the Trump reckoning,” saying he was the “main architect” of the Republican collapse and that “the GOP needs a debate about what it stands for after Donald Trump, and let’s hope it starts this week.”

The story has so far been more complicated for Fox News. Trump lashed out at the network on election night, saying it “bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse.” That seemed a little undeserved. Fox’s primetime opinion hosts—such as Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Jesse Watters—have long elevated Trump to cultlike status. And its hosts and talking heads continued to give Trump an easy ride on election night, as The Guardian’s Jeremy Barr noted after—tough gig!—apparently watching more than six and a half hours of the network’s rolling coverage. Yet Fox’s on-screen pundits could only spin so much. “We believe President Trump will be judged as a bold and consequential leader,” Watters said. “But in the short term, voters delivered judgment day, and it was no bueno.”

I confess that this story fascinates me, as my dual major in college was News Journalism and Political Science.  Hope there are a few of you like me out there.

What do you want to talk about?