Mysterious new Trump neck rash fuels internet frenzy: 'Vigorous handshaking strikes again'

The internet erupted Monday after a new photo of President Donald Trump showed a significant rash on his neck, with new questions surfacing about his health.

Trump spoke for the first time live since the U.S. and Israel launched attacks on Iran and gave a Medal of Honor at the White House to 79-year-old Vietnam veteran Terry P. Richardson, who is credited with saving the lives of 85 soldiers during a 1968 battle.

Independent journalist Aaron Rupar pointed out photos that revealed a large rash on the right side of Trump's neck at the event.

Dr. Sean Barbabella, physician to the president, told CBS News that the president was using a "very common cream on the right side of his neck."

“The President is using this treatment for one week, and the redness is expected to last for a few weeks,” Barbabella added.

People quickly speculated about what could be behind the skin irritation.

"Vigorous handshaking strikes again!" Journalist Mike Rothschild wrote on X.

"Look forward to White House explanation that it’s hickeys," Shannon Watts, author and founder of activist group Moms Demand, wrote on X.

"Sending all possible love and support to this rash," tech and media journalist Evan DeSimone wrote on X.

"Imagine. If. This. Was. Biden," Mehdi Hasan, founder of Zeteo, wrote on X.

"Every woman in America can advise you to say 'it’s a curling iron burn' and change the topic of conversation," consultant Caitlin Legacki wrote on X.

"If President Biden's neck looked like this, Fox News would be running 25th Amendment coverage non-stop," journalist Aaron Parnas wrote on X.

"His ear looks in pretty good shape tho'," media insider David Clinch wrote on X.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth defended Joint Chiefs General Dan Caine's explanation of the Iran war's trajectory Monday, then attacked reporters for questioning the evolving timeline. After initially suggesting the conflict would last two weeks, the administration now indicates four weeks. Hegseth accused NBC of asking "gotcha" questions, insisting Trump has "all the latitude in the world" to adjust timelines as needed. He claimed Trump possesses abilities other presidents lack, including finding "opportunities and off ramps" while executing objectives on the U.S. timeline. Hegseth criticized former President Biden for not understanding military strategy. He dismissed reporters' questions about war duration as "games," praising Trump as "no better communicator" for expressing military intentions. The defense secretary's combative response reflected administration defensiveness over shifting war projections and escalating conflict duration estimates.

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Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's latest legal argument for blocking Democratic members of Congress from unscheduled inspections of immigration detention facilities just got rejected by a federal court.

In a new order released on Monday, U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb ruled in favor of 13 representatives who sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement after they were denied access to detention facilities.

Rules put in place by congressional appropriations bills have mandated that members have the right to inspect any facility at any time. However, last year, DHS repeatedly attempted to roll this back by fiat and required a week's notice to inspect facilities, which, if it became the standard, would give DHS time to conceal any wrongdoing.

During last year's federal government shutdown, Noem argued that the congressional requirement no longer applied because they were not receiving funding. More recently, she has attempted the same tactic after Democrats refused to sign onto continuing DHS funding without reforms to federal immigration enforcement — which has caused a DHS-localized shutdown that is still ongoing — and argued that the policy will be enforced specifically with money from Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill Act" from last year.

In Cobb's ruling, this isn't allowed.

"Given the restrictions on OBBBA funding and the fact that the Office of the Secretary is funded through the annual appropriations process, the Court finds on this record that the logical conclusion is not that the Office of the Secretary was using OBBBA funds, but that it was acting in an excepted status while the February 2 memorandum was issued and working pursuant to the lapsed appropriation," wrote Cobb. "But as Defendants previously acknowledged in this litigation, an agency that continues work on excepted functions during a lapse in appropriations is not simply working with a blank check, legally or financially."

The ruling ultimately suspended changes to the inspection regulation, as a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.

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When Daniel Ellsberg died in 2023, the world lost a unique voice of sanity. Five decades earlier, as a “national security” insider, he had released the top-secret Pentagon Papers to expose the official lies behind the ongoing Vietnam War. From then on, he never stopped writing, speaking and protesting for peace, while explaining how the madness of nuclear weapons could destroy us all.

Now, Ellsberg’s voice is back via a compelling new book. Truth and Consequence, being published this week, provides readers with his innermost thoughts, scrawled and typed over a 50-year period. The result is access to intimate candor and visionary wisdom from a truly great whistleblower.

“My father is dead now,” Michael Ellsberg writes in the book’s introduction, but “I for one care a great deal that he consented to allow us to compile this eclectic corpus of his important thoughts and musings.” Michael worked with his father’s longtime assistant Jan R. Thomas to sift through and curate the huge quantity of private writing.

The book’s subtitle — offering reflections on “catastrophe, civil resistance, and hope” — could hardly be more timely.

Now, the barbaric war on Iran is enabled by remaining silent and just following orders.

At the center of Truth and Consequence are the tensions between conscience and deference to authority.

“Don’t delegate conscience,” Daniel Ellsberg wrote.

“Most people conform and accept,” he noted. “A minority protest, withdraw. A tiny minority resist, take risks.”

“The temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly,” Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he turned himself in for giving the Pentagon Papers to the press and faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.

He instantly became a pariah among colleagues who’d been his friends at the RAND Corporation, a think tank serving the U.S. war machine. He’d been working there as a strategic analyst before and after a stint at the Defense Department.

“After I released the papers,” he vividly remembered, “some people were afraid to write to me … to shake hands with me … to receive a phone call from me.” Three years later, his takeaway was: “Accept the risks of freedom and commitment, instead of the risks of obedience and conformity.”

Ellsberg came to see grim downsides of society’s upper crust. He had graduated from Harvard and went on to get his PhD there. But in 1976 he wrote: “The function of an education at an elite university is to learn inattention and passivity, to learn to disconnect your daily work from the moral values of your family upbringing — sharing, love, trust, mutual dependence — and be part of maintaining a system of inequality, privilege, unnecessary suffering, war, and risk of extinction.”

The next year he wrote: “I have fallen out of love with the State and its Establishment, and I have regained a hopeful affection in the democratic ideal, process, and people who are untouched by power — those outside the base of the existing pyramid of obstruction, power, and privilege.”

And: “Most human-caused destruction, suffering, death, and enslavement (i.e., ‘evil’) is performed by men, at the direction of men. These are typically ‘normal,’ competent, personally agreeable and compassionate men who perform their acts in obedience to lawful orders – or, less often, in obedience to unlawful orders.”

Daniel Ellsberg in 2002. Picture: Christopher Michel/Wiki Commons.

1982: “Massacre is made doable by a chain of command that continually invokes habit, obedience, and career, as well as by leaders’ geographical and bureaucratic distance from the killing.”

Ellsberg had extensive firsthand experience in helping to fine-tune preparations for inflicting radioactive Armageddon, especially during the Kennedy presidency. Later, it was a role that haunted him.

“In this era of the potentially imminent extinction of most of life on Earth, there is now a moral dimension to every aspect of how one spends one’s life,” he wrote in 1977. “The foundation of all morality is that we must now live with awareness of the mortality of our species and the vulnerability of the Earth and all life.”

1985: “The future is not some place we are going to. The future is what we are creating every day. If we continue to prepare and plan for thermonuclear war, that is what we are going to get.”

By the time Ellsberg suddenly found himself vilified and beloved for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he was a devotee of civil disobedience. “Use of a radical, novel, powerful, and possibly illegal tactic of nonviolence,” he wrote that year, “is a form of useful work that is perfectly suited to illustrate the evil being combated.”

And he added: “I have never before shrunk from violence — from imagining it, planning it, preparing for it. I have wanted, and I have gained, the respect of violent men. Now I want the respect of gentle women, gentle men, and children.”

1984: “Nonviolent resistance has a special power to raise the question ‘What can I do to change this situation?’ I have felt that power in my own life.”

1985: “One way of calling attention to a danger or an illegal practice is to take an action of obstruction, or symbolic obstruction, that will lead to your being in court. Once there, in the context of your defense you can raise issues of illegality, criminality, constitutionality, and danger.”

1986: “Nonviolent civil disobedience does not eliminate moral dilemmas, costs, consequences, and lesser evils. However, it does inspire a search for new ways of behaving, seeing, feeling, and being.”

1990: “Ask yourself, ‘Where is the environment where I can be showing moral courage now? My work? My family? My community?’ Find the strength and the moral courage to do what is right, without knowing what the effects may be.”

Ellsberg’s activism took him to jail many more times after he summed up his protest activities this way in 2006: “I have been arrested in non-violent civil disobedience actions close to 70 times, probably 50 focused on nuclear weapons: e.g. at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production facility, the Nevada Test Site, Livermore Nuclear Weapons Design Facility, and the vicinity of ground zero at both the Nevada Test Site and the Vandenberg Missile Test Site. Other arrests have been for protests against U.S. interventions.”

Thirty-five years ago, at the time of the Gulf War, Daniel Ellsberg wrote in his journal: “There is a time when silence is a lie, when silence is complicity, and when silence betrays our troops, our country, and ourselves. We owe it to our troops, as well as to other potential victims of this war, to speak the truth about ourselves: what we believe, what we reject, and what we want.”

• Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine includes an afterword about the Gaza war. His new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy, is free in e-book formats.

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