Opinion
By Jeff Childers
9/3/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Today’s roundup includes: liberals cry themselves to sleep after Trump appears alive, in person, at Oval Office announcement event; Space Force returned to its original location following Biden political shenanigans; House Committee releases Epstein documents, hears witness testimony, and teases bigger things to come; Times op-ed begins to recognize the awful outlines of the master plan; Democrats scheme to recapture House and sideline Trump agenda, but realities intrude; and the FDA’s vaccine committee sees a notable change in personnel.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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The wells of the great deep opened yesterday, as a flash flood of liberal tears threatened to submerge Portland. This morning, the New York Times frontpaged this unbelievable, only-in-2025, Trump-deranged headline: “President Trump Is Alive. The Internet Was Convinced Otherwise.” It was the sum of all fears made manifest: proof of presidential life.
At his widely-watched announcement yesterday, a reporter even pitched the impertinent but highly amusing inquiry, “Mr. President, when did you first learn you were dead?”
Not since the Great Ramp Incident of January 2020 has Trump’s health so consumed the left. They were sure they had him, this time. This time, it was even worse than his slow stroll down a long ramp in the light rain. But alas, their dreams were dashed. Following “three days of silence” —i.e., only 90 posts on Truth Social— Trump popped up more alertly than Punxatawney Phil at a groundhog convention. Surprise, britches!
The Times haughtily held itself above the fray, blaming the controversy on what it called “legions of hyper-online Americans” —i.e., doomscrollers— on TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, and X, who “were ablaze with commentary.” Indeed, the Times confirmed, “there had never been a conspiracy wave as feverish as this one.”
(In other words, Trump Derangement fever is getting worse. They really should get that looked at. But I digress.)
Though the Times started out strongly implying we didn’t fall for it, the mask quickly slipped, and the story revealed that one of the feverish, dashed-hope doomscrollers was the Times itself. It spent over six full pages detailing all the evidence the deranged, doomscrolling leftists had relied on, including full-size photos of the bruise on Trump’s right hand and so on. In other words: See? Don’t blame us! We had good reasons.
More Democrats watched Trump’s announcement about moving Space Force to Huntsville yesterday than had watched the Inauguration. What can you say about President Trump’s marketing genius? He literally did nothing and captured the entire news cycle. He’s a once-in-a-lifetime talent. We’ll never have another one.
🤣 As further evidence of the complete snit that the disappointed Times had worked itself into, it completely ignored the actual reason for Trump’s announcement, which was relocating the Space Force HQ from Colorado to Alabama— where it had originally been assigned before Biden shifted it to the nation’s recreational marijuana capital.
NO, President Trump seemed to say yesterday. It goes over HERE.
Upon entering Huntsville, Alabama, it becomes immediately obvious why the town is the perfect fit for the new military branch, and why locals call it “Rocket City.” When I delivered a speech there last year, I caught an Uber from the airport to downtown. Traveling down the highway, one enters an awe-inspiring giant’s playground of massive buildings, littering the landscape, each bigger than the last, altogether appearing like scattered blocks that gargantuan beings living above the beanstalk play left behind after playtime.
Every big building has a familiar big sign decorating its side. Raytheon, Blue Origin, SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, phases I-III of the Von Braun Complex, and so on, a seemingly endless gallery of big-box defense contractors and space companies. They are all right there.
Downtown Huntsville hums with high-tech electricity. Miniature rockets decorate the lamp-posts. Spaceship-shaped jungle gyms dot the kids’ section of the park. People from every country and every state stroll purposefully, as if on important missions, between the town’s colorful buildings, restaurants, parks, and hotels.
“There’s probably more Ph.Ds and engineers in Huntsville than there are in Silicon Valley,” said Ken Spencer, the site lead for Pratt & Whitney in neighboring Madison, Alabama, which provides specialty coatings for the aerospace industry. “This is a tremendous place.”
“It’s been amazing to me,” said Patti Dare, a Raytheon site manager who relocated from New England to Huntsville in late 2019. “I haven’t seen cooperation like this anywhere. I’ve never seen anything like this culture or this environment.”
The town is skyrocketing amidst a multi-billion-dollar high-tech building frenzy. Everything in Huntsville feels brand new. Standing in downtown, it is immediately obvious to even the most TDS-deranged Democrat that Huntsville has rocket fever.
More importantly, in 2020, Huntsville won two consecutive technical contests run by the Air Force for the site (after other states complained about the first round, the military re-launched the contest— and Huntsville won again). But as soon as Biden infested the Oval Office, he overrode the double-selection and re-aimed the nation’s newest military branch at Cheyenne Mountain in deep-blue Colorado. (In 2023, a Times subheadline admitted Biden’s move was pure politics.)
Yesterday’s Space Force re-relocation was not just logical and fair, but also budget-friendly. Since everything is much cheaper in Alabama than in Denver, the not inconsiderable cost of relocating Space Force to its original selected site will be eclipsed by the annual operational savings.
As with so many other things, President Trump is making everything bad from the Biden era come untrue.
Which probably explained why corporate media snidely ignored yesterday’s actual news —Space Force’s dramatic and controversial restoration— but instead headlined stories about Trump being not dead.
Be aware that Trump derangement kills (brain cells). Do not ignore the warning signs.
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Speaking of TDS conspiracy theories, the Washington Post ran a related story yesterday headlined, “House committee releases first batch of Epstein documents.” Although the new docs included several thousand unpublished documents, nobody is happy, especially Democrats. Somehow, Democrats have determined that somewhere, buried in an overlooked burn bag stuffed with Epstein files, is the key to killing Trump. Since he’s stubbornly still alive, that is.
I’ve tried but failed to find the inflection point when progressives stopped ignoring Jeffrey Epstein and started insisting that the real coverup is about protecting President Trump. Never mind that it was Trump’s DOJ that ended Epstein’s reign of abuse and terror, or that Biden’s DOJ had the case files for the last four years— but Dems never demanded anything be “released.”
Liberals are as sure that Trump was the real Epstein architect as they were that Trump died over the Labor Day weekend. (Not surprisingly, the Times ran its sneering Epstein files story right under the prior story about Trump’s miraculous survival.)
Anyway, the House Oversight Committee has been hard at work, releasing “more than 33,000” documents, of which at least 1,000 pages were never-before-seen, and interviewing survivors in closed session. Fiesty Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna posted this teaser on X yesterday:
Luna said “Slavic foreign governments were named working with Epstein.” What do you want to bet one of those Slavic foreign governments has a fake, corruptocratic president whose name rhymes with “Smellensky?” I’d bet Michelle’s Tahoe on it.
Don’t overlook the tweet’s significance: Luna dropped “international trafficking networks,” “immigration fraud,” the US Treasury, and Deutsche Bank. In other words, she described a state-sponsored, big-dollar, international conspiracy— not just gigabytes of grotesque child porn that ‘somehow’ found their way into the now-useless FBI files during Biden’s tenure.
Remember: Bondi never said there was no Epstein conspiracy. She just said that evidence wasn’t in the FBI files. It appears Republicans are quietly redoing the Epstein investigation, except properly and methodically this time.
For some reason, some conservative black-pillers buy the Democrats’ theory that the “Epstein files” contain some sort of Trump-killing smoking gun. For the life of me, I will never understand why. If that were true, why didn’t Biden use that smoking gun to erase Trump’s political existence? (Democrats cling to a far-fetched theory about unidentified Trump holdovers at FBI shielding the smoking-gun documents during the interregnum.) You guys are on your own with that theory; have at it in the comments.
Can you see what kind of magic is happening here? Democrats are now hanging on every new release from Republicans, carefully reviewing all the trickled-out Epstein material (trying to find their smoking gun, but still). And —this is the most important point— if they ever want to hang Trump with Epstein’s prison sheet, Democrats will have to demand justice for all other names as they surface, too.
Does anyone really believe that Democrats’ fascination with this story happened on accident? Or because President Trump —whose DOJ arrested Epstein— really fears the facts? You really think Congressional Republicans like Anna Paulina Luna and James Comer are defying some Trump directive to “bury the Epstein story?”
It looks to me like the Epstein story is being disclosed, just slowly and painfully, and not in the way we’d pictured it. And somehow the Democrats have come onside with Republicans in demanding justice. It’s a kind of miracle.
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Yesterday, the New York Times ran an overheated op-ed headlined, “Trump’s Most Fateful Teardown Is Happening Now” (originally titled, and I am not making this up: “Trump Wants to Drown Us in a Sea of Chaos”). It might have been titled, “TAW—Trump Always Wins.”
I’m not exaggerating. The very first sentence dramatically declared, “President Trump is winning.”
The author wasn’t happy about that. He was downright morose. Morose, but long-winded: “Universities retreat, law firms submit, scientific and medical funding is decimated, federal employees are purged, tariffs are imposed, military has become the police, and the Smithsonian was forced to eliminate criticism of America’s past.” He sees this as a divide and conquer strategy. “The president targets each constituency in isolation,” the article explained, “leaving all divided and vulnerable, a fragmented opposition bound by the traditional rules of political engagement.”
His divide-and-conquer characterization is debatable. How does he think President Trump could have possibly fought them all together? It wasn’t explained. The suggestion conjures images of that final conflict at Armageddon, with all the massed Marxists in the world facing off against a lone capitalist.
Issue by issue, the article confirmed everything we’ve observed about Trump 2.0. It quoted Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, who’s been at the forefront of debates over university reform and the Trump administration’s attacks on the university:
You see? Those two highlighted sentences said exactly what we’ve been saying: First, Republicans are running a well-organized, interlocking, comprehensive, all-of-government plan. Second, the Democrats had no idea it was coming.
This incredible operational security is more of an accomplishment than it looks at first blush. After all, the Democrats had in hand a 700-page executive summary of Trump’s plans: the Project 2025 document. Democrats practically wrote poems of protest about it. So they had some warning, but they lacked most details of how Project 2025 would flood through the entire federal government in one dramatic pass.
Progressive hysteria over Project 2025 has morphed into grudging admiration:
Expecting Democrats to coalesce into an intellectual movement capable of developing a plan with heft, conviction, energy, and coherence seems like a heavy lift.
Which brings us to the Washington Post’s political entry.
🔥 This morning, the Washington Post ran a story headlined, “Inside the Democratic plan to recapture the House majority in 2026.” Apparently, it’s not a particularly great plan, as the sub-headline suggested: “Their effort is running up against harsh political realities, from Trump’s efforts to revamp the House map to a tarnished Democratic brand with abysmal approval ratings.”
It’s officially midterm season. And House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is racing and readying. He’s “racing to release a plan to revive a depressed base and sell voters on a Democratic Party that hears their concerns,” and he’s “readying a new Democratic agenda intended to turbocharge efforts to recapture the House in 2026 and make him speaker.”
With Democrats’ long-overdue “post-mortem” all but forgotten, Mr. Jeffries has concluded that kitchen-table economics are the party’s winning issue. “House Democratic leaders introduced an initial set of principles based around affordability, health care, and ending government corruption,” WaPo reported.
But there’s a toxicity problem. Call poison control! “Our brand is really toxic right now,” Representative Tom Suozzi (D), who represents a New York swing district, said. “Everybody’s registering as independents because they’re fed up with this whole thing.” Representative Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) said, “We have to be honest. There are places where Democrats have fallen short, and we need to be able to say that, too.”
“Lawmakers,” WaPo said, “are ringing the alarm that voters don’t know what the party stands for.” Well. Some voters do, but that’s a different problem.
Democrats say their 2026 agenda “is not final and will change,” but for now lacks “any stances on crime and immigration.” The article briefly mentioned Speaker Newt Gingrich’s wildly successful 1995 “Contract with America,” which was only unveiled a month before the midterm elections. But WaPo’s tone was less “they’re hiding a secret plan” and more like, “they don’t have the plan nailed down yet.”
The Contract with America is an interesting callback, though. Unlike Gingrich’s clearly stated 10-point plan, Democrats currently have only slogans without specifics. How —specifically— will they accomplish “affordability?” They don’t say, and WaPo called it out: “the issues Democrats are likely to include — health care and lowering costs — are hardly novel, and they’ve run on them before.”
Whereas Democrats are faced with the troublesome task of coining brand-new ideas, Republicans are sitting at a salad bar of existing possibilities. President Trump has teased the possibility of a 2026 GOP Convention, which has never been done for midterm elections. It’s classic Trump —put on a show!— but the idea includes echoes of 1995. At major party conventions, voters expect a platform.
Republicans have a lot to work with, such as promises to make permanent the most popular parts of Trump’s second-term accomplishments. The possibilities are astonishing. Just consider all Trump’s 80/20 issues.
For instance (just spitballing), a “Contract 2.0” could promise to pass permanent 10% tariffs— alongside a major income tax cut. It could ban “no-bail” and “catch-and-release” policies. It could make summary deportation more automatic and limit “due process” for non-citizens. It could protect women’s sports. It could shave vaccine liability protections. The possibilities are endless.
It’s going to be an exciting, maybe historic, midterm cycle. The ideas for items in a Republican Contract 2.0 practically think themselves up. Give me your ideas in the comments.
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The Guardian carried what was perhaps yesterday’s best news. The article ran below the headline, “RFK Jr critic Paul Offit removed from FDA vaccine advisory committee.” Bye, Felicia!
Grandfatherly Paul Offit isn’t the disinterested scientist that corporate media suggests. He’s the consummate insider. He co-invented the rotavirus vaccine Rotateq, cashing out for tens of millions in royalties, which makes him less of an objective adviser and more of a salesman in a lab coat.
While sitting on the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, he helped guide policies that benefited the very industry from which he profited, a glaring conflict of interest. Offit has also become the media’s favorite go-to “expert,” quick to dismiss parental concerns about safety as “anti-science” while tossing off cavalier soundbites like “children could handle 10,000 vaccines at once.”
During the pandemic, mild-mannered Offit emerged as one of the loudest defenders of the vaccine establishment, becoming a permanent fixture on CNN, NPR, and in the pages of the New York Times. As a member of the FDA’s vaccine committee, he routinely backed emergency authorizations and aggressive rollout strategies, occasionally voicing pro-forma technical concerns, but always ultimately voting in favor of mass vaccination.
Throughout the pandemic, he positioned himself as a bulwark against asking questions, castigating even mild hesitation as dangerous. He became the human face of the “public health priesthood”: a so-called scientist with deep pharma ties, regulatory influence, and a media megaphone, pushing mandates while dismissing the lived concerns of ordinary Americans.
Now, without warning, Offit is off of it (the FDA’s vaccine panel). He said he wasn’t given a reason. Notably, the only person the Guardian quoted for its stupid, biased story (besides Offit himself) was dumpy, bow-tied wonder Peter Hotez, who has also made a fortune in vaccine sales. No other committee members, HHS staff, or anti-vaxxers had a chance to speak. So much for balance.
More progress, and more accountability.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! Get your steps in and come back here tomorrow morning, for more essential news and commentary.
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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
