Dear Commons Community,

The Trump administration has terminated hundreds of federal grants awarded to advance STEM education in K-12 schools, colleges and universities—a move that educators and experts say will eliminate important sources of science teacher training, learning opportunities for students, and research into best instructional practices.

These cuts come as part of a broader package of grant cancellations at the National Science Foundation, an agency that is a major funder of science and engineering research. In April, the agency canceled more than 1,100 awards, which the Department of Government Efficiency called “wasteful DEI grants” in a post on X.   As reported by Education Week.

More than 400 of these grants were under the NSF’s directorate for STEM Education, according to a database maintained by researchers at Harvard University and the nonprofit rOpenSci.

Among the projects canceled: an after-school robotics program for middle school girls in Chicago, an initiative to expand access for students of color and low-income students to higher-level math courses in Milwaukee public schools, and a research project to recruit and train more computer science teachers from underrepresented groups in California.

Then, this week, NSF staff were told to pause all future grant awards “until further notice,” the journal Nature reported. This directive came after leadership at the agency instructed staff to screen all new proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities.”

Going forward, grants awarded by NSF shouldn’t “preference some groups at the expense of others, or directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups,” the agency’s former director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, wrote in a statement on April 18 before stepping down the following week.

Projects focused on misinformation or disinformation will also no longer receive funding, according to a “frequently asked questions” document on the NSF website. An agency spokesperson declined to comment on a request for further information about how the foundation chose which grants to terminate.

The cancellations could have big ripple effects in K-12 schools, said Christine Royce, a past president of the National Science Teaching Association, and a professor of STEM education at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

“We’ve had a longstanding history of having different types of money support teacher development [in STEM],” she said.

The Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite prompted investment in teacher training and science curriculum development, a response to fears that American students wouldn’t be prepared to compete in science fields on the world stage. In the 1990s, the federally funded Eisenhower programs provided classroom resources for math and science teachers until Congress cut them in the mid-2000s.

“We’ve seen dropoffs over time when money has been reduced but not eliminated, where … there’s evidence that shows fewer teachers can attend a conference, or not as many teachers can attend a summer program,” Royce said. “I think with this next step of what’s happening, it will have a significant impact.”

Cuts target grants deemed to be connected to diversity, equity, and inclusion

The NSF has several grant programs designed to support work that directly affects teaching and learning.

Computer Science for All awards, for instance, support research and partnerships that help train K-12 teachers to teach computer science and computational thinking. Discovery Research Pre-K-12 grants fund research into STEM learning. The Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship program helps recruit, prepare, and retain science and math teachers in high-need districts.

In applying for these grants, as with all NSF grant competitions, researchers are required to outline their proposals’ broader impacts—their “potential to benefit society,” as described on the NSF website. There are many ways for researchers to meet these criteria, but one is through furthering inclusion of underrepresented minorities in STEM—a goal that Congress has required the NSF to address since the 1980s, and one that some Republicans have taken aim at over the past year.

In October, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas—then the ranking Republican on the Senate’s commerce, science, and transportation committee, which oversees NSF—spearheaded a report claiming that the Biden administration had “politicized” science and identifying 3,483 grants that he claimed went to “questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle.”

Slightly more than half of the terminated grants were on the Cruz list, according to the database maintained by researchers at Harvard University and rOpenSci.

An analysis of the grants in Cruz’s report by ProPublica earlier this year found that many had nothing to do with DEI themes. Research into biodiversity of plants, for example, seemed to have been flagged for including the word “diversity.”

Some, though, sought to expand participation of underrepresented students in STEM, or use science to investigate problems in students’ communities—goals that the researchers say can get more children to engage in the subject.

“If we can make science relevant to students’ lives, it really broadens how they see themselves,” said Tammie Visintainer, an assistant professor of teacher education at San Jose State University in California.

Visintainer’s $786,285 grant, which trained teachers to help students research the causes and effects of urban heat islands in their communities, was canceled on April 18. Cruz had targeted her work in his 2024 report for her focus on “climate justice”—the idea that low-income communities and communities of color disproportionately feel the effects of climate change, and that policy changes can mitigate those effects.

But her grant doesn’t target specific groups of students over others, she said—her program is open to any classroom, and she doesn’t pick the schools or students.

Teachers participate in a 10-day summer institute that digs into the science behind extreme heat in urban areas, explores community-based solutions, and helps educators create curricular units to use with their students.

“There’s this big need for climate science education that puts students in positions of agency and action,” Visintainer said. Experts say that children need opportunities to work through their emotions about the topic, which can often feel overwhelming and scary, while also having a solid understanding of the science behind how climate change occurs.

On a topic like climate change, NSF-funded workshops might have given teachers an opportunity for professional learning they wouldn’t have otherwise seen—most teachers don’t get training in how to teach the topic, a 2022 EdWeek Research Center survey found.

But even in subjects that are more commonly covered in science professional development, grants that fund the dissemination of the latest research to teachers and students play an important role in science education, said Royce, the former NSTA president.

“New science is happening every year, and it’s being released every week,” she said. “By the time it catches up with the medium, whether it’s a printed textbook or an online textbook, there’s going to be a delay.”

Among the grants canceled by NSF was a project  that I was a research associate on at Borough Manhattan Community College and the CUNY Graduate Center related to students with special needs in STEM courses delivered via online learning.  This was a five-year grant that was to run through 2029.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Columbia University said yesterday that it will be laying off nearly 180 staffers in response to Trump’s decision to cancel $400 million in funding over the Manhattan college’s handling of student protests against the war in Gaza.

Those receiving non-renewal or termination notices represent about 20% of the employees funded in some manner by the terminated federal grants, the university said in a statement.  As reported by The Associated Press.

“We have had to make deliberate, considered decisions about the allocation of our financial resources,” the university said. “Those decisions also impact our greatest resource, our people. We understand this news will be hard.”

University spokesperson Jessica Murphy declined to say whether more layoffs were expected, but said Columbia is taking a range of steps to create financial flexibility, including maintaining current salary levels and offering voluntary retirement incentives.

Research will also be scaled back, with some departments winding down studies and others maintaining some level of research while pursuing alternate funding.

The work impacted ranges from a project to develop an antiviral nasal spray for infectious diseases to various scientific studies on maternal mortality and morbidity, treatments for chronic illnesses such as long COVID, caring for newborns with opioid withdrawal syndrome and screenings for colorectal cancer, according to the university.

The layoffs, while expected, were “dispiriting” for faculty, said Marcel Agueros, secretary of Columbia’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which has filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration arguing the cuts are unlawful.

University officials say they’re working with the Trump administration in the hopes of getting the funding restored. But Agueros, an astronomy professor, said it will take years to undo the damage already inflicted.

“When there’s an interruption in funding, people have to leave, new people can’t be hired, some initiatives have to be put on hold, others need to be stopped, so research stops moving forward,” he said.

In March, the Trump administration pulled the funding over what it described as the Ivy League school’s failure to squelch antisemitism on campus during the Israel-Hamas war that began in October 2023.

Within weeks, Columbia capitulated to a series of demands laid out by the Republican administration as a starting point for restoring the funding.

Among the requirements was overhauling the university’s student disciplinary process, banning campus protesters from wearing masks, barring demonstrations from academic buildings, adopting a new definition of antisemitism and putting the Middle Eastern studies program under the supervision of a vice provost who would have a say over curriculum and hiring.

After Columbia announced the changes, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the university was “ on the right track,” but declined to say when or if Columbia’s funding would be restored. Spokespersons for the federal education department didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment Tuesday.

Columbia was at the forefront of U.S. campus protests over the war last spring. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up an encampment and seized a campus building in April, leading to dozens of arrests and inspiring a wave of similar protests nationally.

Trump, when he retook the White House in January, moved swiftly to cut federal money to colleges and universities he viewed as too tolerant of antisemitism.

Tony

Jack Schlossberg

Dear Commons Community,

Jack Schlossberg, John F. Kennedy’s grandson, had this to say when he learned Trump unclassified his grandfather’s assassination.

A. “President Trump is obsessed with my grandfather — but not in his life or what he achieved in it. No, just like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Donald Trump is only interested in JFK’s carcass.”

B. “JFK drafted the civil rights act — Trump made DEI illegal.

C. JFK stared down Russia and did not blink — Trump is Russia’s closest ally.

D. JFK sent a man to the moon — Trump gave Elon the keys to Air Force One.

E. JFK created USAID — Trump eliminated it.”

F. JFK fought fascism and communism. Trump is selling us out to tech warlords, at home and abroad.

G. JFK stood behind unions and labor, demanding healthcare, higher pay. Trump is stripping working families from lifesaving care and financial support.”

In sum, Trump and his cronies “are stealing history from present and future generations — by appropriating the past for their criminal agenda, they normalize themselves in the minds of those without living memory.” 

US president Barack Obama awards the 2010 Medal of Freedom to Warren Buffett at the White House © AFP/Getty Images.

Dear Commons Community,

Warren Buffett announced over the weekend that he would retire at the end of the year as chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.  He was a class act and a model for all of the other billionaires in this country.  Below is a guest essay by Buffett biographer Roger Lowenstein that appeared in The New York Times this morning.  Lowenstein laments that we may never see the likes of Buffett again.

Well-worth a read.

May Buffett have a long and healthy retirement!

Tony

——————————————————

The New York Times

Guest Essay

The Likes of Warren Buffett We Will Never See Again

May 5, 2025

By Roger Lowenstein

Mr. Lowenstein is the author of ”Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist.”

After six decades of pearly wisdom and investment gems, the news from Omaha hit like a thunderbolt.

As a fellow shareholder emailed me after Warren Buffett announced on Saturday that he would retire at the end of the year as chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, “Even though we knew it was inevitable, Warren’s announcement today came as a shock to the system.”

In an age of insecurity, Mr. Buffett was an anchor of endurance. Since he took the helm of Berkshire — on May 10, 1965 — General Motors, then the largest American corporation, has greeted 11 new chief executives. Sears, Roebuck, the biggest retailer, has vanished from the scene. Eleven U.S. presidents have come and gone (two of them having survived impeachment and one forced to resign), and Coca-Cola changed its formula, but Mr. Buffett didn’t change his.

And it wasn’t just constancy. Berkshire’s stock that day in May closed at $18 a share. When he delivered the news, it was above $809,000 — almost 45,000 times as high. Over the same span, the Dow Jones industrial average is up just under 45 times.

For the uninitiated, that means his performance was, literally, a thousand times that of the blue-chip American index. Mr. Buffett was the best investor ever — no second choices. But as I wrote 30 years ago in a biography of him, “The numbers alone do not account for the aura.” Since his performance reflects his many decades of managing Berkshire’s investments, he is also among the greatest corporate leaders.

It was not just the math (Elon Musk is richer) but also the quality of his performance. To paraphrase the famous testimony of J.P. Morgan Sr., with whom Mr. Buffett is often compared, it was his character.

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Mr. Buffett has long stood out on Wall Street because he eschewed its frequent chicanery, self-dealing and greed (and the double-talk that went with it). He revered the institutions of capitalism; most especially, he treated the executive’s duty to shareholders as a sacred trust.

Lest he be accused of violating that trust, he capped his annual salary at $100,000, He never took a stock option (the unholy tool by which chief executives expropriate a piece of the business from the shareholders for whom they are fiduciaries). In corporate America, that made him all but unique.

Today so many institutions seem diminished that the sense of loss at this news stretches beyond the corporate suite. Where in Congress, the media or government is a leader of such principle?

This is why Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, could say, with tolerable hyperbole, “Warren Buffett represents everything that is good about American capitalism and America itself.”

On Wall Street, Mr. Buffett’s most distinguishing mark (aside from sheer skill) was his fealty to what many leaders proclaim but few adhere to: unwavering focus on the long term.

As recently as Berkshire’s annual meeting on Saturday, when he dropped the big news, Mr. Buffett replied to a shareholder’s question on whether he was taking steps to hedge the effects of currency fluctuations on the company’s quarterly or annual earnings. With a bemused grin and one of his patented lectures, he said, “We don’t do anything based on its impact on quarterly and annual earnings.” He added, “What counts is where we are five or 10 or 20 years from now.”

It sounds easy, but a vanishing few could ignore the momentary fashions, the short-term distractions. His ability to look past the next set of numbers is as rare in business as it is in politics. It required an internal value system, a willingness to think for himself.

Contrary to what is often written, Mr. Buffett’s biggest coups were not based on privileged access. He invested in Coca-Cola in the late 1980s and in Apple starting in the mid-2010s based on his evaluation of the publicly reported data. Every investor on the planet had the same information.

They were signature moves — big but well considered — notably unheedful of the Wall Street fetish for diversification. One of his favorite aphorisms was that investors would invest more wisely if they were told at birth they could make only 20 investment decisions. Like many of his best sayings, it was also a commentary on living. Selectivity required courage, personal responsibility.

He lived that way. He had no corporate hand-holders. His sidekick, Charlie Munger, was a sounding board, but Mr. Buffett spoke for himself. I would call from time to time (he even kept the same number) and got right through. Never did I hear, “He is in a meeting.”

In 1991, Mr. Buffett was recruited to rescue Salomon Brothers, a Wall Street bank mired in scandal. He was confronted by a suspicious press, most of whom had never met the so-called wizard of Omaha and some of whom took him for a hayseed. He disarmed them in a Wall Street minute; he would answer their questions, he said, “in the manner of a fellow who has never met a lawyer.”

I thought of that late in 2023, when three university presidents, facing most hostile interrogators in Congress, retreated behind legal formalities. Which is not to take a side — only to point out how rare a leader Mr. Buffett is.

This explains the most curious aspect of his celebrity — the annual trek of thousands of Buffett cultists and other shareholders to his capitalist Woodstock in Omaha. No less than the uncounted bigwigs who call him privately, his fans sought unvarnished answers delivered with his cornhusker simplicity (and his razor wit). And some sought inspiration.

Though his sermons occasionally strayed into political economy (his recent defense of trade was a gem of simplicity), he frustrated those who wanted him to speak out on politics. He preferred to engage within, as he would say, his “circle of competence.”

During the 2008 financial crisis, he helped to prop up the U.S. financial system by investing in Goldman Sachs. He had done similar before — rushing in where others fled. Coupled with his oft-expressed faith in America’s future, his efforts seemed like a capitalist version of a national security blanket. No one else could confer such an endorsement. That he will step down, at age 95, without having overstayed his powers, heightens the sense that he is irreplaceable.

We always had Warren Buffett as a backstop. Until, at the end of this year, we won’t.

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams.  It is a memoir by a former Facebook employee, which portrays the executives at Facebook as a greedy bunch of individuals only interested in the bottom line no matter what the costs to society or to its people.  Wynn-Williams held a high global policy position at Facebook and worked closely with the upper echelon of the company including founder Mark Zuckerberg and CEO Sheryl Sandberg.  Neither of them come across as people anyone would want to work for and I didn’t accept Wynn-Williams’ reasons for staying for seven years.  She ends up being let go by Facebook. Many of the stories told in this memoir have been already reported in the news media but if you are not at all familiar with the Facebook culture, you will find the treatment here illuminating.

Below is an extensive and well-done review that appeared in The New York Times last month.

Tony

———————————

The New York Times

Review of Books

Careless People A Facebook Insider’s Exposé Alleges Bad Behavior at the Top

By Jennifer Szalai

Published March 10, 2025Updated March 18, 2025

CARELESS PEOPLE: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams

For seven years, beginning in 2011, the book’s author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook (now called Meta), eventually as a director of global public policy. Now she has written an insider account of a company that she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders, who chafed at the burdens of responsibility and became ever more feckless, even as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes.

“Careless People” is darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. What Wynn-Williams reveals will undoubtedly trigger her former bosses’ ire. Not only does she have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also delivers the goods.

During her time at Facebook, Wynn-Williams worked closely with its chief executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. They’re this book’s Tom and Daisy — the “careless people” in “The Great Gatsby” who, as Wynn-Williams quotes the novel in her epigraph, “smashed up things and creatures” and “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Wynn-Williams was so eager to work at Facebook that she pitched herself to the company for months before it eventually hired her. Born and raised in New Zealand, she had been working as a diplomat at her country’s embassy in Washington and, before that, at the United Nations. She was drawn to human rights and environmental issues.

Relying on Facebook to stay connected with her friends back home, she believed the platform “was going to change the world.” As governments realized what Facebook could do, she sold herself to the company by telling its officials they could use a diplomat. When they finally hired her, she was elated: “I can’t believe I have the opportunity to work on the greatest political tool of my lifetime.”

What follows is a book-length admonishment to be careful what you wish for. Any idealism about Facebook’s potential as “the greatest political tool” sounds bitterly ironic now, 14 years later. By the end of her memoir, Wynn-Williams is told that her superiors have “concerns” about her performance; she feels so beaten down by her tenure at the company that she describes getting fired as a “quick euthanasia.”

Wynn-Williams sees Zuckerberg change while she’s at Facebook. Desperate to be liked, he becomes increasingly hungry for attention and adulation, shifting his focus from coding and engineering to politics. On a tour of Asia, she is directed to gather a crowd of more than one million so that he can be “gently mobbed.” (In the end, she doesn’t have to; his desire is satisfied during an appearance at a Jakarta shopping mall with Indonesia’s president-elect instead.) He tells her that Andrew Jackson (who signed the Indian Removal Act into law) was the greatest president America ever had, because he “got stuff done.”

Sandberg, for her part, turns her charm on and off like a tap. When Wynn-Williams first starts at Facebook, she is in awe of Sandberg, who in 2013 publishes her best-selling corporate-feminism manifesto, “Lean In.” But Wynn-Williams soon learns to mistrust “Sheryl’s ‘Lean In’ shtick,” seeing it as a thin veneer over her “unspoken rules” about “obedience and closeness.”

Wynn-Williams is aghast to discover that Sandberg has instructed her 26-year-old assistant to buy lingerie for both of them, budget be damned. (The total cost is $13,000.) During a long drive in Europe, the assistant and Sandberg take turns sleeping in each other’s laps, stroking each other’s hair. On the 12-hour flight home on a private jet, a pajama-clad Sandberg claims the only bed on the plane and repeatedly demands that Wynn-Williams “come to bed.” Wynn-Williams demurs. Sandberg is miffed.

Sandberg isn’t the only person in this book with apparent boundary issues. Wynn-Williams has uncomfortable encounters with Joel Kaplan, an ex-boyfriend of Sandberg’s from Harvard, who was hired as Facebook’s vice president of U.S. policy and eventually became vice president of global policy — Wynn-Williams’s manager. A former Marine who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and who was part of the “Brooks Brothers riot” of 2000, which helped bring George W. Bush into office, Kaplan went on to serve as a deputy chief of staff in his administration.

Wynn-Williams describes Kaplan grinding up against her on the dance floor at a work event, announcing that she looks “sultry” and making “weird comments” about her husband. When she delivers her second child, an amniotic fluid embolism nearly kills her; yet Kaplan keeps emailing her while she’s on maternity leave, insisting on weekly videoconferences. She tells him she needs more surgery because she’s still bleeding. “But where are you bleeding from?” he repeatedly presses her. An internal Facebook investigation into her “experience” with Kaplan cleared him of any wrongdoing.

Such scenes of personal degradation are lurid enough, but Wynn-Williams also had a front-row seat to some of Facebook’s most ignominious episodes. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Facebook employees embedded with the Trump campaign helped it micro-target potential voters, feeding them bespoke ads filled with “misinformation, inflammatory posts and fund-raising messages.” (The Clinton campaign declined Facebook’s offer to embed employees.) The following year, in Myanmar, a country heavily reliant on Facebook, hateful lies propagated on the platform incited a genocide against the minority Rohingya ethnic group.

Wynn-Williams says she started raising the alarm about Myanmar several years earlier, trying to persuade Facebook to beef up its monitoring operations when she learned that hate speech was circulating on the platform. Content moderation was painfully (and lethally) slow, she writes, because the company relied on one contractor who spoke Burmese: a “Burmese guy” based in Dublin, multiple time zones away from both Myanmar and Facebook’s California headquarters. “Myanmar demonstrates better than anywhere the havoc Facebook can wreak when it’s truly ubiquitous.”

The book includes a detailed chapter on “Aldrin,” the code name for Facebook’s project to get unblocked in China. According to Wynn-Williams, the company proposed all kinds of byzantine arrangements involving China-based partnerships, data collection and censorship tools that it hoped would satisfy China’s ruling Communist Party.

Knowing that Zuckerberg would probably face questions about China from Congress, his team gave him cleverly worded talking points. “There seems to be no compunction about misleading Congress,” Wynn-Williams writes. “Senators will need to ask exceptionally specific questions to get close to any truth.” When Zuckerberg eventually appears before a Senate committee in 2018, a senator asks him how Facebook is handling the Chinese government’s unwillingness “to allow a social media platform — foreign or domestic — to operate in China unless it agrees to abide by Chinese law.” In his reply, Zuckerberg states, “No decisions have been made around the conditions under which any possible future service might be offered in China,” to which Wynn-Williams comments: “He lies.”

Wynn-Williams has filed a whistle-blower complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Professionally, she has moved on, to work on policy issues related to artificial intelligence and to pour her gallows humor into this book. “Careless People” may contain a cast of careless people, but it’s ultimately Zuckerberg who “wants to be the decider.” She shows him replacing the imperfect system of checks and balances that her policy team developed over the years with his decrees, which typically coincide with his business interests: “Facebook is an autocracy of one.”

And autocracies aren’t bound by term limits. In 2016, during a summit of world leaders in Peru, Wynn-Williams noticed that many faces were familiar; a number of other leaders were gone. “I’m struck by the impermanence of importance,” she writes. “Yet Mark could conceivably continue to hold his place chairing world leaders for another 50 years. He’ll see these leaders off and the generations of leaders that follow them. Like the queen.”

Dear Commons Community,

U.S. Cardinal Timothy Dolan said yesterday that President Donald Trump’s posting of an AI-generated photo showing himself as the pope “wasn’t good” but declined to say whether the White House should apologize to offended Catholics.

Dolan, the archbishop of New York, was asked about the post on the sidelines of a Mass he celebrated at a Rome church ahead Wednesday’s start of a conclave where he and other cardinals under the age of 80 will elect a successor to Pope Francis.

Trump, who is not a Catholic and does not attend church regularly, posted the image on his Truth Social platform late on Friday, less than a week after attending the funeral of Pope Francis, who died at 88 last month.

The White House then reposted it on its official X account.

“It wasn’t good,” Dolan said before the Mass in response to a reporter’s question, adding: “I hope he didn’t have anything to do with that.”

When a reporter asked if he was offended, Dolan said: “Well, you know, it wasn’t good.”

Asked after the Mass if the post should be taken down and if an apology from Trump or the White House was in order, Dolan said in Italian: “Who knows?” He declined to say anything more about it.

I am sorry Cardinal Dolan but you should show more leadership and call him out.  What Trump did was a disgrace and an insult to  Catholics and the Papacy.

Tony

Moderator Kristen Welker interviews President Donald Trump on Meet the Press.

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump wouldn’t take responsibility for the shrinking economy, expressed uncertainty whether he must uphold the Constitution to carry out his deportation agenda and said he’s not looking at running for a third White House term during a wide-ranging interview with NBC’s Meet the Press. 

Trump’s interview with host Kristen Welker, which aired yesterday, comes as he marked his first 100 days in office during his second term with a media blitz.

While the president has touted his work on central 2024 campaign promises – including sweeping tariffs and a nationwide immigration crackdown – he’s been pressed on rising economic anxieties as his approval ratings reach new lows.

Here are five takeaways from the interview as Trump looks to the rest of his second term courtesy of USA Today.

Trump says he’s not looking at running again in 2028

Trump, during the interview that was conducted May 2, said he’s not looking at running for a third term for president in 2028 and acknowledged he’s not allowed to do so ‒ after repeatedly floating the idea since returning to the White House.

“I’m not looking at that,” Trump said, even as the Trump Organization recently started selling “Trump 2028” hats on Trump’s online store.

“I will say this. So many people want me to do it. I have never had requests so strong as that,” Trump said. “But it’s something that, to the best of my knowledge, you’re not allowed to do. I don’t know if that’s constitutional that they’re not allowing you to do it or anything else.”

Serving a third presidential term is explicitly barred by the 22nd Amendment, which states, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

Trump said he’s “looking to have four great years and turn it over to somebody, ideally a great Republican, a great Republican to carry it forward.”

He added: “I’ll be an eight-year president; I’ll be a two-term president. I always thought that was very important, to be honest with you.”

Trump says he’s responsible for only ‘good parts’ of economy

Trump again refused to take responsibility for the state of the economy and blamed his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, after the U.S. gross domestic product shrank at a 0.3% annual rate in the first three months of the year.

“It partially is right now,” Trump said when asked when the economy becomes his. “And I really mean this. I think the good parts are the Trump economy and the bad parts are the Biden economy because he’s done a terrible job.”

Trump said he’s been able to “get down the costs,” although economists warn his tariffs could end up causing consumer prices to increase.

The first quarter GDP covers the first three months of the year, the first three weeks of which were helmed by Biden, whose last full day in office was Jan. 19.

Amid stock market turbulence, Trump last week declared, “This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s,” even though Wall Street’s volatility has widely been caused by his tariff polices. But after stocks surged over the past week, Trump touted the recent turnaround.

“Ultimately, I take responsibility for everything,” Trump said. “But I’ve only just been here for a little more than three months. But the stock market, look at what’s happened in the last short period of time. Didn’t it have nine or 10 days in a row, or 11 days, where it’s gone up? And the tariffs have just started kicking in. And we’re doing really well.”

Trump Not Sure if He Has to Uphold the Constitution

Trump said he does not know whether he’s required to uphold the Constitution as he defended his administration’s actions to remove people who are in the country illegally.

Trump’s comments follow the Supreme Court last month saying his administration must “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland sheet metal worker and father of three who was wrongfully deported to an El Salvador prison without receiving a trial.

“I don’t know,” Trump said when asked whether he needs to uphold the Constitution. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”

The Trump administration has said it doesn’t need to request Abrego Garcia’s release from El Salvador, where he’s originally from, because of how the court worded its decision. Democrats and other critics have argued that such statements show the administration is refusing to obey the nation’s highest court.

Pressed whether he agrees that everyone deserves due process under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution ‒ which says no person “shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” ‒ Trump said he wasn’t sure.

“I don’t know. It seems – it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” he said.

Trump officials have accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of the MS-13 gang and said if he were returned to the United States, he would be deported back to El Salvador because of his immigration status. Abrego Garcia has denied he was a member of MS-13 or any other gang.

Trump doubles down on kids getting fewer dolls

Trump said little girls in America don’t need to own so many dolls, doubling down on an example he gave last week to defend his universal tariffs on imports that could spike the prices of many goods, particularly imports from China.

“I don’t think that a beautiful baby girl needs – that’s 11 years old – needs to have 30 dolls,” Trump told Welker. “I think they can have three dolls or four dolls because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable. We had a trade deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars with China.”

The Trump administration has imposed tariffs totaling 145% on imports from China, while he’s paused reciprocal tariffs on goods from other nations for three months. Trump’s baseline 10% tariffs on other countries remain in effect.

Nonetheless, Trump said his doll scenario is not an acknowledgement that prices for Americans are going to increase or that store shelves could become empty under his economic agenda.

“No. I think tariffs are going to be great for us because it’s going to make us rich,” said Trump, who has argued his steep tariffs are needed to rejuvenate domestic manufacturing in the U.S. “No, I’m not saying that,” he said of empty store shelves in the future. “I’m just saying they don’t need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.”

A growing number of experts have told USA TODAY that they foresee a recession by the second half of the year, spurred by tariffs as well as Trump’s sweeping federal layoffs, removal of migrants and other actions.

Trump says it will be ‘OK’ if U.S. economy falls into recession

Trump downplayed economic anxieties caused by his tariffs, saying that everything would be “OK” even if the U.S. enters a recession in the short term.

“Everything’s OK,” Trump said, arguing the United States is in a “transition period” following the implementation of his steep new tariffs last month.

Asked whether he is concerned about an economic recession, Trump said he’s not. “No, I think we’re going to have the greatest economic … ,” he said, but added that he can’t rule it out.

As the Trump administration negotiates trade deals with more than 170 countries, Trump did not rule out the possibility that some of the tariffs could be permanent.

“No, I wouldn’t do that because if somebody thought they were going to come off the table, why would they build in the United States?” Trump said.

This interview was not great but better than most of his other interviews!

Tony

Claudia Sheinbaum. Reuters/Carlo Allegri/Raquel Cunha.

Dear Commons Community,

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum revealed yesterday that she had rejected President Donald Trump‘s offer of troops to help combat drug trafficking in Mexico, saying, “Sovereignty is not for sale.”

Responding to a Friday report from The Wall Street Journal that Trump was pressuring Mexico to allow for further U.S. involvement in combating drug cartels, Sheinbaum described a tense phone call shared with her northern counterpart last month.

“He said, ‘How can we help you fight drug trafficking? I propose that the United States military come in and help you.’ And you know what I said to him? ‘No, President Trump,’” Sheinbaum told supporters gathered in eastern Mexico.

She continued, “Sovereignty is not for sale. Sovereignty is loved and defended.”

According to the WSJ report, the 45-minute phone call, which took place on April 16, saw Trump push for the U.S. to not just send troops into Mexico but to take a leading role in the fight against the country’s drug cartels. Sheinbaum responded that while her administration would cooperate when it came to intelligence-sharing, it would not accept a direct military presence.

In a presidential memorandum published last month, Trump laid out a plan to have the Department of Defense claim jurisdiction over a strip of public land along the border, known as the Roosevelt Reservation, in order to enable further military activities like border wall construction and the placement of detection equipment.

While Sheinbaum has cooperated with Trump on matters of immigration and trade—Trump agreed to a pause on his tariffs in exchange for Mexico reinforcing their side of the border with 10,000 members of Mexico’s National Guard back in February—she is now making it clear that U.S. military presence in Mexico is where she draws the line. “We can work together, but you in your territory and us in ours,“ said Sheinbaum.

“We will never accept the presence of the United States military in our territory,” she declared.

Standup for what is best for Mexico, President Sheinbaum!

Tony

Anthony Albanese

Dear Commons Community,

For the second time in a week, voters in a prominent US ally angered by President Donald Trump punished conservatives and re-elected a left-leaning incumbent. 

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was poised to win the largest victory for his center-left Labor Party since 1946, both in terms of two-party preferred and overall seat count. He’s the first Australian leader to win consecutive elections in more than two decades, and the only one to increase his party’s vote share after one term since World War II.

“We do not need to beg, or borrow, or copy from anywhere else,” Albanese said in his victory speech on Saturday night. “We do not seek our inspiration overseas. We find it right here, in our values and in our people.” 

Similar to Canada’s election last week, the outcome in Australia would’ve been hard to predict just months earlier. Both ruling parties were on the ropes, with conservatives in both countries seeking to capitalize on the momentum of Trump’s solid election win in November.

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney took to X on Saturday to congratulate Albanese on his win. “In an increasingly divided world, Canada and Australia are close partners and the most reliable of friends,” the newly re-elected prime minister said.

Loser Peter Dutton’s choice of MAGA-style policies, a broader pushback against conservatives and a swing toward stability by voters were all evidence of how Trump influenced Australia’s election, according to Steven Hamilton, assistant professor of economics at George Washington University.

“Without the Trump factor, I think Labor still would’ve got a majority, but I think Trump contributed to the vast margin that Albanese has secured,” Hamilton said. “It made things worse.”

Trump was deeply unpopular in Australia even before he placed broad tariffs on the nation’s exports. A poll by Redbridge in March found that 59% of voters surveyed had an unfavorable view of the US president.

Trump is deeply unpopular everywhere!

Congratulations, Mr. Albanese!

Tony