Thomas Edsall: What Scholars Say About Trump’s Reign of Error and Chaos

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2025 //
12

Thomas Edsall writes a regular feature for The New York Times. In this stunning article, he recounts the views of numerous scholars about what Trump has done since his Inauguration.

This is a gift article, meaning you can open the link and finish reading the article, which is usually behind a paywall.

Edsall writes:

One thing stands out amid all the chaos, corruption and disorder: the wanton destructiveness of the Trump presidency.

The targets of President Trump’s assaults include the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America’s foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more.

J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, succinctly described his own view of the Trump presidency, writing by email that there had never

been a U.S. president who I consider even to have been destructive, let alone a president who has intentionally and deliberately set out to destroy literally every institution in America, up to and including American democracy and the rule of law. I even believe he is destroying the American presidency, though I would not say that is intentional and deliberate.

Some of the damage Trump has inflicted can be repaired by future administrations, but repairing relations with American allies, the restoration of lost government expertise and a return to productive research may take years, even with a new and determined president and Congress.

Let’s look at just one target of the administration’s vendetta, medical research. Trump’s attacks include cancellation of thousands of grants, cuts in the share of grants going to universities and hospitals and proposed cuts of 40 percent or more in the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation.

“This is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,” Jennifer Zeitzer, the deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science magazine. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, warned that cuts will “totally destroy the nation’s public health infrastructure.”

I asked scholars of the presidency to evaluate the scope of Trump’s wreckage. “The gutting of expertise and experience going on right now under the blatantly false pretext of eliminating fraud and waste,” Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote by email, “is catastrophic and may never be completely repaired.”

I asked Wilentz whether Trump was unique in terms of his destructiveness or if there were presidential precedents. Wilentz replied:

There is no precedent, not even close, unless you consider Jefferson Davis an American president. Even to raise the question, with all due respect, is to minimize the crisis we’re in and the scope of Trump et al.’s. intentions.

Another question: Was Trump re-elected to promote an agenda of wreaking havoc, or is he pursuing an elitist right-wing program created by conservative ideologues who saw in Trump’s election the opportunity to pursue their goals?

Wilentz’s reply:

Trump’s closest allies intended chaos wrought by destruction which helps advance the elite reactionary programs. Chaos allows Trump to expand his governing by emergency powers, which could well include the imposition of martial law, if he so chose.

I asked Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin, how permanent the mayhem Trump has inflicted may prove to be. “Not to be flip,” Rudalevige replied by email, “but for children abroad denied food or lifesaving medicine because of arbitrary aid cuts, the answer is already distressingly permanent.”

From a broader perspective, Rudalevige wrote:

The damage caused to governmental expertise and simple competence could be long lasting. Firing probationary workers en masse may reduce the government employment head count, slightly, but it also purged those most likely to bring the freshest view and most up-to-date skills to government service, while souring them on that service. And norms of nonpoliticization in government service have taken a huge hit.

I sent the question I posed to Wilentz to other scholars of the presidency. It produced a wide variety of answers. Here is Rudalevige’s:

The comp that comes to mind is Andrew Johnson. It’s hardly guaranteed that Reconstruction after the Civil War would have succeeded even under Lincoln’s leadership. But Johnson took action after action designed to prevent racial reconciliation and economic opportunity, from vetoing key legislation to refusing to prevent mob violence against Blacks to pardoning former members of the Confederacy hierarchy. He affirmatively made government work worse and to prevent it from treating its citizens equally.

Another question: How much is Trump’s second-term agenda the invention of conservative elites, and how much is it a response to the demands of Trump’s MAGA supporters?

“Trump is not at all an unwitting victim,” Rudalevige wrote, “but those around him with wider and more systemic goals have more authority and are better organized in pursuit of those goals than they were in the first term.”

In this context, Rudalevige continued, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025

was not just a campaign manifesto but a bulwark against the inconsistency and individualism its authors thought had undermined the effectiveness of Trump’s first term. It was an insurance policy to secure the administrative state for conservative thought and yoke it to a cause beyond Trump or even Trumpism.

The alliance with Trump was a marriage of convenience — and the Trump legacy when it comes to staffing the White House and executive branch is a somewhat ironic one, as an unwitting vehicle for an agenda that goes far beyond the personalization of the presidency.

In the past, when presidential power has expanded, Rudalevige argued,

it has been in response to crisis: the Civil War, World War I, the Depression and World War II, 9/11. But no similar objective crisis faced us. So one had to be declared — via proclamations of “invasion” and the like — or even created. In the ensuing crisis more power may be delegated by Congress. But the analogue is something like an arsonist who rushes to put out the fire he started.

One widely shared view among those I queried is that Trump has severely damaged America’s relations with traditional allies everywhere.

Mara Rudman, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, wrote in an email:

The most lasting impact of this term will be felt in the damage done to the reputation of the United States as a safe harbor where the rule of law is king and where the Constitution is as sacred a national document as any country has developed.

Through his utter disregard for the law, Trump has shown both how precious and how fragile are the rules that undergird our institutions, our economic and national security and the foundation for our democracy.

To finish this excellent article, please open the link.

Categories Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, Justice, Science, Technology, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Courts Are Our Guardrail–For Now

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2025 //
11

Heather Cox Richardson is a national treasure. she is also an exemplar of the value of studying history as a guide to today’s events and their meaning.

She writes:

Political scientist Adam Bonica noted last Friday that Trump and the administration suffered a 96% loss rate in federal courts in the month of May. Those losses were nonpartisan: 72.2% of Republican-appointed judges and 80.4% of Democratic-appointed judges ruled against the administration.

The administration sustained more losses today.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that 14 states can proceed with their lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency.” The administration had tried to dismiss the case, but Chutkan ruled the states had adequately supported their argument that “Musk and DOGE’s conduct is ‘unauthorized by any law.’” “The Constitution does not permit the Executive to commandeer the entire appointments power by unilaterally creating a federal agency…and insulating its principal officer from the Constitution as an ‘advisor’ in name only,” she wrote.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon struck down Trump’s March 27 executive order targeting the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, more commonly known as WilmerHale. This law firm angered Trump by employing Robert Mueller, the Republican-appointed special counsel who oversaw an investigation of the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

Leon, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, made his anger obvious. “[T]he First Amendment prohibits government officials from retaliating against individuals for engaging in protected speech,” Leon noted. “WilmerHale alleges that ‘[t]he Order blatantly defies this bedrock principle of constitutional law.’” Leon wrote: “I agree!” He went on to strike down the order as unconstitutional.

Today NPR and three Colorado public radio stations sued the Trump administration over Trump’s executive order that seeks to impound congressionally appropriated funds for NPR and PBS. The executive order said the public media stations do not present “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.” NPR’s David Folkenflik reported White House spokesperson Harrison Fields’s statement today that public media supports “a particular party on the taxpayers’ dime,” and that Trump and his allies have called it “left-wing propaganda.”

The lawsuit calls Trump’s executive order and attempt to withhold funding Congress has already approved “textbook retaliation.” “[W]e are not choosing to do this out of politics,” NPR chief executive officer Katherine Maher told NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly. “We are choosing to do this as a matter of necessity and principle. All of our rights that we enjoy in this democracy flow from the First Amendment: freedom of speech, association, freedom of the press. When we see those rights infringed upon, we have an obligation to challenge them.”

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis today denied the administration’s motion for a 30-day extension of the deadline for it to answer the complaint in the lawsuit over the rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man sent to El Salvador through what the administration said was “administrative error.”

Despite five hearings on the case, the administration’s lawyers didn’t indicate they needed any more time, but today—the day their answer was due—they suddenly asked for 30 more days. Xinis wrote that they “expended no effort in demonstrating good cause. They vaguely complain, in two sentences, to expending ‘significant resources’ engaging in expedited discovery. But these self-described burdens are of their own making. The Court ordered expedited discovery because of [the administration’s] refusal to follow the orders of this court as affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and the United States Supreme Court.”

Trump is well known for using procedural delays to stop the courts from administering justice, and it is notable that administration lawyers have generally not been arguing that they will win cases on the merits. Instead, they are making procedural arguments.

Meanwhile, stringing things out means making time for situations to change on the ground, reducing the effect of court decisions. Brian Barrett of Wired reported today that while Musk claims to have stepped back from the Department of Government Efficiency, his lieutenants are still spread throughout the government, mining Americans’ data. Meanwhile, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought will push to make DOGE cuts to government permanent in a dramatic reworking of the nation’s social contract. “Removing DOGE at this point would be like trying to remove a drop of food coloring from a glass of water,” Barrett writes.

Political scientist Bonica notes that there is a script for rising authoritarians. When the courts rule against the leader, the leader and his loyalists attack judges as biased and dangerous, just as Trump and his cronies have been doing.

The leader also works to delegitimize the judicial system, and that, too, we are seeing as Trump reverses the concepts of not guilty and guilty. On the one hand, the administration is fighting to get rid of the constitutional right of all persons to due process, rendering people who have not been charged with crimes to prisons in third countries. On the other, Trump and his loyalists at the Department of Justice are pardoning individuals who have been convicted of crimes.

On Monday, Trump issued a presidential pardon to former Culpeper County, Virginia, sheriff Scott Jenkins, a longtime Trump supporter whom a jury convicted of conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, and seven counts of bribery. Jared Gans of The Hill explained that Jenkins accepted more than $70,000 in bribes to appoint auxiliary deputy sheriffs, “giving them badges and credentials despite them not being trained or vetted and not offering services to the sheriff’s office.” Jenkins had announced he would “deputize thousands of our law-abiding citizens to protect their constitutional right to own firearms,” if the legislature passed “further unnecessary gun restrictions.” Jenkins was sentenced to ten years in prison.

Although Jenkins was found guilty by a jury of his peers, just as the U.S. justice system calls for, Trump insisted that Jenkins and his wife and their family “have been dragged through HELL by a Corrupt and Weaponized Biden D[epartment] O[f] J[ustice].” Jenkins, Trump wrote on social media, “is a wonderful person, who was persecuted by the Radical Left ‘monsters,’ and ‘left for dead.’ This is why I, as President of the United States, see fit to end his unfair sentence, and grant Sheriff Jenkins a FULL and Unconditional Pardon. He will NOT be going to jail tomorrow, but instead will have a wonderful and productive life.”

Today Trump gave a presidential pardon to Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive who pleaded guilty to tax crimes in 2024. The pardon arrived after Walczak’s mother donated at least $1 million to Trump. The pardon spares Walczak from 18 months in prison and $4.4 million in restitution. Also today, Trump announced plans to pardon reality TV stars Julie and Todd Chrisley, who were sentenced to 7 and 12 years in prison for conspiracy to defraud banks of $36 million and tax evasion. Their daughter spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

Bonica notes that delegitimizing the judicial system creates a permission structure for threats against judges. That, too, we are seeing.

Bonica goes on to illustrate how this pattern of authoritarian attacks on the judiciary looks the same across nations. In 2009, following a ruling that he was not immune from prosecution for fraud, tax evasion, and bribery, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi railed about “communist prosecutors and communist judges.” In 2016, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Türkiye rejected the authority of his country’s highest court and purged more than 4,000 judges. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe pushed judges to stop protests, and the judiciary collapsed. In the Philippines in 2018, Rodrigo Duterte called the chief justice defending judicial independence an “enemy,” and she was removed. In Brazil in 2021, Jair Bolsonaro threatened violence against the judges who were investigating him for corruption.

But, Bonica notes, something different happened in Israel in 2023. When Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition tried to destroy judicial independence, people from all parts of society took to the streets. A broad, nonpartisan group came together to defend democracy and resist authoritarianism.

“Every authoritarian who successfully destroyed judicial independence did so because civil society failed to unite in time,” Bonica writes. “The key difference? Whether people mobilized.”

—

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Justice, Trump

Maurice Cunningham: DFER Moves into MAGA Orbit

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2025 //
2

Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor of political science at the university of Massachusetts and a specialist on dark money in education, exposes the rightward shift of Democrats for Education Reform, as well as its continuing disintegration. DFER spent years cheerleading for charter schools and test-based teacher evaluation, but its pretense has dissolved. Cunningham said it is now closely aligned with rightwing groups.

Cunningham writes:

Democrats for Education Reform, the front operation for billionaire privateering of public education, has gone all-in for right-wing policies. This likely reflects two factors: the collapse of DFER nationally, and an opportunistic pivot to Trump’s MAGA regime.

DFER was established upon the premise, according to its hedge fund co-founder Whitney Tilson, that it would spend lavishly as part of an “inside job” to turn the Democratic Party away from teachers unions and public education and toward charter schools. Its CEO Jorge Elorza has just announced the organization will race even further to the right: DFER will now “Explore innovative funding models such as education savings accounts (ESAs), vouchers, and tax credit programs.” (emphasis in original). This is the program of billionaires Linda McMahon, Betsy DeVos–and Donald Trump.

Judging by the number of high-level staff fleeing from DFER, Elorza has been driving the operation into the ground. Jessical Giles, who served for six years as Washington, D.C. executive director recently resigned because DFER’s policies “no longer align with my values and vision.” 

Other DFER leaders have complained of the group’s gallop toward political extremism. In a complaint filed in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston, former Massachusetts executive director Mary Tamer wrote that Elorza retaliated against her for “inquiring about Mr. Elorza’s decision to join a Koch-funded right-wing coalition that seemed contrary to the organization’s best interests and mission.” The right-wing coalition seems to be the No More Lines Coalition, which includes not only Koch aligned organizations but Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Childrenand the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Elorza has been a guest speaker at the Charles Koch Institute. Tamer is seeking damages against  DFER, and the allied Education Reform Now and Education Reform Now Advocacy for gender and age discrimination.

Tamer’s complaint alleges a number of defections by key DFER leaders. Within months of Elorza’s arrival COO Shakira Petit left, and CFO Sheri Adebiyi was fired. Board Chair Marlon Marshall and Charles Ledley, a co-founder, resigned. The complaint further alleges that “Ms. Tamer is one of several women in leadership positions who have been terminated or pushed out by the Defendants.” That list includes Connecticut state director Amy Dowell and Jen Walmer of Colorado, a close adviser on education to Governor Jared Polis and one of DFER’s most effective advocates.

Despite the name, DFER has raised millions over the years from Republican-backing billionaires. The Walton Family Foundation, the non-profit corporation of the notoriously anti-union family that owns WalMart, has sustained DFER. Rupert Murchoch, who regards K-12 education as a $500 billion market gave DFER at least $1 million, apparently in the hopes the operation would help his ed tech company. 

Elorza’s announcement of DFER’s shift leans on the “market-based solutions” language of neo-liberal privateering, but the reality is that neo-liberalism is not where the action is in 2025. Families for Excellent Schools, at one time a privateering powerhouse, collapsed in 2018. In 2011 Stand for Children president Jonah Edelman boasted his organization had nine state affiliates and would grow to twenty states by the end of 2015. In 2025 Stand for Children is hanging on in seven states. 

Since its 2007 founding, DFER has claimedchapters in nineteen different states plus D.C. and a teachers group. By February 2025 only four chapters remained. In January 2023, DFER listed thirteen national staffers. By February 2025, it had only four. As of May 2025, the “States” and “National Staff” links on DFER’s webpage have disappeared. An Elorza biography lives on. 

The action now is with extremist organizations like the Koch and Leonard Leo aligned Parents Defending Education and Heritage Foundation offspring Moms for Liberty. 

Self-described “school choice evangelist” Corey DeAngelis accurately sees that DFER has joined with the far right on education privateering.  DeAngelis was the face of Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children  until he was fired after revelations he had starred in gay sex porn films. He is now a “senior fellow” at the American Culture Project, which is tied to the Koch network through the Franklin News Foundation. DeAngelis is cheering DFER’s embrace of the Republican education privateering platform. 

What has DFER really joined here? The end game was spelled out in a 2017 memorandumfrom the secretive Council for National Policy to Trump and DeVos: abandon public education in favor of “free-market private schools, church schools and home schools.” 

That is your “choice.” 

DFER has never been a membership organization—there are few real Democrats involved. To be sure, it has gotten donations from charter favoring Democratic billionaires as well as an array of Republican privateers, plus millions of dollars in untraceable dark money. DFER’s organizational drift and rank political opportunism have now cemented its bond with Trump’s MAGA regime.

Maurice T. Cunningham is a retired professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization(2021).

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corruption, Dark Money, Democrats, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Reform, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Hoax, Koch Brothers

U.S. Navy Restores Almost All of the DEI Banned Books

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2025 //
11

The U.S. Navy and the other branches of the military were told by order of Trump and Hegseth to remove all books on the subjects of diversity, equity, and inclusion. In practice, this meant elimination of books about race, racism, and sexual orientation.

These were the search terms used to identify offending titles:

The 20 official search terms included in the May 9 memo included: affirmative action; allyship; anti-racism; critical race theory; discrimination; diversity in the workplace; diversity, equity, and inclusion; gender affirming care; gender dysphoria; gender expression; gender identity; gender nonconformity; gender transition; transgender military personnel; transgender people; transsexualism; transsexuals; and white privilege.

Using these identifiers, the Navy took 381 books out of circulation and off its shelves.

However, a second review restored all but about 20 of the titles.

In a major reversal, almost all the 381 books that the U.S. Naval Academy removed from the school’s libraries have been returned to the bookshelves after a new review using the Pentagon’s standardized search terms for diversity, equity and inclusion titles found about 20 books that need to be removed pending a future review by a Department of Defense panel, according to a defense official.

The reversal comes after a May 9 Pentagon memo set Wednesday as the date by which the military services were to submit and remove book titles from the libraries of their military educational institutions that touch on diversity, race, and gender issues using the Pentagon’s specific search terms.

Prior to the Pentagon memo standardizing search terms, the Navy used its own terms that identified 381 titles, including titles like “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi, “Bodies in Doubt” by Elizabeth Reis, and “White Rage” by Carol Anderson.

Frankly, I have no idea why the list of banned books was pared down from 381 to only 20. The news story doesn’t explain.

Here is the original list of banned books. Most are about race and racism. The others are about gender and sexuality.

If the military is strong enough to fight, aren’t they strong enough to read about challenging topics?

Categories Censorship, Gender, Race, Racism, Trump

Trump Threatens to Transfer Harvard’s Billions for Scientific Research to Trade Schools, Demands Names of Foreign Students

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2025 //
13

Trump is a petty man who is filled with rage, grievance, and a passion for retribution. His current target is Harvard University because the nation’s most prestigious university told him no. Harvard’s President Alan Garber said it would not allow the federal government to control its curriculum, its admissions, and its hiring policies. No.

Every Cabinet department has pulled research grants to Harvard. Now he warns he might turn the billions that were going to medical and scientific research and hand it over to trade schools.

He would rather stop researchers who are trying to find cures for cancer, tuberculosis, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and other diseases than back down on his efforts to stifle academic freedom and his vendetta against Harvard.

I don’t know about you, but I would rather see the federal government fund the search for a cure for MS than withdraw the funding. If he wants to fund trade schools, why should he do so at the expense of crucial research?

He wrote on Truth Social yesterday:

“I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” Trump said in a post on social media. “What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!”

Meanwhile, Trump dreamed up another way to harass Harvard during the hours when he couldn’t get to sleep. He demanded that Harvard give him a list containing the names and countries of origin of all its foreign students. Harvard has nearly 7,000 foreign students. Why? What will he do with those names? Will he say they are spies and try again to expel them? Funny thing is he already has all their names and countries. They were registered when they applied for a visa. It’s all a campaign of endless vengeance by a petty, bitter man.

Categories Academic Freedom, Economy, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Health, Higher Education, Research, Science, Stupid, Trump

Judge Tosses Lawsuit Against Reading Reseacher Lucy Calkins, Other Reading Researchets

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2025 //
28

For many years, “Balanced Literacy ” was considered the gold standard of reading instruction; it encouraged students to use context clues, Then came the fervor for the “Science of Reading,” which emphasized phonics. The reading wars dominated the education world for nearly two decades. Reading instruction across the nation changed to reflect the pro-phonics emphasis.

But then a group of parents went to court to close down the teaching of Balanced Literacy, and they sued Dr. Calkins. They blamed her for students’ test scores and their poor reading skills.

Sarah Schwartz of Education Week reported:

A first-of-its-kind lawsuit against three influential reading professors and their controversial literacy curricula has been dismissed, after a U.S. District Court declined to wade into the murky landscape of curriculum quality and education research. 

Last year, a group of parents filed the lawsuit, which alleged that the professors and their publishers used “deceptive and fraudulent marketing” to sell their popular reading materials.

The case, brought by two parents from separate families in Massachusetts, centers on two sets of reading programs, one created by Lucy Calkins, an education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the other by reading researchers Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, of Lesley University and The Ohio State University, respectively. 

The parents argued that the creators, publishers, and promoters of the curricula—Calkins’ Units of Study for Teaching Reading and a suite of Fountas & Pinnell branded materials—violated consumer protection law in the state by making false claims about the research supporting their programs.

Publishers said that the programs were backed by research even though, the plaintiffs claimed, they omitted or diminished the role of phonics instruction, which decades of reading research has demonstrated is a key component of teaching young children how to decode print.

On Thursday, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts determined that the court could not grant a decision in the case, because it would require passing judgement on the quality of the reading programs in question—a task that the court said it is not equipped to perform.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Education Reform, John King, Librarians

Trump’s Kennedy Center Agenda Features Drag Artists

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2025 //
4

The Daily Beast wrote with amusement that the Trump-branded Kennedy Center in D.C. has listed its coming attractions, and several of them feature drag performers. This, despite Trump denouncing the previous management for permitting anything that included drag actors.

Some shows that were originally scheduled cancel to protest the Trump takeover, including “Hamilton” and the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater.

The new schedule includes one of Trump’s favorite shows, “Les Miserables.” You have to wonder whether he knows what the show is about.

But others have men playing women! Does he know?

The Daily Beast reported:

The Kennedy Center has announced its upcoming season lineup. For a theater that has supposedly banned performers wearing drag, its shows include an awful lot of men dressed as women. 

When President Donald Trump purged the Kennedy Center’s bipartisan board of directors in February and took over as chairman of the new board, he announced an immediate ban on events featuring performers in drag.

“Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP,” he wrote in a Truth Social post announcing a return to a “Golden Age in Arts and Culture” for the storied theater.

And yet the 2025-26 season announced Monday will include Chicago, Moulin Rouge! Mrs. Doubtfire, and Monty Python’s Spamalot, all of which typically feature performers in drag, The New York Times reported.

Mrs. Doubtfire

The entire plot of Mrs. Doubtfire revolves around a man dressing as an elderly woman in order to pose as a nanny and spend time with his children after he and his wife divorce. 

Spamalot pokes fun at the medieval practice of male actors playing female parts with a number of drag bits.

In Chicago, a character named Mary Sunshine is typically a male soprano in drag whose wig is dramatically removed to emphasize a character’s assertion that things are “not always as they appear to be.”

And Moulin Rouge! features a literal drag queen named Baby Doll who is one of the courtesans performing alongside Satine at the Moulin Rouge cabaret.

Moulin Rouge and Chicago are sexually charged.

Trump said the new program would feature “family-friendly” shows. Hahahaha. I have seen all of these shows. Some of them are definitely NOT for children.

Categories Art, Arts Education, Censorship, Gender, Trump

DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! The “Beautiful” Tax Bill Guts the Rule of Law!

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2025 //
12

That “One Big Beautiful Bill” is supposed to be about the budget and taxes but tucked into it are a variety of dangerous items that Trump partisans hope will go unnoticed.

The most dangerous item of all undercuts the rule of law.

Liz Cheney and Adam Kinziger noticed it. They posted this warning on Twitter:

Our blog contributor called Quickwrit noticed the innocuous but dangerous insertion into the bill.

Quickwrit write here:

DANGER!!! DANGER!!! DANGER!!!

Buried at the bottom of Page 562 in the Republicans’ 1,116-page “Big Beautiful Bill” is a provision that will end all federal court challenges to anything that Trump orders and that will allow Trump to declare null and void all previous rulings against his orders.

It will be the beginning of genuine dictatorial rule.

The provision on Page 562 invokes enforcement of Federal Rules of Civil Procedures Rule 65(c) which says that a federal court can ONLY issue an injunction AFTER a plaintiff has posted a bond to cover the costs of damages that an injunction could have on the party against which the injunction was issued if subsequent appeals overturn the injunction.

Because Trump and his federal agencies could claim billions of dollars in damages if an injunction is overturned by the pro-Trump U.S. Supreme Court, there is NO ONE WHO CAN AFFORD to seek any future injunction against Trump’s orders or those of his agencies.

IN ADDITION: Rule 65(c) will be applied RETROACTIVELY to all the injunctions issued so far against Trump and his agencies, and all those injunctions will be removed because no bond was posted with any of them.

THE EFFECT WILL BE that everything that has been blocked by the federal courts will be unleashed and there will be NO FUTURE INJUNCTIONS issued against ANYTHING that Trump orders to be done.

Even if none of the many other odious things are removed from the Big Beautiful Bill, this provision to invoke Federal Court Rule 65(c) MUST BE ELIMINATED or there will be no future restraints on Trump. He will be free to dictate anything he wants with NO COURT INTERFERENCE. Rule by law will end in America.

Categories Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Justice, Republicans, Trump

Trump Posted Unhinged Ravings for Memorial Day

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2025 //
48

It is Trump’s style to insult anyone who disagrees with him. Ever. He can never speak of “the honorable opposition” or his esteemed colleague with whom he disagrees. No, anyone who disagrees is a radical Marxist or a stupid fool or whatever epithet comes to mind.

Here is his Memorial Day greeting to his fellow Americans and to those men and women who gave their lives to protect our country and its ideals:

Categories Trump, Tyranny

Bruce Springsteen: “No Retreat!”

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2025 //
6

While big corporate media are falling all over themselves trying to placate Trump, one guy says “Nope, won’t do it.” Bruce Springsteen.

The head of CBS News and the producer of “60 Minutes” quit rather than agree to settle with Trump, who sued “60 Minutes” for $10 billion for editing its interview with Kamala Harris. Trump called it election interference but he surely knows that interviews are always edited down. Besides, he won the election, so how was he “damaged”? Shari Redstone, who is the CEO of Paramount Global, which owns CBS, needs federal approval for a corporate merger that will net her billions. Will she stand up to Trump? Not likely.

Brian Stelter of CNN reported that The Boss is not afraid of Trump. Trump is going nuts. He thinks he should be able to intimidate everyone.

Stelter writes:

‘No retreat, baby, no surrender’

Andrew Kirell writes: Bruce Springsteen has no surrender. For the first two nights of his Europe 2025 tour, Bruce delivered scripted remarks railing against a “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous” Trump administration. And after both shows, he was the subject of Trump’s fury on social media. Following the first night, Trump called the Boss a “dried out prune” and demanded he “KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT.” After the second show, the president threatened a “major investigation” into Springsteen (and Beyoncé and Oprah Winfreyand Bono). 

Last night in Manchester, England, Springsteen went for round three. He did not mention Trump’s tirade; instead, he repeated the speeches verbatim and sent a clear message by switching up the night’s opening song. This time it was “No Surrender.”

>> This morning, Springsteen dug in even further, surprise-releasing a six-song live EP recorded the first night of the tour, including most of his anti-Trump speeches.

>> Neil Young jumped into the fray on Tuesday to call out Trump’s threats against Springsteen and other musicians. “I am not scared of you. Neither are the rest of us,” Young wrote on his website. “STOP THINKING ABOUT WHAT ROCKERS ARE SAYING. Think about saving America from the mess you made.”

Categories Character, Ethics, Resistance, Trump
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