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Michael Hiltzik: Trump Is Coming for Your Social Security

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2025 //
10

With Trump, there are no guardrails. The Republican-dominated Congress has given him permission to eliminate agencies and cut budgets and fire people. Normally, under the Constitution, Congress makes the laws and controls the purse, but not now.

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times warns that Trump will go after Social Security, despite his promises:

Perhaps the most frequently cited quote from Donald Trump relevant to his purported efforts to root out government waste has been “we’re not touching Social Security,” or variations thereof. 

I expressed skepticism about this pledge shortly after the election by listing all the oblique ways the Trump administration could hack away at the program. 

It gives me no pleasure to update my observation with the words, “I told you so.”

“We’re not touching Social Security.”

— Donald Trump makes a false promise

Among the weapons Trump could wield, I wrote, was starving the program of administrative resources — think money and staff. Sure enough, on Friday the program, which is currently led by acting Commissioner Leland Dudek, announced plans to reduce the program’s employee base to 50,000 from 57,000. 

Its press release about the reduction referred to the program’s “bloated workforce.”

To anyone who knows anything about the Social Security Administration, calling its workforce “bloated” sounds like a sick joke. The truth is that the agency is hopelessly understaffed, and has been for years.

In November, then-Commissioner Martin O’Malley told a House committee that the agency was serving a record number of beneficiaries with staffing that had reached a 50-year low.

I asked the Social Security Administration to reconcile its claim of a bloated workforce with the facts. I got no reply.

Nearly 69 million Americans were receiving benefits as of Dec. 31, according to the agency. That figure encompassed 54.3 million retired workers, their spouses and their children, nearly 6 million survivors of deceased workers and more than 8.3 million disabled workers and their dependents. Agency employment peaked in 2009 at about 67,000, when it served about 55 million people.

“Without adequate staff at the agency,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said at a news conference Monday, “there will be people who can’t get their benefits, period.”

Not only beneficiaries could be affected by Trump’s raid on Social Security. About 183 million people pay Social Security taxes on their earnings. Their right to collect what they’re entitled to based on their contributions is dependent on the system recording those payments and calculating their benefits accurately, to the last penny. Any incursion by DOGE into the program’s systems or the scattershot firings that Dudek forecasts puts all that at risk.

In his testimony, O’Malley talked about how the agency had struggled to establish an acceptable level of customer service. In 2023, he said, wait times on the program’s 800 number had ballooned to nearly an hour. Of the average 7 million clients who called the number each month for advice or assistance, 4 million “hung up in frustration after waiting far too long.” The agency had worked the wait down to an average of less than 13 minutes, in part by encouraging customers to wait off the line for a call back.

Disability applicants faced the worst frustrations, O’Malley said. The backlog of disability determinations, which often require multiple rounds of inquiries, hearings and appeals, had reached a near-record 1.2 million. The program estimated that about 30,000 applicants had died in 2023 while awaiting decisions.

O’Malley had asked for a budget increase in fiscal 2025 to add at least 3,000 workers to the customer-service ranks, but it wasn’t approved.

Make no mistake: The starving of Social Security’s administrative resources, which is currently taking place under the guise of ferreting out fraud and waste, is no accident. It’s part of a decades-long Republican project aimed at undermining public confidence in the program. 

Back in 1983, for example, the libertarian Cato Institute published an article by Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis calling for a “Leninist” strategy to “prepare the political ground” for privatizing Social Security on behalf of “the banks, insurance companies, and other institutions that will gain from providing such plans to the public.” Political opposition, as it happens, resulted in the death of George W. Bush’s push to privatize Social Security in 2005.

Germanis has since become a fierce critic of conservative economics and politics. Butler, who had spent 35 years at the right-wing Heritage Foundation before joining the Brookings Institution in 2014, told me by email he now advocates a private retirement system as an “add-on” private option rather than an alternative to Social Security. He also said he thinks “cutting staff and the claim that Social Security is rife with fraud and abuse are both ridiculous.” 

The Trump acolytes have already taken an ax to some Social Security operations, as announced by Dudek — a former mid-level agency worker who stepped into the vacuum created by the departure of several managers who had dustups with Elon Musk’s DOGE outfit and by a delay in Senate confirmation of Commissioner-designate Frank Bisagnano, a banking and Wall Street veteran.

Last week, Dudek closed the agency’s office of transformation, which he called “wasteful” and “redundant.” The office was engaged in helping to keep the agency’s website operational and to develop usable online resources for beneficiaries and applicants. He closed its office of civil rights and equal opportunity, certainly functions relevant to the program’s operations. Employees in both offices were laid off or fired, and their pages on the website were removed.

On Monday, Dudek bragged about having “identified” some $800 million in cost savings, including through the cancellation of contracts that, for all he knows, may be crucial to the agency’s functioning. The largest “savings” came from a freeze on hiring and overtime in disability determination services, worth $550 million, according to Dudek. 

But that’s an area where hands-on contact between applicants and the agency is indispensable. Academic researchers reported in 2019 that the closing of field offices dealing with disability applications led to “a persistent 16% decline in the number of disability recipients in surrounding areas, with the largest effects for applicants with moderately severe conditions and low education levels.”

In an appearance Friday on Joe Rogan’s webcast, Musk called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” a repetition of an ancient meme that demonstrates only that he knows nothing about Social Security, and nothing about Ponzi schemes. The program boasts an 85-year unbroken record for paying beneficiaries what they’re owed, and currently holds a reserve of nearly $2.8 trillion in Treasury securities, all publicly disclosed.

The GOP brain trust has accepted the claim that Social Security is rife with fraud without devoting a moment’s thought to it. House Speaker Mike Johnson absurdly claimed Sunday on “Meet the Press” that Musk’s “algorithms crawling through the data” are “finding enormous amounts of waste, fraud and abuse.” 

There’s absolutely zero evidence for that. Can we trust Musk to find it? This is the guy whose claim that “millions” of people aged 150 or older were receiving payments was decisively debunked — the notion that benefits were going to people that old was merely an artifact of the software program used by the agency. No payments are going to anyone in that category; Social Security automatically ceases payments to anyone who has reached the age of 115. The chief bug in the system is Musk’s ignorance. 

By the way, the search for waste, fraud and abuse — call it WFA — has a long and discreditable history. Ronald Reagan pledged to ferret out enough WFA to cut the federal budget by more than 6% (sometimes he said 10%). One of his first steps, however, was to fire 15 departmental inspectors general, whose jobs involved finding WFA. Sound familiar? One of Trump’s first orders upon taking office was to fire inspectors-general at 17 federal agencies. 

Reagan impaneled the so-called Grace Commission, whose chairman, industrialist J. Peter Grace, promised to unearth billions of dollars of the elusive WFA. The commission’s eventual proposals included taxing Social Security benefits, adding soy meat-extender to school lunches ($84-million savings over three years), and eliminating the regulatory agencies that oversaw industries represented by the panel’s members.

The truth is that Social Security is one of the most efficient agencies in the federal government. Its administrative costs are one-half of one-percent of its total costs, which include benefit payments. 

What’s the goal of this raid on Social Security, the nation’s premier anti-poverty program and one whose beneficiaries live by the tens of thousands in every congressional district in the land? 

It’s as if Trump and Musk are intent on staging a natural experiment on whether Republicans can tick off or terrify 69 million Americans at one fell swoop by taking away their sustenance in old age or disability — and still win election. 

They’re bound to learn, to the contrary, that there isn’t a federal program that Americans value more than Social Security. Are they dumb enough to try killing it? We shall see.

Categories Accountability, Lies, Trump

Joyce Vance: DOGE Is Gutting the National Weather Service, Which Serves All of Us

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2025 //
16

Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor in Alabama who writes a blog called “Civil Discourse.” In this post, she explains the damage that Elon Musk and his DOGE boys are imposing on NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By making NOAA less effective, they are setting it up to be privatized and available for a fee, not freely available to the public. Their destruction of NOAA will hurt everyone, red and blue states alike.

She writes:

On March 12, there was reporting that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was preparing to lay off more than 1,000 workers as part of the Trump administration’s “reductions in force” directive to federal agencies. Cuts like that call into question whether NOAA will continue to provide the early warnings and predictive modeling that help people prepare for weather emergencies in advance. People who live in hurricane and tornado country keep their “NOAA weather radios” handy, and they are especially important for events that occur, as they frequently do, when most of us are asleep.

In theory, it sounds like one more bad thing to worry about. In practice, it’s much worse. We’ve just had a demonstration of precisely how effective NOAA is and what we stand to lose without it. 

Beginning on Friday, violent, long-track tornadoes with damaging winds of up to 80 mph and large hail materialized across the Midwest and South. This was the news Friday night. NOAA’s early warning system, transmitted on social media, radio, television, and by word of mouth, kept it from being much worse.

Saturday was even worse. Here in Birmingham, the alerts started midday.

At 12:27 pm, I got the first alert through the UA campus system, telling me that in light of what was expected, I should seek shelter now instead of waiting for an actual tornado warning. The system sends alerts after the National Weather Service makes the call about what to expect. The National Weather Service (NWS) is a component of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

We’ve grown accustomed to getting this level of detail. NOAA’s information gets pushed out ahead of these events, causing people to plan in advance. Hard helmets were in short supply here yesterday as people prepared for the storms.

We were relatively lucky in Birmingham. But other places were far less fortunate. By Saturday morning, ABC News reported 36 people were dead in the wake of the storms. This was what the devastation looked like in Tylertown, Mississippi. As I’m writing this, the storm is heading east into Georgia.

How much worse would it have been without the accurate forecasting that let our local news people and local emergency systems warn folks in the storms’ paths sufficiently in advance to get to their safe places? As much as I don’t like to think about it, if Trump and DOGE stay on their current path, we are going to be forced to. Mother Nature doesn’t care who you voted for. If there’s a tornado headed your direction, you need access to early warning systems. Gutting NOAA means you won’t have that.

An example of the tornado warnings issued by National Weather Services offices in Alabama throughout the day Saturday, permitting people to find shelter and take cover in advance.

At 8:52 p.m., local television in central Alabama pushed out a message from the National Weather Service: Talladega, take cover now. It was a tornado on the ground near the famous Superspeedway. Alerts meant people were able to stay safe, which is a good thing—this photo of a bus that ended up on the roof of a nearby high school makes it clear that these early warning systems are critically important. What happens if the National Weather Service is no longer there to do that?

Image

Apparently, the Trump administration is not concerned with that. ABC is reporting that NOAA is down about 2,000 employees since January “as a result of the first round of the Trump administration’s cuts.” California Congressman Jared Huffman, who chairs one of the relevant House subcommittees, said, “There is no way to absorb cuts of this magnitude without cutting into these core missions. This is not about efficiency and it’s certainly not about waste, fraud and abuse. This is taking programs that people depend on to save lives and emasculating them.”

Cuts that sound like a good idea to Elon Musk and Donald Trump have real impacts on the rest of us. That is only just beginning to dawn on people, who I’m sure you’re hearing, like I am, saying, “But I didn’t vote for this.” Trump 2.0, as I’ve written previously, isn’t a pick-your-own-adventure experience. You go to the carnival, you get all of the rides.

We were fortunate last night. Everyone in our house (chickens included) is okay, we just have a little cleanup to do. But so many people weren’t that lucky. They lost houses and lives. They will need support from FEMA and other federal services. If DOGE continues its romp through essential federal work that we, as taxpayers, fund and rely on, it’s only going to get worse. 

When will Republicans wake up? Will their Senators and members of Congress protest what DOGE is doing? Will they even fight for their own backyards? If they continue to bend the knee on this, then instead of demanding that government work for their constituents, they are permitting it to work for the financial interests of the powerful. 

We know what to do about this. With this piece, and the one Friday night about an Idaho Fair Housing Council that I hope you’ll go back and readif you missed it, we’re putting a face on the people DOGE hurts. It’s not about waste and fraud; it’s about people. People who need their government to work for them. Here’s the phone number for the House switchboard: (202) 224-3121. Here’s that number for the Senate: (202) 224-3121. Make sure your representatives know how you feel.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Categories Disruption, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Musk, Elon, Privatization, Stupid, Trump

Federal Judge Orders Halt to Dismantling of USAID by DOGE

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2025 //
7

I have stopped reporting on court orders because there are so many of them, sometimes different judges give conflicting opinions, and sometimes one opinion supersedes another.

But this one was too good to pass up. The issues will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. But this is the first to challenge directly the authority of Elon Musk and DOGE.

The Washington Post reported:

A federal judge in Maryland on Tuesday temporarily blocked billionaire Elon Musk and the U.S. DOGE Service from taking further actions to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and ordered that steps be taken to allow the agency to reoccupy its headquarters inside the Ronald Reagan building in Washington, D.C., should the plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging Musk’s actions win their case.

The judge also ordered DOGE to restore email and other access to thousands of employees who have been cut off from the agency, including those stationed in dangerous areas with their jobs in limbo. He prohibited DOGE from disclosing USAID employees’ personal information outside the agency and said any other action relating to USAID must be made with the “express authorization of a USAID official with legal authority.”

The preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang in a federal court in Maryland, though it leaves a door open for the Trump administration to continue its elimination of USAID, marks another blow to the administration’s efforts to dramatically reduce the size of the government after other federal court orders to reinstate thousands of fired federal workers. Chuang’s ruling remains in effect until a further court order, which could come at another point in the lawsuit or after a trial.

On Monday, the Trump administration moved to reinstate thousands of probationary workers after another judge in Maryland ruled that those firings had been conducted illegally, a decision that is now before a federal appeals court.

The lawsuit was brought by the State Democracy Defenders Fund on behalf of more than two dozen USAID workers named only as plaintiffs J. Does 1-26. They allege that Musk’s assumption of vast authority over federal agencies is “unprecedented in U.S. history” and, under the Constitution, could be exercised only by someone who has been nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate as an “Officer of the United States.” The lawsuit also asserts that DOGE’s moves to eliminate USAID violate the Constitution, because the agency was created by Congress and only Congress can do away with it.

In a 68-page legal opinion accompanying the injunction, Chuang agreed that the Trump administration has acted to effectively dismantle USAID and concluded that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in their claim that those actions violate the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine.

“Where Congress has prescribed the existence of USAID in statute pursuant to its legislative powers under Article I, the President’s Article II power to take care that the laws are faithfully executed does not provide authority for the unilateral, drastic actions taken to dismantle the agency,” Chuang wrote.

The judge’s order, however, applies only to Musk and DOGE — not to USAID officials themselves. Chuang specified that although the dismantling of USAID — even by USAID officials — “likely violates” the Constitution, USAID officials are not parties to the case and not subject to his order. Justice Department lawyers have argued that it is USAID officials, not Musk or DOGE, who have conducted the mass personnel and contract terminations.

Though the lawsuit is not over, the State Democracy Defenders Fund heralded the judge’s ruling while the White House and Musk attacked Chuang.

“Today’s decision is an important victory against Elon Musk and his DOGE attack on USAID, the U.S. government and the Constitution,” said Norm Eisen, executive chair of State Democracy Defenders Fund, in a statement Tuesday. “They are performing surgery with a chainsaw instead of a scalpel, harming not just the people USAID serves but the majority of Americans who count on the stability of our government. This case is a milestone in pushing back on Musk and DOGE’s illegality.”

A White House spokeswoman responded to Chuang’s order by saying he is among “Rogue judges” who are “subverting the will of the American people in their attempts to stop President Trump from carrying out his agenda.”
“If these Judges want to force their partisan ideologies across the government, they should run for office themselves,” said Anna Kelly, deputy press secretary for the White House, in a statement. “The Trump Administration will appeal this miscarriage of justice and fight back against all activist judges intruding on the separation of powers.”

The Trump administration seems to believe that federal courts may not overturn Presidential decisions. That matter was resolved in a case called Marbury v. Madison in 1803.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Extremism, Funding, Musk, Elon, Trump

Sherrilyn Ifill: Do Not Be Silent!

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2025 //
3

Sherrilyn Ifill is a law professor at Howard University and former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She writes a blog called Sherrilyn’s Newsletter, where this post appeared. Open the link to see her footnotes.

“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment. The time is always now.”

-James Baldwin

Illustration by Nick Liu

The past week has shown us in stark terms what it means to fight – to actually fight – to protect against the rise of authoritarians. This week we also saw that somehow, despite years of preparation, some of the leaders of our most powerful institutions seem unprepared for the particular nature of this fight. Others appear just…. unwilling to engage.

Last week the Trump Administration took its most bold actions yet. Through the actions of either Trump himself, Elon Musk or members of Trump’s cabinet, this Administration has:

· Unleashed an unprecedented attack on higher education, the centerpiece of which was a targeted attack on Columbia University. In a letter sent to the University, the Administration[i]demanded that university essentially turn over its decision-making to the Trump Administration, insisting that the University close the Middle Eastern Studies Dept, ban mask-wearing, expel students involved in pro-Palestine protests, and announced the withholding of $400 million in federal dollars until the University accedes to Trump’s demands, unless the University took these actions to address “antisemitism on campus.” The Administration underscored its intentions by entering student dormitories and arresting a Palestinian student who is a legal permanent resident of the U.S. As his 8-month-pregnant wife looked on helplessly, ICE officers arrested Mr. Khalil and then disappeared him, moving him from facility to facility, and offering only vague and unsubstantiated justifications for his arrest. His central “crime” appears to be “advancing positions that are contrary to the foreign policy of this Administration,”[ii]– a concept so staggeringly outrageous it can scarcely be absorbed.

· Fired half the staff of the Department of Education[iii] – as a down-payment on the Administration’s vow to close the agency.

· Indicated its intention to “eliminate Social Security;”[iv]

· Continued firing government workers and removing funding from government agencies including NIH[v] and shuttering offices like the Voice of America.

· Intensified tariffs against Canada and rhetoric suggesting that the sovereign nation of Canada should be annexed to the U.S.;[vi] declared that the European Union was created to “screw the U.S.”; declared that the South African Ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome,[vii] continuing the Administration’s Musk-inspired determination to recognize racist white settlers as victims of Black rule.

· Issued Executive Orders targeting law firms who have litigated cases against Trump in the classified documents cases and who provided pro bono counsel to Special Counsel Jack Smith, removing security clearances and blocking government connected work.

· Argued in court that transgender soldiers should be removed from the military.[viii]

· Removed information about Black, Asian American and women military heroes from the Arlington National cemetery website,[ix]disappearing the accomplishments of people of color and women from official recognition.

And that’s just part of it.

But the resistance to Trump’s authoritarian rule has been busy as well:

· Protests across the country have demanded the release of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian student taken into custody.[x]

· “Tesla Take Down” protests at Tesla dealerships across the country in protest against Elon Musk’s takeover of our government have been so effective in tanking the brand and its stock price,[xi] that President Trump turned the White House into a car lot and personally embodied the used car salesman he was destined to be (if not for his father’s money) in an attempt to gin up Tesla sales.

· Protests nationwide continue to demand an end to government worker firings.

· Voters have shown up at town halls across the country to express anger about proposed plans to cut Medicaid/Medicare and Social Security[xii].

· Lawsuits filed by parents,[xiii] and by a score of states[xiv] have challenged the closing of the Education Department.

· Perkins Coie, the law firm targeted by Trump boldly challenged the Trump administration’s effort to blackball the firm and imperil its business;[xv]

· Federal courts have required Trump to rehire thousands of federal employees fired by DOGE[xvi]

· Federal courts have enjoined Trump’s efforts to freeze spending on governments grants and other funding.[xvii]

· Federal courts enjoined the Administration from removing migrants targeted under Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act – a decision the Trump Administration has defied.[xviii]

But the big stories last week were less about those who have protested and sued, and more about those among the most powerful institutional actors who appear to have lost the plot. Political scientists Steve Levitsky and Ryan Enos offered a blistering and spot-on condemnation of universities that have remained silent in the face of Trump’s authoritarian challenge to the freedom of universities.[xix]Calling out Harvard University specifically (where both scholars teach) for its silence in the face of the hideous attacks on Columbia University, Levitsky and Enos condemned the inaction of universities that have chosen a strategy of “lying low, avoiding public debate (and sometimes cooperating with the administration) in the hope of mitigating the coming assault.”[xx]

Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has faced a wave of outrage and demands for resignation after his decision to vote in favor of cloture to avert a government shutdown. To be sure, the Democrats have few options for stopping the Republicans, who are firmly in the majority in the House and Senate from torching our government. But as many of us have been reminded ad nauseum during the years when Democrats controlled the Senate, the filibuster is one of the few procedural rules the party in the minority in the Senate has to counter being overrun by the majority.

But frustratingly, although Democrats were unwilling to abolish the filibuster in 2022 to advance their agenda, last week they were unwilling to use the filibuster to defy the Republican power grab. Heads the Republicans win. Tails the Democrats lose.

It was hard to understand the point of Democrats affixing their signature to a continuing resolution to fund a government that is being cut to the bone every day by Elon Musk – an unelected billionaire with no official government position – who has been permitted to usurp the appropriation power of Congress. When Trump and Musk lawlessly gut agencies and fire government workers, and Speaker Mike Johnson and his caucus cede the power of Congress to the President, we are in a constitutional crisis.

Trump and Musk’s anti-constitutional usurpation of congressional power with the complicity of the Republicans in Congress is an emergency. It demands an emergency response. Minority Leader Schumer and 7 other Democratic Senators (and I suspect more who were covered by the Leader’s unpopular action) were unprepared to meet the moment in a way that would have upped the stakes. Sometimes when the game is fixed, you have to overturn the tables.

I will concede a serious point Schumer later offered that got lost in the Comms disaster of his Wednesday night statement that suggested there would be a shutdown, and then his Thursday morning announcement that he would vote to avert one. If the government shutdown happened, there would be little chance of obtaining judicial orders enjoining decisions by Trump/Musk to eliminate programs, because legally during a government closure, the President enjoys unfettered power to determine which functions of government are “essential” – standard to which the courts would likely defer. By contrast, with the government open, challenges to DOGE firings and closures continue to do fairly well in the courts and have slowed down the force of Musk’s chainsaw.

In any case, Schumer’s decision and perhaps moreso the clumsy comms that accompanied it have resulted in boiling outrage within the base of the party, including calls for him to step down from leadership.

Of course, none of this compares to the perfidy of the Republican Party. We must never forget the unconscionable and dastardly conduct of Speaker Mike Johnson and the Republicans in the House and Senate – men and women who have abdicated their allegiance to this country and to democracy itself. Their cowardice and complicity in the destruction of this country must never be forgotten or whitewashed. Their betrayal is singular and historic. 

But there’s another group that is failing to meet this moment. America’s corporate leadership has been nearly silent during one of the most volatile economic periods in years. Last week the stock market took a nosedive – entering “correction” status as a result of Trump’s manic and unhinged tariff announcements. [xxi] Trump’s erratic tariffs – up one day, down the next, up again two weeks later – are lunacy. Every rational business leader knows that.[xxii] The predictable market response to Trump’s irrationality threatens the retirement plans of older Americans hoping to retire and the American economy. America’s leadership in the world has been compromised by Trump’s saber-rattling, and his insistence on imperialist moves towards Canada, the Panama Canal and Greenland, is destabilizing the integrity of perception of American stability. Combined with the massive government lawyers, Trump’s policies are bad for America and bad for business.

As Trump literally tanks the American economy and the trust of the international business community, where are the voices of America’s business leaders? Are they all hoping that Trump will do a commercial on the White House lawn hawking their products too? Are the leaders of the Business Roundtable (200 CEOs of the nation’s leading corporations) agnostic about the President’s stubborn insistence on policies that are wrecking the U.S. economy and our standing in the world?

These same business leaders enabled the lie that Trump is a “successful businessperson” – knowing full well that Trump does not seem to know what he’s talking about when he wades into economics, knowing of his six bankruptcies, knowing of his refusal to pay contractors, his false representations, and knowing that no responsible Fortune 500 CEO would ever have gone into business with Trump before he was elected President, or even after. Being wealthy is not the same as being a successful businessperson and they all know it. 

In an interview on CNBC, even host Maria Bartiromo – a Trump sycophant – felt compelled to remind Trump that successful business leaders need predictability to make coherent decisions about investments, infrastructure, expansion, and product development for markets. She noted that the up-and-down tariff mania undermines predictability. Trump responded, “well they say that. It sounds good to say.” Really? Is that it? Or is it a fundamental tenet of business that even a first year MBA student would know? At other times last week he has repeated with “we’re gonna have so much money from the tariffs” with a desperate insistence that suggested mental instability.

American corporations have either tried to placate Trump by paying tribute,[xxiii] or have “crawled into a protective shell” like the university officials called out by Levitsky and Enos. In either case, it is utterly irresponsible. Their voices and influence – presented collectively and forcefully – are critical to protecting the economic interests of this country, and our democracy. Their failure to act is a betrayal of their responsibility as citizens.

Media owners have shamed themselves – whitewashing their teams,[xxiv] surrendering the independence and diversity of their editorial pages,[xxv] and taking a knee before Trump’s demands rather than standing firm in the face of the challenge to our democracy.[xxvi]

In the week ahead, there will be many additional opportunities for leaders from our most powerful democratic institutions to meet this moment. Already it appears that the Trump Administration has defied a federal court order to turn around planes taking Venezuelan migrants accused of being to El Salvador.[xxvii] The Administration announced that the first 250 migrants arrived in El Salvador.[xxviii] What does that mean? Two hundred-fifty Venezuelan nationals have been disappeared into the one of the world’s most notoriously abusive prisons in El Salvador, without judicially approved trials or due process. 

What will judges do as Trump appears to defy judicial orders? This week will test the readiness of our judiciary to defend the rule of law.

Meanwhile ordinary people have been showing tremendous leadership, protesting, launching and participating in boycotts, conducting teach-ins, calling their elected representatives every week, sometimes several times a week, visiting district offices, participating in “die-ins,” writing letters and petitions, and building support for opposition candidates in special elections. A “mass march” has been announced by the organization Hands/Off for April 5th, although information is still spotty [please drop info in the comments]. Black churches have launched a 40-day Lenten boycott of Target for its obsequious abandonment of its DEI commitments.[xxix]

Every day we are called upon to meet the moment. As we see our neighbors seized by plainclothes agents without judicial warrants, and see our workplaces “obey in advance” – removing from websites, official policies and even mission statements expressing their commitment to equality and to inclusion, and as we see law firms crouch before this Administration’s threats, and media outlets silence voices that write the truth about this Administration, we have to decide how we will respond.

All over America ordinary people are looking into their toolboxes of non-violent actions and determining which ones they will use. It’s been beautiful to see.

But we must not absolve the leaders of our most powerful institutions – those who have the money and power, and influence to insulate themselves from the worst consequences of this Administration’s excesses – from their obligation to act and to meet the moment.

To those who are business leaders, captains of industry, university leaders, and media owners, decide who you will be at this moment. If we fully lose democracy in this country, it will be because the most privileged among us refused to accept the responsibility to speak out, to say “no more,” and to lead. History will not kindly remember those who left it to Americans with considerably less power and protection, to do the hard work of saving this country. Your tax cuts will not be large enough to cover your shame. And we will remember.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Corruption, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Lies, Musk, Elon, Racism, Resistance, Trump

Trump Wipes Out NCES in Department of Education

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2025 //
10

Trump or Musk or a bunch of kids who work for DOGE decided that the U.S. doesn’t need to collect statistics or conduct research about the condition of education. So they wiped out the National Center for Education Statistics at the U.S. Department of Education. This is akin to closing down the Bureau of Labor Statistics. NCES is literally the only reliable, nonpartisan source of information about U.S. education. It is not partisan.

NCES is the heart of the U.S. Department of Education. Its purpose is to study “the progress and condition” of American education. It collects data and statistics about every aspect of American education. A bill was passed in 1867 to create an agency with that mission, and that was the beginning of NCES. At first, it was called the Department of Education, but two years later, it was renamed the Office of Education and placed in the Department of the Interior. In 1939, it was shifted to the Federal Security Agency, and in 1953 it became part of the newly created Departnent of Health Dducation and Welfare. In 1979, President Carter signed legislation creating the U.S. Department of Education, and in 1980, the Department began to function.

NCES has always been nonpartisan. It publishes an annual report called The Condition of Education, which is a valuable compendium of facts and trends that covers almost every aspect of education, from preschool through graduate studies. If you want to know the high school graduation rate over the past century, that’s the source. If you want to compare the graduation rates by gender or race, that’s there too.

NCES also oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the federal testing program known as “the nation’s report card.” NAEP has a bipartisan governing board, which is appointed by the Secretary of Education and serves as a policymaking body.

During my time as Assistant Secretary of Education for the Office of Education Research and Innovation from 1991-93, NCES was in my domain. In 1998, Secretary Richard Riley appointed me to serve on the governing board of NAEP, which I did for seven years. There were parts of my domain that I might have offloaded, but with a scalpel, not a chainsaw.

Musk and his DOGE team just eviscerated not only the Department of Education by firing half its employees, but they laid waste to NCES.

Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report has the story. The staff of NCES has been reduced from about 100 to 3. Three! I think that’s called a death certificate.

She began:

President Donald Trump promises he’ll make American schools great again. He has fired nearly everyone who might objectively measure whether he succeeds.

This week’s mass layoffs by his secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, of more than 1,300 Department of Education employees delivered a crippling blow to the agency’s ability to tell the public how schools and federal programs are doing through its statistics and research branch. The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is now left with fewer than 20 federal employees, down from more than 175 at the start of the second Trump administration, according to my reporting. It’s not clear how the institute can operate or even fulfill its statutory obligations set by Congress. 

IES is modeled after the National Institutes of Health and was established in 2002 during the administration of former President George W. Bush to fund innovations and identify effective teaching practices. Its largest division is a statistical agency that dates back to 1867 and is called the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which collects basic statistics on the number of students and teachers. NCES is perhaps best known for administering the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tracks student achievement across the country. The layoffs  “demolished” the statistics agency, as one former official characterized it, from roughly 100 employees to a skeletal staff of just three. 

“The idea of having three individuals manage the work that was done by a hundred federal employees supported by thousands of contractors is ludicrous and not humanly possible,” said Stephen Provasnik, a former deputy commissioner of NCES who retired early in January. “There is no way without a significant staff that NCES could keep up even a fraction of its previous workload…”

The mass firings and contract cancellations stunned many. “This is a five-alarm fire, burning statistics that we need to understand and improve education,” said Andrew Ho, a psychometrician at Harvard University and president of the National Council on Measurement in Education, on social media.  

Former NCES Commissioner Jack Buckley, who ran the education statistics unit from 2010 to 2015, described the destruction as “surreal.” “I’m just sad,” said Buckley. “Everyone’s entitled to their own policy ideas, but no one’s entitled to their own facts. You have to share the truth in order to make any kind of improvement, no matter what direction you want to go. It does not feel like that is the world we live in now.”

The deepest cuts

While other units inside the Education Department lost more employees in absolute numbers, IES lost the highest percentage of employees — roughly 90 percent of its workforce. Education researchers questioned why the Trump administration targeted research and statistics. “All of this feels like part of an attack on universities and science,” said an education professor at a major research university, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. 

The future of NAEP is up in the air. The staff to oversee contracts for data collection, testing, and analysis of results is gone.

Please open the article and read it. This is a deliberate death-blow to the most important function of the U.S. Departnent of Education: the collection and dissemination of facts, data, statistics, and trends in the states and the nation.

Categories Data, Ignorance, Literacy, Musk, Elon, NAEP, Research, Stupid, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Trump Shutters “Voice of America”

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2025 //
25

Trump has closed down the Voice of America, the government-run radio service that has brought news to 420 million listeners around the world since 1942, during World War II. Although he appointed Kari Lake, a Trump ally and election-denier who lost races for Governor of Arizona and the U.S. Senate, to take charge of Voice of America, her assignment just disappeared.

The Washington Post reported (with an emphasis on Kari Lake’s tough luck):

During his first term, Donald Trump accused Voice of America of speaking “for America’s adversaries — not its citizens.” Over the weekend, he essentially dismantled it.
Late Friday, Trump issued an executive order that directed VOA and an array of federal offices to “be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” About 1,000 journalists were placed on indefinite leave. Those who showed up to work to broadcast their programs were locked out of the building…

Voice of America delivers news coverage to countries around the world where a free press is threatened or nonexistent. At its start, VOA told stories about democracy to people in Nazi Germany. VOA and affiliates such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia are designed as a form of soft diplomacy, a way to tout the United States’ free-press values in countries where antidemocratic forces prevail.

Who benefits by closing the VOA?

Russia. China. North Korea. Iran. And every other authoritarian regime.

Tough luck for Lake but good news for repressive dictatorships.

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Extremism, Media, Trump

Talking Points Memo: Trump Bullies Columbia University

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2025 //
1

David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo writes about the Trump administration’s bullying of Columbia University. Under the guise of fighting “anti-Semitism,” Trump has singled out Columbia for extreme punishment. Not only has he frozen $400 million in federal funds for research, he is now threatening Columbia unless it removes certain international studies from its curriculum. Trump has no authority to do this. Columbia is sure to sue and should prevail. This is Trump’s basic authoritarianism showing and portent of worse to come. He wants the nation to bow to his whims and bigotry, and only the courts have stood in his way.

Kurtz writes:

If you still harbored any doubt that President Trump’s ongoing attack on Columbia University – a private institution – is drawn straight from the authoritarian playbook, then the latest development should be clarifying.

The Trump administration – specifically the Department of Education, HHS, and GSA – sent a letter yesterday to Columbia attempting to extortan array of concessions in how the university is run before it may consider restoring some $400 million in frozen federal funding.

Imposing an arbitrary March 20 deadline, the Trump administration demanded that Columbia complete a laundry list of internal restructurings, policy changes, and submissions to federal authority. Among the most alarming demands: put the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department in what it calls “academic receivership” for at least five years.

If Columbia complies by the deadline, then and only then will the Trump administration “open a conversation about immediate and long-term structural reforms” at the university. If it’s not clear, it sure should be: Even if Columbia submits to this extortion letter, it doesn’t get federal funding restored. It merely sets itself up for a later round of bullying, exorbitant demands, and more extortion.

The extortion letter came the same day DHS agents executed search warrants at the residences of two Columbia students. “According to the sources, it was part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on individuals it has described as espousing the views of Hamas and threatening the safety of Jewish students,” ABC News reported.

This all transpired as Columbia graduate and pro-Palestinian protest leader Mahmoud Khalil remained in federal detention as the Trump administration attempts to deport him even though he’s a legal permanent resident. His lawyers amended their filings as they obtained new information about his detainment. In an interview with NPR, a top DHS official could not articulate what wrongdoing Khalil was being accused of.

Meanwhile, The Atlantic reported that the Trump administration had targeted at least one other person at the same time as Khalil:

It turns out Secretary of State Marco Rubio identified a second individual to be deported, and included that person alongside Khalil in a March 7 letter to the Department of Homeland Security. Both were identified in the letter as legal permanent residents, The Atlantic has learned. …

The officials did not disclose the name of the second green-card holder, and did not know whether the person is a current or former Columbia student, or had been singled out for some other reason. The person has not been arrested yet, the U.S. official said.

The Trump administration’s bullying of a private university is being done under the guise of rooting out antisemitism. But the real authoritarian move here is to bring higher education under the thumb of the president. Columbia’s not the only example, but it’s the most extreme.

“So far, America’s leading universities have remained virtually silent in the face of this authoritarian assault on institutions of higher education,” the Harvard student newspaper editorialized.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Higher Education, Trump

Arlington National Cemetery Censors Links and Study Guides to “Notable Graves” of Blacks, Hispanics, Women

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2025 //
8

Matt White, writing in “Task & Purpose” describes the censorship that has been imposed on Arlington National Cemetery by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, implementing the Trump policy of removing all references to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In practice, this policy seems to mean that all people should be described without reference to race, gender, or ethnic origin.

TOMBSTONE OF HUMBERT ROQUE VERSACE AT ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY, A SPECIAL FORCES OFFICER AND MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENT KILLED IN ACTION IN VIETNAM. THE CEMETERY RECENTLY REMOVED LINKS AND REFERENCE TO A PAGE OF “NOTABLE GRAVES” OF HISPANIC SERVICE MEMBERS WHICH INCLUDED THE PHOTO OF VERSACE’S GRAVE. 

ARMY PHOTO

White writes:

Arlington National Cemetery is the most venerated final resting ground in the nation, overseen by silent soldiers in immaculate uniforms with ramrod-straight discipline. Across its hundreds of acres in Virginia, they watch over 400,000 graves of U.S. service members dating back to the Civil War, including two presidents, and more than 400 Medal of Honor recipients.

But in recent weeks, the cemetery’s public website has scrubbed dozens of pages on gravesites and educational materials that include histories of prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members buried in the cemetery, along with educational material on dozens of Medal of Honor recipients and maps of prominent gravesites of Marine Corps veterans and other services.

Cemetery officials confirmed to Task & Purpose that the pages were “unpublished” to meet recent orders by President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth targeting race and gender-related language and policies in the military.

Gone from public view are links to lists of dozens of “Notable Graves” at Arlington of women and Black and Hispanic service members who are buried in the cemetery. About a dozen other “Notable Graves” lists remain highlighted on the website, including lists of politicians, athletes and even foreign nationals. 

Also gone are dozens of academic lesson plans — some built for classroom use, others as self-guided walking tours — on Arlington’s history and those interred there. Among the documents removed or hidden from the cemetery’s “Education” section are maps and notes for self-guided walking tours to the graves of dozens of Medal of Honor recipients and other maps to notable gravesites for war heroes from each military service. Why information on recipients of the Medal of Honor — the nation’s highest award for combat valor — would be removed is unclear, but three of the service members whose graves were noted in the lessons were awarded the Medal of Honor decades after their combat actions following formal Pentagon reviews that determined they had been denied the award on racial grounds.

Like the “Notable Graves” lists, some of the lesson plans remain live but ‘walled-off’ on the cemetery’s website, with no way to reach them through links on the site. Task & Purpose located the de-linked pages by copying the original URL addresses from archived pages at Archive.org or by searching specifically for the pages on Google, which still lists them.

On at least one page that can still be accessed on search engines, language referring to civil rights or racial issues in the military appears to have been altered. A page on Black soldiers in World War II read in December that they had “served their country and fought for racial justice” but now only notes that memorials in the cemetery “honor their dedication and service.”

Altered language on a since-hidden page on African American History at Arlngton National Cemetery. In December, the page was home to over a dozen lesson plans, maps and fact-sheets intended for school groups and visitors. All of those documents have been “unpublished,” according to an Army spokesperson, but will be reposted after they are “updated.” 

A spokesperson at Arlington National Cemetery — which is operated by the Army under the Army Office of Cemeteries — confirmed that the pages had been delisted or “unpublished” but insisted that the academic modules would be republished after they are “reviewed and updated.” The spokesperson said no schedule for their return could be provided.

“The Army has taken immediate steps to comply with all executive orders related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) personnel, programs, and policies,” an Army spokesperson at Arlington told Task & Purpose. “The Army will continue to review its personnel, policies, and programs to ensure it remains in compliance with law and presidential orders. Social media and web pages were removed, archived, or changed to avoid noncompliance with executive orders….”

The removal of the academic lessons hit hard for Civil War historian Kevin Levin, who first noted that Arlington had removed the pages on his substack newsletter. Levin lectures and writes on Civil War history and each year leads trips of history teachers — mostly high school and middle school teachers — through Arlington, so they can better teach students about the cemetery.

Levin noticed that the lessons were missing, he told Task & Purpose, when a teacher he works with tried to prepare a lesson for her students…

“I know the historians and the educators at Arlington, because they meet with our staff every year, and they’ve done a great job of creating lesson plans, they go out of their way to meet with teachers. And I know for a fact that a lot of our teachers are using these lesson plans,” Levin said. “I get the sense that this is being carried out in the sloppiest manner. I get the sense that we’re talking about people who are setting up algorithms and are looking for certain things. I don’t know if this is the end of it. I don’t think it is, I just don’t think these people, whoever is responsible, really knows what they’re doing.”

Levin said he hesitated to post about the missing documents because public exposure could reflect poorly on the professional historians who work at the cemetery and who are “exactly what you want from a federal agency that is responsible for interpreting the past….”

But the slash-and-burn approach to the website, he said, was too much.

“I’ll put it bluntly, this is a shitshow,” he said. “And this one hit home, so I did what I did.”

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Race, Trump

Why Does Trump Want to Destroy America’s Biomedical Research Institutions?

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2025 //
30

Jeff Nesbit, who worked at both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, wrote this article for The Contrarian. The question is one that I keep asking about many federal government programs that are being eliminated by Trump and Musk, like USAID.

Why? It makes no sense.

The fact that Trump chose Robert F.Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services should have been an alarm bell; Kennedy is not only unqualified, he is stridently hostile to science.

The only beneficiary of this insane and reckless slashing of our most successful programs would be our international enemies, Russia and China. They want us to fail. Trump and Musk are making their dreams come true.

Nesbit wrote:

A siren call is cascading wildly through the corridors of every major academic center in America right now with a huge question firmly at its epicenter: Why are Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, and President Donald Trump’s White House team hellbent on destroying the National Institutes of Health, the world’s gold standard of biomedical research?

There isn’t an easy answer to the question, unfortunately.

What is true and known is that Kennedy’s HHS team has halted communications activities about NIH grants; throttled necessary peer-reviewed grant-review meetings; ordered the federal agency staff to review dozens of keywords in thousands of existing grants and issue termination letters based on what it finds; threatened to fire hundreds of expert reviewers and core staff at the agency; placed a cap on indirect costs that underpin basic scientific and medical research; and put woefully unprepared, lower-level career staff in charge of key functions at the agency.

The actions have ground NIH to a halt and sent shockwaves through academia and the biomedical research institutions that have created nearly all our life-saving breakthroughs in the past quarter century. Higher education leaders have halted Ph. D. programs in response. Major research labs are being shuttered or told to stop most of their research.

An American biomedical research enterprise that has been the envy of the world’s science and medical community for decades has been surprised and shocked by the careless destruction of core staff functions and almost mindless efforts to purge NIH of hundreds or thousands of grants for reasons that seem ideological at best and irrational and dangerous at worst.

The question, again, is why? Why are Kennedy, Musk and Trump determined to eviscerate the most successful biomedical research system the world has ever known—a scientific enterprise that produces life-saving medicines and leads to breakthroughs (via basic scientific and medical research) that the private sector would never support?

There was a time, once, that NIH was supported by majorities of Republican and Democratic politicians. NIH’s budget, which supports the entire biomedical research field, has grown year after year with large, non-controversial, bipartisan majorities in Congress.

Until now. Trump and Musk have clearly determined that NIH and the National Science Foundation (NIH’s companion in the world of basic scientific research funding) need to be eviscerated and then reoriented away from life-saving scientific and medical research toward some destination not yet revealed. And while this effort has been racing forward, there has been almost no pushback from politicians—at least not yet.

One reason for this is that scientists are historically apolitical and, to be blunt, quite bad at the political game that dominates Washington, D.C. Scientists aren’t nearly as adept as others at advocating for themselves or their priorities to politicians who make funding decisions…

Trump, Musk and Kennedy don’t trust scientists or academia—and clearly don’t hear or recognize the immense value that the biomedical research enterprise brings to American progress.

NSF funding built and then supported the internet and led to nearly every modern computer and basic scientific advancement we recognize in the hard sciences. NIH medical and scientific research led directly to the creation of nearly all the life-saving drugs developed in the past quarter century that Americans rely on today.

The economic impact to states with large bioscience research centers would be enormous. Tennessee, for instance, would be devastated by the NIH cuts. Vanderbilt University Medical Center is one of the top research hospitals in America. It received nearly half a billion dollars in 2024 for medical research, the second most in the country. Its budget would be cut by more than 10 percent. Nearly 50,000 jobs and 4,000 businesses in Tennessee are dependent on the biosciences research enterprise in the state and would be severely impacted by the NIH cuts.

Other states, such as Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, would be similarly devastated by the cuts. Washington University in St. Louis received $717 million from NIH last year and would lose an estimated $108 million. The University of Michigan received $708 million and stands to see a cut of $119 million. Two Pennsylvania universities – the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh – received nearly $1.3 billion and could lose $244 million. All of those add up to massive job losses and devastating impacts to each state’s economies.

But Trump, Musk and Kennedy don’t trust the scientific and medical research enterprise. They don’t hear the entreaties by scientists who merely want to do great work that benefits the greater good. And they don’t listen to those calls of bewilderment from scientific and medical research leaders that are falling on deaf ears. This could be happening because scientists are particularly bad at politics.

But it also could be that Trump, Musk and Kennedy are willing to destroy the most successful biomedical research enterprise the world has ever known simply because it is a direct way to harm elite academic institutions that they believe harbor leaders and academics who are ideologically opposed to their aims and politics.

And that is a dangerous story that every American needs to hear and fully take to heart right now—before the Trump administration capriciously destroys a hundred years of scientific and medical progress in a matter of weeks or months.

Jeff Nesbit was the assistant secretary for public affairs at Health and Human Services (which includes NIH) in the Biden administration, and the director of legislative and public affairs at NSF during the Bush and Obama administrations.

After I put this article in the queue, I came across this article about John’s Hopkins University:

More than 2,000 positions related to global health are being cut from the Johns Hopkins University after the Baltimore institution saw $800 million in federal grants disappear, a spokesperson confirmed Thursday.

Hopkins’ medical school; the Bloomberg School of Public Health, including its Center for Communication Programs; and JHPIEGO, the university’s health initiative that focuses on global public health, will be affected by the cuts. USAID was the main funder for both JHPIEGO and CCP.

“This is a difficult day for our entire community. The termination of more than $800 million in USAID funding is now forcing us to wind down critical work here in Baltimore and internationally,” Hopkins’ spokesperson said in a statement.

The Trump administration, through advisor Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, is slashing federal spending across agencies in an effort to end wasteful spending. Such cuts have an outsized effect on Hopkins, which comes in first of all universities in federally funded research. By extension, those cuts affect Baltimore and Maryland, where Hopkins is the city and state’s largest largest private employer. Hopkins says it accounts for more than $15 billion in economic output in the state.

The funding cuts for research institutions are hurting universities in multiple states.

Who determines that basic research in science and medicine are unimportant?

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Health, Insane, Musk, Elon, Science, Trump, Tyranny

Jeff Tiedrich: Madman Unleashes Lunatic Attack Before Irish Prime Minister

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2025 //
56

Jeff Tiedrich writes one of the funniest blogs I’ve seen. He uses the F word liberally, and as you know, that is a no-no here. This one made me laugh so much that I decided to share it with you. With a few words clipped. This is not the entirety of his column. Open the link.

He writes:

when world leaders meet, do you think they draw straws, and the loser has to go to the White House to do a press conference with Donny Convict?

at this point there’s no other logical reason why someone with a country to run would step onto an airplane and fly halfway around the world to sit next to a halfwit.

what’s the upside? best case scenario, you’re stuck there with a fake smile plastered on your face as Commander Crazypants blithers incoherently, and you get to go home without sparking a major international incident. worst case, you end up like Zelensky, tag-teamed by Donny and some shithead who f—s furniture.

the thing is, you never know what you’re getting yourself into — and yesterday was Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin’s turn to play Batshit Bingo.

hey, here’s a little-known fun fact: did you know that the Article II powers of the US Constitution confer upon a president the ability to decide who gets to be a Jew? 

I shit you not.

“Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned. he’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. he’s not Jewish anymore. he’s a Palestinian.”

oh, how charming. with the implication that there’s something terrible about being a Palestinian, Donny manages to be both antisemitic and bigoted at the same time. talk about efficiency in government! 

at this point, Prime Minister Martin must be eyeing the exits and reassessing every life choice that brought him to this moment.

well, hold onto your hat, Micheál — it gets batshittier.

“everything is transgender. everybody is transgender. that’s all you hear about.”

f…king hell, not this evil bullshit again. Donny’s got transgender on the brain. was there even a context for this? how does transgender come up in conversation with the leader of Ireland? ‘hey Micheál, was St. Patrick trans?’

no, everyone isn’t transgender. less than one percent of the population identifies as trans. it’s a rounding error away from zero. the only reason that it’s “all you hear about” is that Donny and the Republicans never shut the f..k up about it.

enough with this imaginary moral panic. look how upside f..king down our world has become: last week, cops in Phoenix followed some woman into a Walmart bathroom for the unspeakable crime of not appearing adequately feminine.

I’ll bet PM Martin never imagined he’d be sitting next to a madman and listening to him whine about Barack Obama.

“Obama was a disaster. you know, they have with Obama, he gave them sheets. and I gave them anti-tank missiles. you know that, right? it’s called javelin. you know the javelin? I’m the one that gave them the javelins. people don’t say that. and then they say, ‘oh, Trump has a great relationship with Russia.” I’m the one that gave them the javelins. Obama gave them sheets. it’s an expression. he gave sheets, I gave javelins.”

sheets? what on God’s green earth is Sundowning Grandpa Befuddlepants on about with Obama and sheets?

this: “Obama gave sheets” is a fever-swamp hallucination that Donny has been yammering about for literal years. to hear Donny tell it, the sum total of Obama’s foreign aid to Ukraine was a pile of tatty old bed linens. of course, it’s a delusional, but what else is new?

and by the way, Donny gave javelin missiles to Ukraine after he got impeached for trying to extort Zelensky by withholding them. weird how Donny always leaves that part of the story out.

but Donny remains obsessed with Obama. how ironic is it that he and his tyrant Klansman father were fined by the federal government for refusing to rent their apartments to black people, and now Barack Obama gets to live rent-free in Donny’s head?

Categories Humor, Trump
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