Opinion
By Jeff Childers
3/4/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! I’m late for leaving for the airport, so please enjoy today’s hastily written roundup, inevitable typos and all: Kennedy pens pro-jab op-ed, sending MAHA into an understandable frenzy; Zelensky’s foot-in-mouth disease worsens and Trump sidelines Kiev’s military aid train; California state workers encounter a Trump-like order excreted by Governor Newsom; Trump tariffs finally slam into place and Canada cries bitterly; and Trump’s historic joint address to Congress today generates a swirl of mystery.
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You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you? The Hill ran an enervating story yesterday headlined, “Kennedy sends mixed vaccine messages amid Texas measles outbreak.” The MAHA movement, enjoying a well-deserved run of astonishing good fortune, faced a setback this week, and that setback took the form of a pharma lobby, butt-kissing editorial that RFKjr published in, of all places, Fox News.
It didn’t start that way. The Hill explained that Kennedy “initially downplayed the outbreak in Texas during a Cabinet meeting with President Trump last week, saying it was ‘not unusual’ and falsely claimed that many people hospitalized were there ‘mainly for quarantine.’”
Not only that, but as the Hill correctly reported, “Kennedy has a long history of disparaging the MMR vaccine. He has … repeatedly linked it to rising autism rates and questioned its safety.” So far, so good.
But RFK’s Sunday op-ed sang a different, discordant tune. What a difference a week can make in 2025. Kennedy — or was it Kennedy? — disgracefully opined that, “Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.”
Haha, “community immunity.” Good one. That, my friends, is the stale term “herd immunity,” but rewrapped in NewSpeak to conceal that they think we’re just a pack of dumb farm animals.
The sing-songy slogan “community immunity” was a dog whistle to mandatory jabbers everywhere.
All that said, I’ll scrape up my shattered optimism to defend Kennedy and offer a theory for the longtime vaccine critic’s warp-speed about-face. In my defense, nobody else has a better theory.
There were two subtle signals. First, and maybe most promising, the op-ed was not written in RFK’s voice. I, and many of you, have read Kennedy for years. The op-ed’s robotic, hyper-clinical language did not sound like him at all. I rather suspect that he got an odious assignment and subbed it out to a ghostwriter.
Second —maybe I am reading too much into this— his op-ed started with the sentence, “As the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I am deeply concerned about the recent measles outbreak.” It sounded like a subtle sort of disclaimer. In other words, Kennedy wasn’t writing for himself. He was writing as HHS Secretary. It was his official duty.
🔥 The trouble began earlier, with corporate media’s hyperbolic “measles outbreak” story, which crescendoed last week following tragic news of the death of “a school-age child.” One who, I am confident, had multiple co-morbidities and probably died with measles, not from measles, but they won’t say. Patient privacy.
The cumulative media pressure on Kennedy was enormous. After all, he’d just canceled the annual influenza vaccine committee. He was vulnerable to attack— and so the Deep State struck. Yesterday, Politico reported a story headlined, “Top HHS spokesperson quits after clashing with RFK Jr.
On Friday, Thomas Corry, Kennedy’s brand-new Public Affairs Director, “abruptly quit after clashing with Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his close aides over their management of the agency amid a growing measles outbreak.”
An anonymous HHS leaker blabbed to the Hill that Corry was “the one adult in the room that I saw, unfortunately.”
Two days after Corry rage-quit, Kennedy published his pro-MMR editorial. The next day, yesterday, his principal deputy chief of staff and long-time confidante, Stefanie Spear, sent a statement calling the measles outbreak “a top priority for Secretary Kennedy.”
Obviously, there is a battle raging within HHS, fueled by a media firestorm in the form of a giant burning wicker child. Kennedy made a bad choice in picking Corry. (We can’t even judge that too harshly; for all we know, he was forced to agree to Corry as one of many promises he made to survive Senate confirmation.)
As we discussed yesterday, the Democrats are acting like roadkill, salivating over the first Trump Administration misstep, to launch a narrative counterattack aimed at sanding the Agenda’s machine. Looking at all these facts, it seems the Trump Team maybe reached the difficult conclusion that discretion is the better part of valor. They extracted the canines from the rabid measles narrative before it could strap on its covid face mask.
Switching metaphors, chess sometimes requires sacrificing a piece. On Sunday, Kennedy may have strategically sacrificed a pawnish op-ed, a strategic compromise to quell the swelling counterattack that could have escaped HHS and infected the rest of Trump’s plans.
Either way, it is far too soon to throw the unvaccinated baby out with the pharmaceutical bathwater. Talk, as they say, is cheap. The Administration has plenty of political capital to spend. Perhaps we should hold fire and wait to see what the new Secretary does.
I realize it’s unsatisfying to constantly chalk up baffling missteps to “3-D chess.” But after all, it is true that in chess, a pawn’s sacrifice can set up a series of moves to reach a decisive checkmate and end the game. Nobody said draining the Swamp would to be easy. We must wait and see how this particular gambit pays off—assuming it does.
There was, however, plenty of other good news yesterday.
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That was fast! The Washington Post ran a story yesterday headlined, “Trump administration to pause future deliveries of military aid to Ukraine.” The sub-headline added, “U.S. officials said the halt, an extraordinary pressure tactic, would be lifted if Ukraine’s president shows an openness to peace talks aimed at ending the war.”
Volodymyr “Moochie” Zelenskyy’s worst enemy is not Vladimir Putin. Zelensky’s worst enemy is the guy in the green sweatshirt. (For Portland readers: he’s his own worst enemy. Try to keep up.)
According to “two officials familiar with the matter,” President Trump decided yesterday to pause all future military assistance to Ukraine. All.
It’s for Zelensky’s own good. He needs to get his head right. Think of the aid pause as a kind of time out. “The president has been clear that he is focused on peace. We need our partners to be committed to that goal as well,” said one of the anonymous White House officials. “We are pausing and reviewing our aid to ensure that it is contributing to a solution.”
The official said the decision could still be reversed, if —and only if— Zelensky shows a good-faith effort to participate in peace talks. And that, of course, is the toughest part. What must the Martial Law Administrator do to prove he now wants peace?
He must convince President Trump he really means it, this time.
The President’s decision appears to have been provoked by Zelensky’s own worst enemy, who was busily running his treacherous mouth again yesterday. The AP reported the story under the headline, “Ukraine’s Zelenskyy says end of war with Russia is ‘very, very far away’.”
It wasn’t the best idea Zelensky has had lately. He said the war’s end was not just “far away.” He said it was very, very far away. We’re not even close.
Not too smart. That one moronic slogan gave President Trump the last little push over the line, allowing him to pull the plug on U.S. military aid. Everybody is sick of green sweatshirts. Trump immediately shot back on Truth Social:
President Trump made some pretty good points. This is an opportune moment to remind everyone of the brutally thin ice Zelensky has been skating across. Consider this Politico headline from back in 2016:
Do you think Trump has forgiven and forgotten? Should he? Here’s just one paragraph from the 2016 story:
“The Ukrainian efforts,” Politico continued, “had an impact in the race, helping to force Paul Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia.”
RussiaGate.
You would think, what with the media’s cherished “revenge” narrative, they’d be talking all about Ukraine’s 2016 election interference. Trump is holding a grudge! But they obviously must have decided that particular narrative could backfire.
Yesterday, President Trump ominously told reporters that “it takes two to tango … and if somebody doesn’t want to make a deal, I think that person won’t be around very long.”
🚀 The pause on military aid also threatens the Europeans. They must now immediately spring into the breach, making up the missing American weapons and ammunition, further depleting their already-drained inventories, and wreaking more havoc on their economies.
How about that emergency summit? Politico ran a story yesterday headlined, “Defense promises but scant detail as Europe enters decisive week.” After Kier Starmer hectoring the 18 assembled Old European leaders —plus Canada!— to stop talking and start acting, the assembled delegates could only agree to meet again on Thursday.
But now the agenda has shifted on them again. Instead of talking on Thursday even more about a competing peace plan to ‘present’ to Trump, the harried leaders must now pivot to the much thornier problem of financing the Ukraine Project by themselves.
Oddly, Politico off-handedly mentioned that “despite leading Sunday’s charge, Prime Minister Starmer and the U.K. won’t be in attendance” on Thursday. The rats depart? As for yesterday’s emergency summit, Politico said it was long on rhetoric and glaringly short on anything that resembled any kind of a plan:
Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe they have 11% of a secret plan. Either way, President Trump is keeping Old Europe completely discombobulated. Play possum, Frenchie.
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Yesterday, KCRA-Sacramento ran a delightful little story headlined, “Gov. Newsom orders California state workers to return to office 4 days a week.” Oh, the irony.
Like federal workers, the last thing California’s state employees want to do is come back in to the office. But yesterday, Governor Newsom emitted an odious order requiring four weekdays’ mandatory attendance starting July 1st.
One horrified state worker told KCRA that he thinks it will take away from his work-life balance. “I know one of the things they’re going to say about us coming back, is for collaboration purposes, but like honestly, we do a lot of collaboration on Microsoft Teams, and that works great,” he explained mournfully.
The local SEIU president snipped that Newsom’s order was “out of touch, unnecessary and a step backward.” I guess you can stop progress. Or, “progress.”
Media tried everything it could think of to explain how Newsom’s order was not copying President Trump. “Unlike President Donald Trump,” the Sacramento Bee patiently explained, “Gov. Gavin Newsom’s orders for state workers to return to their offices four days a week is not punitive.”
Readers were left to guess how the California work requirement was not punitive.
What’s next? Will Newsom ask his state workers for a four-point bullet list of work accomplishments? Will he start tweeting in all caps?
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This morning, the Times began a rolling “breaking news” story headlined, “Trump’s tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China snap into effect.” Shares of German automakers with Mexican manufacturing plants tumbled in early trading this morning, as huge tariffs against China, Canada, and Mexico came into effect. And European stock markets plummeted.
Right after midnight last night, as the President has long promised, the Trump Administration slapped a whopping 25% tariff on all imports from Canada and Mexico. It also added another +10% tariff to all imports from China, doubling the existing 10% tariff on Chinese goods that kicked in last month.
China, the only one of the three to act, immediately announced counter-tariffs and sued the U.S. in the World Trade Organization.
Welcome to the economic war. In its tariffs story, the Wall Street Journal described the new taxes as ‘historic,’ both in scale and speed, explaining that even the storied and amusingly named Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 were eased in more gradually.
(It’s even fun to say Smoot-Hawley. Try it.)
Trump’s well described plan is to disrupt the status quo, and force both American and foreign companies to repatriate manufacturing back to the United States. Plan for short-term disruptions. You might want to stock up on toilet paper again.
The media is waiting for us to rebel against the Terrible Orange Man because of rising consumer good prices. They’ll be waiting a long time. We lived through the pandemic’s totally useless and unnecessary supply-chain crisis. We’ll get through this without breaking a sweat.
Trump is not leaving prices to chance. He’s juiced domestic oil production, opened federal forests for timber harvesting, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent this week announced a new “Affordability Czar.” Also, energy products (oil, gas, and electricity) were exempted from all tariffs.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are still obsessing over eggs. Prepare for scads of stories comparing pre- and post-tariff prices.
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Finally, some not-insignificant mystery swirls around President Trump’s planned March 4th address to Congress today. The Associated Press ran the story, headlined “Why Trump’s joint remarks to Congress won’t be a ‘State of the Union’ address.” Nor will wine-soaked Nancy Pelosi be anywhere near a copy of the speech she can drunkenly rip up.
The President’s first address to the joint Congress starts at 9pm EST. It is not called a State of the Union, as most first-year addresses aren’t, but a “Joint Address to Congress.”
There is reason to think it won’t be any ordinary kind of joint address. First of all, the President mysteriously teased in all caps yesterday that it will be a “big” night and he will “tell it like it is.” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Fox News over the weekend people can “expect fireworks.”
A White House official told reporters that the address’s theme will be the “Renewal of the American Dream.” According to the anonymous preview, Trump will “focus on his record thus far, the economy, border security, and what the official called the President’s plans for ‘peace around the globe.’”
White House spokeslady Karoline Leavitt promised it “will be MUST-SEE TV.”
Social media is abuzz with speculation about the auspicious date, March 4th, mainly because it was the original Constitutional date for the Inauguration, later moved up to January 20th by federal statute in 1933. The very first Congress met on March 4th in 1788. It’s also the date when 28 other presidents have made similar addresses.
There is a sense that Trump picked the date on purpose for its historic significance.
Of course, March 4th is also National Pancake Day, and the date of the incredible 1906 revival that launched the Pentecostal movement on Asuza street in the City of Angels (Portanders: that’s Los Angeles.) So, who knows? That’s the thing with dates; there are only 365 of them, so the historical references tend to keep stacking up.
I wouldn’t dare offer any predictions. Everything Trump has done since he took office has defied predictions or even reasonable expectations. It has also been meticulously planned out.
What I expect for tonight’s address is the unexpected. Stay tuned.
Have a terrific Tuesday! I have to run for the airport, so I’m calling a wrap here. But C&C will be back tomorrow to dissect the President’s address and roundup the rest of today’s essential news and commentary. Be there or be square.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
