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You have to be—make that, you’re supposed to be—a remarkable physician if you expect to become surgeon general of the United States. The first one, John Woodworth, trained in the US and Europe and tended to Civil War soldiers during Sherman’s March to the Sea. More recent surgeons general, like C. Everett Koop (appointed by Reagan) or Vivek Murthy (who served under Obama and Biden), had reputations as brilliant doctors and had trained at Yale or Cornell medical schools.
So perhaps you also wondered why Donald Trump’s nominee for the post is Janette Nesheiwat. Her experience includes stints as a Fox News commentator, a role as a hawker of dietary supplements via a company called BC Boost, and a medical degree from the American University of the Caribbean, which is on a tiny island a few hundred miles from Puerto Rico.
Those were the relatively easy parts of Nesheiwat’s CV to find. It was up to Tony Clark, a freelance writer and former senior congressional staffer, to dig much deeper into Nesheiwat’s credentials. In his blistering analysis, he provides details on how Nesheiwat has obfuscated or whitewashed her overseas medical education, appears to have incorrectly characterized her board certification as well as her military background, and lacks basic qualifications in her academic and professional work. (Neither the doctor nor the White House responded to Clark’s request for comment.)
She does have one thing going for her: Nesheiwat is the sister-in-law of Michael Waltz, who serves as Trump’s national security adviser. So if she knows how to set up Signal chat groups, this could be a net positive.
Let’s begin by stating the obvious: a lawsuit that Trump’s social media company filed against a bunch of news outlets over one erroneous number is, I believe, frivolous and should not generate a nickel in damages.
Okay, with that out of the way…
The lawsuit in question got rolling in November 2023, when numerous news sites published stories about Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social, Trump’s X/Bluesky competitor. Those stories mistakenly reported that TMTG had lost $73 million since it launched, in 2022. The company had lost money, according to the many corrections that ran later, but the losses were smaller than what those stories initially stated.
Trump’s firm sued around twenty outlets, ranging from The Guardian to Newsweek to the New York Daily News, in a Florida court and asked for damages of $1.5 billion. That is an eye-watering demand, coming from a company that generated just $3.6 million in net sales for all of 2024—not a lot more than what a well-run hardware store might gross.
There was an interesting twist in the case this week, when Semafor’s Max Tani reported that Nexstar, owner of The Hill and one of the original defendants, got dropped from the suit last December, whereupon the company quickly fired the reporter who had written The Hill’s erroneous piece. Tani’s scoop led me to look through the files at the Sarasota County courthouse’s website, and one particular dart came flying across the hundreds of pages of briefs and exhibits.
Many of those stories, such as the Hollywood Reporter’s early piece, stated that the $73 million figure came from SEC records. But that number doesn’t seem to appear anywhere in the filing. So where did it come from? One theory: some reporter thought the company’s reported $50 million in net income from 2022 was a loss, and then added that to the $23 million net loss the company showed in the first half of 2023. (Newsweek later published a corrected version that, similar to several others, would rely on operating rather than net income figures to come up with a $31 million loss over that period.)
And here’s where our dart comes in. Once that false $73 million figure was published, it ricocheted rapidly around the Web, with many news organizations actually attributing it to the SEC filing—in other words, making it appear that they’d independently verified it by digging through records. But they apparently didn’t look at the filing closely, or they didn’t look at it at all. Making things worse, these were often bylined stories—not pickups from wire services—which gave readers the impression that the reporters were doing their own research, rather than parroting a number that someone had messed up.
That’s not great, but it’s also not a $1.5 billion mistake. Hence, I would like to restate my belief that this lawsuit is frivolous and should not generate a nickel in damages.
Elon Musk’s DOGE project has spanned across the federal government, and a prime target has been US foreign-aid programs, which fund projects to address issues ranging from disease to democracy. The numbers can appear so large—such as this reference to $60 billion in cuts for the US Agency for International Development (USAID)—that it can be hard to get your head around what they mean on the ground.
If you’re in that bucket, you should read this riveting New York Times package about the famine in Sudan, a country in its third year of civil war. The US used to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in food, but that spigot of aid has been interrupted while Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he seeks to ferret out waste. In Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, reporter Declan Walsh and photographer Ivor Prickett went to five soup kitchens, even as more than three hundred other kitchens in Sudan have closed. With children dying and Sudan’s citizens “resorting to eating leaves and grass,” Walsh and Prickett bring you face to face with the human toll of Musk’s and Rubio’s cutbacks.
“Deputies are stopping Hispanic drivers for minor, unprovable traffic violations like veering left of center, then handing them over to Border Patrol agents who are sometimes already at the scene.”
In one documented case after another, Syracuse.com reporters Michelle Breidenbach and Rylee Kirk build a compelling case that local cops in upstate New York are working in tandem with federal agents to stop Latinos on the roads, often on flimsy grounds, as part of a sweep to deport undocumented immigrants. In the cases they cited, the arrested people had no other outstanding crimes or charges, except for entering the US illegally.
“Just driving while brown or just speaking with an accent should not be the basis for a stop, should not be the basis for detention,” said Jose Perez, a local immigration lawyer. Or as the sister of an arrested Honduran man told the reporters, “You just sort of know that going out, you can be followed just for being Hispanic.”
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