FiveStack with Dean Blundell & Zev Shalev

Democrats took the Senate on Tuesday night. Decision Desk HQ called six Republican seats for them between 9:56 p.m. and 1 a.m. Eastern; they needed four. Here is the round-up as the count stood at 2:40 a.m. Wednesday, race by race, with the caller and the time on every call.

The Senate

The first wave hit South Carolina at 9:56. Decision Desk called the race for Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, over Senator Darline Graham, 51 to 47 at 82 percent in. Graham had been appointed to her late brother Lindsey’s seat and carried Trump’s endorsement into a stat...

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Five days before the American midterms, the Justice Department is already seeking conditions that could delay certification of a Democratic Senate victory in Alaska. Trump is demanding the prosecution of the candidate who could win it. The vote is still ahead. The effort to challenge its consequences is underway.

That is the thread through today’s FiveStack: who gets to exercise power, who gets to challenge it, and what happens when institutions or voters refuse to deliver the answer a leader wants.

The countdown runs from a Pentagon firing to a Russian fuel sh...

5️⃣ Melania's ceasefire covers one town

The White House says the first lady got Russia and Ukraine to stop shooting at Oleshky, a town of about 2,000 in occupied Kherson, for 30 hours so far and six days of food and evacuation. Dean's account is that Pope Leo opened the channel to Putin three months ago and secured the truce from a hospital bed, and that the Vatican's thanks never named Melania Trump. The 21,640 Ukrainian children Russia has taken are still in Russia.

4️⃣ Flávio Bolsonaro lands in Miami, and Brazil's court names Rockbridge

Flávio Bolsonaro...

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ISRAEL VOTES

Israel's exit polls landed at 10 p.m.: Channel 12 projects 52 seats for the bloc against Netanyahu and 50 for his coalition, Channel 13 gives the opposition 53, and both have the Arab parties at 17 or 18. The i24NEWS poll differs: Likud 27, Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar 20, Netanyahu's bloc 55, the opposition 49, the Arab parties 16. A majority is 61. Likud is the largest party in every poll. Eisenkot said the polls show "a complete lack of confidence in Netanyahu" and pledged to work to replace his gove...

5️⃣ Lula Beats Trump's Man, and the Loser Cries Rigged

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term as president of Brazil on Sunday night, beating Flávio Bolsonaro by 4.4 million votes, 51.8 percent to 48.2. Bolsonaro, whose father is serving 27 years for trying to overturn the last election, refused to concede and asked the courts to annul the result. Lula told the crowd, "This country will not accept being anyone's backyard." He had told the United Nations to stay out of his election, and the second round came out where the polls said it would. The sa...

5️⃣ Trump Scolds the Reporter Who Asked About Acton’s Abuse

Trump defended Vivek Ramaswamy's ad on Friday and called the NBC reporter who asked about Amy Acton's childhood abuse "a horrible little reporter." The ad is Acton's estranged mother calling her a liar. Trump's answer to the abuse question: "Why shouldn't somebody use that?" Dean Blundell's read: the mother stayed with the husband indicted for abusing Acton, so the ad is the abuse continuing. Zev Shalev's: a president telling Ohio to trust that mother has never told the truth about his own years beside Jeffrey Epstein.

4️⃣...

Putin freed Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old Michigan teacher, and Trump told the reporter who asked what it cost, "Are you a stupid person?" The night before, stepping off his plane, Trump had answered the question himself: "everyone thinks I did the right thing because we're able to get a great person back." The sanctions he lifted last week were the ones Lindsey Graham wrote.

5️⃣ Three men say Lindsey Graham paid them for sex, and the film can't put him in the room.

The Young Turks and a group called Swamp Watch put three men on came...

Putin freed Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American teacher, with no swap, and Trump said it would not have happened without last week's sanctions pause. Steve Witkoff told Putin to his face, "You are a humanitarian also, sir." The quid is on the table; the quo is not.

5️⃣ Trump tells two crowds France's fires are what Democrats want; 10 states quietly prepare for him.

Trump told Kansas on Monday that France burning is what Democrats want to do to America, and told Greenville on Tuesday what he will do about it. Macron said foreign leaders in campaign mode...

5️⃣ Trump, at 31%, tells Kansas America burns if he loses.

Trump stood in Park City, Kansas, Monday night for Sen. Roger Marshall and told the crowd the country will burn like France if Democrats win Congress, and put a price on it: "If you elect a Republican House and Senate on November 3, you'll get $5,000. And if we lose, you get nothing." Reuters/Ipsos has him at 31%. Marshall is tied or trailing Adam Hamilton in a state that last sent a Democrat to the Senate in 1932. The GOP sent Trump to a seat it has already lost. Where he can...

Benjamin Netanyahu announced Trump's endorsement eight days before Israel votes and told Americans that once Iran's threat is gone, "gas prices will go down and how, but only under Trump." Brazil votes two days before Israel, America 15 days from now, and the same movement is on all three ballots.

5️⃣ Amanpour walks out of CNN after 43 years

Christiane Amanpour said Monday she will leave in June 2027, weeks after the Ellison family took control, citing "unprecedented pressures from all sides, political, financial." Semafor reported that CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pushed reporters to find a Muslim Brot...

Katie Zacharia was let go at three in the afternoon, five days after she started; Zev had said she would not last a week. Three people told The New York Times she was fired. Trump told reporters what he had said to her: "Katie, do you need this? I don't think you need this." Guilfoyle Tuesday, Zampolli Thursday, Zacharia Friday.

5️⃣ Trump's allies talk martial law for a lost midterm. Peter Ticktin, Trump's military-school classmate and Tina Peters' lawyer, told MAGA election activists on a Sept. 30 call that "there would have to be martial law" after "another rigged elec...

Trump opened the day in the Rose Garden, turned to Todd Blanche and said he has "some very severe problems" he will not name, then said he was just having fun. The five that followed did not help him.

5️⃣ The press secretary never passed the bar

Katie Zacharia sat the California bar exam after Pepperdine in 2011 and did not pass it, the Journal reported Thursday, and a senior administration official confirmed it to NBC within four hours. Asked on the South Lawn where she passed the bar, she said, "When I moved to China." By Wedn...

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...

Lev Parnas sat in for Dean Blundell, and every story led back to Russia.

5️⃣ Fourteen minutes at the podium

Katie Zacharia gave her first briefing as White House press secretary and left after 14 minutes. She read a statement, called on three friendly reporters, announced that the president had asked Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle to resign, took a question about her children and ended it. Along the way she said "my president," then corrected it to "my husband." Zev: stage managed, a corruption firing announced from the podium with no follow-up allowed. Lev: "She's from Cent...

5️⃣ Canada's Nobel

The Swedish Academy gave the Nobel Prize in Literature to Anne Carson, a 76-year-old Toronto-born poet, the first Canadian since Alice Munro in 2013. She emailed The Globe and Mail one word: "YIKES!!" Zev, who lives in her city and had never heard of her, played a minute of her reading. Trump told reporters Wednesday he should get the Peace Prize, announced Friday.

4️⃣ The Epstein record costs a chair

Leon Botstein resigned his remaining Bard College roles a day after Rep. Jamie Raskin asked for a criminal investigation into his dealings with Jeffrey...

5️⃣ The shot he didn't take

Asked what Democrats could impeach him for if they win Congress, Donald Trump said he could have done "very bad things" to Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Barack Hussein Obama but thought it "inappropriate." Then: "I've had my shot and still do." People have told him "let's go get them," he said, and he told them no, "you can't do that to the presidency." Zev's read: he is trying to talk Democrats out of impeaching him by reminding them what he could have done. Dean translated it as a man afraid of what...

5️⃣ Trump's FBI

Jill Fields, a former supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI's Los Angeles office, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Trump watched a TikTok of protesters warning neighbors about immigration agents in Alhambra, and that Kash Patel told FBI leaders the president "was angry about the incident, and he wanted those protesters investigated and arrested." A second order, she says, came from Emil Bove: investigate anyone protesting at federal buildings in Los Angeles, with no federal crime identified. Everyone assumed it. Now a witness has said it on the record, and Sen. Alex Padilla has...

5️⃣ Flávio Bolsonaro beats Lula and every pollster in Brazil

Flávio Bolsonaro finished first in Brazil's presidential election with 47 percent of the valid vote, two points and about 2.2 million ballots ahead of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, according to the electoral court. Neither cleared 50 percent, so they meet in a runoff on October 25. Lula called the result unexpected and said, "we are in extra time." Every final poll had Lula ahead. Jair Bolsonaro, Flávio's father, is serving 27 years for plotting a coup. If Brazil's pollsters all missed in the same direction, November...

Donald Trump is reshaping the White House while the American labor market slows. September brought just 29,000 new jobs. On this FiveStack, those two stories bookend a countdown about what power protects—and who absorbs the cost.

Between them: a new prosecutor in the Cornell sexual-assault investigation, a Republican senator’s private rebuke of Trump, and another military deployment toward the Middle East. Together, they put accountability at the center of the month before the midterms.

Anne P. Mitchell and Lev Parnas join Zev Shalev for a discussion that refuses to treat an election resu...

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5️⃣ Trump campaigns only where Republicans cannot lose

Donald Trump heads to a Peterbilt plant in Denton, Texas, and a rally in Durant, Oklahoma. "I want all of them by a lot. I'm going there just to make sure," he told reporters before leaving. Ken Paxton explained the itinerary on a leaked tape: "everyone's numbers dropped" after the Republican midterm convention. No candidate on the bubble wants Trump near their district, Zev said, because voters blame him for the price of groceries and gas. "Wherever he goes, it turns to garbage, not...

5️⃣ Jack Smith

Jack Smith told the Senate Judiciary Committee under oath that his investigation "developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation." Republicans spent four hours trying to turn it on him. Senator Eric Schmitt held up a poster of texts to put Smith at an Atlanta Hawks game the day after Fani Willis disclosed her affair, told him "I think you've already perjured yourself," and called him "a total dirtbag." Smith had been in Maryland watching Iowa's Caitlin Clark, he said. Iowa's team is the Hawkeyes. Schmitt never apol...

5️⃣ Egypt

Egypt's intelligence chief telephoned Benjamin Netanyahu days before October 7 and warned him Hamas was about to strike, the Journal reported Monday, the third Egyptian warning to reach him. Netanyahu's office denied it within hours. Netanyahu may not have built the attack, but he was warned, and the war that followed kept him in power. Israel owes itself the reckoning America owes itself over Trump: how did we keep giving this man permission?

4️⃣ The ad

Fox News Sunday aired a 30-second black-and-white Trump spot that closed with "paid for by the U.S. gov...

Dean Blundell came straight from his son’s wedding on Thursday — congratulations to the new Mr. and Mrs. Blundell.

5️⃣ The red carpet

America is watching its empire fold in real time. Trump rolled red carpet from the tarmac to the East Room for Xi Jinping this week, then walked the whole room out to the building site of his ballroom. “It’s one year away from completion,” Trump said in his toast. “This is an honor of President Xi.” He did this for the leader of a country whose groups, CNN reported, have fed Iran intellige...

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5️⃣ Trump hits 32% and enters the Nixon zone

Trump fell to 32% in the Reuters/Ipsos poll published Monday, his career low. Republican strategists told the Guardian they fear a “bloodbath” in 41 days. The Senate is in play, with Iowa a toss-up and James Talarico ahead in Texas. Trump is entering the Nixon zone. Nixon’s senators told him at about 24% he had no votes; he resigned. “I’m not running. Other people are running,” he said at the UN, a week after asking vo...

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Dean Blundell was away for his son's wedding, so Eddy Aragon of The Rock of Talk sat in from Albuquerque. Aragon owns a conservative radio station and spent the hour disagreeing with Zev in public — and, more often, with Trump. Today's Fivestack is brought to you by Ground News, which gives you the news from the left, the right, and tells you what you're missing in the middle. Get 40% off the Vantage plan at groundnews.com/fivestack.

5️⃣ Trump rena...

5️⃣ Natalie Harp Triggered CNN Ban — Paramount Clears Merger, Editorial Board Gutted

Trump’s aide Natalie Harp showed the President a reel of TV hosts criticizing him this week, and within hours Trump announced a ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House press pool. The move backfired spectacularly: major networks including Fox, NBC, and ABC walked out of the pool in solidarity, leaving the White House with no credentialed media. Meanwhile, the Ellison family’s Paramount cleared the final legal hurdle to merge CNN and CBS News, striking a deal with the Attorney General that promi...

Zev broke the countdown to play Hakeem Jeffries on the OpenAI agents: caged in a test environment, they talked their way out, went two months unnoticed, cased Hugging Face, elected a leader and named themselves The Collective. They sent some of their own out to fail on purpose, Jeffries said.

5️⃣ McConnell Votes Wrong

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, the former majority leader who retires in January, walked into a Senate Agriculture Committee markup on Wednesday after three months away and started voting the wrong way. Colleagues stepped in and fixed it...

5️⃣ Burgum Spends $84,000 to Warn Visitors Off American History

Doug Burgum will spend $84,000 on about a dozen National Park Service signs outside the National Museum of American History, telling visitors the exhibits inside push the curators’ “personal viewpoints.” Trump’s Interior Secretary put the price in a September 3 letter to Senators Jeff Merkley and Lisa Murkowski, which The Atlantic published Tuesday. Nobody has written the signs yet. The curators are historians; Burgum’s signs tell the public to doubt them before they walk in. The same week, Bari Weiss opened her first 60 Minutes season Sunday to 7.94 million viewers — 2.09 million fewer th...

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5️⃣ Patel Defends Hiring Memo That Forgives Teenage Bestiality

Kash Patel sat five hours in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, and a Republican did the first damage. John Kennedy of Louisiana asked why the bureau's June hiring memo mentions bestiality at all: "The person who recommended it, why didn't you just say, what planet did you parachute in from?" Patel said the change protects trafficking victims forced into it. Zev...

5️⃣ Trump Spares Putin's Refineries as Diesel Hits $6.23

Diesel hit a record $6.23 a gallon Monday, the 10-year Treasury touched 5 percent, its highest since October 2023, and Costco began rationing motor oil. Trump posted his fix at 11:05 AM: Ukraine has agreed to stop hitting Russian refineries. The player Trump is helping most is Russia. Lev Parnas: Houthi drones took out Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline on Friday, so somebody else's oil fills the gap, and "you got two players right now that Donald Trump is very close with" — Venezuela and Vladimir Putin.

Lev Parnas says his sources tell him Trump...

Every weekday at 3 PM ET. Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev count down the Top 5 Breaking News Stories of the day. FiveStack Live is available for free for everyone. Never miss an episode by joining our mailing list below.

5️⃣ Clinton Auditions On Morning Joe

Hillary Clinton went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Thursday and delivered the line of a candidate testing the room. “I love Israel, and I hate Netanyahu’s government and his policies. I love America, and I hate Trump’s government and policies,” Clinton said. “She’s running. I’m pretty convinced t...

Every weekday at 3 PM ET. Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev count down the Top 5 Breaking News Stories of the day. FiveStack Live is available for free for everyone. Never miss an episode by joining our mailing list below.

Dean spent eleven days in Bavaria with Steve Schmidt and their sons, Jake and Joey, both twenty, walking the road the Nazis took and the road the Allies took back. They drank in the Hofbräuhaus under the bullet hole Hitler put in the ceiling in 1923. They stood in Dachau, where the Nazis killed about 60,000 p...

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American forces destroyed five Iranian tankers Tuesday after the Revolutionary Guard fired missiles at a US warship twice in two days and missed. Iran claims it hit the American base at Al Azraq, Jordan; neither Jordan nor the Pentagon has confirmed it.

5️⃣ Carney Charges Americans, Trump Swings at Kansas

Mark Carney started charging Americans at one minute past midnight Tuesday: C$27.6 billion of American goods. Trump answered on Truth Social: “NO MORE SELLING BOMBARDIER IN THE UNITED STATES!” B...

5️⃣ Gloria Steinem, 1934–2026

Gloria Steinem died Wednesday at her home in New York, at 92, and Zev opened on what she actually invented: an arithmetic. People outnumbered on their own stop being outnumbered together. He first met the idea in a Sociology 101 lecture hall in South Africa, where it became scaffolding for a new constitution — and the reason that country wrote women’s rights and gay rights into law while others did not. Dana DuBois, who stepped out of her workday for the top of the show, said she had never known a world without Steinem’s influence, a...

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5️⃣ TARRANT CUTS THE BOOTHS, THE POST OFFICE SLOWS THE MAIL

Tarrant County’s Republican commissioners closed 92 Election Day polling places on Tuesday and cut early voting from 50 sites to 47, over a room that shouted them down. Zev named the only explanation for closing polls in a county that is growing: somebody knows who votes there. Behind the county sits the same crew — Kash Patel, who helped organise January 6, now runs the FBI and its election-crimes work; Heather Honey, of the Cyber Ni...

Lev Parnas told The Fivestack his sources expect indictments in two to three weeks, an October surprise before the midterms, and that Trump is adamant he wants Barack Obama charged with conspiracy, with Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Miles Taylor. Parnas says the Ratcliffe and Kash Patel Moscow trips feed the material: “Which I wouldn’t call evidence. I would call misinformation.”

Dean is currently on assignment in Europe

5️⃣ Lake Ontario

Doug Burgum, at Interior, says Trump is pressuring Apple to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America”; Google switched it on American phones over the weeke...

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He signed the order on camera. His negotiators gave up the demands the same morning, in the room where the money actually moves.

5. LAKE AMERICA

Trump signed an executive order Thursday afternoon renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” effective immediately, with Doug Burgum beside him. “All it takes is a good pen and some intelligence,” he said. Fifty-seven percent of that lake is in Canada. “They want to be treated like a state, but they’re not a state,” he...

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DEVELOPING….Kash Patel ran the leak hunt out of the White House this week — three Secret Service communications staff on leave, four New York Times reporters subpoenaed, the agency that guards the president investigated from the building it guards. Dean Blundell disputed that on air: nobody has confirmed the Secret Service leaked anything, he said, calling it a purge of people not loyal to Trump and putting the catering-truck leak on Karoline Leavitt, 48 hours before she quit — Narativ ha...

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5️⃣ Dolly Parton Dies at 80

Dolly Parton died at 80. Her family announced it on her own verified accounts, in a video her nephew Bryan Seaver recorded years ago at her request. “Sadness lies with us, not with Dolly,” Seaver said in that announcement. The family released no cause. Zev met her once on the Oprah set, where she sang “Islands in the Stream” with Kenny Rogers. Blundell counted what she did with the money: Dollywood turned not-for-profit, 300 million books mailed to...

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5️⃣ Carney Walks Out, and Canada Starts Fighting Back

Trump’s negotiators handed Ottawa a replacement draft on Friday night, hours before the deadline, and Mark Carney walked. Dean Blundell, who has sources on the Canadian side, read out the demands: an American veto over Canada’s deals with anyone else, price caps and first refusal on its critical minerals, Quebec’s French-language protections eliminated, and Washington deciding how much Canadian energy it takes before anyone else gets a drop. Mark Wiseman...