Do Republicans notice how crazy Trump is? Do they care?

Trump’s Latest Truth Social Rampage Proves He’s Hanging On by a Thread.

President Trump went on a long, angry social media tirade Thursday night while the entire country was asleep, once again raising doubts about his mental fitness and temperament.

Just after midnight, Trump reposted a message from the Border Patrol union calling on “extreme leftist advocate” Senator Chuck Schumer to resign over his recent comments in which he said “nobody respects” ICE or Border Patrol. Just one minute after that, Trump delusionally reposted a random allegation that former President Obama staged a “seditious conspiracy” to overthrow the U.S. government in 2016. He then made four more posts about how Obama and Hillary Clinton should be charged with treason. This was all before 1:00 a.m.

After his Obama derangement syndrome subsided, he argued that the entire 2020 election—which he lost—should be “permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!” if the Southern Poverty Law Center loses the DOJ lawsuit against them. (The case is unrelated to the 2020 election.) Then that was followed by a post attributed to actor Clint Eastwood talking about how great Trump is. Eastwood never said that.

Rather than posting about midterms, the affordability crisis, the war on Iran, or just not at all, the president of the United States is crashing out in the middle of the night, attempting to attack political opponents on no real grounds and relitigating an election that every sensible person knows he lost. (The New Republic)

One more thing.

Chelsea Clinton talks about vaccinations.

RFK, Trump Admin Ramping Up Vaccine Attacks Amid Softer Rhetoric

This week, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has engaged in back-to-back hearings before Congress on his department’s agenda. After a year of aggressive actions that have undermined public health, Kennedy is taking a softer tone, including reversing his previously and often-repeated false claims on the Measles vaccine.

The past few months, the Trump administration has been doing its best to take Kennedy’s anti-vaccine demagoguery out of the spotlight. Polling shows the vast majority of the American public does not trust what Kennedy has to say about vaccines—a dangerous sign for our nation’s top public health policymaker.

But even as the administration ramps down the rhetoric against vaccines, they continue to keep the door open for dangerous voices and silence their own scientists, most recently on the efficacy of Covid vaccines in reducing emergency room visits and hospital stays last winter. Let’s be clear—the work to undermine vaccine confidence and our national childhood vaccination system is continuing, in insidious ways that deserve more attention, scrutiny by Congress, and public opposition.

We know the critical role our vaccine system plays in the health of our country and beyond. We have both dedicated significant time over decades to understanding what works to protect and promote public health. We have seen and studied the effects of vaccines specifically—including when President Clinton made childhood immunization a national priority, launching an initiative that helped drive vaccination rates for America’s toddlers to all‑time highs—and the dangerous effects of vaccine hesitancy to the health and wellness of children when different administrations make different choices.

The United States built our vaccine system on a simple premise: scientific evidence would guide recommendations, and those recommendations would determine access. The premise that independent expertise would guide decisions made vaccination not just possible, but predictable. Something doctors could rely on, families could trust, and public health could scale.

Over the past year, this system has deliberately been disrupted by the people expected to steward it. Soon after taking office, Kennedy dismissed the members of the federal advisory committee that for decades recommended which vaccines children should receive and when they should get them. He replaced respected scientists with vaccine skeptics outside the mainstream of medicine and science—and, earlier this year, under his direction, HHS reduced the number of routinely recommended shots.

The 2024-2025 flu season was the deadliest since the 2009 swine flu pandemic, with 289 pediatric deaths and the vast majority of those unvaccinated. That makes Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s recent decision to end mandatory flu vaccines all the more bewildering; vaccines have been required for U.S. service members for decades.

This year we’ve seen more than 1,300 cases of measles—a disease that had been eliminated in the U.S. in 2000—the highest level in three and a half decades, with outbreaks primarily concentrated in children who have never been vaccinated.

These disturbing trends are the product of yearslong disinformation campaigns that have caused vaccine rates to drop. Today, many of the largest voices in those campaigns—some of whom also made tremendous amounts of money pushing their anti-vaccine claims—sit in decision-making positions in our government.

Last month, a federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily blocked nearly all of HHS’s changes to the pediatric immunization schedule. The case, brought by leading medical and public-health organizations, successfully charged that anti-vaccine voices were installed illegally on the advisory body responsible for vaccine recommendations. Their appointments have been suspended, and the actions taken by that body have been set aside—for now.

However, this month, the Trump administration has taken quiet steps to get around the ruling. On April 9, with little fanfare, HHS published changes to the rules governing this advisory board. The new rules amended who is considered an expert for the purposes of setting national vaccine policy. Now, instead of requiring specific expertise in the use of vaccines in medical practice or research, the definition of who is an expert has been broadened considerably—a transparent way to reinstall unqualified vaccine deniers into these critical posts.
At the same time, HHS is considering a petition pushed by the same Kennedy ally who authored the language used to rewrite the advisory board’s rules. This petition asks to change HHS recommendations to make all vaccines optional—a dangerous shift that would lead to more preventable disease, suffering, and death. Tellingly, Kennedy’s HHS is quiet on this petition for now.

The Trump administration might be trying to take the issue of vaccines out of the spotlight, but make no mistake—dangerous, nonevidence-based views continue driving our vaccine policies, as we see in decisions related to our men and women in uniform, our children and what evidence-based, scientific information the public has ready access to, or doesn’t.

We need stronger safeguards around how vaccine policy is made and a more concerted strategy to rebuild trust. Congress must exercise real oversight over these transparently political actions at HHS, aiming to install vaccine skeptics who lack relevant experience and often have a long history of denying what decades of scientific research have proven. Citizens must make our voices heard—that limiting our ability to access lifesaving vaccines for our families is unacceptable. Our children, our country and our future deserve nothing less.

(Newsweek, by Chelsea Clinton, vice-chair of the Clinton Foundation and a bestselling author. She holds a doctorate in international relations from Oxford University and a master’s in public health from Columbia University.)

This ‘n That.

Have a great weekend. See you on Tuesday!