The Friday Brief, July 10, 2026

#ETTD World Cup Edition

Inside:
Mitch McConnell From The Great Beyond
China Keeps Russia In The Fight
Trump Bet the Economy On AI…Ooops
The Brain Drain to China
Trump Bet The Economy On AI
Mark Carney Leads The Free World
#BinItToWinIt
Not So Blind Item
The End of Reading
Mildly Terrifying

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The Big Picture

Mitch McConnell From the Great Beyond

Let’s be honest about the man before we’re honest about the moment.

First, since We Have Friends Everywhere, including his hospital, I can report he’s alive and in a cardiac/stroke rehab ward. How cogent or conscious he is right now was not in the scope of our source’s information, but he’s not dead. Yet.

Harry Reid once told me there were three great majority leaders in his lifetime: himself, LBJ, and Mitch McConnell, and Mitch was good at it even in the minority. It wasn’t that he liked McConnell’s policies.

It was that game recognizes game, and McConnell had it.

Mitch McConnell earned every ounce of Democratic loathing. He stole a Supreme Court seat from Barack Obama in broad daylight, invented a principle to do it, and