Voice of America is known worldwide for its straightforward, unbiased presentation of world news. Trump placed MAGA enthusiast Keri Lake in charge. At his behest, she just laid off most of the VOA staff. Remember when America was great? We thought we had a message for the world and that the truth would set us free.
But Trump doesn’t want to “Make America great Again.” He wants to make America a land of bitter divisions, where the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer and sicker, unable to get health insurance, medical care, good schools, or any opportunity to rise into the middle class. For that, you need unions and good jobs.
The Trump administration sent layoff notices on Friday to more than 600 employees at Voice of America, a federally funded news organization that provides independent reporting to countries with limited press freedom.
The layoffs, known as reductions in force, will shrink the staff count at the news organization to less than 200, around one-seventh of its head count at the beginning of 2025. They put Voice of America journalists and support staff on paid leave until they are let go on Sept. 1.
The termination notices are the latest round of the Trump administration’s attack on federally funded news networks, including Voice of America.
In March, President Trump accused the news group of spreading “anti-American” and partisan “propaganda,” calling it “the voice of radical America.” He then signed an executive order that effectively called for dismantling of the news agency and put nearly all Voice of America reporters on paid leave, ceasing its news operations for the first time since its founding in 1942.
Kari Lake, a fierce Trump ally and a senior adviser at the news organization’s oversight agency, U.S. Agency for Global Media, notified Congress earlier this month that her agency intended to eliminate most positions at Voice of America. Her letter identified fewer than 20 employees who must remain at the media organization, according to laws passed by Congress to establish and fund it. Friday’s termination notices leave around 200 employees.
Ms. Lake’s decision “spells the death of 83 years of independent journalism that upholds U.S. ideals of democracy and freedom around the world,” Patsy Widakuswara, a former Voice of America White House bureau chief who was placed on leave and is leading a lawsuit against Ms. Lake and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, said in a statement.
She encouraged Congress to intervene and to signal support for Voice of America, which was founded to combat Nazi propaganda and reported in countries that suppress independent reporting and free speech.
“Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and extremist groups are flooding the global information space with anti-America propaganda,” Ms. Widakuswara said. “Do not cede this ground by silencing America’s voice.”
Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthiest will be funded in large part by draconian cuts to Medicare, which provides insurance to poor people. The massive cuts to Medicaid will lead to closure of many rural hospitals, which rely on Medicaid payments. The Senate knows this, and so-called “moderates” are working on adding a fund for rural hospitals. The bill, which Trump insists must pass by July 4, will add trillions to the nation’s debt.
So for all the cuts and firings imposed by Elon Musk and his DOGS, the federal deficit will grow under Trump.
As we at the Prospect have reported, while the Senate’s version of the Republican budget reconciliation bill was widely expected to be more moderate than the House one, when it comes to health care it is more extreme. This came as a surprise to many Republicans, some of whom now want changes. And they all are highlighting the same area of concern. It would be “potentially really bad for rural hospitals,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told The Wall Street Journal. It’s “going to hurt our rural hospitals and hurt them in a big way,” said Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV). Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) expressed “concerns about the effect on rural hospitals in her state.”
This is all certainly true. Senate cuts to the provider tax, a way for states to get more federal funding for their Medicaid programs, along with the House cuts that have been analyzed as leading to at least 11 million fewer people on the Medicaid rolls, will deeply harm the 700-plus rural hospitals already at risk of closure.
But that’s too narrow a frame. The entire health care provider network would come under heavy strain, and possibly collapse.
That’s because each node of the system is interdependent. If the 190 rural hospitals estimated in a recent Center for American Progress report as collateral damage of the Republican cuts close, all of their patients must find treatment at the remaining health care providers. Many of these new-arrival patients are likely to be uninsured (many thrown off Medicaid or Obamacare by Republicans), crushing hospital finances and potentially adding more closures on top.
This means overcrowded hospitals and overburdened staff, in addition to the serious hardships for patients traveling long distances for care. “The Republican Senate budget accelerates the rural hospital collapse that is under way, like jet fuel on a fire,” said Alex Lawson of Social Security Works, who works directly on health care issues in Washington. “Hospitals that don’t close will be the ones people drive four hours to access. The quality of everybody’s health care in this country will plummet.”
If the entire hospital doesn’t close, unprofitable business lines are often shuttered first. “I’ve talked to a lot of hospitals worried about having to close maternity wards,” said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, who ran the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in the Biden administration. In California alone, 56 hospitals have ended maternity care since 2012, and the crisis of maternity deserts is acute.
The situation is worse, Brooks-LaSure said, in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, suggesting that the program is a lifeline for hospitals, supplying a steady stream of paid claims for insured patients. Indeed, Medicaid is often the biggest line item in the accounts receivable budgets for nursing homes, rural hospitals, and maternity wards, as Families USA’s Anthony Wright pointed out to The Bulwark. A letter to the Republican leadership citing data from the Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina notes that 213 rural hospitals serve a disproportionately high share of Medicaid patients.
While hospitals sometimes complain about low Medicaid reimbursement rates, the government has in the past compensated for that with “state-directed payment” arrangements that boost levels to what commercial insurance pays. That is being attacked in the Senate Finance Committee version of the bill, cutting those reimbursement top-ups to Medicare levels.
Hospitals are legally required to take care of patients in an emergency, regardless of their ability to pay. And more emergencies occur when more people are uninsured and put off care until they absolutely need it, which are made worse still if patients have to travel for hours to get care. Uncompensated care builds up in states with larger proportions of their populations who are uninsured, severely damaging hospital budgets.
Taking nearly $1 trillion out of the health system will magnify that problem across the country. And Medicaid cuts that create more uninsured patients, along with the creation of potentially millions of uninsured through Affordable Care Act changes, are terrible for hospitals. According to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, uncompensated care would increase by $204 billion over the next decade if the House version of the bill passed; remember, the Senate bill is even worse. Much of that burden would be thrown onto already shaky hospitals.
To those who argue that the cuts are really to state Medicaid programs and not hospitals, the ways states will deal with those cuts is not likely to be through simply providing more money that they don’t have. They will either change enrollment rules, so fewer people stay on the program, or cut reimbursement payments to hospitals and other providers. Both of these options would directly harm hospital finances.
“These cuts will strain emergency departments as they become the family doctor to millions of newly uninsured people,” said Rick Pollack, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, in a statement, adding that “the proposal will force hospitals to reconsider services or potentially close, particularly in rural areas.”
Please open the link to see the full scope of the threat this Big Ugly Bill poses to rural Americans, most of whom voted for Trump.
Yesterday at the meeting of the leaders of the Group of Seven (G7), a forum of democracies with advanced economies, President Donald Trump told reporters: “The UK is very well protected. You know why? Because I like them, that’s why. That’s the ultimate protection.”
Commenters often note that Trump talks like a mob boss, but rarely has his organized-crime style of governance been clearer than in yesterday’s statement.
Also yesterday, Ana Swanson and Lauren Hirsch of the New York Times reported that Trump has taken unprecedented control over U.S. Steel. Japan’s Nippon Steel has been trying to take over U.S. Steel since 2023, but the Biden administration blocked the deal for security reasons. In order to move it forward, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick demanded an agreement that gives to the president and his successors, or a person the president designates, a single share of preferred stock, known as class G, or “gold.” The deal gives the president permanent veto power over nearly a dozen actions the company might want to take, as well as power over its board of directors.
Swanson and Hirsch note that the U.S. government historically takes a stake in companies only when they are in financial trouble or when they play a significant role in the economy. “We have a golden share, which I control, or the president controls,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Thursday. “Now I’m a little concerned whoever the president might be, but that gives you total control.”
This kind of deal echoes those of the authoritarians Trump appears to admire. His ongoing support for Russian president Vladimir Putin was on display at the G7, when he echoed Russian talking points that blamed European countries and the United States for Putin’s war against Ukraine, rather than acknowledging that it was Russia that attacked Ukraine after giving assurances that it would respect Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine’s giving up the Soviet nuclear weapons stored there.
Also yesterday, Rene Marsh and Ella Nilsen of CNN reported that officials from the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump have been telling staff in the Midwest—which the authors note has a legacy of industrial pollution—to “stop enforcing violations against fossil fuel companies.” At the same time, the Department of Justice has cut its environmental division significantly, leaving “no one to do the work.”
Trump vowed that if he were reelected he would slash the oil and gas regulations he claims are “burdensome.” Now, one EPA enforcement staffer told Marsh and Nilsen, “The companies are scoffing at the cops. EPA enforcement doesn’t have the leverage they once had.”
Also yesterday, outdoor journalist Wes Siler reported in Wes Siler’s Newsletter that while language inserted in the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill requires the sale of up to 3.3 million acres of publicly owned land, an amendment authorizes the sale of 258 million acres more over the next five years. The amendment comes from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and was written by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Steve Daines (R-MT).
It includes Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands in 11 states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. As Siler notes, while the measure does not currently include national monument lands, the Department of Justice under Trump is arguing that the president can revoke national monument protections. If it did so, that would make another 13.5 million acres available for purchase.
Siler notes the process for selling those lands calls for an enormous rush on sales, “all without hearings, debate, or public input opportunities.”
Today, Eliot Brown of the Wall Street Journal reported that Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, is now one of the many wealthy foreign real estate developers “pouring money” into the Trump Organization. Brown noted that the Trump family is aggressively developing its businesses while Trump is in the White House, reaching past real estate into cryptocurrency and other sectors.
The growing power of international oligarchs to use the resources of the government for their own benefit recalls a speech Robert Mueller, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, gave in New York City in 2011. In it, he explained that globalization and modern technology had changed the nature of organized crime. No longer regional networks with a clear structure, he said, organized crime had become international, fluid, and sophisticated, with multibillion-dollar stakes. Its operators were cross-pollinating across countries, religions, and political affiliations, sharing only their greed. They did not care about ideology; they cared about money. They would do anything for a price.
These criminals “may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military,” he said. “They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.”
These criminal enterprises, he noted, were working to corner the market on oil, gas, and precious metals. And to do so, Mueller explained, they “may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”
The FBI’s increasing focus on organized crime and national security is what prompted its interest in the connections between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016.
The willingness of Republicans to enable Trump’s behavior is especially striking today, since June 17 is the anniversary of the 1972 Watergate break-in. On that day, operatives associated with President Richard M. Nixon’s team tried to tap the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate complex. Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard, noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round, he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building.
The story played out over the next two years with Nixon insisting he was not involved in the affair, but in early August 1974 a tape recorded just days after the break-in revealed Nixon and an aide plotting to invoke national security to protect the president. Republican senators who had not wanted to convict their president of the charges of impeachment being considered in the House knew the game was over. A delegation of them went to the White House to tell Nixon they would vote to convict him.
On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign.
Chris Geidner of LawDork notes that despite the lawmakers in our own era who are unwilling to stop Trump, “the pushback…is very real.” Geidner notes not just the No Kings Day protests of the weekend, but also a lawsuit by the American Bar Association (ABA) suing Trump for his attacks on law firms and lawyers, calling Trump’s actions “unprecedented and uniquely dangerous to the rule of law.”
Geidner also notes that lower court judges are upholding the Constitution, and he points especially to U.S. District Judge William Young, an appointee of Republican president Ronald Reagan. In a hearing yesterday, Young insisted on holding the government accountable “for both Trump’s actions and the follow-up actions from those Trump has empowered to act.”
Young called cuts to funding for National Institutes of Health research grants “illegal” and “void” and ordered the NIH to restore the funds immediately. “I am hesitant to draw this conclusion—but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it—that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.”
“I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,” Young said during the hearing. “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.” He added: “You are bearing down on people of color because of their color. The Constitution will not permit that.… Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, probes the divide in the state Republican Party, which is currently in the hands of MAGA extremists.
He writes:
Oklahoma seems to be a case study in MAGA-ism and, now, it may be foreshadowing the chaos that President Donald Trump is creating with his fights with allies.
As the Oklahoma Observer’s Arnold Hamilton explained, the massive Republican majority in the Oklahoma legislature had been “bullied by Gov. Kevin Stitt all session long, until they became “chihuahuas [who] abruptly morphed into pit bulls.” Hamilton then asked, “Was this a one-off, final-hours temper tantrum by legislators fed up with the governor? Or a sign they are embracing their constitutional authority as a co-equal branch of government?”
On the other hand, the Oklahoma Voice’s Janelle Steckleinwrote that the “Stitt Show” shouldn’t distract from the fact that most of his agenda became law, and the people were the big losers.
I suspect that this is another case of Democrats and adult Republicans minimizing the damage that would be done by the passage of the DOGE/Ok agenda. And that is necessary before real progress can be made. I also suspect that the answers as to who won the 2025 session will mostly depend on the courts.
Oklahoma ranks in the bottom five of the nation in child-welfare, and 48th in education. Also, Oklahoma’s poverty rate increased from 38th to 45th in the nation since Stitt took office, and we are 45th in bridge infrastructure. We are in the nation’s top five in men killing women; in the worst women’s health care access; in teen pregnancy; and in the world’s incarceration rates; as one Oklahoman commits suicide every 19 hours.
As the Oklahoma Policy Institute explains, “Oklahoma’s housing crisis is worsening. Moreover, the Trump administration’s “deep cuts to housing programs” are “leaving states to fill the gap in funding.” State lawmakers “punted” on nearly all of their “multiple opportunities to reduce evictions, update the Landlord-Tenant Act, and increase Oklahoma’s supply of housing stock.” And, Stitt “vetoed the only bill to combat the housing crisis the legislature managed to pass, a measure that would have extended the eviction timeline and given families a better shot at staying housed.”
After the legislature gave the governor unprecedented power to control state agencies and Stitt appointed Commissioner Allie Friesen as the head of the ODMHSAA, the legislature had to pass a nearly $30 million emergency bill to keep the agency open until July, and it fired Friesen.
Stitt responded by making personal attacks on fellow Republicans. Senate Pro-Tem Lonnie Paxton the “called Friesen’s appointment by Stitt part of a “pattern” of failure.” Moreover:
“The executive branch continues to produce multimillion-dollar disasters that are routinely dumped in the Legislature’s lap to clean up,” Paxton wrote. “The legislature entrusted this governor with more control of this agency, and he has wrecked it in record time.”
Oklahoma’s extreme mental health crisis isn’t the only extreme challenge, as the Trump administration is ramping up major cuts to health-care funding. As the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy (O.I.C.A.) reports, 59% of the state’s medical facilities are at risk for closing. And the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that 174,000 Oklahomans are likely to lose benefits from SoonerCare, Oklahoma’s version of Medicaid. The Urban Institute estimates that “Oklahoma would have to raise taxes or cut other parts of its budget by $2 billion over ten years to maintain SoonerCare” due to federal Medicaid cuts.
This comes at a time when the legislature will likely have $300 million less to appropriate next year. And it will happen as state agencies say they’ll need $921 million more in funding.
But Stitt, who brags about previously cutting taxes by a billion dollars, then cut income taxes by about $350 million a year, on his “path to zero,” meaning he would eliminate this progressive tax.
And that gets us to what I consider the other most destructive, anti-democracy victory achieved by Stitt and his fellow Republicans, SB 1027. Over the last nine years, voters in our populist state have used the initiative petition to pass state questions on criminal justice reform, medical marijuana legalization and Medicaid expansion. Also, a vote to raise the minimum wage is scheduled. And an effort to end legislative gerrymandering may be coming. Apparently, the biggest reason why the Republicans set out to remove our constitutional right is to prevent SQ 836, a petition for open primaries.”
So, the Republicans have passed SB 1027 which “caps the number of petition signatures that can be gathered in each county and imposes several procedural changes.” By capping the number of votes that can be counted in Oklahoma and Tulsa Counties, they “would effectively end initiative petitions in Oklahoma.”
Rep. Jay Steagall, R-Yukon defended his vote by suggesting “direct democracy as exemplified by initiative petitions invites mob rule.” And, Republican House Speaker Kyle Hilbert defended their refusal to take a stand for democracy, saying, “The founding fathers did have concerns about the tyranny of democracy.”
And that gets back to the question as to whether the integrity of Oklahoma’s judicial system will be maintained.
Until the early 1960s, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court was completely corrupt. In a bipartisan response, our state created an exemplary, honest judicial system. However, Gov. Stitt has repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, tried to turn back the clock to the decades when Oklahoma was one of the most corrupt places in America by repealing the Justice Nominating Commission.
This year, however, he achieved a major goal by creating a Business Court, which could be a tool for enhancing corporate powers. Stitt sees it a tool for building a “more business-friendly state.”
And that brings us to the Oklahoma American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) review of the 2025 session. It listed more than 50 attempts to reverse legal reforms; 15 attempts to attack immigrant rights; 25+ attempts to reverse LGBTQ+ rights; 10+ bills attacking free speech; and 20+ bills attacking voting rights.
Most of these bills were so extreme that they were defeated. For instance, this week, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of Oklahoma’s HB 4156, known as the “impermissible occupation” bill, which “criminalizes certain behaviors of undocumented immigrants, allowing state law enforcement to detain and prosecute them.”
But, there remains work to be done to prevent implementing the Education Department’s (OSDE) demand that immigration data regarding schools be turned over to the state. Also, the ban, aimed at trans-gender persons, on “obscene” performance in public property and certain public places must be challenged, as well as the banning DEI in Higher Education.
So, I conclude that Gov. Stitt has been humiliating himself, but he succeeded in passing the laws that inflict the worst harm on Oklahomans. The civil war between Republican extremists gives more hope that more of the silliest bills can be stopped, giving more power to adults Republicans and Democrats. However, it will take years to build the foundations that are necessary before we can create meaningful pathways to a state with a 21st century political and social systems that serve the people.
Jennifer Rubin was a star columnist at The Washington Post, but resigned after Jeff Bezos tried to exert control over the opinion pages to makts writers less antagonistic to Trump. Ironically, Rubin was originally hired by The Post to be its conservative columnist. But the extremism of the MAGA movement repelled her. After she resigned from The Post, she started a blog called The Contrarian, where she has gathered a stellar lineup of other journalists.
The horrifying assassination of Minnesota state legislator Mellisa Hortman and her husband Mark, and the attempted assassination of state senator John Hoffman and his wife on Saturday followed a week in which the full magnitude of Donald Trump’s violence, cruelty, chaos, and insatiable quest to destroy American democracy as we knew it were on full view. At a time when the country is in dire need of empathy, unity, and healing, MAGA Republicans will return to D.C. this week to pick up where they left off in their reconciliation debate wrangling: seeking to pass a bill that includes the most monstrous transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the uber-rich in recent history.
The Congressional Budget Office determined that if the House bill gets enacted, the bottom decile of Americans by income would lose about $1600 while the top 10 decile would gain more than $12,000. Meanwhile, the debt would balloon to 134% of GDP by 2034.
The MAGA reverse-Robin-Hood scheme would, among other things, remove 11 Million people from Medicaid, 5 Million from the Affordable Care Act exchanges, slash SNAP by more than $700M, “strip 4.5 million children who are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents of eligibility for the Child Tax Credit,” and eliminate or reduce energy credits and subsidies, sending energy costs soaring, particularly in red states.
The bill targets certain categories of legal immigrants (e.g., TPS holders or asylum seekers) by removing them from access to ACA exchanges and stripping them of Medicare benefits (after they have paid into the system).
The party that once stood for federalism would bludgeon states to eliminate Medicaid benefits for these people, provoking the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ assessment that:
“This policy is a direct affront to state sovereignty, placing enormous pressure on states to reduce or terminate coverage programs that their lawmakers have adopted and that they have a legal right to provide or face devastating cuts to Medicaid expansion funding…It goes beyond coercion by imposing a direct, virtually unavoidable penalty on some states.”
Consider the monstrous tradeoffs the bill entails. Former car czar Steven Rattner found that “just the tax cuts for people earning over $500,000 a year would cost $1.1 trillion, very close to the $715 billion that would be saved by cutting Medicaid and SNAP.”
Especially hard-hit would be rural residents in Red states who disproportionately rely on Medicaid. Moreover, their hospitals, which are dependent on Medicaid reimbursement, would go under in dozens of communities. Shuttering hospitals not only deprives residents of access to health services, but in many cases it would mean eliminating the area’s main employer.
Voters have gleaned how this is going to work. The latest Kaiser Family Foundation poll shows “seven in ten adults (72%) are worried that a significant reduction in federal funding for Medicaid would lead to an increase in the share of uninsured children and adults in the U.S., including nearly half (46%) who are ‘very worried’ and one in four (25%) who are ‘somewhat worried.’” In addition, 71% think the bill will negatively impact hospitals, nursing homes, and other health care providers in their communities (71%).
The most heinous aspect of all: Due to the massive cuts in healthcare coverage, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania estimate an additional 51,000 Americans would die each year.
Former president Joe Biden used to say, “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” Apparently, MAGA Republicans value savaging the poor to stuff more money in their (and their donors’) pockets, turn America into an anti-legal immigration country, and rob people of healthcare and other vital programs.
The bill’s damage does not stop there. With the huge increase in debt, borrowing costs for individuals and businesses would go up. “A spike in the national debt can be enough to boost inflation on its own,” the Washington Post reports. The government’s rising borrowing costs would yield painful results for families. “A 1 percent increase in the ratio would amount to extra annual interest costs of $60 for car loans, $600 on the typical mortgage and $1,000 for small business loans after five years, the Budget Lab found. After 30 years, the premium is even higher — adding $2,300 per year to the typical mortgage, for example.
All of that comes on top of the Trump tariffs, another regressive tax that falls disproportionately on lower-income Americans.
No wonder the MAGA bill is so unpopular. The latest Quinnipiac poll found voters oppose the plan by a margin of 53% (including 57% of independents). MAGA Republicans who rubber stamp this bill would therefore be inflicting monstrous pain on Americans, growing the debt, and taking perhaps the worst political vote of their careers.
Trump came to office promising to reduce inflation, lower costs, clamp down on energy prices, and even balance the budget. Instead, if MAGA Republicans allow him, he will continue to increase inflation, raise costs, ignite higher energy prices, and bust the budget. When voters go to the polls in 2026 and beyond, they are not likely to forget who betrayed them.
Guns are the leading cause of death among children. A new study concludes that states that have eliminated gun restrictions have higher death rates among children than states that have retained restrictions. The National Rifle Association, which opposes any restrictions on access to guns, dissented.
The NRA, the Supreme Court, and the gun-loving Republican Party can take credit for the deaths of thousands of children. Their extremist interpretation of the Second Amendment is lethal to children.
Firearm deaths of children and teenagers rose significantly in states that enacted more permissive gun laws after the Supreme Court in 2010 limited local governments’ ability to restrict gun ownership, a new study has found.
In states that maintained stricter laws, firearm deaths were stable after the ruling, the researchers reported, and in some, they even declined.
Guns are the leading cause of death in the United States for people ages 1 through 17, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency room doctor at Massachusetts General Brigham Hospital in Boston, who was the study’s lead author, said he was dismayed to find that most of the children’s deaths were homicides and suicides.
“It’s surprising how few of these are accidents,” Dr. Faust said. “I always thought that a lot of pediatric mortality from guns is that somebody got into the wrong place, and I still think safe storage is important, but it’s mostly homicides and suicides.”
John Commerford, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, called the study “political propaganda masquerading as scientific research.”
The study, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, examined the 13-year period after the June 2010 Supreme Court ruling that the Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms, applies to state and local gun-control laws. The decision effectively limited the ability of state and local governments to regulate firearms.
The researchers classified states into three categories based on their gun laws: most permissive, permissive and strict. They used a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention database to analyze firearm mortality trends from 1999 to 2010 — before the Supreme Court ruling — and compared them with the 13-year period afterward.
Nationally, they found that the number of people under 18 who died from firearm injuries in the period after the ruling exceeded the projected figure for that time by about 7,400, with a total of about 23,000 fatalities.
But in the nine states with the strictest gun laws, youth firearm deaths did not increase. In four — California, Maryland, New York and Rhode Island — they dropped significantly.
The average age of those killed was 14, according to the study, which was coauthored by researchers from Yale New Haven Hospital, the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine and the schools of public health at University of Pittsburgh and Brown University.
Advocates for stricter gun laws praised the study, saying it expanded the evidence that gun safety laws save lives.
“We have shown in the past that states that have the strongest laws when it comes to gun policy have a gun violence rate that’s 2.5 times less than the states with the weakest,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety. “Lawmakers that refuse to take action or further loosen laws are putting kids’ lives at risk.
He also said that gun safety laws had multiple benefits, reducing accidental shootings, while also preventing youth suicides and school shootings. “Three of four school shootings are committed with a weapon taken from the home of the family or a close relative,” Mr. Suplina said.
The conservative, Murdoch–owned Wall Street Journal editorialized that Trump’s immigration plan is in deep trouble, and rightly so. His goal (Stephen Miller’s) is to deport 11 million immigrants (one of every 20 people in the country. That’s led to raids at workplaces. Even his supporters are shocked. They voted to deport criminals, “the worst of the worst,” not the hard-working people who contribute to the economy.
Vincent Scardina is a Trump voter in Key West, Fla., who owns a roofing company. Six of his workers, originally from Nicaragua, were en route to a job late last month when they were detained, according to a report by a local NBC affiliate. Their attorney says five of those men have valid work permits, pending asylum cases, and no criminal records. We haven’t been able to verify that, but if it’s correct, jailing them is a strange enforcement priority.
“It’s going to be really hard to replace those guys,” Mr. Scardina said. “We’re not able, in Key West, to just replace people as easily as, say, a big city.” He also got emotional. “You get to know these guys. You become their friends,” he said. “You see what happens to their family.” Mr. Scardina’s message to the President that he helped to elect: “What happened here? This situation is just totally, just blatantly, not at all what they said it was.”
Four hours after that post about farms and hotels, Mr. Trump was back on Truth Social. President Biden let in “21 Million Unvetted, Illegal Aliens,” who have “stolen American Jobs,” he said. “I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History.” For the record, the Census Bureau says the U.S. population is about 342 million, so he’s talking about maybe deporting 1 person in every 20.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s deportation maestro, Stephen Miller, wants the immigration cops to arrest 3,000 migrants a day. That means raiding businesses across the country. Mr. Trump prefers to talk about “CRIMINALS” because he knows that’s where he has broad public support.
But his federal agents are out raiding job sites full of non-criminal, hard-working people who are contributing to the American economy. The real policy isn’t what Mr. Trump says, but what his agents do on the ground.
How can immigration czar Miller meet his goal without deporting farm workers, construction laborers, restaurant staff, and hotel workers?
Democratic leaders asked the nonpartisan, highly respected Congressional Budget Office to evaluate the consequences of the Trump tax plan. In brief, the bill would widen the gap between haves and have nots and would increase the number in poverty.
The Financial Times reported:
Donald Trump’s landmark tax bill would make the most prosperous Americans $12,000 richer each year, while wiping $1,600 off the disposable income of the nation’s poorest, Congress’s fiscal watchdog said on Thursday.
Trump’s “one big beautiful bill” narrowly passed the House of Representatives last month, extending tax cuts introduced during the US president’s first term in the White House in 2017.
The Congressional Budget Office said in a letter that the top 10 per cent of Americans by income would, on average, see their resources rise by $12,000 a year, or 2.3 per cent of their projected income, should Trump’s “one big beautiful bill” pass the Senate in broadly the same form that it passed the House.
“The changes would not be evenly distributed among households,” said CBO director Phillip Swagel in the letter addressed to Democrat lawmakers Brendan Boyle and Hakeem Jeffries, who had requested the analysis.
“The agency estimates that, in general, resources would decrease for households towards the bottom of the income distribution, whereas resources would increase for households in the middle and the top of the income distribution.”
Please read and take action to oppose Trump’s tyranny:
Earlier this week Donald Trump called for a second civil war at a US military base. This scenario can be resisted and prevented, if we have the courage to listen, interpret, and act. And this Saturday we will have the occasion to act.
The listening is important. The speech was given at the base now known again as Ft. Bragg. The fort was named for a confederate general. It was renamed Ft. Liberty. Under this administration, it was renamed Fort Bragg, now ostensibly to honor another American serviceman, not the confederate general. It is a dishonest pretense that dishonors everyone. The fort is now named again after a confederate general, as Trump made clear. The tradition that is now in fact being honored, that of oathbreakers and traitors.
In Trump’s speech, the existence of the United States is placed in doubt. We are not a country but a divided society in which some of us deserve punishment by others. He made no mention of the world today, nor of any common American interest that might necessitate national defense. There was no concern about threats from China or Russia. Middle Eastern dictatorships, the only countries that Trump singled out, garnered great praise because their leaders gave Trump money. There was no mention of any wars that are actually underway, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Trump invoked battlefields across the decades to create a sense of individual heroism, in which of course the history the the US Army is very rich. But that individual heroism is usually cited by commanders in chief as evidence of a nation that is worthy of defense. No such America figured in Trump’s speech. America did not exist Trump’s speech, except as a cult to him personally.
In the actual history of the United States, one war is central: the Civil War. Trump, who has never seen the point of the Union Army defending the republic, now seems now to have moved on to the position that the Confederacy should have won. He promised to rename Fort Gregg-Adams, the first base named for African-Americans, to Fort Robert E. Lee. The base in question hasn’t been known by the full name of the confederate commander since 1950. Lee was a traitor, an oathbreaker, a defender of slavery and the commander of a force whose mission was to break up the United States of America.
In his speech, Trump claimed that seizing undocumented migrants in 2025 shows the same courage as fighting in the Revolutionary War, or the First World War, or the Second World War, or Korea or Vietnam. It would have been news to the soldiers at the time that charging a trench or jumping from a plane is no different than ganging up on a graduate student or bullying a middle-aged seamstress.
But here we see the magic of Trump’s rhetoric: he seeks to transform the courage of the past into the cowardice of the future. He is preparing American soldiers to see themselves as heroes when they undertake operations inside the United States against unarmed people, including their fellow citizens.
All of this, of course, trivializes actual US military achievements. The actual battles of our history just become a “show,” to use one of Trump’s keywords. They are deeds performed for the pleasure of a Leader who then invokes them to justify his own permanent power. Denuded of all context, military glory becomes a spectacle into which any meaning can be injected. And he who injects the meaning is he who rules. That is the fascist principle that Trump understands. There is no politics except struggle, and he who can define the enemy in the struggle can stay in power. But whereas historical fascists had an enemy without and an enemy within, Trump only has an enemy within. The world is too much for him. The army is just for dominating Americans.
In his speech, Trump was trying to transform a legacy of battlefield victory around the world into a future willingness to take illegal orders regarding his own policy on the territory of the United States. The defiance of the law was clear. Trump cannot, for example, legally just rename those bases. The forts were named by an act of Congress. And he cannot legally deploy the Marines to Los Angeles. He has no authority to do so. The president is expressly forbidden by law from using the armed forces to implement domestic policies.
Trump defined himself not as a president but as a permanent Leader. In repeatedly mocking his predecessor, he was summoning soldiers to defy the fundamental idea that their service is to the Constitution and not to a given person. “You think this crowd would have showed up for Biden?” Whether or not it is unprecedented, as I believe it is, such mockery certainly dangerous. It suggests that something besides an election, something like individual charisma, some personal right to rule, is what matters. That soldiers should follow Trump because he is Trump, and not for any other reason.
In general, we imagine that the US Army is here to defend us, not to attack us. But summoning soldiers to heckle their fellow Americans is a sign of something quite different. Trump seized the occasion to summon soldiers to join him in mocking the press. Reporters, of course, as the Founders understood, are a critical check on tyranny. They, like protestors, are protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Trump was teaching soldiers that society does not matter, and that law does not matter. He “loves” soldiers. He is personally responsible for the pay raises: “I gave you so much money for four years it was crazy.” “We’re giving you an across-the-board raise” This is the way a dictator speaks to a palace guard, or a fascist to a paramilitary.
Trump is putting himself above the army and the army above the country: “we only have a country because we first had an army, the army was first.” That ridiculous: the Continental Army was formed in 1775 from the people, for the very specific and time-limited purpose of ending colonial oppression. Trump wants the armed force to be the end in itself, and freedom to be its enemy. Generally, presidents who speak to soldiers of military glory have had in mind the defense of American freedoms, such as the freedom of expression, including the freedom of the press and the freedom to assemble. Trump said nothing about freedom, except as a “flame” or a “shield.” He said nothing about rights. There was not a word about democracy.
We are witnessing an attempt at regime change, rife in perversities. It has a historical component: we are to celebrate the oathbreakers and the traitors. It has a fascist component: we are to embrace the present moment as an exception, in which all things are permitted to the Leader. And of course it has an institutional component: soldiers are meant to be the avant-garde of the end of democracy. Instead of treating the army as defenders or freedom, Trump presented soldiers as his personal armed servants, whose job it was to oppress his chosen enemies — inside the United States. Trump was trying to instruct soldiers that their mission was to crush fellow Americans who dared to exercise their rights, such as the right to protest.
Referring to migration as an “invasion,” as Trump did during the speech, is meant to blur the distinction between his immigration policy and a foreign war. But it is also meant to transform the mission of the US Army. The meaningful border here is that between reality and fantasy. If soldiers and others are willing to accept that migration is an “invasion,” then they enter into an alternative reality. Inside that alternative reality, they will see those who do not accept the invasion fantasy as enemies. And this is exactly what Trump called for when he portrayed elected officials in California as collaborators in “an occupation of the city by criminal invaders.”
The US Army, like other American institutions, includes people of various backgrounds. It depends heavily on African-Americans and non-citizens. One can try to transform the army into a cult of the Confederacy and a tool to persecute migrants, but this will cause, at a minimum, great friction. Beyond this, using the Army to enforce domestic policy risks ruining its reputation. Deploying the armed forces in cities risks US soldiers killing US civilians. It also risks that provocateurs, including foreign ones, including allies of Trump, will try to kill an American soldier to provoke a disaster. (Trump’s birthday parade seems practically designed for such an incident, by the way.)
Trump will welcome and exploit such situations, of course. He doesn’t have the courage to say things clearly or start conflict directly, but instead sets up others for situations in which they suffer and he profits. The question is whether civil war is the future Army officers and soldiers want. When Trump promises to celebrate Robert E. Lee, he is telling the Army that oath-breakers and traitors will be celebrated in the future. This is not in his gift. Officers who bring the US armed forces to battle American civilians will be remembered by the heirs of a broken republic and as the people who started a second American civil war.
It is clear what Trump is trying to do. He wants to turn everything around. He wants an army that is not a legal institution but a personal paramilitary. He wants it not to defend Americans but to oppress them. He wishes the shame of our national history to become our pride. He wants to transform a republic into a fascist regime by transforming a history of courage into a future of cowardice.
This can only succeed if it goes unchallenged. All of us can think about his words and their implications. Officers and soldiers can remember that not all orders are legal orders. Those in the media can interpret Trump’s speeches clearly rather than just repeating them or seeing them as one side in a partisan dispute. Our courts can name the limits of his authority. And even a Republican Congress can recognize when its powers are being usurped in a way that risks the end of our country.
Though he did not mention the Civil War, Trump did refer to “the sacred soil of Gettysburg.” It is worth recalling Lincoln’s very different sense of the sacrifice of American soldiers in his Gettysburg Address:
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
In the end, and in the beginning, and at all moments of strife, a government of the people, by the people, for the people depends upon the awareness and the actions of all of us. A democracy only exists if a people exist, and a people only exists in individuals’ awareness of one another of itself and of their need to act together. This weekend Trump plans a celebration of American military power as a celebration of himself on his birthday — military dictatorship nonsense. This is a further step towards a different kind of regime. It can be called out, and it can be overwhelmed.
Thousands of Americans across the land, many veterans among them, have worked hard to organize protests this Saturday — against tyranny, for freedom, for government of the people, by the people, for the people. Join them if you can. No Kings Day is June 14th.
Jan Resseger is a social justice warrior who fights for the underdog. She describes here how Trump’s budget enacts the fever dreams of evangelicals and billionaires. He would change federal aid from its historic purpose–equitable funding–and turn it into school choice, diverting funds from the poorest children to those with ample resources. Since 1965–for 70 years–federal education funding for public schools has enjoyed bipartisan support. Trump ends it.
She writes:
Earlier this week, Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman released a concise and readable analysis of the likely impact for public education of two pieces of federal funding legislation: the “Big, Beautiful” tax and reconciliation bill currently being debated in the U.S. Senate to shape public school funding beginning right now in FY 2025, and also President Trump’s proposed FY 2026 federal budget for public schooling in the fiscal year that begins October 1st.
Trump’s FY 2026 budget proposal saves Head Start.
Lieberman shares one important piece of positive news about Trump’s treatment of Head Start in next year’s federal budget: “Some programs survived the cut—including Head Start.” In early May, the Associated Press‘s Moriah Balingit reported: “The Trump administration apparently has backed away from a proposal to eliminate funding for Head Start… Backers of the six-decade-old program, which educates more than half a million children from low-income and homeless families, had been fretting after a leaked Trump administration proposal suggested defunding it… But the budget summary… did not mention Head Start. On a call with reporters, an administration official said there would be ‘no changes’ to it.”
Federal funding for U.S. public schools looks bleak.
Lieberman’s assessment of federal public education funding is not so encouraging. Overall, “The administration is aiming to eliminate roughly $7 billion in funding for K-12 schools in its budget for fiscal 2026, which starts Oct. 1. Several key programs will be maintained at today’s funding level, without an increase: “Flat funding amounts to a de-facto cut given inflation. The administration is proposing to maintain current funding levels for key programs like Title I-A for low-income students ($18.4 billion), the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Part B for special education ($14.2 billion) and Perkins grants for K-12 and postsecondary career and technical education ($1.4 billion).”
What has been historically a key purpose of federal public education funding—to compensate for vast inequity in the states’ capacity and the states’ willingness to fund public education—is being compromised. Lieberman explains that much of federal funding, “is currently geared toward supporting special student populations including English learners, migrants, students experiencing homelessness, Native students, and students in rural schools. Longstanding federal programs that support training for the educator workforce; preparing students for postsecondary education; reinforcing key instructional areas like literacy, civics, and the arts… would disappear. A new K-12 grant program would offer a smaller pool of funds to states and let them decide whether and how to invest in those areas. And for the first time, all federal funding for special education would flow to states through a single funding stream…. Experts view Trump’s budget as part of an effort to roll back a half-century of effort by the federal government to help make educational opportunities more consistent and equitable from state to state and district to district.”
The “Educational Choice for Children Act,” an alarming federal school voucher bill, is hidden inside the “Big Beautiful” bill.
Lieberman worries about the enormous tuition tax credit voucher plan embedded deep in the weeds of the “Big, Beautiful” tax and reconciliation bill now being considered in the U. S. Senate: “Separate from the federal budget process, Congress is currently advancing a massive package of tax changes, including a proposal for a new tax-credit scholarship program that fuels up to $10 billion a year in federal subsidies for private K-12 education. Annual spending on that program could approach the amount the Trump administration is proposing to cut from elsewhere in the education budget.” The voucher proposal is called the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA).
In a separate analysis of the “Big, Beautiful” bill as the House passed it in late May, Lieberman describes this proposed ECCA tuition-tax-credit voucher program: “House lawmakers narrowly approved a sweeping legislative package with $5 billion in annual tax credits that fuel scholarships and related expenses at K-12 private schools. The federal subsidies would come in the form of dollar-for-dollar tax credits for individuals and corporations that donate to largely unregulated state-level organizations that give out scholarship funds for parents to spend on private educational options of their choosing. Any student—even in states that have resisted expanding private school choice—from a family earning less than 300 percent of the area median gross income would be eligible to benefit from a scholarship paid for with a federally refunded donation.”
Lieberman adds: “No other federal tax credit is as generous. The Internal Revenue Service doesn’t currently supply tax credits worth the full donation amount for any cause, as the private school choice scholarship credit would do. The federal government currently offers tax credits on donations for disaster relief, houses of worship, veterans’ assistance groups, and children’s hospitals at roughly 37 percent of the donated amount. A $10,000 donation to those causes would yield a tax credit of $3,700. By contrast, under the proposed legislation, if a taxpayer donates $10,000 to a scholarship (voucher)-granting organization, the IRS would give them a tax credit of $10,000.”
The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy’s Carl Davis explains that because these federal school vouchers are primarily a tax shelter, they might appeal to wealthy people who are not even supporters of school privatization: “The tax plan… includes a provision granting extraordinarily generous treatment to nonprofits that give out vouchers for free or reduced tuition at private K-12 schools. While the bill significantly cuts charitable giving incentives overall, nonprofits that commit to focusing solely on supporting private K-12 schools would be spared from those cuts and see their donors’ tax incentive almost triple relative to what they receive today. On top of that, the bill goes out of its way to provide school voucher donors who contribute corporate stock with an extra layer of tax subsidy that works as a lucrative tax shelter. Essentially, the bill allows wealthy individuals to avoid paying capital gains tax as a reward for funneling public funds to private schools.” “We estimate the bill would reduce federal tax revenue by $23.2 billion over the next 10 years as currently drafted, or by $67 billion over the next ten years if it is extended beyond its four-year expiration date… As currently drafted, the bill would facilitate $2.2 billion in federal and state capital gains tax avoidance over the next 10 years.”
The Brookings Brown Center on Education Policy’s Jon Valant warns that the vouchers are so deeply buried in the “Big, Beautiful” bill that lots of people would not be aware of the plan’s existence until after it is passed: “The Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) continues to move, quietly, towards becoming one of America’s costliest, most significant federal education programs. Now part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, ECCA would create a federal tax-credit scholarship program that’s unprecedented in scope and scale. It has flown under the radar, though, and remains confusing to many observers… ECCA’s stealthiness is partly due to the confusing nature of tax-credit scholarship programs. These programs move money in circuitous ways to avoid the legal and political hurdles that confront vouchers.”
Valant explains how tax-credit vouchers work: “Tax-credit scholarship programs like ECCA aren’t quite private school voucher programs, but they’re first cousins. In a voucher program, a government gives money (a voucher) to a family, which the family can use to pay for private school tuition or other approved expenses. With a tax-credit scholarship, it’s not that simple. Governments offer tax credits to individual scholarship granting organizations (SGOs). These SGOs then distribute funds… to families.”
Valant creates a scenario that shows how this tax credit program could help the wealthy and leave out poorer families. A rich donor, Billy, donates $2 million in stock to an SGO: “Billy’s acquaintance, Fred, lives in the same town as Billy, which is one of the wealthiest areas in the United States. In fact, Fred set up the SGO, looking to capture ECCA funds within their shared community… Like Billy, Fred doesn’t particularly care about K-12 public education… It might seem that Fred’s SGO couldn’t distribute funds to families in their ultra-wealthy area, since ECCA has income restrictions for scholarship recipients. That’s not the case. ECCA restricts eligibility to households with an income not greater than 300% their area’s median income. In Fred and Billy’s town, with its soaring household incomes, even multimillionaire families with $500,000 in annual income are eligible… So, Fred is looking to give scholarship money to some wealthy families in his hometown.”
Valant summarizes the result if the “Big, Beautiful” bill is enacted: “This bill would introduce the most significant and costliest new federal education program in decades. It has virtually no quality-control measures, transparency provisions, protections against discrimination, or evidence to suggest that it is likely to improve educational outcomes. It’s very likely to redirect funds from poor (and rural) areas to wealthy areas.”
