Can John Fetterman Continue in the Senate?

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, a formerly progressive Democrat who has decidedly shifted right in recent years, delivered a hard-line—and honestly bloodthirsty—stance in opposition to a ceasefire in Gaza during a meeting with pro-Israel group J Street’s president Jeremy Ben-Ami in February.

“Let’s get back to killing,” Fetterman said, referring to Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians. A person who heard the conversation told New York magazine that Fetterman, a staunch supporter of Israel’s military campaign, advocated to “kill them all.”

Fetterman denied this account and insisted that if he’d advocated for slaughter, he was speaking solely about members of Hamas. “I do support the destruction of that organization, down to its last member,” he said.

These statements and others are part of what current and former staffers believe is a trend of troubling, erratic behavior from Fetterman, detailed in the sweeping report that was published Friday.

The senator’s unsettling behavior and “I’m not progressive” flip has driven out multiple staffers, including three of his top spokespeople and his legislative director. Adam Jentleson, his former chief of staff, was so concerned by Fetterman’s erratic behavior that he stepped down from his position in April 2024.

Shortly afterward, Jentleson wrote a lengthy email to David Williamson, the medical director of the traumatic brain injury and neuropsychiatry unit at Walter Reed Medical Center, detailing the radical changes he’d seen in his boss, believing that he may be severely struggling with his mental health following a stroke in 2022.

Among other serious concerns, like doubts that his boss was taking his medications, obvious lying, and the purchase of a firearm, Jentleson said that Fetterman was demonstrating “conspiratorial thinking” and “megalomania.”

Fetterman “claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news—he declines most briefings and never reads memos,” Jentleson wrote. During his meeting with Ben-Ami, Fetterman had claimed that he had never met an Arab person who would condemn Hamas, but the notes from the meeting stated that only a “single Arab he has met with that staff was present for wouldn’t outright condemn Hamas.”

Speaking about Palestinians, Fetterman said, “You can’t reform a carton of sour milk.”

After Israel set off on its genocidal campaign in Gaza, which has killed at least 52,000 people, following Hamas’s attack on October 7, Fetterman’s controversial social media posts alarmed staff members and constituents alike. Fetterman’s increasingly callous rhetoric about Palestine has manifested a sharp rift between him and the progressive staffers who saw him elected to the Senate in 2022.

Fetterman’s behavior is so concerning, it’s not clear if he’ll be able to continue in the Senate–let alone run for reelection in 2028, when his term ends.

Fetterman was also the first Democratic senator to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in January, earning him praise from the far-right president. “I couldn’t be more impressed,” Trump said at the time.

It’s not clear how much of Fetterman’s turn to the right is related to his health issues, and Jentleson was more concerned for his former boss’s well-being than his political transformation.

“I believed in John’s ability to work through struggles that lots of Americans share,” he said. “He’s not locked into a downward trajectory; he could get back in treatment at any time, and for a long time I held out hope that he would. But it’s just been too long now, and things keep getting worse.

“Part of the tragedy here is that this is a man who could be leading Democrats out of the wilderness,” Jentleson said. “But I also think he’s struggling in a way that shouldn’t be hidden from the public.”

The Department of Health and Human Services plans to end research into how to improve child welfare programs like Head Start, according to an email mistakenly sent by an HHS employee to grant recipients. 

The email contained a spreadsheet listing 150 research projects on HHS’s chopping block, including grants funded by the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation. The office’s mission is to build “evidence to improve lives” by helping to examine programs helping low-income children and families. 

Other research grants under consideration for termination are related to childcare policy, child development, foster care, preventing child abuse, and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Over 50 universities were listed as having their grants terminated in the document, with state agencies and nonprofits also at risk of losing funding. 

The possible cancellation of these grants comes after HHS already made heavy cuts to its Administration for Children and Families, which is closing five regional offices and fired hundreds of employees last month. In January, the office had 2,400 employees, and now it’s down to just 1,500. 

Head Start, which provides preschool and other education services for low-income children, was one of the first programs to be hit by the Trump administration’s federal funding freeze in February, which later ran into legal trouble. The White House then weakened the program with mass layoffs, and earlier this month even suggested eliminating the program entirely.

Now, the news that research examining and supporting Head Start could be cut is an ominous sign. The Trump administration seems intent on cutting the program and everything connected to it, even though it has widespread support from the public. Already, Head Start offices have closed around the country.  What will fill the void for low-income families in America?

The version of Signal that recently ousted national security adviser Mike Waltz was caught checking during a Cabinet meeting Wednesday is an unofficial edition of the app meant to archive messages, according to 404 Media. The archiving capability suggests that the app may not use end-to-end encryption, making it less secure than the standard version of Signal.

In the images, published by Reuters on Thursday, there is a visible message at the bottom of Waltz’s screen asking him to verify his “TM SGNL PIN.” This is different from the standard version of Signal, where this notification just reads “Verify your Signal PIN.” Not only was Waltz using a private, insecure platform to discuss highly sensitive information, he was using the least secure version of that platform to do so. “TM SGNL” refers to a program from software company TeleMessage that captures and stores Signal messages for the user.

White House communications director Steven Cheung on Thursday said that “Signal is an approved app that is loaded onto our government phones.” It’s not clear if other Trump officials are using the far less secure TM SGNL as well.

The latest controversy comes as both Waltz and current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have made headlines for multiple Signal chats. On Thursday, Trump removed Waltz from his post as national security adviser and nominated him to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

At least one Republican is thinking about the millions of Americans that depend on Medicaid.

Representative David Valadao, a California dairy farmer, represents more Medicaid recipients in his district than anyone else in his party. He also appears to be one of the few Republicans working overtime to keep the fallout of his party’s Medicaid slashing spree to a minimum.

Valadao has spent weeks coordinating group chats with other concerned conservatives and lobbying leadership over the proposed cuts. He also led a letter protest signed by a dozen vulnerable Republicans opposing the bill, all in hope of steering the party’s cart in a different direction from the steep cuts.

“He’s got a very good sense of what Americans need out of their health care. I appreciate his leadership,” New York Representative Nick LaLota, another vulnerable Republican, told Politico Friday. The two, according to LaLota, are in constant communication. “He’s been clear in his communications: We shouldn’t be throwing people off Medicaid who are designed to be on the program.”

Pennsylvania Representative Rob Bresnahan, who similarly has a lot of Medicaid recipients in his district, described Valadao as a “total pillar” of the internal Medicaid debate. “He’s someone I immediately gravitated to,” Bresnahan told Politico. “Just a great sounding board.”

Republicans have spent months attempting to pencil out a $880 billion cut to the program in order to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for corporations and billionaires in an effort to make the tax cut’s estimated $6.8 trillion deficit hike more palatable to their base.

But Valadao, for his part, knows that his political future depends on keeping his constituents happy. The lawmaker was one of many House Republicans to lose his job in 2018 after he voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act—a failed effort that would have stripped health insurance from millions of Americans.

By 2020, Valadao was back in office with a better grip on the stakes of the job. But this time around, Valadao and his cohort are already facing aggressive counter campaigns, featuring provocative TV ads and town hills that oppose the Republican-led cuts.

“We’re going through this partisan exercise to do what is supposed to be a tax bill, and it’s becoming a health care bill, which is what we’re trying to avoid, on an issue that desperately needs reform to make it better,” Valadao told Politico.

One much-discussed solution to square the Medicaid cuts is to make the program more exclusive by way of adding returning work requirements, which House Speaker Mike Johnson said in April would encourage young men to “be at work instead of playing video games all day.”

Republican proposals to introduce a work requirement to Medicaid have thus far asked recipients to navigate work-reporting and verification systems on a monthly basis—a detail that would require significant federal funding. The plans would also negate coverage for individuals who find themselves temporarily unemployed, such as those who were recently fired or laid off.

A February report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that introducing work requirements to the insurance program could strip upwards of 36 million Americans of their health coverage—half of Medicaid’s 72 million enrollees.

Happy birthday, Mr. President—it looks like Donald Trump may be getting his wish of a massive parade in his honor.

The Associated Press reported late Thursday that the Army’s most recent plans to celebrate its 250th anniversary include a large military parade scheduled to take place on June 14, which just happens to be the day Trump will turn 79 years old.

They say age is just a number, but the plan’s hefty price tag is very, very real.

The Army’s blueprints call for a whopping 6,600 soldiers, several Army bands, 50 helicopters, and at least 150 vehicles, which could include historic Army vehicles and even tanks that could significantly damage the streets of Washington, D.C.

When Trump first pitched having a military parade in the nation’s capital in 2018, plans were abandoned due to the exorbitant cost: roughly $92 million. Imagining that these plans include many of the same features as the ones from seven years ago, inflation would put the price tag closer to $117 million. Not to mention the cost of the Army festival already planned for the National Mall.

Plans for an expensive and frivolous military parade obviously fly in the face of the Trump administration’s supposedly necessary cost-cutting measures. In reality, the cuts are more punitive than actually thrifty. Trump signed an executive order Friday directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stop allocating funds to PBS and NPR. The CPB disperses $535 million in taxpayer funds to public stations for educational and cultural programming. That amount is apportioned by Congress, placing the funding outside of Trump’s realm of control.

With the massive cuts to educational public programming, the president can almost afford to throw his lavish birthday party. But he’d still need to scrape together several additional millions.

President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order that ends public government funding of NPR and PBS in yet another culturally polarized attack on anything deemed “woke.”

“Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options,” the executive order reads. “Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”

This order is more symbolic than anything, as both NPR and PBS receive most of their funding from independent sponsors. And yet the order would limit funding to rural areas in particular, as those stations receive the most of the sliver of government funding that NPR and PBS receive.

“This order defies the will of the American people and would devastate the public safety, educational and local service missions of public media—services that the American public values, trusts and relies on every day,” said America’s Public Television Stations CEO Kate Riley. She went on to note that those rural stations provide a “lifeline in hundreds of communities where there is no other source of local media.”

Donald Trump is trying to force Harvard University into subservience, and on Friday he announced that the institution will lose its tax-exempt status. 

“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” Trump posted on Truth Social. 

The move comes after weeks of threats following Harvard President Alan Garber’s announcement last month that the university would not give in to the Trump administration’s demands, outlined in a letter from the Department of Education. These included discontinuing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, reforming Harvard’s admissions process for international students, and dismantling programs with “egregious records of antisemitism.”

Following Harvard’s reply, Trump cut $2.2 billion in grants to the school along with a $60 million contract. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem also demanded records on the “illegal and violent” activities of the institution’s international students, threatening to end Harvard’s ability to enroll any future international students if it didn’t comply.

Trump followed up with plans to pull $1 billion in medical grants to the university, accusing Harvard of “grandstanding” by publicly refusing to defy the White House. But the university isn’t backing down, and has the support of its staff: Over 80 faculty members have pledged to donate 10 percent of their salaries for up to a year to support the university’s cause, with the list growing.  

It’s all part of conservatives’ war on higher education, which they see as a liberal bastion in American life. Many on the right were also incensed at university protests across the country against Israel’s war in Gaza over the past year. Now, it seems that Trump is threatening the existence of America’s oldest university as a show of force. 

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration has shut down a Biden-era program to end sewage backups into central Alabama homes, labeling the whole thing “illegal DEI.”

NBC News reports that Trump ended the $26 million effort to rebuild water infrastructure in Lowndes County earlier this month, with an executive order. The program was meant to end 14 years of sewage backing up into homes in the majority-Black area. The Department of Justice’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harmeet Dhillon, said, in accordance with the order, that the DOJ “will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens.”

In 2023, an independent investigation by the DOJ found that the county’s low-income residents, mostly Black, have not had basic sanitation for generations. Human wastewater is piped into ditches and poorly constructed systems instead of wastewater systems, leaving sewage to collect in yards, open areas, and woods.

Increased rainfall in recent years due to climate change has led to contaminated water flooding into homes, vegetation, and even drinking water. It’s not uncommon for untreated sewage to back up into residents’ backyards, or even sinks and bathtubs. A 2017 study found that a third of the county’s adults suffered from ringworm, an intestinal parasite that was thought to have been eradicated in the U.S. More than 300 families in Lowndes County have to deal with this problem.

“We have to be extra sanitary because people getting sick can be a problem,” Annye Burke, a local resident, told NBC. “The health concerns are real. In 2025 we shouldn’t have to deal with this, but it is what it is.”

The Alabama Department of Health had neglected the problem, showing “a consistent pattern of inaction and/or neglect concerning the health risks associated with exposure to raw sewage,” according to the DOJ’s 2023 investigation. The ADH told NBC that “the installation of sanitation systems and related infrastructure is outside the authority or responsibilities.”

According to the Trump administration, it’s not the federal government’s responsibility either. The White House has also moved to end environmental justice in the Environmental Protection Agency, which would hurt similar efforts across the country to end environmental hazards in different communities, the majority of which are in areas where Trump supporters live. It seems that ensuring people can live free in uncontaminated areas is too woke for the right wing.

Donald Trump’s announcement Thursday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio would replace Mike Waltz to serve as the interim national security adviser appears to have taken the State Department completely by surprise.

When a reporter asked State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce during a press briefing about Rubio’s new role, she was visibly caught unawares.

“It is clear that I just heard this from you,” Bruce said.

A flustered Bruce couldn’t answer questions about the announcement, clearly reeling. “Well, I have some insights as to the potential of certain things that might happen,” she vamped.

“You can have a general sense of what’s possible, and then you see that manifest usually, but I think that one thing certainly that I have learned is that things don’t happen until the president says they’re going to happen,” she added, another incredible non-statement.

Bruce admitted she’d been caught off guard, incredulously attributing Trump’s sudden announcement to “the miracle of modern technology.”

If the State Department’s spokesperson wasn’t made aware of the announcement, it’s likely that Trump’s decision was not given much time to marinate at the State Department, raising questions about whether Rubio had any advance notice at all that he’d be taking on yet another government job.

Rubio now wears several hats for the Trump administration. The secretary is also serving as the head of what remains of USAID and the acting archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration—and in doing so, has found himself leading both an agency that has violated the Federal Records Act and the one that is meant to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Bruce’s apparent shock also raised even more questions about the circumstances surrounding Waltz’s sudden departure earlier Thursday. The former national security adviser, who was responsible for precipitating the Signalgate scandal that rocked the White House, will now serve as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.

Mike Waltz, the Trump adviser who accidentally invited a journalist to a war plans group chat on Signal, was caught casually scrolling through his Signal messages during a Cabinet meeting Thursday. Calls and messages to or from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Vice President JD Vance could be seen on his phone, which appeared to have no privacy screen and the brightness raised to the max.

Waltz, who was White House national security adviser at the time the photos were taken, seemed to think it was a good idea to use Signal in a room full of reporters.

Trump announced Thursday that Waltz will be leaving his post as national security adviser. Instead, he’s being nominated as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Maybe he’ll find a privacy screen by the time he starts his new job.