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Timothy Snyder: Trump’s Fascist Speech to the Troops at Fort Bragg

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2025 //
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Tomorrow is “No Kings” Day. Join a group and protest Trump’s attempt to make himself our king, our permanent dictator.

Timothy Snyder, noted historian, analyzed Trump’s speech to the troops at Fort Bragg and determined that it was not only self-aggrandizing but also an appeal to disunity, division, and hatred. He honored traitors and oath-breakers, like those who participated in an actual insurrection on January 6, 2021, and leaders of the Confederacy.

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.

Abraham Lincoln statue

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.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Inequity, Injustice, Lies, Racism, Trump, Tyranny

DeSantis Fails to Acknowledge That Victims of Pulse Massacre were LGTB and Hispanic

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2025 //
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DeSantis has prided himself on being a leader of the War on Woke. He passed a bill to ban any mention of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which was known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

In line with his principle of refusing to recognize those who are not straight white men, he issued a proclamation today in honor of the 49 victims of the Pulse nightclub, but failed to mention that most were LGBT or Hispanic or both. The Pulse was a gay nightclub that welcomed everyone.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ annual statement on the Pulse shooting anniversary released Thursday makes no mention of the LGBTQ and Hispanic communities — the two groups most devastated by the massacre that left 49 dead.


DeSantis mentioned those communities last year and in other previous statements recognizing the shooting on June 12, 2016. Those anniversary statements called it a “a horrific act of terrorism against the LGBTQ and Hispanic communities.” In his first year in office, however, the two-term governor faced blowback when an initial statement also failed to note who was most impacted by the shooting.


The deletion this year seems in line with efforts by both the DeSantis and Trump administrations to purge what it calls “diversity, equity and inclusion” from the government, which has included similar deletions that reference sexual orientation and race from the National Park Service website and others.


“Gov. DeSantis’ erasure of the LGBTQ+ and Latino communities today may say a lot about what kind of person he is, but it doesn’t change the fact that those were the communities most directly impacted at Pulse,” said Brandon Wolf, a Pulse survivor from Orlando who serves as spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, DeSantis, Ethics, Florida

Jan Resseger: Trump’s Ugly Budget Bill Defunds Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2025 //
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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.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

EPIC Charter Downsizes, Fires the Principals, Cuts Teachers’ Salaries

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2025 //
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When enrollments declined, EPIC virtual charter schools in Oklahoma reacted like any other business: management shrunk the workforce and cut the salaries of those who were not laid off. The remaining teachers found themselves wondering if the charter model itself was flawed.

KFOR in Oklahoma City reported the story:

OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — After Epic Charter Schools laid off hundreds of employees Tuesday, the teachers left behind say they’ve been given no answers, and some are now questioning whether the charter system that they work for truly puts students first.

Those teachers say they don’t know who is in charge, how the school plans to move forward, or whether their jobs are truly safe. At least one teacher says the chaos has her rethinking the charter-school model entirely—and what it means for students.

News 4 reported that more than 350 Epic Charter Schools employees were blindsided on Tuesday with an email informing them that they were being let go….

The state-funded online charter school laid off 357 employees Tuesday, including 83 teachers and nearly 300 administrators.

“We know that there are guidance counselors affected, transition coordinators,” a current Epic teacher said.

The teacher told News 4 that Epic did not inform teachers that the district layoff included eliminating the roles of every principal, leaving teachers unclear about who they now answer to.

“We would love to know. We are very interested in what that looks like,” she said. “And we have not been told any information on how do you have a school without a principal?”

While this teacher still has her job—that has come at a price.

“They cut our pay again two weeks ago,” she said.

She said the new pay scale dropped teachers’ base salaries to $40,000 a year.

“I was hired with the agreement that $60,000 a year would be base pay,” she said. “That’s quite a significant pay cut.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Oklahoma

Turmoil at the V.A., Amid Deep Cuts of Employees and Healthcare

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2025 //
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When Trump named Doug Collins, a Baptist preacher and former member of Congress, to be Secretary of the Veterans Administration, even Democrats were relieved because Collins had a long record as a chaplain in the military and was expected to be a responsible advocate for veterans.

The American Prospect described the rapid turnaround in his reputation:

When Doug Collins first appeared before the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs (SVAC) for his confirmation hearing, his comforting bromides about his commitment to the VA and veterans lulled Democratic members, who, with only a few exceptions, voted to confirm Collins as President Trump’s new secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. As one Capitol Hill insider told the Prospect, many believed that, unlike Pete Hegseth or RFK Jr., Collins was “a man they could work with.”

Democrats on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs (HVAC) came to the same conclusion. Rep. Mark Takano (D-CA), ranking member of the HVAC, said he was ready to welcome the former Georgia congressman back into the fold because “I think we will be able to do some good work at VA with Doug Collins.”

Fast-forward four and a half months to May 6th, when Collins appeared for the second time in front of the Senate Committee, and May 15th, when he made his first appearance before the HVAC. Assessing his first months on the job, Democrats now clearly viewed Collins as someone working not with, but against, them—and against the nation’s veterans. They expressed anger at his firing of 1,000 probationary employees, his cancelation of hundreds of contracts with vendors that supply VA with critical resources, and his termination of VA researchers, thus interrupting clinical trials that could benefit veterans. And, of course, there was Collins’s vow to lay off 83,000 VA employees.

Several weeks later, Collins has shown his determination to disable the VA. Government Executive reported that the representative from Elon Musk’s DOGS team reported that he couldn’t find much “waste, fraud, or abuse” in the VA; he was fired the next day.

Government Executive reported that Collins is pressing forward and is contracting with another federal agency to help organize the mass layoffs:

The Veterans Affairs Department has signed an agreement with the federal government’s human resources office to help it conduct mass layoffs later this year, with VA saying it requires the assistance due to the unprecedented nature of the upcoming cuts. 

VA will pay OPM $726,000 for its layoff consultation services, according to the agreement, a copy of which was reviewed by Government Executive, which will “ensure legally compliant reductions in force (RIF) procedures.” The department previously announced it would cut more than 80,000 employees, though VA Secretary Doug Collins subsequently said that number was an initial target and the final total could be revised upward or downward. 

“VA [Human Resources and Administration/Operations, Security, and Preparedness] has never undertaken such a large restructuring, and does not have the capabilities, expertise or the internal resources to fulfill the requirement,” the department said in the memo. “Therefore, OPM, an outside resource, will be essential for this effort.”

OPM will provide “qualified, seasoned” HR specialists to help VA reach a level of cuts necessary to meet the demands laid out in President Trump’s executive order calling for workforce reductions and subsequent guidance from OPM and the Office of Management and Budget. VA, like most major agencies, is currently blocked by a federal court ruling from implementing any RIFs or otherwise carrying out its reorganization plans. The administration has requested an emergency stay on that injunction before the Supreme Court, however, which is expected to weigh in within a few days. 

“This Interagency Agreement (IAA) will indirectly support veterans by directly supporting VA’s veteran workforce,” VA wrote in the memo. 

McLaurine Pinover, an OPM spokesperson, said the work would go through the agency’s Human Resources Solutions group that routinely provides strategic consulting advice to agencies employing restructurings and RIFs. 

“HRS exists to assist, advise, and consult with agencies to ensure best practices and full legal compliance throughout a personnel action, including a RIF,” Pinover said. “HRS’s work is done entirely pursuant to interagency agreements with other agencies who hire HRS to consult, advise, and help implement via HRS’s revolving fund authority.”

VA did not respond to a request for comment.

One VA executive directly involved in the RIF planning told Government Executive that department leadership is creating challenges for the team overseeing the cuts because it refuses to put its goals in writing and will not spell out the rationale for its decision making. The verbal instruction, the executive said, is for layoff notices to go out in June. In official communications, however, the executive said leadership will not confirm RIFs are a foregone conclusion. 

The cuts are expected to focus overwhelmingly on headquarters staff in Washington and employees in regional offices, known as Veterans Integrated Service Networks. Still, the executive added there was not enough to cut there to spare individual health care facilities entirely if the 80,000 reduction target remained in effect. 

Because the goal remains a moving target, the executive added, planning has become difficult. On a Monday one appointee will approve a reduction target and by Tuesday another appointee will tell the group the figure is not significant enough. 

“You expect change,” the official said of a new administration, “but if they can’t even articulate the in-state expectation, you can’t execute on any sort of change.” 

That executive added that senior VA leaders entered the department with a predetermined idea and are not adjusting to the realities they have encountered. 

“There seems to be a genuine desire to just dismantle things that were working effectively,” the official said. “They came in with the mindset that everything was screwed up and everything needed to be retooled.” 

Former Department of Government Efficiency staffer Sahil Lavingia, who served as a liaison to VA, said the veterans agency mostly worked fine and was not as inefficient as he thought. Lavingia was fired the day after making those comments. 

Collins has maintained that only back-end roles will be impacted by cuts and patient-facing staff will be spared. Several employees questioned that proposition, however, noting that doctors and nurses rely on support personnel to do their jobs. While VA recently cleared more positions to resume onboarding, employees said that services remain hindered by the hiring freeze otherwise in place and such obstacles would be exacerbated by layoffs. 

“You can hire a surgeon but if no one is there to buy the supplies to do the surgery, what the hell’s the difference?” the VA executive said.

VA is currently developing its final workforce plan and has solicited feedback from executives throughout the department. In an unusual move, it has asked those employees to sign non-disclosure agreements related to the planning. VA supervisors have told employees that as a result, they cannot respond to questions to which they know the answers.

VA’s expected reductions have received some bipartisan pushback, with key Republicans saying the department should proceed with caution and without a set number of cuts in mind. Collins has criticized lawmakers for asking him about the plans, saying the matter was predecisional and scaring veterans. The cut target became public only after Government Executive reported on an internal memo discussing it. 

“A goal is not a fact,” Collins said last month of the projected cuts. “You start with a goal. You start with what you look for, and then you use the data that you find from your organizations to make the best choices you can.” 

He added his adjustments could lead to even more significant reductions. 

Categories Character, Cruelty, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Hypocrisy, Trump

Trump Lashes Out at His Enemies and Sells Merch to Troops at Fort Bragg

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2025 //
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Members of the military are supposed to be nonpartisan; they serve the nation, not the President or his party. Yet Trump gave an invective-filled speech to the troops at Fort Bragg, denouncing his political enemies, while a pop-up shop sold Trump campaign merchandise to the troops.

All completely inappropriate. But Trump respects no norms. The Supreme Court gave him “absolute immunity” as president. He will use that license to do and say whatever he wants, no matter how inappropriate.

Military.com reported on the politicization of the military and how it violates Pentagon policy.

It was supposed to be a routine appearance, a visit from the commander in chief to rally the troops, boost morale and celebrate the Army‘s 250th-birthday week, which culminates with a Washington, D.C., parade slated for Saturday.

Instead, what unfolded Tuesday at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, bore little resemblance to the customary visit from a president and defense secretary. There, President Donald Trump unleashed a speech laced with partisan invective, goading jeers from a crowd of soldiers positioned behind his podium — blurring the long-standing and sacrosanct line between the military and partisan politics.

As Trump viciously attacked his perceived political foes, he whipped up boos from the gathered troops directed at California leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom — amid the president’s controversial move to deploy the National Guard and Marines against protesters in Los Angeles — as well as former President Joe Biden and the press. The soldiers roared with laughter and applauded Trump’s diatribe in a shocking and rare public display of troops taking part in naked political partisanship.

For this story, Military.com reached out to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office as well as the Army and the 82nd Airborne Division directly with a series of questions that ranged from the optics of the event to social media posts showing the sale of Trump campaign merchandise on the base, to the apparent violation of Pentagon policies on political activity in uniform.

Internal 82nd Airborne Division communications reviewed by Military.com reveal a tightly orchestrated effort to curate the optics of Trump’s recent visit, including handpicking soldiers for the audience based on political leanings and physical appearance. The troops ultimately selected to be behind Trump and visible to the cameras were almost exclusively male.

One unit-level message bluntly said “no fat soldiers.”

Open the link from Military.com to continue reading.

Trump speech at Fort Bragg.

Categories Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Lies, Trump

Six Nobel Laureates in Economics Denounce Trump Budget Bill

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2025 //
3

The Economic Policy Institute issued an open letter to the American people, written and co-signed by six economists who won the Nobel Prize.

They wrote:

As economists who have devoted our careers to researching how economies can grow and how the benefits of this growth can be translated into broadly shared prosperity and security, we have grave concerns about the budget reconciliation bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on May 22, 2025.

The most acute and immediate damage stemming from this bill would be felt by the millions of American families losing key safety net protections like Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. The Medicaid cuts constitute a sad step backward in the nation’s commitment to providing access to health care for all. Proponents of the House bill often claim that these Medicaid cuts can be achieved simply by imposing work reporting requirements on healthy, working-age adults. But healthy, working-age adults are by definition not heavy consumers of health spending, so achieving the budgeted Medicaid cuts will obviously harm others as well.

Medicaid provides health insurance coverage for low-income Americans, but this includes paying out-of-pocket health costs for low-income retired Medicare recipients and providing nursing home and in-home care services for elderly Americans. Medicaid also covers 41% of all births in the United States, including over 50% of all births in Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Work reporting requirements will obviously yield no savings from these Medicaid functions.

Besides providing affordable health care to families, Medicaid is also crucial to state budgets and hospital systems throughout the country—particularly in rural areas. In 2023, the federal government sent $615 billion to state governments to cover Medicaid spending; this federal contribution accounted for over 75% of total state Medicaid spending in more than 19 states. Rural hospitals in states that accepted the Medicaid expansion that was part of the Affordable Care Act were 62% less likely to close than rural hospitals in non-expansion states.

In addition to Medicaid, the House bill also significantly cuts SNAP. These steep cuts to the social safety net are being undertaken to defray the staggering cost of the tax cuts included in the House bill, including the hidden cost of preserving the large corporate income tax cutpassed in the 2017 tax law. But even these sharp spending cuts will pay for far less than half of the tax cuts (not even including the cost of maintaining the corporate income tax cuts of the 2017 law).

U.S. structural deficits are already too high, with real debt service payments approaching their historic highs in the past year. The House bill layers $3.8 trillion in additional tax cuts ($5.3 trillion if all provisions are made permanent) on top of these existing fiscal gaps—and these tax cuts are overwhelmingly tilted toward the highest-income households. Even with the safety net cuts, the House bill leads to public debt rising by over $3 trillion in coming years (and over $5 trillion over the next decade if provisions are made permanent rather than phasing out). The higher debt and deficits will put noticeable upward pressure on both inflation and interest rates in coming years.

The combination of cuts to key safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP and tax cuts disproportionately benefiting higher-income households means that the House budget constitutes an extremely large upward redistribution of income. Given how much this bill adds to the U.S. debt, it is shocking that it still imposes absolute losses on the bottom 40% of U.S households(if some of the fiscal cost is absorbed in future bills with extremely high and broad tariffs, the share of households seeing absolute losses will increase rapidly).

The United States has a number of pressing economic challenges to address, many of which require a greater level of state capacity to navigate—capacity that will be eroded by large tax cuts. The House bill addresses none of the nation’s key economic challenges usefully and exacerbates many of them. The Senate should refuse to pass this bill and start over from scratch on the budget.

Daron Acemoglu
MIT Economics

Peter Diamond
MIT Economics

Oliver Hart
Harvard University

Simon Johnson
MIT Sloan School of Management

Paul Krugman
Graduate Center, City University of New York

Joseph Stiglitz
Columbia University

Categories Billionaires, Cruelty, Economics, Economy, Equity, Ethics, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Jobs, Republicans, Trump

Governor Gavin Newsom: Do Not Give In to a Lawless President

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2025 //
16

Governor Gavin Newsom spoke to the situation in Los Angeles, which Trump is using as a target in his campaign to distract the public from his incompetence. In his hateful way, Trump always refers to Governor Newsom as “Newscum.”

Governor Newsom said, as transcribed by The New York Times:

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California delivered a speech on Tuesday, titled “Democracy at a Crossroads.” The following is a transcript of his remarks as broadcast online and on television channels:

I want to say a few words about the events of the last few days.

This past weekend, federal agents conducted large-scale workplace raids in and around Los Angeles. Those raids continue as I speak.

California is no stranger to immigration enforcement. But instead of focusing on undocumented immigrants with serious criminal records and people with final deportation orders, a strategy both parties have long supported, this administration is pushing mass deportations, indiscriminately targeting hardworking immigrant families, regardless of their roots or risk.

What’s happening right now is very different than anything we’ve seen before. On Saturday morning, when federal agents jumped out of an unmarked van near a Home Depot parking lot, they began grabbing people. A deliberate targeting of a heavily Latino suburb. A similar scene also played out when a clothing company was raided downtown.

In other actions, a U.S. citizen, nine months pregnant, was arrested; a 4-year-old girl, taken; families separated; friends, quite literally, disappearing.

In response, everyday Angelinos came out to exercise their Constitutional right to free speech and assembly, to protest their government’s actions. In turn, the State of California and the City and County of Los Angeles sent our police officers to help keep the peace and, with some exceptions, they were successful.

Like many states, California is no stranger to this sort of unrest. We manage it regularly, and with our own law enforcement. But this, again, was different.

What then ensued was the use of tear gas, flash-bang grenades, rubber bullets, federal agents detaining people and undermining their due process rights.

Donald Trump, without consulting California law enforcement leaders, commandeered 2,000 of our state’s National Guard members to deploy on our streets, illegally and for no reason.

This brazen abuse of power by a sitting president inflamed a combustible situation, putting our people, our officers and even our National Guard at risk.

That’s when the downward spiral began. He doubled down on his dangerous National Guard deployment by fanning the flames even harder. And the president, he did it on purpose. As the news spread throughout L.A., anxiety for family and friends ramped up. Protests started again.

By night, several dozen lawbreakers became violent and destructive. They vandalized property. They tried to assault police officers. Many of you have seen video clips of cars burning on cable news.

If you incite violence — I want to be clear about this — if you incite violence or destroy our communities, you are going to be held to account. That kind of criminal behavior will not be tolerated. Full stop.

Already, more than 220 people have been arrested. And we’re reviewing tapes to build additional cases and people will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Again, thanks to our law enforcement officers and the majority of Angelenos who protested peacefully, this situation was winding down and was concentrated in just a few square blocks downtown.

But that, that’s not what Donald Trump wanted. He again chose escalation, he chose more force. He chose theatrics over public safety. He federalized another 2,000 Guard members.

He deployed more than 700 active U.S. Marines. These are men and women trained in foreign combat, not domestic law enforcement. We honor their service. We honor their bravery. But we do not want our streets militarized by our own armed forces. Not in L.A. Not in California. Not anywhere.

We’re seeing unmarked cars, unmarked cars in school parking lots. Kids afraid of attending their own graduation. Trump is pulling a military dragnet all across Los Angeles, well beyond his stated intent to just go after violent and serious criminals. His agents are arresting dishwashers, gardeners, day laborers and seamstresses.

That’s just weakness, weakness masquerading as strength. Donald Trump’s government isn’t protecting our communities. They are traumatizing our communities. And that seems to be the entire point.

California will keep fighting. We’ll keep fighting on behalf of our people, all of our people, including in the courts.

Yesterday, we filed a legal challenge to President Trump’s reckless deployment of American troops to a major American city. Today, we sought an emergency court order to stop the use of the American military to engage in law enforcement activities across Los Angeles.

If some of us can be snatched off the streets without a warrant, based only on suspicion or skin color, then none of us are safe. Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves. But they do not stop there.

Trump and his loyalists, they thrive on division because it allows them to take more power and exert even more control.

And by the way, Trump, he’s not opposed to lawlessness and violence as long as it serves him. What more evidence do we need than January 6th.

I ask everyone: Take time, reflect on this perilous moment. A president who wants to be bound by no law or constitution, perpetuating a unified assault on American traditions.

This is a president who, in just over 140 days, has fired government watchdogs that could hold him accountable, accountable for corruption and fraud. He’s declared a war, a war on culture, on history, on science, on knowledge itself. Databases quite literally are vanishing.

He’s delegitimizing news organizations and he’s assaulting the First Amendment. And the threat of defunding them. At threat, he’s dictating what universities themselves can teach. He’s targeting law firms and the judicial branch that are the foundations of an orderly and civil society. He’s calling for a sitting governor to be arrested for no other reason than to, in his own words, “for getting elected.”

And we all know, this Saturday, he’s ordering our American heroes, the United States military, and forcing them to put on a vulgar display to celebrate his birthday, just as other failed dictators have done in the past.

Look, this isn’t just about protests here in Los Angeles. When Donald Trump sought blanket authority to commandeer the National Guard. he made that order apply to every state in this nation.

This is about all of us. This is about you. California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next.

Democracy is next.

Democracy is under assault right before our eyes, this moment we have feared has arrived. He’s taking a wrecking ball, a wrecking ball to our founding fathers’ historic project: three coequal branches of independent government.

There are no longer any checks and balances. Congress is nowhere to be found. Speaker Johnson has completely abdicated that responsibility.

The rule of law has increasingly been given way to the rule of Don.

The founding fathers didn’t live and die to see this kind of moment. It’s time for all of us to stand up. Justice Brandeis, he said it best. In a democracy, the most important office — with all due respect, Mr. President — is not the presidency, and it’s certainly not governor. The most important office is office of citizen.

At this moment, at this moment, we all need to stand up and be held to account, a higher level of accountability. If you exercise your First Amendment rights, please, please do it peacefully.

I know many of you are feeling deep anxiety, stress, and fear. But I want you to know that you are the antidote to that fear and that anxiety. What Donald Trump wants most is your fealty, your silence, to be complicit in this moment.

Do not give into him.

Categories Bigotry, California, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Immigration, Justice, Trump

Trump Shows His Fascist Face

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2025 //
6

It was inevitable. And now it’s happening. During his first term, Trump repeatedly encouraged violence. He told police officers in New York not to be so nice when they arrest people. He asked “his” generals if they could shoot protestors in the legs. He broadcast fake videos showing him beating up a cartoon character labeled CNN. He urged his crowds at rallies to beat up protestors and said he would pay their legal fees. He wants to seem like a real man, a tough guy. But don’t forget that this tough guy dodged the draft five times with a podiatrist’s note about bone spurs in his feet.

This week, his troubles were mounting. There was the very public split with Musk, who dropped hints about Trump’s name in the still confidential Epstein files. There was Elon’s claim that Trump would have lost the election and control of the House without Elon’s help. What kind of “help”? There was the tariff mess, which was causing a global economic disruption and predictions of inflation. And Trump’s poll numbers were plummeting.

What a perfect time to send in large numbers of ICE agents to immigrant neighborhoods in Los Angeles! Send them to Home Depot, where immigrants cluster in search of work–not the “criminals, rapists, and murderers” he warned us about, but laborers looking for work.

Voila! Their friends, families, and neighbors turned out to protest the ICE raids, and all at once there are crowds and people waving Mexican flags (a big mistake, they should have waved American flags). The situation was volatile but there was no reason to think that local and state police couldn’t handle it.

Trump is shrewd: he saw his chance to distract public attention from his failing policies, and he took it. Without bothering to contact Governor Newsom, Trump mobilized the National Guard. He ordered 2,000 into the troubled neighborhood. Then he sent in another 2,000, plus 700 Marines.

Only the Governor can call up his state’s National Guard, except in the most exceptional situations (the last time it happened was 1965, when President Johnson mobilized the National Guard in Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators because Governor George Wallace refused to do so).

It is even more unusual for a President to call in the military to oppose ordinary people, which is normally handled by state and local police. There is an act-the Posse Comitatus Act–that specifically forbids the Army and Air Force from acting against civilians on American soil. A different law, 10 U.S. Code 275, forbids Navy and Marine Corps members from the same thing. Trump claims that the anti-ICE protests are an insurrection, which allows him to call in the Marines. Legal scholars disagree, but most think he overreached and that there was no insurrection in Los Angeles.

Indeed, the large show of force drew an even larger crowd to the protests and made it more dangerous. Nonetheless, there seem to be more military at the scene than protestors.

Miraculously, no one has been killed (unlike the genuinely violent insurrection on January 6, 2021, where Trump rioters viciously beat police officers and several people died). He sat back and watched the insurrection on television and is now considering whether to reimburse them for their legal expenses after being imprisoned for engaging in insurrection.

Trump said on national television that “many people” had been killed during the protests (not true) and that if he had not sent in the troops, the city would have been “obliterated.” This is nonsense. The clash between the protesters and the military is contained to a few blocks of a very large city.

Today, there were spontaneous peaceful rallies in many cities to show support for the demonstrators in Los Angeles.

The best response: show up for a “No Kings” rally on Saturday. Check the website http://www.nokings.org to find one or create one where you live. Be peaceable. Sing. Dance. Bring American flags. The Constitution protects the right to assemble peacefully.

Trump is not only diverting attention from his monstrous One Ugly Bill, he is laying the groundwork for martial law and dictatorship.

Categories Accountability, California, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Hoax, Resistance, Trump, Tyranny

Gary Legum: ABC Punishes Reporter for Accurate Description of Stephen Miller

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2025 //
5

Gary Legum writes at the blog “Wonkette.” Legum was appalled when he heard that ABC had suspended its reporter Terry Moran for posting a tweet about the hatefulness of Trump’s top aide Stephen Miller. Miller prides himself on his open hatred of immigrants and his eagerness to expel millions of them. He is ultra-MAGA and proud of it.

ABC punished Moran because he told the truth.

By the way, there is a reference in this piece to Stephen Miller’s wife Katie. I have not seen any reason to mention the flurry of reports that she has left her government job to work as a personal assistant for Elon Musk. Did she leave Stephen? Did she move to Texas with Elon? what about their children? Are they in DC or Starland, Texas?

Legum writes:

Something happened to ABC News reporter Terry Moran over the weekend: He was brought low by a brutal attack of unvarnished honesty.

Sir, really. Honesty? In Donald Trump’s America?

Even better, Moran’s honesty was an assessment of the character — or complete and utter lack thereof — of Stephen Miller, the irredeemably evil sack of donkey vomit who does whatever it takes to stay on Donald Trump’s good side, all so he can continue to hold the power — as shadow president, basically — to destroy lives for no other reason than his parents apparently never hugged him and told him he was worthy of love.

Which, quite frankly, can you blame them? We imagine raising Stephen Miller involved mysterious supernatural happenings around the house and nannies hanging themselves from the top floor of the family manor in full view of the guests at Miller’s birthday party.

The trouble started, as it so often does, with a tweet. On Saturday, Moran posted his opinion, for which your Wonkette congratulates him even though we know this sort of thing is frowned upon by the giants of journalism:

The thing about Stephen Miller is not that he is the brains behind Trumpism.

Yes, he is one of the people who conceptualizes the impulses of the Trumpist movement and translates them into policy.

But that’s not what’s interesting about Miller.

It’s not brains. It’s bile.

Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater.

You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.

Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred only a means to an end, and that end is his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.

None of this is news about Stephen Miller to anyone who has ever known him, going back to his high school days when he once got booed off a stage for excoriating his fellow students for being nice to the school’s janitors. A journalist who wrote a book about Miller during Trump’s first term titled it Hatemonger, and we doubt many people blinked an eye.

Shoot, the man’s own family disowned him, and his childhood rabbi called him out in a sermon on Rosh Hashanah. Do you know how horrible of a person you have to be to get a rabbi to denounce you from the bema during the High Holidays? That’s an honor usually reserved for biblical villains and Adolf Hitler, and we are not glibly invoking Godwin’s Law when we say that. We have sat through a lot of High Holiday sermons.

Moran deleted the tweet at some point, but the damage was done. The White House jumped all over Moran in defense of Miller. Vice President JD Vance called the tweet “an absolutely vile smear” and declared that Miller is motivated by “a love of country.” White House Press Nazi Karoline Leavitt, perhaps forgetting who she works for and what kind of crap he puts out every day, called it “unhinged and unacceptable” in a tweet. 

Then the press secretary, her face shining like a highly polished apple, went on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business show and said that “ABC is gonna have to answer” for Moran’s comments:

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com

Leavitt: “ABC is gonna have to answer for what their so-called journalist put out on twitter … we have reached out to ABC. They have said they will be taking action, so we will see what they do … hopefully this journalist will either be suspended or terminated.”

Miller himself called Moran a radical “adopting a journalist’s pose.” Oh no, was he so upset he couldn’t eat his usual Sunday brunch consisting of a live bat?

Moran posted his screed at 12:06 a.m. Sunday morning, the “drunk texting your ex because you’ve been drinking all night and are now all caught up in your lonely feels” hour. Nothing good ever comes of picking up your phone at that hour.

ABC News promptly suspended Moran. Via Deadline:

“ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others,” a network spokesperson said. “The post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards — as a result, Terry Moran has been suspended pending further evaluation.”

ABC should try being like Wonkette, whose only standard is the truth. Then Moran could have called Stupid Nosferatu whatever he wanted: hideous shit goblin, Skeletor, fascist taint shavings, a lower life form than the crud under the fridge, a loser husband who rumors are abounding may have been cucked by Elon Musk, a motherfucking shanda fur di goyim … the list goes on and on and on.

We are not in the habit of giving ABC any advice, but we think their response to Leavitt’s demand that they “answer for” Moran should be two middle fingers raised high, accompanied by a sneer that could melt the press secretary’s face off. It is way past time for high-level journalists to be consistently frank about what Stephen Miller is and what he’s doing, instead of couching his vile bigotry and single-minded pursuit of extremist actions as some sort of polite disagreement between right and left over immigration policy.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Ethics, Immigration, Media, Trump
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