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  • Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Goes Off the Rails

    Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Goes Off the Rails


    Trump has a fragile ego in need of constant stroking. When he doesn’t get enough, he praises himself. Two posts appeared overnight that I recommend. One, by the esteemed Heather Cox Richardson, is posted here. The other, by Robert Hubbell, is well worth reading.

    Heather Cox Richardson reviews yesterday’s bizarre summit at the White House, where European leaders tried to convince Trump to support a ceasefire in Ukraine. Trump favored a ceasefire until he met with Putin last Friday, then dropped the idea. Strangest of all, Trump abruptly left the meeting to have a 40-minute conversation with Putin. Our allies had no choice but to stand by until Trump finished his private chat with the Russian tyrant. Was he calling for instructions?

    Someday historians might be able to explain Trump’s bizarre reliance on Putin.

    She writes:

    This morning, J.D. Wolf of Meidas News pulled together all of Trump’s self-congratulatory posts from Sunday morning, when the president evidently was boosting his ego after Friday’s disastrous meeting with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Trump shared an AI-generated meme of himself with a large male lion standing next to him and the words “Peace through Strength. Anyone can make war, but only most courageous [sic] can make peace.” He posted memes claiming he is the “best president…in American history” and the “G[reatest] O[f] A[ll] T[ime], a “legend.”

    Trump also reposted material from two QAnon-related accounts and pushed the QAnon belief that the Democratic Party is “the party of hate, evil, and Satan.” Trump has faced a rebellion among his QAnon supporters as he and administration officials have refused to release information from the federal investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and have moved Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted of sex trafficking children, to a minimum-security prison camp and given her work-release privileges. It appears he’s working to make QAnon supporters forget that he was named in those files and to lure them back to his support.

    For their part, Russia Today trolled Trump’s “peace through strength” boast this morning by posting a video of an armored vehicle first going slowly on a road and then dramatically speeding up. The vehicle was flying both Russian and U.S. flags.

    Trump’s social media account this morning posted a long screed saying the president is “going to lead a movement to get rid of” mail-in ballots and voting machines, and lying that the U.S. is the only country that uses mail-in voting because it is rife with fraud. As usual, the post claimed that Democrats “CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE” and claimed they “are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM.” The post said he would sign an executive order “to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”

    Then the post claimed that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

    This is bonkers across the board. Dozens of countries use mail-in voting, and there is zero evidence of widespread voter fraud in the U.S. Just today, news broke that right-wing channel Newsmax will pay $67 million to Dominion Voting Systems for spreading false claims that the company’s voting technology had been rigged to give the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.

    Combining that sum with the $787 million Fox News paid for spreading the same lies means, as Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) wrote today, that media entities have paid out nearly $900 million “for publishing lies about the 2020 presidential election. Yet Donald Trump, who lost by more than seven million votes, keeps repeating the Big Lie and makes it compulsory dogma for his employees.”

    Certainly, if Democratic leaders were so unelectable, the Republicans would not go to such lengths to rig district voting maps and keep Democratic voters from the polls. Indeed, while voter fraud is vanishingly rare, the Republicans are using the specter of it to engage in election fraud: manipulating the mechanics of an election to favor one side over another.

    This manipulation is happening dramatically right now in Texas, where Trump pressured Governor Greg Abbott to redistrict the state in a highly unusual mid-decade map change in order to set Republicans up to gain five more seats in Congress in the next election. Abbott dutifully called a special session of the legislature to change the maps. Texas Democrats tried to stop the redistricting by leaving the state to deprive the Republicans of a quorum, that is, the minimum number of lawmakers necessary to conduct business. They stayed away until the special session expired. Abbott immediately called another one.

    Today, with it clear Abbott would simply call special sessions until they returned, the Democratic legislators went back to Texas fifteen days after they left. “We killed the corrupt special session, withstood unprecedented surveillance and intimidation, and rallied Democrats nationwide to join this existential fight for fair representation—reshaping the entire 2026 landscape,” said the leader of the Texas House Democrats Gene Wu, acknowledging the protests across Texas at the legislative steal. “We’re returning to Texas more dangerous to Republicans’ plans than when we left. Our return allows us to build the legal record necessary to defeat this racist map in court, take our message to communities across the state and country, and inspire legislators across the country how to fight these undemocratic redistricting schemes in their own statehouses.”

    Finally, the U.S. Constitution is very clear that no president has the power to dictate election rules. The framers were determined to prevent that power from falling into the hands of a potential dictator and so gave it to the states and Congress, establishing that “[t]he Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

    These obvious lies make it seem crystal clear that Trump and his loyalists are preparing to reject any election results that they don’t like.

    Trump’s panic about facing voters is increasingly evident. His job approval ratings are already abysmal, and the fallout from his tariffs and deportations is only now beginning to show. Last Thursday, a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the Producer Price Index—wholesale costs that will likely show up later in consumer costs—jumped 0.9% in July, the largest jump since June 2022, when the U.S. was mired in post-pandemic inflation. The wholesale price of vegetables jumped 38.9% in July.

    On Friday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that the budget reconciliation bill (called by Republicans the OBBBA, for “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”) that adds $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade will trigger cuts of up to $491 billion in Medicare (not a typo) from 2027 to 2034 in addition to its cuts of almost a trillion dollars to Medicaid over the next ten years. The 2010 Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act (S-PAYGO) automatically triggers cuts to government programs if the budget deficit increases as it is expected to under the new law, and Medicare spending would be on the chopping block.

    Although Democrats called attention to this threat to Medicare during debates over the measure, Republicans promised their cuts to Medicaid would target only “waste, fraud, and abuse” and promised they would not touch Medicare.

    Today Marty Schladen of the Ohio Capital Journal showed what those cuts actually look like in one state. Schladen reported that the cuts to Medicaid will take insurance from 310,000 people. Schladen also noted that the law ended the “enhanced premium tax credit” that made health insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act’s insurance markets more affordable for those who make between 100% and 400% of federal poverty guidelines. More than 530,000 people in Ohio have benefited from the program. Their premiums will go up dramatically when it expires at the end of this year, and experts warn that more than 100,000 healthier people will drop their coverage. That loss, in turn, will drive up costs for those remaining in the market.

    Scott Horsley of NPR reported on Saturday that electricity prices in the country have “jumped more than twice as fast as the overall cost of living in the last year.” Prices are going up as producers export liquid natural gas and as data centers swallow energy to fuel the AI boom.

    Elected on his promises to lower prices, Trump is in trouble with those who believed those promises. Today, former Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, formally announced his candidacy for the Senate seat vacated when J.D. Vance became vice president. Brown noted that in Ohio, which has a population of about 12 million people, “half a million are going to lose their [health] insurance. These are mostly working families that are working for an employer that doesn’t provide insurance, or they’re kids, or they’re seniors, or they’re disabled people. Those are the people who are losing their health insurance. People didn’t vote for that. They didn’t vote for drug prices to go up. They didn’t vote for higher grocery bills. They didn’t vote for veterans’ benefits being slashed. They didn’t vote for any of this.”

    On Thursday, the Pew Research Center reported that only 38% of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, with 61% disapproving of it.

    And then there is the increasing evidence that Trump is unable to manage the presidency. Today Trump met with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, French president Emmanuel Macron, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, United Kingdom prime minister Keir Starmer, and Finnish president Alexander Stubb. That so many foreign leaders dropped everything to rush to Washington, D.C., after Trump’s meeting with Putin on Friday indicated their alarm. The leaders reiterated that Putin started the war and could stop it at any time, and pressed Trump to back a ceasefire.

    At today’s meetings, Trump repeated Russian talking points, complained about how poorly he is treated, said he had ended six wars, insisted that voting in the U.S. is full of fraud, and suggested he would cancel the 2028 elections. By the late afternoon, the president was unable to recognize President Stubb, who was sitting directly across the table from him. “President Stubb of Finland,” Trump said. Looking around, Trump continued: “And he’s uh, he’s somebody that, where are we here? Huh? Where? Where?” Stubb said, “I’m right here.” Trump focused on him and answered: “Oh. You look better than I’ve ever seen you look.”

    This evening, CNN senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes reported that Trump paused his negotiation with European leaders to call Vladimir Putin. Her source said that European leaders were not present for the conversation. Ivan Nechepurenko of the New York Times reported that the call was forty minutes long.



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  • CSU students sound off on impact of upcoming tuition increase

    CSU students sound off on impact of upcoming tuition increase


    “I was considering a master’s program through Cal Poly,” Monreal said. “But with the tuition increase, I might just consider getting a master’s degree anywhere else.”

    For students like Monreal, who already manage student loans to take on college tuition costs, the 6% yearly tuition increases will have a profound impact on their education choices.

    As an older sister to several high school-age siblings, Monreal said that she would encourage them to take into consideration these tuition increases when applying to colleges.

    “I have younger siblings, and I think I would encourage them not to go to four-year college,” she said. “As a first-year, I would recommend any junior college so they can get some units under their belt at first, if the cost is increasing so much.”

    Gabriela’s story gathered by California Student Journalism Corps member Arabel Meyer





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  • Dozens of educators to be laid off in West Contra Costa

    Dozens of educators to be laid off in West Contra Costa


    Dozens of educators in the West Contra Costa Unified School District will be laid off in the upcoming school year, including grant-funded positions the district can’t afford to absorb. 

    The district plans to eliminate 104 positions, nearly 40 of those grant-funded, according to district officials. Assistant principals, instructional specialists, psychologists, bilingual paraprofessionals, academic support providers, special education and general education teachers are among the positions being eliminated. 

    Although some educators received preliminary layoff notices on March 15, the board won’t finalize the total number of eliminations until May, officials said. Some of the eliminated positions were already vacant.

    “We understand the community’s concerns about the impact of these layoffs on classroom staffing,” district spokesperson Raechelle Forrest said in an email. “It is important to note that the district is committed to hiring and maintaining qualified and credentialed individuals and that classroom teachers have not received preliminary notices.”

    The school board approved layoffs at a meeting earlier this month. Dozens of parents, educators and students spoke during the public comment period, pleading with the board to vote against the layoffs. In particular, many people spoke about the importance of school community outreach worker positions that will be eliminated. 

    School community outreach workers serve as liaisons between schools and families. Many of those workers are bilingual and can help with translations and teaching non-English speaking parents and students how to navigate the school system. Outreach workers also connect families with resources and can help facilitate meetings when there are language barriers. 

    Outreach workers were among the grant-funded positions district officials said they couldn’t afford to keep without the extra money. The district would need about $9.4 million to keep the nearly 40 positions that are being axed, district data showed. Many of the positions relying on grant money provided extra support for students: bilingual instructional aides, graduate tutors, coordinators, academic support providers and bilingual paraprofessionals. 

    In the 2022-23 school year, nearly 32% of students in West Contra Costa Unified were English learners, according to data from the California Department of Education. The percentage of English learners in the district who became fluent in English has dropped significantly since 2018, data shows, dropping from nearly 13% to about 3% in the 2020-21 school year, the most recent data available. 

    The majority of English learners speak Spanish, about 27% or nearly 8,000 students in the 2022-23 school year. About 30,000 students are enrolled in West Contra Costa Unified. 

    During public comment, parents and teachers spoke about the vital role outreach workers have for schools and the community. Without them, people contemplated how some families would continue to stay engaged in school communities. 

    Educators were also outspoken about how the lack of staffing in schools has been affecting learning. Because of larger classes, there are fewer one-on-one opportunities; there’s an uptick in behavioral issues in classes with consistent substitutes, and teachers are losing prep periods in order to fill in for other classes. One student said he hasn’t had permanent teachers in core classes in recent years and, as a result, he hasn’t learned much. 

    Three complaints were filed with West Contra Costa Unified earlier this year alleging some schools failed to provide students with qualified teachers. The complaints also allege there’s been a pattern of filling vacancies with long-term substitutes, which attorneys at Public Advocates, a nonprofit civil rights law firm, say is illegal. 





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  • NPR Will Fight Trump’s Effort to Cut Off Funding

    NPR Will Fight Trump’s Effort to Cut Off Funding


    Oliver Darcy, media journalist, writes about NPR’s decision to fight the Trump administration’s efforts to shut it down.

    Trump is directly infringing on freedom of the press, punishing NPR because it is not slavishly devoted to him and his views.

    I listen to NPR for straightforward, unbiased news. I appreciate their long-form reports on a wide array of subjects. Many parts of the country are news deserts, where the only media available are the rightwing Sinclair radio stations and FOX News.

    The nation needs NPR, just as the world needs Voice of America, which Trump is defunding.

    As with so many of his decisions, I wonder who benefits? I have no answer.

    Darcy writes:

    When Trump signed an order to defund NPR, the network faced a choice over how it would respond—but CEO Katherine Maher made one thing clear from the start: there would be no backroom negotiations.

    In the days following Donald Trump’s May 1 executive order to strip NPR of all federal funding, leaders at the public broadcaster began deliberating their options. But even before the network’s legal team got to work on the litigation, one decision had already been made. NPR chief executive Katherine Maher made clear that the outlet would not quietly negotiate with the White House—an approach other media companies have recently taken under immense political pressure. 

    “As an independent media organization,” Maher told me by phone Tuesday, “we wouldn’t go ahead and have that conversation because that would be negotiating on editorial principle.” 

    On Tuesday morning, NPR and three of its member stations in Colorado filed a federal lawsuitagainst Trump and his administration, alleging the executive order he signed was not only punitive, but also unconstitutional. In a 43-page complaint, the stations argued that Trump’s directive violated theFirst Amendment, usurped Congress’authority over federal spending, and more broadly, posed a threat to the editorial independence of public media nationwide. 

    The language of the filing was unambiguous. It framed the executive order not as a routine dispute over funding priorities or media policy, but as a retaliatory strike designed to punish critical coverage and reshape the information environment in Trump’s favor. “The Order’s objectives could not be clearer,” the lawsuit stated. “The Order aims to punish NPR for the content of news and other programming the President dislikes and chill the free exercise of First Amendment rights by NPR and individual public radio stations across the country.” 

    I asked Maher what it felt like to take a sitting president to court. She didn’t hesitate. “What did it feel like?” she rhetorically asked me. “It felt like recognizing that there are responsibilities that one takes on in running a media organization, and this was one of those.” She emphasized that the case wasn’t just about NPR’s national desk or morning programming—it was about the entire public media system: “We did this on behalf of our newsroom. We did this on behalf of our editorial independence. We did this on behalf of public media at large.”

    Maher, who only took the helm of NPR in January 2024, told me that the legal option became increasingly clear as the organization studied the implications of the executive order. “We took a look at [the order] and wanted to be able to make sure that we really analyzed it,” she said. “We got to understand what avenues existed for us to be able to seek relief—and litigation was something that we came to once we realized that fundamentally this was a First Amendment issue.” The legal review moved quickly. “Obviously, it’s only been four weeks,” Maher added, “and so you can imagine it happened on a pretty quick timeline.”

    The lawsuit was filed by not just NPR, but also Colorado Public Radio, KSUT Public Radio, and Aspen Public Radio. Together, they asked the court to block enforcement of the order and affirm that federal support for public broadcasting, which Congress has repeatedly approved, cannot be overturned by presidential fiat. For its part, NPR receives just 1% of its annual operating budgetdirectly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the private nonprofit that distributes federal funding. But local member stations across the country receive a much larger slice of their budgets from the $535 million in taxpayer funds CPB distributes. PBS, facing a similar predicament, said Tuesday it is also actively weighing a legal challenge of its own.

    While Trump has long treated NPR as a proxy for elite coastal media (he’s referred to it as a “liberal disinformation machine,” among other insults), Maher declined to say in her own words why he despises the outlet with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns. “I really couldn’t say what the president thinks or doesn’t think,” she told me. “It’s beyond my powers to get inside his mind.” At the same time, she acknowledged the broader context in which public broadcasting has become a partisan target. “I think that we recognize that there has long been pushback about public media,” she said.

    In any case, the legal issue, she insisted, is separate from any political debate. When asked whether she worries that suing the president could further cement in the minds of the MAGA faithful that NPR has a bias against him, she pushed back. 

    “I fundamentally reject the idea that defending the Constitution is partisan,” Maher told me. “We are taking this action on behalf of the First Amendment. We’re taking this action on behalf of the free press. Regardless of your political beliefs, we all benefit from that.” She added that the lawsuit should be viewed as an act of civic duty, not political retaliation: “I would much rather people saw this as an act of patriotic commitment to our Constitution on behalf of citizens rather than saying that this is somehow partisan or political.”

    Of course, that’s not how her actions have been portrayed by MAGA Media, which—similarly to Trump–views NPR as a liberal mouthpiece of the so-called “deep state.” Maher seemed to acknowledge that reality, but said she would continue to work to get the outlet’s message out. She even said she would be willing to appear on outlets like Fox News to do so. “I’m always happy to talk to people who are happy to talk to us,” Maher said. “I think that we’d be open to having that conversation.”

    What happens if the court doesn’t rule in their favor? Maher didn’t give the possibility of such an outcome any oxygen. “I’m really confident that we will [win],” she said. “I feel that we’re on very, very solid ground, so I’m not concerned about the downside.”



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  • Jumping off rocks: Why kids need outdoor play to thrive

    Jumping off rocks: Why kids need outdoor play to thrive


    Nature is a kind of therapy at TimberNook ,where children play in the woods to heal behavorial issues.

    credit: TimberNook

    Jumping off rocks. Climbing trees. Hanging upside down. Spinning so fast it would make an adult dizzy.

    Meet Angela Hanscom, an occupational therapist who has come to the conclusion that children need adventurous activities to develop a healthy sense of body and mind. Not only do children need way more movement than our sedentary society allows them, she suggests, but they need precisely the kinds of movements that make adults gasp, if they are going to thrive. 

    Angela Hanscom, an occupational therapist who founded TimberNook.
    credit: TimberNook

    Often brought into classrooms to solve behavioral issues, Hanscom realized that children today do not get enough free play, exploration and exercise to allow them to focus properly in school. She began using movement as therapy, helping kids heal through spinning too fast on the merry-go-round and flying too high on the swings. 

    Hanscom, a mother of three, founded TimberNook in 2013. It began as an experimental therapy program in her own backyard before expanding to three woodland sites in Maine and spreading to franchises nationally.

    She recently discussed her philosophy of child development, which is also the theme of her book, “Balanced and Barefoot: How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children.”

    How dangerous is it for children to be too sedentary?

    The current research is that kids sit in chairs for about nine hours a day. Being driven to school, being driven home from school, sitting for hours. And then they go home and they have homework. They might have some sports, but a lot of times they’re still in an upright position.

    What really needs to happen is kids need to spin in circles. They need to go upside down because inside the inner ear are these little hair cells, and when we move in rapid ways, the fluid in the ears moves back and forth, stimulating those hair cells and developing what we call the vestibular sense. If that’s underdeveloped because kids are not moving enough, then what happens is it can affect what we call sensory integration, which is basically organization of the brain so they can learn.

    Why is it important for kids to climb trees and jump off rocks?

    It helps you know where your body is in space so you can stay in your seat without falling out. That’s actually an issue. Kids are literally falling out of the chairs in school now. The way we treat that as occupational therapists is that we have kids spin in circles, and that helps them gain more body awareness so they can navigate their environments effectively. 

    Sometimes I’ll see a kid spinning in circles and I’ll hear an adult say, don’t spin. You’re going to get dizzy or get off that rock, you’re going to get hurt. But if we, as adults, keep them from moving in those ways, we have actually become the barrier to the neurological development that needs to happen so they can become safe in their environment. 

    credit: TimberNook

    Some may call your style of outdoor therapy radical and progressive, others might see it as common sense. How do you describe it? 

    I think of it more like a restoration. I don’t think this is a progressive idea. As an occupational therapist, for me, the true occupation of a child is play. And outdoor play is a really meaningful one for most of us. Most of us have fond memories of it, but it’s also really at risk. … That’s why it’s so therapeutic. That’s why a lot of therapists will train in this, because they see how healing it is. It’s giving children what you had, what they were always meant to have.

    It’s actually a very traditional approach, as opposed to something radical.

    Yes, we’re just trying to protect a tradition. We’re saying you can’t touch this. For instance, when we go into schools, teachers aren’t allowed to go into playtime and do teachable moments. We save that for later. This is their time where they have to figure things out. The children need that time. 

    Have you sort of recreated your own childhood?

    Growing up in Vermont, it was a bunch of kids, we’d have like five or six of us. But at TimberNook, it’s like 25 children out in the woods creating societies with natural materials. It’s a dream come true for kids. It’s outdoor play for hours. It challenges them to think creatively. 

    When did you start collaborating with schools?

    We started going to schools with TimberNook in 2017. That was a fascinating process. We’re in 10 schools now, but one in particular, Laconia Christian Academy, is really doing it right.  They started it five years ago, and they did it once a week for two hours, TimberNook time at school, and immediately saw benefits. So they increased it to four hours of woodland time. 

    It’s a very academic school. So when they saw the benefits, they took their half an hour of recess and went to an hour, on top of their four hours of TimberNook time. 

    Did increasing play time have an impact on academic performance?

    During the pandemic they saw no change in academics. If anything, they saw an increase. The headmaster said, we’re seeing joy, we’re seeing kids more resilient, stronger, able to figure out their own problems. So that’s been really interesting. We’re researching that now with the University of New Hampshire on how it’s changing the culture of schools. That study is just starting, but it’s really going to be fascinating, because I think it’s time to rethink what we’re doing in schools. 

    What lured kids away from playing outside? Screens? Or parental fear of dangers outside?

    One of the biggest factors is due to fear. Fear is something that we cannot see, but it is one of the major reasons why parents and schools aren’t providing enough outdoor play time. Fear that there isn’t enough time for play in school settings. The tendency to feel schools need to push more academics. Fear that children will miss out if not playing enough sports at a very really early age. This leads to overscheduling of children for sports. … Screen time is also another major factor. It is highly addictive and is replacing a lot of good old-fashioned playtime. The kind where children are digging in the dirt for hours, rolling down hills, developing the muscles and senses for healthy child development.

    For a lot of families, the pandemic meant forcing your kid to stare at a screen for hours for remote learning, and now it’s hard to walk that back.

    We’re in a bigger hole than we were before. I think the pandemic unveiled a lot of the issues and then just made it worse, unfortunately. 

    Are you optimistic that we can try to make that change as a society? 

    I really think people are waking up. I think the time is now, there’s so much interest, and everyone you talk to now knows that this is an issue.





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