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Donald Trump’s War on History

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Authoritarianism cannot exist with free thought. It must dominate the societal discourse and prevent debate. That means it must also dictate history. The Nazis knew this. In April 1933, two months after Hitler became Germany’s chancellor, Joseph Goebbels, his propaganda chief, proclaimed that “the year 1789” would be “expunged from history”—meaning that the animating ideas of the French Revolution, such as liberty, civic equality, and human rights, were to be crushed. Germany, under Hitler’s rule, was to be tied in narrative to a millennium that skipped recent European history and stretched back to the Viking era and the earlier Greek and Roman empires. The Soviets routinely photoshopped out-of-favor officials from official accounts, literally erasing inconvenient history. George Orwell, naturally, put it well in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

There’s much spewing out of Donald Trump’s firehose of chaos and destruction these days: his war on government, the rule of law, and decency; his reckless tariffs that threaten the economy here and abroad; his revenge-a-thon attacks on universities and law firms; his annihilation of the public health and biomedical research communities; his assault on American allies; and his effort to end the Russia-Ukraine war in Vladimir Putin’s favor. These all have dire and concrete consequences. Trump’s demolition of USAID certainly led to more deaths in Myanmar following the tragic earthquake, given that in previous years this agency would have been on the ground offering assistance within days of the disaster. Yet we also need to pay heed to Trump’s more abstract efforts, such as his war on culture and history.

Late last month, Trump signed an executive order falsely titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The document declared:

Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. 

Republicans, who slammed both Barack Obama and Joe Biden for governing through executive orders, have not muttered a word of concern about Trump’s unending flood of EOs.

Trump was referring to long-standing attempts to explore the dark veins of American history—racism, sexism, genocide, and other nasty business—that have been crucial components of the national story. He called for a sole focus on the nation’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” and assailed this wider perspective for deepening “societal divides” and fostering “a sense of national shame.”

The order essentially declared that Trump is the ultimate arbiter of US history and had the right to police thought.

Conservatives who once upon a time howled about the suppression of free thought and groused that Big Government was telling people what to think voiced no objections. Just as Republicans, who slammed both Barack Obama and Joe Biden for governing through executive orders, have not muttered a word of concern about Trump’s unending flood of EOs.

Trump’s diktat targeted specific examples, including a Smithsonian American Art Museum sculpture exhibit that noted the United States has “used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” But what’s inaccurate about that statement? That’s precisely what slavery did. Serving the right-wing theology of anti-wokeness, Trump seeks to white-out the nation’s original sin.

In the order, Trump stated, “It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.” In other words, no dirty laundry—no references to the mass murder of Indigenous people, the suppression of workers, Jim Crow, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, the mistreatment of Chinese laborers, ugly interventions in Latin America and elsewhere, and so on. Only the glories of the United States shall be acknowledged—that is, worshipped.

Racism—and anti-anti-racism—runs through Trump’s executive order.

Trump named Vice President JD Vance as head of an effort to whitewash US history, most notably by vetting exhibits and programs at the various Smithsonian entities. He also directed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to review whether public monuments, memorials, statues, or markers have “been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history” or “inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures.” In short, bring back the Confederate heroes.

This past week, the Trump administration forced the cancellation of most of the grants made by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provides funding for museums, historical sites, scholarship, and various cultural and historical projects, including books, films, and radio programs, such as Ken Burns’ 1990 documentary The Civil War. Grantees were told the agency would be “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the president’s agenda.” And, no doubt, in furtherance of Dear Leader’s self-serving claptrap about the nation’s past.

Racism—and anti-anti-racism—runs through Trump’s executive order. The document denounced the view “that race is not a biological reality but a social construct.” But this approach to race has become the general consensus. Those who have pushed the idea that race is a biological matter have often done so to establish a hierarchy of races. Guess which race they put at the top? And, yes, we can turn to the Nazis for further edification on this point.

Trump has launched a crusade not only against public servants, legal and governmental norms, commonsense economics, science, higher education, DEI programs, and his critics and political rivals, as he vies for wide-ranging power that will allow him to rule as an autocrat. He is striving to become the Big Brother who determines which parts of the American story are legitimate and which are to be suppressed and deleted.

Like other authoritarians, Trump seeks to manipulate and define reality—of the present and of the past.

During the 2024 election, Trump’s campaign was more a disinformation machine than a political operation. He peddled a fictitious tale: The nation was being overrun by violent migrants who ate cats and dogs and who were taking over entire towns in Middle America, while schools were performing transition operations on kids without informing parents and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were purposefully flooding the country with dangerous criminals and mental patients released out of prisons and hospitals…and while the US economy was collapsing. If a voter believed this false narrative, he or she really had no choice but to pull the lever for Trump.

As president, Trump is still running a disinformation con. Now it’s just bigger. Like other authoritarians, he seeks to manipulate and define reality—of the present and of the past. He is attempting to stymie the sometime messy and occasionally disturbing business of history and, to borrow a term once deployed by conservative hero Allan Bloom, close the American mind.

Trump has never been a fan of the truth. For him, reality is whatever works to his benefit. In his multi-front war on American society, he is applying his well-developed lying ways to the nation’s story—and following in the footsteps of despots who realized that the robust pursuit of history is a vital component of democracy and, thus, a threat to tyranny.

During a Past Measles Outbreak, RFK Jr. Dismissed Concern as “Hysteria”

In early 2015, the California Department of Public Health identified a case of measles in an 11-year-old who had recently traveled to Disneyland. Within a month, at least 125 US residents were stricken with the disease. About a third of them had visited the Magic Kingdom theme park, many were unvaccinated, and the outbreak spread to Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, as well as Canada and Mexico. This burst of measles prompted much public discussion about vaccine hesitancy. Yet Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed concern about the outbreak as “hysteria.”

At the time, several state legislatures were considering measures that would limit vaccine exemptions, in many cases ending the ability of parents to skirt immunization requirements for their children by citing a personal belief (as opposed to a medical reason). As one of the most prominent anti-vaxxers in the nation, Kennedy opposed these bills.

“[T]he impetus for the current measles hysteria and the leap to close vaccine exemptions in state legislatures is being orchestrated by the vaccine industry,” Kennedy wrote.

With Kennedy now leading the Department of Health and Human Services during a measles outbreak and providing medical advice that public health experts say is misguided (if not dangerous), this past episode reveals his troubling attitude toward measles and vaccines.

In early March 2015, Kennedy traveled to Salem, Oregon, to lobby against one of the state measures that would remove the personal-belief exemption. In a local theater, he screened a film called Trace Amounts that alleged there was a link between mercury in vaccines and autism and that assailed public health officials and researchers as corrupt fraudsters. But scientific studies had debunked the notion of a link between autism and vaccines. An infamous 1998 study conducted by a British medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield—based on just 12 children—that tied the measles vaccine to autism had been discredited years earlier and retracted by the journal that had published it.

Still, Kennedy continued to push this claim. At the Salem event, before a small audience of Oregon state lawmakers, legislative staffers, and vaccine opponents, he declared vaccines were causing autism in children. He pressed the legislators to reject the bill. Kennedy was accompanied by Brian Hooker, another anti-vax proponent. Hooker had published a paper claiming there was a connection between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism among young Black boys, and he had asserted the Centers for Disease Control was covering this up. But in October 2014, five months before this screening, the journal that had published his article retracted it, noting a “post-publication peer review raised concerns about the validity of the methods and statistical analysis” used by Hooker.

The day after the Salem event, Kennedy sent an email to several of his comrades in the anti-vax movement in which he suggested “the impetus for the current measles hysteria and the leap to close vaccine exemptions in state legislatures is being orchestrated by the vaccine industry.” He noted it was “very clear” that the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) was pushing these measures. NACCHO, no surprise, was at the time urging local health departments to promote vaccination.

Kennedy, in his email, which was obtained by Mother Jones, noted he had been “told” that NACCHO was “being funded by the vaccine industry” and suggested it was nefariously being used by the Big Pharma to whip up public sentiment in favor of vaccinations. He also informed his associates that he had shared this information with “various state legislators” and that this allegation encouraged these lawmakers to view the reaction to the measles outbreak not as “a public health crisis” but as “another familiar manipulation by a greedy industry that is manipulating their credulous colleagues as proxies, while skillfully remaining invisible from the sidelines.” He asked the other anti-vaxxers to “look out for” evidence of this relationship, adding, “I will know how to put it to good use for maximum effect.”

His email suggests that Kennedy was spreading the allegation that NACCHO was fronting for the vaccine industry without having confirmed that was true.

A NACCHO spokesperson refuted Kennedy’s characterization that it has been an agent of the vaccine industry and said that NACCHO’s 2015 annual report does not list any vaccine manufacturers among its funders.

That year, the annual report for the group disclosed 37 financial supporters. On the roster were Gilead Sciences and Janssen Therapeutics, two pharmaceutical companies. But both focused on developing antiviral drugs, especially for treatment of HIV/AIDS, not vaccines. (Janssen Therapeutics was an affiliate of Johnson & Johnson.) The group of NACCHO backers also included the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Society Association, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control, Johns Hopkins University, the National Marrow Donor Program, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the University of Nebraska, and other governmental, academic, and philanthropic entities.

A source familiar with NACCHO’s operation said that the vast majority of its funding has come from grants provided by the federal government, particularly the CDC. The group has tended to focus its advocacy at the federal level and not engaged in state issues.

The Oregon bill that Kennedy lobbied against was eventually withdrawn in the face of the opposition that Kennedy contributed to. The following year California became the first state in almost three decades to end non-medical exemptions from vaccine requirements for schoolchildren.

Kennedy’s 2015 email is telling. It showed that he did not take seriously the measles outbreak of that year and that he leaned toward a conspiracy theory that pharmaceutical companies were diabolically and secretly orchestrating a fake crisis in order to boost vaccine sales. Kennedy also acknowledged he was spreading this paranoid speculation without having obtained solid proof. These are worrying signs given he’s now in charge of the federal government’s response to the current outbreak that is continuing to spread.

Mother Jones sent Kennedy and HHS a list of questions about his approach to the 2015 outbreak, asking if he considers the current concern about measles to be hysteria, believes vaccine makers are now ginning up such worry to increase their profits, and still thinks the MMR vaccine causes autism and other harm. They did not respond.

Trump and Musk Are Running a Disinformation Campaign on Social Security

Donald Trump keeps saying he has no intention of slashing Social Security, but…he and his mini-me, Elon Musk, won’t stop making outlandish claims about the program and appear to be setting the table for cuts that they will try to call something other than “cuts.”

Just about every time they mention the program and entitlement spending, they lie. Musk recently denigrated Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.” It isn’t, but if it were, shouldn’t you whack away at it? And during an interview with Fox Business, he claimed there’s $500 to $700 billion in annual waste and fraud within entitlement spending—when there is no evidence of that (as Forbes notes). Moreover, he and Trump have falsely insisted there are a gazillion dead people on the rolls, implying checks are going out to ghosts.

If things go to hell at the SSA, older voters might get truly get pissed.

This duo of deceit is doing all they can to raise doubts about the most popular and arguably the most important government program. Meanwhile, Musk and his dodgy DOGErs have moved to shitcan or force out thousands of employees at the Social Security Administration, perhaps as many as 10,000. (Good luck reaching someone there on the phone.) The downsizing that has already occurred at the agency has led to “a significant loss of expertise,” according to one former employee. If things go to hell at the SSA, older voters might get truly get pissed.

Unlike ideologues of the right who have long salivated at the thought of shrinking entitlements and privatizing Social Security, Trump realizes such a move could be political suicide. So he has repeatedly vowed not to reduce the program. But should his promise be believed? (That’s a rhetorical question.) After Musk uttered an inartful statement this week about eliminating purported waste and fraud within entitlement programs—which some people interpreted as an expression of his desire to kill these programs—the White House rushed out a press release declaring, “The Trump Administration will not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits. President Trump himself has said it (over and over and over again).” But here’s the tell that the White House cannot be trusted on this front: The statement was full of lies about entitlement spending.

The press release claimed Musk was correct to opine that waste and fraud in entitlement programs totaled up to $700 billion each year. To back this up, the White House listed four “facts” and provided citations. Nerd that I am, I clicked on the links and discovered—wait for it—these citations did not support what the Trump White House was asserting. Let’s run through them:

FACT:  The US Government Accountability Office  estimates  taxpayers lose as much as $521 billion annually to fraud—and  most of that  is within entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid.

That is not what the GAO said. Its report stated, “The federal government could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.” That is, could. Not that it does. And this estimate of possible fraud included Covid pandemic-fraud, which likely boosted the number. As for the claim that most of this comes from entitlement program, the citation supplied by the White House links to a GAO report that says there was an estimated $236 billion in “improper payments” in 2023. But it adds, “Such payments are essentially payment errors that can be the result of many things—including overpayments, inaccurate recordkeeping, or even fraud.” Medicare and Medicaid did have the most payment errors—$186 billion—but, again, that’s not necessarily due to fraud. 

FACT:  Over the past two decades, the federal government has made an estimated $2.7 trillion in “improper payments”—the  majority  of which come in the form of “payments to deceased individuals or those who no longer [are] eligible for government programs.”

This is highly misleading. The GAO report cited says that most of the improper payments were overpayments. As an example of an overpayment, it pointed to “payments to deceased individuals or those no longer eligible for government programs.” It did not say that payments to dead people or ineligible recipients comprise the majority of these improper payments—only that they account for some of these errant payments. 

FACT:  The Social Security Administration  made  an estimated $72 billion in improper payments between 2015 and 2022.  

This “fact” left out important context. The inspector general of the SSA, who came up with this statistic, noted that the $72 billion was “less than 1 percent of the total benefits paid during that period.” While $72 billion seems like a lot of money, a 1 percent error rate is rather admirable for an immense and complex program. Plus, the IG said that some of these payments were deemed improper because of errors made by beneficiaries in reporting changes in their circumstances. These might not be instances of fraud.

FACT:  The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services  estimated  it made $140+ billion in improper payments in 2024 alone.

The White House is mugging the truth to foster the impression that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are ridden with fraud.

This was quite the whopper. Click on that link and you get a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services fact sheet on improper payments. Add up the figures, and the total is $86 billion, not $140-plus billion. More important, the CMS states, “It is important to keep in mind that not all improper payments represent fraud or abuse. Improper payments are payments that do not meet CMS program requirements. They can be overpayments, underpayments, or payments where insufficient information was provided to determine whether a payment was proper. Most improper payments involve a state, contractor, or provider missing an administrative step.” It added, “Of the 2024 Medicaid improper payments, 79.11% were the result of insufficient documentation.” In other words, these payments might have nothing to do with waste and fraud.

You can see what’s going on here. The White House is mugging the truth to foster the impression that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are ridden with fraud. No doubt, within enormous programs that disburse a combined total of about $2.8 trillion a year, there will be waste, abuse, and fraud. That needs to be addressed, and the feds routinely spend a lot of resources each year trying to do so (without having to be besieged by the minions of DOGE). In its fact sheet, CMS reported that the improper payment rate had dropped for several of its major programs.

By and large, the stats ain’t so bad. Yet Trump and Musk are running a disinformation campaign that targets Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, inaccurately depicting them as rotting with criminality. Why do that? What are they setting up? It’s not too hard to imagine.

Tulsi Gabbard Wanted a Promoter of Pro-Putin Commentators to Be Her Deputy

This week, Tulsi Gabbard had her first brush with controversy as President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, when it became known that she had picked as her deputy a right-wing podcaster named Daniel Davis, who had regularly assailed the Israeli government and its war in Gaza, accusing Israel of “pursuing ethnic cleansing” and criticizing US support for what he called “Netanyahu’s war.” Within hours of Jewish Insider breaking this story on Wednesday, which sparked immediate criticism, Gabbard reversed course on appointing Davis, a senior fellow at the Koch-funded Defense Priorities think tank, to this powerful position that oversees the compiling of the President’s Daily Brief, the collection of intelligence assessments that goes to the White House and top policymakers.

Davis’ fervent opposition to Israel’s war—rooted in the non-interventionist tradition of the far right—was too much to bear for senators and Trump administration officials. He became a victim of the never-ending campaign mounted by pro-Israel hawks to keep such critical voices far from positions of power. But the focus on Davis’ stance on Israel distracted from a truly scandalous aspect of this near-appointment: By picking Davis, a former Army lieutenant colonel with no intelligence community experience, Gabbard sought to hire for this important and highly sensitive position a prolific disseminator of pro-Russia messaging, who himself has been embraced by state-controlled Russian media outlets for the positions he espouses and platforms. Yet Davis’ extensive amplification of pro-Putin talking points received little, if any, attention in the media coverage of this hullabaloo.

Davis posts episodes of his YouTube Deep Dive podcast daily; sometimes he produces multiple episodes a day. In recent months, most shows have focused on the Russia-Ukraine war, with Davis and his guests usually pounding on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and criticizing US assistance for Ukraine. There is not much, if any, criticism of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, his launching of the war, or the atrocities committed by his forces.

In a January episode typical of the show, retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor called on Trump to walk away from Ukraine: “The win for us is extricating us from this tar baby, get out, say good bye move on… Announce we’re leaving, we’re out, we’re not going to do this anymore.” He noted that the United States should not even try to craft a negotiated end to the conflict. Davis agreed and said, “This is what makes sense.” He then cited a key Kremlin talking point, asserting that Russian leader Vladimir Putin has no interest in moving against other European nations and is only “focused on protecting the ethnic Russians in the eastern part of what was Ukraine.”

Because of conversations like these, Davis’ show, which has 134,000 subscribers on You Tube, has been regularly promoted on Russian state media. One private analysis obtained by Mother Jones shows that Russian state media outlets have cited Davis’ show nearly 300 times in the past 18 months. For instance, when Davis hosted Macgregor in late 2023 and he proclaimed the Russian economy was doing “brilliantly” and Moscow was about to win the war, Rossiyskaya Gazeta a government daily newspaper, published a news story on this episode under the headline, “Colonel Macgregor: Biden has made Putin stronger than ever.”

Macgregor has been, by far, the most frequent guest on Davis’ podcast, some weeks appearing several times. In 2020, Trump named him to be US ambassador to Germany, but after CNN revealed his history of making xenophobic and racist comments, his nomination died. Following Putin’s invasion of Russia in 2022, Macgregor often appeared on Fox News programs, spouting a pro-Putin line. He told Tucker Carlson that it would be pointless to impose sanctions on Russia. On another show, he said that Russian forces were “too gentle” during the opening days of the invasion and that Zelensky was a “puppet.” He blasted all information coming from Ukraine as propaganda.

During one Fox appearance, Macgregor said the United States should not demonize Putin, provide no aid to Ukraine, and let the Russian leader take whatever part of Ukraine he desired.

Former Trump Advisor Douglas MacGregor says we need to stop demonizing Putin, lift all sanctions, stop providing weapons and aid, that it’s “hopeless,” and just let Putin take whatever part of Ukraine that he wants. pic.twitter.com/HBnLWVdVgD

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 28, 2022

In his podcast episodes, Davis often seconded Macgregor’s remarks and presented him as a fellow whose extreme views should be heeded by the president and US policymakers.

Another regular guest for Davis has been Larry Johnson, who was a CIA analyst for several years in the 1980s. As the Voice of America reported recently, “The Kremlin uses Johnson’s often false and misleading claims to promote pro-Russian narratives and improve its image.”

Johnson is a longtime critic of US intelligence and an advocate for Russia—and a promoter of conspiracy theories. After the 2016 election, he repeatedly appeared on Russian state media to refute the US intelligence finding that Russia had covertly interfered in that contest to help Trump. (He claimed the CIA might have engineered the hacking of Democratic sources—a crime widely attributed to Russian operatives.) He also pushed the bogus claim that British intelligence services had spied on Trump. As a blogger in 2008, he spread the rumor that Michelle Obama had been recorded uttering a slur about white people.

More recently, in 2023, he contended that US intelligence was scheming to assassinate Zelenskyy and make it look as if he had been killed in a Russian airstrike. Citing his claim, RIA Novosti, the Russian- state-owned news agency, declared that “U.S. intelligence agencies are planning to assassinate Zelenskyy.” Last September, Voice of America reported that leading Russian state media outfits had cited or referred to Johnson more than 1000 times in the previous twelve months, as he often predicted Ukraine was about to suffer a major setback or even lose the war.

On Wednesday, Davis featured Johnson on his show once again, and Johnson reported that he had just attended a small meeting in Moscow with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Davis nodded approvingly, as Johnson voiced Russian talking points, praised Lavrov, and said it was “quite an honor” to speak with the Russian. (On his website, Johnson hailed Lavrov, a longtime Putin henchman, as “a gentleman and the walking definition of a master diplomat.”) Johnson blamed the West for the Russia-Ukraine war and the United States for tensions with Russia. He said of Putin, “As a lawyer, he is a stickler for the law.” Davis did not challenge this observation.

While in Moscow, Johnson and right-wing commentator Andrew Napolitano, also met with Russia oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian media mogul and Putin supporter who was sanctioned by the United States in 2014 for supporting Russian forces in eastern Ukraine and who was indicted by the US in 2022 for allegedly conspiring to violate US sanctions. Talking to Davis about his trip, Johnson recounted that he saw few cops and cited this to suggest that Russia was not a police state. He praised Moscow’s clean streets.

During this podcast, Johnson insisted that Americans should knock off criticizing Russia for corruption. He said he expected the “news” to break “in the next month or two” that members of Congress “took money from Ukrainians, $50 billion worth that wound up in banks in the Caribbean. Fifty billion.” Davis replied, “Yeah.” Johnson dumped on Zelenskyy, saying, “he is not a legitimate negotiating partner.” He called on Ukraine to stop fighting and withdraw its soldiers. He did not say the same about Russia. Davis pointed out that Trump had been right to halt US military aid to Ukraine—which has since been resumed—and remarked, “Trump agreeing to the Russian side isn’t a capitulation. It isn’t a surrender. It is an acknowledgement of reality… There is no other alternative.”

Davis did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Gabbard’s office. Macgregor and Johnson also did not reply to requests for comment.

Davis’ appointment was sabotaged in part because he has defied the pro-Israel hardline deeply ingrained within the Trump administration. (The Anti-Defamation League called him “extremely dangerous” and “unfit for this key security role.”) But his selection should have been problematic for another reason: This conservative non-interventionist has made common cause with and amplified pro-Russia commentators of dubious credibility, and that has rendered him useful for Putin’s state-run media. What’s most troubling is that Gabbard saw him as qualified and suitable for this position. A supposed military expert who relies on and boosts pro-Putin proponents and a conspiracy theorist ought not be in charge of the daily intelligence report the president receives. Gabbard’s initial decision to hire him shows that she, not Davis, is the real problem.

Why the Right Is to Blame for Distrust in the Media

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Recently, I attended a conference in Washington, DC, on the all-important topic of “Innovating to Restore Trust in News.” The Semafor-sponsored event featured one-on-one interviews with such media bigshots as Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times; Emma Tucker, the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal; Mark Thompson, the CEO of CNN; Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR; Bret Baier, the chief political anchor of Fox News; Mehdi Hasan, the editor-in-chief of Zeteo; Cesar Conde, chair of the NBCUniversal News Group; Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission; and Megyn Kelly, the former Fox host who’s now a podcaster.

The prompt for the conversation was a Gallup poll that shows that only 31 percent of Americans have some degree of trust in newsies, a drop from about 70 percent in 1972. Yet there was not much talk of specific innovations that could restore this trust. And it wasn’t until the reception afterward—tuna tartare!—that I realized what had been absent from the hours-long discussion: any consideration of why polls record a decline in trust of the media. I’ll get to that in a moment.

Rupert Murdoch had to pay Dominion $787.5 million for knowingly broadcasting falsehoods. Given that, what qualifies a Fox anchor to talk about trust in the media?

I’m not sure what one could expect from a lineup of media honchos who, if they had a brilliant idea, would probably not want to share it with competitors. But most of the speakers sidestepped the notion that news organizations could whip up something shiny and new to forge stronger bonds with their audiences. Kahn did speak about actions the New York Times has adopted to boost the relationship between its reporters and its readers, such as featuring them on The Daily, the paper’s daily podcast. If you know these folks, you’re more likely to trust their stories, Kahn told the crowd. (Kahn also referred to X as “a cesspool for attacks.”)

His remarks came closest to hitting the target Semafor had set up. Thompson proclaimed that he himself didn’t trust the media and commented, “I’d rather have a questioning audience than a compliant audience that is deferential to media.” He touted CNN’s future, noting its growth will not occur on its cable television platform but on the internet. Baier basically defended his daily show as a straight-news operation. Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith did not grill him on the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit that revealed that Fox had pushed Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election and that showed the world this network is more a propaganda-for-profit shop than a news outlet. Rupert Murdoch had to pay Dominion $787.5 million for knowingly broadcasting falsehoods that catered to its audience’s paranoia and bias. Given that, what qualifies a Fox anchor to talk about trust in the media?

Conde boasted that NBC News is the largest news organization in the nation and hailed its local news operations as means for enhancing trust in the media. (Local reporters often score well on the trust-o-meter.) Maher sought to slay the shibboleth that NPR is too liberal and said one way the network engenders trust is to “show our work” to the audience. Hasan was pressed by Semafor’s Max Tani on why he hasn’t disclosed the investors in Zeteo, the media startup he launched a year ago. He countered that this question has been raised by those who fear his tough coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and who want to suggest he’s secretly backed by pro-Arab interests. (He said his investors were friends and relatives, many of whom do not wish to be targeted because of their support.) On the matter of trust, Hasan remarked that many news consumers are “fed up” with the “coziness” they see when mainstream news people conduct interviews with prominent subjects. That produces a “trust deficit,” he asserted.

Tucker, when asked if Washington was freaking out too much about Trump, replied, “Maybe yes, a little bit.” I imagine that thousands of federal workers dismissed abruptly and perhaps illegally from jobs in which they provided essential services might disagree with her—as might needy people overseas who were cut off from food, clean water, and health care necessary for their survival because of the Trump-Musk blitzkrieg on government agencies.

Carr called social media companies “the greatest threat [to free speech] that we have seen over the last several years.” He did not seem to have X in mind and focused instead on the conservative complaint that the Biden administration leaned on these platforms during the Covid pandemic. He also defended his decisions to investigate NPR and PBS over their advertising policies and to revive complaints into CBS, ABC, and NBC. He told the audience he would fast-track a probe of how CBS News covered the last presidential election. His remarks were more about vengeance than trust.

Pointing to the huge audience her internet show draws, Megyn Kelly brayed, “I’m not having a trust issue.”

A real head-scratcher was Kelly’s place on the list of participants. What could this ex-Foxer tell us about restoring trust in the news media? After all, she endorsed Trump last year and campaigned for him, and Trump is arguably the biggest liar in the history of American politics. No surprise, she had nothing productive to offer. She snarked at CNN (too lefty!) and MSNBC (too, too lefty!). She did a mean-girl thing about Rachel Maddow and sneered that Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos had bent the knee for Trump. (Even a broken clock…)

Pointing to the huge audience her internet show draws, Kelly brayed, “I’m not having a trust issue.” The problem, she claimed, was that every establishment media institution is left-leaning—which is what you’d expect a Trump backer to say. Kelly had not much to share about how the legacy media could regain trust. Her suggestion seemed to be that these outfits ought to cover Trump’s lies as truth. Moreover, her presence at this “summit” was odd. If you want to boost trust in the media, why legitimize a right-wing journalist who became a partisan and helped elect a prodigious liar? By inviting Kelly to this shindig, Semafor indicated it believed she had something to contribute to this important conversation. She didn’t.

Back to the question of why trust in media is low. At the conference, there were crickets regarding the reason for this. A casual glance at the polling provides some insight. In 1972, according to Gallup, 72 percent of Democrats had a great deal or some trust in the media; 68 percent of Republicans felt the same way. Not much of a difference. Independents back then were the least trusting at 59 percent.

Then came a major split. From that point on, the numbers steadily dropped for all three groups. But the decline was sharpest for Republicans. Today, only 12 percent of them trust the media, while 54 percent of Democrats do.

So the overall collapse in trust has been driven most by Republicans losing faith in the media. Trust has fallen for all three groups—though on the chart above you can see there have been times when Democratic trust has rebounded to above 70 percent. Republicans have not hit the 50 percent mark in over 20 years. Take Republicans out of the equation, and the trust-in-media problem looks much less dire.

No one at the conference noted this. What also went unmentioned was that Trump, the GOP, and right-wing media (most notably Fox) have done much through the decades to degrade the national discourse with lies and disinformation, while simultaneously and purposefully encouraging profound distrust and hatred of media outlets that don’t buy their bunk.

The GOP war on the media is not the only reason for the free-falling trust numbers. But it’s a large slice of the story.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Republicans and the right began a crusade against the mainstream media, looking to delegitimize it in the eyes of conservatives. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), a hero of the ultra-right, excoriated the “liberal media,” which he despised for its coverage of the civil rights movement. Other conservatives assailed the conventional media for their critical reporting on the Vietnam War and Watergate. All of this fueled an extensive and well-planned effort on the right that aimed to discredit the media. In the 1970s, this media-bashing became a bedrock of Republican politics, and it has continued to this day. Trump turbocharged this tradition with his vituperative attacks on the press as the “enemy of the people.”

So here’s a basic fact: A long time ago, the right initiated a scheme to encourage distrust and, no surprise, it worked—at least among Republicans and probably among GOP-leaning independents.

The GOP war on the media is not the only reason for the free-falling trust numbers. But it’s a large slice of the story. And as the Republican Party has turned into the MAGA cult, it retains a sharp interest in undermining media that would challenge the “alternative facts,” lies, and disinformation peddled by Trump and his crew. Trump benefits from distrust in the media, and he has deliberately spurred it.

He and his minions don’t want to increase trust in the media because a trusted media would pose a threat to them. During Trump’s first administration, the Washington Post chronicled more than 30,000 lies, false claims, or misrepresentations from Trump. Imagine if Republican voters accepted the newspaper’s portrayal of Trump as a con man. But thanks to the long-running right-wing project to undermine the credibility of the mainstream media, Trump and other GOP politicians are insulated from such damning truths.

No one at the Semafor gabfest pondered why this dramatic decrease on the GOP side has occurred. Consequently, there was no discussion of how this distrust was, to a degree, orchestrated by the right. And if you’re not going to look at what’s driving the problem, you’re not going to be able to fix it.

Perhaps Kelly was right: Throw more right-wing slop at Republicans, and they will trust the media more. But would that bring us to a better spot? Distrust of the media is not a nonpartisan issue. If media barons don’t recognize this, they will not likely concoct innovations that effectively address it.

Trump’s NIH Pick Advised South African Group That Claimed There Was No Covid Pandemic

Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford professor of medicine and economics who President Donald Trump has tapped to lead the National Institutes of Health, became prominent during the Covid pandemic as a contrarian. He was a fierce foe of the restrictive measures advocated by public health officials for combatting the deadly virus. As one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which was developed at an October 2020 meeting of a libertarian think tank, he recommended the United States strive for Covid herd immunity through mass infection instead of fighting the disease with lockdowns, masking, and other countermeasures—a position widely opposed by medical experts as dangerous. And at the outset of Covid, he lowballed the severity of the pandemic, saying it was “likely” that the outbreak would be of a “limited scale” and cause 20,000 to 40,000 deaths, not the million or more predicted by public health officials. (Covid deaths have so far totaled 1.2 million.)

During the Covid crisis, Bhattacharya’s controversial and much-criticized views became well-known. Not as public was his role advising a group in South Africa that has claimed there was no Covid pandemic and that has pushed the conspiracy theory that Covid and climate change are “fabricated global crises” orchestrated to implement “centralized control.”

Weeks into the Covid pandemic, a South African named Nick Hudson, who describes himself as an actuary, private equity investor, and amateur ornithologist, created an outfit called PANDA (short for Pandemics Data and Analytics) to advance the notion that the global reaction to Covid—lockdowns and mandates—was “overwrought and damaging.”

In June 2020, when South African government advisers estimated that Covid could result in 40,000 fatalities in that country, Hudson, through PANDA, released an open letter calling that figure “outlandish”—that is, far too high. He told a South African publication that this estimate “would put us in line with the very worst experiences in the world. That makes no sense.” He added, “We have a younger population, which is associated with a lighter [disease] experience.” He insisted a reasonable forecast would not top 10,000 deaths.

But Hudson had been wrong before. In May 2020, he contended that because no nation “we have noticed” had seen “peak daily deaths” occur outside the range of 30-to-50 days from first death, “poor and middle-income nations would not have significant epidemics.” By the next month—after that 30-to-50-day window had passed—South Africa was still registering record-setting deaths. And greater peaks of daily deaths would continue to occur.

By early August, Covid deaths in South Africa reached 10,000—the number that Hudson and PANDA had maintained would be the high end—and they kept coming. Still, PANDA stuck with downplaying the seriousness of the disease. “There is no health crisis,” the group’s website said. “Well, actually, there is. But it isn’t caused by COVID-19. It is caused by the lockdown and other miserable” measures. The following month, PANDA suggested there was no reason to fear a “second wave” of Covid deaths. Yet a second wave would come and claim tens of thousands of more South African lives. Eventually, the death toll would be over 102,000.

On October 6, 2020, PANDA announced the formation of its “scientific advisory board.” The four members included Bhattacharya, as well as the two other authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Also on the new PANDA board was Michael Levitt, a professor of biophysics at Stanford University. In July 2020, he had tweeted, “US COVID19 will be done in 4 weeks with a total reported death below 170,000… Reported COVID19 deaths may continue after 25 Aug. & reported cases will, but it will be over.” By the time he and Bhattacharya joined Hudson’s board, US deaths were nearly 225,000 and rising. Both had wildly underestimated the Covid death count.

While announcing the alliance with Bhattacharya and the other Covid skeptics, PANDA decried “the corrupt and the inept among scientists and politicians alike” who were “embarking upon a great intrusion against civil liberties and pursuing health policies that…would clearly harm more than help.” It called Bhattacharya and this fellow board members “courageous voices” and asserted Covid “presents negligible risk” to “the vast majority.” The group suggested the Covid response advocated by governments and public health officials was designed to establish a “dystopian ‘new normal.'” PANDA was leaning into paranoia.

When Hudson publicly assailed what he called the “false Covid Narrative,” which he claimed was being advanced by elites to create a “dystopian fantasy,” and argued that the “headlong rush for a vaccine is as unnecessary as it is dangerous,” he cited Bhattacharya’s presence on PANDA’s board to boost his credibility.

In early January 2021, Bhattacharya joined Hudson to record a video. He nodded approvingly as Hudson accused the World Health Organization of fear-mongering about Covid and making sure “everyone was terrified.” Bhattacharya charged the scientific community with “ginning up panic.” They each shared their opposition to lockdowns, and both expressed their support for herd immunity.

In the video, Hudson expressed deep skepticism about the recently developed vaccines and opposed universal mandatory vaccination. Bhattacharya took a slightly different stance, asserting that the public health community had lost the credibility it needed to advocate for vaccine mandates. Still, he maintained that infection for non-elderly people was the best protection. The vaccine, he remarked, “certainly is going to be less well-tested [than infection]. The range of uncertainty around that will be much greater than the protectiveness of Covid infection.”

Hudson thanked Bhattacharya for joining PANDA’s board. Neither acknowledged that they had greatly underestimated the Covid death toll. By this point, nearly 400,000 Americans had died (10 to 20 times what Bhattacharya had characterized as “likely”) and more than 31,000 South Africans had perished (three times what Hudson had said was the highest possible death count).

In the years ahead, Hudson and PANDA would campaign against vaccine mandates and become more invested in conspiracy theories. During a 2023 interview, Hudson claimed there was a a “deeply disturbing” pattern of fabricated global crises, like Covid-19 and the climate “emergency,” which were being pushed to allow globalists to implement “centralized control.” On its web site, PANDA currently states, “There was no pandemic.” It adds, vaccines “were simply not required.”

Levitt broke his ties with PANDA due to its anti-vaccine stance. But there’s no public sign of Bhattacharya saying goodbye to Hudson and PANDA. The group noted in April 2021 that “overnight” several of its scientific advisory board members resigned due to its position on vaccines. It did not specify who had resigned. Its website no longer lists such a board.

Bhattacharya did not respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones. Neither did Hudson nor PANDA.

On Wednesday, Bhattacharya appeared before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee for his committee. He paid lip service to the idea of following the science. But he also said he was open to more research to determine if there is a link between autism and vaccines, though plenty of science has already determined no connection exists. He ducked questions about the Trump administration’s efforts to cut NIH funding. No major Republican opposition has emerged to his nomination. Soon the preeminent government agency in charge of medical research could be under the control of a fellow who legitimized a Covid denialist and conspiracy theory-pusher who, like Bhattacharya, got it wrong.

Musk’s Reckless Ebola Cuts Could Lead to Deadly Pandemics

Last week, standing in front of President Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, Elon Musk, the unelected billionaire running a blitzkrieg against the US government, acknowledged that he had made a mistake—that in going after the US Agency for International Development, the foreign assistance program that he has all but destroyed, he accidentally ended the Ebola prevention project it ran overseas. Musk claimed the error was quickly fixed and there was no interruption in service. But former and current USAID staff quickly told the Washington Post that Musk was wrong—the Ebola response remained sharply curtailed. And, as the Bulwark reported, Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, who was placed on administrative leave Sunday, had drafted an unfinished memo that predicted the demolition of USAID would lead to more than 28,000 cases of Ebola and related diseases, as well as a 28 to 32 percent increase in tuberculosis globally, up to 18 million cases of malaria (with up to 166,000 deaths annually), and an additional 200,000 cases of paralytic polio a year.  

Musk’s assertion that his slash-and-burn assault on USAID had no negative impact on combating Ebola was disinformation. He was hiding the truth on a critical global health issue. I spoke about Musk’s claim with Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International. He ran the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at USAID during the Obama years and returned to the agency to work on Covid during the Biden administration. I asked him to describe how dangerous the cuts are. Have Trump and Musk seriously undermined the nation’s ability to prevent a major pandemic from hitting the United States?

Watch the interview and read the lightly edited and condensed Q&A below.

What does USAID do to prevent the spread of Ebola and other highly infectious and dangerous diseases overseas?

So you’ve got two big chunks to that. One is preparedness. You want to have the systems in place at a country level that can respond when an outbreak emerges and also reduce the likelihood that it emerges. That includes things like laboratory capacity for diagnostics and surveillance, so you can detect things rapidly when they emerge. And then you have to implement treatment, isolation, and infection prevention, so that when people begin showing up sick, they don’t infect health workers or other people.

USAID makes those kinds of investments, along with the Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention], in a lot of countries overseas that are prone to novel outbreaks. When something is detected—like the Ebola outbreak now underway in Uganda—USAID would normally swing into action with an active response team, deploying technical experts to support the Ugandan government, ramping up supplies, and providing personal protective equipment.

Another important element is traveler screening. You might remember the big hullabaloo in 2014 about travelers reaching the United States with Ebola. There’s a lot of investment in traveler screening to prevent people who are sick from traveling and potentially spreading the disease to other countries.

We should underscore here that this obviously helps people in the countries where this is happening. But we also have a bit of self-interest in preventing the spread, right? We’re doing good for others and for ourselves. Does this entail using USAID workers or working with contractors?

Typically, that would mean deploying some USAID personnel, but a lot of the frontline work is done through partner organizations—providing grants and contracts to aid organizations to support the Ugandan government and to run some of their own activities.

When Elon Musk came in with his minions and shut down USAID and froze federal foreign assistance, how did that affect this?

Almost none of the things that would routinely happen in a major outbreak actually took place. USAID did not deploy anyone to Uganda to support the response. They did not get money out to partners quickly. It took them weeks, when it would normally take hours or days. And even the funds that did go out were very, very small. Some contracts were canceled. One of the awards that had been made was to a partner supporting traveler screening at Uganda’s major airport in Entebbe—that was just canceled last week.

That means people can get on a plane in Entebbe and fly to London, Frankfurt, New York—wherever—and no one’s asking them about Ebola?

It means that the support to the Ugandan government to make sure that screening is as robust and airtight as possible is gone. So it’s a huge risk.

Elon Musk “has no idea what he’s talking about. He’s making it up as he goes. He doesn’t understand the things he’s canceling.”

Elon Musk says everything’s been fixed. No?

He has no idea what he’s talking about. He’s making it up as he goes. He doesn’t understand the things he’s canceling. He and his team of teenagers and twentysomethings are using AI—or keyword searches, as far as we can tell—to decide what to cut. They’re not bothering to stop and understand what they’re actually losing when they shut these programs down.

We’re focused here on Ebola, but what does this mean in terms of other diseases and other possible pandemic threats?

One of the things you realize really quickly when you start getting involved in outbreak response is that there are outbreaks all over the world all the time. It’s really hard to know at the front end of one which has the potential to truly explode at a global level. That’s why it’s important to get on top of all of them very, very quickly, before they have a chance to spread. When you lose these capabilities, you increase the chances that one of those outbreaks will spread and get out of control globally.

I read in the newspaper that there’s something going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 50 people dead from a mysterious illness. What does it mean now that the US aid capacity has been severely cut, if not abolished?

This is a good and interesting example. This was a mystery for the first few weeks. Over the weekend, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced they now believe it’s due to water contamination—a waterborne illness. If that’s confirmed, then hopefully that one won’t pose a risk of spreading. But we only know that because WHO was on top of it.

Why is WHO on top of it? Because the section at WHO that handles emergencies and outbreaks was largely created at the behest of—and under pressure from—the US government after Ebola in 2014. And we are the principal funder of it.

“We’re actively weakening the entire global infrastructure we built to keep us safe from these threats.”

Now, the United States is withdrawing from WHO, and the CDC has been barred from talking to WHO. All of our funding is being pulled. So we’re not just taking ourselves out of the game—we’re actively weakening the entire global infrastructure we built to keep us safe from these threats.

That doesn’t sound very encouraging. Let’s see if we can end on a somewhat optimistic note. Would it be possible to restore these capacities if, for some reason, a wave of rationality and sanity struck the Trump-Musk team?

It absolutely would. One of the ironic things here is that clearly, Musk feels pressure over this. He wants to reassure the public and the administration that they’re not cutting things that put Americans at risk. But, of course, they are. He has no idea what to cut and what not to cut—he’s just cutting everything by default.

“It’s going to take decades to rebuild what we’re about to lose.”

There could be a different approach. Congress could intervene and put parameters around this, asserting itself in the process. They haven’t really done that yet. But when you look at what’s actually been done to USAID—yes, they are canceling contracts; yes, they’re trying to push out staff—none of that is unsalvageable. It could still be pulled back, as you say, in a fit of rationality. The risk is that if we persist on this path—if we lose all this capability, all this expertise—it’s going to take decades to rebuild what we’re about to lose. Right now, they’ve done more talking than actual damage. They’re close to locking it in, but it’s not locked in yet. They have no idea how to read the things they’re looking at, and they’re not bothering to stop and listen to the people who could explain it to them. They’re just making fools of themselves.

Trump’s NIH Pick Made a Big Mistake on Covid

Senate Republicans seem to be cruising toward confirming as the director of the National Institutes of Health an academic who made a huge mistake about the most serious health crisis to confront the United States in a century and who refuses to acknowledge he erred big-time.

President Donald Trump’s pick to lead NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of economics and health policy at Stanford, was a fierce critic of Covid vaccine mandates and other anti-pandemic measures, such as lockdowns and mask mandates. He was one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which was developed at an October 2020 meeting of a libertarian think tank. It recommended the United States strive for Covid herd immunity through mass infection and focus on sequestering particularly vulnerable populations, such as older Americans.

A large number of public health experts and organizations assailed this approach. A collection of these groups responded: “If followed, the recommendations in the Great Barrington Declaration would haphazardly and unnecessarily sacrifice lives. The declaration is not a strategy, it is a political statement. It ignores sound public health expertise. It preys on a frustrated populace… The suggestions put forth by the Great Barrington Declaration are NOT based in science.”

Bhattacharya, who advanced the paranoid idea that the pandemic was being used to create a “biosecurity state,” was hailed by libertarians, conservatives, and MAGA-ites for his defiance—even as public health experts noted he had not presented a workable plan to achieve herd immunity while protecting at-risk Americans. He went on to champion himself as a victim of censorship.

Perhaps more worrisome is that he totally misread the potential danger of Covid and now won’t admit that.

At the start of the Covid pandemic, in late March 2020, he co-wrote with Eran Bendavid, another Stanford professor, an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which they dramatically downplayed the possible consequences of this public health crisis. The pair noted there was “little evidence to confirm” the “premise” that Covid would kill millions in the absence of such measures as quarantines and shelter-in-place orders.

Bhattacharya and Bendavid pointed to estimates that predicted 100 million Americans would contract the disease and 2 to 4 million would perish. “We believe that estimate is deeply flawed,” they wrote. They noted that statistical misinterpretations “could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills two million.” And they insisted the lower number was “not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far.”

Covid has killed 1.2 Americans, and that number would probably be much higher—perhaps in the 2 to 4 million range—had a vaccine not been developed.

The two Stanford professors presented a bunch of statistics to contend that the pandemic would likely be of a “limited scale.” And they made an obvious point: “A 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million.”

This was not merely an academic exercise. Their numbers had significant policy implications. They asserted that in the face of a “limited” epidemic, there would be no need for the most severe measures, such as lockdowns. They were providing ammo to those who were opposing the restrictions being advocated by public health officials.

Bhattacharya got it wrong. But what’s worse is that he now won’t concede he was off the mark by a factor of at least 25.

Last fall, I got in a tussle with him over this. Hedge fund manager and Trump fanboy Bill Ackman tweeted that Bhattacharya was a “brilliant scientist” who’s “unafraid to stand by his carefully researched opinion.” Citing the 2020 Wall Street Journal article, I responded that Bhattacharya at the start of the pandemic said that only 20,000 to 40,000 people would die from Covid, adding, “He was only off by 1.16 million.”

Bhattacharya replied, “This is a lie. The article pointed out that, given the evidence available in early 2020, the pandemic could end up killing anywhere between 20k and 4 million. And it called for a study to reduce the uncertainty.” Elon Musk also chimed in to promote a community note attached to my tweet that read, “Bhattacharya never claimed only 20-40K would die from Covid.”

These responses to my tweet were misleading. Bhattacharya hadn’t merely called for better studies. The intent of his article was to suggest that those experts who feared a pandemic and who were proposing tough measures to prevent such a wave of death were likely wrong and overreacting. His op-ed had indeed noted that the estimates of Covid deaths varied from his figure of 20,000 to other predictions of 4 million. But he and Bendavid had clearly stated that they believed the number would end up being at the lower end and that the United States would face an epidemic of “limited scale.”

Bhattacharya and his supporters, including Musk, cannot acknowledge his big error, and they have been trying to erase it. And he is probably prepared to stick to this misleading CYA spin during his Senate confirmation hearing scheduled for Wednesday. There’s nothing wrong about an academic expressing skepticism about the conventional wisdom. More troubling is when a supposed expert in health stats blunders significantly and cannot ‘fess up to it. Such disingenuous defensiveness is not a good trait for the top appointment at the federal agency in charge of biomedical and public health research.

Vladimir Putin’s Investment in Donald Trump Pays Off Bigly

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Talk about a good ROI. Vladimir Putin’s investment in Donald Trump is sure paying off.

In recent days, Trump has promoted Moscow’s horrendously false talking points, excoriating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator” and blaming Ukraine for the brutal war that Putin, a real dictator, launched. He also kicked off talks with Russia to end the war and left out Ukraine. It’s hard to imagine a better scenario for Putin. And at the United Nations, the Trump administration proposed a resolution on the war that declined to hold Russia responsible for the conflict. (It was amended to include language blaming Moscow and then passed, with Washington abstaining.)

Plus, the chaos caused by Trump and Elon Musk’s blitzkrieg against US government agencies could well redound to the Kremlin’s advantage. With national security agencies—the CIA, the FBI, and others—and the Pentagon under siege due to this assault, their capabilities to defend the nation from threats posed by Russia or other adversaries will be diminished. All the Trump/Musk-generated conflict is in sync with Putin’s long-standing aim to sow discord in the United States.

What a good deal for Putin: Trump siding with him on Ukraine, legitimizing his tyrannical reign, and breaking with Western allies.

Moreover, on her first day in office, Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which sought to counter secret operations waged by Russia, China, and other foes to affect US elections. She also cut back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a tool used by the feds to neutralize malign influence and disinformation operations. And now the FBI is being run by Kash Patel, a MAGA provocateur who has hailed the January 6 rioters and who has echoed Putin’s phony claim that Moscow did not clandestinely intervene in the 2016 campaign and assist Trump.

What a good deal for Putin: Trump siding with him on Ukraine, legitimizing his tyrannical reign, and breaking with Western allies. The US government and national security community in turmoil. Washington undermining its standing throughout the world and diminishing its global influence. And a US administration opening the door for more Russian covert attacks and holding Moscow blameless for its previous assaults on American democracy. No wonder Putin did what he could to help Trump win the presidency—not once but thrice. 

The Trumpers will tell you that “Russia, Russia, Russia” was a hoax, a witch hunt and a diabolical Deep State plot. That’s another con that Trump whipped up, with a boatload of help from Patel. But as the Trump-Putin relationship returns to prominence and as an American sellout of Ukraine looms, it’s important to keep in mind that Trump sits in the White House partly because of Putin’s skullduggery and his own betrayal of America.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask Marco Rubio, who’s now Trump’s secretary of state. As I’ve pointed out before in this newsletter, in August 2020, Rubio, then the GOP chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, released a bipartisan 966-page report on the Trump-Russia scandal. It’s the most comprehensive public account of Putin’s attack on the 2016 election. It concludes that Putin “ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president” and that he did so “to help the Trump Campaign…and undermine the US democratic process.”

The report points out that “the Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia”—that is, Trump helped cover up Putin’s culpability. The report also reveals that Paul Manafort, the chief executive of Trump’s 2016 campaign, secretly met with a Russian intelligence office who was possibly connected to Russia’s hack-and-leak operation and shared private campaign information with him. (Does that sound like possible collusion?)

So no hoax. Putin schemed to place Trump in the White House, and Trump aided and abetted the operation by falsely denying its existence.

For years, the Republicans and MAGA-aligned media used a Kremlin-orchestrated smear to advance the impression that Biden was crooked.

The Russian operation helped Trump win in 2016. In the final weeks of a tight election, it produced a steady stream of damaging leaks about Clinton that impeded her campaign. The Kremlin also ran secret projects that tried to assist Trump in 2020 and 2024. What’s the source for that? The first Trump administration. In 2020, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center and the Treasury Department each publicly disclosed that Russia was conducting a disinformation campaign spreading false information about Joe Biden’s actions in Ukraine to smear the former vice president and Trump’s main rival. Rudy Giuliani, then a lawyer for Trump, peddled this phony, Russia-generated propaganda to try to undermine Biden’s presidential campaign.

Such bunk became the basis for the long-running and false GOP narrative that Biden was corrupt. This line of attack failed in 2020, but the Republicans stuck with it. After they won control of the House of Representatives in 2022, they hyped the Biden allegations cooked up by Russian agents and used this disinformation to try to discredit Biden with the false charge that he headed a “Biden crime family.” They cited this bogus claim as the basis for an impeachment investigation. That probe went nowhere, but for years, the Republicans and MAGA-aligned media used the Kremlin-orchestrated smear to advance the impression that Biden was crooked—a sham that Trump enthusiastically promoted and exploited in the 2024 campaign.

Russia’s effort last year to help Trump was not a secret. In the spring of 2024, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines publicly testified before Congress that Russia was once again waging information warfare to influence the presidential election, obviously to benefit Trump. This would come to include a host of disinformation projects. But none of this became major news stories—a true failure of the media. And, it would turn out, one of the key false allegations the Republicans and their media mouthpieces pushed—that Biden and his son had covertly pocketed $10 million in bribes from a Ukrainian energy firm—originated with an FBI informant with ties to Russian intelligence officers. (In December, this informant, Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty to lying to the bureau about this supposed scheme.) 

Whatever the Russians did last year to help Trump will be buried by what we can now call the Trump Deep State.

There’s been no good review of the operations the Kremlin implemented to swing the 2024 election to Trump. And with Trump in charge, Patel at the FBI, John Ratcliffe (another Trump loyalist) heading the CIA, and Tulsi Gabbard serving as the director of national intelligence, there’s as much chance of one being ordered as Trump attending a racial sensitivity seminar. Whatever the Russians did last year to help Trump will be buried by what we can now call the Trump Deep State.

There’s certainly a lot more to the Trump-Putin connection than this brief rundown. In 2013, when Trump announced he’d be holding his Miss Universe contest in Moscow, he tweeted about Putin becoming “his new best friend.” (Putin was already recognized at this point as an antidemocratic thug.) While in Moscow for the event, Trump was obsessed with meeting Putin—which never happened. But the Miss Universe pageant netted Trump $2.3 million—mostly because his partner in the endeavor, a Russian oligarch who was close to Putin, paid Trump a very generous licensing fee and absorbed millions in losses. (Was this a sweetheart deal with a pro-Putin billionaire?)

During the 2016 campaign, Trump tried to set up a megadeal to develop a tower in Moscow and requested help from Putin’s office. (He never told voters about this.) And his top campaign aides met with a Russian emissary after being informed the Kremlin wanted to secretly help his campaign. Of course, Trump has a long history of fawning remarks about Putin, and top administration officials during his first term  about his unending and bizarre affinity for Putin. (This past week the Mirror  that a former Kazakh intelligence chief, who claimed he had served in the KGB, said that Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987. There is no way to evaluate this claim.)

The Trump-Russia tale has largely been smothered by Trump’s endless screams of “witch hunt” and “hoax.” But as Trump moves to help Putin obtain an advantageous end to the cruel and criminal war he initiated, the full context of their relationship ought to be center stage. Yet it’s not been.

One example: Last week, the New York Times published a story reporting on Trump’s “familiar pattern” of “elevating Kremlin talking points”—an accurate characterization. But not until halfway into the piece did it refer to Putin’s attack on the 2016 election. The article said that the Senate Intelligence Committee report had concluded that the Russian government “engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” But the Times did not point out that the committee declared that this operation had been conducted to help Trump triumph. The newspaper noted the Russian endeavor had “damaged” Hillary Clinton’s campaign but said nothing about Trump’s attempt to cover up Russia’s role. The Times also did not mention Putin’s secret efforts in 2020 and 2024 to assist Trump. It downplayed the whole Trump-Russia saga.

Trump is acting like Putin’s handmaid—and pursuing policies and creating discord that could well undermine American democracy and fray, if not shatter, the Western alliance.

Trump’s love affair with Putin has been something of a mystery. Less mysterious is the basic fact that Putin helped Trump reach the White House initially and mounted covert actions in 2020 and 2024 to boost Trump’s chances. What could be more relevant at a time when Trump is demonizing Zelenskyy and trying to broker a resolution of the war that will favor Putin and his regime over a democratically elected ally of the United States?

Putin wanted Trump in the White House, and he screwed with American elections to make that happen. Now Trump is acting like Putin’s handmaid—and pursuing policies and creating discord that could well undermine American democracy and fray, if not shatter, the Western alliance. MAGA refuses to see this. Congressional Republicans won’t face it. And the media doesn’t fully cover this all-important backstory. Whether or not there are secrets to the Trump-Putin relationship that we don’t know, it’s clear that Putin made a clever bet, and it looks like he’s about to cash in.

Democrats Are MIA—Just When the Country Needs Them to Counter the Trump-Musk Blitzkrieg

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

On Thursday afternoon, before I began to write this newsletter, I searched Hakeem Jeffries in Google News. I found but a handful of recent entries for the House Democratic leader from New York. On Sunday, he had appeared on ABC News’ This Week and slapped President Donald Trump and the Republicans for having done nothing to lower the cost of living for Americans and for preparing to push more tax cuts for the wealthy. Three days later, Axios reported that Jeffries, during a call with House Democrats, advised his colleagues to bring guests to Trump’s address to Congress next month who have been negatively affected by the administration.

This search also turned up reports that Jeffries earlier in the month had criticized Trump’s comments on DEI and the DOGE attack on the federal workforce and had compared the Democrats to New York Yankee Aaron Judge, noting they ought to be patient: “He waits for the right one—and then he swings. We’re not going to swing at every pitch. We’re going to swing at the ones that matter for the American people.” Another story noted that Jeffries said at a press briefing, “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have. What leverage do we have? Republicans have repeatedly lectured America—they control the House, the Senate and the presidency. It’s their government.” And on Wednesday he was in the news for cooking up a nickname for Trump—“Captain Chaos”—which to some ears might sound somewhat appealing.

That’s about it. Do these intermittent bursts of criticism strike you as the exertions of a leader who’s fighting a war of survival?

Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, are the two leaders of their party now. And they appear to be mainly watching as Trump and Musk mount an all-out blitzkrieg on the federal government, the rule of law, and democracy. Each day, El-Don launches a fusillade against agencies that provide critical services—USAID, IRS, EPA, FAA, NIH, CDC, USDA, EEOC, CFPB, USPS, NOAA, NASA, the Labor Department, Veterans Affairs, the National Science Foundation, the US Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Social Security Administration, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and more—and it’s all part of a grand scheme: to demolish the one entity than can counter the forces of oligarchy and autocracy.

I previously wrote that Democrats are bringing a teaspoon to a gunfight. But it’s unclear if most Ds even recognize they’re in a gunfight.

This is not your father’s GOP push for lower taxes for the plutocrats and less regulation for corporate pirates and polluters. Musk is seeking to dismantle government to make way for the libertarian dystopia he seeks in which the disruptors and robber-barons of today are free to do whatever they like, as an authoritarian (who’s their pal) rules without restraint. The goal is not government efficiency but government emasculation—and the obliteration of the political party that has called for utilizing government to address such crucial matters as economic inequity, inadequate health care, high prescription drug prices, environmental despoilation, education disparities, crappy infrastructure, housing shortages, and climate change.

The targets so far have generally been government agencies and departments that are perceived as liberal outposts (as if preventing malaria in Africa is a left-wing project). Check out this chart posted by Adam Bonica, a professor of political science at Stanford:

The DOGE firings have nothing to do with “efficiency” or “cutting waste.” They’re a direct push to weaken federal agencies perceived as liberal. This was evident from the start, and now the data confirms it: targeted agencies overwhelmingly those seen as more left-leaning.

— Adam Bonica (@adambonica.bsky.social) 2025-02-20T02:18:23.875Z

Yet in the face of this onslaught—amid this existential battle—Jeffries and Schumer display little sense of urgency. The same goes for many other elected Democratic officials. I previously wrote that Democrats are bringing a teaspoon to a gunfight. But it’s unclear if most Ds even recognize they’re in a gunfight.

Trump and Musk are initiating assaults on multiple fronts every day (including weekends!). They are using their platforms and bullhorns to proclaim nonstop that they are vanquishing waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiency. This is their narrative, and as good propagandists they repeat this line incessantly to justify their slash-a-thon that is defenestrating tens of thousands of government workers and ending or hindering programs and departments that bring food, clean water, and medical care to the needy; that address climate change; that safeguard workers in their workplaces; that protect consumers from vulturous financial firms; that collect revenue for the government; that prevent the pollution of our air and water; that research diseases; that control air traffic; that serve our veterans; that guard nuclear weapons; that inspect our food; and that do much more.

Where’s the counterpunch? Where’s the Democrats’ narrative? Are they in the ring 24/7 explaining to the public that DOGE is a dodge? Just a front for a top-down revolution of elites who want to be unfettered by rules, regulations, or laws? If they are not matching Trump and Musk syllable for syllable, they are losing. A crusade to slim down bloated government sounds good to many Americans. By not loudly calling BS on this, the Democrats lose any chance they might have of winning. Waiting for Trump and Musk to overreach, looking for strategic openings—ah, they really screwed the pooch by killing that veterans program!—is not going to do the trick in the face of this hostile takeover of the federal government by a power-mad autocrat and the world’s No. 1 oligarch. This is a recipe for being crushed. Rope-a-dope is not going to work. Neither will waiting for Trump and Musk to slip in the polls, which appears to be happening.

Your people are demanding action. They look to Washington and to the folks at the top of the party and scream in exasperation, “Where are you? What are you doing? What is the plan?”

The destruction being wreaked upon the government will not be easily undone or repaired, should the tables ever be turned. Many of the fired—people with expertise—won’t come back. Necessary programs will not be revived. Young people will not apply for jobs in a workforce that can be dismantled on a whim. This is the time for a robust response. The barbarians are not at the gate; they’re inside, burning and pillaging. Worrying about guests for a presidential speech two weeks from now is like fretting about your ride home from the dock when your ship is sinking mid-journey.

Then there’s this: Your people are demanding action. There’s polling data and plenty of anecdotal evidence that Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters across the land are yearning for leadership. They look to Washington and to the folks at the top of the party and scream in exasperation, “Where are you? What are you doing? What is the plan?” After the election, there was the usual post-loss chattering about what the party should do. Go left? Go right? Reach out to pissed-off white working-class guys? Focus on message delivery mechanisms? Downplay the social issues (say, trans rights) and zero in on bread-and-butter matters?

Those are all good questions for cogitation, and folks thought they had some time before the next election to reflect on all this. Yet now a crisis is at hand—for the nation and the party. A much different conversation is required—as is an action plan. And there’s a craving for it. On Thursday night, Jeffries was in Chicago for an event promoting his illustrated book, The ABCs of Democracy. Outside protesters chanted, “We don’t need a book tour” and called on Jeffries to “stand up right now” to the Trump-Musk assault. I don’t know if this is a sign of a burgeoning populist uprising of progressives against the Democratic Party. But, as much as I’m in favor of authors promoting their work, this is no time for a book tour.

There are institutional obstacles for the Democrats. Out-of-power parties in America tend not to have paramount leaders with national standing who can go toe-to-toe with a president or a run-amok billionaire. The job descriptions for Schumer and Jeffries do not cover this. They were elected to serve their constituents, not the nation, and, as congressional leaders, their jobs are to manage and wrangle their caucuses, each of which contain members with different needs, different perspectives, and different amounts of political courage. And there are no 2028 Democratic contenders who presently can command as much attention as the liar who stands behind the presidential podium. Some governors are trying—see Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois—while California Gov. Gavin Newsom, once a mighty Trump foe, has been pinned down by the tragic wildfires in Los Angeles.

Certainly, some Democrats understand this is a five-alarm, break-glass moment. When Musk and his minions were shutting down USAID, several House members and senators, including Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), showed up at its headquarters to protest. And in recent days, a few Democratic legislators have demonstrated fierceness. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is one. She got the story right at a recent rally: “[Musk] is trying to gut everything good in America for his own private profit. This is the culmination of what oligarchy is all about…the fusion and the capture of the billionaire class of our democracy.”

"[Musk] is trying to gut everything good in America for his own private profit. This is the culmination of what oligarchy is all about…the fusion and the capture of the billionaire class of our democracy." – @aoc.bsky.social with @fedworkersunited.bsky.social today #SaveOurServices

— Waleed Shahid (@waleedshahid.bsky.social) 2025-02-20T01:33:57.980Z

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut also understands this is a battle for the narrative: “The question is can you work with Republicans in the middle of a constitutional crisis when democracy is on the line? And right now, I think that this crisis is serious and deepening in its seriousness, that our job No.1, No. 2, and No. 3 is to save our democracy.”

@chrismurphyct.bsky.social: "The question is can you work with Republicans in the middle of a constitutional crisis when democracy is on the line? And right now, I think that this crisis is serious and deepening in its seriousness, that our job #1, #2, and #3 is to save our democracy."

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen.bsky.social) 2025-02-16T20:15:26.628Z

But the absence of a top-dog Democrat swinging hard means the party must fashion a collective response to Trump and Musk. And the newly elected Democratic National Committee chair, Ken Martin, is not the answer. His job is mainly to serve the state committee chairs in managing the internal workings of the DNC, not serve as the party’s gladiator.

As I suggested weeks ago, the Dems need a war room that organizes a daily counterassault with those kickass House members and senators—and prominent experts and figures—who are stoked to fight their way into every news cycle to combat the Musk-MAGA propaganda. To point out the consequences of these firings. To promote the overarching message that a campaign to eviscerate government for the benefit of the elites is underway. This can’t be done just by a flurry of press releases. These pols need to be warriors blitzing across social media platforms with posts and video. They must hit whatever news outlets will have them. They must orchestrate PR stunts and events featuring fired workers whose work was essential. And they must do this over and over. There’s a simple strategy to adopt: Everything, everywhere, all at once.

It’s not quite rocket science to have Democratic legislators and leading scientists point out that cutbacks at NASA could help China or other nations gain an edge in space research and exploration or climate change technology. And then there’s another event the next hour on how the slashing at the USDA will lead to less safe food.

This is not going to be easy. Combatting fascism often isn’t. Some Democratic legislators—many?—are not street brawlers and would rather concoct insiderish strategies for how to deal with the pending spending legislation, arguably an important front. But the party as a whole needs to be on the battlefield and acting as if it is fighting for its political life—because that is what’s at stake, as well as the lives of many Americans across the country.

Here is John Oliver roasting Jeffries for his Aaron Judge comparison:

Nobody show Aaron Judge last night's episode of Last Week Tonight.

— Roger Cormier (@yayroger.bsky.social) 2025-02-17T16:03:01.462Z