We have long known that Donald Trump despises science. We also know that he refuses to accept the science concerning climate change. Yesterday, Trump accepted an award as the “Champion of Coal.” He wants to turn the clock back a century. He will go down in history for his willful ignorance and for the harm he has unleashed on the public.
*The Trump administration has repealed the 2009 endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, eliminating the foundation of much of U.S. climate policy.
*The decision reverses decades of environmental progress despite overwhelming scientific evidence and opposition from health experts, environmental groups, 50 cities and 17 states.
*Experts warn the repeal will increase pollution, respiratory disease and planet-warming emissions over the coming decades.
The Trump administration on Thursday reversed the U.S. government’s longstanding scientific assertion that planet-heating pollution seriously threatens Americans, erasing a foundational piece of the country’s efforts to address climate change.
The repeal of the 2009 endangerment finding — a conclusion based on decades of science that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare — represents one of the biggest environmental rollbacks in U.S. history, and the latest in a series of actions by President Trump to scrap policies and regulations designed to curb the use of fossil fuels and accelerate the transition to clean energy.
The administration on Thursday also repealed all federal regulations governing vehicle emissions.
Experts and scientists condemned the action. The Environmental Protection Network — a bipartisan group of more than 700 former staff and appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency — described it as “unprecedented and dangerous.”
“This move is a fundamental betrayal of EPA’s responsibility to protect human health,” said Joseph Goffman, former assistant administrator of the EPA Office of Air and Radiation. “It is legally indefensible, morally bankrupt and completely untethered from the scientific record.”
Independent researchers around the world have long concluded that greenhouse gases released by the burning of gasoline, diesel and other fossil fuels are warming the planet and worsening weather disasters.
Pam Bondi, Trump’s Attorney General, testified before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, and she was rude and insulting when responding to Democrats’ questions. She refused to answer questions, instead praising Trump and citing the booming stock market.
They, in turn, gave her a hard time for destroying the integrity of the Department of Justice and turning it into Trump’s instrument of revenge.
Last week, the state senate in Mississippi considered a bill to authorize vouchers. Governor Tate Reeves was enthusiastic about the bill, and Republicans control both houses in the Legislature. It appeared to be a slam-dunk.
But while the state’s House of Represntatives passed the bill, 17 Republicans defected to oppose it. The voucher bill passed by a narrow margin in the House, 61-59.
The Senate gave the bill short shrift.
It was defeated in committee without a single vote in favor.
Mississippi Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, entered a motion to vote on advancing the bill to the Mississippi Senate floor. The Republican-led committee held a voice vote on the motion, and none of its members spoke in favor of the bill, including Wiggins.
“The nos have it. The bill dies today,” DeBar declared.
Governor Tate was furious.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, harshly criticized DeBar and Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, the Senate president, for the bill’s defeat in a Facebook post Wednesday morning, saying that after 23 years in office, he had “never been more disappointed in elected officials” than he is now with the Senate Education Committee chairman and the lieutenant governor.
“They killed a Republican legislative priority shared by conservatives all across this country and they worked closely with the Democrats to do it,” Reeves wrote. “Even worse—they tried to do it in the dark and hide it from MS conservatives on a deadline day.”
The Mississippi Democratic Party celebrated the legislation’s failure.
“Today’s vote shows what we can accomplish when we stand together for Mississippi’s children against well-funded special interests,” Mississippi Democratic Party Chairman Rep. Cheikh Taylor, D-Starkville, said in a Tuesday press release. “Our public schools are the cornerstone of every community in this state, and this unanimous rejection sends a clear message: Mississippi will not abandon the students and families who depend on quality public education—no matter how much out-of-state money tries to buy our legislators.”
Public school educators were happy to see the bill die.
“Our concern with HB 2 is that it moves Mississippi away from a shared public commitment to education and toward a model that fragments funding and responsibility,” Union Public School District Superintendent Tyler Hansford said in a Jan. 29 Newton County Appeal opinion article. “Public dollars should be used to sustain public systems that serve all students and communities, not to convert a public good into a marketplace transaction.”
Other parts of the education legislation passed:
On Tuesday afternoon, the House Education Committee passed a $5,000 teacher pay raise that includes an $8,000 pay raise for licensed special education teachers in special education classrooms. That bill, House Bill 1126, also includes a structured cap on school superintendents’ salaries, changes to PERS’ years of service requirements, an increase to the Mississippi Student Funding Formula base student cost and a pay raise for school attendance officers’ starting salaries.
The Senate passed three education bills on Jan. 7: a $2,000 teacher pay raise bill, legislation to bring Mississippi Public Employees’ Retirement System retirees to the classroom and a bill making it easier to transfer from one public school district to another. DeBar said at the time that he would like to expand the Senate’s proposed pay raise to $5,000. All three bills await action in the House.
The House’s education bill that includes wide expansion of school choice policies is dead, its fate decided after 84 seconds of deliberation by a Senate panel.
But as the House leadership and proponents of school choice have continued their press, reaching a fever-pitch in recent weeks, Senate leaders have made clear they are opposed to voucher programs that siphon money away from public schools — so opposed that there was no discussion when the committee considered the bill.
“I’m not going to discuss it much other than to say we’ve looked at it in depth and … this committee has passed most everything (else in House Bill 2),” Senate Education Committee Chairman Dennis DeBar said.
After DeBar, a Republican from Leakesville, received no questions, Sen. Brice Wiggins, a Republican from Pascagoula, made a motion to vote on the bill.
After a chorus of “nay” from committee members, DeBar said, “The bill dies today.”
Over the past few years, vouchers have been endorsed by state legislatures even though the public overwhelmingly opposes them. Nearly a score of state referenda have been held, and in every single state, voters rejected vouchers. Even voters in red states said NO to vouchers.
Voters don’t want to pay for tuition at private and religious schools. But legislators ignore their votes. In Arizona, voters rejected vouchers by 65-35%. But the legislature passed a voucher bill anyway, and the cost to subsidize these nonpublic schools is $1 billion a year.
Today’s evangelists for subsidizing religious schools have chosen to ignore the admonitions of the Founding Fathers, who made clear their opposition to state-funded religion. When Thomas Jefferson wrote about “separation of church and state,” he was referencing a widely held principle.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back fifty years of national reproductive freedom in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, the Christian Right has turned to another long-held priority: an eventual Court ruling that states must fund religious education.
Over the past few weeks, efforts to create religious charter schools have seen new life. Charter schools are public schools operated outside of the traditional district framework. They can be independently managed by a non-profit or, in some states, for-profit management group, or they can be part of larger networks of charter providers. There are roughy 8,000 charter schools across the country, serving nearly 4 million students.
Blurring Public and Private
In mid-2025, a case called St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond deadlocked at the Supreme Court, 4-4. It returned back to Oklahoma, where that state’s highest court had invalidated efforts by a Catholic-run provider to operate a virtual charter school. Had the Court ruled in St. Isidore’s favor, it would have effectively created the nation’s first church-run public school.
But Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, reportedly because her best friend, a law professor named Nicole Garnett, had worked extensively on the legal defense for the Catholic charter school (Side note: while I’m glad Barrett recused herself, notice that the one conservative woman on the Court has held herself to a higher ethical standard than right-wing guys like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito).
The Court’s 4-4 ruling was less a definitive position and more an artifact of the small, insular nature of conservative—and especially Catholic conservative—American legal networks. Now, efforts to create a Jewish charter school in Oklahoma, and Christian public schools in Colorado and Tennessee are taking new shape.
Technically, these cases operate in a separate stream of legal theory from school voucher jurisprudence. Vouchers are simply taxpayer subsidies for private schools—either through the tax code or directly through state funds. And since 2002’s Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, their application to religious schools has been constitutional. Three voucher-related cases since 2017—Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) and Carson v. Makin (2022, 3 days before Dobbs)—have extended protections to religious schools in state voucher systems.
Basically, once states use public dollars to subsidize private providers of a certain social service (such as education), they can’t limit those providers to non-religious organizations.
But for now, state’s don’t have to provide voucher funding to parents. It’s just that if they do fund vouchers, they must allow vouchers to be spent at religious schools too.
This connects to the question of religious charter schools because although charter schools are legally public entities, the organizations operating them in most cases are private. In theory, the arrangements governing these groups are similar to situations where a school district contracts with a private transportation company for their buses, or a cleaning company for their buildings. Except that with charter schools, the contracted party typically provides instructional materials and even often supplies the teachers.
What right-wing activists want is for the Supreme Court to say that states can’t prevent religious organizations from running public schools as part of a charter agreement And in that, they are taking one tactical approach in a broader legal and political strategy to simply require states to fund religious instruction.
Establishment and Free Exercise
Spurred partly by new “education savings accounts” spreading in red states (aka vouchers, with additional allowable expenses beyond tuition), a vast network of conservative Christian homeschoolers is pushing for new legal rights. Including mandatory subsidies for their homeschools.
And Betsy DeVos, the billionaire and former U.S. Education Secretary, has made no secret of her desire to see the Supreme Court overturn more than a century of state “Blaine Amendments” prohibiting public dollars spent on religious schools. That would basically force all states to pay for some form of religious instruction.
All of this is possible in large part due to the efforts of Leonard Leo, the Catholic super-fixer of right-wing judicial politics all-but-responsible for the Court’s current conservative majority. Leo has made clear that following Dobbs, state-funded religious education is his next major project in the federal judiciary. And he’s enlisting the Alliance Defending Freedom (the main litigation group in Dobbs) to help lead the way. Beyond garden-variety culture warring, this is partly what the sustained effort to holler about LGBTQ and especially trans-students in public schools is about.
Meanwhile, brand new guidance from what’s left of the U.S. Department of Education is informing public schools across the country that federal dollars will now be tied to expansive interpretations of the right for school personnel to pray during the day in schools. So long as they do not technically compel students to pray at lunch or at the start of the school day, teachers and school leaders may choose to lead their students in prayer.
The end-game here is to de-emphasize the first part of the First Amendment—the Establishment Clause prohibiting government from establishing a single religion—and to emphasize the second part, the Free Exercise Clause.
The argument pushed by DeVos, Leo, ADF and their allies is that by providing taxpayer support only for secular public schools, states are putting undue hardship on families who see religious education as a fundamental part of their free exercise of faith but must pay out-of-pocket for it.
What’s at Stake
It’s possible—even necessary—to object to all this without attacking faith. I’m a Christian man myself, looking forward to the season of reflection of Lent that begins next week.
But church-based public schools are the plan on the Right. And although it’s mostly a battle that will take place in the courts, it’s also a battle that’ll take place in legislatures and in the court of public opinion. And those venues are determined by elections and by political organizing.
When I argue that Democrats have to get serious about improving public schools as part of defending public schools, I’m not just making an argument about campaign strategy (though I’m making that argument too).
What’s at stake here is that the American Right is obsessed with schools, and with carving more and more dollars out to subsidize religious education. And that’s going to be what happens without countering that objective with a bold, sustained vision for educational opportunity for every child.
Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics, insisted that the war on trans athletes should stop. In his view, the widely publicized debate about letting them participate on high school and college teams is a bogus issue.
He writes:
With our lying President, we don’t know if he is actually a homophobe or just plays one on TV. His Department of Education recently reported finding San Jose State University violated Title IX regarding a transgender volleyball player. The transgender player, Blaire Fleming, was on the San José State roster for three seasons after transferring from Coastal Carolina. Her status as transgender apparently became known when Southern Utah forfeited its match against San Jose State in September, 2024. It was Flemming’s third year on the team.
Shortly after this came to light, San Jose State co-captain Brooke Slusser and two former Spartans were incensed by the new knowledge about Fleming and sued the Mountain West Conference over its policies they claim muzzled them. While Slusser was the central figure among the three players that were outraged, it is very likely that a lot of that outrage was fueled by Brooke’s Christian Nationalist mother, Kim Slusser.
A dive into Kim’s Facebook page, shows that she is much more focused on being a mom supporting her kids than she is politics. However, she did recently post to Facebook “Let’s go Leigh Wambsganss for Texas Senate.” Leigh is the wife of a former Southlake mayor, founder of Southlake Family PAC and Leader of a Patriots Mobil PAC designed to take over public schools. Mike Hixenbaugh quoted Wambsganss in his book They Came for the Schools:
“… Leigh Wambsganas … said there was no hope of changing the minds of any Black Lives Matter activists. ‘Sadly, they need to die.’” (Pages 108 and179)
Besides politically supporting crazed right-wing religious zealots, Kim Slusser also posted a graphic encouraging people to listen to the Megyn Kelly show.
A Post in Kim Slusser’s Facebook
The President’s attack on transgender people is fueled by bigoted ideology.
Transgender Reality
A 2022 study by the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute identified of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming. The LGBTQIA WIKI defines gender nonconforming:
“Gender non-conforming is a term describing people who do not follow gender stereotypes and differ from their society’s conventional binary expectations of masculine men and feminine women. Gender non-conformity can encompass many things, such as gender expression, gender roles, or another aspect of gender. It is typically apparent in people whose gender identity is a binary gender, whether they are cisgender or transgender; for instance, a feminine trans man and a feminine cis man are both non-conforming with expectations of masculinity.”
From the 2022 study cited above about 700,000 transgender people are between 13 and 24. Extrapolating from these numbers, I would expect less than 400,000 of them to be transgender women. It is a small but not insignificant number of people considering that there are about 350 million people in America.
The bottom line is that a small subset of human beings is born with gender-dysphoria, a mismatch between gender identity and their own personal sense of gender. Scientific American reported almost all major American medical groups have “policy statements and guidelines on how to provide age-appropriate gender-affirming care”and “find such care to be evidence-based and medically necessary.”
“It is well documented that TGNB [transgender non-binary] adolescents and young adults experience anxiety and depression, as well as suicidal ideation, at a much higher rate than their cisgender peers. According to The Trevor Project’s 2020 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, 54 percent of young people who identified as transgender or nonbinary reported having seriously considered suicide in the last year, and 29 percent have made an attempt to end their lives.”
Both homosexuality and gender dysphoria are naturally occurring phenomena. They are not a mistake and they are human beings worthy of maximum respect.
Even though the Evangelical community is a minority in the Republican Party, their strong unity on cultural issues has made them a must get for victorious GOP candidates. Our President quickly realized he needed them and apparently had no problem abandoning his vow to be an ally to Queer Americans.
Respecting Life and Protecting People
Sixteen-years-old trans-student, Nex Benedict, was attacked in the girl’s bathroom at her Oklahoma high school. The attack was severe enough to require some medical attention, but she was well enough to go home that night. The next day she committed suicide. Caught in a web of ignorance and bigotry she was convinced that life was not worth living. She would be about the same age as San Jose State’s volleyball player, Blaire Fleming, if she had lived until today.
A new law, that took effect January 2025 in California, says teachers, counselors and schools are not to disclose a student’s apparent gender-dysphoria to their parents without the student’s permission. The arguments in the Bill noted, “Unfortunately, not all young people are able to be their authentic selves at home safely, and, in those cases, schools can be a critical source of support.” It also highlighted the large tendency for trans students like Nex Benedict to engage in suicide. The bill claimed that students with “access to affirming homes, schools, community events, and online spaces reported lower rates of attempting suicide.”
That same month, President Trump signed many executive orders including:
“This executive order directs federal agencies and federal employees to interpret “sex” solely as an immutable binary biological classification determined at conception. The order also requires all federal agencies to enforce sex-based rights, protections and accommodations using this definition of “sex.”
A few months before Trump became President, a symposium organized by the National Human Genome Research Institute, an institute of the US National Institutes of Health completely rejected the Trumpian view. “Throughout the symposium, many speakers argued that any attempt to categorize sex runs into the same issue—human variation always provides an exception to the rule.”
An interesting case was presented by Physician Tucker Pyle, from Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC. A person who was born in the 1980s was raised as a girl but felt like a boy. As a teenager, the patient received feminizing hormones but still experienced dysphoria. Years later, he learned doctors performed surgery on him as a baby to make his genitalia, which weren’t clearly a penis or a vulva, look like a vulva. But he ultimately identified as male and socially and hormonally transitioned.
A Personal Opinion
In a dialogue with youth, Daisaku Ikeda said:
“Everyone has a right to flower, to reveal his or her full potential as a human being, to fulfill his or her mission in this world. You have this right and so does everyone else. To scorn and violate people’s human rights destroys the natural order of things. We must become people who prize human rights and respect others.” Faith into Action page 276
This current attack on gay people is evil. Some gay people are not the sharpest tool in the woodshed and some are possessed of brilliance, but more importantly they are all human beings with a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They all deserve respect.
I think trans kids in sports is a made-up issue. Participating in sports with their preferred gender should be accommodated. There are more gender nonconforming females whose male side leads to sporting victories than any unfairness caused by the few transgender participants.
Should someone disagree with this position, we should listen if they have valid points. However, I do not think transgender athletes are the problem that needs reforming.
It is benighted bigots who must be reformed; whose ideology must be shunned.
Blogger Meg White posted on her WordPress blog (@reflectionsined) about Senator Bernie Sanders’ opposition to vouchers, which are overwhelmingly used by students who are already enrolled in private schools and are free to discriminate. The Trump administration has passed voucher legislation and is encouraging the spread of vouchers. In theory, vouchers enable poor students to transfer to better schools. In practice and in reality, vouchers are a subsidy for the rich.
Meg is an advocate for public schools and co-author of a valuable book about desegregation in New Orleans and how it affected one school: William Frantz Public School: A Story of Race, Resistance, Resiliency, and Recovery in New Orleans.
Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) released a report that addresses the federal school voucher program. In the report, Sanders charges that “The Trump administration’s school privatization agenda threatens our nation’s public schools and harms working-class students, students with disabilities, and students from diverse religious backgrounds” (forbes.com). Sanders is a ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP).
Sanders said, “President Trump and his billionaire campaign contributors have been working overtime to create a two-tier education system in America: private schools for the wealthy and well-connected and severely under-funded public schools for low-income and working-class students. That is unacceptable. This report makes clear that vouchers are being used to benefit private schools that reject students because they have a disability or because of their religion, and benefit some of the wealthiest families in America. Trump’s voucher program will only make a bad situation even worse(sanders.senate.gov).
The report analyzed state-level school voucher programs, including 111 SGOs and 1,600 voucher-accepting private schools across eleven states.
The report finds that school voucher programs:
Subsidize private education for the rich. School vouchers, on average, cover just 39% of middle school private school tuition across the sampled states. Even with a private school voucher, tuition prices are often out of reach for working-class families, meaning that the vouchers function as a subsidy to the rich who can already afford to pay for private education.
Allow private schools to systematically deny admission to students with disabilities, limit how many students with disabilities they serve, only serve children with certain types of disabilities or charge extra tuition. While public schools must provide all students with the same opportunities to learn and excel, 48% of private schools analyzed in this report choose not to provide all students with disabilities with the services, protections and rights provided to those students in public schools under the IDEA.
Enable private schools to discriminate against students based on their religion. This report finds that despite the fundamental right of freedom of religion enshrined in our constitution, voucher programs benefit private schools that discriminate against students based on their religious beliefs. Specifically, 17% of private schools reviewed in this report charge different tuition rates based on the family’s religious beliefs.
Benefit private schools that lack basic credentialing, accountability and transparency requirements. Fewer than half of states reviewed require private schools to be accredited, while even fewer require student learning assessments. Unacceptably, only two states require teacher credentials in private schools receiving vouchers (sanders.senate.gov).
“Bottom line, in my view, we should be strengthening and expanding public education, the foundation of American democracy, where Black and White and Latino, rich and poor kids come together in one room” rather than privatizing public education, Sanders said (k-12.com).
The report comes ahead of a HELP Committee hearing where Arizona Education Association President Marisol Garcia will testify about the harms of private school vouchers in her state, which has the nation’s largest universal school voucher program and is a cautionary tale for the rest of the nation. The state is now spending nearly $1 billion annually on private school vouchers, while public schools are being forced to shut down (sanders.senate.gov).Researchers found that the use of vouchers in Arizona is highest in affluent school districts, and lowest in poorer school districts. More than half of voucher students came from the wealthiest quarter of zip codes in the state, with median incomes ranging from $81,000 to $178,000. Most of those students have never attended public schools (azmirror.com).
After Florida cleared the way in 2023 for any family in the state to get a taxpayer-funded school voucher regardless of income, students signed up in droves. Enrollment in the voucher program has almost doubled to half a million children. But by the end of the 2024-25 school year, the program cost $398 million more than expected. When students switched between public schools and voucher-funded programs, tax dollars did not move with them as lawmakers had promised. “On any given day, Florida’s education department did not know where 30,000 students were going to school and could not account for the $270 million in taxpayer funds it took to support them, according to the state Senate Appropriations Committee on Pre-K-12 Education” (msn.com). in 2023, of the 122,895 new students who signed up for vouchers, 69% (84,505) were already in private school, 13% (16,096) came from public schools, and the remainder were new kindergarteners (ncpecoalition.org).
According to the Arkansas Department of Education, 95% of the participants in the state’s universal voucher program had never attended public schools before receiving a voucher (ncpecoalition.org).
Most students in Indiana’s voucher program come from well-off families. During the 2022-2023 school year, voucher recipients were more likely to come from families that made more than $100,000 per year than families that made less than $50,000 per year (the74million.org).
Since Ohio expanded its voucher program to wealthy families, the percentage of low-income students using vouchers in Cleveland fell from 35% to 7%. Now, most Ohio voucher students did not attend public schools before they took a voucher: the percentage of voucher students statewide who had already attended a private school in the year prior jumped from 7% in 2019 to almost 55% in 2023 (ncpecoalition.org).
State-provided data shows that about two-thirds of students receiving vouchers in Iowa’s new statewide program were already attending private schools before getting taxpayer money for tuition. Only about 13% of voucher recipients had ever previously attended a public school (ncpecoalition.org).
Savannah Newhouse, Department of Education Press Secretary commented, “Opponents of President Trump’s Education Freedom Tax Credit are quick to lecture about equity and fairness, but they’re fighting to keep families trapped in failing government-run schools and environments that don’t meet kids’ needs. The reality is this historic tax credit, funded entirely from private philanthropic dollars, puts parents in the driver’s seat—supporting scholarships that can be used for tutoring at public schools, tuition, and essential services for students with disabilities. Expanding school choice levels the playing field so that every family, no matter their income or needs, can better prepare their child for success”. (forbes.com).
Sure, because it’s working so well.
Public Schools in the U.S. educate 90% of the children. Strengthening and supporting public education is essential to maintaining a fair and equitable society. As Sanders’ report illustrates, universal voucher programs serve as a taxpayer-funded subsidy for the wealthy, leaving working-class families behind. Diverting billions of dollars to unregulated private schools not only creates massive budget shortfalls but also destabilizes neighborhood schools that serve the vast majority of American children.
These are my reflections for today.
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Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for The NewYork Times,writes here about a question that has puzzled many observers: what motivates Trump? Some would say he ran the first time out of sheer egoism and the second time to stay out of jail. Or, he ran the first time because of his innate competitiveness and the second time because he figured out how to monetize the Oval Office.
Bouie has a different take.
He wrote:
What motivates Trump?
Not what motivates Trumpism, whatever that is. Not what motivates his MAGA supporters. Not what motivates the infrequent and marginal voters who delivered him his victories in 2016 and 2024.
No. What specifically motivates Donald J. Trump? What brought him into national politics? What drives him as a national political figure?
His allies say a love of country, but this is betrayed by his indifference to the nation’s ideals, traditions and symbols. It is unclear whether Trump has even read the Constitution, and there’s no evidence that he understands its history and significance to the nation he leads. (It would be unfair to ask whether he’s read the Declaration of Independence — we all know he hasn’t.)
The best way to understand the president’s motivations is to find him at his most unfiltered, which is to say, on social media, late at night. And Thursday night, Trump posted a video to his Truth Social account that depicted President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. The clip, which runs for roughly a minute and shows the Obamas at the end, is set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
I try to avoid superlatives in my writing, but there is simply no question that this is the most flagrant display of presidential racism since Woodrow Wilson screened D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” in the White House in 1915. And for a sense of the racism of Griffith’s film, recall that it both reinvigorated the Ku Klux Klan and gave the organization its modern iconography.
I doubt that Trump’s video — less a creative product than half-baked agitprop — will have the same effect. But it carries many of the same messages. It uses an old white supremacist trope to denigrate the Obamas and, by extension, every American who shares their racial background. It presents people of African descent as little removed from beasts, an insult used to great effect in “The Birth of a Nation,” as you can see in this clip from the film.
Initially, the White House defended the video as a joke. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, said. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
But then Republicans began to speak out. “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the Senate and the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, posted online.
Representative Mike Lawler, an otherwise stalwart Trump ally, said the video was “wrong and incredibly offensive.” Representative Michael Turner of Ohio decried the “racist images” as “offensive, heart breaking and unacceptable.”
Here, I should probably note that Barack and Michelle Obama are among the most popular political figures in the United States. Trump, on the other hand, is barely treading water with the public, and majorities of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction. It makes sense, then, that some Republicans would use this as an opportunity to distance themselves from an unpopular incumbent.
Let’s walk back to where we started. What motivates Trump? The answer is simple: racism. You might also say ego and raw self-interest, but the two are connected. Racism, among other things, is a kind of chauvinism, a belief in one’s inherent superiority, based on nothing other than a meaningless accident of birth. It’s an ideology that papers over feelings of inadequacy, that tells you that — no matter what you have or have not accomplished in your life — you’re still better than someone, some group.
Let’s suppose you’re the spoiled son of a self-made man. Let’s suppose that, despite your flash and bravado, you’ve failed at virtually everything you’ve tried. You’re the laughingstock of polite society, a punchline for the privileged. You think you’re superior enough to be the president of the United States — the highest honor in your country — but the actual president is a man of humble origins, a minority of the kind your family didn’t even rent to when you were in the landlord business. And he is claiming power that rightfully belongs to you. He’s even mocking you, ridiculing you for all the world to see.
For years, a cottage industry of political observers has contorted itself to obscure and occlude the obvious. That regardless of what others see in him, Trump’s entire political career — from his embrace of birtherism to his hatred of birthright citizenship — cannot be understood outside the context of his bitter, deep-seated racism.
Trump is not profound. He has been the same person this whole time. The question is why so many others have refused to see what he has never bothered to hide.
Stephen Dyer, former legislator and critic of school privatization in Ohio, explains here how a Republican-sponsored bill will hit Republican districts hardest.
It’s no secret that over the last decade, Ohio has gone from a battleground state to a pretty red one, especially when Donald Trump is on the ballot. The major swing that occurred between 2006 when Democrat Ted Strickland won 70+ counties and 2024 has occurred in rural and urban counties, especially around the Mahoning Valley.
Gov. Ted Strickland’s 2006 victory map
President Donald Trump’s 2024 victory map
So what does the Ohio GOP do this year, which is shaping up to be a tough year for them anyway, to hold onto their Trump coalition?
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Try this: Introduce a bill that would, if passed, require folks living in Mahoning County to increase their property taxes by an average of $2,300 per $200,000 home and Trumbull County by $1,886, or close their kids’ schools.
During a year where everyone is so pissed about property taxes being high that they want to actually get rid of property taxes.
Yeah. Pretty stupid, right?
Why would they do something so stupid, you ask?
So they can maintain an unconstitutional private school tuition subsidy that lets Les Wexner — the guy who was best buddies with Jeffrey Epstein —get a taxpayer funded break on his private school tuition bill.
I can’t make up this shit, man.
These guys obviously think they’re politically invincible.
I ran some more analysis of the bill that Callender introduced (who was Ohio Charter Schools’ go to lawyer prior to returning to the House a few years ago), which would block state aid to any school district that’s suing the state over its private school tuition subsidy, which, again, has been found to violate the Ohio Constitution.
Needless to say, the results are not awesome.
The average Ohio school district would have to go for a levy that runs about 32 mills and would cost a homeowner of a $200,000 home an additional $2,200 a year. And that’s only if they want to keep their kids’ schools open.
Because scores, if not hundreds, of school districts would cease operating under this bill
As you can see, the impact is worst for urban districts, but rurals are really hammered too.
This data is using the most recent Ohio Department of Education District Profile Report (for income and millage) and the most recent District Payment report for February 2026
I mean, you’re going to have poor, small town¹communities having to contemplate losing an additional 5% or more of their income to pay for Les Wexner’s private school tuition cut? That’s what you’re going with? This year?
Some other tidbits:
Trimble Local in Athens County would have to raise their property taxes by a staggering $11,355 per $200,000 home to replace the extorted money. That’s a 162.26-mill levy to raise what amounts to 23% of the average district resident’s income.
Steubenville — the home of Dean Martin and a famously Trump-y area — would need to go for a 119-mill levy, costing the $200,000 homeowner another $8,350 per year, which is 16% of the average family’s income there.
There are 56 Ohio school districts that would need to go for 50-mill levies or higher to replace the state aid Callender wants to cut. Or those kids — all 137,455 of them — will no longer have schools.
There are families in 22 Ohio school districts that would have to give up 10% or more of their average income to make up for Callender’s proposed cuts.
The average share of the cost in these districts that’s borne by the state is 47%. So the “you need to tighten your belt” argument ain’t working for these districts.
All so Les Wexner can get his private school tuition subsidized.
I could go on. I posted the spreadsheet here, in case you want to look at more of these just amazing consequences. Not every school district has joined the lawsuit. So these data only apply to those who have. But there are so many of them (@300, or half of all Ohio school districts) that you can extrapolate the results. If every district joined, the effect would be nearly identical to what’s happening in those that have already.
I will say that this bill is clearly unconstitutional. I don’t know how the state will argue that removing funding from 700,000 students is going to provide those same students with a thorough and efficient system of common schools, as the Ohio Constitution mandates.
So, in short, there is simply no way this bill survives even a modicum of legal scrutiny. So the chances of this happening are next to nothing.
Bu then if it’s clearly unconstitutional, as Callender must know it to be, then why do it? Scare local school districts form joining the lawsuit, or leaving it? Fat chance of that happening. I’ve been hearing districts and, more importantly, parents are more pissed now than they were before.
Like I said earlier, this is quite a play for Callender to make in an already tough political environment 9 months from an election that is expected to be focused on affordability and corruption.
But hey. It’s worked for these guys before and they keep winning in gerrymandered districts.
So why change now, right?
1. These district types are ones developed by the Ohio Department of Education, not me.
Back in the late 1980s, when charter schools were a brand new idea, advocates said that charter schools would be more accountable, cost less, and would get better results.
It was also speculative, since no charter schools existed then. I believed it would turn out that way, as did other proponents of charter schools.
But none of those beliefs/hopes panned out.
We now know that charter lobbyists oppose accountability in state legislatures.
We now know that charter schools do not get better results than public schools, unless they exclude the kids who get low test scores.
We now know that charter schools do not cost less. Many of their leaders are paid more than public school leaders (some are paid $1 million a year). They lobby legislatures to give them the same funding as public schools. In some states, charters have won the power to locate rent-free in public school buildings.
Peter Greene here explains that the charter industry is seeking federal legislation to underwrite the cost of charter school facilities. The federal Charter School Program already provides $500 million a year to start new charter schools or expand existing ones. This grand gift, which the Trump administration increased, ignores the fact that demand for charter schools has declined while charters continue to close because of falling enrollments.
Among the various bills thrown at Congress is one that finds new ways to throw public money at charter schools.
HB 7086, the “Equitable Access to School Facilities Act,” proposes to send money to charter operators, via the state, to buy and build facilities for schools.
The cost of coming up with a building to put charter schools in might seem like part of the cost of being in the charter school business, but charter operators don’t much care for having to fork over the money. In some states, legislators have solved the problem by just allowing charter schools to just take public property. Florida is rolling out a law that lets charters take public school real estate in whole or in part just by saying, “Hey, we want that.” It’s an extraordinary law, sort of like the opposite of eminent domain, in which the facilities that taxpayers have bought and paid for suddenly belong to a private business.
HB 7086 wants to propose a similar federal solution, delivering grants to any states that come up with clever ways to gift taxpayer dollars to charters that want to build or buy some facilities, or want to come up with fun ways for charters to grab taxpayer-funded buildings.
The bill comes courtesy of Rep. Juan Ciscomani, an Arizona Republican, who just wants to make sure that every school is a great school. In a press release, he explains:
Sadly, access to appropriate and affordable school buildings for charter schools continues to be one of the biggest barriers to growth. Unlike district schools, charter schools aren’t guaranteed access to school buildings or traditional access to facilities funding sources like local property tax dollars.
Yeah, I was going to open a restaurant, but access to food and cooking supplies was a big barrier to growth, so maybe the taxpayers would like to buy that stuff for me?
Or maybe when you decide to go into a business, you do it with a plan that takes into account the cost of being in that business. Certainly the notion that building and financing facilities is easy peasy for public school systems is disconnected from reality. When West Egg Schools want a new building, they have to convince the taxpayers or else that school board will find themselves voted out of office.
If you want to get into the charter school biz, you need a plan about how you’ll manage the cost of getting into the charter school biz. “Well, get the feds to drain taxpayers to fund it for us,” is not such a plan.
The bill does display one of the lies of the charter movement– that we can finance multiple school systems with the same money that wasn’t enough to fund one. Not that I expect any choicers to say so out loud. But no school district (or any other business) responds to tough money times by saying, “I know– let’s build more facilities.” The inevitable side effect of choice systems is that taxpayers end up financing redundant facilities and vast amounts of excess capacity, which means taxpayers have to be hit for even more money. Legislators continue to find creative ways to A) ignore the issue and B) legislate more paths by which taxpayer money can be funneled to choice schools.
This bill hasn’t died yet. Tell your Congressperson to drive a stake through its heart.
Nancy Bailey is a retired educator and a dedicated ally of public schools. She understands the importance of public schools as the heart of communities, which bring parents together and teach citizenship.
In many communities, Friday night lights are an important civic ritual. Why should they be dimmed?
In this post, she voices a concern that many parents and educators share: Will school choice kill school sports?
Bailey writes:
Americans love sports, but what happens to athletic programs when democratic public schools close? Privatizing public education, so-called school choice, means drastic changes, as school officials grapple with the effects of school choice legislation.
Communities rally behind high school football in the fall, basketball during the winter, and track and field in the spring. Public schools might offer swimming, soccer, and other sports, critical for helping young people obtain college scholarships. Even though they aren’t easy to obtain, about 180,000 NCAA D1 and D2 student-athletes earn athletic scholarships each year.
School choice, including charter schools, vouchers, homeschooling, and open enrollment, alters who plays sports and undermines community pride in public schools. Defunding public schools ruins sports programs. Which students get access? Will only the wealthiest private schools get sports?
In 2023, West Virginia headlined How lawmakers helped ruin high school football in West Virginia reflecting on game “blowouts” in that state. When private schools corral all the best players, it changes the competition. It also makes for boring games. Brooke High Coach Mac McLean, whose team always struggled in the AAA class, said it’s only going to get worse: The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.
Proponents of school choice argue that parents should be free to choose what’s best for their children, including athletic opportunities. But that freedom raises difficult questions about fairness and competitive balance. If top talent continually migrates to a handful of programs, the very structure of high school sports could change, creating a system where access to success depends less on effort and more on ZIP code flexibility.
Consider that between 2010–11 and 2021–22, 4,000+ public secondary schools closed due to declining enrollment, unaffordable housing, lower birth rates, and an overall defunding of public education by school privatizers seeking to create schools for profit.
Parental school choice is also deceptive. Private schools, not parents, ultimately choose students. Gifted athletes will likely be welcome at a private school that prioritizes sports. Wealthy private school teams will compete with other private schools, but what about students who never got swept up in the choice program, never got identified in their poor charter schools, or in their homeschools?
Undiscovered students who haven’t yet shown their prowess in sports may not have the opportunity to do so, relegated to a fledgling public school that has lost its resources, a charter school, or homeschool, where they remain unrecognized. What if they never get the opportunity to practice sports under the eyes of a good coach?
Charter schools often lack the budget or incentive to offer quality sports programs. Sports facilities, football fields, tracks, or access to swimming pools is costly. Some may rent facilities or partner with community organizations for practice, but this can be expensive.
States like Florida allow charter school and homeschool students (7.d) to participate in traditional public school sports, but this is controversial. It dismisses the community school pride factor, a significant all-American feature of school sports. If parents don’t want their child at that public school, take tax dollars elsewhere; why get the advantage of a public school sports program? What happens when the school ultimately closes?
Missouri is another state that permits homeschool students to participate in public education sports.
Students might also leave public school sports programs for sports clubs, which have become synonymous with college recruitment across areas, though in football, they appear less so.
Private schools often have access to resources that public schools do not – such as better facilities, more experienced coaches or even the ability to attract top talent through scholarships. This creates an uneven playing field during playoff competitions. According to a study by The Atlantic (2013), private high school students are over twice as likely as public school students to reach Division I college sports.
Some private schools are small and also lack resources, but will be expected to compete against wealthier private schools.
School board members in Hamilton, Tennessee, voiced concern that the state’s Education Freedom Scholarship, allowing students to attend private schools, siphons desirable athletes from public schools. They worry about a drop in public school attendance, likely related to the school choice program. Sports success skews toward wealthier super schools, leaving fewer high school teams for competition.
Texas exemplifies the problems school choice creates for sports. At 2.22 on the video below they discuss how football, basketball, and track, public school sports programs beloved in that state, could be affected. It might mean laying off school coaching staff.
Cultural overemphasis and concernsabout sports injuries leave critics to advocate for the end of school sports altogether. But athletics are an ingrained American tradition, and it’s hard to see public schools successfully survive without vibrant sports and extracurricular programs.
Sportsaren’t only about making future successful athletes, of course. Students benefit physically and mentally, and team sports promote positive socialization and all around good health. Students learn how to win gracefully, build confidence, but also how to lose and accept defeat without always quitting.
But if public education is fully privatized, once unimaginable, public school sports could end. Most Americans are not on board for school choice and want to see better and more support of public schooling. The loss of sports might be added in as a reason to reject school choice. It may be time for pushback and Americans rallying around their democratic public schools. Could it be?
Maybe there’s hope, not only for school sports, team building, but for democratic public schools. Perhaps we’ll soon see a public school renaissance and a great refocus on the greatness of our country and its children and their schools, not only with sports but learning. Now that’s truly a winning idea!
Diane Ravitch's blog 