☕️ BEAUTY AND FINISHES ☙ Saturday, April 25, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Your roundup includes: Trump’s marijuana rescheduling coup and Bill Maher’s alarmed coalition math, the Vance task force finally chasing $22 billion in covid-era PPP fraud, and Trump’s unexpectedly satisfying cleanup of Washington’s grimy monuments and reflecting pool. 🔥🔥🔥 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 also really 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. 🔥🔥🔥 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 Admin…