Trump’s Latest Health Care Claim Will Make Your Head Spin

Donald Trump seems to have bought into a health conspiracy that encourages Americans to live more like the Pennsylvania Dutch Amish.

“The autism stat—and you hear different numbers, but it’s thousands. They say between 10 and 20 thousand,” Trump said Friday during a National Governors Association meeting at the White House. “If you go back 15 years ago, we had, like, nobody. It was one in 20,000. Now we have one in 34 … kids have autism.”

That is, however, not correct. In 2014, a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that autism existed within the general population at a rate of one in 45. By 2023, the agency reported that the number for adults had remained the same, but that one in 36 children had the disorder.

But the president’s bold solution for skirting autism raised some eyebrows.

“The Pennsylvania Dutch, they don’t do anything and they’re amazingly healthy,” Trump said, offering the Pennsylvania ethnic group’s lifestyle as a potential model to avoid the disorder.

Trump could have gotten the idea from a conspiracy theory floating in right-wing spheres that claims Amish people have a longer life expectancy than regular people due to their unvaccinated status—which has already been thoroughly baked into autism conspiracies—and a steady diet of unprocessed milk.

(Reminder that pasteurized milk, which has been roundly condemned by health conspiracists, is just milk that has been warmed up. The pasteurization process doesn’t even reach a temperature that would boil the milk, but it does remove harmful bacteria such as salmonella, listeria, and e. coli that can collect on a cow’s udder or remain in its milk by way of its living conditions and exposure to manure.)

Despite being practically eradicated on the national stage thanks to vaccines, Ohio saw a sudden outbreak of measles in 2014. Nearly 400 cases of the highly contagious and potentially fatal disease were reported across nine counties, with 99 percent of those affected living in Amish communities, according to a retroactive study published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The sudden surge in disease actually prompted roughly a third of the community—some 10,000 people—to receive the measles jab.

Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.

And the Amish don’t experience decreased rates of autism due to their lifestyles, either. Several studies have found that rates of autism within the Amish community are comparable to that of the general population, while other studies have indicated that the reclusive community’s cultural sensitivities around reporting may prevent autism from being identified early in Amish youth.

Developments in medical and therapeutic research have expanded the criteria for autism, effectively increasing diagnoses and making the disorder seem more prevalent than it was in the past.

Elon Musk is throwing big bucks behind the Republican candidate in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race, in an effort to ensure that the state, which swung narrowly for Donald Trump, remains steered by conservatives.

Musk’s America PAC dropped $1 million to increase voter turnout for Waukesha County Circuit Judge Brad Schimel, the conservative contender in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election. That single seat on the seven-member panel will determine whether the court is controlled by Democrats or Republicans, at a time when the judicial system has emerged as the only check on Trump’s agenda.

While there are several reasons why Musk would back a candidate in this particular race, the only one he’s outright said is that he hopes to influence how the state holds its elections.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court ruled in July that voters could return their absentee ballots via drop boxes around the state. Musk didn’t like that one bit.

In a post on X in January, Musk urged Wisconsin residents to “vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!”

A Republican majority on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court would undoubtedly shape its answer to some of the hefty questions likely to come before it. Justices are set to weigh an 1849 law banning abortion from conception, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Wisconsin’s Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit arguing the law operates only as a feticide law and does not apply to consensual abortions.

The court could also rule on congressional maps, a hot-button topic in the state where Republicans have amassed six out of eight of the U.S. House seats, despite holding thin margins in state-wide races. Putting a Republican majority on the court could not only keep additional seats out of the hands of Democrats, but also ensure that any legislative redistricting pitched by Republicans is readily approved.

A Republican victory in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race has wider implications. It could also serve to support Trump’s claim to have a mandate from Americans, further empowering his efforts to undermine the checks and balances that prevent him from following his every whim.

Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told CNN that the race was going to be a “blockbuster,” and that the state Supreme Court was “the center of the action.”

America PAC’s recent activity comes in addition to an estimated $1.5 million in TV ads purchased by another Musk-backed group, Building America’s Future. $400,000 worth of ads will reportedly run in Madison, Eau Claire, Wausau, and Green Bay areas, and $255,000 more will be running around Milwaukee.

The French far-right has decided to actually take a stand after Steve Bannon made what appeared to be a Nazi salute similar to the one Elon Musk did weeks ago.

Bannon performed the salute yesterday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) after declaring, “The only way that they win is we retreat. And we’re not gonna retreat. We’re not gonna surrender. We’re not gonna quit. FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT. Amen!”

Jordan Bardella, leader of the French far-right National Rally party, immediately pulled out of the conference.

“Yesterday, while I was not present in the room, one of the speakers out of provocation allowed himself a gesture alluding to Nazi ideology,” Bardella said in a statement. “I therefore took the immediate decision to cancel my speech that had been scheduled this afternoon.”

Bannon of course denied that he did a Nazi salute, saying that it was a “wave” that he used to “thank the crowd.” He then proceeded to excoriate Bardella.

“He’s unworthy to lead France. He’s a boy, not a man,” Bannon told French reporter Claire Meynial, fingers wagging in the camera. “If he took what the mainstream media said … I did that exact same wave at [National Rally] seven years ago when I gave a speech to them. If he’s that worried about it, and wets himself like a little child, then he is unworthy and will never lead France.”

“Was it a Nazi salute?” Meynial asked.

“No, it was a wave!”

Musk and Bannon are trying to gaslight millions of Americans. Roll the tape and see for yourself.

Donald Trump’s plans to make cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency are starting to worry his fellow Republicans. 

GOP politicians in Congress fear that these cuts could hurt disaster response, and they aren’t clear about what exactly the president has in mind. Last week, Trump said on his Truth Social account that he wants to get rid of FEMA, calling it “slow and totally ineffective.” FEMA is critical in the U.S. as natural disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires occur more often thanks to climate change. And Republicans acknowledge its importance, even if they don’t acknowledge the changing climate. 

“FEMA provides a critically important role in disaster recovery,” Senator Ted Cruz told CNN, while stopping short of criticizing Trump. “I feel confident the president knows full well the importance of FEMA and responding to a disaster.”

“Whether FEMA exists or not, there needs to be an agency that provides emergency management services when catastrophes are too big for the state and local community to handle,” said Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. “Could there be reforms in FEMA? Absolutely.”

Fellow Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, whose state was hit by Hurricane Helene, told the outlet that he’s trying to convince the Trump administration to reform FEMA rather than killing or cutting it. 

“If it’s with an eye towards more efficiency and resiliency, great. If it’s an eye towards cutting funding to western North Carolina, not great,” Tillis said of Trump’s plans. 

The president has already created the FEMA Review Council to come up with possible changes to the agency. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative has been to FEMA’s offices, meeting with the agency’s employees and reviewing files. Senior agency officials were told recently to send the administration a list of “anyone who worked or works on climate, environmental justice, equity, DEIA” so that they could be fired, according to an email obtained by CNN.  

The Trump administration also plans to cut another critical government agency that responds to disasters, the Office of Community Planning and Development. That agency often provides billions of dollars in rebuilding efforts to supplement FEMA, and stands to be reduced by 84 percent. 

Trump’s attempts to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Department of Education have only been stalled thanks to pending court battles. It remains to be seen what happens to FEMA.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is hacking and slashing the federal government to size down the budget, but in doing so, they seem to have let go of a few mission-critical employees—despite the agency’s promises against it.

Some of DOGE’s cuts this week were aimed at the Department of Energy. That included layoffs for 1,200 to 2,000 workers at the department’s power grid office, the nuclear security administration, and the loans office, per Reuters. DOGE pledged that the mass firing only affected non-critical employees who “held primarily administrative and clerical roles,” but that appears to be a bold-faced lie.

One of the staffers forced out of his position included Acting Chief of Defense Nuclear Safety James Todd, a senior executive official and the “top authority for all nuclear-safety matters in the agency,” The Bulwark reported Friday.

Other critical employees dismissed in the purge included staffers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is responsible for maintaining and minimizing radiation and potential damage from accidents at the nuclear site. The cut workers included an emergency preparedness manager, a radiation protection manager, the security manager, the fire protection engineer, and two facility representatives.

The losses were considered so ill-advised and extreme that the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration had reversed course on the hatchet job, welcoming the affected employees back to their jobs.

But the process hasn’t been as easy as simply having them return to work the next day. Instead, dejected and “shell shocked” employees at the NNSA are considering early retirement or looking for work in more stable sectors, unsure of if or when the Trump administration might try to dismiss them again, according to The Bulwark.

“We are now hearing disturbing news reports that fired nuclear safety employees whose dismissals were meant to be reversed cannot be contacted,” Senate Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Patty Murray and Ohio Representative Marcy Kaptur, both Democrats, wrote in a joint statement last week.

DOGE’s government-wide probationary layoffs are predicted to affect as many as 200,000 employees in the public sector as the agency seeks to trim 10 percent of the federal workforce. The DOE employs some 14,000 federal employees as well as 95,000 contractors.