Trump: Cutting Off Our Noses To Spite Our Faces— More On The Worst President In U.S. History

A lie? A warped mind? A lot of both?

Sometimes Truth inadvertently slips out of the enemy camp. A few days ago, Nebraska Republican Don Bacon blew the whistle on the shutdown of cyber-intelligence directed against Russia that Trump and Hegseth had ordered and then covered up. It was for one day in February and it was when Trump didn’t want anyone to know what he and Putin were discussing on the phone. The Pentagon had lied about it and the Trumpist regime has deceitfully “stonewalled inquiries on the matter and continued to deny any pause was ordered.” This is how Trump has always operated and it should come as no surprise that it’s how his administration operates as well. No statistics from his adminsitration should ever be taken at face value. Cooking the books, and even simple press releases, is what he and the people who work for him always do.

Sometimes, though, the lies have more far-reaching effects than we would hope. Yesterday, Nicholas Nehamas reported how Trump, long jealous and enraged by the Harvard University he was rejected by as a young scumbag, defunded their research budget for veterans’ suicide prevention. “The Trump administration’s move to cancel an array of federal contracts at Harvard University has set off an internal clash over the impact on medical research intended to help veterans, including projects involving suicide prevention, toxic particle exposure and prostate cancer screening… The dispute among officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs has focused in part on a collaboration with Harvard Medical School to develop a predictive model to help V.A. emergency room physicians decide whether suicidal veterans should be hospitalized… Canceling that contract would result in ‘more veteran suicides that could have been prevented,’ Seth Custer, an official in the V.A.’s Office of Research and Development, wrote in a May 8 email asking leaders at the agency to reverse their decision.”

The tensions inside the V.A. over the Harvard contracts demonstrate how Trump’s use of research funds as leverage in his broader pressure campaign on universities carries political risks. Trump and other Republicans have courted veterans as a key political constituency, and [Secretary of Veterans’ affairs] Collins has repeatedly promised that veteran care would not be affected, even as he enacts major cost-cutting measures and other changes.

… Pushed by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, the V.A. has pledged to cut costs by canceling contracts and slashing more than 80,000 jobs— roughly a sixth of its total work force.

And it sure isn’t just veterans who are being screwed over by Trump, Musk and the GOP. Yesterday, Martha Bebinger reported that the regime “is following through on threats to terminate $2.7 billion dollars in federal grants and other funding for Harvard University. Hundreds of researchers at Harvard Medical School and the T.H. Chan School of Public Health opened emails this week that said funding was eliminated for research across a host of areas, from the origins of breast cancer and the impact of nutrition on fertility to antibiotic resistance. ‘It feels like the academic equivalent of nuclear war,’ said Dr. Michael Barnett, an associate professor of health policy at the school of public health. ‘Nukes have been launched and there’s just increasingly complete devastation.’ The loss of funding is a blow to researchers who’ve spent decades working to improve human health, to lab staff who hoped findings would launch their careers, and to patients around the world who rely on this work.”

Joan Brugge is in the final year of an “Outstanding Investigator Award” from the National Cancer Institute. Her lab has identified altered cells that could be the origin of breast cancer.

“Now we’re finding ways to detect those cells and destroy them so we can prevent the progression of cancer,” said Brugge, a professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School. Losing the money to continue her research feels like a gut punch, she said.

“I’m in shock,” Brugge said. “To have my ability to do that research terminated for what you could consider political reasons is unimaginable.”

…“These grants are not handouts to the university. That could not be further from the truth,” said Michael Baym, whose lab at Harvard Medical School studies how bacteria evolve to resist antibiotics. “These are hard-won, competitive awards and the cuts to scientific research are breaking the engine of American progress.”

Baym opened his first grant termination email Monday night. By Friday, he’d received five such messages, ending funds for 90% of the work in his lab that employs six graduate and four post-doctoral students. Baym said not knowing what’s next for them is devastating.

Harvard President Alan Garber posted a letter to the Harvard community Wednesday that pledged $250 million to “support research affected by these recent suspensions and cancellations.” But researchers don’t know yet how that will play out. Some are under the impression that money will be distributed evenly across hundreds of projects, so they can continue for a few months, at least. Other researchers say they expect Harvard will set priorities.

Dr. Mary Rice said she’s baffled by the inefficiency of the federal cuts. She’s in the final six months of a five-year study to determine if air purifiers can help former smokers with the respiratory illness COPD. The funding was terminated on Wednesday.

“It’s a tremendous waste of resources,” said Rice, an associate professor of environmental respiratory health. “Millions of dollars have been invested in this research that could help people with COPD who are exposed to air pollutants and allergens and wildfire smoke.”

This is just one small glimpse into the rot Trump and his Republican Paarty enablers are injecting deep into the organs of American society. This isn’t policy— it’s sabotage, cloaked in the petty grievances of a man consumed by vendettas and delusions of grandeur. For Trump, the machinery of the state exists not to serve the people, but to shield his insecurities, prop up his ego, and punish his enemies. Every institution he’s touched— intelligence, justice, diplomacy— has been degraded, repurposed to serve his personal mythos, and gutted when it no longer did. We’re living through the long shadow of that corrosion, and the cost is not just broken norms or fractured alliances, but a diminished democracy left vulnerable to the whims of an authoritarian and a national leader who would rather see the country unravel than admit weakness.