Episode Details

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.

Eighteen American soldiers are dead in Iran’s war, Pete Hegseth spent the afternoon asking the Senate for another $70 billion, and the 50% tariff Trump swore at China landed on Canadian dairy. Zev Shalev and Dean Blundell counted down a Tuesday that points one way: the friends get punished, the adversaries get visits.

5️⃣ The Tates Aren’t Getting Sprung

MAGA spent the weekend swearing Trump would never let Britain take Andrew and Tristan Tate. On Monday’s Narativ Live, former Palm Beach state attorney Dave Aronberg walked the extradition step by step and found nowhere for the brothers to stand — 59 counts, seven accusers, a probable-cause bar they clear without trying, and a final signature belonging to Marco Rubio, who won’t spend it on them.

The show added the week’s new pieces: Roy Black — Jeffrey Epstein’s old lawyer — has joined the defense. Dean reported, confirmed through the State Department and two sources close to Trump, that Trump will let the extradition proceed. Four days before the shackles went on, the brothers were honored guests at Paolo Zampolli’s garden party in Washington. Before America, they made videos in front of the Kremlin. Now they sit in solitary 23 hours a day, next hearing July 27. Ghislaine Maxwell dangles testimony and gets “I’d have to take a look.” The Tates get silence — they have nothing to trade.

4️⃣ Trump’s FBI Director Books Moscow

Kash Patel plans October 14 and 15 in Moscow and St. Petersburg with sit-downs at the FSB, per Politico — the first FBI director on Russian soil since 2013. Zev put the calendar problem plainly: the trip lands three weeks before the midterms, when the FBI director should be guarding the election, not touring the service built to attack it. Dean added the history — Patel has done paid work for Russian interests before. Neither Patel nor the Kremlin will say what the trip is for. Narativ won’t invent an agenda. The destination speaks for itself.

3️⃣ Trump Demanded a Cut of His Own Bridge — the Blindspot

The Ground News Blindspot turned into a paper trail on air. Zev put two congressional letters on screen. The first, to Ambassador Bridge owner Matthew Moroun: “It appears that you have used your influence as a donor to President Donald Trump to jeopardize American commerce to protect your company’s bottom line.” The second, to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, lays out the sequence — Moroun met Lutnick on February 9, Lutnick briefed Trump, and Trump attacked the Gordie Howe bridge the same day: “What does the United States of America get — Absolutely NOTHING!”

The opening slipped to July 27, after Canada agreed to share revenue. Dean put the most-cited price of the interference at $2.5 million in donations. Congress wants the documents. Right-wing coverage of all of it: zero percent.

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.

2️⃣ Trump Fires China’s 50% at Canada

Trump signed the 50% tariff Monday — six days before he cuts the ribbon on the bridge. In the Oval Office today he explained it: Canada has “been mean to us.” The wildfire-smoke tariff, he added, is “a different thing we’re going to ding them for.” Hockey sticks sit in the annexes.

Canada answered. Dean watched premier after premier — Ford, Eby, the Atlantic provinces, Manitoba — declare the appeasement game over, with export taxes on potash and energy on the table. Mark Carney has spent eighteen months signing trade and security deals around Washington. And Dean carried the Warren Buffett test into the story: real friends are the ones who would hide you. Canada hid six American diplomats in Tehran in 1979. That country got the tariff.

1