In June, the Trump administration announced plans to effectively transfer two core functions of the Department of Education to other agencies, putting Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of special-education services and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in charge of the DOE’s civil-rights arm. Advocates had anticipated the moves after Trump signed a 2025 executive order calling for the elimination of the DOE, a goal of Project 2025, but that didn’t make the news any less disturbing, particularly in light of Kennedy’s previous comments about autistic people. At a news conference in April 2025, the health secretary declared autism an “epidemic,” stating that autistic people will “never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date.” Doubling down on his fearmongering rhetoric, he promised to find an environmental cause for the rise in autism diagnoses—although years of research have already concluded that there are multiple causes for the increase. Kennedy’s HHS counts among its contractors David Geier, an anti-vaccine activist who was brought on to investigate a link between vaccines and autism—a theory that has been disproven. Geier is known for having created, with his father, a hormone-blocking regimen that would allegedly cure autism, a treatment that has been debunked as junk science.

Most people recognize that Donald Trump and his kids are stealing from us with both hands every day. But they are not as outraged as they should be because most have the view that everyone does it. While I will never defend the Democrats as paragons of honesty (what the hell are those crypto contributions?), they are not in the same ballpark as Trump and his crew.

Part of the confusion stems from the media’s refusal to ever put big numbers in context. They all know that the vast majority of their audience is not clear on the distinction between millions, billions, and trillions, and have no idea how large the federal budget is, but they refuse to take the ten seconds and ten words that would be needed to give readers a clearer sense of what is at stake.

Donald Trump’s use of his second presidency to grow his personal fortune has alarmed legal and ethics experts and congressional Democrats as he has reaped an “unprecedented” $2.2bn in 2025 revenues by amassing big cryptocurrency holdings, benefiting from wealthy foreign interests, expanding his Truth Social business and more, while federal oversight of his actions has waned.

Trump last year raked in at least $1.4bn from his crypto ventures according to financial disclosure forms he filed in June. Simultaneously, about one million investors in a Trump crypto scheme suffered almost $3.8bn in losses as their volatile crypto holdings tanked in value.

Ever since the 2024 election, two mutually hostile conservative foreign-policy camps have raced to claim Donald Trump’s victory as a mandate for their respective views. There are the “restrainers,” a coalition defined by a skepticism of interventionist wars like George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq and by a deep distrust of Israel and its lobby in Washington. And there are the latter-day neocons—the ones who haven’t defected to the Democratic Party, at least—who regard Israel as America’s indispensable ally and remain committed to the military overthrow of its enemies in the Middle East.