It’s hard to say what is the very worst thing Trump has done in the first few months of his second term.
Here’s my candidate: the cancellation of vast numbers of grants for medical research. There is simply no rationale for the way he has laid waste to scientific research–to those seeking the causes and cures for deadly diseases that afflict the lives of millions of people.
The New York Times provided a public service by creating a database of the medical research that has been terminated.
This link is a gift article, so you should be able to open it.
It contains interactive features that I cannot duplicate.
Thousands of grants have been canceled or put in indefinite hold. They include research about effective vaccines. The search for cures for different types of cancer.
In his first months in office, President Trump has slashed funding for medical research, threatening a longstanding alliance between the federal government and universities that helped make the United States the world leader in medical science.
Some changes have been starkly visible, but the country’s medical grant-making machinery has also radically transformed outside the public eye, a New York Times analysis found. To understand the cuts, The Times trawled through detailed grant data from the National Institutes of Health, interviewed dozens of affected researchers and spoke to agency insiders who said that their government jobs have become unrecognizable.
In all, the N.I.H., the world’s premier public funder of medical research, has ended 1,389 awards and delayed sending funding to more than 1,000 additional projects, The Times found. From the day Mr. Trump was inaugurated through April, the agency awarded $1.6 billion less compared with the same period last year, a reduction of one-fifth. (N.I.H. records for May are not yet comparable.)
The impacts extend far beyond studies on politically disfavored topics and Ivy League universities like Columbia or Harvard. The disruptions are affecting research on Alzheimer’s, cancer and substance use, to name just a few, and studies at public institutions across the country, including in red states that backed Mr. Trump.
Why? What is the rationale? Whose interest does this serve?
Did the voters give Trump a mandate to destroy medical research?

He’s simply mean and revels in hurting people.
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It’s hard to tease out the venality, stupidity, self-aggrandizement, and efforts to privatize everything for profit.
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If you wanted to describe Trump and his effects in terms of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy”, (Quoting Hillary Clinton) you might say that this made complete sense. Grand design conspiracies are hard to manage, however, due to defections and light that can be shone on their machinations.
I prefer to think that Trump is just a clearing house approach to the destruction of the American experiment in self government
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Roy: The biggest hypocrisy is the one where the felon in the White House is deporting all the criminals.
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The only voters, who want to let the convicted rapist, fraud and felon do whatever he wants as a kleptocratic-kakistocracy dictator-president, belong to the core of his fanatical loyalist evangelical fundamentalist KKK MAGA cult, who think he is their messiah, the antichrist. I think this group makes up less than half of those who voted for the January 6, 2021, traitor.
Want to know who they are?
Remember or learn what the chanting “fight for Trump” mob did to Congress on january 6, 2021.
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