Episode Details

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