The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Golf’s self-proclaimed science guy Bryson DeChambeau went on a podcast hosted by Katie Miller — yes, the wife of Trump’s favorite white nationalist wordsmith Stephen Miller — to announce that the moon landing footage is sketchy, but interdimensional beings? Absolutely real. Apparently the Venn diagram of LIV Golf, Trumpworld, and YouTube-brained conspiracy culture is now just a perfect circle drawn on a Mar-a-Lago scorecard.

DeChambeau, a former physics major who now treats evidence like a plugged lie in a bunker, says we probably went to the moon because Elon Musk told him so, but the actual footage? Eh, not buying it. However, UAPs and interdimensional visitors are a sure thing, and thousands of NASA scientists and astronauts might just be part of an elaborate decades-long performance art piece. Truly the perfect guest for the household that helped write Muslim bans and family-separation talking points.

When he’s not implying Neil Armstrong was method acting, Bryson gushes about his friendship with Donald Trump, whom the podcast dutifully refers to as "the most powerful man in the world" — because nothing says "healthy democracy" like treating a twice-impeached coup enthusiast as your permanent supreme leader. DeChambeau’s real dilemma, though, is whether to keep playing golf for the Saudis’ collapsing LIV project or go full-time into content creation. Given how well this little reality-detached media tour went, the propaganda ecosystem is clearly begging for his services.

The Trump administration has apparently unlocked a new level of sabotage: fund the NIH on paper, starve it in practice. After Congress — in a rare moment of bipartisanship and basic human decency — restored billions in research money for 2026, the administration responded by just... not really giving it out. Former NIH officials say the agency is now handing out fewer grants, stretched over more years with bigger dollar amounts, so everything looks fine in a pie chart while entire fields of research quietly flatline.

Instead of openly attacking the "crown jewel" of the federal government, they're running a passive-aggressive demolition. NIH "forecasts" for future research funding are being left up like ghost listings on a dead real estate site — 205 of 336 are past their promised posting dates, never turned into real grant calls. To scientists, it looks like opportunity; to the administration, it's just a screensaver.

On the ground, this means cancer labs like Rachael Sirianni’s are laying people off, closing down promising pediatric brain cancer projects, and leaving once-busy benches as little memorials to the research that could have been. Years of taxpayer-funded progress toward saving kids with metastatic tumors are now politely driven into a brick wall, while HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon shrugs and insists everything is just back to "typical funding patterns" — if by typical you mean weaponizing bureaucracy so children’s cancer therapies lose a race against the calendar.

Donald Trump has discovered the Great Salt Lake, which is impressive for a man who once thought raking forests was sound wildfire policy. After years of Utah leaders shrugging at overuse and climate change while the lake evaporated into an "environmental nuclear bomb," they’ve now arrived at their favorite conservative solution: beg Washington for a $1 billion bailout while still cosplaying as rugged, small-government pioneers.

Trump, of course, is thrilled. On Truth Social he declared the lake an urgent “Environmental hazard” and closed with the legally required campaign slogan pun: “MAKE ‘THE LAKE’ GREAT AGAIN!” Because if there’s one thing a collapsing saline ecosystem needs, it’s a branding exercise. The supposed moonshot here is restoring a terminal salt lake — something no country has ever done — but the more familiar storyline is federal money sluicing toward a GOP state that helped create the problem, now rebranded as visionary stewardship because the president noticed a new backdrop for rallies.

Scientists like BYU ecologist Ben Abbott talk about a world-first rescue of a critical ecosystem; Trumpworld hears “massive construction contracts, endless ribbon cuttings, and naming rights opportunities.” Utah gets to keep draining rivers for development and agriculture while the feds pick up the tab, and Trump gets to pose as the savior of a lake his party’s environmental policies helped kill. It’s disaster capitalism, but with more brine shrimp.

NASA sends four astronauts around the far side of the moon to inspire humanity, deepen our sense of planetary fragility, and advance science. Donald Trump responds by yanking the US out of the Paris climate agreement for the second time and trying to kneecap NASA’s budget, because nothing says “visionary leadership” like betting against both Earth and science in the same fiscal year.

The Guardian notes that Artemis II only survived thanks to a rare moment of bipartisan clarity in Congress, which briefly remembered that space exploration is more useful than yet another tax break for whichever oligarch texted Trump last. While Christina Koch is up there talking about Earth’s miraculous generosity, Trump is down here radiating what the editorial politely calls “murderous bellicosity” and less politely resembles a man who saw the overview effect and chose the eviction notice instead.

The piece worries that a £100bn moon program can become a shiny distraction from not torching the one planet we already have, especially when it’s framed as a billionaire space race and a US–China resource grab, complete with plans to drop a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030. Still, the editorial gives credit where it’s due: to the scientists and astronauts, not the White House currently trying to turn climate policy into a bonfire and foreign policy into a threat reel.

The American Heart Association has released new nutrition guidance saying the radical, woke, extremist thing that decades of science already said: eat more plants, less red meat, fewer ultraprocessed foods, and maybe don’t chase every meal with a glass of melted cheese. In a plot twist no one saw coming, this happens to conflict with Donald Trump’s government, which has been busy issuing its own “Make America Healthy Again” guidelines that somehow translate to: more animal protein, full‑fat dairy for everyone, and a special shout‑out to beef tallow like it’s a founding father.

While Trump and Health Secretary RFK Jr are out here crusading against seed oils and synthetic dyes like they’re the Sole Root Cause of All American Illness, the AHA is gently pointing out that maybe, just maybe, hosing your arteries with saturated fat and red meat isn’t the road to national vitality. The AHA wants legumes, nuts, seeds, low‑fat dairy, unsaturated fats, low salt, less booze, and heart‑healthy habits starting at age one. The federal line, meanwhile, is veering toward a taxpayer‑funded meat lobby infomercial with a side of pseudoscience.

The FDA, clearly trying to avoid being dragged into the food culture war Thunderdome, quietly notes that it’s actually aligned with the AHA on the major points and is looking forward to working together. So on one side: cardiologists, long‑term data, and public health. On the other: a president who sells red hats and red meat as a lifestyle brand, plus RFK Jr doing wellness cosplay while the administration’s own recommendations undercut the very heart health they claim to be championing. Make America Healthy Again, apparently, means keep the base angry at broccoli while the arteries do the real protesting.

US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has discovered a bold new frontier in public health: letting wellness hucksters and Silicon Valley bio-bros run the show while the FDA sits quietly in the corner and thinks about what it’s done. Under his Make America Healthy Again (because of course that’s the name) agenda, boring things like proven vaccines and safety standards are treated as tyrannical oppression, while chugging raw milk and injecting barely-studied peptides you bought off a sketchy website are rebranded as heroic “personal choice”.

His latest brainstorm: opening up the sale of “about 14” injectable peptide drugs that the FDA restricted in 2023 for “potential significant safety risks” and zero demonstrated benefit. Some peptides are medicines, some are basically snake venom that melts your cells, but RFK Jr’s plan is to blur that line and call it freedom. Who needs rigorous clinical trials when you’ve got anecdotes, biohacking podcasts, and a booming market for vials labeled “for research use only” being mainlined in Silicon Valley bathrooms?

The Maha project doesn’t just tolerate the peptide grey market; it wants to make the grey market the market. The goal isn’t to prove these drugs safe or effective, it’s to dismantle the FDA’s ability to say no so pharmacies, enhancement-obsessed sports outfits, and assorted wellness profiteers can cash in. Generations of public health policy built on the precautionary principle are being swapped out for a national experiment in crowd-sourced medicine where the control group is ‘other countries that don’t let their health minister legislate off Reddit threads’.

So while normal governments are still insisting on things like evidence and regulation, RFK Jr is happily turning federal health policy into a libertarian theme park where every American can be their own underfunded clinical trial. The administration calls it autonomy. The peptide sellers call it a business opportunity. The rest of us can call it what it is: public health by huckster, with the Health and Human Services seal slapped on the bottle for decoration.