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ZEITGEIST

April 27, 2026

Cole Allen is expected to be arraigned in court today, two days after he ran at a Secret Service checkpoint at the Washington Hilton armed with a shotgun, handgun and knives. What has emerged since is almost as unsettling as the attack itself. In writings tied to him, Allen — who called himself the "Friendly Federal Assassin" and said he was targeting Trump administration officials — mocked the very security meant to stop him. "What the hell is the Secret Service doing?" he wrote. Officials said Allen checked into the hotel the day before the shooting. In his writings, he said he walked in with multiple weapons and that "not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat." A former FBI official put it bluntly: "He didn't beat the security plan the night of the dinner. He beat it the day he made the reservation." Officials had given the dinner a lower security classification than events of national or international significance like the inauguration or the State of the Union. Trump, undaunted, says he wants to hold the dinner again within 30 days.

Into that charged atmosphere arrives King Charles III, who lands in Washington today for a four-day visit billed as his most high-wire diplomatic act since coming to the throne. The trip includes a speech to Congress — the first by a British monarch since 1991 — a private audience with Trump and a state dinner. The "Special Relationship" is at a generational low: the British government considers the Iran war illegal and unwise, Trump regularly harangues Prime Minister Keir Starmer on social media, and reports that the Pentagon is drawing up plans to review support for allies' "imperial possessions," including Britain's control of the Falklands, have further ratcheted tensions. Charles is being deployed as a diplomatic Hail Mary, with Britain hoping his rapport with Trump — who has a well-known soft spot for the monarchy — can ease tensions and reinforce the importance of allies. The palace said Sunday it was in touch with U.S. security officials to determine whether any schedule changes were necessary.

The diplomatic calendar keeps stacking up. Hundreds of officials on both sides are racing to prepare for a May 14-15 summit between Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing — the first U.S. presidential state visit to China in nearly a decade, arriving at a moment of deepening distrust over trade, technology and Taiwan. The advance work involves securing menus course by course, screening ingredients against poisoning and negotiating how many armed Americans can operate on Chinese soil. A detail from Xi's 2023 California visit captures the paranoia: his security agents grabbed his utensils and plate after lunch and sprayed them with an unidentified liquid to prevent DNA collection. During Trump's last state visit to Beijing in 2017, the two leaders' security details got into a fistfight in a corridor of the Great Hall of the People while Trump and Xi met in an adjoining room.

Also beginning this week: Elon Musk's trial against OpenAI, which opens in an Oakland federal courthouse with Musk as the underdog. Prediction market Kalshi puts his chances of victory at about 40%. His original 26 claims were first whittled to four, then effectively reduced to two — breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment — after he dropped the fraud claims to streamline the case. Musk is seeking remedies that could exceed $180 billion, the removal of Sam Altman and Greg Brockman from their leadership roles, and the unwinding of OpenAI's conversion to a more traditional governance structure. The judge previously voiced skepticism about Musk's earlier $134 billion disgorgement estimate, saying his expert was "pulling these numbers out of the air." Even a partial victory could complicate OpenAI's path to a public listing this year.

The AI economy Musk is fighting over continues to reshape corporate balance sheets in contradictory ways. S&P 500 earnings are expected to exceed 13% year-over-year growth for the sixth consecutive quarter, and the gains are now broadening beyond tech and finance. United Airlines posted an 80% profit jump despite jet-fuel chaos, and expects travel demand strong enough to raise fares as much as 20%. Halliburton beat Wall Street expectations as energy companies race to invest from Norway to Argentina. "Energy security is no longer simply a talking point," its CEO told investors. "It demands action." Yet consumer sentiment sits at a record low — darker, according to the Michigan survey's director, than during any previous crisis in the survey's history. American Express reports cardholder spending up 9%, with luxury retail up 18%, while Charter Communications' stock plunged 25% on Friday after it lost 120,000 internet subscribers. The K-shaped economy is still evident: the wealthy keep spending while most everyone else feels strapped.

Wall Street, meanwhile, is conducting a live triage of software companies, sorting them into AI winners and losers. An analysis of more than 100 software-company loans found wide variation in the damage. Vertical software — companies embedded in narrow industries like auto insurance or legal data — saw loans drop only 4.2 cents on the dollar since late January. Software for software engineers, the category most directly threatened by AI's ability to write code, fell 16.3 cents. Cybersecurity sits somewhere in between, with investors debating whether more AI-powered attacks will increase demand for existing products or render them obsolete.

In London on Sunday, two men did something no human had done in a record-eligible race: run a marathon in under two hours. Kenya's Sabastian Sawe finished in 1:59:30, obliterating the previous world record of 2:00:35 set at the 2023 Chicago Marathon. Ethiopia's Yomif Kejelcha — in his first competitive marathon — crossed at 1:59:41. Even the third-place finisher, Uganda's Jacob Kiplimo, beat the old record. The breakthrough caps a decade of innovation in training and footwear: Sawe and Kejelcha wore Adidas shoes weighing 3.4 ounces, barely more than a deck of cards.

In California, backers of a proposed billionaire tax say they have gathered more than 1.5 million signatures to place a one-time, 5% wealth tax on the November ballot — well above the roughly 875,000 valid signatures required. The tax would apply to roughly 200 individuals who resided in California as of Jan. 1 and have net worths of $1 billion or more at year-end and could raise roughly $100 billion to offset healthcare cuts from Trump's tax-and-spending law. Governor Newsom opposes it. Nvidia's Jensen Huang says he's "perfectly fine" with it. Opponents, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin, have poured tens of millions into competing ballot initiatives that would bar retroactive taxes and ban new taxes on personal property. A UC Berkeley poll found 52% of California voters inclined to support it.

The Supreme Court hears arguments today in a case that will decide whether geofence warrants — which allow police to obtain troves of cellphone-location data and identify anyone near a specific place at a specific time — violate the Fourth Amendment. The case involves a Virginia bank robbery, but the implications reach far wider: federal investigators used geofence warrants to identify hundreds of people present during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Google, which has more than 500 million users with location history enabled, has already migrated that data to individual devices so it can no longer conduct the sweeping searches police once relied on. The Trump administration's solicitor general argues that eliminating the warrants would "handicap the investigation of major crimes."

And at the box office, Hollywood's bet on Michael Jackson paid off. "Michael" opened to $217.4 million worldwide, posting the biggest-ever biopic opening in the U.S. and Canada, despite largely negative reviews. Sixty percent of ticket buyers were women. The film, which cost about $150 million to produce, ends in the late 1980s, before accusations that Jackson sexually abused children; Lionsgate and Universal have been preparing a sequel covering the rest of his life if the first film succeeds.

A king arriving to salvage a fraying alliance, a tech billionaire heading to trial against the company he helped create, a marathon barrier shattered twice in a single morning — Monday's picture is of old limits being tested and, in some cases, broken, while the institutions meant to hold things together scramble to keep up.

ZEITGEIST DISPATCH — April 27, 2026

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