Stack the Week

John Dickerson
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Stack the Week is a weekly review of the news — what mattered, what's coming, and why it all connects. With occasional acts of wonder. John Dickerson reads the week, ranks it, and accounts for it. www.johndickerson.com

  1. Stack the Week Daily

    2h ago

    Stack the Week Daily

    Welcome to Stack the Week for July 13th, Monday. The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the feedback, the emails, and the steady stream of notes. Oh and the Apple podcast reviews are helpful. They introduce us to a wider audience. If you’re reading this text on a screen instead of listening to the audio, remember that this is also designed as a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re commuting, folding laundry, or pondering what you’re going to do with all that World Cup knowledge you accumulated after next week. A brief note about Laura Doan and Annie Cohen. They have both increased the labor participation rate by finding employment in corporations larger than Dickerson Enterprises and Picayune. Congratulations to them both! Okay, let’s start. Man Made Deaths How do you count the people who die because someone dismantled the system that would have kept them alive? That’s the question Atul Gawande raises in the latest New Yorker, borrowing a concept from historian Richard Rhodes called “public man-made death.”Examples include: the child whose malnutrition treatment never comes, the woman who dies in childbirth after her clinic closes, the tuberculosis patient whose medicine disappears. Gawande cites research from Boston University and The Lancet estimating that the dismantling of USAID has already contributed to roughly 700,000 deaths, with millions more possible if the cuts persist. Those figures remain projections and are disputed by the Trump administration and Elon Musk who ran the operation that dismantled USAID. But Gawande’s larger point survives the debate over the exact number: policy decisions can kill people just as surely as wars do. Why did we lead with this? Because our sorting criteria at the moment weighs human death– no matter what nationality of human– as a key priority. Human death as a consequence of human choices also pushes it higher. Iran is Back On Imagine you’re the captain of a 1,000-foot supertanker—longer than three football fields—or a container ship stacked 20 stories high, entering one of the most dangerous waterways on Earth. You’ve switched off your AIS transponder—the electronic beacon that normally tells nearby ships, insurers, and satellites who you are and where you’re headed. That makes you harder to target, but harder for everyone else to avoid. Collision risk rises. Rescue becomes more difficult. Insurers lose the ability to monitor your voyage in real time. Oh, and you might hit a mine or be hit by a drone. That’s why only six ships passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday, the lowest daily total in five weeks. Before the war, roughly 3,000 ships crossed every month, carrying about one-fifth of the world’s oil. One of them was hit anyway. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard attacked a Cyprus-flagged container ship because it used what Iran called an unauthorized route, crippling the vessel and leaving one civilian crew member missing. Open access to the Strait of Hormuz was part of June’s ceasefire agreement. By declaring which routes are “authorized,” Iran is rewriting that agreement by force. The United States answered with a third round of strikes in a week, reportedly hitting about 140 Iranian military targets. Before February, Iran had almost no say over what moved through Hormuz. Today, it fires warning shots, dictates shipping lanes, inspects commercial traffic, and proposes charging tolls. Monday President Donald Trump declared the United States would become the “Guardian of the Hormuz Strait,” said it would charge ships a 20 percent fee for safe passage, and suggested America would effectively take responsibility for keeping the waterway open. That will take more time, money, military effort and risk, just the kind of mission-creep candidate Trump often argued had drawn previous presidents into costly, open-ended conflicts. The Financial Times reports that Dubai is planning a new port designed to reduce dependence on Hormuz altogether. They no longer see it as a passing military episode. The Washington Post reports that Israel shared intelligence with Washington, indicating that elements of Iran’s hard-line leadership want President Donald Trump dead. U.S. officials stress the intelligence reflects the views of ultra-hardliners rather than an approved assassination plot. Some officials also caution that Israel may have emphasized intelligence because it knows how President Donald Trump makes decisions: present him as the target, and he may become more receptive to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s argument that military pressure on Iran should continue. Trump dismissed the warning. “Israel came up with nothing,” he told the New York Post, while adding that he has been Iran’s “number one” target for years. Security officials worry less about an official assassination order than about a lone actor inspired by the rhetoric. A government doesn’t have to authorize an attack if one supporter decides to carry it out. A New York Times report. It says Mossad secretly recruited former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—the man who once called for Israel’s destruction—met him in Budapest, paid his expenses, hid him inside Iran after the war began, and hoped he might someday lead the country. Another ICE Death A federal immigration agent shot and killed a man during an ICE enforcement operation Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine, after authorities say he drove his vehicle toward an officer while attempting to flee. The shooting brings to at least nine the number of people who have died during the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign. State and local officials from both parties, including Governor Janet Mills, Senator Susan Collins and Mayor Liam LaFountain, called for a full, transparent investigation. The agents were not wearing body cameras, leaving investigators without video evidence of the encounter. The shooting also comes as Minnesota prosecutors announced they have finally obtained evidence the Trump administration withheld for more than six months in two earlier fatal ICE-related shootings, while prosecutors in Houston say federal officials are still refusing to provide key evidence in another fatal ICE shooting last week. Lindsey Graham Fallout Just one day before he died, Senator Lindsey Graham was on the phone from Kyiv with CBS’s Margaret Brennan, celebrating what he believed was a breakthrough. After months of lobbying President Donald Trump, he had finally won White House backing for his bipartisan Russia sanctions bill. Twenty-four hours later, he was dead. He had suffered an acute aortic dissection—a tear in the inner wall of the aorta, the body’s largest artery. Blood had forced its way between the layers of the artery wall, causing them to separate. It is one of the deadliest cardiovascular emergencies in medicine. Roughly half of patients die before reaching a hospital. Doctors describe the pain as feeling “like a knife to the heart.” Graham had just returned from his tenth trip to Ukraine. His bipartisan sanctions bill would impose severe secondary sanctions and tariffs on countries—including China and India—that continue buying Russian oil. In the short term, Republicans effectively lose one vote. Until South Carolina appoints a successor and Senator Mitch McConnell returns from medical leave, Republicans have only a 51-47 majority on paper. Graham’s death also creates one more Senate race Democrats will at least examine. South Carolina remains a deeply Republican state. Donald Trump carried it by roughly 18 percentage points in 2024, Republicans hold every statewide elected office, and Republican Governor Henry McMaster has appointed Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, as her late brother’s temporary replacement . That makes a Democratic pickup unlikely. Even so, an open seat is almost always more competitive than one held by a well-known incumbent. Republicans may have to spend money defending South Carolina. To win the Senate, Democrats must gain four Republican-held seats while holding every Democratic seat they currently control. The key Republican targets remain North Carolina, Ohio, Maine, Alaska, Iowa and Texas, while Democrats must also defend the open seat in Michigan. The overall judgment from six pollsters and political analysts surveyed by The New York Times was consistent: Democrats remain favored to win the House, but the Senate map still tilts toward Republicans. North Carolina appears to be Democrats’ strongest pickup opportunity. Beyond that, they would likely have to win several states Donald Trump carried comfortably. McConnell Speaks After four weeks of speculation, McConnell explained his absence: a fall at his Washington home on June 14 left him briefly unconscious and hospitalized, followed by a mild case of pneumonia. The 84-year-old, who survived childhood polio and has fallen repeatedly this year, said his doctors found no fractures, no stroke, no heart attack, no tumor. He’s moved to a rehabilitation center and isn’t cleared to return to the floor. His statement came with a photo — smiling beside his wife Elaine Chao, holding Sunday’s Washington Post sports section, a tacit answer to online rumors that he’d died. He addressed the long silence directly: “You all know how folks of my generation often hesitate to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older.” It took Kentucky’s Democratic governor publicly asking him to update the public to break it. McConnell is retiring in January, the longest-serving party leader in Senate history. Times Subpoenas When does a leak investigation become an attack on the press? That’s the question raised Friday when federal agents showed up at the homes of four New York Times reporters with subpoenas ordering them to testify before a Manhattan grand jury this Wednesday. Their reporting had revealed that President Donald Trump

    24 min
  2. Stack the Week Daily

    3d ago

    Stack the Week Daily

    Welcome to Stack the Week for July 10th, Friday. The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the feedback and the reviews on Apple Podcasts. If you’re reading this instead of listening, remember this is also a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re driving, making dinner, or trying to lessen the cognitive load at the end of the week because frankly you’re a blob of jelly and just forming words is a challenge. Here at Stack the Whatever We Call it, we have the words. Thank you to Laura Doan for helping me bolt all of this together. Iran Again off Again The repetitive rhythm of this war—attack, retaliation, ceasefire, collapse—invites a danger. Every day feels like yesterday, so we stop asking key questions. Wake me when the war’s over. This hands over our critical faculties to the people who try to confuse us. So I’m going to give you the news and then try to knock us all out of our presentism. First, the news: The U.S. hit more than 170 targets in Iran over two days. Iran answered the recent U.S. attacks with missiles and drones at bases in four countries—Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan—including Qatar, the mediator of the talks it’s still supposedly conducting. The US attack included a railway bridge —civilian infrastructure, not just military hardware. Central Command says the bridge moved weapons toward the Strait; Dana Stroul, the Pentagon’s former top Middle East official, told The New York Times the strike was a message that Iran’s bridges and railways are now targets. Problem: attacks on civilian infrastructure could constitute war crimes. The administration is trying to write around that by saying the civilian infrastructure is dual use. On the other hand, who will take the U.S. to court? In last month’s memorandum of understanding the U.S. gave Iran sanctions relief in return for its assurance that it would allow free use of the Strati of Hormuz. Iran cheated, taking the relief while trying to keep control of the Strait by forcing shippers onto an Iran-approved route and when tankers didn’t take that route Iran attacked, as it did with three commercial ships earlier this week. That’s the news. Here’s the 30,000-foot view: One of the world’s worst regimes—one that murders and suppresses its own people, funds terrorists abroad, and seeks to build the means to do both more effectively with missiles and nukes—has been significantly degraded. The costs of the degradation are: Death. A thirst for revenge implanted in an entirely new Iranian generation. Destabilization of the world economy. Further deterioration of the American public’s faith that their leaders will tell them the truth about the highest-stakes actions taken in their name. Missile stockpiles—both the interceptors that defend and the weapons that attack—have dwindled, weakening the United States and its allies against every other threat. Russian oil allowed to flow, propping up a regime that kills Ukrainians. Hardliners are in power in Tehran. Nobody in Washington can say who they’ll be negotiating with in five years. The U.S. has publicly claimed the right to hit bridges and power plants under a dual-use theory, a precedent Russia and China can now cite back at us. Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan absorbed attacks on their own soil for hosting American forces, a bill that will come due. Congress never voted—four months of war, 170 targets in two days, and the constitutional question has simply been steamrolled. The war has also consumed something harder to measure but just as finite: American attention. Attention is finite. Every hour, intelligence asset, diplomat, or Patriot battery devoted to Iran isn’t available for China, Ukraine, or the next crisis. Was it worth it? And was it worth it the way it has been done? Could it have been done no other way? The only way to come up with an honest answer is to keep the question right at the end of our nose. Making a final calculation also depends on what finally comes of diplomatic negotiations (let’s not call them peace talks or a ceasefire—those words have lost the snap in the waistband). Finally, and I know I mentioned it earlier in the week, but as the war heats up, I return to the spin from the administration and its allies: that when Donald Trump signed the June Memorandum of Understanding, it was a savvy move to quiet the war’s impact in advance of the November elections. That spin was folly at the time and today’s news reminds us why. It’s a double folly really: the happy talk of 18 dimensional electoral chess strategy echoes the original criticism of the war—that it was built on happy talk, fantastical outcomes and incapable of hard thinking about long-term and unintended consequences. Houston Shooting Update We told you Tuesday about the Houston construction worker who was fatally shot by an ICE agent during a traffic stop. The Department of Homeland Security initially said the driver had tried to run over an officer with his van, forcing the agent to fire in self-defense. The update: in reporting by The Washington Post and the Associated Press, the three men who were in the van have now given detailed, consistent accounts disputing that version, saying the van never drove toward an officer and that agents opened fire from the side of the vehicle. There is still no body-camera footage. ICE says the agents involved had not yet been issued body cameras, even though the agency has adopted a policy requiring their use where they have been deployed. ICE has not released other evidence supporting its account. Body cameras matter here because they reduce the space where competing official and eyewitness narratives can survive indefinitely. In ordinary policing, video increasingly settles factual disputes within days. Immigration enforcement still operates in many places without that evidentiary backstop, leaving the public to judge credibility instead of evidence. Several other fatal encounters involving ICE agents are also in dispute, with similar claims that victims acted aggressively toward officers. In the case of two incidents in Minneapolis, reporting later showed that video evidence contradicted key parts of ICE’s initial account. Election Assistance Commission Donald Trump fired the remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Friday. If your reaction was, “The what?”, you’re not alone. Congress created the commission after the disputed 2000 Bush-Gore election, not to run elections—despite the repeated efforts by president Trump that remains the responsibility of the states—but to make elections run better. The EAC tests and certifies voting machines, distributes election-security grants, maintains the national voter registration form, shares best practices with thousands of local election officials, and coordinates efforts to protect election systems from cyberattacks. The immediate practical effect may be limited. States will still run this November’s elections, and the commission has operated without a full slate of commissioners before. The larger story is what this says about the long-running fight over who gets to shape American elections. President Trump has repeatedly argued that elections need stronger safeguards against illegal voting, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register. Those in touch with the data and facts respond that documented cases of noncitizen voting and other forms of voter fraud are exceedingly rare. Democrats say requirements of the kind Trump is advocating risk making it harder for eligible citizens to vote. Federal courts have already blocked parts of the administration’s effort to impose document requirements through executive order, saying the Constitution largely leaves the conduct of elections to Congress and the states. This is one of the first major tests of the Supreme Court’s recent expansion of presidential authority to remove leaders of independent federal agencies. We know that Donald Trump has a history of repeated claims that elections were rigged when there is no evidence. Removing experts who could fact-check him allows his evidence-free claims to flourish in an environment where being loud and wrong is more powerful than facts or reason. Trump and Housing Bill If the Election Assistance Commission isn’t really about elections anymore, maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that the housing bill isn’t really about housing anymore either. Hours after firing the commissioners, Donald Trump refused to sign Congress’s bipartisan housing bill—not because he objected to anything in it, but because the Senate had failed to pass his SAVE America Act, which he says would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. The housing bill will become law anyway at midnight because Trump chose neither to sign nor veto it, foregoing a chance to boast about an issue close to people’s election year concerns. So what does that mean for housing costs? Probably not much this year. The bill tries to increase housing supply over time by making it easier and cheaper to build homes, easing federal regulations, encouraging local governments to permit more construction, and limiting some large institutional purchases of single-family homes. Economists generally see it as a useful, incremental supply bill—not one that will noticeably lower your rent or mortgage in the near future. The larger point is the one we’ve been talking about all week. Increasingly, legislation isn’t judged on its own merits. It becomes leverage in a fight about something else. In this case, one of the largest bipartisan housing bills in decades has been turned by the president into something else. The thing that might help people with the necessity they care about most is overshadowed by a phantom problem that gains them nothing. Ebola In the United States or Europe, an Ebola case sets off a rapid, almost choreographed response: t

    24 min
  3. Stack the Week Daily Edition

    4d ago

    Stack the Week Daily Edition

    Welcome to Stack the Week for July 9th, Thursday. The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the feedback and the reviews on Apple Podcasts. If you’re reading this instead of listening, remember this is also a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re driving, making dinner, or concluding that you really haven’t done enough to decide what your new look for summer is going to be. Thank you to Laura Doan for helping me bolt all of this together. I usually start with a big thought connecting the day’s events that I can roll at you to say I am Lazarus, come from the dead. I’m not seeing it in the entrails today. I don’t want to force one and then have one, settling a pillow by her head, say, “That is not it, at all.” So, get yourself a peach and follow along with what happened, sorted through our way. Iran is a big mess again The ceasefire stopped organizing the Iran war. Now we’re back to a more dangerous process of watching each side calculate which has more leverage and how to get more. For the last few weeks, every new development was measured against the question: Would the ceasefire hold? Now we are back to a familiar formula: Iran cannot match the United States bomb for bomb. It doesn’t have to. It has its hand around the throat of something the rest of the world cannot afford to lose: the Strait of Hormuz. I won’t bore you with the shipping math. The world needs what moves through that narrow stretch of water. And Iran doesn’t have to close the strait to use it. It only has to make ship captains, insurers, energy traders, and presidents nervous. That’s why the June memorandum of understanding–—the ceasefire that lifted the American naval blockade, and reopened the Strait— mattered more than it first appeared. It wasn’t simply an agreement. It was an acknowledgment that the Strait itself had become one of the central prizes in the conflict. And as acute listeners will know, it was not a prize before the conflict because it was not an issue of contention. Even as the formal truce collapsed into open conflict, high-level mediators from Qatar, Pakistan, and Egypt kept lines of communication open around the clock. The war and the negotiations are no longer alternating; they are happening simultaneously. The problem was not that Washington failed to imagine Iran’s leverage. The problem was that it acted as if American military superiority could make that leverage irrelevant. That’s a big mistake and a big one for Donald Trump who presents himself as having a killer instinct that understands all possibilities. So now that President Trump has declared the ceasefire over, what are the choices now? The United States can try to degrade Iran’s ability to threaten shipping, do the slow, hard work of reopening the Strait, and rob Iran of its leverage. Or it can escalate the bombing in the hope of forcing the regime to yield. The Iranian regime can continue asking its people to absorb the pain while betting it can disrupt the Strait long enough for pressure from the world economy—and perhaps from the approaching November election—to produce better terms. Ukraine’s Strategic Shift The lesson of the Iran war—if we can’t beat your army, we’ll attack the system that keeps it fighting—is playing out in Ukraine too. Ukraine is going after the machinery that lets Russia keep fighting: oil depots, refineries, fuel terminals, tankers, rail links, and the supply lines that keep Crimea and the front fed. On Thursday, Ukrainian drones hit more Russian oil facilities and set two oil tankers ablaze in the Sea of Azov. Fires broke out at oil sites prompting evacuations, while one tanker continued burning after its crew fled. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calls the campaign “long-range sanctions.” If sanctions are supposed to squeeze the revenue and supply lines that sustain war, Ukraine is now trying to do with drones what Western governments have tried to do with finance. Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries and fuel infrastructure have helped trigger gasoline shortages, rationing, and long lines in multiple Russian regions. Foreign Policy reports that Ukraine has hit Russian oil refineries 194 times this year—11 times as often as during the same period last year—and that more than half of Russia’s regions have reported fuel shortages, rationing, or restrictions on civilian sales. This is the change in the war. Ukraine is no longer only trying to stop Russian advances at the front. It is trying to make the front harder for Russia to supply. I don’t know what to do with this exactly, but for years, Ukraine’s allies worried that striking inside Russia would escalate the war. How worried should we be about escalation now? The lesson isn’t being lost on the rest of NATO. On Thursday, at a NATO summit, Germany announced it will buy American Tomahawk cruise missiles, giving it—for the first time since the Cold War—a ground-based weapon capable of striking targets more than 1,000 miles away. Since NATO was created to counter the Russian threat, those 1,000 miles might be measured straight into Russia. European allies also pledged billions of dollars to develop their own long-range strike systems. Europe is drawing the same lesson Ukraine has learned by necessity: in modern war, holding an enemy’s logistics, industry and infrastructure at risk may matter as much as defeating its armies at the front. President Trump said Wednesday that the United States would give Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot air-defense systems. A license is not a shield over Kyiv: A top Ukrainian official warned that it could take a year or more to produce Patriot interceptor missiles. Fire in the Land of Shoes China’s shoe capital became the site of one of the country’s deadliest industrial accidents in years Thursday. A fire tore through the Huiteng shoe factory in China’s Fujian Province, killing 28 people. More than 200 workers escaped or were rescued, but many were trapped as flames spread through the multi-story building. The fire broke out in Jinjiang, a city whose factories produced more than 1.2 billion pairs of shoes last year—roughly one out of every five pairs made anywhere in the world. Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered what state media called an “all-out” rescue effort and demanded that those responsible be held accountable. Authorities arrested the factory owner and other managers, froze the company’s assets, and opened an investigation into what caused the fire. Preliminary findings suggest the blaze started on the building’s ground floor. Officials said materials such as rubber soles, adhesives, and chemical solvents used in shoe production helped it spread rapidly, while firefighters told state television that large quantities of stored materials had been piled into stairwells, slowing both evacuations and rescue efforts. The speed of the government’s response reflects a familiar pattern in China. Major industrial accidents often produce an immediate promise of accountability, arrests of local managers, and a national investigation. The harder question usually comes later: whether the findings lead to broader changes in workplace safety or simply identify people to blame. Perhaps not the Time for a Fruit Habit Food has become remarkably good at traveling across America. Unfortunately, so have the things that sometimes come with it. Health officials are investigating one of the country’s largest cyclospora outbreaks in years after nearly 1,000 people in Michigan and hundreds more in neighboring Ohio became sick with a parasite that causes severe diarrhea. More than 40 people have been hospitalized, but no one has died. Officials still don’t know what food caused the outbreak. Cyclospora exposes a weakness in the modern food system. By the time people become sick—sometimes two weeks after eating contaminated food—the lettuce, basil, cilantro, berries or other produce that carried the parasite has long since been harvested, shipped, sold and eaten. One contaminated ingredient may have passed through multiple distributors into grocery stores and restaurants across dozens of states before investigators even know an outbreak exists. Tracing the source is unusually difficult. The parasite cannot be grown in a laboratory, many routine tests don’t look for it, and investigators often discover that the only thing hundreds of patients shared was a single ingredient hidden inside dozens of different meals. Sometimes they never find the source. The defenses are modest: Wash produce, though washing may not remove this parasite. Peel what you can. Skip pre-cut produce during an outbreak. And if diarrhea lingers after a meal of fresh produce, tell your doctor what you ate. Sometimes the most important clue isn’t in a lab result—it’s in your last meal. Participation Puzzler The unemployment rate tells you how many people are looking for work and can’t find it. The labor-force participation rate tells you something different: How many Americans are even in the game? It measures the share of adults who either have a job or are actively trying to get one. Stop looking, and you disappear from both the labor force and the unemployment rate. Your family, however, will still expect you at dinner. That’s why economists watch it so closely. A falling unemployment rate usually signals a healthy economy. A falling participation rate can mean people aren’t finding work, can’t work, or no longer think work is worth pursuing. USA Today highlighted just how dramatic that shift has become. In June, roughly 720,000 Americans left the labor force, pushing the participation rate down to 61.5 percent. Outside the pandemic, that’s the lowest level in nearly half a century. Why are they leaving? No one agrees. Some are retiring as America ages. Some have left work to care for children or aging parents. Some are living with chronic illness or dis

    24 min
  4. Stack the Week Daily Edition

    5d ago

    Stack the Week Daily Edition

    Welcome to Stack the Week for July 8th, Wednesday, which is still not Friday. The experiment continues. Thank you for the feedback and the reviews on Apple Podcasts. If you’re reading this instead of listening, remember this is also a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re driving, making dinner, or finally finishing that wooden boat you’ve been building in the basement since the Hoover administration. Thank you to Laura Doan for helping me put this together. We sort the news into sections to make it manageable. Foreign news over here. Markets over there. Elections down at the local level, run by county clerks. The world doesn’t work that way: The Iran war is across the globe but hit us in our gas tank on Wednesday. A president gave away a private company’s license. Federal officials crossed the boundaries into state-level election decisions. In Maine, a candidate and the party are each drawing a different line. Detention centers can’t detain viruses. Viruses don’t stay inside detention centers… … Only the inhabitants of the worst corners of the internet were content to stay inside their box. The Iran war arrives on Wall Street On Wednesday, President Trump declared the ceasefire with Iran “over” and promised to “hit them hard again tonight.” Speaking at the NATO summit in Ankara, he called Iran’s leaders “scum,” “sick people,” and “vicious, violent people,” adding: “And if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it.” Tehran answered that it would not negotiate under military threat. “The era of bullying and extortion is over,” said Iran’s parliament speaker. “It leads nowhere. We don’t fold.” Events on Wednesday proceeded from the exchange of fire on Tuesday. Iran fired on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. forces answered by striking more than 80 Iranian targets—air defenses, coastal radar, and dozens of Revolutionary Guard boats. Iran then launched missiles and drones Wednesday at American bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. Brent crude jumped about eight percent—its largest one-day increase since this phase of the conflict began. Earlier spikes in this conflict had been roughly two to three percent. The Dow fell roughly 800 points. Higher oil prices eventually reach trucking companies, airlines, manufacturers, farmers, grocery distributors, and ultimately consumers. Traders were no longer pricing isolated attacks. They were pricing the possibility of a prolonged conflict that could repeatedly disrupt oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. How much will corporate profits sink, or will they pass along the higher prices? NBC News reported Tuesday that the Defense Department, with a budget of nearly a trillion dollars, is running out of cash. Defense officials asked Congress for more than $67 billion. Lawmakers haven’t approved it, in part out of frustration over how little the administration tells them about the war. Ukraine gets a license, not missiles Russia fired ballistic missiles at Kyiv Tuesday night into Wednesday—the third attack on the capital in less than a week. The strikes exploited the shortage we talked about Monday: Ukraine can shoot down ballistic missiles only with Patriot interceptors, and it is running out of them. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has spent six months asking Washington both for more Patriot interceptors and for permission to build his own. Lockheed Martin builds roughly 600 Patriot interceptors a year. Russia builds roughly 120 ballistic missiles a month—and recently fired 30 in a single night. Everyone defending against ballistic missiles draws from that same limited supply. Gulf states have fired more than 1,100 Patriots defending against Iran, and every interceptor the production line replaces for the Gulf is one that can’t protect the golden church domes of Kyiv. At the summit Wednesday, President Trump granted the license—while ruling out more American missiles, because “we need them for ourselves too.” He announced the license before telling Lockheed Martin, the company whose technology he had just promised away. A license, however, is not a missile. Trump claimed new U.S. plants could stand up production in two to three months. Lockheed Martin’s expansion of its existing line will not reach 2,000 interceptors a year until 2030. It remains unclear whether the license covers interceptors, the full Patriot system, or where production would happen. And a missile factory in Ukraine would sit inside the range of the weapons it is meant to stop. Or, Russians could seize production and use it themselves. In the main, the Trump complain was mainly aimed at Spain. The U.S. president continued his long-running push for NATO members to increase defense spending. Spain is the only alliance member that has not committed to spending 5 percent of GDP on defense by 2035. “I don’t want anything to do with Spain,” he said. “Cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits.” But it is unclear whether Trump could single out Spain, the European Union’s fourth-largest economy, without threatening the broader U.S. trade relationship with the EU’s 27 member countries. The president has made similar threats toward Spain before without following through. The DOJ sends 51 letters The Justice Department warned every top election official in the country Tuesday that they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting. The threat targets a crime that, like overcrowding at a seance or unicorn stampedes, doesn’t exist. Noncitizen voting is already a federal crime—punishable by prison and, for the voter, deportation. That is why it rarely happens. State audits, including in Republican-led states, have found noncitizen voting to be extremely rare, and every state already has procedures to prevent it. So why would the head of the Civil Rights Division bang out a directive on the keyboard? For the same reason World Cup Soccer players flop all over on the ground and pretend they’ve been fouled. President Trump has spent years claiming that elections he loses are rigged. Republicans are not favored in November’s midterms. If the Justice Department is already telling states they could be prosecuted for allowing noncitizens to vote, then after the election it can point to those warnings and argue that any Republican loss was caused by illegal noncitizen voting. The pushback is bipartisan. Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state called the letters insulting to county recorders. Utah’s Republican chief election official, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, described “another love letter” from the DOJ and called the threats “truly bizarre behavior” from “the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.” The letters follow a losing streak. The department has sued 30 states and D.C. for their voter rolls and has yet to win a case. Eleven federal courts have dismissed its demands, and the department lost its first appeal. Courts also blocked key parts of Trump’s executive order that sought to restrict mail voting. The department keeps losing for the same reason: the Constitution assigns the running of elections to the states. Five Days You can tell a live oyster from a dead one with a tap. A live oyster snaps shut. A dead one gapes. Within hours the meat begins to rot, announcing itself to everyone huddled over a Red Stripe looking for solace. Which brings us to the dying candidacy of the Democratic nominee for Maine’s Senate seat. Graham Platner farms oysters for a living. Since Monday, Democrats have been tapping. Even Stephen King, Maine’s most famous Democrat, deleted his post defending Platner. No snap. Platner was silent Wednesday, and the smell of a dead campaign has reached every passerby since Monday’s rape allegation—which he denies. His campaign held a staff call that set no timeline for a decision. A person close to the campaign told CNN: “I think he knows it’s over,” but “he thinks ‘I built this thing’”—and wants a say in who gets the nomination. The Maine Democratic Party is already designing a replacement process. It rebuffed Platner’s attempts to shape the pick. His campaign insists it wants “voters and volunteers” choosing a successor, “not the political establishment.” The party’s answer: nothing starts until he withdraws. The candidates aren’t waiting. Troy Jackson, the former state Senate president who campaigned alongside Platner, filed exploratory paperwork Tuesday—the first to do so. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is considering a run. So is Nirav Shah, the former CDC director. Platner has until 5 p.m. Monday to withdraw; the party has until July 27 to name someone. A virus inside, a shooting outside Measles is loose in federal custody. DHS confirmed seven active cases among detainees at the Florence Detention Center in Arizona. It’s the second cluster in Arizona federal custody this year. The system is designed to spread it: ICE constantly transfers detainees from one facility to another—to open up beds, to stage deportations—so an infection doesn’t stay where it starts. It rides the bus to the next facility. In June, one infected detainee from the Arizona network arrived at Fort Bliss in Texas, and the facility had to quarantine nearly 180 people. That’s the arithmetic of measles, among the most contagious viruses we know: one case in a crowded building means everyone unvaccinated nearby is presumed exposed. A detention center gives measles everything it wants: people packed in close quarters, a population that turns over constantly (fresh virus shipments daily!), and no reliable record of who’s been vaccinated. In response, ICE has stopped in-person visits at Florence, stopped moving detainees around inside the facility, and quarantined anyone suspected of contact with an infected person. Quarantining the building doesn’t quarantine the outbreak, because immigration detention isn’t a pr

    22 min
  5. Stack the Week Daily

    6d ago

    Stack the Week Daily

    Welcome to Stack the Week for July 7th. It’s still not Friday. We here at Stack the Whatever We’re Calling It have a grasp of the totally obvious, if nothing else. But we are pushing our Soap Box Derby car out of the shed and seeing how far it will go before the wheels come off and roll into the abandoned lot with the tires and discarded refrigerator. Thank you to Laura Doan for helping sous chef all of this into a format available to all humans. Thank you out there, as always, for your subscriptions, your comments, and your favorable reviews on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere. Our marketing department has let us know there might be some confusion about how you can listen to this offering. It is a podcast, and so it is available here as a podcast or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You don’t have to listen to the AI-generated voice that Substack provides. Today the world’s most important waterway caught fire again, a militant group gave up a government it held for nineteen years (maybe!), the Atlantic alliance renegotiated its founding bargain, and the Democratic Party spent the day trying to talk its own Senate nominee off the ballot in Maine. Also: a man who fought beside American soldiers in Afghanistan died in American custody, and almost nobody noticed. And in New York, engineers noticed a sagging skyscraper just in time. The Strait of Hormuz is hot again Before dawn, a mayday. A Qatari tanker carrying liquefied natural gas was struck by a drone. Its engine room caught fire. Reuters has the audio recording — the captain calling out his ship’s name, reporting the hit on the port side. Simultaneously, a Saudi supertanker was struck by a missile. By afternoon, the British military reported a third tanker hit by a drone; it remains damaged but sailing. All three used the southern route along Oman’s coast — the route Iran told the world last Thursday not to use. They are out there because the main northern lanes are heavily mined. No casualties reported on any of the three. Qatar’s foreign ministry called the strike a grave violation of international law. Brent crude rose on the news — climbing about two and a half percent to just under seventy-four dollars a barrel. A five-month high for global oil. In response, the U.S. revoked a license that had authorized the sale of Iranian oil. This ended economic life support granted Tehran just last month, effectively killing the interim ceasefire. Now, either the administration allows global energy prices to spiral by choking off Iranian crude, or it is forced to back up its economic penalties with direct military strikes to keep the strait open. The ten-year Treasury yield ticked up, one of those numbers you hear on the news but rarely understand. It means investors lending money to the government now want a bigger return. One reason is that they expect higher oil prices to push up inflation. When it costs more to move oil, it usually costs more to move almost everything else. I started this item with a little bit of theatricality because I was trying to locate the story in flesh and blood—the captains who must traverse the Strait and hope that nothing hits their vessel from above or below. With every strike, fewer captains are going to want to make the run, and fewer insurance companies will be willing to risk their cargo. When ships stop sailing, prices go up. That’s how all of this makes life more expensive for you. There is a theory that President Trump agreed to the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran because he wanted everything to cool down before November’s elections, planning to push Iran into greater concessions afterward. Today’s events expose the weakness in that theory. The Iranians push a couple of buttons, and the transmission line between those explosions and your wallet is short. They can keep doing it until November, making it impossible to guarantee the calm that agreement was supposed to buy. President Trump said Monday that Iran must make a deal or the United States would finish the job. Iran’s foreign minister answered this morning: no more talks while the threats continue. The death of an ally This story hasn’t gotten much pickup, but by our framework, a loss of life outranks a political scandal. Official medical examiner findings and death certificates released Tuesday reveal that Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, 41, died of acute anaphylaxis and severe asthma less than twenty-four hours after entering federal custody this March. Paktiawal was a combat ally who spent more than a decade fighting alongside U.S. Army Special Forces in Afghanistan before being evacuated to America in 2021. Paktiawal’s family alleges that arresting agents confiscated and withheld his necessary medical inhaler during the booking process. For more than ten years, this man bet his life on America’s word, walking patrols with Special Forces in a country where helping Americans was a death sentence. We flew him out in 2021 because we owed him. He survived a decade of the Taliban. He did not survive his first day in ICE custody. Fifty-two people have died in ICE custody since January of last year, according to Human Rights Watch. Thirty-three died in 2025—the most in more than two decades—and this year is on pace to break that record. The death rate in detention has more than doubled, rising faster than the detained population. Platner back on the farm This is the story you might have expected to be the lead story today. Nearly every American front page leads with it. Is that news judgment or rubbernecking? The campaign of the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, Graham Platner is in jeopardy. By the time you hear this, that campaign may be referred to in the past tense. But at noon Tuesday, the story was a credible Politico report featuring an on-the-record sexual assault allegation by a former partner, Jenny Racicot, which Platner denied. By 1:25 p.m., Senator Bernie Sanders publicly cut ties and told him to withdraw immediately. An elevator full of other prominent Democrats did too. The Senate runs through Maine. Democrats’ most plausible path to a majority requires beating Susan Collins, and their nominee’s collapse makes that path substantially harder. The story also matters because it sits inside a recurring national argument: what we owe accusers, what we owe the accused, and how a movement responds when one of its stars is accused of wrongdoing. That’s not gossip. It’s how parties demonstrate their values—and a model for how the rest of the culture handles abuse in the workplace and at home. Under Maine’s election statute, a nominee who withdraws by 5 p.m. on the second Monday in July—this coming Monday, July 13—can be replaced on the November ballot. The party then has until July 27 to name someone. Miss the deadline and Platner’s name stays, disowned by nearly everyone who put it there. Yesterday, we noted that Platner’s rise reflected what can happen when a political movement prizes raw, unvetted “authenticity” above all else. But as our community rightly noted—and I should have said—authenticity doesn’t inherently breed misconduct, nor are establishment candidates immune. NATO, renegotiated The postwar Atlantic bargain—America underwrites European security, Europe follows America’s lead—is being renegotiated in real time. The summit was convened in Turkey rather than Brussels, the de facto headquarters of NATO and the European Union. Alliance meetings are typically held there to signal unity and institutional continuity. Instead, leaders gathered in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s palace compound, and Trump said that if Erdoğan weren’t hosting, he might not have come. Trump likes Erdoğan—a strongman who deals leader to leader, flatters generously, and skips the lectures Trump gets from Western Europe. The strategic reason is that the war in Iran has made Turkey’s geography indispensable. It fields NATO’s second-largest army, controls the straits connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, hosts pipelines carrying Caspian and Iraqi oil west, and remains the one NATO capital on speaking terms with Moscow, Kyiv, and Tehran at once. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it the most consequential gathering in the alliance’s history, and he meant it as a boast. In the administration’s telling, this is the summit where NATO rebuilds on American terms: Europe paying more, Europe supplying the troops and ships America pulls out. The Americans who distrust NATO and the Europeans who run it now agree on the basic facts: after this week, America does less and Europe does more. They only disagree about what to call it. The White House calls it fixing a bad deal. Much of Europe calls it being left on their own by the country that helped write the rules of the modern global order. Trump renewed his demand that the United States acquire Greenland—territory of Denmark, a NATO ally—and suggested that if Europe keeps resisting, the U.S. could pull every service member off the continent. The alliance came to Ankara carrying billions in new arms deals—much of it buying American—assembled less as strategy than as appeasement. Europe is arming to make itself less dependent on a partner it no longer fully trusts, while paying that partner in the meantime. The Thank you, sir, may I have another strategy. Sitting beside Erdoğan, Trump announced he’ll lift the sanctions imposed in 2020 after Turkey bought Russia’s S-400 air defense system—”We don’t want to sanction friends,” he said—and that he’ll consider selling Turkey the F-35, the stealth fighter Turkey was expelled from in 2019 for that same Russian purchase. Congress wrote the expulsion into law; Trump did not explain how he’d get around that law. Erdoğan says he’s been promised five jets. Israel’s prime minister spent Monday morning on television claiming the sale was a threat to its security and urgin

    24 min
  6. Stack the Week: Day Edition

    Jul 6

    Stack the Week: Day Edition

    Welcome to Stack the Week for July 6th. Wait, it’s not Friday. No, it’s not. This is a new turn on the experiment. So, let’s give this Monday a nudge and see if it can walk on its halting legs out of the haybed in the barn and into the sunlight. Maybe this is the theme of every day, but if you look at today’s ledger, a repeated theme is that the old speed bumps built to keep the world stable are melting away. For generations, we counted on institutional rulebooks, legal processes, and treaties to slow raw power and keep things fair. Monday you see that changing: * A sixty-four-year-old soccer rule vanishes the moment a president makes a personal phone call. * A humanitarian law built to protect solo immigrant children is stripped down just to move bodies out of the country faster. * What happens when the National Guard is on the crime beat. * A president trying to redefine economic success. * A rising political star is forced out of a crucial Senate race because voters don’t want a peacemaker anymore—they want a street-fighter. When you tear out the joists that keep a society steady, you lose the protections against chaos. The world stops operating by tradition or fairness and collapses into a raw game of tug-of-war, where the only rule left is who has the muscle to pull the hardest. But at least the sun is weaker than we thought. Thank you to Laura Doan for helping with this iteration of the experiment. 1. Ukraine/Russia/NATO Every missile hit. Russia fired 29 ballistic missiles at Kyiv overnight and Ukraine intercepted none. Normally the Patriot missiles would have answered — the American-made system is the only thing Ukraine has that can stop a ballistic missile. But the Patriot missiles from the US that would have resupplied Kyiv were spent months ago defending Israel and American bases across the Middle East against Iran, and new ones can’t be built fast enough. Ukraine had been stretching what remained — one missile per incoming warhead when the manual says two to four. Sunday night the medicine cabinet was empty. The total Russian barrage — 419 weapons in all, 351 drones and 68 missiles — killed at least 12 and wounded 60, four days after a strike that killed 31. The strike was called in by Putin, whose other phone use this weekend was a nearly 90-minute call to Donald Trump — the Kremlin readout says Trump offered to help find a solution to the war, and Putin reminded him of his open invitation to Moscow. We are coming up on the one year anniversary of the Alaska summit that was heralded by the president and his men as a huge success. Nothing much came of it. The U.S. calls battlefield progress “frozen”; the more accurate assessment is asymmetric stalemate — Ukraine’s long-range strikes onto Russian territory are causing fuel shortages inside Russia while Russia empties ballistic inventory into a capital that can’t stop them as they once could. Tuesday, Trump meets Zelenskyy in Ankara, at a NATO summit with one question under every agenda item: Europe promised Trump it would pay for more of its own defense, but money takes years to become weapons and soldiers — can the allies show him enough, fast enough, to keep America in the alliance? They doubt it themselves: for months they’ve been meeting in secret to plan a NATO without the United States. 2. Iran mourns its leader The flag-draped casket of Ali Khamenei moved by truck through Tehran Monday morning. Organizers actually had to shorten the ten-kilometer route from Revolution Square to Freedom Square because the mourning crowds were simply too massive. The eighty-six-year-old Supreme Leader—who ruled for thirty-seven years—was killed alongside his family in a joint U.S.-Israeli strike. Behind his casket came four more coffins: his daughter, his son-in-law, his daughter-in-law, and his fourteen-month-old granddaughter. Along the route, the state prominently displayed a photograph of Khamenei holding the baby. It is a deliberate piece of propaganda—an attempt to reframe a ruler responsible for decades of massacres and state terror into a grieving grandfather. By spotlighting that one small coffin, the regime hopes the world will focus on the bloody imprecision of an American and Israeli strike, rather than the thousands of Iranians Khamenei sent to the gallows. Mourners chanted death to America, hanged a Trump effigy, chalked grief messages onto a black, concrete wall by the thousands. Organizers misted water over the crowd to fight the heat. Revolutionary Guard men, who never talk to reporters, talked to reporters: the war is not over until he’s avenged, they said. The late Henry Kissinger asked whether Iran wanted to be a country or a cause.The funeral asks Kissinger’s question all over again, and Iran has to answer fast. The new supreme leader is Khamenei’s son Mojtaba — badly burned in the same strike that killed his father, and he hasn’t appeared in public since. He takes over a country pulled two ways: the crowds in the street are demanding revenge on America, while his government is negotiating peace with America. Those talks are paused for the mourning. They will start again Thursday, once his father is buried. 3. The quickened pace of removing migrant children Migrant children were never guaranteed a place in America. They were guaranteed a process — a hearing, a lawyer’s help, a humane exit if the answer was no. ProPublica reported Monday that the administration has whittled that system down into a sliver of its former self in an energetic effort to get children out of the country as fast as possible. “Unaccompanied minor,” the designation for the children we’re talking about, means anyone under 18 with no legal status and no parent at the crossing. Most were sent alone toward a relative already in America. Their legal claims run from asylum from persecution in their home countries to visas for children abused, abandoned, or trafficked. Children with applications pending have lost the legal counsel and the shield from deportation that let them wait for an answer. Another new wrinkle: the kids are bait. To claim a child from federal custody, an adult must come forward — and the child-welfare agency now hands that adult’s name, address, and fingerprints to the deportation agency. A government document recovered in litigation this year warns children that an undocumented sponsor faces “arrest and removal.” The parent’s choice: step up and risk deportation, or stay hidden and leave the child in custody. Since the start of Trump’s second term, immigration courts have issued more than 10,000 removal orders against minors a month, nearly quadrupling the old pace. The vast majority removed last year had no criminal record. When federal legal services ended in March 2025, some 26,000 children lost their lawyers; children as young as two have since faced judges alone. What we’re talking about here is not whether children hear no, but the process for delivering that news. The door was never open to these migrant children. A 2008 statute, passed unanimously and signed by George W. Bush, accepted deportation as an outcome and civilized the path to it: a hearing, a screening for trafficking, placement with relatives while waiting, and — for the children who lose — a handoff to a named adult in the home country, not a minor deposited at a border crossing at night. Last fall, the administration pulled Guatemalan children from shelter beds and loaded them onto overnight deportation flights before a court order stopped the planes. The process used to take years, which itself became a magnet. Word traveled that a child who crossed alone got a long runway before any judge said no, and parents made rational decisions on that basis. The administration’s actions demagnetize the attraction. The article tells the story of Elder Chavez, 18, who wears braces. His parents abandoned him as a toddler in Honduras — a fact proven in family court, which earned him the legal status Congress built for children with no parent to return to. At 14 he crossed alone to reach his older sister in Alabama, who took him in and paid for the braces. Now, he sits awake most nights in an adult detention center in Louisiana, finally falling asleep near 4 a.m., the hour guards call detainees to breakfast. He was brought there after a traffic stop. Before last year, he’d have gotten a ticket and gone home to his sister. 4. National Guard Shooting Early Sunday morning in downtown Memphis, National Guard soldiers shot and killed Tyrin Johnson, 20. His is the third death tied to the federal task force Trump has deployed across six Democrat-run cities. Johnson lived in Nashville, worked construction, took university classes, and had his first child earlier this year. Police responding to shots-fired calls just before 4 a.m. say they spotted him carrying a handgun; he ran; Guard soldiers joined the foot chase. What happened next, the state investigators’ statement renders in the passive voice: “for reasons under investigation, the situation escalated.” Police say Johnson turned toward the soldiers with his weapon. His family says he was shot twice in the chest. “I just want to know, how they shot a 20-year-old twice in the chest, he hadn’t harmed anyone,” said his cousin, who called him “as good a boy as can be.” Two Guard medics knelt to treat the wounds. A Tennessee judge blocked this deployment as unconstitutional; an appeals court overturned the injunction in April, and the troops stayed. They patrol a city where crime was already falling before they arrived, part of an operation projected to cost taxpayers more than $1 billion this year. The shooting came during the most violent stretch of the American calendar. At least 52 people were shot in nine states over the holiday weekend, eight of them at Coney Island, four of those children. 5. China pops off While Russia was reminding NATO w

    24 min
  7. Stack the Week

    Jun 26

    Stack the Week

    Intro Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 22 through June 26. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player. Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering. Measuring Iran, UK PM goes down, the pedestrian’s enemy, The Supreme Court closes doors, more drones than ever hit Russia, Vance says Watergate Shmatergate, Clive Davis could say more in three minutes than Alan Greenspan in a weekend and when this guy yells you’d better cover your ears. Let’s take it day by day. Monday June 22 Hammering out a deal after the bombs. Was the war in Iran worth it? As the U.S. and Iran work on a deal to end the war, each item in that deal should be seen in the light of that question. JD Vance departed Switzerland on Monday after talks that stretched past 1 a.m. He said Iran had agreed to let international nuclear inspectors back into the country. Iran’s foreign minister said inspections would “continue as usual.” In the word choices lies a key distinction. Iran has had inspectors in the country, on and off, for decades, including before the war. The question – as it has been going back to the Obama era agreement– is which sites the inspectors can visit, and on what terms. Under the 2015 nuclear deal — the one Trump called “one of the worst deals ever” and cancelled in 2018 — Iran agreed to give inspectors access to Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain, including uranium mines, centrifuge production facilities, and access to undeclared or military sites within 24 hours at declared facilities. Critics at the time — Trump-ally Senator Tom Cotton chief among them — said the inspections schedule wasn’t enough. Inspectors had to be allowed in anytime anywhere. After Trump cancelled the deal in 2018, Iran reduced the access it had given. Since last June, Iran has barred inspectors entirely from sites bombed by the U.S. and Israel — which include the facilities where Iran had been producing and storing highly-enriched uranium. What Vance announced Monday then, was a return to something like the 2015 baseline — the arrangement that wasn’t good enough for the hawks who cheered Trump’s decision to blow up the Obama-era deal. Iran’s president said his country’s frozen assets– $100 billion held in unpaid oil bills and decades-old military contracts.-- would be unfrozen and returned. Vance said Iran could use it only to buy American agricultural products — soy, corn, wheat– and only if Iran cooperated in negotiations. The Strait of Hormuz remains open to shipping, Vance said, though the main central route is still mined. Iran’s military said Saturday it had closed the strait in response to continued fighting in Lebanon; U.S. Central Command disputed that. By Monday, Vance said the strait was open. Before the war, 100 to 130 vessels passed through the strait each day. Over the weekend, there were 71 confirmed transits. Keir Starmer to exit Britain is now on its seventh prime minister in a decade. The position is the Spinal Tap drummer of global leadership. Keir Starmer announced his resignation Monday morning, two years and roughly two months into a term that began with Labour’s largest parliamentary majority this century. The majority was the misleading part. Labour won 34 percent of the vote in July 2024 because the conservative opposition was fractured, not because voters were enthusiastic. In fact, it was a record low for a party forming a government. Analysts called Starmer’s victory a “loveless landslide.” And the love did not arrive after the marriage. Starmer left office as the least popular prime minister in polling records. There’s been so much turnover in the office of the prime minister that Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group said, in the future, everyone will be prime minister of Great Britain for fifteen minutes. Starmer did not launch a failed war, mismanage a pandemic, or crash the economy. His missteps were more mundane. He cut the winter fuel payment — an annual heating subsidy worth £200 to £300, paid to nearly all British pensioners since 1997 — restricting it to only those on the lowest means-tested benefits. That took the payment away from roughly 10 million people. The stated rationale was filling a £22 billion hole in the public finances left by the Conservatives. He reversed course which the left called it callous, and financial markets called it indecisive. Starmer then proposed cutting the benefit that helps millions cover the extra daily costs of living with a long-term disability, such as help getting dressed, getting around, or managing medication. Over 100 Labour MPs threatened to vote it down. He backed off that too. The problem for Starmer and any British prime minister is structural. More than half of Britain’s annual government spending — roughly 600 billion pounds — goes to three line items: the National Health Service, the welfare state (disability payments, housing support, and pension benefits) and debt repayment. All three are growing. America faces a version of the same fiscal trap UK leaders face. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest on the national debt together consume more than half of all federal spending, and every one of those lines is growing. Touch any of them and you lose the next election. Touch other popular items to fix the problem and people revolt. There were non-policy problems as well. Under Starmer’s predecessors, Conservative lawmakers had thrown parties in Downing Street during the Covid lockdowns they themselves had imposed on the country. So when the labor party’s P.M. accepted tickets to Taylor Swift and Arsenal matches while he was calling for austerity measures, he was open to charges that he’d dropped his posture as an antidote to the Conservatives’ culture of entitlement. He also appointed Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Washington despite Mandelson’s well-documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer fired Mandelson in September once those ties became clearer. The question that followed him — what he knew, and when, about whether security officials had cleared Mandelson — was made sharper by the fact that the British royal family had already forced Prince Andrew out over his Epstein ties. The institution least associated with accountability had managed to show some. The prime minister hadn’t. You can see how he might have miscalculated though. The country he was sending Mandelson to, after all, was one whose president had been photographed with Epstein dozens of times, whose cabinet included officials who had maintained ties with Epstein after his conviction for sex trafficking. If Washington had set the bar that low, an ambassador with a special Epstein relationship might help with the special relationship, the term sometimes used to describe U.S./U.K. ties. Federal judges blocking President Trump has engaged in a multi-pronged effort to change American voting. In legislation, by executive order and rhetorically. His specific target – non-citizen voting– which is already illegal and fraud which is rare and has never been shown to remotely affect a national election. In the executive branch, the Trump administration took a database the government uses to check immigration status — a tool called SAVE that was built to cover the roughly 26.5 million noncitizens and naturalized citizens who had passed through the federal immigration system — and expanded it to cover nearly every American with a Social Security number, folding in citizenship data and biometric records. This allowed states to run their voter rolls through the tool to flag supposed noncitizens. Several Republican-led states used the system and removed people it had identified as noncitizens — some of whom were, in fact, U.S. citizens. Monday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the use of the overhauled SAVE tool. Her 75-page ruling found that federal agencies had been “scrambling to comply” with an executive order mandating its use in the creation of eligible voter lists for each state which caused sloppy results. She ruled the system violated three federal laws meant to protect private information: the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. The administration’s argument — that only a small number of records were inaccurate — she called a red herring. Disseminating false citizenship data, she wrote, is defamatory, because it implies the flagged voter committed a federal crime. The larger fight is about who controls elections. The Constitution assigns that authority to states, not the president — a deliberate choice by founders who explicitly sought to dilute concentrated federal power. The Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington D.C. to force them to hand over voter rolls — and is 0 for 9 so far in court. Minnesota mean A grand jury subpoena is one of the most powerful tools in federal law enforcement — a demand by prosecutors for testimony or evidence that is almost impossible to refuse and almost never blocked by a judge. On Monday, a judge blocked one. Or six of them, in fact, all aimed at Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and other state and local officials. The subpoenas arrived on January 20th, the same day Trump posted on social media promising a “Day of Reckoning & Retribution” for Minnesota’s leaders — one day before the Justice Department leaked word of a federal investigation into Walz. The DOJ’s stated justification was that Walz had obstructed federal immigration agents during Operation Metro Surge, an immigration sweep that left two Americans dead and resulted in roughly 4,000 arrests. Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz — a George W. Bush appointee — found that explanation “risible.” The connections between the information sought and any actual criminal violation– the standard required for th

    1h 12m
  8. Stack the Week

    Jun 19

    Stack the Week

    Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 15 through June 19. 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. The MOU with not much U, a G-7 that crosses a low bar, the UK bans social media for growing brains and one of its mayors may get an upgrade, Growing brains on SNAP have it tougher, Claude sounds French but being American is its problem. In France the high schoolers earn their berets and cigarettes, they must have given a mouse a cookie in Australia, and a heavy week of mourning for trees. Let’s take it day by day. Monday, June 15th Memorandum of Misunderstanding For what purpose did this war in Iran take place? One of the goals of this here podcast has been to try to keep that question at the center of what we do, both with respect to the Iran war, but also in general. Trying to find the balance between keeping you updated on the latest developments while also keeping in mind the basic question: What is the point of this enterprise we are delivering you the latest news on? Don’t let the swarm of daily developments distract our focus from the key question. Events on Monday brought that question back to the center– that is, why this war had started– as the world evaluated the Sunday announcement by the president that a deal had been reached with Iran to end the war. What kind of deal was a secret on Sunday and Monday. But as the sun went down Monday night a few things were clear: The first was that the stated goals at the start of the war– regime change in Iran, unconditional surrender, verifiable destruction and ending of Iran’s nuclear program had all not happened. Sure, The regime had changed in the sense that the previous members of it were all dead, but the current members share the same ideological bent, and so for all practical reasons there has been no regime change. As to the details: The Strait of Hormuz will open—a critical waterway that only got a kink in it once the war started— and Iran will profit from oil sales in exchange for promising not to develop nuclear weapons. This core commitment echoes the famous line from the preamble of the 2015 JCPOA that President Trump cancelled in 2018. As Bloomberg noted of the new interim framework: “It seems the US president’s negotiators have solved only the problems Trump himself has created.” ‘Memorandum of misunderstanding.’ That’s what Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called it. Because on some key details, the two sides said were saying different things. Take the situation in Lebanon. Iranian state media announced that the deal secureds a permanent ceasefire on all fronts, interpreting the agreement as a U.S. obligation to force Israeli troops out of Lebanon and end the bombing. But the view from Washington and Jerusalem wasis entirely different: the U.S. frameds the deal as a mechanism to neutralize Iran’s regional proxy warfare, while Israeli officials hadve already publicly declared that Trump’s agreement doesn’t bind them and their troops aren’t leaving Lebanon. Then there is the issue of transit. The Trump administration touted a completely open, toll-free international waterway, but Tehran told its domestic audience that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened exclusively “under Iranian arrangements.” As Axios first reported, intercepted communications show Iranian officials telling one another they have zero intention of agreeing to a final deal on U.S. terms or allowing the physical removal of their enriched uranium stockpile. Instead, Tehran’s private strategy is to treat the 60-day interim window as a mechanism to immediately break the U.S. naval blockade and pocket early economic lifelines—like legalized oil exports—while dragging out technical talks and resisting any enforcement that actually reduces their nuclear capabilities. During Operation Epic Fury, the name the administration gave to the operation while it was in its heavy bombing phase, Trump administration officials and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent maintained that Iran would receive no sanctions relief or access to its estimated $100 billion in frozen foreign assets prior to completing verified nuclear concessions. Bessent explicitly stated that paying transit tolls to Tehran was illegal and warned that any damages inflicted on Gulf allies would be compensated using funds confiscated from Iranian accounts. Hot talk. Under the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) the U.S. granted immediate sanctions waivers for Iranian oil and fuel sales—alongside necessary banking, insurance, and transport services. $100 billion in frozen assets will be available to Iran if they play ball during the 60 day negotiations. Additionally, the text of the MOU includes a framework for a $300 billion international reconstruction and economic development fund for Iran. This erupted into a spat over whether the United States was paying off Iran. The administration said no, the performance-based money would be funded by the Gulf Coast Coalition rather than U.S. investment. Two notes: The concern with paying off Iran has always been that they will use the money to just rebuild their capabilities and these structured payments look an awful lot like the kinds of payments that were once savaged by Trump and others when the Obama administration was also releasing Iranian money frozen by sanctions. Judging by the details of the accord Israel who was in on the take off of this war– some would say Israel was flying the plane.-- was not there for the landing. As of Monday, Israel had neither been a party to the talks or seen a copy of the Memorandum of Understanding. That’s in part because it deals with almost none of Israel’s concerns. G-7: a fragile balance President Trump landed in France Monday for a summit America’s allies had spent months engineering around him. The Group of Seven met this year in Évian-les-Bains, on the French shore of Lake Geneva, with a host who pushed the summit back a day — France originally scheduled it for June 14, Trump’s 80th birthday — and who rescinded an invitation to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa after administration aides warned Trump would boycott the summit if Ramaphosa attended. The two countries had been at war over South Africa’s genocide suit against Israel at the International Court of Justice and a land reform law Trump called persecution of white Afrikaners. France denied acting under U.S. pressure. And Macron also arranged for Trump a private dinner at Versailles — among the gilded halls built for Louis XIV — a bauble to keep the American president from leaving early. The G-7 — a gathering of the world’s seven advanced economies — was built in 1975 precisely to limit this kind of diplomatic rushing around. French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing wanted a small, informal room where the leaders of the major democracies could coordinate without the carbuncular bureaucracy in the way. That architecture assumes the participants want the same basic thing, which was easier to assume after the Second World War. European leaders have largely concluded they can no longer count on that with the United States. After the tariff wars, lukewarm support for Ukrainian democracy, footsie with Russia and hostility toward NATO, the Greenland episode — at one point some European governments believed Trump was preparing to send troops to seize the island from Denmark — and the U.S. strike on Iran without allied consultation. You can see why the calculation has shifted. European leaders are now trying to ride two horses: building a structure that functions without the U.S. and not irritating Trump. None of the leaders gathered in Évian want an open rupture with Washington. The U.S. still provides the nuclear umbrella, the intelligence architecture, and most of NATO’s logistical backbone. Oh and its markets, access to capitol, customers and more are part of the global economy. A summit like the G-7 is always a collision between the calendar and the crisis — between the long-range problems that demand collective attention and the immediate emergency that actually has everyone’s focus. This one was no different. The formal agenda that France had carefully assembled — AI cooperation; critical minerals, the lithium, cobalt, and rare earths that China controls and the West needs for defense hardware, semiconductors, and batteries; and development partnerships, the loans and infrastructure financing meant to counter China’s influence in the Global South — was pushed to the margins by the Iran war’s aftershocks. Energy prices are elevated. Supply chains are rattled. DOJ Newsom snoop In July 2019, Donald Trump pressed the Ukrainian president to announce an investigation into Joe Biden — who was likely to be his 2020 opponent — and find proof that Biden had done something– anything– illegal. The House impeached Trump for using his office for personal reasons and warping the obligations of national security. The Senate acquitted him, 52 to 48, with Mitt Romney the only Republican voting to convict. Two-term California Governor Gavin Newsom claimed Trump was running the same play on him. Newsom, who is widely believed to be running for president, announced Monday that the Trump Justice Department is investigating him and his wife. Federal agents have knocked on the doors of friends and former associates and subpoenaed documents spanning years, according to the governor’s office. Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, have not themselves received subpoenas. The scope is unclear. A person familiar with the matter — speaking anonymously to the Associated Press— confirmed multiple federal probes involving people around the governor, including

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Stack the Week is a weekly review of the news — what mattered, what's coming, and why it all connects. With occasional acts of wonder. John Dickerson reads the week, ranks it, and accounts for it. www.johndickerson.com

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