Mother Jones

As Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem talked about the need to apply constitutional rights to all citizens in a Thursday press conference,Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), ostensibly an unannounced guest, approached the podium.

“I’m Sen. Alex Padilla,” he is seen stating. “I have questions for the secretary.”

BREAKING: California Democratic Senator @AlexPadilla4CA just crashed DHS Secretary Noem’s press conference in LA and was forcibly removed. pic.twitter.com/Q2sUWiImAM

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) June 12, 2025

Despite the disclosure that he was a sitting US senator, at least four security members were seen forcibly pushing and dragging Padilla out of the room as he condemned the false narrative that the immigrants targeted in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda are criminals. Noem did not appear to acknowledge Padilla’s presence or his forced removal, while she continued with her speech defending the president’s deployment of the military in Los Angeles. Another video showed officers handcuffing Padilla.

In a statement, DHS falsely accused Padilla of failing to identify himself. (He can be heard in videos that have circulated on social media doing just that.) “Sen. Padilla chose disrespectful political theatre and interrupted a live press conference without identifying himself or having his Senate security pin on as he lunged toward Secretary Noem,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Mother Jones.

“Mr. Padilla was told repeatedly to back away and did not comply with officers’ repeated commands. US Secret Service thought he was an attacker, and officers acted appropriately. Secretary Noem met with Senator Padilla after and held a 15-minute meeting.”

The altercation comes amid a chilling use of law enforcement to arrest Democrats and elected officials peacefully protesting the administration’s immigration crackdown. Just this week, Democratic Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey was indicted on three counts after her protest outside an ICE facility last month. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who was also arrested at the same demonstration, but the charges against him were eventually dropped.

The unbridled willingness to punish elected officials, through forceful removal and criminal apprehension, marks a key escalation point in the Trump administration’s embrace of blatantly authoritarian tendencies, as they seek to crush dissent, peaceful or not. And it carries the tacit approval of the president. “If there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force,” Trump said this week in advance of his military-birthday parade in DC this weekend.

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On Monday, as ICE swept Los Angeles with raids in President Donald Trump’s escalating drive for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, a client of the Survivor Justice Center had an appointment for a court hearing.

The purpose was to secure a permanent, five-year restraining order against her abuser, who had already violated a temporary restraining order, according to Carmen McDonald, executive director of the organization, which supports immigrant survivors of domestic violence. The woman had been dealing with extensive physical abuse, McDonald said, which—coupled with her abuser’s violation of a prior order—made getting stronger protection critical.

But on Tuesday, the day after the hearing was to take place, McDonald learned from a staffer that the survivor had not shown up. Based on the woman’s immigration status, prior concerns she had shared with staff, the fact that ICE has been ramping up arrests at courthouses, and the agency’s ongoing raids across LA, McDonald and her staff believe the woman was likely afraid of being detained. As of Thursday, their client remains missing—“likely back with her abuser,” McDonald says. If so, she could be in serious danger: Advocates say survivors wind up at increased risk just after they file for a restraining order or try to leave an abuser.

“She literally had to choose [between] physical harm or potential [ICE] custody,” said McDonald, who added that the survivor had a pathway to citizenship independently from her abuser. McDonald believes that “it’s the fear and the tearing apart of families that kept her in a dangerous situation.”

“She literally had to choose: physical harm or potential [ICE] custody.”

McDonald is one of a half-dozen domestic violence service providers in the LA area who told Mother Jones that the increased presence of ICE over the past week is creating a chilling effect for their organizations and the undocumented survivors they serve. Despite President Donald Trump’s claims he would “protect women,” advocates contend that intense immigration enforcement in LA and elsewhere is putting women and LGBTQ people, who experience the majority of domestic violence, at increased risk by making them less likely to seek help for fear of being detained.

A recent federal policy change allowing immigration enforcement at domestic violence shelters and similar organizations has also created more barriers for undocumented survivors, who advocates say already deal with abusers threatening to report them to ICE or take their children out of the country as means of control.

“When you send enforcement agents into courthouses and you take such broad immigration actions, you’re actually making it less safe for survivors because of this chilling effect,” said Connie Chung Joe, chief executive officer of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California. “Now victims are more scared about getting detained or separated from their children and family, and that becomes scarier than [not] being able to protect themselves against their abusers.”

Local domestic violence advocates say the prospect of ICE appearing at shelters is their worst fear. That has become a more pressing concern since January, when the Trump administration rescinded guidance the Biden administration implemented characterizing domestic violence shelters and victim services centers, among others, as “protected spaces” where immigration enforcement should not take place due to the harm it could inflict on a community. The Trump administration’s updated guidance says ICE officials will make “case-by-case determinations regarding whether, where and when to conduct an immigration enforcement action in or near a protected area.”

According to Cristina Verez, legal and policy director at the immigrants’ rights organization ASISTA, the policy change led to “a flood of concerns and questions about what that meant for [domestic violence] orgs and how they could…protect everyone at those locations.” Several service providers in LA note that many of their staff are also from mixed-status families, making the concerns relevant to both staff and survivors.

“It’s the fear and the tearing apart of families that kept her in a dangerous situation.”

The policy change already appears to be having an impact. On Wednesday, LA city councilor Hugo Soto-Martinez said in a video posted to Instagram that ICE had shown up at a confidential domestic violence shelter, apparently in search of one person who was not present. “How they found out this information, we don’t know,” Soto-Martinez said in the video. (Federal laws protect individual survivors’ confidentiality, and many shelters keep their locations secret.) “These are places where people go and find refuge and try to be safe fleeing violence,” the lawmaker added. (His office did not immediately provide further information on the alleged incident; spokespeople for ICE, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and LA Mayor Karen Bass did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.)

Chung Joe, McDonald, and two other LA service providers say their organizations have seen increases just this past week in survivors calling and asking for advice on how to navigate ICE. “Our clients are calling and scared, asking, ‘Can I go to my doctor’s appointment? Can I go to this Pride event? Can I take my kids to school?’” McDonald said. She added that of the approximately 1,000 survivors her organization serves per year, 70 percent are immigrants and more than half of those are undocumented. Another LA-area service provider who is not being identified for fear of retaliation added: “Domestic violence programs, rape crisis programs, should be safe sanctuaries, and we can’t even guarantee that anymore.”

LA-area service providers said they have ramped up “know your rights” trainings and implemented pandemic-era precautions to avoid potential raids. One LA organization that supports South Asian survivors said that its staff has been working from home since Monday, leaving their in-person office temporarily closed.

Two other organizations located in areas close to raids also reported closing physical spaces where survivors can typically drop in to get resources; one provider said her organization left a note on its door instructing survivors to call their help line for assistance, and started what she calls “difficult conversations” with clients in shelter about how to prepare for the worst-case scenario: line up emergency contacts, gather their documents, and designate someone safe to take care of their kids if they are detained. “We don’t know if we’re sending a client to sit in a lobby to wait for a service, [if] ICE will come in,”the provider said.

Some providers say their clients have also been afraid to appear in-person for courthearings—as McDonald believes her missing client was—and have instead opted for virtual appointments. In California, state courts do not deport undocumented people, who can access domestic violence restraining orders and other family court services regardless of their status. Immigrant survivors of domestic violence and related crimes can also often access pathways to citizenship through special visas. But these protections can feel meaningless for undocumentedsurvivors in light of Trump’s mass deportation efforts coupled with ICE’s increasing presence in and near courthouses. “They can’t afford to be detained and separated from their children or their families, so they’d rather just stay with their abusers,” said Chung Joe.

“If we keep these individuals from walking through the doors to any of these facilities because of fear, then as society, we have failed them.”

Some lawmakers have floated special protections for domestic violence shelters that they say are newly relevant in light of what’s happening in LA. Susan Rubio, a Democratic state senator in California, has put forth a bill that would prohibit immigration enforcement in private sections of shelters for homelessness, human trafficking, and domestic violence, along with rape crisis centers, without a judicial warrant. “If we keep these individuals from walking through the doors to any of these facilities because of fear, then as society, we have failed them,” said Rubio, who is also a survivor of domestic violence. The legislation has passed the Senate and has been referred for committee hearings in the Assembly. Similar legislation was recently proposed in New York and signed into law:%20June%201%2C%202025) in Maryland.

Casey Swegman, director of public policy at Tahirih Justice Center, an organization that serves immigrant survivors, said she is “heartened that states are taking up the mantle,” adding that these bills “empower the staff at those agencies to leverage the law to better implement policies at their shelter.”

At the federal level, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) has reintroduced the WISE Act in this session of Congress, a bill that offers a slate of additional protections for immigrant survivors, including prohibiting protections at domestic violence shelters and similarly sensitive locations. “When ICE shows up at domestic violence shelters or arrests survivors seeking help, it only empowers abusers, who too often use immigration status as a threat to keep people in abusive situations. This also impacts public safety overall by making immigrants fearful of local police and less likely to report abuse,” Jayapal said in a statement provided to Mother Jones.

As promising as those bills may be, advocates say they cannot stem the immediate fear facing undocumented survivors, in LA and across the country. “Our clients are already living in fear,” McDonald, from Survivor Justice Center, points out. “Now, they’re afraid at home and they’re afraid in the community.”

If you or someone you care about is experiencing or at risk of domestic violence, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline by texting “start” to 88788 or calling 800-799-SAFE (7233) or visiting thehotline.org. The Alliance for Immigrant Survivors also offers a list of resources, and the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence maintains a directory of organizations across the state.

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This story was published first byProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up forProPublica*’s Big Story newsletter to receive our biggest stories as soon as they are published.*

In mid-April, President Donald Trump sat down in the Oval Office with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador to celebrate a new partnership. They had recently negotiated an extraordinary deal in which El Salvador agreed to incarcerate in a maximum security prison hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants that the Trump administration had labeled as violent criminals, though few had been convicted of such crimes. The US also sent back accused members of the notorious Salvadoran gang MS-13—which both the US and El Salvador have designated as a terrorist organization.

Bukele’s presidency has been defined by his successful crackdown against MS-13. He has jailed tens of thousands of alleged gang members, transforming one of the hemisphere’s most dangerous nations into one of its safest. Although human rights groups have criticized his tactics, Bukele remains extremely popular in El Salvador.

During their meeting at the White House, Trump praised his guest as “one hell of a president.” He shook Bukele’s hand, saying, “We appreciate working with you because you want to stop crime and so do we.”

A long-running US investigation of MS-13 has uncovered evidence at odds with Bukele’s reputation as a crime fighter. The inquiry, which began as an effort to dismantle the gang’s leadership, expanded to focus on whether the Bukele government cut a secret deal with MS-13 in the early years of his presidency.

New reporting on that investigation by ProPublica shows that senior officials in Bukele’s government repeatedly impeded the work of a US task force as it pursued evidence of possible wrongdoing by the Salvadoran president and his inner circle.

Bukele’s allies secretly blocked extraditions of gang leaders whom US agents viewed as potential witnesses to the negotiations and persecuted Salvadoran law enforcement officials who helped the task force, according to exclusive interviews with current and former US and Salvadoran officials, newly obtained internal documents and court records from both countries.

In a previously unreported development, federal agents came to suspect that Bukele and members of his inner circle had diverted US aid funds to the gang as part of the alleged deal to provide it with money and power in exchange for votes and reduced homicide rates. In 2021, agents drew up a request to review US bank accounts held by Salvadoran political figures to look for evidence of money laundering related to the suspected diversion of US funds. The list of names assembled by the agents included Bukele, senior officials and their relatives, according to documents viewed by ProPublica.

“Information obtained through investigation has revealed that the individuals contained within this submission are heavily engaged with MS-13 and are laundering funds from illicit business where MS-13 are involved,” the agents wrote. The people on the list “are also believed to have been funding MS-13 to support political campaigns and MS-13 have received political funds.”

The outcome of the request is not known, but its existence shows that the US investigation had widened to examine suspected corruption at high levels of the Bukele government.

The investigation was led by Joint Task Force Vulcan, a multiagency law enforcement team created at Trump’s request in 2019. Agents found evidence that the Bukele government tried to cover up the pact by preventing the extraditions of gang leaders who faced US charges that include ordering the murders of US citizens and plotting to assassinate an FBI agent.

In addition, US officials helped at least eight of their counterparts in Salvadoran law enforcement flee the country and resettle in the United States or elsewhere because they feared retaliation by their own government, current and former US officials said.

It has been clear from the beginning what Trump wants from El Salvador: an ally who would accept, and even imprison, deportees. Less clear has been what Bukele might want from the United States. In striking the deal with the Salvadoran president, Trump has effectively undercut the Vulcan investigation and shielded Bukele from further scrutiny, current and former US officials said.

Veterans of the Vulcan team are “concerned that all their work, the millions of dollars that were spent, going all over the United States, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, that it will be weakened for political reasons,” said a US official familiar with the investigation.

The task force worked closely with the Salvadoran attorney general’s office, whose prosecutors shared evidence from their own investigation of the gang negotiations and suspected graft in the Bukele government, according to current and former US and Salvadoran officials.

“There was good information on corruption between the gang and the Bukele administration,” Christopher Musto, a former senior official at Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, who worked on Vulcan, said about the Salvadoran investigation. “It was a great case.”

In May 2021, Bukele’s legislative majority in Congress ousted the attorney general and justices of the Supreme Court, which oversees extradition requests. Within seven months, newly installed justices reversed or halted six requests for senior gang leaders wanted in the US, according to interviews and documents.

“Bukele’s people were coming to the Supreme Court and saying under no circumstances are we extraditing the MS-13 leaders,” said the US official familiar with the investigation. “‘Delay, interfere, undermine, do what you have to do.’”

Senior Bukele officials helped an MS-13 leader with a pending extradition order escape from prison, according to court records, US officials and Salvadoran news reports. At least three other top gang leaders were released from Salvadoran custody after the US filed extradition requests for them, according to Justice Department documents.

Published accounts in the United States and El Salvador have reported allegations that Bukele also pushed for the return of MS-13 leaders to prevent them from testifying in US courts about the pact. Despite his government’s refusal to extradite gang bosses to the United States, the Trump administration in March deported one MS-13 leader accused of terrorism. The Justice Department is now seeking to dismiss charges against a second leader, which would allow him to be sent back to El Salvador, according to recent court filings.

The Justice Department declined to comment in response to questions sent by ProPublica. The State Department referred questions to the Justice Department.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to detailed questions.

“President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people and removing dangerous criminals and terrorist illegals who pose a threat to the American public,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson. “We are grateful for President Bukele’s partnership.”

Bukele, the Salvadoran Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Salvadoran Supreme Court did not respond to lists of questions. Bukele has repeatedly denied making any agreement with MS-13. The Trump administration’s deportation of MS-13 members to El Salvador, he said in a post on X, will enable security forces to dismantle the gang.

“This will help us finalize intelligence gathering and go after the last remnants of MS-13, including its former and new members, money, weapons, drugs, hideouts, collaborators, and sponsors,” the post said.

“Just Fear”

Bukele was elected president of El Salvador in February 2019, promising to fight the country’s ingrained political corruption and pervasive gang violence, which he called “one of the greatest challenges” facing the nation.

During his first term, Trump also made MS-13 a high-profile foe, calling it “probably the meanest, worst gang in the world.” In August 2019, Attorney General William P. Barr created the Vulcan task force, teaming federal prosecutors with agents of the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies. The goal: Eradicate MS-13.

For decades, MS-13 has bedeviled law enforcement in the Americas with its vast reach, extreme violence and complex culture. The initials stand for “Mara Salvatrucha.” “Mara” means a swarm, while “salvatrucha” has been said to refer to a clever Salvadoran, according to interviews and an academic study. The number represents the 13th letter of the alphabet, M, in homage to the Mexican Mafia, the powerful Southern California prison gang.

MS-13 emerged in the 1980s in Los Angeles among Salvadoran youths whose families had fled a bloody civil war. The gang expanded throughout the diaspora and, as the US deported planeloads of ex-convicts starting in the 1990s, took root in El Salvador. Although most of the leaders were serving sentences in El Salvador, a jailhouse council of 14 bosses, known as the “Ranfla,” used cellphones to micromanage criminal activities in US cities thousands of miles away.

The gang developed a reputation for torturing, brutalizing and dismembering its victims. Barr has called it “a death cult” in which violence is more important than riches.

“It was like a very violent mom-and-pop operation where the cousins and second cousins all want to be a part of it,” said Carlos Ortiz, who served as the HSI attaché in El Salvador from 2018 to 2024. “Minimal money, compared to others. Even though it’s an organization, a lot of it is just fear. Fear of the high-ranking bosses among the rest of the gang, that’s what drives it.”

Trained with military weapons, MS-13 warred with security forces in El Salvador, took over neighborhoods and generated one of the world’s worst homicide rates, driving an exodus of immigrants reminiscent of the 1980s. The Salvadoran Supreme Court designated the gang as a terrorist organization in 2015.

The Vulcan task force had about 30 members, including prosecutors, agents and analysts. Its director, John J. Durham, was a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York who had spent a decade pursuing MS-13 cliques on Long Island. Members of the task force worked from bases around the country and traveled to Mexico and Central America.

One of the founding investigators, Newark FBI agent Daniel Brunner, spoke fluent Spanish and had worked gangs for seven years. He became a roving specialist providing expertise, communications intelligence and court transcripts, sometimes in person and sometimes from a distance.

“Our idea was that Vulcan was like a SEAL Team 6, going in to help the different districts build cases,” Brunner, who is now retired, said in an interview.

Vulcan built on the longtime US presence and extensive influence in El Salvador, where the embassy has long funded and trained law enforcement agencies. FBI agents and others were embedded as advisers in police anti-gang and homicide units and worked with prosecution teams led by Attorney General Raúl Melara.

The US task force modeled its strategy on the ones used against Mexican cartels and Colombian narcoguerrillas: Break the power of the MS-13 bosses by extraditing them to face trial and prison in the United States.

On Jan. 14, 2021, six days before the end of the Trump administration, Durham and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray joined acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen when he announced “the highest-reaching and most sweeping indictment targeting MS-13 and its command and control structure in US history.”

Prosecutors charged the 14 members of the leadership council with major crimes including conspiracy to support and finance narcoterrorism. For more than two decades, the Ranfla ran a criminal network in the United States, Mexico and Central America that sanctioned the murders of Americans and trafficked drugs and arms, the indictment alleged.

The indictment contained a stunning charge: MS-13 bosses had taken the extraordinary step of giving an order, or “green light,” to assassinate an FBI agent working with local investigators in El Salvador. Embassy officials learned of the threat and evacuated the agent, according to interviews.

It is highly unusual for Latin American criminal groups to target a US agent—they have learned that it invites an overwhelming law enforcement response. The assassination plot was a sign that the US crackdown had rattled the gang chiefs, current and former officials said.

Vulcan on the Hunt

In conversations with American officials as president-elect, Bukele promised cooperation and welcomed their support against gangs and graft, even in his own Nuevas Ideas party, according to current and former US officials.

At a press event about the Vulcan task force in 2020, Trump asserted that in the past El Salvador “did not cooperate with the United States at all,” but now it had become a strong law enforcement partner.

Already, though, there had been news accounts alleging that Bukele had cut deals with gangs when he was mayor of San Salvador. Vulcan investigators quickly found evidence that top aides to the new president were negotiating a new pact with gang chiefs, according to interviews.

For more than a decade, MS-13’s control of the streets had made it a political force. It could deliver votes, ignite mayhem or impose order. A series of politicians had held talks with gang leaders to seek electoral support and reductions in violence in return for improved prison conditions and perks such as prostitutes and big-screen televisions.

The Bukele government adopted a more sophisticated bargaining strategy, according to current and former US and Salvadoran officials. During secret meetings in prisons and other sites, the president’s emissaries offered MS-13 leaders political power and financial incentives if they lowered the homicide rate and marshaled support for the Nuevas Ideas party, according to current and former US and Salvadoran officials and court documents.

The chief negotiator was Carlos Marroquín, a former rap artist and confidant of the president. Bukele had appointed him the director of a new Justice Ministry program known as “Reconstruction of the Social Fabric” that operated in impoverished communities.

Marroquín promised the Ranfla a central role in developing the program, control of neighborhood youth centers, power over urban turf and other financial and political benefits, according to current and former US officials, court documents and Treasury Department sanctions. Informants and communications intercepts indicated that some of the resources going to MS-13 came from US government aid, a violation of US law, according to interviews and documents.

“Money was going from us, from USAID, through to this social fabric group,” a former federal law enforcement official said. “They’re supposed to be building things and getting skills and learning. It was funding the gangs.”

Vulcan also gained information from two highly placed Salvadoran officials involved in the talks with MS-13. The officials provided inside information to US agents about the negotiations, which they said Bukele directed, according to interviews.

The accumulating evidence about the gang pact and the suspected misuse of US funds spurred the task force to broaden its initial focus and target alleged corruption in the Bukele government, current and former US officials said.

In April 2021, federal agents prepared a list of powerful Salvadorans for a financial review by the US Treasury Department. Bukele was one of the 15 names. So were Marroquín; Osiris Luna, the director of the national prison system and another alleged organizer of the gang talks; Martha Carolina Recinos, the president’s chief of staff; and other political figures and their relatives. The request asked the Treasury Department to search for possible illicit transactions in any bank accounts held in the United States by those on the list, according to documents seen by ProPublica.

The Vulcan task force was seeking evidence in US banks of money laundering tied to the diversion of USAID funding through the gang pact, the documents showed. Agents explained that the task force had “uncovered information that MS-13 members are in close contact with politically exposed persons in El Salvador,” referring to prominent government figures.

“The USAID funding is believed to have been laundered by the individuals submitted in this request,” who were suspected of “facilitating, supporting and promoting MS-13 through their official positions,” said the request, which was viewed by ProPublica.

Made under section 314A of the USA Patriot Act, the request for a canvass of US banks requires that investigators show reasonable suspicion rather than probable cause, which is a higher standard. The outcome of the request is unknown. The Treasury Department declined to comment. US prosecutors have not publicly accused Bukele and the others of crimes related to USAID funds.

As US investigators advanced in this political direction, they gained valuable information from the Salvadoran prosecutors who were pressing their own investigation of the gangs and the Bukele administration.

Known in English as Operation Cathedral, their probe was as ambitious and sensitive as the US one. Investigators had documented the secret jailhouse deals with MS-13 and the official attempts to cover them up. They also pursued leads that revealed alleged widespread corruption involving the country’s COVID-19 relief programs, according to current and former US and Salvadoran officials and documents. Political tensions increased as the Salvadoran prosecutors targeted the president’s inner circle and raided government offices, clashing with police who tried to stop them from searching the Health Ministry in one incident.

April 2021 was also when a delegation led by Attorney General Melara came to Washington to meet with leaders of Vulcan and other senior US officials. The prosecutors laid out their case against prominent figures in the Bukele government. The “impressive” presentation, a former US federal law enforcement official said, cited videos, phone intercepts and other evidence showing that Marroquín, prisons director Luna and others had clandestinely arranged for government negotiators and gang leaders to enter and leave prisons, smuggled in phones and destroyed logs of prison visits.

“Melara was very nervous because of the very high level of the people he was investigating,” a former US federal law enforcement official said.

Melara declined to comment, saying he does not discuss his work as attorney general.

Interference

On May 1, 2021—soon after Melara and his team met with US investigators—the Salvadoran Legislature, controlled by Bukele, voted to expel the attorney general and five justices on the Supreme Court.

The purge was a decisive step by Bukele to centralize power. It drew international condemnation. In El Salvador, critics denounced the president’s actions as a “self-coup.” On his Twitter page, Bukele began calling himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”

For Vulcan, the expulsions marked a dramatic shift in its investigation. The Supreme Court justices had signaled their willingness to sign off on some extraditions. Melara had been a helpful ally who reportedly pledged to do “everything necessary” to extradite the Ranfla members, many of whom were in custody in El Salvador. But it soon became clear that the government was no longer interested in handing over senior gang leaders.

“The next prosecutors were not willing to work with us,” said Musto, the former HSI official. “We were not closed out, but all these things that we had in place that we were moving to getting people back here slowed down to a snail’s pace.”

The first clash came over Armando Melgar Diaz, an alleged MS-13 leader who acted as a middleman between gangs in the United States and senior leaders in El Salvador. Melgar, known as “Blue,” had ordered the kidnapping of a family in Oklahoma that owed the gangs $145,000, collected money from a drug ring operating out of restaurants in Maryland and Virginia and was involved with killings in the US, according to an indictment and interviews with US officials. He was the first MS-13 member to be accused under terrorism laws.

The newly constituted Supreme Court voted to approve Melgar’s extradition but then reversed its decision, announcing that the matter needed further study. Later, Bukele’s new attorney general asked for a halt to the extradition. The reason: The United States had failed to guarantee that it would not seek the death penalty or life in prison, sentences not allowed under Salvadoran law.

The rationale made no sense to Vulcan prosecutors. The Justice Department had already promised that it would not pursue such punishments against Melgar, according to records and interviews. US and Salvadoran officials attributed the sudden reversal to fear that Melgar could link Bukele and his government to the pact with MS-13.

“Melgar Diaz was going to be the test case,” Musto said. “It was going to be an easy win for Vulcan.”

Information obtained by US agents included allegations that Bukele’s judicial adviser, Conan Castro-Ramírez, had called one of the new Supreme Court justices and told him to find ways to stop the extradition of Melgar, according to interviews. When the justice objected, saying that the extradition had already been approved, Castro allegedly ordered him to reverse it. “That’s why we put you there,” he said, according to the interviews.

The State Department sanctioned Castro for his role in assisting in the “inappropriate removal” of the Supreme Court justices and the attorney general. Castro did not respond to attempts to contact him.

A Salvadoran court sentenced Melgar to 39 years in prison for conspiracy to commit homicide, among other crimes. He was the first MS-13 leader whose extradition was blocked. Soon after, the US extradition requests for other gang chiefs ran into opposition.

“Bukele and his government are using the entire state apparatus to prevent these people from being extradited,” a person with knowledge of the Salvadoran judicial system said in a recent interview.

Miguel Ángel Flores Durel, a newly appointed Supreme Court justice who reportedly had served as a lawyer for a top MS-13 leader, made sure that the requests were never granted, according to the person with knowledge of El Salvador’s judicial system. Flores instructed colleagues “do not work on extraditions at all,” the person said.

In July 2022, El Salvador agreed to extradite two lower-ranking MS-13 members charged with the murders of Salvadoran immigrants in Long Island in 2016 and 2017 in which victims were butchered with axes and machetes. The Supreme Court also approved the return of Salvadorans not affiliated with the gang who were accused in the US of crimes such as murder.

This was a deliberate strategy, the person said. Flores said that El Salvador needed to continue some extraditions in order to “calm” US officials, who were complaining about the lack of cooperation with Vulcan, the person said. (Flores died in 2023.)

It didn’t work. The extradition of other criminals by the Bukele-aligned Supreme Court only emphasized the lack of cooperation on requests for the senior MS-13 leaders.

“We were never told officially that it wouldn’t happen, but it became impossible,” said Brunner, the former FBI agent.

In October 2022, Bukele’s new attorney general announced that criminals would first have to serve their sentence in El Salvador before being sent to the US—an interpretation of the country’s extradition treaty that differed from the previous Supreme Court.

“We aren’t going to be sending Salvadorans without them first paying for the crimes they have committed” in El Salvador, Rodolfo Delgado said.

Threats and Roadblocks

The Bukele government’s interference with the US investigation went beyond blocking extraditions, US officials said.

Senior Bukele allies also waged a campaign of harassment and intimidation against the Salvadoran officials who had investigated corruption and assisted the Vulcan task force, according to interviews with current and former US and Salvadoran officials.

The government threatened officials with arrest and sent police patrols to their homes, according to current and former US and Salvadoran officials. At least eight senior Salvadoran law enforcement and judicial officials fled El Salvador for the United States and elsewhere. Vulcan provided them with travel money, language classes, housing and help gaining legal immigration status and finding jobs. In one instance, a US Embassy official escorted a Salvadoran prosecutor out of the country because American officials believed his life was in danger, according to an official familiar with the incident.

The Salvadoran government also weakened special “vetted units” of the police that had worked with the FBI and other US agencies, according to current and former US officials.

Bukele’s allies didn’t stop there. They allegedly helped the escape or release from prison of at least four members of the MS-13 leadership council sought by Vulcan for alleged crimes in the US, according to interviews, court documents and press reports.

Elmer Canales-Rivera, alias “Crook de Hollywood,” was one of the most wanted of the Ranfla members. He had been imprisoned for several murders in El Salvador, including a case in which he reportedly helped suffocate and drown in insecticide a gang member who violated orders. In the United States, prosecutors had accused him of orchestrating murders and kidnapping across the nation for more than 20 years.

In November 2021, Canales escaped from prison. El Faro, a prominent investigative news outlet, and other Salvadoran media published stories that detailed how Marroquín had escorted Canales from the prison. The articles featured taped calls between gang members and a person identified as Marroquín discussing his role in the escape, along with photos of officials apparently attempting to remove jail logs to conceal their presence at the prison.

Canales was caught in Mexico and turned over to US authorities. Currently in prison awaiting trial, he has pleaded not guilty.

Over the next several months, three other MS-13 leaders disappeared from Salvadoran prisons, causing Durham, the head of the task force, to express his concern in a letter to the judge in New York overseeing the cases. At the time the Bukele administration had received extradition requests and Interpol notices, he wrote, the leaders had been in custody. Salvadoran media later reported that the country’s Supreme Court had formally denied the extradition requests for the three men.

The purge of the Supreme Court and prosecutors, the blocked extraditions and the disappearance of the MS-13 gang members marked a significant deterioration in relations between Bukele and the administration of President Joe Biden. Agencies across the government began looking for ways to push El Salvador to cooperate.

Acting US Ambassador Jean Manes announced a “pause” in relations with El Salvador and left the country. A veteran diplomat who had previously served in El Salvador, Manes had pressured Bukele in public and private, criticizing the extradition delays and his increasingly authoritarian rule, according to State Department officials.

“What are we seeing now? It is a decline in democracy,” Manes said shortly before her departure.

In December 2021, the Treasury Department issued sanctions against Bukele aides Luna, Marroquín and Recinos, blocking them from conducting financial transactions in the United States because of alleged corruption. None of them responded to questions sent to a Bukele spokesperson.

Nonetheless, former members of the task force said they felt that the Biden administration treated Vulcan as a lower priority and cut its resources. They said Biden officials saw the task force as a Trump initiative and wanted to focus on other law enforcement targets, such as human trafficking.

“As soon as the Biden administration came in, we were slowed down,” Brunner said. “There was a lot more red tape we had to go through.” Former Biden officials denied this was the case.

Whatever truce had existed between the Salvadoran government and MS-13 collapsed in March 2022. The country descended into chaos. Over one three-day period, some 80 people were killed in gang-related violence.

Bukele reacted forcefully. He declared a nationwide “state of exception” that suspended constitutional protections. Police began rounding up thousands of accused gang members and others. He announced the construction of the megaprison known as CECOT.

The policies proved tremendously popular. Murder rates dropped dramatically, though human rights advocates criticized the loss of civil liberties. Bukele dismissed their complaints.

“Some say we have put thousands in prison, but the reality is that we have set millions free,” he has said, an assertion he repeated to Trump in the Oval Office.

The Turnaround

Despite the harsh treatment of gang members—an estimated 14,500 people are now held in CECOT—one thing did not change: The Bukele government continued to refuse to extradite senior MS-13 leaders to the United States.

The reasons for Bukele’s alleged protection of the gang leadership versus his relentless pursuit of the rank and file are the subject of speculation in both the United States and El Salvador. One possible explanation, according to current and former US and Salvadoran officials: Bukele is aware that Vulcan was gathering evidence that could lead to criminal charges and political damage. The imprisoned leaders are potential witnesses to his alleged deal with MS-13, while El Salvador’s street-level gangsters are not.

In February 2023, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment for another group of leaders, most of whom operated a tier below the Ranfla, relaying its directives to gangsters on the streets. The 13 defendants were accused of terrorism and drug smuggling, among other charges.

The US announced it would “explore options for their extradition with the government of El Salvador.” The Justice Department declined to say whether any such requests had been made.

In filing the charges, prosecutors made their strongest public accusations yet about deals between the Bukele government and the gangs. Without naming the president or his allies, prosecutors alleged that MS-13 leaders agreed to use their vast political influence to turn out votes for candidates belonging to Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party in legislative elections in 2021.

The gang bosses also “agreed to reduce the number of public murders in El Salvador, which politically benefited the government of El Salvador, by creating the perception that the government was reducing the murder rate,” the indictment said.

As part of the arrangement, the senior MS-13 leaders demanded that the Bukele government refuse to extradite them, the indictment said. The alleged condition appears to be in effect. To date, none of the extradition requests for more than a dozen high-ranking gang members has been approved.

In the face of obstacles, Vulcan relied increasingly on the Mexican government for help. During the past four years, Mexican authorities have captured nine of the 27 MS-13 leaders named in the indictments and deported them to the United States, where they were arrested. This year, prosecutors obtained guilty pleas to terrorism charges from two lower-ranking bosses, including one who prosecutors said had helped implement the deal between the Bukele administration and the gang. Sentencing for the men is pending.

Since Trump took office this year, his administration has redirected Vulcan’s mission to also target Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the president has put in the spotlight.

There has been a remarkable recent development related to MS-13, however. After more than five years leading the Vulcan task force, Durham wrote letters asking the judge overseeing the cases to dismiss charges against two gang leaders in US custody, allowing them to be deported to El Salvador. The letters were dated March 11 and April 1, weeks after the Trump administration began negotiating the mass deportation deal with Bukele’s government.

César Humberto López Larios, a member of the Ranfla known as “Greñas,” had his charges dismissed and was returned to El Salvador with more than 250 Venezuelans and Salvadorans sent to CECOT as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation of migrants on March 15. López, identified in media reports, is featured in a slickly produced video posted by Bukele on X, kneeling in the prison, his head shaved. He had pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

Then, in April, Durham asked for the dismissal of terrorism charges against a lower-ranking MS-13 prisoner, Vladimir Antonio Arevalo-Chavez, alias “Vampiro,” according to recently unsealed court records. His defense lawyers are seeking to stall the request to give them time to fight his deportation to El Salvador. He has pleaded not guilty.

Durham acknowledged in his letters to the judge that the evidence against the two men is “strong.” After millions spent on an operation involving investigators and prosecutors from the US., El Salvador and other countries, Vulcan had amassed a trove of evidence aimed at incarcerating the MS-13 leaders who had overseen the killings, rapes and beatings of Americans. Prosecutors told defense attorneys they had more than 92,903 pages of discovery, including 600 pages of transcribed phone intercepts, 21 boxes of documents from prosecutors in El Salvador and 11 gigabytes of audio files.

Durham said prosecutors were dropping their pursuit of the cases “due to geopolitical and national security concerns.”

It was like a reverse extradition. Trump was giving Bukele the kind of high-level criminals that the United States had never received from El Salvador.

During the negotiations over the use of El Salvador’s prison, Trump officials agreed to pay some $6 million to house the deported men and acceded to an additional demand.

Bukele had one specific request, according to Milena Mayorga, his ambassador to the United States.

“I want you to send me the gang leaders who are in the United States,” she quoted Bukele as telling US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

For Bukele, she said in a broadcast interview, it was “a matter of honor.”

Mica Rosenberg contributed reporting, and Doris Burke contributed research.

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In May, the Department of Energy quietly introduced a proposal to eliminate its longstanding requirement that new buildings receiving funds from the agency be accessible to disabled people—a rule in effect across the federal government since 1980, thanks to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.

“Disability rights,” professor Jasmine Harris said, “are not uncontroversial as the Department of Energy claims.”

According to a document published in the Federal Register, the final rule will become effective July 15—unless it receives “significant adverse comments” by Tuesday, a month after the rule was proposed.

“The Department of Energy’s decision to rescind the Section 504 new construction accessibility requirement is a direct attack on disability rights and part of a broader pattern of civil rights rollbacks aligned with Trump-era policies,” said Robyn Powell, an assistant professor specializing in disability law at Stetson University College of Law.

“It is DOE’s policy to give private entities flexibility to comply with the law in the manner they deem most efficient,” part of the public document reads. “One-size-fits-all rules are rarely the best option. Accordingly, DOE finds good reason to eliminate this regulatory provision.”

“By labeling these long-established protections as ‘unnecessary and unduly burdensome,’” Powell said, the Department of Energy “is prioritizing private convenience over the civil rights of disabled people” in its rulemaking. (The agency did not respond to Mother Jones’ questions.)

More than 3,000 comments have been submitted so far, many after the launch of a campaign by the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF). “From our point of view, they cannot lawfully do this, because the regulations were reviewed by Congress,” said Claudia Center, the organization’s legal director. Beyond its mandated inclusion in the Federal Register, Center added, “There was no announcement, no press release that we saw” regarding the proposal—allowing it to largely slip under the radar.

The proposed rule, according to Center, “really just disrupts this whole idea of Section 504, and the regulations—which is that, over time, we’re going to have a more accessible society.” Attacks on Section 504’s disability protections through federal rulemaking are unprecedented, Center said.

Center’s wider concern: DOE’s move could be a blueprint for other Trump administration federal agencies to follow, extending it to a much wider range of buildings and institutions—a kind of trial balloon at a federal agency which draws less public attention, and controversy, than the departments of Health and Human Services and Education, for instance.

“The Department of Energy—not exactly an obvious hot spot for attacks on disability or other civil rights,” said University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor Jasmine Harris, who also specializes in disability law. “Anti-civil rights creep often happens away from the main stage, more likely to be under the radar.”

Cuts and opposition to disability rights and protections, Harris said, “such as the statutory requirements to require the new construction and alterations meet accessibility standards to comply with the law, are not uncontroversial, as the Department of Energy claims.”

In fact, Harris noted, this isn’t the agency’s first or only attack on civil rights via federal rulemaking. “The Department of Energy is seeking to eliminate a rule regulating a program that extends loans to minority-owned businesses because it purportedly conflicts with Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a recent Supreme Court decision addressing race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions,” she said.

“If we don’t put a line in the sand here,” Center said, “other agencies will try and do the same thing—and we really need to stop it at the outset.”

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To the untrained eye, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Ice Core Facility in Lakewood, Colorado, doesn’t look like much: a boxy brick building packed with shelves of ice-filled metallic cylinders 10 centimeters in diameter. But to the more than 100 scientists who pull from its frozen records annually, it’s a treasure trove of information on our changing climate.

The facility holds more than 13 miles—200 football field lengths—of tubes of ice collected from Antarctica, Greenland, and other parts of North America. Their contents can date back hundreds of thousands of years, allowing researchers to engage in scientific time travel. Crucially, the ice provides clues as to what’s in store for our climate down the road. But now President Donald Trump’s assault on science has put this invaluable resource at risk.

“If you drill down in an ice sheet, the deeper you go, the older the ice gets,” says Benjamin Riddell-Young, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies methane isotopes. One recent experiment involved analyzing molecules trapped in ancient ice from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide, including cores recovered from around 2 miles underground. “When the snow falls and compresses into ice, it forms these little bubble cavities that trap the air at the time the ice was formed,” he explains.

Those tiny bubble cavities can lead to big discoveries. Researchers have used prehistoric ice samples to determine global temperatures, weather patterns, and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations in the distant past. Ice cores have provided some of the best data for tracking climate change—and the researchers who use the NSF facility have racked up an impressive roster of publications. Just last year, some of them found that atmospheric CO2 is increasing 10 times faster than at any point in the last 50,000 years. In another study, published by the journal Nature in January, Riddell-Young and his former adviser, Ed Brook, a professor of earth, ocean, and atmospheric sciences at Oregon State University, linked increased wildfire activity during the last ice age to abrupt shifts in the prevalence of greenhouse gases.

Riddell-Young and Brook were studying the past, but their knowledge helps researchers better understand the effects of climate change today—including its likely role in the fires that ravaged Los Angeles. “We study the past in part because we want to calibrate climate models that we use for the future,” Brook says.

The urgency of ice-core research has intensified in recent years because, as the planet warms up, the historical record captured in the ice is slowly melting. The miles-deep ice should be safe for another century, but researchers are already finding water when they drill closer to the surface. “We came too late,” Margit Schwikowski, a recently retired professor at Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute, lamented in a report. “We need to speed up to safeguard heritage ice cores.”

Rising temperatures aren’t the only threat. Funding for Riddell-Young and Brook’s study and others like it also comes from the NSF, which keeps the Colorado facility cold and running. In the two months after their Nature study was published, the Trump administration fired 10 percent of the agency’s 1,500-person staff, including several specialists working in Antarctica. Federally funded researchers have lost grants mentioning climate change, leading their peers to remove the phrase from research proposals. But for scientists using the Ice Core Facility and studying the history of global climate, that can be exceedingly difficult.

The Trump administration also has proposed slashing the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, another key funder of climate research, by at least a quarter. Reductions of such magnitude would endanger that agency’s collaborations with universities—including the one where Riddell-Young works.

Geopolitical tensions, too, imperil US involvement in Arctic research. Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, international scientists have been cut off from Russian sections of the Arctic. Trump’s aggression toward Greenland and Canada also poses threats to the reserves. “It makes science diplomacy virtually impossible,” says Klaus Dodds, who studies polar geopolitics at the University of London.

Dodds, who is British, describes the United States as a “premier polar power” because of decades of investment in studying the region. But when asked about the future, his optimism fades: “Unfortunately, it could be imperiled because of these swinging funding cuts.” Oregon State’s Brook concurs. “I fear we’ll lose our competitive edge in science,” he says.

The science world is hedging its bets as US leadership wanes. In 2021, researchers from France, Italy, and Switzerland created the Ice Memory Foundation to collect and save ice cores from locations that are particularly endangered by climate change. Collaborating with 10 nations, the group, which is funded by private philanthropists and governments, collects cores from glaciers at risk of melting and plans to store them deep in the Antarctic Plateau, where temperatures are more stable.

Such efforts are essential, Riddell-Young points out, because “there’s questions that we don’t know we should be asking yet.” And then, “maybe 30 years down the line, we’ll say, ‘If only we had an ice core from this location, we could have answered this, but now that ice core is gone.’”

The administration has continued to chip away at Arctic science, alongside widespread cuts to all US science disciplines.

In April, the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota lost its funding. In early May, NOAA decommissioned its snow and ice data products. A mid-May analysis by the New York Times found that there is an 88 percent monetary reduction in the average grants awarded this year for polar science, as opposed to the average of previous years.

Last month, the Trump administration released its proposed budget, which encourages Congress to slash the NSF by over half, citing “climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences.” While Antarctic infrastructure funding, which maintains the Arctic stations, remains relatively unscathed, 70 percent of the research funding in the Office of Polar Programs is proposed to be cut.

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The Trump administration is investigating whether former President Joe Biden was so enfeebled that his advisers secretly ran the country on his behalf. House Republicans and Trump’s obsequious new pardon attorney are likewise probing whether Biden’s aides issued pardons without his knowledge. “Although the authority to take these executive actions, along with many others, is constitutionally committed to the President,” stated Trump’s executive order initiating the investigation, “there are serious doubts as to the decision making process and even the degree of Biden’s awareness of these actions.” If Biden wasn’t aware of them, the order states, the actions may be void.

Trump’s indifference to the job is the modern incarnation of a problem that defenders of a strong presidency have always ignored.

The country is only starting to understand the extent of Biden’s decline, with the truth somewhere between the fully-capable Biden his White House insisted on and the Weekend at Bernie’s presidency Trump has conjured. But the ongoing investigations by Trump and his allies must inevitably reckon with a separate but important question: What exactly is the job of the president, and how much incapacitation or delegation is too much?

It is ironic that these questions are being pressed so forcefully by Trump, who himself is uninterested in much of the work of governing. The irony deepens when you consider that Trump and his administration are seizing power under the theory of the “unitary executive,” the idea that a single person, the president, embodies the entire executive branch and must have the power to hire, fire, and direct executive agencies as he desires. This theory so clearly animates the Trump administration that it is infused in the text of the executive order on the Biden investigation, especially in a section that makes an issue of Biden’s use of an autopen. The president, it states, “as the unitary head of the executive branch, holds tremendous power and responsibility through his signature… The Nation is governed through Presidential signatures.” That is not how American government is supposed to operate, but, as Trump’s own executive order concedes, the fantasy of unchecked presidential power only works if the president is actually in charge.

The Supreme Court, now dominated by proponents of a unitary executive, is seizing on Trump’s illegal power grabs to further etch the theory into Constitutional law. From allowing Trump’s illegal firings of independent commissioners to take effect to greenlighting the Department of Government Efficiency’s access to troves of Social Security data in likely violation of the law, the court’s GOP-appointed majority is a embracing a vision of executive authority that overrides Congress’s laws and grows the powers of the White House. At the very moment that the country is grappling with whether the last president was significantly diminished, followed by a president with a clear disdain for much of the job, the courts continue to hand the office increasingly king-like powers on the theory that the president alone must run the show.

“The overall problem is that the unitary executive theory is a fiction,” says Christine Chabot of Marquette University Law School. “Unitary executive theory seems to think that, at its extreme, the president is in control of all policy decisions made in the executive branch. And that’s just an impossibility. It has been since day one. George Washington could never have controlled all the executive branch decisions that were being made when he was president, and it’s even more true now.”

During Trump’s first term, it was well known that the president didn’t like to read, thus limiting his intake of memos and policy briefs. This time around, Trump’s disengagement may be worse. In May, Politico reported that Trump had only sat for 12 briefings with intelligence officials since his inauguration, a dangerous abdication compounded by the fact that he doesn’t appear to read the intelligence briefs thatare produced for him five days a week.

There are many such signs of Trump’s detachment.In an ABC interview marking the first 100 days of his second term, Trump deferred the question of whether immigrants he has condemned to a notorious El Salvadoran prison were owed due process, saying, “They get whatever my lawyers say.” Of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man his administration mistakenly sent there, Trump appeared to believe his own administration’s false propaganda that Abrego Garcia had tattooed the transnational gang name “M-S-1-3” on his knuckles. The episode raised the question of whether Trump is informed by his aides or deceived by them.

Musk’s role suggests Trump is not fully in charge—not because he is incapable of leading, but because he just doesn’t want to.

Then there is Elon Musk. In the first months of this administration, the president outsourced to the world’s richest man the project of dismantling his own government. He did this, reportedly, without keeping tabs on the operation and possibly misunderstanding its mission. Of Musk’s promise to cut $1 trillion in spending, Trump recently wondered, “Was it all bullshit?”

According to an astonishing Wall Street Journal report, Musk “often surprised senior administration officials with his decisions” and “made dramatic government cuts without consulting others, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.” Trump’s top aides learned second-hand what DOGE was doing, and Musk made “cuts at the Health and Human Services Department that some in the West Wing disagreed with.” There is surely an element of political opportunism in these leaks, distancing Trump from Musk’s most unpopular actions as he slinks away from Washington. But they are also an extraordinary account of a president who is not fully in charge—not because he is incapable of leading, but because he just doesn’t want to.

Related### The Legal Theory Behind Trump’s Power Grabs

The idea of an incapacitated or uninterested president whose administration is surreptitiously run by his aides gnaws at the logic of the unitary executive theory. The theory rests on the thin reed of two clauses in Article II of the Constitution, which vest executive power in the president and charge the president with ensuring the laws are faithfully executed. To add meat to these bones, Chief Justice John Roberts, whose judicial opinions have given constitutional life to the unitary executive theory, has also adopted a long-running argument that endowing the president with more power over the executive branch leads to more democratic accountability.

This is the constitutionalization of the general idea that,as President Harry Truman put it,the buck stops at the Resolute Desk. If every member of the executive branch operates according to the president’s will and at the president’s pleasure, then voters know who to blame when something goes wrong. The executive power “acquires its legitimacy and accountability to the public through ‘a clear and effective chain of command’ down from the President, on whom all the people vote,” Roberts wrote in 2021.

“The functional argument is its democratic responsiveness,” explains New York University law professor Noah Rosenblum. “That requires some amount, at least theoretically, of presidential involvement, engagement, invigilation…that’s supposed to go along with a sense that the president is genuinely seeing what’s going on.”

Roberts himself has flicked at the necessity of an active executive. The founders, he wrote in his 2024 decision granting presidents broad criminal immunity, envisioned a “‘vigorous’ and ‘energetic’ Executive… for a ‘feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government.’” While Alexander Hamilton, whom Roberts quotes in that passage, wrote those words to argue for a single president over an executive branch run by multiple people, the need for a sole point of authority—much less an energetic one—is theoretically incompatible with a tired president whose aides run the show. Roberts’ further justified presidential immunity as a critical condition for the president to execute his duties “fearlessly.” The further you get from a vigorous president making all the decisions, the less important immunity theoretically is.

On the other hand, the legal justification for the president’s powers—those all-important lines from Article II—requires neither an energetic president, nor does it frown upon inordinate amounts of delegation. The theory “is about the original meaning of the Constitution,” originalist scholar Michael Rappaport of San Diego University School of Law wrote in an email. “It does not mean that it is good policy,” though he says he believes it is. While “abuses of the presidency by presidential staff and infirm presidents are problematic and in many cases illegal,” he added, “illegal actions by some is not necessarily a reason to depart from the constitutional rule.”

The need for a sole point of authority is theoretically incompatible with a president whose aides run the show.

Because it is impossible for one person to make every decision, “there is a more realistic version of the accountability idea of the unitary executive theory, where the President is in control at least of the larger, more important decisions,” says Chabot. “The problem is the Constitution doesn’t have great accountability mechanisms” after a president’s abdication goes beyond that point and the president is too checked out.

Given their professed belief in democratic accountability, Roberts and fellow backers of the unitary executive theory might argue that the antidote to a president who won’t or can’t keep up with the job is small-d democracy itself; that the people might see an enfeebled president and so elect someone else. This is, in fact, what doomed Biden’s shot at a second term.

But the mechanisms for democratic accountability are inadequate. The president can win with a minority of the popular vote, as happened in 2000 and 2016, while a second-term president will never face voters again. The Supreme Court’s own disdain for voting rights legislation, its approval of widespread gerrymandering, and its gutting of campaign finance regulations, belies the increasingly empty promise of democratic course correction. Thus, Roberts and the Republican legal movement envision an engaged president, but don’t actually provide an off-ramp when we don’t get one.

Jeremy Rabkin, professoremeritus at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, doesn’t believe that Biden’s or Trump’s incompetencies raise fundamental questions about unitary executive theory. Rabkin wonders whether Biden was fit enough for the job even in his earliest months as president based on the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan and its aftermath. “But I don’t see any remedy for this—apart from expecting journalists to highlight the problem and move public opinion to demand some change at the very top,” he wrote in an email. “It wouldn’t be sensible to say, ‘The President should not be in charge of the military, because he might be too gaga to give sound directives to them.'” In other words, the constitutional grant of ultimate responsibility in the president should not be turned off just because some presidents rely too heavily on their staff.

Unitary executive theory is built around the platonic ideal of a president—active and engaged at every level: responsive to the people, and naturally lawful. But presidents are not always vigorous, and they cannot possibly be on top of everything happening in the executive branch. Nor are they immune from the allure of criminal conduct—it’s no accident that the modern unitary executive theory was first cooked up by President Richard Nixon’s lawyers to shut down the Watergate investigation.

“These guys profess to worship the founders of the Constitution, and yet the very premise of that document was that we have to design something for fallible people who are not perfect, and who get old and die and lose their energy,” says Rosenblum. “If men were angels, none of this would be necessary.”

The Republican legal movement envisions an engaged president, but doesn’t provide an off-ramp when we don’t get one.

While the unitary executive theory operates under the presumption of an ideal president, it incentivizes a far worse, even criminal, version. It assigns the president powers that Congress cannot touch, transforming our system of government from a power-sharing arrangement between all three branches to one in which the president will usually win out over the other two. In doing so, it promises democratic accountability in theory, but removes the Constitution’s central accountability mechanisms.

By reinventing the presidency as an Oval Office king, the theory also recreates one ofmonarchy’s patheticincarnations: a hapless king whose close ministers rule the realm. It’s not hard to imagine this situation. Againtake Musk, whose hatchet job across the federal government breached authorities reserved for the cabinet secretaries. The Supreme Court is blessing Musk’s actions, even as reporting makes clear Trump wasn’t even aware of some of what he was doing. This is, of course, the exact situation Republicans contend occurred under Biden.

“This is a larger topic, one we all need to reckon with when it comes to the American presidency today,” Jake Tapper, who co-wrote a recent book that reported on how Biden’s aides concealed his decline, told the New Yorker last month, “and the degree to which one person is bestowed with so much power, and surrounded by individuals whose own power depends on that person maintaining power, regardless of whether or not it’s good for the White House, the party, or the country.”

That a president might become senile, incapacitated, or simply uninterested in the job is not an unforeseeable problem for the unitary executive theory. In fact, it is baked into its history from the very beginning. The unitary executive theory claims its legal roots and historical tradition from a 1926 Supreme Court decision called Myers v. United States. The case arose when Frank Myers, a postmaster in Oregon, sued for back pay after he was illegally removed from his post during President Woodrow Wilson’s administration. But Chief Justice William Taft, a former president himself, wrote a decision that blessed the firing, seizing on the case to create a more powerful executive. Republican lawyers resurrected the case in the 1980s when they invented the unitary executive theory. It’s endorsement of the president’s broad removal power continues to lay the theory’s legal foundations, from Justice Anonin Scalia to Roberts. But this case undergirding the idea of an all-powerful president most likely came about because of an incapacitated one.

The origins of the Myers case, and exactlywhy Myers was removed in an illegal manner, are mysterious. At the time, by law, presidents could only remove postmasters by having the Senate confirm a new one. But Myers was fired without Wilson nominating any replacement. As Rosenblum and Andrea Katz, a professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, detailed in a 2023 law review article, the likeliest explanation is that Myers was fired by Wilson’s underlings while the president was convalescing.

Wilson suffered a severe stroke in October 1919, and in the months that followed his wife, Edith, took charge of the White House. While Wilson’s doctor, a close friend, fended off inquiries about the absent president’s health, Edith and his closest advisers functionally ran the country. “In the period surrounding the Myers affair, Wilson was rarely lucid and was prone to impulsive action and erratic, unmoored thinking,” Katz and Rosenblum write. It was the first lady who decided what was brought to the president’s attention, screening out all but the most pressing issues. At the time of Myers’ firing, Wilson’s limited faculties were focused on the League of Nations. It seems unlikely that the question of who should take a new patronage job in the Postal Service would have reached his bedside.

As Reagan lawyers, Justices Roberts and Alito helped increase his powers just as he was shrinking from the job.

“This would explain why Wilson did not seek to remove Myers by nominating a replacement: He was in no position to nominate one,” Katz and Rosenblum write, theorizing that “Myers’s removal may have been the accidental improvisation of a group of presidential advisers acting without a plan.” So with the Meyers decision, the Supreme Court authorized the presidential removal of an officer that Wilson himself may never have actually removed.

But on a deeper level, the irony of the case is that it provided the basis for a fundamental shift toward a president-controlled government based on the possibly falsified actions of an incapacitated president’s aides. The question of Biden’s ability to run the government and Trump’s apparent indifference to the job do not reflect a new challenge to the unitary executive theory—they are simply the modern incarnations of a problem that defenders of a strong presidency have conveniently ignored from the beginning.

The historical ironies don’t end there. Some sixty years after Wilson’s incapacitation, it was lawyers for President Ronald Reagan who first used Myers to push the bounds of presidential power and piece together the legal skeleton of the unitary executive theory. Scalia, a Reagan appointee, joined the Supreme Court in 1986 and, just two years later, penned a landmarkdissent that conservative law professors used as the backbone of their new unitary executive theory. All this was happening at a time when Reagan, the oldest president until Trump and Biden, may have been suffering from early symptoms of Alzheimer’s. At the very least, perhaps like Biden, age was taking its toll while on the job.

President Ronald Reagan at the 1986 briefing announcing the Supreme Court nomination of Antonin Scalia (left).Ron Edmonds/AP

There is an unsettled debate about when Reagan’s Alzheimer’s symptoms began, and whether it diminished his ability as president. Journalist Lesley Stahl has written about an Oval Office meeting she had with Reagan in 1986, where she found a frail and silent man with a vacant stare. She was mentally preparing a broadcast to tell the country that the president was senile when Reagan seemed to “recover,” leaving her to decide she “couldn’t report on my observations.” Stahl later came to the conclusion that Reagan’s wife and aides were covering up his decline.

Columnist Max Boot, who published an authoritative Reagan biography last year, said he had not encountered evidence of Alzheimer’s symptoms while he was president, but that his advanced age—Reagan left office at 77—meant that aides were running the show. “A lot of the administration decisions were being made by [National Security Adviser] Colin Powell, [Defense Secretary] Frank Carlucci, and [Secretary of State] George Schultz,” Boot told the Washington Post, “who were just meeting among themselves and presenting the president with fait accomplis.”

The Iran-Contra Affair, in which the Reagan White House’s National Security Council smuggled arms to Iran and used the proceeds to illegally fund the Contra uprising in Nicaragua, provides more evidence of the problematic combination of a declining president and an empowered executive. Reagan’s aides essentially turned the NSC, a presidential advisory council, into an extra-legal arms dealing operation, professing that executive power exempted them from Congress’ dictates—yet they did so in the name of a president who wasn’t fully aware of the scheme. Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, who started out as young Reagan administration lawyers, helped to increase Reagan’s powers just as the president himself was shrinking from the job. Today, they are implementing unitary executive theory on the court.

The question of how to square an all-powerful president with the reality of an absent one is particularly salient as the two oldest presidents ever collide with the Supreme Court’s still-unfoldingdecision to turn this theory of expansive presidential powers into our new system of government. The justices themselves could conceivably be asked to reconcile the mess they’ve made.

As Trump-backed investigations into Biden and his inner circle unfold, it’s possible that the Trump administration might declare certain of his actions or pardons void, or even seek to prosecute former Biden aides, on the theory that they criminally usurped the power of the president—whether the evidence warrants it or not. Such actions would inevitably end up in federal court, possibly the highest court. But at the end of the day, in any review of Biden-era decisions, it would be unlikely that the justices would pull back on the unitary executive theory. The theory might envision a perfect president, but come what may, it entrusts the nation to imperfect ones.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Tanks, armored personnel carriers, and howitzers will roll through the streets of Washington, DC, on Saturday—coming to a halt just steps from where President Donald Trump once exhorted his supporters to “fight like hell” and march on the US Capitol. But the president’s grand military parade has something else in common with the “election integrity” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection: It’s being organized by some of the same political operatives.

The permit application for the parade—which celebrates the 250th anniversary of the US Army and, conveniently, coincides with Trump’s own birthday—lists former Trump aide Megan Powers as a point of contact. Powers, the document says, is a general contractor for America250.org Inc., the nonprofit helping organize the publicly funded, multiyear America250 commemoration of the country’s semiquincentennial.

America250.org Inc. parade permit applicationNational Park Service

Four and a half years ago, Powers was on the permit for the infamous January 6 Ellipse protest, where Trump demanded that Vice President Mike Pence overturn the 2020 election. So was Hannah Salem Stone, another former Trump White House staffer now involved in running the upcoming parade. Stone and Powers were subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee and cooperated with the panel; neither was accused of wrongdoing.

In 2021, both women were working closely with Event Strategies Inc., a Trump-aligned firm that oversaw arrangements for the January 6 rally. This year, Event Strategies is working with America250 to oversee logistics for the parade and other activities.

Permit for the Women for America First rally in support of Trump on January 6, 2021National Park Service

While the involvement of January 6 rally planners might seem to undermine the parade’s patriotic billing, it is fully consistent with the stunning transformation taking place within America250. In recent months, the putatively nonpartisan group has seen an influx of MAGA loyalists. And what was once planned as a unifying celebration for all Americans has morphed into a militarized exaltation of Donald Trump—its website trumpeting a photo of Trump’s head alongside the presidents onMount Rushmore.

With these changes, the wildly expensive parade—on which the Army alone has said it is spending up to $45 million—and the upcoming anniversary celebrations have become a source of job and contract opportunities for Trumpworld operatives.

In January, the organization brought on as a senior adviser Chris LaCivita, the former Trump campaign co-chair who once masterminded the “swift boat” smear campaign targeting John Kerry’s Vietnam service. A representative for America250 said LaCivita offers “guidance on strategic communications, public affairs initiatives, and coordination with the White House Task Force on America 250,” but declined to say whether LaCivita was being paid for this work. LaCivita confirmed his work for the group in a text message but did not answer questions about his compensation.

“America250 has been hijacked.”

America250’s executive director has been replaced by a 25-year-old former Fox News producer who spent six months in the first Trump administration, mostly as an intern. Its media operation is now being handled by Campaign Nucleus, a company founded in 2022 by Brad Parscale, who worked for all three of Trump’s presidential campaigns.

Earlier this month, America250 announced that Monica Crowley, a former Fox News pundit whom Trump has made the State Department’s chief of protocol, would become the top media representative for the organization. Crowley began her work for the group by suggesting, on Steve Bannon’s podcast, that the crowd at the parade would serenade Trump with “Happy Birthday” during the event.

In the five months since Trump took office, the organization’s work has shifted dramatically, too. The liaison in charge of coordinating with federally recognized tribes was let go. Advisory councils, each dedicated to making the anniversary events resonate with different groups of Americans, have been quietly removed from the website. Council members say they have not heard from the organization in months. Meanwhile, corporations with ties to Trump or his inner circle—such as UFC, Palantir, and Coinbase—have been brought on as sponsors.

The sweeping changes have angered some of those who spent years working on the celebration. “America250 has been hijacked,” a former advisory council member told Mother Jones. “It’s disgusting.”

The “cascade” of MAGA-connected individuals surrounding America250 “is a further example of how corrupt Trump is,” said Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), a member of the congressionally created US Semiquincentennial Commission, which is closely affiliated with the project. “It’s a damn shame A250 has to be blemished with Trump…It’s unfortunate that this egoistical maniac is the president when we are supposed to be showcasing our country in a bipartisan or nonpartisan way.”

President Donald Trump salutes during the United States Military Academy commencement ceremonies in West Point, New York, in May 2025. Adam Gray/AP

America250 consists of two closely related organizations. The first, the US Semiquincentennial Commission, was established by Congress in 2016 to oversee planning for the celebration of the United States’ 250th anniversary; it is composed of 32 lawmakers and federal officials. The second organization is the nonprofit America250 Foundation, which was formed in 2019 and now goes by America250.org Inc., or A250. According to its website, A250’s role is to support the commission “with a focus on procurement, development, and facilitation with our team of expert service providers for programming purposes.” A250 and the commission work together, sharing a website, an office building, and members of their leadership. The commission receives millions in federal appropriations, much of which it passes on to the foundation.

In January, Trump issued an executive order creating Task Force 250, a separate entity filled with administration officials. While America250 is required by law to be bipartisan, Task Force 250, housed in the Department of Defense, has no such obligation. Trump and Vice President JD Vance are the chair and vice chair of the task force, highlighting Trump’s desire for control of this “extraordinary celebration of the 250th Anniversary of American Independence.”

Trump’s influence can be felt outside Task Force 250, too. In April, the New York Times reported that A250 had severed ties with Precision Strategies, a consulting group founded by former Obama staffers, and replaced it with Event Strategies Inc. The latter company made millions of dollars organizing rallies for Trump’s 2020 and 2024 campaigns. It also pulled in around $179,000 overseeing preparations for the January 6, 2021, rally.

America250 did not respond to questions about how it is paying former Trump operatives and firms like Event Strategies and Campaign Nucleus for their work.

On Tuesday, Trump kicked off the official celebrations of the US Army’s birthday with a speech at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The president lambasted former President Joe Biden, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, the media, and immigrants. He described Los Angeles—where he recently deployed National Guard troops and US Marines—as “a trash heap.”

The event, where MAGA merchandise was for sale, was promoted by Never Surrender Inc.—formerly the principal campaign committee for Trump’s 2024 run—in an email that advertised the supposedly nonpartisan address in a manner similar to a campaign rally.

“You’ve been invited to Fort Bragg by President Trump!” announced the subject line of an email featuring a “Team Trump” and “Make America Great Again!” banner. A link directed users to an event registration page run by Parscale’s Campaign Nucleus on America250’s website. Former A250 advisory council members told Mother Jones that the email was unprecedented, a complete departure from the group’s past efforts to avoid partisan politics.

US Army personnel offload tanks and other military vehicles in Maryland ahead of the military parade.Stephanie Scarbrough/AP

This past spring, the Bitcoin Conference—“the largest and most influential gathering of the bitcoin world”—announced that America250 would be co-hosting the first day of the massive Las Vegas confab. Dubbed “Code + Country,” the day was specifically for crypto whales and industry insiders and featured talks from a who’s who of GOP influencers and politicians. Even with Trump’s desire to make the United States the “crypto capital of the world,” the conference seemed an odd choice to celebrate American history.

LaCivita—who serves on the global advisory council of crypto giant Coinbase—spoke on a panel devoted to “the next golden age of America.” Joining him were Coinbase chief policy officer Faryar Shirzad; Rep. Brian Jack (R-Ga.), a former Trump aide; and A250 Chair Rosie Rios, who is on the board of the cryptocurrency firm Ripple. Rios served as US treasurer in the Obama administration, and some Trump supporters have called for her removal. But at the conference, she and other panel members cited her status as a Democrat to play up America250’s nonpartisan bona fides.

“I’ve been a fiscal conservative for years,” Rios said. “By the way, we are by law mandated to be bipartisan for the 250th.” Rios praised Trump and asserted that in the last few months, she had been able to accomplish more under his leadership than the organization had achieved in the previous seven years combined.

“Thank you to all of you for what you have done to put this president in office,” she told the audience.

Some of those recently sidelined from America250 bristle at such comments and argue that Rios is ignoring the extent to which Trump has redirected the group toward his own priorities.

Sara Capen, executive director of the Niagara Falls National Heritage Area and a former member of the Civics, History, & America’s Future Advisory Council, lamented the apparent elimination of the group’s advisory councils.

“My experience with A250 wasn’t about Philadelphia and the Liberty Bell, but how can we make sure the stories of farmers in Iowa are part of this, the stories of the people of the Mississippi Delta?” Capen said. “We tell the story of steel workers, the coal region heritage foundation in West Virginia. How can we make sure the coal workers’ story is told, how they shaped America? We wanted that included.”

Last July, A250 held a conference in DC, where council members were assured that their mission and organization would not be affected by the outcome of the election—a true nonpartisan effort. But now, the organization has transformed into something that does not need heritage areas advocating for rural America.

The Bitcoin Conference’s Code + Country day ended with Code, Country, and Cocktails, an open-bar VIP party for America250 that featured women in cow onesies dancing to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. Upon arrival, disembodied hands held out glasses of champagne for guests, the bar staff’s bodies hidden behind a wall covered in Tron branding.

Tron is owned by Justin Sun, who in 2023 was accused of fraud in a federal complaint filed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. After the 2024 election, Sun became a major investor in Trump’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture, and in February, the SEC agreed to pause its lawsuit. By May, Sun was also the largest holder of the $TRUMP meme coin, an entirely different crypto project connected to the president. Days before the Bitcoin Conference, Sun attended a $TRUMP gala dinner. The Bitcoin Conference waited to announce him as a speaker until two days before its start, but the Tron branding on display at the America250 party suggested that his involvement may have been in the works for far longer.

America250 recently updated its website with an assortment of new corporate sponsors, including Coinbase, Palantir, UFC, and Phorm Energy, an energy drink company partly owned by UFC CEO and Trump ally Dana White. In a press release, the organization said that “many of these sponsors will support the upcoming grand military parade” and that the companies “will bring essential resources, ideas, and expertise to engage all Americans in this historic milestone in the year to come.”

Hours after that release went out, Trump laughed off the idea that the government would be spending a lot of money on the parade. “A lot of that money is being paid for by me and people who make donations…we have people putting up money to do it.”

A stage constructed for the military parade and celebrationJulia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

America250 hasn’t answered questions about the details of these sponsorships. It’s unclear how much money the companies are donating and what services they might be providing. Two weeks before it was announced that Palantir had joined America250, the Department of Defense awarded the company another $795 million contract. The week prior, the New York Times reported that Trump planned to use Palantir to compile cross-agency data on Americans.

Whatever the sponsors’ motivations, A250’s critics aren’t looking forward to Trump’s parade.

“I think that this parade and its association with America250 is very unfortunate,” said Watson Coleman, the New Jersey Democrat on the Semiquincentennial Commission. “I respect our military, our Army. I respect celebrating their 250 years. But we don’t boastfully show our might in parades.” The troops, she said, shouldn’t be sent through the streets of the nation’s capital “so they can salute some authoritarian leader, which is what this looks like to me.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

For the first time in two decades, the Democratic Party has found itself without a clear political leader—or even an obvious frontrunner. Angry and adrift, voters are clashing with politicians over how to fight back.

&Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

They’re also dealing with an uncomfortable new reality: The communities that shifted furthest away from Democrats last fall were the same ones that for years formed the backbone of the party’s coalition—working-class, nonwhite, and immigrant-rich parts of blue cities and states.

Now the battle for the party’s future and reckoning over its recent past is coming to a head in New York City, where support for Democrats has cratered among Latino and Asian voters. In one of the first big tests of the party’s direction after Donald Trump’s reelection, Democrats will choose between radically different options for mayor: a centrist former governor in his 60s who resigned in disgrace, and a millennial democratic socialist whose rise in the polls has shocked the political establishment.

This week, Reveal heads to New York to talk to voters who ditched the Democratic Party in November—and looks at the party’s sometimes bitter fight to win them back.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

In late March, the US Department of Education put state education officials on notice: No longer would the federal government tolerate what the agency described in a Dear Colleague Letter as the widespread infringement on parents’ rights to direct the schooling of their kids. “By natural right and moral authority, parents are the primary protectors of their children,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon declared in a cover letter attached to the guidance. “Yet many states and school districts have enacted policies that presume children need protection from their parents.”

Like many of the executive orders and other directives coming out of the Trump administration since January, the guidance focused largely on trans and queer students—in this case, their right to privacy (or lack thereof). But McMahon’s sweeping rhetoric framed the issue as something much bigger.“Attempts by school officials to separate children from their parents, convince children to feel unsafe at home, or burden children with the weight of keeping secrets from their loved ones is a direct affront to the family unit,” she wrote.

The US Supreme Court has long held that the parental right to direct the upbringing of one’s children is fundamental. But McMahon’s letter highlights how the Trump administration is weaponizing that idea to a degree that scholars and advocates say is unprecedented at the national level.The ideology of parental rights has emerged as a cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda, repeatedly invoked by him and others to justify the rollback of a wide range of policies—involving civil rights, education, public health, and reproductive health—that conservatives have vociferously opposed.

Some of the biggest supporters of the Trump administration’s actions are Christian nationalists intent on imposing a near-limitless idea of parental rights on American society, legal scholars and children’s rights advocates say. In the view of religious ultraconservatives,any government infringement on the right of parents to control every aspect of their children’s upbringing violates both the laws of the land and the laws of God.

“Christian nationalists feel like, with Trump in control, they have the political and cultural momentum, and they’re pushing to make this happen right now.”

“Christian nationalists feel like, with Trump in control, they have the political and cultural momentum behind them, and they’re pushing to make this happen right now,” says Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma and a leading scholar of the religious right. “They feel like, OK, this is our chance, and we are not going to apologize about pushing our agenda.”

The parental rights agenda has found eager supporters on Capitol Hill, in state legislatures, and with state and federal courts. Here are some examples:

In January, Republicans in both houses of Congress introduced the “Families’ Rights and Responsibilities Act,” which would empower parents to use parental rights as a defense for any behavior that falls short of “serious physical injury” to or death of their child.At least 22 states have enshrined “parental bills of rights” into their laws, reports the ultra-conservative think tank theHeritage Foundation, which was responsible for Project 2025, the policy blueprint for the Trump 2.0 era. One of those states, Texas, just passed another bill that prohibits the government from infringing on “the fundamental rights granted to parents by their Creator.” Among other things, it bans DEI hiring programs in K-12 schools and school-authorized LGBTQ clubs.Lawmakers and courts have been using parental rights to roll back reproductive protections for minors. In May, a Florida appeals court ruled that the state’s “judicial bypass” law allowing teenagers to seek a judge’s sign-off for an abortion violated the rights of parents. Last year, the ultraconservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals partially sided with a Texas father who sued to block Title X clinics in the state from offering birth control to minors without parental consent.Even child labor protections have been getting the “parental rights” treatment, with more than a dozen states weakening labor laws for children since 2021.

An expansive idea of parental rights is also before the US Supreme Court this term. The case of Mahmoud v. Taylor was brought by agroup of religious parents who opposed the required reading of LGBTQ-inclusive storybooks in public schools. A decision is expected by the end of June.

Legal scholars note thatincreasingly, conservatives are deploying “parental rights” as a way to advance regressive and unpopular socialpolicies. Their strategy has been successful because “almost everybody can agree on the importance of parental rights,” says Naomi Cahn, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. “It’s a good Trojan horse.”

But for Christian nationalists, “parental rights” is much more than a buzz phrase—it is part of a deeply held belief system, rooted in religion and patriarchy. They’re not egalitarians, Perry says. “They live in a world of authorities and hierarchies. One of those includes parents [having authority] over their children.” He points out that allowing “for the possibility that a child could kick against that [authority] to carve out their own space…is out of the question.”

“They live in a world of authorities and hierarchies. One of those includes parents [having authority] over their children.”

Whatever adherents are motivated by—a sincerely held belief in the rights of parents, or something more cynical—the expansion of parental rights comes at a cost to the very children that conservatives vow to “protect,” child advocates warn. “They may want to cloak this in the words ‘parents’ rights,’ but it’s about authoritarianism,” says Rebecca Gudeman, who leads health policy initiatives at the National Center for Youth Law. “It’s not about one parent’s ability to create a safe space for their child, it’s about controlling society.”

Parental rights are far from being a new rallying cry. Theyhave been invoked to support or oppose a slew of policies for over a century—titans of industry in the 1920s, for example, warned that restricting child labor would threaten the “fundamental institution” of the family. Around the same time, the Supreme Court issued two seminal opinions establishing parental rights in education: Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, which respectively struck down an English-only instruction law and a compulsory public education law. But the modern parental rights movement was born when the Supreme Court ordered public schools to desegregate in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

Fearmongering by white parents about the federal government’s infringement on their right to direct their children’s schooling led to the widespread establishment of segregation academies: whites-only private schools, some receiving government funding, many of them religiously based. “You had largely evangelical Christian conservative populations in the American South say, ‘This was about family values, this is about traditional families. It’s not about racism. It’s just about us wanting to control our own families and their education,’” Perry says. “But of course, it looks a lot like segregation, and it looks a lot like just retreating from mainstream culture and values.”

Over the years, many of the hardest-fought parental-rights battles have been waged over education and reproductive health. In the 1980s and ’90s, itsrhetoric was used to challenge sex education in public schools and school curriculums more broadly and to push for the right of parents to withdraw their children from school and teach them at home. Parental rights arguments also led to the passage of dozens of state laws requiring parental consent or notification for minors seeking abortion after Roe v. Wade in 1973.

In the past, parental rights laws were aimed at “giving parents an individual decision about whether to opt in or opt out of something, or to make an individualized decision for their child.” Now, many of these laws “create mandates coming top down from the state.”

Importantly, most parental-rights laws of this era were aimed at “giving parents an individual decision about whether to opt in or opt out of something or to make an individualized decision for their child,” says abortion historian Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. But since 2020, that’s changed: Now many of these laws “create mandates coming top down from the state, imposing [ideas or actions] on all parents in the name of parents’ rights.”

The pandemic was a turning point for the parental rights movement. With school closures in early 2020, parents became much more involved in their children’s education—and many were clamoring for school re-openings or appalled by what they saw. Add to this,the “racial reckoning” that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, and conservatives became mobilized in opposing curriculum changes around the teaching of American history. “Covid-19 opened parents’ eyes to the pervasive indoctrination taking place in many classrooms,” McMahon wrote in her March letter to educators. “Families across the country saw gender ideology and critical race theory taught on-screen at their own kitchen tables.”

Beginning in earnest in 2021, issues like vaccine requirements and mask mandates were weaponized in the name of parental rights by fledgling rightwing groups like Moms for Liberty as well as conservative behemoths such as the Alliance Defending Freedom. But the parental rights movement’s biggest obsession was diversity and school curricula focused on America’s racial, and racist, history. The CRT Forward Tracking Project at the UCLA law schoolfound that local, state, and federal government bodies introduced nearly 900 policy proposals targeting critical race theory and diversity initiatives from September 2020 through the end of 2024. “Parents’ rights cannot help but be racialized,” UCLA law professor LaToya Baldwin Clark wrote in the Yale Law Journal in 2023, calling the parental rights movement and the anti-CRT movement “twins.” “The movements work in tandem because they are born from the same parent: White supremacy.”

The next wave of bills focused on queer and trans kids. Queer acceptance—particularly the notion that children can be trans—was a direct threat not only to the order of men and women in society but to the authority of parents over children, Perry says. Hundreds of anti-trans bills, pushed by religious right groups, flooded state legislatures in the latter half of Joe Biden’s presidency. When Florida passed its then-groundbreaking Parental Rights in Education bill in 2022—banning, among other things, teaching about gender and sexuality from kindergarten through third grade—then-Republican House Speaker Chris Sprowls called the year “the session of Florida parents.”Meanwhile, the overturning of Roe v. Wade has led to a new flurry of actions targeting minors seeking abortion and other forms of reproductive care—notably, “abortion trafficking bans” in Idaho and Tennessee that make it a crime to help teenagers cross state lines to get an abortion. Cases like these prompted Ziegler and her colleagues to take a broader look at how parental rights are being used by conservatives: not to protect individual parents’ rights but to bring about a sweeping policy realignment that rolls back progressive policies. They call this strategy “retrenchment by diversion.”

“The idea is that you have to invoke some other goal—[in this case,] parental rights—to advance your agenda when you know that voters would be much more likely to reject it if you named what it was you were prioritizing,” Ziegler says. “There are bona fide movements for parental rights, and then there are movements with very different agendas that have hitched their starto parental rights arguments when they think doing so will help.”

“There are bona fide movements for parental rights, and then there are movements with very different agendas that have hitched their star to parental rights arguments when they think doing so will help.”

Conservatives stop short of promoting parental rights when to do so would conflict with their other beliefs—like banning gender-affirming medical care for trans youth, regardless of whether parents support such care for their own children. Maxine Eichner, a family law scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sees this as evidence that the real goal of many parental rights bills is to turn back the clock on broad policies that conservatives abhor. “Recent uses of parental consent statutes seem like a subtle, or not so subtle, attempt by legislatures just to force minors to forgo some activity that the legislature simply doesn’t like,” Eichner says.

Perry has seen what he describes as “a form of local resistance among red states to push parental rights” transformed, after Trump’s election, to become “mainstreamed at the national level.” It doesn’t matter to the religious right that Trump isn’t exactly a model Christian, Perry adds. The president is “Christian enough” since herepresents a political vision that Christian nationalists want: A strong patriarch willing to break things in pursuit of what they see as righteous goals. “Whether they think Donald Trump should teach their Sunday school, I think they wouldn’t have that,” Perry says. But “he fights for their team. He is powerful. He doesn’t apologize, he’s not democratic, he’s not egalitarian. He’s an authority, and he issues executive orders, which they love. … So they do see him as a Christian leader in as much as he is leading our country back to ultimate authority: authority of the Bible, patriarchal authority, authority of God.”

This aggressive push for a no-guardrails version of parental rights has made children’s rights advocates deeply alarmed, because, put simply, parents don’t always act in the best interest of their children. Certainly, many well-meaning parents make decisions with good intentions that nonetheless end up having long-term negative consequences for their children. But as it expands its power, the parental rights movement is resisting efforts to impose minimal constraints in order to protect children from harm.

For example, this year’s battle over homeschooling regulation in Illinois. The state has among the loosest regulations on homeschooling in the United States, with no record-keeping mandates or requirements that a parent or other teacher has a high school diploma or a GED. When the legislature tried to pass a law addressing the lack of regulations—prompted by an investigation by ProPublica and Capitol News Illinois, which found that fatal child abuse went unaddressed due to the state’s homeschooling laws—homeschool advocates, supported by the Home School Legal Defense Association, launched a nationally-reaching opposition campaign. The bill’s sponsor, Democrat Rep. Terra Costa Howard, told multiple news outlets that she received a death threat in the mail. “God said ‘Do Not Kill,’ but also said ‘Smite thine enemy.’ We’re watching,” the anonymous letter read.

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The anti-regulation campaign was effective: Despite passing out of committee, the bill never received a floor vote in the Democrat-controlled House and died when the legislative session ended on May 31. That disappointed a homeschool reform advocate I’ll call Elizabeth, who calls the legislation’s attempts at oversight “bare minimum.” Elizabeth was homeschooled in Illinois from third through eighth grade and says her later education and transition to the workforce suffered from a lack of structure, oversight, and accountability. “The sheer spectrum of what can go wrong is so wide,” she says, “from something this simple like, I just was not educated, to situations of deep and horrific abuse that can happen when there’s [no regulation] in place.”

The parental rights movement thinks about issues in terms of what parents want, rather than what children need, says Anna, another woman whose childhood experiences being homeschooled in Illinois have made her an advocate for more regulation. “My parents are the consumers of homeschooling, they’re the consumers of the curriculum,” Anna says. “But once I turn 18, they are done.” And then it’s left to the now-adult homeschooled children to pick up the pieces.

“We have this legal historical construct, both in the world of policy and the world of litigation, we have been trying to shed, which is that children are chattel.”

Homeschooling is far from the only issue that worries children’s rights advocates contemplating the Trump 2.0 era. In opposing the proposed “Families’ Rights and Responsibilities Act” introduced by Republicans in Congress, the bipartisan advocacy organization First Focus Campaign for Children underscores the threats to children’s well-being. Child abuse that falls short of “serious injury or death” would be harder to prosecute, particularly with the built-in parental rights defense afforded by the bill. State-level vaccine mandates for education could be nullified (alongsideHealth Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push for greater vaccine scrutiny at the federal level). Requirements that parents “make and consent to” all healthcare for children would prevent adolescents from accessing STI treatment, mental health care, and reproductive health services, while likely denying them the right to refuse medical treatment that has proven to be harmful, including anti-queer “conversion” therapy.

“Parents are the guardians and not the owners of children,” First Focus Campaign for Children President Bruce Lesley wrote in a February letter to lawmakers. “Policymakers should reject philosophies that treat children as the property of parents or that assume children lack independent reason, agency, or understanding of their own ‘best interests.’”

It’s a battle that’s as old as this country. For much of our history, white women were considered the property of their husbands and children the property of their fathers (marriages between enslaved people weren’t legally recognized, and neither were their parental rights). The family patriarch could force his children to work, enlist his sons in the military, marry off his daughters, and otherwise harm his children under the guise of corrective punishment. “We have this legal historical construct, both in the world of policy and the world of litigation, we have been trying to shed, which is that children are chattel,” says Kristen Weber, the National Center for Youth Law’s senior director of child welfare. The rise of the parental rights movement makes one thing clear, she adds: “We haven’t really fully gotten there.”

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“This is Donald’s room,” Phyliss Shobe says as she ushers me into the neat, spare room where the 81-year-old retiree has covered almost every available space with MAGA memorabilia. Arrayed on the bed, there’s the Gulf of America shirt she got for a friend, as well as a Trump calendar, a Melania book, a fake American Express card identifying her as a charter member of the 2020 Republican Presidential Task Force bearing Trump’s signature, and of course, the “MAGA King” hat she was wearing when I first met her last year at a Trump rally in Richmond, Virginia.

When I arrive at her house, Shobe apologizes for not having a cake ready for my arrival. She bakes cakes for everyone, including her doctors, but a family emergency the night before had kept her out of the kitchen. She’s dressed up for the occasion, her nails expertly painted purple. She’d gone to the hairdresser that morning. Shobe’s home, 20 miles south of Richmond, is modern but comfortably cluttered with her well-organized collections of elephant figurines, antique tea cups, and other “junk,” as she calls it.

The “junk,” however, can’t possibly compete with the spread in Donald’s room. When we enter the shrine, Shobe narrates a tour with the confident delivery of a professional docent. She points out the special shelves her son designed to display more Trump tchotchkes than I’ve ever seen outside of a Trump rally.

There’s the iconic photo of him, bleeding, with his fist in the air after he was shot at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally in 2024. Christmas ornaments, glasses and coffee mugs, lighters, bottle openers, coasters, and every sort of pin are laid out with care, not a speck of dust on them. The 2024 Trump “revenge tour” gold coin takes center stage on one shelf, along with a Make American Great wristwatch. Trumpy Bear presides on a little chair in the corner.

Looking around her sanctuary with pride, Shobe assures me, “This is all going to be treasure someday.”

Shobe is what you might call a Trump superfan. She’s one of the 96 percent of Republicans who strongly supported Trump in 2024 and who, according to an AP-NORC poll, still believe Trump has been a great president. They’re the folks who’ve stuck with him through his mismanagement of the Covid pandemic, his impeachments, his various criminal prosecutions, and the January 6 insurrection.

Typically white, Christian, over 65, and less likely than most Republicans to have a college degree, MAGA voters like Shobe are a small but vocal minority. They make up only about 15 percent of all American voters and about a third of all Republicans, according to a 2024 study by researchers at the University of California Davis. But they’re devoted.

As Trump’s erratic tariffs threaten the economy, federal health and safety agencies have been gutted, and the military has been deployed to corral peaceful protesters who oppose his immigration tactics, his overall approval rating has plummeted in less than six months. Only 38 percent of Americans approve of the job he’s doing, according to a June poll. Yet Trump’s support among Republicans like Shobe has remained sky high—nearly 90 percent still strongly approve of his performance.

A shelf of badges, pins, and other Donald Trump collectables.Stephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

“I fight anybody thathas anything bad to say about Donald Trump,” she told me before I went to visit her in March. “I just admire the man so much for what he goes through and put up with when he didn’t have to.” She’s not alone among her cohort. “All my friends are true believers,” she says.

But have Trump’s marital infidelities, for instance, ever dimmed his star in her eyes?Maybe the allegations that he paid hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels? “What goes on in his personal life,” she says, is between him and his wife. “As long as it doesn’t affect the American people.”

What about the New York City civil jury that found that Trump had sexually abused E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room? Shobe, like more than 90 percent of Trump’s 2020 voters, simply doesn’t believe it. And don’t get her started on January 6, which she knows was caused by government agitators; otherwise, the Capitol Police would never have let it happen.

Many Democrats and now even some Republicans are a bit bewildered by people like Shobe, for whom Trump really can do no wrong. The diehards who make up Trump’s base tend to get parodied in the media and dismissed as cult members. But after covering Trump for nearly a decade now, I’ve learned that his most devoted fans are often far more complicated than the stereotypes suggest. Shobe is no exception.

Look beyond her MAGA hats and “Missed Me?” T-shirts and it’s clear that a whole confluence of things have brought her to this place. She’s had a difficult life and one that more often than not, the government has done little to ease, regardless of who was in office. And she is deeply unsettled by the rapidly changing world that manifests in everything from the George Floyd protests to gender fluidity— and especially in the recent influx of immigrants. “Donald is sending ’em back,” she adds approvingly, explaining that she sees him as a stabilizing force, someone who will put an end to all the madness.

Shobe is so committed to Trump that last year when he finally staged a rally near her house, she made the pilgrimage, even though she was battling what she called “Mr. C”—cancer. I met her as she was waiting to go inside the Richmond Convention Center with her brother and sister-in-law, all three using walkers. She was wearing a one-of-a-kind Trump T-shirt, so I asked if I could take her picture. She happily agreed but told me to wait so she could hide a bag full of urine under her shirt. She didn’t want it to show up in the photo.

Not long after the rally, she had her kidney removed along with part of her bladder and went through several rounds of chemotherapy. (She’s now in remission.) While she was recovering, Shobe had to stow all her Trump merch so that a live-in caregiver could stay in the spare bedroom. When the woman left after a month, Shobe was relieved, and not just because they argued about politics. As her son told her, “You can have Donald Trump’s room back.”

Phyliss Shobe in her Trump room.Stephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

Much of her collection is bounty from the political donations she’s made over the past five years, mostly in $20 or $50 increments, which have netted these expressions of gratitude from a host of GOP luminaries. “I got a message from Trump that says he loves me,” she says, beaming. Alongside autographed Christmas cards from Trump, there are others from Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). “I can’t find the DeSantis one,” she laments.

“I got a message from Trump that says he loves me.”

Shobe doesn’t want to say how much money she has donated to political campaigns, but she’s given to various Trump committees, the Republican National Committee, and MAGA congressional candidates: Hershel Walker in Georgia, Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s race in California, Blake Masters in Arizona, and former Ohio Sen. JD Vance among them.

As a prolific small donor, Shobe is part of a trend. A 2022 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the number of voters from both parties donating $200 or less grew from 5.2 million in 2006 to 195.0 million in 2020. Meanwhile**,** the average size of a contribution plummeted, from $292.10 to $59.70. Those small donors, like Shobe, tend to be the most ideological voters in the country, and their donations are a major driver of political polarization.

Richard Pildes, an NYU law professor and campaign finance expert, told the New York Times in 2023 that Trump-supporting House Republicans who voted against certifying the Electoral College count on January 6, 2021, received an average of $140,000 in small contributions in the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans who voted in favor of the peaceful transfer of power received only an average of $40,000.

A Donald Trump signed portrait, left, and a Donald Trump themed stuffed bear.Stephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

In that sense, Shobe’s modest donations add up to a lot of influence for a senior from “chicken country” in Moorefield, West Virginia. “I’m just a dumb hillbilly,” she tells me with a laugh. On the wall in her TV room is a photo circa 1958 showing the inside of the one-room log cabin where she first attended school. Pointing out a picture of Jesus on the classroom wall, she asks, “You wouldn’t see Christ in a classroom now, would you?”

Shobe has never been wealthy. Her working life started at age 13 when she moved in with West Virginia State Senator Don Baker (D) to take care of his children. Baker died shortly after taking office, and his wife Betty got elected to his seat. Shobe stayed with her until she graduated from high school in 1961. Then she moved to Washington, DC, sharing a crowded apartment with other girls from her high school drawn to the city for jobs.

After bouncing around between Maryland, West Virginia, and DC, she eventually moved to Virginia to do typesetting for the Masons. In the late 70s, she got stomach cancer that was misdiagnosed and left her in and out of hospitals for three years. The fraternal organization took care of her. “They paid my rent and everything,” she told me.

Among her other many jobs, she helped Israel “Izzy” Ipson, a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor, work on his memoirs. He would record his thoughts on tape, and Shobe would transcribe them and clean up his English. “He was a lovely man, oh my,” she told me. “That’s why I don’t like to hear people cutting down Jewish people.” Her work with him contributed to a 2004 book*,* Izzy’s Fire: Finding Humanity In The Holocaust, by Nancy Wright Beasley. (Ipson’s son Jay founded the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond.)

“He loves getting to us uneducated people. I knew he couldn’t be bought.”

Shobe had been a Trump fan on some level since the ‘80s when he was a brash young real estate developer. He “is a nice-looking man,” she has told me more than once. And, of course, she watched him on “The Apprentice.” She got on board with his political ambitions as soon as he announced he was running for president in 2015. “He loves getting to us uneducated people,” she explains. “I knew he couldn’t be bought.” But she didn’t make her first campaign contribution until 2020 when she started reading “about the Federal Reserve”and watching YouTube videos with her friend Angie, who does hair.

Since then, she’s been all in, driven by her anger about the direction the country is going. Shobe’s modest political donations have earned her eternal gratitude from GOP candidates—and an avalanche of fundraising calls, texts, and emails. Her landline rang nonstop while I was at her house. She showed me one fundraising email that claimed Trump has ended taxes on Social Security taxes—he hasn’t. Others contained invitations to become a “special member” of this or that exclusive Republican club. She has responded to a lot of them, answering polls from Elon Musk asking what hat he should wear to the Inauguration, and making small donations.

As a result, she now owns an inch-thick stack of commemorative membership cards from everyone from now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), all of which went into the shrine. Shobe says she is such a sought-after Trump supporter that she occasionally talks to Musk on the phone. I asked her how she knew it was the billionaire. “They know things about me,” she confided in a whisper. (AARP has warned that financial scams originating with phone callers claiming to be Elon Musk have become epidemic.)

“I just admire the man so much for what he goes throughand put up with when he didn’t have to.”

Hats, t-shirts, books and other Donald Trump collectables.Stephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

By the time I visited Shobe, Trump had already imposed aggressive policies well beyond what he did in his first term. Musk and his DOGE boys had dismantled the US Agency for International Development and sacked thousands of federal employees, including about 3,000 from Social Security.

“How do you think Trump is doing?” I ask her. “I don’t know if he’s doing that the right way,” she replies earnestly. “I thought, ‘Oh Donald. Slow down a little.’” But mostly she’s thrilled with his presidency. I wondered if she knew about Musk’s effort to seize control of personal information the government held on Americans. She didn’t but she also didn’t care. “You know why it doesn’t bother me?” she asks with a laugh. “My bank account is empty.”

“I don’t know if he’s doing that the right way. I thought, ‘Oh Donald. Slow down a little.’”

When I arrived, Shobe had just gotten off the phone with the bank, trying to recoup money that had mysteriously vanished from her account. Her credit card numbers have been stolen multiple times. “There isn’t anything out there that’s secret,” she says.

I mentioned that Trump had shuttered the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the only federal agency whose mission was to protect Americans from financial scams. She’d never heard of it but conceded that it was a good idea. Her brother lost $17,000, his life savings, after getting a call from someone claiming to have kidnapped his grandson.

Shobe may not know about Trump’s destruction of the CFPB, but she does know all about men in women’s sports, the 300-year-old people receiving Social Security who Musk “discovered,” the Covid “lab leak” theory, murderous immigrants, DEI ruining the FAA, and Hollywood’s involvement in child trafficking. I ask where she gets all her news. “Fox, Fox, Fox,” she says. “I don’t even turn to other channels.”

Her media diet definitely does not include Mother Jones, which she didn’t realize was a liberal publication until after I arrived at her house. After the tour of Donald’s room, I took Shobe to lunch and her sister called while we were in the car. “You’ve reached the famous Phyliss Shobe,” she said, explaining that she was still busy with “the reporter.”

“Do you know she’s a Democrat?” Shobe says in amazement. “Tell her to get out of the car!” her sister responds, before asking if Shobe was converting me to Trumpism. They both laugh and Shobe assures her that even though I’m a liberal, I’m still a nice person. We go to an Italian place near her house, and over a steak and cheese hoagie, she tells me more about her life.

When Shobe was pregnant with her first child, her husband was in a bad motorcycle accident that left him unable to do manual labor. She worked to put him through college in another part of the state while she stayed behind to raise her two children. The strain was eventually too much, and they split up after 10 years. But her children did well and are now taking good care of her, even if they don’t necessarily share her enthusiasm for Trump.

When Shobe was 50, the young daughter of a West Virginia friend was struggling. Shobe took in her baby, Tim, and raised him as her own. It wasn’t always easy. When she was on the night shift at a gas station, she’d push two chairs together for him to sleep on while she worked.

She was never close with her father, but she went back to West Virginia to care for him for 18 months before he died at age 103—“The best thing I ever did.” Later, she took in her 95-year-old dying sister. “That’s how I tore up my body,” she says, explaining that she had to have her shoulder replaced after all the lifting. “But it was worth it.” Her family prided itself on its self-sufficiency. “We never got help from anybody,” Shobe tells me. “We gave help to people. We don’t believe in welfare.”

“We never got help from anybody. We gave help to people. We don’t believe in welfare.”

In that way, Shobe resembles the avid Trump supporters sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild profiles in her new book, Stolen Pride, whom she calls the “elite of the left-behind.” She writes of discovering that “those most enthralled with Donald Trump were not at the very bottom—the illiterate, the hungry—but those who aspired to do well or who were doing well within a region that was not.”

Shobe may have escaped poverty-stricken West Virginia long ago, but her roots there are still profoundly shaping her worldview in a way that’s masked by her current prosperity. Even her relatively new suburban lifestyle hasn’t shielded her from more trauma, however.

In 2020, one of her two sons nearly died from Covid and was in a coma for a month. Not long after, Tim was shot in a drive-by outside a Roanoke nightclub. The bullet went through his arm and into his side, where it tore up his intestines and colon. Given all she’s endured, perhaps it’s not surprising that Shobe believes we’re in what evangelicals call the End Times. All the crazy weather from the changing climate? “That’s God,” she assured me, “trying to let the people know he’s coming.”

After lunch, we return to her tidy bungalow in a 55-and older community. Inside, Tim is snoozing on the couch while his almost 2-year-old toddler naps nearby in a travel crib. We sit in recliners in the cozy den where Shobe watches Fox News, and she recommends some books to me by the controversial evangelical writer Sarah Young. She shows me her worn copy of Jesus Calling Devotions for Every Day. The phone keeps ringing.

The now iconic photo of Donald Trump after he narrowly escaped being fatally shot in Pennsylvania in July of 2024.Stephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

After listening to Shobe’s life story, I had to wonder why she wasn’t a Democrat. After all, the party’s platform revolves around helping people just like her, advocating better health care, supporting children, and opposing gun violence. As it turned out, she had a political shrine once before—for President John F. Kennedy. “I loved John Kennedy,” she says. “That was my first voting experience.” She also voted for Bill Clinton, though she thinks Hillary is “scary.”

During the Obama years, Shobe says she wasn’t paying enough attention to know much about what he did in office. “He’s a Muslim, you know.” She’s also sure Barack and Michelle are getting divorced—there’s a YouTube video about that. As for former President Joe Biden, she feels only pity. “We watched [him] deteriorate in front of our eyes,” she tells me with a shake of the head. “I felt sorry for the man because his family let him go out there and embarrass himself and the country.”

She isn’t necessarily opposed to voting for Democrats, it’s just that she has no idea what their agenda is. I suggest they are, among other things, trying to save Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. She’s unconvinced. Medicare costs for her have been going up even when Democrats were in office. And the Social Security office was almost impossible to reach on the phone before Trump was elected. She can’t imagine it getting much worse.

The politics talk ends when the toddler awakens. Even though Shobe’s back is in bad shape, she picks him up and cuddles him. He’s already joining her Trump fan club. The dark-haired sprite loves Trumpy Bear and when he sees the president on TV, he will raise both arms and yell, “Go Donald!”

Eventually, it’s time for me to go. I bid Shobe farewell and she invites me to visit again any time—and promises next time there will be cake. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch. One day in early June, I asked her if she knew Trump was making cuts to cancer research and the Veterans’ Administration, both things she cares about. “I’d have to read more about that,” she said skeptically. “I don’t think Donald is responsible for that.” The next day, she sent me this text:

“After we talked yesterday I thought about things you said and I have followed Donald Trump for many years but when he and Melania came down those steps I knew in my heart that this country needed those two people… So, I guess nothing will change my opinion of my President I’m behind this couple one hundred percent. I like you a lot and although we disagree on politics. I hope we can stay in touch and be friends. I think we meet people for a reason. Just think you might end up with all of my keepsakes. Ha! Ha!”

Phyliss Shobe massages the fabric of a Donald Trump t-shirt.Stephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

“This is Donald’s room,” Phyliss Shobe says as she ushers me into the neat, spare room where the 81-year-old retiree has covered almost every available space with MAGA memorabilia. Arrayed on the bed, there’s the Gulf of America shirt she got for a friend, as well as a Trump calendar, a Melania book, a fake American Express card identifying her as a charter member of the 2020 Republican Presidential Task Force bearing Trump’s signature, and of course, the “MAGA King” hat she was wearing when I first met her last year at a Trump rally in Richmond, Virginia.

When I arrive at her house, Shobe apologizes for not having a cake ready for my arrival. She bakes cakes for everyone, including her doctors, but a family emergency the night before had kept her out of the kitchen. She’s dressed up for the occasion, her nails expertly painted purple. She’d gone to the hairdresser that morning. Shobe’s home, 20 miles south of Richmond, is modern but comfortably cluttered with her well-organized collections of elephant figurines, antique tea cups, and other “junk,” as she calls it.

The “junk,” however, can’t possibly compete with the spread in Donald’s room. When we enter the shrine, Shobe narrates a tour with the confident delivery of a professional docent. She points out the special shelves her son designed to display more Trump tchotchkes than I’ve ever seen outside of a Trump rally.

There’s the iconic photo of him, bleeding, with his fist in the air after he was shot at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally in 2024. Christmas ornaments, glasses and coffee mugs, lighters, bottle openers, coasters, and every sort of pin are laid out with care, not a speck of dust on them. The 2024 Trump “revenge tour” gold coin takes center stage on one shelf, along with a Make American Great wristwatch. Trumpy Bear presides on a little chair in the corner.

Looking around her sanctuary with pride, Shobe assures me, “This is all going to be treasure someday.”

Shobe is what you might call a Trump superfan. She’s one of the 96 percent of Republicans who strongly supported Trump in 2024 and who, according to an AP-NORC poll, still believe Trump has been a great president. They’re the folks who’ve stuck with him through his mismanagement of the Covid pandemic, his impeachments, his various criminal prosecutions, and the January 6 insurrection.

Typically white, Christian, over 65, and less likely than most Republicans to have a college degree, MAGA voters like Shobe are a small but vocal minority. They make up only about 15 percent of all American voters and about a third of all Republicans, according to a 2024 study by researchers at the University of California Davis. But they’re devoted.

As Trump’s erratic tariffs threaten the economy, federal health and safety agencies have been gutted, and the military has been deployed to corral peaceful protesters who oppose his immigration tactics, his overall approval rating has plummeted in less than six months. Only 38 percent of Americans approve of the job he’s doing, according to a June poll. Yet Trump’s support among Republicans like Shobe has remained sky high—nearly 90 percent still strongly approve of his performance.

A shelf of badges, pins, and other Donald Trump collectables.Stephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

“I fight anybody thathas anything bad to say about Donald Trump,” she told me before I went to visit her in March. “I just admire the man so much for what he goes through and put up with when he didn’t have to.” She’s not alone among her cohort. “All my friends are true believers,” she says.

But have Trump’s marital infidelities, for instance, ever dimmed his star in her eyes?Maybe the allegations that he paid hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels? “What goes on in his personal life,” she says, is between him and his wife. “As long as it doesn’t affect the American people.”

What about the New York City civil jury that found that Trump had sexually abused E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room? Shobe, like more than 90 percent of Trump’s 2020 voters, simply doesn’t believe it. And don’t get her started on January 6, which she knows was caused by government agitators; otherwise, the Capitol Police would never have let it happen.

Many Democrats and now even some Republicans are a bit bewildered by people like Shobe, for whom Trump really can do no wrong. The diehards who make up Trump’s base tend to get parodied in the media and dismissed as cult members. But after covering Trump for nearly a decade now, I’ve learned that his most devoted fans are often far more complicated than the stereotypes suggest. Shobe is no exception.

Look beyond her MAGA hats and “Missed Me?” T-shirts and it’s clear that a whole confluence of things have brought her to this place. She’s had a difficult life and one that more often than not, the government has done little to ease, regardless of who was in office. And she is deeply unsettled by the rapidly changing world that manifests in everything from the George Floyd protests to gender fluidity— and especially in the recent influx of immigrants. “Donald is sending ’em back,” she adds approvingly, explaining that she sees him as a stabilizing force, someone who will put an end to all the madness.

Shobe is so committed to Trump that last year when he finally staged a rally near her house, she made the pilgrimage, even though she was battling what she called “Mr. C”—cancer. I met her as she was waiting to go inside the Richmond Convention Center with her brother and sister-in-law, all three using walkers. She was wearing a one-of-a-kind Trump T-shirt, so I asked if I could take her picture. She happily agreed but told me to wait so she could hide a bag full of urine under her shirt. She didn’t want it to show up in the photo.

Not long after the rally, she had her kidney removed along with part of her bladder and went through several rounds of chemotherapy. (She’s now in remission.) While she was recovering, Shobe had to stow all her Trump merch so that a live-in caregiver could stay in the spare bedroom. When the woman left after a month, Shobe was relieved, and not just because they argued about politics. As her son told her, “You can have Donald Trump’s room back.”

Phyliss Shobe in her Trump room.Stephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

Much of her collection is bounty from the political donations she’s made over the past five years, mostly in $20 or $50 increments, which have netted these expressions of gratitude from a host of GOP luminaries. “I got a message from Trump that says he loves me,” she says, beaming. Alongside autographed Christmas cards from Trump, there are others from Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). “I can’t find the DeSantis one,” she laments.

“I got a message from Trump that says he loves me.”

Shobe doesn’t want to say how much money she has donated to political campaigns, but she’s given to various Trump committees, the Republican National Committee, and MAGA congressional candidates: Hershel Walker in Georgia, Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s race in California, Blake Masters in Arizona, and former Ohio Sen. JD Vance among them.

As a prolific small donor, Shobe is part of a trend. A 2022 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the number of voters from both parties donating $200 or less grew from 5.2 million in 2006 to 195.0 million in 2020. Meanwhile**,** the average size of a contribution plummeted, from $292.10 to $59.70. Those small donors, like Shobe, tend to be the most ideological voters in the country, and their donations are a major driver of political polarization.

Richard Pildes, an NYU law professor and campaign finance expert, told the New York Times in 2023 that Trump-supporting House Republicans who voted against certifying the Electoral College count on January 6, 2021, received an average of $140,000 in small contributions in the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans who voted in favor of the peaceful transfer of power received only an average of $40,000.

A Donald Trump signed portrait, left, and a Donald Trump themed stuffed bear.Stephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

In that sense, Shobe’s modest donations add up to a lot of influence for a senior from “chicken country” in Moorefield, West Virginia. “I’m just a dumb hillbilly,” she tells me with a laugh. On the wall in her TV room is a photo circa 1958 showing the inside of the one-room log cabin where she first attended school. Pointing out a picture of Jesus on the classroom wall, she asks, “You wouldn’t see Christ in a classroom now, would you?”

Shobe has never been wealthy. Her working life started at age 13 when she moved in with West Virginia State Senator Don Baker (D) to take care of his children. Baker died shortly after taking office, and his wife Betty got elected to his seat. Shobe stayed with her until she graduated from high school in 1961. Then she moved to Washington, DC, sharing a crowded apartment with other girls from her high school drawn to the city for jobs.

After bouncing around between Maryland, West Virginia, and DC, she eventually moved to Virginia to do typesetting for the Masons. In the late 70s, she got stomach cancer that was misdiagnosed and left her in and out of hospitals for three years. The fraternal organization took care of her. “They paid my rent and everything,” she told me.

Among her other many jobs, she helped Israel “Izzy” Ipson, a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor, work on his memoirs. He would record his thoughts on tape, and Shobe would transcribe them and clean up his English. “He was a lovely man, oh my,” she told me. “That’s why I don’t like to hear people cutting down Jewish people.” Her work with him contributed to a 2004 book*,* Izzy’s Fire: Finding Humanity In The Holocaust, by Nancy Wright Beasley. (Ipson’s son Jay founded the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond.)

“He loves getting to us uneducated people. I knew he couldn’t be bought.”

Shobe had been a Trump fan on some level since the ‘80s when he was a brash young real estate developer. He “is a nice-looking man,” she has told me more than once. And, of course, she watched him on “The Apprentice.” She got on board with his political ambitions as soon as he announced he was running for president in 2015. “He loves getting to us uneducated people,” she explains. “I knew he couldn’t be bought.” But she didn’t make her first campaign contribution until 2020 when she started reading “about the Federal Reserve”and watching YouTube videos with her friend Angie, who does hair.

Since then, she’s been all in, driven by her anger about the direction the country is going. Shobe’s modest political donations have earned her eternal gratitude from GOP candidates—and an avalanche of fundraising calls, texts, and emails. Her landline rang nonstop while I was at her house. She showed me one fundraising email that claimed Trump has ended taxes on Social Security taxes—he hasn’t. Others contained invitations to become a “special member” of this or that exclusive Republican club. She has responded to a lot of them, answering polls from Elon Musk asking what hat he should wear to the Inauguration, and making small donations.

As a result, she now owns an inch-thick stack of commemorative membership cards from everyone from now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), all of which went into the shrine. Shobe says she is such a sought-after Trump supporter that she occasionally talks to Musk on the phone. I asked her how she knew it was the billionaire. “They know things about me,” she confided in a whisper. (AARP has warned that financial scams originating with phone callers claiming to be Elon Musk have become epidemic.)

“I just admire the man so much for what he goes throughand put up with when he didn’t have to.”

Hats, t-shirts, books and other Donald Trump collectables.Stephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

By the time I visited Shobe, Trump had already imposed aggressive policies well beyond what he did in his first term. Musk and his DOGE boys had dismantled the US Agency for International Development and sacked thousands of federal employees, including about 3,000 from Social Security.

“How do you think Trump is doing?” I ask her. “I don’t know if he’s doing that the right way,” she replies earnestly. “I thought, ‘Oh Donald. Slow down a little.’” But mostly she’s thrilled with his presidency. I wondered if she knew about Musk’s effort to seize control of personal information the government held on Americans. She didn’t but she also didn’t care. “You know why it doesn’t bother me?” she asks with a laugh. “My bank account is empty.”

“I don’t know if he’s doing that the right way. I thought, ‘Oh Donald. Slow down a little.’”

When I arrived, Shobe had just gotten off the phone with the bank, trying to recoup money that had mysteriously vanished from her account. Her credit card numbers have been stolen multiple times. “There isn’t anything out there that’s secret,” she says.

I mentioned that Trump had shuttered the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the only federal agency whose mission was to protect Americans from financial scams. She’d never heard of it but conceded that it was a good idea. Her brother lost $17,000, his life savings, after getting a call from someone claiming to have kidnapped his grandson.

Shobe may not know about Trump’s destruction of the CFPB, but she does know all about men in women’s sports, the 300-year-old people receiving Social Security who Musk “discovered,” the Covid “lab leak” theory, murderous immigrants, DEI ruining the FAA, and Hollywood’s involvement in child trafficking. I ask where she gets all her news. “Fox, Fox, Fox,” she says. “I don’t even turn to other channels.”

Her media diet definitely does not include Mother Jones, which she didn’t realize was a liberal publication until after I arrived at her house. After the tour of Donald’s room, I took Shobe to lunch and her sister called while we were in the car. “You’ve reached the famous Phyliss Shobe,” she said, explaining that she was still busy with “the reporter.”

“Do you know she’s a Democrat?” Shobe says in amazement. “Tell her to get out of the car!” her sister responds, before asking if Shobe was converting me to Trumpism. They both laugh and Shobe assures her that even though I’m a liberal, I’m still a nice person. We go to an Italian place near her house, and over a steak and cheese hoagie, she tells me more about her life.

When Shobe was pregnant with her first child, her husband was in a bad motorcycle accident that left him unable to do manual labor. She worked to put him through college in another part of the state while she stayed behind to raise her two children. The strain was eventually too much, and they split up after 10 years. But her children did well and are now taking good care of her, even if they don’t necessarily share her enthusiasm for Trump.

When Shobe was 50, the young daughter of a West Virginia friend was struggling. Shobe took in her baby, Tim, and raised him as her own. It wasn’t always easy. When she was on the night shift at a gas station, she’d push two chairs together for him to sleep on while she worked.

She was never close with her father, but she went back to West Virginia to care for him for 18 months before he died at age 103—“The best thing I ever did.” Later, she took in her 95-year-old dying sister. “That’s how I tore up my body,” she says, explaining that she had to have her shoulder replaced after all the lifting. “But it was worth it.” Her family prided itself on its self-sufficiency. “We never got help from anybody,” Shobe tells me. “We gave help to people. We don’t believe in welfare.”

“We never got help from anybody. We gave help to people. We don’t believe in welfare.”

In that way, Shobe resembles the avid Trump supporters sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild profiles in her new book, Stolen Pride, whom she calls the “elite of the left-behind.” She writes of discovering that “those most enthralled with Donald Trump were not at the very bottom—the illiterate, the hungry—but those who aspired to do well or who were doing well within a region that was not.”

Shobe may have escaped poverty-stricken West Virginia long ago, but her roots there are still profoundly shaping her worldview in a way that’s masked by her current prosperity. Even her relatively new suburban lifestyle hasn’t shielded her from more trauma, however.

In 2020, one of her two sons nearly died from Covid and was in a coma for a month. Not long after, Tim was shot in a drive-by outside a Roanoke nightclub. The bullet went through his arm and into his side, where it tore up his intestines and colon. Given all she’s endured, perhaps it’s not surprising that Shobe believes we’re in what evangelicals call the End Times. All the crazy weather from the changing climate? “That’s God,” she assured me, “trying to let the people know he’s coming.”

After lunch, we return to her tidy bungalow in a 55-and older community. Inside, Tim is snoozing on the couch while his almost 2-year-old toddler naps nearby in a travel crib. We sit in recliners in the cozy den where Shobe watches Fox News, and she recommends some books to me by the controversial evangelical writer Sarah Young. She shows me her worn copy of Jesus Calling Devotions for Every Day. The phone keeps ringing.

The now iconic photo of Donald Trump after he narrowly escaped being shot in Pennsylvania in July of 2024.Stephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

After listening to Shobe’s life story, I had to wonder why she wasn’t a Democrat. After all, the party’s platform revolves around helping people just like her, advocating better health care, supporting children, and opposing gun violence. As it turned out, she had a political shrine once before—for President John F. Kennedy. “I loved John Kennedy,” she says. “That was my first voting experience.” She also voted for Bill Clinton, though she thinks Hillary is “scary.”

During the Obama years, Shobe says she wasn’t paying enough attention to know much about what he did in office. “He’s a Muslim, you know.” She’s also sure Barack and Michelle are getting divorced—there’s a YouTube video about that. As for former President Joe Biden, she feels only pity. “We watched [him] deteriorate in front of our eyes,” she tells me with a shake of the head. “I felt sorry for the man because his family let him go out there and embarrass himself and the country.”

She isn’t necessarily opposed to voting for Democrats, it’s just that she has no idea what their agenda is. I suggest they are, among other things, trying to save Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. She’s unconvinced. Medicare costs for her have been going up even when Democrats were in office. And the Social Security office was almost impossible to reach on the phone before Trump was elected. She can’t imagine it getting much worse.

The politics talk ends when the toddler awakens. Even though Shobe’s back is in bad shape, she picks him up and cuddles him. He’s already joining her Trump fan club. The dark-haired sprite loves Trumpy Bear and when he sees the president on TV, he will raise both arms and yell, “Go Donald!”

Eventually, it’s time for me to go. I bid Shobe farewell and she invites me to visit again any time—and promises next time there will be cake. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch. One day in early June, I asked her if she knew Trump was making cuts to cancer research and the Veterans’ Administration, both things she cares about. “I’d have to read more about that,” she said skeptically. “I don’t think Donald is responsible for that.” The next day, she sent me this text:

“After we talked yesterday I thought about things you said and I have followed Donald Trump for many years but when he and Melania came down those steps I knew in my heart that this country needed those two people… So, I guess nothing will change my opinion of my President I’m behind this couple one hundred percent. I like you a lot and although we disagree on politics. I hope we can stay in touch and be friends. I think we meet people for a reason. Just think you might end up with all of my keepsakes. Ha! Ha!”

Phyliss Shobe massages the fabric of a Donald Trump t-shirt.Stephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

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Few have felt the whiplash of President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs with China more than American farmers. The US is the world’s largest exporter of agricultural products, from corn to soybeans, wheat, and cotton. And the largest importer of America’s farm products? China. The two countries have engaged in a back-and-forth series of escalating levies since Trump imposed tariffs on the country in April. Those tariffs were then deemed illegal the following month by a US trade court, and the administration is currently appealing that decision.

One of the many farmers caught in limbo is Bryant Kagay, who raises cattle and grows soybeans, corn, and wheat. Kagay says he voted for Trump last year even though Trump promised that as president, he would place tariffs on the very products Kagay sells to China. But now, Kagay questions whether the president has a long-term trade strategy and is increasingly concerned about what the market will look like come harvest time this fall.

“I like to think that my corn is really good, but as far as the markets are concerned, my corn doesn’t really look any different than anybody else’s,” Kagay says. When a farmer from a country with low or no tariffs can sell corn cheaper than Kagay’s on the global market, he adds, that farmer will win out.

As the US and China continue negotiating, Kagay talks with host Al Letson about how tariffs from Trump’s first term affected his farm, why he voted for Trump in 2024 knowing tariffs could jeopardize his business, and why farmers are often hesitant to take government subsidies—yet often accept them anyway.

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This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Al Letson: So tell me about your farm. From what I understand, you weren’t living in this area, you weren’t living in Missouri for a while, and then you and your family came back.

Bryant Kagay: Yeah, well, I’m the fourth generation on our family farm. I guess my great-grandfather, he started a very small operation and then my grandfather has grown it, really, mostly in the 60s and 70s and 80s. But yeah, following college, I had a corporate job, lived in several different states, but in 2018 my wife and I decided to come back and work into the farm, more in a management-type role, management trainee, if you will, type role. And I’ve continued to take more responsibility since coming back.

How many employees do you have on the farm?

Yeah, so it’s myself, my dad, my 87-year-old grandfather is still involved as much as he can be. And then we have two full-time employees and currently one part-time employee. So we’re a fairly small operation as far as manpower goes.

What do you produce?

So our main products, corn, soybeans, wheat, and then we also have a cattle operation. Many will refer to it as a cow-calf, so we have cows, produce calves from them, but then we also have, often referred to as a beef feedlot or a finishing operation that we feed cattle to get them right up to the point of them going to the meat processor for them to become the finished product.

So you’re running a family business that depends on international trade. We’ve been following President Trump’s trade war with China. What would really steep tariffs mean for your farm?

I think that what they mean for our farm is, it’s not that different from what they would mean to everybody. We live in a very global economy, a global market. So many of the products that we purchase, both on the farm and within our households and within any business you run, often come from overseas. Those trade networks and industries have been set up, many of them have been in place for decades. Chinese manufacturing, we’ve been making things in China for years and years, and they’ve gotten pretty good at it. They’ve got pretty good systems to get them shipped here. I think steep tariffs will, at least for the foreseeable future, will mostly raise the prices that everyday Americans and farmers spend on the things that they buy. So I think that’s how it affects all Americans.

Now, how does it affect me differently? Well, many of the products I sell that get shipped into overseas markets or international markets, now they are looking to buy that commodity from somewhere else. And what I’m selling is a commodity. I like to think that my corn is really good, but as far as the markets are concerned, my corn doesn’t really look any different than anybody else’s. So if mine is now 20% higher or 120% higher, whatever these tariffs are, I’ll buy it somewhere else, because it’s the same stuff.

Are you scared that if these tariffs continue that it will basically put you out of business? If China can buy soybeans from Central America at a much cheaper price than what they would buy them from you, how is that going to affect your farm in the long term, especially if these tariffs stay up?

For our farm, personally, we try to manage things very financially conservative. So do I feel that a trade war would put us out of business? No, probably not, because if a trade war puts us out of business, it’s going to put a whole lot of other people out of business first, and there are business owners that have probably taken on more risk. And at the end of the day though, if there are, let’s just put it in simple terms, a hundred units of soybeans produced globally and China uses 50 of them, whether they get 50 from the United States or 50 from everywhere else, all the soybeans are probably going to go somewhere and get used. It’s that friction that gets added in the system for tariffs that, well, now instead of sending multiple large container ships to China with soybeans, I’ve got to send a hundred smaller container ships to multiple other countries to make that same sale. So you lose that economic efficiency the more hurdles you put in this trade deal.

So what do you think of Trump’s reasons for imposing these tariffs?

Well, it depends what day you get. So someday, one day, it may be, “I’m going to impose these tariffs because I want to bring American manufacturing back.” And you think, “Well, I could get behind parts of that in some industries.” But for that to happen, we’ve got to have consistent tariffs for a long time because I’m not going to come build a factory tomorrow, it’s going to take years. There’s whole supply chains that have to be built up around it, and if I’m an investor or a business owner, I don’t want to build a factory when tomorrow he may say, “Well, tariffs are off. We worked out a deal.” On one side, this long-term play that, “I want to get manufacturing and jobs back to the United States.” Which yeah, I think, I don’t know too many of us that would argue with that, but there’s a lot of hurdles to doing that and that’s a long-term play.

And then the other side is, “Well, I’m just using it as a bargaining chip. I’m going to get him to the table and get better deals.” And he’s maybe done some of that. I don’t know. I’m not a hundred percent confident that he has a really clear vision for exactly how this plays out. I think, I don’t know, it’s been so uncertain whether, are these short-term, we’re going to try to get short-term deals, or is this a long-term strategic, we’re going to rebuild American manufacturing? And I don’t know where it is because it changes every week.

And when we talk about, is it a long-term goal, I’ve done a lot of reporting on manufacturing in the past, and the thing that keeps coming to me is that it may be a long-term goal that is really unrealistic in the sense that I can’t imagine Americans going to work in manufacturing plants where the pay is not going to be the type of pay that… The reason why all the manufacturing is in different parts of the world is because their economies are different and people will go in there and work for a couple dollars an hour, whereas, here in America, people would need government aid to survive off of working in a factory if we were paying the same amount to workers that they do in China. So it doesn’t feel like a realistic goal to me, it feels like manufacturing at that scale is in our past and not really in our future.

Yeah, I completely agree. I just think, yeah, if you want to talk automobile manufacturing or some of those higher level, more advanced type manufacturing. Yeah, and maybe there’s a national defense reason we need more computer chip manufacturing in the country, but if you think we’re going to have a Nike sneaker factory in the country, come on. These other countries have been doing this for decades. They’re good at it. They’ve got systems set up, they’ve got the people to work there. I don’t know any of my neighbors who want to go sit at a sewing machine and make t-shirts all day. That’s not what this country’s going to do. It’s probably not realistic.

Yeah. So all that being said, in 2024 you voted for Trump knowing that this may be what he would do. How did you come to the decision to vote for him?

That is a very good question, and it was something that I struggled with, to be a hundred percent honest, I was not thrilled with either candidate. I’m a little bit embarrassed that on the global stage, these are the best two candidates that we could come up with out of this great country. I was very uncomfortable with the Harris campaign on some social issues, some other things. I was very uncomfortable with the Trump campaign on a lot of, I guess, his personal character issues that I am very uncomfortable with. I don’t think it represents our country very well, what we stand for very well. Ultimately, because you look at what a president can do, I felt like his policies long-term were probably more in line with what I wanted, but this was not something that I was really sold on either way. So I did know that these trade wars were possibly coming. I also felt that his business experience, I guess I felt, much like he says, some of the time that he would use these type of things as a bargaining token, but at the end of the day, I do feel he’s got a decent business acumen and would recognize that, yeah, we’re not going to bring a bunch of manufacturing back to this country. Maybe we should use our power on the global stage to get some better trade deals. I was hopeful that amidst all the rhetoric and all the talk that he would use them maybe more wisely than I feel he has to this point.

Let me run down some numbers for you here to… Because I want to focus up that you said that he’s got a good business acumen. In 1991, his casino, the Taj Mahal, bankrupt. In 1992, Trump Plaza Hotel, bankrupt. Castle Hotel Casino, ’92, bankrupt. Trump Hotels, Casino and Resorts in 2004, bankrupt. Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009, bankrupt. I could go on, there’s more. I would say that the way we have talked about Trump, both in the media… Because I believe that the reality show that he was on where he’s got that great saying, “You’re fired.” It’s myth building. It makes this idea that he is a really great business man, but the truth of the matter is that when you look into his business deals, I mean he had a college that the government had to sanction and shut down because it was ultimately deemed, and I may be putting it in colloquial terms, but it was ultimately deemed a scam. So I mean, how do you feel about that when you think about it, looking at it from this vantage point?

Yeah, maybe I should have rephrased my previous statement as he has given us this idea that he has a lot of business acumen. I’ve always questioned whether he really does or not, because I see those things that you’ve mentioned. Apparently he’s been pretty good at running failed businesses and enriching himself, which that is what pointed to a lot of the character issue that I had voting for him to begin with. I mean, that’s one of the character issues. I still think it’s no secret. I live in a very red area and the people I talk to, I think there’s still some that they still are very confident that he has this really good plan that this is all going to work out for the better. And I guess I don’t necessarily… I don’t have that much confidence. I think he’s doing a lot of running his mouth without much of a plan, and maybe it’ll end up okay in the end if he throws his power around enough. But I’m a little more skeptical.

So Bryant, your farm has been in your family for a very long time. How have you seen farming change over the years?

There have been a lot of changes in agriculture over the long term. When I think about my great-grandfather, he would’ve started with some horse-drawn equipment, likely moved into tractors pretty quickly thereafter, but nothing on the scale of what we use today. There’s a lot of technology that we use to try to make sure every product we use gets put in the right place at the right time, and we are just better at conserving land and water resources as well.

I’ve done a lot of reporting with farmers in the past, and the one thing that I think our listeners may not understand or know, is really like the economics of farming. So I’m just curious if you can break down for my listeners, what’s your income like and how do you get that income? Do you get a big check from delivering cows to market? How does all that work?

I think from the outside people see, we deliver a lot of high value products, whether it’s right now cattle are at record highs. The checks we receive from selling cattle are very high. The checks we receive from selling grain can be very big. To the average American, that’s a lot of money. The issue is that we have so many expenses tied to producing that crop that really very little of it is profit. As far as the money, when I had a corporate job, I had a paycheck every two weeks. I had so much money that went into my bank account and that was very reliable and consistent. With this, it’s a lot more inconsistent and you find the business can pay for a lot of our living expenses. So my out-of-pocket expenses are less, but I don’t take just regular paychecks. Mostly what we do is we take our profits and invest those back into the business through land and equipment that it’s like this business has it’s built in 401(K) that you’re investing in assets all the time and eventually you hope to get a pretty big asset base, but you don’t do it through collecting a lot of cash in your bank account. It goes elsewhere.

When it comes to competition, it seems to me that you are dealing with different factors than your dad had, than your grandfather, than your grandfather had. And I’m thinking of specifically with the rise of big agriculture and these big company farms that I would imagine make it hard to compete because of the resources that they have.

Yeah, I think what’s often referred to as corporate farms probably get a lot of bad press. I think there can be some confusion in just because you’re a really large farming operation doesn’t mean it’s not still family owned and operated, but it may not still have that same family feel that I feel our operation does. As you get bigger, you do have to put some corporate structure, mid-level managers, a lot more process and procedure in place. We have seen over the past 10 years, especially some of the very biggest producers have continued to grow, and I think the economics have worked out for them to do that. And they’ve really built systems and as equipment gets bigger, they’re just able to cover a lot more acres. I think for our operation, we decided that our way to improve and build for the future was not necessarily to try to achieve scale at all costs, but to try to focus more on a more diverse operation and also just to produce, let’s say, higher quality over quantity, let’s put it that way.

Yeah. So take me back to 2018 when President Trump imposed tariffs on China. This is right around the time when you are starting to come back to the farm. How’d that affect you and your family?

Yeah, so that was an interesting year. We had a pretty severe drought that first summer I came back and then trade war with China on top of that. So it was a pretty rough year that first year, but I guess I was still getting my feet under me. So maybe I didn’t fully grasp, I just thought that was normal, but that first trade war, it did severely affect the price of soybeans, primarily because China is such a huge buyer of US soybeans. We produce a lot of soybeans, and when your largest customer, the harder you make that to do trade with them, that directly affects our bottom line. And then on top of that, they come through with these direct payments from the government that I think are a touchy subject amongst farmers. I’m not going to tell you we turned ours away. You feel like it’s a competitive market. You can’t reject it on principle, but at the same time, I don’t think any of us feel like that’s how we want markets to operate. We try to be self-sufficient and run our business in a way that can be profitable and let me do that. I don’t need the government to come in and write me a check to make sure I stay in business.

Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask you is why do you think it’s a touchy subject?

Well, I think if you ask many people, in the parts of the country I live, about welfare programs, SNAP, they might look at those with a negative light. This idea that, “Hey, I work really hard to support myself. I don’t need the federal government coming in and doing that for me.” And then all of a sudden I’m a farmer and I’m taking this check from the government because government-induced tariffs reduce the value of my product. At the same time, I don’t know any farmer who turned theirs away who said, “Well, I don’t believe in it, so I’m not going to accept it.” We all took it, but I ultimately think it’s really those programs aren’t administered very well on who actually needs them the worst. And also if you give all a certain number of farmers in the same area, a whole bunch of money, it’s no different than the COVID payments that drove a lot of inflation. You can’t just hand out a bunch of money and not have other effects in the economy. And I think we saw that as well through that.

So there’s a lot of debate about whether those payments actually helped or hurt, and I’ll let economists argue over that. The thing that stands out for me when I think about those payments is that when Trump did it, the left complained. And when Biden did it, the right complained. To me, what it tells me is that America has turned politics into sports. Maybe neither party is functioning or serving Americans particularly well, but because of team loyalty, people just go with it and sometimes they vote not for their interests, but for the team that they represent, their home team, the thing that they feel strongly about.

Yeah, I think there’s a lot of reasons that our political system has drifted this way. I live in a congressional, like a house district that there’s virtually zero chance that it would ever flip to blue. So I think our incumbent, as long as he continues to say and do right-leaning things, he’s never going to be challenged. And he’s never going to be held to account for how much he actually accomplishes because, “Hey, he’s on my team, so I’m not going to go against something that my team wants.” But it’s something that American politics really has to figure out. I think we continue to go through these cycles where really nothing really happens. And I just think with this many smart people, we have to be able to come together and come up with solutions that maybe the edges of both sides are not thrilled with, but ultimately move our country forward.

And I don’t know what it’s going to take to get there, but I too am very frustrated with this polarized, “I pick my team. The other team can do nothing right and my team can do nothing wrong.” Because we just know that’s just not how it works, and it’s just not true. I’m not confident enough in my own abilities, knowledge, biases, to think that I have all the solutions to make all this better. I know we need both sides to be able to come together, but our political system, our primaries, there’s so many reasons why that doesn’t happen. And I don’t know what it’s going to take to break, but you just see these presidential elections that are so evenly split, so much urban rules, so much class-based voting, and it’s not good for our country, and we do need some leaders who can really bridge that and try to bring people together for a greater good.

You just gave a great campaign speech. I’m just saying. You are looking for an answer and I think you might be it. I’m just saying. Bryant Kagay, thank you so much for talking to me, and thank you for being open, man. You just have a good conversation. I am going to be thinking about this conversation for days to come. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. I enjoy it. I try to be open and honest and I appreciate those kind words. I try to be a reasonable voice amidst all the polarization, so thank you.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

A day after videos emerged of ICE agents chasing after farmworkers across California, forcing immigrants to hide in fields, President Donald Trump appeared to say, in a Truth Social post, that he would not fully pursue his core policy proposal of mass deportation. He had sympathy, if not for the workers then for the agricultural industry—his fellow bosses—who needed the hunted men for labor power.

“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” he wrote on Truth Social, before issuing a vague declaration, “Changes are coming!”

A quick look at similar remarks should disabuse you of such hope.

What changes? Had a frazzled “Farmer” person “in the Hotel and Leisure business” gotten through to the president? The Department of Homeland Security did not have clear answers. “We will follow the President’s direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets,” Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, told Mother Jones.

From one angle, it could seem as though Trump, amid the explosive escalation in his mass deportation agenda that has resulted in more military personnel in the city of Los Angeles than Syria and Iraq combined, sees the terror of his agenda. That a racist plan to deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States is now actively ruining industries, including some of our most critical. (He clearly did not heed my colleague Isabela Dias’ many warnings.) That maybe, Trump has gone too far.

But a quick look at similar remarks should disabuse you of such hope.

In April, Trump proposed something comparable, and equally vague. “So a farmer will come in with a letter concerning certain people, saying they’re great, they’re working hard,” he rambled in a Cabinet meeting. “We’re going to slow it down a little bit for them, and then we’re going to ultimately bring them back. They’ll go out. They’re going to come back as legal workers.”

It wasn’t clear what Trump meant by “slow[ing] it down a little bit” or what visa he was proposing with the prospect of returning as a legal worker. Immigrants across the country have been disappeared and physically terrorized ever since; the country is now seeing the clear hardline approach of Stephen Miller, who has reportedly driven the administration to workplace raids, which set off the protests in LA.

That confusion, both in April and today, is all but certain to be intentional. Because, while Trump’s politics teem with many abhorrent themes, the singular idea that this country has gone to hell because of immigrants, and we must take it back from them, is what animates his entire worldview. Sure, some empathetic, moderating position might emerge on his social media platform. But chaos and confusion are just a piece of this overall plan.

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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Energy policy analysts are in broad agreement about one consequence of major legislation that Republicans are currently pushing through Congress: It will raise energy prices for the average American household by hundreds of dollars, once all is said and done.

That’s because the legislation, which President Donald Trump has dubbed the One Big, Beautiful Bill, will repeal the vast majority of clean energy provisions contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which a Democrat-controlled Congress passed in 2022. That earlier law provided a wide array of financial incentives for the deployment of electricity sources like solar, wind, battery storage, and nuclear power, as well as support for consumers looking to buy zero- and low-emissions products like electric vehicles. Choking off support for those measures not only hobbles U.S. efforts to fight climate change—the IRA, if left intact, could single-handedly reduce the country’s carbon emissions by 40 percent—but it also means there are fewer new sources of energy for a country that has started to need more and more of it. And reduced supply coupled with increased demand means higher prices.

That’s the virtually unanimous conclusion of the academics and policy experts who have been trying to understand the likely effects of the rollback for the past few months, though each group of experts used different assumptions about the full extent of IRA repeal, given that the legislation is still being revised by the Senate. Part of the reason for this unanimity is that once constructed, many newer energy sources like wind and solar don’t have substantial operating costs compared to traditional power plants that must be continuously supplied with fuel.

“Clean electricity has zero generation cost,” said Robbie Orvis, a senior director for modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank. “One of the dynamics is that less clean electricity gets built, and that makes power generation more expensive because we’re relying more frequently on fossil fuels with higher generation costs.”

“You’re really increasing the reliance on gas and therefore gas demand and gas prices.”

Orvis’ group calculated that those higher power generation costs from using coal or natural gas, along with other price increases stemming from IRA repeal, would result in household energy costs rising by more than $33 billion annually by 2035, compared to a scenario in which the IRA was left intact. That works out to roughly $250 more per year per household. Other analysts came to similar conclusions: The Rhodium Group, an independent policy analysis firm, estimates that average household costs could be as much as $290 higher per year by the same date. Princeton University’s ZERO Lab projects that energy costs could grow even higher: Their estimates show that, in a decade, annual household prices will be $270 to $415 higher under the GOP plan.

Energy Innovation’s analysis calculated the effects of repealing the IRA on energy bills and transportation costs across the nation. They found that if the tax credits for clean energy are taken away, utilities will increasingly rely on natural gas and coal, which have higher generation costs. These costs would then be passed on to customers. Additionally, as electric utilities’ demand for natural gas increases, the cost of fossil fuel in the market will also rise, further raising household energy bills.

“Gas suppliers can’t respond immediately to large changes in the demand for gas,” said Orvis. “The change in gas demand is pretty large without the tax credits. So you’re really increasing the reliance on gas and therefore gas demand and gas prices.”

On the transportation front, the legislation passed by the House of Representatives eliminates IRA tax credits for electric vehicles and undoes the nation’s latest tailpipe standards, which limit the amount of pollution that new vehicles are allowed to emit. The result is a greater reliance on gasoline than would happen under the status quo—and more demand for gasoline means higher prices at the pump, per Orvis’ modeling.

These price spikes—and the electricity spikes in particular—won’t be felt uniformly across the nation. One key factor is how utilities in a state are regulated. Many states have just one utility that both generates power and provides it to electricity customers. But in so-called deregulated markets such as Texas and Pennsylvania, electricity providers compete on an open market to sell their power.

The rules around how utilities calculate and pass on the costs of generating electricity vary significantly between these two models. In regulated markets with just one provider, the cost of generating electricity and getting it to homes is averaged out and passed on to customers. But, the competitive nature of deregulated markets means that customers can see wild fluctuations in price. During peak winter and summer, when demand for power is high, prices can be double or triple normal rates. As a result, customers in deregulated markets see more variation in their bills—because those bills closely track changes in the marginal cost of electricity. If those costs rise in dramatic and systematic ways because IRA repeal leads to fewer sources of energy, customers in deregulated markets will feel the full force of it. Customers in regulated markets like much of the Southeast, on the other hand, will be somewhat cushioned from the increase, because their costs reflect the average of all generation and transmission costs incurred by their utility.

“That helps minimize the impact of repealing IRA tax credits—though it also runs the opposite way and helps reduce savings when market prices go down,” said Jesse Jenkins, an associate professor at Princeton University who led the modeling conducted by the ZERO Lab, in an email.

These rising costs will come on top of U.S. energy bills that are already ticking upward. Electricity prices have been steadily rising since 2020, and the federal Energy Information Administration recently forecasted that that trend is likely to continue through 2026. Prices have increased for a variety of reasons, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupting global oil and gas supply chains, extreme heat and other weather shocks, costly maintenance needed to protect the grid from wildfires, and the buildout of additional capacity to meet growing demand. U.S. electricity demand is beginning to rise for the first time in decades, thanks to the construction of new manufacturing facilities and data centers, which support operations like cloud computing and artificial intelligence, as well as the growing adoption of electric vehicles.

Orvis said that the IRA has been helping meet that demand and maintain the country’s competitive advantage with China, one of the Trump administration’s stated goals. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill would undermine that progress by reducing the amount of energy available for new manufacturing and AI development—and making the electricity that’s left more expensive for everyone.

“The ironic thing is that what’s in the bill, the net results of it will be completely contradictory to what the [Trump] administration’s stated policy priorities are and will cede a lot of the AI development and the manufacturing to China specifically,” said Orvis. “That’s the important macro context for everything that’s happening now—and some of the un-modelable implications in the long run.”

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday warned Americans in a televised address that the country is witnessing the initial phases of American democracy’s slide toward authoritarianism with the president’s deployment of the military to respond to peaceful protests in Los Angeles.

“California may be first, but it clearly will not end here,” Newsom said. “Other states are next. Democracy is next.”

“Democracy is under assault right before our eyes,” he continued. “The moment we’ve feared has arrived.”

The speech, which many remarked resembled that of a wartime president, further appeared to cement Newsom’s role as the Democratic Party’s primary voice of opposition, after repeatedly blasting Trump’s actions in LA.

Trump’s deployment of the military came in response to Los Angeles residents protesting ICE’s workplace raids in the region, a key point in the president’s plot to increase mass deportations across the country. The demonstrations, which started Friday, were overwhelmingly peaceful—until Trump’s call to send in the National Guard. Trump has since deployed more National Guard members, as well as the Marines, to the city.

Despite the heavy condemnation, Trump is showing no signs of descalation. As he explicitly warned on Tuesday, anyone protesting his military parade this weekend—even peacefully—would be met with “very heavy force.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

On Monday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced his decision to “retire” all 17 members of the advisory committee on immunization (ACIP), the group that issues recommendations on vaccines to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In advance of his confirmation, Kennedy had assured lawmakers that he had no intention of interfering with the work of this panel of experts and would preserve it. Members of the group, who are required to disclose any conflicts of interest, meet regularly to review relevant data regarding vaccines.

Public health leaders reacted to the news with horror. Major medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, issued statements condemning Kennedy’s decision. Former CDC head,infectious disease physician Tom Frieden, tweeted that the move would “undermine public trust under the guise of improving it.”

But antivaccine activists greeted the announcement—which appeared in the Wall Street Journal—with praise and celebration. Sherri Tenpenny, the osteopathic physician who claimed that Covid vaccines make people magnetic, told her 210,000 followers on X that the firing of the committee members was “long overdue.” Erin Elizabeth, an anti-vaccine activist with 218,000 followers on X, described the move as “an awesome thing.” Larry Cook, head of the group Stop Mandatory Vaccination chimed in, telling his 130,000 followers it was “great news!”

Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group that Kennedy helmed before he ran for president in 2024, took to social media to lambast professional groups and lawmakers that had criticized Kennedy’s dismantling of the committee, accusing the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics of being controlled by pharmaceutical companies. “Has common sense escaped these Senators that are outraged by this move?” the group tweeted. “Or are their Big Pharma profits just on the chopping block?”

Although the members of the committee are required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest, Kennedy and other anti-vaccine activists have accused them of being in the pocket of pharma. Calley Means, an adviser to Kennedy and the founder of a supplement company, posted to his 306,000 followers what he considered to be evidence of this to justify the firings. It is a YouTube clip of an 80-second portion of a 2018 ACIP meeting when the committee voted on whether to recommend a Hepatitis B vaccine. Because of the way the video is edited, it appears that the committee unanimously decides in favor of the recommendation, despite the fact that there was no data available on one of its ingredients’ use in combination with other vaccines. The committee also appears to greenlight the recommendation, apparently ignoring “signals” that suggested the vaccines could cause myocardial infarction (heart attack). Means’ post was retweeted more than 1,000 times.

Jeffrey Tucker, a writer who runs the libertarian think tank the Brownstone Institute, also posted the YouTube clip to his 250,000 followers. “This video sums up the core of the corporatist state,” he wrote. “Powerful industrial interests linked with entrenched and mostly out-of-sight bureaucracies overseen by shadowy military people operating under a classified cover, blessed as right and good by academic shills.”

But Paul Offit, an infectious disease pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who served on ACIP from 1998-2003, said that the clip was misleading. He clarified that all vaccines must be tested before they hit the market to make sure they’re safe to use with other vaccines. He added that “signals” of the vaccine causing heart attacks could mean practically anything—even a handful of mentions in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, a database where anyone can make claims of harm without providing evidence. A former CDC official added that it’s standard practice to continue to monitor adverse reactions after a vaccine is recommended.

In recent months, Kennedy has made a slew of other moves around vaccine policy that worry public health experts. He has rewarded vaccine critics with high-level appointments, downplayed the role of immunizations in a measles outbreak, and vowed to interrogate a possible connection between vaccines and autism—despite abundant evidence that none exists. “None of this should be surprising,” tweeted Offit. “RFK Jr. will do everything he can to make sure that all vaccines are no longer mandated and to make vaccines less available, less affordable**,** and more feared. This is only the beginning.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

My red carpet interview with Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) at the Saturday premiere of a new documentary on her history-making election as the first openly transgender member of Congress was interrupted by an adoring passerby.

“Sarah, I love you!” the man shouted. “I’m a donor and I don’t even live in the district!” (“Thank you for all you do!” the congresswoman replied.)

The fact that the 34-year-old first-term Delaware congresswoman has a national fan base, and is the subject of a documentary, State of Firsts, that premiered the Tribeca Film Festival less than six months after her inauguration, is only surprising if you are unfamiliar with McBride’s role as a trailblazer in American politics.

Last November, she became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, outperforming Vice President Kamala Harris among voters in the nation’s second-smallest (and first) state. Before that, she was the nation’s first openly trans state senator when she served in the Delaware General Assembly. Her congressional election brought not only a national spotlight, but also anti-trans attacks from GOP lawmakers once she took office. There were also critiques from some trans people who wanted McBride to fight harder on their behalf as Republicans mount a full-scale assault on trans rights.

State of Firsts portrays McBride grappling with both the highs and the lows of what it meant to step into her role. It resists an easy narrative about life as a “first” being an upward trajectory of progress and celebration. For McBride, it has also been heavy with impossible expectations, conflicting allegiances, and flattening portrayals. As McBride sums up early on in the film: “It is an unbelievable challenge to figure out how I am seen as a full human being rather than just as a walking trans flag.”

Part of that challenge came from her GOP colleagues. In one scene, McBride watches Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) attack her with insults on Steve Bannon’s podcast. “She’s just going to act like that every day,” McBride says to a campaign staffer as they watch the clip while sitting on a couch, “and my job will be to not respond.”

That self-imposed challenge was put to the test just weeks after her election, when Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) introduced a resolution seeking to bar McBride from using the women’s restroom. That move led to a swarm of media coverage. Democrats and LGBTQ advocates rushed to McBride’s defense. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) eventually announced that he would back a bathroom ban in the Capitol and impliedthat McBride would have to use the private bathroom in her office or one of the building’s unisex bathrooms. Greene even reportedly threatened to fight a transgender woman if she tried to use a women’s bathroom in the House part of the Capitol.

McBride refused to take the bait. She issued a statement that did not mention Mace by name but called the chaos sowed by the bathroom ban an effort to distract from the real issues plaguing the majority of Americans. “We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars.” After Johnson announced he would move to enforce the bathroom ban (on Transgender Day of Remembrance, no less), McBride put out another, lengthier statement saying she would follow the rules “even if I disagree with them.” But for some trans advocates who wanted McBride to fight back, her response came as a “betrayal.”

The documentary features McBride’s most extensive and personal commentary on the debacle to date.

“The disobedience isn’t taking a toilet seat; the disobedience is taking this congressional seat,” McBride says in a scene while driving her car after an orientation in DC for freshman lawmakers. “It’s not just that they don’t want me in bathrooms; they don’t want me in Congress.”

“A win for them is me fighting back and then turning me into a caricature,” she continues. “There would be a bounty on my head if I said I refused to comply. I refuse to be martyred. I want to be a member of Congress.” And in what is perhaps her most blunt assessment of the risks she faces, McBride says: “It’s hard to play the long game when your short-term life is at risk.”

McBride manages to display an unwavering faith that she will be able to shift the culture in Congress, even if her strategy for doing so is not the one some advocates wanted. “The power of proximity, the power of our presence—it doesn’t change everything, but it has an impact,” McBride says in the car scene. “There are people who think representation doesn’t matter at all and there are people who think it will solve everything, and it’s somewhere in the middle.”

The film also shows the ways McBride’s family, Democratic allies, andan ongoing supply of Wawa coffee supported her during the campaign and her early days in office. In a sit-down with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the pioneering lawmakers discuss the harder parts of making history. “What people don’t see and what they don’t really experience is that being the first means being the only,” Ocasio-Cortez tells McBride. “What they go after is your essential dignity as a human being. And, to be frank, that’s what really pisses me off about this,” she adds, referring to the bathroom ban.

“I want to respect your autonomy and I want to respect your story and how you want to handle this for yourself, but I also want to clock these motherfuckers,” Ocasio-Cortez adds.

McBride’s strategy, though, seems to have paid off: Mace and Greene have since directed their attention elsewhere, and McBride has managed to work with colleagues across the aisle to introduce and co-sponsor several pieces of bipartisan legislation.

“You have to remove the incentives for these people, because at the end of the day the incentive is attention,” McBride said at a panel discussion after the New York City premiere. “They’re employing the strategies of reality TV.”

McBride, on the other hand, describes herself as “fairly disciplined” in how she conducts herself in office. But she makes room for humor: After the credits roll, there’s a short video of McBride giving a tour of her office in Congress—including the bathroom.

“It’s amazing,” she says, when she steps inside, “that I didn’t just burst into flames.”

State of Firsts will next show at the DC/DOX film festival in Washington, DC on June 15.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

A new, ultra-private, super-exclusive club for the Trump oligarchy has opened in Washington, DC. Dubbed the Executive Branch and offering memberships that cost up to $500,000, the club, located in a spot beneath a Georgetown mall, aims to be a safe space for the Trump clan as well as hangers-on, who are likely to include big shots with interests before the federal government and desires to sway the administration. The initial media coverage of the club has noted the president may become a regular visitor.

Founding members reportedly include David Sacks, the tech tycoon who is now Trump’s crypto and AI czar and the chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology; the Winklevoss twins, whose crypto firm was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission; Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist and podcaster; and Jeff Miller, a prominent Trump fundraiser and mega-lobbyist. On the list of owners are Donald Trump Jr.; Zach and Alex Witkoff, the sons of the president’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff; Omeed Malik, a venture capitalist and business associate of Trump Jr.; and Chris Buskirk, a close ally of Vice President JD Vance and cofounder of an influential conservative donor group.

It’s a line-up of Trump royalty. But at the top of the corporate structure of the club, as its president, is a much less well-known figure who previously has not been publicly identified with the high echelons of Trumpworld: a San Francisco real estate businessman named Glenn Gilmore. For years, he has been a close business associate of Sacks, and his role in the endeavor adds to possible ethics questions related to Sacks’ involvement in this operation, according to government ethics experts.

“On current facts, it is not clear whether there are any violations of laws or rules based on the role of David Sacks or others, or based on the possibility of lobbyists obtaining memberships,” Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, says, “However, it is deeply problematic to have an expensive social club that is premised on the idea of wealthy people and interests paying significant sums of money for access to high-level administration officials. It contributes to a sense among Americans that the government is set up to cater to the wealthy and powerful, not regular people.”

Mother Jones sent a long list of questions to each Gilmore and Sacks regarding the club. Reached on the phone, Gilmore declined to discuss the venture and said all queries had to be addressed to the club’s press office. Sacks did not respond to the questions. Instead, a representative of the Executive Branch provided a limited reply to both sets of queries. “The Executive Branch club,” he says, “is a private, luxurious space for colleagues to connect without media interference. It is not about access to the Trump administration. Any claim otherwise is false and potentially defamatory.”

Gilmore is not a big macher in Trump circles. He’s not a Trump donor or fundraiser. Gilmore, though, does have extensive business links with Sacks, who has been a prominent champion of the club, who hosted its launch party, and who has called himself “member No. 1.”

“The real problem,” says John Peliserro, the director of government ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, “is that no official in a presidential administration should be promoting a business, including that club. It provides an opportunity for business partners and friends of members of the administration to do business out of the public eye.”

During a an episode last month of the All-In podcast, Sacks described the club this way:

We wanted a place to hang out, and the clubs that exist in Washington today have been around for decades. They’re kind of old and stuffy. To the extent there are Republican clubs, they tend to be more Bush-era Republicans, as opposed to Trump-era Republicans. So we wanted to create something new, hipper, and Trump-aligned… We want a place to go where you don’t have to worry that the next person over at the bar is some fake news reporter or even a lobbyist or something like that who we don’t know and we don’t trust… You want to go somewhere that’s highly curated.

He also said, “Since I’m in the government I can’t be an owner [of the club].”

For years, Sacks has had financial ties with Gilmore, the fellow who, according to corporate filings, is running the show. That means Sacks, Trump’s influential crypto and AI guy, is promoting a clubby venture that could be lucrative for a business associate.

Gilmore is president of Brick & Timber Collective, a commercial real estate firm that specializes in developing spaces for VC and tech firms. The company’s portfolio includes at least 13 properties in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami, and its tenants have included tech mogul Peter Thiel’s [Founders Fund](http://read/ today's Edition Log In|Subscribe 89°F NEWS SPORTS IMMIGRATION POLITICS OPINION GAMES OBITUARIES CAREERS BANKING GUIDES Home Customer Service Stay Connected Read today's Edition Miami-Dade Favorites News Sports Politics Business Living & Entertainment Opinion Obituaries Video Featured Miami.com Detour Travel Florida Keys News El Nuevo Herald Miami-Dade Favorites Guides Shopping/Reviews Deals & Offers Careers & Education Banking Legal Services Coupons Special Features Press Releases Sponsored Content Classifieds Place an Ad - Celebrations Search Jobs Search Legal Notices Advertising BUSINESS Miami tech boom accelerates as Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund lands in Wynwood By Rob Wile Updated March 30, 2021 11:51 AM Wynwood Annex will now be home to venture groups Founders Fund and Atomic — and the company they are co-creating, OpenStore. Wynwood Annex If there was any doubt about the willingness of some of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms to make Miami their new home base, they may be put to rest now. Founders Fund, the multi-billion dollar venture capital firm led by PayPal co-founder (and new Venetian Islands homeowner) Peter Thiel, announced Tuesday it has signed a multi-year lease at the Wynwood Annex, the recently completed class-A office tower developed by Jorge Pérez’s Related Group along with real estate group East End Capital. Founders Fund’s lease will accompany ones being signed by Atomic, a venture capital and startup building firm led by Jack Abraham, a serial entrepreneur already living in Miami; and OpenStore, a new company led by Founders Fund’s Keith Rabois and Atomic’s Abraham. The leases total more than 22,000 square feet — housing as many as 50 workers — within the Wynwood Annex, encompassing three full floors, with commitments extending up to 10 years. According to an interview Abraham gave to Fortune magazine, OpenStore is aiming to capitalize on the “non-Amazon” part of e-commerce, especially more boutique retailers. “We have plans to scale massively in Miami and make OpenStore the largest company in the city’s history,” Abraham told Fortune, adding that OpenStore is one of three startups Atomic is currently working on out of Miami. In a statement to the Miami Herald, Abraham said: “Miami is the perfect city to start the next generation of technology companies, such as OpenStore. It’s incredibly diverse with amazing entrepreneurial talent, and Atomic plans to invest and scale significantly here.” Founders Fund previously signed a one-year lease in Brickell; the new lease represents a long-term commitment to the city. The news represents another marquee relocation in a city now awash in them. Since global real estate giant Blackstone announced it was opening an office in Miami, the city has seen Miami announcements from firms including Microsoft, Barry’s Bootcamp, Point72 and Subway. They join a list of firms, especially ones in finance, that had announced Miami moves earlier in 2020. “The signing of leases by Founders Fund, Atomic and OpenStore in Wynwood is proof that Miami is well on the way to becoming the capitol of capital,” said Miami Mayor Francis Suarez in a statement. “I am excited about all of the opportunities for impact that will be unlocked for founders, job seekers and innovators as a result of the arrival of these iconic firms to Miami.” Added Jon Paul Pérez, president of Related Group, in a statement: “Wynwood’s tech transformation is real and here to stay. Founders Fund and Atomic are leaders in their sectors, and their decision to plant their flag in Wynwood speaks volumes to the potential of the neighborhood and Miami as a whole.” East End Capital founder and managing principal Jonathon Yormak said the Wynwood Annex is at the forefront of a trend that is likely to make Wynwood less of a destination neighborhood and more of a “365-day-a-year” one, with a mix of commercial and residential alongside its traditional food, beverage, and retail reputation. At the same time, he said, no one is challenging its zoning code of strictly low-rise construction and incorporating its traditional design and street art elements. “The origination of Wynwood as an art community, one with great murals — that is going to continue,” Yormak said. This story was originally published March 30, 2021 at 8:40 AM. Rob Wile Miami Herald 305-376-3203 Rob Wile covers business, tech, and the economy in South Florida. He is a graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and Columbia University. He grew up in Chicago. Part of the McClatchy Media Network ABOUT About Us Contact Us Archives Connect with us: SUBSCRIPTIONS Customer Service Start a Subscription Cancel a Subscription Make a Payment ADVERTISING McClatchy Advertising Place an Ad Place a Classified Ad Place an Ad - Celebrations Place an Obituary Staffing Solutions Political | Advocacy Adverstising EXPLORE Read Today's Edition Mobile Apps Newsletters Puzzles & Games Horoscopes COPYRIGHT COMMENTING POLICY PRIVACY POLICY COOKIE PREFERENCES YOUR PRIVACY CHOICES TERMS OF SERVICE Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article250258600.html/#storylink=cpy) and Atomic Labs, a VC incubator whose investors include Thiel and Sacks.

In April, Bloomberg, citing loan documents and people familiar with the matter, reported that Sacks is “a limited partner in projects” of Gilmore’s Brick & Timber Collective.

According to the Executive Branch representative, when the club was being formed, Malik, one of the owners, asked if Sacks knew a real estate developer who could help with the project, and Sacks recommended Gilmore. “David Sacks and Gilmore are not business partners but have collaborated on past deals,” he says. This representative adds, “Sacks has no financial interest in the Executive Branch club, directly or indirectly. His involvement has been reviewed and approved by government ethics attorneys.” He would not say whether Gilmore is being compensated by the club or holds an ownership interest in it.

The official corporate paperwork for the club identifies Gilmore variously as president, managing member, or director. In March, he incorporated a company called Executive Branch LLC located at the address for the club. He was listed on that registration as a director or officer. That month, a company with the same name and operating address was incorporated in Wyoming. A subsequent trademark application described the enterprise as a “private members dining club” and listed Gilmore as its managing memo. A later form filed with Wyoming designated Gilmore as the president of the company.

Addresses that appear on the various corporate records for Executive Branch LLC are associated with different Sacks’ businesses. Its initial filing in Wyoming noted its mailing address was 855 Front Street, San Francisco. That building is owned by 855 Front Street LLC, a Delaware firm registered in California by Gilmore in 2016 and that had the same address as Sacks Ventures, one of Sacks’ companies. According to California corporate records, Sacks Realty LLC, another Sacks enterprise, is listed as an officer of 855 Front Street LLC. The 855 Front Street property is also an address for Sacks’ Craft Ventures VC firm.

In April, the mailing address for Executive Branch LLC in the Wyoming corporate records was changed to 55 Green Street, San Francisco. This is a property near 855 Front Street and owned by Brick & Timber Collective. According to SEC records, Sacks Realty and Gilmore were both guarantors of a $36 million mortgage for this Green Street property.

There are other business ties between Gilmore and Sacks. The same day Gilmore incorporated Brick & Timber Collective in California, Sacks registered a company with the same name as doing business in San Francisco. In its articles of incorporation, Brick & Timber Collective listed as its address a San Francisco building owned by Sacks. And according to corporate records, an entity called DS PPI LLC—for which Sacks served as a director—was once an officer of Gilmore’s Brick & Timber Collective; it no longer is.

The Executive Branch representative says, “Neither David Sacks nor any of his entities own any interest in Brick & Timber Collective.”

The corporate records for the Executive Branch club filed in Wyoming and Washington, DC, list no other directors or officers other than Gilmore. He appears to have no preexisting public connections to any of the owners and initial members other than Sacks. He has not been been a major political funder. According to Federal Election Commission records, the only donation he has made to a federal candidate in the past 10 years was a $2,000 contribution to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in June 2023.

In light of Sacks’ White House job overseeing both artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency policy, his business and financial interests have been a matter of controversy, with critics claiming his appointment presents a conflict of interest due to his extensive holdings and personal involvement in crypto and tech. In March, the White House issued Sacks a conflict of interest waiver and maintained he had taken “significant steps to minimize potential conflicts of interest” by divesting “hundreds of millions of dollars in digital assets.”

But in a letter to the Office of Government Ethics last month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) contended that Sacks had not sufficiently divested his digital assets, and she asked if that office had been consulted regarding the waiver. She noted that because Sacks’ personal financial disclosure form has not been released, “the public cannot verify the waiver’s factual claims.” She also questioned whether his continuing association with Craft Ventures, which is heavily tech-focused, raises a conflict with his role as AI czar. Her office says she never received a response from OGE.

Government employees are entitled to social lives. But the arrangement with this new club seems rather comfy: The president’s crypto and AI adviser is promoting a plutocratic club that stands to earn millions of dollars in revenue for its owners (which includes a son of the president)—with some of that money presumably coming from the checkbooks or crypto wallets of lobbyists, donors, and others who might want favorable policies and decisions from the Trump administration. And a business associate of his is a key part of the action and perhaps in a position to benefit financially.

“No government official should be assisting a business associate in their financial interest,” Peliserro says. “It is unfair and there is a lack of transparency when people are interacting with Trump administration officials in an expensive private club that other people cannot access.” Bookbinder adds, “That some of those profiting from this enterprise have close connections to the administration makes it problematic.”

Trump once proclaimed he would drain the swamp in Washington. Instead, it looks as if his kin and crew are developing it.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Ava Tharpe, the plaintiff in A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, a notable education and disability rights case on the Court’s current docket. The ruling ensures that families will not have to meet the notoriously difficult standard of proving “bad faith and gross misjudgment” when suing schools for disability discrimination under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

A.J.T. centers around Tharpe, a Minnesota teenager with epilepsy that is more severe in the morning. I covered the case for Mother Jones in February.

Tharpe and her family had requested that she receive more instructional hours later in the day, a proposal rejected by the school district. The family sued the district under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Section 504 and the ADA. Tharpe and her family won the case under the IDEA, but the Eighth Circuit court ruled in favor of the school district under Section 504 and the ADA, holding that the case did not meet the “bad faith and gross misjudgment” standard.

As I wrote previously:

In five of the 13 federal circuit courts, including the Eighth Circuit, which covers Minnesota, families suing schools under Section 504 and the ADA have to prove “bad faith or gross misjudgment,” a standard the Eighth Circuit said Ava’s case did not meet—despite acknowledging that the family “may have established a genuine dispute about whether the district was negligent or even deliberately indifferent”…

A ruling against Ava and her family could be a major setback for student disability rights enforcement and an equally major boon for the Trump administration’s plan to gut the Department of Education at the expense of disabled kids.

While diversity and equity protections are under attack by both the conservative Supreme Court majority and the Trump administration, A.J.T. illustrates the ways disability rights law is sometimes less politically polarized. Even the Trump administration, in an amicus brief, said there is “no sound basis for that idiosyncratic heightened standard” around only schools.

“We hold today that ADA and Rehabilitation Act claims based on educational services should be subject to the same standards that apply in other disability discrimination contexts,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the unanimous decision. “Nothing in the text of Title II of the ADA or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act suggests that such claims should be subject to a distinct, more demanding analysis.”

Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates legal director Selene Almazan previously said that the bad-faith test runs counter to another item of federal legislation, the Handicapped Children’s Protection Act of 1986.

The case received some extra attention due to a “surprisingly aggressive” back-and-forth between Justice Neil Gorsuch and a lawyer representing the Osseo school district, Lisa Blatt, who accused Tharpe’s lawyers of “lying” about the district’s argument and whom Gorsuch admonished to be “careful with [her] words.” The district’s lawyers also argued that bad faith and gross misjudgment should be the standard for all ADA and Section 504 lawsuits—not just those pertaining to schools.

A ruling that in any way supported that argument would have made it much more difficult to enforce the ADA and Section 504—but the new ruling against the Minnesota district, by contrast, makes it easier.

“That our decision is narrow does not diminish its import for A. J. T. and ‘a great many children with disabilities and their parents,'” Roberts wrote in the conclusion. “Together they face daunting challenges on a daily basis.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Within days of Donald Trump’s return to office, a chilling message for voting rights arrived. The Justice Department was seeking to dismiss a lawsuit, originally brought forth by the Biden administration, challenging Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s efforts to purge voter rolls.

It wasn’t exactly a surprising move; the new Trump administration would soon back similar voter suppression efforts around the country. But for Virginia in 2025, the stakes couldn’t be higher. This November, the offices of governor, attorney general, lieutenant governor, and every seat in the state’s House of Delegates are up for grabs, setting up an off-year election season—and, critically, a bellwether for Trump—to be one of the most closely watched in recent memory.

As Dr. Fergie Reid Jr., a prominent political activist in the state, told the Virginia Mercury last month: “Virginia is the first opportunity for really any state in the United States to answer back to what’s going on in Washington right now. It’s going to send a big, loud message to the rest of the country and to the world that not everybody in America is with Trump.”

So with all eyes on Virginia this year, how are voting rights groups preparing? I caught up with Joan Porte, president of the League of Women Voters of Virginia, one of the initial groups to back a similar lawsuit that had challenged Youngkin’s voter removals, to hear about the group’s work ahead of November.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What are organizations like the league doing to make voters feel empowered this election cycle?

We’re ramping up what we normally do. Even headed into our biennial convention this month, I’m planning to somehow get 1,516 boxes of election material, including yard signs, into my car to distribute to our local leagues. We will be distributing our usual massive amount of voting information, getting it translated into six languages, and making it available to our partners so they can download and distribute it to their groups. We will be doing candidate forums. Our Richmond league always has a call-in show on a news program and a local station so that the candidates can answer questions. We have social media posts with voting reminders.

Only four states, including Virginia, have off-year elections. What have you heard about voter burnout?

We’re always worried about the voter lag in Virginia, because our state, along with my home state of New Jersey, pretty much has an election every year, which can lead to fatigue. But experts say that off-year elections are often a reflection of the new administration. We saw this in 2012 during [President Barack] Obama’s term with the rise of the Tea Party.

Trump’s mass deportation scheme, a looming abortion ban, the DOGE layoffs that hit Virginia’s military bases and federal workers especially hard. Can you talk about how these issues will affect Virginians at the polls this year?

It all comes down to this: Are they going to vote? We saw it last year with about 36 percent of people who were eligible to vote who just didn’t. If you’re asking me for a crystal ball, I would say that those things will affect voters, but will it affect them enough to say, “Yes, I’m going to go vote this way or that way,” or will they say, “Meh, what’s even the use? They’re all the same. Nothing is going to change.” That’s what we always fear at the league. We want to see 100 percent voting. We want to see every eligible person have their voice heard. All these things could motivate one party over another. But it could also keep people away out of a sense of despair, which is the worst thing that can happen.

Let’s talk about Gov. Youngkin’s voter purge. Do you think it lessened people’s faith in Virginia’s voting system?

That lawsuit is still ongoing. We are waiting for the judge to reconvene. There were two purges, including one last year, where 7,000 people, based on very faulty information from the Department of Motor Vehicles, were removed from the rolls.

“You might ask, ‘Well, what’s wrong with having uniformed police at the polling booth?’ Well, probably nothing, if you look like me, a white woman of a certain age. But if you are a member of a cultural group that has been targeted by police, seeing uniformed officers at the polls is not comforting.”

We won in every court except the Supreme Court. Fortunately, in Virginia, we have same-day voter registration, so we were able to encourage those people to vote. But I think anytime that something like that happens, it lessens people’s faith in the voting system. Some people will vote no matter what, but some are prone not to vote. Youngkin’s efforts also have a chilling effect on people who may be naturalized citizens but are fearful about government intervention.

Tell me about voter intimidation in Virginia.

We always anticipate voter intimidation, and we’ve seen some very creative ones in Virginia. Someone had a gun shop that happened to be near a polling place, so they were shooting off guns the day of the election. We have seen people trying to stir up trouble so that there’s a police presence at the polling booth. Now you might ask, “Well, what’s wrong with having uniformed police at the polling booth?” Well, probably nothing, if you look like me, a white woman of a certain age. But if you are a member of a cultural group that has been targeted by police, seeing uniformed officers at the polls is not comforting, especially now with the ongoing intimidation of immigrant populations.

What are some ways that voters can protect themselves and their rights when casting their ballot?

The election protection hotline is a great resource, and there are several in various languages, including Spanish, Arabic. If you know you’re a citizen and you’re registered, you can call that number. It is staffed by nonpartisan attorneys, and they have a very good track record of getting this stuff cleared up so that a person can vote. Getting on the permanent absentee ballot list is also a great move, and it has been shown to increase voter turnout. Fortunately, the league was instrumental in getting rid of that ridiculous “you need somebody to sign it” rule,which was a voter suppression tactic.

Gov. Youngkin recently announced that a special election will take place September 9 to fill the seat of the late Rep. Gerry Connolly, adding one more critical race in an already high-stakes election year. Could the addition of one more surprise election exacerbate this sense of voter fatigue and ennui we talked about amongst voters?

Yes, it could.

Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears [the GOP candidate for governor] recently landed in some hot water for failing to disclose several free international trips, including one to Israel. Tell me a bit about the history of Virginia’s campaign finance laws and how they could affect the governor’s race this year.

Basically, we don’t have any. We only barely passed a law during the last session requiring [candidates] to not use campaign funds for personal events like child care or care of an elderly parent. But before this law came into effect, I could say I’m running for this office, and if you love me dearly, you could give me $3 million, I could buy a new house with it, and there’d be no law against that.

I am exaggerating a little bit. But generally, we have terrible campaign finance laws in the state of Virginia.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Hummingbirds run on sugar.

Sweet nectar powers their tiny, furious bodies and super-fast wings, which beat as many as 80 to 90 times per second. And luckily for them, they don’t seem to get diabetes, even though they have extremely high blood glucose levels.

In the wild, hummingbirds, the smallest birds in the world, get their sugar from wildflowers, such as honeysuckle, lilies, and bee balm. But following the sweeping destruction of native prairies, forests, and wetlands over the last century, these fluttering jewels have had a more difficult time finding their glucose fix. Warming linked to climate change is also making flowers bloom earlier and changing the range of some hummingbird species, making it even harder for the birds to feed.

While humans are, of course, responsible for these impacts, some wildlife lovers are also trying to help—by installing feeders. Often red and plastic and filled with sugar water, hummingbird feeders provide a supplementary source of nectar for hummingbirds, especially during fall and spring migration when the birds are traveling long distances. Research shows that feeders may increase the number of hummingbirds locally, and birds tend to visit them more when there are fewer flowers in bloom.

So on the whole, feeders are good. They also provide an easy way for people to connect with wildlife.

But there’s one big, *big,*caveat here: If your feeder is dirty, it could be harming, or even killing, the hummers that visit it, turning the feeder from a lifeline into a trap. Unless you’re prepared to regularly clean your feeder, you may be better off not having one.

The problem is simple: If sugar water is left out too long, it will spoil, meaning it will attract and grow microbes. Some of those microbes are bad and can cause infections, including candida—a type of yeast that causes yeast infections in humans and, apparently, in hummingbirds.

When hummers contract fungal infections, their tongues swell and become difficult to retract. That can put them at risk of starvation. Infected birds also sometimes appear with lesions on their beak or more generally lethargic, said Melanie Furr, a licensed wildlife rehabber who works with Wild Nest Bird Rehab in Georgia.

One study published in 2019 found that most microbes in feeders are not dangerous to hummingbirds. And it’s unlikely that dirty feeders are causing population-wide declines of birds, said Don Powers, a professor emeritus at George Fox University who’s studied hummingbirds for decades.

But it’s still “fairly common” for individual birds to be sickened by them, Furr told me.

“I think it boils down to the fact that most people are not cleaning their feeders or refreshing their nectar as often as they should.”

“I think it boils down to the fact that most people are not cleaning their feeders or refreshing their nectar as often as they should,” she said.

Other wildlife rehabbers have similarly indicated that many adult and baby hummingbirds are in need of rescue because of feeder-related infections. Furr says antifungal medication can clear up the infection and make them healthy enough for release.

Just as the problem is simple, the solution is thankfully simple, too.

There are two key components to a healthy hummingbird feeder: the right recipe and regular cleaning. Both are incredibly straightforward. Recipe:

Mix 1 part refined white sugar with 4 parts drinking water, such as ¼ cup sugar with 1 cup water. Dissolve over heat and cool.

Important notes:

Don’t use other kinds of sugar or sweetener.Avoid red food coloring, including store-bought nectar with artificial color.Purified water is better. Avoid distilled water, Furr said, because it lacks trace minerals that birds need.You can refrigerate unused nectar for up to two weeks.

In spring and fall, you should clean your feeder every two to three days. In the summer—or whenever it’s hot—you should clean the feeder daily or every other day, Furr said.

“If you wouldn’t leave your drink sitting out in the sun for three days and then drink it, don’t do it for hummingbirds,” Furr said. “Why should a little, 3-gram hummingbird be expected to survive whatever germs are growing there?”

If you’re changing out the nectar every few days, you can simply clean the feeder with hot water, she said. But if it’s been a while, or you see or smell mold, scrub it down with a mixture of vinegar and water or use hydrogen peroxide. You should also make sure the feeder is completely dry before refilling it to prevent bacteria from growing, said Chad Witko, a specialist in avian biology at the National Audubon Society.

“If you’re going to commit to keeping it clean, it’s a great idea,” Furr said of feeders. “Hummingbirds, like birds across every biome, are in decline. Habitat loss and lack of native plants present challenges to them. Having a clean feeder can provide an additional food resource that can be important.”

Don’t want to bother with cleaning? Or want to do more for your local hummers?

Consider planting native hummingbird-friendly wildflowers. The National Audubon Society has a tool that tells you what to plant in your region to attract hummingbirds.

And lastly, if you do come across an injured hummingbird, contact a local wildlife rehabber. This website is a good place to start.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency was many things in the first months of the second Trump administration. It was a chain saw, a wood chipper, and “a way of life, like Buddhism,” according to Elon Musk, its fearless leader according to everyone but the president’s lawyers. It was a funnel of disinfo, a conflict of interest, a bureaucratic mystery, and a tired meme. But above all, it was the realization of a dream.

For all the talk of changing demographics and new coalitions, the most important development in US politics last fall involved money and power: The billionaires who believe their technology will save civilization found common cause with authoritarians who hoped that same technology could help them control it. They realized that, in the end, the things they wanted were mostly the same. The problem was democracy; the solution was technofascism.

The idea that a post-liberal, “merit-based” ruling class should use new technologies to govern the rest of us has been building on the right for years. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and former Musk business partner whose condemnation of vacuous startup culture nudged Vice President JD Vance toward Catholicism, once questioned whether “freedom and democracy are compatible.” (This skepticism of the democratic process did not stop him from spending tens of millions of dollars to influence it.) He was neither the first nor the last to suggest that our current political system had set a trap that only a few skilled visionaries could free us from.

Among the earlier proponents was Musk’s own apartheid-­supporting grandfather, who believed in replacing the electoral system with a “technocracy” of benevolent scientists. One of the more prominent thinkers on the new right these days is Curtis Yarvin, whose pitch for a monarchical “Dark Enlightenment” reached an audience that included Vance, Thiel, and VC billionaire Marc Andreessen. Andreessen, who has mocked the use of the term “technofascist” to describe the administration, describes himself as a “techno-optimist,” who believes artificial intelligence breakthroughs will usher civilization onto a new plane of existence and the sooner we get there, the better. This faith in the destiny of accelerating technological progress has become Silicon Valley’s version of end-times theology and is affecting our politics in much the same way—anything that can be done, must, to hasten the coming of the Borg.

DOGE offered a glimpse of the technofascist future. It formed the beachhead for a targeted hit on public institutions and their employees in the service of a new, radical, and cash-soaked post-democratic order. The fact that a few were imposing this on the many was the point.

If this bureaucratic smash-and-grab had a technical mission, it was to break down existing silos of the data the government collects on you to enable a sort of God’s-eye view of the American populace.

Musk and his allies relished demolishing firewalls online and off, forcing their way into buildings and firing or threatening to arrest civil servants who refused to comply. Federal employees feared that DOGE was monitoring what they typed and using AI to eavesdrop on what they said. At one point during Musk’s successful attempt to “delete” the United States Agency for International Development, employees thought they had restored funding for a few lifesaving programs for children, only for two Musk lieutenants to simply uncheck those boxes in the agency’s computer system; “pronatalism” for me, DOGE for thee. A manifesto shared by Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded the surveillance behemoth Palantir with Thiel, implored the administration to “fire people who can’t be fired…Mass deport people who can’t be deported.” Musk, for his part, urged the administration to “go after” Tesla critics and suggested the administration could ignore court orders—which, of course, Donald Trump did.

If this bureaucratic smash-and-grab had a technical mission, it was to break down existing silos of the data the government collects on you to enable a sort of God’s-eye view of the American populace. Big Tech and the government have hoovered up and exploited your data for decades, but never so openly and so panoptically. Musk was trying to riffle through your Social Security, Medicare, and tax data. The goal was to use these pots of information—long legally separated to avoid exactly this kind of thing—to purge the undesired and justify the mass reduction of government the right has long pined for.

As usual, immigrants bore the brunt. The government used AI to trawl through the personal data of thousands of students to find thought crimes. Palantir used its vast data collection apparatus to help the government locate and track undocumented residents. To ensure those immigrants could never collect benefits, the Social Security Administration simply reclassified thousands of people as dead. At the Border Security Expo in Phoenix in April, acting ice Director Todd Lyons expressed his wish that the government could streamline the logistics of mass deportation. What was needed, he said, according to the Arizona Mirror, was “like Prime, but with human beings.”

The first few months of the administration were filled with moments like that. It was not just that the new people in charge sounded like the sort of people who hunt service workers for sport, but that they didn’t really seem to care who knew.

The key to the administration’s technofascist turn was that you could start from either direction and end up in the same place. Tech was a means to impose fascism; fascism was a means to unfettered tech. The rise of cryptocurrency and AI helped the MAGA movement and Silicon Valley moguls meet in the middle. Eager to have a president who would let them do as they pleased, some of the biggest names in the business showered Trump with hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign cash. To them, these kinds of civilization-shaking creations demanded an accommodation from everyone else. They would require massive new infusions of energy and render the existing economy obsolete. (With one notable exception: Andreessen predicted recently that venture capital investing could be “one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing” after AI takes over, because it is more an art than a science.)

And then there’s Trump 2.0’s preferred aesthetic, a sort of machine-learning mashup of Thomas Kinkade, Leni Riefenstahl, and Starship Troopers that renders the harshest fever dreams in soft-focused and cruel ways. In February, the president posted an AI-generated video of an ethnically cleansed Gaza, with Musk eating flatbread on a beach. The Department of Defense recently offered up its own vision of Secretary Pete Hegseth holding up an inexplicably four-fingered hand next to the border wall. Slop like this is everywhere now, in White House statements and in the depths of Musk’s Grok-powered feedback loop.

This grand alliance is a bit fraught, though, as the recent falling out between the president and his richest ally underscored. Trump wants to unshackle particular kinds of technology to help particular groups, but it’s not exactly “technocracy.” For one thing, he fired all the technocrats—and gutted the nation’s capacity for research. Andreessen’s “Techno-­Optimist Manifesto” includes the immortal line: “We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.” How’s that going?

Immigrants were just the initial target. Musk’s legion—which is also, according to the Wall Street Journal, how he describes his kids—launched a broader attack on the mostly liberal white-collar professionals he and his fellow oligarchs blamed for debasing society. They were “the professional managerial class” or “childless cat ladies”—denizens of what the court philosopher Balaji Srinivasan refers to as the “Paper Belt.” The professional class who staff not just the government, but higher education, media, law firms, and NGOs were the enemy, and the solve, in industry terms, was to blow up those sectors. “You probably deserved it,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) told a recently axed Department of Health and Human Services employee who confronted him on Capitol Hill in April. Why? Because, Banks later explained, the man had a “woke job.”

All of the most malicious forces in government are now integrated with a Silicon Valley powered by an existential sense of urgency and illusions of its own supremacy. For all the flashy tech and futurist manifestos, this new politics is a throwback. Offering medals to women who have a certain number of children—an actual proposal that two of Musk’s fellow pronatalists sent to the White House —feels a bit midcentury German. Musk’s obsession with IQs and large brains is a sequel many times over, indicative of a growing sense that the people in power believe they are innately superior. To them, the world is divided between protagonists and NPCs—automated background video-game characters, in other words, not so unlike “the unthinking demos” Thiel once lamented controlled “so-called ‘social democracy.’” For a long time, as investors threw money at robotaxis and never-realized Hyperloops, the joke was that the San Francisco Bay Area’s best and brightest were hard at work trying to reinvent the bus. But it turns out if you get enough VCs in a Signal chat together, you’ll eventually reinvent feudalism, too.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

In 2020, Marlean Ames alleged that she was denied a job promotion and subsequently demoted by the Ohio Department of Youth Services because she is heterosexual. Her supervisor at the time was gay.

Ames sued her employer for discrimination, but lower courts initially dismissed her case. She hadn’t met a legal bar called the “background circumstances” rule, in which members of majority groups have to show additional evidence of discrimination for their cases to proceed.

But last week, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the “background circumstances” rule is inconsistent with anti-discrimination laws. In the decision written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court said that majority groups shouldn’t have to meet a higher legal bar than minority groups.

As the Trump administration wages a battle against the concept of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)—removing references to slavery abolitionists on government websites and charging Harvard with discriminating against white male job applicants—some conservative groups are celebrating the ruling as a clear victory towards ending diversity-friendly policies.

But Xiao Wang, the University of Virginia law professor whose legal clinic won the case, has a much more nuanced take.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Where you were when the opinion was announced? What were you doing?

You never know when your opinion gets released, but it’s generally at 10 a.m. on Thursdays. So around 9:45 or so, I usually have the Supreme Court’s website on automatic refresh on my computer. It’s like watching the ball drop on New Year’s—only for legal nerds. I was at home drinking coffee, wearing a raggedy t-shirt, and hadn’t brushed my teeth or anything yet. I had to get ready really quickly and come to the law school to try to take some interview requests.

How did you get involved in this case?

The Sixth Circuit is the lower court that decided this case. I used to be a clerk there, so I try to keep up with their opinions. The opinion in this case didn’t seem quite right. Even the lower court suggested that maybe the Supreme Court should look at it. I reached out to the local trial counsel, Ed Gilbert, on this and talked about how we—as a law clinic—could help. I think Ed was reassured by how I approached the case. I said, “Look, I think this is a pretty narrow legal issue. I think it’s something that hopefully we can find some common ground on and bring it up to the Supreme Court in a respectful and nuanced manner.”

Colloquially, people are describing this case as being a win for the fight against “reverse discrimination.” But what narrow legal question was the court really addressing?

I guess I have an issue with the colloquial term. The Supreme Court never uses that term, and and a lot of the lower courts don’t use that term. And so to me, what this case was about is just discrimination.

The simplified question was, “How do [anti-discrimination laws] apply across different situations? And I think our answer to that was to apply the same legal standards and legal framework [in any discrimination case]. The outcome might come out differently in different situations based on the facts on the ground. But judges should have the same law in front of them and apply it in the same even-handed manner.

How would you explain to a ninth grader what the court ultimately decided in this case?

I think what it comes down to is the idea that anyone can be subject to discrimination. And if they are subject to discrimination—at least in the workplace—and they want to bring a lawsuit, then the judge should apply the same law, the same standards to them.

Also, the underlying premise behind this case was “majority group” versus “minority group” discrimination. But it can be hard to make that distinction, because we can be part of a majority group in some ways, but not others… I think it’s just easier for courts to say, “Well, the best way to figure out whether discrimination happened is based on the same legal framework and legal standards.”

You won your case, but Miss Ames’s legal fight is ongoing. The Supreme Court “vacated and remanded” it. Can you explain what that means?

What we were asking from the justices was really just to let her have her day in court. We removed the legal obstacle blocking her case from proceeding, but the next big step after that is usually to present your factual story to a jury. Let’s have 12 people in Ohio see whether they believe that this is what happened—whether it was driven by discrimination. And if it was, what sort of remedy you should get? We won’t be involved in that part of her legal fight.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately—including by the President of the United States—about efforts to end DEI initiatives. There’s an insinuation here that any sort of efforts aimed towards achieving Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion have the effect of discriminating against majority classes—such as white people. Is there a place for nuanced, carefully built DEI policies?

I think a lot of us want diverse workplaces and diverse educational institutions, and for these places to reflect all different types of people and all different types of views. One of the reasons that I wanted work with law students was to be able to reach out to students that might not come from the traditional backgrounds. And I give so much credit to my students for producing the great work that leads to unanimous decisions like this.

On a micro scale, I definitely think [DEI policies are] important. Maybe these individual policies will be tested in the courts—I don’t know how they’ll rule on them. My sense from Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion in the [Students for Fair Admissions] affirmative action case is that, at the end of the day, he thinks it’s laudable to have this goal of greater diversity. It’s really just a question of how you carefully frame it within the confines of the Equal Protection Clause and other legal constraints. And I don’t know, there might be some more stops and starts before we figure out the right recipe, but certainly I think it’s something we shouldn’t stop trying to do.

Are you concerned that people who lead the anti-DEI fight may misconstrue the merits of this specific, narrow Supreme Court decision to gain advantages for majority classes at the expense of marginalized ones?

That’s a really tough question. I’ve learned—especially in this case—that interest groups may take whatever they want from the case and run with it. But that’s different than what the law actually says, and how it actually gets applied in courts.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

My red carpet interview with Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) at the Saturday premiere of a new documentary on her history-making election as the first openly transgender member of Congress was interrupted by an adoring passerby.

“Sarah, I love you!” the man shouted. “I’m a donor and I don’t even live in the district!” (“Thank you for all you do!” the congresswoman replied.)

The fact that the 34-year-old first-term Delaware congresswoman has a national fan base, and is the subject of a documentary, State of Firsts, that premiered the Tribeca Film Festival less than six months after her inauguration, is only surprising if you are unfamiliar with McBride’s role as a trailblazer in American politics.

Last November, she became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, outperforming Vice President Kamala Harris among voters in the nation’s second-smallest (and first) state. Before that, she was the nation’s first openly trans state senator when she served in the Delaware General Assembly. Her congressional election brought not only a national spotlight, but also anti-trans attacks from GOP lawmakers once she took office. There were also critiques from some trans people who wanted McBride to fight harder on their behalf as Republicans mount a full-scale assault on trans rights.

State of Firsts portrays McBride grappling with both the highs and the lows of what it meant to step into her role. It resists an easy narrative about life as a “first” being an upward trajectory of progress and celebration. For McBride, it has also been heavy with impossible expectations, conflicting allegiances, and flattening portrayals. As McBride sums up early on in the film: “It is an unbelievable challenge to figure out how I am seen as a full human being rather than just as a walking trans flag.”

Part of that challenge came from her GOP colleagues. In one scene, McBride watches Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) attack her with insults on Steve Bannon’s podcast. “She’s just going to act like that every day,” McBride says to a campaign staffer as they watch the clip while sitting on a couch, “and my job will be to not respond.”

That self-imposed challenge was put to the test just weeks after her election, when Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) introduced a resolution seeking to bar McBride from using the women’s restroom. That move led to a swarm of media coverage. Democrats and LGBTQ advocates rushed to McBride’s defense. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) eventually announced that he would back a bathroom ban in the Capitol and impliedthat McBride would have to use the private bathroom in her office or one of the building’s unisex bathrooms. Greene even reportedly threatened to fight a transgender woman if she tried to use a women’s bathroom in the House part of the Capitol.

McBride refused to take the bait. She issued a statement that did not mention Mace by name but called the chaos sowed by the bathroom ban an effort to distract from the real issues plaguing the majority of Americans. “We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars.” After Johnson announced he would move to enforce the bathroom ban (on Transgender Day of Remembrance, no less), McBride put out another, lengthier statement saying she would follow the rules “even if I disagree with them.” But for some trans advocates who wanted McBride to fight back, her response came as a “betrayal.”

The documentary features McBride’s most extensive and personal commentary on the debacle to date.

“The disobedience isn’t taking a toilet seat; the disobedience is taking this congressional seat,” McBride says in a scene while driving her car after an orientation in DC for freshman lawmakers. “It’s not just that they don’t want me in bathrooms; they don’t want me in Congress.”

“A win for them is me fighting back and then turning me into a caricature,” she continues. “There would be a bounty on my head if I said I refused to comply. I refuse to be martyred. I want to be a member of Congress.” And in what is perhaps her most blunt assessment of the risks she faces, McBride says: “It’s hard to play the long game when your short-term life is at risk.”

McBride manages to display an unwavering faith that she will be able to shift the culture in Congress, even if her strategy for doing so is not the one some advocates wanted. “The power of proximity, the power of our presence—it doesn’t change everything, but it has an impact,” McBride says in the car scene. “There are people who think representation doesn’t matter at all and there are people who think it will solve everything, and it’s somewhere in the middle.”

The film also shows the ways McBride’s family, Democratic allies, andan ongoing supply of Wawa coffee supported her during the campaign and her early days in office. In a sit-down with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the pioneering lawmakers discuss the harder parts of making history. “What people don’t see and what they don’t really experience is that being the first means being the only,” Ocasio-Cortez tells McBride. “What they go after is your essential dignity as a human being. And, to be frank, that’s what really pisses me off about this,” she adds, referring to the bathroom ban.

“I want to respect your autonomy and I want to respect your story and how you want to handle this for yourself, but I also want to clock these motherfuckers,” Ocasio-Cortez adds.

McBride’s strategy, though, seems to have paid off: Mace and Greene have since directed their attention elsewhere, and McBride has managed to work with colleagues across the aisle to introduce and co-sponsor several pieces of bipartisan legislation.

“You have to remove the incentives for these people, because at the end of the day the incentive is attention,” McBride said at a panel discussion after the New York City premiere. “They’re employing the strategies of reality TV.”

McBride, on the other hand, describes herself as “fairly disciplined” in how she conducts herself in office. But she makes room for humor: After the credits roll, there’s a short video of McBride giving a tour of her office in Congress—including the bathroom.

“It’s amazing,” she says, when she steps inside, “that I didn’t just burst into flames.”

State of Firsts will next show at the DC/DOX film festival in Washington, DC on June 15.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of theClimate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump’s administration is set to claim planet-heating pollution spewing from US power plants is so globally insignificant it should be spared any sort of climate regulation.

But, in fact, the volume of these emissions is stark—if the US power sector were a country, it would be the sixth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has reportedly drafted a plan to delete all restrictions on greenhouse gases coming from coal and gas-fired power plants in the US because they “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution” and are a tiny and shrinking share of the overall global emissions that are driving the climate crisis.

However, a new analysis shows that the emissions from American fossil-fuel plants are prominent on a global scale, having contributed 5 percent of all planet-heating pollution since 1990. If it were a country, the US power sector would be the sixth largest emitter in the world, eclipsing the annual emissions from all sources in Japan, Brazil, the UK, and Canada, among other nations.

“That seems rather significant to me,” said Jason Schwartz, co-author of the report from New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “If this administration wants to argue only China has significant emissions they can try to do that, but a court will review that, and under any reasonable interpretation will find that US power plant emissions are significant too.”

Fossil fuel-derived electricity is responsible for the second largest source of emissions in the US, behind transportation. No country in history has caused more carbon pollution than the US, and while its power sector’s emissions have declined somewhat in recent years, largely through a market-based decline in heavily polluting coal, it remains a major driver of the climate crisis.

The cocktail of toxins emitted by power plants have a range of impacts, the NYU analysis points out. A single year of emissions in 2022 will cause 5,300 deaths in the US from air pollution over many decades, along with climate impacts that will result in global damages of $370 billion, including $225 billion in global health damages and $75 billion in lost labor productivity.

“It’s a completely illogical argument: There’s not a lot of emissions so don’t worry, but yet we have to block every attempt to control them.”

“We were surprised when we ran the numbers just how quickly these deaths start tallying up,” said Schwartz. “All of these harms stack up on top of each other. Climate change will be the most important public health issue this century and we can’t just ignore the US power sector’s contribution to that public health crisis.”

The Trump administration, though, is looking to dismantle a plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The move comes as part of a wider deregulatory blitz upon a wide range of rules aimed at protecting clean air and water; on Thursday, the EPA also confirmed a plan to delay the implementation of Clean Air Act protections against methane and other harmful pollutants from fossil fuel production.

Removing these protections will prove not only dangerous, but also costly, said Christopher Frey, who was a science advisor to Joe Biden and led a clean air EPA committee under Barack Obama.

“A ‘do nothing’ policy to rollback greenhouse gas emission standards is not really a policy to do nothing,” said Frey, now an associate dean at North Carolina State University’s college of engineering. “It is a policy to force us to have to do more later to compensate for not taking preventive action sooner. It is a policy to knowingly cause more damage for folks in the not so distant future to contend with.”

The power plant plan has endured a tortuous history, having been first put forward by the Obama administration, only to be halted by the first Trump administration and also the Supreme Court. The Biden administration last year rolled out a more limited version of the plan aimed at satisfying the Supreme Court’s ruling.

This version is now targeted for repeal by the Trump administration, expected in the coming weeks ahead of a public comment period and further expected legal challenges. Despite pointing to declining power plant emissions in its justification, the Trump administration has simultaneously attempted to increase these emissions by demanding a revival of the coal industry, boosting oil and gas drilling and axing incentives for cleaner energy.

“President Trump promised to kill the clean power plan in his first term, and we continue to build on that progress now,” said Lee Zeldin, administrator of the EPA. “In reconsidering the Biden-Harris rule that ran afoul of Supreme Court case law, we are seeking to ensure that the agency follows the rule of law while providing all Americans with access to reliable and affordable energy.”

Trump has long claimed that the US should not engage in international climate talks because its emissions footprint is negligible, noted Judith Enck, who served as an EPA regional administrator under Obama. Meanwhile, his administration has cracked down on states’ ability to regulate emissions, she said.

“Apparently there is no level of governance where we can have these regulations,” Enck said. “It’s a completely illogical argument: There’s not a lot of emissions so don’t worry, but yet we have to block every attempt to control them at the state, federal [and] international levels?”

Experts have questioned whether pollution needs to be deemed “significant” in order to be subjected to the Clean Air Act, which has been used to regulate even proportionally small levels of environmental toxins.

“There is absolutely no legal basis for them to propose a pollutant like CO2 has to meet some sort of significance, they are making this up, this is make-believe law,” said Joseph Goffman, who led theEPA’s office of air and radiation during Biden’s term. “This is a sort of cheat code to try to neutralize any tool they fear might be used to reduce greenhouse gases.”

The climate crisis is a global problem of the shared commons that experts say requires all countries, particularly the largest emitters, to remedy. Goffman said the Trump administration is attempting to reject this basic tenet. “They are trying to write one of the biggest historical emitters in the world a get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said.

Correction, June 10: This post has been updated to credit its original publisher.

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