FiveStack: Trump is Cornered at 31% Approval; Senate Kills The Billionaire Ballroom; House Prepares for War Resolution Vote

Beschreibung

A pollster tied to Fox put Donald Trump’s approval at 31 percent today. Twenty-five is the number that ended Nixon. A president at 31 and sliding can no longer make his own party afraid of him — and on Thursday, his own party stopped pretending to be. The Senate killed the billion dollars he wanted for his ballroom. The House moved to take away his power to wage war. Two dozen Republicans lined up to kill the fund he built to pay the people who stormed the Capitol. Five stories, one engine: a cornered president, and the arithmetic that cornered him. 5️⃣ The Ballroom Dies on a Technicality Trump wanted a billion dollars of public money for the ballroom going up on the White House lawn. He buried it inside a spending bill and called it Secret Service security. He did not get it. He lost it on a technicality, which is the only way anything stops this White House anymore. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse walked through the kill: the White House is a public building under the Environment and Public Works Committee, and it sits on national park land under Energy and Natural Resources. Republicans wrote their reconciliation bill without instructions to either committee. Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich sent their lawyers to argue the funding was therefore defective. The parliamentarian agreed in a day. Bye-bye, billionaire ballroom. What’s left is the question of why a president needs a billion-dollar fortress at all. Trump talks about drone ports and snipers and keeping the world safe. The likelier read is the one Dean gave it: this is a bunker, and a man builds a bunker when he does not plan to leave. The same afternoon, a commission of his own appointees approved his triumphal arch by the Arlington Memorial Bridge. The fortress and the monument, waved through on the same day. Trump noticed only the second one — “I finally get good news,” he said. 4️⃣ The Democrats Disown Their Own Autopsy For months the Democratic National Committee sat on its own report into why Kamala Harris lost. On Thursday, Chair Ken Martin released it — and stapled a note to the front saying the party “cannot independently verify the claims presented.” He published the autopsy and disowned the coroner in the same motion. Martin did not release it because he wanted the answers. He released it because hiding it had become the bigger story. So the report — which faults the Biden White House for never preparing Harris and says she “wrote off rural America” — hit every front page with the party’s own fingerprints smudged across it. The Democrats had a reckoning to write and a plan to write. They published a draft they refused to sign. This is the only story today that did not break against Trump by breaking toward someone. On a Thursday when every lever of his power jammed, the party built to replace him spent the morning arguing with its own paperwork. A 31 percent president is beatable. He still has to be beaten by somebody. 3️⃣ Good Night, Colbert Stephen Colbert taped the final Late Show on Thursday night, 11 years after he inherited the desk and a decade as the most-watched host in late night. CBS calls the cancellation “purely financial.” Colbert calls it what it followed: Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Trump over a 60 Minutes edit — a payment Colbert named a “big fat bribe,” made while the company needed federal sign-off on an $8 billion merger. This is media capture in its most comfortable form — not a censor, a spreadsheet. The company settles, the merger clears, the loudest nightly critic of the president goes dark, and nobody has to say the word. Bari Weiss now runs the newsroom. The ratings are gone. A historic network is dying a quiet, self-inflicted death. The miscalculation is that it works. Late night is where the men at the Yankees game get their politics — the ones who do not read the Post and would never call themselves political. Kill Colbert, and every host still standing inherits a reason to swing harder and a martyr to swing for. Jon Stewart, on Colbert’s couch this week, named the future better than any pollster: a day when the country “repudiates this putrid administration,” he said, and the joyful noise from its bowels makes Hungary’s break from Orbán “look like an Amish Sabbath.” 2️⃣ One Vote From the End of the Iran War Last week the House split 212 to 212 on whether to pull the United States out of Trump’s war with Iran. A tie fails, and the war went on. On Thursday the arithmetic moved: Jared Golden, the lone Democratic holdout, said he would vote yes, and the House headed back to the floor. The final count is unconfirmed as this posts — but the count was never the real story. Watch what actually turned those votes. Not conscience — Dean called it the butterfly effect, and the plainer word is self-preservation. Trump spent sixteen months primarying the Republicans who crossed him: Thomas Massie for wanting the Epstein files, Bill Cassidy for voting against him nine percent of the time. The survivors looked at a 31 percent president and did the math. A vote to claw back war powers is no longer a vote against a strongman. It is a vote with the wind. It comes the same day Tehran hardened. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, ordered that the country’s near-weapons-grade uranium stay inside Iran — the exact concession Trump promised Israel a peace deal would deliver. So Trump now sits between a Congress moving to forbid him from fighting the war and an enemy refusing to give him a reason to stop. He owns the Strait of Hormuz, he says. What he owns is a war he cannot win and cannot end — and gas prices that will carry it into November. 1️⃣ The Slush Fund — and the Quiet Half Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges held the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The men who beat them were pardoned. On May 20, those same men started filing claims against a $1.8 billion federal fund — and Dunn and Hodges sued to freeze it before a dollar moved. Read the claims out loud. One January 6 defendant who served 1,075 days wants $30 million. Michael Caputo wants $1.8 million “today.” Mike Lindell went on Fox to ask for $400 million. This is not compensation for a wrong. It is a down payment on the next one — money to keep the people who stormed the Capitol once ready to do it again. Two dozen Republicans now say they will help kill it, more than the math requires. The money was never the deepest part of this. The same settlement that created the fund barred the IRS, forever, from auditing Trump, his family, or his companies — and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed a memo handing the Trump family permanent immunity from financial crimes, past, present, and future. So ask the obvious question: what is inside those sealed returns that is worth this much trouble to bury? Narativ has spent years tracing the Epstein money, and that trail runs through tax filings and financial records exactly like the ones Blanche just sealed. The fund is the loud half of this story. The immunity is the quiet half — Trump shredding the records while the country argues about the payouts. THE PATTERN Add up the Thursday. The Senate took the ballroom. The House moved on the war. Two dozen Republicans turned on the slush fund. Even CBS folding and the Democrats fumbling their autopsy run on the same current — a 31 percent president generates no fear, and a strongman nobody fears is just a man. None of it was courage. Every Republican who found a spine this week found it in a poll. But the machine Trump built to make himself untouchable — the fund, the immunity, the war power, the ballroom he never has to leave — runs on fear, and the fear is draining out. He spent the day asking for good news. He should have been counting votes. The Fivestack airs weekdays at 3 PM ET with Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev. Subscribe free or paid at narativ.org — paid subscriptions push this reporting in front of more people. Thank you Lev Parnas [https://substack.com/profile/35788031-lev-parnas], Ellie Leonard [https://substack.com/profile/39376636-ellie-leonard], This Will Hold [https://substack.com/profile/315023719-this-will-hold], LC - Silence is Complicity [https://substack.com/profile/498003941-lc-silence-is-complicity], Story Carrier [https://substack.com/profile/3151678-story-carrier], and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe [https://www.narativ.org/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

FiveStack: SCOTUS Hands Trump the Government

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews [https://groundnews.com/fivestack] — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan. In forty-eight hours the Supreme Court closed its term and rewrote who runs the government. Six to three, again and again — a number that tells you how fixed this Court has become. It gave Donald Trump the agencies, opened the money spigot, and let the states decide who counts as a girl. Then it drew exactly two lines it would not let him cross: it would not erase the Fourteenth Amendment, and it would not hand him the Federal Reserve. On Tuesday’s Fivestack, Zev counted the five rulings down — least significant to most — with guest Anne P. Mitchell, the Stanford Law professor and federal-law author who writes Notes from the Front. (Dean Blundell was out sick; Mitchell stepped in at short notice.) What follows is the countdown, the words the justices actually wrote, and the impact measured in numbers. 5️⃣ The Court Lets the States Decide Who’s a Girl For three years Lindsey Hecox fought Idaho’s law to try out for the Boise State women’s track team, and a West Virginia middle-schooler, Becky Pepper-Jackson, fought to stay on her school squad. On June 30 the Court ended both fights at once, upholding state bans on transgender girls in girls’ and women’s sports. Kavanaugh wrote it. The vote was 6–3. Mitchell put her finger on the move that should trouble even people who welcome the result: the Court resurrected “separate but equal.” A century of race cases held that separate is inherently unequal. Here the majority says the opposite — that limiting girls’ teams to “biological females” is “substantially related” to an important government interest, and so it stands. The ruling leans on the meaning of “sex” when Title IX passed in 1972, before the country was having any conversation about gender identity. “It’s funny,” Mitchell noted, “how they only do that when it’s to their ideological advantage.” The reach is total. This is the Supreme Court, not a circuit — it is now the law of the land. Twenty-seven states already ban trans girls from school sports; every public school and university in them, K-12 through the NCAA, now operates on solid constitutional ground. Sotomayor, in dissent: “to the Court, the facts do not matter, even though the consequences are serious.” The majority, she wrote, lets states bar every transgender athlete “even if the facts show” no competitive advantage — moving the goalposts to answer the constitutional question without the record to support it. 🎯 THE GROUND NEWS BLINDSPOT — The Next Fight Is Already Here This week’s GroundNews.com [http://groundnews.com/fivestack]’s Blindspot is the sequel the Court already greenlit: it granted review of the assault-weapons bans in Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois — the first direct ruling on AR-15-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, with about a dozen state bans hanging on it. Arguments come this fall. Mitchell, who says she hasn’t missed a call yet this term, expects the bans struck. Power, then money, now the guns — the same six justices, one case at a time. Sign up for the blindspot at groundnews.com/fivestack [http://groundnews.com/fivestack] and get 40% off of their vantage plan. 4️⃣ Trump Tried to End Birthright Citizenship — and Lost On day one of his second term Trump signed an order stripping citizenship from babies born on U.S. soil to undocumented and temporary residents. Eighteen months later Chief Justice Roberts told him no, 6–3: children born here to parents “unlawfully or temporarily present” are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and “are citizens at birth.” The challengers’ reading, Roberts wrote, “commanded only a dissent in 1898, and neither time nor circumstance has changed the fact it is not the law.” Mitchell traced the stakes back to the worst day in the Court’s history. The Fourteenth Amendment exists because of Dred Scott — the 1857 ruling that Black Americans born on this soil were not citizens. The amendment was the country’s answer. Her takeaway: even a Supreme Court can be overruled by the people who wrote the Constitution to begin with. “They are only one of three — I argue four — branches of government,” she said. “The fourth being we the people.” The number behind the ruling is enormous. Roughly 255,000 to 260,000 babies a year — about one in nine U.S. births — had their citizenship riding on this case, and the order reached past the undocumented to the children of H-1B workers, international students, asylum seekers, and DACA recipients. It is Trump’s biggest defeat of the term. And the warning sits in the dissent: Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, wrote 90 pages arguing the other way. The three justices who wanted to read the amendment down are still on the bench. 3️⃣ The Court Opens the Spigot — Unlimited Party Money A Watergate-era cap on how much a party could spend hand-in-glove with its own candidate just fell. In NRSC v. FEC, Kavanaugh wrote for a 6–3 majority that coordinated-spending limits “necessarily abridge political parties’ freedom of speech.” One of the original plaintiffs, back in 2022, was a Senate candidate named JD Vance — now the Vice President, who will run on a case he helped bring. Mitchell flagged a detail most coverage skipped: the suit was filed under Biden, but by the time it reached the Court, the Trump DOJ agreed with the plaintiffs. The justices had to appoint outside counsel to defend the limits at all — and you have to wonder how vigorous a defense the law got with no administration behind it. The result rewires the money. A single donor’s reach jumps from $7,000 given directly to a candidate to roughly $500,000 routed through the party — a 70-fold widening, by Justice Kagan’s math — and the party can now operate in lockstep with the campaign. Republicans are cheering louder than Democrats, Mitchell said, because “they’re the party of a massive amount of money behind the donors.” The throughline is Citizens United. That ruling freed the outside money; this one frees the inside money, the party and the candidate spending as one. Kagan, in dissent, warned it “ushers back in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check.” Watch the airwaves in contested districts as November approaches. 2️⃣ The Fed Survives — But Read the Fine Print Here the show did what Narativ exists to do: correct the headline. Every outlet reported that the Court let Lisa Cook keep her seat at the Federal Reserve. Mitchell stopped Zev cold. “That’s not what it says.” What the 5–4 ruling actually did was send Cook’s case back down. Trump moved to fire her over an allegation of mortgage fraud surfaced by Bill Pulte; the Court found she had never been given a chance to answer it, and remanded so she can present her defense. Along the way the majority wrote an exhaustive history of why the Fed, created by its own statute, has always stood apart — but it pointedly did not announce a blanket rule that Fed governors can only be fired for cause. As Mitchell put it, Trump probably wishes he had fired Cook without stating a reason at all. Had he done that, she’d have gone the way of Rebecca Slaughter. Why it ranks second on a list where it touches one person: this is the board that sets interest rates, that steers inflation, affordability, the direction of the whole economy. A president who can install a majority on the Federal Reserve can manipulate the cost of living heading into an election. The Court drew its second line here — not out of principle, but because even this majority knows a president who can fire the Fed chair on a whim can crash the bond market. The line held by a single vote. 1️⃣ The 90-Year Wall Falls — Trump Can Fire Them All The biggest ruling of the term overturned a unanimous 1935 precedent. For ninety years, Humphrey’s Executor held that a president could not fire the members of independent agencies just for disagreeing with him. On June 29, in Trump v. Slaughter, Roberts erased it 6–3. The case began when Trump fired FTC commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya in 2025 with no cause, citing only Article II. Mitchell called the animus by name. Roberts has been gunning for Humphrey’s since 2010, chipping away case by case, shopping for the right plaintiff and the right moment for fifteen years — a Federalist Society long game, with Trump as the figurehead willing to bring the suit. The Chief Justice wrote his contempt into the opinion: “if anything more is left of Humphrey’s, the Court overrules it.” This was never really about Slaughter. It was about who is allowed to work in government. The impact is structural: more than two dozen independent agencies — the FTC, the SEC, the FCC, the NLRB, and the rest — lose their insulation. Congress built them bipartisan on purpose, so the referees couldn’t be fired for the call. Now they answer to one man. Mitchell offered her “cynical hope” — that Trump has already done most of the firing, so the damage may be priced in. Zev was less sanguine: a president who has spent his term gutting the government of anyone who opposes him will go as deep as the law now lets him. The enforcement machine has one master, and he has shown he will use it. ALSO FROM THE BENCH Two rulings barely made the headlines, and Mitchell brought both to the table. In Chatri v. United States, the Court held that pulling a person’s cell-phone location data from Google is a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant — Americans have “a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone location information.” Against an administration building a Palantir-fed database to geolocate people, that is a real limit. And in a quieter blow to Trump, the Court let states count mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day, even if they arrive after — even as the USPS floats a rule demanding states hand over their voter rolls. Mitchell’s advice: use a drop box, not the mail. THE PATTERN Read these decisions as one move. The Court expanded executive power, opened the money, upheld the culture-war ban, and reached toward the guns — and where it stopped Trump, it stopped him narrowly and for reasons of self-protection, not principle. The Fourteenth Amendment was too plain to erase; the Fed was too dangerous to hand over. Everything the Constitution’s text or the bond market protected survived. Everything else moved toward the Oval Office. That is not a term of decisions. It is a transfer of power — and the only check left standing is the one the justices can’t touch: a November election. Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews [https://groundnews.com/fivestack] — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan. The fight isn’t over; it just got more expensive. Subscribe to Narativ for the intelligence behind the news — and Know Sooner. Guest: Anne P. Mitchell writes Notes from the Front at annpmitchell.substack.com. Thank you Lesley Jane Seymour [https://substack.com/profile/182346601-lesley-jane-seymour], Robin Payes [https://substack.com/profile/22747167-robin-payes], Lalisa [https://substack.com/profile/286625111-lalisa], Noble Blend [https://substack.com/profile/21659563-noble-blend], Michelle C. Funk [https://substack.com/profile/1290880-michelle-c-funk], and many others for tuning into my live video with Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. [https://substack.com/profile/17911946-anne-p-mitchell-esq]! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe [https://www.narativ.org/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

30. Juni 202658 min

FiveStack: Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews [https://groundnews.com/fivestack] — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan. Denver Riggleman came on to break down five stories. He left having broken news of his own: the former Republican congressman and intelligence officer told Zev Shalev he is “at 99%” to run for governor of Virginia — and to run unaffiliated, as a one-man “party of the rational.” The reveal landed at the end of an hour that kept circling one idea. A president too weak to wait — collapsing abroad, sinking at home — is rushing everything, blaming everyone, and selling a peace nobody believes, while the guardrails that used to catch him are being pulled out one at a time. Filling in for Dean Blundell, Riggleman brought the credential that made the day’s intelligence story personal: fifteen years in the Air Force, a posting at the NSA, and four oaths to the Constitution. Here is how the five fit together. 5️⃣ The Green-Slime Lagoon Trump painted the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American flag blue” for the 250th. The dark coating cooked the water, the algae bloomed, the paint peeled — and the president blamed vandals he cannot produce, routing reporters to the Interior Department and an investigation of “six people” while offering no evidence of his own. Riggleman read it as the whole administration in miniature. “An inveterate liar is going to inveterately lie,” he said. “It’s like, don’t believe your lying eyes.” The decision tree behind the pool, he argued, is the same one behind everything: “How does it help me? How does it help my buddies? How does it bind them to me? And where do we make money?” Zev called it the work of “the distraction president” — a man spending taxpayer hours on the color of a pool while the country slides. The vandals always appear. The proof never does. 4️⃣ Pulte’s Purge A housing-finance executive with no intelligence background now runs America’s spy agencies. Bill Pulte, the new acting Director of National Intelligence, began purging staff this week and ordered 300 to 400 of the roughly 1,000 employees at the National Counterterrorism Center identified for firing — the one center built to stop the next 9/11. This is where Riggleman stopped laughing. He worked alongside the NCTC in uniform, and he tied the cuts directly to the Iran fallout: an administration raising the risk of terror attacks while gutting the ability to detect them. “Whether you get shot on purpose or shot on accident, you’re still getting shot,” he said. He went further — calling the combination “treasonous,” and arguing there is no longer “baseline truth in the intelligence apparatus anymore. It’s whatever Trump wants.” His verdict on the larger pattern: the people who tell a president inconvenient truths are being replaced by people who won’t. Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews [https://groundnews.com/fivestack] — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan. 3️⃣ The World Already Voted Pew’s new 36-country survey put numbers to the freefall. A median of 23% express confidence in Trump’s handling of world affairs — below Putin, below Xi. Seventy-four percent disapprove of his handling of Iran. In Canada, the share calling the U.S. a reliable partner fell from 83% in 2022 to 35% today; in Germany, “considers our interests” cratered from 60% to 23%. Zev played the tell: Trump explaining why he signed the Iran deal at Versailles — “he knew my weakness, because I think Versailles is one of the great places.” A president drawn to palaces while allies walk away. Riggleman’s worry ran past the polling to the people behind it: that the world will not trust America “for generations,” because America is the country that elected this twice. 2️⃣ The Deal That Isn’t a Deal Trump says Iran agreed to inspections; Iran’s foreign minister says no procedure exists. Asked when inspectors would actually arrive, Trump said it himself: “At the appropriate time. There’s no rush.” Strip away the public squabbling and the talks are advancing — but on Tehran’s terms, with the nuclear question pushed to the next stage of a 60-day clock. Riggleman refused the fantasy that Iran will now play nice “after we assassinated their head of state.” The reported $300 billion, he warned, flows straight back into the IRGC and Iran’s proxies — and likely back to Trump-aligned companies through reconstruction, Starlink, oil and Hormuz tolls. His sharpest line cut at the strategy: “Think about how inept you have to be to be the country that actually invoked sympathy for Iran.” His read on the timeline was bluntly political — the rush is about the midterm hangover, not human lives, which is why the deal is unlikely to truly close. 1️⃣ The Counterforce — and the Wedge For years the question was where the answer to Trumpism would come from. Tonight it was on the ballot in New York, where Zohran Mamdani spent his capital to drag the party left — and the dividing line, race after race, was Israel. Zev’s call: support for Israel becomes the single biggest issue into November, a binary that follows voters from the primary to the general. Riggleman agreed it is “one of the three legs of the stool” being eaten away — alongside the economy and healthcare cuts in red districts, and the Epstein files he insists won’t go away. But Riggleman, who once took AIPAC money and felt the leash, warned the left against its own version of the right’s mistake: “reciprocal radicalization.” Zev likes democratic socialism as policy — he lives with it in Canada — but doubts its candidates survive a general electorate. His answer was the news of the night: a serious look at an independent run for Virginia governor, a state where a plurality can win and national money can flow, refusing AIPAC and JPAC alike. “What if I just told the truth? What would that look like?” THE PATTERN Riggleman’s grimmest line was also his thesis: “They won the money game. We have to win the future of America game.” The pool, the purge, the polls, the deal and the primary are one story — a corrupt, cornered administration converting the government into a revenue stream while dismantling the institutions that could stop it, and using Israel to split the opposition. He put the stakes in plain terms: the midterms still likely break toward Democrats, the House flips, the Senate lands near 50-50 with Vance the tiebreaker — but 2028, he said, “terrifies me.” And then the man who took the oath four times said he is 99% in. Whether a former spy running up the middle in Virginia is a dream or a strategy, the hunger he is betting on is real. The counterforce to Trumpism may not come from the left or the right. It may come from the exits. Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews [https://groundnews.com/fivestack] — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan. Thank you Ellie Leonard [https://substack.com/profile/39376636-ellie-leonard], Amy Gabrielle [https://substack.com/profile/5498662-amy-gabrielle], Cat: Poli-Psych [https://substack.com/profile/94117599-cat-poli-psych], LC - Silence is Complicity [https://substack.com/profile/498003941-lc-silence-is-complicity], Robin Payes [https://substack.com/profile/22747167-robin-payes], and many others for tuning into my live video with Denver Riggleman [https://substack.com/profile/99144984-denver-riggleman]! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe [https://www.narativ.org/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

23. Juni 20261 h 0 min

FiveStack: Trump is Cornered at 31% Approval; Senate Kills The Billionaire Ballroom; House Prepares for War Resolution Vote

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