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The Donald Trump- JD Vance administration has sentenced Middletown, Ohio — Vice President JD Vance's hometown — to decades of environmental devastation by canceling a $500 million federal grant that would have transformed a major steel plant into the world's cleanest industrial facility.

Instead, Cleveland-Cliffs is now planning to reline its aging blast furnace with coal and coke, locking the region into at least 15 to 18 more years of toxic pollution and the health consequences that come with it.

According to The Guardian's Stephen Starr, new permitting documents filed with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency show the steel company is moving forward with a several-hundred-million-dollar investment to keep the fossil-fuel burning operation running indefinitely.

CEO Lourenco Goncalves has embraced the decision with Trump's own rhetoric. "Beautiful coal, beautiful coke," he announced to investors last summer, echoing the president's signature phrasing.

The No. 3 blast furnace, installed in the 1950s, consumes hundreds of thousands of tons of coke annually to produce around 3 million tons of raw steel per year.

The damage to the region will be catastrophic. Research from Industrious Labs estimates that over the 18 years following the furnace relining, the Middletown steel mill and its coke supplier, SunCoke Energy, will result in 810 to 1,476 premature deaths, 132,300 lost school days, and numerous other serious health ailments.

The facility is already the 11th worst carbon monoxide emitter in the United States, according to EPA data from 2020.

Local residents are already suffering. Vivian Adams, who moved to Middletown from Louisville just four years ago, has watched her six-year-old daughter's health collapse.

"My daughter was born prematurely so she already had lung issues, but it's gotten worse. She stays sick and coughing and can't breathe. She's had to go on everyday medication for her asthma, plus she has a rescue inhaler," Adams said.

The environmental contamination is inescapable. "The smell some days is absolutely awful," Adams said. "We sit on our chairs and there's a bunch of black stuff on them, on our vehicle, it's soot. It's on their toys, so you can't leave them outside."

The Biden administration had attempted to modernize the facility. The $500 million grant would have replaced the coke-burning infrastructure with a hydrogen-powered furnace that, according to some analyses, would have made Middletown the lowest greenhouse gas-emitting steel plant in the world.

Instead, Trump and Vance have prioritized fossil fuels over clean energy and human health in the vice president's own backyard.

Trump's embattled surgeon general nominee took another hit this week when the president's own former Surgeon General Jerome Adams publicly called for her rejection, saying Casey Means is fundamentally unqualified for the job.

According to the Washington Post, Adams has made it clear he views Means as lacking the necessary credentials and is actively working to tank her nomination — a particularly damaging blow since no past surgeon general has stepped forward to defend her.

Means's nomination has stalled in the Senate for nearly 11 months, with several Republicans raising serious concerns about her vaccine skepticism, her antagonism toward the medical establishment, and her inactive medical license. Multiple lawmakers have expressed frustration with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s vaccine policy agenda and are now reluctant to confirm another one of his ideological allies.

Adams framed his opposition in structural rather than personal terms, but his critique was scathing.

"The role of surgeon general has centuries of precedent and requirements, and she doesn't meet them," Adams said in an interview.

He highlighted a particularly damning reality: if Means is confirmed to oversee the Public Health Commissioned Corps — a 6,000-person force of government health workers — she would not be appointed as a physician. Instead, she would be slotted into a different category reserved for health-service workers.

"The irony would be the nation's doctor wouldn't even be in the corps as a doctor," Adams said.

The structural problem stems from Means abandoning her surgical residency in its final year and subsequently rejecting mainstream medicine in favor of functional medicine — an approach that focuses on lifestyle interventions rather than traditional medical practice.

Means has defended her qualifications by citing her role as co-founder of a health care technology company, her speaking engagements on chronic disease, and her best-selling book "Good Energy," which has become a cornerstone of Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again movement. She placed her Oregon medical license in inactive status because "she was not seeing patients over the past several years," according to her explanation.

When asked about criticism from past surgeons general, Means went on the attack. "Notably, under the tenures of our recent past Surgeon Generals, America's health and lifespans have worsened," she wrote — a deflection that avoided addressing her own qualifications gap.

But Adams's intervention signals that the professional medical community views her as a legitimate threat to the office's credibility and mission.

Republican leaders at the state level are desperately trying to convince the White House that Donald Trump's Iran war, combined with skyrocketing food and gas prices, is heading toward a catastrophic midterm collapse for the party.

According to Politico's Samuel Benson and Liz Crampton, there are serious concerns that Republican candidate turnout will plummet significantly. GOP canvassers knocking on doors have encountered registered Republicans literally chasing them away with threats to call the police.

Each passing week of war compounds the economic damage. Economists warn gas prices could remain elevated for months even if the U.S. immediately de-escalates with Iran. Extended conflict also risks mounting American casualties, particularly if ground troops deploy to combat zones — a nightmare scenario for a president who promised to end "forever wars."

The political danger is acute. MAGA voters backed Trump partly because of their explicit rejection of endless foreign interventions and regime change operations. The war threatens to demoralize the very base Trump needs to show up in November.

GOP strategists and county chairs acknowledge the crisis, though they're still willing to give Trump time to course-correct.

"What's the end game? I don't think the president has been clear about that," said Todd Gillman, chair of the Monroe County Republican Party in Michigan. "The gas prices are a problem. We're concerned how this might affect the midterms."

Craig Berland, chair of the Maricopa County, Arizona, Republican Party, described the turnout threat bluntly.

"I don't think it's going to impact Republicans' desire to vote Republican, but I do believe that that turnout will be an issue," Berland said. "If the war drags on, that is going to impact the turnout, unless we are very, very successful in communicating and educating."

The on-the-ground reality is even more dire than internal polls suggest.

"We're even going around canvassing neighborhoods and registered Republicans are yelling out the door, 'go away, or I'm calling the police,'" Berland said. "I find that very discouraging."

The rage stems from two sources: "the war or the economy. And the economy is defined largely by energy prices."

Buzz Jacobs, a GOP strategist and White House official under George W. Bush, warned that wars consume all political oxygen.

"These types of major events can become all-consuming. They certainly suck up political capital, and they make it very difficult for the most senior officials, particularly the President, to focus on any other strategic objective."

Farmers are getting hammered. Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz have sent fertilizer prices skyrocketing just ahead of planting season across Pennsylvania, North Dakota, and other agricultural states. Desperate producers are scrambling to replant with crops requiring less fertilizer — a decision that could trigger lower yields and spike food prices this summer.

North Dakota Farmers Union President Matt Perdue acknowledged the compounding crisis.

"We've had just a pile of uncertainty, a pile of volatility in the markets that we buy from and sell to and we're just creating more volatility, more uncertainty as we move ahead."

Farmers have historically been Republicans' most loyal constituency and Trump supporters. But now they're facing a devastating dual catastrophe: tariffs that destroyed foreign markets for their crops, combined with war-driven fertilizer costs that are obliterating their margins.