The Dictatorship

Trump-Kennedy autism announcement: What we know about the condition’s causes

Published

9 months ago

September 23, 2025

Trump-Kennedy autism announcement: What we know about the condition’s causes

WASHINGTON (AP) — Many doctors and scientists were reeling Monday after President Donald Trump went on TV to insist that pregnant women should never take Tylenol and revive debunked theories about vaccines and autism.

Trump went beyond his own Food and Drug Administration’s more modest advice that doctors “should consider minimizing” the painkiller acetaminophen’s use in pregnancy — amid inconclusive evidence about whether too much could be linked to autism. His comments came as the administration also moved to make more available a possible but unproven autism treatment — and also announced more research into the disorder.

Dr. Steven Fleischman, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, worried that the Tylenol claims would terrify mothers-to-be and parents of children with autism.

“I don’t want you going back and looking and saying to yourself, ‘I shouldn’t have done this, I shouldn’t have done that.’ It’s nothing you did. It really is not,” he said. “Not treating the fever probably has more adverse effects that you need to worry about than taking the medication.”

As for vaccines, “studies have repeatedly found no credible link between life-saving childhood vaccines and autism,” said American Academy of Pediatrics president Dr. Susan Kressly. ”Any effort to misrepresent sound, strong science poses a threat to the health of children.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised earlier this year to determine the cause of autism by September. That baffled brain experts who say there is no single cause and that the rhetoric appears to ignore decades of science into the genetic and environmental factors that can play a role.

Here’s what we know about autism and the Trump administration’s new steps to address it.

What is autism?

Autism isn’t a disease. It’s a complex developmental condition better known as autism spectrum disorder that affects different people in different ways.

It can include delays in language, learning or social and emotional skills. For some people, profound autism means being nonverbal and having intellectual disabilities, but the vast majority of people experience far milder effects.

Autism rates have been going up for decades

There are two main reasons. First, the definition of autism broadened as scientists expanded their understanding of its wide range of traits and symptoms. That led to changes in the criteria doctors use to diagnose autism and improvements in screening.

At the same time, parents increasingly sought a diagnosis as autism became better known and schools began offering educational services they hoped could help their kids.

As late as the 1990s, only children with the most profound symptoms were considered to have autism. In the early 2000s, as the definition began changing, the autism rate was estimated to be 1 in 150 children. The latest count found 1 in about 31 children are affected by autism spectrum disorder.

The increase isn’t among the profound cases; it’s an increase in the milder cases that weren’t historically considered autism, said expert Helen Tager-Flusberg of Boston University.

There is no single test for autism, which is diagnosed mostly through developmental and behavioral assessments.

It’s hard to tell if there may be additional factors behind the increase.

What’s the state of autism research?

Science has shown autism is mostly rooted in genetics, with the discovery of several hundred genes that play a role. Those genes can be inherited, even if the parent shows no signs of autism, or mutations can occur as the brain is developing and its rapidly dividing cells make mistakes.

Experts say different combinations of genes and other factors can all affect how a fetal brain develops. They include such factors as the age of a child’s father, preterm birth and whether the mother had health problems during pregnancy such as fevers, infections or diabetes.

What about Tylenol?

Some studies have raised the possibility that taking the over-the-counter painkiller in pregnancy might be associated with a risk of autism — but many others haven’t found a connection. In addition, the Coalition of Autism Scientists said Monday that acetaminophen use during pregnancy hadn’t increased in recent decades like autism rates have. Acetaminophen is known in most countries outside the U.S. as paracetamol.

But untreated fevers in pregnancy, particularly the first trimester, increase the risk for miscarriages, preterm birth and other problems, according to the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine.

Part of the difficulty in settling the question is that studies using medical records can’t tell if the fever, or a drug to lower the fever, might be connected to later health.

The FDA wrote doctors on Monday advising them to minimize acetaminophen’s use during pregnancy but acknowledged uncertainty: “To be clear, while an association between acetaminophen and autism has been described in many studies, a causal relationship has not been established and there are contrary studies in the scientific literature.”

Tylenol’s label already advises women to ask their doctor about use in pregnancy, and the society continues to advise that it’s an appropriate option.

What is the possible new autism treatment?

Also Monday, the FDA announced it was taking initial steps to try to approve a folic acid metabolite called leucovorin as a treatment option for some people with autism. It’s based on a theory that some people have too little folate, a form of vitamin B, in the brain and that giving them more could alleviate some symptoms.

Women already are told to take folic acid before conception and during pregnancy because it reduces the chances of certain birth defects, advice that possibly could help lower autism risk as well, Tager-Flusberg said.

Leucovorin is sold for other health conditions and already used by some families in hopes of helping autism. But Tager-Flusberg cautioned that only a few small, first-step studies have been done so far.

“Is this something worth pursuing? Yes, it is in potentially a subset of individuals,” she said. But there needs to be a large, very rigorous study to prove if it really works.

What about vaccines?

Any concern that vaccines could be linked to autism has been long debunked, stress scientists and leading advocacy groups for people with autism.

Childhood vaccines — and how and when to give them in combination — go through rigorous studies, and safety tracking continues for years as the shots are used.

“No doubt children will suffer” from Monday’s claims, said Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

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Associated Press journalists Matt Perrone and Mike Pesoli contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Dictatorship

Rep. Julia Letlow wins Louisiana GOP Senate primary runoff

Published

4 hours ago

June 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Rep. Julia Letlow wins Louisiana GOP Senate primary runoff

Jun. 27, 2026, 9:51 PM EDT

Rep. Julia Letlow won Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary runoff Saturday, defeating former Rep. John Fleming.

Her win comes as a victory for President Donald Trump, who has endorsed her repeatedly throughout the race — including before she was even officially running.

Letlow made history in 2021 when she became the first Republican woman to represent Louisiana in Congress. In that special election, she won the seat that her late husband, Luke Letlow, had won prior to dying of complications related to Covid-19 in December 2020.

Letlow had no political experience prior to running for her late husband’s seat. She holds a doctorate in communication from the University of South Florida and worked as an administrator for Tulane University and the University of Louisiana, according to her LinkedIn page. Nonetheless, she won the special election House race with nearly 65% of the vote.

In Congress, she has served on the appropriations and education committees, and has been a reliably MAGA Republican.

Letlow’s win also comes as a rebuke to Fleming, who loaned himself more than $11 million, according to the Federal Election Commission, and tried running for the same seat in 2016 only to finish in fifth place in the nonpartisan primary. (Letlow did not loan her campaign any money, and took in more than $5.35 million compared to Fleming’s more than $12.1 million, FEC filings show.)

Trump has played a key role in the race. In addition to backing Letlow early on, the president also helped tank Republican incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy’s re-election campaign in last month’s primary, based on the senator’s record of bucking his party and voting in favor of Trump’s second impeachment. In the primaryLetlow earned nearly 45% of the vote, giving her a healthy lead over both Fleming, who received about 28% of the vote, and Cassidy, who earned nearly 25%.

Ahead of Saturday’s runoff, polling showed Letlow and Fleming in a close race, with Letlow retaining a small lead in several polls.

Letlow will now proceed to the November general election to face off against the Democratic nominee, farmer Jamie Davis, who came out on top in tonight’s Democratic primary runoff.

The state has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, when Mary Landrieu won her last term in office.

Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.

The Dictatorship

‘Horrifying’: Pulte’s choice for top spy aide stokes fears of Trump vote tampering

Published

4 hours ago

June 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

‘Horrifying’: Pulte’s choice for top spy aide stokes fears of Trump vote tampering

Jun. 28, 2026, 1:36 PM EDT

Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligencehas stirred fear by choosing as his chief of staff a GOP election lawyer who oversaw a poll watching program that included Jack Posobiec and other conservative conspiracy theorists. The lawyer, Christina Norton, also appears to have no experience working in the intelligence community.

“It is horrifying,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official told MS NOW Saturday. “Not only does Norton have absolutely no background, experience or expertise in national security or intelligence, but her principal qualifications appear to be loyalty to Pulte and an embrace of absurd election-interference conspiracies.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who has been a vocal critic of Pulte, also raised concerns about election integrity on Sunday while taking shots at the director of national intelligence and the office itself.

“We should eliminate the DNI, and we should eliminate Pulte from the DNI until that happens,” he said on BLN, adding, “I am concerned that we’re gonna continue to cast doubt on elections in November and erode what has been a 250-year tradition of a peaceful transition of power.”

Pulte’s choice of Norton is also likely to increase concerns among Democrats that President Donald Trump intends to use the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to interfere in the midterm elections. Pulte, a loyalist with no intelligence experience, has used his current position as head of federal mortgage agencies to refer political rivals of the president for federal criminal prosecution.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told MS NOW on Sunday that the choice “just confirms” that the “only job qualification is absolute political loyalty and devotion to Donald Trump.” But he expressed faith in the judicial system during an appearance on “The Weekend,” noting that “right now we have federal courts across the land that are rejecting their various attempts to take over the election process. Nine different federal courts have rejected the claim that the president, by executive order, can compel the states in the union to turn over all of their voter lists to Donald Trump and to the White House.”

The New York Times first reported Norton’s appointment.

The former senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation, told MS NOW the choice also “signals as clearly as could be that Pulte has been put at ODNI to misuse the awesome power of the U.S. intelligence community to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections.”

Norton, reached by MS NOW by telephone, declined to comment and referred questions to an ODNI spokesperson. The spokesperson declined to comment on Norton but defended Pulte’s tenure.

“Acting Director Pulte and his team are focused on carrying out President Trump’s national security priorities while faithfully executing ODNI’s statutory mission,” the spokesperson told MS NOW. “We are leading the Intelligence Community to provide President Trump with elite, apolitical intelligence that keeps America safe.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, said his objection to Pulte is “that he used personal information to target a political enemy of the president,” a reference to New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“You should not be using the force of government to crash upon somebody just because the person in charge does not like them or finds them inconvenient. The fact that Bill did that is disqualifying for someone to be the director of national intelligence,” Cassidy said.

Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Friday that Congress would ensure that the ODNI under Pulte will “report on legitimate foreign threats to elections, not Donald Trump’s imaginary ones.”

Himes warned that, “Trump was explicit when he appointed Bill Pulte to a job he had no qualifications for that he had elections in mind.”

Trump has said in interviews with the news media that he would like to see Pulte shrink the size of the ODNI and investigate election fraud. Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, participated in investigations in Georgia and Puerto Rico to find proof of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Democrats and some former intelligence officials say they worry that Pulte may try to falsely claim that his office has found evidence that foreign governments are secretly funding Democratic candidates in the midterms.

Pulte could falsely claim foreign actors have hacked U.S. voting machines, they say, and altered vote totals in favor of Democrats during the midterms. Or Trump could instruct Pulte to be present if FBI agents seize ballots and election records in November as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Georgia.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned in a statement on Friday that Pulte should not use his position to spread Trump’s false election conspiracy theories.

“The mission of ODNI is to identify and counter foreign threats, not to import election denialism into the Intelligence Community,” Warner said. “Americans have every reason to fear that this administration is once again eroding the wall between our intelligence agencies and domestic elections.”

David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.

The Dictatorship

In Springfield, Ohio, Trump’s rhetoric becomes a grim reality

Published

4 hours ago

June 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

In Springfield, Ohio, Trump’s rhetoric becomes a grim reality

Jun. 27, 2026, 4:07 PM EDT

Having lived with Donald Trump’s infamous and baseless insult against them — “they’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats” — Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are bracing for a far bigger injury.

More than 10,000 Haitians across Ohio and hundreds of thousands more around the country who had Temporary Protected Status now face the imminent prospect of deportation. The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration can halt those legal protections for Haitians and Syrians and resume forcing them to leave.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinionfor the court’s Republican-appointed majority curbed the power of courts to review government decisions to terminate protections under the TPS program.

“They side with him on everything that he says or everything that he does, which means there is no check and balance,” said Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian TPS holder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, a town Trump catapulted into a maelstrom of misinformation about immigrants when he was running to retake the White House in 2024.

“The president has that freeway in front of him to do whatever he wants to do, unfortunately, and most of the time to a minority group of people,” added Dorsainvil, who has lived in the United States since 2020.

In a country rife with political and economic instability, Haitians returning from the U.S. are in danger of being killed or kidnapped, said Dorsainvil’s colleague at the Haitian Support Center, Rose Thamar Joseph.

“There is this perception in Haiti that if you are living here in the United States, you have money, so you are living your good life, so sending people back to Haiti will put them in real danger,” Joseph said.

Staying in the U.S. without legal status creates a different crisis.

“We received calls this morning from people saying that, unfortunately, starting on July 1, they won’t be able to go to work anymore,” Joseph said Friday.

Joseph predicted that families would be separated during the deportation process.

“We know that there will be separation,” she said. “A lot of those parents with TPS … they have kids who were born in the United States, so we know that it will happen, not for everybody, not for all the families, but it will happen,” she said.

The oncoming nightmare for the Haitian community in Springfield was, in many ways, predictable after Trump notoriously targeted them on the debate stage against then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the fall of 2024.

“They are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said without a shred of evidence, greatly amplifying an unfounded rumor that had been confined to smaller corners of social media.

That rhetoric continued Trump’s track record of racist languageparticularly when it comes to immigration, including during his first White House stint when he referred during his first to Haiti and other majority non-white nations as “shithole” countries.

Dorsainvil argued that the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday proved his beliefs are institutionalized, calling it “a validation of all those bad rhetorics of the president against us.”

Asked by MS NOW if those with TPS should expect to be deported, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said, “Well, of course. If you no longer have status in this country, then you’re supposed to be deported.”

Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration policy, went on to single out the Haitian population by name.

But the outcry against the court’s ruling blurs party lines in Ohio.

“Changing the immigration status of these individuals is not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio,” Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said.

Springfield’s Republican mayorRob Rue, has denounced Trump’s misinformation about his community as dangerous from the start.

“Many of the individuals affected by this decision are our neighbors, coworkers, business owners, taxpayers, and parents,” Rue said in a statement after the ruling came down. “They contribute to our local economy, support our schools, strengthen our neighborhoods, and have become part of the fabric of Springfield.”

Alex Tabet is a reporter for MS NOW.