Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the hour: None of us were prepared for the double whammy of last week’s White House press conference, where Trump made false claims not only about vaccines, but also about Tylenol causing autism. We’ll have analysis from Gregg Gonsalves. He teaches at the Yale School of Public Health; he’s been an AIDS activist for 30 years; and he’s also a MacArthur Fellow — class of 2018. And he’s The Nation’s public health correspondent. But first: The Democrats challenged Trump on the budget & the government shutdown – finally! Harold Meyerson will comment – in a minute.
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Topic number one this week is the government shutdown. For comment, we turn to Harold Myerson. He’s editor at large of the American Prospect. Harold, welcome back.
Harold Meyerson: Always good to be here, Jon.
JW: For the Democrats in Congress, this is a big week of defiance — fighting Trump as a united force. Let me just summarize how we got here: Senate Republicans need Democratic votes to pass a budget, because Democrats can filibuster. But the Party’s Senate leadership up to now has been pretty submissive, especially back in March when Senate Democrats surrendered and Chuck Schumer failed to state any demands and then voted for the GOP’s temporary budget bill.
And Schumer received massive blowback. Democratic party approval hit a 30 year low, lower than Trump’s approval rating, lower than the approval rating of congressional Republicans. The Democratic party last summer had a 24% positive rating, 56% negative. That’s the lowest rating for either party going back almost 30 years.
Now we have a new Republican budget, and this time the Senate Democrats stated their demands: restore Medicaid, protect the Affordable Care Act. And the Democrats are running ads in the districts of 10 vulnerable house Republicans holding them responsible for whatever happens with higher healthcare costs. So the Democrats’ plan now is a lot better than the last one. But Trump still holds most of the cards at this point, it seems to me. What do you think?
HM: No, I think he does — because clearly the standoff cannot go on forever. A shutdown is also injurious to a lot of the American people. Just as the Republican cuts to Medicaid and throwing people off the Affordable Care Act is injurious to millions of American people, so it’s a bit of a crapshoot either way.
Now, the Republicans could get around this by simply abolishing the filibuster on this bill. There are a couple of Republican institutionalists who might not go along with that. I’m thinking maybe Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins. But that still would leave 51 votes to abolish the filibuster. So we’ll have to see where it goes.
Certainly after the debacle of March, Schumer and virtually every Senate Democrat realized that they couldn’t go gently into this good night. And so they’re not, and the banner they’re going under is certainly a politically popular one, which is not throwing millions of Americans off of the healthcare rolls.
JW: There’s one other possibility, very remote: Even if the Democrats won their demands and got the Republicans to vote for a budget that restored funding for Medicaid and Obamacare, Trump could still refuse to spend the money, which is what he’s been doing a lot of lately.
HM: Well, there was a school of thought, and I am one of the advocates of that school, that the Democrats should also have said that nothing in this budget can be rescinded or impounded by the President, which is after all a negation of the Article One, not amendment one, article one of the Constitution, which gives Congress, not the President, the power to authorize and appropriate funds. So this has been, in many ways, perhaps the most fundamental of Trump’s flouting of the Constitution, and I think that should there have been in a sane Congress, that would’ve been the shared premise of the current budget. But of course, the Republicans are more loyal to Trump than they are to the constitution.
JW: And Tuesday was also the day that defense secretary Pete Hegseth brought 800 military leaders from around the world back to Virginia to hear him give a speech. When Trump found out about it, he decided he wanted to give a speech too. Trump’s speech, the New York Times reported, was no surprise. They called it ‘a rambling address that included familiar talking points’–insults to Joe Biden, praise for his tariffs. What else?
HM: Well, I think the headline item coming out of it as he suggested troops could get necessary training by being deployed to American cities, and that the generals and admirals probably need to focus more on what he termed ‘the war within’—that’s a quote–than on their various overseas ventures.
Now that raises an interesting question: for those of us, like you Jon and like me, who live in American cities, what kind of training do we think we can provide to our boys and goils in blue or whatever the color of their—khaki– whatever the color of their uniforms might be. I mean, like today, my daily rounds basically consist of going to the cleaners to pick up some shirts. Now I don’t know that that really will hone the ability of our troops to respond. So was Trump wanting us to become like Neo-Black Panthers to give our troops actually people they can shoot at? And there are ambiguities here, but I think it raises the bar for all of us who live in cities to consider how best we can prepare our troops for whatever they may face on foreign soil.
JW: Modest proposals. I was interested also in Hegseth’s own speech, where he told the assembled generals at admirals that he was tightening standards for ‘fitness and grooming,’ and he attacked what he called ‘stupid rules of engagement’ that he said limited what soldiers could do in the field. This was the theme of the book that he wrote several years ago. These are the rules of engagement, which have been there for many decades, which prohibit the army from engaging in torture, from attacking civilians, and from killing prisoners. These are the things that Hegseth considers ‘stupid.’
How do you think that generals and admirals like being summoned back to Washington to listen to Tuesday’s speeches?
HM: I think they understood that this was kind of a political display, that Trump and Hegseth wanted to try to make their preoccupations those of the military, even when not, they either have no bearing on military readiness or actually deter order in the ranks or whatever have you.
I know Trump made one digression: that he’d been watching the old 1950s TV series Victory at Sea, and he started to get nostalgic for battleships, which generally the military since late 1941 have regarded as basically sitting ducks in any conflict. But this sort of aligns with Trump’s belief in coal, and I am reminded that before 1916, American warships were powered by coal and then they switched to oil. So you can imagine coal powered battleships being Trump’s weapons of choice.
To take a line, a last line, of a novel: ‘boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.’
JW: Beautiful!
HM: That’s where we’re headed.
JW: I’d also like to talk about Trump indicting the former head of the FBI, James Comey, for federal crimes. For a lot of people who agree that Trump has done many terrible things, the Comey indictment is the worst. The New York Times is in this group. They wrote, quote, this is the editorial in the New York Times, ‘an inexperienced prosecutor, loyal to Trump, in the job for less than a week, filed criminal charges against one of her boss’s most reviled opponents. She did so not only at Trump’s direct command, but also against the urging of her own subordinates and her predecessor, who had just been fired for believing, for arguing there was insufficient evidence to indict’ Comey.
Michael Tomasky expanded on this. He says the inexperienced attorney who brought the charges, he said, ‘this is a name you need to commit to memory because it will live in infamy in the country’s history, Lindsey Halligan, she has never been a prosecutor. She was an insurance lawyer in Florida. She chased tornadoes and it almost goes without saying that she represented insurance companies against the ordinary people whose homes had been damaged by tornadoes. Trump somehow spotted her one day when he was golfing and she was playing tennis. Oh, by the way, she’s a former Miss Colorado. Trump then invited her onto his legal team.’
Seems to me this case is quite likely to be thrown out before it ever gets to trial. Is that too optimistic?
HM: No, not at all. I mean since basically the consensus of the legal community is that there were no viable grounds for the charge, you kind of have to expect that the judge, who was not a Miss Colorado and seen by Trump playing tennis, would tend to be aligned with the bulk of the legal community and dismiss the charges. Which is not to say that Trump will not instruct Ms. Halligan to also indict Leticia James and Adam Schiff and whoever, although that would, those would probably lead to judicial dismissals as well.
JW: Then I think we should look back at Trump’s failed campaign to silence the late night comedians who tell jokes about him. The last chapter of this came when the owners of the local stations who had continued to boycott Jimmy Kimmel, even after Disney and ABC gave up and put him back on the air. — this is Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar Media Group, they threw in the towel, went back to broadcasting Jimmy Kimmel on their stations Friday night. They had kept him off for a week in the hopes of pleasing Trump. This was true in dozens of markets, including DC where you live, Columbus, Ohio, St. Louis people had been unable to watch Jimmy Kimmel on their local stations.
When he came back on last Friday night, 6 million people watched his monologue on broadcast tv. 26 million more people watched it on social media, mostly on YouTube–and he had that memorable line:
“This show is not important. What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.”
So really this is a total defeat for Trump. It’s also kind of a big risk for both Disney-ABC, and the two broadcast groups which are seeking government approval for big mergers and now have defied Trump.
But the big picture here, let me quote David Dayan in the Prospect: ‘If you see Trump Two as an experiment in what boundaries to push, the result here is that speech restrictions are a losing battle, and nobody has to comply in advance.’ So it seems that Americans like freedom of speech– Almost all Americans. And the corporations are submitting to that and risking Trump’s retaliation.
HM: Yeah, I think, and Sinclair and Nexstar are overtly right wing corporations. Sinclair inflicts right wing propaganda on all of its local newscasts and so on. But they realized they were running against something even deeper than MAGA. In a sense, this was to people of my generation and your generation sort of like attacking Johnny Carson. I mean that is beyond the pale in this country, and Steven Miller and Donald Trump may want to live in a country where you can dismiss and boot around the Johnny Carsons, but most Americans are not there.
JW: Let’s note that Jimmy Kimmel had the highest ratings among young viewers, 25 to 49, the most sought after by advertisers. So us oldsters may not watch his show, but millions of young people do,
HM: I guess. So there are no young people in my household, so I’ll have to follow the great god Nielsen on this.
JW: We also have an update this week on the Epstein files — because we have a new Democrat about to become a member of the House. Adelita Grijalva, who won the special election for Arizona’s congressional district previously held by her late father, Raul Grijalva. She was supposed to be sworn in on Tuesday, but Republicans canceled Tuesday’s congressional session before the vote could take place. So now they’re saying maybe next week. Whenever she is sworn in, she will sign the discharge petition that will force a House vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.
HM: I suppose the Republicans could always just refuse to reconvene for the rest of their session rather than get that 218th signature on the release-the-Epstein-file bill. If they don’t want to convene again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing either.
JW: Yeah, especially if there’s a government shutdown. What is there for the House to do anyway?
HM: Just demagogue.
JW: That’s their job.
HM: Yes, indeed.
JW: Well, here’s a wild story: Trump took to Truth Social on Saturday: ‘It was just revealed that the FBI on January 6th secretly placed against all rules, regulations, protocols and standards — 274 FBI agents’ were sent into the crowd just prior to and during what he calls the January 6th hoax. He said the FBI agents — 274 FBI agents – ‘were probably acting as agitators and insurrectionists, but certainly not as law enforcement officials.’ This is a more wild than usual and very specific.
And it led Kash Patel, his handpicked head of the FBI, to go onto Fox News to contradict the part where Trump said FBI agents acted as’ insurrectionists and agitators’ on January 6th. Patel said agents were ‘sent into a crowd control mission after the riot was declared.’ So here’s Cash Patel correcting Donald Trump on Fox News.
HM: Will wonders never cease. Actually, Trump’s social media statement reminds me a little of Joe McCarthy saying they’re 140 or some odd communists in the State Department. The quantification puts it in that same group, and quantification always makes something sound a little more plausible, even when it’s absurd as Joe McCarthy was and Donald Trump is.
JW: And through all of this, Trump remains unpopular. Nothing he does improves his overall approval ratings. Nothing he does wins majority support. He’s still the most unpopular president in history. We got a new poll from the New York Times this week, asked the very interesting question: ‘Do you think Donald Trump’s actions on each of the following have gone too far, not far enough, or have been about right.’ And here’s some of the highlights.
‘Pressuring media organizations that covered Donald Trump, unfavorably’: Trump has gone too far, 61%. What Trump has done is about right, 26%.
‘Sending National Guard troops into big cities’: 53% say he’s gone too far. 33% say what he’s done is about right.
‘Immigration enforcement’, broad category: 51% say he’s gone too far, 35% say what he’s done is about right.
‘Pressuring colleges and universities to adopt new policies’: 49% say he’s gone too far. 30% say he’s about right.
So the public continues to be deeply opposed to Trump’s main initiatives.
HM: And if you look at the polling, what’s clear is that Trump retains the support on all of those of the MAGA base, but not of the Democrats, not of independents, and not of any Republicans who are not part of the MAGA base.
JW: Harold Myerson of the American Prospect. Harold, thank you for talking with us today.
HM: Always good to be here, Jon.
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JW: Many of us thought we were getting used to the terrible news about access to vaccines, news from RFK Jr. and Trump, but no one was prepared for the double whammy of last week’s wacky press conference at the White House ,where Trump made false claims, not only about vaccines, but also about Tylenol – acetaminophen – causing autism. For comment and analysis, we turn to Gregg Gonsalves. He teaches at the Yale School of Public Health. He’s coordinator of Yale’s Global Health Justice Partnership. He’s been an AIDS activist for 30 years. And he’s also a MacArthur Fellow — class of 2018. And he’s The Nation’s public health correspondent. Gregg, welcome back.
Gregg Gonsalves: Thanks, Jon.
JW: Trump said pregnant women should not take Tylenol because, he said, ‘it can be associated with a very increased risk of autism.’ Is that conclusion supported by scientific research?
GG: Jon, I’m having flashbacks to 2020 and injecting bleach into your veins and shining UV light on you, and hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. The point is that acetaminophen is the safest fever reducer painkiller you could use in pregnancy. Its associations with autism or any autism spectrum disorder are dubious at best. There’ve been some associations shown in some small studies, but a very large Swedish study of close to 2.5 million children suggested there wasn’t an association. And it’s important to know why. In small studies, even slightly larger ones, there’s always a risk of confounding–that there’s something associated both with the outcome and the exposure that might predispose one to finding an association when there isn’t one.
What the Swedish study did was to take sibling pairs and use that to control for confounding. It might be due to parental genetics or familial environment, and if they didn’t use the sibling controls, they saw a slight association. But once they added the sibling controls, poof, the association disappeared. That’s probably the strongest evidence we have right now. Is it impossible that acetaminophen has some ties to autism? Maybe. Possibly. But the data is so scant that it doesn’t warrant changing any sort of clinical guidance for pregnant people.
JW: I want to ask about the one study that Trump referred to. We’re used to a lot of what RFK Junior says about the causes of autism coming from people who are not scientists, but the study Trump referred to at his press conference had a lot of impressive authors, including the dean of the public health school at Harvard, a doctor named Andrea Baccarelli. And the New York Times reports that Trump and Kennedy consulted with him before that press conference. Who is Andrea Baccarelli, and what is this study?
GG: A couple of things. One is he is indeed the dean of this Harvard School of Public Health. He was also an expert witness in a case in which the relationship of acetaminophen to autism was an issue. What’s really important is that the judge in the case looked at the study and said, this doesn’t hold any water. Even a non-professional could see that the claims being made in the paper and by this expert witness — who has been paid $150,000 for his testimony — was dubious at best. Again, there are studies that show an association between autism and acetaminophen, but they are small, they’re contradictory, and when you use more rigorous methodologies like I just described, the association melts away.
JW: The conclusion even of that paper was that Tylenol should be ‘used judiciously in the lowest dose at the least frequent interval.’ Does that change the current standard for Tylenol use by pregnant women?
GG: We’re not talking about high dose Tylenol or used for an extended amount of time. We’re talking about to reduce fever, to potentially reduce pain associated with points in pregnancy. And so even that paper, as you said, is not making grandiose claims about the dangers of acetaminophen, but I think in the context of being expert witness in that trial, the plaintiffs in the case were trying to make a much more extensive accusation which didn’t hold water in a court of law.
JW: Yeah, that study concluded that there was a small, but they said significant correlation between some uses of Tylenol and increased risk of autism. But of course, it’s always worth reminding people, and even the authors remind people, that correlation is not causation. The best example I’ve heard of this recently was Stephen Colbert’s. He said he had to choose one day at lunch between a side salad and fries, and he picked the side salad. And later that afternoon CBS canceled his show. And he said, ‘from now on, I’m not picking the side salad. I’m getting the fries.’ Steven Colbert, on the difference between correlation and causation.
If we want to find where the real damage is occurring, you suggest in your new piece at thenation.com that it’s the cuts to Medicaid that are about to do tremendous damage and especially in places like Mississippi. Tell us the state of maternal health in Mississippi these days.
GG: A couple of things. One is I can’t tell you much about it. I don’t work there and I don’t live there, but the Mississippi State Department of Health said, the state health officer Dan Edney said, ‘Too many Mississippi families are losing their babies before their first birthday.’ The infant mortality rate in 2024 is 9.7 deaths per a hundred live births, which is highest in more than a decade, and Mississippi has rates of infant mortality that vastly outnumber those among our rich nation peers. They’re doing terribly in the context of American health rankings for infant mortality, but they’re doing terribly in terms of what other developed nations see in terms of infant mortality.
It’s not just the fact that Tate reuses to expand Medicaid in his state or that the big beautiful bill is going to cut $800 billion for Medicaid, which remember about 60% of births in Mississippi are funded by Medicaid.
There’s a whole sort of constellation of things that are happening at the federal and state level that are making it difficult for mothers and children nowadays. The attacks on COVID vaccination for pregnant people and infants, the raising doubts about the combined MMRV vaccine, that hepatitis B vaccine, the Trump administration just got rid of the entire division at CDC that follows maternal and infant mortality so that we can’t even tell what’s going on at a state level anymore because we don’t have the people to do that work on a federal level. So it’s all these sort of compounded disasters that are inflicted by either the state government through Governor Reeves or from the White House and President Trump and Russell Vaught and others.
JW: In related news, getting far away from Mississippi, vaccines have become a political issue this month in the New Jersey gubernatorial race that’s currently underway, the Republican candidate–a guy named Jack Ciattarelli — was a featured guest at an event hosted by a group that’s one of New Jersey’s main opponents of mandatory vaccination. The keynote speaker was a doctor who has claimed that the COVID vaccine ‘magnetizes patients,’ this doctor named Sherry Tenpenny, testified in 2021 in Ohio. For people who have had the COVID vaccine, ‘they can put a key on their forehead, it sticks, they can put spoons and forks all over them and they can stick,’ close quote.
What can you say? [LAUGHTER] You’re trying it. If only we had video here! Did it work?
GG: No. I mean I’ve been told I’m magnetic, but not in that way.
JW: For us, you’ll always be magnetic.
GG: I mean, can we just stop? I mean, it’s ludicrous, but then again, claims being made by the Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Junior are ludicrous. Right? The point is that people believe them. People are taken in by them and it is no laughing matter. It compromises the health of children and their classmates in school. It compromises the health of immunocompromised people in the community. And so the fact that the GOP politicians, I’m not quite sure Republican voters are running in this direction. GOP voters are sort of taking the bait from RFK Jr on his anti-vax views. Vaccines are pretty popular among Democrats, Republicans and independents in this country. So while we’re having revival of anti-vax sentiment in this country and we’re seeing people from Ron DeSantis in Florida go after the childhood vaccination schedule, overall the country supports vaccination.
It’s important for your readers to know that this support of vaccines is bipartisan and it’s only the far right that is now in control of the Republican party that is making this an issue — at the expense, again, of children and parents and families.
JW: We did have some very bad news from New Jersey’s health commissioner, who reported that, in New Jersey this year, the state lost its herd immunity from measles. Please explain what that means.
GG: Measles is one of the most infectious viruses we know of among common viruses. It doesn’t take very much for it to take off like wildfire in a community, particularly that’s unvaccinated. And we all always think ‘I’m protected. I’m vaccinated. So what’s the problem?’ The point is, is that you don’t want measles spreading through your community because you could have gotten your measles vaccine like I did decades ago, and it could have waned. You could have just had a transplant, or be an immunocompromised, or you could be a newborn infant who has not even yet got their first shots. Measles wasting your community puts you in jeopardy, and measles is so infectious is that we need 95% of people in a community to be vaccinated for it to sort of cut the chains of transmission between each other. If you drop down to 90, 85%, it basically lets this powerfully transmissible virus spread throughout communities. And so once she said We’ve lost herd immunity, I assume she’s saying we don’t have significant coverage in the state of New Jersey to protect our children and our families against this virus, which can be incredibly deadly and can have complications that only arise years later.
JW: The Republican candidate in New Jersey did say, ‘we’ve got to get above the threshold of herd immunity to keep our community safe.’ What does it take to get herd immunity back?
GG: It means getting people to get vaccinated. So if you want to talk about measles, we’ve got to get it back up into the mid-nineties. We can’t afford to let down our guard and risk infections spreading across New Jersey like they spread across West Texas.
So it means like the state of Connecticut, we don’t have an ability to get an exemption from vaccination except for medical reasons. So no more philosophical religious exemptions in the state of Connecticut, although there are demonstrations last week against that in our state capital in Hartford. But we’ve got to just sort of do what’s right. There was a very famous court case at the beginning of the 20th century called Jacobson versus Massachusetts in which somebody said, ‘I don’t want to get vaccinated against smallpox.’ And the court case, the judge, judge Harland said, ‘Liberty is not absolute. Your freedom and liberty ends at the point in which what you do affects my life.’ And that’s just sort of paraphrasing what you said, but he talked about the community’s needs to protect itself even if you have some personal reservations about getting vaccinated. We’re rehashing century old debates that were closed cases in this 21st century. That seems like the ninth century in the US.
JW: There was some surprisingly good news last week: despite everything that Trump and RFK Junior have said, the latest round of research funding just announced by the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, this is $50 million in new research grants, went to 13 projects which are grounded in decades of mainstream autism science. They start from the finding that genetics accounts for 80% of the identifiable causes of autism. That’s their starting point. And these 13 projects will examine how the genetic explanations for autism interact with environmental influences to determine someone’s risk of developing autism. And these grants were announced at that same press conference where Trump told pregnant women’ don’t take Tylenol.’ What do you make of these new NIH autism grants?
GG: Jon, I haven’t seen them, so I can’t evaluate them. We have this sort of strange situation in the context of this new administration where they are excited about certain pieces of biomedical research, not just autism, but lenacapavir, which is a new drug used to prevent HIV infection–very much interested in it. But overall, they’re slashing and cutting NIH grants because of their association with keywords like women or race or equity or LGBTQ. And so we’re seeing a lot of good research losing its funding even as we speak, and the courts have been very supportive of the White House’s tack on this. Even though lower courts have said ‘it’s outright discrimination, more blatant than I’ve seen in my career on the bench’ –Judge Young in Massachusetts. the Supreme Court has said the White House has a right to cut those grants. And so we’re seeing a slow destruction of the National Institute of Health that I think many Americans aren’t paying attention to.
But in the long run, new cures for cancer, for heart disease, for other dreaded diseases are going to be left in the dust because we are losing a generation of researchers. So yes, there’s maybe some good news here and there from what the administration is doing, but I do believe the White House has sort of mayhem on its mind when it comes to the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, their budget requests ask for 40, 50% cuts to these agencies. That’s not how an administration or a country that supports science, innovation and prosperity acts.
JW: Gregg Gonsalves — he’s The Nation’s public health correspondent. His latest piece is headlined ‘Trump and RFK are presiding over a massacre of the innocents.’ You can read it [email protected]. Gregg, thanks for talking with us today.
GG: Always. Thank you, Jon.