Thursday morning traffic: Closures along Highways 1, 9, 152
This post is updated throughout the day to reflect the latest incidents. It was last updated at 8:01 a.m.
Here’s what’s happening on Santa Cruz County roads this morning…
▼︎ new incidents ▼︎ long-term incidents
Road incidents as of 8 a.m. on June 11- A 5-foot-wide Comcast communication line fell and blocked both lanes of the road at 1500 Smith Grade in Bonny Doon. The road was completely closed, and fire and utility crews responded. The incident was reported yesterday.
- South Highway 1 is facing closures at Park Avenue in Capitola because of road excavation work. The closure is expected to last until Aug. 19.
- Highway 9 at Cascade Avenue in Brookdale has one-way traffic due to ongoing work. This closure is expected to last until Aug. 31.
- There will be alternating lane closures on Highway 9 at Pool Drive in Boulder Creek because of bridge work. This is scheduled to continue until April 30, 2027.
- A lane on westbound Highway 152 at Clifford Drive/Ohlone Parkway in Watsonville is closed for asphalt paving. The closure is expected to last until July 3.
- Lompico Road at 12320 in Felton will be closed to vehicles today during work hours from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 3 p.m. while MGE Underground replaces a crossarm and cutouts.
- The California Highway Patrol helped with construction work at the intersection of Highway 9 and Highway 236 in Boulder Creek today.
These have been going on for a while, but are still worth keeping in mind.
- River Road at 618 River Rd. in Boulder Creek will be closed to vehicles on June 11 from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 3 p.m. while crews repair a connector and replace a broken crossarm.
- Thurber Lane near 4672 Thurber Lane in Santa Cruz will be fully closed from June 8-12 during work hours (8:30 a.m.-4 p.m.) for tree trimming and vegetation management by county crews.
- Single lane closures are in place on Soquel Drive between Huntington Drive and Jaunell Road in Aptos from today through June 12, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. while county crews do overhead tree trimming.
Disclosure: Traffic incidents are partially generated by artificial intelligence. We are constantly working to improve the accuracy and quality of our AI-generated content. However, there may still be errors or inaccuracies. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.
The post Thursday morning traffic: Closures along Highways 1, 9, 152 appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
Trump Is “Going to Blow” Up Over Pushback Against New Intel Chief
The White House is corroding from the inside.
The president is reportedly “pissed” and “increasingly frustrated with everyone” surrounding him—though the drama seems to be a mess of his own creation.
The pressing issue started last week, when Donald Trump suddenly appointed Bill Pulte—a real estate developer serving as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency—to run U.S. national intelligence in place of the outbound Tulsi Gabbard.
Democrats and some Republicans on the Hill immediately opposed Pulte’s appointment and were quick to point out that the PulteGroup heir would come to the job with zero national security experience, a direct violation of the law, which specifically requires a director of national intelligence to have “extensive” national security experience.
Lawmakers have accused Trump of nominating Pulte for his own personal benefit: “The apparent motivation for his elevation is the demonstrated willingness of Bill Pulte to search government databases for alleged dirt on President Trump’s chosen political enemies,” House Democratic leadership wrote in a statement Thursday.
At risk thanks to Pulte’s nomination is the imminent expiration of FISA Section 702, a statute that allows federal agencies such as the NSA and the CIA to surveil people without warrants. That statute is slated to expire Friday, but Democratic leadership has indicated it won’t vote to renew it “without meaningful reforms,” emphasizing Pulte’s recent promotion in its demands.
Senate Republicans expected Trump to find an off-ramp on the matter—House Speaker Mike Johnson even visited the White House Tuesday to discuss it. But they were wrong.
Trump was irate with “everyone, from his own team to the Senate,” a MAGA-world operative close to the White House told Politico Thursday, highlighting Senate Republicans’ opposition to Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom, his $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, and the general disregard for Trump’s desire to fire Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough after she identified procedural problems in the SAVE Act.
“He’s pissed, and people are not recognizing the level of pissed that he is,” the operative added. “He does not like being put in a box. When you put him in a box, then Trump’s going to blow the box up.”
The message was received loud and clear. One senior GOP staffer described Trump’s recent moves to Politico as “a middle finger to Congress.”
Trump is also furious that his preferred candidate for Iowa governor, Representative Randy Feenstra, lost his primary last week. “He’s really angry about this Iowa endorsement—like really, really angry,” a White House ally told Politico. “He’s really angry that his consultants and people pushed him to do that.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene says Epstein cover-up ‘comes from the top’
In the wake of new reports detailing behind-the-scenes efforts by the White House to public outrage over the Epstein files, former MAGA acolyte Marjorie Taylor Greene was asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for her reaction. According to excerpts from New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s forthcoming book, Vice President JD Vance suggested that right-wing broadcaster Tucker…
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CBS Hit With Fresh Scandal Over Ousted 60 Minutes Correspondent
60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia Vega was fired while she was in the midst of a feature on Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories—perhaps the most prominent institutional voice against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
“Cecilia Vega and her team were indeed working on a report for CBS examining the impact of the U.S. sanctions on my work and personal life, including developments in the U.S. courts,” Albanese wrote on X Thursday morning, confirming reporting from Zeteo. “I am sorry they were punished.”
Vega was fired by CBS head Bari Weiss at the end of May, along with Sharyn Alfonsi—who lambasted Weiss’s decision to push back her report on the notoriously inhumane CECOT megaprison in El Salvador—executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.
The timing of Vega’s firing is extremely questionable given that Weiss and CBS owner David Ellison are staunch Zionists aligned with the Trump administration. Albanese has been sanctioned by the United States, has had multiple European countries call for her resignation, and has faced a wave of personal attacks online for her Palestinian advocacy.
FIFA Peace Prize Recipient Vows to Hit Iran ‘VERY HARD’ on First Night of World Cup
On Thursday, President Donald Trump said that the US would strike Iran “VERY HARD TONIGHT,” in a bid to “assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets.”
Trump made the statement in a Truth Social post, comparing the effort to the US military kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January and taking over the country’s multi-billion-dollar oil industry.
The possible strikes come on the same day as the first two World Cup matches, the global soccer tournament organized by FIFA, a corrupt governing body, whose president awarded Trump the FIFA Peace Prize for his “unwavering commitment to advancing peace and unity.” Among the achievements FIFA cited: playing “a pivotal role” in establishing a ceasefire and promoting peace between Israel and Palestine.”
View this post on InstagramAs I wrote in May, Trump has used his supposed success in Venezuela as fuel for subsequent takeovers attempts of Iran and Cuba. If he sees his legacy on the line—with both his and Israel’s war in Iran and the World Cup—the possible consequences look dire.
According to data from Iran’s government ministries, nearly 3,500 people have been killed since February 28, and, per a Wednesday report from the New York Times, the US military may have already hit two water facilities serving thousands of people in Iran (which many international law experts label as a war crime).
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Trump Gives Pathetic Justification for Claim About Loving Inflation
President Donald Trump’s attempt to explain his sudden “love” for high inflation just made things so much worse.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office Wednesday, Trump brushed off a bleak inflation report finding that America’s annual inflation rate had reached its highest levels in three years.
“The numbers were great. You know what I really love? I love the inflation,” Trump said.
Speaking on the phone with the New York Post later that day, Trump claimed he’d been taken out of context. “I love the inflation numbers because of what I’m talking about,” he said.
“The numbers are going to be phenomenal because what’s showing is that despite the fact that we’re in a war, the numbers are much lower than anticipated, and when we’re out of that war, the numbers will be at lower numbers than they were even before it started,” Trump claimed.
Inflation is not any lower than anticipated. Last month, a group of economists surveyed by Bloomberg estimated the consumer price index would rise to 3.9 percent. The Organization for Economic Cooperation raised its prediction up from 3 to 4.2 percent. Per Wednesday’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report, the current inflation rate is 4.2 percent.
Still, Trump attempted to repackage the fastest-growing inflation in three years as better than it could’ve been and a sign of good things to come. That’s not good enough for Americans who are struggling to pay for gas, rent, and groceries because of a reckless war with no end in sight.
Trump also dismissed Democrats who’d criticized his gushing over high inflation.
“They’re so bad,” Trump said. “I was talking about inflation numbers that will be so good as soon as the war ends. The numbers will come way down, that’s what I’m talking about.
“I’m always taken out of context,” the president continued. “My inflation numbers will be very low as soon as the war—they’re already very low, but they’ll be very low, because you know the energy brings them up a little bit, because we have to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon.”
Of course, that doesn’t even begin to qualify as being taken out of context. It was Trump who elided the actual context of the question: the current inflation rate. Not future numbers, or predictions, but the painful reality that Americans are literally paying the price for Trump’s wildly unpopular war. Was he concerned? No, he was delighted.
If anything, the president’s baffling remarks have handed Democrats a winning message for the midterm elections: Trump loves inflation, and thinks that anyone whose struggle to make ends meet should thank him that things aren’t worse.
How Gordon S. Wood Shaped the Idea of America
He never expected to become famous and certainly never admitted to wanting to be famous. He’d studied men like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, who had sought fame and described its strange, arbitrary workings. But by the time Matt Damon name-checked Gordon S. Wood on “the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization” in Good Will Hunting, Wood had long since become a lightning rod for his fellow historians and the much greater number of others who drafted the American Revolution into the culture wars.
The Brown University professor chuckled about that scene in the film, a story of a working-class Bostonian who mocks a Harvard graduate student as likely to take Wood’s interpretations as gospel only to drop them the very next year. After all, as a Harvard Ph.D. from working-class Concord, Massachusetts, Gordon Wood had been both of these types and more, while keeping a professorial distance from all. No one could say whether, when he repeated the story of how former House Speaker Newt Gingrich handed out copies of his Radicalism of the American Revolution to new members of the Republican caucus, he had been bragging, trolling, or just reading the room.
The prolific historian of early America burst onto the scene 60 years ago with an essay in the field’s flagship journal titled “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution.” Two schools of interpretation had been battling for some time: “neo-whigs,” who saw the patriots as motivated by “constitutional principles,” versus “progressives,” who saw them as motivated by profound socioeconomic change, for all their rhetoric about liberties. Wood, who had been reading up on social theory, brilliantly arbitrated that debate, maintaining that declining opportunities inspired men to fear what changing imperial politics could do to them and their status as provincial Britons. The Revolution had been conservative in its impulses, even if it had unanticipated radical results. Historians needed a “behaviorist” approach that saw revolutionary rhetoric as “psychological” reality.
Wood discovered a remarkable knack for explaining how ideas could be new and old, innovative and conservative, at the same time.In his own way, Wood opened up the understanding of the Revolution to feelings as well as thoughts, to ideology as well as theory. Meanwhile, he was revising his Harvard doctoral thesis, which became The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. Published in 1969, this pointillist, essayistic yet comprehensive study tracked how understandings of political structure, including the very idea of constitutions, changed under the pressure of revolutionary war and the formation of state governments. An American revision of classical and seventeenth-century English republicanism informed the fledgling republics. In 1787, experience moderated the democratic spirit of ’76. Wood discovered a remarkable knack for explaining how ideas could be new and old, innovative and conservative, at the same time—and how creative political thinking advanced best under the sometimes self-deceiving cover of restoration.
Out of irrationality could come a higher rationality, though not without ironic results. For example, John Adams’s tough-minded insistence that constitutional structures had to reflect the existence of social classes, including aristocrats and plebes, in order to balance them, made him “irrelevant” when enough Americans agreed to disagree, or at least to stop talking about, whether such classes did or should exist.
Wood exaggerated Adams’s unpopularity, but in doing so drove home the sobering point that American republicanism, tending toward Herrenvolk democracy, would have a lot of trouble dealing with the relationship between economic inequality and political power. The course of the 1780s led toward a Madisonian “science of politics” that saved the nation from revolutionary excess yet sought to bury rather than reflect or address economic conflict in its schemes of federalism and representation, creating an American political tradition that couldn’t deal honestly with class or money.
With this flourish, the 35-year old assistant professor performed an acclaimed scholarly triple axel, fashioning a learned interpretation of American origins that seemed to have something for everyone, which was no easier in 1969 than today. At great length and sophistication, he’d offered something to those inclined to celebrate the Constitution, something to those who criticized it, and much to those looking for some way between. The republic, simply put, was moderate yet innovative, advanced and yet caught up in self-deception. Some of the founders were brilliant, yes, but maybe only slightly more so than Gordon S. Wood, who figured out what they knew, what they did, and what they had barely perceived.
Some of the founders were brilliant, yes, but maybe only slightly more so than Gordon S. Wood, who figured out what they knew, what they did, and what they had barely perceived.
Wood caught and rode a wave of sophistication about the workings of ideology. In his hands, disembodied “thought” became culture and politics and made history. One could see it happening in obscure and popular pamphlets, in the plays and newspapers, and in the letters of politicians of the late eighteenth century. Tracing ideological struggle was heady stuff, and the late 1960s and 1970s came to represent something of a golden age for American historians, especially intellectual historians who could claim to explain the motives and worldviews informing critical events. Wood continued to endear himself to scholars with essays that plumbed how understandings of conspiracy and “interests” and “disinterestedness” shaped the debate over the ratification of the Constitution. These turned out to be brilliant middle chapters of his 1991 Pulitzer-winning triptych, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, a work that expanded his interpretation of the emergent American ethos chronologically while keeping republicanism and its tribulations at the center.
“Monarchy” characterized a late colonial era that believed in hierarchy. Social changes undermined those hierarchies in a radically reformative cultural process—“republicanism”— that informed the break from England. Meanwhile, the rise of capitalism further undermined social structures that had never really take strong hold in colonies with more available land and less inherited wealth. Work came to be valued more than lineage; representation in formal, legislative politics mattered more with kings and their appointed governors thrown out. All this dwarfed putative differences between north and south, east and west. The result: The early republic was a society in which democracy and capitalism arose and reinforced each other, much to the disappointment of more rigorously republican politicians who had seen themselves as disinterested men of virtue.
To many readers, Wood had seemingly accounted, in beautiful, measured prose, for both what was radical about the Revolution and why many revolutionaries proceeded to fight for more—or less—of it. One could read Wood as a critic of emergent democracy or even, on the other hand, of capitalism.
Yet as Alfred F. Young, a careful critic, wrote at the time, Wood had not so much distilled the radicalism of the Revolution as magnified it to encompass all of early American history. That sheer interpretative ambition turned out to be an Achilles’ heel. War and violence dissolved in Wood’s egalitarian upsurge. So did settler colonialism and slavery. In the introduction, Wood insisted that it didn’t matter whether political revolution caused or just reflected the social or cultural revolution, and that because it didn’t matter, we should simply credit the radicalism of the revolution for “the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking.” This “in fact” made for strange rhetorical alchemy as he continued to stress how exceedingly different late–eighteenth century people were from later Americans.
By the new century, Wood had already begun to complain publicly about a tendency to judge eighteenth-century Americans by what he deemed “presentist” standards. A tense divide over his sometimes enigmatic work and persona ensued, especially among liberals and leftists. Wood’s tendency to lump all Americans together greatly irked a generation of social historians who made regional, class, and urban-rural differences their bread and butter and who worried much less than he did about how to pull American diversity and conflict, not to mention imperial reach, into a common national story. (In a tone-perfect illustration of Wood’s changing reputation among academics, in the 1997 film, Will Hunting first baits the graduate student with the above précis of Wood on radicalism, only to interrupt his predictable response: the regurgitation of a social historian’s comment on how Wood “drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth.”)
Worse, there were very few women, Black people, or Indians in his expansive, transformative, century-long radical revolution. How radical could that be, then? Yet Wood stuck to his guns, even doubling down. It remained “anachronistic” to ask why the patriots didn’t end slavery even as they complained about their political enslavement. Slavery was never questioned until the revolutionaries began to question it, he argued. Those folks simply weren’t part of the American conversation then: The founders didn’t think or talk about them, didn’t consider them as a subject of politics. This explanation held less water when his own definition of revolutionary politics had expanded to include almost everything else besides race and sex.
Wood laid a foundation for a distinctive, genteel kind of “founders” history: one that keeps a quiet distance from uncritical flag-waving by emphasizing at every turn how different the eighteenth century was, still while insisting that everything good about the United States emanated from the founding, even if ironically and unintentionally. Too aware to ignore the threat that alternative histories posed to his mountain of scholarship, he slammed those that bid to take down founder worship, to add other groups to the pantheon of founders, or to dwell on the inegalitarian aspects of what the founders created. He issued a few occasional mild dissents against ahistorical constitutional originalism, but punched left a lot harder and more often than he punched right.
In books like Empire of Liberty, his 2009 entry in the Oxford History of the United States series, and his career-summing Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution (2021), Wood foregrounded the most optimistic and forward-looking revolutionaries, like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, whose understanding of the Revolution as a transformative event in world history seemed to prove his case. His admiration for “the revolutionary generation”—which had once been a minor, more implicit theme in his scholarship, mitigated by the vast distance he discerned between their world and ours—swelled when he confronted those who identified strongly against a past construed as backwards and racist. Republishing the many review essays he wrote for venues like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, he added afterwords that cast further aspersions on historians who forwarded their “preoccupation” with race, class, and gender, or failed to preserve the requisite balance and appreciation for the Revolution, where Americans go “to refresh and reaffirm our nationhood.”
Like a number of our best historians—and politicians—he insisted we hang on, for dear national life, to the rhetoric.Yet after the brouhaha over The 1619 Project, in which he participated as an often-quoted critic, Wood good-naturedly admitted just how much that controversy demonstrated what had been missing from the histories his generation had written.
Americans remain stuck with a revolution we rightly perceive as both radical and conservative. For all his insistence on our revolution’s beneficence and singularity, Gordon Wood helped us see that revolutions are as confusing and contradictory as they are compelling in retrospect and prospect. Their true measure is the never-ending debate over how and whether they remade reality—or just rhetoric. Like a number of our best historians—and politicians—he insisted we hang on, for dear national life, to the rhetoric. “To be an American is not to be someone but to believe in something. And of that something most important is the belief that all men are created equal,” he wrote in a 2019 essay. As it was natural for him to suspect the Revolution’s critics, it’s somewhat tragic that his appreciation of revolutionary minds grappling with possibility could be appropriated for causes he did not fully endorse. No doubt, he appreciated the irony.
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Looks like Sean Duffy isn’t the only unqualified hack in the family
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s 26-year-old son-in-law, Michael Alfonso, wants to get into politics just like his dear old father-in-law did. No, not by merit and hard work, silly: by parlaying a vaguely influencerish hard-right background into elected office. And Duffy is going all out to help make that happen. Alfonso has never held a political office of any sort…
States Are Ditching Trump’s “Great American State Fair”
President Trump’s Freedom 250 birthday extravaganza is looking so bleak that entire states are pulling out.
NOTUS has reported that Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, and North Carolina—the last of which Trump won in 2024—have all declined to send a representative to the president’s 16-day fair on the National Mall. Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Washington remain undecided even as the fair begins just two weeks from now.
Each state is supposed to have a 600-square-foot themed booth with a representative or official sent by state leadership. With these states declining to send one, the administration has decided to pick their own. Multiple states said they had no knowledge as to who was chosen to represent their homes or why.
Other states noted the hefty price attached to the event. Michele Walker, the comms director of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, told NOTUS her state would have to spend a minimum of $100,000 on travel, hotels, and their themed booth all together.
“We decided early in the process that we do not have the capacity to participate,” Walker said. “Our limited resources are focused on America250 events across North Carolina.”
This news comes just a week after nearly all of the first wave of musical performers—from Young MC to the Commodores—dropped out as well. This lack of enthusiasm only reaffirms that this “Freedom 250” event, unlike the educational America250 commission, is just a birthday party for Trump.
Trump Threatens Ground Invasion of Iran as He Demands Total Submission
President Trump is threatening a ground invasion of Iran.
On Truth Social Thursday morning, Trump posted that the U.S. military “will be hitting Iran (Whose Navy, Air Force, Radar, Anti Aircraft, and all other forms of Defense, together with most of its offensive capability, are GONE!), VERY HARD TONIGHT.
“At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States of America. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” the post read.
Trump’s threats are an alarming escalation, especially considering he previously claimed the U.S. and Iran are close to a deal to end the war. Publicly announcing plans for such an attack also carries risks, as it puts U.S. troops in harm’s way and gives Iran time to prepare countermeasures. Trump could also be bluffing, thinking that the specter of a ground invasion of Iranian territory will force concessions.
That seems to be in line with what he told Fox & Friends Thursday morning. Trump was asked about the post, and complained about media coverage of Iran, claiming the country has been decimated but that news outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal say that it’s doing well.
“They’re dying to make a deal. They want to make a deal so badly,” Trump said. “We dropped $250 million of bombs on them last night, the whole thing is crazy. And they’re really in submission, they just don’t know it yet.”
Trump on Fox & Friends: "They're dying to make a deal. They want to make a deal so badly. We dropped $250 million of bombs on them last night. They're really in submission. They just don't know it yet." pic.twitter.com/XKW5CGc1CU
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2026Trump’s daily accounts of the war with Iran are increasingly incoherent, and it’s tough to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Anything could happen Thursday night, and in the meantime, the world will be watching with uncertainty as a man with visible cognitive decline has his finger on the trigger.
63 years ago: The University of Alabama was desegregated
Nine years after the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education decision that struck down segregation, Black students Vivian Malone and James A. Hood, flanked by federalized Alabama National Guard troops, confronted racist Gov. George Wallace and entered the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and registered for classes. Wallace, who ran an openly racist campaign that included…
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Democrat Immediately Shuts Down Trump’s Secret Iran Oil Mission Claims
President Donald Trump’s bizarre claim to have secretly moved more than 100 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz just got shut down by the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
Trump announced Wednesday that he’d directed the military to conduct a “secret mission” to support the flow of energy through the essential trade passageway—as he struggled to justify the U.S. economy reaching its highest annual inflation rate in three years.
Speaking on CNN that night, Connecticut Representative Jim Himes, who serves as ranking member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, dismissed the president’s claim.
“A lot of that is just flat-out untrue,” Himes said.
CNN: What do you know about what he's saying that Iran didn't until right now didn’t know that we're taking millions of barrels of oil. And this 100 million barrels that Trump says he's actually helped get through the strait.
Himes: A lot of that is just flat out untrue. Let's… pic.twitter.com/IamnOmqSfB
“And remember the record here, right. This war was going to be over in a couple of days. For the last three months the Iranians have been two or three days, or maybe a week or two weeks away from striking a deal,” Himes said. “So, let’s just agree that the president has precisely zero credibility on anything that he says about the Iran war.
“But look, you don’t need to be an intelligence expert to understand that in the Strait of Hormuz, you’re not moving anything in secret. With a good pair of binoculars on either coast you can see what’s happening.”
Himes isn’t the only one calling B.S. on the president’s claims: Energy Secretary Chris Wright appeared not to have a clue what Trump was talking about, either.
When asked about the 100 million barrels of oil during a House committee hearing Wednesday, Wright appeared confused and said he was “unaware” of the operation.
“I do not think the president is lying, I think the president is talking casually about our efforts to stop the flow of Iranian oil,” Wright claimed, though Trump was clearly talking about oil that had made it out of the strait, not oil that had been blocked.
Trump, 79, Hits Worrying Milestone at Latest Medical Check-Up
Donald Trump’s health has hit a new milestone.
The president’s latest examination at Walter Reed Medical Center on May 26 reportedly involved 22 specialists, reported The Washington Post. That puts Trump at a dozen specialists beyond the previous record held by George W. Bush, who once saw 10 specialists in one go.
The White House has not elaborated on exactly why Trump needed so many doctors. Trump officials told the Post that the unconventionally large medical team allowed for a “complete and preventive evaluation” of the president. White House physician Sean Barbabella commented that the assessment found Trump in “excellent health.”
“The involvement of multiple specialists reflects a comprehensive, multidisciplinary evaluation consistent with best practices for executive-level medical care,” the White House said in a statement.
Nonetheless, the figure has contributed to yet more intrigue about Trump’s health as he nears his 80th birthday.
“It is an extraordinary number,” Jonathan Reiner, a longtime cardiologist for former Vice President Dick Cheney, told the Post. “What specialties do they represent? Why so many?”
Trump is the second-oldest man to ever serve as America’s commander in chief, and his increasingly erratic behavior has sparked global concern in recent weeks about his stability and judgment. The 79-year-old has spent hours at Walter Reed Medical Center on multiple occasions over the last nine months, fallen asleep during more than a dozen critical meetings, seemed lost and disoriented around foreign heads of state, frequently slurred his speech, and appeared with discolored and bruised skin on several occasions.
His behavior has also grown increasingly erratic, as he has thrown cheap and petty insults at members of the press, challenged long-standing U.S. alliances, and even taken jabs at the pope.
The American public is apparently wising up to Trump’s age: A Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll released last month found that 59 percent of Americans do not believe that Trump has the mental acuity to lead the country.
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We Need to Talk About Black Women and Uterine Cancer
I grew up in a household of women who didn’t talk much about their reproductive health. Period talks were reserved for hushed tones, always behind closed doors. But over the years, stories began to emerge: A relative clocking into work despite her stomach being so swollen with fibroids she appeared pregnant; a childhood friend excelling in school while doctors dismissed her chronic pain and missing periods as “anxiety”; a family member’s miscarriage garnering little sympathy from nurses.
Black women have long been forced to grin and bear reproductive pain until it becomes unbearable—just like the data has been telling us: By age 50, 90 percent of Black people with uteruses in the United States report having fibroids and often have severe symptoms like anemia and intense pain. Black women are not only more likely to have uterine cancer, but twice as likely to die from it than non-Black women. Black women are also three to four times more likely to die in childbirth. It’s a crisis that transcends economic and education boundaries, with celebrities like Beyoncé and Serena Williams experiencing near-fatal pregnancy complications.
I spoke with Dr. Kemi Doll, author of the new book A Terrible Strength: The Hidden Crisis of the Black Womb and Your Survival Guide to Healing, about what Black women can do to educate ourselves about our reproductive health and how we can advocate for ourselves in our gyno offices and beyond.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
One of the main points you bring up is how breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and our ongoing maternal mortality crisis are reproductive issues that make headlines. But with uterine cancer, the disparity in Black women doesn’t receive that same attention from the public. Why is that?
I have a lot of ideas about this. Part of it is that all of us, the public included, are so used to not talking about “down there.” So we don’t. We eliminate that world in a woman’s life unless she’s pregnant, unless we can tie it to something like bringing life into this world. But then we see this [lack of care] played out on a larger scale, where you have this cancer disparity.
Uterine cancer is the worst cancer disparity that we have that affects women. We’re getting more cases every year. But the level of dialogue and awareness doesn’t match the gravity of the crisis. It’s an example of what I’m talking about: the power of silencing. It’s why I’m so passionate about talking about the womb in the realm beyond giving birth and beyond being pregnant, because we all spend most of our time not pregnant, and we all deal with these conditions every day. It’s beyond time to stop that silencing and suppression.
I think that it connects right back to how, when a girl has her first period, you teach her how to hide it. That a successful period is one that nobody knows is happening. That goes all the way up to a uterine cancer epidemic and a disparity among Black women that nobody knows is happening. Those things are connected.
Let’s talk about the misogynoir that Black women face: the expectation to be stoic, to be high achievers, and excellent. Can you talk about this and how that stereotype affects Black women and their reproductive health?
One hundred percent. I think we have to understand where we came from with this history. At the beginning of obstetrics and gynecology, physicians were giving insurance policies on enslaved Black women to say: This woman can reproduce. It was a field that was essentially looking at Black women’s bodies only through the lens of how well this body can reproduce.
After Emancipation, when Black bodies are no longer directly profitable, there is no interest in the continued health and well-being of that body. When this is the history of gynecology, these reproductive disparities make sense.
In this system, Black women’s wombs and our reproductive health are not a priority. What that means is that we have decades of research that haven’t focused on the conditions that most strongly affect Black women. It means that when we develop treatments, solutions, clinical protocols, and guidelines, we do not consider how they would impact or how they would work or not on Black women. That misogynoir is so deep, and it’s on so many levels that I understand the strength that Black women have to have. Your pain is not read. Your vulnerability is not legible. We literally can’t see it. So it means that Black women suffer in silence, and we call it endurance. I don’t think you tell the story of gynecology itself if you don’t tell the story of the suffering of the Black womb and this crisis.
“When a girl has her first period, you teach her how to hide it. That a successful period is one that nobody knows is happening. That goes all the way up to a uterine cancer epidemic and a disparity among Black women. “
One of my favorite aspects of the book was how you weaved in the more clinical and informative parts with the very human stories of Black women’s reproductive health. Can you talk about how you decided to add these women’s stories and what it was like interviewing them?
The Black tradition is a storytelling tradition. Ain’t nobody tell a story like Black people can tell a story. So, I’m harnessing all the tools in my toolbox to be able to communicate long-overdue information. I’ve recognized that there’s a huge gap to bridge between what my field of gynecology has done to Black women and the information that I need to impart.
I am a qualitative researcher, so I do interviews as part of my research work on the scientific side. I knew each of these women that I profiled. But what was really profound is that every time I left an interview session, I left with a completely different level of understanding because I asked them so specifically about their womb.
We have access to another layer of understanding each other, and Black women need each other in these times. We need bonds that are unshakable in these times. I felt like I learned about all of these women even more, and the respect and love for them that I had grown.
Let’s talk about that historical expectation of excellence and stoicism, and how it plays a role in the disproportionate rates of uterine cancer in Black women.
One of the reasons why all the women [profiled in the book] are so incredible and high-achieving is that it’s really important to change the face of what suffering looks like. I can tell you from the medicine side, we have a certain image in our head of what a woman in pain looks like. What does a woman suffering look like? And Black women don’t get to look like that. We can’t walk around with that kind of vulnerability.
When you can imagine the other things that are on a Black woman’s plate, and then when you imagine what the threshold is that we have to hit before we are really saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I need help,” we are unfortunately just managing and dealing with that symptom for months and years before being seen. What that means is that Black women are showing up with stage three and four cancers, when it’s not curable.
What are some early signs of uterine cancer that people should watch out for?
The cardinal sign is postmenopausal bleeding. The formal definition is that if it’s been 12 months since your last cycle and you are of menopausal age, and then you start bleeding again, that is the number one most common sign of uterine cancer. It’s usually not a full period; it’s a few little spots. It doesn’t mean you have cancer, just like a lump in your breast does not mean you have breast cancer, but it does mean you need to go get it checked out. Another thing that we see is that, especially in Black women who are more likely to have irregular cycles, [potential signs of uterine cancer] are heavier cycles as they get older, instead of lighter.
Number three is fatigue. This is where I start talking in the book about whether Black women even know when we have fatigue. Do we even know when we’re tired? Because, again, the way that we can endure. Another sign is pelvic pressure. Bleeding after sex, in your fifties and sixties, is another sign. We also don’t talk about that. We act like older women don’t get it in. Meanwhile, I am like, “Girl, I don’t care what you’re doing, but if you’re bleeding after sex, I need to see you.”
Even before Trump’s second term, little funding went into women’s reproductive health, with less than 8 percent of funding for the National Institutes of Health going toward women’s health research in 2023. This, paired with the cuts to reproductive health research on top of the DEI initiatives by our current administration, seems ominous.
It does concern me because we’re not just missing out on these years of research right now. We’re missing out on a compound of research discoveries. A study that was canceled today would have had some output in two years, four years, and five years, and then that would have led to more discoveries. All of those things down the line are now delayed by potentially decades. It’s really sad. On the other hand, there are those of us in this field who are not going anywhere. I’m still running my research lab. We’re still figuring out funding. We’re still getting creative. Our devotion is to Black women and the Black womb, and we are going to continue to use science to improve things, period.
Can you talk about the historical background and current medical racism that has led to this generational distrust of the medical system among Black women specifically?
How much time do you have? I tell a lot more stories to educate people about just how much mistreatment there had been in gynecology specific to Black women’s bodies, and this idea that Black women were more appropriate to experiment on than white women, and all these things, so I do think it’s important to educate. But I don’t think as a Black woman you need to know that history to know that when you walk into a doctor’s office, especially when it’s about the womb, that you are on guard. You are on guard for being dismissed, being neglected, because it is such a vulnerable position to be in when you are seeking care in that way, right? These are the intimate parts of ourselves that we often don’t talk to other people about. We have to tell stories that might be difficult, in all of these ways.
It’s so vulnerable, and yet you’re entering into a system that would happily just dismiss you, that you have probably been dismissed by, or you know somebody who has. Medical racism is very much alive. It’s with a great deal of responsibility and gravity that I say, Black women, you need to go to the gynecologist. I will tell you that as a gynecologic oncologist, as a cancer physician, I want you to live.