To celebrate, the president wants to offer free admissions that day to the country’s national parks, a self-serving gesture, no doubt, but one that is no surprise for a man who spent much of his adult life plastering his name on the sides of buildings, airplanes and casino hotels.

But that is not a real problem. The public should take every opportunity to take full advantage of the vast offerings of the National Park Service.

The problem is that the free admission benefit is being removed next year for Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, a blatant swipe at African Americans and the nation’s civil rights history.

“The raw & rank racism here stinks to high heaven,” Cornell William Brooks, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and a former NAACP president, wrote on social media about the new policy.

Other days of free park admission in 2026 are Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Constitution Day, Veterans Day, President Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday (Oct. 27) and the anniversary of the creation of the Park Service (Aug. 25).

The new free-admission policy takes effect Jan. 1 and was one of several changes announced by the National Park Service late last month.

Another announced change was higher admission fees for international visitors, an “America-first entry fee policy” that would charge international tourists up to an extra $100 to enter some of the most popular sites, while leaving them out of fee-free days reserved for Americans.

Foreign tourists will also see prices for their annual park passes rise to $250, while U.S. residents will continue to be charged $80.

“These policies ensure that US taxpayers, who already support the National Park System, continue to enjoy affordable access, while international visitors contribute their fair share to maintaining and improving our parks for future generations,” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

Could there be anything more petty than a president punishing foreign tourists? It’s a wonder he didn’t raise the fees for Black people, too.

The MLK Day and Juneteenth snubs are only the latest attacks on Blacks and people of color.

Since his first day in office again, Trump has tried to dismantle diversity across the federal government, downplaying the nation’s racist history while whitewashing the civil rights victories of Black Americans.

Trump doesn’t even try to disguise his contempt anymore.

After years of dancing around whether or not he called Haiti and other Third World hotspots “s—hole countries,” Trump leaned into the phrase and did it again.

“Remember I said that to the senators?” Trump said recently during a speech in Pennsylvania. “Our country was going to hell. And we had a meeting, and I say, ‘Why is it we only take people from s—hole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let us have a few from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Do you mind?’”

Welcome to the National Park Service. Please have your passports out for inspection.

The new entry fee policy will also be a logistical nightmare for Park Service staff. Screening visitors for nationality will only make lines longer, and increase foreign resentment.

And, I don’t like the ideal of having to prove I’m a citizen every time I want to visit the Lincoln Memorial.

Other countries, including Egypt, Thailand and Cambodia, also charge higher entry fees for international tourists to visit national parks and attractions.

But this is America. Do we really want to be like them?

Leonard Greene is a New York Daily News columnist. ©2025 New York Daily News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

The trick is using a debating tactic known as Gish galloping, named after American creationist Duane Gish. It refers to rapid-style speech where one interlocutor bombards the other with a stream of facts and stats that become increasingly difficult to pick apart.

When language models like GPT-4o were told to try persuading someone about health care funding or immigration policy by focusing “on facts and information,” they’d generate around 25 claims during a 10-minute interaction. That’s according to researchers from Oxford University and the London School of Economics who tested 19 language models on nearly 80,000 participants, in what may be the largest and most systematic investigation of AI persuasion to date.

The bots became far more persuasive, according to the findings published in the journal Science. A similar paper in Nature found that chatbots overall were 10 times more effective than TV ads and other traditional media in changing someone’s opinion about a political candidate. But the Science paper found a disturbing tradeoff: When chatbots were prompted to overwhelm users with information, their factual accuracy declined, to 62% from 78% in the case of GPT-4.

Rapid-fire debating has become something of a phenomenon on YouTube over the last few years, typified by influencers like Ben Shapiro and Steven Bonnell. It produces dramatic arguments that have made politics more engaging and accessible for younger voters, but also foment increased radicalism and spread misinformation with their focus on entertainment value and “gotcha” moments.

Could Gish-galloping AI make things worse? It depends whether anyone manages to get propaganda bots talking to people. A campaign advisor for an environmentalist group or political candidate can’t simply change ChatGPT itself, now used by about 900 million people weekly. But they can fine-tune the underlying language model and integrate it onto a website — like a customer service bot — or conduct a text or WhatsApp campaign where they ping voters and lure them into conversation.

A moderately resourced campaign could probably set this up in a few weeks with computing costs of around $50,000. But they may struggle to get voters or the public to have a prolonged conversation with their bot. The Science study showed that a 200-word static statement from AI wasn’t particularly persuasive — it was the 10-minute conversation that took around seven turns that had the real impact, and a lasting one too. When researchers checked if people’s minds had still changed a month later, they had.

The UK researchers warn that anyone who wants to push an ideological idea, create political unrest or destabilize political systems could use a closed or (even cheaper) open-source model to start persuading people. And they’ve demonstrated the disarming power of AI to do so. But note that they had to pay people to join their persuasion study. Let’s hope deploying such bots via websites and text messages, outside the main gateways controlled by the likes of OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, won’t get the bad actors very far in distorting the political discourse.

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.” ©2025 Bloomberg. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Owens musings are unhinged, but Erika Kirk’s trip to Nashville, brokered by conservative star Megyn Kelly, demonstrates that they’ve become too influential for right-wing leaders to ignore. Kelly herself — a former Fox News host who’d never been known for her outré views — has refused to denounce Owens, insisting her ideas are legitimate.

On her podcast, Kelly said that she buys the official story that Kirk was killed by Tyler Robinson, the Utah man charged with the crime. But, she added, “many people believe there’s more to this story, that we’re being lied to by our FBI, that there are too many inconsistencies around the official story. And those people are more than entitled to that belief.”

Kirk’s death has divided

The aftermath of Kirk’s assassination should have been a unifying moment for the right. The facts of the case — Robinson is said to have had a trans partner and was angry about Kirk’s demonization of sexual minorities — would have been easy for conservatives to exploit in their fight against gender nonconformists. But Robinson evidently wasn’t a grand enough enemy for some on today’s right, which is increasingly built on conspiracies and the content they generate. So Kirk’s killing, far from knitting the movement together in grief and anger, has precipitated a bitter, squalid internecine feud.

“Today the conservative movement is in serious danger,” Ben Shapiro said in a blistering speech on the opening night of Turning Point’s AmericaFest conference Thursday, the first since Kirk’s death. That danger comes not just from the left, Shapiro said, but “from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” He went on to denounce Owens by name, as well as his fellow Turning Point speakers Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.

Shapiro, however, doesn’t have the power to excommunicate Owens. Maybe no one does. Her audience is simply too big. As of this writing, she is ninth on Spotify’s podcasts charts, ahead of every other right-wing podcast except Carlson’s.

(Shapiro is at 48, right behind Oprah Winfrey.) A TikTok video she posted after her meeting with Erika Kirk was viewed over 14 million times. Her fandom extends beyond political junkies; on TikTok, you’ll find Owens followers who otherwise post mostly about celebrities and wellness, both subjects she talks about often. In a world where traditional gatekeepers have lost most of their power, she’s a star.

This is partly a story about conservatives creating a monster they can’t control. Owens, after all, has been saying nutty things for a long time. In 2019, she left her job as communications director of Turning Point not long after arguing that Adolf Hitler’s real sin was globalism, not nationalism. (“If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great,” she said, it would have been fine.) Rather than ostracize her, however, powerful conservative organizations cultivated her. Republicans invited her to testify before Congress about why white nationalism wasn’t a problem. In 2020 Shapiro hired her at the Daily Wire, his media company, which is where she began her podcast. (They split in 2024 over her increasingly antisemitic rhetoric.) Having elevated her in large part for her willingness to say outrageous things about her opponents, people on the right are now surprised by her willingness to say outrageous things about them.

Owens’ rise, and the damage she’s done to her erstwhile allies, also offers a warning about the danger of the influencer politics that conservatives have excelled at. Since the 2024 election, Democrats have lamented the advantage Republicans have gained in new media, including long-form podcasts, webcasts and vertical video platforms like TikTok.

Clearly, liberals should try to figure out how to become competitive in all these mediums, since many Americans rely on them to learn about the world.

Perverse incentives

The problem is that the influencer ecosystem rewards those who promise access to suppressed, esoteric truths, making viewers feel as if they’re part of real-life melodramas. The algorithms are optimized for illiberalism.

I was struck by a stray reference in Owens’ podcast this past week to the “mommy sleuths and investigators” in her audience. She was announcing plans to provide these amateur digital detectives with photos of Charlie Kirk’s rental car, which somehow, in her telling, point to problems with the investigation of his death. It demonstrated one of her chief innovations: She packages her conspiracy theories in the slick conventions of true crime, allowing people following along on their screens to participate in the search for answers.

QAnon once offered its adherents a similar sense that they were taking part in solving a great mystery. Lately, however, that movement’s energy seems to have dissipated. There was always a strange optimistic streak to QAnon, since it posited that heroic “white hats” were working behind the scenes to set the world right. As one popular meme put it, “Patriots are in control.” But now, Donald Trump is firmly back in power, and no golden age is at hand. Rather than the cathartic unmasking of deep state pedophile networks, we’ve seen Trump struggling to keep the case files of his friend Jeffrey Epstein secret.

For at least some former true believers, disillusionment is setting in. Marjorie Taylor Greene mournfully referenced the QAnon movement’s tropes when she announced her resignation last month. “There is no plan to save the world or a 4D chess game being played,” she said.

If patriots aren’t in control, it raises the question of who is. Unsurprisingly, some entrepreneurial figures on the right have settled on a tried-and-true answer: the Jews. Owens especially has taken this most elemental of paranoid fixations and turned it into something between a soap opera and a live-action roll-playing game. “It’s necessary for people to recognize how greatly evil these Zionists are,” Owens said on her podcast, describing them as “Trotskyites” who employ Soviet techniques of mind control. The implication is that if you reject her, you’re falling into their trap.

“Just asking questions, positing vague conspiracies, raving like Alex Jones about secret confederacies that control your life, none of it makes your life better,” Shapiro said in his AmericaFest speech, a cri de coeur against the direction of the movement he’s dedicated his career to. Unfortunately, when it comes to people trying to build an audience, he’s wrong.

Michelle Goldberg is a New York Times columnist.

Also in the release was a photograph of a woman’s lower leg and foot on what appears to be a bed, with a paperback copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” visible in the background. The 1955 novel centers on a middle-aged man’s sexual obsession with a 12-year-old girl. Epstein, a serial sexual abuser, famously nicknamed one of his private planes “The Lolita Express.” And we are to believe that some of the globe’s brightest minds could not put the dots together?

Donald Trump, who once described himself as “a very stable genius,” included.

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Choosing silence

Later, the two had a public falling out, and Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. Great. But denial after the fact is only one side of this story. The other is harder to digest: Either the self-proclaimed “very stable genius” spent nearly two decades around Epstein without recognizing what was happening in plain sight — or he recognized it and chose silence. Neither explanation reflects on intelligence as much as it does on character. No wonder Trump’s defenders keep raising the most overused word in American politics today: hoax.

“Once again, House Democrats are selectively releasing cherry-picked photos with random redactions to try and create a false narrative,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson. “Here’s the reality: Democrats like Stacey Plaskett and Hakeem Jeffries were soliciting money and meetings from Epstein after he was a convicted sex offender. The Democrat hoax against President Trump has been repeatedly debunked, and the Trump administration has done more for Epstein’s victims than Democrats ever have by repeatedly calling for transparency, releasing thousands of pages of documents and calling for further investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends.”

Jackson has a point.

Democrats were cherry-picking which photos to release, even if many of the men pictured were aligned with progressives. That includes the president, who was a Democrat when he and Epstein were running together in New York in the 2000s. Trump didn’t register as a Republican until 2009. Now whether the choice of photos and timing was designed to shield political friends or weaponize against perceived enemies isn’t clear. What is clear is that it doesn’t take a genius to see that none of this is a hoax.

The victims are real. The flight logs are real. The millions that flowed into Epstein’s bank account have wire transfer confirmation numbers that can be traced. What Democrats are doing with the information is politics as usual. And you don’t want politics to dictate who gets justice and who gets vilified.

Right and wrong

Whatever the politicians’ intentions, Americans can decide how to react to the disclosures. And what the men around Epstein did with the information they gathered on his jet or his island fits squarely at the heart of the national conversation about masculinity. What kind of men could allow such abuse to continue?

I’m not saying the intelligent men in Epstein’s ecosystem did something criminal, but the lack of whistleblowing before his arrest raises questions about their fortitude for right and wrong. And the Trump White House trying to characterize this conversation as a partisan witch hunt — a hoax — is an ineffective strategy because the pattern with their use of that word is so clear.

We saw what happened on Jan. 6, and Trump tells us the investigation is a hoax. We hear the recording of him pressuring Georgia officials to find votes, and he tells us the investigation is a hoax. Trump campaigned on affordability issues — the cost of bacon, no taxes on tips — but now that he’s in office such talk is a hoax by Democrats. As if we don’t know the price of groceries in real time. Ten years ago, Trump told us he had proof that President Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. We’re still waiting.

In his book, “Art of the Deal,” Trump framed his lies as “truthful hyperbole” but by now we should understand for him hyperbole matters more than truth — and his felony convictions confirm that some of his claims were indeed simply false.

So if there is a hoax, it is the notion that none of the brilliant men whom Epstein kept in his orbit had any idea what was going on.

LZ Granderson is an columnist for the Los Angeles Times. ©2025 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Describing housing as “a fundamental human need,” Newsom said the shortage “breaks my heart” and promised that as governor he would lead the effort to develop “the 3.5 million new housing units we need by 2025, because our solutions must be as bold as the problem is big.”

The goal was impossible on its face, and he later backed away from it, terming it  “aspirational” rather than achievable.

Nevertheless, Newsom has championed policies to remove artificial barriers to new housing, particularly local rules that make development more difficult, or in some cases virtually impossible.

His administration has cracked down on cities that ignore housing quotas when planning land use and supported legislation to encourage “accessory dwelling units” and multiple-family projects on land zoned for single-family homes.

If a city resists higher-density projects, developers can invoke a “builder’s remedy” allowing them to proceed without local approval.

All of these pro-housing moves are highly controversial, as local officials often are squeezed between pressure from the state and the desires of their constituents to maintain the status quo.

The interactions have shown a curious tendency. The state, dominated by Newsom and other Democrats, is tougher on Republican-leaning communities that resist pressure from Sacramento than on those full of Democratic voters, particularly affluent ones.

For instance, Newsom has made an example of heavily Republican Huntington Beach, recently hailing the state Supreme Court’s rejection of that city’s contention that as a charter city it was partially exempt from pro-housing laws.

“Huntington Beach needs to end this pathetic NIMBY behavior,” Newsom said in a statement. “They are failing their own citizens by wasting time and money that could be used to create much-needed housing. No more excuses, you lost once again — it’s time to get building.”

Contrast that with how the state has dealt with Marin County, a bastion of affluent Democrats just as resistant to high-density housing as Huntington Beach.

Legislation to give Marin a partial exemption from state housing quotas by altering its status from urban to suburban was enacted during Jerry Brown’s governorship and extended by Newsom.

Newsom was a Marin resident prior to being elected governor and has recently relocated his family from Sacramento to a $9 million home in Kentfield, one of Marin’s most affluent communities.

And a few months ago, Newsom signed legislation that broadly exempts multi-family projects from the California Environmental Quality Act, but it contains a brief passage that subjects a 270-unit, eight-story project near Santa Barbara’s historic mission to CEQA compliance.

The project in picturesque, wealthy and heavily Democratic Santa Barbara faces sharp local opposition, and the language will help opponents prevail. It was inserted at the behest of state Sen. Monique Limón, a Santa Barbara Democrat who is the newly designated Senate president pro tem.

Finally, Newsom issued an executive order allowing affluent Los Angeles County communities stricken by wildfires early this year, such as Pacific Palisades, to ignore a pro-housing law that Newsom signed in 2021 as they rebuild. The law allows homeowners to split their single-family lots into as many as four properties, thus making more land available for duplexes.

Newsom’s order essentially limits rebuilding in those communities to single-family homes. It drew an immediate lawsuit from YIMBY Law, a pro-housing organization that has been a Newsom ally on previous housing issues. The suit alleges this order is illegal.

The tenor of these incidents could be coincidental. But taken as a whole, they imply that on housing policy some Californians are more equal than others, depending on their politics and economic status.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

While smoke hung in the air in Los Angeles, some politicians and political commentators were already stridently proclaiming that these fires prove we need more intensive forest management to stop such blazes and protect communities. People were mourning, and confused, and much was still unknown about the circumstances of the fires. Many, in shock, were looking for easy answers. Congress responded by passing the “Fix Our Forests Act” (H.R. 471) through the House on Jan. 23 while the fires still burned.

After the smoke cleared, and people had an opportunity to take a closer look at the facts surrounding the fires, and a closer look at the legislation, a very different picture emerged. Neither of the Los Angeles fires was a forest fire. The fires burned through grass and shrubs, not forests. The homes were not destroyed by walls of flames but, rather, by firebrands, blown for miles by fierce winds, showering down by the millions like an ember rain.

Many soon realized that the Fix Our Forests Act contained no provisions to help communities become fire-safe through proven, highly effective measures like home hardening, defensible space pruning and evacuation planning and assistance. Instead, it quickly became clear that the act was simply a logging bill that would override bedrock environmental laws to facilitate taxpayer-subsidized timber sales on remote, backcountry public lands under deceptive euphemisms like “thinning” and “fuels reduction.” The bill contains no limits on the percentage, size or age of trees that would be cut down, killed and hauled off of public lands by logging corporations.

Perhaps it was understandable why many members of both political parties voted to pass the Fix Our Forests Act through the House back in January. When so little was known or well-understood. When the fires still burned and the pain of loss, and the fear, were so fresh. Perhaps. But not now.

Heedless of the facts and impervious to evidence, however, the full Senate may vote on a similar version of the Fix Our Forests Act (S. 1462) early next year. Logging industry contributors to congressional reelection campaigns would benefit; everyone else would lose. In fact, if the Senate passes the Fix Our Forests Act, it would increase the threat of wildfires to communities, putting homes and lives in greater danger.

Abundant research finds that removing trees changes the microclimate of forests, reducing the cooling shade of the forest canopy and increasing sun exposure, which can intensify fires. Faster wildfire speed is most strongly associated with large losses of homes and lives. Removing trees reduces a forest’s natural windbreak, increasing windspeeds and causing fires to spread more rapidly. This means fires would reach communities much faster, giving people less time to safely evacuate, and giving first responders less time to arrive and help.

As over 200 ecologists and climate scientists recently warned Congress, “We have watched as one large wildfire after another has swept through tens of thousands of acres where commercial thinning had previously occurred … .” Will Congress listen?

Chad Hanson, based in the Sierra Nevada, is a wildfire scientist with the John Muir Project and the author of the book “Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate”.

“Hmm,” you say, “maybe Ted Cruz.”

But there’s more, the traveler says. The same Republican president will ship armaments to support Ukraine in a brutal war against Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

“OK,” you say, “then we can probably scratch Trump off the list.”

And finally, your visitor informs you, this president will put in place a naval blockade of socialist Venezuela, aiming at a Latin American realignment that might undermine Venezuela’s ally Cuba as well.

You immediately log onto a novel website called a prediction market and bet your entire savings on Marco Rubio.

The presidency in 2026 belongs to Trump, and the language of his administration sounds nothing like the idealistic neoconservatism that defined Rubio’s political brand a decade ago. Depending on the document or day of the week, Trumpism can sound like Nixonian realism, pre-World War II isolationism or just a swaggering mercantile imperialism.

Influence pervasive

But look at what the administration is actually doing, not just how it talks, and the hawkish foreign policy that you might have once expected from a President Rubio is palpably present in the policies of Trump’s second term.

There’s a continuing quest for peace with Russia, yes, but almost a year after Trump promised an immediate deal, the war continues with American military support. There’s more daylight between the United States and Israel than vintage neoconservatism would favor, but the military action long desired by Middle East hawks was delivered by Trump. And while the justifications for attempting regime change in Venezuela have ping-ponged around — drugs! oil! the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine! — we’re clearly engaged in the kind of old-fashioned anti-communist action that you’d expect with a son of Miami as the secretary of state.

In exerting this apparent influence, Rubio has somehow avoided becoming either a media fixation or a major player in the right’s unfolding psychodrama. He has accumulated formal power (adding the national security adviser’s portfolio in a Kissingerian consolidation) without accumulating many open enemies. It helps that he has officially subordinated his political ambitions, promising to support JD Vance if he runs in 2028. But a lack of formal presidential intentions hasn’t prevented everyone from Pete Hegseth to Susie Wiles from becoming a temporary lightning rod. Yet Rubio remains powerful and relatively aloof, not bulletproof but at least wearing a little bit of Teflon.

This makes him the most interesting figure in the administration right now. A running theme in the critique of Trump-era Republican politicians is that in accommodating themselves and making moral compromises, they ultimately earn only humiliation. Rubio has certainly had to compromise his principles. It’s difficult to imagine that he took any pleasure in what Elon Musk did to foreign aid or that he enjoys the amoral style in which White House officials are expected to talk about world affairs. But it is also very clear what he has earned from working within the contours of Trumpism: the power to shape foreign policy in ways consonant with his pre-Trumpian beliefs.

Venezuela is test

Whether that power is worth the compromises is one question; whether he is exercising power wisely or well is another. I was a skeptic of Rubio’s foreign policy vision in 2016, and I remain a skeptic of armed interventionism. That said, the current administration approach in Ukraine — negotiating intensely and shifting burdens to Europe while recognizing that Putin may not want a deal — has balanced hawkishness and dovishness in a reasonable way. And the bombing of Iran’s nuclear program has not produced any of the feared blowback or drawn us into a regime-change war.

Venezuela is the major test right now, the place where Rubio’s long-standing interests are most in play and where the administration’s just-war arguments are thinnest. Nicolás Maduro’s regime is deplorable, and to have it fall peacefully, under economic pressure and the threat of war, would be a triumph for the Trump administration, even if the justifications are dubious. But it’s as easy to imagine a scenario in which we end up saber-rattling and blowing up suspected drug boats for nothing, or alternatively act rashly and create a Libya in Latin America, as to envision a smooth restoration of democracy.

But it’s the nature of power that its possession puts your ambitions to the test. And just the fact that we’re testing a strategy of Latin American regime change is strong evidence that what never materialized in the 2016 campaign — the Marco Rubio moment — might have finally arrived.

Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist.

For 18 long minutes on the evening of Dec. 17, we were subjected to a rant by President Donald Trump that predictably careened from immigrants (bad) to jobs (good), rarely slowing down for reality. But jumbled between the vitriol and venom was a vision of American health care that would have horror villainess M3GAN shaking in her Mary Janes — a vision that we all should be afraid of because it would take us back to a dark era when insurance couldn’t be counted on.

Trump’s remarks offered only a sketchy outline, per usual, in which the costs of health insurance premiums may be lower — but it will be because the coverage is terrible. Yes, you’ll save money. But so what? A cheap car without wheels is not a deal.

“The money should go to the people,” Trump said of his sort-of plan.

The money he vaguely was alluding to is the government subsidies that make insurance under the Affordable Care Act affordable. After antics and a mini-rebellion by four Republicans also on Wednesday, Congress basically failed to do anything meaningful on health care — pretty much ensuring those subsidies will disappear with the New Year.

From bad to worse

Starting in January, premiums for too many people are going to leap skyward without the subsidies, jumping by an average of $1,016 according to the health policy research group KFF.

That’s bad enough. But Trump would like to make it worse.

The Affordable Care Act is about much more than those subsidies. Before it took effect in 2014, insurance companies in many states could deny coverage for preexisting conditions. This didn’t have to be big-ticket stuff like cancer. A kid with asthma? A mom with colitis? Those were the kind of routine but chronic problems that prevented millions from obtaining insurance — and therefore care.

Obamacare required that policies sold on its exchange did not discriminate. In addition, the ACA required plans to limit out-of-pocket costs and end lifetime dollar caps, and provide a baseline of coverage that included essentials such as maternity care. Those standards put pressure on all plans to include more, even those offered through large employers.

Trump would like to undo much of that. He instead wants to fall back on the stunt he loves the most — send a check!

What he is suggesting by sending subsidy money directly to consumers also most likely would open the market to plans without the regulation of the ACA. So yes, small businesses or even groups of individuals might be able to band together to buy insurance, but there likely would be fewer rules about what — or whom — it has to cover.

Most people aren’t savvy or careful enough to understand the limitations of their insurance before it matters. So it has a $2-million lifetime cap? That sounds like a lot until your kid needs a treatment that eats through that in a couple of months. Then what?

Trump suggested people pay for it themselves, out of health savings accounts funded by that subsidy check sent directly to taxpayers. Because that definitely will work, and people won’t spend the money on groceries or rent, and what they do save certainly will cover any medical expenses.

“You’ll get much better health care at a much lower price,” Trump claimed Wednesday. “The only losers will be insurance companies that have gotten rich, and the Democrat Party, which is totally controlled by those same insurance companies. They will not be happy, but that’s OK with me because you, the people, are finally going to be getting great health care at a lower cost.”

He then bizarrely tried to blame the expiring subsidies on Democrats.

Lower costs, quality

Democrats “are demanding those increases and it’s their fault,” he said. “It is not the Republicans’ fault. It’s the Democrats’ fault. It’s the Unaffordable Care Act, and everybody knew it.”

It seems like Trump just wants to lower costs at the expense of quality. Here’s where I take issue with the Democrats. I am not here to defend insurance companies or our health care system. Both clearly need reform.

But why are the Democrats failing to explain what “The money should go to the people” will mean?

I get that affordability is the message, and as someone who bought both a steak and a carton of milk this week, I understand just how powerful that issue is.

Still, everyone, Democrat or Republican, wants decent health care they can afford, and the peace of mind of knowing if something terrible happens, they will have access to help. There is no American who gladly would pay for insurance each month, no matter how low the premium, that is going to leave them without care when they or their loved ones need it most.

Grandpa Trump doesn’t have this worry, since he has the best health care our tax dollars can buy.

But when he promises to send a check instead of providing governance and regulation of one of the most critical purchases in our lives, the message is sickening: My victory in exchange for your well-being.

Anita Chabria is a Los Angeles Times columnist. ©2025 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

PACE stands for Program of All Inclusive Care for the Elderly, and it is an effective option to support older adults whose goal is to safely age in their own homes. As a physician focused on the field of geriatric medicine (a specialty focused on caring for older adults), I believe in the power of PACE. Unfortunately, it remains one of the most underutilized resources in our long-term care system. Although there are several reasons for this, there also exist several attainable solutions.

Each PACE program is community-based and provides wraparound medical and social services. The goal is simple but powerful: help seniors age with dignity and independence while remaining in their communities as long as possible and simultaneously reducing hospitalizations.

Its comprehensive services range from primary care, physical therapy, social work and dental, to transportation, meals, home care and day center activities.

Some might think PACE seems too good to be true, that it must be available only to those with ample resources. Well, good news! PACE is funded through Medicare and Medi-Cal, making it a feasible option for a wide range of people. Participants qualify for PACE enrollment if they are 55 or older, live within a PACE program’s service area and need nursing-home-level care.

PACE sounds nice, but does it actually work? A 2021 study by CalPACE, the state’s PACE advocacy association, found that PACE participants were hospitalized 44% less often than similar non-PACE individuals and had 26% less emergency room usage. Additionally, 98% of PACE participants continued to live in the community, and participants overall experienced lower rates of depression, better medication adherence, and higher satisfaction with care.

PACE isn’t just the right thing to do for seniors; it’s smart public policy. With Medi-Cal costs rising and nursing home capacity strained, PACE relieves stress on the elder care system and budget. For example, PACE enrollment saved California taxpayers $369.4 million in 2024 alone.

Why then are only about 10% of eligible older adults enrolled in PACE?

Unfortunately, PACE remains limited by geography, infrastructure and awareness. Thus far PACE serves less than half of California counties. And starting a PACE program requires significant upfront investment and navigating complex state and federal licensing processes.

Even where programs do exist, many eligible seniors, caregivers and healthcare providers don’t know about them. To improve access and use, we should consider focusing state-level funding to help new PACE programs launch — especially in underserved areas — and on streamlining the approval process for PACE centers and investing in outreach to families, caregivers and healthcare professionals.

With nearly one in four Californians projected to be over age 60 by 2030, it’s time to take action and invest in more effective and compassionate care models.

Models like PACE hold out hope for a future where every older adult can age with the support, grace and respect they deserve.

Janice Grandi is a primary care physician working in geriatrics. Her commentary originally appeared in CalMatters.

Something about late November into December nudges us toward reflection. Whatever you call it — holiday spirit, cultural memory, or just a pause in the chaos — it’s real. And in a country this divided, it might be the reminder we need most.

Because the truth is simple: America has never thrived by choosing one ideology over another. It has thrived because our competing visions push, restrain, and refine each other. We forget that at our own risk.

I grew up in a time when political conversations were part of life, not a reason to exile someone from it. You could disagree without severing the relationship. The center wasn’t seen as a weakness. It was maturity — the space where people with different temperaments and values tried to make something workable.

Today, we act as if our country must pick a single path and purge the rest. But that’s not how the United States was designed. It wasn’t intended as a pure libertarian project or a pure social democracy. It’s a deliberate blend — a push-and-pull system with enough room for Hamilton’s national strength, Jefferson’s local skepticism, Roosevelt’s compassion, and Reagan’s correction.

The very friction we complain about is the mechanism that keeps us balanced.

And you can even see that balance in our books. Wealthier, urban, blue-leaning states indeed tend to generate more federal revenue than they receive. But those same states depend just as heavily on the energy, agriculture, manufacturing, and natural resources that come from the rural, older, red-leaning states that receive more federal spending.

That’s not ideology — that’s geography, demographics, and economic interdependence. Neither side is self-sufficient, and neither thrives without the other. The numbers simply reveal how tightly woven the country really is.

Some Americans daydream about a national split — two countries, one red and one blue — each free to express pure ideology without interference. It’s a tempting fantasy until you follow the math. A “blue nation” might be wealthy on paper, but it would be burdened by the cost of living, bureaucracy, and a shortage of land-based industries. A “red nation” might feel culturally unified, but would immediately face fiscal strain, aging demographics, and the challenge of replacing the federal inflows that currently stabilize its budgets.

Cut the country in half ideologically, and each half becomes a weaker version of itself.

Together, they make the thing work.

This time of year has a way of softening the edges, even if only for a few weeks. It reminds us that the people who frustrate us most are often the same people we share a meal with, raise kids around, or bump into at the grocery store. We don’t disappear from each other in December. We draw a little closer, whether we like it or not. That closeness is a quiet lesson in what the country needs year-round.

The center isn’t a compromise of conviction. It’s the only place 330 million people with wildly different values can coexist without tearing the nation apart. It’s the adult table — the one where no single worldview gets everything it wants, but everybody gets enough stability to keep moving.

As this season unfolds, I find myself hoping we rediscover that center. We don’t have to agree on every policy or election. But we do need to stop pretending one side can run the country alone. America’s strength has always come from its opposites — from the tension between compassion and discipline, progress and caution, liberty and responsibility.

That tension isn’t a flaw. It’s the American design.

Maybe this quieter stretch of the year gives us the breathing room to remember it. And maybe that’s enough to soften the tone, steady the hand, and remind us that disagreement is not the end of the relationship — it’s the beginning of the conversation.

Joe Palaggi is a writer and historian. ©2025 The Fulcrum. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.