“The Devils in The Dark” – The Continuing Evolution of the Medical Tricoder
Posted on | June 30, 2025 | 1 Comment
Mike Magee
On March 9, 1967, the Star Trek classic episode, “The Devil in the Dark” first aired. The Enterprise had received an urgent distress call from miners on the planet Janus VI. They are literally melting after, Horta, a wounded inhabitant has targeted them with liquifying acid rays.
A sympathetic Spock hears the call, and in an effort to disclose cause and motivation, “mind-melts” with the creature. Turns out, all she’s trying to do is protect her babies from a perceived threat. Kirk agrees, and with Spock, calls in Dr. McCoy to access the patient’s condition.
What McCoy encounters is a “rocky-skinned patient.” With the aid of his tricoder, a handheld diagnostic sensor, “Bones” (McCoy’s nickname referencing the historical 19th century American slang “Sawbones” referring to surgeons) uncovers a serious and deep gaping wound that requires immediate attention.
Kirk manages to “beam down” a hundred pounds of thermoconcrete, and McCoy expertly applies it to the wound. All of which is a set-up for his shipmates to wonder if this will work, which generates the iconic most-repeated line in the series storied history. McCoy (clearly irritated) utters in his “How do I know?” moment – “I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer.”
Similarly challenged modern day doctors have been voicing their own frustrations for more that a few decades. But the AMA has been scientifically tracking their discontent only since 2011. The levels of burnout are somewhat down in 2025 compared to peaked pique in 2021. But among the irritants, integration of new technology remain near the top of the list.
Nobody knew better than McCoy the mixed blessing of technology. His original “23rd century tricoder” was a marvel of diagnostic science, but also raised ethical dilemmas and patient expectations. The fictional tool originally was the size of a portable tape recorder and served as a general data sensor and analyzer. The medical version was a “hand-held high resolution scanner” which (in the 24th century version) had a flip out panel with expanded screen, said to have been inspired by the HP-41C scientific calculator.”
On May 10, 2011, Qualcomm partnered with tricoder entrepreneurs to create the Ticorder X Prize, a $10 million incentive for anyone who could actualize the Star Trek fictional model’s capabilities in a hand-held medical tricoder. Five years later, the contest was officially closed out, with $3.7 million awarded to multiple contestants, none of whom successfully reproduced all the capabilities.
This is not to say that dreamers in the Stare Trek mode ever gave up on being successors to McCoy. In 2013, 15-year-old Aspyn Palatnick took a summer internship at Long Island’s historic Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to learn the basics of genome analysis. Seven years later in 2020, after teaming up with his original professor, Michael Schatz, he revisited the Laboratory for its 125th anniversary celebration. By then, they had developed “the world’s first mobile genome sequence analyzer” as an iPhone app termed iGenomics.
Cold Spring Harbor trumpeted their success on December 7, 2020, stating “The iPhone app was developed to complement the tiny DNA sequencing devices being made by Oxford Nanopore. Palatnick, now a software engineer at Facebook, was already experienced at building iPhone apps when joining the Schatz laboratory. He and Schatz realized that ‘As the sequencers continued to get even smaller, there were no technologies available to let you study that DNA on a mobile device. Most of the studying of DNA: aligning, analyzing, is done on large server clusters or high-end laptops…flying in suitcases full of Nanopores and laptops and other servers to do that analysis in the remote fields (was impractical).’” iGenomics helps by making genome studies more portable, accessible, and affordable.”
“Portable, accessible, and affordable!” That’s something Bones McCoy could get behind. In fact, he’d be amazed to see what he has spawned in 2025, and how new technology is augmenting rather than complicating the work of physicians, nurses and medical scientists.
Consider, for example the publication that dropped on June 3, 2025 in Nature. In the reporting in Science magazine, you could feel the excitement: “During a single week in April 2023, the area around Florida’s Washington Oaks Gardens State Park was abuzz. A bobcat passed by, perhaps stalking the eastern gray squirrels. An eastern diamondback rattlesnake slithered through the undergrowth. The spaces among the grand oaks hummed with wildlife—a big brown bat, mosquitoes, and an osprey—and people with African, European, and Asian ancestors… Scientists didn’t directly see any of these creatures. But they used cutting-edge DNA technology to find evidence of them in tiny specks of organic material floating in the air. A similar analysis of air from the streets of Dublin revealed a far different, but equally rich, tableau of life.”
The new technique, “shotgun sequencing” can read, analyze, and reconstruct large DNA sequences from billions of short sequences. But what’s really startling is the usability of the device in the field. As reported, “At least one newer machine is smaller than a cigarette packet and can plug into a laptop, compared with previous machines the size of a small household refrigerator.”
David Duffy, a biologist at the University of Florida’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience and senior author of the new study, originally wanted to title the article, “Towards a tricorder,” but was dissuaded stating,“We’re not claiming to be there,” Duffy says. “We’re saying we are a lot closer to this being a factual reality than we were a few years ago. And you can foresee it being a reality in the future.”
Ready or not, for doctors entering residency training July 1, 2025, some version of the “medical tricoder” is likely to be standard equipment when they enter practice in 2030.
Tags: aspyn palatnick > Bones McCoy > cold spring harbor > Dr. McCoy > medical technology > michael schatz > Nature > physician burnout > Science > shotgun sequence > Star Trek > tricoder
Life Goes On – How, When, Why?
Posted on | June 29, 2025 | 1 Comment
Here are some notable views on managing life’s daily challenges. Do any especially resonate with you, and why?
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The crisis you have to worry about most is the one you don’t see coming.
Mike Mansfield
The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; ‘tis dearness only that gives everything it’s value.
Thomas Paine
If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.
Martin Luther King
Ah, but man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?
Robert Browning
Adversity is the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free from admirers then.
Samuel Johnson
The nature of the flower is to bloom.
Alice Walker
If you want a place in the sun, you’ve got to put up with a few blisters.
Abigail van Buren
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn’t pass it around. Wouldn’t be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don’t say I embrace trouble. That’s as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you’ll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
When you can’t solve the problem, manage it.
Dr. Robert H. Schuller
Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.
Frederic Chopin
No man can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest. For it is part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.
T. S. Eliot
One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.
Vincent van Gogh
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles he has overcome trying to succeed.
Booker T. Washington
In three words I can sum up everything I have learned about life. It goes on.
Robert Frost
Stand Tall Stanford. Lead Again – Divest TESLA!
Posted on | June 24, 2025 | Comments Off on Stand Tall Stanford. Lead Again – Divest TESLA!
Mike Magee
On the Stanford campus this Spring, in the middle of Silicon Valley, it was impossible not to hear echoes of Apartheid re-emerging with force 3/4 of a century after the original battle for social justice here and in far away lands was fully engaged. Stanford’s President, Jonathan Levin, said it best in his public support of Harvard, after Columbia capitulated to Trump.
Levin’s statement read:
“America’s universities are a source of great national strength, creating knowledge and driving innovation and economic growth. This strength has been built on government investment but not government control. The Supreme Court recognized this years ago when it articulated the essential freedoms of universities under the First Amendment as the ability to determine who gets to teach, what is taught, how it is taught, and who is admitted to study. . . Universities need to address legitimate criticisms with humility and openness. But the way to bring about constructive change is not by destroying the nation’s capacity for scientific research, or through the government taking command of a private institution. Harvard’s objections to the letter it received are rooted in the American tradition of liberty, a tradition essential to our country’s universities, and worth defending.”
As students prepared to head home for the summer, Stanford Trustees gathered quietly to advice their university president how best to handle Trump and Musk aided assaults on university autonomy, DEI, and challenges to F-1 visas for full-time international students pursuing academic studies.
Stanford had found itself in a harsh spotlight two months earlier in a Feb. 10, 2025 Wall Street Journal report that read, “Steve Davis, who earned a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from Stanford, led advanced projects at Musk’s rocket company SpaceX before taking over as president of Musk’s tunnel startup The Boring Company, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. He’s Musk’s key lieutenant in his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).”
That was quite a wake-up call on campus. After all, it was a sit-in, staged by Stanford students nearly a half century ago to protest South African Apartheid, that redefined that struggle by focusing on the use of university divestiture to deliver an “economic punch” to the ruling minority. Another South African, Elon Musk, had attempted to manage his illegal alien status by enrolling in Stanford as a graduate student in 1995, only to bale 2 days after enrollment to pursue his internet get-rich scheme.
Two decades earlier, a decision made by the Stanford Board to oppose a Ford Motor Company stockholder’s proposal to withdraw operations from South Africa had triggered a campus revolt. Stanford at the time held 93,950 shares of Ford Stock. In response to the inaction, the Stanford students launched a sit-in (captured by the Stanford Daily student newspaper below) inside the Old Student Union Building at 1 P.M. on Monday, May 9, 1977. When they wouldn’t leave five hours later, 294 students and faculty were arrested including the daughter of the U.S, Secretary of Labor, Jill Ann Marshall.
Six months later, after repeated demonstrations and disruptions on campus, the Board issued a statement that each of their trustees held a “deep aversion to the practice of apartheid”, and adopted a “South Africa-related ethical investment policy.” Still it took until 1985 for the university to “create formal investment policies that explicitly set out guidelines for investing in South Africa-related companies.”
Many of us today, in our 70s and 80s, once again feel the familiar strains of suppression and oppression in the behavior and actions of Trump and Musk, as he toggled emotionally between Texas, South Africa, the Silicon Valley, and Washington. The Musk-led and Trump enabled assault, disguised as “efficiency” is little more than stealing money from the poor to give to the rich, widening an already extraordinary income gap.
Violence at home and abroad is once again in the air, driven by intense greed, cruelty, subjugation, and the targeting of vulnerable peoples. Oligarchic and super-aggressive, sadly there is nothing new here. Musk’s child-like behavior obsesses on a “super-hero” world and visions of Mars as he ravages the inhabitants of Mother Earth.
Given his life origins and path, it is not surprising that he has left Washington in response to intensive economic isolation. And this time it is not Ford, but Tesla divestiture, that has been front and center. But his foot soldiers remain, continuing the active dismantling of our government’s structural pillars.
Like Harvard, Stanford is an elite university with large numbers of foreign students, many engaged in basic scientific research, information technology, and engineering. 13% of Stanford undergraduates are international, and 36% of its graduates students are from outside the U.S. Both universities also share large endowments and a history of active social engagement.
Stanford’s 2024 financial returns on its’ “Merged Pool” (the principal investment vehicle for the university’s endowment) documented an endowment of some $43 billion with returns that year on investments of 8.4% (their 5 year return was 9.9%).
The University Trustees, in June, 2020, updated their “Ethical Investment Framework” whose origins date back to its’ epic battle with students and faculty last century over South African Apartheid. In the final paragraph of this statement, the Trustees proclaim, “In rare instances, the University’s Board of Trustees may elect to divest specific companies or categories of investment that are deemed abhorrent and ethically unjustifiable.” I would suggest that investment in Tesla is one of those “rare instances.”
Investing in Tesla is tantamount to investing in their founder and CEO, Elon Musk. His own shareholders took him to court last year and were granted relief from his demand for a $56 billion annual salary. The case remains under appeal. This after he literally abandoned his struggling company for nearly a year as he labored, first to get Trump elected, and then to serve as lead henchmen in dismantling nearly every federal agency at the hands of a lethal band of “20 something year-old IT henchmen” with a Stanford grad and Trump employee in the lead.
Musk quite literally is Tesla. 60% of his wealth exists as Tesla stock. He owns 13% of the company’s holdings. But it’s been a rocky road since his MAGA chainsaw appearances. In the past six months the stock has gone from $430 a share to $348, and that’s only with the help of a 8% bump up this week on the carefully staged launch of the Tesla Robotaxi in Austin, Texas. The NY Post covered it all, including a dangerous illegal turn and broken speed limits. But social media gave it 5 stars. Why? As the paper reported, “Despite the apparent hiccups, Tesla shares surged after a handpicked group of influencers who participated in the trial run uploaded positive reviews on X and other social media platforms.”
Musk leaves little to chance. And neither should Stanford Trustees. His profiteering with Trump is obvious, visible, and accelerating even as another SpaceX rocket spectacularly burst into flames last week.
A Tesla Divestiture allows citizens the ability to send a tangible message. Along with demonstrations, like the 5 million strong NO KINGS marches last week in response to Trump’s Birthday Military parade, concrete actions like these are the most likely way to “deliver us from evil” as they did with South African apartheid on April 27, 1994.
Musk=Trump=Vance=ICE Raids=Autocracy
Want to help? In addition to encouraging Stanford Trustees to stand tall, here are 3 easy steps and then one more.
1. Trade it in. If you own a Tesla, trade it in for another brand now.
2. Check – Do you or your organization own Tesla stock in any form?
3. If yes, organize a teach-in, to explain Divestiture (as in SA Apartheid), its’ purpose and utility.
4. Circulate and post an online petition to ask your organization to divest of all Tesla holdings.
. . . and one more, Copy and Share this post with all your contacts.
Modern Advice From a 90 Year Old in 1988
Posted on | June 19, 2025 | Comments Off on Modern Advice From a 90 Year Old in 1988
Mike Magee
These days we’re all seeking good advice, how best to manage fear and worry, to focus on the goodness in others, and believe that caring and compassion are rationale responses to those in need. But surprisingly, advice – whether free or at a price – is mostly off the mark.
But not in the case of Elodie Armstrong. At the age of 50, she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Forty years later, she took the time out to share a bit of wisdom with her family and friends.
Her daughter, Marge Wisner of Longview, Washington, described her mother as “a special lady, full of fun, spirituality, and faith. She is an inspiration to all who know her.”
Olivena Elodie Smith was born in Greenwood, Wisconsin on Christmas Eve in 1897. She was one of five children. She married Arthur Armstrong on June 10, 1916, and they went on to have three children – William, Betty Mae, and Marjorie Jeanne. Their mother died on November 9, 1994, at the age of 96.
Back in 1988, Marge decided to share the advice her mother had written down with her local paper which then printed it – twice. Encouraged by the response, she wrote a note to Ann Landers. It said, “I would like to share her personal commandments with you in the hope that you will print them.”
On September 3, 1988, Ann Landers did just that in her very popular, nationally syndicated column. That column is displayed above. And Elodie Armstrong’s advice has never been more relevant than it is today. I encourage you to read it carefully, and share it with family, friends and colleagues far and wide. Elodie may be gone, but you can help assure she is not forgotten.
Reflecting On Good and Evil.
Posted on | June 16, 2025 | 2 Comments
Mike Magee
There’s a lot of soul-searching going on. Take a moment to read out loud – to pause and consider. The topic: Good vs. Evil.
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That there is goodness in this world is undeniable. That there is evil, capable of taking root to branch and multiply with breathtaking speed and by surprise, is equally the case.
But little candles throw great beams, and light enlightens, while sins cast long shadows.
We and our world are both evil and good. By our deeds you shall know us.
All the learning, earning and yearning can’t replace a moment’s hesitation or justice withheld in the face of evil.
Tyranny, poverty, disease – there is more than enough to battle to prove our inner worth. Though it’s useful to remind that the knowledge and power that accrues can always be turned upon ourselves.
That we possess a conscience does not assure its use. But it can be stirred by the universe and the belief that we all have a right to be here among the trees and stars.
Amid the noisy confusion people do somehow find peace inside, and dreams of a beautiful world, and a confidence (sometimes shaken but never withdrawn).
Injustice is a double-edged sword and given time justice will prevail. (In God we pray.)
Introducing Claude Elwood Shannon
Posted on | June 10, 2025 | Comments Off on Introducing Claude Elwood Shannon
Mike Magee
Let me be the first to introduce you to Claude Elwood Shannon. If you have never heard of him but consider yourself informed and engaged, including at the interface of AI and Medicine, don’t be embarrassed. I taught a semester of “AI and Medicine” in 2024 and only recently was introduced to “Claude.”
Let’s begin with the fact that the product, Claude, is not the same as the person, Claude. The person died a quarter century ago, and except for those deep in the field of AI has largely been forgotten – until now.
Among those in the know, Claude Elwood Shannon is often referred to as the “father of information theory.” He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1936 where he majored in electrical engineering and mathematics. At 21, as a Master’s student at MIT, he wrote a Master’s Thesis titled “A Symbolic Analysis Relay and Switching Circuits” which those in the know claim was “the birth certificate of the digital revolution,” earning him the Nobel Prize in 1939.
None of this was particularly obvious in those early years. A University of Michigan biopic claims, “If you were looking for world changers in the U-M class of 1936, you probably would not have singled out Claude Shannon. The shy, stick-thin young man from Gaylord, Michigan, had a studious air and, at times, a playful smirk—but none of the obvious aspects of greatness. In the Michiganensian yearbook, Shannon is one more face in the crowd, his tie tightly knotted and his hair neatly parted for his senior photo.”
But that was one of the historic misreads of all time, according to his alma mater. “That unassuming senior would go on to take his place among the most influential Michigan alumni of all time—and among the towering scientific geniuses of the 20th century…It was Shannon who created the “bit,” the first objective measurement of the information content of any message—but that statement minimizes his contributions. It would be more accurate to say that Claude Shannon invented the modern concept of information. Scientific American called his groundbreaking 1948 paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” the “Magna Carta of the Information Age.”
I was introduced to “Claude” just 5 days ago by Washington Post Technology Columnist, Geoffrey Fowler – Claude the product, not the person. His article, titled “5 AI bots took our tough reading test. One was smartest — and it wasn’t ChatGPT,” caught my eye. As he explained, “We challenged AI helpers to decode legal contracts, simplify medical research, speed-read a novel and make sense of Trump speeches.”
Judging the results of the medical research test was Scripps Research Translational Institute luminary, Eric Topol. The 5 AI products were asked 115 questions on the content of two scientific research papers : Three-year outcomes of post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 and Retinal Optical Coherence Tomography Features Associated With Incident and Prevalent Parkinson Disease.
Not to bury the lead, Claude – the product – won decisively, not only in science but also overall against four name brand competitors I was familiar with – Google’s Gemini, Open AI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and MetaAI. Which left me a bit embarrassed. How had I never heard of Claude the product?
For the answer, let’s retrace a bit of AI history. The New York Times headline in 2023 announced the rapid progress of generative AI as “Exciting and Scary” after four years of tracking its’ progress. Their technology columnist wrote, “What we see emerging are machines that know how to reason, are adept at all human languages, and are able to perceive and interact with the physical environment.”
Leonid Zhukov, Ph.D, director of the Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) Global AI Institute, believed then that offerings like ChatGPT-4 and Genesis (Google’s AI competitor) “have the potential to become the brains of autonomous agents—which don’t just sense but also act on their environment—in the next 3 to 5 years. This could pave the way for fully automated workflows.”
OpenAI co-founders Elon Musk and Sam Altman in 2016 initially expressed concerns about machines that not only mastered language, but could also think and feel in super-human ways. Desires for safety and regulatory oversight linked them in those early years. But that didn’t last for long. When Musk’s attempts to gain majority control of the now successful OpenAI failed, he jumped ship and later launched his own venture called “XAI.”
In the meantime, the Open AI Board staged a coup, throwing Sam Altman over-board claiming he was no longer into regulation but rather all in on an AI profit-seeking “arms race.” That only lasted a few days, before Microsoft, with $10 billion in hand, placed Sam back on the throne. In the meantime, Google engineers, who were credited with the original break- through algorithms in 2016, created Genesis, and the full blown arms race was on, now including Facebook with it’s MetaAI with super-powered goggles.
Altman later penned an op-ed titled “The Intelligence Age” in which he explained, “Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the (AI enabled) Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will.”
Claude was born that same year. Its’ parents were sibling co-founders of the 2021 public-benefit corporation, Anthropic, Dario Amodeo and Daniela Amodeo. They were the VP of Research and the VP of Safety & Policy at OpenAI until Sam Altman’s conversion of that non-profit into a capped for-profit entity (with Microsoft in the wings) created high levels of tension and distrust in upper ranks who felt safety and public-good had been compromised. The whole idea, after all, was for OpenAI to “build safeAI and share the benefits with the world.”
In December 2020, Dario, Daniela and 14 other OpenAI researchers jumped ship. Their new Board endorsed a dual mission to: seek profit for shareholders as part of their fiduciary responsibility,” while creating “transformative AI that helps people and society flourish” and if need be “pursue AI safety and ethics over creating profit.” Their approach to “helpful and harmless” AI assistants was anchored in a commitment to “Constitutional AI” on their 1 year anniversary in 2022. This human creation (the AI Constitution) juries the boundaries of usefulness and safety. In the image of Claude Elwood Shannon, Claude, the AI with a soul, was born.
They embraced a technique for development called “Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback” (RLHF). Definition: RLHF = “Models engage in open-ended conversations with human assistants, generating multiple responses for each input prompt. The human then chooses the response they found most helpful and/or harmless, rewarding the model for either trait over time.” This allowed Anthropic to “engage models in open-ended conversations with human assistants, generating multiple responses for each input prompt.
As the process evolved, they were able to train the AI to grade the AI on consistency to the Constitution they had established. The AI now was able to grade itself harmlessness and helpfulness. The new process, Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) was now the automated judge of RLHF. Going one step further, Dario disclosed the Constitution which reinforced Anthropic’s commitment to transparency and public service.
What can Claude do? In can generate text in tandem, summarize, search, code, and more with high accuracy since it does not rely on Internet search for content.Researchers are now fast at work training Claude to “generate responses based on character traits …like curiosity, open-mindedness, and thoughtfulness.”
Besides winning the Washington Post liberal arts test (including law, medicine, literature and politics), the Claude website (with free access) had 100 million visits in March 2025, and its iOS app had 150,000 downloads within its first week of release in May, 2024. Anthopic has raised $18.2 billion as of May, 2025, (2nd only to OpenAI) with Amazon as its top investor at $8 billion in return for naming its cloud service (AWS) its primary cloud and training partner. Google is in as well at $2 billion.
On June 5, 2025, Dario penned an opEd in the New York Times titled “Don’t Let A.I. Companies off the Hook.” In it he argues aggressively for a focus on transparency stating “This is about responding in a wise and balanced way to extraordinary times.” One can almost see Claude Elwood Shannon in the shadows, quietly smiling.
Tags: aniella amadeo > Claude > Claude Shannon > dario amadeo > elon musk > Eric Topol > father of information theory > Geoffrey Fowler > leonard zhukov > Magno Carta of Information Age > MIT > Nobel Prize 1939 > OpenAI > RLAIF > RLHF > sam altman > U. Michigan
Trump Sucker Punches Catholic Conservatives – Twice.
Posted on | June 2, 2025 | 2 Comments
Mike Magee
If there is one thing we Catholic kids learned in what we used to call “Parochial School” was the look and feel of “schoolyard bullies.” They were recognizable from a distance and you gave them plenty of space because they were unpredictable. You could be standing there doing nothing, and the next thing you know they could haul off and sucker-punch you right in the face.
Trump grew up as a member of “the other team” – a mainline Protestant. In the 1959 photo above, the 13 year old in the top row, second from the left is Donald J. Trump, at his own First Presbyterian Church Confirmation Day picture in Jamaica, NY, 11 miles away from Trump Tower on the East River.
His mother was a devout Scot who gifted him a Bible on completion of Sunday School in the 9th grade. But deep dives by investigative journalists into his formal ties to religion found a “seeming lack of deep religious orientation. He doesn’t have a hometown church…” But not for lack of trying. Claims that he later suggested an affiliation with Norman Vincent Peale’s famous midtown Manhattan based Marble Collegiate Church were denied by the church and drew condemnation from Peale’s son.
Rev. Scott Black Johnston, pastor of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (whose history dates back to 1808 and had a hand in the founding of the Princeton Theological Seminary, the American Bible Society, and New York Presbyterian Hospital), was a bit more diplomatic. Following a 2017 prayer session with the President at the White House, he remarked, “He is a Christian who’s what I would call a young Christian. He is early on this journey. He has not spent a lot of time exploring the faith.”
Trump’s current journey has carried him back to the school yard where he has sucker-punched the Catholic establishment not once, but twice in 2025.
Punch 1: Defunding USAID
On January 20, 2025, Trump by Executive Order issued a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid. In the process, he effectively gutted USAID, “the main international humanitarian arm of the U.S. government” which, in 2023, included $40 billion in combined appropriations (0.4% of the 2024 U.S. federal budget).
Approximately 2/3 of that funding goes to the Catholic Relief Services (CRS), an organization begun “during World War II to answer the call to serve migrants and refugees.” Since it’s beginning, CRS has been governed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Prior to Trump and Musk led defunding, it has supported 200 million people in 121 countries through thousands of projects “from emergency assistance to long-term transformational development.”
When you attack USAID and CRS, you are hitting especially close to Catholics hearts. USAID was created in 1961 by the first Catholic President, John F. Kennedy. Around 1000 parishes, dioceses and schools join the USAID in fund raising that contribute to CRS programs. When Trump and Musk attacked USAID and the CRS, the response from the Catholic top brass was immediate. On February 10th, the Vatican labeled the action as “reckless and could kill millions.”
This was in part a response to the USAID website being taken down, and the USAID building in DC shuttered by Secretary of State and Catholic Marco Rubio who was now declared the Acting Administrator of USAID. It took only four days for a U.S. district court judge to issue a temporary restraining order in American Foreign Service Association v. Trump, with seven more organizations joining in on February 11, 2025, in Global Health Council v. Trump. The USCCB also took the unusual step of suing Trump directly, asking the court to declare the “suspension of aid to refugees unlawful.”
Punch 2: Attacking Conservative Catholic Mega-Donor – as a “Sleazebag.”
Conservative Catholic leaders on May 30, 2025, woke to the news that the President had decided to label their most prominent and beloved financial and policy patron, lawyer Leonard Leo, a “sleazebag”, elaborating on social media that he is “a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.” As if that wasn’t enough, he included the veiled threat “This is something that cannot be forgotten!”
This was in response to the U.S. Court of International Trade’s federal judge panel ruling that the President’s tariffs were unlawful. A Trump spokesperson took a scorched earth approach, declaring on the day of the decision, “It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency. (The President will) use every lever of executive power to address this crisis.” Then things got really personal.
Leonard Leo is not used to being punched in the face. He co-chairs the Federalist Society and is the chairman of the uber-conservative PR firm, CRC Advisors, where he is credited with having a hand in the appointment of Catholic friendly Supreme Court Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Coney Barrett, and Kavanaugh.
In addition to traditional corporate clients like GM, Chevron, and the Walt Disney Company, CRC Advisors has a litany of Catholic clients beginning with the USCCB, but extending deeply into a wide range of religious freedom advocacy organizations.
Leo himself is a member of the Knights of Malta, described as “a lay religious order of the Catholic Church dating back to the 12th century, and he and his wife, Sally, were named Stewards of St. Peter, an honor given by the Papal Foundation to those who donate $1 million or more to the Vatican.” Add to that board positions at the Catholic University of America, the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, the Catholic Association and its affiliated Catholic Association Foundation,The Becket Law Fund, the Napa Legal Institute, and the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Trump is likely believing that a professional like Leo can take a hit in stride, and that delivering a message to Supreme Court patrons, most especially Roberts and Coney Barrett, is worth the risk. But angering a person like Leo, and those who adore him, and humiliating Supreme Court Justices could carry a hefty price.
Like the rest of us, all these power players grew up in the same rough and tumble school yards that we did. And beyond being able to recognize a bully from a distance, we also learned to hold a grudge when bruised, and orchestrate pay-back that had been well-earned. We Catholics made a sacrament out of forgiving, but the Sacrament of Penance never required that we forget.
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By the way, when it comes to cutting Medicaid, in many Catholic hospital systems, 1/4 of revenues come from Medicaid reimbursement.
Tags: Catholic Health Association > Catholic hospitals > Catholic Relief Services > Conservative Catholics > CRC > CRC Advisers > Donald J. Trump > Leonard Leo > supreme court > U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops > USAID
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