I think it's more likely that he legitimately targetted Trump but was allowed to get so far by secret services so they could arrest him with a lot of drama instead of quietly on the train to Chicago.
Posting a link to someone's video in which he discusses many opinions is not evidence.
You, yourself, have not posted one single sentence of evidence.
The best thing for Trump: no one is asking about Iran anymore.
be seen as a martyr
Cole Tomas Allen, who was arrested during an attempt to storm the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday, may be America’s first normie liberal terrorist.
The right, naturally, sees Allen as part of a pattern, lumping him in with figures like Thomas Matthew Crooks, who fired on Donald Trump in 2024, grazing his ear; Ryan Wesley Routh, who carried a semiautomatic rifle to one of Trump’s golf courses a few months later; or Tyler Robinson, charged in the killing of Charlie Kirk last year. But all those men had weird or heterogenous politics. Crooks was a nihilistic Republican misfit. Routh had a history of violence and a delusional fixation on Ukraine, where he reportedly tried to join the war effort. Robinson seems to have cooked his brain in online fetish subcultures.
But Allen, who on Monday was charged with attempting to assassinate the president, seemed to be a man with remarkably ordinary political opinions. Social media posts that appear to come from him suggest that he despised ICE, cared a lot about Ukraine, and, like the majority of Americans, wanted to see Trump impeached. Far from a radical leftist, he reposted criticisms of pro-Palestine protesters and the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker. He wasn’t exactly a standard Democrat — he was registered to no political party, and at least at one point was an evangelical Christian — but from what we know so far, before he showed up at the Washington Hilton, he had fairly mainstream beliefs.
This makes Allen’s apparent attempt at political martyrdom particularly convenient for conservatives who want to stigmatize Democratic denunciations of the president. National Review blamed “the feverish opposition to Trump” for allowing “sundry fanatics and losers to resort to political violence.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board tied Saturday’s attack to a political culture in which Trump’s opponents have lost “all judgment and proportion.” Some nonpartisan journalists have parroted this framing. On CNN, Dana Bash asked Representative Jamie Raskin whether he’s thinking twice about “heated rhetoric” against the president, such as calling him “terrible for this country.”
I can’t really blame Republicans for exploiting the attack; Allen has provided them with an irresistible rhetorical cudgel. The problem, of course, is that Trump is indeed terrible for this country. The fact that people have tried to kill him can’t be a reason to eschew frankness about his depravity. Rather, it’s a reason to reiterate that even depravity doesn’t justify political violence, which is morally abhorrent, socially corrosive and counterproductive.
It’s true that the manifesto attributed to Allen contains exaggerated accusations. “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” the manifesto declares. There is no convincing evidence that Trump has ever abused children; all the women who’ve credibly accused him of sexual assault have been adults. Calling Trump a “pedophile” has become a too-common way to describe the president’s intimate relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and coverup of the Epstein files. The manifesto is a reminder that all of us should be more precise in our language. To describe Trump accurately, however, will always sound to some like incitement.
There’s a fierce argument in America about whether the right or the left is more violent. Until very recently, there was no contest: The right was. (A 2024 study using National Institute of Justice data found that in the United States since 1990, “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists.”) In recent years, however, there’s been an uptick in left-wing terrorist attacks and plots.
A report on this phenomenon from the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests that there’s a ratchet at work. It noted that both Republicans and Democrats overestimate their foes’ approval of violence, and said, “Widespread polarization and misperceptions that the other side is far more violent than it actually is creates a dangerous environment where extremists can more easily rationalize using violence.” Each act of political violence further frays our threadbare social fabric, laying the foundation for authoritarianism.
After any act of political terror, conspiracists will often make “false flag” accusations, and Saturday was no different; as The New York Times reported, uses of the word “staged” soared on X. There is, of course, no defense for spreading disinformation or indulging in ideological self-delusion. Still, we can recognize that people start such rumors because they correctly intuit that violence often discredits the causes that inspire it. The left-wing terrorism rampant in the 1970s helped usher in Ronald Reagan, not socialist revolution. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing ended up being a boon to Bill Clinton’s political fortunes. By attempting to kill Trump in 2024, Crooks helped to elect him. Violence isn’t just ethically reprehensible; it’s strategically stupid.
At least one person at the White House correspondents’ dinner was elated by the chaos the shooter caused. Describing agents running into the room with guns amid screaming and flipping tables, Dana White, the Trump-supporting head of Ultimate Fighting Championship, said it was “awesome — I literally took every minute of it in.” Perhaps he understood that the attack had given his movement a gift. Whatever evil the would-be assassin thought he was fighting, all he did was feed it.
Earlier this month, the IRS finished collecting 2025 taxes, taking in an estimated $5.2 trillion from businesses and households. That’s a lot of cash.
But Congress is spending $7 trillion a year, pumping out as much fiscal stimulus now as it did during the Great Recession. All of those excess dollars are spurring retailers to raise prices and the Federal Reserve to slow down interest-rate cuts. Were the economy to tank—because of, say, a war with Iran—we could end up with a toxic combination of widespread joblessness and rampant inflation. Congress is creating long-term risks too. In the coming years, a smaller share of Americans will work and a larger share will require Social Security payments, Medicare, disability-insurance coverage, and long-term care. More mandatory spending plus less revenue plus soaring interest costs on a hefty preexisting debt load add up to a big problem.
Instead of doing something about it, Washington is egging on a nationwide tax revolt. Politicians from both parties are slashing rates and spinning loopholes. They’re telling workers that they shouldn’t have to pay for social services, and that even prosperous Americans are overtaxed. In doing so, they are imperiling the country’s financial security and making it harder for future politicians to pass transformative initiatives. Uncle Sam is going to need to raise some money. And that’s going to be hard to do if Americans see their tax returns not as a fair contribution to the greater good but as a punishment or an injustice.
Over the past decade, the share of Americans who believe that their income-tax bill is unfair has climbed by 14 percentage points. A majority of Americans, in both parties and at all income levels, say that they are kicking in too much. The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, which teaches people how to conscientiously object to income levies, reports surging interest in its training sessions. Grassroots groups around the country are fighting to “ax the tax.” Most people want rates to go up—just not on them.
No wonder. For 50 years, Republicans have made taxes out to be the enemy of the government and the governed alike, passing cuts that have increased inequality and spilled red ink. Ronald Reagan argued that “taxes should hurt” as he dropped the top marginal rate from 70 percent to 28 percent. (Shouldn’t hurt that much, I guess!) George W. Bush provided “relief” to families, while phasing out levies on multimillion-dollar estates and lowering charges on capital gains. Over the past year and a half, Donald Trump has foghorned about what he has done for waiters and whispered about what he has done for real-estate developers. “Every single American at every income level has more money in their pockets,” he told supporters in Las Vegas earlier this month. Technically true—the worst kind of true. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut the tax liability of 85 percent of households, though 60 percent of the cuts went to the wealthy.
Washington has applied lighter taxes to investment profits than to salaries and wages for nearly as long as it has been in the business of taxing income at all. Yet under Trump, something has changed. Income levies have become not just uneven but irregular, contingent. The “big beautiful bill” created special provisions for tips, overtime, and retirement benefits, as well as profits taken by owner-operators. Viewed one way, Trump helped blue-collar workers and job-creating entrepreneurs. Viewed another, he created some nice tax-avoidance options for his base, leaving the salary-earning professional-managerial class as the last finger in the national-revenue dam. At his State of the Union address this year, Trump even proposed using tariffs to “substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.” (Trump continues to insist that foreign exporters pay tariffs. Domestic importers do, passing the costs onto consumers. Thus, Trump’s tariffs constituted the biggest tax hike since 1993.)
Along with depressing revenue and complicating the code, Trump is making it harder for the IRS to do its job. He has called its civil servants vindictive, factional, and even anti-Christian. He has fired 25,000 of them, slashing the agency’s budget by nearly 10 percent. The campaign feels personal. In 2022, two of Trump’s businesses were found guilty on four counts of felony tax fraud. Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion for failing to prevent the leak of some of his tax records. (Were he to win, the payout would cost every American taxpayer $62.) He refuses to release his returns on his own, breaking with half a century of presidential tradition.
The IRS’s reputation as a competent, professional agency is under assault. And the notion that the tax code should be simpler and fairer has become a quaint relic of a less polarized time—like proposing that the country bring back voice votes at town halls. Or restore the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit. (Honestly, not a bad idea.) Or tie scolds to the ducking stool again. (When you think about it …) Nobody on the Hill talks about broadening the base and lowering rates anymore. Republicans are all in on giving away goodies to their co-partisans and fermenting a code that looks like Swiss cheese. Democrats are too.
To close the deficit, Bill Clinton raised income taxes on filers making more than $250,000 a year in today’s dollars. To pay for the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama raised income taxes on individuals making more than $284,000 a year in today’s dollars. In 2019, Joe Biden vowed never to raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000 a year—a colossal sum, even in Greenwich, Connecticut, or Cupertino, California. To Democratic politicians, apparently, families in the 97th income percentile are middle-class.
Perhaps Democrats have exempted high earners from tax hikes to account for the cost-of-living crisis. Perhaps they are trying to address the fractal nature of American inequality, or trying to keep the tax code progressive, even if they cannot keep its revenue stream sufficient. Perhaps, like Trump, they are just pandering to their base. “Democrats used to be the party of the struggling, working class, and downtrodden,” Jessica Riedl of the Tax Policy Center told me. Now they are the party of the “upwardly mobile professional class in major cities—doctors, lawyers, financial advisers, who live in Silicon Valley and Hollywood and New York—and don’t want the Democrats raising their taxes.”
Some prominent Democrats are even pushing for tax cuts, beyond the ones the Republicans just made. Senator Chris Van Hollen wants to take a family’s cost of living into account on the 1040 form. Senator Cory Booker wishes to expand credits for kids and low-wage workers. Both want to exempt millions of working-class families from income taxes entirely.
While tinkering with marginal rates, Democrats have threaded deductions, credits, and exemptions into the tax code, engaging in “submerged” policy making, as Cornell’s Suzanne Mettler describes it. Tax expenditures are easier for Congress to pass than spending programs, and they’re easier to target at low-income households. Still, Americans don’t really understand these policies. Two in three claimants of the home-mortgage-interest deduction say it doesn’t do much for them. (The deduction can reduce a family’s tax bill by as much as $15,000 a year.) Two in three people with a 529 college savings plan believe that they have never used a government program. The more tax breaks a person receives, the less likely they are to report that Uncle Sam has improved their quality of life, Mettler has found. Yet such initiatives cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars.
The fiercest tax revolts are brewing at the local level. Governor Kathy Hochul of New York has cut state income taxes for joint filers earning up to $323,000 a year, permitted towns and cities to exempt seniors from property taxes, and pushed for abolishing taxes on tips. “If you’re working long shifts, nights, or weekends, those tips should help you pay the bills, not get taxed away,” she said, echoing Bush in promising her constituents “relief.” Politicians in North Dakota, Indiana, Texas, and Montana have slashed property taxes; politicians in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kansas are trying to do so. The front-runner in the Georgia governor’s race wants to eliminate income taxes for public-school educators.
The few tax hikes on the table tend to be hyper-focused on the hyper-rich. California is contemplating a one-time, 5 percent levy on the state’s billionaires—200 or so people in a population of 40 million. Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani want taxes on pieds-à-terre worth more than $5 million. The president does not like the proposal: “Mayor Mamdani is DESTROYING New York!” he posted on Truth Social. “The TAX, TAX, TAX Policies are SO WRONG.” (Trump’s Central Park triplex reportedly sports views of all five boroughs, a diamond-encrusted front door, a marble sculpture of Eros, a czarist malachite table, and a ceiling mural of Apollo astride a chariot.)
The proposals have some legitimate rationale. Wages for hourly employees have crawled, while the paychecks of investors and executives have soared. At the same time, the wealth of investors and executives has skyrocketed, with the taxman scarcely tapping these fortunes at all. As the law professor Ray Madoff has observed, Amazon has paid Jeff Bezos a salary of roughly $82,000 a year since the late 1990s, “low enough to make him eligible to claim the child tax credit (which he did!).” From 2014 to 2018, his net worth climbed by $99 billion, just 0.98 percent of which went to public coffers, whereas many middle-class families fork over 25 percent of their earnings. Plus, again, the cost of living has become brutally high. Even households making six figures are struggling to afford child care, rent, groceries, health insurance, summer camp, and student-loan debt.
Yet tax cuts aren’t a great way to handle high prices. They’re inflationary: They cause high prices. And a lot of these supposedly progressive policies would aid the prosperous, as well as the middle class and working class. Getting rid of property taxes in particular feels like a sop for the well-heeled. Assessments have gone up because home values have gone up. People might not like it, but it is not unfair.
It is unfair, however, to give tax write-offs to specific kinds of people making specific kinds of money, even if the policies sound nice in a stump speech. Why should teachers be exempt from income taxes, but not firefighters, sanitation workers, NICU nurses, aides in memory-care units, or paramedics? Why should California’s billionaires pay a wealth tax, but not its near-billionaires? Why should a 66-year-old homeowner get a write-off, but not a 64-year-old homeowner? Why should waiters and security guards get “relief,” but not line cooks or roofers? Why are we calling tax provisions “relief” at all? And why are we casting loopholes for labor instead of cutting them for capital?
For Democrats, today’s anti-tax ideology will limit the scope of the possible. Say that a presidential candidate wants to create universal prekindergarten, implement a comprehensive parental-leave policy, lower the Medicare-eligibility age, and invest in clean energy and cancer research. How would they sell the necessary tax hikes? They could raise rates on businesses and millionaires, but it wouldn’t be nearly enough. Liberal European countries fund their welfare programs with broad-based taxes on workers and consumers, not just confiscatory taxes on oligarchs. Nothing suggests that Democrats have the stomach for it. “For all of their talk about taxing the rich, Democrats have not significantly raised upper-income taxes since 1993,” Riedl, from the Tax Policy Center, said. “Why do we assume this massive utopia of huge tax-the-rich revenue is just around the corner?”
For Republicans, anti-tax ideology is endangering their political fortunes right now. To pay for his tax cuts for the rich, Trump axed Medicaid and SNAP benefits for the poor. People don’t tend to notice when their tax liability goes down. They really, really notice when they can’t put food on the table or go to the ER for an infection. And in time, anti-tax ideology might threaten the country’s solvency and end up necessitating austerity budgets. Washington has run large deficits without spooking the bond market for years. But what if yields surge and inflation spikes when millions more Americans are retired and millions fewer are working?
Average citizens aren’t hearing these arguments. Politicians have spent years telling people making $312,000 a year that they are middle-class, and offering credits, exemptions, loopholes, rate reductions, and deductions to anyone who might cast a ballot for them or cut them a check. They have spent decades making the tax code impossible to understand and the filing process incomprehensible. Nobody needs to enjoy paying their taxes. But the amount they pay has to be reasonable. And they do need to pay up.
There is a frenzied feeling to the news coming from the White House these days.
Yesterday, the administration tried to blame Democrats and the media for the incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night, when Secret Service agents apprehended a man carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives on the floor above the room where the dinner was taking place. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called opponents of Trump a “left-wing cult of hatred against POTUS and all of those who support him” and blamed the “entire Democrat party” for the event.
Shots were fired during that incident, although not in the room where Trump, cabinet members, or the press were seated, but there is a good chance it was actually not Cole Tomas Allen, the intruder, who fired them. Yesterday the Department of Justice charged Allen with attempting to assassinate the president.
At his press conference hours after the event, Trump insisted the trouble proved the need for his proposed ballroom. On Sunday morning, the Department of Justice (DOJ) demanded that the National Trust for Historic Preservation drop its lawsuit against Trump’s plans, saying the “lawsuit puts the lives of the President, his family, and his staff at grave risk.” The National Trust for Historic Preservation rejected the demand yesterday, saying that while the event was “awful,” it did not change the fact that Trump must follow the law and get congressional approval for the ballroom.
Yesterday Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and others jumped in front of the cameras to present a bill to appropriate $400 million of taxpayer money to build the ballroom. Republican loyalists in the House have also called for public funding of a ballroom.
Late last night, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche filed a motion to dissolve the court’s preliminary injunction stopping the construction of the ballroom (although the court did not stop the construction of the bunker underneath the proposed addition). The motion begins: “‘The National Trust for Historic Preservation’ is a beautiful name, but even their name is FAKE because when they add the words ‘in the United States’ to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it makes it sound like a Governmental Agency, which it is not.” It goes on from there, insisting for seven pages that the lack of a ballroom endangers Trump. Chris Geidner of LawDork called the motion “deranged.”
The administration’s focus on the ballroom seems to echo Trump’s insistence after his first inauguration that the crowd at that inauguration was bigger than that at President Barack Obama’s. Anyone could see that was a lie, but Trump and his administration officials clung to it. Forcing supporters to accept a lie as reality is a key tool of authoritarians, making it harder for them to reject the next lie, and so on. The claim that Democrats are calling for violence, when in fact it has been Trump calling for executing those he believes are his enemies, follows that pattern exactly.
But there is at least one other story behind the administration’s insistence on building Trump’s ballroom: the man desperately needs a win.
His war in Iran has settled into a humiliating stalemate in which Iranian leaders appear to be calling the shots. Speaking to German students on Monday, German chancellor Frederich Merz said that the U.S. clearly has no strategic plan and that the “entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership.”
Gas prices are at their highest level in four years, with the average U.S. price for a gallon of regular at $4.18. Economist Paul Krugman noted in his Substack today that the world is currently using oil that it had in storage, but when that runs out, prices will rise enough to get rid of the demand for about 11 or more million barrels of oil a day. Krugman illustrated his article with a picture of an egg in a vise.
On Saturday, April 25, Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, Mosheh Gains, and Natasha Lebedeva of NBC News reported that the damage Iran inflicted on American military bases, radar systems, aircraft, warehouses, and infrastructure in the Gulf region was far worse than the administration has told the public and will cost up to $5 billion to repair.
On Sunday, Democratic senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts responded to reports from survivors that the U.S. military post in Kuwait where six service members died and at least 20 more were injured was unprotected.
One of the injured soldiers told CBS News that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s statement that a drone “squeaked through” was false. “I want people to know the unit…was unprepared to provide any defense for itself,” the service member said. “It was not a fortified position.” The senators asked Hegseth to explain by May 11 why the post did not have protection against drones and who was responsible for that lack.
Yesterday Missy Ryan, Vivian Salama, Michael Scherer, and Nancy A. Youssef of The Atlantic published a piece that echoed others by indicating that Vice President J.D. Vance is distancing himself from the Iran debacle, in this case by questioning whether Hegseth is providing Trump accurate information about the war. An article in The Hill by Alexander Bolton said Republican senators are losing confidence in Hegseth as he hollows out the ranks of senior military officers.
The Republican-dominated Congress is not helping Trump look competent. The short-term extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) expires on April 30. The House of Representatives was also scheduled to address the farm bill, a multiyear bill addressing farm and nutrition policies. Finally, the House is long overdue in funding the Department of Homeland Security, which has now been operating without appropriations for more than 70 days. The Senate unanimously passed a measure to fund most of DHS on March 27, but Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has yet to take it up.
Republican infighting kept a rules package that would advance the measures bottled up in committee yesterday, but this evening the Rules Committee advanced the three measures out of committee. As Emily Brooks of The Hill noted, it’s not clear the necessary rule will pass the House, which has to happen before the measures themselves can come to a vote. Johnson can afford to lose only two Republican votes on the rule, and already members are expressing reservations about voting yes.
And so, Trump and his loyalists are trying desperately to demonstrate their dominance. Just today, Benjamin Parker of The Bulwark reported that the State Department is finalizing plans to put an image of Trump’s face in U.S. passports that are issued from the Washington, D.C., Passport Agency. They are already minting a $1 coin with his face on it, issuing a gold commemorative coin with his face on it, and putting Trump’s face on national park passes.
Also today, the Pentagon asked Congress to change the name of the Defense Department to the “Department of War,” making formal the change administration officials informally made last year. This change, accentuating Trump and Hegseth’s focus on a “warrior ethos” instead of the defensive alliances the U.S. has enjoyed since World War II, will cost taxpayers $52 million.
Trump has also ramped up his attacks on those he perceives to be enemies. Today the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced it is reviewing ABC’s licenses after late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about First Lady Melania Trump last Thursday. Trump loyalist Brendan Carr, who, as Daniel Arkin of NBC News notes, frequently attacks media organizations, chairs the FCC.
The administration has also gone after former FBI director James Comey again. A federal grand jury in North Carolina has indicted him for making a threat “to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States, in that he publicly posted a photograph on the internet social media site Instagram which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out ‘86 47’, which a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.” That is, Comey’s posting a picture of seashells on a beach arranged in the pattern of 86 47—in slang, 86 means to get rid of something, and Trump is the 47th president—was a threat against Trump’s life.
The grand jury also issued a warrant for Comey’s arrest.
Comey has been a thorn in Trump’s side since the beginning of his first term, when Comey refused to drop the FBI investigation into the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives. Trump fired him. Then, in September 2025 under then–attorney general Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice charged Comey with lying to Congress, but a judge dismissed the case, saying that Lindsey Halligan, the prosecutor who brought it, had been appointed illegally. Now, Acting Attorney General Blanche appears to be currying favor with Trump by going after Comey again.
In July 2025, Trump also fired Comey’s daughter, Maurene Comey, from her job as assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Maurene Comey specializes in prosecuting white-collar crime and corruption. She led cases against sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
Comey moved to private practice but sued over her firing. The Department of Justice tried to get the case moved from court to the Merit Systems Protection Board, which has come under the sway of the Department of Justice itself, but today a judge kept the case in court, saying it was not a routine firing. “Maurene Comey was, by all accounts, an exemplary Assistant United States Attorney. In her nearly ten years working at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, she was assigned some of the country’s highest profile cases, and she consistently received the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike,” the judge said.
Flailing on multiple fronts, Trump is so desperate to demonstrate dominance that this afternoon, at about 3:30, the official social media account of the White House posted a picture of Trump and King Charles, who is in the U.S. on a state visit, with the caption “TWO KINGS.”
James Comey had his own answer to Trump’s aspirations to authoritarianism: “Well, they’re back,” he said in a video today. “This time about a picture of seashells on a North Carolina beach a year ago. And this won’t be the end of it. But nothing has changed with me. I’m still innocent. I’m still not afraid. And I still believe in the independent federal judiciary, so let’s go.
“But,” he added, “it’s really important that all of us remember this is not who we are as a country. This is not how the Department of Justice is supposed to be. And the good news is we get closer every day to restoring those values. Keep the faith.”
I. HOW LONG CAN IT LAST?
How long can it last? The world is in crisis. Much of it, caused by America’s President. And yet the US economy is “booming.” Is it?
I think it’s a house of cards.
The US economy today is often called “K-shaped,” meaning that there’s a class of people who are doing well, and a class that aren’t. So far, so predatory capitalism. It’s a pretty…simplistic…metaphor. It has no dynamics, no interactions, no inner structure at all. That’s why I think it’s lacking.
This frame hides a number of crucial—and catastrophic—realities.
A much better metaphor is a house of cards. How we see social realities matters, if we want to understand—and be able to predict—them.
Let me explain.
II. THE CRUCIAL WEAKNESS OF THE US ECONOMY, OR, MONEY MONEY MONEY
The US economy has an Achilles Heel. A critical weakness.
It’s 70% consumption. That means that it’s exquisitely sensitive to changes in consumption, which is how much people spend (versus invest, and we’ll come to the investment part shortly.)
This is unique, different, and a true point of critical weakness. It’s unique in the world. No other economy on the globe consumes at such a high rate. It’s different from the rest of the wealthy world, too, which is much more sensitive to changes in government investment, because of the expansive social contracts in Europe and Canada.
And it’s a true critical weakness in the sense that a small, unforeseen change can wreak absolute havoc. It can cause failure cascades.
Like those in 2008, where banks failed, or in 2003, where the dot com bubble crashed, or during the pandemic, where the economy went haywire.
So: the US economy depends critically on consumption, which is also why the news about it is always about how much other people spend, and that’s deeply weird if you’ve ever lived overseas. And if that number falls, even a little bit, then the economy can go south, fast, hard, and deep, unlike almost anywhere else in the world, too.
III. THE THREE MAGIC NUMBERS IN THE ECONOMY
What is an economy? Let’s think of it as a set of markets. Stock markets. Bond markets. Currency markets. The labor market. And so on. There are more, but those will do for now.
What happens when this Magic Number, consumption, begins to falter, even just a little bit, in America? One almost elementary consequence is that the stock market falls. The bond market weakens, too. So does the currency. And of course, eventually, labor markets do too, meaning that unemployment begins to rise, which is easy to understand if people are buying and spending less.
Now we’re going to begin discussing the house of cards metaphor a little.
America, like I said, is unlike any other economy. Not just because everything depends on Magic Number One, consumption. But also because that Magic Number determines Magic Number Two, the stock market. Magic Number Three, by the way, is GDP, which depends on the first two.
The stock market in America is everything. People obsess over it unlike anywhere else in the world. Europeans and Canadians by and large have no idea what their stock markets are doing, and that’s because they don’t have to care: they don’t have these miserable things called 401Ks. Investment and retirement’s taken care of for them.
But in America, Magic Number One, consumption, determines Magic Number Two, the stock market, or people’s 401Ks, savings, etcetera, which is everything.
The stock market in America is everything in a literal sense. Europeans and Canadians have expansive social contracts, like I said, from retirement to healthcare to childcare. In America, you work, and your money’s put into the stock market more or less automatically.
The stock market is the only safety net there is. It has taken the place of every single functional system in working countries. That’s why Americans obsess over it, and they’re right to, they have to. No money, you die.
Now think again of the link between Magic Number One, consumption, and Magic Number Two, the stock market. See how America’s always on edge about the economy?
That’s because the economy is always on the edge. It’s on a perpetual knife edge. A tiny move in the wrong direction can have life-wrecking consequences.
Even for “rich” Americans.
V. THE CLASS STRUCTURE OF AMERICAN WEALTH
Now let’s picture the house of cards.
The K shape metaphor says: richer Americans are doing well. And it implies that they’ll continue to do well. We imagine the branches or legs of the K having their own momentum, separating, bifurcating.
But is that true?
“Richer” Americans these days have grown wealthy largely due to a single industry: tech. It’s provided a route to the upper middle class, what’s left of it, through astronomical salaries and stock market gains. So much so that Americans now make 3-4 times what their counterparts do in the rest of the rich world. Does that sound sustainable to you? I digress a little bit.
My wife and I were in Seattle recently. I was astounded by the level of wealth a little bit. Nice shops, restaurants, cafes, with astronomical prices, tiny houses that cost a fortune. So I did a little research, and learned something I didn’t know before. Seattle has the largest number of tech workers in the country. Hence, all this newfound wealth.
“Tech,” we’ve discussed recently, is misnomer. It’s really advertising, and mail order. They’re responsible for a very, very large portion of this K shape. And the story goes like this. This class of richer Americans will just keep spending, spending, spending.
So there’s an idea that “the wealthy can just keep spending…forever.” But will they? Can they? Maybe if their money came from the heavens above, certainly. But the wrinkle in this very earthly tale is that their money is coming from below, because they are in the business of mass advertising. Global, in fact, and the world economy is emphatically not doing well. However you look at it, their wealth comes from the rungs of the ladder below them.
Once you understand that this is a story of advertising, then things become much clearer. To advertise, you need people in mass, society-scale, markets to buy stuff. Who can. If they don’t, then of course, there’s little reason to advertise.
So while it’s true that these richer Americans may want to keep spending, the point is that they’re employed in and by an industry which depends on advertising to everyone else. Not just them. This is how the US economy really works right now, and has for a decade plus.
See what I mean by house of cards a little bit?
VI. THE HOUSE OF CARDS
Now let’s put it all together.
This new class of techno-wealthy, and here I don’t mean Musk and Bezos, but your average tech worker pulling a quarter of a million plus, is working in an industry—advertising—that’s premised on selling ever more stuff to the people below them in the economic ladder.
That is where their wealth is really coming from.
And they’re one step away from catastrophe, too, make no mistake. One lost job, one missed paycheck. This level of wealth doesn’t insulate you much at all from the brutal realities of American financial life—that comes with having tens or hundreds of millions. At this level of wealth, family, groceries, and housing are still very much an ongoing basic issue of household financial management.
To put it another way, this level of the house of cards is fragile. It’s not on solid ground. It depends critically on the one beneath it.
Now think of the other stratum beneath them on the economic ladder. How are they doing? The ones being advertised to?
Not very well at all. They’re under immense strain. They are struggling to make ends meet, and we see it in every statistic there is, from bad debt, to rising credit card delinquencies, to car payments, to savings rates, to levels of distress, and so on.
Magic Number One, Two, Three. See how much risk they’re at? Of…
VII. WHAT HAPPENS TO A HOUSE OF CARDS?
What happens in a house of cards?
The bottom falls out.
The bottom layer suddenly gives way, and the rest of the thing collapses as if it were nothing at all. A breeze blowing the wrong way undoes it.
This is where the economy really is.
And I think that the “K shape” metaphor hides this. Prevents us from really seeing it or understanding it well.
If we think about it clearly, a house of cards is a clearer pattern for us. It has internal structure, dynamics, logic, the elements are related, and there is a pattern to it at the macro scale. It isn’t just “some cards are doing well, and others aren’t.”
None of the levels of such a house are safe, on solid ground, secure.
Let me continue my little explanation.
Remember Magic Numbers One and Two? Consumption and the stock market?
What happens if the bottom begins to give way, and the people at the bottom stratum stop spending at what are now rates they can barely, if at all, afford? The rung above them feels the pain instantly, and in multiple ways. Their jobs, created by advertising, are at sudden risk (and I won’t even get into AI for now.) And so is their wealth, which is tied up in the stock market, and locked into stock options of the very “tech” meaning ad companies they work for. They face a triple whammy.
So there are feedback effects here, which make the edifice a house of cards: unstable by its very nature.
All this is why Americans are under so much financial stress and pressure, too, no matter what rung of the economic ladder they’re at. Everything is poised to fall apart, perpetually and constantly. Precisely because nothing is on solid ground.
Every rung of the economic ladder above is sitting above one that’s precarious and unstable and shaky, and so the economy just stays unstable the further you go up, perhaps even more so. This is why you see the interesting and morbid effect of couples making a quarter to a half a million dollars a year jointly, which is an amount the entire rest of the world would be flabbergasted by, and who still “feel poor.”
If you make it to the very top, which is to say, you made hundreds of millions, or dozens maybe, you can jump off the whole damned thing, buy a yacht, and sail away. But until then? You’re still trapped in it all.
VIII. A HOUSE OF CARDS IN AN EARTHQUAKE ZONE
Now think of all the shocks heading our way as a world. Trump started a foolish war that’s causing an energy crisis that’s going to cause a massive inflationary wave. The economy worldwide is stagnating. People are getting sick of tech and it’s weird man-child obsession with controlling their lives in puerile ways. Climate change. Fascism. Etcetera. AI, ripping away all those jobs from this tech meaning advertising class, and replacing them with idiot sales bots.
Any one of those alone would be enough to cause the house of cards to teeter and sway in the wind. But all of them together?
I think of the US economy as a house of cards standing on an earthquake zone. Was that a rumble I just heard?
I’d be very, very careful about where you invest your wealth these days. Wise investment isn’t about catching the breeze. It’s about foundations, resting on solid ground.
I will have plenty to say about the Supreme Court’s decision today in Callais v. Louisiana, but tonight I want to make sure that yesterday’s speeches by President Donald J. Trump and King Charles III of the United Kingdom don’t get lost in the tidal wave of news. They presented a very clear picture of what is at stake in the United States today.
King Charles and Queen Camilla are in the U.S. on a state visit, and in his speech welcoming them to the White House yesterday, Trump redefined the United States from a nation based on the principles of the Enlightenment, as it has historically been understood, to one based in the white nationalist ideas of blood and soil.
“Long before Americans had a nation or a constitution, we first had a culture, a character, and a creed,” Trump said. “For nearly two centuries before the Revolution, this land was settled and forged by men and women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British. Here on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and…Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride.”
Weirdly, Trump’s speech then turned the American Revolution—which included a war against the British to create an independent country—into a celebration of unity between the Patriots and their English countrymen. “The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true,” Trump said.
And then he got to the heart of the matter. In words that sounded far more like White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller—who has been clear he wants to see the nation purged of nonwhite people—than like Trump himself, the president rejected the longstanding belief that the United States is based on the profound idea articulated in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and “[t]hat to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
In 1776 the idea that men were born equal and had a right to a say in their government was a revolutionary idea indeed. It was one that shaped the new nation and then set the world on fire.
But Trump rejected that idea in favor of the idea that a nation is about bloodlines. “In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea, but the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic,” he said.
The American and the British people “share that same root,” Trump said. “We speak the same language. We hold the same values. And together, our warriors have defended the same extraordinary civilization under twin banners of red, white, and blue.”
After riffing on his parents for a bit, during which he said his mother “had a crush on Charles” when he was younger, Trump turned the Atlantic Charter, drafted in 1941 by British prime minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, into an affirmation of a shared gene pool. In fact, the Atlantic Charter was the founding document for the post–World War II order that Trump is deliberately destroying. It defined a post–World War II order based on territorial integrity, national self-determination, economic growth, and alliances to protect those values. It was the basis for most of the postwar international institutions that have protected a rules-based order ever since.
Ignoring the substance of the Atlantic Charter, Trump said the meeting illustrated “our nations’ unique bond and role in history.” He concluded: “If they could see us today, our ancestors would surely be filled with awe and pride that the Anglo-American revolution in human freedom was never, ever extinguished, but carried forward across centuries, across oceans, and across history until it became a fire that lit the entire world…. Let us remember what has made our countries the two most exceptional nations the world has ever known, and together let us go forward with even stronger resolve to carry on our sacred devotion to liberty and to the traditions of excellence that have been our shared gift of all mankind.”
Later, King Charles addressed a joint session of Congress. He was the second British monarch to do so; the first was his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, in 1991. He began by noting that “our destinies as Nations have been interlinked.” But, unlike Trump’s, his understanding of that linkage underscored the traditional understanding of the United States of America. He began by defining Congress as “this citadel of democracy created to represent the voice of all American people to advance sacred rights and freedoms.”
His picture of the United States also was markedly different from Trump’s. He noted that the Founders “united thirteen disparate colonies” by “balancing contending forces and drawing strength in diversity.” When they created a nation “on the revolutionary idea of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” they “carried with them, and carried forward, the great inheritance of the British Enlightenment—as well as the ideals which had an even deeper history in English Common Law and Magna Carta.”
King Charles noted that at least 160 Supreme Court cases have cited the Magna Carta. That observation was not idle. It was the heart of his message. The Magna Carta, or Great Charter, hammered out in 1215 by King John of England and a group of rebel barons, established the concept that kings must answer to the law. It prohibited unlawful imprisonment and protected the right to trial by jury.
Famously, it put into writing that: “[n]o free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land.” It also stated:“To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.”
The Magna Carta placed limits on the king’s ability to tax his subjects and established the law as an authority apart from the king. Anticipating the idea of checks and balances, it set up a council of barons to make sure the king obeyed the charter. If he did not, they could seize his lands and castles until he made amends.
When the Founders came together to stand against taxation without representation and to demand jury trials, all in the understanding that the king could be checked by the people, they were standing on the principles enshrined in the Magna Carta.
King Charles recalled Congress to this tradition, reminding them that “it is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America’s Founders is present in every session and every vote cast.” Rejecting Trump’s blood and soil nationalism, he added that political debate is enriched “by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States. In both of our countries,” he said, “it is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse and free societies that gives us our collective strength.”
Rather than centering the friendship of the U.S. and the U.K. in what Trump had defined as their cultural and genetic heritage, he said instead that “the essence of our two Nations is a generosity of spirit and a duty to foster compassion, to promote peace, to deepen mutual understanding and to value all people, of all faiths, and of none.”
King Charles reminded Congress that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has invoked its collective defense Article 5 just once: after the U.S. was attacked on 9/11. He recalled the decades in which the U.S. and U.K. have stood together under NATO, and he called for continued cooperation. He called for the “same unyielding resolve” to help the people of Ukraine fight off the Russians.
“We do not embark on these remarkable endeavours together out of sentiment,” he said. “We do so because they build greater shared resilience for the future, so making our citizens safer for generations to come.
King Charles explained: “Our common ideals were not only crucial for liberty and equality, they are also the foundation of our shared prosperity. The Rule of Law: the certainty of stable and accessible rules, an independent judiciary resolving disputes and delivering impartial justice. These features created the conditions for centuries of unmatched economic growth in our two countries.”
In addition to celebrating the past, King Charles looked forward to the future, asking his audience to “reflect on our shared responsibility to safeguard Nature, our most precious and irreplaceable asset.” He noted: “[O]ur generation must decide how to address the collapse of critical natural systems, which threatens far more than the harmony and essential diversity of Nature.”
King Charles urged the U.S. to “ignore the clarion calls to become ever more inward-looking,” and reminded his listeners that “America’s words carry weight and meaning, as they have since Independence. The actions of this great Nation matter even more.” He called for the U.S. and the U.K. to “rededicate ourselves to each other in the selfless service of our peoples and of all the peoples of the world.”
Appearing to miss the point completely, at about the time King Charles finished his speech, the official social media account of the White House posted a picture of Trump and King Charles with the caption “TWO KINGS.”
