☕️ GET PUTIN ☙ Saturday, August 16, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump-Putin summit stretches like Marvel superhero; NYT mocked for dueling authoritarian op-eds while crying Trump’s authoritarian; HHS spawns new vaccine safety panel, spooking pharma / media.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! It’s time for an abridged Weekend Edition, (it’s a travel day). Today’s roundup includes: the Trump-Putin meeting, for all the hoopla and falderol, is basically still going in slow motion; the New York Times earns a merciless mocking this week with a duo of all-out authoritarian op-eds while crying about Trump’s authoritarianism; and HHS fires up yet another vaccine safety group, terrifying pharma and its compliant media allies.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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If nothing else, it was a masterclass in Trumpian media manipulation. If it were only staged for the photo ops, it would be credited a wild success. By a fair judge, that is. The NYT did everything it could to let the air out of the psychological balloon, running an unenthusiastic, top-of-page story headlined, “Trump and Putin Put on a Show in Summit, but No Ukraine Deal Emerges.”

(Much has been made of this picture of Trump and Putin meeting each other for the first time in person since Trump 1.0. Does it look like two paranoid adversaries warily circling each other before a tense negotiation, or does this look more like the faces of two men who’ve just navigated a fraught 7-year arc together and are finally meeting in person to celebrate some success? Just asking.)

It was, indeed, a show. The red-carpet meeting included a dramatic flyover with an impressive B-2 bomber flanked by F-35s. The media moments were carefully staged to show just enough of throngs of barking reporters jostling for position to cement the legacy of the meeting’s historicity— not for what emerged, but that it happened at all.

The Economist sneeringly called it, “Donald Trump’s gift to Vladimir Putin.” It reported, “the encounter at the Elmendorf-Richardson military base in Anchorage transformed Mr. Putin from a pariah of the West into an honoured guest on American soil.”

The Russians agreed. "They spent three years telling everyone Russia was isolated, and today they saw the beautiful red carpet laid out for the Russian president in the U.S.," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeslady Maria Zakharova said after the meeting.

🚀 Last night, the post-summit announcement was upbeat but cagey, but details were scarce. “We had an extremely productive meeting and many points were agreed to, and there are just a very few that are left,” President Trump said. “We didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there.”

Trump is making a plate for Ukraine to eat. Afterwards, in a quick interview with Hannity, he said, “now it is really up to President Zelensky to get it done. Russia is a very big power, and they're not.” After a brief pause, he added, “the European nations have to get involved a little bit.”

The meeting’s tangible, geopolitical significance might be a little obscure to those of us who don’t swim in politics, but for the globalists, it was tectonic. The Times’ subheadline stated it plainly: “President Trump … effectively ended Putin’s diplomatic isolation over the past three years for his invasion of Ukraine.”

In short, President Chronic Cabbage had put Putin in a diplomatic time-out; last night, Trump set him free.

🚀 Determining whose prediction was right —mine or the New York Times’— is a Rorschach blob. I initially forecast it would be only enough incremental progress to justify more time— and that is exactly what the Europeans saw. “The summit was slammed by European leaders,” the Jerusalem Post reported, “who thought that the Russian leader effectively played for time to prolong the war in Ukraine.”

Indeed, President Trump told Hannity that new oil sanctions for Russia were now off the table “for a few weeks.”

Anchorage was a sell-out crowd of media. Trump didn’t platform Putin—they did.

As levels of media chatter inflated into a massive rhetorical Tower of Babel, a mosh-pit of reporting climaxing both in fervor and unhinged expectations, I later revised my initial prediction, slightly, tentatively, against my better judgment, and speculated that something unexpected would emerge.

I wasn’t wrong. Trump delivered the unexpected after the “show,” early this morning, disclosing two new ground-shaking details:

First, Trump’s Truth Social post rejected the concept of a temporary ceasefire in favor of a complete peace agreement to end the war for good and quit nibbling around the edges of the peace cookie. Nobody had seen that coming.

Next, he said the Green Goblin (Zelensky) will attend an Oval Office meeting on Monday. I can’t wait to find out whether Zelensky will put on a suit this time. Imagine the pressure. But I don’t know how to knot the tie! Reporters had missed the potential that Trump could stitch this epic get-together into a perfectly logical series of meetings.

Not only did Trump completely dominate the media cycle —again— but he’s once again shifted the burden back to his political enemies. Having announced that he resolved “most” of the issues with President Putin, it’s now Zelensky’s chance to take the pathway to peace or bobble the ball.

When the green sweatshirt inevitably bobbles, Trump can say, well, I teed it up for him, it was a straight shot down the fairway, but Zelensky shanked the drive.

They keep trying to put Trump in a box. But whenever they open it, they find it empty and Trump’s standing right behind them.

Trump owns them and they don’t even know it

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The Times’ op-editors have been on an ironic roll this week. On Thursday, the Times ran this remarkable, high-minded piece, to help save bureaucracy. Sorry, I mean save democracy:

Without a new Constitution? I just want to stop right here, just for a moment, and point out how Democrats spent the last four years —right up to November, 2024— practically writing songs about how important it was to protect our wonderful democracy.

Now, six months later, they want to throw it out and start over.

“There’s no ideal democracy out there in the world,” the author generously allowed. “But I think, it’s fair to say that our system is not really democratic, as much as it might purport to be one.”

It only took six months. Now, the author thinks America should delete half of Congress, demolish and rebuild the Supreme Court, and prune several branches from the Constitution, like lopping off the Electoral College. In other words, the hysterical screed was nothing new; just the usual regurgitated progressive talking points, but repackaged for post-pandemic audiences (with short memories) in intellectual-sounding word salad, and this time, under the banner of it’s not even a democracy anyways.

And what about that subheadline: the left can’t win without a new Constititution? They’re not even pretending it’s about making things fair or more democratic. It’s just about winning.

As if that weren’t authoritarian enough, one day before, the Grey Lady excreted this totally not coup-ey opinion:

In other words, the op-editors “used to think” the military would “stand up to Trump” — exactly the opposite of Constitutional civilian control of the military.

The military isn’t supposed to be independent. That is crazy dangerous. It is supposed to be at all times under the President’s control. That’s what the Constitution says.

The two moronic authors of this banana-republic manifesto were no random Twitter trolls. They are two classic deep staters, with approved Ivy League credentials, who should know better. Steven Simon was described as holding “senior positions in the State Department and at the National Security Council.” And Jonathan Stevenson “served on the National Security Council staff during the Obama administration.”

The authors complained at length about Trump’s national guard deployments, especially in LA, casting them as terrifying encroachments of military force into domestic situations. Only at the op-ed’s tail end, and in passing, did they mention that the Ninth Circuit has upheld the legality of the President’s orders. Oh, that. Just never mind.

Well, mostly peaceful. Apart from the burning cars and stuff.

But what most twisted their knickers was what they called the “purge” of “good” generals like, and I am not making this up, Gen. Mark Milley.

Citing treasonous former Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley as a military exemplar should have been instantly disqualifying. It is like complaining about OnlyFans and virtual prostitution, then waxing nostalgic for virtuous crime-fighting pioneers like Jack the Ripper. Not a good look.

Between the two op-eds, over a span of 48 hours, the Times promoted a soft call for a military coup, and pushed a piece seriously arguing that the Constitution and the U.S. Senate prevent the United States from achieving “real” democracy. To call these things bad ideas does violence to the notion that ideas can be bad.

The funniest part is that at the same time, the Times is complaining to anyone who’ll listen about Trump’s authoritarianism. But who, pray tell, is actually advocating for scrapping the Constitution and putting the military in charge?

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On Thursday, the Hill ran a terrific story headlined, “HHS revives long-dormant childhood vaccine safety task force.” Spoiler: The Hill couldn’t find anything to like in a legally required task force to protect kids, which tells you everything you need to know about this particular encouraging development.

The 1986 Childhood Vaccine Act required the government to create a permanent Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines to ensure that vaccines given to kids are safe, and to make recommendations for more ways to improve safety. I’ll give you one guess what happened to it.

Anyway, the Task Force was required to formally report to Congress every two years. Its last report issued in 1998, after which, for reasons that are not perfectly clear, the legally required group went “defunct.” The coroner ruled it natural causes.

In May, Secretary Kennedy was sued by Children’s Health Defense, the vaccine non-profit that he founded, to force HHS to follow the 1986 Act’s task force requirements. This week, the parties announced a settlement— HHS will revive the task force. (While he was at CHD, Kennedy sued the government over the task force, too, but at that time just seeking records.)

Like a 1950’s Saturday horror feature zombie, the Task Force is back, lurching out of its bureaucratic grave and lumbering after a terrified group of pharmaceutical reps at a sales retreat.

Even better, the reconstituted vaccine task force will be chaired by the fantastic new NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who also co-authored the pandemic’s Great Barrington Declaration. In a statement on Thursday, HHS announced the task force will focus on promoting research for making vaccines safer and also improving the reporting of adverse reactions.

For pharma, tracking adverse reactions is like dousing the original vampire in garlic soup. It burns, it smells perfectly wretched, it’s messy, and it could kill all the lesser vampires, too. But keeping track of exactly how kids get injured by taking vaccines also seems sort of, well, common sense. Unless I’m missing something.

Without naming anyone, the Hill reported that, “Critics said resurrecting the panel could be another way for Kennedy’s HHS to undermine public confidence in vaccines and redirect or stop investments in childhood vaccines.”

In other words, the Hill’s anonymous “critics” were really arguing that no task force is better than one that could undermine vaccine confidence. Okay. That kind of thinking is exactly how we got here.

Anyway, the revived Task Force will join Kennedy’s already-created Vaccine Advisory Panel and the newly reconstituted CDC vaccine approval committee. In sum, we now have a whole lot more folks in official positions looking specifically at vaccine safety— compared to precisely none before.

The Hill’s hilarious inability to locate even a single expert or official who could applaud HHS for focusing on children’s safety tells you everything you need to know both about the media and our public health expert class.

Have a wonderful weekend! Meet me back here on Monday morning to kick off the week right, with a completely new roundup of essential news and commentary.

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