Stack the Week

John Dickerson

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. johnfdickerson.substack.com

Episódios

  1. Stack the Week

    HÁ 6 DIAS

    Stack the Week

    Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for May 4th through the 8th. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player. Thank you to Annie Cohen for help preparing this delicious offering. The war became a project and then a trifle. Jobs are up, but not for Democratic lawmakers. So are gas prices and appliances, but the dollar is down. The gap between expectations and reality is squeezing the American Dream more than the aquifer in Mexico City. Rubio swaps gifts with the Pope. Lutnick endures the inquisition. The Pentagon releases info about UFOs, which are now easier to spot than some parts of the Epstein files. Tariffs are 0 for 5 in court and Sunday is for mothers, who really deserve more than a brunch. Let’s take it day by day. Monday, May 4 Monday was a day about the distance between the way things are and the way they’re supposed to be—the easy use of pepper spray in a system that isn’t supposed to punish, an exodus from a financial “safe haven,” the college students with too much faith and their parents without enough, a successful phone ban that didn’t score, a parade without tanks, and over-prescribing a heroin metaphor. “Project Freedom” On Monday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard launched cruise missiles, drones, and fast-attack speedboats against commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. None succeeded. U.S. missiles shot down the incoming fire; Apache and Seahawk helicopters lifted off the deck of carriers and sank six speedboats threatening two American-flagged tankers. (Between Venezuella and Iran, the U.S. has been hell on speedboats.) The tankers made it through—the first since the ceasefire began on April 8. The operation was called “Project Freedom,” the administration’s attempt to reopen the strait without restarting the war. (For a little while I was calling it Project Freedom, which I also thinks works). “He wants action,” a senior official told Axios about the president. “He doesn’t want to sit still.” Trump had been presented different plans of action. Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, unfurled a plan to drive Navy ships through by force and destroy any Iranian battery or boat that responded. Trump chose the less aggressive path. U.S. destroyers and aircraft would loiter near merchant ships, share intelligence on mine locations, and intervene if Iran attacked—but wouldn’t formally escort anyone. The restraint was partly tactical and partly arithmetic. The U.S. doesn’t have enough destroyers to escort the more than 100 ships that transited the strait daily before the war through a channel where the usable lanes are about two miles wide and Iranian missiles can be fired from trucks and fishing boats. All Iran has to do is get enough through to make captains, shipping companies, and their insurers nervous. By the United States military’s estimation, about 1,550 marine vessels—oil tankers, bulk carriers, container ships, and more—idled in the Persian Gulf right on Monday. The crews weren’t planning for that which means they’re running out of supplies. The question wasn’t whether American warships can win a fight in the strait. It’s whether the Project Freedom umbrella was wide enough to bring commercial traffic back. Meanwhile the president’s poll numbers resemble those speed boats: sinking. A Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll in late April found 61 percent called the strikes on Iran a mistake—disapproval at the level Iraq hit in 2006, Vietnam in 1971. Ukrainian strike on Moscow swells The oligarchs aren’t safe. Early Monday a Ukrainian drone hit a luxury 54-story tower in southwestern Moscow in a neighborhood of foreign embassies and Russian elite. —about six kilometers from the Kremlin, three from the Defense Ministry. One floor was gutted; no one was killed. The target’s swank address was the point: even the most protected civilians in the capital are within reach, and Moscow’s tightened GPS jamming and internet restrictions failed to stop it. The attack comes five days before the Victory Day parade on Red Square, an annual World War II celebration Putin has used to cast the war in Ukraine as a continuation of the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany. This year’s parade will proceed without heavy military equipment for the first time since 2007—no tanks, no armored vehicles—and without military school cadets. Whether that reflects a critical shortage of display-ready hardware or a fear that stationary armor on Red Square would make easy targets for a drone swarm, the effect is the same: the showcase of Russian power has been hollowed out. The guest list tells its own story. In 2005, Bush, Chirac of France, and Schröder of Germany attended. In 2015, after Russia invaded Crimea, Xi Jinping and Modi still showed up. In 2026, the marquee foreign dignitary is Slovakia’s Robert Fico—who announced he will meet Putin and lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier but skip the parade itself, distancing himself from the optics of honoring a war against a neighboring European state. Merz penalty The alliance supposedly opposing Russia took a hit of its own. On Friday, the Pentagon announced it would withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany over the next six to twelve months — fulfilling a threat President Trump made after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said publicly that the United States was “being humiliated” by the Iranian leadership and criticized Washington’s lack of strategy in the war. Merz was saying what allied diplomats had been saying privately for weeks. Trump’s response was to punish the messenger. The withdrawal reverses part of the buildup President Biden ordered after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and will leave about 30,000 American troops in Germany. Spain and Italy were warned they could be next. ICE Use of Force The story of Donald Trump’s successful immigration crackdown is contained in the numbers. Border crossings have fallen 93 percent; deportations are running 85 percent above two years ago. There are other numbers too. Forty-seven people have died in ICE custody since January 2025—one every six days this year. Seventy-one percent of those detained have no criminal record, according to ICE’s own data, undermining the president’s claim that he would only round up “the worst of the worst.” A Washington Post investigation highlights another number: 1,460 use-of-force incidents across 98 detention facilities between January 2024 and February 2026. During the first year of Trump’s second term, those incidents rose 37 percent. The number of individuals subjected to force climbed even faster—54 percent, to 1,330 people—because guards increasingly used chemical agents and physical tactics on groups rather than individuals. The detained population grew 45 percent over the same period, which means force is outpacing even the surge in bodies. Detention is classified as non-punitive administrative custody—a system for making sure people show up for court, not a sentence. Yet the tools are indistinguishable from high-security corrections: Tasers, pepper spray, restraint chairs, takedown maneuvers, deployed in facilities often housed in former prisons and staffed by former corrections officers. In multiple incidents the Post documented, the triggering behavior was detainees asking for things they’re legally entitled to—food, water, medical care, personal belongings. The administration also shuttered two oversight offices responsible for investigating detention conditions, saying they added “bureaucratic hurdles.” What the emails describe is a system designed for administrative holding that, under the pressure of rapid expansion, has defaulted to the only model its operators know: crowd control. A Pew survey last week found that only 41 percent of Americans are confident Trump can make good decisions on immigration, down from 53 percent after his reelection—a 12-point drop on what was supposed to be his signature issue. An NBC poll found that 58 percent of Americans say they do not believe that “regular, law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear” from immigration agents. On Monday the Pulitzer board awarded the Chicago Tribune its prize for local reporting — for its coverage of ICE sweeps in Chicago. Mifepristone in Limbo The 5th Circuit blocked telehealth and mail prescription of mifepristone last Friday claiming that it threatened the safety of pregnant women and the sovereignty of Louisiana, which has banned abortion in almost all cases. Women can still get the pill, but only by going to a clinic in person. Telehealth lets a woman finish a medication abortion within a few days. In-person requirements stretch that into multiple clinic visits — time off work, gas, a babysitter, sometimes a hotel — which means more money and, more importantly, more time. Time matters because mifepristone is only approved for the first ten weeks of pregnancy. The longer the trip takes to arrange, the more women age out of the option. In states with abortion bans — thirteen of them — there is no clinic to go to. Those women had been getting pills by mail from providers in states with shield laws. The two manufacturers immediately asked the Supreme Court to stay the ruling. The Court issued a temporary administrative stay through May 11. Sixty percent of U.S. abortions now happen by medication; about 1 in 4 are by telehealth. Mifepristone is roughly as safe as ibuprofen. Carrying a pregnancy to term — any pregnancy — is about 14 times more likely to kill you than ending one with the drug. Voters have approved 14 of 17 abortion-rights ballot measures since Dobbs — the 2022 ruling that eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion and returned the question to the states — including in Republican-leaning Missouri, Montana, and Ohio. The FDA is conducting a parallel safety review, though mifepristone is o

    1h 23min
  2. Stack the Week

    1 DE MAI.

    Stack the Week

    Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for April 27th through May First. An assassination deconstructed. The Defense Secretary IDs the real enemy. The Fed can’t agree, but conservatives on the Supreme Court can. The Chancellor sees humiliation in Iran, the king brings the jokes to Congress, the FCC brings jokes to court and the DOJ meme police go after James Comey. Five million Americans 86 their health insurance. See what I did there? Well, the monks would have laughed. Let’s take it day by day. Monday, April 27 Assassination Attempt Monday, the details firmed up about the nearly four seconds in the Washington Hilton Concourse Level when a shooter rushed headlong down a hallway into a group of at least nine security officials one floor above where President Trump was having dinner. The assailant fired one shot from a 12-gauge shotgun in the direction of the staircase leading down to the ballroom, hitting a Secret Service officer in his bulletproof vest, which stopped the round. In 1.2 seconds the officers fired six rounds in return, according to the Washington Post. The assailant fell, though he was not hit. He was taken into custody unharmed. The clue that resolved who fired first came from the dust in the ceiling lights. A frame-by-frame analysis released by the FBI showed dust resting in two overhead lights had been disturbed and was drifting downward in the frame after the suspect raised his shotgun — and before any officer returned fire. The most likely explanation is the muzzle blast from his weapon. Prosecutors recovered one spent shell from the shotgun. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said there was “no evidence the shooting was the result of friendly fire.” The shooter’s public defenders argued the video shows no muzzle flash. The charges filed Monday included attempted assassination and firing a weapon, but not shooting a federal officer — a gap that may close as the forensic case develops. The system worked, but the threat was more deliberate than first reported. Surveillance footage from April 24, the day before the attack, shows the suspect casing the hotel corridors and entering the gym. The headlong rush wasn’t panic. It was a route he had practiced. He still helped the system along. He barreled down a hallway full of people strolling, many of whom were security, drawing attention to himself, then ran through the magnetometer instead of around it, slowing his progress. He put every ounce of momentum into reaching a choke point staffed by nearly a dozen armed officers. Even if he had made it past the staircase, he still had to get down a floor and through the ballroom doors to the most heavily protected human on the planet (probably), who had just been served a salad — a route that passed dozens of armed officers whose earpieces would already have been carrying his location. That no one died is a kind of miracle. The two thousand in attendance now join the 54% of Americans say that they or a family member have been impacted by gun violence. The shooter took the shotgun and the .38 he purchased legally in California in 2023 and 2025 on a train from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington, arriving April 4. He booked his room at the Hilton on April 6 — three weeks before he used it. About twenty minutes before he stepped onto the elevator, he emailed a manifesto to family members and a former employer. He signed it “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen.” In the manifesto he called the president a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” and wrote that he was “no longer willing to permit” such men to “coat my hands with [their] crimes.” He declared it his “duty” to target administration officials. Federal authorities said his writings also railed against the U.S. military strikes on boats in the eastern Pacific suspected of smuggling drugs. It was the third attempt on Trump’s life — Butler in July 2024, West Palm in September 2024, the Hilton — and the first in which the gunman successfully discharged a round at security personnel. The Center for Strategic and International Studies tracks political violence. Their 2025 readout was the roughest in thirty years. For the first time in two decades, the left outpaced the right in sheer number of plots and attacks — mostly Molotov cocktails at immigration facilities and Republican offices. The right still accounts for more of the bodies: targeted assassinations of lawmakers, armed assaults on government headquarters. Security and Ballroom The president was never in danger from this shooter, though the event did raise questions about security unrelated to the facts of the case. “I’m the one that would complain,” Trump said Saturday night. “I’d be up here right now saying they didn’t do their job. Oh, believe me, because, you know, it’s my life.” But imagine a more competent shooter. Or a team of Iranians looking to cause mayhem. The Hilton has more than a thousand rooms; the Iranians, who spent a decade building a network of proxies, would not have sent a man with a shotgun and a training that consisted of being in the nerf club. The Secret Service runs the names of all event attendees through criminal databases, but not the names of every guest in the hotel’s 1,000-plus rooms. But it was in the context of security concerns that the subject of the White House ballroom was once again in the Washington swirl. The White House ballroom is a story you may have trained yourself to ignore. The project is an abomination of proportion, scale, taste and beauty — traditions Western Civilization has relied on for hundreds of years to cool the passions and enliven the senses. Up to this point, President Trump has brought up the ballroom willy-nilly. Often when more important matters are at stake. The fixation is as rooted in his bones as his fixation on crowd sizes. A Washington Post analysis on April 19 found he had mentioned the ballroom on about a third of the days this year — about as many days as health insurance and affordability. He brought it up with oil and gas executives, with foreign leaders, and at an Easter lunch. Invoking the Hilton attack to argue for the ballroom smacks of using a near tragedy to justify Trump’s vanity project. Still, the security argument is not nothing. Every time the president goes to the Hilton or a convention center, he moves through soft zones — hotel kitchens, service elevators, public hallways — where security is temporary and reactive. A dedicated ballroom on the White House grounds would eliminate the off-site trip, and with it the guest who books a room two floors up three weeks in advance. The cost is the fortress itself. It further encases the people’s representative, adding another wall to an already imperial presidency. And it turns every event into an away game for everyone else — stripping out the particular joy, cultural significance, and vibe (as the founders called it) of gatherings not held inside a bunker. A Washington Post poll this week found 56% of Americans oppose tearing down the White House’s East Wing to make way for the planned ballroom. Twenty-eight percent support it — roughly a two-to-one margin. A YouGov survey this week found opposition at 53% and support at 29%. Iran Last week one piece of Iran reporting wouldn’t fit. The Economist had it: when Vice President Vance met the Iranians in Islamabad two weeks ago, the Iranian delegation ran to more than eighty members — and the disputes among them were hotter than anything between the two governments. The Pakistani hosts spent most of their time pulling Iranians off other Iranians. The reason it didn’t make last week’s digest: late Friday, the White House announced Jared Kushner and lead negotiator Steve Witkoff were headed back to Islamabad for another round. But two days later the trip was called off — in part, the reporting suggested, because the Iranian side was still pulling itself apart. So Monday’s news arrived with that picture in mind. Tehran, mediated by Pakistan, offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war if the United States lifts its naval blockade of Iranian ports. The catch? What wasn’t in the offer. The proposal pushes the nuclear question — enriched uranium, enrichment going forward, who inspects what — into a later phase. That has been, by the administration’s own framing, the entire point of the war. So the Iranian offer amounted to essentially giving up nothing but the leverage it had gained since the war started. But the clock is ticking for Iran. The blockade has forced Iran to store oil in makeshift containers and disused tanks for lack of buyers willing to run the gauntlet. Tehran’s oil infrastructure has essentially become a massive, clogged drain, forcing engineers to frantically stash crude in everything from rusty, decommissioned coastal tanks to the “zombie” hulls of 30-year-old tankers anchored like sitting ducks in the Gulf. With the U.S. blockade choking off 80% of exports, the regime is staring down a “storage doomsday” in mid-May. Now there’s the kind of term you can just drive right by without explaining. A “Storage Doomsday” represents the physical seizure of the entire Iranian energy sector, where the sheer lack of space forces a catastrophic choice between allowing an environmental disaster from overflowing tanks or permanently “killing” oil wells through forced shutdowns that could take decades to repair. Monday afternoon,The Atlantic published that Vice President Vance has been quietly questioning the Pentagon’s portrait of the war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have publicly described U.S. weapons stockpiles as robust and Iranian forces as devastated. Vance, according to senior administration officials, has been pressing Trump on whether either claim is true. Internal assessments suggest Iran retains

    1h 9min
  3. Stack the Week

    25 DE ABR.

    Stack the Week

    Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for April twentieth through the twenty-fourth.1 You can hear me read it here: Iran on pause. Schrodinger’s Strait was both opened and closed. Kash Out Crash Out at the FBI and cash out from the Treasury Department. Virginia voters turned 3-d chess into checkers. A soldier bet on the wrong war. And in the UK Smoke ‘em while you got ‘em. So let’s take it day by day. Monday April 20 Iran War In Islamabad, Pakistan, the high-security Red Zone surrounding the Serena Hotel was sealed off by traffic police. Billboards went up. Security checkpoints multiplied. All in anticipation of a face-to-face meeting between Vice President Vance and Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf — a meeting that, by Monday night, had become a ghost summit. The Iranians refused to show, citing the ongoing U.S. naval blockade as a violation of the ceasefire. The president called Iran’s leaders “indecisive.” Regional experts saw something different: an Iranian government waiting for a unified signal from Washington that never came. Friday had looked different. The president told CBS News that Iran had “agreed to everything,” describing a joint operation to remove enriched uranium: “Our people, together with the Iranians, are going to work together to go get it. And then we’ll take it to the United States.” Within hours, Tehran disputed the president’s claims and said there was no such deal. By Sunday, familiar terrain. The president posted that his representatives would arrive in Islamabad the following evening, warning that if Iran rejected what he called a “very fair and reasonable DEAL,” the United States would “knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran.” “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!” he wrote. While gas prices climbed, it felt like the gas went completely out of the president’s war effort. An administration official told Axios that the president is “over it” and willing to give Iran a window of only “three to five days” to “get their s**t together.” He doesn’t want to fight anymore, the official said, but will if he feels he has to. Two questions keep surfacing. Did the president’s negotiating tactics — the public threats and the premature claims of a total surrender — poison whatever progress existed? And is this a repetition of what preceded the initial strike: a fundamental misreading of where the Iranians actually stood? One of the rotating justifications for the war was that Iran refused to negotiate in good faith. There were suggestions at the time that the U.S. had simply misread the internal fractures of the Iranian leadership. Career diplomats exist precisely to anticipate these gaps — to know the difference between posturing and a genuine impasse before the shooting starts. This also returns us to the unanswered questions at the center of the entire war: Was Iran truly close to a weapon, and was military action the only remedy? Only one person claims to know the answers, and he is an unreliable narrator — perhaps even to himself. Monday proved that in the Trumpian theater of war, the Negotiator and the Commander-in-Chief are often on stage at the same time, speaking over one another. Gas Prices President Trump told The Hill on Monday his Energy Secretary Chris Wright got it wrong when he said gas prices might not fall below $3 a gallon until next year. “No, I think he’s wrong on that. Totally wrong,” Trump said, adding that prices would drop “as soon as this ends”—meaning the Iran war. The president offered no mechanism, no timeline, just confidence overriding his own appointee’s assessment. But Wright has the better of the argument. Reopening the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t flip a switch. It starts a clock. Tankers need weeks to reach refineries, refineries that cut capacity or shifted schedules during the disruption need time to ramp back up, and the fuel still has to move through the distribution chain to local stations. “Gas prices go up like a rocket and come down like a feather,” as independent oil analyst Tom Kloza put it to CNN. Why? Gas station owners bought their current inventory at peak prices and won’t eat the loss until they’re confident the drop will stick. Consumers, meanwhile, stop comparison-shopping once prices dip even slightly, which removes the competitive pressure that might force stations to cut faster. And none of this accounts for OPEC+, which controls supply independent of any shipping lane. If the cartel holds production cuts to defend an $80 or $90 floor, American drivers pay that price regardless of what happens in the Strait. Peak summer driving season arrives on top of all of it, pushing demand higher just as supply tries to normalize. SCOTUS on Catholic Preschools The Supreme Court decided to wrestle this: A gay parent wants to send their four-year-old to a neighborhood preschool—with money the state set aside for exactly that purpose. The school says no, because the people who run it believe, at the core of who they are, that enrolling that child would be wrong. The Supreme Court justices agreed on Monday to decide whether Catholic preschools in Colorado that decline to enroll 4-year-olds with gay or transgender parents can participate in a publicly funded state program. A Colorado program pays for families to send their children to the preschool of their choice, public or private, including faith-based programs.Two Catholic parish preschools in the Denver area said admitting such children would require them to violate their religious convictions. The state said the schools can’t block the kids. The church sued. The church lost—twice. Now the Supreme Court will decide. At bottom, this is a fight about two things the government does when it makes that call: it decides who belongs, and it decides whose conscience counts. For a gay parent, a state that allows that exclusion when distributing tax dollars is a state that has decided who belongs. For a believer, a state that overrides their conviction is a state that has decided whose conscience counts. FBI Director Kash Patel sues The Atlantic Kash out. The FBI director announced Monday that he was suing The Atlantic for a story over the weekend that asserted that Patel drank to such excess that it was affecting his ability to do his job and that as a result, his job might be in danger. The magazine also reported that he is sometimes so out of pocket (that’s not a euphemism) that key decisions cannot be made and, in the article’s most colorful passage: “On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated.” A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors.” If the FBI director were to carry this suit to its conclusion, The Atlantic would be able to depose Patel and administration officials under the penalty of perjury. Detroit Ballots The Justice Department demanded that Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit — turn over more than 860,000 ballots, envelopes, and receipts from the 2024 election. DOJ cited three fraud convictions and five lawsuits as evidence of the county’s “history” of election problems. But the three convictions were from 2020, involved individuals caught forging signatures, and were prosecuted by the state — in other words, cases where the system worked exactly as designed. The five lawsuits were almost entirely dismissed by Michigan judges for lack of evidence. The Republican-led state Senate also investigated and found no widespread fraud. None of it had anything to do with 2024. This fits a pattern. In January, the FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia, elections office and seized hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots. Last May, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s team seized voting machines in Puerto Rico, finding no evidence of the Venezuelan interference they were looking for. The Justice Department has sued 24 states for refusing to turn over unredacted voter rolls. In each case, the administration cites election integrity; in each case, the predicate is thin or nonexistent. One detail worth noting: Trump won Michigan in 2024. He lost Wayne County by nearly 250,000 votes. The DOJ is investigating an election its own boss won, in a county where he didn’t. Whether any of these inquiries turn up actual fraud is almost beside the point. As Trump’s own attorney general William Barr testified in 2022, he told the White House at the time that its election fraud theories were “crazy stuff” doing “grave, grave disservice to the country.” Trump and his allies lost dozens of lawsuits challenging 2020 results. But Trump has repeatedly, across decades, raised the specter of election fraud where none exists — not necessarily to prove it, but to create enough confusion that the claim itself becomes the point. Tariff Refunds. (New York Times) Even though president Trump said tariffs were paid by other countries, it was always Americans who paid the import taxes. That’s why this Monday, exactly two months after the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s most sweeping tariffs, American importers started applying for reimbursement. They are owed $166 billion in refunds plus interest. It is estimated that 30,000 to 35,000 firms will apply. Everything from precision manufacturers to pharmaceutical importers will be eligible to upload proof of the levies they paid. It’s a deluge. Some companies have up to 5,000 individual entry lines to reconcile.Refunds will be issued 60 to 90 days after approval. The court ruled that the president had usurped Congress’ power to tax through his tariff program. Economists note that while the money is coming back, it doesn’t account

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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. johnfdickerson.substack.com

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