Some weeks the news cycle gives you nothing. Other weeks it hands you a $400 million ballroom, a federal indictment over a photo of seashells, the King of England personally negotiating American whisky prices, and Big Tech setting fire to enough money to fund a small country’s GDP. Pull up a chair.
Big Tech: The “Just Light Money on Fire” Era
The AI arms race has fully detached from anything resembling normal corporate behavior. Combined Big Tech capital expenditure on AI is projected to exceed $600 billion in 2026 alone. Six hundred billion. With a B. Alphabet just raised its full-year capex guidance to as much as $190 billion. Microsoft pushed past $40 billion a quarter and warned investors it still expects to be capacity-constrained through the rest of the year. Tesla nearly tripled its capital plan to over $25 billion, mostly on self-driving, Optimus humanoid robots, and a robotaxi rollout that Elon Musk himself called a “leap of faith.”
Speaking of Musk, he’s been on the witness stand in the OpenAI trial, accusing Sam Altman and the company of betraying the nonprofit mission he says it was founded on. Things got weirder this week when OpenAI’s lawyers introduced messages they say show Shivon Zilis — a longtime Musk employee and the mother of four of his children — acting as a covert liaison between him and OpenAI. Friday’s headlines are now legal-thriller territory.
Apple closed out a strong quarter, but Tim Cook also warned of an “extended memory crunch” — meaning the same DRAM/NAND scarcity hitting hyperscalers is now squeezing the world’s biggest consumer electronics company. Tech stocks just closed out their best month since the start of the pandemic in 2020. The market is high, the Wall Street parties are good, and somewhere a Cursor-powered Claude agent autonomously deleted a startup’s entire production database — and the backups — after picking up a stray API token. Somebody’s founder is staring at a ceiling fan right now.
The King Charles Whisky Routine
Let’s talk about Friday’s most absurd headline. King Charles III and Queen Camilla wrapped a state visit to the White House on Thursday, and within hours Trump posted on Truth Social that he was lifting tariffs on Scotch whisky, “in honor of the King and Queen.” His exact words: “The King and Queen got me to do something that nobody else was able to do, without hardly even asking!”
Sit with that for a second.
These tariffs were costing Scotland’s economy millions of pounds a month. They were also, crucially, costing American consumers — because tariffs are a tax that gets paid by the importer and passed on at the register. Your bottle of Glenlivet got more expensive because of the President. Your bottle of Macallan got more expensive because of the President. The Scotch Whisky Association had been begging for relief for months. The U.K. government had been negotiating. Distillers were staring down a 25% tariff snapback in June. Nothing worked.
Then King Charles flew over, smiled at a state dinner, and Trump dropped the tariffs. As a personal favor. To a foreign monarch. Because he was charmed.
Genuine question: shouldn’t the President of the United States want to lower prices for Americans? Without first requiring a royal entourage to fly in and butter him up? The whole point of being the President of America is that the people you should be doing favors for are, as the title implies, Americans. Instead we’re getting a foreign policy where pricing decisions on consumer goods hinge on whether His Majesty schedules a visit. Want cheaper gas? Maybe Norway can send a prince. Cheaper electronics? Get someone to put the Emperor of Japan on a plane. This is no way to run a 250-year-old republic.
How Bad Are the Economic Numbers, Really?
Pretty bad. Here’s the polling, all from the last two weeks:
- CNN/SSRS (early April): Trump’s approval on the economy hit a career low of 31%. Approval on inflation: 27%, down from 44% a year earlier. Roughly two-thirds of Americans say Trump’s policies have made economic conditions worse — the highest of his presidency, and higher than the share who said the same about Biden at any point in his term.
- Reuters/Ipsos (April 24-27): Overall approval at 34%, his lowest since returning to the White House. Only 22% of voters back Trump’s performance on the cost of living. 22 percent.
- AP-NORC (April 16-20): Overall approval 33%, economy 30%.
- CNBC All-America (released April 23): Net approval of -18 overall, -21 on the economy. Both are the worst readings of Trump’s two terms in CNBC’s polling.
- Silver Bulletin polling average (this week): Trump’s net approval on inflation and cost of living has fallen to -40. Forty.
Average gas: $4.17 a gallon, up from under $3 before the war with Iran. Eggs are still expensive. Groceries are still expensive. One Republican respondent in the CNN poll wrote, in their own words: “Prices! Everything is so expensive. Makes it very difficult to do anything other than work and go home.”
That’s the political climate in which Senate Republicans had a brilliant idea.
The $400 Million Ballroom (No, Really)
Following the attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton last weekend, Senators Lindsey Graham, Katie Britt, and Eric Schmitt rolled out legislation this week to authorize $400 million in taxpayer money to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom on the White House grounds. The East Wing has already been demolished to make room. The original cost estimate was $100 million. It has, in the time-honored Washington construction tradition, “ballooned” — pun fully intended — to four times that. Trump previously said the project would be paid for with private donations.
Their reasoning, as best I can follow it: there was a security incident at a hotel ballroom, therefore Americans must pay $400 million for a different ballroom. With $39 trillion in debt on the books, gas at $4.17, and the President sitting at 22% approval on the cost of living, the diagnosis from a wing of the Senate GOP is apparently that what really ails the country is a shortage of gilded function space.
Even some Republicans are quietly raising hands. Rand Paul says he’s not backing “the whole $500 million.” Rick Scott pointed out — with the kind of clarity that emerges only when one is genuinely annoyed — “We have $39 trillion in debt. Maybe we ought to stop spending money.” When Rick Scott is the voice of fiscal restraint at your party meeting, the meeting has gone sideways.
The pitch is essentially: the political moment requires a gilded ballroom for the President. Eggs are $7. Gas just went up another 50 cents overnight. But what the people really need — what will heal the discourse — is a ninety-thousand-square-foot crystal palace on the South Lawn. Of course.
Words and Threats
Worth pausing to remember the rhetorical environment we’re operating in. This is a President who, on stage with Tucker Carlson before the 2024 election, said of Liz Cheney: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.” He has called her guilty of treason and floated military tribunals. NPR tallied over 100 public threats from Trump since 2022 to investigate, prosecute, jail, or otherwise punish his political opponents.
That’s the rhetorical baseline. Which brings us to Comey.
A Year. To Investigate. A Photograph.
On May 15, 2025, James Comey posted an Instagram photo of seashells he’d seen on a beach walk in North Carolina. The shells were arranged to read “86 47.” Caption: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” When some people pointed out that “86” can be read as a violent threat, he deleted the post the same day, said it never occurred to him that’s how it would land, and added that he opposes violence of any kind.
That was almost a year ago. On Tuesday, the DOJ indicted him for it.
Two felony counts. Threatening the president and transmitting a threat across state lines. Up to ten years if convicted. This comes after the first indictment of Comey was tossed by a judge who ruled the prosecutor was illegally appointed. So we’re on round two, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who used to be Trump’s personal lawyer — held a press conference where he was asked how the government plans to prove Comey “knowingly and willfully” intended a threat. His answer: there had been “a tremendous amount of investigation.”
A tremendous amount. Of investigation. Into a beach photo. For a year.
Anyone who’s spent five minutes in a bar knows what “86” means. To 86 someone is to cut them off and bounce them. It’s bartender slang older than half the people drinking. Green Day has a song called “86” about getting kicked out of a club. The notion that a former FBI director who saw shells in the sand and thought “hey, political message” was actually plotting a presidential assassination — and the federal government needed twelve months and a grand jury to determine that — is the kind of thing that should make every taxpayer reach for a receipt and ask for a refund. He saw the shells. He took the picture. When confronted, he took it down and apologized. That’s it. That’s the case.
If this isn’t a textbook example of a Justice Department being aimed like a weapon at the President’s enemies list, I genuinely don’t know what would qualify.
Former DOJ Prosecutor had a good talk on it all.
Cubs Take the Series at Petco in a Close One
Out west, the Cubs and Padres played one of the more entertaining three-game sets of the early season at Petco, and Chicago walked away with a 2-1 series win that came down to a one-run finale on Wednesday afternoon.
It started rough. Game 1 on Monday was a 9-7 slugfest the Padres took at home — the kind of game where the bullpens got passed around like a hot potato and nobody covered themselves in glory. The Cubs answered Tuesday with an 8-3 statement win, Pete Crow-Armstrong launching a three-run shot in the seventh, and the series was knotted heading into the rubber game.
Then came the finale. The Cubs jumped out 3-0 through four against Matt Waldron, with PCA launching another three-run bomb to do the heavy lifting. The Padres punched back with three runs in the bottom of the fifth to tie it — Nick Castellanos with a two-run shot, Miguel Andujar going deep on his own. Matt Shaw, who finished 3-for-4 on the day, answered with a solo homer in the sixth to put the Cubs back ahead. Tatis Jr. plated one in the eighth to make it a one-run game, but Hoby Milner and Ben Brown slammed the door, and Chicago held on 5-4. Jameson Taillon got the win with seven solid — three runs, six punchouts, only three hits allowed.
The Cubs are now 19-12, sitting six games over .500, and looking like a real team in the NL Central. Diamondbacks come to Wrigley this weekend.
A Couple Things to Watch and One to Stream
HBO’s Rooster. If you haven’t started this one yet, do. Steve Carell plays Greg Russo, a best-selling writer of trashy “beach read” detective novels who takes a writer-in-residence gig at the small New England college where his daughter Katie (Charly Clive) teaches art history. It’s from Bill Lawrence — the Scrubs, Ted Lasso, and Shrinking guy — co-created with Matt Tarses, and it has that exact same Bill Lawrence DNA: warm, ensemble-driven, a little messy, with characters who feel like people you’d want to grab a beer with. It’s holding an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes, was renewed for a second season in April, and the cast is stacked — John C. McGinley, Phil Dunster, Danielle Deadwyler, Connie Britton, Rory Scovel, Annie Mumolo. Charly Clive in particular is a revelation if you haven’t seen her work before. New episodes drop Sunday nights through May 10.
It’s the comfort hang you need after a week like this one. Carell does the cringy-but-warm thing as well as anybody alive, and the father-daughter chemistry is the engine that makes the whole thing run.
Nikki Glaser: Good Girl. Glaser’s fifth hour dropped on Hulu last Friday and it’s worth your evening. Filmed at the Fabulous Fox Theatre in her hometown of St. Louis, directed by Hamish Hamilton (the man behind the Oscars and the Super Bowl Halftime Show), it’s a noticeable step up in production — pop-star-style entrance, a backdrop that actually changes throughout the set, her own hype song. The material is about aging, beauty, fame, and the absurdity of being told to be a “good girl” while making a living telling the truth on stage. She’s coming off back-to-back Golden Globes hosting gigs, and you can feel the relaxed confidence of someone who doesn’t need to chase the room anymore.
Catch you next week, assuming the news cycle slows down. (It won’t.)