Saturday, September 06, 2025
Will the Trump Economy Be the Felon's Undoing?
One of the ironies is that voters often mistakenly believe a Republican presidential administration will usher in a stronger economy despite the fact that data shows historically the reverse is true. The economy flourishes more under Democrat administrations and the federal deficit is better controlled in contrast to Republican regimes explode the deficit - as the Felon has done in both of his terms. This ironic misconception was on full display in the lead up to the 2024 election when the Felon and Republicans railed against the so-called Biden economy and promised to lower prices, lower inflation, increase job opportunities and, of course, cut taxes for the very wealthy. Almost eight months into his second regime, other than cutting taxes for the very wealthy, none of these promises have been delivered upon. Instead, the opposite has occurred: consumer prices are up in significant part due to the Felon's tariffs, inflation has not gone down, and the jobs reports are dismal, again in part due to the Felon's mass firings of federal employees (Virginia has been particularly harmed) and huge cuts to funding for research and funding for renewable energy resources (the Felon has cut $679M for offshore wind projects, including 2 in Hampton Roads). Throw in the harm done to the agriculture and construction industries by the ICE raids on undocumented workers and it is clear the economy is struggling. Hopefully, all of this will catch up with the Felon and Republicans who continue to debase themselves by pandering the Felon. A piece in the New York Times takes stock of where we are at present:
Last year, Donald Trump couldn’t stop talking about the economy. As a presidential candidate, he assailed Democrats for inflation and rode the persistent malaise over the high cost of living right back to the White House, promising swift relief even though economists warned that his plans could actually drive prices higher.
Today’s [yesterday’s] lackluster jobs numbers are a reminder of how quickly the issue could present him, and his party, with political peril as elections approach.
The economy added only 22,000 jobs in August, which, my colleague Lydia DePillis explained, is a sign that the labor market appears to be stalling. Looking backward, the news is even worse: A revision to June’s figures shows the labor market actually lost 13,000 jobs that month, making it the first negative number since December 2020.
There are other signs of trouble. A key measure of underlying inflation rose over the summer as Trump’s tariffs put pressure on prices, driving up the costs of things like furniture, appliances and clothing. Manufacturing activity has been shrinking for six months.
It’s not clear right now just what will happen to the economy between now and next year’s midterm elections. . . . But what is clear, right now at least, is that the president has a problem.
A recent Gallup poll found that his approval rating on the economy fell to 37 percent in August, from 42 percent in February. That’s a steep drop from his average approval rating on the economy during his first term, which was 52 percent.
When you dig into specific issues, it doesn’t look any better. A poll late last month by The Economist and YouGov found inflation to be the top ranked issue for voters — and just 34 percent of them approved of his handling of the issue, according to the poll.
And then there’s the vibe — the feeling of malaise that weighed down President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris last fall. Last month, 63 percent of Americans thought the economy is getting worse, Gallup found — one point higher than the 62 percent who believed that in October 2024, right before the election.
Democrats are seizing the moment as an inflection point, eager to hammer home to voters what Trump has done to make the economy his own as they attempt to wrest control of Congress from Republicans next year. Trump passed expansive tax cuts into law and implemented steep tariffs that have driven up prices of everyday goods and raw materials. He is also trying to exert more control over the historically independent Federal Reserve.
“The American people are feeling the impact of the Trump administration’s dangerous one-man command policies in community after community,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House minority leader, said in a statement on Friday. He added that Trump and Republicans had promised to lower the cost of living, but failed.
They [Democrats] believe a laser focus on the economy can help them win in tough races next year. Voters rated the economy as their top issue in every one of The New York Times and Siena College’s pre-election polls last year, and exit polls showed that Trump outperformed Harris among those who believed the economy was in poor shape.
Trump is already working hard to make sure the midterms are about anything other than the economy. He has openly said that he believes his crackdown on crime in Washington — which he has said he intends to expand to cities like Chicago and perhaps New Orleans — will play well for him next fall.
Days after the leaders of three major Eastern powers — China, Russia and India — clasped hands and shared a warm greeting, Trump acknowledged India’s shift away from the U.S. and toward America’s adversaries. . . . . Trump did not mention the role he played in pushing the country away.
In August, he imposed 50 percent tariffs on India for importing Russian oil. Trump has also claimed that he “solved” the military conflict between India and Pakistan. That irked India’s leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who told him U.S. involvement had nothing to do with a May cease-fire.
Trump’s post, . . . was an unusual acknowledgment that his blunt force approach has had unintended consequences.
Friday, September 05, 2025
The MAGA Influencers Rehabilitating Hitler
The moral rot on the political right has been growing for years now even as supposed "Christian" values are touted by both the professional "Christian" set and the members of the Republican Party who prostitute themselves to the falsely "godly folk." Truth be told, many evangelicals and their self-anointed leaders are nothing short of vicious towards those they dislike or label as "sinners." Concentration camps for migrants seemingly is widely embraced and calls for the execution of gays while not yet mainstream are not out of the norm on some far right sites. But perhaps nothing underscores the moral bankruptcy of the far right as much as the efforts by some right wing influencers to rehabilitate Adolph Hitler and, in some cases, suggest the USA should have sided with Germany in WWII. To these individuals the murder of millions of Jews - and Roma, gays, and Slavic peoples - and the total of 50-55 million civilian deaths is either all a myth to be undone or utterly ignored. Indeed, its as if the anti-Semitism that existed in pre-WWII America is being revived. The irony is that while the Felon attacks universities for allegedly inadequate measures to stop anti-Semitism on campuses, some of his loudest cheerleaders on the right are basically Holocaust deniers. The hypocrisy is off the charts. A piece in The Atlantic looks at this ugly effort:
The story we got about World War II is all wrong,” a guest told Tucker Carlson on his podcast two weeks ago. “I think that’s right,” replied Carlson. The guest, a Cornell chemistry professor named David Collum, then spelled out what he meant: “One can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.” Such sentiments might sound shocking to the uninitiated, but they are not to Carlson’s audience. In fact, the notion that the German dictator was unfairly maligned has become a running theme on Carlson’s show—and beyond.
Last September, Carlson interviewed a man named Darryl Cooper, whom he dubbed “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” Cooper’s conception of honest history soon became clear: He suggested that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill might have been “the chief villain of the Second World War,” with Nazi Germany at best coming in second. The day after the episode aired, Cooper further downplayed Hitler’s genocidal ambitions, writing on social media that the German leader had sought peace with Europe and merely wanted “to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” He did not explain why the Jews should have been considered a “problem” in the first place.
“What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” the far-right podcaster Candace Owens asked in July 2024. “The first thing people would say is: ‘Well, an ethnic cleansing almost took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like we actually did to the Germans.’” A repeat guest on Carlson’s show, Owens defended him after his conversation with Cooper. “Many Americans are learning that WW2 history is not as black and white as we were taught and some details were purposefully omitted from our textbooks,” she wrote on X.
These Reich rehabilitators are not fringe figures. Carlson’s show ranks among the top podcasts in America. He spoke before President Donald Trump on the final night of the 2024 Republican National Convention, and his son serves as a deputy press secretary to Vice President J. D. Vance, who owes his office in part to Carlson’s advocacy. Owens has millions of followers on YouTube, Instagram, and X . . . . Her output has attained sufficient notoriety that she is currently being sued by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, over her repeated claims that the French first lady was actually born a man.
The Nazi apologetics are partly an attention-seeking attempt at provocation—an effort to signal iconoclasm by transgressing one of society’s few remaining taboos. But there is more to the story than that. Carlson and his fellow travelers on the far right correctly identify the Second World War as a pivot point in America’s understanding of itself and its attitude toward its Jewish citizens. The country learned hard lessons from the Nazi Holocaust about the catastrophic consequences of conspiratorial prejudice. Today, a growing constituency on the right wants the nation to unlearn them.
Before World War II, the United States was a far more anti-Semitic place than it is now. Far from joining the conflict to rescue Europe’s Jews, the country was largely unsympathetic to their plight. In 1938, on the eve of the Holocaust, Gallup found that 54 percent of Americans believed that “the persecution of Jews in Europe has been partly their own fault,” and that another 11 percent thought it was “entirely” their fault. In other words, as the Nazis prepared to exterminate the Jews, most Americans blamed the victims.
The same week that the Kristallnacht pogrom left thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses in ruins, 72 percent of Americans opposed allowing “a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live.” Months later, 67 percent opposed a bill aimed at accepting child refugees from Germany; the idea never made it to a congressional vote.
This climate of paranoia and hostility had deadly consequences. In 1939, the U.S. and Canada turned away the M.S. St. Louis, which carried nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees. The ship was forced to return to Europe, where hundreds of the passengers were captured and killed by the Germans. Restrained by public sentiment, Roosevelt not only kept the country’s refugee caps largely in place but also rejected pleas to bomb the Auschwitz concentration camp and the railway tracks that led to it. When the United States finally entered the war, it did so not out of any special sense of obligation to the Jews but to defend itself after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
That indifference to the Holocaust was immediately dispelled when the Allied Forces liberated several of the Nazi camps where millions of Jews had been murdered. Entering the gates of these sadistic sites, American service members came face-to-face with unspeakable Nazi atrocities—rotting piles of naked corpses, gas chambers, thousands of emaciated adults. Denial gave way to revulsion.
Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and future U.S. president, personally went to Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi camp liberated by American troops. “I made the visit deliberately,” he cabled to Washington, “in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” Eisenhower then requested that members of Congress and prominent journalists be brought to the camps to see and document the horrors themselves.
Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews had been murdered. American soldiers, drafted from across the United States, returned home bearing witness to what they had encountered. “Anti-Semitism was right there, it had been carried to the ultimate, and I knew that that was something we had to get rid of because I had experienced it,” Sergeant Leon Bass, a Black veteran whose segregated unit entered Buchenwald, later testified. In this way, the American people learned firsthand where rampant anti-Jewish prejudice led—and the country was transformed.
Slowly but surely, anti-Semitism became un-American. But today, those lessons—like the people who learned them—are passing away, and a wave of propagandists with a very different agenda has arisen to fill the void they left behind.
Over the past few years, Tucker Carlson and his co-ideologues have begun insinuating anti-Semitic ideas into the public discourse. The former Fox News host has described Ben Shapiro, perhaps the most prominent American Jewish conservative, and those like him as foreign subversives who “don’t care about the country at all.” He has also promoted a lightly sanitized version of the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” theory that has inspired multiple anti-Semitic massacres on American soil. Candace Owens has accused Israel of involvement in the 9/11 attacks and the JFK assassination, and claimed that a Jewish pedophile cult controls the world.
In March, an influencer named Ian Carroll—who has a combined 3.8 million social-media followers, and whose work has been shared by Elon Musk—joined Joe Rogan, arguably the most popular podcaster in America, to expound without challenge about how a “giant group of Jewish billionaires is running a sex-trafficking operation targeting American politicians and business people.”
Before America entered World War II, reactionaries such as the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and the Catholic radio firebrand Father Charles Coughlin inveighed against the country’s tiny Jewish population, accusing it of controlling America’s institutions and dragging the U.S. to war. “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government,” Lindbergh declared of American Jews in 1941.
The 21st-century heirs of Lindbergh and Coughlin seek to turn back the clock to a time when such sentiments were seen by many as sensible rather than scandalous. These far-right figures have correctly ascertained that to change what is possible in American politics, they need to change how America talks about itself and its past. “The reason I keep focusing on this is probably the same reason you’re doing it,” Carlson told Darryl Cooper, the amateur Holocaust historian. “I think it’s central to the society we live in, the myths upon which it’s built. I think it’s also the cause of the destruction of Western civilization—these lies.”
Carlson couches his claims in layers of intellectual abstraction. Others are less coy. “Hitler burned down the trans clinics, arrested the Rothschild bankers, and gave free homes to families,” the former mixed martial artist Jake Shields told his 870,000 followers on X last week. “Does this sound like the most evil man who ever lived?” The post received 44,000 likes.
Had Carlson and his cohort attempted their revisionism 20 years ago, they would have encountered a chorus of contradiction from real people who had experienced the history they sought to rewrite and know where its conspiratorial calumnies lead. But today, most of those people are dead, and a new generation is rising that never witnessed the Holocaust firsthand or heard about it from family and friends who did.
Late last year, David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s top data scientists, surveyed some 130,000 voters about whether they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of Jewish people. Hardly anyone over the age of 70 said their view was unfavorable. More than a quarter of those under 25 did. The question is not whether America’s self-understanding is changing; it’s how far that change will go—and what the consequences will be.
Thursday, September 04, 2025
State of Permanent Fake Emergency
Donald Trump has figured out the cheat code for authoritarianism: Fake emergencies bring real power. The president has invoked emergency authority in three distinct contexts—declaring a public-safety emergency to defend his takeover of the District of Columbia; claiming an “invasion” to justify an immigration crackdown, including sending the National Guard to Los Angeles; and invoking “extraordinary” factors to support his tariff war. Although Trump is not the first president to grab greater powers behind the cloak of emergency authority, he is the first to have done so in such an extreme way. Worse yet, the lack of resistance from Congress or the courts suggests that there is little, if anything, to prevent Trump from expanding his use of “emergency” authority even further as he accumulates power.
Emergency powers exist for good reason. In democratic societies, the general rule is that the legislative branch defines what the executive branch should do, and then the executive acts on the direction of the legislature.
The problem with that model is that legislative activity is remarkably slow, even at the most urgent of times. By way of example, the USA Patriot Act, which was passed in response to the 9/11 attacks, was not adopted until six weeks after the World Trade Center towers fell (and even at that rate, many, in retrospect, think that the legislation was rushed and, as a result, ill-considered).
Recognizing this systematic inadequacy, Congress has, at least since the Cold War, developed something of a solution. It declares general restrictions, such as requiring FDA approval for public use of a drug, but couples those provisions with language authorizing the executive to act in violation of those limitations in times of national crisis—by, for example, allowing the use of an unapproved drug to address a pandemic crisis. A study by the Brennan Center identified 137 statutory provisions in which these sorts of emergency authorities can be invoked by the president.
Until Trump, this approach more or less worked. Presidents had certain amplified powers when needed, and those instances were limited in frequency, nature, and duration. Three factors undergirded this careful balance.
First, and most obvious, the people elected as president met some baseline for character and used their power with good intent.
Second, Congress could—and did—contain executive authority. It did so at the front end by placing clear textual limits on when and how emergency authorities could be invoked. And it did so on the back end by conducting vigorous oversight of presidential invocations of emergency authority. For example, when President Harry Truman attempted to nationalize the steel industry, he did so in violation of the Defense Production Act, in which Congress had given the president only a very narrow and deliberately cumbersome authority to seize private property.
The Truman steel-seizure case likewise demonstrates the third restraint on presidential emergency overreach—the possible intervention of the courts. When the steel companies sued, the Supreme Court was called upon to resolve the matter, and by a 6–3 vote, it concluded that Truman had acted in excess of his statutory and constitutional authority.
Taken together, these three limits on presidential excess have, for nearly a century, been more or less up to the task of constraining emergency declarations.
Today, however, those guardrails are failing. To begin with, it is now clear that a second-term Trump (unlike even Trump in his first term) has absolutely no internal or external regulator—no inner voice whispering, Perhaps I shouldn’t do that, and no adviser suggesting restraint. Time and again, Trump has invoked emergency presidential authority to achieve the objective of aggrandizing his power. Worse yet, his objectives seem at least as much focused on personal enrichment (his family wealth is estimated to have increased by more than $1 billion since his 2024 election) as the benefit to the country.
Congress, meanwhile, far from checking Trump, has become his biggest cheerleader. And, with a couple of exceptions, judicial review of Trump’s actions has not assessed the substance of his various assertions that an emergency exists, and instead has modeled deference, taking him at his word.
Consider Trump’s invocation of emergency powers to temporarily take control of D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department. . . . Any fair analysis would turn up problems. The District does have a higher than average crime rate, but if there’s an emergency, it lies elsewhere in America. In the six months leading up to Trump’s emergency declaration, violent crime in the District had dropped by 25 percent. Memphis and St. Louis have had higher murder rates than the District in recent years. Yet those cities have not seen a surge of law enforcement.
Likewise, Trump has characterized the nation’s ongoing problems with illegal immigration as an “invasion” from Latin America, justifying extraordinary presidential authority. In deploying military troops to Los Angeles, for example, Trump cited a federal statute that applies only in cases of rebellion or invasion, or when the president is unable “to execute the laws of the United States” without military assistance.
Trump also played the “invasion” card in his decision to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and deport, without due process, Venezuelans who are alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang. Many courts have, thankfully, reviewed the merits of this claim and rejected it . . . .
By contrast, there is one area in which the courts appear more willing to scrutinize an “emergency” declaration and test the substance of Trump’s claims: the question of tariffs. Trump declared trade deficits, many of which have existed for decades, an “emergency” that justified his invocation of authority to address an “unusual and extraordinary” threat from abroad. The Court of International Trade rejected this declaration unanimously. But even that victory is incomplete; the Federal Circuit affirmed the court’s decision last week, but further appeal to the Supreme Court lies ahead.
All of these emergencies are just an excuse to gain power. There is no “crime emergency” in D.C. There has been no “invasion” on our southern border by immigrants or criminal gangs. And there is no “extraordinary” threat arising from the trade deficit. All that exists to support those declarations is the unilateral, fevered imagination of Trump, unchecked by Congress or the courts.
The only truly “extraordinary” danger here arises from the supine response to Trump’s actions. Beyond the damage already done, the lack of any guardrails now gives Trump the apparent authority to, for example, impose a 50 percent tariff on Brazil because it is prosecuting his friend Jair Bolsonaro.
And the list of threats will only grow. . . . . worse yet, what if Trump purports to suspend the writ of habeas corpus because “public safety may require it”?
Eventually, the courts may intervene. In the first AEA case that came before the Supreme Court, the Court did say that judges can evaluate “questions of interpretation and constitutionality” of the act, which seems to suggest a substantive role of review. But that hint of possible review is a thin reed on which to rest democracy. The structure of law granting exceptional emergency powers was wise, once upon
Wednesday, September 03, 2025
Tuesday, September 02, 2025
The Epstein Scandal Continues to Plague the GOP
House GOP leaders returning to Capitol Hill this week from the long summer break will be immediately confronted with the radioactive subject of Jeffrey Epstein.
Top Republicans had accelerated their July exit from Washington in part to avoid the thorny Epstein saga and were hoping the attention swirling around the convicted sex offender would dissolve over the five-week recess, allowing Congress to move on to other things in September.
Instead, the focus on Epstein is poised to erupt beginning in the earliest days of Congress’s return, creating challenges for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and GOP leaders just as they’re racing to prevent a government shutdown on Sept. 30.
The issue will come at them from various angles — and quickly.
On Wednesday, a pair of bipartisan lawmakers will host a press event at the Capitol to advance their efforts to force the Trump administration to release all of the government’s Epstein files. To ramp up the pressure, the lawmakers — Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) — will be joined by several survivors of Epstein’s abuse.
Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee have subpoenaed the Epstein estate for a slew of sensitive documents, including anything resembling a “client list” and Epstein’s “birthday book” — a 2003 volume, compiled by his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, that reportedly includes a lewd letter written by President Trump when he was a private citizen in New York. Those materials are slated for delivery to Capitol Hill by Sept. 8.
And the House Rules Committee, which Republicans shut down in late July to avoid Epstein-related votes, will have to resolve that impasse if GOP leaders want to move virtually any significant piece of legislation to the floor.
The combination is sure to challenge Johnson and other GOP leaders, who have sought unsuccessfully to defuse the Epstein controversy and would prefer to focus their energies on keeping the government open beyond September.
Democrats, meanwhile, are only eager to keep the story alive. “We’re not going to stop talking about this,” said a House Democratic aide familiar with the debate.
If it were just Democrats clamoring for the Epstein files, GOP leaders would have an easier time brushing the issue aside. But some prominent voices in the House GOP conference, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), a close Trump ally, have been an active part of the pressure campaign demanding that the Department of Justice (DOJ) publicize the documents.
Those conservatives were not convinced by the DOJ’s July memo refuting the right-wing conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein, including the central claim that the government is concealing his case files to protect powerful “elites” who committed crimes against minors. And they haven’t been silenced by President Trump’s calls to forget the Epstein “hoax,” or his threats to disavow any supporters who continue to press for more information.
Greene, for one, warned Trump that refusing to release the files risks losing the bulk of his MAGA base.
“If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down every enemy of The People,” she posted on the social platform X. “If not. The base will turn and there’s no going back.”
The issue has put Republican leaders in a bind, squeezed between their loyalty to a president who wants the issue to go away and conservatives in and out of Congress demanding that it doesn’t.
Massie is leading that charge on Capitol Hill. He’s pushing a procedural gambit, known as a discharge petition, to force a vote on his legislation with Khanna. The bill would require the DOJ to post, in searchable form, every record the agency possesses related to its investigations into both Epstein, who died by suicide in prison in 2019, and Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for crimes related to the sexual abuse of minors.
Under the bill, redactions are permitted to protect the identity of victims but are prohibited for purposes of preventing “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”
That resolution currently has 11 other Republican co-sponsors, in addition to Massie. The key question heading into September is whether those GOP lawmakers will go a long step further in their defiance of Trump by signing the discharge petition, which requires 218 signatures to force a vote on the floor.
Johnson said Friday on CNN that the House would “probably” vote on an Epstein-related resolution.
It remains uncertain, however, if all of that movement will appease the Republicans who have sought the DOJ’s comprehensive files on the Epstein and Maxwell cases — information that was not disclosed, critics said, when the department delivered some documents to the Oversight panel on Aug. 22 in response to the earlier subpoena.
Khanna said 97 percent of those files had been previously made public. “Less than 1 percent of files have been released. DOJ is stonewalling,” Khanna said in response. “The survivors deserve justice and the public deserves transparency.”
Monday, September 01, 2025
Hegseth and the Felon Insist on Honoring the Confederacy
When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced earlier this month that he would return a Confederate memorial to Arlington National Cemetery, he blamed “woke lemmings” for it having been taken down. Created by the sculptor Moses Ezekiel, the statue in question, which Hegseth described as “beautiful and historic,” features sentimental images of Confederate soldiers and loyal Black slaves. It was first installed in the cemetery in 1914 and was removed in late 2023, as part of the Biden administration’s larger effort to remove memorials that glorified the Confederate cause and to rechristen bases whose names lionized traitors to the United States. The war against the Confederacy killed more than 300,000 members of the military that Hegseth leads—a grim fact that the defense secretary trivializes in his efforts to score political points against the left.
Hegseth’s move is one of several by the Trump administration to bring Confederate commemorations back. . . . . “Unlike the left, we don’t believe in erasing American history—we honor it,” Hegseth said after announcing the return of the Ezekiel sculpture. That claim is hard to square with Trump’s recent complaint on Truth Social that the Smithsonian Institution is “OUT OF CONTROL” because of its museums’ focus on “how bad Slavery was.”
At best, Hegseth is going out of his way to needle and mock Americans who rightly see the Confederacy for what it was—a treasonous, doomed effort to keep millions of Americans in bondage. At worst, he and the Trump administration are making common cause with apologists who believe that the wrong side won the Civil War. Many people who refuse to repudiate even Confederate leaders claim they are merely honoring battlefield sacrifices of common soldiers. Americans should reject this sophistry.
My family has a tradition of military service. When I was a U.S. Army artillery officer during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I thought about my immigrant grandfather, who had been an artilleryman during World War II. Despite my love and admiration for him, I sometimes found him scary when I was a child—he had a quick temper and a thick Sicilian accent that I often struggled to parse.
But my reverence for my grandfather didn’t change an important fact about his service: He had fought in Mussolini’s army. He and his comrades had tried to repel the American invasion of Sicily—the combat debut of the 82nd Airborne Division, the very unit in which I served as it moved toward Baghdad six decades later. Fortunately, my grandfather lost.
Many Americans have ancestors who took up for bad causes. My children are descendants, on their maternal side, of two great-grandfathers who fought in Normandy on D-Day. One landed on Utah Beach. The other was already present as a soldier in the German army. I hope my kids never feel obliged to make excuses for the latter’s cause.
As a military brat, I lived in Germany at a time when many people vividly remembered the war years. On weekends, my family and I used to hike through Bavarian fields that abutted small graveyards, where fresh flowers lay alongside crosses holding the pictures of young Wehrmacht soldiers. These families were mourning their sons, brothers, and fathers without glorifying Hitler or National Socialism.
Americans can similarly pay proper respect to military sacrifice while rejecting Confederate nostalgia. In small-town public squares across the South—a region in which I have spent much of my adult life—I have seen countless statues and monuments dedicated to local residents who did not return from the Civil War. Many of these solemnly recount the names of the dead without rhapsodizing about the Confederate cause.
Like many institutions, the Virginia Military Institute, my undergraduate alma mater, has struggled to balance the two impulses. The school was deeply enmeshed in the Confederate cause. In its graduation rituals every May, the school commemorates cadets who died for the Confederacy at the 1864 Battle of New Market. It also holds a huge commissioning ceremony to honor the newest officers from VMI, who are entering the Army those cadets were fighting.
The New Market commemoration includes the placement of wreaths on the graves of six VMI cadets who died. Looming over those graves is a statue called Virginia Mourning Her Dead, also by Ezekiel, the creator of the Arlington memorial. Before becoming a sculptor, Ezekiel was the first Jewish person to attend VMI, and he saw combat at New Market. One of his closest friends, a 17-year-old named Thomas G. Jefferson, was among the 10 cadets who died in the battle.
When I attended the school, a second Ezekiel statue stood on campus. It featured the Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who had taught at VMI before the war. In 2021, VMI took down this statue and later relocated it to the New Market battlefield museum. The institute wasn’t erasing history; it was recognizing that an institution that educates officers for the U.S. military should not revere generals who helped lead wars against it. The school left in place the monument to the dead cadets, who, like their counterparts in countless other armies, were average teenagers, whipped up in the pursuit of adventure and eager to prove their manhood.
The Ezekiel work now set to be returned to Arlington—likely sometime in 2027, after a refurbishment—goes far beyond commemorating dead soldiers. It bears a Latin inscription that translates as “The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause pleased Cato.” This quotation, from the poet Lucan, is widely interpreted as an observation that righteous efforts sometimes fail. But nothing was righteous about the rebellion against the United States, and paeans to it do not belong in a U.S. military cemetery.
I loved my grandfather who served in Mussolini’s army, and I am proud of my alma mater. But I am also proud to have held a commission in the Army that defeated them both.
Sunday, August 31, 2025
RFK, Jr., Is Endangering Lives and Must resign
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign.
Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have done exactly the opposite.
This week, Mr. Kennedy pushed out the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after less than one month on the job because she refused to act as a rubber stamp for his dangerous policies. Four leading officials at C.D.C. resigned the same week. One of those officials said Mr. Kennedy’s team asked him to “change studies that have been settled in the past” apparently to fit Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views. This is not Making America Healthy Again.
Despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community, Secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been rejected repeatedly by scientific experts.
It is absurd to have to say this in 2025, but vaccines are safe and effective. That, of course, is not just my view. Far more important, it is the overwhelming consensus of the medical and scientific communities.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the country’s largest professional association of pediatricians, representing over 67,000 doctors who treat our children every day, calls immunizations “one of the greatest public health achievements,” which prevents tens of thousands of deaths and millions of cases of disease.
The American Medical Association, the largest professional association of physicians and medical students, representing over 270,000 doctors along with 79 leading medical societies, recently said that vaccines for flu, R.S.V. and Covid-19 are “the best tools to protect the public against these illnesses and their potentially serious complications.”
The World Health Organization, an agency with some of the most prominent medical experts around the globe, recently noted that over the past 50 years, vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives and reduced the infant deaths by 40 percent.
Against the overwhelming body of evidence within the medicine and science, what are Secretary Kennedy’s views? He has claimed that autism is caused by vaccines, despite more than a dozen rigorous scientific studies involving hundreds of thousands of children that have found no connection between vaccines and autism.
He has called the Covid-19 vaccines the “deadliest” ever made despite findings cited by the W.H.O. that Covid shots saved over 14 million lives throughout the world in 2021 alone.
He has ridiculously questioned whether the polio vaccine has killed more people than polio itself did even though scientists have found that the vaccine has saved 1.5 million lives and prevented around 20 million people from becoming paralyzed since 1988.
He has absurdly claimed that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”
Who supports Secretary Kennedy’s views? Not credible scientists and doctors. One of his leading “experts” that he cites to back up his bogus claims on autism and vaccines had his medical license revoked and his study retracted from the medical journal that published it.
Many of his supporters are from Children’s Health Defense — the anti-vaccine group he founded and profited from — and a small circle of loyalists that have spread misinformation and dangerous conspiracy theories on vaccines for years.
The reality is that Secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a career on sowing mistrust in vaccines. Now, as head of H.H.S., he is using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public health and on truth itself.
Short term, it will be harder for Americans to get lifesaving vaccines. Already, the Trump administration has effectively taken away Covid vaccines from many healthy younger adults and kids, unless they fight their way through our broken health care system. This means more doctor’s visits, more bureaucracy and more people paying higher out-of-pocket costs — if they can manage to get a vaccine at all.
Covid is just the beginning. Mr. Kennedy’s next target may be the childhood immunization schedule, the list of recommended vaccines that children receive to protect them from diseases like measles, chickenpox and polio. The danger here is that diseases that have been virtually wiped out because of safe and effective vaccines will resurface and cause enormous harm.
Two years ago, when I was the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, I held a hearing with the major government officials responsible for protecting us from a new pandemic, including the head of the C.D.C. Without exception, every one of these agency heads said that, while they could not predict the exact date, there will be a future pandemic and we must be much better prepared for it than we are today.
Unfortunately, Secretary Kennedy’s actions are making a worrisome situation even worse by defunding the research that could help us prepare for the next pandemic. This month, he canceled nearly $500 million in research for the kinds of vaccines that helped us stop the Covid pandemic. At the same time, Mr. Kennedy is cutting funding to states to prepare and respond to future outbreaks of infectious diseases. This is unacceptable.
America’s health care system is already dysfunctional and wildly expensive, and yet the Trump administration will be throwing an estimated 15 million people off their health insurance through a cut of over $1 trillion to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. This cut is also expected to result in the closing of or the decline in services at hundreds of nursing homes, hospitals and community health centers. As a result of cuts to the Affordable Care Act, health insurance costs will soar for millions of Americans. That is not Making America Healthy Again.
Secretary Kennedy is putting Americans’ lives in danger, and he must resign. In his place, President Trump must listen to doctors and scientists and nominate a health secretary and a C.D.C. director who will protect the health and well-being of the American people, not carry out dangerous policies based on conspiracy theories.
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