Gilani is a graduate student journalist for Medill on the HIll, a program of Northwestern University in which students serve as mobile journalists reporting on events in and around Washington, D.C.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to include information from a letter the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services submitted in response to the Senate hearing.
In February of 2023, the U.S. Senate Human Rights Subcommittee Chairman Jon Ossoff launched a bipartisan inquiry following reports that children in the care of Georgia’s state government have been subject to abuse and neglect.
In 2018, the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) placed 2-year-old Brooklyn Aldridge in the care of her estranged father and his girlfriend, after the toddler’s mother was arrested. Brooklyn’s mother, Rachel Aldridge, repeatedly objected to the placement, worried that her daughter was put in an unsafe environment.
When Aldridge was released from jail, she visited Brooklyn’s father’s home and reported a bruise on her daughter’s leg. The child welfare agency did not take any action.
After six weeks in her father’s care, Brooklyn was killed by his girlfriend, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2019. The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.
The ongoing inquiry, led by Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., held its first public hearing Wednesday as it examines threats children face in foster care institutions in Georgia and across the country. The ultimate goal of the investigation is to prompt reforms at both state and federal levels.
“Brooklyn would still be alive if anyone at DFCS had just been willing to listen to me, her own mother,” Aldridge said before a Senate subcommittee on Wednesday. Aldridge took her first plane ride to testify at the hearing. She was one of more than a hundred witnesses that have testified during the eight months that the subcommittee had been investigating the foster care system.
Throughout the hearing, Sen. Ossoff repeatedly referenced a grim statistic. The Division of Family and Children Services failed to meet its obligations to assess risks and manage children’s safety 84% of the time. The number came from the agency itself in a 2023 internal audit.
After the hearing, DFCS lawyers sent a letter to Ossoff and Blackburn claiming some of the witnesses' and subcommittee members' statements were inaccurate. The letter said Brooklyn was ordered into her father's care by a Georgia superior court and was not in DFCS custody at the time of her death.
Melissa Carter, a witness and executive director of Emory University’s Child Law and Policy Center, said when a government agency intervenes in a family, it is obliged to continuously assess the safety of the children. For example, in the case of Brooklynn Aldridge, Carter said the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services should have better assessed options for a substitute caregiver by conducting background checks and remaining involved in her case.
“There’s this ongoing responsibility to be checking in, to just make contact with that child, with those caregivers, to continue to take in information, to adjust on the basis of changing circumstances,” she said.
We heard heartbreaking testimony from Rachel Aldridge, a Georgia mother, whose two-year-old daughter Brooklyn was murdered while in care — a proper background check had not been carried out. The reports that she had made about concerns for her daughter’s health and safety had not been heard.
Senator Ossoff spoke passionately of the testimony of Mon’a Houston, an inspiring 19-year-old young woman who had been in foster care and described being locked up like an inmate while she was in care and testified to being overmedicated, while she was in care.
In her time under the state of Georgia’s care, Houston said she was placed in group homes, institutions and hotels more often than in foster homes. “I would often go more than six months without seeing my caseworker. I felt alone,” she said.
Emma Hetherington, another witness at the hearing and a law professor at the University of Georgia, said the overarching structure, internal policies and administrative barriers of the Division of Family and Children Services obstruct its good work, causing her clients to “experience extreme harm.”
Among 35 of her clients, she said most of them made allegations of abuse or neglect against their foster care placement caregivers. All of them experienced “early childhood maltreatment.”
“The foster care system in Georgia has always struggled with systemic challenges and barriers, but I’ve never seen it as dismal as it is today,” she said in her testimony.
The Georgia Department of Human Services, the department that oversees the Division of Family and Children Services, declined to comment in an email to Medill News Service.
Chairman Ossoff hopes the testimony at the live hearing brings results. “Foster care is meant to provide sanctuary for our most vulnerable children,” he said. The first-hand testimony from children and parents who have suffered grievously is the first step in Congress’s effort to provide the facts needed to enact necessary reforms.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.