☕️ SWAMP APOCALYPSE ☙ Wednesday, February 12, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Yesterday was a terrible, no-good, very bad day for the Swamp. Trump struck back in a coordinated assault on all fronts. He's not waiting for the courts to do the right thing—nor is he defying them.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Yesterday, instead of retreating into lawfare defense mode as everyone expected, the Trump Team unleashed the most devastating assault yet, the Deep State’s D-Day. Nobody’s covering it, but it is inescapable. You may have heard about some of the parts, but just wait till you see the big picture.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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The Trump Team fooled everybody, including me. As last week’s various lawsuits sprouted restraining orders like early buds emerging all over the willow trees in springtime, most commenters expected Trump to take a necessary pause for defensive retrenchment. Surely, we all thought, it would take Trump’s anti-bureaucrats some time to clear the judicial logjam. But all of us were wrong.

A brief pause to clear past the TROs wasn’t Trump’s strategy at all. No pauses! Instead, yesterday Trump tripled down, jamming the battle tank’s accelerator into overdrive and smashing ahead in a whole different direction. His new battlefield banner unfurled yesterday afternoon in the form of one executive order plus three separate press conferences, which together sent a just-relaxing Deep State enemy racing for the bunkers with its trousers still half off.

It was a simultaneous coordinated assault, deployed with consummate skill in a single afternoon. It was all happening at once. We will start with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and his incredible comments. The New York Times covered the story in a haplessly hysterical headline, “Johnson ‘Wholeheartedly’ Agrees With Trump’s Spending Cuts, Undermining Congress.”

Undermining Congress! The Times was vexed because Speaker Johnson told reporters he agreed that the President could unilaterally withhold congressionally authorized payments, if they are wasteful, fraudulent, or abusive. The Speaker explained, “There’s a presupposition in America that the commander-in-chief is going to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars.” Johnson also pointed out that DOGE workers were better able to make decisions on government funding than members of Congress, since “the agencies have hidden some of this from us.”

A tearful Times was clearly experiencing the “anger” stage of denial, as it raged over its despair that Congress and the President weren’t getting into a highly public budget fight after all. Johnson’s express agreement only helped Trump, both in the court of public opinion as well as the court of far-left judicial activists.

But that bit of welcome agreement was the least interesting thing Johnson said.

First, Johnson confronted the Democrats’ new “constitutional crisis” narrative, and encouragingly, vaccine mandates made an appearance. The Speaker explained:

The Democratic party is in a completely different place right now. There’s no identified leader of the party. They don’t have a clear vision. They just seem rudderless. In hopes of finding themselves, they’ve latched onto this new shiny object called ‘the rule of law.’ We’d like to welcome them to the concept.

It would be more admirable if they hadn’t spent the last four years with their heads buried in the sand while Biden literally trampled over the rule of law without objection.

In fact, many Democrats cheered that lawlessness, like when the Biden Administration unconstitutionally forced the middle class to pay the student loans of doctors and lawyers. They illegally mandated that private companies implement vaccine requirements. They radically rewrote Title IX to undermine women’s rights. Those things were actually illegal. The Democratic party cheered it on; they didn’t oppose it at all.

CLIP: Speaker Johnson defends DOGE and sarcastically mocks Democrats as insincere (1:48).

I can’t believe I’m noting this as an aside, but as you can see, with vaccine mandates having been included in Johnson’s list, the reckoning is still coming. But set that aside. We have bigger whales to fry today.

Johnson continued. He didn’t just accept DOGE, he endorsed it:

I met with Elon yesterday to get an update. To me, it is very exciting what they’re able to do. What Elon and the DOGE effort are doing right now is what Congress has been unable to do in recent years, because the agencies have hidden some of this from us.

DOGE is uncovering things that we’ve known intuitively have been there, but we couldn’t prove it. Now, the proof is being provided. And no one can argue the counter to that. So stay tuned—there’s a lot more to come.

The courts should take a step back and allow these processes to play out. DOGE is is making sure that your tax dollars are spent in the way they were intended to be spent.

CLIP: Johnson explains how DOGE actually HELPS Congress be a good steward rather than ‘frustrating’ authorized spending, enraging the New York Times (1:32).

With me so far? It was very bad news for the permanent bureaucracy that DOGE and Congress are on the same team. It would have been so much better for them had Congress taken umbrage over the Executive refusing to make payment they’d authorized. But it got so much better.

Then Johnson delivered the coup de grâce, the single sentence revealing a ghastly Sword of Damocles dangling on a gossamer thread right above the Deep State’s masked head, and a critical puzzle piece dropped into what we perceive in the strategic brilliance of Trump’s de-Swamping order of operations. Johnson said:

We have a $36 trillion dollar federal debt. We have got to get ahold of these things. You’re going to see it reflected in the reconciliation package that comes forward, you’re going to see it reflected in the appropriations as we go forward, and you’re going to see it in these efforts to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.

And we think the final number on that is going to be substantial and a game changer in Washington.

The clear threat was in Johnson’s final sentence. A game-changer in Washington. DOGE isn’t the weapon, it’s just the canary in the limestone mine. Now that Congress knows where the waste is —like USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Department of Education, DEI spending, the Treasury, Social Security, and the rest— legislators are working up a budget bill to nuke the Deep State from orbit.

It’s wonky, but this is very important. The fact Johnson announced a budget bill is critical. Bills related to reconciling the budget can be passed using a process called ‘budget reconciliation,’ which avoids the Senate filibuster and can be approved with a simple majority. In other words, it’s the Deep State’s worst nightmare: first, DOGE identified the bureaucratic bloat, and so now Republicans in Congress have a viable legislative path to cut the guts out of the bloated, mutant Swamp whale.

Now we see that the DOGE data dumps have always been paving the way for this— the Congressional reconciliation bill. If Congress does the cutting, it will instantly cure all the alleged ills the Democrats and their captive judges have been complaining about. They howled that Trump was “overriding Congress” by stopping payments and so forth. But Congress is about to stop them.

And who knows what other goodies Republicans might stick in the reconciliation package.

I would bet a week’s salary that USAID, for example, is a dead duck, a spent force, a walking corpse. With DOGE’s data exposing where the transgender Operatic bodies were buried, Congress now has a fact-based justification for deep, tectonic cuts.

In other words, like a covid jab heart attack, the Deep State is suddenly and unexpectedly facing a whole new existential fight that arose right behind it— in Congress.

The Swamp thought DOGE was the main battle group, but it was only a reconnaissance force. Surprise! They wasted weeks trying to block, discredit, and contain DOGE, believing it was the real fight—but they were wrong. DOGE was never the main attack. DOGE was just scouting the battlefield, mapping the enemy’s weaknesses, and exposing vulnerabilities.

By shifting the battlefield to a budget reconciliation bill, Trump has neutralized the courts as any significant factor. Unlike executive actions, a budget bill passed through reconciliation is almost untouchable by judicial review. The only real challenges are procedural, which is a Senate issue, not a judicial one.

The Left thought they had Trump boxed in with lawsuits. Instead, they’ve spent weeks planning and fighting over emergency injunctions that will soon be completely irrelevant. The Deep State was preparing for trench warfare in front of judges, but Congress is unleashing a drone hellscape from their rear.

Trump tricked them all. The same activist judges siding against him using Congress as an excuse, must now twist into legal pretzels somehow arguing that neither Congress nor the Executive hold the power of the purse, which is even less constitutionally plausible. In other words, Trump tricked the judges into committing to a Congressional-powers argument, which becomes moot when Congress does it.

Checkmate.

🔥 You may ask: but how do we know this is the strategy Congress has in mind? I made a big claim that Republicans are united behind DOGE. It’s a big claim, but I brought some receipts. Here’s exhibit A: even neocon Senator Lindsay Graham is on board. Yesterday, the Neocon-in-Chief said, “USAID is a victim of their own excesses…and will cease to exist as it did before, because it should.”

CLIP: Lindsay Graham — USAID is suffering from a self-inflicted injury (0:33).

What will the activist judges do if both Congress and the President cancel USAID? Can you see it now? DOGE merely prepared the battlespace. It handed the Republicans everything they need to justify killing corrupt, Swampy agencies like USAID.

Now, Trump and Elon are no longer fighting the Deep State alone. The two other branches have joined forces against the Judiciary. If I’m right, we’re looking at a wholesale shift in Republican strategy—from playing defense against activist courts to actively dismantling the administrative state using medieval tools— through Congress and the Executive, working together.

We always hoped the Supreme Court would save us. Trump’s not relying on the Supreme Court. He’s managed to capture the two other branches of government. It’s two-against-one.

Facing an unstoppable budget reconciliation weapon, the Deep State won’t be able to hide behind lawsuits. Nor will any amount of pearl-clutching editorials from the New York Times will stop what’s coming.

DOGE was just the recon team. The real war starts now. And that was just the beginning yesterday.

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Another massive headache struck the Deep State’s rattled cranium during a press conference with photogenic Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna. Notice in the next clip how she carefully reads a pre-prepared statement, and how James Comer (R-Ky.) stood quietly but resolutely behind her the entire time. Luna announced she will lead the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets:

CLIP: Rep. Luna (R-Fl.) announces new commission on declassification (2:19).

Ms. Luna explained her task force’s goal will be to form “a new relationship between the government and the governed” and restore “trust through transparency.” Among other things, Luna announced a list of previously top-secret files to be declassified, disclosed, and released to America. We already knew about the first three:

— The Kennedy Assassination. (Luna intriguingly said, based on what she’s seen, she believes “there were two shooters.”)

— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Assassination.

— Senator Robert Kennedy’s assassination.

That was only the warmup. Behold, the next part, which the Deep State probably never saw coming. The task force will declassify and release these files, too:

— The 9/11 files

— UFO files

— Covid-19 Origins files

— The Jeffrey Epstein files including the client list

Betty, bar the barn doors. This could get ugly.

You might wonder whether this is anything different than the usual Congressional committee that goes nowhere. Yes, it is something different. Ms. Luna explained it would be a multi-agency task force, including foreign intelligence allies, the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and the White House. For decades, “national security” was the go-to excuse for burying everything that was politically inconvenient. But now, with a formal, multi-agency declassification push, that excuse could plausibly, finally crumble.

If even a fraction of Luna’s list were disclosed, it could permanently eviscerate the general public’s flagging trust in government institutions. Just look at how strongly the public has reacted to DOGE’s disclosures of wasted tax dollars from a single subterranean agency.

The public’s totaled trust could be the most dangerous threat the Deep State has yet faced, because the only solution will be to drastically prune agencies’ ability to classify anything. In other words, I think Ms. Luna and friends are about to teach Americans how badly the government has abused the classification scheme.

Luna’s task force poses another existential threat to the Swamp, a second one. It was a carefully coordinated escalation combined with Speaker Johnson’s announcement. Now, the Deep State must fight two simultaneous battles— both the incoming reconciliation bill and the inevitable steady drip of Congressional counter-leaks from the disclosure files.

Imagine— only 24 hours ago, the Swamp creatures were high-fiving each other over a handful of leftist TROs. I bet this morning, they’re not thinking about those TROs at all. They’re sweating bullets, and scrambling to crab together another new battle plan.

But wait. That wasn’t all. Not even close.

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The “Main Event,” if you’ll allow me to use that trope, was the third and biggest press conference, held from the sanctified quarters of the Oval Office, including the President and the Counter-Leaker-in-Chief himself, Elon Musk. (And Musk’s young son.) It was picture-perfect, a carefully choreographed and devastatingly effective political land mine. The Wall Street Journal ran the story headlined, “Elon Musk Defends Cost-Cutting Efforts in Oval Office Appearance.”

On its face, the press conference was billed as Elon’s delivery of a DOGE status report to the President. Musk spoke for thirty minutes and actually answered hostile reporters’ questions. (Although, hilariously, the AP was banned from the room, for refusing to recognize the newly renamed Gulf of America in its style guide, the latest salutary side effect of that particular name change. Keep #resisting, dummies.)

Let’s start with a reaction clip. CNN hosted former New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who is not exactly a MAGA crusader. Still, Sununu delivered a spirited defense of Musk’s status report, leaving a totally flustered Anderson Cooper blurting, “don’t be a d—k.”

CLIP: former Gov. Sununu defends Musk status report (1:51).

Sununu scolded Anderson, “To complain about this administration over transparency when this President takes open questions on a daily basis, yet Joe Biden didn’t show up for a press conference for six months, is insane. These guys are being extremely transparent. They don’t have to sit there and take the questions, but they do.”

Indeed, during the conference, Musk took great pains to educate the skeptical reporters, explaining, “The people voted for major government reform… and that’s what they’re going to get. That’s what democracy is all about.” He asked the media, "If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?”

The media did not answer that question.

🔥 Musk offered many examples of fraud, waste, and abuse. Elon said the $59 million that FEMA paid to New York hotels to house illegal migrants this week was at double normal room rates—even at a 100% occupancy rate. The space billionaire also announced that DOGE found some people over 150 years old who are still collecting Social Security. “I think they're probably dead, is my guess, or they should be very famous, one of the two,” Musk quipped.

Maybe most shocking, Elon reported that only 10,000 government employees could resign in a month because the records are stored in a literal mine shaft, and record processing is constrained by the speed of the mine elevator. The federal government recently spent $160 million to “modernize” this sad state of affairs and failed, so they just gave up. More waste and abuse.

"You know what?,” Elon rhetorically asked reporters. “Instead of working in a mineshaft, carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mine, you could do practically anything else.”

It was a fusillade of devastating counter-leaks.

🔥 But what probably most panicked the Swamp creatures was when Elon said —with the President of the United States nodding along right beside him— that DOGE plans to investigate public officials who somehow got rich in office despite their nominal salaries. Boom again.

CLIP: Musk—DOGE will investigate unaccountably wealthy public officials (0:52).

This presser was the kill shot. It made the TROs laughably irrelevant. The Deep State is realizing it has been caught in an inescapable death spiral—and the Oval Office press conference was the final checkmate move in another one-day tactical massacre. Yesterday’s assault on the Swamp was for the highest stakes yet.

🔥 The optics were brilliantly engineered. By having Musk—America’s most famous billionaire entrepreneur and a former Democrat—standing next to Trump in the Oval Office, it looked like a formal, apolitical status update. It framed DOGE as a neutral, fact-finding operation. It shoved the media into an indefensible crouch—they had to attack Musk, but in doing so they attacked transparency. It showed family values and unity—Musk’s young son’s presence subtly signaled that the next generation is watching.

Musk’s no-doubt carefully chosen examples of wasteful spending were a master stroke. FEMA paying double rates for migrant hotels while North Carolinians live in tents in freezing weather? Social Security checks still going to people over 150 years old? For real? A literal mine shaft bottlenecking manual record processing? It was beyond inefficiency—most Americans heard it as criminally negligent, at best.

As far as the narrative goes, Elon Musk just deployed the single most dangerous rhetorical weapon the Deep State has ever faced, when he asked, “If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?” Trump has brilliantly shifted the narrative. It’s no longer about Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s about The People vs. The Bureaucracy.

🔥 Taken all together, yesterday’s three press conferences rearranged the chess board again. Yesterday wasn’t just a response to the Deep State’s legal maneuvers—it was a full-spectrum battlefield realignment. The chess board was flipped, the rules changed, and the Swamp’s legal victories were swept away, already obsolete.

The Deep State spent the weekend celebrating its judicial bottlenecks, believing it had stalled Trump’s momentum. Instead, they woke up yesterday to three separate existential threats unfolding at the same time.

The announcement of the pending reconciliation bill put Congress on the chessboard. If Congress cuts the Deep State’s purse strings, the courts have nothing to say. The Swamp now faces the horrifying prospect that its most powerful agencies may be actually defunded, not just paused.

Take the money away, and the Deep State starves. That was the first existential threat.

Anna Paulina Luna’s Declassification Task Force threatens to start a systematic, ongoing unraveling of decades of classified secrets. But more importantly, it will give Congress the excuse to strip off the Deep State’s institutional cover, by reining in overclassification. The Deep State cannot survive in sunlight. That was the second existential threat.

Finally, Musk’s DOGE status report put uncooperative public officials on notice. It’s now a possible criminal investigation. They can resist, but resistance only draws more attention to themselves. And, while corporate media continues trying to deny it, since Elon brought receipts, the bureaucracy is on notice. The counter-leaks will continue.

The Deep State thought it could box in Trump with legal challenges, but he’s moved the fight to Congress and to public disclosure, where the judiciary has no power.

But even that wasn’t all. Trump made sure. He scorched the Earth.

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The UK Independent ran the story under the headline, “Trump signs order handing Musk and DOGE more power to slash federal workforce.” The sub-headline added, “The new executive order forbids agencies from hiring more than one new worker for every four who leave government service.” But that was just the start.

Leading off Musk’s status report, President Trump signed a new executive order titled, “Implementing The President's ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative.” Effective immediately, it required all federal agencies to cooperate with DOGE and its cost-cutting operations. It ordered agencies to “coordinate and consult with DOGE to shrink the size of the federal workforce and limit hiring to essential positions.”

It also ordered the Office of Personnel Management to publish new rules governing federal worker conduct. Now, federal workers will be required to (a) be citizens, (b) timely file their tax returns, (c) comply with non-disclosure requirements (i.e. stop leaking), and (d) not engage in “theft or misuse of Government resources and equipment, or negligent loss of Government resources and equipment.”

Boom again!

Federal agencies were told to plan for “large-scale reductions in force,” by reporting on what functions could be eliminated or combined. The downsizing requirements excluded “national security, public safety, law enforcement, and immigration enforcement.”

In short, Trump put more jet fuel in DOGE’s cutting engine, and short-circuited a whole bunch of court orders by offloading some of the work from DOGE to the agencies themselves.

But more importantly, it is another avenue of attack against the deep state. Leaking, and intentional or even negligent waste, are now terminable offenses. Any bureaucrat resisting DOGE’s work will now breaking a direct executive order.

The new conduct rules target the exact class of people who abuse the system the most— the “Resisters.” The courts may have stalled President Trump’s firing orders, but he just sidestepped them, and built in large-scale reductions in force, by requiring four employees to be laid off by the agencies for every new hire.

Without waiting for any possible Congressional budget cuts, the agencies must start shrinking immediately. Good luck enjoining that.

In just the last 24 hours, Trump has deployed the threat of a historic, Swamp-draining reconciliation bill, forced deep-state classified disclosures, devastating counter-leaks, public-official grifting investigations, and a new Executive Order requiring massive downsizing and making Resistance a terminable offense.

It was a whole-of-government, belt-and-suspenders strategy. It has created a Deep State doom loop.

You are probably tired of hearing this, but we are truly living in unprecedented times. We’ve never seen anything like this. We are witnessing the first real, systematic dismantling of the Administrative State in American history. It is the biggest battle over the federal government’s power since the Civil War, maybe ever.

I told you Trump could see the activist court resistance coming a mile off. I told you there was a strategy. I didn’t think it would happen this fast.

How much do you like it?

Have an absolutely wonderful Wednesday! And believe me when I tell you a lot more great stuff happened yesterday, too. Tomorrow, we’ll cover as much as we can, including the woefully underreported triumph of Trump quietly stopping World War III. See you then.

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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