Dolly Parton, Country Singer Who Crossed All Party Lines, Dies at 80

Dolly Parton, the award-winning singer, songwriter, actress, philanthropist, and all-around all-star human being, died on Tuesday at the age of 80.

Her death was announced by Bryan Seaver, her nephew and head of security, in a video posted to her official Instagram. As a prolific country singer and humanitarian, Parton’s work transcended the stark political boundaries that have set in across the modern cultural landscape.

“I don’t do politics,” Parton once said on a podcast. “I have too many fans on both sides of the fence. Of course, I have my opinion about everything, but I learned years ago to keep your mouth shut about things.” She even joked about avoiding political rallies. “I think my joke is that my daddy was a Republican, and my momma was a Democrat, and I’m a hypocrite!”

Rather than shilling for politicians or parties, Parton’s values were brightly illuminated in her more than 3,000 original songs—including the pro-labor anthem “9 to 5”—as well as her extensive work as a humanitarian.

Here, she revealed her beliefs without ever having to declaim them. Over the course of her career, Parton urged her fellow Christians to accept and embrace members of the LGBTQ community and defended the rights of transgender people—making her a target for certain figures on the right. She was an outspoken supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, and she donated the royalties from Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” to the Black community in Nashville. During one of this country’s darkest moments in 2020, Parton donated $1 million to coronavirus research at Vanderbilt University, which helped fund Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine.

She also founded the Dollywood Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at improving education and uplifting children, donated money for cancer research and treatment, and set up funds for victims of natural disasters. Her Imagination Library provides free books to children all around the world.

Already, politicians who didn’t agree with Parton’s actual values are mourning her death. President Donald Trump posted a statement calling her “one of the greatest Country singers, and far beyond, EVER.” Even he can’t deny that essential truth—nor could he deny her the memorial she deserved by flying the American flag at half-staff.

In the end, everybody loved Dolly Parton, and she loved everybody too. There’s probably something we can learn from that.

Calls for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s resignation are growing after two unvaccinated people died from measles in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. There have been 393 confirmed measles cases in 28 counties in Pennsylvania this year, and 2,777 total cases nationally—a 35-year high.

These are the first measles deaths in the United States this year, and in Pennsylvania in more than three decades.

“RFK Jr.’s lies and conspiracy theories are making Marylanders sick,” Democratic Maryland Senator Angela Alsobrooks wrote Tuesday on X. “RFK Jr. must resign or be fired. Vaccines are safe and effective. Listen to your pediatrician.”

“Measles is officially out of control. How many more people need to die before there is a nationwide call for RFK Jr. to resign?” said Shaughnessy Naughton, president of the pro-science organizing group 3.14 Action. “His anti-science, anti-vaccine policies are killing people and infecting a generation of Americans with dangerous vaccine skepticism that will take years to recover from.”

These are just the latest calls for Kennedy Jr.’s resignation as he systematically sabotages vaccine science.

“There is one effective way to reduce the spread and severity of measles: vaccination. And RFK Jr. has undermined it at every turn,” Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock wrote on X last month. “He is a hazard to our health and must resign.”

While Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro stopped short of calling for Kennedy Jr.’s resignation Tuesday, he did tell reporters he had a “blunt” conversation with the health secretary.

“His actions and the rhetoric that’s coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America, particularly right here in Pennsylvania,” he said. “Sharing conspiracy theories and misinformation does not help the cause of public health—and it leaves people less healthy and less safe, and it leaves parents in a position where it’s harder for us to do our jobs to protect our children.”

The Trump administration, in its ongoing effort to shatter previous world records for spitefulness, is threatening to demolish the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts if it is not allowed to put Donald Trump’s name on it.

In a court filing Monday, prosecutors suggested that the proposed $250 million renovation project—which includes tacking the president’s name to the facade of the building—was necessary for the institution’s survival, The New York Times reported.

“Without those efforts, the center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down,” the filing said, “with a determination to follow on what to build on the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years.”

In reality, Trump’s overhaul of the prestigious national theater has only hastened its demise. The Kennedy Center is on track to fall $100 million short of its profit goal, and the shortfall can be directly tied to Trump changing the institution’s name. It expects to miss its budget target by 70 percent and contributed revenue by 25 percent, a projected $23 million deficit.

The Kennedy Center has become an outlet for the Trump administration’s shocking pettiness. The Trump-appointed Kennedy Center board first tried to close the center in May, after multiple artists canceled their performances in response to the proposed name change. Democratic Ohio Representative Joyce Beatty successfully challenged the decision in court.

The renovations were blocked by U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, who argued that the board’s decision was “ill-informed and seemingly preordained.” Trump’s name was then scraped off the wall, and the building’s facade has remained concealed by a massive tarp.

Earlier this month, the board voted again, this time deciding to close the center for two years so that it can renovate the building in Trump’s image. Now Beatty has asked a federal judge to once again keep Trump’s name off of another man’s memorial.

A court has ordered the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to disclose to immigrants’ rights groups how involved it was in getting tax and Social Security information shared with the Department of Homeland Security. 

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled Monday that the government has to turn over the records after refusing requests to do so as part of a lawsuit against Trump administration officials, Bloomberg reports. The government has until September 14 to comply with the ruling, Talwani said, adding that its refusal constituted “another significant gap precluding the court from evaluating Plaintiffs’ claims.”

As part of President Trump’s mass deportation agenda, DHS and the IRS reached an agreement to share taxpayer information to find undocumented immigrants. Immigration advocacy groups sued to stop the data sharing, and a federal court granted them a preliminary injunction in February limited to the IRS. 

Talwani rejected the government’s claims that it handed over all of the legally required materials to the groups suing it, saying that federal agencies also had to turn over DOGE’s communications, as well as those from inside the Social Security Administration. However, the judge granted the government one reprieve, saying that it does not need to turn over the actual data the SSA shared with DHS or the names and contact information of SSA employees involved in the data sharing. 

DOGE, spearheaded by tech oligarch Elon Musk, was given unprecedented access to internal government data from the start of Trump’s second term. Almost every agency was mined, including the SSA, the Treasury Department including the IRS, and Medicare and Medicaid records. All of this was ostensibly to root out waste, fraud, and abuse while increasing efficiency, although that never happened. 

Musk’s businesses, including his artificial intelligence company xAi, could have benefited from this information, but that is still under investigation. What is known is that the data definitely helped and continues to help Trump’s efforts to deport millions of immigrants. Now the public will get at least a small look into how DOGE helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s violent deportation efforts.  

Is the Republican Party going to spend the election season running away from Donald Trump? If Ralph Alvarado, a Republican candidate running for Kentucky’s 6th congressional district, is any sign of things to come, then maybe so.

This week, Alvarado stripped mentions of the president’s agenda from his campaign materials, apparently deciding that being too tied to Trump would hinder rather than help his odds come November.

Before-and-after screenshots of Alvarado’s campaign website, captured by NBC News’s Sahil Kapur, reveal that Alvarado’s messaging has switched from marking him as an “America First Fighter” to “Independent Leadership.”

On June 9, Alvarado’s website proudly displayed his loyalty to the president, claiming in a subheading that “President Trump needs more allies in Congress to deliver on his bold vision to Make America Great Again. With your help, I will be that fighter.”

By August 24, the physician’s tune had changed. The new text in that space reads: “Healthcare isn’t a talking point to me—it’s been my life’s work. In Congress, I’ll work with both parties to fight for affordable healthcare, lower costs, and practical solutions that help Kentucky families.”

A photo of Alvarado standing beside Trump was also removed from campaign materials. In place of a paragraph that once described Alvarado as “one of President Trump’s earliest supporters” and detailed his determination to “stop the woke agenda,” new language now frames him as an ardent supporter of bipartisanship, singularly focused on bringing down health care and affordability costs.

He’s not the only one to make a change. Andy Biggs, the MAGA Republican running in Arizona’s gubernatorial race, originally pushed campaign signs that championed the fact that he was “Trump endorsed” in bold, black lettering above his own name. That no longer seems to be the case. Biggs’s campaign has since erected modified signs that added the name of Biggs’s running mate, Sine Kerr, and stripped any mention of the president from his roadside advertising. (Unlike Alvarado, Biggs’s website still mentions that he was endorsed by Trump.)

Recent polling offers some insight behind these curious changes. A Reuters/Ipsos poll published Tuesday suggests that the president’s influence is waning: Just 13 percent of Americans strongly approve of the president—down from 23 percent who felt the same way this time last year, according to data from a 2025 YouGov Poll.

Republican attitudes toward Trump have also changed, according to the Reuters/Ipsos poll. Just 35 percent of conservatives surveyed said they “strongly approved” of Trump’s job during his second term. In the same poll, 41 percent of registered voters said that they would vote for a Democratic candidate if the presidential election were conducted today.

Midterm-bound Republicans were explicitly encouraged by the White House as well as party leadership last month to break from Trump in an effort to save their election chances.

“The understanding is pretty damn implicit: The president is going to say what the president is going to say,” a Republican operative working on the party’s midterm races told MS NOW in July. “You’re not going to have candidates or lawmakers running out to defend the president’s handling of the economy or the war—polling shows that most people don’t agree with his handling.”