☕️ SAD DONKEY ☙ Monday, March 19, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

JFK files drop as hot takes fly; Trump and Putin talk war; Middle East erupts; Trump vs. Houthis; economy defies doomers; tariffs hold firm; judge impeachment fight heats up; NYT wakes up; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Today’s bursting roundup includes: the JFK documents were finally released and we begin to sift through all the noisy hot takes; progress in the proxy war as Trump and Putin get down to brass shell casings; Middle East heats back up as war breaks out all over; Trump versus Houthi militants; Trump meets with Middle East leaders; economic apocalypse evaporates in the warmth of continuing good economic news; experts pivot on inflation predictions; Trump team doubles down on tariffs despite of dour corporate media coverage; controversy swirls over efforts to impeach overreaching judges; and New York Times notices that Trump isn’t just sitting around hoping for favorable mid-terms.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, one subject dominated social media’s attention— the long-awaited JFK document release. The Times of Israel ran its story headlined, “Trump administration makes public thousands of files related to JFK assassination.” The sub-headline added, “About 2,200 files of over 63,000 pages posted to US National Archives, but no narrative-changing revelations expected; some documents deal with CIA ploys against Cuba’s Castro.”

It is wall-to-wall hot takes. My first attempt to sort through all the independent takes on social media turned up outright fakes, ham-handed edits trying to boost narrative appeal and clicks, recycled, long-released documents claimed to be newly released, and overall it was something like a giant Rorschach test wherein influencers large and small declared with no hesitation or reservation whatsoever having conclusively scryed in the fog of early releases whatever predetermined conclusion they had long hoped to find.

Here’s what we know for sure. Tulsi Gabbard tweeted, somewhat ambiguously, that previously redacted files would be released without redactions. An attached press release said only, “the … and … RothXXXX … sausage.” The rest was blacked out. Haha, just kidding.

The unredacted press release used slightly different language from our Samoan-Hawaiian NSI Director, saying the “release consists of approximately 80,000 pages of previously classified records that will be published with no redactions.”

What we got yesterday obviously isn’t all of them. Some documents weren’t included in this dump, including “documents only available for in-person viewing,” those “withheld under court seal or for grand jury secrecy, records subject to section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code,” and a weathered carton of classified papers stored in Joe Biden’s garage that was mostly empty anyways.

The press release said the National Archives and the DOJ are working diligently, day and night (so to speak), on unsealing and uploading those final categories, but, as the press release pointed out, visitors and grand juries have already seen them.

The rushed document release was understandably unorganized, unsummarized, and unannotated, which instantly provoked horse-laughs of criticism and faux outrage. “This dump is profoundly more impenetrable than all the previous more annotated ones,” sniped David J. Garrow, a historian “who has written extensively about the intelligence agencies,” who spoke to the New York Times.

Mr. Garrow’s critique echoed across social media. Apparently, folks expected that the government not only would release the unredacted documents but also would highlight the smoking guns and feed them to us with an unredacted spoon. Don’t cancel me, but that optimistic expectation may have been slightly, just a smidge, unrealistic.

The New York Times’s story agreed, saying, “Some documents appeared to have been versions of papers already released to the public. Others had no obvious connection to the assassination. It is also possible that Tuesday’s initial release did not include all the documents covered by Mr. Trump’s order.”

In other words, it’s still murky.

As far as I can tell from the first 12 hours of hot takes, there was some interesting new material released about the CIA’s Cold War dirty tricks and spy techniques that have intrigued some long-time deep-state watchers. For example, here’s Mike Benz:

It’s a little wonky, but it seems the documents confirm that the CIA and related spy agencies were busy little beavers back then, creating libraries of anti-communist propaganda. Until 2020, I would have fully endorsed that, except that the deep-state’s narrative-spinning machine appears to have now been aimed back against us.

Just for flavor, here’s one wonky example of newly disclosed CIA work product:

Try imagining a conference room of CIA spooks drafting children’s cartoon books, distributed in the sixties in their millions. So … what is the CIA up to these days? Transgender comics for school kids?

An emerging consensus among the trained reviewers was that these documents appear originally redacted to protect CIA methods rather than conceal a ‘real’ assassin. But again, it’s early, and that emerging consensus could still shift.

At this point, all we know for sure is that a lot of historically interesting documents have been released, nobody has yet found a smoking redaction pen, and we haven’t seen them all yet.

🚀🚀🚀

Yesterday, President Trump and President Putin had their second call, to further the cease-fire negotiations over Ukraine. They’re dickering. The New York Times ran the story under the grudging headline, “Putin Agrees to Limited Cease-Fire on Ukraine Energy Targets.”

The bottom line was that Russia agreed to a limited cease-fire, assuming Ukraine agrees. For thirty days, Russia will stop systematically bombing Ukraine’s energy system, and Ukraine must halt its much less effective drone attacks on Russian power plants, which are so useless some proxy war commenters have described them as “pinpricks” and “mosquito bites.”

It was progress, which even the Times was forced to agree. The two leaders agreed to continue negotiating a permanent peace. President Trump seemed pleased with the 2-hour talk:

The two presidents also agreed on a small list of less significant but incremental concessions including, for example, prisoner swaps.

The green sweatshirt was excluded from the discussion. Some analysts pointed out that his conspicuous absence underscored the real conflict to be resolved is the one between the U.S. and Russia, with admittedly eager Ukraine serving as an American proxy. But what I found most interesting in the readouts of the calls was that both Putin’s and Trump’s included a reference to discussion over resolving the conflict in the Middle East.

🚀 Maybe the week’s most underreported story was the latest outbreak of war all over the Middle East region. The least interesting part was the announcement of a fulsome and long-overdue attack against Yemen. Foreign Policy ran the story yesterday below the headline, “Trump Dramatically Escalates Military Strikes on Yemen’s Houthis.”

The hot takes were, as usual, off base. Social media rushed to argue that President Trump is no peacemaker! He’s starting a brand new war! Nonsense. The Houthis —a militarized government that runs half of Yemen— have been waging a missile and economic war against the United States and Israel for two years, with the feckless and timid Biden Administration apparently unable or unwilling to tackle the problem.

Just over two years ago, the Yemeni militants exploded onto the global stage due to their missile and drone attacks against commercial shipping and U.S. warships in a narrow, Red Sea chokepoint called the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, shown above. Not only did the attacks humiliate the U.S., which kept losing, but since the strait is used for ten percent of the world’s shipping transit, they also spiked worldwide costs and prices.

I have long argued in C&C that these Yemenese attacks are part and parcel to the Proxy War in Ukraine. Russia repeatedly warned Biden that, if the U.S. kept arming Ukraine, Russia would start arming the U.S.’s problematic regional adversaries. I cannot prove the Russians began supplying more advanced arms to the Houthis, but the timing and circumstantial evidence fit.

🚀 The Middle East is burning. Three days ago, the delicate cease-fire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas collapsed after Hamas broke its agreement and refused to release any more hostages. And, as we’ve seen, the pro-Russian Syrian government fell, and Syria is now a failed state now suffering horrible internal chaos.

By my count, Israel —supported by the U.S.— is currently and openly fighting Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthi militants in Yemen, and ambiguous armies in Syria. And a new open conflict is once again brewing between Israel and Iran.

It’s an absolute mess.

🚀 So it was no wonder that Trump and Putin’s call included discussions over the Middle East. My simplified reading is that, when the Ukraine proxy war ends and America stops arming Russia’s enemy, then Russia will stop helping the U.S.’s (and Israel’s) enemies, and the Middle East situation can be resolved next.

Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz famously quipped that war is the continuation of politics by other means. America’s recent attacks on the Houthis were not unprovoked aggression against defenseless militants (pure nonsense), and not only were they (regrettably) necessary, but they were almost certainly one of Trump’s opening moves in brokering a permanent peace in the Middle East.

Who knows. But I suggest the concept of a bigger picture. Trump appears to be working on a truly global resolution, not just between Russia and Ukraine, but among all major conflicts that Biden’s neocons allowed to spiral out of control.

So it was unsurprising that yesterday Trump also met with leaders from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who the President described “have long been partners in the work to bring peace and security to the Middle East and the World”:

The breathtaking scope of Trump’s worldwide peace plan is right there, for anyone to see, except that corporate media is bumbling along like Mr. Magoo at an eye exam.

🔥🔥🔥

Meanwhile, corporate media is just as clueless back at home. The economic apocalypse they and Democrats swore was imminent is frustratingly not showing up on schedule, having been trapped in Manhattan traffic during a climate change protest. Yesterday, Reuters ran the first prediction-defying story headlined, “US manufacturing output accelerates in February.”

According to government and industry sources, manufacturing surged more than three times the projected levels, which already had anticipated growth. Apparently, Trump’s tariffs are not “wrecking the economy” after all. Four days ago, the far-left American Prospect ran this quite unfortunate headline:

Womp, womp. Not only that! In yet more tariff news, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran an even more encouraging opinion piece yesterday headlined, “Philip K. Bell: Trump's tariffs are saving the American steel industry.”

Philip K. Bell should know. He is the president of the Washington, D.C.-based Steel Manufacturers Association (SMA), which represents over 70% of domestic steel production.

Mr. Bell reported that, under Biden, “the American steel industry was cutting production, laying off workers, and idling facilities because of unfair trade.” The steel industry considered the situation to be unfair because a whole bunch of countries were selling steel in the U.S. either below their cost or subsidized by their governments.

When I say “a bunch of countries,” it was a lot: China, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, India, Vietnam, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Japan, Belgium, and France.

But, said Bell, on March 12th, President Trump “reinvigorated” America’s steel industry “by closing the exemptions and loopholes that had weakened” his Trump 1.0 tariffs.

Last week, in response to Trump’s March 12th reinvigorated steel tariffs, CNN Business sourly, ran a story whose headline wrongly predicted, “It’ll be tough for Trump to dig his way out of this one.” Trump, the story grimly explained, “placed tariffs on all steel and aluminum imported from every country around the world, a policy that could drive up prices on a broad range of consumer and industrial goods for Americans.”

“If the president keeps going in this direction, prices will rise and the economy will slow even further,” pessimistically predicted MIT economics professor Simon Johnson. But Professor Johnson is now crying in his soy latte after yesterday’s manufacturing report.

Here’s another one. A week ago, overpaid CATO Institute think-tanker Scott Lincicome gloomily mused, “For anyone who voted for Donald Trump on his promise to lower prices, it’s going to be a shock and potentially infuriating that prices haven’t gone down – and instead, they’ve gone up.”

Or have they? Yesterday, just five days following Lincicome’s inopportune forecast, the Hill ran this auspicious expert op-ed:

Whoops! Which is it? Will we be infuriated for voting for President Trump or not? The op-ed’s author, Georgia College professor Nicholas Creel, is no Trump fan. In fact, he sneered that the inflation-fighting effects of Trump’s tariffs were “ironic,” “nuanced,” just an “economic placebo effect,” and “an entirely accidental artifact of his frenetic style of governance.”

Well, they have to say something. After all, they promised tariffs would lead straight to higher prices. “Basic economics tells us that increasing the cost of imported goods feeds directly into higher prices across the economy,” Professor Creel explained, before immediately explaining how much more nuanced “basic economics” really are, which is why experts like him weren’t wrong, per se.

After all, they are experts. They can’t be wrong. It’s just that dummies like us don’t understand all the implicit nuance hidden inside their inaccurate forecasts.

📈 Finally, the Washington Post ran a tariffs story yesterday headlined, “Trump aides prep new tariffs on imports worth trillions for ‘Liberation Day’.” While details remain undisclosed, the Trump team has signaled that across-the-board reciprocal tariffs are scheduled to come to life on April 2nd. Experts were terrified.

On Monday, Trump told reporters, “It’s a liberation day for our country because we’re going to be getting back a lot of the wealth that we so foolishly gave up to other countries, including friend and foe.” The President explained the U.S. will soon match other countries’ tariffs on American goods dollar-for-dollar, with equal “reciprocal” duties.

“In other words, 100 percent is 100 percent,” President Trump tweeted. “If they charge US, we charge THEM — an eye for an eye, a tariff for a tariff, same exact amount.”

The obvious implication is that this will force other countries to lower their trade duties on U.S.-made products. Treasury Secretary Bessent suggested that many tariffs may never even take effect, because countries will quickly agree to lower or eliminate their own import duties before the April 2nd “liberation day” announcement.

WaPo’s Eeyore-like experts gloomily gnashed that it will never work. We shall see.

🔥🔥🔥

I’m trying my hardest to avoid being dragged into the current social media firestorm over impeaching Judge Boasberg. The BBC ran a euphoric story yesterday headlined, “Top US Supreme Court justice rebukes Trump's call to impeach judge.”

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Chief Justice Roberts said yesterday in a rare statement. Roberts was responding to a Trump tweet calling for Republicans in Congress to impeach Judge James Boasberg, who is currently micromanaging deportations through bizarre, nationwide TROs.

The problem with all of this overwrought impeachment talk is that removing Judge Boasberg, or any other judge, would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate. It has happened before, the government’s own website on impeachment says eight federal judges have been removed in the nation’s history. But it is highly improbable that any Democrats in our current Senate would join in removing a Trump-hating federal judge.

While the House might succeed in technically impeaching Judge Boasberg, it would only be performative, since the show would end in frustration in the Senate. I have no opinion over Trump’s mean tweets (I assume he knows what he is doing) or even Justice Roberts’ surprisingly political response. By all means, duke it out.

But don’t get your hopes up that impeaching judges will provide any relief. Justice Roberts was right about one thing: "normal appellate review process exists for that purpose". This problem must be resolved in the courts. At least, for now. Maybe some new possibilities will emerge after the mid-terms.

Which brings us to today’s final segment.

🔥🔥🔥

They are finally starting to notice what’s happening to them. The walls are closing in on Democrat mid-term hopes. Yesterday, the New York Times ran an unintentionally encouraging story headlined, “With Orders, Investigations and Innuendo, Trump and G.O.P. Aim to Cripple the Left.” That’s not an exaggeration.

I remember well sitting in a conservative action group meeting four years ago and watching a presentation by a major influencer about Soros-funded Arabella Advisors. I’ll never forget the crazily intricate flow chart of cash flows. Shadowy leftist “charitable organization” Arabella has snaky financial tendrils extending into nearly every leftwing protest group, every corporate media company, and most big corporations like Disney.

The influencer persuasively argued that, unless Republicans can somehow halt the left’s dark-money finance operation, nothing will ever change.

Well, it appears that the message permeated. The Times listed all the worst known offenders, from Arabella to Act Blue, which all appear to now be squarely within the investigatory crosshairs. “President Trump and his allies,” the Times warned, “have taken a series of highly partisan official actions that threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come.”

What was shocking news in top conservative circles four years ago is now being openly debated on the pages of the New York Times.

A GOP representative denied any coordinated effort to take down the Democrat party, simply because it is doing that well enough on its own. Indeed, a USA Today headline published this week blared, “Democrats amp up infighting and 'unhinged petulance' as approval rating plummets.”

That headline was not lonely. An AP headline published this morning advised, “Democrats clashed over their shutdown strategy. But the party's identity crisis runs far deeper.” The story quoted Representative Seth Moulton (D-Ma.), who complained, “The Democratic brand absolutely needs to change; We will not win with the status quo.”

Immediately after Trump’s resounding victory in November, Democrats rushed to encourage progressive voters, by reminding them of the long-established fact that first-term presidents always lose Congress in the mid-term elections. We’ll take back the House and stop the Trump train. But this is no ordinary first term. And the Trump Team does not appear to be resting on its electoral laurels, either.

I’ll be first to say it. From what we can see from here, the Democrats appear headed toward a historically devastating and catastrophic mid-term election. They only have about eight more months to get their act together before the 2025 mid-term election season begins in earnest.

Truthfully, their real deadline looms much sooner. Fundraising, candidate recruitment, and messaging must all be locked in within the next few months, especially given the structural disadvantages Democrats currently face. Biden’s coattails were weak to non-existent in 2024. What does the party look like now, under new leadership? What leadership? Or worse, how do prospects for recovering the House appear amidst an internal civil war over whether to race further left or pivot back to the center?

No pressure.

They say it always looks darkest before the dawn. But Democrats appear to be stranded in an Arctic base, with a madman on the loose. The sun isn’t forecast to rise for a long, bitterly cold time.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Then get back here tomorrow morning, for another delicious and nutritious serving of essential news and 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 🦠

How to Donate to Coffee & Covid

Twitter: jchilders98.
Truth Social: jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Telegram: t.me/coffeecovidnews
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com