Trump upends tradition of nonpartisan military,
alters priorities of U.S. government
(part 6 of a series, updated 10-20-25)
• ‘Dangerous Cities,’ the Military, Trump and the Founding Fathers (Helene Cooper, NY Times, 10-1-25)
"The U.S. armed services have long sought to preserve the tradition of a nonpartisan military. President Trump’s language at a gathering of generals upends the principle of a nonpartisan military. Mr. Trump’s suggestion that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military” is in tension with a core principle that the country’s armed services have long sought to preserve — that the military should be nonpartisan.
---The Army Is NOT WITH TRUMP (Barry Gander, Substack, 6-15-25) The Trump Parade army was NOT marching in step. Observers call this “desertion in place”. They are not standing up for the president. They signed up to defend the Constitution. The entire ETHOS of the Armed Forces prevents it from serving a King.
---Trump Comes for Chicago (The Weekly Sift, 10-6-25) "Saturday, the regime announced it was sending 300 federalized National Guard troops to Illinois. Governor Pritzker says the troops will come from Texas. The governor has sued to stop this invasion, making claims similar to the ones that have been successful in Portland."
"I have to wonder what troops can do that other federal agents aren't already doing. Agents from ICE, the Border Patrol, the FBI, BATF, and DHS have been wearing military fatigues, sporting heavy weapons, and conducting military-style attacks.
"Whatever this is about, it's not public safety."
---Oregon governor calls Trump’s actions ‘an abuse of power and threat to our democracy’ (Geoff Bennett, Elizabeth Summers, Matt Loffman, Ali Schmitz, and Alexa Gold, PBS News Hour, 10-6-25) President Trump’s plan to deploy National Guard troops to U.S. cities is setting up a new showdown in federal courts over the limits of his authority. Illinois sued the administration to stop plans to send in 400 troops from Texas. It comes after a separate judge blocked Trump from sending California’s National Guard to Oregon. Geoff Bennett discussed more with Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek.
---Judge Again Blocks Guard Deployment as Trump Expands His Targets (Shawn Hubler, Anna Griffin and Eric Schmitt, NY Times, 10-5-25)
"A federal judge on Sunday night blocked the Trump administration from deploying hundreds of out-of-state National Guard troops to Oregon, even as President Trump turned to the Texas guard in a widening hunt for military forces to send to Democratic cities."
---How Washington Became a Testing Ground for ICE (Hamed Aleaziz, Brent McDonald and Amogh Vaz, reporting from Washington, 10-1-25)
"A series of arrests captured on video reveal how immigration officers have worked with other law enforcement agencies to identify migrants during stops for minor infractions.
"A man from El Salvador was stopped for allegedly driving a landscaping truck through federal parkland. A Honduran man was pulled over when the police said he ran a stop sign as his family left a local park. A Jordanian man was detained while working in a food truck on the National Mall during a crackdown on unlicensed vendors."
---Why Trump Turned to the Sewer (Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, 10-20-25)
"The president’s disturbing, excremental propaganda campaign.
"The majority of Americans object to President Donald Trump’s politicization of justice, his militarization of ICE, and his usurpation of congressional power. Eventually some of those presidential supporters and enablers might, like Jäger the border guard, be persuaded to side with the majority and help bring this assault on the rule of law to an end.
"The people in the White House know this too, and they reacted accordingly. Trump, the successor to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, posted an AI-created video of himself as a fighter pilot, wearing a crown, flying over an American city, and dumping shit onto American protesters. The point was not subtle: Trump wanted to mock and smear millions of Americans, literally depicting them covered in excrement, precisely so that none of his own supporters would want to join them."
• How many wars has President Trump really ended? (Jake Horton & Nick Beake, BBC Verify, 10-15-25)
President Trump has claimed that he has "ended 8 wars in just 8 months" in a social media post with the title "the president of peace". His latest addition to his list of wars "ended" is the two-year conflict between Israel and Hamas.
The other seven were between Israel and Iran, Pakistan and India, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Thailand and Cambodia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Serbia and Kosovo.
A number of these conflicts lasted just days, although they were the result of long-standing tensions - and one of them had no fighting to end. It is also unclear whether some of the peace agreements will last.
BBC Verify has taken a closer look at the conflicts and how much credit the president can take for ending them. Clearly, you can't take Trump's boasts as facts.
• How the Capitalism of the 1980s Created Donald Trump’s Theory of the State ( Kim Phillips-Fein via The Nation, Bunk History, 10-4-25) The proliferation of privately held companies during the Reagan years laid the foundations for Trump’s approach to government. Trump's politics and his appeal are not only inspired by far-right ideologies, culture-war passions, age-old xenophobic prejudices, and a long-standing Republican animus toward the welfare state; they emerge out of a capitalist order that has ceased to be constrained by any of the institutional, intellectual, or professional limits that defined corporate capitalism in an earlier era.
The financiers, tech bros, and megalomaniacal entrepreneurs of today's Republican Party are no longer accountable to the bureaucratic corps of middle managers that populated the mid-20th-century corporations or to large numbers of external shareholders. The authority of the private executive over the firm that he owns is echoed in Trump's habit of governing by executive order, his penchant for making "deals," and his ability to win the allegiance of tech billionaires like Elon Musk, who also believe in the need to free corporate founders from the hassle of answering to regulators or shareholders.
• The Presidential Fitness Test Won’t Make America ‘Tough’ Again (Shelly McKenzie via Zócalo Public Square, Bunk History, 10-23-25) The Trump administration Is borrowing from a failed cold-war era playbook.
• The Historical Precedents for Trump’s Gaza Plan (Heather Penatzer via Compact, Bunk History, 10-10-25)
• ‘The smoking gun’ that points to Trump’s cognitive decline (YouTube, Psychologist Analyses, Times Radio) The IQ test he took was dementia screening, not cognitive tests. Dr John GartnerSigns of his decline: Malignant narcissism, psychopathy, paranoia, sadism. Impulsivity. Signs of dementia: Cognitive problems. He wanders. His language has deteriorated; he has trouble completing a thought. Tangential thinking. Disinhibition.
• Donald Trump’s Deep-State Wrecking Ball (Andy Kroll, New Yorker, 10-17-25) Co-published as The Shadow President with ProPublica.
"Russell Vought is using the White House budget office to lay waste to the federal bureaucracy—firing workers, decimating agencies, and testing the rule of law.
'From the wholesale gutting of federal agencies to the ongoing government shutdown, Russell Vought has drawn the road map for Trump’s second term. Vought has consolidated power to an extent that insiders say they feel like “he is the commander in chief.”
"What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House’s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an AI-generated video that depicted his budget director — who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or canceled $26 billion in funding for infrastructure and clean-energy projects in blue states — as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C.
“We work for the president of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the OMB told me. But right now “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.”
“DOGE is underneath the OMB,” Michelle Martin, an official with Citizens for Renewing America, a grassroots group founded by Vought, said in May, according to a video of her remarks. “Honestly, a lot of what Elon began pinpointing ... was at the direction of Russ.”
• Trump’s DEI Executive Order: Only the Beginning of Attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (Mel Wilson, National Association of Social Workers, 10-22-24)
'President Trump’s DEI Executive Order has an official title of “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” That title leaves nothing to the imagination about how deeply the Trump and his administration loathes DEI as a concept and its objectives. Furthermore, the use of venomous terms such as “demonstrated immense public waste and shameful discrimination”—in the preamble of the document—to describe former President Biden’s DEI program reflects a purposeful distortion of the historic nature of DEI as envisioned in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. :To that point, is the manipulative distortion of the meaning of “discrimination” by suggesting—in the context of the DEI Executive Order—that DEI gives special preferences to people of color, women, LGBTQ+ and others in hiring processes. In the thinking of anti-DEI advocates, excluding whites from such “preferences” is tantamount to discriminating against whites. In that racial discrimination is a violation of civil rights laws, the far-right have reasoned that DEI is discriminatory."
• The Power Map of the Trump Regime (Robert Reich, 10-17-25) Who really works for whom?
• Trump’s illegal executions (Robert Reich,10-24-25) You or I could be next. The United States is now executing people on the high seas whom Trump calls “enemy combatants.” He’s doing so without a declaration of war, without input from Congress, and without any findings that they pose a threat to the United States. At this moment, Secretary of Defense (or Secretary of War, as Trump prefers) Pete Hegseth is positioning warships, including an aircraft carrier, and planes in waters off Latin America.
Hegseth has already bombed 10 boats, eight of them in the Caribbean and two others this week in the eastern Pacific. So far, the death toll is 43.
It is illegal, under domestic and international law, to deliberately target civilians who are not directly participating in hostilities — even if they are suspected criminals. Now, Trump is summarily executing people suspected of being drug dealers, without any proof. Trump claims that the attacks are not murder because he has “determined” that the boats are smuggling drugs, that they are being run by drug cartels, that drug trafficking by cartels constitutes an armed attack on the United States, and that the United States is now engaged in a formal armed conflict with the cartels. As a result, he reasons, the boat crews are “enemy combatants” and can be executed.
What if Trump “determines” that anyone he dislikes — immigrants, Democrats, student protesters — is an “enemy combatant?” He has already referred to the “enemy within” the United States — in characterizing domestic political opponents, including government officials, critics, activists, and protesters.
• Listen To The Jeffrey Epstein Tapes: ‘I Was Donald Trump’s Closest Friend’ (Hugh Dougherty, The Daily Beast, 9-2-24, updated 2-27-25, PDF from docs.house.gov) Quite a bit here about Trump's sex life. 'Startlingly for a man who became one of the world’s most notorious sex offenders, Epstein on the tapes offers a damning judgment of Trump, telling [author Michael] Wolff, “The moral compass just does not exist.” '
• Anatomy of Two Giant Deals: The U.A.E. Got Chips. The Trump Team Got Crypto Riches. (Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany, Bradley Hope, Tripp Mickle and Paul Mozur, NY Times, 9-15-25) A lucrative transaction involving the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm and an agreement giving the Emiratis access to A.I. chips were connected in ways that have not been previously reported.
• Trump and the Presidency That Wouldn’t Shut Up (Jill Lepore, New Yorker, 10-27-25) His posts and rants are omnipresent, ugly, and unhinged. Don’t look to history to make it make sense.
• The Race to Save America’s Democracy (Garry Kasparov, The Atlantic, 9-28-25) Trump’s administration may seem chaotic, but Americans should not take the integrity of next year’s elections for granted. Donald Trump likes to say he doesn’t actually lose elections–only the “rigged” ones. Such comments are not mere bluster, like the president’s boasts about golf. They are threats to democracy, which is more fragile than many Americans may realize. "Although Trump himself may operate on instinct, his more disciplined advisers are masterminding a steady accumulation of power. The very bedrock of American democracy—free and fair elections—is under threat. Already there is talk of redrawing district maps, banning mail-in ballots and electronic-voting machines, and rewriting voting rules. If the administration is allowed to continue on this path, Americans should not take the integrity of next year’s midterms for granted."
• ‘Bow to the Emperor’: We Asked 50 Legal Experts About the Trump Presidency (Emily Bazelon, NY Times, 10-6-25) Before the election, we surveyed the legal establishment about what a second Trump term could mean for the rule of law. A year later, they’re very, very worried.
In Trump’s Justice Department, "retribution has been institutionalized. In February, Bondi created a “weaponization working group” to investigate “abuses of the criminal justice process.” She instructed the group to look into people who prosecuted Trump.To the dismay of some of our respondents, the head of the working group, Ed Martin, promised to smear the reputations of any targets he couldn’t indict. “In a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed,” Martin said in May.
Before Trump’s re-election, many of our respondents expressed faith in the government’s system of checks and balances to do what it historically had done: provide a necessary corrective to the potential overreach of any other branch. Now all 50 believe that Congress... is doing very little — or nothing at all — to fulfill its role of restraining the president.
“The greatest threat,” said Stuart Gerson, an assistant attorney general for President George H.W. Bush, “comes with the probability that the president is on the road to assuming autocratic powers and that the Congress has allowed its countervailing constitutional powers to wither.”
• With no takers yet, White House meets with colleges still weighing an agreement with Trump (Associated Press, 10-17-25)
The University of Virginia turned down a proposal from President Donald Trump's administration that invited selected universities to make commitments aligned with Trump's political priorities in exchange for favorable access to research funding. It was the latest effort by Trump’s administration to bring to heel prestigious universities that conservatives describe as hotbeds of liberalism.
• When Authoritarianism Looms, Old Friends Reunite (NY Times, Opinion, 9-11-25)
David Brooks, E.J. Dionne Jr. and Robert Siegel take a temperature check on Trump’s second term. "To me, what we're looking at is not a momentary shift to authoritarianism, but a generational shift toward savagery. What I worry about is the complete deterioration of the global order.
• Trump's power to deploy National Guard, explained (Jaclyn Diaz, Juliana Kim, Morning Edition, NPR, 10-7-25)
President Trump is bucking tradition and legal precedent in pushing to deploy the National Guard to Democratic-led cities such as Portland, Ore., and Chicago due to what he says is rampant crime and to support his crackdown on illegal immigration.
'Legal experts say Trump is testing the limits of presidential authority by using the rarely used statute to deploy federal troops to American cities without state approval. And the legal tactic is getting mixed results in federal court.
"It's not about whether the federal government should have this authority at all. It's about whether the federal government should be able to use these authorities based on what really appear to be completely contrived claims about the situation on the ground," said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. "This law hasn't been used in this way before, by any previous president."
• My travels through Chicago: teargas, resistance and Trump’s big immigration crackdown (Oliver Laughland, The Guardian, 10-3-25)
The Broadview immigration processing centre, a two-storey brick structure in the Chicago suburbs, is "a focal point in the resistance to Donald Trump’s recent immigration crackdown in the city, portentously dubbed Operation Midway Blitz. It is here, following arrest, that hundreds of people targeted for deportation are brought to languish in squalid conditions before being sent to detention centres around the country."
"Chicago is among the handful of Democratic strongholds where Donald Trump has pledged to deploy the military amid false claims of rising crime."
And other features of Trump's second term:
• I’ve been through government shutdowns. This one is radically different. (Robert Reich, 10-2-25) "There have been eight shutdowns since 1990. Trump has now presided over four. But this shutdown — the one that began yesterday morning — is radically different.
"The big ugly fundamentally altered the priorities of the United States government. It cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act — with the result that health insurance premiums for tens of millions of Americans will soar starting in January.
"The big ugly also cut nutrition assistance and environmental protection, while bulking up immigration enforcement and cutting the taxes of wealthy Americans and big corporations."
As a practical matter, the U.S. government has been “shut down” for over eight months, since Trump took office a second time.
Trump and the sycophants surrounding him — such as Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and, before him, Elon Musk and his DOGE — have had no compunctions about shutting down parts of the government they don’t like — such as USAID.
In fact, the eagerness of Trump and his lapdogs over the last eight months to disregard the will of Congress and close whatever they want of the government offers another reason why Democrats shouldn’t cave in.
• A Great Unraveling Is Underway (Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times, 3-11-25) And to repeat:
"If you are confused by President Trump’s zigzagging strategies on Ukraine, tariffs, microchips or a host of other issues, it is not your fault. It’s his. What you are seeing is a president who ran for re-election to avoid criminal prosecution and to get revenge on people he falsely accused of stealing the 2020 election. He never had a coherent theory of the biggest trends in the world today and how to best align America with them to thrive in the 21st century. That is not why he ran.
"And once he won, Trump brought back his old obsessions and grievances — with tariffs and Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky and Canada — and staffed his administration with an extraordinary number of fringe ideologues who met one overriding criterion: loyalty first and always to Trump and his whims over and above the Constitution, traditional values of American foreign policy or basic laws of economics.
"The result is what you are seeing today: a crazy cocktail of on-again-off-again tariffs, on-again-off-again assistance for Ukraine, on-again-off-again cuts in government departments and programs both domestic and foreign — conflicting edicts all carried out by cabinet secretaries and staff members who are united by a fear of being tweeted about by Elon Musk or Trump should they deviate from whatever policy line emerged unfiltered in the last five minutes from our Dear Leader’s social media feed."
'• Anatomy of Two Giant Deals: The U.A.E. Got Chips. The Trump Team Got Crypto Riches. (Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany Bradley, Hope Tripp Mickle, and Paul Mozur, Reporting from Washington, New York, London, Dubai, San Francisco and Taiwan, NY Times, 9-15-25)
"A lucrative transaction involving the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm and an agreement giving the Emiratis access to A.I. chips were connected in ways that have not been previously reported. At the heart of their relationship are two multibillion-dollar deals. One involved a crypto company founded by the Witkoff and the Trump families that benefited both financially. The other involved a sale of valuable computer chips that benefited the Emirates economically.
"While there is no evidence that one deal was explicitly offered in return for the other, the confluence of the two agreements is itself extraordinary. Taken together, they blurred the lines between personal and government business and raised questions about whether U.S. interests were served.
• Trump Administration Litigation Tracker (Lawfare Media) This project includes two tables that follow legal challenges to the actions from the Trump administration.
Email tips@lawfaremedia.org to submit a case or correction.
• Really? Qatar gets its own air force facility inside the United States? Why? (Robert Reich, 10-11-25)
At a time when Trump has all but declared war on the “enemy within” America, and is busy kicking immigrants out of the nation and isolating America from the rest of the world — what does the Trump family get out of its deal to give Qatar its own facility inside the nation?
"Trump has claimed that Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, is “very smart.” That whales are being killed by windmills. That he won all 50 states in 2020. That he defeated Barack Obama in 2016. That the outgoing chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed. The most telling evidence of Trump’s growing dementia is found in his paranoid thirst for revenge, on which he is centering his entire presidential campaign."
• My Lai, William Calley, and Donald Trump (Eugene L Meyer, Substack, 9-25-25)
"[T]he U.S. military under Trump administration orders summarily executed 17 alleged drug traffickers on three boats in the high seas off the coast of Venezuela, with whom we are not at war, despite Trump’s assertions to the contrary....
"The U.S. military members who carried out the attacks did so at the direction of Trump and [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth, who has previously stated that, regardless of the lawful rules of engagement, shoot to kill....
"Hegseth has eviscerated the corps of lawyers – JAG (for Judge Advocate Generals) – whose job it is to advise the military on the rule of law, including whether presidential orders are legal. Under U.S. law and a long line of precedents, our military must adhere to a strict code of conduct on engagements with civilians as well as enemy combatants.
"In his confirmation hearing, Hegseth complained about “burdensome rules of engagement.”
As a young lieutenant in the National Guard in Iraq in 2005, David Ignatius has written in The Washington Post, “his platoon was advised not to shoot someone carrying a rocket-propelled grenade unless it was ‘pointed at you with the intent to fire.’” Hegseth told his platoon, “That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed,” and ordered them to “destroy the threat.”
..."More than half a century ago, the military prosecuted and convicted Lt. William Calley for the murder of “not less than 22” unarmed Vietnamese in the hamlet of My Lai on March 16, 1968. In December 1973 the conviction was upheld in a 2-1 decision by the U.S. Court of Military Appeals, a mostly obscure tribunal that I covered then for The Washington Post.
"Calley had many defenders, but his crimes once exposed were also widely condemned. Even though his sentence was reduced, he was never pardoned. The current Supreme Court has granted Trump (and possibly those following his directives) virtual absolute immunity. Unlike in Calley’s case, today no such legal reckoning is likely to occur."
• Scientists Say Trump Distorts Facts on Autism, Tylenol, and Vaccines (Amy Maxmen, Clinical Advisor, 9-25-25) Scientists involved in autism research respond to Pres. Trump's claim that Tylenol causes autism. Helen Tager-Flusberg, director of the Center for Autism Research Excellence at Boston University, called Trump’s comments dangerous. Fevers can harm the mother and the developing fetus, she said, adding that fevers are more strongly associated with autism than Tylenol.
Soon after Robert F. Kennedy Jr was confirmed as health secretary, he called autism “preventable,” pointed to “environmental toxins,” and contradicted the results of a CDC study finding that the main driver of rising autism diagnoses was that doctors increasingly recognize the disorder. The Trump administration is eroding scientists’ ability to probe the safety of pharmaceuticals, said Robert Steinbrook, head of health research at Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer protection group.
• Trump, RFK Jr. distort facts on autism, Tylenol and vaccines, scientists say: "Sick to my stomach" (Amy Maxmen, CBS News, 9-23-25) Mr. Trump and Kennedy promised this year that under their leadership the federal government would swiftly figure out what causes autism. Scientists who work in the field have been skeptical, noting that decades of research has shown that no single drug, chemical, or other environmental factor is strongly linked to the developmental disorder. In addition, both Mr. Trump and Kennedy have repeated the scientifically debunked notion that childhood vaccines may cause autism.
---As the administration focuses on autism, many in the community say they need support, not a ‘cure’ (Amanda Musa, Lily Hautau, Nayeli Jaramillo-Plata, Gordon Ebanks, CNN, 9-24-25) The president’s claims are raising concerns among some people with autism and their loved ones, who say his remarks cast blame on mothers, re-stigmatize those with autism and ignore the support needed for families and individuals dealing with autism.
• DOE to drop accessibility requirement for buildings receiving federal funds (Facebook post, 7-17-25)
On top of everything else that's going on in America, the DOE (Department of Energy) said that they would no longer be requiring *federally funded* buildings to meet accessibility standards. They rescinded a long standing rule under section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that required any buildings receiving federal funding to be accessible and said that it was *"UNNECESSARY AND UNDULY BURDENSOM"*.
Disability-rights advocates say the agency is misusing the fast-track process. Direct final rules are intended for uncontroversial regulatory actions, like changing the name of a program, they say, not for rescinding a rule that's required under federal statute, as this one is.
"The Department of Energy's decision … is a direct attack on disability rights and part of a broader pattern of civil rights rollbacks aligned with Trump-era policies," Robyn Powell, an assistant professor at Stetson University College of Law, told Mother Jones.
Remember, at any point in time you can become disabled.
• Liar! (Facebook post, Occupy Democrats, 9-15-24) Donald Trump lands in UK for second visit, gets BRUTAL surprise!
Our would-be despot has travelled to the United Kingdom for a second state visit, and the British are none too pleased at the news. Britain’s Channel 4 news network is planning to dedicate the entirety of its Wednesday night programming to exposing and debunking Trump’s incessant lies with what they’re calling “the longest uninterrupted reel of untruths, falsehoods and distortions ever broadcast on television”.
• Roundtable: How to Cover Science During Sociopolitical Disruption (The Open Notebook, 9-16-25)
Since the beginning of 2025, many journalists have found themselves in one of the toughest phases of their careers. The second Trump administration has systematically dismantled the practice of science in the U.S. Entire government agencies are under attack, as mass layoffs, budget cuts, or reorganizations have crippled the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service, the Department of Agriculture, and more.
Here's a roundtable discussion with five journalists whose coverage of science has been upended by the current U.S. administration. Between assignments, they shared the challenges they’ve faced while reporting in recent months, and some of the workarounds they’ve found to disentangle fact from fiction, work with hesitant sources, and strike the right balance between science and politics.
Many science journalists who once spent much of their time writing about incremental scientific developments and the obscure minutiae of academia have become, sometimes reluctantly, full-time policy reporters. In fact, reporters of all stripes are being tasked with chronicling the fallout of the most rapid and comprehensive change in the American scientific enterprise in recent history.
• RFK Jr. Has Declared Full-Blown War on CDC (Lawrence Gostin, MedPage Today, 9-9-25)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr's "long record of fomenting distrust of vaccines and purveying false and misleading health information -- and now even stoking animus against career scientists -- is shaping national policy. The consequences are reverberating across America's most venerable scientific institutions like the FDA and NIH. But there is no agency where the damage is so palpable and enduring than the CDC, America's frontline agency against health threats."
• Trump’s central role in Comey case may become key to defense strategy (Salvador Rizzo and Jeremy Roebuck, Washington Post, 9-27-25)
"The president overruled prosecutors who declined to bring charges in the case and has heavily criticized the former FBI director in public comments. Comey, who was indicted Thursday, is the first former senior government official to be charged in Trump’s campaign of retribution against his political opponents, but he may not be the last. Legal experts said they could not recall another instance in which a president appeared to overrule a Justice Department charging decision.
"Whatever the outcome of Comey’s case, it won’t be the only test of Trump’s power to direct federal prosecutors. The president has also urged the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against other perceived political foes, including New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), Sen. Adam Schiff (D-California), former CIA director John Brennan, and John Bolton, Trump’s first-term national security adviser." Trump’s insistence that the former FBI director be prosecuted is proof that his co-opting of the Department of Justice is now complete.
• CDC's No-Bid Contract on Vaccine-Autism Study Raises Alarm (Judy George, MedPage Today, 9-15-25)
The HHS intention to award a sole source contract to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to study an association between vaccinations and autism raised concerns from autism researchers.
• Jerrold M. Post CIA psychological profiler who labeled Trump ‘dangerous’ dies of covid-19 at 86 (Sydney Trent, Washington Post, 12-5-2020) “The dangerous, destructive charismatic leader polarizes and identifies an outside enemy and pulls his followers together by manipulating their common feelings of victimization,” Post said in a December 2019 interview.
• Trump’s Plan to Use the State to Crush Dissent (Marc Elias, Democracy Docket, 9-25-24)
The idea of an explicit government crackdown on thought and speech would have been unthinkable in the past.
• New CA Bill Could Punish Educators for Discussing Israel’s Genocide in Gaza (@DropSiteNews)
"Teacher unions (CTA, CFT, CFA), civil rights groups, and 100+ grassroots orgs are sounding the alarm over AB 715 — a bill passed overnight that gives a governor-appointed 'Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator' sweeping power to police classrooms."
"AB 715 will chill classroom discussion of Israel/Palestine by tying California policy to Trump and Biden's antisemitism strategy, which endorses the IHRA definition — a framework that conflates constitutionally protected criticism of Israel, including calling it a settler-colonial or apartheid state, with antisemitism."
• President Trump sues Penguin Random House (Jane Friedman,The Bottom Line, 9-17-25)
"Released in November 2024 by Penguin Press, How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, "draws on 20 years of Trump’s confidential tax information and returns. The book was written by New York Times journalists, and the NYT and the journalists themselves are being sued alongside Penguin Random House. Trump says the book and New York Times articles are defamatory and written with actual malice, and he’s seeking $15 billion in damages. Both the NYT and PRH have released statements saying the suit is without merit and meant to intimidate. Learn more. This is not the first time Trump has sued a publisher; so far none of his lawsuits against publishers have been successful."
• 'Times' Journalists Puncture Myth Of Trump As Self-Made Billionaire (Terry Gross interviews investigative reporters Susanne Craig and David Barstow, who say the president received today's equivalent of $413 million from his father's real estate empire, through what appears to be tax fraud. See also Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father (Susanne Craig and David Barstowand Russ Buettner, NY Times, 10-2-18) The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through schemes to avoid paying taxes on multimillion dollar gifts in the family.
• David R. Yale’s Real & Unbiased News Sources (David R. Yale, on Bluesky: Starter pack by @davidryale.bsky.social)
101 news sources that are not bought, controlled, or influenced by fat-cat billionaires. Includes a few unusual sources like @indivisible.org and @peoplepowerunited that give news on a specific issue and suggest actions you can take. Find more stories here!
• How Trump buried his school transcript, days after challenging Obama’s academic record (Michael Miller, The Independent, 3-6-19)
'Days after Donald Trump challenged president Barack Obama to “show his records” to prove that he hadn’t been a “terrible student” in 2011, the headmaster at New York Military Academy got an order from his boss: find Mr Trump’s academic records and help bury them.
'The superintendent of the private school “came to me in a panic because he had been accosted by prominent, wealthy alumni of the school who were Mr. Trump’s friends” and who wanted to keep his records secret, recalled Evan Jones, the headmaster at the time.'
• Trump said in 2011: “Obama was a terrible student and he shouldn’t have been able to get into the schools he did”. (Quora)
Read the responses. Obama graduated from Harvard Law Magna Cum Laude, which is usually the top 4% of the class. He also graduated "with honors" as an undergraduate from Colombia.
And Obama was on Law Review and president of Law Review at Harvard.
Roundups of links to stories about Donald Trump (on the Writers and Editors blog):
I share links to all my roundups of facts and counter-opinions about Trump's presidencies in several blog posts, partly so nonsubscribers can read articles in the NY Times:
---Trump's first term (blog post highlighting points in NY Times opinion piece, 7-19-24)
---Trump stinks: Let me count the ways (blog post, 11-20-20, updated 4-5-22)
---Trump, January 6, opinions vs. facts, indictment, trials, election tactics, political agenda (blog post, 10-12-24)
---'Trump's rampage through democracy' a/k/a Trump's Damaging Initiatives and Priorities (blog post, 4-5-25)
---The problem with Trump's tariffs (blog post, 4-10-25)
---Trump upends tradition of nonpartisan military, alters priorities of U.S. government (blog post, updated 10-6-25)
See also
---How Project 2025 recommends changing American life (blog post, 10-27-24)