Just 48 hours after declaring himself “king,” President Donald Trump, in a highly public display, launched a verbal attack on Maine Democratic Governor Janet Mills over his stance on transgender girls in sports. He threatened to cut all federal funding — literally defund the entire state — and vowed to end her political career, in what is being called a “terse” exchange.

“The president directly threatened Mills over the state’s refusal to comply with a recent executive order that would bar transgender athletes from competing on women’s sports teams,” NBC affiliate NewsCenter Maine reports.

Speaking to a bipartisan group of governors at the White House, Trump asked Governor Mills (video below) if her state would not “comply” with his executive order.

“Is Maine here? Is the governor of Maine here? Are you not going to comply with it?”

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“I’m complying with state and federal laws,” Mills replied.

“Well, I’m — we are the federal law,” Trump angrily shot back. “Well you’d better do it. You better do it, because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t. And by the way, your population, even though it’s somewhat liberal, although I did very well there, your population doesn’t want men playing in women’s sports. So you’d better comply, because otherwise you’re not getting any — any — federal funding.”

“See you in court,” Mills responded.

“Good, I’ll see you in court. I look forward to that,” Trump said. “That should be a real easy one. And enjoy your life after governor, ’cause I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.”

Governor Mills later released a statement.

“If the President attempts to unilaterally deprive Maine school children of the benefit of Federal funding, my Administration and the Attorney General will take all appropriate and necessary legal action to restore that funding and the academic opportunity it provides. The State of Maine will not be intimidated by the President’s threats.”

Critics are slamming the president.

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“An incredibly revealing exchange, but especially a window into Trump’s view when he says ‘We are the federal law.’ As opposed to, you know, actual laws (& constitutional provisions) that authorize and limit what he can do,” noted CNN senior political analyst Ronald Brownstein.

“L’etat c’est moi as Louis XIV might (or not) have said,” Brownstein added, which loosely translates into “I am the state,” or, “I myself am the nation.”

“Not so easy to cosplay as a king when you aren’t hiding behind a phone screen,” Human Rights Campaign national press secretary Brandon Wolf commented.

“The distance between the most benign possible interpretation of Trump’s public statements and clear autocracy has narrowed to the width of a hairline fracture. Yet Republicans continue to insist that what he ACTUALLY meant was something totally cool and not autocratic,” observed veteran Democratic political strategist Tom Bonier.

“THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT. Right in the White House, Maine Gov Janet Mills goes toe to toe with Trump. Wow,” remarked veteran journalist turned media critic Jennifer Schulze.

Democratic former Washington governor Jay Inslee applauded the Maine governor: “Governor Janet Mills has brought thousands of heat pumps to Maine and now has brought some righteous heat to Donald Trump. Way to bring the heater Janet!”

Trump has signed at least four executive orders threatening the civil rights of transgender people in America.

Watch the video below or at this link.

Gov. Mills: I’ll comply with the state and federal laws

Trump: We are the federal law. You better do it because you’re not going to get any federal funds.

Gov Mills: See you in court pic.twitter.com/sBuWDeOCpM

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 21, 2025

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Image via Reuters 

President Donald Trump is expected to announce plans to take over the U.S. Postal Service, an independent agency that has its roots in the U.S. Constitution, and absorb it into the Commerce Department. Congress, not the executive branch, has primary control over the USPS, although the president nominates members of the USPS Board of Governors, who must receive Senate confirmation.

Critics are calling it a “reckless power grab” and warning that it could disenfranchise the millions of Americans — nearly half of all voters — who vote by mail, and threatens to disrupt the lives of millions of Americans, especially seniors, veterans, and rural residents, who receive “about a billion shipments of prescription drugs” through the mail.

According to The Washington Post, which first broke the story, the move “would probably violate federal law,” and throw “the 250-year-old mail provider and trillions of dollars of e-commerce transactions into turmoil.”

For decades, Republicans have wanted to privatize the USPS, at one point restructuring it and forcing it to effectively “bank” a continuous 50 years’ worth of pension and health care funding, something no other agency has ever been required to do. Calling the Postal Service “essential,” President Joe Biden signed the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022—legislation that passed with massive bipartisan support—which eliminated the pre-funding requirement, providing the agency with far greater stabilization.

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President Trump for years has blasted the Postal Service, and weaponized his criticism into attacks on Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, one of his prominent critics. (Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, more recently has appeared to adopt a more supportive tone.) Amazon is one of the top customers of the Postal Service, and Trump tried to force the USPS to increase the rates that the company, one of the nation’s top retailers, has to pay.

Trump in 2018, for example, wrongly claimed that “the Post Office is losing billions of dollars … because it delivers packages for Amazon at a very below cost,” Factcheck.org reported. “He also said taxpayers are ‘subsidizing’ Amazon’s deliveries, but the U.S. Postal Service does not receive any federal funds for its operating costs and hasn’t since 1982.”

The Postal Service’s governing board, “is planning to fight Trump’s order, three of those people told The Washington Post,” the paper reported. “In an emergency meeting Thursday, the board retained outside counsel and gave instructions to sue the White House if the president were to remove members of the board or attempt to alter the agency’s independent status.”

“This is a somewhat regal approach that says the king knows better than his subjects and he will do his best for them. But it also removes any sense that there’s oversight, impartiality and fairness and that some states wouldn’t be treated better than other states or cities better than other cities,” James O’Rourke, who studies the Postal Service at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, told the Post. “The anxiety over the Postal Service is not only three-quarters of a million workers. It’s that this is something that does not belong to the president or the White House. It belongs to the American people.”

CRITICS RESPOND

Critics immediately blasted President Trump upon hearing news of his plans to take over the Postal Service.

“Now he’ll control mail-in voting. Right out of the autocrat’s playbook,” remarked journalist and author Craig Crawford.

“This is insane,” declared U.S. Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA). “Now Trump wants to seize the Postal Service, dismantle its independence, and throw mail delivery into chaos. This isn’t reform—it’s an incompetent, reckless power grab. We will use every tool at our disposal to fight back.”

“USPS, despite its faults, delivers hundreds of millions of pieces of mail on a *daily* basis, and as a small percentage of that volume, is also the literal backbone of our entire elections, voter registration, and political campaigning system in America,” observed Nick Lima, Registrar/Director of Elections for the City of Cranston, Rhode Island.

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“Taking over the USPS would be plainly contrary to the 1970 Postal Service law. Is the President is betting he can do it and that Congress will do nothing & that maybe the SCOTUS will declare the 1970 statute’s method of appointing the PMG [Postmaster General] unconstitutional?” noted Dr. Kevin R. Kosar, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies the U.S. Congress, the administrative state, American politics, election reform, and the U.S. Postal Service.

“The Postal Service is one of the largest employers of Veterans in the country. Hundreds of thousands of Veterans rely on USPS to deliver medications, benefits, and critical information. We won’t stand by and let this happen. We WILL fight this!” announced the progressive political action committee (PAC) VoteVets.

TRUMP, COVID, AND THE USPS

During the summer of 2020, during President Trump’s first term, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, many more Americans turned to the Postal Service to obtain their prescription medications.

Documenting that phenomenon, Popular Science, citing Michael Pignone, a doctor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Texas’s Dell Medical School, reported that the USPS is “part of the healthcare system.”

“You can think of the post office as just this incredibly well-distributed last-mile logistics network,” Pignone said. “There are all kinds of possibilities of what the postal service can do.”

WIRED magazine, also in 2020, reported on the ” little-known Postal Plan, which dates back to the Clinton era,” that “charges mail carriers with delivering critical supplies—like vaccines—as a last resort.” It also cited “a little-known Obama administration plan, ‘Executive Order 13527: Medical Countermeasures Following a Biological Attack,'” where “it would fall to the Postal Service to be the first-line responders to a widespread biological terror incident—think an anthrax attack, where the post office shows up at your door with Cipro. Those plans could potentially be dusted off to help respond to disease epidemic or pandemic.”

In its report on Trump’s plans to take over the Postal Service, The Washington nPost also noted that “Republicans have grown wary of [outgoing Postmaster General] DeJoy and the Postal Service’s close ties to the Biden administration. The two partnered to deliver nearly 1 billion coronavirus test kits, the largest expansion of postal capabilities in a generation, and to fund a fleet of more than 60,000 electric mail delivery vehicles, though those were plagued by delivery delays.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump had one of the worst responses compared to other similar nations. He infamously begged officials to slow down testing for the coronavirus, and said, “by having more tests, we have more cases.”

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Image via Reuters

One week after being sworn into office, President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is reportedly preparing to make significant changes to the vaccine approval process—actions that critics say violate the “commitment” he made to several Republican senators. These assurances, senators claim, were key conditions for their votes to confirm the Kennedy, an attorney known for his “role in legitimizing anti-vaccine activism.”

Secretary Kennedy “is preparing to remove members of the outside committees that advise the federal government on vaccine approvals and other key public health decisions, according to two people familiar with the planning,” Politico reported Thursday. “Kennedy plans to replace members who he perceives to have conflicts of interest, as part of a widespread effort to minimize what he’s criticized as undue industry influence over the nation’s health agencies.”

The apparent most likely target is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which “plays a key role in setting vaccine policy. Kennedy and his top aides are also scrutinizing a host of other outside panels, including those that advise the Food and Drug Administration,” according to Politico.

In anticipation of this possibility, before leaving office, President Joe Biden and his HHS Secretary, Xavier Becerra, “approved the appointments of eight new candidates” to ACIP, STAT News reported in January. The medical news outlet called it “a burst of activity within a matter of a few months that could, in theory, make it more difficult for the Trump administration to shape the panel with its own appointees.”

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But experts believe that “any attempt to protect the status quo at the ACIP will prove to have been futile. People who sit on this committee have at-will appointments,” they noted.

Multiple news outlets on Thursday reported that ACIP’s first scheduled meeting of the year, slated for next week, has now been postposed, a development raising concerns.

Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a noted virologist, responded on social media to the rescheduling, remarking: “This is how RFK Jr will administratively destroy vaccination programs.”

U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy is a Louisiana Republican and a medical doctor who “co-founded the Greater Baton Rouge Community Clinic, a clinic providing free dental and health care to the working uninsured,” his Senate bio reads. “Bill also created a private-public partnership to vaccinate 36,000 greater Baton Rouge area children against Hepatitis B at no cost to the schools or parents. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Bill led a group of health care volunteers to convert an abandoned K-Mart building into an emergency health care facility, providing basic health care to hurricane evacuees.”

Politico reports that the assurances RFK Jr. “provided helped clinch his confirmation, after Senate HELP Committee Chair Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said he received commitments that changes would not be made to the CDC’s vaccine committee.”

On February 4, standing on the floor of the Senate, Dr. Cassidy delivered a speech detailing those commitments.

“After seeing patients die from vaccine preventable diseases, I dedicated much of my time to vaccine research and immunization programs. Personally witnessing the safety monitoring, and the effectiveness of immunization. But simply, vaccines save lives,” Cassidy said (archived).

“This is the context that informed me when considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr as the nominee to be Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services,” Cassidy continued, explaining why he was choosing to vote to confirm RFK Jr. “Regarding vaccines, Mr. Kennedy has been insistent that he just wants good science and to ensure safety. But on this topic, the science is good, the science is credible. Vaccines save lives. They are safe. They do not cause autism. There are multiple studies that show this. They are a crucial part of our nation’s public health response.”

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Crucially, Senator Cassidy said that Kennedy “committed that he would work within the current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems, and not establish parallel systems. If confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices [ACIP] without changes.”

Cassidy was not the only Republican who voted to confirm Kennedy based on commitments he personally made to them.

Defending her vote to confirm Kennedy, widely recognized as one of the least qualified among all of President Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees, U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) issued a lengthy statement repeatedly explaining that RFK Jr. had made “commitments” to her, personally, that were sufficiently satisfying to earn her vote — despite his lengthy reported history of anti-vaccine activism, his statement that, in his opinion, “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective,” and what has been recorded as his documented history of promoting conspiracy theories.

RFK Jr.,Trump’s nominee to lead the HHS, suggested that the Polio vaccine “killed many, many more people” than polio ever did. pic.twitter.com/jhpCHykBzl

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) December 17, 2024

“I continue to have concerns about Mr. Kennedy’s views on vaccines and his selective interpretation of scientific studies, which initially caused my misgivings about his nomination,” declared Senator Murkowski. “Vaccines have saved millions of lives, and I sought assurance that, as HHS Secretary, he would do nothing to make it difficult for people to take vaccines or discourage vaccination efforts. He has made numerous commitments to me and my colleagues, promising to work with Congress to ensure public access to information and to base vaccine recommendations on data-driven, evidence-based, and medically sound research. These commitments are important to me and, on balance, provide assurance for my vote.”

One week ago CNN’s Manu Raju reported, “Asked Lisa Murkowski if she trusts RFK Jr on vaccines, and she said: ‘We are going to hold him accountable and that’s how we will get the trust.'”

Thursday afternoon, the nonprofit Protect Our Care, issued a statement strongly criticizing Senator Cassidy.

“Just one week in, RFK Jr. has already begun enacting some of the most radical parts of his conspiracy theory-filled agenda, breaking promises he made to on-the-fence Senators during his confirmation process. Coverage confirms that RFK Jr. will be removing members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee after canceling a critical meeting on vaccine approvals,” the group charged.

“RFK Jr. played Bill Cassidy like a fiddle,” the group’s president, Brad Woodhouse, added. “It hasn’t even been a week and he is already breaking his promises. After saying anything to on-the-fence senators to get confirmed, RFK Jr. is now showing his true colors as the anti-science, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist he always has been. The consequences of RFK Jr.’s broken promises, which were always bull—, will be more sick and dead Americans, including children, and Senator Cassidy and his colleagues who bought what Kennedy was selling will bear responsibility.”

Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported on another commitment RFK Jr. made to Senator Cassidy, one he appears to be preparing to rescind.

“To earn the vote he needed to become the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a special promise to a U.S. senator: He would not change the nation’s current vaccination schedule,” the AP reported. “But on Tuesday, speaking for the first time to thousands of U.S. Health and Human Services agency employees, he vowed to investigate the childhood vaccine schedule that prevents measles, polio and other dangerous diseases.”

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