MMR

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares47 Views

    The uniting theme of Trump’s presidency? Ineptitude | Robert Reich

    by

    Some Democrats fear they’re playing into Donald Trump’s hands by fighting his mass deportations rather than focusing on his failures on bread-and-butter issues like the cost of living.But it’s not either-or. The theme that unites Trump’s inept handling of deportations, his trampling on human and civil rights, his rejection of the rule of law, his dictatorial centralization of power, and his utterly inept handling of the economy is the ineptness itself.In his first term, not only did his advisers and cabinet officials put guardrails around his crazier tendencies, but they also provided his first administration a degree of stability and focus. Now, it’s mayhem.A sampling from recent weeks:1. The Pete Hegseth disaster. The defense secretary didn’t just mistakenly share the military’s plans with the editor of the Atlantic; we now know he shared them with a second Signal group, including his wife, brother and personal lawyer.He’s a walking disaster. John Ullyot, who resigned last week as Pentagon spokesperson, penned an op-ed in Politico that began: “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon.” Last Friday, Hegseth fired three of his senior staffers. His chief of staff is leaving. As Ullyot wrote, it’s “very likely” that “even bigger bombshell stories” will come soon. The defense department “is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership”.It’s not just the defense department. Much of the federal government is in disarray.2. The Harvard debacle. A Trump official is now claiming that a letter full of demands about university policy sent to Harvard on 11 April was “unauthorized”. What does this even mean?As Harvard pointed out, the letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised. Recipients of such correspondence from the US government – even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach – do not question its authenticity or seriousness.”Even though it was “unauthorized”, the Trump regime is standing by the letter, which has now prompted Harvard to sue.3. The tariff travesty. No sooner had Trump imposed “retaliatory” tariffs on almost all of the US’s trading partners – based on a formula that has made no sense to anyone – than the US stock and bond markets began crashing.To stop the selloff, Trump declared a 90-day pause on the retaliatory tariffs but raised his tariffs on China to 145% – causing markets to plummet once again.Presumably to stem the impending economic crisis, he declared an exemption to the China tariffs for smartphones and computer equipment. By doing so, Trump essentially admitted what he had before denied: that importers and consumers bear the cost of tariffs.Now, Trump is saying that even his China tariffs aren’t really real. Following warnings from Walmart, Target and Home Depot that the tariffs would spike prices, Trump termed the tariffs he imposed on China “very high” and promised they “will come down substantially. But it won’t be zero.”Markets soared on the news. But where in the world are we heading?4. The attack on the Fed chair fiasco. When Trump renewed his attacks on Jerome H Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve – calling him “a major loser” and demanding that the Fed cut interest rates – Trump unnerved already anxious investors who understand the importance of the Fed’s independence and feared that a politicized Fed wouldn’t be able to credibly fight inflation.Then, in another about-face, Trump said on Wednesday he had “no intention” of firing Powell, which also helped lift markets.An economy needs predictability. Investors won’t invest, consumers won’t buy, and producers won’t produce if everything continues to change. But Trump doesn’t think ahead. He responds only to immediate threats and problems.Who’s profiting from all this tumult? Anyone with inside knowledge of what Trump is about to do: most likely, Trump and his family.5. The Kilmar Ábrego García calamity. After the Trump regime admitted an “administrative error” in sending Ábrego García to a brutal Salvadoran torture prison, in violation of a federal court order, Trump then virtually ignored a 9-0 supreme court order to facilitate his return.To the contrary, with cameras rolling in the Oval Office, Trump embraced Nayib Bukele – who governs El Salvador in a permanent state of emergency and has himself imprisoned 83,000 people in brutal dungeons, mostly without due process. Trump then speculated about using Bukele’s prisons for “homegrown” (ie, American-born) criminals or dissidents.Meanwhile, after the Trump regime deported another group of immigrants to the Salvadoran prison under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law, the supreme court blocked it from deporting any more people under the measure.6. Ice’s blunderbuss. Further illustrating the chaos of the Trump regime, immigration officials have been detaining US citizens. One American was held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Arizona for 10 days until his relatives produced papers proving his citizenship, because, according to his girlfriend’s aunt, Ice didn’t believe he was American.Last week, the Trump regime abruptly took action to restore the legal status of thousands of international students who had been told in recent weeks that their right to study in the United States had been rescinded, but officials reserved the right to terminate their legal status at any time. What?Freedom depends on the rule of law. The rule of law depends on predictability. Just like Trump’s wildly inconsistent economic policies, his policies on immigration are threatening everyone.7. Musk’s ‘Doge’ disaster. Musk’s claims of government savings have been shown to be ludicrously exaggerated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRemember the claim that taxpayers funded $50m in condoms in Gaza? This was supposed to be the first big “gotcha” from the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), but as we know now, it was a lie. The US government buys condoms for about 5 cents apiece, which means $50m would buy 1bn condoms or roughly 467 for every resident of Gaza. Besides, according to a federal 2024 report, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) didn’t provide or fund any condoms in the entire Middle East in the 2021, 2022 or 2023 fiscal years.Then there have been the frantic callbacks of fired federal workers, such as up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration who work on sensitive jobs such as reassembling warheads. Four days after Doge fired them, the agency’s acting director rescinded the firings and asked them back. Similar callbacks have occurred throughout the government.Trump and Musk are threatening the safety and security of Americans – for almost no real savings.8. Measles mayhem. As measles breaks out across the country, sickening hundreds and killing at least two children so far, Trump’s secretary for health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, continues to claim that the measles vaccine “causes deaths every year … and all the illnesses that measles itself causes, encephalitis and blindness, et cetera”.In fact, the measles vaccine is safe, and its risks are lower than the risks of complications from measles. Most people who get the measles vaccine have no serious problems from it, the CDC says. There have been no documented deaths from the vaccine in healthy, non-immunocompromised people, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.Kennedy also says: “We’re always going to have measles, no matter what happens, as the [measles] vaccine wanes very quickly.” In fact, the measles vaccine is highly protective and lasts a lifetime for most people. Two doses of the vaccine are 97% effective against the virus, according to the CDC and medical experts worldwide. The US saw 3m to 4m cases a year before the vaccine. Today it’s typically fewer than 200.9. Student debt snafu. After a five-year pause on penalizing borrowers for not making student loan payments, the Trump regime is about to require households to resume payments. This could cause credit scores to plunge and slow the economy.Many of the households required to resume paying on their student loans are also struggling with credit card debt at near-record interest rates and high-rate mortgages they thought they would be able to refinance at a lower rate but haven’t. Instead of increasing education department staffing to handle a work surge and clarifying the often shifting rules of its many repayment programs, the Trump regime has done the opposite and cut staff.10. Who’s in charge? In the span of a single week, the IRS had three different leaders. Three days after Gary Shapley was named acting commissioner, it was announced that the deputy treasury secretary, Michael Faulkender, would replace Shapley. That was the same day, not incidentally, that the IRS cut access to the agency for Doge’s top representative.What happened? The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, told Trump that Musk had evaded him to install Shapley.Meanwhile, the Trump regime is cutting the IRS in half – starting with 6,700 layoffs and gutting the division that audits people with excessive wealth. These are the people meant to keep billionaires accountable. Without them, the federal government will not take in billions of dollars owed.At the same time, the trade adviser Peter Navarro has entered into a public spat with Musk, accusing him of not being a “car manufacturer” but a “car assembler” because Tesla relies on parts from around the world. This prompted Musk to call Navarro a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” in a post on X, later posting that he wanted to “apologize to bricks”.The state department has been torn apart by the firing of Peter Marocco, the official who was dismantling USAID, by Marco Rubio, the secretary of state. Career officials charged that Marocco, a Maga loyalist, was destroying the agency; Trump’s Maga followers view Marocco’s firing as a sign that Rubio is part of the establishment they want to destroy.Worse yet, Trump has fired more than a half-dozen national security officials after meeting with the far-right agitator Lara Loomer, who was granted access to the Oval Office and gave Trump a list of officials she deemed disloyal.Bottom line: no one is in charge. Trump is holding court but has the attention span of a fruit fly. This is causing chaos across the federal government, as rival sycophants compete for his limited attention.Incompetence is everywhere. The regime can’t keep military secrets. It can’t maintain financial stability. It can’t protect children from measles. It cannot protect America.While we need to continue to resist Trump’s authoritarianism, we also need to highlight his utter inability to govern America.

    Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares185 Views

      in US Politics

      Second child dies of measles in Texas amid rising outbreak

      by

      A second child with measles has died in Texas amid a steadily growing outbreak that has infected nearly 500 people in that state alone.The US health and human services department confirmed the death to NBC late Saturday, though the agency insisted exactly why the child died remained under investigation. On Sunday, a spokesperson for the UMC Health System in Lubbock, Texas, said that the child had been hospitalized before dying and was “receiving treatment for complications of measles” – which is easily preventable through vaccination.The family of the child in question had chosen to not get the minor vaccinated against the illness.Michael Board, a news reporter at Texas’s WOAI radio station, wrote on Sunday that official word from the state’s health and human services department was that the child died from “measles pulmonary failure” while having had no underlying conditions.Citing records it had obtained, the New York Times described the child as an eight-year-old girl.That marked the second time a child with measles had died since 26 February. The first was a six-year-old girl – also hospitalized in Lubbock – whose parents had not had her vaccinated.The Trump administration’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, on Sunday identified the two children to have died with measles as Kayley Fehr and Daisy Hildebrand. Daisy was the one who died more recently, and Kennedy said in a statement that he traveled to her funeral on Sunday to be with her family as well as the community in its “moment of grief”.Kennedy for years has baselessly sowed doubt about vaccine safety and efficacy. He sparked alarm in March among those concerned by the US’s measles outbreak when he backed vitamins to treat the illness and stopped short of endorsing protective vaccines, which he minimized as merely a “personal choice” rather than a safety measure that long ago was proven effective.In his statement on Sunday, Kennedy said: “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” which also provides protection against mumps and rubella. He also said he would send a team to support Texas’s local- and state-level responses to the ongoing measles outbreak.A third US person to have died after contracting measles was an unvaccinated person in Lea county, New Mexico, officials in that state announced in early March.Dr Peter Marks, who recently resigned as the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine while attributing that decision to Kennedy’s “misinformation and lies”, blamed the US health secretary and his staff for the death of the child being buried on Sunday.“This is the epitome of an absolute needless death,” Marks said Sunday during an interview with the Associated Press. “These kids should get vaccinated – that’s how you prevent people from dying of measles.”Marks also told the AP that he had warned US senators that the country would endure more measles-related deaths if the Trump administration did not more aggressively respond to the outbreak. The Senate health committee has called Kennedy to testify before the group on Thursday.One of that committee’s members is the Louisiana Republican and medical doctor Bill Cassidy, who frequently speaks about the importance of getting vaccinates against diseases but joined his Senate colleagues in voting to confirm Kennedy as the US health secretary.Cassidy on Sunday published a statement saying: “Everyone should be vaccinated.”There is “no benefit to getting measles”, Cassidy’s statement added. “Top health officials should say so unequivocally [before] another child dies.”Measles, which is caused by a highly contagious, airborne virus that spreads easily when an infected person breathes, sneezes or coughs, had been declared eliminated from the US in 2000. But the virus has recently been spreading in undervaccinated communities, with Texas and New Mexico standing among five states with active outbreaks – which is defined as three or more cases.The other states are Kansas, Ohio and Oklahoma. Collectively, as of Friday, the US had surpassed 600 measles cases so far this year – more than double the number it recorded in all of 2024. Health officials and experts have said that they expect the measles outbreak to go on for several more months at least – if not for about a year.Texas alone was reporting 481 cases across 19 counties as of Friday, most of them in the western region of the state. It registered 59 previously unreported cases between Tuesday and Friday. There were also 14 new hospitalizations, for a total of 56 throughout the outbreak.More than 65% of Texas’s measles cases are in Gaines county, which has a population of just under 23,000, and was where the virus started spreading in a tightly knit, undervaccinated Mennonite community.Gaines has logged 315 cases – in just over 1% of the county’s residents – since late January.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘The goal is to disassemble public health’: experts warn against US turn to vaccine skepticism

      by

      As vaccine hesitancy increases in the US, isolated, tight-knit and religious communities have frequently been at the center of high-profile outbreaks.Such is the case in west Texas, where a rural community is the center of an expanding measles outbreak that has already claimed the lives of two Americans – the first deaths from the disease in nearly a decade.However, as the conspiracy theories of Maga conservatism marry the bugbears of the US health secretary and vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr, the one-time fringe view of vaccines has become increasingly mainstream – with activists in right-leaning population centers taking lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic into the realm of childhood inoculations.One need look no further than Sarasota, Florida, for a full-throated political denunciation.“Generally, people are weak, lazy,” said Vic Mellor, an activist based near Sarasota, and a close ally of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.Mellor owns the We the People Health and Wellness Center in nearby Venice. Mellor, in a shirt that shouts “VIOLENCE MIGHT BE THE ANSWER”, is a self-professed attendee of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.“And that lazy part just makes them ignorant … Covid has proven that obviously this is true. I mean, all the facts are starting to come out on Covid now – that it was a hoax. That is just an extension of where this hoax began decades earlier with the vaccines, OK? This is all a money grab, this is all a power grab.”The pandemic was real, and it started Mellor down the road of questioning vaccines. Where he once opposed only the Covid-19 shots, he now opposes vaccines entirely – arguing they harm children despite experts on vaccines considering them one of mankind’s greatest medical achievements.“This is not an isolated, rural, religious community, which I think is what a lot of people associate with an anti-vaccine mentality,” said Kathryn Olivarius, the author of Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, and a historian of disease at Stanford University. “This is in the heart of everything.”Sarasota has become a proving ground for the Maga right. Among nail salons, mom-and-pop Cuban restaurants and roadside motels lining US 41, known locally as the Tamiami Trail, a visitor can find the gates of New College. This was once a public university prized for its progressive liberal arts education. Now it is part of the new conservative experiment in remaking higher education led by activists aligned with Donald Trump and the Republican Florida governor, Ron DeSantis.Along the same road is the Sarasota memorial hospital, an aberration in American healthcare – it is publicly owned with open board elections. The normally sleepy election became contentious when insurgent “health freedom” candidates, supported in part by Mellor, entered the race. Three won seats on the nine-member board in 2022.Even the name of this stretch of sun-bleached asphalt is up for debate. This year, a state Republican lawmaker – who has also introduced bills to limit vaccine requirements – briefly proposed changing its name to the “Gulf of America Trail” – a nod to Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.Arguably the most salient artifact of this activism in Sarasota is the least visible: vaccination rates against measles.Measles vaccination rates for kindergarteners have plummeted over the last two decades – from 97% in 2004 to 84% in 2023, according to state health records. Sarasota is roughly on par with the vaccination rates in rural Gaines county, Texas – the center of the ongoing measles outbreak that sickened 279 people in in that state alone. Notably, both Gaines county and Sarasota have large home-schooling communities, meaning vaccination rates could in fact be lower.It is well known in research circles that right-leaning states across the US south and west have worse health metrics – from obesity to violence to diseases such as diabetes. That reality was supercharged during the pandemic; as vaccine mandates became a fixation on the right, Republican-leaning voters became more skeptical of vaccines. In turn, places with politically conservative leaders experienced more Covid-19 deaths and greater stress on hospitals.Measles is one of the most contagious diseases known to medicine. At least 95% of the population needs to be vaccinated to prevent outbreaks of the disease. But despite a supremely effective vaccine that eliminated the disease from the US in 2000, vaccine hesitancy has increasingly taken hold.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionConservative activism alone can’t be blamed for declining measles vaccination rates. The measles vaccine in particular has been subject to a sustained firehose of misinformation stemming from a fraudulent paper linking the vaccine to autism in 1999. For years, this misinformation was largely nonpartisan. And Florida’s anti-vaccine movement was active even before the pandemic – with a vocal contingent of parents arguing against strengthening school vaccine standards in 2019.What appears new in Sarasota is how local conservative activists have brought opposition to vaccines into the heart of their philosophy. By Mellor’s telling, he and a loosely affiliated group of Maga activists began to adopt anti-vaccine beliefs as the pandemic wore on – helping organize major health protests in the area in recent years, such as mask mandate opt-outs and the “health freedom” campaign for hospital board seats.Mellor said his nearby property, the Hollow, was a gathering place during the pandemic (it is also a part-time gun range). He cites ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug that became a fascination of the right, as the reason “we didn’t lose people at all” during the height of the pandemic. Available clinical evidence shows it is not effective against Covid-19.Kennedy has fit neatly into this realignment. He enjoys trust ratings among Republicans nearly as high as Trump, according to polling from the health-focused Kaiser Family Foundation. Kennedy has already spread dubious information about measles vaccines in public statements (notably: from a Steak ’n Shake in Florida) – a response one vaccine expert said “couldn’t be worse”.“While children are in the hospital suffering severe measles pneumonia, struggling to breathe, [Kennedy] stands up in front of the American public and says measles vaccines kill people every year and that it causes blindness and deafness,” said Dr Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the division of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Severe side effects from the vaccine are possible, but they are much rarer than disability and death from measles.“This is what happens when you have a virulent anti-vaccine activist, a science denialist, as the head of the most important public health agency in the United States,” said Offit. “He should either be quiet or stand down.”The same poll found trust in public health agencies has fallen precipitously amid Republican attacks. More than a quarter of Republican parents report delaying childhood vaccines, the poll found, a rate that has more than doubled since 2022. There is no analogous trend among Democratic parents. Despite how claims espoused by vaccine skeptics can be easily refuted, their power has not been undercut.“The anti-vaccine business is big business,” said Offit, pointing to the myriad unproven “treatments” offered by promoters of vaccine misinformation, some of which are offered at Mellor’s We the People health center. “We have been taken over by a foreign country, and the goal of that foreign country is to disassemble public health.”The misery of measles did not take long to appear in Texas – measles-induced pneumonia has already led pediatricians to intubate children, including at least one baby, according to the Associated Press. About one to three people out of 1,000 who are infected by measles die from the infection, and one in 1,000 suffer severe brain swelling called encephalitis, which can lead to blindness, deafness and developmental delays.“We actually don’t have the perspective people in the past had on these diseases,” Olivarius. “I have spent many, many, many years reading letters and missives from parents who are petrified of what’s going to happen to their children” if there are outbreaks of yellow fever, polio or measles, Olivarius said about diseases now largely confined to history – thanks to vaccines.“The lesson from history is these are not mild ailments,” she said. “These are diseases that have killed hundreds of millions of people – and quite horribly too.” More