Conservatives Are Dying Faster Than Liberals, Study Proves

Trump's appeal of his sexual abuse ruling has been delayed 15 times, MAGA business owners are going bankrupt from tariffs, and Tennessee is reporting child hospital patients to immigration

Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

Trump’s appeal of a jury finding that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll has upended the Supreme Court’s schedule. MAGA business owners who backed his tariffs are now watching those tariffs destroy their businesses. Starting July 1, Tennessee will report undocumented kids in a lifesaving health program to immigration enforcement. And a new study finds conservatives are dying of internal causes at more than six times the rate of liberals.

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Now, let’s dive in.

SCOTUS Delayed Trump’s Sexual Abuse Appeal 15 Times

There is no faster way to make a problem disappear than to reschedule it roughly once a week for half a year.

That is what has happened to Donald Trump’s appeal of a federal jury’s finding that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll. The justices have rescheduled the politically sensitive case 15 times since Trump filed it in November.

The day before the justices were set to discuss it privately on February 27, the case was yanked from the agenda. No explanation.

The delay has a beneficiary. It has deferred the $5 million verdict a New York jury awarded Carroll more than three years ago. Including interest, Trump now owes her over $100 million across two cases.

Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck noted that the only alternative explanation to the court waiting on related appeals is “some kind of special solicitude for President Trump.” He added a small problem with that theory: the conduct in question happened when Trump was not in office.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into Carroll for alleged perjury tied to the very appeal that keeps not getting heard. At least someone’s getting a hearing.

MAGA Business Owners Are Regretting Their Votes

Some people have to touch the tariff to find out it’s hot.

A number of MAGA-aligned small business owners say the trade policies they cheered are now destroying the businesses they own. “Our business is getting destroyed by this administration,” one San Francisco owner told a podcast. “Truly, it’s being destroyed.”

The specifics are not abstract. A florist explained that flowers come from Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, Japan, and South America, and tariffs plus shipping have jacked up costs at every step. A fashion brand owner said a product that once cost $29 to manufacture now carries duties that price it out of reach.

An entrepreneur who imports gym equipment said tariff increases completely erased his profit margins. Some businesses hit rates so high that staying open stopped making sense.

The problem is not only that costs went up. It’s that they keep moving. Owners say they can’t set prices, sign contracts, or plan inventory when the rules change week to week.

Several of the business owners said they genuinely believed Trump’s promises of lower prices and stronger growth. They just didn’t expect the policies they voted for to come for their own livelihoods.

One voter summed it up: “I wish I never voted for Trump.” We wish you hadn’t, too.

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Tennessee to Immigrant Parents: Your Kid’s Care, or Deportation

The state of Tennessee is turning children’s hospitals into border checkpoints.

Beginning July 1, undocumented children enrolled in the state’s Children’s Special Services program — which provides wheelchairs, surgeries, prescriptions, and hospitalizations for severely ill or disabled kids — will be reported to the Tennessee Centralized Immigration Enforcement Division, an agency created last year to share data with ICE.

Parents now get to weigh whether their child’s lifesaving care is worth the risk of being deported.

The program has served families regardless of immigration status for years. A new state law turned health departments into immigration reporting agencies. The numbers are small and specific. Roughly 4,640 children were enrolled as of 2024. About 400 families got letters in the mail warning them of the change.

Dr. Sanmi Areola, who runs Metro Nashville’s public health department, said these are some of the kids with the highest health needs. One client of the Tennessee Justice Center, a mother of a 10-year-old with severe spina bifida, has already disenrolled and delayed a necessary pain-relieving surgery.

Pro-life state, terms and conditions apply.

Conservatives Are Now Dying at Higher Rates Than Liberals

This one almost went in the “positive stories” section.

A paper published last month in Nature analyzed individual health data from a long-term study of a large, representative sample of Americans across all 50 states. The finding is blunt: conservatives are dying at significantly higher rates than liberals, and the gap did not exist a decade ago.

“2010 is the last year in which we can say fairly clearly that there is not this gap,” coauthor Elizabeth Elder told Fast Company. By 2016 it showed up in biomarkers. By 2020 it was showing up in deaths from heart disease, cancer, and stroke.

The numbers are stark and specific. Between 2020 and 2022, only 0.2% of “very liberal” respondents died of internal causes, compared with 1.34% of “very conservative” respondents.

The authors rule out the easy explanations: COVID deaths, demographics, geography, age. What’s left is a widening divide in trust toward doctors and the medical system, a crisis that accelerated during the pandemic and now reaches blood pressure medication and chest pains.

Elder notes the mistrust may not hurt the young and healthy. For older people and those with chronic conditions, it becomes a matter of life and death. Owning the libs, one blood pressure reading at a time.

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Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

Federal judge blocks DHS from using citizenship database to purge voters. A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from using a DHS database to purge voter rolls, ruling that the government “haphazardly” mashed together Americans’ private data in violation of multiple federal laws to build a citizenship-checking system that flagged thousands of actual citizens as noncitizens. The DOJ has now sued 30 states to force them to run their voter rolls through the system. Its record in those lawsuits: 0-9. The database has been used to check 67 million voters so far, which is a lot of effort to build something a judge just told you to take apart.

Republicans Likely Can’t Defund Planned Parenthood Again. The one-year ban on federal funds going to Planned Parenthood is set to expire around July 4, after the Senate parliamentarian capped it at one year instead of the proposed ten. Republicans now concede they likely lack the votes to extend it, with razor-thin margins in both chambers and the midterms looming; Sens. Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins have already said a third reconciliation bill isn’t happening. Polling shows a majority of voters oppose defunding the organization, which may explain why the party that spent years chasing this goal would now very much like to stop talking about it.

‘Blatantly unlawful’: Judge blocks DOJ subpoenas aimed at Tim Walz. A federal judge quashed DOJ subpoenas targeting Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Minneapolis mayor, the state AG, and other Minnesota Democrats, ruling the investigation was not an investigation but an unconstitutional effort to bully state officials into helping enforce immigration law. The subpoenas were issued days after ICE agents killed two American citizens during raids in the Twin Cities. The judge, a George W. Bush appointee, called the DOJ’s justification “risible,” which is the legal term for laughable, and noted that the government couldn’t point to a single instance of actual criminal conduct.

Mamdani outlines plans to air World Cup throughout New York for free. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is putting World Cup matches on hundreds of sidewalk kiosks — the same 55-inch screens that normally show ads — across the five boroughs. He did the same with two NBA Finals games so that New Yorkers without cable or streaming could watch the Knicks end a 53-year title drought. He also secured 1,000 tournament tickets at $50 each with free bus rides to the stadium, which is notable given that get-in prices for World Cup games in New York were approaching $1,000. This did annoy Knicks owner James Dolan, which is generally how you know a policy is working.