5️⃣ The nightmare before the polls
Inflation came in at 3.7 percent on Wednesday, the last report before the midterms, and The Economist's tracker has Trump at 34 percent approve and 61 disapprove, ten points above Nixon's last reading. Fuel oil is up 74 percent on the year. Reuters/Ipsos found 78 percent of Americans blame Trump's policies for prices outrunning their pay, and 64 percent of Republicans put some of the blame on the White House.
4️⃣ Guilfoyle's donor paid Trump's sons too
Kimberly Guilfoyle lost her ambassadorship on Tuesday, less than a week after Eric Deters' texts surfaced, and the next names on his list are the president's sons: $200,000 to Don Jr. for two appearances, $100,000 to Eric Trump, $125,000 to Trump's PAC and $100,000 for a Kentucky Derby trip, by Deters' own count. Zev Shalev played Trump calling Guilfoyle "my friend for a long time," a day after he said he barely knew her. The fear inside the White House, Shalev said, is what she has written down over the years.
3️⃣ The CFTC pulled its own referral
Bloomberg reported Tuesday that a senior adviser to CFTC chair Michael Selig told staff to retract the insider-trading referral on about $580 million of oil-futures bets placed at 6:49 a.m. on March 23, fifteen minutes before Trump's post postponing strikes on Iran, and took the review over himself. Narativ reported those trades the night they happened. "This is how they do the corruption when they're in government," Shalev said. "They do the corruption and then they hide it."
2️⃣ The Saudis break from the mob
The Houthis have hit Saudi Arabia three times since Oct. 3, the latest a building at Aramco's headquarters, and Trump, who holds a truce with the Houthis, has fired nothing. Shalev's reading: the war is being kept running to juice energy prices, and a president who lets Iran's proxy hit an American ally has picked a side. "If you're helping our enemies attack our allies, you're a traitor."
1️⃣ Musk throttles Starlink as Putin blacks out Kyiv
SpaceX capped Ukraine's military Starlink terminals at 100 mph on Tuesday night and told nobody; Ukraine learned of it from customer support. The same night Russia fired 39 ballistic missiles and 120 drones, hit all three of Kyiv's heat-and-power plants and left 600,000 people without power, and the first wave came with no American warning. Zelensky, to Piers Morgan: "It's a pity that we are losing a strong partner." He said he is sure they knew what they did, that Starlink was blocked at 1 a.m. by SpaceX and the United States, and that people will die. Dean Blundell called Musk a war criminal. Shalev agreed.
Bonus: Abramovich
The BBC's Panorama says Deloitte Cyprus faked the papers that hid $10 billion of Roman Abramovich's money. Narativ found him in the Epstein files and in the Bear Stearns funds beside Epstein in 2007. The next chapter of The Greatest Heist takes him up.
Thank you Uncomfortable Truth by Monica, LC - Silence is Complicity, Beth Cruz, Robin Payes, LeftieProf, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app.
