☕️ IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BURRITO ☙ Saturday, August 8, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Blanche confirmed 50-49 at 1am as the Senate's Turtle Caucus dies off; a top House Judiciary Democrat defects to the GOP in Michigan; and Burrito-Gate exposes what's really wrong with zoomers.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! It's August in Florida, where the air outside has taken on the approximate texture of a warm dishrag, so we are staying in. Your Weekend Edition roundup includes: the Senate confirming a new Attorney General at one in the morning on a Friday, which is where you schedule a vote you'd rather nobody watched; four Republican turtles heading for the exits at once, and what that quietly does to President Trump's 2027; a former chief counsel for the House Judiciary Democrats announcing he is campaigning for the Republican in Michigan, and warning his old party what happens to people who saddle up a starving tiger; Hillary Clinton conceding on a podcast that the 'communist' attack is going to work, and then calling for unity; Bernie Sanders inviting James Carville to go start his own party; and the Republican Party spending three solid days in open civil war over a twenty-dollar burrito. Which, as we'll see, was never about the burrito.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Due to a late-Friday-night off-news-cycle Senate vote, it’s now official: President Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, who took over as Acting Attorney General when Pam Bondi stepped away, has been formally confirmed as the official United States Attorney General. The Associated Press reported, “Todd Blanche narrowly confirmed as Trump’s attorney general in overnight vote.”

The Senate confirmation vote, taken after midnight on a Friday, ended up squeaking across the finish line 50-49, with two Republicans joining all Democrats to vote against Mr. Blanche: Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME). (Collins is running for re-election in a DSA-infected blue state in November, so.)

Democrats and corporate media framed the story about Trump and Blanche’s close relationship, hinting darkly at some seditious violation of ‘independence,’ as though presidents usually nominate strangers to the AG’s job. Nothing could be further from the truth. Progressive darling John F. Kennedy, for instance, installed his own brother, Robert Kennedy, as his attorney general, even though Robert had little experience lawyering and was only 35 at the time, becoming the youngest AG since 1814.

Other 20th Century presidents, from FDR to Reagan (and beyond), have picked for AG their campaign managers, national party chairs, personal friends, fixers, and practically anyone but so-called ‘independent’ actors.

But never mind that! Whatever Trump does is always totally unprecedented in some tortured way, and always amounts to the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of the Milky Way Galaxy. Compliant corporate media always credulously laps up these Democrat narratives like good little doggies.

This time, the media frame is: even Republicans didn’t want Blanche. But they voted him in anyway.

Squishy Republican senators —mainly, the sour-grapes brigade of Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, and John Cornyn— made a big show of pressing Blanche to the limit, but they finally fell into line. “The path to confirmation for Blanche was unusually rocky,” AP said dramatically, “due in large part to Republican concerns about a controversial settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS.” In short, a handful of Republican Senators pressed Blanche to promise not to fund the $1.8 billion weaponization compensation budget, which would have potentially paid people persecuted by Biden’s AG, Merrick Garland, over January 6th.

Pam Bondi built the foundation, and Todd Blanche is now executing the long-planned strategy. Pam conducted mass firings, she de-weaponized and restructured DOJ, surged immigration prosecutions, cracked down on cartels and violent crime, opened adversary probes (e.g., Letitia James, James Comey, John Brennan, Adam Schiff, etc.), and, of course, managed the Epstein files nightmare.

Todd’s short tenure is accelerating. He’s already continued the removals of ‘resisting’ DOJ staff, built out the anti-fraud infrastructure, and fueled the RussiaGate probes, such as by issuing fresh subpoenas to Crossfire Hurricane/Mueller-era actors.

🔥 The Senate also batch-confirmed 74 less-prominent positions, including spots like Space Force Chief, with dozens more at DOD, Energy, State, and other agencies. Despite all the public friction, the Senate is on track to deliver a historically fast confirmation record for President Trump’s nominees. It’s a total turnaround. The Trump 1.0 Senate set the exact opposite record.

But that era of old-guard, Never Trump GOP resistance is suddenly and unexpectedly coming to a sudden and unexpected close. The Senatorial Turtle Caucus is becoming an endangered species. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), having vanished into his hospital’s quiet room, is retiring this year. Thom Tillis (R-NC) announced his retirement last year, after he voted against the Big Beautiful Bill and faced primary challengers. John Cornyn (R-TX) was primaried by Trump-endorsed Ken Paxton, and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) lost his primary to a Trump-backed rival.

Here’s something else to consider: Thanks to the Great Turtle die-off of 2026, if Republicans can hold the House and Senate —by just clinging onto the narrow margins they already have— President Trump will, for the first time since the start of Trump 1.0, have a fully engaged, compliant Congress that can quickly pass his legislative agenda.

As a teaser, for one example, in January, 2027, the President could finally have the Senate votes needed for filibuster reform. With that, the sky would be the limit. Far beyond things like the SAVE Act, we can dream about ambitious projects like replacing the Internal Revenue Service with the External Revenue Service.

In short, the Golden Age. We just need to hold the line at the midterms.

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We’ve been tracking the Democrats’ escalating polycrisis — the fracturing of their coalition, the sudden realization that maybe, just maybe, nominating people who detest America isn’t a winning electoral strategy. Yesterday, we met Frankenstein’s Socialist, who seems to have a very active social life. On the same day, the New York Post published a remarkable op-ed by Julian Epstein, former chief counsel for the House Judiciary Democrats, headlined, “I’m a longtime Democrat — fighting for GOP’s Mike Rogers, and my party’s soul, in Michigan.”

Consider how topsy-turvy the world has become when a former top House Judiciary Democrat is openly campaigning for the Republican Senate nominee.

At first, we might be tempted to wave this off as just the Democrat version of the Lincoln Project, a Liz Cheney-style defection, or just another “Never Trumper” crossing over, where some formerly conservative pundit gets a CNN contract for announcing that morality requires them to vote for Democrats.

But this is not like that. It’s not the marginal flip-flopping we are accustomed to occasionally seeing during every election cycle. Not even close. For one thing, the Never-Trumpers were never any actual electoral threat. They were merely a media drama in miniature— a small collection of disgruntled RINO consultants and pundits who got massive media coverage precisely because corporate media needed them, and who proceeded to lose every single race they touched.

The anti-Trump Republican Lincoln Project, for instance, raised $90 million and, according to the most accurate available figures, moved approximately zero votes. Their entire operation was an expensive stage performance for cable news green rooms. They didn’t represent any kind of genuine political movement. They were always just symbols. The cameras loved them, but the ballot box did not.

What Julian Epstein’s piece described is something structurally different. He isn’t a pundit looking for a CNN contract. He’s the former chief counsel of the House Judiciary Democrats— the party’s own inner legal infrastructure. And more importantly, he isn’t alone. He’s describing a movement of working-class voters, black and brown voters, and longtime party operatives who are quietly heading for the exits— not to get on television, but because they are genuinely done.

Mr. Epstein warned that “some in Michigan are hinting at mass party defections in November,” and that Abdul El-Sayed’s nomination for Senate at the top of the Democrat ticket means “the bleeding won’t stop.”

This matters electorally, especially in swing states like Michigan. Biden (allegedly) won that state in 2020 by about 154,000 votes. Then Trump won it in 2016 by about 10,700. These are not margins that can absorb even a modest, unglamorous, camera-shy defection of working-class Democrats who simply stay home or even actually pull the lever for Republican Mike Rogers in protest.

The Never-Trumpers were nothing more than a rounding error in already decided states. But a potential mass Democrat defection in Michigan is a categorically different thing.

🔥 Mr. Epstein started his piece by quoting JFK’s memorable inaugural address: “In the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.” He then helpfully compared that vivid imagery to Michigan Democrats, who by nominating DSA-backed El-Sayed for Senate, are currently strapping their saddle onto an overgrown, starving tiger.

As for Mr. Epstein? He’s not getting on. “After decades of giving my all for Democratic House and Senate candidates,” he wrote, “this fall I will support — and contribute to — Mike Rogers, Michigan’s GOP Senate nominee, instead.” Boom.

Epstein is fed up and fired up. He continued by tearing his own party a new one. He called out “weak, timid figures like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer” who spout “empty clichés” about a “big-tent party” while “abdicating their moral and political responsibilities.” He’s not wrong. Schumer, for his part, issued what can only be described as the most tepid endorsement in Senate history— of a guy who has publicly called for Schumer to be replaced.

That is remarkable. One wonders how threatened Chuck Schumer, the Senator from New York, must be by the DSA’s army of socialist volunteers, who literally just elected Zohran Mamdani and crew.

🔥 The force of Mr. Epstein’s piece lay in his description of what Democrats are actually embracing right now. They aren’t just coddling sweet Scandinavian-style socialists, he says. They are “getting into bed with a nihilistic, deconstructionist brand of third-worldism”— an ideology that seeks “the elimination of prisons, policing, borders, the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court and democratic free markets.”

Just as we did yesterday in Coffee & Covid, Democrat insider Epstein noted that El-Sayed’s main campaign surrogate, Hasan Piker, blames the US for 9/11, and “professes his love for China’s madman dictator Mao Zedong, who slaughtered millions of his own people.” (A rare concession from the left.)

This is the political equivalent of Wile E. Coyote strapping himself to an ACME rocket, lighting the fuse, and then looking surprised when he ends up a small, charred smudge at the canyon’s rocky bottom. The Democrats spent years cultivating the DSA fringe as radical shock troops aimed at Trump. And now that fringe —Frankenstein’s Socialists— are turning the establishment into breakfast.

🔥 Look at it this way. Abdul El-Sayed won the primary nomination with the support of only 12.5% of Michigan’s registered voters, drawn almost entirely from what Mr. Epstein called “the radical professional class of white college graduates” (ironically, not ‘the workers’)— while “underperforming in black, brown and working-class districts.”

The DSA wing is a loud minority, not a majority. But it controls the nomination machinery now. And that has become the Democrats’ pounding headache.

Epstein’s closing warning should give Democrat strategists nightmares: “Democrats in many districts will be forced on the campaign trail to distance themselves from El-Sayed or denounce him — and every one of their comments will write another permission slip for party defections come fall.”

🔥 To show you how different this is from “Lincoln Republican” defections, yesterday, Hillary Clinton appeared on Kara Swisher’s Pivot Podcast. To her credit, the former Secretary of State has a fairly reliable instinct for detecting political disasters, weighed in on El-Sayed’s nomination. The NY Post ran the story.

“The real fight will be, how do we make sure that people who voted for Haley feel comfortable voting for Abdul El-Sayed,” Hillary said, “and how do we get Independents to feel comfortable?”

Then came a stunning, un-Hillary-like admission: “It’s not just about Michigan, but the Republican messaging is ‘communist, socialist.’ It’s going to be a very effective attack.”

When Swisher —seemingly incredulous that anyone in 2026 could be scared off by the word “communist”— pushed back, Hillary doubled down: “All I know is that is the attack Trump is leading with, and I assume they’ve tested that, and I assume they have reason to believe it’s effective or they wouldn’t be beating the drum on it.”

After admitting that the ‘communist’ attack will probably work, Hillary called for “unity.” This was the political equivalent of a ship’s captain announcing that the iceberg has punctured the hull, half the lifeboats are missing, and he hopes that everyone will work together to have a positive attitude. In other words, it’s incoherent.

Right when Democrats need them the most, its party leaders are not leading. Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and former president Barack H. Obama have all been conspicuously silent. A CNN Facebook post from two days ago said: “Barack Obama has not endorsed anyone in Michigan’s Democratic Senate race.” But Obama’s brain, former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, called the DSA platform “a losing political message.”

In terms of public defections, Julian Epstein followed Bill Maher, who recently said, thanks to DSA-style politics, his “vote is in play... I’m not living in communist America.” Yesterday, longtime Democrat party activist James Carville (who got Bill Clinton elected) told Fox News Digital, “Well, if the Democrats went crazy and the Republicans went sane, then I probably would be a Republican.”

If Carville’s quote sounds mild, just look how Bernie Sanders responded to the weak threat: “If Mr. Carville doesn’t want to be in my party, the party that I belong to, that Hasan Piker, that El-Sayed belongs to, he can start his own party.” For his part, Twitch-streaming influencer Hasan Piker piled on, saying Carville and Fetterman threatening to leave was “sweetening the deal.” Go ahead, make my day.

This is what a late-stage polycrisis looks like. We are watching a blue-on-blue civil war breaking out in Michigan, in New York, and in Wisconsin, all in the critical midterm season, all following the same pattern: the DSA wing primaries a safe-seat Democrat, the sane wing panics, Chuck Schumer calls it “a big tent,” and working-class voters quietly update their party registrations.

This is not a one-state story. This is a national fracture playing out in fast motion, one primary at a time.

It will soon be feeding time in the tiger cage. Relax, this is only going to hurt for a very long time.

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Our C&C scrolling-addicted members probably noticed that the Republican Party spent the last three days engaged in our own bitter, bloody civil war— over a burrito. The Washington Post, which never misses the chance to capitalize on intra-conservative conflict, perfectly captured the absurdity in its piece yesterday headlined, “A viral $20 burrito is dividing conservatives online.” The Post ‘helpfully’ wondered: “Is this the new avocado toast?”

“Sometimes a burrito is just a burrito,” the WaPo story began. That is undoubtedly true. And sometimes it is a delivery system for e. coli and a ticket to spending a week on the toilet.

The controversy, now raging worse than explosive diarrhea, began when Andrew Kolvet, a TPUSA spokesman, innocently posted a quote from a college student who’d told him, simply: “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.” This is also true. Kolvet added that, while $20 burritos can be blamed squarely on covid and Biden-era inflation, “the lived experience is the same: It just feels like basic things cost too much.”

This otherwise innocuous observation triggered an immediate and ferocious backlash from the old-guard, fiscal-conservative wing of the Republican Party. Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) took to X to sneer at the complaining zoomers. “Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates,” he wrote. “The market doesn’t care what you think something ‘should’ cost.”

Ouch.

For the record, this is the exact same Dan Crenshaw who, in 2021, mocked the Biden administration for telling Americans to eat less meat to fight inflation, posting: “Biden admin: just be vegan and stop complaining you bunch of rubes.” So. But I digress.

🔥 The poisonous “Republican civil war” narrative was unsurprisingly trumpeted by WaPo, but the blowback was not limited to far-left schadenfreude. Behold: headline from Fox News, two days ago:

Pundit Marc Thiessen piled on the burrito babies, telling students to “cry me a river,” eat in the cafeteria, and stop summoning one large order of fries on DoorDash. This prompted Vice President JD Vance to deliver what might be the funniest line of the entire three-day saga, a single mean-tweet that generated a whole New York Times hit piece. Replying directly to Thiessen, Vance unleashed a fat joke: “I’m surprised to hear Mark say this. If you’ve ever met him in person, it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.”

But underneath the ‘mean-spirited’ humor, we face a very serious political reality. The old guard thinks this is just a bunch of lazy kids complaining that they can’t afford daily food delivery. But the populist wing of the party —including the Vice-President— understands that Burrito-Gate isn’t about the burrito.

It’s about the fact that an entire generation of young Americans is drowning, and they are beginning to stop caring about who threw them the anvil.

🔥 Let’s connect a few dots. Zoomers were battered by covid lockdowns during the prime of their social and educational years. Then they were hit with Bidenflation, which was not a talking point, but a brutal, compounding reality. (If you don’t believe me, ask anyone who has pushed a $500 grocery cart through the checkout line recently. Like my wife.)

$500 dollars of groceries plus incipient heart attack

Then, perhaps worst of all, there is the student loan scam. As conservative commenter James Lindsay and others have been pointing out on X, an entire generation was sold a lie: just accept massive debt to go to college, and you’ll be all good, set for life.

But now, far too many of them have useless degrees in woke nonsense, a phenomenon that some academics have ironically labeled ‘elite overproduction.’ They expected a window office, but instead they are serving Frappuccinos on the weekend shift instead of taking 2-week paid vacations. And unlike almost any other form of debt in America, their unaffordable student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. It is an inescapable trap.

And finally: housing. Zoomers feel —not without cause— they are priced out of the American dream. My first home —a 2,800 square foot, 4 bed, 4 bath pool home on a half acre— cost $168,000. Even after the Democrats’ real estate crash, I sold it in 2011 for $230,000 and thought I did well. I can’t imagine that well-used home selling for much less than $500K now.

So when a 22-year-old complains about a $20 burrito, they aren’t actually complaining about the outrageous $2 guacamole upcharge. They are expressing the terrifying realization that the math of their lives isn’t mathing. The ‘burrito’ is the proverbial bean-stuffed canary in the Mexican coal mine.

I’ll give them this— the Democrats have done a masterful job of obscuring the real solutions (like they always do). They focused the zoomers on their feelings, blamed capitalism, and promised them unrealistic government lifelines like free rent and student loan forgiveness.

But the zoomers are also noticing that the same government telling them they have to pay back their crushing loans is simultaneously handing out prepaid debit cards and free hotel rooms to illegal aliens. They are understandably pissed off.

🔥 This should be a massive political win for the Republican Party. The Democrats wrecked the economy. They built the student loan trap. They lavished taxpayer money on illegal aliens who have no expensive college degree debt. But we cannot win over angry, broke young voters by sneering at them, telling them tales about how hard we had it back in the old days, or encouraging them to invest in cheap, ultraprocessed, Chinese noodles.

That’s not even a narrative. That’s just not listening. We desperately need a sympathetic counter-narrative. And we need it fast.

The most frustrating thing about this unnecessary fast-food argument is that the Trump-Vance ticket already has the counter-narrative. They just need to tell it better. They need to say, plainly: you’re right, the Democrats screwed us all. We’re working on it.

Every single day, President Trump is actively pushing policies that directly address the zoomer crisis. He is promoting H1-B visa reforms to protect American tech jobs. He is pushing nuclear and data center initiatives to create high-paying domestic careers. He is pushing mass deportations as fast as humanly possible, which is starting to relieve the artificial pressure on the entry-level job market, rent prices, and the starter-home housing supply.

But it takes a long time to turn a Celebrity Cruise ship around. First you have to quell the riot at the buffet line.

If you look around, signs of early success are everywhere. Take the housing market, for example: Real estate analyst Nick Gerli tweeted this week about how America’s biggest homebuilders are slashing prices to move stale inventory. Lennar has reduced its average selling price from $511k to $377k (a whopping 26% drop), and DR Horton has cut prices from $415k to $366k. The market is finally adjusting to make homes more affordable for first-time buyers again.

Or look at the skilled trades. For years, Dirty Jobs star Mike Rowe, the patron saint of hard work, was mocked and vilified for questioning the value of a modern college degree. He’s now been completely vindicated. Mike appeared on a podcast last month reporting his recent visit to an AI data center in Plano, Texas. He met three young electricians there. All under 30. All debt-free. All making between $240,000 and $280,000 a year.

“There’s a ten trillion-dollar infrastructure coming,” Mike explained. “And we do not have the skilled workers to make it happen.”

That is the counter-narrative. The answer to the $20 burrito isn’t “stop whining.” The answer isn’t pointing out that when burritos cost $5.89, the minimum wage was only $3.35. It’s not bragging about how I put myself through college and law school without any loans. Those things are all true, but they aren’t helpful. It might be scientifically accurate to tell your wife she does look fat in that dress, but that kind of honesty will only launch a new, much less pleasant and much less rational conversation.

Remember: It’s not about the nail. Or the burrito.

🔥 The correct answer is: You’re right. You were scammed by the university system, you were robbed by Bidenflation, and you were sold out by open borders. But socialism won’t fix any of that. It will just make things worse. We must fix the housing market, protect jobs, and build an economy where they don’t need a useless gender studies degree to make $250,000 a year. They only need an AI-proof trade skill instead.

As I said, evidence shows it is manifestly working. But it takes time. Here’s a headline from Metaintro, in April:

We hold all the political cards, because we have the real answers. Democrats can only keep lying. They literally cannot make the same promises. Doing so would contradict their whole shell game. They can never admit that a college degree is only useful if it guarantees a meaningful entry ticket to a well-paying job, which probably means STEM or a professional certification. Democrats can never confess that covid, open borders, and Bidenflation were at least partly to blame.

The difficult truth is that Millennials and Zoomers were sold a lie. They were promised that, if they kept up their grades, went straight from high school into college on ‘student loans,’ regardless of degree, they’d be set. (Then they were made to stay home, keep borrowing, and take shots they didn’t want. But I digress.) And as far as I know, for far too long, only “Dirty Jobs” Mike Rowe was telling the truth.

We aren’t blameless. Even if Republicans didn’t create the lie or wreck the economy for young people, we silently acquiesced to it.

You can argue Zoomers shouldn’t have believed the lie. But they were seventeen. Either way, they are victims of a massive fraud. They’re mad. They are burn it all down mad. That righteous anger is what the Democrats and the DSA are tapping into, awakening a monster they cannot control.

Look: When Zoomers complain the system is rigged against us, they are 100% right. They face profound systemic problems that Boomers and GenX did not. Not burritos. Worse.

If conservatives could stop fighting amongst ourselves about Mexican munchies long enough to deliver that message, we could win a generation. If we keep telling kids to eat ramen, sooner or later we will lose. And, as one conservative commentator put it this week, we’ll deserve it.

Have a wonderful weekend! Meet me back here on Monday morning, for an all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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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