Federal Judge Rips Trump to Pieces, Blocks Freeze on Harvard Funding

A federal judge on Wednesday blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze $2 billion of government funding to Harvard University, dealing a notable blow to the president’s attempt to “unwoke” academia under the guise of stopping antisemitism.

“The Court grants Harvard’s request for a permanent injunction that prevents Defendants reimposing any unconstitutional conditions imposed to date, and enjoins Defendants from issuing any other termination, freezing of funds, stop work orders, or withholding of payment on existing grants or other federal funding, or refusal to award future grants, contracts, or other federal funding to Harvard in retaliation for the exercise of its First Amendment rights,” Judge Allison D. Burrough wrote.

Burrough also dissected the administration’s antisemitism justification in just a few sentences.

“A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that [the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services] used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of the [Administrative Procedure Act], the First Amendment and Title VI,” Burroughs wrote pointedly. “Further, their actions have jeopardized decades of research and the welfare of all those who could stand to benefit from that research, as well as reflect a disregard for the rights protected by the Constitution and federal statutes.”

“The record here … does not reflect that fighting antisemitism was Defendants’ true aim in acting against Harvard and, even if it were, combatting antisemitism cannot be accomplished on the back of the First Amendment,” she added.

Burroughs stated the obvious: The Trump administration doesn’t actually care about antisemitism, they’re just looking for something to use to excuse their right-wing takeover of some of America’s top colleges and universities. This is pure culture war.

This story has been updated.

Over 1,000 current and former employees of the Department of Health and Human Services have demanded that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. resign for “placing the health of all Americans at risk.”  

The signatories, who released the letter on Wednesday, include representatives from a number of health-related agencies, such as the Administration for Children and Families, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, and more. 

After a reportedly anti-vax shooter attacked the CDC on August 8, a number of federal health employees sent a letter to Kennedy, urging him to stop spreading false information about Covid-19. But now, as Kennedy “continues to endanger the nation’s health,” these horrified federal workers, scientists, and physicians are leveling up their demands.

 Last week, Kennedy fired CDC Director Susan Monarez, which spurred the resignations of multiple other high-ranking officials. Demetre Daskalakis, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, was one of those who stepped down. He shared his resignation letter on X, writing: “I am unable to serve in an environment that treats the CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.”

Current and former employees cited these examples, along with Kennedy’s appointment of “political ideologues who pose as scientific experts,” his refusal to be briefed by CDC experts, and his rescinding of the FDA’s emergency use authorization for the Covid vaccine, as reasons they were demanding  Kennedy’s resignation.

“We swore an oath to support and defend the United States Constitution and to serve the American people. Our oath requires us to speak out when the Constitution is violated and the American people are put at risk,” employees wrote.

The letter is also addressed to Congress. If Kennedy refuses to step down, the signatories requested that Congress and the president appoint someone new to take his place. 

But for the sake of these federal employees, and the health of all Americans, let’s hope it doesn’t get to the point where relying on the sanity and compassion of congressional Republicans is our only option.

President Trump is considering offering jobs to New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for him dropping out of the crowded general election. This would give former Governor Andrew Cuomo a better chance of beating Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani in the general election in November.

Politico reported that Adams was offered a position at the Department of Housing and Urban Development for his withdrawal, after going to Florida to meet with Trump’s staff on Monday. The New York Times reported that Trump is also considering offering a job to Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa in order to swing the race even further.

Adams has denied reports that he’d end his campaign early to join team Trump.

“Mayor Adams has not met with Donald Trump—don’t believe the noise,” said Adams campaign spokesperson Todd Shapiro. “He is not dropping out of the race.”

Adams didn’t fully close the door to dropping out of the election, though, telling FOX5 Wednesday, “Whenever I make a move, I’ll make an announcement.”

These reports are not shocking, as Trump is essentially the reason Adams isn’t actively on trial or in jail right now. After months of Adams shamelessly flattering, imitating, and breaking bread with Trump and his inner circle, the Justice Department dismissed his corruption case in a quid pro quo deal that threw Adams’s own constituents under the bus. And corruption still follows Adams even after that massive favor, with his former chief adviser now facing corruption charges and his former Asian community liaison caught bribing a reporter with a wad of cash in a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips. And that’s not to mention the former cops suing Adams for running the NYPD like a “criminal enterprise.”

Adams’s campaign is flailing badly in the face of all this, making reports of his exit all the more plausible. The most recent polling has him at a measly third place as an independent, at about 11 percent, well behind Mamdani and Cuomo. This, compared with his past fealty, makes a move to HUD or somewhere similar feel as certain as his election loss.

Cuomo has also sidled up to Trump, although less publicly than Adams. And while he denies that he’s spoken to Trump directly about the race, all of his actions have implied that he’s hoping for some rhetorical support against Mamdani from an old family friend.

“We can minimize [the Sliwa] vote, because he’ll never be a serious candidate,” Cuomo said at a fundraiser in the Hamptons last month. “And Trump himself, as well as top Republicans, will say the goal is to stop Mamdani. And you’ll be wasting your vote on Sliwa. So I feel good about that.”

“Let’s put it this way: I knew the president very well,” he continued. “I believe there’s a big piece of him that actually wants redemption in New York. He feels that he was rejected by New York. We voted for Hillary Clinton. Bill de Blasio took his name off things. So I believe there will be opportunities to actually cooperate with him.”

Whoever you choose to believe, it’s clear that wealthy, elite Democrats would rather work with the man they’ve been calling an “existential threat to democracy” for nearly a decade than throw their support behind the young, charismatic leader who their own voters chose.

The New York City mayoral election is on November 4.

President Donald Trump may have his eyes set on a new target for his military takeover of American cities, and this time it’s in a Republican-led state.

While speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump floated the possibility of expanding his largely baseless military crackdown.

“We’re making a determination now,” Trump said. “Do we go to Chicago, or do we go to a place like New Orleans, where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to straighten out a very nice section of this country that’s become quite, you know, quite tough, quite bad?”

“So we’re going to be going to maybe Louisiana,” Trump added.

Louisiana is one state that could probably use help getting its crime rate down—if only Trump were interested in doing it the legal way. Instead, his administration has cut more than $800 million in Justice Department grants to crime-prevention programs.

In 2024, New Orleans had a homicide rate of 34.7 murders per 100,000 residents, while the rate in Washington D.C., where Trump instituted a federal crackdown earlier this summer, was 27.3 per 100,000 residents, according to a report from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The rest of Louisiana isn’t in the clear, either. In 2024, Baton Rouge had a murder rate of 36 people per 100,000, and Shreveport, which is in House Speaker Mike Johnson’s district, landed at #25 on Newsweek’s recent list of the 30 U.S. cities (with at least 100,000 residents) that had the highest number of violent crimes against people.

Still, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry had approved sending some of his state’s National Guard troops to Washington D.C. to assist in Trump’s so-called crackdown on crime in the capital, despite the fact that his own state has far higher crime rates.

Trump’s reference to a pliant Landry was likely a dig at Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who has consistently hit back at the president’s advances to send the military to Chicago. “I want to go into Chicago,” Trump pouted Wednesday, during the same press conference. “And I have this incompetent governor who doesn’t want us.”

So far, Trump’s use of National Guard troops to counter crime has been focused on Democratic cities. On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard in Los Angeles had blatantly violated the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, an act prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law.

While the decision apparently infuriated the president, who has claimed he has “the right to do anything” he wants, Trump appears reluctant to help anyone who isn’t willing to beg him for it.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on Wednesday announced that the state will become the first in the country to end all vaccine mandates.

“The Florida Department of Health, in partnership with the governor, is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates in Florida law,” Ladapo said. “All of them. All of them. All of them. Every last one of them.

“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” he continued.

According to Ladapo, Florida’s Health Department mandates “maybe a half a dozen” vaccines. “So those are going to be gone for sure,” he said. “And we’re going to be working with our amazing Governor DeSantis and our wonderful lawmakers to get rid of the rest of it.”

Florida currently requires vaccines for kids to attend public school, including for diseases like measles, polio, chicken pox, and hepatitis B.

“Today is a great day for chickenpox, measles, and polio in Florida,” wrote state Senator Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democrat, on X in response to the news.

Democratic state Representative Anna V. Eskamani called the move “a public health disaster in the making for the Sunshine State,” as it will “drive down immunization rates” and “open the door to outbreaks of preventable diseases, putting children, seniors, and vulnerable Floridians at risk.”

At the same Wednesday event, DeSantis announced the establishment of the Florida MAHA Commission, a working group chaired by his wife, Casey DeSantis, and Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins.

The new commission will, per the governor, “recommend state-level integration” of the “Make America Healthy Again” principles espoused by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who is currently dismantling the nation’s public health infrastructure and stoking vaccine skepticism as the head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

California, Oregon, and Washington are joining forces to combat Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s dismantling of public health infrastructure, the states announced Wednesday.

The coalition of the three Democratic-run states will work together to set evidence-based health policy and guidelines, separate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations. This move comes after a week of chaos at the CDC after RFK Jr. fired the agency’s director. Several other high-ranking officials resigned in protest.

“President Trump’s mass firing of CDC doctors and scientists—and his blatant politicization of the agency—is a direct assault on the health and safety of the American people. The CDC has become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science, ideology that will lead to severe health consequences. California, Oregon, and Washington will not allow the people of our states to be put at risk,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a press release.

According to the announcement, the new “Health Alliance” will focus largely on vaccine and immunization recommendations. The alliance attempts to ensure that manufacturers, health plans, doctors, and residents alike can get scientifically proven guidance, regardless of what’s happening on the federal level.

“Our commitment is to the health and safety of our communities, protecting lives through prevention, and not yielding to unsubstantiated theories that dismiss decades of proven public health practice,” said Dennis Worsham, Washington’s secretary of health.

President Trump on Wednesday called bipartisan demands to release the Epstein files a “Democrat hoax,” moments after survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse demanded he stop calling it that and made direct, impassioned appeals for his support in their fight. 

“There have been survivors of Jeffrey Epstein speaking at a press conference on Capitol Hill, they’re calling for these case files, these documents to be released,” a reporter told Trump during his press conference with Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s far-right president. “Thomas Massie, who is sponsoring a discharge petition to get the House to vote on the release of these documents, says he doesn’t think you’re implicated in these files, but many of your friends and donors may be. He says that’s why the Justice Department is redacting them and slow-walking the release. Is the Justice Department protecting any friends or donors, sir?” 

Trump immediately dismissed the victims and their claims, something he’s done since this devastating story took over the news cycle earlier this summer. 

“So this is a Democrat hoax that never ends,” Trump said. “You know, it reminds me a little of the Kennedy situation; we gave ’em everything. Over and over again, more and more and more. And nobody’s ever satisfied. From what I understand—I could check—but from what I understand, thousands of pages of documents have been given. But it’s really a Democrat hoax. Because they’re trying to get people to talk about something that’s totally irrelevant to the success that we’ve had as a nation since I’ve been president.” 

The victims, who find this all extremely relevant, had asked the president to stop calling it a hoax at their own press conference moments earlier. Haley Robson also addressed him directly. 

“Mr. President Donald J. Trump, I am a registered Republican, not that that matters because this is not political. However, I cordially invite you to the Capitol to meet me in person so you can understand this is not a hoax,” said Robson, when asked about Trump’s repeated dismissal of the case. “We are real human beings. This is real trauma.… We’re here in person. To say that it’s a hoax is just not … please humanize us. I would like Donald J. Trump and every person in America and around the world to humanize us, and to hear us for what we have to say.”

“I don’t want to send a direct message to [President Trump]; I’m already scared enough,” added Marina Lacerda, who came out for the first time publicly as one of Epstein’s victims, detailing her abuse from the ages of 14 to 17. “Just pass the vote, listen to us. This is not a hoax. Like, it’s not gonna go away. Like I said in my speech earlier, we are not gonna be silenced anymore. We will be speaking moving forward; wherever we need to be we will be, and we need to pass this.”

Trump’s dismissal of this is despicable and could very well backfire as the Epstein files return to the news cycle. The “thousands of pages of documents” the Justice Department and House Republicans have released are full of old, redacted information, and even duplicate pages to make it seem like a bigger dump. Rather than release the files in full, Trump and his Justice Department have done everything in their power to avoid giving these abused women the transparency they promised them and every American.

“[Epstein] abused not only me but countless others, and everyone seemed to look away,” said Chauntae Davis, another survivor who was abused by Epstein for four years. “The truth is, Epstein had a free pass. He bragged about his powerful friends, including our current president, Donald Trump. It was his biggest brag, actually.”  

At a Wednesday morning press conference, victims of Jeffrey Epstein slammed the Trump administration for its lack of transparency, and demanded the release of all documents regarding the late sex criminal and former self-described “closest friend” of Donald Trump.

Survivor Chauntae Davies also shared information about the relationship between Epstein and Trump, during remarks about how Epstein’s powerful connections caused her to feel helpless to seek recourse for the abuse she experienced.

“Epstein surrounded himself with the most powerful leaders of our country and the world,” Davies said. “He abused not only me but countless others, and everyone seemed to look away. The truth is, Epstein had a free pass. He bragged about his powerful friends, including our current president, Donald Trump. It was his biggest brag, actually.”

Later, she again recalled Epstein boasting about his relationship with Trump. “His biggest brag, forever, was that he was very good friends with Donald Trump,” she said. “He had an 8x10 framed picture of him on his desk, with the two of them. They were very close.”

As Epstein’s victims continue applying pressure on Congress to order the release of the Epstein files—which could be possible with just two more GOP votes—Trump on Wednesday repeated his accusation that the whole affair is a “Democrat hoax that never ends.”

President Donald Trump’s administration has hit a disturbing new economic milestone: For the first time since April 2021, the number of unemployed Americans has surpassed the stock of available jobs.

In July, there were 7.24 million job seekers and 7.18 million open positions, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. The number of open jobs had dropped from 7.4 million in June.

“This is yet another crack in the labor market that illustrates how much harder it is to get a new job right now than what we’ve seen in a long time,” wrote Heather Long, the chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union, on X.

She noted that while the final tally of jobs might be subject to revision, there was an observable and “straightforward” trend. In June and July the U.S. also experienced its lowest hiring rate since 2013, Long wrote in a separate post.

Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, said that the latest numbers signaled “softening labor market conditions.”

“The job openings-to-unemployed ratio fell below 1.0 for the first time since April 2021, signaling a loosening demand for workers,” she wrote in a statement.

Last month, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned that the economic slowdown was “much larger” than originally assessed in June, pointing to the revised July jobs report, which showed a stark contrast from the growth felt during the same period in 2024. He said the economy was suffering from decreased demand as well as decreased supply.

“This unusual situation suggests that downside risks to employment are rising. And if those risks materialize, they can do so quickly in the form of sharply higher layoffs and rising unemployment,” he said.

“This slowdown is much larger than assessed just a month ago, as the earlier figures for May and June were revised down substantially. But it does not appear that the slowdown in job growth has opened up a large margin of slack in the labor market—an outcome we want to avoid,” Powell said. Now it seems that “slack” may have started to appear.

The House committee investigating Jeffrey Epstein released another batch of documents as part of the so-called “Epstein files”—but journalists were quick to notice the similarities between the latest dump and past disclosures.

“I reviewed some of the 33,000 pages last night. Of note is how many of those pages are simply DUPLICATES of the same (old) reports—page after page, in order to make it APPEAR that this is a big document dump,” wrote Julie K. Brown, a Miami Herald journalist and author of a book on Epstein, on X. “This tactic is a recurring effort to deceive the public.”

The House Oversight Committee had obtained the files from the Justice Department in response to a subpoena by House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky. The Trump administration has been under fire for its lack of transparency on the infamous sex offender’s case, and for the president’s open disdain for those still pursuing justice.

Much of the latest batch of documents is comprised of old and already-released information: public fillings in Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal cases, the transcript of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s interview with Maxwell that was released in August, and video from inside the prison where Epstein died, according to NBC.

Meanwhile, victims of Epstein and Maxwell are demanding that the administration stand on the side of survivors and release the rest of the files.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Marina Lacerda spoke publicly for the first time about the abuse she suffered at the hands of Epstein for three years, which she said started when she was 14 years old. But she said that trauma has clouded her memory of the events, causing “so much fear and so much confusion.”

“My therapist says that my brain is just trying to protect itself, but it’s so hard to begin to heal knowing that there are people out there who know more about my abuse than I do,” Lacerda said.

“The worst part is that the government is still in possession right now … of the documents and information about, that could help me remember and get over all of this, maybe, and help me heal. They have documents with my name on them that were confiscated from Jeffrey Epstein’s house,” she said. “But I don’t have any of it.”

Until the public gets full transparency on Epstein—and the powerful people in his orbit who abused women and children, and those who were and are complicit in keeping his secrets—survivors like Lacerda cannot find peace. Showy binders and duplicate documents simply won’t cut it.