Trump Proves the Cruelty Is the Point With HIV Funding Move

The Donald Trump administration has stopped a program that distributes an anti-HIV drug in poor countries. 

The halt is part of the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid last week, and instructs organizations overseas to stop distributing HIV medications bought with U.S. aid, even if they have already been acquired and have made it to local clinics. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, started by George W. Bush, is part of the freeze, even though it’s credited with saving over 25 million lives since it began. 

Last week, the administration stopped PEPFAR’s funding from moving to clinics, hospitals, and other organizations around the world. Now appointments are being canceled with patients being denied access to clinics. HIV patients’ ongoing treatment has come to a stop. And in this atmosphere of chaos, federal government officials have been ordered by the White House not to speak with partners outside of government, fueling worry and confusion. 

In addition, U.S. officials were told not to speak with their counterparts in foreign governments’ ministries of health, which could lead to worsening relations overseas. All of this follows an order issued to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Sunday night to stop all communications with the World Health Organization, including being present in the same real or digital meeting rooms. 

Officials around the world were told that PEPFAR’s data systems would shut down at 6 p.m. EST Monday, shutting off access to all data sets, reports, and analytical tools. The program’s official website has been taken down, although the State Department’s PEPFAR website is still up as of Tuesday morning.  

Some Republicans have opposed PEPFAR for years, arguing that it encourages abortions, but it was still given a one-year renewal last March. An interruption to the program could have drastic consequences for the spread of HIV and AIDS overseas. 

Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has long been a skeptic of public health programs and the WHO. These actions, coupled with Kennedy’s other plans if he’s confirmed, could have horrific effects on public health, both in the U.S. and around the world.

Trump has ordered a far-reaching pause on all federal loans and grants, putting multiple organizations in jeopardy and causing widespread confusion throughout the federal government.

Office of Management and Budget Director Matthew J. Vaeth issued a two-page memo Monday stating that federal agencies need to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance,” and any other programs that included “D.E.I., woke gender ideology and the Green New Deal.” The funding pause starts on Tuesday and will go through February. The rest of the details are unclear. 

“The use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism and Green New Deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” Vaeth continued in his memo.

But the Green New Deal was never an actual law, and how much federal funding is actually going toward “transgenderism”? The budget freeze is apparently making exceptions for people receiving “personal assistance,” but who falls under that umbrella is also up in the air. Will farmers and small-business owners be shut out of federal funding now too?  

Perhaps most troubling, the order seems to violate the impoundment law, which prevents presidents from withholding funding already approved by Congress. 

“This order is a potential five-alarm fire for nonprofit organizations and the people and communities they serve,” said Diane Yentel, the chief executive of the National Council of Nonprofits.

“From pausing research on cures for childhood cancer to halting food assistance, safety from domestic violence, and closing suicide hotlines, the impact of even a short pause in funding could be devastating and cost lives,” she continued. “This order could decimate thousands of organizations and leave neighbors without the services they need.”

Donald Trump’s Justice Department has already fired more than a dozen employees who were involved in the forty-seventh president’s criminal prosecution.

The mass firing targeted career prosecutors who had worked directly with former special counsel Jack Smith as he developed two cases against Trump: one on the forty-fifth president’s alleged retention of classified documents after he left the White House, and another on Trump’s involvement in the January 6 riots. Smith’s team had at least 40 attorneys investigating Trump after the end of his first term.

The matter boiled down to “trust” for the incoming administration, which claimed that the prosecutors had weaponized the government against the MAGA leader and had no place in a second Trump term.

“In light of their actions, the Acting Attorney General does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda. This action is consistent with the mission of ending the weaponization of government,” a spokesman told The Washington Post in a statement Monday.

The highly unusual firings are effective immediately, according to the Associated Press, which noted that rank-and-file prosecutors are rarely terminated by incoming administrations for their involvement in sensitive investigations.

Smith concluded his investigations shortly after Trump won the November election, citing statutes that prevent criminal investigations of a sitting president. He resigned from the Justice Department earlier this month, and the first volume of his final report—which focused on the details of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election—was released the following week under the direction of former Attorney General Merrick Garland. One line from the report plainly stated that Smith had obtained enough evidence to convict Trump had he not been reelected to the Oval Office.

The firing of Smith’s team follows a major reshuffling of key officials at the Justice Department, which last week conducted a leadership shakeup by reassigning as many as 20 senior officials to different departments.

The Quakers are suing Trump’s Department of Homeland Security for allowing ICE raids in places of worship.

The lawsuit, filed in Maryland on Monday by multiple different Quaker groups from across the country, states that “the very threat of [immigration] enforcement deters congregants from attending services, especially members of immigrant communities,” and notes that the raids infringe on religious freedom.

“A week ago today, President Trump swore an oath to defend the Constitution and yet today religious institutions that have existed since the 1600s in our country are having to go to court to challenge what is a violation of every individual’s constitutional right to worship and associate freely,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which is representing the Quaker groups in court. “The troubling nature of the policy goes beyond just houses of worship with sanctuary programs—it is that ICE could enter religious and sacred spaces whenever it wants.”

Trump rescinded the “sensitive locations” restriction on Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests last week, allowing federal agents to conduct raids in places that were deemed off limits in previous years, like schools, hospitals, and places of worship. The policy goes back to the 1990s, and was maintained even in Trump’s first term.

“Quaker meetings for worship seek to be a sanctuary and a refuge for all, and this new and invasive practice tangibly erodes that possibility by creating unnecessary anxiety, confusion, and chilling of our members’ and neighbors’ willingness to share with us in the worship which sustains our lives,” said Noah Merrill, secretary of the Quaker group the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends. “This undermines our communities and, we believe, violates our religious freedom.”

Fox News is trying to make adding Donald Trump to Mount Rushmore happen.

Following a MAGA push over the weekend to change the national monument, the hosts of Fox News’s Outnumbered praised the idea on Monday morning, with Harris Faulkner claiming “a growing number of conservatives are pushing to add Trump to the legendary monument.”

Contributor Jason Chaffetz, a former member of Congress, expressed his support for Trump being added to the South Dakota landmark.

“Hey, if there’s room up there I think it’d be great,” Chaffetz said. “I think what Donald Trump has done—and is in the process of doing—is transforming the United States of America and putting America first. And I think America loves it, and I think there’s a great case for it.”

Trump reportedly floated the idea of having his face added to the mountain during his first term in 2020, even asking South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (now his DHS secretary) about the possibility. Nothing came of it except for Noem gifting Trump an $1,100 bust of the monument with his face on it that same year.

This time around, the idea has gotten some attention on the right thanks to Trump’s former aide, conservative pundit Corey Lewandowski, who raised the idea on fellow right-wing pundit Benny Johnson’s show on Friday, suggesting a MAGA legislator could get the ball rolling. Representative Anna Paulina Luna then chimed in on X to say that she planned to introduce legislation to get Trump’s mug on the monument.

Leaving aside the absurdity of the idea, it’s not feasible—the National Park Service said in 2020 that there is no secure space on the mountain. Not to mention that any attempt would be quite an expense for the American taxpayer for an administration pledging to increase “government efficiency.”

Realizing this, other Fox personalities on Outnumbered floated changing the name of Dulles International Airport to Trump International Airport instead, likening it to Ronald Reagan National Airport in the D.C. metro area. That idea was floated last year by Republicans in Congress, only to be met with a tongue-in-cheek response from House Democrats to instead name a federal prison after the convicted felon president.

Now that Republicans have control of both houses of Congress with Trump in office, though, Trump will likely have his name or face on something before he leaves office. Hopefully, it’s something akin to the poor excuse for a state park that bears his name.

A Trump-aligned effort to make the Senate vote to confirm Tulsi Gabbard public could be what pushes the controversial nominee over the finish line.

Gabbard is the forty-seventh president’s pick for director of national intelligence, but in order to actually get the job, she’ll need the support of every single Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee—and it appears that she currently does not have the votes.

“I think it remains to be seen,” Republican Senator John Cornyn, an Intelligence Committee member, told The Hill of Gabbard’s odds. “I think the jury’s still out.”

The committee has a 9-8 split, with Republicans holding the majority. That means that just one Republican voting against Gabbard could compromise her nomination, should Democrats uniformly vote against her.

But a MAGA coalition in the Senate is trying to turn the traditionally closed vote into a public one in order to pressure Republicans on the committee from voting against Trump’s nominee, Politico reported Monday.

Doing so would break Intelligence Committee procedure: “While panel rules allow for the release of a vote tally, they do not allow for a public roll call of how each member voted. Members are free to disclose their votes if they wish,” an unidentified source familiar with the committee told Politico.

According to the outlet, Gabbard’s allies hope that forcing a public vote could scare any reticent Republicans into line. When a few Republican senators expressed concerns about Pete Hegseth, who was sworn in over the weekend as secretary of defense, MAGA fans and Elon Musk threatened to primary them in the 2026 midterms.

Gabbard is scheduled to participate in open and closed hearings before the committee on Thursday.

So far, Maine Senator Susan Collins has expressed frustration with Gabbard’s criticism of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows intelligence officials to conduct surveillance operations on foreign targets and Americans without a warrant.

“There are several questions I want to follow up on in the hearing,” Collins told The Hill, noting that she wants to hear Gabbard’s “unpracticed responses.”

Gabbard, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate turned MAGA acolyte, has also gotten heat from GOP lawmakers for her relationship with fallen Syrian dictator Bashar Al Assad, as well as her apparent affiliation with Russian media, her propensity for amplifying Russian propaganda, and spreading conspiracy theories.

In December, the editor in chief of the Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT said that Gabbard was one of the friendly faces in Trump’s proposed Cabinet that brought the Kremlin “lots of joy.”

If confirmed, Gabbard would be the first director of national intelligence to have never held any senior government roles. For reference on her relative lack of experience: Gabbard would replace Avril Haines, the first woman to serve in the role. Haines held top national security and intelligence positions before being appointed by President Joe Biden to the role, including serving as deputy national security adviser and deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration.

Senate Republicans are wary of Tulsi Gabbard, putting her confirmation as director of national intelligence in jeopardy.

The former Hawaii congresswoman’s confirmation hearings are scheduled for this week, along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s for secretary of health and human services, but Gabbard seems to be facing more opposition from the GOP, The Hill reports.

“I think it remains to be seen,” said Senator John Cornyn, a Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, regarding whether the committee will back Gabbard. “I think the jury’s still out.”

Another Republican senator told The Hill that Gabbard “has a path [that] continues to narrow.”

The committee is split 9–8 between Republicans and Democrats, meaning that Gabbard can’t lose a single GOP vote. Republican Senator Susan Collins is a member of the committee, and she was one of the three Republicans who voted against Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, necessitating a tiebreaker vote from Vice President JD Vance.

Collins said she was concerned about Gabbard’s stance on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows foreign targets to be surveilled without a warrant. As a member of the House in 2020, Gabbard proposed repealing the program, and has voted against reauthorizing it.

Gabbard claims to have changed her position recently, telling Punchbowl News that Section 702 is “crucial” and “must be safeguarded to protect our nation while ensuring the civil liberties of Americans.” But Collins isn’t Gabbard’s only GOP skeptic on the committee. Senator Todd Young has been described as being a “problem” for Gabbard by two GOP aides, according to The Hill.

“Those members are going to have a really hard time getting to ‘yes,’” said one of the aides. An aide also said that Senator Mitch McConnell, who was a “no” vote on Hegseth, is telling other Republicans that he is “adamantly” opposed to Gabbard’s appointment.

Even if Gabbard sways enough skeptics on the Intelligence Committee, she could face broader GOP opposition in the full Senate over her policy views, as well as her sympathies toward Russia and ousted Syrian President Bashar Al Assad. The question is whether that is enough to sink her nomination.

Forget about the price of eggs—Trump still wants to build the United States its own “iron dome.”

The president is set to sign an executive order that would begin the production of a “next generation” missile defense shield that would envelop the entire country.

“The order calls for an ‘Iron Dome’ for an America, borrowing the name of the short-range Israeli missile defense system that for years has been used to intercept launches from Gaza. The U.S. provided billions of dollars in funding to Iron Dome, and the US Army has its own system,” White House reporter Alayna Treene wrote on X.

The Israeli Iron Dome was a collaboration between Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and U.S. weapons manufacturer Raytheon that came online in 2011. It is not a literal iron dome but a system of “interceptor missiles” that can shoot down enemy missiles before they reach their targets

Even still, it’s hard to imagine a system that could do the same for the entirety of the continental U.S., as Trump has suggested multiple times before today.

“We will build a great iron dome over our country, a dome like has never seen before, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield that will be entirely built in America,” Trump said at a Wisconsin campaign rally last summer. “We are going to build the greatest dome of them all. You see what happened in Israel, they shot 3000 missiles and they knocked down almost all of them … we are entitled to that also, you know and it was our idea, by the way.”

The iron dome was also the eighth point of the first part of his campaign platform, as the president promised to “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY—ALL MADE IN AMERICA.”

National security analyst Joseph Cirincione has been highly skeptical since the beginning of Trump’s iron dome fantasy.

“[The] Iron Dome is designed to intercept short-range rockets, not intercontinental ballistic missiles. Each Iron Dome system can defend an area of roughly 150 square miles,” Cirincione wrote for the Defense One website last summer. “We would need to deploy more than 24,700 Iron Dome batteries to defend the 3.7 million square miles of the continental United States. At $100 million per battery, that would be approximately $2,470,000,000,000.”

Not only would this iron dome be a waste of time and effort, it would also cost three times more than America’s entire military budget for 2025.

Defending America’s police force is apparently no longer a priority for Republican leadership.

Five years after the party took a hard pro-police stance in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, Vice President JD Vance believes it’s okay to support individuals who beat and kill cops, so long as they do so in support of Donald Trump.

While listening to a list of January 6 offenders who had harmed police officers while invading the U.S. Capitol, Vance said he continued to “stand by” the decision to grant the violent attackers full, complete, and unconditional pardons.

“If you stand with law enforcement, how can you call these people unjustly imprisoned?” asked CBS’s Margaret Brennan on Sunday.

“Margaret, you’re separating—there’s an important issue here,” Vance said. “There’s what the people actually did on January the 6th, and we’re not saying everybody did everything perfectly, and then what did Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice do in unjustly prosecuting well over 1,000 Americans in a way that was politically motivated?”

“Is violence like that against a police officer ever justified?” pressed Brennan.

“Violence against a police officer is not justified but that does not mean that you should have Merrick Garland’s weaponized Department of Justice expose you to incredibly unfair process, to denial of constitutional rights, and frankly, to a double standard that was not applied to many people,” Vance responded.

“The pardon power is not just for people who are angels or people who are perfect. And of course, we love our law enforcement and want people to be peaceful, with everybody, but especially with our good cops. That’s a separate issue from what Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice did. We rectified a wrong, and I stand by it.”

Last week, the country’s most powerful police union torched Donald Trump for pardoning more than 1,500 people in connection with the January 6 riot, including individuals who attacked Capitol Police as they broke into the Capitol building.

“The [International Association of Chiefs of Police] and FOP are deeply discouraged by the recent pardons and commutations granted by both the Biden and Trump Administrations to individuals convicted of killing or assaulting law enforcement officers,” the Fraternal Order of Police said in a statement. “The IACP and FOP firmly believe that those convicted of such crimes should serve their full sentences. Crimes against law enforcement are not just attacks on individuals or public safety—they are attacks on society and undermine the rule of law. Allowing those convicted of these crimes to be released early diminishes accountability and devalues the sacrifices made by courageous law enforcement officers and their families.”

The both-sides statement was a humbling turnaround for the fraternal order, which endorsed Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Moments after the pardons were announced, the order initially reacted with “no statement” statement.

Even some of the people who raided the U.S. Capitol and received pardons do not believe they deserve the nation’s forgiveness. Former MAGA granny Pamela Hemphill, 71, rejected Trump’s offer of clemency last week after serving 60 days in jail on a misdemeanor charge for her role in the insurrection. In an interview with NPR on Thursday, Hemphill claimed that accepting the pardon “would be a slap in the face to the Capitol police officers, to the rule of law, to our whole nation.”

“You know, I broke the law that day—period, black and white. I’m not a victim. I’m a volunteer,” Hemphill said. “And I don’t want to be a part of them trying to rewrite history what really happened that day. So if I took a pardon, I’m saying, yeah, it’s OK what I did that day. No, it was not OK.”

Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts are already going too far and have caused Native Americans to be questioned and detained.

At least 15 Native people in New Mexico and Arizona have reported that they’ve been stopped, questioned, or detained by federal law enforcement officials during immigration roundup efforts since Wednesday, according to Navajo Nation officials. They were asked to provide proof of citizenship despite being Indigenous to the United States.

In a news release, the Navajo Nation said its officials contacted the governors of Arizona and New Mexico, the Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to follow up on the reports.

“My office has received multiple reports from Navajo citizens that they have had negative, and sometimes traumatizing, experiences with federal agents targeting undocumented immigrants in the Southwest,” said the office of Navajo President Buu Nygren.

One Navajo woman was reportedly questioned by ICE after her workplace in Scottsdale, Arizona, was raided Wednesday morning, and was asked to show proof that she was Native, Arizona state Senator Theresa Hatathlie, who is Diné/Navajo, told CNN. The woman and seven other Indigenous people were lined up behind white vans and questioned for two hours without a way to contact their families.

“Now is it ICE or some other entity? I don’t know,” said Hatathlie, whose district includes Navajo land. “I did work with some individuals to confirm whether or not ICE did do that worksite raid, but the communication back to me was that it’s not a normal practice for ICE to confirm a raid or not.”

The woman was eventually allowed to use her cell phone and contact family members for proof of Native citizenship and then was allowed to leave, Hatathlie said.

With Trump reportedly dissatisfied with the pace of deportations and urging higher detention numbers with higher-profile raids, incidents like these are sure to continue as officers rush to meet the administration’s quotas. Due diligence is going to be swept aside as long as the president and right-wing lawmakers can claim that they are deporting large numbers of undocumented immigrants. All the while, more citizens and legal immigrants are likely to be swept up.