Pennsylvania will not change its immunization guidelines in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order this week calling for states to reduce the number of recommended childhood vaccinations and separate a combination shot protecting against measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR).
Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said his administration will “continue to give Pennsylvanians clear public health guidance based on science and facts.”
“President Donald Trump and [Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.] are screwing around with the childhood vaccine schedule — ignoring decades of science, sowing chaos and confusion, and spreading dangerous misinformation that put kids and families at risk,” Shapiro said.
States set vaccination mandates for schoolchildren, not the federal government.
And it gives Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, 90 days to present Trump with a plan for a number of vaccine policy changes. Changes could include splitting the MMR vaccine into separate shots for each disease. There are currently no individual vaccines for measles, mumps, or rubella licensed in the United States.
“Splitting up combination immunizations, like the MMR vaccine, creates unnecessary hurdles for parents, needlessly extends the window of risk for our youngest residents, and doesn’t follow the results of the many studies that went into developing the previous vaccine schedules,” Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Debra Bogen said in a statement.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai did not comment directly on Pennsylvania officials’ decision to keep its original vaccine recommendations.
He said in a statement that Trump has pledged to reduce the vaccines recommended for all children, and the “administration is committed to delivering with Gold Standard Science and every lever of executive authority.”
“The countless parents whose questions and concerns about America’s vaccine schedule have been ignored if not mocked finally have a true champion in President Trump,” he said.
Vaccine politics under Trump
The new executive order is not binding, experts say, and states are free to ignore it.
Several states, including Pennsylvania, have already balked at Trump’s repeated attempts to upend longstanding childhood vaccination schedules.
And last year, when the Trump administration did not approve COVID-19 vaccinations for certain groups, Pennsylvania changed state policy to allow pharmacists to dispense vaccines based on recommendations from a number of professional medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Previously, pharmacists were asked to dispense vaccinations based solely on recommendations from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention committee. Kennedy fired the entire committee and replaced them with hand-picked appointees last year, some of whom included vaccination skeptics. That action is also the subject of a court battle.
“The way to handle this is to ignore it,” said Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a prominent Kennedy critic.
“It’s not science based, it doesn’t make vaccines safer or more effective,” he said. “All it does is put children in harm’s way.”
He noted that despite longstanding concerns by anti-vaccination activists that children receive too many vaccinations, breaking up combination vaccinations like MMR would result in children getting more shots. “Kids would need six shots instead of two,” he said.
Logistics uncertain
Changing the kinds of vaccines available in the United States would take years, said Ana Santos Rutschman, a professor specializing in health law at Villanova University.
Trump could ask the Food and Drug Administration to approve separate measles, mumps, and rubella vaccinations, which would require extensive clinical trials and a long approval process, she said. And vaccine manufacturers may not attempt to develop new shots if Republicans lose control of the White House in 2028, she added.
“Right now, it’s unlikely anyone will reshift their operations,” she said. “It’s feasible — it’s just expensive, and the payoff is very small.”
The FDA could revoke licensing for the current combination MMR vaccines, but that would likely invite court challenges, Santos Rutschman added.
In the short term, she’s concerned that Trump’s repeated attempts to change longstanding vaccine policy will only confuse parents and providers who have relied on consistent recommendations from the federal government.
“Suddenly, you have our top regulators saying there’s a reason to hop to a different set of products. This is inherently confusing,” she said.
Gov. Josh Shapiro made a declaration in the early days of his administration: Pennsylvania is open for business.
The move would ultimately include promises to slash bureaucratic red tape, cut permit wait times, and offer a new direct line to Shapiro’s office for major corporations hoping to set up shop in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania would “move at the speed of business” and “get stuff done,” the new mottos used by his administration, he said. He’s campaigning for reelection in November on the same catchphrases, and boasting major successes like the 12-day repair of I-95 in 2023 that traditionally would have taken months to reopen as an example of how he can think outside the box to solve problems.
What’s more: He sees delivering for residents — showing them government can actually solve problems — as the future of the nationalDemocratic Party, while it searches for an effective message and messenger heading into the 2028 presidential primary, which he is widely expected to enter.
It was with this same spirit last summer that Shapiro announced the largest single private sector investment in Pennsylvania history: Amazon committed $20 billion in Pennsylvania that included two data center campuses in Luzerne and Bucks Counties. Pennsylvania scored the project because of its promise to fast-track permitting and use tax breaks for the massive developments.
“Pennsylvania’s gonna be better off. I think America’s gonna be better off, because we’re going to win the battle of AI supremacy and it’s going to be done right here in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Shapiro said in an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box on the day he announced the deal.
Gov. Josh Shapiro announces a $20 billion investment by Amazon in Pennsylvania data centers in Salem Township and Falls Township on June 9, 2025.Commonwealth Media Services
But in a year’s time, the politics — and public opinion on both sides of the aisle — have dramatically shifted on data center development. Shapiro’s early welcome of data centers has created an opening for criticism from his gubernatorial opponent and members of his own party.
Yet efforts to cut red tape have proven to be slow and overblown: Only six data centers are actually under construction in Pennsylvania since the announcement, and 10 have received at least one state-level permit approval, according to Shapiro’s office. Still, Shapiro’s popularity is being evaluated by some voters and anti-data center activists on a perception that he moved too quickly and sacrificed the state’s safety in favor of Big Tech.
“I am all about legislators and decision makers getting s— done. This version of it is reckless and it’s irresponsible and it’s not actually serving our people,” said Carrie Santoro, the executive director of progressive advocacy groupPennsylvania Stands Up who has been holding town hall meetings in communities around the state on data centers.
“Governor Shapiro intends to use all the tools available to him to stop the dozens of speculative data center projects that do not meet community needs and Pennsylvania should expect to hear more from him on that in the coming weeks,” said Shapiro’s press secretary, Rosie Lapowsky.
Now Shapiro, who otherwise maintains vast popularity ratings in the state, faces a vulnerability on one of voters’ top priorities as he heads into November, and a particularly sensitive concern among Democrats as he potentially vies for the party’s nomination in two years.
Many states, including Pennsylvania, had already begun welcoming the major projects, and some hyperscale developers plan to spend billions of dollars to build them. Pennsylvania’s General Assembly first approved a sales tax exemption for data center developments in 2021, when Shapiro’s predecessor, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, was still in office.
Shapiro, for his part, initially embraced data centers as an economic opportunity for Pennsylvania, bringing union jobs for construction workers to build out the physical infrastructure for the computers running AI software. He also wanted to position Pennsylvania to inherit the most benefit from providing space for AI to operate, leading not only other states but also other countries in the race to advance new technology. He and U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) appeared together as early embracers of the technology and the massive buildings needed to power it, speaking together during McCormick’s first AI summit in Pittsburgh last summer.
Sen. Dave McCormick shakes hands with Gov. Josh Shapiro at a panel discussing state investment and infrastructure at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on July 15, 2025.Kaiden J. Yu / Staff Photographer
But as communities began to push back against the rapid proliferation of data center proposals, in part to protect their water and energy resources, Shapiro adjusted.
Shapiro, like many elected officials, has changed his positions and rhetoric on the unpopular developments. He announced his Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Standards (GRID) as a way to incentivize developers to follow transparency and environmental requirements in order to receive tax breaks. And when the General Assembly failed to approve his GRID standards or any substantial data center restrictions, Shapiro said he’d act on his own, though it’s still unclear what that will entail.
“You want to build a data center there? You’ve got to bring your own power; you’ve got to pay for your own power. You’ve got to be transparent with the local community — tell them who the hyperscaler is, tell them what’s going to go on there. You’ve got to have a local benefits agreement to help that community. You’ve got to protect the water sources that are used to cool off those facilities,” he said in a June interview with GZERO.
The Democratic governor has been lauded nationally for challenging PJM Interconnection, which is the electric grid operator for Pennsylvania and 12 other states over its efforts to raise prices on ratepayers. He capped the price Pennsylvania consumers could pay through 2029, as residents fear rate hikes due to the data center boom.
But Shapiro’s plan on data centers is too little, too late, Santoro said.
“I saw the GRID proposal as him moving on this issue, and the thing that I am concerned about is he didn’t move enough to keep up with how much voters have moved on this issue,” she said.
Some of those voters would agree. A Quinnipiac University poll of Pennsylvania voters, conducted in early June, found just 24% of those surveyed — and 40% of Democrats — approved of “the way Gov. Josh Shapiro is handling data centers in Pennsylvania.” It’s a stark contrast to Shapiro’s overall approval numbers, in which he’s maintained above 50% approvals — record-high favorability ratings for a first-term Pennsylvania governor.
People sign in and head into an East Vincent Township supervisors meeting where an agenda item involved a data center proposal at the former Pennhurst state hospital grounds on Dec. 17, 2025, in Spring City, Pa. Marc Levy
Joanna Tenney, 36, of East Vincent in Chester County, held a sign at a June rally in the state Capitol that read: “Shapiro: Amazon’s bootlicker.” A registered Democrat, she voted for him in 2022, and believes he should be held accountable for supporting data center development in Pennsylvania that led to the fast-tracking of a now-stalled 125-acre data center project near where she lives.
She’s so fed up with Shapiro’s approach to data centers that she said will be writing in the name of her state senator, Sen. Katie Muth (D., Chester), who has been on the front lines of advocating for many state environmental issues, for governor on her November ballot. Tenney said she and a few other anti-data center advocates plan to run a write-in campaign for Muth.
“We’ve elected somebody that we thought was going to make the right choices by us, and we don’t really see that happening,” Tenney said.
Muth, who took office in 2018, said she would not be supporting Shapiro or “any elected official who puts the interests of Big Tech ahead of the health, safety, and future of Pennsylvania communities.”
If Shapiro changes his stance on data centers, she would support him, Muth said. She is the prime sponsor of a bipartisan bill to place a three-year moratorium on hyperscale data center development.
“Get right on the issue, Right your wrongs. If you can’t be on the side of science and people, my support is MIA,” she added.
Emily VanFleet, 26, lives in Archbald in Northeastern Pennsylvania, where six data center projects are underway comprising more than 50 buildings that, when completed, will cover 14% of the town. VanFleet, who is an unaffiliated voter, said she also supported Shapiro in 2022. But because of his public support for speeding up data center development in Pennsylvania, she is “certainly not going to vote for him this upcoming election,” she said. She isn’t sure she’s going to vote at all.
“I want Shapiro to stop being a coward,” VanFleet said in June. “I have emailed him, I have called him, I have reached out to him so many times. I have not heard back, not once. I see his videos all over social media that he has an open-door policy, but I have yet to see it.”
(In May, Shapiro’s administration announced that one of the unpopular Archbald developments, Project Gravity, was removed from a fast-track permitting program for failing to properly engage with the community.)
But negative attitudes toward Shapiro’s position on data centers may be limited statewide and his position is unlikely to dramatically knock down his high popularity or reelection odds: The June Quinnipiac poll found 56% of those surveyed approve of the way he is handling his job as governor overall, and recent polling shows Shapiro ahead 53% to 40% against his Republican challenger, state Treasurer Stacy Garrity.
The data center pitfall
Shapiro’s political opponents — both immediate and prospective — are also seizing on the issue.
Garrity, of Athens in Northeastern Pennsylvania, has also led a statewide listening tour on the topic. In June, she convened one of those sessions in Hatfield with a group of commissioners, zoning planners and emergency responders to talk about how they have been impacted by data centers. She blasted Shapiro for his role in attracting Amazon and said his proposed new requirements amount to a “flip flop.”
“Josh Shapiro has failed on this topic. He was the biggest cheerleader for data center development in Pennsylvania, until he wasn’t,” Garrity said at the June 24 meeting.
Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity participates in the podcast “Ruthless” during an event hosted by Americans for Prosperity, Concerned Veterans for America, and the Libre Initiative at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Jan. 29. Elizabeth Robertson / Staff Photographer
Garrity has her own mixed record on data centers.
At the time of the Amazon announcement, Garrity called the investment “great news” that would bring “historic investment” and “create thousands of jobs.” And her current position remains unclear. She has said she opposes a statewide moratorium but wants “a pause” on development instead.
Like Republicans running in districts that supported Trump in 2024 but oppose data centers, she appears to be attempting to find a pro-business and pro-regulation path.
“We want to make sure data centers are an addition to the grid, not a contraction. If there’s infrastructure that needs to be added to the grid, rate payers shouldn’t be paying for it,” she said. “I’m not opposed to data centers, but we have to do them the right way, and we haven’t done it. It’s because of a lack of leadership from the government.”
Garrity’s “long record of supporting completely unregulated data center development makes it clear that she just can’t be trusted,” said Manuel Bonder, a spokesperson for Shapiro’s campaign.
Local government leaders said at Garrity’s campaign roundtable in June that there has been lack of guidance around issues, especially around power demand, water use, infrastructure, environmental impacts, and community compatibility.
Kathie Doyle, a Republican on the Richland Township Board of Supervisors, said confusion around data centers have “set off a firestorm” in her community. Earlier this year, warnings of a supposed proposal for a data center in the Bucks County township circulated on social media, but turned out to be a “business park” with two buildings.
“Our residents don’t understand that we just cannot say no,” she said. Municipalities in Pennsylvania cannot outright ban data center development.
Santoro said Shapiro’s inconsistency is a liability that could sway some voters away from casting their ballot for him.
“Certainly he is giving her an ‘in’ by staying on the wrong side of this,” she said.
And it’s not just Republicans seizing on Shapiro’s position. The early reputation Shapiro earned as a champion of data centers may become a point of attack among other Democratic contenders for the presidency in 2028, too. In a veiled jab at Shapiro in June, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, knocked Pennsylvania on a businesspodcast for allowing Constellation Energy to restart Three Mile Island nuclear plant just to power Microsoft’s data centers.
“My guess is that’s going to be a reasonably unpopular thing to have done,” Pritzker said, without noting Shapiro by name on the Prof G Markets podcast.
Vulnerability for down-ballot Democrats
With a $50 million campaign war chest and high approval ratings, Shapiro is widely favored to win reelection this year. But his record on data centers could prove a liability for those he’s hoping to pull along, some advocates, like Santoro, say.
Shapiro has been staking much of his national political clout on his ability to flip four House districts in Pennsylvania for Democratic control of the U.S. House, drawing voters to the polls with his name at the top of the ticket. He’s also aiming to flip Pennsylvania’s Senate into Democratic control for the first time since 1993, giving him a Democratic trifecta in Harrisburg, as the state’s split legislature has blocked many of Democrats’ priorities from becoming law.
Santoro predicted that could be in jeopardy “if he does not change course.”
“Shapiro’s leadership on data centers will be the thing that costs us the first Democratic trifecta in 31 years, and I think that while he will likely win reelection with this wildly unpopular position on data centers, other elected officials and candidates will not,” she said.
Other Democratic candidates aware of data centers’ deep unpopularity are differentiating themselves on the issue, despite remaining otherwise aligned with Shapiro. Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti, who is running in Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District, released a new ad last month putting data center developers on notice.
“Big Tech needs to pay their own way, not hide behind [nondisclosure agreements]. No tax breaks. Don’t raise our electric bills. Don’t poison our water. And hire local union labor,” she said, in the ad spot. “You can’t meet that? Then get out.”
Cognetti’s stance isn’t vastly different from Shapiro’s — both want to end blanket tax breaks — but her rhetoric is much stronger, and she’s putting the issue at the forefront of her campaign.
Democrats insist Republicans, including those running at the state level, don’t have the moral high ground on data centers after failing to pass through several measures that would have enacted stricter controls for their approval.
Sam Silverman, a former congressional aide and founder of Silverman Strategy Group, a strategic communications firm focused on technology and politics, said Shapiro’s approach to data centers — proposing a plan rather than enacting a moratorium — presents a risk that could either pay off and become the model for other states, or fail to fully address all future concerns and is unpopular.
“Shapiro is going out in front by proposing a bargain now. If the standards protect ratepayers, produce visible benefits, and hold bad actors accountable, Pennsylvania could have a model others can follow,” he said. “But because he is putting forward the deal now, he will be judged on whether it delivers.”
Taking a risk involves trust, though. Shapiro can afford to make a big swing at one of the hottest issues in politics because voters put so much faith in him, Silverman said.
“Most politicians do not have the amount of trust and political capital to take a risk, either,” Silverman said.
Whether the governor is triumphant will come down to what standards go into effect and whether bad actors are held accountable, he said, “and whether Pennsylvanians believe those standards are working.”
Do rich guys have to ruin everything? Apparently so. There came a time about 15 years ago when my soccer obsession got to the point where I felt I needed to pick an English Premier League team to root for, in addition to the U.S. national teams and the Union. Long story, but I went with Liverpool, in a city many consider the Philadelphia of the U.K., and it’s been a good ride, including a couple of trophies. On Monday, it was reported Amazon gazillionaire Jeff Bezos is buying 30% of the team. I’m officially out. Go, Leeds!
When did Trump’s ballroom become a national security fortress? We need answers.
Construction continues on a helipad and the White House ballroom on the South Lawn of the White House on Aug. 5.Tierney L. Cross
Donald Trump’s originally stated 2025 scheme to demolish the East Wing of the White House to make way for an oversized ballroom to hold state dinners and whatnot was bad enough: an unneeded, unwanted, gilded, and presumably tacky callback to Louis XVI, a massive monument to a modern let-them-eat-cake regime.
A year later, the project is better describedasan alleged ballroom — another bait-and-switch scam by America’s first grifter president. The fact that the public really doesn’t know how much this project actually costs — estimates have soared from the initial lowball of $300 million to now at least $600 million, but possibly more — or how much of that will be dumped on U.S. taxpayers is just the beginning of the problem.
Nearly 10 months after the president shocked Washington, D.C., and the rest of America by taking a wrecking ball to the history-packed East Wing, Trump has all but stopped talking about a black-tie party venue and instead rebranded the project as essential to national security.
When the D.C. federal appeals court on Friday ordered the White House, which never got congressional approval for either the demolition or the ballroom addition, to halt aboveground construction, Trump took to Truth Social and described the ruling as akin to treason.
“The Military and Secret Service are viewing this horrendous, politically motivated, and unlawful ruling as a National Security threat to our Nation in that the entire Complex is being built for the protection of our Country and, additionally, all future Presidents,” Trump posted, using language that’s probably never previously in human history been used to describe a “ballroom.”
Trump didn’t say in his post anything about crystal chandeliers, or great acoustics, or things you might expect in a world-class ballroom. Instead, he said the facility will have bomb shelters, a state-of-the-art hospital, top-secret military facilities, protective missile-resistant steel, columns, roofs, and beams, drone-proof ceilings and roofs, military-grade venting, and bullet-, ballistic-, and blast-proof glass.
It sounds like somebody is expecting a last tango in Washington.
Trump’s post was alarming — shocking, really — but in case anyone missed the point, or doesn’t know how to read, he also posted some AI-created renderings, which again did not depict waltzing diplomats, but instead showed a rooftop “DronePort” that was packed to thegills with ominous-looking military drones, manned by troops and also with armored vehicles that somehow drove up there. The vibe was Darth Vader’s Death Star, except with “military-grade venting” this time around.
There are two very different ways to look at all of this, and let’s start with the more benign one. Ever since the beginning of his second crack at the presidency, Trump — when he’s not pursuing his main projects of making billions of dollars, punishing his enemies, and staying out of prison — has been obsessed with placing his personalist stamp on Washington. Maybe that’s for his legacy, or maybe he just wants a Mar-a-Lago-by-the-Potomac to comfort his octogenarian mind.
Trump might not be able to crash weddings as he does at his Palm Beach, Fla., estate, but his ballroom idea would be close enough. Although he’s also sought and received donations for the project from the usual suspects of friendly billionaires and favor-seeking corporations, Trump also wants both additional dollars and — more importantly, in light of the appeals court ruling — a stamp of approval from Congress. That’s been a thwarted agenda item for GOP leaders on Capitol Hill for months.
But if Trump can’t sway Congress, he hopes to win over a U.S. Supreme Court where he has appointed three of the nine members. The White House knows that both Congress and the high court tend to fall in line whenever national security is invoked, while there is no constitutional right to foxtrot. So maybe all the military bluster is just political posturing for Trump’s latest real estate development.
But as the project enters its second year, it seems to have morphed into something a lot more disturbing than that. The pictures, descriptions, and accounts of Trump’s game here are sounding a lot more like the impregnable mountain lair of a Bond villain.
This is a man who fomented an attempted coup the first time he was asked to leave 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and who saw how South Korea’s corrupt right-wing president was ousted after a massive throng of protesters overwhelmed key government buildings. Wasn’t it Chekhov who said you don’t put drones up on the roof unless you intend to deploy them by the third act? The two most likely scenarios for actually using Trump’s bunker — Civil War II, or World War III — are less than optimal.
This national security bunker isn’t the only thing that’s worrisome as Trump looks to the second half of what’s supposed to be his final term. As noted in this space recently, Trump has also extended the presence of National Guard troops in Washington through Jan. 20, 2029, which coincidentally is the scheduled last day of his term.
Since their arrival last year, the Guard troops — many from units in pro-Trump red states, and costing U.S. taxpayers at least $1.4 billion and possibly more — have often been spotted hanging around, or picking up trash as a kind of busywork. But residents and some advocates like Scott Michelman, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, are already complaining Trump is “treating [D.C.] like a police state.”
It raises the same questions as the alleged “ballroom.” The president is entitled to state-of-the-art security, and while the public doesn’t need to know all of the operational details, American taxpayers also can’t be expected to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars for these projects without truly knowing what they are for.
Democrats on Capitol Hill need to start demanding answers. On Monday, there was an encouraging report by the New Republic’s Greg Sargent that the opposition party is working to demand communications from the Justice and Interior Departments to explain why several people were wrongly criminally charged with vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool when the actual damage was a botched repainting contract.
Congress can, and should, also flex its muscles over this ballroom fiasco — first by denying any public money for the project, and then by launching a similar investigation into the hasty demolition, the political fundraising, and the sketchy purposes for the project. Someone owes America the truth, and it’s not going to come from the current regime without a fight.
Whatever happens, the woman or man who hopefully succeeds Trump and sends those guard troops back to their own private Idaho in January 2029 is also going to have a giant mess in their backyard. But it’s better to have the ruins from a botched, halted construction project than from the Battle of Armageddon.
Yo, do this!
The California journalist Gil Durán has been paying attention to the political craziness coming out of Silicon Valley years before anyone else was, and now comes the big payoff in the form of a book that is not only incredibly timely but has the best title of the year: The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Durán explores the strange beliefs of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and their friends, their obsession with building their own private “networked cities,” and their unlikely alliance with Donald Trump. I’ve been waiting on this one for a while.
August is always a great month for books. While Durán drills down on the high-tech enemies of liberty, the great writer Dave Zirin has a new tome about one of democracy’s heroes, the late historian Howard Zinn, his former mentor. Public intellectuals are still arguing about the merits of Zinn’s 1980 masterwork, A People’s History of the United States, but nobody disputes his influence on the national conversation. Zinn rejected American exceptionalism, but also spotlighted everyday heroes like labor leaders or civil rights activists who expanded our freedoms over two centuries. I’m looking forward to reading The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn.
Ask me anything
Question: Data centers are the flashpoint but the root problem is the unregulated AI that is sweeping up every keystroke and every written document then repackaging it as if original thought. How do we get a federal government mired in 2020 to begin legislating on AI? — Suzi (@wanderponder.bsky.social) via Bluesky
Answer: Great question, Suzi, and I think we all know the main reason why the body politic — and I’m talking about both Democrats and Republicans — have been so painfully slow to respond to voters’ widespread anxiety not only about noisy, polluting, resource-wasting data centers, but also to artificial intelligence itself. The reason is money. Silicon Valley AI developers have raised an unbelievable $220 million to spend on November’s election, and — while there are some disagreements within Big Tech about policy — most of the cash will go to the politicians least likely to regulatean industry badly in need of it. Cognitive computing is not only stealing our intellectual property, as you noted, but also our jobs, as well as our children’s ability to learn.The good news is that public backlash against AI is so strong that even a quarter-billion dollars may not be able to stop the movement. But it’s way past time to get money out of politics.
What you’re saying about …
I should have guessed that newsletter readers don’t have much more of a clue than Donald Trump about what to do about the giant mess in the Persian Gulf. I did get one thoughtful response from an emailer with a “cbluff” handle (Reminder: Please sign your real name to these responses) who said the Trump regime needs to send skilled negotiators — and be realistic. “I believe the U.S. will have to cede the Strait of Hormuz, allow Iran and Oman to collect protection money, remove sanctions and pay them so we can declare victory and leave,” they wrote. It’s hard to disagree. Once again, the United States has lost a war.
📮 This week’s question: Since the Democratic Senate primary win by Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed last week, the mainstream media has been obsessed with the question of whether this year’s progressive surge, including candidates (although not El-Sayed) tied to the Democratic Socialists of America, is hurting the Democrats. What do you think? Are leftists bringing needed energy to a moribund party, or are they too out there to defeat the GOP in November? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Democrats and the left” in the subject line.
Backstory on the day Trump left his press corps for dead
Catering trucks are parked at Air Force One on the tarmac as the motorcade carrying President Donald Trump arrives to depart following the NATO summit, at Ankara International Airport in Ankara, Turkey, on July 8.Alex Brandon
It was appalling enough back in late July when we watched a room full of some of America’s highest-profile journalists break bread with Donald Trump at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, where the president got up and hurled crude insults at several of the media members. Many of us were disgusted that some of the nation’s most respected journalists would platform a man who has repeatedly called a free press “the enemies of the people.” But the White House press corps was in the dark about an even more disturbing plot twist.
Just 16 days earlier, Trump had left some of those journalists for dead — at least potentially — as human decoys who might be blown from the skies in a feared Iranian plot.
The stunning story came out late Monday night as I was writing this newsletter, with a scoop by the Washington Post, matched shortly, with some additional details, by the New York Times. The articles revealed a modern-day Air Force One kind of thriller that essentially involved a shell game with three different aircraft. It was triggered by what officials deemed was a credible Iranian assassination threat against the president when he traveled to a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey — just over 700 miles from the border with the U.S. enemy.
This launched a series of events, beginning with a plan to abandon Trump’s new, $400 million gift-from-Qatar iteration of Air Force One for an older version that actually has more advanced defensive capacities. Trump was filmed boarding the replacement Air Force One, followed by the White House press corps and some traveling aides for the departure from Ankara to a U.S. air base in Great Britain. What those passengers could not have imagined was that Trump had somehow been spirited out “via a catering container that had been lifted to the opposite side of the plane,” and switched to a C-32A military plane for the flight to the U.K.
Then they kept the unwitting journalists and aides on the ground for a couple of hours before it was revealed POTUS was safely in Britain and the Iranians had been thwarted and … haha, of course that’s not what really happened. No, the press corps took off as human decoys — the latest sitting ducks in an idiotic war that never should have been launched in the first place. Thankfully, no one was hurt … this time. Journalists wondered why they’d been ordered to keep the airplane’s window blinds closed, which inspired this now ironic exchange between Trump and some journalists when they reunited for the flight from Britain back to the U.S.
Trump lied that he didn’t know of any specific plot against Air Force One, and then added: “I’m No. 1on their list, before you. But if I go, you go. Right?”
Apparently not.
Even as I write this in the middle of the night just hours after the Post and Times scoops, the internet is already flooded with memes depicting Trump crammed into one of those airport serving carts, or pigging out on the adjacent airline food. It’s funny to see that your president isn’t Harrison Ford punching out the terrorists, but, in reality, slinking away in a food truck, leaving other Americans in the line of fire, right?
No, it’s not funny at all. This whole episode is a grand metaphor for a careless president who smashes up things before retreating into his money or whatever keeps him going — not thinking twice about the fate of human beings in a squalid ICE detention camp or an Iranian girls’ school. Or bantering with the gaggle of journalists whom he abandoned after drawing a big target on their backs. The first media question at the next Oval Office event ought to be, “Why did you treat me like cannon fodder?” But I wouldn’t bet on that happening.
What I wrote on this date in 2016
It’s almost funny now, in a dark-comedy kind of way, to look back on the fateful summer of 2016 and remember what it felt like to be stubbornly convinced that something, anything, was bound to happen to stop the obvious insanity of a Donald Trump presidency. It seems so incredibly naive now to read what I believed exactly one decade ago, when I actually thought the success of a diverse and incredibly talented U.S. Olympics team in Brazil would expose the Big Lie of Trump’s racism. I wrote, “The exclamation point is the remarkable women’s gymnastics team led by individual gold medalist Simone Biles — so dominant you will easily forget they also celebrate the kind of diversity that is America’s best feature, not the bug that’s described by the bitter and the disaffected back home.”
The fight for America’s future is waged on many fronts, and I’m trying to keep up. Last week, I wrote about a fascinating political development that’s been largely flying under the radar screen: a movement out west to knock off GOP incumbents by creating one-on-one contests with feisty, populist independents. That means long-shot Democrats need to drop out — which has happened in Nebraska, Idaho, and South Dakota, but not in Montana. It’s both a bold plan to end the Republican majority on Capitol Hill and a sad commentary on the failed Democratic Party brand in the American heartland. This weekend, I wrote about the Trump regime’s latest assault on higher education — denying loans for students who major in fields linked to lower-income jobs — and the increasingly bleak future of a liberal arts education. I wondered why Democrats won’t fight harder to end runaway careerism and preserve college campuses as bastions of critical thinking.
This August feels like the calm before the storm in Philadelphia sports. Some of that is the excitement over the Eagles finally beingback in training camp and looking to regain that Super Bowl mojo as 76ers fans try to process, if that’s the right term, a once-in-a-lifetime offseason rebuilding project. But much of it is angst over the Phillies, who are clinging by their fingernails to a playoff spot despite adding the National League’s batting champ to a lineup that already includes home run king Kyle Schwarber, future Hall of Famer Bryce Harper, and one of baseball’s best pitching rotations. None of that matters when the Phillies don’t have a relief pitcher who can carry a lead past the 7th or 8th inning. The Inquirer’s ace sports columnists like David Murphy and Marcus Hayes have all asked the same question: Can this team be saved? The answers are just over the paywall, and you can leap over it just like Saquon Barkley at the first-down marker; all you need to do is subscribe to The Inquirer.
By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.
Before this year, many physicians at Lancaster General Hospital had only read about measles in textbooks.
But now, as they treat pneumonia and brain swelling in patients infected with measles during Pennsylvania’s worst outbreak in three decades, they’re rapidly becoming experts on a disease once considered eradicated in the United States.
“It feels surreal,” said physician Jeffrey Martin, the chair of the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Lancaster General Heath, which is affiliated with Penn Medicine. “You’re treating something you probably never saw before.”
Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak continues to spread across the state, with 18 counties affected as of Mondayand 232 cases reported this year, including more than two dozen in the Philadelphia region. Thirty-eight people have been hospitalized. In the last week alone, state health officials recorded 57 cases.
At the center of the outbreak, Lancaster County has reported 133 measles cases this year — 125 of them since April. At Lancaster General, physicians are treating mostly adults, including pregnant women.
About 35% of the state’s cases this year have been diagnosed in children, who are among the most vulnerable to serious complications. And many experts fear the risk of infection will rise when schools open beginning at the end of August.
Lancaster County has among the lowest vaccination rates in the state, with just 87.6% of kindergartners and 83.3% of 7th graders vaccinated against measles, well below the 95% immunization threshold required to prevent community spread of a disease so contagious that up to 90% of unvaccinated people exposed will become ill.
“I don’t want to be alarmist, but I don’t think we should be minimizing the risk,” said Lancaster County Commissioner Alice Yoder, a nurse who formerly worked as a Lancaster General administrator. “There will be a large number of children coming together every day, and measles is just extraordinarily contagious.”
Back-to-school this year is “a very scary time,” she said.
The outbreak increasingly poses a threat outside Lancaster, with several counties in central Pennsylvania reporting their first cases last week.
Suburban Philadelphia’s Chester County, which borders Lancaster County to the east, has seen 22 cases of measles so far this year. And local cases are higher than reported, officials there say, adding that some residents with measles have refused to cooperate with the health department’s efforts to trace their contacts.
Lancaster officials, too, say the outbreak has spread more widely than case counts indicate. “Every case we have, we know there’s another 10 or 20 behind it,” Yoder said.
Pennsylvania health secretary Debra Bogen speaks to the media at a press conference on the state’s measles response earlier this summer in Lancaster.Dana Munro
New infections may also be coming from other places. Lehigh County reported its first two cases in two siblings last week, according to St. Luke’s University Health Network.
The children, whose parents had opted against vaccinating them, had recently traveled internationally, St. Luke’s pediatrics chair Jennifer Janco said.
St. Luke’s doctors first saw the children on video to avoid exposing other patients at a clinic and worked with state health department staff to test them for measles at home.
“We don’t want someone with measles in a doctor’s office or urgent care waiting room,” Janco said.
Eventually, one of the children was hospitalized at another area health system after becoming dehydrated, Janco said. “They became weak and sick to the point of dehydration — they couldn’t take enough fluids by mouth,” she said.
Like Yoder, she is concerned about the threat to Pennsylvania children with the school year about to start.
“The risk is real. This isn’t measles halfway across the country,” Janco said. “And measles doesn’t care about county lines.”
‘Do it for your neighbor’
State officials for months have recommended accelerating the schedule for routine childhood measles vaccinations, giving infants their first measles, mumps, and rubella shot as early as six months.
State health officials say their staff have administered more than 2,000 doses of the MMR vaccine this year, with more than 1,300 provided in June and July alone.
At Lancaster General, Martin says he’s seen increased interest in vaccination from some parents who had previously refused MMR shots for their children.
“There does seem to be a message that resonates here, and that is, if not for yourself, do it for your neighbor. Get the immunization to protect the most vulnerable,” he said.
Still, he said, many county residents who are not connected to healthcare settings “vaguely hear there’s something going on with measles, but don’t fully understand we’re in an outbreak status.”
And information about the measles from county government officials has been scarce.
Yoder, a Democrat, said she has been unable to convince her fellow county commissioners, both Republicans, to publish more information about the outbreak and the importance of vaccination on the county website.
Josh Parsons, one of the Republican commissioners, did not return a call for comment on the outbreak.
Lancaster County Commissioner Alice Yoder has proposed forming a local health department to combat a growing measles outbreak in the area.Tyger Williams / Staff Photographer
And the county health advisory council, which makes non-binding health recommendations for the county, did not discuss the outbreak at its meeting last month, said Martin, who serves on the council.
State officials handling the outbreak have done “a fantastic job,” Martin said, but he believes stronger local health leadership couldhelp combat the outbreak with a better understanding of the “complexity and diversity” of the county and its attitudes toward public health.
Yoder says the county must do more to reach out to residents about the outbreak and has been advocating for Lancaster County to form a local health department.
“The local government is typically a trusted place for people to go to. It would be so important and beneficial for us to come out stronger about the importance of vaccination,” Yoder said.
South Dakota is a prairie state that voted more than 63% for Donald Trump in 2024, so it’s not the first place you’d look to find a wave of discontent over GOP rule. But deep under the state’s expansive corn and soybean fields grow the invasive roots of political rage.
There’s the trade war that’s dried up demand for farmers’ crops while driving up the costs of essential items like fertilizer. Disdain for Trump has slashed the flow of Canadian tourists who once flocked to Mount Rushmore. There’s the same high gas and supermarket prices as in the other 49 states. And farmers who had liked the president’s border policies are now scared of losing workers to immigration raids.
Doug Sombke, president of the South Dakota Farmers Union, recently told the Canadian magazine Maclean’s that some Dakotans now “see we got sold a bill of goods … They were told grocery prices were going to come down. Trump keeps leading them on, saying, ‘There’s gonna be some pain.’ I don’t think anybody was ready for this much pain, this soon.”
In this brutal climate, one South Dakotan who probably should be bracing for pain is the mostly pro-Trump GOP Sen. Mike Rounds, a former governor seeking reelection to the Senate in November. And on Tuesday, Democrats hoping to oust Rounds from Capitol Hill got the big news that a lot of them were hoping for.
That’s right. In what may be the most counterintuitive political strategy in U.S. political history, liberal anti-Trump activists in politically red states west of the Mississippi have been pleading for obscure, long-shot Democratic candidates to abandon their races — so that spunky independent candidates can challenge the GOP one-on-one instead.
When ex-state trooper and longtime Democratic activist Julian Beaudion told South Dakotans that, feeling pressure, he’s quitting the race, it cleared the path for independent Brian Bengs to consolidate the anti-incumbent vote in November. Polls suggest that the retired U.S. Air Force lawyer and college professor who was briefly a Democrat is already within striking distance of an upset.
And he’s not alone. Democrats are also not running a Senate candidate in Nebraska — where a well-funded and well-known independent, labor leader Dan Osborn, is running again — or in Idaho, where Todd Achilles, a one-time Democratic lawmaker who left the party, is on the ballot. In Montana, an independent Senate hopeful is also hoping that a Democrat will drop out, but unsuccessfully so far.
Casual political observers probably know that Democrats (and two allied independents) — currently in the Senate minority by a 47-53 count — are hoping Trump’s unpopularity will help their candidates run the table in five to six key contested states from Maine to Texas. But much less attention has been paid to this stealth backup plan — the notion that a few prairie populists can end the GOP majority.
What’s truly remarkable about this scheme is that a growing number of Democratic strategists are making a tacit, not to mention uncomfortable, acknowledgment: In the American heartland, their party’s brand is in the toilet.
That’s why a number of political activists believe the only way in these blood-red states to make the most out of rising voter anger against Republicans over high gas prices and Trump’s badly botched war with Iran is to offer voters an alternative without a “D” next to their name.
Steve Hildebrand, a Sioux Falls-based political consultant who was a high-ranking official in Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, is one of the Democrats who thinks that — despite voter unrest against the GOP — an independent has the best chance in South Dakota.
“I think our party has gravitated too far away from fighting for hard-working Americans — you know, blue-collar workers, union workers,” Hildebrand told me this week. “You know, we’ve been fairly pathetic about a unified party message, and frankly, we’ve been pathetic about beating back on Donald Trump.”
Still, most of the political agenda of the western independents is larded with a modern brand of prairie populism that feels like a first cousin to the left-wing progressivism of Democrats — like Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed — who’ve been scoring 2026 victories in blue states. They are strongly against billionaire influence in politics while advocatingfor healthcare reform and progressive ideas about making life more affordable.
“Getting money out of politics to the maximum extent possible would be the single biggest accomplishment I think of my career and of Congress,” Bengs told Independent Voter News. “And I’d also like to get healthcare affordable, so people don’t have to worry about, ‘Don’t call the ambulance, because I can’t afford that.’”
So why not run as a Democrat, when so many of his proposals overlap? Bengs did join the Democratic Party to challenge South Dakota’s other GOP senator, Majority Leader John Thune, in 2022, and after losing by 27 percentage points, he said he’ll never do that again.
He said at county fairs and parades he met voters who liked his ideas, but told him, “I’ll never vote for a Democrat.” “Sometimes there was an expletive in there. The takeaway was that the letter was more important than what I was saying.”
“Democrats are simply not competitive in at least 20 states, maybe more.” Larry Sabato, the University of Virginia political scientist and veteran analyst, told me. He said independent races can be a way to win in these red states, but the candidate needs to break with the Democrats on some issues and show themselves as a true outsider.
Sabato said Republican dominance of prairie and mountain states can end up with “voters getting fed up with the ruling party, and desiring a switch so badly that they’ll hold their nose and defect. I suppose it is easier to vote for an independent.”
Except that clearing the political field to create the desired one-on-one race between a Republican and such an independent upstart is proving to be not so easy.
Experts like Sabato say the strongest independent Senate candidate might be Montana’s Seth Bodnar, a former University of Montana president and Army veteran. But the Democrat who’s on the ballot in Big Sky Country, Alani Bankhead, told Politico last week that she would abandon the race only “if a lightning bolt from God struck me” — an unlikely event even in this summer of wild weather. Polls suggest the Republican, Kurt Alme, would easily win a three-way race against both Bodnar and Bankhead.
The process in South Dakota was just as messy. The Democrat, Beaudion, also had been insistent he would not withdraw before Tuesday’s deadline, when he alleged that he and his family faced “intimidating threats to drop out of the race,” and gave no indication he would support Bengs’ campaign.
The best chance for knocking off a GOP incumbent remains Nebraska. Osborn, who rose to prominence as the union leader of a high-profile strike against the food giant Kellogg’s, got nearly 47% of the vote against Sen. Deb Fischer in 2024 when Trump was on the ballot. In 2026, he’s poised to capitalize on the president’s fading approval as he challenges another incumbent, Sen. Pete Ricketts.
“If you believe that billionaires, like Elon Musk, George Soros, or Pete Ricketts, should not be allowed to buy anything they want, including private islands for sex trafficking, and our elections, and our votes, then send them a message in cash and vote for me,” Osborn told a recent town hall. The most current poll, conducted in May by Tavern Associates, showed Osborn winning by 5 percentage points.
Still, it’s an uphill climb for many of these prairie independents. Incumbents like Rounds, Ricketts, and Idaho’s 83-year-old Sen. James Risch enter their races with an unshakeable base of MAGA Trump supporters, and they’ll have millions of dollars for ad campaigns that will surely portray their opponents as liberal Democratic wolves in sheep’s clothing.
There are also a ton of questions about what will happen if any of them win in November. Would they join the two current independents, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Maine Sen. Angus King, in caucusing with the Democrats? (Osborn has explicitly said he will not.) Whom would they support for majority leader, with a likely challenge to the current top Democrat Chuck Schumer? Would they vote mostly with Democrats, or take contrary, libertarian stands on issues like gun control, in line with voters back home?
The biggest question for Democrats, however, might be the long-term one: How will yanking so many candidates in 2026 help the professed goal of rebuilding a Democratic Party that some day will be viable in all 50 states? That will have to wait until the political derecho of disgust with both parties blows past.
“There’s just a lot of different stripes out there right now, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” Hildebrand said. “I think the Democratic Party and the Republican Party both have terrible brands. I think you know that it’s their own fault. It’s not the fault of voters.”
Clad in a royal blue, two-piece suit, Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity stood next to a seated President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday, in a video message posted to his social media platform, Truth Social.
“Pennsylvania is very lucky because you have somebody running for governor who’s going to do a fantastic job,” Trump said to the camera, while shaking Garrity’s hand. “She really is a spectacular person. And I just want to wish you luck. I think you’re going to win.”
The White House appearance signaled a closer public alliance between Trump and Garrity, and the latest chapter in her campaign challenging Gov. Josh Shapiro as she seeks to draw Trump’s loyal fan base to the polls in November.
Trump, who endorsed Garrity in January, followed the video message by posting a photo with Garrity, writing: “Stacy is running to be the next Governor of the GREAT Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. She has my Complete and Total Endorsement. She will do a fantastic job!”
Garrity’s campaign said in a statement that she was visiting the White House alongside the Penn State wrestling team, which was being honored for its 2026 national championship.
The Oval Office meeting represented a repair of sorts between Garrity and Trump after he has displayed little enthusiasm toward her campaign in recent months.
It was my Great Honor to welcome Highly Respected and very popular Pennsylvania State Treasurer, Stacy Garrity, into the Oval Office. Stacy is running to be the next Governor of the GREAT Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. She has my Complete and Total Endorsement. She will do a… pic.twitter.com/1vROsLLTlM
— Commentary Donald J. Trump Truth Social Posts On X (@TrumpTruthOnX) August 4, 2026
Garrity entered the race against Shapiro, the Democratic incumbent, last summer as Republicans — disappointed with their 2022 performance — sought to consolidate support early around one strong candidate. When Trump endorsed Garrity, he called a “true America First Patriot” who “WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN!”
In March, Garrity hosted a fundraising dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, where, beneath a wrought-iron doorway at his private golf club, the president said “she should win.”
But when Trump visited Pennsylvania in June and Garrity introduced him onstage, he seemed to forget her altogether.
During a speech meant to focus on manufacturing in Macungie, Trump spent over an hour talking about weight-loss drugs, immigration, firearms, the role of transgender athletes in women’s sports, and the UFC fight recently held on the White House lawn. But Garrity never received a mention, and Trump instead celebrated U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser, a Pennsylvania Republican who considered a run for governor before ultimately opting against it. Trump even name-checked Shapiro.
Three months out from Election Day, Garrity has struggled to gain traction among voters. A Quinnipiac University survey of 895 registered Pennsylvania voters in July found 53% would vote for Shapiro, while 40% said they would vote for Garrity.
At right is Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro listening to Stacy Garrity, 78th State Treasurer, Forum Auditorium in Harrisburg, Pa., Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
Trump’s latest show of support for Garrity comes as Shapiro — who is rumored to be eyeing a run for the White House in 2028 — has set his sights beyond the governor’s office, lending his time and spending his money to support Democrats up and down the ballot, in an attempt to flip the Pennsylvania state Senate and four swing districts in Congress.
Last month, in another stop in Pennsylvania, Trump attempted to lend more support to Garrity during Republican U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick’s Defense and Innovation Summit.
“I hear things about Stacy, and I’m hearing some poll numbers that are very good,” he said.
Regarding her opponent, however, Trump had stronger words.
“This guy Shapiro is totally overrated. … He doesn’t have what it takes,” Trump said.
President Donald Trump visits Mack Trucks in Macungie in the Lehigh Valley Tuesday, June 23, 2026.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
In Pennsylvania, Trump remains deeply underwater in popularity. The Quinnipiac survey found only 39% of Pennsylvania voters would give him a positive job approval. Elsewhere in the country, Trump has remained Republicans’ most effective energizer to the polls — though some are concerned about GOP successwithout his name on the ballot in November.
Pennsylvania Democrats on Tuesday seized on Garrity’s appearance with the president.
“Stacy Garrity always sprints to any chance she gets to pledge her 100% loyalty to Donald Trump and his disastrous agenda,” Ava Pitruzzello, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, said in a statement.
Last week, Shapiro’s campaign launched a new ad calling Garrity “100% MAGA.” Garrity’s campaign, in a statement, called the ad “a dishonest, lying attack.”
Today’s newsletter is all about things I thought I was done writing about: COVID-19, Kamala Harris, and the World Cup. Regarding the latter, FIFA strongman Gianni Infantino walked off the pitch after last month’s final like the hero in Steve Miller’s “Take the Money and Run”: He got the money — an ungodly $15 billion in revenue — thinking he got away. But instead, just like Icarus, Infantino flew too close to the sun. A plan to make even more cash off the world’s greatest sporting event — by selling a share to private investors led by the brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law — outraged so many folks that the FIFA chief could lose his job. What a shame.
The right can’t shut up about COVID-19 because it needs your outrage against experts
Workers move bodies to a refrigerated truck from the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home in the Brooklyn borough of New York in April 2020.AP
Honestly, I thought — and hoped, frankly — that I’d written about the COVID-19 pandemic for the last time by the end of 2021. The issues it raised — about everything from public health preparedness to conspiracy theories — had seemed important enough, but I was more than ready to move on from empty baseball stadiums and masks in the supermarket.
I thought most folks felt the same way — that we were all eager to put the coronavirus in the rearview mirror. Clearly, I was wrong. The people we call MAGA still can’t stop yelling about it.
Last week brought the acid flashback of the government’s communicable disease czar when the pandemic erupted in 2020,Anthony Fauci,getting dragged before a U.S. Senate committee in a Joe McCarthy fashion, forced to take the Fifth Amendment to avoid any perjury traps that would satisfy the senators’ mouth-breathing constituents’ raw lust to imprison the 85-year-old public health icon.
The realization that they weren’t going to send Fauci — who was pardoned for his past actions in January 2025 by outgoing President Joe Biden to protect the good doctor from GOP wrath — up the river led these Republican statesmen to do the only thing left: scream at him.
“Who the f— do you think you were for doing that?” Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno yelled at Fauci, even as it’s hard to understand what “that” was, except for working tirelessly to give Americans the best information about a rapidly evolving, deadly pandemic. “It is a total disgrace what you did to this country.”
The baseless attacks on Fauci by right-wingers — who’ve convinced themselves that the real crisis of 2020-2021 wasn’t the invisible virus that caused the early death of more than 1.2 million Americans, but an authoritarian government (led at the time by Donald Trump, but no matter) making them wear those masks and avoid those baseball games — were both infuriating and unconscionable. Still, maybe because of my aversion to reliving the pandemic, I was going to let the subject slide.
But then the current government’s top health official, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., went on CNN to double down on the Trump regime’s Big Lies about what really happened during the COVID years. And like Moreno, RFK Jr. turned the volume up to 11.
“Anthony Fauci was mismanaging the COVIDpandemic and was doing it under the Biden administration. President Trump wanted to end the lockdowns,” Kennedy loudly told CNN’s Dana Bash, inventing a farcical, backward timeline. An agitated RFK Jr. insisted the government’s priority during COVID-19 should not have been saving lives, but “protecting constitutional rights,” yet to make this fiction sound less ridiculous, the HHS chief also had to lie about the extent of thecrisis.
“There were ICUs that were empty all over the country, including in New York, at the height [of the pandemic],” Kennedy insisted.
This can no longer be ignored. There are two very important points that need to be made here.
First, when a high-ranking government official tells a lie on national television, this must be debunked immediately. The truth here is that the hospital emergency rooms and intensive care units, especially in New York City but other locales as well, were overwhelmed in the spring of 2020. So were many morgues and funeral homes, which struggled to keep up with the dead.
“I worked for New York’s largest medical center at the start of the pandemic,” Lucky Tran, a Columbia University scientist, posted on Bluesky. “There were morgue trucks on the streets. They set up emergency medical tents in Central Park. Healthcare worker colleagues died. It is horrific that RFK Jr is on national TV lying that ICUs were empty.”
Of course, this is just one of a number of lies about the pandemic — that the vaccines released to the public in early 2021 are dangerous (they’re not), that the virus came from a Chinese lab (it almost certainly didn’t) and not animal-to-human contact, and that Fauci led some kind of Watergate-level cover-up (his personal diaries, obtained by the senators, revealed exactly the opposite) — that are matters of faith among the political right.
Which brings us to the second big thing: Why? Why are all of these petty grievances about inconveniences we experienced six years ago still so gosh-darned important to these yelling people in 2026? Why do they want to send an octogenarian Fauci — a grandson of Italian immigrants whose life was the kind of American dream 20th-century Republicans would have celebrated — to prison?
The real virus here is anti-intellectualism — a strain that has always existed in American life, as the historian Richard Hofstadter famously wrote in 1964 — that has metastasized from a small, well-contained syndrome to overtaking the entire Republican Party. So-called rural resentment leads angry voters to think people like college professors or doctors in white coats are looking down on them.
It’s an antisocial worldview that was encouraged from on high by the likes of Big Oil executives who love it when the masses scoff at climate scientists. But the rejection of expertise reached a whole new level in 2020 when doctors like Fauci started telling Americans to wear masks or avoid social gatherings to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Sure, there were tough calls around issues like how long to close schools, but in real time, health experts were erring on the side of caution — the right thing to do — while shell-shocked regular folks stewed about an assault on their liberty.
As the revived Fauci controversy continued online this week, Mike Adams, whose website has been accused of spreading medical disinformation, posted Monday on X that getting a COVID-19 vaccine “reveals a twisted and artificial obedience to the falsified appearance of authority. People like that should never be trusted, because they are not in control of their own minds.”
They believe experts like Fauci don’t want to help you, but control you — welcome to the far right’s Bizarro World.
But still, why? At the end of the day, these extremists might care somewhat about thwarting climate science or not wearing masks, but the real reason they despise educated experts is because facts shatter the ancient, lie-based hierarchies such as white supremacy, the patriarchy, or homophobia that give meaning to their broken world.
I think some of the reason they still care so much about Fauci is that the pandemic spring of 2020 also brought the police murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter marches that shocked many of the communities where they occurred. In their minds, all of it — masks, diversity training, vaccines, calls to “defund the police” — merged into one giant threat.
Which brings us to: Why now? There’s no question that the lingering resentments of 2020-2021 over both the coronavirus and the Floyd protests were the rage fuel that revived Trump, who looked dead in the water after his failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021. Now, it’s less than 100 days until a new election that could cripple Trump and his MAGA movement. And they are desperately waving the bloody shirt of COVID-19.
We must never forget the truth about 2020, Fauci, or the necessity of public health in a true democracy. Our anti-science government is seeing rising cases of measles and of the bacteria that causes explosive diarrhea (which has now been linked to two deaths), and God only knows what elseis in the pipeline.
Experts like Fauci aren’t here to tell you how to live your life — just how to not die.
Yo, do this!
I remain fascinated with the hidden history of American reactionary movements, which is coming out of the shadows during the Trump era. I’ve been listening to the audiobook of The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915 by College of Charleston historian Joseph Kelly, which looks at how the defense of slavery in the antebellum South, Jim Crow, and the early 20th century revival of the Ku Klux Klan all bore the defining characteristics of an American strain of fascism, often for the self-preservation of monied interests. In the same mode, I highly recommend a recent New York Times guest essay, “It Wasn’t a Civil War. It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” by history writer Anthony Conwright, who argues persuasively that the name most of us have always used to describe the 1861-1865 conflict is actually a whitewash pushed by the South. The piece is a real eye-opener.
Did I mention that 2026’s summer of soccer isn’t over? The Philadelphia Union have emerged from the two-month World Cup break with a completely different look from the group that tanked in the first half of the MLS season, with the return of Kai Wagner (from England) and Quinn Sullivan (from injury) and rising young stars Neil Pierre and Cavan Sullivan, Quinn’s brother. They’ll also get a fresh start for a trophy opportunity with the arrival of the Leagues Cup tournament against the best teams of Mexico’s Liga MX. Check out their first match Thursday night at 8 p.m. against traditional powerhouse Cruz Azul, live at Subaru Park in Chester and on Apple TV.
Ask me anything
Question: Do you believe the Dems have a chance to take the Senate in November? — Elise (@bnat4.bsky.social) via Bluesky
Answer: Elise, I’d almost bank on it happening, and here’s why. Since the early months of the Trump 47 presidency, Democrats — who need to gain four seats for a majority — have consistently run double digits ahead of past performance in special elections. That should put seven states in play, with the strongest possible candidates in places like North Carolina (ex-Gov. Roy Cooper), Alaska (ex-Rep. Mary Peltola), and Iowa (Josh Turek). Maine voters will forget the Graham Platner fiasco long before they forget Sen. Susan Collins’ vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Ironically, the battle to hold a Democratic seat in Michigan looks toughest, but likely primary winner Abdul El-Sayed is an excellent campaigner. As Trump’s popularity plummets, there’s even a chance for shockers in places like Florida or with independent candidates in Nebraska or Idaho. For me, the bigger question is whether 51-plus Dems will dump Chuck Schumer as their leader after November. Stay tuned.
What you’re saying about …
Many of you had great ideas for a fall Democratic message that’s about more than just “affordability” — the preferred mantra of the party’s consultant class. Many sought to widen the conversation to issues around corruption and inequality. Here are some pithy ones. Roberta Soules wants to “take power away from the large corporations and oligarchs.” Meg Berlin suggested “More Butter. Fewer Guns.” Dane Madsen prefers “Stop the Trump Crime Family,” while Frank Friedman went with an even simpler, “We will be honest with you.” Stephen R. Rourke wrote simply, “Peace, prosperity, and justice for all.”
📮 This week’s question:CNN is reporting that the Pentagon recently took the highly unconventional step of asking rank-and-file troops for creative new ideas on how “to punish Iran.” But what should be done about this mess? Can the United States simply walk away at this point? Or do big problems like the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz or Iran’s nuclear ambitions require a response, and what is that, exactly? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Iran war ideas” in the subject line.
Backstory: Is Kamala Harris ‘the new Nixon’?
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a concession speech for the 2024 presidential election, Nov. 6, 2024, on the campus of Howard University in Washington. Jacquelyn Martin
Although it’s true that, as a 5-year-old kindergartner in 1964, I nearly got into a fight with a kid who said he supported Barry Goldwater, the first presidential election I really followed came four years later in 1968. I was probably waiting for the baseball scores when I saw news reports that the GOP front-runner was a “New Nixon,” which made this 9-year-old wonder what was wrong with the old one. Indeed, a Californian who’d lost a presidential election (and a gubernatorial race just two years later) stunned America with the political comeback that made him the 37th president. We’d spend the next six years of Kent State and Watergate learning the kinder, gentler Richard Nixon of 1968 was all a lie.
It would be a Nixon-level comeback if Kamala Harris were to win the Democratic nomination in 2028, let alone the presidency. Like Tricky Dick, Harris is a child of the Golden State and former vice president to the oldest-ever POTUS at that time (Dwight Eisenhower was 70 when he left office, which was unprecedented before Ronald Reagan, Joe Biden, and now Donald Trump), and a failed nominee, although shewas smart enough not to run for governor when she returned home. People forget the brief lightning bolt of excitement when she replaced Biden on top of the 2024 ticket, and so the smart money has been that her moment has passed, as the Democratic base looks for new blood.
But it feels like the earth has shifted a bit, and the reason can be summed up in two words: South Carolina. Last week, the Democratic National Committee unveiled its list of the first six presidential primary states, and the South Carolina primary tops the list. The same South Carolina where, in 2020, the state’s main Democratic voting bloc — older, center-left, Black members of the middle- or working classes — turned the race around for Biden, the man who then tapped Harris as his veep. The same South Carolina whose Democratic power broker, Rep. James Clyburn, is close to Harris. A state that seems tailor-made for a Harris comeback.
But the Palmetto State isn’t the only reason to start taking a Harris return seriously. In politics, your weakness is often also your strength, or vice versa. Harris has long been a political chameleon — from tough 2010s prosecutor to a sharp left turn during Trump’s first term that she backpedaled away from in 2024. Today, Harris is feeling the zeitgeist. She is drifting left again, but perhaps more importantly, she understands the desire by core Democrats to support fighters, not milquetoast cowards.
“They are ruthless,” Harris told the annual gathering of the National Urban League in Nashville on Friday, referring to Republicans. “We need to be ruthless, too” — explaining that Democrats should not be “cruel,” but “uncompromising.” She added: “For example, and I know this is going to be controversial coming from me, in particular, we need to revisit the Electoral College. We need to revisit the point of expanding the court to 13 justices, like we have 13 district courts. We need to revisit, if they so want, statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C.” Harris has also been holding extensive meetings with some of the pro-Palestinian activists who often clashed with her over Israel policy in 2024.
She’s running? It sure sounds like it.
To be clear, while I thought in the fall of 2024 that Harris had thepotential to become a very good president, and I still do, I’m also very much in the “new blood” camp when I think about 2028. I’d love to see what someone from the progressive Bernie Sanders-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the movement could do in wiping away the stain of Trumpism. But establishment Democrats, intentionally or not, have thrown Harris a lifeline with their South Carolina gambit. The coming months will reveal whether this former vice president can be “the new Nixon” of the left.
What I wrote on this date in 2013
I was reminded that the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks is almost upon us. Expect a lot of what you might call negative nostalgia about that wretched day in 2001, but also the bad times that followed. Do you remember the terror alerts? Many of us thought those would vanish when George W. Bush left the White House, so it was a little jarring when Barack Obama continued the practice, including this major one 13 years ago. I wrote that “the problem with the terror warning of 2013 is not the warning itself but the decade of government baloney that preceded it. Washington needs to acknowledge the reality: If it wants to do a better job of keeping the public safe, it will need to start doing a much, much better job of telling the public the truth.”
The Trump regime’s cruel campaign against our immigrant neighbors is the biggest story of our time. Last week, I traveled to a tiny borough in Central Pennsylvania, Mount Holly Springs, where a budding partnership with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has seized 32 immigrants in just four months, and angrily divided a rural community. Pennsylvania’s small towns are becoming the front line of mass deportation. Over the weekend, the immigrant crackdown was central to my essay about the rising death toll that’s attributable to Trump’s misrule, which includes murdered deportees in Guatemala, a woman left by ICE agents to die at a Pittsburgh bus terminal, the latest civilian bombing victims in Iran, and many, many more. It’s a humanitarian crisis that demands our immediate attention.
No two people define the world-class journalism that we regularly produce here at The Inquirer more than my longtime friends Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker, who could have rested on their laurels after winning the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 2010. Instead, both are working harder than ever. Ruderman has applied her talent for digging to Philadelphia’s leading industry, healthcare, with remarkable results. Check out her latest exposé about a Main Line psychiatrist who lost her license after a wildly inappropriate affair with a troubled younger client. Laker remains a linchpin of The Inquirer’s investigative unit, and — joined by her colleagues Ryan W. Briggs, Max Marin, and Ellie Rushing — she has been digging into the dark tale of a Philadelphia pornographer and his family’s mysterious ties to two missing women. Investigative reporting is essential to democracy and forging better communities, but it’s costly, time-consuming, and won’t happen without your support. Subscribe to The Inquirer today.
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HARRISBURG —More than one million Pennsylvania households spend over 30% of their income on housing. And over the next decade, the state’s housing crunch is slated to intensify, with estimates that Pennsylvania will have nearly 185,000 fewer new homes than it needs to keep up with projected demand.
State legislators have pushed to address the need, introducing bills that would increase the housing supply through accelerated approval processes and lifting restrictions on new developments — and urged leaders to include those initiatives in this year’s budget negotiations.
But none of the proposed policies were included in the final budget deal, passed last month. Instead, the budget included the creation of a housing database — a move some lawmakers and advocates say falls short of addressing Pennsylvania’s burgeoning housing crisis.
“I think the budget generally left a lot of questions unaddressed. And housing, one of the top three issues in terms of the cost-of-living crisis, was one of them,” said Sen. Nikil Saval (D., Philadelphia).
Saval was one of six senators who voted against the budget. He has since said that was because it left many key policy issues, including housing, unaddressed. Sen. Katie Muth (D., Montgomery), the only other Democratic senator to vote against the budget, has also said she believes the budget left issues like housing, rising energy costs, and affordability unanswered.
Shapiro’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
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The new housing database — incorporated through a bill sponsored by Saval and authored by fellow Philadelphia Democratic Sen. Vincent Hughes — will be overseen by the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency. Saval said it will ensure more robust data collection to provide transparency on how much affordable housing is available across the state.
Under the new legislation, the agency will be required to create an online searchable database of all publicly financed housing that is subjected to public assistance programs. It will include anticipated termination dates on properties’ affordability restrictions and will note if the property has been granted an extension on those restrictions.
Saval said the publicly available database will ensure lawmakers have a better idea of the state’s affordable housing stock. Much of the affordable housing in the state was created with the help of low-income tax credits that are subject to expiration dates. As termination dates on these housing units loom, with many set to expire within the next five years, Saval said, the database will keep lawmakers aware of when housing is no longer affordable and allow them to see if restrictions can be extended.
The database will be updated annually by the PHFA, with local housing agencies submitting data every year.
Chris Anderson, communications officer for the PHFA, wrote in an email that the database is still in the early stages of being built, but that it will not pose any significant costs to the agency and existing resources will be used to create it.
There are no penalties if the PHFA does not update the database, and the new law does not make it mandatory for local agencies to report information to the agency. The intended audience is primarily housing advocates and organizations, as well as policymakers, Anderson said.
Saval said the database will help lawmakers know how much affordable housing there actually is in the state.
But he said the state budget — where legislators often pass policies in addition to the yearly spending plan — was still a missed opportunity to address Pennsylvania’s housing concerns.
“Anytime there’s a set of budget negotiations where there’s the potential to allocate funding, or create policy that would increase the supply of housing, or address the concerns faced by renters, and anytime that opportunity is missed as it was in this budget, I think it’s a step back,” he said.
‘Missed opportunity’
Carrie Rathmann, vice president of strategic partnerships for Habitat for Humanity Philadelphia, said one initiative notably absent from the final budget deal was the PA Home Preservation Program, a grant administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development to provide funding for construction cost gaps and keep homeowners in their houses through repairing outdated buildings. The initiative was last funded when it was signed into the budget in 2022, but has not received funding since.
Previously known as the Whole-Home Repairs Program, the state allocated $125 million toward the program using American Rescue Plan dollars, repairing more than 2,600 affordable homes across the state.
Douglas Paige (from left), Carrie Rathmann with Habitat for Humanity, Tyron Cheeseboro, and Danielle Paige on the steps of Pennsylvania Capitol during a 2023 rally for the Whole-Home Repairs Program.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
Housing advocates have pushed for the state to renew the funding, with the Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania calling it one of the organization’s biggest priorities.
In an email, spokespeople from the housing alliance noted that the state funding in 2022 was not enough to support the number of people that applied for it, meaning there are still people waiting to have their homes repaired.
“The program received far more applications from qualified homeowners than available funding could support, highlighting both the scale of unmet need and the importance of preserving existing housing,” the spokespeople wrote.
The program has not returned in a line item in the state budget since 2022. Companion bills in both chambers supporting the program have received bipartisan support — the House bill passed 122-80 — but are sitting in the Senate Urban Affairs and Housing Committee.
“That felt like it represented a huge missed opportunity to help thousands of Pennsylvanians stay housed and to keep homeowners safe and healthy in the homes that they already own, because without that dedicated investment, this crisis will only grow,” Rathmann said.
Habitat for Humanity is a nonprofit that does not rely on state dollars, but Rathmann said state money goes to counties and housing providers like the Philadelphia Housing Development Corp. The money helps an “ecosystem” of housing organizations in the Philadelphia area, and Habitat uses it for a portion of the organization’s work. That included the Built to Last program, an initiative spearheaded by the Philadelphia Energy Authority that inspired the statewide initiative of Whole-Home Repairs in 2022.
Rathmann said state initiatives that increase efficiency on building houses are key to developing homes faster and cheaper, which in turn increases the housing supply and can keep people in high-quality houses. This includes incentives like building lower density “by right,” meaning property owners can build low-density housing without special approval.
“We see every day at Habitat that that impact is real, it’s tangible, it crosses different sectors like kids can get to school and do better,” Rathmann said. “Seniors are healthier. People are healthier. People feel less stressed. They have more money in their pocket for medication and food.”
‘Risk aversion on all sides’
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in Pennsylvania’s divided state legislature have pushed for their own housing initiatives. Bills have passed through the Democratic-controlled House or Republican Senate, but have yet to move forward in the opposing chamber.
Democratic-backedHouse bills sitting in Senate committeesinclude proposals to remove barriers to building accessory dwelling units, lift restrictions on how many unrelated people can live in one home, and seal eviction records to help tenants.
Beth Rementer, spokesperson for House Democrats, wrote in an email that the House has sent 22 bills to the Senate Housing Committee, while the Senate sent two in June.
The state’s lack of housing action marks a difference from the Republican-controlled federal government. In early July, Congress sent the ROAD to Housing Act to President Donald Trump’s desk — a bill that reduces barriers to home construction and modernizes housing programs alongside other initiatives, including a pilot of Whole-Home Repairs.
Saval attributed the Pennsylvania legislature’s inaction to a desire to pass the state budget quickly without debate on hot-button policy issues ahead of the November election, when half the Senate and all members of the House are on the ballot.
“Essentially, there was risk aversion on all sides,” Saval said. “And, understandably, an unwillingness to get into a budget discussion that would prolong the budget negotiation process.”
Kate Flessner, spokesperson for the Senate Republicans, said in an email that the Senate supports a number of housing initiatives, but that underlying issues lie in how the state will pay for them in light of the roughly $5 billion structural deficit.
“As we continue working to address the state budget’s serious structural deficit, we will be primarily focused on ways we can improve housing access that do not require vast sums of taxpayer money — and there are many of them,” Flessner said.
Natalie Javitt is an intern with the Pennsylvania Legislative Correspondents’ Association. She can be reached at natalie.javitt@gmail.com.
A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit from President Donald Trump’s administration that sought New Jersey’s unredacted voter files.
The case — one of more than two dozen lawsuits filed by the Trump administration against states ahead of the midterm election — predates New Jersey’s recent disclosure that thousands of noncitizens had been registered to vote in 2023 and 2024 due to a glitch in the motor vehicle system.
U.S. District Judge Zahid N. Quraishi ruled the department did not have the authority to compel New Jersey to hand over its unredacted records.
“The Constitution’s architects chose to delegate election administration to the states, recognizing local governments have the deepest understanding of their constituents’ circumstances,” Quraishi wrote in the ruling, which granted New Jersey’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
Quraishi has become the 18th U.S. District Court judge to rule against the Trump administration on the issue, according to data from the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Trump administration will likely appeal the case, as the president and his allies have made election security a focal point ahead of the November midterms. It is mounting an appeal in a similar case in Pennsylvania.
The ruling in the state’s favor came a day after New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill formally told the Justice Department she would not release personal information about noncitizen voters who had been mistakenly added to the state’s voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election.
Sherrill announced last week that about 6,600 noncitizens had been registered to vote due to a glitch in the automatic voter registration system at the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission. She said fewer than 400 had cast ballots and there was no evidence they had affected election results.
On Tuesday, she said the New Jersey Department of State had begun removing 4,500 voters from the rolls. But there is a chance the rest could actually be citizens, so counties will review those about2,000 individuals to ensure no eligible voters are disenfranchised, she said.
Following Sherrill’s disclosure last week, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon requested the full names, dates of birth, nationalities, and home addresses of the individuals who were erroneously registered, as well as additional information about the noncitizens who voted, within a week.
Sherrill had publicly indicated she would not hand over the data, but her letter Tuesday put it on the books.
“Here and always, I remain committed to protecting New Jerseyans’ personally identifying information,” Sherrill wrote, reiterating her stance from the previous week, when she cited concerns about federal data breaches under Trump.
In response to Sherrill’srebuffing, Dhillon said the Justice Department’s request was rooted in the legal authority to “keep ineligible voters off its rolls” and vowed to obtain the information “through all legal means!”
Sherrill’s “refusal to cooperate with federal law enforcement does nothing to protect law-abiding NJ voters,” Dhillon said on X.
Sherrill on Tuesday criticized the Trump administration for “weaponizing the government against individuals that disagree with them.”
She pointed to an issue during her campaign last year in which the federal government provided personal information about her that should have been redacted, like her Social Security number, to an ally of her Republican opponent. The National Personnel Records Center director apologized at the time and called it a rare error, but Sherrill claims her data were “weaponized” against her.
Sherrill has not shied away from the issue of voter access in New Jersey as it becomes a national talking point in the debate over election security after last week’s revelation that thousands of people had been improperly added to the voter rolls when applying for driver’s licenses and identification cards.
On Tuesday, she championed a new law, the John R. Lewis Voter Empowerment Act, that offers a slew of policies meant to increase voter participation.
The erroneous registrations took place between June 2023 and June 2024 under former Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration due to a software glitch in New Jersey’s motor vehicle system, which processes the automatic registration when citizens obtain an ID or a license unless they decline.
Even though they checked “no” when asked if they were a U.S. citizen, the noncitizenswere registered anyway.
Sherrill pointed a finger at her predecessor but a spokesperson for Murphy said the former governor had “no knowledge” of the glitch.
U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a South Jersey Republican, said he planned to hold hearings over the issue and called on Sherrill to answer a slate ofquestions.
Sherrill said Tuesday that her administration had hired a law firm to conduct an independent bipartisan investigation. One of the firm’s main partners worked under former Republican Gov. Chris Christie as attorney general and was later appointed by Christie to the Senate, she noted, saying “we have nothing to hide.”
Christie said in a post on X that Sherrill “made the right choice tapping my former AG Jeff Chiesa to lead the independent investigation into New Jersey’s voter rolls.”
“Jeff won’t hide anything from the public,” he said. “You can count on it.”
But the New Jersey GOP questioned Wednesday why Sherrill would not comply with theJustice Department if she “has nothing to hide.”
“She ran on transparency and accountability,” the partysaid in a post online. “Apparently, those were campaign promises that expired the moment she was sworn in.”
Republicans have seized on the noncitizen voter registrations to make the case for the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship like a passport or birth certificate to register to vote.
Congress has every right to investigate the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
It should ask difficult questions about the origins of the virus, school closures, public health restrictions, research oversight, masking guidance, and the government’s changing messages to the public. More than a million Americans died, businesses closed, families suffered, and trust in public institutions was badly damaged.
But what is now happening to Anthony Fauci as he appears before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday no longer looks like a good-faith effort to learn from those failures.
It looks like political persecution.
Fauci, appearing under subpoena before the committee chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and declined to answer questions.
His critics immediately treated that decision as proof of guilt.
It is not.
The Fifth Amendment does not protect only guilty people. It protects anyone who reasonably fears that their words may be used against them in a criminal prosecution. That protection is especially important when the person asking the questions has already spent years accusing the witness of crimes and demanding that they be imprisoned.
Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chairman, speaks at the start of a hearing with Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.HAIYUN JIANG
Paul has not approached Fauci as a neutral investigator. He has repeatedly accused him of lying to Congress and called for his prosecution. Under those circumstances, Fauci had every reason to believe the hearing was not simply intended to gather information. It was also intended to create a criminal referral, a damaging headline — or both.
There is a difference between oversight and a trap.
Fauci has testified before Congress many times. He has answered questions about the National Institutes of Health, coronavirus research, government funding, and the still-unresolved debate over whether COVID-19 emerged naturally or through a laboratory-related incident.
Republicans are entitled to challenge his answers. They are entitled to criticize his judgment. But they should not be permitted to announce that he is guilty, threaten him with prosecution, and then place him under oath in the hope that some minor difference in wording can be turned into a new criminal allegation.
The release of more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s pandemic-era notes shortly before the hearing only strengthens the appearance of a coordinated political campaign.
Those notes reportedly show that Fauci and other scientists privately considered several possible explanations for the virus’s origin.
Of course they did.
That is how science works.
In the early months of the pandemic, scientists were working with limited and rapidly changing information. They considered competing theories, debated evidence, and revised their conclusions as new facts emerged.
Scientific uncertainty is not evidence of dishonesty.
Considering a laboratory origin in private did not require Fauci to publicly declare that theory proven. Nor does changing one’s position as evidence develops amount to perjury or a cover-up.
The journals also reveal Fauci’s private criticism of Donald Trump. Republicans may find those comments offensive, but criticizing a president is not a crime.
Fauci’s real offense in the eyes of the MAGA movement appears to be that he sometimes contradicted Trump publicly.
Trump wanted optimism. Fauci warned of danger.
Trump wanted the country reopened. Fauci warned about transmission.
Trump promoted claims before strong evidence supported them. Fauci attempted, sometimes imperfectly, to return the discussion to science.
That made him a political enemy.
None of this means Fauci should be beyond criticism. His decisions should be examined. The government’s masking guidance, vaccine messaging, school closure recommendations, and oversight of research funding all deserve scrutiny.
But an honest investigation begins with open-minded questions.
This one began with a verdict.
The broader danger goes far beyond Fauci. Scientists and career public servants are being warned that if their professional judgment conflicts with the political needs of a president, they may face years of investigations, public attacks, and threats of prosecution.
That will not produce better science. It will produce fear and silence.
The next pandemic will require experts willing to speak honestly, revise their conclusions, and tell a president when he is wrong. A government that punishes experts for delivering unwelcome information will eventually be left with people who say only what political leaders want to hear.
Fauci is not infallible. But political disagreement is not a crime. Scientific uncertainty is not perjury. And invoking the Fifth Amendment is not a confession.
Michael A. Gottesman is a lawyer and the founder of the New Jersey Public Education Coalition.
