America’s Global Standing Takes Yet Another Hit

This autumn, I was supposed to visit the United States as an official guest. Together with other European journalists, I was selected to participate in a friend-making program organized by the State Department.

For two weeks, I was to travel across four states, visit media organizations and universities, discuss journalism with Americans and meet with authorities at various levels. Everything was organized, planned, carried out and paid for by the U.S. authorities, part of a program that has been around for many decades.

That was not how it turned out.

For decades, the United States’ international trademark has been to win hearts and minds. But something  big changed in a short time: President Donald Trump now sees more value in blackmail, punitive tariffs and ultimatums than in ‘soft’ diplomacy.

Then the same authorities who invited me to their country as their guest  suddenly went silent.

This story begins a few years ago. A couple of diplomats from the U.S. Embassy in Oslo asked if they could nominate me to participate in an exchange programm for young people, better known as the International Visitor Leadership Program or IVLP.

Since 1940, this has been an important tool for the American State Department to promote diplomacy and understanding between the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Arctic Circle Visit

The diplomats who recruited me  were visiting Tromsø, a small city north of the Arctic Circle where I live, to familiarize themselves with the media landscape in Northern Norway. At that time, a controversy surrounding the arrival of American nuclear submarines in Norway had reached the columns of the regional newspaper Nordlys, where I was working.

Geopolitics above the Arctic Circle, where the golf stream can create shirtsleeve weather in December and further north Norway borders the Russian Federation, are also  local. My columns and articles, and those of others, were full of reporting on American foreign and security policy.

My immediate reaction to the official invitation: why not?

I’ve never been particularly interested in the United States. I cannot recite lists of American presidents or name all 50 states. But I have always been fascinated by how Americanism plays out around the world, especially in Europe.

In late summer, confirmation of my trip came from the U.S. embassy. My departure from Norway was set for Sept. 13. I received a list of all the participants along with the cities and states we would visit. This seemed most promising.

The specific program is called the Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists: Investigative Reporting. It was designed to give European news media professionals a better understanding of the American news media landscape today. It’s named for the American journalist who virtually invented radio news, the CBS correspondent who broadcast live from London rooftops as Nazi bombs fell down around him, as you can hear a bit off here.

I was told to report to the consular section of the U.S. Embassy in Oslo for a visa. That’s when things started to get interesting. For my previous trips no visa was required, but that was before Trump began his second term.

Soft diplomacy

For decades, the United States’ international trademark has been to win hearts and minds. Some 230,000 people have participated in an IVLP program, a dozen of whom became Nobel Prize winners. About 500 are current government officials, according to the US State Department. They participate in programs ranging from security policy, art and culture to women’s rights and leadership development.

But something  big changed in a short time: President Donald Trump now sees more value in blackmail, punitive tariffs and ultimatums than in “soft diplomacy.” Support for civil society is being cut. The country is withdrawing from multilateral cooperation. This creates opportunities for other nations.

China has long recognized that power is not only about economic growth and military build-up, but also about narrative. Soft power—the ability to shape others through peaceful persuasion—has therefore become a central part of Beijing’s global strategy.

Implications Explored

What does this mean for Europe?

The Trump administration’s attacks on the press, political opponents and control functions are now so commonplace that they are no longer news. Both the U.S. civil service and political appointees are now under constant pressure from the president and his allies to conform to whatever Trump wants.

What significance does this have for the U.S.’s relationship with us in Europe? Purges and reorganizations lead to a loss of expertise and institutional memory. This could backfire when a major crisis arises. Employees in ministries are being reassigned or fired as Trump loyalists are appointed to those posts. To Team Trump, the federal civil service is the enemy. The room for experienced federal experts to maneuver is limited.

Just One Question

When I arrived at the consular section in Oslo, I was asked only one question: ‘What do you do for a living?’

Then I’m told that all social media accounts must be set to public. They will be screened.

“All of them?” I ask.

“All of them,”  the visa officer replied. “And we need your usernames.” She listed examples: Snapchat, X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Flickr…

I lose track.

“Do you have X?” she asked.

“No.”

I deleted it when Elon Musk bought it, but I refrain from mentioning that.

“OK, all the others, then.”

“Is Flickr considered social media?” I ask., referring to a photo storage service.

“Yes.”

What to do?

I’m handed a document. It says: “Limited access to, or visibility of, online presence could be construed as an effort to evade or hide certain activity.”

What do you do in such a situation? This violates the fundamental principles of any journalist. Should I give the U.S. access to all my social media content, I ask myself silently?

On the other hand, it is possible to be pragmatic and swallow some principles for the greater good. I could give in and get a first-hand impression of a regime that is in the process of eating away at liberal democracy from the inside.

Most important, doesn’t the U.S. already have control over what I write on social media? Not that there’s anything exciting there anyway. A few pictures of my garden, my friends, and me traveling together and some soccer matches plus some articles I’ve written.

Well, I decided to put my accounts on “public” as the visa officer asked.

Next, I’m invited to a meeting with the embassy’s diplomats, where we go through the program’s purpose and content. The itinerary is confirmed. I’m sent lists of other participating journalists and the cities we will visit.

Weeks go by. I ask about the visa.

‘You will be notified when the application has been processed,’ is the response from the embassy’s consular section.

Time to Go

The day of departure arrives. The diplomats who invited me to the United States are unable to respond when I ask about the promised visa.

‘The visa process takes on a life of its own,”  I’m told.

At last I finally got my passport back in an envelope, but without a visa.

Former CIA Director William J. Burns has described how American diplomacy is now being undermined from within. What was once a strength — a foreign service that represented the United States with knowledge and long-term vision — is now seen as an obstacle by the Trump administration. Even a visa invitation from the State Department to participate in a program organized by them is not enough in my case to be allowed to enter the US.

I have wondered a lot about why I never got a visa. I have never in my career covered U.S. politics. I have never been arrested, used drugs or been involved in criminal activity.

Could it be a Facebook post from January 2021 that raised a red flag at a visa office in Washington D.C., where I referred to how the storming of Congress was covered in the Russian media? Or was it a debate on the night of the presidential election that a friend and I organized in Tromsø, entitled “MAGA 2.0 or MAGA Splash,” that set off alarm bells?

I have no idea. I will probably never know.

I have since tried to find out why I never got a visa. But neither the consular section at the embassy nor the diplomats who invited me to the U.S. have been forthcoming. I hear nothing from the former. From the diplomats, the message is that the visa process is something they have no insight into or control over. Sorry, they say.

Just as this column was to be published I heard back from the American embassy about the reasons my trip was cancelled. The anodyne explanation came in an email:

“Mr. Trellevik,
Thank you for your email and apologies for our delayed response.  The visa was refused because your program start date passed before the visa could be issued.  We are unable to issue J-1 visas when the purpose of travel no longer exists.
Thank you for your email.”

This is, of course, just a way to get away from the basic issue—they ‘waited me out’ until the program was over before refusing to issue me a visa.

Balance of Power

Trump’s new term is more focused on attempting to change the entire balance of power and dismantle the rules-based world order. I’ve read stories of foreign journalists being arrested and deported in America.

I called an acquaintance in the U.S. and aired my concerns long before I realized that I would never get a visa to participate in the program.

“You have to come over and report on how democracy is being dismantled piece by piece,” she said, adding a dire warning for me and my fellow Europeans:

“It is an illusion that what is happening now in the US cannot happen in Europe.”

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The post Team Trump Rudely Reneges On An Invitation appeared first on DCReport.org.

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For the last 3 or 4 months, maybe a bit longer, Marjorie Taylor Greene has been a loud, obnoxious asshole. OK, she’s always been a loud, obnoxious asshole but she’s been directing the majority of her bile at her own party.

Here’s the thing. This isn’t the usual internecine fighting among Republicans where they’re trying to one-up each other in who can be the shittest person. That’s so normal we hardly even notice it anymore. Instead, Greene is blasting her own party for protecting pedophiles and keeping the government shut down, and refusing to extend the ACA subsidies.

She’s also gone against Trump on his warmongering, his support for the slaughter in Gaza, and his failures on the economy.

Don’t get it twisted. Greene is no liberal. She’s still a racist scumbag overflowing with tinfoil hat nonsense to appeal to the MAGA base of inbred imbeciles.

So what’s happening here?

It’s not super complicated. Greene is a cockroach. Her job is to KEEP her job. She is a political animal and her survival instinct is well-honed. When Trump was ascendant, she was all-in on Trumpism.

But Trump isn’t so ascendant anymore, is he?

Long before Tuesday’s bludgeoning, Greene clearly saw the shift in the country and decided, “Fuck this. Trump is a losing bet.” Not every Republican who keeps their wagon hitched to Trump will be wiped out when it all implodes in spectacular fashion, but a lot of them will be left in pieces on the ground. Greene looks determined to avoid that fate.

Does that make her a hero of the resistance? Fuuuuuck no. Is the enemy of my enemy my friend? Absolutely fucking not. We tried that with Liz Cheney and, not for nothing, Cheney went all in on supporting Democrats to stop Trump. That is not what Greene is doing here in the slightest.

Greene is building a place for herself in the GOP in a post-Trump world. A world she sees coming in the very near future.

That’s a problem for Trump.

I keep pointing this out (because it’s true): Fascism is based on the illusion of absolute power and inevitability. It can’t be stopped because it’s irresistible and it’s what the people want, bla bla fucking bla. That’s sometimes true because people are stupid and don’t realize what they’re giving away until it’s too late (Germany, 1933; Russia, 2000; Hungary, 2010). But it’s still always an illusion that has to be maintained at all costs. Once the illusion is broken, the entire premise of fascism: power and strength and control, crumbles and the system collapses.

It’s been quite some time since Trump and his regime projected real strength. Even longer since they projected any kind of control. Tuesday’s electoral bloodbath showed how little support Trump has and just like that, Greene doesn’t seem like an outlier. She seems like a prophet.

Allegedly, she’s not the only Republican who sees the writing on the wall. A month ago, Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell said at least 100 House Republicans were ready to vote to release the Epstein files. There’s new reporting from David Shuster backing this up:

To understand why so many are (allegedly) ready to break ranks, it’s really important to understand that Republicans have made opposing pedophilia a central organizing principle of their party. Accusing everyone they hate of being part of a shadowy global cabal of wealthy pedophiles probably seemed like a good idea at the time. The problem is that it turned out to be actually true and the leader of their cult is a central figure of the cabal. Whoops.

Worse, the left is well-known for burning its own to the ground. We rarely circle the wagons for real crimes and certainly not pedophilia. There will be no “both sides” to this. The right, on the other hand, very much circles the wagons and makes a million excuses. If there are 10 Democrats in the files, we will demand all 10 go to prison. If there 100 Republicans? Fox News will demand all 10 Democrats go to prison. See how this works? But the base won’t accept that.

What happens when you have built a cult whose central premise is that pedophiles and anyone protecting them must be destroyed? How do you reprogram it? You really can’t. Greene knows it. So does the rest of the party, which is why so many of them have been working nonstop to hide the Epstein Files.

But they can’t be hidden forever, and too many people have seen them for the files to be “accidentally” destroyed. They’re going to come out and Trump will be exposed as a pedophile. The very thing his cult has been trained to loathe above all other things.

There is already a thriving opposition to Trump. Add millions of MAGA who will not tolerate a child rapist in the Oval Office, even if they won’t support a Democrat, and it’s all over for the regime.

This is what Greene is anticipating. Now, the question is: Did she start too early or will she be seen as a visionary by her supporters?

Greene is up for reelection in the midterms. It’s going to be a wave election and Republicans all across the country are going to be pummeled into dust. Greene’s seat is pretty secure. She won her last election by 30 points. Even a massive blue wave is not going to touch her. But I’ll bet a shiny nickel she’s going to draw a primary challenger. Someone eager to suck up to Donald Trump, who is undoubtedly tired of her criticism.

If so, pay attention to that race. If Greene wins her primary, that means the MAGA base has not turned on her for turning on Trump. And I promise you, Trump will speak out against her, loudly, because he will want to send a message to the rest of the party not to cross him. But if Greene wins anyway? That means the base is no longer behind Trump. And if Trump cannot command the base, he commands nothing, including the Republican Party.

Greene is trash. She always was, and she always will be. But I think she heralds something incredibly dangerous for Trump and very good for the rest of us. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend, but I sure as hell am going to cheer her on in her quest to outlive Trump because her success speeds up the end of American fascism.

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The Blue Wave is here! There are 360 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid and they should be. We are legion and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

Here is what everyone’s favorite Nazi has done: He’s forcing the Republican Party to pick sides, and to absolutely no one’s surprise, they have picked the side of Fuentes and the Nazis.

Yesterday, the Washington Post had a front page story on how the whole thing about Tucker Carlson’s let’s-play-house interview with the U.S. top practitioner of the Master Race theory of politics Nick Fuentes has torn the Heritage Foundation apart. Wow. What a surprise. Some dumbbell in Washington D.C. decided to raise the hood on the Heritage Foundation and check the oil, and instead of an engine, they found a squirrel cage full of Nazis running around. Who’d-a-thunk? They’re the zoomed-out right wing goofniks who authored Project 25 that Trump put into operation on Day One and began disassembling the United States government, outlawing anyone not conforming to two official genders, and further defenestrating the right to vote in this country.

The guy running Heritage, Kevin Roberts, turns out to be not only a raging racist and friend of Nazi-sympathizer Tuckie-poo Carlson, he’s been “humiliating” young female Heritage staffers by telling them that if they don’t have children, they “don’t have skin in the game.” Roberts fired his chief of staff after there was a huge blowup over his video-taped defense of Fuentes and Carlson. To replace him, he hired one Derrick Morgan, who during an all-staff meeting recently told female interns that they should “make yourselves marriageable and go out and seek marriage.” The Heritage vice president of “domestic policy” told a female staffer that she should have six children and another new female employee that she should forget about going to law school and just get married and start having children.

Roberts runs an operation with a $300 million-plus budget, and these are the guys he thinks are going to help him dig himself out of the hole he’s in.

Who knew this kind of shit was going on behind the doors of one of the oldest and most respected right-wing think tanks in D.C.? Apparently nobody, at least until Fuentes showed up on Carlson’s show and put every Republican in town on the spot: whose side are you on? Are you just fine with Elon’s Nazi salute and Tucker’s kiss-up interview with Nazi eugenicist racist incel jew-hater Fuentes like the rest of us, or are you one of those woke Republicans who thinks there’s something wrong with having an SS tattoo on your chest and holding celebratory parties on Hitler’s birthday?

This day has been coming not since Trump came down the escalator, but all the way back to Reagan and Goldwater. Remember? Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights acts of the mid-60’s, and Reagan purposefully announced his candidacy for president in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the three civil rights workers were murdered by the Klan in 1964.

It’s fucking perfect, isn’t it? Fuentes goes on Carlson’s show and starts talking about how “organized Jewry in America” is behind all our problems with race and immigration and feminism and abortion and every other thing you can think of. And what are Republicans doing? Kevin Roberts told us what they all really think when he said on Wednesday that Heritage is busy “wordsmithing and workshopping language” about how to “distance” Heritage from the whole Carlson/Fuentes problem.

It apparently hasn’t occurred to any of them that the way you deal with Nazis in your midst isn’t to “distance” yourself from them, but to kick them the hell out of your house. One of these assholes flapped his hands in the air and lamented earlier this week that the Fuentes/Carlson clusterfuck was making them work so hard to save “legitimate forms of conservatism.”

There is no legitimate form of conservatism. They’re all fucking Nazis, and they always have been.

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Trump and his regime of murderous fascists were already peeing their diapers over the midterms. Now, they’re going to be in a full-blown panic. How do we know? Just listen to them. After weeks and months of “Let them eat cake!”, the regime is suddenly deeply concerned about the common man:

Top Trump political adviser says president will focus on affordability going forward

Fresh off Democrats’ clean sweep of the 2025 off-year elections, President Donald Trump plans to refocus his political messaging on affordability, James Blair, the political director for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and the RNC, told POLITICO in an exclusive interview Wednesday.

“The president is very keyed into what’s going on, and he recognizes, like anybody, that it takes time to do an economic turnaround, but all the fundamentals are there, and I think you’ll see him be very, very focused on prices and cost of living,” Blair, who now serves as White House deputy chief of staff, said in an interview on “The Conversation” with Dasha Burns.

Who the fuck do they think they’re kidding? Besides Chuck Todd and Chris Cillizza, of course.

I swear to god, the first article I see claiming that Trump is “pivoting” towards the economy is going to make me vomit. Trump is not keyed into what’s going on. He has no fucking idea what’s happening in this country because he’s being fed propaganda by Stephen Miller and Russ Vought. He’s a puppet suffering from severe dementia.

It should be noted that in the run-up to Tuesday’s elections, Trump was not out campaigning. The press failed to mention this. Was he too busy to help his party hold on to power in critical elections? He certainly had all the time in the world to play golf and tweet about his brand-new marble bathroom and obsess over his gaudy new ballroom. He definitely had more than enough time to throw himself a tacky Great Gatsby party in Florida.

But no campaigning. Trump LOVES to campaign. It’s what he lives for, but he was hardly out there helping Republicans win lose.

One might suggest that’s because Trump is no longer capable of sustained campaigning. Just the occasional public appearance. Good luck with the midterms, fellas.

Back to being a puppet. Trump, himself, has no real ideology. If he were actually paying attention, he might actually do something about affordability because he, personally, cares about what makes him look good or bad. It might also help if he actually had the most rudimentary understanding of how the economy worked. Or math. Or anything at all.

But Trump isn’t the one calling the shots. Not really. Tariffs weren’t his idea. The shutdown wasn’t his idea. Gutting healthcare wasn’t his idea. None of it was his idea. Everything destroying the economy came from Project 2025 and Stephen Miller’s white nationalist purge. They will not allow Trump to undo their life’s work and that would be the only way to deal with the affordability crisis we’re in.

Instead, what we’re going to see is the regime making token gestures and then lying nonstop about how absolutely AMAZING everything is. They were already bragging about the most incredible economy of all time until the damage became so severe, they gave up and said, “Eh. Wait until next year. Things get better. We swear!”

Now they’re back to swearing the economy is amazing. Well…OK. That’s the same mistake Biden made with a crucial difference: The economy was actually improving under Biden. Just not fast enough and not evenly enough. Affordability was a problem and Biden/Harris were punished for it.

Under Trump? The economy is crumbling, specifically because of Republican policies. Policies they’ve been bragging loudly about. Devastating manufacturing. Killing renewables and increasing the price of electricity. Cutting healthcare and the social safety net. All things the regime is very proud of.

It’s impossible to point at Democrats or trans kids or immigrants or Canadians and blame them. Everyone can see what’s happening and who did it. Worse, they can see Republicans ignoring the damage and crowing about how awesome everything is. They don’t just seem out of touch; they seem completely psychotic.

Slapping a few band-aids on won’t fix anything and will end up being even more insulting as Vought and Miller continue their destruction of the country. It’s not like Trump has the power to stop them. He’s not in control.

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Now, it’s really important to understand how the next year is going to play out.

No matter how many doomers say the midterms won’t happen, everything Trump and his lackeys say and do tell us otherwise.

If they were capable of rigging the voting machines, Tuesday’s elections would not have been so brutal. Democrats would have won, but it would have been a moderate win. No one controlling the machines would have allowed such an overwhelming beatdown.

This cannot be repeated enough: A stolen election has to be plausible. After the absolute slaughter on Tuesday, there is no plausible scenario where the GOP doesn’t lose the 2026 midterms. It cannot be sold to the public as a reasonable outcome.

After Pete Hegseth’s and Trump’s comically stupid gathering of the military’s top leaders, any possibility of a military coup is gone.

The generals and admirals are not going to betray their oaths for a clown and a senile mental patient.

Stephen Miller’s private army won’t be ready, either. ICE can’t find enough able-bodied Nazis. Also, the ones they’re finding are so fucking stupid, they’re failing open-book tests. Read that again. They cannot pass a test where they can look up the answers.

ICE is so desperate for bodies, they’re looking into hiring bounty hunters because they can’t find enough racist white men to do the job.

You think they’ll be capable of overthrowing an election in 12 months? They’re in court right now trying to cope with the horror of a sandwich being thrown at them.

So no, ICE will not be large enough to do a goddamn thing to the midterms. Besides, what would their legal rationale be? Are the voting machines undocumented? Fuck off.

The midterms are coming. Pay attention to what the regime does, not what they say. Everything they do for the next year will be panic and desperation and flailing to avoid the coming tsunami. Tuesday was just the beginning. Tuesday was the water pulling away from the shore. In the distance, those aren’t mountains. They’re waves. Our waves.

The regime is afraid because once they lose control of the House and the Senate (and they will), the investigations begin. Their fascist plan to end democracy grinds to a halt without a compliant Congress. They will not be able to cement themselves into power before the 2028 election, and another violent coup will not succeed. They only get one bite at that apple.

After that? It all goes downhill very quickly for the criminals of the Trump regime and all of their collaborators. So, yes, expect lots of noise about how the regime suddenly cares VERY deeply about affordability. But watch how everything they do is geared towards interfering with the midterms instead of actually delivering on their promises of a stronger economy.

Fascism is never about improving the world for the many or even for the “chosen people.” It’s always about breaking everything and enriching the rulers at the expense of everyone else. The run-up to the 2026 midterms is going to prove it.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave is here! There are 361 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid and they should be. We are legion and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

The new federal tax credit scholarship program, passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, allows taxpayers to claim a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, or SGOs. These SGOs can fund a range of services already embraced by blue-state leaders, such as tutoring, transportation, special-education services and learning technology. For both current and incoming governors, it’s a chance to show voters that they’re willing to do what it takes to deliver for students and families, no matter where the ideas originate.

The encourage governors to "unlock these resources" as if these are magic dollars stored in a lockbox somewhere and not dollars that are going to be redirected from the United States treasury to land instead in some private school's bank account. 

Democratic governors are reluctant to get into a program that "could be seen as undermining public schools." But hey-- taking these vouchers "doesn't take a single dollar from state education budgets" says Duncan, sounding exactly like DeVos when she was pushing the same damned thing. And this line of bullshit:

It simply opens the door to new, private donations, at no cost to taxpayers, that can support students in public and nonpublic settings alike.

"At no cost to taxpayers" is absolute baloney. Every dollar is a tax dollar not paid to the government, so the only possible result must be either reduction in services, reduction in subsidies, or increase in the deficit. I guess believing in Free Federal Money is a Democrat thing.

The "support students in public and nonpublic settings" is carefully crafted baloney language as well. Federal voucher fans keep pushing the public school aspect, but then carefully shading it as money spent on tutors or uniforms or transportation and not actual schools. And they are just guessing that any of that will be acceptable because the rules for these federal vouchers aren't written yet.

Duncan and Elorza want to claim that this money will, "in essence," replace the disappearing money from the American Rescue Plan Act. "In essence" is doing Atlas-scale lifting here because, no, it will not. The voucher money will be spent in different ways by different people on different stuff. They are not arguing that this money will help fund public schools-- just that it might fund some stuff that is sort of public education adjacent. 

But how about some "analysis" from Education Reform Now, which claims that the potential scale is significant." They claim that "the federal tax credit scholarship program could generate $3.1 billion in California, nearly $986 million in Illinois and nearly $86 million in Rhode Island each year," drifting ever closer to "flat out lie" territory, because the federal vouchers won't "generate" a damned cent. Pretending these numbers are real, that's $3.1 billion in tax dollars that will go to SGOs in the state instead of the federal government. It's redirected tax revenue, not new money. Will the feds just eat that $3.1 billion shortfall, or cut, say, education funding to California? Next time I get a flat tire, will I generate a new tire from the trunk? I think not.

In classic Duncan, he would like you to know that not following his idea makes you a Bad Person. Saying no to the federal vouchers is a "moral failure." 

Next up: Political advice.

Over the past decade, Democrats have watched our party’s historical advantage on education vanish.

Yeah, Arne, it's more than a decade, and it has happened because you and folks like you have decided that attacking and denigrating the public education system would be a great idea. You and your ilk launched and supported policies based on the assumption that all problems in school were the sole treatable cause of economic and social inequity in this country, and that those problems were the result of really bad teachers, so a program of tests followed by punishment would make things better in schools (and erase poverty, too). 

But now the GOP states are getting higher NAEP scores, so that means... something?

This is Democrats’ chance to regain the educational and moral high ground. To remind the country that Democrats fight to give every child a fair shot and that we’ll do whatever it takes to help kids catch up, especially those left behind for too long.

Yes, Democrats-- you can beat the Republicans by supporting Republican policies. And that "we'll do whatever it takes to help kids catch up" thing? You had a chance to do that, and you totally blew it. Defund, dismantle and privatize public schools was a lousy approach. It's still a lousy approach.

Opting in to the federal tax credit scholarship program isn’t about abandoning Democratic values — it’s about fulfilling them.

When it comes to public education, it's not particularly clear what Democratic values even are these days, and my tolerance for party politics is at an all time low. But I am quite sure that the interests of students, families, teachers, and public education are not served by having the GOP offer a shit sandwich and the Democrats countering with, "We will also offer a shit sandwich, but we will say nice things about it and draw a D on it with mayonnaise." 

We have always heard that Arne Duncan is a nice guy, and I have no reason to believe that's not true. But what would really be nice would be for him to go away and never talk about education ever again. Just go have a nice food truck lunch with Betsy DeVos. 

When Pentagon journalists walked out rather than sign Donald Trump’s loyalty-style media agreement, it exposed just how far his administration is willing to go to control the narrative. But as DCReport’s founder David Cay Johnston explains, that may actually be good news for journalism — and for democracy.

In this episode of Reality Check, Johnston breaks down how Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, tried to force reporters to become Pentagon propagandists — and why their refusal could open the door to a new kind of accountability reporting.

At DCReport, we’ve proven for nearly nine years that you don’t need access, press conferences, or spin to uncover the truth — just persistence, public records, and independent thinking. Imagine if Pentagon coverage worked the same way.

📢 Watch below to learn why real journalism means covering what politicians do, not just what they say.

🔎 About DCReport:
Founded by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, DCReport.org is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates how government actions affect you — not corporations, not politicians, not the powerful few.

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The post David Cay Johnston: Trump, the Pentagon and the War On Truth appeared first on DCReport.org.