INTRO
Good evening, and welcome to Two to the Fifth, the ten-minute news show for people who suspect the news may have started before breakfast.
We look at five timeframes: the last 24 hours, the last week, the last month, the last year, and the last decade. Two minutes each. Five pours. One country. No chaser.
Most news tells you what happened today. We try to put it in context.
This week: primaries, tariffs, terrorism, artificial intelligence, manufacturing, electricity and constitutional law. Which sounds less like a news rundown and more like somebody emptying the junk drawer onto the kitchen table and finding Canada underneath the batteries.
Sometimes, however, apparently unrelated stories turn out to have something in common. Gimme a minute. Well, gimme 10 minutes actually.
This is Two to the Fifth.
THE LAST 24 HOURS
What Exactly Are Voters Trying to Change?
New Hampshire and Rhode Island’s primaries were Tuesday and Wednesday. New Hampshire was hardly a pitchfork uprising, favoring incumbents and establishment picks. The Rhode Island Primary was a different story.
Former CVS executive Helena Foulkes thumped Democratic Governor Dan McKee, 62 to 38 percent, after a campaign in which McKee’s handling of the long-running Washington Bridge mess became a major issue. And Providence voters delivered an upset in a very different ideological direction, with Mayor Brett Smiley losing to 27-year-old democratic socialist David Morales. Rent control, which Smiley had vetoed, was a central theme of Morales’s campaign.
There’s the primary season in miniature. A former corporate executive beats an incumbent democratic governor. A democratic socialist beats an incumbent mayor. New Hampshire’s picks feel like nostalgia.
Ten years after an election that upended American politics, there’s still plenty of appetite for change. What’s a whole lot less clear is any trend in what voters want to change it to.
Tariffs: Canada Waits Politely, Then Takes Its Turn
In response to U.S. tariffs, Canadian retaliatory tariffs took effect Tuesday ranging from 15 to 50 percent, covering about $27.6 billion in U.S. goods. Which is how trade wars work. You tax their stuff. They tax yours. Sorry.
Then the United States announced outright bans, effective September 29, on broad categories of Canadian alcohol, motorcycles and dairy products. The dairy list includes whey protein and molasses. Not sure what kind of cow produces molasses, but whatever.
There is a serious idea underneath these tariffs. America lost enormous amounts of manufacturing capacity over decades, and rebuilding some of it is a legitimate national goal. In theory, well-targeted tariffs can help protect domestic production and jobs. But the results so far are unconvincing at best. And they’re not without cost.
Everybody wants the factory back. Nobody particularly wants to pay the bill for bringing it back.
THE LAST WEEK
Twenty-Five Years Later, the Focus Has Migrated Inside the House
Friday marks twenty-five years since 9/11. Before the memorials and documentaries arrive, here’s one number worth carrying with you. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday found that when Americans are asked whether ideological violence from inside or outside the country poses the greater danger, 61 percent say domestic extremists. Just 34 percent say foreign extremists.
When offered a broader range of threats, mass shootings rank above either kind of terrorism.
Twenty-five years ago, America reorganized its institutions around danger coming from somewhere else, creating Homeland Security, ICE, and TSA (our shoes are quite familiar with this one), with the Director of National Intelligence coming out of the 9/11 commission.
A quarter-century later, some of those same institutions sit at the center of much more domestic arguments.
Today’s Washington Post documents how DHS has shifted enormous resources toward interior immigration enforcement; ICE is arresting record numbers of people inside the country, including growing numbers without criminal records. The Director of National Intelligence has also become entangled in domestic disputes over elections and presidential power.
So as you watch the commemorations this week, notice not only what America remembers being afraid of. Notice what we’re afraid of now, and how our own institutions have morphed accordingly.
Meanwhile, Washington and Beijing Agree on Something
Reuters reported Friday that U.S. and Chinese officials appear to be preparing for their first official bilateral talks devoted specifically to AI safety later this month. Two countries competing for technological, economic and military advantage apparently can both imagine ways AI might go so rogue that nobody wins.
The Cold War eventually taught nuclear powers that mutual distrust and mutual self-preservation can coexist. Nice to know we haven’t forgotten everything.
THE LAST MONTH
Bigotry in Campaigns: Same Tactic in a Convenient New Package
Reuters reported this week that a number of Republican campaigns are making Muslim identity a campaign strategy. I was a bit stunned to see this tactic in negative ads I recently saw in both Maryland and Pennsylvania.
Vice President JD Vance recently called Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is Muslim, “very, very evil” and accused him of defending terrorism. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has attacked a proposed Muslim-led real estate development as an effort to establish sharia law, an allegation disputed by the developers and civil-rights groups.
You should absolutely be allowed to campaign against a candidate who happens to be Muslim. But there’s a big difference between that and using the fact that they’re Muslim as a reason to oppose them.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, some fear-based political tactics have an embarrassingly long shelf life.
I Love It. I Hate It.
According to the Institute for Supply Management, U.S. manufacturing expanded for the eighth straight month in August, with its index at 54.6. Yeah, I have no idea what that means either, but I looked it up. If the number’s over 50, that’s a good thing.
Yet Reuters reports that 58 percent of manufacturers comments were negative, citing higher input prices, tariffs, shortages and uncertainty. So is it A: Manufacturing is expanding? Or B: Manufacturers are pessimistic? Apparently C: All of the above.
The statistics say production increased. The person running the factory - or working in it - is saying: then why do I feel less secure than I did six months ago?
Finally, a macroeconomic indicator that behaves like an actual person.
THE LAST YEAR
Why Does the Cloud Need an Extension Cord?
For years electricity was the thing that happened when you flipped the switch. It was just…there.
Now it is becoming a strategic economic constraint. AI data centers in particular are driving power demand higher.
In response, the Energy Department announced Tuesday a loan of up to $1.9 billion to help restart Iowa’s Duane Arnold nuclear plant, which shut down in 2020. Google has already signed a 25-year agreement to buy its electricity.
We shut the plant six years ago, at a time when keeping it running no longer made economic sense. Now Google needs the power so badly that we’re spending nearly $2 billion to help turn it back on. Apparently the cloud needs a really big extension cord.
At the same time, the Trump administration has spent roughly $3.9 billion buying back offshore-wind leases so developers will abandon projects, according to the Associated Press. Some agreements require or accompany investment in fossil-fuel projects instead.
if America urgently needs more electricity, does spending almost $4 billion to kill new generation while spending another $1.9 billion to resurrect old generation constitute a coherent - or economically wise - power strategy?
Who Is Supposed to Say No?
Again and again over the past year, major fights over the limits of presidential power - from voting and citizenship to spending cuts and agency dismantling - have ended up in front of federal judges.
Some should. Deciding whether presidents exceed statutory or constitutional authority is part of judicial review. But there is another institution that is supposed to counterbalance executive power too. Congress.
Congress is supposed to write the laws. Control spending. Conduct oversight. Except Congress increasingly deadlocks while presidents act. Then somebody sues. And the courts become the referee.
It’s been getting worse for decades. When did federal courts become America’s most functional congressional oversight committee? That’s not technically their job. Which is precisely the point.
THE LAST DECADE
New Symptoms. Same Old Problem.
Ten years ago, Donald Trump won an election almost nobody expected him to. Bernie Sanders nearly overturned the Democratic establishment from the other direction. The movements wanted profoundly different things. But their supporters shared something important.
The system wasn’t working for them.
In a Pew survey during the 2016 campaign, 46 percent of registered voters said life had gotten worse for people like them. Among Trump supporters it was 75 percent. By August, another Pew survey found that 49 percent of registered voters thought life would be worse for the next generation. Only 24 percent thought it would be better.
Like it or not, the dissatisfaction didn’t start with Trump. Trump stumbled onto how large the market for it had become, and exploited the opportunity, quite successfully.
So how did such massive dissatisfaction, on both sides, happen? Here’s my best guess.
Most of us grew up thinking the American Dream was America’s natural condition. Except it wasn’t.
After World War II, long before nearly every one of us was born, the United States occupied an extraordinary position. Our factories - and economy - were intact while much of Europe and Asia was rebuilding from the rubble of war. American companies could manufacture almost anything and sell it almost anywhere. So productivity and wages rose, unions asked for a lot, and got it. Homeownership expanded. Employer pensions and Social Security made a comfortable retirement attainable for millions more Americans.
Not everyone shared equally. Black Americans in particular were deliberately excluded from large parts of that prosperity. But for tens of millions of Americans, an expectation took hold: Work hard, play by the rules, and my kids will do better than I did.
We mistook an unusually favorable period in American history for the permanent operating system. Then the rest of the world rebuilt. Europe competed. Japan competed. The 1973 Arab Oil Embargo exposed how dependent America had become on resources from elsewhere.
Over the following decades, globalization brought billions of people into an increasingly integrated world economy. We benefited from cheaper stuff, but factories also moved offshore and many of the jobs went with them.
The rest of the world didn’t steal the American Dream. Mostly, it just caught up with us. But nobody sent Americans the memo that the deal had changed.
Put this week through that lens and a bunch of seemingly unrelated stories start to line up. The manufacturer who sees growth but feels insecure. The citizen who wants the factory back but still wants cheap imported goods. The person worried immigrants are taking our jobs who can’t find anyone to paint their house. The voter who chooses “the new one” instead of the incumbent..
Different symptoms. Same underlying questions: What happened? How come my kids don’t have the same security and opportunity America promised me? And whose fault is it?
It would be nice to have a convenient villain, and there are some excellent ones out there, regardless of how you lean politically. But maybe we keep making a mistake when we ask which group broke America. Maybe the world changed, and a lot of us are simply mourning different versions of the same thing: the expectation that every generation should live a little better than the one before it.
If there’s a bright spot here, I think we’re remarkably unified on one thing: We want the American bargain back. Now the tougher part. Are we willing to find common ground, roll up our sleeves, and build the next version of it instead of spending another decade fighting over who stole the last one?
OUTRO
So that’s this week’s Two to the Fifth.
Underneath a surprising amount of our national discourse is the same nagging question: What happened to the deal we thought we had?
The tragedy isn’t that the world we accepted as normal wasn’t a forever state. The tragedy would be spending another decade arguing about who stole the old American Dream instead of figuring out what the next one should look like.
Thanks for joining us. Now get out of here. Drink responsibly. Before you blame somebody for stealing the American Dream, check whether it came with a lifetime warranty.
And remember: the news is not what happened today.
The news is what today proves is still happening.