Trump: My uncle was at MIT, one of the great professors. 51 years whatever… three degrees in nuclear, chemical and math. Kaczynski was one of his students? Do you know who that is? There is very little difference between a mad man and a genius. pic.twitter.com/56fpC1sDsS
My uncle was at MIT, one of the great professors. 51 years whatever… three degrees in nuclear, chemical and math. Kaczynski was one of his students? Do you know who that is? There is very little difference between a mad man and a genius.
“I said, ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’ Dr. John Trump. He said, ‘What kind of a student? ‘Man,’ he said, ‘seriously good … He’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him.”
As the Daily Beast reports:
John Trump died in 1985, a decade before Kaczynski was linked to the Unabomber attacks. The alleged conversation would had to have occurred years before the public knew Kaczynski was even responsible for the bombings, which killed three people and injured 23 others between 1978 and 1995. Kaczynski was arrested by the FBI in April 1996. He pleaded guilty in January 1998.
Also, Kaczynski didn’t attend MIT. He studied at Harvard and the University of Michigan
Doesn’t it ever bother Republican officials or his donors and allies that he is either a pathological liar or seriously mentally ill? They don’t care?
The right wing in America has been conducting a war on science for quite some time but under Donald Trump 2.0 they have decided to go nuclear. The many cuts to scientific research are so cataclysmic that it may set the United States back to its third tier status of the early 20th century
America has long had tension between scientific advances and resistance from cultural conservatives. For many GOP voters it is tied to the fundamentalist religious view that the theory of evolution contradicts the Bible and is, therefore, blasphemous. Denying that basic understanding of the natural world makes virtually every scientific advance suspect in their minds. (As it happens, the Scopes evolution trial took place exactly 100 years ago this week, July 10 to July 21, 1925. Then, as now, the controversy was fed by a sense of paranoia and social anxiety over rapid cultural change. )
But the war on science isn’t just about religion or common mistrust. This phenomenon is also related to the Republican Party’s fealty to businesses like the fossil fuel industry which requires that they deny climate change in order to reduce competition from renewable energy sources. It has led to a recent descent into a right wing conspiracy theory which holds that the extreme weather events we’re experiencing are perpetrated by the “Deep State” which is allegedly manipulating the weather. I suppose it’s a good sign that they’re at least admitting that humans are affecting these deadly weather occurrences.
In addition there has always been a conservative faction that wished to slash taxes and hoped to end support for science in the public sector. These people believe that business would pick up the slack, refusing to acknowledge that much of the basic research which leads to breakthroughs in science and technology, some of which leads to dead ends and disappointing outcomes, do not immediately make a profit and are therefore unlikely to be pursued.
And then there is the traditional right wing suspicion toward government which leads many adherents to be hostile to regulations around public health or the environment. We saw that play out in living color during the pandemic and the fall-out from that devastating event looks like it’s going to haunt the country for some time to come.
Today we are seeing the Trump administration creating a perfect storm in which the government’s involvement in the pursuit of scientific advances and service for the public is being systematically destroyed.
This disaster is happening at all levels of the federal government and impacting every agency. It’s all terrible. But I think the one that should be discussed more fully in the public is the effect it’s having on biomedical research. The changes are truly profound and frankly, catastrophic for the lives of millions of citizens in this country and around the world.
The attacks on universities for spurious political reasons are affecting many research projects that would otherwise lead to treatments and cures for deadly diseases. And the naming of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse: Robert F. Kennedy Jr as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr Mehmet Oz to run Medicaid and Medicare, Dr. Marty Makary as head of the FDA and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institute of Health has signaled the end of any serious approach to biomedical science and public health by the United States government. Their individual histories as dangerous conspiracy theorist,quack cure TV huckster,eccentric contrarian and ethically challenged partisan have sent shockwaves through the scientific community as they’ve taken a wrecking ball to the august institutions that were previously considered to be the best in the world.
This is the caliber of expertise we now have running them as they work diligently to ensure that real medical research and public health are eliminated:
RFK Jr: "This administration wants to encourage Americans to take control of their health — to eat right, to have lifestyle changes that save us all. And that's the patriotic thing to do, not only for our country but for every individual American. It's a patriotic duty to keep ourselves healthy."
Mehmet Oz on Medicaid: "We'll be there for you, the American people, when you need help, but you gotta stay healthy yourself … don't eat carrot cake. Eat real food." pic.twitter.com/m0B81ZteGr
Makary: "We have a lot of data and it may not necessarily be the traditional 50 year randomized control trial follow up. It's data from families that say their kids have been acting with bad behavior … and they eliminate the petroleum-based food dyes and the behavior improves.… pic.twitter.com/7Oh6vicIxL
Sure, we should all eat better and exercise. And it’s great that the U.S. is finally getting rid of the food dyes that Europe and other countries banned years ago. But none of that is science. It’s just self-help, internet based, anecdotal nonsense.
Meanwhile, after telling us not to eat carrot cake, these luminaries are strangling research into one of the potentially greatest advances in medical research in a century, all because of more right wing crank conspiracy theories about the mRNA COVID vaccines. The consequences are tragic. As the Guardian reported this week:
Pancreatic cancer has a 10% survival rate and is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in the US, but in a small study, about half of the patients who received an mRNA vaccine did not see their cancer return, and they still had strong immune responses three years later. Early mRNA vaccine trials also indicated the recurrence of melanoma could be cut in half. And a small study co-authored by Sayour on glioblastoma showed the vaccines started affecting the tumors within 48 hours.
All of that is at risk now. The NIH is dismissing dozens of grant reviewers for mRNA research, leaving them understaffed and without the necessary expertise to assess the data. They have cancelled $766 million in contracts to develop mRNA vaccines against potential pandemic flu viruses. It’s clear that this government is pulling the plug on support for this research and it’s devastating.
It’s too much to expect these people to care about the lives that won’t be saved because of their antediluvian attitudes toward modern science but they usually care about money. Economist Paul Krugman points out that “two first-rate economists, David Cutler and Ed Glaeser, have made a stab at estimating the impact of cuts at NIH. Their analysis suggests that these cuts might save $500 billion in federal spending over the next 25 years — while imposing more than $8 trillion in losses.”
But then caring about that would require long term thinking which Americans have never been very interested in. But we used to let scientists and researchers think about it for us and deliver the fruits of their labor for our benefit. It served us very well for over a century. Now we’re just going to tell people that it’s their patriotic duty to be healthy and leave it at that.
“I want to have security of rare earth,” Donald Trump said in February about a proposed minerals deal with Ukraine. “They have great rare earth.” It’s also one reason he’s obsessed about acquiring Greenland. That’s more about its size on a Mercator map, but I digress.
Trump doesn’t know what he is talking about, as usual. Something about advanced technology needing something, something, rare earth minerals (or rare earths) he could not find on the periodic table. But someone whispered that the U.S. needs to rely less on buying them from China, so here we go.
Rare earths are ubiquitous in the technologies we rely on every day, from smartphones to wind turbines to LED lights and flat-screen TVs. They’re also crucial for batteries in electric vehicles as well as MRI scanners and cancer treatments.
Rare earths are also essential for the US military. They’re used in F-35 fighter jets, submarines, lasers, satellites, Tomahawk missiles and more, according to a 2025 research note from CSIS.
JV Last on Tuesday pointed to a Trumpish move toward securing domestic supplies of rare earth materials. Specifically (CNBC):
MP Materials owns the only operational rare earth mine in the U.S. at Mountain Pass, California, about 60 miles outside Las Vegas. Proceeds from the Pentagon investment will be used to expand MP’s rare earths processing capacity and magnet production, the company said.
Shares of MP Materials soared about 50% to close at $45.23. Its market capitalization grew to $7.4 billion, an increase of about $2.5 billion from the previous trading session.
Whaddya bet some of Trump’s pals in Congress bought stock in MP Materials just ahead of the announcement? But I digress.
Let’s digress some more.
A man in the news whose name is as foreign-sounding to white ears as Barack Obama’s might be the latest WWE foreign menace. But Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, is instead the winner of the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Among other proposals, Mamdani proposes creating nonprofit, city-owned and subsidized groceries in all five boroughs, “grocery stores whose mission is lower prices, not price gouging.”
Trump and the right immediately lashed out. He is a “Communist Lunatic,” said Trump, and threatened to arrest and deport him. Cato and The National Review expressed outrage at the proposal.
Given the Pentagon’s new ownership stake in MP Materials, JV Last points out the obvious problem amidst the right’s smear campaign against Mamdani. Not only has the Pentagon poured $400 million into owning the means of production, Apple has joined in with a $500 million investment of its own, driving share prices even higher. Apple is currently negotiating with Trump over the 25% tariff he wants to levy on iPhones made in China. Shades of the Paramount settlement and its pending merger.
Thus, Last offers, the government “now controls $900 million-worth of MP because Apple has agreed to become its junior partner in the venture. There’s your actual, real-deal socialism.”
And not only is this naked corruption so routine as to no longer even be worth noticing, but the people who have the vapors about Zohran Mamdani’s five grocery stores are silent as the grave.
The Bulwark’s Will Sommer broke down the different MAGA factions reaction to the Epstein scandal. The following are just short excerpts. It’s worth subscribing to read the full explanation. (It’s worth subscribing for a lot of reasons, actually.)
The “Get Over It crowd”
If Trump’s remarks before his cabinet meeting on Tuesday about getting over Epstein didn’t send a clear enough message to his allies, his farcical allegation over Truth Social on Saturday that Barack Obama had somehow tampered with or even fabricated the Epstein files made it clear that he’s not reopening the Epstein investigation and folks should give it up.
That prompted some of the right’s biggest names to, finally, fall in line.
Charlie Kirk had been pimping this hard and then, after getting a call from the president himself, he came out and said that he wouldn’t talk about it anymore because he trusts his “friends in the White House.”
Daddy spanked him.
2. Epstein Dead-Enders
It’s not so easy for everyone to move on from Epstein. That’s because, for Trump supporters, the Epstein case has come to symbolize something that goes far beyond the mysterious rich sex criminal and his circle of friends.
They see it instead as the most notorious example of a permanent theme in American society: the elites getting one over on the common man. For this part of Trump world, Epstein has come to stand for everyone and everything that screws the little guy: mass immigration to depress wages, housing unaffordability, and much more. If the elites can keep abusing girls with impunity, what else can they get away with?
This is the biggest faction at least for now.
3. The Show-Trial Compromisers
The Trump administration and its still-reliable culture war allies seem to be offering the president’s angry supporters a compromise. Rather than prosecuting the pedophiles allegedly on some Epstein list, maybe instead we could launch trumped-up cases against some unrelated national security and law enforcement officials?
On Sunday, reliably pro-Trump website Just the Newsreported that the FBI under Patel is operating a sprawling probe aimed at participants in a so-called “grand conspiracy” of government weaponization. The remit of the investigation (and the special prosecutor whose appointment is being considered) comprises an impressive variety of government actions that Trump supporters have been mad about—in some cases for the better part of a decade. The grievances touch on everything from the failure to prosecute Hillary Clinton over her email server to former special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal cases against Trump.
Steve Bannon fits into this group. He wants a Special Prosecutor — to also look into the 2020 election and Russia, Russia, Russia.
4. The Cabal Accommodationists
Once, QAnon believers urged one another to put blind faith in Trump and “trust the plan,” knowing in their hearts that he would take on and ultimately defeat the pedophile cabal.
Now, some of Trump’s media allies are saying their audiences should “trust the plan” and leave the powerful cabal alone. For example, comedian Tim Dillon suggested that if Trump pushed further on the Epstein case, the cabal would kill him.
5. The Oblivious
No one has more badly misjudged the current Epstein moment than longtime Trump-world creature Roger Stone, who gave a speech at the TPUSA conference while dressed in his customary Al Capone-chic. Stone told the audience about a conversation he’d purportedly had with a reporter who kept asking Stone, “What about Epstein?” In Stone’s recounting, he steadfastly ignored the question and touted Trump policy accomplishments. As Stone talked up the Big Beautiful Bill and the Golden Dome missile shield, the reporter just kept bringing up the infamous pedophile.
He thought he was showing that this is just a media creation but the audience kept screaming “what about Epstein?!” Ooops.
These fault lines are new and perhaps they will end up widening and being permanent. That would be a good thing. But I think one of the unappreciated factors in all this is that Trump is a lame duck president and MAGA cultists are starting to think about their roles going forward without him. If this movement is to survive (IOW, their money train) a lot of them have to find a way to keep their piece of the MAGA movement without Daddy. This could be the first stirrings of that entirely predictable phenomenon — as only MAGA would do it.
The Internal Revenue Service is building a computer program that would give deportation officers unprecedented access to confidential tax data.
ProPublica has obtained a blueprint of the system, which would create an “on demand” process allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain the home addresses of people it’s seeking to deport.
Last month, in a previously undisclosed dispute, the acting general counsel at the IRS, Andrew De Mello, refused to turn over the addresses of 7.3 million taxpayers sought by ICE. In an email obtained by ProPublica, De Mello said he had identified multiple legal “deficiencies” in the agency’s request.
Two days later, on June 27, De Mello was forced out of his job, people familiar with the dispute said. The addresses have not yet been released to ICE. De Mello did not respond to requests for comment, and the administration did not address questions sent by ProPublica about his departure.
DeMello was actually the second general counsel, hired to replace another one who said that their proposal was illegal and unethical.
The Department of Government Efficiency began pushing the IRS to provide taxpayer data to immigration agents soon after President Donald Trump took office. The tax agency’s acting general counsel refused and was replaced by De Mello, who Trump administration officials viewed as more willing to carry out the president’s agenda. Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, and the IRS negotiated a “memorandum of understanding” that included specific legal guardrails to safeguard taxpayers’ private information.
In his email, De Mello said ICE’s request for millions of records did not meet those requirements, which include having a written assurance that each taxpayer whose address is being sought was under active criminal investigation.
“There’s just no way ICE has 7 million real criminal investigations, that’s a fantasy,” said a former senior IRS official who had been advising the agency on this issue. The demands from the DHS were “unprecedented,” the official added, saying the agency was pressing the IRS to do what amounted to “a big data dump.”
The biggest police force in the country, unaccountable and out of control, wants access to Americans’ personal data.
Noem says that every single detention by ICE and CBP is the result of probable cause determined by a thorough investigation which is absurd. They are trolling Home Depots and city parks looking for anyone who looks Latino. They are stopping drivers who look Latino. They are raiding workplaces and rousting people on the streets demanding to see their papers. There is voluminous video of this happening. She is a liar.
This IRS move is nothing more than a fishing expedition. And don’t kid yourself. This new secret police force is going to be set loose on anyone the administration believes is “harboring” or lending “material aid” to undocumented immigrants. This is where they’re headed. And I would expect the Supremes to back them all the way.
If you’re still a little lost about some of the details, Mehdi Hasan put together an excellent explainer on the relationship between Epstein and Trump. Well worth watching:
Update —
I’d forgotten about this weird one:
Donald Trump as principled decarceration activist (on behalf of rich sex criminals) was one of his funniest bits pic.twitter.com/KghSzBMVbr
It’s always been obvious that because Trump doesn’t really understand anything and has no capacity to learn that he simply adopted the strategy of reversing everything his political predecessors ever did in order to appear to have an energetic positive agenda. I’ve always been surprised that there wasn’t more comment on this.
This analysis by Peter Baker takes a deeper look at this phenomenon in the context of this second term’s wrecking ball:
Fluoride was introduced into drinking water starting in 1945. The flu vaccine was first made available to the general public a year later. Fuel efficiency standards for cars were adopted in 1975.
Such innovations long ago became stitched into the fabric of American life, largely accepted by most Americans who came to rely on them or gave them little thought. That is, until President Trump and his team came along and began methodically rolling back widespread practices and dismantling long-established institutions.
It should come as no surprise that Mr. Trump would try to undo much of what President Joseph R. Biden Jr. did over the past four years. What is so striking in Mr. Trump’s second term is how much he is trying to undo changes that happened years and even decades before that. At times, it seems as if he is trying to repeal much of the 20th century.
Baker attributes this to Trumpian nostalgia for the world of his youth and a hazy belief that America was at its peak in the 19th century and I agree that’s part of it. Trump never really developed intellectually and clings to ideas that came to him 40 to 60 years ago. Some fragment he learned in high school or a segment he watched on Larry King in 1989 form the entire basis of his understanding of how the world works.
But I think it’s clear that as president he’s developed a shorthand for making decisions which simply comes down to: whatever they did, I will do the opposite. It’s the laziest possible way to make decisions and perfect for someone with a mind like Trump’s — all ego, no intellect.
The good news for him is that his henchmen and accomplices in 2.0 have long wanted to do exactly what he’s doing — reverse everything Democrats have done for the past 80 years or so. (And quite a bit of what Republicans have done as well.) But they have a real vision for the future as well, something that Trump only vaguely sees as a restoration of some Leave it to Beaver fantasy.
There are the tech-bros wanting to create an AI Valhalla on earth, the racist hatemongers wanting to rid the country of immigrants and put Black Americans back in the back of the bus, the “Christians” who want to dominate the country with their throwback, fundamentalist, patriarchy just to name a few examples. What they all have in common is a belief that the nation as we’ve known it must be blown to smithereens so that their enemies can never rebuild it the way it was.
That’s the project. Trump is just their tool. As he babbles about “the golden age of Trump” and fiddles with the White House rose garden, his minions hand him the royal edicts to sign that will make their dreams come true.
It’s got to be some kind of elaborate con. After ignoring the fact that Donald Trump is on record saying that he’d like to date his own daughter and bragging that he would enter the dressing rooms of the Miss Teen USA pageant to “inspect” the young contestants, not to mention the dozens of women who have testified that he’d sexuality assaulted them, the MAGA leaders who are obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein and his sex trafficking of young women have come up with this:
President Donald Trump is under pressure from his MAGA base to appoint right-wing firebrand Matt Gaetz as a special prosecutor to investigate the Epstein case as rage continues over a potential cover-up.
Months after Gaetz was forced to withdraw his nomination to be Trump’s attorney general amid allegations of sexual misconduct with an underage girl, the former congressman is being touted as the man MAGA wants put in charge of examining the crimes and death of child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“Matt Gaetz would be the best,” former Trump strategist Steve Bannon said on stage with conservative activist Charlie Kirk at this weekend’s Turning Point USA summit.
“Matt Gaetz would be a no brainer, right?” Kirk added to rapturous applause by the crowd.
Come on. They’re joking, right? Or do they think that Gaetz’s very, super, special experience trafficking underage girls for wild drug and sex parties makes him the perfect expert?
What in the world is wrong with these people? Have they truly lost their minds or are we now living in some AI simulation designed to test our sanity every fucking day?
“A Democrat, located in the wild, is usually thinking defensively,” writes Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley. I couldn’t agree more. It’s that defensive crouch I’ve mentioned time and again.
His point is that Donald Trump’s revenge-a-palooza is so damned unpopular, it has opened a door for Democrats with a taste for offense big enough to drive a truck through:
The opportunity is, well, most of these things are unpopular, and House elections are held every two years. Lake is a two-time loser. The determinative swing cohort of American voters elected Trump not so that he could let the country’s weirdest crime guys out of jail and shut down Alzheimer’s research but rather so that he could end inflation—something he has not spent much time working on, relative to the amount of time he has spent attacking Los Angeles with horses. There’s an opening in Trump’s approval rating chart big enough to drive a truck through. By 2028, Democrats may even have a few candidates emboldened enough to propose that the party get some revenge of its own.
The question is will they? Wa-a-a-y back in December 2016, I suggested:
Institutional reserve leaves Democrats as a party in a perpetual, defensive crouch, looking for all the world more like abused spouses than bold leaders. All defense, as if in the age of Trump they have something left to lose.
There’s even less to lose today, isn’t there? Fight or die.
