☕️ ALWAYS WINNING ☙ Friday, May 30, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Just like that: tariffs back on; MIT deletes DEI; Bondi kneecaps ABA; RFK Jr. axes $600M mRNA deal; and the Times accidentally spotlights Trump 2.0’s master plan—history, reversed; and much more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! And we have a galloping roundup today: just like that, Trump’s tariff dashboard has been re-lighted by the bosses of the judges who pulled its plug yesterday; the Times, mourning over its loss, accidentally lights up what might be the key to unlocking the Trump 2.0 strategic lodestar; Massachusetts Institute of Technology becomes the biggest institution yet to cave to Trump’s demands, and yeets its DEI department; Attorney General Bondi yanks American Bar Association’s special judicial nomination privileges and proves the theory; and a big finish with Kennedy’s $600 million assault on mRNA technology and the awesome historic parallels to the most muscular administration in history.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, the New York Times suffered a tragic narrative embolism after the Federal Circuit rebooted Trump’s tariff terminal and put the batteries back in his favorite foreign-policy joystick. How big a fit did the Times throw? The Times ran at least four top-of-fold stories about the setback. The least hysterical article sported the headline, “Federal Appeals Court Temporarily Spares Trump From Having to Wind Down Tariffs.” Here are two more. See if you can detect how the Times feels about the latest news:

Unmoored! Gasping! Hope, evaporating! Sources Say Times Staffers Found Floating Face-Down in Their Lattes, Whispering “IEEPA.”

Two days ago, the International Trade Court slapped an injunction on most of Trump’s tariffs, including all the ones we usually talk about here. But yesterday, and despite the Times’ faux surprise, the US Court of Federal Appeals predictably placed an administrative stay on the lower court’s injunction. In other words, for now at least, the power is back on and Trump is back at the tariffs table.

The Times suddenly got whiplash. It despairingly dropped the champagne flute from its nerveless fingers. The doctors diagnosed premature celebration.

Yesterday, I sharply criticized the Trade Court’s reasoning. Afterward and coincidentally, the DOJ agreed, in its brief calling the judges’ order invalidating Trump’s trade powers “rife with legal error.” Rife is a good word. I could’ve used that.

🔥 Maybe one reason the Times was so upset was that the Appeals Court’s simple, 2-page order could be interpreted as a stinging rebuke to the three judges at the lower court (and thus, a bad sign for the case).

There is a customary, hierarchical process in a federal appeal. Normally, a party seeking an emergency stay of an order, pending appeal, must first seek that stay from the same court that entered the order. Almost always, the court will perfunctorily deny that motion, and then you may file your motion at the higher court of appeals. When the appeals court says no, you can proceed climbing the chain of command up to the Supreme Court.

But sometimes, in truly exigent circumstances, when things are really critical —say, during delicate, ongoing global trade negotiations, and if you’re the President— you can fire the legal shotgun and simultaneously seek a stay from all three levels, which is what happened yesterday. And the Court of Appeals promptly responded, not waiting around for the lower court to deny Trump’s stay request first.

Indeed, the Appeals Court’s order practically said, “let us know if the lower court ever says anything about their stay, when it gets around to ruling.” It was in dry judicial dialect, but the implied criticism was, as they say, thinly veiled.

Among many things to complain about in their order, perhaps the worst was that the three International Court judges utterly failed to recognize that, while it thwarted Trump, their order was also potentially blowing up billions of dollars of trade deals benefiting the American people. By not waiting even a day or two to give the three lower judges a chance to weigh in, the Appeals Court was essentially saying, “you guys are reckless idiots. We’re taking over.”

That might explain why the Times was fit to be tied. The insta-stay was early evidence of daylight between the appeals court and the lower court. The lower court, giddy with TDS over-stimulation, didn’t realize its order was that big of a deal to anyone but Trump. But their boss, the appeals court, was appalled by the potential damage the lower court’s order could do to the country. It’s kind of like the plumber’s manager incredulously asking, “You mean you left the water main on? Get out of the way.”

That crack of daylight is no guarantee of future results. But it was definitely a bad sign for how the appeal will turn out.

Yesterday, I explained how the order’s reasoning was thinner than a rice cracker. The appeals court seems to see that, too. So it’s not yet time to throw the judicial baby out with the activist bathwater. As awkward and inefficient as it may be, our democratic system, creaking and straining under the load, is still afloat and sailing forward.

🔥 In a sidebar, I was particularly intrigued by one particular quotation in the article. The story cited Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, who coined an astonishing catchphrase:

President Trump always wins.

You could read that quote as bluster, which I’m sure is how the disgruntled Times meant for readers to take it. But it seemed there was something more there, a hint at a strategy, a doctrine, or even a brand. Call it the Doctrine of Always Winning. If I’m right, it’s awful news for Harvard, China, the European Union, and everyone else in Trump’s crosshairs.

What if Trump’s presidential brand is: he always wins? It would mean that he won’t quit, regardless of activist courts, childlike media tantrums, geriatric Democrats, plutocratic bureaucrats, pampered European elites, or anybody else, till he gets what he wants. It sounds simple but it might be brilliant. If Trump can convince everyone that he’ll just keep going, finding new, ever more creative and painful ways to win, his enemies will surrender that much faster.

“President Trump always wins” isn’t just Hassett puffing up his boss; it’s Trumpism distilled to a psychological payload. Trump’s entire negotiating strategy may rest on projecting inevitability. Not persuasion or consensus. Finality: Don’t drag this out. You’ll give in eventually, and it’ll just hurt more the longer you resist.

Consider today’s next story.

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Yesterday, CNN ran an anguished article below the headline, “MIT is shuttering DEI office amid Trump administration’s diversity program purge.”

Translation: Merit is creeping back into the classroom. MIT president Sally Kornbluth put it plainly: “MIT is in the talent business. Our success depends on attracting exceptionally talented people of every background, from across the country and around the world, and making sure everyone at MIT feels welcome and supported.”

MIT has announced it plans to shutter its DEI office, “joining a raft of universities scrambling to scale back their diversity, equity and inclusion programs amid President Donald Trump’s push to end those initiatives in US schools,” CNN explained.

Scrambling.

Carol Swain’s tweet (pictured above) shows the same sentiment as Kevin Hassett’s blustery quote: The Trump Inevitability Doctrine. Even though Harvard gamely continues to resist, egged on by a passel of progressive cheerleaders, MIT just tapped out.

Harvard, meanwhile, is still digging in—losing funding, facing investigations, and now battling in court over whether it can legally host international students at all. President Trump doesn’t argue, he escalates. And he won’t stop. MIT and the “raft of scrambling universities” are starting to get the message.

🔥 The original bully pulpit, is now a cliché, but was originally coined by Teddy Roosevelt. The phrase refers to persuasion and influence; a moral high ground. It’s a metaphor for presidents shaping public opinion through lofty rhetoric and principled leadership. But Trump is less bully pulpit and more bully bullhorn.

Where past presidents tried to move the needle, Trump is ripping the gauge off the dashboard and replacing it with a black and gold MAGA sticker.

The “Trump Always Wins” doctrine recalls the last, and maybe only, time that America had a commander-in-chief who was this muscular. Franklin Roosevelt, the only four-term president in U.S. history, was so dominant that we even had to amend the Constitution to stop it from ever happening again. FDR tamed two wild national emergencies —the Great Depression and World War II— broke the Supreme Court’s back, and rode those emergencies right over the submissive bodies of the most powerful corporate cartels on Earth.

Today, Trump is doing something strikingly similar: wielding the emergencies of border chaos, trade collapse, drug-fueled urban decay, and cultural disintegration like quadruple reins hauling up a runaway administrative state— an anti-democratic apparatus that ironically was built by FDR himself.

President Trump, the anti-FDR, intends to break the institutions that once deigned to destroy him and scatter them to the winds.

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Here is another example. Yesterday, the Hill ran an encouraging story headlined, “DOJ cutting American Bar Association access to judicial nominees.” New Attorney General Pam Bondi made the announcement:

Bondi’s letter officially ejected the American Bar Association from its decades-long perch as gatekeeper of federal judicial nominations, with all the subtlety of a boot to the face. In short, Trump isn’t going to argue with the ABA. He’s cutting the mic and tossing the ABA’s podium out the West Wing’s top-floor window.

Since Trump 1.0, the ABA has rated nearly every Trump judicial nomination as “unqualified.” And for decades before that, the ABA has enjoyed special access and privileges related to presidential judicial nominations: confidentiality waivers to get private bar records, one-on-one interviews with judicial nominees, and deep-diving surveys that nominees must answer.

Bondi cancelled all of it, casting the ABA down into Dante’s lowest level of judicial hell, which is reserved for loony, Soros-funded activist outfits like the Southern Poverty Law Center.

🔥 One of Marxist revolutionaries’ most effective tactics wasn’t literally storming the palace— it was slyly capturing the certification process. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist theoretician, called it “the long march through the institutions,” meaning to infiltrate cultural organs not with guns, but with gatekeeping power.

The USSR mastered this model early, building parallel structures of party-approved unions, academic boards, and scientific councils—each vouching for the ideological purity of the others. In the West, the same approach evolved, virus-like, into a web of cross-reinforcing credentialing bodies: bar associations, accreditation boards, medical colleges, journal editorial committees—all marching in rhetorical lockstep.

They all work together. One group sets the guidelines, another “independently” evaluates compliance, and a third awards legitimacy. It’s Marxism in a business suit or a lab coat, spouting peer-reviewed footnotes. By the time anyone asks who made them the arbiters, they’ve already rewritten the standards and discredited anyone not compliant with the guidelines.

As Bondi’s letter made clear, conservatives, Congress, and even originalist judges have complained for years about the ABA’s ideological capture—but no one ever did anything about it. Until now. President Trump just ripped the beating heart out of the Marxist credentialing machine that has quietly policed judicial appointments for generations.

The impact could be enormous. Conservative judges aspiring to higher benches need no longer fear a secret ideological inquisition from the ABA— nor temper their rulings to avoid getting slapped with a scarlet “Not Qualified” label. For the first time in decades, judicial independence might actually include freedom from activist gatekeepers.

Once again, Trump didn’t debate. He didn’t take to the bully pulpit and beg for fairness. He didn’t encourage the ABA to reform from within, or run a strongly worded op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. He just cut them out of the process. Snip! This may be what “Trump Always Wins” really means— not that he never faces setbacks, but that he doesn’t ask permission, and never stops pushing until the mulish obstacle breaks, bends, or becomes irrelevant.

Whether it’s trade policy, DEI bureaucracies, or the judicial gatekeeping cartel, Trump keeps marching back through the institutions, while corporate media scribbles furious dissents. They expect a fight. But he isn’t fighting, he’s carving them up like the knight who said “Ni.” Less scalpel, more greatsword.

Chop, chop.

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One final example for today’s roundup. Yesterday, the medical fetishists at the New York Times ran an unintentionally marvelous story headlined, “U.S. Cancels Contract With Moderna to Develop Bird Flu Vaccine.” The sub-headline explained, “Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly questioned the safety of mRNA technology,” as if that was somehow disqualifying. 🙄

And just like that, $600 million dollars evaporated from Moderna’s pandemic gravy train. One wonders how long it can stay in business with no products.

It was also very bad news for the medical-industrial complex’s favorite technology toy. Andrew Nixon, a new Health and Human Services spokesman, explained Kennedy’s decision: “After a rigorous review, we concluded that continued investment in Moderna’s H5N1 mRNA vaccine was not scientifically or ethically justifiable.”

In other words, neither safe nor effective.

It was another clean, clinical application of the “Trump Always Wins” doctrine. The President didn’t consult a committee of technocrats. He didn’t appoint a blue-ribbon panel. He just … canceled it. Snip again.

Christopher Ridley, a Moderna spokesman, defended the mRNA technology, laughably claiming that “results during the pandemic speak for themselves, including demonstrated efficacy and a safety profile established in over a billion people worldwide.” Don’t get me started.

In any case, like MIT, Moderna caved. “Moderna said it would explore alternatives for developing the vaccines covered by the contract,” the story reported.

What would we do without scientific worry? “So far, the virus does not seem to spread easily among people,” the Times admitted. “But scientists have long worried about a bird flu pandemic.” These days, one suspects a bird flu pandemic is more likely to emerge from an anxious lab than from a Chesapeake rooster. Maybe it would be better to just prescribe the fretful scientists some Paxil than keep shoveling hundreds of millions into them.

Over the last few days, what we’ve seen is a remarkable cross-agency coordination between Trump and his Cabinet, especially standouts like Rubio, Bondi, and Kennedy. A complete reversal from Trump 1.0, it also directs us back to FDR.

🔥 Roosevelt’s Cabinet wasn’t just a group of politically rewarded friends and patrons— it was a tight, coherent ideological machine, unified around the singular goal of expanding executive power and reconstructing the American state. His lieutenants weren’t there because they’d helped elect him or made large donations. They came to work. Each held a clearly defined role: Perkins institutionalized the welfare state, Morgenthau unshackled the Treasury, Hopkins ran the New Deal economy from inside the White House, and Hull exported progressive values abroad.

The results were seismic. Together, FDR and his cabinet rewrote the American contract, built the permanent bureaucracy, and sidelined the Constitution’s checks, all with a smile and a fountain pen.

Now fast-forward. Over just the last 48 hours, we’ve seen the State Department threaten visas of foreign officials who violate Americans’ First Amendment rights— Rubio’s unstated doctrine of reciprocal sovereignty. Dan Bongino, now head of domestic intelligence, announced formal investigations into the Dobbs leaker, the J6 pipe bomb suppression, and the FBI’s staged Whitmer kidnapping. Pam Bondi summarily stripped the ABA of its power to vet judicial nominees. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pulled the plug on Moderna’s $600 million pandemic boondoggle, declaring the bird flu mRNA contract “neither scientifically nor ethically justifiable.”

People, that’s just the last two days. Remember, all this began with even bigger foundational moves like dismantling USAID, shuttering the CIA’s “Institute for Peace,” and announcing the Department of Education’s “last, most important mission”— shutting itself down.

🔥 What we’re witnessing may be historical alchemy: the unlikeliest combination of a muscular presidency with a fully aligned team of Cabinet members— generating a new element that isn’t on the table. It could be the first truly ideologically unified presidential cabinet since FDR— but this time, running in reverse. Like FDR, Trump didn’t hand out Cabinet seats like post-election prizes or hand over their selections to political consultants and vetting committees.

He picked each Cabinet member for a reason, and most are people who loathe the agencies they lead. Like FDR’s team, Trump’s team came to work.

Whereas Roosevelt’s inner team built the apparatus of modern liberal governance, Trump’s team is systematically dismantling it, agency by agency, doctrine by doctrine. Never before has a president enjoyed this level of alignment across every axis of executive power —national security, public health, foreign policy, education, and the courts— and used it not to entrench a legacy, but to eradicate his enemies’ institutional infrastructure. It’s not a return to pre-pandemic normal. It’s a forceful return to a constitutional baseline, wielded like a chainsaw carving right through the post-New Deal history books.

It is so easy to lose the sound of the orchestra amidst social media’s doom-scrolling cacophony, where every minor setback proves that Chicken Little was right, and the conservative sky is falling. But if you can tune out the panic merchants for just a moment, you can hear the steady rhythm of an administration not flailing, but conducting. Like notes on a score sheet, one by one, day by day, agencies closed down, lies dismantled, gatekeepers dismissed.

What we are witnessing isn’t chaos; it’s choreography. And the tempo is accelerating.

Have a fabulous Friday! Return for tomorrow’s performance, right here, same time, same channel, for even more essential news and commentary.

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