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FiveStack with Dean Blundell & Zev Shalev: Daily Summaries Delivered
by D. Blundell and Z.Shalev
The Top 5 stories of the moment with Canada's #1 Shock Jock Dean Blundell and Former CBS News executive producer Zev Shalev. www.narativ.org
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- Today53 min
EVERYTHING TRUMP TOUCHES TURNS GREEN
NARATIV FLASH SALE FOR TODAY ONLY: 50% off our annual rate forever. New subscribers only. Five stories Friday, one tell. A presidency that polishes the facade while the substance rots underneath. A reflecting pool painted flag-blue for the 250th, now a green swamp. A ballroom rising where the East Wing stood. A ceasefire that lasted 42 minutes. A cultural landmark missing $17 million. And a stack of Epstein names the Justice Department insists are nothing. Zev and Dean ran the countdown 5 to 1 — and every story pointed the same direction.5️⃣ The Ceasefire That Lasted 42 MinutesThe guns over Lebanon went quiet at 4 p.m. local — and stayed quiet for about 42 minutes before Netanyahu resumed bombing. The truce, brokered by the United States and Qatar, exists to prop up the memorandum Trump signed with Iran this week, whose very first point demands “permanent termination of all war on all fronts, including Lebanon,” and the protection of Lebanese sovereignty. Israel’s far right answered in real time: Itamar Ben-Gvir vowed to wipe Lebanon off the map, Bezalel Smotrich echoed him, and the bombs kept falling.Zev floated the read that the public rift between Trump and Netanyahu may be stage-managed. Trump told Axios that Netanyahu “will do anything I tell him” and that the Israelis “do as I say” — a strange boast for a man whose ceasefire collapsed in under an hour. Behind it sits the leverage: a reported $300 billion routed toward Iran, a president at 28 percent, and a deal he needs more than he needs peace.The opening Zev keeps naming: a Democratic Party with the nerve to stand for a democratic Israel, not just an American one — the thing that turned a desert into a tech power in the first place.4️⃣ The Bedroom War and the Book Nobody Should BuyMaggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change lays out the imperial presidency in domestic detail. Melania holds the master bedroom; Trump was pushed into the second-floor living room and wanders the residence pocketing furniture she picked, until her staff began labeling her things to keep them. He called Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick a “pussy” to his face over tariffs; Lutnick rebranded himself Trump’s “$25-billion-a-month pussy.” Staff relay the nighttime archaeology — chip bags, Starbucks wrappers, ice cream cartons on the floor, fresh carpet relaid in his bathroom daily, super glue and fake gold pressed onto the Oval Office walls.Zev and Dean told viewers to keep their $59.99. The Narativ objection is not the gossip — it’s that the authors sat on Epstein-related material for months to sell a book, and that the silence touched the real world, shaping how members voted on the Epstein Transparency Act. Zev noted it isn’t the first time. The same instinct surfaced in yesterday’s conversation with Lev Parnas: information held back from the people who needed it.One more receipt landed the same day — Giorgia Meloni flatly calling Trump’s claim that she “begged” for a photo invented. “Italians don’t beg.”3️⃣ A Judge, a Tarp, and the Missing $17 MillionA federal judge ordered the administration to keep the Kennedy Center open for the summer, with plans for public access and programming due by June 18 — a check that follows the board takeover and the name change a court already reversed. The tarp over John F. Kennedy’s name still hangs, because Trump won’t let it stand without his own name above it.The detail that hasn’t traveled, and the one Dean pulled forward: roughly $17 million in operational money has gone missing from the Center’s accounts since Trump’s people took the keys. The judge’s order opens the door to discovery — where the money went, and why the regime won’t produce the financials. Zev noted a new for Trump Crimes Commission. Dean tied it to damnatio memoriae — the Roman practice of chiseling a disgraced name off every wall — and offered it as the platform: remember exactly what was done, and take the name down from everything it touched.2️⃣ The Survivors Call Blanche’s BluffActing Attorney General Todd Blanche has said for months the Epstein files hold nothing left to prosecute. This week, survivors and the family of Virginia Giuffre walked into James Comer’s office with the Justice Department’s own files — pulled from the Transparency Act release — and handed the Oversight chairman a list of more than fifteen names. They are calling Blanche’s bluff, weeks before his confirmation hearings.The names are not new; they are the ones long suspected and now corroborated in the files — Jes Staley, Leon Black among them, with George Mitchell and Bill Richardson now deceased but the conduct still mappable. The cases Blanche calls closed are not closed.Dean’s turn was the sharpest of the day: these women have done the government’s job for three decades, showing up for the hundredth time with a list because t
- Yesterday36 min
Moscow on Fire; Hegseth Guts NATO; JD Vance Turns on Israel's Hawks, and SCOTUS Set To Redefine Who Can Be American
Five stories, one motion. On Thursday the president pulled America back from almost everything it has held for eighty years — the alliance that contained Russia, the war he says he ended, the courts that check him, even the Israeli hawks he used to arm. Each retreat left a space, and into every one of them someone else is already stepping. That was the through-line of today’s Fivestack.5️⃣ Vance Tells Israel “You Can’t Kill Your Way Out”For the first time, a senior Trump official said it to Israel’s face. JD Vance — who helped negotiate the Iran framework — named Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir and dismissed their revolt against the deal as a “freakout,” warning Israel to “wake up and smell the reality.”It’s a real crack in a coalition that has run on lockstep support for Netanyahu’s government. Trump wants the war closed so he can bank the win; Israel’s far right wants it open. Watch the daylight widen — this is the rare fight where the administration is to Jerusalem’s left.4️⃣ Four Presidents, One Stage — Obama Opens His Center on JuneteenthWhile the sitting president gutted NATO, four former presidents shared a stage in Chicago. Barack and Michelle Obama dedicated their $850 million center with Springsteen, Stevie Wonder and Bono performing and Clinton, Bush and Biden in the seats; the doors open to the public Friday, on Juneteenth.Dean took the turn the moment earns: this is the counter-image to the rest of the board. One definition of America was being dismantled in Washington today. Another was being enshrined on the South Side.3️⃣ “Your Moscow Will Burn” — Ukraine’s Biggest Strike on the CapitalA day after Trump shrugged him off at the G7 — “it has no impact on us, we’re thousands of miles away” — Zelensky made Moscow impossible to ignore. Ukraine’s largest drone barrage of the war shut all four Moscow airports and set fire to a refinery feeding 40 percent of the city’s gasoline.“If Ukraine burns, then your Moscow will burn as well,” Zelensky said. Russia’s hard-liners answered by demanding the Kremlin “strike the enemy mercilessly.” The front line hasn’t moved in months; the war is climbing into the skies over both capitals — and that escalation is exactly what a vacuum invites.2️⃣ The Court Decides Who Is a CitizenThe Supreme Court closed its term on the question of who counts as American. Trump v. Barbara tests the order he signed on day one stripping birthright citizenship from children born here to parents without permanent status — a 160-year guarantee written into the Fourteenth Amendment.Whether the justices strike the order outright or simply shrink the power of any single judge to block him nationwide, the term ends the same way: with the presidency larger than it was. The same bench is also deciding how freely Trump can fire the heads of independent agencies.1️⃣ Hegseth Guts NATO — Trump Hands Putin the OpeningThe biggest story of the day was the quietest in tone and the loudest in consequence. In Brussels, Pete Hegseth cut — effective immediately — about a third of the U.S. forces Washington would send to Europe in a crisis, including strategic bombers allies can’t replace for years, and opened a six-month review of the rest. He called NATO “a paper tiger and a one-way street” and mocked allies for spending on “gender equity and climate change.”The assets he pulled are the exact ones that would blunt a Russian push into the Baltics, Poland or Romania. This is the authoritarian tell of the day: America retreating from the alliance built to contain Russia, on the same morning Russia’s capital is burning and its hawks are calling for a wider war. Trump didn’t end a war today. He cleared the path for the next one.THE PATTERNPut the five together and the shape is unmistakable. NATO, Ukraine, the Court, Israel — across every front, Trump is pulling America inward and downward, and the power he gives up doesn’t vanish. It moves to Moscow, to the bench, to whoever is willing to fill the space. The counterweight stood on a stage in Chicago today, four presidents deep. The question for the summer is whether that’s memory or a map.Subscribe to Narativ — the Fivestack runs Monday to Friday at 3 PM ET. Know Sooner.Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Truthsayer, Jeanne Elbe, Courtney M 🇨🇦🏳️🌈, Kim G, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me f
- 2 days ago57 min
FiveStack: Trump's Surrender Televised Live In Front of a Worldwide Audience
Dean Blundell opened the show with a line that held up for the next hour: the decline has been televised. Wednesday handed Zev Shalev and Blundell a president who surrendered a war abroad and tightened the screws at home on the same afternoon — paying Iran to stop a war he started, fencing off the park where Americans protest him, switching off a company that defied him, and holding the nation’s intelligence leadership hostage to a voter-suppression bill. Five stories, one man, one move repeated: Donald Trump treats the world as something he commands, and on Wednesday the world stopped pretending to obey. The countdown ran 5 to 1.5️⃣ The Surrender He’s Calling PeaceTrump and JD Vance signed an Iran agreement by video on Monday and spent three days calling it the end of a war. The leaked 14-point memorandum tells the real story, and Zev walked through it line by line: Iran pockets more than $20 billion in frozen assets on day one, draws on a reconstruction fund the show pegged at $300 billion or more, sells its oil sanction-free, and promises — in writing — nothing it can’t walk back in sixty days. There is no enforcement mechanism. Long-range ballistic missiles never appear in the text. Iran’s own Supreme National Council called it a victory over the United States and Israel, and as Zev put it, it’s impossible to argue with them.Blundell ran the arithmetic of the war that produced this “win”: thirteen dead American service members, hundreds wounded, thousands of Iranian civilians killed, precision munitions spent down so far the administration quietly invoked the Defense Production Act to rebuild the stockpile — all to reopen a strait that was open before, for maybe two months, with tolls. The deal rests on a ceasefire Israel never signed. The first time Netanyahu fires into southern Lebanon, it collapses. Zev’s verdict: a structure built to fail from day one, kept alive only long enough to get Trump to November.4️⃣ The Plot That Showed Up Right on TimeThe FBI announced it had foiled a plan to attack the White House UFC card with explosive drones. The next morning, the Justice Department walked into appeals court and cited that very plot to argue Trump should finally get his ballroom — the one with a drone port and a drone-proof roof, the one a judge halted and the Senate parliamentarian defunded. Zev and Blundell didn’t buy it for a second. A terror scare with no detail attached, converted overnight into roughly $600 million in taxpayer help for the president’s vanity project, fit a pattern the show has named before: an assessment arrives without evidence and leaves as policy.3️⃣ Fencing the People’s ParkTrump moved to ring Lafayette Square — the protest ground directly across from the White House — with a permanent fence, letting officials shut the public out at will. Zev, who has stood in that square, named the point plainly: it is the one place a real, rolling protest against this president would form, and a permanent fence makes sure he never has to hear it. The same contractors building the ballroom got the call. Authoritarianism rarely announces itself; sometimes it just pours a footing.2️⃣ Ninety Minutes to DisappearThe White House gave Anthropic less than ninety minutes on Friday to pull its newest AI models offline, and six days later the company still can’t get a straight reason. Anthropic’s staff say they’re being targeted. Zev pointed past the official cybersecurity story to the thing nobody’s naming: three weeks ago, the company’s co-founder stood with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican to help unveil the pontiff’s first decree on the dangers of AI — a company at war with Trump siding with the one authority the White House can’t strong-arm. Blundell added the money underneath it: Anthropic refuses to let the government buy a single share or wire its models into weapons targeting and surveillance. Defy the regime, embarrass it in Rome, and the flagship goes dark in ninety minutes. The state deciding which company is allowed to exist is the story.1️⃣ Holding the Nation’s Secrets HostageFrom the G7, Trump canceled his own DNI nominee’s Senate hearing and said the quiet part out loud — the country gets no confirmed intelligence chief until Congress passes the Save America Act, his proof-of-citizenship voter bill, and reauthorizes FISA on his terms. Bill Pulte, a mortgage official with no national-security experience, stays in the chair. A president can’t actually cancel a Senate hearing; he can only strong-arm the senators in his own party who never wanted Pulte to begin with. This wasn’t a nomination fight. Trump put the nation’s intelligence leadership on the table as a chip to rewrite who gets to vote.THE PATTERNThe show ended where the man did: not on a plane home, but at Versailles, where Trump delayed his return to dine in what he called “the real deal,” a “place of gold.” Zev let the address answer
- 3 days ago55 min
FiveStack: Trump Surrenders; Melania's First Lady Scandal; Vance Bombs On The View; Bibi Loses It in Court
Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Donald Trump spent Tuesday losing. He lost a Vice President’s defense on live daytime television, lost his closest foreign ally in an Israeli courtroom, lost a court fight over his immigration freeze, and — on the show’s biggest story — signed away a decade of American pressure on Iran in a deal he admits he hasn’t read. On The Fivestack, Zev Shalev and Dean Blundell counted five stories down from five to one, and every one of them pointed the same direction: a regime running on cover stories, and an opponent who keeps winning in court while the President signs surrenders abroad.5️⃣ Vance Wanted the List. Now He Buries It.JD Vance went on The View to sell a memoir about faith and walked into an Epstein buzzsaw. He told the hosts “we’re not holding anything back,” then spent two minutes explaining why two and a half million pages remain sealed. He called himself “kind of a conspiracy theory on the Epstein stuff,” waved off the New York Times report that he ran Situation Room strategy on the files, and kept reaching for the same alibi: “I was inside the room.”Ana Navarro did the work the Vice President would not. Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act under duress, she said, only after Republican women — Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene — refused to fold, and after he dragged Boebert into the Situation Room to break her. “That’s all true,” Vance conceded. As the team has reported, Trump has since spent months destroying the four Republicans who forced those files open. Two of them are the women Navarro named.4️⃣ Netanyahu Loses the RoomWhile Vance defended the President, Benjamin Netanyahu was losing in a Jerusalem courtroom. On the last day of cross-examination in his fraud trial, the Israeli Prime Minister’s pardon request collapsed and Netanyahu began shouting at the bench — “you’ve done something never before done” — until the judge told him he’d answered the question and to move on.Zev read the courtroom defeat against the Iran deal Trump is about to sign over Netanyahu’s objections. Former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe told the show Netanyahu will do anything to derail the peace, because the war is the only thing keeping his coalition — and his freedom — intact. Netanyahu says the deal signed Friday “will not bind” Israel. The man who helped put him in power is walking away from him in real time.3️⃣ Narativ Exclusive — The First Lady’s Russian FriendThe show’s exclusive came from a story Zev published hours before air, built on an interview with Amanda Ungaro, a former partner of Paolo Zampolli. Zampolli is the modeling agent who brought Melania Knauss to America nearly thirty years ago, stayed close the entire time, and now holds an ambassadorship for global partnerships he received, Zev reports, through her. According to Ungaro, the First Lady and Zampolli remain close enough to text constantly.Peeling back who Zampolli is, Zev’s investigation found at least two Russian women working for him out of a UN sports body he runs — one tied closely to Vladimir Putin, the other, known as “Lana,” who Zev reports previously worked for Jeffrey Epstein. The crossover between Epstein’s world and Zampolli’s, long blurred, comes back into view, along with the open question Zev put on the table: in a friendship this durable and this useful, is Zampolli the First Lady’s handler? The reporting also raises a harder question — whether Melania Trump was involved in the deportation of someone close to Zampolli who may have known too much. Zev said the piece was checked and re-checked fact by fact before it ran.2️⃣ Blindspot — The Court Loss the Left IgnoredThis week’s Ground News Blindspot was a Trump defeat the left barely covered. U.S. District Judge John McConnell vacated the USCIS directive that froze asylum, green-card, and work-permit decisions for 39 countries — ruling the freeze likely unlawful. By the coverage breakdown, the right carried the story and the left looked away from a win on its own side.It is the cleanest example of the day’s theme: the rule of law held, a judge struck down an unlawful order, and the audience that should have celebrated it never heard. FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.1️⃣ The Surrender PackageThe number-one story was a capitulation. Dean and Zev laid out the terms of the Iran deal: roughly $324 billion flowing to Tehran, with $150 billion due this month; oil and petrochemical sanctions suspended; the naval blockade lifted within thirty days — already underway, with Iranian supertankers sailing the Strait of Hormuz, which reopens under IRGC management. U.S. forces withdraw from the Gulf. Iran’s missile program stays fully intact. In exchange, America gets a pinky
- 4 days ago55 min
FiveStack: Everything Trump Touches Rots
5️⃣ The Green on the MallTrump’s $14.2 million repaint of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — a deeper “American flag blue” ordered up for the country’s 250th — turned green with algae within days of completion. The Interior Department calls the bloom “residual,” a hangover from supply lines that sat dormant during construction. The mechanism was no mystery to Dean, who’s built and owned pools: drop a dark coating into a shallow, slow-moving basin and you grow algae — a problem flagged in advance and waved off.Zev pulled the metaphor all the way out — the toxic sludge taking over the pool right after Trump’s attempt to fix it is exactly what he’s done to the whole American system. Dean capped it: the most photographed pool in America, at the feet of the man who ended slavery and the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, remade to look better and emerging covered in sludge — “everything this guy touches rots.” It rhymed with the rest of the weekend’s vanity projects: the Kennedy Center name tarped over on a judge’s order, a planned “Trump Promenade” at the Lincoln Memorial, the Rose Garden paved, the East Wing torn down for a ballroom. Polish the facade, ignore what’s rotting beneath it.4️⃣ Amanda Ungaro and the Friend Trump Has Kept LongestThe show turned to Zev’s Thursday interview with Amanda Ungaro, who asked to be described as the mother of the son of Paolo Zampoli — an envoy inside the Trump administration and, by Trump’s own history, his longest-running friend, dating to 1985. Ungaro alleges that as she fought for custody, Zampoli used his government connections to have her arrested by ICE, held three and a half months, and deported, while their son stayed behind. These are her allegations; Zampoli has not answered them publicly, and he has not been removed from his post.Ungaro also described being put on Epstein’s plane once, at sixteen, among other girls who looked to her like students rather than models — her only meeting with Epstein. Her stronger ties, Zev noted, run to the Trumps, and to Melania in particular. From there the questions get heavier: why Melania stays close to a man swimming in Russian intelligence and oligarch connections, whether that relationship was ever what it appeared, and why the First Lady, told of Ungaro’s deportation, did nothing. The Narativ team is careful to mark these as open questions, not findings — but they are the questions a follow-up, and a separate Deutsche Bank–Epstein investigation teased for later this week, intend to press.3️⃣ Washington Switches Off an AI by MemoAt 5:21 p.m. on June 12, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick signed an order barring Anthropic from serving its newest models — Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — to any foreign national, down to Anthropic’s own foreign-national employees. Unable to sort nationality in real time across a global user base, the company shut both models off worldwide. The stated rationale was a national-security concern over a jailbreak; Anthropic’s own statement, read on air, says the government supplied no written specifics, that the flagged vulnerabilities were minor and already discoverable by other public models, and that the company had red-teamed the system with the U.S. government and the U.K. AI Security Institute for thousands of hours.Zev’s read went past the cover story. Anthropic and OpenAI are heading to public markets at the same moment, and Anthropic has refused to sell shares to anyone in the Trump orbit. More pointedly, Zev tied the move to his own beat: tools that can chew through millions of documents are exactly what an investigator uses, and Lutnick is a subject Zev is still chasing — specifically his dealings with Tether. The theory on the table: the crimes in those files were built to evade human eyes, not machines, and someone would rather the machines stay off.2️⃣ The First Trillionaire — Built on Public MoneyElon Musk became the first person worth more than a trillion dollars when SpaceX priced its IPO — a fortune two decades of federal contracts, loans and grants helped build, with no equity ever flowing back to the taxpayers who took the risk. The stock ran hard out of the gate, but the warning lights were the story. SpaceX carries 18,712 bitcoin — about $1.3 billion, the eighth-largest corporate crypto stash — on its balance sheet, and as index funds scoop up a company this size, that exposure lands in ordinary 401(k)s and pension funds.Dean brought the outside view: a weekend conversation with a hedge-fund manager who called the IPO “the ultimate rugging” and refused to buy a share for his clients — a company never profitable, with no third-party customers, flying to space mostly for itself and the U.S. government, on a valuation with no runway to justify it. He sketched the same machinery underneath: government money, Ontario pension money, Chinese loans now spent, all lashed to everything Musk owns. The kic
- 1 weeks ago1h 4m
FiveStack: Trump Swaps His Spy Chief, Fakes a Ceasefire, and Buries a Ranch
The FiveStack with Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev is broadcast LIVE Monday-Friday at 3 PM ET at Narativ.org and it’s 100% free. Sign up today and never miss a show. Trump spent Thursday governing by press release — and got caught at every turn. He named a new spy chief on Truth Social, posted a ceasefire Iran says never happened, and let the rest of the machine grind on: a Supreme Court finishing off the Voting Rights Act, a Justice Department indicting protesters while the named walk free, and a New Mexico crime scene dug to bedrock with nobody allowed to look. Five stories, one tell — the performance is the policy now, and the institutions built to call it are folding instead.5️⃣ The Supreme Court Finishes Off the Voting Rights ActThe Court gutted what was left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act this week and cleared Alabama to run the GOP map a three-judge panel had already called intentional race discrimination. The map stands. The discrimination finding doesn’t. Alabama heads into the 2026 midterms with six Republican-leaning districts and one Democratic — the lines drawn, the remedy removed.Dean and Zev tied it back to the rot underneath: a billionaire’s court that decides one day for the Constitution and the next for Trump’s immunity, with Clarence and Ginni Thomas, Alito, and Roberts as the standing exhibit. Zev pointed to Denver Riggleman, who had the receipts on Ginni Thomas and January 6th and asked for a subpoena — until Liz Cheney said no. The point isn’t a single ruling. It’s that the body meant to be the last check keeps choosing not to be one, and stops pretending to be embarrassed about it.4️⃣ Zorro Ranch — the Hole, the Blackmail, the Next NamesSomebody carved a hole the size of forty-seven Olympic pools out of Epstein’s New Mexico ranch — 155,000 cubic yards, 20 to 25 feet deep, next to the main house. Narativ’s shadow analysis of drone and satellite imagery shows a squared, leveled structure that appeared around 2014–15 and vanished this year. Eddie Aragon dates the dig to late January, early February — before the Epstein files went public, and before the search. The likeliest read, Zev’s read, is a crypto-mining vault tied to Epstein’s crypto years, not the biolab the speculation wants; either way, the timing is the tell. You don’t move forty-seven pools of dirt to resurface a garden.The cover-up is the story now. New Mexico’s AG was told to stand down by the federal government. No mainstream outlet will touch the dig. And it widened on air: Bill Gates testified this week — on the record, for the first time — that Epstein tried to blackmail him, vindicating the reporting Zev first broke in 2019. Todd Blanche and Kash Patel are now set to be hauled in. Leon Black is next. The ground proves something was there; the silence proves someone wants it gone.3️⃣ The DOJ Indicts Eight Protesters While the Named Walk FreeThe Justice Department indicted eight pro-Palestinian activists it says ran a harassment campaign against University of Michigan officials and the Jewish Federation of Detroit to force the school to divest from Israel. Set that beside the segment that came right before it — the names in the Epstein files walking free — and the two speeds of this DOJ are the whole point: fast on dissent, frozen on the powerful.Dean carried it north. Hours after a Toronto officer was killed investigating a shooting at the U.S. embassy, Trump’s ambassador Pete Hoekstra used a symposium to lecture Canada about buying American booze and F-35s. Same regime, same instinct — punish, posture, alienate — whether the target is a Michigan protester or a neighboring country.2️⃣ Clayton Replaces Pulte at DNI — the Cold OpenThe show opened on the break: minutes before air, Trump posted to Truth Social that Jay Clayton is his pick to run national intelligence, pushing Bill Pulte out eleven days before he was due to take the chair. It’s about FISA. With Section 702 lapsing and Republicans in open revolt over arming Pulte — a man who’d used his housing post to chase mortgage-fraud claims against Trump’s enemies — the President swapped in a company man: former SEC chairman, current U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, a Sullivan & Cromwell alumnus.Zev’s read: Clayton is a serious figure, which is exactly why he won’t last long — Trump would rather have a loyalist than a professional, but with the midterms 150 days out and his approval at 27 percent, he needed the appearance of seriousness. The swap quiets the FISA fight and buys a veneer of integrity heading into an election. The intelligence chair changed hands by social-media post, the same way this President now does everything.1️⃣ Trump Fakes an Iran Ceasefire — and Iran Says It Never HappenedFor the second straight night the U.S. bombed Iran, and Trump promised a third — “very hard tonight” — and threatened to seize Kharg Isl
- 1 weeks ago52 min
FIVESTACK: Trump Booed in New York, Bombed in Iran, and Breaking Up With Bibi
Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Three men spent a decade selling the same product: invincibility. On Tuesday, all three ran out of it at once. Trump got booed out of his own city. Putin watched Ukraine torch his supply lines and his hometown. Netanyahu’s government kept crumbling while his last patron edged toward the door. And running underneath every one of them — the Epstein files, still naming names. Zev Shalev and Dean Blundell stacked the day from the smallest humiliation to the largest, and the through-line wrote itself: the strongman act only works until the room stops playing along.5️⃣ Booed Out Of His Own BuildingTrump walked into Madison Square Garden expecting a coronation and got a verdict. The second his face hit the jumbotron during the anthem, tens of thousands of Knicks fans drowned out the music — middle fingers up, “f**k Trump” chants rolling courtside. The control room yanked him off the screen within seconds. Fox News dubbed in cheers anyway.He spent the rest of the night asleep beside James Dolan, the MSG owner riding an $8 billion development deal that runs straight through Trump’s desk. Asked later about the reception, Trump insisted he heard “mostly cheers” — a man narrating a different reality back to himself in real time.You can measure exactly how much it stung by what he did next. Roughly an hour after the boos, Trump greenlit a major ICE surge into New York City. Booed in public, he answered with force — the tell of a 27% president who can’t take a room he doesn’t own. He’s skipping Game 4.We found our next story on Groundnews.com using their Blindspot feature 4️⃣ Putin Is Losing Crimea — And No One Will Say ItThis week’s Ground News Blindspot is the biggest story MAGA media won’t put on a screen: Putin is losing, badly, and the mainstream won’t report it because it embarrasses the president who bet everything on him. Zev walked through what Navy veteran Ken Harbaugh brought back from two weeks on the ground in Ukraine — Odessa, Kharkiv, the Donbas, Kyiv.The map is turning. Ukraine controls the land bridge into Crimea and has spent five weeks picking off the radar and air-defense protecting the M14, Russia’s only land-based resupply route to the peninsula. More than 400 fuel tankers, destroyed. The Black Sea Fleet, gone. Crimeans now queue six to twelve hours for gas — some wait two days — in an oil-producing country reduced to horses and buggies. Russian speakers and FSB officers are quietly pulling out. Ukraine retook the 600-square-kilometer Kinburn Spit. A refinery in Dagestan burned Tuesday; neighborhoods near Moscow evacuated.For years Putin promised Russians the war would never reach home. This week it reached St. Petersburg and Moscow’s suburbs, because the air defense that should guard them is busy guarding oligarchs’ homes instead. The myth was the whole product. The myth is gone — and the silence around it is the story.3️⃣ Netanyahu Crumbles — And Trump Walks AwayThe third strongman is cracking from inside and out. Netanyahu’s coalition is falling apart at home: the ultra-Orthodox parties walked, stripping his majority and forcing the country toward elections. Abroad, even his oldest insurance policy is lapsing — Trump.The pattern of the week told the whole story. Trump tells Netanyahu to stop the strikes; twenty minutes later, Israel hits. Trump says stand down on Lebanon; thirty minutes later, Hezbollah targets in flames. Netanyahu never wanted the peace deals because he was never interested in peace — but the leverage he spent fifty years building inside American politics is finally draining away. Democrats are done with him. Republicans are tired of him. And the grip he held over Washington is loosening exactly when he needs it most.There’s even a quiet quid pro quo hiding in the rubble: the CNN merger Trump still has to approve, the kind of favor that used to flow automatically between allies and now hangs as a question mark. When the favors stop being automatic, the alliance is already over.2️⃣ Iran Downs A U.S. Apache — And Trump Promises A Deal AnywayTuesday morning, Trump said Iran shot down a U.S. Army Apache — the first American helicopter lost since the war began — and declared the U.S. “must, of necessity, respond.” The crew was rescued and is safe. The reported weapon: a roughly $20,000 Shahed drone against an $80 million machine. The IRGC denies it. On day 100 of this war, it’s gotten easier to weigh Tehran’s denials against the administration’s claims.In the same breath, Trump said a deal with Iran was in its “final throes.” It’s a familiar throes. The New York Times counted the times he’s p
- 1 weeks ago1h 6m
FiveStack: Trump Told No, Five Times
ON NOW! OUR FLASH SALE: 50% OFF ANNUAL PLANS - FOR FIVE HOURS ONLY ! ENDS AT MIDNIGHT ET The strongman act runs on a single assumption: that no one gets to say no. Monday, on five different fronts, someone did. A fired anchor said it to the network that bent toward the president. The man who built the Hunter Biden smear said it about his own operation. A reporter on a Wisconsin farm said it until Trump walked off the set. A federal judge said it to the name on the building. And an Iranian missile barrage said it loudest of all — by forcing Israel to stand down and exposing the rift Washington can no longer hide. Five stories, one crack running through all of them.5️⃣ “There Is No Democracy Without Journalism”Scott Pelley got fired from 60 Minutes, and this weekend he told the New York Times what it felt like: the death of a spouse. Thirty-seven years at CBS, forty-two years married — “that’s the depth of my devotion.” Then he named the cause. CBS’s new editorial chief, Bari Weiss, put “a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events” — a level of political interference Pelley said he had never seen in nearly four decades.The breaking point was a story. Weiss wanted protesters painted as more violent and Renee Nicole Good cast as a domestic terrorist aiming her car at police. Pelley looked at the same footage and refused — she wasn’t that person, and he wouldn’t make her one. He stopped being a “team guy” the moment he wouldn’t lie. The new executive producer, Nick Bilton, then accused Pelley of physically assaulting him, only to retract it in the room the second Pelley denied it. No one was fired for the false accusation. Pelley was fired for the truth.Zev, who covered alongside Pelley in his CBS years, vouched for the man behind the patriotism — the correspondent who sat on the steps of the tour bus writing notes, who crawled through deserts and slept in foxholes filling with water. Asked about Trump calling him a “stiff” who doesn’t care about his country, Pelley’s answer landed like a verdict: he’s never worn the uniform, but he’s been shot at in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait for this country — and he’s not aware the president has ever done the same. “There is no democracy without journalism. It can’t be done. And that is why I am a journalist.” The lawsuit, Dean noted, is coming sooner than people think.4️⃣ The Man Who Built the Laptop Lie Sat Across From Hunter BidenFor a decade the hottest topic in American politics was Hunter Biden’s laptop. The second-hottest was the man who helped engineer the operation behind it. This weekend, on Dean’s “Coffee & Tea with Lev and Dean,” both men sat at the same virtual table — Lev Parnas, the Giuliani fixer who went hunting for Biden dirt, and Hunter Biden, the human being that machinery was pointed at.Parnas said plainly what he’s already said under oath. The laptop held the nudes, the footage of addiction, the wreckage of a man deep in his disease — and nothing else. No espionage. No foreign agent. No corruption. The other eighty percent, the Biden-crime narrative that nearly turned an election, was invented. Parnas knows because he was inside the machine that built it. The man Marjorie Taylor Greene put on the House floor in graphic detail sold $225,000 of his own paintings; the families running half-million-dollar access clubs and routing rare-earth and Kazakhstan deals through the White House go unmentioned.But the segment wasn’t a takedown. It was an amends. Parnas apologizing to Hunter was part of his recovery; Hunter — early in his own sobriety — accepting it was part of his. Two men who no longer have to hide, Dean said, looked freer than anyone in MAGA. Both Zev and Dean see something the GOP should fear heading into 2026 and 2028: a comeback story America tends to love, run by a man who owns every receipt instead of running from them.3️⃣ Trump Walked Off the FarmKristen Welker asked Trump for evidence. He didn’t have any. Pressed on his 2020 fraud claims and the $1.776 billion “weaponization” fund that could compensate the January 6 rioters who beat police, Trump ran the routine Zev has watched a hundred times — lean in, raise the voice, the finger in the face, the blowup. Then the question came one more time. “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.” He crushed his lapel mic underfoot and left. “I’ve had enough.”The walkout is the answer. He’ll hold court for hours when he’s winning; the instant the questions reach the money and the mob, he’s gone. And the target, both hosts noted, is rarely random. The cabinet members he’s fired, the reporters he savages — overwhelmingly women, met with a contempt he saves for them alone. The rage isn’t new. It’s the oldest thing about him.2️⃣ The Name Comes DownMonday the Kennedy Center deleted Trump’s name from its website — not by choice, by court order. A federal j
About FiveStack with Dean Blundell & Zev Shalev
The Top 5 stories of the moment with Canada's #1 Shock Jock Dean Blundell and Former CBS News executive producer Zev Shalev. www.narativ.org
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