FiveStack with Dean Blundell & Zev Shalev

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...

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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...

5️⃣ The Green on the Mall

Trump’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 t...

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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...

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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...

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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...

For eight days the most photographed man alive went unseen — no podium, no rope line, no walk to Marine One. The last live sighting was May 27th, the day after his third Walter Reed visit in thirteen months; since then, only a Truth Social feed running twenty-seven posts a day and one pre-recorded interview the White House wouldn’t date. We asked the question all afternoon: where is the president? Then, as the show was ending he answered it — Trump surfaced in an Oval Office press conference, his first live appearance in over a week. The press event doesn’t erase...

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5️⃣ Six States Vote — and Only One Date Matters

Six states held primaries Tuesday — California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota — and the one worth watching is Iowa, where Randy Feenstra is the only Republican carrying a Trump endorsement, a quiet test of whether that endorsement still moves a state cooled on the president by the economy and the war. Read the rest honestly and it tells you less than the cable graphics will pretend: California is its own animal...

Donald Trump just killed his own slush fund.

Minutes before we came on air — a senior administration official told Axios the President’s $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund is, in their words, “dead for now.” Trump built that fund out of a lawsuit he filed against his own IRS, then aimed it at the people he calls victims of lawfare — a pot of taxpayer money critics said could cut checks to January 6 convicts. Judge Leonie Brinkema froze it Friday. Both parties turned on it over the weekend. And rather than defend it in open court on June 12, Trump pulled it himself...

By the time Dean introduced Scott MacFarlane, a federal judge in Washington had already ordered Donald Trump’s name peeled off the Kennedy Center within 14 days. By the time we got to story five, the Freedom 250 concert Trump is planning for the South Lawn had collapsed from nine acts to three. By the end of the hour, the day’s argument was sitting in plain view — everything he touches is rotting in his hands, and Washington is starting to peel away.

5️⃣ FREEDOM 250 COLLAPSES TO THREE

Trump’s “Great American State Fair” was announced 48 hours ago with nine perfor...

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 surv...

1️⃣ THE CABINET MEETING THAT WASN’T

On Tuesday the White House posted that Donald Trump’s six-month physical had “checked out PERFECTLY.” On Wednesday at 11:56 AM the president sat down at his own Cabinet table and proved otherwise. Within the hour he threatened to bomb a US security partner — “Oman will behave just like everybody else or we’ll have to blow them up” — confused Oman with Iran, then confused Venezuela with Iran in the same answer, then claimed America produces double the oil that Russia and Saudi Arabia produce combined, a number that is not real. He looked ga...

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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 tomorr...

A pollster tied to Fox put Donald Trump’s approval at 31 percent today. Twenty-five is the number that ended Nixon. A president at 31 and sliding can no longer make his own party afraid of him — and on Thursday, his own party stopped pretending to be. The Senate killed the billion dollars he wanted for his ballroom. The House moved to take away his power to wage war. Two dozen Republicans lined up to kill the fund he built to pay the people who stormed the Capitol. Five stories, one engine: a cornered president, and the arithmetic that corn...

DEAN BLUNDELL WAS OUT TODAY

Five stories led the Fivestack today, and they were not five separate stories. Together they show a government doing two things at once. Abroad, it is redrawing the map. At home, it is rewriting the rules so the people in charge never have to answer for anything.

Here is the day, counted down.

5️⃣ The Castro Indictment Is About Cuba, Not 1996

In Miami today, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment of Raúl Castro — Fidel’s younger brother and Cuba’s former president — over the 1996 shootdown of...

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Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — Donald Trump’s former personal defense lawyer — sat in front of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee Tuesday morning and did five things in one hearing. He defended a $1.776 billion fund that pays Jan 6 rioters out of the Treasury. He answered for Ghislaine Maxwell’s federal prison transfer, which followed his own private interview with her in Tallahassee. He was cornered, after months of refusal, into agreeing to meet the Epstein survivors. He quietly signed and posted a sec...

Xi Jinping couldn’t have choreographed a more picture perfect display of the decline of the American empire than showed up in Beijing today. True to form, Trump didn’t miss an opportunity to sing Xi’s praises while ignoring the harsh realities that his host was aiding an abetting Iran - the very enemy that has locked his presidency into freefall since the war he began more than 60 days ago.

5️⃣ Day Two in Beijing

Xi opened with cooperation, partnership, the “Thucydides trap.” He also opened with a threat: handle Taiwan wrong, the Chinese Foreign Ministry reado...

5️⃣ TRUMP LANDS IN BEIJING — XI SENDS A DEPUTY

Air Force One touched down at Beijing Capital at 7:50 PM local time, 7:50 AM Eastern. Three hundred Chinese children in blue and white uniforms waved American and Chinese flags. The man at the foot of the stairs was Vice President Han Zheng. Xi Jinping was not there. He will receive Trump on Thursday morning. Melania did not make the trip. The first lady stayed home.

The choreography of the welcome was deliberate. The Chinese president sent his deputy to the tarmac. The American president walked off the pl...

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The Fivestack was supposed to count five stories but we could not turn our eyes away from today. Lev Parnas walked out of a Florida Senate hearing on Jeffrey Epstein, called in, and the show became one story. The story is what Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has done to the women who survived Epstein —Today’s show is dedicated to them.

5️⃣ THE HEARING REPUBLICANS WOULDN’T HOLD

House Oversight Democrats drove to West Palm Beach. The...

The plan today was a five-story countdown . The plan did not survive Benjamin Netanyahu on 60 Minutes.

Sunday night, the prime minister of Israel walked onto Bari Weiss’s captured CBS — “Breitbart Light,” as Dean Blundell called it about thirty seconds into the show — and effectively told the American people that he gets to decide when their war with Iran ends, what their soldiers will be asked to do, and what their citizens may say on social media. Donald Trump sat off-screen in Washington and posted backup in all capital letters. “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE… AT A MUCH HIGHER LEVEL.”

We started...

THE GOP’S ELECTION FIX IS IN

Four to three Friday morning. Virginia voters had passed the redistricting amendment 52-48 four weeks ago — a margin of about three hundred thousand votes — to undo the Republican-favored 2022 map and flip up to four GOP-held House seats. Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote for the majority. The legislature, he held, took its second vote on the amendment four days before the last day of early voting in the special election, denying voters the chance to elect delegates with a known position on the proposal. Chief Justice Cleo Elaine Powell wrote the dissen...

The President of the United States lost the Saudis. The Commerce Secretary forgot his story. A federal judge found a lost note by Jeffrey Epstein, Elon Musk’s ex-partner says she’s done with right, and Ted Turner — the man who built 24-hour news — died on a day tailor-made for cable news..

Trump declared “Operation Project Freedom” on Truth Social Sunday. He told nobody — not Mohammed bin Salman, not Oman, not Kuwait, not the UAE — that he was going to launch a U.S. Navy escort mission through the Strait of Hormuz that needed their bases, their air...

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Today the President of the United States looked at a sustained naval battle in the Strait of Hormuz and called it a skirmish. The Senate looked at a billion dollars for a ballroom and called it modernization. The Met looked at a hundred-thousand-dollar seat and called it culture. A Canadian province being bought through Dutch troll farms got called a poll. And the Kremlin called the coup talk a psy-op while Putin hid in a bunker. Five stories. One muscle-memory move from...

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We opened cold today with breaking news out of FBI HQ: Kash Patel is now threatening to sue anyone who calls him “J. Edgar Boozer.”

Yes. Really. The FBI Director — fresh off losing a defamation suit against former assistant director Frank Figliuzzi (he lost because there was evidence he’d been drunk at work) — is apparently so rattled by the new nickname tha...

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5️⃣ The 60-Day Dodge

Trump sent letters to Congress today claiming the Iran war “has terminated” and that hostilities ended on April 7. The Senate killed the war powers resolution 47–50 last night, the sixth time in eight weeks, with Maine Republican Susan Collins crossing for the first time. Asked at the rope line why he would not se...

5️⃣ Hegseth Grilled — “Obliterated” Doesn’t Add Up

Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine took chairs in front of the House Armed Services Committee at ten this morning to defend a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget. Hegseth told the chamber that Iran’s nuclear facilities had already been “obliterated” before Trump launched the war, then told Adam Smith the war was justified anyway because “they had not given up their nuclear ambitions.” Pentagon finance chief Jules Hurst III put a $25 billion price tag on what he called “Operation Epic Fury,” with two destroyed C-130s in the bill. Hegseth attacked Democrats...

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5️⃣ Carr Comes For Kimmel And Disney

FCC chair Brendan Carr opened an investigation into ABC and Disney on Tuesday, threatening eight broadcast licenses over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue delivered three days before the Washington Hilton incident. Kimmel had quipped that Melania Trump carried “the glow of an expectant widow.” Carr’s office is folding the line into the administration’s case that critics of the president are inciting violence. Shalev framed the move alongside the Comey indictment as one signal repeating...

5️⃣ DC Rolled Its Eyes And Wolf Blitzer Lost A Shoe

The first thing the room did when the shots rang out was nothing. Wajahat Ali was outside the Hilton when it happened, held back by police as the perimeter went up. “Everything was chill,” Ali said. “The residents of D.C. just rolled their eyes. People are like, did someone try to shoot this mother effer? You think it’s real? You think it’s staged? No one cared.” Inside, Lev Parnas described after-parties continuing as the cops shut down every intersection. Steve Schmidt giggled. Dean Blundell, a...

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5️⃣ The Soldier Who Bet On His Own Mission

Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment overnight charging a U.S. special forces soldier with using classified information about the Maduro raid to place cash bets on the outcome. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who reports to the Joint Special Operations Command and helped plan and execute the operation, placed 13 Polymarket bets between December 27 and January 26, turning $33,000 into more than $409,000. “That’s 13 bets because the operation kept moving,” Shalev said. “So he had to keep moving...

5️⃣ Laura Loomer Loses

A federal judge in Florida, a Clinton appointee, granted summary judgment to Bill Maher and HBO, killing Laura Loomer’s $150 million defamation suit before it reached a jury. “Summary judgment, which means the judge laughed at it,” Blundell said. The suit targeted a September 2024 Real Time bit in which Maher named Loomer as the president’s likely mistress. Her own deposition sank the case — her income went up in 2024, she still flies on Trump’s plane, she still gets into the White House, and she could not name one person whose opinion of her had chang...

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5️⃣ Patel’s “Never Intoxicated” Presser — And Who Trump Hires On Purpose

The FBI Director of the United States of America stood at a DOJ podium yesterday and told a room of reporters he has “never been intoxicated on the job.” That’s the sentence. That’s what we’re doing now. Acting AG Todd Blanche stood beside him — Patel’s boss, for...

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5️⃣ Vance Off The Plane, China On The Board

Vice President JD Vance didn’t even bother traveling Islamabad for talks on Iran, trump claimed it was for security concerns but no Iranian delegation had left for Pakistan. On CNBC’s Squawk Box, Trump described intercepting an Iranian vessel carrying “things on it, which wasn’t very nice,” calling the cargo “a gift from China, perhaps” — the first time a sitting U.S. president has described Beijing rearming Tehran’s air defenses. F...

5️⃣ The Strait of ‘Iran’, Open but Chained

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi declared the Strait of Hormuz “completely open” on Friday morning. President Trump quote-posted “THANK YOU!” in all caps and then, in a second Truth Social post the same morning, confirmed the U.S. naval blockade would remain in force “until such time as our transaction with Iran is 100 percent complete.” “It’s easy to be cynical when you hear pronouncements of victory,” MeidasTouch Chief Washington Correspondent Scott MacFarlane said on The Fivestack, noting the conspicuous Republican silence and Ann Coulter’s reaction: “yay, the strait that was open before we began...

Trump stepped onto the White House lawn on his way to Vegas today and said something that may actually be true: Iran is close to agreeing to no nuclear weapons — not for 20 years, not for 30, but permanently. He also confirmed the second aircraft carrier was sent “in case we don’t make a deal” and said if they do, “it’ll be leaving very soon.”

We’ve heard “close to a deal” before. But this time was different. The Lebanon-Israel 10-day ceasefire is confirmed. Netanyahu and Lebanese President Aoun spoke directly for the first time in 34 years. A photo op is expect...

Pakistan’s army chief was in Tehran as we went to air today. The ceasefire expires April 21. Three American aircraft carriers are closing in. The diplomacy and the military buildup are happening simultaneously — and as Olga put it on today’s show, it feels exactly like a trap.

“The Americans are piling all their resources into a part of the world where you can’t really escape,” she said. “It’s a tiny sliver of water they have to protect. Iran has two routes they can block — 20% of global goods through Hormuz, another 15-20% through the Red Sea with the Houth...

There’s a pattern hiding in plain sight. Each story today reads like a separate news cycle. A military standoff in the Persian Gulf. An election office captured by loyalists. A congressman accused of rape. A new pope who refuses to blink. A Canadian prime minister reshaping the Western alliance. But pull back and look at all five at once, and what you’re watching is a single crisis playing out across five fronts simultaneously — the story of a government that has isolated itself from the world, captured its own institutions, and is now confronting the consequences.

Z...

Wajahat Ali of The Left Hook is sitting in for Dean Blundell, who’s away. Before the countdown, Zev and Waj tore into Donald Trump’s escalating holy war with Pope Leo — the blasphemous AI image of Trump as a healing Christ-figure, his tarmac slam calling the first American Pope “a very liberal person” who “likes crime,” and his press conference insistence that the image was just “me as a doctor.” As Waj put it, “this man is the most blasphemous, hedonistic vulgarian we’ve seen in a long time.” The broader picture: allies are walking away. Chrystia Freeland told MSNBC that America...

DEAN IS OUT THIS WEEK

5️⃣ Melania’s Epstein Press Conference Backfires

In an unprecedented move, First Lady Melania Trump held a surprise press conference in front of the White House press corps to deny any knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse, any relationship with Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell, and any involvement in criminal activity. The denial came just hours after Brazilian former model Amanda Ungaro — who was brought into Epstein’s orbit at age 16 by modeling agent Paolo Zampoli, the same man Melania claims introduced her to Donald Trump — posted a blistering message on Twitter addressed dire...

5️⃣ Canada’s Endless Acronym Becomes an Elon Musk Op

A clip of NDP MP Leah Gazan using the full “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” acronym on the floor of Parliament exploded online after Elon Musk amplified it through Alberta separatist David Parker of Take Back Alberta, who repackaged it as proof that Canada is forcing citizens to rattle off a 15-letter identity pledge. “That is an op,” Dean said flatly on the show. “One woman, Leah Gazan, not very well respected in this country.” Zev, who is gay, gently pushed back on the acronym sprawl itself: “I remember the time when it was just the...

5️⃣ Vance Campaigns for Orbán

Vice President JD Vance spent day two of his Budapest visit openly campaigning for Viktor Orbán ahead of Hungary’s April 12 parliamentary election, a vote Orbán’s Fidesz is trailing in for the first time in more than a decade. Zev called the trip a transparent audition. “Vance is desperately trying to position himself as being outside of this war, being anti this war, being anti-Israel, so he can assume the mantle as the next president of the United States,” he said. “He might be sounding very reasonable these days compar...