Tag: donald trump

The Trump Administration Misses Key Deadlines for Imposing Restrictions on Gain-of-Function Research

Biosafety hawks were initially optimistic that the incoming second Trump administration would at last place binding constraints on so-called “dangerous gain-of-function” research, in which pathogens are manipulated in laboratories to be more virulent or transmissible in humans.

The administration’s picks for top health policy jobs—most notably National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—are both gain-of-function critics who have asserted that this type of research created SARS-COV-2 in Wuhan, China.

In May, the White House issued an executive order creating a broader definition for dangerous gain-of-function research and promising that new restrictions on it would be issued within a few months.

“The conduct of this research does not protect us from pandemics. There’s always a danger that in doing this research, it might leak out by accident even and cause a pandemic,” said Bhattacharya at the Oval Office press conference when the order was signed. With the order, “the public can say ‘no, don’t take this risk.'”

But the deadlines for the new restrictions called for in that order have since come and gone without any new policy being released. Meanwhile, there are indications that the NIH is continuing to fund risky virological research.

Gain-of-function critics who were optimistic that this research would finally be put back in the box are now concerned that the Trump administration will fail to implement meaningful restrictions.

“There was a promise to deliver these policies. It’s very disappointing to see that not emerge,” Bryce Nickels, a professor of genetics at Rutgers University, tells Reason. Nickels briefly served as a contractor advising the NIH on new gain-of-function policy before being let go in August.

In his role as an NIH contractor, Nickels reviewed draft policies on gain-of-function research that the May executive order called for. He said that there was no practical reason why the White House shouldn’t have been able to meet its deadline to issue the new policy.

The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which is responsible for issuing the new gain-of-function regulations called for in the May executive order, did not respond to Reason‘s request for comment.

While arguments about COVID-19’s origins have polarized discussions about gain-of-function research, fears that it could cause a pandemic via a laboratory accident were once mainstream.

The past three presidential administrations issued policies imposing some restrictions on it. That included the 2014 “pause” on gain-of-function research involving MERS, SARS, and influenza viruses issued by the Obama administration.

This was followed by the implementation of a 2017 framework in the first Trump administration that allowed funding for gain-of-function research to start again, provided that the riskiest experiments received risk-benefit vetting by a department-level panel within HHS.

Finally, in 2024, the Biden administration issued a new framework on “dual-use research of concern” that was supposed to clarify when experiments involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential should receive that HHS-level review.

Critics have long argued that these policies failed to actually restrict the most dangerous gain-of-function experiments.

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Trump Says He Is Trying to Get Bagram Air Base Back from the Taliban

President Donald Trump said he was working to reestablish America’s largest military base in Afghanistan. While Trump negotiated an agreement with the Taliban to end the Afghan War, he has argued that President Joe Biden made a mistake by withdrawing from the Bagram Air Base. 

While discussing Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump explained that the US made a mistake by withdrawing from the Bagram Air Base, and he had planned to keep the facility. However, Trump signed an agreement with the Taliban to end the Afghan War and withdraw from the country. 

Trump says he is now working to establish the military facility. “We gave it to them for nothing. We’re trying to get it back, by the way. That could be a little breaking news, we’re trying to get it back because they need things from us,” The President said Thursday.

While Trump did not elaborate on what he may offer the Taliban, the US maintains crippling economic sanctions on Afghanistan, and the country faces intense poverty. 

The President went on to say that the base will give the US a military position near China’s nuclear weapons facility. “We want that base back but one of the reasons we want the base is, as you know, it’s an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons,” he added.

It’s unclear how the Taliban will respond to Trump’s proposal to reoccupy part of Afghanistan. Last week, Washington made a prisoner exchange deal with the Taliban that is part of a larger effort to normalize US-Afghan relations. 

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President Trump Rebukes Colombia Over Drug Trafficking Cooperation

The United States has placed Colombia on its list of countries that “fail to co-operate” in fighting drug trafficking — the first time since 1997 — blaming President Gustavo Petro’s government for record cocaine output, according to the Financial Times.

In a statement to Congress, Donald Trump said Colombia’s “coca cultivation and cocaine production have reached record highs” and that the government “failed to meet even its own vastly reduced coca eradication goals.” He argued Bogotá had undermined “years of mutually beneficial co-operation between our two countries against narco-terrorists.”

Colombia, the world’s top cocaine producer, had 253,000 hectares of coca under cultivation in 2023, yielding more than 2,600 tonnes, according to UN figures.

Petro, a former guerrilla who has floated legalising cocaine, denounced the US move: “Decades of our police, soldiers and civilians [dying] . . . in order to stop drugs reaching North American society,” he said, insisting “Everything we do really isn’t about the Colombian people — even if they get affected. It’s about stopping North American society from smearing its noses.”

The Financial Times writes that while criticising Petro’s approach, Trump praised Colombia’s security forces, who he said “continue to show skill and courage in confronting terrorist and criminal groups.” Washington also issued a waiver allowing continued programs that “advance US interests,” potentially preserving military co-operation.

The move reflects rising tensions. For years, Colombia was Washington’s closest anti-narcotics ally, receiving more than $10bn in US military aid under Plan Colombia (2000–2016). But Petro has shifted focus from eradication campaigns to intercepting drug shipments at sea, while violence and production have grown under his “Total Peace” policy.

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President Trump Designates ANTIFA as a “Major Terrorist Organization”

It’s about time!

President Trump on Wednesday evening announced he designated Antifa a “major terrorist organization.”

“I am pleased to inform our many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump said on Truth Social.

President Trump on Monday told reporters that he is “100%” willing to designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week.

“I think it would start with Pam [Bondi],” Trump said.

Charlie Kirk, 31, was assassinated by a leftwing terrorist, later identified as 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, during a speaking event at Utah Valley University last Wednesday. The shooter was revealed by law enforcement to have engraved his ammunition casings with Antifa and transgender slogans.

Trump said he will designate Antifa and other far-left radical groups as domestic terror organizations and said he wants RICO charges brought.

“Are there other groups that you can think of?” a reporter asked President Trump.

“There are other groups, yeah, there are other groups. We have some pretty radical groups, and they got away with murder. And also, I’ve been speaking to the Attorney General about bringing RICO against some of the people that you’ve been reading about that have been putting up millions and millions of dollars for agitation. These aren’t protests. These are crimes what they’re doing, where they’re throwing bricks at cars of ICE and Border Patrol. They come in a beautiful new car. They’re so proud and it’s Border Patrol, ICE, you know, it’s got whatever it is, and they’re throwing rocks at it. And after 50 yards, it looks like an old, beat up vehicle. It was just brand new. It was just bought for the purposes, and they don’t have to take that anymore. Let it be known, we’ll take responsibility. They don’t have to take it anymore, and they don’t want to take it. They were told by a past administration, it became almost a culture, if somebody throws a rock at you, do nothing. If somebody spits in your face, do nothing. And I say when they spit, you hit. Do whatever you want. You do whatever the hell you want,” Trump told reporters.

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Trump Admin Expands Targets Across Global Narco Networks 

President Trump’s “America First” strategy – also described as “Hemispheric Defense” and alignes with the century-long Monroe Doctrine of the early 1800s – has expanded through increased border security, elevated pressure on allies such as Canada and Mexico, punitive measures against adversaries including China, Venezuela, Colombia, and Afghanistan, and declaring fentanyl crisis as well as both a public health crisis and national security threat, while also expanding list of nations designated as major drug transit or illicit drug-producing countries. 

A White House statement to begin the week announced that the Trump administration invoked Section 706(1) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2003 (Public Law 107-228) to designate Afghanistan, The Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Burma, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Laos, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela as major drug transit or illicit drug-producing countries.

Trump’s new designation for the countries listed above provides the administration with additional leverage, including the ability to impose severe consequences on foreign assistance programs if those governments fail to meet counterdrug obligations.

In effect, the designation gives Trump another bold tool to bring into line countries it views as complicit in the global drug trade network with drugs that eventually end up on the streets of U.S. cities, which have fueled an overdose crisis killing more than 100,000 Americans annually.

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Trump Has a Habit of Asserting Broad, Unreviewable Authority

In separate attacks this month, the U.S. military blew up two speedboats in the Caribbean Sea, killing 14 alleged drug smugglers. Although those men could have been intercepted and arrested, President Donald Trump said he decided summary execution was appropriate as a deterrent to drug trafficking.

To justify this unprecedented use of the U.S. military to kill criminal suspects, Trump invoked his “constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive” to protect “national security and foreign policy interests.” That assertion of sweeping presidential power fits an alarming pattern that is also apparent in Trump’s tariffs, his attempt to summarily deport suspected gang members as “alien enemies,” and his planned use of National Guard troops to fight crime in cities across the country.

Although Trump described the boat attacks as acts of “self-defense,” he did not claim the people whose deaths he ordered were engaged in literal attacks on the United States. His framing instead relied on the dubious proposition that drug smuggling is tantamount to violent aggression.

While that assumption is consistent with Trump’s often expressed desire to kill drug dealers, it is not consistent with the way drug laws are ordinarily enforced. In the absence of violent resistance, a police officer who decided to shoot a drug suspect dead rather than take him into custody would be guilty of murder.

That seems like an accurate description of the attacks that Trump ordered. Yet he maintains that his constitutional license to kill, which apparently extends to civilians he views as threats to U.S. “national security and foreign policy interests,” transforms murder into self-defense.

Trump has asserted similarly broad authority to impose stiff, ever-changing tariffs on goods imported from scores of countries. Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected that audacious power grab, saying it was inconsistent with the 1977 statute on which Trump relied.

The Federal Circuit said the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which does not mention import taxes at all and had never before been used to impose them, does not give the president “unlimited authority” to “revise the tariff schedule” approved by Congress. The appeals court added that “the Government’s understanding of the scope of authority granted by IEEPA would render it an unconstitutional delegation.”

Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) against alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has also run into legal trouble. This month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit concluded that Trump had erroneously relied on a nonexistent “invasion or predatory incursion” to justify his use of that 1798 statute.

Trump argued that the courts had no business deciding whether he had complied with the law. “The president’s determination that the factual prerequisites of the AEA have been met is not subject to judicial review,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign told the 5th Circuit.

Trump took a similar position in the tariff case. As an opposing lawyer noted, it amounted to the claim that “the president can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, for as long as he wants, so long as he declares an emergency.”

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The Strange Case of Summary Execution of Eleven Suspects in Caribbean Waters

The U.S. government has been executing suspected terrorists without indictment, much less trial, since the dawning of the Drone Age, on November 3, 2002. On that day, the George W. Bush administration used a Predator drone to dispatch six alleged terrorist suspects in a car driving down a road in Yemen, far from any battlefield. This unprecedented act of extrajudicial execution was precipitated by the attacks on U.S. soil of September 11, 2001, which set the stage for a new, sanguinary, period of military history.

Officials such as John Brennan, Barack Obama’s CIA director, and former CEO (from 2005 to 2009) of a private military contracting firm, the Analysis Corporation, assumed the lethal authority to incinerate potentially dangerous human beings, including U.S. citizens such as Anwar al-Awlaki. Officials at the helm of what became a literal killing machine adamantly insisted on the necessity of deploying deadly force wherever they ordered missile strikes. The psychological climate in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, powerfully suppressed criticism, and the new techno-killers enjoyed the benefit of the doubt on the part of both the mainstream press and most of the populace. After years of launching missiles covertly, under a pretext of State Secrets privilege, the summary execution of suspects came eventually to be openly acknowledged by President Obama and widely accepted as completely normal, a standard operating procedure, whether carried out by the Pentagon or the CIA.

Even while thus terrorizing millions of innocent people, the perpetrators of the relentless targeted killing campaigns always characterized them as antiterrorism initiatives. As the nugatory, counterproductive “Global War on Terror” dragged on, fomenting anger among locals and creating more radical jihadists than it eliminated, the so-called battlefield expanded to include countries where war was never officially waged, as it had been by President George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq. The inhabitants of Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Mali, and other parts of the Middle East and Africa were also regularly terrorized by the lethal drones flying above their heads, never knowing when or where the next missile would make contact with human beings on the ground.

Each successive president insisted that the AUMFs (Authorizations for Use of Military Force) granted by Congress to George W. Bush in 2001 and 2002 sufficed to make any suspected terrorist or associate identified by U.S. government authorities fair game for summary execution. Among the “authorities” enlisted to create kill lists were privately contracted analysts with financial incentives to locate persons suspected of terrorist acts, whether past or, preposterously, potentially in the future. Despite a long list of documented incidents involving the U.S. government’s annihilation of entirely innocent persons, and often their families as well, such as the case of Zemari Ahmadi in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 29, 2021, so-called suspects continue to be “lit up” by missile strikes, provided only that whoever happens to be the commander in chief either agrees with the lethal determination or has delegated his war-making authority to those in his employ.

Many of the missiles have been launched by remote control, from unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), a.k.a. remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs), to eliminate persons in places where no ground troops would ever have been sent in to kill the suspects, because, among other reasons, they were not acting as armed combatants at the time of their death. The targets were not provided with the opportunity to surrender (most were not armed anyway) and in fact met their demise at the hands of the drone warriors only because of the development of the technological capacity to kill by remote control. No officials in the executive branch of the federal government ever publicly debated whether rejecting the advances made in the Magna Carta, the presumption of innocence, the very concept of due process, and the post-World War II Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a good idea. Instead, We Kill Because We Can became the U.S. government’s guiding principle throughout the Global War on Terror, as it evidently continues to be today.

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Trump reveals secret third blast against Venezuelan boats as intensifying drug war prompts talk of invasion

American forces have blasted three Venezuelan vessels out of Caribbean waters in recent weeks, President Donald Trump told reporters Tuesday, revealing the expanding scope of his military campaign against  ‘narco-terrorists.’

The commander-in-chief posted a video to his Truth Social account on Monday evening showing U.S. military action against a Venezuelan boat in the Caribbean.

It was the second apparent operation against what the administration claims are narcotic traffickers bound for America.

But not even a day later, the president divulged that an additional third strike was carried out on a ship after receiving a question about rising tensions with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

‘We knocked off, actually three boats, not two, but you saw two,’ the president said on the White House‘s front lawn just before departing for the U.K. with his wife, Melania Trump.

‘And the problem is, there are very few boats out in the water. There are not a lot of boats out in the water. I can’t imagine why. Not even fishing boats. Nobody wants to go take a fish,’ the president continued.

The video Trump posted on Monday evening shows a boat out at sea before being engulfed in flames following a military strike. Three confirmed narcotics traffickers were killed in the operation, the president claims.

The Trump administration is restricting congressional oversight of recent military strikes on Venezuelan vessels by barring senior House staffers from classified briefings, according to The Intercept.

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How The Drug War Benefits Donald Trump And The State

From the standpoint of many U.S. officials, one can easily see why they find the drug war advantageous. Like the drug lords and drug cartels, there is a huge drug-war federal bureaucracy that has grown dependent on the drug war. There are, for example, generous salaries for federal judges (plus lifetime appointments), federal prosecutors, DEA agents, court clerks and secretaries, law clerks, and others, all of which would dry up if the drug war were ended and drugs were legalized. Just like the drug lords and drug dealers, the last thing these federal bureaucrats want to do is let go of the source of their largess.

But there is another benefit to the drug war, one that President Trump is now using to expand his militarized police state across America. That’s the violence that necessarily comes with the drug war. Trump is using that violence as a way to complete the destruction of freedom in America.

Here is how the drug-war racket works.

The U.S. government enacts drug laws that make it illegal to possess, ingest, or distribute drugs that have not been approved by the U.S. government. It would be difficult to find a better example of the destruction of a free society than drug laws. With the enactment of such laws, the federal government is declaring to the citizenry: “You are the serfs and we are your masters. We, not you, will decide what you possess, ingest, and distribute. If you disobey our edicts, we will punish you with incarceration and fines.”

But that’s not the end of it. The drug war not only destroys individual liberty and sovereignty, it also produces a black market — that is, an illegal market. Notwithstanding the government’s drug laws, there are still a large number of Americans, for whatever reason, who wish to continue consuming drugs and who are willing to pay large amounts of money for them.

Thus, black-market sellers of drugs enter the illegal market to meet this demand. Angry and chagrined over this phenomenon, federal officials crack down by targeting both distributors and consumers with things like mandatory-minimum jail sentences, asset-forfeiture laws, no-knock raids, racist enforcement, killing of drug lords, burning of drug crops, and more.

But all that this crackdown accomplishes is higher black-market prices and profits arising from the sale of illegal drugs. The ever-soaring profits attract more people into the drug-supply business. Competition for consumers inevitably turns violent — extremely violent, especially given the unsavory nature of black-market distributors. There are, for example, turf wars where drug suppliers do their best to kill their competitors.

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Burning the Flag or Torching the Constitution: Only One Destroys Freedom

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”Ray Bradbury

Cancel culture—political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance—has shifted us into an Age of Intolerance.

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than President Trump’s latest executive order calling for criminal charges for anyone who burns the American flag—a symbolic act long upheld by the Supreme Court as protected political expression.

This push is not about patriotism—it is political theater.

For an administration under fire—from the Epstein cover-up to tanking approval ratings and mounting constitutional crises—flag burning serves as symbolic outrage staged as political cover, a culture-war diversion to distract from more serious abuses of power.

Consider the timing: on the very same day Trump announced penalties for flag burning, he also signed an executive order establishing “specialized” National Guard units to patrol American cities under the guise of addressing crime.

This is the real bait-and-switch: cloak military policing in patriotic theater and hope no one notices the deeper constitutional violations taking root.

In other words, Trump’s flag fight is a decoy.

Yet in today’s climate, where mobs on the left and censors on the right compete to silence speech they dislike, even this form of protest is under fire.

In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Texas v. Johnson that burning the flag of the United States in protest is an act of protected free speech under the First Amendment.

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