The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new treatment for Alzheimer’s: just cancel the studies, shred the data pipeline, and call it a victory for freedom. In Pittsburgh, a 15-year, community-trusted NIH-funded project following cognitive health in two low-income, mostly Black neighborhoods has been abruptly kneecapped, along with more than 5,700 other medical research grants nationwide. Participants like 70-year-old Roderick Blair spent years wearing monitors, answering invasive surveys, and building trust, only to find out that the White House’s latest science policy is basically: if it mentions racism, poverty, or public health, it’s either “DEI” or “fake.”

Researchers were given 90 days to shut everything down – not enough time to finish the neuropsychological reviews that would actually help diagnose early Alzheimer’s, but just enough time to make sure nobody gets useful results, and nobody gets paid to interpret them. The unique, long-term dataset on how discrimination, neighborhood neglect, and trauma shape brain health in Black communities? Labeled expendable in Trump’s crusade to remake science into something that never challenges power, racism, or corporate interests.

Blair calls it what it is: retribution. A government that already treats Black neighborhoods as disposable has now decided their brains are, too. Instead of confronting the uncomfortable reality that structural racism doubles Alzheimer’s risk for Black Americans, the administration is pulling the plug and walking away from years of work. Early diagnosis, life-saving interventions, and community trust are all collateral damage in an administration that views science as a loyalty test and human beings as props in a culture war.

The Trump administration has apparently decided the First Amendment is more of a suggestion than a rule, and is using the NIH like a political content filter. According to a new ACLU-backed class action lawsuit, the White House has been blocking and cancelling scientific grants using a secret list of 235 naughty words — including "gender" and "racist" — because nothing says "serious biomedical research" like pretending racism, sexism, and climate change are just pronouns you can opt out of.

Researchers studying stuff like Alzheimer’s risk in marginalized communities and gender equity in medicine suddenly found their long-term, peer-reviewed grants vaporized or frozen because their work might generate results that offend Trump’s ideology. Years of taxpayer-funded research, community trust, and data collection? Shredded so NIH can cosplay as a right-wing comment moderator. Scientists are now literally scrubbing words like "equity" and "sexual harassment" from grant applications to dodge an ideological blacklist, which is a totally normal thing in a functioning democracy and not at all how authoritarian governments politicize science.

The numbers are as subtle as a Truth Social post: more than 5,700 NIH grants disrupted, thousands cancelled or rerouted through this keyword inquisition, with many still not restored. The lawsuit argues this is textbook viewpoint discrimination and a blatant First Amendment violation — NIH is supposed to fund the best science, not the most MAGA-compliant abstracts. Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, declined to comment, presumably because "we built a censorship thesaurus for medical research" doesn’t test well outside the fascism focus group.

Donald Trump has announced on Truth Social that AI risk is just another hoax, bravely taking on the combined paranoia of every major AI lab and most of the people who actually build the stuff. While Anthropic and friends are out here weakly suggesting a coordinated global slowdown so humanity doesn’t accidentally self-delete, Trump explains that all we really need is a president with a very high IQ — specifically, his — because somewhere deep inside every AI model is a default-off switch that kneels before the US president. Checks notes: the plan is literally “Trump will mind-control the supercomputers.”

Meanwhile, actual experts and even tech bros are saying there’s maybe a 10% chance we all die in the next decade, which apparently still ranks below “two crypto billionaires cut a £72m check to hard-right grifters” on the political panic scale. The UK government responds by assuring everyone there’s no need to get ‘hyperbolic’ about global extinction, while boasting about an AI Security Institute that depends on American and Chinese companies voluntarily handing over their code — something they have zero intention of doing because there are obscene profits to be made before the robots flip the table.

So we’re left with a familiar Trump-era governance model: ignore the experts, mock the risks, and replace regulation with the unshakeable faith that a deeply insecure septuagenarian’s self-reported genius will save the species. If humanity does go extinct, it won’t be because AI outsmarted us — it’ll be because we let a guy who can’t pass the Turing test claim he can out-think the machines and everyone else nodded along on cable news.

The Trump administration has heroically solved the Pennsylvania measles crisis by deploying its favorite medical intervention: changing the numbers. After three apparent measles-related deaths in the state – including two infants and a 40-year-old woman whose coroner says she would still be alive without the infection – the CDC quietly switched how it counts measles deaths. Instead of using the normal National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System that tracks actual cases in real time, they’re now leaning on the National Center for Health Statistics, a system designed for long-term trend analysis that, conveniently, currently shows zero 2026 measles deaths as an “underlying cause”. Problem solved, if you define “solved” as “buried in a spreadsheet.”

This sudden outbreak of statistical creativity arrived right after reporting that HHS secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr – yes, the anti-vax guy now running federal health policy – pressured CDC director Erica Schwartz not to count the earlier Pennsylvania deaths in the official tally. The day after Reuters exposed that little chat, the CDC’s data source magically changed. Former CDC chief medical officer Debra Houry calls the move “puzzling” and says the system they switched to is not meant to confirm individual cases, which of course makes it perfect for an administration trying to turn a lethal outbreak into a rounding error.

On the ground, Pennsylvania has at least 676 confirmed measles cases and a coroner who says he can “100% guarantee” the real numbers are higher. He’s begging people to get vaccinated to protect babies, pregnant people, and the immunocompromised – the very people this administration is hanging out to dry while RFK Jr posts about fitness and screen time instead of explaining why his department is massaging death stats during an outbreak fueled by the anti-vaccine movement he helped build. Officially, HHS swears the MMR vaccine is still recommended. Unofficially, the message from the top is clear: if measles deaths make the anti-vax secretary look bad, they simply don’t count.

American politics has achieved such a peak state of derangement that a pediatrician, Dr Annie Andrews, is running for Senate in South Carolina on the radical platform of believing in vaccines while measles tears through the state. Her opponent? Darline Graham, handpicked by Donald Trump to inherit big brother Lindsey’s seat like it’s a family timeshare and not, you know, a constitutional office. Because if there’s one thing this era needed, it’s more literal political dynasties chosen by a guy who thinks hydroxychloroquine is a food group.

Andrews is part of a broader push by 314 Action to elect 100 doctors by 2030, which sounds ambitious until you remember the context: Medicaid is getting hacked down to the bone, scientific research is being gutted, and the federal government is doing immigration raids in hospitals. National health agencies are collapsing under partisan sabotage, so the new strategy is to airlift physicians directly into statehouses and Congress and hope they can triage the damage before the next outbreak or executive tantrum.

There are already 20 doctors in Congress, but most of the prominent ones on the right – looking at you, Rand Paul – treat "science" as more of a suggestion than a method, happily spreading vaccine misinformation while cashing their government paychecks. So now Democrats are trying to build a pipeline of doctors who don’t think Facebook memes are peer-reviewed studies. The catch: actually qualified physicians are usually buried under medical school debt, while the ones rich enough to run tend to be conservative and oddly chill about dismantling the healthcare system their patients need to survive.

The result is a 2026 midterm landscape where health and science are suddenly "salient" because people are, minor detail, getting sick and dying amid foodborne outbreaks, vaccine-preventable diseases, and shredded safety nets. The experts who warned this would happen are now running for office to clean up a mess created by politicians who insisted they knew better than epidemiologists. It’s less a functioning democracy and more a code-blue situation where the doctors have to wheel the crash cart straight onto the Senate floor.

Donald Trump has signed an executive order telling states to offer separate measles, mumps, and rubella shots instead of the standard combined MMR vaccine, while simultaneously declaring the triple jab "quite lethal"—a bold claim, given that the lethality in question mostly describes his administration’s IQ. There’s just one tiny snag: those separate vaccines don’t exist in the US, don’t have licenses, and drug companies have already said there’s no science to justify them. So what he’s really offering parents is a choice between a safe, effective vaccine and panic fueled by a Fox News fever dream.

The White House brain trust powering this stunt? A disgraced British ex-doctor, Andrew Wakefield—who helped trigger the original MMR panic in 1998 and now enjoys folk-hero status in Texas anti-vax circles—and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the man who turned vaccine paranoia into a full-time lifestyle brand. Together with Trump, they’re pushing to shrink the US childhood vaccine schedule, pointing to Denmark as their model while conveniently skipping the part where Denmark has universal healthcare and functioning public health systems, unlike the for-profit chaos they’re busily sabotaging.

Public health experts worldwide say no country recommends single measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines, but Trump’s executive order is designed to muddy the water just enough that confused parents conclude the combined jab must be dangerous—and maybe no jab is better. That’s how you get falling vaccination rates, rising measles cases, and kids paying the price for a president who thinks epidemiology is something you cure with a Truth Social post. Trump keeps waxing poetic about "beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children" while building policy on YouTube comments and RFK Jr podcasts. The only thing being immunized here is the administration’s ego—against facts.