Donald Trump – Page 6

The feud may simmer down, but the bromance is over. Musk’s toxic tweet about Epstein and Trump ensures that.

I don’t want to waste a lot of space on the feud between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Pixels aren’t cheap, you know. But I do want to push back on the notion that this is (1) some kind of pre-arranged stunt; (2) a distraction from what’s really important; or (3) a prelude to their eventual reconciliation. I think it’s both real and important, and that the fallout will be long-lasting.

“Well, Elon Musk finally found a way to make Twitter fun again,” wrote Democratic strategist Dan Pfeiffer for his newsletter, The Message Box. Indeed it is fun — these are two people who are doing enormous damage to our country, and it’s hard not to enjoy watching their very public falling-out.

Trump has no friends. One of the keys to the way he operates is that he also has no permanent allies and no permanent enemies. Everything is conditional. After all, he and Steve Bannon patched up their relationship after Bannon absolutely torched him in Michael Wolff’s book 2018 book “Fire and Fury.”

But Musk has suggested that Trump was involved in the late Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile sex ring, and that goes many steps beyond a normal knock-down-drag-out. Here’s what Musk wrote on Twitter: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”

Of course, “in the Epstein files” is doing a lot of work in that tweet. Trump has been photographed with Epstein and even joked (gift link) about Epstein’s predeliction for young girls, because that’s the kind of dirtbag Trump is. Musk, though, is hinting at something much, much worse on Trump’s part.

Now, it has to be said there’s no reason to believe that Musk even knows what’s in the Epstein files, and that if Trump is in there, it’s likely as a walk-on, not as a participant. As much as I loathe Trump, he strikes me as way too cautious to get caught up in anything that evil — and, more to the point, illegal. (Before you @ me, read this.)

Musk also has a habit of accusing his enemies of engaging in child rape. Here’s an example, and it’s not the only one. What’s missing are any examples of Musk kissing and make up with someone he’s accused of such horrendous activities.

Right-wing billionaire Bill Ackman took to Twitter and urged Musk and Trump to “make peace.” Musk responded, “You’re not wrong.” But though the two may find it’s in their best interest not to maintain a white-hot level of animosity, it strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that Musk will ever return to a position of real power in Trump’s White House. Good.

Feds indict alleged ringleader in NHPR harassment case; plus, public media lawsuits, and trouble for Musk

Photo from the Middlesex County district attorney’s office via NHPR

It’s been a major loose end in a frightening story about harassment and threats directed at journalists.

Four men have been sentenced to federal prison for carrying out a campaign of terror against New Hampshire Public Radio journalist Lauren Chooljian, her parents and her editor, Dan Barrick. All four appeared to be motivated by Chooljian’s reporting on Eric Spofford, the founder of several addiction treatment centers, who, according to Chooljian’s reporting, had engaged in sexual abuse and harassment.

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Yet Spofford denied any involvment and was not charged. He even turned around and sued Chooljian and NHPR for libel, a suit that was dismissed by a New Hampshire state judge.

Now, according to a story by WBUR and posted at NHPR, federal authorities are charging Spofford with orchestrating a conspiracy to vandalize the homes of Chooljian, her parents and Barrick — vandalism that included threatening and offensive graffiti. The story says in part:

Prosecutors say Spofford paid his close friend, Eric Labarge, $20,000 in two installments to vandalize the homes in 2022. Spofford allegedly provided the addresses and specific instructions on what to do. Labarge then found three others to carry out the attacks.

Spofford reportedly lives in Salem, New Hampshire, and in Miami. He was arrested Friday and will be arraigned in U.S. District Court in Boston on Monday. According to a press release from the U.S. attorney’s office, Spofford, 40, was indicted by a grand jury on four counts of conspiracy and stalking. If he’s found guilty, he could face a prison sentence of up to five years and a fine of up to $250,000 on each of the four counts.

Continue reading “Feds indict alleged ringleader in NHPR harassment case; plus, public media lawsuits, and trouble for Musk”

Trump’s cuts force the elimination of Mass. library access to academic databases and The Boston Globe

The Trump administration’s war on access to knowledge will result in the end of public library access in Massachusetts to a number of academic databases and The Boston Globe. The cuts take effect on July 1.

The dispiriting news is reported in a memo issued May 20 by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners that is weirdly titled “MBLC Maintains some Databases, Support for eBooks, and ComCat.” I don’t mean to be critical of the commissioners, since Trump’s perversity is not their fault. But the news here is what’s being cut, not what’s being saved.

The cuts are the result of an executive order issued by Trump on March 14 titled “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy.” The order eliminates a number of agencies and programs, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which in the current fiscal year provided $3.6 million for library services in Massachusetts as well as grants to local libraries. The MBLC spent about $2.2 million of its federal allocation on access to various online databases. MBLC director Maureen Amyot said in a statement:

The federal impact cannot be overstated. In Massachusetts, over 1,600 school, public, academic and special libraries from across the state benefit from federal IMLS funding. Millions of people rely on federally funded library services. Developing a plan for services in an environment of almost daily federal change has been challenging, but our goal has remained constant: to maintain services that are integral to the functioning of our system and heavily relied on by the people of the Commonwealth.

The MBLC was able to preserve access to some databases. The decisions about what to cut and what to keep were based on usage, according to the MBLC. In addition, the statewide program that funds access to e-books and audiobooks will continue, as well the Commonwealth Catalog, or ComCat, which provides access to items that a local library may not have.

Needless to say, there is no reason for any of this. Trump inherited a strong economy that continues to perform reasonably well despite his efforts to take a wrecking ball to it. These cuts call to mind his infamous outburst in 2016: “I love the poorly educated.” It appears that he wants to keep them that way.

What’s being cut

Boston Globe Article Archive
Britannica Moderna
Gale Academic OneFile Select
Gale General OneFile
Gale Health and Wellness
Gale in Context: Biography
Gale in Context: Elementary
Gale in Context:Environmental Studies
Gale in Context: Global Issues
Gale in Context: Middle School
Gale in Context: Science
Gale in Context: US History
Gale in Context: World History
Gale Interactive: Science
GaleLegalForms
HeritageQuest Online
Peterson’s Career Prep
Peterson’s Test Prep
Science Database (ProQuest)
Transparency Language Online

What’s being saved

Britannica Escholar
Britannica Library
Britannica School
Gale Academic OneFile + OneFile Collections
Gale in Context: Opposing Viewpoints
PebbleGo

What’s the Colorado angle in the NPR lawsuit?; plus, a Muzzle for Quincy’s mayor, and an AI LOL

Kevin Dale, executive editor of Colorado Public Radio. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

I haven’t seen any explanation for why three public radio outlets in Colorado joined NPR in suing the Trump administration over its threat to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I’m glad they did, but it seems to me that all 246 member stations ought to sign on, including GBH and WBUR in Boston.

The Colorado entities, according to Ben Markus of Colorado Public Radio, are CPR (which reaches 80% of the state through a network of transmitters and translators), Aspen Public Radio and KSUT Public Radio of Ignacio, a Native American station that serves the Southern Ute Tribe.

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When I was in Colorado several years ago to interview people for the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News,” CPR was perhaps the largest news organization in the state, with a staff of 65 journalists. (I say “perhaps” because executive editor Kevin Dale thought one or two television stations might be bigger.) Some cuts were made last year as business challenges hit a number of public broadcasting outlets as well as NPR itself.

The basis of the lawsuit, writes NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, is that CPB is an independent, private nonprofit that is funded by Congress. The suit claims that the president has no right to rescind any money through an executive order; only Congress can do that. Moreover, the suit contends that this is pure viewpoint discrimination, as demonstrated by Trump’s own words — that NPR and PBS, which also relies on CPB funding, present “biased and partisan news coverage.”

Continue reading “What’s the Colorado angle in the NPR lawsuit?; plus, a Muzzle for Quincy’s mayor, and an AI LOL”

Public broadcasting giant WNET doesn’t want you to see this Art Spiegelman cartoon

WNET, the New York public broadcasting giant, doesn’t want you to see this cartoon — at least not on public television.

The New York Times reports (gift link) that 90 seconds have been butchered out of a documentary about the artist Art Spiegelman that is scheduled to be shown as part of the “American Masters” series on PBS. It is, as you can see, wildly unflattering to President Trump, and it comes at a moment when Trump is trying to eliminate all funding for public media.

WNET vice president Stephen Segaller told Times reporter Marc Tracy that the 9-year-old drawing of Trump, with feces and flies on his head and a swastika superimposed over the image, was a “breach of protocol,” adding, “I don’t think we’d have made a different decision if it had been a year earlier.” Yeah, probably not. Last year at this time, Trump was leading President Joe Biden in the polls, so the incentive not to antagonize him was just as strong then as it is now.

Spiegelman was quoted as saying, “It’s tragic and appalling that PBS and WNET are willing to become collaborators with the sinister forces trying to muzzle free speech.”

But at least you can see Spiegelman’s cartoon in the Times. And here.

A New England Muzzle Award for Stephen Miller, who enabled Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest for writing an op-ed

The assault on freedom of expression being waged by the Trump White House is so wide-ranging that it’s hard to know where to begin. From threats against universities to bogus lawsuits targeting news organizations, it is clear that President Trump and his thuggish allies want to silence criticism and force civil society to cower in fear.

But there is one action in particular that stands out for its cruelty as well as its blatant disregard for the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and of the press. And that’s the arrest and detention of Rümeysa Öztürk, who, at long last, was freed over the weekend. It also happens to have played out in New England, from her Soviet-style snatch-and-grab by black-clad ICE goons on the Tufts campus, where she’s a Ph.D. student, to her release at the hands of a federal judge in Vermont.

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The anti-First Amendment intent of the government’s actions was underscored by U.S. District Judge William Sessions III in Burlington, Vermont, who said that he could find no reason for detaining Öztürk other than her co-authoring an op-ed piece in The Tufts Daily that was critical of Israel and sympathetic to the pro-Palestinian cause.

“That literally is the case. There is no evidence here … absent consideration of the op-ed,” Sessions said, according to an account by Liz Crampton and Kyle Cheney in Politico. “Her continued detention cannot stand.”

Which is why this whole sordid affair is worthy of a New England Muzzle Award. In fact, it may be the most worthy Muzzle since I started handing them out at The Boston Phoenix 27 years ago.

But who should be the winner? My choice is Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and the dark lord of Trump’s anti-immigration policies. Over the years, Miller has made his hatred for non-white immigrants clear, and though he generally directs his rhetoric at those who are undocumented, his overall contempt for people who don’t look like him permeates the Trump gang, starting at the very orange-hued top.

For example, here’s something that Miller wrote about Muslims for his high-school newspaper, according to a profile by William D. Cohan for Vanity Fair:

Blaming America for the problems of countries whose citizens would rather spend time sewing blankets to cover women’s faces than improving the quality of life is utterly ludicrous.

And in a speech to his high-school classmates, Miller once said: “I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would do.”

Now, is it fair to cite things that Miller wrote and said in high school to build a case against him today? In his case, the answer is yes, because he devolved into exactly the sort of adult that he said he would nearly a quarter of a century ago. I mean, if you want something recent, he called for the suspension of habeas corpus — a basic protection against false imprisonment guaranteed not just by the Constitution but by Magna Carta — on Friday, as Steve Vladeck writes in his newsletter, One First.

ICE goons grab Rümeysa Öztürk near Tufts.

As for Öztürk, her ordeal is not over yet. A Turkish citizen, she was attending Tufts legally on a student visa. That visa was revoked by the State Department on the grounds that her activism could create a “hostile environment for Jewish students” and that she might support “a designated terrorist organization,” according to an account by Rodrique Ngowi and Claire Rush in The Associated Press. But the State Department’s own case cites nothing except the op-ed, which merely argues that the university administration should uphold resolutions passed by the faculty senate.

In other words, Öztürk could still be deported for nothing more than expressing her views, which the First Amendment protects for anyone in the United States, regardless of immigration status. That would be an outrage, and if the Trump administration can find a judge who’s willing to go along, a second Muzzle Award might be looming on the horizon.

But at least Öztürk is free to defend herself, no longer locked up in a Louisiana detention facility, where she reportedly experienced multiple asthma attacks without access to her medication.

Sadly for all of us, it’s Miller Time. We can only hope that his day of reckoning is coming soon.

Ann Telnaes’ Pulitzer sends a message to Jeff Bezos; plus, Pulitzer notes, and Ezra Klein blurs a line

Ann Telnaes is a worthy recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for illustrated reporting and commentary; after all, she previously won in 2001, and she was a finalist in 2022. Her winning portfolio is trademark Telnaes, portraying Donald Trump as a dumpy, orange-faced gnome who somehow manages to be simultaneously menacing and pathetic.

At the same time, I think it’s unavoidable to conclude that the Pulitzer judges, in recognizing Telnaes, were sending a message to Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Telnaes quit in January after opinion editor David Shipley killed a cartoon that made fun of billionaires for sucking up to Donald Trump — including Bezos.

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Shipley later followed Telnaes out the door after Bezos decreed that the Post’s opinion pages would henceforth be dedicated exclusively to “personal liberties and free markets.”

As Poynter media columnist Tom Jones observes, the Pulitzer board took note of Telnaes’ departure earlier this year by hailing her “fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years.”

Continue reading “Ann Telnaes’ Pulitzer sends a message to Jeff Bezos; plus, Pulitzer notes, and Ezra Klein blurs a line”

Not even Trump may be able to pierce the independence that Congress granted to public media

NPR headquarters — Photo (cc) 2009 by James Cridland

Much of what President Trump is doing, or at least flapping his gums about, is illegal. An example would be his demand that Harvard be stripped of its tax exemption. Such a move would not only be illegal but Trump also arguably broke the law just by saying it, since, as Rachel Leingang reports in The Guardian, “Federal law prohibits the president from directing or influencing the Internal Revenue Service to investigate or audit an organization.” Paging Pam Bondi!

With that as context, I want to discuss Trump’s executive order that PBS and NPR be defunded. I certainly don’t think we should dismiss the threat. The authoritarian era has now fully descended upon us, and Trump may be able to get away with his lawbreaking if no one will stop him. Still, there’s reason to think that public media are in a better position to withstand his assault than are some other institutions.

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As all of us should know by now, executive orders are not laws, and Trump’s ability to impose his will through them is limited. Last Monday, Trump tried to fire three of the five board members at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It didn’t go well. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik reported that the CPB filed a lawsuit to stop the firings, arguing that it was specifically set up to be free from White House interference.

Folkenflik wrote that “the law specifically states that the CPB ‘will not be an agency or establishment of the United States Government’ and sets up a series of measures intended to ‘afford the maximum protection from extraneous interference and control.’” The CPB itself said:

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is not a government entity, and its board members are not government officers. Because CPB is not a federal agency subject to the President’s authority, but rather a private corporation, we have filed a lawsuit to block these firings.

Reporting for the “PBS NewsHour,” William Brangham said that the heads of the CPB, NPR and PBS have all pointed out that the CPB reports to Congress, not to the president.

Moreover, the CPB’s budget is set two years ahead, and is already funded through 2027. The agency describes it this way: “The two-year advance funding underscores Congress’ intention that CPB have operational independence, that public media could better leverage other funding sources, and that producers have essential lead time to develop high-quality programming and services.”

So what would a cutoff of government funding mean for NPR and PBS? As Folkenflik writes, the CPB distributes more than $500 million every year, with most of that money going to local television and radio stations. PBS and its stations are actually quite dependent on these funds, getting about 15% of their revenues from the CPB.

NPR depends on the CPB for just 1% of its budget. But that oft-cited 1% figure is poorly understood, because NPR-affiliated stations get about 10% of their revenues from the CPB. According to NPR, the network receives about 30% of its revenues from fees paid by local affiliates so they can broadcast “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered” and other programs. In other words, a cutoff would actually affect NPR quite a bit.

By most accounts, large public radio stations that serve affluent communities, such as WBUR and GBH in Boston, would be less affected by the cuts than small outlets and those that serve rural areas and communities of color. Writing in The Washington Post (gift link), Scott Nover, Herb Scribner and Frances Vinall report that stations like WWNO in New Orleans say a cutoff of funding would hamper their ability to cover natural disasters such as Hurricane Ida in 2021.

In fact, public media are a lifeline in less affluent areas across the country, which is why even Republican members of Congress have blocked efforts to cut the CPB, as Republican presidents have tried to do going back to Ronald Reagan.

Although public media asks for viewer and listener donations, they are available for free to those who can’t (or won’t) pay, making NPR as well as PBS shows such as the “NewsHour” and “Frontline” our most vital sources of free, reliable news.

In the short run, public radio and television are probably safe. In the long run, who knows? As with so many of our institutions right now, we need to withstand the authoritarian gale and hope that it blows itself out.

Scott Jennings is the latest partisan hack to embarrass independent opinion journalists

Trump and Jennings on stage in Michigan. Click on image to view the clip.

This morning I want to defend the honor and integrity of opinion journalism, which is the side of the street I’ve worked for most of my career.

Done well, opinion journalism combines reporting, research and, yes, opinion that illuminates issues in a way that goes beyond what straight news reporting can offer. Above all, we honor the same rules of independence as everyone else in the newsroom. We don’t make political donations, put signs on our lawns or (I think you know where I’m going with this) speak at political rallies.

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On Tuesday, CNN’s MAGA talking head, Scott Jennings, leaped up on a Michigan stage at President Trump’s invitation, embraced his idol, and then took the mic. I’ll let media reporter Oliver Darcy describe what happened next:

After Trump asked Jennings to come up on stage, Jennings obliged and then very briefly spoke from the podium. The CNN commentator joked he was looking at perhaps buying a farm in Michigan “because when you own as many libs as I do, you have got to have a place to put them all.”

Mediate has the gruesome video, which you can watch here or by clicking on the image above.

Darcy writes that a CNN spokesperson told him the network was fine with Jennings’ appearance with Trump, even though Fox News once upbraided talk-show host Sean Hannity for doing the same thing. Which leads to where I think the line is being drawn.

The cable networks employ journalists, including straight news reporters and opinionators; talk-show hosts like Hannity; and partisan hacks. (Yes, Hannity is a partisan hack, but his primary allegiance is to Fox, not Trump.) Since we’re talking about CNN, I’ll observe that it’s brought on board MAGA sycophants like Jeffrey Lord, Rick Santorum and Jennings as well as Democratic operatives such as Donna Brazile and David Axelrod. Brazile actually tipped off the Hillary Clinton campaign about a CNN debate question while she was working for the network, according to an email unearthed by WikiLeaks.

This is all sordid stuff, and it stems from cable executives’ desire to have predictable partisan commentators offering predictable partisan talking points rather than honest opinion journalists who might say something contrarian. Scott Jennings is merely a symptom. The disease is that the cable nets have elevated talk over actual news.

Lindsey Graham’s bizarre suck-up; plus, the LA Times’ latest woes, and the Trumps’ crypto grift

It’s now being laughed off as a joke, and I suppose that’s right. But social media on Tuesday was going a little nuts over Sen. Lindsey Graham’s ridiculous post on Twitter in which he endorsed Donald Trump’s expressed desire to be the next pope. I thought the always astute Richard Nixon, writing on Bluesky, put it best:

On the bright side, becoming pope would get Trump out of the U.S.

Tough Times in LA

Jeff Bezos isn’t the only billionaire-gone-bad who’s running a major American newspaper. In fact, he may not even be the worst. After all, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who killed his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris before Bezos did the same at The Washington Post, is actually using AI to label the bias of opinion journalists.

An aside: Opinion journalists are supposed to be biased.

Independent media reporter Oliver Darcy, who’s done yeoman’s work in keeping track of the LA Times’ travails, writes that layoffs are on the way. Darcy also cites reporting by Adweek that the paper lost $50 million in 2024 and that subscribers continue to head for the exits.

You’d like to think that steady, forward-looking ownership would put the Times in a position to thrive as other billionaire-owned papers have done — principally The Boston Globe and The Minnesota Star Tribune.

Maybe Boston and the Twin Cities are just better news towns with a higher level of civic engagement than the notoriously transient Los Angeles area. Still, Soon-Shiong’s feckless and irresponsible management certainly has not helped.

The crypto presidency

I read this in horror Tuesday — an in-depth investigation by The New York Times into the Trump family’s crypto grift, an entirely new way for foreign powers to bribe Trump while skirting federal laws.

As Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany and Ben Protess report, the Trump-controlled crypto company World Liberty Financial also puts the Trump family in close contact with some might unsavory characters. They write:

The firm, largely owned by a Trump family corporate entity, has erased centuries-old presidential norms, eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.

Mr. Trump is now not only a major crypto dealer; he is also the industry’s top policy maker. So far in his second term, Mr. Trump has leveraged his presidential powers in ways that have benefited the industry — and in some cases his own company — even though he had spent years deriding crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.

Because it’s the last day of the month and I still have some gift links to distribute, you can read it here for free. And here’s a gift link to a sidebar on yet another dubious Trump crypto relationship.