🌍 Midterms meltdown

Your Insider’s briefing:
— Midterms meltdown
— Games night in Seoul
— Treason in Jakarta

🎓 Are you a student? Once you’ve finished last night’s pizza leftovers, get your sweet Insiders discount here!

34%

That’s how much US ammonia imports from Trinidad have declined this year amid a gas shortage, contributing to fertiliser price pressures on US farmers. Trinidad is America’s second-biggest supplier of ammonia after Canada.

Tired of all the winning, President Trump has now pivoted to losing. And losing bigly, might we add.

So to help make sense of it all, we're taking inspiration from a fellow Queens native who also famously, um, lost quite a bit: Seinfeld's own George Costanza.

The opposition Dems are now on track to win as many as 255 House seats, potentially forming their largest majority in decades!

Why?

It turns out folks don't like it when you pledge to end wars, but instead start and lose new ones; or vow to drain the swamp, but instead execute a $1.4B crypto rug-pull; or scoff at insider-trading, then make Nancy look like a passive ETF with your 60 trades a day; or campaign against inflation, then deliver $6.50 diesel.

But what's it all mean?

Sure, the Dems now take every House committee chair and control the floor. Or to put it another way, they now control the megaphone, purse strings, and spotlight, auguring a lame-duck period of subpoenas and hearings on anything from Epstein and insider-trading to who turned off Ukraine's Starlink, and why.

And yet to be clear, for all the soundbites and Fox fury, the House can't stop a war, unwind tariffs, or force a president to (say) stop humiliating allies or coddling foes.

So then what about...

Everyone saw that flipped House coming, but a flipped Senate was always more of a stretch. And yet we've now seen...

Throw in other big flips like South Carolina (taking the late Lindsey Graham's seat), North Carolina (its first Dem since 2008), and Maine (ousting 30-year veteran Susan Collins), and the Democrats now control the Senate.

But what's it all mean?

This new ~55 seat majority will slam the brakes on any Trump 2.0 judicial confirmations and cabinet appointments, perhaps meaning fewer Guilfoyles to Greece or Petes to the Pentagon, but also (say) fewer tax-cut extensions when parts of the One Big Beautiful Bill start sunsetting from late 2028.

And yet, again, a Democratic Senate can't (with this majority) impeach a president, force him to start using his sanctions authority against a foreign dictator, nor (say) uphold security commitments to allies.

So then what about...

If losing Congress hurt, the gubernatorial map offered little safe harbour:

Throw in others (like Ohio, Wisconsin) and the Democrats now control a majority of US states for the first time in 16 years. Of the ten most populous states, President Trump's party now runs just one (Florida)!

Why so many flips? Sure, these statehouse victories often reflect more local issues and personalities, but this feels more like federal spill-over: Georgia’s outgoing governor was actually pretty popular, for example.

As for what it all means? The White House will now see more domestic roadblocks against its agenda, but nowhere does that grab our attention more than in Texas, where the state's rapid-fire AI data-centre buildout just collided headfirst with public pushback. And that might explain...

Anyone hoping for a Red Wave soon got one on their trading screens: as the results came in, Nasdaq 100 futures dropped 2%, S&P500 futures lost 1% (though then rebounded after Trump accepted the results), and Japan's Nikkei fell ~4%.

It's not because markets are MAGA, but because all that unexpected losing forced them to rapidly reprice big bets, including around tech, and particularly in Texas.

In fact, prediction markets were giving Governor Abbott 70% odds of re-election, particularly after he reversed course by pausing new AI data centres in rural communities — this helped tame voter anger around grid reliability, water scarcity, and related taxes.

But with Texas due to host a quarter of all new US data centre capacity coming online by 2030, there was always a quiet if widespread market hope he would unwind that moratorium after re-election.

Instead, his loss now not only suggests the moratorium could be permanent, but those market jitters reflect fears the broader US era of frictionless tech-sector expansion could now be over. Realistically it’ll find a new equilibrium with greater community buy-in, but it might still tap the US brakes in the short-term right as DC races to establish AI dominance against a less restrained competitor in China.

Anyway, President Trump just suffered what Costanza might describe as electoral "shrinkage". But rather than protest this time, he's congratulated his opposition, and is pledging to work across the aisle.

If friend and foe alike are now wondering how a cuffed White House handles two years of domestic gridlock ahead, allow us to again tap the wisdom of George Costanza: “If she can’t find me, she can’t break up with me.” Or to put it another way…

If friend and foe alike are now wondering how a cuffed White House handles two years of domestic gridlock ahead, allow us to again tap the wisdom of George Costanza: “If she can’t find me, she can’t break up with me.” Or to put it another way, US history suggests that when final-term presidents feel boxed in at home, they pack their bags in search of redemption abroad.

This is both because they can (foreign policy is where the Oval Office retains maximum muscle) but also because the world stage offers the biggest prizes for any leader hoping to polish up that legacy for the history books.

Don’t believe us? That same twilight period was when (say) Clinton pushed through China’s accession to the WTO, Obama inked his big deals with Iran and Cuba, and Bush 1.0 deployed 25,000 troops to Somalia before signing NAFTA!

So we likewise expect President Trump to pack his bags and go shopping for legacy deals abroad. The catch, of course, is the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily care.

First, Trump himself is proof that any late-stage deals rest on a fragile foundation that can easily be unwound by a successor: recall, for example, that it was Trump who ditched Obama’s Iran deal.

But the other challenge is how tricky the world now looks: for one hotspot (North Korea) we got a reminder on election day, with the regime popping off another half-dozen test missiles, including one with a new dispersal warhead capable of frying 15 acres. That timing is no accident, btw; the Kim family often flexes during US elections to maximise its own perceived leverage over and relevance to DC priorities: we operate on our own timelines, and will engage (or not) on our own terms.

There’ve been rumours Trump could try meeting Kim again, but we see no reason why he’d have any more success than the last two times (which, to be clear, really achieved nothing beyond legitimising a dictator). To the contrary, Kim’s weapons program advancements mean US leverage has eroded since Trump 1.0.

That leaves two other possibilities: first there’s Iran. On election-eve, the US president randomly called a Financial Times reporter to insist he has no plans to resume hits on Iran, which makes us think he might, but so many of Trump’s inner circle (Bessent, Ratcliffe, Vance, Rubio) now seem to be nudging him away from further military escalation in hopes the slow squeeze will do the job. The trick here is there’s no guarantee this plays out on a timeline that gets Trump the credit.

Which brings us to maybe the biggest prize of all: just as we foreshadowed last week, Russia and Ukraine are now resuming direct talks in Abu Dhabi next week, while DC pushes parallel Europe/NATO talks on security guarantees for Ukraine. It all gives us “sign a big accord at the G20 summit in Miami” energy.

And this president may well secure a photo-op and a signed piece of paper, but it’s still hard to see how that resolves this war’s root causes: not rattled democracies running to NATO for protection, but the Kremlin’s expansionist dictator sending them there, while politically trapped into his own maximalist war aims or risk getting polonium in his jocks.

Sure, the administration will package any late-stage paper as a historic win. But to borrow one final piece of wisdom from Queens’ finest: "It's not a lie if you believe it."

Today’s briefing is sponsored by:

Every Nvidia chip needs servers, networking, power and a data center to run. Analysts say the smaller companies supplying those pieces have more room to grow, with price targets up to 55%. Get all five tickers texted to you free today.

Unlock All 5 Tickers

[🏁 Prefer ad-free reading? Sign-up to Intrigue Insiders today!]

Commodities corner is back:

“Running shos” shouldn’t return zero results. Gladly understands what your shoppers mean, typos and all, and finds the right products.

See how it works

There probably aren’t too many politicians urging their own head of state to play more video games, but geopolitics remains a deep and quirky reservoir.

Enter South Korea’s conservative lawmaker Han Dong-hoon, who recently took to Facebook to assign some mandatory digital homework for the more left-leaning President Lee Jae Myung: a few hours playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4!

Why? The newly released blockbuster features a full-scale North Korean invasion complete with airborne troops and missile barrages levelling downtown Seoul. So Han is exhorting his president to “try playing this game”, adding “I hope that the landscape of Seoul, which has become a pile of rubble in the game, will remain virtual forever”.

Naturally, the game has quickly morphed into a political football, with conservatives using the digital apocalypse as an extrapolation of where President Lee’s dovish posture might lead, while critics fret over the ethics of milking inter-Korean tensions for foreign entertainment.

Anyway, no word yet on whether President Lee will pick up a controller, order in some Domino’s, and get the fellas over for an all-nighter.

Yesterday’s poll: Do you see much merit in the dead Internet theory?

🤖 Yep, bots will run the show (61%)
🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Nope, you can't beat real connection (38%)
✍️ Other (write in!) (1%)

Your two cents: