Tag: donald trump

Trump Doesn’t Support Government Doing Business With Musk’s AI Company: White House

President Donald Trump is not interested in allowing the federal government to do business with tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on July 23.

During a White House press briefing on Wednesday, Leavitt was asked whether Trump supports federal agencies contracting with Musk’s company, xAI.

“I don’t think so, no,” Leavitt said.

But last week, the company, alongside Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, scored a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense to boost the agency’s adoption of artificial intelligence.

When asked whether the president wanted to cancel the contract, Leavitt said she would discuss it with Trump.

All four companies were awarded contracts with the same $200 million ceiling from the Defense Department’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office to advance the Pentagon’s adoption of AI.

The same day the contracts were awarded, xAI announced a new series of AI products for the U.S. government, referred to as Grok for Government.

Last year, Musk stepped into the political arena and decided to endorse Trump, donate to his campaign, and act in an advisory capacity. Trump then tapped him to lead his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which recommended a series of federal worker layoffs and steep cuts to multiple agencies.

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Is Trump’s Ukraine Arms Deal a Deception?

U.S. President Donald Trump has consistently insisted that the war in Ukraine “is not Trump’s war. This is a Biden war, this is a Democrat war.” But on July 14, it started to look a lot like Trump’s war, as Trump announced “billions and billions” of dollars of American military equipment to be sent to Ukraine along with “severe tariffs” to be applied to any country who buys oil from Russia if a peace deal is not reached in fifty days. But that appearance may be illusory, and the new weapons deal may be a deception.

From one perspective, Trump’s reversal may be celebrated in Ukraine as America reentering the war with the first weapons package and the first tariffs of the Trump administration. From another perspective, the U.S. just made public that its new policy direction is to pull out of the war, stop providing Ukraine with free military equipment, and leave the war to Europe if they wish to continue fighting it.

“We’re sending weapons to NATO, and NATO is paying for those weapons, a hundred percent,” Trump said. The U.S. will no longer approve weapons packages for Ukraine. Instead, they will sell weapons to NATO who will then send those weapons to Ukraine, or they will sell weapons to NATO countries to replenish weapons they have sent to Ukraine.

Though Kiev may celebrate America’s reengagement in the war, the European countries who are financing it may see it differently. “If we pay for these weapons, it’s our support,” European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas rebutted. “So it’s European support…. If you promise to give the weapons, but say that somebody else is going to pay for it, it’s not really given by you, is it?”

The Trump announcement that American weapons would once again be flowing to Ukraine may simultaneously be America’s withdrawal from the war in Ukraine, returning the burden to Europe where Trump has long said it should be.

And it is not just a question of who is supplying Ukraine with the weapons. The new weapons deal may not even be what it seems. 

The Financial Times has reported that Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky if the Ukrainian armed forces were able to bring the war to Russia and “make them feel the pain” by striking military targets deep inside Russia. “Volodymyr, can you hit Moscow?… Can you hit St Petersburg too?” Trump asked. “Absolutely. We can if you give us the weapons,” Zelensky replied. But there are reports that Trump is not willing to give them the weapons.

The same Financial Times article reports that Trump told reporters at the White House that Zelensky “shouldn’t target Moscow” and that the U.S. is “not looking” to supply long-range missiles to Ukraine. 

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Did Trump Expose the DC Sham on Waste and Fraud?

On January 24, President Trump fired 17 inspector generals working for a wide array of federal agencies. Trump’s action jolted Washington because most of those officials could supposedly only be removed for cause — specific misconduct or other abuses. Trump also scorned the federal law requiring giving Congress 30-days notice before terminating such officials. 

Some of the inspector generals that Trump axed had done good work exposing government abuses while others had defaulted to the lap dog mode. A White House official justified the firings: “These rogue, partisan bureaucrats who have weaponized the justice system against their political enemies are no longer fit or deserve to serve in their appointed positions.” The official said the firings will “make room for qualified individuals who will uphold the rule of law and protect Democracy.” 

Maybe the White House wanted inspector generals who could bring bigger brooms to sweep evidence under rugs? The controversy that erupted over Trump’s firings largely ignored the long history of inspector generals either being wrongfully terminated or being worse than useless. 

Politicians create facades to make citizens believe that government automatically guards against waste, fraud, and abuse. The purpose of inspector generals is to create the illusion of honest government — to make people think that oversight is going on. While inspector generals are routinely portrayed as paragons of integrity, many are appointed by the chief of the federal agency they oversee. Their jobs and budgets depend directly on the political appointees they are supposed to investigate, and they grovel accordingly.

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Amid Calls For Epstein Files, Trump Admin Releases 230,000 MLK Documents

As U.S. President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans stonewall efforts to keep the full files on deceased financier and convicted child sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein under wraps, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Monday released a long-anticipated massive trove of documents related to the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., despite opposition from his family.

“Today, after nearly 60 years of questions surrounding the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we are releasing 230,000 MLK assassination files, available now at http://archives.gov/mlk,” Gabbard said on the social media site X. “The documents include details about the FBI’s investigation into the assassination of MLK, discussion of potential leads, internal FBI memos detailing the progress of the case, information about James Earl Ray’s former cellmate who stated he discussed with Ray an alleged assassination plot, and more.”

“Thanks to President Donald Trump’s leadership, Executive Order 14176 resulted in three, unprecedented interagency efforts to identify, digitize, declassify, and release files related to the federal government’s investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. King,” Gabbard added.

However, many of the MLK documents remain heavily redacted.

Responding to the MLK files’ publication, the King family said in a statement: “As the children of Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, his tragic death has been an intensely personal grief—a devastating loss for his wife, children, and the granddaughter he never met—an absence our family has endured for over 57 years. We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief.”

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CNN Doctor Who Raised Alarms Over Trump Diagnosis Is an NAACP ‘Health Equity’ Director, Not a Practicing Physician

A CNN doctor who painted a dark picture of President Donald Trump’s health appears not to have practiced medicine since her residency, instead spending her career as a diversity, equity, and inclusion specialist. She is also an “apostle” of a church whose leader describes Trump as the “antichrist.”

Chris Pernell, a frequent television doctor on CNN and other news stations, warned last week that President Trump’s broadly unremarkable diagnosis of chronic venous insufficiency could be more than it seemed.

“It is a disease that is progressive,” Pernell said. “And what that means is that if there aren’t conservative treatments, elevation, compression, medication, if needed, to treat accompanying ulcers or skin changes, it can worsen and actually put a person at risk for deep venous thrombosis.”

Pernell went on to suggest other potential complications as a result of chronic venous insufficiency.

“If a person is sitting or standing for prolonged amounts of time, you can get chronic venous insufficiency, and while it is not life threatening, it can be debilitating,” she added. “You can develop ulcers in addition to skin discoloration. And if a person develops ulcers, you want to make sure those ulcers aren’t infected.”

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Debunking the 100,000 Medicaid Deaths Myth

“More Americans will die—at least 100,000 more over the course of the next decade,” wrote Yale law professor Natasha Sarin in a June 9 Washington Post column about the Medicaid cuts in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“That isn’t hyperbolic,” Sarin added. “It is fact.”

The average reader might be inclined to believe Sarin, who holds a Harvard Ph.D. in economics as well as a Harvard law degree, and served in the Treasury Department during the Biden administration. But contrary to her characterization, her claim is both hyperbole and not “fact.”

Sarin’s assertion reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of “statistical lives saved.” In particular, she and several other prominent journalists misinterpreted a recent working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

As a professional debunker of bad research, I can say with some authority that the authors of that study, Dartmouth economist Angela Wyse and University of Chicago economist Bruce D. Meyer, wrote an excellent paper—a rarity among academic studies these days. But the University of Chicago’s press office trumpeted the paper’s findings, declaring, “Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act saved about 27,400 lives between 2010-22,” which is highly misleading. 

That take was echoed in coverage of the study by major news outlets. “The expansion of Medicaid has saved more than 27,000 lives since 2010, according to the most definitive study yet on the program’s health effects,” reported Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz in The New York Times. Their May 16 article was headlined “As Congress Debates Cutting Medicaid, a Major Study Shows It Saves Lives.” 

The story was also picked up by Time (“Medicaid Expansions Saved Tens of Thousands of Lives, Study Finds”), NPR (“New Studies Show What’s at Stake if Medicaid Is Scaled Back”), NBC News (“Proposed Medicaid Cuts Could Lead to Thousands of Deaths, Study Finds”), and several other news outlets. These journalists either didn’t read the study, didn’t understand it, or willfully misrepresented its findings for partisan reasons. 

In the past, conservative opponents of Medicaid have been equally guilty of misconstruing academic research to support their policy views. That is what happened with the most famous study on the subject, The Oregon Experiment—Effects of Medicaid on Clinical Outcomes, which The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published in 2013. The NBER and NEJM papers offer a similar account of Medicaid’s impact on health, but both have been misinterpreted.

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Anti-Marijuana Physician Who Criticized Rescheduling Proposal Joins Trump White House’s Drug Office

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) is adding to its team a medical professional who has linked marijuana use to suicide, advocated against a Florida legalization measure and criticized health agencies’ move to reschedule cannabis.

She has also said it is an “insult” to refer to cannabis as “medical.”

Roneet Lev—an emergency medicine and addition physician who previously served as chief medical officer at ONDCP under the first Trump administration—announced on Monday that she’ll be rejoining the office for the chance to “save lives on a much bigger scale.”

While she didn’t mention marijuana in the announcement on her podcast “High Truths on Drugs and Addiction,” Lev has previously spoken extensively about her issues with cannabis—describing it as an understated public health risk and arguing that commercial interests are the driving force behind the legalization movement.

In one episode of her podcast from June 2024, she dedicated over an hour to a discussion with prohibitionist advocates about the marijuana rescheduling process that was initiated under the Biden administration, making clear she strongly disagrees with the top federal health agency’s recommendation to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

She said that people who are accepting the scientific findings that led to the recommendation,”including some in the medical community,” are “drinking that same Kool Aid again” with marijuana as they did with prescription opioids. And she claimed that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) produced a flawed report on cannabis, with mistakes in “like every single sentence.”

“When it comes to marijuana, the harms are right in front of our eyes—but we ignore the data and follow the industry talking points just like we did in the oxycontin days,” Lev said during the segment, which featured prominent prohibitionists such as Bertha Madras, who also previously served as an ONDCP official.

The revised review process that HHS relied on to reach its Schedule III determination for marijuana posts a “threat to the entire way of approving medications and to the medical community at large,” Lev said, adding that her primary contention is the idea that cannabis possesses medical value.

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Almost $1 Billion is Not a Hoax

Trump’s White House is in damage-control mode over Trump’s meltdown over the Jeffrey Epstein case. The eruption of anger among a large portion of Trump’s MAGA base caught the Trump team with its pants down. Instead of putting the matter to rest, Trump has created a veritable video Tsunami of substantive analyses that is painting a dark picture of the US Government aiding and abetting a pedophile ring. The so-called “list” of Epstein’s clients, as I have noted in a previous piece, is a red herring. The real question is why the US Government has adamantly refused to conduct a thorough investigation and indict wealthy, powerful men who were busy bedding underage girls under the tutelage of Jeffrey Epstein.

The image at the top of this post was created by Ryan Dawson, who has been one of the key citizen investigators since Epstein’s first arrest in 2006. The total settlements paid out so far to the victims of Epstein’s pedophile ring is over $800 million. How is that, as Trump stupidly claims, a hoax? Only four people have been arrested in the Epstein affair — Jeffrey and Ghislane in the US, and two men overseas. Besides Epstein, the guy imprisoned in France also committed “suicide.”

Notwithstanding Trump’s lame attempt to insist there is nothing to see here, and his order to release some grand jury testimony, he is now just one more member of a Deep State cover up. What he should have done is ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to empanel a grand jury and go for indictments. Pathetic.

If you want to understand the full scope of the evil confronting us, I encourage you to watch the video of Tucker Carlson interviewing Daryl Cooper and the video of Vive Frei with Mike Benz. This is ugly, and I hope it does not go away.

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Trump’s “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” Greatly Expands Biometric Surveillance, Funds DHS’ ‘End-To-End Biometric Travel’ And Autonomous Surveillance Towers

Of the many things contained in President Donald Trump’s highly touted spending package, the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” (BBB) which he signed earlier this month, the bill allocates hefty spending to drastically expand nationwide biometric surveillance in the United States, drastically bolstering the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) tracking capabilities.

Though not revealed by mainstream or alternative media, Biometric Update highlights how the 940-page BBB allocates hundreds of billions of dollars “in immigration-related funding for fiscal year 2025 alone, which is by far the largest such allocation in U.S. history and represents a dramatic technology buildout.”

“Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would receive nearly $30 billion in funding through 2029, earmarked not only for personnel and deportation operations, but also for digital modernization efforts that lean heavily on AI and biometric surveillance,” the outlet added. “More than $5.2 billion within ICE’s share is dedicated to infrastructure modernization, including $2.5 billion specifically for artificial intelligence systems, biometric data collection platforms, and digital case tracking.”

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Trump Admin Will Encourage All Americans To Use Wearables, Says RFK Jr.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will soon start a massive advertising blitz to encourage uptake of wearables such as fitness trackers among Americans, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on June 24.

“We’re about to launch one of the biggest advertising campaigns in HHS history to encourage Americans to use wearables,” Kennedy said on Capitol Hill in Washington during a congressional hearing.

Rep. Troy Balderson (R-Ohio) spoke positively about what he described as innovative wellness tools and asked Kennedy to describe how the government is promoting access to such tools. Balderson noted that research suggests that increased patient engagement can result in improved health.

“It’s a way people can take control over their own health, they can take responsibility, they can see what food is doing to their glucose levels, their heart rates, and a number of other metrics as they eat it, and they can begin to make good judgements about their diet, about their physical activity, about the way they live their lives,” Kennedy said.

“We think that wearables are a key to the MAHA agenda, Making America Healthy Again. My vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years.”

Balderson also asked about concerns over keeping data from wearables private. Kennedy declined to address that aspect of the matter.

In addition to his role as health secretary, Kennedy is chairman of the MAHA Commission, established by President Donald Trump to study ways to improve the health of Americans.

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