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Trump Administration Will Close Major Center for Research on Climate Change

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2025 //
3

The Trump administration is engaged in a war against science and medicine. It has eliminated funding in many crucial areas of research conducted by universities and by the National Institutes of Health. Incalculable damage has been done to set back the search for cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, infectious diseases, HIV, respiratory diseases, and pediatric cancer. People will die because of the ignorance of those who close down ongoing, vital research.

Trump has consistently claimed that “climate change” is a hoax. He has said that the term “climate change” refers to the weather. He hates wind farms and has cut federal funding for them. He has hated wind farms since wind turbines were built near his Trump International Golf Links in Scotland. He sued to block them but repeatedly lost.

Now he is closing down a major hub of climate research.

The New York Times reported:

The Trump administration said it will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions.

The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters around the country, and its scientists study a broad range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming.

But in a social media post announcing the move late on Tuesday, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, called the center “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and said that the federal government would be “breaking up” the institution.

Mr. Vought wrote that a “comprehensive review is underway” and that “any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”

USA Today first reported on the White House plans.

Scientists, meteorologists and lawmakers said the move was an attack on critical scientific research and would harm the United States.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research was originally founded to provide scientists studying Earth’s atmosphere with cutting-edge resources, such as supercomputers, that individual universities could not afford on their own. It is now widely considered a global leader in both weather and climate change research, with programs aimed at tracking severe weather events, modeling floods and understanding how solar activity affects the Earth’s atmosphere.

The center’s research has often proved useful in unexpected places, such as when its studies of downdrafts in the lower atmosphere in the 1970s and 1980s led to development of wind shear detection systems around airports that helped address the cause of hundreds of aviation accidents during that era.

Categories Environment, Evil, Extremism, Medicine, Research, Science, Stupid, Trump

How Jeffrey Epstein Became Wealthy: The New York Times Investigates

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2025 //
8

This is a link to a gift article.

Several reporters at The New York Times worked together for months unraveling the secrets of Jeffrey Epstein’s financial success. How did he go from being a high school math teacher to a multimillionaire? His greatest trick, it appears, was cultivating and leveraging friendships among people who were wealthy and powerful. Name-dropping was a tactic. So were lying and boasting, as he rose in elite circles, cultivating contacts, references, women, and friends.

Categories Character, Cheating, Corruption, Ethics, Evil, Fraud, Hoax, Lies, Scandals

Glenn Kessler: Trump’s Top Ten Lies of 2025

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2025 //
14

Glenn Kessler spent 15 years as the Washington Post fact-checker. He stepped aside recently and now writes at his Substack blog. For years, he has had the daunting task of counting Trump’s lies. Trump has the unparalleled ability to lie with great sincerity even when he knows he is lying.

He writes:

The hardest part about building a list of Donald Trump’s ten biggest lies in a year is the abundance of material.
When I ran The Fact Checker at The Washington Post, our team counted more than 30,000 false or misleading claims in his first term. That’s more than 20 erroneous claims a day. No one is keeping such a comprehensive list in his second term — it’s a thankless duty — but I’m sure he’s keeping the same pace.

Trump makes many false statements, big and small, and I tried to keep this accounting to substantive issues, both domestic and foreign. Even so, I found myself removing claims that others might consider worthy of inclusion.
For instance, he regularly claimed an executive order he issued on prescription drugs would “slash drug prices by 200 percent, 300 percent, 400 percent, 500 percent, 600 percent, 700 percent, 800 percent.” That’s a mathematical impossibility. A 100-percent cut would mean prices were zero. Trump is surrounded by so many lackeys that no one appears to have the heart to tell him.
Another arithmetic-challenged claim is Trump’s frequent boast that under his leadership the United States has secured nearly $20 trillion in new investments. That’s double the official White House count, which itself is a misleading brew of aspirations and vague promises, not actual investments. One clue this is bogus: Trump’s number is two-thirds of the annual gross domestic product of the United States.
Then there’s Trump’s claim that “Portland is burning to the ground,” apparently because he watched a Fox News report that included B-roll from 2020. This year, a few protesters outside an ICE facility have set some small fires, quickly extinguished. Again, why doesn’t his staff set him straight?
Another runner-up was Trump’s outrageous accusation that Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, had manipulated jobs numbers. He fired her after job-growth estimates were revised downward — a common occurrence. “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” he fumed on social media, even though the estimates are derived from surveys conducted by professionals many rungs below the director. Trump never offered evidence for his claim.
Readers may have other nominations. Here’s my list for Trump’s biggest lies in 2025, in no particular order. Taken together, these falsehoods demonstrate how Trump governs — impulsively, defiantly, and often detached from reality.
“Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”
Is it a lie if someone appears to firmly believe something? Trump may love tariffs but he’s been lying to himself as well as the American people about the impact. Every economist agrees that tariffs are a tax on consumers — not countries. Yet in his inaugural speech, Trump said the opposite. It is economic nonsense. Trump, of course, made this claim throughout the 2024 campaign (and in his first term), but it merits inclusion on the 2025 list because this lie had such real-world implications. Trump likely circumvented the Constitution by imposing such sweeping tariffs without congressional authorization, though the final verdict will come from the Supreme Court.
Throughout the year, Trump made many false claims about tariffs — “We’re taking in billions and billions of dollars. … We were losing $2 billion a day. … Now we’re making $3 billion a day” — and offering empty promises to use the “trillions” from tariffs to reduce taxes and pay down the national debt. The money raised from tariffs is not enough to reduce income taxes — and it is in fact another tax — and it won’t pay down the debt. That didn’t stop Trump from falsely claiming in November that tariffs would reduce the federal budget deficit by 25 percent.
By the end of the year, Trump offered $12 billion in aid to farmers hurt by his trade war with China — an unstated acknowledgment that tariffs do have costs for Americans.

“We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
On the face of it, this sounds idiotic, but Trump kept repeating it (and sometimes inflated the figure to $100 million) to justify terminating the U.S. Agency for International Development — an effort led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. But USAID, which distributed condoms to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted disease, spent less than $50,000 on condoms in the entire Middle East in a year — and nothing in Gaza.
In a striking example of the White House’s sloppy staff work, someone appears to have confused Gaza, the Palestinian enclave on the Mediterranean, with the Gaza province of Mozambique in Africa — and then USAID funding with Health and Human Services Department money given to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation for HIV/AIDS prevention. It would be funny if it were not so sad.
Nevertheless, despite such fiction, USAID was dismantled, at great cost to the United States’ global reputation and with little impact on the $7-trillion federal budget. Though Trump in February claimed that DOGE had already saved as much as $500 billion, DOGE itself only tallied $214 billion by December. Of course, that’s also an exaggerated figure. When Politico scrubbed the data in August, it found the savings amounted to less than five percent of the claimed value. That’s because DOGE would count the ceiling value of contracts, which is far more than what the government has agreed to pay.

“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
Trump said this in February about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has, against the odds, managed to fend off a Russian assault on his country for nearly four years.
Trump, who for some inexplicable reason always tilts toward Russia, echoed the Russian position that it was pushed into the conflict. It’s akin to saying Japan was forced into attacking Pearl Harbor because the United States imposed a trade embargo in 1940, depriving Japan of oil. The trade embargo came after Japan’s provocative actions in the Pacific, such as the 1931 occupation of Manchuria following a Japanese-manufactured incident.
This comment is emblematic of a series of Trump’s lies about Ukraine — that Zelensky admitted U.S. aid is missing, that Zelensky has never said he has been grateful for American assistance, that the United States provided more aid than Europe, and so forth. Despite sometimes suggesting he was exasperated by Russia, Trump throughout the year has consistently favored Moscow over Kyiv in the conflict that, in the 2024 campaign, he claimed he would solve in 24 hours.

“We’ve ended weaponized government where, as an example, a sitting president is allowed to viciously prosecute his political opponent like me.”
Trump made this proclamation in his annual speech to a joint session of Congress, a clear example of a lie of commission. He and his allies already had fired career Justice Department and FBI employees who worked on the Jan. 6 cases or the Trump prosecutions, launched investigations into political groups and donors, and targeted law firms who worked on cases against him.
Soon, Trump ordered the indictments of former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, after firing the U.S. Attorney who decided the cases were weak. The cases rested on such shaky ground that they were soon dismissed. But they could be revived and Trump’s point was made — cross him and you will be in the crosshairs.
(For the record, there is no evidence that Joe Biden directed the Justice Department or local prosecutors to pursue the four criminal cases against Trump.)

“Just about everything is down. You know, this whole thing is, they use the word affordability. It’s a Democrat hoax.”
By year’s end, Trump’s approval rating had fallen sharply, largely because Americans perceived he was not focused on “affordability” — the rising cost of goods and services.
As usual, Trump thinks he’s doing great. In December he gave himself a score of “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” for his handling of the economy. When asked by Laura Ingraham why Americans were anxious, he dismissed the concern: “I don’t know they are saying that. The polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.” Even though grocery prices were up, Trump insisted they were down.
Instead, he lied that any problems faced by Americans were the legacy of Biden’s presidency, claiming that “we inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare.” In fact, Trump inherited an economy with relatively low unemployment, falling inflation and strong growth. The month before the November election, the Economist newspaper published a cover story declaring that the U.S. economy was “the envy of the world.” Taking office, Trump upended the economy — and sent prices higher — by imposing sweeping tariffs.

“Don’t take Tylenol. Fight like hell not to take it.”
Trump’s news conference in September claiming a link between Tylenol and autism was an appalling display of ignorance and hubris.
He falsely suggested autism rates were soaring — from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 36 — when in fact the diagnosis of autism has increased because of better detection and expanded definitions. He seized on a disputed report to blame Tylenol, despite decades of research failing to find a causal link. He claimed nonsense that Amish don’t have autism because they refuse vaccinations. Surveys show many Amish vaccinate their children and that there is autism in the community. He cited a “rumor” that Cuba has no autism because the island can’t afford Tylenol. That curious claim was news to Cuba doctors. And then he told American women that they shouldn’t take Tylenol even if they suffer a fever — though fevers can be very harmful to fetuses. (Indeed, it may be fever, not Tylenol, that is linked to autism.)

“I’ve ended eight wars.”
No one can accuse Trump of modesty. In his desperate bid to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — Barack Obama won one, after all — Trump over the course of the year has added to his list of “wars” that he claimed he’s ended. But few of these were wars, Trump’s role was often tangential, and the resolution of the conflicts are likely temporary. Many of the pauses require careful follow-up to ensure implementation, and already some are falling back into bloodshed.
Yet that has not stopped Trump from claiming credit and even asserting “we’ve never had a president that solved one war, not one war.” That’s obviously false. Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for negotiating peace in the 1904-5 war between Russia and Japan, while Jimmy Carter negotiated the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978.
What’s on Trump’s list? Cambodia and Thailand (A border dispute keeps flaring up, and indeed restarted in December); Armenia and Azerbaijan (They signed a U.S.-brokered peace deal in August, with Trump hosting an Oval Office ceremony, but it must be ratified and Armenia needs to change its constitution); Israel and Iran (a ceasefire was declared after a 12-day conflict but the decades-long conflict continues); India and Pakistan (The long-running dispute over Kashmir continues, though a ceasefire was reached in May; Trump’s claim of credit has been rejected by India); Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Fighting continues though a peace agreement was signed with U.S. involvement); Egypt and Ethiopia (This is a mystery entry on Trump’s list as the nonviolent dispute is over hydroelectric dam opened by Ethiopia); Serbia and Kosovo (Another mystery entry as tensions have never eased since Kosovo broke off in 2008); Hamas and Israel (Trump pushed Israel to finally agree to a ceasefire in the two-year war, a real accomplishment, though a final resolution to the conflict appears elusive).
As you can see, it’s inflated and rather crass, much like accepting a dubious “world peace award” from FIFA and renaming the U.S. Institute of Peace after himself after the administration fired the staff and destroyed it.

“Every boat that you see get blown up, we save 25,000 – on average – 25,000 lives.”
Trump has been under fire for the administration’s military strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug boats in international waters, and in defense he offered a nonsense figure. Dutifully, other administration officials have echoed the lie.
First of all, the administration had not provided evidence that the boats carried drugs. Trump asserts they were transporting fentanyl but that makes no sense since Venezuela mainly supplies cocaine to Europe. In three months, about 20 vessels have been hit by airstrikes, killing more than 80 people, so using Trump’s math that would mean 500,000 Americans lives supposedly were saved. Yet provisional federal data shows that the total number of U.S. overdose deaths was about 75,000 in the 12 months ending in April (the most recent period available).
In other words, Trump invented these numbers. (The “on average” is an effort at verisimilitude.) It’s not supposed to make sense — just sound good.

“These [Epstein] files were made up by Comey. They were made up by Obama. They were made up by Biden.”
One of the few issues Trump could neither spin nor shrug off centered on demands that his administration release the investigative files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a onetime friend from the 1990s with whom he later fell out. Trump had promised to release the files during the 2024 campaign, but then the Justice Department refused to do so. Pressure built in Congress for passage of a law to force the files’ release, and in July Trump lashed out, claiming the files were all made up by Democrats, name-checking former FBI director James Comey, Obama and Biden.
This claim is simply nuts. The files represent investigative evidence, so nothing was invented. Neither Obama nor Biden were in office when the FBI investigated Epstein — that happened under George W. Bush in 2007-2008 and Trump in 2018 — while Comey wasn’t even in government at the time. Epstein, who molested hundreds of girls, at first received a sweetheart deal that minimized his crimes, and then the case was reopened under Trump after a Miami Herald investigation. He was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial, an apparent suicide.
Trump’s instinct is to deflect problems onto his opponents, but he wasn’t successful in this instance. Congress passed the law, requiring the files be released by Dec. 19. The Justice Department has indicated it won’t meet the deadline.

“It won’t interfere with the current building. It will be near it but not touching it. And pays total respect to the existing building.”
This was Trump in July, speaking about his plans to add a ballroom to the White House complex.
Then, suddenly, in October, wrecking crews ripped down the entire East Wing of the White House. Trump was unrepentant about the fierce public outcry, dismissing the East Wing as “common brick, little tiny windows, it looked like hell.” (The White House skipped the requirement to submit its demolition plans, claiming the National Capital Planning Commission has no jurisdiction over demolition.)
In July, Trump had said the ballroom would hold 600 to 700 people and cost $200 million; now the plans call for about 1,000 people, the budget ballooned to more than $300 million, and the architect was replaced because he objected to Trump’s grandiose ambitions. The resulting 90,000-square-foot building will overshadow the existing 55,000-square-foot White House structure.
Is there any lie more emblematic of how Trump has approached his second term? He forges ahead, destroying any obstacles in his path, including the truth, while paying little heed to what Americans might think.

Categories Evil, Extremism, Lies, Trump

Trump Says Murder of Reiners Was All about Trump

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2025 //
15

Trump, being Trump, turns everything into a story about him. When the news first came out that Hollywood icon Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle were murdered in their home in Los Angeles, Trump posted a callous, cruel comment about their deaths. He wrote the following comment on Monday morning before the police arrested their son Nick.

Trump attributed their deaths to their hatred of him. What?

“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”

Trump’s message was so cynical and self-serving that several Republicans criticized his heartlessness.

Politico mentioned several Republicans who were taken aback by Trump’s narcissism.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the deaths of Reiner and his wife were “a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies.”

Rep. Mike Lawler said that Trump’s comments were “wrong,” and that their deaths deserved “sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period.”

Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky said Trump’s post was “inappropriate and disrespectful”; he challenged “anyone to defend it.”

Jenna Ellis, who was one of Trump’s personal lawyers who defended him after he lost the election in 2020, criticized Trump’s post.

The New York Times wrote about her reaction:

“A man and his wife were murdered last night. This is NOT the appropriate response,” Jenna Ellis, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer who is now a conservative radio host, wrote on social media on Monday. “The Right uniformly condemned political and celebratory responses to Charlie Kirk’s death. This is a horrible example from Trump (and surprising considering the two attempts on his own life) and should be condemned by everyone with any decency.”

Trump shows who he is without shame or guile. He has no empathy, no compassion, no sense of propriety. Every issue, every interaction, every event boils down to his self-interest. Nothing else matters.

Categories Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Shame, Trump

Students Applying for College Must Be Wary of DEI!

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2025 //
4

Back in the days when the Republican Party was actually conservative, Republicans believed in small government. They said repeatedly that the federal government should not interfere with decisions made by local governments and private institutions.

The Trump administration is not conservative. It believes that it should impose its ideology on every kind of institution and every level of government.

Trump’s personal hatred of immigrants, of affirmative action, of any kind of program to help members of historically disadvantaged groups knows no bounds. His administration is on the hunt to stamp out anything that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion. In addition to satisfying his (and Stephen Miller’s) personal hatreds, the war on DEI appeals to unsuccessful white men who think that underrepresented groups got advantages unavailable to them.

Here is the latest intrusion: Trump officials want to stamp out any reference to DEI in college admission essays. Students who have prevailed over adversity should be careful not to mention it, especially if they are Black or immigrants. Colleges are wondering how they will pay for this new federal demand.

This student was warned not to write about her life!

Mo Marie Lauyanne Kouame, 18, dreams of being an aerospace engineer and building spacecraft. This fall, she applied to MIT, Princeton, and Columbia. 

For one college essay, she wrote about being homeless at 8 years old, when she came to the United States from France. 

She recalled watching her parents fight for help from the Department of Transitional Assistance and sleeping in hospital beds at Boston Medical Center when they didn’t know where else to go. That early experience changed her, she said. 

“Homelessness,” she wrote, “taught me resilience.”

Kouame’s essay, which recounts how she learned to thrive as a low-income student of color “surrounded by classmates whose lives felt worlds apart from mine,” is about overcoming adversity. 

That’s a theme the White House has identified as a problem in its campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion. Over the past year, the federal government has flagged “cues” such as personal essays, along with narratives about “overcoming obstacles” and “diversity statements,” as being potentially unlawful: a stand-in for talking about race.

More than two years have passed since the Supreme Court ended race-conscious affirmative action, and the Trump administration has since demanded colleges submit data proving they don’t consider race in admissions. It has also expanded what it sees as “discriminatory admissions processes” to include considering a student’s sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnicity, nationality, political views, and religious associations.

For Kouame, not writing about her identity felt “impossible,” she said in a Zoom interview, “because the things that I’ve gone through in life make me who I am now.” 

Other students are weighing the pros and cons, said Ethan Sawyer, founder of College Essay Guy, which offers one-on-one coaching and free online resources through the admissions process. He added the key is “to step back and take stock” of what colleges are actually looking for. Essentially: “How will you be a valuable, contributing member of the community?” 

Navigating the college admissions landscape has never been easy, but for the class of 2030 it’s particularly fraught. Plenty of advisers can be hired for a fee: Private consulting is a $3 billion industry, with parents paying tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to give their kids an edge. Community organizations, college-prep programs, and high schools are also on hand to assist students. 

There’s no question it’s an uneven playing field, though this year there is one equalizer in the college admissions game: No one really knows what’s coming next.

Categories Bias, Equity, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Higher Education, Trump

Musk and Trump Have Blood on Their Hands After Canceling US AID

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2025 //
11

At the start of the second Trump administration, Trump unilaterally created a fake “Department of Government Efficiency,” led by Elon Musk. Only Congress can create or eliminate Departments. According to the Constitution, the House of Representatives is responsible for funding and defunding the federal government.

Trump ignored the Constitution and Congress and let Musk and his team ransack the Federal Government, fire thousands of civil servants, and close agencies at will. DOGE decisions were made not by experts but by Musk and his team, most of whom were young men in their 20s, even a teenagers. From their point of view, their greatest accomplishment was to copy massive amounts of personally identifiable data from the Treasury Department and the Social Security Administration.

While DOGE slashed and burned agencies and Departments with abandon, the cruelest cut of all was the near-total elimination of foreign aid. Millions of people in impoverished countries relied on U.S. AID for food, medicine, and medical care. The aid is gone. Hundreds of thousands of people died. If you say it in the active tense, Trump and Musk murdered “hundreds of thousands of people” whose lives depended on US AID. The food aid was more than a humanitarian impulse: American farmers lost at least $2 billion that was used to pay them to supply food for US AID.

Matt Johnson wrote for MS NOW:

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Elon Musk boasted in February, shortly after President Donald Trump gave him permission to hack his way through the federal government. As a “special government employee” with no oversight running the “temporary organization,” the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Musk destroyed the 64-year-old humanitarian agency in a matter of days, abruptly halting deliveries of lifesaving medicine, emergency food aid and many other forms of support to the poorest people on the planet. This was done in the name of DOGE’s mission to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

Musk claimed that DOGE would slash government spending by “at least $2 trillion,” but it ended up saving a microscopic fraction of that figure. Now that DOGE has been disbanded, Musk claims “We were a little bit successful” — but admits that he wouldn’t do it again. 

Musk tried his hand at government, shrugged and moved on. The same can’t be said for the people who are dead and dying thanks to the DOGE-led onslaught on the U.S. Agency for International Development. “No one has died as [a] result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Musk declared in March. According to models created by Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, hundreds of thousands of people have in fact died as a result of eliminated and disrupted aid. 

It’s impossible to calculate the ultimate human toll of shuttering USAID. The U.S. was responsible for 40% of the total foreign aid tracked by the United Nations in 2024, and much of the infrastructure that delivered this aid has now been destroyed. Beyond the frozen payments for active aid projects, partner organizations have closed, supply chains for medicine and food deliveries have been severed and staff who administered and monitored programs have been fired. Early warning systems for starvation and infectious diseases have shut down. 

The individual stories are harrowing. A South Sudanese child with HIV died from pneumonia because he didn’t receive the medication necessary to sustain his immune system. People participating in studies were abandonedwith experimental drugs in their systems and medical devices in their bodies. Cases of acute malnutrition at refugee camps have surged. 

In the MAGAverse, none of this is true because USAID was never an aid organization to begin with. Mike Benz, a right-wing influencer who has accused the agency of being a terror organization and subverting governments around the world, was a big influence on Musk’s assault on USAID, which Benz called the “Terror Titanic.” Like Musk before him, Benz has now been appointed as a special government employee to investigate his allegations that USAID was a massive covert influence operation and front for the CIA. 

Benz’s campaign is just the latest example of MAGA propaganda using USAID as a convenient political scapegoat. DOGE viewed the takeover of USAID as an opportunity to find instances of “viral waste,” which could be broadcast to the American people as a justification for its other cost-cutting efforts. One example cited by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was the “50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” Trump later declared that the money had been “sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.” 

There was just one problem: The money was actually for family planning in a province of Mozambique called Gaza….

This is not the full article. Open the link to read the rest.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Data, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Failure, Funding, Injustice, International, Musk, Elon, Trump

Peter Greene: Today Is the Anniversary of the Sandy Hook Massacre. Remember?

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2025 //
10

Today, many of us are following the news about a terror attack at Brown University, where a gunman walked into a large classroom, murdered two students, and wounded at least a dozen more. A suspect is in custody. And we are following the news about a massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, where terrorists fired on a large crowd of Jews celebrating the first day of Chanukah. At least 16 people died, and many more were wounded.

It happens to be the 13th anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. A mentally deranged young man killed his mother, then went to the school, where he killed 20 children–first- and second-grade students–and six staff members, the principal and teachers. Then the murderer killed himself.

The children were babies.

The nation was in a state of shock. I remember being glued to the television as the extent of the horror was revealed. I remember the weeping parents, the shell-shocked survivors, children and teachers.

For many, it seemed that Congress was sure to enact meaningful gun control. Certain to limit access to deadly weapons.

But, not long after the event, the conspiracy theories began to roll out. The vile Alex Jones said that there was no massacre. No one was killed. The parents and students were “crisis actors.” It was all staged to create momentum for gun control. President Obama was in on the hoax. One of this blog’s readers sent me a video created to “prove” that Sandy Hook was a lie. It was shocking and sickening.

Some Newtown parents sued Alex Jones for his lies, which caused them extreme pain and suffering. The parents won their case and were awarded more than $1 billion from Alex Jones. Jones, however, declared bankruptcy and through legal maneuvers has paid little to those he defamed.

Sandy Hook was supposed to be the tragedy that would compel Congress to enact strict control. Needless to say, gun enthusiasts blocked any efforts to strengthen gun control laws. Then, with Trump’s addition to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court decided that guns should not be controlled at all, citing their interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Then there was the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022. Nineteen children and two teachers were murdered by an 18-year-old man with an assault weapon. Nearly 400 law officers from local, state, and federal agencies arrived on the scene, where they crowded the hallways and did nothing. They waited 77 minutes before confronting and killing the gunman.

Gun advocates would have you believe that gun control has never happened and can never happen. That’s not true.

During the Clinton administration, Congress passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban in 1994. The law, called the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, had a 10-year sunset clause for the ban on assault weapons. It expired in September 2004, during the George W. Bush administration, and was not renewed.

The current Supreme Court opposes gun control. So here we are.

Peter Greene wrote today:

You can be forgiven for not having noticed that today is the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings, the murder of 26 human beings, 20 of them children. There’s not the usual wave of retrospective stories, perhaps because we’re busy catching up on the latest US campus shooting from the weekend.

It makes me angry, every day. Sandy Hook stands out among all our many various mass murders in this country, all our long parade of school shootings, because Sandy Hook was the moment when it finally became clear that we are not going to do anything about this, ever. “If this is not enough to finally do something,” we thought, “then nothing ever will be.”

And it wasn’t.

“No way to prevent this,” says only Nation Where This Regularly Happens is the most bitter, repeated headline The Onion has ever published. We’re just “helpless.”

Today was the 13th anniversary of the shooting that established that we aren’t going to do a damned thing about it, other than blaming the targets for not being hard enough. Need more security. Arm the (marxist untrustworthy) teachers. And somehow Alex Jones and Infowars have not been sued severely enough for them to STFU.

One thing that has happened over the past several years is a huge wave of folks expressing their deep concern about the children.

A whole industry of political activism has been cultivated around the notion that children– our poor, fragile children– must be protected. They must be protected from books that show that LGBTQ persons exist. They must be protected from any sort of reference to sexual action at all. They must be protected from any form of guilt-inducing critical race theory. They must be protected from unpatriotic references to America’s past sins. And central to all this, they must be protected from anyone who might challenge their parents’ complete control over their education and lives.

Well, unless that person is challenging the parents’ rights by shooting a gun at the child.

The Second Amendment issue is the issue that combines so poorly with other issues. We may be pro-life and insist that it be illegal to end a fetus– but if the fetus becomes an outside-the-womb human that gets shot at with a gun, well, nothing we can do about that. Students should be free to choose whatever school they like–but at any of those schools, people still have the right to shoot at them with a gun. We must protect children from all sorts of evil influences–but if someone wants to shoot a gun at them, well, you know, nothing we can do about that.

The other ugly development has been the ever-growing school security industry, peddling an ever-growing array of products that serve no educational purpose but are supposed to make schools safe, harden the target. Lots of surveillance. Lots of stupid mistakes, like the Florida AI reading a clarinet as a weapon. Lots of security layers that now make entering a school building much like entering a prison. It is what NPR correctly called the “school shooting industry,” and it is worth billions.

That’s not counting the boost that gunmakers get after every school shooting. The panic alarm goes off and the weapons industry sells a ton more product as the usual folks holler, “They’ll use this as an excuse to take your guns” even though in the 26 years since Columbine, the government hasn’t done either jack or shit about taking anybody’s guns. I expect that part of that sales bump is also from folks saying, “Now that I’m reminded that the government isn’t going to do anything about keeping guns out of the hands of homicidal idiots, I guess I’d better arm myself.”

Miles of letters have been strung together to unravel the mystery of why this country so loves its guns and why none of the factors used as distraction (mental health, video games, bad tv shows) could possibly explain the prevalence of gun deaths in this country because every other country in the world has the same thing without having our level of gun violence.

We are great at Not facing Problems in this country, and there is no problem we are better at Not facing than gun deaths. Hell, we can’t even agree it’s an actual problem. The “right” to personally possess the capability to kill other human beings is revered, and more beloved than the lives of actual human children.

And if some of our fellow citizens and leaders are unwilling to make a serious effort to reduce gun violence and these folks insist that the occasional dead child is just the cost of liberty (particularly the liberty to conduct profitable business), well, how can we expect them to take seriously other aspects of young humans’ lives, like quality education and health care.

It is a hard thing to know, every day, that we could do better, and we aren’t going to. We have already taken a long hard look at this issue, and we have decided that we are okay with another Sandy Hook or Uvalde. A little security theater, a little profiteering on tech, a few thoughts and prayers just to indicate that we aren’t actually happy that some young humans were shot dead (talk about virtue signaling), and that pivot quickly to defending guns. Send letters, make phone calls, get the usual platitudes back from elected representatives, who will never, ever pay an election price for being on the wrong side of rational gun regulation.

The whole dance is so familiar and well-rehearsed that we barely have to pay attention any more. It’s exhausted and exhausting, and yet I am still angry.

Categories Evil, Extremism, Guns, History

Andy Borowitz: The Story that Mainstream Media Won’t Touch–About “Katie Johnson”

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2025 //
3

Stories have circulated for years about a young woman who claimed that Trump raped her when she was 13. After the case was filed, the young woman–who used the pseudonym “Katie Johnson”–withdrew the charges and was never heard from again.

There are two possibilities:

  1. The story was withdrawn because it was fraudulent.
  2. The complainant was offered money to shut up or was threatened with violence if she didn’t shut up.

Now Andy Borowitz revives the story in a podcast with a philosophy professor at Cornell University who was determined to find out what happened. He interviewed her on a podcast.

Andy Borowitz wrote:

Davidoff Studios/Getty Images

(Warning: This post contains upsetting content.)

Last week on my podcast, I interviewed the writer Kate Manne about the disturbing case of Katie Johnson.

Although Johnson’s accusations have never been adjudicated, her account is extremely detailed and, in my opinion, credible.

I interviewed Manne about this case because she has spent a significant amount of time researching it. She also created a transcript of Johnson’s testimony, something that corporate media, which have largely ignored the story, have never done.

After the podcast episode went live, I received many requests from paid subscribers asking me to remove its paywall so that the story of Katie Johnson could reach a larger audience. I have done so, and you can now access it for free here. 

In video testimony recorded in 2016, the pseudonymous Johnson alleged that she was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and raped by Donald Trump when she was thirteen. 

It is, as I’ve warned, an extremely upsetting story, but I think it’s important that people know about it. Please consider watching it and sharing it. And thanks, as always, for your support.

What do you think?

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Evil, Trump

The Trump-Putin “Peace Plan” Spells Surrender for Ukraine

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2025 //
13

Make no mistake. Trump is Putin’s ally. Putting Trump in charge of negotiations to end the war in Ukraine is akin to putting the fox in charge of guarding the henhouse. On more than one occasion, Trump has sent his emissaries to devise a “peace plan” without asking Ukraine or the representatives of Europe to participate in the discussions.

Trump campaigned by claiming that he could end the war in a single day. All that was required would be a phone call to his good friend Putin.

That hasn’t happened, but Trump continues to threaten to cut off all aid to Ukraine unless Zelensky capitulates to Putin’s demands. These demands would give Putin everything he wants.

Max Boot spelled out the situation in The Washington Post:

Russia’s barbaric assault on Ukraine continues: A single Russian drone and missile strike on an apartment block in western Ukraine last week killed at least 31 civilians. Meanwhile, Russia is ramping up its campaign of sabotage in Europe: Polish authorities blamed the Kremlin for a Nov. 15 explosion on a rail line used to transport supplies to Ukraine. As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said recently, Europe “is not at war” but it is also “no longer at peace” with Russia.

The growing threat from Vladimir Putin’s despotic, expansionist regime calls for Churchillian resolution, unity and strength on the part of the transatlantic alliance. Instead, Neville Chamberlain-style irresolution and confusion reigns on both sides of the Atlantic. The situation is far more concerning in the United States than in Europe, with the Trump administration having seemingly endorsed, at least for now, a “peace plan” that would give Russia a victory at the negotiating table that it hasn’t earned on the battlefield.

The Europeans have stepped up, providing weapons and funding to Ukraine as U.S. support has dried up. The European Union has a plan to do even more by sending Kyiv some $200 billionin frozen Russian assets as a “loan” that would likely never be repaid. Obviously, given the current corruption scandal in Kyiv, safeguards on the disbursement of the money would be needed. But this is a vital — indeed, irreplaceable — source of funding that can keep Ukraine afloat for years. Yet tiny Belgium, where most of the funds are frozen, is wringing its hands and holding up the plan. There is no Plan B: Europe has to send the Russian funds or else Ukraine will run out of money. So why dither and delay?

As for the peace plan floated by the White House last week: The 28-point plan amounts to a holiday wish list from the Kremlin. It would require Ukraine to cede the entire Donbas region — even the parts that Russian troops have been unable to conquer — and to cut the size of its armed forces by roughly a third. Ukraine would not be allowed to join NATO, and NATO would not be allowed to dispatch peacekeeping troops to Ukraine. Ukraine would hold elections within 100 days and “all Nazi ideology” would be “prohibited”; this is Kremlin code for toppling the Zelensky government. Russia isn’t being asked to limit the size of its armed forces or to hold elections; all the demands are on Ukraine.

What does Ukraine get in return? A separate draft agreement specifies that in the event of renewed Russian aggression, the United States could respond with “armed force, intelligence and logistical assistance, economic and diplomatic actions.” But the U.S. wouldn’t be compelled to do anything. Ukraine would be left to rely on a worthless Russian pledge of “nonaggression” — something it already promised in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

This isn’t a peace plan. It’s a blueprint for Ukraine’s capitulation. If implemented, it would turn this pro-Western, democratic nation, which has been courageously resisting Russian aggression since 2014, into a Kremlin colony….

In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman was scathing in his view of the Trump-Putin “peace plan.”

He predicted that Trump would not get the Nobel Peace Prize, which he covets, but would certainly win the ““Neville Chamberlain Peace Prize” — awarded by history to the leader of the country that most flagrantly sells out its allies and its values to an aggressive dictator.”

He wrote:

This prize richly deserves to be shared by Trump’s many “secretaries of state” — Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio and Dan Driscoll — who together negotiated the surrender of Ukraine to Vladimir Putin’s demands without consulting Ukraine or our European allies in advance — and then told Ukraine it had to accept the plan by Thanksgiving…

If Ukraine is, indeed, forced to surrender to the specific terms of this “deal” by then, Thanksgiving will no longer be an American holiday. It will become a Russian holiday. It will become a day of thanks that victory in Putin’s savage and misbegotten war against Ukraine’s people, which has been an utter failure — morally, militarily, diplomatically and economically — was delivered to Russia not by the superiority of its arms or the virtue of its claims, but by an American administration…

He was the British prime minister who advocated the policy of appeasement, which aimed to avoid war with Adolf Hitler’s Germany by giving in to his demands. This was concretized in the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which Chamberlain, along with others in Europe, allowed Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain boasted it would secure “peace for our time.” A year later, Poland was invaded, starting World War II and leading to Chamberlain’s resignation — and his everlasting shame.

To all the gentlemen who delivered this turkey to Moscow, I can offer only one piece of advice: Be under no illusions. Neither Fox News nor the White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt will be writing the history of this deal. If you force it upon Ukraine as it is, every one of your names will live in infamy alongside that of Chamberlain, who is remembered today for only one thing:

This Trump plan, if implemented, will do the modern equivalent. By rewarding Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine based on his obsession with making it part of Mother Russia, the U.S. will be putting the whole European Union under Putin’s thumb. Trump’s message to our allies will be clear: Don’t provoke Putin, because as long as I am commander in chief, the United States will pay no price and we will bear no burden in the defense of your freedom.

Which is why, if this plan is forced on Ukraine as is, we will need to add a new verb to the diplomatic lexicon: “Trumped” — to be sold out by an American president, for reasons none of his citizens understand (but surely there are reasons). And history will never forget the men who did it — Donald Trump, Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio, Dan Driscoll — for their shame will be everlasting.

As a Wall Street Journal editorial on Friday put it: “Mr. Trump may figure he can finally wash his hands of Ukraine if Europe and Ukraine reject his offer. He’s clearly sick of dealing with the war. But appeasing Mr. Putin would haunt the rest of his presidency. If Mr. Trump thinks American voters hate war, wait until he learns how much they hate dishonor. … A bad deal in Ukraine would broadcast to U.S. enemies that they can seize what they want with force or nuclear blackmail or by pressing on until America loses interest.”

Mind you, I am not at all against a negotiated solution. Indeed, from the beginning of this war I have made the point that it will end only with a “dirty deal.” But it cannot be a filthy deal, and the Trump plan is what history will call a filthy deal.

Even before you get to the key details, think of how absurd it is for Trump to strike a deal with Putin and not even include Ukraine and our European allies in the negotiations until they were virtually done. Trump then declared it must be accepted by Thursday, as if Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who has a parliament that he needs to win acceptance from, could possibly do so by then, even if he wanted to.

As my Times colleague David Sanger observed in his analysis of the plan’s content: “Many of the 28 points in the proposed Russia-Ukraine peace plan offered by the White House read like they had been drafted in the Kremlin. They reflect almost all Mr. Putin’s maximalist demands.”

Ukraine would have to formally give Russia all the territory it has declared for itself in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The United States would recognize that as Russian territory. No NATO forces could be based inside Ukraine to ensure that Russia could never invade again. The Ukrainian military would be capped at 600,000 troops, a 25 percent cut from current levels, and it would be barred from possessing long-range weapons that could reach Russia. Kyiv would receive vague security guarantees from the U.S. against a Russian re-invasion (but who in Ukraine, or Moscow, would trust them coming from Trump?).

Under the Trump plan, $100 billion in frozen Russian assets would be put toward U.S.-led efforts to rebuild and invest in Ukraine, and the U.S. would then receive 50 percent of the profits from that investment. (Yes, we are demanding half of the profits generated by a fund to rebuild a ravaged nation.)

Trump, facing blowback from allies, Congress and Ukraine, said Saturday that this was not his “final offer” but added, if Zelensky refuses to accept the terms, “then he can continue to fight his little heart out.” As always with Trump, he is all over the place — and as always, ready to stick it to Zelensky, the guy fighting for his country’s freedom, and never to Putin, the guy trying to take Ukraine’s freedom away.

What would an acceptable dirty deal look like?

It would freeze the forces in place, but never formally cede any seized Ukrainian territory. It would insist that European security forces, backed by U.S. logistics, be stationed along the cease-fire line as a symbolic tripwire against any Russian re-invasion. It would require Russia to pay a significant amount of money to cover all the carnage it has inflicted on Ukraine — and keep Moscow isolated and under sanctions until it does — and include a commitment by the European Union to admit Ukraine as a member as soon as it is ready, without Russian interference.

This last point is vital. It is so the Russian people would have to forever look at their Ukrainian Slavic brothers and sisters in the thriving European Union, while they are stuck in Putin’s kleptocracy. That contrast is Putin’s best punishment for this war and the thing that would cause him the most trouble after it is over.

This would be a dirty deal that history would praise Trump for — getting the best out of a less than perfect hand, by using U.S. leverage on both sides, as he did in Gaza.

But just using U.S. leverage on Ukraine is a filthy deal — folding our imperfect hand to a Russian leader who is playing a terrible one.

There is a term for that in poker: sucker.

James Traub wrote anoter excellent analysis of Trump’s “peace plan.” It would be worth your while to open the link and read in full.

He concludes:

My first reaction on reading the Trump Administration’s 28-point peace plan for Ukraine was shame. That’s a different emotion from the anger I feel when Trump does something deplorable at home, like use the Justice Department to terrorize his enemies. When he abandons people elsewhere I feel ashamed of my country before the world.

This latest exercise in coercive diplomacy does not merely give the Russians what they want and deprive the Ukrainians of what they need. What is extra specially Trumpian, and thus shameful, about the proposal is that its second beneficiary is the United States. Point 10 guarantees the United States “compensation” for the completely unspecified security guarantees alluded to in Point 5. From whom? The plan doesn’t say, but presumably the answer is Ukraine, from which Trump demanded a preposterous $500 billion earlier this year in exchange for ongoing support. So we will profiteer off Ukraine’s subjection….

If the United States walks away, we will have vindicated Putin’s belief that in the end nothing matters except force. We will leave Europe to live in fear of an emboldened Russia. We will have washed our hands of a democratic and patriotic nation.

Categories Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International, Trump

Trump Honors Crown Prince Bonesaw

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2025 //
3

We have seen many repulsive sights in the Oval Office since Trump was sworn in last January. The covering of the room in fake gold ornaments is an abomination. Trump’s rude treatment of Zelensky was an outrage.

But the top abomination, at this moment, was his loving embrace of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who should be reviled for his brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

What next? A Presidential Medal of Honor for Putin?

Trump has many personal commercial ties to Saudi Arabia. Cynically speaking, Trump is building alliances by making personal deals with potentates who increase his family wealth. Surely, we cannot forget that MBS arranged to give Son-in-law Jared Kushner $2 billion after Trump left office in 2021. Kushner had no experience in financial investing. His background was real estate. Now, Trump’s real estate buddies Steve Witkoff and Howard Lutnick, are Trump’s envoys to Russia, the Middle East, and other hotspots. They too (and their children) are taking in millions and billions, because they are in “the room where it happens.”

The New York Times wrote recently about how Lutnick’s sons are making lucrative deals , which are helped by the fact that their father is Secretary of Commerce. “But never in modern U.S. history has the office intersected so broadly and deeply with the financial interests of the commerce secretary’s own family, according to interviews with ethics lawyers and historians…”

The New York Times also chronicled the ways that billionaire Steve Witkoff’s sons are cashing in with investments in the Middle East and in cryptocurrency, building on their father’s connection to Trump.

This is not what the Founders intended.

But maybe those of us who worry about abstract ideas like ethics and laws are in the wrong. Maybe the best way to make a deal with the devil is to get in bed with him, speak his language, and buy his friendship. That’s Trump’s way. And nobody does it better.

Sabrina Haake writes:

Trump just threw a lavish state party to welcome a Saudi murderer. He defended the murderer’s crime, blamed the victim, and viciously attacked a reporter for asking the question on everyone’s mind: What about Jamal Khashoggi?

Of all the shameful metaphors for the corruption, ignorance, and rot presently infecting the White House, this one wears the Trump crown.

A brutal regime dismembers its critic

Jamal Khashoggi was a US resident and journalist for the Washington Post during its halcyon years, before it fell to corporate interests that now serve Trump.

Khashoggi was also a frequent critic of the Saudi government. He frequently criticized the royal ruling family, not for their lavish lifestyles, but for their suppression of dissent, their refusal to allow free speech among the Saudi people, and their widespread human rights abuses.

On Oct. 2, 2018, Khashoggi was murdered in Istanbul. He had gone to see about a visa for his Turkish fiancée at the Saudi consulate’s office, where he was attacked, stangled, and dismembered.

A recording made by Turkish intelligence agents in the building captured the whole gruesome ordeal: Khashoggi could be heard struggling against Saudi guards of the royal Crown Prince as his killing was recorded, complete with screams, the sounds of strangulation, then quiet, before a bone saw was heard dismembering his body.

US Intelligence knows bin Salman did it

In 2021, US intelligence reports concluded that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, aka “the Bone Saw Prince,” had personally ordered the operation.

The US Director of National Intelligence supplied reasons supporting that conclusion, including:

· bin Salman’s total control of decision-making in the Saudi Kingdom;

· The direct involvement of bin Salman’s key adviser in the brutal attack, along with members of his personal security team; and

· bin Salman’s stated support for using violence to silence critics of the Saudi government abroad, including Khashoggi.

US intelligence added that, “Since 2017, the Crown Prince has had absolute control of the Kingdom’s security and intelligence organizations, making it highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince’s authorization.”

Despite these publicly available facts, Trump treated bin Salman to an unusually lavish state reception, complete with military officers in full dress carrying both Saudi and American colors. As the US taxpayer-funded Marine band played, Trump and Mr. Bone Saw were treated to a fly-over of advanced fighter jets, samples of the 48 F-35 jets Trump already sold to Saudi Arabia, despite national security concerns that China would be able to steal the aircraft’s advanced technology.

Trump courts a murderer to line his own pockets

Trump’s personal wealth has increased by over $3 billion since his return to office, largely from ethics-adjacent crypto schemes, foreign real estate deals, meme coins that have no value, and overt pay to play transactions. His lavish courtship of bin Salman fits neatly into the same corrupt pattern, promoting Trump’s illegal,private, for-profit interests.

The Trump Organization now has multiple, large-scale projects pending in Saudi Arabia, including a new Trump Tower and a Trump Plaza development in the works in Jeddah, along with two other projects planned in Riyadh. These deals are publicly known; it’s likely billions more are exchanging hands under the table.

Trump is also in private partnership with the Saudi-owned, “International Luxury Real Estate Developer,” Dar Global. There’s also a separate $2 billion deal where an Abu Dhabi-based, UAE-backed investment firm used a cryptocurrency from the Trump family’s venture, World Liberty Financial, to invest in another crypto exchange, profiting Trump royally.

And no one has forgotten Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner’s, $2 billion private “investment” fee from the Saudis, packaged when Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) announced a $55 billion acquisition. Kushner’s fee is widely regarded as payment for providing political cover and guaranteeing Trump’s regulatory protection. After the PIF’s own advisors initially rejected the deal, bin Salman personally overruled them and pushed it through.

Trump didn’t mention these deals this week when he rolled out the red carpet on taxpayers’ dime, but claimed instead with trademark ambiguity that the Saudis were going to “invest as much as $1 trillion in the US.”

Trump endorses the unthinkable

Journalists around the world, not to mention Khashoggi’s family, had to endure the nightmare of watching Trump fawn all over bin Salman. In every photo from the mainstream media, Trump couldn’t keep his hands off him, as if Trump were absorbing Saudi wealth through his fingers.

Tuesday, when journalist Mary Bruce asked bin Salman about intelligence reports concluding that he ordered the Khashoggi murder, Trump jumped in, answering for him. “He knew nothing about it! You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking something like that.”

Trump then suggested Khashoggi got what he had coming for criticizing the government, saying, “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman (Khashoggi) that you’re talking about, whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”

After sending this chilling message to his critics, Trump then attacked Bruce for asking a “horrible,” insubordinate,” and “just a terrible question,” dressing her down in garbled syntax before cameras of the world with, “You’re all psyched up. Somebody psyched you over at ABC and they’re going to psych it. You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter,” and later demanded that ABC lose its broadcast license.

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is condemned throughout the civilized world as a brutal 5th Century pariah. Trump just spent a taxpayer fortune to rebrand him “one of the most respected people in the world” to elevate and promote Trump’s own private business ventures.

It is fitting that Trump committed this atrocity in a formerly dignified room recently desecrated with tacky gold medallions. The Oval Office is now a bordello whose pimp is selling America to the highest bidder, and we, his trafficked victims, are letting him do it.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, International, Trump
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