Dr. Paul Offit On the Absurdity of Trump’s Vaccine Recommendations

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2026 //
1

Dr. Paul Offit is a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In this interview, published by Medpages, he explains why Trump’s vaccine recommendations are crazy.

Offit: What Donald Trump said made about as much sense as when he said we all should drink bleach and expose ourselves to UV light to treat COVID. Maybe he’s not the guy to go to, to get the best medical information.

Trump: Effective immediately, my administration’s recognizing gold-standard childhood vaccine recommendations for only 11 core vaccinations against the most serious and dangerous diseases, along with the MMR [measles, mumps, and rubella], which hopefully will be split up. You have the MMR, we want it in three separate vaccinations given at separate times. Together there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal and separately it looks like they are not at all lethal, but just very effective. So the MMR, we want to have separate — separate visits, separate times. The vaccine being broken into three separate single doses and vaccines being administered in separate visits.

Offit: So, here’s where this all comes from. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a British researcher, published a paper in the journal The Lancet of eight children who had received the combination measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, and then within a month supposedly developed signs and symptoms of autism. Now, that paper was ultimately retracted.

Nonetheless, the day after he published that paper, Andrew Wakefield held a press conference and he said, “I think this vaccine should be separated into its three component parts to lessen the risk of autism.” And so when I was on the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices between 1998 and 2003, we were asked to vote on whether or not this vaccine should be separated into its three component parts, which made no sense. I mean, if the vaccine doesn’t cause autism, then separating it into its three component parts won’t make it less likely to cause autism. We were forced to basically have that vote and we all unanimously voted no.

So, the first measles vaccine came into existence in the United States in 1963, the last best measles vaccine in ’68. The mumps vaccine came into existence in 1967, the first rubella vaccine in 1969. Those three vaccines were combined in 1971 and have been used safely for the last 50 years. We have an enormous amount of information showing that those single vaccines when given singly are no safer and no less effective than when you give the vaccine as a combination.

So the combination vaccine is safe, it’s effective, and it means children get two shots instead of six. This is an administration that constantly talks about giving fewer shots and then makes a recommendation to give more shots.

Trump: And I saw this early on and I’ve seen proof of it where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body.

Offit: Would love to see the proof that President Trump has of a bottle of soda being poured into a little child’s body. The standard dose of vaccine for children is 0.5 mL. That’s roughly a 10th of a teaspoon. If you look at a multi-dose vial, which would contain say 10 doses, that would be one teaspoon of fluid. A soda bottle contains about 2,000 mL, or said another way, it contains 4,000 doses of vaccine. What is he talking about?

I think the most amazing aspect of that particular press conference is that the media who was standing there listening to him didn’t all burst out laughing. It’s just a ridiculous thing to say. And if he says he has proof of it, great. Let’s see that proof.

Trump: Very importantly, vaccinations to hepatitis B, COVID-19, and influenza, among others, are no longer recommended for all children.

Offit: So, in January, beginning of January of 2026, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put out a schedule, which was a made-up schedule that was ultimately defeated by a federal court action in March of 2026. But in that schedule, RFK Jr. said that there were three vaccines that basically are optional, shared clinical decision-making. You could choose to get them or not choose to get them reasonably. And those were the influenza vaccine, the SARS-CoV-2 or COVID vaccine, and the rotavirus vaccine.

Now there was another category, the so-called high-risk vaccine category, which President Trump alluded to there, which included the hepatitis A vaccine, the hepatitis B vaccine, RSV, the respiratory syncytial virus, as a monoclonal antibody, and the meningococcal vaccines. Well, everyone is susceptible. I mean, there are arguably some high-risk groups, but everyone is susceptible to those diseases. That’s why everyone is routinely recommended to receive them.

A choice not to get those diseases is a choice to put your child at risk. That’s why they’re routinely recommended. I mean, who’s at high risk for hepatitis A? Anybody who ever eats at a restaurant. The notion that there’s a high-risk group is just absurd. In 1991, we, the United States, recommended a universal hepatitis B vaccine for every child born in this country. At the time in 1991, there were roughly 16,000 cases of hepatitis B in children less than 10 years of age.

This is an AIDS virus. This is a virus that can be transmitted relatively casually because it’s a virus that lives on surfaces for up to 7 days. So sharing towels, sharing washcloths, sharing toothbrushes, sharing razor blades, can put a child at risk of hepatitis B. Those other 8,000 children less than 10 who got hepatitis B from places other than their mother weren’t getting it because they were intravenous drug users. They weren’t getting it because they were sex workers. They were getting it because chronic hepatitis B infections are common in this country and it’s easy to come in contact with someone who could infect you.

Now, if you’re infected in the first year of life, if you’re infected while traveling through the birth canal of a mother who is infected, then you have a 90% chance of going on to develop cirrhosis or liver cancer.

So we dramatically decreased the incidence of hepatitis B in children less than 10, virtually eliminating it because of that recommendation more than 30 years ago. Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. want to loosen the reins there to once again let hepatitis B back into a situation where it can cause cirrhosis, meaning chronic liver disease or liver cancers. It’s an incredibly unconscionable thing to do.

Trump: Decades ago, children received only a small fraction of the vaccines required today in those times. People were much healthy and of course the high rates of autism now observed did not exist.

Offit: So, those were not the glory times. I’m not sure what he’s talking about when he’s saying that the incidence of autism has increased because of an increase in vaccines when that’s not true. The reason that the diagnosis of autism has increased is, most importantly, we’ve changed the definition. It’s now autism spectrum disorder, which includes a much wider spectrum of children. Two, we have better diagnostic tests.

It’s at least 80% genetic. Not all of it is heritable genetics. There are de novo or spontaneous mutations. There are factors associated with maternal health, with maternal infections during pregnancy, with maternal drugs taken during pregnancy that increase the risk of autism. But you don’t hear about any of that because people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump have taken the autism story hostage to support their own false beliefs — false, immutable, science-resistant beliefs — that vaccines are the cause.

That is the single best studied environmental influence on autism and it’s not it. So why are we still spending money on this fruitless dead-end hypothesis? We could be spending money on far more promising leads. By doing what RFK Jr. and President Trump are doing, by taking autism hostage for their own anti-vaccine efforts, all they’re doing is hurting children with autism.

After the executive order came out, the sun came up the next day. Parents took their children to the pediatrician’s office. Pediatricians gave them their vaccines according to a schedule, the recommended childhood schedule that is science-based. And the sun came up the next day and the next day after that. I think that this will largely be ignored. I think that state health departments and governors in states are largely going to ignore this. And we can then move past this in much the same way we move past President Trump’s recommendation to drink bleach to try and treat your COVID.

Check out this related video: RFK Jr. Falsely Claims Measles Vax Causes Deaths ‘Every Year’

The interview was conducted by:

Gregory Laub is the Senior Director of Video and currently leads the video and podcast production teams.

Gillian Booth is a Senior Social Media Manager for MedPage Today. She is based in Philadelphia.

Categories Childhood, Health, Medicine, Safety, Science, Trump

Trump Threatens to Demolish Kennedy Center If He Is Not Allowed to Renovate It

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2026 //
14

Trump’s lawyers yesterday threatened to demolish the Kennedy Center if he is not allowed to close it for two years and renovate it. His “expertise” as a builder makes him uniquely qualified to rebuild the Kennedy Center, his lawyers said.

He forgets that his full-time job is President. He has no time to manage construction, although he is very good at destruction. In New York City, he was never known as a “master builder.” He cut corners. He hired undocumented workers to save money. He stiffed subcontractors.

When he built Trump Tower, he saved money by not installing fire detectors. An apartment owner died a few years ago because he didn’t get out in time no fire detector or smoke alarm). He promised to donate the elegant friezes at the front of Bonwit Teller to the Metropolitan Museum, but he demolished these priceless items because it would cost too much to preserve them.

After he became President in January 2025, Trump has been determined to remake the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts into one of his possessions.

He fired the bipartisan board and replaced it with his trusted associates. His board immediately named him chairman of the board and voted to put his name on the building, which was named in 1964 to honor the memory of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

In response to the addition of Trump’s name, performers and major productions began canceling, the Washington National Opera moved out, and ticket sales sharply declined. The Center’s revenues plummeted.

The board’s response to the wreckage they created was to propose to close the Center for two years for renovations.

Joyce Beatty, a board member and a member of Congress from Ohio, sued to restore the building’s original name and to prevent the board from closing it for two years. She prevailed in court, and a federal judge ordered the board to remove Trump’s name from the building, the website and all other places and to stop plans to close the Center without providing a reasonable explanation.

In court yesterday, the Trump administration’s lawyer said that the President would demolish the building if he was not allowed to close it and renovate it.

The Washington Post reported:

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will eventually have to be demolished unless President Donald Trump is allowed to save it, Justice Department lawyers representing the center argued in a court filing posted late Monday.

The center, which the lawyers described as “structurally unsound, fundamentally unsafe, and embarrassing to the Nation’s Capital,” faces “terminal decline” without Trump’s experience as a real estate developer and fundraising prowess, assistant attorney general Brett Shumate and two other department lawyers wrote.

“Without those efforts, the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down,” Shumate wrote. It could be replaced by a structure “such as a large outdoor amphitheater,” he added.

Trump is a big baby. If he can’t put his name on the Kennedy memorial, he will tear down the Center altogether, as he tore down the East Wing of the White House without seeking permission to do so. He is determined to put his name on the Kennedy Center, and the board recently voted to try again.

He is a model of stolen honor. The world knows that he is obsessed with Obama and Biden, but neither of them has a monument that Trump can deface. Next best: Put his name on Kennedy’s memorial center. He was admired, revered, and idolized as Trump has never been and never will be. So, of course, Trump has to slap his name on the Kennedy Center.

What else will Trump rename to honor himself? The Lincoln-Trump Memorial? The Washington-Trump Monument?

Categories Art, Corruption, Ethics, Evil, Trump

Do Children Benefit from Attending Pre-K? Yes!

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2026 //
1

A new study was recently released about the academic benefits of pre-K. It directly refutes the Trump administration’s determination to demolish Headstart.

Elizabeth Heubeck and Jennifer Vilcarino wrote in Education Week about a new study of pre-K:

The study asked and answered this question: Does pre-K give kids a lasting academic boost?

This question has plagued early education researchers for years, yielding widely mixed results. Some studies show decidedly positive outcomes, others find that initial benefits fade by 3rd grade, and still others show worse academic outcomes for children who attended pre-K over peers who didn’t.

Findings from the latest study to examine this question, conducted by Florida International University and George Mason University researchers and published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly, boosted the case for public pre-K attendance. It found that poor children in a large urban community in the Southeastern United States who attended public school pre-K performed better academically in 3rd grade than their peers who attended either center-based care or family childcare as 4-year-olds.

“The take-home point is that kids who went to public school pre-K do better in 3rd grade compared to those who went to center-based care, who did better than those who went to family childcare,” said Adam Winsler, a professor in the Department of Psychology at George Mason University and an author of the study.

These latest findings come at a pivotal time for early education. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced plans to dismantle many of the regulations that guide Head Start, the decades-old federally funded program serving over 700,000 low-income children from birth through 5, and to cap individual programs’ administrative budgets at 5%, down from 15%. At the same time, several states are pushing to increase access to publicly funded preschool or have already done so.

Given the current spotlight on preschool, policymakers and district officials are eager to understand the effects of pre-K on students long-term—especially as they pertain to children from lower-income families, whom researchers say have the most to gain from early formal education. While there doesn’t seem to be any clear path to long-term academic success, this and other related studies offer clues to a path forward. 

Study background and findings

This study collected information between 2002 and 2007 on an estimated 30,000 students, mostly from low-income households, in Florida. Among the students, 60% were Latino, 33% were Black, and 7% identified as white/other. A partnership with the Miami-Dade County public schools allowed the researchers to access data on academic outcomes in 3rd grade from 4-year-olds who had attended either public pre-K, family childcare in a provider’s home, or center-based care.

Students who attended public pre-K had higher GPAs and scored better on 3rd grade reading and math tests. Also, pre-K attendees were 35% less likely to be retained in 3rd grade than those who attended family childcare. Researchers did not evaluate behavioral outcomes.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Reform

Farewell to an Icon: Dolly Parton Reminds Us That There is Goodness in the World

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2026 //
11

The death of Dolly Parton was a blow to millions of people who never met her but loved her for her spirit, her kindness, her humor, and of course, her music.

In a time of meanness, she was steadfastly kind.

She was born into dire poverty, one of 12 children in a one-room house. She was never bitter or angry about her meager beginnings. She marveled at where her talent took her.

Over the course of her long career, she amassed a huge fortune but she did not aspire to be a billionaire. She was a philanthropist. She gave her money away, unlike Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and the Trump family. Is there a hospital or library or public space named for them because of their generosity? None that I know of. People will remember Dolly for her generosity; the others and their ilk will be remembered for their avarice.

She was not political but she spoke up for Black Lives Matter and for LGBT people. When she was interviewed by Johnny Carson in 1977, she spoke up for LGBT people in her straightforward way. She loved drag queens; she knew that they liked to mimic her style, her hair, her dress. She said it was God’s role to judge, not ours. Hers was the voice of love and compassion.

Peter Greene wrote about Dolly here:

I wrote this four years ago when the twins aged out of her Imagination Library, one of the best things any wealthy person ever did. How cramped and meager some of our leaders look in comparison.

After five great years, the Board of Directors has aged out of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.
I have been plugging this program for years (my first post was in 2014, back before the Board of Directors was even a sparkle in our eyes). Parton has engineered putting a book a month into the hands of families all across the country–we’re talking (currently) 184 million books in millions of households meeting no requirement other than they have a child between the ages of born and five. It costs the family nothing.

The quality of the books is great. Over the years we have received classics, newer books, books featuring every sort of family, every sort of kid. They are filled with wonder, kindness, beauty, excitement. This is one of the best examples of thoughtful, useful, not-trying-to-take-over-a-government function philanthropy you’ll find.

The program launched in 1995 in Sevier County, and it grew quickly. By 2006, when the Washington Post wrote about it, the program had spread to 471 communities in 41 states. In 2011 it launched in Scotland, and it can now be found in the UK, Australia, and Canada. The site says that 706,468 US kids are currently signed up. It’s still fairly simple. Some combination of sponsors (some private, some government, depending on the locale) help with the financing (the cost is roughly $27 per child per year) and the Foundation delivers the books, each in its own poly bag with the child’s name on it (consider the power of a child, even a small one, receiving a book that is theirs, addressed to them, by name).

I am not, I’ll confess, a huge fan of Parton’s music, but she is the very best example of what good a person can do with their giant pile of money you can find. Not trying to shape the world to her own requirements, not trying to buy a good name, not trying to make herself the unelected boss of whatever. And the little PR that Imagination Library does is to get itself out into the hands of students, not to raise Parton’s profile. She doesn’t pay people to promote it, and it has spread largely through word of mouth or through the local organizations that co-sponsor it and help make the connections to local families.

Once a month, the boys received a book, addressed to them personally. We love books in this house, and the arrival of the monthly “book from Dolly” was an event. We will miss it.

The last book to arrive is Kindergarten, Here I Come, and the first page inside the front cover is a letter from Parton, that I’ll quote in part:

My, how time flies. It seems only yesterday when your family and friends read you your first story. You were just a baby. Now you’re five years old and about to go to school. How exciting!

This may be your last book from my Imagination Library but you have to promise me you will keep on reading…Every book is a treasure and every time you open one you will meet new friends and take wonderful journeys to magical places.

I hope you have a great time in school. I bet your school will even have a library where you can check out books. You and all your friends are very special. There is no limit to what you can do or how far you can go.

The board of directors examines a position paper

Her signature, a simple Dolly, is at the end. The first time we read the message together I was apparently having a bad allergy day.

None of the rich amateurs who want to change the face of education are doing anything of this value on this scale–both intensely personal and yet broadly across the globe. I mean, imagine if Bill Gates had said, “I want to give every child a book” instead of “I want to give every child a test.”

And if there is a tiny human in your life, and they aren’t signed up, go to the program website and see if it’s operating in your neighborhood, and if so, then sign up that child.

What a fabulous, generous, powerful program. God bless Dolly Parton. We are going to miss here at this house.

Categories Character, Creativity, Ethics, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Goodness, Joy, Love

Arizona: State Supreme Court Kicks Anti-Voucher Referendum Off the Ballot

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2026 //
2

Save Our Schools Arizona enlisted thousands of volunteers to reform the state’s costly, wasteful, and destructive voucher program. They collected almost half a million signatures, but the state Supreme Court ultimately threw the measure off the ballot. This was not a decision on the merits: most members of the Supreme Court were appointed by Koch puppet, Governor Doug Ducey.

The last time vouchers were on the ballot, in 2018, they lost by an overwhelming majority. The legislature proceeded to enact a massive voucher program.

Meanwhile, most kids using the vouchers never attended public schools. Some families used the voucher money to buy frivolities. It is welfare for those who previously paid their own tuition.

Arizona SOS posted the events:

As we reported last week, the fate of the Protect Education Act was in the AZ Supreme Court’s hands. Unfortunately, the Court ruled against Protect Education, and the measure will not be on the November ballot. Here is our statement.

Thousands of SOSAZ volunteers gave this measure their all for 14 weeks, pounding the hot pavement and talking to Arizona voters. This decision has gutted all of us, knowing that the $1 billion voucher program will remain unchecked with no regard to student safety or taxpayer accountability, and knowing that the impacts of the voucher drain on public schools will mean continued school closures, teacher and staff layoffs, and program and resource cuts.

Arizona students deserve so much better – but our state is the tip of the spear when it comes to the war on public education, and we are up against powerful and deep-pocketed special interests that want to see our schools privatized, turned into unregulated private models that can pick and choose their students and profit off of our tax dollars. They don’t want Arizona voters to have a say in this $1 billion, taxpayer-funded voucher program because they know they voters are with us and would have passed Protect Education hands down.

What happened? We believe in full transparency and giving our volunteers who worked so tirelessly the full information, so here is a breakdown. We were so proud to have turned in ~420,000 signatures, which then went through the Secretary of State’s office for their review. Their office removed some signatures due to detached or un-notarized pages, invalid dates, wrong counties, etc., which was a predictable margin that left us with 387,249 signatures.

Then, a 5% sample from each county was sent to that county’s Recorder’s office to determine a validity rate that would be applied to the full county sample. Our validity rates were extremely high, due primarily to our incredible volunteers: Apache 75%, Cochise 89%, Coconino 93%, Gila 95%, Graham 93%, Greenlee 75%, La Paz 100%, Maricopa 73%, Mohave 78%, Navajo 80%, Pima 81.5%, Pinal 82%, Santa Cruz 86%, Yavapai 94%, and Yuma 61%. The statewide validity rate was determined as 75.2% — far higher than most initiatives! — which meant we were left with about 292,820 signatures.

However, the scorched-earth lawsuits from the voucher lobby proved too damaging given the numbers. The lower court threw out many signatures on ticky-tack technicalities, and the Arizona Supreme Court (packed with former Gov. Ducey’s appointees) upheld the lower court’s rulings. The voucher lobbyists suing Protect Education challenged the initiative’s validity on 47 different categories of objections, many focused on picayune details like the phone number or address a paid circulator used when registering with the Secretary of State. By throwing everything at us but the kitchen sink, it became a numbers game. In one example, the court ruled against a paid circulator, who gathered 10,419 signatures, for using a mailbox for her address on her registration form out of fear for her safety. In other words, 10,419 voters were disenfranchised on a technicality. As Gov. Hobbs pointed out, the Republican-controlled state legislature has spent years making citizens’ initiatives increasingly difficult, with strict compliance setting a nearly impossible bar.

The Courts also favored Goldwater on the issue of “duplicate” signatures – which Protect Education rightfully argued double counts the rejection of duplicates. This matters because (due to the fake petition circulated by voucher-pushers) there were over 20,000 duplicate signatures on petitions — people wanted to make sure they signed the right one. Protect Education’s argument was that if the county recorders’ reports result in invalidating ~100,000 signatures and the law says that for every signature removed for being a duplicate one valid signature must be kept, you cannot prove that happened unless every signature is checked. That wasn’t done, the math is off, and this results in a double count of many duplicates.

When all was said and done, the Court rejected around 40,000 signatures, leaving Protect Education ~12,000 signatures short, around 3% of the number we turned in.

This was not the outcome we wanted, but we hold our heads high knowing that we fought a fight that matters deeply, that we are on the right side of history, and that we had hundreds of thousands of conversations with Arizona voters about the critical importance of public education and the devastating impacts of private school vouchers. Those conversations matter, and as we pivot to effecting change in this election and flipping the state legislature, they will make the winning difference.

Prop 145 Also Kicked Off the Ballot: It is a small consolation that Prop 145 (HCR2048, the poison-pill referral designed to block Protect Ed and any effort to regulate vouchers in Arizona, disguised as “military scholarships”) was also kicked off the ballot. A lower court ruled it unconstitutional and the Arizona Supreme Court upheld that ruling this week. A “yes” vote on that measure would have enshrined ESA vouchers into our state constitution, so we are relieved.

📋👟 It’s TIME: Vouchers are not on the ballot, but electing a new legislature that will enact the Protect Education Act’s reforms IS. We must also elect pro-public ed school board members and statewide officials like Dr. Ruiz for Superintendent of Public Instruction, PLUS achieve NO votes on Props 320, 318, and 144.

There are 8 target districts to flip the state legislature to one that is pro-public education – and we only have 11 weeks left to educate voters!!! We are asking our volunteers to “adopt” a district and commit to volunteering there – whether in person (canvassing or driving canvassers), or by phonebanking virtually with us.

  • LD2 (NW Phx, Deer Valley)
  • LD4 (NE Phx, Scottsdale, Paradise Valley)
  • LD9 (Mesa+)
  • LD13 (Chandler, Sun Lakes, Gilbert)
  • LD16 (mostly Pinal)
  • LD17 (Marana, NW Tucson)
  • LD23 (Yuma, plus parts of Maricopa, Pinal, Pima)
  • LD27 (NW Phx, Glendale, Peoria)

To ADOPT a district, sign up TODAY! → bit.ly/SOSAZPledge

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Budget Cuts, Closing schools, Elections, Funding, Privatization, Vouchers

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

Trump Threatens to Sue Think-Tank for Publishing a Report He Doesn’t Like

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2026 //
2

https://share.google/DwYvniOIxZNXpV1Md

The Center for American Progress (CAP) is a centrist, Democratic-aligned think tank in D.C. It is known as a haven for high-Democrats when Republicans are in power and as an incubator for new policies. It is to the Democratic Party what the Heritage Foundation is to the Republican Party, except that the Heritage Foundation is allied with the extremists in the GOP, not the centrists.

CAP recently published a report concluding that Trump’s decision to station troops in Los Angeles, Memphis, and the District of Columbia cost $1.7 billion but had not reduced crime. Trump didn’t like that report. He didn’t agree with its conclusion.

Understand that journalists and think tanks publish articles critical of elected officials every day. Elected officials may use their bully pulpit to disagree, but they can’t stop critics from voicing their views..

That’s the way it has been, but Trump likes to break norms.

Trump has retained a lawyer and threatened to sue CAP for $5 billion.

Categories Education Reform

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

Pentagon Fires Leadership of “Stars and Stripes” for Exercising Freedom of the Press

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2026 //
3

Pete Hegseth has made clear his determination to control press coverage of his actions. He decided which media would get space in the press rooms of the Pentagon, kicking out some established journalists to make room for right-wing journalists. He tried to monitor all information coming from the Pentagon.

This week, he fired the leadership of the military’s “Stars and Stripes,” which has always enjoyed editorial independence. Hegseth can’t tolerate that. He wants total control.

Although he was a talking head on FOX, he has no respect for freedom of the press.

The New York Times reported:

The Defense Department on Friday fired the publisher and the editor in chief of Stars and Stripes, a government-funded news outlet that reports on the U.S. military, according to a senior Pentagon official and the dismissed journalists.

The firings raised questions about the Pentagon’s willingness to ensure the editorial integrity of the publication that has reported extensively on difficulties faced by military communities as the war in Iran has dragged on. The terminations came about 10 days after Stars and Stripes journalists reported on hardships that Navy sailors were facing on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier whose deployment was extended to nine months amid the war.

On Friday, the Pentagon sent termination notices to Erik Slavin, the editor in chief, and Max Lederer, the publisher, who had announced his retirement earlier this week, citing conflict with the Pentagon leadership on the paper’s direction. Lara Korte, a Middle East correspondent at the news outlet, was also fired on Friday, according to the official and a post she made on social media.

The Defense Department declined to comment. Capt. William Urban, the military deputy to the publisher who was brought to the role earlier this month, said in a letter published on Friday that his priority was to ensure “the highest quality of editorially independent reporting” at Stars and Stripes. Captain Urban’s previous role was as a senior spokesman for the Pentagon….

Why it matters:

“Stars and Stripes” is supposed to be an independent news organization for the military, not a propaganda mouthpiece for the Pentagon.

The ouster of the leadership of “Stars and Stripes” is a plain effort to muzzle the publication and turn it into a lapdog for Pete Hegseth.

This is a brief overview of how “Stars and Stripes” won its editorial independence, as told by blogger TCinLA:

In 1944, General George S. Patton Jr. was very upset with a 22-year old Sergeant who drew cartoons for “Stars and Stripes”. The Sergeant was Bill Mauldin, creator of two cartoon characters, Willie and Joe, who were considered to be the voice of American GIs on the front lines. Willie and Joe were always tired, needed a shave, were wearing the filthy fatigues they lived in on the front lines in Italy, and viewed the U.S. Army as a more threatening personal enemy than the Wehrmacht. The GIs agreed with everything they said. By 1945, the war in Europe was a slog through the coldest European winter in a century. In March 1945, General Patton summoned Mauldin to his Luxembourg headquarters, where over 45 minutes he accused Sgt. Mauldin of inciting mutiny and destroying military discipline through his unkempt character portrayals. Mauldin defended his work as a “safety valve” for combat infantrymen, resulting in a tense 45-minute standoff that ended in a stalemate.

It took an intervention by Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower to protect Mauldin and preserve the editorial independence of “Stars and Stripes,” preventing Patton from banning the paper or jailing the cartoonist. Eisenhower fiercely believed that “Stars and Stripes” should belong entirely to the front-line troops, famously declaring: “This newspaper should be the equivalent of a soldier’s hometown newspaper, with no censorship of its contents, other than for security.” Ike recognized that Willie and Joe served as a vital, non-destructive psychological safety valve. He knew that letting G.I.s laugh at their miserable conditions and blow off steam about overbearing officers actually preserved army morale. Too bad the current dildo running the Pentagon and his short-fingered thin-skinned felonious boss are too fucking stupid to understand that Eisenhower was smarter than all ten of them combined.

Originally when it was created by Congress in 1942, Start and Stripes occupied a unique place in American journalism: funded by the government, read by the military, but mandated by law to report the news independently, without editorial interference. This was because the America that could actually win wars believed US servicemen deserved real news, not Pentagon horseshit. (That happens to still be the law, should any congressional moron care to see it enforced.)

Cartoonist Bill Mauldin won a Pulitzer Prize for his work in “Stars and Stripes.”

You should read the full post by TCinLA, which reports on the recent episodes of censorship by the Trump administration, some of which have succeeded, others that have not.

Categories Censorship, Ethics, Freedom of the Press
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