Good morning! Donald Trump brought his traveling extravaganza to Sioux City, Iowa, Thursday night, where he spent roughly 94 minutes celebrating America’s golden age, warning of economic apocalypse if Democrats win the midterms, and reminding Iowans that their 401(k)s had doubled thanks entirely to him. “You didn’t do a damn thing. I did it,” he graciously explained. Along the way, he described the intellectual challenges of identifying a snake on a cognitive test, complained that operating a modern lawnmower practically requires a PhD from MIT, and revealed that Melania keeps begging him to stop dancing in public. And those were merely the warm-up acts. The evening’s main attractions involved a new ocean, a constitutional loophole, and an awards committee that clearly needed replacing.
First, the ocean. Having already renamed a gulf and a Great Lake, Trump decided the Atlantic might look better as the American Ocean. He even claimed to have sent Google CEO Sundar Pichai a map featuring his proposed improvement. According to Trump, Pichai responded, “Sir, this has to stop.” Trump insisted he was joking. Presumably, Google has learned to distinguish presidential humor from executive action, although the rest of us could use some guidance.
Next came the Twenty-Second Amendment. Trump acknowledged that the constitutional prohibition against being elected president more than twice was unfortunately “quite concise,” with very little wiggle room. But he thinks he deserves another turn because he insists the 2020 election was stolen from him. Apparently, the Constitution now has a customer-service department where disappointed candidates can dispute their electoral history and request a complimentary term.
Finally, because the Nobel Peace Prize committee has stubbornly failed to appreciate his accomplishments, Iowa congressional candidate Joe Mitchell presented Trump with a newly invented Man of the Century Award. Mitchell even instructed CNN to zoom in on it. Why bother with an international selection committee when someone in Sioux City can produce a certificate and settle the matter?
So there we have it. A new ocean, a constitutional do-over, and a consolation prize for the Nobel.
Outside the arena, the actual world was proving considerably less cooperative. Oil prices were surging, Wall Street was wobbling, and the war Trump promised would end soon was showing every sign of sending Americans another very expensive bill.
Hours before Trump told Iowans their retirement accounts had doubled, the Nasdaq 100 fell 2.9 percent and the S&P 500 lost 1.2 percent. On Friday morning Brent crude rose past $115 a barrel for the first time since May. Investors, spooked, poured into government bonds. Treasuries had their best day since 2023, the kind of rally that usually means money is looking for a place to hide.
Two separate worries are converging. The first is energy. The Iran war has squeezed shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and with hopes for a settlement fading, oil is pricing in the possibility of a long fight. That cost lands everywhere, from the diesel in a combine to the price of groceries.
The second is artificial intelligence. Meta’s latest forecast for capital spending spooked investors already uneasy about how much the AI boom costs and how much of it is financed with debt. The tech giants have carried an outsized share of the stock market’s gains—and, through index funds, plenty of Americans’ retirement savings—on the promise that those enormous investments will eventually pay off. Thursday, investors were no longer content to take that promise on faith.
Neither problem is small. Together, they create an especially nasty squeeze: higher fuel and transportation costs for households just as the technology stocks doing so much of the lifting for their retirement savings begin to wobble. The golden age, it turns out, has a margin call.
In Sioux City, Trump said Iran would be “finished very soon, one way or the other,” and added that it was “almost insignificant to me which way.” His complaint was that the U.S. had killed so many of Iran’s leaders that “nobody wants to be president of Iran,” leaving him no one to negotiate with. Imagine bragging about that.
His ambassador to the United Nations is working on a different calendar. Mike Waltz told the Financial Times that the U.S. could still be stuck in a stalemate with Iran a year from now. So the president says very soon, and his own diplomat says possibly next October.
The war, sadly, is not on pause while the White House sorts out its calendar. According to the U.S. Naval Institute, October has already recorded 27 attacks on commercial ships, more than any previous month of the war. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has fallen again. Trump told the Iowa crowd that Iranian forces still “shoot at us every once in a while.” It sounds almost casual from a rally stage. For the Americans deployed in the region, there is nothing casual about incoming fire, and no clear end to their mission.
The bill for all this shows up at the pump. Diesel is averaging about $6.31 a gallon, and American refineries spent the summer operating at their highest utilization rates since 1998. Trump announced plans for up to $150 million in Defense Production Act funding to expand refining capacity, one more emergency lever in a growing pile of them. But announcing new capacity doesn’t put additional diesel in anybody’s tank today, and the midterms are eleven days away.
That brings us to perhaps the most revealing timetable of all. On October 8, Trump promised not to resume military strikes against Iran before the November 3 election. The Pentagon has reportedly prepared for renewed major operations, and further escalation afterward remains a possibility.
The war has no clear end date. Trump’s promise not to resume strikes, however, has an election date attached.
Another war offers a much longer political timeline. A leak of more than 420,000 internal emails from Germany’s far-right AfD, examined by the Guardian, shows the party courting Trump within days of his 2016 victory. Its first congratulatory telegram expressed confidence that he would end the war in Ukraine “by mutual agreement with Russia.”
A decade later, the AfD leads German polls at about 30 percent, its politicians have met with State Department officials, and Trump has just waived new Russia sanctions that Congress overwhelmingly passed.
The party’s wish list hasn’t changed much. Washington’s approach to Russia has.
We’re examining the connections and will have more soon.
The future of warfare, as envisioned by Project Meridian co-leader Palmer Luckey, needs more than drones and autonomous submarines. Luckey and Ben Lamm have unveiled Warhound, a startup valued at $1.2 billion before its first genetically engineered puppy has even been born. The plan is to clone the military’s best working dogs, gene-edit them for health and eventually improved performance, and outfit them with body armor and what Anduril calls “cybernetics.” Lamm, whose other company says it is bringing back the woolly mammoth, calls it a “Captain America programme for dogs.” Investors have already put up $200 million, including Sequoia, Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest, and CIA-backed In-Q-Tel.
Luckey’s Pentagon appointment comes with an interesting bit of timing. Within a week of Pete Hegseth selecting him to help shape the military’s future technology priorities, Luckey’s defense firm, Anduril, announced two contracts worth up to $4.7 billion combined. There is no evidence Project Meridian influenced those awards, but the overlap between advising the Pentagon on what it should buy and running a company positioned to sell it raises an obvious question: Who gets to help write the shopping list?
Warhound’s founders say the genetic modifications could mean healthier, longer-lived dogs and fewer animals washing out of training. If those improvements are real, they would be welcome. But as someone who loves dogs, I find the larger proposition deeply disturbing. These are living, trusting creatures, not weapons systems that happen to have fur. We already ask military working dogs to risk their lives in conflicts they cannot understand or choose. Now the plan is to redesign them for those missions and build a billion-dollar business around the results. The dogs get no say in what happens to their bodies or where those bodies are sent.
Man’s best friend is now a defense-industry growth opportunity. I can think of few uglier ways to repay their loyalty.
On that note, Marz and I are in need of a long romp this afternoon. I need to clear the images Warhound has planted in my head, and he has important business involving fresh air, suspicious smells, and whatever has wandered through the yard since breakfast. He doesn’t need body armor, cybernetics, or a billionaire’s vision of the perfect military dog. He needs room to run, the freedom to be a dog, and someone who loves him just as he is.
And for the record, he’s already perfect. Nobody needed $200 million to make him that way.
Warhound is one the most barbaric ideas to be hatched in a remarkably barbaric era.
What ever the form, none of these people value LIFE, honest to goodness, organic from birth to old age to death LIFE. Not the EARTH, not the oceans, the rivers, the mountains, the deserts, wild life, domestic life, ANY LIFE! The value for them is in how they can manipulate, reconfigure, and play with the natural order until all is destroyed. These are soulless mounds of flesh slithering all over living out their most gross fetishes....I hope if y'all haven't voted yet you get out and do so and keep alert for after 11/3, it's gonna be a colossal shit show pretty much guaranteed!