☕️ CIRCLING THE DRAIN ☙ Saturday, August 9, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump and Putin, the elites’ most-hated, set rapid initial peace meeting; Dems launch doomed redistricting war; GOP surges; Trump signs historic EO sparking jaw-dropping historical parallels; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! I should probably get used to this, but my stack of stuff for the Weekend Edition was set aside by breaking news and one of the most profound and revolutionary Trump moves since, well, the last one. In today’s roundup: Trump and Putin —the two men the elites hate most— announce first face-to-face meeting in less than a week, and the world loses its ever-lovin’ mind; Democrats start re-districting war they are bound to lose, and GOP races toward a magnificent finish; and Trump signs what might be the most significant executive order yet, cueing astonishing historical comparisons and the first clear view of the swampy bottom.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Early this morning, the Wall Street Journal broke a story headlined, “Putin Tells U.S. He’ll Halt War in Exchange for Eastern Ukraine.” Seems like a fair deal; we let Putin keep the slim strip of East Ukraine the Russians already won fair and square, a rural part of the country the Ukrainians always sneered at anyways— and we can stop paying billions and having to listen to slava this or that. Slava burrito.

Don’t get me wrong. I am deeply sympathetic to the plight of the ordinary, war-tossed Ukrainian. I appreciate very much that the Russians have so carefully avoided most civilian casualties (unlike other countries recently in the news, cough). My beef is with Ukraine’s corrupt, kleptocratic government, which conspired with the deep state to overthrow the U.S. government in 2019, and which helped hide a CIA bioterror army from the American people— whose own money was paying for it.

That was partly our bad, and we’re working on the problem right now.

But yeah, over the years, as information has trickled out, I have developed a legit list of real complaints against Ukraine’s bizarre leadership. Least of all, but worth mentioning: for a former comedian and penis pianist, shrimpy Zelensky turned out to be not that funny. Maybe the humor gets lost in translation, but I was expecting at least one or two chuckles in his speeches. Whatever, I want my money back. They bungled a war that should have been unloseable, wasted our best weapons that we gave them for free, refused to dress up for the Oval Office, and on top of all that didn’t even crack one decent joke.

Sorry. I’m digressing again.

🚀 Anyway, the Wall Street Journal reported two developments. The first is that both the U.S. and Russia have confirmed next Friday, August 15th, for a Trump vs. Putin, mano-a-mano, tango in the Congo. Or Alaska. We’re not sure yet. (Actually, it’s peace talks, but it sounded more dramatic the other way, and I needed to compensate for the painful humor deficit caused by invoking the unfunny green sweatshirt.)

The second development, according to anonymous officials “who were briefed on the call” —i.e. the kindergarten telephone game— is that the tentative proposal includes Russia keeping the territories it has captured or almost fully captured, and maybe swap Ukraine some other real estate to compensate for the small sections Russia doesn’t quite yet control. In the map above, the black lines show the “states” that Russia might get, whereas the red-shaded areas are ones already under Russian military control. Never mind Crimea at the far south; it is already Russian since 2014, but the neocons at the Journal are still sulking about that.

The offer might actually exist. Yesterday, Trump frenzied reporters by casually commenting in the Oval Office that there could be talks about “swapping territories to the betterment of both.” Meanwhile, President Putin hilariously told reporters Russia would pass laws pledging not to invade Europe. See? Even old stoneface Putin is funnier than the former comedian.

That’s not funny.

We’ll see. Last night, the Ukrainians promptly sneered and pre-rejected anything of the sort. They’d rather go down with the dacha than concede one square centimeter of land voluntarily. The Europeans groused that it hardly seems fair for Russia to get all that land, if it only has to stop beating Ukraine like a drunken hobo who keeps urinating in the daffodil garden.

Can the U.S. make a deal for Ukraine? Presumably, it would involve Trump negotiating the best deal he can —which would be 1,000 times better than any deal Zelensky could get— and then giving the Ukes an ultimatum. To me, a land swap with some mutual peace guarantees would be a cheap way for Ukraine to get itself out of this mess. What do you think?

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Kim Strassel published a unexpectedly comedic op-ed in the WSJ yesterday, titled “Democrats’ Gerrymander Flub.” Framing her mocking comments with a reference to the infamous scene from A Christmas Story where Flick freezes his tongue to the pole on a triple-dog-dare, Kim pointed out that Democrats don’t really have much wiggle room in a national war over partisan redistricting.

All that is true, and if you’re following the story, Kim’s op-ed is a great summary of where things stand this weekend. The short version is: Texas started the ball rolling by preparing a new district map that would give Republicans five more Congressional seats and, showing Flick-like levels of maturity, yellow-bellied state Democrats fled the state to avoid having to vote on it. That triggered a cascade of Democrat-controlled state governors —like California, Illinois, and Massachusetts— to vow they would redistrict too. In response, red-state governors —Ohio, Florida, Missouri, South Carolina— are also leaping on the redistricting bandwagon.

The problem for Democrats is that, since they are the original designers of sneaky districting, there just isn’t much juice left to squeeze out of the blue states.

Simply put, Republicans started a fight they are certain to win. They triple-dog-dared the Democrats, and the donkey party fell for it. Instead of just letting Texas alone, they feigned outrage and spun up a national race to the finish, and the GOP has the inside track.

Now consider how this battle’s timing before the 2026 midterms is simply perfect. There remains just enough time to complete redistricting before the cutoff. To me, the chances this happened accidentally or organically are implausible, to say the least. This is all part of a well-coordinated plan to manhandle the Democrats into permanent minority.

Just imagine what could happen if Trump gets a filibuster-proof Senate. All those executive orders could be made permanent.

Enjoying the popcorn yet? Wait, it gets even better.

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Oh, frabjous day! Here comes the best story of all. Yesterday, the AP ran an especially auspicious article, hysterically headlined, “Trump executive order gives politicians control over all federal grants, alarming researchers.” Things just keep getting better; this is draining the swamp. The new EO is part of a fast-moving, shock-and-awe campaign to rip the spigot out of the swamp’s hands, dismantle the grant-industrial-complex that’s been quietly running Washington’s pet projects for decades, and replace it with a results-driven, politically accountable system. And, just like FDR used the Great Depression to reshape the federal government for a generation, Trump is using the post-covid collapse of trust in our institutions to do the exact opposite and bulldoze the old order before it can get its underpants on. Let me explain.

If there is one single, supreme scam the Democrats have perfected, one master grift by which progressives have hollowed out budgets, looted the treasury, bled taxpayers dry, chewed through the Constitution, and rammed their social engineering down the world’s throat— it’s the grant game.

The playbook is simple: incorporate a bunch of “non-profits,” load up a series of grant applications with magic liberal buzzwords, and watch taxpayer cash gush in. You don’t actually have to stage transgender operas in Colombia— just promise you will try. As the budget has swollen fatter and fatter, grant graft has become a cottage industry of theft and grift, with billions of partisan largesse tucked away in the budgetary nooks and crannies.

Not to mention even darker and more dangerous grants, like gain-of-function research in communist China, censorship non-profits in the U.S., and color revolution cash for foreign countries— all used to pay former government officials to do things with their “charitable nonprofits” that the government itself was prohibited from doing.

Anyway, once your grant-writing operation is up and running, and the grant money starts flowing in, you pay yourself a fat salary, funnel some love to ActBlue, do some deep state dirty work, and toast the rubes from your Italian villa. And on alternate weekdays, you hire some cheap Indian call center workers to type up even more grant applications.

It’s the Good Life.™ It’s O.P.M.! Or, How To Get Rich Using Other People’s Money (Without Them Knowing).

Over the last six months we’ve seen the many egregious examples. (Portlanders: here’s a quick refresher from February’s House Foreign Affairs Committee release.) But the crazy days of free cash are coming to an end. The bottom line is that everyone’s caught onto the scam now. Trump and his cabinet have been yanking the plug piecemeal for months, which is a lot like trying to play whack-a-mole on the deck of a cruise ship in a tropical storm.

But on Thursday, Trump executed a surprise political jiu-jitsu move and kicked the whole regime right in the tender spot. Cue progressive panic.

🔥 Trump’s new executive order is simply titled, “Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking.” It’s a death blow to the entrenched grant-industrial complex. You can easily read it for yourself, but I’ll hit the main points.

Maybe most significant, Trump’s order jams a political brake onto the grant mill, forcing every discretionary award to sit idle until it gets a live review —in person or on Zoom— by a senior political appointee or their designated stand-in. There will be no more faceless ‘peer review’ rubber-stamping in the background; now, a named human being tied to the President’s chain of command must sit in the room, ask questions, and sign off with the White House’s priorities squarely in mind.

Specifically, the order said, “Senior appointees shall not ministerially ratify or routinely defer to recommendations of others, but shall apply their own independent judgment to determine whether each discretionary award is consistent with applicable law, agency priorities, and the national interest.”

That one change slows the grant conveyor belt to a crawl. These appointees are few, busy, and deliberate, and every meeting they take is a scheduling chess match. It has a two-fold effect: deceleration, since nothing moves until the meeting and approval happens, and centralization, because the bottleneck forces all approvals through accountable, politically aligned gatekeepers who can pull the plug mid-stream if a grant smells off-mission.

They have to put their name on it. Just think about what that means.

🔥 Next, the order takes a sledgehammer to the grant-industrial-complex: the cozy cartel of universities, NGOs, and repeat-players who’ve turned federal grants into a perpetual motion machine of taxpayer-funded self-enrichment. For decades, the same privileged insiders have recycled the same jargon-stuffed applications, leaning on legacy agency friendships and unspoken understandings to keep the money flowing with minimal scrutiny.

Trump’s EO rips up the VIP passes: it mandates a wider distribution of awards to be given to newcomers, strips away the dense legalese preventing average folks from playing by requiring “plain-language,” and routes every application through political appointees who aren’t beholden to the old-boy grant networks. By tying eligibility to the President’s policy priorities and outlawing entire categories of progressive pet projects, it yanks the feeding trough out from under the entrenched class and forces the game into open competition—on unfamiliar turf, under unfriendly referees, and with the rules suddenly rewritten.

For one example, the EO said, “Discretionary grants should be given to a broad range of recipients rather than to a select group of repeat players … Funding opportunity announcements and related forms should be written in plain language so as to minimize the need for legal or technical expertise by applicants.”

🔥 The EO also arms agencies with a “cancellation for convenience” trigger, letting them pull the plug on any new grant, at any time —even midstream— if it drifts off mission or seems sketchy. For the legacy grant-industrial-complex, that’s a death knell for the well-worn strategy of winning funding on lofty promises, then quietly pivoting to pet projects once the money arrives.

Now, the moment a project veers into ideological weeds or stalls on deliverables, a political appointee can shut it down without ceremony, cutting off the cash flow and sending a message that the days of guaranteed multi-year funding for insider favorites are over.

The “cancellation for convenience” clause doesn’t just break the old guarantee of riding a grant to the last penny. It flips the leverage entirely. Under the old regime, once a project got funded, supervisors had little more than polite oversight tools; clawing money back was rare and painful.

Now, grant managers can point to a standing presidential order and say, “Show measurable progress or we pull the plug. Provide the expense report now, or the gravy train stops.” It forces recipients into a state of deliver-or-die, knowing that the same political appointees who approved the grant can terminate it instantly if it drifts, stalls, or hides behind paperwork. In one stroke, it transforms the supervisor’s role from passive accountant to active enforcer.

The EO wrenches the grant system’s focus away from rewarding the right buzzwords reinforcing approved narratives, and locks it onto tangible, real-world results. Under the old model, the surest path to funding was fluency in fashionable language—drop enough “equity,” “sustainability,” and “stakeholder engagement” into a proposal, and the outcome didn’t matter in any practical way.

For example, the order said, “Discretionary awards should include clear benchmarks for measuring success and progress towards relevant goals and, as relevant for awards pertaining to scientific research, a commitment to achieving Gold Standard Science.” Say farewell to amorphous goals like “assisting Costa Rican coffee bean growers to understand sustainability techniques.”

The new regime makes narrative compliance worthless without measurable impact: progress must be visible, documented, and aligned with the administration’s priorities, not just the zeitgeist of the academic or activist class. It’s a pivot from funding intentions to funding deliverables, where success is defined in what actually happens on the ground, not in how gracefully a proposal flatters the prevailing orthodoxy.

You’d think all this would be common sense, but common sense is scarce in Washington, and it terrifies the entrenched interests.

🔥 Finally, the EO functions as an automatic “no” to the kind of social engineering and globalist tinkering that’s long piggybacked on U.S. grantmaking. It hard-bans funds for racial preferences, gender-fluidity dogma, illegal immigration support, and anything deemed to compromise public safety or “advance anti-American values,” and thereby slams the door on the progressive pet projects that have quietly siphoned billions into ideological campaigns at home and abroad.

Gone are the days when activist NGOs could rebrand cultural re-education, immigrant “integration,” DEI evangelism, or overseas political meddling as “capacity building” or “community development” and count on a steady Washington stipend. The message is blunt: taxpayer money is for concrete benefits that serve the national interest, not for reshaping societies to fit an elite global agenda.

The AP moaned that Trump’s EO would “politicize” a grant process they insisted was once “politically neutral,” yet their own story didn’t quote a single person in favor of the order— a neat little non-neutral irony they somehow missed. They stacked the piece with hand-wringing researchers and trade groups, all lamenting the death of neutrality while proving, in real time, that the old system was anything but.

That old, “neutral” process reliably showered money on a narrow band of aligned insiders pushing ideologically fashionable projects, without a whiff of balance in who got heard or funded. If the AP’s coverage is any indication, the EO’s real crime is not bias; it’s daring to redirect the cash pipeline away from the people who’ve been running it like their private ATM.

Their panic was completely predictable. Remember Ghostbusters (1984)? A terrified Dr. Ray Stantz exclaimed, “Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college. You don’t know what it’s like out there. I’ve worked in the private sector… they expect results.”

Trump just said the public sector expects results.

🔥 Once again, Trump has made history. Nothing even close to this kind of radical, government-wide financial re-engineering has happened, not since FDR loaded the first bricks of coal into the grant-giving train. This is what draining the swamp looks like, in real time.

Trump’s EO wasn’t just another policy tweak. It’s a deep detonation inside the very heart of the federal spending machine’s underground bunker. In one stroke, Trump yanked hundreds of billions in discretionary grants out of the quiet hands of career bureaucrats and dropped them squarely into the grip of his political appointees, armed with the power to approve, veto, or cancel midstream at will.

This is the first time in living memory a president has applied an across-the-board ideological filter to all federal agencies, hard-banning entire categories of progressive social engineering while demanding measurable results that serve the national interest. Overnight, the sprawling grant-industrial-complex went from running on autopilot to flying under direct, manual control from the cockpit— and the pilot is making a stern announcement: this plane isn’t hauling globalist cargo anymore.

If the concept of “draining the swamp” ever needed a bureaucratic blueprint, this EO is it. For decades, the grant-industrial-complex has been one of the swamp’s deepest, murkiest lagoons— billions sloshing quietly to the same entrenched network of insiders, activist NGOs, and international pet projects, all shielded by jargon, process, and a veneer of “neutral” expertise.

Trump’s order plopped a drainage pump right into the midst of the muck: forcing every discretionary award through a small group of political appointees loyal to the nation’s interests, banning the ideological slop that’s been ladled out for years, requiring results and accountability, and giving those appointees the power to pull the plug the instant a project veers off course. It drains not by a one-time purge, but by entirely rerouting the flow, cutting off the murky nutrient stream that’s kept the swamp’s most deeply buried creatures fat and happy for decades.

Given that hundreds of billions of dollars are potentially at risk for NGOs and “public charities” long on the graft, expect legal fireworks. But President Trump is on solid legal ground. We’ll cover those issues as the robes send their injunctions down the pike.

🔥 Massive. Unprecedented. Revolutionary. Unexpected. It was yet another move that changed the whole game and opened up a whole new front in the war against the deep state.

Trump’s strategy is starting to come into sharp relief. He’s clearly learned that the surest way to beat the entrenched opposition is to keep them permanently off balance, never giving them time to mass forces or entrench positions. It’s classic maneuver warfare, straight out of Sun Tzu’s dictum to “attack where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.”

Instead of telegraphing major moves in advance, Trump’s firing them in rapid, unpredictable bursts — tariffs one week, Harvard funding freezes the next, then this grantmaking EO detonating without warning. Before they can organize resistance to the last shock, here comes another, forcing the opposition into a reactive spinning cascade. The pattern looks more like a global blitzkrieg than a domestic policy agenda: feint on one front, break through on another, and keep the tempo so high the defenders are always fighting yesterday’s battle.

The grant-industrial-complex just got rolled like a sleepy mountain outpost at dawn; they’re still rubbing their eyes trying to figure out what just happened while the next strike is already inbound.

Trump is pulling this off by running almost the exact opposite of the Beltway’s standard operating procedures. Most presidents float tentative trial balloons in advance, to test the political winds, let allies and interest groups weigh in, and slowly build a coalition before pulling the trigger. That normal process telegraphs intentions months in advance, giving opponents ample time to mobilize, pressure swing votes, and soften the policy before it ever lands.

Trump’s learned —especially during the bloody trench warfare of his first term— that the longer the runway, the more time enemies have to plant political IEDs along the path. Now, he operates on a shock-and-awe tempo, treating policy like a battlefield maneuver: keep the plan under wraps, work it up in a tight inner circle, and launch at full speed with no warning.

It’s a military strategy of tempo dominance, hitting so fast and in such unexpected places that his opponents are always scrambling to catch up, fighting the last battle while the next one is already underway. It’s the governing equivalent of an artillery barrage followed by rapid armored thrusts— no time for defenders to recover or re-form before the next strike lands.

One big, unanswered question is, if this works, why hasn’t any previous president used the same techniques? The answer is what increasingly makes FDR appear as the best presidential comparison to Trump. The two men, while political opposites, are historical bookends. Both enjoyed a mandate to make generational change. Both mandates arose from catastrophe.

FDR had the Great Depression. Trump has the pandemic.

🔥 In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt swept into Washington on the back of a shattered economy, with banks collapsing, brokers flying out of 40-story windows, and breadlines stretching for blocks. The Great Depression wasn’t just a financial crisis — it was a legitimacy crisis for the old economic order.

“This nation asks for action, and action now,” FDR declared in his inaugural address, right before unleashing a blitz of New Deal programs so fast the entrenched opposition never had time to catch its breath. In less than a hundred days, the federal government rewrote its role in American life, from social security to the alphabet-soup agencies that still shape our world.

Trump’s historic moment, though completely different in cause, is similar in scale. Covid didn’t deliver a bad flu season, it exposed the entire bureaucratic state as bloated, self-dealing, and brazenly political. Administrative agencies like the CDC, once cloaked in “neutral expertise” and showered with accepted accolades, turned out to just be petty fiefdoms playing politics with science, shuttering businesses, mandating citizens— and shoveling billions to insider NGOs.

For millions, that was the moment the old system’s credibility flatlined. Now, unbound by re-election worries and backed by a party more united than in his first term, Trump is using that collapse of trust the same way FDR used the collapse of the markets: to ram through structural changes at shock speed.

Where FDR built new machinery, Trump is tearing down rusted scaffolding. He’s replacing quiet bureaucratic control with direct political oversight, and in the case of his grantmaking EO, yanking hundreds of billions out of the swamp’s hands before it can regroup.

Both men leveraged a national catastrophe to do in months what normal presidents couldn’t do in years — only Trump’s “New Deal” is a deal to dismantle. Covid is the opposite of, or the antidote to, the Great Depression.

The Great Depression convinced Americans that government had to do more — to build agencies, safety nets, and permanent programs to stabilize the economy and shield families from market shocks. Covid convinced a huge swath of Americans of the opposite: that government was already doing far too much, and in all the wrong ways — micromanaging daily life, engineering dangerous viruses, corrupting children, strangling businesses, dispensing justice like a rigged game of Chutes and Ladders, funneling favors to insiders, and hiding its failures behind the crumbling mask of “expert” credentials.

If the Depression was a call to build, covid was a call to bulldoze. Both presidents used catastrophe as a crowbar to pry open the system, but they’re prying in opposite directions — FDR (the destroyer) erecting the federal edifice, Trump (the builder) tearing it down to the studs.

It’s pretty wild when you think about it. The world reeled when FDR made peace with the USSR’s General Secretary Josef Stalin. Similarly, the world is holding its breath about Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. You can’t make this stuff up.

Oh, dear reader, there’s so much more, but time (and attention spans) wane. We’ll cover it soon, I promise.

Have a wonderful weekend! We’ll regroup on Monday morning, to assess the weekend and roundup all the essential news and commentary that you need to know about.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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