This is a link to a gift article.
Several reporters at The New York Times worked together for months unraveling the secrets of Jeffrey Epstein’s financial success. How did he go from being a high school math teacher to a multimillionaire? His greatest trick, it appears, was cultivating and leveraging friendships among people who were wealthy and powerful. Name-dropping was a tactic. So were lying and boasting, as he rose in elite circles, cultivating contacts, references, women, and friends.
Glenn Kessler spent 15 years as the Washington Post fact-checker. He stepped aside recently and now writes at his Substack blog. For years, he has had the daunting task of counting Trump’s lies. Trump has the unparalleled ability to lie with great sincerity even when he knows he is lying.
The hardest part about building a list of Donald Trump’s ten biggest lies in a year is the abundance of material.
When I ran The Fact Checker at The Washington Post, our team counted more than 30,000 false or misleading claims in his first term. That’s more than 20 erroneous claims a day. No one is keeping such a comprehensive list in his second term — it’s a thankless duty — but I’m sure he’s keeping the same pace.
Trump makes many false statements, big and small, and I tried to keep this accounting to substantive issues, both domestic and foreign. Even so, I found myself removing claims that others might consider worthy of inclusion.
For instance, he regularly claimed an executive order he issued on prescription drugs would “slash drug prices by 200 percent, 300 percent, 400 percent, 500 percent, 600 percent, 700 percent, 800 percent.” That’s a mathematical impossibility. A 100-percent cut would mean prices were zero. Trump is surrounded by so many lackeys that no one appears to have the heart to tell him.
Another arithmetic-challenged claim is Trump’s frequent boast that under his leadership the United States has secured nearly $20 trillion in new investments. That’s double the official White House count, which itself is a misleading brew of aspirations and vague promises, not actual investments. One clue this is bogus: Trump’s number is two-thirds of the annual gross domestic product of the United States.
Then there’s Trump’s claim that “Portland is burning to the ground,” apparently because he watched a Fox News report that included B-roll from 2020. This year, a few protesters outside an ICE facility have set some small fires, quickly extinguished. Again, why doesn’t his staff set him straight?
Another runner-up was Trump’s outrageous accusation that Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, had manipulated jobs numbers. He fired her after job-growth estimates were revised downward — a common occurrence. “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” he fumed on social media, even though the estimates are derived from surveys conducted by professionals many rungs below the director. Trump never offered evidence for his claim.
Readers may have other nominations. Here’s my list for Trump’s biggest lies in 2025, in no particular order. Taken together, these falsehoods demonstrate how Trump governs — impulsively, defiantly, and often detached from reality.
“Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”
Is it a lie if someone appears to firmly believe something? Trump may love tariffs but he’s been lying to himself as well as the American people about the impact. Every economist agrees that tariffs are a tax on consumers — not countries. Yet in his inaugural speech, Trump said the opposite. It is economic nonsense. Trump, of course, made this claim throughout the 2024 campaign (and in his first term), but it merits inclusion on the 2025 list because this lie had such real-world implications. Trump likely circumvented the Constitution by imposing such sweeping tariffs without congressional authorization, though the final verdict will come from the Supreme Court.
Throughout the year, Trump made many false claims about tariffs — “We’re taking in billions and billions of dollars. … We were losing $2 billion a day. … Now we’re making $3 billion a day” — and offering empty promises to use the “trillions” from tariffs to reduce taxes and pay down the national debt. The money raised from tariffs is not enough to reduce income taxes — and it is in fact another tax — and it won’t pay down the debt. That didn’t stop Trump from falsely claiming in November that tariffs would reduce the federal budget deficit by 25 percent.
By the end of the year, Trump offered $12 billion in aid to farmers hurt by his trade war with China — an unstated acknowledgment that tariffs do have costs for Americans.
“We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
On the face of it, this sounds idiotic, but Trump kept repeating it (and sometimes inflated the figure to $100 million) to justify terminating the U.S. Agency for International Development — an effort led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. But USAID, which distributed condoms to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted disease, spent less than $50,000 on condoms in the entire Middle East in a year — and nothing in Gaza.
In a striking example of the White House’s sloppy staff work, someone appears to have confused Gaza, the Palestinian enclave on the Mediterranean, with the Gaza province of Mozambique in Africa — and then USAID funding with Health and Human Services Department money given to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation for HIV/AIDS prevention. It would be funny if it were not so sad.
Nevertheless, despite such fiction, USAID was dismantled, at great cost to the United States’ global reputation and with little impact on the $7-trillion federal budget. Though Trump in February claimed that DOGE had already saved as much as $500 billion, DOGE itself only tallied $214 billion by December. Of course, that’s also an exaggerated figure. When Politico scrubbed the data in August, it found the savings amounted to less than five percent of the claimed value. That’s because DOGE would count the ceiling value of contracts, which is far more than what the government has agreed to pay.
“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
Trump said this in February about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has, against the odds, managed to fend off a Russian assault on his country for nearly four years.
Trump, who for some inexplicable reason always tilts toward Russia, echoed the Russian position that it was pushed into the conflict. It’s akin to saying Japan was forced into attacking Pearl Harbor because the United States imposed a trade embargo in 1940, depriving Japan of oil. The trade embargo came after Japan’s provocative actions in the Pacific, such as the 1931 occupation of Manchuria following a Japanese-manufactured incident.
This comment is emblematic of a series of Trump’s lies about Ukraine — that Zelensky admitted U.S. aid is missing, that Zelensky has never said he has been grateful for American assistance, that the United States provided more aid than Europe, and so forth. Despite sometimes suggesting he was exasperated by Russia, Trump throughout the year has consistently favored Moscow over Kyiv in the conflict that, in the 2024 campaign, he claimed he would solve in 24 hours.
“We’ve ended weaponized government where, as an example, a sitting president is allowed to viciously prosecute his political opponent like me.”
Trump made this proclamation in his annual speech to a joint session of Congress, a clear example of a lie of commission. He and his allies already had fired career Justice Department and FBI employees who worked on the Jan. 6 cases or the Trump prosecutions, launched investigations into political groups and donors, and targeted law firms who worked on cases against him.
Soon, Trump ordered the indictments of former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, after firing the U.S. Attorney who decided the cases were weak. The cases rested on such shaky ground that they were soon dismissed. But they could be revived and Trump’s point was made — cross him and you will be in the crosshairs.
(For the record, there is no evidence that Joe Biden directed the Justice Department or local prosecutors to pursue the four criminal cases against Trump.)
“Just about everything is down. You know, this whole thing is, they use the word affordability. It’s a Democrat hoax.”
By year’s end, Trump’s approval rating had fallen sharply, largely because Americans perceived he was not focused on “affordability” — the rising cost of goods and services.
As usual, Trump thinks he’s doing great. In December he gave himself a score of “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” for his handling of the economy. When asked by Laura Ingraham why Americans were anxious, he dismissed the concern: “I don’t know they are saying that. The polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.” Even though grocery prices were up, Trump insisted they were down.
Instead, he lied that any problems faced by Americans were the legacy of Biden’s presidency, claiming that “we inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare.” In fact, Trump inherited an economy with relatively low unemployment, falling inflation and strong growth. The month before the November election, the Economist newspaper published a cover story declaring that the U.S. economy was “the envy of the world.” Taking office, Trump upended the economy — and sent prices higher — by imposing sweeping tariffs.
“Don’t take Tylenol. Fight like hell not to take it.”
Trump’s news conference in September claiming a link between Tylenol and autism was an appalling display of ignorance and hubris.
He falsely suggested autism rates were soaring — from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 36 — when in fact the diagnosis of autism has increased because of better detection and expanded definitions. He seized on a disputed report to blame Tylenol, despite decades of research failing to find a causal link. He claimed nonsense that Amish don’t have autism because they refuse vaccinations. Surveys show many Amish vaccinate their children and that there is autism in the community. He cited a “rumor” that Cuba has no autism because the island can’t afford Tylenol. That curious claim was news to Cuba doctors. And then he told American women that they shouldn’t take Tylenol even if they suffer a fever — though fevers can be very harmful to fetuses. (Indeed, it may be fever, not Tylenol, that is linked to autism.)
“I’ve ended eight wars.”
No one can accuse Trump of modesty. In his desperate bid to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — Barack Obama won one, after all — Trump over the course of the year has added to his list of “wars” that he claimed he’s ended. But few of these were wars, Trump’s role was often tangential, and the resolution of the conflicts are likely temporary. Many of the pauses require careful follow-up to ensure implementation, and already some are falling back into bloodshed.
Yet that has not stopped Trump from claiming credit and even asserting “we’ve never had a president that solved one war, not one war.” That’s obviously false. Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for negotiating peace in the 1904-5 war between Russia and Japan, while Jimmy Carter negotiated the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978.
What’s on Trump’s list? Cambodia and Thailand (A border dispute keeps flaring up, and indeed restarted in December); Armenia and Azerbaijan (They signed a U.S.-brokered peace deal in August, with Trump hosting an Oval Office ceremony, but it must be ratified and Armenia needs to change its constitution); Israel and Iran (a ceasefire was declared after a 12-day conflict but the decades-long conflict continues); India and Pakistan (The long-running dispute over Kashmir continues, though a ceasefire was reached in May; Trump’s claim of credit has been rejected by India); Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Fighting continues though a peace agreement was signed with U.S. involvement); Egypt and Ethiopia (This is a mystery entry on Trump’s list as the nonviolent dispute is over hydroelectric dam opened by Ethiopia); Serbia and Kosovo (Another mystery entry as tensions have never eased since Kosovo broke off in 2008); Hamas and Israel (Trump pushed Israel to finally agree to a ceasefire in the two-year war, a real accomplishment, though a final resolution to the conflict appears elusive).
As you can see, it’s inflated and rather crass, much like accepting a dubious “world peace award” from FIFA and renaming the U.S. Institute of Peace after himself after the administration fired the staff and destroyed it.
“Every boat that you see get blown up, we save 25,000 – on average – 25,000 lives.”
Trump has been under fire for the administration’s military strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug boats in international waters, and in defense he offered a nonsense figure. Dutifully, other administration officials have echoed the lie.
First of all, the administration had not provided evidence that the boats carried drugs. Trump asserts they were transporting fentanyl but that makes no sense since Venezuela mainly supplies cocaine to Europe. In three months, about 20 vessels have been hit by airstrikes, killing more than 80 people, so using Trump’s math that would mean 500,000 Americans lives supposedly were saved. Yet provisional federal data shows that the total number of U.S. overdose deaths was about 75,000 in the 12 months ending in April (the most recent period available).
In other words, Trump invented these numbers. (The “on average” is an effort at verisimilitude.) It’s not supposed to make sense — just sound good.
“These [Epstein] files were made up by Comey. They were made up by Obama. They were made up by Biden.”
One of the few issues Trump could neither spin nor shrug off centered on demands that his administration release the investigative files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a onetime friend from the 1990s with whom he later fell out. Trump had promised to release the files during the 2024 campaign, but then the Justice Department refused to do so. Pressure built in Congress for passage of a law to force the files’ release, and in July Trump lashed out, claiming the files were all made up by Democrats, name-checking former FBI director James Comey, Obama and Biden.
This claim is simply nuts. The files represent investigative evidence, so nothing was invented. Neither Obama nor Biden were in office when the FBI investigated Epstein — that happened under George W. Bush in 2007-2008 and Trump in 2018 — while Comey wasn’t even in government at the time. Epstein, who molested hundreds of girls, at first received a sweetheart deal that minimized his crimes, and then the case was reopened under Trump after a Miami Herald investigation. He was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial, an apparent suicide.
Trump’s instinct is to deflect problems onto his opponents, but he wasn’t successful in this instance. Congress passed the law, requiring the files be released by Dec. 19. The Justice Department has indicated it won’t meet the deadline.
“It won’t interfere with the current building. It will be near it but not touching it. And pays total respect to the existing building.”
This was Trump in July, speaking about his plans to add a ballroom to the White House complex.
Then, suddenly, in October, wrecking crews ripped down the entire East Wing of the White House. Trump was unrepentant about the fierce public outcry, dismissing the East Wing as “common brick, little tiny windows, it looked like hell.” (The White House skipped the requirement to submit its demolition plans, claiming the National Capital Planning Commission has no jurisdiction over demolition.)
In July, Trump had said the ballroom would hold 600 to 700 people and cost $200 million; now the plans call for about 1,000 people, the budget ballooned to more than $300 million, and the architect was replaced because he objected to Trump’s grandiose ambitions. The resulting 90,000-square-foot building will overshadow the existing 55,000-square-foot White House structure.
Is there any lie more emblematic of how Trump has approached his second term? He forges ahead, destroying any obstacles in his path, including the truth, while paying little heed to what Americans might think.
Trump, being Trump, turns everything into a story about him. When the news first came out that Hollywood icon Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle were murdered in their home in Los Angeles, Trump posted a callous, cruel comment about their deaths. He wrote the following comment on Monday morning before the police arrested their son Nick.
Trump attributed their deaths to their hatred of him. What?
“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”
Trump’s message was so cynical and self-serving that several Republicans criticized his heartlessness.
Politico mentioned several Republicans who were taken aback by Trump’s narcissism.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the deaths of Reiner and his wife were “a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies.”
Rep. Mike Lawler said that Trump’s comments were “wrong,” and that their deaths deserved “sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period.”
Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky said Trump’s post was “inappropriate and disrespectful”; he challenged “anyone to defend it.”
Jenna Ellis, who was one of Trump’s personal lawyers who defended him after he lost the election in 2020, criticized Trump’s post.
The New York Times wrote about her reaction:
“A man and his wife were murdered last night. This is NOT the appropriate response,” Jenna Ellis, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer who is now a conservative radio host, wrote on social media on Monday. “The Right uniformly condemned political and celebratory responses to Charlie Kirk’s death. This is a horrible example from Trump (and surprising considering the two attempts on his own life) and should be condemned by everyone with any decency.”
Trump shows who he is without shame or guile. He has no empathy, no compassion, no sense of propriety. Every issue, every interaction, every event boils down to his self-interest. Nothing else matters.
Back in the days when the Republican Party was actually conservative, Republicans believed in small government. They said repeatedly that the federal government should not interfere with decisions made by local governments and private institutions.
The Trump administration is not conservative. It believes that it should impose its ideology on every kind of institution and every level of government.
Trump’s personal hatred of immigrants, of affirmative action, of any kind of program to help members of historically disadvantaged groups knows no bounds. His administration is on the hunt to stamp out anything that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion. In addition to satisfying his (and Stephen Miller’s) personal hatreds, the war on DEI appeals to unsuccessful white men who think that underrepresented groups got advantages unavailable to them.
Here is the latest intrusion: Trump officials want to stamp out any reference to DEI in college admission essays. Students who have prevailed over adversity should be careful not to mention it, especially if they are Black or immigrants. Colleges are wondering how they will pay for this new federal demand.
This student was warned not to write about her life!
Mo Marie Lauyanne Kouame, 18, dreams of being an aerospace engineer and building spacecraft. This fall, she applied to MIT, Princeton, and Columbia.
For one college essay, she wrote about being homeless at 8 years old, when she came to the United States from France.
She recalled watching her parents fight for help from the Department of Transitional Assistance and sleeping in hospital beds at Boston Medical Center when they didn’t know where else to go. That early experience changed her, she said.
“Homelessness,” she wrote, “taught me resilience.”
Kouame’s essay, which recounts how she learned to thrive as a low-income student of color “surrounded by classmates whose lives felt worlds apart from mine,” is about overcoming adversity.
That’s a theme the White House has identified as a problem in its campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion. Over the past year, the federal government has flagged “cues” such as personal essays, along with narratives about “overcoming obstacles” and “diversity statements,” as being potentially unlawful: a stand-in for talking about race.
More than two years have passed since the Supreme Court ended race-conscious affirmative action, and the Trump administration has since demanded colleges submit data proving they don’t consider race in admissions. It has also expanded what it sees as “discriminatory admissions processes” to include considering a student’s sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnicity, nationality, political views, and religious associations.
For Kouame, not writing about her identity felt “impossible,” she said in a Zoom interview, “because the things that I’ve gone through in life make me who I am now.”
Other students are weighing the pros and cons, said Ethan Sawyer, founder of College Essay Guy, which offers one-on-one coaching and free online resources through the admissions process. He added the key is “to step back and take stock” of what colleges are actually looking for. Essentially: “How will you be a valuable, contributing member of the community?”
Navigating the college admissions landscape has never been easy, but for the class of 2030 it’s particularly fraught. Plenty of advisers can be hired for a fee: Private consulting is a $3 billion industry, with parents paying tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to give their kids an edge. Community organizations, college-prep programs, and high schools are also on hand to assist students.
There’s no question it’s an uneven playing field, though this year there is one equalizer in the college admissions game: No one really knows what’s coming next.
At the start of the second Trump administration, Trump unilaterally created a fake “Department of Government Efficiency,” led by Elon Musk. Only Congress can create or eliminate Departments. According to the Constitution, the House of Representatives is responsible for funding and defunding the federal government.
Trump ignored the Constitution and Congress and let Musk and his team ransack the Federal Government, fire thousands of civil servants, and close agencies at will. DOGE decisions were made not by experts but by Musk and his team, most of whom were young men in their 20s, even a teenagers. From their point of view, their greatest accomplishment was to copy massive amounts of personally identifiable data from the Treasury Department and the Social Security Administration.
While DOGE slashed and burned agencies and Departments with abandon, the cruelest cut of all was the near-total elimination of foreign aid. Millions of people in impoverished countries relied on U.S. AID for food, medicine, and medical care. The aid is gone. Hundreds of thousands of people died. If you say it in the active tense, Trump and Musk murdered “hundreds of thousands of people” whose lives depended on US AID. The food aid was more than a humanitarian impulse: American farmers lost at least $2 billion that was used to pay them to supply food for US AID.
Matt Johnson wrote for MS NOW:
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Elon Musk boasted in February, shortly after President Donald Trump gave him permission to hack his way through the federal government. As a “special government employee” with no oversight running the “temporary organization,” the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Musk destroyed the 64-year-old humanitarian agency in a matter of days, abruptly halting deliveries of lifesaving medicine, emergency food aid and many other forms of support to the poorest people on the planet. This was done in the name of DOGE’s mission to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
Musk claimed that DOGE would slash government spending by “at least $2 trillion,” but it ended up saving a microscopic fraction of that figure. Now that DOGE has been disbanded, Musk claims “We were a little bit successful” — but admits that he wouldn’t do it again.
Musk tried his hand at government, shrugged and moved on. The same can’t be said for the people who are dead and dying thanks to the DOGE-led onslaught on the U.S. Agency for International Development. “No one has died as [a] result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Musk declared in March. According to models created by Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, hundreds of thousands of people have in fact died as a result of eliminated and disrupted aid.
It’s impossible to calculate the ultimate human toll of shuttering USAID. The U.S. was responsible for 40% of the total foreign aid tracked by the United Nations in 2024, and much of the infrastructure that delivered this aid has now been destroyed. Beyond the frozen payments for active aid projects, partner organizations have closed, supply chains for medicine and food deliveries have been severed and staff who administered and monitored programs have been fired. Early warning systems for starvation and infectious diseases have shut down.
The individual stories are harrowing. A South Sudanese child with HIV died from pneumonia because he didn’t receive the medication necessary to sustain his immune system. People participating in studies were abandonedwith experimental drugs in their systems and medical devices in their bodies. Cases of acute malnutrition at refugee camps have surged.
In the MAGAverse, none of this is true because USAID was never an aid organization to begin with. Mike Benz, a right-wing influencer who has accused the agency of being a terror organization and subverting governments around the world, was a big influence on Musk’s assault on USAID, which Benz called the “Terror Titanic.” Like Musk before him, Benz has now been appointed as a special government employee to investigate his allegations that USAID was a massive covert influence operation and front for the CIA.
Benz’s campaign is just the latest example of MAGA propaganda using USAID as a convenient political scapegoat. DOGE viewed the takeover of USAID as an opportunity to find instances of “viral waste,” which could be broadcast to the American people as a justification for its other cost-cutting efforts. One example cited by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was the “50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” Trump later declared that the money had been “sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
There was just one problem: The money was actually for family planning in a province of Mozambique called Gaza….
This is not the full article. Open the link to read the rest.
It’s typical in American politics that the party that wins the Presidency usually loses the mid-term elections two years later. The other party picks up seats, sometimes enough seats to dominate one or both Houses, enough to stymie the President’s agenda and enough to hold investigations that embarrass the President.
With Trump’s low standing in the polls, the rising cost of living, the backlash against tariffs, and the evident cruelty of ICE, Republicans have worried about an electoral wipeout in November 2026.
Some clever Republican strategist devised a plan to protect the Republican dominance in the House of Representatives. Simple. Persuade red states to redistrict (gerrymander) their Congressional maps, creating more Republican seats while eliminating Democratic seats. This was out of the ordinary, because states usually redistrict every ten years, after the latest census.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a loyal MAGAT, was first to act. He pushed through a new map that split up Democratic districts and created five new Republican seats. The U.S. Supreme Court supported the Trump goal, as usual, and approved the Texas gerrymander.
Governor Gavin Newsom of California was quick to respond. He called a referendum that would redistrict the state and produce five new Democratic seats. Newsom’s new map is being changed in the Supreme Court, but it’s difficult to see the Court approving the Texas gerrymander while rejecting California’s.
The administration began pressuring other red state governors to follow the lead of Texas. Some Democratic states set about redrawing their maps.
And then there was Indiana. NBC News tells the fascinating inside story of how the Trump team alienated key Republicans in that state.
Indiana is a deep-red state with a Republican supermajority in both houses of the legislature. Republicans hold seven Congressional districts, Democrats only two. Trump wanted those two seats.
The Trump operatives thought the state leaders would quickly fall in line. When they didn’t, the Trump operatives decided to unleash their usual tools: bullying, pressure, threats, intimidation, even death threats. At least 14 Republican state senators received death threats.
Jane C. Timm of NBC News wrote the story:
INDIANAPOLIS — As the redistricting battle began to pick up steam in Indiana last month, state Sen. Jean Leising’s grandchildren were receiving odd text messages.
Ads from little-known outside groups had spliced the longtime Republican lawmaker’s image next to prominent Democrats like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Some of the messaging was sloppy, referring to Leising as “him.”
A conservative and supporter of President Donald Trump, Leising, 76, was furious. Following months of conversations with her constituents, she felt they were generally opposed to redrawing Indiana’s congressional map ahead of the 2026 midterm elections — even though such an effort would favor her party and was backed by her president. So in mid-November, she fired off a statement making it official: She wouldn’t support it.
“The negative campaigning just put me over the top,” she said in an interview with 13WTHR in Indianapolis, an NBC News affiliate, at the time. “He may wonder why Indiana is struggling to get on board. Well, it’s probably the antics they used.”
It was a sign of things to come. Ultimately, the months of pressure applied by Trump and his supporters from outside of Indiana to pass a redrawn map that would split up the state’s two Democratic districts backfired. On Thursday, Leising joined a majority of Republicans in the state Senate in voting to sink the map in the face of potential future primary challenges, a flurry of online attacks — and in some cases, violent threats.
The result was one of the biggest rejections that Trump, who has otherwise largely ruled over the GOP with an iron fist, has faced since returning to office, and it could cost the party in its bid to preserve its narrow House majority….
“You have to know Hoosiers. We can’t be bullied, we don’t like it,” GOP state Sen. Sue Glick said after voting against the map.
Despite intense lobbying by Trump, JD Vance, and Mike Johnston, Republican leaders in the state were not enthusiastic. They resented the pressure.
When Rodric Bray, the leading Republican in the State Senate, warned that there were not enough votes to pass the new map, Trump lashed out at him. He threatened to run an opponent to Bray, but Bray didn’t tremble because he’s not up for re-election until 2028.
Trump wrote on Truth Social:
“In the entire United States of America, Republican or Democrat, only Indiana ‘Republican’ State Senator Rod Bray, a Complete and Total RINO, is opposed to redistricting for purposes of gaining additional Seats in Congress,” Trump wrote in one Truth Social post of the well-liked Republican leader in the Senate. “The Rod Brays of Politics are WEAK and PATHETIC.”
The map passed the Indiana House by The map passed the state House last Friday by a 57-41 vote, with 12 Republicans voting against it.
When the vote shifted to the State Senate, the map was resoundingly defeated, 19-31, with 21 Republicans voting against it.
Trump lost the vote of one State Senator when he called Tim Walz “retards.” The State Senator has a child with Down Syndrome. Others said they would not be bullied.
Garry Rayno, veteran journalist in New Hampshire, understands the war on public education. He knows that privatization is meant to diminish public education. He knows that it is sold by its propagandists as a way to help the neediest students. He knows this is a lie intended to fool people. He knows that the children who are hurt most by the war on public education are the most vulnerable students.
You might rightly conclude that the war on public education is a clever hoax.
Rayno writes:
“The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.”
The quote is often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, but is also similar to words from British UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft.
What better measure of treating the most vulnerable than the public education system open to all, not just those with the resources to send their children to private or religious schools.
Public education is often called the great equalizer providing the same learning opportunities to a community’s poorest children to the richest in stark contrast with today’s political climate driven by culture wars and fear of diversity, equality and inclusion.
Public education has provided an educated citizenry for businesses, government and political decision making for several hundred years.
Public education is the embodiment of “the public good,” as it provides a foundation for a well-lived life that is both rewarding and useful to others.
But for the last few decades there has been a war on public education driven by propaganda, ideology and greed.
While the war has intensified in the last decade, it began with the US Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954 declaring racial segregation in public schools a violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
The decision overturned the court’s earlier Plessy vs. Ferguson decision which established the separate-but-equal provision for public education.
The Brown decision required the desegregation of public schools sending a tidal wave through the south reaching north to Boston.
The southern oligarchs who never really believed the South lost the Civil War soon colluded with others like them to develop a system to bypass their obligation to pay to educate black kids. Instead they established “segregation academies” where their children could learn in a homogeneous setting.
The system was created with the help of libertarian economist James Buchanan who touted the belief that the most efficient government is one run by the wealthy and educated (the oligarchs) because the regular folks are driven by self interest which makes government inefficient, and most importantly, costly through higher taxes.
This philosophy continues today as libertarians and other far right ideologues want to privatize public education because it takes too much of their money in taxes, and a humanities-based public education induces children to develop beliefs different from their parents, which once was the norm for American families.
It is not by happenstance we see parental bills of rights, opt outs, open enrollment and greater and greater restrictions on what may be taught, along with increased administrative work loads piled onto public education by politicians in Concord as they double down on refusing to do the one simple thing the state Supreme Court told them to do 30 years ago, provide each child with an adequate education and pay for it.
Instead they have pushed a voucher system costing state taxpayers well over $100 million this biennium, with 90 percent of it paying for private and religious school tuition and homeschooling for kids who were not in public schools when their parents applied for grants if they ever were in public schools.
Most of the voucher system expansion occurred under the Chris Sununu administration with his back-room-deal appointed Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut.
Edelblut nearly beat Sununu in the 2016 Republican primary for governor for those with short memories.
Sununu sent his children to private schools while he was governor and Edelblut homeschooled his children.
Public education during the eight years of the Sununu administration was not a priority although 90 percent of the state’s children attend public schools.
And it is not coincidence that after the Republican House resurrected House Bill 675 which would impose a statewide school budget cap, that Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s small DOGE team — led by two “successful businessmen” — issued its long awaited report and one category targeted schools following the legislature’s Free State agenda of greater transparency and efficiencies, seeking Medicaid and insurance reimbursements and reforming school audit requirements.
HB 675 failed to find enough support last session because it violates the once sacred “local control ideal” often touted for local government.
House Majority Leader Jason Osborne, R-Auburn, issued a press release linking the report and the bill.
“HB 675 applies the findings of the report where they matter most. When dollars are committed and taxpayers are on the hook, HB 675 puts power back into the hands of the voter by requiring a higher threshold of consent,” he said.
Yes a higher threshold which means the will of the majority is nullified by a minority.
State lawmakers fail to acknowledge they provide the least state aid to public education of any state in the country. Instead local property taxpayers pay 70 percent of public education costs and should be able to set their school budget and various other realms usurped by state lawmakers without a “higher threshold of consent.”
The battlefield in the war on public education shifts over time. It began with religious and political ideology; moved into gender and sexual identification; parental rights, including who decides whether school materials and books are appropriate; school choice such as open enrollment, which will exacerbate the already great divide between property poor and wealthy school districts; and is now positioned to impact the most vulnerable of public school children, those with disabilities.
Last week special education administrators gathered for their annual meeting and to celebrate 50 years of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to improve access to education and to integrate classrooms to include those with disabilities.
Today’s special education services and supports are lights overcoming the darkness of institutionalization or stay-at-home kids separated from their peers in public schools.
Many children with disabilities were told to stay home and not to attend school as there were no specialized services or therapies for them.
But services are expensive as federal lawmakers knew they would be, promising to pay 40 percent of the cost, but reneging on that promise and paying only about 13 percent.
In New Hampshire, most of the remainder is paid by local property taxpayers.
The state pays little until a student’s costs reach three-and-a-half times the state’s per-pupil average or about $70,000.
But state lawmakers have also failed to live up to their obligation to pay their state of the catastrophic costs, so local school districts are reimbursed at less than 100 percent.
Last session lawmakers approved an 80 percent threshold as the low end of the reimbursement scale.
Special education costs are difficult to predict and a budget can be blown quickly if a couple students needing costly special education services move into a district.
The federal government is potentially moving the Office of Special Education from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services which local special education administrators said would change the goal from education to a health model which would imply there is a remedy or an illness.
And they said it is the first step back down the road they began traveling 50 years ago when students with disabilities were institutionalized or warehoused in one facility.
Several bills to come before the legislature this session will explore going back to centralized facilities to provide services and supports and explore if the private sector can better provide the services, which is consistent with the libertarian ideal of private education.
Great strides have been made in the last 50 years allowing people with disabilities to lead productive and rewarding lives independently, but that could change as lawmakers focus on costs and greater efficiencies, and the political climate seeks a homogenous environment without minorities, disabilities or vulnerable people.
Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.
Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.
Today, many of us are following the news about a terror attack at Brown University, where a gunman walked into a large classroom, murdered two students, and wounded at least a dozen more. A suspect is in custody. And we are following the news about a massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, where terrorists fired on a large crowd of Jews celebrating the first day of Chanukah. At least 16 people died, and many more were wounded.
It happens to be the 13th anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. A mentally deranged young man killed his mother, then went to the school, where he killed 20 children–first- and second-grade students–and six staff members, the principal and teachers. Then the murderer killed himself.
The children were babies.
The nation was in a state of shock. I remember being glued to the television as the extent of the horror was revealed. I remember the weeping parents, the shell-shocked survivors, children and teachers.
For many, it seemed that Congress was sure to enact meaningful gun control. Certain to limit access to deadly weapons.
But, not long after the event, the conspiracy theories began to roll out. The vile Alex Jones said that there was no massacre. No one was killed. The parents and students were “crisis actors.” It was all staged to create momentum for gun control. President Obama was in on the hoax. One of this blog’s readers sent me a video created to “prove” that Sandy Hook was a lie. It was shocking and sickening.
Some Newtown parents sued Alex Jones for his lies, which caused them extreme pain and suffering. The parents won their case and were awarded more than $1 billion from Alex Jones. Jones, however, declared bankruptcy and through legal maneuvers has paid little to those he defamed.
Sandy Hook was supposed to be the tragedy that would compel Congress to enact strict control. Needless to say, gun enthusiasts blocked any efforts to strengthen gun control laws. Then, with Trump’s addition to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court decided that guns should not be controlled at all, citing their interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Then there was the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022. Nineteen children and two teachers were murdered by an 18-year-old man with an assault weapon. Nearly 400 law officers from local, state, and federal agencies arrived on the scene, where they crowded the hallways and did nothing. They waited 77 minutes before confronting and killing the gunman.
Gun advocates would have you believe that gun control has never happened and can never happen. That’s not true.
During the Clinton administration, Congress passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban in 1994. The law, called the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, had a 10-year sunset clause for the ban on assault weapons. It expired in September 2004, during the George W. Bush administration, and was not renewed.
The current Supreme Court opposes gun control. So here we are.
You can be forgiven for not having noticed that today is the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings, the murder of 26 human beings, 20 of them children. There’s not the usual wave of retrospective stories, perhaps because we’re busy catching up on the latest US campus shooting from the weekend.
It makes me angry, every day. Sandy Hook stands out among all our many various mass murders in this country, all our long parade of school shootings, because Sandy Hook was the moment when it finally became clear that we are not going to do anything about this, ever. “If this is not enough to finally do something,” we thought, “then nothing ever will be.”
And it wasn’t.
“No way to prevent this,” says only Nation Where This Regularly Happens is the most bitter, repeated headline The Onion has ever published. We’re just “helpless.”
Today was the 13th anniversary of the shooting that established that we aren’t going to do a damned thing about it, other than blaming the targets for not being hard enough. Need more security. Arm the (marxist untrustworthy) teachers. And somehow Alex Jones and Infowars have not been sued severely enough for them to STFU.
One thing that has happened over the past several years is a huge wave of folks expressing their deep concern about the children.
A whole industry of political activism has been cultivated around the notion that children– our poor, fragile children– must be protected. They must be protected from books that show that LGBTQ persons exist. They must be protected from any sort of reference to sexual action at all. They must be protected from any form of guilt-inducing critical race theory. They must be protected from unpatriotic references to America’s past sins. And central to all this, they must be protected from anyone who might challenge their parents’ complete control over their education and lives.
Well, unless that person is challenging the parents’ rights by shooting a gun at the child.
The Second Amendment issue is the issue that combines so poorly with other issues. We may be pro-life and insist that it be illegal to end a fetus– but if the fetus becomes an outside-the-womb human that gets shot at with a gun, well, nothing we can do about that. Students should be free to choose whatever school they like–but at any of those schools, people still have the right to shoot at them with a gun. We must protect children from all sorts of evil influences–but if someone wants to shoot a gun at them, well, you know, nothing we can do about that.
The other ugly development has been the ever-growing school security industry, peddling an ever-growing array of products that serve no educational purpose but are supposed to make schools safe, harden the target. Lots of surveillance. Lots of stupid mistakes, like the Florida AI reading a clarinet as a weapon. Lots of security layers that now make entering a school building much like entering a prison. It is what NPR correctly called the “school shooting industry,” and it is worth billions.
That’s not counting the boost that gunmakers get after every school shooting. The panic alarm goes off and the weapons industry sells a ton more product as the usual folks holler, “They’ll use this as an excuse to take your guns” even though in the 26 years since Columbine, the government hasn’t done either jack or shit about taking anybody’s guns. I expect that part of that sales bump is also from folks saying, “Now that I’m reminded that the government isn’t going to do anything about keeping guns out of the hands of homicidal idiots, I guess I’d better arm myself.”
Miles of letters have been strung together to unravel the mystery of why this country so loves its guns and why none of the factors used as distraction (mental health, video games, bad tv shows) could possibly explain the prevalence of gun deaths in this country because every other country in the world has the same thing without having our level of gun violence.
We are great at Not facing Problems in this country, and there is no problem we are better at Not facing than gun deaths. Hell, we can’t even agree it’s an actual problem. The “right” to personally possess the capability to kill other human beings is revered, and more beloved than the lives of actual human children.
And if some of our fellow citizens and leaders are unwilling to make a serious effort to reduce gun violence and these folks insist that the occasional dead child is just the cost of liberty (particularly the liberty to conduct profitable business), well, how can we expect them to take seriously other aspects of young humans’ lives, like quality education and health care.
It is a hard thing to know, every day, that we could do better, and we aren’t going to. We have already taken a long hard look at this issue, and we have decided that we are okay with another Sandy Hook or Uvalde. A little security theater, a little profiteering on tech, a few thoughts and prayers just to indicate that we aren’t actually happy that some young humans were shot dead (talk about virtue signaling), and that pivot quickly to defending guns. Send letters, make phone calls, get the usual platitudes back from elected representatives, who will never, ever pay an election price for being on the wrong side of rational gun regulation.
The whole dance is so familiar and well-rehearsed that we barely have to pay attention any more. It’s exhausted and exhausting, and yet I am still angry.
The Trump vengeance and retribution campaign seems unlikely to end.
The Department of Justice sued Fulton County, Georgia, for access to its 2020 votes.
Trump wants to prove that the election was rigged, despite numerous investigations that concluded it was fair.
He lost. In his mind, he never loses so he will pursue every path that might prove that he won.
The 2020 election was not close.
Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232.
Biden won 81,283,501 votes.
Trump won 74,223,975 votes.
The Washington Post reported:
The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia, over records related to the 2020 election, escalating the Trump administration’s efforts to boost the president’s false claims that his loss to Joe Biden was rigged.
Citing a need to investigate “compliance with federal election law,” the lawsuit demands Georgia election officials turn over “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”
Fulton County officials previously told the Justice Department that those records are sealed and cannot be produced without a court order, according to the lawsuit.
The Justice Department’s lawsuit comes amid increased pressure by President Donald Trump for members of his administration to find evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, despite those claims having been repeatedly debunked and dismissed in dozens of cases by the courts over the past five years.
In a statement Friday, Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, indirectly and without evidence accused Georgia officials of “vote dilution.”
“States have the statutory duty to preserve and protect their constituents from vote dilution,” Dhillon said. “At this Department of Justice, we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws. If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”
Fulton County election officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit against Fulton County is also in line with Trump’s years-long fixation on voting results in Georgia, where Biden became the first Democrat to win the state since 1992. In January 2021, Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) in a phone call to “find” enough votes to reverse Biden’s win in the state.
“All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state,” Trump told Raffensperger then.
One evidence of character is the ability to concede loss gracefully.
Trump is a SORE LOSER.
Trump will spend the rest of his life insisting that he won in 2020 despite losing over 60 appeals to courts, which found no evidence of fraud.
His revenge tour is also faltering. James Comey seems to be out of Trump’s reach because the statute of limitations has run out.
Letitia James was indicted for “mortgage fraud” in her first trial, but the indictment was thrown out because of errors by Trump’s hand-picked prosecutor Lindsay Galligan, who previously was Trump’s personal lawyer.
Yesterday a jury in Alexandria, Virginia, refused to indict James.
ProPublica dug up evidence that Trump himself had signed mortgages on two homes next to Mar-a-Lago, claims both as his primary residence, when they were not.
We will see whether the Justice Department goes after a third indictment against New Tork State Attorney General James.
And then there are Senator Adam Schiff and Rep. Eric Swalwell, who are also at the top of Trump’s enemies list.
“It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game” is a famous quote often attributed to American sportswriter Grantland Rice, emphasizing that sportsmanship, integrity, character, and effort matter more than the outcome, focusing on fair play and respect for opponents.
Scott Maxwell of the Sun-Sentinel in Orlando calls out state education officials for their double standards. Public schools give state tests and are held accountable for student performance. Private voucher schools are not required to give the tests, and few do. Public schools are required to hire teachers who are detified to teach. Voucher schools can hire anyone, even “teachers” without a college degree. Public schools are not allowed to discriminate against students with disabilities or students who are gay. Voucher schools discriminate against any students they don’t want.
By SCOTT MAXWELL | smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com | Orlando Sentinel
Florida’s new top education official is pretty unpopular these days.
Last week, Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas was booed by local school officials from around the state.
Keep in mind: This wasn’t a room full of lefty liberals. It was a gathering of school board members from across the state — the majority of whom represent rural, Republican counties.
But even conservative leaders have quickly tired of an education official whose top priority seems to be trashing public education.
In fact, that seems to be why Gov. Ron DeSantis picked his 37-year-old former deputy chief of staff for the post — to trash teachers, threaten schools and generally troll public education. It’s like putting a guy who hates puppies in charge of an animal shelter.
Still, big talkers often clam up when pushed to address the facts beyond their cheap shots. And that has been the case here. Kamoutsas loves to claim that public schools are “failing,” but seems thoroughly uninterested in talking about how many voucher and charter schools have been proven disasters.
After all, it has become abundantly clear that Florida’s multi-billion-dollar experiment in school choice has failed a lot of kids. The Orlando Sentinel has documented many examples in its “Schools Without Rules” investigation into voucher (or “scholarship”) schools.
All of it funded by taxpayers. All of it documented in print. Yet most of those school operators didn’t get threats from state officials. They just got more public money.
Some schools were such financial disasters, they shut down in the middle of the year, leaving families stranded. (We found one in Orlando that was evicted from a commercial complex where the neighboring tenants included a place called “Drug Tests R Us.” More recently, a South Florida TV station reported that a voucher school in Fort Pierce closed its doors one weekend in September, “leaving parents scrambling for alternatives.”)
We also found schools that employed “teachers” without teaching credentials or college degrees.
Hundreds also had written policies of discrimination, saying they refused to serve students with autism, in wheelchairs, who are gay or who have LGBTQ parents.
So after Kamoutsas threatened to shut down public schools in the name of “accountability,” I asked him why he hadn’t pushed for accountability for all voucher schools as well.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Kamoutsas didn’t respond to that question. Neither did his press office. Suddenly, all the tough talk stopped.
And those messes at taxpayer-funded voucher schools are just the tip of Florida’s increasingly messy school-choice iceberg. Florida’s network of voucher and charter schools keep making national headlines for new problems.
Just last week, the state’s own auditors concluded that Florida’s publicly funded voucher program was such a financial mess that the state couldn’t account for hundreds of millions of tax dollars.
Then there was a report from CBS News that said a startup charter school connected to Erika Donalds, the wife of GOP gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, had enrolled students, only to never open its doors.
Where’s the accountability for that?
A handful of GOP leaders have spoken up. Veteran Republican State Sen. Don Gaetz called for more accountability for voucher money after declaring: “Whatever can go wrong with this system has gone wrong.” And Lt. Gov. Jay Collins tweeted that law enforcement should perhaps probe the “financial irregularities” at the Donalds-connected school.
But Gaetz received pushback. And Erika Donalds said that Collins was only spotlighting problems at her schools because Collins is contemplating an uphill gubernatorial battle against her husband. The reality is that Republican leaders in this state have never pushed for serious accountability for taxpayer-funded schools of choice.
Even after Florida journalists exposed schools that shut down mid-year, hired teachers without degrees or discriminated against students with disabilities, nothing was done. All we heard was more trash talk about public schools and teachers.
Some choice schools do stellar jobs. I’ve been a big advocate for charter schools like UCP of Central Florida that specialize in teaching kids with special needs and do so in caring, effective fashion. And some private schools that accept vouchers are among the best in the state.
But there are also some total dumpster fires. That’s why people who truly believe in accountability believe it should apply to all schools that get public money.
I do. So does the Orlando Sentinel at large. Over the years, this newspaper exposed many problems at public schools — everything from safety violations and poor test scores to unfit teachers and absentee school board members. Usually, public officials agreed that reform and accountability was needed.
Yet most every time we’ve exposed problems in taxpayer-funded voucher schools over the past decade, state lawmakers and education leaders looked the other way.
There are some basic measures that should be in place to protect both students and taxpayers.
Voucher schools, for instance, should be required to publish graduation rates and nationally accepted test scores, hire teachers who are certified or at least have a college degree, disclose all their curriculum, end their discrimination policies and prove that they have their finances in sound enough order to remain open for an entire school year. This is all really basic stuff.
The bottom line: If Kamoutsas and other state officials truly believe in accountability, they’d demand it for all taxpayer-funded schools. And for all the students who attend them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 