Opinion
By Jeff Childers
3/15/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! In the weekend edition roundup: with apologies, a full-throated morning monologue deemed this year’s surreal motif and describing why no one seems able to keep up with President Trump’s political alchemy; Joe Biden’s presidency of unreality and his fake oval office debuts at last; President Autopen’s cabbage-like orders raise legal questions; Trump legal team claps back with blockbuster Supreme Court appeal challenging nationwide epidemic of TROs and injunctions; and Trump and Putin put on a masterclass about negotiating for the hapless corporate media.
🪖 C&C MORNING MONOLOGUE 🪖
As early as January, last year, we deemed 2024 to be the historic year of broken records. It never let us down. For instance, consider the Democrats’ side of the electoral campaign. Starting in the summer, Joe Biden flamed out in a record-breakingly poor debate, he was pushed aside in a historically public intra-party coup, and then the Democrats introduced a lowest-polling-ever replacement candidate and did it later in the campaign season than had any previous post-convention switcheroo. (Curiously, Democrats have pulled this trading-places trick at least three times, but Republicans have never switched candidates after their convention.)
Then in the vote, Democrats set their worst records with men, latinos, blacks, and hispanics, shattering their fantasies about permanent majorities and casting a terrifying pall of prospective permanent minority.
We are now in March of 2025. The Chinese Year of the Dragon is over. We are now in the Year of the Snake. This year’s new motif is not just about setting new records. Breaking a previous record implies some kind of incremental improvement (or failure) along an existing track, like a runner who completes the quarter mile faster (or slower) than any runner has ever raced before.
But this year’s historic events aren’t merely extensions, exaggerations, or new records. We’re living through historical alchemy that’s cooking up a novel element. A unique combination of disparate material factors are melding together in an accelerating spontaneous reaction. These prediction-defying factors include absolutely unique human personalities (e.g., Trump, Musk), novel technologies (e.g., A.I., worldwide wireless internet, ubiquitous handheld devices), and a nascent global world empire pooling into something completely new like drops of mercury assembling from scattered bits of Pax Americana.
It’s creating a whole new type of surreal substance, an entire, novel reality knitted from a Twenty-First century high-tech fabric. That word, “surreal,” has two parts. First, a French prefix, sur, which means above, beyond, or over. Second, the latin root realis, which means actual, existing, or true. So, surreal literally means something beyond reality or above the real. It’s different from “unreal”—which suggests something made up or imaginary.
Rather, surreal implies a distortion or exaggeration of reality itself, to the point where things acquire a dreamlike quality.
Just a few quick weeks ago, President Trump casually renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. He didn’t appoint a two-year, blue-ribbon committee to study the name change and give him advice. He just did it. Boom. Who cares what anyone thinks or says about it? Next.
I dare you to argue that Trump’s talk of annexing Greenland and Canada isn’t surreal. He’s not even hinting around—he’s said it outright, repeatedly, with signature bluntness. He’s been entirely consistent in his explanations: America needs Greenland for Arctic security against Russia and China. Canada, he’s argued, cannot exist economically without the U.S.—so why pretend it’s independent? Just make it the 51st state and move on.
And, crucially, President Trump doesn’t seem to be joking. And we’re now actually discussing annexing all of North America.
🪖 The media (and many other folks) struggle to comprehend that it is really happening. They are almost stunned, in shocked (and often outraged) disbelief. The media and much of the public, conditioned by a lifetime of politicians saying one thing but meaning something completely different, still struggle cognitively to accept current events. They keep retreating into mental safe spaces, assuming Trump must be bluffing, posturing, or trolling.
But they also assumed that about his border wall in 2016. They assumed that about moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. They assumed that about the original tariffs on China.
And yet, here we are—watching the impossible become inevitable.
Frankly, I doubt they are even sure what’s exactly is going on. Like the rest of us, media is struggling to keep up with the frenetic rush of events. Media isn’t even sure what to disbelieve. And I hardly blame them. The timeline itself is flying at hypersonic speeds, defying the laws of physics, far beyond anything we’ve previously considered to be possible in the real world.
🪖 Christopher Nolan’s 2010 movie Inception might be the most appropriate metaphor. In its iconic scene, a dramatic scene unfolds (and refolds) inside a bizarre lucid dream, with the cityscape of Paris bending, folding, and reshaping itself in impossible ways, its classical architecture warping beyond all physical limits while somehow preserving an indescribable sense of coherent reality.
That dreamlike sequence is a perfect visual metaphor for 2025’s Year of Surreality. The world isn’t dissolving into chaos. It’s reorganizing itself into something structurally sound but completely beyond traditional expectations. The laws of political physics aren’t breaking, but they’re bending in ways nobody thought was even possible.
Except President Trump. He saw possibilities that no one else saw.
🪖 One of the most dependable axioms of life has always been that government is glacial. Fast government is altogether new. Hypersonic government is literally unthinkable. The fact it’s happening is not just an extension of the world before, or some kind of incremental improvement.
Trump isn’t reinventing government— he’s reimagining government. Not just government. He’s reimagining a new, new world order.
2025 seems so surreal because history isn’t acting like we expect. Things are happening too marvelously fast, and too magnificently openly. The old world order is breaking apart in real time, but instead of dissolving into chaos, something altogether new and uniquely American is taking shape. But what?
We don’t know yet. Trump’s called it a “Golden Age,” but in classic fashion, he has not yet precisely described the endpoint. (Nor should he, given who his enemies are and what they are capable of.)
So, for better or worse, we’re all passengers on an unidentified flying vessel moving at impossible speeds, bending the rules of history like a UFO warping space-time. The old world isn’t just ending—it’s folding in on itself, Inception-style, with new shapes emerging in real time from a molten forge of historical alchemy. What was once thought immovable is liquefying, reacting, and speeding up. The gravitic laws of past assumptions are failing.
The world expects politics to obey obsolete laws, but Trump is rewriting the rules in mid-flight —building a new UFO while flying it— untethered, accelerating, and unconcerned with the politically “impossible.”
But it isn’t a dream. It’s not an illusion. It’s more than real— it’s surreality. Will the stubborn creatures of history collapse back into the swamp? Or are we looking at a different new world order that Davos never, in its wildest fantasies, could have possibly foreseen?
Think I’m exaggerating? Let’s look at some news.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
🔥🔥🔥
For our first example of 2025’s surreality, how would you like to hear the true fable of Alina Habbaba and the magic autopen?
To set the stage, so to speak, consider this Reuters headline from a little over four years ago, which ran one week after Biden’s inauguration:
Having established corporate media’s position on the matter, now let’s take a look at the video uploaded this week by Trump’s personal attorney Alina Habba:
CLIP: Trump lawyer Alina Habba shows Biden’s fake movie set Oval Office (0:27).
Alina turned the camera around the green-screened studio and revealed Biden’s giant teleprompter. In contrasst to President Trump, who is busily wearing out reporters daily with all his unscripted remarks and open-ended pressers, Joe Biden occasionally showed up in an Eisenhower building studio, where he read off short scripts that were undoubtedly written for him by someone else.
And, lest you feel tempted to forgive Reuters’ diligent ‘fact-checkers,’ remember that the media participated in propagating this unreal fakery— because it was right there, filming the so-called president. The years of unreality.
But Biden’s fake Oval Office was only the beginning.
🔥 The UK Daily Mail ran a breaking story last week headlined, “Biden autopen signature appears on almost every document, report finds.” The presidential autopen has a long and storied history. President Eisenhower began using the mechanical device to sign letters and thank-you cards back in the 1950s. But in 2011, President Obama infamously used the presidential autopen to sign a Patriot Act extension while he was traveling in Europe— the first known use of the scribbling gadget to enact a law.
After skeptics complained, the DOJ issued an infamous opinion that presidential autopen signatures were legal, so long as the president had authorized it and knew what the document said. You can understand the logic in this digital age. Even a mouse click on an “I accept” button constitutes a legal signature these days, letting Jimmy Johns ding your bank account for the rest of your life for $7.95 a month, as its brand-new member of the hasty-sub-club.
And it’s all perfectly legal, even if you didn’t read all the three-point type in the End User License Agreement.
In the digital era, what even is a signature anymore? Well, Joe Biden fully embraced that philosophy and went wild with it. He autosigned everything— including, apparently, plastic spatulas (I am not making that up).
This week, news broke of Intrepid independent researchers at the Oversight Project, organized by the Heritage Foundation, who compared all Biden’s executive order signatures. Unsurprisingly, they found that nearly every single Biden executive order was not signed by the presidential cabbage but by the presidential auto-signing machine. Even the Fauci pardon. Even the pardon for his own family:
CLIP: Oversight Project— watch multiple Biden signatures collapse into identical form (0:15).
So far as I know, Biden set records by becoming the first president to robotically sign his own executive orders. Hey, that signing pen is heavy. And every time you get to the office, it’s sign this, sign that and then who has time for watching Nickelodean reruns and reading your niece’s diary?
🔥 On March 5th, Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey asked the DOJ to investigate all this robotic signing and confirm that Biden actually knew they were even doing it:
It raises an intriguing question: if Biden didn’t know what his rogue autopen was signing, then who did? And if it wasn’t Biden, are all those pardons legal? Remember— the key question over legality is informed consent. While Biden might be presumed to have authorized the autopen’s use, where is the evidence?
Surely, for a presidential act as significant as signing bills into law, executive orders, or pardons for large groups of crooked malefactors, there should be some evidence of prior approval.
🔥 The story does not seem likely to fade away soon. If anything, it is picking up autopen-like speed. Yesterday, the New York Post ran a story headlined, “Biden sources suspect key aide may have abused autopen as Trump’s ‘far more restrictive’ signing rules revealed.” According to the Post, “two former White House sources” accused one particular key Biden aide of exceeding their authority, by liberally using the mechanical scribbling robot to sign official documents on President Autopen’s behalf.
The Post responsibly (and probably to avoid a lawsuit) did not disclose the ‘key staffer’s’ name, absent any non-testimonial evidence, and in light of denials by former colleagues. But the source said other staffers wouldn’t necessarily know, since Biden’s White House culture was “shut up and don’t ask questions.”
The Post asked the alleged autopen aide, but they “did not respond to requests for comment.”
🔥 On Thursday, reacting to the news, President Trump signed a strict new order setting out restrictive guidelines for using the presidential autopen— all common-sense rules you could easily predict. The Trump autopen is never to be used for anything with official effect, such as EOs, bills, appointments, pardons, or nominations, and not even more routine things like memos or invitations to foreign leaders.
In all official settings, Trump will only sign official documents in front of at least two witnesses.
Yesterday, President Trump gave a major speech at the Department of Justice (to the Department of Justice). Among his wide-ranging and pointed remarks about two-tiered justice, Trump commented on the burgeoning Biden autopen scandal (0:17). He said, “You don’t use autopen. Number one, it’s disrespectful to the office. Number two, maybe it’s not even valid. Biden had no idea what the hell he was doing.”
It’s not fair to call Biden’s over-muscled autopenning ‘record-breaking.’ The debate itself is astonishingly surreal. It defies prediction. How is it possible that we are learning of Biden’s overuse of green screens and fake signatures— and the still unanswered question of whether he ever even knew what he was doing?
In defending all this artifice and automated governance, Democrats and the culpable media have scrubbed into oblivion the already-blurry line between official, legal reality and movie-magic stage management. At this point, the better questions might be: what, if anything, was real about Biden’s presidency? And if not Biden, who was the real president?
🔥🔥🔥
Getting back to reality, this week —with gratitude— we witnessed the next important step snap into place in the Trump Team’s ongoing lawfare plan. The Bablyon Bee ran a related satirical story under the surreal headline, “Federal Judge Appoints Himself President.”
But in real (surreal?) news, this week, Trump’s legal team appealed to the Supreme Court for a stay of a Maryland court’s preliminary injunction that shut down Trump’s new birthright citizenship rules. Combining two other similar injunctions from Washington and Massachusetts, the president’s lawyers finally tackled the epidemic of federal district courts issuing a record-shattering raft of national injunctions that, all together, micromanage the executive branch down to a nub, with liberal judges creating and enforcing their own personal political policy positions.
Here’s how the excellent appellate brief described the problem of so-called “universal injunctions:”
These injunctions, empowered by clever forum shopping to find liberal, Trump-resistant district courts, weave together into patchwork of interlocked or “overlaying” orders, which create a completely anti-federalist miasmi of complicated and conflicting rules:
The appeal was cleverly framed in the context of the three specific injunctions on appeal, but it clearly invited the Supreme Court to finally craft rules about how broadly and how often district courts can enjoin executive branch activity. Can the courts literally extend judicial protection to people beyond the actual plaintiffs in the lawsuit to everyone in the entire world, including illegal immigrants who haven’t even entered the country yet (but are giving it serious consideration)?
For decades, the Supreme Court has delicately danced around the issue of universal injunctions, but has never definitively cabined their scope. The conservative justices, particularly Thomas and Gorsuch, have often signaled deep skepticism of district courts wielding nationwide policy-shaping power, particularly when those injunctions are weaponized against the executive branch.
I expect several key themes to emerge from the Supreme Court’s analysis of this appeal. First, is the Separation of Powers issue. Universal injunctions effectively let unelected district judges act like super-legislators overriding executive action without check. That’s a direct challenge to the constitutional balance of powers.
Second, the issue of Judicial Overreach versus Proper Relief. Traditionally, injunctions should only apply to specific, named plaintiffs, not hypothetical or future parties. The Supreme Court will likely reaffirm this strict standard, and reject the notion that district courts can possibly grant relief applying to the entire country—or beyond.
Finally, the Forum-Shopping Problem. The Trump team’s brief hammers on the coordinated lawfare of cherry-picking liberal courts to engineer politically motivated injunctions. The Supreme Court may even set new limits that could prevent a handful of progressive district judges from effectively governing the entire nation from the bench.
If the justices want to rein in this chaos, the Trump team has teed up the perfect case for it.
👨⚖️ Finally, it’s perfect timing. This appeal wasn’t really just about three birthright injunctions— it’s about them all. Trump’s legal team deliberately let the national judicial overreach play out before making their move. Rather than challenging the issue after a single ruling, they let the lower courts leap onto the pig-pile, creating a critical mass of conflicting, overlapping, and contradictory rulings.
The eager progressive judges helped create a perfect storm of legal absurdity that the Supreme Court cannot ignore.
President Trump’s lawyers waited for the precise right moment to strike— not just to fight a single injunction, but to force the Court to tackle the systemic problem. And now, the legal minefield laid by activist judges is so preposterous that even neutral observers must admit that something has to change.
We’ll be carefully watching this case.
🚀🚀🚀
Yesterday, we looked at the public negotiation dance playing out between President Trump and President Putin. A new song has begun to play. Reuters ran an encouraging story yesterday afternoon headlined, “After Trump request, Putin says he will let Ukraine troops in Kursk live if they surrender.”
Appropriately (and surreally), it all started yesterday with a Trump tweet on Truth Social, requesting that President Putin spare the lives of Ukrainian troops surrounded in the doomed Kursk salient:
Later in the day, President Putin addressed his Security Council saying he’d read Trump’s appeal. “In this regard, I would like to emphasize that if [Ukrainian troops] lay down their arms and surrender, they will be guaranteed life and decent treatment under international law and the laws of the Russian Federation,” Putin informed his team in a part of the meeting that was publicly broadcast.
Tellingly, President Putin stressed the new policy was in response to Trump’s ask: “To effectively implement the appeal of the US president, a corresponding order from the military-political leadership of Ukraine is needed for its military units to lay down their arms and surrender.”
Bizarrely, Ukraine defiantly insisted its Kursk troops are not surrounded, so there is no reason to surrender. Media reported those crazy claims without criticism, but also without enthusiasm. Nobody seems to believe Zelensky.
As usual, witless corporate media completely missed the mark, clueless to the fact that Putin’s concession shows progress in the delicate peace negotiations. Most media framed the story as Putin’s “demand for Ukraine to surrender.” For example, here’s the Seattle Times’ take:
Media couldn’t see an elephant if it were sitting in the passenger seat. Here’s the actual timeline: yesterday, Putin graciously reviewed the US’s proposed cease-fire, and responded with a bunch of correct but complicating questions, including what happens to the surrounded Ukrainian troops in Kursk? Can they just walk away?
Trump indirectly responded to that question with his tweet. It coyly avoided actually asking for anything, but rather suggested Russia should spare their lives. And Putin, citing Trump’s request, agreed. He promised that if the Ukrainians lay down arms and surrender, he will guarantee their safety. It is a huge improvement —right now, they face imminent death— and more importantly, it resolved one of Putin’s most important questions about the proposed cease-fire’s terms.
🚀 President Trump masterfully deployed a well-known negotiating technique called incremental agreement. Rather than trying to get your adversary to agree to a large, complicated deal, you start by peeling off the easiest issues one-by-one. After your negotiating partner starts saying ‘yes,’ or ‘da,’ each subsequent incremental agreement becomes that much easier, and before you know it, Bob’s your uncle and you have a final deal.
It was a win for both parties. Putin handed Trump a highly visible incremental agreement that went to the heart of Trump’s stated goal: to stop the killing. For his part, Putin garnered points for being reasonable and for visibly working toward a deal—which blows the media’s stonewalling narrative to bits. And the Russian president skillfully jammed the Ukrainians into a painful crack: if they refuse to agree and lay down arms, he’ll then be fully justified in wiping them out.
And then the Americans can blame Kiev, for Zelensky’s stubborn intransigence.
That explains why the Ukrainians are pretending their troops are not surrounded. That unbelievable claim is the only remaining safe spot to hide in. Of course, everyone realizes they should order the troops to put down their weapons, rather than letting the Russians turn them into battlefield chum. But the Kiev regime has long showed a strategic choice of never surrendering. It’s the last thing they want to do.
And very soon now, somebody is going to ask Zelensky the obvious question, why not just order any surrounded troops to surrender? If no troops are surrounded, then asking them to surrender wouldn’t matter, would it?
See what just happened? Trump meaningfully convinced Putin to change Russian military policy—on Twitter. (I know, Truth Social.) Meanwhile, Ukraine’s government is reduced to incredulously denying the battlefield even exists. The game of peace-deal hide-and-go-seek is moving fast, and Zelensky is running out of hiding places. They’ve already chucked the dimunitive former comedian out of the negotiating room. Very soon, the inevitable and only question will be: does Ukraine want peace or not?
Have a wonderful weekend! Then log back in on Monday morning for all the latest essential news and commentary. Till then.
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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.
