Good morning. It is Wednesday, May 27th, 2026, and this is your Morning Brief.

COHOST: Today has a very Wednesday feeling to it. The headlines are not clean resets. They are stress tests on stories that were already under pressure.

HOST: The biggest one is still Iran, and the overnight shift is that the White House now has to prove its diplomacy story in front of its own Cabinet. The Associated Press reports President Trump is meeting with Cabinet officials this morning as negotiations aimed at ending the war with Iran remain in flux, just days after he said the two sides had largely negotiated a settlement.

HOST: That alone would make this a top story. What keeps it at number one is the contradiction that has not gone away. AP also reports the U.S. military carried out what it called self-defense strikes in southern Iran on Monday, including on missile launch sites and boats that were placing mines, even while the administration kept saying talks were moving in the right direction.

COHOST: Which means the market still wants to believe in de-escalation, but the military facts keep reminding everyone how narrow that path is.

HOST: Exactly. And this is where continuity matters. Yesterday the story was the clash between optimism and escalation. Today the fresh development is that the administration has to turn that contradiction into an actual governing position. If the Cabinet meeting produces clear signals about what a deal would look like, markets may keep treating this as a messy route to a settlement. If it does not, then every new strike becomes a stronger argument that the peace narrative is outrunning the facts on the ground.

HOST: That matters far beyond foreign policy. Oil, inflation expectations, shipping, and consumer mood are all tied to whether investors think the Strait of Hormuz story is stabilizing or whether this is just another temporary pause before the next shock.

COHOST: So the practical watch item is not whether officials say they want peace. They have been saying that. The watch item is whether they can describe something concrete enough to lower the temperature.

HOST: The second national story is a different kind of pressure test inside the Republican Party. AP reports Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated Senator John Cornyn in the Republican Senate runoff, a result that underlines how hard it has become for even a well-established incumbent to survive after falling out of favor with Trump.

HOST: Cornyn spent months trying to show he was aligned with the president, and it still was not enough. That is the headline. But the broader political meaning is larger than one Texas race. It says that in this phase of national politics, ideological agreement is not always enough if the loyalty question has already been decided.

COHOST: And that reaches beyond Texas because it affects how Senate Republicans, governors, and House members will calculate every visible disagreement from here to November.

HOST: Right. There is also a second sign of strain inside that same redistricting and power map. AP reports South Carolina senators rejected Trump's call to redraw the state's congressional map, while a federal court blocked Alabama's new Republican-backed plan. So in one twenty-four-hour stretch, Trump showed enormous force in a Republican primary and ran into clear limits in the structural fight over House maps.

HOST: The useful read this morning is that Trump still dominates candidate-level politics inside the GOP, but that does not mean every institutional push automatically works. Courts, state legislators, and election calendars still matter. For the next few days, watch whether Republicans in other states treat the Paxton result as a warning to stay close to Trump, or whether the South Carolina and Alabama setbacks make some of them more cautious about how far to push.

HOST: On the AI and technology front, the freshest development is not a gadget launch. It is a governance argument getting louder. AP reports Pope Leo the Fourteenth issued a sweeping manifesto calling for robust regulation of artificial intelligence and urging developers to serve the common good rather than profit alone.

COHOST: That may sound abstract until you line it up with what markets and local governments are doing right now.

HOST: Exactly. Investors are still rewarding the buildout side of AI very aggressively. AP reports Wall Street hit more records Tuesday as the S and P 500 rose zero point six percent to seven thousand five hundred nineteen point one two, the Nasdaq gained one point two percent to twenty-six thousand six hundred fifty-six point one eight, and the rally was led in part by a nineteen point three percent jump in Micron, the latest company to cross the trillion-dollar mark on AI demand.

HOST: So this morning the AI story has two lanes running side by side. One lane says the infrastructure and chip demand story is still powerful enough to drive markets to records. The other says the social license for AI is getting harder to treat as an afterthought. When a global religious leader, national policymakers, security officials, and markets are all talking about the same technology at once, it is no longer just a Silicon Valley product cycle. It is a political economy story.

COHOST: And Central Ohio keeps living the physical version of that story because the data centers, power demand, land use, and tax questions keep landing here.

HOST: Which brings us to the most important Ohio continuity story this morning. WOSU reports Ohio's data-center sales tax exemption cost about one point six billion dollars in 2025, compared with an original estimate of one hundred thirty-six million dollars. That follows an already sharp jump to about five hundred fifty-five million dollars in 2024.

HOST: The reason it stays active today is not that we learned a new number overnight. It is that the political consequences are still unfolding. WOSU reports lawmakers formed a legislative committee focused broadly on data centers, and committee chair Adam Holmes said the point is to get state officials in a public forum and explain what happened.

COHOST: Which is the sign that this has moved from interesting policy trivia to a real accountability fight.

HOST: Right. In Central Ohio, this is where the AI boom becomes local math. Supporters of the subsidy can still argue that data centers bring jobs, construction, prestige, and infrastructure investment. But once the public cost lands at state-budget scale, the burden shifts. The question is no longer whether the tax break helped attract growth. It is whether the deal still looks defensible at this price and under this demand environment.

HOST: So watch for any signal in the next few days about hearings, testimony, reporting requirements, or attempts to narrow the subsidy. Even if lawmakers do not move immediately, the conversation is now operating on a different level of seriousness.

HOST: Back in Columbus, Sawyer Towers remains the local story where the image and the policy argument are moving together. WOSU reports demolition is expected to take roughly six months and will proceed slowly and systematically, while the city points to new relocation protections, a housing stability division, and a rental registry as proof that the post-Sawyer reforms are real.

COHOST: That is why this story still has to be handled with continuity language. The teardown itself is not new. The accountability test remains live because the buildings are still coming down in public view.

HOST: Exactly. And the fresh angle for this morning is not spectacle. It is credibility. As long as the towers stay in demolition, Columbus officials are still effectively making a public promise that this disaster will produce stronger enforcement before the next crisis. WOSU reports the redevelopment plan calls for nearly three hundred eighty affordable units on the site, which gives the city a future-oriented message. But the immediate question is whether enforcement, inspection, and renter protections are strong enough right now.

HOST: In other words, Columbus has moved from saying it learned the lesson to needing to show its work. That is what makes Sawyer still active rather than just symbolic.

HOST: On home lending and mortgages, the basic strain is familiar, but there are still fresh numbers attached to it. Freddie Mac's weekly survey shows the average thirty-year fixed mortgage rate at six point five one percent as of May twenty-first, with the fifteen-year fixed at five point eight five percent. Fannie Mae's May housing outlook still sees the thirty-year fixed averaging around six point three percent this year, which is another way of saying the baseline call is for only modest relief.

COHOST: So buyers are getting a little more inventory, but not the kind of rate break that would make the math feel easy again.

HOST: That is exactly where Central Ohio sits. Columbus Realtors reports April closed sales fell thirteen point six percent from a year ago to two thousand two hundred two, while inventory rose thirteen point four percent to five thousand twenty-seven homes and the median sales price climbed to three hundred forty-six thousand five hundred dollars.

HOST: The helpful shift is that shoppers have more selection and slightly more time to think. The hard part is that more choice has not translated into affordability. Monthly payments are still being set by rates that remain well above what many buyers had hoped for at the start of the year. So the local market is normalizing in pace, but not in budget comfort.

COHOST: Around here that means people may feel less panic than during the frenzy ...