President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday intended to stop states from regulating AI—an idea that had received a lot of pushback from members of his base.

The order didn’t emerge out of a vacuum, of course. MAGA Republicans and Silicon Valley leaders have been locked in a battle for influence over the White House on tech policy for some time, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.

Trump’s tech advisers seem to be winning.

Let’s back up a few months: over the summer, the Senate killed a bill that would have imposed a 10-year moratorium on AI laws from states. Then, when a draft version of the just-signed executive order leaked last month, many Republicans, who traditionally support states’ rights, tried to stop the president from going forward with it.

GOP members including Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene decried the idea, writing on X that “states must retain the right to regulate and make laws on AI and anything else for the benefit of their state. Federalism must be preserved.”

Conservative groups, members of Congress, and governors all reportedly reached out to the White House to raise the alarm about the draft as well.

The Post spoke to more than a dozen people familiar with the administration’s AI policies and White House officials and concluded that this moment was emblematic of a wider struggle between Trump’s base and his tech advisers and industry leaders who used their money and sway to help put him in office.

“It feels like millions of votes across the country just got traded for thousands of [venture capitalist] and tech rich votes in regions Republicans will never win,” one source said.

Compromises were made to the draft to bring Republicans on board, and silence critics, the Post reported, and Trump ended up signing the order this week.

The tension between what Big Tech and the president’s populist supporters want isn’t likely to disappear overnight, though. And as the midterm elections loom, more and more cracks are appearing among Trump’s MAGA base.

President Donald Trump’s support is starting to waver, even among his staunchest supporters, a new poll shows.

Don’t get it twisted—Trump’s approval rating among adults has been in the red for months, and is still falling, with now close to 60 percent of Americans saying they disapprove of the president. But according to an NBC News Decision Desk poll that surveyed 20,252 adults online, the two groups that show the largest drop in support for the president since April are Republicans and MAGA Republicans.

For people who identified themselves as Republicans rather than part of MAGA, the percentage who “strongly approve” of the president has dropped to 35 percent, from 38 percent in April.

Among MAGA Republicans, there’s a much higher percentage of people who strongly approve of Trump: 70 percent. But that’s down eight percentage points since April.

Plus, fewer Republicans report being part of MAGA today than did earlier this year. In April, 57 percent of Republicans identified as MAGA, but today the two sides of the party are equally split at 50–50.

These are small shifts, but they belie Trump’s fracturing base of support. From Marjorie Taylor Greene’s split from the president and abrupt resignation to the botched rollout of the Epstein files, to Trump’s tariffs and inability to bring down prices, there are some issues that even die-hard MAGA adherents can’t overlook.

Chocolate, vanilla, coffee, cinnamon: The ingredients for your favorite holiday foods are becoming increasingly harder to grow because of climate change.

For example, cocoa beans are grown in West Africa, which has been facing more days of extreme heat and drought, according to a recent report from the Weather Channel. “The crop doesn’t like it,” meteorologist Jennifer Gray explained.

And when cocoa production falls, consumers also feel the heat: Prices for chocolate have shot up over the last year and were four times as high at the end of 2024 as they were in 2022.

Vanilla and cinnamon, key ingredients for holiday baking that are largely grown in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, are also under threat. “Because we rely on just a handful of islands to produce basically our world’s cinnamon, it is extremely vulnerable. These are also places that are facing climate extremes,” Gray said.

And for something like coffee, climate change is drastically shrinking the land where it can grow. Suitable locations could decrease by 50 percent by 2050,........

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