Wednesday, February 25, 2026 · 154 newsletters

State of Disunion

politics · ai · tariffs · antitrust · markets · foreign-policy · culture

Published on Wednesday, February 25, 2026.

Pulled from 162 newsletters sent to read@madho.net yesterday. State of the Union day, four days after the Supreme Court torched Trump's tariffs, and the most-covered story in my inbox was not actually the speech. Here's the signal cut from the noise, organized by trend.

Politics: A Speech Nobody Wants to Watch

The dominant thread across the political newsletters wasn't the State of the Union itself; it was the unusual unanimity that the speech is going to be ugly. Matt at WTF Just Happened Today? led with the polling: 55% disapprove of Trump's job performance, 61% say he has "become erratic with age," only 10% of Americans say things are going well. Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger at The Bulwark pointed out Trump has shed roughly a sixth of his approval in a year (CNN now has him at 36%). Rick Wilson framed the night as "humiliation and peril," noting how presidents from FDR to Clinton to Obama have historically used the address to reset a sagging narrative, and predicting Trump cannot.

Democrats are counter-programming, not rebutting. Matt at Crooked Media covered the "State of the Swamp" event organized by former Trump official Miles Taylor at the National Press Club, and Anand Giridharadas at The Ink covered the "People's State of the Union" on the National Mall. Dozens of congressional Democrats are skipping the speech entirely. Lincoln Square hosted a whole afternoon arguing whether they should even show up. Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger is delivering the official response with a kitchen-table affordability message that telegraphs the entire midterm strategy.

Sports gets dragged in. Per PRWeek, Trump invited the gold-medal-winning US men's and women's Olympic hockey teams to the speech; the women's team politely declined, and Flavor Flav, in a turn of events nobody's bingo card had, invited them to party with him in Las Vegas instead. Marc Elias at Democracy Docket called the night "a wannabe king speaks to his court of GOP jesters."

Tariffs: The Liberation From Liberation Day

Last Friday's Supreme Court ruling against Trump's IEEPA-based tariffs is still the macro story everyone is processing. Trivium China titled their piece "Re-liberation day" and walked through the 6-3 decision; Trump has already reverted to a 10% global tariff under the Trade Act of 1974, with Bloomberg noting that the rate is queued to go to 15%. Global Trade Magazine flagged the fresh uncertainty for supply chains, and The Average Joe was the clearest on the consequence: between $133B and $175B in tariff refunds are now potentially owed to corporate America, Customs and Border Protection only stopped collecting the now-illegal duties on February 24 (three days after the ruling), and Kavanaugh openly described the unwind as a legal "mess." Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution tied the moment to a fresh NBER paper showing tariff shocks are contractionary across 184 years of US history.

David Callaway flagged the next SCOTUS shoe to drop: a major climate case forcing Exxon and Chevron into a single federal preemption ruling. Semafor Business noted importers are already lining up to sue for refunds, and that the paperwork alone will take months.

AI: Anthropic Is Having the Worst Week of Its Existence

By volume, this was the biggest single story of the day, and it broke open in a way I didn't see coming. Techmeme led with sourcing from Axios and Reuters: the Department of Defense told Anthropic it will invoke the Defense Production Act, or label Anthropic "a supply chain risk," if it is not given unfettered Claude access by Friday. The existing contract bars two uses, surveillance of Americans inside the US, and Claude in autonomous lethal weapons; the Pentagon now wants both. Dario Amodei is set to meet Pete Hegseth today per The Information, and Alex Wilhelm at Cautious Optimism reports Anthropic intends to dig in. As @deanwball put it on X, the Pentagon's position is that Anthropic is "Woke; such a national security risk that they need to be regulated in a manner usually reserved for foreign adversary firms; AND so essential for the military that they need to be commandeered using wartime authority."

Software stocks are in a doom loop. Runtime led with "Wall Street doesn't get software," explaining how Anthropic's Friday release of Claude Code Security sent IBM's stock down 13% and wiped billions off CrowdStrike and Okta. App Economy Insights drew the broader frame: "if you are a software stock in 2026, you are only one Anthropic blog post away from calamity," then pivoted to point out Anthropic itself runs on Workday for its own HR and finance. Techmeme also flagged Meta's agreement to acquire up to 6GW of AMD Instinct GPUs in a deal valued at $100B+, potentially giving Meta up to 10% of AMD.

The Citrini doomer post is the other half of the panic. A viral 7,000-word AI doomsday scenario from Citrini Research, dated as a 2028 thought experiment but read as a near-term mechanism, spooked SaaS and fintech. Charlie Liu at Fintechnize tied it to the OpenClaw aftermath (an open-source agent project that did meaningful damage by chewing through inboxes when guardrails failed). Ben Thompson at Stratechery wrote the most pointed rebuttal, arguing the piece "lacks an appreciation for dynamism and markets." Semafor's First Word column was the cleanest summary: Blue Owl is real but not systemic, and Citrini is systemic but not real, and the two are getting confused.

Agents are the actual story underneath the panic. Axios AI+ ran a Scott Rosenberg piece framing the moment as "the bot population bomb," walking through Gas Town (Steve Yegge's labor camp for coding agents) and OpenClaw as proof of a Cambrian moment. Aakash Gupta coined "Vibe PMing" with an Amplitude principal PM showing the agent stack pulling data, drafting specs, and filing tickets live. ChinaTalk wrote about Chinese vibecoders building on ByteDance's TRAE and the new Doubao-Seed-2.0-Code, and Every published its editorial AI guidelines as a model. Underneath it all: Cerebras filed confidentially for a US IPO.

Markets: Jamie Dimon Sees 2008

Bloomberg Evening Briefing and the Morning Briefing both led with Jamie Dimon explicitly drawing parallels to the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, calling some rival lenders' behavior "dumb things." Boaz Weinstein at Saba Capital is stepping up his warnings on private credit, saying the Blue Owl turmoil is "the super-early innings of the wheels coming off the car." Saba and Cox announced cash tenders at steep discounts for three Blue Owl funds. The 10% Trump tariff that went into effect this morning is the macro overlay.

A side plotline most newsletters missed: Matt Stoller covered California AG Rob Bonta's filing for an immediate halt to what he calls a widespread Amazon price-fixing scheme. Stoller's read: the only way a court grants an immediate injunction a year before the scheduled trial is if it concludes Amazon is highly likely to lose. Amazon's North America online business is $426B a year, roughly $3,000 per US household, and third-party prices have been rising at 7% annually, more than twice inflation.

Foreign Affairs: Carriers, Coups, and a Russian Anniversary

SpyTalk noted two US carrier strike groups now surround Iran and the State Department is evacuating personnel from Lebanon; the Joint Chiefs warned the White House a major Iran strike could turn into a prolonged campaign and drain US air defense interceptors. SpyTalk's second piece flagged Pakistan bombing Afghanistan twice in the past three weeks as militancy escalates between two nuclear powers. France barred Charles Kushner from direct access to French ministers after he skipped a formal summons over State Department comments calling a French activist's death "terrorism." Lincoln Square had Stuart Stevens checking in from Warsaw on the 4th anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Olympics and Culture: The Disco Hangover

The Average Joe had the cleanest Olympic medal table: Norway dominated with 18 gold and 41 total (including Johannes Klæbo sweeping all six cross-country events, a Winter Games first), US finished second with 12 gold and 33 total. Numlock News and Casey Lewis at After School both flagged the Alysa Liu disco moment: streams of Donna Summer's "MacArthur Park" jumped from 12,000 per day to 139,000 after Liu's gold-medal free skate. PRWeek noted Milan-Cortina drew nearly double the daily viewers of Beijing 2022.

NYC: Snowball-gate

Gothamist led with an incident in Washington Square Park that's now pitting Mayor Mamdani against the NYPD. ("It looks like a snowball fight," Mamdani said.) Another blizzard is on the way per their forecast piece. Emily Sundberg had Delia Cai on as guest lecturer, walking through how the link-roundup-as-business model only became viable in the last decade.

Marketing and Brand: Memes That Age, Wines That Don't

A surprisingly cohesive set on legacy brands modernizing. Case Studied covered J.Crew growing online customers 40% in a single week by reviving the rollneck sweater for Gen Z via TikTok. Daniel Murray at Marketing Millennials studied how Josh Cellars converted "Chicken Wine" meme fame into durable revenue. Justin Oberman had the strongest provocation: "I have won 6 figure pitches using nothing but a napkin and a pen. I once won a pitch by reciting Rilke." Snaxshot profiled Kim Kardashian becoming a co-founder of Update, the paraxanthine energy drink trying to win biohacking baddies away from Alani Nu.

Africa, China, and Frontier Markets

Samora Kariuki at Frontier Fintech launched an executive search arm with Triage focused on African digital financial services leadership. Elephant Room had the dispatch of the day: Beijing's first Black Puffer Beauty Pageant, won by a dog. The runner-up was a 169-yuan jacket with nine pockets, stuffed with water bottles, scarves, and an iPad.

Health, Lifestyle, and a Pre-Spring Mood

Dan Go ran his "Longevity Olympics" framework with eight specific metrics (waist-to-hip under 0.5, HbA1c at or below 5.6, VO2max thresholds). The Newsette flagged "gentle fitness" as the 2026 mood: pilates, walking, slow reps replacing HIIT. PUNCH on Bràulio Riserva and Amaro San Simone landing stateside. Blake Madden at Hospitalogy talked hospital competition reform with Fairview's James Hereford. JVL at The Bulwark wrote a long, moving column tying the Minneapolis memorials for Alex Pretti and Renee Good back to his 2002 reporting on Flight 93 at Shanksville.

Trucking, Cattle, and the Quiet Crises

FreightWaves had the largest enforcement story most people will not see: 550 CDL training schools are being removed from the federal registry after a 1,426-site investigation in all 50 states; the training floor that Congress wrote into the 2022 ELDT rule was gutted by lobbying before it took effect, and the result was years of license mills producing drivers with three weeks of training for 80,000-pound vehicles. Numlock News flagged the Ranger Road Fire on the Plains burning 283,283 acres and counting, helping push beef to $6.75/pound, up 22% year over year.

Three Takeaways for You

The Anthropic-Pentagon standoff is the most important story of the day and probably the week. A US administration threatening to invoke the Defense Production Act against a frontier AI lab over usage restrictions is a categorical shift in how the state intends to relate to private AI capacity. Watch what Dario does in the Hegseth meeting; that's the signal.

The market panic on private credit and AI doom is two unrelated stories getting fused into a single mood. Sticky inflation, a Supreme Court-shaped hole in the tariff revenue base, Jamie Dimon comparing 2026 to 2007, and a viral doomer essay that economists are tearing apart all landed in the same week. Semafor's framing (one is real but not systemic, the other systemic but not real) is the cleanest way to hold this in your head.

If you only read three pieces, I'd suggest: Matt Stoller on the California AG's Amazon filing (the antitrust story that will define 2026), Ben Thompson's rebuttal of the Citrini doomer post (because every market-mover this week is downstream of this argument), and JVL on Shanksville and Minneapolis (because politics will go faster than you think tonight, and you'll want something slower in your head when it does).