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

Yesterday morning, Secretary of State Marco Rubio walked up to a podium at the White House and said five words that stopped a lot of people mid-scroll: “The operation is over.”

Operation Epic Fury, the campaign that began on February 28th when American and Israeli forces launched nearly 900 strikes on Iran in a single night, was officially declared complete. Rubio told reporters the mission had achieved its objectives and that Washington now prefers “the path of peace.”

Sixty-seven days. A supreme leader assassinated. A global energy crisis. Gas at $4.45 a gallon. Seventeen countries affected. And now, a press briefing.

Before you exhale, read the rest of the sentence.

On the same day Rubio declared the operation over, Trump posted on social media that Epic Fury would “be at an end” only if Iran “agrees to give what has been agreed to.” Otherwise, he wrote, “the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before.”

So the operation is over. Except it isn’t. Unless it is. Depending on what Iran does next.

That is the honest state of affairs on May 6th, 2026. And you deserve more than a headline.

What Epic Fury actually was

Step back for a second and look at the full picture of what happened over these 67 days, because the official narrative and the actual outcome are two different things.

The United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on February 28th targeting Iranian military installations, nuclear enrichment facilities, and key officials, including the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the opening hours.  The operation was called Epic Fury on the American side and Operation Roaring Lion on the Israeli side. It was one of the largest coordinated air campaigns in the history of the modern Middle East.

Iran hit back almost immediately. Under what it called Operation True Promise IV, Iran extended the war’s geographic footprint to seven countries within 48 hours, striking Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Iraq. A drone hit a British base on Cyprus. Missiles were shot down over Turkey. The Strait of Hormuz was closed, and the world’s oil supply was functionally held hostage.

This was not a contained operation. This was a regional war.

What the US actually achieved

Here’s where the official story and the military reality diverge, and it matters.

Operation Epic Fury achieved its stated military objectives: degrade Iran’s nuclear program, target senior leadership, and reduce conventional military capacity. The naval blockade produced leverage in ongoing negotiations.  On those narrow terms, Rubio is not wrong to claim success.

But zoom out, and the picture is more complicated. The consensus from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Soufan Centre is that the US achieved tactical damage but could not reach underground infrastructure, could not eliminate the Strait threat, and could not produce the political outcome it sought.

That last part is the part that matters most. Because wars are not ultimately judged by how many targets you hit. They are judged by what changed afterward.

Approximately 50% of Iran’s missile launchers remained intact according to US intelligence assessments in April. The IRGC Navy retained roughly 50% of its pre-war assets. And the regime survived the decapitation of its leadership — succession protocols produced a more hard-line successor drawn entirely from the IRGC.

You killed the general. The army is still standing. And the new general is angrier than the last one.

The Islamabad moment nobody can forget

The clearest measure of where things stand came on April 11th, when JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner flew to Pakistan for what was billed as a historic peace negotiation. The US team had 300 members. Iran’s team had 70. They talked for 21 hours across three rounds of negotiations, the highest-level direct engagement between Washington and Tehran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

They left with nothing.

“We just could not get to a situation where the Iranians were willing to accept our terms,” Vance told reporters at 6:30 in the morning, boarding his plane home.

Trump’s own summary was stark: “Most points were agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, nuclear, was not.”  Germany’s chancellor said publicly that Iran had “humiliated” US leaders by making them fly to Islamabad and sending them home empty-handed.

The stumbling block was not secret. The US demanded zero uranium enrichment, permanently. Iran’s atomic energy chief replied that his country would not accept limits on its nuclear enrichment program, full stop.  On timeline, the US reportedly asked for a 20-year commitment. Iran offered three to five years. Nobody moved.

Tehran was also demanding control of the Strait of Hormuz, payment of war reparations, a lifting of all sanctions, and a regional ceasefire that explicitly included Lebanon.  Israel said Lebanon was not part of the deal. Iran said there was no deal without Lebanon. The US agreed with Israel.

That is the geometry of a negotiation that was never going to close in one room in Islamabad.

The Strait: still the center of everything

People keep asking what the real issue is. The nuclear program is the headline. The Strait of Hormuz is the body of the story.

By March, only 154 vessels passed through the Strait. In a normal month before the war, it was closer to 3,000. That single number explains why gas costs $4.45 a gallon in New York. Why airlines are folding. Why shipping companies are rerouting through the Cape of Good Hope and adding three weeks to their delivery times. Why inflation is ticking back up in places that thought they were done with it.

Iran’s parliament is now moving to pass a law formally codifying restrictions on who can use the Strait, stating that Israeli vessels will never be allowed through and that ships from “hostile countries” will be required to pay reparations for a permit.  That is not a negotiating position. That is a legal architecture being built around permanent leverage.

Trump responded by launching Project Freedom on Monday, a US military escort mission through the Strait involving guided-missile destroyers, more than 100 aircraft, and 15,000 service members. By Tuesday he had paused it. Experts say the pause of Project Freedom could be the beginning of the end for the war on Iran, a signal that Washington is genuinely looking for an exit.

Or it could be a 48-hour tactical pause before everything escalates again. We have been in this film before.

What it all actually means

Let’s be honest about something most commentators won’t say plainly. The United States went into this conflict with three goals that were never fully compatible with each other: destroy Iran’s nuclear capability, produce regime change, and keep the Strait open. It achieved partial versions of two out of three and is still negotiating the third.

The post-1945 model of alliance burden-sharing depends on consultation, reciprocity, and shared ownership of risk. Operation Epic Fury inverted that sequence, initiating conflict first and seeking coalition support afterward. The result is not simply friction, but a weakening of the alliance model itself.  America’s NATO partners were not consulted before the strikes. Germany and France found out when the bombs were already falling. That is a relationship damage that will not be repaired with a White House press briefing.

At home, only 32% of Americans surveyed say they support the war. Trump himself acknowledged that number this week, calling the polls “fake” but notably not disputing that his approval on this specific conflict is underwater.

And then there is the question that nobody in Washington wants to answer out loud: if the goal was to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and Iran still has 50% of its missile infrastructure intact, a harder-line IRGC leadership running the country, and a deep motivation to accelerate its nuclear program as a deterrent against future strikes, then what exactly was accomplished?

Military analysts put it this way: there was a failure to connect military action to a political end-state. The institutional processes that exist to ensure that connection were not used.  That is a polite way of saying the strategy was built backward, with the bombing decided before the endgame was defined.

What comes next

A second round of talks in Islamabad is being discussed. Pakistan has kept the channel open and deserves credit for that. Iran has sent signals through mediators that it is willing to keep talking. Trump extended the ceasefire once already and may do so again.

The most honest scenario is this: the war as a full-scale air campaign is probably over. The conditions that caused it, the nuclear standoff, the Strait as a weapon, the proxy conflicts from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen, are not. They have been scrambled, not resolved. And the new Iranian leadership, drawn entirely from the hardest line of the Revolutionary Guard, has no political incentive to appear to have capitulated to American bombs.

The deal that eventually gets made, if one gets made, will likely look a lot like what was on the table in February, before any of this started. That is what makes the last 67 days so painful to reckon with.

A lot of people died to end up back at the table.

That’s what this letter is for. To tell you the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.

— US Daily Letter | May 6, 2026

Saturday morning, May 2nd. Millions of Americans woke up and checked their phones to find a message no traveler ever wants to see: your flight is canceled. Not delayed. Not rescheduled. Gone. The airline is gone.

“It is with great disappointment that on May 2, 2026, Spirit Airlines started an orderly wind-down of our operations, effective immediately. All flights have been cancelled, and customer service is no longer available.”

Just like that. Thirty-four years. Over.

This didn’t come out of nowhere. Spirit’s collapse has been building for years, through bad bets, blocked mergers, two bankruptcies, and finally a war in the Middle East that sent jet fuel prices off the charts. But the story of how Spirit died is also the story of something bigger: what happens to regular Americans when the budget option disappears.

The numbers first

Spirit had about 9,000 flights scheduled from May 2 through the end of the month, a total of 1.8 million seats. That’s an average of 300 flights and 60,000 potential passengers a day, left scrambling. About 17,000 jobs could be impacted. 

Those aren’t statistics. Those are families stranded at airports, workers without paychecks, and people who booked the only fare they could afford, now told to figure it out.

How we got here

Spirit’s problems didn’t start this year. The airline had been struggling financially for years, filing for bankruptcy twice, in November 2024 and then again in August 2025, due to continued losses, high debt, and intense competition from other airlines.

The model had been cracking for a while. “When you’re a low-cost carrier, by definition, you’re relying on having a cost advantage. And they just don’t have that anymore,” said Shye Gilad, a former airline pilot and professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. “They just don’t have a lot of options left.”

Then came the Iran war. And it was the last straw.

Spirit’s restructuring plan had assumed jet fuel costs of about $2.24 a gallon in 2026. By the end of April, prices had climbed to about $4.51 a gallon, more than double, leaving the carrier unable to survive without new financing. Three days after Spirit announced a deal with creditors in February to emerge from bankruptcy, the war in Iran started, choking off about 20% of the world’s oil supply and sending jet fuel prices soaring.

Timing doesn’t get crueler than that.

The bailout that wasn’t

Here’s where it gets political.

In recent weeks, Spirit had been in very advanced discussions with the Trump administration on a rescue package, a $500 million cash infusion in exchange for a significant potential stake in the company. Unions representing Spirit’s pilots, flight attendants, and ramp workers pushed hard for the deal. Jobs were on the line. Communities were on the line.

It fell apart at the last minute. A key group of creditors rejected the plan. On Friday, Trump acknowledged reality: “We’re looking at it, but if we can’t make a good deal, no institution’s been able to do it. I’d like to save the jobs.”

By Saturday morning, there were no jobs left to save.

Trump administration officials then took to social media to blame the Biden administration for Spirit’s demise, pointing to Biden’s opposition to a proposed merger between Spirit and JetBlue in 2023. There’s truth in that. The blocked merger likely was the beginning of the end. But blaming a predecessor doesn’t put 17,000 people back to work or refund the 60,000 daily passengers left holding worthless tickets.

What this means for your wallet

Let’s be direct with you: Spirit’s death is going to cost you money, even if you never once set foot on a yellow plane.

“You do not have to fly a small carrier in order to benefit from its presence, because they will bring down the big guys’ fares,” said William McGee, a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project. Without Spirit flying those routes, “everyone will be paying more.”

That’s not an opinion. That’s how airline economics work. Spirit’s ultra-low fares forced Delta, United, American, and Southwest to compete on price on every route Spirit flew. Now that pressure is gone. Removing the 2% of domestic US flights Spirit was scheduled to fly this summer will push fares higher across the entire industry. 

Budget-conscious travelers will feel it most. Leisure travelers in places where Spirit had a big footprint, Las Vegas, Fort Lauderdale, and similar markets, will likely feel the absence most acutely. Spirit had a market share of about 27% in Fort Lauderdale alone. That’s not a footnote. That’s a market restructured overnight.

If you’re stranded right now

The practical reality for passengers caught mid-trip or holding upcoming tickets:

United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue Airways and Southwest Airlines are capping fares for Spirit passengers, with prices expected to be about $200 for a one-way ticket. That’s the good news. The bad news: Spirit said it will not reimburse customers for incidental travel costs associated with canceled trips, though travel insurance may cover costs for those who purchased it. Potential refunds for rewards, coupons and vouchers will be determined through the bankruptcy court process. 

In plain language: get on a competitor’s flight, save your receipts, and don’t hold your breath for Spirit to make you whole anytime soon.

The bigger picture

Spirit is the first American airline to fully collapse since the pandemic era. It will not be the last if the Iran war keeps fuel prices where they are. American Airlines has said that every penny that jet fuel prices rise costs the airline $50 million over the course of a year. United said last month that if fuel prices continue at their current level, the airline could incur $11 billion in additional expenses, double its highest-ever annual profit.

The big carriers can absorb that, painfully, but they can. Smaller ones cannot. German airline Lufthansa canceled 20,000 flights last month to protect itself from soaring fuel costs. India’s Air India increased fuel surcharges on all flights and reduced 100 flights a day.  The aviation industry is in a slow-motion crisis that most Americans haven’t fully registered yet.

Spirit just became the first visible casualty on US soil.

The bottom line

Spirit wasn’t a beloved airline. The fees were maddening, the seats were thin, and the complaints were endless. But it served a real purpose for real people, the ones who couldn’t afford the legacy carriers, who just needed to get somewhere without draining a savings account.

That option is now gone. The Iran war, two bankruptcies, a failed merger, and a bailout that fell apart at the last hour all converged on the same outcome. Thirty-four years of flying, ended by a press release at 3 in the morning.

Seventeen thousand workers. Sixty thousand daily passengers. Higher fares for everyone else.

Some collapses happen in slow motion. You watch them coming for years. This one still managed to hit like a gut punch when it finally arrived.

We’ll keep watching what happens to air travel and to your money as this shakes out.

That’s what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | May 4, 2026

Sources: NPR, CNN, Fortune, Al Jazeera, Georgetown University

Subject line: Spirit Airlines is dead. Here’s what it costs you.

Preview text: 17,000 jobs gone. 60,000 passengers stranded. And your fares are about to go up.

US Daily Letter | Week of April 27, 2026

Dear Reader,

In a more normal week, a reauthorization of surveillance powers, a budget resolution, or a farm bill might take center stage on the House floor. This week, the House is scheduled to do all of that — and host a joint meeting of Congress to hear from King Charles III.

Four major things are happening simul…

Read more

US Daily Letter | Week of April 21, 2026

From somewhere between the Gulf of Oman and the ruins of Beirut, this letter is written not for generals — but for you.

This is not a war that announced itself cleanly. There was no declaration, no joint session of Congress, no solemn address from the Oval Office on a Sunday night. Operation Epic Fury began on Febr…

Read more

US Daily Letter | Week of April 21, 2026

Dear Fellow American,

In the founding era of this republic, letters traveled on horseback from Washington to every corner of the country. They carried news from the capital — not summaries, not spin, but the unvarnished account of what your government was doing in your name. This is that letter. Written this Tuesda…

Read more

A LETTER FROM WALL STREET

Week of April 21, 2026

Dear Reader,

Wall Street spent last week celebrating what looked like peace. It’s spending this week trying to decide if it was premature.

Here’s the situation as the opening bell rings on Tuesday morning.

THE RALLY THAT ALMOST WAS

Last week, the S&P 500 gained 4.5%, the Dow rose 3.2%, the Nasdaq rallied 6.8%, and the small-cap Russell 2000 jumped 5.6% — a broad-based surge that came on the back of Iran’s brief decision to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.  Indexes hit all-time highs. The Fear & Greed index flipped from Fear to Greed almost overnight. Traders were pricing in a deal.

Then the weekend happened.

Iran had declared that the Strait of Hormuz was reopened — but by Saturday, vessel traffic was restricted again, with state media saying the U.S. had not fulfilled its obligations. On Sunday, the Navy seized an Iranian cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman. The S&P 500 shed 0.24% to close at 7,109.14 Monday, while the Nasdaq’s 13-day winning streak — its longest positive run since 1992 — came to an end.

This morning, however, the mood has shifted again. S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures are up 0.3% and 0.4% respectively, with Dow futures gaining 310 points, as investors focus on a second round of peace talks between the U.S. and Iran in Islamabad. Tehran is reportedly sending a delegation. The ceasefire officially expires today.

The pattern is clear: this market is being held hostage to a single choke point in the Persian Gulf, whipsawing between relief and dread every 48 hours.

EARNINGS SEASON: THE REAL STORY UNDERNEATH THE NOISE

While geopolitics dominates the headlines, corporate America is quietly delivering. And the numbers are good.

Q1 2026 earnings growth is running at +12.6% year-over-year — the sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, with tech driving 87% of the gains. That’s the underlying foundation the bulls keep pointing to, and they’re not wrong to do so.

Analyst estimates for full-year S&P 500 profits continue to trend higher — up 2.8% since the start of the Iran conflict, driven by upward revisions in energy, technology, and materials. Even war, it turns out, is good for some balance sheets.

This week is the densest stretch of the season. Noteworthy firms reporting include Tesla, Intel, IBM, Boeing, GE Aerospace, UnitedHealth, AT&T, American Express, and United Airlines. Each of them is a different kind of diagnostic. Boeing tells you about industrial recovery. United Airlines tells you whether the Iran war is hitting travel demand. UnitedHealth tells you about healthcare costs. Tesla tells you about EV demand — and whether Elon Musk’s political detours have cost him customers.

UnitedHealth shares jumped more than 6% in pre-market trading this morning after the health insurance giant posted better-than-expected quarterly earnings and hiked its full-year outlook — a strong early signal for the week.

The bigger question, though, isn’t whether companies beat their Q1 numbers. It’s what they say about Q2 and Q3. If companies cite the Iran war’s impact on supply chains or temper their forward guidance due to demand uncertainty, it could undercut the rally narrative even if Q1 beats expectations. Watch for the word “ceasefire” in earnings calls. When CEOs start hedging around geopolitics, that’s the canary.

THE FED: A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN — MAYBE

As if the market didn’t have enough to process, the Federal Reserve is also in focus today in a very different way.

Kevin Warsh, President Trump’s pick to succeed Jerome Powell as Fed Chair, is testifying before the Senate Banking Committee this morning. Powell’s term expires May 15. The succession clock is ticking.

Warsh spent years criticizing the Fed for doing too much. More recently, he has suggested it may need to do the opposite — putting him squarely in the middle of a tug-of-war between appeasing Trump and protecting Fed independence.

In his prepared remarks, Warsh emphasized the importance of central bank independence, warning against political encroachment: “The Fed must stay in its lane.” Notably absent from those same remarks: any firm statement on where interest rates should go from here.

That silence is itself a signal. Inflation has been running above the Fed’s 2% target for five years, and with another price shock now coming from elevated oil prices, the case for near-term rate cuts is weak — regardless of what the President wants.

The political drama adds another layer: Republican Senator Thom Tillis has vowed to block Warsh’s confirmation until a DOJ probe into Jerome Powell is resolved, meaning a swift confirmation is unlikely. If Powell isn’t replaced by May 15, he stays as chair pro tempore. Markets hate that kind of limbo.

THE APPLE HEADLINE YOU ALMOST MISSED

Buried under the geopolitical noise: Apple named John Ternus as its next CEO, with the stock falling about 0.6% in extended trading on the announcement. Ternus, currently Apple’s SVP of Hardware Engineering, is the man who will be holding the iPhone when it folds — literally. He is set to take over on September 1, 2026, positioning him to lead the launch of the company’s first foldable iPhone just weeks after taking the helm.

The market’s muted reaction tells you everything: investors respect the internal promotion but are reserving judgment. Tim Cook’s shoes are famously difficult to fill. The foldable iPhone will be Ternus’s first real test.

THE BOTTOM LINE FOR YOUR PORTFOLIO

Three things are true at once right now, and they pull in different directions.

Corporate earnings are strong. The underlying economy, buffered in part by roughly $200 billion in household stimulus from the new tax bill — including average tax refunds up 11% to $3,500 — is cushioning the blow of higher energy prices on consumers. That’s genuine support for the bull case.

At the same time, oil at $88–$95 a barrel is a persistent tax on everything. Every week the Strait of Hormuz stays contested, that tax compounds.

And the Federal Reserve, whatever happens at today’s hearing, is not riding to the rescue anytime soon. Rate cuts require confidence that inflation is beaten. With energy prices elevated and a new Fed chair navigating a political minefield, that confidence is months away at best.

The market is not in freefall. But it is running on hope — hope that the ceasefire holds today, hope that earnings guidance doesn’t crack, hope that Warsh threads the needle between Trump and independence. That’s a lot of hope for a Tuesday morning.

Stay sharp.

— US Daily Letter | From Wall Street

THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ: THE CHOKEPOINT THAT COULD DEFINE 2026

The two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran expires tomorrow — and right now, nobody knows what comes next.

Here’s the quick version of how we got here: On February 28, Israel and the United States launched airstrikes against Iran, killing its supreme leader and many other officials and destroying a large number of military and government targets. Iran responded with missile and drone strikes against Israel and U.S. bases, and by closing the Strait of Hormuz.  That closure sent shockwaves through global energy markets and triggered a 40-day escalation that brought the region to the edge of a wider war.

Trump announced a two-week suspension of attacks on Iran, contingent on Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz — calling it a “big day for world peace.”  Pakistan brokered the truce. The world exhaled. For about 48 hours.

Then things got complicated again. Iran said Saturday it had reinstated control of the Strait and reversed course on its decision to reopen the critical waterway, citing Trump’s refusal to end the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports.  On Sunday, Trump said the U.S. Navy’s USS Spruance intercepted and seized an Iranian-flagged cargo ship, the Touska, in the Gulf of Oman after firing on its engine room. 

As of this morning, oil prices surged, with West Texas Intermediate jumping more than 6% to $89 per barrel and Brent climbing to $95.50, while U.S. stock futures fell as the two sides teetered on the brink of renewed conflict. 

The economic damage is already severe. The Strait of Hormuz — which normally carries roughly one-fifth of global oil supply — has been effectively closed for nearly two months, with experts estimating supply disruptions of around 13 million barrels of crude per day and a cumulative shortfall already exceeding half a billion barrels.  Experts warn that even if a deal is signed today, it could take months to unwind the damage.

The ceasefire deadline is Tuesday. Watch this space closely.

THE POPE TAKES ON AFRICA — AND TRUMP

While diplomats scramble in Islamabad, Pope Leo XIV is wrapping up an 11-day, four-nation apostolic journey across Africa — visiting Algeria, Cameroon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea through April 23. 

This trip has been anything but quiet. The first American-born pope has delivered remarks seen as critical of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran and U.S. policy, including calling Trump’s threat to end Iran’s civilization “unacceptable.” Trump responded by calling the Catholic leader “weak” and “terrible for foreign policy.” 

Standing next to Cameroon’s 93-year-old President Paul Biya — himself accused of presiding over decades of authoritarian rule — Leo didn’t hold back: “In order for peace and justice to prevail, the chains of corruption — which disfigure authority and strip it of its credibility — must be broken.” 

In Angola, addressing tens of thousands at an open-air Mass, Leo urged the country to move beyond the “enmity and division, squandered resources and poverty” left by its civil war-scarred past, telling the faithful: “Today, there is a need to look to the future with hope and to build that hope.” 

Today, Leo heads to Equatorial Guinea for the final stop — a diplomatically delicate challenge, as the former Spanish colony is run by Africa’s longest-serving president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who has been in power since 1979 and is accused of widespread corruption and authoritarianism.  Don’t expect the Pope to go easy on him.

THE GLOBAL ECONOMY: “IN THE SHADOW OF WAR”

The International Monetary Fund dropped its annual World Economic Outlook last week, and the title says it all: Global Economy in the Shadow of War.

The pre-conflict global growth forecast for 2026 had been set at 3.4%. War in the Middle East has halted that momentum.  Under the assumption that the conflict remains limited, global growth is now projected at 3.1% in 2026 — with risks decisively on the downside.

The IMF’s warning is pointed. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz and serious damage to critical facilities in a region central to global hydrocarbon supply raise the prospect of a major energy crisis should hostilities continue.  In a severe scenario where energy disruptions extend further into the year, global growth could fall to 2% and inflation could exceed 6%.

The countries most exposed: emerging market and developing economies — especially commodity importers with preexisting vulnerabilities — where the downside is most pronounced. That means much of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia is staring down a compounding crisis not of their making.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Three stories. One through-line: the world’s stability is being tested from multiple directions at once — a war with no clean ending, a Pope challenging both tyrants and the American president, and an IMF warning that the economic bill is already being tallied.

For Americans, the stakes are real. Oil prices hit your gas pump. A wider war hits your 401(k). And what happens in the Strait of Hormuz this week may be the most consequential 72 hours of the year.

Stay informed.

— US Daily Letter

Yesterday, President Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran. Within the hour, missiles were already flying again.

That tells you almost everything you need to know about where we stand.

Let’s back up and give you the full picture — because this war moved fast, the stakes are enormous, and most of what you’ve seen in your feed has been noise.

How we got here

On February 28, 2026, U.S. and Israeli forces launched nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours targeting Iranian missiles, air defenses, military infrastructure, and leadership.  The opening salvo was historic in its brutality. The attacks killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and several other Iranian officials. 

Here’s the part that will be debated for years: just before the strikes began, Omani foreign minister Badr Al-Busaidi said a “breakthrough” had been reached and Iran had agreed both to never stockpile enriched uranium and to full verification by the IAEA — adding that peace was “within reach.”  Talks were scheduled to resume on March 2nd. They never happened.

Trump administration officials have offered multiple explanations for launching the war anyway — to pre-empt Iranian retaliation against US assets, to destroy Iran’s missile capabilities, to prevent a nuclear weapon, to secure Iran’s oil resources, and to achieve regime change.  The explanations kept shifting. The bombs did not.

What Iran did next

Tehran hit back hard. Iran launched hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles at targets in Israel and at US military bases in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. A drone struck Britain’s Akrotiri military base on Cyprus, and missiles were shot down over Turkey. 

The war spread quickly across the entire region. The conflict disrupted global travel and trade, halted flights in and out of the Middle East, and led to shipping reroutes to avoid the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.  Oil markets shook. Fuel shortages rippled across Asia. The world’s most critical energy chokepoint — through which roughly 20% of global oil flows — was effectively shut down.

The Strait of Hormuz: the real center of gravity

You’ve heard the name. Here’s why it matters so much.

The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow passage between Iran and Oman — just 21 miles wide at its tightest point. Every day in normal times, roughly 17 to 21 million barrels of oil pass through it. Saudi oil. Emirati oil. Kuwaiti oil. Qatari LNG. If it closes, Asia runs short within weeks. Europe scrambles. Prices spike globally.

Iran used the strait as its most powerful non-military weapon. By threatening — and partially restricting — shipping through the Hormuz, Tehran forced the entire world to pay attention to the war in a way that no missile barrage could. Trump issued a deadline threatening the “complete demolition” of Iran’s power plants and bridges if Tehran did not fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz.  Iran called the threats “delusional.”

Then, at the last hour, a phone call from Pakistan changed everything.

The ceasefire — and what it actually says

Iran says it has accepted a two-week ceasefire, with talks set to begin on Friday in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, after President Trump agreed to suspend attacks on the condition that Tehran fully reopens the Strait of Hormuz. 

The truce was brokered by Pakistan, following fierce exchanges of airstrikes, missile attacks and threats that saw unprecedented strikes on Gulf nations, disrupted global shipping routes and heightened fears of a prolonged confrontation. 

The terms, as we know them: Iran’s military will coordinate passage of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz during the ceasefire. Iran and Oman plan to charge transit fees on passing ships, with Tehran planning to use the revenue for post-war reconstruction. 

Iran came with its own framework. Tehran’s 10-point peace proposal includes lifting sanctions, creating a war-loss fund, a potential US troop withdrawal from the Gulf, and recognition of Iran’s right to enrich uranium in exchange for a pledge not to build nuclear weapons.  It is unclear whether the US has agreed to any of it.

But the guns didn’t stop

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about this ceasefire: it started with explosions.

Missile attacks were reported across the Gulf region and Israel shortly after Trump announced the two-week ceasefire. Kuwait and the UAE said they were working to intercept incoming drone and missile threats. Qatar’s Ministry of Defense said it had successfully intercepted a missile attack. Bahrain’s Interior Ministry said sirens were sounding. 

And Israel made its position crystal clear within hours: Prime Minister Netanyahu confirmed support for the US decision to suspend strikes on Iran, but stressed the ceasefire does not extend to Lebanon.  Israel then bombed locations across Lebanon including the capital Beirut in devastating attacks that killed at least 89 people and wounded over 700. 

A ceasefire with an asterisk the size of a country.

So who’s winning?

The honest answer: nobody cleanly, and the next two weeks will determine a great deal.

Iran took devastating losses — its supreme leader killed, military infrastructure hammered, universities and cultural sites destroyed. But it survived 40 days as a functioning state, kept its weapons, and forced the world’s superpower to the table. Iran expert Trita Parsi said the potential talks in Islamabad could fail, “but the terrain has shifted.”  Iranian leaders are declaring the conflict is ending “on Iran’s terms.”  That’s partly propaganda — but only partly.

The US entered with overwhelming force and achieved the killing of Khamenei. But it did not achieve regime change, did not eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability, and did not keep the Hormuz open. Analyst Trita Parsi described the ceasefire as a strategic retreat by Trump, arguing the conflict had “become an absolute disaster” and forced the White House to seek a way out. “Trump needed an exit, and he took it.” 

The Gulf states — Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait — absorbed Iranian missiles on their own soil while hosting American forces. They want the strait open, Iran neutered, and to never be in this position again. They are not satisfied.

The world economy got a 40-day warning about what a closed Strait of Hormuz actually looks like. It will not forget.

What to watch next

Talks begin Friday in Islamabad. The questions that will define everything:

Will the US accept Iran’s right to enrich uranium — the point that blew up negotiations in February, before the war even started? Will Iran accept any verification regime that actually has teeth? And will Netanyahu — who is “widely suspected of having derailed the last round of talks” brokered by Oman  — allow a diplomatic solution to hold?

Two weeks is a very short runway.

The bottom line

Forty days of war. Thousands dead. The global oil supply held hostage. A ceasefire announced while missiles were still in the air.

This is not resolved. This is a pause — fragile, contested, already fraying at the edges in Lebanon. The Strait of Hormuz is open for now, and oil prices dropped on the news. But the fundamental questions that started this war — Iran’s nuclear program, American power in the Gulf, Israel’s security — remain completely unanswered.

What happens in Islamabad on Friday matters more than almost anything else happening on the planet right now.

We’ll be watching. And we’ll write you again the moment it breaks.

That’s what this letter is for.

— US Daily Letter | April 9, 2026

MARKET INSIGHT | March 28, 2026

Four weeks in, the economic damage is real, spreading, and far from over.

The US-Israeli strikes on Iran began on February 28. What followed was not just a military campaign — it was the ignition of what the International Energy Agency has called the greatest global energy security challenge in history. Today, March 28, markets are still absorbing the full weight of that shock.

The Strait Tells the Story

Everything comes back to one narrow corridor of water. The Strait of Hormuz, a maritime chokepoint between Iran and Oman, normally handles roughly 20 million barrels of oil and petroleum products per day — about a fifth of global consumption — plus roughly one-fifth of global liquefied natural gas trade.  Since the first strikes, that corridor has been effectively paralyzed.

Following the closure of the Strait on March 4, oil and LNG exports were stranded, causing Brent Crude to surge past $120 per barrel and forcing QatarEnergy to declare force majeure on all exports.  On March 18, the situation worsened: Iran struck Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City LNG complex, causing a 17% reduction in Qatar’s LNG production capacity — damage that analysts estimate will take three to five years to repair. LNG spot prices in Asia consequently surged by over 140%. 

Markets With Nowhere to Hide

The war and the spike in energy prices have rattled not just stocks, but also traditional safe havens like bonds, gold, and currencies, leaving investors with fewer places to shelter. 

The Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq are each on track for their worst month in a year. Gold futures have dropped 4%, Treasury yields are climbing as investors sell bonds, and the Nasdaq has entered correction territory, down more than 10% from its peak in late October. 

Traders are currently pricing in zero rate cuts from the Federal Reserve this year.  The Fed, already navigating inflation above its 2% target before the conflict started, now faces an oil-driven inflationary impulse with little room to maneuver. The word economists are quietly starting to use: stagflation.

Asia Absorbs the Hardest Hit

Japan relies on the Middle East for roughly 90% of its crude oil imports, most of which transits through Hormuz. South Korea gets about 70% of its crude from the region and routes more than 95% of that through the strait. South Korea has already activated a 100 trillion won market-stabilization program, roughly $68 billion, in response to war-related volatility. 

As of mid-March, Australia’s stock exchange had fallen more than 6%. Russian stocks, meanwhile, have trended upward, Russia being a major non-Gulf hydrocarbon supplier now positioned to benefit from the disruption. 

Europe: Exposed but Not Defenseless

Europe imports only about 5% of its crude oil through the Strait, but as a major energy importer it remains highly exposed to rising global prices. The European Central Bank postponed planned rate reductions, raising its 2026 inflation forecast and cutting GDP growth projections.  The euro-zone economy is expected to contract in Q2 and flatline through the second half of the year. 

Europe entered 2026 with significantly lower gas storage levels than in recent years — 46 billion cubic metres at end of February, compared to 60 bcm in 2025 and 77 bcm in 2024.  That buffer is thin heading into a prolonged disruption.

Food, Fertilizer, and the Downstream Spiral

The damage isn’t limited to fuel pumps and trading floors. From the start of the conflict through March 20, fertilizer prices increased by up to 40%, sending food prices rising across the globe.  Aviation has also been significantly disrupted by airspace closures on key corridors between Africa, Asia, and Europe, with airlines rerouting around the Middle East adding time, fuel costs, and economic friction to global supply chains. 

The Bottom Line

What begins as a battlefield shock hardens into a geoeconomic one.  The United States, as a net energy exporter, is better insulated than most, but not immune. The conflict is likely to reinforce a broader pattern already underway: the relative economic strength of the United States compared to its allies and trading partners. 

The critical variable remains duration. If hostilities wind down in the coming weeks, markets will recover. If the Strait of Hormuz stays commercially compromised through spring and summer, the damage to growth, inflation trajectories, and central bank credibility becomes structural, not cyclical.

For now, the world is watching a chokepoint the size of a county road decide the fate of the global economy.

US Daily Letter — Markets & Geopolitics Desk | March 28, 2026

INSIGHT — Tuesday, March 24, 2026

By the US Daily Letter Editorial Desk

You showed up two hours early. You still almost missed your flight.

That’s the reality at dozens of American airports right now — and it’s about to get a political explanation that depends entirely on which party you’re listening to.

Here are the facts.

The shutdown nobody’s talking about

Since February 14, the Department of Homeland Security has been operating under a partial government shutdown — the result of a Democratic refusal to fund DHS after the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis.  Democrats demanded reforms at ICE and Customs and Border Protection before releasing funds. Republicans refused to separate those agencies from the rest of DHS. Nobody blinked. The shutdown has now run more than five weeks.

TSA’s more than 50,000 frontline officers have been working without regular paychecks the entire time.  They are deemed essential workers. They have to show up. They just don’t get paid.

The numbers are bad

The TSA callout rate is now five times higher than normal. More than 400 agents have quit.  Of those who quit, nearly half had over three years of experience and a third had over five years  — meaning the workers walking out the door are not rookies. They are the people who know what they’re doing, and they can’t afford to keep showing up for free.

At Houston Hobby International Airport, the single-day callout rate hit 55% on March 14.  At Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson — the busiest airport in the world — wait times stretched beyond two and a half hours over the weekend. At JFK, one traveler arrived before 5 AM for a 7 AM flight and barely made it to his gate. 

Economists estimate the shutdown has produced over $2.5 billion in economic losses so far.  Spring break is not over.

Enter ICE

On Sunday, Trump announced the fix: hundreds of ICE agents would be deployed to airports Monday to help ease the lines.  Border czar Tom Homan framed it simply — ICE would guard exit doors and help move lines in areas that don’t require TSA’s specialized screening expertise.  By Monday morning, ICE agents were patrolling at more than a dozen airports across the country. 

The union representing TSA workers did not see it that way. The American Federation of Government Employees called the move a political maneuver that misses the point entirely: their members don’t need supervision, they need paychecks.

What both sides won’t say plainly

Republicans are correct that TSA workers are being hurt by this impasse and that Americans deserve functioning airports. But they have blocked every Democratic effort to fund TSA separately while negotiations over ICE continue — a clean, targeted fix that would have put money in workers’ pockets without conceding anything on immigration policy. That Democratic bill failed 41-49 in the Senate, along party lines. 

Democrats are correct that ICE agents at checkpoints don’t solve the underlying crisis, and that deploying immigration enforcement officers into airports carries a symbolism that goes beyond logistics. But blocking DHS funding entirely — including TSA — as leverage for immigration reforms is a tactic with real victims. Those victims are the agents taking second jobs to pay their bills, calling out of work to do those jobs, and feeding a staffing spiral that makes every American’s airport experience worse. 

Meanwhile, a top TSA official warned last week that some smaller airports may have to “quite literally shut down” if Congress doesn’t act. 

The bottom line

This is not an airport story. It’s a Washington story — one where a political standoff over immigration enforcement has produced a very tangible, very visible consequence for millions of ordinary Americans trying to get home for spring break.

At 20 airports where private contractors handle screening — including San Francisco and Kansas City — lines are moving normally.  At every other airport in America, they’re not. That contrast alone tells you everything about how far this has drifted from common sense.

ICE agents at the exit doors are a Band-Aid on a wound that Congress opened and only Congress can close.

US Daily Letter — Correspondence from where it matters most. usdailyletter.com