Better in their words…

JEFF CHILDERS APR 25, 2026

Good morning.Getting the $22 Billion back is important, but unless the swamp is really drained of the stealth deep state actors, it just kicks the can down the road I’m with Childers on Marijuana: I don’t want it around. And cleaning up DC is great! mrossol.

ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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Politics meets the munchies. Yesterday, the AP reported, “Trump reclassifies state-licensed medical marijuana as a less-dangerous drug in a historic shift.” Get out your dispensary cards, there’s more to this historic story than meets the eye.

For our entire lives, the federal government has treated marijuana with the exact same level of regulatory concern as weapons-grade plutonium. Under the law, cannabis has been classified as a Schedule I substance, meaning it has “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” It sat right there on the list next to heroin and LSD, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the Uber Eats driver to deliver a 24-pack of Taco Bell chalupas.

But Thursday, the Justice Department, on orders from President Trump, decided it was time to harsh the government’s mellow. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order to officially reclassify state-licensed medical marijuana as a Schedule III drug.

For perspective, Schedule III is the regulatory equivalent of the shallow end of the pharma pool. It’s where they keep Tylenol with codeine. It means the federal government is finally conceding that maybe, just maybe, the stuff your kooky aunt grows in a flowerpot on the backside of her porch won’t cause the collapse of Western civilization.

To be clear, and to illustrate the broader point, I have wandered a long way into the medical freedom camp, but I still personally oppose legalization. I understand the libertarian argument, but I also don’t want to see coin-operated gummy dispensers in Walmart. I don’t want to have to pre-lick my kids’ Halloween candy to see whether I get a contact high. I have concerns about some people’s susceptibility to serious side effects and their obvious inability to drive faster than 15 mph.

But this move was a classic Trumpian third way.

It did not make marijuana federally legal. But it did massively improve the tax situation for state-licensed cannabis businesses, which can finally deduct their business expenses. Until now, the IRS has treated these companies like they were running a smuggling operation out of a Miami basement. Now that growers can pay taxes like other regular businesses, retail prices will, presumably, plummet. So break out the tie-dye and the Spicoli quotes.

Personally, I would support an outright ban on pot products and sales. I have a harder time with laws about what people can grow at home, which is where my libertarian thread flares up like an angry leg rash. So you can chalk this up as another example where I disagree with the President, but I’m not rage-quitting over it.

🔥 There’s a much bigger story here. And I couldn’t possibly improve on the political Ted Talk that late-night comedian Bill Maher gave during his show this week. Bill Maher — a man who has spent decades donating to the Democratic Party while simultaneously looking like he just woke up from a nap in a tour bus— explained how ‘TAW’ works better than anyone in the media has so far.

CLIP: Bill Maher on Trump’s issue-picking superpower (7:13).

The real story here isn’t the tax code or marijuana classifications. The real story is politics. Maher delivered a monologue that started by telling Democrats, “I told you so.” Bill argued that elections aren’t won with lofty, abstract speeches about “saving the soul of America” or “muh democracy.” Elections are won by fixing the things that actually annoy regular people on a daily basis. You might call them 80/20 issues within smaller, discrete voting blocs.

Maher mused that Trump has mastered this technique. He called it a “coalition of little things that hit people personally.” For instance, Trump ran on “no tax on tips,” and every waitress in Las Vegas immediately understood what that meant for her wallet. (Nevada flipped for Trump.) He ran on jettisoning the TSA’s stupid shoe-removal ritual. (Moses, praise the roses.) He ran on fixing low-flow toilets, lackluster LED lights, and stingy showerheads. He ran on saving TikTok (even after targeting it during Trump 1.0), which spiked the youth vote.

As Maher put it with brutal accuracy: “Kamala ran on ‘democracy,’ which is the most important issue, but without the political skill to sell it, it added up to nothing. Meanwhile, Trump was running on, ‘I’ll make the poop go down.’”

It’s one micro-TAW after another.

🔥 Trump just did it again, this time with marijuana. For decades, Democrats dangled the carrot of marijuana reform before independent-minded voters. They yammered about it, they convened gold-star committees over it, they promised to promptly look into it— right after they finished making girls’ sports safe for boys and thereby “saving the soul of America.”

This story’s timing, landing within striking distance of the midterms, was not accidental. Trump came along, studied the Democrats’ evergreen marijuana promises, and said, “Let’s just reschedule it.” Boom. Done. Issue captured.

In one move, he scooped up another passionate, highly motivated voting bloc (well, highly motivated when they aren’t napping). As Maher explained, marijuana was the last tangible, personal issue that Democrats still owned. And Trump just walked over and grabbed it off their plate, the same way he grabbed the crypto bros in Silicon Valley and grabbed RFK Jr.’s MAHA voters who prefer their cereal be made out of actual grain instead of glowing petrochemical byproducts.

It turns out that a billionaire real-estate developer from Manhattan, a guy who has probably never unclogged his own toilet or ever had to take off his shoes and walk barefoot across the TSA’s germ mats, is still somehow better at listening to the daily grievances of the real American voter than the entire Democratic strategist class.

The Democrats keep losing to a guy who promised to make the commode work on the first flush.

Trump understands that, while voters do care about the big picture, they alsoreally care about their shower pressure, their tips, and their right to buy state-licensed cannabis without the DEA kicking down the door. They care about those things much more than the current state of the Strait of Hormuz.

And those small-but-important issues all translate directly to smaller government, which has been the Republicans’ main theme ever since the Reagan revolution.

Trump is teaching many Democrats and independents how unexpectedly valuable shrinking government and reducing regulations are. Meantime he keeps peeling off one historically democrat voter group after another. The midterm pitch is already scripted: vote for Republicans— or the Democrats will take away what you just got.

The Democrats have noticed. They are quietly attempting a Clintonesque triangulation, and are tacking right, running straight white guys all over the country. Headline from Axios, a month ago:

But at the same time, they can’t help following their instincts. They continue leaping right into a progressive purity spiral at the same time. It’s weird how clueless they seem, considering all the intellectual heavyweights leading that party, by which I mean perfect nitwits like Ilhan Omar, Jasmine Crockett, and blue-haired Rosa DeLauro.

As I said, I have mixed feelings and some reservations about the change. But for our libertarian friends and MAHA freedom extremists, the good news is that the federal government now says your medical marijuana is only as dangerous as cough syrup with codeine.

Aloha, Mr. Hand.

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Yesterday, Fox News —and only Fox— reported a massive development that sent tentacles of terror through the Democrat donor class. The headline: “Vance task force reveals Biden admin ‘protected’ 562K pandemic loans in $22.2B suspected fraud scheme.” The Biden Administration didn’t cover up pandemic loan fraud because it was committed by conservatives. Think about that for a second.

As a taxpayer during the pandemic, you will surely remember the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL). These programs were created by the federal government with the noble goal of keeping small businesses afloat while simultaneously shutting them down. The applications were easier to fill out than a below-average waiver to enter a children’s trampoline gym.

In other words, the government achieved this noble goal of saving Main Street by taking an enormous firehose, hooking it up to the U.S. Treasury, and blasting trillions of dollars out the window while screaming, “TAKE IT! TAKE THE MONEY! NO QUESTIONS ASKED!”

But down on the bottom of each and every form, in barely visible six-point type, was a stern warning about lying, a right for the government to claw back inappropriate payments, accompanied by a nearly incomprehensible string of tiny numbers and letters identifying various federal statutes that provided years and years of potential prison time. Nobody paid any attention to this paragraph. (Except for my clients, since I highlighted it in bright yellow ink for them.)

As it turns out —this will not even surprise Portland readers— when you offer people free money with zero oversight, you create what economists call a “moral hazard.” They are tempted to bend the rules and take the free money, or to grab more than they should. Some of these people were actual small business owners. But many, many others were enterprising individuals who suddenly discovered they owned, for example, highly lucrative ‘ballet studios’ in the weathered plastic Home Depot sheds in their backyards.

According to the Vice President’s fraud task force, we’ve learned that at least $200 billion of this emergency-aid money was stolen by fraudsters. That is a staggering amount. It is enough money to buy every single person in America a very nice riding lawnmower. Instead, it went to creative people who concocted fake basketball leagues, imaginary farms, and phantom employees.

Usually, when someone steals billions of dollars from the federal government, the government gets cranky and sends people with windbreakers and badges to collect it. But according to yesterday’s announcement from the Small Business Administration (SBA), the Biden administration took a different approach. They quietly determined that chasing down covid fraudsters was just too much hassle.

“After extensive review, and with the strong support of the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force, we are taking our most decisive action yet to end a Biden-era scheme that protected over 560,000 borrowers tied to more than $22 billion in suspected pandemic-era fraud,” SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler explained.

In other words, SBA has finally referred a half a million (562,000) already identified fraudulent loans to the Treasury Department— for collection. They total $22.2 billion.

Fox reported that the Biden administration had flagged these 562,000 loans as highly suspicious, and then did absolutely nothing about them. They didn’t send them to collections. They didn’t refer them to the Justice Department. They just slid them into a bottom drawer, presumably labeled “DO NOT OPEN UNTIL WE HAVE A BASE ON MARS.”

The SBA press release called President Cabbage’s non-prosecution a “de facto amnesty scheme.” In layman’s terms, this means the government knew that a guy named “John Doe” who claimed to have 100 employees at a business called “John’s Totally Real And Not Fake Exotic Animal Farm” had stolen $2 million, and the Biden Administration’s official response was, “Well, animals are important, too. Even fake ones.”

But … why not? Biden went after every single J6 tourist and scads of abortion clinic prayer warriors. Why not round up all the covid fraudsters? Who are they?

To understand how absurd this really is, look at the kind of fraud we are talking about. This wasn’t sophisticated, Ocean’s Eleven-style cybercrime. It wasn’t even Learing Center level fraud. This was people using deceased relatives’ Social Security numbers to apply for loans. This was people claiming to run multi-million-dollar agricultural empires out of a one-bedroom apartment in Queens. In one terrific example, an online lender approved hundreds of pandemic loans to “farms” with names like “Devious” and “Beefy King.”

If you or I tried to deduct a $53 business lunch on our taxes, the IRS would audit us so hard our grandchildren would feel it. But if you told the Biden-era SBA that you needed a million dollars to cover payroll for your amateur basketball league —an actual case where a man just pleaded guilty— the government apparently handed you the cash and then deliberately looked the other way while you never paid it back.

Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland prosecuted around 1,000 covid fraud cases. There is no clear partisan pattern; Republican donors and Democrats appeared in the list. As early as November 2020, the Project on Government Oversight reported on large political donations following equally large PPP loans. (Curiously, POGO’s article briefly mentioned Marjorie Taylor Greene as having a potential covid loan problem related to her construction business, which makes you think.)

Administrator Loeffler stated that the Trump SBA is now “working to claw back stolen taxpayer dollars and hold fraudsters accountable.” The agency announced it has already suspended over 110,000 borrowers in California alone, tied to $8.6 billion in suspected fraud.

🔥 Which brings us to the obvious question: Why? Why would the Biden administration deliberately shield half a million suspected fraudsters from the consequences of their own actions?

If you look closely at where this fraud was concentrated, a very interesting pattern emerges. The Trump SBA has already suspended over 110,000 borrowers in California, representing $8.6 billion in suspected fraud. That is a massive chunk of the total— over a third. And where do you suppose the rest of it is hiding? If you guessed “deep blue urban centers where Democrat political machines rely on a constant flow of federal cash to keep their constituents happy,” you won the prize.

But now, the bill is coming due. And this could have massive implications for the 2026 midterms.

You can run the numbers without a degree in political science. The Biden administration looked at a list of 562,000 people who had essentially looted the Treasury, realized that a statistically significant portion of those people lived in key Democrat strongholds, and decided that prosecuting them might be bad for morale. Nothing ruins a get-out-the-vote rally quite like the FBI showing up to arrest the precinct captain for inventing a fake poultry farm.

This ‘de facto amnesty’ was, essentially, a $22 billion taxpayer-funded stimulus package for the Democrat base. It was the ultimate political patronage system: We gave you the money, we know you shouldn’t have it, but we’re going to let you keep it. Remember that in November. Or else.

The Treasury Department now must track down 562,000 people who have spent the last few years believing they had successfully pulled off the greatest heist in American history. It’s like trying to squeeze $22 billion worth of toothpaste back into the tube. But the Treasury has lots of tools and techniques; for instance, it can grab any federal payment to that person and apply it to the outstanding debt (like social security payments, grants, tax refunds, and so on). It can also transfer collections to private agencies, file lawsuits itself, and threaten to make criminal referrals to DOJ.

More importantly, it means that hundreds of thousands of people in blue states are about to receive a very nasty letter from the federal government demanding our money back.

Naturally, this will make a lot of morally flexible people intensely angry. And angry people tend to vote (unless they have felony convictions; just saying). But who will they be angry at? The Trump administration, for finally enforcing the law? Or the Democratic politicians who promised the gravy train would never stop flowing?

And now what happens to blue donations? A half-million Democrats are suddenly going to need as much cash as they can lay hands on, for lawyers and settlement payments.

If we don’t try to get this money back, then we are sending a very clear message to the American people: working hard and paying taxes is for suckers. The real money is in autism centers, hospice, childcare, and fake orange groves.

So, to the 562,000 people who are about to get a letter from the U.S. Treasury: I hope you enjoyed the free money. And if you bought a riding lawnmower with it, you might want to put it on Craigslist. You’re going to need the cash.

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Yesterday, at my son Luke’s Spring Recital, the band director spent a sober moment reflecting on the importance of beauty. He’s not the only one. Yesterday, CBS reported, “Trump says he’ll resurface the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, turning it blue.” The project, originally projected to take three years, has already started and will be done in a few weeks, well in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was originally built in the 1920’s. It stretches between the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial/Washington Monument along the National Mall. Its basin totals over 300,000 square feet and is over 2,000 feet long— the length of around twelve Olympic-sized swimming pools stacked end-to-end.

The Reflecting Pool has prompted a great deal of reflection. In 2012, Obama spent $34 million to “renovate” the pool, and the before-after distinction was so stark it required scientific instruments to detect. Visitors often describe the water as green, sludgy, and filled with algae. One August 2024 Yelp review noted the pool had “very little water,” and what water it did have was “green, brackish, and emanates a not exactly edifying smell,” with ducks walkingrather than swimming. Another 2024 review mentioned being “surprised to see how dirty it was; cigarette butts, food wrappers, algae, etc.”

President Trump decided to fix it and described his plan during this week’s Oval Office event about TrumpRx, in a classic Trump topical diversion. “It’s filthy, dirty—the water looks disgusting,” the President said, adding that, “it leaks like a sieve.” In short: “It doesn’t represent our nation.” He described asking a government contractor for a quote to properly repair the pool. They quoted $300 million and three years of construction.

The President smelled an overpriced rat. So he called some of the pool guyshe used back in the day when he was building hotels and asked for a “fair price.” He told them to treat it like it was a very big swimming pool. The result: a $1-2 million quote, a 40 to 50-year lifespan, and a forecast of one week. They asked for his surface color preference, suggesting “American flag blue,” and Trump immediately accepted. “It will look more beautiful than when they built it in 1922, much more beautiful,” he said.

In November, President Trump posted a “before” video on his Truth Social feed captioned “Make the Capitol Beautiful Again,” and told us to “bookmark it.” Well, here it is, in time for both the Washington, DC, anniversary celebration and the midterm elections. But that wasn’t nearly all the beautifying.

Earlier this month, BusinessWeek ran a story that reported “President Donald Trump is reshaping Washington, DC, from the White House to federal buildings.” A few examples include the Reflecting Pool, the new East Wing ballroom, building renaming, proposed new monuments, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and the most recent example, the Lafayette Park fountain, which is nearly complete.

CLIP: Nearly refurbished Lafayette Park Fountain (0:11).

The twin Lafayette Park fountains are ornamental, circular basins set in the lawn panels east and west of Andrew Jackson’s statue in Lafayette Park, directly north of the White House across Pennsylvania Avenue. They had fallen into disrepair and stood bone-dry for several years (2021–2024) before the Trump Administration prioritized getting them operational again.

The fountains flank one of the strangest visual juxtapositions in Washington: a flamboyant equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson on a horse balancing only on its hind legs —the first of its kind in the world— surrounded by calm lawns and modest fountains. (Historical note: the statue’s 1853 artist, Clark Mills, had never seen an equestrian statue before. He worked with horse cadavers and his own stallion —named Olympus— to figure out the balance. At the dedication, he threw his own body against the front legs to prove it wouldn’t fall.)

Earlier this year, the National Park Service started a major Lafayette Park rehabilitation that includes repairing the historic fountains, installing new pumping systems and underground vaults, and upgrading irrigation, turf, benches, and hardscape. This week, the fountains were turned back on —for the first time since the Cabbage infested the White House— with water running even as the surrounding construction continues. It is a liquid metaphor for how history continues drowning the Biden Era and how the waters of freedom are flowing again.

🔥 Beauty in a national capital is not a luxury. It is one of the ways a people tells the truth about itself without words. Monuments, fountains, gardens, and even the everyday facades of bureaucratic buildings all form a kind of civic mirror, reflecting back what a nation believes is worthy of honor and what future it imagines.

When visitors walk onto the Mall or look across Lafayette Park at the White House, they aren’t just seeing stone and water; they are seeing a visual argument about order, permanence, and aspiration. Capitals that neglect beauty tend to feel provisional and brittle, as if their institutions expect not to be loved or remembered. Capitals that cultivate it, by contrast, invite citizens into an emotional relationship with their own country.

Trump’s second-term “beautification” drive in Washington is a visible demarcation line between eras. It doesn’t just tweak décor; it is aggressively rewriting the capital’s aesthetic script. Previous presidents largely operated within a shared vocabulary of incremental restoration: tune up a garden, repair a façade, maybe add a sculpture here or there— but always as careful custodians of inherited symbolism.

Trump the Builder, by contrast, has treated Washington as a personal construction project: a $400 million White House ballroom, a paved and rebranded “Rose Garden Club,” towering banners on federal facades, a triumphal arch proposal, and a campaign to repaint, relight, or recolor everything from fountains to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It is a shift from stewardship to authorship.

That is why the current wave of projects, like turning dead fountains back on in Lafayette Park and across the District, functions as a bright line in time, a cultural demarcation point. On one side is the Capital’s long post-Cold-War decline, a gradual relaxation into the aesthetics of battered homeless citizens, garbage mountains, broken infrastructure, security fences, police tape, ugly stained building facades, and piles of goose droppings.

It was a long, disappointing story of pessimism and a slow surrender to the forces of entropy.

But now, we are on the other side. We are building a newly energized, humanized, personalized capital, where beauty is mobilized as a uniquely American brand: giant arches, flag‑colored pools, and ballroom-scaled entertaining spaces that tie the look of the city more tightly to a positive, optimistic identity, a new birth of freedom, growth, development, and adventure.

I wonder how future historians will evaluate all the Democrats’ lawsuits to stop this in its tracks. Not well, I hope. Why any American would want to keepour capital in perpetual decline is a question that invites a very serious and troubling answer.

Kudos to President Trump and all his beautification projects. America is grateful.

🔥 Finally, notice the thread that runs through all three of today’s stories. It’s about Democrats’ broken promises and their perpetual failure to deliver. Democrats promised marijuana reform and never delivered. Democrats flagged $22 billion in fraud and decided not to collect. Democrats spent $34 million on the Reflecting Pool and the ducks walk on dirty concrete. President Trump is finishing everything the Democrats started‚ and making it beautiful again.

Have a wonderful weekend! We shall return on Monday morning, with another delicious and intellectually nutritious roundup of essential news and commentary.

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