People wanted to know what happened. Was the system safe? What failed? What was being done to fix it? And who was accountable?

Those are reasonable questions. Getting straight answers shouldn’t be so hard.

The FAA’s explanation pointed to aging telecommunications equipment and problems with newer technology being added to an outdated system. The cause was still under investigation. The public heard from senior administration officials, but there is a difference between having the authority to speak and having the expertise to explain. When the systems responsible for keeping planes safely in the air fail, people deserve to hear from the engineers, aviation specialists and technicians who understand what went wrong. They need clear explanations of what is known, what isn’t and what happens next.

We have been here before.

During COVID, the White House briefing room became a daily destination for Americans trying to make sense of a public health crisis that was upending their lives. It should have been a reliable place to get information. Instead, political messaging and public health expertise became increasingly entangled. Scientific guidance evolved as experts learned more, but the public was often left trying to sort out what was established fact, what was changing and what was politics. The people at the podium weren’t always the people best equipped to explain what was happening.

That experience damaged confidence in a place Americans once expected to turn for answers. I don’t think that confidence has been restored.

And now, consider what happened with Microsoft. A widespread disruption to Microsoft 365 affected Outlook, email and other services used by businesses, government agencies and millions of people. For many, these aren’t optional conveniences. They’re the tools that keep the workday moving. When they stop working, customers need more than a brief statement saying the company is aware of the problem. They need a reliable place to get updates, an explanation of what is affected and a predictable schedule for hearing more. Even if the update is that the company is still working on it, say so.

The FAA incident and the Microsoft outage were separate events. There is no reason to suggest they had a common cause. But they raise a familiar question: When systems people depend on fail, can the institutions responsible explain what happened in a way the public can understand and trust?

I’ve spent 30 years in communications, working in government, campaigns and the private sector. I’ve been in the room when organizations are under pressure to respond to a crisis. The instinct is to get a statement out, reassure people and get ahead of the story. I understand that pressure. But the desire to get ahead of a story can quickly overtake the responsibility to get it right.

That’s where credibility gets lost. People can accept that systems fail. They can understand that investigations take time and that the first explanation may not be the final one. What they have a harder time accepting is being given a polished answer that doesn’t answer the question, hearing from people who aren’t equipped to explain the problem or watching an institution go quiet once the immediate headlines fade.

There is a national security dimension here, too. Russia and China don’t need to cause every American crisis to benefit from the confusion that follows. They have spent years looking for ways to exploit divisions and weaken confidence in American institutions. When people can’t agree on basic facts, don’t know which sources to trust and assume every explanation is politically motivated, that work gets easier.

We are doing enough damage to our own credibility without their help.

This is part of what I mean when I talk about the trust election taking shape ahead of the 2026 midterms. Trust isn’t just going to be tested by candidates and campaign promises. It is tested when a government agency explains a safety failure, when a technology company tells customers why a service has gone down and when people decide whether the information they’re receiving is worth believing.

Communicators have a role in this. Ours is not simply to make an institution sound more convincing. It is to push for accurate information, put the right experts in front of the public, explain what is known and what remains uncertain and keep the updates coming. Sometimes that means telling a client that the facts aren’t ready to support the message they want to deliver.

We can’t manufacture credibility. We can only help institutions demonstrate that they deserve it.

Technology will fail. Infrastructure will age. Unexpected things will happen. The question is whether the people and institutions responsible have thought about how they will communicate when they do. Who will speak? What will they be able to explain? Where will people find reliable updates? And when will they hear from you again?

People need to know where to go for information they can trust. They need to hear from people who know what they’re talking about. And they need to believe the facts haven’t been shaped to serve someone’s political or corporate interests.

The facts matter. So does who’s delivering them.

The committee told the press before it told the witness.

I kept coming back to that call while talking with Brandon Rios and Jake Greenberg on The Friday Reporter. Democrats take the gavels in January, and the investigations are coming. Brandon and Jake know how they’ll run because they ran them. Brandon was Democratic counsel on House Oversight and later served in the Biden-Harris White House. Jake was the Republican general counsel on the same committee. They spent six years across the table from each other. In July they launched a congressional investigations practice together at DLA Piper.

Their read is blunt. The White House holds most of the cards. Privilege and testimonial immunity can stall a document request for months. Companies have no such shield. So Democrats will go through corporate America — the contractors, the donors, the businesses holding many of the same emails — to tell the story they want to tell about the administration.

That changes the question a company should be asking. Not “did we do anything wrong?” But “are we a target or a source?”

Brandon’s answer is the best advice I’ve heard all year. Figure out how to be uninteresting.

Most companies won’t. They’ll hire a white collar partner, treat the letter like litigation and wait for a judge who never shows up. A congressional investigation has no judge. It has cameras, members with 10 million followers and staff under constant pressure to produce something new.

Jake made the point I wish every CEO heard before the first subpoena. A call to the chairman rarely makes it go away. The decisions get made by the staff running the investigation day to day. Those are the relationships that matter.

And from where I sit: bring communications in early. Not to talk. To watch the room, and to get the call from the reporter before anyone else does.

Notable quotes

1. “The question for most private sector companies right now is, am I potentially a target or am I a source of information? And how can I be uninteresting?” — Brandon Rios

2. “Congressional investigations are essentially civil discovery with malleable rules. No judge. And everything you do is on TV or could be on TV.” — Brandon Rios

3. “The real decisions in a matter are made at the staff, the much lower level, who are running the investigation on a day to day basis.” — Jake Greenberg

Takeaway

The companies that come through the next two years intact will be the ones that treated a letter from Congress as a political event from day one.

Thirty years in politics and public affairs will teach you a few things about scandal. One of them is that people in power have a remarkable ability to convince themselves they can talk their way out of almost anything.

Jensen Huang is a case in point.

The Nvidia CEO repeatedly denied having a personal relationship with Alice Huang. Then he admitted that the relationship was romantic and that he had been unfaithful to his wife.

So let’s be clear about what happened. He denied it. He kept denying it. And then he admitted it.

The relationship was one issue. The repeated denials created another.

I’ve watched politicians make this mistake over and over. They get caught, deny what happened and hope the story goes away. When that doesn’t work, they attack the people asking questions or come up with another explanation. By then, the original behavior is competing for attention with a much bigger problem: why did you lie about it?

We know a crisis communications firm was retained in October 2025. That’s a detail worth noting, though there’s nothing inherently unusual about bringing in experienced advisers when a high-profile executive faces scrutiny. What matters is what the CEO does with the advice he’s given.

I’ve watched communications professionals get put in impossible positions because the person at the top refuses to accept reality. The boss wants a defense. The facts don’t support one. And suddenly everyone around him is spending their time trying to protect him rather than the institution.

That’s what happens when a CEO believes his own importance makes him untouchable.

Huang’s situation carries additional questions about business relationships and potential foreign intelligence involvement. Those deserve serious investigation. But the personal scandal offers a lesson that anyone who’s spent time around powerful people will recognize.

The people who work for you may be afraid to challenge you. Your wealth may buy you access and influence. Your success may convince you that you can bend the rules.

But it doesn’t make the truth go away.

You can survive a scandal. It’s much harder to survive the discovery that you repeatedly denied something that turned out to be true.

On November 7, 2006, Republicans lost control of the House, giving up 31 seats. Democrats also took control of the Senate, with two independents caucusing with them. After 12 years of Republican leadership in the House, the majority was gone.

I was serving as Deputy Communications Director for the Speaker. I was also a young mother with a one-year-old at home and knew another child was likely in my future. Suddenly, I had a very practical question to answer: What was I going to do next?

I could have taken the easier path into the private sector. Instead, I chose a harder one. I went on to serve as a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, helping lead the party’s communications operation at a moment when Republicans were trying to understand what had happened and where to go next.

I didn’t know it then, but that decision would shape the next two decades of my career.

Twenty years later, I’m watching another political earthquake unfold. The circumstances are different, but the lessons from 2006 are worth revisiting.

Political parties are remarkably good at explaining away losses. They’re less good at listening to what those losses are telling them.

In 2006, George W. Bush was deeply unpopular. The war in Iraq had become a defining issue, public confidence in the administration was eroding and voters were frustrated with a government that seemed disconnected from their concerns. The election was a referendum on the president and his party. Republicans paid the price.

What happened next is what I remember.

The day after the election, Bush announced that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was leaving the administration. He congratulated Nancy Pelosi and the incoming Democratic leadership and spoke about working together.

Bush hadn’t changed his political philosophy overnight. But he understood that voters had delivered a message and that governing required responding to it. He had two years left in office and a Democratic Congress to work with. The political landscape had changed, and he acknowledged it.

That distinction matters today.

The 2026 midterms have delivered a sweeping rebuke to Republicans. Democrats have taken control of both chambers. Voters have expressed deep frustration with the economy, the cost of living and the direction and conduct of government.

There are obvious parallels to 2006: an unpopular president, a governing party struggling to connect with voters and an electorate using the midterms to register its dissatisfaction.

But there is a difference in how the presidency itself has operated. Bush understood the institutional nature of the office and the need to work with people who disagreed with him. Donald Trump’s political identity is far more closely tied to his personal preferences, grievances and public battles. His party has often found itself defending the president rather than defining its own priorities.

I’ve never been a Donald Trump supporter. But my interest here isn’t partisan. After decades in political communications, I’ve seen what happens when organizations become so consumed with defending their leadership that they stop hearing what the public is telling them.

You can spend millions on advertising, produce endless talking points and dominate the news cycle. None of it matters if your message doesn’t reflect what people are actually experiencing.

People know what groceries cost. They know what they’re paying for housing and healthcare. They know whether they feel better off than they did two years ago. When those experiences don’t match what they’re hearing from elected officials, credibility disappears.

And when voters deliver a result like this, doubling down, blaming the media or insisting they simply misunderstood the message is a mistake. Leaders need to take an honest look at their decisions, their priorities and their relationship with the people they represent. That takes humility, something political organizations can lose after years of winning or simply fighting to stay in power.

Democrats should take note, too.

Winning an election doesn’t mean voters have given you permission to do whatever you want. They may have rejected the party in power without embracing the alternative. Democrats now have an opportunity to show that government can function, that disagreement doesn’t have to become dysfunction and that leadership can be about more than the daily political spectacle.

If they spend the next two years focused on political retribution and scoring points against the president, they’ll miss the same lesson Republicans missed: voters expect something from the people they put in charge.

Twenty years of experience have given me a different perspective on all of this. I’ve worked in campaigns, Congress, the executive branch and the private sector. I’ve watched political organizations rise, struggle and reinvent themselves. I’ve also learned that the best leaders aren’t the ones who always have an answer. They’re the ones who recognize when they need to ask different questions.

And there’s a personal reason I find myself thinking about 2006.

That one-year-old baby I was thinking about when I made my career decision is now a young adult. He was ten when Donald Trump first ran for president. For most of the years he’s been old enough to follow politics, Trump has been a constant presence in American political life, either as a candidate or as president.

Think about what that means for an entire generation. They’ve grown up with constant campaigning, extraordinary political division and a level of conflict that has become almost routine.

I hope they get to see something different.

I hope the next generation gets to witness leaders who can disagree without treating one another as enemies, who understand that public service is bigger than personal loyalty and who can admit when something isn’t working. They deserve to see a different kind of politics. They deserve the perspective that comes from knowing our political system can evolve and that the people leading it can change, too.

I don’t know what comes next. But I see an opportunity for a new chapter, for new voices and for a different kind of leadership.

In 2006, I watched a political party lose its footing and had to figure out what came next for myself. Twenty years later, I recognize the moment again, only this time with a much longer view of what happens when political organizations fail to listen.

No party owns the electorate. No leader is bigger than the institution. And no amount of communications can permanently overcome a failure to listen.

Authentically speaking, sometimes the most important message is the one you have to stop talking long enough to hear.

Thirty years later we’re still friends. Our kids are hearing the same warning.

Rob is an executive coach now. Before that he built a career in cancer research and ran business operations in the corporate world. He left that role and went looking for what came next right as ChatGPT hit its inflection point in 2022. He saw it early. The technology would move as fast as it moves. The people would be slower.

That’s the heart of his new book, The Relevance Advantage. It starts with a fear social scientists now have a name for. FOBO. The fear of becoming obsolete.

You know the feeling. You built a career. You put years into a set of skills. Now a machine does some of it faster, better and cheaper.

Rob doesn’t argue with that, and I love that he doesn’t. Most AI books sell you the tool or sell you the panic. Rob concedes the speed, then points to what the machine can’t touch. If you’re mid- or late-career, you’re sitting on the answer. Judgment. Experience. Wisdom.

That’s why I reached out to him. I run my business with Claude as a systems operator. It keeps my invoices moving and my CRM current. Nobody hires me for that. They hire me for 30 years of judgment. Rob calls it a moat. What’s inside is yours. Everything outside is fair game for the tools.

His framework, TRUST, is built for the people who freeze. Target where you’re going. Recognize what’s resisting you. Undertake small experiments instead of jumping in at step 17. Steady yourself through the messy middle. Transform.

The part that stays with me is the one he’s still working out. Kids coming out of college were told the tools were cheating. Now they’re walking into offices where nobody knows how to teach them. How do you build judgment when the reps that used to build it are gone?

He doesn’t have that answer yet. He’s writing toward it.

In the meantime, he’s coaching an 80-year-old solar engineer on AI. The man is flying.

The Relevance Advantage is in presale right now. Rob is my friend, and this is the book I wish every one of my clients had on their desk. Support it here: books.manuscripts.com/product/the-relevance-advantage

Key Quotes

“It feels like this machine can do what I do faster, better, cheaper. And I think that that’s true, and I’m not going to refute that.” — Rob Ott

“A lot of people with AI will jump in at step 17 and say, oh my God, what is this? And they’ll get freaked out and close the computer and walk away.” — Rob Ott

“When you commoditize intelligence, it changes the way you’re going to build that judgment.” — Rob Ott

Takeaway

Speed was never what they hired you for. Judgment was.

Earlier this month I joined Bob for the Washington Examiner’s March to the Midterms series. I wanted to start with trust because that’s where every voter starts. Who do I trust to make the right decision for me? That question hasn’t ch…

Read more

Darren and I go back years. Energy, then politics. He was the reporter and I was the flack, and we’ve both changed our shade a few times since.

In late 2022, one of those journal entries saved him. His team at Insider had just won an SPJ award for Conflicted Congress, its investigation into members trading stocks. Washington is still arguing about that story. Then he was fired. He told me it sucked. He also told me it was the most he’d ever talked about it.

So he wrote. An essay called “Why I Love Journalism,” trying to talk himself into staying in the business. Somewhere along the way it flipped into a letter from journalism back to him.

Love, Journalism. Comma in the middle.

That’s his Substack now. He didn’t leave the newsroom right away. He went back in twice, to The Messenger and then USA Today, where he led White House, Congress and campaign coverage through the stretch all of us lived through. Earlier this year he walked out. His tank was empty, and had been for a lot longer than he let himself admit.

He’s clear-eyed about the business he came back to. The outlets that are thriving, from a one-man courts beat on Substack to the Times and the Post, know exactly who they’re talking to. He worries about where that leads, with everyone gravitating to their own churches. He also sees a living in it for journalists willing to experiment and fail. He’s failed before. He learned from every one.

What struck me is how much fun he’s having. A weekly podcast. Photographs of power lines out his car window. Poetry. A Bigfoot story he swears is coming. At 12, Darren wanted to be Dave Barry. Now he has the column, and Dave Barry is on Substack too.

I asked how he knows when it’s time to go. His grandfather admired people who talked about ideas, he said. So Darren checks whether he’s still learning something about himself, the world or the business he loves. At Insider and again at USA Today, the answer stopped being yes.

He says a lot of what he writes now is for the reporters he used to edit. A little inspiration. A nudge along the way.

Consider this one passed along.

Notable Quotes

“And then I got fired. And man, I’ll just say it. It sucked.” — Darren Samuelsohn

“I think the tank was empty two or three years before it was empty.” — Darren Samuelsohn

“Everyone’s kind of gravitating to their own churches, and that’s dangerous as well as a bounty and an opportunity for journalists who want to write.” — Darren Samuelsohn

Takeaway

Sometimes the love letter to the work only gets written after the work lets you go.

In 2005, Nate Cook’s mission was Route Irish, the road into Baghdad where more improvised explosive devices went off than almost anywhere in Iraq. He was a field artillery officer. His job was targeting.

Twenty years later, his job is targeting again. Different adversary. Same discipline.

Nate is the chief strategy officer at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association. Brody and I have had dozens of guests on The Deciders, and none of them came to advocacy the way he did: West Point, deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, then years as the Army’s liaison to the Senate out of Russell 183.

He didn’t apply for the job. A mutual friend sent him to APCIA CEO David Sampson to help find someone else for it.

“But you realize I don’t know that much about property and casualty insurance. And he said, no, that’s okay. I got lots of people who know about that. I’m looking for a fresh perspective.”

Brody asked if he’d pulled a Dick Cheney. Nate didn’t argue.

Washington has a measurement problem. Most bills never become law. Most policy never gets enacted. So most advocacy shops can’t say with a straight face whether they’re winning, and plenty would rather nobody asked.

Nate asked. He moved APCIA’s board reporting from twice a year to every quarter, by strategic objective. What happened last quarter and how the plan changes for the next one. The Army would call it holding your azimuth while the ground moves under you. And the ground is moving. Nate was blunt that populism is creating more chaos in both parties. He isn’t fighting it. He’s mapping it.

“You’re looking at where is the key terrain that you want to occupy, so that you can best set conditions for success in the environment where you’re operating.”

What struck me most was how carefully he walked into that building. He knew the staff might see the military guy coming to impose discipline, so he made himself the person who lightened their load. His one do-over: for 18 months he moved slower than he should have, unsure a guy from outside insurance belonged in the role.

Then I asked about the industry’s reputation, and he gave the answer every trade association should hang over the door.

“That’s what builds the reputation and trust, not just telling someone how insurance works or trust me, it’s going to be okay. We have to show it.”

Brody thinks more associations will start hiring people like Nate. The smart ones already are.

The rest will find the terrain already taken.

Takeaway line: The organizations that win in this Washington know where the key terrain is before the fight starts.

Want more about this conversation — I’ve got a long form discussion on my Insights page here — > https://fridayreporter.com/blog

In 2004, Jon Seaton went door to door for Bush-Cheney with a clipboard. Can the president count on your support? Great. I can get you a yard sign. There were never enough yard signs. Somewhere in Arlington there are probably still boxes of those sheets, every answer written in pen.

Jon and I came up together in Bush world — him in the field, me on the communications side. He went on to run John McCain’s national field program, advise Lindsey Graham and launch Echo Canyon Consulting, named Best New Firm at this year’s Reed Awards. This week he came on The Friday Reporter to compare notes, four weeks out from the midterms.

The clipboard is gone. It all happens on a phone now, and a campaign knows more about a voter before the knock than we used to learn after it. Jon gives Karl Rove the credit. Rove decided grassroots could be measured like money raised or quotes in the paper: doors knocked, voters reached, events attended, every single day. That idea built the modern campaign. It also built every corporate and issue campaign in Washington that actually works.

So you’d expect a guy who sells canvassing data to swear by the numbers.

He doesn’t, entirely. Jon isn’t anti-analytics, but politics is a people business, and no forecaster can stand in 50 congressional districts at once. He reads Google Trends. He watches the national environment. Then he gets out to Phoenix or Texas, sits down at a restaurant and talks to whoever is next to him. Everybody jokes about the vibes, he told me. The vibes can tell you a lot.

What he hears out there isn’t what Washington is chasing. Not one person in Phoenix has brought up the White House ballroom with him. They want to afford groceries and gas. The campaigns that miss it are the ones that are entirely too online, chasing the outrage of the day because it feels like catnip. His fix is almost too simple. Take Twitter off your phone and listen.

I’ve worked the last four weeks of a race the same way for years. I don’t listen to Washington. I call my friends outside the Beltway.

On Election Day, Jon sends one tweet: What are you hearing? Then he waits like the rest of us, with the whole thing finally in the voters’ hands.

Notable Quotes

“They joke about the vibes, but the vibes can tell you a lot.” — Jon Seaton

“I don’t know one person in Phoenix, Arizona that cares about what the Kennedy Center is called.” — Jon Seaton

“You can question their judgment. You shouldn’t question their motives.” — Jon Seaton, on what he learned from John McCain

Takeaway

The data tells a campaign which door to knock on. The person who answers tells it what’s actually going on. Four weeks out, Jon Seaton is still listening for both.

We’re going to spend a lot of time between now and November talking about whether the election is a referendum on Donald Trump. Of course that will be part of the story. He’s the president, his party controls Washington and midterm elections are, by definition, at least partly a judgment on the people in power.

But I keep coming back to something broader: trust.

Who do we trust anymore?

That question starts with politicians and political parties, but it doesn’t end there. We’re having a much bigger conversation about whether we trust the institutions and systems that shape our daily lives. Do we trust the government to do what it says it will do? Do we trust the media to tell us what actually happened? Do we trust the way our elections are administered? Do we trust the information we’re getting about the food we eat, the products we buy or the companies that make them?

And then there is the basic question of whether we trust the information coming at us in the first place.

I’ve spent most of my career around politics and communications, so I’m fascinated by what that does to an election. A voter can be unhappy with Donald Trump and still not trust Democrats to govern. Someone can trust a candidate on one issue and have serious doubts about that same candidate on another. Someone can distrust the media and still consume it every day. Someone can believe an election result and still question the system that produced it.

We have more information available to us than ever, yet I’m not sure we have more certainty about what to believe. We have candidates communicating directly with voters, thousands of news sources, podcasts, newsletters, social media and an endless stream of people ready to tell us what is really happening.

Some skepticism is healthy. We should question institutions. We should ask for evidence. We should expect people in positions of power to explain themselves.

But there is a difference between healthy skepticism and deciding that nobody is trustworthy.

That distinction matters in politics because campaigns have become very good at getting our attention. They can create a viral moment in minutes, dominate a news cycle and put a candidate’s message directly into millions of feeds without relying on traditional media to carry it.

None of that guarantees credibility.

In fact, I wonder if credibility is becoming the harder currency in politics. The candidate who can get our attention is easy to find. The person we actually believe is a much harder thing to identify.

That’s why I’m interested in the idea of the 2026 midterms as a trust election. I don’t mean simply whether voters trust Republicans or Democrats. I mean whether candidates, parties and institutions can convince people that they understand what is happening in their lives and that they can actually do something about it.

The economy is a good example. Politicians can point to the numbers, but voters experience the economy through their grocery bills, their mortgage payments, the cost of sending a kid to college and whether their paycheck goes as far as it used to. When the political explanation doesn’t match a person’s experience, trust starts to break down.

The same thing happens when people hear conflicting information about elections, government programs, the news or even something as basic as what they’re putting on their dinner table. Once people begin to assume that someone is trying to sell them something, even accurate information can have a hard time getting through.

That feels bigger than a midterm election.

The political question is obviously important. Which party voters choose will tell us something about how they feel about the country and the people running it. But I’m more interested in what sits underneath that choice: who they believe, what they believe and whether there are still institutions they feel comfortable relying on.

That’s a much harder thing to capture in a poll or a campaign slogan. It may also tell us considerably more about where we are as a country.

I talked about some of this with Bob Cusack on the *Washington Examiner* podcast this week. [Our conversation here.]

Then someone asked him to go to the Mess. Governor Romer was thirsty. And you can’t bring one governor a Coke, so make it 20 Cokes and Sprites.

Mona Mohib, a senior staffer he’s still close to, set him straight.

“You’re clearly going places, and it’s going to come and come fast for you, but it’s not coming today.”

It came. Puck recently called him the most omnipotent guy in DC. He laughed it off when Brody brought it up. What he told us next was the real news.

Democrats are widely expected to win the House. Scott’s clients are getting ready, and he isn’t sugarcoating it for them. Oversight moves faster than litigation. The subpoenas are already being teed up. Brody made the sharper point: most of what gets hammered won’t be illegal. A check to the ballroom. A check to the inaugural. All legal. All about to be very public.

Saying you were asked won’t be an answer. The question will be what you got for it.

And most companies are still preparing for a fight that already moved.

“Too many people are fighting the last battle.”

One BPI client spent a year battling its top five news stories, about 4 million eyeballs. The five short-form videos it barely noticed drew 43 million. Nearly eleven times the audience, and nobody was watching it.

Scott’s answer isn’t another tip sheet the night before a hearing. It’s an outside game — reputation, culture and leaders who are clear about what they stand for long before the gavel comes down. BPI’s new Reputation Resilience Index found 81% of people say AI makes it easier for rumors to spread. Only 15% feel ready to deal with it.

“When you stand for something and when it’s clear who you are and what folks know about you, that’s a bank of goodwill you can draw down when you’re making decisions.”

What stayed with me most was a smaller detail. CEOs are buying houses in Washington again. Not to sell in two years. They’re planning for this administration and the next one, this Congress and the next one.

Nobody buys a house for one hearing.

Takeaway line: In the next Washington, the legal defense is the floor, not the plan.

Alethia Jackson calls it being the whisperer. When she invited me onto The Power Within, her podcast about power, influence and modern leadership, I got to be the one answering the questions for a change. This week The Friday Reporter is sharing that conversation.

Alethia founded The Ultimate Power Play, a community of women leaders across health care, finance, technology, government and culture. She opens every interview the same way: how do you define power? Where I landed is that power is the ability to move something. A person, a decision, a conversation. Not the biggest title or the longest résumé. The ability to read a room and then act on what you see.

I believe the quietest person in the room is often the most powerful one, and I spent most of my career being that person on purpose. Noise gets clicks. The people who sit back and take stock are the ones who actually move things.

But staying quiet for a client is strategy. Staying quiet about your own point of view is something else. At 53 I finally have enough confidence (and enough gray hair) to share mine. When you’ve spent a career advancing other people’s voices, finding room for your own feels almost uncomfortable.

Alethia knows the feeling. Early in her career she would sit in meetings and hold back a point, figuring someone else would make it. A mentor told her that what she was thinking had value. She was in that room to take up time and space.

Someone else will say it, sure. Nobody else will say it from your experience. Imposter syndrome might be the most overused phrase of 2026, and there’s a reason it’s everywhere.

Since I started Authentically Speaking, colleagues have told me it gave them the courage to share their own points of view. That’s the part that keeps me writing.

We closed on legacy. Lately I’ve been running elevator pitch trainings, teaching everyone from the front desk to the C-suite to say who they are, what they do and why it matters in the ride from the first floor to the third. It seems small. It’s the same lesson I had to learn myself.

On the way out, Alethia said people who help others communicate give them power and voice. I spent 25 years giving mine away. It turns out you’re allowed to keep some.

Listen to my conversation with Alethia Jackson on this week’s Friday Reporter: [EPISODE LINK]. Find The Power Within wherever you get your podcasts and The Ultimate Power Play at powerplayseries.org.

Pull Quotes

“I spent 25 years writing the words that were not my own… I now feel like I have enough confidence and enough gray hair to share my own unique point of view.” — Lisa Camooso Miller

“I’m there to take time and space and to have that voice.” — Alethia Jackson

“People who help others communicate give them power and they give them voice.” — Alethia Jackson

Takeaway

Spend a career giving other people their voice and you earn the right to use your own.

He and Jeff Shockey had worked together on the Appropriations Committee — Jeff as staff director, John as the guy complaining it was time for something new. Jeff’s answer was simple: why don’t we do our own thing? They mapped it out over drinks, shook on it and walked into a PNC branch in Chevy Chase the next morning to open an account with about ten dollars. They paid a college kid to draw six logos. Their wives picked the winner.

Then came the hard part.

“That first year, I went nine months without a paycheck. That’s a little scary.”

John told Brody and me he’d saved ten mortgage payments before they started. He was down to his second-to-last when the first real check arrived — $6,000. He called it the happiest they’ve ever been, and I believed him.

Fifteen years later, S-3 is one of the firms Washington calls when an issue gets complicated. Makes sense. Complicated is where John learned the trade. Nearly a decade on Appropriations means years inside the least legible process in town — the markups, the conference committees, the senators across the table negotiating bills in real time. Knowing how it worked was never the job. Explaining it to the people who didn’t was.

That skill matters more now than it did in 2011. Brody put it to him plainly: the Republican Party is turning on corporate America. How does a lobbyist work with that?

“You have to have a message that is deliverable to Main Street.”

S-3 now represents three unions. For a firm built by two Republican appropriators, that isn’t a detour. It’s the same job with a new audience — and John thinks the party’s focus on working people is a good thing.

What stayed with me most wasn’t the strategy, though. In fifteen years, exactly one person has left S-3 for another firm. A year later he wanted back.

“It’s not about bodies and policy skill sets. It’s about people and individuals and reputations and families.”

Washington likes to measure influence in access and headcount. John made the opposite bet — hire good people no matter which way the political winds blow, keep them and let the reputation compound.

Ten bucks, a handshake and a logo the wives picked. Fifteen years in, he’s still running the same play.

Takeaway line: In a Washington that keeps changing its language, the translators are the ones who last.

That’s where her new book opens. Katie ran Facebook’s global elections work for a decade, through 2016, Cambridge Analytica and the congressional hearings that followed. This week she came back to The Friday Reporter for a second conversation, this time about Disrupting Politics: A Front Row Seat to the Collision of Technology and Democracy, out October 6.

She didn’t hedge on why she wrote it. People know the Zuckerberg and Sandberg version. Almost nobody knows what the people in the trenches lived through day to day. She wanted that on the record, in her words.

Katie and I came up the same way. Campaigns first, an analog world, then a digital one. I was at the RNC when she was, and we all wanted the same thing: a president talking directly to voters online. For fifteen years that was the goal. Then it felt like everything changed overnight.

Washington and Silicon Valley are still two bubbles that bump into each other now and then. These days she’s in DC explaining what a prompt is, the same way she once explained a news feed. Anyone who watched Mark Zuckerberg tell a senator “we sell ads” remembers what that gap costs.

You’d expect someone who lived through that backlash to come out of it cynical about AI. Katie didn’t. Her mantra is panic responsibly: weigh what’s in front of you, make the best call you can and be willing to pivot. Congress probably won’t move before 2029. The states already are. And election officials, from the Secretaries of State to Democracy Works, are sitting down with AI companies right now on how chatbots answer where, when and how to vote. She wishes it had started six months ago. It started.

Every time I get breathless about technology, I hear Katie in my head.

She ended on something bigger than tech companies or Congress. We choose our platforms. We choose what we read and what we share. That sends a signal on its own.

Fifty years from now historians will write about this stretch. Katie made sure her story is in the pile. The rest of us are writing ours every time we hit share.

Preorder Disrupting Politics here: [LINK]

Notable Quotes

• “I didn’t want anyone else telling me my story.”

• “The best thing you can do is weigh the options in front of you right now. Make the best decision you can, and then be willing to pivot based upon what you learn from that.”

• “We can control what content we are consuming, and we can think about what content we are sharing.”

Takeaway

The problem isn’t panic. It’s freezing up. Twenty-five years at the collision of tech and politics taught Katie Harbath to make the call, stay ready to change it and never forget the citizen has a say too.

Watch here —

Her aunt was Anne Northup of Kentucky — a straight shooter, Bradbury told Brody and me this week, the kind of member who worked harder for her district than anyone gave her credit for. Bradbury studied political science, did the internships, landed in the Bush administration, and eventually became a floor aide. Then the first female floor director for a Speaker of the House. Then, without setting out to, the person running an all-female floor staff.

“We kind of looked around one day and said, well, this is crazy. I just built the first all-female floor staff in any leadership office.”

That was not the headline she was chasing. It rarely is, for her. Bradbury spent years managing the suspension calendar — the unglamorous bills that pass by a two-thirds vote and never make the news, because bipartisan and boring go together in this town. She still thinks about Washington that way: an iceberg, mostly submerged, doing more than anyone watching from above gives it credit for.

Now she runs the American Exploration and Production Council, the trade group for the independent producers responsible for most of America’s oil and natural gas, and the argument she’s making sounds almost nothing like what you’d expect from an industry with a friendly White House.

“There’s no pause button.”

Drill a well and most of its output comes in year one. Let regulation swing every time the White House changes hands, and you’re not protecting the industry from a hostile administration — you’re making it impossible to plan for any administration.

“Whoever can win the energy race is going to win the future.”

She means that as a warning as much as a boast: the alternative isn’t less American energy, it’s Russia and Iran filling the gap.

It would be easy to write that off as an industry talking its own book. Bradbury doesn’t sound like she’s talking a book. She sounds like someone who spent fifteen years learning that the real work in this town is the kind nobody covers — steady, structural, done in both directions across the aisle, one suspension-calendar vote at a time.

She built a career on things that don’t pause. Now she’s arguing her industry can’t either.

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If you listened to my first conversation with Senator Shelly Moore Capito and Emily Goodin, you already know this game is about a lot more than what happens on the field.

For this second episode, I’m joined by Atalie Ebersole and Mary Ajango, who bring another perspective on the game, the Young Survival Coalition and the community that has grown around this really remarkable Washington tradition.

We talk about why this night matters, what the Young Survival Coalition means to the women it serves and why showing up — literally — can make a difference.

The game is next Wednesday, September 23, at Audi Field.

So if you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, this is your nudge. Come watch Congress take on the Washington press corps and support a cause that deserves the attention.

Tickets are available at congwomensoftball.org.

And with that, here’s Part Two.

This is a special two-fer edition of The Friday Reporter because sometimes one conversation just isn’t enough.

This week, I talked with four women who know the Congressional Women’s Softball Game from very different angles — Senator Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV) and Emily Goodin (New York Post), team captains for the two teams and then Atalie Ebersole, President of the Congressional Softball Game and Mary Ajango, Young Survival Coalition.

And if you know anything about this game, you know it’s about a lot more than softball.

For 18 years, women Members of Congress have taken on the women of the Washington press corps (Bad News Babes) in a bipartisan game that has become one of Capitol Hill’s great traditions.

But the reason this game exists — and the reason it keeps going — is the Young Survival Coalition, which supports young adults diagnosed with breast cancer.

Since the game began in 2009, it has raised more than $4.3 million for YSC.

And that’s what really struck me in these conversations: the game is fun, it’s competitive, there’s plenty of trash talk — but underneath all of that is something pretty powerful. Women who spend their days on opposite sides of politics come together around a cause that has nothing to do with party.

The 18th annual game is next Wednesday, September 23, at Audi Field here in Washington.

So if you’re looking for something to do next Wednesday night, go watch some women in Congress take on the press corps — and support a really important cause while you’re at it.

Tickets are on sale now at congwomensoftball.org

Tune in and play ball!

That’s the house Will grew up arguing in. Not the Massachusetts summers with his grandfather. The other one, on a small farm in Ohio, where his parents were the crunchy, MAHA-before-it-was-a-hashtag kind of household, debating politics over dinner in a way that let nobody off easy.

“I had to know why I believed what I believed,” he told Brody and me this week. “I couldn’t just posit something. I had to be able to back it up.”

He’s President and CEO of the American Investment Council now, which means he spends his days defending a multi-trillion-dollar industry that most of Washington still doesn’t understand and, more often than not, doesn’t want to. Private equity is easy to be against. It’s the villain in a hundred campaign ads, the shorthand for everything wrong with modern capitalism, and Will’s job is to walk into rooms full of people who’ve already made up their minds and explain it anyway.

That’s not a new skill for him. That’s the dinner table.

What struck me, listening back, is how directly one connects to the other. He didn’t learn to argue policy on the Hill, though he spent fifteen years there, seven as Kevin McCarthy’s top policy staffer, sitting in on the four-corners negotiations with Pelosi and Schumer and McConnell. He learned it first at home, against people who loved him and disagreed with him anyway.

“The vast majority of private equity firms don’t have a government relations person. They don’t have a communications point person. They really are putting the private in private equity.”

That’s the gap he’s trying to close. Not with a bigger ad budget. With stories — a California company where longtime employees walked away with 30 months’ salary when it sold, a 70-year-old medical device maker that got its innovation back and an ice cream truck that turned into a hundred stores.

“34 million Americans in public pensions rely on private equity to secure their retirement.”

That’s the number that should reframe the argument, if anyone’s still listening by the time it gets said. It’s not a hedge fund story. It’s somebody’s mother, teaching third grade, counting on a pension that a private equity deal helped fund.

Will Dunham spent his childhood learning that being right and being understood are two different jobs. He’s still doing both.

Tune in Tuesday on YouTube to see the whole episode.

That morning it was Drumthwacket. I parked and walked into the command center to find the troopers on detail that day, the way I did most mornings. One of them was racing out as I came in — his father was in one of the towers. A plane had hit, that much everyone knew. That early we thought it was small, contained, and an accident.

I walked through the side door into Drumthwacket and saw the televisions on in the troopers’ offices, and that was the moment I knew. This is not what I had in mind for today.

The Governor himself was further inside, in the parlor, with a group of Holocaust survivors the state was hosting for breakfast, deeply engaged in a room you don’t want to interrupt. But reports were coming in that the National Mall was on fire, that this wasn’t contained to one place and we had to get to State Police headquarters.

What I remember most about those first hours isn’t a fact. It’s the fear — deep and gut-level. I was twenty-six years old, and for most of that day I wouldn’t let Rae Hutton, the Governor’s press secretary, out of my sight. I needed an adult in the room, even though by then I was supposed to be one.

The reporters wanted the same thing from us. What do you know? What can you tell us? It sounded like a question about facts, but really it was a search for reassurance, for some sense that someone, somewhere, had an answer. That day was the first time in my life I understood that the adults did not always have the answers.

There was no way to check on the people I loved either. My boyfriend at the time — now my husband — and my sister were both in Washington. None of the calls were going through. The troopers and I had two-way pagers, a little texting, nothing more. No BlackBerrys, no iPhones. You sat and watched broadcast news, and that was the whole of what you knew, professionally and personally, at once.

I had friends at the Port Authority. Several were running late that morning and never made it in. I think about that luck often. Others weren’t as fortunate — New Jersey lost more than seven hundred people that day. I still remind people of this: we were closer to Manhattan than Albany was. We were on the ground before the Governor of New York even arrived. One woman on the Governor’s staff lost her brother in the towers. I went with the Governor and the troopers to his funeral. I have never once heard bagpipes since without feeling that day in my bones.

Later that day, before any of the funerals, the Governor prepared to board a Black Hawk for Liberty State Park. He turned to me first.

“Not today, Lisa. I do not know what we will see. Today, I would like you to stay here and stay safe.”

He was the one flying toward it. I was the one told to wait. Twenty-five years later, I’m still not sure which of us had the harder job.

Debbie Baker went with him — the same trooper who’d first told him a plane had hit. When she came back, she had a blank look on her face. I asked her what she saw.

“There was nobody there,” she said.

That night I drove myself home, alone on roads that should have had other cars on them and didn’t. I have never been more frightened in my life. I got home, turned the television on, and didn’t turn it off. I don’t think I slept.

The next day, we went into the city by boat — the Holland Tunnel was closed, so boat was the only way in. What I saw at the site looked like a war zone, except it wasn’t a war, and everyone there knew it. Hundreds of people moving in near silence, still searching for anyone who might be alive.

I sat in the biggest rooms and the saddest ones after that — meetings with Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki, watching men try to make decisions about a catastrophe no one had a playbook for. I remember Giuliani pushing to get government buildings back open — something close to we need to show them they can’t win — and someone telling him, gently, that the work wasn’t done. Not cleanup. Preservation. It was still a recovery site.

I watched medical students give their time to identification work with no clean edges to it. I walked past telephone poles covered in photographs — faces, names, phone numbers, taped up by people who hadn’t stopped looking yet. There was a smell in the air for weeks I have never been able to describe to anyone who wasn’t there. I will never forget any of it — the rooms, the poles, the smell, the quiet next to the loudest grief I’ve ever been near.

I can’t believe it’s been twenty-five years. Those memories are seared into me in a way almost nothing else from my life is.

That day is the reason I moved to Washington. I wanted to be part of whatever the solution turned out to be — to protect this country, the people I loved, the children I hadn’t had yet and the children they’d go on to have. That’s the call underneath everything I’ve done since.

That day didn’t just define me. It defined a nation.

I asked the Governor this week what he remembers most, twenty-five years on. Not the chaos. Not the decisions. The people who ran toward it. “Even people who weren’t working that day, who went up into those towers to help,” he told me, “and who perished because they were going up while everyone else was coming down.” Tomorrow, like most every year, he’ll be at Ground Zero for the service, standing in the quiet while they read the names.

Twenty-five years ago, he told me to stay behind. Tomorrow, he goes back.

Mike Catanzaro told Brody and me something on *The Deciders* this week that most CEOs in this town would never say on the record — not “we’ll consider it” and not “we’re staying flexible.” Just plain, no.

Private equity firms have been circling Washington lobbying shops for years, offering cash for growth and an exit for founders. CGCN Group, the Republican firm Catanzaro co-founded, keeps turning them down.

“We don’t want them to be our bosses. We don’t want people telling us how to run our business.”

In this week’s episode, Catanzaro talks independence like a business decision.

His firm considered going bipartisan once, right after a brutal 2020 election, when plenty of Republican shops were quietly building out Democratic practices as insurance. CGCN said no to that, too.

“We’ve cornered the market on the best Republican information analysis in Washington because of that trust. If we go bipartisan, we lose it.”

He was pleased to report that CGCN grew during the Biden years. Not despite being an all-Republican shop, but because of it. Clients needed help fighting regulations they hated and CGCN had built the muscle to do exactly that.

“We positioned the firm to be immune to what we once thought were adverse political cycles. For us, it doesn’t matter.”

Most of Washington optimizes for the next election, not the next decade. Hedge the bet, diversify the client list, take the money when it’s offered because who knows what happens eighteen months from now.

That instinct makes sense, but it’s a different bet than the one Catanzaro made.

He learned to make it from Bob Novak — the columnist he worked for as a young reporter, decades before any of this. Novak’s rule was sit down, shut up and listen.

“No one cares what you think or what you say,” Catanzaro remembers him saying.

Everyone in this town wants to be the smartest person in the room. Novak taught a 20-something that the room doesn’t need him to be smart. It needs him to be paying attention.

I think that’s the thread running through all of this. The private equity offers. The decision to stay Republican. The way the firm grew during the Biden years.

Catanzaro built a firm that doesn’t need to know what happens next, it just needs to pay attention.

The Deciders with Mike Catanzaro hits YouTube tomorrow morning. https://www.youtube.com/@DecidersShow