The Food and Drug Administration in recent months has approved a small number of drugs quite quickly under a new expedited review program. But Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has overstated the impact of the program by making misleading comparisons to the pace of drug approvals in the past.

“We just approved two new drugs, two new oncology drugs, in record time, one in 45 days,” Kennedy said at an April 16 congressional hearing, adding that the other was approved in 55 days. “The closest before that was 310 days.” At another hearing that same day, he called the two approvals the “fastest in history.”

The cancer drugs weren’t completely new drugs. Instead, the FDA approved an expanded use, or indication, for a previously approved drug and a new combination of previously approved drugs, reviewing the drugs 44 and 55 days after filing, according to FDA news releases. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s 310-days figure is the average new drug application review time for 2025, according to April 1 remarks by now-former FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary.

Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, who studies the regulation of drugs at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told us that comparing the fast recent oncology approvals to an average for all drugs is like “comparing apples and gorillas.” The recent oncology approvals would have been easier to review to begin with since they were for new indications, he said, even without the FDA’s new expedited program.

Nor is it unprecedented for the agency to approve certain drugs more quickly, or far more quickly, than the average.

The FDA announced the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher pilot program in June 2025, the latest in a long line of efforts over decades to expedite approvals of certain drugs. The CNPV program says it aims to “dramatically reduce review times” for drugs that meet national health priorities, with target review times of one to two months. Seven drugs have so far completed review through the program.

Makary, who resigned from his position on May 12, has made similar claims. In a May 5 interview with CNBC, Makary said that the FDA “got those decisions out in 44 days and 55 days instead of a year,” for example.

It’s a “little bit soon to evaluate” the overall impact of current policies on drug approval speeds, Kesselheim said, given the “relatively small” number of drugs that have been reviewed entirely under the watch of the new administration. “There’s no evidence that there’s been any major change yet in this administration,” he said.

Kennedy was also wrong to say that the oncology drugs were approved “in record time.” Makary acknowledged an even faster approval of an HIV drug in the 1990s. (However, the FDA later, on May 8, approved a new indication for a third cancer drug even more quickly, tying the previous record Makary mentioned.)

The HHS secretary further claimed the number of new and generic drug approvals under the Trump administration in 2025 were each a “record.” But information on the FDA’s website contradicts that. The agency didn’t reply to our questions about these claims.

‘Comparing Apples and Gorillas’

As we said, Kennedy’s and Makary’s comparisons of the recent oncology drug approvals with previous review times of 10 months to a year are misleading.

The 44-day oncology review Kennedy has promoted was of zongertinib, a drug originally approved in 2025 to treat a subset of patients with advanced lung cancer. In February 2026, the agency expanded the group of patients for whom the drug was approved to include those who had not received prior treatment.

“Zongertinib was an expansion of an already-approved indication, which is completely outside of what we are talking about in terms of average review times,” Kesselheim said. This is “an already-approved drug with a known efficacy for a certain indication, a known safety profile,” he continued. “The manufacturer is submitting a little bit more evidence to support a label expansion to a very closely connected indication.” 

Studies have long shown that supplemental indications take a shorter time to review than applications submitted for drugs that have never been approved before.

After a drugmaker submits an application to the FDA, the agency has 60 days to review the application and decide whether to “file” it. Using the FDA’s website, we’re able to see the time from a drugmaker’s submission to FDA approval, as this is the information in the agency’s approval letters.

Kennedy’s and Makary’s figures, however, measure drug review times from when the FDA files the application, according to FDA press releases.  

The CNPV program aims to get more materials from drug companies during a 60-day presubmission period and to shorten the 60-day filing period, including by using artificial intelligence-based tools. The goal is to review drugs within around one to two months after the FDA files the application, with a possibility to extend the timeline.

“The required pre-submissions and extensions make these reviews feasible, but they also implicitly acknowledge that true 30 to 60–day reviews are unlikely,” Ryan Conrad, an economist and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in an October commentary. “While these reviews will take longer than advertised, they are designed to be faster than existing timelines,” he added.

For zongertinib, the FDA spent 235 days — or a little under eight months — reviewing the drug’s original application, from the time it was submitted. The FDA then spent a total of 104 days reviewing the application for zongertinib’s expanded indication, which includes the 60-day filing period plus the 44 days it took the FDA to review the application after filing it.

The other oncology approval, whose 55-day review from filing Kennedy and Makary promoted, was for Tec-Dara, a combination of drugs approved to treat the blood cancer multiple myeloma. The drug was approved 90 days after submission. However, the two drugs making up the combination had previously been approved to treat the same cancer type. This sort of approval “does not require the same sort of start-from-scratch review that a new drug that had never been on the market before we would expect to be subject to,” Kesselheim said.

Kennedy compared these approvals to an average 310-day drug review time in 2025, a figure Makary had cited. We found that figure to be plausible. We calculated an average of around 366 days from the time of submission to approval for new drug applications, the type of application Makary’s presentation mentioned. This is roughly in keeping with Makary’s estimate, assuming that his number does not include the FDA filing period of up to 60 days.

The latest CNPV approval, on May 8, was again for an expanded indication for a cancer drug targeted to tumors with a particular genetic mutation. The drug, zenocutuzumab, was approved for patients with a rare bile duct cancer, expanded from a prior approval for patients with lung and pancreatic cancer with the same mutation.

As for the other drugs thus far approved under the CNPV program, many had some additional characteristics that may have sped up their approvals regardless. 

For example, the FDA in an April 1 press release promoted the approval of orforglipron, a new oral GLP-1 for weight loss, in 50 days from filing, or 71 days from submission. These drugs “have been around for 2 decades after being discovered based on publicly funded research in the 1980s and 1990s,” Kesselheim said. “So that’s another example of a drug class with a long track record for which this is a new formulation.” The agency also approved a higher dose of a previously approved GLP-1 drug.

The CNPV program’s first action in December 2025 had been to bring back an antibiotic, Augmentin XR, whose brand-name version had gone off the market. The drug is a “many decades old product that is widely available as a generic,” Kesselheim said, explaining that such applications require “far less data than new drug applications do.”

Sorting Out Claims of Record Approvals

Kennedy also claimed the administration was setting records for the number of drugs approved, but we found information that contradicts that.

“We have broken every record for drug approvals,” he said during the April 16 congressional hearing, a claim he repeated at an April 21 hearing. “We approved 67 drugs this year, new drugs,” he said, calling this a record. “We approved 91 new generic drugs, which is a record,” he continued. HHS social media accounts also shared these claims.

Kennedy’s 67 figure matches the number of medications and certain other products approved in 2025 by the FDA’s drugs and biologics divisions, when added together. However, when adding up the equivalent approvals from 2024, we found that the agency had approved 69 products. Kennedy’s claim of a record 91 generic approvals again matches the number of 2025 approvals for first-time generics. But as recently as 2022, there were 107 such approvals.

Makary, by contrast, called the 67 approvals a “near record” in his presentation to FDA staff and again during his May 5 CNBC interview. A report from the FDA on a subset of drugs and biologics approved by the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research found the number of approvals in 2025 was “similar to the average for the last five years.”

As for the drug review speeds, Kennedy touted the reviews of the expanded oncology indications as records, while Makary said the 44- and 55-day reviews came near the record-breaking approval of an HIV drug. The 42 days it took to approve the HIV drug, Crixivan, in 1996 was from submission to approval, however, while the HHS officials counted from a later milestone for the two recent oncology approvals, as we explained.

From submission to approval, the recent oncology reviews took 104 and 90 days.

Long History of Expedited Review

In the 1980s, the FDA had low funding and average drug review times of two to three years, Kesselheim explained. In 1992, Congress passed the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which required companies applying for drug approval to pay a user fee, allowing the FDA to hire more staff. The law also set a standard review deadline of 12 months and eventually 10 months from filing, and it created priority review status for certain drugs, which had a review deadline of six months.

“Very quickly after that, review times fell,” Kesselheim said.

Expedited FDA review programs have accumulated over time, and there are currently four main pathways, plus the CNPV pathway and other initiatives aimed at shortening review. The programs have been criticized for expanding to include a majority of drugs, without necessarily requiring companies to show their drugs have greater therapeutic value than other options, and for approvals of drugs that later turn out to have previously unknown safety issues or to be less effective than initially thought.

Studies agree that drug review speeds in the U.S. decreased rapidly in the late 1980s and 1990s, and that reviews in the U.S. have since been among the fastest in the world.

A study by Kesselheim and his colleagues found that review times “declined from more than 3 years in 1983 to less than 1 year in 2017.” By 2018, median FDA review times for drugs in the standard review pathway had fallen to a little over 10 months, and to 7.6 months for drugs in the priority review program.

Another study found that median review time from submission fell from more than two years before the passage of PDUFA in 1992 to a little over a year over the following two decades, to under 10 months in the decade after that.

However, data from the U.K.’s Centre for Innovation in Regulatory Science showed that FDA review times from submission inched up in recent years, reaching a median of more than 11 months from 2022 through 2024.

Regardless of the average review time, there is precedent for the FDA to approve some drugs quite quickly. To name a few oncology examples, the agency in 2001 approved Gleevec, a treatment that transformed the prognosis for an often-fatal form of leukemia, 72 days after the drug’s application was submitted. It would go on to approve two other leukemia drugs in 75 and 78 days.

In the case of the CNPV program, it is not entirely clear what qualifies a drug for fast review or who makes the selection, according to former and current FDA staff and regulatory policy experts quoted in several news reports. The administration in February released some details on selection, but questions remain.

Vouchers have been awarded after drugmakers discussed deals with the Trump administration to lower drug prices. Last month, the FDA also added three psychedelics to the program amid a larger effort from the White House to boost the drugs, after President Donald Trump said that podcaster Joe Rogan and others had talked to him.

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A TV ad attacking incumbent Texas Sen. John Cornyn for supporting “Muslim mass immigration” misleadingly cites a 2021 quote from Cornyn about certain Afghan refugees and claims that “Cornyn has a special place in his heart for radical Islam.”

The ad, which started airing on May 12 according to data from AdImpact, came from the campaign of Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who is challenging Cornyn for his seat in the Senate. Neither one garnered more than 50% of the vote in the March 3 Republican primary, sending them to a runoff election on May 26. Paxton got President Donald Trump’s endorsement on May 19.

The ad claims, “Cornyn even believes we have a moral obligation to support Muslim mass immigration.” Shown on screen is a quote from Cornyn saying, “I do think we have a moral obligation to help them.”   

But that quote is out of context. According to a TV news report from the Fox affiliate in Dallas, Cornyn said it while meeting with Afghan immigrants and organizations helping evacuees shortly after the U.S. pulled troops out of Afghanistan in 2021. He spoke to two Afghan men who had worked as interpreters for the U.S. military and came to the U.S. on special immigrant visas, or SIVs, which Congress created in 2006 for those in Iraq and Afghanistan who worked with the U.S. government.

At the time, it wasn’t clear how many Afghans eligible for SIVs were left in Afghanistan. “The State Department is still negotiating for the evacuation of some of these individuals, including people who have permanent legal status in the United States,” Cornyn said in the meeting.

“I do think we have a moral obligation to help them, protect them and their families,” Cornyn said.

Between October 2018 and September 2022, more than 5,000 SIV holders were resettled in Texas, according to a 2023 report from the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General.

When we asked Paxton’s campaign for evidence to support the claim that Cornyn has advocated “Muslim mass immigration” beyond that quote, we didn’t get a response.

The ad also says, “Even as Muslim extremists force Sharia law on Texans, Cornyn sides with his friends at groups tied to radical Islamic terror.” The first part of that statement is likely a reference to unfounded claims in recent years that Sharia — the moral code and rules for followers of Islam — is encroaching on Texas.

For example, earlier this year, Paxton referred to plans for a residential development for Muslims outside of Dallas as a “Sharia city.” The Dubai-based developer of the project called that description “inaccurate” in a statement to a local news outlet, saying, “We would also like to clarify that recent characterizations of the project are inaccurate and do not reflect the nature, intent, or structure of The Sustainable City model, which is inclusive by design and aligned with the regulatory and cultural frameworks of the markets in which it operates.” The proposed “sustainable city” development was halted after backlash and an investigation by Paxton’s office.

Cornyn has opposed Sharia in the U.S., introducing a bill May 14 that would ban immigrants who practice Sharia from entering or remaining in the country. He also co-sponsored a bill in October that would prohibit the practice of Sharia in the U.S. if it violated constitutional rights. 

The second part of the ad’s claim appears to be a reference to Cornyn’s previous praise for Islamic Relief USA, a Virginia-based nonprofit that does charity work across the country. The ad features a clip of Cornyn from 2021 in which he recognized Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, and thanked the organization for help it provided during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The ad, though, describes Islamic Relief USA as being tied to “radical Islamic terror.” The image of a news report in the ad indicates that’s a reference to accusations against Islamic Relief Worldwide, a U.K.-based charity from which the U.S. organization agreed to operate independently in 2019. Islamic Relief Worldwide has denied having ties to terrorism or the Muslim Brotherhood.

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President Donald Trump on multiple occasions has assured the public that high gasoline prices will “rapidly” or “quickly” decline “as soon as” the war with Iran ends. Energy experts told us that prices will start to fall when the conflict is resolved, but it could take many months before the national average price is back to where it was before the conflict began.

“For pre-war prices to show up, it could take beyond a year,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for the fuel-price tracking service GasBuddy, said in an interview. But he told us that there are “a lot of different potential” outcomes depending on what happens when the war ends.

The average U.S. price for regular grade gasoline was $4.50 per gallon as of the week ending May 11, according to the Energy Information Administration. That was up $1.56, or 53%, from the average price of $2.94 during the week ending Feb. 23 – which was five days before the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran.

Gasoline prices spiked after Iran responded to the joint attack by blocking the Strait of Hormuz – a vital waterway in the Middle East for trade – stopping the vast majority of crude oil exports from the Persian Gulf region. About 20 million barrels of oil and oil products were exported through the strait per day in 2025, which was about one-quarter of global seaborne oil trade, according to the International Energy Agency.

The reduced supply caused oil prices to increase, and that led to the rise in gasoline prices, since the cost of oil makes up about half of what drivers pay at the pump. Because it’s a global oil market, “if something goes wrong anywhere, the price goes up everywhere,” Mark Finley, a nonresident fellow in energy and global oil at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us in March.

But Trump has said repeatedly that gasoline prices will fall fast when the war concludes.

“As soon as it’s over, you’re going to see gasoline and oil drop like a rock,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on May 11.

About a week before that, on May 1, during a Florida event for seniors, Trump said that “it’s going to come down lower than it was,” referring to the price of gasoline. “When all of that stuff comes out,” he said, mentioning “pent up” oil in the Strait of Hormuz, “you’re going to see prices dropping on gasoline like you’ve never seen.”

The same day, at another event in Florida, the president said the price of gasoline will “snap back” in the end. “I believe it will snap back very, very quickly,” he said.

And Trump isn’t the only person in his administration to make such a claim. 

On May 4, in an interview with Fox News, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he is “also confident” that gasoline prices are “going to come down very quickly” at the end of the conflict with Iran. “This gasoline — this temporary aberration — will be over in a matter of weeks or a month,” he said.

Experts told us it’s difficult to predict exactly what will happen in the long run. But they said it could be months, plural, before motorists see substantial price relief at the pump. Getting back to pre-war prices would take longer than Trump’s and Bessent’s remarks suggest, they said.

Expert Analysis

“When the strait opens in a meaningful way, it would likely have a fairly quick impact to start pushing prices down,” De Haan said, adding that price decreases will depend on how quickly oil tankers resume transporting shipments through the strait to increase the global supply.

“It’s very contingent on how much oil starts getting through the strait, whether it’s all or nothing,” he said. “But it’s going to take several weeks for those ships to reach destinations once it becomes open. So, at best, it’s probably going to still be two to three weeks before the flows of oil can normalize. So, at least several weeks, and potentially beyond that.”

“If the strait were to reopen today,” he said, “it would probably be early June until ships started going in and out,” and “it could be until July for some of those cargoes to start getting to the market.”

De Haan told us he was reluctant to make specific price predictions because of the uncertainty of the situation. But he did say that a return to average gasoline prices at less than $3 per gallon in the immediate future seems doubtful.

“Beyond the big drop, the initial big drop, it could take quite a bit longer for gas prices to more noticeably get back to like pre-war levels,” he said. “That’s going to take quite a bit of time, and the longer the situation goes on, the more time that could end up taking.”

Abhi Rajendran, a nonresident fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute of Public Policy and the director of Oil Markets Research at Energy Intelligence, largely agreed. 

“Should the conflict actually find some path to resolution, then I think prices could come down,” he said. But how fast that happens is another matter.

“I don’t know if it’s going to be quick and look like before-the-conflict prices were,” Rajendran said. He said he doesn’t see $3 per gallon gasoline “anytime soon,” even if the conflict ends, because “there’s still damage that’s been done to the supply side and to inventory, and that’s going to be felt for a little while.”

After a while, Rajendran said, he could see gasoline prices settling at between $3.25 a gallon and $3.50 a gallon, which is “higher than they were before the conflict.”

Meanwhile, Tom Kloza, chief energy adviser for Gulf Oil, predicted that prices in many states could be “back in the $3-$3.50/gal neighborhood” in the final 100 days of the calendar year, when he said “gasoline prices almost always drop” because “demand slumps and the formula for motor fuel changes.” 

However, that projection could change, he said in an email to us, if the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz continues, or if a strong hurricane hits the Gulf of Mexico, which would “lengthen the $4-$4.75/gal pricing backdrop.”

“What happens between now and Labor Day is tougher” to forecast, he said. 

Other Projections

Back on April 16, in an interview with CNN, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said prices would “certainly” decline after the conflict with Iran ends. But he was less sure about when the average price would again be below $3 a gallon.

“That could happen later this year,” or “that might not happen until next year,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

But one day before that, in an April 15 press briefing from the White House, Bessent, Wright’s fellow Cabinet secretary, said he was “optimistic” that “we can have $3 gas again” this year, between June 20 and Sept. 20.

Skip York, another nonresident fellow in energy and global oil at Rice’s Baker Institute, told us that, like Wright, he believes $3 gasoline may not happen until next year.

“[R]eturning to $3/gal gas looks like more [of] a 2027 resolution,” he said in an email, in which he listed several reasons prices often “[go] up like a rocket, but down like a feather.” 

York said when wholesale gasoline prices rise, “retailers raise pump prices immediately to cover the expected cost of replacing inventory.” When wholesale prices come down, however, “retailers may still be selling higher‑cost inventory and wait for cheaper supplies before cutting prices.”

In addition, he said, “Retailers often wait for a sustained downward trend before reducing prices because a quick cut could force them to raise prices again if wholesale costs rebound.”

Market behavior and competition is also a factor. “Drivers tend to more actively shop when prices rise but less as they fall; that reduces competitive pressure to cut prices quickly,” he said.

Finally, York added, abrupt supply shocks, such as geopolitical events and refinery outages, “cause fast price increases driven by consumer fears of shortages,” while easing those risks and rebuilding inventories “takes time, so declines are more gradual.”

Federal Gasoline Tax Holiday?

As of May 14, the war with Iran had gone on for 75 days, which is much longer than the “four to five weeks” that Trump initially said he intended for it to last.

With the U.S. so far being unable to reach a deal with Iran to end the conflict, and having a ceasefire agreement with Iran that is on “massive life support,” as Trump said on May 11, the president has proposed temporarily suspending the federal tax on gasoline. 

That would reduce gasoline prices by about 18.4 cents per gallon and prices for diesel by about 24.4 cents per gallon. But that plan would also require approval from Congress, and it is not yet clear if there is enough bipartisan support to make that a law.

Furthermore, the experts said, eliminating the gasoline tax, even temporarily, could help keep prices more elevated than they otherwise would be.

“While relieving the gasoline tax would lower pump prices, that lower price also would encourage more consumption, meaning it would take longer to rebuild inventory,” York said. “If a policy doesn’t improve supply availability, it doesn’t really help restore physical fundamentals back to pre-conflict levels.”

De Haan also said that the plan for a federal gasoline tax holiday “could actually stimulate demand,” which would add to the imbalance between demand and supply and “could send prices higher.”

In a May 11 floor speech criticizing Trump on Iran, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that “Senate Democrats will support real action to lower costs.” But he said a decrease of 18 cents per gallon is hardly enough.

“Eighteen cents isn’t a dollar fifty, which is how much the price of gas has gone up since this war started,” he said. “Americans don’t need just a few cents back.” He said the “best way to lower costs” was to end the war. 

Schumer said, “Trump could end this war tomorrow and prices would plummet by far more than 18 cents a gallon.”

But, as we explained, while experts have said that the price of gasoline will likely start going down not long after the war ends, it is less likely that the price will “plummet” as quickly as Schumer suggested. 

In its Short-Term Energy Outlook for May, the EIA projected that the average retail price for gasoline will be $3.88 for 2026 and $3.62 for 2027. That’s up from the average prices the agency projected in early February – before the war began — which were $2.91 in 2026 and $2.93 in 2027.

In its May analysis, the EIA said its most recent price projections assume that the Strait of Hormuz “will remain effectively closed through late May, with flows slowly starting to resume in late May or early June.” If that happens, the agency said it expects it will take “until late 2026 or early 2027 for most pre-conflict production and trade patterns to resume.”

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Q: Has President Trump asked for a billion dollars for the ballroom?

A: Since the White House announced plans in July for a ballroom, the president has promised to fund its construction without using public money. But in May congressional Republicans proposed $1 billion in federal funding for “security adjustments and upgrades” including at the White House and the ballroom site.

FULL ANSWER

President Donald Trump has claimed that the new White House ballroom would be privately funded, using “not one dime of government money.” But Republicans in Congress have proposed $1 billion in public funds for “security” features, prompting criticism from Democrats that this means taxpayers are paying for the ballroom.

The White House has said the congressional proposal is strictly for security elements, not the ballroom itself.

When Trump first began touting the project shortly after he took office in 2025, he said he would foot the bill himself. When it was officially announced on July 31 at an estimated cost of $200 million, the president answered a question from a reporter about the source of the funding, saying, “It’s a private thing, yeah, I’ll do it, and we’ll probably have some donors or whatever.”

The press release for the project said, “President Trump, and other patriot donors, have generously committed to donating the funds necessary to build this approximately $200 million dollar structure. The United States Secret Service will provide the necessary security enhancements and modifications.”

As recently as late March, when the estimated cost had doubled to $400 million, the president maintained that it would be donor-funded, saying, “This is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents.”

But following the April 25 shooting during the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, some congressional Republicans cited security concerns and proposed public funding for the project, arguing that the White House needs to have a secure facility for hosting large events.

“If this is not a wake-up call, what would be?” Sen. Lindsey Graham said on April 27, referring to the shooting, while announcing legislation that would authorize $400 million to build the ballroom and fund a military installation below it. (More on that later.)

A week later, Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, announced a proposed $1 billion for the Secret Service to provide “security adjustments and upgrades, including within the perimeter fence of the White House Compound to support enhancements … relating to the East Wing Modernization Project, including above-ground and below-ground security features.” The ballroom is replacing the East Wing.

The funding was part of a $72 billion plan to fund the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement through 2029 without Democratic support. It followed a record-breaking partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security that hinged on Democrats’ demands for changes to immigration enforcement policies after agents killed two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — in Minneapolis earlier this year.

Democrats panned the proposal, with Rep. Jared Huffman of California saying, “They’re sending Trump $1 billion to build a gilded room for their balls,” and Rep. Susie Lee of Nevada saying, “The economy in NV is tanking, gas prices are going through the roof … and Republicans are throwing down $1 Billion for Trump’s ballroom.” Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland wrote on X on May 5, “Trump said, ‘Not one penny is being used from the federal government’ to fund his ballroom boondoggle. True, in the sense that $1 billion is a lot more than one penny!”

In a meeting on May 12, the Secret Service chief reportedly told Republican lawmakers that only $220 million of the $1 billion proposal would be used to fortify the ballroom with bulletproof glass, drone detection equipment, chemical filtration systems and other security elements. The rest would be used for training and security measures elsewhere, as a DHS spokesperson also told us in a statement.

Both the White House and Grassley’s office have responded to the criticism by pointing to language specifying that the $1 billion allocation would cover only “security”-related features. “None of the funds made available under this section may be used for non-security elements of the East Wing Modernization Project,” the legislation reads. We asked Grassley’s office for further details on what might qualify as a security feature, but we didn’t get an answer to that question.

Instead, we were provided a statement attributable to a Senate Judiciary Committee spokesperson that said, “The reconciliation text speaks for itself, providing funds for critical security enhancements to ensure Secret Service can fulfill their duties of securing the White House, protecting the President, members of the administration and White House visitors, and supporting broader public safety for designated events like America 250 and the World Cup.”

Likewise, a White House spokesman said, “The Ballroom will still be paid for with the private funds raised. The reconciliation package introduced was funds for DHS and USSS to better secure the WH complex.”

Here’s what we know so far about the project.

The Ballroom

The Trump administration began demolition of the East Wing of the White House in October to make way for what it has described as a 90,000 square-foot ballroom that can seat 650 people, although the president has said that it will have a capacity of 999.

The move drew condemnation from some architectural and historical organizations, prompting a lawsuit from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In March, the federal judge handling that case ordered that construction of the ballroom should stop until plans receive authorization from Congress, although he allowed for the continuation of construction “necessary to ensure the safety and security of the White House.” The administration has appealed.

Another lawsuit brought against the administration revealed in April the funding agreement for the project. The agreement cited a comprehensive design plan for the White House complex that the National Park Service published in 2000 after about a decade of research, planning and public comment.

That design plan “identified the need for expanded event space to address growing visitor demand and provide a venue suitable for significant events,” the funding agreement said.

That’s true, but nowhere in the plan does it suggest a ballroom to replace the East Wing of the White House. Rather, it emphasized the importance of maintaining the existing structure of the White House complex and recommended expanding space underground, including a new meeting and conference space near the West Wing that could accommodate up to 200 people. It also recommended building a special events plaza in the ellipse on the south side of the White House.

As for the donors who have contributed to the fund to build the ballroom, a reporter asked on May 7 for a list and Trump responded, “I have no problem with it. You’re not supposed to because it’s done under a way where you don’t have to do that, but I have no problem. They’re unbelievable people. These are great patriots.”

In October, the White House released a list that included both companies — such as Amazon and Meta — and individuals — such as the Winklevoss twins, who had accused Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea to build Facebook and now run a cryptocurrency exchange, and Stephen A. Schwarzman, CEO of alternative investment firm Blackstone. The list didn’t include any dollar amounts for donations to the ballroom. Trump, himself, was not listed among the donors.

The Bunker

In March, Trump began speaking more about the military’s involvement in the project.

“The military wanted it more than anybody,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on March 26.

Three days later, he said, “There’s not one dime of government money going into the ballroom,” but he immediately added that “the military’s building a massive complex under the ballroom, and that’s under construction and we’re doing very well.” He described the ballroom as a “shed” over the subterranean military installation. “Everything’s drone-proof and bulletproof.”

There isn’t much publicly available information about plans for the new installation or the former bunker under the East Wing, which was built during World War II and has been updated over the years. “Known as the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), it can become a command center for the president as needed,” the White House Historical Association wrote in a 2024 social media post. “For example, after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush and his team spent time in the PEOC.”

Trump was also taken to the bunker during his first term, amid protests following the death of George Floyd in 2020. He described the visit as an “inspection.”

The cost of construction for the new bunker and other security elements — which Trump has said would include “bomb shelters” and “very major medical facilities” — is also unclear.

But Trump said on May 7 that the $400 million he’s promised to collect in donations will pay for “the ballroom section of the ballroom,” while the $1 billion proposed in the reconciliation bill is “for projects having to do with safety … in a certain section of the White House grounds. That’s not all for the ballroom.”

We asked both the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, if they were paying for any of the construction. The Defense Department didn’t respond.

A DHS spokesperson provided this statement: “The $1 billion in funding included in the reconciliation bill will assist the United States Secret Service in delivering critical security upgrades at the White House to minimize threats, including, but not limited to, the security components of the East Wing Modernization Project, which will afford needed protection for the President, his family, and visitors, along with additional security functions. This hardening of the White House complex is long overdue, especially in today’s heightened threat environment. A majority of the money provided by the bill will fund other core critical missions for the USSS such as training, money for the Special Operations Division, and increased security measures to ensure safety at multiple upcoming events of national significance.”

Update, May 18: The Senate parliamentarian — a nonpartisan professional position that assists in applying legislative rules — found that the $1 billion in funding couldn’t be included in a budget reconciliation bill, Democrats announced on May 16. Reconciliation bills can be passed with only a simple majority. But a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader John Thune indicated in a social media post that Republicans would redraft that provision.

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In the midst of a court battle over whether to continue to allow access by mail to the medication abortion pill mifepristone, Republican lawmakers have claimed that 10% or more of women who take the drug have serious side effects. A 2025 report from an anti-abortion group that put forward the figure has been criticized by reproductive health researchers for methodological issues and a lack of transparency about its data source.

Peer-reviewed studies show a far lower rate of serious problems.

Republicans cited the statistic last week while discussing court rulings on medication abortion. The Louisiana-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals halted access to mifepristone by mail on May 1, but the Supreme Court temporarily restored access on May 4 for a week. On May 11, the court extended its order through May 14.

Update, May 15: The Supreme Court on May 14 extended its pause on the lower court’s decision, allowing continued access to the drug by mail while the court case proceeds.

“Mifepristone sends 1 in 10 women who use it to the emergency room with life threatening conditions,” Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri wrote in a May 4 post on X, calling on Congress to ban the drug when used for abortion.

Rep. Riley Moore of West Virginia in an X post that same day called the drug “extremely dangerous” while referring to a thread from a year prior that claimed “1 in 10 women had dangerous complications like sepsis or hemorrhaging,” based on an April 2025 report from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative nonprofit that opposes abortion.

“Eleven percent of these women will have side effects so bad within the first 45 days that you can cause sepsis or internal bleeding, hemorrhage, things like that,” Rep. Diana Harshbarger from Tennessee said during a May 6 interview with Tony Perkins, who is president of the Family Research Council, a Christian think tank that also opposes abortion. Harshbarger shared a clip of the interview on X.

Harshbarger’s communications director, Max Mallhi, confirmed to us that Harshbarger was talking about the EPPC report. Hawley’s office did not reply to an email asking for the source of the senator’s similar statistic. 

The 2025 report, which was also cited by plaintiffs in the case now before the Supreme Court, claimed that 10.93% of women prescribed mifepristone abortions went on to have serious adverse events within 45 days, based on a review of health insurance claims data on more than 865,000 women from an undisclosed source. 

Adverse events are health issues that arise after using a drug, but they aren’t necessarily caused by the drug. Serious adverse events are those that are life-threatening or lead to hospitalization, permanent damage or death.

A May 6 amicus brief from 360 reproductive health researchers filed with the Supreme Court said that the EPPC report, which was not published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, was “riddled with methodological flaws that render its conclusions unreliable.” This conclusion echoed an August 2025 letter by an overlapping group of researchers.

The EPPC report authors “clearly misconstrued and used deceptive methods to erroneously inflate the rate of serious adverse events after an abortion,” Ushma Upadhyay, a public health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and an author on both the 2025 letter and the amicus brief, told us last fall.

Mifepristone is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for medication abortion through week 10 of pregnancy and is given alongside another drug, misoprostol. During the pandemic, the FDA eased enforcement of requirements that the drug be dispensed in person and in 2023 formally allowed it to be prescribed via virtual telehealth appointments and sent by mail. That year, 63% of abortions in the U.S. were medication abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports reproductive rights. 

The case currently being considered by the Supreme Court was brought by the state of Louisiana, which said the FDA’s 2023 decision violated law on proper administrative procedures and was illegal under an 1873 anti-obscenity law. Louisiana claimed the FDA’s actions had injured the state in various ways, such as by interfering with its sovereign ability to ban abortion and costing it Medicaid dollars for treatment for those who had used the drug.

The May 6 amicus brief from reproductive health researchers said that EPPC had failed to disclose key information on where the claims data underlying the study came from or how it was analyzed. We explained before that it is standard when doing research using health insurance claims data to disclose these details, and that researchers experienced in using such data said they had not heard of a dataset that matched EPPC’s description.

“This fundamental lack of transparency precludes any independent verification or reproducibility—fatal deficiencies for any scientific analysis,” the reproductive health researchers wrote in the amicus brief.

In a Feb. 12 amicus brief, EPPC said that it had “entered into a confidentiality agreement with the particular vendor of the database that it is using, in order to protect the vendor from political backlash,” adding that “substantially similar databases are widely available.” The brief also said the report “was internally reviewed and adjudicated by a panel of board-certified obstetricians and gynecologists, who carefully evaluated the clinical classifications, coding, and outcome assessments to ensure medical accuracy and consistency.”

The EPPC report incorrectly counted situations in which someone needed further treatment to complete the abortion as serious adverse events, the reproductive researchers’ amicus brief said, and otherwise “inflated its serious adverse event figures.” For example, the researchers wrote, the EPPC report “inadequately” defined hemorrhage. “Because a successful medication abortion always involves bleeding, EPPC more likely than not misclassified cases of normal, expected bleeding as serious adverse events,” they continued.

Multiple other sources of data on the safety of mifepristone show a far lower rate of serious adverse events. The rate of serious adverse events shown on the drug’s label from the FDA is less than 0.5%, based on data from 10 clinical trials.

Mallhi, the spokesperson for Harshbarger, said the EPPC report’s strength was in using claims data instead.

“FDA’s current label claims are based largely on controlled clinical trials,” Mallhi said in an email. “This study uses real-world claims data, and that is precisely why it matters. When findings this significant emerge, they should be treated as a serious safety signal warranting transparency, full adverse-event reporting, and a thorough FDA review.”

However, published studies using real-world data have corroborated the low rate of serious adverse events reported on the FDA label. For example, one study of Medicaid claims data identified a serious adverse event rate of 0.23%.

(Mallhi went on to say that an FDA review “is especially urgent because, in 2016, the Obama FDA stopped requiring prescribers to report all serious adverse health events associated with chemical abortion pills, leaving deaths as the only adverse-event reporting requirement.” As we’ve written before, in 2016 the FDA relaxed extra reporting requirements for physicians for mifepristone. The standard reporting expected for FDA-approved drugs remained, such as having manufacturers report adverse events, Greer Donley, an abortion law expert at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told us.)

Studies of telehealth abortions have not found a safety difference when drugs are dispensed by mail versus in person. In deciding to allow mail access to mifepristone, the FDA consulted relevant peer-reviewed studies and reviews of FDA adverse events monitoring data from the period when in-person requirements were initially relaxed.

In contrast, the EPPC report was not able to shed light on the safety of medication abortion via mail specifically because it did not break down its data by mail versus in-person dispensing, the reproductive researchers who wrote the May 6 amicus brief said.

In its Feb. 12 amicus brief, EPPC referred to a new analysis the group performed, which compared serious adverse events before and after the in-person dispensing requirements were first relaxed in 2020. The analysis, also released in a March 10 fact sheet, claimed that serious adverse events rose from affecting 10.15% of users between 2017 and mid-2020 to 11.5% from mid-2020 through 2023. However, EPPC noted that the group lacked “firm data” on the proportion of prescriptions that were dispensed by mail.

The May 6 amicus brief from the reproductive health researchers said that few by-mail instances were likely included in EPPC’s insurance claims data, because during this period the “vast majority” of medication abortion prescriptions by telehealth were not covered by insurance. “Telehealth is likely not the cause of any such increase,” the researchers wrote.

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The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will reduce federal Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over a decade. But in a series of congressional hearings last month, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. misleadingly claimed that “there are no cuts to Medicaid” as a result of that 2025 law.

Kennedy said there are no cuts to Medicaid under the OBBBA because the CBO also estimated that federal spending on Medicaid will increase by “47% over the next 10 years.” But health policy experts told us that total spending on Medicaid is expected to still grow because of population changes and an increase in healthcare costs.

“[T]he notion that since Medicaid spending overall will continue to rise means that there are no cuts is simply false,” Michael S. Sparer, chair of the department of health policy and management at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, told us in an email. “The rise in Medicaid spending would be far greater had HR1 not been enacted,” he said, referring to the OBBBA’s assigned bill number.

At the hearings, however, Kennedy repeatedly clashed with Democrats who said that the Republican legislation that President Donald Trump signed into law last summer made cuts to Medicaid and would reduce access to healthcare for millions of people.

For example, during an April 22 Senate Finance Committee hearing on the HHS budget, Democratic Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota, while talking about mental health services covered by Medicaid, said that the Trump administration and congressional Republicans had “pushed through the biggest cuts to Medicaid in the history of that program.” 

In response, Kennedy said that wasn’t the case. “First of all, there are no cuts in Medicaid,” he said. “I keep saying this. Here’s what the CBO said: In fiscal year 2025, $668 billion. Fiscal year 2036, $981 billion. That’s not a cut. It’s a 47% increase.”

Smith interjected, by saying: “Secretary Kennedy, a trillion dollars in cuts, according to the CBO. Seven million people losing their health insurance because of the Trump administration actions. That’s not debatable.”

Smith was largely correct about what the CBO said. It estimated a more than $900 billion reduction in Medicaid spending and an increase in the uninsured of 7.5 million people over 10 years.

Based on a CBO analysis, KFF, an independent health policy research organization, estimated that the OBBBA reduces federal Medicaid spending by precisely $911 billion. Most of the federal savings, KFF said, come from the law imposing new work requirements on individuals who became eligible for Medicaid due to an expansion of the program under the Affordable Care Act, as well as “limiting states’ ability to raise the state share of Medicaid revenues through provider taxes, restricting state-directed payments to hospitals, nursing facilities, and other providers, and increasing barriers to enrolling in and renewing Medicaid coverage.”

KFF said that those Medicaid spending reductions in the OBBBA would offset some of the costs of another part of the bill, which extended some expiring tax cuts for individuals.

Those spending reductions count as “cuts,” experts in health policy told us.

“By conventional budget scoring methods, including those used by CBO, as well as [Office of Management and Budget] and others, there were very large cuts to Medicaid in OBBBA,” Leighton Ku, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University, said in an email. “CBO (and others) compare estimated federal Medicaid expenditures under OBBBA with the amount that would have been spent WITHOUT the legislation.”

Furthermore, Ku said, “A more telling sign of the impact of the cuts is that CBO estimated that the Medicaid and related CHIP cuts will cause the number of uninsured to rise by about 7.5 million people” by 2034. (CHIP is the Children’s Health Insurance Program for families that make too much money to qualify for Medicaid but can’t afford private insurance.)

We reached out to HHS about Kennedy’s claims, but haven’t received a response.

In an April 22 hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Kennedy said the statement that “we’ve cut Medicaid by a trillion dollars” was a Democratic talking point. He claimed that the CBO “disagrees” with Democrats, and referenced the agency’s estimate that federal spending on Medicaid will increase from more than $600 billion in fiscal 2025 to well over $900 billion 10 years from now. 

But Kennedy “is using smoke and mirrors here — everything gets more expensive over time, especially in health care,” Dr. Benjamin Sommers, a Harvard University professor of health care economics and medicine, told us in an email.

Akeiisa Coleman, senior program officer for Medicaid at the Commonwealth Fund, said in an emailed statement that, despite the projected spending reductions resulting from OBBBA, “federal spending on Medicaid is likely to increase over time to reflect changes in population and the cost of health care.”

Ku called Kennedy’s claim “misleading” because it “ignores the reality of medical care inflation, the aging of the population (which causes medical expenditures to rise even more) and other pressures.” He said “the reality is that people will receive much less health care under Medicaid because of these cuts,” and that “health care providers like hospitals, doctors’ offices and nursing homes will hurt financially because of the loss of revenue.”

Meanwhile, HHS has argued that some spending reductions were part of necessary changes to overhaul the Medicaid program.

“To be clear, HHS is taking steps to ensure Medicaid serves those it is intended to support,” Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesman, told the Associated Press for an April 23 story about Kennedy’s claims. “These actions are not cuts — they are focused on addressing waste, fraud, and abuse to better position the program for those who rely on it.”

However, Sommers said “this is not simply cutting out waste and abuse,” since the CBO estimates that millions of people will lose health insurance because of eligibility restrictions and other changes that the law made to Medicaid.

“Any reasonable person would interpret that as a sizable cut to the program – particularly if you’re one of the millions of people expected to lose their health insurance under the law,” Sommers said.

We’ve explained before that while Republicans have said they are targeting able-bodied adults with the new Medicaid work requirements, health policy experts say that other groups would lose coverage as well due to paperwork burdens and other Medicaid provisions in the legislation.

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An ad attacking Sen. Susan Collins in Maine claimed that she voted “to raise healthcare costs and raise insurance premiums,” as well as give President Donald Trump “a blank check for his war in Iran.” But neither claim fully explains Collins’ more nuanced position on those issues.

For the healthcare claims, the ad cites her vote in September against a Democratic bill to, among other things, temporarily fund the federal government and permanently extend enhanced Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies beyond 2025. But Collins did support extending the subsidies with some restrictions — however, she said the extension should be addressed separately from spending bills proposed to prevent or end a government shutdown.

As for the Iran war, Collins initially voted against multiple war powers resolutions filed by Democrats to require the Trump administration to get congressional authorization to continue the joint U.S.-Israeli operation that began with airstrikes on Iran in late February. But she also signaled that she would change her vote to require authorization by Congress if the conflict with Iran lasted longer than 60 days — and she did. That resolution ultimately failed.

The anti-Collins ad is being sponsored by Majority Forward, a nonprofit registered with the IRS as a 501(c)(4) issue advocacy organization. Majority Forward is aligned with Senate Democrats who hope to defeat Collins in the race for her long-held Senate seat in Maine.

Semafor reported that the liberal group is spending $600,000 to run the 30-second ad statewide. It began airing on April 23, according to AdImpact, which tracks political advertising.

Health Insurance Premiums

The ad begins with the narrator telling Mainers: “You’re already getting squeezed, because Susan Collins voted with Donald Trump to raise healthcare costs and raise insurance premiums. Now, Susan Collins voted to give Trump a blank check for his war in Iran.”

We’ll get to the Iran claim later. As we indicated, the claims about healthcare costs are not the whole story.

The ad suggests that Collins was opposed to extending the more generous insurance subsidies — which are actually premium tax credits — for those buying coverage on the ACA marketplaces. The enhanced subsidies were first passed by Democrats in 2021 as part of pandemic relief legislation. But that wasn’t the case, according to Collins, who said she favored continuing them – at least for certain people, for a limited period of time.

It’s true that she voted against a continuing resolution that Democrats proposed to fund the government, permanently extend the ACA enhanced subsidies and other things. In fact, she voted against that resolution on multiple occasions between Sept. 19 and Oct. 9.

Around that time, Collins explained her position by saying that she thought the ACA subsidies – which didn’t officially expire until year’s end – should be handled apart from a must-pass spending bill to keep the government open.

For example, addressing the subsidies in a statement to the Maine Morning Star for a Sept. 26 story, Collins said, “It is clear that we need to act on this issue, but our focus right now needs to be on avoiding a harmful government shutdown that would cause disruptions to vital programs that many Americans rely on every day.” 

And in a post on Facebook on Oct. 1, Collins encouraged her fellow senators to support the “House-passed clean, short-term funding measure” from Republicans instead of the “alternative proposal” from Democrats that she said was “full of significant partisan policy changes.”

She wrote: “We must end the government shutdown, continue our bipartisan negotiations on the annual appropriations bills, and work to find a path forward on the enhanced premium tax credits.”

In an email to us, Shawn Roderick, a spokesperson for the Collins campaign, said that during this period, the senator “was working around the clock to fund government and put an end to the harmful government shutdown” while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer “was focused on forcing these performative messaging votes” that were “full of partisan poison pills.”

In addition to temporarily funding the government and permanently extending the enhanced ACA subsidies, the spending bill introduced by Democrats would have repealed healthcare provisions in the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, restored certain funding being withheld by the Office of Management and Budget, and limited OMB’s authority to withhold other congressionally authorized funding. Democrats attempted to get those policy initiatives enacted by attaching them to a spending bill to fund the government.

Collins, as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, would go on to help write the funding bill that ended the 43-day shutdown in November. But that bill did not extend the subsidies in question.

Then, in December, as time to act on the subsidies was getting short, Collins joined with a Republican colleague, Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio, to propose legislation to temporarily extend the subsidies for two years, while capping the household income threshold for eligibility at $200,000 and requiring a $25 minimum monthly premium.

“This bill would help prevent unaffordable increases in health insurance premium costs for many families by extending the Affordable Care Act enhanced premium tax credits for two years and putting a reasonable income cap on these subsidies to ensure they are going to the individuals who need them,” she said in a statement about the proposal.

That same month, Collins also voted to advance legislation introduced by Schumer that would extend the tax credits for three years. But that bill — which Collins sought to amend to include income limits — failed to receive the 60 votes necessary to move to final consideration.

In 2025, 86% of the more than 62,000 people insured through Maine’s state-based marketplace received premium tax credits, according to the health policy research organization KFF.

Lauren French, a spokesperson for Majority Forward, made the argument to us that Collins’ previous votes matter more than her words.

“The Senate doesn’t offer a lane for Sen. Collins to enable outcomes she claims to oppose and then skip accountability for her votes increasing the cost of health care and giving Donald Trump unchecked authority to wage war,” French said in an email.

Iran War

The Iran war claim is based on Collins’ previous votes against war powers resolutions that would stop military operations in Iran until Congress officially declared war or authorized the use of force. The ad cites one particular vote in March, but Collins voted against the war powers resolution multiple times.

In congressional testimony on April 29, the Pentagon’s comptroller, Jay Hurst, told Congress that the war has cost approximately $25 billion so far. But other estimates put the cost at closer to $40 billion to $50 billion, according to news reports citing unnamed U.S. officials.

In a statement released on March 4, Collins said she didn’t vote to stop the military operation that began days earlier because it was important not to allow Iran to have nuclear weapons and to show support for U.S. troops.

“Passing this resolution now would send the wrong message to Iran and to our troops,” Collins said. “At this juncture, providing unequivocal support to our service members is critically important, as is ongoing consultation by the Administration with Congress.” 

But Collins later indicated in mid-April that her position would “very likely” change if the conflict continued for more than 60 days, which, under the War Powers Act of 1973, would then require the approval of Congress.

And as the war approached the two-month mark, Collins, on April 30, voted for a war powers resolution sponsored by Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff to halt military actions against Iran unless approved by Congress. (The ad began airing before this vote, but it was still running in Maine as of at least May 3, according to AdImpact.)

“As I have said since these hostilities began, the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief is not without limits,” Collins said in a statement put out by her Senate office. “The Constitution gives Congress an essential role in decisions of war and peace, and the War Powers Act establishes a clear 60-day deadline for Congress to either authorize or end U.S. involvement in foreign hostilities. That deadline is not a suggestion; it is a requirement.”

The statement continued: “Further military action against Iran must have a clear mission, achievable goals, and a defined strategy for bringing the conflict to a close. I voted to end the continuation of these military hostilities at this time until such a case is made.”

Collins was one of just two Republicans to vote for the resolution, but it failed 47-50.

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During an April 17 congressional hearing, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called for retraction of a new Danish study that didn’t find a link between Tylenol and autism, repeatedly calling it “garbage” and baselessly suggesting that it was industry-generated and “fraudulent.”

There is no evidence of fraud or industry involvement, and the criticism Kennedy made was a limitation the authors of the paper acknowledged — not legitimate grounds for retraction, according to scientists.

Beginning with a press conference about autism in September — the Kennedy-imposed deadline for knowing the cause of the “autism epidemic” — President Donald Trump has repeatedly told pregnant women not to take Tylenol unless “absolutely necessary.” Kennedy has been a bit more circumspect on the topic, speaking of a “potential association” between prenatal Tylenol, also known as acetaminophen, and later autism diagnoses in children and calling the literature finding a connection “very suggestive.”

As we wrote in September, some studies have shown an association between prenatal acetaminophen use and autism. However, experts told us that these associations were likely not causal, and instead probably due to traits shared among people who tend to take more acetaminophen in pregnancy, such as a hereditary susceptibility to autism.

The new Danish study, published April 13 in JAMA Pediatrics, looked at national prescription fulfillment records for mothers of more than 1.5 million children and corresponding health records, finding no association between taking acetaminophen or taking greater doses of the drug during pregnancy and later autism diagnoses in the children.

When asked about the Danish study at the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on April 17, Kennedy moved to discredit it. “The study is a garbage study. It should be retracted,” he told Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina. Kennedy went on to criticize the study for relying on prescription records when acetaminophen is also available over the counter. “It was a garbage in, garbage out study,” Kennedy continued. “The industry has the capacity to generate these studies all the time, and it’s fraudulent. It should be retracted.”

The study did rely on prescription data, which can lead to incomplete data on the use of the drug, Dr. Kira Philipsen Prahm, a doctor in the Center for Fetal Medicine at the Copenhagen University Hospital Rigshospitalet and first author of the study, told us via email. But such a limitation “does not automatically invalidate results,” she said. “The key question is whether the misclassification is likely to meaningfully bias the findings.” Her team’s analyses, along with prior research, indicate that “if there were a strong causal effect” of acetaminophen on autism, “it would be unlikely to be entirely obscured by this limitation,” she said.

Brian Lee, a professor of epidemiology at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, told us that most acetaminophen is prescribed in Denmark, following restrictions on how much of the medication can be sold without a prescription. This makes Denmark a relatively good location to do a prescription-based study, he said, contrary to Kennedy’s implication that the approach invalidated the study. These restrictions were in place during the latter years of the study.

Furthermore, Prahm said, her team’s study did not find “a pattern suggesting increased risk with greater recorded exposure.” If acetaminophen were causing autism, one would expect to see more cases with increasing doses.

Nor are papers retracted simply because they have limitations, which all studies have. Prahm and her colleagues wrote in their paper that information about individuals’ over-the-counter acetaminophen use was missing and that “thus, the true exposure level among those with low-level exposure was likely underestimated,” while also explaining why they thought this was unlikely to have introduced meaningful bias.

Kennedy has a history of trying to “wield his considerable influence” to “force a retraction of a study without a legitimate reason,” Lee said, referring to a study about a common vaccine ingredient Kennedy said last summer should be retracted.

Legitimate reasons for retraction, Lee said, would include “analytical errors that affect the qualitative conclusions of the study, integrity issues, or loss in confidence of findings by the authors.” Prahm’s study “does not appear to feature any of these issues,” he said, calling Kennedy’s calls for retraction “unwarranted and politically coercive.” Lee was co-author of a 2024 Swedish study that pointed away from a causal association between prenatal acetaminophen use and autism in children, but he was not involved in the new Danish study.

Dr. Per Damkier, a professor in the department of clinical research at the University of Southern Denmark, told us via email that Kennedy “is well outside his domain of expertise” in assessing the scientific merits of the study. Damkier was not involved in the new study but has studied acetaminophen use during pregnancy.

Prahm said that the study was “conducted using nationwide Danish registry data and the pharmaceutical industry was not involved in funding or any other part of the study.” The study lists Danish governmental and hospital funding. One of the nine authors disclosed funding by a pharmaceutical company for unrelated work evaluating a contraceptive pill.

HHS did not reply to a request asking for the basis for Kennedy’s claims about the Danish study.

Missing Context on Acetaminophen in Denmark

Kennedy faulted the Danish study for using prescription data and for the low percentage of women it recorded as using acetaminophen. “Only 2% of the people in this study got Tylenol during pregnancy, according to the endpoint,” Kennedy told lawmakers. “In fact, we know, because Tylenol is available by over the counter, most of you have taken Tylenol. Very few of you have ever gotten a prescription.”

But Kennedy was missing context on acetaminophen in Denmark, which has been increasingly obtained via prescription in recent years.

“Reliance on prescription records alone would be bad in a setting like the US, where most acetaminophen use is” over the counter, Lee said. “However, Denmark is not the US.”

Damkier said that before 2014, “more than 60% of all acetaminophen sold in Denmark” was over the counter. But in late 2013, Denmark limited the quantity of acetaminophen that could be sold without a prescription. Following this change, “more than 80% of acetaminophen sold has been prescription based,” he said, citing his own research on the topic. “I believe exposure data from 2014 and onwards are valid and representative with low risk” of misclassifying acetaminophen use, he said.

The new study looked at prescription records from pregnancies for children born between 1997 to 2022. Damkier said that the study “can be criticized” for using prescription data prior to the change in prescription regulations but that he believes “the conclusions of the authors are substantiated” overall. “By and large, this large population-wide study supports the findings from the most recent studies: Exposure to acetaminophen during pregnancy is not associated with an increased risk of childhood” autism, he said.

Prahm said that she and her co-authors had done further analyses to see if the findings varied before or after 2013, but the team “found no statistical differences between the two periods.”

Kennedy also provided a relatively high-end estimate for acetaminophen use during pregnancy in Denmark. “Fifty percent of the women in Denmark, we know from other studies, actually took Tylenol during pregnancy,” Kennedy said. “So the study was comparing people, women who took Tylenol during pregnancy to women who took Tylenol during pregnancy.”

HHS did not reply to a question about where Kennedy got this statistic, but older, self-reported data from the Danish National Birth Cohort found this relatively high rate of use. Estimates of acetaminophen use during pregnancy vary, and one more recent study​ found that 6% of women reported using the medication during the first trimester.

Lee said that many women in the Danish National Birth Cohort study were missing responses on acetaminophen use and were not included, saying that “the 50% is almost assuredly an overestimate.”

Furthermore, Lee and Prahm both objected to Kennedy’s characterization of the new study as comparing “women who took Tylenol during pregnancy to women who took Tylenol during pregnancy.”

“That is not an accurate description of the study design,” Prahm said. “While some individuals classified as unexposed may in fact have used over-the-counter acetaminophen, this does not mean the two groups are equivalent.”

Pros and Cons of Prescription Data

The Danish study is not alone in using prescription data. Lee explained that using prescription data has “advantages and disadvantages.” An advantage is that it provides an objective record of drug supply, whereas studying over-the-counter exposure requires asking people to report on their own use, he said.

People can misreport their medication use, Prahm said, or the data can be influenced by recall bias, a phenomenon where people can remember things differently depending on later events. For example, a parent with a child diagnosed with autism might remember their medication use during pregnancy differently than a parent without this experience.

Furthermore, while prescription-based studies do miss some exposures to acetaminophen, they are likely to capture the most impactful use.

“Prescription based exposure likely captures those women who use substantial amounts of acetaminophen as opposed to [over-the-counter] based use, which tends to be low and sporadic,” Damkier said. “If there is no signal for prescription-based use, it is consequently exceedingly unlikely that sporadic [over-the-counter] use be associated with an increased risk” of autism.

Regardless, researchers don’t rely on single studies to draw conclusions. Rather, they look for a pattern of replication among studies done using various methods and datasets, David S. Mandell, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and director of the Center for Mental Health Policy and Services Research, told us via email. “When we see replication, we grow more confident in the findings.”

Multiple studies have found that associations between prenatal acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental conditions go away when comparing siblings. In recent months, two review studies have pulled together the available data, concluding that the evidence does not show any clear or “clinically important” link between prenatal exposure to the medication and autism.

“We now have studies from Nordic countries, Japan and Taiwan showing that Tylenol doesn’t cause autism,” Mandell said. The degree of acetaminophen use varied in the studies, “and it doesn’t make a difference in the findings.”

Prahm emphasized that her team aimed to “contribute one piece of evidence” to be interpreted in the context of the broader literature. “Overall, the current evidence does not establish a clear association,” she said.

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A federal indictment against former FBI Director James Comey hinges on the meaning of “86.” The Department of Justice said it indicates a threat of physical harm, while the more common dictionary definition is to throw out or get rid of something. 

Legal experts have said the ambiguity of the meaning will make this a difficult case for the DOJ.

In May 2025, while walking on the beach in North Carolina, Comey said he came across shells arranged to spell out “86 47” — Donald Trump is the 47th president — and he shared the image on Instagram.

According to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, “eighty-six” is a slang term most commonly used to mean “to throw out,” “to get rid of” or “to refuse service to.” More recently, though, and sparsely, Merriam-Webster says, it has also come to mean “to kill.” And that’s the definition the Department of Justice relies upon.

According to a two-page indictment announced on April 28, Comey “did knowingly and willfully make a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States” by posting the image of the shells that “a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.”

The indictment includes two charges: threatening the president and “transmitting a threat in interstate commerce” (via Instagram). Combined, the charges carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

“Threatening the life of the president of the United States will never be tolerated by the Department of Justice,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press conference announcing the indictment.

“James Comey disgracefully encouraged a threat on President Trump’s life and posted it on Instagram for the world to see,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a press release. In the press conference, Patel said the grand jury was presented with the fact that “shortly after posting that threat, he deleted that threat and then issued an apology.”

It’s true that the same day he posted the photo to Instagram, Comey took it down. But he did not apologize.

“I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message,” Comey wrote in a new Instagram message on May 15, 2025. “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”

In an interview on MSNBC on May 20, 2025, Comey insisted there was “no dark intention on my part” and that while he regretted the controversy around his post, “it’s hard to have regret about something that, even in hindsight, looks to me to be totally innocent.”

Comey said he thought it was just “a silly picture of shells that I thought was a clever way to express a political viewpoint. And actually I still think it is. I don’t see it the way some people are still saying it is, but again, I don’t want any part of any violence. I’ve never been associated with violence, and so that’s why I took it down.” 

Trump wasn’t buying it.

“He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant,” Trump said on Fox News on May 16, 2025. “If you’re the FBI director, and you don’t know what that meant, that meant assassination, and it says it loud and clear.”

After the indictment, Trump commented on April 29, “If anybody knows anything about crime, they know 86. … It’s a mob term for kill him. You know, you ever see the movies? ’86’ the mobster says to one of his wonderful associates. ’86 him.’ That means kill him. … People think of it as something having to do with disappearing, but the mob uses that term to say when they want to kill somebody, they say, ’86 the son of a gun.'”

As we said, the Merriam-Webster dictionary says the term “eighty-six” is “slang meaning ‘to throw out,’ ‘to get rid’ of, or ‘to refuse service to.’ It comes from 1930s soda-counter slang meaning that an item was sold out. There is varying anecdotal evidence about why the term eighty-six was used, but the most common theory is that it is rhyming slang for nix.”

“In the 1950s the word underwent some functional shift, and began to be used as a verb,” Merriam-Webster says. “The initial meaning as a verb was ‘to refuse to serve a customer,’ and later took on the slightly extended meaning of ‘to get rid of; to throw out.’ The word was especially used in reference to refusing further bar service to inebriates.”

Merriam-Webster notes, “Among the most recent senses adopted is a logical extension of the previous ones, with the meaning of ‘to kill.’ We do not enter this sense, due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.”

The Oxford English Dictionary also says of the U.S. slang term, “In restaurants and bars, an expression indicating that the supply of an item is exhausted, or that a customer is not to be served.” The OED doesn’t include a definition meaning “to kill.”

When the controversy over Comey’s post first erupted last year, Jesse Sheidlower, adjunct assistant professor in Columbia University’s writing program and formerly editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary, told the Associated Press, “The original sense is, we are out of an item. But there are a bunch of obvious metaphorical extensions for this. 86 is something that’s not there, something that shouldn’t be there like an undesirable customer. Then it’s a verb, meaning to throw someone out. These are fairly obvious and clear semantic development from the idea of being out of something.”

There are some uses of the phrase as a euphemism for killing someone, he said, but that usage is more rare.

“Yes, it can mean ‘to murder,’” Sheidlower told the New York Times last year. “But without any very specific indication that that’s the intended meaning, you’d never assume that. The notion that Comey was suggesting this is completely preposterous.”

Some legal experts say prosecutors will have a hard time proving Comey “knowingly and willfully” posted the photo as a violent threat.

“Posting numbers constitute a threat? I just don’t accept that,” Jimmy Gurulé, a University of Notre Dame law professor and former federal prosecutor, told the Washington Post. “They are going to have to prove that to a jury — beyond a reasonable doubt. … I don’t think they are going to be able to satisfy that legal threshold.”

“I think this indictment is deeply flawed. I think it’s probably fatally flawed. And here’s why,” CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said on April 28. “The law that Justice Department prosecutors have chosen to charge here requires an intent to kill or physically injure the president of the United States. And I think if you look at this communication, these seashells, it’s just way too ambiguous.

“What does 86 mean? Yes, there have been instances in pop culture and elsewhere where people have used 86 to mean kill, but there have been plenty of other instances, apparently far more instances where it simply means to remove or to cross off a list,” Honig said. “And that ambiguity is going to be a major problem for prosecutors because I will tell you, ambiguity is always the enemy of the prosecutors because you have to prove your case not just by 51% or 75%, you have to prove your case beyond a reasonable doubt. And I don’t see any realistic way prosecutors are going to be able to do that here.”

John Keller, a former senior Justice Department official who led a task force to prosecute violent threats against election workers, told the AP that he agreed the term “86” posted by Comey was “ambiguous — it doesn’t necessarily threaten violence and the fact that it was the FBI Director posting this openly and notoriously on a public social media site suggests that he didn’t intend to convey a threat of violence.”

Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley wrote in an opinion piece that despite being “one of Comey’s most vocal and consistent critics,” he believes the indictment is “facially unconstitutional absent some unknown new facts.” In order to convict Comey, he said, “the Justice Department will have to show that his adolescent picture was a ‘true threat'” according to the law. “It is not,” Turley wrote.

At the indictment press conference, Blanche was asked how he intended to prove intent when Comey has said he did not associate “86” with doing physical harm.

Blanche said that over the last year, the Department of Justice has done “a tremendous amount of investigation. And how do you prove intent in any case? You prove intent with witnesses, with documents, with the defendant himself, to the extent is appropriate, and that’s how we’ll prove intent in this case.”

This is the second time Trump’s Justice Department has sought criminal charges against Comey. In September, Comey was indicted on two criminal counts alleging he made a false statement to Congress in 2020 and obstructed a congressional proceeding. In November, a federal judge threw out the case, ruling that Lindsey Halligan, the prosecutor who secured the indictment, was unlawfully appointed to her role. The Justice Department has appealed.

On April 28, Comey released a video message on Substack responding to the latest indictment: “Well, they’re back. This time about a picture of seashells on a North Carolina beach a year ago. And this won’t be the end of it. But nothing has changed with me. I’m still innocent. I’m still not afraid, and I still believe in the independent federal judiciary. So let’s go.”

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Two days after an armed man tried to enter the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt cited rhetoric from Democrats that she said is “inspiring violence” against President Donald Trump and other Republicans. But several of the statements she quoted were stripped of their original context, a point that House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries made in a rebuttal.

In prepared remarks in the April 27 press briefing, Leavitt called out a number of congressional Democrats, and a late-night television host, for “hateful and constant and violent rhetoric directed” at Trump. On April 25, security prevented the armed man from accessing the WHCA dinner, which the president and top administration officials attended. After Leavitt’s briefing, the man was charged with attempting to assassinate the president.

For example, the press secretary said: “As the first lady of the United States pointed out this morning, just two days prior to the shooting, ABC’s late-night host, Jimmy Kimmel, disgustingly called first lady Melania Trump an expectant widow. Who in their right mind says a wife would be glowing over the potential murder of her beloved husband?”

Later, Leavitt said she had “a whole host of examples” of “despicable statements” from Democratic lawmakers that she could share. “Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, just this April, this month, said we are in an era of maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” she said.

She continued: “Gov. Josh Shapiro said heads need to roll within the administration. Sen. Alex Padilla said people are, quote, ‘dying because of fear and terror caused by the Trump administration.’ Sen. Elizabeth Warren, President Trump is making the country look like a, quote, ‘fascist state.’ Sen. Adam Schiff saying President Trump using a dictator playbook. Sen. Ed Markey calling President Trump a dictator, saying that this administration’s actions are authoritarianism on steroids.”

And finally, reading off more quotes, she said: “Gov. JB Pritzker, never before in my life have I called for mass protests, disruptions. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. You have Rep. Pressley saying we’ll see you in the streets. Rep. [LaMonica] McIver, a Democrat representative on Capitol Hill, we will not take this shit from Donald Trump. He thinks he’s a dictator. We are at war.”

But Jeffries, the House minority leader, responded to Leavitt in his own April 27 press conference, calling her a “stone-cold liar” and claiming that the Democrats’ statements were “all taken out of context.”

Some, but not all, of the remarks she highlighted were presented without the context that shows them in a different way than Leavitt presented.

We’ll start with the statements by Jeffries, Kimmel, Shapiro, Padilla, Pritzker and Pressley that lacked important context.

Jeffries

On April 21, the day that Virginia residents voted to allow the state’s congressional district lines to be redrawn — potentially giving Democrats more seats in Congress next year — Jeffries posted about the election results on X.

“House Democrats have crushed Donald Trump’s national gerrymandering scheme,” Jeffries wrote, referring to Trump advising GOP state lawmakers in Texas and other Republican-run states to redraw their congressional district maps to give Republicans an advantage in the midterm elections this fall. After listing several ways that Democrats have stopped or negated those Republican efforts, Jeffries wrote:  “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

He expanded on his social media post the following day in a press conference celebrating the outcome in Virginia.

Jeffries said: “We are in an era of maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time. And we are going to keep the pressure on Republicans at every single state in the union to ensure, at the end of the day, that there is a fair, national map. Because we believe that it’s the people who should decide who’s in the majority in the next Congress – not Donald Trump and MAGA extremists.”

In an April 27 press conference in which he also condemned political violence, Jeffries responded to Leavitt quoting him without the fuller context about the back-and-forth over redistricting.

“The notion that any of us are concerned with so-called criticism from these phony Republicans as it relates to anything that has been said — certainly as it relates to the comment related to maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time, in connection with the redistricting battle that Republicans launched — I stand by it,” Jeffries said. “You can continue to criticize me for it. I don’t give a damn about your criticism.”

Jeffries noted that the “maximum warfare” phrase didn’t originate with him. It “came from the White House in the summer of 2025 when they started this redistricting battle,” he said. 

He was referring to an August 2025 New York Times article that quoted an unnamed “person close to the president” who told the newspaper that “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time” was the “White House’s political strategy” on redistricting.

Kimmel

On Thursday, April 23 — two days before the WHCA dinner — ABC’s late-night host, Jimmy Kimmel, included a segment on his show in which he performed a comedic roast similar to what is traditionally done at the correspondents’ dinner. The show spliced in footage of some administration officials facetiously suggesting they were in the audience.

Following a couple of jokes alluding to Trump’s age in that segment, Kimmel said, “And of course our first lady, Melania, is here. So beautiful — Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”

Both the president and first lady responded on April 27 with social media posts calling for Kimmel to be fired. Trump described Kimmel’s statement as a “call to violence.”

Likewise, Leavitt said at the press briefing the same day, “Who in their right mind says a wife would be glowing over the potential murder of her beloved husband? … This kind of rhetoric about the president, the first lady and his supporters is completely deranged and it’s unbelievable that the American people are consuming it night after night after night.”

But the context of the statement suggests that Kimmel was making a joke about the age gap between the two. Melania Trump turned 56 on April 26, which Kimmel mentioned, while Donald Trump — the oldest person to be inaugurated as president — is 79 and has a birthday coming up in June.

Kimmel responded to the criticism during his show on April 27, saying that the statement was “obviously” a joke about their age difference. “It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am. It was not — by any stretch of the definition — a call to assassination.”

The Federal Communications Commission issued an order on April 28 expediting a review of eight local broadcasting licenses held by ABC — a move that critics saw as retaliation from the Trump administration against Kimmel’s broadcaster.

Shapiro

In a January interview with progressive podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen, Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, said that “heads do need to roll, certainly, within the administration” while calling for Kristi Noem, then the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to be fired over tactics used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Minneapolis.

After Cohen asked about the possibility of Noem being held accountable through impeachment by Congress, Shapiro said, “As it relates to Noem, she should be fired. The president should fire her. If he doesn’t, I think Congress needs to act.” Acknowledging that impeachment was unlikely, Shapiro said that even a growing number of Republicans appeared to “understand that she is way in over her head and that her directions, and the president’s directions, are violating people’s constitutional rights and undermining who we are.”

Later, when Cohen noted that Noem had been quoted saying that she was simply following instructions from the White House, Shapiro criticized her for not pushing back on “unconstitutional” immigration enforcement orders.

“Yeah, I mean it confirms what we were just talking about a moment ago, which is this is a directive that was sent by the president or [White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Adviser] Stephen Miller or [Vice President] JD Vance to Noem, and Noem didn’t stop and say, ‘Hey, this is unconstitutional, I’m not doing it.’ Instead, she plowed forward and now Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti are dead,” Shapiro said, referring to Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two U.S. citizens who were killed in January by immigration officers in Minneapolis.

Shapiro then said, “People have been disappeared in the community. American civil rights have been violated. None of this is acceptable. Heads do need to roll, certainly, within the administration. But most importantly for the good people of Minnesota and across this country, this directive needs to end. The mission needs to be terminated.”

Padilla

A 57-year-old farmworker from Michoacán, Mexico, named Jaime Alanís died after falling off of a greenhouse roof during an ICE raid in Ventura County, California, in July.

The day after his death, Dana Bash — who was anchoring CNN’s “State of the Union” — asked Sen. Padilla of California, “We learned overnight that a migrant farmworker died after he fell from a roof during ICE raids in Ventura County in your state. Have you been able to talk to the family?”

Padilla answered [emphasis ours]: “I haven’t spoken with the family directly, but I have been in touch with President Teresa Romero of the United Farm Workers union. I have known her for a long time. We’ve been in touch over the last several days. She’s been with the family and other families of people that are literally terrorized and traumatized based on what ICE is doing.

“Again, if all they’re doing is going after serious violent criminals, that’d be one thing. But because of these artificial quotas established by — whether it’s Donald Trump or Stephen Miller or somebody in the administration — it’s causing ICE to get more aggressive, more cruel, more extreme, and these are the results.

“It’s people dying because of fear and terror caused by this administration. It’s not just undocumented immigrants. There’s lawful immigrants that are being rounded up. There’s United States citizens that are being detained. There are military veterans that are being detained.”

Leavitt quoted the portion of his answer in bold as an example of “Democrat elected officials calling for war against the president of the United States and his supporters.”

Pritzker

In an April 2025 speech at a New Hampshire event, Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, said that “these Republicans cannot know a moment of peace,” while calling for Democrats to “fight” and protest against Trump administration policies on immigration and more.

More than 26 minutes into his almost 30-minute speech, the governor said: “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact because we have no alternative but to do just that, that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”

When some Republicans said at the time that Pritzker’s comments could be seen as a call for violence, he told reporters that interpretation was “ridiculous” and not his intent.

“I called for people to take out their megaphones and their microphones, to stand up on soapboxes and get to the ballot box in order to defeat the people who are trying to take so many things away from the American people,” he said. “That has nothing to do with violence.”

Pressley

In the first year of Trump’s second term, Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts attended rallies and called on citizens to demonstrate against some of the administration’s policies.

At a February 2025 rally against the administration’s cuts to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Pressley said, “We are going to litigate, legislate, agitate, and resist because you are worth it. So we will see you in Congress, and the courts, and in the streets.”

The same month, at a rally protesting Elon Musk’s access to the Treasury Department, Pressley said, “We will match their energy with unprecedented organizing, mobilizing, agitating. We will see you in the courts, in Congress, in the streets.”

Leavitt summarized her call to action as, “we’ll see you in the streets,” and cited it as another example of “Democrat elected officials calling for war against the president of the United States and his supporters.”

This isn’t the first time that Pressley’s calls for citizens to demonstrate against government policy have been cast by conservatives as an example of Democrats inciting violence. In 2021, we wrote about a viral meme that had cited her comments regarding postal funding as a call for violence.

Other Quotes

Sens. Warren, Schiff and Markey did, respectively, use the terms “fascist state,” “dictator playbook” and “authoritarianism on steroids” to refer to Trump, his administration or certain policies.

Leavitt criticized such characterizations, saying, “Those who constantly falsely label and slander the president as a fascist, as a threat to democracy and compare him to Hitler to score political points are fueling this kind of violence.”

And Rep. McIver said at the February 2025 rally outside the Treasury Department that “we are at war” while criticizing the Department of Government Efficiency and Musk, the former head of DOGE and a major Trump campaign donor, for being given access to sensitive Treasury data. “Anytime a person can pay $250 million into a campaign and then be given access, full access to the Department of Treasury of the United States of America, we are at war,” McIver said.

Whether those remarks amount to “inspiring violence,” as Leavitt said, we’ll leave for readers to judge. But we would note that the politicians did not explicitly promote violence.

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