Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your roundup includes: the corporate media’s silent treatment lasts exactly one news cycle, the Times needs the smelling salts over Trump’s UN speech, Cubans flee, Iran negotiations commence, Trump signs actual Denmark-Greenland deal, Florida lets Pell Grants pay for welding school, and TrumpIRA.gov puts a stock portfolio one click away from every American.
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Just think about how much fun last year’s UN General Assembly speech was. Yesterday afternoon, the New York Times slipped into its well-worn drama queen outfit and theatrically reported, “Trump Threatens Annihilation in Iran in UN Speech and Lays Out Winner-Takes-All Vision.” (The Times would have preferred a Winner-Takes-An-Equitable-Portion vision.) Hey, it was a marked improvement over last year, when he told the whole assembly, “Your countries are going to hell.” But the hilarity started well before Trump began speaking.
Um … what happened to the media’s silent treatment? Every biological male reading this knows how it works. You forget to bring back the milk, even though that was literally the reason she asked you to stop at the store. (It wasn’t your fault. You were distracted by a sale on ribeyes, and thought she’d be pleased you saved money.) Short of divorce or a sex boycott (Lysistrata), her only option is to punish you by not talking until you have been sufficiently chastened.
This was the same strategy the corporate media employed in a surge of solidarity to punish President Trump for banning three platforms from the White House press room, which was also dramatically unveiled by the New York Times on Monday: all the major networks had agreed to boycott White House coverage— smothering the President, in the Times’ deathless phrase, by depriving him of “the oxygen of screen time.” That will teach him.
That was Monday. By Tuesday he was back on the Times’ front page. The silent treatment disappeared faster than the last Oreo in a house full of teenage boys.
Peter Baker —the Times’ chief White House correspondent, a man who has covered the White House since 1996 and, in his own words, has never seen a day when television networks refused to participate in the pool— filed this histrionic headline:
The sting! Of cancellation! As if the president had been banned from Twitter again rather than —checks notes— the networks had canceled him, on purpose, less than 24 hours earlier, as a punishment, and were now writing 1,500 words about how much being ignored must sting.
The article’s opening was marvelously clever. “For President Trump, this is the tree-falls-in-the-forest moment of his administration. If the most television-addicted president in history suddenly finds the cameras missing, is he really still president?” (A better question: If CNN falls in the forest, does anyone notice?) Because television, Baker continued, unleashing his internal amateur psychologist, “is better than any narcotic” to Trump. Next week: “Trump’s Relationship With Diet Coke: A Cry for Help.”
Not yet knowing how short-lived the victory would be (three paragraphs), the piece lovingly described Trump’s Monday: cutting the ribbon on the new White House helipad, “almost literally shouting into the wind,” recorded only by “a second-tier news broadcaster that could not capture his voice over the roar of Marine One.” That must have stung. Baker rubbed it in: “There was Trump moving his mouth, and no one could hear him.” You could sense Mr. Baker rolling that sentence over his tongue like a fine cabernet. A whole paragraph of pure, undiluted schadenfreude, generously decanted onto the front page.
There was just one problem. A problem that Baker was forced to admit by paragraph four: by the end of the day Monday, Trump was live on CNN anyway— via non-pool cameras in New York, as a guest of Mayor Zohran “Mini-Mao” Mamdani at Gracie Mansion. “They said they’re going to boycott me, but they never boycott me,” Trump shrugged wonderingly.
This, it must be said, appears to be empirically true, since the boycott’s first full day ended with the boycottee live on CNN while the boycotters were still writing about how starved-for-television he was.
🔥 But the real main event was Tuesday at the UN, where Trump delivered a fiery 37-minute broadside and the Times responded the way it always responds when Trump does something, with or without a media boycott. (Hint: it needed smelling salts.)
The story began, “The podium of the United Nations was an unusual setting for the leader of a global superpower to threaten to ‘annihilate the Islamic Republic’ of Iran.” Cue a massive eye roll. Here is what everyone on Earth knows— except, apparently, the editors of the New York Times: this is Trump’s opening bid. This is the part where he says the foyer chandelier costs ten million dollars, so that when he only pays two million, everyone feels great. He even wrote a book about it. It’s called The Art of the Deal. It was a New York Times bestseller. A long time ago.
Hilariously, six paragraphs in, the Times was forced to sheepishly admit, “It may have been largely a negotiating tactic.” Oh, may it? May it have been the negotiating tactic employed by the most famous negotiating-tactic user in modern political history, in a speech where, right after the ‘annihilate’ line, he literally added, “I believe we will make a deal right after the election”?
Why, yes. Come to think of it, it just might have been a negotiating tactic after all. Brilliant and insightful analysis as usual, Times! (Portlanders: don’t panic. Shortly after threatening annihilation, Trump’s envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff met with the Iranians for three hours.)
“They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election,” Trump added. The only foreign government openly campaigning for a Democrat House is the one we’re at war with. Just saying.
He next called Cuba a failed state, right to their face, causing the Cuban delegation to sprint for the exits. They fled. In great haste and huffiness, as it were. “Communism will never be coming to America,” the President promised, “but freedom will be coming to Cuba.”
Then he got to Venezuela, a portion of the speech the Times described with the hushed horror of a PBS nature documentary describing a pack of lions taking down a gazelle: “Special Operations forces swept into Caracas, seized Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their bed, and delivered them to a detention center in Brooklyn.” From their bed! To Brooklyn! “It was a war,” Trump added, “but it’s perhaps the biggest deal ever made.” The Times called it gunboat diplomacy. Trump called it the biggest deal ever made. Tomato, tomahto.
Then came Greenland, which was my personal favorite, because the Times had to deploy its shrink-ray. When it can’t find a mean sentence to clutch its pearls over, it finds a win to diminish. Trump announced publicly signing the deal with both Denmark and Greenland for two new US bases (Narsarsuaq and Mestersvig, which defy pronunciation to confound our enemies), plus an expanded Pituffik, plus American flyover, landing, and undersea (submarine) rights across all of Greenland, plus missile defense for the Golden Dome, with no end date, surviving even Greenlandic independence, and a clause barring non-NATO powers from any military presence or investment. (Sorry, Beijing.)
The Times sneered. He could have done all that anyway, under an existing treaty, it claimed. Oh, could he? Then why did the United States go from 17 Greenland installations in the Cold War to exactly one? That 1951 treaty sat there for 75 years producing nothing but Pituffik, and then, one “total takeover” tweet later, Denmark is happily signing amendments at the UN.
If any president could have done it in previous decades, previous decades would have done it. The Times watched a man talk the dealer down ten grand and get the floor mats for free, then sniffed that the car was on the lot the whole time.
The Times’ sourcing was a masterpiece of journalistic failure. The only American politician quoted in the entire piece was back-bench Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey, who snarled on X, “Trump never misses a chance to humiliate himself in front of the world.” That’s it. That’s the entire domestic quote roster. Two thousand words, no horrified diplomats, no trembling ‘experts,’ no concerned analysts … and not one quotable human willing to say “he actually made a couple decent points.” The Grey Lady searched the entire United States and couldn’t find a single community college assistant professor who found it at all amusing when he called the International Criminal Court “an evil bunch of people.”
It’s like the Times can’t even hear itself. While breaking its own ‘silent treatment’ pledge, what it complained most bitterly about was that the President does not govern by poll. The Times reported —with visible distress— that “Americans were telling pollsters they overwhelmingly disapproved of his foreign policy.” It cited a CNN poll at 29% approval, 71% disapproval, “reaching or exceeding levels of disapproval President George W. Bush faced in 2006.”
And then, the sentence that gave the whole game away: “But none of that seemed to lead Mr. Trump to back away.” The media’s polls say stop, and he... doesn’t. He stood up there last year and said, “I’ll be very badly criticized for saying it, but I’m here to tell the truth. I don’t care.” I don’t care. What?? A politician saying media criticism doesn’t matter? Imagine, the horror.
Hey, Times: nobody wants a President who governs by polls.
The Times was more shocked by this than a sommelier seeing someone drinking wine out of a coffee mug. Not only did he not care about media critics, he also bragged in the same speech: “I have the highest poll numbers I’ve ever had,” which only further triggered the Grey Lady. It was like he’d said, “but the girls at the office don’t care about milk.” Maybe she’ll give him the silent treatment even harder this time.
Oh, in case you missed the memo, the Times reported that the President has officially renamed artificial intelligence. His point, I think, is that it isn’t artificially intelligent— it really is smart. “From this point forward,” he declared, we’ll use “the much more accurate term ‘super’ as opposed to ‘artificial.’ So it’s super intelligence.” He asked the world’s leaders to call it “SI” instead of “AI.” Maybe we could call it the intelligence formerly known as artificial.
It is a kind of test. “Let’s see if I have any power,” he said. “Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. We’re going to find out pretty soon.” I dunno. That seems like a heavy lift, since the term “artificial intelligence” has been used since Eisenhower and approximately 14 billion times. But as he said, we shall see.
They declared a media boycott by silent treatment. Trump annihilated it in one afternoon.
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Here’s more good news for young Americans (especially in Florida), and more bad news for the Ivy-clad halls of academia. The Miami Times reported, “Florida students can use Pell grants for workforce training, Gov. DeSantis says.” Terrific Governor Ron DeSantis is definitely not relaxing into his lame duck status. Florida is now the first state on board. If anything, he’s already running for president in 2028.
First, Florida hired former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor Dr. Henry Mack to be its new Education Commissioner. Mack is specifically tasked with implementing one of President Trump’s priorities: Workforce Pell Grants for short-form programs, not just for “traditional higher education institutions.”
A Pell Grant is not a loan. It pays tuition for useful degrees— and students who qualify don’t have to pay it back. It’s not a lot of money, especially in the context of expensive “traditional” degrees for things like gender studies, interpretive polyamorous dance, and feminist film criticism. But the new Workforce version —passed in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act— covers not just degrees but certifications for the kinds of high-wage, high-demand skills that regular universities won’t touch with a ten-foot pride flagpole. Like welding.
Even better —and the reason why the universities sneer at these occupations— these kinds of certifications are short, fast, and focused. The new Workforce grants generally apply to intensive training programs completed in eight to fifteen weeks. That leaves practically no time for professors to teach students how wonderful socialism is (and how it’s never really been tried), why America is systematically toxic, or how to organize and fund Tesla dealership protests using taxpayer money.
That is one problem. But Workforce students also have expectations, like well-paying jobs when they graduate, which is the kind of guarantee traditional colleges are somehow unwilling to offer, despite burdening their students with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in federally subsidized loans that last a lifetime.
It’s bigger than you might think. Commissioner Mack offered examples of the ‘blue-collar’ programs the Workforce grants can be used for, like “certified production technology, CNC machinists, rapid prototype specialist, automation, lean manufacturing, electronics aide, aluminum welding and fabrication, marine electrician, professional research diving, CDL, aviation mechanic, and certainly last but not least, many of our first responder programs, firefighters, EMT — critical occupations.”
“You’re talking about machinery, defense applications, things that are going to make these students very, very marketable,” Governor DeSantis said. “We’re doing this, of course, to give students more opportunity to have productive lives, but it’s also something writ large for our economy.”
Even assuming that degreed students have some earning advantage over those with skilled trade credentials —an assumption that the AI boom, or “SI boom,” is making more arguable by the minute— that advantage is not enough to overcome the student loan debt penalty. A welder or aviation tech without a four-year degree (or loan) will own a house sooner, can start a family earlier, and will generally own more assets by age 30 than the young person who spent four years+ in college to gain a marginal salary advantage but also a crushing debt.
Furthermore, a trade skill virtually guarantees lifetime employment, cementing their status as permanently productive members of society. After all, nobody has ever outsourced a burst pipe to Mumbai. And, as their skills increase, such as welders specializing in underwater or defense welding, they can easily enter six-figure salary ranges, especially with overtime and performance bonuses.
This is not newly discovered wisdom. We’ve known for decades that many skilled occupations are better bets than non-STEM bachelor’s degrees, especially when those degrees are burdened by loans. But until Trump’s second term, no one had the stones to risk offending the Ivory Tower by focusing on alternatives to post-secondary education. Just ask Dirty Jobs’ Mike Rowe, who has been a brave voice in the wilderness for twenty years.
Well, it’s finally happening. More options are opening for young Americans. And the best news is that trade schools aren’t overburdened with costly amenities, administrators, and tenured professors whose skills are long out of date.
But that wasn’t all.
🔥 This morning, Finance Buzz reported, “New Trump Executive Order Could Change Retirement Savings for 56 Million Americans.” Back on April 30, President Trump signed an executive order creating a new federal website, TrumpIRA.gov, that “connects working Americans — independent contractors, part-time workers, small-business employees, and the self-employed — with high-quality, low-cost Individual Retirement Accounts.”
It also provides for matching federal contributions for low-income Americans, right now limited to just $1,000 a year, but you can easily imagine it expanding. It is another Trump innovation, where he took existing law —a long-dormant Biden-era savings program— and ran with it. It’s not that low-income Americans couldn’t open their own IRAs. It was just too hard. There was no cheap, easy way for workers outside corporate America to open and manage them.
Biden signed it, promptly forgot all about it, and now Trump’s branded it on his website as a keystone initiative. Classic.
Starting on January 1st, 2027, Americans without ready access to IRAs can use the new web portal to find and fund retirement accounts from approved private providers. It’s Trump Accounts for grownups. In other words, every American can easily become a stockholder and benefit from the rising market. Not just oligarchs.
The stock market has set 59 record highs since Trump 2.0 started.
The Administration isn’t waiting around for the media to tell people about their new options. Letters seem to be going out directly to affected taxpayers. Seen online, this morning:
TrumpIRA.gov also answers the “job lock” problem, where young Americans feel bound to seek jobs with benefits rather than doing what they might prefer to do or, like in the previous story, train for a skill rather than undertake vast debt to get a four-year degree as a ticket to a soul-crushing corporate job with healthcare and retirement. Thereby side-stepping the whole barista-with-a-degree risk.
Helping Americans build retirement savings could be a bigger deal than it even looks at first blush. Even back in 2021 when he was still a senator, Marco Rubio complained that Americans “worked here their entire lives. They retire. They get $800, $900, $1,000 a month from Social Security. And then they run into somebody who just got here from Cuba three months ago, doesn’t work, and is given $1,500 a month.”
“Imagine if you’ve been working here for 40 years, and your Social Security check is smaller than the benefits going to a 28-year-old able-bodied person who just got here,” he noted. He added, unnecessarily, “That makes no sense.”
No. No, it doesn’t. So empowering Americans with their own private retirement accounts —accounts they control through Trump Accounts for kids or TrumpIRAs for adults— cuts the disastrous Social Security program right out of the middle. (Which, for our fiscal hawks, answers the hard question of why the federal government should match low-income Americans’ IRAs at all. We’re already paying far more in other benefits and transfer payments.)
I’m not just spitballing. In July 2025, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent slipped, called it “a back door for privatizing Social Security,” and then walked it back. They have a plan. Either way, this gives Americans a lifeboat they own instead of a check Washington controls and puts under the shrink-ray.
Finally —and this might be the most important point— between the promotion of skill-based education, most-favored-nation prescriptions, and now one-click retirement accounts (with some federal matching), the case for capitalism is getting stronger for younger Americans who felt cut out of the prosperity boom and unable to afford fast food lunches, never mind houses and the increasingly elusive American dream.
Options for young Americans are exploding. Opportunity is bursting. A golden age is just within reach. This time, we remembered the milk.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! Return here in the morning for another delicious serving of optimistic news and caffeinated commentary.
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I started life blue-collar. No college for me. But what people don't realize about Men is the fact that we get significant happiness from completing things. Fixing things. Building things. College careers rarely lead there.
All of these dinosaur networks are on the verge of going extinct. If it wasn’t for Biden and big Pharma they would be long gone. This is their motive for bashing Trump and getting him out of power. It’s all about their own survival, like so many others on the take. Without their daily bashing and lying about Trump their ratings would be even closer to zero if that’s possible. Trump is 99% of their broadcast content.