The Paul Truesdell Podcast

Five Counts Down, the Rest of the Cabal to Go: The Morens Indictment Is Just the Start

562 Podcast # Five Counts Down, the Rest of the Cabal to Go: The Morens Indictment Is Just the Start [https://paultruesdell.com/] The Justice Department finally indicted someone. One person. A 78-year-old senior adviser, two years past retirement. On April 28, 2026, a federal grand jury in Maryland charged him with five crimes: conspiracy against the United States, destroying federal records, falsifying records during a federal investigation, hiding records, and helping others do the same.[^1] The law allows up to 20 years in prison for each falsification count.[^1] Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called it a "profound abuse of trust" during a global pandemic.[^1] He is right. The problem is that David Morens did not do this by himself. The people above him — the ones he reported to, the ones whose careers his lies protected, the ones who built a workplace where a senior NIH adviser could write down a plan to hide emails and send it from his government phone — those people walked out the door with paper in their pockets that says they don't have to answer for any of it. ## The Charges, in Plain English For 16 years, Morens sat inside NIAID's Office of the Director. He advised the man who, for those 16 years, ran the country's response to infectious disease.[^1] After NIH canceled a grant to EcoHealth Alliance — a grant that sent money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China — Morens allegedly teamed up with two other people. The indictment doesn't name them, but reporters identified them as Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and a former NIH official named Gerald Keusch.[^2] Neither has been charged. The plan, according to prosecutors: get the grant back, and shoot down the theory that COVID came from a lab. To do it, the three of them agreed in writing to do their work through Morens's personal Gmail. That way, public records requests would never see it.[^1] One email reproduced in the indictment is almost too good. In May 2020, Morens was drafting a science journal piece "in part to benefit" the company. He told his co-writers he wanted no "fingerprints" of theirs on it. He added: "I need to keep this off of govt email and govt phone text."[^3] He typed that sentence on a government phone, from a government account. The man briefing Tony Fauci on what to tell the President of the United States could not even hide an email conspiracy without leaving it on the very system he was trying to hide it from. The indictment also says Daszak sent Morens wine, as a thank-you for his "behind-the-scenes shenanigans." Morens then went looking for an official act he could perform to "deserve" the gift — a journal article saying COVID came from nature, not a lab.[^1] Prosecutors say Daszak also offered Morens dinners at Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris, New York, and Washington.[^1] In plain English, that is a bribe. A federal employee is not allowed to take either the wine or the dinners. He took both. ## The Pardons That Insult the Country On January 20, 2025, hours before he left office, Joe Biden handed out a stack of pardons. Anthony Fauci was on the list. So was retired General Mark Milley. So were every member and staffer of the House January 6 Committee.[^4] None of them had been charged with a crime. The pardons were "preemptive" — meaning, they covered any future charges that might be brought. Biden's team said the pardons were needed to protect these people from "unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions."[^4] What the pardons actually did was draw a circle around the most senior figure in the chain that produced the conduct now being charged at the staff level. And across that circle, they wrote: *off-limits.* Fauci himself says he committed no crime and didn't need a pardon.[^4] If that's true, the pardon was unnecessary. If only the second half is true, the pardon was a confession dressed up as a gift. Either way, it stinks. The 78-year-old staff adviser is in front of a grand jury. His boss cannot be touched. That is not how a serious legal system works. ## The Chinese Are Going to Pay Nothing No sanctions. No prosecutions. No formal demands of any kind that the Chinese government will feel. The Chinese Communist Party blocked outside investigators in the first weeks of the outbreak. They ran the wet-market story as long as it was useful. They disappeared the early whistleblowers in Wuhan. Whatever combination of accident, fraud, or worse happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the United States has now chosen — twice, across two administrations — to absorb the damage and make Beijing pay nothing. That is its own breach of trust. The people who lost loved ones, jobs, businesses, schooling, and years of their lives are entitled to ask why. They are entitled to ask why the only person presently in federal jeopardy is a 78-year-old American science bureaucrat, while the lab at the center of the story is still running, fully funded, on the other side of the ocean. ## A Full Accounting of the People Who Helped The cover-up was not just inside NIH. It included the media outlets that carried water for the official story and ridiculed everyone who asked obvious questions. Remember CNN's coverage of Joe Rogan's COVID in the fall of 2021. Rogan, a grown adult, took ivermectin under the care of his doctor. Ivermectin is a Nobel-recognized drug given to humans hundreds of millions of times for parasites. CNN called it "horse dewormer." Anderson Cooper said it was "something more often used to deworm horses."[^5] Then CNN's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, sat down on Rogan's podcast. Rogan pressed him on it. Gupta admitted his own network "shouldn't have said that."[^6] CNN then put Gupta on with Don Lemon, who doubled down on the smear anyway.[^7] That is the whole story of pandemic-era media in a single 24-hour news cycle: caught, conceded, then re-asserted the lie on the next show. The 2020 *Lancet* letter — the one signed by 27 scientists that called any non-natural origin a "conspiracy theory" — was secretly organized by the same Peter Daszak now named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Morens case. That letter is still cited. The journals that suppressed open debate on origins are still in business. The fact-checkers who flagged ordinary citizens for saying things the U.S. intelligence community would later formally adopt have not apologized. None of them will be charged. All of them helped. ## The Vaccine Reckoning the Establishment Won't Hold The same institutions that hid the lab-leak debate also hid the vaccine-safety debate. The record is now hard to dismiss. **Myocarditis.** Heart-muscle inflammation showed up as a real side effect of the mRNA vaccines, especially in young and teen-aged males after the second dose. The CDC and FDA acknowledged the signal in 2021 and added warnings. Studies in the United States, Israel, and the Nordic countries confirmed rates above what would normally be expected. **The J&J vaccine.** The Johnson & Johnson shot was pulled from the U.S. market over a rare but sometimes deadly clotting disorder. **AstraZeneca.** AstraZeneca pulled its COVID vaccine, Vaxzevria, off the global market in 2024. The company said the reason was "commercial." By that point, in court filings, the company had already admitted the same clotting problem in rare cases. These are not fringe claims. These are the drug companies' own admissions, written in the smallest print available, years after honest disclosure would have meant something. And then there are the ordinary people in between — otherwise healthy adults who report chest pain, racing hearts, exercise problems, and exhaustion that started within weeks of a shot and never went away. The honest position is that the long-term picture is still...

May 22, 2026

561 May 22, 2026 [https://truesdellwealth.com/]   PODCAST EPISODE 561 — THE NUMBERS NOBODY WANTS TO SHOW YOU By Paul Truesdell This is episode five hundred and sixty-one. And I'm going to start with that number, because that number is the whole reason I'm doing this episode. The title of Episode 561 is The Numbers Nobody Wants to Show You. Last time, I wrapped up episode five hundred and sixty. Five-six-zero. And I'll come back to it in a minute, but I want to set the table first. Last episode I talked about what I've learned over three decades behind microphones. Why I'm not playing the algorithm game anymore. Why I'm not chasing thumbs-ups, view counts, or any of the rest of that digital fool's gold. After that one went out, a few of you asked the same question. So, Paul — where does that actually put you in the mix? What do the real numbers look like? Fair question. So I went and pulled twenty-four sources for this episode. Edison Research. The Interactive Advertising Bureau. Amplifi Media. Buzzsprout. Pew Research Center. Google's own official YouTube documentation. Academic studies. Trade publications. The full list — every one of them, with links — is in the show notes at PaulTruesdell.com. Go there. Read them yourself. Don't take my word for any of this. What I'm about to tell you is the truth, with receipts. Settle in. PART ONE — THE CLIFF Let me start with the cliff. Because there is a cliff. And almost nobody who starts a podcast gets past it. Amplifi Media, working with James Cridland over at Podnews, ran the numbers off the Podcast Index database. The Podcast Index lists about four million podcasts. Four million. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it. Here is what they actually found. Forty-four percent of all podcasts ever launched have published three or fewer episodes. Twenty-six percent published exactly one episode. One. They recorded it, they uploaded it, they probably texted their mother to listen to it, and they were done. It gets worse. Only thirty-two percent of all podcasts ever reach episode ten. Let me read that again, because the people listening on a walk just missed it. Out of every hundred people who start a podcast, sixty-eight of them never make it to episode ten. They quit before they even know what they're doing. Now raise the bar one more notch. Active podcast. Meaning ten or more episodes, plus an episode released in the past week. The number who clear that bar is just under four percent. Four percent of every podcast ever launched qualifies as a real, breathing, ongoing show. A reasonable listener asked the question, Paul — do very few podcasts go beyond forty episodes. Yes. Very few. By the time you hit forty episodes, you've outlasted essentially everyone who ever stood behind a microphone with a dream and a USB cable. You are in a small room. Dan Misener at Pacific Content put it nicely. He analyzed millions of podcast feeds and reported the median age of all podcasts is one hundred and seventy-four days. About six months. He called it mosquitoes versus tortoises. Most podcasts are mosquitoes. They show up, they make some noise, and they're gone. Now. About that five hundred and sixty. If only thirty-two percent of podcasts reach episode ten, and only four percent reach the active threshold, what happens when you keep going? What happens at one hundred episodes? Two hundred? Five hundred? The curve doesn't level off. It falls off a cliff. There is no clean public dataset on exactly how many podcasts reach five hundred episodes, because almost nobody does. But every factor-of-ten gate cuts the survivors brutally. Industry pattern data places podcasts with one hundred or more episodes at well under one percent of all shows ever launched. Five hundred or more — somewhere around one-tenth of one percent. Or fewer. For context, here is the company you keep when you cross five hundred episodes. Joe Rogan, who started in two thousand and nine, sits north of twenty-two hundred episodes. The Daily, the New York Times show, has fifteen hundred plus, and they run a daily cadence. Stuff You Should Know, started in two thousand and eight, sits past eighteen hundred. This American Life, on the air since nineteen ninety-five, is past eight hundred and fifty. Then the smaller ones. Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, around two hundred and fifty. SmartLess, around two hundred and fifty. Crime Junkie, around four hundred. I'm past all three of those. Past Conan. Past SmartLess. Past Crime Junkie. I'm well into the territory of shows that have been grinding for a decade or more. I'm not telling you this to brag. I'm telling you because it is the answer to the question. Five hundred and sixty episodes puts a podcaster in roughly the top one-tenth of one percent of all podcasts ever launched, measured by the one metric that actually requires showing up — episode count. Most "top one percent" lists rank by downloads. Anybody can buy their way onto a download leaderboard with one viral guest or a hundred grand in promotion. By durability — by actually being here every week for years — the room is much, much smaller. And most of the people in it are too busy working to brag about it. PART TWO — THE LISTENER NUMBERS Let's say you do beat the cliff. Let's say you publish your fortieth episode, your hundredth, your five hundredth. How many people are actually listening? For this part, I'm leaning on Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout is one of the largest podcast hosts in the world. They're certified by the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Tech Lab — meaning their download numbers are honest, not the inflated raw-hit nonsense that everybody else uses. They publish their statistics live on their website. They host more than a hundred and fifteen thousand active podcasts. Here is the median number of downloads a new podcast episode gets in its first seven days on Buzzsprout. Twenty-nine. I want you to hear that one more time. Twenty-nine downloads. That is the fifty-percent line. Half of all podcasts on the biggest indie host in the world get fewer than twenty-nine downloads in seven days. If you get one hundred and two downloads in seven days, you are in the top twenty-five percent. If you get four hundred and seventeen, you are in the top ten percent. If you get one thousand and twenty-three, you are in the top five percent. If you get four thousand seven hundred and forty downloads in seven days, you are in the top one percent of all podcasts. Joe Rogan, by comparison, runs around eleven million downloads per episode. The math gap between the median podcaster and Rogan is roughly the gap between a garden hose and the Pacific Ocean. So when somebody tells me they want to be the next Joe Rogan, I just nod politely and think about lunch. Now, the demand side is actually healthy. Edison Research's Infinite Dial 2025 report came out this past March. Forty percent of Americans twelve and older listened to a podcast in the past week. Record high. Fifty-five percent listen monthly. Roughly one hundred and fifty-eight million Americans are listening to something every month. People are listening. Lots of people. The problem is, they are not listening to your show. They are listening to the same fifty shows everybody else is listening to. PART THREE — THE MONEY Now let's talk money. Because every person who calls me about starting a podcast eventually gets around to asking — Paul, when does the money show up. Here's when. Almost never. But let me give you the numbers, because precision matters. The Interactive Advertising Bureau, working with PricewaterhouseCoopers, publishes the most authoritative report on internet adv...

May 21, 2026 - B

Why most podcasting efforts are a waste of time.  PODCAST NOTES — WHAT I'VE LEARNED ABOUT PODCASTING By Paul Truesdell A LITTLE BACKGROUND Let me give you some background on what I've learned about this whole podcasting business. When I started, we had dialup. That's right — dialup. The internet sounded like a fax machine having a nervous breakdown, and I was running a program called Icecast. I-C-E-C-A-S-T. Phenomenal piece of software. Still around, by the way. We did everything live. I shut it down. Why? My business partner had a peculiar habit — he was late, unprepared, and apparently allergic to a clock. I tried it again later with a few other folks. Same story, different cast. And I don't cotton to that. That's one of my phrases. I don't cotton to certain things, and chronic unreliability sits right at the top of the list. Here in little old sleepy Ocala — and I mean truly sleepy, the kind of sleepy where the town rolls up the sidewalks at sundown — we had built that show up to fifteen hundred, two thousand listeners. In the early days of the internet, that wasn't small potatoes. That was a whole bushel. I've always been one of the first ones on a platform. Not all of them — a lot of them came and went — but Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, you name it, we were early. And along the way I figured out something important: there is no one format that works for everybody. THE JOE ROGAN FANTASY Let me address the elephant in every podcaster's studio. So many people sit down behind a microphone and genuinely believe they are going to be the next Joe Rogan. Let me explain how that actually works. Joe Rogan spent decades — plural — building connections across the country. His early guests were comedians, because comedians were his friends. He did not roll out of bed one Tuesday and suddenly have heads of state on the line. He grinded. For years. And he does not edit people the way 60 Minutes edited a certain presidential candidate. He just lets the tape roll. That's a feature, not a bug. So before you order business cards that say "podcast host," ask yourself one honest question: Do you actually want to sit and interview people for hours, day after day? You might. But you had better have connections. You had better know how to interview. And — this is the kicker — the people sitting across from you had better have something worth saying. Here is the dirty little secret nobody wants to print on a billboard: most podcast guests are boring. They don't know how to use their voice. They have no rhythm, no cadence, no sense of when to land a point and when to let it breathe. They mumble through a thought that should have taken thirty seconds and stretch it into a seven-minute meandering autobiography of their lunch order. A RADIO VOICE IS A TRAINED VOICE I have a radio voice. That isn't bragging — it's the result of a very long time spent learning how to raise the voice, lower it, color it, and end a thought with a little signature click that tells you we're done. Most folks haven't done that work. They sit down expecting the microphone to do it for them. The microphone doesn't. THE TWO-PALS-IN-A-POD PROBLEM You can do the co-host thing — two people, three people, just riffing. I did it with my son. We called it Two Pals in a Pod. Loved every minute of it. Here's why it ended: he has his life, I have mine, and the moment you involve another human being, you adopt their schedule. I'm not doing that anymore. Life is too short and calendars are too full. EDUCATIONAL CONTENT AND A LESSON IN HUMAN NATURE Then I tried the educational route. Training videos. Real, useful, actionable material that could change your finances, your health, your life. You know what I learned? Most people don't actually want help. They want entertainment. They want a good-looking woman or a buff young fella reading a teleprompter, and they will happily sit through twenty minutes of pure nonsense as long as the dopamine drip stays steady. The information could be pure crapola — they'll watch anyway. Because they are not there to learn. They are there to feel. Now, there is a smaller crowd — and you know who you are — who, when life hits the fan and you find yourselves wedged between a rock and a hard place, suddenly want real answers. Those are the people I work with. Those are my clients. They become family. And when I say family, I mean it the old-fashioned way: I actually care about you. WHAT NOBODY WILL TELL YOU ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE Here is a truth no podcasting guru will ever sell you in a course. Nobody gives a damn about you. Read it again. Let it sink in. The general public, given a comment box, will use it the way a vandal uses a brick wall. Look at the Wall Street Journal comments. Look at any platform. People are mean, nasty, and bored. So if you enjoy throwing red meat into a piranha tank and watching the water churn, podcasting will give you exactly what you want. I have a simple rule. I only work with nice people. Dead serious. Less, in this case, is more. A small group of folks who actually engage with you, who use your products and services, who treat you like a human being — that's gold. Everyone else? Why, exactly, are you worrying about them? Oh, I forgot. The algorithm. The algorithm will reward you if your viewer count goes up. Who cares? The algorithms are screwing your brain. They don't mean a thing. A QUICK WORD ABOUT THE WORD "PODCAST" I don't know how the word podcast got so universally adopted. They were audio casts. Leo Laporte — good man — tried to push "netcast." Didn't take. The word podcast comes from the iPod, and right now somebody listening to this is asking, "What's an iPod?" And there you go. Today, YouTube says it has podcasts. YouTube is video. A podcast can be live, on-demand, behind a paywall, free, audio, video, an audiobook in disguise. The word means nothing and everything at the same time. It's a linguistic accordion. Why isn't an audiobook called a podcast? It hits every technical definition. Nobody knows. Sometimes I wish George Carlin were still around. He had a gift for slicing through the hogwash, balderdash, and poppycock. We could use about ten more of him right now. THE TRUTH ABOUT VIDEO I've done video. I've done green screens. During COVID I had a whole production setup that would have made a local news station envious. Here's what I've learned: video is a lot more effort for not a lot more return. Live video means technical glitches, sneezing fits, a stray nose hair that's plotting against you, a burp at exactly the wrong second, the moment your tongue ties itself into a sailor's knot. On-demand video means editing. And editing means clip, clip, clip, clip, clip — those little jump cuts that have become the visual vocabulary of modern YouTube. Every time I see a video edited like that, I think the same thing: this person can't hold a thought together for twelve consecutive seconds. If I need to show you a diagram, I'll put it on the website and tell you where to find it. Open a new tab. We do still use that word, right? Tab? Browser? Some of you, I know, need to be told. So here it is: open a new tab. Look at the graph. Come back. That's the whole trick. YOUTUBE DID ME A FAVOR I am grateful — genuinely grateful — that YouTube and its discriminatory algorithm decided to bury me. Because it gave me back my time. I'm not playing the game anymore. I shouldn't have ever started. I got sucked in because it was cool to watch the view counter climb. It was bull. It really was. My clients can think. They connect the dots. They understand there is no such thing as a free lunch. They pay me for my time, my effort, my aggravati...

Ocalawood

Oh Cala Wood. Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only.  The future performance of a security is not guaranteed. This conversation does not involve securities.  Truesdell Wealth, Inc. A Registered Investment Advisor  The Truesdell Professional Building 200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34481 352-612-1000 or  212-433-2525  If you've ever driven north out of Orlando on Interstate 75, somewhere around the time the suburbs thin out and the land starts to roll, you begin to notice that you've crossed into a different Florida. The flat coastal Florida of postcards is behind you. The Florida in front of you has hills, real hills by Florida standards, with white-board fences running along the ridges and thoroughbreds grazing in pastures that look like somebody airlifted them out of Kentucky. The exits start carrying horse names. The road signs point to the World Equestrian Center, a place so large and so deliberate that it changed the conversation about what Ocala is and what Ocala could become. And out beyond those horse farms, along the commerce corridors, you'll see something else. Warehouses. Big ones. New ones. Steel rising on what used to be pine flats and pasture. The trucks moving in and out tell you that the rest of the world has figured out something the locals have known for a while: this part of Florida is positioned at the intersection of just about everywhere. Hold that picture in your mind, because we have a question to chew on for the next little while. Could the Ocala metropolitan area, the heart of Florida and the country just north of Orlando, be poised for a film, television, and video production boom? Could the same combination of land, infrastructure, beauty, and cost advantage that's drawn equestrian sport, retirees, distribution centers, and breeders also draw the cameras? I'm not going to tell you yes and I'm not going to tell you no. The honest answer is more interesting than either. But by the time we ride out of this together, you'll have a clearer picture of where the industry is, where Florida is, what Ocala has, and what would have to happen if the forward-thinking minds in this region decided that the next chapter was going to be theirs to write. Now, before we get to Ocala, we have to take an honest look at where the picture business actually stands. Because if we don't understand what's happening to Hollywood and why, we'll either oversell what's possible here or undersell it. Both are mistakes. There's a story going around out west that just about tells the whole tale. A television producer was putting together a game show. He had Rob Lowe lined up to host. He had contestants ready to play. And when he set the cost of filming in Los Angeles next to the cost of flying the whole production to Ireland, Ireland won. Not by a nickel either. By enough to make the decision easy. So they packed up Rob Lowe, packed up the contestants, packed up the cameras, and off they went across the Atlantic. That one decision, by one producer, on one show, captures more about the modern entertainment business than a thousand pages of trade press. For a hundred years, Hollywood was the place. If you wanted to make a picture, you came to Los Angeles. The talent lived there. The crews lived there. The stages were there. The vendors were there. You could walk down a street in Burbank and find every craftsman, every camera operator, every costume designer you needed within a five-mile radius. It was the kind of cluster that took a century to build and nobody figured could ever come apart. Well, friend, it's coming apart. The numbers tell the story plain enough. Last year, on-location shoot days in the greater Los Angeles area dropped to about nineteen thousand seven hundred. That's a sixteen percent fall from the year before and the lowest count in recent memory if you set aside the pandemic shutdown. The first quarter of last year saw a twenty-two percent drop year over year, with television down better than thirty percent and feature films down nearly twenty-nine. There's been no annual increase since 2021. Early 2026 did show a small bump, about ten percent better quarter over quarter, with features leading the way, but the overall level still sits below where it stood in better years. Soundstages that used to run at near full occupancy are sitting at about sixty-three percent. Tens of thousands of jobs have evaporated. Forty-two thousand in entertainment-related sectors in Los Angeles County alone over a couple of years, with the below-the-line folks taking the worst of it. Those are the grips, the gaffers, the prop masters, the caterers, the people who actually build the magic. An old rancher I knew used to say that when the water dries up, you find out pretty quick which cattle were grazing for love and which were grazing for grass. Hollywood is finding out which productions were there for the talent and the legacy and which were there because that's just where the trail ended. Turns out a lot of them were the second kind. So why is this happening? It isn't because the talent moved. It isn't because the audiences disappeared. It's because doing business in California got too expensive to pencil out. Start with labor. Wages are high, benefits are high, payroll burdens run anywhere from twenty-eight to thirty-four percent. Workers' compensation costs are eye-watering. Union work rules add expense at every turn. None of this is to say workers don't deserve fair pay. They do, and they earned it. But when you stack it all up, Los Angeles becomes a number that simply will not compete with the numbers a producer can get in Georgia, New Mexico, New York, or overseas. Then add the real estate. Housing in Los Angeles is a punchline at this point. The crews who used to live thirty minutes from the studio now live three hours away or have left the state entirely. The vendors are getting squeezed by the same costs. The whole ecosystem that made Hollywood Hollywood is being priced out of Hollywood. Then there's the permitting and the regulation. Layer upon layer of process. Sign here, wait here, pay here, do it again. Here's where I have to stop and admire the situation for a moment. California, the state that prides itself on being the cultural capital of the world, has spent decades writing rules, taxes, and regulations that make it economically irrational to produce culture inside its own borders. Then it acts surprised when the cameras leave. That takes a certain kind of accomplishment. You almost have to applaud it. To be fair, the state has finally noticed. Last year they expanded the Film and Television Tax Credit Program to seven hundred and fifty million dollars a year. They call it Program 4.0, which is what folks call something when they've already tried three other versions of it. They raised the base credit to thirty-five percent and stretched it as high as forty-five with bonuses. They made the credits more refundable. They broadened who could qualify. FilmLA says there are early signs of recovery. That's good. That's something. But uncapped programs in other states and overseas still beat what California is offering, and tax credits cannot fix the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that everything else in California is too expensive. Some of the analysts are now warning that parts of the Hollywood ecosystem could end up looking like Detroit looked in the 1980s. Detroit didn't lose the automobile. It lost the assumption that everything had to be built in Detroit. Hollywood is losing the assumption that everything has to be shot in Hollywood. Once that assumption is gone, you don't get it back easily. That's where Hollywood sits. Now let's swing east, bec...

Either the President Owns the Wreckage or He Owns the Rescue. Pick One

Either the President Owns the Wreckage or He Owns the Rescue. Pick One. Drug overdose deaths fell to pre-pandemic levels in 2025. The same crowd that blames a President for the weather can't seem to find the microphone today. The Lifeguard Pulled 30,000 People Out of the Water. Now Ask Who's Pushing Them In. America just had its third straight year of falling overdose deaths — and the real story isn't only who gets the credit. It's why the beach was ever this deadly to begin with. Rough Draft & Disclaimer There's a story making its way out this week, and it's the kind of story that ought to be on every front page in the country. Ought to be. Won't be. But ought to be. The Centers for Disease Control just put out their preliminary numbers for 2025. Drug overdose deaths in the United States — the thing that has been ripping families apart for over a decade, the thing that's the leading cause of death for Americans between 18 and 44 — drug overdose deaths dropped nearly 14% in 2025. An estimated 69,973 Americans lost. Still too many. Way too many. But here's the math: from over 100,000 deaths a year just a couple of years back, we're down to roughly 70,000. Synthetic opioid deaths — and we're talking fentanyl here, the stuff coming in from China through the cartels — those fatalities dropped from 48,913 in 2024 to 38,084 in 2025. That's more than ten thousand American mothers, fathers, sons, daughters who are still alive today. Cocaine deaths, down. Methamphetamine deaths, down. The drops have even pushed U.S. life expectancy to a record high, according to the federal government. Three years in a row of declines. Just the fifth time in over three decades the numbers have moved the right direction. Now. Pause. Take a breath. Because I want you to notice something. Where are they? Where are the cable news panels? Where are the late-night monologues? Where are the columnists who, for the last decade, have written every single overdose death as a national emergency? Funny thing. Real funny. The silence is just deafening, isn't it? For four years we heard the border didn't matter, that fentanyl was a complicated, multifactor problem, that nobody could really be held responsible for what comes across because, well, you know, it's just complicated. And now — what a coincidence — the President who said he was going to lean on China, who said he was going to slap tariffs on the precursors, who said he was going to treat the cartels like the terrorist organizations they are — that President takes office, and the numbers keep moving in the right direction. And the people who would have you believe Trump caused the sunrise to be late are suddenly very, very quiet. Imagine, just for a second, if these numbers had come out on a different administration's watch. Imagine the press conferences. Imagine the victory laps. Imagine the magazine covers. "He Saved a Generation." You'd be sick of hearing about it by Tuesday. I'll be fair, and unlike some folks, I'll actually do it. The decline started before this administration. State programs, naloxone access, telemedicine, mobile clinics — none of that is nothing. Credit where credit's due. But the trend continued, and it continued during a year when one man made fentanyl a centerpiece of his foreign policy and his border policy. You don't have to like him. You can hate his tie. But you don't get to memory-hole the numbers. And here's something that gives this weight. The President has been very open — painfully open — about losing his brother to alcoholism. He doesn't touch a drink. Never has. Tell me that doesn't matter when a man sets policy on addiction. Tell me that doesn't change how he hears the phone call from a parent in Ohio or West Virginia who just buried their kid. Now. Here's the rest of the story. Picture a lifeguard on a beach. And this lifeguard pulls thirty thousand people out of the water in a single summer. Saves them. Drags them onto the sand, gets them breathing. Thirty thousand souls. What do you do with that lifeguard? You give him the key to the city. You name the pier after him. You put him on every front page in the country. You absolutely do. But then a reasonable person stops and asks a second question. Wait a minute. Why are thirty thousand people drowning at my beach? That is the real question. That is where the attention has to go next. Because the lifeguard is doing the job. The lifeguard is doing the job. But somebody is pushing people into the water. Somebody is pouring fentanyl across the border. Somebody is profiting. Somebody is looking the other way. Somebody in Beijing is signing off on chemical exports. Somebody in a cartel is laughing all the way to the bank. So which is it, friends? Either the President of the United States gets credit for the lives saved, or he doesn't. You can't say a President owns every bad thing that happens on his watch — every storm, every market dip, every bad jobs report — and then turn around and say, well, this good thing, this seventy thousand instead of a hundred and ten thousand, that just happened. The wind blew. The tide came in. Nobody did anything. You don't get it both ways. You never did. Tippecanoe and Tyler Too, Click Click, Later, I’m out of here.  Xxx Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only.  The future performance of a security is not guaranteed. This conversation does not involve securities.  Truesdell Wealth, Inc. A Registered Investment Advisor  The Truesdell Professional Building 200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34481 352-612-1000 or  212-433-2525  Paul Grant Truesdell, The Elder J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC Founder