☕️ INCURSIONS ☙ Friday, January 31, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump team's response to first tragedy humiliates Dems; more Trump EOs hit, hard; another lawfare test for Dems over spending freezes; foreign aid freeze exposes deep state; Dems bottom out; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! It’s also the end of January, the first month of the new year, if you can believe that. Today’s roundup includes: Trump’s team faces its first tragedy and performs literally one million times better than Biden’s Administration would have; three lesser-known executive orders begin to hit hard; public schools face patriotic overhaul; trans hospitals grapple with federal de-funding threats; colleges wrestle with barrage of culture war changes; embattled Democrats face another test of will as to lawfare against spending freezes; spending freeze on foreign aid produces unexpected benefits; and the Democrats continue sliding in the polls to historic lows.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, only ten days in, the brand new Trump Administration grappled with its first tragedy: an unspeakable midair collision. Around 9pm on Wednesday night, a fully loaded passenger jet smashed into a semi-covert military helicopter on a training mission, killing everyone involved. It was right over one of the country’s busiest airports — the nation’s Capitol. The hot takes were and are off the charts, but the deplorable tally of incompetence and failure continues climbing. The New York Times ran several stories about the deadly crash yesterday, one headlined, “Clues From D.C. Plane Crash Suggest Multiple Failures in Aviation Safety.”

The story’s sub-headline soberly informed Times readers that “clues emerging from the moments before an Army helicopter collided with a passenger jet suggest breakdowns in the system at the busy Reagan National Airport.” Breakdowns is one way of putting it.

Another big story emerged alongside news of the horrific tragedy. A story of comparative government. Under Biden’s Administration, we still wouldn’t know anything. Honestly, many of the details we already have in the first 24 hours under Trump, would under Biden have remained a mystery forever. These critical details would have all been cloaked under a heavy “ongoing investigation” blanket and whitewashed in a fog of excuses and obfuscation.

In dramatic contrast to the last four years, Trump Administration officials have been forthcoming with information, forwarding it to the public almost as soon as they get it themselves. President Trump gave multiple statements yesterday and answered countless mind-numbing and moronic media questions. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth personally issued an update from his desk through social media, avoiding media cutouts entirely. Almost unbelievably, the FAA has already issued a same-day preliminary internal report — you mean they could have done this after New Palestine’s train crash or the bridge accident?

And as you almost certainly saw for yourself, unmuzzled local officials talked a blue streak.

✈️ Our hearts ache with shared grief for the families of those on board the American Airlines flight and for the families of the Black Hawk’s crew. We pray that they quickly receive peace beyond understanding as well as spiritual and physical comfort, as they reckon with unanswerable questions and unimaginable anguish. This should have never happened.

✈️ Information promptly provided by Trump officials (information that we’d have never gotten from Biden’s FAA) shows, so far, multiple points of potential failure.

For an as-yet unknown reason, the helicopter flew outside its approved flight path along the Potomac, twice as high as it should have, and hundreds of yards from its assigned path, far too close to the runways. The American Airlines pilots, adjusting to a last-minute re-route onto a super-short runway, were laser-focused on landing as they made the final, fatal turn toward the runway, and probably never even saw the blacked-out helicopter closing into their flight path.

The tower was the locus of lamentable tragedy. A harried air traffic controller, juggling two jobs at the same time, noticed the looming disaster — but inexplicably failed to direct the helicopter and the plane to separate, offering instead something sounding more like an unhurried suggestion. The controller was handling both helicopters and planes —normally separate jobs— because their supervisor unaccountably let another controller go home early.

The F.A.A.’s preliminary report found tower staffing was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic.” Presumably, the FAA meant the tower was understaffed, since who would complain about overstaffing?

In the background of these instantaneous errors lies a fractured FAA having a slow-motion existential crisis. A class-action lawsuit continues grinding away in discovery, exposing the agency’s tragic 2014 decision to scrap merit-based testing when hiring air traffic controllers. Instead the FAA relied on a “biographical statement” that scored, you guessed it, totally irrelevant factors like skin color and ethnic background.

Reams of headlines over the last couple years have reported growing numbers of close calls at airports and an expanding crisis over staffing levels — a manpower crisis that festered even while the agency essentially refused to hire better-qualified white applicants, holding those jobs open for less-qualified minority applicants.

As bad as that sounds, it gets worse. The FAA’s critical staffing issues started —I am not making this up— with its mass layoffs in 2021 of controllers who refused to take the jabs. The agency has never recovered from that horrible mistake. It remains currently 3,000 controllers under normal staffing levels.

Thus, it is unsurprising that in its last survey in 2023, Pete Buttigieg’s DOT reported that 77% of critical air traffic control facilities were understaffed. The truth is probably closer to all of them.

In the same year, the New York Times reported that near-misses on airport runways (“incursions”) had climbed to an all-time high, and that overworked, burnt-out air traffic controllers were falling asleep on the job and getting drunk at work. To put a number on it, the FAA self-reported 1,750 runway incursions for each of the past three years. By comparison, in 2014, the year the FAA changed its testing standards, the agency reported only 1,278 incursions.

Finally, I am aware of widespread rumors on X that one of the three military pilots was a transgender ‘woman’ (biological male), and was possibly suicidal. Since I cannot confirm that rumor, I won’t further develop it, not until the DOD releases the crew’s names. If the rumor is true, then Trump knows it and the media doesn’t. Their ridiculous fact-checking might blow up in their faces.

✈️ Yesterday evening, President Trump signed a brand-new executive order titled, “Immediate Assessment of Aviation Safety.” The brief order identified some of the same problems I mentioned earlier and ordered the terrific new Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and the incoming FAA Administrator to review all Biden-era decisions and orders — and to promptly fire anyone below minimum, merit-based standards.

Here’s the key paragraph in Trump’s EO reciting some of the FAA’s many failures:

For whatever reason, corporate media barely reported Trump’s executive order. They seemed to prefer trying to fact-check the President and quibbling with all the passion of an argumentative middle-schooler about the role of DEI and the Obama/Biden policies.

Nobody cares about their silly fact-checks anymore.

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Speaking of Trump’s executive orders, you already know about the big ones, like spending and hiring freezes, and deleting DEI. But there are some others that you may not have heard about, and which are already starting to take terrific effect. Here are three examples of these less-recognized but still significant orders.

🔥 Back when Biden blackmailed public schools into teaching revolting transgender sexual ethics, by threatening to take away their federal funding, the deliriously happy New York Times thought it was so marvelous! so wonderful! and so brilliant! But now that Trump is using the exact same tool to restore patriotism to public schools, the New York Times is appalled! shocked! horrified! and has magically re-discovered federalism, which had dropped behind the stained employee lounge microwave oven. Yesterday’s headline:

Trump issued two public school EOs. The first order is a 2,400-word beast that cracks down on race, gender, and anti-patriotic educational practices, and is aimed at “ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling.” The second, and possibly more influential order in the long term directed a vast swath of federal agencies to find ways to expand access to private school vouchers.

For just one example, the order said, “Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Education shall issue guidance regarding how States can use Federal formula funds to support K-12 educational choice initiatives.”

🔥 Second, the risk-averse medical community has started pruning back on its apalling enthusiasm for barbaric, transvestite plastic surgeries and genital mutilations, thanks to another Trump executive order. The AP ran the story yesterday:

Trump’s EO ordered federal agencies to ensure that hospitals receiving federal research and education grants “end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.” It’s already working. For example, “Denver Health in Colorado has stopped providing gender-affirming surgeries for people under age 19,” the AP reported, “to comply with the executive order and continue receiving federal funding.”

Womp womp. No courage of conviction when money is on the line. Cowards and sell outs.

The hilariously blunt (and accurate) language in Trump’s executive order included triggering words like “maiming,” “sterilizing” and “mutilation.” Haha, it also labeled commonly cited gender guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) as “junk science.” Take that, snowflakes.

🔥 Finally, It isn’t just K-12. If anything, Trump signed more EOs related to or affecting colleges and universities than public schools. Three days ago, the American Council on Education called the collective effect of the EOs a “shift in the higher education landscape:”

Trump’s various EOs challenge colleges and universities in a wide range of areas like: immigration, DEI, Title IX (protecting women’s sports), gender bending, climate nonsense, and more. In fact, they are still trying to figure out exactly how far it all goes, and wondering when somebody else is going to file a lawsuit.

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Yesterday, I posted about how it is now dawning on progressives that Trump’s mass firings might be bait, intended to trick them into filing lawsuits that could lead to even more Executive Branch authority over its own employees. A day later, they are wondering whether the same thing may also be true about Trump’s spending freezes. The Washington Post ran the story yesterday headlined, “White House eyes fight to expand Trump’s power to control spending. “

“President Trump,” WaPo explained, “is laying the groundwork for a landmark confrontation over his authority to strike federal spending and regulation, and reconfigure vast swaths of the U.S. government even without approval from Congress.” More history in the making. Meanwhile, his enemies appear helpless. “Infuriated Democrats,” the article admitted, unsuccessfully “tried yesterday to block Trump’s selection to lead the White House budget office — Russell Vought — from proceeding to a full Senate confirmation vote.”

It might have been a better idea not to sue, but now it’s too late. Cutting off their money was too provocative to resist, and several lawsuits are already underway, with at least one lower-court judge having ordered a temporary stay of the domestic funding freeze. It’s on.

🔥 The judge stayed the domestic spending freeze, but the State Department’s freeze on foreign aid remains in play. And magical, if not miraculous fruit is already growing on the tree of Secretary Rubio’s foreign funds freeze. The freeze is rooting out hidden truths. The howls of protest from funding recipients are giving away the never-before-known positions where the dark money had been flowing, and the emerging battlescape is even uglier than you would have thought.

Here’s one example. Bubbling up in protests from some smaller, less sophisticated Ukrainian media outlets was the astonishing fact that ninety percent of Ukrainian media is now U.S. funded. Or at least, it was till Trump stopped it. Wednesday’s headline (before it disappears) from Ukraine’s Institute for Mass Information:

Hilariously, ironically, and completely unselfconsciously, Director Romaniuk complained that freezing U.S. funding of basically all Ukrainian media would undermine “democracy and democratic institutions in Ukraine.” It got even funnier. Romaniuk scolded readers, warning them that “someone may want to take advantage of the situation to seize the media space, start controlling it, and thus turn the media into a tool for some kind of influence.”

You mean, like the US just did?

Hahaha! Stop! The irony! It hurts to laugh this hard! First, on an informational aside, most Ukrainian NGOs, including its legacy media, have begun desperately seeking donations to stay afloat in the fallout from Secretary Rubio’s foreign funding freeze. Democrats now have the chance to step up, in this time of trial, and put their own money where their I stand with Ukraine mouths are.

But do you stand with Ukraine, though? Show us.

Consider the brilliance of Trump’s global foreign funding freeze. How else could we, the hapless, information-starved American people, have learned what Biden’s State Department was buying with billions of our tax dollars? Trump made the recipients reveal themselves. The truth was buried below layer upon layer of neocon lies and official obfuscation. But Trump’s fearless freeze on opaque federal funding ripped off the masks, and now we’re frantically glancing around the room in horror, wondering what the Dickens have we gotten ourselves into here? And how are we going to get out of this?

The smarter, more politically savvy recipients of USAID are, no doubt, keeping quiet in public, which is why the outcry has been so muted. That, and because our corporate media understands the game. But there are just too many recipients. The whole thing is too big, especially in Ukraine. Many of the smaller grifters simply don’t understand our politics and the bad optics, and so they are telling us where the money was going, despite Biden’s neocon’s relentless efforts to keep us in the dark.

In other words, as the swamp drains, it’s gradually revealing all the bodies hidden beneath the water. Meanwhile, the Democrats still lack a coherent strategy or even a clear leader. Since the deep state must hide itself in order to exist, and since it works through the Democrat party, the party’s disarray disadvantages the deep state.

And the trends keep going the wrong way for the Swamp.

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Two days ago, the Washington Post ran the provocative headline, “Democrats’ brutal poll problem.” The anguished sub-headline added, “Two recent polls show the party is more unpopular than it has been in nearly two decades.”

“In fact,” the WaPo added, “Democrats’ 57% unfavorable rating is their highest ever in Quinnipiac’s polling, dating back to 2008.” On the other hand, “the GOP’s 43% favorable rating is its highest ever.”

Similarly, a CNN poll from last week reported a record-low 33% of Americans held a favorable view of the donkey party. That 33% must be the party’s terminal baseline, the group whose livelihoods depend on progressive policy. The far-left WaPo confirmed that the Dems are enervated and leaderless:

While it was good news for Republicans, in the sense the Democrats must wander out of the political wilderness in time for the mid-term elections, it was even better news for Trump. First of all, it confirmed his mandate, in case there was any question about that. Second, the polls reflected the public’s positive response to Trump’s first week in office, contradicting most of the media narrative.

But third, and most important, it’s like I said. The Democrat party’s disability leaves the real deep state equally disabled, since the deep state cannot act directly, not without being exposed. Thus, a weak Democrat party means a weak deep state, which is terrific news for President Trump and even more so for the rest of us.

What a week! Let’s have another one. I’m not tired of winning yet.

Have a fabulous Friday! My goodness, it’s impossible to keep up with the news this week. Tomorrow I hope to brief you on my comments about the three remarkable Senate hearings for Kennedy, Gabbard, and Patel, and catch up a LOT more news. Make plans now to get back here tomorrow morning, for what will surely be a packed Weekend Edition.

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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