☕️ GROWING AND SHRINKING ☙ Tuesday, April 30, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump stock ‘unexpectedly’ jumps; Trump trial miracle is deranged star witness; NYT admits trial is about nothing; shrinking Ukraine aid narrative; China pushing back on Biden; WHO treaty shrinkage.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your roundup of everything you need to know about what’s going on in the world includes: Trump stock price ‘unexpectedly’ jumps as second trial week starts; another miraculous gift lands on the Trump trial; another trump-deranged law professor admits its a trial about nothing — in the New York Times; Ukraine aid narrative shrinking faster than Alice after eating the mushroom that makes you small; China pushes back on historic Biden peacetime war powers; and the WHO pandemic treaty shrinks to a more manageable size.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

📈 On the upside, CNBC ran a story yesterday headlined, “DJT: Why Trump Media shares closed more than 12% higher.” Of course, after reading the article we discover they don’t know why. The “why” headline is corporate media’s clickbait version of “one weird trick.”

The article referred to the initial public offering of Trump Media, which was the nearly miraculous billion-dollar save the Trump team pulled out of thin air last month to pay for the appeal bond on his other ridiculous, victimless case about criminally overvalued real estate.

“We’re selling this so cheap it should be a crime!” Guess what? It is!

Buy, sell, buy again. Baffled, perplexed, and confused, CNBC noted Trump’s stock shot up despite “any significant news about the company’s bottom line improving.”  But it later quoted a University of Florida business professor that called DJT a “meme stock.”

“Meme stock” is a derogatory finance slur, implying that a stock’s market value is disconnected from its underlying business performance or future business prospects. Which in DJT’s case happens to be true. It’s a pure political play.

Buying DJT is buying a slice of history and putting a thumb into Letitia James’ beady little eye.

There was even more good DJT news. Last week, Trump earned bonus shares in the new stock worth about an extra +$1.15 billion, triggered after the share price stayed (well) over a $17.50 minimum for 30 days.

CNBC sort of admitted that Trump haters have been trying to tank the stock. It reported how Trump Media officers fought back last week against short sellers who were manipulating the stock’s price down.  Last Monday, the company issued a press release giving stock owners instructions about how to frustrate the short sellers. Trump Media officials also complained about the short sellers to Congressional Republicans and Nasdaq’s CEO.

They are fighting President Trump for every single inch, on every front. And still, somehow, they keep losing.

📉 2024 just got slightly more bizarre, dramatically revealing yet another flabbergasting bingo square that nobody saw coming. ABC News ran a serendipitous story yesterday headlined, “Michael Cohen is cashing in on the Trump trial with TikTok livestreams -- and it could be a problem.” Yes, it could. It could be a problem for Trump’s enemies, that is. The problem is this ridiculous buffoon:

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney who turned out to be a criminal, a ‘criminal lawyer,’ if you will, had apparently agreed to Alvin Bragg’s increasingly desperate requests to please stop tweeting about the trial. Last week, Michael satisfied Bragg’s anxious prosecutors by tweeting to his 620,000 followers, “see you in a month (or more).”

Then, the ever-dependable Michael broke his promise by immediately firing up a new account on TikTok talking about, you guessed it, Donald Trump. Hey, the slippery lawyer never actually said he wouldn’t talk about the trial on TikTok. After all, TikTok isn’t “my X account” or “the Mea Culpa Podcast” either.

Every night since, Michael has been mugging for tips from deranged democrats on his TikTok channel, where he’s mostly yammering about the Trump Trial and yipping about how much he hates President Trump.

It’s a gift to Trump’s lawyers. They are probably turning somersaults.

All of Michael’s TikTocking is fair game for trial. It can all be played to the jury, to show how Michael is making money off hating President Trump. It’s practically become his entire career. Some jurors may be sufficiently TDS-inflicted to agree with the disgraced lawyer, but by ABC’s description, Michael’s performance sounds just as weird and icky as you would expect. Here’s a sample:

Cohen's streams often seem like a fever dream -- with Trump's one-time fixer fluctuating between personal attacks on his former boss and making heart shapes with his hands after a user sends him a gift. Cohen did not specify how much he has made on the streams when asked by ABC News.

At one point on Tuesday night, in the middle of Cohen discussing his upcoming possible testimony, a TikTok user gifted Cohen a "Knight Helmet," which cost 199 TikTok coins. The gift placed a cartoon helmet on Cohen's head, prompting him to stop briefly mid-sentence before continuing,

"Ultimately what will happen is it will be my day ... I'll go there with my helmet, my spear, and I'll sit my ass in that witness stand and I'll just tell the truth," Cohen said.

Michael Cohen wouldn’t recognize the truth if it gave him a Cherry Ripple colon cleanse. And this TikTok grifter is Alvin Bragg’s star witness.

Which brings us to another remarkable New York Times editorial.

🔥🔥 The trial must not be polling well. The New York Times ran a desperate, narrative bending guest essay yesterday, headlined “I Was an Attorney at the D.A.’s Office. This Is What the Trump Case Is Really About.” It was penned by Rebecca Roiphe, who before Alvin Bragg’s time a former assistant DA in the Manhattan office. Now she’s a Trump-deranged law professor at New York University who often gives media salty quotes about Trump posing the greatest danger to  the Nation’s democracy.

Rebecca is worried about the trial, and put the bad news up front. Alvin Bragg’s case against President Trump is turning out to be totally incomprehensible, and people are struggling to comprehend exactly what Trump is supposed to have done wrong:

Now that the lawyers are laying out their respective theories of the case in the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump in New York, it would be understandable if people’s heads are spinning. It’s not surprising that the lawyers are trying to make this about something sexier. This is a narrative device to make the jurors side with them, but it has also created confusion.

No kidding. Like me, and like other experts recently quoted in C&C, even Trump-deranged Rebecca admits this case is not about election interference or even about salacious “hush money” payments. Those things are distractions. It’s just about the stupid check stubs:

This case is not really about election interference, nor is it a politically motivated attempt to criminalize a benign personal deal. Boring as it may sound, it is a case about business integrity. Mr. Trump is accused of creating 11 false invoices, 12 false ledger entries and 11 false checks and check stubs, with the intent to violate federal election laws, state election laws or state tax laws.

Rebecca was even generous enough to admit that this clinically-insane prosecution doesn’t depend on the truth or falsehood of any of the bad things Trump’s been accused of, which as Rebecca sees it, poses another problem:

For the prosecution, the elements of the crime in this case do not require a finding that Mr. Trump interfered with the 2016 election. Nor does it matter whether he had sex with Ms. Daniels. By over-emphasizing the crime he was intending to conceal rather than the false business records, the prosecution also risks confusing the jury into thinking about whether the lies affected the election or to wonder why Mr. Trump wasn’t charged with this alleged election crime.

After carefully considering these pro’s and con’s and weighing the risks, Rebecca posed the question that we are all asking ourselves: “Is it really worth charging a former president for this?”

By way of an answer, all Rebecca could come up with was a single paragraph leaning into the tired old “no man is above the law” trope that we’ve repeatedly demolished. Ask Hunter Biden about no man being above the law. What’s a little sex trafficking between friends, anyway?

Rebecca laughably suggested that since any regular small businessman would be charged and tried for writing “legal expenses” on his check stubs too, then it’s super fair to also charge a President. After all, the liberal law professor mused, it proves the system is fair.

I hate to give Rebecca more bad news, but small businesspeople mischaracterize expenses all the time. It’s practically a national pastime. And in my experience as a commercial litigator, businesspeople usually do mischaracterize expenses to avoid paying some kind of tax, like sales tax, payroll tax, or income tax. And avoiding paying tax is clearly an “other crime” that would support a felony conviction for check stub fraud if Alvin Bragg were equally applying the law.

And if I am recalling correctly — and I think I am — Hillary’s campaign also mischaracterized the Steele “Russia Russia Russia” dossier as legal expenses. Yet this obvious example of prosecutorial double standards somehow escaped Rebecca’s keen legal instincts.

If charging the President with crimes proves the system is fair, without even really trying that hard I can think of a lot of things with which to charge Joe Biden. Let’s go.

🚀🚀 Literally one day after Biden signed the new $61 billion Ukraine aid package into law, corporate media began hauling back the narrative. Last Thursday, the AP sprang into action, slashing expectations down from “winning” the war to just “avoiding defeat”:

Now they tell us. According to the AP, the $61 billion was always intended to buy Ukraine some time, not to win or anything. The AP informed its readers that sometimes, just buying time is the best strategy:

“Ultimately it offers Ukraine the prospect of staying in the war this year,” said Michael Clarke, visiting professor in war studies at King’s College London. “Sometimes in warfare you’ve just got to stay in it. You’ve just got to avoid being rolled over.”

Now, try to follow me here. First they told us Ukraine desperately needed the money to win. Now they say it was just to stay in the fight, to avoid being rolled over, like Professor Clarke said. But guess what? It turns out its going to be months and months before Ukraine even gets anything useful:

Vadym Ivchenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament’s National Security, Defense and Intelligence Committee, said logistical challenges and bureaucracy could delay shipments to Ukraine by two to three months, and it would be even longer before they reach the front line. What’s coming first is not always what front-line commanders need most, said Davyd Arakhamia, another Ukrainian lawmaker. He said that even a military giant like the U.S. does not have stockpiles of everything.

Sorry, it’s backordered. But the AP explained don’t worry, everything is okay, it will be fine, since Russia is simply too exhausted to try anything this year:

Many experts believe that Russia is exhausted by two years of war and won’t be able to mount a major offensive — one capable of making big strategic gains — until next year.

The point is, they wouldn’t want anybody complaining about that $61 billion that was supposed to save Ukraine.

But what a difference a week makes! One week after passing Ukraine aid, and after lowering expectations to just holding the exhausted Russians in place to buy Ukraine some time, this happened yesterday. From Politico:

Sixty-one billion dollars later, they’re retreating! Politico said it, not me. They are calling it a “tactical retreat,” which I guess is somehow better than the regular kind of retreat. And the Russians seem pretty peppy for an exhausted army. Politico reported yesterday that Ukraine’s top General Syrskyi said Russian forces were continuing to attack “along the entire front line” of over 620 miles.

Whew. I guess the Russians are taking their vitamins.

Let’s recap: Two weeks ago, Ukraine needed the $61B right now or all would be lost, any second now. One week ago, well, it’s going to take a few months, since the parts are on backorder. This week, it’s strategic retreating.

What’s next?

🚀🚀 Unexpectedly! At the same time last week Congress approved the $61 Billion aid package to Ukraine, it also weaseled through $8 billion for Taiwan plus a bill letting Biden seize any foreign technology he deems a national security risk. China was not amused.

Yesterday, Fox ran a story I predicted was coming, headlined “China threatens retaliation for Taiwan, TikTok law signed by Biden.”

After complaining about the military aid package to Taiwan — an obvious jab at China — the Chinese Foreign Ministry voiced its grave concern over the U.S.’s historic plan to let Joe Biden (of all people) pick Chinese companies that will be forced to fire-sell their technology assets to presumably American owners, at pennies on the yen.

Here’s how China’s foreign ministry described it:

"The legislation undermines the principles of market economy and fair competition by wantonly going after other countries’ companies in the name of ‘national security,’ which once again reveals the U.S.’s hegemonic and bullying nature."

And this Bloomberg headline, also from yesterday, is probably totally unrelated, right?

Team Biden knows what they’re doing, right?

🔥🔥 Some pretty great news is developing on the WHO “Pandemic Preparedness” Treaty. This week, Intellectual Dark Web pundit Brett Weinstein interviewed Dr. Kat Lindley, President of the Global Health Project, who delivered some welcome good news about the so-called WHO pandemic treaty.

RUMBLE: Dark Horse Podcast talks WHO Pandemic Treaty good news (30:06).

In case you somehow missed it, in which event lucky you, the barely sentient maniacs at the United Nations and the World Health Organization had proposed revisions to an existing ‘pandemic treaty’ to vastly expand the WHO’s influence. One of the most alarming parts of the proposed draft was language essentially putting the WHO in charge of all member countries, including America. All the WHO would have to do is declare a pandemic and then look out, Lucy.

Worse, to approve this grotesque mockery of democratic ideals, all that would have had to happen would be for the leader of each country, in our terrifying case Joe Biden, to sign the damnable thing, and that presumably would have been that.

It’s still not perfect, but thanks to the hard work of many freedom activists over the last few months to shine a light on this horrible, so-called ’treaty’, the worst parts of the draft — including the ‘binding effect’ on member states — have now been jettisoned. The current draft still does some bedeviling stuff like letting the WHO declare global pandemics and pushing for 100-day turbo vaccine development. But the greatest risks have been sliced out.

Believe it or not, it was mostly small countries that pushed back on the draft’s worst excesses. Robert Kennedy recently tweeted celebrating (and warning) about the state of the treaty:

As you can see, as Kennedy’s tweet suggested, the activists, now madder than jabbed hornets, aren’t letting up on the pressure. Maybe they will ultimately drive the WHO right into the sea and get rid of it once and for all. We can hope.

Anyway, you can move worrying about the WHO treaty down to the bottom of this week’s list. It’s progress.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Get back here tomorrow for another oversized, not shrunken, C&C roundup of all the news you need to know.

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