Trump Order Forces Kids to Receive Vaccine That Doesn’t Exist

The State Department revoked over 175,000 visas, Florida's AG threatened to arrest WNBA players over a foul, and the Trump administration is building a border wall through a 1918 massacre site

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

Trump signed an executive order claiming he can override the CDC and upend the vaccine schedule for children. The State Department revoked more than 175,000 visas, many over minor law-enforcement encounters that never reached a courtroom. Florida’s attorney general threatened to charge WNBA players with assault over a hard foul. And the Trump administration is building a border wall through the site of a 1918 massacre still being studied as a crime scene.

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Trump Signs Order Mandating Kids Receive Vaccine That Doesn’t Exist

The president would like pharmacies to carry three vaccines that don’t exist, to cure a problem that also doesn’t exist.

Trump signed an executive order on Monday that would require the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to be split into three separate shots. The problem: no individually licensed measles, mumps, or rubella vaccine exists in the United States, and the licensing process takes years.

The order props up changes to CDC recommendations that a federal judge has already halted, effectively attempting to override the agency responsible for vaccine guidance. It would also recommend that every childhood shot be given at a separate medical visit, adding financial and logistical strain on families and providers for no medical reason.

Only six of the 17 routinely recommended vaccines would keep their full endorsement. The rest get demoted to “high risk” or the obscure “shared clinical decision-making” category.

At the signing, Trump described the MMR vaccine as potentially “quite lethal.” The vaccine has been given to hundreds of millions of children; serious adverse reactions are so rare that the CDC counts them in single-digit cases per million doses. He also compared a vaccine dose to “the size of a bottle of soda, poured into a little child’s body.” A standard vaccine dose is 0.5 milliliters, roughly one-tenth of a teaspoon.

Twenty-nine states and D.C. have already decoupled their vaccine requirements from the CDC, and insurance still covers the shots. What the order does in effect is apply political pressure to states to address an autism link that does not exist.

The State Department Just Revoked Over 175,000 Visas

Strict constitutionalists who have memorized the Second Amendment apparently think the First starts with “Citizens only.”

The Trump administration announced Monday that it has revoked more than 175,000 visas from foreign nationals since taking office, with the reasons cited ranging from assault to posting mean things about Charlie Kirk online.

That’s more than 10,000 revocations a month in 2026. In all of 2025, the total was about 8,000.

The State Department called the majority the result of “law enforcement encounters,” but the category is broader than it sounds. The leading causes listed — assault, driving under the influence, theft, drug crimes — include charges that never went through the judicial process at all.

The department said it revoked visas from “multiple foreign nationals who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” including one who said “when fascists die, democrats don’t complain” and another who said Kirk “died too late.” A Kuwaiti national was deported on “foreign policy grounds” for supposedly wishing violence against the president.

Florida’s Attorney General Threatens to Arrest WNBA Players Over a Foul

Florida does not have a WNBA team. It does, however, have an attorney general with strong feelings about one.

Over the weekend, Attorney General James Uthmeier said he would charge players with assault after a hard foul against Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham during a game in Indianapolis. The foul, by the Chicago Sky’s DiJonai Carrington, resulted in an ejection.

“The WNBA knows better than to play games down here in Florida, because I’ll be charging people with assault,” Uthmeier wrote. He followed up to clarify: “assault and battery.”

Cunningham has spent recent weeks pushing back on transgender athletes in women’s sports, and the league said it would review its eligibility policies in response. Uthmeier connected the two, asking, “What’s next, men assaulting women on the WNBA courts?”

And in case it needed to be said, there are no transgender women playing in the WNBA. Carrington, who committed the foul, is not transgender. The foul was a standard basketball play that the league handled in real time.

But other than getting the sport wrong, the state wrong, the player wrong, and the issue wrong, it was a very strong legal threat.

Trump Is Building a Border Wall Through a Massacre Site

It took a hundred years to get the government to acknowledge the massacre, and considerably less time to pave over it.

In 1918, Texas Rangers and U.S. Army soldiers dragged fifteen Mexican villagers from their beds and executed them against a rock outcropping in the West Texas desert. No one was ever prosecuted. For most of the twentieth century, the killings were absent from school books, which instead taught children the Rangers were mythic symbols of frontier justice.

In 2018, after decades of research and lobbying, descendants finally got the Texas Historical Commission to erect a marker documenting the atrocity. A 2015 excavation had already turned up military-issue cartridge casings, implicating the U.S. Army in the massacre.

Now the Trump administration is building a thirty-foot steel wall through it. Based on CBP’s “Smart Wall Map,” the barrier would cut off access to the site, bulldozing what remains of the archaeological zone and the evidence.

CBP said the route “has not been finalized” and that it collected public input between February and May. None of the descendants said they were contacted. Arlinda Valencia, 74, whose great-grandfather was one of the victims, asked: “Do you think if you started bulldozing Gettysburg that people would accept it?”

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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

Voters Back Adding 150 New Lawmakers to Congress. A new survey found that 54 percent of respondents support expanding the House of Representatives by 150 seats, and 50 percent support proportional representation. The House has been capped at 435 voting members since 1929, while the U.S. population grew from about 123 million in 1930 to more than 331 million in 2020. Supporters like political scientist Lee Drutman argue that smaller districts would give voters more direct representation, and advocates say proportional representation would curb gerrymandering. Congress has the authority to change the size of the House by legislation, though it would take a political consensus that has been missing for decades.

Trump Ballroom Deemed Unlawful by Federal Appeals Court. Late last week, a federal appeals court upheld a lower court’s finding that halted construction of Trump’s ballroom at the former site of the White House East Wing. The majority opinion noted that “Each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence,” and found that Trump had no delegated authority to rebuild the East Wing to his liking. Trump responded on Truth Social by insisting, “We are not tenants... we are PRESIDENTS.” Meanwhile, a Washington Post/Ipsos poll found 65 percent view the D.C. building projects negatively, and an Economist/YouGov poll found just 24 percent support the ballroom itself.

Massachusetts Expands Abortion Access to Any Point During Pregnancy. Massachusetts became the tenth state to let doctors decide when an abortion is medically necessary, at any point in a pregnancy. Governor Maura Healey signed the bill Monday, replacing a 24-week cutoff that had been forcing hospitals to turn patients away even when their doctors wanted to treat them. Almost no abortions happen that late, and when they do, it’s almost always because something life-threatening went wrong. The new law just lets the doctor in the room make the call instead of a politician who wasn’t there.

Cherokee Nation Bans Hyperscale Data Centers on Tribally Owned Lands. The Cherokee Nation banned hyperscale data centers on its tribal and trust lands, making it the second Oklahoma tribe to do so after the Seminole Nation in March. A task force surveyed nearly 1,600 tribal citizens on the potential impacts of data centers, finding that 64% opposed them. Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said the tribe won’t support any data centers on its reservation without proper consultation, including on non-tribal land, since those projects still affect Cherokee citizens.