The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

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.

Trump’s war on reality has officially reached the marmots. A 60-year ecological study tracking yellow-bellied marmots in the Rockies was about to be strangled to death after the administration froze more than $700m in science grants and installed a blacklist of forbidden words like “climate” and “women” — because nothing says ‘serious governance’ like turning the National Science Foundation into a vibes-based loyalty test.

So the scientists did what any responsible researchers in a collapsing democracy would do: they opened an OnlyFans. OnlyMarms features fully clothed marmots waddling around rocks while America’s president rakes in roughly $635m from his own meme coin and his science advisor, Silicon Valley bro Michael Kratsios, declares that real research money will go to AI and robots, not boring things like ecosystems or wildlife. When OnlyFans brought in a mere $6,000, an anonymous crypto cult spun up a marmot meme coin on Solana and, in two weeks, accidentally did more for long-term field biology than the federal government, coughing up another $88,000.

The result: about $100,000 to keep one of the world’s longest-running animal monitoring projects alive for a single extra year, while the marmots themselves are getting fatter in longer summers, then freezing to death in low-snow winters caused by the very climate crisis Trump has ordered his agencies not to mention. The researchers openly admit that begging the internet for horny-sounding subscriptions and riding meme-coin volatility is not a substitute for stable public funding — but under Trump’s science policy, it apparently counts as a happy ending.

Scientists dug 56 million years into the past and found that when you dump massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, forests don’t hold hands and sing hymns to Exxon. They collapse. Up to 60% of standing forest biomass vanished during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, turning a lush planet into something closer to a sepia filter. So yes, the planet did get greener – if you count charred scrub and dying trees as an aesthetic.

The timing is perfect, because Trump’s Interior secretary Doug Burgum is on Fox Business explaining that CO₂ “was never a pollutant” and that plants “thrive with more CO₂,” while the administration simultaneously moves to erase the federal government’s own power to address climate change. Energy secretary Chris Wright helpfully adds that there are “pluses” to global heating, presumably referring to the booming market in air purifiers and wildfire respirators.

This isn’t just garden-variety ignorance; it’s state-sponsored climate denial weaponized to justify regulatory arson. The administration is literally citing cartoon-level science to dismantle the EPA’s ability to regulate the gas that, according to actual evidence, helped wipe out ancient forests. They’re using fossil-fueled fairy tales to lock in fossil-fueled collapse. The trees are already dying back, burning, and being cut down – and Trump’s team is sprinting to make sure they can’t recover, but the oil companies can.

Donald Trump has signed an executive order trying to personally overrule the CDC’s childhood vaccine schedule, because when you think "lifesaving immunization policy," you obviously think "guy who stares at eclipses." The order attempts to strip down routine recommendations, shove key vaccines into a vague "shared clinical decision-making" purgatory, and pretend the White House now outranks decades of epidemiology. Executive orders can’t magically erase science or state school requirements, but Trump is once again betting that chaos and intimidation can do what the law can’t.

The showpiece stunt: demanding the MMR vaccine be broken into three separate shots and spaced out across separate doctor visits, despite there being no such individual vaccines licensed in the US and zero evidence this does anything except cost families more time and money. Trump solemnly warned that combined vaccines are “quite lethal” and described a soda-bottle-sized injection being poured into children, which is not how medicine works but is a great preview of what happens when Facebook memes become federal policy. He also nodded to the long-debunked autism lie, because why not revive a conspiracy that already helped bring back measles?

To round out the authoritarian cosplay, the order tells the attorney general to go after state laws that conflict with Trump’s fantasy schedule, even though school mandates are set by states and executive orders don’t apply to the public. Vaccine law experts note this should have no direct operational effect, but that’s not really the point: the goal is to crank up political pressure on states, undermine trust in vaccines, and turn public health into another loyalty test. Herd immunity is out; herd delusion is the new official guideline.