Jeff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Syndicate. He is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at jeffdanziger.com.
Last week’s Make American Healthy Again Commission report on childhood health was clearly the product of the left side of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brain. Other than its vaccine section, it echoed arguments that progressive physician-scientists and public interest groups have been making for decades:
These public health concerns are areas where the left and the MAHA movement led by RFK Jr. happen to be in agreement. The still unanswered question is what will they do about it.
Commission members endorsing the report included nearly every relevant cabinet secretary. But it also included Russell Vought (head of the Office of Management and Budget), Stephen Miller (anti-immigration czar and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy), and Kevin Hassett (Director of the National Economic Council). They promised to offer a plan by mid-August that would “get to the truth of why we are getting sick” while “spurring pro-growth policies and innovations.”
That, too, is something the left has been offering for decades. There is no reason why American corporatized farms have to pursue mono-crop agriculture that relies on heavy doses of pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers. Smaller, family-owned farms can earn just as good a living by including more nutritious foods for local use in their crop mix.
For decades, the left has also bemoaned the lack of regulation over the thousands of chemicals used by industry that are being dumped into the air and water without being tested for their potential effects on humans. Progressives have long argued that scientists funded by government or truly independent non-profit research institutes should be the sole determinants of what chemicals can be unleashed on the public.
If RFK Jr. at the Health and Human Services Department, Martin Makary at the Food and Drug Administration, Jayanta Bhattacharya at the National Institutes of Health, and Lee Zeldin at the Environmental Protection Agency (all signatories to the report) want items for their action agenda, here’s one place they could look. Last January, the 25-member Consortium for Children’s Environmental Health issued a call, published by the New England Journal of Medicine, for a new law governing the regulation of chemicals used by industry.
Here’s some facts drawn from that article:
The Toxic Substances Control Act, passed in 1977, failed to give the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to prevent dangerous chemicals from being introduced into the environment or food supply. It assumes all manufactured chemicals are safe and puts the onus on government to prove otherwise.
The EPA was never given the resources to conduct the necessary research. And now, under the Trump regime, the entire research department is being eliminated.
Even before Elon Musk wielded a meat-axe at the EPA and other agencies, most research about potential toxicities from chemicals came from industry-funded scientists. The same held true for the FDA when it looks at studies of food additives, most of which, not surprisingly, claim no harms are caused from their use. I participated in a 2007 study documenting this bias entitled, “Relationship between Funding Source and Conclusion among Nutrition-Related Scientific Articles,” which was cited in the MAHA Commission report.
The Consortium for Children’s Environmental Health action agenda included these items:
“Pollution by synthetic chemicals and plastics is a major planetary challenge that is worsening rapidly, “ the Consortium’s authors concluded. “Continued, unchecked increases in production of fossil-carbon–based chemicals endangers the world’s children and threatens humanity’s capacity for reproduction… Inaction on chemicals is no longer an option.”
Had the MAHA report eschewed vaccine skepticism, it might have been greeted with less skepticism in the media. Will they take actions this summer that actually limit the ability of Trump’s corporate campaign contributors to spew toxics into the air and water and adulterate the food supply?
Yesterday, RFK Jr. announced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is withdrawing its recommendation that pregnant women and children get vaccinated for COVID. That suggests his priorities lie elsewhere.
Reprinted with permission from Gooz News.
If you’re anything like I am, you have probably spent a considerable amount of time over the past two months trying to figure out what these dull fuckers think they’re doing. I won’t take your time providing a full list of what they’ve done since Trump sat down in the Oval Office on inauguration night and started signing executive orders, but let us at least review the last week’s events.
Last weekend, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security set forth to deport about 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan gang. They have managed to get themselves hung up on violating a judge’s order to stop the deportation. It has been revealed that some of those deported were not gang members. They have refused to provide a list of the deportees. Lawyers for the Department of Justice have refused to answer the judge’s questions on grounds of “national security” and plan to invoke something called the “state secret privilege” in denying information about the deportation flights and handling of deportees, which were covered nearly door-to-door by Fox News.
A federal judge ruled that the closure of the United States Agency for International Development and firing of thousands of federal workers employed there was “likely unconstitutional” and ordered the government to reinstate them and give them access to their USAID email accounts and access to official information that will enable them to do their jobs.
Another federal judge ordered the Social Security Administration not to allow Elon Musk and his team of rat-fuckers to access the private information of millions of Social Security recipients, including their SS numbers, drivers license numbers, ages, and addresses.
Yet another federal judge stopped Trump’s ban of transgender troops at least in part because government orders are not made by “tweets,” and the government does not have any information about how many transgender individuals serve in the U.S. military, so the government does not know who would be affected by the ban. The Pentagon tried to change the definition of the ban from “transgender” to “people with symptoms of gender dysphoria.” The judge was not buying the attempted change in the ban, telling the Pentagon lawyer, “The policy’s impact is the same. This is still a ban on transgender service members.”
White House adviser and known immigration paranoid Stephen Miller, who is descended from a family of Belarussian Jewish immigrants, denounced the court decisions that have failed to go Trump’s way as “the insane edicts of radical rogue judges,” and multiple articles of impeachment have been filed against judges who have ruled against Trump by radical, rogue House Republicans, who drew a rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts.
And then, over the last 24 hours, we have been treated to what appears to be one of the great Department of Defense clusterfucks of the last 50 years. Elon Musk was apparently scheduled to get an ultra-top secret briefing at the Pentagon today that would have taken place in the equally ultra-top secret ”tank,” about US plans to defend the island of Taiwan in the event of an attack by the Chinese military.
My old friend and West Point history professor Terrence Goggin wrote on his Substack today an excellent analysis of what actually happened. Goggin thinks an order came down from the White House to give Musk the top secret briefing and the Pentagon was sufficiently disturbed by the idea of sharing such top secret information with a civilian who had nowhere near the clearance to hear it, that news of the briefing was deliberately leaked to the New York Times, which promptly published it on the front page. Once the unusual, to put it mildly, information about Musk’s special briefing was made public, it was cancelled, and the White House and Musk scrambled to come up with another excuse for his Pentagon visit.
Goggin’s informed speculation is that what we witnessed was the Pentagon's way of disobeying a presidential order without appearing to, and of course without ruffling Trump’s hair-sprayed feathers. He may be right, or the whole thing may have been a gigantic mistake made by a bunch of nonmilitary trained amateurs, but either way, exactly nobody in the whole mess -- not Trump, not his aides, not Hegseth, and not his aides, and certainly not Elon Musk -- evidenced even a smidgen of competence or knowledge of and respect for national security.
So, what's really going on here? Trump and Miller and Musk and the various Republican maniacs who surround them are clearly trying to disassemble what they have called the deep state. Hell, they advertised as much when they told a thousand lies during the campaign that they had nothing to do with Project 2025, which they have followed almost to the letter since Inauguration Day.
But given all that planning, don't you think that they'd be able to execute their plan a little better? They've had not months but years to have lawyers scrutinize every move they planned to make sure it would pass at least minimal legal muster, not to mention that their plans would fall within the outer bounds of constitutionality. Not only has it that not happened, they haven't even come close. Which is why we've been hearing the chorus of complaints about judges, some of whom have been Democratic appointees, but just as many have come from Republican presidents.
Sure, the rank incompetence stands out, as does the quicksand of lawlessness the whole mess floats on. You can tell that they're even getting nervous about their bought and paid for Supreme Court when you begin hearing not just mutterings but squawks of outrage about Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Roberts, both of whom have been reliable votes for Republicans until now.
Is it just that they're going too far too fast? The whole enterprise is beginning to show cracks of excess and madness that are getting wider seemingly by the day. They couldn’t even get rid of a bunch of heavily tattooed drug gang members without fucking the whole thing up, and their attempt to let Elon in on state secrets that he could turn over to his Chinese friends and use to stuff a few extra 100 billion in his pockets was so ham-handed it looked like a Three Stooges skit.
You would think that long-time aspirants to fascism would be more practiced with their tiny fists wrapped tightly around the levers of power, wouldn't you? They’re as dangerous as a cornered wolverine, but smart wolverines don’t allow themselves to get backed into corners of courthouses by people wearing long black robes.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.
Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter
Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff, is under fire after appearing repeatedly to attempt to whitewash the Office of Management and Budget memo that ordered a funding freeze on “all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”
The OMB memo, which was not publicly rolled out but rather discovered by journalist Marisa Kabas, appears to have led to the shuttering on Tuesday of the Medicaid portals in all 50 states. There were also reports that in addition to the Medicaid portal, the portal for SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as “food stamps,” also went down on Tuesday, along with other sources or recipients of federal funding.
Miller declared that the massive nationwide concern and confusion were a media creation.
“I can’t help it if left-wing media outlets published a fake news story that caused confusion,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. The confusion, Miller insisted, was a “false story” that was “created by the media.”
Later on Tuesday Miller doubled down, declaring on social media, “Welcome to the first dumb media hoax of 2025. OMB ordered a review of funding to NGOs, foreign governments and large discretionary contracts. It explicitly excluded all aid and benefit programs. Leftwing media outright lied and some people fell for the hoax.”
OMB was forced to issue an explainer Tuesday after media outlets accurately reported what the OMB memo stated. But some say that the FAQ was an opportunity for OMB to backtrack after massive, nationwide anger, fear, and confusion — which was somewhat quieted after a federal judge issued a temporary partial pause on the OMB memo.
Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) responded to Miller’s remarks, writing: “They are back-tracking because we spoke up. Good. But make no mistake: their OMB memo ordered a freeze of *all* grants. The Medicaid and SNAP portals went dark. Head Start providers couldn’t draw funds. This was not a coincidence. It was their plan. And they screwed up bigly.”
Despite Miller’s repeated claims that the memo was clear and did not affect a wide array of federally-funded programs, The Boston Globe reported that “Children’s Friend, a Head Start program in Rhode Island, said it was unable to draw down $500,000 for this week’s payroll,” and “Open Door Health, an LGBTQ+ health clinic, said it could not access its federal funds on Tuesday.”
Rep. Magaziner also posted a list of organizations that he says are being blocked from receiving funding by the Trump Department of Homeland Security. “This is a gift to terrorists and our adversaries across the world. Trump needs to stop this madness and resume funding now,” Magaziner, the Homeland Security Ranking Member for Counterterrorism, wrote:
Outrage at Miller’s remarks calling the massive public upset and confusion over OMB’s memo a “dumb media hoax” was extensive.
“Completely false. Your first lie of the year. Payment Management Services (PMS), through which states get Medicaid funds from the federal government, had a banner saying payments were stopped because of Trump’s order. Stop lying,” wrote MSNBC columnist Rotimi Adeoye, whose bio says he is a former congressional aide and advisor for the ACLU Voting Rights Project.
“Sure there are dumb media hoaxes but if you accidentally turn off Medicaid people notice,” observed Matt Stoller, a political commentator, author, and the research director of the American Economic Liberties Project.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
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