DeSantis Aide Says He Resigned Rather Than Follow His Menacing Orders

Governor Ron DeSantis’s top deputies directly ordered a Florida Health Department lawyer to prosecute television stations for airing political ads about protecting abortion rights in the state.

According to a sworn affidavit from John Wilson, general counsel for the Florida Department of Health, on Monday, DeSantis’s office directed him to send prewritten cease and desist letters to TV stations that aired political ads supporting Amendment 4, a ballot initiative to increase abortion access.

“I received drafts of the letters directly from Sam Elliot, Assistant General Counsel for the Executive Office of the Governor, earlier that day,” wrote Wilson in his affidavit. “Ryan Newman, General Counsel for the Executive Office of the Governor, and Jed Doty, Deputy General Counsel for the Executive Office of the Governor, directed me to send them under my name and on the behalf of the Florida Department of Health.”

Wilson alleges that he was given the threatening prewritten letters to send to the stations on October 3, with no conversation about the letters beforehand. He then made the decision one week later to quit his job instead of sending more letters. “A man is nothing without his conscience,” wrote Wilson in his resignation letter.

DeSantis is part of a federal lawsuit by Floridians Protecting Freedom, the group leading the Yes on 4 campaign to expand abortion rights in the state. The lawsuit will now drop Wilson as a named defendant.

“This affidavit exposes state interference at the highest level,” said Lauren Brenzel, campaign director of Yes on 4. “It’s clear the State is hellbent on keeping Florida’s unpopular, cruel abortion ban in place.”

It’s not looking good for DeSantis and his cronies, as a federal judge last week had tough words for the villains looking to take the pro-choice ads off of the air: “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid,” wrote U.S. District Judge Mark Walker.

Donald Trump thinks the answer to the Bronx’s ailing schools is “no transgender, no operations.”

The former president visited a Bronx barbershop with Fox and Friends’ Lawrence Jones in a segment that aired on Monday, and was asked by a local what he would do to improve the school system. Trump replied, “Well, we’re moving them back from Washington, where you have people who don’t care about New York, frankly.”

Trump launched into a brief rant about how he’d cut the Department of Education, claiming “half the buildings” in D.C. belonged to the federal department and that he’d cut it to “one person and a secretary to just make sure they’re teaching English,” which he has said on the campaign trail before. But then, he went off on a disturbing tangent.

“No transgender, no operations, you know they take your kid. There are some places. Your boy leaves the school, comes back a girl, OK. Without parental consent. What is that all about? And they talk about a threat to democracy, they’re a threat,” Trump said as Jones looked on.

“Without parental consent. And first when I was told that was actually happening, I said, ‘You know it’s an exaggeration.’ No: it happens, there are areas where it happens. We’re not going to let it happen,” the former president and convicted felon added.

Trump’s rant fits right into conservative plans, as outlined in the Project 2025 manifesto, to eliminate the federal Department of Education and curtail LGBTQ+ rights. For the record, there are no schools giving free, secret sex-change operations to children.

Eliminating the Department of Education is also a right-wing fantasy, which would deprive school districts around the country of vital federal funds. A president who unilaterally tried to shut it down would run into stiff resistance from Congress as well as state governments. Trump either doesn’t know this, or he’s just repeating what the people around him, many of whom have connections to Project 2025, keep whispering into his ear.

If the intention behind overturning Roe v. Wade was to save infant lives, it failed.

A new study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics found that infant mortality in the U.S. worsened after the Supreme Court reversed its landmark ruling in June 2022, allowing states to implement their own abortion restrictions.

The death rate for infants with severe anatomical problems was significantly higher during six months by the end of 2023 than it had been prior to the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, researchers found. During that period, researchers also found three months when the country’s overall infant mortality rate had increased.

Medical experts saw the throughline: The Dobbs decision had prevented some women from receiving critical care for pregnancies that otherwise would have resulted in abortions.

“There’s a really straightforward mechanism here,” Alison Gemmill, a demographer and perinatal epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Los Angeles Times.

“Prior to these abortion bans, people had the option to terminate if the fetus was found to have a severe congenital anomaly—we’re talking about organs being outside of the body and other things that are very severe and not compatible with life,” Gemmill said.

But, with patients situationally forced to continue the pregnancy, “those babies would die shortly after birth,” Gemmill told the Times.

Stronger abortion restrictions may be on the horizon. Donald Trump, Project 2025, and the Republican Party have worked overtime to encroach on abortion access, from fighting for a national abortion ban to celebrating the advancing stateside restrictions on other, adjacent reproductive procedures, such as in vitro fertilization.

Meanwhile, the lack of national protections for the critical procedure has spelled disaster for women in states that have already implemented draconian laws. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that even emergency abortions violate Texas’s extreme abortion ban, despite the law’s supposed emergency abortions clause, effectively ruling that women in the Lone Star State will never be able to receive abortion care—even if their lives depend on it.

Nearly one in five Republicans say that if Trump loses the election he should declare the results invalid, and do whatever it takes to assume office, according to a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institute published earlier this month. An even larger number support their party using violence to advance their political aims.

If Trump loses, there are quite a few ways he could try to fight his way into the White House. Politico speculated that the Republican nominee could potentially undermine the vote certification process, convince Republican-led state legislatures to appoint alternate electors, and lobby for a GOP-led House to accept his alternate electors, essentially allowing the House to choose the president.

Meanwhile, only 12 percent of Democrats surveyed said that if Kamala Harris loses, she should call the results invalid, and seize the office.

49 percent of Americans believe that Trump would use the office of president to become dictator, while only 28 percent hold a similar concern about Harris. While disturbing, it’s not particularly surprising, considering Trump’s explicitly authoritarian plan to enact massive deportations and undermine rights and public education. There’s also that pesky promise to become a dictator on “day one.”

The survey also found that Republicans were more likely to support political violence than Democrats, with 29 percent of Republicans believing that true American patriots may resort to violence to save the country, compared with only 8 percent of Democrats agreeing with that statement.

Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI, told Axios that the results were particularly disturbing. “I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and these answers … are keeping me up at night,” Jones said.

Vice President Kamala Harris may have better odds in the presidential election than previously predicted.

A poll published Monday by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago suggests that Harris has more than a marginal lead in favorability over the Republican presidential nominee, but is actually surging by double digits.

The nationwide poll, conducted last week, found Harris’s favorability to be significantly higher than Trump’s, with 51 percent of registered voters viewing Harris as a favorable candidate compared to just 40 percent who felt the same about Trump. Independent voters, notably, were equally split on their opinions of Harris, while the majority of independent voters—58 percent—felt negatively about Trump.

Surveyed voters also leaned toward the Democratic presidential nominee on a wide range of issues. Harris led with voters by 20 percent on election integrity, by 12 percent on middle-class taxes, by 11 percent on natural disaster relief, by five percent on the national housing crisis, and by two percent on jobs and unemployment. Trump, meanwhile, led with voters on immigration and crime, which he led Harris by eight percent and five percent, respectively.

But perhaps no Democratic stance resonated more with voters than abortion, which saw Harris lead Trump by 23 percent.

Abortion has become a losing issue for Republicans nationwide. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn abortion access proved disastrous for Republicans that November, resulting in major midterm losses in districts where abortion was a key talking point. Post-election, at least some members of the conservative party had a stunning reversal, with GOP consultants referring to the turning tide on the issue as a “major wake-up call.”

But much of the Republican party, especially the MAGA movement, has refused to give it up. Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, for one, has previously likened abortion to murder, and has supported efforts to strip abortion access away from women. In 2023, the Ohio politico called for a “minimum national standard” on abortion restrictions, and his run for U.S. Senate in 2022 included language on his website that described him as “100 percent pro-life.”

Trump, meanwhile, has made abortion a key component of all three of his campaigns, repeatedly promising over the last eight years to ban the medical procedure at every available opportunity. While in office, he expressed support for a bill that would have banned abortion nationwide at 20 weeks.

Since then, he has used scare tactics to spread disinformation about the procedure, erroneously claiming that Democrats support abortions “after birth”—otherwise known as murder. And Trump’s track record includes the most egregious offense against national access—the appointment of three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.