Episode Details

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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:

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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 re