Stack the Week

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week 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 27Assassination AttemptMonday, 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 BallroomThe 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%.IranLast 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 RiskThis 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 s**t 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 CanterburyHenry 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 PotIn 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 HumansI 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 28Iran: MerzThe 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 AttemptBy 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 againSpeaking 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 LicensesThe 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 visitKing 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 OPECIf 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 costsJetBlue 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 Survey55 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 trialElon 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 LessMonk 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 29IranThe 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 economyWe 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 attacksThe 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 ActLast 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 stabbingTwo 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 DividedThe 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 arsenalRemember 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 GDPThe 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 GDPThe 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.IranGasoline 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 MaineIn 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 fundingThe 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 earningsEli 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 1IranFriday 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 flightThe 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 payCEO 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 shutdownSpirit 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. Get full access to John Dickerson at johnfdickerson.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for April twentieth through the twenty-fourth.1 You can hear me read it here:Iran on pause. Schrodinger’s Strait was both opened and closed. Kash Out Crash Out at the FBI and cash out from the Treasury Department. Virginia voters turned 3-d chess into checkers. A soldier bet on the wrong war. And in the UK Smoke ‘em while you got ‘em.So let’s take it day by day.Monday April 20Iran WarIn Islamabad, Pakistan, the high-security Red Zone surrounding the Serena Hotel was sealed off by traffic police. Billboards went up. Security checkpoints multiplied. All in anticipation of a face-to-face meeting between Vice President Vance and Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf — a meeting that, by Monday night, had become a ghost summit. The Iranians refused to show, citing the ongoing U.S. naval blockade as a violation of the ceasefire.The president called Iran’s leaders “indecisive.” Regional experts saw something different: an Iranian government waiting for a unified signal from Washington that never came.Friday had looked different. The president told CBS News that Iran had “agreed to everything,” describing a joint operation to remove enriched uranium: “Our people, together with the Iranians, are going to work together to go get it. And then we’ll take it to the United States.” Within hours, Tehran disputed the president’s claims and said there was no such deal.By Sunday, familiar terrain. The president posted that his representatives would arrive in Islamabad the following evening, warning that if Iran rejected what he called a “very fair and reasonable DEAL,” the United States would “knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran.” “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!” he wrote.While gas prices climbed, it felt like the gas went completely out of the president’s war effort.An administration official told Axios that the president is “over it” and willing to give Iran a window of only “three to five days” to “get their s**t together.” He doesn’t want to fight anymore, the official said, but will if he feels he has to.Two questions keep surfacing. Did the president’s negotiating tactics — the public threats and the premature claims of a total surrender — poison whatever progress existed? And is this a repetition of what preceded the initial strike: a fundamental misreading of where the Iranians actually stood? One of the rotating justifications for the war was that Iran refused to negotiate in good faith. There were suggestions at the time that the U.S. had simply misread the internal fractures of the Iranian leadership. Career diplomats exist precisely to anticipate these gaps — to know the difference between posturing and a genuine impasse before the shooting starts.This also returns us to the unanswered questions at the center of the entire war: Was Iran truly close to a weapon, and was military action the only remedy? Only one person claims to know the answers, and he is an unreliable narrator — perhaps even to himself.Monday proved that in the Trumpian theater of war, the Negotiator and the Commander-in-Chief are often on stage at the same time, speaking over one another.Gas PricesPresident Trump told The Hill on Monday his Energy Secretary Chris Wright got it wrong when he said gas prices might not fall below $3 a gallon until next year. “No, I think he’s wrong on that. Totally wrong,” Trump said, adding that prices would drop “as soon as this ends”—meaning the Iran war. The president offered no mechanism, no timeline, just confidence overriding his own appointee’s assessment.But Wright has the better of the argument. Reopening the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t flip a switch. It starts a clock. Tankers need weeks to reach refineries, refineries that cut capacity or shifted schedules during the disruption need time to ramp back up, and the fuel still has to move through the distribution chain to local stations. “Gas prices go up like a rocket and come down like a feather,” as independent oil analyst Tom Kloza put it to CNN.Why? Gas station owners bought their current inventory at peak prices and won’t eat the loss until they’re confident the drop will stick. Consumers, meanwhile, stop comparison-shopping once prices dip even slightly, which removes the competitive pressure that might force stations to cut faster. And none of this accounts for OPEC+, which controls supply independent of any shipping lane. If the cartel holds production cuts to defend an $80 or $90 floor, American drivers pay that price regardless of what happens in the Strait. Peak summer driving season arrives on top of all of it, pushing demand higher just as supply tries to normalize.SCOTUS on Catholic PreschoolsThe Supreme Court decided to wrestle this: A gay parent wants to send their four-year-old to a neighborhood preschool—with money the state set aside for exactly that purpose. The school says no, because the people who run it believe, at the core of who they are, that enrolling that child would be wrong.The Supreme Court justices agreed on Monday to decide whether Catholic preschools in Colorado that decline to enroll 4-year-olds with gay or transgender parents can participate in a publicly funded state program. A Colorado program pays for families to send their children to the preschool of their choice, public or private, including faith-based programs.Two Catholic parish preschools in the Denver area said admitting such children would require them to violate their religious convictions. The state said the schools can’t block the kids. The church sued. The church lost—twice. Now the Supreme Court will decide.At bottom, this is a fight about two things the government does when it makes that call: it decides who belongs, and it decides whose conscience counts. For a gay parent, a state that allows that exclusion when distributing tax dollars is a state that has decided who belongs. For a believer, a state that overrides their conviction is a state that has decided whose conscience counts.FBI Director Kash Patel sues The AtlanticKash out. The FBI director announced Monday that he was suing The Atlantic for a story over the weekend that asserted that Patel drank to such excess that it was affecting his ability to do his job and that as a result, his job might be in danger. The magazine also reported that he is sometimes so out of pocket (that’s not a euphemism) that key decisions cannot be made and, in the article’s most colorful passage: “On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated.” A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors.” If the FBI director were to carry this suit to its conclusion, The Atlantic would be able to depose Patel and administration officials under the penalty of perjury.Detroit BallotsThe Justice Department demanded that Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit — turn over more than 860,000 ballots, envelopes, and receipts from the 2024 election. DOJ cited three fraud convictions and five lawsuits as evidence of the county’s “history” of election problems. But the three convictions were from 2020, involved individuals caught forging signatures, and were prosecuted by the state — in other words, cases where the system worked exactly as designed. The five lawsuits were almost entirely dismissed by Michigan judges for lack of evidence. The Republican-led state Senate also investigated and found no widespread fraud. None of it had anything to do with 2024.This fits a pattern. In January, the FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia, elections office and seized hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots. Last May, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s team seized voting machines in Puerto Rico, finding no evidence of the Venezuelan interference they were looking for. The Justice Department has sued 24 states for refusing to turn over unredacted voter rolls. In each case, the administration cites election integrity; in each case, the predicate is thin or nonexistent.One detail worth noting: Trump won Michigan in 2024. He lost Wayne County by nearly 250,000 votes. The DOJ is investigating an election its own boss won, in a county where he didn’t.Whether any of these inquiries turn up actual fraud is almost beside the point. As Trump’s own attorney general William Barr testified in 2022, he told the White House at the time that its election fraud theories were “crazy stuff” doing “grave, grave disservice to the country.” Trump and his allies lost dozens of lawsuits challenging 2020 results. But Trump has repeatedly, across decades, raised the specter of election fraud where none exists — not necessarily to prove it, but to create enough confusion that the claim itself becomes the point.Tariff Refunds. (New York Times)Even though president Trump said tariffs were paid by other countries, it was always Americans who paid the import taxes. That’s why this Monday, exactly two months after the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s most sweeping tariffs, American importers started applying for reimbursement. They are owed $166 billion in refunds plus interest. It is estimated that 30,000 to 35,000 firms will apply. Everything from precision manufacturers to pharmaceutical importers will be eligible to upload proof of the levies they paid. It’s a deluge. Some companies have up to 5,000 individual entry lines to reconcile.Refunds will be issued 60 to 90 days after approval. The court ruled that the president had usurped Congress’ power to tax through his tariff program. Economists note that while the money is coming back, it doesn’t account for the “lost opportunity cost.” That is all the things that couldn’t be done while trying to avoid the import taxes– Companies reported moving senior logistics managers off of product development and into “tariff mitigation” full-time for over 18 months– and now another opportunity cost: all the stuff that isn’t being done in order to keep up with this paperwork nightmare that was easily avoidable. Many small businesses, unable to float the 25% tax, went under; they will not be able to request refunds.In an interview, the president said he will “remember” companies that don’t claim their money.While the president’s signature economic policy is being dismantled in keeping with the Supreme Court ruling, his standing on the economy continues to drop. An Associated Press poll puts approval on the economy at 30 percent in April, down from 38 percent in March. Only about a quarter of adults approve of his handling of the cost of living — a Marquette Law School survey puts that number at 24 percent. The New York Times has him at his highest disapproval rating ever: 58 percent.Gaza needs $71 billion to rebuild“Domicide” is the systematic destruction of the ability to call a palace home. That is what a new study by the European Union, United Nations and World Bank shows has happened in Gaza. It says the Israeli destruction in retaliation for the Hamas attack on October 7 has knocked the civilization back eight decades. Over 371,000 housing units are damaged or destroyed. That is roughly 92% of all pre-war residential structures. A daily average of four people are still killed and 24 wounded every day during this “ceasefire” period due to unexploded ordnance and lingering skirmishes.Six months into the ceasefire, the “reconstruction” hasn’t actually begun for most. Nearly the entire population is squeezed into a sliver of land along the coast, while the rest of the territory is occupied or under displacement orders.over 50% of hospitals non-functional. Because Israel still restricts fuel, half of all families are now burning hazardous waste and plastic to cook their food, leading to a surge in respiratory illnesses among children. There is an estimated 40 million tonnes of debris to clear. To put that in perspective, if you lined up the trucks needed to move it, the line would stretch from Gaza to New York and back.Over 80% of croplands are destroyed. The soil is now “decimated” by munitions and noxious gases, meaning Gazans cannot even grow their own vegetables to offset the aid shortages. The World Health Organization’s emergency minimum water ration is 15 liters per person per day. Gazans are currently averaging 8.4 liters—less than a single 10-minute shower for an entire day of drinking, cooking, and washing.Drought in the USIn context that is so different I can’t make obvious transition, there are water shortages in the U.S. too. More than 61% of the nation is now in a drought, the highest percentage in nearly four years, according to the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor. In all, 45 of 50 states are enduring drought, with only Alaska, North Dakota, Michigan, Connecticut and Rhode Island completely drought-free.In Texas and the Southern Plains, soil moisture levels are at historic lows, which typically leads to higher crop insurance claims and potential spikes in food pricing for corn and wheat. In Virginia and the Carolinas, summer droughts significantly increase the risk of “dry lightning” and forest fires in the Appalachian region. Power plants (thermal and nuclear) require massive amounts of water for cooling. Low water levels in reservoirs can lead to reduced power output or temporary shutdowns during peak summer heat.North Korean Missile Launch: Father and Daughter Affair.What are intergenerational dictators wearing to missile launches this season? Black leather jackets. Not exactly a departure from menace wear, but that’s what North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his teenage daughter were both wearing as they watched a missile test launch from a coastal observation point as a projectile soared over the water, trailing gray smoke. No fuchsia for the next generation, but it was far more stylish than the four elderly military officers standing behind them in regulation brown, peering up into the sky, all of them holding small booklets and writing instruments like they were all recording their golf scores. South Korea’s spy service recently assessed that the daughter, reportedly named Kim Ju Ae, could be considered Kim’s heir. North Korea has tested cluster bomb warheads before. But observers say the Iran war may have prompted North Korea to display that it has cluster munitions and accelerate efforts to develop better ones.Labor Secretary Steps DownMonday, the Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer stepped down amid an accordion file of accusations such as sending staff to pick up liquor and attempting to use business trips as excuses for personal travel including for example, a UFC fight in Chicago, a Morgan Wallen concert and to see friends and family in various states. She reportedly asked staff to design work trips that would provide her openings to attend those events. For months, the Labor Department’s Inspector General’s Office has been investigating these claims as well as a complaint that Chavez-DeRemer was having a sexual relationship with a member of her security team. She now joins former Homeland Security Secretary Christie Noem who was accused of similar business and former Attorney General Pam Bondi, as the highest profile ejections from the Trump administration.Tim Cook to Step DownApple — the world’s most valuable company, one of the Magnificent Seven that drive the S&P 500, a $4 trillion enterprise whose devices sit in the hands of 2.5 billion people — will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2026, and this week announced its most significant leadership transition in a generation. CEO Tim Cook will step down September 1, moving to Executive Chairman. Cook transformed Apple from a premium computer maker into a global utility — revenues nearly quadrupled to $400 billion under his watch. But his final years were shadowed by a perceived AI gap, with Apple trailing Microsoft and Google.His successor: John Ternus, the 50-year-old hardware chief who has been with Apple since 2001 and led the transition to Apple Silicon, the move that unified the company’s chips and software architecture. Where Cook was the operations and supply chain master, Ternus is a product engineer — an amateur rally car racer known for taking teams to off-road tracks to practice precision under pressure. The choice signals Apple believes its AI problem is ultimately a hardware problem.While Apple figures out its AI strategy, a Chinese smartphone company just built a robot that outruns every human who has ever lived. One year ago it finished a half marathon in two hours and forty minutes. This year: fifty minutes. So, if Apple licks its AI problem, the next Apple CEO might be a robot.Tuesday April 21Iran War“Vacate your engine room. We are prepared to subject you to disabling fire.” This message sent Sunday by the USS Spruance preceded the disabling the Touska, an Iranian-flagged container ship, which like a child at college, had been ignoring messages. For six hours warnings were sent until finallyprecision rounds were fired directly into the ship’s propulsion compartment. This surgical strike allowed the Marines from the 31st MEU to board via helicopter and secure the vessel.Why am I putting it on a Tuesday? First of all, it’s just an amazing story. And second of all, the seizure underscored the extreme tension in the Strait of Hormuz, where commercial traffic has effectively vanished; only three tankers transited the waterway that entire day, all of which carried non-Iranian cargo and were only permitted passage after pre-coordinating with regional authorities to avoid similar engine room events.On the diplomatic front, the engine also seemed to be disabled. This somewhat bouncy transition brought to you by the bouncy cab in which it was written.Tuesday, President Trump told CNBC that he expected a “great deal” with Iran but signaled he will not extend the ceasefire and was ready to resume bombing. By the end of the day he had announced an indefinite ceasefire.In what is becoming common practice, $500 billion in oil trades were placed just before Trump made the ceasefire announcement.In the CNBC interview the president said, “We’ve taken out their leaders…but these leaders are much more rational.”This is an ongoing matter. Are the leaders of Iran really more rational? What evidence is there of that? These are the leaders whose civilization Trump was promising to destroy. Why would he have wanted to destroy the reasonable leaders? Why would he wing out civilization destroying threats if they were responding to reason. But let’s accept the president’s assertion that he changed the regime. What is the point of regime change if the regime that is in power is still very hostile to the United States or more hostile?What is fair to say is that the U.S. strikes effectively ended the “Theocratic” era of Iran, replacing it with a Militaristic Autocracy led by the IRGC. The “regime change” Trump refers to is the transition from a government of clerics to a government of survivalist generals. Whether they are “rational” or simply “desperate” remains the central question of the current ceasefire negotiations.Finally, because the Iran war has not gone as easily as the president expected, he’s taken to declaring that he would have had an easier time with other wars. Vietnam, for example, the war he did not decide to fight when he had the chance. “I would have won Vietnam very quickly. I would have, if I were president, I would have won Iraq in the same amount of time that we won, because essentially, we won here.”Just a week after Artemis II took humans farther from earth than any had ever been, this assertion traveled an even greater distance from the experience we have had on earth as we know it.Drone BoostThe Pentagon’s largest-ever budget request earmarks $75 billion for drones and the technology to counter them. The centerpiece: the Defense Autonomous Working Group, a little-known office working with U.S. commandos, would jump from $226 million this year to $54.6 billion — likely the largest single year-over-year boost of any defense program in history, and certain to draw scrutiny inside an already eye-catching $1.5 trillion request that’s 42 percent larger than this year’s budget.The numbers amount to a verdict on how effective cheap drones have been in this conflict — and in Ukraine before it. The math is brutal: the U.S. routinely uses million-dollar Patriot and THAAD missiles to intercept drones that cost a few thousand dollars. Roughly $21 billion of the request targets that imbalance directly, funding directed-energy weapons — lasers and high-power microwaves — designed to kill drone swarms at a cost of a few dollars per shot rather than a few million.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Airline Iran War Fallout SpreadsGlobal jet fuel prices are up more than 70 percent, and the Iran-war-based pain is spreading across the airline industry. American Airlines lowered its earnings target, warning it may post a loss in 2026 after $4 billion in additional fuel costs. United Airlines says fares may rise 20 percent. In Europe, where airlines are the largest consumers of fuel shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, low-cost carrier Ryanair said last week it could only guarantee jet fuel supply through May.Passengers are adapting in their own way. Travel experts report that frequent flyers are hedging against cancellations and route disruptions by using miles to make overlapping bookings across multiple routes for the same trip. Because award tickets carry minimal or no cancellation fees compared with cash bookings, travelers can drop the extra reservations at the last minute.Those who stay home are staying home — and drinking there.Nearly a third of Americans who still drink say they now pregame before going out because drinks cost too much. The practice, once associated with college, is showing up on spreadsheets. Suntory, which makes Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark, reports higher demand for its small-format bottles. Among drinkers who say prices influence whether they go out at all, 41 percent have switched to water or non-alcoholic options. Thirty-seven percent are pregaming.Condom pricesAlso potentially grounded as a result of the war: Malaysian company Karex told Reuters Tuesday that the company may be forced to raise condom prices at least 20 to 30 percent. Condom production requires materials that also arrive by ship through the waterway that has become the center of this conflict. The company, which produces Durex and Trojan makes 5 billion condoms annually and exports to more than 130 countries. The company’s CEO Goh told Reuters that along with higher costs for manufacturing and packaging, there are delays in shipping. “We’re seeing a lot more condoms actually sitting on vessels that have not ⁠arrived ​at their destination but are highly required.”Pentagon Flu VaccineThe Pentagon is no longer requiring those who serve to get the annual flu vaccine. For decades, the consensus was that a flu outbreak in a barracks or on a carrier could take a unit “off the board” just as effectively as an enemy strike. The new priority argues that the intangible cost to morale and the political cost of coercion are now higher than the biological cost of the virus. It frames the mandate not as a shield against disease, but as a “compliance test” that alienates the very demographic the military needs to recruit. This isn’t really about the flu; it’s a retroactive battle over the COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The resistance that formed during the pandemic has been industrialized into a broader skepticism of all mandatory medical interventions. By removing the flu shot—a long-standing, relatively uncontroversial requirement—the administration is signaling a “demilitarization” of public health, treating medical decisions as private choices rather than command directives.Congressional Expulsions:Last week two men accused of sexual predation were bounced from the house and this week on Tuesday, there were two more motions in the bouncy House. House Democrats prepared to expel Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-FL) for, among other things, funneling $5 million in COVID relief funds to her campaign, but the Congresswoman resigned before they could make it official. Rep. Nancy Mace introduced a measure to expel Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) who has been accused of campaign finance violations and sexual misconduct.Fed Independence:For months Donald Trump has used his administration to target the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and member of the fed board of governors Lisa Cook. He didn’t like their reluctance to lower rates fast enough. They, along with most economists, worried inflation would rise.Tuesday, the president’s replacement appeared as a part of his Senate confirmation. Much of the intense questioning Kevin Warsh faced regarded his independence from the White House. The Fed is an independent agency to keep politics out of interest rate decisions in order to safeguard the economy. But even a president booing from the sidelines has economic impacts.Southern Poverty LawA federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday — 11 counts including wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The DOJ’s theory: the SPLC, a 55-year-old civil rights organization best known for fighting the Klan, defrauded its donors by secretly funneling more than $3 million to paid informants inside the very extremist groups it claimed to be dismantling.The informants were known internally as “field sources” or “the Fs.” Between 2014 and 2023, at least eight were paid through shell companies with names like “Center Investigative Agency,” “Fox Photography,” and “Rare Books Warehouse,” with payments loaded onto prepaid cards. One informant affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance received more than $1 million. Another, paid $270,000, sat in the online leadership group that planned the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville — attended the rally at the SPLC’s direction, made racist posts under their supervision, and coordinated transportation for other attendees. After Charlottesville left one person dead and dozens injured, SPLC donations nearly tripled, from $50 million to $132 million in a single year.The SPLC calls it a “weaponized prosecution,” saying its informants risked their lives and shared intelligence that saved others. The core problem with the DOJ’s theory: paying confidential sources inside criminal organizations is what federal law enforcement does routinely. Multiple legal scholars called the indictment thin and questioned whether it makes out the elements of a crime.That’s the legal question. The political question is broader. The SPLC’s “Hate Map” has been used for decades by the FBI, banks, and tech companies to track, de-platform, and investigate extremist groups. It has also been used to label conservative organizations — a fact Republicans have hammered for years. This indictment arrives under an acting attorney general who is under reported pressure from the president to deliver wins against perceived political opponents. Whether the underlying conduct was criminal or standard investigative practice, the charges alone freeze the SPLC’s operations and credibility at a moment when the organization sits on a $750 million endowment that the DOJ could target through forfeiture.Florida and AIFlorida launched a criminal investigation into OpenAI on Tuesday after chat logs revealed the suspect in last April’s Florida State University shooting — two killed, six injured — asked ChatGPT what gun and ammunition to use, where and when on campus he’d find the most people, and whether school shooters go to maximum security prison. The chatbot answered. The state’s attorney general said if a human being had provided that advice, prosecutors would charge them with murder. The question with no precedent: does the same apply when the advisor is software?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Ticks sending people to the ERWhile city dwellers move to the country for the warmer months, ticks are moving in the opposite direction. Lyme disease cases in Michigan nearly quadrupled between 2022 and 2025 in part because ticks are moving to suburban and urban areas. The CDC reports that bites are sending Americans to the emergency room (ER) at the highest rate in nearly 10 years. It’s not just the city’s broadway plays and used bookstores that are causing the spike, however. The earlier onset of warm weather means more people are out and about outside.Wednesday, April 22Iran War: Six Months to Sweep Mines.On Wednesday, Iran attacked three ships in the Strait of Hormuz and escorted two to Iranian waters. The dueling naval operations strained the ceasefire and exposed a key sticking point in negotiations: Iran’s chief negotiator says reopening the strait is impossible while the U.S. blockade remains.That blockade was no longer the concern of Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, fired Wednesday, three weeks after Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George got the same treatment. The dispute reportedly pit Phelan—a political appointee—against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over management style, personnel, and the pace of shipbuilding.The Washington Post reported that in a classified briefing to the House Armed Services Committee, Pentagon officials said completely clearing the Strait of Hormuz of Iranian-laid mines could take six months.This is what makes the war so tricky. Wednesday morning the president boasted about destroying the Iranian navy. True enough—92% of the fleet, 140 to 158 vessels. But military analysts and the Pentagon distinguish between the “conventional navy”—which is indeed “gone”—and Iran’s “asymmetric” capacity, which remains potent.Iran deploys hundreds of small, civilian-style boats and midget submarines difficult to track. These launch from hidden coastal facilities and seed small numbers of mines even during a ceasefire or active blockade. Iran has GPS-enabled “floating” mines that can be released remotely, making their location unpredictable once they hit the current. Iran’s sea mine inventory numbers in the hundreds—enough to seed the Strait faster than the U.S. can clear it.Specialized mine-countermeasure vessels are slow-moving and vulnerable. The U.S. uses unmanned underwater vehicles like Knifefish to minimize risk to personnel, but these drones still require support ships that are targets for Iranian missiles, drones, and fast-attack craft. The Navy must first establish a “sanitized” zone to protect clearing operations—difficult when Iran can fire land-based anti-ship missiles from coastal batteries and hidden tunnel networks.And clearing has to be near-total to matter. Shipping firms suspended operations in late February after 21 confirmed attacks on merchant vessels. The uncertainty has driven insurance premiums to prohibitive levels.Ukraine gets CashThe war in Ukraine continues — another conflict the president said he would solve in short order. Since he hasn’t, the Ukrainians took what help they could get: the European Union will finally disburse a €90 billion loan after Hungary lifted its veto, ending months of deadlock over funding that Ukraine needs within weeks to keep both its military and its government running. The breakthrough came with a trade — Ukraine repaired the Druzhba pipeline and resumed Russian oil flows to Hungary and Slovakia, and in return, both countries dropped their blocks on the loan and a fresh package of Russian sanctions.Can we pause here for a minute? Has any artist other than Jimi Hendrix done more with Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” than Dave Matthews? Did I say that out loud? Sorry, that’s on my headphones.No, the reason I wanted to pause is that what we have here is Ukraine repairing a pipeline so their enemy can sell oil — profits that fund the very missiles being fired at Ukrainian cities. They did it anyway, because they needed the money more than they needed the principle. That’s the paradoxical math of relations among nations.On the battlefield, the money arrives at an unexpectedly strong moment. Ukraine’s foreign minister said the country’s frontline position is the strongest it has been in a year, driven largely by drone superiority and improved air defense. An analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War confirmed that Russian troops made almost no territorial gains across the frontline in March — the first time that has happened in two and a half years.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Virginia Redistricting & 2026 MidtermsReform minded states and voters have put independent redistricting commissions in place to keep the party in power from drawing maps that keep it in power. In 2020, 65 percent of Virginia voters approved exactly that — a bipartisan commission to draw the state’s congressional lines. This week, Virginia Democrats threw it out.On Tuesday, voters narrowly approved a referendum — 51.5 to 48.6 percent — to temporarily return redistricting to the Democratic-controlled legislature, which has already drawn a map favoring Democrats in 10 of the state’s 11 House districts. Virginia currently splits 6-5.The new lines could flip four seats. Democrats aren’t pretending this is principled. They’re calling it necessary. The redistricting arms race started last summer, when President Trump pressured Texas to redraw its congressional map mid-decade — something states almost never do between censuses. Texas obliged, targeting five Democratic seats. Missouri and North Carolina followed. The Supreme Court allowed the Texas map to proceed 6-3, despite a lower court finding it was a racial gerrymander.California responded with its own Democratic-friendly redraw. Virginia followed. Trump’s original calculation was straightforward: gerrymander enough red states to insulate the Republican House majority heading into the midterms. Instead, he triggered a chain reaction. Democrats now argue they can’t unilaterally respect nonpartisan commissions while Republicans dismantle the maps in every state they control. All of this activity nets out to mean that Democrats have actually picked up a seat.The legal fight isn’t over. A Tazewell County judge — the same Republican appointee who tried to block the referendum twice before, and was overruled by the Virginia Supreme Court both times — declared the vote void the day after it passed. The attorney general is appealing. The state Supreme Court will likely have the final word before August primaries.More districts drawn to be safe for one party means more representatives who answer only to their base, more primaries decided by the most partisan voters, and less incentive for anyone in office to negotiate with the other side. The commissions were supposed to prevent exactly this.Ten Commandments in Texas classroomsTexas can require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools, a U.S. appeals court ruled. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, called the ruling “a major victory for Texas and our moral values.” “The Ten Commandments have had a profound impact on our nation, and it’s important that students learn from them every single day.” Paxton’s wife of 38 years filed for divorce last year “on Biblical grounds” and in the filing claimed that he had committed adultery, proof of the ongoing need of moral reminders. Similar laws in Arkansas and Louisiana are also before the courts.U.S. Rep. David Scott diesU.S. Rep. David Scott, a Georgia Democrat and the first Black chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, died on Wednesday. He was 80. His office described the death as “unexpected,” – indeed he had voted Tuesday on the House floor– and while no specific cause was immediately released, he had recently dealt with declining health. Scott, who was seeking his 13th term in Congress despite challenges from within his party, was once a leading voice for Democrats on issues related to farm aid policy and food aid for consumers and a prominent Black member of the party’s moderate Blue Dog caucus.CDC won’t publish reportThe Washington Post reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had blocked the publication of a scientific study showing that COVID-19 vaccines significantly reduced hospitalizations and emergency room visits this past winter by approximately 50% to 55%. In public health terms, cutting the risk of hospitalization in half is at the high end of what is usually hoped for from a seasonal flu shot.Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya—who also leads the NIH—halted the publication citing “methodological concerns.” The Post cited sources familiar with the matter who noted the study used the same process—the “test-negative design” and VISION network data—the CDC recently used to publish flu vaccine effectiveness data.The decision has sparked internal concern that scientific data is being suppressed to align with the views of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent critic of the COVID-19 shots whose critiques have been received with withering criticism from experts across all scientific fields, who point out that his positions contradict the consensus of nearly every major global health body.UK smoking banThe UK Parliament passed the Tobacco and Vapes Bill on Tuesday — legislation that ensures anyone born on or after January 1, 2009, can never legally buy tobacco in their lifetime. Not at 18, not at 30, not ever. Starting in 2027, the legal purchasing age rises by one year, every year. The door closes behind today’s 17-year-olds and stays closed.The scope goes well beyond cigarettes. The bill bans snus, the oral tobacco popular in Scandinavia, and extends to smoking accessories — including cigarette papers, meaning the 2009-and-after generation can’t buy the materials to roll their own. On vaping, the government still treats e-cigarettes as a quitting tool for adults but moved to strip away everything that makes them appealing to children: new powers to restrict candy-like flavors, packaging, and store displays, plus a ban on vaping in cars when children are present. Smoke-free and vape-free zones now extend to playgrounds and the areas outside schools and hospitals.A clerk who fails to check ID faces a £200 on-the-spot fine. Shops that repeatedly violate the law can be banned from selling tobacco or nicotine products for a year. The bill cleared its final legislative stage between the Commons and the Lords on Tuesday and awaits Royal Assent from King Charles, expected next week.While we’re in Britain: the Times published a quiz this week asking whether you can tell real British regional insults from fake ones. “Bampot” (Scottish: lunatic), “wazzock” (Northern English: idiot), “numpty” (Scottish: fool), and “mardy” (Midlands: soft, cowardly) are all apparently real words that real people say to other real people. The quiz is in the show notes, you jammy dodger.Carter Page settlement.The Trump Justice Department agreed Wednesday to pay $1.25 million to Carter Page, the 2016 campaign adviser the FBI wiretapped during the Russia investigation — settling a lawsuit the government had already won in lower courts. Two things are true about Carter Page, and the settlement works hard to obscure one of them. The FBI did botch its surveillance applications — an inspector general found serious errors and omissions across four rounds of court orders. Page had a legitimate grievance. But settling a case you’ve already won is almost unheard of in the history of the Justice Department. The government fights these cases precisely to avoid setting precedents that invite more lawsuits against taxpayers.Walking away from a victory means something else is driving the decision. And this follows a pattern. Last month, $1.25 million to Michael Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI before being pardoned. Last year, nearly $5 million to the estate of Ashli Babbitt, shot while breaching the Capitol on January 6th. In each case, the DOJ bypassed normal procedures to carve out settlements for people aligned with President Trump. The administration calls it combating the “weaponization of government.” But taken together — an unprecedented legal surrender, combined with payouts that track loyalty rather than legal merit — it starts to look less like fairness and more like an effort to discredit the entire Russia investigation. An investigation corroborated by the U.S. intelligence community, the Mueller probe’s 34 indictments, and even the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee.Spirit Airlines BailoutWe’ve talked about airlines absorbing the fuel costs of the war with Iran. For Spirit Airlines, the war didn’t just hurt — it made the airline’s existing bankruptcy exit plan mathematically impossible. Unlike the major carriers, Spirit does no fuel hedging — no pre-buying at lower rates — and its entire business model depends on filling cheap seats in volume. When fuel prices spike, the big airlines absorb the hit. Spirit drowns in it.Now the Trump administration is negotiating a $500 million rescue package that could leave the federal government owning 90 percent of the airline. Remember last August, the government converted Biden-era grants into a 10 percent ownership stake in Intel, arguing that without it, the U.S. would depend on chip factories in Taiwan for everything from fighter jets to iPhones. In January, a similar stake in USA Rare Earth. The logic: don’t just give grants to firms, take equity because taxpayers share in the upside, and the government keeps strategic assets from failing or falling into foreign hands. For an administration that campaigned on getting government out of the way of business, it’s a striking turn — the federal government deciding which companies live and which ones don’t.Why is a discount airline strategically critical? The administration argues if Spirit dies, the Big Three lose their primary low-cost competitor, and ticket prices for working-class travelers spike during an already inflationary war. The president also cited the loss of 14,000 jobs. A wrinkle: Spirit flies nothing but Airbus — 76 European-made planes. If this deal closes, the “Buy American” administration becomes the majority owner of an airline that doesn’t fly a single American-made aircraft, while simultaneously locked in trade tensions with the EU. Bottom line: will the U.S. gain leverage or become owner of an airline nobody else wanted.988 Hotline SuccessIn July 2022 the 988 mental health crisis hotline launched, and over the next two and a half years there were 11 percent fewer suicide deaths among 15- to 23-year-olds than researchers had expected — nearly 4,400 lives. This, according to a study published Wednesday in JAMA. As a gut check, researchers looked at England, which had no comparable hotline launch during the same period — and saw no similar decline in youth suicides.The reduction tracked directly with usage: the ten states with the largest increases in call volume saw an 18 percent drop in suicide deaths; the ten states with the smallest increases saw only 11 percent. The more a community used the service, the more lives were saved. The 988 program represents roughly $1.5 billion in federal investment, one of the largest in suicide prevention history. But that 11 percent drop was achieved with specialized sub-networks in place — including partnerships like the Trevor Project’s dedicated line for LGBTQ+ youth, a population at significantly elevated risk.The administration’s July 2025 termination of the dedicated LGBTQ+ sub-network has sparked warnings from researchers that the 2026 data could show a rebound in suicide rates among queer and trans youth, who previously utilized the ‘Press 3’ prompt for counselors specifically trained in their unique stressors.Thursday, April 23Iran WarThursday it was the battle of the blockades.The U.S. military intercepted two Iranian oil supertankers that had attempted to slip through the dragnet but were unable to because, well, they are supertankers, one definition of which is the largest self-propelled vehicles ever built. Very hard to be stealthy.While the U.S. successfully interdicted the outward flow of Iranian crude, Tehran struck back. In a direct retaliation, Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) commandos seized two Western-linked vessels.Senate Adopts G.O.P. BudgetThe Senate passed a Republican budget blueprint early Thursday morning to end the longest Department of Homeland Security shutdown in American history. DHS has been partially paralyzed since mid-February, when federal agents fatally shot a 37-year-old man, Alex Pretti, during an immigration operation in Minneapolis. Democrats used the 60-vote filibuster threshold to block all DHS funding, demanding use-of-force reforms the administration refused to consider.Republicans turned to budget reconciliation — a mechanism that lets them bypass the filibuster and pass the funding bill with a simple majority. The goal: unlock up to $70 billion for ICE and Border Patrol, putting the administration’s immigration agenda on autopilot for the next three and a half years.Democrats couldn’t stop the bill, but they used the mandatory vote-a-rama — a marathon of rapid-fire amendments — to force Republicans on the record rejecting restoration of SNAP benefits, school meal funding, and energy-cost relief.The larger story is what reconciliation costs. Congress generally gets only one reconciliation bill per budget cycle. By spending the 2026 slot to reopen a shuttered department and fund ICE, Republicans forfeit their best tool for passing tax cuts or deregulation later this year. That tradeoff likely drove the only two Republican defections: Rand Paul, who called it a fiscal gimmick that adds billions to the deficit, and Lisa Murkowski, who objected to abandoning the Senate’s tradition of bipartisan cooperation.Epstein DOJThe Justice Department’s internal watchdog opened a review Thursday into whether the department defied the law Congress wrote specifically to prevent it from doing what it did. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed by the president late last year, stripped the DOJ of its usual discretion — no withholding records for “political sensitivity,” “reputational harm,” or the “embarrassment” of public figures. Release everything within 30 days. The only exception: protecting victim identities.The DOJ blew past the December deadline, producing a fraction of the documents and citing “logistical hurdles” that drew bipartisan contempt. When the department finally dumped millions of pages in late January, it managed a special kind of achievement. It failed in both directions: tens of thousands of pages still missing, while the rushed redaction process left the names and personal details of several victims exposed. The Inspector General now wants to know whether the department used privacy as a shield to hide records while simultaneously failing to protect the people the law existed to shield.Marijuana ClassificationActing Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order moving state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I, the same classification as heroin, to Schedule III, alongside ketamine and Tylenol with codeine. The most significant shift in federal drug policy since 1970 legitimizes the medical programs of 40 states in one stroke while leaving recreational marijuana exactly where it was: federally illegal.Medical dispensaries can now deduct rent, payroll, and operating costs on their taxes for the first time — a provision the old Schedule I classification blocked, costing the industry billions.Researchers who spent years trapped in a bureaucratic paradox — needing federal approval to study a drug the federal government insisted had no medical value — can now access state-licensed cannabis for clinical trials without risking prosecution.The legal result is stranger than the policy. The same plant, grown in the same facility, can now be a Schedule III medication when sold to a patient with a medical card and a Schedule I narcotic when sold to an adult for recreational use next door. The administration calls this common sense. The DEA will hold hearings in June on whether to reschedule marijuana more broadly.Soldier arrested for Polymarket betsHe was the soldier who turned Operation Absolute Resolve into Operation No You Didn’t. A U.S. Army Special Forces master sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke was arrested for allegedly using classified information to make extremely profitable bets on the Polymarket prediction market related to the American military mission that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, the Department of Justice said Thursday.Van Dyke, 38, wagered a total of about $33,000 in 13 or so bets in the week leading up to that operation, with the knowledge that the United States was secretly planning military action against Maduro. The bets won Van Dyke nearly $410,000, the indictment alleges.Meta layoffs and Microsoft buyoutsLast week we told you that Meta was creating an AI replica of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg so that employees could interact with the AI boss to get a better sense of what he was thinking. 8,000 of those employees – or 10 percent of its workforce– will be denied that delicious conversation. They are being let go, the company said Thursday so Meta can ramp up spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure and highly paid AI-expert hires. Also Thursday, Microsoft said it was offering voluntary buyouts to thousands of its U.S. employees. The software giant plans to make the offers in early May to about 8,750 people, or 7% of its U.S. workforce.College ToursA study published this week by researchers at Amherst College found that the weather on the day of your campus visit meaningfully affects whether you apply. Applications dropped 10 percent when the tour was hot, 8 percent when it rained, and 5 percent when it was simply cloudy — compared to mild, sunny days. Male visitors, the study found, were more sensitive to weather conditions than female visitors. The study was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is a serious institution that has now confirmed that a passing cloud may have determined where you spent four years of your life.Friday, April 24Iran WarAt the end of the week, the United States was negotiating with Iran over the same points that have been at issue since 2015, when the Obama administration and five other world powers struck the JCPOA — the agreement designed to ensure Iran’s nuclear program stays peaceful. Same technical questions: how much enrichment Iran keeps, who inspects it, whether the stockpile goes to a third country. Same political question: what does Iran get in return.Trump spent years mocking Obama for what he paid to get that deal. Now he’s spent considerably more. The New York Times reported this week that the war burned through roughly $28 to $35 billion — just under a billion dollars a day for 38 days. In the first two days alone, the military used $5.6 billion in munitions.The U.S. fired more than 1,100 JASSM-ER cruise missiles — long-range stealth weapons designed not for Iran but for a war with China. Roughly 1,500 remain in inventory. More than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles, at $4 million each. The U.S. produces about 600 Patriots a year. Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said reconstituting what was expended “could take years.” Admiral Paparo, head of Indo-Pacific Command, told the New York Times: “There are finite limits to the magazine.”Trump has been adamant in private that his deal must be better than Obama’s. But “better” isn’t just a measure of the document. The calculation requires subtracting what the JCPOA would have delivered, then weighing that delta against the full cost of getting here: the dead, the debt, the depleted Pacific posture, and whatever chilling effect this war has on America’s willingness to intervene the next time.Dominic Tierney, writing in Foreign Affairs, offers the frame: the American way of war doesn’t reward tactical dominance. Americans believe winning requires decisive success — which means the definition of winning isn’t only Iran’s to give or the administration’s to give. Trump has to sell it to an electorate that already doesn’t believe him.Support for continuing the war sits at 31 percent. Seventy-eight percent of Americans say the U.S. has not met its goals; 21 percent say it has. The president’s handling of the conflict draws 32 to 34 percent approval, with disapproval as high as 61 percent in Pew and YouGov tracking. Pew found that by nearly two to one, Americans say the war is not going well. Forty percent believe it will leave the country less safe. Sixty-six percent say the U.S. should find a way out, even without achieving its stated objectives.Two thirds of the country have already decided that getting out matters more than winning.For all of president Trump’s marketing genius.(that is how he became president, after all) he is slouching under the weight of two wars– a trade war and the war in Iran. Though he is trying to convince the public that the economy is doing great and that America has won in Iran, he is not succeeding.Criminal inquiry into Jerome Powell closedThe Justice Department closed its criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Friday — clearing the way for Kevin Warsh’s confirmation as Powell’s successor. The probe centered on cost overruns in the Fed’s headquarters renovation: a project that grew from $1.9 billion to roughly $2.5 billion, which the Fed attributed to a sinkhole, asbestos, and inflation. Powell had called the investigation an attempt to pressure the Fed into cutting rates — currently at 3.6% — toward the 1% the president wanted. In March, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg quashed the DOJ’s subpoenas, finding “essentially zero evidence” Powell had committed a crime. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro closed the file Friday, handing the renovation questions to the Fed’s Inspector General, with the option to reopen if the IG finds fraud rather than mismanagement. Republican Senator Thom Tillis had vowed to block any Fed nominee while the probe remained open. With it closed, Tillis signaled he’d support moving Warsh to a full Senate vote.Judge’s Ruling on Asylum.A federal appeals court ruled Friday that Trump’s declaration of an “invasion” at the southern border was illegal — effectively reopening the U.S. to migrants seeking asylum for the first time since the first day of his second term.The administration will almost certainly appeal. Asylum processing hasn’t resumed, and the court didn’t set a timeline. But the ruling lands as a rebuke: Congress, the court found, never gave the president the power to waive asylum law by proclamation. The ruling doesn’t mean open borders — it means the U.S. rejoins nearly every other country in the world in giving people fleeing persecution a hearing.The question of who this country keeps its promises to surfaced elsewhere this week. The Trump administration is weighing whether to send roughly 1,100 Afghans — translators, guides, people who worked alongside American troops against the Taliban — to the Democratic Republic of Congo rather than honor the visa program Congress authorized for them. The alternative the administration is also floating: return them to live under the Taliban. Lawmakers in both parties objected. “We made promises to those fighting by our side to bring them to the U.S.,” said Republican Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska. “We should keep our promises.”And if you’re charting the tussle between the branches this week, you have the independent Fed on slightly firmer footing, the tariff money being repaid for executive overreach, and now this asylum ruling. Three rulings, one direction. Almost like the founders planned it that way.World Cup final tickets listed for more than $2.2millionIn economics, a Veblen good is one where demand increases alongside the price because the cost itself functions as a status symbol. This explains the psychological theater behind the news that a single 2026 World Cup ticket has been listed for $2.3 million. While no one is likely to actually pay that “moonshot” price, its mere existence serves a strategic purpose. By abandoning the resale price caps used in previous tournaments, FIFA has created a wild-west secondary market where they collect a 15% fee from both the buyer and the seller. This 30% combined “tax” gives the governing body a direct incentive to let wacky pricing stand.From a psychological standpoint, however, this outlier functions as an anchor. It recalibrates the fan’s sense of value: once you’ve processed the idea of a $2 million seat, the actual $11,000 price tag for Category 1 seats—itself an astronomical sum—suddenly feels like a bargain.1Some 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. Get full access to John Dickerson at johnfdickerson.substack.com/subscribe

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