TRUMP HITS 33% AS THE AGENCIES TURN ON HIS CRITICS
The Narativ | Know Sooner — 🗂️ File Released · 📺 Licences Called · 🗳️ Thousand Watchers · ⚓ Ocean Empty · 💸 Forty Trillion
👀 STORIES TO WATCH
🗂️ THE FILE THAT CLEARED HIM
The White House published 147 pages of FBI files on Eric Swalwell yesterday, and the files clear him. In February 2017 an agent wrote that the investigation "has not found violations of federal corruption statutes perpetrated by Congressman Eric Swalwell," took his name off the case and left Christine Fang on it alone. What the pages do show is that agents ran an undercover operation whose first objective was to indict and arrest him — and that in April 2015 two senior FBI officials walked into the Capitol to warn him a foreign service was working him, while he was a subject of their own criminal case. Nobody told him. Trump declassified the file on March 23; Swalwell resigned three weeks later over unrelated allegations; the file appeared yesterday, aimed at a man who no longer holds anything. Fox, Newsmax and the Federalist ran it hard, one headline handing him the crimes the FBI charged to Fang. CNN, MSNBC, NBC, the Post and the Times have not covered it at all.
📺 EIGHT LICENCES, ONE DAY LATER
Disney and ABC sued the Federal Communications Commission and its chairman Brendan Carr this morning, over eight television licences the agency ordered renewed years early — WABC in New York five years ahead of schedule, WPVI in Philadelphia five years and two months. The order landed on April 28, one day after Trump called a Jimmy Kimmel joke “a despicable call to violence” and demanded Disney fire him. Twelve days ago Carr’s commission repealed the national ownership cap 2-1. Its dissenting member called that “unlawful on its face.”
🗳️ A THOUSAND WATCHERS, NO ADDRESSES
The Justice Department will send roughly a thousand monitors into polling places in November — a figure that exists as one sentence its civil rights chief gave Bloomberg television on Monday, with no list of jurisdictions. Every previous cycle was counted in jurisdictions: 86 in 2024, 64 in 2022, 44 in 2020. A week ago in Minneapolis, operatives from Project Veritas's successor entered polling places in "Muslim costumes," using real voters' names. Poll workers caught them.
⚓ NOBODY IS WATCHING THE PACIFIC
America has no aircraft carrier in the Western Pacific. The Lincoln and the Bush are both in the Arabian Sea fighting Iran. On August 12 an Indonesian frigate drilled alongside a Chinese one east of Taiwan — the first time China has exercised with a foreign navy there. Today Seoul said it will take back wartime command of its own troops.
💸 FORTY TRILLION, AHEAD OF SCHEDULE
Treasury counted $39.93 trillion on Friday and passes $40 trillion this week, against a Budget Office projection of $39.4 trillion for the whole year. Japan and China both sold American debt in June.
🎯 THE BIGGER PICTURE
Reuters and Ipsos put Trump at 33 percent yesterday, the lowest of his presidency. Watch what gets reached for at 33 percent. A file the FBI closed nine years ago goes online, aimed at a critic who already resigned. Eight broadcast licenses get called in four and five years early, the day after a comedian's joke. A thousand poll monitors are announced on television with no list of where they go, seventy-seven days before an election. Each instrument was built for something else and each is pointed the same direction now.
Meanwhile the actual power is draining out the back. No American carrier covers the Western Pacific. Japan and China both cut their holdings of American debt in the same quarter the tariffs died in court. Seoul is walking out of American command and building its own submarines. Rome collected statues while the provinces stopped paying.
Last August in the White House, Volodymyr Zelensky was explaining that Ukraine cannot hold elections under martial law. Trump cut across him. "If we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections. Oh, that's good." The room laughed.
Americans vote in 77 days. Congress set that date in statute, and no president can move it.
🔴 LIVE TODAY ON NARATIV
1:00 PM ET — WORLD ON THE BRINK. Zev with intelligence analyst Jacob Kaarsbo. From Asia to Romania to Iran to Greenland — is the world tripping into a new war, or is somebody walking it there?
NO FIVESTACK TODAY - DEAN AND I HAD PREVIOUSLY SCHEDULED MEETINGS
📚 READ THIS
SPECIAL REPORT: The Plot To Spring Ghislaine Maxwell From Prison — April 24, 2026. The pardon, the immunity, the vacatur: every route considered for keeping the one living witness off the record. Worth re-reading this week, as Judge Preska's August 11 order hands the Justice Department discretion over which Giuffre documents the public ever sees.
If everyone who holds America's debt sold it, we would go bankrupt? Instead of Trump pilfering millions of American tax dollars into his private accounts, as our president he could have paid down our deficit. That used to be a Republican goal, to lower the federal deficit. Where are the real Republicans? They should form their own party and get this felon out.
When I saw that photo of the soldier saluting the US President, I thought that the adjudicated rapist probably would like American troops to raise their right hands yo him and say 'Heil Trump'.