‘Went smoothly’
Recently: Is it a heatwave if the heat never quits?
Today: The U.S. president has fired his attorney general—the second Cabinet secretary he’s relieved of her responsibilities in a month. … His first prime-time address on the Iran war offered no timeline and no plan for the Strait, as oil crossed $104 a barrel. … &c.
For members: What is legal tender, anyway? J.W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev’s new book, Against Money.
+ New music from Bill Orcutt ...
Loyalty and its limits
On Wednesday, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi rode with U.S. President Donald Trump to the Supreme Court for oral arguments on birthright citizenship. That evening, she attended his prime-time address on the Iran war. In Trump’s first term, officials who felt their standing slipping tended to keep their distance. Bondi did the opposite—leaning in, spending more time at his side in recent weeks. On Thursday, Trump fired her.
President Trump has now removed two Cabinet secretaries in a month, after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, takes over as acting attorney general. The administration is reportedly considering Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin as a permanent replacement.
Why fire Bondi now?
The reporting points to two frustrations: One, Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation files turned Trump’s own base against her—especially after she told Fox News a client list was “sitting on my desk,” and then the department said, actually, there was no such list. A House subpoena for Bondi’s testimony on the Epstein matter still stands. Two, the president’s efforts to prosecute his political rivals, which it was Bondi’s responsibility to execute, kept failing: A judge threw out the Justice Department’s indictments of the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
One source told CNN that Trump felt Noem’s firing “went smoothly,” making him less wary of removing others.
Meanwhile
- Integrity, outbound. Artemis II lifted off on Wednesday evening from Kennedy Space Center, carrying the first astronauts bound for the Moon since 1972—NASA’s Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Christina Koch, along with mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency. The crew named their Orion capsule Integrity. On Thursday, they prepared for the translunar injection burn—the engine firing that sends them on a four-day coast to the far side of the Moon, farther from Earth than anyone’s ever traveled.
- Stone ages. Trump used his first prime-time address on the Iran war—33 days in—to declare military objectives “nearing completion” and threaten to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages.” He offered no timeline, no plan for the Strait of Hormuz, and no explanation for the war’s shifting goals. On Thursday, oil surged past US$104 a barrel. Asian markets sold off, and representatives of 35 countries met virtually to discuss how to reopen the Strait. The United States didn’t attend.
- Slightly dented. U.S. Supreme Court justices—including three Trump appointees—expressed skepticism at the administration’s bid to end birthright citizenship on Wednesday. Chief Justice John Roberts: “It’s the same Constitution.” … Human Rights Watch documented 1,800 civilian killings in Burkina Faso since 2023, including ethnic cleansing of Fulani communities. … Iran struck Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates during and after Trump’s address on Wednesday night. … Eastern Libya’s Khalifa Haftar acquired Chinese and Turkish drones despite the UN embargo. … Dutch prosecutors recovered the 2,500-year-old Coțofenești helmet—stolen with a firework bomb, feared melted—slightly dented but intact.
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Books
Pace Hume
What is legal tender, anyway? J.W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev’s Against Money.
While campaigning for the American presidency in 2024, Donald Trump appeared at a cryptocurrency conference and promised that, if elected, he’d instruct the U.S. government to set up a “strategic Bitcoin reserve.” On entering office, he signed an executive order to this effect.
And while Bitcoin is the oldest and most established cryptocurrency, it’s just one kind—at the institutional end of the spectrum; President Trump backs the $Trump coin; his wife has the $Melania coin. Cryptocurrencies have gone from niche to mainstream—anyone who’s watched American sports commercials or tracked American campaign finance has noticed.
In the meantime, central banks have begun exploring similar technology to issue their own electronic currencies: The European Union, for example, is moving ahead with a digital euro.
Money, it seems, is undergoing some kind of transformation.
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New music
‘Giving Unknown Origin’
The San Francisco-based guitarist and composer Bill Orcutt is back with a solo record titled Music In Continuous Motion. Which is a pretty good description of this track. Orcutt loops and layers his electric guitar into something restless and luminous.
