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  • Trump Plans to Revise U.S. History in the Smithsonian and All Other Federal Sites

    Trump Plans to Revise U.S. History in the Smithsonian and All Other Federal Sites


    On March 27, Trump issued an executive order authorizing the cleansing of the Smithsonian Museums and other federal sites of anything that detracts from American greatness and patriotism.

    Trump makes clear that he doesn’t want anything displayed that implies that racism exists. He specifically targets the 21 museums of Smithsonian Institute. He wants all exhibits to remind the public of America’s greatness. Any exhibits that don’t, he says, should be removed.

    The executive order says, in part:

    It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.  Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.

    The executive order assigns to Vice-President JD Vance the job of cleansing the Smithsonian museums and all federal parks and cultural institutions of all derogatory content about our history. In doing this, Vance will be assisted by one Lindsey Halligan, Esq.

    Who is Lindsey Halligan, the woman who will determine which parts of the nation’s story should be told? If you open the link, you will see that she is a beautiful woman with long blond hair. But that’s not all.

    The Washington Post explained:

    The first question is: What is improper ideology, exactly?

    The second: Who is Lindsey Halligan, Esq.?

    We have her on the phone, actually. She’s calling from the White House.

    “I would say that improper ideology would be weaponizing history,” Halligan says. “We don’t need to overemphasize the negative to teach people that certain aspects of our nation’s history may have been bad.” That overemphasis “just makes us grow further and further apart.”

    As for the second question: Halligan, 35, is a Trump attorney who seems to have tasked herself as a sort of commissioner — or expurgator, according to critics — of a premier cultural institution.

    After moving to D.C. just before the inauguration to continue working for Trump as a special assistant and senior associate staff secretary, Halligan visited local cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian museums of Natural History, American History and American Art. She didn’t like everything she saw. Some exhibits, in her view, did not reflect the America she knows and loves.

    “And so I talked to the president about it,” Halligan says, “and suggested an executive order, and he gave me his blessing, and here we are.”

    Here we are: A former Fox News host is leading the Pentagon. A vaccine skeptic is running the Department of Health and Human Services. A former professional wrestling executive is head of the Department of Education.

    And Lindsey Halligan, Esq., could turn a major cultural institution upside down.

    How did she arrive at this point? Halligan grew up in Broomfield, Colorado, and went to a private Catholic high school, Holy Family, where she excelled at softball and basketball. Her parents worked in the audiology industry. Halligan’s sister, Gavin, a family-law attorney in Colorado, ran for a state House seat as a Republican in 2016 in a blue district and lost.

    Halligan attended Regis University, a Jesuit university in Denver, where she studied politics and broadcast journalism. She was always interested in history, she says — particularly the Civil War and the westward expansion of the country.

    She competed in the Miss Colorado USA pageant, making the semifinals in 2009 and earning third runner-up in 2010, according to photos and records of the events. This was back when Trump co-owned the organization that puts on the Miss Universe pageant, for which Miss Colorado USA is a preliminary event.



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  • Texas: Governor Abbott Celebrates His Big Voucher Win and Lies About It

    Texas: Governor Abbott Celebrates His Big Voucher Win and Lies About It


    Governor Gregg Abbott signed his big voucher bill into law yesterday, repeating promises he has made that are most certainly false. He claimed that vouchers will put Texas on a path to being the number one school system in the nation. Several other states have large voucher programs–e.g., Florida, Arizona, and Ohio–and none of them is the number one rated school system in the nation.

    If anything, vouchers and charter schools break up the common school system that states pledge in their constitutions to support. Public schools are one system, regulated by the state, subject to elected local school boards. Charter schools are another, lightly regulated by the state, some for-profit, some as corporate chains, managed by private boards. Voucher schools are a third system, almost entirely deregulated, not required to accept all students, as public schools are. Voucher schools are not required to have certified teachers, as public schools are. Voucher schools are exempt from state testing. Most voucher schools are religious schools, managed by their religious leader. Private and religious schools choose their students.

    Vouchers have been a big issue since the early 1990s. The first voucher program was launched in Milwaukee in 1990. The second started in Cleveland in 1996, ostensibly to save poor kids from failing public schools. Neither Cleveland nor Milwaukee is a high-performing district.

    What we have learned in the past 30-35 years about vouchers is this:

    1. Most students who use vouchers were already enrolled in nonpublic schools.
    2. The students who transfer from public to private schools are likely to fall behind their peers in public schools. Many return to public schools.
    3. The public does not want their taxes to be spent on religious schools or on the children of affluent families. In nearly two dozen state referenda, voters defeated vouchers every time.
    4. The academic performance of students who leave public schools to attend nonpublic schools is either the same or much worse than students in public schools.
    5. Vouchers drain funding from public schools, where the vast majority of students are enrolled. This, the majority of students will have larger classes and fewer electives to subsidize vouchers.
    6. Vouchers are expensive. Arizona is projecting a cost of $1 billion annually. Florida currently is paying $4 billion annually.

    To learn more about the research, read Joshua Cowen’s book The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers (Harvard Educatuon Press).

    Governor Abbott surely knows these facts, but he determined that vouchers were his highest priority. Certainly they make him the champion of parents who send their children to private and religious school. All will be eligible for a subsidy from the state. And Abbott delivered for the billionaires who funded his voucher campaign.

    Edward McKinley of the Houston Chronicle wrote:

    Gov. Greg Abbott signed a $1 billion school voucher program into law Saturday, cementing the biggest legislative victory of his decade in office before a huge crowd including families, legislators and GOP donors.

    Abbott framed the ceremony as the climax of a multiyear effort by himself and advocates around the state, and touted the state’s new program as the largest to ever launch in the nation. 

    “Today is the culmination of a movement that has swept across our state and across our country,” he said, using the speech to call out parents in the crowd who had already pulled their students from “low-performing” public schools to put them into private ones. “It’s time we put our children on a pathway to have the number one-ranked education system in the United States of America.”

    He put pen to paper at a wooden desk in front of the Governor’s Mansion, as a gaggle of children stood around him wearing their private school colors and logos. Someone shouted, “Thank you, governor!” before the crowd of nearly 1,400 people erupted in applause. Abbott pumped his fist in the air. 

    The ceremony marked a major moment for the third-term Republican, who threw his full political weight and millions of campaign dollars into a push for private school vouchers, overcoming a legislative blockade that had lasted for decades. The bill he signed into law will give Texas students roughly $10,000 a year that they can put toward private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks and other expenses…

    Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath and Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass mingled in the crowd. Yass contributed more than $12 million to Abbott’s campaign last cycle, as the governor sought to unseat anti-voucher Republicans in the 2024 primary election.

    Abbott was joined on stage by U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, House Speaker Dustin Burrows and the House and Senate authors of the bill. Also in attendance were private school leaders, including Joel Enge, director of Kingdom Life Academy. 

    After Abbott’s address, Enge told the crowd he founded his Christian school after working in public schools in a low-income area of Tyler and watching children fall behind. His speech had the feel of a sermon.

    “Children who have been beaten down by the struggles in the academic system that did not fit the system will now be empowered as they begin to find the right school setting that’s going to support them and to allow them to grow in confidence in who God created them to be,” he yelled, to raucous cheers. “Amen!…”

    Hours earlier, Democratic legislators, union leaders and public educators gathered in the parking lot of the AFL-CIO building across the street from the governor’s mansion, where they had a much different message. 

    Echoing lines used throughout committee hearings and legislative debates for the past few years, they warned that vouchers would hurt already struggling neighborhood public schools by stripping away their funding. About two dozen people swayed under the direct sun, waving signs that said “public dollars belong in public schools” and “students over billionaires.” 

    “Today, big money won and the students of Texas lost,” said state Rep. James Talarico, an Austin Democrat. “Remember this day next time a school closes in your neighborhood. Remember this day next time a beloved teacher quits because they can’t support their family on their salary.”

    Several speakers pointed out that while Republicans fast-tracked the voucher bill, they have yet to agree on a package to increase funding to public schools and raise teacher pay.

    State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, an Austin Democrat, said she hoped this defeat could sow the seeds of future victories. Abbott and most legislators are up for reelection next year.

    “He may have won this battle, but the war is not over,” she said. “There will be a vote on vouchers and he can’t stop it, and it will be in November 2026.”

    What’s in the bill

    The new law stands to remake education in Texas, granting parents access to more than $10,000 in state funds to pay for private school tuition and expenses, or $2,000 for homeschoolers. The first year of operation will begin in 2027, and in the run-up, the state will choose nonprofits to run the program, develop the application process and pick which families will have access.

    All students will be eligible, although families making more than 500% of the federal poverty line, about $160,750 in income for a family of four, cannot take up more than 20% of the funds. The funds will be tied roughly to the amount of money the students would have received in public schools, meaning students with disabilities will receive extra.

    School vouchers have become a signature of Abbott’s three terms in office. 

    After the COVID-19 pandemic, other Republican-controlled states such as Florida, Arizona, Iowa and Indiana created or expanded their own voucher programs. But school choice advocates repeatedly fell short in Texas thanks to an alliance between Democrats and rural Republicans. Bills passed the Senate but failed to gain traction in the House. 

    Then, in May 2022, Abbott announced in a speech at San Antonio’s Southside that he’d be throwing his full weight behind the policy. Even as public schools struggled to keep teachers in the classroom and balance their budgets, the governor told lawmakers he wouldn’t approve extra funds until a voucher bill made it to his desk. When it didn’t happen, even in special sessions, he took to the campaign trail, spending millions to unseat about a dozen key GOP lawmakers who stood in his way.

    This session, he enlisted President Donald Trump’s help at the last minute to rally Republican House members, some of whom said they felt forced to back the policy.

    Critics warn the state’s voucher program lacks safeguards to ensure it reaches the children it was designed to help and say they expect many of the slots to go to students already in private schools, which can pick and choose who they educate. The majority of private schools in Texas are religiously affiliated, and the average tuition costs upwards of $10,900, according to Private School Review.

    Though $1 billion is set aside for the program in the first biennium, the nonpartisan Legislative Budget Board projects it could grow exponentially in the next decade amid huge demand from students currently in private or home schools.

    It remains to be seen how many private schools will accept the vouchers, but many advocated their passage, including Catholic, Jewish and Muslim schools.

    Although Abbott has said repeatedly that the program won’t pull funds from public schools, because schools are funded based on attendance, the LBB analysis showed that the program would reduce state payments to public schools by more than $1 billion by 2030. 



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  • Why is Trump Killing the Voice of America?

    Why is Trump Killing the Voice of America?


    Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day.

    Press Freedom is at risk in every authoritarian regime, but also in the U.S. Trump has filed frivolous lawsuits against ABC and other news outlets. ABC paid him $15 million to make peace.

    Trump sued CBS for $10 billion for editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris and is now in settlement talks. Editing a pre-taped interview is standard practice. The interview may last for an hour, but only 20 minutes is aired. Since Trump won the election, how was he damaged? It is hard to imagine he would win anything in court.

    But Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, has the power to destroy CBS. And the owner of CBS–Shari Redstone– is currently negotiating a lucrative deal that needs FCC approval. What will CBS pay Trump?

    Given Trump’s legendary vindictiveness, will he succeed in eviscerating press freedom? Will the media dare criticize him as they have criticized every other president?

    See CNN’s Brian Stelter on the state of press freedom today.

    Now comes Trump’s puzzling vendetta against the Voice of America. In March, he issued an executive order to shut it down, although Republicans have traditionally supported it. On April 22, a federal district court judge overturned Trump’s executive order and demanded the rehiring of VOA staff. They were told they would be back at work in days. But yesterday, a three judge appeals court stayed the lower court’s ruling and VOA’s future is again in doubt. Two of the three appeals court judges were appointed by Trump.

    The Voice of America has a unique responsibility. It brings objective, factual, unbiased news to people around the globe. For millions of people, the Voice of America is their only alternative to either government propaganda or no news at all.

    Why does Donald Trump want to kill the Voice of America.

    He has never explained.

    He has called VOA “radical,” “leftwing,” and “woke,” but there is no factual basis for those attacks. They are talking points, not facts.

    He appointed his devoted friend, Kari Lake, who ran for office in Arizona and lost both times, as the agent of VOA’s demise. She was an on-air commentator, so she knows something about media.

    VOA seems to be in a death spiral, like USAID and the Department of Education.

    The Washington Post reported on the Appeals Court’s ruling. Kari Lake described the decision as a “huge victory for President Trump.”

    Trump has never explained why the Voice of America should be silenced.

    Apparently no one at the VOA understands. I found this interview by Nick Schifrin of PBS (also on Trump’s chopping block), Lisa Curtis, and Michael Abramowitz, Director of VOA:

    • Nick Schifrin: Lisa Curtis is the chair of the board of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and a former senior director on President Trump’s first National Security Council staff.
    • Lisa Curtis: While it’s understandable that President Trump wants to cut down on government waste and fraud, I think this is the wrong organization to be attacking. Russia, Iran, China, these countries are spending billions in their own propaganda, their own anti-American propaganda. So I think it’s critical that the U.S. government is supporting organizations like RFE/RL that are pushing back against that disinformation, misinformation.
    • Nick Schifrin: And she says RFE/RL’s content reaches more than 10 percent of Iranians, many of whom have protested the regime.
    • Lisa Curtis:So I think it really is part of U.S. soft power, but they actually call it the hard edge of soft power because it is so effective in getting out the truth about America, about what’s happening in their local environments. And this is absolutely critical.
    • Nick Schifrin:Curtis said she considers the freeze and their funding illegal because the money is congressionally appropriated and RFE/RL’s mission is congressionally mandated. And they will sue the Trump administration to get it restored.To discuss this, I turn to Michael Abramowitz, who since last year has been the president of Voice of America and before that was the president of Freedom House.Michael Abramowitz, thanks very much. Welcome back to the “News Hour.”As you heard, President Trump in his statement on Friday night referred to VOA as a radical propaganda with a liberal bias. Is it?Michael Abramowitz, Director, Voice of America: I don’t think so.I do think that people at many different news organizations have been accused of bias on both right and left, like many different news organizations. VOA is not perfect, but we’re unusual among news organizations because we are one of the few news organizations that by law has to be fair and balanced.Every year, we look at each of our language services, review it for fairness, for balance. I have been a journalist in this field for a long time, and I think the journalists at VOA stand up very well against people from CNN, FOX, New York Times, et cetera, in terms of the commitment to balance.When we do talk shows, for instance, broadcasting into Iran, we will have Republicans, we will have Democrats. We are presenting the full spectrum of American political opinion, which is required by our charter.
    • Nick Schifrin:You have heard from other administration officials or allies of the president. Ric Grenell, who is a special envoy, called it — quote — “a relic of the past. We don’t need government-paid media outlets.”
    • Elon Musk says:“Shut them down. Nobody listens to them anymore.”Fundamentally, why do you believe taxpayers should pay for VOA journalism?
    • Michael Abramowitz:You know, the media is changing, the world is changing, and the Cold War doesn’t exist anymore.But what is happening around the world is that there is a huge, really, battle over information. The world is awash in propaganda and lies, and our adversaries like Russia and China, Iran are really spreading narratives that directly undermine accurate views about America.And we have to fight back. And VOA in particular has been an incredible asset for fighting back by providing objective news and information in the languages, in 48 languages that people in the local markets we serve. No other news organization does that.
    • Nick Schifrin:Let me ask a little bit about the status of the agency. You and every employee were put on leave over the weekend. Today, all contractors have been terminated. Do you have any notion of what the goal is from the administration? Is it to reform VOA, or is it simply to destroy it?
    • Michael Abramowitz:Candidly, I don’t know.Ms. Kari Lake, who is supposed to be my successor at some point she’s given some interviews, and I think she clearly recognizes in those interviews that VOA serves an important purpose. I think there are a lot of Republicans, in particular, especially on the Hill, who recognize the value of Voice of America, who recognize that, if we shut down, for instance, our program on Iran, which is really an incredible newsroom — we have 100 journalists, most of whom speak Farsi, has a huge audience inside Iran.When the president of Iran, when his helicopter went down over the summer, there was a huge spike in traffic on the VOA Web site because the people of Iran knew that they could not get accurate information about what was going on, so they came to VOA to get it. That’s the kind of thing that we can do.
    • Nick Schifrin:I want to point out, we heard from Lisa Curtis, the chair of the board of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.Voice of America and the Cuba Broadcasting, previously known as Radio Marti — we have got a graphic to show this — those are fully federal networks.(Crosstalk)
    • Nick Schifrin:What RFE/RL is talking about, they are a grantee. They get a grant from the U.S. government. RFE/RL will sue. Does VOA have any recourse today?
    • Michael Abramowitz:Well, I think we are — I mean, there’s a lot of discussion about some lawsuits that different parties are making. I know that the employees may be thinking about that.I think — I’m not sure that litigation in the end is going to be the most productive way. Maybe — I mean, you have to see what happens. But I think what would be really great is if Congress and the administration get together, recognize that this is a very important service, recognize that it’s sorely needed in a world in which our adversaries are spending billions of dollars, like Lisa said, and reformulate VOA to be effective for the modern age.
    • Nick Schifrin:And, finally, how — what’s the impact of this decision and the language that we have heard from the Trump administration on the very idea that information, that journalism sponsored by the U.S. government can support freedom and democracy?
    • Michael Abramowitz:We have been on the air essentially for 83 years through war, 9/11, government shutdown. VOA has kept — has kept its — has kept the lights on, has not been silent.So we’re silenced for the first time in 83 years. That’s devastating to me personally. It’s devastating to the staff. It’s devastating to all the thousands of people who used to work at VOA. I mean, this is a very special and unique news organization. It deserves to live. It doesn’t mean we can’t reform, but it deserves to survive.

    I still don’t understand why Trump wants to close down America’s voice to the world.

    I ask myself, who benefits if the Voice of America is stifled.

    The obvious culprits: America’s enemies, especially Russia.

    During the decades of the Cold War, VOA beamed information to dissenters behind the Iron Curtain. It kept hope alive.

    No one would be happier to see VOA shut down than Putin.



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  • Dana Milbank: Trump and His Ideas are Meshuggene

    Dana Milbank: Trump and His Ideas are Meshuggene


    Dana Milbank tries to find humor in Trump’s disastrous policies. Trump inherited a healthy economy. In only a few months, he has repeatedly crashed the stock market, wiping out trillions of dollars. He announced global tariffs on what he called “Liberation Day,” he lunges forward with his latest nutty idea (seizing control of Greenland), then lurches back for a brief period of sanity. No one seems able to modulate his behavior. The good news is that his poll numbers continue to fall.

    Dana Milbank, a regular columnist for The Washington Post, reviewed some of the latest nuttiness, giving evidence that searing critiques of Trump do survive publication in The Post.

    He writes:

    I love it when MAGA bros speak Yiddish.
    “The president deserves better than the current mishegoss at the Pentagon,” John Ullyot, who just quit as a top aide to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, wrote in a takedown of his former boss in Politico this week.

    Ullyot, who had been the department’s chief spokesman, described “a month of total chaos at the Pentagon,” a “near collapse inside the Pentagon’s top ranks” and a “full-blown meltdown at the Pentagon,” and he alleged that “the Pentagon focus is no longer on warfighting, but on endless drama.”

    Let me offer Ullyot a heartfelt mazel tov, both for his courage and for his use of the term “mishegoss” — which is on point, if not entirely precise. It means, literally, “insanity,” though as Leo Rosten noted in “The Joys of Yiddish,” mishegoss “is nearly always used in an amused, indulgent way” to connote tomfoolery. But there is nothing amusing about what these shmegegges are doing at the Pentagon. Their insanity is putting the lives of our troops and the security of our nation at risk.

    We now know the woefully unqualified Hegseth, a former Fox News personality, shared details of a military operation in a second Signal chat; this one, the New York Times reported, included his wife, brother and lawyer. He also had the app put on his Defense Department computer. Hegseth has purged his top staff — people he just hired — and blames them for a series of damaging leaks. He set up a top secret briefing on China for Elon Musk, ignoring an outrageous conflict of interest that even the Trump White House couldn’t stomach. He brought his wife to sensitive meetings. He had a makeup studio set up for TV appearances, CBS News reported.

    Under Hegseth, the whole place has devolved into paranoia and vulgar recriminations. Hegseth’s ousted chief of staff, two of his former colleagues told Politico, “graphically described his bowel movements to colleagues in one high-level meeting.”

    Oy gevalt.

    It’s not just at the Pentagon. Across the executive branch, in agency after agency, it’s amateur hour under the Trump administration.

    That titanic legal battle with Harvard University now underway over academic freedom and billions of dollars in grants? The whole thing might have been set off by mistake. The Times reported that the university, after announcing its intention to fight the administration, received a “frantic call from a Trump official” saying the administration’s letter full of outrageous demands that provoked the standoff was “unauthorized” and should not have been sent.

    Likewise, in the celebrated case of Kilmar Abrego García, deported from Maryland to El Salvador in violation of a court order, the Trump administration blamed “an administrative error” and “an oversight” for the original deportation.

    Now, the administration is trying to justify Abrego García’s deportation retroactively with a statement from a disgraced police officer who claims the Maryland resident was an “active member” of the MS-13 gang in Upstate New York — where he has never lived.

    And — oops — the administration did it again. On Wednesday, a Trump-appointed judge ruled that the administration had deported another person, a 20-year-old Venezuelan migrant, in violation of a court-approved settlement, and must facilitate his return.

    There’s mishegoss at the IRS, which is now on its fifth commissioner in three months; the last one presided for only three days before being replaced last week, the victim of a power struggle between Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that exploded into a shouting match in the West Wing.

    Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent listens as President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store at the White House on Thursday. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
    There’s mishegoss at the Department of Homeland Security, where Secretary Kristi Noem had her Gucci bag containing $3,000 in cash stolen from under her seat at the Capital Burger restaurant in D.C. on Sunday. This follows her recent visit to El Salvador, where she posed in front of imprisoned deportees while wearing a $50,000 Rolex.

    There’s mishegoss at the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made the ridiculous claims this week that “teenagers in this country have the same testosterone levels as 68-year-old men” and that diseases such as Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, which have been described in medical literature for centuries, “were just unknown when I was a kid.”

    There’s mishegoss in the White House briefing room, where press secretary Karoline Leavitt this week gave a seat of honor and the first question to far-right influencer Tim Pool, who has various white-nationalist ties and was funded (unknowingly, he says) by a Russian propaganda outlet.

    There’s mishegoss at the National Security Council, where national security adviser Mike Waltz, while promoting the fiction that the president’s unilateral executive orders are acts of Congress, claimed this week that Trump “just passed an amazing executive order” — as though it were a kidney stone.
    But the meshuggener in chief resides in the Oval Office. There, Trump announced this week that “the cost of eggs has come down like 93, 94 percent since we took office.” If that were true, eggs should now cost about 39 cents per dozen.
    Cock-a-doodle-doo!


    Trump edged closer this week to admitting that the centerpiece of his economic agenda — his trade war — was a mistake. Two weeks ago, Trump was still attacking China for its “lack of respect” and raising tariffs on Beijing to 145 percent. But as stock markets were finishing what would have been their worst April since the Great Depression, Trump did another about-face, as he had done earlier with his “reciprocal” tariffs. “We’re going to be very nice” to China, he said this week, and the tariffs “won’t be anywhere near” the current 145 percent. In China, which denied Trump’s claim that the two countries were in talks, analysts claimed victory, citing Trump’s “panicking.”

    The markets also forced Trump to acknowledge error in his plans to oust Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Last week, Trump proclaimed that Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough,” and Trump’s top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, said that “the president and his team will continue to study” the legality of firing Powell. But Trump reversed himself this week, saying he had no plans to fire Powell: “None whatsoever. Never did.”


    Why would anyone think otherwise?

    Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Feb. 11. (Valerie Plesch/For The Washington Post)
    The president can’t even seem to keep his endorsements straight. In December, he endorsed Karrin Taylor Robson’s candidacy for Arizona governor. But this week, he announced that he was also endorsing Robson’s opponent in the GOP primary, Rep. Andy Biggs. He offered “MY COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT TO BOTH.”


    We are by now accustomed to Trump’s amateurism. When he rolled out his “reciprocal” tariffs, they targeted penguin-occupied Antarctic outposts and the like. When his administration rolled out its memo requiring a government-wide spending freeze, the memo was quickly rescinded, as White House officials claimed it (like the Harvard letter) hadn’t been approved.

    The whole meshuggene administration could use some oversight. So what is Congress doing? Well, Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin and chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, announced this week that he would hold a hearing on … his belief that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were an inside job. “Start with Building Seven,” he said during a podcast, referring to a common conspiracy theory. He said that the World Trade Center structure collapsed because of a “controlled demolition,” that the evidence was destroyed, and that the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s investigation was “corrupt.” Quoth QAnon Ron: “My guess is there’s an awful lot being covered up in terms of what the American government knows about 9/11.”


    Trump this week voiced his determination that “we’re not going to be a laughingstock” among nations. It’s a bit late for that.


    Let’s review where Trump’s mistakes have left us over the past week.


    The International Monetary Fund reduced growth forecasts for the United States to just 1.8 percent this year, down from 2.8 percent last year, in large part because of Trump’s trade war. After saying it would reach 90 trade deals in 90 days, the administration has yet to negotiate even one. The CEOs of Walmart, Target and Home Depot warned the president that his tariffs would lead to empty shelves, as Axios first reported — part of what caused Trump’s latest surrender on China. Markets were pleased, but Americans have been deeply shaken. A Gallup poll found a record number of people saying their personal financial situation is deteriorating. A Reuters-Ipsos poll found that only 37 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, lower than it ever was during his first term. Fox News found that Trump is lower in public esteem than any other president has been at the 100-day mark in more than a quarter-century.

    Trump’s cruelty, by contrast, exceeds that of all others. Gothamist, a publication of New York Public Radio, carried a heartbreaking account this week of migrant children at shelters in New York facing an immigration judge alone because the Trump administration has cut off the funding that provides them with lawyers. The judge explained why the United States wants to deport a group that “included a 7-year-old boy, wearing a shirt emblazoned with a pizza cartoon, who spun a toy windmill.” The report went on: “There was an 8-year-old girl and her 4-year-old sister, in a tie-dye shirt, who squeezed a pink plushy toy and stuffed it into her sleeve. None of the children were accompanied by parents or attorneys, only shelter workers who helped them log on to the hearing.”


    In foreign affairs, Trump is proposing the most odious appeasement in Europe since Neville Chamberlain abandoned the Sudetenland. He is demanding Ukraine surrender the 20 percent of its country, including Crimea, that Vladimir Putin has seized and abandon any hope of joining NATO. When Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky understandably protested, Trump dismissed him as a man with “no cards to play.” Putin continues some of his most savage attacks of the war (Russian strikes on Kyiv early Thursday killed at least 12 people and wounded about 90 others) in expectation that Trump will force Ukraine to give up even more. “Vladimir, STOP!” Trump pleaded in a Truth Social post on Thursday morning. (Trump simultaneously resumed his attacks on our former friend and ally Canada, saying it “would cease to exist” as a country without U.S. support.)

    Police officers help an injured woman leave her damaged house in Kyiv after a Russian airstrike on Thursday. (Evgeniy Maloletka/AP)
    Trump’s corruption has become even more brazen. A website promoting Trump’s cryptocurrency “meme coin,” $TRUMP, announced that the top 220 investors in the meme coin — proceeds of which go directly to Trump and his family — would be invited to an “Intimate Private Dinner” with the president and a “Special VIP tour.” The Justice Department has stepped in to help Trump in his appeal of the $83 million jury award against him for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, which would amount to a gift by the taxpayers to Trump of millions of dollars in legal fees. A Trump political appointee at the Treasury Department has asked the IRS to reconsider audits of two “high profile friends of the president,” including MyPillow’s Mike Lindell, The Post’s Jacob Bogage reported. And Musk’s SpaceX is poised to be given a juicy contract by the Pentagon to build Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile shield.

    To arrest Trump’s ongoing abuses of power, judges have now weighed in more than 100 times blocking his actions, at least temporarily. Though Trump officials, including an increasingly hysterical Stephen Miller, blame a “rogue, radical-left judiciary” and “communist, left-wing judges” (as Miller screamed Wednesday night on Fox News’s “Hannity”), the judges include conservatives such as Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, who this week ordered the administration to restore Voice of America. Lamberth said the administration’s attempt to shut down VOA was “a direct affront to the power of the legislative branch” and said it would be “hard to fathom a more straightforward display of arbitrary and capricious actions.”

    Likewise, appellate Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a conservative icon, last week said the administration’s deportations without due process were a threat to “the foundation of our constitutional order” and should be “shocking not only to judges but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.” Yet Trump continues to worsen the constitutional crisis by ignoring or slow-walking responses to court orders, not just in deportation cases but also in cases where courts have blocked the firings of federal workers, such as those employed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

    This largely illegal destruction of federal functions continues to pile up casualties and proposed casualties: Food-safety inspections. Efforts to make infant formula safer. Milk testing. Weather balloons. Monitoring of IVF treatment safety. Data on maternal health. The administration has even tried to sell off the Montgomery, Alabama, bus station where Freedom Riders were attacked in 1961; it now houses the Freedom Rides Museum. Republican Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia proposed a plan that would sharply cut what the federal government spends on Medicaid. Happily, after a disastrous quarter for Tesla (net income fell 71 percent, largely because of its CEO’s antics), Musk said he would “significantly” reduce his time spent on his government work, calling the cost-slashing effort “mostly done.” His boss is apparently moving on. “He was a tremendous help,” Trump said on Wednesday, in an unmistakable shift to the past tense.

    And Trump continues to Trump. Twice in the past week, he has posted a photo from the Oval Office of himself holding an image purporting to show the knuckles of deportee Abrego García, with a message saying “He’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles.” But the “MS-13” characters are obviously photoshopped, as clumsily done as Trump’s one-time manipulation of a government weather map with a Sharpie.

    Surrounded by young children at the White House Easter Egg Roll, Trump entertained them by showing them a different photo: that of him, bloodied, after last year’s assassination attempt.

    Meshuggene doesn’t begin to capture it.



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  • Maine Governor Mills Stands Up to Trump’s Bullying; He Backs Down

    Maine Governor Mills Stands Up to Trump’s Bullying; He Backs Down


    Last February, Trump met with the nation’s governors. He gave them a lecture about his agenda. When it came to his determination to ban transgender athletes, he called out Governor Janet Mills of Maine. He warned her that had “better comply” with his executive order. They exchanged words. She was unbowed. She said to Trump: “See you in court.”

    Trump told the Agriculture Department to hold back $3 million in food from Maine schools.

    Maine sued to get the money that was due.

    They settled. Maine got its $3 million. Governor Mills changed nothing.

    The New York Times reported:

    The state’s attorney general, Aaron M. Frey, said his office had withdrawn a lawsuit it filed in objection to the funding freeze, which had held up around $3 million, he estimated, and was initiated by the Agriculture Department last month. The federal dollars, Mr. Frey said in an interview, pay for food preparation in schools and child care centers, and also assist in feeding disabled adults in congregate settings…

    “The food doesn’t just buy itself, deliver itself, cook itself,” Mr. Frey said Friday, adding that the Trump administration had tried to “bully” Maine. “The message here is if you don’t follow the law and you try to target Maine without relying on any shred of law to support it, we’re going to have to take you to court.”

    The White House deferred comment to the Agriculture Department. 

    Ms. Mills said in a statement that the Trump administration had made an “unlawful attempt to freeze critical funding.” But the agreement, she said, will preserve healthy meals for about 170,000 schoolchildren across Maine.

    That’s the thing about bullies. If you stand up to them, they back off. They get their power by intimidation. At bottom, they are cowards. Take Trump. He dodged the draft. Five times. Don’t be afraid of him.



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  • Catherine Rampell: Why Does Trump’s Regime Have Your Data and How Will They Use It?

    Catherine Rampell: Why Does Trump’s Regime Have Your Data and How Will They Use It?


    Catherine Rampell is an opinion writer for The Washington Post who writes often about economics. She focuses here on the expansion of data collection by the Trump administration, even as it ceases to collect anonymous data about health trends. What worries me is the invasion of privacy by the DOGE team, who scooped up personally identifiable data from the IRS and Social Security about everyone, including you and me. Why did they want it? What will they do to it?

    She writes:

    It’s rarely comforting to appear on a government “list,” even (or perhaps especially) when compiled in the name of public safety.

    It was alarming in the 1940s, when the U.S. government collected the names of Japanese Americans for internment. Likewise in the 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee catalogued communists. And it’s just as troubling now, as the Trump administration assembles registries of Jewish academics and Americans with developmental disabilities.

    Yes, these are real things that happened this past week, the latest examples of the White House’s abuse of confidential data.

    Last week, faculty and staff at Barnard College received unsolicited texts asking them whether they were Jewish. Employees were stunned by the messages, which many initially dismissed as spam.

    Turns out the messages came from the Trump administration. Barnard, which is affiliated with Columbia University, had agreed to share faculty members’ private contact info to aid in President Donald Trump’s pseudo-crusade against antisemitism.

    Ah, yes, a far-right president asking Jews to register as Jewish, in the name of protecting the Jews, after he has repeatedly accused Jews of being “disloyal.” What could go wrong?

    The same day, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya announced a “disease registry” of people with autism, to be compiled from confidential private and government health records, apparently without its subjects’ awareness or consent. This is part of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vendetta against vaccines, which he has said cause autism despite abundant research concluding otherwise.

    This, too, is disturbing given authoritarian governments’ history of compiling lists of citizens branded mentally or physically deficient. If that historical analogue seems excessive, note that Bhattacharya’s announcement came just a week after Kennedy delivered inflammatory remarks lamenting that kids with autism will never lead productive lives. They “will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job,” he said, adding they’ll never play baseball or go on a date, either.

    This all happened during Autism Acceptance Month, established to counter exactly these kinds of stigmatizing stereotypes. Kennedy’s comments and the subsequent “registry” set off a wave of fear in the autism advocacy community and earned condemnation from scientists.

    Obviously, advocates want more research and support for those with autism. They have been asking for more help at least since 1965 (when what is now called the Autism Society of America was founded in my grandparents’ living room). But few in this community trust political appointees hostile to scientific research — or a president who has publicly mocked people with disabilities — to use an autism “registry” responsibly.

    (An unnamed HHS official later walked back Bhattacharya’s comments, saying the department was not creating a “registry,” per se, just a “real-world data platform” that “will link existing datasets to support research into causes of autism and insights into improved treatment strategies.” Okay.)

    These are hardly the administration’s only abuses of federal data. It has been deleting reams of statistical records, including demographic data on transgender Americans. It has also been exploiting other private administrative records for political purposes.

    For example, the Internal Revenue Service — in an effort to persuade people to pay their taxes — spent decades assuring people that their records are confidential, regardless of immigration status. The agency is in fact legally prohibited from sharing tax records, even with other government agencies, except under very limited circumstances specified by Congress. Lawmakers set these limits in response to Richard M. Nixon’s abuse of private tax data to target personal enemies.

    Trump torched these precedents and promises. After a series of top IRS officials resigned, the agency has now agreed to turn over confidential records to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement locate and deport some 7 million undocumented immigrants.

    The move, which also has troubling historical echoes, is being challenged in court. But, in the meantime, tax collections will likely fall. Undocumented immigrant workers had been paying an estimated $66 billion in federal taxes annually, but they now have even more reason to stay off the books.

    This and other DOGE infiltrations of confidential records are likely to discourage public cooperation on other sensitive government data collection efforts. Think research on mental health issues or public safety assessments on domestic violence.

    But that might be a feature, not a bug, for this administration. Chilling federal survey participation and degrading data quality were arguably deliberate objectives in Trump’s first term, when he tried to cram a question about citizenship into the 2020 Census. The question was expected to depress response rates and help Republicans game the congressional redistricting process.

    Courts ultimately blocked Trump’s plans. That’s what it will take to stop ongoing White House abuses, too: not scrapping critical government records, but championing the rule of law.

    Ultimately, the government must be able to collect and integrate high-quality data — to administer social programs efficiently, help the economy function and understand the reality we live in so voters can hold public officials accountable. None of this is possible if Americans fear ending up on some vindictive commissar’s “list.”



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  • Jonathan V. Last: MAHA Is a Fraud

    Jonathan V. Last: MAHA Is a Fraud


    Jonathan V. Last writes for and edits one of the liveliest and most informative sites on the Internet: The Bulwark. That is home base for a significant number of Republican Never Trumpers. In this post, he explains that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not only unqualified in medical issues but his ignorance puts all of us in danger.

    America has never been healthier. Going backwards is going to mean more people getting sick and dying.

    (Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

    1. The Past Sucked

    I had a great conversation with Your Local Epidemiologist, Katelyn Jetelina, yesterday. It’s here if you missed it.

    As she was explaining the state of play with measles outbreaks and falling vaccination rates, I asked her if there was any analog to this moment in the history of public health. She couldn’t think of one.

    What America’s new public health establishment—by which I don’t mean actual public health experts but their dilettante conspiracist bosses—is doing is choosing to move the country backwards. Less medical research, a pull-back on life-saving vaccines, turning away from science and embracing folk medicine.

    Our new health establishment is explicit about wanting to go backwards. It’s right there on the hat: Make America Healthy Again.

    Again.

    Meaning: America used to be “healthy” and now is not.

    I’m sorry, I know we’re supposed to meet people where they are and give them a loving truth sandwich, but this is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.

    Does anyone remember what “health” looked like in America a generation or two ago? Half the country smoked. People dropped dead at 50 on the reg. Child birth was dangerous. Seatbelts were suss. Drug use was off the charts.

    Dangerous communicable diseases were still around. Cancer was a death sentence. AIDS looked like an unstoppable tsunami.

    Food? Do remember what grocery stores looked like in 1980? Aisles of canned vegetables, processed foods, and frozen TV dinners. Fresh produce? Good luck. That section of the Acme was a shoebox.

    But that’s all anecdotal. Let’s look at the data. Because it shows—absolutely, unequivocally—that this is the healthiest period in American history.

    Let’s start with the dumbest possible metric: life expectancy.

    We’ve had a slight downtick in the last year or two largely driven by COVID. You know why a lot of people died from COVID? Because they refused to follow public health advice during the pandemic and then refused to get vaccinated once we had vaccines in hand. So it was precisely the MAHA idiocy that moved our life expectancy backward.

    Let’s zoom out and look at America compared to the rest of the developed world:

    You want to “Make America Healthy Again”? Get the fucking COVID vaccine like everyone else in the civilized world did.

    How about infant mortality? That’s another excellent marker of health in a society. Oh, look—it’s incredibly low: 5.61 deaths per 1,000 live births. This is up slightly from 2020 because, again, COVID. But it’s still a historic low.

    When do you think the golden, “healthy” past was? In 1980, the infant mortality rate was more than double what it is today (12.0). In 1960 it was more double that number (25.9).

    Real problems do exist. For instance: Access to healthcare for African-American women. The black infant mortality rate is double that of white Americans and the maternal mortality rate for African-American women has been rising sharply for a generation.

    These statistics are absolutely shameful. Yet you don’t hear a lot about them from the beef-tallow crowd, do you?

    How about infectious diseases? In 1900 half of all deaths in America were from communicable diseases. Through medical advances—especially vaccines—we got that number down to about 5 percent—until COVID. All by itself COVID accounted for 12 percent of all deaths in the United States in 2021.

    So again: If you want America to be healthy you’d do exactly the opposite of what the Trump administration is doing and urge everyone to get vaccinated.

    And while we’re talking about healthy habits: Americans don’t smoke like they used to.

    Also, forty years ago less than a fifth of people in cars used seatbelts. Today that number is well over 90 percent.

    2. The Big C

    Let’s talk about cancer. You ever feel like, “Man, people are getting cancer like crazy these days?”

    Here’s what happened. There was a huge spike in the incidence of cancer diagnoses from 1975 to 1995. Why? Two things.

    First, people were living longer and you have to die of something. Since people weren’t dying from polio, measles, and communicable diseases, they were living long enough to get cancer.

    Second, medical science developed more tools to detect cancer. Inventing effective tests and screenings means finding more incidences. Donald Trump knows this.

    So when you look at this graph the solid lines are cancer incidences. You see that they go up, and then down. But I want you to look at the dotted lines:

    The dotted lines are the cancer mortality rates. And what you see is that in the early 1990s, people started surviving cancer at higher rates even as the incidences of cancer increased. And from 1995 to 2000, as the cancer incidence rate peaked, the mortality rate fell off a cliff.

    Why?

    Because better tests = more cancer diagnoses = earlier interventions + therapeutic advances = much higher survival rates.

    The pattern we see with cancer incidence describes a lot of our health challenges today. Why do so many people get dementia or Alzheimer’s now? Because they’re surviving cancer and—again—something is going to get us eventually.

    Why so many autism diagnoses? Because 40 years ago doctors didn’t understand what they were seeing in kids who had ASD. Now they do. Once medical science understands what it’s looking at, you’re going to get more diagnoses. This isn’t hard to understand.

    Look: There are some things that have legitimately gotten worse over time. The incidence of Type 2 diabetes has increased dramatically since 1950. Some of this is linked to increasing obesity.

    What’s the answer? Diet and exercise, which you may recall Michelle Obama talking a lot about (and getting ridiculed by Republicans for her trouble). Semaglutide drugs show tremendous potential for helping curb obesity and reduce the incidence of diabetes.

    You may be surprised to hear that MAHA does not like this class of pharmaceuticals.

    So what’s going on here? Why does the “Make America Healthy Again” movement romanticize the health outcomes of the past (which were worse) and misunderstand the health outcomes of the present (which are significantly better along the most important vectors and continue to improve over time)?

    Why do people like RFK Jr. oppose medical practices that create better outcomes (vaccines; the Ozempic-class drugs)?

    I don’t know. Maybe you have a theory and can discuss it in the comments.

    But at the end of the day, the “why” doesn’t matter. What matters is the results. And the results are going to be bad.

    3. Worse Than Fraud

    Buildings used to catch on fire all the time in America. It was a serious problem. That’s why cities had as many fire stations as churches.

    Over time, we cut way down on the number of fires. We switched construction materials. We came up with safer mechanisms for delivering gas and electricity. We developed best-practices and enshrined them in building codes. The big thing was the invention of the sprinkler system.

    The result was that even as the total number of buildings in America kept growing, the annual number of structure fires kept going down. Dramatically.

    Imagine a movement that looked at this data and decided America didn’t need sprinkler systems anymore.

    Modern building costs are too high. There’s too much red tape. We spend billions on sprinkler systems every year that are never used. Let’s go back to the old ways. Make Buildings Great Again.

    After all, we don’t have to worry about fires anymore.

    The MAHA movement is like that. Except that while trying to get rid of sprinkler systems and building codes, they are also walking around carelessly tossing lit matches.

    These people aren’t just frauds. They’re arsonists. And right now they run the U.S. government, the CDC, the NIH, and the fire department, too.



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  • John Thompson: Oklahoma Has Its Own DOGE, Just as Destructive as Elon’s

    John Thompson: Oklahoma Has Its Own DOGE, Just as Destructive as Elon’s


    After Trump introduced Elon Musk and his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” several Republican-controlled states created their own DOGE operations. Like the one Musk launched, these were non-governmental, unelected, unaccountable cost-cutters, set loose to apply a chainsaw to state government.

    John Thompson reports on what happened in Oklahoma.

    CBS’s Sixty Minutes recently reported on the danger of H5N1 bird flu spinning out of control. It cited Dr. Kamran Khan who explained why “We are really at risk of this virus evolving into one that has pandemic potential.” Another expert agreed that “this flu could make Covid look like a walk in the park.”

    This frightening reporting comes as the DOGE–OK seeks to cut nearly $150 million for programs that provide immunization services, pathogens surveillance, and emerging infectious diseases prevention, and provide Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity for Prevention of Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases.

    And this is only one reason for looking into the DOGE–OK process.

    Anyone paying attention to Elon Musk’s leadership of the Trump administration’s DOGE campaign to cut federal programs has reason the fear the DOGE campaigns launched in 26 states. After all, as the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) explains, when Governor Kevin Stitt opened Oklahoma’s DOGE-OK, he called for a reduction in our personal income and corporate tax rates, thus making the state’s tax code even more regressive.

    The EPI further explained that Stitt selected Marc Nuttle, “who was the ‘chief strategist’ behind Oklahoma’s 2001 so-called right-to-work referendum—a policy designed to disempower workers and lower wages (and contrary to proponents’ claims, it did not bolster job growth in the state).” The executive order empowered Nuttle to lead efforts of a newly formed agency to study the state budget.

    Moreover, the EPI explains:

    DOGE-OK is itself duplicative since the Office of the State Auditor and Inspector is constitutionally mandated to “examine the state and all county treasurers’ books, accounts, and cash on hand, stipulating that [the office] shall perform other duties as may be prescribed by law.” Similar to DOGE-OK, the auditor reviews staffing levels, assesses state spending, and issues public reports to promote transparency.

    The DOGE-OK report now explains:

    Once DOGE-OK ideas are received, they are analyzed and vetted with the appropriate group. If validated, ideas are added to the DOGE-OK website. 

    But, when I studied the report, I found no sign of hard evidence to back its claims. For instance, they didn’t explain their methodology, and offered no cost/benefit analyses. DOGE didn’t explain what “groups” it considered to be “appropriate,” and what data was used to analyze and vet, and validate their ideas.  

    Since the first DOGE headlines focused on $157 million in supposedly “wasteful health grants” by the federal government, I focused on Medicaid and Department of Health cuts.

    These proposed cuts are especially disturbing because, as Shiloh Kantz, the executive director of the nonpartisan Oklahoma Policy Institute, explained, “Oklahoma already ranks among the worst in health outcomes.”

    First, DOGE-OK claimed that $60 million per year would be saved if the state, not the federal government, performed eligibility checks on children. And, they cited two drugs that received accelerated approval without working, costing $42 million. But, they did not mention the number and the benefits of the other drugs, like the Covid vaccine, that received accelerated approval.

    Also, DOGE-OK inexplicably said that easing the prescription drug cost cap would improve prices. And they recommended repeal of staffing requirements for Long-Term Care facilities in order to save $76 million annually, without mentioning harm to elderly patients due to under-staffing.

    DOGE-OK also said that three Oklahoma State Department of Health programs should be cut by almost $150 million because their funding exceeded the amount necessary.  As already mentioned, in the wake of Covid pandemic, and as measles and bird flu spread, these programs provide immunization services, pathogens surveillance, and emerging infectious diseases prevention, etc. So, how did DOGE reach the conclusion that the full funding of those programs is no longer necessary?  

    Then, DOGE-OK said that 7 programs should have cuts because of “duplication,” with partners doing the same or similar work. They said $2.2 million would be saved by getting rid of the team efforts necessary to improve health.

    And Sex Education should be cut by $236,000 because of its low Return on Investment.

    Again, I saw no evidence behind their recommendations for $157,606,300 in overall health care reductions. Neither did they address financial costs of implementing their ideas. And, there is no evidence that DOGE seriously considered the costs in terms of the lives that would be damaged or lost.

    Given the history of the Trump/Musk DOGE, none of the DOGE–OK should be a surprise. When Gov. Stitt selected Nuttle, a true-believer in Milton Friedman, to run the project, Stitt said, “With his help, we’ll leave state government leaner than we found it.”

    Is that the proper way to launch a supposedly balanced and evidence-driven investigation of such complex and crucial policy approaches?

    Stitt’s news release previewed Nuttle’s methodology: “use his knowledge of the inner workings of government to comb through agency budgets, legislative appropriations, and contracts.”

    So, to paraphrase the DOGE-OK report’s description of its methodology, its proposals would be “analyzed and vetted” by what they see as the “appropriate group.”

    In other words, Oklahomans were never promised an open, balanced, evidence-based DOGE process for making our state better. But the same is also true for Musk’s federal DOGE chainsaw.



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  • Trump Launches an Era of Unprecedented Corruption in His Second Term

    Trump Launches an Era of Unprecedented Corruption in His Second Term


    The second Trump administration may well go down in history as the most corrupt presidency in our history. We learned yesterday that the Trump family crytocurrency just received an investment of $2 billion from a fund in Abu Dhabi; this is a sure way to gain access to the patriarch in the White House. Not only is he enriching himself and his family, but has also allowed Elon Musk to violate every ethical rule in the federal government while shackling his competitors.

    Steven Rattner, a columnist for The New York Times, details some of the ways that Trump enriches himself during his Presidency. We should not be surprised. Throughout his adult life, Trump has been a hustler, a con man, a performer, and a man who loves money.

    He wrote:

    No presidential administration is completely free from questionable ethics practices, but Donald Trump has pushed us to a new low. He has accomplished that by breaking every norm of good government, often while enriching himself, whether by pardoning a felon who, together with his wife, donated $1.8 million to the Trump campaign; promoting Teslas on the White House driveway; or holding a private dinner for speculators who purchase his new cryptocurrency.

    Mr. Trump’s blatant transgressions have swamped those of any modern president and even those of his first term. Remember the outrage when he refused to divest his financial holdings or when he used a Washington hotel he owned as a kind of White House waiting room? Those moves seem quaint in comparison.

    In his trampling of historically appropriate behavior, Mr. Trump appears to be pursuing several agendas. Personal enrichment stands out: Imagine any other president collecting a cut of sales from a cryptocurrency marketed with his likeness. There is the way he is expanding his powers: He has ignored or eliminated large swaths of rules that would have inhibited his freedom of action and his ability to put trusted acolytes in key roles. And then there’s rewarding donors, whether through pardons or favors for their clients.

    I was working in the Washington bureau of The Times when Richard Nixon resigned, and even he — taken down by his efforts to cover up his misdeeds — did not engage in such a vast array of sordid practices.

    The corruption of Trump 2.0 has not gotten the attention it deserves amid the barrage of news about Mr. Trump’s tariff wars, his attack on scientific research and his senior appointees’ Signal text chains. But self-dealing is such a defining theme of this administration that it needs to be called out. Like much that Mr. Trump has done in other areas, it announces to the world that America’s leaders can no longer be trusted to follow its laws and that influence is up for sale.

    Just as in the post-Nixon era, when guardrails were established to prevent transgressions, the next president could decide to restore some of the sound government practices that Mr. Trump has trampled on. But the damage he has inflicted by, say, pardoning his donors or lining his own pockets is irreversible.

    The below represents just a sampling of what’s transpired these past 100 days.

    • He turned a legitimate federal employee designation into a loophole. By giving senior officials such as Elon Musk the title “special government employee,” Mr. Trump avoided requirements that they publicly disclose their financial holdings and divest any that present conflicts before taking jobs in the administration.
    • He ended bans that stopped executive branch employees from accepting gifts from lobbyists or seeking lobbying jobs themselves for at least two years.
    • He loosened the enforcement of laws that curb foreign lobbying and bribery.
    • He dismissed the head of the office that polices conflicts of interest among senior officials.
    • He jettisoned the head of the office that, among other things, protects whistle-blowers and ensures political neutrality in federal workplaces.
    • He purged nearly 20 nonpartisan inspectors general who were entrusted with rooting out corruption within the government.

    Rewarding donors is part of any presidential administration. Every president in my memory appointed supporters to ambassadorships. But again, Mr. Trump has gone much further.

    • Jared Isaacman, a billionaire with deep tentacles into SpaceX, gave $2 million to the inaugural committee and was nominated to head NASA — SpaceX’s largest customer.
    • The convicted felon Trevor Milton and his wife donated $1.8 million to the campaign and Mr. Milton received a pardon, which also spared him from paying restitution.
    • The lobbyist Brian Ballard raised over $50 million for Mr. Trump’s campaign, and Mr. Trump handed major victories to two Ballard clients. He delayed a U.S. ban on China-owned TikTok his first day in office and killed an effort to ban menthol cigarettes, a major priority of tobacco company R.J. Reynolds, on his second.

    Mr. Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire who spent $277 million to back Mr. Trump and other Republican candidates, requires his own category.

    As a special government employee, Mr. Musk is supposed to perform limited services to the government for no more than 130 days a year. By law, no government official — even a special government employee — can participate in any government matter that has a direct effect on his or her financial interests. That criminal statute hasn’t stopped Mr. Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency from interacting with at least 10 of the agencies that oversee his business interests.

    • He installed a SpaceX engineer at the Federal Aviation Administration to review its air traffic control system. The F.A.A. is reportedly considering canceling Verizon’s $2.4 billion contract to update its aging telecommunications infrastructure in favor of a SpaceX’s Starlink product. (SpaceX has denied it is taking over the contract.)
    • SpaceX is a leading contender to secure a large share of Mr. Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense project, an effort that could involve billions of revenue for the winner.
    • X, Mr. Musk’s social media outlet, has become an official source of government news. The White House welcomed a reporter from the platform at a recent briefing, and at least a dozen government agencies started DOGE-focused X accounts.
    • As Mr. Musk’s political activities started to repel many potential customers of Tesla, his electric vehicle company, Mr. Trump lined Tesla vehicles up on the White House driveway and extolled their benefits. Then Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged Fox News viewers to buy Tesla shares.
    • DOGE nearly halved the team at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that regulates autonomous vehicles. The agency has been investigating whether Tesla’s self-driving technology played a role in the death of a pedestrian in Arizona.

    Critics of crypto argue that it has demonstrated little value beyond enabling criminal activity. Despite this, Mr. Trump has wasted no time eliminating regulatory oversight of the industry at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department, even as his family grows ever more invested in it.

    By enabling money to be delivered anonymously and without any bank participation, crypto offers the possibility for any individual or foreign state to funnel money to Mr. Trump and his family secretly. Moreover, Bloomberg News recently estimated that the Trump family crypto fortune is nearing $1 billion.

    • On the eve of his inauguration he released $TRUMP and $MELANIA memecoins — a type of crypto derived from internet jokes or mascots. Next, the S.E.C. announced it would not regulate memecoins. Then last week, Mr. Trump offered a private dinner at his golf club and a separate “Special VIP Tour” to the top 25 investors in $TRUMP, causing the price of the currency to surge and enriching the family. (That tour was initially advertised as being at the White House. Then the words “White House” disappeared, but the rest of that prize remained.)
    • The S.E.C. eliminated its crypto-enforcement program, ending or pausing nearly every crypto-related lawsuit, appeal and investigation. That includes the civil suit against Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur who had separately purchased $75 million worth of tokens tied to Mr. Trump’s family after the election.
    • The S.E.C. also suspended its civil fraud case against Binance, the huge crypto exchange that pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations and allowed terrorist financing, hacking and drug trafficking to proliferate on its platform. Soon after, the company met with Treasury officials to seek looser oversight while also negotiating a business deal with Mr. Trump’s family.
    • World Liberty Financial, a crypto company that Mr. Trump and his sons helped launch, said it had sold $550 million worth of digital coins. A business entity linked to him gets 75 percent of the sales.
    • The Trump family has said it will partner with the Singapore-based crypto exchange Crypto.com to introduce a series of funds comprising crypto and securities with a made-in-America focus.
    • The federal government’s “crypto czar,” David Sacks, Mr. Lutnick and Mr. Musk all have connections to the market. (Mr. Musk named DOGE after a memecoin.)
    • Mr. Trump is reportedly on his way to raising $500 million for his political action committees — highly unusual for a president who cannot run for re-election.
    • A new Trump Tower is underway in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second largest city, with plans for two more projects for the kingdom announced after Mr. Trump’s November election victory, all in partnership with a Saudi company with close ties to the Saudi government.
    • Mr. Trump’s team asked about bringing the signature British Open golf tournament to his Turnberry resort in Scotland during a visit of the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, to the White House.
    • He posts news-making announcements on Truth Social, the company in which his family owns a significant stake.

    It’s all a sorry and sordid picture, a president who had already set a new standard for egregious and potentially illegal behavior hitting new lows with metronomic regularity.



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  • Republicans Were Eager to Investigate Biden, But Not Trump

    Republicans Were Eager to Investigate Biden, But Not Trump


    Philip Bump of The Washington Post notes the hypocrisy of Republicans, especially James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who searched and searched forevidence of President Biden’s corruption. He never found it but he never stopped looking and releasing press releases about the corruption he expected to find.

    Now there is a genuine grifter in the White House, and Comer has lost interest in corruption, even when it’s detailed on the front pages of the daily press.

    Yesterday, we learned that a fund in Abu Dhabi had invested $2 billion in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency business. Is this what we expect of our presidents? Will there be a Congressional investigation?

    Bump writes:

    One of the more striking aspects of Elon Musk’s rampage through the federal government has been that it is, at least in theory, redundant. There already exist congressional bodies and powers that are ostensibly focused on waste and corruption. The House Oversight Committee, for example, declares as its mission to “ensure the efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability of the federal government and all its agencies.” Why deal with Musk’s messiness when Republicans control how the House exercises that power?

    We are not so naive that we cannot summon some answers to that question. One reason for this approach, for example, is that Musk was tasked with operating outside the system by design, pushing for sweeping cuts to congressionally appropriated spending specifically to get around the system of checks and balances.

    A more important reason, though, is that the majority of members on the House Oversight Committee and, in particular, Chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky.) have a specific vision for how their power should be deployed. Their mission is not to work across the aisle to make government faster and cleaner. As has been made very clear in the two years since Republicans retook the majority, their mission instead is to generate allegations of impropriety by their political opponents while shielding their allies.

    Nowhere is this more obvious than in the conflicting approach Comer and his committee have taken to allegations of self-enrichment by the nation’s chief executive.

    Days after Republicans won their majority in November 2022, Comer held a news conference in which he sought to draw attention to claims — stoked in right-wing media and embraced by his party while in the minority — that President Joe Biden had benefited from his son Hunter Biden’s consulting work. He insisted that “the Biden family swindled investors of hundreds of thousands of dollars — all with Joe Biden’s participation and knowledge” and suggested that the sitting president (and presumed 2024 Democratic presidential nominee) might be “a national security risk” who was “compromised by foreign governments.”

    What ensued over the next 16 months was far less “Law & Order” than “Keystone Kops.” Comer and other Republican leaders made little progress in tying Biden to his son’s business beyond the vaguest of connections, like that Hunter Biden would put his father on speakerphone during business meetings. Countervailing evidence for the idea that Joe Biden was entwined with Hunter’s foreign partners was ignored or spun away. One particular allegation hyped by Comer backfired spectacularly.

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) was eventually pressured into announcing an impeachment probe targeting the president mostly centered on the same things Comer had been claiming since 2022. It went nowhere.
    To put a fine point on it, two years of searching and subpoenas and depositions provided no concrete evidence (and very little circumstantial evidence!) that Joe Biden had used his position for his own personal benefit. Two seconds into Donald Trump’s second term in office, by contrast, there could have been any number of ripe targets for a similarly focused investigation.

    Comer very obviously has no interest in doing so. When he inherited the Oversight Committee in 2023, in fact, he quietly ended an investigation into Trump’s finances, despite the committee having prevailed in a legal fight to obtain documentation from Trump’s accounting firm. Even with the former president pushing for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, the various ways in which Comer’s allegations against Biden were much more obviously applicable to the Trumps attracted no interest from House Republicans.

    Since the inauguration in January, viable avenues for investigation have become only more numerous.

    On Tuesday, the New York Times published an exhaustive look at the Trumps’ creation of a crypto-centered investment structure called World Liberty Financial. It has explicit manifestations of nearly everything Comer was unable to prove about Biden and his family: exercising presidential power for the benefit of the company (and by extension himself and his sons), allowing partners to assume the trappings of the federal government for private financial discussions, foreign investors admitting that their interest is driven by the president’s participation.

    The Washington Post recently detailed Trump’s rollout of a different cryptoworld product: a bespoke coin that serves as little more than a speculative vehicle — one from which Trump and his family can directly profit. Trump recently announced that top investors in the coin would be granted an audience with him. At around the same time he did so, the federal government registered the domain thetrilliondollardinner.gov.

    “He’s actually selling access, personal access, to him and to the White House if people invest in this meme coin, which really has no intrinsic value,” Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel for the watchdog group State Democracy Defenders Action, told The Post. “If you are a foreign government burdened by tariffs, will you be enticed to invest? If you’re a criminal felon, will you maybe invest in hopes of they’ll give you an opportunity to make your case for a pardon?”
    Oh, that reminds me: At least two investors in World Liberty Financial have already received presidential pardons.

    Then there was the announcement last month that Donald Trump Jr. is the co-founder of a new private club in D.C. For a membership fee of $500,000, you can mingle with MAGAworld luminaries and — if the kickoff event is any indicator — members of the Trump administration. None of this rinky-dink “I’ll put my dad on speakerphone if he calls” stuff. Aptly enough, the club is called Executive Branch.

    Those are just recent reports, mind you. The Trump Organization (which directly enriches the president) still operates private businesses around the world, at times in partnership with foreign governments. Trump himself has visited properties run by his private company on 42 of his 102 days in office, giving customers a decent shot at getting face-time with the president. Even when he isn’t at a Trump Organization property, he’s still selling pro-Trump merchandise (like a “Trump 2028” hat) both directly through the Trump Organization and through licensing deals.

    Comer, meanwhile, has been focused not on investigating the obvious questions about Trump but, instead, on probing ActBlue — a fundraising system used by Democratic politicians. In an egregious break with the tradition of presidents avoiding interference in the Justice Department, Trump used the pretext of the House probe to demand that ActBlue face criminal investigation.

    On Wednesday morning, Comer appeared on Fox Business to discuss Republican efforts to draft a budget bill. He began by asserting that his committee had identified billions in potential budgetary savings (which he later explained would come from targeting federal employee benefits, not from any robust investigation unearthing fraud or waste). Asked about articles of impeachment filed against Trump this week, he leveled a deeply ironic charge at his colleagues across the aisle.

    “Harassing, obstructing — that’s all the Democrats know,” Comer said, while insisting that impeachment would go nowhere. “They don’t have any ideas or vision for the future.”

    If there is one thing that can be said of Trump, it is that he has a vision for the future — in particular as it relates to the robustness of his own bank account. Comer and his colleagues in the House have proved to be more than happy to not stand in his way.



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