This week, the United States Mint began producing a new dollar coin. On the front: Donald Trump, in a suit and tie, with a stern look on his face. Around him, the word LIBERTY arcs across the top. The dates 1776 and 2026 frame the bottom. IN GOD WE TRUST sits in the middle.

The coin is gold. Or rather, it looks gold. It is not made of gold. It is composed of non-precious metals with a gold-like finish on the exterior, which is a technically accurate description that also tells you almost everything you need to know about the aesthetic ambitions of this project.

Trump, when asked about it Wednesday on Fox Business Network, said: “It’s very unusual, but I was honored by it. It’s very cute they gave me a coin.”

There is a law that says this coin should not exist. The coin exists anyway. That tension, between the legal, the historical, and the political, is worth unpacking carefully before everyone retreats to their corners and starts yelling.

What the law actually says

Federal law has prohibited the depiction of a living person on United States currency since 1866. The prohibition came after Congress got fed up with Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase putting his own face on paper money during the Civil War and decided the practice was unseemly enough to ban permanently. For 160 years, the rule held. Washington on the quarter. Lincoln on the penny. Hamilton on the ten. Every face on American money belonged to someone already dead.

The Trump coin exists because of a carve-out. In 2020, during Trump’s first term, Congress passed a law authorizing commemorative dollar coins in 2026 with designs, in the law’s exact language, emblematic of the United States semiquincentennial. That law gave the Treasury Secretary the authority to authorize the minting and issuance of coins in connection with the 250th anniversary celebration.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent used that authority. He argued the design falls squarely within the America 250 statutory authority and called the coin a way to honor both our founding and our current leadership within the bounds Congress has set. The Commission of Fine Arts, whose members were appointed by Trump, approved the design earlier this year.

What the law authorized was a semiquincentennial coin. What the Treasury produced was a Trump coin with semiquincentennial dates on it. Whether those two things are the same depends entirely on who you ask and what you believe about the people making the decision.

What is on the coin and what changed

The front features Trump in a suit and tie with a stern expression, which is not how most commemorative coins tend to present their subjects, but is consistent with the particular brand of stern authority Trump has cultivated across two decades of public life. The word LIBERTY arcs across the top. The dates 1776 and 2026 sit at the bottom. IN GOD WE TRUST appears in the center.

The back is traditional: the bald eagle from the Great Seal, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA across the top, E PLURIBUS UNUM on the shield across the bird’s breast.

An earlier version of the design, approved by the Commission of Fine Arts in the spring, showed Trump with his fists resting on a desk as he leaned forward. That version did not make it to production. The Treasury Department has not explained why the final coin differs from the approved design, or who made that call, or when. The fists are gone. The stern look remains.

The coin will not circulate as regular currency. It will be sold through the US Mint’s numismatic channels as a packaged legal-tender dollar, meaning you can spend it as a dollar but you would not receive it as change at a grocery store. It carries a modest premium over face value. It is, in the language of coin collecting, a commemorative piece aimed at collectors and, presumably, supporters.

The context that matters

This coin does not exist in isolation. It is the latest entry in a pattern that has been building since Trump’s second inauguration.

In March, the Treasury announced that Trump’s signature would appear on all new US paper currency. Traditionally, bills carry the signatures of the Treasury Secretary and the Treasurer of the United States, not the president. That change means that every dollar bill printed from this point forward carries Donald Trump’s name on it, a departure from 230 years of practice.

Trump has also renamed the US Institute of Peace, the Kennedy Center, a new class of US Navy battleships, and multiple federal buildings after himself or members of his family. His name appears on the checks sent to families through the Trump Accounts program. The dollar coin announced Wednesday is not an isolated gesture. It is part of a coherent and deliberate project of imprinting a presidency onto the physical artifacts of American life.

In a 2025 letter to Bessent, Senate critics warned that putting Trump on a dollar coin risked edging the United States toward a cult of personality aesthetic more common in monarchies and urged Treasury to stick with non-presidential semiquincentennial motifs. The letter did not stop the coin. It did produce a useful phrase that will be debated for years.

The two honest arguments

Here is where this letter tries to do something the cable news coverage will not.

The case for the coin, made honestly: Congress passed a law in 2020 authorizing commemorative semiquincentennial dollar coins. The Treasury Secretary has statutory authority to approve coin designs in connection with that anniversary. Every face on American currency represents a human being who once led this country. The 250th birthday of the United States is a genuine occasion for commemoration. A president who presided over the anniversary year appearing on a commemorative coin is not, on its face, historically unprecedented in concept even if it is unprecedented in the specific.

The case against it, made equally honestly: the 1866 prohibition on living persons on currency exists for a reason that has not changed. The Commission of Fine Arts that approved the design was appointed by the man whose face is on the coin, which is not an independent review process by any reasonable definition. The coin is not a neutral historical document. It is being released during an active presidency, by a Treasury Secretary who serves at the pleasure of the man depicted, in the context of a broader pattern of putting that man’s name and face on as many public artifacts as possible. The semiquincentennial law authorized a coin emblematic of the nation’s 250 years. A portrait of the sitting president is a portrait of the sitting president. Those two things are not identical.

Both of those arguments are real. Both deserve to be heard before anyone decides which one wins.

The bottom line

By this fall, you will be able to walk into a post office or log onto the US Mint’s website and purchase a gold-toned dollar coin bearing the face of a living president, the first time that has happened in American history under a law designed to prohibit exactly that, enabled by a statutory carve-out, approved by a commission the president himself appointed, announced by a Treasury Secretary who serves at his pleasure.

Trump called it very cute. Critics are calling it something else entirely. The coin presses at the Philadelphia Mint are already running.

Whatever you think about the politics, the precedent is set. The next president will be able to point to this moment and say it has already been done. The one after that. And the one after that.

That is the thing about precedents. They are very hard to unmint.

That is what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | July 16, 2026

Saturday night, emergency services responded to a call of cardiac arrest at Senator Lindsey Graham’s Washington home. He had been scheduled to appear on NBC’s Meet the Press this morning. He had been in Kyiv as recently as Friday. He had just won his Republican primary, seeking a fifth term in the Senate.

By Sunday morning, his office had released five s…

Read more

WHAT TO KNOW THIS WEEKEND July 11, 2026. Ten things that matter. A letter from US Daily Letter HQ.

Good morning. It is Saturday July 11th. The World Cup quarterfinals are today. The Iran ceasefire is cracking again. A NATO summit just wrapped. Ebola is spreading in Congo. And Taylor Swift is somewhere on a honeymoon. Here is everything worth knowing before Monday.

1. The Iran ceasefire broke again this week. It is holding again. Barely.

On Thursday, the United States launched new airstrikes on Iranian targets. Iran responded by hitting US-allied Gulf countries. For 48 hours the world held its breath wondering whether the war signed away in Switzerland two weeks ago was already dead. By Friday night, both sides pulled back. The ceasefire is technically intact but the pattern of sign, fight, pause, repeat is now well established. The formal Iran deal may be signed. The instinct to keep hitting each other is not yet gone. Watch this one all weekend.

2. Two World Cup quarterfinals are today. Both are enormous.

Norway vs England kicks off tonight at 5pm Eastern at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami. Then Argentina vs Switzerland at 9pm Eastern in Kansas City. France and Spain are already through to the semifinals after beating Morocco 2-0 and Belgium 2-1 respectively. France meets Spain on Bastille Day, Tuesday July 14th in Dallas. The other semifinal is in Atlanta on Wednesday. The final is July 19th at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Eight days left. Four teams still standing after tonight. This tournament has been extraordinary and it is not done yet.

3. Messi is still in it. At 39 years old. And he is rewriting history in real time.

Argentina beat Egypt in the quarterfinals Tuesday with Messi scoring once and assisting once. He now has 8 goals and 1 assist in this tournament, leading the Golden Boot race alongside Kylian Mbappe, who also has 8 goals. His overall World Cup tally stands at 21 goals across six tournaments, the most in the history of the competition by any man or woman. He is the first player ever to score in eight consecutive World Cup appearances. He is 39 years old. He started this tournament with a hat trick against Algeria in Kansas City on June 16th, his first ever World Cup hat trick. Argentina faces Switzerland tonight in Kansas City. Make time to watch.

4. NATO just wrapped in Turkey. Ukraine got something real.

The NATO summit concluded in Antalya, Turkey, with Trump meeting Ukrainian President Zelensky and announcing the US will give Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot air defense systems domestically. That is significant. Ukraine has been dependent on Western-supplied Patriot batteries that take weeks to replace when damaged. Domestic production changes that equation. Trump also pressed NATO allies to increase defense spending. The summit produced less drama than expected, which in the current geopolitical climate is its own kind of accomplishment.

5. Ebola is spreading in Congo beyond its original zone.

The Democratic Republic of Congo government confirmed new suspected Ebola cases in parts of the country previously unaffected, signaling spread beyond the epicenter in the Ituri province. Clinical trials for a new treatment protocol are underway at the Evangelical Medical Centre in Bunia. This is not yet a global emergency. The WHO has response teams on the ground. But Ebola appearing in a new geographic area in a country with limited infrastructure is always a story that deserves more attention than it gets until it is too late. We are watching it.

6. The measles surge in America just hit a new threshold.

The US is tracking 32 new measles outbreaks this year, and federal health officials are preparing to review whether the country can still be classified as having eliminated the disease. Measles elimination status, achieved in 2000, requires sustained interruption of transmission. Thirty-two outbreaks in one year puts that status in genuine jeopardy. Vaccination rates in certain communities have declined enough that the firebreaks that once contained measles are no longer reliable. This is a public health story that has been building quietly all year and is approaching a moment of formal reckoning.

7. Trump Accounts just got their first deposits.

Trump announced this week that the federal government deposited the first $1,000 into more than 500,000 Trump Accounts, the children’s savings accounts created under the Big Beautiful Bill for babies born after January 1, 2025. The accounts are designed to grow until the child reaches adulthood and can be used for education, a first home, or starting a business. Supporters call it generational wealth building. Critics call it a politically branded gimmick funded by debt. Either way the money has started moving and half a million families now have an account with the president’s name on it.

8. A wildfire killed multiple people in Spain this weekend.

A fast-moving wildfire in the southern Spanish province of Almeria, a popular summer holiday destination for Europeans, killed several people whose bodies were found inside burned-out vehicles, believed to have died while trying to flee the flames. Spain has been battling extreme heat and drought conditions throughout the summer. This fire comes two weeks after the US broke heat records across a dozen states on the Fourth of July weekend. The northern hemisphere is having a brutal summer and the season has barely reached its midpoint.

9. The AI legal battles are just getting started.

Multiple major lawsuits involving AI and intellectual property are moving through federal courts simultaneously this week. The cases involve whether AI companies can train on copyrighted material without permission, whether AI-generated content can be copyrighted at all, and who owns the output when a human and an AI system collaborate. These cases will define the economic architecture of the AI industry for decades. They are getting buried under World Cup coverage and Iran updates. They should not be.

10. The final is eight days away. France and Spain are the favorites. But this tournament has been full of surprises.

Norway eliminated Brazil. Morocco knocked out Canada. Paraguay upset Germany on penalties. Switzerland beat Colombia on penalties after a goalless draw. This has been the most unpredictable World Cup in a generation and the bracket still has room for one more shock. England has not won a World Cup since 1966. Argentina would make Messi a back-to-back champion at 39. France and Spain are meeting in a semifinal for the third consecutive tournament. Norway, a country of 5 million people built around one extraordinary 25-year-old named Erling Haaland, is in the last eight after knocking out Brazil. Eight days. Two semifinals. One final. One champion.

Whatever else is happening in the world this weekend, and as you can see there is quite a lot, something extraordinary is also happening on a soccer field somewhere in America. Do not miss it.

That is what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | July 11, 2026

For 24 days, the 2026 World Cup had achieved something almost miraculous in modern America: it had almost nothing to do with Donald Trump.

That ended last Wednesday with a phone call.

Folarin Balogun, the United States team’s leading scorer with three goals, received a straight red card in the 64th minute of the round of 32 match against Bosnia-Herzegovin…

Read more

This morning, the Supreme Court ruled on something that will affect your money, your mortgage, and the price of groceries for years to come. Most Americans will not hear about it until tonight. That is exactly why we are writing it now.

In a 5-4 decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court ruled that President Trump cannot remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook from her position, at least not yet, and not the way he tried to do it. Cook was the first Governor to be fired in the central bank’s 111-year history. The Court blocked her removal and sent the underlying question back to the courts to be resolved through proper legal process.

The ruling is narrow. It is procedural. And it is far more consequential than either of those words suggests.

What actually happened

In August 2025, Trump posted screenshots on Truth Social of a letter firing Cook from the Fed, contending that before joining the Fed she had committed mortgage fraud by designating both a house in Michigan and a condo in Atlanta as her primary residence when taking out loans within a two-week period. The allegations came from a Trump-appointed official. Cook denied everything and went to court immediately.

The Supreme Court’s opinion was pointed on the procedural failure: “At minimum, Cook was entitled to some explanation of the evidence at issue, some avenue for a response.”

The Court did not rule that Trump can never fire a Fed governor. It ruled that you cannot fire someone without telling her what she is accused of and giving her a chance to respond. That principle is older than the Constitution itself.

Cook was direct about what she believed was really happening: “This was never about mortgage documents signed years before I became a Federal Reserve governor. It was an attempt to remove me on a manufactured pretext because I refused to bow to political pressure and continued to set interest rates based only on what would best serve the American people.”

Trump called the decision “strictly procedural” and vowed to pursue the case further.

The ruling that landed alongside it

On the same morning, in a separate case, the Court expanded presidential power significantly. The justices overturned a key 1935 ruling called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, giving Trump far broader authority to remove members of independent agencies previously shielded from political removal. Chief Justice Roberts wrote: “Our Constitution creates three branches, but only one president. Subordinates who exercise the president’s power are subject to removal by him.”

So the Court said, in the same breath, on the same morning: the president can fire independent agency heads more freely than before, and he cannot fire this Fed governor the way he tried to. The Court explicitly concluded that the Federal Reserve is different from other independent agencies, based on its unique structure, history, and role in the nation’s financial system.

Justice Kavanaugh, concurring, was blunt: the government’s argument that a president could fire any Fed governor without judicial review “would weaken, if not shatter, the independence of the Federal Reserve.”

Four justices dissented. Their argument is a legitimate constitutional one: if the president heads the executive branch, restricting his ability to remove those who exercise executive power limits his authority in ways the Constitution does not clearly permit. Today’s ruling buys time. It does not settle that argument.

Why this matters to you personally

The Federal Reserve sets the interest rate that determines what you pay on your mortgage, your car loan, and your credit card. The entire theory behind its independence is that monetary policy should be made on economic evidence, not on what is politically convenient for whoever is in the White House.

Trump has been publicly demanding interest rate cuts since before his second inauguration. The Fed has declined, citing inflation supercharged by the Iran war and the energy crisis. Cook voted with the majority to hold rates steady. The attempted firing cannot be separated from that context.

The unbiased read

Both sides have something right here.

The administration is correct that presidential authority over the executive branch is a real constitutional principle and that independent agencies with no direct electoral accountability raise legitimate questions about democratic governance. Four Supreme Court justices said so today.

Cook and her defenders are correct that the Federal Reserve’s independence from short-term political pressure is one of the structural pillars of the American economy. Markets trust the Fed precisely because it is not simply an instrument of whoever won the last election. Eroding that trust lands on ordinary people in the form of higher borrowing costs and more volatile prices.

Both things can be true simultaneously. A president can have a legitimate constitutional interest in executive accountability and still have chosen a method that bypassed the procedural protections the law requires.

The Court drew a line around the Federal Reserve today. The underlying lawsuit continues. The constitutional question remains unresolved. And Trump has already signaled he intends to pursue it.

How long that line holds is the question the next chapter of this case will answer.

That is what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | June 29, 2026

Last Sunday night in Las Vegas, a 37-year-old man named Jordan Staal skated around T-Mobile Arena holding the Stanley Cup above his head. He was crying. His teammates were piling on. Somewhere in the stands, 150,000 people who were about to pour into the streets of downtown Raleigh on Saturday morning were already planning the route.

Twenty years. That is how long Carolina waited.

The Hurricanes beat the Vegas Golden Knights 3-0 in Game 6 of the 2026 Stanley Cup Final, finishing one of the most dominant postseason runs in NHL history at 16 wins and 3 losses. The last time this franchise hoisted the Cup was 2006. Rod Brind’Amour was the captain then, a star center who lifted the trophy as a player. Twenty years later he lifted it again, this time wearing a suit and tie.

“I don’t even know what to say right now,” Brind’Amour told ESPN. “I wanted it as a player. I really wanted it. But I wanted it for these guys as a coach because it just means so much.”

That sentence contains the whole story of this Carolina team.

How they got here

The road started with a sweep of Ottawa, then a sweep of Philadelphia, making the Hurricanes the fifth team in NHL history to open a postseason 8-0. Then Montreal in five. Then Vegas, the Western Conference’s toughest out, in six.

The path was not always clean. The first three games of the Final were brutal. Multi-goal leads evaporated on both sides. Carolina looked nothing like the team that had demolished the East. Then something shifted in Game 3 that changed everything.

Backup goaltender Brandon Bussi walked out of the locker room to start the third period and did not come back off the ice for the rest of the series. From that moment through the final horn of Game 6, Carolina gave up two goals total. Bussi made 22 saves in the shutout clincher and spent his first interview crediting the goalie he replaced. “I love him,” Bussi said of Frederik Andersen. “He’s the reason why we’re here. I only got three-and-a-half games. He honestly deserves more of the credit.”

That kind of generosity does not happen on bad teams. That is the culture Brind’Amour built.

The man who made history

Jordan Staal is 37 years old. He won his first championship with Pittsburgh in 2009. Then seventeen years went by.

Seventeen years between championships is the longest gap in NHL history, breaking a record set by Hall of Famer Chris Chelios. Staal spent those years being a very good player on teams that always fell short. He scored in each of the first five games of the Final, finished with six goals in the series, won 69 percent of his face-offs, and at 37 years and 277 days old became the oldest player ever to win the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP.

“That’s a lot of years,” Staal said, holding the trophy. “It’s amazing. This is something I’ve been going after ever since we got the first one.”

Seventeen years of wanting it. One week of delivering it.

The question this team answered

Can you win the Stanley Cup without a transcendent superstar? Carolina just answered that question for the second time in twenty years.

No Connor McDavid. No Nathan MacKinnon. Just a deep, suffocating defensive team, a coach who has been building this culture since 2018, and a captain who waited seventeen years for one more shot. Taylor Hall was brilliant. Logan Stankoven scored in all four first-round games. Jackson Blake scored the insurance goal in Game 6. Nobody carried the weight alone. Everybody carried it together.

On Saturday, 150,000 people packed the streets of downtown Raleigh for the championship parade. North Carolina’s governor proclaimed it Stanley Cup Summer. The fan base long dismissed as too small, too southern, too far from traditional hockey markets showed up in numbers that settled that argument for good.

For a week this full of harder news, that is a story worth every word.

That is what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | June 23, 2026

Subject line: Preview text:

Two executive orders. One quiet revolution in American national security. And a deadline that affects every bank account, medical record, and government secret in the country.

Yesterday, Monday June 22nd, Donald Trump signed two executive orders that almost nobody outside the tech world is talking about. The Iran deal is getting the headlines. The World Cup is getting the eyeballs. Meanwhile, something genuinely significant happened in Washington that will affect the security of your bank account, your medical records, and the classified secrets of the United States government for the next decade and beyond.

The subject is quantum computing. Before you click away, hear this out. Because the part that matters most to ordinary Americans is not about physics. It is about a clock that is already ticking.

What Trump actually signed

Two orders. Think of them as an offense and a defense working together.

The first is the offensive play. It commits the United States to building a research-grade quantum computer, housed in a national laboratory, by 2028. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna was in the room. So was Alphabet President Ruth Porat. So was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. The government is not doing this alone. The funding picture makes that clear: $1 billion to IBM, $375 million to GlobalFoundries, $100 million each to D-Wave, Rigetti, and Infleqtion, on top of $2 billion already directed from the CHIPS and Science Act in late May. This is not a research grant. It is an industrial policy.

The second order is the defensive play, and it is the one every American should understand. It requires federal agencies to migrate to post-quantum cryptography by December 31, 2030, with digital signatures updated by December 31, 2031. Every federal contractor must comply by the same deadline. NIST, CISA, and the NSA are all tasked with providing the technical guidance to get there.

In plain language: the United States government has given itself five years to change every lock on every door before someone builds a key that can open all of them at once.

The threat you have not heard about

The encryption protecting your bank account, your medical records, and the classified communications of the US military is built on a mathematical problem that classical computers cannot solve in any reasonable time. Breaking it would take longer than the age of the universe. That is why we trust it.

A sufficiently powerful quantum computer changes that equation entirely. It could break today’s encryption in hours. Maybe minutes. Most experts place Q-day, the moment that becomes possible, somewhere in the 2030s.

That sounds far away. It is not, for one specific reason.

Adversaries can steal encrypted data today and store it, waiting until a future quantum computer unlocks it. Security experts call this harvest now, decrypt later. China and other state actors are almost certainly doing it right now. Every classified document, every intercepted communication, every sensitive file that has ever moved across a network could be sitting in a foreign server farm, waiting for the day the quantum key gets built.

The executive order is a recognition that the United States cannot wait for Q-day to start protecting itself. Five years is not a comfortable runway. It is a tight one.

The China race underneath everything

These orders exist in the context of a technology race with China that has been accelerating for a decade. China’s government-backed quantum programs are among the best-funded in the world. The FBI has warned for years that Chinese intelligence is actively targeting American quantum research, recruiting researchers and stealing intellectual property.

The orders direct the FBI to expand its Quantum Counterintelligence Protection Team and task the Director of National Intelligence with strengthening protections around quantum research. The government is not just trying to build the best quantum computers. It is trying to make sure nobody steals the blueprints while it does.

As one analyst noted, adversaries do not need a quantum computer to steal quantum breakthroughs. They only need access.

What it means for you personally

If the federal government fails to migrate to post-quantum cryptography before Q-day, the consequences reach well beyond classified military files. Social Security records. Tax returns. Medicare data. Veterans health files. Every piece of sensitive information the government holds about every American is currently protected by encryption a quantum computer could eventually break.

The order also extends beyond federal agencies. CISA must help critical infrastructure operators develop post-quantum adoption plans covering water systems, power grids, and financial networks. The quantum-resistant security push is going into the infrastructure that keeps American daily life functioning.

For readers who follow markets, the signal was immediate. Several publicly traded quantum companies drew fresh attention after the announcement. Government demand at this scale, with dollar amounts and firm deadlines attached, removes the largest single risk factor for long-term investment in the sector.

The bottom line

Two executive orders signed on a Monday afternoon. The Iran deal and the World Cup will get the attention this week. But these two documents may ultimately matter more to the daily security of ordinary Americans than either of those stories.

The United States has declared, officially and with funding attached, that quantum computing is a strategic national priority. It has set a deadline for protecting its own systems before the technology it is racing to build becomes a weapon in someone else’s hands.

The clock is running. The harvest is already happening. Someone in Washington finally decided to start changing the locks.

That is what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | June 23, 2026

WHAT TO KNOW THIS WEEK

June 15, 2026. A letter from US Daily Letter HQ.

This is not a normal Monday morning briefing. This week, a war that started 107 days ago may officially end. A cathedral in Kyiv is on fire. The World Cup is underway. Markets are doing something they have not done in months. There is a lot to carry. Here is what matters.

1. The Iran deal is real. It gets signed Friday.

President Trump and Iran declared they have reached an agreement intended to end more than three months of war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The formal signing is scheduled for Friday in Switzerland.  Pakistan’s Prime Minister announced a permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon. Trump posted: “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all.” We have heard versions of this before. But this time the signing ceremony has a date, a location, and international witnesses. Friday is the day to watch.

2. But the Strait is not open yet. And the shipping industry is not celebrating.

The International Maritime Organization confirmed at least 46 attacks against international shipping in and around the Strait of Hormuz since February 28th. The maritime sector is treating the news with wary disbelief rather than celebration, with shipping analysts calling this a fragile reprieve rather than a return to normality. Demining the strait is now on the G7 agenda, with Britain and France expressing interest in assisting. Nobody knows how many mines are in the water. The deal may be signed. The strait still needs to be cleared before a single tanker moves through it safely.

3. The G7 summit is happening right now in France.

The 52nd G7 Summit opened today in Évian-les-Bains, France, running through June 17th. Leaders from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States are at the table, along with invited guests including Brazil, India, Kenya, and South Korea. The Iran deal, the Strait demining, Ukraine, and trade are all on the agenda. Trump is there. Watch whether he stays through the end or leaves early the way he did in Kananaskis last year.

4. Russia hit Kyiv this morning. A thousand-year-old cathedral is burning.

A large-scale Russian attack this morning killed five rescuers in Kharkiv, wounded twenty in Kyiv, set apartment buildings ablaze, and sparked a fire at one of Ukraine’s most significant religious landmarks, the Dormition Cathedral at the Monastery of Caves, a site that has stood for over a thousand years. This attack did not happen in a vacuum. Ukraine has been hitting Russian military facilities and oil infrastructure deep inside Russia using its domestically produced Flamingo missiles. The war in Ukraine is escalating in both directions simultaneously, and the G7 leaders sitting in France this morning woke up to the news of a burning cathedral.

5. Oil dropped. Then everyone remembered the mines.

Markets rallied hard on the Iran deal announcement Sunday night. Oil fell more than six dollars a barrel in after-hours trading, the biggest single-session drop since the war began. By this morning, crude prices had settled roughly ten dollars per barrel above pre-war levels as traders absorbed the reality that reopening the Strait requires demining operations that could take weeks, not hours. Gas at the pump will not fall dramatically this week. The relief is coming, but it is not here yet.

6. The World Cup kicked off Thursday. America’s opener is tomorrow.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup opened Thursday at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City with Mexico facing South Africa in front of a crowd that stopped the city in its tracks. The United States plays its opening match tomorrow, June 12th, against Paraguay at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles at 9pm Eastern. Christian Pulisic is the name to know. The whole country will be watching. Turn it on even if you think you do not care about soccer. You will.

7. South Korea just sentenced its former president to 30 years.

South Korea’s ousted President Yoon Suk Yeol and his former defense minister were sentenced to 30 years in prison Friday for allegedly ordering drone flights over Pyongyang in 2024 to heighten tensions with North Korea and justify declaring martial law. This is not a small story in Asia. South Korea is one of America’s closest military allies. The political instability that produced this trial is not resolved by the sentencing, and the relationship between Seoul, Washington, and Pyongyang is now operating in a context without precedent.

8. A Somali referee who made history was denied entry to the United States.

A Somali referee who was set to make history officiating at the World Cup was denied entry to the United States. FIFA has not commented publicly on whether the assignment will be rerouted. The World Cup is being hosted here. The image of turning away a historic figure at the border, during the opening week of the tournament, is not something that lands well globally. It is a small story with a large symbolic weight.

9. The Fed meets Wednesday. Nobody expects anything. That is the story.

The Federal Open Market Committee convenes Wednesday for the first meeting chaired by new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. The universal expectation is that rates hold at 3.50 to 3.75 percent. But the statement that follows the decision and Warsh’s first press conference as chair will tell you more than any rate move could. Listen for how he talks about oil prices, inflation, and his independence from the White House. The first words out of his mouth Wednesday afternoon will set the tone for everything that follows this year.

10. The Big Beautiful Bill’s Medicaid cuts start reaching real people this month.

The work reporting requirements for Medicaid eligibility went into effect June 1st. States now have until December 31st to implement them and must begin notifying affected enrollees by September. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill’s Medicaid provisions will leave millions without coverage. The arguments about that number will continue in Washington. The letters going out to enrollees this fall are not an argument. They are a reality. Watch for the first state-level numbers on projected disenrollment to emerge this month.

We will be here all week. The Iran deal signing on Friday is the single most consequential event on the calendar. We will write you the moment the ink is dry and tell you exactly what it means.

That is what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | June 15, 2026

:A LETTER FROM THE SOCCER FIELD

What every American needs to know before the greatest sporting event on earth kicks off in your backyard

June 5, 2026

Dear America,

It starts in six days. And if you have spent the last four years focused on the economy, the wars, the gas prices, and the general noise of being alive in 2026, you may have almost missed it.

Almo…

Read more

LETTER FROM CONGRESS

What happened on Capitol Hill this week — and what it means for the rest of the country

June 5, 2026

This was not a normal week in Washington. It rarely is anymore. But this week, something genuinely significant happened inside the United States Congress, something that has not happened since the Vietnam era, and most Americans woke up this morning not fully aware of it.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted to end the war with Iran.

Let that land for a second.

A bipartisan majority in the Republican-led House voted 215 to 208 to pass a war powers resolution directing President Trump to end hostilities with Iran, with four Republicans joining Democrats in support. It was the clearest congressional rebuke of the president’s conduct of this war since the bombs fell on February 28th. It was not loud. It did not make the front page the way a missile strike does. But it happened, and it matters.

Here is the full picture of what Congress did and did not do this week.

The war powers vote, what it means and what it does not

Start with the honest caveat: the resolution is mostly symbolic. Democrats have been unable to pass a matching measure in the Senate, and even if they could, Trump would almost certainly veto it. The White House dismissed it within the hour. Trump called it a disgrace. Republican leadership in the Senate said it would go nowhere.

But dismiss it as symbolic at your peril. Four House Republicans broke with their party and their president to vote that this war should end. That number does not sound large. In a chamber where the Republican majority is razor-thin, it is enormous. Republicans had actually called off an earlier scheduled vote in May when it became clear they did not have the numbers to defeat the resolution. They delayed it into June hoping to shore up support. They could not.

This is a war that started without a vote of Congress. The House and Senate have collectively rejected nine war powers measures since early March. The Pentagon testified this week that the conflict has cost $25 billion so far, not counting damage to US military installations, and that a supplemental appropriations request, meaning a bill to pay for the war retroactively, will come to Congress once costs are fully assessed.

Nobody voted to start this war. Now Congress is being asked to pay for it after the fact. And four Republicans decided this week they have had enough.

Hegseth on the hot seat

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared before the House Armed Services Committee this week for his first congressional testimony since the war began. The hearing was ostensibly about the administration’s 2027 military budget, which would boost defense spending to a historic $1.5 trillion. What it became was a reckoning. 

Democrats pressed Hegseth on the cost, the legal authority, and the strategy. He called congressional Democrats and some Republicans the administration’s “biggest adversary” in the war, a statement that drew gasps in the chamber and confirmed what many members had suspected: the Pentagon views Capitol Hill oversight not as a constitutional function but as an obstacle.

Republicans focused on the budget numbers and largely voiced support for the operation. But even GOP members signaled they are eager for the conflict to end, and several are privately watching the war powers issue as a potential future test of their relationship with the White House if the war drags on.

The War Powers Act of 1973 requires the president to obtain congressional authorization within 60 days of committing forces to hostilities. That deadline arrived this week. When asked directly whether Trump would seek congressional authorization or the statutory 30-day extension, Hegseth said the clock pauses during a ceasefire. That answer satisfied nobody in the room and will be tested in court.

The Big Beautiful Bill: now it is law, now it is real

The One Big Beautiful Bill was signed on July 4th of last year. This week, its consequences started arriving.

The Department of Health and Human Services released its interim final rule this week implementing Medicaid work reporting requirements, the mechanism by which states must now verify that certain Medicaid recipients are working, volunteering, or in job training in order to maintain their coverage. States have until December 31st to implement those requirements and must begin notifying affected enrollees by September.

The numbers behind that rule are not abstract. The bill cut Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion, deeper even than the already controversial House version. The Congressional Budget Office estimated it would add $3.4 trillion to federal deficits over ten years and leave millions without health insurance. Republicans dispute those figures. But the work requirement rule that landed this week is the first visible mechanism through which those cuts actually reach real people.

Several green energy tax credits also expire June 30th, including credits for EV charging equipment installation and energy-efficient home upgrades. Homebuilders and contractors who planned projects around those credits have been scrambling.  These are not ideological abstractions. They are business decisions made by real companies that now need to be unwound.

What the committee schedule tells you

If you want to understand what Congress actually thinks is important in a given week, read the committee schedule. It tells you more than any floor speech.

This week the Senate Appropriations Committee held a markup on the Agriculture, Rural Development, and Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Acts for 2027. The House Homeland Security Committee held hearings on the FY2027 DHS budget request. The House Transportation Aviation Subcommittee met on airline industry oversight. That last one is not unrelated to the Spirit Airlines collapse three weeks ago and the broader disruption hitting the aviation sector from fuel prices.

The Senate Commerce Committee held an open hearing on college sports and student athlete compensation, which under normal circumstances would be the week’s headline. This is not a normal week.

The DHS funding saga still not resolved

The Department of Homeland Security has been operating under an informal funding arrangement since February 14th, when Congress failed to agree on a full funding bill. The stalemate has continued through the spring, with the Senate passing a version Democrats could accept and House Republicans rejecting it as insufficient on immigration enforcement funding. No resolution was reached this week. DHS employees continue to be paid through alternate funding mechanisms the administration has not fully explained publicly. This is not a sustainable situation and is becoming a slow-moving institutional crisis that sits just below the radar of daily news coverage.

The Senate’s Iran sanctions question

Several senators this week introduced measures that would condition or mandate congressional review of any executive branch actions related to Iran sanctions relief. The issue is direct: if Trump strikes a deal with Iran that includes lifting sanctions, does he need Congress to approve it? The administration says no. Multiple senators from both parties say yes. This question will define the legislative shape of any Iran peace deal and is one that Washington has not yet resolved.

The bottom line from Capitol Hill

Four Republicans broke with their president on a war vote. The defense secretary called Congress his adversary. The law that cuts a trillion dollars from Medicaid began generating its first real-world rules this week. DHS is still not properly funded. And the Senate is quietly preparing to fight over who controls the terms of any Iran peace deal.

This is not a Congress that is governing confidently. It is a Congress managing multiple simultaneous crises with thin majorities, fractured coalitions, and a White House that views oversight as interference. The war powers vote on Wednesday was the sharpest expression yet of an institution trying to remember what it is supposed to be.

Whether it succeeds at that is the question that will define the rest of this congressional term.

We will be watching. And we will write you every week from inside this building and everything happening around it.

That is what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | June 5, 2026

A letter from US Daily Letter HQ. Monday, June 1st, 2026.

Welcome to June. The world did not slow down for the calendar change. Here are the ten things worth knowing as this week begins.

1. The Iran deal is closer than it has ever been. Which means it could still fall apart.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday that US-Iran negotiators have agreed to broad principles of an agreement, conveyed through Pakistani mediators, and that there has been “a little bit of movement.” Tehran confirmed it is considering the latest American proposal. That is genuinely the closest thing to progress this conflict has produced since Islamabad failed in April. The nuclear question is still the wall. Nothing is signed. Nothing is guaranteed. But pay attention to whatever comes out of the next 72 hours.

2. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for 92 days.

Iran has blocked or threatened shipping through the Strait since February 28th, laying sea mines, boarding merchant vessels, and warning all foreign ships that passage is prohibited. Seventeen merchant ships have been damaged, seven abandoned, and twelve seafarers killed or missing. The world’s most important energy chokepoint is now in its fourth month of crisis. Every day it stays closed, the damage compounds.

3. Hurricane season starts today. And the agency watching it has been defunded.

NOAA officially opens the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season today, forecasting a below-normal season with 8 to 14 named storms, including 3 to 6 hurricanes and 1 to 3 major hurricanes. The relatively calm forecast is the good news. The bad news: the Trump administration proposed cutting NOAA’s budget by more than a quarter, including dismantling its Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. Even after Congress rejected the deepest cuts, NOAA’s budget is still down from previous years and staffing is stretched. A below-normal forecast still means storms. Storms still need people watching them. The agency doing the watching has fewer people than it did last year.

4. Gas is $4.55 a gallon and could hit $5 this month.

The Memorial Day number was already the highest since 2022. Analysts are warning that global oil inventories have roughly four to six weeks before the cushioning effect runs out entirely. If the Iran deal does not produce a Strait reopening soon, the summer driving season is going to get considerably more expensive before it gets better.

5. London just had its hottest May in recorded history. Europe is not fine.

The UK recorded its hottest May day ever twice in the same week, hitting 95.2 degrees Fahrenheit in London. At least nine people died in water-related incidents, including seven children. A wildfire broke out near Edinburgh. Only 5 percent of UK homes have air conditioning. The heatwave is moving into early June. This is not a European story. It is a preview of what extreme heat does to countries that were not built for it, and the United States has plenty of its own infrastructure not built for what is coming.

6. America has been bombing boats in the Pacific for nine months. 200 people are dead.

Operation Southern Spear, the US military campaign against suspected drug traffickers in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean, has now carried out more than 50 strikes killing nearly 200 people since September 2025. Ecuadorian fishermen are coming forward saying their boats were among those destroyed. The Trump administration says the operations are legal but has not publicly identified any of the victims or provided evidence about individual strikes. This story is underreported and it deserves your attention.

7. Israel is still bombing Lebanon. Every single day.

While Iran dominates the headlines, the IDF carried out over 120 airstrikes across southern and eastern Lebanon last week alone, killing dozens of civilians. Netanyahu has threatened to escalate toward Beirut. Iran has made any peace deal with the US contingent on a Lebanon ceasefire. Israel says Lebanon is not part of any Iran deal. That disagreement is one of the main reasons the broader conflict will not close cleanly even if the nuclear question somehow gets resolved.

8. The new Fed chair holds his first meeting in three weeks.

Kevin Warsh was sworn in last Friday as Federal Reserve Chair with Trump standing next to him predicting rate cuts “very quickly.” Markets are betting there will be no cuts this year. Warsh is a hawk with his own agenda and has publicly stated he would never commit to a rate decision in advance. His first FOMC meeting is June 17th. Whatever he decides will affect your mortgage, your savings account, and the cost of borrowing for every business in America.

9. The Big Beautiful Bill is coming to a vote.

Trump’s sweeping domestic legislative package, which combines tax cuts, spending reductions, and significant changes to Medicaid and student loan programs, is heading toward a congressional vote this week. It has divided Republicans in the House, drawn fierce opposition from Democrats, and is being described by some fiscal analysts as the largest single piece of deficit-expanding legislation in American history. Watch the vote count carefully. This one has real consequences for real people.

10. The world is tired. But it cannot afford to look away.

Ninety-two days of war. A heatwave across Europe. A hurricane season starting with a defunded weather agency. Gas at $4.55. A Fed chair facing his first real test. Military strikes in the Pacific nobody is talking about. A Lebanon conflict running parallel to a bigger one. It is a lot to carry into a Monday morning. But this is the world as it actually is right now, and knowing it is the first step toward navigating it.

We will be here all week.

That is what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | June 1, 2026

1. The Iran ceasefire is being tested every single night

The guns have not stopped. In the early hours of Thursday morning, US forces struck an Iranian drone control station near Bandar Abbas, the second strike on the same city in less than a week. Iran called it an act of aggression and promised it would not go unanswered. Kuwait activated air defenses hours later to respond to incoming missiles and drones. Trump sat at a Cabinet meeting Wednesday and said negotiations were going “nicely.” Both things happened in the same 24-hour window. This is the ceasefire. Going into the weekend, no new talks are confirmed, no deal is signed, and the Strait of Hormuz remains contested. If you are watching one story this weekend, watch this one.

2. London just had its hottest May day in recorded history. Twice.

The United Kingdom smashed its all-time May temperature record for the second time in 24 hours this week, with London’s Kew Gardens hitting 95.2 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday. The average high for London in late May is 68 degrees. At least nine people have died in water-related incidents since the heatwave began, including seven children. A wildfire broke out near Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. Hundreds of properties in southeast England lost water as demand spiked. Only about 5 percent of UK homes have air conditioning. France recorded deaths. Heat alerts are still active across Western Europe going into the weekend. Scientists are calling it mind-bogglingly early for temperatures of this magnitude. The summer has not even officially started.

3. America has been bombing fishing boats in the Pacific. Nearly 200 people are dead.

This story has been building for nine months and most Americans have not heard about it. Since September 2025, the US military has carried out more than 50 strikes across the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean targeting vessels it says were being used by narco-traffickers. Nearly 200 people have been killed. Now Ecuadorian fishermen are coming forward saying their boats were among those destroyed and their crews detained. The Trump administration insists the operations are legal but has not publicly provided evidence or identified the victims. A fisherman named Jhonny Sebastian Palacios told NPR: “I don’t want to go to sea anymore.” The operation is called Southern Spear. It is ongoing. It deserves far more attention than it is getting.

4. Gas is $4.55 a gallon and the pain is just getting started

The national average hit $4.48 on Memorial Day weekend, up from $3.14 a year ago. More than 90 percent of that difference is directly tied to the Iran war, according to GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis. Analysts warn prices could hit $5 a gallon next month.  Global oil inventories have four to six weeks left before the shock absorbers run out and prices shoot higher still. Even if the Strait reopened today, prices would likely stay elevated above pre-war levels until 2027. The summer driving season has just begun. The worst of the fuel price story may still be ahead of us.

5. The war nobody is talking about — Lebanon

While Iran dominates the headlines, the Israeli military carried out at least 120 airstrikes across southern and eastern Lebanon this week, killing at least 31 people. IDF ground forces are operating north of the agreed ceasefire line. Netanyahu has threatened to intensify operations and potentially strike Beirut. Iran has made any US-Iran peace deal contingent on a Lebanon ceasefire. Israel says Lebanon is not part of the deal. That disagreement alone is enough to keep the entire region on edge going into the weekend. Lebanon is not a footnote to the Iran war. It is one of the reasons it will not end cleanly.

Five stories. One very complicated world. We will be back with the full picture on Monday.

— US Daily Letter | May 28, 2026

Day 89. A ceasefire nobody is honoring. Strikes on the same city twice in one week. And a president who says negotiations are going “nicely.”

At 1:30 in the morning local time on Thursday, three explosions shook the outskirts of Bandar Abbas, a port city on Iran’s southern coast, right at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz. Air defense sirens briefly activated. The US military had just struck an Iranian ground control station that was about to launch a fifth drone, according to a US official, who described the action as “measured, purely defensive, and intended to maintain the ceasefire.”

Iran did not see it that way. The IRGC issued a statement saying its response was “a serious warning” and that American aggression “will not go unanswered.”  Within hours, Kuwait’s army reported its air defenses were responding to hostile missiles and drone threats.

This is the ceasefire. This is what maintaining it looks like on Day 89.

Earlier that same Wednesday, Trump was sitting at a Cabinet meeting at the White House telling reporters the Iranians “want very much to make a deal.” “We’re not satisfied with it, but we will be,” he said. “Either that or we’ll have to just finish the job.” The White House said negotiations were proceeding “nicely.”

That evening, the bombs fell on Bandar Abbas.

The city that keeps getting hit

This was the second US strike on Bandar Abbas in less than a week. That is not a coincidence. It is a geography lesson.

Bandar Abbas is Iran’s most strategically important city. It sits directly on the Strait of Hormuz. It houses Iran’s main commercial port, its naval headquarters, and critical oil infrastructure. US forces shot down four Iranian drones and struck a drone ground control station there. The message being sent with every strike on that city is the same: the US will not allow Iran to militarize the chokepoint through which a fifth of the world’s oil flows.

Iran’s message back, sent with drones launched toward Kuwait in the middle of the night, is equally clear. It will not surrender control of its own coastline without a fight.

Both messages are being sent simultaneously with a ceasefire technically in place. That is the central absurdity of where this war stands today.

What “largely negotiated” actually means

Last week Trump said a deal with Iran was “largely negotiated.” This week he said the Iranians want to make a deal but he is not satisfied yet. Those two statements, delivered days apart, describe a negotiation that is either almost finished or nowhere near finished, depending on which day you ask.

The gap between them is the nuclear question, the same one that blew up the Islamabad talks in April, the same one that has been the wall in every conversation since February 28th. “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. I’m doing that for the world. I’m not doing it just for us,” Trump said at the Cabinet meeting Wednesday.

Iran’s position has not changed. Its atomic energy chief has stated the country will not accept limits on its enrichment program. The US wants zero enrichment permanently. Nobody has moved on this in 89 days.

What has changed is the pressure. The oil inventories that cushioned the first two months of this war are running low. Analysts say there are four to six weeks before gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel prices shoot higher as the buffers run out. Gas is already at $4.55 a gallon nationally, with some states above $5. The economic window for a prolonged stalemate is closing, and both governments know it.

The Oman threat that changed the conversation

Yesterday Trump did something that rattled the entire Gulf region. Asked about a reported plan that would see Iran and Oman jointly manage the Strait of Hormuz and charge transit fees to passing ships, he did not just reject it. He threatened Oman directly. “Oman will behave just like everybody else or we’ll have to blow ’em up,” Trump told reporters.

Oman is a neutral country that has served as a back channel between Washington and Tehran for decades. It brokered the original nuclear deal under Obama. It was the country that announced a diplomatic breakthrough the night before the bombs fell on February 28th. It has been, throughout this war, one of the only parties both sides trusted enough to talk through.

Trump just threatened to bomb it.

The practical consequences are significant. If Oman feels it can no longer serve as a neutral mediator without becoming a military target, the diplomatic off-ramp that everyone has been quietly counting on gets narrower. The Gulf states that have been hosting American forces while absorbing Iranian missiles are already deeply uncomfortable. Threatening one of the most stable and cooperative among them does not make that situation easier to manage.

What to actually watch

The next few days matter more than most. A second round of talks has been discussed. The ceasefire, such as it is, is being tested every night over the Strait. Oil inventories are running out. And Trump’s own timeline, “either that or we’ll have to just finish the job,” is being compressed by economics whether he likes it or not.

“Finish the job” means a resumption of full-scale strikes. Nobody in the Gulf wants that. Nobody in the global economy wants that. Whether the fear of it is enough to close the gap on the nuclear question before the pressure becomes unbearable is the only question that matters right now.

The bombs fell on Bandar Abbas at 1:30 in the morning. The ceasefire is still technically in place. The deal is still “largely negotiated.”

Day 89.

That is what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | May 28, 2026

90 days in, the bill is no longer abstract. It is at every gas station in America.

Last weekend, 45 million Americans got in their cars and drove somewhere for Memorial Day. They packed coolers, loaded up kids, mapped routes, and pulled into gas stations along the way.

And they paid.

The national average stood at $4.55 per gallon on the Friday before Memorial Day, an increase of more than 50 percent since the United States and Israel began the war with Iran on February 28th. It is the most Americans have paid on Memorial Day weekend since 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. 

Over the course of the long weekend, American drivers spent approximately $7 billion on gasoline, about $2 billion more than they spent last year. 

Two billion extra dollars. In a single weekend. To drive to the same places they drove last year.

That is not a macroeconomic data point. That is money that did not go toward groceries, rent, a credit card payment, or a kid’s summer activity. It went into a tank, and the reason it cost that much is a 21-mile strait on the other side of the world that has been effectively closed for 90 days.

What is actually driving the price

The answer is not complicated. Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, said more than 90 percent of the price difference compared to last year is directly tied to the Iran war and the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Since the day before the war began, gasoline prices are up roughly 51.5 percent. Diesel is up 49.8 percent. Jet fuel has surged 56 percent. These are not gas pump numbers anymore. They are embedded in the price of everything that gets shipped, flown, or trucked across this country, which is almost everything.

The surge in gas prices pushed the US inflation rate to nearly 4 percent in April. For the first time in three years, real wages adjusted for inflation are shrinking. Consumer prices are going up faster than paychecks.

Chris Haenel, a computer repair technician from Pittsburgh, put it as plainly as any economist could. “Every day, I drive by the gas station and it’s just insane,” he said. “My wife comes home with three bags of groceries and it’s $300. I’m 60 years old and trying to save for retirement, but this is limiting how much I can save.”

That is the Iran war in one paragraph. Not strategy. Not geopolitics. Three bags of groceries and $300.

What Trump said about it

On Tuesday, Trump told reporters he is not thinking about the finances of Americans “even a little bit” as he negotiates with Iran. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” he said. “I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

Earlier in the week he called the price of gas “peanuts” compared to the cost of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, adding that he “appreciates everybody putting up with it for a little while” and that prices won’t stay high “much longer.”

The problem with “much longer” is that it has no meaning without a deal. And right now there is no deal.

Analysts predict that even if the Strait immediately reopened today, prices would likely stay elevated above pre-war levels until 2027. The damage to global energy supply chains is not a light switch. It does not turn off the moment diplomats shake hands. Inventories take months to rebuild. Shipping routes take time to normalize. The pain at the pump will outlast whatever agreement eventually gets signed, by months.

What comes next at the pump

Analysts are warning prices could hit $5 per gallon next month. Research shows that when gas hits $5, behavior starts to change. Three quarters of Americans say they would alter their driving habits at that level. That is the threshold where summer road trips get canceled, where commuters start carpooling out of necessity rather than choice, where small businesses that run fleets start making hard decisions.

Global oil inventories are declining fast, with just four to six weeks until gasoline, diesel and jet fuel prices shoot higher as the buffers run down. The shock absorbers that have cushioned the first 90 days of this war are almost gone. What comes after them is the raw price of a world without enough oil moving through the right places.

The bottom line

The Iran war has a body count and a geopolitical score that historians will argue about for decades. It also has a gas pump price that 45 million Americans felt personally last weekend, and will feel again every time they fill up this summer.

$4.48 on Memorial Day. Up from $3.14 a year ago. That extra $1.34 per gallon is not a rounding error. Multiplied across every commute, every delivery truck, every flight ticket, every grocery shipment in America, it is an enormous and ongoing tax on ordinary life, paid not to the government but to the consequences of a war that was launched 90 days ago and has not yet produced a deal.

Trump says it will not last much longer. We will keep checking the price board at the gas station until he is right.

That is what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | May 28, 2026

Trump wanted rate cuts. What he got is more complicated than that.

Last Friday morning, Kevin Warsh walked into the East Room of the White House, raised his right hand, and was sworn in as the 17th Chair of the Federal Reserve by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

It was the first time a Fed chair had been sworn in at the White House since Alan Greenspan in 1987. That detail is not ceremonial trivia. It is a statement about how close the president wants to keep the one institution specifically designed to operate at arm’s length from political pressure.

Trump could not contain himself. “I had a rotten head of the Fed, and now I have a great head of the Fed,” he told a rally in New York that same evening, adding that interest rates would be coming down “very quickly.”

Here is the problem. Kevin Warsh may not cut interest rates. And the reasons why tell you almost everything important about the American economy right now.

Who he actually is

Warsh is not a loyalist handed a job he cannot do. He is a former Fed governor who served during the 2008 financial crisis, a Stanford fellow, and a man with strong views that do not simply amount to whatever Trump wants.

He wants to sell off most of the Fed’s $6.7 trillion balance sheet and return the central bank to a passive observer of markets rather than an active participant. He wants to eliminate the Fed’s famous quarterly interest rate forecast chart in favor of more flexible communication. He wants to strip the Fed of involvement in climate policy and diversity initiatives, which aligns with Trump’s view that the central bank “lost its way” under Powell.

In short, Warsh is a hawk with his own agenda.

What Trump wants and probably will not get

Fed policymakers had projected rate cuts later this year but have shifted their thinking as energy prices surge and geopolitical instability grows. The majority now favor holding rates steady. Some are floating the possibility of a rate hike.

That last sentence and Trump’s rally promises exist in direct contradiction. The Fed held its benchmark rate at 3.50 to 3.75 percent at its last meeting, with four dissents, the most divided the committee has been since 1992. Gas at $4.55 a gallon is feeding inflation across food, shipping, and manufacturing. The Fed’s job in that environment is to hold or raise, not cut.

As of mid-May, less than 3 percent of investors believed there would be a rate cut at any remaining FOMC meeting this year. Markets are essentially betting Trump gets nothing he wants from his new chair for the rest of 2026.

When senators asked Warsh directly whether Trump had pressured him on rates, he was unequivocal: “The president never asked me to predetermine, commit, fix, decide on any interest rate decision in any of our discussions, nor would I ever agree to do so.”

What it means for you

Your mortgage rate is not going down anytime soon. Your credit card APR is not dropping. The home you want to buy is not getting more affordable this summer.

In three weeks, Warsh chairs his first Federal Open Market Committee meeting. That will be the first real test of everything: his independence, his ability to manage a deeply divided committee, and his willingness to tell a president who already announced the outcome something he does not want to hear.

The gap between what Trump is promising and what Warsh is likely to deliver is significant. How that plays out will determine whether the economic pain of the Iran war gets worse before it gets better.

One man now holds enormous influence over that question. He was sworn in last Friday in the East Room, with the president standing next to him, while outside the Strait of Hormuz was still closed and gas was still $4.55 a gallon.

Good luck to him.

That is what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | May 28, 2026

Friday afternoon, Tulsi Gabbard walked into the Oval Office and handed Donald Trump a letter. She was resigning as Director of National Intelligence, effective June 30th. Her husband, Abraham Williams, had been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer, and she wrote that she could not let him face it alone. “At this time, I must step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle,” she said.

Trump posted on Truth Social within the hour. He called her departure unfortunate, praised her work as incredible, and said he had no doubt her husband would “soon be better than ever.” It was gracious. It was warm. And it closed the door on one of the strangest tenures in the history of American intelligence.

Because the full story of Tulsi Gabbard’s 16 months as the nation’s top spy is not really a story about cancer. It is a story about a woman who took a job she was philosophically unqualified to perform, tried to hold herself together inside an administration that did not trust her, and ended up as a footnote to a war she had spent years warning America not to fight.

Who she was before all of this

To understand what just happened, you have to remember who Tulsi Gabbard was before she walked into that confirmation hearing in January 2025.

She was the Hawaii congresswoman who deployed to Iraq, came home, and spent the next decade building a political brand around one central idea: America’s military interventions abroad were reckless, counterproductive, and driven by neoconservatives and warmongers who did not send their own children to fight. She ran for president in 2020 on that message. She sold T-shirts that read “No War With Iran.” She went on Fox News in January 2020, after Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, and said: “Speeding towards an all-out war with Iran would make the wars that we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan look like a picnic. It will be far more costly in American lives and American taxpayer dollars, and all towards accomplishing what goal? What objective?”

She endorsed Trump in 2024 because, she said, he would keep America out of new forever wars. She called Joe Biden a warmonger. She said Trump represented the future of American foreign policy: strong, non-interventionist, and focused on the people rather than the political elite.

Then Trump started a war with Iran on February 28th of this year, and the ground beneath Tulsi Gabbard’s entire identity collapsed.

What happened inside the administration

The cracks started showing long before the bombs fell on Tehran.

Gabbard testified to Congress in 2025 that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, the official assessment of the entire US intelligence community. Trump dismissed it. As Trump was preparing to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, he was reminded by a reporter that Gabbard had reiterated that assessment. “I don’t care what she says,” Trump responded. When pressed again a couple of days later, he snapped: “She’s wrong.”

The president of the United States publicly repudiating his own Director of National Intelligence on the central intelligence question of the year is not a small thing. It is a statement about where Gabbard stood in the hierarchy of people whose opinions actually shaped policy. The answer was: nowhere near the top.

When Trump ordered military action in Venezuela, Gabbard was not even invited into the White House Situation Room to observe the operation.  The woman whose entire job is to brief the president on threats to American security was not in the room when the president was deciding how to respond to one of those threats. That tells you everything about how much weight her voice carried.

Instead of being part of the major national security decisions, Gabbard focused her energy on pursuing Trump’s political grievances: declassifying documents related to past administrations, appearing at an FBI ballot seizure at an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and investigating what the administration called Deep State activity inside the intelligence community. She was given a lane that kept her busy and kept her quiet. She stayed in it.

The Joe Kent moment

In March, everything that had been building under the surface came into the open.

Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center and one of Gabbard’s closest political allies, resigned in an open letter stating that he could not in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote, “and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

It was a grenade thrown directly at the administration from inside the intelligence community. And Gabbard was sitting right in the middle of the blast radius.

At a congressional hearing the following day, she refused to condemn Kent. Trump’s response when asked if he still had confidence in her was lukewarm. “Yeah, sure,” he told reporters. “I mean, she’s a little bit different in her thought process than me, but that doesn’t make somebody not available to serve.”

“A little bit different in her thought process” is not how a president describes a trusted cabinet member. It is how he describes someone he is keeping around because firing her would create worse headlines than tolerating her.

Laura Loomer, the far-right activist with close ties to Trump, tried to push the president to fire Gabbard outright. Roger Stone, one of Trump’s oldest allies, reportedly intervened to save her job, warning Trump that Loomer was trying to manufacture a crisis. Tulsi Gabbard’s continued employment as America’s Director of National Intelligence was, at one point, dependent on a back-channel argument between Roger Stone and Laura Loomer.

Let that sink in.

The Iran contradiction she could never escape

Throughout her tenure, Gabbard was pressed repeatedly in Congress on whether she had provided Trump with an honest intelligence assessment showing there was no imminent threat from Iran to justify the war.  Her answers were careful, institutional, and carefully avoided saying what her entire career before this job had trained her to say.

When asked directly whether Iran posed an imminent threat, she told the House Intelligence Committee: “It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat.” That statement, from the woman who built her public identity on making exactly those kinds of determinations and shouting them from every media platform available to her, was the sound of a person who had made a choice and was living with its consequences.

The first six days of Operation Epic Fury cost $11.3 billion. At least thirteen American servicemembers were killed. Approximately 200 were wounded. Gabbard, who had once predicted that a war with Iran would make Iraq and Afghanistan look like a picnic, was the principal intelligence advisor to the president who started it.

What her departure actually means

Gabbard is the fourth cabinet member to leave Trump’s second term, following Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. The pace of departures at this level of government is notable. Every one of them tells a story about the gap between what Trump said he was building and what he actually built.

Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Aaron Lukas will take over in an acting capacity. Lukas is a career intelligence professional, confirmed by the Senate, unknown to the general public. He will do the job quietly and without the ideological drama that defined his predecessor’s tenure. For the intelligence community, which spent 16 months watching its work get publicly dismissed by the president its director served, that may actually be a relief.

As for Gabbard herself, she is leaving with her husband sick and her political identity largely unrecognizable. The woman who sold “No War With Iran” shirts spent the last year and a half defending, in careful bureaucratic language, a war with Iran. She was hired because she seemed like a disruptor who shared Trump’s instincts. She ended up being sidelined precisely because she did not share enough of them when it actually mattered.

She wrote in her resignation letter that Abraham had been her rock through eleven years of marriage, through her deployment to East Africa on a Joint Special Operations mission, through multiple campaigns, through every difficulty their life together had produced.  That part of the letter reads as completely and purely true. Whatever the politics, she is a wife whose husband is seriously ill, and she is going home to him.

The rest of the story is considerably more complicated. And it will be a long time before American history sorts out what to make of what Tulsi Gabbard did and did not do in the room where the decisions were made.

That is what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | May 23, 2026

This morning, Air Force One touched down at Beijing Capital International Airport. Three hundred Chinese children in blue and white uniforms lined the tarmac waving American and Chinese flags. A brass band played. Chinese Vice President Han Zheng, Xi Jinping’s chosen envoy for diplomatic ceremonies, walked out to greet the president. Elon Musk, standing nearby, shook the vice president’s hand.

It was the first time an American president had set foot on Chinese soil in nearly nine years. The last time was November 2017, also Trump, also Xi, also with pomp and pageantry and a tour of the Forbidden City. A lot has changed since then. The two countries have fought a trade war. American companies have been pushed out of Chinese markets. China has built military infrastructure across the South China Sea. The United States has spent the last 73 days bombing China’s closest energy partner in the Middle East while simultaneously asking Beijing to help clean up the mess.

Kurt Campbell, a top Biden-era China adviser, put it plainly: “It is remarkable that President Trump is prepared to go to China under these circumstances. But may I also say that it is also deeply unusual that China is prepared to host him.”

That sentence contains the whole story of this visit. Both sides need something. Neither side wants to appear to need it. And the outcome of the next 48 hours will affect the price of your gas, the future of Taiwan, the technology in your next phone, and the shape of a global order that is being renegotiated in real time behind closed doors in Beijing.

Here is what every American should actually know.

Why this visit happened at all

The Beijing summit was originally planned for April but was postponed when the Iran war started on February 28th. The delay was telling. Washington was bombing China’s closest ally in the Middle East and simultaneously trying to arrange a state visit with the country that buys more Iranian oil than anyone else on earth. The diplomatic gymnastics required to hold both positions at once were extraordinary.

And yet here we are. China’s goal, according to analysts at Trivium China, is to put the relationship on a stabler, longer-lasting footing after the constant turbulence of 2025. Anything beyond that will be a bonus.  That is a modest ambition for a summit this large, but modesty is the only realistic option when the agenda includes trade, Taiwan, artificial intelligence, a shooting war in the Middle East, and the world’s most critical energy chokepoint.

Trump told reporters before departure he expected “great things” from the summit. Experts expected something considerably more measured.

The Iran question that dominates everything

Trump said publicly that trade would be the main focus of the trip. Then he said he would have “a long talk” with Xi about Iran. Both things are true, but only one of them is urgent.

Analysts have been blunt about what Washington actually needs from Beijing: China purchases more than 80 percent of Iran’s shipped crude exports. It is, by a wide margin, the largest buyer of Iranian oil on earth. If Xi were to apply meaningful pressure on Tehran, to tell Iran privately that China’s support has limits and that reopening the Strait is a condition of continued partnership, the entire dynamic of the Iran negotiation could shift.

Lyle Goldstein, director of the China Initiative at Brown University, said he could imagine Trump asking Xi directly to pressure Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and return to the negotiating table. “Let’s face it,” Goldstein said, “this war will dominate the summit. It will push a lot of other things off the agenda.”

The complication is that China has every reason to stay neutral and several reasons to prefer the war continues at its current low simmer. In the lead-up to the summit, China ordered its companies not to comply with US sanctions on Iranian oil and hosted Iran’s foreign minister for a visit in Beijing. Those are not the gestures of a country preparing to break with Tehran. They are the gestures of a country that understands its own leverage and is not in a hurry to spend it.

The ordinary residents of Beijing that CNN spoke to along the streets near the Second Ring Road voiced little appetite for China becoming more involved to end the Iran war. Their views reflected a broader instinct: frustration with Washington, exhaustion with geopolitical confrontation, and a strong preference for neutrality.

Xi does not govern by public opinion the way Trump does. But those streets matter as context. Beijing is not arriving at this summit in a mood to do America any favors.

The Taiwan card nobody wants to talk about

Here is the conversation that could blow up everything else in the room.

On May 11th, Trump announced he would raise with Xi the matter of arms sales to Taiwan, breaking with the Six Assurances, the longstanding US framework that had governed American arms sales to the island since 1982. That is a significant departure. The Six Assurances were designed precisely to prevent American presidents from using Taiwan as a bargaining chip with Beijing. Trump is apparently prepared to use Taiwan as a bargaining chip with Beijing.

Some US officials have expressed concern that Trump is walking into a meeting where Xi holds the cards, and that the Chinese leader may use that leverage to get what he wants on Taiwan. Trump himself told reporters Monday: “He’ll bring up Taiwan, I think, more than I will.”

That casual remark conceals an enormous amount. Experts noted that the ongoing Iran war has given China greater leverage generally, because the US has diverted significant military resources away from South Korea and Japan to the Middle East, reducing American capacity to respond to a potential conflict over Taiwan. Xi knows this. Trump knows Xi knows this. And the question of what gets traded across that table in exchange for Chinese cooperation on Iran is one that the 23 million people of Taiwan are watching with considerable anxiety.

The business delegation and what it signals

Trump brought with him to Beijing a delegation of executives representing some of America’s most valuable companies, including Elon Musk of Tesla and Jensen Huang of Nvidia. Also present were the CEOs of Boeing and Mastercard.

This is not incidental. It is the message. Trump is telling Xi, and the world, that this visit is as much about commerce as it is about conflict. Analysts anticipate that Trump and Xi may announce large Chinese orders of American planes and soybeans when the meetings conclude. Boeing desperately needs orders. American agriculture desperately needs export markets. And Trump needs a win he can point to before he boards Air Force One on Friday and flies home to a country where gas is still above $4 a gallon and the Iran ceasefire is still on life support.

The presence of Eric Trump and Lara Trump on the trip, accompanying the president “in a personal capacity” as representatives of the Trump Organization’s business interests, has already drawn conflict-of-interest questions from ethics watchdogs. The Trump Organization is a private business. Its principals are meeting with Chinese officials in Beijing while the president of the United States is negotiating trade and security terms in the next room. That is worth noting, even if nobody in the administration thinks it warrants a second look.

What Xi actually wants

This is the question that American coverage tends to underweight, and it is the most important one.

Xi arrives at this summit having achieved something he has wanted for years: being received as an equal by the United States. The last year of tit-for-tat tariffs, China’s willingness to leverage its hold over rare earth supply chains, and now Trump flying to Beijing to ask for help with Iran have all reinforced a single message that Xi has been sending since 2013: China is not a junior partner. It is a co-equal power that expects to be treated as one.

As one analyst at Leiden University put it: “Trade remains politically powerful, especially for Trump, because it gives rivalry a language that voters can easily understand. Yet the deeper conflict concerns hierarchy, legitimacy, and the future architecture of global order.”

That is what is actually being negotiated in Beijing this week. Not just soybeans and planes and whether Iran reopens the Strait. The shape of who runs the world for the next generation.

What to watch before Friday

The formal meetings between Trump and Xi begin Thursday morning Beijing time, which is Wednesday evening for most Americans. After the bilateral session, the two leaders are scheduled to tour the historic Temple of Heaven together and attend a state banquet. On Friday, they will share tea and a working lunch before Trump departs.

Watch for four things when the readouts start coming.

First, whether China commits to anything specific on Iran, or offers only vague language about de-escalation and dialogue. Specific commitments would be a genuine win for Trump. Vague language would mean Xi gave up nothing.

Second, whether Taiwan appears in any joint statement and in what terms. Any language that softens America’s longstanding position on Taiwanese sovereignty would be alarming and consequential.

Third, what deals get announced and who benefits. Boeing orders are good for American workers. But if rare earth supply restrictions get quietly eased in exchange for American concessions elsewhere, the headline deal may obscure the real cost.

Fourth, whether Trump boards Air Force One on Friday claiming a “12 out of 10” the way he described his last meeting with Xi in South Korea. After that Busan summit last fall, Trump said on Air Force One: “From zero to 10 with 10 being the best, I would say the meeting was a 12.” If he uses that language again, it likely means the deliverables were thin and the atmospherics were all anyone has to show for it.

The bottom line

The most powerful man in the world is sitting in Beijing right now, in a city that is watching him with wariness, asking the leader of the country that is simultaneously his largest trading partner, his primary strategic rival, and his closest ally’s largest oil customer to help him end a war he started.

That sentence should give every American pause, regardless of politics.

The Iran ceasefire is on life support. The Strait of Hormuz is still contested. Gas is still expensive. Taiwan is still on the table. And somewhere in Beijing tonight, in a room full of interpreters and aides and the weight of history, two men are deciding how much of all of that changes before Friday.

We will be watching every word that comes out of those rooms. And we will write you the moment the smoke clears.

That is what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | May 13, 2026

Sunday night, Donald Trump sat down and read Iran’s response to his latest peace proposal. Then he picked up his phone and posted twice on Truth Social within two hours.

The first post said Iran had been “playing games with the United States, and the rest of the World, for 47 years.” The second said: “I have just read the response from Iran’s so-called ‘Representatives.’ I don’t like it. TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!”

By Monday morning he was behind the Resolute Desk telling reporters he had not even finished reading it. “After reading that piece of garbage they sent, I didn’t even finish reading it,” he said. Later in the same session he called it “a stupid proposal.”

Three descriptions. One document. Garbage. Stupid. Totally unacceptable.

That is the diplomatic temperature on Day 73 of the Iran war. And it tells you almost everything you need to know about where this conflict is heading.

What Iran actually put on the table

Before we get to Trump’s fury, it helps to understand what Tehran actually sent, because the gap between the two positions is not a misunderstanding. It is structural.

Iran’s counter-proposal included recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, a demand for compensation for war damages, the lifting of all US sanctions, and the release of frozen Iranian assets. Iran also offered, according to two regional officials who spoke to the Associated Press, to dilute part of its highly enriched uranium and transport the rest to a third country, with a request for 30 days of negotiations to finalize the details.

That last part is actually significant and got buried under the noise of Trump’s reaction. Iran moved, at least marginally, on the nuclear question. The offer to ship enriched uranium to a third country is not nothing. It is a negotiating position, not a surrender, but it is movement.

The problem is everything else on the list. Sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. War reparations. Sanctions lifted before discussions on the nuclear program even begin. Iranian state media framed Washington’s proposal as a demand for surrender. Washington framed Tehran’s response as a joke. Neither framing is entirely wrong, and that is exactly the problem.

What Trump said, word for word

The language Trump used Monday matters because it is not just venting. It signals the internal state of a negotiation and tells the other side, and the world, where the red lines actually are.

“I have a plan. You know, it’s a very simple plan. I don’t know why you don’t say it like it is. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. He added that any agreement would require Iran to pledge to permanently abandon its nuclear program. No enrichment. No pathway. No ambiguity.

Then he said something that reveals the deeper tension inside the White House’s own strategy: “You know, in war, you have to change, you have to be flexible, you have a lot of plans, but you have to do different plans in different days. But I have a great plan. But the plan is they cannot have a nuclear weapon.”

Read that carefully. The president described himself as flexible and then immediately stated a position that is, by definition, non-negotiable. You cannot be flexible and simultaneously have a single absolute condition. That contradiction is not a slip of the tongue. It reflects the genuine bind the administration is in: Trump wants a deal, needs a deal politically, and yet the core American demand, zero Iranian enrichment forever, is the one thing Iran has consistently said it will never accept.

The ceasefire, he added, was on “massive life support” and was “unbelievably weak.”

What Iran said back

Tehran did not go quiet. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei responded Monday with language that matched Trump’s in tone if not in volume.

He said Iran had not demanded any concessions, only its “legitimate rights.” He accused Washington of continuing to insist on “unreasonable demands.” And he described Iran’s proposal as reasonable and generous, which is almost exactly the opposite of how Trump described it.

Iranian state media framed Tehran’s position as a refusal to bow, with officials vowing they would “never” surrender to American pressure. Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not been seen publicly since the war began and whose whereabouts were unclear for weeks, reportedly issued new directives for the “continuation of operations and the powerful confrontation with the enemies” while meeting with the joint military command.

That is not the language of a government preparing to make concessions.

The Strait and the clock

While the two governments trade insults through press briefings and social media posts, the economic clock is ticking loudly.

The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed for ten weeks. Saudi Aramco warned Monday that if the reopening is delayed by a few more weeks, market normalization will not happen until 2027. Even if the strait reopened today, it would still take months for energy markets to rebalance.

That means the pain at American gas pumps, which is already substantial, is not going away regardless of what happens in these negotiations in the near term. The damage is already baked in. And every week the strait stays contested, it gets harder to unwind.

Oman’s foreign minister said publicly Monday there is an “urgent need” to free the ships stranded along the strait. Britain and France are leading talks among several dozen countries on a coalition to reestablish freedom of navigation, but have said plainly that coalition will not activate until there is a sustainable ceasefire and the maritime industry is confident ships can transit safely. Right now neither condition exists.

The China trip and what it might change

Trump flies to Beijing this week, and the Iran negotiation follows him there whether he wants it to or not.

A regional source told CNN the talks are unlikely to make significant progress until Trump meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The theory is that China, as Iran’s largest oil customer and one of its few remaining diplomatic partners, holds genuine leverage over Tehran that Washington does not. If Xi were to apply pressure on Iran to make concessions on the nuclear question, or at minimum on the Strait, it could shift the dynamic in ways that 73 days of American military posturing have not.

Whether Xi is willing to do that is a different question. China has benefited from discounted Iranian oil throughout this conflict. It has its own reasons to want the Strait open, but it also has every reason to avoid being seen as doing America’s bidding in the Middle East. The likely outcome in Beijing is careful language, vague commitments, and what one analyst described as “managed détente with thin deliverables.”

That is diplomatic shorthand for not much.

The bottom line

Trump called Iran’s proposal garbage, stupid, and totally unacceptable inside a single 24-hour period. Iran called Trump’s proposal a demand for surrender and vowed never to bow. The ceasefire is holding in the narrowest technical sense while both sides continue to exchange fire in the Strait. Oil is above $100 a barrel. The world’s largest energy company says price normalization may not come until next year.

This is not a negotiation approaching resolution. This is a negotiation that has not yet found the shape of a deal that both sides can survive politically. Trump cannot accept an Iran with nuclear capability. Iran cannot accept terms that look like defeat. And neither side has yet found the formula that gets them both somewhere they can stand.

Until someone does, the strait stays contested, the ceasefire stays on life support, and the rest of the world keeps paying the bill.

We will write you the moment something actually moves.

That’s what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | May 11, 2026

On May 2nd, the World Health Organization received an alert that stopped global health officials in their tracks. A cluster of passengers aboard a Dutch-flagged cruise ship in the Atlantic Ocean were developing severe respiratory illness. Two of them were already dead. A third was critically ill. The ship, the MV Hondius, was somewhere in the South Atlantic with 147 people still on board and no port willing to take it.

The culprit, confirmed four days later, was hantavirus. Specifically, the Andes virus, a strain normally found in South America and one of the deadliest respiratory viruses known to medicine. And unlike almost every other hantavirus in existence, the Andes virus can spread between people.

That last sentence is the one that matters.

What hantavirus actually is

Hantavirus is not new. It has been around and documented in the United States since a mysterious outbreak in the American Southwest in 1993, when a cluster of young, healthy Navajo people died of sudden respiratory failure. Scientists eventually traced it to the deer mouse. Since then, cases have turned up across North and South America, Europe, and Asia, always linked to rodents and almost always involving someone who spent time in places where infected mice or rats had left their droppings, urine, or saliva.

There are more than fifty known types of hantavirus. Most of them spread in exactly one way: you breathe in contaminated dust from rodent droppings, usually in rural cabins, sheds, or fields. You do not catch it from another person. You do not get it at a restaurant or on a subway. It is, in that sense, a virus with a very specific pathway that most people in cities can reasonably not worry about.

The Andes virus is the exception. It is the only known hantavirus documented to spread from person to person, although that spread has typically required close, prolonged contact with someone who is already symptomatic. That distinction is critical to understanding why a cruise ship became a cluster and why health officials worldwide are paying attention.

What happened on the Hondius

The MV Hondius departed Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city in the world, on April 1st, bound for Antarctica and a series of remote South Atlantic islands. It carried roughly 150 passengers and crew representing 23 nationalities. Most passengers came from Spain, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The leading hypothesis from Argentine investigators is that the index case, a Dutch citizen who showed the first symptoms, contracted the virus before boarding. He had completed a four-month road trip through Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina ending just days before the ship departed. He had returned from Uruguay only four days before embarkation.

Once on board, in the close quarters of a ship with shared spaces, recirculated air, and sustained contact between passengers, the virus moved. A passenger died on April 11th. His wife disembarked at Saint Helena and died two days later in a hospital in Johannesburg. A third passenger also died on board. A British passenger was evacuated to South Africa in critical but stable condition.

As of May 8th, the WHO reports eight cases total, six confirmed and two probable, including three deaths, for a case fatality rate of 38 percent. All confirmed cases have been identified as Andes virus through PCR testing. Symptomatic patients are currently hospitalized in South Africa, the Netherlands, Germany, Saint Helena, Spain, and Switzerland.

The CDC has confirmed no cases in the United States as a result of this outbreak and has classified the risk to the American public as extremely low. Routine travel can continue normally. Still, the CDC sent a team to meet the ship in the Canary Islands on May 7th and is coordinating the repatriation of American passengers to a specialized medical facility in Nebraska.

Why the 38 percent number matters

That case fatality rate deserves more explanation, because it is both alarming and contextual.

The WHO reports hantavirus mortality between 1 and 15 percent in Asia and Europe, rising to as high as 50 percent in the Americas. The CDC’s 38 percent figure applies specifically to patients who develop full hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, the severe respiratory form of the disease. Not every infected person reaches that stage. But those who do deteriorate fast.

Symptoms of Andes virus infection typically appear between 4 and 42 days after exposure, beginning with fever, muscle aches, fatigue, and gastrointestinal symptoms before progressing to the lungs. Patients can deteriorate rapidly, and delayed care reduces the chance of survival significantly. In severe cases, a procedure called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, which takes over the work of the lungs externally, can improve survival to roughly 80 percent if started early.

There is no specific antiviral drug that treats hantavirus. There is no vaccine. Treatment is supportive care: rest, hydration, oxygen, and in severe cases, intubation or ECMO. This is a virus that medicine currently manages rather than defeats.

What makes this outbreak unusual

The hantavirus cases that occur every year in the United States, roughly 30 to 40 annually, almost all involve rural exposure to rodents. Someone cleans out a cabin that has been closed all winter. A farmer works in a grain storage area. A hiker encounters a nest. Those cases are tragic but contained. They do not move between people.

What is happening on the Hondius is different, and scientists are watching it carefully for that reason. The spread on board has been at least partially attributed to human-to-human transmission, given the epidemiological links between cases and the timing of symptom onset clustering around documented incubation periods for the Andes virus.  This is not a rodent problem on a cruise ship. This is the rare strain that can move through sustained human contact, moving through sustained human contact on a vessel where people ate together, shared corridors, and breathed the same recirculated air for weeks.

That does not make it COVID. The Andes virus requires close, prolonged contact with a symptomatic person, not a brief encounter in a hallway. But it makes this outbreak scientifically significant in a way that routine hantavirus cases are not.

What the authorities are saying

The WHO assessed the global risk from this event as low as of May 4th and has not changed that assessment.  The organization notes that the total number of cases remains small, that the virus requires specific conditions to spread between people, and that contact tracing has been aggressive and largely successful. The 30 passengers who disembarked at Saint Helena have all been traced by the UK Health Security Agency.

The CDC’s message to Americans is measured and specific. If you were not on the Hondius, your risk is essentially zero. If you were on the Hondius or had close contact with someone who was, monitor for symptoms and seek medical care immediately if fever, muscle aches, or breathing difficulty develop within 42 days of potential exposure.

For healthcare workers treating potential cases, the CDC recommends airborne infection isolation rooms and full protective gear including N95 respirators.  That guidance reflects appropriate caution rather than evidence of widespread airborne spread.

What we do not know yet

Several important questions remain open. Argentine authorities are still capturing and testing rodents along the route the index patient traveled, trying to pinpoint exactly where and when he was exposed. Genomic sequencing of the virus samples is ongoing, which could clarify the transmission chain more precisely. The full passenger manifests of everyone who disembarked at various ports are still being cross-referenced against reported symptoms globally.

There is also the question of what the ship’s conditions contributed. Recirculated air systems, shared dining spaces, small cabins. Whether ventilation played a role in facilitating transmission aboard the Hondius is something epidemiologists are actively investigating.

What you should actually do

If you live in the United States and have no connection to the Hondius, you do not need to do anything differently today. Hantavirus in America remains an occupational and environmental risk tied to rodent exposure in specific settings, not a community-spread disease.

If you are planning travel to South America, particularly to rural or outdoor areas in Argentina, Chile, or Patagonia, the guidance that has always existed still applies. Avoid contact with rodents and their droppings. Do not sleep in enclosed spaces that show signs of rodent activity without cleaning them thoroughly first. If you develop flu-like symptoms with significant muscle aches after potential exposure, tell your doctor specifically about that exposure. Hantavirus is easy to miss in early stages because it looks like the flu, and timing matters enormously.

The bottom line

Three people are dead. Eight are confirmed or probable cases across six countries. A cruise ship full of passengers from four continents is docking in the Canary Islands right now while health authorities in a dozen countries track everyone who breathed the same air for the past five weeks.

This is not the next pandemic. The WHO and the CDC have been consistent on that. But it is a genuine and ongoing outbreak of one of the deadliest respiratory viruses known to science, spreading through a mechanism that most experts had hoped would remain theoretical. It deserves attention, honest reporting, and the kind of clear-eyed monitoring that early outbreaks always require.

We will keep watching it.

That’s what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | May 10, 2026

On Monday morning, May 4th, more than 300 supporters gathered outside the Elections Alberta headquarters in Edmonton, waving the provincial flag and chanting. Their leader, Mitch Sylvestre, walked up to the building carrying boxes of paper. Inside those boxes were nearly 302,000 signatures, enough under Alberta law to force a referendum on whether the province should leave Canada and become an independent country.

“This day is historic in Alberta history,” Sylvestre told the crowd.

Maybe. Or maybe it is the loudest chapter yet in a very old argument, one that has been building since the 1970s, one that Ottawa has never fully taken seriously, and one that is now, for the first time, moving through an actual legal process toward an actual vote.

From where we sit in the United States, this story looks almost familiar. A wealthy region that feels like it subsidizes everyone else. A cultural identity that does not match the national government in power. A political establishment dismissing the anger as fringe. We have heard versions of this before, from Texas to California to rural everywhere. The difference is that Canada actually has a legal framework for secession, and Alberta is now testing it.

Who Alberta is and why it matters

Alberta sits in the heart of western Canada, landlocked between British Columbia to the west and Saskatchewan to the east, with Montana running along its southern border. It has about 4.7 million people, roughly the population of Louisiana. Beneath its surface lies approximately 167 billion barrels of oil reserves, nearly four times the volume of the United States. The oil sands of northern Alberta are one of the largest proven reserves on the planet. Alberta does not just produce energy for Canada. It generates wealth that funds public services for people in provinces that have never come close to producing the same.

Each Canadian receives about $485 per year from Alberta-generated oil revenues alone. That is not separatist rhetoric. That is math. And that math is the central fact around which this entire argument turns.

The money fight, told plainly

Canada has a program called equalization payments. The federal government redistributes wealth from richer provinces to poorer ones so every Canadian can receive comparable public services. It sounds obviously fair until you sit down and look at the actual numbers.

Since the program began in 1957, Alberta has not received a single penny in equalization payments. Between 2015 and 2025 alone, the province of Quebec received $129 billion, for which Alberta footed most of the bill. From 2007 to 2022, Alberta’s net contribution to federal finances was $244.6 billion, the largest of any province. A quarter of a trillion dollars more sent to Ottawa than came back, over fifteen years, while the federal government was simultaneously passing policies designed to limit Alberta’s core industry.

Quebec’s equalization payments rose from $9.3 billion in 2014 to $14 billion in 2023. Alberta, despite economic crashes in 2015 and 2020, received nothing. And while Alberta’s pipelines were being blocked, Quebec passed a province-wide ban on new oil and gas development, then kept cashing checks funded in part by Alberta’s oil wealth.

If someone explained this to you at a kitchen table, you would probably feel the same way those 300 people in Edmonton feel.

The wound that never healed

The economic argument does not exist in a vacuum. In 1980, Pierre Trudeau’s federal Liberal government introduced the National Energy Program, a policy designed to assert federal control over Alberta’s oil revenues without the province’s consent. It contributed to the loss of tens of thousands of Alberta jobs and a recession that scarred a generation. That wound never fully closed. Every time a Liberal government in Ottawa passes a pipeline regulation, an emissions cap, or a climate policy that disproportionately burdens Alberta’s energy sector, it opens again.

Federal policies including pipeline review requirements, an oil tanker ban limiting exports to Asian markets, and a cap on oil and gas emissions have cost Alberta dearly. A 2024 Deloitte report estimated the emissions cap alone will make Alberta’s economy $191 billion smaller from 2030 to 2040. The money flows east. The regulations flow west. That combination is what fills those signature boxes.

How the movement got here

Alberta separatism is not new. It flares up during Liberal governments and low oil prices, then subsides. What is different now is that it has an actual legislative pathway. Premier Danielle Smith is not herself a separatist, but she lowered the threshold for citizen-initiated referendums from 20 percent of eligible voters to 10 percent and said she would respect the democratic process if the petition succeeded. It succeeded. But between 302,000 signatures and an actual independent country lies a distance most of the crowd in Edmonton may not have fully mapped.

Three walls standing in the way

The first wall is legal. Canada’s Clarity Act requires a clear majority on a clear question, followed by negotiations with the federal government. But it also gives the House of Commons, not the province, the power to decide whether the question and the majority are sufficiently clear. Ottawa has effective veto power over whether Alberta’s vote even counts. Actual separation would require a constitutional amendment, meaning all provinces and the federal government get a say.

The second wall is Indigenous, and it may be the most consequential. Most of Alberta’s land is covered by treaties made between the Crown of Canada and Indigenous peoples that predate the province’s legal existence. Those treaties were not made with a future independent Alberta. The Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, and the Blackfoot Confederacy have already filed legal challenges. Chiefs of Treaties 6, 7, and 8 stated they will not tolerate any action that undermines their treaties or their sovereignty. A court stay has already frozen the certification of signatures pending those challenges.

The third wall is economic. An independent Alberta would wake up the morning after independence surrounded entirely by foreign countries, Canada on three sides and the United States on the fourth. Every pipeline, every export route, every truck of grain moving to a port would need to cross someone else’s border. Alberta would lose $6.6 billion in Canada Health Transfers and $2.1 billion in social transfers annually. It would need to assume between $75 and $100 billion of Canada’s national debt, develop its own currency, negotiate trade deals from scratch, and build an entirely independent pension system. The existing trade agreement with the United States applies to sovereign states, not provinces. An independent Alberta would not automatically be covered.

The American angle

This story has not gotten nearly enough attention in the United States, and it should. The Alberta Prosperity Project met with the US State Department and Treasury three times between April 2025 and January 2026. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called Albertans “very independent people” and described the province as “a natural partner of the US.” The Financial Times confirmed that Trump administration officials discussed scenarios involving loan guarantees against Alberta’s natural resources. Alberta sits on 167 billion barrels of oil, borders Montana, and is deeply conservative and deeply frustrated with a federal government that Trump’s allies have spent two years painting as hostile to North American energy. The interest from Washington is real, calculated, and not entirely friendly to Canada’s territorial integrity.

Both sides of the argument, honestly

People who support secession are not lunatics. Many are ordinary workers who watch federal policies shut down pipelines that would have created jobs in their communities and feel like they are funding a country working actively against them. That belief is understandable even if the economics of independence tell a harder story.

On the other side, the former deputy premier of Alberta called the movement a form of treason. The anti-independence group Forever Canada gathered more verified signatures against separation than the pro-independence group collected for it. And the economic case against independence is largely uncontested by credible analysts. A landlocked country starting its independent life with a $75 to $100 billion debt assumption, no existing trade agreements, and legal challenges from Indigenous nations covering most of its land is a brutal starting position for any new country.

But economies are not the only reason people seek independence. The sense that your values and your industry are systematically undervalued by the government that claims to represent you is not nothing. Dismissing it as economically irrational misses the entire human point of what is happening in those Edmonton streets.

What likely happens next

If a referendum does happen, current polling puts independence support somewhere between 28 and 47 percent. That is unlikely to produce a yes vote. But a strong showing for independence, even a losing one, would fundamentally change the negotiating dynamic between Edmonton and Ottawa. Premier Smith almost certainly sees the petition as leverage, a way to force the federal government to address Alberta’s grievances without actually breaking up the country. That is probably the most realistic outcome. Not secession. Not the status quo. A renegotiation, forced by the credible threat of one.

Whether Ottawa is wise enough to take that off-ramp is a different question entirely.

The bottom line

Can oil-rich Alberta actually secede from Canada? Legally, barely, and only after years of constitutional battles, Indigenous negotiations, and federal consent that would be almost impossible to obtain. Economically, an independent Alberta faces challenges that would test any new nation. Politically, the votes are not there.

But the anger that fills those signature boxes is real, rooted in decades of legitimate grievance, and it is not going away. The question of whether Canada can hold itself together while its wealthiest province feels like a cash machine with no real vote is now, formally, on the ballot.

We should watch this closely. It involves our energy supply, our biggest trading partner, and a continent whose stability most Americans take completely for granted.

The boxes have been delivered. The argument is just getting started.

— US Daily Letter | May 8, 2026