The bad news is that the Trump administration’s jet-fueled incompetence and corruption picked up speed toward causing the death of more Americans, more immigrants, more rights and just more of everything.
Not even a year into a disastrous presidency that everyone was thoroughly warned about well in advance, alongside a complicit Republican-locked Congress and Supreme Court, there is no good news.
Sorry.
Here are three things from this week to help you understand how dangerous things have become under a man who keeps getting convicted of crimes but stays out of prison.
First up, the former heroin-addicted and brain-worm-riddled lawyer who runs the most important science and medicine agency on the planet, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has promised to dangerously upend the nation’s vaccine program based on nothing but quackery baked up by other creepy-as-hell quacks like himself.
Kennedy’s latest assault on the nation’s vaccine program isn’t just reckless, it’s an act of public-health terrorism.
By stacking the federal vaccine advisory committee with assorted long-time vaccine skeptics, outright quacks and anti-science activists, Kennedy has engineered exactly the outcome he’s always wanted.
The newly remade Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, once a gold standard for evidence-driven medical guidance, is preparing to vote on scrapping the universal hepatitis B birth dose, a recommendation that has helped drive infections in children and teens down 99% since 1991, the Washington Post reported this week.
It’s one of the most successful public-health interventions in modern American history. Kennedy and his accomplices want to pull it apart based on the profoundly un-serious argument that “most babies aren’t at risk.”
Ummm, Secretary Kennedy, that is precisely the point of universal vaccination. The goal is to prevent transmission “before” it happens, you effusive ghastly gastric emulsion.
The goal is to protect infants from a virus that, when acquired early, carries a lifelong risk of liver failure and cancer. It can, and does, kill people.
But the Kennedy Kookie Klan isn’t stopping there. Its members are opening the door to revisiting the entire childhood immunization schedule, floating the idea that vaccines, not decades of well-documented environmental, genetic, and socioeconomic factors, might be the hidden cause of asthma, eczema, and autoimmune disorders. These claims have been rejected again, and again, and again by every major medical association and by mountains of rigorous research.
President Trump, the call is coming from inside the house.
This isn’t a search for truth. It’s the institutionalization of conspiracy thinking at the highest levels of federal health policy. And if allowed to proceed, it risks unraveling decades of progress, endangering millions of children, and replacing real science with the dangerous delusion that every question is still up for debate, even the ones we’ve answered definitively.
But wait, there’s more.
I was among those who sat slack-jawed and glued to the TV when former President Richard Nixon famously told interviewer David Frost that he could not be held to blame for butchering people in North Vietnam during bombings as part of the Vietnam War because, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”
The current president now has White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt to provide cover for Trump’s administration illegally murdering alleged drug transporters as part of a wild scheme to end drug abuse in the United States and draw attention from endless demands for the release of the Epstein Files
If the president says it, it isn’t a lie, is pretty much the standard response from Levitt every time Trump and his coterie are accused of some new crime, gaffe or psychotic episode.
The Trump administration’s attempt to defend boat strikes in the Caribbean isn’t just unconvincing, it’s an insult to the public’s intelligence. Faced with credible reporting that survivors of an initial missile strike were killed in a follow-on attack, the White House is scrambling to construct a narrative in which everyone acted “within the law,” everything was justified, and any suggestion of wrongdoing is simply “fabricated,” according to reporting by the Associated Press.
It is the kind of reflexive denial you get when accountability is replaced with fearful political loyalty.
But this time, the stakes are far higher than bruised egos. More than 80 people have been killed in these maritime operations, which the administration insists are anti-drug missions but increasingly resemble a shadow war carried out far from public view.
Lawmakers in both parties were stunned by reports that a second strike targeted survivors, and even more stunned to learn that Hegseth reportedly issued a verbal order authorizing it. Now he claims an admiral made the call.
This is all so Trump. Take credit for anything they think the public likes. Blame someone else when everything goes to hell.
The White House’s shifting explanations only deepen the suspicion that the administration is trying to contain, not clarify, what happened on that boat. If these strikes were truly as lawful and clean as officials insist, why not release the video? The reports? The emails?
Congress is right to demand answers. Extrajudicial killings cannot be brushed aside as a bureaucratic misunderstanding or operational fog.
Not only are Trump and his lickspittles trying to throw cover over these dubious operations, but when honored military vets in Congress warned military members to avoid illegal acts, Trump began trying to make them criminals for telling fellow military members not to get caught in Trump’s trap.
On Tuesday, Trump told the press and members of his cabinet he didn’t know anything about these boaty things in the American Ocean someplace. War Secretary Pete Hegseth said it’s all a “fog of war” to him and that he’s cool with whatever, as long as there are no beards or fatty’s at the Pentagon calling the shots.
Finally, Trump, this week, moved way past his profound hatred for legitimate media always ratting him out for his crimes, incompetence, lies, distortions and psychiatric problems. No more just calling reporters “piggy” or “horrible” persons or kicking them out of the White House. Now, Trump and his stooges are taking direct aim at real journalism and the First Amendment.
The Trump marketing department has created a new website at www.whitehouse.gov/mediabias.
There, marketing specialists dutifully take to task stories about Trump and his administration that the president doesn’t like.
Clearly, this is going to take a lot of time and space.
Not only has the president begun cataloging unfavorable stories, he’s also offering “Media Offender of the Week.” This week, the Boston Globe, CBS News and the Independent get flagged and flogged for publishing stories pointing out clearly illegal acts, lies and unscrupulous behavior by Trump and his staff.
The marketing department’s defense for doing this? Just because the president said what he said and did what he did, that doesn’t mean he meant to do things like call for the execution of military veterans who are now members of Congress or repeat proven lies, distortions and misstatements about vaccines, Tylenol, pasta, nooses, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, ICE or Steve Witkoff.
(See above: If the president says it, it isn’t a lie.)
Sorry, folks. I know that, as of today, it’s been only 317 days since he took that oath, and while he’s golfed on 79 of those days, the dude has whiffed nearly every day he made it to the Oval Office.
Also sorry, folks, but it’s 336 days to the mid-term elections and some hope that Republicans will either get washed away from the House and Senate by the growing anti-Trump tsunami, or be fearful enough of having voters kick their cowardly asses out of the Capitol that they’ll tell Trump how things are really going to be for the rest of his term.
My money is on a blue wave even in places like Texas and Florida next year and articles of impeachment filed on Jan. 3, 2027, when the next Congress starts up.
In the meantime, I’m just going to hold on and wait for my turn to make the Trump White House naughty list.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com
I want to zero in on one thing. Hegseth and Trump’s incredibly stupid and illegal direct order from Hegseth to kill survivors from an attack, after they were rendered an unviable threat. This is a war crime, but in true Trump fashion, when all hell breaks loose, they find someone else to blame instead standing up and taking the blame, like real leaders do. I can’t recall one instance when pissant Trump stood his ground. He always blames the handiest lacky. This time he and Hegseth (another manchild) conspired to blame an admiral – who arguably carried out an illegal order FROM HEGSETH (sound familiar)! The US is losing it’s crap!
Defending drug smuggling that kills thousands of Americans is just as ridiculous as defending deportations of illegal alien criminals. Seriously, do you really think this is ok? It’s pure nonsense in my opinion. Trump derangement syndrome is clearly apparent in this editorial. Please wake up from being Woke. It’s a true cancer in America that attempts to weaken this country like Europe who has already been lost and it’s citizens are suffering from. Justifying nonsense is ridiculous.
Know geography? Small fishing boats with 2 to 4 crew members are not going to traverse the Caribbean and Gulf to get to America.
Know drug commerce? Venezuela doesn’t make fentanyl.
Know the law? Just as police here can’t go shooting all drug users and dealers but need to follow some procedures like getting proof, presenting it at trial, and letting judges determine guilt and punishment, having the military do missile strikes on civilian boats violates US and international law.
Dave Perry crashing out because his heckin’ valid Third World drug runnerinos are getting eliminated before they get to Aurora.
In response to Jim Smith, just because Trump claims the boatmen are smuggling drugs doesn’t mean they are. He just makes the claims he wants to justify his blood-lust and presents ZERO evidence. Like ICE picking up people with brown skin because Trump claims they are rapists, criminals, etc. It’s all BS and no facts.