Stack the Week

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week¹ experiment for April 27th through May First.

An assassination deconstructed. The Defense Secretary IDs the real enemy. The Fed can’t agree, but conservatives on the Supreme Court can. The Chancellor sees humiliation in Iran, the king brings the jokes to Congress, the FCC brings jokes to court and the DOJ meme police go after James Comey. Five million Americans 86 their health insurance. See what I did there? Well, the monks would have laughed.

Let’s take it day by day.

Monday, April 27

Assassination Attempt

Monday, the details firmed up about the nearly four seconds in the Washington Hilton Concourse Level when a shooter rushed headlong down a hallway into a group of at least nine security officials one floor above where President Trump was having dinner. The assailant fired one shot from a 12-gauge shotgun in the direction of the staircase leading down to the ballroom, hitting a Secret Service officer in his bulletproof vest, which stopped the round. In 1.2 seconds the officers fired six rounds in return, according to the Washington Post. The assailant fell, though he was not hit. He was taken into custody unharmed.

The clue that resolved who fired first came from the dust in the ceiling lights. A frame-by-frame analysis released by the FBI showed dust resting in two overhead lights had been disturbed and was drifting downward in the frame after the suspect raised his shotgun — and before any officer returned fire. The most likely explanation is the muzzle blast from his weapon. Prosecutors recovered one spent shell from the shotgun. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said there was “no evidence the shooting was the result of friendly fire.” The shooter’s public defenders argued the video shows no muzzle flash. The charges filed Monday included attempted assassination and firing a weapon, but not shooting a federal officer — a gap that may close as the forensic case develops.

The system worked, but the threat was more deliberate than first reported. Surveillance footage from April 24, the day before the attack, shows the suspect casing the hotel corridors and entering the gym. The headlong rush wasn’t panic. It was a route he had practiced.

He still helped the system along. He barreled down a hallway full of people strolling, many of whom were security, drawing attention to himself, then ran through the magnetometer instead of around it, slowing his progress. He put every ounce of momentum into reaching a choke point staffed by nearly a dozen armed officers.

Even if he had made it past the staircase, he still had to get down a floor and through the ballroom doors to the most heavily protected human on the planet (probably), who had just been served a salad — a route that passed dozens of armed officers whose earpieces would already have been carrying his location.

That no one died is a kind of miracle. The two thousand in attendance now join the 54% of Americans say that they or a family member have been impacted by gun violence.

The shooter took the shotgun and the .38 he purchased legally in California in 2023 and 2025 on a train from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington, arriving April 4. He booked his room at the Hilton on April 6 — three weeks before he used it. About twenty minutes before he stepped onto the elevator, he emailed a manifesto to family members and a former employer. He signed it “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen.” In the manifesto he called the president a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” and wrote that he was “no longer willing to permit” such men to “coat my hands with [their] crimes.” He declared it his “duty” to target administration officials. Federal authorities said his writings also railed against the U.S. military strikes on boats in the eastern Pacific suspected of smuggling drugs.

It was the third attempt on Trump’s life — Butler in July 2024, West Palm in September 2024, the Hilton — and the first in which the gunman successfully discharged a round at security personnel.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies tracks political violence. Their 2025 readout was the roughest in thirty years. For the first time in two decades, the left outpaced the right in sheer number of plots and attacks — mostly Molotov cocktails at immigration facilities and Republican offices. The right still accounts for more of the bodies: targeted assassinations of lawmakers, armed assaults on government headquarters.

Security and Ballroom

The president was never in danger from this shooter, though the event did raise questions about security unrelated to the facts of the case. “I’m the one that would complain,” Trump said Saturday night. “I’d be up here right now saying they didn’t do their job. Oh, believe me, because, you know, it’s my life.”

But imagine a more competent shooter. Or a team of Iranians looking to cause mayhem. The Hilton has more than a thousand rooms; the Iranians, who spent a decade building a network of proxies, would not have sent a man with a shotgun and a training that consisted of being in the nerf club.

The Secret Service runs the names of all event attendees through criminal databases, but not the names of every guest in the hotel’s 1,000-plus rooms.

But it was in the context of security concerns that the subject of the White House ballroom was once again in the Washington swirl.

The White House ballroom is a story you may have trained yourself to ignore. The project is an abomination of proportion, scale, taste and beauty — traditions Western Civilization has relied on for hundreds of years to cool the passions and enliven the senses.

Up to this point, President Trump has brought up the ballroom willy-nilly. Often when more important matters are at stake. The fixation is as rooted in his bones as his fixation on crowd sizes. A Washington Post analysis on April 19 found he had mentioned the ballroom on about a third of the days this year — about as many days as health insurance and affordability. He brought it up with oil and gas executives, with foreign leaders, and at an Easter lunch.

Invoking the Hilton attack to argue for the ballroom smacks of using a near tragedy to justify Trump’s vanity project.

Still, the security argument is not nothing. Every time the president goes to the Hilton or a convention center, he moves through soft zones — hotel kitchens, service elevators, public hallways — where security is temporary and reactive. A dedicated ballroom on the White House grounds would eliminate the off-site trip, and with it the guest who books a room two floors up three weeks in advance.

The cost is the fortress itself. It further encases the people’s representative, adding another wall to an already imperial presidency. And it turns every event into an away game for everyone else — stripping out the particular joy, cultural significance, and vibe (as the founders called it) of gatherings not held inside a bunker.

A Washington Post poll this week found 56% of Americans oppose tearing down the White House’s East Wing to make way for the planned ballroom. Twenty-eight percent support it — roughly a two-to-one margin. A YouGov survey this week found opposition at 53% and support at 29%.

Iran

Last week one piece of Iran reporting wouldn’t fit. The Economist had it: when Vice President Vance met the Iranians in Islamabad two weeks ago, the Iranian delegation ran to more than eighty members — and the disputes among them were hotter than anything between the two governments. The Pakistani hosts spent most of their time pulling Iranians off other Iranians.

The reason it didn’t make last week’s digest: late Friday, the White House announced Jared Kushner and lead negotiator Steve Witkoff were headed back to Islamabad for another round. But two days later the trip was called off — in part, the reporting suggested, because the Iranian side was still pulling itself apart.

So Monday’s news arrived with that picture in mind. Tehran, mediated by Pakistan, offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war if the United States lifts its naval blockade of Iranian ports.

The catch? What wasn’t in the offer. The proposal pushes the nuclear question — enriched uranium, enrichment going forward, who inspects what — into a later phase. That has been, by the administration’s own framing, the entire point of the war.

So the Iranian offer amounted to essentially giving up nothing but the leverage it had gained since the war started.

But the clock is ticking for Iran. The blockade has forced Iran to store oil in makeshift containers and disused tanks for lack of buyers willing to run the gauntlet.

Tehran’s oil infrastructure has essentially become a massive, clogged drain, forcing engineers to frantically stash crude in everything from rusty, decommissioned coastal tanks to the “zombie” hulls of 30-year-old tankers anchored like sitting ducks in the Gulf. With the U.S. blockade choking off 80% of exports, the regime is staring down a “storage doomsday” in mid-May.

Now there’s the kind of term you can just drive right by without explaining. A “Storage Doomsday” represents the physical seizure of the entire Iranian energy sector, where the sheer lack of space forces a catastrophic choice between allowing an environmental disaster from overflowing tanks or permanently “killing” oil wells through forced shutdowns that could take decades to repair.

Monday afternoon,The Atlantic published that Vice President Vance has been quietly questioning the Pentagon’s portrait of the war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have publicly described U.S. weapons stockpiles as robust and Iranian forces as devastated. Vance, according to senior administration officials, has been pressing Trump on whether either claim is true.

Internal assessments suggest Iran retains two-thirds of its air force, the bulk of its missile-launching capability, and most of the small fast boats that can mine the strait.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated this week that the United States may have already burned through more than half its prewar supply of four key munitions — interceptors and standoff missiles that would also be needed to defend Taiwan, South Korea, or Europe.

If Vance’s reading is closer to the truth than Hegseth’s, the Iranian offer reads differently. Tehran may not be giving up nothing because it has nothing. Tehran may be giving up nothing because it has noticed that the United States doesn’t have as much in the magazine as it has said it does. A negotiation is shaped by what each side believes the other can still afford. Iran appears to have done the math.

Brent crude closed above $108 a barrel — up roughly 50% since the war began. A coalition of dozens of nations led by Bahrain issued a joint statement demanding the strait be reopened, citing the cost to global food and fertilizer supplies that move through it.

And the Iranian Foreign Minister went to Moscow. He met with Vladimir Putin to ask for support — the same Putin who, according to Ukrainian intelligence, has been using Russian satellites to help Iran target U.S. forces.

The Iranians have done a solid for Russia in return. The BBC reported Monday that one of Putin’s closest oligarchs was sailing a $500 million superyacht through the strait that no one else can use. The Nord, 465 feet long, registered to the wife of Russian steel billionaire Alexei Mordashov, slipped from Dubai to Muscat over the weekend along a route that requires Iranian permission. The boat has a swimming pool, a submarine, and a helipad.

Hepatitis B Infection Risk

This story starts in the recovery room of a hospital, where a new mother—exhausted, overwhelmed, and holding a 12-hour-old baby—is being asked to make a high-stakes medical decision. For decades, the “safety first” rule was simple: every baby gets a Hepatitis B shot before they even leave the hospital. But under a new policy from HHS, the government suggests skipping that birth dose and waiting until the baby is two months old.

The problem: life happens. While about 80% of children eventually get their preventive visits, data shows that many families, especially those struggling with transportation or work schedules, find it hard to make it back to the doctor on time once they leave the hospital’s bubble of care. In fact, medical experts warn that when you delay the first shot, the chances of a child ever finishing the full three-dose series drop significantly. Data shows that while 97% of babies who get that first shot in the hospital go on to finish the full three-dose series, only about 55% of babies who skip the birth dose ever get fully protected.

Even if a mom’s pregnancy test was negative, those tests can be wrong or the paperwork can get lost. Because Hepatitis B is a “silent” virus that can live in tiny amounts of fluid—like on a shared toothbrush or a caregiver’s nicked finger—an unprotected baby is at total risk. While an adult’s immune system can usually fight the virus off, a baby’s system is so new that 90% of those infected will have the virus for life, leading to liver cancer or even death. By moving the shot from the hospital (where the baby is already “right there”) to a later appointment that might be missed, new studies in JAMA Pediatrics published Monday, predict we will see hundreds of extra infections and at least $16 million in added healthcare costs just from the babies born this year.

Teacher salaries

Teacher salaries have grown 28.2% over the last decade. What your teacher will tell you is that figures can sometimes mean less than they do at first blush. When adjusted for inflation, the average teacher has actually seen a 4.6% pay decrease since 2017.

Let’s all pause for a moment and remember the teachers in our lives: Mrs. Maziotta, Mr. Jewell, Mr. Tonken, Mr. Lang, Mr. LeSure, Dr. Duckham, Mr. Hill. The people who introduced you to wonders, set you back on course when you were lost, and who, as my friend and teacher Neal Tonken, sometimes provided you with a sympathetic ear because, as he used to say “kids need an adult they can tell their shit to.”

Those life-changing people are already undervalued. Now more so. Low pay limits the ability to attract and retain quality educators in the profession. Too many potential educators never enter the classroom, in part because of low starting salaries and a widening wage gap between teaching and other professions requiring similar education. Other talented, passionate educators leave the profession due to low wages. On average, teacher salaries are 27% lower than those of their similarly educated peers.

Pope XIV and Archbishop of Canterbury

Henry VIII wanted to split with a woman so he split with the Catholic church. In a reversal of all that, the first female Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally joined with the head of the Catholic church, Pope Leo XIV. The two prayed together Monday in the Vatican where the Pope vowed to keep working to overcome differences “no matter how intractable they may appear.” One difference would be that the Catholic Church does not let women into the ordained clergy and does not recognize or perform same‑sex marriages, even though it has recently allowed limited blessings for same‑sex couples. In related news, the current king of England– also known as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England – landed in the U.S. on Monday.

Monks and Pot

In other religious news, Sri Lankan customs officers at Bandaranaike International Airport in Colombo on Saturday arrested twenty-two Buddhist monks returning from Thailand. Their suitcases, packed with school supplies and candy on top, contained nearly 247 pounds of cannabis underneath — about eleven pounds per monk. Police called it one of the largest drug seizures in the airport’s history. Daily News, the state-owned newspaper, valued the haul at $3.45 million. Recreational cannabis is illegal in Sri Lanka, and trafficking convictions can carry the death penalty. The monks, many of them in their twenties, are unlikely to face the worst of those penalties.

Extremely Fast Humans

I went for a run yesterday and it was the metaphysical oposite of this story. Sebastian Sawe of Kenya ran the London Marathon Sunday in 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 30 seconds — the first time anyone has finished a 26.2-mile marathon under two hours in an officially sanctioned race. He beat the previous world record by 65 seconds. Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, running his first marathon, finished eleven seconds behind him, also under two hours. Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo came in third at 2:00:28. All three men ran faster than any human being had ever run that distance until that morning. The barrier had stood since the marathon was invented. Three people went through it on the same Sunday.

Tuesday, April 28

Iran: Merz

The German Chancellor Frederich Merz said the American President was getting played. “An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership,” he told students Monday. The Iranians, Merz said, are “very skilled at not negotiating, letting the Americans travel to Islamabad and then leave again without any result.” The Americans, he added, have “no truly convincing strategy.”

Merz is a center-right CDU Chancellor who took office promising to repair the transatlantic relationship. Many leaders have chosen to coddle Trump. Merz went right at his sense of himself as the world’s great negotiator and used his favorite concept: humiliation. Humiliation matters because it’s the word the President’s political life has been built around. Never be humiliated, always come out on top, never let anyone catch you getting worked.

In three weeks president Trump has declared total victory, threatened to destroy Iranian civilization by 8 p.m., called it off ninety minutes before the deadline, sent envoys to talks the Iranians wouldn’t attend, and returned to the same technical questions the Obama administration negotiated in 2015. The President has spent roughly $28 billion to reopen a conversation he spent years mocking Obama for closing.

The response from the White House came on Truth Social, and it followed the script the administration has settled into for allies who decline to cheer. Merz, the President wrote, “thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.” But Merz wasn’t saying Iran’s military program should be allowed to continue. His claim was that Trump was losing.

This was in contrast to the President’s response when asked over the weekend about what he thought about China helping Iran. “They’re helping, but not much,” he said on Fox News’ The Sunday Briefing. “They could help more. I’m not overly disappointed. We help people too… So I don’t consider them having been bad.”

Merz said the war was going badly and was accused of wanting Iran to have the bomb. China is reportedly preparing to ship MANPADs to Iran and got a shrug.

Assassination Attempt

By Tuesday, the near tragedy at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner became a debate about the connection between speech and violence.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt argued that the assassination attempt was the “direct result” of years of what she described as systemic demonization of the President. There is some truth to this.

Her core argument was that the language used by political opponents and media figures had effectively “legitimized” violence by painting the administration as an existential threat.

That undoubtedly contributes to the situtation too — you can hear it in the ravings of two of the president’s would-be assassins. Butler is the cautionary footnote. Thomas Crooks’s motive was never established. No manifesto, no clear ideological frame, no rhetorical smoking gun. The man who came closest to killing Donald Trump did so for reasons no one has been able to name. Immediately, then, we’re faced with evidence that something other than words cause violence. (That didn’t stop JD Vance at the time of that shooting from blaming Democrats; for which there was no evidence, but which is evidence if you’re measuring whether Vance and others are acting in good faith.)

The question is not whether the rhetorical climate contributes, but how much, exactly whose rhetoric we’re talking about, the relative weight of the speaker, and how much words contribute relative to other factors.

If the White House is arguing that there is a link between speech and violence then an analysis of public speech — including all levels of the quote unquote media — must also include speech and actions by the most powerful person in the world, the president.

Donald Trump has done more than any other president to degrade public dialogue and demonize opponents. Starting with his role as America’s chief advocate of the racist smear that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, he is directly responsible for promoting the most effective claim of presidential illegitimacy that, by Leavitt’s reasoning, contributes to violence. His consistent labeling of the January 6th defendants as “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots” directly challenges the legitimacy of the judicial process in a way that, by the Press Secretary’s own causal logic, “legitimizes” resistance to federal authority. That instinct continues from the president today. We see it in his repeated characterization of federal judges as “partisan hacks” and his description of the political opposition as “vermin” that must be “rooted out.” It is a part of his administration now. Last month, Trump administration officials publicly labeled two American citizens killed protesting immigration crackdowns as “domestic terrorists” — a designation easily falsifiable with the human eye.

There is a difference though between when a user says it on Twitter and when a president says it. That’s determined not only by the obvious fact his megaphone is larger, but by the traditions that govern the person who uses it. A Twitter user is expected to pop off. A president is not. The breach of that tradition has a magnifying force that contributes to these conditions.

We know about the power of President Trump’s voice by the testimony of the January 6th rioters who cited his encouragement and the Unite the Right protesters in Charlottesville who associated themselves with Trump’s views.

Usually conservatives argue that responsibility begins and ends with the shooter. By opening the door to causal links outside the shooter himself, the president’s allies also put themselves in a new position in the gun debate. If a single tweet is a powerful enough “nudge” to propel a man toward a shotgun, why is a high-capacity magazine considered a neutral object? If crazy people can be inspired by Tweets then do gun laws play no role at all? Is it possible that the ease of access to the tool is as much a “condition” as the rhetoric that precedes its use? You cannot hold rhetoric responsible for animating a shooter and hold the shotgun blameless for arming him. Either the environment shapes the act, or it doesn’t.

We should probably roll in some historians too as we’re trying to sort the proportions of causality. Ford was targeted twice in a month in 1975. There was no Twitter. Kennedy, obviously the same. Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley — three presidents killed in thirty-six years, in a country that had not yet invented the radio. History reminds us that there are other things that contribute to the unmistakably repugnant act of assassins.

Furthermore, a culture that celebrates norm breaking as heroic — whether it is blowing up drug boats in the Atlantic or putting masked police in the streets — creates the conditions for blowback. It’s the kind of causation Trump has repeatedly argued for in the foreign policy context — about Iraq, about Libya, about the Middle East generally — that American intervention creates the conditions for the violence that follows. Why is that question not permissible on domestic affairs when the president is the one challenging the traditions of separation of powers and due process as he carries out his job?

Asking these questions should leave you with the impression that the answers are necessarily against the administration’s interests. They are the kinds of questions we’re compelled to ask if the press secretary wants to go down this road. But evidence suggests that Karoline Leavitt wanted to keep the lane narrow as a balance beam. Her argument was that because the shooter was a crazy extremist, any words or sentiments he used when used by the press — say words like “authoritarian” — made them complicit in what led to the assassination attempt.

The press secretary was joined by the acting Attorney General Todd Blanche who said to the Justice Department press corps:

“Many people in this room, if we’re going to be honest about it, have done it as well. They’re just as guilty as a lot of people on X. When you have reporters, when you have media, media just being overly critical and calling the president horrible names for no reason and without evidence, without proof, it shouldn’t surprise us that this type of rhetoric takes place.”

No, we shouldn’t be surprised. But what might surprise us is comparing Twitter users to credentialed members of the press corps. We don’t know who was in the room, but the people who cover the Justice Department for a living are correspondents from the wires, the Times, the Post, the television networks. The charge that they call the president “horrible names for no reason” does not describe their work; it describes someone else’s, ported over.

That is the move. Not to draw a connection between speech and violence — but to redefine journalist down to the level of X user, so that the speech-violence connection lands on credentialed reporters who can be chilled from reporting critically about Trump administration policies. The chill is the policy. The argument about the shooter is the vehicle.

Comey indicted again

Speaking of which…

Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted for a second time Tuesday, this time over a photo of seashells officials said threatened President Donald Trump. Comey posted a photo on social media of shells on a beach writing out the numbers “86 47,” which critics said referred to taking out or killing Trump. Comey removed the post the same day, writing on social media that he assumed the shells represented “a political message” but “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.”

The Department of Justice previously brought a case against Comey suggesting he had lied to Congress, but it was thrown out after a federal judge found that the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, had been illegally appointed by the Justice department.

This is a reminder that public figures shouldn’t meme.

The case will hinge on whether the prosecutors can prove subjective intent. It isn’t enough for the DOJ to show that a “reasonable person” would find the seashells down by the sea shore threatening. They must prove that James Comey personally understood that there was a substantial risk his post would be viewed as a threat and that he proceeded anyway—a standard known as recklessness—or that he intended it as a “true threat.”

The origins of “eighty-six” range from 1930s soda jerk shorthand for “out of stock” to the legend of Chumley’s speakeasy at 86 Bedford Street, where the address served as a code to exit before a police raid. Others point to Article 86 of the New York liquor code regarding refusing service to drunks, or naval engineering where the “number 86” valve was used to shut down a ship’s engine. More macabre theories suggest it refers to an “eighty-six inch” grave depth or the power of the Winchester Model 1886 rifle, while linguists argue it might just be rhyming slang for “nix,” meaning to cancel or veto.

FCC To Review Disney Licenses

The FCC has decided that what Jimmy Kimmel says on television is a question of character.

That’s the legal frame Chairman Brendan Carr is reportedly preparing to use to open an early license review of the eight ABC stations Disney owns and operates. Broadcast licenses run on an eight-year cycle. The Communications Act lets the FCC pull one off the cycle if the licensee no longer serves “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” Since 1986, the agency has policed something called the “character factor” — a standard built for felony fraud and licensees lying to the Commission. Carr has spent the last year suggesting it can also cover DEI policies and “misleading” programming. [Make sure that is a fair characterization.] Just as the definition of “emergency,” and “war” have been stretched in other contexts in the administration, the category here is being stretched until it can hold whatever the chairman wants to put in it.

The catalyst is Kimmel’s joke told two days before the WHCA dinner and in a different context in which he made fun of Donald Trump’s age and referred to his wife as an “expectant widow.”

The administration’s argument is that the joke contributes to a climate of political violence. ABC has been here before — the network suspended Kimmel last fall over comments about Charlie Kirk. What Carr is signaling now is that the network’s own discipline isn’t sufficient.

Carr’s stated theory is that broadcasters use public airwaves and owe the public something in return. The unstated theory is that broadcasters use public airwaves and owe the President something in return. The first is the one in the statute. The second is the one being applied.

A license review costs Disney’s lawyers months and Disney’s stock several percentage points. Networks notice. Talent gets called in for conversations. Jokes don’t get written.

For those of you keeping track of things on your Stack the Week notebook at home:

Comey posts a meme and gets indicted.

Germany’s Mertz says the war isn’t going well and gets accused of wanting Iran to have the bomb.

Italy’s Meloni declines to send troops and gets called a coward.

The Fed’s Powell won’t lower rates and gets a visit from DOJ prosecutors.

The instrument changes — Truth Social, a criminal probe, an FCC review — but the operation is the same one. Find the regulatory or rhetorical lever closest to the critic or adversary and pull it.

King Charles visit

King Charles followed in his mother’s footsteps Tuesday, becoming only the second British monarch to address a joint session of Congress — his mother was the first, in 1991. He came with jokes:

On the East Wing demolition: “I cannot help noticing readjustments to the East Wing. I’m sorry to say that we British, of course, made our own small attempt at real estate development in the White House in 1814.” (Also the only other time the US Capitol was attacked other than January 6, 2021). On the President’s frequent line that Europe would be speaking German without American help, the King offered an alternative timeline at the state dinner: “Dare I say that, if it wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking French.”

The speech extolled “checks on executive power” – a direct descendant of George III reminding Americans in the age of “No Kings” protests. The King also referenced “defending democratic values,” and made a glancing reference to Saturday’s near-tragedy at the Hilton — the shared heritage of the two nations, the King said, provides a necessary check on the impulses of any single leader. Trump called the speech “fantastic,” then added: “He got the Democrats to stand. I’ve never been able to do that.”

The King gave the President a framed facsimile of the 1879 plans for the Resolute Desk and a British World War II relic, the original bell from the HMS Trump, a T-class submarine launched in 1944 which sank one of the last ships to be destroyed by a British warship in World War .

The special relationship itself was a relic, argued the UK Ambassador, Sir Christian Turner, though he didn’t’ mean for anyone to hear him. A Financial Times story (leaked no doubt by one of Turner’s adversaries) reported on a recording in February where Turner told sixth-form students– roughly eleventh or twelfth grade in the American system— that “special relationship” was a phrase he tried not to utter — “nostalgic,” “backwards-looking,” carrying “a lot of sort of baggage.” The country with an actual special relationship with the United States, Turner said, “is probably Israel.”

He also called it “extraordinary” that the Epstein scandal had cost Britain a member of the Royal Family and an ambassador while in the United States it “really hasn’t touched anybody.”

The Foreign Office called the comments “private, informal” and “not any reflection” of the government’s position, which is also a lesson to those sixth form students a diplomatic way of saying the ambassador meant every word and shouldn’t have said any of them out loud.

UAE Leaves OPEC

If I have to hear one more story about oil in the Strait of Hormuz I’m going to faint. Okay, what about a story about oil and OPEC? There is a massive break up in the world of oil that will make gasoline more expensive for everyone because the group that usually works together to keep the world’s oil flowing-- that’s OPEC-- is falling apart just as a major shipping route has been blocked. (Don’t you dare mention Hormuz)

So now there is less oil available and more chaos in how it gets to us.

The United Arab Emirates initiated the crack up. The world’s third biggest producer behind Saudi Arabia and Iraq, said that on May 1 they are officially quitting OPEC.

To understand what this means, imagine a group of neighbors who all own lemonade stands. To keep the price of lemonade high, they all agree to only sell 10 cups a day. If they all flooded the street with lemonade, the price would crash, and nobody would make a profit. The UAE is sick of this arrangement. They spent billions building a massive lemonade factory that can produce 50 cups a day, but the club is still forcing them to only sell 34. They are tired of leaving their expensive equipment sitting idle while they watch other club members like Russia “cheat” by selling more than they allowed.

Saudi Arabia, the leader of the club, is now losing its best partner, which means when it tries to set those prices for lemonade in the future, there’s going to be one big producer out there selling it whatever he wants to be selling it for, and that will affect what Saudi Arabia and the members of the club can do to set global prices. Implicit in the move by the UAE is that they want to grab as much oil money as they can right now before the world moves to electric cars and away from oil, which is where the world is moving despite what some people say.

Jet Blue fuel costs

JetBlue is the latest airline to tear up its previous expectations and run to the whiteboard to accommodate the mayhem created by a war the airline doesn’t fly anywhere near. On Tuesday, the company’s CEO said demand isn’t the problem. Revenue is up. Revenue per seat is up. The problem is fuel — twenty-six percent above what they were expecting. The second quarter is going to be an even longer ride in the middle seat: fuel prices seventy-five percent above last year. To accommodate this, the airline is going to raise fares, fly fewer planes, hire fewer people. Checked bag fees on domestic economy jumped to $39 to $49.

You’ll remember from last week’s discussion of Spirit Airlines that low-cost carriers buy fuel at the price the day demands, while the Big Three — Delta, United, American — buy fuel forward. This makes JetBlue really sensitive to the daily swings.

Gallup Affordability Survey

55 percent of Americans say their personal financial situation is getting worse, according to Gallup’s annual affordability survey released Tuesday. The highest figure Gallup has recorded since it started asking the question in 2001. The only previous period that came close was the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 during a period where the unemployment rate went from 5 to 10 percent.

The cost of living remains the top concern at 31 percent, below the 41 percent peak in 2024 but still among the highest readings on record. Housing costs are tied for second at 13 percent. Healthcare is fourth at 8 percent. 60 percent of Americans say they are “very worried” about being able to pay for a serious illness.

Speaking of affordability: The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Regal recently charged $50 a ticket for opening-night seats to Dune: Part Three in its best theaters. Premium-format screens — bigger picture, better sound. Movies, which were once a marginal stretch for the typical family so everyone could have a little fun, are becoming premium events. That drives profits but excises people out of behavior they associate with basic prosperity.

Open AI trial

Elon Musk’s lawsuit of OpenAI opened Tuesday. Musk co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 and he is trying to undo its shift to a for-profit company. He says CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman betrayed the original mission. OpenAI’s lawyers say Musk is a sore loser who sued only after he failed to take over the company himself, and that going for-profit was the only way to pay for the computing power the technology requires.

Musk testified first. He told the jury the company wouldn’t exist without him. OpenAI’s lawyers then showed that his often-cited $100 million donation was actually closer to $40 million. Musk, who is frequently wrong on matters of verifiable fact, said he may have been mistaken on the number but his reputation was worth more than the cash.

OpenAI is currently valued at around $852 billion and is planning a public stock offering later this year that could value it at a trillion. Musk is asking for $134 to $150 billion in damages, returned to the original nonprofit, and a court order removing Altman and Brockman from the board. A win for Musk would end the IPO.

Talking Less

Monk and Altman aren’t on speaking terms much and neither are the rest of us. Americans are talking to each other 28 percent less than they did a decade ago. Researchers at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Arizona counted. In 2005, the average American spoke about 16,632 words a day. By 2019, that number had fallen to 11,900. The researchers haven’t published post-pandemic data yet, but they suspect the gap has widened. Across a year, that’s roughly 120,000 words each of us no longer says out loud. The reasons aren’t mysterious — texts replace conversations, AirPods replace eye contact, the phone replaces the person across the table. I, however, am trying to accomplish 120,000 words in one episode of a podcast.

Wednesday, April 29

Iran

The Pentagon put a price tag on the war Wednesday: $25 billion so far. Most of it is munitions. The rest is operations and equipment replacement. This first official accounting since the conflict began came out in testimony to the House of Representatives — your shared-powers system– briefly–in action. The administration is asking Congress for a $1.5 trillion defense budget — a nearly 50 percent increase — to sustain what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described as an “existential fight.”

Hegseth was the day’s main event Wednesday. He told lawmakers that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “obliterated,” then was pressed: if the threat has been eliminated, why is the blockade still in place? Hegseth answered that while the facilities are gone, the “nuclear ambitions” remain.

What was the point of this war? Well, there have been many, but a consistent one was that Iran posed an imminent nuclear threat. That’s what justified the military action rather than diplomacy. The clock was ticking. That always grated against President Trump’s claim that the program was obliterated last summer. If obliterated, how imminent — as the poet said. Now the Secretary is using that term again, this time with respect to the success of recent military action. To slalom around the question of why the US needs to keep fighting if everything has been so successful, he changes the terms of the war. Now, it’s Iran’s “nuclear ambitions” that are the case for war.

That’s the goalposts moving. Think back to the Iraq war twenty years ago. The failure was not finding a weapons of mass destruction program. Were there ambitions for WMD? Certainly. Would saying it was ambitions and not actual WMD have shielded Bush from withering criticism — criticism, from Donald Trump among others, that he should have been impeached? It would not have shielded him.

Facilities can be bombed. Ambitions cannot. By saying that getting rid of Iran’s nuclear ambitions is the goal, and the reason for the war, makes for a lower bar for conflict.

The most striking line of the day was directed not at Iran but at the room. “The biggest adversary we face at this point,” Hegseth told the committee, “are the reckless, feckless, and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans.” Asked about a strike that reportedly killed hundreds of Iranian schoolgirls, he said he had ordered “no stupid rules of engagement” that would put American troops at risk**.**

The administration’s case continues to rest on deferred verification. The President says Iran is in collapse, the U.S. holds all the cards, the naval siege is working. The evidence will arrive eventually, in the form of a deal. Until then, supporters are asked to take it on faith and critics are asked to be patient — or, per the Defense Secretary, to keep quiet.

Iranian economy

We hear endless figures about the effects of the Iran war on the world and global economy, but not much about what’s happening in the country itself. Now, some data: The war has cost roughly two million Iranians their jobs — one million directly, another million indirectly — out of a workforce of about 25 million, according to an official at Iran’s Labor and Social Affairs Ministry. Annual inflation hit 67 percent in the month through mid-April. Subsidized red meat, most of it imported by sea before the blockade, now runs about $3.60 a pound in a country where the minimum wage is $130 a month. The Iranian government the President has said is in collapse is, by these numbers, collapsing on the people who live under it.

Caribbean attacks

The New York Times reported Wednesday that the U.S. military has carried out its 55th strike on a boat in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific — the seventh this month — killing three people on Sunday and bringing the confirmed death toll since September to 185. International monitoring groups put the figure closer to 220 once boats that sank without survivors are counted. The Pentagon has quietly added MQ-9 Reaper drones and fixed-wing attack aircraft, reportedly A-10 Warthogs, to bases in El Salvador and Puerto Rico, enough that strikes can now be launched in either ocean without moving planes between them.

The administration calls the targets “narco-terrorists,” a designation that allows it to bypass the boarding-and-arrest protocols used by the Coast Guard in favor of what the Pentagon calls “lethal kinetic strikes.” The military has not produced public evidence — seized narcotics, manifest data — that any of the 55 vessels was actually carrying drugs. In an October strike off Trinidad, the families of the dead produced evidence that those killed were artisanal fishermen on a multi-day run.

The first strike, on September 2, killed eleven people. The Times has reported that the aircraft used was classified and painted to look like a civilian plane, with its munitions hidden inside the fuselage. Two survivors of the initial blast climbed onto an overturned piece of the hull and waved at the plane. The military killed them with a follow-up strike. If one accepts the administration’s claim that this is a legal armed conflict, feigning civilian status to attack adversaries is itself a war crime.

In December, reporting surfaced that Secretary Hegseth had given a verbal order to “kill everyone” during a live-monitored strike in which two men were seen clinging to wreckage before a second strike was called in.

Voting Rights Act

Last week we talked about Virginia voters reversing their view on using the shape of districts to retain political power. This week, the Supreme Court reversed what was once settled. In a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the conservative majority removed the Voting Rights Act from American life. I mean, it’s still around. You can visit on Sundays if it’s not napping. But the champ couldn’t stir a ladybug.

The case concerned a Louisiana map redrawn to include a second majority-Black district after a federal court found that the state’s previous map — which contained only one majority-Black district out of six — likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

The state complied, drew the new map, and elected Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, in that second district in 2024. Then a group of voters who described themselves as “non-African American” sued, arguing the redrawn map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court agreed.

The key upshot of the ruling is that the burden of proof shifts. States no longer have to prove their maps aren’t racist. Advocates have to prove they are — and to do it, they must now show intent. It’s no longer enough to demonstrate that the outcome disadvantages one race. A state legislature can simply say: we’re not being racist, we’re just political hacks redrawing districts to stay in power. That second motivation — partisan gerrymandering — has been protected by the Court since 2019.

The intent-versus-outcome distinction matters because legislators rarely write down that they meant to dilute the votes of Black or Hispanic citizens. The outcome test was the workaround — courts could look at the map, look at the demographics, and ask whether minority voters had been packed into one district or scattered across several to prevent them from electing a candidate of their choice. Without that test, the only path forward is a smoking gun. Smoking guns are rarely produced on purpose.

This is complicated in the South by the fact that race and party affiliation track each other so closely. Black voters in Louisiana vote Democratic at rates above 90 percent. A legislature that wants to weaken Democrats and a legislature that wants to weaken Black voters will, in practice, draw the same map.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, after Bloody Sunday in Selma, after a century in which Southern states used poll taxes, literacy tests, and redrawn district lines to keep Black citizens from translating their numbers into political power. Section 2 was rewritten by Congress in 1982 specifically to remove an intent requirement the Court had imposed two years earlier — a deliberate choice by the legislature that the burden should not fall on voters to read the legislator’s mind. Wednesday’s ruling restores that burden.

This is the third major narrowing of the Voting Rights Act in twelve years. In 2013, Shelby County v. Holder gutted the requirement that states with a history of discrimination get federal approval before changing their voting laws. In 2021, Brnovich v. DNC made it harder to challenge voting restrictions. Wednesday completed the trilogy.

On the same day, the Florida House approved a new congressional map proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis designed to give Republicans four additional seats — a map whose authors explicitly cited the pending Supreme Court decision in their reasoning.

Now that the ruling has come down it’s less likely that legal challenges will pause the new congressional map DeSantis has suggested. Here’s how that would go, a civil rights group would make a voting rights challenge, in the past a judge might say okay we’ll pause the DeSantis plan of a new gerrymander ‘till there’s a hearing. Now, the new standard means a judge would be apt to conclude the civil rights case would lose and therefore while not dismissing the case, would not pause the DeSantis plan.

South Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri haven’t begun early voting, and could theoretically still draw new maps before the midterms.

London antisemitic stabbing

Two Jewish men, ages 34 and 76, were stabbed and hospitalized on a London street Wednesday in a terrorist attack. A 45-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. The attack happened in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in north London, and counterterrorism investigators are looking at whether it connects to a string of arson attacks on synagogues and Jewish sites in the city over the past six weeks — including four ambulances belonging to a Jewish volunteer service torched in March, attempted firebombings of synagogues in April, and an arson attack on a memorial wall in Golders Green honoring Iranian protesters two days before Wednesday’s stabbings.

A Fed Divided

The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady Wednesday — keeping the price of borrowing money roughly where it has been all year — in what may be Chair Jerome Powell’s final meeting before his term ends in May. The decision was expected — markets had priced in a 100 percent chance of no change.

What was not expected was the split. Four members of the Federal Open Market Committee dissented, citing different reasons, the largest dissent at a Fed meeting since October 1992. The committee’s post-meeting statement cited persistent inflation, “in part reflecting the recent increase in global energy prices.”

Some dissenters wanted to cut rates anyway, arguing that the inflation surge is being driven by the Iran war’s effect on energy prices — a one-time supply shock, not the kind of broad-based wage-and-demand inflation that rate hikes are designed to cool. Their view: keeping rates high punishes the economy for a temporary problem rate cuts can’t fix. You can’t cut the rates and open the Straits, as no one says. The rebuttal is that what might seem temporary can have long-term impacts in an economy.

Others wanted the Fed to stop hinting that cuts are coming. Their worry: when prices are still rising, a Fed that talks about cuts looks like it’s stopped worrying about inflation. And once businesses and workers stop believing the Fed will hold the line, businesses raise their prices faster and workers demand bigger raises — both bracing for an inflation that the bracing itself helps create. That cycle is what the Fed exists to prevent.

Powell, asked about the institution’s future, said: “The Fed can stay independent. But we’re going to have to fight for it.”

Kevin Warsh, Powell’s successor, is expected to be confirmed by the full Senate next week.

North Korea nuclear arsenal

Remember all that talk about imminent nuclear threats? You thought there was just one of ‘em. A Bloomberg story on Thursday throws a cat amongst the pigeons. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is approaching the size at which it could overwhelm the missile defense system the United States spent thirty years and roughly $65 billion to build. That defense system was designed for a small-scale attack — a handful of incoming warheads, knocked down by interceptors based in Alaska and California. North Korea is now producing enough weapons-grade material to build up to 20 nuclear weapons a year, according to South Korean President Lee Jae Myung.

While the Pentagon asks Congress for $1.5 trillion to fight a war with Iran, the slower, larger danger continues to assemble itself in the country we are not at war with.

In June of 2018 president Trump declared “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!”

Thursday April 30

GDP

The American household is starting to flinch. Consumer spending grew just 1.6 percent in the first quarter, down from 1.9 percent the quarter before, with the weakness concentrated in physical goods — the kind of purchases families pull back on first when the gas bill spikes. That’s the human story buried inside Thursday’s GDP report from the Commerce Department, which clocked overall growth at 2 percent, an acceleration from the stagnant 0.5 percent at the end of 2025. The headline number was held aloft by two things: federal government spending, which jumped 9.3 percent on the rebound from last fall’s 43-day shutdown and the war effort in Iran, and business investment, which surged 10.4 percent, almost entirely on AI data centers.

Residential investment fell 8 percent — the fifth straight quarterly drop. The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the PCE price index, jumped to 4.5 percent from 2.9 percent. Inflation expectations for April rose from 3.8 to 4.7 percent, the biggest one-month jump in a year. The growth, in other words, is institutional: the government and the AI companies are still spending. The country’s families are starting to do the math.

Administration officials once boasted about five or six percent growth. They are no longer doing that. Now they are making the case that it’s a marvel that there is growth at all during wartime. The fact that the country grew at all, the argument runs, is a credit to the administration’s deregulation of domestic energy production, which has kept American crude flowing while imports get squeezed. The 10.4 percent surge in business investment is offered as further proof: the AI boom, in their telling, is the dividend of a hands-off regulatory posture.

Voters get a role in this debate. Reuters this poll this week showed the President’s approval rating on the economy was twenty seven percent. 22% on the cost of living.

Debt Reaches 100% of GDP

The national debt hit 100.2% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at the end of March, based on new economic data released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The amount the US owes is bigger than what it produces. Why does this matter:

It is another way to demonstrate that leaders aren’t leading. This ratio usually only gets this high during emergencies like World War II. Now, the emergency is that Congress and the president can’t make wise and hard choices.

Second, In 2026, the U.S. is on track to spend roughly $1 trillion just on interest payments. That is more than we spend on the entire U.S. Military— well, before this budget request. Every dollar spent on interest is a dollar that isn’t being spent on fixing roads, improving schools, or lowering your taxes.

Third, When the government needs to borrow $31 trillion, it has to find people to lend it that money. If the government jumps in and takes almost all of it to pay for its old bills, there’s less left for everyone else to borrow to build things or get a loan.

Fourth, no cushion. If there’s another emergency the US has less room to borrow.

Iran

Gasoline in California crossed $6 a gallon Thursday — $6.01 on average, per AAA, the highest in the country and the highest the state has seen since October 2023, a 30 percent jump since the war began in late February. The national average rose 27 cents in a week to $4.30.

Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine voted Thursday to end the war — the first Republican to change her vote on the military campaign. The resolution failed 47-50, but the shift matters: Friday marks the 60-day deadline under the War Powers Act, after which the President is required to terminate operations unless Congress has authorized them. Rand Paul has been a consistent yes from the GOP side. John Fetterman remained the lone Democrat voting no.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters the deadline doesn’t apply because the ceasefire means there are no active hostilities — a reading that requires ignoring the 10,000 personnel still enforcing the blockade and the $25 billion Hegseth himself disclosed to Congress on Wednesday.

The problem: The War Powers Act covers not just active combat but the introduction of forces into “situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated.” A naval blockade is, under international law, an act of war.

Also, the statute has no pause button: once the 60-day clock starts, it runs. The law does provide a safety valve — the President can certify in writing that 30 additional days are needed for safe withdrawal — but the administration isn’t using it. It is instead arguing for a third, unwritten category of military action that exists outside congressional oversight.

Janet Mills Maine

In the contest to replace Susan Collins. Maine Governor Janet Mills dropped her Senate bid Thursday, citing a lack of campaign funds to compete in what has become one of the country’s most-watched races. Her exit hands the Democratic nomination, almost certainly, to Graham Platner, an oyster farmer who was unknown a year ago and who has spent the last several months answering for past online comments and a tattoo widely recognized as a Nazi symbol. Mills did not endorse him. If Democrats have any shot of retaking the Senate, which requires taking four seats away from Republicans, they will have to beat Collins in Maine.

DHS funding

The 76-day shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security ended Thursday — the longest in the agency’s history — when the House passed, unchanged, the Senate funding bill it had been refusing to take up for weeks.

The trigger wasn’t bipartisanship. It was the calendar. Without action by Thursday, roughly 240,000 employees, including TSA agents and Coast Guard personnel, would have missed their first May paycheck during a war. The pay they had received up to that point came from emergency transfers between accounts — money moved around by the executive branch because Congress couldn’t do its job.

Step back for a second. The reason these funding fights happen is structural. Major legislation in the Senate needs 60 votes, which forces the parties to work together — and when they refuse, the government runs out of money.

Senate Democrats had blocked DHS funding since mid-February, after federal agents shot and killed a 37-year-old man named Alex Pretti during an immigration raid in Minneapolis. They demanded reforms to ICE and CBP use-of-force policies — body cameras during raids, de-escalation training, public reporting of shootings, independent review of fatal incidents — before they would vote to fund the agencies carrying out the administration’s deportation operations.

The administration refused. That was the standoff. It is also why, in April, Republicans used budget reconciliation — a procedure that bypasses the 60-vote threshold — to fund ICE and Border Patrol with $70 billion through 2029. That means Democrats lose their leverage. They can’t withhold ICE funding to force changes again until the next presidential term, because the money is already approved and out the door.

That left the rest of DHS — FEMA, the Coast Guard, TSA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — still unfunded. Republican Senator Susan Collins and Democratic Senator Patty Murray built a workaround: fund the non-enforcement agencies separately, with no policy riders attached.

House Republican leaders felt cut out of the negotiation and sat on the bill. They floated amendments — additional border-wall funding, asylum restrictions, other enforcement language — and couldn’t pass any of them, because their own conference was split between hardliners who wanted to add more enforcement provisions to the bill and moderates who just wanted the agency open.

When the deadline arrived, Speaker Mike Johnson brought the Senate bill to the floor unchanged and passed it with mostly Democratic votes. He had to. He didn’t have the Republican votes on his own.

Speakers don’t like to do this. Passing a bill with the other party’s votes infuriates the majority’s hardliners — it was the move that cost Speaker Kevin McCarthy his job in 2023 — and it undercuts the leadership’s leverage in the next negotiation. It happens anyway because the alternative, in this case, was federal workers going hungry during a war.

The healthier version of this would have been bipartisan negotiation upfront, on the front end of the 76 days rather than the back end. That is what Congress used to do. It is what the institution was built to do. What happened on Thursday isn’t bipartisanship. It’s collapse, with the votes counted at the last possible minute to keep the lights on.

Eli Lilly earnings

Eli Lilly stock jumped almost 10 percent Thursday after the company reported that its two GLP-1 drugs — Zepbound for weight loss and Mounjaro for diabetes — together brought in $12.8 billion in a single quarter. GLP-1s mimic a hormone the gut releases after a meal. They tell the brain you’re full, slow how fast the stomach empties, and prompt the pancreas to produce more insulin. The result, for many patients, is dramatic weight loss and better blood sugar control. Zepbound sales rose 80 percent year over year. Mounjaro rose 125 percent. The drugs now account for roughly two-thirds of Eli Lilly’s total revenue, which itself grew 56 percent to $19.7 billion. Even with lower U.S. prices, demand carried the quarter. A class of medication that didn’t exist as a meaningful business five years ago is now the engine of one of the most valuable pharmaceutical companies in the world.

Friday, May 1

Iran

Friday marks 60 days since the President sent his War Powers notification to Congress, the formal report required after the February 28 strikes against Iranian missile sites, mining capabilities, and air defenses. Under the War Powers Act, that’s the deadline by which the President must terminate operations unless Congress has authorized them. Congress hasn’t.

The American public has reached its own conclusion. A Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll released Friday found 61 percent of Americans say using military force against Iran was a mistake. Fewer than 2 in 10 think the campaign has been successful. The disapproval has reached the levels Iraq hit in 2006 — three years into a war with thousands of American casualties — and the levels Vietnam hit in 1971, after more than 50,000 American deaths. Thirteen American service members have died in this war so far. The country has reached the same verdict in two months that took the previous wars years.

The military picture is the part the administration would prefer not to discuss in front of Congress. The Times reported Friday that the war has drained munitions stockpiles deeply enough that the Pentagon is diverting weapons originally promised to allies. Last Monday, Hegseth told his Estonian counterpart the U.S. was suspending delivery of six HIMARS rocket launchers Estonia — a frontline NATO state on Russia’s border — had already paid for. Similar messages have gone to other European and Asian allies. “If we’re running low after a few weeks of fighting Iran,” said Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute, “we’re nowhere near where we need to be for Russia and China.”

The Pentagon’s solution is to buy more. The President has announced ambitious agreements with Lockheed Martin and other contractors to scale up production — Patriot interceptors from 600 a year to 2,000, THAAD interceptors from 96 to 400. The trouble is that the agreements are tentative. Congress hasn’t appropriated the money. Lockheed told investors last week it would wait until the funding was secured before expanding production. And the man asking Congress for the money is the same Defense Secretary who told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that lawmakers were “the biggest adversary we face.” Republican Austin Scott of Georgia tried to flag the math for him: it takes 218 votes to pass anything in the House, the GOP doesn’t have 218 reliable votes, and the Pentagon is going to need Democratic ones. Hegseth doubled down before the Senate the next day.

Trump on Thursday acknowledged the economic price for the first time and also tried a new line of spin. “When we hit 50,000 on the Dow and 7,000 on the S&P,” he told reporters in the Oval Office, “I said to myself, ‘We got to do something about Iran.’ And I hated to do it to my people… and the fire is taking place in the lovely country of Iran, and they want to have a nuclear weapon.”

The idea here is that everything was jake before he made his presidential decision. Whether Iran was the kind of tough choice a president must make is up for debate. Iran wants a nuke. This is what stopping them looks like. Ignore execution, that’s the presidential level decision to be evaluated by all of us.

But what’s not up for grabs is that the economy was doing really great. Trump cites the stock market but those affordability numbers are so low because people know what lives they lead. Wages are fluttering ahead of inflation. Inflation is up and particularly in the areas of housing, education and health care, items Americans associate with opportunity in this country. Growth in the last quarter was anemic and the manufacturing jobs are going to the robots.

Sixty percent of Americans say the war has increased the risk of recession. Sixty-one percent say it has increased the risk of terrorism on American soil. Half think gas prices will be worse a year from now.

Affordable Care Act flight

The New York Times reported Friday that roughly 5 million Americans have dropped Obamacare coverage since Congress let the enhanced subsidies expire at the end of 2025. Enrollment is on track to fall about 20 percent — from 24 million last year to roughly 19 million — with some analysts projecting losses as high as 26 percent. The hardest hit, according to the Times, are early retirees with middle-class incomes, the group that saw the steepest premium jumps. In some markets, their monthly costs rose by more than $1,000.

The behavior that follows shows up in the Gallup affordability survey from earlier this week. A third of American adults report making at least one trade-off to pay for healthcare in the past year, including stretching prescription doses, borrowing money, and skipping meals. Among the uninsured, that figure rises to 62 percent. Roughly half of middle-income households — those making between $48,000 and $180,000 — say they have postponed a major life decision, like buying a home or changing jobs, because of healthcare and energy costs. The squeeze that used to land hardest at the bottom has moved up the income ladder.

CEO pay

CEO pay in the United States grew roughly 20 times faster than worker pay last year, according to a report released this week by Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation — both advocacy organizations, but drawing on data from S&P Capital IQ, the Federal Reserve, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Adjusted for inflation, the average private-sector worker’s hourly wage grew 1.3 percent from 2024 to 2025. Pay for the 384 S&P 500 CEOs the analysts could track grew 25.6 percent. The typical CEO now earns 281 times what the typical worker does, per the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. Thirty-five years ago, the ratio was 60 to 1.

Spirit Airlines to shutdown

Spirit Airlines is preparing to shut down, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The discount carrier had been in talks with the Trump administration over a $500 million rescue that would have given the government a stake of up to 90 percent — but the deal fell apart over disagreements inside the administration about whether the federal government should be in the airline-rescue business at all — and, separately, about how to structure the rescue if it happened. Spirit’s bondholders also weren’t keen. — specifically the part where the deal with the government moved them to the back of the line so taxpayers could move to the front if things went to hell in the end and investors needed to be paid out. With no rescue and no cash, the airline is now moving to liquidate its aircraft fleet. Spirit has spent most of the last year and a half in Chapter 11. The business model that once made it an industry maverick — bargain fares plus a fee for everything else — couldn’t survive the combination of relentless competition, heavy debt, and the war’s effect on jet fuel.

If you have made it this far it is a testament to the quality of your breeding and the width of your sympathies.

Thank you to Annie Cohen for helping me pull all this together.

1. Some of you may remember the Face the Nation Diary. Same instinct, new form. I think it’s probably best experienced if you listen to me read the audio version. Please let me know what you think — and what you like and don’t like.