Opinion

Trump delivers a barnburner SOTU; Ukraine folds as he halts support; Team Trump moves to axe half the IRS; RFK Jr.’s HHS shakes up measles treatment; we get an answer to Kennedy op-ed; more.

By Jeff Childers, Mar 05, 2025

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! We have a terrific roundup for you today: President Trump takes the presidential podium and delivers a stem-winding State of the Union Address only fifty days into his second first term; Ukraine climbs down in humiliating insta-concession after Trump shutters military support; Trump team warms up to fire HALF of the IRS; and we already have our answer to the Kennedy op-ed. We didn’t have to wait long.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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The Nation breathed a heavy sigh of relief last night, as the presidential podium was occupied by an indefatigable President who could deliver a spirited Congressional speech without relying on a cocktail of high-octane uppers and sleeping for a week in advance. Feeling totally inadequate to meet the moment, the Teleprompter party was sullen, churlish, and increasingly unhinged leading up to President Trump’s Joint Address to Congress. The Washington Post ran the story beneath the headline, “Defiant Trump signals full speed ahead on divisive policies.”

“We are just getting started,” Trump began. Full speed ahead.

A dynamic President started strong: He is back, which means America is back. “Our momentum is back, our spirit is back, our pride is back, our confidence is back, and the American Dream is surging bigger and better than ever before.” He continued, “The American Dream is unstoppable, and our country is on the verge of a comeback the world has never witnessed, and perhaps will never witness again. There’s never been anything like it.” As I have repeatedly told you.

Trump’s first 50 days has already outperformed most Presidents’ first two years. Unsurprisingly therefore Trump shattered chatty-Cathy Clinton’s previous speech record and delivered the longest Presidential address in history (100 minutes). I suspect the number of standing ovations also set a record last night, but I don’t have that data handy. It sure seemed like it.

Zelensky holds no cards. And last night, Trump stacked the Democrats’ increasingly thin deck against them, repeatedly daring the surly progressives to embrace more politically indefensible positions. They kept taking the bait. At one point, for instance, they refused to stand to honor Laken Riley’s grieving family. They sat stony-faced for other crowd-favorite visitors, like a young lady who’d been brain-injured by a transsexual boy who spiked the ball in her face, permanently ending her sports career.

“We’re not going to put up with it any longer,” Trump said with a hint of barely restrained anger.

He kept deliberately provoking the Democrats, and was especially hard on Biden, who he repeatedly called a pathetic failure. At one point, he looked straight at the liberal side of the chamber, wagged his finger, raised his voice, and scolded them, “Joe Biden let the price of eggs get totally out of control! Totally out of control.” And he got personal. “Our justice system was taken over by radical left lunatics and weaponized against people. Like me.”

Democrats, hounded to fight back by the same partisan activists that they trained how to dog conservatives, came primed for chaos. They let Trump talk for just over two minutes before they started a tiny insurrection, booing over everything Trump was saying, while Trump tried raising his voice to talk over them, and then they just booed louder.

It didn’t last long. Unbothered, Speaker Johnson stood, mildly adjusted his microphone, coolly directed Democrats to maintain decorum, and in a tone like he was asking for directions to the gift shop, directed the Sergeant at Arms to physically remove heckling cane-waver Rep. Al Green from the chamber and restore order.

That did it. After the Sergeant quelled the limp insurrection, Democrats quieted down, for the remainder of the speech waving silly signs saying “I’m retarded” (or words to that effect), and huffily walking out one by one trying to create camera moments for their constituents. Bye, Felecia!

Apart from that, they just sat and took it, spanking after spanking.

🔥 The address itself was a gripping, unfiltered, enthusiastic hodgepodge of Trumpism. It was part stump speech, part victory lap, part scathing critique. He rattled off a dizzying list of incremental victories and fulfilled promises, and promised more. The frenetic pace and sheer volume of information weren’t just a feature of the speech; they were a perfect metaphor for Trump’s first 50 days—fast, overwhelming, and relentless.

For those of you who earlier this week wished I’d listed all of Trump’s first-month achievements—watch the speech. You’ll love it. Here’s the WSJ’s full video. Skip the grand entrances and scrub to when Trump takes the podium.

Notable by its absence, Trump wisely played his cards close to his poker vest, not disclosing many details of what might be coming next. He didn’t need to— there was already plenty to talk about.

I expect today’s social media to be suffused with spicy applause lines. For instance, Trump said, “I terminated the Green New Scam,” and “I withdrew from the corrupt World Health Organization.” He spoke directly to kids, saying “You are perfect the way you are.” He read off a laundry list of DOGE-identified waste, which itself could have been a comedy routine. (Here’s the clip (1:58).) For instance, “$40 million dollars to improve the social and economic inclusion of sedentary migrants— nobody knows what that is!”

In promising terms, the President triggered progressives at every turn, once calling out “shocking levels of incompetence and fraud in our Social Security system.” He casually called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.” She sat there helplessly and took it. Mean!

Perhaps the evening’s most emotional moment was when Trump honored Corey Comperatore’s sacrifice. (Here’s the clip (3:00).) In sober tones, the President introduced Corey’s wife and daughters, describing how they were literally saved by Corey’s protecting body. “I believe I was saved by G-d to make America Great Again,” Trump finished, “I believe that,” and Corey’s family applauded.

Someone should give his speechwriters a raise. The address’s conclusion was dramatic, patriotic, wildly encouraging and insanely optimistic. And it was followed by a sustained standing ovation (clip, 2:16):

Now it is our time to take up the righteous cause of American liberty, and it is our turn to take America’s destiny into our own hands and begin the most thrilling days in the history of our country. This will be our greatest era. With G-d’s help, over the next four years, we are going to lead this nation even higher, and we are going to forge the freest, most advanced, most dynamic and most dominant civilization ever to exist on the face of this Earth.

We are going to create the highest quality of life, build the safest and wealthiest and healthiest and most vital communities anywhere in the world. We are going to conquer the vast frontiers of science, and we are going to lead humanity into space and plant the American flag on the planet Mars, and even far beyond.

Through it all, we are going to rediscover the unstoppable power of the American spirit. And we are going to renew unlimited promise of the American dream. Every single day we will stand up and we will fight, fight, fight for the country our citizens believe in and for the country our people deserve. My fellow Americans, get ready for an incredible future, because the golden Age of America has only just begun. It will be like nothing that has ever been seen before. Thank you. God bless you and God bless America.

🔥 One issue worth special mention: Ukraine. This morning, the UK Independent ran an astonishing story headlined, “Ukraine war latest: US ends intelligence-sharing – Starmer insists Trump ‘reliable’.” Uh oh. Yesterday, the U.S. shut off Ukraine’s intel feed.

Absent U.S. intelligence, the Ukrainian military is dead in the Ukrainian mud. Shuttered. Kaput. Dasviydanya, Maria. We provided all their targeting information, warned them of threats, and fed them real-time battlefield intel. It was “a move,” the Independent admitted, “that could seriously hamper the Ukrainian military’s ability to target Russian forces.” Haha, “hamper.”

More like plug, pulled. No more soup for you.

🚀 On Tuesday, Trump signaled a “full” pause on U.S. military aid— since Kiev’s Martial Law Administrator (formerly known as “President” Zelensky) doesn’t actually want peace. We know now that “full” included intelligence sharing. Within hours yesterday, Zelensky folded like a cheap pair of cargo pants.

During last night’s address, Trump told Congress he’d received an “important letter” from the tiny president. The New York Post ran the story headlined, “Trump announces he received letter from Zelensky asking to come back to ‘negotiating table’ after Ukraine prez was booted from White House.”

Trump read the letter aloud: “The letter reads, quote, ‘Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer. Nobody wants peace more than the Ukrainians.” And then the kicker: “‘My team and I stand ready to work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts.’”

(Hopefully, Trump will first insist that Ukraine reverse the 2022 law it passed forbidding any negotiation with Russia while President Putin remains in office. Otherwise it will be a pretty boring negotiating session.)

Yesterday, Zelensky (or whoever writes his tweets for him) mirrored the letter’s sentiment on X. He has learned to stop worrying and love the minerals deal. His tweet said that now, suddenly, he will sign Trump’s deal, after all, and he’ll do it “any time, and in any convenient format.” I will sign it on a house! I will sign it on a bus! I will sign it with a mouse! I will sign it anywhere.

Meanwhile, the Proxy War “experts” who assured everybody who’d listen yesterday that Ukraine could last for “months” if Trump paused military aid— they all experienced sudden, painful aneurysms provoking apopletic Teret’s-style swearing sessions that were picked up by a NASA probe passing Jupiter.

Zelensky’s tweet also included a half-baked apology, or more accurately, the infamous diplomatic, passive-voiced statement of regret:

In other words, holding no cards, Zelensky stopped bluffing and folded. The art of the deal. It may have felt humiliating in Kiev, but was most humiliating in Brussels. It was a PR defeat for Old Europe on a Waterloo scale. After dwarflike Zelensky was tossed out of the White House, he’d fled straight to Old Europe, where he was swaddled in royal regalia, hugged until he squealed, serenaded, and promised undying love. European leaders convened ‘emergency’ meetings, solemnly vowed to take up the slack on Ukraine aid, and spewed defiant statements at the United States.

But any fantasy that Europe could possibly pick up the slack winked out of existence yesterday, right after Zelensky caved. Old Europe was exposed as a spent-force, a fraud, and a toothless lion, like a hogtied Scooby-Doo monster after its rubber mask gets ripped off at the end of the episode. Look! It was just Old Man Simpson the whole time!

Whatever influence Old Europe might have had, it’s over. It was always astroturf.

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Yesterday, the New York Times devolved into a full panic, running a story headlined, “Trump Administration Pushes to Slash I.R.S. Work Force in Half.” Leaping to find the glass half-empty, the Times’s sub-headline groused, “Americans may have to wait longer to receive tax refunds.” Cue the tiny violins.

“The IRS is preparing to shed as much as 50 percent of its staff,” the Times marveled, “a significant cut that could jeopardize the agency’s ability to complete its basic mission of collecting taxes.” Progress. Maybe they should consider pruning up the tax code? Maybe that would cut down on the workload? Oh, nevermind.

As always, it was the terror of the possible. The Times found three possible catastrophes to complain about. First, a possible delay in “processing refunds.” Second, maybe longer wait times for phone service. And third, there might be fewer audits.

Not fewer audits! Joe, say it isn’t so. (Chalk up another 80/20 issue Trump is claiming for the GOP.)

But the real problem is that the IRS isn’t exactly crushing it. According to a 2023 CATO Institute article, things at the nation’s most feared and despised agency are not super great:

• The IRS answers the tax-assistance line only about 11% of the time, and those lucky souls got through after an average of 29 minutes on hold.
• 28 percent of calls received a “courtesy disconnect,” which is IRS-speak for hanging up on people after they’ve been on hold for 90-120 minutes, and telling them to try it over again later.
• The IRS takes over 350 days to resolve cases of identity theft involving fake returns.
• IRS staff enter paper returns into the IRS system by hand, resulting in up to 43% error rates.
• Treasury’s inspector general estimated the IRS could save over $200 million a year in labor costs just by ending manual data entry of paper returns.

They haven’t exactly created a loyal fan base, either:

• Unlike all other criminal law, in tax cases the burden of proof is on you, the taxpayer, not the government.
• You get no trial by jury in Tax Court.
• The Fifth Amendment does not apply to tax matters. Taxpayers must sign their returns “under penalty of perjury”— regardless that it might later be used against them in a criminal case. In other words, no Miranda. They don’t read you your rights.
• Since last year, even selling a broken toaster on eBay gets you a 1099-K, dumping the burden on you to prove you didn’t turn a taxable profit.

And that’s just the administrative incompetence—we haven’t even touched on the weaponization of the IRS for political purposes. If you want to read a more complete primer on the IRS’s many failures, that 2023 CATO Institute article is a great place to start.

DOGE it! I would call cutting IRS in half a good start.

💉💉💉

Yesterday, we discussed HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s op-ed about the Texas measles “outbreak” and the MMR vaccine, and I urged you to withhold judgment and see what HHS does. We only had to wait one day. The headlines were, as they say, a target-rich environment. I choe the far-left New Republic, which shrieked: “RFK Jr.’s Solution for Measles Outbreak Has Health Experts Horrified.” If ‘health experts’ were horrified, you know it had to be good.

CLIP: RFK Jr’s scandalous solution that has experts’ knickers twisted is: cod liver oil (1:15).

“What we’re trying to do,” Kennedy explained, “is restore our faith in government and not particularly dictate what people ought to be doing.” Specifically, the CDC — under Kennedy’s direction — sent teams to Texas bearing Budesonide (a 30-year old steroid), Clarithromycin (an antibiotic), and cod liver oil, “which has high concentrations of Vitamin A and Vitamin D.”

But what about the vaccines!

Last Friday, terrifying public health gatekeepers even more, the CDC quietly added a section on Vitamin A to its measles webpage, explaining the supplement may be given to infants and children under supervision as part of supportive management. The new language provided dosing recommendations and explained that severe measles cases requiring hospitalization should “be managed with vitamin A.”

But! But! Nobody makes money from cod liver oil!!

The new measles guidance was part of a larger push that Kennedy hinted at in his op-ed. The Vitamin A advice was just a small part of many recent updates to CDC guidance about “therapeutic medications.” The fact that this kind of basic medical information was missing, and that adding it is at all controversial, proves just how uselessly vaccine-obsessed the CDC had become.

💉 “The CDC is actively supporting Texas state health officials and will be on the ground Tuesday working with the frontline health care providers,” said Kennedy’s principal deputy chief of staff Stefanie Spear. A Washington Post article reported that HHS is, in fact, sending 2,000 doses of measles vaccine to Texas — for anybody who wants them — along with shipments of Vitamin A.

In Gaines County, Texas, the center of the measles outbreak, WaPo reported “residents have embraced vitamin A and cod liver oil as crucial ways of getting through the surge.” Gaines County is home to a large Mennonite community— Christian anabaptists, of mostly German descent. They accept modern medicine but “prefer home remedies and traditional healing methods.”

In other words, the CDC is responding to the needs of the community rather than to the diktats of white-coated overlords.

The WaPo’s article was a circus of the usual suspects, like bowtied-wonder and vaccine developer Peter Hotez. They were all extremely concerned about the risks of Vitamin A. You can overdose on it! It can make you think you don’t need a vaccine! Of course, there wasn’t a single reference in any of the corporate media articles to any risks posed by the MMR vaccine.

💉 In light of these fascinating developments, we can now scrutinize more closely the carefully selected words in Kennedy’s op-ed. For a deeper dive, read this encouraging Substack by Jenna McCarthy, which several alert C&C readers recommended in yesterday’s comments section. But I’d like to focus on a single sentence that I believe is key to unlocking Kennedy’s vaccine strategy: informed consent.

Here’s the most important paragraph from Kennedy’s op-ed:

Health freedom advocates were badly triggered by that final sentence, which ends “make vaccines readily available for all those who want them.” It seemed like an endorsement. But standing alone, it is an uncontroversial throwaway line. Of course, in a free country, people have the right to choose their own health care, including vaccines — so long as they know what they are choosing.

Our biggest problem with vaccines isn’t their bare existence. It’s the government-fueled disinformation and all the lies about their outsized risks and underwhelming efficacy, which is why the immediately preceding sentence was so important. Kennedy isn’t going to charge right up the drawbridge leading to Big Pharma’s best-defended castle. He’s diving into the moat, swimming up the septic tunnel, and planting a bomb.

“This includes ensuring that accurate information about vaccine safety and efficacy is disseminated.” That key sentence, which itself sounds like a throwaway, includes a critical key word: accurate. Accurate information about safety and efficacy.

I promise you that Big Pharma understands the sinister significance of the word, “accurate.” Those eight letters drip with dreadful provenance. Kennedy’s smiling op-ed, seemingly spreading sunshine on the wonders of vaccine science, is a mask. “There is a dagger in men’s smiles,” Donalbain observed in Macbeth, and never was that more true than of Kennedy’s cleverly constructed jab endorsement.

Here’s why. If parents fully understood the real risks and relatively minor benefits when considering whether to vaccinate their healthy babies, they might think twice. They might hesitate. “Here’s the Gardasil shot!” the pediatrician chirpily suggests, “which won’t prevent uterine cancer in you son— since, haha, he doesn’t have a uterus … that we know of! But under the crazy new HHS guidelines, I’m legally required to tell you there’s a tiny chance that he could, well, sort of die from it. Unlikely, but it’s possible! Plus, we have no idea about the long-term risks, but who has time for that? So—what do you say? Ready for that injection?”

In a very Trumplike fashion, Kennedy is flipping the script on them. Kennedy is turning the concept of vaccine hesitancy inside out. He’s saying, you should hesitate, at least long enough to learn what you’re actually getting and what it might cost you.

Hesitation isn’t ignorance. It’s intelligence. It’s the natural instinct of any rational person informed about a medical intervention that carries risk, uncertain long-term effects, and a track record of regulatory corruption. That they concealed critical information under a blanket of hand-waving and trust-the-science™ — while branding informed consent as a thought-crime — gives the whole game away.

Far beyond merely challenging the narrative, Kennedy is ripping up the rulebook and rewriting the instructions.

Under fair rules, they’ll lose— every single round. Here comes the needle of truth, and there might be some injection-site discomfort.

But don’t worry— it’s only going to hurt for a very long time.

See? I told you. Let the man work.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! C&C shall return tomorrow, same Bat time, and same Bat substack, with another delicious and satisfying roundup of essential news and commentary. Upgrade to paid

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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.