Stack the Week

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 8 through June 12. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player. Thank you for those who have reviewed it on Apple Podcasts

Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering.

Declarations that the war is over aren’t over. Inflation isn’t over either. Xi shows even autocrats can be good neighbors. A semitrailer of bourbon vanishes in daylight. Epstein reaches the Situation Room. Ukraine outlasts the Great War. The cost of kicking it on the South Lawn, and solar power passes coal. The bears come down the mountain.

Let’s take it day by day.

Monday June 8

Iran and Israel

Last week Donald Trump called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu crazy and swore at him. It was notable not only that he was swearing at America’s ally, but that so many people in the White House were anxious to tell reporters that this had taken place.

This week started on a similar sour note. The two launched the Iran war together a hundred days ago, boasting of “unprecedented ‘shoulder to shoulder’ cooperation.” Monday they were fighting each other in public — Trump saying Netanyahu doesn’t get a vote on how the war ends, Netanyahu saying in an on camera rebuttal that he does.

The spat was set off by a chain of events that went back a week. On June 3, the U.S. brokered an Israel–Lebanon ceasefire in Washington. The next day Hezbollah rejected it and fired rockets at Israel. Sunday Netanyahu ordered a strike on Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut. That same day, Iran fired ballistic missiles at northern Israel in support of Hezbollah — the first Iranian fire since the April 8 ceasefire.

Enter Trump. On Sunday, he tried to stop Israel’s retaliation for the Iranian attack. He told Fox News he’d tell Netanyahu not to hit back, and urged Iran to the table: “You’ve shot your missiles, that’s enough. Get back to the table and make a deal.” He also told Fox he hadn’t known about Israel’s Beirut strikes and was angry about them.

He then told Axios he would call Netanyahu “right now and tell him not to strike back,” and that the U.S. is “very close to a final deal with Iran… I don’t want it to blow up because of what is happening now.”

In a phone interview with the Financial Times the same night — referring to Netanyahu’s say over any U.S.-Iran deal — Trump said: “He won’t have any choice. I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.”

At this point you need to evaluate whether people who say they call the shots really call the shots.

Remember a few weeks ago when I said this entire war is taking place in real time and in public? I’m sticking to that.

Israel ignored the U.S. president and approved its biggest wave of strikes on Iran since April at around 4:30 p.m. Sunday. Trump called Netanyahu shortly after and told him to halt it — Trump’s second call to Netanyahu in under 24 hours. Israel then struck Iran anyway. Trump posted on Truth Social that both sides should stop “immediately.”

Netanyahu waited nearly a day, then posted a two-minute prerecorded video: “Israel has every right to self-defense, and we will exercise that right whenever necessary” — said “with appreciation and respect… to my friend President Trump.”

Netanyahu is reading the battlefield and domestic politics. He’s trailing in the polls with a hard re-election ahead. A New York Times analysis suggests striking Hezbollah let him show his base he’d stand up to Trump, who’d just scolded him over Beirut. But the Times of Israel reports Netanyahu actually resisted far-right pressure to defy Trump on the Iran strikes — “Why should we pick a fight with him?”

Hold this in your brain too. It could be all theater. The Financial Times separately reported Trump knew Israel’s plans all along — good cop talks, bad cop strikes, by design. A former official: if Israel does the dirty work the U.S. wants done, Trump’s “happy with that.” We’ve heard that before in this war. The U.S. let Israel kill all the Iranian leaders at the start of the war. Let is a funny word in that context because the U.S. lives with the consequences.

Weaponization fund not dead

When we ended Stack the Week last week, Anne correctly asked whether the fund was dead or not. I couldn’t give her a good answer. First, because it was unclear: the acting attorney general said the weaponization fund was dead, but since Todd Blanche has been actively carrying out the president’s wishes against the norms of the office and the legal profession, a discerning listener could be suspicious. And the president’s answer last week to Kaitlan Collins’ basic question about whether the fund was dead betrayed such irritation that it lined up with what we know: when the president is angry in public, he’s putting pressure on his aides to give him what he wants. I hadn’t conveyed that full picture.

Sunday the picture got more color. Trump sat for an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and when Kristen Welker asked the same question—was he backing off the fund completely, as Blanche had said, or looking for another way to revive it—he didn’t answer it. He defended it. People had been destroyed by what he called a fake weaponization of government, he said; lives ruined, jobs and families lost, suicides. “If it was up to me, I’d pay them the kind of money that they deserve.” He called the fund a great idea, said other Republicans agreed, and allowed only that approval was someone else’s job: if it passes, great; if not, he’d be disappointed.

So Blanche’s “dead” and the president’s “great idea” are not the same position.

Then Welker asked whether anyone who attacked police on January 6th should get taxpayer money. Trump wouldn’t rule it out—he said he’d have to see it, then pivoted to the claim that 97 percent of those people were set up by dirty cops and a crooked FBI. Welker noted there’s no evidence the FBI ushered rioters inside or any of the other claims the president made.

Which, I hate to be gauche, means that the president who raises his hand to protect the Constitution is lying with the wide sweep of his hand in order to pretend that people who tried to undermine that Constitution through force on his behalf had been tricked into it by the FBI which is in the executive branch he leads.

I belabor this because if, in the middle of a tennis match, one of the players started eating the tennis balls, it would be worth noting. Is that analogy apt? It doesn’t track, but it might have caused you to pay attention to a development that might just seem like the way things go, given all that this president has done, so if I knocked you out of complacency then it did a useful journalistic thing, which is to put an event into context when the very idea of context is under assault.

Now back to that Meet the Press interview. It went the way these things go. Trump called the 2020 election and last week’s California primary rigged—Welker said there was no evidence—and Trump provided none, attacked NBC, unclipped his microphone, and walked off. “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough.”

The Ring of Fire

The earth’s surface is a cracked eggshell — a dozen rigid pieces sliding slowly on hot rock underneath. All the action — earthquakes and volcanoes — happens at the cracks. It feels like the continental coastlines should line up with these cracks, but they usually don’t. The Atlantic seafloor and the Americas sit on the same piece, moving together like two cars side by side at 65 — no collision, nothing to rupture.

The Pacific seafloor is the exception: its own separate plate, ringed by cracks that run exactly at the coastline. All the way around the edge, the Pacific plate is ramming into the plates carrying Japan, Alaska, California, Chile, Indonesia. And because ocean crust is denser than continental crust, the seafloor loses every one of those collisions: it bends and dives underneath the continent, like one car getting forced under another in a head-on crash. The plates stick, strain builds for decades, then slips all at once. Draw a line connecting every place this happens around the rim of the Pacific and you get a 25,000-mile horseshoe called not the horseshoe of fire but the ring of fire. This is not Johnny Cash’s fault. Nine of every ten earthquakes on Earth happen along it, and three of every four active volcanoes sit on it.

The Philippines and its 7,000 islands sit on that horseshoe and on Monday were hit by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake offshore, at 7:37 a.m. — the hour children were arriving for the first day of school after summer break, fresh uniforms, waiting for the flag raising that starts the day. At least 35 people are dead and about a dozen still missing, with more than 200 injured, most of them in buildings that came down. In Glan, the shaking brought a mountainside down on the houses at its foot, killing 13 people at once. A meter-high tsunami came ashore.

Ebola spread

The Ebola outbreak could be the worst ever. And we’ll get to the mayhem in a second, but since we’re not in the business of freaking you out until you’re scratching at the liquor cabinet with an allen wrench to break the lock, there is some moderation in order. Some experts believe the strain of Ebola circulating might have a slightly lower mortality rate than other common variants. So far 12 patients have recovered from their Ebola cases. And the outbreak, of the Bundibugyo species of Ebola, has an estimated case-fatality rate of 17.4% so far according to the WHO—compar