What did Donald Trump do today?

He admitted screwing over scientists from blue states out of revenge but said that wasn't "political."

Among the casualties of Trump's assault on federal science programs last year were 624 grants from the Department of Energy that were marked for cancellation. 284 of them were, in fact, canceled. Of those, 283 of them were from states that "had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators.” That language comes from Jeff Novak, a DoE lawyer, in a recent court filing.

In other words, the Trump administration has admitted in open court that it deliberately canceled grants on research into improved energy technologies based on whether or not the recipients were in a blue state.  

But in a comment today, Trump's Department of Energy insisted that refusing all grants from states that didn't give Trump their electoral votes somehow wasn't a political decision: "None of the termination decisions were based on political considerations."

This is just the latest in a string of episodes where Trump has openly punished the states that voted for his opponents—which, collectively, represent more than half of the nation's population and tens of millions of his own supporters. He's all but stopped signing disaster declarations in blue states, and he's trying to shut off Medicaid funding to two blue states whose governors he particularly hates. 

It's not new behavior: at the height of the COVID outbreak in 2020, he threatened to hold off on supplying urgently needed medical equipment unless blue-state governors like "the woman in Michigan" (Gov. Gretchen Whitmer) until they were appropriately "appreciative" of him in public. 

The Trump administration is currently finalizing an administrative rule that would purport to give him the power to cancel any grant that didn't "demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities"—essentially giving Trump a personal veto over any scientific or academic research that he didn't like, regardless of what Americans' representatives in Congress had specified in appropriations bills for that funding.

Why does this matter?

• Punishing the citizens you think of as your enemies is what dictators do.   

• Americans deserve a president who isn't constantly looking to screw over the places where more than half of them live.