☕️ DOUBLE STANDARDS ☙ Monday, March 30, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump wants Iran's oil (since 1987) and talks ensue; No Kings protesters can't find a king, but really want one; NYT flips on FBI file releases; Jill Biden's Secret Service agent has a very bad day.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! It’s Holy Week, the cherished period leading up to the most important Christian holiday of the year: Easter. Celebrate as you see fit. In today’s roundup: Day 30 of the Iran war delivers a Financial Times interview in which Trump casually discusses seizing an entire island like a man choosing appetizers, while Iran fights back with a Lego movie (seriously); eight million protesters march against a king we don’t have, wearing the official uniform of the Oppressed; Trump proposes giving healthcare money directly to THE PEOPLE and progressives somehow end up defending Big Insurance; the New York Times experiences a sudden allergy to releasing FBI files when the target is a Democrat; and a Secret Service agent discovers that legs are not, in fact, bulletproof.

🚀⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING — IRAN WAR UPDATE ⛑️ 🚀

Overnight, London’s Financial Times ran a remarkable interview with the President, headlined,“Donald Trump says US could ‘take the oil in Iran.’” This, apparently, was shocking news to the elite establishment, even after Venezuela. But I digress.

It’s Day 30 of the Iran war. Yesterday, the president sat down with a UK Financial Times reporter to answer pointed questions about his grand strategy. “My favorite thing,” Trump said, in what may be the most quintessentially Trump sentence in recorded modern history, “is to take the oil in Iran.” He added that “some stupid people back in the U.S.” keep asking him why, but helpfully clarified that “they’re stupid people.” The FT highlighted the paragraph with Trump’s “stupid people” quote, politely using highlighter ink to indicate derision. He should talk more like Keir Starmer.

First of all— do you ever remember a single time Joe Biden gave a hostile press interview on a Sunday— never mind a Palm Sunday? Me neither. The man is a machine. Second, a 1987 20/20 video clip made the rounds afterwards in which a young Trump told Barbara Walters the exact same thing in the 1980s.

CLIP: 1987— “Why couldn’t we go in and take over some of their oil along the sea?” (0:55)

Nobody called Donald Trump crazy after the 20/20 interview aired. Liberals were actually ecstatic, since Trump was implicitly criticizing President Reagan for being too restrained in dealing with Iran, which was busily planting mines in the very same Strait of Hormuz we argue about today, nearly forty years on and running.

Back to the FT interview. Trump mentioned Kharg Island— Iran’s main oil export hub, through which 90% of the country’s petroleum normally flows. “Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t,” Trump told the FT, with the casual energy of a man deciding whether to order the halibut. “We have a lot of options.” Three thousand five hundred US troops arrived in the region on Friday. The 82nd Airborne has been ordered into the theater.

The Pentagon has apparently been planning for weeks of possible ground operations. Somebody’s doing the math on Kharg Island, and it isn’t just the president, which isn’t surprising considering how long he’s been talking about it.

Meanwhile, President Trump reported that talks continue, and that Iranian officials have ‘authorized’ twenty cargo ships to transit the Strait —double last week’s number— as a sign of goodwill. As evidence, Trump named Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliamentary speaker and one of the country’s top wartime leaders, as the one who had authorised the additional tankers.

Say what you like about the war, but let’s be grateful to have a president who can recall random names like Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf without note cards, verbal traffic jams, or invoking “you know, the thing.”

Trump continued, apparently a little stung by the media’s earlier skepticism about negotiations. “He’s the one who authorised the ships to me,” Trump said. “Remember I said they’re giving me a present? And everyone said: ‘What’s the present? Bullsh-t.’ When they heard about (the next 20), they kept their mouth shut, and the negotiations are going very well.”

President Trump seemed skeptical about the invisible replacement Ayatollah. “The son is either dead or in extremely bad shape,” Trump told the Financial Times. “We’ve not heard from him at all. He’s gone.”

In an Air Force One gaggle last night, Trump said the negotiation with Iran was going “extremely well, but you never know with Iran, because we negotiate with them, and then we always have to blow them up.” The President declared effective regime change, because the first sadistic regime was destroyed, all but one man in the backup group was taken out, and now the third folks —“who no one’s ever heard of before”— are much more reasonable. But you never know. You might have to blow them up.

One of the most remarkable things about Trump 2.0 is that nobody knows whether President Trump is bluffing about taking Kharg Island. Doing so would be devastating to the government that remains in Iran. But it would need the US Marines and special ops to grab and hold the tiny industrial island, and many wonder whether Trump can withstand the political winds of misfortune a single bad day could bring.

This is, after all, Fifth Generation warfare. This weekend, Iranian propagandists published a Lego movie about Kharg Island:

CLIP: Iran tries to mock the US with Kharg Island Lego-movie adaptation (1:58).

If you watch it, you’ll note the Iranian propagandists are making the most of useful idiots here in the US. But … a Lego movie? Who is it for? Is it aimed at kids? Lego nerds? I give them props for creativity, but I’m not sure it lands exactly how they wanted. On the other hand, American leftists were delighted by the silly clip. Wait a minute— maybe that’s who it was for.

Our psy team should get them back with our own, better Lego movie. Put Batman in it. Hard pass. We could call the back-and-forth the Lego wars. (Meanwhile, the private LEGO foundation had no comment. Its lawyers aren’t even sure where to serve the copyright infringement subpoena. The IRGC headquarters office is a blackened hole in the ground.)

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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It’s that time of year again: “No Kings” Protest weekend, otherwise known as International Poster Board Industry Support Day. My local News4-Jax ran a story headlined, “Hundreds participate in Jacksonville ‘No Kings’ rally against Trump administration.” Hundreds. In a metro area of 1.7 million. At least they enjoyed nice weather.

On Saturday, I found myself stuck in traffic behind a large group of people dressed like they were preparing to scale Mount Everest for a costume contest, but who were actually just marching toward the local park to bravely declare that America has a king. Apparently. Actually, we’re not sure yet what exactly they were complaining about. Scientists continue to study it.

It was the third “No Kings” protest gala, a nationwide event in which, according to corporate media, 8 million Concerned Citizens gathered across 3,300 locations to stand up against the Monarchy that, as far as I can tell, we do not actually have.

I am not making this up. The premise, if you can call it that, of the “No Kings” protest is that President Trump is acting like a literal monarch. Now, I am just a working lawyer, not a constitutional scholar. My primary qualification for commenting on the organization of the federal government is that I once successfully assembled a gas grill without having any leftover parts. But I am fairly certain that actual kings do not have to deal with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Or with this:

If we actually had a king, things would be very different. For one thing, we would all have to wear pantaloons. (The Pantaloons would, by the way, be an excellent name for a folk music band. Just saying.)

But alas, there were no pantaloons on Saturday. Instead, there was a lot of chanting, some of it explicit. Explicit chanting is how you know a political movement is legitimate. If you just stand there quietly holding a sign that says “I AM UPSET,” people might mistake you for a guy waiting for his wife outside Ikea. You have to chant. Explicitly.

The protests united gender studies majors, elderly boomers, hardened Marxists, drag queens, and a large group of adult children in inflatable costumes who wish Halloween were a daily event. They were united in their anger about many things. Like immigration, the situation in Iran, and the fact that we are not a communist autocracy. You could tell they were serious because of the sheer volume of artisanal signage. The real winner this weekend was not Democracy; it was Big Sharpie.

I carefully observed some of the coverage in trad-media. One protester —who was wearing a $400 Patagonia jacket, which is the official uniform of the Oppressed— was yelling into a megaphone about how we are currently living in a brutal dictatorship.

This is a fascinating type of dictatorship. It is the kind of dictatorship where you can organize a massive, highly publicized public rally to yell at the dictator, and the dictator’s police force actually blocks off traffic so you can yell more safely. In historical dictatorships, like the ones run by actual kings, traffic control was generally handled by guys with halberds, and the penalty for yelling at the king was that your head was relocated to a spike.

But modern oppression is different. Modern oppression means you have to march for three miles in high heels, take a selfie for Instagram to prove you are on the Right Side of History, and then try to find a bathroom that doesn’t require you to buy a $9 latte to get the door code.

Resisting modern oppression also seems to mean supporting things like vaccine passports to enter grocery stores, FEMA camps, misgendering laws, social media censorship, cheering on political violence, and forced face masking (except for ICE agents). It also apparently means you can vote for a cabbage-brained candidate on Sunday, and on Tuesday, the Party retires the old man and crowns a cackling Queen. Efficiency! No voting required.

Queens, yes. Kings, no. But never mind. I won’t call the movement incoherent outrage. That gives it too much credit. They can’t even settle on the no-kings thing. NPR headline, 2013, when Obama flexed his executive power during a shutdown to nominate nauseating Janet Yellen for Treasury:

See? In 2013, it was good to be the king. Now, not so much, apparently, when it’s the other guy wearing the crown.

In the end, this weekend’s “No Kings” protests achieved their primary objective, which was to make everyone involved feel very good about themselves, and to ensure that nobody could get to the Olive Garden for lunch. The republic survived. The poster boards are being recycled. And the “king” remains enthroned in the White House, probably eating a Big Mac and definitely not wearing pantaloons.

Which is a shame, really. The pantaloons, I mean. That would be kind of fun.

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Yesterday morning —on what was shaping up to be a quiet and reflective Palm Sunday, except for the ongoing war with Iran, 8 million incoherent No Kings protesters, the tariff war with the entire developed world, and whatever is happening with Letitia James— President Trump somehow found time to chuck another grenade into American healthcare. “Donald Trump slams ‘unaffordable’ Obamacare and reveals new health plan,” the Daily Express reported, which I realize sounds like a tabloid headline but is actually a reasonable summary.

Trump’s Truth Social post called the Affordable Care Act the “Unaffordable Care Act” —which is, as a matter of recent record, statistically defensible, given that a new KFF survey found one in ten Americans enrolled in ACA plans just dropped their coverage entirely after subsidies expired last year, because the plans became unaffordable— and proposed replacing the whole thing with direct payments to Americans.

To THE PEOPLE, he said, in the all-caps construction Trump prefers as much as taking Iranian oil. The idea is that federal subsidies would go to regular human beings to buy their own healthcare, “rather than to bloated and uncaring Insurance Companies.” He is not wrong about the “bloated and uncaring” part. Big Insurance stocks have gone up as much as 18x since ObamaCare passed. Patients have not gotten 18x healthier.

Ten minutes ago, No Kings people were celebrating a psychotic young man who assassinated a random insurance executive outside his hotel in Manhattan. Now they are defending Big Insurance. I am not making that up. “It sounds like he’s suggesting the worst aspects of single-payer, plus the worst aspects of for-profit healthcare,” one Redditor complained.

It’s odd. “The latest comments from Trump could negatively impact health insurance companies,” Investing.com rationally reported. Not hurt consumers. Hurt health insurance companies.

Transferring federal subsidies to Americans rather than to mega-corporations would seem to be something that anti-kings types would love. But they can’t decide. One commenter to the article sarcastically demanded, “You want to bypass insurance companies, great, but where would people get healthcare insurance? Hot dog stands?”

Um. Trump’s idea seems to be that subsidized Americans could buy as much or as little insurance as they want, using other people’s money. But progressives spend the first half of their day complaining that Trump is making his friends rich, and the second half demanding that he keep sending billions to giant corporations. Make it make sense.

The good news is that insurance companies are ‘bloated and uncaring.’ The bad news is that’s also a fairly accurate description of the federal government that is writing the checks. The difference is that at least the insurance company might occasionally pick up the phone if the consumer were the customer instead of the federal government.

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After spending most of last year demanding 30-year-old Epstein files be released “in full,” on Saturday, the New York Times ran a story about the latest outrage, headlined, “F.B.I. Said to Dig Up Old Investigative Files on Democratic Lawmaker.” The New York Times —a newspaper so large it could be used as a primary structural support for the Golden Gate Bridge— is suddenly very, very upset about the concept of releasing information.

According to “people familiar with the matter,” the FBI, at the Administration’s direction, is gathering a decade-old investigative file on Representative Eric Swalwell’s (D-CA) affair with Chinese spy Christine Fang while he sat on the House Intelligence Committee (her pet name: “Fang Fang”). Equally unnamed “law enforcement officials” are now “alarmed” because the files contain “classified material and private information” that could be “released publicly to smear” Swalwell, who’s the leading Democrat candidate to replace Gavin Newsom as CA governor.

Ironically, the Times now apparently believes that digging up old files to show what a public official was doing behind the scenes is a threat to Democracy, a word that the Times now capitalizes more often than “G-d” or “Free Quinoa.”

Until just a few weeks ago, and for most of calendar year 2025, the Times was banging its inky drum for the “full and immediate” release of every single unredacted page of the Jeffrey Epstein files. These files are, in some cases, 30 years old. They involve people who are now so old their primary hobby is shouting at squirrels. By the FBI’s own admission, the files are packed with “unverified hearsay” about lots of public officials, including President Trump.

The paper seemed painfully aware of the contradiction. It tried to thread the needle between Swalwell’s dirty laundry and Epstein transparency by calling the Epstein releases an “occasional exception.” Which is like saying that the New York Times is normally a useless propaganda organ with “occasional exceptions” when it inadvertently says something true.

That reprehensible paragraph completely whitewashes the Times’ own role in cheerleading the releases —damn the consequences— long before Congress passed its disclosure petition.

When it comes to the Epstein files, the Times screams, “The Public Has a Right to Know!” But when it comes to the Swalwell files, the Times shouts, “The Public Has a Right to Mind Its Own Business!” This is what professionals and experts call “Journalistic Consistency,” which is a highly technical term meaning, “We Make The Rules Up As We Go Along.”

The Times’s argument is that the Swalwell files are “decades-old” and “already settled.” This is a fascinating legal theory. It implies that, if you do something suspicious, you just have to wait long enough until it becomes Vintage Suspicion, at which point it is protected by the same laws that govern antique furniture, historic buildings, and heirloom tomatoes.

In 2015, Fang Fang fled the US for China after learning about the counterintelligence investigation. Swalwell managed to bluster through, denying any wrongdoing. Obama’s DOJ “concluded the investigation” without filing charges. In 2023, under Biden, the House Ethics Committee closed its own separate two-year review without action.

Swalwell kept his House Intelligence Committee seat the whole time.

Nobody knows exactly what the Trump Administration plans to do with the Swalwell files. Either this is a rare leak by an FBI agent terrified that it might hurt Swalwell’s chances in the California gubernatorial race, or it was a strategic leak to accomplish the same thing. After all, should DNC donors keep backing Swalwell with this File Cabinet of Damocles hanging over his head? A tough call.

Ironically, the NYT, by sounding the alarm to protect Swalwell, may have done more damage than Kash Patel ever could.

You decide.

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Finally, always remember: safety first. After you check the safety. Last week, CNN reported, “Agent on Jill Biden’s Secret Service detail accidentally shot himself in the leg, official says.” Gosh.

A United States Secret Service agent —a member of an Elite Federal Force whose primary job is to be extremely professional and not accidentally shoot things— managed to accidentally shoot himself in the leg while on security detail protecting the former First Lady. At an airport.

Specifically, the awkward incident occurred this past Friday at the Philadelphia International Airport. According to the Secret Service, which is currently busy trying to find a way to explain the event without using the phrase “Whoopsie Daisy,” the agent suffered a “negligent discharge” of his service weapon. (Um. I’ll just say that Negligent Discharge would be an excellent name for a punk rock band. That’s two today; I’m on a band-naming roll.)

Now, I have never been a Secret Service agent. My closest experience with high-level security was when I was ten years old, and I tried to stop a fight between a German Shepherd and a Siamese that just had kittens. (I lost.) But I have always been under the impression that the Secret Service is composed of highly skilled people who can hit a moving target from three miles away while reciting the Preamble to the Constitution backward in Old English.

The report explained the agent was in an unmarked car when the shooting occurred. This is a very important detail. It means that, while the agent was supposed to be protecting a former First Lady from potential threats, the most dangerous thing in the vicinity was actually his own holster. Jill Biden would probably be right to wonder whether her detail is DEI hires. It’s one thing to have a security detail that will “take a bullet for you.” It’s quite another to have a security detail that is actively providing the bullets. It’s like hiring a lifeguard who accidentally tries to drown himself during his lunch break.

The Secret Service’s statement continued reassuringly, insisting that “no one else was injured.” Well, this is good news. It means that the agent’s leg was the only thing that suffered from his sudden decision to engage in a solo gunfight. I don’t know what the training program standards are for the Secret Service these days. Maybe it needs a few more PowerPoint slides about “Gun Safety: Why Your Leg Is Not a Target.” Or maybe they should just give everyone a panic whistle and tell them to try their best.

But I will suggest this: If we are going to have an Elite Federal Protective Force, we should probably make sure they know the basic rule of firearms, which is that the bullets come out of the front end.

Have a magnificent Monday! Contemplate the eternal significance of the Resurrection, and then get back here for some more essential news and heavily sarcastic commentary.

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