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  • Harris or Trump? A lot at stake today for California students

    Harris or Trump? A lot at stake today for California students


    A person stops to watch a screen displaying the U.S. presidential debate in September between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in Washington.

    Credit: Democracy News Alliance/news aktuell via AP Images

    Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have contrasting visions of schools and the federal government’s role in funding and shaping them. Today, voters will pick a president and his or her educational agenda.

    Based on what he said during the campaign, Trump would pursue radical changes from the conservative playbook, such as abolishing the Department of Education, withholding federal funding from states like California that protect transgender students, stripping the department’s Office of Civil Rights of defenders of civil rights, and elevating the case for school vouchers and programs of choice.

    Harris also has priorities that would affect the lives of children, including increasing the child tax credit by thousands of dollars and making universal prekindergarten a national priority. During the vice presidential debate, candidates Tim Walz and J.D. Vance found common ground on more federal support for early childhood. Harris wants to expand the federal child tax credit, now $2,000, to $6,000. Vance supports raising it to $5,000, paid for by raising tariffs on all imported goods.

    Harris has vowed to find common ground and negotiate with Republicans. Trump is a disrupter who is confident the Supreme Court won’t stand in his way. Much of his rhetoric could prove to be bluster that a narrowly divided Congress will ignore. Harris’ priorities may face the same fate.

    Here are some examples of policies that, depending on who wins the presidency, could change the nation’s educational system.

    Trump policies could mean big changes

    Abolishing the federal Department of Education has been an idea circulating among Republicans off and on since its creation 45 years ago during the Carter administration.

    Trump has revived the idea of targeting the department, which he calls a waste of money and an intrusion on states’ authority.

    But only Congress can abolish what it established, and it would take Republican control of the House, and perhaps the elimination of the filibuster in the Senate, for this to happen.

    Then Congress would have to decide how to handle, up until now, untouchable funding streams for Title I and special education.

    A less drastic option would be to transfer the department’s functions to the Labor Department or, for Pell Grants and federal higher education aid, to the Treasury Department. But if that happens, there probably wouldn’t be “much impact beyond the Beltway,” observed conservative writer Rick Hess.    

    School choice

    Trump has pledged to offer “universal school choice” through some form of taxpayer support that could underwrite private school tuition, which also was a major goal of his first administration.

    It would not find fertile ground in California. “Twice in the last three decades, California voters have decisively rejected taxpayer-funded voucher plans — the last time in 2020 — and no one has ventured to put a similar initiative on the ballot since. Any such plan would also run into resistance from the state Legislature as well as teachers’ unions, which would see a voucher plan as a threat to public schools.

    It is possible, however, that if Republicans gained control of Congress, they could pass one or more variations of a voucher plan — like setting up education savings accounts that for-profit companies could donate funds to in return for tax credits. These funds could then be awarded in the form of scholarships to eligible students and families. If — and it is a big if — the federal government were to set up a program like this, California might have no choice but to allow families to take advantage of it. 

    “Twice in the last three decades California voters have decisively rejected taxpayer-funded voucher plans –the last time in 2020 — and no one has ventured to put a similar initiative on the ballot since.

    Immigration

    A Trump win could cause widespread fear for many California children. An estimated 1 million California children — about 1 in 10 — have an undocumented immigrant parent. About 165,000 California students are recent immigrants themselves.

    Trump has pledged to deport undocumented immigrants en masse, and has said immigrant children who do not speak English are a burden to public schools, an idea that aligns with a plan from the conservative Heritage Foundation to end the right to public education for undocumented children.

    Curriculum

    Trump wants to have more say about what students are taught in school. He has said they should be taught reading, writing and math, and not about gender, sex and race. He has threatened to stop funding schools that teach students about topics like slavery or systemic racism. 

    In California, the State Board of Education sets policy regarding academic standards, curriculum, instructional materials and assessments. Local school districts decide how they will implement curriculum requirements. It isn’t clear whether Trump would be able to make changes at the federal level that would impact the state’s curriculum, including new ethnic study graduation requirements that will start with the graduating class of 2029-30. 

    Vaccination

    Trump has vowed to cut federal funding to schools that mandate vaccinations, a move that runs counter to California’s requirement that all children have 10 vaccinations against disease to attend school. It is unlikely that Trump could simply strip schools of federal funding and, because there is no federal mandate to vaccinate students, stopping them from doing so will almost certainly require congressional action. 

    Just days before the election, Trump heightened attention to the issue when he told reporters that he will find a place in his administration for campaign adviser Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent vaccine skeptic, and would consider banning some vaccinations.  

    Water fluoridation

    In a late campaign development, Trump said, if elected, he would act on Kennedy’s proposal to remove fluoride from America’s drinking water, although it’s unclear how that would be accomplished.

    Fluoride, which helps children grow strong teeth, is also commonly present in toothpaste and mouthwash. Its use across the country and globe, starting in the 1950s, was considered one of the great public health achievements of the 20th century. Studies have shown that poor oral health is linked to poorer academic outcomes.

    Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer, has long railed against man-made chemicals and claimed some could be making children gay or transgender. Numerous studies have found that the level of fluoride in drinking water is safe.

    Cultural attacks

    Conservative groups leveraged parental angst over Covid-19 school closures and masking policies to ignite a “parents’ rights” movement that has since pushed back against educational policies on gender identity and racial equity, which Trump has vowed to eliminate. Some school board meetings have been so incendiary that school districts have had to pay for additional security to keep unruly audiences in order. Some think a Trump victory will further embolden far-right conservative activists.

    “I think that a Trump victory will lead some on the right to take the message that these sorts of cultural attacks that have been playing out across the United States, and across California in the last couple of years, are an effective strategy for mobilizing the base and for energizing an electorate,” John Rogers, director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access, told EdSource. 

    Higher education

    In response to pro-Palestinian sentiment on some college campuses in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the Trump campaign in November 2023 proposed “taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments” and using the money to establish a free, online educational institution where “there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed.” Politico reported that plans for the new institution — to be called the American Academy — called for giving students credit for previous coursework and granting credentials students could use to seek jobs with the federal government and its contractors.

    Harris to focus on early childhood, paid leave

    Harris has said she would make child care more affordable for American families by starting a program that limits a family’s cost to 7% of their income. It is unclear how this program would be funded.

    Harris also said she would support paid family leave for workers who need to care for newborns or ill family members. So far, attempts to pass paid family leave in Congress have been unsuccessful, and the extent to which a Harris administration would be able to expand child care programs will depend heavily on the makeup of Congress. 

    Even though the Senate almost certainly will be in Republican hands, child care and preschool is one issue that has significant bipartisan support, so this is one area where Harris could make headway. 

    Student loan forgiveness

    Harris’ platform notes that she plans to “continue working to end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt,” though it doesn’t offer specifics, and she has said little else on the campaign trail. Any significant action hinges on the Democrats winning back control of Congress — an unlikely outcome. That’s because President Joe Biden’s most sweeping actions on student loan forgiveness programs have been blocked by the courts. In 2022, for example, the Supreme Court blocked his plan to cancel more than $400 billion in loans, ruling he didn’t have the authority to cancel that debt. However, the Biden administration was able to have millions of loans forgiven through executive action, and Harris would no doubt seek ways to continue to do that.

    Workforce development

    Harris has previously promised that, if elected, her administration would remove degree requirements for some careers in the federal government. In remarks last week, she took that commitment a step further, pledging to “eliminate unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs” through an executive order signed on the first day of her presidency, according to Politico. 

    For-profit colleges

    During her campaign, Harris has repeatedly referred to her record while attorney general of California when she filed a lawsuit against the California-based Corinthian Colleges for false advertising and deceptive marketing practices, especially those targeting low-income students. 

    The Trump administration reversed Obama-era policies implementing greater regulation of for-profit colleges, and some of these were in turn reversed by the Biden administration. Last year, it introduced regulations intended to ensure that students are prepared by these colleges for “gainful employment.” But the task of regulating for-profit colleges is far from complete, and it is likely that a Harris administration would attempt to extend the efforts of her Democratic predecessors in the White House. 

    Areas of agreement?

    Notwithstanding the candidates’ diametric differences on many issues, there may be opportunities for compromise, whoever wins.

    Both parties want more support for career and technical education. Trump’s platform says he favors funding preferences for schools that provide internships and summer jobs aligned to future careers.

    Both Harris and Trump emphasized support for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which supply 20% of the nation’s Black college graduates. In 2020, Trump reauthorized $225 million in funding for minority-serving institutions, including $85 million in recurring funds for HBCUs. The Biden-Harris administration upped the ante with $17.3 billion during the past four years, including $1.3 billion announced in September.

    During the vice presidential debate, candidates Tim Walz and J.D. Vance found common ground on more federal support for early childhood. Harris wants to expand the federal child tax credit, now $2,000, to $6,000. Vance supports raising it to $5,000, paid for by raising tariffs on all imported goods.





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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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  • California education leaders try to reassure students of protections against Trump policies

    California education leaders try to reassure students of protections against Trump policies


    In this Jan. 25, 2017, file photo, protesters rally outside of City Hall in San Francisco in the wake of Donald Trump’s first election as president..

    Credit: AP Photo/Jeff Chiu,file

    Este artículo está disponible en Español. Léelo en español.

    When Alejandra Lopez saw swing states that had gone for Joe Biden in 2020 leaning red for Donald Trump on Tuesday night, it felt like déjà vu.

    “I was really distraught. Honestly, I really would have never thought I would see him having a second term in office,” said Lopez, who is a second-year political science student at Cal Poly Pomona.

    For Lopez, the stakes were personal. Both of her parents are undocumented immigrants from Mexico who have lived in the U.S. for almost 20 years. Trump has pledged to enact mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

    When Trump won for the first time in 2016, Lopez was 11 years old. She remembers feeling scared that her parents — or even she, a U.S. citizen — would be deported and crying all day in class. Now, she feels more angry.

    “I’m angry that he was elected into office again, that he has promised the same thing again, and that people keep perpetuating it and moving it forward, not recognizing how harmful it can be,” she said. “You look back, and you see that time and time again, he’s just rephrased the same hate that he’s spewed.”

    Many California children and their families, including immigrants, transgender students and Black and Latino students, among others, are feeling similar fear and uncertainty, after the election of a candidate who has threatened to deport undocumented immigrants en masse, and to cut school funding to states that protect transgender students and promote diversity, equity and inclusion in their schools.

    California education leaders and advocates said the fear is palpable and justifiable, but they also urged TK-12 schools, colleges and universities to make sure students and families know about policies to protect their rights, some of which were enacted during the first Trump administration.

    An estimated 1 million California children — about 1 in 10 — have an undocumented immigrant parent, the state estimates. Many more have undocumented family members. About 165,000 California students are recent immigrants themselves.

    “If we thought teaching was hard yesterday, wait for today’s questions like, “Is Trump going to send me back to the gangs?” and “Is he going to deport my mother/father/brother/cousin?” wrote teacher Larry Ferlazzo on X (formerly Twitter) Wednesday.

    Xilonin Cruz-González, deputy director of the advocacy organization Californians Together, said schools must reach out now to immigrant families to ensure they feel welcome and safe in school.

    “Even though it feels scary, especially for immigrant families, because of the rhetoric we’ve heard through the election cycle and we anticipate we will continue to hear, it’s important to remember, especially in California, we have legal protections for immigrant students,” Cruz-González said. “We have federal protections that require us to make sure our schools are safe and welcoming for all students. And we have California laws, especially AB 699, that was passed in 2017, that requires school districts to ensure that our immigrant students are welcomed into our public schools.”

    The U.S. Supreme Court established in 1982, in the case Plyler vs. Doe, that all children have a right to a free public education, regardless of their immigration status.

    California’s Assembly Bill 699 was passed in response to the previous Trump administration’s immigration enforcement and the fear it caused among immigrant families in California. The bill instructs schools not to collect information about families’ immigration status unless required by law, and requires schools to pass policies limiting assistance with immigration enforcement at public schools, among other things.

    Lindsey Bird was a newcomer teacher, working with recent immigrant students in 2016 when Trump was first elected. She said she had Syrian refugee students in tears that day.

    “They felt like their humanity was on the ballot, and they lost,” she said.

    Bird now works with Teach Plus California, coaching teachers throughout the state on how best to teach English learners. She said teachers are “heartbroken” for their students after Tuesday’s election and eager to share information with their students about their rights.

    “One teacher told me, ‘I’ll let myself grieve for the remainder of the week, but then I feel like my mama bear mode has been activated because I feel like I have to protect my students,’” Bird said. “So she was asking, ‘How can I protect them? What are my rights? What are their rights?’”

    Megan Stanton-Trehan, a senior attorney at Disability Rights California who represents students with disabilities, said she saw many students with disabilities and students of color struggle during the last Trump presidency.

    “I am really concerned about my clients who have disabilities, who are students of color, who are transgender,” said Stanton-Trehan. “In California, we may have a state that is protecting those students to some degree. We have laws that protect them here that are not dependent upon the way the federal government interprets the law, but that’s a lot of burden to put on the state.”

    She said that the lessons of that first term, however, are in the power of people standing up to such policies.

    “I think it’s definitely more than ever a time to really center those students and their needs and, really, their voices too,” Stanton-Trehan said. “They’re the next generation, and they’re living through this as well. They’re the ones at the forefront. If there’s any silver lining, it’s perhaps how galvanizing this can be for young people to say enough is enough.”

    State Attorney General Rob Bonta has said that his team is preparing to protect immigrants, transgender students and others, with possible litigation against Trump’s expected policies.

    “Fortunately, and unfortunately, we have four years of Trump 1.0 under our belts. We know what to expect, and we won’t be caught flat-footed,” said a Bonta spokesperson. “California’s Legislature has enacted strong protections for the rights of all students in California, and the Department of Justice will ensure those protections are enforced across the state. We are paying attention to what Trump and his advisers have said about their plans for a second administration, and we will be prepared to defend California’s values.”

    U.C. Berkeley political science professor Dan Schnur said Gov. Gavin Newsom has battled Trump before, but faces a new reality with Harris’ loss.

    “Newsom’s challenge is going to be balancing what’s best for him as governor and what’s best for him as a potential presidential candidate,” Schnur said.

    And Trump recognizes, Schnur said, “how much he can benefit politically with his base by beating up on California. The question is how he decides how much of that political benefit can be realized by threats and how much can be realized through follow-up on those threats.”

    Trump’s campaign promise of shutting down the U.S. Department of Education is an example.

    Such a move “is a long, long, long shot,” Schnur said “Even if Republicans do win a House majority, he’s going to have a lot of members here who are reluctant to cast that vote.”

    But Trump’s railing against transgender people and false claims that children receive gender reassignment surgeries at public schools may keep political traction, Schnur said.

    “I think that debate is much more likely to be central to his agenda.”

    LGBTQ+ youth were a major focus of this election season up and down the ballot, according to Jorge Reyes Salinas, communications director for LGBTQ+ civil rights organization Equality California. 

    Trump attacked transgender women playing sports and gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Local school board candidates promoted policies that outed transgender students to their parents, in opposition to a new state law. Anti-bullying policies at local school districts that specifically name LGBTQ youth have become a flash point.

    California already has laws on the books that protect these communities, and Salinas noted that voters supported Proposition 3, which enshrines the right to same-sex marriage.

    “I think being in California does provide a peace of mind,” Salinas said.

    Equality California will be working with other organizations to ensure that there are no gaps in protecting LGBTQ+ youth in California, and that state laws that do support them are implemented. 

    Some school districts, including Los Angeles Unified, sent messages out to parents prior to or during Election Day, highlighting protections for students and offering mental health support for students experiencing anxiety or fear after the election.

    The union representing teachers in LAUSD, United Teachers Los Angeles, issued a statement saying that “Ensuring that students and their families are informed and safe will always be our top priority. We are committed to ensuring that every LAUSD student, especially BIPOC, immigrant, and LGBTQIA+ students, has access to the education, resources, and support they deserve.”

    Some colleges and universities sent similar messages to students. Santa Monica College sent a message to students before the election to offer counseling and “debriefing” spaces for all students, but particularly for LGBTQ students, undocumented students and “racially minoritized communities.” In a Nov. 6 message, San Francisco State University President Lynn Mahoney encouraged students to seek support from campus counseling services as well as groups including the Dream Resource Center and the Queer & Trans Resource Center.

    Higher education officials in California are well aware they could face legal and funding challenges from the Trump administration on such issues as enrolling undocumented students, free speech and diversity, equity and inclusion. In a rare move Wednesday, the leaders of California’s three public higher education systems shared a joint statement emphasizing that their campuses are welcoming to students and staff from all backgrounds.

    “Following the presidential election results, we understand that there is a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety within California’s higher education community,” reads the statement, which was signed by Michael Drake, president of the University of California; Mildred García, chancellor of the California State University; and Sonya Christian, chancellor of California Community Colleges.

    “The University of California, the California State University, and the California Community Colleges remain steadfast and committed to our values of diversity and inclusivity,” they added.

    Ju Hong, director of the UCLA Dream Resource Center, said Trump’s call for mass deportation is stoking fear among undocumented students and students who are citizens but have family members who are undocumented.

    Hong said there’s also concern that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program could get terminated by the courts during Trump’s presidency. Hong himself is a DACA recipient. If the program gets terminated, he wouldn’t be able to keep his job and would be at risk of deportation. 

    Hong called on UC leaders, including the system’s board of regents, to support immigrant students and staff, both with public statements of support and by advocating for more funding for programs like the Dream Resource Center.

    “Hopefully they think through what are some creative ways to proactively support immigrant students on and off campus,” Hong said.

    Kevin R. Johnson, professor and former dean of the UC Davis School of Law, said he is concerned that the election of Trump to a second presidency could deter undocumented students from attending public universities, even in California, where they are eligible for in-state tuition and where all three public college and university systems have legal services for undocumented students and family members.

    “I do think that over the next few months, we will see a great deal of fear and consternation in the immigrant community, including the immigrant student community,” Johnson said. “I fear that the general tenor and thrust of President Trump and some others about immigrants can chill undocumented students from attending a public university and be worried that any appearance in public places could lead to their removal.”





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  • California schools chief pledges to resist cuts in funding if Trump axes U.S. Dept. of Education

    California schools chief pledges to resist cuts in funding if Trump axes U.S. Dept. of Education


    Surrounded by education leaders from around the state, California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond reacts to President-elect Donald Trump’s education agenda at a news conference in Sacramento on Nov. 8, 2024.

    Credit: California Department of Education

    California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond vowed on Friday to fight President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to abolish the U.S. Department of Education, which he said represented a “clear threat to what our students need to have a good education and a great life.”

    “We cannot be caught flatfooted,” Thurmond said, during a news conference.

    Thurmond made his pronouncement in Sacramento on Friday while flanked by legislators and education and labor leaders holding up signs saying “Education Is For Everyone” and “Protect All Students.”

    Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump has vowed to abolish the department, a long-standing and so far unfulfilled pledge made by Republican leaders dating back to former President Ronald Reagan.

    Thurmond said there are concerns that abolishing the department would put at risk some $8 billion that California receives in federal funds for programs serving students with disabilities and those attending low-income schools, both public and private.

    “We will not allow that to happen,” he said. “The law will not allow that to happen.”

    He observed, for example, that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, known as IDEA, guarantees students in special education programs a “free and appropriate education,” and to receive a range of special education services in an individualized education program drawn up for every special education student.

    Thurmond said Trump’s plan to defund the Department of Education would also harm students whose civil rights are violated and investigated through the Office of Civil Rights, including victims of racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, hate and bias toward LGBTQ students.

    “To tear down and abolish an organization that provides protections for our students is a threat to the well-being of our students and our families and of Americans,” Thurmond said.

    It was also not clear what would happen to student financial aid that the department administers, Thurmond said.

    The first line of defense in the fight against Trump’s education plan is the Congress, Thurmond said. He said his department is reaching out to legislators to affirm their commitment to public education — an issue that he says surpasses partisan labels.

    “Let me be clear,” Thurmond said. “This is not a partisan issue. This is an issue of continuing to assure that students have access to the resources that they are entitled to under the law. And we will continue to do that, and we will work with the members of Congress to ask them to stand and support our students.”

    But Thurmond said that the California Department of Education is also preparing for a worst-case scenario: large-scale cuts to federal funding. In that case, he said, he is working with the California Legislature on a backup plan.

    “If it comes to it, as a contingency, we are prepared to introduce legislation that would backfill funding for special education programs, Title I programs and programs that are similar in its scope,” Thurmond said. Title I money supplements state and local education funding for low-income students.

    Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, the chair of the Assembly Education Committee, said that the state is prepared to stand up for all the students who are targeted by Trump’s policy proposals and rhetoric. He pointed to the threat of deportations of undocumented immigrants that would hurt large numbers of children of immigrants, as well as threats to other student populations.

    “It is the job of every teacher, every school board member, every principal, every elected representative in the state of California who believes in public education, it is time for us to stand up to protect all of these kids,” he said. “When we are facing a bully who is targeting our most vulnerable students, we all need to stand up.”

    “We need to get ready now for what is going to start on Jan. 20,” Muratsuchi said, referring to Trump’s second inauguration.

    In 2017, California enshrined into state law some federal laws or court decisions to protect the education rights of immigrant students, said Xilonin Cruz-Gonzalez, deputy director of Californians Together, a statewide coalition that advocates for immigrants and multilingual learners.

    In the wake of Trump’s attacks on immigrants, Cruz-Gonzalez said it is important to remind school staff of those protections so that students and families will continue to feel safe and protected when they attend school.

    “It’s not enough to know that we have laws on the books,” Cruz-Gonzalez said. “We have to work together in coalition and ensure our superintendents, our school board members and our teachers know what to do to protect these rights.”

    The right to public education is the “cornerstone of democracy,” said Chinua Rhodes, school board member at Sacramento City Unified School District.

    “This is not just a political battle, it is a moral one,” Rhodes said. “Our schools should not abandon the most needy.”

    Louis Freedberg contributed to this report.





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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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  • Trump Signs Executive Order Urging CPB to Stop Funding NPR and PBS

    Trump Signs Executive Order Urging CPB to Stop Funding NPR and PBS


    The Constitution says Congress has the power of the purse, not the president. The president executes the funding decisions of Congress.

    Yesterday Trump called on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stop funding public radio and public television. Never mind that National Public Radio brings news to listeners in areas totally saturated by rightwing Sinclair stations. Never mind that PBS is the best source of documentaries about science, history, nature, medicine, other nations, and global affairs. PBS is educational television at its best.

    The Washington Post reported:

    President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday evening seeking to prohibit federal funding for NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The order, which could be subject to legal challenge, called the broadcasters’ news coverage “biased and partisan.”

    It instructs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to cease providing direct funds to either broadcaster. It also orders CPB to cease indirect funding of the services through grants to local public radio and television stations.

    CPB is the main distributor of federal funds to public media. It receives about $535 million in federal funds per fiscal year, which it mostly spends on grants to hundreds of stations nationwide. The stations spend the grants on making their own programming or on buying programming from services such as NPR and PBS.

    CPB, created by an act of Congress in 1967, also sometimes provides direct grants to NPR and PBS to produce national programs.
    Thursday’s order instructs the CPB board to ensure that stations receiving its grants “do not use Federal funds for NPR and PBS.”



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  • Trump nominee for education secretary would come backed with detailed policy agenda

    Trump nominee for education secretary would come backed with detailed policy agenda


    Linda McMahon, former administrator of Small Business Administration, speaking during the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee.

    Credit: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

    President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of a close ally and the co-chair of his transition team indicates that education could be a major priority of his administration, even though it did not feature prominently in the 2024 presidential campaign.

    Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, is a leading financial backer Trump has been close to for decades. She is also chair of the board of the little known America First Policy Institute, sometimes referred to as a “shadow transition operation” or “White House in waiting.”

    The institute has issued a detailed education policy agenda that is likely to serve as a guide for McMahon, and the Trump administration in general, should she be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

    For those reading the political tea leaves, it was notable that in nominating McMahon, Trump did not explicitly charge her with shutting down the U.S. Department of Education, and that the agenda of the America First Policy Institute does not call for it either. Instead, Trump called on her “to spearhead efforts to send education back to the states” an expansive and undefined charge, especially because by law education is already mostly a state and local function.

    Regardless of the fate of the department, the contrast between President Joe Biden’s and Trump’s education agendas — and between McMahon and current Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona — could not be wider. 

    Cardona is a lifelong educator, becoming secretary after a career as a teacher, principal, district administrator, and state commissioner of education. McMahon spent most of her career building the WWE, founded with her husband, Vince McMahon. 

    Cardona’s net worth is estimated by Forbes magazine to be $1 million, most of it tied up in his principal residence, retirement savings, and a 529 college savings account for his children. By contrast, Forbes places McMahon and her husband’s net worth at $2.5 billion. 

    The only thing they seem to have in common is that they are both from Connecticut. 

    But even though McMahon has a slim resume regarding education, she is not entirely an education neophyte. She studied to become a French teacher in college. She has been a trustee of Sacred Heart College, a Catholic college in Fairfield, Connecticut, for years. She was appointed to the Connecticut State Board of Education in 2009, although she left after a year to run for the U.S. Senate in 2010 and again in 2012 — both times unsuccessfully.  

    McMahon is more of a traditional conservative Republican than several of Trump’s other Cabinet nominees. In some ways, she is more similar to Betsy DeVos, another billionaire, who was Trump’s first secretary of education. But unlike DeVos, she has had experience in government, as head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term.   

    In 2019, she left that post, not under a cloud or fleeing vitriol from Trump like many others in his administration, to head the America First PAC, which raised funds for Trump’s re-election bid in 2020. 

    On the explosive issue of “school choice,” publicly, at least, she has mostly called for expanding charter schools, rather than taxpayer-funded vouchers. “I am an advocate for choice through charter schools,” she declared in her 2010 campaign for Senate. 

    She also has some bipartisan instincts, even getting support from the Democratic senators she had previously run against, when they had to approve her nomination to head the Small Business Administration. Sen. Richard Blumenthal called her “a person of serious accomplishment and ability,” and Sen. Chris Murphy described her as a “talented and experienced businessperson.”

    As SBA administrator, she drew high praise from some Democrats for increasing loans to women-owned businesses, and for making the agency more efficient, including from then-Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., the ranking member of the Small Business and Entrepreneur Committee.

    Another sign of her bipartisan inclinations came in a September commentary in The Hill newspaper, when she argued for a radical revision of the Pell Grant, the main form of federal student financial aid. 

    While most Pell grants go to full-time students, McMahon argued that the grant should also be available to students enrolled in “high-quality, shorter-term, industry-aligned education programs that could lead to immediate employment in well-paying jobs.” 

    To that end, she endorsed a bill known as the Workforce Pell Act, sponsored by lawmakers usually on far opposite sides of the political aisle — Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., and Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Calif., Bobby Scott, D-Va. 

    Arguably one of her key qualifications is that she and Trump have a positive relationship. Unlike many who served in his first administration and left reviled by their former boss, when she stepped down as SBA administrator, Trump praised her as a “superstar.” “Just so smooth,” he said. “She’s been one of our all-time favorites.”

    But her most important credential may well be her role as chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute, which she helped start.

    Its 150-person staff includes well-known Trump staffers like Kellyanne Conway and its executive director, Chad Wolf, the former secretary of homeland security. Pam Bondi, the head of the institute’s legal arm, was just nominated by Trump to be attorney general in place of Matt Gaetz, who withdrew his nomination.

    Like Project 2025, the conservative blueprint issued by the Heritage Foundation, which Trump has disavowed and says he had no role in crafting, the America First Policy Institute has also drawn up a similar detailed policy framework, including one on education. Yet the institute has not done much to publicize its proposals, which Trump has reportedly appreciated.  

    The institute draws a sharp contrast between its “America First” polices and what it calls “America Last” policies championed by Democrats.

    “America Last” policies, it argues, “prioritize radical ideologies and failing public schools.” These include promoting “transgenderism” and “radical ideologies over core subjects,” while fighting “school choice expansion,” and parent notification policies regarding curriculum and gender identification. 

    The institute calls for reinstating Trump’s 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic civic education” and removing critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion from what it alleges are requirements for federal grants.

    And instead of supporting “leftist teachers unions” and teacher tenure, it advocates for “reduced union influence, and increasing flexibility in hiring and firing.”

    For these and other reasons, it is to be expected that key education groups would oppose McMahon’s nomination. 

    “Rather than working to strengthen public schools, expand learning opportunities for students, and support educators, McMahon’s only mission is to eliminate the Department of Education and take away taxpayer dollars from public schools,” said President Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the U.S.

    But for conservatives like Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, McMahon is an unknown quantity when it comes to education, and he made a pitch for approaching her nomination with an open mind. “I’m looking forward to learning more about her views and approach to the role in the weeks to come,” he said. “I’d avoid gross assumptions based on biography. Those seeking reflexive celebration or condemnation should look elsewhere. “

    Controversy has already surfaced about her nomination. Media reports point to an October lawsuit in Maryland alleging McMahon and her husband failed to stop a prominent WWE ringside announcer in the 1980s and 1990s from sexually abusing 12- and 13-year-olds known as “ring boys” who were hired to do errands in preparation for wrestling matches.

    What is still an open question is whether Trump will move to eliminate the Department of Education, or how aggressively he will do so. His administration may decide that it is more important to keep the department intact for any number of reasons, including transforming its influential Office of Civil Rights into a weapon to impose his education agenda onto states or schools.

    And it is possible that McMahon will continue to voice her praise for teachers, and for public schools, including charter schools. “We have a very good system of public and private schools,” she said in an interview a decade ago. “I’ve watched some masterful teachers who are innovative and who are reaching kids who are below grade level in many of the subjects.  To see how they get turned around is heartwarming and astounding.”





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  • Conflict of Interest? No Problem. Trump Family Will Collect Hundreds of Millions

    Conflict of Interest? No Problem. Trump Family Will Collect Hundreds of Millions


    David Yaffe-Bellany of The New York Times reported on a startling development in Dubai that will enrich the Trump family by hundreds of millions of dollars. Is it a conflict of interest? Of course. Will it matter to the Republican leaders in Congress? No. Has there ever been a President who used his office for financial gain so brazenly? No. Trump is #1.

    Gaffe-Bellamy writes:

    Sitting in front of a packed auditorium in Dubai, a founder of the Trump family cryptocurrency business made a brief but monumental announcement on Thursday. A fund backed by Abu Dhabi, he said, would be making a $2 billion business deal using the Trump firm’s digital coins.

    That transaction would be a major contribution by a foreign government to President Trump’s private venture — one that stands to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family. And it is a public and vivid illustration of the ethical conflicts swirling around Mr. Trump’s cryptofirm, which has blurred the boundary between business and government.

    Zach Witkoff, a founder of the Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, revealed that a so-called stable coin developed by the firm, would be used to complete the transaction between the state-backed Emirati investment firm MGX and Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world.

    Virtually every detail of Mr. Witkoff’s announcement, made during a conference panel with Mr. Trump’s second-eldest son, contained a conflict of interest.

    MGX’s use of the World Liberty stablecoin, USD1, brings a Trump family company into business with a venture firm backed by a foreign government. The deal creates a formal link between World Liberty and Binance — a company that has been under U.S. government oversight since 2023, when it admitted to violating federal money-laundering laws.

    And the splashy announcement served as an advertisement to crypto investors worldwide about the potential for forming a partnership with a company tied to President Trump, who is listed as World Liberty’s chief crypto advocate.

    “We thank MGX and Binance for their trust in us,” said Mr. Witkoff, who is the son of the White House envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. “It’s only the beginning.”

    Mr. Witkoff and Eric Trump were speaking on a panel at Token2049, a major crypto conference in the United Arab Emirates, where more than 10,000 digital currency enthusiasts have gathered for a week of networking. It was the latest stop in an international tour by Mr. Witkoff, who visited Pakistan last month with his business partners to meet the prime minister and other government officials. Eric Trump, who runs the family business, has spent the week in Dubai, where he announced plans to back a Trump-branded hotel and tower.

    There is more.

    This is a gift article so you should be able to read it in full even without a subscription.



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  • Trump Celebrated His First 100 Days by Attacking Biden

    Trump Celebrated His First 100 Days by Attacking Biden


    Multiple polls show that Trump has the worst ratings of any President in decades at this point in his term. But he doesn’t believe the polls unless they affirm his claims. While polls show that the public is opposed to his tariffs, economic uncertainty, and continued inflation, he continues to claim great success and to attack Joe Biden. One big change: he switched referencing “the late, great Hannnibal Lecter” and now refers to “the late, great Al Capone.”

    In other words, he’s the same old Trump: boasting, lying, and insulting his enemies.

    Dana Milbank watched his 100-day celebration of the “new golden age” and reported back:

    President Donald Trump, at his Michigan rally on Tuesday night marking 100 days in office, gave a shout-out to his traveling groupies from the campaign trail. There was “my friend, Blacks for Trump,” the guy in the brick-patterned suit he identified as “Mr. Wall,” the group of “beautiful women” from North Carolina and the “Front Row Joes.”

    “I miss you guys,” he said. “I miss the campaign.”
    I believe him.

    After 100 days on the job, Trump has found the hard work of governing to be less pleasant. His tariffs have destabilized markets and brought historic levels of pessimism to American businesses and consumers. His policies have alienated allies and emboldened Russia and China. He has the lowest approval rating that any president in generations has experienced at this stage of his presidency.

    Those were simpler times, when he could make up nonsense claims about how Joe Biden, “the worst president in history,” had turned the United States into a “failing nation” and a “third-world country” — and could present an alternative in which Trump would end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, spread peace across the planet and make a booming U.S. economy the envy of the world.

    So what did Trump do to mark his 100th day in office? He renewed his campaign against Biden.
    “What’s better, Crooked Joe or Sleepy Joe?” he asked his supporters in Michigan. “Ready? A poll!”

    Having ascertained from the crowd that they preferred the moniker “Crooked Joe,” Trump revived a favorite campaign story about his retired former opponent. “He goes to the beach, right? And he could fall asleep … drooling out of the side of his mouth. And he’d be sleeping within 10 minutes.” The story went on in disjointed fashion: “Carrying the aluminum chair, you know, the kind that’s meant for old people and children to carry? It weighs like about four ounces. And he couldn’t get his feet out of the sand … He’d be in a bathing suit. Somebody convinced him that he looks great in a bathing suit.” [Imagine Trump in a bathing suit!]

    Trump invoked Biden’s name 21 times on Tuesday night, not counting an additional nine references to “Sleepy Joe” and “Crooked Joe,” a transcript shows. This is on top of various and sundry disparaging references to the “last administration” or simply “this group” or “that guy.” By comparison, Trump made just two mentions of the economy in an hour and a half, and seven of inflation — and even these were often employed to describe “Biden’s inflation disaster” and the like.

    Here was a president with so little to say about his own achievements that he dwelled on the imagined failures of another man: “Sleepy Joe, the worst president in history … Biden had no control … Joe Biden was down 35 points. The debate was not a good one for him … Whoever operated the autopen was the real president.”

    On some level, Trump must have known it wouldn’t really work to blame Biden for his problems. Recounting a conversation with an appointee about the price of eggs, Trump said the price would have to come down, because “nobody is going to believe me when you get out there that it’s Sleepy Joe Biden’s fault.”

    And yet that’s just what Trump spent the night doing. For 100 days, he has run the country with authoritarian sweep, unconstrained by Congress (with its subservient GOP majority) or by concern for what is legal or constitutional. If things aren’t going well, he has nobody to blame but himself.

    Yet he looked everywhere for villains to take the fall. He mocked “Kamala, Kamala, Kamala” and “lunatic” Bernie Sanders “going around with AOC.” He blamed “fake polls” put out by the “crooked people” in the media. He cited the “totally crazy” backbenchers who want to impeach him and imagined that “the radical Democrat Party is racing to the defense of some of the most violent savages on the face of the Earth.”

    He recited his grievances as if the months and years had never passed: Democrats “tried to cheat” in 2024. They “tried to jail your president.” He was “under investigation more than the late, great Alphonse Capone.” To his familiar list of persecutors, he added a few new entrants: “grandstander” Republicans,” the Federal Reserve and “communist radical left judges.”

    Even so, he insisted that he presided over “the most successful first 100 days of any administration in the history of our country, and that’s according to many, many people.” By “many people” he apparently meant “Stephen Miller,” for the presidential aide joined Trump on the stage and shouted at the crowd that Trump is “the greatest president in American history!”

    Trump regaled his audience with phony achievements in lieu of actual ones. The cost of eggs is down 87 percent. We now have a trade surplus. His actual approval rating is “in the 60s or 70s.” Americans say the country is headed in the right direction for “the first time ever.” His tariffs are acts of “genius.”

    The crowd cheered for his inventions. They cheered for Elon Musk and Pete Hegseth. They cheered for a video showing migrants, deported without due process, being humiliated at an El Salvador prison. They cheered him for pardoning the “political prisoners” who attacked the Capitol. They cheered when a junior aide joined him on stage and asked, “Trump 2028, anybody?”

    The rally began, as during the campaign, with the song “God Bless the USA” and ended by doing his Trump dance to “YMCA.” Supporters waved placards proclaiming a new “Golden Age.”
    And yet, the magic was gone. The pool traveling with Trump’s motorcade found relatively few supporters lining the motorcade route. When Trump called a supporter onstage for a lengthy tribute ending with the words “President Trump, I love you,” a girl on the stage behind Trump yawned. Attendees started trickling out of the arena 30 minutes into his speech and continued doing so over the next hour.

    Perhaps they had come seeking reassurance about their present troubles — only to hear from a man mired stubbornly in the past.



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