The Second Term of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States of America

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At a May lunch at the president’s golf course in northern Virginia, President Trump asked Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., why he wasn’t doing more to probe the alleged connection between vaccines and autism, according to people familiar with the matter. The health secretary had the yips, Trump told Kennedy, according to one of the people.

Kennedy was taken aback. Even though he has long been known to be skeptical of vaccinations, he had been asked by White House political advisers to tone down his vaccine efforts ahead of the midterms, the people said.

Now, it was the commander in chief who was pushing to make the study of vaccines and autism more of a priority. The president steers nearly every conversation with his health secretary back to the issue, some of the people said.

Chief among the president’s desires: Do more to reduce the number of shots that federal guidelines recommend for children, according to people familiar with the matter. They said the president hopes to then see autism rates drop, even if any such effect could take years.

Trump has long mused publicly and privately about whether vaccines cause autism, despite reassurances from scientific advisers in his first term that they don’t and the widespread conclusion among scientists that there is no valid reason for concern.

The issue has been an ongoing point of tension between the two men. In a mid-June meeting in the Oval Office, the president vented to Kennedy that he wasn’t doing enough, people familiar with the matter said.

www.theguardian.com

Trump reportedly pushing RFK Jr to cut vaccines more aggressively

White House has halted changing vaccine schedule as it is unpopular, but anti-vaxx Trump set on ‘alleviating autism’
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
Not the gotcha that Paul thought it was

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Anthony Fauci's newly released diary is turning into a pretty rough own goal for the republicans who leaked it, because instead of exposing him as some deep state villain, it mostly shows a scientist working the phones, trusting the evidence, and quietly rolling his eyes at donald trump's chaos while trying to keep the country safe.

Senator Rand Paul released more than a thousand pages of Fauci's private notes from 2019 to 2022, and Fauci testifies before Paul's committee this week. Paul has framed the release around the idea that what Fauci wrote privately and what he told the country were two different stories.

Paul's biggest headline claim does not hold up well under scrutiny. He points to a diary entry where Fauci allegedly acknowledged early on that the virus did not originate at the Wuhan wet market, while publicly backing a paper that pointed to natural spillover from that market, and Paul is using the gap to argue Fauci covered for a lab leak.

But the entry Paul is citing actually shows Fauci complaining that conspiracy style letters from members of Congress were an amazing and unbelievable waste of time, which reads like frustration, not confession. A Dartmouth virologist told NPR that scientists being less certain in private than in public is normal, and that solid evidence exists for two separate viral lineages emerging, which actually supports natural spillover.

Paul has also repeatedly alleged, without evidence, that NIAID funded gain of function research in Wuhan caused the pandemic, a claim Fauci denies both publicly and in the supposedly damning private diary itself. If Fauci were really hiding something, you would expect the private version to admit it. Instead it says the same thing as the public one.

What actually comes through in the diary is a guy trying to steer a president who kept wandering off topic. Fauci repeatedly described trump's public comments as rambling, noting at one point that trump would drift into talking about TV ratings while Fauci tried to keep him on track. That is what a competent official sounds like when the man in charge cares more about ratings than case counts.

The timing of this outrage cycle is not an accident either. While cable news spends the week over a diary that mostly makes Fauci look diligent, RFK jr is overseeing the worst measles comeback in a generation. The CDC reported 2,318 measles cases in 2026 alone, more than all of 2025 and far beyond the 283 cases in 2024, with the number still climbing.

Not to mention the ever increasing outbreak of diarrhea lettuce.

So dig through Fauci's diary if you want. What you will mostly find is a professional doing his job under an erratic boss, and a senator whose greatest hits don't survive contact with their own footnotes.

SOURCE with comments
 
Shiftless2 said:
"Not the gotcha that Paul thought it was" #3,702
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Without much if any logical justification I liked doctors / senators Paul.
Problem is the Paul family interpretation / application of "conservatism" may mystify genuine conservatives.

Making life difficult for Dr. Anthony Fauci is an automatic demerit. Thank you for your impressive public service Dr. Fauci.
 
Shiftless2 said:
"The anti science death cult" #3,705
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This term bears the standard characteristics of exaggeration.

Apparently, it is not the quotation which is extreme.
It is a characterization of the Trump administration.
- anti science ? Anti-vax to be sure.
- death cult?

cult
noun
ˈkəlt
1: a group (such as an organization or religious sect) with tenets and practices regarded as coercive, insular, or dangerous

O M G :eek:
 
Shiftless2 said:

"Serve or resign" S2 #3,708​

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Wiki lists Governor Beshear's party affiliation as Democrat.
My initial reaction is it's more divisive partisan politics.

But with sadness I also recognize, Republicans prioritize their own partisan loyalty ahead of their own patriotism. They're Americans. They're Republicans. But apparently they deem themselves Republicans first.
We can't know for certain. But perhaps if Republicans prioritized their own citizenship ahead of their partisanship, it would have been a Republican to urge McConnell [R-KY].
 
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Sixty-one years ago this week, Lyndon Johnson flew a thousand miles to sign Medicare into law. He didn't have to. The fight was already won in Washington.

Johnson went to Independence, Missouri, because twenty years earlier Harry Truman had asked Congress for national health insurance and been buried for it, the American Medical Association howling about "socialized medicine" until the idea was dead.

He wanted the old man in the room when it finally happened.

So on July 30, 1965, he sat at a table in the Truman Library, signed Medicare and Medicaid with Truman at his side, and enrolled the 81-year-old as beneficiary number one. His wife Bess got card number two.

"No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine," Johnson said that day. "No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years."

Then he gave the credit away, telling the crowd it was Truman who "planted the seeds of compassion and duty which have today flowered into care for the sick and serenity for the fearful."

That was Johnson. He had been a schoolteacher once in a dirt-poor Texas town, in front of children who came to school hungry, and he never stopped governing like a man who remembered their faces.

When one of the biggest landslides in American history handed him the power to do almost anything, he spent it on ....

CONTINUED with comments
 

A U.S. Citizen Deleted His Phone’s Data. Now He Faces a Felony Charge.​

Federal prosecutors charged a man returning to the United States with obstruction because he gave them a passcode that erased his smartphone during a customs search.

It sounds like something James Bond would use: a gadget that self-destructs if it falls into the wrong hands. But it’s actually an open-source operating system that can be downloaded onto Android phones.

Federal prosecutors in Atlanta are bringing an obstruction charge against a U.S. citizen who gave customs officers what is known as a duress passcode, which activated software that erased the contents of his phone.

The authorities stopped Samuel Tunick, an Atlanta resident, for interrogation at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport as he returned to the United States on Jan. 24 last year, according to a November grand jury indictment. The authorities seized his phone before allowing him to enter the country. A hearing on the case was ....

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Shiftless2 said:

" A U.S. Citizen Deleted His Phone’s Data. Now He Faces a Felony Charge.​

Federal prosecutors in Atlanta are bringing an obstruction charge against a U.S. citizen"
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Looks like a MAGA portion nothing-burger.
UNQUESTIONABLY if substance comes of this, cause for alarm. BUT !

definition:
obstruction of justice
n.
The criminal offense of intentionally hindering or interfering with the processes of law.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ©2022 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.

Wouldn't that mean incident to a criminal investigation?
Repatriation is not (yet) a crime.
Thus, it was not a warranted search, what is the basis of "obstruction"?

<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Here to fore Customs screened for weapons, commercial contraband, etc.
Have we entered an era where there's a data / cyber exception to our 4th Amendment Constitutional protections?

B.O. R. ARTICLE #4: Ratified December 15, 1791
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and
no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Our cars evolve.
So do our laws. stay tuned
 
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