Trump gave us the worst diarrhea outbreak in decades yet corporate media yawns!

This demands coverage!

I have not eaten salad in a week--and I love salad! But I live in New York, which is one of the 34 states that has seen lettuce contaminated with a parasite that causes “explosive diarrhea”—two words you never want to hear together.

The corporate media coverage has covered the cause which is Cyclospora--a microscopic parasite that infects food that has come into contact with human feces, most commonly when produce is irrigated or washed with contaminated water. And they have detailed that Taylor Fresh Foods voluntarily removing all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico from the U.S.

But what they are not detailing—likely be design—is how Donald Trump’s regime has played a significant role in this outbreak which is now officially the worst since the US began recording data. And by not covering it, they are sentencing us to even more dangerous and deadly outbreaks in the future.

As of now, there are an estimated 7,000 known cases in this outbreak and rising. For context, this year’s total is 27 times higher than last year’s total at this time. Yes, 27 times higher. Is that because of better testing by the Trump regime? Stop laughing. As we saw during Covid, Trump and especially his minions aren’t big fans of science.

What they are big fans of our is helping their big donors make more money—like Taylor Fresh Foods a massive company with $7 billion in annual revenue that has made large donations to Trump and GOP. They do that by cutting budgets for programs and workers who monitor and investigate these health risks.

In fact, as The American Prospect reported, “Trump has wreaked havoc on American food safety infrastructure.” For starters, in 2025, Trump dissolved the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods. This committee was set up in 1988 under President Reagan to provide scientific advice and coordinate best practices for defending against dangerous microbes at all levels of government. Yep, the very type of parasite we are seeing now impact thousands of Americans.

Beyond that, Trump eliminated jobs of people charged with inspecting places like Taylor Fresh. As of February of 2026, the US Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service had lost 913 staff members. The agency’s National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection was also eliminated. In sum, more than 20,000 workers left USDA last year.

In addition, the Food and Drug Administration has lost more than 4,000 employees meaning food safety inspections have been going undone. Maybe this explains the screw up by the FDA which announced Sunday that a previous test identifying the parasite in a sample of lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico was not actually contaminated with Cyclospora. The agency reviewed the results and said in a statement it “concluded that the finding does not represent true amplification and should be considered a false positive.”

Then there are Trump’s massive cuts to the Center for Disease Control—which helps track these types of health threats. Last year, the Trump administration’s CDC scaled back a federal-state partnership that monitors foodborne illnesses, including cyclospora--known as the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet.) That system had made cyclospora one of the key pathogens they would track—but that ended last year. All of this is why there has been a well-documented lag by CDC in reporting on the parasite outbreaks.

That means weeks into the largest parasitic explosive diarrhea outbreak ever—the Trump regime cannot tell us the source of the Cyclospora illness outbreak. And all of these cuts were made so Trump and GOP could give a tax cut to their wealthy donors at the expense of you and your family’s health!

That brings us to the latest wrinkle in this. After the FDA walked back the positive test results of Taylor Fresh’s products, some in media noted that Taylor had made a $1 million donation to Make America Great Again Inc. in March 2025. In addition, the head of the company, Bruce Taylor, has personally donated $400,000 in 2025 and 2026 to Trump and the GOP across several Republican-aligned PACs, including $100,000 to NRSC Victory, which is affiliated with the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

And just days before Trump’s FDA reversed itself, we learned that Taylor Farms company executives had met with White House and FDA officials. That raised questions about whether the big dollar donations to Trump and GOP the reason was the test results were dubbed inaccurate.

In response to news stories raising this, Trump’s Health and Human Services posted on social media a very Trumpian response: “This is how the FAKE NEWS works: imply collusion, ignore the facts.” The RFK Jr headed agency added without a hint of irony, “Nothing influences our decisions except science and the safety of the American people.”

Did Taylor Foods get special treatment? Who knows. But surprisingly on Sunday, they publicly slammed Trump administration’s response, saying there were “shortfalls in the FDA’s and CDC’s outbreak response process.” Ouch. When a big GOP donor is publicly saying the outbreak was made worse by Team Trump it says something.

The fact that GOP loving Taylor Fresh is slamming Trump should be getting more press. But the corporate media would rather just cover the outbreak—not Trump’s role in it. And by doing so it means we will see even more dangerous outbreaks like this in the future!

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For those interested below is the discussion we had about this topic on my Substack live segment, YOU ARE MY GUEST: