Trump Trounces Liberal Gov on Transgender Issue

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The federal government has been sending billions in taxpayer dollars to states for their public schools, including Maine. Maine does not have to accept this money but if it does, then it has to comply with the conditions attached just as households can place conditions on charities that receive their donations, or donate the money elsewhere.

At the recent governors’ meeting at the White House, President Trump politely asked Maine’s Gov. Janet Mills if she is “not going to comply with” his executive order protecting girls’ sports against boys viewing themselves as transgendered, as he had heard from the media. She indicated that she would not comply, and argued instead that she is “complying with state and federal law” by allowing transgendered teenagers, born as male, to play in girls’ sports.

Trump responded that “we are the federal law” in reference to how the executive authority under the Constitution is vested in the president, and how Trump had cited the federal statute enacted by Congress. Trump then continued, “you better do it, you better do it, because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t.”

“And, by the way, your population, even though it’s somewhat liberal, although I did very well there, your population doesn’t want men playing in women’s sports.” Mills interrupted Trump by brusquely saying, “See you in court,” and was photographed smiling smugly at her table.

“Good, I’ll see you in court, I look forward to that, that should be a real easy one,” said Trump. Then Trump added one of his trademark zingers that infuriates the Left, “And enjoy your life after governor because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.”

This 57-second confrontation in which Trump rebuked the entrenched liberal Maine Governor illustrated how much better Trump is than any other Republican politician. Who else would have stood up against a tough, bossy liberal woman attorney as Trump just did?

At issue is whether federal transgender policy should be carried out and enforced by elected leaders – or whether a small dissenting minority can use the courts to overcome the will of the majority. The federal government headed by Trump can and should use funding as a lever to enforce compliance by states and schools that receive the funding.

Trump’s Department of Education immediately opened an investigation into Maine schools, showing that he will follow through on this and all his campaign pledges. Nine days earlier, on February 12, Trump’s Education Department announced that it will also investigate the interscholastic athletic leagues in Minnesota and California for violating Trump’s ban on allowing boys to compete unfairly in girls’ sports.

A week earlier, Trump’s Education Department gave notice that it is investigating the Massachusetts interscholastic league and the University of Pennsylvania and San Jose State University, about this same issue. Virtually every state has an association that governs high school sports, and the league in Washington State has been considering setting up a program separate from girls’ sports for transgender athletes.

On February 20 Trump’s Department of Education also issued a statement applauding the conformance by the interscholastic athletic leagues in New Hampshire and Wisconsin with Trump’s executive order banning men in women’s sports. These are two important presidential swing states, and New Hampshire holds the first-in-the-nation presidential primary.

Trump’s shutting down of the “transgender insanity,” as he accurately describes this, is part of his overall block on federal funding of woke ideologies. On Feb. 13 Trump’s Education Department announced the termination of over $350 million in grants to promote wokeness.

The amount of federal spending on boondoggles in public education is staggering. In the small state of Maine alone, the federal government wastes more than $280 million annually in funding its public schools, which “ranked dead last on a list compiled by U.S. News comparing the quality of public high schools between states.”

Liberals have run Maine public schools into the ground. “During the 1990s, Maine typically ranked first or second on the NAEP” exams, but school policies in Maine have ruined its public schools since then, reports The Maine Wire.

Maine Gov. Mills remains defiant. The day after the public confrontation, Gov. Mills issued a written statement claiming that Trump is violating the Constitution by using federal funds to enforce compliance with his executive order, and that she is standing up for the “rights of transgender Mainers” based on the Maine Human Rights Act passed in 2021.

But missing from Mills’ statement is any recognition of the rights of girls to fair competition in school sports, as thousands of girls are being denied the right to a level playing field by the transgender invasion. Once popular, Mills’ disapproval rating surpassed her approval rating even prior to her meeting with Trump.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Planes Collide with DEI

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

After Delta Airlines reaffirmed its full commitment to the DEI ideology, one of its planes crash-landed, flipped upside down, and burst into flames at Toronto Airport. Everyone miraculously survived this latest plane crash that happened once the plane was oddly cleared to land amid a crosswind having gusts up to 40 mph on its approach to the airport.

DEI means that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are the priority in hiring and promotion, and protection against firing inept workers. President Trump has issued two Executive Orders against DEI, and many large corporations have recently rescinded or rolled back their DEI programs, including Amazon, Disney, Google, GE, GM, and Pepsi, while major banks are taking DEI off their websites.

Donald Trump’s trademark phrase was “You’re fired!” long before he ran for president. Now, as president for the second time, he’s been refreshingly firing everyone who stands in the way of transforming the federal government from DEI to a merit-based system.

Trump should consider firing those in charge of air travel safety, including investigators of these crashes. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) asserts exclusive authority over analyzing such crashes in the United States, but this federal agency is liberal like other federal agencies.

The initial statements by the NTSB chairwoman last Friday seemed to avoid holding anyone accountable for the mid-air collision last month in D.C., despite how it killed all 67 people on the American Airlines plane and a military helicopter. No collision of this magnitude should happen today, and any suggestion that no one was severely at fault is grounds for firing the investigators.

Yet at this rate no air traffic controller will be fired for this deadly collision near Reagan National Airport, even though the day before a similar mid-air collision near the same airport was averted only by an alert pilot aborting his landing and recircling. Air traffic controllers are federal employees and they adopted a policy a decade ago to make it nearly impossible to fire any of them, no matter how incompetent.

During the Obama Administration the use of a merit and skills-based exam, the AT-SAT, was deemphasized in hiring air traffic controllers. Instead a biographical test based on DEI became more important in hiring decisions in this occupation on which the lives of thousands depend daily.

An air traffic control expert, Michael Pearson, told Just the News that the numerous errors made by air traffic control in the recent D.C. crash included failing to “tell the jet that the helicopter was in sight” and failing to give timely “safety advisories” when alerted about the impending collision in the sky. In addition, the “helicopter route was horrible” while “the controller didn’t apply the rules properly,” Pearson said.

But the air traffic controllers’ association, which functions like a union in impeding the ability to fire workers, has immunized the federal employees against being fired by adopting the Air Traffic Safety Action Program. Under this policy “employees are promised that no punitive or disciplinary actions will be taken as a result of reporting errors that could impact safety, provided those errors are not the result of gross negligence or illegal activity.”

The NTSB is already protecting its fellow federal government workers by speculating that the altitude meter in the military helicopter may have somehow malfunctioned, and that a belated warning was “stepped on” by an interruption and hence may not have been heard. But air traffic controllers should ensure their messages are timely heard and acted upon, or else take immediate action to warn others as the DC controllers failed to do.

Missing from the NTSB statements is criticism of air traffic control for not alerting the helicopter pilots to divert their course until less than 30 seconds before the collision. Subsequently the air traffic controller told the helicopter pilot to fly “behind” the landing aircraft, which lacked an urgent altitude change needed.

Pete Buttigieg, who oversaw the air traffic controllers for four years in the Biden Administration, is turning the tables by demanding, “The flying public needs answers.” So while the biased NTSB withholds real answers, Buttigieg blames Trump to boost his campaign for U.S. Senate in his adopted state of Michigan.

A lawsuit has been pending for many years in federal court challenging how air traffic control hiring practices have disadvantaged qualified candidates from the leading training program, called the Air Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative. This lawsuit, captioned Brigida v. US Dept of Transportation, was certified as a class action in February 2022 in federal court in DC.

Several hundred employees of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have been fired by Trump, but not any air traffic controllers or their supervisors. The recent two crashes, one in Canada, suggest that replacing DEI with a merit-based system for air traffic control is badly needed.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Half-Trans, Half-Free: Blue States Defy Trump

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Democrat-majority states are defying President Trump on the transgender issue, and dividing our Nation into half-trans and half-free. The free half are the states that protect girls’ sports from males invading as transgenders, and which protect both boys and girls against mutilating transgender surgeries.

This country endured “half-slave, half-free” until it became impossible to co-exist that way, as the half-slave portion insisted on complicity by the half-free portion until it was no longer willing to go along. President Trump has already put an end to federal workers signing their emails with pronoun commands to recipients for how they address the senders.

On January 28, Trump signed an Executive Order that commanded every federal agency “that provides research or education grants to medical institutions, including medical schools and hospitals” to “immediately take appropriate steps to ensure that institutions receiving Federal research or education grants end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.”

President Trump further ordered the Attorney General to “prioritize enforcement of protections against female genital mutilation.” Trump has also ended the transgender policies of our Armed Services.

On Feb. 7 and as made public on Monday, newly confirmed (by Vice President JD Vance’s tie-breaking vote) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suspended all future military promotions of soldiers who have “a history of gender dysphoria.” He canceled “all unscheduled, scheduled, or planned medical procedures associated with affirming or facilitating a gender transition for Service members.”

As to boys and young men invading girls’ school sports and locker rooms, Trump issued another Executive Order terminating that for all schools receiving federal funds. Only private high schools and a few private colleges do not receive federal funding.

“The war on women’s sports is over,” President Trump announced at his White House signing of this protection against unfair competition. He thereby rescinded a Biden policy encouraging boys to compete as transgender athletes in girls’ sports, as many have.

The NCAA, which governs college sports, immediately issued a new policy in partial compliance with President Trump’s orders. The NCAA immediately disallows men, as defined not by Trump’s definition based on reproductive potential at conception but by birth certificates (which could be inaccurate) from competing in women’s sporting events while still allowing men to practice with women and thus enter their locker rooms.

Blue states including New York and Minnesota are already flatly defying Trump’s directives. Democrat New York officials have advised the many hospitals in New York City and throughout the state to continue to perform transgender surgeries on children even if that means they will lose federal funding.

A total of 23 Attorneys General from blue states have obtained a temporary restraining order (TRO) from a federal court in the blue state of Rhode Island against Trump’s freezing of federal funding of hospitals and other institutions that are performing transgender operations on children. California and 14 other blue states have told hospitals not to cancel transgender procedures or else they would be in violation of state laws against discrimination.

A few hospitals had reportedly canceled a few transgender procedures, while the ACLU and others have sued to seek an injunction blocking Trump’s order against transgender surgeries and treatments from taking effect. Federal power is at its zenith on the issue of how it spends its money, and thus Trump should ultimately prevail at the Supreme Court, but that Court may not resolve this anytime soon.

Meanwhile, the Minnesota State High School League has told schools there to continue to allow boys to compete as transgender athletes in girls’ sports. In Virginia, which has a Republican governor, schools will comply with Trump’s order against boys invading girls’ sports.

Planned Parenthood is in the business of transgender treatments, so every Democrat-appointed judge sides with that agenda. Blue state judges rule entirely for transgender activists.

On Sunday the New York Times Editorial Board stated their opinion entitled “Trump’s Shameful Campaign Against Transgender Americans,” and asserted that Trump is siding with “the worst of” U.S. history. Yet grassroots politics are confirming the opposite.

In Pennsylvania, where the Democrat voter registration advantage over Republicans exceeded 800,000 voters in 2020, that margin has fallen to less than 200,000 and continues to plummet even after the recent election. Outspoken Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who will face reelection there in the presidential year of 2028, observed in November that Trump’s victory may have resulted from ads saying, “Kamala is for ‘they/them.’ President Trump is for you."

More recently Fetterman described the overall political approach by Democrats today as “toxic,” particularly for the young men who shifted to vote Republican in the last election. Fetterman assessed Trump’s election victory as a “gut-check kind of vote” about which side would protect voters’ “personal view of the American way of life,” and that is President Trump.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Billions to Be Lost in Super Bowl Gambling

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The embrace and promotion of gambling by the NFL make this Super Bowl week the worst of the year for those susceptible to being victimized. And next month features March Madness, when an estimated 68 million Americans bet on the annual college basketball tournament.

Many billions are wagered on the Super Bowl, basketball games, and nearly everything else. The easy availability of gambling on phone apps and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to promote individualized betting have vastly expanded this vice far beyond the limited horse racing of a generation ago.

Young adults, and particularly young men, are the biggest victims, according to a survey released a few months ago by Fairleigh Dickinson University. It found that 10% of men and 7% of women between ages 18 and 30 have a gambling addiction today.

Gambling causes suicides and cognitive disorders even more than other addictions, including substance abuse. A study in Sweden found that gamblers were 15 times more likely to commit suicide than the overall population.

College basketball is particularly vulnerable to corruption by gambling, as players desperate for income can alter their performance to enable gamblers to win big by betting on aspects of a game. ESPN reported on Monday that three college basketball programs are under a federal investigation into gambling rings.

Major League Baseball fired its top balls-and-strikes umpire after his gambling app account was being used by someone else to place substantial bets on baseball. Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani’s ex-interpreter faces federal sentencing for allegedly stealing $17 million to gamble and, while Ohtani himself was cleared, last year there was an NBA player who pled guilty to a scheme to depart games early with a phony injury and then an illness so that bets could win.

Delta Airlines recently announced its new partnership with DraftKings, a sports gambling company, to offer free gaming to passengers while in-flight. Apparently money will not be wagered through this program, but hooking idle travelers on this addiction can result.

Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court opened the floodgates to sports gambling in 2018, the sums wagered have increased. Missouri, through a ballot initiative, will soon join the 38 states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, that allow sports betting.

More people seek help for their gambling addiction at this time of year, during NFL playoffs through the Super Bowl, according to the executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of Pennsylvania Josh Ercole. “A lot of this has to do with the ease of access and the continued increased availability,” he said, which has sharply increased through phone apps.

These bets are not merely on the outcome of a game, but throughout the game on predictions like what the next play will be or how well a particular player performs. “Prop wagers,” short for “proposition wagers,” are pervasive now in betting on sports.

A prop wager is a bet on something within a game, such as who scores the first touchdown or kicks the longest field goal. There are nearly endless varieties of prop bets promoted to someone using a gambling app during a game, and the potential for corruption with players, particularly unpaid ones at the college level, is severe.

The longtime NFL Commissioner who built the NFL into the world’s premier sports league was Pete Rozelle, a conservative and a big fan of Phyllis Schlafly. Rozelle banned NFL games on Christmas Day, and said in 1975 that “the NFL is firmly opposed to the concept of legalized gambling on professional football.”

That is not the NFL today, as it welcomes gambling to boost its television ratings among those who place bets. The NFL insists on playing on Christmas too, so this holy day has been transformed into a day of gambling for many.

The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit may even allow gambling on election outcomes, in a case that was argued on January 17 captioned KalshiEX v. CFTC. The plaintiff seeks to offer trading in political event futures contracts, which the Commodity Futures Trading Commission so far prohibits under its interpretation of a federal statute.

Texas, which recently opened its biennial legislative session, has admirably resisted pressure to allow sports gambling in the Lone Star State. Texas also properly prohibits ballot initiatives like the one that gambling companies just passed in Missouri.

The revered longtime Mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia, who built the Big Apple during the Great Depression, worked hard to keep gambling out and was even photographed destroying slot machines with a sledgehammer. He dumped them into the river rather than allow harm from gambling.

Congress could and should prohibit sports betting, and has the authority to do so under the Commerce Clause. States, too, should prohibit sports betting as nearly a dozen have done.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.