President Trump just can’t help himself, and I’m going to keep talking about it on my blog as long as I can. The day may come when I don’t have the freedom to do that.

This week has been brutal!

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Let’s stop training mental health counselors

Even though every time there is a “lone wolf” terrorist attack or mass shooting in the U.S., there is an outcry for more mental health facilities and more mental health counselling.

So why did Trump stop a $10 million grant program to train mental health counselors?

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Trump says he won’t run for a third term

Section 1 of the 22nd Amendment to the United States Constitution seems straightforward to me: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

Trump announced on Tuesday that he does not plan to run for a third term as U.S. President.

That’s big of him!

It isn’t known whether he plans to move out of the White House at the end of his second term, or whether he plans to just never leave office.

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Anti-Science Trump

Trump has ordered NASA to destroy two satellites that provide detailed information about carbon dioxide and crop health. Just because Trump thinks climate change is a hoax does not make it so.

Farmers, scientists, oil and gas companies, among others, depend on the data gathered by those two satellites.

The American taxpayers paid $750 million for those satellites.

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Trump on human biology

Trump was truly on a roll Tuesday. He appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box and talked about how he believes undocumented immigrants are naturally made for farm work and people who live in inner cities can’t do it.

You can’t make this stuff up!

Here’s a quote from the show:

“We can’t let our farmers not have anybody,” Trump added of undocumented farm laborers, primarily of Hispanic origin, who are being targeted for deportation by his Department of Homeland Security. “These [are] people that you can’t replace them very easily – you know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work. They’re just not doing that work. And they’ve tried – we’ve tried, everybody tried. They don’t do it. These people do it naturally, naturally.” 

I love how Rolling Stone summed up the incident: “It should go without saying that no group of people feels an intrinsic urge to cultivate the land for sub-livable wages and at constant risk of detainment and deportation, but the president doubled down.” 

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mRNA vaccine research cancelled

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced on Wednesday that the Trump Administration is cancelling $500 million in mRNA vaccine research. Kennedy, a lifelong vaccine-denier, claims there is a more high-tech way to develop vaccines. He also said there is no proof that mRNA vaccines work against respiratory viruses. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) beg to differ, saying the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine saved an estimated 14.4 million lives.

Twenty-two different research projects are being halted, including those studying the possibility of using mRNA vaccines in the treatment of cystic fibrosis and pancreatic cancer.

Who put RFKjr in charge of vaccines? Oh yeah… Donald Trump and the United States Senate.

This decision could wreak havoc with our health and our economy.

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Trump pulls United States out of UNESCO

The White House announced yesterday that Trump is withdrawing the United States from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Trump considers UNESCO to have a “woke” and politically divisive agenda.

This outrageous!

When I wrote The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina for Arcadia Publishing in 2014, I proudly included the following: “The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization named Grandfather Mountain a member of the international network of Biosphere Reserves in 1992 because it supported 42 rare and endangered species.”

If Trump thinks by pulling the United States out of UNESCO he can erase that, he is wrong. My book stands as is, and I will not edit Grandfather Mountain’s UNESCO designation out of it!

How can one person encapsulate such a level of hatred for the beauty and wonder of the world?

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ICE having trouble with recruitment?

It warms my heart to learn that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is having trouble recruiting people to be Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, but Secretary Kristi Noem has come up with a solution. She announced the lifting of the maximum age cap and the lowering of the minimum age to 18.

Until this week a person could be no older than 40 years old to apply for the job. According to Noem, there is now no age limit and she welcomes teenagers to apply.

What could possibly go wrong with 18- and 80-year-old ICE agents?

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Ex-Acting FBI Director Fired

Brian Driscoll was Acting Director of the FBI at the beginning of Trump’s second term, but Driscoll refused to give Trump a list of the FBI agents who worked on the January 6, 2021 attempted coup.

Kash Patel was eventually named FBI Director, but Driscoll had returned to serve in the agency in another position. That was until yesterday when Trump fired him.

All federal employees take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. But Trump demands loyalty to Donald J. Trump alone. If you remain loyal to the U.S. Constitution, he will fire you.

This is not the way things are supposed to be. Will Americans wake up before it is too late?

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Breaking the Constitution to have another census

To add a measure of legitimacy to the rigging of the 2026 mid-term elections, Trump is calling for a federal census to be taken this year in which only U.S. citizens will be counted.

Under the law, the census has been taken every 10 years since 1790 and everyone has been counted – not just U.S. citizens.

I guess I need to dust off my passport application and get it submitted as soon as possible, in case my birth certificate does not prove I’m a citizen.

You see, in Texas the Republicans are trying to redraw the U.S. House Districts before the 2026 Congressional election and gerrymander the map to take away five predominantly Democratic districts and convert them into predominantly Republican districts. The bottom line is that Trump does not want to lose the Republican majority currently in the U.S. House.

There has been quite a stir over this very issue in Texas this week, and the U.S. House of Representatives hangs in the balance.

I will quote from https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/about/census-constitution.html, because it states the whys and wherefores of the census and the U.S. Constitution better than I could:

“Why Jefferson, Madison and the Founders Enshrined the Census in our Constitution”

“The U.S. Constitution empowers the Congress to carry out the census in “such manner as they shall by Law direct” (Article I, Section 2). The Founders of our fledgling nation had a bold and ambitious plan to empower the people over their new government. The plan was to count every person living in the newly created United States of America, and to use that count to determine representation in the Congress.

“Enshrining this invention in our Constitution marked a turning point in world history. Previously censuses had been used mainly to tax or confiscate property or to conscript youth into military service. The genius of the Founders was taking a tool of government and making it a tool of political empowerment for the governed over their government.

“They accomplished that goal in 1790 and our country has every 10 years since then. In 1954, Congress codified earlier census acts and all other statutes authorizing the decennial census as Title 13, U.S. Code. Title 13, U.S. Code, does not specify which subjects or questions are to be included in the decennial census. However, it does require the Census Bureau to notify Congress of general census subjects to be addressed 3 years before the decennial census and the actual questions to be asked 2 years before the decennial census.”

Also: “Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution mandates that an apportionment of representatives among the states must be carried out every 10 years. Therefore, apportionment is the original legal purpose of the decennial census, as intended by our Nation’s Founders. Apportionment is the process of dividing the 435 memberships, or seats, in the U.S. House of Representatives among the 50 states, based on the state population counts that result from each decennial census.  The apportionment results will be the first data published from the 2020 Census, and those results will determine the amount of political representation each state will have in Congress for the next 10 years.”

That’s a long explanation, but it is really rather simple that the census be taken every ten years. If Trump thinks it will be simple for every U.S. citizen to produce documented proof of citizenship, he is woefully mistaken.

Someone needs to tell him that the U.S. Congress controls the taking of the U.S. Census – not the temporary occupant of the White House.

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Resurrection of Confederate statues

Americans will never be able to move on from it’s 1861-1865 civil war as long as people like Donald Trump keep stoking the fire.

The National Park Service, which is operating with a skeleton crew after Trump eliminated thousands of park staff this year, apparently has enough employees left to reinstall the statue of a member of the Ku Klux Klan on the grounds of the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department.

There had been requests made to Congress since 1992 to have the 11-foot statue of Confederate Army Gen. Albert Pike removed, but it stayed in place until the Black Lives Matter Movement.

Pike once wrote about the white race, “white race, and that race alone, shall govern this country. It is the only one that is fit to govern, and it is the only one that shall.”

It sends a chilling message that the Trump Administration is having Pike’s statue put back in place. It sends a strong message to all people of color: Racism is alive and well in the White House.

But that’s not all…

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, in response to Trump’s “Executive Order On Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” is having a 32-foot bronze “Confederate Memorial” rebuilt and reinstalled in Arlington National Cemetery.

Sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the statue was installed in 1914 and depicts slaves supporting Confederate soldiers. The statue perpetuates the myth that slaves supported the Confederacy during the Civil War.

But Hegseth didn’t stop by just quietly having the Confederate Memorial reinstalled in Arlington National Cemetery. Apparently not knowing when to stop talking, Hegseth said, “It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history—we honor it.” 

That’s rich, coming the week after Trump’s two impeachments were removed from the Presidential Impeachments exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History.

You can’t make this stuff up!

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Price of prescription drugs

If someone in my family or circle of friends said that the price of drugs will decrease by 1,500%, I would assume that person had either had a stroke or had some form of dementia.

So why is it that the President of the United States can say that he is decreasing the price of prescription drugs by 1,500% and no one blinks an eye? He has said this several times.

I fear we have become so accustomed to Trump’s lies and nonsensical proclamations and rantings that we just accept it as, “That’s just the way he is.”

This is not something an adult with any level of intelligence or mental capabilities would say. Any fourth grader knows a 1,500% drop in the cost of a candy bar is a mathematical impossibility.

In conclusion

That’s just eleven things the Trump Administration did this week that I thought you might not have heard about.

I’m sorry this post is so long. Don’t blame the messenger.

Have a great weekend!

Janet