Governance by Stock Chart

Climate denial, Epstein fallout, ICE chaos, and a Homeland Security shutdown — but don’t worry, the ticker is green.

Good morning! The sun is coming up over a capital that has decided, once again, that the best way to demonstrate functional governance is to threaten to shut down the Department of Homeland Security while arguing about whether the Dow Jones Industrial Average can double as a moral compass.

Let’s begin there, because nothing captures this moment better than Pam Bondi, seated before Congress with Epstein’s victims behind her, choosing to defend the administration not with facts, or transparency, nor with accountability, but with a stock ticker.

“The Dow is over 50,000,” she scolded lawmakers, as if that settled it. The S&P is smashing records. Americans’ 401(k)s are booming. That’s what we should be talking about.

Silly Congress. Why fixate on a billionaire sex trafficker with decades of elite protection when 30 publicly traded companies are having a good week? Welcome to the single-metric presidency, where justice is measured in basis points. Oversight is bearish. Subpoenas are volatility. The line goes up, therefore shut up.

But here’s the part they always skip in these Dow-as-moral-alibi sermons: the stock market is not the economy, or the country. It is not even remotely a reliable proxy for the lives most Americans are actually living.

The Dow is a scoreboard for the investor class, a number reflecting the paper wealth of corporations and shareholders, not whether rent is affordable, whether wages keep up with groceries, whether hospitals are closing, whether people can take a sick day without financial ruin. It does not measure asthma attacks in wildfire smoke or families rationing insulin or the quiet humiliation of selling plasma to cover the electric bill. It measures capital’s mood.

Markets can soar while households drown. The S&P can smash records while childcare costs metastasize. Equities can rally while disaster relief is gutted and public infrastructure rots in place. Wall Street can toast “confidence” while the rest of the country is stuck in a K-shaped recovery where the top floats upward and everyone else is told to be grateful they’re allowed to tread water.

That’s the magic trick of this administration’s economic morality play: if the ticker is green, nothing else counts. Epstein? Don’t look there, look here. ICE shootings? Ignore them, look here. Climate deregulation? Forget it, look here. Democracy fraying at the seams? The Dow is over 50,000.

This is governance by stock chart, politics as portfolio management, the republic reduced to a quarterly earnings call. And it is grotesque, because the market is not a measure of justice. It is not a measure of truth. It is not a measure of human well-being. It is simply a measure of who is already winning.

Bondi’s performance was less testimony and more daytime cable audition. She flipped through her burn binder, tossed insults at Democrats, and when pressed about Epstein, pivoted to equities like a CNBC intern who wandered into the wrong hearing. The Justice Department she oversees is still “moving on” from the Epstein files, an interesting phrase given that Wall Street seems unable to.

Goldman Sachs’ top lawyer, Kathryn Ruemmler, is stepping down after fresh document releases showed she remained close to Epstein through his 2019 arrest. She was backup executor in his will, exchanged friendly emails, and received luxury gifts, including a $53,750 wire for a private jet charter in her name. Goldman insisted these were “irrelevant throwaway comments,” which is one way to describe Hermès bags and Bergdorf gift cards.

The Epstein files are functioning like a slow-motion guillotine for elite reputations. Careers keep rolling gently into the basket, one after another. And yet the administration insists there is nothing to see here. Trump himself, asked about Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick visiting Epstein’s island, offered what might be the most morally vacant defense of the week: from what he hears, Lutnick was there with his wife and children. Oh. Well then. Totally different vibe.

“I was never there,” Trump added, in that oddly preemptive tone that suggests he’s arguing with a future documentary narrator. “Somebody will someday say that.” Yeah, that’s generally how history works.

If the Epstein scandal is being dismissed as a sideshow, Congress has chosen an equally elegant way to express its displeasure: barreling toward a Homeland Security shutdown with no off-ramp in sight. Senate Democrats blocked a Department of Homeland Security funding bill this week, not because they hate airports or disaster relief, but because they refuse to extend a blank check for chaos in immigration enforcement. As Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer put it sharply, legislators would not “support a blank check for chaos” without “commonsense reforms to rein in ICE and stop the violence.”

The immediate trigger for this standoff was the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration operation in Minneapolis, known as Operation Metro Surge, which saw thousands of arrests and two fatal shootings by federal agents that have consumed public attention and fury. Democrats demanded meaningful changes, including mandatory body cameras, identifiable badges for agents, limits on enforcement near schools and hospitals, and judicial warrants for home entry, but the White House and GOP negotiators have refused to go far enough. Schumer argued that without these reforms, there would be no Democratic votes to fund ICE and extend the “awful status quo” that exists.

The irony is galling even by Washington standards: the very agency driving the dispute, ICE, is budgetarily insulated. Thanks to last year’s funding surge, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, ICE and Customs and Border Protection have already been allocated tens of billions of dollars above their usual appropriations, meaning a DHS shutdown would leave their operations largely unaffected while hitting TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency instead.

That is, Congress is effectively staging a knife fight over immigration enforcement while threatening to unplug airport security and disaster response to do it. “From day one, I’ve said unless there were really strong, meaningful reforms to rein in ICE and stop the violence, there will not be Democratic votes to fund ICE,” Schumer said, capturing the deadlock with brutal clarity.

A shutdown now appears imminent, likely beginning as soon as funding lapses, and would mark another chapter in a political climate where institutional trust is already evaporating. ICE will continue its work, but FEMA will be furloughed. TSA agents, the very people who screen travelers’ shoes, could be sent to work without pay. All of it, every conflict, every deadlock, every lapse in trust, grows out of the same dynamic: narrative certainty on one side, evidentiary contradictions on the other, and a public caught somewhere in the middle.

Remember the dramatic headlines about an ICE officer ambushed with a shovel and broom handle in Minnesota? DHS alleged attempted murder, and a violent struggle. The Justice Department has now moved to dismiss those charges with prejudice, citing “newly discovered evidence” that is materially inconsistent with the original allegations. Translation: the affidavit didn’t hold up.

A Trump-appointed judge also ruled against DHS in Minnesota, issuing an emergency order requiring detainees swift access to counsel and sharply admonishing federal enforcement: “The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then disregard their constitutional rights because it would be too challenging to honor those rights.”

Just to make sure the week wasn’t lacking in classified intrigue, we also learned that a whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been quietly marinating for eight months, and it centers on an intercepted foreign conversation that reportedly mentioned Jared Kushner.

According to reporting, the NSA intercepted a discussion between two foreign nationals about Iran in which Jared Kushner’s name came up. Officials say the allegations in the conversation would be “significant if verified.” They are not verified. They may amount to gossip, or disinformation, or possibly something more. But the point is: it was sensitive enough to trigger a whistleblower complaint alleging Tulsi Gabbard restricted distribution of the intelligence and limited who could see it.

And it lands differently when Kushner himself has been remarkably blunt about what, exactly, he’s selling. In one interview, asked why his investment fund supposedly outperforms competitors, he reportedly answered, more or less: because we have geopolitical connections. Which is a refreshingly honest way of saying the quiet part out loud: this isn’t just finance, it’s influence, the monetization of proximity to power.

So maybe the intercept was nothing, just smoke. But in an administration where the president’s son-in-law is simultaneously floating through Middle East negotiations and running a fund backed by foreign monarchies, even an unverified mention in a foreign intercept is enough to make Washington’s nervous system start firing. Because “geopolitical connections” is a pretty phrase for something Americans used to call a conflict of interest.

The complaint reportedly sat inside her office for months before Congress received a heavily redacted version under “read and return” rules, meaning lawmakers weren’t allowed to take notes. Trumpian transparency like “you can look at it, but don’t write anything down.”

Gabbard’s defenders insist she acted properly. Inspector generals have not found credible misconduct. Republicans say the uproar is political theater. Democrats say the delay itself is the problem. In an administration where Jared Kushner has helped steer negotiations with Iran while also running a Middle East investment fund, even the mention of his name inside an intercepted foreign conversation is enough to make Washington twitch.

There is something deeply American about it. We have infinite money for data centers, celebrity brands, and speculative AI plays, but when it comes to school lunches or public housing, we are suddenly very concerned about fiscal discipline. We can summon billions for enforcement surges, but not the political will to reform the agencies carrying them out.

The market is not a moral scoreboard. It is a price discovery mechanism for capital. The market does not measure justice, reflect trauma,and it does not care a damn constitutional rights. It will go up, and it will go down, and the people who move it fastest will be just fine.

The rest of us are left watching an Attorney General effectively explain that accountability can wait because, have you checked the Dow lately?

That was the surreal core of it. Victims of Jeffrey Epstein seated behind her. Lawmakers asking about prosecutions, about transparency, about whether powerful people would ever face consequences. And the response, distilled to its essence: the Dow is over 50,000. The S&P is smashing records. Americans’ 401(k)s are booming. In other words: why are we talking about pedophiles when equities are green?

It’s a breathtaking inversion of priorities, an Attorney General behaving as though economic sentiment is a substitute for criminal accountability. As though a rising index absolves a government of pursuing the truth. As though a bull market is a get-out-of-prosecution-free card.

And it would almost be dark comedy if it weren’t so grotesque: a republic reduced to a trading floor, where the suffering of victims competes with quarterly earnings, and the implicit message is clear, if the line keeps climbing, the questions will stop.

Except they won’t, and even in a bull market, gravity reasserts itself.

By the time you read this, the sun will be up and the markets will be opening again, ready to tell us how we’re supposed to feel about the state of the republic.

Yesterday, Marz and I stepped away from all of it. We drove over the mountains for a quick visit to the big city, a simple meal with family, a little laughter that didn’t require fact-checking, a reminder that most of life still happens far away from hearing rooms and press briefings and breathless cable chyrons. On the way home, we took the scenic route along the Oregon Coast, where the cliffs drop into that impossible blue-gray Pacific and the light hits the water just right, and for a while the only thing rising or falling was the tide. No Dow ticker. No shutdown countdown. Just wind, salt air, and the long curve of Highway 101.

We made it back home in time for our nightly moonbeam vigil. Marz is fully committed to the routine now, especially when it isn’t raining. He stations himself like a furry little sentinel of cosmic order, gazing at the sky as if personally responsible for keeping the moon in orbit. I handle the moonbeams, it’s a good system.

Sending you peace and love from the coast.