Mother Jones

The Minnesota shooter who killed a state lawmaker and her husband and wounded another legislator and his wife reportedly had a list containing dozens of other names, including abortion providers and advocates.

Multiple news outlets, including CNN, ABC, and the Minnesota Star Tribune, have reported that the alleged shooter—57-year-old Vance Luther Boelter, who remains at large—left a list of names behind in his car that included abortion providers and advocates and figures with ties to Planned Parenthood, along with Democratic politicians. Rep. Kelly Morrison (D-Minn.), told the Star Tribune that she was on the shooter’s list and that local law enforcement told her to shelter in place on Saturday; a spokesperson for Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) told the New York Times the senator was also on the list.

Much is still unknown about the suspect’s motivations. A longtime friend of Boelter told CNN on Saturday that the allegedshooter was a staunch opponent of abortion rights. On Meet the Press Sunday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said, “There clearly was some through line with abortion because of the groups that were on the list and other things that I’ve heard were in this manifesto.”

A spokesperson for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety told Mother Jones on Sunday that the contents of the list, which he said he had not seen, are “investigative information.” The spokesperson said that anyone who was named on the list will be, or already has been, contacted by law enforcement. The National Abortion Federation (NAF), a professional organization of abortion providers and supporters, said in a statement that it is working with its members in Minnesota “to provide additional security support while the suspect is still at large.” Spokespeople for Planned Parenthood and several Minnesota-based reproductive rights groups did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones.

While Boelter’s motives remain unclear, the reports that abortion providers and supporters were named on the list come amid a wave of threats and violence since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. “What we’ve seen since the Dobbsdecision has been a shift, where some of the states that historically have been more protective of abortion are seeing more incidents of harassment and targeting of providers,” the NAF’s Melissa Fowler told my colleague Laura Morel last month. On top of that, in January, President Donald Trump pardoned nearly two dozen people charged with violating the FACE Act, a federal law that prohibits interfering with access to reproductive health clinics. Trump’s DOJ has also said it will limit enforcement of the law going forward, and just last week, House Republicans advanced a bill that seeks to repeal the law entirely.

The anti-abortion group Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life said in a statement posted to X that while the shooter’s motives haven’t yet been established, “his actions are completely antithetical to the mission of MCCL and the pro-life movement.”

The FBI is offering a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to Boelter’s arrest and conviction.

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

For the fewer than a hundred people that make up the entire population of Port Heiden, Alaska, fishing provides both a paycheck and a full dinner plate. Every summer, residents of the Alutiiq village set out on commercial boats to catch salmon swimming upstream in the nearby rivers of Bristol Bay.

John Christensen, Port Heiden’s tribal president, is currently making preparations for the annual trek. In a week’s time, he and his 17-year-old son will charter Queen Ann, the family’s 32-foot boat, eight hours north to brave some of the planet’s highest tides, extreme weather risks, and other treacherous conditions. The two will keep at it until August, hauling in thousands of pounds of fish each day that they later sell to seafood processing companies. It’s grueling work that burns a considerable amount of costly fossil fuel energy, and there are scarcely any other options.

Because of their location, diesel costs almost four times the national average—the Alaska Native community spent $900,000 on fuel in 2024 alone. Even Port Heiden’s diesel storage tanks are posing challenges. Coastal erosion has created a growing threat of leaks in the structures, which are damaging to the environment and expensive to repair, and forced the tribe to relocate them further inland. On top of it all, of course, diesel generators contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and are notoriously noisy.

“We live on the edge of the world. And it’s just tough.”

“Everything costs more. Electricity goes up, diesel goes up, every year. And wages don’t,” Christensen said. “We live on the edge of the world. And it’s just tough.”

In 2015, the community built a fish processing plant that the tribe collectively owns; they envisioned a scenario in which tribal members would not need to share revenue with processing companies, would bring home considerably more money, and wouldn’t have to spend months at a time away from their families. But the building has remained nonoperational for an entire decade because they simply can’t afford to power it.

Enormous amounts of diesel are needed, says Christensen, to run the filleting and gutting machines, separators and grinders, washing and scaling equipment, and even to store the sheer amount of fish the village catches every summer in freezers and refrigerators. They can already barely scrape together the budget needed to pay for the diesel that powers their boats, institutions, homes, and airport.

The onslaught of energy challenges that Port Heiden is facing, Christensen says, is linked to a corresponding population decline. Their fight for energy independence is a byproduct of colonial policies that have limited the resources and recourse that Alaska Native tribes like theirs have. “Power is 90 percent of the problem,” said Christensen. “Lack of people is the rest. But cheaper power would bring in more people.”

In 2023, Climate United, a national investment fund and coalition, submitted a proposal to participate in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF—a $27 billion investment from the Inflation Reduction Act administered by the Environmental Protection Agency to “mobilize financing and private capital to address the climate crisis.” Last April, the EPA announced it had chosen three organizations to disseminate the program’s funding; $6.97 billion was designated to go to Climate United.

Then, in the course of President Donald Trump’s sweeping federal disinvestment campaign, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was singled out as a poster child for what Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claimed was “criminal.”

“The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” Zeldin said in February. He then endeavored on a crusade to get the money back. As the financial manager for GGRF, Citibank, the country’s third-largest financial institution, got caught in the middle.

“The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over.”

The New York Times reported that investigations into Biden officials’ actions in creating the program and disbursing the funds had not found any “meaningful evidence” of criminal wrongdoing.

On March 4, Zeldin announced that the GGRF funding intended to go to Climate United and seven other organizations had been frozen. The following week, Climate United filed a joint lawsuit against the EPA, which they followed with a motion for a temporary restraining order against Zeldin, the EPA, and Citibank from taking actions to implement the termination of the grants. On March 11, the EPA sent Climate United a letter of funding termination. In April, a federal DC district judge ruled that the EPA had terminated the grants unlawfully and blocked the EPA from clawing them back. The Trump administration then appealed the decision.

Climate United is still awaiting the outcome of that appeal. While they do, the $6.97 billion remains inaccessible.

Climate United’s money was intended to support a range of projects from Hawai’i to the East Coast, everything from utility-scale solar to energy-efficient community centers—and a renewable energy initiative in Port Heiden. The coalition had earmarked $6 million for the first round of a pre-development grant program aimed at nearly two dozen Native communities looking to adopt or expand renewable energy power sources.

“We made investments in those communities, and we don’t have the capital to support those projects,” said Climate United’s Chief Community Officer Krystal Langholz.

In response to an inquiry from Grist, an EPA spokesperson noted that “Unlike the Biden-Haris administration, this EPA is committed to being an exceptional steward of taxpayer dollars.” The spokesperson said that Zeldin had terminated $20 billion in grant agreements because of “substantial concerns regarding the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program integrity, the award process, and programmatic waste and abuse, which collectively undermine the fundamental goals and statutory objectives of the award.”

A representative of Citibank declined to comment. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service did not respond to requests for comment.

Long before most others recognized climate change as an urgent existential crisis, the Alutiiq peoples of what is now known as Port Heiden, but was once called Meshik, were forced to relocate because of rising seawater. With its pumice-rich volcanic soils and exposed location on the peninsula that divides Bristol Bay from the Gulf of Alaska, the area is unusually vulnerable to tidal forces that erode land rapidly during storms. Beginning in 1981, disappearing sea ice engulfed buildings and homes.

The community eventually moved their village about a 10-minute drive further inland. No one lives at the old site anymore, but important structures still remain, including a safe harbor for fishing boats.

In a region that’s warming faster than just about any other place on the planet, much of the land is on the precipice of being swallowed by water.

The seas, of course, are still rising, creeping up to steal the land from right below the community’s feet. In a region that’s warming faster than just about any other place on the planet, much of the land is on the precipice of being swallowed by water. From 2017 to 2018, the old site lost between 35 and 65 feet of shoreline, as reported by the Bristol Bay Times. Even the local school situated on the newer site is affected by the shrinking shoreline—the institution and surrounding Alutiiq village increasingly threatened by the encroaching sea.

Before the Trump administration moved to terminate their funding, Christensen’s dream of transitioning the Port Heiden community to renewable sources of energy, consequential for both maintaining its traditional lifestyle and ensuring its future, had briefly seemed within reach. He also saw it as a way to contribute to global solutions to the climate crisis.

“I don’t think [we are] the biggest contributor to global pollution, but if we could do our part and not pollute, maybe we won’t erode as fast,” he said. “I know we’re not very many people, but to us, that’s our community.”

The tribe planned to use a $300,000 grant from Climate United to pay for the topographic and waterway studies needed to design two run-of-the-river hydropower plants. In theory, the systems, which divert a portion of flowing water through turbines, would generate enough clean energy to power the entirety of Port Heiden, including the idle fish-processing facility. The community also envisioned channeling hydropower to run a local greenhouse, where they could expand what crops they raise and the growing season, further boosting local food access and sovereignty.

In even that short period of whiplash—from being awarded the grant to watching it vanish—the village’s needs have become increasingly urgent. Meeting the skyrocketing cost of diesel, according to Christensen, is no longer feasible. The community’s energy crisis and ensuing cost of living struggle have already started prompting an exodus, with the population declining at a rate of little over 3 percent every year—a noticeable loss when the town’s number rarely exceeds a hundred residents to begin with.

“It’s really expensive to live out here. And I don’t plan on moving anytime soon. And my kids, they don’t want to go either. So I have to make it better, make it easier to live here,” Christensen said.

Janine Bloomfield, grants specialist at 10Power, the organization that Port Heiden partnered with to help write their grant application, said they are currently waiting for a decision to be made in the lawsuit “that may lead to the money being unfrozen.” In the interim, she said, recipients have been asked to work with Climate United on paperwork “to be able to react quickly in the event that the funds are released.”

For its part, Climate United is also now exploring other funding strategies. The coalition is rehauling the structure of the money going to Port Heiden and other Native communities. Rather than awarding it as a grant, where recipients would have to pay the costs upfront and be reimbursed later, Climate United will now issue loans to the communities originally selected for the pre-development grants that don’t require upfront costs and will be forgiven upon completion of the agreed-upon deliverables. Their reason for the transition, according to Langholz, was “to increase security, decrease administrative burden on our partners, and create credit-building opportunities while still providing strong programmatic oversight.”

Still, there are downsides to consider with any loan, including being stuck with debt. In many cases, said Chéri Smith, a Mi’Kmaq descendant who founded and leads the nonprofit Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, replacing a federal grant with a loan, even a forgivable one, “adds complexity and risk for Tribal governments.”

Forgivable loans “become a better option” in later stages of development or for income-generating infrastructure, said Smith, who is on the advisory board of Climate United, but are “rarely suitable for common pre-development needs.” That’s because pre-feasibility work, such as Port Heiden’s hydropower project, “is inherently speculative, and Tribes should not be expected to risk even conditional debt to validate whether their own resources can be developed.” This is especially true in Alaska, she added, where costs and logistical challenges are exponentially higher for the 229 federally recognized tribes than in the lower 48, and outcomes much less predictable.

Raina Thiele, Dena’ina Athabascan and Yup’ik, who formerly served in the Biden administration as senior adviser for Alaska affairs to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and former tribal liaison to President Obama, said the lending situation is particularly unique when it comes to Alaska Native communities, because of how Congress historically wrote legislation relating to a land claim settlement which saw tribes deprived of control over resources and land. Because of that, it’s been incredibly difficult for communities to build capacity, she noted, making even a forgivable loan “a bit of a high-risk endeavor.” The question of trust also shows up—the promise of loan forgiveness, in particular, is understandably difficult for communities who have long faced exploitation and discrimination in public and privatized lending programs. “Grant programs are a lot more familiar,” she said.

Even so, the loan from Climate United would only be possible if the court rules in its favor and compels the EPA to release the money. If the court rules against Climate United, Langholz told Grist, the organization could pursue damage claims in another court and may seek philanthropic fundraising to help Port Heiden come up with the $300,000, in addition to the rest of the $6 million promised to the nearly two dozen Native communities originally selected for the grant program.

“These cuts can be a matter of life or death for many of these communities being able to heat their homes.”

“These cuts can be a matter of life or death for many of these communities being able to heat their homes, essentially,” said Thiele.

While many different stakeholders wait to see how the federal funding crisis will play out, Christensen doesn’t know what to make of the proposed grant-to-loan shift for Port Heiden’s hydropower project. The landscape has changed so quickly and drastically, it has, however, prompted him to lose what little faith he had left in federal funding. He has already begun to brainstorm other ways to ditch diesel.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said. “I’ll find the money if I have to. I’ll win the lottery, and spend the money on cheaper power.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Many Republicans quietly but noticeably skipped Trump’s military-slash-birthday parade on Saturday. According to a survey Politico did earlier this week of 50 congressional Republicans, only seven said they planned to stay in Washington, DC, for the weekend to attend the festivities.

OneRepublican—Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)—was more directabout his opposition to the event. “I just never liked the idea of the parade because I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, and the only parades I can remember are Soviet parades, for the most part, or North Korean parades,” Paul said on Meet the Press Sunday.

“The parades I remember from our history were different,” Paul continued. “We never glorified weapons so much. And I know [Trump] means well. I don’t think he means for any of this to be depicted in another fashion. But I’m just not a big fan. Then there is the cost. I mean, we’re $2 trillion in the hole and just an additional cost like this, I’m not for it.”

Rand Paul: "I've never liked the idea of the parade. I grew up in the '70s and '80s, and the only parades I can remember are Soviet parades for the most part or North Korean parades. The parades I remember from our history were different…we never glorified weapons so… pic.twitter.com/KwhuMlzvuG

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 15, 2025

Indeed, Army officials have estimated the parade would cost between $25 and $45 million, but the final price tag has not yet been publicly confirmed. Videos from the event show Army tanks rolling through the streets as spectators watch from the sidelines and, in some sections, sparsely populated bleachers.

That the libertarian-ish Paul would vocally oppose the parade is not especially shocking. He has been vocal about his opposition to Trump’s tariff policy as well as the current version of the massive budget reconciliation bill Trump is trying to push through Congress, which led to Trump blasting him in a pair of Truth Social posts earlier this month. “Rand votes NO on everything, but never has any practical or constructive ideas,” Trump wrote in one post. “His ideas are actually crazy (losers!).” On Meet the Press Sunday, Paul said he’s “not an absolute no” on the budget bill.

Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

On June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States Army. In 1916 on that same date, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the day Flag Day, which Congress made an official holiday in 1949. On June 14, 1946, Fred and Mary Anne Trump welcomed the birth of their second son Donald at Jamaica Medical Center in New York. And, on June 14, 2025, President Donald Trump has planned an extravagant and hugely expensive military parade down Constitution Ave. in Washington, DC, to celebrate the 250th birthday of the Army, and coincidentally, his 79th.

But also, on June 14, 2025, approximately 2,000 demonstrations in all fifty states—and some other countries—organized under the theme of “No Kings,” have been organized to protest Trump’s increasingly authoritarian rule. The protests were planned for months, but have gained further urgency over the last week, as the administration deployed the military to Los Angeles to quash generally peaceful protests against aggressive ICE immigration raids.

We will spend the day covering these protests as well as the parade this evening. As our Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery noted:

The "No Kings" organizers say that there are more than 1,800 protests planed for tomorrow.: www.nokings.orgWe'll have journalists at several of them, but you can tag @motherjones.com with your clips and tips.

— Clara Jeffery (@clarajeffery.bsky.social) 2025-06-13T15:42:02.438Z

June 14, 11:15 a.m. ET: Meanwhile, early morning in Los Angeles, where the Trump administration has deployed the Marines.

Cities prepare for ‘No Kings’ rallies as Marines arrive in LA https://t.co/2lDhwKWqBi pic.twitter.com/mQYSQHj2FM

— The Independent (@Independent) June 14, 2025

10:56 a.m. ET: The protests aren’t just in the US. Here are some scenes from abroad.

HAPPENING NOW: The “No Kings” protests have gone worldwide as protesters have gathered in Paris, France for a rally against the corrupt Trump regime (Video: Heidy Torres) pic.twitter.com/SmzCxZO2wi

— Marco Foster (@MarcoFoster_) June 14, 2025

10:11 a.m. ET: Some advice for protesters.

If you're going to a 'No King's Day' event tomorrow (and you should) please take a minute to familiarize yourself with your rights. pic.twitter.com/li2KDQWW0C

— Senator Heidi Campbell (@Campbell4TN) June 13, 2025

June 13, 1:30 p.m. ET: Dozens of current and former national politicians have taken to X (whose boss still can’t get back in Trump’s graces) to promote Saturday’s nationwide protests.

The most important words of our Constitution are the first three: We the People. We have no Kings here, no monarchs, no slaves and no subjects. We the People. pic.twitter.com/CzhJFrLkd7

— Rep. Jamie Raskin (@RepRaskin) June 12, 2025

Others include former Labor Secretary Robert Reich:

On "No Kings Day," we'll be peacefully demonstrating against a wannabe king and his trampling of our constitutional rights.And as we protest, we build solidarity.From that solidarity, we feel less alone and build courage for the work ahead. pic.twitter.com/LmXAjdsDnK

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) June 13, 2025

June 13, 7:30 a.m. ET: Asked whether Trump would allow protests around his planned military parade to go forward, White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt—calling the inquiry “stupid”—said:

“He supports the First Amendment. He supports the right of Americans to make their voices heard. He does not support violence of any kind. He does not support assaulting law enforcement officers who are simply trying to do their job.”

Trump, a notable instigator and excuser of assaults on law enforcement officers who were just trying to do their job, pardoned masses of January 6 insurrectionists just after his return to office—a slap in the face of multiple Capitol Police officers “grabbed, beaten, tased, all while being called a traitor,” in the words of former Washington, DC, officer Michael Fanone.

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On Monday, the Boston Globe reported that the Senate version of New Hampshire’s two-year budget bill contains language that “would prohibit public entities from supporting any program designed to improve the lives of people with disabilities.” The reason? An attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion by state House and Senate Republicans.

“The Senate’s anti-DEI provisions would prohibit state and local government entities from supporting any program related to efforts to improve ‘demographic outcomes’ for people with physical or mental disabilities,” writes Boston Globe reporter Steven Porter.

Disabled people already face challenges in hiring, both due to biases of companies and some people just needing more assistance. DEI-focused hiring programs and trainings—both for disabled people and people of color—help this problem.

The House version of the bill is also an anti-DEI attack, though it does not specifically go after disability as heavily as the Senate version of the budget. The House bill goes after race-conscious practices in hiring, which still would hurt disabled people of color. Karen Rosenberg, policy director for the Disability Rights Center, told Porter that the bills are “mostly the same, and they’re both terrible.”

As Porter writes, the curtailing of disability programs in the state can also affect disabled children.

Louis Esposito, executive director of ABLE NH, an advocacy group for people impacted by disability, said there have been so many additional pressing concerns—including a disagreement between the House and Senate over a proposed cut to Medicaid provider rates—that the implications of the anti-DEI provisions in the state budget legislation haven’t garnered as much attention as they warrant.

Esposito said the proposals could have far-reaching ramifications in education. If a school offers a training session on neurodiversity, for example, would that be deemed a DEI violation? School leaders who are unsure might avoid such topics, at the expense of equity and inclusion for students with disabilities, he said, especially since the proposals would direct the state’s education commissioner to withhold all public funding from schools deemed noncompliant.

The House and Senate will have to come to an agreement and pass a two-year budget bill before July 1.

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I was told there would be a diamond-encrusted steak.

One hot May morning in Las Vegas, I was wandering through the art gallery section of the cavernous convention hall at The Venetian Resort’s hotel and casino—where 35,000 crypto enthusiasts were gathered for the seventh annual Bitcoin conference—in search of Rare, by artist Maxfield Mellenbruch.

He had supposedly transformed a hunk of meat into “an exquisite combination of platinum and 216 carats of diamonds and rubies,” according to the description on the conference website. “Much like Bitcoin itself, Rare challenges conventional ideas of value, art, and asset.” The piece, which had been appraised for $2.2 million and would be auctioned off during the conference, was nowhere to be found among the portraits of Pepe the Frog and Bitcoin-themed Warhol soup can knock-offs.

The Bitcoin Conference is a platform for experts, investors, and innovators to share knowledge, showcase projects, and network with like-minded individuals.Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu/Getty

Instead, the exhibit that seemed to be commanding the most attention was considerably less dazzling: A dingy gray sweatsuit, a plain white T-shirt neatly folded on top of a mesh bag, and a pair of beat-up sneakers, each framed and mounted on a gallery wall. I assumed these must be some kind of high-concept installation—until I read the text that accompanied them. Not just random laundry, these objéts were Ross Ulbricht’s uniform when he had served 11 years of a life sentence in various prisons for creating the Silk Road, a crypto-fueled drug market on the internet.

For many at the conference, Ulbricht was not a criminal but a visionary victim, indeed almost a Christ-like figure. An early champion of cryptocurrency, he had been maligned, persecuted, and now, thanks to a pardon from President Trump, he had risen triumphant.

And so had the price of Bitcoin. Less than a week before the conference began, it hit an all-time high of just under $112,000, up from about $70,000 a year earlier. Repeatedly, speakers at the conference told the story of crypto’s fall from grace and its astonishing comeback. In his opening address, Grant McCarty, co-president of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, reminisced about the first conference after one of the largest crypto trading platforms, FTX, was revealed in 2022 to be a fraud and the price of Bitcoin had tanked to less than $20,000. “Politicians at the time were calling for federal bans,” he said. “Nightly news insisted that only criminals and bad people were using this technology.” Crypto’s future looked bleak—but McCarty would not be deterred, so he decided to form the Bitcoin Policy Institute. “We started out as a handful of true believers with basically a Google Doc, a prayer, and an absolute conviction that Bitcoin is good for the world,” he said, earnestly enunciating every syllable.

Two years later, their prayers seem to have been answered. Bitcoin’s market cap is now estimated at about $2.1 trillion, the seventh largest asset on Earth, and Bitcoiners at the conference were jubilant. Wearing tracksuits, blazers, and mini-skirts in bright orange, the official color of Bitcoin, their T-shirts said “Our Founding Fathers Wanted Bitcoin” and “Bitcoin Saves.” They played a life-size version of the game Guess Who?, where the people on the cards were crypto celebs. At the marketplace section of the expo hall, they bought (in Bitcoin, of course) a kids’ card game called The Inflation Monster, meant to teach the evils of fiat—crypto enthusiasts’ word for traditional money. They bought underwear and bras emblazoned with the Bitcoin logo and baby onesies with phrases like “Hodl me tight,” a reference to a misspelling of the word “hold” that became a meme about the importance of not selling your Bitcoin. They bought psychedelic artwork that depicted banking regulators as ghoulish figures presiding over a Monopoly board.

And they bought MAGA gear: “Trump 2028” hats, a framed AI-generated portrait of President Trump holding a Bitcoin, a bag of coffee called Bitcoin Blend featuring a picture of, yes, the 47th president of the United States. But Trump hasn’t always been a Bitcoin hero. He dismissed it during his first term—in a 2019 tweet, he called digital currencies “not money” and “based on thin air.” But in the last few years, he has changed his mind, likely prompted by his sons, who have extensive Bitcoin business interests. The real Trump lovefest, I learned, began at the previous year’s conference, where Trump had stopped on the campaign trail to assure this crowd that he intended to become “the crypto president.” He became the first presidential candidate from a major party to accept crypto donations; at the 2024 Bitcoin conference, he promised to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” Shortly before he was inaugurated, he launched his own digital currency, the $TRUMP meme coin, which has earned him an estimated $1 billion. (First Lady Melania Trump wasn’t so lucky—her meme coin, launched shortly after her husband’s, has plummeted in value.) Just a few days into his second term, Trump signed an executive order vowing to explore establishing an American strategic Bitcoin reserve.

A cutout of President Donald Trump holding a Bitcoin is displayed on a group of servers during The Bitcoin Conference. Trump has gone from disparaging the currency to being one of its most powerful champions. Ian Maule/AFP/Getty

Three Bitcoin bills, aimed at establishing a regulatory structure that would legitimize the currency, are currently making their way through Congress; another, the BITCOIN Act, would create the strategic reserve that Trump had promised.

Bitcoin’s redemption story imbued the conference with an energy that I can only describe as quasi-religious. The mood bore a striking resemblance to what I experienced at the prayer rallies and church services I have attended while reporting on Christian nationalism. With the unquestioning intensity of their crypto faith informing every conversation, conference attendees behaved like proselytizers. But instead of Christianity, this was a new American religion, complete with deities (the mysterious Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto), prophets (Trump), and even nearly martyred saints with relics (Ulbricht and his sweat suit).

As with all true believers, the danger of extremism is ever-present. During the conference, I began to see hints that this devotion to digital currency had become an all-consuming obsession— for attendees and the politicians and industry leaders on stage.

The more that others embraced Bitcoin, “the more likely you are to succeed. The more likely they are to succeed. The more likely Bitcoin is to succeed, the more likely the human race is to succeed!”

In his keynote, Michael Saylor, whose cloud-computing company, Strategy, owns nearly 600,000 Bitcoins—approximately worth $60 billion—urged the crowd to “become an evangelist for economic freedom.” Saylor, who has advocated for Bitcoin to be exempt from capital gains tax, said that the more that others embraced Bitcoin, “the more likely you are to succeed. The more likely they are to succeed. The more likely Bitcoin is to succeed, the more likely the human race is to succeed!”

This is when most stories on cryptocurrency attempt to explain it in layman’s terms. It’s a big spreadsheet! It’s a robot bank! It’s digital Pokémon cards!

The good news is that if you don’t completely get it, you don’t have to for this story. All you need to know is this: When crypto fans talk about how Bitcoin (or any other crypto, of which there are many) is going to help you cast off the yoke of extractive big banks, or stick it to woke lenders, or help the underclass build generational wealth, they might earnestly believe those things. But there is a much more basic reason that they want everyone to buy Bitcoin, and it has to do with the basic economic principle of supply and demand. There is a fixed amount of this currency—21 million to be exact—and the more people who have decided that Bitcoin is desirable, the more it’s worth. If you buy Bitcoin, the value of their Bitcoin goes up. *Their investment is predicated on making you buy Bitcoin.*In this way, it’s a little like multi-level marketing, like Avon or Amway. Given those terms, the evangelizing begins to make a lot more sense.

Nearly all the panels reinforced this message. Consider “Marketing Bitcoin to the Masses,” which took place the first afternoon and featured Brian E. De Mint, author of the 2022 book Bitcoin Evangelism: Planting Seeds for the Decentralized Revolution, sharing his strategy for “orange-pilling,” or convincing the uninitiated of Bitcoin’s greatness. He pointed to the early Christians who “spread the religion to people who didn’t believe in a God, and then they spread the religion to the pagan people who believed in a higher power, but perhaps another God.” Extending the metaphor, he described those who were skeptical of all crypto as “atheists,” and those who had accepted crypto but not Bitcoin as pagans.

The list of Bitcoin’s alleged powers is long and weird. The author of a parenting book called I Am Not Your Bruh told me he believed that buying Bitcoin made people better at child-rearing. “When you embrace Bitcoin,” he said, “you can think beyond just yourself and your lifetime—it makes you more inspired to be intentional with your parenting.” In my quest to see the diamond-encrusted steak, I talked to a curator who claimed Bitcoin had liberated artists from rapacious galleries. At one panel, it was revealed that Bitcoin could stop human trafficking; at another, I learned that it could reduce Americans’ reliance on pharma companies and improve our diet. “There’s no point in having long-term regenerative health if you don’t have long-term regenerative wealth,” said an Australian chef influencer, cryptically. Paolo Ardoino, the Italian billionaire CEO of the crypto company Tether explained, “I know that people think about Bitcoin as the digital gold, but I prefer to think in Bitcoin terms. It’s almost like [gold] is the natural Bitcoin.”

“Gold is imperfect,” he said. “Bitcoin is perfect.”

It’s one thing when your libertarian uncle prattles on about the virtues of Bitcoin at Thanksgiving. And believe me, I met your libertarian uncle at this conference, many, many times over. (One of them referred to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is no fan of the currency, as “Lie-awatha.”) But it’s a wholly different experience to hear elected officials and members of America’s first family make those same pitches.

The first day of the conference featured a “Code and Country” program, a celebration of the blossoming relationship between the government and Bitcoin. But in the midst of the euphoria, the conference seemed ambivalent about setting the mood for the day: serious and dignified, or bedazzled orange YOLO? In the biggest room, on the Nakamoto Stage, between speakers, a string quartet clad in concert black solemnly performed a cover of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA,” then the British miniskirt-clad emcee tried to pump up the crowd about the price of Bitcoin. “Do we think we’re gonna hit another all-time high in the next few days?” she bellowed. “A little bit more energy! Do we think we can? Yes, of course we are!” (They didn’t.)

About halfway through the first morning of the conference, Sen. Jim Justice (R-W. Va.) took the stage. Next to him, panting, on a folding chair, was Babydog, a celebrity in her own right. Babydog is his five-year-old English bulldog whose star turn began as a mascot for Justice’s Covid vaccination campaign in 2021 when he was governor of West Virginia. The senator began speaking about Toby and Edith, a fictional couple useful in speeches as a generic stand-in for solid, middle-class Americans. For Bitcoin to truly succeed in America, he said, there needed to be a way for Toby and Edith to use it at Walmart, thereby “saving all kinds of money” and “contributing to all kinds of goodness.” But Toby and Edith wouldn’t do that until they really understood Bitcoin. “When Toby and Edith get it,” he continued, “then everything starts happening at light speed for all of us, all the legislation, everything, in every way!” The crowd murmured approvingly.

I suspect that Toby and Edith’s reluctance to jump on the crypto bandwagon had less to do with their not understanding it and more to do with the many well-publicized scams that have besmirched the industry. A non-exhaustive list of the most egregious: the 2014 OneCoin Ponzi scheme, which defrauded investors of over $4 billion with a fake cryptocurrency; BitConnect, which promised absurd returns via a “trading bot” and collapsed in 2018; a Chinese scam called PlusToken stole more than $2 billion from users. In 2022, the conflagration of the crypto exchange FTX revealed massive fraud and mismanagement by founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who had promised to put billions of his own crypto wealth toward charitable causes but ended up spending investors’ money, bankrupting the company, and being sentenced to 25 years in prison.

So it’s hardly surprising that Congress felt the need to get involved and write up several new crypto bills. Sponsored by both Democrats and Republicans, they aim to fix the scams through clearer regulation. The Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, sponsored by senators including Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), John Boozman (R-Ark.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) would make crypto subject to regulation by the  Commodity Futures Trading Commission; the Lummis-Gillibrand Responsible Financial Innovation Act would establish new oversight bodies, rein in advertising, and require companies to write contracts in plain language; Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s (D-Mich.) Cryptocurrency Accountability Act would require more transparency in lawmakers’ crypto holdings.  It’s unclear how effective these laws would be. The biggest problem is that they lack provisions that would require customer insurance and real-time audits—meaning consumers aren’t robustly protected and it could take months or even years for regulators to catch on to fraud.

Later, I caught up with Justice as he and Babydog were heading out of the conference hall. I asked him if he was worried that the new bills didn’t offer enough consumer protection. “Everybody’s scared to death and afraid of the dark, and we need to quit being that way,” he said. “Because really and truly, the way the crypto world works, there is such a paper trail, it is unbelievable. So for people to be able to cheat, it’s very difficult to do. I am all in because I think it’s a real opportunity for America!”

“Everybody’s scared to death and afraid of the dark, and we need to quit being that way…I am all in because I think it’s a real opportunity for America!”

Keith Ammon, a Republican state representative in New Hampshire who holds Bitcoin, also told me he thought crypto was good for America. I asked him to help me understand why. “Why is the internet good for America?” he retorted. “Like, it’s a dumb question that you’re asking me. It’s like asking, ‘What are we going to do with the Internet?’” He used the same analogy to explain his opinion on regulations for consumer protection. “When the internet was a thing, Congress didn’t put in a bunch of rules around the internet before it even got started,” he said. “They had, like, 10 years of hands-off. And this is what this industry needs.”

The conference attendees I spoke to also seemed to favor loose regulations. Brian Johnson had traveled nearly 1,800 miles from Huntsville, Alabama, to Las Vegas and was wearing a shirt from last year’s conference that said “FREE ROSS VOTE TRUMP.” He said he thought the free market could take care of bad actors by making their companies fail. What about the people who lose money because of scams like FTX? I asked. “It sucks,” he said, shrugging. “You have to just do due diligence and invest and understand the risks.” Tyler Williams, who was from Orange County, California, and was wearing an American flag-themed shorts set, told me he didn’t believe that consumer protections worked, anyway. “If you have actually had a true economic collapse of money, I would be truly concerned if those FDIC protections would ever even be there,” he said.

Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) agreed. During her speech later that day, she praised “the people who will be undaunted by our government’s reluctance to let us think freely and embrace the freedom that technology is going to add” to all of our lives. Lummis has spoken publicly about the fact that she owns Bitcoin but in 2021, she failed to disclose a Bitcoin purchase of as much as $100,000 within the designated reporting timeframe of 45 days, thus breaking a law meant to prevent members of Congress from using their inside knowledge of pending legislation to influence their investments. (Lummis attributed the delay to a clerical error; her office resolved the situation with the Ethics committee.) “You can see it,” she said, her voice breaking. “You can just see what this country can do!”

Ross Ulbricht, founder of The Silk Road, a crypto-fueled drug market on the internet and pardoned from a life sentence by President Donald Trump, speaks at the conference. For many, he is not a pardoned criminal but a visionary victim. Gage Skidmore/Zuma

One of the themes that emerged in my reporting on Christian nationalism was persecution—specifically the idea that Christians were being oppressed and hunted the world over because of their faith in Jesus Christ. Persecution is a powerful narrative because it gives the persecuted group a sense of unity and purpose. Frederick Clarkson, a researcher who has long studied the Christian right at the pro-democracy think tank Political Research Associates, told me that in many charismatic communities, the idea of persecution binds a group together that might not otherwise have much in common. “Once you’ve established that people are in a community together and that there’s some formidable opponent that’s out to get us, and we’re all together,” he said, “an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.”

At the Bitcoin conference, that sense of underdog righteousness was on full display. On the second day of the conference, President Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, spoke on a panel. Its official title was “Bitcoin as a Public Asset: The Rise of New Bitcoin Models,” but the Trump brothers appeared to be more interested in crafting a tale of parallel redemptions, how both their family and the crypto community had triumphed over adversity. Had the Biden administration succeeded in passing anti-crypto legislation, they might not be sitting there today, said another panelist. “We could be in orange for Bitcoin, but it would be an orange jumpsuit!” quipped Don Jr. Audience members hooted appreciatively.

In another panel, Don Jr. told the head of the right-wing social media platform Rumble about how his family had been ostracized by the finance community. “The second we got in the political spectrum, the guy that I could have called two weeks prior in New York and gotten a loan for a building in about five minutes, all of a sudden, that guy wouldn’t even take my calls,” he groused. “We’re getting de-banked, we’re getting de-insured, we’re getting de-everythinged.”

“I always say, ‘the enemy of your enemy is often your friend,’ and that’s what happened between the Trump family and the crypto community.”

It was that treatment, he said, that prompted him to explore the world of cryptocurrency. For the Trump family, the stakes are personal. In addition to Trump’s meme coin, the Trump family owns 60 percent of World Liberty Financial, a digital assets firm that has brought in at least $550 million in crypto sales. Eric serves as chief strategy officer of American Bitcoin, a mining operation. Earlier this year, his family business, the Trump Organization, sued Capital One bank, claiming that the company had closed their accounts as a punishment for Trump’s involvement in the insurrection of January 6, 2021. More likely, it was the fact that in 2022, the Trump Organization committed financial crimes, convicted in 2022 on 17 counts of tax fraud, conspiracy, and falsifying business records.

“I always say, ‘the enemy of your enemy is often your friend,’ and that’s what happened between the Trump family and the crypto community,” said Eric. “And I’m not sure without you we would have won the same way [without you]. I think we would have won, but I’m not sure if we would have won in the same decisive manner.” The crowd erupted in applause.

The themes were the same in the highly anticipated keynote address from Vice President JD Vance. By the time I arrived at the press area, the snaking queue to hear the speech filled two floors of the Venetian’s cavernous conference wing. Someone handed me an orange flier about the “prisoners of war” who were still serving time for crypto-related crimes. Its title read, presumably in a nod to the Old Testament story of Moses, “LET OUR PEOPLE GO!”

Vance began by cheering the end of “four years of mistreatment and outright hostility led by Democrat regulators,” adding, triumphantly, “As you know, there’s new sheriff in town!” He was there at the conference to announce “loud and clear with President Trump, crypto finally has a champion and an ally.”

Vice President JD Vance speaks to the crowd at the conference and preaches that Bitcoin is a force for democracy. Travis P Ball/Sipa USA/AP

Vance, who owns between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of Bitcoin, according to financial disclosures he filed last year, described Bitcoin as a democratizing force. “I believe that America is a place where anyone should be able to make a fortune, no matter where you grew up, what degree you may or may not have,” he said. “In recent years, I’m hard pressed to think of a better place to do so than right here in the digital assets industry.”

Things were less democratic here at the conference where, if you wanted to see what your theoretical American crypto fortune could someday buy, you would have been out of luck. Later that day, I headed back to the gallery area in search of the steak. I flagged down the curator, who told me it was on display in the VIP area, accessible only to holders of $9,499 “Whale Pass.” The conference organizers were trying to figure out how to display it for a few hours for the hoi polloi in the main conference area, but marshaling the necessary security was proving difficult. I had to catch my flight before I ever got to glimpse the diamond-encrusted steak.

Many of the Christian nationalists I’ve met described their effort to spread their religion using metaphors of war: a battle between good and evil, a “spiritual war” against a satanic “enemy.” In the weeks leading up to the Capital insurrection, several prominent pastors used these images in speeches they made about how they believed the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump. Clarkson, the religion researcher, has observed that some evangelical Christian leaders use imagery of fighting “to get people psychologically primed,” he told me. “They’re going to be the heroes in the end times army.”

In his speech, Vance joked, “The Secret Service is a little bit nervous, because I told them these Bitcoin guys really like guns,” he said. “But they really like the president, vice President of the United States, too, so I think we’re doing okay.”

But would they always really like him? There are members of the crypto community who believe that only a revolution will truly liberate the masses from the chains of the current financial system. In an eponymous session, panelists debated whether Bitcoiners had become “sycophants of the state;” another described “Bitcoin as a Digital 1776,” with the currency itself as a form of revolution. The moderator, who goes by the name GMoney and is the host of the Bitcoin-focused podcast Rugpull Radio (40,000 listeners per episode on Rumble), said he thought neither party had any business bogging down crypto with cumbersome federal legislation. “Fuck this dick-sucking of the Republican party that’s going on, like this is absurd,” he growled. “We are a powerful political contingency at this point in time. Why the fuck are we on our knees in front of the Republican Party when we should be asking for the opposite?” He had more choice words for the idea of a federal Bitcoin reserve. “You want to put the same fucking retards that destroyed the economic system in charge of a large portion of Bitcoin?” he said. “Like, that’s fucking dumb.”

Toward the end of his speech, Vance told the crowd that as advocates for crypto, they were fighting for the people. “I see crypto as a hedge against one of the most dangerous trends in the digital era,” he said, “elites who, rather than innovate themselves, prefer to simply take over and co-opt cutting-edge technologies to assert their control over other people.” It was a bold statement for a Yale Law grad and Silicon Valley alum who now held the second-highest office in the nation. Did he not worry, I wondered, that the revolution crowd might someday decide he was a member of the elite that needed to be hedged against?

When I got home, I discovered that the steak had been auctioned off for a little more than a quarter of its $2.2 million appraisal. I also watched Ulbricht’s speech, which I missed because I left early. Ulbricht, whose title was listed as “freedom fighter,” recalled a time he had successfully removed seven wasps’ nests from a porch. The wasps’ power, he explained, was in their decentralization, just like Bitcoin, which was distributed instead of residing in a single bank. “We’re not there yet—there is still more freedom to be won,” he said. “I’m talking about freedom beyond what anyone anywhere has ever had. It’s going to be incredible, and it’s going to be worth fighting for.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

A massive manhunt is underway in Minnesota, as law enforcement searches for the shooter responsible for the deaths of one state lawmaker and her spouse and the injuries of another lawmaker and his spouse, in what are described as two separate but “targeted shootings.”

In a news conference Saturday morning, Gov. Tim Walz said, “This was an act of targeted political violence.”

BREAKING: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz confirms that both Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot an killed early this morning in a "politically motivated" attack. John Hoffman and his wife are both out of surgery and doctors remain optimistically hopeful for their recovery. pic.twitter.com/nS5elAwoc0

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) June 14, 2025

Democratic state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark have died, the governor confirmed. Meanwhile, Democratic state Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were shot several times and after surgery are reported to be recovering. Walz described himself as being “cautiously optimistic” that they will survive the attacks. Both lawmakers were members of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party.

The identity of the shooter is not known, but authorities are speculating that the person may have been impersonating law enforcement when they appeared at the respective homes, which are located in the Minneapolis suburbs. A shelter-in-place alert has been issued for the community.

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety reported that at approximately 2 a.m. officers appeared at the home of Sen. Hoffman after receiving notice of the shooting. According to the local ABC affiliate KLTV, “When they arrived, they saw an SUV equipped with lights, mimicking a squad vehicle, and were confronted by a man dressed as an officer. DPS reported the man fired at police, who returned fire, before retreating into the home.”

The Minnesota Star Tribune reports:

Authorities investigating the shooting recovered an alleged manifesto.“There was a list of individuals and the individuals that were targeted were on that list,” said Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans.“When we did a search of the vehicle there was a manifesto that identified many lawmakers and other officials, we immediately made alerts to the state, who took action on alerting them and providing security where necessary,” Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley added.

This is a developing story.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Close to four hundred people, many of them wearing plastic gold crowns, assembled in the Hudson Valley town of New Paltz, New York, on Saturday morning for one of the first “No Kings” rallies of the day.

It was a large turnout for the town of roughly 15,000, which is part of a key swing district represented by Democratic Congressman Pat Ryan.

Trump’s shredding of the Constitution and his unprecedented deployment of the National Guard and Marines in response to the protests in Los Angeles were key themes of the rally.

Braving the cold and rain, hundreds appeared to protest.

“We are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution next year,” said Jen Metzger, the county executive of Ulster County, which includes New Paltz. “That was a war against tyranny. We are fighting a war against tyranny again.”

Attendees of the “No Kings” rally in New Paltz.

Democratic State Senator Michelle Hinchey, who represents the area, gave a fiery speech denouncing the militarized response to the LA protests against ICE immigration sweeps in the state and the attack on California Democratic Senator Alex Padilla.

“We are watching history unfold in real-time, when US senators are being thrown to the ground for asking a question,” Hinchey said. “When we are watching the very fabric of our country unravel, this is the moment in history where we will look back on and say where were you when?Where were you when we were watching dictators take over?”

NY State Sen Michelle Hinchey gave powerful speech at No Kings protest in New Paltz today. “When we are watching the very fabric of our country unravel, this is the moment in history where we will look back on and say where were you when? Where were you when we were watching dictators take over?"

— Ari Berman (@ariberman.bsky.social) 2025-06-14T18:04:03.618Z

Ryan, a former Army intelligence officer who is the first West Point graduate to represent the Academy in Congress, sharply criticized Trump’s speech to troops at Fort Bragg this week, where he said he would rename military bases after Confederate generals and announced thatthe military would be used to stop “an invasion” in California.

“Donald Trump has done more damage to our apolitical military just this week than every other President combined,” Ryan wrote on X.

Hinchey called the Hudson Valley “a bellwether” that would be critical to the Democrats’ chances of retaking the US House in 2026. “We will take back our flag,” Hinchey said at the rally, “and show what democracy looks like.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

I was told there would be a diamond-encrusted steak.

One hot May morning in Las Vegas, I was wandering through the art gallery section of the cavernous convention hall at The Venetian Resort’s hotel and casino—where 35,000 crypto enthusiasts were gathered for the seventh annual Bitcoin conference—in search of Rare, by artist Maxfield Mellenbruch.

He had supposedly transformed a hunk of meat into “an exquisite combination of platinum and 216 carats of diamonds and rubies,” according to the description on the conference website. “Much like Bitcoin itself, Rare challenges conventional ideas of value, art, and asset.” The piece, which had been appraised for $2.2 million and would be auctioned off during the conference, was nowhere to be found among the portraits of Pepe the Frog and Bitcoin-themed Warhol soup can knock-offs.

The Bitcoin Conference is a platform for experts, investors, and innovators to share knowledge, showcase projects, and network with like-minded individuals.Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu/Getty

Instead, the exhibit that seemed to be commanding the most attention was considerably less dazzling: A dingy gray sweatsuit, a plain white T-shirt neatly folded on top of a mesh bag, and a pair of beat-up sneakers, each framed and mounted on a gallery wall. I assumed these must be some kind of high-concept installation—until I read the text that accompanied them. Not just random laundry, these objéts were Ross Ulbricht’s uniform when he had served 11 years of a life sentence in various prisons for creating the Silk Road, a crypto-fueled drug market on the internet.

For many at the conference, Ulbricht was not a criminal but a visionary victim, indeed almost a Christ-like figure. An early champion of cryptocurrency, he had been maligned, persecuted, and now, thanks to a pardon from President Trump, he had risen triumphant.

And so had the price of Bitcoin. Less than a week before the conference began, it hit an all-time high of just under $112,000, up from about $70,000 a year earlier. Repeatedly, speakers at the conference told the story of crypto’s fall from grace and its astonishing comeback. In his opening address, Grant McCarty, co-president of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, reminisced about the first conference after one of the largest crypto trading platforms, FTX, was revealed in 2022 to be a fraud and the price of Bitcoin had tanked to less than $20,000. “Politicians at the time were calling for federal bans,” he said. “Nightly news insisted that only criminals and bad people were using this technology.” Crypto’s future looked bleak—but McCarty would not be deterred, so he decided to form the Bitcoin Policy Institute. “We started out as a handful of true believers with basically a Google Doc, a prayer, and an absolute conviction that Bitcoin is good for the world,” he said, earnestly enunciating every syllable.

Two years later, their prayers seem to have been answered. Bitcoin’s market cap is now estimated at about $2.1 trillion, the seventh largest asset on Earth, and Bitcoiners at the conference were jubilant. Wearing tracksuits, blazers, and mini-skirts in bright orange, the official color of Bitcoin, their T-shirts said “Our Founding Fathers Wanted Bitcoin” and “Bitcoin Saves.” They played a life-size version of the game Guess Who?, where the people on the cards were crypto celebs. At the marketplace section of the expo hall, they bought (in Bitcoin, of course) a kids’ card game called The Inflation Monster, meant to teach the evils of fiat—crypto enthusiasts’ word for traditional money. They bought underwear and bras emblazoned with the Bitcoin logo and baby onesies with phrases like “Hodl me tight,” a reference to a misspelling of the word “hold” that became a meme about the importance of not selling your Bitcoin. They bought psychedelic artwork that depicted banking regulators as ghoulish figures presiding over a Monopoly board.

And they bought MAGA gear: “Trump 2028” hats, a framed AI-generated portrait of President Trump holding a Bitcoin, a bag of coffee called Bitcoin Blend featuring a picture of, yes, the 47th president of the United States. But Trump hasn’t always been a Bitcoin hero. He dismissed it during his first term—in a 2019 tweet, he called digital currencies “not money” and “based on thin air.” But in the last few years, he has changed his mind, likely prompted by his sons, who have extensive Bitcoin business interests. The real Trump lovefest, I learned, began at the previous year’s conference, where Trump had stopped on the campaign trail to assure this crowd that he intended to become “the crypto president.” He became the first presidential candidate from a major party to accept crypto donations; at the 2024 Bitcoin conference, he promised to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” Shortly before he was inaugurated, he launched his own digital currency, the $TRUMP meme coin, which has earned him an estimated $1 billion. (First Lady Melania Trump wasn’t so lucky—her meme coin, launched shortly after her husband’s, has plummeted in value.) Just a few days into his second term, Trump signed an executive order vowing to explore establishing an American strategic Bitcoin reserve.

A cutout of President Donald Trump holding a Bitcoin is displayed on a group of servers during The Bitcoin Conference. Trump has gone from disparaging the currency to being one of its most powerful champions. Ian Maule/AFP/Getty

Three Bitcoin bills, aimed at establishing a regulatory structure that would legitimize the currency, are currently making their way through Congress; another, the BITCOIN Act, would create the strategic reserve that Trump had promised.

Bitcoin’s redemption story imbued the conference with an energy that I can only describe as quasi-religious. The mood bore a striking resemblance to what I experienced at the prayer rallies and church services I have attended while reporting on Christian nationalism. With the unquestioning intensity of their crypto faith informing every conversation, conference attendees behaved like proselytizers. But instead of Christianity, this was a new American religion, complete with deities (the mysterious Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto), prophets (Trump), and even nearly martyred saints with relics (Ulbricht and his sweat suit).

As with all true believers, the danger of extremism is ever-present. During the conference, I began to see hints that this devotion to digital currency had become an all-consuming obsession— for attendees and the politicians and industry leaders on stage.

The more that others embraced Bitcoin, “the more likely you are to succeed. The more likely they are to succeed. The more likely Bitcoin is to succeed, the more likely the human race is to succeed!”

In his keynote, Michael Saylor, whose cloud-computing company, Strategy, owns nearly 600,000 Bitcoins—approximately worth $60 billion—urged the crowd to “become an evangelist for economic freedom.” Saylor, who has advocated for Bitcoin to be exempt from capital gains tax, said that the more that others embraced Bitcoin, “the more likely you are to succeed. The more likely they are to succeed. The more likely Bitcoin is to succeed, the more likely the human race is to succeed!”

This is when most stories on cryptocurrency attempt to explain it in layman’s terms. It’s a big spreadsheet! It’s a robot bank! It’s digital Pokémon cards!

The good news is that if you don’t completely get it, you don’t have to for this story. All you need to know is this: When crypto fans talk about how Bitcoin (or any other crypto, of which there are many) is going to help you cast off the yoke of extractive big banks, or stick it to woke lenders, or help the underclass build generational wealth, they might earnestly believe those things. But there is a much more basic reason that they want everyone to buy Bitcoin, and it has to do with the basic economic principle of supply and demand. There is a fixed amount of this currency—21 million to be exact—and the more people who have decided that Bitcoin is desirable, the more it’s worth. If you buy Bitcoin, the value of their Bitcoin goes up. *Their investment is predicated on making you buy Bitcoin.*In this way, it’s a little like multi-level marketing, like Avon or Amway. Given those terms, the evangelizing begins to make a lot more sense.

Nearly all the panels reinforced this message. Consider “Marketing Bitcoin to the Masses,” which took place the first afternoon and featured Brian E. De Mint, author of the 2022 book Bitcoin Evangelism: Planting Seeds for the Decentralized Revolution, sharing his strategy for “orange-pilling,” or convincing the uninitiated of Bitcoin’s greatness. He pointed to the early Christians who “spread the religion to people who didn’t believe in a God, and then they spread the religion to the pagan people who believed in a higher power, but perhaps another God.” Extending the metaphor, he described those who were skeptical of all crypto as “atheists,” and those who had accepted crypto but not Bitcoin as pagans.

The list of Bitcoin’s alleged powers is long and weird. The author of a parenting book called I Am Not Your Bruh told me he believed that buying Bitcoin made people better at child-rearing. “When you embrace Bitcoin,” he said, “you can think beyond just yourself and your lifetime—it makes you more inspired to be intentional with your parenting.” In my quest to see the diamond-encrusted steak, I talked to a curator who claimed Bitcoin had liberated artists from rapacious galleries. At one panel, it was revealed that Bitcoin could stop human trafficking; at another, I learned that it could reduce Americans’ reliance on pharma companies and improve our diet. “There’s no point in having long-term regenerative health if you don’t have long-term regenerative wealth,” said an Australian chef influencer, cryptically. Paolo Ardoino, the Italian billionaire CEO of the crypto company Tether explained, “I know that people think about Bitcoin as the digital gold, but I prefer to think in Bitcoin terms. It’s almost like [gold] is the natural Bitcoin.”

“Gold is imperfect,” he said. “Bitcoin is perfect.”

It’s one thing when your libertarian uncle prattles on about the virtues of Bitcoin at Thanksgiving. And believe me, I met your libertarian uncle at this conference, many, many times over. (One of them referred to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is no fan of the currency, as “Lie-awatha.”) But it’s a wholly different experience to hear elected officials and members of America’s first family make those same pitches.

The first day of the conference featured a “Code and Country” program, a celebration of the blossoming relationship between the government and Bitcoin. But in the midst of the euphoria, the conference seemed ambivalent about setting the mood for the day: serious and dignified, or bedazzled orange YOLO? In the biggest room, on the Nakamoto Stage, between speakers, a string quartet clad in concert black solemnly performed a cover of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA,” then the British miniskirt-clad emcee tried to pump up the crowd about the price of Bitcoin. “Do we think we’re gonna hit another all-time high in the next few days?” she bellowed. “A little bit more energy! Do we think we can? Yes, of course we are!” (They didn’t.)

About halfway through the first morning of the conference, Sen. Jim Justice (R-W. Va.) took the stage. Next to him, panting, on a folding chair, was Babydog, a celebrity in her own right. Babydog is his five-year-old English bulldog whose star turn began as a mascot for Justice’s Covid vaccination campaign in 2021 when he was governor of West Virginia. The senator began speaking about Toby and Edith, a fictional couple useful in speeches as a generic stand-in for solid, middle-class Americans. For Bitcoin to truly succeed in America, he said, there needed to be a way for Toby and Edith to use it at Walmart, thereby “saving all kinds of money” and “contributing to all kinds of goodness.” But Toby and Edith wouldn’t do that until they really understood Bitcoin. “When Toby and Edith get it,” he continued, “then everything starts happening at light speed for all of us, all the legislation, everything, in every way!” The crowd murmured approvingly.

I suspect that Toby and Edith’s reluctance to jump on the crypto bandwagon had less to do with their not understanding it and more to do with the many well-publicized scams that have besmirched the industry. A non-exhaustive list of the most egregious: the 2014 OneCoin Ponzi scheme, which defrauded investors of over $4 billion with a fake cryptocurrency; BitConnect, which promised absurd returns via a “trading bot” and collapsed in 2018; a Chinese scam called PlusToken stole more than $2 billion from users. In 2022, the conflagration of the crypto exchange FTX revealed massive fraud and mismanagement by founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who had promised to put billions of his own crypto wealth toward charitable causes but ended up spending investors’ money, bankrupting the company, and being sentenced to 25 years in prison.

So it’s hardly surprising that Congress felt the need to get involved and write up several new crypto bills. Sponsored by both Democrats and Republicans, they aim to fix the scams through clearer regulation. The Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, sponsored by senators including Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), John Boozman (R-Ark.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) would make crypto subject to regulation by the  Commodity Futures Trading Commission; the Lummis-Gillibrand Responsible Financial Innovation Act would establish new oversight bodies, rein in advertising, and require companies to write contracts in plain language; Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s (D-Mich.) Cryptocurrency Accountability Act would require more transparency in lawmakers’ crypto holdings.  It’s unclear how effective these laws would be. The biggest problem is that they lack provisions that would require customer insurance and real-time audits—meaning consumers aren’t robustly protected and it could take months or even years for regulators to catch on to fraud.

Later, I caught up with Justice as he and Babydog were heading out of the conference hall. I asked him if he was worried that the new bills didn’t offer enough consumer protection. “Everybody’s scared to death and afraid of the dark, and we need to quit being that way,” he said. “Because really and truly, the way the crypto world works, there is such a paper trail, it is unbelievable. So for people to be able to cheat, it’s very difficult to do. I am all in because I think it’s a real opportunity for America!”

“Everybody’s scared to death and afraid of the dark, and we need to quit being that way…I am all in because I think it’s a real opportunity for America!”

Keith Ammon, a Republican state representative in New Hampshire who holds Bitcoin, also told me he thought crypto was good for America. I asked him to help me understand why. “Why is the internet good for America?” he retorted. “Like, it’s a dumb question that you’re asking me. It’s like asking, ‘What are we going to do with the Internet?’” He used the same analogy to explain his opinion on regulations for consumer protection. “When the internet was a thing, Congress didn’t put in a bunch of rules around the internet before it even got started,” he said. “They had, like, 10 years of hands-off. And this is what this industry needs.”

The conference attendees I spoke to also seemed to favor loose regulations. Brian Johnson had traveled nearly 1,800 miles from Huntsville, Alabama, to Las Vegas and was wearing a shirt from last year’s conference that said “FREE ROSS VOTE TRUMP.” He said he thought the free market could take care of bad actors by making their companies fail. What about the people who lose money because of scams like FTX? I asked. “It sucks,” he said, shrugging. “You have to just do due diligence and invest and understand the risks.” Tyler Williams, who was from Orange County, California, and was wearing an American flag-themed shorts set, told me he didn’t believe that consumer protections worked, anyway. “If you have actually had a true economic collapse of money, I would be truly concerned if those FDIC protections would ever even be there,” he said.

Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) agreed. During her speech later that day, she praised “the people who will be undaunted by our government’s reluctance to let us think freely and embrace the freedom that technology is going to add” to all of our lives. Lummis has spoken publicly about the fact that she owns Bitcoin but in 2021, she failed to disclose a Bitcoin purchase of as much as $100,000 within the designated reporting timeframe of 45 days, thus breaking a law meant to prevent members of Congress from using their inside knowledge of pending legislation to influence their investments. (Lummis attributed the delay to a clerical error; her office resolved the situation with the Ethics committee.) “You can see it,” she said, her voice breaking. “You can just see what this country can do!”

Ross Ulbricht, founder of The Silk Road, a crypto-fueled drug market on the internet and pardoned from a life sentence by President Donald Trump, speaks at the conference. For many, he is not a pardoned criminal but a visionary victim. Gage Skidmore/Zuma

One of the themes that emerged in my reporting on Christian nationalism was persecution—specifically the idea that Christians were being oppressed and hunted the world over because of their faith in Jesus Christ. Persecution is a powerful narrative because it gives the persecuted group a sense of unity and purpose. Frederick Clarkson, a researcher who has long studied the Christian right at the pro-democracy think tank Political Research Associates, told me that in many charismatic communities, the idea of persecution binds a group together that might not otherwise have much in common. “Once you’ve established that people are in a community together and that there’s some formidable opponent that’s out to get us, and we’re all together,” he said, “an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.”

At the Bitcoin conference, that sense of underdog righteousness was on full display. On the second day of the conference, President Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, spoke on a panel. Its official title was “Bitcoin as a Public Asset: The Rise of New Bitcoin Models,” but the Trump brothers appeared to be more interested in crafting a tale of parallel redemptions, how both their family and the crypto community had triumphed over adversity. Had the Biden administration succeeded in passing anti-crypto legislation, they might not be sitting there today, said another panelist. “We could be in orange for Bitcoin, but it would be an orange jumpsuit!” quipped Don Jr. Audience members hooted appreciatively.

In another panel, Don Jr. told the head of the right-wing social media platform Rumble about how his family had been ostracized by the finance community. “The second we got in the political spectrum, the guy that I could have called two weeks prior in New York and gotten a loan for a building in about five minutes, all of a sudden, that guy wouldn’t even take my calls,” he groused. “We’re getting de-banked, we’re getting de-insured, we’re getting de-everythinged.”

“I always say, ‘the enemy of your enemy is often your friend,’ and that’s what happened between the Trump family and the crypto community.”

It was that treatment, he said, that prompted him to explore the world of cryptocurrency. For the Trump family, the stakes are personal. In addition to Trump’s meme coin, the Trump family owns 60 percent of World Liberty Financial, a digital assets firm that has brought in at least $550 million in crypto sales. Eric serves as chief strategy officer of American Bitcoin, a mining operation. Earlier this year, his family business, the Trump Organization, sued Capital One bank, claiming that the company had closed their accounts as a punishment for Trump’s involvement in the insurrection of January 6, 2021. More likely, it was the fact that in 2022, the Trump Organization committed financial crimes, convicted in 2022 on 17 counts of tax fraud, conspiracy, and falsifying business records.

“I always say, ‘the enemy of your enemy is often your friend,’ and that’s what happened between the Trump family and the crypto community,” said Eric. “And I’m not sure without you we would have won the same way [without you]. I think we would have won, but I’m not sure if we would have won in the same decisive manner.” The crowd erupted in applause.

The themes were the same in the highly anticipated keynote address from Vice President JD Vance. By the time I arrived at the press area, the snaking queue to hear the speech filled two floors of the Venetian’s cavernous conference wing. Someone handed me an orange flier about the “prisoners of war” who were still serving time for crypto-related crimes. Its title read, presumably in a nod to the Old Testament story of Moses, “LET OUR PEOPLE GO!”

Vance began by cheering the end of “four years of mistreatment and outright hostility led by Democrat regulators,” adding, triumphantly, “As you know, there’s new sheriff in town!” He was there at the conference to announce “loud and clear with President Trump, crypto finally has a champion and an ally.”

Vice President JD Vance speaks to the crowd at the conference and preaches that Bitcoin is a force for democracy. Travis P Ball/Sipa USA/AP

Vance, who owns between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of Bitcoin, according to financial disclosures he filed last year, described Bitcoin as a democratizing force. “I believe that America is a place where anyone should be able to make a fortune, no matter where you grew up, what degree you may or may not have,” he said. “In recent years, I’m hard pressed to think of a better place to do so than right here in the digital assets industry.”

Things were less democratic here at the conference where, if you wanted to see what your theoretical American crypto fortune could someday buy, you would have been out of luck. Later that day, I headed back to the gallery area in search of the steak. I flagged down the curator, who told me it was on display in the VIP area, accessible only to holders of $9,499 “Whale Pass.” The conference organizers were trying to figure out how to display it for a few hours for the hoi polloi in the main conference area, but marshaling the necessary security was proving difficult. I had to catch my flight before I ever got to glimpse the diamond-encrusted steak.

Many of the Christian nationalists I’ve met described their effort to spread their religion using metaphors of war: a battle between good and evil, a “spiritual war” against a satanic “enemy.” In the weeks leading up to the Capital insurrection, several prominent pastors used these images in speeches they made about how they believed the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump. Clarkson, the religion researcher, has observed that some evangelical Christian leaders use imagery of fighting “to get people psychologically primed,” he told me. “They’re going to be the heroes in the end times army.”

In his speech, Vance joked, “The Secret Service is a little bit nervous, because I told them these Bitcoin guys really like guns,” he said. “But they really like the president, vice President of the United States, too, so I think we’re doing okay.”

But would they always really like him? There are members of the crypto community who believe that only a revolution will truly liberate the masses from the chains of the current financial system. In an eponymous session, panelists debated whether Bitcoiners had become “sycophants of the state;” another described “Bitcoin as a Digital 1776,” with the currency itself as a form of revolution. The moderator, who goes by the name GMoney and is the host of the Bitcoin-focused podcast Rugpull Radio (40,000 listeners per episode on Rumble), said he thought neither party had any business bogging down crypto with cumbersome federal legislation. “Fuck this dick-sucking of the Republican party that’s going on, like this is absurd,” he growled. “We are a powerful political contingency at this point in time. Why the fuck are we on our knees in front of the Republican Party when we should be asking for the opposite?” He had more choice words for the idea of a federal Bitcoin reserve. “You want to put the same fucking retards that destroyed the economic system in charge of a large portion of Bitcoin?” he said. “Like, that’s fucking dumb.”

Toward the end of his speech, Vance told the crowd that as advocates for crypto, they were fighting for the people. “I see crypto as a hedge against one of the most dangerous trends in the digital era,” he said, “elites who, rather than innovate themselves, prefer to simply take over and co-opt cutting-edge technologies to assert their control over other people.” It was a bold statement for a Yale Law grad and Silicon Valley alum who now held the second-highest office in the nation. Did he not worry, I wondered, that the revolution crowd might someday decide he was a member of the elite that needed to be hedged against?

When I got home, I discovered that the steak had been auctioned off for a little more than a quarter of its $2.2 million appraisal. I also watched Ulbricht’s speech, which I missed because I left early. Ulbricht, whose title was listed as “freedom fighter,” recalled a time he had successfully removed seven wasps’ nests from a porch. The wasps’ power, he explained, was in their decentralization, just like Bitcoin, which was distributed instead of residing in a single bank. “We’re not there yet—there is still more freedom to be won,” he said. “I’m talking about freedom beyond what anyone anywhere has ever had. It’s going to be incredible, and it’s going to be worth fighting for.”

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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 the Climate Desk collaboration.

Bill Cross pulled his truck to the side of a dusty mountain road and jumped out to scan a stretch of rapids rippling through the hillsides below.

As an expert and a guide, Cross had spent more than 40 years boating the Klamath River, etching its turns, drops, and eddies into his memory. But this run was brand new. On a warm day in mid-May, he would be one of the very first to raft it with high spring flows.

Last year, the final of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River were removed in the largest project of its kind in US history. Forged through the footprint of reservoirs that kept parts of the Klamath submerged for more than a century, the river that straddles the California-Oregon border has since been reborn.

The dam removal marked the end of a decades-long campaign led by the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath tribes, along with a wide range of environmental NGOs and fishing advocacy groups, to convince owner PacifiCorp to let go of the aging infrastructure. The immense undertaking also required buy-in from regulatory agencies, state and local governments, businesses, and the communities that used to live along the shores of the bygone lakes.

As the flows were released and the river found its way back to itself, a new chapter of recovery—complete with new challenges—emerged.

Among the questions still being answered: How best to facilitate recreation and public connection with the Klamath while recovery continues. There are hopes for hiking trails, campgrounds, and picnic spots. A wide range of stakeholders are still busy ironing out the specifics and how best to define the lines between private and public spaces.

It’s a delicate process. Not just the ecology is being restored; the Indigenous people whose ancestors relied on the river for both sustenance and ritual across thousands of years are also renewing their relationships with the land.

More than 2,800 acres, some of which emerged from under the drained reservoirs after the dams came down, will be returned to Shasta Indian Nation, a tribe that was decimated when construction on the dams started in the early 1910s. Ready to be stewards, they are also now navigating their role as landowners in a recreation region.

On May 15, the first opening day for new access sites on the Klamath, visitors got the first real glimpse of the extensive restoration efforts since demolition began in 2023. It also served as an early trial for how the public and an eager commercial rafting community might engage with the river and the landscapes that surround it.

As the sun broke through a week of cloudy weather that morning, rafters readied their gear near an access now bearing the traditional name in the Shasta language, K’účasčas (pronounced Ku-chas-chas).

“If we were here a little over a year ago, we would be standing on the edge of a reservoir.”

“If we were here a little over a year ago, we would be standing on the edge of a reservoir,” said Thomas O’Keefe, the director of policy and science for American Whitewater, as he helped Cross and Michael Parker, a conservation biologist, ready their boat for a stretch of river above where the Iron Gate dam once stood. The Guardian joined them to try the section on opening day.

O’Keefe has played a pivotal role in bridging recreation and restoration on the river. He hopes connecting people to the landscapes will encourage future care for them.

“The vast majority of people want to do the right thing,” O’Keefe said, describing the extreme care taken towards ecologically and culturally sensitive areas. “We want to make sure we can define where that can happen.”

There is still a lot of work left to do. Rustic roads that lead to the river’s edge are minimally paved and laden with potholes. It’s not immediately clear where visitors should park. Finishing touches are still being added on signs and infrastructure – from put-ins to picnic tables – with the completion of five new public recreation sitesplanned for August 1.

And for rafters, of course, the river itself must be relearned. Roughly 45 continuous miles were unleashed between the Keno and Iron Gate dams. Rapids, long-dependent on artificial surges from the hydropower operations, are at last being fueled by natural conditions.

“We are kind of writing the book on it,” said Bart Baldwin, the owner of Noah’s River Adventures, a commercial outfit out of Ashland, Oregon, who has taken guests downriver for decades. While he admits the releases from the dams made for “world-class” rapids, he says the loss has created new opportunities.

“The scenery is stunning and I think it’s going to be special.”

The waters of the Klamath have burst back to life in recent weeks, spurred by melt-off from strong winter storms. The Iron Gate Run bumps and sways through a mix of class II and class III rapids, enough for a fun ride that’s manageable for most experience levels. Upriver, the exciting and challenging K’íka·c’é·ki Canyon run winds through more than 2.5 miles of class IV rapids, beckoning those with more expertise.

As he called out paddling orders to navigate his boat’s small crew through splashy sections, Cross was relieved. In the years before the dams came out, he’d worked to outline the new river and its whitewater potential**,**armed with historical topographic maps, old photos, and bathymetric data that showed depth and underwater terrain. Rooted in science, it requires a bit of guesswork. The volcanic geology here often comes with surprises.

“I spent the first six months sweating bullets watching the water recede and the channel scour and wondering if there was going to be a waterfall I didn’t predict,” he said.

Even with strong flows, there was space to breathe between more challenging sections. There were spots to beach boats for a picnic lunch and places to quietly float through the vibrant scenery.

Vestiges of the recent past are still visible. Gradients of green shroud a scar left by the high-water mark of the reservoir. Columns of dried mud, remnants of the 15m cubic yards of sediment held behind the dams, are clumped along the river’s edge.

But there are also signs of nature’s resilience. Swaying willows stand stalwart from the banks. Behind them, rolling hills splashed with orange and yellow wildflowers and ancient basalt pillars stretch to the horizon. Far from the hum of the highway and roads, the silence here is broken only by the purr of the river as it rolls over rocks, accented with eagle calls or chattering sparrows who have already claimed sites along the water for their nests.

Years before the dams were demolished, as teams of scientists, tribal members, and landscape renovation experts tried to envision how recovery should unfold, there wasn’t a guidebook to go by. There weren’t records for how the heavily degraded ecosystems should look or function.

“Creating the mosaic we are currently seeing out there has been a work of educated estimation,” said Dave Coffman, a director for Resource Environmental Solutions (RES), the ecological recovery company working on the Klamath’s restoration. “There’s nothing in that watershed that hasn’t been touched by some sort of detrimental activity.”

In less than a year’s time a dramatic reversal has taken place. Some spots have bounced back beautifully. Others had to be carefully cultivated to mimic what could have been if the dams never disrupted them. Native seeds were cast across the slopes, some by hand and others from helicopters. Heavy equipment trucked away mounds of earth. Invasive plants were plucked from around the reservoir footprint before they could spread across the barren ground.

“We are giving nature the kickstart to heal itself.”

“We are giving nature the kickstart to heal itself,” said Barry McCovey Jr, the fisheries department director for the Yurok tribe. What he calls “massive scars” left by the dams “aren’t going to heal overnight or in a year or in 10 years”, he added. Giving the large-scale process, time will be important – but a little help can go a long way.

In late November last year, threatened coho salmon were seen in the upper Klamath River basin for the first time in more than 60 years. Other animals are benefiting, too, including north-western pond turtles, freshwater mussels, beavers, and river otters. It took mere months for insects, algae, and microscopic features of a flourishing food web to return and sprout. “It’s amazing to see river bugs in a river,” he said. They are good indicators of water quality and ecosystem health.

It might seem like a happy ending. McCovey Jr said it’s just the beginning. “We are going to have ups and downs and it will take a long time to get to where we want to be,” he said.

Ongoing Yurok projects will focus on making more areas “fish-friendly” and closely monitoring aquatic invertebrates in coordination with the other tribes, researchers, and advocacy organizations, and the Klamath River Renewal Corporation that was created to oversee the project.

There are also far-flung parts of the watershed they are still working to restore. Close to 47,000 acres of ancestral Yurok homelands in the lower Klamath basin will be returned to the tribe this year after being owned and operated for more than a century by the industrial timber industry. Considered the largest land-back conservation deal in California history, the work there will complement and benefit from what’s being done upriver.

Even as recovery on the riverremains perhaps at its most fragile, most people who have been part of this enormous undertaking are looking forward to welcoming the public.

“I think one of the biggest fears of this project is that it wouldn’t work,” Coffman said. “I am excited for more folks to get out here and see what we are capable of.”

The work goes beyond the water line. The lands that hug this river have had their own transformation, along with the people who once called them home.

“People are really focused on dam removal and fish and recreation—and those are all great things—but it is a very personal story for us,” said Sami Jo Difuntorum**,**cultural preservation officer for the Shasta Indian Nation. As the tribe returns to their ancestral lands, they are envisioning ways to introduce themselves to a largely unfamiliar public.

Their story is laced with tragedy, but also resilience. Shasta Indian Nation is not federally recognized, largely because they were massacred in the mid-19th century when gold-seeking settlers poured into the region. Their villages and sacred lands were drowned in the damming of the river. But the people tied to these lands have largely remained close by; many still reside in the county.

As the waters of the reservoirs receded, it revealed a place held at the heart of their culture for thousands of years.

“The return of our land is the most important thing to happen for our people in my lifetime.”

“The return of our land is the most important thing to happen for our people in my lifetime, for the generation before and the generation ahead,” Difuntorum said, standing on a quiet overlook watching the river course through the sacred K’íka·c’é·ki Canyon. This steep basalt chasm was left dewatered while the river was rerouted to the hydroelectric plant.

“There are so many things we are learning, like how to coexist as future landowners with the whitewater community, the local community, the fishermen—and then all the tribes,” she added. “It’s a lot—but it’s all good stuff. It’s huge for our people.”

Looking ahead, plans are being made both for public use and for tribal reconnection. There will be access trails across their lands and efforts to plant traditional medicinal and ceremonial plants. Old buildings that provided electricity from the plant will be converted into an interpretive center. Places have been picked for sweat lodges, an official tribal office, and the area where the first salmon ceremony will be held in more than century. Difuntorum’s grandsons— ages nine and six—will be dancing in that ceremony this year.

For the tribe, reconnecting to the river has provided an opportunity to reconnect to their culture and history.Part of reconnecting comes through reintroducing their language. James Sarmento, a linguist and tribal member, is helping Shasta people learn and use pronunciations for recovered places as they were once known along with the stories of creation tied to them. The public will learn them, too.

“It’s about making a relationship and having conversations with the land,” Sarmento said. “These are landscapes that we are not only working to protect—we are working to speak their names out loud.”

The darker moments in the tribe’s history live on. Remnants of the now-inoperable hydroelectric plant still sit solemnly on the embankment: coils of metal, enormous pipes, nests of wires that connect to nothing. A cave, tucked into the steep slopes among ancient lava fields where 50 or so Shasta people sought refuge in the mid-1800s, still bears the violent marks of a miners’raid that left five people, including women and children dead.

Difuntorum said it used to be hard for her to see it all. “I don’t feel that now,” she said. “Of all the places I have been in the world, this is where I feel the most me— out here at the water.”

Cross, O’Keefe, and Parker pulled up their paddles to ease into the final float of the run, gliding through the channel that once propped up the Iron Gate dam. Overhead, an osprey settled into its nest with a large fish as a throng of small birds scattered into the cloudless sky.

There are sure to be challenges ahead. The climate crisis has deepened droughts and fueled a rise in catastrophic fire as this region grows hotter. Habitat loss and water wars will continue as city sprawl, agriculture, and nature increasingly come into conflict.

For now, though, the river’s recovery is a hopeful sign that a wide range of interests can align to make a positive change, even in a warming world.

“I never thought I would see the run under reservoirs be revealed,” Cross said, smiling as he packed up his boat. As a new chapter begins, the Klamath has already become a story of what’s possible, fulfilling the hopes that the project could inspire others.

And, after decades of advocacy and years of work, “we have salmon and beaver and poppies,” he said. “This river will go on forever.”

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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

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

Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claimed on Wednesday that its plan to eviscerate power plant pollution standards will save the US about $1 billion a year. In reality, though, this represents a starkly uneven trade-off, experts say.

The savings for “Americans” will go entirely to power plant operators who won’t have to cut their pollution, while at the same time, climate and health benefits for all Americans that are 20 times larger in dollar terms will be deleted.

“The massive cost to the public compared to the minuscule benefits is breathtaking,” said Charles Harper, power sector campaigner at green group Evergreen Action. “The costs will be borne by the American people who will breathe dirtier air and those around the world suffering from climate change. The benefits will go to a very small group of donors. Perhaps they should change the name of the agency if they are no longer about protecting the health of Americans.”

“Perhaps they should change the name of the agency if they are no longer about protecting the health of Americans.”

The EPA is proposing to entirely ditch all restrictions on planet-heating emissions coming from US power plants, the second largest source of carbon pollution in the country, while also weakening a separate regulation designed to limit the amount of harmful toxins, such as mercury, seeping from these power plants into Americans’ air, water and soils.

These restrictions were imposed by Joe Biden to “advance the climate change cult” and the “green new scam,” according to Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, at an unveiling of the rollbacks on Wednesday that did not mention any benefit to the environment or public health.

“Together, these rules have been criticized as being designed to regulate coal, oil, and gas out of existence,” said Zeldin, who touted the need for “beautiful clean coal” and for the US to develop artificial intelligence, neither a core EPA responsibility.

In justifying its decision, the EPA has claimed that power plant emissions “do not contribute significantly” to the climate crisis—despite US electricity generation being one of the largest single sources of such pollution in the world—and that the rollbacks will save the country $19 billion over two decades, or about $1.2 billion a year.

However, this “saving” is entirely for the benefit of power plant operators who won’t have to install technology to reduce hazardous pollution, rather than the broader public. The EPA has said overall electricity costs will go down, too, but did not provide a figure on any estimated savings from this.

By contrast, the existing climate rule for power plants, put in place by Biden last year, was previously estimated by the EPA to save the US $370 billion by the 2040s, at about $20 billion a year, via climate and public health benefits. The rule is also expected to slash more than 1 billion tons in carbon emissions and save thousands of lives from reduced air pollution.

Experts said that the vast 20 to one discrepancy in benefits, and who they flow to, represents a damaging favor given to the fossil fuel interests that have strongly backed Trump, at the expense of the American public.

“American families will pay the cost of these rollbacks in higher healthcare bills from emergency room visits, missed work days, and missed school days.”

*“*The only people who benefit from these rollbacks are the biggest emitters of toxic pollution who don’t want to install cleaner technologies,” said Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a group composed of former EPA staff. “American families will pay the cost of these rollbacks in higher healthcare bills from emergency room visits, missed work days, and missed school days. This proposal is scientifically indefensible and represents a complete abdication of EPA’s responsibilities under the Clean Air Act.”

Under Trump, the EPA has set about dismantling an array of clean air and water protections and adopted the president’s agenda of boosting fossil fuel production. The agency argues that casting off such regulations will bolster the economy and save money for households.

“Coal and natural gas power plants are essential sources of base load power that are needed to fuel manufacturing and turn the United States into the artificial intelligence capital of the world,” said an EPA spokesperson. “Regulatory costs are inherently regressive—placing a heavier burden on those who can least afford it. These costs are ultimately borne by consumers in the form of higher utility bills and rolling blackouts.”

But, critics warn that the EPA’s traditional purpose to protect public health and the environment is being rapidly eroded.

“EPA’s proposal to stop regulating emissions of greenhouse gases and mercury from US power plants reflects Trump’s breathtaking willingness to sacrifice public health and progress against climate change in the service of the nation’s worst polluters,” said John Holdren, who served as Barack Obama’s science adviser. “In this and so many other ways, Trump and his enablers are doing their best to drive this country off a cliff.

“American jobs, economic competitiveness, health, environment, national security, and standing in the world are all in peril from Trump’s ignorance and reckless disregard for the public good,” said Holdren, who now co-directs the science, technology, and public policy program at Harvard University’s Belfer Center.The EPA announcement makes good on Trump’s campaign trail promise to “unleash American energy” and open “dozens and dozens” of power plants.

It came as part of Trump’s assault on pollution regulations. Taken together, his administration’s planned environmental rollbacks—including of power plant and tailpipe emission standards and clean energy incentives from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—will result in 22,800 additional pollution-related deaths and a $1.1 trillion reduction in US GDP by 2035, a University of Maryland study published on Thursday found.Julie McNamara, an associate director at the science, climate, and health-focused advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, said Zeldin’s Wednesday proposal was “shameful”.

“There’s no meaningful path to meet US climate goals without addressing carbon emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants—and there’s no meaningful path to meet global climate goals without the United States,” she said.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Car horns. Tambourines. Trumpets. Call-and-response chants. Wacking a spoon against a metal folding chair. Demonstrators outside Los Angeles-area hotels—where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are believed to be sleeping—are employing creative methods to keep those ICE agents awake. “No sleep for ICE” is the rallying cry, and the medium is noise.

ICE raids targeting Los Angeles County businesses are entering their eighth day, and the Trump administration clearly has been eager to keep tensions high in the area, appealing a federal order to withdraw the National Guard troops that California says were illegally deployed to the city. Protests have continued, too. For the past several nights, demonstrators have gathered outside hotels where they believe ICE agents are staying, almost all of them in small cities within Los Angeles County but outside LA proper, including Glendale, Pasadena, Whittier, Arcadia, and Burbank.

“Everyone just started doing laps while blasting horns so the little fuckers had a terrible sleep.”

KTLA reported that “a large crowd” gathered outside a DoubleTree in Whittier on Wednesday night, while a widely-circulated TikTok video from independent photojournalist Jeremy Lee Quinn shows demonstrators on a sidewalk outside a Hilton Garden Inn in Arcadia. A second TikTok video claims that ICE subsequently left the building. Journalist and filmmaker David Farrier shared footage of a protest outside a Hilton in Glendale, writing, “Everyone just started doing laps while blasting horns so the little fuckers had a terrible sleep.” He added, “And maybe Hilton will think twice about taking these rioting goons in again.” An Instagram video posted by the account All Things Labor shows a person exuberantly playing a trumpet, with text overlaid: “Heard ICE is trying to sleep. Time to pull out the trumpet. No sleep for kidnappers. ”

It was not immediately clear if ICE agents were actually in all of the targeted hotels. None of the hotels named in information circulating on social media responded to requests for comment from Mother Jones. Meanwhile, Los Angeles Magazine reported that hundreds of demonstrators gathered earlier this week in front of Pasadena’s AC Hotel to protest the reported presence of ICE agents there. One Instagram reel from a local musician who attended the event showed demonstrators chasing white cars marked “POLICE” through the hotel’s parking garage, cheering and shouting “Fuera ICE”—”Out ICE”—as they drove away.

“The hotel asked them to leave after we put on pressure,” text on thevideo read, over footage of people in black uniforms wheeling a loaded luggage cart out of the building. An AC Hotel employee speaking anonymously to Los Angeles said that some ICE agents had left “but the tires on their cars had been slashed (which is why they remained parked on the lot’s seventh level hours after checking out of AC Hotel.)”

In one case over the weekend, an elected official confirmed that ICE agents had been spotted at a hotel but evidently had since left. Besides making noise, demonstrators have also left a deluge of one-star Google reviews for the targeted hotels, many of them noting the presence of “rats.”

“Late last night and early this morning, we received several reports of immigration enforcement officers here in several Pasadena hotels,” State Senator Sasha Renee Perez said in a Sunday, June 8 video on Twitter/X. “We know that they actually have checked out of several of those hotels. And in many cases, several hotels have actually asked them to leave.”

There’s no clear timelines on when ICE might withdraw from the city, and the National Guard troops are expected to stay through the weekend. Large rallies are planned across the country, although downtown Los Angeles, choked with National Guard and law enforcement, may not see the same crowds as earlier in the week.

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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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As quickly as condemnation poured in over the forcible removal of Sen. Alex Padilla from a Department of Homeland Security press conference on Thursday, the right appeared to identify a different victim.

Kristi Noem, who, in her characteristic makeup and baseball cap, had been delivering a speech defending the president’s deployment of the military in Los Angeles, when Padilla, a Latino man and elected official, started to approach the podium. He is heard, despite what DHS falsely claimed after the incident, stating his identity. Still, at least four men are seen quickly pouncing on Padilla, shoving him out the door, while Noem continued with her prepared remarks.

But to the right, Noem was the wrong party. For them, the incident seems to have transformed her into something of a wounded dove by the incident. “She’s like the most delicate, beautiful, tiny woman,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said during an appearance on Benny Johnson’s podcast. She also took a shot at Padilla’s manhood. “What actual testosterone dude goes in and tries to break Kristi Noem?”

Break Noem? Padilla may have been there to call out cruelty. But the senior senator from California was not there to break anyone. That a woman who sits atop an agency ruthlessly profiling and deporting immigrants, and in some cases, sending them to a Salvadoran gulag with no due process, is suddenly unable to be confronted by an elected official without them being physically assaulted is risible. Yet, Noem’s rise to power has long seemed to rely on this intentional contradiction: perfectly styled hair while deriding caged immigrants in the background; heavily caked makeup while tagging along for made-for-TV immigration raids; tough on crime but “delicate, beautiful, tiny.” As I wrote in a recent piece, it is the push for regressive gender roles by an increasingly fascist administration.

But conservative gender norms have nothing on the glaring racism in the suggestion that Noem, a white woman, is the victim after a Latino man is physically dragged out of a room by multiple Secret Service agents. The pretext of criminality attached to people who are not white pervades this administration. Just this week, Rep. LaMonica McIver, a Black congresswoman from New Jersey, was indicted on charges of impeding and interfering with law enforcement officials after protesting at an ICE facility last month. The charges, which carry a maximum of 17 years in prison, come despite shifting explanations from the Trump administration about what led to McIver’s arrest. McIver has condemned the charges as politically motivated; as the New York Times reported, far-right groups have since targeted McIver with intense racism online.

Both incidents, Noem’s press conference and McIver’s arrest, underscore with acute clarity the racist themes that animate this administration. In these early days of our fascist slide, it is painfully clear who gets to be “delicate, beautiful, and tiny,” and who is seen as a violent threat to law enforcement.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

On Wednesday, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security shared a propaganda poster on official accounts on X and Instagram. It featured Uncle Sam urging Americans to “Report All Foreign Invaders” by calling the Immigration and Customs Enforcement tipline. The image was first circulated by a white nationalist who has recently defended use of the n-word and shared material from an explicitly neo-Nazi X account, according to a review of social media activity.

“This should inspire you all. I made a digital poster,” a user who posted the n-word wrote on Wednesday. “TODAY OUR EFFORTS ARE COMING OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE!”

The anonymous user who claims to have created the doctored Uncle Sam image goes by the name Mr. Robert on X. The user, who has only about 350 followers on the site and whose bio states “Wake Up White Man,” first shared the image last Friday. It was then circulated by more prominent far-right users before being shared by DHS on Instagram and X, where it has 2.5 million followers. The White House also shared the poster with its 8.7 million followers on Instagram.

Help your country locate and arrest illegal aliens.To report criminal activity, call 866-DHS-2-ICE (866-347-2423). pic.twitter.com/VVy3TjKWhL

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) June 11, 2025

In response to a request for comment, DHS Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin declined to say how the department came across the image but did not deny that the Mr. Robert account created it. Instead, she said the “assertions” raised by Mother Jones were “fundamentally unserious and reflect the completely juvenile state of mainstream journalism.”

Mr. Robert’s extremism is obvious from its recent posts and reposts. On Friday, the user shared a white nationalist post from the “Aryan Defense League,” an openly neo-Nazi account that has frequently praised Adolf Hitler and has suggested that the Holocaust was justified. One day later, Mr. Robert wrote on his own behalf: “N[*****] is an English word used by our forefathers to call out savagery we still see in our American streets today. It’s not spoken in clicks. White Men created the word to call out what threatens his wife and children.”

Thanks to the Trump administration, the Mr. Robert account is now taking an extended victory lap. “This should inspire you all. I made a digital poster,” he wrote on Wednesday. “@whitelandia made some too and printed them out…TODAY OUR EFFORTS ARE COMING OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE!”

The Whitelandia account is transparently pro-Nazi and antisemitic. It has mocked remembrance of the Holocaust, shared a post from the “Aryan Defense League” featuring a Nazi soldier that calls on people to “Embrace your race,” and argued that only three flags should be allowed in the United States: The Stars and Stripes, the Confederate flag, and the Nazi swastika.

How the modified Uncle Sam poster came to the attention of the White House and DHS social media teams is unclear. Last Friday, C. Jay Engel, a right-wing X user, wrote on the platform that the “online right should be taking these old World War II American propaganda posters about buying war bonds and rewrite them with the ICE tip line number.” Mr. Robert replied with the Uncle Sam image. (Engel has since said on X that Mr. Robert created the image.)

In response to a request for comment from Mother Jones about his political views and role in promoting the image from the Mr. Robert account, Engel described himself as “Pat Buchanan conservative.” He added, “Nazism has no relevance to my American political vision. I consider it a wonderful thing that America finally has an administration that echos [sic] the interests and priorities of Heritage Americans.” (Engel has previously said that he is not a Nazi and does not “popularize Nazi ideology.”)

After Mr. Robert replied with the modified Uncle Sam image, Engel and other right-wing users on X shared it with their many followers—one of whom presumably works in the Trump administration or knows someone who does. That is hardly surprising: It has been obvious since the early days of this administration that many government social media accounts are now run by the kinds of trolls who were once confined to sites like 4chan.

On Wednesday, the DHS X account also shared a post from an account named memetic_sisyphus that is popular on the far right. Right-wing writer Nate Hochman, who was fired by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R-Florida) presidential campaign for secretly making video that included a Nazi symbol, appeared to celebrate DHS’ decision to amplify the account. Jack Posobiec, a “good” friend of Vice President JD Vance who has defended Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet, did the same.

The people whose post on official government accounts are now amplifying envision an America that is forever dominated by whites—at almost any cost. In another post shared by Mr. Robert last Friday, a Nazi-looking soldier wears a gas mask and shoots off a flamethrower. “Due process is White culture,” the caption read. “It doesnt [sic] apply to nons.”

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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 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

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

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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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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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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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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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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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