To The Moon

🐯Hi Tigers,

2026 is a U.S. midterm election year — all 435 House seats and 35 Senate seats are up for grabs on November 3rd. And heading into it, Trump's numbers aren't pretty: recent polling puts his approval in the low-to-mid 30s, with disapproval running as high as 57-60%, among the weakest pre-midterm standing of any president in the modern polling era. Voters are largely citing inflation and cost-of-living pressure as the top complaint, and Republicans are bracing for a rough November.

There's a quiet irony in this week's news cycle. On the same days that Washington's most visible communicator is packing up her desk, $Apple(AAPL)$ is hiring someone to do exactly her job — just for a company instead of a country.

🎁Stick around till the end and tell us what you think for a chance to win Tiger Coins!

1️⃣ The Exit: Leavitt Steps Away From the Podium

Karoline Leavitt — one of Trump's most trusted aides and the youngest press secretary in White House history — announced she's leaving her post by the end of August, barely a month after returning from maternity leave.

📌 Key Insight: She isn't disappearing from politics — she's changing roles. Trump says she'll become a top outside advisor, helping steer the GOP's midterm campaign strategy. In other words, she's trading the daily podium for the bigger, longer game: winning back Congress in November.

It's a telling moment. With approval ratings under pressure over cost-of-living issues, the administration is shuffling its messaging talent from "defend today's headline" mode into "win the next election" mode.

2️⃣ The Hire: $Apple(AAPL)$ Builds Its Own Bridge to Washington

Here's the twist — while the White House loses its translator, $Apple(AAPL)$ is busy building one of its own.

Two Apple appointments are landing within a day of each other, right as the company also changes hands at the very top:

• August 31: Tim Cook steps down as CEO after 15 years; hardware chief John Ternus takes over the next day, with Cook staying on as executive chairman

• August 31: Apple names Nate Gatten — a veteran of government affairs at American Airlines and, before that, JPMorgan — as its new VP of Government Affairs

Here's the part that's easy to miss: AAPL itself hasn't cheered any of this. The stock is trading around $302–306, still down roughly 10% from its July 28 all-time high of $339.79, and just took a Jefferies downgrade to "Sell" on August 10. When the Gatten hire landed on Aug 12, shares actually dipped slightly rather than rallied. Even back in April, the Cook-to-Ternus announcement barely moved the stock the day of — it was the next day that AAPL had its worst session since February, down 2.5%, as if the market needed a beat to actually price in the succession risk.

📌 Institutional Take: The timing isn't a coincidence, sources suggest. Apple specifically wanted someone who could keep tariff-era communication with the Trump administration smooth — a problem Cook himself has spent increasing personal time managing in recent years. So as Apple hands the CEO baton to a new, untested leader, it's simultaneously reinforcing the one relationship it can't afford to fumble — though so far, the market isn't treating that insurance as a reason to buy.

Worth noting: Cook isn't gone, just repositioned. As Executive Chairman, he's likely to keep working Washington personally alongside Gatten — so this isn't Apple replacing Cook's diplomacy, it's Apple institutionalizing it.

3️⃣ Is Trump Actually Hard to Work With Right Now?

Zooming out: the numbers suggest a lot of companies might be asking themselves that question. Approval sitting near historic midterm-year lows is exactly the kind of environment that makes companies like Apple want a seasoned Washington operator on staff, not just a CEO's personal relationships.

📌 What gets credit: supporters point to a strong run for markets — the S&P and Nasdaq both hitting records this year — and an aggressively deregulatory, business-friendly posture that companies like Apple have generally welcomed.

⚠️ What draws criticism: the loudest complaint has been the Trump family's own financial dealings. Ethics filings show the family reported over 1.4 billion in cryptocurrency-related income in 2025 alone, mostly through ventures like World Liberty Financial and the TRUMP meme coin. Several Democratic senators have flagged potential conflicts of interest between the family's crypto holdings and the administration's crypto-friendly policy moves; the family disputes any wrongdoing and says the criticism is overstated.

That's the tension companies like Apple are navigating: an administration that's been good for markets and deregulation, but one whose own ethics questions and low approval numbers make the political relationship itself feel less predictable than usual — exactly the environment where hiring your own "translator" starts to look less like overkill and more like common sense.

4️⃣ The Bigger Picture: What Midterm Years Usually Do to Stocks

Zoom out, and both stories sit inside the same calendar: 2026 is a midterm election year, votes cast November 3rd — not a presidential year, but historically still a market mover in its own right.

The S&P 500 is already up over 13% YTD, sitting near 7,753 — stronger than markets typically run at this point in a midterm cycle. Wall Street strategists (Franklin Templeton, BlackRock among them) are watching for two familiar phases to play out:

October–November — the "uncertainty lifts" trade. As polling clarity emerges before the vote, capital that's been sitting out political risk tends to come back in. This cycle, voters are grading the administration on inflation, spending, and tariff execution — and a shift in Congressional control could trigger real sector rotation.

Post-November — historically the strongest 6-month stretch in the entire 4-year cycle. Since 1970, the S&P 500 has averaged a 14% gain from November through the following April, once midterm uncertainty clears — regardless of which party wins.

5️⃣ The Risks Underneath the Optimism

• Credit cracks, and zero margin for error: Bank of America flags widening credit spreads among tech giants as credit markets grow warier of AI infrastructure's capex bill. For a hardware-heavy business like Apple, already absorbing tariff and memory-cost pressure, that's a tight window — a high-capex cycle leaves little room to also eat a political surprise.

• Sector divergence: Healthcare and energy tend to hold up better in midterm years; industrials and financials — more policy-sensitive — may see rougher repricing in H2

📌 The Takeaway: Two very different institutions — the White House and Apple — are both making a bet on who controls the narrative heading into a politically loaded stretch. History says markets usually reward patience through midterm turbulence. But this year's market has already run ahead of the usual script, which means the "sell the rumor, buy the resolution" playbook may have less room to work than it has in past cycles.

🎯 Closing Take

Neither of this week's headlines was really about a resignation or a hire — they were both about the same underlying trade: who controls the story before November? Leavitt's exit frees her up to fight the midterms from outside the briefing room, while Apple's Gatten hire insures a brand-new, untested CEO against the one relationship it can't afford to mismanage. The market, meanwhile, has already priced in a chunk of the "post-midterm rally" script before the midterms have even happened — which suggests investors want to see results, not just reassurance, before repricing the stock — a reminder that "the market" being hot this year doesn't mean every name in it is along for the ride.

One sentence summary: Two very different institutions are both hedging their communication risk ahead of the midterms, while the S&P's already running hotter than history says it should at this point in the cycle.

🐯💬 What's your take? History says midterm years get rocky before they rally. Are you positioning for the pre-election bumps, or riding through and waiting for the post-November stretch?

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