The Narativ | Know Sooner
Friday, October 23, 2026
Trump called Musk on Wednesday and asked him to lift the limits on Ukraine's Starlink. Musk left them on. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal both reported the call. On Thursday Trump told reporters he would not say whether he phoned, "or whether somebody else called, it doesn't make a difference," and then said what the call was for: "The bottom line, he put it back." A week earlier he had said it "wasn't me" and he didn't "think it was Elon." Kyiv says he put nothing back. "Overall, nothing has changed anywhere," a Ukrainian official told the Kyiv Independent on Wednesday night. The cap SpaceX dropped on Ukraine's military terminals on Oct. 14 still holds at 161 km/h, about 100 mph. The interceptor drones Ukraine flies at Russian Shaheds go faster than that. Narativ reported Oct. 21 that Musk gave the order.
Jared Kushner says the accounts never existed. A new book says Dutch spies watched him log in. Vanity Fair ran an excerpt of Matthew Cole's book, Princes and Thieves, on Thursday. Mohamed bin Zayed, who runs the United Arab Emirates, and Mohammed bin Salman, who runs Saudi Arabia, put money into accounts in other people's names, the book says. One sat at First Abu Dhabi Bank in the name of an Emirati charity, the Watani Al Emarat Foundation, and took in about $750 million.
Trump said Thursday that "she's fair game." Amy Acton is the Democrat running for governor of Ohio, and the ad in question is her own mother's. Donna Arthur looks into the camera and talks about her daughter. "Amy has a serious problem," she says. "She lies about her past." "My daughter needs help, and she can't help you if she needs help herself."
Mike Waltz would not rule out another year of the Iran war on Friday morning. Oil hit $115 the same morning. Trump's ambassador to the UN gave the Financial Times an answer the paper read as another year of war. "I'm not going to put out hypotheticals," he said. Trump said at the start it would take four to five weeks.
Start with what everyone remembers. In July 2025 the Justice Department and the FBI put out a short memo and told the country the Epstein story was over. No client list. No blackmail.
The Grift Clock counts every time the Trump network gets paid. One week added twelve entries. Kushner's $2 billion is not counted because he denies it exists. The arch may break ground Nov. 5.
What is impossible to miss in today's stories is the unprecedented reach of foreign governments and their sovereign funds into America's national interest. You cannot understand how Elon Musk, a man who answers to shareholders, can run around the world and, with his relationship with Putin, be allowed to direct a national resource on a battlefield. There is nothing here that looks even remotely like patriotism. It is the exact opposite: a man working for his own interest and the interest of a foreign government, an adversary at that, against our allies. Trump can play the “he said, he said” game as long as he wants. We all know these two are working in concert with Vladimir Putin and Russia, so the blame game we are watching is nothing more than theater. The truth is the switch is off because it suits them, not because of anything in our national interest, and now they blame each other and hope the whole thing disappears in the crossfire. You can see the same thing in the Kushner controversy: how is a man negotiating war and peace on behalf of the American people is also holding down a $2 billion payout from Saudi Arabia secured by Israel? The Grift Clock keeps running, billions being taken from the American government, and a scandal as big as Epstein's now crashes against the door of the Oval Office. None of this surprises us at Narativ, because The Greatest Heist, our investigation, laid it out: a corrupt enterprise that has been around for a very long time has now seized the highest office in the land and operates against America's national interest. If you haven’t read it yet, we humbly recommend it. There’s a lot of noise in the news, but our reporting cuts through it all and arrives at a one-word conclusion: treason.
