Stack the Week

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 1 through June 5. 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.

A chirping of hacks. A crazy partner in a war of moderate ceasefiring. A powers vote with no power. A slush fund still slushing. An enforcement bill that outlasts the revolt. A jobs number nobody saw coming. A Manhattan of bees underground, a ghost up on the mountain, and the screwworm is back thanks to the world’s first trillionaire.

Let’s take it day by day.

Monday June 1

Monday was about leverage and who actually has it — a president learning that more bombs don’t buy more obedience, neither does allyship with Israel, a slush fund his own party wouldn’t swallow, ten thousand government lawyers who decided the work wasn’t worth their names, and five and a half million bees who’ve held the same patch of cemetery since before any of them were born.

Bored

The president of the United States occupied many parts of the register Monday on the war he started in Iran.

He told CNBC’s Eamon Javers he’d lost interest.

“If they’re over, honestly, I don’t care,” he said, referring to peace talks. “I could care less. If they’re over, they’re over. If they’re not, you know — I think they took too much time. Frankly, I thought they started to get very boring.”

(Isn’t that the metric you want for peace talks? Boring? War is exciting. Peace talks you want to be boring.)

The president criticized Republican “hacks” for “chirping” about his handling of the war.

Wait till he learns what happens to him at the hands of his own party later in the week!

And on Truth Social he claimed credit for stopping something: that he’d personally kept the Israelis from striking the southern suburbs of Beirut.

The public posture was boredom.

The private posture, according to two U.S. officials and a third source briefed on the call, was rage.

This is all Axios reporting.

Summarizing the president’s remarks to Benjamin Netanyahu, one official said Trump told the Israeli leader:

And you’ll want to cover the ears of young ones:

“You’re f*****g crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”

A second Axios source said Trump at one point yelled, “What the f**k are you doing?”

This does not sound like the transcript of a victory party.

Remember, the public posture from the president is that the United States has “met and exceeded all military objectives” and achieved “total and complete victory” in the war in Iran.

Netanyahu’s office disputes the personal remarks.

The deal the president said was close last Friday wasn’t close.

After a Situation Room meeting, he sent the preliminary framework — a 60-day extension of the April 7 ceasefire — back for changes.

He wants tougher language and more promises from Tehran before any of its frozen funds are released.

As a candidate, Trump hammered Barack Obama for unfreezing Iranian money under the 2015 nuclear deal.

Now that he can launch the bombers and has, he is discovering what Obama discovered: bombs only get you so far.

The Strait, slightly ajar

Before the war, more than 100 commercial ships a day passed through the Strait of Hormuz.

They carried everything from the fertilizer that helps feed corn crops to the helium that goes in MRI machines.

These are container ships about 1,000 feet long — half the size of the reflecting pool in Washington, this week’s most popular unit of measurement.

Over the last three weeks, the U.S. has guided about 70 through total. An average of three a day.

To make the passage, most ships are turning off their Automatic Identification Systems and running dark.

A Greek supertanker carrying two million barrels of crude crossed that way last week. So did a Chinese-owned vessel loaded with fertilizer.

This pokey pace won’t refire the global economy.

But it might mean that whatever is being learned moving these ships through can be scaled up later.

The painstaking work reminds us how ridiculous it was for some — including the president — to suggest that countries who rely on the strait should just hop in and escort their own ships.

They didn’t start the war, so it was a tough ask in the first place.

And given how hard this has been even for the U.S. military, it puts the lie to the armchair pundits who said other countries could just snap their fingers and watch the traffic come roaring back.

Cord cutters in the Strait.

A few weeks back we wrote about Iran’s idea of charging a toll for the internet cables under the Strait of Hormuz.

On Monday, DealBook reported that Silicon Valley has concerns about this.

In early May an Iranian military spokesman said the country might demand license fees from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta to use the cables they operate under the strait — and hinted the cables could be cut.

So the tech giants are running what one adviser called “intensive back-channel engagement” to protect their subsea networks.

Usually we don’t go in for that kind of jargon here at Stack the Week.

What the hell does “intensive back-channel engagement” mean anyway?

But we’ve been unable to learn anything more. It sounds kinda weak.

Iran’s own news agency puts the traffic at about $10 trillion a day.

The cables carry roughly 99 percent of the world’s internet, according to the International Telecommunication Union.

And there aren’t many people who can fix a cut.

Four companies lay undersea cable.

Maybe twenty repair ships exist, most of them weeks from the Middle East.

In 2024, a single cut in the Red Sea took down a quarter of the region’s internet for weeks.

It took months.

But let’s not make this sound like a fella could dive in the water with a kitchen knife in his teeth.

Combat divers, the most effective way to cut the fiber optic cables in the Strait, would have to use specialized equipment, because modern fiber-optic cables are protected by dense engineering armor comprising galvanized steel wires and insulating materials.

The slush fund goeth

This next story about the president’s slush fund is going to change by the end of the week.

But here at Stack the Week, we have a theory: that walking through the news day by day adds context a Friday summary can’t.

A story delivered all at once on Friday flattens things.

It front-loads the latest and the loudest, and that can bruise your understanding.

We might be wrong. So weigh in, if you have a view.

Monday, the Trump administration said it would pause the $1.8 billion fund built to compensate the president’s allies.

It was complying with a court order — and bowing to a revolt among Republicans.

The fund would have paid people who said the federal government wrongly targeted them.

In practice, that meant January 6th defendants and Trump associates.

Majority Leader John Thune said Monday he hoped the White House would shut it down on its own.

His words: “The best way to handle it is if the administration decides to shut it down themselves.”

A pause is not a death. So this will likely go a few more rounds.

But even if the fund disappears, don’t reach for the eraser to update your commemorative Stack the Week Destruction of Norms tracker.

The norms are broken even if the fund never pays out a cent.

Because in defending the fund the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the acting attorney general would not rule out that the money might go to convicted defendants — people who assaulted police officers.

Ten thousand lawyers

One in five lawyers who worked for the federal government at the end of 2024 had left by March 2026.

That’s an exodus of more than 10,000 attorneys, according to a New York Times analysis of federal employment data.

Some retired. Some were cut. Some quit over the administration’s policies.

The effect is the same: the federal government is no longer the place an ambitious public-interest lawyer wants on a résumé.

Many are taking their experience to Democratic state attorneys general and the nonprofits suing the administration.

George Washington University’s law school is a fifteen-minute walk from the White House.

It’s now steering public-service students toward state legislatures and city councils instead.

Scott Bourque, who just finished his first year at Georgetown Law, turned down a Justice Department internship.

“A lot of people I’ve spoken to just in the last few months have said that they would look down on a person if they had a federal job on their résumé that they started during this administration,” he said.

“Some people have explicitly said they would see a person willing to go to work at this D.O.J. as somebody they couldn’t trust.”

Graham Platner’s accounting

The Republican party transformed itself for Donald Trump, changing its once-ironclad views on personal morality, trade, and democracy abroad. Democrats, whose party did a smaller-bore version of morality-tailoring to defend Bill Clinton, now face the question again: what conduct is so inconsistent with party values that its worth risking the party gaining power?

Graham Platner is a Marine veteran with no political experience who has surged ahead in Maine’s June 9 Senate