News That’s Fit to Print
Three Front Page Stories Paint a Scary Portrait of Trump’s Stupidity, Corruption and Authoritarian Designs
I’ve always loved newspapers. From delivering newspapers on my bike as a kid through my 25-year professional career as a newspaper reporter and editor to a lifetime of reading newspapers, I’ve long had news ink in my blood.
I do read news online, but it’s just not as satisfying as perusing a newspaper, particularly one plopped on my front porch. These days, my only print newspaper subscription is The New York Times on Sundays, which I savor for days to come, starting with the front page and working my way inward to the magazine.
I know some progressives think the Times is too mainstream and that it hasn’t been hard enough on Trump and his lies. And I’ve certainly been critical of the Times before, particularly in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, when it parroted official lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, and with its decision not to expose President Bush’s warrantless domestic surveillance until just after the 2004 presidential election.
But generally, I think The New York Times is the gold standard of American journalism. Even back when I was even more of a radical leftist and people asked me about favorite news sources, I often told people they could get most the news they need from the Times, even though it didn’t have the progressive slant or analysis of the Guardian, The Nation, or Mother Jones.
The front page of last Sunday’s Times is an excellent example of my point, particularly a trio of well-reported stories that illustrate the stupidity, the corruption, and the real authoritarian dangers posed by the Trump administration and its actions and appointees. Each is worth reading and analyzing.
Xi Watched Trump Blink: The top headline Sunday was “Trump Orders Exemptions on Phones and Computers,” over a pair of stories about Trump’s trade wars: one an news story about Trump suddenly exempting electronics from his 145% tariff on China, the other an excellent analysis piece on how Trump is likely to lose his trade war with China.
“Xi Has a Trade-War Weapon: Austerity,” reads the print headline of reporter Li Yuan’s article, while the online version of the same story goes with “Trump Showed His Pain Point in His Standoff with China.” That latter headline zeroes on the main point: Trump demonstrated weakness and vulnerability to Chinese leader Xi Jinping by quickly lowering his tariffs after U.S. stock and bond markets crashed.
“Mr. Xi learned that his adversary has a pain point,” Li wrote. “As reckless and ruthless as Mr. Trump may seem to some parts of the world, in Mr. Xi and China he is squaring off with a leader and a party state that have a long history of single-minded pursuit of policies, even when they resulted in economic and human catastrophe.”
Already, China appears to be winning the standoff by slapping a 125% tariff on American goods, refusing to blink when Trump threatened to raise his China tariff even higher, and then following up by banning exports to the U.S. of rare Earth metals and magnets we need to make car batteries, consumer electronics, and certain defense systems. And the U.S. appears unlikely to gain ground.
The article tracks how completely the Chinese Communist Party controls that country and the history of hardships its population has had to periodically endure during China’s rise, from the revolution of Mao Zedong through the Korean War, Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution, to the Tienanmen Square massacre of protestors, COVID-19 lockdowns and today’s iron-fisted leadership by Xi.
Communist ideology and Chinese cultural history have taught its people the virtues of selflessly enduring suffering to achieve long-term goals. But here in the United States of America — a rich, young, spoiled country with entitlement issues — Americans aren’t accustomed to enduring economic pain to achieve geopolitical goals, particularly the poorly articulated goals of an unpopular president who most of us oppose.
And Team Trump’s chaotic rollout of his illogical tariffs — with their shifting rationales, contradictory goals, and sudden cancellations — certainly didn’t win over any new supporters. Instead, Trump just seems weak and indecisive, bellicosely belying his duplicitous claim that “I know what I’m doing.”
Despite his tough talk, Trump seems to have picked a fight that we just can’t win. And when that fight continues to drag down our economy and Trump’s political standing, it may be Trump who’s kissing Xi’s ass to try to normalize our trade relationship again, prevent a recession, and try to save face.
The article reinforces what MAGA means now: Morons Are Governing America.
Skin Graft: Another front page Times story from Sunday didn’t seem to involve Trump at all — until you got down to the eighth paragraph to learn how a president who claims to be weeding out “waste, fraud and abuse” in federal spending is actually profiting from one of the biggest Medicare scams going.
Because…of course he is.
It involves ridiculously expensive bandages called “skin substitutes” made from dried pieces of human placenta or other living membranes, which can make certain wounds heal faster, particularly the deep foot wounds suffered by many diabetes patients. They sell for as much as $21,000 per square inch, up from closer to $1,000 just five years ago.
But the companies that make them are taking advantage of a loophole in Medicare rules to overcharge for them, and using kickbacks to doctors to overprescribe them. Medicare rules created by the last Trump administration in 2020 requires payment of whatever these companies charge for them, then they pass along discounts to the doctors, who can make millions of dollars a year prescribing them.
As a result, Medicare coverage (which is funded by taxpayers) paid out more than $10 billion for these skin substitutes in 2024, a figure that more than doubled from the previous year.
“Medicare now spends more on the bandages than on ambulance rides, anesthesia or CT scans,” wrote the Times, citing an analysis of Medicare data.
It’s such a scam that private insurance companies rarely pay for skin substitutes and the Biden Administration had ordered a review of the coverage and development of new restrictions.
But Trump last week ended that review and mocked it on social media: “‘Crooked Joe’ rammed through a policy that would create more suffering and death for diabetic patients on Medicare,” Trump wrote, posting it along with a flier of industry talking points.
But of course, our president of projection is actually the crooked one. A leading skin substitute seller called Extremity Care hired top Trump fundraiser Brian Ballard as a lobbyist and donated at least $2 million to Trump’s last campaign. And there are likely many other connections with MAGA’s other shifty schemers.
So Trump makes money by facilitating a multi-billion scam of federal taxpayers, which will hurt Medicare’s finances so that Trump, Musk and the Republicans can later try to cut Medicare by citing its waste, fraud and abuse. That’s how corrupt and obscene things have gotten.
Building Big Brother: As Trump’s stupidity and corruption become clearer to more Americans, how is he going to hold onto power and avoid accountability for his crimes and blunders? That’s where the third Times story that grabbed my attention comes in — and it’s scary as hell.
So we already know that Elon Musk and his DOGE minions are running amuck through the federal government, firing and threatening workers, cancelling spending mandated by Congress, making stupid mistakes, and then lying to the public about how much they’re reducing federal spending (as we know from the Times’s excellent ongoing reporting on the subject).
But it’s actually so much worse than even that, as we learn from the Times’ other big front page, above-the-fold story on Sunday: “How Musk’s Team Collects, and Connects, Data About You.” Or as it’s headlined online: “Trump Wants to Merge Government Data. Here Are 314 Things It Might Know About You.”
Musk claims that in order to effectively find all the waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending, he needs to access all government databases that have information about you — including sensitive taxpayer, criminal, employment and other data — and merge it into one big database, then sort through it with AI-power tools.
But as career staff, privacy groups, data security pros, national security experts, and those who study authoritarian regimes tell the Times, this would be a nightmare scenario that compromises all of our most sensitive personal information, makes it easier for bad actors to hack it, and allows the Trump administration to weaponize it against their political opponents.
“The federal government knows your mother’s maiden name and your bank account number. The student debt you hold. Your disability status. The company that employs you and the wages you earn there. And that’s just a start,” the Times wrote, identifying 314 different federal databases that contain personal information about Americans that Musk is targeting.
Those disconnected data systems are intentionally kept separate for privacy reasons, as we’ve all been assured for decades, which is the reason we feel comfortable in providing it. But breaking down those barriers to create a master database on everyone in the country is what authoritarian states like Russia and China do to track, coerce and punish their citizens.
That’s exactly the kind of authoritarian overreach that so-called conservatives, libertarians and Republicans used to freak out over and vigorously oppose. “Where will it end?” then-U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater, a right-wing icon, asked 50 years ago when the privacy laws protecting our data were passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal. “Will we permit all computerized systems to interlink nationwide so that every detail of our personal lives can be assembled instantly for use by a single bureaucrat or institution?”
So why would Republicans allow Musk — a single individual with extensive business ties to China, Russia and other autocratic regimes, who hasn’t even been required by Trump to report his conflicts of interest or pass security clearances required of other bureaucrats with far less power — to amass that kind of control over every American?
It truly boggles the mind. We simply can’t allow Trump and Musk build and control the Big Brother system that George Orwell warned us about in 1984. As he wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
So let’s not cede control of our present to these corrupt, reckless, and dangerous assholes.