Archives for category: Trump

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.

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.

Heather Cox Richardson writes today that Trump eagerly overstepped his authority so as to create a crisis in Los Angeles. Local and state authorities responded appropriately to protests against the aggressive actions of ICE. But Trump insisted that there was an insurrection underway, a statement tweeted by his aide Stephen Miller. He took charge of the state National Guard, which was last done in 1958 when President Eisenhower called in the Arkansas National Guard to restore order in Little Rock during white protests against civil rights enforcement.

HRC suggests two reasons for Trump’s eagerness to call in troops in L.A. First, he wants a pretext to send troops anywhere anytime, in effect, to create a police state. Second, he wants to distract attention from his embarrassing breakup with Elon Musk, the chaos caused by his tariffs, and the controversies surrounding his “One Ugly Bill” and its threat to Medicaid.

A third reason is that he seized on the opportunity to humiliate Democratic Governor Newsom.

A fourth reason is that he loves to play the part of a tough guy.

Question: why did he not send in the National Guard to protect the Capitol on January 6, 2021?

She wrote:

Flatbed train cars carrying thousands of tanks rolled into Washington, D.C., yesterday in preparation for the military parade planned for June 14. On the other side of the country, protesters near Los Angeles filmed officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) throwing flash-bang grenades into a crowd of protesters. The two images make a disturbing portrait of the United States of America under the Donald J. Trump regime as Trump tries to use the issue of immigration to establish a police state.

In January 2024, Trump pressured Republican lawmakers to kill a bipartisan immigration measure that would have beefed up border security and funding immigration courts because he wanted to campaign on the issue of immigration. During that campaign, Trump made much of the high immigration numbers in the United States after the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, when the booming U.S. economy attracted migrants. He went so far as to claim that migrants were eating people’s pets.

Many Trump supporters apparently believed officials in a Trump administration would only deport violent criminals, although Trump’s team had made it clear in his first term that they considered anyone who had broken immigration laws a criminal. Crackdowns began as soon as Trump took office, sweeping in individuals who had no criminal records in the U.S. and who were in the U.S. legally. The administration worked to define those individuals as criminals and insisted they had no right to the due process guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

Anna Giaritelli of the Washington Examiner reported that at a meeting in late May, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who appears to be leading the administration’s immigration efforts, “eviscerated” federal immigration officials for numbers of deportations and renditions that, at around 600 people per day, he considered far too low. “Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested,” one of the officials at the meeting told Giaritelli. “‘‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” Miller said.

After the meeting, Miller told Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity that the administration wanted “a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day, and President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every single day.” Thomas Homan, Trump’s border czar, took the message to heart. “You’re going to see more work site enforcement than you’ve ever seen in the history of this nation,” he told reporters. “We’re going to flood the zone.”

According to a recent report by Goldman Sachs, undocumented immigrants made up more than 4% of the nation’s workforce in 2023 and are concentrated in landscaping, farm work, and construction work. Sweeps of workplaces where immigrants are concentrated are an easy way to meet quotas.

The Trump regime apparently decided to demonstrate its power in Los Angeles, where over the course of the past week, hundreds of undocumented immigrants who went to scheduled check-in appointments with ICE were taken into custody—sometimes with their families—and held in the basement of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in downtown L.A.

This was the backdrop when on Friday, June 7, federal officials launched a new phase of the regime’s crackdown on immigration, focusing on L.A. workplaces. Agents in tactical gear sweeping through the city’s garment district met protesters who chanted and threw eggs; agents pepper sprayed the protesters and shot at them with what are known as “less-lethal projectiles” or “non-lethal bullets” because they are made of rubber or plastic. Protesters also gathered around the federal detention center, demanding the release of their relatives; officers in riot gear dispersed the crowd with tear gas.

Officers arrested more than 40 people, including David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union California (SEIU), for impeding a federal officer while protesting. Huerta’s arrest turned union members out to stand against ICE.

At 10:33 a.m. yesterday morning eastern time—so, before anything was going on in Los Angeles—Miller reposted a clip of protesters surrounding the federal detention center in Los Angeles and wrote that these protesters constituted “[a]n insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.” Miller has appeared eager to invoke the Insurrection Act to use the military against Americans.

On Saturday, in the predominantly Latino city of Paramount about 20 miles south of L.A., Rachel Uranga and Ruben Vives of the Los Angeles Times reported that people spotted a caravan of border patrol agents across the street from the Home Depot. Word spread on social media, and protesters arrived to show that ICE’s arrest of families was not welcome. As about a hundred protesters arrived, the Home Depot closed.

Over the course of the afternoon, protesters shouted at the federal agents, who formed a line and shot tear gas or rounds of flash-bang grenades if anyone threw anything at them or approached them. L.A. County sheriff’s deputies arrived to block off a perimeter, and the border agents departed shortly after, leaving the protesters and the sheriff’s deputies, who shot flash-bang grenades at the crowd. The struggle between the deputies and about 100 protesters continued until midnight.

Almost four million people live in Los Angeles, with more than 12 million in the greater L.A. area, making the protests relatively small. Nonetheless, on Saturday evening, Trump signed an order saying that “[t]o the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” Based on that weak finding, he called out at least 2,000 members of the California National Guard to protect ICE and other government personnel, activating a state’s National Guard without a request from its governor for the first time in 50 years.

At 8:25 p.m., his social media account posted: “If Governor Gavin Newscum, of California, and Mayor Karen Bass, of Los Angeles, can’t do their jobs, which everyone knows they can’t, then the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!”

California’s governor Gavin Newsom said Trump’s plan was “purposefully inflammatory.” “LA authorities are able to access law enforcement assistance at a moment’s notice,” Newsom said. “We are in close coordination with the city and county, and there is currently no unmet need. The Guard has been admirably serving LA throughout recovery. This is the wrong mission and will erode public trust.” Newsom said the administration is trying “not to meet an unmet need, but to manufacture a crisis.”

Trump apparently was not too terribly concerned about the “rebellion”; he was at the UFC fight in Newark, New Jersey, by 10:00 p.m.

At 10:06 p.m., Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is under investigation over his involvement with a Signal chat that inappropriately included classified information, posted: “The violent mob assaults on ICE and Federal Law Enforcement are designed to prevent the removal of Criminal Illegal Aliens from our soil; a dangerous invasion facilitated by criminal cartels (aka Foreign Terrorist Organizations) and a huge NATIONAL SECURITY RISK.” He added that the Defense Department was mobilizing the National Guard and that “if violence continues, active duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized—they are on high alert.”

At 2:41 a.m., Trump’s social media account posted: “Great job by the National Guard in Los Angeles after two days of violence, clashes and unrest. We have an incompetent Governor (Newscum) and Mayor (Bass) who were, as usual…unable to to handle the task. These Radical Left protests, by instigators and often paid troublemakers, will NOT BE TOLERATED…. Again, thank you to the National Guard for a job well done!”

Just an hour later, at 3:22 a.m., Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass posted: “I want to thank LAPD and local law enforcement for their work tonight. I also want to thank [Governor Gavin Newsom] for his support. Just to be clear, the National Guard has not been deployed in the City of Los Angeles.”

National Guard troops arrived in L.A. today, but James Queally, Nathan Solis, Salvador Hernandez, and Hannah Fry of the Los Angeles Times reported that the city’s garment district and Paramount were calm and that incidents of rock throwing were isolated. Law enforcement officers met those incidents with tear gas and less-lethal rounds.

Today, when reporters asked if he planned to send troops to L.A., Trump answered: “We’re gonna have troops everywhere. We’re not going to let this happen to our country. We’re not going to let our country be torn apart like it was under Biden.” Trump appeared to be referring to the divisions during the Biden administration caused by Trump and his loyalists, who falsely claimed that Biden had stolen the 2020 presidential election. (In the defamation trial happening right now in Colorado over those allegations, MyPillow chief executive officer Mike Lindell, who was a fierce advocate of Trump’s lie, will not present evidence that the election was rigged, his lawyers say. They added: “it’s just words. All Mike Lindell did was talk. Mike believed that he was telling the truth.”)

At 5:06 p.m. this evening, Trump’s social media account posted: “A once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals. Now violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations—But these lawless riots only strengthen our resolve. I am directing Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Attorney General Pam Bondi, in coordination with all other relevant Departments and Agencies, to take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots. Order will be restored, the Illegals will be expelled, and Los Angeles will be set free.” He followed this statement with that odd closing he has been using lately: “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal answered: “Hello. I live in Los Angeles. The president is lying.”

At 6:27, Governor Newsom posted that he has “formally requested the Trump Administration rescind their unlawful deployment of troops in Los Angeles county and return them to my command. We didn’t have a problem until Trump got involved. This is a serious breach of state sovereignty—inflaming tensions while pulling resources from where they’re actually needed. Rescind the order. Return control to California.” The Democratic governors issued a statement standing with Newsom and calling Trump’s order “ineffective and dangerous.”

At 10:03, Trump posted: Governor Gavin Newscum and “Mayor” Bass should apologize to the people of Los Angeles for the absolutely horrible job that they have done, and this now includes the ongoing L.A. riots. These are not protesters, they are troublemakers and insurrectionists. Remember, NO MASKS!” Four minutes later, he posted: “Paid Insurrectionists!”

There is real weakness behind the regime’s power grab. Trump’s very public blowup with billionaire Elon Musk last week has opened up criticism of the Department of Government Efficiency that Musk controlled. In his fury, Musk suggested to Trump’s loyal followers that the reason the Epstein files detailing sexual assault of children haven’t been released is that Trump is implicated in them. Trump’s promised trade deals have not materialized, and indicators show his policies are hurting the economy.

And the Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is raising significant opposition. Today Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) complained about the excessive spending in the bill for ICE, prompting Stephen Miller to complain on social media and to claim that “each deportation saves taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.” But David J. Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute on Friday estimated that the deportation plans in the measure would add almost $1 trillion in costs.

There is no doubt that as their other initiatives have stalled and popular opinion is turning against the administration on every issue, the Trump regime is trying to establish a police state. But in making Los Angeles their flashpoint, they chose a poor place to demonstrate dominance. Unlike a smaller, Republican-dominated city whose people might side with the administration, Los Angeles is a huge, multicultural city that the federal government does not have the personnel to subdue.

Trump stumbled as he climbed the stairs to Air Force One tonight.

Trump is determined to defund NPR and PBS. He claims they are radical, far-left media outlets. The federal funding these media receive is funneled through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In his effort to control CPB, Trump told three members of the board of CPB that they were fired. Trump intends to control every outlet of public information, either by threatening their funding or (if private) suing to intimidate them. This is fascism.

The CPB board sued and said that it was created by Congress to be independent of political direction.

A federal district judge in DC, appointed by Obama, issued a decision that caused both sides to claim victory. The decision said that the board members would not suffer irreparable harm if removed, but that CPB is an independent agency. The judge declined to block the firings but CPB treated the ruling as a victory for its independence.

Brian Stelter of CNN described the decision:

Yesterday a federal judge declined to immediately intervene in Trump’s attempt to remove three Corporation for Public Broadcasting board members, “ruling the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate a strong likelihood the firings were unlawful or that they would suffer irreparable harm,” The Hill’s Sarah Fortinsky reports.

“But CPB officials celebrated the ruling as a win, pointing to part of the ruling that acknowledges that ‘Congress intended to preclude the President (or any subordinate officials acting at his direction) from directing, supervising, or controlling the Corporation.'” The entity’s statement on the matter is titled “Court Recognizes CPB’s Independence.”

The bottom line: CPB is keeping its board members in place and continuing to fight. 

In his epic battle to punish the nation’s most prestigious university, Trump claimed that Harvard is teaching remedial math. That was his way of saying that its standards of admission are very low because Harvard wants to recruit unqualified nonwhite students.

Trump has refused to release his own academic record but his public statements indicate that he is in no position to tell Harvard whom to admit or what to teach.

Only 3.6% of the students who applied to Harvard last year were admitted.

The Boston Globe took a close look at the course that Trump–the stable genius–calls “remedial.”

A star student at her small Alabama high school, Kyra Richardson graduated confident in her academic prowess in all but one subject: math.

By the time she arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2024, it had been more than 12 months since Richardson‘s last math class. Even though she passed a college-level AP calculus course as a high school junior, Richardson said it felt more like she was memorizing formulas than truly understanding the concepts behind calculus.

So when it came time for her to begin fulfilling the math requirement associated with Harvard’s pre-medical track, the university recommended (and Richardson agreed) she should take an intro-level calculus course called Math MA.

Even with her previous calculus experience, she said, the Harvard course was far from an easy A. “I’m glad that I took a class that pushed me,” Richardson said.

In recent months, amid the White House’s ongoing battle with Harvard, the Trump administration has used that class to questionthe university’s academic rigor. In what has become a familiar refrain, Education Secretary Linda McMahonJosh Gruenbaum, a top US General Services Administration official, and President Trump himself have all labeled a modified version of the calculus course Richardson completed — known as MA5 — “remedial math.” 

“I want Harvard to be great again,” Trump said in the Oval Office last month. “Harvard announced two weeks ago that they’re going to teach remedial mathematics. Remedial, meaning they’re going to teach low grade mathematics like two plus two is four. How did these people get into Harvard if they can’t do basic mathematics?”

Richardson said she laughed when she heard the remedial math comment because “MA5 is the exact same class [as MA]. It just meets five times a week” as opposed to four. 

According to an online course description of MA5, the extra day of instruction time “will target foundational skills in algebra, geometry, and quantitative reasoning that will help you unlock success in Math MA.” The homework, exams, and grading structure of MA5 are the same as MA, a course Harvard has offered for decades. Even MA5’s format is not entirely new. Five days of instruction was previously required for all students taking Math MA in 2018.

“If you look at academic support and a college trying to help their students, and you think that’s unnecessary or it’s embarrassing that they have to provide that kind of support, then it’s coming from a place of ignorance,” said Richardson. “You have no understanding of how, not just college, but how learning works. You can’t learn without help.”

All Harvard freshmen take a placement exam in mathematics prior to their arrival on campus. Based on how they score, the university suggests which course they should be placed into. Math MA5, MA, and its companion course, MB, make up Harvard’s most basic introductory calculus courses known as the M series. MA5 was introduced last year by Harvard to combat pandemic learning losses, which saw students show up to campus with gaps in their math knowledge, especially in early high school courses like algebra, as a result of virtual learning. 

“When this first came out about us teaching remedial math, I was like, ‘Well, this is news to me and I wouldn’t even know how to do it,’” said Harvard’s director of introductory math Brendan Kelly. “Thinking about how to explain addition to somebody is an expertise that your elementary school teachers and middle school teachers have. … We focus on much more advanced mathematics.”

Only 20 students took MA5 this past academic year according to Kelly. The course was taught across two sections, each with 10 students, Kelly said, all of whom have declared majors like economics or biology that necessitate a strong foundation in calculus…

Remedial math courses in higher education are typically defined as “non credit bearing courses that cover middle school and high school content below that of college algebra,” said Chris Rasmussen, a professor of mathematics at San Diego State University. “So we’re talking fractions or some basic algebraic manipulation.” Rasmussen — who was part of a team of outside professors that recently conducted a full review of Harvard’s math department — said “in no way is MA5 a remedial math course. It’s a rigorous calculus course.”

The article includes a PDF with the course syllabus. How many members of Congress could pass it? Not many. Certainly not Trump or Secretary McMahon.

Trump got very angry at the AP, an international press agency, because it insisted on calling the Gulf of Mexico by its rightful name. It refused to follow Trump’s renaming it as “the Gulf of America.”

So Trump punished the AP by excluding it from the press pool on Air Force 1 and in other gatherings.

A three-judge panel voted 2-1 to allow Trump to continue choosing which press gets access to him. Two of the judges were appointed by Trump.

Peter Baker, a national correspondent for The New York Times wrote on Twitter:

Appeals court rules that the president can punish a news outlet based on the content of its coverage by denying it access that it has had for generations. If the decision stands, it represents a major blow to press freedom. @ZJMontague @minhokimdh

The consequences of this go beyond Trump barring the @AP from the White House press pool. By this logic, a future Democratic president will be able to bar conservative media outlets that want to ask about, say, his advancing age or his son’s business activities.

Replies to his comments criticized the media for not boycotting Trump events in solidarity with AP.

The New York Times reported:

A federal appeals court on Friday paused a lower court’s ruling that had required the White House to allow journalists from The Associated Press to participate in covering President Trump’s daily events and travel alongside their peers from other major news outlets.

By a 2-to-1 vote, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that many of the spaces in the White House complex or on Air Force One where members of the press have followed the president for decades are essentially invite-only, and not covered by First Amendment protections.

“The White House therefore retains discretion to determine, including on the basis of viewpoint, which journalists will be admitted,” wrote Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee. She was joined by Judge Gregory G. Katsas, who was also appointed by Mr. Trump.

The ruling temporarily lifted the requirement that the White House give A.P. journalists the same access as other news media professionals while the appeal continues. But it was clouded by the fact that the situation facing The Associated Press has shifted considerably since the legal standoff began in February.

Heather Cox Richardson is a historian so naturally she recoils at the daily misuse and distortion of history by Trump and his appointees. They don’t know much about history, and they want to distort it for partisan purposes.

She has a plan to set the record straight, based on evidence and facts. Read on.

She writes:

In April, John Phelan, the U.S. Secretary of the Navy under President Donald J. Trump, posted that he visited the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial “to pay my respects to the service members and civilians we lost at Pearl Harbor on the fateful day of June 7, 1941.”

The Secretary of the Navy is the civilian head of the U.S. Navy, overseeing the readiness and well-being of almost one million Navy personnel. Phelan never served in the military; he was nominated for his post because he was a large donor to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. He told the Senate his experience overseeing and running large companies made him an ideal candidate for leading the Navy.

The U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, is famous in U.S. history as the site of a surprise attack by 353 Japanese aircraft that destroyed or damaged more than 300 aircraft, three destroyers, and all eight of the U.S. battleships in the harbor. Four of those battleships sank, including the U.S.S. Arizona, which remains at the bottom of the harbor as a memorial to the more than 2,400 people who died in the attack, including the 1,177 who died on the Arizona itself.

The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States entered World War II.

Pearl Harbor Day is a landmark in U.S. history. It is observed annually and known by the name President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it: “a date which will live in infamy.”

But that date was not June 7, eighty-four years ago today.

It was December 7, 1941.

The Trump administration claims to be deeply concerned about American history. In March, Trump issued an executive order calling for “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” It complained, as Trump did in his first term, that there has been “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

The document ordered the secretary of the interior to reinstate any “monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties” that had been “removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.” It spelled out that the administration wanted only “solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”

To that end, Trump has called for building 250 statues in a $34 million “National Garden of American Heroes” sculpture garden in order to create an “abiding love of country and lasting patriotism” in time for the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4, 2026. On May 31, Michael Schaffer of Politico reported that artists and curators say the plan is “completely unworkable.” U.S. sculptors tend to work in abstraction or modernism, which the call for proposals forbids in favor of realism; moreover, there aren’t enough U.S. foundries to do the work that quickly.

Trump is using false history to make his followers believe they are fighting a war for the soul of America. “[W]e will never cave to the left wing and the left-wing intolerance,” he told a crowd in 2020. “They hate our history, they hate our values, and they hate everything we prize as Americans,” he said. Like authoritarians before him, Trump promised to return the country to divinely inspired rules that would create disaster if ignored but if followed would “make America great again.” At a 2020 rally, Trump said: “The left-wing mob is trying to demolish our heritage, so they can replace it with a new oppressive regime that they alone control. This is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country.”

Trump’s enthusiasm for using history to cement his power has little to do with actual history. History is the study of how and why societies change. To understand that change, historians use evidence—letters, newspapers, photographs, songs, art, objects, records, and so on—to figure out what levers moved society. In that study, accuracy is crucial. You cannot understand what creates change in a society unless you look carefully at all the evidence. An inaccurate picture will produce a poor understanding of what creates change, and people who absorb that understanding will make poor decisions about their future.

Those who cannot remember the past accurately are condemned to repeat its worst moments.

The hard lessons of history seem to be repeating themselves in the U.S. these days, and with the nation’s 250th anniversary approaching, some friends and I got to talking about how we could make our real history more accessible.

After a lot of brainstorming and a lot of help—and an incredibly well timed message from a former student who has become a videographer—we have come up with Journey to American Democracy: a series of short videos about American history that we will release on my YouTube channel, Facebook, and Instagram. They will be either short explainers about something in the news or what we are releasing tonight: a set of videos that can be viewed individually or can be watched together to simulate a survey course about an important event or issue in American history.

Journey to American Democracy explores how democracy has always required blood and sweat and inspiration to overcome the efforts of those who would deny equality to their neighbors. It examines how, for more than two centuries, ordinary people have worked to make the principles the founders articulated in the Declaration of Independence the law of the land.

Those principles establish that we have a right to be treated equally before the law, to have a say in our government, and to have equal access to resources.

In late April, in an interview with Terry Moran of ABC News, Trump showed Moran that he had had a copy of the Declaration of Independence hung in the Oval Office. The interview had been thorny, and Moran used Trump’s calling attention to the Declaration to ask a softball question. He asked Trump what the document that he had gone out of his way to hang in the Oval Office meant to him.

Trump answered: “Well, it means exactly what it says, it’s a declaration. A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.”

The Declaration of Independence is indeed very special to our country. But it is not a declaration of love and unity. It is the radical declaration of Americans that human beings have the right to throw off a king in order to govern themselves. That story is here, in the first video series of Journey to American Democracy called “Ten Steps to Revolution.”

I hope you enjoy it.

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Tim O’Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion News. He writes here about why it is dangerous to call Trump “TACO Trump,” a moniker given to him by Robert Armstrong of the Financial Times.

TACO means “Trump Always Chickens Out.” It refers to his brash statements about draconian tariffs, followed by his usual backing down and deferring them. It happened on “Liberation Day,” April 2, it happened with his shakedown of Canada and Mexico, then his latest occurred when he announced 50% tariffs on the EU and the very next day, postponed them until July 9.

O’Brien writes about Trump’s huge and fragile ego. Although he evaded the draft when he was draft-eligible, he needs to be perceived as strong, tough, fearless, and fierce. A super-hero. A warrior. A man with nerves of steel.

O’Brien has a long history with Trump. In 2006, he wrote a book about Trump called TrumpNation. In the book, he said that Trump was not a billionaire, that he was worth only $150-200 million. Trump sued him for $10 billion for defamation. The suit was tossed out in 2009.

Being called “chicken” makes Trump very angry, O’Brien says.

“That’s a nasty question,” he told a reporter who asked about the TACO moniker at a White House press briefing on Wednesday. “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question. … To me, that’s the nastiest question.”

Trump, who fashions himself a brilliant dealmaker and strategist despite ample evidence to the contrary, is, of course, always going to bristle at the notion that he is a chicken — and a predictable one at that. He also routinely peddles himself as an infallible winner, so the nastiest question is also one that speculates about whether he’s mired in a losing streak. His tariff policy, unleashed on allies and competitors alike, has been rolled out on a seesaw and riddled with economically damaging ineptitude.

O’Brien says we must prepare for a Trumpian show of force. He must show the world that he is no chicken. Not Putin’s puppet! Not a chicken! Tough! Strong! Never chicken!

Glenn Kessler is a professional fact-checker for The Washington Post. He recently reviewed a controversy about the consequences of the Trump administration’s shutdown of USAID. Democrats said that people have died because of the cuts; Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not agree. Kessler reviews the record.

He writes:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “No one has died because of USAID —”
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California): “The people who have died …”
Rubio: “That’s a lie.”

— exchange at a congressional hearing, May 21


“That question about people dying around the world is an unfair one.”
— Rubio, at another congressional hearing later that day


When Rubio testified last week about the State Department budget, Sherman confronted him about numerous anecdotal accounts of people around the world dying because the Trump administration, at the direction of billionaire Elon Musk, dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and shut down many of its programs.


Sherman used his time mainly to pontificate, and Rubio’s attention must have wandered. He asked Sherman to repeat the question after Sherman said: “We next focus on USAID. Musk gutted it. He said no one died as a result. Do you agree no one had died yet as a result of the chainsawing of USAID? Yes or no.”


Sherman repeated: “Has anyone died in the world because of what Elon Musk did?”


Rubio stumbled a response — “Uh, listen” — and Sherman cut him off. “Yes or no?” he said. “Reclaiming my time. If you won’t answer, that’s a loud answer.”


That’s when Rubio said it was “a lie.” As Sherman’s staff held up photos of people alleged to have died because they stopped receiving services from USAID programs, Rubio denounced the claim as “false.”


Later in the day, at another hearing, Rep. Grace Meng (D-New York) gave Rubio an opportunity to clean up his statement. “Do you stand behind that testimony?” she asked. “And has there been any assessment conducted by the department to this point of how many people have died?”

Rubio said it was “an unfair question.” He tried to reframe the question, arguing that other countries such as Britain and France also have cut back on humanitarian spending, while China has never contributed much.


“The United States is the largest humanitarian provider on the planet,” he said. “I would argue: How many people die because China hasn’t done it? How many people have died because the U.K. has cut back on spending and so has other countries?”


There’s a lot to unpack there.


The facts


At least until the Trump administration, the United States was the largest provider of humanitarian aid in the world — in raw dollars. In the 2023 fiscal year, the most recent with complete data, USAID’s budget was about $42 billion, while the State Department disbursed about $19 billion in additional aid, and other agencies (such as the Treasury Department) did, as well. Now USAID is all but gone, folded into the State Department. Nonetheless, when the dust settles, the United States might still be the biggest aid donor — again, in raw dollars.


When measured as a percentage of a country’s economy, even before the Trump administration, the U.S. was far behind nations such as Britain, Norway, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. The United Nations has set a target of contributing 0.7 percent of gross national income in development aid; the U.S. clocks in with less than 0.2 percent, near the bottom of the list of major democracies, according to a 2020 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Most economists would say that a percentage of a nation’s economy is a more accurate way to measure the generosity of a country.

Rubio is correct that Britain and France have cut back, and that China has not been much of a foreign-aid donor. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, for instance, said he would pay for increased defense spending by cutting the foreign-aid budget from roughly 0.5 percent of gross national income to 0.3 percent. (That is still higher than the U.S. share before President Donald Trump began his second term.) China’s aid budget is a bit opaque — numbers have not been published since 2018 — but it appears to be an average of just over $3 billion a year, according to the Brookings Institution.


But when it comes to whether people have died as a result of the Trump administration’s cuts, we have to look at how the cuts unfolded. Starmer announced his plans in a pending budget proposal. Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 imposing a 90-day freeze on all U.S. foreign aid — and then Musk forced out thousands of employees who worked at USAID, helping to manage and distribute funds. The resulting chaos was devastating, according to numerous news reports.


Sherman’s staff held up a photo of Pe Kha Lau, 71, a refugee from Myanmar with lung problems. On Feb. 7, Reuters quoted her family as saying she died “after she was discharged from a U.S.-funded hospital on the Myanmar-Thai border that was ordered to close” as a result of Trump’s executive order. The International Rescue Committee said it shut down and locked hospitals in several refugee camps in late January after receiving a “stop-work” order from the State Department.


Another photo held up as Rubio said the death claims were false was of 5-year-old Evan Anzoo. He was featured in a March article by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof titled: “Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True.” Kristof focused on South Sudan and the impact that a suspension of HIV drugs — under a George W. Bush program called PEPFAR — had on the poor country ravaged by civil conflict. PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, is regarded as a singular success, saving an estimated 26 million lives since it was created in 2003. Kristof focused on individual stories of people who died after they lost access to medicines because of Trump’s order.

“Another household kept alive by American aid was that of Jennifer Inyaa, a 35-year-old single mom, and her 5-year-old son, Evan Anzoo, both of them H.I.V.-positive,” Kristof wrote. “Last month, after the aid shutdown, Inyaa became sick and died, and a week later Evan died as well, according to David Iraa Simon, a community health worker who assisted them. Decisions by billionaires in Washington quickly cost the lives of a mother and her son.”


Anecdotal reports can go only so far. It’s clear that people are dying because U.S. aid was suspended and then reduced. But it’s difficult to come up with a precise death toll that can be tied directly to Trump administration policies. The death certificates, after all, aren’t marked “Due to lack of funding by U.S. government.”


Kristof cited a study by the Center for Global Development that estimated how many lives are saved each year by American dollars: about 1.7 million HIV/AIDS deaths averted; 550,000 saved because of other humanitarian assistance; 300,000 tuberculosis deaths prevented; and nearly 300,000 malaria deaths forestalled. But that shows the positive impact of U.S. assistance, not what happens when it is withdrawn.


Brooke Nichols, a Boston University infectious-disease mathematical modeler and health economist, has developed a tracker that attempts to fill this gap. As of Monday, the model shows, about 96,000 adults and 200,000 children have died because of the administration’s cutbacks to funding for aid groups and support organizations. The overall death count grows by 103 people an hour.

With any calculation like this, a lot depends on the assumptions. The methodology uses a straight-line estimate of program terminations based on 2024 data and published mortality data to estimate the impact of loss of treatment. Nichols said that because it is not entirely clear what aid has been restored, she has not updated the tracker to account for that. But she noted that Rubio claimed on Capitol Hill that “85 percent of recipients are now receiving PEPFAR services.”


“For HIV, the total mortality estimates reflect either a 3-month complete cessation of PEPFAR, or 12 months of PEPFAR reduced by 25 percent (the total results are the same),” Nichols said in an email. “If what Rubio says is true … and 85 percent of PEPFAR is back up and running, then the numbers here are still very accurate.”
In a statement to The Fact Checker, the State Department put it differently from Rubio: “85 percent of PEPFAR-funded programs that deliver HIV care and treatment are operational.” We asked for documentation for the “85 percent” figure, because the phrasing might not include funding for drugs that prevent HIV infection. We did not receive a response.


Nichols acknowledged that the tracker was not adjusted for double counting — a child counted as dying from malnutrition and diarrhea — though she didn’t think it would affect the overall results much. Some of the estimates are based on country-specific information; others are not. Data limitations required her to assume an equal distribution between children treated for pneumonia and diarrhea through USAID.

“The biggest uncertainties in all of these estimates are: 1) the extent to which countries and organizations have pivoted to mitigate this disaster (likely highly variable), and 2) which programs are actually still funded with funding actually flowing — and which aren’t,” Nichols said.


A key source document for the tracker is an internal memo written on March 3 by Nicholas Enrich, then USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health, estimating the impact of the funding freeze on global health (including how such diseases might spill over into the United States). Enrich, a civil servant who served under four administrations over 15 years, estimated that a permanent halt in aid would result in at least 12.5 million cases of malaria, with an additional 71,000 to 166,000 deaths annually, a 28 percent to 32 percent increase in tuberculosis globally and an additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year.


As a result of writing the memo — and others — he was placed on administrative leave.


Nichols said the death toll would not be so high had the administration pursued a deliberate policy to phase out funding over a 12-month period, which would have permitted contingency planning. “It’s true that other countries are cutting back on humanitarian spending. But what makes the U.S. approach so harmful is how the cuts were made: abruptly, without warning, and without a plan for continuity,” she said. “It leads to interruptions in care, broken supply chains, and ultimately, preventable deaths. Also, exactly because the U.S. is the largest provider of humanitarian aid, it makes the approach catastrophic.”

When we asked the State Department about Rubio’s dismissal of the idea that anyone had died as a result of the suspension of aid — and that it was clearly wrong — we received this statement: “America is the most generous nation in the world, and we urge other nations to dramatically increase their humanitarian efforts.”

The Pinocchio Test

Given numerous news reports about people dying because they stopped getting American aid, you would think Rubio’s staff would have prepared him with a better answer than “lie” and “false.” His cleanup response wasn’t much better. The issue is not that other nations are reducing funding — but how the United States suddenly pulled the plug, making it more likely that people would die.
There is no dispute that people have died because the Trump administration abruptly suspended foreign aid. One might quibble over whether tens of thousands — or hundreds of thousands — have died. But you can’t call it a lie. Rubio earns Four Pinocchios.

Four Pinocchios


The Fact Checker is a verified signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network code of principles

Glenn Kessler has reported on domestic and foreign policy for more than four decades. Send him statements to fact check by emailing him or sending a DM on Twitter.

The most famous and powerful bros broke up today. Elon Musk and Donald Trump turned on one another. Elon had spent months slashing and burning the federal government, destroying agencies and Departments.

Congress sat back and watched, happy to relinquish their Constitutional powers to the richest man in the world. No, he can’t close down USAID, which is Congressionally authorized. No, he can’t shutter the U.S. Department of Education, without the consent of Congress. Republicans in Congress did nothing to slow him down or reclaim their Constitutional duties.

Apparently, Elon was not happy to learn that Trump’s new budget will increase the national debt.

The tweets flew today between Musk and Trump. I don’t have them all, but you will get the picture of intense acrimony.

The most amazing tweet: Musk wrote that Trump would have lost and Republicans would have lost the House without Elon’s help. What did Elon do that turned the election for Trump? We know he offered million dollar rewards to Trump voters, but only a few. What else did he do? Was it something about voting machines?

I am not taking sides. They deserve each other.

The Boston Globe summed it up:

May 27: Musk says he’s ‘disappointed’ in Trump’s spending bill 

Musk criticized Trump’s spending bill, saying he was “disappointed” in the president’s bill in a CBS News interview.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk told CBS. 

DOGE stands for the Department of Government Efficiency, which has been responsible for slashing federal programs and jobs during Trump’s first months back in office.

June 3: Musk calls Trump’s spending bill a ‘disgusting abomination’

Just days after Musk departed as a senior adviser at the White House, the billionaire issued a scathing criticism on X, calling President Trump’s spending bill a “disgusting abomination”

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk wrote on X. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”

June 4: Musk continues to blast Trump’s bill

Musk on Wednesday escalated his attacks, urging lawmakers to “KILL the BILL.”

“Call your Senator, Call your Congressman,” Musk wrote. “Bankrupting America is NOT ok!”

June 5: Trump threatens to cut Musk’s government contracts 

During an Oval Office meeting Thursday with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump told reporters that he was “very disappointed” with Musk as the tech billionaire continued to blast the president’s massive tax and spending cuts package. 

“I’m very disappointed because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill,” Trump said. “I’m very disappointed in Elon. I’ve helped Elon a lot.”

Trump added that he and Musk “had a great relationship” but “I don’t know if we will anymore.”

Musk swiftly responded to the president’s criticism on social media, saying “Slim and beautiful is the way.”

“Whatever. Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote on X.

“In the entire history of civilization, there has never been legislation that both big and beautiful. Everyone knows this! Either you get a big and ugly bill or a slim and beautiful bill. Slim and beautiful is the way,” Musk added. 

Musk continued his criticism in a series of posts, saying Trump has him to thank for winning back the Oval Office.

“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Musk wrote

“Such ingratitude,” Musk wrote in a follow-up post.

Just hours after Trump said he was “disappointed” with Musk, the billionaire fired back online — prompting Trump to stoke the flames by threatening to cut Musk’s government contracts.

“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Trump wrote Truth Social, his social media network. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”

Musk then claimed Trump is in the Jeffrey Epstein files, then reposted a comment calling for the president’s impeachment. 

Trump fired back on Truth social, saying Musk “just went CRAZY!”

In a separate post, Trump touted his spending bill and suggested Musk should’ve turned against him months ago.

OnnElin’s Twitter account (@Elonmusk), he tweeted that Trump would cause a recession in the second half of the year. He also retweeted videos of Trump partying with Jeffrey Epstein and young women.

At 3:10 pm today, Musk tweeted:

Time to drop the really big bomb:

@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.

Have a nice day, DJT!