☕️ ONE MONTH ☙ Monday, March 3, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A traveling roundup: the breathtaking scope of Trump's first month in office and what it might mean; and making sense out of the Proxy War dustup—where is it all going? War?

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! I’m traveling for work today and returning tomorrow, so the two posts may be a little shorter than normal. Fortunately, the pace of breaking news eased a little and in today’s roundup, we catch up on two critically important big pictures: what we (and the rest of the world) can see emerging from Trump’s first month in office, and what possible destination the Ukraine disaster is rocketing toward at hypersonic speeds.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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What I’d originally intended to be a “first 30 days recap” has, under the unrelenting press of events, elongated into a “first 40 days observation.” I am grateful that breaking news stopped to catch a breath this weekend, giving us this chance to glance backwards. So I’ll set the table with a remarkable op-ed from last week’s New York Times, penned by veteran “ragin’ cajun” Democrat consultant James Carville, titled “James Carville: It’s Time for a Daring Political Maneuver, Democrats.” His ‘daring maneuver’ was: do nothing.

If you needed conclusive evidence that Trump 2.0’s first month has been devastatingly effective, this op-ed provided the evidence in heaping handfuls. “President Trump is hellbent on dismantling the federal government,” Carville snarled, “and there’s nothing Democrats can legitimately do to stop it, even if we wanted to.”

It’s no use. “It’s time,” the long-time political consultant advised, “for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead.” There are a couple jokes I could make right now but they’re too tasteless even more my morbid sense of humor.

This idiotic “play dead” suggestion means Carville is all out of ideas. Asked to write an NYT op-ed saying something smart, he sat at the keyboard for hours and came up with … zip. He should have plenty of source material: but all those meetings, zooms, and calls with Democrats panicking over the Trump Agenda have obviously produced nothing useful.

Contrast Carville’s creative exhaustion with the same point in Trump 1.0, when the “#Resistance“ was already in full flower. Nay, compare it to just a few months ago, when Carville was “certain” Kamala would win the presidential election:

To be sure, Carville continued, suggesting Democrats, having played dead, to lay lie snakes in the grass, waiting to strike Trump’s exposed ankle after a fatal misstep in the future. Carville, emptied of ideas for effective action now, waxes eloquent in describing all the future mistakes Republicans might make. After all, Trump was only elected to drive down egg prices, not this.

To put it bluntly: for the first time in his life, Carville is flat out of suggestions, until something changes. Not just Carville. Here’s Bill Maher delicately asking Rahm Emanuel and Fareed Zakaria whether Carville is right.

CLIP: Maher asks panel of top progs about ‘play dead’ strategy (3:36).

Emanuel and Zakaria denied the Carville playing possum formula. But they offered no other suggestions except exactly what Carville essentially said: wait. Wait for Trump to overreach. Obamacare architect Rahm Emanuel fretted that President Trump will “take away” Obamacare and then people will have had enough (like anyone wants their horrid Obamacare).

How were Democrats exhausted in one month?

🔥 Iconic NFL coach Vince Lombardi once said, “The will to win is not nearly so important as the will to prepare to win.” We just watched a historically unique transition of power. Nothing like it has ever happened before. Gambling with a massive fortune that would have been squandered had he lost, Trump spent four years working under very difficult circumstances, in a total media blackout, with conservative experts carefully crafting a meticulous plan to dismantle the Swamp.

As a direct result, Trump has issued more than twice as many executive orders during his first 30 days as the next runner-up, Joe Biden, who himself set the record, albeit largely the result of mass-undoing of Trump era policies.

More significantly, unlike Biden, Trump’s EOs were not a grab-bag of random reactions to what his immediate predecessor did. Trump’s orders fall into two clear categories. First is a farrago of “issue” orders, related to campaign promises and MAGA hot buttons, like ending DEI, plugging the border, defending Christians and girls’ sports, declassifying mythological government files (UFOs, JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King), renaming the Gulf of America, reopening oil leases and pipelines, nixing plastic straws, and declaring English to be the official language of the United States.

There were too many to list, not and retain my readers’ patient attention, regardless of how wonderful it would be to enumerate them one by one.

These orders were red meat for the base, intended to continue building political capital. I might also describe this first group of orders as “bait.” Each was carefully crafted to enrage progressives and dare them to file yet another lawsuit, each lawsuit consuming a little more of their finite resistance resources.

🔥 The second, smaller group of orders was even more fascinating. It included a chained series of linked orders aimed at deep-frying the Deep State, or what you might call the Administrative State. This is the process James Carville sneeringly described as the GOP being “hellbent on dismantling the federal government.”

Obviously, Carville did not really mean Republicans want to dismantle the entire federal government. He meant that we are hellbent on dismantling the federal bureaucracy.

This group of orders started with a bang, in one of Trump’s first orders renaming an existing White House “digital services agency” that nobody ever heard of into DOGE— which everyone has by now heard of. Then the Administration blasted both barrels into the Swamp, by pulling the plug on USAID and pausing all discretionary domestic spending. As Trump’s Cabinet members were approved one by one, DOGE teams quietly arrived for work at all key federal agencies.

These orders stripped away the Swamp’s backup credit cards, throwing the entire globalist regime-change project into instant chaos, diverting yet more precious, double-secret backup resources from resisting toward a mad scramble to salvage whatever could be salvaged.

In another shocking contrast to Trump 1.0, this time, they never saw it coming. The Trump Team’s pre-election communications discipline is now the stuff of legend.

Since then, blindsiding waves of staggered layoffs, without apparent rhyme or reason, keep washing over the federal agencies like waves during a storm. They can’t predict where the latest round might strike next. It has spread even to the intelligence agencies themselves.

It’s a total disruption plan keeping every single federal worker off base and in reaction mode. The return-to-work order tied the resistance army into knots. No more unsupervised freedom. The now-weekly status report emails cast a dreadful pall of unanticipated accountability over every single executive branch employee.

Thanks to this series of Trump actions, including even more features like stripping spooks’ security clearances and pausing contracts with progressive law firms (including the one that just hired Viktoria Nuland), the shadow government is losing cohesion. It is drifting, falling apart, becoming ghostly and transparent.

That is all from just one month.

🚀 It would be naive to believe the plan does not include a four-year arc. In the first couple of weeks, they may have hoped, but I doubt anyone now thinks Trump’s first month was accidental or just a response to four terrible years in Biden’s cabbage patch.

This is why James Carville is scraping the bottom of the ideas barrel. If he doesn’t understand Trump’s plan, how can he create a counter-plan? How can anyone? The lynchpin of the Trump 2.0 Agenda is operational security.

An oft-repeated line goes, “In Washington, the only time a secret is safe is when it’s still in your head—and even then, only sometimes.” They counted on learning through leaks and through co-opting Trump’s people. But Trump solved that problem, through careful vetting, and by picking veteran Cabinet members with personal experience of how slippery and untrustworthy the Swamp creatures are.

And I only described Trump’s domestic agenda.

In one month, shellshocked Democrats’ best idea is to play dead.

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Speaking of playing dead and of foreign policy, CNN ran an equisitely revealing story yesterday headlined, “‘A crossroads in history’: Europe seeks to take control of Ukraine negotiations at pivotal London summit.” And so, we begin at last see the outlines of Trump’s peace plan. It’s no plan at all. He’s not planning to end the Ukraine war. He’s ending the Proxy War.

Compare that headline describing the Europeans’ crazed chaos with a different New York Times headline yesterday: “Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Stop Offensive Cyberoperations Against Russia.” See? As the Europeans madly try to twist the wires of conflict back together and get the juice flowing again, Trump is turning the lights off the World War III proxy war.

But first, let’s look at those Europeans. After his dramatic dressing down and dynamic disinvitation, Zelensky fled the White House— and flounced straight back to his European masters at Ten Downing Street, London, England. Good doggie. He didn’t pass “go.” He never even stopped for borscht or to pull on a fresh Che Guevara t-shirt.

The disastrous Trump-Zelensky debacle prompted the Europeans to hold yet another emergency summit this weekend, again —in perfect democratic fashion— inviting only the “good” countries and leaving the others fuming. Of course, Russia was not on the invite list (why bring the other party to the war?), but neither were “lesser” EU members. Nor were China, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, or any other great world power invited to attend.

It is almost like Zelensky and Old Europe have made themselves a neat little mean-girls cliqué.

🚀 In his pristine, stiff-upper-lipped, private-school British accent, Prime Minister Starmer primly scolded the assembled leaders, who haven’t enjoyed a moment’s peace or a single chance to spin the roulette wheel on the Rialto. The British PM officiously told them, “This is not a moment for more talk. It’s time to act.”

Those first two sentences caused the assembled reporters to burst out in hyena-like laughter, slapping each other on the backs and falling out of their folding chairs in hysterics. After which the globalist nincompoops then spent eight hours talking, not acting, and then King Charles invited Zelensky up to the Royal Palace for crumpets or biscuits or whatever treats they are serving the hoi polloi these days.

Meanwhile, back at the ninth consecutive daily emergency summit, Starmer informed the grumpy, assembled leaders that they needed to “step up” because “the West is at a crossroads in history.” His choice of the word crossroads startled them; they’re feeling less like being stopped at a crossroads and more like Western Europe is on the expressway to nowhere, realizing with growing dread that Europe somehow accidentally merged into the high occupancy lane when it should have taken the exit.

According to CNN, after “US President Donald Trump chastised Zelensky in the Oval Office,” the Old Europeans were “appalled,” which in turn led to “a moment of intense anxiety.” Terror. Afterwards, Starmer assured reporters he was diligently working with “France and a small number of other nations” —the cool kids cliqué— to craft their own competing peace plan to be presented to the US President in short order.

They’re taking Zelensky off the chessboard. CNN wryly noted that the emergency London summit “suggests a tacit acceptance that bringing Trump and Zelensky to the negotiating table together could result in tensions combusting once more.”

You don’t say.

🚀 Thus we arrive at another perplexing aspect of the conflict that stinks worse than mouldy French cheese. Since Russia’s invasion in 2022, it has constently —if not relentlessly— told anyone who would listen that it was willing to meet with the Ukrainians any time, any where. But not only have the Ukrainians stubbornly (and just as relentlessly) refused every single chance to talk, Zelenksy personally pushed through a law outright banning Ukraine from negotiating with Russia so long as Putin remains president.

I am not making that anti-negotiating-law up, although I can forgive you for doubting it, because who would do that?, and especially since the media instantly develops a paralyzing case of Mr. Magoo-like nearsightedness whenever the subject arises.

Why did Ukraine make it illegal to negotiate peace with Russia? They could have rescinded that law anytime. But they haven’t.

This might sound crazy, but think about this. It is well known that Volodomyr Zelenskyy was a slightly-below-average comedic actor who never held a single elected office —not even dog catcher— who in ten minutes microwaved up a brand-new political party (named for the TV show on which he’d played president) and then catapulted himself into the highest office in the land, donning his next costume.

What if, and I know it seems like a stretch, but what if Zelensky is, in fact, a moron? What if he is just a puppet, a Biden-like figurehead installed by squidlike deep state forces? It would explain a lot. First of all, he could never be trusted to negotiate mano-a-mano with Putin, who is notoriously sly and smart.

The reluctance to put Zelensky in the same room with the Russian president would also explain the otherwise inexplicable Ukrainian law forbidding that conversation. They need a reason to keep Zelensky away from Putin. And Zelensky’s intellectual deficit would also explain why his meeting with Trump blew up on the SpaceX launch pad, and why the Old Europeans are racing now to intermediate between Zelensky and the US President.

So long as Zelensky was dealing with Joe Biden, a sympathetic elderly counterpart with a poor memory —i.e., with limited capacities of his own— that was one thing. But now he’s brushing up against something hot in President Trump, a savvy dealmaker on par with Putin. It also explains why Macron and Starmer tag-teamed Trump in the days preceding Zelensky’s arrival—they didn’t trust the gnomelike Ukrainian to handle it by himself.

Let’s call Zelensky’s stupidity a working hypothesis. Either way, the Old Europeans have now shoved themselves into the middle, right as the Trump Administration moves to normalize its relationship with Russia and rewind the Doomsday Clock.

🚀 It looks more and more like the Europeans want to draw America into planting a long-term, high-risk footprint in Ukraine. On the other hand, it is looking less and less like Trump wants to have anything to do with it.

American negotiating teams have now met with Russian counterparts several times. Not once has the Ukraine war been on the agenda. It is increasingly obvious they are making up for four years of diplomatic neglect. The two great powers have much to discuss.

The actual agendas with Russia have included restoring diplomatic relations, discussing Iran and the Middle East conflict, and, most of all, the BRICS and the dollar’s status as the world reserve currency. Ukraine has not been on the list. So, despite all the hysterical wailing about negotiating about Ukraine without Ukraine, that has not, in fact, happened.

Yesterday, President Trump suggested that we all quit worrying so much about President Putin and start dealing with our own problems here at home — the same chorus that anti-proxy-war activists have been singing for two years. And he slammed Old Europe:

Works for me.

🚀 The European summit showed cracks in its resolve even before it began. One of the favored invited leaders, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, publicly scolded the leaders, asking a fairly obvious question:

Why should 500 million Europeans ask 300 million Americans to defend them against 140 million Russians? Well, maybe you can think of a few reasons, but they aren’t good ones. President Trump seems to be saying, fine, if you guys want to negotiate a peace deal with Russia, have at it. But we have bigger fish to fry, and those fish include keeping the U.S. out of war with another nuclear superpower.

Sir Kier Starmer faces a few difficult and intractable problems. All the leaders attending his emergency summit this weekend witnessed the same public Zelensky implosion as did the entire world. A private spat would have been easily handled through normal narrative spinning. But this? This spectacle sowed doubts about the entire Ukrainian project.

Consider that in just one month, Trump has got the Europeans holding emergency summits to discuss meeting one of Trump’s main goals from his first term: getting Europe to urgently discuss paying for its own security.

And here we are … in one month. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues quietly normalizing its Russian relationship— without Ukraine. How long until Old Europe decides that its best strategy is to roll over and play dead?

Have a marvelous Monday! Coffee & Covid will return tomorrow morning with another quick traveling update, and then we’ll resume the delightful regular schedule on Wednesday. Safe travels.

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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