☕️ THE GOLDEN SHARE ☙ Saturday, October 3, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

The Times counts empty seats; Medicare's "improvement" fund finally improves something; and the Pentagon buys a piece of Venezuela for a penny a share— Is Trump doing the impossible?

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Your weekend edition roundup includes: the New York Times sending its seat-counters to Alabama and somehow missing the 80-year-old on a 32-day campaign tour; ninety bucks per senior from a Medicare "improvement" fund that has never improved anything; the Pentagon buying more than a third of a Venezuelan oil company with penny warrants; thirty-nine government stock deals that nobody in Washington will explain; and the dots between all of it and the end of the income tax, which the experts haven't connected — yet.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Yesterday, the New York Times nearly broke its ugly face by over-sneering while reporting, “In Alabama, Trump Relives His Glory Days (This Time With Some Empty Seats).” The U.S. President, 80, is amidst a month-long rally tour to support Republican candidates for the midterms. If Trump were a Democrat, the Times would be running stories and interviewing scientists explaining Trump’s endless stamina. Instead, they counted stadium seats.

Since I value your time, we’ll skip any detailed description of the article. Summarized in a sentence, the reporters carefully attempted to prove that “we are deranged morons and nobody sane should ever listen to us.” In other words, they compared last night’s crowd size in Alabama to the 2015 rally there— without once mentioning that even a slow fifth grader would expect turnout for a Friday night rally during midterm elections where Trump isn’t even on the ballot to be somewhat reduced from the energized multitudes during an electrified Presidential cycle.

Look. I can’t believe I have to say this. A sitting president who isn’t even running for anything and can still turn out any decent number of citizens for a Friday night area rally on short notice is undeniably a historically popular president. I don’t care how much seat-counting they do or how many “polls” they cite. Biden couldn’t have filled the first rows of folding chairs in an assisted living facility’s backup cafeteria— even with a month’s warning.

“Mr. Trump’s poll numbers have been falling for months,” the paper primly claimed, without citing any. But any political scientist would have conceded, had the Times bothered to ask, that a president doesn’t need broad polling support to wield political power. All a politically powerful president needs is a highly motivated core of support.

Which the crowd delivered in spades. So it proved the opposite of what the Times claimed.

Anyway, that foul ‘crowd-size’ narrative was just the warm-up. That wasn’t even the real journalistic malpractice. The real error was omitting the astonishing story of an 80-year-old president with roughly a million other irons in the fire, including a hot war in the Persian Gulf, who is somehow still finding the time and energy to hold political rallies every day for a month on behalf of other downballot candidates.

It was, perhaps, too much to expect them to make any direct comparisons to their favorite vegetable, Joseph Robinette “Cabbage” Biden, whose staff usually ‘called a lid’ around 10:30am each morning, if not earlier. (Portlanders: In the media’s arcane lexicon of careful euphemism, the phrase “a lid” is a synonym for nap time.) And lidded Biden was sharp as a tack!

But never mind. If scientists could invent a jab that delivered Trump-level energy at 80 years old —despite all the McDonald’s and Diet Coke!— I would be first in line for that one.

Be encouraged. Trump wouldn’t put his rally-magic reputation on the line like this if he didn’t think there was a decent chance of holding Congress.

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Don’t laugh, but he’s done it again. This morning, USA Today reported, “Trump promises ‘nearly $100’ to 20M seniors in latest cash giveaway.” The midterm elections are starting to look more like a Powerball lottery.

As the article took pains to point out, first Trump sent $1,776 to service members. Then $500 to people paying for “low-cost” Obamacare plans who the Administration says were overcharged. He’s funded $1,000 each to young American children in Trump Accounts. He’s promised $5,000 in tariff dividends to every American if Republicans win. Now this.

It’s a federal credit-card cashback policy.

“My Administration will, immediately, begin sending ‘Checks’ of nearly $100 to over 20 MILLION wonderful Seniors to help pay for their Medicare Part B premiums,” the president announced late last night on Truth Social. “This money will come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, a pointless ‘Slush Fund’ that has only been used by Dumocrats in Congress to pay for the Waste, Fraud, and Abuse.”

He’s not wrong to call it a pointless slush fund. The history of this particular budget item would make a sainted Bishop curse like a seaman. Congress created the “Medicare Improvement Fund” back in 2008. It gives the HHS Secretary complete discretion to use it for “improvements” to provider reimbursements. Every year since, Congress has increased, reduced, or delayed it. Once, during Obama, Democrats raided it for $20 billion to help pay for Obamacare, which, despite Democrat word games, is not Medicare.

The improvement fund currently has a $2 billion budget.

Two years ago, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the government has never spent a dollar on Medicare improvements. Did you expect any? Yet, “it’s unclear,” USA Today said, “whether the White House has the authority to divert the cash” back to taxpayers.

Congress thought it was clever by handing billions of dollars to executive agencies and giving them ‘discretion’ to spend the money. Now Trump’s finding all those little slush funds and sending the money back where it came from. It would be ethically cleaner to give it directly back to the particular taxpayers who paid the money, but he wasn’t given that authority, so.

USA Today found the price to be the most newsworthy part of this plan. “Nearly $100” means ‘only’ $90 to each senior, the paper scoffed. This is socialist logic. If, when you divide it up into individual taxpayers, it doesn’t sound like much, then a few billion here or there doesn’t really count. See how it works?

But —according to the CBO’s own figures— $90 checks are still more of an improvement to Medicare than anything the “improvement fund” has ever been used for.

We’ll take it. And what can we see about Trump’s larger midterm strategy? I don’t want to get too carried away here, but between all the givebacks and one other curious bit of news, we have some astounding dots to connect. Let me show you something. Take a look at this.

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Prepare to make some connections that might change the whole way you view the November midterms. Our first headline arrived from The Wall Street Journal, published Thursday:

A “penny warrant” is an option to later buy shares for one cent apiece. “The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital would utilize penny warrants,” the article explained, “to secure an equity interest in North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), granting a direct U.S. government position tied to massive Venezuelan oil fields without major upfront capital outlays.”

The plans, unveiled in September, would give the Pentagon a massive 35% stake in NABEP, which controls 17 Venezuelan oil fields and up to 300 billion barrels of oil reserves. The deal, which Trump called (in all caps) “the biggest oil deal in World history,” would also let the State Department buy oil at cost. It could then refill the strategic reserve, or even perhaps sell the oil at a profit.

Senate Democrats, led by Liz “Pocahontas” Warren (D-MA), are furious and demanding answers. They want to know whether any Trump family members are in on it. They complained the Pentagon lacks authority to do a deal like this. They wondered why the American public “should support this attempt to entangle the United States with a relatively unknown foreign oil company.”

Put a pin in that. Let’s look at the next one.

🔥 About two weeks ago, CNBC ran another quick story on a different Pentagon investment proposal:

So the “story,” if you can call it that, was a mild “conflict” narrative with a side dish of “wrong person.” The Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer, Emil Michael (a double first namer), told CNBC’s Squawk On The Street that he “hopes” the government won’t take an investment interest in AI companies, for reasons that weren’t clearly explained in the story. “We don’t want government to get in the middle,” Emil said.

Then came the astonishing paragraph that should have been the story. The US government is acquiring a “growing portfolio of private sector companies.”

(A “golden share” is stock ownership that has special control rights beyond ordinary stock shares.) Despite CNBC’s dire framing of “big government socialism” hypocrisy, it was FDR who started it in the 1930s. The Obama Administration also did it, acquiring a giant stake in automaker GM during that company’s bailout. (The US later sold its shares.)

But Trump 2.0 is doing something different, probably unprecedented. As of July 30, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Deal Tracker counted thirty-nine announced direct-ownership or equity-like deals worth at least $27 billion since January 2025, including nine disclosed Defense Department deals. I’m not sure anything like this —permanent stakes in healthy companies outside of a crisis— has ever happened before in US history.

Whatever is going on is not something the Administration has telegraphed or explained in a National Security document. The closest announced comparable might be broad strategic goals for securing critical supply chains —including obvious ones like oil, semiconductors, and steel— but we’re left guessing. There are no documented strategies for hoarding golden stock shares. But the trend is unmistakable.

Whenever we’ve watched the Administration doing things without clear explanations, it’s always been because there’s a plan afoot that they don’t want Democrats filing lawsuits over yet. What could the plan be this time?

To be fair, this raises all sorts of fascinating and important questions, like the aforementioned “big government socialism” issue or even whether it amounts to something resembling fascism’s blended government-corporate model. Absent detailed explanations, we can only speculate.

🔥 But the dots nobody has yet connected are the President’s curious occasional comments about ending the income tax. “As time goes by, I believe the tariffs paid for by foreign countries will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax,” Trump said during his State of the Union address. Here’s a sample headline, also from CNBC, from as recently as February:

The ‘experts’ laughed till they passed out. How on Earth does he expect to pay for it like this? How could the government possibly fund a trillion-dollar military with tariff revenues? “To put it simply, the math just doesn’t work,” Alex Durante, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation, said contemptuously. “Income taxes generated roughly 13 times more revenue than tariffs did in the latest fiscal year,” Axios debunked.

But maybe we are starting to see the outlines of an answer.

🔥 What if Trump’s vision is bigger than anything the myopic experts can see? Could he be imagining a federal government financed partly through tariffs and partly as an investor and dealmaker in industry, rather than as chief tax collector? This isn’t just something I came up with after my fourth cortado. Only a month after Trump took office last year, a Washington Post op-ed by two Ivy League law professors mused about something enticingly similar:

At the time, in February 2025, the President signed an executive order demanding a 90-day plan for “a sovereign wealth fund: a government-owned fund that could invest in stocks, real estate or other private assets, allowing the American people to share those companies’ profits.”

The editorial speculated that government-owned stock shares could replace the corporate income tax: “The sovereign wealth fund would be required to hold the shares as an investment, and the income they generated would replace the tax.” Their idea was to replace the corporate income tax —which is really a tax on customers, but never mind that now— with a system where corporations donated non-voting stock shares into the sovereign wealth fund instead of paying taxes.

Over time, they explained, growth in those stock shares and dividends could replace the lost tax revenues and eventually get big enough to produce benefits for Americans themselves. A neat plan.

Well, the Administration never really said much more about the sovereign wealth fund, and everyone just sort of … forgot about it. But what if the editorial was directionally right about there being a plan to eliminate income taxes through private investments, just wrong about how the government would get the stock shares or how massive the scale would be?

Replacing the corporate income tax is only described as more feasible because the amount of revenue (about $425 billion a year) is smaller than the revenue collected from individual income taxes ($2.66 trillion). But what if Trump is thinking bigger than the op-ed’s authors were? What if he is thinking about much bigger deals— deals like “the biggest oil deal in World history?”

Instead of tweaking tax policy to let companies donate stock instead of paying corporate taxes, what if Trump is using U.S. diplomatic and strategic power to obtain ownership, governance rights, and preferential access to resources, then building federal revenue from the resulting assets? The White House brief on the Pentagon-Venezuela deal expressly described that stake as potentially worth “hundreds of billions in value and dividends for the United States.”

Remember: the CFR is tracking at least 39 deals. So far. Venezuela makes 40. With no upper limit.

🔥 We don’t know the plan (nor should we). It could be something completely different. But there clearly is a plan. Trump has said he wants to replace the hated income tax. He’s talked about golden ages. He’s clearly linked it to tariffs— a system he’s already built and has overcome a sustained legal war. He suggested repricing the gold reserves. He’s selling Platinum Visas. He’s teased a $5,000-per-American dividend. And now he is quietly building a novel portfolio of massive investments that are intended to produce “value and dividends for the United States.”

A little over a week ago, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters, “Together we’re going to deliver that $5,000 dividend plan and we’re going to pay that money to Americans, and not from taxpayer money.” Where is the money coming from then?

Ready for the most mind-bending part? What if, when President Trump teases his $5,000 dividend checks —but, he says, only if Republicans keep Congress— he is trying to tell us something? What if the plan is to authorize the checks via a budget reconciliation bill, which does not need 60 votes in the Senate?

I think that is the plan. Back on September 11, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told reporters the $5,000 dividend could be authorized by reconciliation. But wait. What if the budget reconciliation bill that Trump has in mind includes the $5,000 dividend checks— but only as a small side issue?

Think big. What if Trump has a much bigger reconciliation bill ready that would completely re-engineer the American system of income taxes?

It is perfectly reasonable to imagine that he’d keep the big picture under tight wraps till after the midterms. Democrats would mobilize in vast numbers if they believed their beloved system of income taxes —through which they effect incalculable social policies— was under threat. Remember how they weaponized Newt Gingrich’s simple comment about letting Medicare “wither on the vine?”

If Trump talked about changing income taxes, all we would hear is how Republicans were destroying Social Security and Medicare and wheeling grandma off the cliff.

Another proven characteristic of Trump 2.0 is operational security. We just do not see unapproved leaks. So I am speculating about things I cannot possibly know. But I would bet that between Trump’s public statements, the tariffs, the unprecedented portfolio of investments, the draining of slush funds, the untapped sovereign wealth fund, and the $5,000 dividends, he is planning something much bigger than the experts can imagine.

The experts can’t even accurately imagine the price of gas, never mind reimagining government itself. I’ll take Trump’s vision, sight unseen. Regardless, even if it’s only a tenuous hope, we have one more terrific reason to turn out on November 3rd.

Every citizen, a sovereign shareholder. That’s the real golden share.

Want to see the end of income taxes? Vote.

Have a wonderful weekend! The news cycle continues its frantic mad dash, so we will have much to discuss in Monday’s all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary. Don’t miss out.

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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