Walters spent most of his energy promoting evangelical Christianity in the public schools. He wanted Bible-based lessons, the Ten Commandments in every classroom, and prayer in the schools. He was an outspoken MAGA guy and tried to insert doubts about the 2020 election in the social studies curriculum.
The final straw may have been the time recently when Walters conducted a meeting with members of the State Board of Education in his office and two attendees saw pornography on his television screen. Walters meanwhile had been ranting about pornography in school libraries.
It’s daunting to try to keep track of the Trump family’s conflicts of interest. They have moved the Overton Window so far that future presidents might accept large cash gifts from corporations and foreign heads of state without anyone caring.
In normal times, the media and the public used to become outraged when an elected official accepted large gifts or had blatant conflicts of interest. Under Trump, no one cared that a foreign state gave Trump a $400 superluxury jet to use as Air Force 1 and to keep after he leaves the Presidency.
The New York Times reported that Tiffany Trump and her husband were enjoying a vacation on a super-yacht owned by an oil company executive even as Tiffany’s father-in-law was negotiating with the owner of the yacht. (And no one cared when Trump appointed his son-in-law’s father as his envoy to Africa on the mistaken belief that the gentleman was a billionaire).
The Times reported:
Massad Boulos traveled to Libya in July as the State Department’s senior Africa adviser. But as he talked to energy executives and government leaders, his other position was no less important. He was also the father-in-law of President Trump’s daughter Tiffany.
That family connection was so significant that some Libyan officials had privately taken to calling him “Abu Tiffany,” Arabic for “Tiffany’s father.”
While Mr. Boulos posed for photographs and announced deals to ramp up Libyan oil and gas production, Tiffany Trump and her husband, Michael Boulos, were cruising the French Riviera aboard one of the world’s largest superyachts — owned by a major broker of Libyan oil.
The yacht, the Phoenix 2, is a floating palace with two helipads, a swimming pool and an 18-foot bronze figurehead of a flaming phoenix rising from its bow. It is not available to charter. But when it last was, it rented for over $1.4 million per week, with the listing highlighting an Art Deco interior and custom Steinway piano.
The vessel is owned by the billionaire oil traders Ercument Bayegan and his wife, Ruya Bayegan. Ms. Bayegan’s energy company, BGN International, stands to benefit from any increase in Libyan oil production.
Massad Boulos is the face of the Trump administration’s diplomacy in Africa, a strategy that prioritizes cutting business deals over international comity and the promotion of democracy. The presence of his son and Ms. Trump on a luxury yacht owned by international billionaire executives is a measure of how hard it is to tell where the interests of government end and the Trump family begins.
Mike DeGuire is a veteran educator in Denver. He says it’s time to take stock and assess the damage that “reform” has inflicted on students and public schools in Denver.
Is public education a public or a private good? This issue is at the heart of the school choice debate sweeping the country.
Advocates for school choice are advancing policies that move us toward the privatization of our schools, treating our children’s futures as commodities rather than community investments. This well-funded bi-partisan coalition promotes privatization through charter school expansion, vouchers, tax credits, and education savings accounts. Republicans use the words “parental rights, freedom and competition,” while neoliberal Democrats brand it as “innovation and expanding opportunity.”
Public education is one of the last shared institutions that binds us together across race, class, and geography; when we weaken it, we weaken democracy itself.
The result is the same for communities when privatization becomes a reality in red states with vouchers or in blue cities where most charter schools are located. Vouchers segregate schools by class and race, diminish the importance of community, and severely limit funding for public schools.
Charter schools operate like private schools, create competition for students, often have unelected boards. Additionally, the charter schools, not the community, get to determine who enrolls, who stays, and what kind of learning takes place. As marketplace ideology takes over, public dollars and democratic control move from local neighborhood schools to private boards and political operatives.
Denver Public Schools (DPS) shows how this movement works in a blue city, and why it matters now in Trump’s vision of America’s education system.
Different slogans, same destination
On the right, and in most Republican-led states, legislatures enacted policies to privatize education with vouchers and education savings accounts (ESAs) designed to route public funds to private and/or religious schools. Often, these tactics originate with model bills written and promoted by the American Legislative Council (ALEC) and their allies. The goal is to let public dollars “follow the child,” which means diverting them away from democratically governed school districts.
On the neoliberal Democratic side, the mechanism is the charter-centric “portfolio model.” Local school boards often elected with large amounts of pro-reform money approve policies to close or “restart” neighborhood schools. Then they open new charters, bring in “operators” deemed to be “effective,” and the district “manages” the schools and their networks like an investment portfolio.
This storyline was supercharged under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, which rewarded states for removing barriers to charter growth and for aggressively initiating school “turnarounds.”
The overlap with Republicans and Democrats is structural. Both sides define schooling as a marketplace and shift authority from elected school boards to private actors, like charter boards, appointed authorities, and national nonprofits. In their book, “Wolf At the Schoolhouse Door,” Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire describe “how Republicans and Democrats joined to support failed policies whose ultimate goal was to eliminate public education and replace it with a free-market approach to schooling.”
Charles Siler, who worked as a lobbyist for the libertarian Goldwater Institute, told the Washington Post that “Charter schools are part of the incremental march towards full privatization. In many ways, charter schools are the gateway to total public-school dismantling.” Since vouchers are unpopular with the public and some lawmakers, Siler continued, “privatizers have to engage in incrementalism, and they use different names to create a sort of moving target.”
Both camps sell the public on privatization by claiming that “failing test scores” prove neighborhood schools, especially those serving Black and Brown students, are broken beyond repair. They argue the racial achievement gap is proof that these schools must be shut down and replaced with charters through “school choice.”
This narrative is deeply misleading. First, decades of research show that standardized test scores mostly measure socioeconomic status and neighborhood inequality, not the quality of individual schools. Poverty, housing insecurity, and systemic racism drive disparities, not the mere fact of attending a district school.
Second, the research demonstrates that replacing schools with charters has not closed achievement gaps. Denver Public Schools illustrates the point: after years of churn, closures, and huge charter expansion, racial disparities in achievement persist. Black and Latino students continue to score lower on state tests than white peers — not because they are “trapped in failing schools,” but because privatization has siphoned resources from their neighborhoods, destabilized communities, and ignored root causes.
Bipartisan funding for similar goals
The funding networks and foundations knitting these free-market agendas together are deep-pocketed and bipartisan. For instance, the conservative Walton Family Foundation underwrites charter startups and charter facilities nationwide, spending well over $1 billion on this effort. The majority of their political spending goes to Republican causes, with over 2/3 of their PAC money going to Americans for Prosperity, founded by the Koch brothers.
In his book, “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America,” journalist Christopher Leonard describes how the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a Koch-funded right-wing group, creates model legislation which can be introduced in state legislatures. Many of these bills aim towards privatizing schools by implementing voucher programs.
City Fund raised millions, largely from Netflix founder Reed Hastings and hedge fund manager John Arnold, to spread charter schools in over 40 cities through portfolio management systems and by bankrolling local political action groups. While Hastings supports Democratic causes, he is opposed to teacher unions and believes that local school boards should be abolished. Arnold, also a Democrat, gifted the KIPPcharter network millions, and like many billionaires today, is seen as cozying up to the Trumpadministration for influence.
The Bradley Foundation and ALEC financed the policy and political infrastructure for vouchers and ESAs for decades. The Bradley Foundation, the Colorado-based Coors family, and the Koch foundation were three of the six billionaire families that funded Project 2025, which has been the playbook for Trump since he took office in January.
Many of these same philanthropic and political dollars fund both a Republican voucher push and a Democratic-branded charter expansion — two lanes of the same privatizing highway.
Denver: a “portfolio” laboratory
Denver is often cited by education reformers as a national model as it implemented unified enrollment, systematic school closures, and rapid charter school growth. But the backstory behind who paid for these policies is less sanguine. A Network for Public Education report details how Denver Public Schools became a neoliberal “experiment,” using a web of nonprofits and political groups to expand charters and restructure the school district.
Both Republicans and Democrats contributed large amounts of money in Denver school board elections to promote corporate reforms, such as teacher pay for performance, school choice systems, and enrollment zones. In the 2017 DPS school board election, billionaires gave huge sums to the Denver candidates favoring charter school expansion. According to a report from the Network for Public Education Action, these included “Colorado billionaires Phillip Anschutzand Kenneth Tuchman, and out-of-state billionaires John Arnold of Texas and the Alice, Jim and Stuart Waltons of Arkansas.”
Both sides define schooling as a marketplace and shift authority from elected school boards to private actors, like charter boards, appointed authorities, and national nonprofits.
Meanwhile, years of churn and school closures left communities reeling. Even reform-friendly analyses concede that the “portfolio model” era meant opening lots of charters and closing or “replacing” dozens of neighborhood schools. Researchers studying this model have cited significant concerns with the efficacy of the model, including equity issues, narrow reliance on test scores, instability and churn, tensions among schools, and loss of democratic control and community voice.
In a 2016 article, progressive education advocate David Osborne documented that “Since 2005 [Denver] has closed or replaced 48 schools and opened more than 70, the majority of them charters.”
The billionaires’ money helped maintain a pro-charter majority school board until 2019 when teacher union-backed candidates were elected because of organized community backlash to the reforms and unrest after a teacher-led strike that year. That shift caused alarm bells among the billionaire backers of the pro-charter movement. They moved quickly to expand their funding to two political action groups in Denver.
RootED and Denver Families for Public Schoolsreceived over $38 million from Reed Hastings’ City Fund organization, which they used to promote their pro-charter agenda through grants to charter schools, local think tanks, and other community groups. Their efforts paid off in the 2023 school board election, when three of their endorsed candidates won their elections after Denver Families Action spent nearly $1 million to promote their campaign.
Outside spending has transformed Denver board elections into major dark money funding events, with the 2023 election hitting $2.2 million, just shy of the 2019 record of $2.3 million.
In an op-ed for Charter Folks, Clarence Burton and Pat Donovan, leaders for Denver Families for Public Schools, described their plans to repeat the 2023 wins in the upcoming November 2025 school board election. They may spend some of their vast resourcesfrom City Fund to sway voters.
In the next four years, DPS faces continued enrollment declines, and district leaders seem inclined to approve more closures to rebalance finances. That is the portfolio playbook’s endgame: when money is scarce, close neighborhood schools and expand privately run options. If successful in electing their endorsed candidates, Denver Families Action is poised to help that happen.
Do charters drain district resources? What the evidence says
District leaders and parents feel the fiscal squeeze when enrollment flows to charters. Fixed costs don’t disappear just because 5% or 10% of students leave. Research consistently warns that losses to enrollment can trigger costs that are not fully “variable” — you can’t cut 1/20th of a teacher or 1/10th of a bus route. Studies from New York and other locales estimate significant per-pupil losses in host districts as charter school share rises.
A policy brief from the National Education Policy Center summarizes the structural mechanisms that occur with fixed costs, diseconomies of scale, and shifting student composition. The brief describes how “a network of philanthropists and wealthy donors have reshaped the political economy of school finance, advocating for school voucher policies, charters, and privatization in the face of declining public-school enrollments.”
Pro-charter think tanks argue the picture is “mixed,” especially longer-term if districts close schools and cut staffing, the very things communities have fought against. But even those reviews concede there are short-term inefficiencies and significant harms. In practice, these policies mean closures, layoffs, and program cuts in neighborhood schools.
This bipartisan push undermines neighborhood schools, deepens inequality, and places corporate interests above the common good.
Trump-world raises the stakes
Under President Trump’s second term, privatization is not just encouraged; it’s federal policy. A January 29, 2025, White House directive ordered the Education Department to steer states toward using federal formula funds to support K-12 “choice” initiatives, which was a direct push for vouchers and related schemes.
Trump’s “Agenda47” likewise spotlights universal school choice as a signature plank, tied to dismantlingprior civil-rights guidance and reshaping federal oversight. Plans to weaken or abolish the Education Department are framed as clearing the path for parental choice.
Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon increased the federal department budget for charter schools by $60 million to a historic record of $500 million. At the closing session of the National Democratic Governors Association meeting, McMahonstressed to the governors they should open charterand micro-schools to promote more competition. This is the Republican Lane, wide open.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 promoted federal tax credits for vouchers, which are now approved federal legislation. The CEO of Democrats for Education Reform is pushing Democratic governors to use these new federal vouchers to expand learning opportunities for economically disadvantaged students or lose “free federal money.”
The policy highway already built by the neoliberal Democrats (charter growth, closures, portfolio management) has made it easier for a voucher-first administration to push public taxpayer dollars out of democratically governed systems. That’s the interlock: Democrats normalized the market; Trump-world aims to privatize the whole store.
The bottom line
Denver is not an outlier — it’s a warning. A bipartisan coalition normalized the idea that public education should be run like an investment portfolio, where schools are opened, closed, and “reconstituted” based on technocratic dashboards and political spending. The Trump administration’s voucher agenda, promoted for decades by the Koch brothers and other conservatives accelerates the same logic, now directs federal policy to help states route public dollars out of public governance altogether.
If we believe education is a public good — funded equitably, governed democratically, and accountable locally — the public must see charter expansion and vouchers as two halves of the same privatization project. When education is treated as a public good, it is essential for democracy, civic participation, economic stability, and social cohesion.
Every child deserves an equal chance in life. Therefore, education must remain a public good — not a marketplace where opportunity is limited to the school’s choice of selecting students. The question isn’t whether our schools should be run like private businesses. It’s whether we are willing to fight for education as a right, not a privilege.
And, if the public cares about our children’s future,they need to vote, organize, and promote legislation accordingly.
Mike DeGuire, Ph.D., is the vice chair of Advocates for Public Education Policy. He has been a teacher, district level reading coordinator, executive coach, and a principal in the Denver metro area for most of his education career. He also worked as a leadership consultant for several national education organizations, and as an educator effectiveness specialist with the Colorado Department of Education. His writing is also featured on a4pep.org.
Ashana Bigard is a parent activist in New Orleans. From her perspective as a parent leader and as the parent of a child with special needs, the New Orleans experiment has been a very expensive flop.
Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, the nation’s most radical education overhaul has produced stunning inequality alongside modest test gains
As I sit in Bricolage Academy’s office, frustrated but trying to remain pleasant, I’m having the same conversation again about my son. He’s on the autism spectrum. He is high performing, extremely quiet, and sweet. Despite his IEP, he wasn’t receiving the required services. The special education coordinator had quit in frustration, the school counselor was cut due to budget issues, and my fifth-grader was falling through the cracks.
I’m not just any parent. I’m an advocate who has worked with the CEO since the school’s creation. I have written for national magazines about our system’s problems and challenged the school’s “diversity by design” narrative. Yet here I was, fighting for basic services. If this is my experience, imagine what average parents face.
The Numbers Don’t Add Up
Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina replaced New Orleans’ traditional public schools with the nation’s first all-charter system, the grand experiment presents a troubling paradox. With half the students and double the funding, the system has achieved modest academic gains while disempowering the communities it promised to serve.
“When you have half the students and twice the resources, you should see transformational results,” says Neil Ranu, a civil rights attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Instead, we see money flowing upward to administrators while classrooms struggle.”
Antonio Travis, director of Black Man Rising, mentored several affected students. “There was shame, self-blame. Many felt they wouldn’t be successful in college.” Families canceled graduation celebrations, uncertain about the future.
Right now, Louisiana U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey is currently presiding over the dissolution of the special-needs consent decree related to New Orleans schools. Because New Orleans public schools have no oversight, and no unions to fight to ensure the law is followed, we, as parents of children with special needs, have to fight to get our stories to the judge so hopefully he will keep it in place.
Walk through charter schools and notice what’s absent or insufficient. Arts programs have declined; fewer offer pre-kindergarten, and students average 35-minute bus commutes. Basic skills, such as cursive instruction—required by state law for signing legal documents—are often ignored. “The children only learn what’s tested,” observes one advocate. “Everything else gets cut.”
“When people ask if they should move out of the city for better education,” says one advocate, “my answer is: if you can afford to move, you should. This system is not built to support our children.”
The comment hangs like an indictment not just of a school system, but of a 20-year experiment that promised everything and delivered prosperity for some, displacement for others, and continued struggle for families who need excellent public education most.
Ashana Bigard is a fifth generation New Orleanian and lifelong resident of the Crescent City. A mother of three, Ashana is a tireless advocate for equity and social justice, especially in her work advocating for children and families in New Orleans and Louisiana. She leads the Education Justice Project of New Orleans, where she organizes and advocates for the rights of students and parents. Ashana is an adult ally advisor to United Students of New Orleans. She also serves as a Community Faculty member with Tulane University’s Center for Public Service.
Joe Perticone of The Bulwark describes the committee that has been created by House Republicans to recast what happened on January 6, 2021. They aim to show that it was mostly staged by anti-Trump provocateurs, with substantial help from the FBI. And at the same time, despite what everyone saw with their own eyes, it was “a day of love,” because Trump said so.
Frankly, I can’t make sense of it. Why would Trump praise a large group of people driven and controlled by anti-Trump forces?
A new House subcommittee has been established to finally, at long last, give the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol the investigation Donald Trump thinks it deserves. Two weeks ago, Republicans tucked its formation into a rule vote that, among other things, approved a resolution expressing support for the House Oversight Committee’s Jeffrey Epstein investigation. The new subcommittee’s Republican members, appointed by House Speaker Mike Johnson, have all held conspiratorial views about what transpired at the Capitol that day.
Atop the subcommittee will be Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.). The other Republicans joining him will be:
Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.)
Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas)
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.)
Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.)
Democrats, for their part, put their more pugnacious members on the subcommittee as a counterbalance of sorts. The list includes Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), and Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.).
Loudermilk had been advocating for the formation of this panel for quite some time, saying over the summer that setting it up was a high priority for Trump. The nature and extent of the proposed subcommittee’s jurisdiction had been debated for months before Loudermilk introduced the resolution establishing it in July. The Capitol riot has been a consistent focus of Loudermilk’s throughout the 119th Congress and even before it was convened: Back in December, he oversaw the publication of a report that downplayed January 6th by emphasizing—as the lawmaker put it in a prefatory letter—“that there was not just one single cause for what happened at the U.S. Capitol . . . it was a series of intelligence, security, and leadership failures at several levels and numerous entities.”
The committee structure is unique. Loudermilk will have unilateral subpoena authority, allowing him to go through with decisions that even a majority of subcommittee members might oppose.
But I don’t think Loudermilk need worry much about being stymied in his quest to uncover the real truth behind January 6th. The new subcommittee is stacked with lawmakers who have peddled baseless conspiracy theories about that day.
Loudermilk himself claimedwidespread voter fraudleading up to the attack and voted againstestablishing the original January 6th Committee that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi put together.
Over the years, Higgins’s conspiracy theories have proliferated like daisies in an unmowed field. He claimed that “ghost buses” had provided transportation to many of the rioters, by which he meant that the buses were most likely non-MAGA plants being used to cause trouble for Trump.¹ His evidence for the “ghost buses” claim, which he presented on blown-up posters in a hearing with former FBI Director Christopher Wray, consisted of photographs showing that there were many buses parked at Union Station on the day of the attack. (Union Station hosts more than 2.6 million intercity bus riders per year.)
The FBI was not only involved in actions on January 6th from within. They had, I suspect, over two-hundred agents embedded within the crowd, including agents—or as they would call [them], “human assets”—inside the Capitol dressed as Trump supporters before the doors were opened.
Higgins has also claimed a large portion of the January 6th crowd consisted of actual FBI agents. As he told Newsmax in 2023:
Along with Higgins, Nehls has spread the “fedsurrection” conspiracy theory that the FBI was behind the attack, elevating claims that wedding planner Ray Epps was one of the government’s plants. Epps, a two-time Trump voter who became a central character in a wild yarn of conspiraciesaround that day, later pleaded guilty to January 6th–related charges. He was ultimately pardoned by Trump as part of the mass absolution on the first day of the new administration.
Hageman, who defeated Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) in a Republican primary after Cheney worked on the original January 6th Committee, has cosponsored legislation claiming Trump didn’t engage in any wrongdoing with regard to the attack. Hageman also signed on to an October 2024 letter to then–Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding he not withhold any evidence that could show how the FBI may have been involved in January 6th.
“The American people deserve to know those federal employees involved in formulating and carrying out the events on January 6th,” Hageman said in a statement accompanying the letter. “With today’s weaponized federal government, led in no small part by an FBI that continues to target conservatives, we should take every measure to ensure the truth is revealed.”
And while Griffith hasn’t openly promoted conspiracy theories in the way that Nehls and Higgins have, he did, like the others, vote against the 2020 election certification.
If you’re wondering why Republicans feel there is a need to relitigate the findings of the original January 6th Committee, the simplest explanation is purely political. The new subcommittee is meant to downplay the events of the attack, shift blame to the Democratic lawmakers and staff who hid behind locked doors while Trump watched television footage of the mob roaming the hallways of the Capitol, and—perhaps most importantly—to validate the president’s longstanding delusion that January 6, 2021, was a “day of love” for all involved.
For many years, Glenn Kessler was a fact-checker for The Washington Post. He retired and now has his own Substack blog, where he continues doing what he does best.
In this post, he fact-checks a few of Trump’s most egregious claims when he spoke to the United Nations.
To me, what’s most striking about the speech is the fantasy world in which Trump has cocooned himself — with no modesty, he depicts himself as a brilliant peacemaker worthy of a Nobel Prize (or maybe seven), an economic genius and someone who is right about everything.
In my years as diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post, I watched many speeches delivered during the U.N. General Assembly. When the stage was occupied by a tyrant, such as then-Venezuela president Hugo Chavez in 2006, the insults came fast and furious.
“The devil came here yesterday, and it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of,” Chavez declared, referring to President George W. Bush.
Well, Chavez doesn’t hold a candle to Donald Trump, who in today’s bombastic speech managed to denounce leaders — once among America’s closest allies — concerned about refugees and climate change and even question the U.N.’s existence. Predictions about climate change “were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes,” Trump fumed.
Of course, much of what he says is false. Here’s just an inkling of the false claims he made to other world leaders.
“We are rapidly reversing the economic calamity we inherited from the previous administration, including ruinous price increases and record-setting inflation, inflation like we’ve never had before.”
Nope. Inflation peaked in 2022, largely because of supply chain issues after the pandemic, and it was far from the worst inflation in U.S. history (or Trump’s lifetime). Two months before the 2024 election, the Economist magazine published a cover story declaring that the U.S. economy was “the envy of the world.”
“Energy costs are down, gasoline prices are down, grocery prices are down, mortgage rates are down, and inflation has been defeated. The only thing that’s up is the stock market, which just hit a record high. Fact, it hit a record high 48 times in the last short period of time.”
Not quite. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has hit seven highs this year. Grocery prices are increasing and mortgage rates have been generally higher in 2025 than 2024. Gas prices have declined slightly but electricity has gone up.
“Workers’ wages are rising at the fastest pace in more than 60 years, and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
Too soon to say. This is based on a misleading Treasury Dept chart that looks only at the December-May period. In fact, growth stalled in June and July.
“In four years of President Biden, we had less than $1 trillion of new investment into the United States. In just eight months since I took office, we have secured commitments and money already paid for $17 trillion.”
This is made-up math that undercounts Biden’s numbers and inflates Trump’s numbers.
“In my first term, I built the greatest economy in the history of the world. We had the best economy ever, history of the world.”
False. Even before the pandemic sent the economy spiraling, Trump’s economy was not better than under Harry Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton. As for best in the history of the world, how can a serious person even say that?
“Hard to believe, because if you look back just a year ago, it was millions and millions of people pouring in from all over the world, from prisons, from mental institutions; drug dealers.”
This is again fantasy. Some bad apples crossed the borders but millions from mental institutions and prisons?
“On the world stage, America is respected again like it has never been respected before. You think about two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, or one year ago, we were a laughingstock all over the world.”
False. By any objective measure, the United States has never been more isolated than under Trump’s current presidency. In a diplomatic defeat, the White House even could not head off a move by close allies, led by France, to recognize Palestine.
“Likewise, in a period of just seven months, I have ended seven unendable wars….No president or prime minister, and for that matter, no other country has ever done anything close to that, and I did it in just seven months. It’s never happened before.”
“I was too busy working to save millions of lives, that is, the saving and stopping of these wars.”
Not the whole story.By one estimate,165,000 adults and 344,000 children likely have died because of funding cuts from Trump’s closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“This [Russia-Ukraine] war would never have started if I were President. This was a war that should have never happened. It shows you what leadership is, what bad leadership can do to a country.”
Another fantasy. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Trump applauded Putin’s savvy, saying “this is genius.”
“Just a few years ago, reckless experiments overseas gave us a devastating global pandemic.”
This is still not proven, but Trump states it as an undisputed fact.
“The previous administration also lost nearly 300,000 children. Think of that. They lost more than 300,000 children, little children who were trafficked into the United States on the Biden watch, many of whom have been raped, exploited and abused and sold. Sold. Nobody talks about that. The fake news doesn’t write about it.”
False. The Biden administration did not lose 300,000 children. Trump is citing a figure that refers to children who were never given a date to appear in immigration court or missed an appearance — including during almost 2½ years of Trump’s first term. He then hypes it up with unverified claims of sex-trafficking.
“Energy is another area where the United States is now thriving like never before. We’re getting rid of the falsely named renewables. By the way, they’re a joke, they don’t work. They’re too expensive, they’re not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. The wind doesn’t blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate, and they have to be rebuilt all of the time and they start to rust and rot.”
Trump hates wind power. He often imagines that if there is no wind, then homes lose electricity. That’s ridiculous. Wind turbines do not generate power when there’s no wind, but the power grid can handle this variability.
“Washington, D.C. was the crime capital of America. Now it’s a totally – after 12 days, it’s a totally safe city.”
Trump invents a problem, and then solves it. Crime was already falling when he sent in the National Guard. Trump likes to cite a 12-day homicide-free period, but in March there were 16 straight days without a homicide.
“In 1982, the executive director of the United Nations’ Environmental Program predicted that by the year 2000, climate change would cause a global catastrophe. He said that it will be irreversible as any nuclear holocaust would be. This is what they said at the United Nations. What happened? Here we are. Another UN official stated in 1989 that within a decade, entire nations could be wiped off the map by global warming. Not happening.”
Trump misquotes Noel Brown, then the director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program. In 1989, Noel Brown was quoted by the Associated Press as saying nations had to take action by 2000 or else the damage could be irreversible. He didn’t say nations would be underwater. At the time, UNEP was studying the effect of rising sea levels and the projections made at the time have held up well. Check out this 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning series in The Washington Post about the impact of extreme climate change.
“And I’m really good at predicting things, you know? They actually said during the campaign – they had a hat, the best-selling hat, ‘Trump was right about everything.’ And I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything.”
Noted without comment.
“Europe loses more than 175,000 people to heat deaths each year cause the costs are so expensive, you can’t turn on an air conditioner.”
This figure — which is correct — demonstrates the risks of climate change. Many European buildings are not fitted with air conditioning because it was not necessary until recently. Trump is apparently ignorant of that.
President Donald Trump delivered a combative speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday morning, lambasting the international body while touting the work of his administration.
Trump spared no criticism in the hourlong address, beginning with his predecessor former President Joe Biden before taking aim at world leaders on everything from migration to the Russia-Ukraine war.
“One year ago, our country was in deep trouble. But today, just eight months into my administration, we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world, and there is no other country even close,” he said at the top of his remarks.
Trump touted the U.S. as having the “strongest” borders, military and relationships around the world.
The president then turned his attention the United Nations, accusing it of not living up to its promise and even accused it of bringing on more problems.
“What is the purpose of the United Nations?” Trump asked. “It has such tremendous, tremendous potential. But it’s not even coming close to living up to that potential. For the most part, at least for now, all they seem to do is write a really strongly-worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It’s empty words and empty words don’t solve war. The only thing that solves war and wars is action.”
Trump accused the organization of ignoring conflicts around the world that he says he solved, casting himself as a peacemaker.
“Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize for each one of these achievements,” Trump said. “But for me, the real prize will be the sons and daughters who lived to grow up with their mothers and fathers because millions of people are no longer being killed in endless and inglorious wars.”
Richard Drew/AP – PHOTO: President Donald Trump addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, in New York City, Sept. 23, 2025.
Trump threatens Russia sanctions, but says Europe must do more
Trump said the United States is prepared to enforce a “very strong round of powerful tariffs” on Russia should Moscow not be ready to make a peace deal.
But he said other countries need to pull back on buying Russian oil and energy products “otherwise we’re all wasting a lot of time.”
“Europe has to step it up. They can’t be doing what they’re doing. They’re buying oil and gas from Russia while they’re fighting Russia. It’s embarrassing to them,” Trump said.
Trump also took a moment to criticize China and India, calling them the main sponsors of the war in Ukraine because of their purchases of Russian oil.
The president has threatened for months to impose harsher economic penalties on Russia but has yet to do so. He didn’t say on Tuesday what it would take for him to determine Russia doesn’t want peace, though he said the war is “not making Russia look good, it’s making them look bad.”
Jeenah Moon/Reuters – PHOTO: President Donald Trump addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, in New York City, Sept. 23, 2025.
Trump bashes world leaders on migration, green energy
Trump said other countries should be modeling the U.S. on the issue of immigration.
“Not only is the U.N. not solving the problems it should, too often it’s actually creating new problems for us to solve,” Trump said. “The best example is the No. 1 political issue of our time, the crisis of uncontrolled migration. It’s uncontrolled. Your countries are being ruined.”
To leaders gathered in the conference hall, Trump said: “Your countries are going to hell.”
He also encouraged leaders to reject policies geared toward fighting climate change and global warming, calling climate change “the greatest con job ever” and touting his administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.
“If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail,” Trump said.
Shannon Stapleton/Reuters – PHOTO: President Donald Trump addresses the 80th United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York City, September 23, 2025.
Trump demands Hamas release hostages, disagrees on Palestinian statehood
On Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, Trump said the world has to “come together” to “end the war in Gaza.” He reiterated that he wanted to see the hostages released immediately, but offered no clear path forward on progressing negotiations.
Trump continued to express his disagreement with countries moving to recognize Palestinian statehood. Several key U.S. allies, most recently France, have announced they are recognizing a Palestinian state.
“Now, as if to encourage continued conflict, some of this body is seeking to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. The rewards would be too great for Hamas terrorists for their atrocities,” Trump said.
Trump instead called for a united message from the body for Hamas to release hostages.
“Those who want peace should be united with one message: release the hostages now. Just release the hostages now. Thank you,” Trump said.
Trump also boasted about his poll numbers, which he said were the highest ever. His approval rating is 37%.
This post is about the brutal tactics of ICE. In the instance described, ICE agents broke into the home of a U.S. citizen at 5:30 am, smashing his doors. Five people were arrested, two of them American citizens. One who was handcuffed and shown on television being led away by ICE was the homeowner, an American citizen, born in Texas.
Every time I see one of these ICE videos, I get outraged. I have seen them knocking people to the ground who were photographing them. I have seen them smash car windows and drag people out through the window. I have seen them brutalizing people suspected of being illegal. I have seen them beat up protestors. All while wearing a mask, but not a badge or shield. and I keep wondering, “is this America?”
Joyce Vance served as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. She knows the law and she has a deep love of justice, compassion, and America.
She writes a blog called Civil Discourse, where this excerpt appeared. She is appalled by ICE’s thuggish tactics, and also by Kristi Noem’s showboat tactics. Noem’s behavior towards others reminds us that she killed a young dog because she couldn’t train him. She is known as “Ice Barbie.”
Vance reminds us that ICE in earlier days followed the law. Now, many people object to its actions, specifically, snatching people off the street, throwing them into an unmarked van, disappearing them, all without a warrant. And the masks! Are they being arrested or kidnapped? No one knows. No wonder people call them “Trump’s Brownshirts.”
Vance writes:
For weeks now, the news has been a deluge, making it impossible to keep up with everything. This week so far has been no exception. We know that this is intentional, at least in part. It tends to distract from things like the fact that the Epstein Files have yet to be released. There’s a constant hum of Trump’s incessant push to grow a more muscular, imperial presidency that will allow the Article II branch of government to eclipse the Article I and Article III branches.
But some days, it can be helpful to stop and focus on one small incident to get a snapshot of what’s happening. Today, I focused on some reporting about ICE, one of the agencies under the control of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
A lot has been written about how Trump has transformed ICE. I know many of you have seen that and are deeply concerned by it, as am I.
ICE’s congressionally designated mission focuses on immigration enforcement and transnational crime. When I was a prosecutor, we worked serious cases with ICE agents. They were competent investigators. They knew how to get cases done. We did some of the early crypto for crime cases with them and also international networks that were engaged in human sex trafficking, drug trafficking, and elder abuse. They worked computer intrusion cases that had a transnational aspect. We did immigration cases with them, focusing on prosecuting people who were illegally in the U.S. after a prior deportation and who had violent criminal history or were involved in gangs. But what we didn’t do was bust into an American citizen’s house at 5:30 a.m. with the DHS Secretary along.
Newsweek reported that Noem “joined federal immigration agents during an early morning operation in Elgin, Illinois, on Tuesday that resulted in multiple people being led away in handcuffs, and two U.S. citizens being briefly detained.” CBS reported that five people were arrested during the raid, among them two U.S. citizens, who were released after showing their papers.
It’s a simple, red brick, ranch-style house. Witness video, taken after a pre-dawn explosion was heard by neighbors, shows agents peeking into the home, a helicopter flying overhead with a spotlight right on the house in what people in the video describe as a “very quiet neighborhood.”
This is what Noem posted Tuesday morning, characterizing the men, including the two U.S. citizens who were subsequently released, as violent offenders.
By 8:30 a.m. local time, DHS was responding to these reports, tweeting that “No U.S. citizens were arrested, they were briefly held for their and officers’ safety while the operation in the house was underway. This is standard protocol. Please see our release on those arrested.”
American Immigration Council Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick tweeted that the man seen in the video was a U.S. citizen named Joe Botello. “They smashed in the doors, dragged him and his roommates out in handcuffs, then posted a video online suggesting he was a criminal, despite knowing he was released soon after,” he wrote, relying on a report from the Chicago Tribune. The agents were masked and armed when they made forcible entry into Botello’s home, destroying both his front door and a glass patio door, according to the Tribune. An agent asked the Texas-born Botello, “how he was able to speak English so well.”
It was another poorly executed raid where people’s rights, in this case, American citizens, were violated.
By the way, the Secretary’s presence might seem like a small thing here, but it’s not. It’s not amusing. It’s not cosplay. It’s not cute. It’s not shake your head and then look away. It’s dangerous. And it was done, apparently, for a photo op.
I spoke with my former colleague Sarah Saldaña, who served as the Director of ICE from 2014 to 2017 and as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas from 2011 to 2014. She was the last presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed Director of ICE. I asked her about participating in law enforcement actions. She told me, “ICE removal operations in the field are highly sensitive and potentially dangerous events. Enforcement removal officers are fully armed and trained to respond to various, often unexpected scenarios that they might encounter. Our focus in removal operations under the Obama Administration was on individuals who presented threats to national security and public safety, and those with convictions of serious criminal offenses. As Director and with training only as an attorney and agency manager, I would never have considered actually interjecting myself into the execution of such an operation. I could easily represent a distraction to officers and, without the proper training, present a danger to them, the persons sought, and to myself.”
Noem, too, should be concerned about the security risk her presence creates. Furthermore, if Noem accompanied agents to the scene, as the reporting indicates, she made herself a witness. If I’m a criminal defense lawyer for one of the men or a plaintiff’s lawyer in a civil suit, I’m cutting the subpoena for her testimony pronto. This is why smart prosecutors know better than to go along when a search warrant is executed, let alone an attorney general or a cabinet secretary. But Noem likes her photo ops. It’s just another sign of the less-than-professional way Trump’s appointees are running government, following Pam Bondi’s comments about prosecuting people for First Amendment-protected speech earlier this week.
Just as members of Congress challenged FBI Director Kash Patel during his oversight hearing on the Hill today, we have to continue to speak out and challenge Noem, Bondi, Kennedy, and others who aren’t up to doing the job the American people deserve. Americans speaking up is precisely what this administration doesn’t want. They want us to be overwhelmed by all the stories about all the things. They want us to be intimidated from exercising our right to speak, lest we fall under attack too. So, our job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. “Courage is contagious” is becoming one of our mottos for this administration. Keep focusing on the truth. Keep speaking out. Keep going.
Was the remaking of schools in New Orleans a great success or a hoax? Is I John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, analyzes the conflicting narratives here.
Like Diane Ravitch, who explained that there was “No Miracle in New Orleans,” I was upset by Ian Birrell’s Washington Post article which agreed with Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who “boldly said that the hurricane was ‘the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.’” I felt better after she cited Gary Rubenstein who explained that Birrell was an international reporter who probably didn’t know “that there has been an ongoing battle over education reform in this country where the ‘reformers’ have all kinds of tricks for misrepresenting data to advance their agenda.”
During the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I had been reviewing previous research on the take-over and charter-ization portfolio model of the New Orleans schools. I had been invited to two conferences held by the Tulane Education Research Association (ERA), and to crash at the home of CEO Neerav Kingsland, who arranged for me to visit many schools and interview numerous district leaders.
My memories of the resulting conversations are very similar to the narratives documented in 2012 by Anya Kamenetz, who was then a reporter with National Public Radio. Kamenetz investigated the evidence for both – that the portfolio process could a “Beacon” for hope in high-challenge schools, or a “Warning” about test-driven, competition-driven school reforms.
She reported on both the large increases in test scores, as well as the effects of segregation by choice, the misuse of test scores, and the inevitable results of a system where 45,000 students were trying to get into 18,500 slots. The damage done by those behaviors was mostly inflicted on the low-performing Recovery School District (RSD).
Then, interviewing the ERA’s Douglas Harris, she found that he had “bad news” for the higher-challenge RSD. He acknowledged that there had been several years of swift improvement, followed by a plateau this past year.” Harris said, “The increasing trend in scores is not all achievement.” He explained, “People were taking these scores as gospel. They had completely bought into the idea that scores equal learning.”
Kamenetz then explained:
Harris isn’t talking about outright cheating — though more than a third of the city’s schools were flagged by the state between 2010 and 2012 for cases of plagiarism, suspicious levels of erasures [of failing grades], and similar indicators. … He means something subtler: a distortion of the curriculum and teaching practice. “You’re learning how to adjust the curriculum, teach to the test.
Kamenetz then cited a professor at North Carolina State University, who had observed and interviewed teachers at “a ‘KIPP-like’ charter school in New Orleans. She reported that:
There aren’t many projects, discussions, or kids reading literature. They are really teaching what will be tested at the exclusion of all other materials. I had a science teacher tell me that if there was an earthquake in New Orleans, she wouldn’t have the time to cover it if it weren’t on the test. …
There is extreme effort to control, rather than engage, students in the classroom,” she says.
Sarah Carr exemplified the same type of objective nuance in her book Hope Against Hope, which acknowledged several positive results while documenting the “human cost” of failures. Carr was sympathetic to the argument that failing schools need to be closed down, but she concluded, “at some point there needs to be some degree of stability.” For instance, only about 10% of Teach for America teachers remained in their school for five years. And she observed:
There were some kids I saw that, even a couple of years out from Katrina, were still getting bounced from school to school to school as they were closed or transitioned out or taken over by different operators. She then concluded that to the extent that NOLA reforms were a success story, “it’s a story of micro-level successes.”
Around that time, when it seemed like even the fervent believers in evaluating teachers using test-growth models were acknowledging that it had failed, Doug Harris and I had similar exchanges over two points. First, why should we believe that test-score increases, especially in the first years of the unregulated NOLA takeover, represented increased learning?
Second, English Language scores surged for three years, 2007 to 2010, but stagnated until 2014 when growth declined to what it was before Katrina.
Harris argued that that plateau was evidence that the learning was real because previous gains didn’t disappear.
I was far more impressed by Rutgers’ Bruce Baker’s evidence as to how and why the ERA’s models were “problematic” when trying to account for demographic changes. Baker noted that after Hurricane Karina “citywide school census had plummeted from 65,000 to 25,000,” meaning that. “There’s just way too much that changed as a result of the storm in students’ lives to make confident comparisons.” Baker concluded, “The main drivers of improvement” were “increased school spending and a less impoverished student population post-Katrina.”
Then, and now, I concluded, that the ERA would need to be as transparent as possible in analyzing future outcomes if it sought to back up their viewpoint. Plus, I remained frustrated by their failure to accept the burden of proof as to whether running controls on test score metrics, especially for poor children of color, provided accurate estimates regarding increases in meaningful learning
The New Orleans reforms led to large gains in average student achievement and increased rates of high school graduation, college entry, and college graduation in the first decade after they were implemented. Student outcomes have stabilized since then.
But, recent reports seem to be excessively focused on post-Covid increases in outputs, and it would hard for me to understand a connection between those gains and the test-prep, the teacher-firing, and school closing approach from a dozen years before.
The historian in me wonders if there would have been a different discussion if the ERA had featured a graph showing big gains from 2007 to 2010, which correlated with so many opportunities to manipulate data and significantly increased funding, followed by stagnate growth for nearly a decade.
To Harris’ and Carroll’s credit, in 2025, they noted, “There were additional troubling signs of inequity in the first several years of the reforms: schools apparently selected students rather than students choosing schools. The expulsion rates increased 1.5 – 2.7 percentage points (140-250%) in the early years.”
Harris and Carroll found increased segregation by race and income in high school, but not elementary schools. And they noted a 2019 policy change that “prioritizes admission at most elementary schools for applicants who live within a half-mile of the school. We find that this gives White and high-income students an advantage in securing a seat at high-demand schools.”
They note the decline in pre-K availability prompted by the district’s choices, as well as less of a focus on the arts during the first decade of the reforms, and in 2018, arts educators reported feeling ignored and under-resourced compared to educators in tested subjects. And Harris and Carroll explain the problems that vouchers created.
As was true previously, Harris and Carroll were careful to warn against the belief that similar reforms would have worked in different times and places.
But, Harris kept praising “growth” measures that account for where students start at the beginning of the year. These accountability measures, however, almost surely contributed to the finding:
Heavy workload is a top reason why teachers leave New Orleans schools; teachers reported working an average of 46 hours per week. This combination of less preparation, lower job security, less autonomy, and higher workloads—to go along with lower salaries (see Conclusion #4)—would increase turnover in any city and any occupation.
Above all, I couldn’t understand why they still supported mass school closures and takeovers, that had supposedly:
Driven essentially all of the post-Katrina improvement. This was especially true in the first decade after Katrina; low-performing schools were replaced by higher-performing ones, which gradually lifted average student achievement.
Harris and Carroll acknowledge that, “it could be that students attending schools that are closed or taken over experience negative effects.” While they noted that “support to students in closed schools helps them end up in better schools the following school year,” even though providing such support to all remains a challenge.
And they don’t deny the harm done by failing to listen to school patrons, and reducing the percentage of Black teachers from 71% to 49% by 2014, as well as the reduction in teachers’ experience, and an increase in turnover.
At least Harris and Carroll conclude:
Local leaders will have to address remaining distrust among key stakeholders and disagreement about the roles of the district and other key actors. State control of New Orleans schools ended in 2018, but the local district did not regain many of the powers that it held pre-Katrina, including school staffing, curriculum, and instruction. … New Orleans created an entirely new type of local school district. Strained relationships and confusion about roles among the district, school leaders, and the community remain.
My reading of the ERA’s twenty-year evaluation of New Orleans’ market-driven reforms is that I wish they would return to Harris’ previous acknowledgement that those who had imposed them “completely bought into the idea that scores equal learning.”
On the other hand, the 2025 report may be good for public relations, persuading some corporate school reformers and international journalists, but it’s not going to persuade school patrons to have more trust in their reward and punish model.
Jack Hassard, retired science educator at Georgia State University, writes that authoritarians can’t tolerate jokes directed at them. They are thin-skinned. They hate being ridiculed. In Russia, one of Putin’s first targets when he took power in 2000 was a puppet show.
Hassard wrote a book about Trump after his first term, called The Trump Files. No doubt he believed that we had seen the last of Trump. Now he blogs about science, politics, and education.
[He added: “They also fear teachers.” That is an amusing echo of the title of Randi Weingarten’s first book, which was just published. Its title: Why Fascists Fear Teachers.]
It is telling that satire, of all genres, is under assault. Authoritarian leaders understand that ridicule delegitimizes power more efficiently than argument. A chart or a speech can be rebutted. A joke that makes the president look ridiculous can’t. That is why Soviet authorities censored jokes. Autocrats in Hungary and Turkey sued comedians. Despots everywhere fear being laughed at. When the United States begins punishing its comedians, it signals a shift. The shift is from democracy confident enough to tolerate ridicule. It progresses to illiberalism that can’t bear mockery….
CONSEQUENCES BEYOND COMEDY
The silencing of late-night satire does not stand alone. It echoes what we have already seen on university campuses, where professors face funding freezes and political monitors in classrooms. It mirrors attempts to pressure journalists with access threats and selective prosecutions. Step by step, the Trump administration is narrowing the arenas in which dissent can be voiced. Censoring satire matters because it collapses one of the last mass-audience platforms for critique. Millions never read a legal opinion. They never attend a lecture. Still, they still meet politics through Colbert’s monologues or Kimmel’s opening jokes. Shut those down, and you have not just silenced comedians — you have muted a public square…
The legal challenges will come. Networks sue. Civil liberties groups will file briefs. Courts eventually reaffirm that the First Amendment forbids retaliation against political speech. But lawsuits take years, and the damage happens now. In the meantime, networks will err on the side of silence. That chilling effect is harder to measure than a canceled show, but it is more corrosive. A student who stops asking questions means a small silence. A professor who drops a reading does too. A comedian who trims a monologue is also a small silence. Collectively, they create a democracy that speaks less, laughs less, and thinks less freely.
NAMING THE PATTERN
If there is one lesson from history, it is this: censorship rarely arrives all at once. It arrives as a series of “exceptions,” each one justified as minor, situational, or deserved. It started on January 20, 2025 with Trump’s first set of Executive orders, and continued for months. Today it is Colbert and Kimmel. Tomorrow it is a journalist, a novelist, a professor, or a teacher. The pattern is clear: when power fears ridicule, it begins by silencing the jesters. The canceling of a late-night joke seems trivial against the backdrop of global crises. But in a democracy, humor is not trivial. Humor is a form of truth-telling. And when the government cancels the joke, it is really trying to cancel the truth.
Diane Ravitch's blog 