Donald Trump’s Petty War With Anthony Fauci Just Got Dangerous

While taking questions from the press at Asheville Airport, in Fletcher, North Carolina, Trump was asked to comment on the removal of the security detail charged with protecting his former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“You know, when you work for government, at some point your security detail comes off. And you know, you can’t have ’em forever. So I think it’s very standard,” Trump said.

“If it would be for somebody else, you wouldn’t be asking the question,” Trump said. “I think the question is very fair.

“You can’t have a security detail for the rest of your life because you work for government,” Trump added.

Trump’s previous efforts to discredit and demonize Fauci give the removal of his security detail a distinctly more sinister connotation.

As recently as August, Trump shared a picture of Fauci in an orange jumpsuit, during a particularly violent tirade on Truth Social. Biden issued a last-minute pardon for Fauci ahead of Trump’s inauguration Monday, likely crushing Trump’s dreams of seeing the former health official behind bars. Taking away his safety might be the next best thing.

In the past week Trump has pettily removed the security details of his former national security adviser John Bolton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—two administration officials who had openly criticized Trump—despite warnings from the Biden administration that both were still receiving threats against their safety.

In Fauci’s memoir, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, he detailed Trump’s volatile behavior and his abusive treatment of the embattled former health official. He also exposed just how desperate the president was to reopen the country through the embrace of poorly qualified advisers pushing unproven treatments.

The Trump administration is embracing a dark loophole to justify the executive’s attempts to dismantle birthright citizenship.

Donald Trump’s Justice Department cited an archaic statute in a legal filing Wednesday, arguing that the president’s executive order ending constitutionally guaranteed birthright citizenship should be totally kosher, since the children of Native Americans weren’t historically considered citizens, either.

The department cited Elk v. Wilkins, a landmark 1884 case in which the Supreme Court ruled 7–2 that Native Americans could not vote since they owed “immediate allegiance” to their tribes rather than the United States, even if they were born on American soil. (To rectify this, Congress enacted the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924 to extend citizenship to Native Americans who had been precluded from the Constitution’s protections.)

But according to Trump’s administration, the ancient ruling opens up the possibility that some individuals born within the nation’s boundaries “are not constitutionally entitled to citizenship.”

“Indian tribes occupy an intermediate position between foreign States and U.S. States,” the Justice Department wrote in a motion opposing a temporary restraining order on Trump’s executive missive. “The United States’ connection with the children of illegal aliens and temporary visitors is weaker than its connection with members of Indian tribes. If the latter link is insufficient for birthright citizenship, the former certainly is.”

The forty-seventh president’s move to end birthright citizenship was blocked by a federal judge on Thursday, who deemed the executive order as “blatantly unconstitutional.”

“I have been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear,” Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, said, adding that it “boggled” his mind that anyone in the legal profession would believe the order could pass muster with the U.S. Constitution.

“Where were the lawyers?” when the order was made and signed, the judge asked.

Birthright citizenship is baked into the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to everyone born or naturalized on U.S. soil.

“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” the text of the amendment reads.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, once pitched the idea to run an experiment on the children of Samoa to see whether vaccines actually work.

Kennedy Jr., who ran the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense (from which he profited greatly), still claims the long-debunked theory that vaccines cause autism and a range of health problems. A report from NBC News published Friday shows that the man who may be in charge of America’s health agencies is more than willing to play games with public safety to test his own conspiracy theories.

In July 2018, Samoa was rocked by the death of two infants, who died after being administered improperly prepared vaccines. The scandal resulted in a 10-month pause in Samoa’s vaccine program. When the program eventually resumed, parents were slow to rejoin the line for vaccines for their children.

Less than a year later, in June 2019, Kennedy Jr. received an invitation to visit Samoa from Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, who had expressed that he’d previously lost a grandchild “under similar circumstances,” which many understood to mean due to complications relating to vaccines. Edwin Tamasese, a local vaccine skeptic, had told Malielegaoi about Children’s Health Defense, and urged him to invite Kennedy Jr. to speak with him.

Kennedy Jr. knew all about the deaths in Samoa, and Children’s Health Defense had been using it to make misinformation materials and escalate its calls for “vaccine safety science,” despite the fact that the deadly error in the case had been a human one.

It was then that Kennedy Jr. pitched his cruel experiment: to use the drop in vaccination rates as an opportunity to see if vaccines actually work (spoiler alert: They do).

He brought with him Dr. Michael Craven, the Children’s Health Defense’s new chief information officer, who could set up an information system to track the effects of vaccines, or lack thereof.

Ultimately, his pitch wasn’t convincing. “I was not interested in his ideas—he was not a medical doctor,” Malielegaoi told NBC News. “Our medical experts are more credible to me.”

But Kennedy Jr. wasn’t far from done trying to intervene. Months later, when a measles outbreak started to spread through Samoa, Kennedy wrote to Malielegaoi suggesting that there was another reason for the spate of deaths. By the end of the year dozens of children were dead.

That’s when Kennedy reached out to Tamasese, the vaccine skeptic. Tamasese said that Kennedy helped assemble a team of doctors who advised him on the real cure, a vitamin C treatment, to save the kids of Samoa from the spread of measles. Meanwhile, one of the doctors on Kennedy’s team asked Tamasese to secure a vial of the measles vaccine and send it to the U.S. for testing.

Eventually, Samoa instituted a vaccine mandate, and the Covid-19 pandemic diverted Kennedy’s efforts in Samoa. Kennedy continues to claim that the measles were not responsible for the deaths of 82 children. “Nobody died in Samoa from measles,” Kennedy said in August. “They were dying from a bad vaccine.”

The Oath Keepers involved in the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection are facing new restrictions from a federal judge, just days after they had their prison sentences commuted by Donald Trump.

On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Stewart Rhodes and seven other members of the far-right militia can’t enter Washington, D.C., or the U.S. Capitol without the court’s permission.

Rhodes was originally sentenced to 18 years in prison, one of the toughest sentences handed down as a result of January 6, and given the heavy charge of seditious conspiracy. Unlike other January 6 rioters, Rhodes was not pardoned but had his sentence commuted, along with other defendants convicted of seditious conspiracy.

“My only regret is they should have brought rifles,” Rhodes said in a January 10, 2021, recording played at his trial in 2022. “We should have brought rifles. We could have fixed it right then and there. I’d hang fucking Pelosi from the lamppost.”

On Wednesday, following his release from prison, Rhodes was spotted in the Capitol complex, sitting down in a Dunkin’ Donuts and casually speaking to reporters. The far-right militant also met with several Republican members of Congress, drawing the ire of Democrats.

“It’s just incredibly sad that this is someone who House Republicans feel should be welcomed in this building, someone who doesn’t support the rule of law, someone who actively worked against the peaceful transfer of power in our country,” Democratic Representative Pete Aguilar told Politico.

Now, at least, Rhodes and several of his far-right compatriots will be restricted from the site of their crimes four years ago. Many of their supporters, however, will be under no such restrictions, and Trump has effectively told them that they don’t have to worry about legal trouble.

The family of the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. hopes to see the declassified government files on his assassination before they are made public.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday directing administration officials to make a plan to release thousands of classified government documents on the assassinations of King, as well as former President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy.

“More than 50 years after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Federal Government has not released to the public all of its records related to those events,” the order stated. “Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth. It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.”

The King family responded in a statement from the X account of Bernice King, Martin Luther King’s youngest daughter.

“Today, our family has learned that President Trump has ordered the declassification of the remaining records pertaining to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, and our father, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” the statement read. “For us, the assassination of our father is a deeply personal family loss that we have endured over the last 56 years. We hope to be provided the opportunity to review the files as a family prior to its public release.”

The assassinations of King and both Kennedys have been the subjects of speculation and conspiracy theories since they occurred. Many suspect the declassified information may implicate government agencies like the CIA or FBI in some way—as that may be why they’ve been classified for so long in the first place. There could also be personal information from the FBI’s aggressive surveillance of King in the 1960s.

Trump has ordered the director of national intelligence and attorney general to have a process to release the JFK records in 15 days, and the MLK and RFK files up to 30 days after that.