Better in their words…

JPMorgan admits debanking Trump; Tariff deals survive SCOTUS and disappoint dems;. NYT’s Kristof gets red-pilled on red-state schools; Voter fraud debunk backfires; Mar-a-Lago raid coordination. Empty lot registrations.

Source: CONFESSIONAL ☙ Sunday, February 22, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS

ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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America’s largest bank spent the last five years denying it did exactly what everyone knew it did. Yesterday, JPMorgan Chase finally ran out of consequence-free lying room. The Associated Press ran the story, headlined, “JPMorgan concedes it closed Trump’s accounts after Jan. 6 attack.”

JPMorgan Chase acknowledged for the first time that it shut down dozens of Trump accounts —personal and business— in February 2021, right after January 6th. The accounts included Trump hotels, housing developments, retail shops in IL, FL, and NY, plus Trump’s personal private banking account handling his inheritance from his father. The closing letter, which directed him to “find a more suitable institution,” signed off with “Thank you for your attention to this matter,” which has ironically become Trump’s favorite phrase.

President Trump did find a more suitable institution: state court in South Florida.

The one-line concession made news because, until yesterday, JPMorgan had stubbornly refused to admit it yanked the President’s accounts after January 6th. The bank, playing it coy, would only offer foggy hypotheticals about when it generally does and doesn’t close accounts, hiding behind the skirts of bank privacy laws. We can neither confirm nor deny…

But in a recent motion arguing for moving the case from Florida state court to a federal court in New York, the mega-bank was forced to strategically concede what Trump has claimed all along— that it did in fact close his accounts. “In February 2021, JPMorgan informed Plaintiffs that certain accounts maintained with JPMorgan’s CB and PB would be closed,” the bank’s new filing admitted.

It was legal chess, or at least checkers. Conceding that point sacrificed a pawn to potentially shift the locus of harm from Florida to New York, where the bank is headquartered. Under the law of venue —the choice of lawsuit location— most cases must be filed where an injury occurred. That’s why the bank’s previous refusal to even admit that any harm occurred left the bank vulnerable to accepting Trump’s version of events.

Trump sued JPMorgan Chase and its CEO, Jamie Dimon (personally), for $5 billion in damages based primarily on three claims: trade libel (think defamation), Florida’s Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act (skeevy or unethical conduct), and for breaching Trump’s accountholder agreements (bad faith contracting).

Five billion in damages would sting, even for JPMorgan. Red Florida juries aren’t likely to be sympathetic about J6 debanking, so you can easily understand why the bank made this early admission— it’s desperate to get the case as far away from Trump’s home court as possible. It’s deeply cynical, though. Fine, we did it, okay? But we did it in New York, so we can only be sued there.

Confessing sin is good for the soul.

I don’t know what the judge will do, especially in a hyper-political case like this. Nobody can sensibly predict anything. But if the case stays in South Florida, JPMorgan will have a pretty hot time. I can’t predict the judicial decision, but I can see the outlines of a generous settlement looming in the bank’s future. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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Yesterday, I took a controversial position on the Supreme Court’s tariff decision, arguing that despite all the triumphant headlines wallowing in joy over the “devastating blow” to Trump’s “signature policy,” Democrats’ celebrations would be short-lived as reality sets in. It took one day. Here’s the first headline, from yesterday’s New York Times:

“The Supreme Court may have ruled 6-3 against President Trump,” the Times began. “But Mr. Trump seems intent on continuing the experiment he has run with the U.S. economy over the past year, in which he has raised tariffs to levels not seen since the 1930s.”

Haha, good one, Times. In spite of its sneertastic description of Trump’s Tariffs as “an experiment” —from the same paper that couldn’t find any experiment in mRNA vaccines, just saying— the Times was forced to admit that tariffs continue and they are working so far.

Not only that. Yesterday, progressives also began to realize that, during the last year while a slow Supreme Court let Trump continue using IEEPA to build out his tariff dashboard, the President already accomplished a lot. Such as negotiating with a bunch of countries that have already ‘done deals,’ and Trump no longer needs any tariff authority with them.

“Countries which signed deals with the U.S. and agreed to a tariff above 15 percent are now disadvantaged,” said the chief executive of a geopolitical consulting firm. (Indonesia, Malaysia, and Cambodia already agreed to 19% tariffs, for example.) In other words, the tariff project is well underway— regardless of the Supreme Court.

It’s not over yet. Many other countries have not yet finalized trade deals. But as the initial euphoria wears off, Democrats are starting to understand that we are a lot further along the tariff turnpike than they’d realized.

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The New York Times just published what might have been the most painful opinion column in its history. Top columnist and Times staple Nicholas Kristof ventured out of the elite bubble into the heart of darkness —Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana (after getting all his shots, one presumes)— and reported, unironically, that, and I quote, “These Three Red States Are the Best Hope in Schooling.”

Let that sink in for a second. The New York Times— the paper that has spent decades dismissing the South like it was an educational porta-potty— just sent a Pultizer Prize-winning columnist to Mississippi, and he came back saying they’re doing school better than everybody else.

It’s not even close. After adjusting for demographics like poverty and race, Mississippi ranks number one in the entire country in fourth-grade reading, fourth-grade math, and eighth-grade math. Louisiana is number two in reading. Alabama has the lowest chronic absenteeism of any state tracked. And here’s the stat that should keep every progressive education bureaucrat tossing on their organic pillows: Black fourth graders in Mississippi are better readers than Black fourth graders in Massachusetts— which spends over twice as much per pupil.

Twice the money, half the results. That’s not an education gap, that’s a scam.

Kristof’s column was remarkable not just for what it said, but for what it accidentally confessed. He admitted that “many of my fellow liberals scoffed” when he first wrote about Mississippi’s initial gains in 2023. He admitted blue states “succumbed to the idea of lowering standards in hopes of improving equity.” He even quoted the old George W. Bush line about “the soft bigotry of low expectations”— in the New York Times!

Someone order a well-check for the editorial board.

🔥 Education is titrating into two discrete models. The blue states are easing standards so that the numbers look better. Oregon reduced graduation requirements. San Francisco stopped teaching algebra to 8th graders. Progressive schools embraced “equitable grading”— no zeros, no late penalties, unlimited test retakes.

The result is that blue-state GPAs are rising, but their standardized test scores like the ACT are plunging. At the same time! 12% of UC San Diego freshmen can’t do middle school math despite 4.0 GPAs. In other words, they couldn’t even tell you how many 12% comes to. Almost half —nearly 40%— of Stanford undergrads are registered as disabled. For the first time in its history, Harvard is teaching freshmen remedial algebra.

Meanwhile, what you might call the “red” model focuses less on “fairness” and more on accountability. In these red states, third graders cannot graduate to fourth until they complete their reading requirements. Attendance is closely monitored and truancy laws are enforced. Alabama even publishesstudent report cards, and top performers are often highlighted in local news.

They take attendance very seriously. “When students are embarrassed to go to school because of bad hair or teeth,” Kristof said, “teachers try to find them free haircuts or dental care — whatever it takes.” The extra effort isn’t surprising, since Mississippi’s educational “office of accountability” publishes lists shaming the 10 school districts with the lowest graduation rates.

One Marion County, Alabama, superintendent told Kristof, “The secret sauce is quite simply no excuses.” The result? “A Black Mississippi child is two and a half times as likely to be proficient in reading by fourth grade as a Black California child,” Kristof gloomily reported.

Kristof’s entire point, a point he cautiously approached like a housecat stalking a careless cardinal, and only made quickly, before speeding away from the scene of the thoughtcrime, was that progressives’ relentless monofocus on money has been wrongheaded from the jump.

“What’s particularly impressive is that the Southern surge states lifted student achievement with only modest budgets,” he reported. “Spending per pupil in Alabama and Mississippi was below $12,000 in 2024, while in New York it was almost $30,000.”

“We liberals need to wake up to the reality that we are being outperformed,” Kristof concluded, “on education, opportunity and racial equity — supposedly our issues.” If only progressives could focus more on outcomes than virtue signaling.

Mr. Kristof —who once sought the Democrat nomination for Oregon’s governor— is getting red-pilled.

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Yesterday, Marc Elias’s Democracy Docket ran a defiant story headlined, “Right-wing influencers are going viral claiming voter fraud. The problem? They’re wrong.” The article set out to debunk viral videos from conservative influencer Benny Johnson and commentators David Khait and Fabian Garcia, who visited vacant lots, abandoned buildings, and UPS stores in California and Georgia where dozens —sometimes hundreds— of voters are unaccountably registered.

Democracy Docket’s devastating rebuttal was, and I am not making this up: yes, that’s all true, but it’s actually a good thing.

How wonderful are these goofy liberal fact-checking articles that debunk themselves, saving us all the work. Paragraph two: yes, 26 people are registered to vote at a vacant lot with a portable toilet. Paragraph five: yes, 70 people are registered at a homeless shelter that closed in 2017. Paragraph eight: yes, 96 people are registered at a UPS Store.

But the evil conservative influencers are still wrong. You see, under Georgia and California law, homeless people can register at literally any location they can describe in any language: cross streets, vacant lots, porta-potties, Circle-K’s, churches, homeless shelters, underpasses, warm feelings, fading memories, leprechaun groves, UFO landing pads, and “near where that taco truck used to park on Fourth Street.” Influencer post on X:

Democracy Docket’s argument, if you can call it that, was that this shows the system is working for homeless people. What else do you want them to put down for an address? But … why folks with mental illnesses and substance problems who can’t even manage basic life skills should be voting about anything remained a different, unexplored question.

The article’s key source was a Fulton County, Georgia, commissioner who excreted this gem: “even if some people have the wrong address, the percentage of people we’re talking about still would not have affected the outcome of the 2020 election.” In other words: okay fine, we can’t verify these registrations, but just trust us here: it doesn’t really matter.

But where do they send the mail-in ballots? The vacant lot? The taco truck?

This article debunked nothing; it was a footnoted confession. The way Democrats are framing proven registration fraud reminds me of how they wave off covid vaccine injuries. Well, maybe a few people get pancreatic cancer from the jabs, but it is super rare. It’s not so ‘rare,’ though, when you add all the different kinds of injuries together.

Nobody has ever done a study to calculate your chances of experiencing some adverse event after your covid shot.

In the same way, Democracy Docket claimed —without evidence— that this particular type of undeniable voter fraud isn’t, by itself, enough to swing a presidential election. I’m not convinced that’s true, but let’s run with it. What happens when you add the unverifiable address problem to all the other types of uncovered fraud?

In 2020, President Trump lost Georgia by only 11,800 votes. So.

What we’ve learned about voter fraud is this: the law provides an impossibly short deadline after an election to bring a case— ten days. That case must include precise evidence, not speculation, of a fraud big enough that it changed the outcome of the election. How anyone is supposed to gather that kind of evidence in ten days remains unanswered.

Then, when the ten days pass, and the lawsuits are dismissed, people are just supposed to “move on” and forget all about the stolen ocean that passed under the bridge. Focus on the next election, is the omnipresent and mind-numbing advice.

But not this time. We’re not moving anywhere, especially not “on.” We’re getting to the bottom of it, this time.

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Speaking of things we’re not letting go of, on Friday, Fox’s Bret Baier reported a story that would have triggered 24/7 coverage panels on every major network— had it been about anyone other than Donald J. Trump. Fox ‘obtained’ internal FBI emails from May 2022 revealing that the Biden White House Counsel’s office coordinated directly with the DOJ about interviewing Trump’s butler, Walt Nauta— three months before 36 machine-gun-toting FBI agents descended on Mar-a-Lago in the most dramatic presidential raid since— well, since never, because it had never happened before.

Right after the raid, Joe Biden witlessly claimed he “found out about the raid from the media.” Come to think of it, that could be true. Nobody bothered to tell him. (They told the Autopen, though.) But his White House also repeatedly denied any foreknowledge or coordination.

The newly released emails don’t show a White House blissfully unaware of looming events. Rather, they show a White House so deep in the DOJ’s planning that its lawyers were coordinating witness interviews months in advance. Of an investigation they supposedly didn’t know existed. Into documents they supposedly weren’t tracking.

The Biden White House lied. Released records show that the initiating agency, NARA, was working with Biden’s White House as early as August 2021— a full year before the raid. Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “The more we learn about the DOJ’s weaponization under the prior administration, the worse the story gets.”

At this point, the drip-drip of evidence is less of a leak and more of a burst pipe. We aren’t surprised, of course. We’ve all known it was political since the day the story broke. The only question remaining isn’t whether it was a setup— it’s how many Democrats knew it at the time.

It’s been nearly four years since the raid, and to many people, it’s an old story, part of our common history, perhaps, but nothing more. But this new Fox story shows the Administration is still trickling out evidence, evidence creeping closer and closer to treason.

In isolation, this case would be a curiosity, unlikely to amount to much except for winding up the base. But it’s not in isolation. On top of the Mar-a-Lago raid, the investigation into the 2020 election continues. Investigation into RussiaGate continues. Investigation into special prosecutor Jack Smith continues. Plus Epstein, welfare fraud, covid cheaters, Big Food and Big Pharma, and more.

We don’t know where all this is going. But it’s going somewhere. We are now closing in on March, with the critical midterms in November racing down the calendar. What happens when these investigations begin turning into disclosures? Or disclosures become prosecutions? We’ve never seen anything like this before. Buckle up.

Have a blessed Sunday! Coffee & Covid will return tomorrow with a whole new week of breaking essential news and cutting commentary. Thank you once again for your continued loyal support.

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