FiveStack with Dean Blundell & Zev Shalev

BREAKING: Trump’s Name Must Come Off The Kennedy Center

By the time Dean introduced Scott MacFarlane, a federal judge in Washington had already ordered Donald Trump’s name peeled off the Kennedy Center within 14 days. By the time we got to story five, the Freedom 250 concert Trump is planning for the South Lawn had collapsed from nine acts to three. By the end of the hour, the day’s argument was sitting in plain view — everything he touches is rotting in his hands, and Washington is starting to peel away. 5️⃣ FREEDOM 250 COLLAPSES TO THREE Trump’s “Great American State Fair” was announced 48 hours ago with nine performers. By Friday it was down to three: Vanilla Ice, Flo Rida, and Freedom Williams of C+C Music Factory — and Williams may also bail. Morris Day and the Time said they were never contacted. Martina McBride said the booking agent misled her about who was running it — Trump’s “Freedom 250,” not the congressionally chartered “America 250.” The Commodores walked. Bret Michaels — winner of Celebrity Apprentice, a man who in Dean’s line “would suck the chrome off a bumper for Donald Trump” — said no. The lineup didn’t collapse over politics in the abstract. It collapsed because nobody wants the stink. Vanilla Ice is the floor. 4️⃣ THE SOUTH LAWN LOOKS LIKE A TRAILER PARK Workers are parking on the White House lawn. Cranes, gaudy flags, chicken-coop fencing on the public side of the wrought iron. Behind it: the East Wing hole that may one day become Trump’s bunker — with hospital, drone port, and glass roof — and the UFC-branded Freedom 250 stage going up alongside. Steve Schmidt called it a used-car lot. Dean called it a hoarder’s yard. Scott — careful as ever — called it the worst possible optics during a moment his community is afraid to fill the tank. Gas is eight dollars a gallon in parts of California. Inflation jumped to 3.8%. Beef is up. And Trump is building a circus on the South Lawn. Jackie Kennedy would have set fire to the contractors. 3️⃣ BONDI BLAMES BLANCHE, REFUSES TO ANSWER ON TRUMP Pam Bondi arrived at the House Oversight Committee Friday morning under DOJ supervision — Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights and as polarizing a figure as the agency has, sitting next to her. Then she pointed at her former deputy. Todd Blanche ran the Epstein release. The redaction errors were his. The decisions were his. On every question that touched her conversations with Donald Trump about the Epstein files, Bondi refused to answer. As Zev put it on air: that sounds like a confession. The Republicans on the committee didn’t show. Only James Comer. Friday before a holiday weekend, no oath, no cameras, no recording — a closed-door designed to die in a transcript nobody reads. Outside the room, survivors were pushed aside in the hallway so Bondi could enter unaccosted. Liz Stein — who was twenty-one and a college senior when Maxwell and Epstein found her in 1994 — refused the country’s framing afterward, on camera: not Republicans versus Democrats, not conspiracy versus cover-up. The crime of sex trafficking. More than a thousand identified victims. A Department of Justice that redacts survivors’ names and protects perpetrators. 2️⃣ JUDGE FREEZES THE $1.776B SLUSH FUND Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema temporarily blocked Trump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund Friday morning. A hearing is set for June 12. The fund is the proceeds of a settlement Trump engineered with the IRS against himself — taxpayer money running to his allies through a vehicle even Republicans are walking away from. Brian Fitzpatrick first. Then Mike Flood of Nebraska, an off-the-radar Republican in an off-the-radar district, on the record trashing it. When Mike Flood is naming the slush fund a slush fund, the politics have cracked. The fund froze the same morning a different judge took Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center. Two courts. One Friday. Both pushing back on a Department of Justice that has stopped doing the work. 1️⃣ TRUMP’S NAME COMES OFF THE KENNEDY CENTER U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper halted the planned closure of the Kennedy Center and ordered Trump’s name removed within 14 days. Trump’s regime had been preparing to shut the building down on the Fourth of July. The lead plaintiff was Joyce Beatty, the Ohio Democrat and Kennedy Center trustee who was muted during the board meeting when the resolution to rename the building was voted through. They left her on mute. She sued. She won. Preservation groups joined her and won with her. The regime will appeal — they always do — and the order may get peeled back. For now, the cameras will be there when the letters come down. The federal courts are doing the work the Department of Justice will not. THE PATTERN Five stories. One Friday. A judge takes Trump’s name off a Washington landmark. A second judge freezes the cash vehicle he built for his friends. A former Attorney General arrives with a DOJ minder, blames her deputy for the Epstein cover-up, and refuses to answer a single question about her conversations with the president. The South Lawn looks like a carnival hauled in for a one-night stand. The concert collapses because Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida are the floor of who will still take the booking. The story for the next 6 months is fatigue. Not outrage. The kind that bleeds through every issue at once — the slush fund, the $300 billion he’s promising Tehran, the eight-dollar gas, the Epstein cover-up, the cars on the White House lawn. Trump’s presidency is in free-fall, and we’re all too tired to deal with it, but now is not the time to fade away, or he’ll take us all down with him Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych [https://substack.com/profile/94117599-cat-poli-psych], LC - Silence is Complicity [https://substack.com/profile/498003941-lc-silence-is-complicity], Ang Traders [https://substack.com/profile/5314520-ang-traders], Grace Alexandra Hayden [https://substack.com/profile/20104703-grace-alexandra-hayden], Leah Anderson [https://substack.com/profile/9962200-leah-anderson], and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell [https://substack.com/profile/34833166-dean-blundell] and Scott MacFarlane [https://substack.com/profile/379469498-scott-macfarlane]! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. 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THIEL RUNS FOR THE EXITS, JUDGE OKS VOTE GRAB, 60 MINUTES GUTTED, AND INFLATION SPIKES UP SHARPLY

5️⃣ EVEN THIEL FLEES TRUMP The donor decamped. Peter Thiel — the venture capitalist who funded J.D. Vance into the vice presidency, the founder of Palantir, the PayPal-mafia patron whose money built the operational core of MAGA — has moved his family to a twelve-million-dollar mansion in Barrio Parque, met Javier Milei at the Casa Rosada this afternoon, and bought a tract of land near Punta del Este in Uruguay that observers suspect will house a bunker, making Argentina his third escape hatch after New Zealand citizenship in 2011 and a Maltese passport in 2022. The man who built the surveillance company the Trump regime uses to vacuum up Americans’ data, and whose Valor Equity Partners took a forty-million-dollar Epstein injection around the 2016 election, does not believe the country he funded will hold — and Buenos Aires is the kind of city a man chooses when his name is about to come up under oath in Washington. 4️⃣ TRUMP’S FACE ON THE $250 BILL The Washington Post reports that two Treasury appointees, Brian Beach and Andrew Brown, ordered the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to prototype a $250 banknote with Donald Trump’s face on it — specifically, the Fulton County mugshot taken when he was booked on the Georgia election-interference indictment — and the bureau’s printing director was reassigned within weeks of flagging that federal law forbids putting a living person on U.S. currency. George Washington was asked at Mount Vernon whether his face belonged on American money; he said no, because that, he said, was what kings do. Two and a half centuries later, Trump’s appointees are doing it anyway, with the booking photograph of the man as he stood charged with trying to overturn the 2020 election — and the very fact that the country now needs a $250 note is the symbolic confession that today’s dollar buys what yesterday’s hundred used to. 3️⃣ TRUMP JUDGE GREENLIGHTS MAIL-IN VOTING POWER GRAB Federal judge Carl Nichols — a Trump appointee, a Federalist Society alumnus — today denied the plaintiffs’ request to block the executive order Trump signed March 31 restricting mail-in voting and ordering DHS, the Social Security Administration, and the U.S. Postal Service to build a federal voter list, ruling that the case is not ripe and the plaintiffs lack standing because the order has not yet caused them concrete harm. He invited them to return when it has, and a parallel case before Judge Talwani in Boston hears argument June 2 on the same question. The procedural posture matters less than the practical one. The executive order continues to operate, the federal voter list build continues, and the mail-in restrictions roll forward into a midterm. 2️⃣ NAVARRO STEERED $620 MILLION TO DON JR. ProPublica documented today what Denver Riggleman has been reporting at Narativ for four months: Peter Navarro — Trump’s senior counselor, the man Don Jr. visited in prison and to whom Don Jr. dedicated a book — personally called the Pentagon and directed the Office of Strategic Capital to lend six hundred and twenty million dollars to Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth startup whose investors include Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm 1789 Capital, which took an undisclosed stake three months before the loan was announced and watched Vulcan’s valuation run from roughly two hundred million to roughly two billion dollars in the months that followed. Across Vulcan, the drone parts firm Unusual Machines, and the one-point-six-billion-dollar Kazakhstan rare-earth mine, Eric and Donald Jr. have now built a portfolio worth roughly three-point-two billion dollars in eighteen months, almost all of it on sole-source contracts and federally-greased deals from their father’s regime — and the Republican Party that spent two years investigating Hunter Biden over a few hundred thousand dollars sits silent at this. Their silence is the answer. 1️⃣ INFLATION HITS 3.8% — TRUMP STALLS IRAN DEAL The April inflation reading came in at 3.8 percent, and the back-to-back monthly jumps of 0.9 percent in March and 0.6 percent in April mark the sharpest two-month spike since the 2022 surge — worse than anything Trump produced during his first term — while the Iran deal that would cool the oil price sits unsigned on his desk, he tells reporters he “won’t rush” it, and overnight U.S. and Iranian forces traded fresh strikes east of Bandar Abbas as Tehran fired a missile toward Kuwait. Trump is not defending the U.S. dollar — he is deliberately breaking it, because his personal stablecoin and his crypto portfolio, which independent reporting now estimates at roughly twenty billion dollars in Bitcoin and crypto futures, depend on the dollar’s continued devaluation, and every American paying more at the pump and at the grocery store this summer is paying, very directly, into Donald Trump’s personal hedge against the country he is running. 🎯 THE PATTERN Take all five stories together and the day tells itself. The donor is fleeing because he does not believe the country he funded will hold. The Treasury is engraving the president’s mugshot on a banknote that should not exist because the dollar is being deliberately gutted. A Trump judge is handing the regime the machinery to thin the voter rolls before the midterms. The president’s senior counselor handed the president’s son six hundred and twenty million dollars through a Pentagon loan. And inflation is hitting the worst short-term spike since the pandemic surge because the Iran deal that would cool it sits unsigned. Add this week’s firings at CBS — Sharon Alfonsi, Tanya Simon, Cecilia Vega, Dragan Mihailović, Matthew Polevoy, all gone under Bari Weiss — and the press is being purged at the same time the currency, the courts, and the contracts are. The same hand is moving every piece. It is not a series of scandals. It is one operation, run in plain view, and every American is paying the bill while the people running it move their money offshore. Read The Narativ daily at narativ.org [https://narativ.org/]. Subscribe to support independent reporting that the captured press will not do. Thank you Caro Henry [https://substack.com/profile/464640-caro-henry], Robin Payes [https://substack.com/profile/22747167-robin-payes], Debbie Hupp [https://substack.com/profile/1531283-debbie-hupp], LeftieProf [https://substack.com/profile/116079548-leftieprof], Lalisa [https://substack.com/profile/286625111-lalisa], and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell [https://substack.com/profile/34833166-dean-blundell]! 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]

Skeleton With a Wig

1️⃣ THE CABINET MEETING THAT WASN’T On Tuesday the White House posted that Donald Trump’s six-month physical had “checked out PERFECTLY.” On Wednesday at 11:56 AM the president sat down at his own Cabinet table and proved otherwise. Within the hour he threatened to bomb a US security partner — “Oman will behave just like everybody else or we’ll have to blow them up” — confused Oman with Iran, then confused Venezuela with Iran in the same answer, then claimed America produces double the oil that Russia and Saudi Arabia produce combined, a number that is not real. He looked gaunt. Dean called him a skeleton with a wig. The shoulders sunken, the cadence slow, the pauses long enough that the room had time to wonder whether the sentence was coming. Cardiologist Jonathan Reiner is on the record about “extreme somnolence.” Rick Wilson said it plain on television this morning — the president is dying. Marco Rubio looked at the wall. Pete Hegseth looked at the floor. The Secretary of State responsible for the Iran negotiation and the Secretary of Defense responsible for the war it followed sat shooting darts with their eyes trying to get the president to stop talking. He kept going. Trump told the country that allowing the cameras in was the most transparent thing any administration had ever done. He may well be right. Every American who turned on a television at noon today saw exactly what his staffers have seen for months: the president who leads the free world cannot lead a meeting. 5️⃣ KENNEDY CATCHES SNAKES, BLAMES CIRCUMCISION While the Cabinet meeting unfolded, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services uploaded a video of himself catching two snakes barehanded on Dr. Mehmet Oz’s Palm Beach patio. His wife, Cheryl Hines, can be heard begging him to stop — Bobby, please. Bobby told the camera the snakes were water moccasins, venomous; they were Black Racers, non-venomous; he did not know what he was holding. They were mating, which is why they bit him. Forty-eight hours later the same Bobby Kennedy sat at the Cabinet table and told the country circumcision causes autism, citing two studies whose lead reviewer called their methods “truly appalling.” This is the same Bobby Kennedy who cut the head off a whale and drove it home on his Jeep, who staged a dead bear in Central Park as a bike-accident victim, whose Vice President admitted yesterday he is on the “RFK nutrient diet” but will not say what is in it because “I’ll get in trouble for it.” The pseudoscience used to be a podcast bit. Now it is federal health policy. And the man delivering it does not know a Black Racer from a water moccasin. 4️⃣ TEHRAN TURNS THE INTERNET ON Eighty-seven days after Iran cut its national internet — the longest national shutdown ever recorded — Tehran flipped the switch back on Wednesday. Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref called it “the first step toward free and regulated access,” the word regulated doing the work. A regime does not reopen its country when it has lost. Iran has been letting only 25 ships through the Strait of Hormuz in a 24-hour window against a pre-war average of more than 100 — Tehran controls the tap. Their people will see the videos the regime wants them to see: the 42 US military aircraft downed, the USS Gerald Ford in dry dock for two years, more than two-thirds of US munitions and interceptors in the region depleted. Trump told his Cabinet “we don’t need oil, we don’t need the straits, we don’t need anything.” His allies in Europe and Asia need the straits. Inflation needs the straits. If Trump thinks he forced regime change in Tehran, he is delusional. The new leaders of Iran are the same — if not worse — than the ones before. 3️⃣ ALFONSI WALKS, CBS BURNS Sharyn Alfonsi’s last day at 60 Minutes was Saturday. She left after nearly twenty years at CBS and published a statement today naming editor-in-chief Bari Weiss as the executive who killed her CECOT segment on migrants vanished into El Salvador’s prison system. CBS leadership’s behavior, Alfonsi wrote, was “a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting” — “a chilling message to the entire newsroom.” She said she has learned exactly what it costs to hold the line; hold it anyway. Weiss was installed in October by Larry Ellison, Benjamin Netanyahu’s biggest American backer. Ellison’s son David runs Paramount-Skydance, one regulatory approval from buying Warner Bros Discovery and putting CBS News and CNN under one roof with Weiss above both. The Netanyahu interview that aired on CBS a few weeks ago was handpicked by Netanyahu’s office, edited with the prime minister signing off on every syllable. CBS News is no longer CBS News. It is a lobby group for Donald Trump and his friends and a news service for Benjamin Netanyahu. Sharyn Alfonsi went scorched earth on her way out because there was no one left inside the building to fight beside her. 2️⃣ TRUMP HANDS TALARICO A GIFT Within minutes of being declared the Republican Senate nominee in Texas, Ken Paxton — twice indicted on securities fraud, impeached by his own Texas House in 2023, accused of using his office to help a donor who employed his mistress, friend of the pedophile Adam Hoffman whom he helped cut a sweetheart deal, twice unfaithful to his pro-life Christian wife — was met by James Talarico’s first general-election video. “Ken Paxton is the most corrupt politician in America. He embodies the broken political system we’re running against. It’s puppet politicians who serve themselves and their billionaire mega donors instead of serving us. It’s time to come together: the People vs. Ken Paxton.” Talarico is 37, a Presbyterian seminarian, a Texas state representative, and the best Democratic fundraising story in the country — $27 million in the first quarter, more than every Republican Senate candidate in any state combined. He launched the People vs. Paxton Tour tonight at Rich’s Houston, timed to the third anniversary of Paxton’s impeachment. Cook Political Report moved Texas from Likely Republican to Lean Republican within the hour. The Senate Leadership Fund’s $342 million in fall ad reservations did not include Texas at this scale; they planned for Cornyn. Trump may have forced Cornyn off the board, but in doing so he handed Talarico exactly the foe Democrats prayed for. The rescue money for Paxton comes out of Alaska, North Carolina, Maine, and Ohio — the four seats Democrats actually need to take the chamber. Trump handed his party a Texas problem and his opponent a national platform on the same Tuesday night. THE PATTERN Trump is losing his grip. The Cabinet meeting showed a president no longer sharp, no longer coherent, no longer able to recall the names of countries his own military is at war with. He told the room he doesn’t care about November, claiming Paxton’s win shows how much support he really has. He did not see the gift he had just handed Democrats. It is the same shoot-before-you-think instinct he used to start the Iran war he is now losing, the same instinct his acolytes used to pull Sharyn Alfonsi’s CECOT story and run her contract out, the same instinct Bobby Kennedy uses to grab snakes he cannot identify and federal health policy he cannot defend. Every political move has consequences. A president who cannot tell Oman from Iran is not thinking clearly about the consequences of his next one. Day 493. That’s why you need to know sooner. Follow Dean: deanblundell.substack.com [https://deanblundell.substack.com/] Thank you Ellie Leonard [https://substack.com/profile/39376636-ellie-leonard], Leah Anderson [https://substack.com/profile/9962200-leah-anderson], Micheal Scott [https://substack.com/profile/313863550-micheal-scott], Ms.Yuse [https://substack.com/profile/322112054-msyuse], Rachel-We are Renee and Keith [https://substack.com/profile/305439072-rachel-we-are-renee-and-keith], 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]

Bombs Iran. Posts "PERFECTLY." Loses Alabama. Rewrites the Vote. Launders Through a Braque.

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews [https://groundnews.com/fivestack] — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan. Iranian officials told Washington Monday to ignore Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts about a peace deal. They are, in the words a Tehran back-channel briefing used and the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Axios, Reuters and Al Jazeera later confirmed, “political theater for a domestic audience.” By Tuesday afternoon that read covered every story on Fivestack. The president walked into Walter Reed and walked out posting one word in all caps. He pulled his full cabinet to Camp David for tomorrow because the strike he ordered Monday collapsed the talks he had claimed Friday were nearly done. He demanded eight Sunni states join the Abraham Accords on one phone call and the line went silent. A federal court in Birmingham — two Trump-appointed judges on the panel — told Alabama its gerrymander was not “particularly complex or close.” And our own investigation published this morning showed where the money funding Jeffrey Epstein’s operation came from: a 1911 Georges Braque still life, a $30 million round-trip wire, and a bank that sat on three sides of the same table. Theater up top. Machinery underneath. 5️⃣ Walter Reed — Trump’s “PERFECTLY” and Nothing Else Donald Trump walked into Walter Reed Tuesday and walked out posting one word in all caps on Truth Social: PERFECTLY. That was the entire disclosure of the fourth publicly disclosed medical exam of his second term — the third Walter Reed visit in thirteen months. He turns eighty in June. Dr. Jonathan Reiner, Dick Cheney’s former personal physician, went on CNN and laid out what the camera shows: hand bruises covered with makeup (the White House said “handshakes”; Reiner called the explanation “not credible”), severe acute-chronic edema in the ankles, daytime somnolence putting him to sleep in the Oval and possibly at Arlington on Memorial Day. April 2025 released full bloodwork. July gave a diagnosis and no results. October went vaguer still and the press office sat on it until December. Today: one word. The succession question lives in the room nobody is allowed to enter. TODAY’S GROUND NEWS BLINDSPOT IS: Read it at GroundNews [https://groundnews.com/fivestack] — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan. 4️⃣ Court Tosses Alabama’s 6-1 Map — SC Republicans Defect to Save Clyburn A unanimous three-judge federal panel in Birmingham — two of them Trump appointees — refused Tuesday to let Alabama use its 6-1 congressional map for the November midterms, ruling in a 79-page opinion that the map “intentionally discriminated based on race in violation of the Constitution” and that the question was “not particularly complex or close.” AG Steve Marshall promised an immediate Supreme Court appeal. Hours later in South Carolina, state Senate Republicans broke ranks and joined Democrats to kill a similar GOP map that would have eliminated the last majority-Black district in the state — preserving the seat of Representative James Clyburn, the first Black member of Congress elected from South Carolina in nearly a century. The Supreme Court gave the GOP the rule last month with its Louisiana decision weakening the Voting Rights Act. The rule still required something Alabama could not produce: a map that did not intentionally crack Black voters. 3️⃣ Trump’s Election EO — and the NDA They Want Every Federal Employee to Sign Trump’s executive order “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections” is the document voting rights groups warned about for two years — it restricts voter access, punishes states that make voting easier, and grew out of a seventeen-page draft that proposed declaring a national emergency to seize federal control of the 2026 midterms. Stacked on top this week: a White House proposal requiring every federal employee, including contractors, to sign a nondisclosure agreement banning any information that disparages the president or the administration. The whistleblower carve-out is paper; the regime’s track record with whistleblowers is doxx, swat, hand the address down to the incel army. Federal employees work for the public, for Congress, for the law — not for the president. The line runs from the EO to the NDA to the DOJ’s “mega masters” deporting people who missed a court notice. One machine. 2️⃣ Narativ Exclusive — Black, Epstein, and the $30 Million Braque Our investigation published this morning begins with one wire instruction Jeffrey Epstein sent his lawyer Darren Indyke: “ok to wire the 30 million.” On the deadline day of a §1031 like-kind exchange — midnight, November 23, 2016 — a U.S. Virgin Islands trust Epstein controlled bought a Giacometti and Georges Braque’s 1911 Le Guéridonfrom Apollo co-founder Leon Black for $30 million. The “buyer” was Epstein. The “fee” was money Black had just paid him — round-tripped Southern Trust → Southern Financial LLC → the Haze Trust → back to Black. Bank of America sat on three sides of the wire. Six months later Christie’s sold the Braque for $8.8 million; the Haze Trust netted $7,725,000 in fewer than two hundred days. A Ukrainian MC2 model who flew to Sochi the week of the sale pocketed a $772,500 “commission” on a sale she did not broker. Senator Wyden’s Senate Finance minority calls it a sham conveyance: $1.3 billion in deferred U.S. tax that funded Epstein’s offshore operation. Black testifies to House Oversight on June 26. 1️⃣ Trump Strikes Iran — Talks Pause, IRGC Vows Retaliation, Cabinet Moves to Camp David While Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and foreign minister Abbas Araghchi were in the air Monday bound for peace talks in Doha, U.S. warplanes sank two Revolutionary Guard speedboats laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz and struck missile launch sites near Bandar Abbas, Iran’s major southern port and naval base. By Tuesday afternoon Ghalibaf was on a plane home — talks paused. The IRGC promised a “decisive reciprocal response.” Supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his father after U.S.–Israeli bombs killed the elder Khamenei on the war’s opening day February 28, told the region American military bases are no longer safe. Trump moved Wednesday’s full cabinet meeting to Camp David. Days earlier he had phoned the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain on one call and demanded they all join the Abraham Accords as the price of peace; Pakistan rejected him on the line, and the silence ran long enough that Trump joked into the line, “are you still there?” U.S. intelligence assessments leaked this month confirm Iran retains thirty of thirty-three missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, seventy percent of its mobile launchers, and seventy percent of its prewar missile stockpile. And the Iranians told Washington this week to ignore Trump’s Truth Social posts about the deal — political theater for a domestic audience. 🎯 The Pattern The Iranian foreign ministry gave us the day’s frame for free. Political theater for a domestic audience — the Truth Social posts, the PERFECTLY medical exam, the all-Sunni Abraham Accords ask, the election integrity EO, the federal NDA, the gerrymander dressed in civil-rights drag. Theater for the cameras at the top. And underneath: Bank of America on three sides of a $30 million wire that funded Jeffrey Epstein’s operation. A federal panel in Alabama with two Trump appointees on it telling the state its gerrymander is racist on its face. State Senators in deep-red South Carolina killing their own party’s map to save Clyburn’s district. A chronic-insomnia diagnosis the White House will not let the doctor speak. A cabinet meeting moved to Camp David because the talks the president claimed had succeeded had just been shattered by the strike the president ordered. A man who lights the building, calls the fire department, and asks for the credit — and a country whose institutions are deciding, one Trump-appointed judge and one state senator at a time, whether they are still willing to play the part assigned to them. Day 492. That’s why you need to know sooner. Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews [https://groundnews.com/fivestack] — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan. Subscribe We do this reporting because no major outlet will. Subscribe at narativ.org [https://www.narativ.org/]. The Leon Black–Epstein investigation is the first of several. The receipts are real, and the room is full. — Zev Shalev Thank you Robin Payes [https://substack.com/profile/22747167-robin-payes], LeftieProf [https://substack.com/profile/116079548-leftieprof], Leah Anderson [https://substack.com/profile/9962200-leah-anderson], Lalisa [https://substack.com/profile/286625111-lalisa], Jeanne Elbe [https://substack.com/profile/96662126-jeanne-elbe], and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell [https://substack.com/profile/34833166-dean-blundell]! 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: Trump is Cornered at 31% Approval; Senate Kills The Billionaire Ballroom; House Prepares for War Resolution Vote

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! 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