🛡️ AMERICA STEPS BACK, PUTIN STEPS WEST

Pete Hegseth flew to Brussels on Thursday and pulled the floor out from under Europe. The whiskey-loving former Fox weekend anchor ordered a six-month review of U.S. troops on the continent and, effective immediately, slashed the forces Washington would send if war broke out — about a third of its fighter jets, plus the strategic bombers and deep-strike weapons Europe can’t replace for years. He dressed it up as tough love, calling NATO “a paper tiger and a one-way street” and mocking allies for spending on “gender equity and climate change.” Read the map, not the insults. Russia is already probing NATO airspace and massing beyond the Ukrainian front, and the assets Hegseth just pulled are the exact ones that would blunt a push into Lithuania, Poland, or Romania. Shorting Europe’s defense doesn’t only knife the allies — it hands Vladimir Putin the opening to carry his war past Ukraine and onto NATO soil. Trump didn’t end a war today. He cleared the path for the next one.

🔥 “YOUR MOSCOW WILL BURN”

The snub in Brussels had a rehearsal. Days earlier at the G7, Trump booked one-on-ones with the leaders of France, the Gulf, Egypt, and India — and left Ukraine off the list, granting Zelensky only a sideline huddle with Macron in the room. When Zelensky held up photographs of Russia’s strike on the Pechersk Lavra, one of Kyiv’s holiest sites, Trump shrugged: “it has no impact on us, we’re thousands of miles away.” On Thursday, Ukraine made sure Moscow couldn’t look away — the largest drone barrage on the capital since Putin launched the invasion four years ago, shutting all four Moscow airports, setting fire to a refinery that supplies 40 percent of the city’s gasoline, raining oily smoke over neighborhoods where no sirens sounded. “If Ukraine burns, then your Moscow will burn as well,” Zelensky warned. Now Russian hard-liners are demanding Putin “strike the enemy mercilessly” — and Russia holds the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.

⚖️ THE COURT DECIDES WHO IS A CITIZEN

By the time most readers eat lunch, the Supreme Court may have decided whether a baby born in a Texas hospital is American. The justices hand down term-end rulings this morning, and Trump v. Barbara leads — the challenge to the order Trump signed on day one of his second term, stripping citizenship from children born here to parents who entered illegally or hold temporary visas. Birthright citizenship has held since 1868, written into the Fourteenth Amendment. In April’s arguments a majority sounded ready to strike the order down, but the case turns as much on whether one judge can block a president nationwide — a narrower door that could let the order survive in pieces. The same bench also rules today on Trump’s power to fire the heads of independent agencies.

🌍 SIGNED REMOTELY, STILL SHOOTING

Trump and Iran’s President Pezeshkian signed their framework to end the war this week — done electronically, and the White House now calls it “in effect,” with sanctions waived for Iranian oil and Tehran’s enriched uranium headed for dilution. Then Trump warned he’d start bombing again “if they don’t behave.” Schumer called the war “one of the biggest American disasters”; Cassidy, a Republican, called the deal “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.” Israel is already testing it, killing one person in a south Lebanon drone strike Thursday while refusing to pull back from the Litani.

🕊️ OBAMA OPENS HIS DOORS ON JUNETEENTH

Three former presidents, Stevie Wonder, and Bruce Springsteen gather in Chicago’s Jackson Park today to dedicate Barack Obama’s $850 million presidential center, which opens to the public Friday on Juneteenth. The first Black president cuts the ribbon on his legacy the same morning the Court weighs who gets to be a citizen at all.

🎯 THE BIGGER PICTURE

While Ukraine’s resistance is nothing short of remarkable, we cannot allow ourselves to daydream that these drone strikes from Ukraine - effective as they may be - will be enough to defeat Russia. And while Zelensky’s message to Putin about Moscow burning reminds Russia that it is not invincible, it has not yet changed Putin’s resolve to strike at Lithuania, Romania and further Westward. What is startlingly clear from Pete Hegseth’s policy shift in Brussels is that Trump is actually retreating from NATO, leaving our allies vulnerable to Putin’s military aggression as Russia seeks to expand the battlefield. At home the Court he built decides who counts as an American while in Chicago the first Black president opens the doors to his library.

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🌍 THE SURRENDER HE’S CALLING A WIN

What Trump and JD Vance signed by video Monday isn’t a deal — it’s a 14-point memorandum to go negotiate one, and everyone who’s read the leaked text lands on the same verdict: it favors Tehran. Iran pockets more than $20 billion in seized assets unfrozen immediately, draws on a $300 billion reconstruction fund, wins sanctions relief, and sells its crude through American services again — and promises in return never to build a bomb while its wider nuclear program waits in the long grass. The negotiators left enforcement for later, too. Netanyahu already broke the ceasefire’s first test — he won’t stop hitting Hezbollah in Lebanon, the strikes have run on since the announcement, and if the deal dies it dies right there. Trump pictures a new order he brokered single-handed; instead he paid Iran to reopen a strait Iran shut and called the bill a victory. He gets his photo Friday on a Swiss mountaintop. Iran takes the cash, its oil, and 60 days it’s already allowed to extend

.

🤖 ROME, NOT CYBERSECURITY

The White House gave Anthropic less than 90 minutes on Friday to pull its newest models offline, and six days later the company still can’t pry loose a straight reason why. Officials pointed to a flaw Amazon flagged in Fable 5 — except Amazon never tested the rival models that do the same thing, and 150 cybersecurity experts signed a letter calling the crackdown what it looks like: bullying. One government official let the real tell slip, citing concerns over “which companies Anthropic chose to work with” — a concern no one ever raised with Anthropic directly. Three weeks earlier, co-founder Chris Olah had stood beside Pope Leo XIV to unveil the first papal encyclical on AI, a company at war with Trump banking moral standing with the one authority the White House can’t strong-arm. Refuse the regime’s surveillance work, say yes to Rome, and you learn in 90 minutes who’s allowed to exist.

💵 WARSH KILLS THE CUT

Kevin Warsh held rates at 3.50–3.75% in his first meeting as Fed chair — the easy part. The tell is what he stripped out: the statement’s cutting bias is gone, the new dot plot erases the lone 2026 cut markets were counting on, and several officials now pencil in a hike. Inflation stuck at 4.2%, Brent crude above $100, and a labor market that won’t crack handed him the cover. Warsh just told Wall Street the rate-cut era is over — from the one seat Trump wants to control and doesn’t.

🚁 RIGHT ON CUE

The FBI says it foiled a plot to attack the UFC Freedom 250 card at the White House with explosive drones and snipers, charging five men including a 19-year-old turned in by his own mother. Hours later the DOJ was in appeals court citing that very plot to argue Trump should finally get his ballroom — the drone-proof one the Senate parliamentarian defunded and a federal judge halted — which is the kind of timing worth noticing.

⚖️ THURSDAY AT THE COURT

The Supreme Court rules Thursday on whether Trump can end birthright citizenship and fire a sitting Fed governor — the term’s two tests of how much of the presidency the Court will hand one man.

🎯 THE BIGGER PICTURE

Trump walked into the G7 and told the room, “I’m the boss.” Everyone laughed — and the laugh is the problem. Trump wants to remake the world in his image, and he could not care less what came before, how things are done, or what the law allows. He wanted a blue Reflecting Pool, resurfaced the Lincoln Memorial’s without review, and watched it dry green. He wanted a war he could end with a signature, and he signed one that hands Tehran the money and the oil. He wanted a company to bend, and he switched off its product. He wanted his ballroom, and a foiled drone plot arrived right on time to argue for it. He wanted to end Ukraine with a handshake, denied Zelensky the private meeting, and sent him home with missiles instead of the deal Trump keeps promising. Reality keeps handing him green where he ordered blue. The Iran deal is a quagmire, and it stays a quagmire, because a man who only knows how to give orders never learns what he can’t command.

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🕊️ IRAN TO COLLECT HORMUZ TOLLS AFTER 60-DAY FREE WINDOW

Trump arrived at the G7 declaring the Iran war “finished” and the Strait of Hormuz “permanently toll-free” — then the actual terms started leaking. Iran’s Fars agency says Tehran slipped an eleventh-hour amendment into the memorandum: Iran and Oman recognized as sole authorities over the strait, free passage for 60 days, and after that, tolls — “maritime services” for security, navigation, insurance — paid to Iran. Washington insists “zero” frozen funds have been released and calls the deal “behavioural,” no sanctions relief; Tehran is telling its public the opposite. Trump says he’ll likely skip Friday’s Geneva signing, sending Vance, Witkoff and Kushner, and wants the MoU released that day “because it’s a very powerful document.” The price of peace with Iran is a permanent toll booth on the world cargo and oil traffic - a permanent inflationary device that entrenches the Iranian regime for a very long time

🚀 MUSK HITS A TRILLION — ON THE PUBLIC’S DIME

Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire when SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share, but the climb ran on public money: roughly a fifth of SpaceX’s revenue comes from Washington, and the company sits on $22 billion in federal contracts, including two Space Force deals worth $6.4 billion last month alone. Taxpayers financed the risk for two decades and were locked out of the equity until Musk chose to sell at a $1.77 trillion valuation — the upside was always his. It’s time to rewrite the rules for public money flowing into private fortunes: if the government builds the company, the public should share the return.

🚀 BITCOIN BOMB IS TICKING INSIDE MUSK’S SPACE X

And there’s a ticking time bomb buried in the balance sheet — SpaceX now holds 18,712 bitcoin, about $1.3 billion, making the Pentagon’s favorite contractor the 8th-largest corporate crypto holder on the market. A bitcoin crash wouldn’t just dent Musk; it could crack a company the national-security state depends on and ripple straight into the 401(k)s of a public handed all of the risk and none of the reward.

🤖 TRUMP SILENCES NEW CLAUDE

At 5:21 p.m. on June 12, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick signed an order barring Anthropic from serving its most powerful models — Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — to any foreign national, and because the company can’t sort nationality in real time, both went dark worldwide overnight. The trigger, per the administration, was a rival firm’s claim it had jailbroken Mythos. Anthropic calls it a “misunderstanding” and is scrambling to cut a deal to restore access. The precedent stands either way: Washington can now switch off a commercial AI by memo.

🟢 LINCOLN MEMORIAL POOL TURNS GREEN AFTER $14M REPAINT

Trump’s $14.2 million repaint of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — a deeper “American flag blue” for the 250th — turned green with algae within days of completion. Interior calls the bloom “residual,” from supply lines that sat dormant during construction. Symbolic or not, the country’s most photographed pool was remade to look better and came out covered in rot.

👑 NORWAY CROWN PRINCESS’S SON CONVICTED OF RAPE

Marius Borg Høiby, son of Norway’s Crown Princess, was found guilty of two counts of rape and sentenced to four years — prosecutors had sought nearly eight. Foreign nations proving that they can live by the rule of law where no one is above the law. A principle America has surrendered.

🎯 THE BIGGER PICTURE

Run the day together, and one color holds it: green. Trump’s “toll-free” peace routes Hormuz toll money straight to the Iranian regime — America weaker, Tehran richer, in the world the deal builds. Musk’s trillion runs on the same green: taxpayer contracts going in, the public’s 401(k)s now riding a crypto-loaded balance sheet, and not a cent of the upside flowing back to the people who paid for the climb. On the Mall, $14 million of fresh blue paint bled algae within the week; it’s emblematic of what Trump actually runs on — toxic sludge that seeps through everything, equal parts greed and immorality. On Friday, we’ll find out how much Trump is really handing Iran.

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⛽ THE WAR COMES HOME AT THE PUMP

The war Trump is fighting abroad showed up on the price tag this morning. Consumer prices rose more than sixty percent of the jump came from energy, with gasoline up 40.5% over the year. That isn’t the market misfiring; it’s the Strait of Hormuz, the blockade Trump calls the most successful in naval history, billed straight back to the voter who fills up on the way to work. He brags about choking Iran’s economy and leaves out that the same squeeze runs through every American supply chain. Core inflation held cooler at 2.9%, which tells you this is a supply shock he created — not demand he can pin on anyone else. The Fed meets next week with. a new chairman with no clean move: cut and feed the fire, or hold and choke the economy he needs through the midterms. Watch the pump all summer — every day the Strait stays contested, the number he printed this morning gets harder to walk back.

🎙️ GROF, GATES AND UNGARO

Bill Gates sits for a closed-door House Oversight interview today — the richest name yet to answer for the friendship — a day after Epstein’s assistant of eighteen years, Lesley Groff, told the same committee she placed calls between Epstein and Trump about once a quarter, against twenty years of “we fell out.”

Thursday, Amanda Ungaro takes the chair on Narativ Live: the model who flew Epstein’s plane at seventeen and was deported to Brazil after a call from Trump’s envoy Paolo Zampolli.

💥 THE IRAN WAR AD INFINITUM

The truce that held 24 days collapsed overnight. Hours after a US Apache went down over Hormuz Monday night, Trump struck southern Iran — and by morning the IRGC had hit the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and US bases in Kuwait and Jordan, claiming twenty-one targets. Tehran says it’s done negotiating; Trump says Iran “will pay the price.” Seal the Strait and the war stops being Iran’s problem and becomes everyone’s — starting with the number in story one.

🕵️ CONGRESS WON’T TRUST TRUMP’S TOP SPY

Trump’s surveillance power dies Friday, and he pulled the plug himself. Naming Bill Pulte — a housing regulator with no intelligence background who’s been firing criminal referrals at Trump’s enemies — as acting spy chief handed Democrats the reason to let Section 702 lapse. The warrantless program he wants expires because he couldn’t resist putting a loyalist over it.

🚐 ICE SURGES IN NEW YORK AND LA

The one lever he fully controls got locked in through the term: the House cleared $70 billion for ICE and Border Patrol 214–212, Trump signs today, and the money runs on past any Congress that might switch it off. Watch New York and LA as Trump surges ICE in those cities.

🎯 THE BIGGER PICTURE

The bills for electing Trump are coming due, all at once. On top of 4% inflation at the pump and in the grocery aisle, taxpayers are about to foot the rumored $300 BN reparation bill to Iran. Another $315 Billion is being blown repatriation - the American Immigration Council pegs a full deportation near $315 billion. The peace deal he sold came down with that Apache over Hormuz. The Epstein files won’t stop singing, and the song is Trump-Epstein — his own people, under oath. Next it moves to the streets: fund an ICE surge and LA and New York, the cities that rose a year ago, are where it breaks first. Pick any promise and it’s collapsing on schedule.

Today we expose what lay beneath Zorro Ranch and tomorrow we sit down with Amanda Ungaro.

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🔥 IRAN WAR COULD SPLIT ISRAEL AND US ALLIANCE

Israel ordered all of Tyre to evacuate Tuesday — Christian quarter included — and struck the southern Lebanese port hours later. It moved after Trump spent the morning selling a deal he says is “days away,” one that ends the war and reopens the Strait. That’s the bind Trump is in: he wants this foolish war finished, Netanyahu wants it to continue, and Netanyahu no longer takes the order. Trump warned him to stop or “you’ll be on your own very soon” — and Bibi struck Tyre anyway. The strikes aren’t a move by a united alliance; they’re the alliance pulling apart. And the cost lands on the Americans caught in between: a US Army Apache went down near the Strait of Hormuz overnight, both crew pulled out alive, the second such incident in days. What’s breaking on Day 100 isn’t the ceasefire — it’s American and Israeli foreign policy splitting in real time, no longer able to agree on what a successful outcome looks like, or the best exit ramp to take.

🐻 VLADIMIR PUTIN’S HUMILIATION

Putin is in a retreat of his own. Russian troops are abandoning the Kinburn Spit at the mouth of the Black Sea, supply lines cut by Ukrainian drones they can no longer shoot down. Ukraine’s commander says his forces have retaken more than 600 square kilometers this year — in May gaining more ground than they lost, the first real reversal after years of Russian grind. A Russian general now warns Kyiv is massing for a push on Crimea itself. And a cornered Putin is the dangerous kind: the Kremlin answered the losses by reaffirming it will use “all available means, including nuclear weapons.”

📺 TRUMP STILL HOLDS THE CNN CARD OVER BIBI

The tell is a single hire: Paramount is recruiting a business partner for Bari Weiss — the signal that when its $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery deal closes, CBS and CNN fall under one roof, Weiss over all news editorial across both. But the deal can’t close without the FCC and DOJ approval Trump controls — which makes CNN the one card he still holds over a defiant Netanyahu, because handing Ellison the network Israel wants turns two of America’s biggest newsrooms into a single pro-Israel machine. Weiss has already fired Scott Pelley, who says he was ordered to “inject falsehoods and bias” for the president’s version of events. The FCC once barred one company from owning two stations in a single market; now Trump can give or withhold the thing Israel wants most — which is why this fight ends at his desk.

🕵️ SETTING DOWN THE TOOLS TO SEE

At the same time as America’s newsrooms are being swallowed up by pro-Israeli forces, America is set to lose one of its sharpest intelligence tools because Trump’s new spy chief can’t be trusted. Section 702 — the surveillance authority the agencies call indispensable — slides toward expiration because Democrats won’t reauthorize it while Bill Pulte runs national intelligence in an acting capacity. A more dangerous world arrives just as Washington puts down one of the instruments it uses to watch it — over a fight about a single appointment.

🗽 BOOED, THEN LYING ABOUT IT

At Madison Square Garden, Trump — the first sitting president at an NBA Finals — was booed so loudly that the anthem was nearly drowned out. He told reporters later that it was “mostly cheers”; the video says otherwise. Maybe Trump dreamt of a different reality as he slept throughout the NBA game.

🎯 THE BIGGER PICTURE

Zoom out and today is one story: the strongman alliance is cracking — and it’s cracking because all three of them are weak at once. Putin is in retreat, his forces pulling out of the Kinburn Spit as Ukraine retakes 600 square kilometers and drones gut his supply lines, a humiliated Kremlin now rattling its nukes to cover the losses. Trump is exposed by a midterm he could lose in November, and a line of legal and corruption fights that lie waiting beyond it. Bibi’s continued assault on Lebanon risks the peace talks and the strongman alliance. If Trump-Putin-Bibi can’t find a way to rebound, which militarily and politically seems very difficult— self-preservation kicks in and no-one knows who will win.

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🔥 THE RIFT WITH NETANYAHU BREAKS OPEN

The two men who started this war together no longer agree on how to end it. Sunday night, Benjamin Netanyahu moved to blow up Trump’s peace deal — Israel hit Beirut’s southern suburbs, a petrochemical plant in Iran’s southwest, and a line of military targets, and Iran answered with missile barrages, the worst exchange since the April truce, on the war’s 100th day. Trump called Netanyahu and ordered him to stand down — and to take the Iranian salvo without firing back. An American president just told the world the United States will absorb Iranian missiles and do nothing, a thing Washington would never have swallowed a year ago. Netanyahu wants to keep pounding Iran until the regime breaks; Trump wants out, because the war is bleeding his poll numbers and his own voters have turned against it. So Trump sided with Tehran over his closest ally, and the rift between the two men cracked open. Israel still wants to prosecute the war; Trump says no. The no is the tell on how weak he has become, but it makes clear what has been evident up until now. Netanyahu is willing to risk the US relationship with Israel, in exchange for an ongoing war with Iran.

🎙️ AT HOME, THE WEAKNESS COMES OUT AS RAGE

That same weakness has a louder face at home. Kristen Welker only had to ask Trump about his $1.8 billion fund to pay the people who stormed the Capitol — and he insisted the rioters “lost everything,” that FBI agents “ushered them into the building,” that the 2020 election “was rigged.” Welker told him he had no evidence. Trump called her crooked, called her stupid, and walked off his own interview. A president sure of his ground answers the question; this one fled it, still defending January 6, still selling a stolen election five years gone. The rage isn’t an act — it’s what’s left when the facts run out.

🗳️ THE CANDIDATE NOBODY CAN SINK

Graham Platner keeps generating scandals, and Maine Democrats keep not caring. The oyster farmer turned Senate frontrunner has survived a tattoo critics likened to a Nazi insignia, a trail of old inflammatory posts, and now his own wife flagging the explicit texts he sent other women — and he still leads Susan Collins 48 to 43 heading into Tuesday’s primary. Janet Mills, the establishment’s recruit, quit in April for lack of cash and left him the lane. Tomorrow, Maine decides whether the Bernie-backed harbormaster his own party keeps trying to disown is the one who finally beats Collins.

🕵️ THE SPY LAW DIES FRIDAY — OVER PULTE

The government’s warrantless-spying power runs out Friday, and the Senate just let it happen. Early Friday seven Republicans — Josh Hawley, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul among them — joined Democrats to block reauthorization of Section 702, 47 to 52, balking at Trump’s choice of his attack dog Bill Pulte to run the spy agencies and sign the surveillance certifications. Unless Trump’s own party reverses itself this week, Washington’s most powerful surveillance tool goes dark on June 12 — killed not by privacy activists but by senators who don’t trust the man now holding it.

🎥 HUNTER BIDEN COMES BACK SWINGING

Hunter Biden sat down Saturday with Lev Parnas and Dean Blundell and pointed across the table at Parnas as the man who flew to Ukraine and Austria to build the “laptop” — sourced, Hunter said, from Kremlin-linked oligarch Dmytro Firtash and sanctioned agent Andrii Derkach, months before the Delaware repair-shop story ever surfaced. The man the smear machine was built to destroy walked back onto the national stage and named the operatives he says ran it.

🎭 ALSO LAST NIGHT — Broadway crowned Schmigadoon! Best Musical and Liberation Best Play, while Death of a Salesman took six Tonys; in a week of real wars, the stage picked a parody of small-town nostalgia.

🎯 THE PATTERN

When you have to publicly distance yourself from an ally in order to get a bad peace deal with your enemy, you are not winning. By launching its attack on Israel, Tehran exposed two realities: how weak the United States is in the region, and a rift between the two allies who launched the war against it. What should concern Israelis the most is that by launching this senseless and expensive war, their leader Bibi Netanyahu is revealing his antipathy towards America and its people. It may ultimately cost Israel its true democratic partner in the world, and that may well be the death knell for democracy in the entire region.

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💣 EPSTEIN CASTS SHADOW FROM THE GRAVE

It’s official: the Department of Justice has completed its transformation into the Department of Jeffrey. Trump named Todd Blanche — his own former defense lawyer — as nominee for permanent Attorney General, and within hours House Oversight released Pam Bondi’s closed-door transcript, where the former AG tossed every aspect of the Epstein cover-up directly into the lap of the Acting AG. Instead of owning the process — or revealing what Donald Trump told her — Bondi blamed Blanche for “the process and the entire release of the Epstein files.”

Bondi is likely doing what she was told: by heaping the blame on the acting AG, she shields Donald Trump from being suspect #1 in the cover-up of the Epstein files — but it also forever labels Blanche as Donald Trump’s Epstein fixer. By nominating him to the permanent Attorney General position, Trump is fundamentally remaking the Department of Justice into something else — one that caters to launderers rather than imprisoning them, buys politicians instead of convicting them, and puts profit over service.

The Department Of Justice is no more. The Department of Jeffrey is what replaced it.

🚔 ONE IN SIXTEEN

Trump pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 rioters with one signature on his first day back. Lawfare finished counting Thursday: at least 97 of them have since been arrested, charged, or convicted of unrelated crimes — child molestation, reckless homicide, grand larceny, sex offenses against minors — nearly one in sixteen. Earlier tallies by the New York Times and CREW found 33 to 39; the true number is more than double. Five committed their new crimes only because the pardon freed them early; one, Andrew Paul Johnson, drew a life sentence for child molestation in February. And Todd Blanche, testifying in May, wouldn’t rule out paying some of these men from the $1.776 billion fund — the one the Senate refused to ban in a pre-dawn vote Friday.

⚖️ KELLEN NAMES TWO MORE

Sarah Kellen kept Epstein’s calendar for more than a decade. Last month she sat with House Oversight and named names the committee didn’t expect: Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell abused her, she testified, and so did Philip Levine, the former Miami Beach mayor and Democratic gubernatorial candidate, and Frédéric Fekkai, the celebrity hairstylist. Thursday, Comer’s Republicans asked the Justice Department to investigate both men — the department Blanche is about to run.

💵 THE NUMBER AND THE SHADOW

The economy added 172,000 jobs in May, more than double the 80,000 economists expected, and unemployment held at 4.3 percent — a third straight month of growth since spring 2025. Look past the headline and it thins: leisure, hospitality, and government did the lifting while manufacturing, construction, and retail went flat and finance shed another 22,000. Wages rose 3.4 percent, but inflation runs faster and a gas-price shock still hasn’t landed — Americans are earning more and buying less.

🦞 MAINE PICKS ITS FIGHTER

The Democratic Senate primary in Maine is Monday, and Graham Platner — the oyster-farming Marine who cleared the field when Governor Mills quit in April — is still the frontrunner. He’s there despite a New York Times story this week in which former girlfriends describe him sexting while married, one calling the behavior “unsettling.” Platner blames a dark stretch of undiagnosed PTSD and drinking, says he’s staying in, and the polls say Maine Democrats are staying with him.

🎯 THE PATTERN

Trump is transforming Washington, DC, in his own image. His 250-foot triumphal arch won design approval even as planners flagged the flight path overhead; he announced a promenade to the Potomac he wouldn't mind calling the Trump Promenade; he ordered the Reflecting Pool coated blue for the July 4 party — a reflecting pool that no longer reflects. The monuments are the easy part. The harder remake is the government itself, and when your nominee for Attorney General was your own defense attorney, there's very little chance you'll ever be held to account for anything,

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💣 Trump Nominates His Epstein Fixer For AG

Wednesday night, at a closed Rose Garden event, Trump told Dan Scavino he wanted it made official, and by morning Scavino had posted the video: Todd Blanche, the lawyer who once defended Trump in a courtroom, would be his nominee for permanent attorney general. Blanche has spent his months as acting head of the department doing the one thing Trump prizes above all others, executing the demand without flinching — clearing the prosecutions of the president’s enemies, carrying the $1.776 billion fund built to pay the president’s friends, and absorbing every hard question that came his way about the Epstein case.

💰 Trump’s $1.776 BN Slush Fund Resurrected

Blanche told Congress that the weaponization fund was finished, but it actually never died - the machine that pays Trump’s allies didn’t need the fund. When Lindsey Graham suggested the government simply use existing law, Associate AG Stanley Woodward answered with three words, “We’re on it,” and then deleted the post. The law is the Federal Tort Claims Act, a 1946 statute, and Trump’s allies are already filing lawsuits to claim their cash. 400 claims from Jan 6 insurrectionists were dropped off at the DOJ yesterday.

🎖️ Bolton’s Diary Becomes A Felony

John Bolton, the mustachioed hawk who served as Trump’s national security adviser and then spent the years since warning the country against him, has agreed to plead guilty to a single felony count of illegally retaining national security information — notes he kept in a private diary that only his wife and daughter ever read. The Justice Department had charged him with eighteen counts; it will take the one, a fine north of $2 million, and the spectacle, with up to five years on the table when he changes his plea on June 26.

🛢️ One Dead Soldier Away

The House voted 215-208 to cuff Trump’s war powers, four Republicans crossing the aisle to do it, even as Trump quietly set his own trigger: he has told aides he won’t return to all-out war with Iran unless American troops are killed.

📉 The Gates Are Closing

Blackstone capped withdrawals from its $79 billion credit fund on Thursday after redemption requests reached 10 percent, and Partners Group now says the run is spreading out of private credit and into private equity. Pimco’s Dan Ivascyn calls it the first sustained loss cycle in years.

🎯 THE PATTERN

Trump seems to defy gravity and logic as he anoints Todd Blanche for AG, forces John Bolton to plead guilty, and proves he’ll just ignore Congress on his $1.776 Bn fund. The most worrying sign out there is the credit markets tightening— a signal that Trump continues to steer the good ship USA into total economic collapse.

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📺 CBS FIRES SCOTT PELLEY

Scott Pelley spent thirty-seven years at CBS News, and Monday he stood up in a staff meeting and accused his new boss, editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes.’” Tuesday night they fired him — “terminated for cause, effective immediately,” in a letter signed by Nick Bilton, the tech writer Weiss installed to run th…

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1. 💣 PULTE’S FAMILY TIES TO EPSTEIN

Trump handed the spy agencies to a man who gives away cash on Twitter. In a Truth Social post Tuesday morning he named Bill Pulte — the 37-year-old homebuilding heir who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency — acting Director of National Intelligence, over the CIA, the NSA, and sixteen other agencies. Pulte keeps the housing job too, along with the chairmanships of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac he handed himself. He has no intelligence experience. What he has is a year of mining FHFA’s files to manufacture mortgage-fraud referrals against Trump’s enemies — Letitia James, Adam Schiff, Lisa Cook, Eric Swalwell — and a GAO investigation into how he did it. The watchdogs who asked how he pulled Democrats’ private mortgage records were fired. Now the man under investigation for misusing data access runs the surveillance state. Narativ has already placed his father, the developer Mark Pulte, inside Epstein’s own account of the rigged Maison de l’Amitié auction — 3 p.m. on the Fivestack.

2. 🎖️ Blanche Defends The Slush Fund

At 4 p.m. Blanche sits before House appropriators to defend the indefensible. The administration insists the $1.776 billion slush fund is dead — for now, which suggests a plan to revive it when we aren’t looking. Judge Leonie Brinkema froze it through June 12. GOP senators want confirmation the “anti-weaponization fund” is really dead. He has to explain Epstein again, too. Eighteen survivors accused him of lying under oath the last time he testified, in May, when he claimed meetings with them that never happened.

3. ⚖️ Weiss Is Murdering 60 Minutes

Scott Pelley told the room what the rest of CBS won’t. In a Monday staff meeting he accused editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” 60 Minutes — “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that” — after Weiss installed tech writer Nick Bilton as executive producer and fired Tanya Simon, Sharyn Alfonsi, and Cecilia Vega. Bilton walked out fifteen minutes in. The room applauded Pelley. Skydance bought CBS, Weiss was the install, and the last newsmagazine that still bites is being gutted while Paramount courts the president it is supposed to cover.

4. 📉 Trump To Bibi: You’re Crazy

“You’re fucking crazy,” Trump told Netanyahu on Monday, by Axios’s account — “you’d be in prison if it weren’t for me.” Israel’s push into Lebanon nearly blew up his Iran talks, so he killed the Beirut strike on the phone. By evening, Israel said it would hold.

5. 🌍 Six States Vote Tonight

Six states vote tonight — California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota — and Iowa’s Randy Feenstra is the test of whether Trump’s endorsement still moves a state the economy and the Iran war have soured on him.

🎯 THE PATTERN

One man takes the intelligence agencies Tuesday and keeps the mortgage files he already weaponized. Another defends a fund built to pay the president’s friends. An ally is burying 60 Minutes. We are watching a shrinking presidency fighting for its life by turning all of government on its enemies.

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3 PM FIVESTACK WITH DEAN BLUNDELL

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🎙️ THE TAPE MELANIA DREADED

For seven weeks Melania Trump’s denial held — she’d walked into the White House Cross Hall in April, unscheduled, to insist she never knew Jeffrey Epstein, and the story went quiet. This weekend it stopped being quiet. Amanda Ungaro — the Brazilian model who flew Epstein’s plane out of Paris as a teenager, then spent two decades beside Trump’s matchmaker Paolo Zampolli — released a voicemail she left for Zampolli. On it, Ungaro alleges Melania worked as an escort tied to Epstein’s circle, and that Zampolli brokered the silence that buried it. Narativ reported the shape of this in April, when three replies from Ungaro to an old Melania post triggered the First Lady’s panic statement a day later. The tape proves nothing about Melania; it does something harder to wave off, putting the allegation in the voice of the woman who was there. Melania’s denial answered a rumor; now it has to answer a recording.

💣 THE WEEKEND TRUMP CAME APART

Even before the tape dropped , Trump raged at everything else. Over the weekend he told the country to “Cancel it” on his own Freedom 250 concert after the acts walked, dismissed the singers he’d booked as “third rate” and “boring,” blamed both parties for making his Iran deal harder, then turned to attack a federal judge — all while insisting the war was already over. The fury landed on musicians and a courtroom, the safest targets he could find. Everything he couldn’t shout down kept arriving anyway.

🌍 THE REGIONAL WAR ARRIVES

The ceasefire isn’t just dead — the war is spreading on every front at once. Netanyahu ordered the army to seize 70 percent of Gaza and told his commanders to strike Beirut’s southern suburbs, while U.S. and Iranian forces traded missiles over the weekend and Tehran’s Revolutionary Guard-linked Tasnim agency threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, pushing Brent crude past $96. Trump says the war he started is over; Gaza, Lebanon and the Gulf say otherwise. This is the regional war we were promised could never happen.

🎖️ TRUMP WANTS TO MERGE ISRAELI AND US MILITARY

While the war burns and Trump shouts, the House slipped Section 224 into its 2027 defense bill — a “U.S.-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative” that would fuse the two militaries on AI, cyber, autonomous weapons, even “data fusion” that turns U.S. military data into Israel’s. Ben Freeman of the Quincy Institute calls it deeper integration than the U.S. holds with any nation on earth, written to move the relationship out of the annual aid vote and into the dark of defense contracting. It lands as just 30 percent of Americans back Trump’s Iran war and 38 percent want weapons to Israel cut off entirely. The merger nobody voted for arrives the week the war nobody wanted reignites.

🪪 THE DEPORTATION ASSEMBLY LINE

Courts in Chicago, Boston and Chelmsford have begun herding immigrants into “mega masters” — mass dockets built to print removal orders faster, often before the immigrant learns the date moved. Dallas is next, and the quota is a million a year.

🎯 THE PATTERN

The tirade is the tell. Trump spent the weekend screaming at musicians and judges because the things he can’t scream away kept arriving anyway: a war metastasizing across three countries, a tape naming his wife, a military merger his own House is writing into law. The noise is aimed at what he can win — a concert, a news cycle. The silence covers what he can’t — Epstein, Hormuz, the dark contracts. A president this loud is a president with something he needs you not to hear. Day 498. That’s why you need to know sooner.

📖 WATCH THIS ON NARATIV

Special Report: Panic At The White House — Melania’s denial revealed more than it concealed.

📺 LIVE TODAY ON NARATIV

FIVESTACK — Monday 3 PM ET with Dean Blundell & Zev Shalev.

TOMORROW: EDDY ARAGON ON ZORRO

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💣 Inflation Hits 3.8%

Inflation ran to 3.8 percent in April, and the back-to-back monthly jumps of 0.9 percent in March and 0.6 in April mark the sharpest short-term spike since the 2022 surge — worse than anything Trump’s first term ever produced. The cascade is no mystery: the Iran strikes Trump ordered have sent crude up, the tariffs he layered on Canada and Mexico have sent groceries up, and the Treasury he’s installing has time to design new money but no time to defend the value of the old. If inflation continues at this relentless pace voters will deliver a disastrous verdict at the polling booth. Trump told reporters yesterday he “doesn’t care about the midterms” The next CPI reading lands June 10, and Trump’s people already know it will be worse.

🛢️ Trump Holds America Hostage

Axios reports the United States and Iran have a 60-day memorandum of understanding on the Strait of Hormuz and the nuclear file, and the deal now sits on Trump’s desk awaiting his signature — which he says he “won’t rush.” Overnight, U.S. and Iranian forces traded fresh strikes and Tehran fired a missile toward Kuwait, which is the pattern he already revealed in March, when he let a 24-day humanitarian ceasefire collapse not because Iran broke it, but because he wanted the war back. American consumers are being caught in teh crossfire and Trumpo is taking his time. Perhaps he believes ending the war win his schedule may change GOP prospects.

💰 Trump Devalues The Dollar

The Washington Post reports that two Treasury appointees, Brian Beach and Andrew Brown, ordered the Bureau of Engraving to prototype a $250 note with Donald Trump’s face on it, and the bureau’s printing director — who flagged that federal law forbids putting a living person on U.S. currency — was reassigned within weeks. Trump may be missing the poor optics of issuing ever increasing currency denominations which reminds us of Zimbabwe and Argentina - not America.

⚖️ Trump Will Indict Obama

Yesterday, it was E. Jean Carroll, and today Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — Trump’s former personal lawyer — is driving the federal grand jury targeting Barack Obama and his senior intelligence chiefs, the same machinery that indicted James Comey in April and referred John Brennan for prosecution.

Tomorrow, Pam Bondi testifies before Congress on the Epstein files.

🌍 Even Thiel Flees Trump

Peter Thiel — Trump’s biggest donor, Palantir’s chairman, the venture capitalist who funded J.D. Vance into the vice presidency — already collected New Zealand citizenship in 2011 and a Maltese passport in 2022, and has now decamped to Buenos Aires, bought a mansion, enrolled his children in a local school, and picked up land near Punta del Este that observers suspect will house a bunker. The man who lit the fuse that is triggering the US collapse is running - or perhaps it’s because of his Epstein-Russia ties.

🎯 THE PATTERN

Trump’s treasury is powering ahead with the $250 bill which may become the historic symbol of massive devaluation on the US dollar and the soaring grocery prices. Instead of harming Iran’s regime, Trump seems committed to harming his own economy. All of this as Peter Thiel decamps to Argentina - the man who lit the fuse has the perfect escape hatch.

TODAY ON NARATIV

🔥 FIVESTACK — 3 PM ET, with Dean Blundell

🔴 5 PM ET — Chris Armitage on SCOTUS

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💣 TRUMP’S CABINET MEETING LAID BARE FOR THE WORLD TO SEE

On Tuesday, the White House posted that Donald Trump’s six-month physical had “checked out PERFECTLY.” On Wednesday, sitting at the Cabinet table, the president threatened to bomb Oman. “Oman will behave just like everybody else or we’ll have to blow them up,” he said of the lo…

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🤖 POPE LEO TO SILICON VALLEY: DISARM

When Anthropic - the makers of Claude - told Trump’s Pentagon it would not let its AI be turned loose on mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons, it was not just declin…

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💣 JAN 6 RIOTERS QUALIFY FOR PAYOUTS

The pool of people eligible for Trump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” includes the January 6 rioters he pardoned in his first week back. The fund pulls the money out of the Treasury’s Judgment Fund without congressional approval, and a commission picked by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche decides who ge…

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Xi Jinping had Donald Trump in front of him, the state cameras positioned to give viewers the optical illusion of a powerful ascendant Xi lording over a supplicant. Trump delivered, performing the role he reserves for strongmen. Head tilted. Voice softened. The American president — leader of what is still, on every measure, the most powerful country on …

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🐉 THE PROMISE CHINA KEEPS BREAKING

Trump and Xi began their bilateral today with Trump desperate for a way out of his own Iran war. Xi handed him a promise: China will stop arming Iran but theworld has heard this promise before — and the arms kept flowing through secret shipments, front companies and Gulf transit hubs. A leaked Pentag…

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🚨TRUMP IN CHINA WITH FEW CARDS

As if the humiliation in Iran weren’t bad enough, Trump arrives in Beijing with very few cards to play against Xi’s overwhelming deck of aces. The idea of an American president arriving in Beijing cap-in-hand suggests how quickly Trump has upended the world order in China’s favor.

Trump — on his walk to M…

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Donald Trump posted to Truth Social yesterday afternoon that Iran “will be laughing no longer” after rejecting an Iranian response to his peace proposal.

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💣 GIANT WITH A LIMP

The Iran war just stopped being a Middle East story. China’s foreign-policy class is reading the Pentagon’s munitions ledgers and saying out loud what Washington will not admit. Half of America’s long-range stealth cruise missiles…

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