Bloomberg columnist Ron Brownstein posted this this morning on Twitter.
Disney’s initial surrender over [Jimmy] Kimmel marked another ominous advance in Trump’s campaign to suppress dissent. Kimmel’s restoration shows those willing to resist that campaign can tap into a deep well of public concern. But this fight is hardly over, for any of Trump’s targets.
He’s exactly right. This goes to a topic we’ve frequently discussed: not simply the deep well of public concern but the civic totems that makes American blanch at the idea that the chair of the Federal Communications Commission should act like a Minister of Propaganda or Speech Commissar.
As Ron says, this is far from over. This morning, Nexstar has announced that it won’t resume airing Jimmy Kimmel’s show on the ABC affiliates it owns. I believe Sinclair, a far-right company which also owns a large number of affiliates, says the same.
There are many threads surrounding the MAGA right’s ongoing martyr-making and canonization of Charlie Kirk. We know about the tendentious rewriting of history both from Kirk’s stalwarts and his fellow travelers; we know how his death is being used as the pretext for various crackdowns on free speech and domestic enemies. But the part of this saga that is most interesting to me is the part that is based on a fairly simple and lazy misunderstanding. It’s not a terribly large part of the story but it contains some interesting dimensions.
Ezra Klein, rather notoriously, eulogized Kirk as someone who was doing politics right. He wanted to debate everyone. He was a master of persuasion, Klein claimed. California Gov. Gavin Newsom made similar points. Each of them made slightly better points than their one-line quotes that have gotten the most circulation. But in those comments and in their penumbras an idea got hatched that Kirk was an example of people debating their disagreements, engaging rather than retreating to their echo-chamber bubbles.
This article first appeared at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase in the condition and vowed to gather “the most credible scientists from all over the world” to solve the mystery.
Nothing like that has ever been done before, he told an interviewer.
McCanlies was stunned. The work had been done.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing!” she said to her husband, Fred.
As an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which Kennedy oversees, McCanlies had spent much of the past two decades studying how parents’ exposure to workplace chemicals affects the chance that they will have a child with autism. Just three weeks earlier, she’d been finalizing her fourth major paper on the topic when Kennedy eliminated her entire division. Kennedy has also overseen tens of millions of dollars in cuts to federal funding for research on autism, including its environmental causes.
For 20 years, Kennedy has espoused the debunked theory that autism is caused by vaccines, dismissing evidence to the contrary by arguing that vaccine manufacturers, researchers and regulators all have an interest in obscuring their harms.
He remains skeptical of the scientists who have been funded by his own agency to study the neurodevelopmental condition. “We need to stop trusting the experts,” he told right-wing host Tucker Carlson in a June interview, going on to suggest that previous studies that found no relationship between vaccines and autism were marred by “trickery” and researchers’ self-interest.
In contrast, Kennedy told Carlson that under his leadership, and with a new, federally funded $50 million autism research initiative, “We’re going to get real studies done for the first time.”
Some autism researchers fear that the effort will manipulate data to blame the condition on vaccines. “Kennedy has never expressed an open mind, an open attitude towards what are the fundamental causes of autism,” said Helen Tager-Flusberg, a Boston University psychologist who founded a coalition of scientists concerned about his approach to autism. In a June statement, the group said the initiative lacks transparency and that Kennedy “casually ignores decades of high quality research that preceded his oversight.”
As Kennedy promotes his new initiative, ProPublica has found that he has also taken aim at the traditional scientific approach to autism, shutting down McCanlies’ lab and stripping funding from more than 50 autism-related studies. Meanwhile, he has stood by as the Trump administration encourages the departure of hundreds of federal employees with experience studying the harm caused by environmental threats and rolls back protections from pollution and chemicals, including some linked to autism.
Kennedy did not respond to requests for an interview, and an HHS spokesperson did not answer specific questions from ProPublica, including those related to the concerns of the coalition of autism scientists. “Under the leadership of Secretary Kennedy, HHS is taking action on autism as the public health emergency it is,” the spokesperson wrote. “NIH is fully committed to leaving no stone unturned in confronting this catastrophic epidemic — employing only gold-standard, evidence-based science. The Department will follow the science, wherever it leads.”
Genetic factors account for a significant portion of autism cases. Research like the kind McCanlies and other government-funded scientists have conducted over the past two decades has established that environmental factors have a role, too, and can combine with genetics. Multiple factors can even converge within the same individual. Some of those environmental risks could be reduced by the very measures the Trump administration is rolling back.
Kennedy would have been well positioned to advocate for researchers looking into the environmental causes of autism while sitting on President Donald Trump’s cabinet.
The nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of his former attorney general, Bobby, Kennedy spent decades as an attorney battling some of the world’s most notorious corporate polluters. Once heralded by Time Magazine as one of the “heroes for the planet,” he railed against actions by the first Trump administration, complaining in his 2017 introduction to the book “Climate in Crisis” that 33 years’ worth of his work was “reduced to ruins as the president mounted his assault on science and environmental protection.”
But recently he has remained publicly silent as the Environmental Protection Agency halts research and weakens regulations on air pollution and chemicals, including some McCanlies and her colleagues have identified as possible factors in the development of autism.
“I don’t think he’s aware of my work,” McCanlies said, “or most of the literature that’s been published on what the causes of autism are.”
McCanlies was studying how a toxic chemical, beryllium, causes chronic lung inflammation in workers when she began to think seriously about autism.
It was 2005, and her college-age stepson had a job shadowing children with autism. As he described helping them navigate playground dynamics, reminding them to return a wave or a greeting, McCanlies wondered whether their behaviors might be tied to chemicals their parents had encountered on the job. Could the exposures have altered genes their parents passed down? Could they have infiltrated the kids’ developing brains through the womb or through breast milk?
The questions remained abstract until McCanlies met another researcher named Irva Hertz-Picciotto, who had a unique data set. She had collected detailed information on the occupations of two large groups of parents: those who had children with autism and those whose kids developed neurotypically. Comparing the groups’ chemical exposures before their children were born could help illuminate causes of the condition, McCanlies realized.
Hertz-Picciotto, an environmental epidemiologist based at the University of California, Davis, was a pioneer in the search for the causes of autism. In 2009, she published a much-cited paper highlighting a sevenfold increase in diagnoses in California. While others had asserted the rise was due to increased awareness and broadened diagnostic criteria, Hertz-Picciotto found those factors could only partially explain it. She and others went on to document additional contributors to autism risk, including parental age at the time of birth, a mother’s fever during pregnancy and more traditional environmental considerations, such as chemical exposures.
McCanlies hadn’t studied autism. But she offered Hertz-Picciotto her experience in genetics and epidemiology as well as the considerable resources of her agency. NIOSH was established in 1970 to investigate the dangers of the workplace, and its statisticians and industrial hygienists were among the world’s experts on the health impacts of chemical exposures.
Their first collaboration, published in 2012, used Hertz-Picciotto’s data to see if parents of children with autism were more likely to have been exposed to chemicals already thought to be dangerous to the developing brain. The work was technical and time-consuming, but the analysis showed a clear relationship: Mothers and fathers of children with autism were more likely than the parents of unaffected children to have been exposed to solvents such as lacquer, varnish and xylene on the job. These solvents evaporate quickly and can be easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin. Chemical plant workers, painters, electricians, plumbers, construction workers, cleaners and medical personnel are among those who may be exposed to these solvents.
The sample size was small — just 174 families. But the results lined up with recent findings showing possible links between autism and exposure to metals and certain solvents during pregnancy or early childhood, including a solvent called methylene chloride. They also tracked with studies linking the chemicals to miscarriage, reproductive problems, birth defects and developmental problems other than autism.
McCanlies and Hertz-Picciotto followed up with a 2019 study that looked at more than 950 families. It showed that women exposed to solvents at work during pregnancy and the three months leading up to it were 1.5 times more likely to have a child with autism than women not exposed to the chemicals. (The study did not find a link for chemically exposed men.)
Their third study, published in 2023, took the link between solvent exposure and autism as a starting point. Using blood samples to examine the genetic makeup of the parents of children with autism, McCanlies and Hertz-Picciotto found that when exposed to solvents on the job, people with specific variants of 31 genes had an especially elevated risk of having a child with autism. Their genetic makeup appeared to increase the risk that solvents by themselves posed. Some of those 31 genes help cells connect with one another; others play a role in helping cells migrate to different areas so they can grow into the various parts of the brain; still others ensure that cells clear away toxic substances.
Researchers were also making strides under the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a division of Health and Human Services, which has financed investigations into dozens of environmental contaminants. Several have been linked to autism, including air pollution, certainpesticides, a plastic additive known as BPA and diesel exhaust, which causes “autism-like behavioral changes” in mice. In 2021, Hertz-Picciotto co-published a study linking “forever chemicals” called PFOA and PFNA with the condition. (In 2023, a second paper also found an association with PFNA.) Other government-funded research has established a link between autism and another solvent, trichloroethylene, also known as TCE, which has been used for dry cleaning, manufacturing and degreasing machines.
Together, the results have shown that many exposures can increase the likelihood of autism, and that there can be multiple causes for any one person.
At least one exposure can have the opposite effect: A study by a researcher named Rebecca Schmidt — and funded by the NIEHS and NIH — found that a B vitamin called folic acid was associated with a significant decrease in the chances of an autism diagnosis. More than a dozen studies have since confirmed the association.
One problem hung over much of autism research. The sweeping diagnosis includes everyone from people who treasure their neurological differences to those with debilitating symptoms, including repetitive behaviors, excruciating sensitivity to touch and sounds, and difficulty responding to social situations. McCanlies and Hertz–Picciotto wondered whether certain chemicals were linked to the most severe cases or to specific symptoms.
In 2023, they set about finding out.
They were preparing to submit their study for publication when newly inaugurated Trump put Kennedy in charge of America’s health.
Despite having made chronic health conditions the focus of his agenda, Kennedy has quietly abided environmental policies that will exacerbate these problems, including autism.
The Environmental Protection Agency, under Administrator Lee Zeldin, is rolling back rules and regulations that will result in an increase in air pollution, which multiplestudies have linked toautism. The agency is in the process of reversing bans on several chemicals, including TCE, one of the solvents associated with the disorder, and has told a federal court it won’t legally defend certain aspects of a ban on methylene chloride, another of the solvents linked to autism. It also began dismantling its Office of Research and Development, which has funded research into the environmental conditionscontributing to autism. According to an EPA spokesperson, more than 2,300 workers have so far elected to leave the agency through Trump administration programs encouraging early retirement and resignation.
The EPA also began canceling grants, including one it had given to Schmidt, the researcher who studied the protective effect of folic acid. Schmidt had been awarded $1.3 million to determine whether air pollution from wildfires might increase the risk of various neurological conditions. Schmidt and her colleagues had just done preliminary analysis and found that there was a significant association between wildfire pollution exposure and autism when she received a letter saying that the grant was terminated because the project was “no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.” After a judge ruled in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of University of California researchers alleging their funding was unlawfully terminated, her grant was reinstated last month. But the EPA has appealed the judge’s ruling, leaving Schmidt unsure about the fate of the project.
Schmidt said there is an urgent need to finish the study and warn people about how to avoid the dangers from wildfire smoke by staying indoors and using air filters and N95 masks. “Millions of pregnant women are getting exposed as we speak,” she said.
Meanwhile, Kennedy has presided over his own gutting of research. Known for sharing videos of his bare-chested workouts, he likened his agency’s cuts to getting rid of “unhealthy fat,” but his plan to reduce the staff of HHS by 20,000 amounts to slashing the workforce by roughly a quarter, including veteran scientists. Among the divisions Kennedy eliminated was one that studied air quality and collected data on chemicals found in human blood. Some workers in the division were subsequently reinstated. After a lawsuit and pressure from Congress, HHS has also rehired some NIOSH workers, though none at the division where McCanlies worked. Those whose jobs have not been reinstated remain on administrative leave.
The reorganization plan for HHS involves consolidating the remnants of these parts of the agency, along with several others, into a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America. Asked about the transition, an HHS spokesperson told ProPublica in an email that the reorganization would save taxpayers $1.8 billion a year and that “critical programs will continue.”
Meanwhile, a ProPublica review of federal data found that more than $40 million in grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health for dozens of autism-related research projects were canceled under Kennedy’s watch. Some had been awarded to universities the administration is now targeting, while others ran afoul of Trump’s “anti-woke” priorities by mentioning gender and other verboten terms. Among them was a grant to Harvard University to use data on nearly half a million Israeli children to evaluate whether men’s exposure to air pollution affects the risk of having a child with autism. (A small number of grants have been recently reinstated.) A survey of researchers conducted by the Autism Science Foundation, which tallied cuts to training grants and the anticipated cuts to future grants over the next few years, estimated that the total loss of funding could be tens of millions more.
“We’re talking about probably decades of delays and setbacks,” said Alycia Halladay, chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation. “To take money away from all these areas of need to focus on a question that the HHS director considers high priority seems not scientific and not the way that science is done.”
Housed under the National Institutes of Health, Kennedy’s new $50-million Autism Data Science Initiative is looking to fund two- to three-year research projects that plumb large public and private datasets to find “possible contributors to the causes of autism” as well as conduct research on existing treatments.
With the deadline for his promised discovery fast approaching, Kennedy recently acknowledged that his initial six-month timeline was overly optimistic. He told Carlson he should have “some initial indicator answers” about the causes of autism by September, his original deadline, and promised unqualified answers within another six months.
While the NIH typically releases the names of the scientists on the committees that review grant applications and the criteria they use to review them, it has not done so in this case. Nor has the agency clarified what role NIH staff will have in awarding the grants, who will make the final selection, or what terms and conditions researchers must agree to if they receive funds. HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about who will make the final grant selection and why the agency has not yet made this information public, but a video NIH created for applicants of the funding acknowledges that reviews of the proposals “do not follow the traditional NIH review process.” According to the video, the process was “designed to ensure integrity, fairness and transparency.”
Hertz-Picciotto, who laments the fact that Kennedy is “shutting down good studies,” is among the researchers in her field who have decided to apply for the funding. “Some of his agenda is really ridiculous and very counterproductive,” she said. “But if something good can be done with this money, I’d like to be part of that.”
If her project is approved, she plans to hire McCanlies to consult on it.
McCanlies said she agreed to work on the project because she has complete confidence in her longtime colleague, if not the health secretary. “I don’t trust him at all,” she said.
McCanlies had never paid much attention to Kennedy — or to politics. Throughout the seven presidential administrations that governed while she had been at NIOSH, her work had been utterly uncontroversial. But weeks after his confirmation, she knew her job was in peril. She had deleted the first email she received from Trump’s Office of Personnel Management. The tone was so strange and disrespectful, hinting that she might be punished if she didn’t respond by confirming her email address, that she assumed it was a phishing attempt. By the time she received a second, suggesting that she find a “higher productivity” job in the private sector, firings and budget cuts were rolling across federal agencies.
The 58-year-old, who has short, greying hair, hazel eyes and three graduate degrees, hadn’t been ready to leave NIOSH’s Health Effects Lab in Morgantown, West Virginia, a place where she had mentored young colleagues, taught a lunchtime meditation class and helped conduct several yearslong research projects. The lab is also where she met Fred, her husband, another Ph.D. scientist who studied workplace chemical hazards. She reluctantly put in for early retirement just days before the entire lab was dissolved.
McCanlies spent her final days at NIOSH finishing her last paper, which explores the association between workplace chemicals and the severity of autism. Normally, she would have her supervisor sign off on her submission to a journal, but he had already lost his job. The rest of her colleagues were gone, too, and the lab’s hallways were empty as she gave the manuscript a final edit.
She felt proud of the study, which answered some of the questions she and Hertz-Picciotto had posed years ago. There were indeed links between exposures and the severity of autism. Parents’ exposure to plastics was “consistently and significantly associated” with lower cognitive scores in their children who had autism, increases in “aberrant behaviors” and deficits in basic life skills, the study found. The exposure was also linked to particular symptoms of autism, including social withdrawal, hyperactivity and repetitive behaviors such as hand flapping and body rocking. Higher autism severity scores and weaker daily living skills were also linked with ethylene oxide. Last year, the EPA imposed stricter limits on the chemical, which is used as a sterilizer. But the agency is now reconsidering those restrictions, and, in July, Trump exempted some of the biggest polluters from them.
The paper, which is now available as a preprint, recommended that regulatory agencies “consider increasing awareness of these hazards and make clear recommendations for implementing protective measures at the worksite.”
Having just watched so many occupational health experts forced to leave their jobs, McCanlies suspected their advice was unlikely to be heeded anytime soon.
Despite all the echoes of early 20th century European fascism, Donald Trump is still firmly planted in the long American tradition of snake oil salesman, carnival barkers, and con artists. It’s at least as strong a through-line in American history as our puritanism, sitting in counterpoise to its ascetic, moralistic self-deprivation. We celebrate charlatans like P.T. Barnum, make scoundrels into lovable archetypes, and root for the conversion of con artists like “Professor” Harold Hill.
The crossover between hucksters and politicians didn’t begin with Trump.
Louisiana’s Dudley J. LeBlanc, who served in the state legislature intermittently from the 1920s into the 1970s, made a fortune creating the patent medicine labeled Hadacol. In the early 1950s, Hadacol was a marketing marvel, boosted by the traveling medicine show the Hadacol Caravan, which featured some of the leading performers of the day, including Hank Williams. What made Hadacol so popular was less its promise of miracle cures and more its 12% alcohol content. You could drink it in dry counties where little else was available.
Leblanc, whose dubious Wikipedia page credits him with the idea for Social Security, made millions from the high-flying over-leveraged, marketing bonanza of Hadacol before it all collapsed amid unpaid bills, overdue taxes, and scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission (more on which from the Supreme Court below). “The Federal Trade Commission complained that Hadacol’s leeringly prurient ballyhoo (‘The Hadacol boogie makes you boogie-woogie all the time’) is ‘false, misleading and deceptive’ in representing the nostrum as ‘an effective treatment and cure for scores of ailments and diseases,” Time magazine reported in 1951.
The snake oil salesman is such a fixture of our culture that one of American politics’ most famous grifters, Louisiana Sen. Huey Long, famously used the trope to disparage the two major political parties in seeking to set himself apart. The parties were, he said, no different than the patent medicine salesman selling the same product under beguilingly different names: High Papalorum and Low Popahirum. Asked to explain the difference between the two bottles, the salesman explained that they were both made from the same tree but they were different: The former was made from the bark peeled from the top down and the latter peeled from the bottom up.
Yesterday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s traveling medicine show made a stop at the White House, where President Trump was the featured barker at an off-the-rails press conference. Taking unscientific aim at vaccines and unsubstantiated links between Tylenol and autism, the president went on a long, meandering musing reminiscent of some of the worst of his COVID-era pressers touting bleach and ultraviolet light:
Trump: "Asceda — well, let's see how we say that. Ascenem — enophin. Acetaminophen. Is that okay?"
Trump: "It's too much liquid. Too many different things are going into that baby at too big a number. The size of this thing when you look at it. It's like 80 different vaccines and beyond vaccines."
Medical experts, scientists, and public health advocates were aghast at the White House scene.
Roberts Court Sounds Final Death Knell for Indy Agencies
It was fitting that on the day President Trump and his HHS secretary were deriding science and touting unproven cures, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts took a sledgehammer to the FTC.
In another abuse of its shadow docket, the Roberts Court effectively overturned its own century-old precedent on independent agencies and allowed Trump’s firing of the Democratic FTC commissioner to go into effect while the appeal of the case proceeds.
The precedent the Supreme Court effectively overturned, Humphrey’s Executor, was a 1935 case about the firing of an FTC commissioner — so it could hardly be more on point. So eager was the court to change course that it agreed to take up the case immediately rather than wait for the appeals court to hear it. It was a contrast with, for example, the Roberts Court’s refusal to consider Special Counsel Jack Smith’s similar request for expedited treatment in Trump’s presidential immunity case. And we all know how that turned out.
Even Justice Elena Kagan, usually more subdued than her two liberal colleagues on the court, managed outrage and indignation in her dissent: “Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.”
Operation Fast Casual: Homan’s Non-Denial Denial
It wasn’t just extraordinary that the White House would take a public position on the underlying facts of a criminal investigation it blocked and buried. It was also comical that while press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that border czar Tom Homan had taken the $50,000 in a Cava bag in an exchange allegedly recording by the FBI, Homan for his part didn’t directly deny it in a interview last night on Fox News with Laura Ingraham:
Q: Did the president ask the DOJ to close the Homan investigation and does he have to return the $50,000LEAVITT: Mr. Homan never took the $50,000, so you should get your facts straight … you had FBI agents going undercover to try and entrap one of the president's top allies and supporters
The Trump administration is preparing to bail out the Argentine economy, whose current President is Trump ally Javier Milei. Says Reuters, “Markets have been roiled by corruption allegations inside Milei’s circle and a larger-than-expected loss in a local election in Buenos Aires …”
Former Trump defense attorney Lindsey Halligan was reportedly sworn in as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Monday after the president forced out her predecessor for failing to turn up wrongdoing with which to charge New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) and other public figures he considers his enemies.
Erik Siebert, the previous acting U.S. attorney, resigned Friday after Trump told reporters he wanted him gone.
Halligan has no prosecutorial experience. Most recently, she worked in the White House staff secretary’s office, reportedly tasked with censoring the Smithsonian museums. Previously, per ABC, she handled insurance claims related to the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.
Trump announced that he’d be appointing her Friday via social media. That post came shortly after one that was styled as (and possibly intended to be) a direct message to AG Pam Bondi, where Trump reamed her out for not pursuing his political enemies (including James) aggressively enough.
— Kate Riga
Schumer, Jeffries Drag Out The Will They, Won’t They Mamdani News Cycle
Another weekend has passed, and with it the latest chance for Democratic leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) to put to bed the endless speculation about why they haven’t endorsed Democratic candidate for New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, and whether they will.
“I’ll have more to say about the Mayor’s race sometime soon,” Jeffries said on MSNBC — perhaps a nod to a potential coming endorsement, per the New York Post.
Schumer’s dodge on CNN reads as less of a tease: “All I can tell you is, I’m going to continue talking to him.”
The political triangulation here is too cute by half. If the fear is Fox News et al making Mamdani the face of the Democratic Party — particularly if he struggles as mayor — do Schumer and Jeffries really think foot-dragging an inevitable endorsement will give them any cover? As if the right-wing media structure hesitates to assign random social media users as spokespeople for the Democratic Party.
They’ll either endorse Mamdani or not endorse at all — and doing either decisively when Mamdani won the primary would have been less of an albatross around the party leaders’ necks than these endless iterations of fence sitting, a particularly bad look as the Democratic base clamors for brashness and vitality over hesitancy and poll-tested limpness.
Mamdani aims to be seen as doing the former. On Monday, he announced that he’d cancel a planned ABC town hall in response to the network’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel.
“ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air after the FCC sought to pressure them,” Mamdani said at a press conference Monday. “The message that it sends to each and every American across this country is a message the First Amendment is no longer a right that can be counted on, but rather that it is government which will determine what should and should not be discussed, what can and cannot be spoken. And we cannot normalize these kinds of acts nor offenses. These must be the basis upon which we act.”
— Kate Riga
MAGA Comes to South American Allies’ Aid
Javier Milei, Argentina’s embattled, libertarian TV-commentator-turned president received some welcome news today from his friends in the U.S. government: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is prepared to intervene as the country’s currency plunged amid a run on the peso.
“All options for stabilization are on the table,” Bessent tweeted this morning.
With Jair Bolsonaro out of power in Brazil (and recently convicted of a coup attempt), Milei has become MAGA’s loudest South American ally. A friend of Elon Musk, his government did a DOGE-like thing, slashing huge numbers of government jobs during his first weeks in office, helping to inspire Musk’s own haphazard attempt to do the same here. Milei famously gave Musk that chainsaw, a prop that Milei had become known for hauling out on Argentine TV.
The display of full support from the Trump administration is a demonstration of the favors available to its ideological allies abroad (even if that overlap is more a question of social media style than actual ideology: Milei campaigned against decades of government involvement in Argentina’s economy and meddling in its economic statistics, while Trump appears eager to take a page from Milei’s Peronist foes in his own second term). MAGA diplomacy, of course, cuts both ways; the Trump administration on Monday sanctioned the wife of a justice on Brazil’s Supreme Court who oversaw Bolsonaro’s prosecution, and revoked the visas of other government officials.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
An early episode of South Park features a subplot in which tiny gnomes sneak into the houses of South Park residents in order to steal their underpants. When asked why, they explain that collecting underpants is just the beginning: “Well, Phase 1, we collect underpants.” “What about Phase 2?” “Well, Phase 3 is profit.” When pressed, they explain again: “You see, Phase 1, collect underpants. Phase 2 … [silence]. Phase 3, profit.”
It’s a beautifully crisp lampooning of half-baked ideas, built for business plans but readily adaptable to any sort of scheme. And it’s profoundly relevant to the current electoral conversations.
Over the weekend we had a confluence of three stories which together illustrate where the federal government is eight months into the second Trump administration. 1. The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was either fired or resigned under pressure (probably the latter) for his refusal/inability to prosecute designated Trump enemies like New York Attorney General Letitia James. 2. We learned that last fall, Tom Homan was the subject of an investigation in which he had accepted a literal bag of $50,000 cash for corrupt actions during the second Trump administration should Trump again be elected. Investigators were waiting to see if Homan, who is now Trump’s border czar, would follow through on those promises once in office. (If you stiff the folks who bribed you it’s still a crime but it’s a lesser offense.) However, the Trump DOJ shut down the investigation. 3. Finally, NOTUS reports this morning that Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section has gone from 36 “experienced attorneys assigned full-time to investigate corrupt politicians and police officers” to two. That’s two as in double of one. The departures are a mix of firings, pressured or forced resignations, resignations on principle and reassignments.
In a blockbuster weekend story, MSNBC reported that the Trump Justice Department shut down a bribery investigation of Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, which recorded him allegedly accepting $50,000 of cash during a sting operation in the summer of 2024:
The federal investigation was launched in western Texas in the summer of 2024 after a subject in a separate investigation claimed Homan was soliciting payments in exchange for awarding contracts should Trump win the presidential election, according to an internal Justice Department summary of the probe reviewed by MSNBC and people familiar with the case.
Homan was recorded accepting the $50,000 in bills in a bag from the fast casual chain Cava, Reuters reported.
FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued an extraordinary joint statement in which they condemned the investigation as “baseless.” The Trump White House called it a “blatantly political investigation.”
MSNBC and, later, other outlets reported that rather than the investigation being over or it having found no evidence of wrongdoing, investigators were waiting to see if Homan followed through on the quid with a quo once he took office. That would have arguably advanced the seriousness of the case from conspiracy to commit bribery to actual bribery. But the probe was scotched by the new incoming Trump political appointees at DOJ.
Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general and now a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, “told Justice Department officials he did not support the investigation,” MSNBC reported. Bove called it a “deep state” operation, according to Reuters, which reported that Patel ordered the investigation closed over the summer.
The Whole U.S. Attorney Scandal Plays Out in a Weekend
Nearly 20 years ago, TPM cut its chops on the 2006-07 U.S. attorney scandal. The Bush II-era firings of Republican U.S. attorneys for failing to be aggressive enough in pursuing bogus voter fraud charges led to congressional hearings and eventually the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
It all seems almost quaint now by the standards of Donald Trump.
In a cascading series of corrupt moves over the weekend, President Trump revealed for all to see that he himself is the prime mover behind targeting his political foes for retribution with criminal investigations and prosecutions.
With Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, having failed to secure an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James on bogus mortgage fraud charges, the president told reporters that he wanted Siebert out. In response, Siebert — who was also investigating former FBI Director James Comey, another leading Trump foe — told his staff he was resigning, though Trump insisted he’d fired the career prosecutor.
In a mad king series of social media posts — the initial one perhaps intended as a private DM, perhaps not — Trump publicly pressured Attorney General Pam Bondi to get moving on prosecuting a host of Trump foes, including James.
It was Trump himself — not a White House aide, overzealous underling, or misguided political appointee — publicly directing that charges be brought, the evidence be damned. It was Trump himself finding a compliant loyalist — Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer of his with no prosecutorial experience — to replace Siebert in running one of the most important U.S. attorney’s offices in the country. For now Bondi has appointed Mary “Maggie” Cleary, a Republican lawyer in Virginia, as acting U.S. attorney, Politico reports.
Two decades ago, White House interference with U.S. attorneys took weeks to uncover and months to play out. This time, a turbocharged version of the same scandal played out across one weekend, with the president himself the primary conspirator.
“We’ve never seen anything even approaching this level of interference with the day-to-day job of prosecutors,” said Carol Lam, a former U.S. attorney who was among those forced to resign in the Bush-era scandal, told the WaPo.
‘Hands Can Become Dirty’
Conservative Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith speaks directly to political appointees about the perils of continuing to justify remaining at the Trump DOJ: “At some point, it defies [your] oath to serve a president who rejects the rule of law and bends the Department to his abuses.”
The Retribution: Thanks, John Roberts
Mother Jones’ Pema Levy on how the Roberts Court cleared the way for Trump’s lawless and retributive political prosecutions.
The new pledge asks journalists to acknowledge in writing that acquiring or using unauthorized information would be grounds for “immediate suspension” of Pentagon access. It defined off-limits information to include both classified materials and “controlled unclassified information,” a broadly defined category that includes materials that could pose a risk to national security if released to the public.
The kind of authoritarianism I fear is emerging in the United States, which political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism,” doesn’t involve the outright criminalization of the opposition or formal martial law. Instead, it depends on perverting the law, modifying and twisting it with the intent of incrementally undermining the opposition’s ability to compete fairly in elections.
Judge Drop-Kicks Trump’s NYT Lawsuit Out of Court
In a scolding order, U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday of Tampa, Florida, rejected President Trump’s absurd 85-page defamation lawsuit against the NYT as too long and tedious under court rules:
… a complaint remains an improper and impermissible place for the tedious and burdensome aggregation of prospective evidence, for the rehearsal of tendentious arguments, or for the protracted recitation and explanation of legal authority putatively supporting the pleader’s claim for relief. As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective — not a protected platform to rage against an adversary. A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner.
The judge gave Trump 28 days to file an amended complaint of no more than 40 pages.
[L]ast week showcased another, equally important side of Kennedy’s management: the way he is eliminating the people and dispensing with the procedures that allow agencies like the CDC to carry out their basic functions in a transparent, scientifically sound way. The effect isn’t so much to realign priorities as it is to unleash chaos. But that can still be corrosive to the government’s credibility—and hazardous to the people who depend on it.
Data Destruction Watch: USDA Edition
The Trump administration is canceling an annual USDA effort to gather data on how many Americans struggle to get enough food, the WSJ reports.
A Good Read
Drew Johnson offers an extended reflection on the long-forgotten Rep. James M. Hinds (R-AR), the first sitting member of Congress to be assassinated, ambushed by a Klansman in October 1868.
ASHE COUNTY, N.C. — In the time it took to read an email, the federal money vanished before Superintendent Eisa Cox’s eyes: dollars that supported the Ashe County school district’s after-school program, training for its teachers, salaries for some jobs.
The email from the Department of Education arrived June 30, one day before the money — $1.1 million in total — was set to materialize for the rural western North Carolina district. Instead, the dollars had been frozen pending a review to make sure the money was spent “in accordance with the President’s priorities,” the email said.
In a community still recovering from Hurricane Helene, where more than half of students are considered economically disadvantaged, Cox said there was no way they could replace that federal funding. “It is scary to think about it, you’re getting ready to open school and not have a significant pot of funds,” she said.
School leaders across the country were reeling from the same news. The $1.1 million was one small piece of a nearly $7 billion pot of federal funding for thousands of school districts that the Trump administration froze — money approved by Congress and that schools were scheduled to receive on July 1. For weeks, leaders in Ashe County and around the country scrambled to figure out how they could avoid layoffs and fill financial holes — until the money was freed July 25, after an outcry from legislators and a lawsuit joined by two dozen states.
“I had teachers crying, staff members crying. They thought they were going to lose their jobs a week before school,” said Curtis Finch, superintendent of Deer Valley Unified School District in Phoenix.
Now, as educators welcome students back to classrooms, they can no longer count on federal dollars as they once did. They must learn to plan without a playbook under a president intent on cutting education spending. For many districts, federal money is a small but crucial sliver of their budgets, potentially touching every part of a school’s operations, from teacher salaries to textbooks. Nationally, it accounts for about 14 percent of public school funding; in Ashe County, it’s 17 percent. School administrators are examining their resources now and budgeting for losses to funding that was frozen this summer, for English learners, after-school and other programs.
So far, the Trump administration has not proposed cutting the largest pots of federal money for schools, which go to services for students with disabilities and to schools with large numbers of low-income students. But the current budget proposal from the U.S. House of Representatives would do just that.
At the same time, forthcoming cuts to other federal support for low-income families under the Republican “one big, beautiful bill” — including Medicaid and SNAP — will also hammer schools that have many students living in poverty. And some school districts are also grappling with the elimination of Department of Education grants announced earlier this year, such as those designed to address teacher shortages and disability services. In politically conservative communities like this one, there’s an added tension for schools that rely on federal money to operate: how to sound the alarm while staying out of partisan politics.
For Ashe County, the federal spending freeze collided with the district’s attempt at a fresh start after the devastation of Helene, which demolished roads and homes, damaged school buildings and knocked power and cell service out for weeks. Between the storm and snow days, students here missed 47 days of instruction.
Cox worries this school year might bring more missed days: That first week of school, she found herself counting the number of foggy mornings. An old Appalachian wives’ tale says to put a bean in a jar for every morning of fog in August. The number of beans at the end of the month is how many snow days will come in winter.
“We’ve had 21 so far,” Cox said with a nervous laugh on Aug. 21.
Fragrant evergreen trees blanket Ashe County’s hills, a region that bills itself as America’s Christmas Tree Capital because of the millions of Fraser firs grown for sale at the holidays. Yet this picturesque area still shows scars of Hurricane Helene’s destruction: fallen trees, damaged homes and rocky new paths cut through the mountainsides by mudslides. Nearly a year after the storm, the lone grocery store in one of its small towns is still being rebuilt. A sinkhole that formed during the flooding remains, splitting open the ground behind an elementary school. As students walked into classrooms for the first time since spring, Julie Taylor — the district’s director of federal programs — was reworking district budget spreadsheets. When federal funds were frozen, and then unfrozen, her plans and calculations from months prior became meaningless.
Federal and state funding stretches far in this district of 2,700 students and six schools, where administrators do a lot with a little. Even before this summer, they worked hard to supplement that funding in any way possible — applying to state and federal grants, like one last year that provided money for a few mobile hot spots for families who don’t have internet access. Such opportunities are also narrowing: The Federal Communications Commission, for example, recently proposed ending its mobile hot spot grant program for school buses and libraries.
“We’re very fiscally responsible because we have to be — we’re small and rural, we don’t have a large tax base,” Taylor said.
When the money was frozen this summer, administrators’ minds went to the educators and kids who would be most affected. Some of it paid for a program through Appalachian State University that connects the district’s three dozen early-career teachers with a mentor, helps them learn how to schedule their school days and manage classroom behavior.
The program is part of the reason the district’s retention rate for early career teachers is 92 percent, Taylor said, noting the teachers have said how much the mentoring meant to them.
Also frozen: free after-school care the district provides for about 250 children throughout the school year — the only after-school option in the community. Without the money, Cox said, schools would have to cancel their after-school care or start charging families, a significant burden in a county with a median household income of about $50,000.
The salary for Michelle Pelayo, the district’s migrant education program coordinator for nearly two decades, was also tied up in that pot of funding. Because agriculture is the county’s biggest industry, Pelayo’s work in Ashe County extends far beyond the students at the school. Each year, she works with the families of dozens of migrant students who move to the area for seasonal work on farms, which generally involves tagging and bundling Christmas trees and harvesting pumpkins. Pelayo helps the families enroll their students, connects them with supplies for school and home, and serves as a Spanish translator for parent-teacher meetings — “whatever they need,” she said.
Kitty Honeycutt, executive director of the Ashe County Chamber of Commerce, doesn’t know how the county’s agriculture industry would survive without the migrant students Pelayo works with. “The need for guest workers is crucial for the agriculture industry — we have to have them,” she said.
A couple of years ago, Pelayo had the idea to drive to Boone, North Carolina, where Appalachian State University’s campus sits, to gather unwanted appliances and supplies from students moving out of their dorm rooms at the end of the year to donate to migrant families. She’s a “find a way or make a way” type of person, Honeycutt said.
Cox is searching for how to keep Pelayo on if Ashe County loses these federal funds next year. She’s talked with county officials to see if they could pay Pelayo’s salary, and begun calculating how much the district would need to charge families to keep the after-school program running. Ideally, she’d know ahead of time and not the night before the district is set to receive the money.
Districts across the country are grappling with similar questions. In Detroit, school leaders are preparing, at a minimum, to lose Title III money to teach English learners. More than 7,200 Detroit students received services funded by Title III in 2023.
In Wyoming, the small, rural Sheridan County School District 3 is trying to budget without Title II, IV and V money — funding for improving teacher quality, updating technology and resources for rural and low-income schools, among other uses, Superintendent Chase Christensen said.
Schools are trying to budget for cuts to other federal programs, too — such as Medicaid and food stamps. In Harrison School District 2, an urban district in Colorado Springs, Colorado, schools rely on Medicaid to provide students with counseling, nursing and other services.
The district projects that it could lose half the $15 million it receives in Medicaid next school year.
“It’s very, very stressful,” said Wendy Birhanzel, superintendent of Harrison School District 2. “For a while, it was every day, you were hearing something different. And you couldn’t even keep up with, ‘What’s the latest information today?’ That’s another thing we told our staff: If you can, just don’t watch the news about education right now.”
There’s another calculation for school leaders to make in conservative counties like Ashe, where 72 percent of the vote last year went for President Donald Trump: objecting to the cuts without angering voters. When North Carolina’s attorney general, a Democrat, joined the lawsuit against the administration over the frozen funds this summer, some school administrators told state officials they couldn’t publicly sign on, fearing local backlash, said Jack Hoke, executive director of the North Carolina School Superintendents’ Association.
Cox sees the effort to slash federal funds as a chance to show her community how Ashe County Schools uses this money. She believes people are misguided in thinking their schools don’t need it, not malicious.
“I know who our congresspeople are — I know they care about this area,” Cox said, even if they do not fully grasp how the money is used. “It’s an opportunity for me to educate them.”
If the Education Department is shuttered — which Trump said he plans to do in order to give more authority over education to states — she wants to be included in state-level discussions for how federal money flows to schools through North Carolina. And, importantly, she wants to know ahead of time what her schools might lose.
As Cox made her rounds to each of the schools that first week back, she glanced down at her phone and looked up with a smile. “We have hot water,” she said while walking in the hall of Blue Ridge Elementary School. It had lost hot water a few weeks earlier, but to Cox, this crisis was minor — one of many first-of-the-year hiccups she has come to expect.
Still, it’s one worry she can put out of her mind as she looks ahead to a year of uncertainties.
Meanwhile, the anxiety about this school year hasn’t reached the students, who were talking among themselves in the high school’s media center, creating collages in the elementary school’s art class and trekking up to Mount Jefferson — a state park that sits directly behind the district’s two high schools — for an annual trip.
They were just excited to be back.
Marina Villeneuve contributed data analysis to this story. Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at gilreath@hechingerreport.org.
