First stop, the diary room, where Fed chair Kevin Warsh sat down for his big Jackson Hole confessional. He told the cameras the economy looks great and everybody has jobs, then in the same breath said prices are still way too high, then refused to actually say what he is going to do about any of it. Classic diary room move, say just enough to keep everyone guessing. Because he would not commit, the other houseguests are now betting there is close to a coin flip chance rates go up again next month. Borrowing money got more expensive this week and chances are won’t let up anytime soon.

Then Trump pulled the biggest power move of the season. He announced the US basically is taking control of Venezuela’s oil, more than 65 billion barrels of it, calling it the greatest deal ever made. Here’s the twist though, nine months ago we secretly voted Venezuela’s own president off the show and shipped him out on drug charges. So the sequence is, remove the guy running things, then cut a deal with his replacement for all his stuff. That is not a trade, that is stealing someone’s snacks after locking them out of the kitchen. And the details keep getting messier the closer you look. The key guy on the Venezuelan side helping broker all this oil business has been investigated in multiple countries for money laundering and still has an active arrest warrant waiting for him overseas. On top of that, nobody seems totally sure where the money from earlier oil sales even went, with reports that some of it has been sitting in an offshore account instead of just, you know, going where oil money is supposed to go. Whenever anyone asks about details of the money, the Trump people are always saying they’re out of time or simply cut to commercial break.

He also announced a fun little side quest this week, a Space Academy for training astronauts. In the announcement, he danced at the podium while a lineup of actual astronauts stood behind him, probably ordered there for the photo op and just trying to get through it. Cute idea on its own. But it lands the same month SpaceX just went public, its stock is already down a chunk since the IPO, and investors keep raising alarms about how much control Musk has over the whole thing. Think of the timing. A shiny new government funded space school announced right when Musk’s company could use some extra government love and good press feels less like inspiring the next generation and more like a producer quietly slipping a struggling contestant an immunity idol so they do not get voted off this season.

Now the war picked back up again. Sunday, the US hit Iran’s Larak Island, the first strike in over a month, taking out two rocket launchers that were reportedly loaded with sea mines meant to keep ships from passing through. Iran says people died and is promising payback. This feud with Iran keeps getting renewed for another season and nobody can figure out how to cancel it.

An even bigger twist, also dropped today. The most senior military leaders in the country, several four star generals plus the Navy’s top admiral, formally told their boss Pete Hegseth in writing that they think keeping more than 50,000 troops in the Middle East is a bad call. That is basically the entire alliance turning on the head of household in the same episode. When your own top players tell producers on camera they disagree with your strategy, the show is not going well.

And then, because this house apparently needed more chaos, we found out the Pentagon has been quietly sneaking social media personalities onto the payroll. Three retired military guys with huge online followings got real government jobs and email addresses, all while using their platforms to hype up Hegseth and attack anyone who criticizes him dragging us all into their nonsensical culture war. Nobody told the audience this was happening, which is wild for a show that claims to be the most transparent ever filmed.

On top of all that, JPMorgan warned this week that a real global food crisis might be coming, thanks to fertilizer shortages and rough weather, which could make groceries even pricier for everyone.

And then there is the one story that is not part of the game at all, and honestly the one that should be getting all our attention right now. Nepal is facing a genuine disaster. Flash floods from a glacier collapse tore through several towns, killing hundreds of people, with over 4,247 still missing. This is real life, real families, no twists, no eliminations, just a tragedy that deserves our full focus. But somehow, even during a week when a country is burying the dead, Trump still finds a way to make the rest of the world worse at the same time. It’s like he’s purposely trying to burn down the show we are all forced to be on.

So that was the episode. A Fed chair who won’t give a straight answer, an oil grab dressed up as a deal with a sketchy money trail, a space school that smells like a favor, new strikes on Iran, a mutiny from the top of the military, secret influencers on the government payroll, a food crisis warning, and a real disaster in Nepal that deserves more attention than any of it. Same house, way too much drama, and they keep putting up fake exit doors.

The bond market, basically the moody judge on this show who never claps for anyone, decided it had seen enough. Long term Treasury yields freaked out to levels we haven’t seen since 2007. The 30 year bond went pushing above 5 percent, which in judge speak is the bond market standing up, throwing its buzzer across the room, and walking off set.

Naturally, Bessent did what any desperate showrunner does when the season is collapsing. He announced a plot twist. Treasury would double its bond buyback program, from 2 billion to at least 4 billion dollars, starting September 9. Basically the government decided that if nobody else wants to buy its debt, it’ll just buy its own debt, like a contestant voting for themselves at tribal council and hoping nobody notices.

For about six hours, it actually worked. Yields dropped, stocks perked up, and somewhere the White House toadies were tweeting up their victory dance. Then, right on cue, the bond market pulled an X-Files style twist where the truth is still out there and everything you thought you fixed yesterday is back on fire. Yields crawled right back up, and days later they still haven’t settled down. The best way to sum it up is that the bond market wasn’t fooled.

Then, because one twist is never enough for this show, Trump added his own subplot by threatening a dramatic economic showdown over Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices jumped, and just like that, every basis point Bessent clawed back got erased in under a day.

Not to be discouraged, Bessent gave the whole stunt an official name, calling it his own Treasury twist. He insists yields are simply out of whack with where they should sit. Bessent also brushed off the debt crossing 40 trillion dollars for the first time, saying the number itself isn’t magic and the country can grow its way past it, while pinning most of the blame on Biden because of course he did. Put it together and this is turning into a full bond vigilante storyline, the market’s version of a villain returning for a reunion episode nobody invited them to.

The AI subplot is chugging along in the background too, and it fits the tone perfectly. Anthropic just filed confidentially for an IPO while still burning billions a year to train its models, and Elon Musk wants to solve AI’s power problem by skipping Earth entirely and building actual data centers in space. And all this is funded by glorious debt that is competing for buyers.

Back at the studio, the network decided this was the perfect weekend to throw a season finale party. Trump capped his summer long birthday tour with an actual IndyCar race through downtown DC, complete with a bald eagle flyover, fighter jets, and Air Force One doing a low pass, while he and Melania took a lap around the National Mall in the presidential limo before he waved the green flag himself. Cars hit 200 miles an hour past the National Archives while preservationists quietly panicked about vibrations cracking priceless documents next door. Somewhere between the eagle and the fighter jets, nobody on camera mentioned the 30 year yield. But hey, we get to sell beer on the mall for the first time.

Underneath all the confetti, the numbers are still less reality show drama and more documentary about a house sliding into a sinkhole. The deficit this fiscal year sits near 2 trillion, 5 percent wider than last year. Interest payments hit 963 billion in just 10 months, up 14 percent from a year ago, so Uncle Sam is basically paying a subscription fee just to keep existing. Foreign buyers like Japan and the UK have quietly backed away from the merch table, and mortgage rates are still sitting near 6.7 percent, so anyone trying to buy a house is a background extra getting crushed by a falling set piece.

At this point the national debt looks less like a subplot and more like the Death Star with the shields still up, and Bessent’s the guy sprinting around insisting the thermal exhaust port is fine, totally fine. Up next, we got Jackson Hole later this week, basically an awkward reunion special where the Fed and Treasury sit across from each other and everyone waits to see if the Fed chair holds hands and plays along or just rolls his eyes on camera. Grab your snacks. The green flag has dropped and there will surely be more crashes ahead.

That is basically where we are with Iran.

This past Friday, Trump stood in front of reporters and said the deployment of sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln, stuck at sea for almost 9 months, is not nearly long enough. 9 months. That is long enough to grow an actual human being, and instead we have exhausted sailors who have gone 250 consecutive days without a port call, a modern Navy record. When they finally got a quick stop, in Guam and later Oman, they were kept aboard or locked inside a secured compound instead of going home. Multiple sailors have reportedly tried to jump off the carrier. Letters and texts from military families have been pouring in to lawmakers and reporters trying to get someone to pay attention. One sailor’s wife described the ship to CNN as a floating metal prison, same bunk beds, same people for 250 days straight. Her response, the man does not think before he talks.

Trump also said he might just declare the Strait of Hormuz a US territory. Say that out loud and it should stop you cold, this is water where American sailors are dying and getting hurt, and he is talking about it like a real estate listing. He also said he will never apologize for any of it, gas prices included.

And here is the thing everyone already knows, because it is everywhere, this war is stalled. US weapons stockpiles are running dangerously low, and rebuilding them will take years. 18 US service members have died and more than 600 wounded. That part is not a joke, those are real people with real families who signed up for something pitched as short and clean and turned out to be neither. Which raises an obvious question, why would anyone want to enlist right now. Most Americans already oppose this war, and stories about a floating metal prison and sailors trying to jump overboard are not exactly a recruiting poster.

Meanwhile the bill is massive, and it is landing on every house in America except the White House. The Pentagon publicly says the war costs around 30 billion dollars, but internal projections reportedly put the real number between 80 and 100 billion once you count base repairs and everything blown up. Independent estimates with veterans care and long term interest push the price closer to 150 or 200 billion. The federal government is also paying more than 30 billion extra in interest this year, with national debt closing in on 40 trillion.

It is not just hitting our wallets either. Shutting down the Strait of Hormuz choked off roughly a fifth of the world’s oil shipments, and the International Energy Agency called it the largest oil supply disruption on record. Brent crude spiked as much as 65 percent, fertilizer and shipping costs jumped along with it, and countries with far less cushion than ours are facing real shortages.

Now zoom in on the home front, because this is where it gets ugly. More than 400,000 federal workers have lost their jobs since Trump took office, whether fired outright or pushed into buyouts, and the last jobs report showed the economy unexpectedly lost 23,000 jobs in July, the first drop in months. Republicans have thrown a party over the firings anyway. Marjorie Taylor Greene said federal employees do not deserve their jobs or their paychecks, like the people processing veterans benefits and running the national suicide hotline were extras who wandered onto the wrong set. And it is not just headcount trimming. A right wing think tank tied to Musk, Thiel, and Koch has been advising the White House on replacing up to 30 percent of the federal workforce with AI, and the administration is already turning that into policy. Fire the humans, hand it to software, call it efficiency.

Put it together and the pattern is hard to miss. Sailors are worth less than a longer deployment. Federal workers are worth less than a chatbot. Regular families are worth less than whatever the war costs this week. Somewhere out there is a guy who has never checked his bank account before groceries, telling exhausted sailors their sacrifice is not enough, telling laid off workers they were never real employees, and telling the rest of us the economy has never been stronger. If this were a reality show, we would have voted this cast off months ago. We do not get a remote in real life, but we do get a ballot, and the midterms are the closest thing to one. Maybe it is finally time to cancel this clown show.

And listen, I get it, geopolitics is messy. But when your own envoy is casually mentioning the big reveal might slip to November, and the White House keeps quietly walking back or reframing whatever it just told the public was a done deal, you start to wonder if there’s even a season two in production or if we’re all just stuck watching the same three episodes forever.

Speaking of things nobody saw coming until the footage leaked, can we please talk about the catering truck? Because this might be the single most unhinged thing we’ve seen all year. Reports came out that back in July, at a NATO summit in Turkey, Trump secretly bailed on Air Force One using an airport catering truck to sneak onto a totally different plane, while the rest of the world assumed he was still on the original jet. That decoy plane flew off to the UK with a bunch of reporters and staff who had zero idea the guy they thought they were flying with had already vanished. Somewhere in Ankara there’s actual security footage of the president getting elevated up to a plane door inside a food truck, like he’s a tray of chicken tenders being delivered to first class. I want to be extremely clear that this is not a bit. This really happened. And the White House sat on it for weeks. If a reality show pulled this stunt, you’d say it was too much, too obvious, way too on the nose. Contestant fakes his own elimination using catering equipment. Legendary television. Deeply, deeply unserious for an actual presidency.

Now let’s do the economy segment, which is basically the part of the show where the budget quietly runs dry and everyone keeps smiling for the cameras anyway. The July jobs report dropped and it was rough. The economy actually lost 23,000 jobs when analysts were expecting something like 83,000 gained. Not a slowdown. An actual loss. And the two months before that got revised down by over 100,000 jobs combined, so the numbers we thought looked fine were quietly wrong the whole time. Meanwhile Kevin Hassett, Trump’s top economic adviser, is out here on television bragging that the administration slashed 300,000 federal jobs, framing it as a huge win for the deficit. So really sit with that for a second. The labor market is bleeding jobs nobody planned for, and the guy whose job is explaining the economy is taking a victory lap for cutting hundreds of thousands more on purpose. That’s not a plot twist, that’s the producers laying off the crew mid season and calling it a bold creative choice.

Meanwhile, back at the studio, the budget people are quietly having a full meltdown about the bigger picture too. The national debt just blew past 39 trillion dollars, a number so enormous it basically stops meaning anything, like trying to picture a trillion grains of sand on a beach somewhere. We’re paying more in interest alone these days than entire federal agencies used to run on.

And here’s the part that should actually worry you. All those missiles we’ve been firing off during the Iran war? We are running low. Like genuinely, uncomfortably low. Reports this month say the US has burned through the vast majority of its long range precision missiles, and stockpiles of key missile defense interceptors are down as much as 80 percent from where they started the year. The Pentagon keeps insisting everything is totally fine, which is exactly what you say right before the fan favorite gets sent home because production ran out of budget for challenges. Rebuilding that stuff takes years.

Oh, and the emergency oil stash, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, just dipped below 300 million barrels, the lowest it’s been since 1983. We keep draining the emergency tank to keep this season limping along, and somehow nobody’s refilling it.

So here’s where the show stands heading into fall. No peace deal. Jobs disappearing while the guy in charge brags about cutting even more of them. No missile stockpile. No oil cushion. Just a mountain of debt and a president who apparently travels via sandwich truck when things get dicey. Polling has Democrats up several points on the generic ballot heading into the midterms, which is basically the audience quietly reaching for the remote. Every long running show eventually runs out of ideas and starts recycling old plots hoping nobody notices. We’ve seen this episode. We know exactly how it ends. The only real cliffhanger left is whether voters finally decide in November that it’s time to change the channel.

Let’s start with the newest table on the floor. Robinhood, once the app that let regular people buy a share of Apple with their lunch money, is now making more money off prediction markets than crypto. Sure, there’s the normal stuff like the World Cup and whether the Fed cuts rates, but then you scroll a little further and it turns into a fever dream. There are markets on which movie wins Best Picture, what some random university’s out of state tuition will be next year, and which AI chatbot is the best one by the end of the year. Billions of contracts a quarter, on everything from geopolitics to gossip. It is less investing and more Vegas sportsbook with fireworks and rocket emojis slapped on top. And the wild part is nobody is hiding it anymore. The company is bragging about it on earnings calls like it is a good thing that your economy runs better on vibes and parlays than on wages and savings.

Speaking of paying for an unfair edge, Trump’s own social media company just started selling early access to his tweets. For up to $100,000 a month, trading firms can see his posts a few seconds before the rest of us, which matters a lot when those posts move markets. So now you can literally buy a peek at the next spin of the wheel before anyone else even knows it happened.

Meanwhile over in the AI corner of the casino, you’ve got a hedge fund literally called Situational Awareness treating artificial intelligence like it’s the last spin of a slot machine before the world changes forever. It was started by Leopold Aschenbrenner, Wall Street’s wiz kid who wrote a giant essay about how AI was about to reshape civilization and then built a fund around betting on that exact story. For a while it worked, the fund was up more than a thousand percent and Aschenbrenner looked like the guy who saw the future before anyone else. Then the AI trade wobbled and the whole thing blew up, margin calls, forced fire sales, a fund that ballooned to $45 billion getting cut down to a fraction of that almost overnight. Depending who you ask, we are either three years from a superintelligence that reshapes civilization or we are just watching very expensive chatbots argue with each other while wiz kids lose other people’s money betting on the answer.

Then there’s Japan, which just did something so rare it made headlines everywhere, a coordinated yen intervention with the US Treasury, the first joint move like this since 2011. The yen had crashed to a 40 year low. Forty years. That is older than a lot of the traders currently panic buying yen on their phones. Two governments had to team up just to keep a major currency from turning into Monopoly money. And sitting quietly behind it all is the Iran War, setting off small fires nobody wants to deal with. Oil prices spike every time tensions flare, which then hits Japan’s import costs, which then hits the yen, which then requires another government intervention. It is one long chain of dominoes and somehow every single one of them lands back on regular people paying more at the pump and the grocery store.

Here’s the thing about a casino though. The house always wins. And this is where the real trick of the whole show gets exposed, because the house has figured out how to win differently depending on which floor you’re standing on. That is the K shaped economy in a nutshell. One group is up in the penthouse suite, watching their portfolios climb no matter what happens downstairs, treating tariffs and wars and currency chaos as background noise for their next big trade. Another group is stuck at the regular tables, working three jobs just to stay afloat, so busy trying to make rent that they do not even have time to notice the game is rigged. And then you’ve got a third group who absolutely knows something is wrong, who can feel the floor tilting under them, but who still walk up to the table convinced that this time they can beat the house, whether that is through a hot stock tip, a prediction market parlay, or the next big AI trade. Three totally different experiences of the same broken system, all happening under the same roof at the same time.

Normal people did not sign up to be players in this thing, but here we all are anyway. Some are demanding the whole format get canceled and rebuilt from scratch. Some are convinced they just need better strategy to finally win. And plenty more are simply too exhausted from working extra shifts to even watch the show, let alone realize how much of their paycheck already got bet on their behalf.

Maybe the scariest part is nobody running any of these tables is even pretending there’s an exit plan. No game show host is coming out to explain the rules or say when the season wraps. The lights stay on, the wheel keeps spinning, the music keep splaying, and everyone downstairs keeps hoping their table does not go bust before someone finally calls time’s up.

Start with an actual finale. Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in extra time on Sunday to win the World Cup, which should have been the whole story. Instead the story became Trump, who presented the trophy to Spain’s captain, then simply declined to leave the stage while the team tried to do their championship celebration. Infantino, the FIFA guy who has spent a year acting as Trump’s personal hype man, physically tried to walk him off camera and got nowhere. Crowd booed. Man stayed. The team’s biggest night of their lives, and there he is in the background, photo bombing into someone else’s moment and deciding it was now his moment too.

That same Sunday marked the ninth consecutive night the US has bombed Iran, hitting missile sites, air defense, coastal surveillance, the whole checklist read out that they keep telling us has already been destroyed. Iran keeps striking back, and American service members death toll is climbing in Jordan and Iraq. Nine nights in a row is not a plot twist anymore, it is the subscription you keep trying to cancel but somehow never can.

Meanwhile close to 900 wildfires are currently burning across Canada, sending dirty air so thick into the US it was messing with air quality around the World Cup final itself. Trump’s move was to blame Canada for not maintaining their forests, then announce he would tack the cost of the smoke onto the tariffs already being charged on Canadian goods, with nobody in his own White House able to explain what authority would let him do that. This comes right after his administration pulled out of the USMCA trade deal, the agreement that had kept the US and Canada on stable footing for years. He spent years torching relationships with tariffs and insults, and now rants and raves that the neighbor he keeps punishing is not rushing to bail him out.

And underneath all of it is the part that actually lands in your bank account. Real wages are still not keeping up. Only about 1 in 8 workers say their pay has actually kept pace with inflation, and the average household has spent something like 3,100 dollars more than they were spending in early 2025 just to cover the basics. Meanwhile officials keep going on television promising the Golden Age is right around the corner, like a producer insisting next week’s episode is going to be the best one yet while half the crew just got canned due to budget cuts.

While all of that is happening, someone decided the smart move was to control what the audience thinks about it, rather than fix any of it. A Wall Street Journal investigation found Americans have been getting a steady stream of pro Israel text messages, AI generated, run through a firm tied to Brad Parscale, funded by the Israeli government to the tune of around 50 million dollars. Several people in our community commented that they got these texts themselves, so this is not some fringe thing, it is landing in ordinary inboxes right now. Let’s be clear, this is a foreign government quietly trying to shape opinion on a war that is draining American families in real time. It’s that odd thing you don’t think to mention to others until you realize everyone is experiencing it too.

Even the one storyline that had nothing to do with Washington still managed to remind everyone the show has real competition now. A Chinese startup called Moonshot released a model called Kimi K3 that landed near the top of the AI leaderboard, and it rattled Wall Street badly, because a huge chunk of the entire economy right now is basically betting on America staying ahead in AI. Half the economic growth story this administration keeps bragging about is propped up by AI infrastructure spending, data centers, chips, the whole build out. If it turns out cheaper Chinese models can do almost as much (if not better) for a fraction of the cost, that entire bet gets a lot shakier, and nobody in Washington seems to be planning for what happens if the AI spending spree turns out to be the dud instead of the miracle.

Bad war policy, bad energy policy, bad trade policy, all airing at once, with real people covering the production costs out of their own paychecks while someone else buys ad space to tell them how to feel about it. And the war part is not staying contained either. What was a month old ceasefire has fully come apart, strikes are hitting deeper into Iran every night, and the fighting keeps spilling into more countries around it. The scariest part is nobody remembers agreeing to a second season, but here we are.

The scale of it is honestly is absolutely bonkers. Kalshi did more than $30 billion in trading volume in June alone, up about 87% from May. Polymarket hit a record $10.8 billion on top of that. Combined, these platforms have already crossed $130 billion in volume just this year, mostly thanks to the World Cup. It’s not a niche hobby for finance nerds anymore. Our system is like a Survivor season that refuses to vote anyone off because the ratings are too good to stop.

And this isn’t just Kalshi and Polymarket running their own little side hustle. Every big tech company wants a piece of the action. Elon Musk has been talking for years about turning X into an everything app, basically America’s version of WeChat, where you post memes and manage your money in the same place. X Money finally launched this summer, letting people send cash through the app, earn interest, get a debit card with their username on it. X already partnered with Polymarket to show live betting odds next to your feed, and it takes zero imagination to guess where this goes next. Think crypto support, prediction markets, betting built right into the same app you use to argue with whacked out strangers at 3am. X and xAI turning into your bank, your casino, and your group chat all at once isn’t a hypothetical anymore, it’s basically the plan.

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to miss the party either. Meta is reportedly building its own prediction app internally called Arena, aiming for something like 100 million users, and Zuckerberg has personally pushed his team to explore actual partnerships with Polymarket and Kalshi on top of that. Right now Arena would use points instead of real money, but Meta has openly said cash betting isn’t off the table down the road. So the two biggest social platforms in the country are both racing to turn your scroll time into your betting time.

Now stack that next to what’s actually happening inside these markets. People have reportedly used inside information to bet on military strikes before they happened, cashing in hours ahead of the news. Accounts got created just minutes before war announcements or specific Trump tweets and walked away with big wins. Goldman Sachs got so nervous it now bans employees from betting on anything except sports and entertainment, or they can lose their job. Meanwhile the CFTC is still writing its actual rulebook for this stuff, months after the money started flooding in, partly because the tech and crypto crowd spent all year flooding the agency’s comment period arguing regulators should just get out of the way.

And who’s steering that rulebook? A recent investigation found companies with direct ties to the Trump family business leaned on the CFTC to get favorable treatment while career staff raised concerns behind the scenes. Trump himself keeps publicly cheerleading the agency’s authority over these markets and attacking state officials trying to regulate them as unworthy of setting any rules at all. Which of course is on brand for him. The boss at the water cooler doesn’t want somebody else writing the pool rules. He wants it run exactly the way he likes it, and he wants him and his buddies to be the one collecting at the end of the day.

Then there’s the AI spending sitting underneath all of this, and this is the part that should worry you most. We have a casino based economy built on top of a bubble AI foundation. Companies are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure and data centers, betting that all of it eventually pays for itself through higher productivity and profits. Most of these companies are burning cash at a pace that would get anyone else fired, and there’s no guarantee the returns ever show up at the scale needed to justify it. Massive infrastructure booms built on promises of a payoff down the road have a habit of leaving regular investors and workers holding the bag once the hype cools off, while the people at the top who cashed out early walk away just fine.

So that’s the office we’re all working in right now. Every major tech company wants to run the pool, the boss used to own casinos, and the guy writing the rules works for him. Worth remembering, that boss has run casinos into the ground before, more than once. Trump Plaza, Trump Castle, and the Trump Taj Mahal all ended up in bankruptcy in Atlantic City, and he walked away with his own money intact while plenty of workers and investors did not. Not exactly a comforting resume for the guy now cheering on a brand new, mostly unregulated casino spread across every app on your phone. Most Americans are still filling out our brackets like this is an honest game, not realizing that the players keep diverging between those that have the inside track and those that do not.

Apple opened the episode by raising prices across the board on MacBooks and iPads. The MacBook Neo, which Apple had just introduced as the affordable option for budget shoppers, now starts at $699 instead of $599. The MacBook Air jumped from $1,099 to $1,299. The MacBook Pro, iPad, and iPad Air all got hit too. Hours later, Microsoft walked out on the same stage and announced it would raise Xbox console prices. Not to be left holding the bag alone, two companies just synchronized their wallet punches like a choreographed elimination round.

The villain of this season is not Apple or Microsoft. It is AI. Every tech giant on the planet is locked in a race to build enormous data centers, and those data centers are devouring the world’s supply of memory chips. Data centers now consume an estimated 70% of all memory chips produced worldwide, up from around 20 to 30 percent just a few years ago. The entire chip supply went from “available for everyone” to “claimed by AI landlords” practically overnight. One AI infrastructure initiative alone is positioned to consume up to 40% of global memory chip output. The companies placing those orders reportedly told chip suppliers they would take as much supply as available regardless of cost. When the richest companies on earth write blank checks for raw materials, everyone downstream pays the markup. The AI is not paying for any of this, by the way. It does not have a wallet. You do.

Apple said it has never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly, and Tim Cook said he has never seen anything like it in over 40 years. When a company sitting on one of the largest cash reserves in human history says it cannot cover the bill, the bill is genuinely enormous. The rest of the cast is right there with them. Microsoft’s new Surface Pro starts at $1,599, up 60% from the previous generation. Sony’s PS5 Pro has risen 20% in two months to $900. Nintendo hiked the Switch 2 to $499. At this point the only thing not going up in price is your salary.

Here is where the show gets dark. These price hikes are landing in an economy that is already exhausted. Consumer confidence has been cratering. Unemployment is ticking up. Inflation has been grinding people down for years, and household budgets are stretched in ways that do not show up in stock tickers. When a MacBook jumps $200 and an Xbox jumps $150 in the same afternoon, a lot of people do not just decide to wait for a sale. They decide to stop entirely. The technical term is demand destruction. The regular person term is “I’m just not buying it.” Companies raise prices to protect margins, consumers pull back, and the whole machine slows down in ways that are very hard to reverse. Nobody puts a press release out about that part.

The iPhone has not been touched yet, and that is where the status angle gets interesting. Analysts estimate that to maintain current margins, Apple would need to price the next iPhone Pro around $1,299 or higher. The iPhone is not just a phone. It is the primary status object in American consumer culture, the thing people stretch their budgets for, finance over 24 months, and upgrade on a cycle that has become practically ritualistic. When that object gets meaningfully more expensive, it does not just affect sales numbers. It affects who can participate in the signaling system that smartphone culture has built over two decades. And the answer, increasingly, is going to be: not everyone.

That is the K-shaped economy doing what it does, and this is not a supply chain story. It is a class story. The price of entry to the same devices, the same status markers, the same tools for work and school, just went up for the people who can least afford it, and stayed completely irrelevant for the people who never had to think about it. At the top of the K, a $300 laptop price increase is a rounding error. At the bottom, it is a real decision with real consequences, and the companies setting these prices know exactly which half of the K is still buying without flinching. They are not writing press releases for the other half.

The chip shortage is expected to last well into 2027, with some projections pushing it out to 2030. The prices are not coming back down. The gadgets are not getting cheaper. The data centers are not going to stop being hungry.

Welcome to the no fun economy. You cannot afford to leave.

This week alone made the case for why. Trump wants to build a 250 foot arch by the Lincoln Memorial, bigger than the Arc de Triomphe, and when told DC caps buildings at 130 feet, his guy just said the rule shouldn’t apply to him. Meanwhile the reflecting pool he had painted American flag blue for 14 million dollars is now peeling apart like a bad spray tan. He unveiled a new 400 million dollar jet from Qatar like it was a sneaker drop, theme song included. He threw a UFC cage match on the White House lawn for his birthday and the Pentagon reportedly made soldiers pass a body measurement just to get a ticket. His son got caught seeking inside info on whether the fights were rigged. He accused Italy of begging him for a photo, and Italy called him a liar, with the president of the Italian Senate saying he would sooner eat a live chicken than believe Meloni begged anyone. And somewhere in the middle of all that, he declared the Iran war over again, nearly 40 times now but who’s counting, on a deal that barely resolves anything.

Any one of these would be a weird week. All of them in one week is a sign we have wandered into a genuinely absurd timeline, the kind where the joke stopped being funny a while ago and we just kept watching because the algorithm wouldn’t let us look away.

And that’s really the deeper problem here. Flip around most American channels right now and you’ll find angertainment, people screaming at each other, half truths dressed up as breaking news, content built to make you furious instead of informed, because fury keeps you watching longer than facts do. Every platform is incentivized to hand you the most enraging version of every story, stripped of context, because a calm explanation doesn’t get the same engagement as a clip built to make your blood boil. We didn’t end up in this timeline by accident, we got fed into it, one outraged headline at a time, until shouting started to feel like the only way to be heard. That is not what we are doing here. No screaming, no half truths, just laughing at the absurdity while telling you what actually happened.

Which is why it actually mattered that Barack Obama stood up in Chicago this week and reminded everyone what a presidential speech, and a presidential person, used to sound like. He opened his presidential center and gave a speech that never once said Trump’s name and didn’t need to. He talked about democracy being slow and frustrating on purpose, built on trusting your neighbor rather than declaring yourself the winner every single day. He told the crowd to skip the clips of his own old speeches and pay attention instead to the regular people in the exhibits, the nurses and organizers and small business owners who actually built the progress everyone remembers. He said it’s tempting right now to slide into cynicism, to believe working together is corny and someone always has to lose for you to win, and that he refuses to believe that’s the real story of this country. The next chapters get written by all of us, not by whoever’s name ends up on the building.

It was a small thing in the middle of a chaotic week, but it actually stood out. No stunts. No fights picked with allies. No countdown clock on a war that never ends. Just someone talking like an adult who actually believes in the people he’s talking to, a reminder that decency is still out there if you go looking for it instead of the loudest voice in the room.

We don’t get out of this timeline by waiting for the show to cancel itself. We get out by remembering that calm, competent, boring decency used to be the baseline, not the plot twist. That means choosing what you let into your head, ditching the channels built to make you furious, and sticking with the communities that help you think and understand instead of clench your fist and scream. Go be the kind of citizen Obama was describing, the kind that shows up, votes, organizes, and refuses to mistake outrage for engagement. That’s the actual escape hatch. Not a bigger arch. Not a louder feed. Just us, deciding we want our reality back.

Early seasons back in late 1990s to 2000, was the dot com bubble. Companies with no profits, no real plan, and sometimes barely a working website got valued like they’d invented warp drives. Everyone said this time technology changes everything, and then it all came crashing down while everyone acted shocked. It was like nobody saw a websites burning cash and no sustainable business models as a problem.

Then the show rotated seasons to real estate. The 2008 financial crisis season, where banks bundled up risky mortgages, repackaged them with fancy names, and convinced everyone they were AAA safe. Spoiler alert, they were not safe. The whole thing collapsed, millions of people lost their homes, and a handful of executives walked away just fine. Great season for drama, terrible season for basically everyone watching.

And now we’ve got this week’s premiere, SpaceX Goes Public, and the production values are off the charts. The retail investor events for this thing was reportedly built more like a tech keynote than an investment pitch, with Star Wars music, rockets on elevators, and merchandise on sale, including a bell shaped like one of the company’s rocket engines, because nothing says sound investment like a gift shop. Elon Musk also skipped the normal IPO process where the price gets negotiated based on demand and some semblance of reality. Instead they just said the price is 135 dollars, take it or leave it, even though major research firms valued the company at less than half that. And about 78 percent of the money being raised was already promised to insiders before the public even got a look. Wall Street was lining up to collection their $100 million fees. None of that stopped the stock from opening at $150, popping as high as $176, and closing around $161 with the company now valued over 2 trillion dollars. The IPO also made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, with his net worth jumping to roughly 1.1 trillion dollars in a single day. Three times the next closest person. Everyone clapped. Champagne flowed.

But here’s what’s been nagging at me, and it’s not really about the rockets. It’s about the guy whose face is plastered all over this thing, and the fact that a lot of regular people are now quietly attached to his fortunes whether they know it or not.

See, here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough. Because of how big this IPO is and rewriting of the rules, index funds, the kind that sit inside millions of ordinary 401k and retirement accounts, may end up being required to buy billions of dollars worth of this stock automatically, regardless of whether it’s a good idea. Pension funds representing workers in New York and California already raised concerns about the company’s structure before the IPO even happened. And on top of that, SpaceX’s business is deeply wired into government contracts, NASA, the Department of Defense, the whole thing, meaning taxpayer money keeps flowing toward a company controlled almost entirely by one guy. So even if you’ve never bought a single share on purpose, there’s a decent chance your retirement account or your tax dollars are quietly part of this insane story anyway. Congratulations, you just go volunteered to burn money.

And the guy at the center of it has built a career on saying things that aren’t true and just kind of vibing through the consequences. Full self driving cars, coming next year, for like ten years running. A Mars colony, also coming next year, also for like ten years running. At some point “next year” stopped being a timeline and became his catchphrase, like a magician’s “abracadabra” except instead of a rabbit out of hate, nothing happens and everyone just moves on anyway. People normalized the scam.

Then there’s the X situation. He bought it, fired a huge chunk of the staff seemingly overnight, and turned it into his personal megaphone for posting wild stuff that gets blasted out to hundreds of millions of people with basically zero guardrails, because he owns the guardrails now. When advertisers started pulling out, he told them on stage, in front of cameras, to go f*** yourselves, which is one way to keep your remaining advertisers feeling valued. Then there was the time he showed up on stage waving an actual chainsaw around as a symbol of cutting government spending. He’s also known for blowing up working relationships fast, picking very public fights with coworkers, business partners, and former allies. On top of all that, reports came out that Oracle founder Larry Ellison, a longtime friend, was so concerned about Musk’s drug use that he reportedly invited him out to Hawaii to dry out. That’s when you know he’s clearly an addict.

And then there’s the family situation, basically its own subplot. This is a middle aged guy with at least 14 kids and a rotating cast of baby mamas and a history of being a deadbeat dad. There have also been multiple reports of him offering his sperm to coworkers like he’s handing out business cards at the office. On top of all that, he spends a good chunk of his time online pushing conspiracy theories to an audience of hundreds of millions.

So just picture your average middle aged guy down the street doing all of that. Baby mamas he barely shows up for, blowing up at coworkers, offering people his sperm at the workplace, wild conspiracy posts at all hours. How do you think the neighborhood would treat that guy?

Now picture that same guy is also worth over a trillion dollars, and a chunk of the neighborhood’s retirement money is now riding on his rocket company that explode rocket debris over your house whether they signed up for it or not. One of his king social media fluffers recently floated that Musk is on track to hit 10 trillion dollars in net worth, about a third of the entire US economy. His followers just nod along like that’s a totally normal goal and not a sign that everyone involved needs to step away from their phones for a bit and spend some time in reality.

None of the behavior changed, only his paper bank account did, and somehow that’s enough to flip “yikes” into “visionary.” We’ve quietly rewired what counts as admirable in this country. Net worth success gets treated as proof of goodness, like the math just works backwards. Got a trillion dollar valuation? Must be doing something right, ignore literally everything else.

That’s how the SpaceX premier went. Roll the highlight reel, cue the applause, enjoy the ride while it lasts. But every season of this show ends the same way. The bubble pops, the music stops, and everyone acts shocked all over again, like history wasn’t basically begging them to see it coming. The only real question left is when it ends, not if. See you then.

This week’s big showcase: SpaceX goes public. And not just goes public the normal way. Goes public targeting as much as $86 billion, easily crushing every IPO record in history. Come on down.

But SpaceX is not even the only one with their hand out this week. Google raised $85 billion for AI. Meta saw that and started lining up to do the same. And then Elon, who has never once in his life been fine with second place, filed to raise $86 billion. One billion more than Google. Because the rocket has to be bigger.

Anthropic raised $65 billion last week at a valuation of nearly $1 trillion, leapfrogging OpenAI. OpenAI had already raised $122 billion earlier this year. Every tech company on earth is raising money for AI right now like they all got the same group text saying the sale ends at midnight.

This is the part of the episode where the audience loses its mind because the prizes just keep coming.

And now SpaceX. Word is that investor demand has already hit $150 billion, about double the $86 billion on offer. Nobody official is confirming it. But someone with something to gain definitely wants you to believe it. That’s like lining up for a ride that isn’t built yet and paying double the ticket price because someone said it might go to space. It might literally go to space. That’s the thing.

Fidelity, which originally required a $500,000 minimum account balance to access the IPO, slashed that threshold down to $2,000. They just opened the velvet rope and waved everyone in. Come on down. Come on down. Everyone come on down. Your cousin who day trades on his lunch break is now eligible. This is fine.

Musk is reportedly allocating up to 30% of shares directly to retail investors, at least three times the typical amount. Why? Because a shareholder is more likely to become a Starlink customer. You are not an investor. You are a customer who also gets to pay for the privilege of being a customer. Warp speed ahead.

And what exactly are you buying? You are buying Elon. All of him. The rockets and the satellites but also the lawsuits, the debt, the broken promises, and the 2am posts. He has never met a deadline he couldn’t miss or a business he couldn’t complicate. But the man can sell a vision like someone who got high, watched one too many sci fi movies at 3am, and has been quoting them wrong ever since.

Oh and also space data centers. Literal data centers. In space. Nobody has built one yet but Elon promises he can do it. This is in the actual filing.

Now. Let’s zoom out. Because it is important to understand the full picture of the timeline we are somehow in.

The largest IPO in human history hits the market Friday. Google just raised $85 billion. Meta is lining up behind them. OpenAI and Anthropic are both racing toward a trillion dollar valuation. Every major tech company on earth needs more money for AI right now, simultaneously, with urgency. And on Sunday, there is a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House. For Trump’s 80th birthday. Totally normal stuff. Trump has also floated the idea of just never taking down the giant lighting structure they built for it, comparing it to the Eiffel Tower.

This is peak bubble. This is the thing historians circle with a red pen. This is the moment someone points to and says there, right there, that’s when the vibe check failed completely.

Your cousin is refreshing his Fidelity app with $2,000 and a dream. Musk will control 82% of the voting power and every decision that follows. You get the risk. He gets the rocket.

To boldly go, they say.

Live long and profit.

The setup is almost too good. You take the most unprepared team in the history of diplomacy and fly them into a country that has been playing 3D chess since the land that would become America was just forests and very unbothered deer. You give them forty eight hours on the ground, a state banquet, a tour of the Temple of Heaven, and the job of somehow winning on trade, on Iran, on Taiwan, and oh by the way could you also get China to stop buying Iranian oil. All while the ceasefire Trump said was going great is now, in his own words, on massive life support.

What could go wrong?

The trip was supposed to happen back in April but got pushed a month because the Iran war, originally billed as a quick operation, just kept going. The US negotiating team used that extra time wisely, showing up this week with the economic deliverables still not nailed down and the whole thing described by insiders as evolving up until the last minute. Think of it as showing up to blow up the Death Star and realizing you never actually learned to use the Force.

Meanwhile Xi has been sitting in Beijing like a poker player who peeked at everyone’s cards before the game started. China has weathered the Strait of Hormuz disruption surprisingly well thanks to massive energy reserves and overland pipelines, so Xi does not actually need anything out of this meeting. He has home field advantage, the high ground, the rare earths, the oil, and a friend in Tehran. If this were a video game he would be playing on easy mode and Trump would still be waiting for his unqualified assistant to read the instructions, except they are all in Chinese. The Iran war handed him exactly the leverage he knew was coming the moment the first bomb dropped, and on top of that the US burned through so many missile interceptors that it now needs rare earth minerals from China just to restock.

The US response to all of this was to show up needing rare earths, needing investment, needing China to fix their war, hat in hand. These are the people who cannot stop telling you how rich they are, all those trillions and trillions from tariffs, and yet they showed up to the biggest negotiation of the year offering soybeans like a peasant bringing a chicken to pay the landlord. Somewhere a Shark Tank reject is watching this and feeling better about their pitch.

Something will probably get announced anyway because both sides need the meeting to look like a success. There is talk of soybeans, Boeing planes, and vague AI cooperation gestures, which is the diplomatic equivalent of getting evicted and telling your friends you decided to move. Whatever China agrees to will probably never actually happen. But does Trump care? He is not here for the policy. He is here for the photo op, the parade, and the soldiers standing at attention. He even tweeted that Xi would give him a big fat hug when he landed.

Melania, for the record, did not come. Even she did not want to be an escort on this one.

The Orange Menace walked into the most complex geopolitical negotiation of the year expecting a hug and a parade. That is some serious I have you now energy right before the Millennium Falcon swings back into frame.

Two leaders walk in, both declare victory, everyone else refreshes their feed trying to figure out what actually happened. Xi looks like the steady hand on the galaxy. Trump gets the parade, the banquet, and the photo op.

The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The ceasefire has about a one percent chance of survival. The rare earths are still in China.

Thank you for crawling.

Here is how we got to today’s episode. Trump announced over the weekend that the US. would help stranded ships escape the strait starting Monday morning. He called it a humanitarian gesture. He named it. He posted about it. Project Freedom is a whole thing now. It has a name, a press release, and was announced between holes on a golf course, which is about how much thought went into it.

Now here is the twist. One official said Project Freedom is not an escort mission, though nobody seems entirely sure what it is. Trump’s post strongly implied escorts. CENTCOM announced 15,000 service members and over a hundred aircraft. Then officials clarified that US Navy ships will be in the vicinity and will mostly be providing commercial vessels with information on the best maritime lanes, including routes not mined by Iran. So the operation involves 15,000 troops, a hundred aircraft, and guided missile destroyers. To give ships directions. It is the world’s most expensive GPS update. Whether the ships will actually be escorted, guided, accompanied, observed, or simply encouraged from a distance by a destroyer that is technically nearby remains, at this hour, unclear. These are not the escorts you are looking for. Melania was unavailable for comment.

This is also the third fire extinguisher. First there was the ceasefire, which was going to fix everything. Then there was the Maritime Freedom Construct, a coalition the State Department started quietly pitching to allies, which was going to fix everything. Now there is Project Freedom, which is going to fix everything. About 800 commercial vessels are still stuck in or around the waterway. A few weeks ago Trump announced the strait was completely open and ready for business. It was a failed mind trick. And yet here we are in the bonus round, watching the third fire extinguisher also not spray water but promise to be in the vicinity in case water is needed.

Enter France. Emmanuel Macron, attending a meeting of European leaders, looked at Project Freedom and said what everyone in the back row was already thinking. What he wants is a coordinated reopening by the US and Iran together. That is the only solution, he said. He also added that France would not be taking part in any military operation in a framework that seems unclear to him. Which is a very diplomatic way of saying he has read the same news we have and has questions about what this operation actually is. France and Britain have been quietly assembling their own coalition to reopen the strait once peace is secured. They were not invited to the Project Freedom press release.

So the current situation is this. The US has a plan that one official says is not an escort mission. France has a plan that requires peace first. Iran has a 14-point proposal that Trump cannot imagine is acceptable. And about 800 ships are still sitting there waiting to find out which plan wins the challenge round.

The real scoreboard this whole time has been gas prices, and gas prices do not lie. They do not issue clarifying statements. They do not hold press conferences. Gas is up nearly 50% since the war started and currently sitting at nearly $4.50 a gallon. Every time a new initiative gets announced and the strait stays closed, the scoreboard updates itself at every gas station in America. The empire is not winning. The rebels are not winning. Everyone is just paying more for everything.

The rules of the game show are consistent. The host announces something is done. The thing is not done. A new initiative is launched to do the thing. The initiative gets a name and a press release. An ally points out the framework is unclear. An official clarifies the initiative is less than advertised. The thing remains undone. The scoreboard ticks up another ten cents. Repeat.

Nowhere is this clearer than the last 72 hours. On Friday, Trump sent Congress a letter saying hostilities with Iran are terminated. A few hours later he told reporters you know, we are in a war. Later Friday he said the options were to blast the hell out of them or make a deal. Friday night he said maybe they were better off not making a deal at all. Saturday morning he said he was reviewing Iran’s proposal but could not imagine it would be acceptable. Saturday afternoon he said he would probably reject it because Iran had not yet paid a big enough price. Sunday he announced Project Freedom. This is week ten. The Death Star has been announced 3 times and is still under construction. Gas is nearly $4.50 a gallon.

Over in the congressional bonus round, there is a law that says after 60 days of war the president needs to ask Congress for permission to keep going. Friday was day 60. Trump declared the war terminated in a letter to Congress, deployed 15,000 troops the same weekend, and called the law unconstitutional for good measure. Hegseth told the Senate the clock pauses during ceasefires. The administration has now covered every possible exit: the war is over, the clock does not count, and the law itself is invalid. Congress has been checkmate’d without anyone asking if they wanted to play. Gas prices ticked up.

Project Freedom is live as of Monday. The ships have not moved yet. The strait is not open yet. The deal is not acceptable. The framework is unclear. The warships are in the vicinity.

I have a bad feeling about this.

For anyone who missed the premiere: the first round ran for 21 hours back on April 11th and ended without a deal, marking the first time the US and Iran had started talking since Obama sat them down in 2015. Twenty one hours of television and nobody got eliminated, nobody coupled up, and nobody went home with a final rose. Iran’s foreign minister said they were inches away from a memorandum of understanding and accused the US of moving the goalposts. The US said Iran just refused to accept their terms. Pakistan refreshed the snack table and said nothing. The reunion special never happened. The credits rolled.

The producers have been scrambling ever since. Pakistan has been trying to get both casts back to the table after Trump extended the ceasefire, though Iran has kept attacking ships in the strait while the US has maintained its blockade of Iranian ports. Every time it looks like this week’s episode might finally deliver a breakthrough, somebody outside the house blows something up. Israel strikes Lebanon. Trump posts that the Iranians have agreed to things they definitely have not agreed to. Iranian officials publicly reject the claims, while US officials privately admit the messaging has been unhelpful. The live feed cuts to commercial. The audience screams at the television.

Back home, the audience is not doing great. US consumer sentiment fell in April to a record low, driven by worries about the economic fallout from the Iran war. The lowest reading ever recorded. Lower than the financial crisis. Lower than the pandemic. Lower than every other moment in living memory when things felt genuinely terrible. Gas is sitting above four dollars a gallon and diesel is worse. Households shrugged off the ceasefire announcement and stayed focused on the inflation they are already living with. Inflation expectations just jumped to their highest level in years and people are bracing for unemployment to follow. Everything that arrives on a truck, which is basically everything, is about to cost more. The show promised a thrilling season finale and somehow it is the viewers who keep getting eliminated. Your gas bill is the next challenge. Your grocery run is the next round. Nobody handed you a green tracksuit but here you are. In Squid Game at least the players knew they had signed up.

And because the showrunners apparently needed one more subplot this week, the Justice Department announced Friday that it will adopt the firing squad as a permitted method of federal execution, as part of a broader push to ramp up capital punishment cases. Electrocution and gas asphyxiation are also on the table. Meanwhile over at the Pentagon, a TMZ reporter asked the Secretary of Defense at a press briefing whether he gets an adrenaline rush when he orders the bombing. Hegseth called it a very TMZ question and did not really answer. So while the Islamabad house is trying to end a war, the domestic spinoff is running a very different kind of elimination round. Same network. Very different vibe.

Here is where the season stands. The house is still open. Both casts are technically present. Pakistan is exhausted but committed to keeping the cameras rolling. Consumer confidence just hit the floor. The US says the blockade holds. Iran says ships are getting through. There has been an almost daily back and forth over whether the strait is open or closed, blockaded or not. Nobody agrees on anything except that the cameras are still rolling. The audience at home is stress eating with both eyes on the live feed, slowly realizing they are not watching the game. They are in it.

Next episode drops whenever Iran decides to admit it showed up.

Here is the situation. The US and Israel started bombing Iran six weeks ago. Iran, unsurprisingly, responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, the little chokepoint that roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil passes through. Then they started charging ships millions of dollars just to get through the thing. So we went from bombing to blockade to tollgate in about a month and a half, and here we are.

Trump lost it. He called it blackmail and extortion and announced the US Navy would blockade the strait, which is a bit like the Empire blockading Hoth to protest the Rebel Alliance blockading Hoth. The strait stays closed either way. Logic has left the station.

JD Vance, the Jar Jar Binks of American foreign policy, went on Fox News and called Iran’s toll scheme economic terrorism. Iran was threatening any ship that moved through the strait, he said. Then, in the same breath, he explained that the United States was now doing exactly that, with the justification that two can play at that game. The game, just to be clear, is economic terrorism. Apparently that sounded like a great idea to Vance and everyone in the room.

The US Navy kicked things off Monday morning with 15 ships in the region. When Trump was asked whether the goal was forcing Iran back to talks or lowering gas prices, he said maybe everything, both of those things, certainly, and more. Clouded by the dark side, his answer was. Clear, it was not. A plan, there was none.

And then, right on cue, China entered the chat. China’s Defense Minister said his country had trade and energy agreements with Iran and that the strait is open for us, and he made clear he expected the US to stay out of it. Beijing’s Foreign Ministry called the blockade a dangerous and irresponsible act that risks blowing up an already fragile ceasefire. China buys the overwhelming majority of Iran’s oil, so this is not some abstract diplomatic complaint. This is Beijing telling Washington, on the record, that the blockade does not apply to them. The WW3 group chat just added a new member.

On the ground the whole thing is messier than anyone is letting on. It is like trying to bluff your way past the Empire with a stolen clearance code, except the Empire keeps changing its mind about whether it is working, and everyone is busy trying to crack new ones. The Pentagon claimed six merchant ships turned around in the first 24 hours. But the Rich Starry, a Chinese sanctioned tanker flying a fake Malawi flag, appeared to make a successful run before abruptly reversing course, and ships heading to Iranian ports were quietly changing their destination in the tracking system to something more innocent looking. Nobody is entirely sure who is in and who is out, and that includes the US Navy.

Things are not great at home either. Oil prices jumped 8 percent to over $104 a barrel the moment the blockade was announced, Americans are already paying over four dollars a gallon for gas, and inflation has been climbing. Trump told Fox that gas prices could end up the same or maybe a little bit higher by the midterms. The plan to punish Iran for raising global energy prices is raising global energy prices. Cool strategy.

Meanwhile the rest of the world is quietly building the post American Empire galaxy without sending Washington an invite. France and the UK passed on the US blockade and announced their own mission to reopen the strait, one that explicitly excludes the United States, Israel, and Iran. Macron and Starmer are hosting a summit this week with around 30 countries to coordinate the plan, and US officials confirmed Washington will not be attending. Spain said the whole thing makes no sense. Iran’s parliamentary speaker told Americans to enjoy current gas prices while they last.

The ceasefire is barely holding, the Islamabad talks fell apart over the weekend, and now the US and China are staring each other down across a very crowded stretch of water. Iran says the strait stays closed. Trump says Iran wants a deal very badly. China says its ships are coming through regardless. This is the part of the episode where everyone goes very quiet and someone says I have a bad feeling about this, which is the understatement of the galaxy. At some point someone is going to need to blow the thermal exhaust port on this whole thing before the global economy melts down, and the best plan anyone is talking about so far is posting in all caps and sharing AI Jesus memes online.

Tune in next week to see where our insane timeline takes us.

We are now almost six weeks into the US war with Iran, and things have taken a turn that can only be described as the most unhinged episode of a reality show that nobody voted to be on. The latest drama centers on the Strait of Hormuz, which is basically the world’s most important toll road, and right now the booth is on fire. About twenty percent of the world’s oil flows through it, and with the strait effectively shut down, gas prices in the US have spiked by as much as twenty to thirty percent. Everyone at the pump is quietly crying into their steering wheel.

Iran closed the strait after the US and Israel launched their initial strikes, and Trump has been issuing deadlines to reopen it the way most people issue empty threats about going on a diet. There was a five day deadline. Then a ten day deadline. Then a 48 hour deadline. Then another 48 hour deadline. Each time the deadline passes, the threats just get bigger and the oil prices get fatter.

This weekend, the show delivered its wildest episode yet. Trump posted that Tuesday would be “Power Plant Day and Bridge Day” in Iran, warned the regime they would be “living in Hell,” and signed off with “Praise be to Allah,” which is a sentence I did not have on my bingo card. He then walked into the White House briefing room Monday and said every bridge in Iran would be decimated and every power plant would be out of business, burning and never to be used again. Lined up along the wall behind him were Eric and Tiffany Trump, their spouses, and real estate buddy Steve Witkoff, all watching in the kind of tense silence you usually associate with a family intervention. Nobody was cheering. Nobody was nodding along. They just stood there staring at him the way you stare at someone you love who is about to do something you cannot stop. When asked whether the war was winding down or ramping up, Trump said “I can’t tell.” The people behind him looked like they already knew the answer.

If you need one image to capture where we are as a civilization right now, consider what happened a few hours earlier on the South Lawn. Standing next to a person in a full size Easter Bunny costume, with his grandchildren nearby, a Marine band playing patriotic songs, and kids rolling eggs in the background, Trump told reporters he was not worried about war crimes and that Iran had until Tuesday or face total destruction of its infrastructure. The Easter Bunny stood next to him and stared blankly into the distance, probably wondering the same thing the grandkids were wondering, which is whether grandpa had taken his meds. If you have seen Donnie Darko, you know that a giant silent bunny standing next to someone delivering an ominous message is not generally a good sign for how things are about to go.

Oh, and somewhere in the middle of all that, Trump announced he is polling higher in Venezuela than anyone ever has, and that once he wraps up the Iran situation he plans to learn Spanish and run for president there. Just a normal Monday.

The strategy, if you can call it that, has a name. It is called “escalate to de-escalate,” and the idea is that you threaten something so catastrophic that your opponent backs down rather than call your bluff. The problem is it very rarely works, because it requires your opponent to both trust you and be willing to publicly capitulate. Neither of those things describes the Iranian government’s current mood. If anything the threats are making a deal harder to reach, pushing Trump deeper into a corner where he eventually has to choose between losing face or actually following through.

Iran’s foreign ministry put it plainly this week, saying negotiations are “incompatible with ultimatums and threats to commit war crimes.” Mediators from Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey and Oman have been quietly trying to broker a ceasefire, and a 45 day proposal is reportedly on the table, but Iran has rejected it and Trump has called their counteroffer “not good enough.” The Red Cross also weighed in to say that threatening civilian infrastructure cannot become the new norm in warfare, which felt less like a diplomatic statement and more like a scream into the void.

Meanwhile the rest of the world has stopped waiting around and started working the problem themselves. Iran announced that Iraqi ships are now free to pass through the strait, calling Iraq a “brotherly nation” whose struggle against the US is “worthy of praise.” India, which had not bought Iranian oil in seven years due to US sanctions pressure, has quietly started purchasing it again now that the war blew up its regular supply chains. South Korea, which routes nearly seventy percent of its crude through the strait and currently has twenty six ships sitting stranded in the waterway, just sent special envoys to Saudi Arabia, Oman and Algeria to find oil somewhere else entirely. Everyone is basically treating Trump’s deadline the way you treat a coworker who keeps saying they are going to quit. Sure buddy. We’ll see.

The longer this drags on, the bigger the problem gets. Iran does not even need to sink every ship to keep control of the strait. It just needs to hit one every few days to make the whole waterway uninsurable, which is exactly what has been happening. Traffic is down over ninety percent. That is not a blockade. That is a vibe.

Oil benchmarks climbed past $115 a barrel this week. Foreign central banks have reportedly become net sellers of US Treasuries since the war began, which is the kind of detail that should stop everyone cold but keeps getting buried under the bridge bombing news cycle. And if Trump follows through on Tuesday, Iran has already signaled that the Houthis could close the Bab al Mandab strait as well, which is the other chokepoint at the bottom of the Red Sea. So the backup toll road also has a booth on fire now.

Tune in to see whether Tuesday night becomes Power Plant Day or whether the host blinks and announces a new deadline. Same time. Same chaos. And remember, in this version of the Showcase Showdown, nobody knows what anything is worth anymore.

The White House promised this would be over in four to six weeks. We are past that window. The new timeline is two to three weeks. Before that it was three weeks. Before THAT it was four days. Congress went to closed-door Pentagon briefings to find out the actual strategy and walked out fuming. One official said there was no plan, no strategy, no end game, no answers. Just vibes. Even Republican senators were calling the briefings a total waste of time. Nobody could explain what winning looks like or how we get there.

Meanwhile Pete Hegseth stepped up to a Pentagon podium and cleared everything up. He waved his arms around and explained that US warplanes are loitering over Iran right now, just circling up there, keeping their hand on the throttle, waiting. And while they wait, he said, we negotiate with bombs. With a straight face. On camera. That is the plan. War is now just a group chat where one side sends messages via airstrike, drops a few bomb emojis for clarity, and hopes the other side responds before Hegseth accidentally adds a journalist to the thread.

Gas hit $4 a gallon this week for the first time since 2022. Trump said prices will drop as soon as the US leaves Iran, then turned around and threatened to bomb Iran’s oil wells. The markets have been through five straight weeks of losses and are basically curled up under a desk at this point. Analysts are talking about oil hitting $150 a barrel. Some are saying $200, which would be like the Death Star blowing up the global economy except there is no Rebel Alliance coming to save us. The all-time record is $147 set back in 2008 and we are sprinting toward it. Every country that drives a car, flies a plane, or runs a factory is watching the Hormuz situation like someone just flipped the Monopoly board and now everyone has to figure out what to do next. China, Japan, Korea, India, Australia, Pakistan, all the Gulf states, all of Europe. All of them.

And here is where it gets really fun. Every time Trump posts something market-moving about the war, somebody already seems to know it is coming. Fifteen minutes before he announced a pause on bombing Iran’s power plants, $580 million in oil futures changed hands out of nowhere. No news, no announcement, nothing. Just an enormous perfectly timed bet. The story was all over the news. Who was behind it? Trump? A family member? A staffer? Nobody had a good answer. The agencies that would normally investigate this kind of thing have been largely gutted. The White House said the whole thing was baseless. Right. And we have a bridge to sell you.

On top of all that Trump spent the week going after pretty much every ally he could find. Spain shut its airspace to US military planes. The UK got called out for sitting on the sidelines. France got dragged in too. Rubio was out there publicly dressing down NATO allies like a disappointed Little League dad whose whole team showed up late. Trump’s message to all of them was simple. Go get your own oil. He literally told countries to sail up to the Strait of Hormuz and just take it. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are quietly telling Washington to finish the job while also being very nervous about what finishing the job actually means. Qatar is begging everyone to leave the desalination plants alone because that is where their drinking water comes from. Iran drone-attacked fuel depots at Kuwait’s airport this week. It is genuinely a lot.

Back home the judges have been busy. A federal court blocked Trump’s order to defund NPR and PBS, calling it unconstitutional retaliation against news organizations he does not like. The White House called it a ridiculous ruling by an activist judge, which is what they call every ruling that goes against them. Then a second judge stopped construction on Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom, the one being built on the spot where the East Wing used to stand. The judge basically said you are the steward of the White House, not Tony Stark, you cannot just build whatever you want without asking Congress first. Trump went online and called the historic preservation group that sued him a radical left group of lunatics. The appeal landed within 90 minutes.

So that is this week’s episode. A war with no plan is still going. Gas costs $4 and could get uglier. Someone is getting very rich off suspiciously well-timed bets. Every country on Earth is either panicking or furious. The ballroom is on hold. NPR and PBS are still on the air. And the president is managing all of this while being, by multiple accounts, very personally invested in the marble selection for said ballroom.

Nobody knows when the finale is. Iran says they can fight for six months. The administration keeps changing what winning means.

Rinse and repeat. Same chaos. See you tomorrow morning.

We are now entering the third week of the US and Israel’s war on Iran. Trump says he’s not ready to make a deal because the terms aren’t good enough yet. Iran says it never asked for one. Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi told CBS his nation “never asked for a ceasefire, and we have never asked even for negotiation.” One guy says the other side wants to quit. The other guy says he never asked for a deal in the first place. Someone is lying, and it’s probably the guy who said he’d make Mexico pay for a wall.

Speaking of making other people pay. Trump tweeted that China, France, Japan, South Korea, and the UK would all be sending warships to clean up his mess in the Persian Gulf. A team effort, he called it. Very generous of everyone to volunteer for a war nobody else voted for.

Except nobody volunteered.

Japan said the threshold to send warships is “extremely high” and that “independent judgement is fundamental.” Translation: not our war, not our bill. France said flat out it is not sending ships, posting that its aircraft carrier is staying in the eastern Mediterranean. South Korea said it was “closely monitoring” the situation and “comprehensively considering various measures.” That is diplomat-speak for absolutely nothing. China called for all parties to “ensure stable and unimpeded energy supply,” which is the geopolitical version of thoughts and prayers. Britain said it is “intensively looking” at options. Sure it is.

The World War III group chat has gone very quiet. Nobody is giving it the thumbs up emoji.

Here is why this matters to your wallet. There is a narrow stretch of water called the Strait of Hormuz and about 20 percent of the world’s oil moves through it every day. That waterway is now effectively shut. Hundreds of tankers are just sitting there waiting, which is what a DMV line looks like when the computers go down and nobody knows when they’re coming back up. When oil stops moving, everything gets more expensive. That bill goes to you too.

Gas at the pump jumped from $2.93 a month ago to $3.70 a gallon and climbing. Iran is not done talking either. The Revolutionary Guard told the world to “expect oil at $200 per barrel.” Two hundred dollars. At that point $3.70 gas is something you tell your grandkids about. Wall Street has spent three straight weeks losing ground. The only people smiling are the ones who own oil companies.

The economy was already shaky before any of this started. The US lost 92,000 jobs in February, the third time in five months payrolls dropped, with unemployment rising to 4.4 percent. That was before the war. Now throw soaring oil on top of a weakening job market and you get a K-shaped economy on steroids. Defense contractors are doing great. Oil companies are doing great. Everyone else is losing jobs and paying more for gas at the same time. Short-term pain is what they call it when it’s not happening to them.

Oh and someone has to pay for the war itself. Hassett went on TV this morning and said the US has spent $12 billion so far. The number keeps rising. No allies are splitting the bill. No exit plan means no end to the spending. The most expensive tab in the room and Trump is looking around for someone else to cover it.

Meanwhile Jared Kushner is doing just fine. While regular people are getting squeezed at the pump, Trump’s son-in-law and official peace envoy is out pitching investors to raise $5 billion for his private equity firm, hitting up the same Gulf governments he is supposed to be negotiating with on behalf of the United States. Saudi Arabia already put $2 billion into his fund after Trump’s first term, a deal the Saudis’ own advisers reportedly rejected before the Crown Prince personally overruled them. So the peace envoy is doing peace on one side of the table and fundraising on the other. That is a conflict of interest. In this White House they call it Tuesday.

So the administration hit every Sunday show to explain why all of this is fine. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on TV this is “short-term pain to get through to a much better place” and that the war will end “in the next few weeks, could be sooner.” When asked if he could guarantee gas prices come down, Wright said “there are no guarantees in wars at all.” So certain it ends soon. Zero guarantees on the part everyone actually cares about. That is not a plan. That is a guy at a party telling you everything is fine while the cat is on fire.

Here is what they skipped. Even if the war ended today, experts say it would take one to three months just to get oil moving through the strait again. The mess doesn’t clean itself up just because the guy who made it declares victory via tweet and a weird meme that only his base thinks is funny. At this point economists are not asking if there will be a global recession. They are asking how bad.

Everyone else pays. That’s not just the name of the show. That’s the whole strategy.

Since the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, the Strait of Hormuz has basically become the world’s most expensive parking lot. About 20% of the planet’s oil flows through that narrow passage on any given day. These days, traffic has dropped to nearly zero. Ships aren’t moving. Insurers have canceled war risk coverage. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has made it crystal clear: try to sail through, and your ship becomes a bonfire. We are approaching 20 reported incidents since the end of February and that number is rising fast, with attacks hitting ships near Oman, near Dubai, in Iraqi waters, across the whole region. Crew members have been killed. Others are missing.

At this point the Strait of Hormuz has become its own episode of The Price is Right. Iran stepped up to the mic and bid $200 a barrel for oil. The US bid lower. Markets bid somewhere in between. Nobody knows who wins. But the showcase showdown prize is the global economy, and nobody wants to take it home.

And then the producers decided the show needed a twist. Oil hit almost $120 a barrel on Monday before mysteriously crashing back below $100. Energy traders started making calls trying to figure out who the mystery seller was. The leading theory is that it might have been the US Treasury cooking the books on oil prices from the back room. The head of CME Group went public to say that if the government were doing that it would be a “biblical disaster” for market confidence. The Treasury denied it. The truth is out there.

Gas prices in the US are up about 50 cents a gallon since this all started. The International Energy Agency coordinated the largest emergency release of oil reserves in its history to try to stop the bleeding. The bleeding has not stopped.

While all of this is happening at sea, something equally alarming is quietly unraveling on dry land. The private credit market is basically a $3 trillion shadow banking system where private equity firms lend money to companies that can’t get traditional bank loans. It has been growing in the dark, with almost no regulatory oversight, for years. What could go wrong?

Quite a bit, it turns out. PIMCO called it a crisis of “really bad underwriting.” Multiple funds are now limiting how much money investors can take out. A UK mortgage lender collapsed in late February and spooked global bank stocks. Corporate bankruptcies are ticking up. And the gates are up. That’s the industry term for your money went in and it is not coming out. But don’t worry, it’s for your protection. The protection being, of course, theirs and not yours.

And while all of this is happening, Trump is tweeting at the Fed Chair like he’s leaving a comment on a YouTube video. Cut rates. Now. Not at the next meeting. Now. The Fed is designed to be independent from the White House specifically so this cannot happen. Powell is holding the line. Which at this point makes him the most disciplined person in Washington. Cutting rates right now, with inflation already sticky and oil heading toward $200 a barrel, would be like pouring jet fuel on a campfire and then asking why the forest burned down. Trump does not care. He wants the number to go down before it becomes his problem.

Within the first hours of the war, Trump was already announcing victory. Iran was decimated. The war was basically over. This was an obvious lie, and everyone with a TV could see it as Iranian missiles kept flying and ships kept burning. The reassurances kept coming anyway, like a contestant on The Apprentice who just blew the challenge telling the camera they totally crushed it.

Then Trump’s Energy Secretary posted that the US Navy had safely escorted an oil tanker through Hormuz. Markets calmed. Oil fell. The post disappeared. The White House said it never happened. Oil spiked back up. Iran said the US was just lying to manipulate markets. And somewhere out there, someone made a lot of money on the move. Totally normal stuff.

At some point you run out of ways to describe an administration lying about a war while the war keeps getting worse. This is that point. This is the Survivor tribal council where the host announces someone is going home while three people are already in the medical tent.

Regular people are already paying the price. At the pump. At the grocery store. In their 401ks. In their heating bills.

The game masters are doing fine. The contestants, as usual, are on their own.

We are five days into something the government is actually calling “Operation Epic Fury,” which sounds like an energy drink flavor nobody asked for. People are dead on all sides, Iran is firing back across the Middle East, U.S. embassies are closing, and thousands of Americans are stuck abroad with nobody picking up the help line. Meanwhile Trump is tweeting about shipping insurance like he’s filming an infomercial at 2am.

Into all of this walked U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee with the energy of a cruise director on a sinking ship. His advice to Americans trapped in a war zone? Great news, there’s a Ministry of Tourism shuttle bus to Egypt. Try not to run up too many hotel costs. The Embassy, he added, couldn’t actually help anyone get out. And then he told people you’ve had a good time and now it’s time to go home. It was something so whacked out and surreal, like it was something out of a sci-fi movie.

Then there’s this, and there’s nothing funny about it. On the very first day of strikes, a girls’ elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab was hit. The students were between seven and twelve years old. The death toll reached 165. Iran held a mass funeral this week, and photos of freshly dug graves for over 160 children circled the globe. UNESCO called it a grave violation of humanitarian law. The US military said it was looking into it. That’s where we are.

The through line of Trump’s career is simple: he breaks things and calls it winning. He broke norms, he broke institutions, he broke alliances. His base loved it. Now he’s trying the same approach on a country of 93 million people in the most volatile region on earth.

So when he looked at Iran, a regime that had spent years losing allies and influence across the region, he saw exactly what he always looks for: something already on its way down. And like a cartoon villain who just found the big red button, he pushed it. No hesitation with no real plan. This is not the combination you want.

Well, almost no plan of his own. We just got word of what’s going on behind the scenes. The CIA is now arming Kurdish forces along the Iran-Iraq border, hoping they’ll spark a popular uprising inside Iran. Trump called Kurdish leaders days into the war to recruit them. And according to reports, this whole Kurdish strategy wasn’t even Trump’s idea. Netanyahu apparently walked into the White House with it pre-packaged: these Kurdish groups here, this many fighters there, here’s who takes over after. A plan handed to Trump by a foreign leader, for a war that American troops are dying in.

Here’s the problem. US intelligence has already said the Kurdish groups don’t have the numbers or the resources to pull off a successful uprising. The groups are also divided, with different agendas and no unified leadership. And the Kurds have been down this road before. The US has armed them, used them, and walked away more times than anyone can count. In Iraq. In Syria. Every time. There is no reason to believe this time is any different. So the exit strategy for this war appears to be: bomb the country from the air and hope that a fragmented, underfunded militia that America will eventually abandon can somehow finish the job on the ground. What could go wrong.

Here’s the part that should make every American’s blood boil regardless of party. The Constitution is crystal clear: only Congress can declare war. Not one man posting videos from the White House at 3am. Even George W. Bush, who took America into Iraq on weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist, at least spent months making his case to Congress and the American people. He lied, but he showed up and made the argument. Trump didn’t even do that. He launched a full-scale war on a sovereign nation and sent Congress a notification after the bombs were already falling. It’s a flagrant abuse of power and most certainly impeachable offense. He should be removed from office immediately. Any normal functioning country would have done that by now. People are angry because Congress seems to be looking the other way as the Republicans hold the majority. One thing the Republicans don’t hold though is any kind of morals or backbone. It’s painfully obvious when you see them repeating moronic party talking points on TV.

The justification for this war has changed so many times that nobody can keep up. It started as stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, then became regime change, then an imminent threat to US troops, then something about following Israel’s lead. Most TV shows take a whole season to lose the plot. This one managed it over one long weekend. This will be remembered as the worst disaster in history.

Pete Hegseth got in front of cameras to promise everyone this is not Iraq and it won’t drag on forever. Which is exactly what someone says right before something becomes Iraq and drags on forever. Thanos said he was inevitable too, and we all know how that ended.

Trump’s own base is turning on him. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once one of his most loyal supporters before their very messy public falling out, called the administration a “bunch of sick fucking liars” and reminded everyone they all campaigned on America First and zero new wars. Tucker Carlson called the strikes disgusting and evil. The sick reality TV show’s most devoted fans are throwing their remotes at the screen.

Here’s where we are. We are in a hole. Trump dug it, his people are making it deeper, and nobody in the room seems to know or care how to get out. The longer this goes on, the harder it becomes to get out.