President Donald Trump went on quite the emotional journey Wednesday after a reporter informed him that the financial community has coined a new term for dealing with his chaotic tariff threats: the “TACO trade,” which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out.
The revelation followed an Oval Office ceremony to swear in bottled-water tantrum thrower and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Washington.
“Oh, isn’t that nice—I chickened out. I never heard that,” Trump responded, seemingly unaware that his trade “strategy” of bluster followed by retreat is being mocked by the very finance bros he seeks approval from.
Trump worked himself up into a lather trying to defend his wounded ego, bragging that he is opening China and characterizing his latest capitulation to the European Union after threatening 50 percent tariffs as strategic.
“We have the hottest country in the world right now,” Trump said, quoting an alleged compliment from the king of Saudi Arabia. “Six months ago, this country was stone cold, dead. We had a dead country.”
A still rambling Trump proceeded to admit that he had to reduce his crazy high proposed tariff rates after realizing, “Wow, that's high.” It isn’t the first time that Trump has confessed to making up numbers when blabbing out misguided policies.
Trump closed with one of his routine attacks on the free press, admonishing the reporter who hurt his feelings by telling him the truth.
“But don't ever say what you said. That's a nasty question,” he whined. “To me that’s the nastiest question.”
That query was the least nasty thing about being in a room where Pirro had just been sworn in for anything other than a deposition.
Just like the so-called Department of Government Efficiency it was named after, the House Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency Caucus has delivered little more than chaos and waste.
Started by Republicans Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Rep. Aaron Bean of Florida, the DOGE caucus pledged to help multibillionaire Elon Musk scour the federal government to find trillions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse.
Reps. Jared Moskowitz of Florida and Greg Landsman of Ohio were the first Democrats to join the committee, arguing that if Republicans are truly interested in government efficiency and oversight, Democrats should be at the table. While the move drew some criticism, it effectively called Republicans’ bluff.
“The DOGE caucus is dead. It’s defunct. We haven’t met in months. We only had two total meetings in five months. And we weren’t involved at all in anything [happening at DOGE], which Elon was in charge of. Zero. Zilch. Nada. [Musk] did it all on his own,” Moskowitz told Politico.
He added that “DOGE was a complete failure. Complete failure. Nothing has been made more efficient. Ask the people in Newark [Liberty International Airport, which has suffered delays and cancellations] how efficiency is going.”
If these DOGE offshoots have succeeded at anything, it's toeing the Trump administration line: Musk is somehow both in charge of everything DOGE does and completely blameless for its failures.
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has left National Weather Service teams desperately scrambling to staff depleted operations ahead of the hurricane season.
According to the National Weather Service Employees Organization, there are at least 155 vacancies that need to be filled, including forecasters essential for the around-the-clock coverage needed during hurricane season.
“For most of the last half century, NWS has been a 24/7 operation. Not anymore, thanks to Elon Musk,” Tom Fahy, legislative director of the union, wrote in an email to the Washington Post.
Now, the Trump administration is looking into reassigning some of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s remaining staff to the “critically understaffed” weather service offices.
At the start of 2025, NOAA had more than 600 vacancies, but instead of trying to fill these important roles, President Donald Trump—with the help of Musk’s DOGE goons—illegally fired and pushed out about ten percent of the remaining workforce.
And the effects of these cuts were felt immediately. In March, the NWS announced that it would suspend weather balloon observations in several locations and greatly reduce data collection efforts in others due to staffing issues.
The economic value of NOAA’s weather and climate data has been estimated at more than $100 billion, but that was before Trump and Musk got their hands on it.
The Trump administration’s efforts to destroy NOAA are part of its broader strategy of undermining climate science. By gutting weather and climate research, it obscures the real costs of climate change and extreme weather events, leaving Americans in the dark.
They say Kennedy uses the disorder as a political tool and pushes damaging stereotypes that spread misinformation.
“The U.S. Secretary of Health, RFK Jr., made false comments about autism, like people with autism are broken, that autism is caused by vaccines, and that people with autism will never have jobs or families,” said Teddy, a fourth grader from New Jersey whose statement at a school board meeting went viral earlier this month.
“I have autism and I’m not broken,” Teddy said. “And I hope that nobody in Princeton Public Schools believes RFK Jr.'s lies.”
The New Jersey schoolkid and autism awareness groups felt the need to speak out after Kennedy’s vile comments last month about U.S. autism rates, where he repeated his false claim that autism is an epidemic that “destroys families.”
Kennedy also mischaracterized autism as a “preventable disease” and falsely asserted that 25% of autistic people are non-functioning—ridiculous notions that experts say are inaccurate.
“His comments were incorrect, but more to the point, they were eugenic,” Colin Killick, executive director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, told the Boston Globe. “Talking about autistic people as themselves being destroyed but also having destroyed their families is a horrific argument.”
“There’s an unscrupulous industry of alternative medicine providers who exploit families by charging them tens of thousands of dollars to ‘recover’ people with autism,” Ari Ne’eman, who is autistic and an assistant professor of health policy and management at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told NBC News. “The way that industry works is by terrifying families.”
David Mandell, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatry professor and director of the Penn Center for Mental Health, told PBS News that Kennedy’s “fixed, myopic view” stems from needing to interface with parents of autistic children and scientists who work in the field.
Julie DeFilippo, a social worker with an autistic son, told the Boston Globe that “as a parent of an autistic kid, I get hundreds of moments of joy every day. That’s the easy part—being at home and supporting him.”
Kennedy’s characterization of autism as a preventable tragedy also appears connected to his notorious anti-vaccine crusade. In a recent interview with Dr. Phil McGraw, he repeated the vigorously debunked claim of a link between autism and vaccines.
“Many of the parents have reported that their kid, that their child, developed autism immediately after [childhood vaccinations],” Kennedy told the psychologist-turned-TV star.
Kennedy has used his position as America’s chief public health official to launch what he claims is a scientific study into the cause of autism, to be led by an anti-vaccine activist with heinous ideas about treatments for the condition that include experimenting with chemical castration drugs.
“I have seen a lot of people treat [Autism Spectrum Disorder] as some sort of disease that needs to be ‘cured,’ which is very offensive towards people like me,” John Trainor, a high school student, told the Boston Globe. ”We are normal people who have a much harder time socially.”
Kennedy has also announced plans to create an autism database, using the private medical information of millions of Americans, promising Trump in a surreal Cabinet meeting in April that he’d be able to identify the cause of autism by September.
Kennedy announced on May 7 that he intends to direct the National Institutes of Health to use Medicare and Medicaid insurance claims related to autism diagnoses to build his database.
Critics point out that Kennedy’s plan amounts to an autism registry, and experts add that Kennedy’s promises are unrealistic.
"If you just ask me, as a scientist, is it possible to get the answer that quickly? I don't see any possible way,” Dr. Peter Marks, a former top vaccine scientist for the FDA, said on Face the Nation last month.
If you thought FBI Director Kash Patel had any competence whatsoever, think again.
Appearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday, Patel was unable to provide a timeline for when his department’s budget—which was required by law to be submitted more than a week ago—would finally be delivered to Congress.
Democratic Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland noted that the hearing was essentially pointless, since Patel failed to provide critical spending and budget documents.
“How do we, as Congress, do our budget and our work without that request and without the spend plan?” Murray said, calling Patel’s lack of preparedness “insufficient and deeply disturbing.”
Patel’s signature dunderheaded combativeness was on full display during a tense exchange with Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who asked whether people deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 have the constitutional right to due process under the Fifth Amendment.
“It’s not for me to call the balls and strikes on it,” Patel responded.
“You haven't read the Constitution?” Merkley asked, citing the Supreme Court ruling in Reno v. Flores as part of the settled law on the matter.
“It concerns me that you're not familiar with the core concept of due process applying to all persons as written in black and white in the Constitution,” Merkley added.
After the hearing, Murray called out Patel’s incompetence and the threat it poses to the United States.
“Kash Patel, the conspiracy theorist that Republicans made FBI Director, came to a Senate hearing on the budget—with NO budget, NO timeline, and NO clue. It's downright incompetent, and it's making America less safe. We need serious leadership at the FBI,” she wrote on Bluesky.
No budget? Check! Equivocating statements about the Constitution? Check! Seems like Patel’s competence is perfectly in line with the rest of the Trump administration.
The insanity continues with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who appeared on Dr. Phil McGraw’s YouTube channel Tuesday to crow about the “revolution” in health he and the Trump administration are administering to the American people.
“Many of the parents have reported that their kid, that their child, developed autism immediately after the vaccine,” Kennedy said.
Of course, this claim has been debunked many times by many different scientific studies.
He then cavalierly implied that a pharmaceutical conspiracy is behind medical professionals’ support for the measles vaccine.
“I got chicken soup and vitamin A, which, you know, which nobody can patent. But now the only treatment that doctors really know about is you've got to get the measles vaccine,” Kennedy said.
When an audience member asked whether new parents should vaccinate their children, Kennedy gave an intentionally vague anti-vax response.
“We live in a democracy, and part of the responsibility of being a parent is to do your own research,” he said.
Kennedy also repeated the myth that the COVID-19 vaccine led to an increase in myocarditis in children, ignoring the evidence showing that the risk of myocarditis is actually higher in those who contract COVID-19 than in those who are vaccinated.
And during a Q&A session, a woman who identified herself as “Emily” raised concerns that “stratospheric aerosol injections” are “continuously peppered on us every day.”
“Stratospheric aerosol injections” is the sesquipedalian way of referring to the chemtrail conspiracy theory, which purports that the white trails left behind airplanes—officially called condensation trails—are some kind of biological weapon sprayed by sinister and shadowy actors to manipulate everything from the weather to human minds.
“It's not happening in my agency. You know, we don't do that. It's done, we think by DARPA. And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel,” Kennedy said, blaming the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it. We'll bring on somebody who's going to think only about that.”
For years, Kennedy and other Republicans have eschewed their actual responsibilities to bring bills to state legislatures that presuppose that the unsubstantiated chemtrail theory is true. Just last month, Kennedy boasted that he would use his office to tilt at this windmill.
Kennedy’s interview with Dr. Phil wasn’t the revolution he thought it was. Rather, it was an hour-long disinformercial for Kennedy’s rampant conspiracy theories, proving that he remains one of the most dangerous obstacles facing public health today.
Recent filings with the Federal Election Commission have revealed the scale of record-breaking corporate donations to the Donald Trump-JD Vance Inaugural Committee. Trump smashed his previous inaugural donation record of $107 million for his first presidency, raising more than twice as much, with 650 donors—140 of whom gave no less than $1 million. This includes the tech billionaires who ponied up and got VIP seats at the dreary event.
The crypto industry donated a total of $18 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, and has been one of the biggest winners so far. Trump courted cryptocurrency firms during his campaign, promising to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.”
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which dropped a cool $1 million on Trump, watched the Securities and Exchange Commission drop its lawsuit against them after Trump came into office. And Trump Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche recently announced that the Justice Department’s unit that investigated cryptocurrency fraud-related crimes would be disbanded.
Companies with a large investment in the electronics market such as Apple, whose CEO Tim Cook gave $1 million to Trump, have received a respite from potentially crushing China tariffs on popular products like the iPhone, though Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said there’s a good chance that will change.
Pilgrim Pride, a poultry company owned by Brazilian meat conglomerate JBS, reportedly made the largest donation to Trump’s inaugural committee, $5 million. What did they get in return so far? Trump recently paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law that has allowed the U.S. to investigate and prosecute foreign corruption tied to America’s trade interests since 1977. JBS knows this law intimately, having already paid out more than a quarter of a billion dollars in criminal bribery charges under the FCPA.
And there is no end in sight for billionaires who want to make payments to Trump in some form or another. Major companies like Meta, Amazon, Tesla, and X, which all face ongoing government lawsuits, are settling cases, many of which are considered by critics to be baseless, with Trump himself.
With hundreds of billions of dollars in government contracts on the line, and many companies coincidentally linked to investors with names like Musk, Vice President JD Vance, and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to connect the swampy dots in Trump’s White House.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is continuing his life’s work of making public health more precarious as the Food and Drug Administration, which he oversees, is suspending its quality-control testing of raw fluid milk and other dairy products due to budget cuts, according to Reuters.
The suspension of testing begins this week and includes Grade “A” raw milk and other finished dairy products. Grade “A” is the nation’s highest sanitary standard for milk, making sure it does not contain harmful pathogens.
According to a spokesperson, the FDA's Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory, which conducts such food safety testing, has been “decommissioned.” That, along with massive Trump administration budget cuts, has left the FDA "no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis,” according to an internal email obtained by Reuters.
This news follows the suspension of programs focused on bird flu outbreaks, which included studies showing how pasteurized milk can kill the virus, after Kennedy fired senior veterinarians designing them.
In his quest to fund tax for the wealthy, President Donald Trump’s administration demanded that the HHS, which includes the FDA, cut $40 billion from its budget. Since January, HHS has lost an estimated 20,000 positions in its workforce.
It remains unclear whether Kennedy will be able to slap together a replacement testing program, like the one at the now-closed Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory. Like many of the government agencies decimated by Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the scramble to rehire essential employees seems to have become a weekly crisis.
As Trump continues to pretend that he has conquered soaring egg prices, which are still largely driven by one of the worst outbreaks of avian flu in U.S. history, his budget cuts and the decision to have Kennedy run public health leave no clear end in sight.
President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador joined President Donald Trump for a Q&A session with reporters on Monday, during which he pigheadedly said that he would not return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison.
“I suppose you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist threat to the United States. I'm not going to do it. It's like, I mean, the question is preposterous,” he said.
Bukele continued to claim, “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” before Trump eventually jumped in to call the press “sick people” for asking about Garcia's Supreme Court-ordered return.
Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen and legal U.S. resident who is married to a U.S. citizen, held valid documents of residency issued by the Department of Homeland Security
But the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that the Trump administration must facilitate Garcia’s return to the United States.
Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration is now wrongfully claiming that the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over this case—because that would be a democracy with checks and balances, not a dictatorship.
An eight-year-old Texas child died of pulmonary failure as a result of measles, marking the third confirmed measles death and the second death of a child from measles to occur in the United States in decades. Both children were unvaccinated.
“[T]here are 642 confirmed cases of measles across 22 states, 499 of those in Texas,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote on X.
Kennedy also announced that he was traveling to Texas to offer condolences to the family of the recently deceased child.
While the infamous anti-vaxxer failed to mention that the majority of cases are in unvaccinated children, he did admit that the MMR vaccine is the “most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.”
As the measles outbreak rages on, Kennedy has admitted that the MMR vaccine is the most effective way to fight against the disease, while also undermining the necessity of vaccinations. In public appearances, such as on Fox News with Sean Hannity, Kennedy said it was better to get infected with measles than to be vaccinated.
Texas HHS has confirmed that, while most confirmed cases remain primarily in the western part of the state, new cases have emerged in central Texas and a concerning rise in the northeast region. Meanwhile, New Mexico has reported more than 50 cases, and Kansas has reported 24.
At the same time, Kennedy’s nonprofit Children’s Health Defense Fund continues to promote dangerously uninformed science about vaccines and measles, falsely claiming that poor medical treatments are to blame for the recent deaths. The organization is also pushing vitamin A supplements, which not only can’t cure nor stop the spread of measles, but can actually be toxic for children.
Outside of offering “comfort” to grieving families, Kennedy’s actions belie any meaningful scientific or medically proven solutions to stopping this public health nightmare.
So while Kennedy may occasionally acknowledge the importance of vaccines, his actions and continued encouragement of anti-vaccine rhetoric consistently undermines any public health efforts.
Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and a terrible parent, was handed another loss on Wednesday, after his electric vehicle company Tesla released its first quarter sales report. The news wasn’t good. The EV maker reported its lowest quarter sales since 2022, well below the modest predictions analysts had forecasted.
Tesla shares fluctuated, beginning Wednesday with a six percent drop, before rebounding, possibly due to talk that Musk would be leaving his Department of Government Efficiency. And even Tesla cheerleaders, like Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, were having a hard time turning this lemon into lemonade, as he expressed on X.
Musk’s latest setback comes just a week after reports that Tesla’s sales in Europe had dropped 40 percent in February, even as Europe’s EV market was enjoying an upswing in sales. Tesla’s losses in Europe can be partly attributed to Musk’s full-throated support of Germany’s far-right, neo-Nazi-affiliated Alternative for Germany party.
“In addition to Elon Musk’s increasingly active role in politics and the increased competition it is facing within the EV market, the brand is phasing out the existing version of the Model Y—its best-selling vehicle,” Felipe Munoz, global analyst at Jato Dynamics told the Financial Times.
Tesla’s brand has taken hits on top of Musk’s embrace of right-wing extremism. Nearly all of Tesla’s Cybertrucks were recalled in March due to issues stemming from the glue used to hold the stainless steel facade detaching, creating possible dangerous road hazards.
While Tesla faces increased competition in the market, the biggest problem the company faces is Musk’s politics and personality. Musk and DOGE’s unconstitutional attack on government agencies has cost tens of thousands of Americans their jobs and threatened their economic security.
The Trump administration has clearly been ordered to cravenly prop up the billionaire’s nosediving reputation. But promising to throw people in jail if they protest against Tesla, holding an informercial in front of the White House, and having the entire Trump administration hawk Tesla stock during their television appearances has clearly not been the recipe for success they hoped for.
And now, Musk’s toxicity has become so great that even Donald Trump’s most loyal parasites are trying to find the right way to distance the GOP leader from his top donor. Whether or not Trump and friends can quit Musk’s hundreds of billions of dollars remains to be seen.
Geier, who holds a bachelor’s degree in biology, has spent decades pushing discredited theories linking vaccines to autism. Geier and his father Mark Geier have long been known for peddling bad science, with the scientific journal Nature even naming them among the world’s top science deniers in 2010.
Geier’s new role within HHS signals another win for the anti-vaccine movement—and a loss for public health.
“This is a worst-case scenario for public health. It’s a slap in the face to the decades of actual credible research we have,” Jessica Steier, a public health researcher who leads the Science Literacy Lab, told the Washington Post.
Despite having his access to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revoked in 2004, Geier will now be given multiple sets of CDC data on vaccine safety.
During HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Senate confirmation hearings, Democratic lawmakers highlighted his inadequacy to lead the country’s public health agencies.
Tesla’s downward trajectory took another hit on Thursday, after it was reported that over 46,000 Cybertrucks—almost all of them—are being recalled. The issue stems from the glue holding the stainless steel paneling to the Cybertruck’s exterior possibly detaching, creating a dangerous road hazard.
The recall feels almost symbolic of everything world’s richest man Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency represents to Americans these days. Vehicles under the recall include all 2024 and 2025 vehicles produced, as well as some from the end of 2023. That is nearly all of the Cybertrucks that have been delivered to customers. This is the eighth recall of Cybertrucks in just over a year.
“If you want to learn something on this show tonight, buy Tesla,” Lutnick told Watters’ viewers. “It’ll never be this cheap again.”
It was yet another example of the Trump administration’s efforts to boost sales of co-president Musk’s struggling business. In the last two weeks Trump has crassly hawked cars in front of the White House, Attorney General Pam Bondi has threatened to imprison those who protest Tesla, and MAGA conspiracy theory minions have said that peaceful opposition to Musk and his companies amounts to domestic terrorism.
Since December, Tesla has lost nearly 49 percent of its market cap. Clearly desperate, the carmaker has been sending out tone-deaf surveys to frustrated customers and offering big discounts to existing customers in an attempt to get them upgraded to new models.
“Tesla is a peaceful company; we've never done anything harmful. I've never done anything harmful, I've only done productive things. So, I think we just have a deranged ... there's some kind of mental illness thing going on here because this doesn't make any sense.
Meanwhile, Tesla sales have reached new lows worldwide, and even prominent investors are “trimming” their holdings in the company to reduce their exposure to Musk’s general turpitude. This includes Tesla board members like Musk’s brother, Kimbal; Rupert Murdoch’s son James; and board chair Robyn Denholm, who reportedly sold off $75 million in shares over the past five weeks.
Trump family representatives have been in discussions to take a financial stake in the U.S. arm of crypto exchange Binance, whose founder served four months in prison for money laundering.
Binance, along with former CEO Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering, unlicensed money transmitting, and sanctions violations in 2023.
A deal with the Trump family would allow the previously banned company to return to the United States.
Billionaire New York real estate developer and Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff has reportedly been involved in the talks with Binance.
This is just the latest example of President Donald Trump’s willingness to align himself with the shady—and often illegal—crypto world. Trump’s billionaires club is filled with tech bros who have both made and been floated by considerable amounts of money in the crypto space.
Trump has seen how much more lucrative a grift of the barely policed crypto world is in comparison to previous ventures, like selling shiny gold sneakers.
Trump launched his own meme coin $TRUMP shortly after inauguration in a clear money grab, pulling in millions while exploiting hundreds of thousands of suckers. But more importantly it was a naked pay-to-play scam, allowing foreign agents and fellow grifters to curry favor with the president—like Tron founder Justin Sun, who was facing a civil fraud case started under the Biden administration.
After Sun “invested” tens of millions into Trump’s meme coin, he was rewarded by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission cutting a deal and dropping the case.
As the Trump family continues talks with Binance, the potential investment—and whether or not it would include one of Trump’s patented pardons—remains to be seen.
House Democrats are calling on their colleagues in the Senate to reject the GOP-passed spending bill—and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says he’s got the votes to do just that.
“Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort, but Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution without any input—any input from congressional Democrats,” Schumer said Wednesday. “Because of that, Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House.”
The Republican-led House caved to President Donald Trump and co-president Elon Musk Tuesday, passing a spending bill that would force $880 billion over 10 years in cuts from social safety net programs like Medicaid. The move is a naked attempt to extend GOP tax cuts for the rich at the expense of working-class Americans.
While Republicans were able to pass the bill in the House with the vote of only one Democrat, it’s a different story in the Senate, where Republicans will need Democrats to help them. And so far, they’re not getting it.
“They should refuse to allow this bill to pass in the Senate,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, warned her Senate counterparts on Tuesday. “If they don't, I think there's going to be a huge backlash from across the country. And I think, all of them will, you know, will have to deal with the consequences of that.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was also clear about her feelings on the matter. “The Republicans have the White House, the Senate, and the House. If they want to do this, and if they want to screw over the American people, they can do this with their votes and their party. I do not believe that Democrats should participate.”
“Everyone needs to call their Dem Senator right now. They are starting to cave,” wrote Ocasio-Cortez on her social media account, adding that voters should “Tell them: 1. Vote NO on Cloture AND 2. Vote NO on the Republican spending bill. Don’t let them pivot to reconciliation. GOP doesn’t need Dem votes on that and they know it.”
Maybe Schumer and his fellow Senate Democrats have been getting those calls from voters—and at least for now, they seem to be listening.
Lara Trump appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Monday to declare that “people ought to be kissing the feet of Elon Musk and Donald Trump” for the illegal dismantling of the U.S. government.
The nepo baby’s comments came as she and Hannity wrung their hands about the unfairness of protests against Musk at various Tesla locations.
President Donald Trump’s minions, for their part, are already doing a lot of ass-kissing, and Hannity told Trump’s daughter-in-law that he plans to buy his own Tesla in solidarity with the world’s wealthiest man.
And Trump himself announced that he will buy a Tesla to support Musk, adding to suspicion that the billionaire is pulling Trump’s puppet strings.
Tesla’s stocks have plummeted since Musk’s takeover of the U.S. government and threats to popular programs such as Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare.
“Every time you hear these people on the left say Elon's enriching himself and his friends. This guy is losing money because of what he's doing,” Lara said.
In the wake of the growing measles outbreak in Texas, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published an op-ed on Fox News’ website over the weekend, urging Americans to … get vaccinated.
With the subhead “MMR vaccine is crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease,” the infamous anti-vaxxer wrote, “Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.”
Texas Health and Human Services first reported the outbreak in mid-January. The disease rapidly spread, reaching nearly 150 confirmed cases. The majority (if not almost all) of those cases are among children who have not received the MMR vaccine. Texas officials say the outbreak is the worst in almost three decades.
Kennedy has spent much of his career promoting anti-vaccine misinformation, notably amplifying debunked bad science connecting the MMR vaccine to autism rates in children. Kennedy, along with others in the anti-vaxx movement have contributed to declining vaccination rates, resulting in outbreaks like the one in Texas.
The Texas outbreak, which began in Gaines County and has now spread to eight more counties, had alarmingly low vaccination rates among its cases of school-aged children. This is not just by chance; It has been fomented by Mr. Measles and his anti-science allies for decades.
At the same time, the Children's Health Defense, the organization Kennedy founded and previously chaired, continues to promote false information about the Texas outbreak. On February 20, its official social media account blamed the outbreak on the MMR vaccine itself. Their claims have the same amount of evidence they have always had—zero.
Kennedy can write as many toothless op-eds as he likes, but as cases pile up Kennedy’s first order of business at the HHS was to gut the agency tasked with educating the public and preventing outbreaks like this one. Kennedy even abruptly canceled the FDA’s planned meeting for next flu season and paused multimillion-dollar efforts to develop a new COVID-19 vaccine to deal with new strains.
