☕️ RESERVATIONS ☙ Saturday, April 12, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Pentagon fires rogue commander for defying VP; Trump diplomacy sparks surprise Iran talks; inflation plunges, economy surges; jab-refusers reinstated; military takes charge at southern border; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Time for the weekend edition. Your roundup today includes: Department of Defense fires rogue space force commander who defied the Vice President and sent an email I bet she wishes she could take back; Trump diplomacy moves Iranian mountains in the Middle East as unexpected peace talks begin in Oman; lots of ‘unexpected’ good economic news on the domestic front as Trump’s financial plans continue bearing fruit and the Biden woes recede into the rear-view; separated military members now fully eligible for back pay and reinstatement after refusing the ‘safe and effective’ jabs; and Trump deals more cards from his carefully assembled hand, bypassing rivers of red tape and placing large sections of the border under military control.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Oh, Susannah! You’re fired. My favorite headline encapsulated one of this week’s best signs of military healing and appeared in MSNBC, which owned itself with this poorly considered effort: “Pentagon fires Greenland base commander for refuting JD Vance’s remarks.” In other words, defying command. The sub-headline explained, “A Pentagon spokesperson suggested that Col. Susannah Meyers ‘undermined’ Vance when she praised the unity of the base’s multinational staff in an email.” She was only trying to be nice!

Now, let’s allow a little leeway for military personnel relegated to the United States’ Northern Territory of Greenland … oh wait! I’m not supposed to say that yet. Sorry. Denmark’s icy isle of Greenland. Just for grins, your daily fact is: Greenland is fifty times bigger than Denmark. Just saying. Size sometimes matters.

Last week, Vance was junketing on the world’s biggest island and inspecting Thule Space Force Base, which some Biden-era virtue signaler renamed to Pituffik, which is Eskimo for “the place where you leash the dogs.” I did not make that up. The base oversees missile warning, space surveillance, and satellite control.

Anyway, whilst meeting with Colonel Meyers and her team, Vance offered some very mild criticisms of Copenhagen, which was 2,200 miles away at the time, and probably still is. “Our message to Denmark is very simple,” Vance quipped during his base visit. “You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” he continued, adding, “You have underinvested in the people of Greenland, and you have underinvested in the security of this incredible, beautiful landmass.”

After Vance left, Colonel Susannah’s maternal instincts were inflamed. She experienced an overwhelming (and professionally fatal) emotional need to contradict the Vice President to calm everyone’s bruised feelings, especially the Danes among the base’s mixed-nationality group. She unleashed the dogs of virtue and loosed a base email, which began by saying she’d reflected on “actions taken, the words spoken, and how it must have affected each of you.”

Maybe she should have reflected harder. Maybe she should have let the email marinate in the drafts folder for a day or so. Alas, overcome by emotion, Susannah hit “send all.”

“I do not presume to understand current politics,” Col. Meyers wrote, trying her best to sound apolitical, “but what I do know is the concerns of the U.S. administration discussed by Vice President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base.”

Cry havoc! Further inflaming bruised feelings, especially media’s feelings, Space Force summarily unleashed Colonel Meyers from command of Pituffik Space Base. In a statement, the branch cited a “loss of confidence in her ability to lead.” Boom. “Commanders,” the statement continued, “are expected to adhere to the highest standards of conduct, especially as it relates to remaining nonpartisan in the performance of their duties.”

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell tweeted a single sentence summary:

Replacement Space Force Colonel Shawn Lee has now assumed base command, and will presumably keep the dogs of maternal instinct on a tight leash. Pituffik.

What snow-blinded Col. Meyers was her lack of attention to the constitutional character of our civilian-led military. And she got off lightly. Indeed, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 88, provides “Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”

I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but discipline is essential to the military, because it’s the foundational virtue that transforms a collection of cranky misfits into a cohesive fighting force. Without discipline, a military isn’t a military—it’s just a well-armed mob driving around in the world’s deadliest Recreational Vehicle.

It’s encouraging to see the new-and-improved Pentagon enforcing its foundational virtue.

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Yesterday the New York Times ran a once-in-a-lifetime story almost complimentary of President Trump, headlined “Why Iran’s Supreme Leader Came Around to Nuclear Talks With Trump.”

Until this week, Iran —a country perpetually two weeks from developing weapons of mass destruction, according to US intelligence professionals— refused to negotiate with the Great Satan, referring to the United States in a Halloween costume and plastic pitchfork. As you will surely recall, President Autopen had stirred the mad mullahs up into bombing Israel twice, a troubling development novel in historical terms and which required the immediate deployment of a stack of aircraft carriers (5 holes), ten cruisers (3 holes), and the battleship (4 holes) to the Middle East’s game board.

Lost in the roiling news of Zelensky gaffes, global tariffs, and rocky stock markets was that President Trump’s team have been quietly encouraging the Iranians to stop acting like angry girlfriends and start talking about returning some stability to the region. “I’m not asking for much, they just can’t have a nuclear weapon,” President Trump said, adding, “I want them to thrive. I want Iran to be great.”

After the Persians refused to return his phone calls or text messages, Trump quietly parked a squadron of stealth bombers on Diego Garcia, a US base comfortably within towel-snapping distance of Tehran’s steamiest bathhouses— a super-secret military deployment covered extensively on The View. In an even more significant development for Trump’s quiet diplomatic successes, Iran’s two main allies, Russia and China, also ‘encouraged’ Iran to settle its nuclear standoff with the United States.

Buckling under irresistible pressure and the rapid pace of events, this week Ayatollah Khomeneih (106, and probably drawing U.S. Social Security and sixteen covid loans), pivoted —quite gracefully for someone older than sedimentary rock— and now the Iranians will meet with a U.S. delegation to discuss quietening things down.

To save face, the meeting will be held in Oman, and technically speaking the Iranians will keep the Ayatollah’s command to never ever negotiate with America, by sticking the two diplomatic teams in separate rooms and having the Omanis carry counteroffers back and forth on gold-limned cocktail napkins.

Negotiations began early this morning.

Despite inheriting global chaos, simmering wars, runaway inflation, and markets gyrating like drunken sailors in a Turkish disco, President Trump has still managed—within his first blistering hundred days—to bend geopolitical time and space, turning yesterday’s impossibilities into today’s breaking news. It’s almost like he thrives on complexity, sprinting from nukes in Tehran to DEI at Columbia U. to ice bases in Greenland, leaving stunned media scrambling to update the narrative.

Trump is moving with the surgical decisiveness of a battlefield medic and the gleeful unpredictability of a reality-TV host, rewriting rules and running rings around bureaucrats and enemy leaders alike. Trump’s audacious velocity through these first 100 days isn’t just making history. Trump seems intent on completely resetting the historical bar, packing decades of geopolitical maneuvering and domestic policy upheaval into mere weeks.

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Unexpectedly! This week, core CPI (Consumer Price Index) inflation fell below 3.0% for the first time since March 2021. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal ran the story headlined, “March CPI Report Shows Unexpectedly Large Slowdown in Inflation.” Overall inflation did even better than core inflation. There is no doubt remaining that inflation was a Biden-era artifact, despite his ironically named Inflation Reduction Act, a piece of legislative wishcasting if ever there was one.

As measured by the consumer-price index, inflation fell to 2.4% in the 12 month period through March. That undershot even the most optimistic predictions of highly credentialed, persistently wrong economic experts.

Not coincidentally, the New York Post ran this headline yesterday:

More unexpectedly! Meaning, more vindication for President Trump’s lightning economic policy— not that they’ll ever give him credit for it. Hence, “unexpected”— the word media economists use whenever reality stubbornly refuses to align with their forecasts.

Also, unexpectedly, the markets continued to hold strong yesterday. The Journal ran the story under the headline, “Stocks Rise Despite Recession Fears; Treasury Yield Surges.” And on Thursday, Swiss drug giant Novartis announced it will spend $23 billion over the next five years to build a research hub in San Diego, expand three U.S. plants, and build six new ones.

It’s classic Art of the Deal. Give yourself multiple ways to win. Falling inflation coupled with cheap gas and surging foreign investment provides the Administration with a buffer against tariff- and trade war-related price hikes, to the extent they ever actually appear.

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In more great military news, the Federal News Network ran a story this week headlined “Pentagon welcomes back troops discharged over COVID-19 vaccine, offers back pay.” It’s justice. Safe and effective justice.

A finalized DoD policy will apologize to service members who resigned or were separated for refusing covid shots and offer them reinstatement with back pay, albeit reduced by any benefits and earnings they received in the meantime. The obvious goal is to make them whole, as though they were never separated to begin with.

The new policy tracks an executive order President Trump signed during his first week, requiring the Department of Defense to reinstate troops forced out for refusing the vaccine, and offer them “full back pay.”

During the pandemic, I consulted with many very upset military folks. It was extremely frustrating, since I’m not at all a military law expert. I’m afraid I wasn’t much help. But some firms, like Orlando’s Liberty Counsel, did heroic work protecting jab-refusing servicepeople. Far too many of them were forced to make awful choices and derail their careers.

But the vaccine worm has turned. The military is healing.

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Another huge executive order landed yesterday to mixed media reviews. CNN ran the story headlined, “Trump authorizes military to take control of federal land along US southern border.”

The Roosevelt Reservation is a a 60-foot-wide band of federally owned land established along the southern border of the United States by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. It was created by Presidential Proclamation and runs all along the US-Mexico line up to the Texas border. (Roosevelt’s Proclamation permitted Texas to police its own border area, which is also protected by the Rio Grande river.)

It was just the latest example of the Trump Team harvesting long-overlooked or unenforced statutes and regulatory pathways. No Administration has ever skipped this nimbly through the Nation’s law books, perhaps since it requires an exhaustive knowledge of byzantine, arcane, and forgotten elements of US law. Are they using AI or something?

Trump’s new memorandum dramatically elevated the military’s role in border enforcement, explicitly framing illegal immigration as an invasion requiring an emergency military solution. Finally! It expanded military authority, reallocated jurisdiction over border-proximate federal lands, and set the stage for intensified border security operations.

In particular, the memo authorized the DoD to take jurisdiction over all federal lands along the southern border, especially (but not only) the Roosevelt Reservation, for military activities including building border barriers and installing surveillance and detection systems. In other words, more bricks in The Wall.

It also gave Pete Hegseth authority to classify parts (up to all) of the Roosevelt Reservation as secure military installations, where unauthorized civilians face fines and prison sentences.

Rather than fruitlessly asking for Congressional permission, the memo invoked the 1958 Engle Act and the 1950 McCarran Internal Security Act, which together grant the President (via the Secretary of the Interior) broad authority to withdraw and reserve public lands for national defense purposes— bypassing the usual red-tape and congressional approvals that would typically be required by law.

This was only possible because of pieces Trump’s team carefully placed on the political chessboard starting from Day One. The two Acts could only be used after the declaration of an invasion and a national emergency— both of which were included in previous executive orders. How anyone can believe they are “winging it” is beyond my comprehension.

CNN weakly complained that Trump is deploying the military for what were typically law enforcement functions. Overkill! “The military is prohibited from carrying out domestic law enforcement under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act,” CNN groused, but grudgingly admitted it was probably legal. “By describing the zone as a ‘holding’ area, DoD could feasibly circumvent that law,” the article allowed.

The Wall Street Journal noted that the memo will allow the Department of Defense to use its own budget for border security initiatives, possibly including migrant detention facilities, bypassing any need for Congress to allocate funds. Far-left outlets like Axios whined that, since border crossings were already at historic low levels, Trump’s new order was wasteful and redundant.

Like I said, you just can’t please some people.

Noticably absent from the 2025 conversation, though, was any classic whining about how border walls don’t work. Nor did Pope Francis chime in this time, with his usual tut-tutting about unfairly excluding people from seeking better lives (except in Vatican City, sheltered behind its border walls, that’s completely different).

From here in the cheap seats, it looks like Trump aims to permanently fix the border problem. He’s going to finish the wall, and I’ll bet a steak dinner he figures out how to make Mexico pay for it by the time it’s all over.

We are witnessing a mature and muscular Executive Branch calmly flexing the full strength of its legal powers and cracking its regulatory knuckles. The Trump administration is executing a masters’ clinic in bureaucratic jiujitsu, systematically leveraging obscure, forgotten, or dormant statutes —like the Engle Act and the Internal Security Act— to swiftly maneuver through a regulatory and legal maze that usually bogs down even modest presidential initiatives.

I’m wearing myself out trying to come up with different ways to express how novel and unprecedented it all is. Every future presidency will now be compared to this, or what it will be, since the Agenda remains yet to be fully revealed.

Have a wonderful weekend. Coffee & Covid will be waiting for you on Monday morning, ready to help you kick off another terrific week, with all the most essential news and encouraging commentary.

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