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Wednesday, May 20, 2026 · 146 newsletters

The 1776 Slush Fund

Trump Slush Fund · Musk Loses OpenAI · Google I/O · Ebola Outbreak · Fintech · China Biotech · LIRR Strike · AI Labor · World Cup · Crypto

Published on Wednesday, May 20, 2026.

Pulled from 153 newsletters sent to read@madho.net yesterday. One story bent the inbox: the Trump Justice Department settling a Trump lawsuit with $1.776 billion of taxpayer money, while a jury threw out Elon Musk's case against OpenAI, Google opened I/O with Gemini 3.5, and an Ebola outbreak met a dismantled global health network. Below, what mattered, clustered by trend.

Politics: The 1776 Slush Fund Becomes the Story

The convergence yesterday was unmistakable. Donald Trump's DOJ, run by Todd Blanche, settled Trump's own $10 billion suit against the IRS for a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded "weaponization" fund Trump himself controls. Andrew Egger at The Bulwark called it the "Ultra-Corrupt Settlement Fund," noting Treasury's top attorney quit hours after the announcement. Paul Krugman, in The Looting of America, said the move "takes the shamelessness to a new level" and predicted the beneficiaries will include January 6 defendants and Trump allies. Rick Wilson hit it twice, with Den of Thieves framing the heist as a political poison pill and the earlier Casino Donnie's Insider Trading Racket tying it to JD Vance's defense of Trump's 3,700 stock trades in the first quarter, worth between $220 million and three-quarters of a billion dollars.

The slush fund made everyone converge. Matt at Crooked reported John Thune saying "yeah, not a big fan" and Senate Republican skepticism mounting. Lincoln Square hosted Susan Demas and Edwin Eisendrath on the trades, and Stuart Stevens on Bill Cassidy's RFK Jr. vote as the moment Cassidy's career bargained itself away. George Bounacos's Gov Brief Today flagged Rep. Jamie Raskin calling the fund unconstitutional. Matt Kiser at WTF Just Happened Today added the Senate's war powers vote on Iran and Trump's expansion of the IRS settlement to bury all pending audits of him and his businesses.

The bigger frame. JVL at The Bulwark called this "the Turn," the point at which a regime stops claiming popular legitimacy and starts leveraging institutional power instead, citing Trump's worsening approval alongside improving House Republican prospects as the asymmetry the courts and the media are now built to absorb. Brian Beutler at Off Message made the most useful counter-argument of the day: ambitious Democrats will be tempted to triangulate around cost-of-living messaging in 2028, and earnest pro-democracy candidates will be condescended to as naive. The Ink's Trump Can't Kill the Epstein Story closed the political cluster, noting Rep. Thomas Massie's Trump-blessed primary defeat in Kentucky as another front in the burial campaign.

AI: The Verdict, the Job Market, and the Permanent Underclass

A jury found Elon Musk sued OpenAI too late, with claims barred by statute of limitations. MIT Technology Review's Download, the Information AM, TLDR, and Mike Kaput's SmarterX all led with it. The interesting takeaway in Pirate Wires Daily was the absence of revelation after months of discovery and dumped texts between Sam Altman and Satya Nadella, "well that was disappointing."

The labor story is getting louder than the model story. Anand Giridharadas at The Ink opened with Ken Griffin confessing depression on camera about AI's coming displacement of high-level work, the messenger being a finance magnate who is both an investor in AI and a user of it inside his own firm. Guillermo Flor's AI Market Fit catalogued the predictions (Dario Amodei on entry-level white collar wipeout, Sam Altman on jobs going away "full stop," Musk on a benign-scenario zero-employment world) and named the concept everyone is circling: the Permanent Underclass. Ruben Hassid hit the math: "a subscription to an intelligence" is getting 6,000x cheaper in four years.

The Pragmatic Engineer survey is the document of the week. Gergely Orosz published Part 2 of "AI's impact on software engineers in 2026", drawn from 900+ subscriber responses. Headlines: codebase quality is decreasing while management does not care, maintenance is concentrating on a shrinking number of engineers, less experienced engineers run higher token bills and get less benefit, and AI tooling "feels like a slot machine" with pricing engineered to keep you prompting. AMP's Special Edition on 24,000 job postings found 1,035 AI Operator roles hiding under 636 different job titles, with 59% asking for ops skills and under 5% asking for technical depth.

The institutional pushback. Project Liberty's Inside Wikipedia's AI Ban profiled the English Wikipedia editors who voted to ban AI-generated text outright as a movement-building blueprint. Kathleen Booth's AI Personal Operating System 2.0 and Molly Graham's WorkLife with Max Mullen sat on the other side, treating AI as the new Excel and arguing most people are days away from being "experts" if they actually use it daily.

Google I/O, Agent Protocols, and the New Stack

Techmeme's lead was Gemini 3.5 Flash, billed as Google's "strongest agentic and coding model yet," shipping into the Gemini app and Search's AI mode. Tom Krazit at Runtime framed it as Google's bid to catch up in agentic coding, with new developer tools alongside the model. Nate at Nate's Substack wrote the cleanest piece on the protocol race underneath the demos: six new agent protocols have launched in the past year, and three of them (MCP, A2A, AG-UI) will decide which products survive. Simon Willison published The Last Six Months in LLMs in Five Minutes, the annotated version of his PyCon US lightning talk, which is the fastest way to catch up if you have been heads down.

Open-weights pressure. Guillermo Flor walked through Kimi K2.6, Moonshot's new release that beats Claude Opus on certain coding benchmarks, costs roughly a tenth per token, and ships an official CLI that mirrors Claude Code. Superhuman led with Odyssey shipping two world models in a single day with multiplayer and sound layered on real-time visuals. The Code and Pirate Wires both pointed at Deedy Das's viral X thread on Silicon Valley splitting between AI winners and the "depressed engineer on $500K" cohort, which is now the framing every VC dinner is using.

Infrastructure economics. Paul Kedrosky's Chart of the Day showed commercial electrical demand from data centers passing residential demand in the United States. Bloomberg Technology said Meta investors want to see whether the Louisiana data center is worth the cost. Sequencing all of this, the model launch is the headline, but the slot machine, the underclass, and the kilowatts are the story.

Ebola Returns While the Safety Net Disappears

Jonathan Cohn at The Bulwark wrote the piece of the day on this thread: an Ebola outbreak in Central Africa is on track to be the third worst ever recorded, and the global health network the United States built and led has been dismantled by the Trump administration that is now agitating for travel restrictions. The local hook came from Gothamist: the Trump administration is now citing the Ebola outbreak as the reason it cannot bring back Adriana Zapata, a Colombian national deported to Congo last month. Two stories pointed at the same gap. Bloomberg's evening briefing had NATO considering a Hormuz deployment, but the more telling state-capacity story was a virus and a deported woman.

Fintech: Stablecoins, Card Rails, and the Distribution War

The distribution war is where the action is. Samora Kariuki's Frontier Fintech GPS #72 led with Tether taking a strategic stake in LemFi to power stablecoin remittances across emerging markets. Nicole Casperson at Fintech Is Femme interviewed Citi's Ida Liu on the "Fluency Gap" inside the $100 trillion wealth transfer, the system having been built before women and millennials were the ones in charge. Linas Beliūnas at Linas's Newsletter called ChatGPT's new personal finance feature OpenAI's bid to "kill the fintech app economy," wired through Plaid and pitched as Plaid x OpenAI in TLDR's sponsor slot.

Rails and crypto. Matt Brown's Card Issuing in 1,000 Words is the cleanest primer published yesterday on how the plastic economy actually works. Bankless covered Coinbase and Circle's bet on Hyperliquid as a salvo against USDT dominance. The 0xResearch issue inside The Breakdown traced USDe's Solana growth loop while netting out crypto's reaction to Trump's "schizophrenic" Iran posts to "not much." Exec Sum flagged Google and Blackstone teaming on AI cloud and chip infrastructure as the contour to watch. Zarik Khan at Fintech Compliance Chronicles read the RBI's cancellation of 150 nonbank lender registrations as a cleanup rather than a crackdown.

China: Compute, Biotech, and the New Venture Capital

Trivium China reported Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang touring data centers as Beijing prioritizes a self-sufficient compute "grid." Lucas Fluegel and Nick Corvino at ChinaTalk wrote a deep dive on WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics as the TSMC analog of Chinese biotech, arguing the BIOSECURE Act underestimates how integrated the consortium has become. Term Sheet at Fortune led with Chinese state capital becoming "the new VC," with Rebecca Fannin's Silicon Dragon parsing the CNBC 2026 Disruptor 50 list where AI startup funding swelled to $337 billion, up from $127 billion in 2025, with nearly half the list in California. Trivium's podcast unpacked the Xi-Trump Beijing summit aftermath, while International Intrigue tracked a Korea strike countdown and Dominican Republic search trends.

Iran, Drones, and the Slow-Motion Bond Wreck

Bloomberg's evening briefing put NATO weighing a Hormuz deployment as the energy-crisis hedge story of the week. Noah Smith's Noahpinion argued that with batteries cheap enough and AI good enough, "all non-drone militaries are obsolete," referencing his own 2013 prediction. John Ellis at News Items pointed at John Authers calling developed-market bond markets a "slow-motion car wreck" with Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom and France all selling off. Maritime Analytica flagged the Xi'an to Tehran rail corridor running every three to four days at sharply rising freight quotes, the inland-corridor question being the one to watch when sea access tightens. The political pricing in oil and bonds is doing more work right now than any single economic data release.

NYC: LIRR Trains Run Again

Gothamist News Alerts, the Gothamist Daily, and Bloomberg's Morning Briefing all converged on the LIRR resuming service on the Babylon, Huntington and Port Jefferson, Port Washington and Ronkonkoma branches just after noon Tuesday after a three-day strike. Around the city, Consuming Collective reported Drew Nieporent at the Springsteen MSG show and an Action Bronson Katz's Deli event so badly run that it ate the night, and Emily Sundberg at Feed Me filed her summer 2026 movie guide from Orkney.

Ideas Worth Reading

Outside Interests

Data Worth Noting

Three Takeaways for You

The 1776 slush fund is the regime change story to track, not because the dollar amount is exceptional but because the convergence is. When Paul Krugman, the Bulwark editorial board, Rick Wilson twice in one day, Crooked, Lincoln Square, Gov Brief, and JVL all reach for the same frame inside 24 hours, the political environment has moved. JVL's "Turn" thesis names what every other writer is circling.

The AI conversation has fully shifted from capability to labor. The Pragmatic Engineer survey, the AMP scrape of 24,000 job postings, Anand on Ken Griffin's confessional, Guillermo Flor on the Permanent Underclass, and Ruben Hassid on the 6,000x compression are not five separate stories. They are one story with five entry points, and it is the most important story of the year for anyone hiring, building, or borrowing money against the future of work.

If you only read three pieces today, I would suggest The Looting of America by Paul Krugman for the political frame, AI's Impact on Software Engineers in 2026, Part 2 by Gergely Orosz at The Pragmatic Engineer for the operational reality, and Trump Decimated Our Global Health Network. Then Ebola Hit. by Jonathan Cohn at The Bulwark for the state-capacity stakes.