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

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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

Kaiser's Coffins to Killer Swarms - Why Cheap, Expendable Drones—Not Billion-Dollar Platforms—Will Decide the Next Century of American Power

Kaiser's Coffins to Killer Swarms Truesdell Wealth [https://truesdellwealth.com/] * Events [https://truesdellwealth.com/events] * Truesdell Wealth Contact [https://truesdellwealth.com/contact] Truesdell Travel [https://truesdell.travel/] * The February 2027 Cruise [https://truesdell.travel/cruise] * Truesdell Travel Contact [https://truesdell.travel/contact] Paul Truesdell [https://paultruesdell.com/] * About [https://paultruesdell.com/about-4] * Blog [https://paultruesdell.com/blog] * Podcast [https://paultruesdell.com/podcast] https://paultruesdell.com/ Why Cheap, Expendable Drones—Not Billion-Dollar Platforms—Will Decide the Next Century of American Power Good morning, afternoon, or evening, this is Paul Truesdell and this is the Paul Truesdell Podcast. There is an old truth out in the high country, one that every scout and every hunter and every man who ever read the weather off a ridgeline comes to learn. The wind always tells you what is coming before the storm arrives. You only have to be quiet enough to listen, and honest enough to believe what you hear, even when the sky straight overhead is still blue. I want to talk to you about a storm that is gathering. Not to frighten you, because fear is a poor compass and a worse general. I want to talk about it so that we are ready. Because the United States is in the middle of the largest retooling of its military since the Second World War, and most good people have not yet felt the wind shift. Let me begin where every serious conversation about American power has to begin. With the sea. And with a man most of you have never heard of. His name was Henry J. Kaiser. Today, if his name rings any bell at all, it rings because of a hospital. Kaiser Permanente. But before he ever built a clinic, Henry Kaiser built ships, and he built them the way Henry Ford built automobiles. On an assembly line. In 1942, with the fleet still smoking at Pearl Harbor and our real carriers years away from the water, Kaiser walked into the United States Navy and made a promise that sounded like a tall tale. He said he could turn out aircraft carriers, not in years, but in weeks. Small ones. Cheap ones. Built from prefabricated parts by welders, many of them women, most of them folks who had never built a ship in their lives. The admirals told him no. They wanted gold-plated ships, the big beautiful fleet carriers, and they thought his little flattops were a joke. So Kaiser did what Americans with a good idea and no patience for a closed door have always done. He went over their heads. He took his case straight to President Roosevelt, and Roosevelt ordered the admirals to give him a contract for fifty. They called those ships jeep carriers. Baby flattops. The sailors who crewed them had a darker name. Kaiser's coffins, they called them, because they were small and thin-skinned and the men figured they would burn. Combustible, vulnerable, and expendable, that was the joke. And then those expendable little ships sailed into history. Off the island of Samar, in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, a handful of Henry Kaiser's jeep carriers and their escorts ran headlong into one of the most powerful surface fleets Japan ever put to sea. Including the Yamato, the largest battleship ever built by any nation on earth. By every rule of war those Americans should have been wiped from the ocean. Instead, they turned and fought, and they held, and the great Japanese fleet broke off and ran. Cheap ships. Plain men. American production and American grit. That is the whole story of this country in a single afternoon of fire. I tell you that story because we are standing exactly where Henry Kaiser stood in 1942. We are looking at a fight we hope never comes, and we are discovering that the arsenal we built for the last century will not win the next one. Now, you have heard, no doubt, that the military budget has gone up. Way up. And you have heard a certain breed of commentator howl about it. These are the popular economists, the online sages, the men who have built a following by sounding very sophisticated about China and warfare and the economy, and who somehow manage to miss the most obvious thing standing right in front of them. And they miss it for a simple reason. They are not really analysts. Many of them are simply men who decided years ago that they hate this President, and everything they say has to be bent to fit that hatred. When your only tool is a grudge, every fact starts to look like a nail. So let me tell you what they are missing. That budget did not balloon to waste your money. It ballooned to retool the entire fighting force of the United States. We are getting ready for a war. I will say it plainly. That war, if it comes, will most likely be with China. And the whole purpose of spending this money now is to make certain that war never has to be fought at all. Here is what the retooling is about. For most of modern history, the platform was the prize. The tank. The battleship. The fighter jet with a man strapped inside it. We sent our finest young men into the cockpit and into the gun turret, and when the enemy got lucky, we buried them. We cannot fight that way anymore. We will not fight that way anymore. Look at what a small, stubborn country did to a much larger one in Ukraine. A nation with almost no navy drove a real navy back into its own harbors. Not with battleships. With drones. Cheap, attritable machines, the kind you can afford to lose by the thousands, that cost less than a used pickup truck and can sink a vessel that cost a billion dollars to build. That is the lesson the whole world just learned, and China learned it too. A multi-billion-dollar warship can be killed by a twenty-thousand-dollar machine. Xxx That changes everything. So, think about how we used to fight, and how we are going to fight. In the Revolutionary War, men stood in a straight line out in the open, shoulder to shoulder, and took turns firing volleys into one another like targets at a county fair. We do not need that anymore. We do not need cannon fodder. What we need are the Green Mountain Boys. The men who knew the timber, who picked off the redcoats from the tree line, and then slipped away to live and fight another day. That is exactly what a drone is. That is what this entire revolution is about. The skill of the hunter in the woods, multiplied by the machine. Picture it the way the old Western stories would picture it. A wolf pack. There is the mother at the center, strong and patient, and around her move the young, fast and fearless, willing to take the wound so the pack survives. Now put that pack in the air, on the ground, under the sea, and out in space. A mothership at the center. A swarm around it. Machines willing to throw themselves at the enemy so that not one more American pilot has to. If you have seen the old space pictures, you have seen it already. The hero comes flying in, and all around him the smaller craft dart and weave and shield him with their lives. That is no longer a movie. That is a procurement plan. And this is where the Navy becomes more critical than ever, not less. Because the great weakness of the enemy is the same weakness it has always been. A fixed position. A base that sits on land cannot move. Its coordinates are written down somewhere, and once your enemy knows where you are, every missile he owns is already pointed at you. A land base is a sitting duck. But a fleet moves. An armada moves. An aircraft carrier is a piece of sovereign American soil that does not stay put long enough to be hit. That is why the big carriers still matter. And it is why we have to retool t...

20. juni 202632 min

THE FUTURE OF DRONE TECH: NAVAL LAUNCH PLATFORMS, AI, AND MORE

THE FUTURE OF DRONE TECH: NAVAL LAUNCH PLATFORMS You have known the aircraft carrier all your life. It is the floating city of steel — a thousand feet of runway riding the open ocean, home to thousands of sailors and scores of fighter jets. For three generations, it has been the proudest symbol of American reach. When trouble flared anywhere on the globe, a president had only to ask one question: where are the carriers? And the answer, more often than not, settled the matter. That great ship is not going away. But the story of the carrier is changing — quietly, and faster than most folks realize. And in a moment, I'll tell you the rest of the story. Here is the trouble, told plainly. The very thing that makes a supercarrier so mighty — its size, its cost, the sheer value packed into one hull — has also made it a tempting target. Today an enemy does not need a battleship to threaten one. He needs only cheap, fast missiles and small unmanned boats and aircraft. We saw the lesson written large in the Black Sea, where Ukraine, a nation with almost no navy to speak of, used inexpensive remote-controlled sea drones to bloody Russia's proud fleet. We saw it again in the Red Sea, where small bands fired waves of low-cost drones at some of the finest warships afloat. The point was made for all the world to read: a swarm of cheap, expendable machines can rattle even a sophisticated fleet. Now, a wise old hand on the frontier never tied his whole fortune to a single horse, no matter how fine that horse might be. He kept a string of them. And that, in essence, is what the United States Navy and its allies are now learning to do at sea. Enter the "mini" carrier. These are smaller, cheaper ships built not to launch heavy, manned fighter jets, but to launch drones — unmanned aircraft and vessels guided by remote control or by their own onboard intelligence. Because a drone weighs a fraction of a piloted fighter, the ship that carries it can shed much of the heavy machinery a supercarrier requires. No giant catapults. No reinforced steel decks built to absorb a thirty-ton landing. The result is a vessel that can be built smaller, fielded faster, and bought in far greater numbers. They go by many names — light carriers, drone carriers, unmanned surface vessels — but the idea behind all of them is the same. Trade a little exquisite capability for a great deal of useful mass. And mass, in this new arithmetic of the sea, matters more than ever. The plan is not to retire the great carriers, but to surround them with these smaller companions. Picture the formation: one supercarrier at the center, the seasoned trail boss, providing command, manned air superiority, and heavy striking power. Riding alongside it, a handful of mini carriers — the outriders and scouts — each carrying its own herd of drones. Together they form what the Navy calls a battle group, only now it is a hybrid one, part manned and part machine. What do these smaller ships actually do? Several jobs, and each a valuable one. First, they serve as the eyes of the fleet. Their drones fly long, patient circles over the horizon, watching, listening, and feeding a steady stream of information back to the flagship. This work goes by the cumbersome name of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance — but you may simply think of it as keeping watch, the way a good lookout once kept watch from the high ground while the wagons made camp below. Second, they confuse and protect. Some drones are sent up not to strike, but to jam an enemy's radar or to play the decoy — drawing fire away from the precious carrier at the center. Let the enemy waste his expensive missiles on cheap and empty bait. Third, and most striking, they attack in numbers. From racks and rails, a mini carrier can loose dozens, even hundreds, of small, low-cost attack drones at once — a swarm meant to overwhelm an enemy's defenses by sheer saturation. And here lies the heart of the matter, the cold arithmetic that has admirals rethinking everything. A single attack drone may cost a few thousand dollars. The missile required to shoot it down may cost a few million. When the cheap can exhaust the expensive, the old math no longer holds. Now, who is building these things? The answer reaches around the globe, and that is part of the rest of the story. Turkey moved first, taking a ship originally meant for fighter jets and repurposing it to launch drones from a curved, ski-jump deck — and flying them successfully in NATO exercises just this year. South Korea, once set on a traditional light carrier, changed course and aimed its new ship squarely at commanding swarms of drones. Portugal is bringing into service Europe's first vessel built from the keel up for unmanned systems in the air, on the surface, and beneath the waves. And China — let no one mistake this — is racing ahead with stealthy drone-carrier prototypes and converted cargo ships, rehearsing the very kind of mass drone launches that would accompany a missile strike. The United States has chosen a somewhat different road. Rather than build a fleet of standalone drone carriers, the Navy is weaving unmanned systems into the force it already has. Through an effort fittingly named Replicator, it aims to field thousands of inexpensive, expendable machines in a hurry. It is fitting unmanned surface vessels — robot ships — to act as floating drone trucks. It is bringing aboard a new unmanned aircraft that can refuel jets in midair, easing the burden on the carrier's pilots. And it is adapting its big amphibious assault ships, the workhorses that already carry jump-jets and helicopters, to launch drone swarms of their own. The aim, spoken openly, is a larger and more distributed fleet — one that does not place every egg in one very expensive basket. There are honest difficulties yet to be conquered, and any straight-talking man will name them. Launching a drone is one thing; catching it again on a pitching deck at sea is another, and engineers are still perfecting the nets, the guidance, and the artificial intelligence to do it. A determined enemy will try to jam the signals that guide these machines, so the Navy must build communication links that bend but do not break. Batteries and small engines still limit how far and how long these drones can range. None of these are small problems. But none of them, judging by the progress of the past two years, appears beyond the reach of American industry and ingenuity. What does it all add up to? A fleet that is harder to find, harder to cripple, and far harder to bankrupt. The optimal Navy now taking shape would keep a modest number of mighty supercarriers — perhaps ten or twelve — and ring them with dozens of smaller drone-launching companions and hundreds of robot vessels besides. In the wide and contested waters of the Pacific, near the island chains that have shaped naval strategy for a century, such a force could keep a persistent, patient watch that no single missile could erase. The frontier of the sea, like every frontier before it, rewards the side that adapts — the one that learns the new country fastest and rides it best. The lone, magnificent gunfighter has his place still. But the smart money, out where the trails are dangerous, has always been on the well-led outfit that travels in numbers and watches every approach. So let me tell you, now, the rest of the story. The supercarrier — that floating city of steel — is not being put out to pasture. It is being given a posse. Cheap, plentiful, unmanned machines, launched from smaller and humbler ships, are becoming the eyes, the decoys, and the swarming spear-point of the modern fleet. The lesson, hard-learned from recent wars, is a simple and almost old-fashioned one: that mass matters, that distribution protects, and that it is wiser to risk ...

2. juni 202615 min

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

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