Jake Lahut: Yeah, this whole thing works just so much smoother when you’re in the opposition. When you’re Dan Bongino and you have the keys handed to you to be the heir to Rush Limbaugh, that’s a pretty great gig. Being deputy director of the FBI, actual hard gig. You got people reporting to you, you have people to answer to, and you can’t run that conservative media playbook of the drip, drip, drip, wait until this next batch of files comes out and we’ll have a week’s worth of content.
Zoë Schiffer: Right, exactly. Yeah, because you’re the one with all the files. People are like, “Just release them.”
Jake Lahut: You quite literally are the establishment, yeah.
Zoë Schiffer: Our next story is about another topic that has consistently been on the Trump administration’s radar, which is tariffs. Specifically, this is quite the caper about how some bitcoin miners raced to beat the sharp tariff increases that were initially put in place back in April around Liberation Day. Our colleague Joel Khalili wrote about the grueling logistics efforts that US-based Luxor Technology embarked on to ship two packages of bitcoin mining materials, both of them worth millions of dollars. These packages were coming from Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, and they were all subject to the way, way higher tariffs. So this was a huge problem. And at some point they were bidding 1.76 million for a charter plane only to be outbid overnight by another importer that was desperate to get their materials into the U.S. So I mean, this is another area where I feel like while the Trump administration has been very friendly to this industry, it is still true that I don’t think they’re in the weeds enough to realize that the really high tariff hike is going to impact the very industry that they’re trying to promote.
Jake Lahut: Yeah. And this is where this kind of emerging culture of shut up and take it within the Republican Party is really interesting, because their message to the crypto community, both if you’re in your big Coinbase or Andreessen Horowitz, Kraken type space, or if you’re someone who started donating to the Republican Party and you bought the meme coin, maybe you’re personally wealthy off bitcoin, but you’re not an industry player. For all those people, if you have an ask or you’re like, “Hey, we gave you a lot of money in the campaign, could you maybe not do the tariffs” or whatever else it is that they find objectionable, they’re like, “Actually, why don’t you sit down and shut up? Let us do the decisionmaking here, and good luck getting anything with the Democrats,” which I think is a very interesting whole realm for another discussion of the opening the Democrats may have here with just as more of a cultural wedge issue than a policy one with the crypto folks. But Joel’s story is just crazy because of the sense of urgency and this scramble they had. And it’s just kind of like, I think the game, Hungry Hippo is probably not the best comparison here, but you’re just moving this stuff around for you to take this cost on the chin in some form, maybe just a little less depending on the rate coming out of a place like Singapore or wherever. And yeah, it has last-chopper-out-of-Nam vibes. It’s a real doozy of a story.