The Cyclospora Administration

Between May 1 and August 31, 2026 the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) received reports of 19,595 confirmed domestic cases of Cyclospora cayetanensis infection, aka cyclosporiasis. Food Safety Magazine reported that state counts were higher, although some of the difference is because states report probable and confirmed cases while the CDC reports only confirmed cases. Cyclosporiasis is an intestinal illness caused by ingestion of food or water that has come in contact with human feces – in other words, eating shit¹. Once the parasite has been ingested it infects the lining of the intestines where it reproduces and forms an “egglike structure” called an oocyst, which passes out of the body in stool. Oocysts need 1 to 2 weeks to mature. Per the Mayo Clinic, common cyclosporiasis symptoms can include watery diarrhea, stomach cramps, bloating, loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, and fatigue.

In July, Taylor Farms, one of the largest produce suppliers in the US, announced that it was “voluntarily removing” iceberg lettuce that originated in Mexico, after the FDA stated that it had identified a Taylor subsidiary as a source of lettuce contaminated with cyclospora. The contaminated lettuce had been supplied to fast-food chain Taco Bell among other outlets. Walmart announced that it was removing Taylor-sourced products from its stores, although they reported “no confirmed illnesses.”

Taylor Farms has been associated with at least three other instances of contaminated products dating back to 2013. In 2024 Taylor onions used on McDonald’s Quarter Pounders were found to be contaminated with E. coli – bacteria that normally lives in the gastrointestinal tract of healthy people and animals. In 2020 Taylor recalled several products containing onions, this time contaminated with Salmonella – another bacteria spread through shit. And in 2013 Taylor products sourced in Mexico were linked to another cyclospora outbreak. A CNN investigation found that Taylor had been associated with other cyclospora or E. coli outbreaks as well, and “regularly downplayed the seriousness of the problems and insisted it found no evidence its produce was contaminated.” In August 2026 CNN reported that Taylor Farms founder and CEO Bruce Taylor at one time chaired an industry group that advocated an end to food pathogen monitoring, and that the company has “spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying Congress in recent years on food regulations.” The FDA, however, had not sent an inspector to Taylor Farms’ Mexico site since 2019, and between January and June 2026 had inspected only 5 of the more than 168,000 Taylor produce shipments from Mexico.

In separate incidents, more than 19 million eggs were recalled in July due to salmonella contamination, and in late June hundreds of cases of people becoming sick from eating contaminated jalapeno peppers were reported. (The jalapeno incident also included items sourced from Taylor Farms.) And between May 11 and June 5 illness eventually traced to Publix Super Market blueberries contaminated with E. Coli were reported in Florida and Georgia.

Meanwhile the Trump administration is shutting down three USDA projects that constitute nearly all the department’s research on cyclospora. Congress defunded two projects earlier this year; a third was moved from Maryland to Iowa in a departmental reorganization, but none of the scientists working on it chose to relocate.

As reported by CBS, plans for the FDA to end most food safety inspections were already underway in early 2025. One possibility under discussion would shift routine food inspections to the states, where some are outsourced already, although officials speaking to CBS characterized the work normally assigned to states as “lower-risk.” Layoffs of FDA support staff were expected to reduce the number of inspections the FDA can handle, and Commissioner Marty Makary had reportedly ok’d plans to hire contract workers, although observers were skeptical. Consumer Federation of America’s director of food policy, Thomas Gremillion, told CBS that “any plans to replace federal food inspectors with some other workforce deserves suspicion.”

According to Janet Hamilton of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, the number of outbreaks of food-borne illnesses is not so different from other years, but (1) these seem more severe, and (2) there’s less staff to deal with them. Hamilton’s organization found that “one-third of public health officials in state health departments have left their positions since the Trump Administration took control in 2025.” Part of this trend is a follow-on effect from federal budget cuts to the CDC and FDA, since “more than half of state and local health department budgets” come from federal funds. In the federal government tens of thousands of people have been fired from health-related jobs, including FDA, CDC, and USDA, including over 900 members of the Food Safety and Inspection Service.

Adding insult to injury, so to speak, as reported by the Guardian (UK) in late August, the US faces a possibly toilet paper shortage with Canada threatening tariffs on paper goods of between 25% and 50%.

The US accounts for more than 20% of global tissue consumption despite having only 4% of the world’s population. The average American uses 141 rolls of toilet paper per year, making them No 1 for No 2s globally, just ahead of Germans, each using an average of 134 rolls annually.

Trump’s communications anticipated the cyclosporiasis infections when, in response to the October 2025 No Kings protests, he posted an AI-generated video in which he dumps what NBC called “apparent fecal matter” on protesters in New York’s Times Square.

In their introductory psychology textbook Psychology: the brain, the person, the world, authors Stephen M. Kosslyn and Robin S. Rosenberg describe Sigmund Freud’s anal stage of psychosexual development as lasting from approximately age 1½ to 3. “The primary zone of pleasure shifts from the mouth to the anus,” they write. “Retaining and expelling feces are the primary pleasures in this stage….” The battle of wills between parents and child over toilet training can result in a “fixation” in adulthood.

One type of fixation, the anal-retentive, can be thought of as producing a constipated personality that waits until the last moment to “go.” Such people are more likely to delay gratification, and, according to Freudian theory, are neat, methodical, miserly, and stubborn. In contrast, the anal-expulsive personality is characterized by cruelty, destructive acts, emotional outbursts, and a disregard for conventional rules.

In a 1913 discussion of what he terms “pregenital organization of sexual life” Freud designates “anal-erotic and sadistic” impulses to be the dominant “component instincts” of that stage of development. He describes two aspects of the relationship between the anal phase and the potential for sadism. The first factor is that the act of excreting is an exercise of control, in which the subject starts and ends production of shit. The second factor is the power the child exerts of his/her parent by making or withholding shit. In Freud’s analysis the child is more dependent on the mother in the oral stage, when the child’s focus is on breastfeeding, while in the anal phase the child has more control. In the anal stage of development all objects the child desires are something he/she can exercise control over. Psychiatrist Sidney Tarachow saw feces as having special “narcissistic value” for the child – i.e. he/she regarded it as still a part of them. This expands on Freud’s view of the issues around taking a shit as embodying the tension between the child’s love for itself (narcissism) represented by his body product, and the developing love for people outside himself (aka objects), usually initially the mother. (For in-depth discussion of narcissism see also "The Further Adventures of Episodic Man", and "'Masse' and Group Attitudes".)

University of Melbourne’s Nick Haslam noted in 2011 that, although Freud’s concept of “anal character” had fallen out of favor in psychiatric circles “as studies failed to support the psychoanalytic explanation of its origins and enthusiasm for psychoanalysis dwindled,” it reappeared under different names in research programs active as of the time of his writing. Haslam proposes that personality traits such as “authoritarianism, conscientiousness, detail focus, disgust sensitivity, hoarding, obsessive–compulsive personality disorder, perfectionism, and Type A” have what he terms a “family resemblance” to Freud’s “anal character.” Haslam suggests “that the anal character has not so much been consigned to the scrap heap of bad ideas, but has been recycled into several smaller but better ones.”

In his essay Character and Anal Erotism, Freud wrote “To relate obstinacy to an interest in defaecation would seem no easy task; but it should be remembered that even babies can show self-will about parting with their stool….” Freud goes on to describe an “extensive” connection between money and defecation.²

… [W]herever archaic modes of thought have predominated or persist - in the ancient civilizations, in myths, fairy tales and superstitions, in unconscious thinking, in dreams and in neuroses - money is brought into the most intimate relationship with dirt. We know that the gold which the devil gives his paramours turns into excrement after his departure…. We also know about the superstition which connects the finding of treasure with defaecation, and everyone is familiar with the figure of the ‘shitter of ducats [Dukatenscheisser³]’. Indeed, even according to ancient Babylonian doctrine gold is ‘the faeces of Hell’ (Mammon = ilu manman).

Gold as a symbol of divine excrement also appears in Aztec culture. The name of the god Tlazolteōtl means “Deity of Dirt,” and was also called Tlahēlcuāni, which has been translated as “she who eats dung.” Offerings to Tlahēlcuāni included gold, which in the Nahuatl language is teocuitlatl, meaning divine excrement (or holy shit).

“Trump’s return to the White House has brought with it a tackiness not often seen in the office of a head of state. Not one that got there by winning an election, anyway,” the Daily Mirror (UK) quipped in April 2025. “It's a combination of his natural taste in decor - he famously loves gold. Gold things. Gold walls. Gold skin tones - and a dictator's eye for trinkets and trophies.”

In the Oval Office Trump replaced tables, mirrors, added vases that the Mirror describes as projecting a “high school trophy cabinet vibe.” On and adjacent to the fireplace Trump added what the Mirror refers to as “generic” gold sconces, which they report as available “on Alibaba for under a tenner.” Formerly beige chairs were reupholstered in a gold pattern. CBS’s Inside Edition reported in May 2025 that several of the gold items could have been plastic molds from Home Depot that had been painted gold. Fact checking site factually.co reports “no conclusive forensic proof” that the Oval Office gold accents are 24-karat gold.

But as Trump adds gold or the appearance thereof to the White House, nations around the world have been withdrawing actual gold from reserves in the US. In early September the Netherlands announced that they were relocating about half of the gold they had stored with the Federal Reserve in New York. The move by the Netherlands followed a shift by France of approximately 5 percent of its gold holdings from New York to Paris. France had previously moved 300 tons of gold from New York to Paris during the first Trump administration.

Finally, from the concrete metaphor of shit as gold, we turn to the realm of language as bullshit. In his 1986 essay On Bullshit, philosopher Harry Frankfurt defines bullshit as statements with a lack of connection to a concern with the truth and an “indifference to how things really are.” As we’ve noted elsewhere,

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled. whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others.to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.

Harvard economist Jason Furman’s analysis of Trump’s failure to understand basic economics is a case in point. In a 2025 op-ed in the New York Times, Furman described the flow of funds in international trade: the US buys goods from other countries, paying for them in dollars; the countries then invest the dollars in the US where they are the native currency – some goes to business raising funds for new facilities, some goes to Treasury bonds or other federal instruments to fund the budget deficit. As the budget deficit increases, the government borrows more money, which drives up interest rates, which increases the value of the dollar relative to other currency, making US products more expensive and foreign products less. And the US trade deficit increases. Furman’s first point with this analysis is that the tax cuts in Trump’s big bill will drive up the budget deficit and the trade deficit. “All of this may seem counterintuitive,” Furman wites, “but it’s one of the few things that economists agree about.”

In an earlier piece Furman used the analogy of his local bookstore to describe the absurdity of Trump’s view of tariffs. “My local bookstore has been taking advantage of me for years,” he writes. “I have run a trade deficit, giving it money with nothing but books in return.” At the same time, he continues, he’s been taking advantage of his employer: Furman receives money as his salary, and his employer receives nothing but educational services in return. These obvious logic errors are directly analogous to Trump’s tariff argument, Furman writes. Trump’s assertion that a US trade deficit with another country means that country is taking advantage of the US. “Every step in this chain of reasoning is wrong,” says Furman. Imports are good, not bad, provide variety to consumers, enable US companies to offer better products at lower prices through use of imported components, and allow US businesses to devote more resources to industries that produce exports for us, such as tech and aerospace. Reciprocal tariffs, Furman asserts, will lessen the overall volume of trade. Trump’s picking-and-choosing where to apply them and not creates “enormous” business uncertainty, and likely lower economic growth. “Lower-income families will pay a higher fraction of their income in tariffs, but the revenue will very likely go to tax cuts skewed to high-income households.”

While Trump’s nonsense economics may meet Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit, as McGill political science professor Jacob T. Levy observed in 2016, many Trump administration lies are “too big, too obvious, and too free of any evidence” to qualify as bullshit or gaslighting.

CNN’s Daniel Dale chronicled 13 lies Trump made in one cabinet meeting in December. Trump claimed he had secured more than $18 trillion in investment commitments since the start of his second term, when the actual figure was around half that. He claimed grocery prices had declined when in fact they were up nearly 3% over the prior year. He made the now famous claims that he was cutting prescription drug prices by 500% to 900%, which is mathematically meaningless. He claimed that his domestic policy bill eliminated tax on Social Security, when in reality it merely increased temporarily the standard deduction for people aged 65 and over. Etc.

In his recent portrait of departing Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt for The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait wrote “The lie is the elemental matter of the Trump administration.” This state of affairs, says Chait, makes the press secretary’s job less important than it normally is. Chait doubts that Leavitt would have known how to engage in spin; instead, he writes, she repeated talking points ad infinitum, “sprinkling in heavy doses of personal abuse and slander.” Leavitt’s audience – and by extension the audience of most public statements by administration officials – is “loyalists who require no convincing and who believe that any news story that reflects poorly on Trump is by definition a hoax.”

Between August 3 and September 11 2026, the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org documented more than a dozen major false and misleading public statements by Trump or administration officials.

“Trumpism barely tries to convince the public because it barely has to do so,” wrote independent journalist Karl Bode shortly after the 2024 election. “A vast unopposed web of well-funded bullshit artists have spent decades doing all the heavy lifting. After all, there’s plenty of money to be made in exploiting valid public anger at widespread institutional failure to further befuddle, distract, and confuse the American electorate.”

As we approach midterm elections, however, the situation has changed. A recent Associated Press-NORC poll found that mistrust of the government is higher than it was at the end of Trump’s first term, “underscoring how his recent attempts to dismantle parts of the federal bureaucracy may have affected public confidence in the executive branch, particularly among Democrats.”

“I love Trump. I voted for Trump,” a middle-aged Missouri Republican told the AP. “But some of the things he’s doing just makes me distrust more,” he continued, mentioning in particular stunts like Trump’s recent renaming of Lake Ontario.

The AP-NORC poll found that only about one-quarter of voters of either party trust their party’s campaign messages to be factual. However, a New York Times poll released September 15 found that voters trust Democrats over Republicans on all but one of eight issues including immigration, the economy, and health care. (The one issue was AI.)

As of September 19, the latest New York Times/Siena poll shows Democrats 8% ahead in the generic congressional ballot, and the You Gov/Economist poll shows Democrats ahead 12% among likely voters. Based on these numbers pollster Nate Silver, who for some time has predicted Democrats re-taking the House, now gives Democrats a 65% chance of also retaking the Senate.