A former White House national security advisor was taken aback by the Trump administration’s most recent cabinet meeting.
Jake Sullivan, who served as former President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, discussed the meeting on a recent episode of The Bulwark’s podcast on YouTube. He described the meeting as one taken from a “Kim Jong-Un documentary,” referring to the dictatorial leader of North Korea.
“Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Sullivan said. “And there is a kind of ludicrous, humorous quality to it, but it’s also a little bit scary because it reflects something deeper and dangerous about the president’s autocratic tendencies and the fact that these people around him are just so slavish that I don’t think they would stand up to him on anything at any point.”
“And without those kinds of guard rails, I think it’s uh it’s bleak what we may be facing here in the coming days and months,” he added.
Sullivan said the tactics Trump is using to fulfill his autocratic tendencies reminded him of other strongman leaders across the globe.
“This looks a lot like Erdogan in Turkey. It looks a lot like Orban in Hungary,” Sullivan said. “But with one big twist, which is in both of those cases, it took a long time for them to play out their strategy. We’ve been at this now for seven months. And you just look at the breakneck speed with which Trump is moving to try to break down the various guardrails of our democracy.”
“It’s extremely concerning,” he added.
Tag Archives: Environmental Protection Agency
CBS News: RFK Jr. releases report on childhood chronic disease. Here’s what to know.
The White House’s “Make America Healthy Again” or “MAHA” commission, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has published its first report on what it says are four leading drivers of childhood chronic disease.
“The report is the product of a consensual process, and it represents a collaborative effort of all the agencies and the White House. And it represents a consensus that is probably the strongest and most radical consensus by a government agency in history about the state of America’s health,” Kennedy told reporters in a call ahead of its release.
Who’s going to take advice on our children’s health from a moron who takes his grandchildren swimming in a sewage-contaminated creek where swimming is banned for public health reasons? A moron who’s had brain worms likely because he eats bush meat and road kill?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rfk-jr-maha-report-childhood-chronic-disease
Alternet: Behind Trump’s Order 14270: A sweeping directive that dismantles a century of protections | Opinion
On April 9, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14270, blandly titled “Zero-Based Regulatory Budgeting to Unleash American Energy.” Behind that bureaucratic name is a sweeping directive: Dismantle a century of environmental protections.
Every regulation related to the environment, natural resources, or energy, whether it safeguards air, water, species, or public lands, must be rewritten to serve polluters or vanish by default.
Some will claim this is just about efficiency. But no standard review process sets a mass expiration date for protections, regardless of science, impact, or legal mandate. This is not streamlining. It is a countdown to erasure.
Euronews: ‘A surprising debasement’: Trump administration sues four states over climate lawsuits and laws
The Trump Administration filed lawsuits against two US states on Wednesday, to stop them from taking legal action against fossil fuel companies for harms caused by climate change. On Thursday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued two more states over their climate laws.
Officials in the four Democratic states – Hawaii and Michigan, New York and Vermont – are defiant in the face of these unprecedented lawsuits.
It fits a strong pattern of anti-climate action measures that Trump has pursued during his first 100 days back in office. On the campaign trail last year, he pledged to “stop the wave of frivolous litigation from environmental extremists.”