Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America. Please take a moment to click the ❤️ and restack this post. The oligarchs’ platforms are trying to keep stories like the ones below from hitting your feeds, and this helps us break through.
Trump’s personal physician must remain within three minutes of him at all times, according to a new report. The administration secretly funneled $86 million in teen pregnancy prevention money to a consulting firm linked to the president. Federal agents searching Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home reportedly violated a judge’s specific instructions and blocked her from calling a lawyer. And Trump mocked an anti-transgender WNBA player for being bad at basketball because she’s a girl.
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His heart is 14 years younger than he is, which would make it 66 and still too old for this.
Trump’s primary physician, Navy captain Sean Barbabella, or a backup colleague, must be within three minutes of the president at all times, according to The Wall Street Journal. White House staffers are regularly asked to step out when Barbabella and Trump speak.
Barbabella’s May 2026 health report said that AI-enhanced electrocardiogram analysis shows Trump’s cardiac age is about 14 years younger than his actual age. The military doctor said Trump was in excellent health and fit for duty, but advised him to reduce his aspirin intake, exercise more and change his diet.
Trump’s doctors have a long history of giving him suspiciously glowing health reports. His former personal doctor Harold Bornstein wrote in 2015 that Trump would be the healthiest person ever elected president, then told CNN three years later that Trump had dictated the full letter himself.
The president has also publicly rejected medical advice he doesn’t want to follow. At a rally in Ohio last week, he called his aspirin regimen a “monster” dose and said he told his doctors to leave him alone when they suggested he stop taking it.
To be fair, nobody who spends all day talking to AI is getting anyone pregnant.
The Trump administration secretly gave $86 million in teen pregnancy prevention funding to Guidehouse, a consulting company with no apparent experience in reproductive health, according to a legal filing reported by NPR. Three HHS officials have worked for the firm, including one senior official in the agency that awarded the contract on the last day of the fiscal year.
Guidehouse describes itself as an AI-led professional services firm owned by private equity giant Bain Capital. Nowhere on its website does it ever refer to teen pregnancy or reproductive health.
For more than a decade, the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program has been awarding about $100 million a year through a competitive public process to dozens of organizations around the country. The administration revoked all those grants in June, arguing they normalize sexual activity for minors.
Hennepin County, Minnesota, which lost its grant in June, has filed a legal challenge calling the award arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion. The first hearing is scheduled for Tuesday in U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
The agents didn’t read the warrant, which is ironic for an investigation about paperwork.
Federal agents who searched Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington, D.C., home last week did not provide a copy of the warrant to her lawyers or contact the House Office of General Counsel before entering as a U.S. magistrate judge had ordered. Omar’s attorneys say agents also blocked her from contacting legal counsel for more than an hour after the search started.
The restrictions were meant to protect Omar’s legislative work under the speech and debate clause of the Constitution. Her attorneys have demanded the immediate return of all property seized, including her cell phone and passport.
The investigation centers on decades-old immigration paperwork that Omar’s father filled out when she was a child. Career immigration officials reviewed the evidence during Trump’s first term in 2019 and determined there was not enough to warrant a full investigation.
Omar has labeled the investigation a politically motivated attack by an administration that has repeatedly gone after the president’s critics. Her legal team argued the search also violated the Justice Department’s longstanding policy of avoiding public investigative steps involving political candidates within 60 days of an election.
She went to bat for him and he told everyone she can’t hit.
Sophie Cunningham has been among the most prominent athletes backing Republican efforts to bar transgender women from competing in women’s sports. Last week, Trump told a rally crowd that the WNBA player is beautiful but bad at the sport because she’s a girl.
Trump told the crowd in Youngstown, Ohio that there are a lot of men who want to watch Cunningham. “You probably wouldn’t mind her on the team, not to help you with points, but to help you with attendance,” he said.
Cunningham told ESPN in July that she wants to “protect” women’s sports from transgender competitors, saying she would “never falter” in that belief. She was booed throughout a game against the Minnesota Lynx, where head coach Cheryl Reeve wore a shirt reading “Trans kids belong.”
Trump has signed two executive orders banning transgender women from competing in women’s sports. Elon Musk’s super PAC has spent over $100 million on anti-trans advertising this midterm cycle, despite the Human Rights Campaign finding in 2024 that only 4 percent of voters said the issue motivated their vote.
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** Farmers Who Voted for Trump Three Times Are Refusing to Support Republicans.** More farmers are turning away from Trump as diesel prices, fertilizer costs, and farm bankruptcies skyrocket across rural America, ABC News reports. Scott Thomsen, a fourth-generation Nebraska farmer who has voted for Trump three times, says the conflict with Iran has driven up costs as much as 40 percent and he won’t support the administration again. An AP-KFF poll found 57 percent of rural voters disapprove of Trump’s economic handling, and Republicans are in competitive Senate races in states like Nebraska that Trump won by more than 20 points in 2024.
Senators Demand Todd Blanche Confirm the DOJ Will Not Seize Midterm Ballots. Senators Alex Padilla, Dick Durbin, and Sheldon Whitehouse sent a letter demanding that Attorney General Todd Blanche publicly promise that the Justice Department will not seize ballots or election materials during the midterms. The letter said the department has been sending mixed signals, including filing a lawsuit on the same day against California to prevent it from counting ballots from over 20,000 voters. Earlier this year, the FBI seized ballots from Fulton County, Georgia and issued a subpoena for ballots from Maricopa County, Arizona. In September, Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, sent a separate letter to FBI Director Kash Patel and Blanche asking whether the DOJ intended to send armed federal agents to polling places on Election Day.
Nebraska Supreme Court Upholds Voting Rights for U.S. Citizens Living Abroad. The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled 6-1 to uphold a lower court’s ruling in August that supported a state law allowing eligible U.S. citizens who live abroad to vote. It’s yet another loss for the Republican National Committee, which has filed lawsuits in at least eight states against overseas voters. The RNC’s own lawyer admitted in court that the provision impacts just a few dozen people and only six voters cast ballots under it in the 2026 primary. Some Republicans have admitted in court filings that they’re challenging overseas voting because they believe those voters tend to support Democrats.
School District Bans AI Across All Grades Weeks After Rolling Out Google Gemini. The school board in Frederick County, Maryland voted 6-1 to ban AI use in the classroom from pre-K through 12th grade, just weeks after rolling out Google Gemini for older students. Board members expressed concern that Gemini was introduced without warning to parents, and that AI tools have been used to generate inappropriate images of students and to offer damaging mental health advice. Last month, New York City’s school system banned AI for elementary and middle school students, and the Los Angeles school district has also restricted access. Several Frederick County educators have gone back to paper-and-pencil assignments because they no longer trust that students are completing their own work.