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Trump vs. The Military

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2026 //
3

The USS Abraham Lincoln is on its way home after spending many months at sea. It’s coming home because family members of its crew complained about the morale of the sailors and the conditions aboard the ship. Resupplying the ship with food and other necessities became difficult after Iran bombed and closed down American bases across the Middle East.

Hegseth and Trump tried to discount the complaints, but ultimately conceded. That’s why the ship is coming home.

Jason Linkins of The New Republic writes that these events are part of the contempt that Trump has towards the military. He dodged the draft five times, yet he loves to post memes of himself as a general covered with medals. Why do veterans still support him?

Linkins writes:

If you want to get the unfiltered skinny on how the never-ending war with Iran is going, it’s written in the dust. Responsible Statecraft’s Trita Parsi reported this week that U.S. service members marooned in the Persian Gulf have been expressing themselves in messages fingered onto a dusty aircraft flap. The anonymous graffiti, which calls to mind the helmet scrawls of disgruntled soldiers in Vietnam, include “Operation Epstein Fury,” “Peace deal #64 incoming … ALL THIS FOR THE HOLY LAND,” and “Bibi’s cucks.” Sounds like things aren’t going so well! “I have no frame of reference, I can’t compare it to the sentiments of U.S. soldiers in previous conflicts,” Parsi wrote. “But I suspect these are new sentiments, or at least a new willingness to express them this openly and directly.”

Whether these sentiments are new is indeed unclear, but it’s not without a frame of reference. Trump has always been fairly explicit in his disrespect for the grunts who do most of the work—and all of the dying—in this racket that we call “war.” But only now is a seemingly unwinnable war bringing this all to a head. It’s no longer possible to pretend that the president doesn’t have boundless contempt for U.S. service members. They’re trapped in a war that was essentially kicked off to distract from all the other terrible news the Trump administration generates—or at least to turn attention away from the Epstein files. (Though if these dust etchings are any guide, Trump failed in this attempt to wag the dog.)

In recent weeks, this dynamic has been playing out on board the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier that has been on a nine-month deployment to support Trump’s war with Iran. Conditions on board the carrier have deteriorated to the point where some seamen have jumped overboard in an attempt to escape the misery. The crew has, for several weeks, been dealing with food shortages and grotesque sanitation issues. As TNR’s Hafiz Rashid reported, “In recent town hall meetings with military leaders, including acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao, things have gotten heated, with family members expressing fear and worry over mental health and the risk of self-harm for the ship’s personnel.”

As it happens, this trouble is not confined to the USS Lincoln: Crews on the USS Benfold, Carl Vinson, and Tripoli have also reported miserable conditions in recent weeks. Pete Hegseth, our self-styled “secretary of war,” has gone to great lengths to downplay and even deny these accounts, characterizing them as misrepresentations while covering up the reason the Lincoln, which is now finally coming home, wasn’t resupplied. The dust scribbles surfaced by Parsi tell a different story.

If anything, the story is an old one. There has always been good reason to question Trump’s respect for U.S. service members. As The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported in September of 2020, Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in Paris, questioning his senior aides as to why he should go to a cemetery full of “losers.” Per Goldberg, “In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.” All of this came about because he didn’t want to get his hair mussed in the rainy conditions. (Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, would later confirm Goldberg’s reporting.)

Trump’s disparagement of the military is pretty consistent. He’s slagged off the armed forces’ top officers as “dopes and babies” and compared them unfavorably to the military leaders he, for whatever reason, holds in high esteem: Adolf Hitler’s generals. He’s complained about having to see disabled veterans at military events, and has advocated for the exclusion of wounded soldiers at official functions because, “Nobody wants to see that.” These kinds of insults were a staple of his first run for office, during which time he mocked Gold Star families and, famously, Vietnam POW survivor John McCain.

But Trump’s disregard is hardly limited to mere aesthetics. As The Huffington Post’s David Wood reported in 2017, Trump’s gigantic military buildup shoveled billions of dollars to the Pentagon, but not much of that kitty ended up benefiting the working grunts who risk their lives on our nation’s behalf.

Only the outlines of Trump’s proposal to lavish money on the military have been drawn up. There’s a request for Congress to add $30 billion to this year’s defense budget and a vague plan to add $54 billion to next year’s spending. Not included in those plans: money for the best infantry weapons, the safest troop-lift helicopters, the most protective lightweight body armor. Instead, grunts will have to settle for budget leftovers with antiquated rifles, helicopters built for their grandfathers during the Vietnam War, and communications gear that is overweight and unreliable.

The least surprising observation you can make about Trump is that he is an asshole and a cheapskate. Still, the president’s Iranian misadventure has fully exposed both his ineptitude as commander in chief and the consequences of this lack of care for military members and their families. As conditions on U.S. ships erode, the administration is finding itself in a media war with the concerned familiesof troops deployed to the region. Stockpiles of vital munitions are being burned through at an alarming rate. And for some reason, Trump has picked this moment to order a bizarre retrofitting of U.S. aircraft carriers, demanding that they be kitted out with obsolete steam catapults. (TNR contributor Brynn Tannehill has the lore drop you need if you’ve been confused by this story.)

Public opinion about the war in Iran has been consistently awful for Trump, whose overall approval hit a low of 33 percent this week. As Parsi reports, those who are stuck on the front lines of this folly are not likely to disabuse their fellow Americans of this being anything but FUBAR. As one service member told him: “What people in the media don’t understand when they compare past conflicts to this one, is this operation has no morale behind it. That makes a world of difference to service members deployed to undesirable locations indefinitely.” Parsi thinks that the only thing left to do now is to “simply end” the war. But Trump is knee-deep in this big muddy, and there truly is no end in sight.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Trump

Paul Krugman: Reality and Evidence Are Not to Be Trusted!

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2026 //
2

Paul Krugman is the Nobel-Prize winning economist who was a columnist for The New York Times for many years. He here captures brilliantly the MAGA refusal to accept reality and evidence. How was the mainstream of the Republican Party either captured or cowed by this delusional mindset?

Krugman writes:

The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rakeits 2 million square miles of boreal forest.

We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.

The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating.

Trump won the 2020 election.

Communism is the greatest threat facing America.

The modern American right is very good at hating. MAGA hates immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans); it hates liberals; it hates scientists.

What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to shoot the messenger.

Of course, motivated reasoning isn’t confined to the right. Some people on the left insist that zoning restrictions have no role in causing high housing prices, that it’s all about Wall Street greed. Many centrists insist that being in the middle on a left-right scale — which isn’t even how most voters think about politics — is the secret to electoral victory. And so on.

I’m not immune to the temptation to believe what I want to be true. I try to fight it, but don’t always succeed. Still, I try to acknowledge and admit it when I have let wishful thinking warp my judgement.

But what we’re seeing now isn’t run-of-the-mill motivated reasoning. It’s something far more extreme.

If believing something suits MAGA’s prejudices and interests, they don’t hesitate: they simply insist that it’s true. They routinely dismiss scientific and statistical evidence, but they don’t stop there. They’re perfectly willing to deny reality even if the truth is staring them in the face.

Thus, Trump urged Americans to remember that 2024 TV blackout, which nobody remembers because it didn’t happen. He insists that California has “blackouts and brownouts every weekend,” when the state’s 39 million residents can tell you it doesn’t. He says that you must show ID to buy groceries, which everyone who buys their own food knows isn’t so.

Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it, that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says that they don’t.

George Orwell, whose work seems more relevant by the day, knew all about this mindset. In his essay “Looking back on the Spanish war” he wrote about how the rise of totalitarianism had changed the rules:

In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.

Totalitarians, however, denied that objective facts existed. Furthermore, reality is mutable, changing with the leader’s whims:

If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five.

If you find the assertion that MAGA has a totalitarian mindset over the top, all I can ask is, have you been following the news?

What’s remarkable is the extent to which Republican politicians act as if they are living in a totalitarian state, when they aren’t — not yet, anyway. ICE would clearly like to be an American Stasi, policing any deviation from the party line, but it’s not able, so far, to arrest members of Congress who express skepticism about the president’s claims. And many Republican politicians still, I believe, know the difference between fantasy and reality.

But they behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump speeches are sometimes followed by “endless applause moments,” because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to stop clapping.

The susceptibility of the GOP to this totalitarian mindset has come as a surprise even to cynics. I have some idea of how this happened: It involves a confluence of big-money corruption, crony capitalism, religious fanaticism, and the ever-present forces of racism and sexism. But that’s a subject to be delved into another day.

What’s clear is that the war on reality is exacting a high price on America as a whole.

Remember, 1.2 million Americans died from Covid — a number that would have been much lower if MAGA misinformation hadn’t caused so many people to refuse vaccination. Now we’re seeing a frightening rise in measles and other infectious diseases, and God help us if another pandemic strikes with Trump or his successor still in charge.

Climate denial and hostility to renewable energy will mean more pollution even as it consigns the U.S. to energy and economic backwardness.

And the Iran war — which Trump started and now refuses to end because he won’t accept reality — has destroyed America’s credibility and depleted our weapon stocks with stunning speed.

But anyone pointing out the obvious is, of course, a Communist.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Hoax, Lies, Trump

Jamelle Bouie on the Real Natalie Harp Scandal

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2026 //
2

For several days, a relatively unknown White House aide became a very well-known White House aide. Until recently, few people knew the name Natalie Harp. Now she is front-page news across the country.

While some writers have speculated about the relationship between the aging Trump and his attractive young assistant, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie says that salacious speculation misses the real scandal. Harp filters the news that Trump gets. She gives him good news. She posts items on his social media. She even communicates with foreign powers on his behalf. She is one of the most powerful people in the government. CNN reported that she posted scores of tweets supporting Trump on January 6, 2021, urging readers to fight for him and overturn “the steal.” Those tweets have since been deleted.

This is not normal, unless you hearken back to the time when Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke, and his wife acted on his behalf.

Bouie writes:

Last month, after a warning that there might be an Iran-sponsored attempt on his life, President Trump secretly left Air Force One for a military jet when he was leaving the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. His Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, as well as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his key deputy, Stephen Miller were left to fly on Air Force One.

Who did Trump bring on his emergency departure plane? There was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; a White House aide, Dan Scavino; and Natalie Harp, the president’s executive assistant.

Harp was in the news this week after Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia mentioned her in a stump speech, as an aside to an attack on Trump. “And while the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings,” Ossoff said. “See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

The White House pounced, attacking Ossoff in crude, juvenile terms. But rather than change the subject, the ferocity of the response drove new questions about Harp’s role and relationship to the president. On MSNOW, my Times newsroom colleague Maggie Haberman referred to Harp as the president’s “comfort blanket.” And that role appears to include information management, as Haberman noted in an article she wrote with Shawn McCreesh:

As long as Ms. Harp is around, he enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which he has always been mistrustful. Her moniker is “the human printer,” because she tails the president with a portable printer so she can hand him information in hard copy.

Harp posts on social media in Trump’s name and even responds to foreign leaders in his name. She spends more time with Trump than any other aide and reports exclusively to him and no one else.

If the presidency is a job of crisis management, in which the principal task is to deal with an endless number of fires of various sizes and scope, then the most important thing a president can have is good information, to help him know what to handle, what to delegate and what to delay.

If Harp has as much control over Trump’s information environment as she appears to hold — if she is the one shaping his sense of the outside world — then it is entirely reasonable to say that Natalie Harp is one of the most powerful people in the United States.

The reason the Harp story has caught fire is that it is salacious — the elderly president spends nearly all of his waking hours with a young, attractive aide — but the reason it matters is that it is further confirmation of one essential fact of the Trump White House: that the president exists in a degraded, chaotic information environment.

He rejects information that is gathered and collected for the purpose of informing him and is highly reliant, instead, on counsel from people who have no incentive to contradict him and every incentive to tell him what he wants to hear or what they want him to hear. Trump has dismantled every institutional structure designed to curb the worst aspects of the presidency — a tendency toward isolation and groupthink — and has instead sunk deeper into his own propaganda and invented reality.

Harp, it appears, is a key part of that. A total devotee, she shapes his world. The result is a chief executive who is detached from the information he needs to avoid disaster, much less successfully govern the country. Accordingly, Trump has neither avoided disaster nor managed to put the country on stable footing. Instead, he is carelessly careening toward catastrophe. So far, it’s only been a matter of luck that we haven’t crashed.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Trump

How ICE Caused a MAGA Patriot to Lose Faith in Trump

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2026 //
7

Brint Jindra was a true MAGA patriot. He voted for Trump three times and was especially appreciative of Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants.

The New York Times recently told the story of how Jindra was disillusioned by a close encounter with reality.

In July, Brint Jindra had an experience that upended his political views. He took his wife to wine country in California to celebrate her 40th birthday.

His wife was a Russian immigrant. They married in March 2025. They applied for a marriage-based green card. Their application was accepted, and they were waiting for the green card to arrive.

When the couple deplaned in Burbank, the wife was pulled aside by an ICE officer and arrested.

She spent 16 days in a detention center. While they are awaiting trial, they can’t go home to Ohio. Brint’s wife Galina Bobteneva must wear an electronic ankle monitor and can’t go more than 75 miles from their location in California.

Their lawyer, Patrick Valdez, requested a bond hearing, scheduled for July 28. Ms. Bobreneva was released July 29 on a $35,000 bond with an ankle monitor and an order to report to ICE in San Francisco Aug. 5.

Over dinner at a seafood restaurant in Redwood City the night before her appointment, Ms. Bobreneva barely touched her crab cakes. She had been struggling to sleep and was terrified of being detained again.

“I never thought that it was so easy to take freedom from anyone,” she said.

Mr. Jindra, too, was nervous.

“We are living in fear in my own country,” he said.

Early the next morning, they joined a line outside the immigration building that wrapped around the block. Ms. Bobreneva entered with her lawyer more than two hours later.

They emerged with instructions from ICE to report back on Sept. 7.

The couple returned to Redwood City, where unopened birthday gifts and deflating balloons sat on their dining room table, alongside a vase of two dozen wilted roses.

“I cannot celebrate anything,” Ms. Bobreneva said.

Her first court appearance is Oct. 22, but her case will take months to be resolved.

The Trump administration is trying to fill a quota of apprehending 2,000 immigrants every day. This means that more people who are not illegal are ensnared, even including some American citizens.

This is Trump’s America. No longer the home of the free.

Categories Cruelty, Immigration, Trump

The Transgender Conundrum 

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2026 //
14

As a matter of principle, I believe in the “live and let live” way of life. So long as people aren’t hurting anyone else, their choices about how to live should be tolerated at least and respected at best. 

Governor Tim Walz used a memorable phrase that captures the same idea. “It’s none of your damn business!” 

That’s my response when Republicans whip up the public to hate or fear transgender people. 

Why do they do it? It’s a sure fire winner. It appeals to base instincts. (“How dare they flaunt society’s norms?”) They made it a big issue during the 2024 Presidential campaign.

But it’s overdone.

According to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, about 1% of the population over the age of 13 identifies as transgender. Or, 2.8 million people. 

I understand the outrage about biological males competing in women’s sports, most especially, sports where men have a physical advantage, like swimming or track and field.

But I do not understand why Trump and Hegseth have expelled members of the military who are transgender. Many of those who have been booted from the military are decorated veterans who have served their nation with courage and distinction. Some are high-ranking officers with medals and multiple commendations. 

I truly don’t understand why the military would expel officers or enlisted personnel who want to serve their nation and who are willing to risk their lives for our protection.

What does their sexual identity have to do with their ability to perform their duties? Does it give them an unfair advantage? I have not heard a convincing argument from Trump or Hegseth to justify their purge of transgender personnel from the military.

It seems to me that this is an open and shut case of bigotry, no different from discrimination based on religion, race, or gender. The transgender members of the military have been discharged because of who they are, not because of any dereliction of duty.

The Republican Party seems intent on banning the very existence of transgender people. In the states, Republican legislatures have passed laws mandating that there are only two biological genders, and you are whatever your birth certificate says. No matter what laws they pass or what executive orders Trump signs, transgender people are not going to disappear. But these official actions can make them miserable and ruin their lives.

A recent article by M. Gessen in The New York Times described the unnecessary harassment of transgender people in Kansas. There, transgender people must have their birth gender on their driver’s license. Why? What governmental purpose does this serve? None. 

For 1% of the population, this bifurcation is not true. A tiny percentage of people born male live as females. A tiny percentage of people born female live as males. This is who they are. 

Why not let them live the life they want? 

Categories Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Reform, Gender, Republicans, Trump

Trump Lashes Out at Another Female Reporter. Why Doesn’t the White House Press Corps Walk Out?

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2026 //
11

Trump despises the press and delights in insulting them. In his first term, he called the press “the enemy of the people,” a term usually associated with Joseph Stalin. He has continued to lash out at reporters who are not his lapdogs. He ridicules them, especially if they are female.

When it happens, other members of the press corps act as though nothing happened.

Why don’t they stand up for their colleagues? Why do they ignore Trump’s unprecedented bullying?

He needs them. He glories in their presence. They give him oxygen.

Why don’t they close their iPads, cell phones, and notebooks, and walk out en masse?

Walk out.

Here is Trump’s latest diatribe, directed of course at a female journalist.

The Washington Post reported:

The White House on Monday leveled a sharply personal attack against CNN reporter Kristen Holmes after she asked President Donald Trump a pointed question during a news conference, crossing a barrier rarely breached by politicians to invoke her children.

“Jon Ossoff said you’d rather travel with your aide Natalie Harp and build the ballroom than do your job as president,” Holmes said. “What is your response?”

Trump answered Holmes’s question with an insult to Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia), whom he called a “Pee-wee Herman look-alike,” referring to the Paul Reubens character.

Then the White House’s “rapid response” account on X took up the altercation, posting a video clip of the exchange and assailing Holmes as a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession.”

In a follow-up tweet, the account dipped into a more personal line of attack: “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question,” the White House wrote. “They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment about its social media posts.

Trump’s personal attacks on journalists have been a defining feature of his combative approach to the press. Though he has criticized reporters throughout his political career, his critiques of women journalists, particularly those representing CNN, have grown more heated in recent months. And the administration has increasingly used official White House social media accounts to escalate what might once have been spur-of-the-moment exchanges.

Most recently, at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in July, Trump said that CNN anchor and Chief White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins should “just smile” — a misogynistic trope — and likened her appearance to that of Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender activist villainized in conservative circles.

He followed up by posting an edited image imposing Collins’s likeness on an image of Mulvaney, which was later shared by an official White House account.

Trump’s critique of Holmes, a senior White House correspondent, continued during the news conference.

At another point, the president shushed her: “Quiet. Quiet. Quiet. You’re very disrespectful in front of this young man, okay? Don’t you find her disrespectful? He understands. Quiet. Who are you with?”

“I’m with CNN,” Holmes replied.

“Fake news. You’re fake news. You’re loud. You’re a loud, boisterous person. You’re fake news,” Trump said. “Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet. You’re a fake reporter, and you report fake news.”

CNN, in a statement, defended Holmes, calling her “one of the most respected and accomplished journalists covering the White House” and said it rejects the attacks “in the strongest possible terms.”

“This afternoon, she did her job and asked the President of the United States a tough, relevant, and newsworthy question on behalf of the American people,” a CNN spokesperson wrote in a statement. “Public officials are free to challenge reporting they disagree with, but personal attacks on journalists for asking questions are beneath the office and inconsistent with the principles of a free press.”

Holmes’s colleagues on CNN’s White House team rushed to her defense. “What a horrible to thing to say. Kristen is an incredible reporter, person and, above all, mother,” White House correspondent Alayna Treene wrote on X. “I don’t understand such a reaction to a journalist asking the president for his response to something a Democratic senator has leveled against him.”

“Kristen is an excellent reporter who asked a good question, to which the president gave a fulsome answer,” Betsy Klein, a senior White House reporter, wrote. “You know what’s disgusting and inhumane? Bringing her perfect children into this.”

Categories Cruelty, Freedom of the Press, Trump

Peter Greene: Federal Voucher Money Will Not Go to Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2026 //
2

Will the federal voucher program benefit public schools? Peter Greene says no. It is not intended to send funds to public schools, but to subtract them. How else can states afford the tuition of almost every child currently enrolled in religious and private schools? The states don’t intend to increase the funding pie. As voucher schools grow–with your tax dollars–public schools will experience budget cuts. Some will close. This is what Linda McMahon, Betsy DeVos and their allies want.

Peter Greene writes on his blog Curmudgucation:

Remember “backpacks full of cash”? It was a phrase coined by reformster Jeanne Allen that captured the way that taxpayer-funded vouchers turned private school students into couriers, bagmen who simultaneously delivered and laundered taxpayer dollars so that public money could be directed to private religious schools. We may someday be nostalgic for the era in which such manipulations were necessary– “Once upon a time, not only was the government not required to fund religious organizations, but they were actually rquired NOT to.”

Vouchers were always an elegant solution to the question of “How do we get public money to private schools?” Private schools were already funded by a stream of students carrying backpacks stuffed with their parents’ cash. To get government-to-school funding going would require a whole other stream to be created, but vouchers could just hop onto the stream that already existed. Parents could stuff the backpacks with taxpayer dollars as well as their own.

It’s important to keep this model in mind when discussing one of the hot issues around the federal voucher system.

Voucher fans argue that federal vouchers will benefit public schools, which is a careful choice of wording because the federal vouchers will not go to schools– they will go to families, to shove into their child’s cash backpack.

For private schools, that’s a distinction without much difference, because vouchers pack new cash into the same old funding stream. But for public schools, it’s a completely different issue.

The public school funding stream is taxpayer to government to school district. There is no public school version of a funding stream fed by individual students carrying backpacks full of cash. That is, in many ways, antithetical to the public school mission.

In the private school backpack model, the size of the student’s backpack determines where they can go with that load of money. A large backpack full of loads of cash? You get to go to Philips Exeter. A fanny pack loaded with a small, lonely stack? You get to go to Bob’s Strip Mall Academy.

How the market treats you depends on how big and how stuffed your backpack full of cash is.

The public system is designed to work differently. All the cash comes into one big pool, and every student gets to swim in it regardless of what their family’s contribution might have been. (Does it work perfectly? No, particularly because of the ties to housing. The irony here is that the public mission is undermined by market forces in the housing market).

Point is– federal voucher dollars are not going to go to public schools unless the public schools can figure out a way to create the new funding stream for students carrying cash backpacks, and that create a whole new set of issues. If a special tutoring program is available to Susie because she has a backpack of federal voucher money, then why shouldn’t that tutoring be available to any or all students, regardless of backpack status?

Addendum: If a district already has a program that charges fees, then the federal voucher would help families pay that fee, but that would result in zero new revenue for the district.

If a public school sets up a program for backpack-bearing students to pay for a basic service, how do we square that with the mission of providing the same basic service for all? If a public school sets up a program for backpack-bearing students to “buy” an extra service, how do we justify only providing that special service to some students?

These dilemmas are unavoidable because, again, the federal voucher program will not give money to schools, but to students. For private schools, that will mean business as usual. For public schools, that will mean a new business model that will have to somehow co-exist with the traditional public service mission. There are undoubtedly some public districts out there well-positioned to wrestle with this issue, but it would be great if governors and districts put some real thought and discussion into the issue, because federal voucher dollars will only make it to public schools via a new and potentially troubling path.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Closing schools, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Trump, Vouchers

Board of Kennedy Center Votes to Put Trump’s Name on the Building Again, Defying Court Order

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2026 //
12

One of Donald Trump’s first acts when he returned to the Presidency was to take full control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. During his first term in office, Trump never attended any event at the Kennedy Center.

In 2025, Trump fired its board of directors, all except members of Congress, whom he can’t fire. He replaced the bipartisan board with his cronies, who promptly named Trump the chairman of the board. The board proceeded to fire the professionals who ran the Center and to adopt a resolution renaming the Center. Henceforward, the board decreed, the Center would be known as the John F. Kennedy and Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts.

That decision led the Center into a spiral of decline. Many performers and shows cancelled. The Washington National Opera moved out. Ticket sales dropped.

The Kennedy Center suffered incalculable reputation damage after he politicized it. Why did he do it?

Despite his wealth and notoriety, Trump was never accepted into the world of high culture in New York City. He was never invited to serve on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Modern Art, or any of the city’s other prestigious institutions of high culture. Nor was he known as a donor to those institutions.

He built his brand as a brash businessman who hung out in night clubs with mobsters and beautiful women and sought recognition in the gossip columns of the city’s tabloid press. He was rich, and he was a celebrity, but he was never admitted into elite circles.

His vendetta against the Kennedy Center should be seen in that perspective.

His puppet board at the Kennedy Center did his bidding. In addition to adding his name to the facade of the building, the board decided to close the Center for two years for repairs and renovations. The closure would halt the embarrassment of canceled performances and empty seats. Some critics worried that Trump would tear down the Center as he tore down the East Wing of the White House. Act fast and don’t apologize.

One board member, Congresswoman Joyce Beatty of Ohio, sued to stop the board’s decision to rename the Center and also to close it for two years for Trump-directed “renovations.”

U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper ruled on May 29, 2026, that the Kennedy Center board did not have the legal authority to rename the institution. He said that Congress had established the name by statute and only Congress could change it. He ordered the removal of Trump’s name from the building and from all official Kennedy Center materials. Judge Cooper gave the board a deadline of 14 days.

The Kennedy Center board considered an appeal to delay or reverse the order but ultimately complied. Workers began on June 12 to erect scaffolding in front of the building, moving at a snail’s pace, and began removing Trump’s name at 1:20 a.m. on June 13.

Since then, the facade of the building that shows its name has been covered by white tarps.

At first, Trump petulantly said that Congress should run the Kennedy Center, but he soon reverted to control mode.

On August 13, 2026, the Kennedy Center board voted to put Trump’s name back on the building. It wants to add an inscription saying the center was “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump,” despite Judge Cooper’s earlier ruling. And it voted to name the large plaza in front of the Center for Trump. It also voted to close the Center for two years, which Judge Cooper said it could not do without more detailed plans and reasons.

Congresswoman Joyce Beatty is suing to reverse the board’s defiance of Judge Cooper’s May 29 decision.

At the same time, the Trump administration is appealing Judge Cooper’s original order.

Judge Cooper could hold the board in contempt of court. Or he could order them not to change the name, as he did in May. Or he could accept the new wording for the facade, which seems unlikely. Or the board could challenge Judge Cooper’s decision to higher courts. Or Congress could step in and rewrite the statute so that Trump could add his name.

Why is the board so insistent on honoring Trump? His hand-picked President Richard Grennell praised Trump for “his visionary leadership.” Board members appointed by him have lavished praise on him.

Trump needs this sycophantic behavior. At his Cabinet meetings, Cabinet secretaries mouth the same obsequious language, stoking his ego, which is insatiable.

Why does this squabble over the Kennedy Center even matter? The U.S. is stuck in a war with Iran that has caused loss of life, depleted our supply of weapons, and harmed the global economy by limiting the flow of oil.

But Trump is deeply engaged in his vanity projects, of which this is one. He is obsessed with his ballroom, which has been stopped by the courts temporarily but is under construction. He assumes it will be known as “the Donald J. Trump Ballroom” forever. He intends to build a 250′ triumphal Arch, despite overwhelming public opposition. He ripped out Jackie Kennedy’s rose garden and paved it over.

He’s doing something to the portico of the White House, but it is hidden by huge shrouds. He is installing a permanent helipad on the White House grounds. He is renovating the Lincoln Bedroom into who-knows-what. He wants to paint the historic grey granite Eisenhower Office Building white, although preservationists have warned him against it (the paint won’t last and it is likely to damage the granite).

All of this is about leaving a permanent mark on D.C. He was not engaged in vanity projects during his first term. Now, at the age of 80, aware of his mortality, he is obsessed by his passion to create a permanent legacy.

Of the many monuments in Washington, D.C., that honor presidents–the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center–all were created after the honoree was dead.

Perhaps Trump, who is deeply insecure despite his braggadocio, is afraid he won’t be honored after his death. He remains angry that he never was accepted into the top ranks of New York City’s elite. They treated him like scum. That may be why he is so intent on building Trump monuments while he can.

Act first, get permission later from commissions packed with your flunkies.

Categories Art, Corruption, Ethics, History, Trump

Jan Resseger: The Trump Administration’s War on Children

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2026 //
1

Jan Resseger keeps a steady focus o what matters most in a decent society: the well-being of children. Trump and his minions don’t care. Not about children. Not about the rule of law. Not about democracy. Trump cares about greed and self-enrichment. He seems to care about his children. He cuts them in on the grift. His youngest son Barron is said to be worth $150 million. But he doesn’t care about yours.

The fact that he just issued guidance on childhood vaccinations, which reduces mandated vaccines and puts America’s most vulnerable at risk of serious illness and death, tells you all you need to know about this scientifically ignorant man.

Jan writes:

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s important new book, Regime Change, explores how the second Trump administration functions—the cast of characters, their relationships, and their operational style. A reader is also exposed, however, to the President’s and the administration’s big policy concerns—imposing tariffs, ridding the country of immigrants, ending nuclear weapons in Iran, proclaiming that everything is more affordable, and ending the public’s fixation on Jeffrey Epstein. These issues have also been widely covered broadly in the news.

Here are topics that do not appear at all in Regime Change‘s index: children, public education, CHIP, SNAP, Head Start, or Child Care.  There is not even a mention of Trump’s tuition tax credit private school vouchers launched in the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The issue of birthright citizenship is mentioned in the index only as a subhead under immigration, and in the book itself birthright citizenship is covered only in one sentence describing its proposed elimination by an early Trump executive order. In the index, there is only one page citation to the U.S. Department of Education itself, but the reference is to brief coverage of the administration’s attempt to eradicate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” at Harvard University.

The lack of regular news coverage—particularly in the local newspapers—about Trump’s damaging public education policy and the administration’s failure to protect children’s well-being and children’s rights does not, however, mean that these issues have been untouched by Trump administration policy. For those of us who do not need CHIP or SNAP, who can afford quality child care and preschool, whose children attend well-funded public schools, whose families have been citizens for generations, however, there is minimal exposure to the Trump administration’s threats to the institutions on which vulnerable families and children depend.

Just this past week the Trump administration took two steps that, if they do come to pass, will seriously impact some of our society’s most vulnerable children—poor children benefiting today from Head Start, and the children of immigrants from whom the President is once again trying to steal the protection of birthright citizenship. First Focus on Children’s President Bruce Lesley has identified what he calls the Trump administration’s “organized abandonment” of the needs and rights of our society’s most vulnerable children.

The Trump administration attempted to destroy Head Start.     At the end of last week, the Trump administration formally proposed new federal administrative guidance to deregulate the quality of Head Start programs that currently serve 700,000 children across the United States.  The destruction of Head Start had been predicted early last week but on Thursday in a notice in the Federal Register, the administration formally proposed radically diminishing 133 pages of rules that have shaped Head Start since it was established in 1965 as a centerpiece of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.  The Center on Law and Social Policy explains that the proposed new rules are being disguised by the administration with language describing “an effort to ‘streamline,’ ‘enhance,’ and ‘modernize’” the program.  Politico‘s Mackenzie Wilkes reports: “The Heritage Foundation has long called for the elimination of Head Start, but the conservative group published a report last month saying the program should be deregulated in many of the ways the proposed rule suggests while ‘officials work to end the program.’ ”

The Associated Press‘s Moria Balingit outlines the changes the new rules would prescribe: “Head Start… is currently governed by more than 100 pages of regulations… (which) require centers to have low staff-to-student ratios and a research-backed curriculum, among other things, and they ensure centers are providing wraparound services that are critical to children in poverty, including medical and dental screenings and parent coaching. The proposal would toss out nearly all of that rule book. Education Week”s Elizabeth Heubeck adds: “The new proposal would require (that) all classroom instruction be conducted in English, except for immersion programs operated on Native American tribal lands. An estimated 30-35% of children enrolled in the Head Start program are dual language learners.”  The program would also exclude many non-citizen children and children in some immigrant families.

While Congress establishes federal departments and the specific offices within the departments, the legislative branch has no power over the executive branch’s right to establish formal administrative rules and guidance.  It is possible that the rules announced in last week’s Federal Register can be challenged in court, and it is also possible, of course, that public outrage might cause the Trump administration to modify the new rules during the 60 day period when the public is invited to submit public comments before the rule becomes final. A future President, of course, could replace the Trump administration’s new rules.

President Trump signed two new executive orders to undermine birthright citizenship.     Last Thursday, The Washington Post‘s Isaac Arnsdorf, Justin Jouvenal, and David Nakamura reported: “President Donald Trump took another stab at restricting automatic citizenship for people born in the United States after the Supreme Court rejected his earlier attempt. In two executive orders signed Thursday, Trump reached for different legal maneuvers to test the limits of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. The first order said children would be ineligible if born to ‘alien enemies,’ members of foreign terrorist organizations, or foreign lobbyists. The second order said children of people who fraudulently request tourist visas for the purpose of giving birth in the U.S. would not become citizens… The new orders marked a fresh effort to… deliver on a campaign promise by expanding the categories of people who the administration argues fall outside the constitutional guarantee.”

The reporters quote legal experts who doubt that the first executive order could survive a legal challenge: “An estimated 15 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S., while only a few thousand people are foreign lobbyists registered with the Justice Department. No significant populations of U.S. residents are designated as alien enemies or foreign terrorists, making that provision largely symbolic.”

The reporters attribute the second executive order to White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, who has made stopping “birth tourism” a priority. They provide data to demonstrate that what is called “birth tourism” is relatively infrequent. “In 2024, fewer than 10,000 babies were born in the U.S. to people with foreign addresses, out of 3.6 million total live births.”

None of the legal experts the reporters quote believes that either of these executive orders would be upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court or would challenge in any way what Chief Justice John Roberts declared in his June 30, 2026 decision in Trump v. Barbara: “Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.”

First Focus on Children’s Bruce Lesley believes that both of  last week’s executive orders are seriously misguided: “The legal question isn’t simply what the government thinks about immigration. It’s whether an innocent child can lose fundamental rights grounded in the Constitution because of something government officials allege about a parent’s conduct and intent… The latest effort to gut a fundamental constitutional operating principle since our nation’s founding has been written clearly in the Constitution since 1868, is being sold to the public with pathetic history and legal arguments the Supreme Court itself rejected 128 years ago and early this year. Every administration has the authority to enforce immigration laws. However, none has the authority to rewrite the Constitution… by redefining which babies they deem are precious and which are pushed into the shadows of our society.”

Although there has obviously been some news coverage of the week’s public policy initiatives impacting our society’s children, the well-being of our children is neither the top policy concern for officials in the Trump administration nor the top story for the reporters who track the administration’s agenda. Because the needs of children are definitely not the primary lens through which the Trump administration views and conceptualizes our society’s important needs, it is especially important to watch for news about children’s welfare, their rights, and the enormous institution of public schools that serves the mass of our children

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Industry, Environment, Ethics, Evil, For-Profit, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Health, Science, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Trump Finds New Ways to Grift and Grab

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2026 //
6

Thom Hartmann is a diligent journalist who digs deep into the corruption of this regime.

On the deregulation of public lands: Trump is allowing destruction of parts of Big Bend National Park, to make way for its exploitation. No complaints from Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

He writes:

— Trump has figured out a way to grift off the plight of immigrant kids. A Texas law firm with virtually no immigration experience, but multiple people close to Trump or accused of being open racists, just got a $150 million sole-source contract to replace the public defenders defending kids being held in Trump’s concentration camps for brown-skinned people. Meanwhile, ICE says that, sure, they’ll wear body cameras when they beat up and murder people, but they’ll only share those videos when they make them look good. Don’t expect to see any released that actually show criminal activity by armed, masked ICE thugs. Sounds over the top? Here’s their exact language: they’ll only release body camera footage when “it is in the best interests of the agency.” Trump has built his SA/SS force of violent, unaccountable modern-day Klan members to intimidate and even kill anybody who dares defy this regime, and it’s not about to start following the law or even behaving morally any time soon. 

— Trumponomics is even worse than Hoovernomics or Reaganomics. Since he fired his statistics person at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with a hand-picked toady, the numbers have been looking weird. For example, the regime reported 57,000 new jobs in May, then later quietly revised that down to 20,000 (although the headlines of 57,000 are still out there); they reported 129,000 new jobs for June, then quietly revised that down to 63,000 (ditto on the headlines). And this week we found that instead of the anticipated creation of 80,000 new jobs, the American economy actually lost 23,000 jobs last month (and expect that number to get worse when they “revise” it in 2 months). No matter how hard they try, they can’t keep Americans from noticing that housing, groceries, gas, transportation, drugs, medicine, and pretty much everything else are more expensive while billionaires and the Trump Crime Family get richer and Republicans continue to refuse to allow an increase in the minimum wage or the right to unionize. Eventually, reality catches up with politics, no matter how fast and furious Trump and his lickspittles try to keep us distracted or hating on each other, and hopefully it’s going to catch up in a big way this November. 

— Over at Montana Dispatch, Ryan Busse lays out the five Big Lies Republicans are using to steal our public lands. Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee, for example, recently lied to his constituents that the Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments President Obama designated were brought into being no public comment or input when, in fact, over 2.7 million people weighed in during the comment period. Another Big Lie is that we must let drilling companies exploit our public lands to become “energy independent,” a designation we reached during the Obama years. They’re also trying to tell us that the way to prevent forest fires isn’t to cut back on climate-change-causing CO2 from burning fossil fuels but, instead, to log those trees and leave behind nude wastelands (which actually catch on fire even more easily, because all the wood debris there is dead). Trump — who’s probably never walked through an old-growth forest in his life — tried pitching the lie that people can’t and don’t use our public lands for recreation like camping and fishing. And they try to tell us that we’re not subsidizing the oil and cattle industries with our public lands when in fact we’re handing them the equivalent of billions of dollars every year. Hopefully one of these days there’ll be a cost to these Republicans for the continuous streams of lies they keep pouring out on dozens of topics. 

— Trump has figured out a new grift to let his oil company donors profit from his drawing down the National Oil Reserve. Here’s how it works. Normally, when we release oil from the strategic reserve we sell it on the open market at market prices. That would mean that the oil Trump’s releasing would go for around $100 a barrel, paid by the oil companies. When the oil shortage is over, the government would go onto the public market and buy the oil back for, say, $50 a barrel and refill the reserve. It actually makes a profit for the government. But what Trump’s doing is “loaning” our oil to the oil companies at no charge. They then sell it for $100 barrel and when it’s time to “return” the oil to the reserve they’ll buy it on the market at $50 a barrel (or however low it goes when the crisis is over). The entire profit — quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars — instead of going to us taxpayers, goes to the oil companies who funded Trump’s campaign for president. Lever News has the entire sordid story broken down on their site in an article by Freddy Brewster. 

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Trump
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