Trump Targets School Funding in Disturbing “Indoctrination” Order

Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order that would defund schools that teach kids about “critical race theory” or gender.

The executive order “prohibits federal funding of the indoctrination of children which includes radical gender ideology and critical race theory in the classroom.” 

“On day one, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children,” Trump said on the campaign trail.  

Critical race theory is a basic historical analysis of the social dynamics of this country, and has been part of educational curriculums for years. Republicans have recently latched on to it as a touchstone in their culture war, alleging that it only serves to make white students feel sad and uncomfortable when presented with facts.

It is unclear how the Education Department will go about determining which public schools are CRT schools and which aren’t. 

Trump also goes after gender in his order, stating that local and federal officials should “file actions against teachers and school officials who sexually exploit minors or practice medicine without a license through ‘social transition’ practices.” 

The president has ordered all this before his education secretary and former WWE executive, Linda McMahon, has even had a confirmation hearing.

Last week, just days after his inauguration, Donald Trump eliminated the membership of a key committee that handles aviation security. And on Wednesday night,  a passenger plane collided with a military helicopter in the Washington, D.C., area. 

On Tuesday, January 22, the Aviation Security Advisory Committee’s members received a memo from the Trump administration saying that the Department of Homeland Security was getting rid of the membership of all advisory committees in a “commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security.” At the same time, Trump also fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard.

Congress mandated the aviation committee in 1988, after the PanAm Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. After Trump’s move, the committee technically continues to exist but has no members to examine safety issues in airlines and airports. Its membership consisted of key groups in the aviation industry, from major unions to representatives from major airlines, as well as a group associated with victims of the PanAm bombing. 

Throughout its existence, the committee’s recommendations were adopted into air travel procedure. It was out of commission for more than a week until Wednesday’s disaster. No survivors were reported in the crash between American Eagle Flight 5342 heading to D.C. from Wichita, Kansas, and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter. 

The D.C. fire chief has said that recovery is now underway, as bodies are pulled out of the Potomac River. With many of Trump’s executive orders and policy memos disrupting the normal function of government, could this disaster have been prevented by a competent administration? 

House Republicans are fielding threats from their party whip: Bend to Donald Trump’s agenda, or risk losing your seat.

In an interview with NOTUS on Tuesday, Majority Whip Tom Emmer candidly shared his strategy for getting legislative outliers to fall into place.

“Do you really want the president going to your district and telling your voters that you are the one that is preventing him from doing what he was elected to do? I don’t think so,” Emmer told NOTUS.

Trump has a tough path ahead of him when it comes to advancing his agenda through the 119th Congress. Republicans have just enough lawmakers in the House to constitute a simple majority—but they won’t be able to lose any votes on items that Democrats rally against. Meanwhile, Republicans have a slightly more comfortable lead in the Senate, where the conservative party holds 53 seats compared to Democrats’ 45.

But should GOP lawmakers find problems in any legislation advanced by Trump’s MAGA acolytes in the House, Emmer believes that they’ll come to discover that the sacrifice of compromising on their ideals in order to aid Trump will all be worth it.

“Are they all going to be happy with everything? I seriously doubt it,” Emmer told NOTUS. “But at the end of the day, when that final product is ready, they’re all going to vote for it.”

Emmer’s statement is a signal that Trump’s expectation of total loyalty has crept from the White House and seeped into another branch of government.

That common denominator carried more weight than practically any other quality as the forty-seventh president selected dozens of nominees to lead different agencies, nearly all of whom had previously lent a hand to Trump in his criminal trials, donated money to his political campaign, or helped build out one of his presidential transition playbooks, such as Project 2025.

They have, in turn, consistently yielded to the president’s demands and expectations throughout their confirmation hearings over the last two weeks. When asked if he would obey the Impoundment Control Act, Trump’s nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget (and Project 2025 architect) Russell Vought claimed that the law was unconstitutional and that he would defer to the Trump administration as to whether his office would act in accordance with the law.

U.S. attorney general nominee (and former Trump attorney) Pam Bondi weaseled her way out of answering whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump’s confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wouldn’t commit to not cutting Medicaid. (Project 2025, the fiscal year 2025 Republican Study Committee budget plan, and the fiscal year 2025 House budget all propose sweeping cuts to the wildly popular program that provides comprehensive health insurance to some 72 million Americans.)

In October, transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick promised that a government equipped with total allegiance to the chief Republican was on its way.

While explaining how Trump’s last administration buckled under the weight of staff turnover due to disagreements in “vision,” Lutnick said that the new agenda was to eradicate any internal hostility to the Republican’s plans.

“They’re all going to be on the same side, and they’re all going to understand the policies, and we’re going to give people the role based on their capacity—and their fidelity and loyalty to the policy, as well as to the man,” the Wall Street billionaire said at the time.

Donald Trump will sign an executive order Wednesday that goes after the specter of antisemitism, giving the federal agencies powers to identify, punish, and deport foreign nationals allegedly prejudiced against Judaism and Jewish people.

The order’s language places an emphasis on “pro-Hamas aliens and left-wing radicals,” as well as “leftist, anti-American colleges and universities,” The Forward reports. The order calls for the deportation of foreign nationals who are “Hamas sympathizers on college campuses,” a clear threat to international students who have participated in pro-Palestine protests.

The order additionally calls for the United States to “ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States” do not “support designated foreign terrorists,” which is vague enough to justify severe action from the Trump administration. The order places particular emphasis on what it calls “the explosion of antisemitism on our campuses and streets” since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, which sparked the more than year-long brutal war on Gaza.

In October, Republicans in Congress floated punishing universities and colleges allowing pro-Palestine protests by revoking their accreditation and jeopardizing their federal funding. Trump has already taken aim at higher education institutions in his deluge of executive orders with one provision that would investigate diversity, equity, and inclusion “discrimination” at “institutions of higher education with endowments over $1 billion,” which could be used against racial and religious groups on campuses that support Palestinian rights and protest against Israel.

Many of Trump’s executive orders directly align with goals outlined in the conservative Project 2025 manifesto, and some of the same right-wing minds behind the manifesto at the Heritage Foundation have also crafted “Project Esther” to target pro-Palestine activists.

Project Esther specifically calls for deporting foreign students if they take part in pro-Palestinian activism, and during his campaign, Trump pledged to “deport pro-Hamas radicals” to end protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Most protesters, however, are U.S. citizens. This latest executive order is straight from the Project Esther playbook, and could be the first of many to blatantly violate First Amendment rights to free speech and freedom of assembly.

Donald Trump’s federal funding freeze has somehow become even more of a fiasco—and he has his press secretary to thank.

Twenty-three state attorneys general appeared in federal court in Rhode Island Wednesday to oppose the Office of Management and Budget’s memo freezing federal funding for grants and loans that Congress had already approved and passed.

Ahead of the hearing, the OMB issued a memo rescinding its original memo about the freeze. White House aides said that the decision to rescind the memorandum was not intended as a way to back off the funding freeze, but rather to sidestep another court’s injunction that was issued Tuesday night, according to CBS News’s Jennifer Jacobs.

Unfortunately for the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt seems to have undermined their gambit by giving up the game in a statement posted to X.

“This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze. It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo,” Leavitt wrote Wednesday. “Why? To end any confusion created by the court’s injunction. The President’s EO’s on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.”

Hours later, the states were able to introduce Leavitt’s confused and confusing statement during the hearing as evidence that their lawsuit should continue despite the fact that the memo had been rescinded.

Chief U.S. District Judge John McConnell agreed to grant a restraining order on the freeze, saying that “based on comments by the president’s secretary,” the rescission of the “hugely ambiguous” OMB memo was merely a linguistic distinction and hadn’t actually blocked the freeze at all, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

While the Trump administration insisted that certain programs, such as Medicaid and Head Start, would not be affected by the directive, every single state experienced issues accessing these programs on Tuesday, leading to a national outcry from citizens and Democratic lawmakers.

In a separate case brought forward by nonprofits, a district judge issued a brief administrative stay before the memo was expected to go into effect Tuesday evening.