Merrick Lackner

While most Republicans are celebrating, I want to take a moment to offer a more somber perspective. The nation faces unprecedented challenges ahead. Trump was chosen because a majority of Americans want him, not Harris, to confront these challenges. Geopolitics: Russia/Ukraine: We’re likely to see an end to the war during Trump’s term. Russia will retain much of the land it occupied during the conflict, but the world will be safer, and the U.S. won’t be funding an ongoing massive overseas war. China: China is unlikely to attack Taiwan while Trump is President. However, trade tensions and competition over technology will intensify. Tariffs and political scapegoating from both sides will harm both the U.S. and China. Our nations are co-dependent now—escalating adversarial relations hurts both sides. With China’s economy weakening, the best outcome is a reset in U.S.-China relations. Iran: The Ayatollah faces his decline. Trump will allow Israel to take the fight to Hamas and Hezbollah, as he did with ISIS. There’s a real risk of escalation between now and January 20th, as Tehran’s leadership knows this window of weakness is closing. Economy: Inflation: Inflation has decreased, but core inflation remains stubbornly high. The Fed has started to bring down rates, yet long-term treasury indicators suggest higher rates may still be necessary. If rates are cut too quickly, inflation could reignite; if they stay high too long, a recession could follow. The Fed must remain independent, but Trump will face pressure to pass major spending bills to stimulate the economy. Balancing this will be tough—avoiding a recession will be a miracle. Housing: The average home price in America is $420,000, while the median household income is $80,000. This means that most potential homeowners are already at or near the 1/3 threshold of pre-tax income devoted to mortgage payments. If housing prices or wages rise, it risks tipping the economy into a recession. If they fall, it could trigger a similar outcome. National Debt: Neither Trump nor Harris has proposed measures to address the national debt, which continues to balloon. We now spend more on debt service than on national defense. Some argue this is a serious risk. China is taking a more conservative approach, and despite their own economic struggles, they might be in a better fiscal position. How much higher can our debt-to-GDP ratio go? We're in uncharted territory. Immigration: Trump has promised to secure the borders and deport those in the U.S. illegally. Historically, America has never deported large numbers of immigrants en masse. The consequences of this policy could lead to civil unrest, which is a real concern. With so many high-stakes issues on the table, Trump is likely to face one of the most difficult presidencies in American history. He is strong and resolute, but he is also human. I pray that America emerges from these next four years stronger than we are today.

Jensen Huang. Alice Huang. Their just cousins. Fake news.

Absolutely wild segment on CNN about Jensen Huang and Alice Huang. Maybe its a big misunderstanding. After all they are both Huangs. Maybe she is just his niece?

If Jensen Huang loses it all because of Alice Huang that will be the biggest suprise of 2026 for me.

Now is not the time for retreat. It is the time for fiscal sanity. There is plenty of time left for a more perfect Union. Let’s be honest about how we got here, because most of what you’re hearing in the news, online, and from the extreme pundits about Tuesday night is wrong. Coming out of the Biden era, pandemic stimulus poured fuel on inflation, and Jerome Powell famously made it worse by insisting it was “transitory.” Americans felt the pinch. They voted for Trump and the Republicans because they wanted change. They did not get it. Since the tariff regime launched, GDP has kept growing on paper, but almost none of it has reached the average paycheck. Real hourly earnings have been negative every single month since April. Gas is up over 30% in a year. Median weekly earnings grew 1.5% while prices grew 3.5%. The top 1% now holds a record 32.5% of all household wealth, the highest share the Fed has ever recorded. The top 10% does roughly half of all consumer spending in this country. The gap between people who own assets and people who earn wages has never been wider. Then came the political blunder. Instead of acknowledging the squeeze, the message was that affordability is a “hoax” and that this is the “greatest economy in history.” You cannot talk people out of what they feel at the register. Biden tried that and lost. Trump tried it and just lost the House and the Senate in a rout. Now the excuses are rolling in, and I want to address them directly. The Vice President says Republicans lost because of the war in Iran. Plenty of pundits agree with him. Others are back to attacking Islam, or insisting this was really about the transgender issue, or whatever the outrage of the week is on Fox and MSNBC. None of that is why Republicans lost. Americans have stomached unpopular wars before and reelected the people who started them. If gas were at an all time low and groceries were flat, voters would have shaken off Iran the way they’ve shaken off every other foreign conflict that didn’t hit their wallet. The war didn’t lose the election. A 34% jump in the price of gasoline lost the election. A paycheck that buys less every month lost the election. The data isn’t subtle. In the final Reuters/Ipsos poll before the election, 48% of voters said cost of living was the single most important issue deciding their vote. Immigration was 13%. The culture war issues that dominate cable didn’t make the top three. And here is the part the professional outrage class on both sides refuses to understand. The average American cares far less about the social issues than cable news does. Those fights are a business model. They sell ads. They drive engagement. They do not pay anyone’s mortgage. What Americans actually care about is taking care of their families. Can I afford the groceries. Can I fill the tank and still make rent. Can my kid go to college without a lifetime of debt. Can my parents retire. Those are private concerns. They happen at the kitchen table, not on a cable panel. And when a politician spends his airtime on the manufactured culture war instead of the real one, voters notice that he isn’t talking about them. That’s the signal in this election. Not Iran. Not a social wedge. Affordability. Full stop. We tried MAGA populism. It didn’t deliver on the one thing people hired it to do. Now voters are handing the keys to left wing populism. Worth noting that the Democrats who actually won on Tuesday, in Texas and Kansas and South Carolina, ran on cost of living, not on the agenda their own activist wing wanted them to run on. But the party as a whole hasn’t learned the lesson yet, and I don’t think left wing populism works either. Here’s why. Neither party is serious about the debt. We just closed fiscal 2026 with a $2 trillion deficit, the largest in five years. Total debt crossed $40 trillion. We now spend more on interest than on national defense. Not one leader in either party has a credible plan to stop the bleeding. The left’s answer is more spending. The right’s answer was a tax bill CBO scored at $3.4 trillion in new deficits, supposedly paid for by tariffs that the Supreme Court threw out and the Treasury is now refunding. Both add to the pile, and the pile is what’s quietly driving the interest rates, the rents, and the prices that voters just punished Republicans for. Common sense says if you don’t fix the underlying problem, the next crew fails too. So is there any way out? When outrage is the product and manufactured fights are the ad inventory, can the country actually escape it? I think so. Not because anyone in media or politics is going to grow a conscience, but because three things are breaking the model at the same time. First, the audience is dying off. Literally. The median cable news viewer is pushing 70, and that’s true on every channel. CNN is 67, Fox is 69, MSNBC is 71. Fox lost 27% of its daytime audience in October compared to a year ago. MSNBC’s primetime audience dropped 25% in 2025 and shed 40% of its under-55 viewers. CNN has lost nearly half its primetime audience since 2017 and now regularly finishes behind the Food Network. Nearly half of Americans say they actively avoid the news altogether. The outrage machine still runs on both the left and the right, but every year it is shouting into a smaller and older room. Second, the voters are walking out on both parties. Gallup just recorded the highest share of independents in its history: 45% of Americans, against 27% for each party. Among Gen Z it’s 56%. That is not apathy. That is the largest voting bloc in America telling both teams they are not interested in joining either one. Every politician who keeps performing for the base is performing for a shrinking slice of the electorate, and Tuesday showed what happens when the other slice shows up. Third, the math is running out. When interest on the debt costs more than the entire military, the culture war becomes a luxury the country can’t afford. The bond market does not care who is on which panel or which bathroom bill passed in which state. At some point the people who lend us money force the conversation that the pundits won’t have. I’d rather we have it voluntarily, but either way, it’s coming. Now, the obvious objection. People leaving cable doesn’t mean the outrage goes away. It moves online, to this platform and others, where there is no editor and the algorithm rewards whoever is angriest. In some ways that’s worse. But here’s the difference. Cable viewers vote. The loudest accounts online mostly represent no one but themselves. The feed is not the electorate, and both parties just paid for confusing the two. Trump looked at his timeline and concluded affordability was a hoax. The Democratic activist wing looked at theirs and wanted to run on ideology. The 45% in the middle weren’t on either timeline. They were working, raising kids, and quietly deciding the election. Which raises a bigger question. We just turned 250 years old. Does 45% of the country refusing to join either party mean we finally get a real third one? I’ll be honest, this is speculation, and history says probably not. The last time a new party replaced an old one was the 1850s. Perot got 19% of the vote in 1992 and zero electoral votes. Our winner-take-all system punishes third parties no matter how many independents there are. And we just watched the richest man in the world try it. Elon Musk announced a fiscal sanity party last year, never got a single candidate on a ballot, went back to the GOP, spent more than any donor in American history, and lost most of the races he targeted, including every statewide office in Texas. If he couldn’t do it, nobody is doing it with money. But there is a second way this plays out, and we’ve already seen it once. Trump didn’t start a third party in 2016. He took over an existing one from the outside. The independents don’t need a new party. They need to capture one of the two we have. The Democrats who won on Tuesday ran on affordability over ideology. Whether that’s the beginning of the 45% taking over a party, or just a one cycle backlash that the activist wing claws back, is the thing I’ll be watching most closely over the next two years. That sets up 2028. In two years Democrats will have run Congress and can’t blame Republicans for everything. Republicans will have had the White House and two years of full control, and can’t blame Democrats for missing their shot. Both parties will walk into the most contentious presidential race of our lifetime with no one to point at but themselves. And if either side spends those two years relitigating the culture war instead of the cost of living, they’ll get the same result Republicans got Tuesday. My hope and prayer is that something better rises out of this turmoil. A more centrist America. A return to real bipartisan work. Grown-ups who are willing to say out loud that the deficit is a national security threat and then actually do something about it. Leaders who finally understand that most Americans are not on a team, they’re on a budget. Time will tell. But any leader who can tell the difference between the timeline and the country is going to do very well over the next two years.

It really is this simple.

People forget Americans have enormous empathy. Bush won as a compassionate conservative for a reason. Most voters are not tribal. They want problems solved. That is why I am so over the polarization, and over both parties pretending they are addressing the core issues. Biden and Trump both pushed massive stimulus. Both own a share of the inflation and the debt. Both signed off on raising the debt ceiling, Biden in 2023 and Trump in 2025. Neither party has told us honestly how they plan to fix it. Inflation is back above 3%, the national debt just crossed $40 trillion, and we now spend about $1 trillion a year on interest alone. The class divide keeps widening. Tuesday looked like a lot of the populist voters who backed Trump swinging to Democrats, who are now making the same big promises. Let's be real: neither party can deliver all of it without wrecking the country or setting us back. Part of it is that Democrats simply ran better candidates. Talarico and El-Sayed won in Texas and Michigan with energy, new ideas and real passion. Paxton and Rogers were tired candidates from the Trump mold. I would rather spend time with the first two, not because I agree with them, but because they have an energy worth engaging. Clearly a lot of voters felt the same. But better candidates are not a fix. If we keep swinging the pendulum based on personalities and hyped solutions instead of fixing the debt and the real problems, we become the next France or Argentina. Out-of-control debt until it finally forces change and breaks us. Both parties need to have the courage to work together to fix our broken financial system. Otherwise we are handing our children an insurmountable problem to deal with.

Can't wait to read this week's Science magazine.

Posted this in May. Capex dollars don't matter, capex growth does. When the growth rate rolls over, thats the real break. Summer 2027, right before the election cycle. Today wasn't that. S&P down 4.4%, Nasdaq in correction, Nvidia off 9%, worst day since April 2025. But capex growth didn't change today. Politics did. Anti AI candidates won across the map and the market priced in regulation in one session. Heres why I think its overdone. OpenAI and Anthropic going public isn't a tech story, its a national security story. The US can't let China win this and Washington knows it. I said in June those IPOs were racing the clock. The pressure to clear a path just went up, not down. The structural bid stays until the growth number actually rolls over. Thats 2027-2028, not this week.

Stumbled on this clip and watched it a few times. Here is the problem for Republicans. He is likeable. Calm, funny, quick on his feet, talks like a guy you'd want as your kid's pediatrician. He's a guy you'd want to goof around with on a Sunday afternoon. Not one sentence sounds focus grouped. Michigan voters saw that and shrugged off every attack ad, because the man on their screen did not match the monster in the mailers. Republicans keep running against the caricature. Voters are voting on the person. Politics is a likeability business and Republicans keep pretending it's a policy business. You do not beat a candidate like this by yelling louder about how dangerous he is. You beat him by finding someone people like more, and Republicans didn't. Stop calling the winners stupid. Start asking why people wanted to vote for them.

I hate Abdul El-Sayed's politics. On Israel I think he is flat wrong. But I told my 15 year old son to learn from him anyway. He lost a governor's race in 2018. Everyone wrote him off. He got up, kept grinding, took on $95 million in outside money, and this week became the first Muslim US Senator. In Torah we say Ein Davar Omed Lifnei Haratzon. Nothing stands in the way of will. He willed it his entire life and got the seat. The people who succeed are driven. They never give up. They work hard, they study hard, and they have a will like nobody else. But will alone is not enough. Confidence without competence will not make you happy. Kobe was confident, and he was also the best player in the room. Put in the time to get competent. You can respect the grind and reject the ideas. My son can be the first Asian Jewish senator if he wants it that badly.

Crony capitalism as evinced by the Trump and Melania Meme coins was always peak stupidity. You reap what you sow.

I pinned this post the day Trump won and have kept it live since that day. He had one of the hardest jobs any President has faced, and he failed the people who elected him. Last night made it clear: MAGA is dead and he’s a lame duck. I’m in Dallas for work, but I’ll share my thoughts on where common sense takes us from here in the coming days.

Market futures bouncing on conciliatory tone from Trump on Fox phone interview in real-time.

Sean Hannity is usually the most certain man on television. Tonight he can barely get through a segment on how midterms tend to go badly for the sitting president. Quivering, breathing heavy, picking every word. Meanwhile Fox keeps cutting back to some little bar in Florida like that's the story. Flip to CNN and MSNBC and it's a celebration. Nonstop on immigration, tariffs and the economy, hammering Trump policy by policy. Democrats own the narrative tonight. One remote, two countries. This is America.

I can’t get over the Learjet N722BD decisions. ATC warned them of moderate-to-extreme precip, said the turn to Freeport looked pretty bad/nasty, and explicitly approved deviations left and right, Freeport when able. They were still ~8–10+ minutes and tens of miles out. They made some adjustments but kept going, reported “manageable” light clear ice and moderate turbulence, then picked up precip and asked to climb. Minutes later they were in an overspeed spiral. Why not lose an hour, divert, and avoid the cell entirely? Pilot-in-command owns weather avoidance. “If there’s any doubt, there’s no doubt.” NTSB will sort the full picture, but this one is hard to square. That these nine beautiful lives are lost over a navigational mistake is nauseating. Tragic, heartbreaking, sad. Life is short, got to make the most of it, and try to do as much good as possible.

Hats off to this Jet Blue captain. Decisive action to protect the souls on board his flight.

Tragic loss of life. Condolences to all family and friends of those lost on flight.