Sam Altman suggested that an investigative story describing him as someone “unconstrained by truth” with a “sociopathic lack of concern” for consequences caused an early Friday attack on his San Francisco home.

The OpenAI CEO’s unsubstantiated implication came in a post on his personal blog published on Friday, hours after the attack. “There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago,” he wrote. Although he initially “brushed it aside,” he said he was “pissed” and now “thinking that I have underestimated the power of words and narratives.”

A 20-year-old man was arrested early Friday after allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s home. No one was hurt in the incident. The same man is suspected of also threatening to burn down a building at OpenAI’s headquarters later that morning. The Monday New Yorker investigation Altman referred to included interviews with over 100 people who had firsthand knowledge of how Altman conducted business. While a few people defended Altman, most said he was power-hungry and manipulative.

In a move that appears as an attempt to soften his appeal, Altman accompanied his post with a photo of his husband and son. While he acknowledged the present moment as “a time of great anxiety about AI,” he noted, “while we have that debate, we should de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics and try to have fewer explosions in fewer homes, figuratively and literally.”

Altman’s suggestion of “tactics” indicates that he believes reports like the New Yorker investigation are intentionally dishonest and lead to violence.

The attack comes as CEOs are spending more money on personal security. According to a report by the Conference Board, a nonprofit research group, and ESGauge, an analytics platform, the top 10 percent of spenders pay an average of $1.2 million per year for full-time protection teams, armored vehicles, and threat intelligence.

As of April 11, OpenAI is hiring for four positions in corporate security, including a risk analyst, who will bring experience in “physical security, counterintelligence, and risk management,” and security leaders in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and at data centers.

But security goes far beyond safety when considering the technology OpenAI produces. The attack could be used to develop a surveillance dragnet. The company secured a Pentagon contract in February and announced the deal in a company release titled “Our agreement with the Department of War.”

That same day, the Trump administration dropped and blacklisted Anthropic, a rival AI company, from federal contracts due to the company’s refusal to remove safety restrictions on its AI model that prevent the government from using it for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. So while OpenAI claimed in its February announcement that it would ensure that its tools “will not be used for domestic surveillance,” how could it have successfully secured the contract?

If Altman truly wants to “de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics,” he has to reconcile with boosting a company that requires massive energy resources to harm not only those abroad in the name of national security but our communities at home.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Sam Altman wants you to know that he’s just fine. Sure, his company, OpenAI, is reportedly building technology that it fears and some of his former colleagues think he’s a pathological liar, but really? It’s no big deal.

The company’s upcoming model is being finalized and only being given to select group of companies, according to a Thursday Axios report.

This news comes just after the company released policy recommendations on Monday in a 13-page document titled “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First.” Their “ambitious ideas” claim to add guardrails and safety nets as AI evolves toward a “superintelligence” capable of “outperforming the smartest humans even when they are assisted by AI.”

One terrifying proposal: policymakers should reimagine taxes as AI reduces the need for companies to employ as many workers. OpenAI says the trend could expand corporate profits and capital gains while “erod[ing] the tax base that funds core programs like Social Security, Medicaid, SNAP, and housing assistance.” To ameliorate the potential problem, there could be higher taxes on those capital gains and corporate profits.”

(Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.)

And another: create a “Public Wealth Fund” that gives “every citizen—including those not invested in financial markets—with a stake in AI-driven economic growth.”

The week started with a New Yorker investigation that might be the most thorough look yet at Altman and why so many people worry about him being at the helm of such powerful technology.

Reporters Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spoke to more than 100 people**,** most of whom described Altman as someone with an unrelenting drive for more power. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person,” an OpenAI board member told the pair. “The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”

Sue Yoon, a former board member, said that Altman wasn’t a typical “Machiavellian villain,” but instead someone who could convince himself of the ever-fluctuating landscapes he portrayed in his sales pitches.

Combining OpenAI’s policy proposals with the New Yorker investigation reveals a familiar story where an authoritarian Silicon Valley leader becomes synonymous with their technology as their personal whims have significant influence on where the industry—and regulation on it—goes next. And regular people are the ones who deal with the consequences.

The policy recommendations feel like a desperate PR move in light of OpenAI’s limited release of its new model. AI companies know that a lot of people hate their technology.

As my colleagues Anna Merlan and Abby Vesoulis wrote last month, many in the AI industry feel that the technology is exciting, terrifying, essential for the future, and too overwhelming to stop all at once.

Yet the New Yorker investigation noted that “Altman publicly welcomed regulation, he quietly lobbied against it,” referencing reporting that OpenAI lobbied the European Union to scale back its AI regulation.

Thank you for thinking of us, Sam!

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

A con man’s challenge is to stay ahead of his con. If his marks begin to see too many signs that they are being played—and the swindler can’t craft a cover story to account for these contrary facts—the artifice can start to crumble.

Donald Trump may be at this point.

Of course, millions of Americans have known from the start that Trump has long been a deceitful scammer. But millions of others have fallen for his hustle—and they stuck with his flimflam after his first stint as president demonstrated he lied when he promised cheaper and better health care, a revival of American infrastructure, and an end to budget deficits. Despite his failure to make good on these pie-in-the-sky promises, he managed to keep the con going—even after miserably mismanaging the Covid pandemic and then scheming to overturn a national election.

Facts can emerge and threaten a hustle. That might be happening now.

As we know—and he certainly does—many scams depend on people wanting to believe the scammer. That was evident in 2024, when Trump’s vow to lower grocery prices and spur an economic Golden Age appealed to voters slammed by inflation and the high cost of living. He had conned the electorate once before and nearly destroyed American democracy, but these voters were willing to give the bunko artist another shot. This was akin to an abused spouse offering their abusive partner a second chance on the promise that all will be grand this time.

Yet even within false realities, facts can emerge and threaten a hustle. That might be happening now. It has been widely noted that Trump campaigned as an America Firster opposed to so-called “forever wars,” and yet he launched this war of choice against Iran on what appears to have been a whim. (His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called it a “feeling.”) At the time of his impulse, negotiations between Washington and Tehran were still underway and Iran was not two weeks away from producing a nuclear weapon, as Trump has insisted. His trigger-happiness has belied his proclaimed aversion to Mideast wars and overseas interventions. He showed no fealty to what he professed to be a chief principle. This brazen contradiction is tough for everyone but the most committed Trump devotees to ignore.

And that’s not all. This past week, Trump proposed a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, which would entail a 44 percent increase for the military. Such a boost is inconsistent with an America First position. If the priority is the well-being of Americans at home, why spend so much more for potential overseas military actions? The 2025 US military budget is already $962 billion, the most in the world and more than the combined total of the next nine nations (China, $246 billion; Russia, $150 billion; Germany, $109 billion).

Moreover, Trump’s wish-list budget cut 10 percent of non-defense spending. He said last week that it’s “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid, and child care costs—which was sort of big news that got lost in the shuffle. Any president saying something like that in years past would have faced days—maybe weeks—of headlines.

He has cast himself as the champion of the little guy who’s been screwed over by Washington and the elites. Yet in his second term, Trump has wallowed in opulence and narcissistic self-worship.

This budget proposal is unlikely to be adopted by Congress, but his call for shoveling an additional half-a-trillion dollars into the Pentagon while further gutting health care programs and much else is no America First position. Plus, pursuing such a path would exacerbate the budget deficits he once pledged to eliminate.

Trump’s con is being undermined on other fronts. His one big promise in 2024 was to lower prices and make life more affordable. His tariffs have done the opposite—so, too, the Iran war. He has cast himself as the champion of the little guy who’s been screwed over by Washington and the elites. Yet in his second term, Trump has wallowed in opulence and narcissistic self-worship, gold-leafing whatever he can, attaching his name to whatever he can, constructing a poorly designed White House ballroom, and pocketing tremendous amounts of money in assorted grift, including his own crypto scam. (In a December poll, 66 percent disapproved of Trump adding his name to the Kennedy Center; only 18 percent favored this self-glorifying move.) His claim that his mass deportation crusade targets criminal migrants has been proven false by horrific accounts of arrests, detentions, and deportations of law-abiding residents, including students, workers, grandmothers, and other valued members of local communities. And the public has reacted with revulsion to his immigration policies.

In a healthy sign of popular rationality, Trump’s approval rating has been on a steady decline over the past year, and many polls now have his approval only in the mid-30s. That means he’s getting close to his floor. My guess is that about 25 percent of American adults are full-on MAGA—people who believe whatever bunk Trump peddles and will follow the guy off a cliff, while he has the only available jet pack. These surveys suggest that non-cultists are not buying his crap anymore.

Trump’s act is getting old. His chaos does not wear well. He’s not delivering on the unrealistic promises he made, and he’s making things worse.

That seems especially true regarding Iran. A Reuters/Ipsos poll last month found that only 35 percent of Americans support the military strikes on Iran. And the numbers are sliding among non-MAGA Republicans. A CBS News poll in mid-March showed that while 92 percent of self-identified MAGA Republicans backed his war on Iran, only 70 percent of non-MAGA Republicans did. An Economist/ YouGov poll published on March 31 found that support for the war in Iran had dropped by 1 point for the MAGA GOPers fell by a whopping 23 points for those non-MAGA Republicans. Trump is losing everyone but the die-hard Trumpists, who don’t really give a damn about the supposedly cherished ideas of MAGA—such as America First—and are driven mostly by devotion to a divisive demagogue.

Trump’s act is getting old. His chaos does not wear well. He’s not delivering on the unrealistic promises he made, and he’s making things worse. And there’s not much room for improvement on the horizon, especially since it’s unclear how this dumb war will be resolved. Which may be why some folks fear that Trump—cornered like a wounded bear—might become more dangerous and resort to authoritarian measures in the midterms to preserve GOP power (to avoid a boatload of investigations and possibly another impeachment).

Or that he could lash out with more war. His Easter message to Iran’s leaders—“Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah”—showed derangement and desperation. His subsequent statement to Axios—“If they don’t make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there”—was a threat to commit war crimes.

One commentator—I don’t recall who—recently observed that Trump might be hitting an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment. In that Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, the con is that the vain emperor’s new outfit is made of magical fabric only the intelligent can see. So he struts around naked, with everyone afraid to say he’s wearing nothing—until during a procession through town, while his aides pretend to be carrying his train, a child exclaims, “He hasn’t got anything on.” Then all the people join in and cry out the same: The dude’s not wearing anything! The scam is uncovered. The Emperor exposed (literally).

Is Trump close to such a brink? Andersen’s story does not conclude with that moment of truth. After the people see through the ruse, Andersen wrote,

The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.

The spell was broken. But the Emperor and his die-hard supporters continued with the charade.

Trump is the most successful con man in American history. Maybe in world history. (Who else ran a swindle that landed him in charge of an arsenal that can blow up the planet?) But the con is fraying. Perhaps it will collapse. As Bob Dylan once warbled, “Even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have to stand naked.” Now, no one wants to see Trump in the buff. But it may be time to wonder what happens when his racket no longer holds—and what perils that could present.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

The US Department of Health and Human Services gave at least $34 million directly to 16 crisis pregnancy centers between 2018 and 2024, according to a US Government Accountability Office report publicly released on Wednesday.

Crisis pregnancy centers, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, are “facilities that represent themselves as legitimate reproductive health care clinics providing care for pregnant people” but work to dissuade them from seeing abortions, even during life-threatening situations such as ectopic pregnancies. There are between 2,400 and 2,800 crisis pregnancy centers in the United States.

This report comes as the Trump administration doubles down on its “pro-life and pro-family agenda,” according to White House spokesperson Kush Desai. On Friday, the Trump administration, in its budget proposal, announced plans to overhaul its Title X family planning program, moving away from contraception and instead focusing on “optimal health (defined as physical, mental, and social wellbeing), not just medical intervention.” This also seems to dismiss that some people need medical interventions, like IVF, in order to have children.

The researchers at GAO noted that it was difficult to identify how much money was given to crisis pregnancy centers over the six-year period, which does not include Trump’s second term, as they “are not easy to identify in government spending data.” They were able to identify 16 crisis pregnancy centers that received federal funds from HHS because they received a large amount of funding through two HHS Sexual Risk Avoidance Education grants.

“HHS’s oversight of federal funding obligated to CPCs is specific to therequirements of the grant awarded and varies depending on whether the CPC isthe direct or pass-through recipient of the grant, according to HHS officials,” the researchers wrote. “HHS neither targets nor excludes CPCs from any federal grant opportunities, according to agency officials.”

The amount of grant funding that GAO located given to crisis pregnancy centers was not exclusive to the years during the first Trump administration. 2021 to 2024, HHS gave an average of just under $4.8 million per year over a four-year period during the Biden administration, just under the average of $5 million per year under the first Trump administration.

The GAO report lines up with a 2024 Health Management Associates report, which found that 650 crisis pregnancy centers received close to $400 million from federal funding streams between 2017 and 2023.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

President Donald Trump’s dumping of Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday was the kind of shrewd personnel change one might expect from an executive who made a name for himself by firing people. Bondi presided over the unraveling of the Department of Justice. Under her leadership, the DOJ has lost the respect of judges and juries, its ranks have been decimated by lawyers fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, and it racked up embarrassing losses at an unheard of clip. Almost impressively, Bondi has turned the Justice Department from an august symbol of the rule of law into a limping, corrupt enterprise.

But Bondi wasn’t ousted for her disastrous leadership. Her incompetence, magnified in her handling of the Epstein files, in which she managed to make sure a bad story for her boss wouldn’t go away, contributed to Trump’s growing frustration. But Trump reportedly soured on Bondi because she failed to failed to lock up his political enemies. The irony of the situation, of course, is that Trump’s own involvement is what doomed not just those sham prosecutions, but ultimately the DOJ itself.

Trump spent his first term pining for a Justice Department that would protect him, and an attorney general who would serve like his personal attorney—or hit man. In his second term, Bondi willingly tried to fill that role. But her tenure is living proof of a problem whose origin ultimately lies with the rightwing push for a so-called unitary executive who controls every inch of the executive branch: that sort of presidential power breeds distrust, corruption, and ultimately failure.

Before Trump returned to the White House, the Supreme Court granted him criminal immunity for official acts. That instantly infamous opinion, Trump v. United States, also emphasized that the Justice Department was the president’s personal playground. The attorney general was no longer the nation’s chief law enforcement official but, in the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, “acts as the President’s ‘chief law enforcement officer.’” Trump could direct investigations and prosecutions; he could even utilize the department’s prosecutorial powers in furtherance of crimes, including politically motivated investigation and charges.

This Supreme Court constructed an all-powerful presidency on the premise that such power would breed both decisive leadership and democracy accountability. In Trump, Roberts wrote that the Constitution’s framers “deemed an energetic executive essential to…‘the steady administration of the laws.’” And in a 2021 case that acted as a stepping stone to the immunity decision, Roberts assured the public that a unitary executive would create the most politically responsive government. The executive power “acquires its legitimacy and accountability to the public through ‘a clear and effective chain of command’ down from the President, on whom all the people vote,” he wrote.

Bondi was the first attorney general to operate unencumbered by any loyalty to the rule of law, or any pretense of independence. Instead, she was liberated to act, unabashedly, as an appendage of the president. Not long ago, political interference at the Justice Department cost an attorney general his job. For Bondi, that sort of thing was all in a day’s work. In multiple congressional hearings, she demonstrated—through pre-planned zingers hurled at Democratic lawmakers, combatively refusing to answer questions, and praising Trump in terms that would make Stalin blush—that she had no respect for the idea of democratic accountability.

Bondi showed that treating the Justice Department as an instrument of the president’s will is ultimately self-defeating. Whereas Roberts promised “steady administration of the laws,” Bondi delivered embarrassing loss after embarrassing loss, and racked up scandal after scandal. Once elite jobs at DOJ are now so hard to fill that officials are left begging for applicants on social media, even as experience requirements have been slashed. Judges and jurors alike know that the Justice Department has been compromised.

Let’s survey the wreckage. The Justice Department has mounted numerous prosecutions against anti-Trump protesters who oppose the administration’s cruel immigration sweeps. But in its zeal to punish dissent, dozens of have failed. A prosecutor, the aphorism goes, can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. But Bondi’s DOJ failed to secure an indictment against DC’s famous sandwich-thrower, who hurled a hoagie at a law enforcement official in protest of Trump’s immigration enforcement surge. Undeterred, DOJ hauled the thrower before a jury on a misdemeanor charge, where he was promptly acquitted.

Last September, the Trump administration launched a showy, chaotic, and violent immigration operation in Chicago. Immigration agents descended from helicopters onto an apartment building in the middle of the night, where they not only detained immigrants but also zip-tied citizens and naked children. The brutal crackdown sparked demonstrations, and in came the Justice Department to prosecute the protesters, often with charges of impeding or assaulting officers. So far, they’ve failed to get a single conviction.

The Chicago Sun-Times has tracked 32 federal prosecutions tied to the Chicago deportation blitz. Of those, half were dismissed, grand juries declined to indict in three, one ended with a jury acquittal, and three will have charges dropped for good behavior. One of the people whose prosecution was dropped was Marimar Martinez, a US citizen who was shot five times by an ICE officer, then smeared as a domestic terrorist and charged with assaulting a federal officer.

The department’s motives can’t be trusted, and no longer can it be trusted to speak honestly to judges or to follow their orders.

On September 20, Trump tapped out a message to Bondi demanding that she hurry up and prosecute three people he held grudges against. “What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia???” he wrote, referring to former FBI Director James Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and New York Attorney General Leticia James. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” When he hit send, Trump reportedly thought he was delivering a private message through his Truth Social media platform. Instead, he posted the instructions for the world to see. Bondi sprang into action.

In her pursuit of a Comey indictment, Bondi and Trump ousted the US attorney in Virginia’s eastern district who wouldn’t go along with the scheme. They replaced him with Florida insurance lawyer Lindsey Halligan. Halligan lacked any prosecutorial experience, and had worked on exactly three federal cases. But she had the qualification Trump and Bondi cared most about: Loyalty, as in all three cases, she had represented Trump. In a government run on the whim of one man, allegiance has proven more important than competence.

Unfortunately, loyalty isn’t enough to secure a conviction. Halligan promptly engineered indictments against James and Comey, although a judge questioned whether Halligan had made critical misstatements of the law to a grand jury in Comey’ case. The New York Times found that Halligan omitted possibly exculpatory facts to James’ grand jury. Ultimately, a federal judge dismissed both indictments on grounds that Halligan’s appointment was unlawful. When the Justice Department tried to get a new indictment against James, the grand jury refused. The government is still appealing the dismissal of the charges against Comey.

When a video featuring six Democratic lawmakers reminding active-duty military and intelligence officers that they have a duty not to follow illegal orders enraged Trump, DOJ jumped into action. The US attorney’s office in DC, led by Trump ally Jeanine Pirro, sought indictments against the members of Congress. A unanimous grand jury rebuffed them.

Then came the attempted prosecution of the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, whom Trump wants to oust as part of his bid to take control of the powerful central bank. A federal judge in Washington quashed two grand jury subpoenas last month that were part of that criminal investigation. The opinion of Judge James Boasberg laid out not just that the case against Powell is paper thin, but that the Justice Department’s reputation is in such a state of ruin that it can no longer be trusted to act in the interest of justice. Boasberg was clear-eyed about the DOJ’s track record of launching prosecutions at the president’s behest, and how that history tainted the Powell case. The department once enjoyed a “presumption of regularity,” or good faith, before judges. Now, judges are presuming the worst.

In New Jersey last month, a federal judge threw a top prosecutor out of his courtroom and ordered his superiors to come in to testify about who was actually running the state’s US attorney’s office. Bondi had previously split the top job between three people after judges ousted another Trump lackey and former personal lawyer, Alina Habba, from the position, for having been unlawfully appointed. Bondi’s attempt to keep the office in the hands of Trump allies who aren’t Senate-confirmed failed when, last month, another court ruled that the three prosecutors jointly running the office had also been appointed unlawfully.

“The Administration has made clear that it cares far more about who is running the” US attorney’s office, Judge Matthew Brann wrote, “than whether it is running at all.”

It’s a truth that applies to the department as a whole. Trump is so bent on loyalists—Bondi, Halligan, Pirro, Habba—who will implement his agenda, that he has undermined the department’s ability to function. Perhaps his next attorney general will not be so inept as those four. But the problem for Trump and his withering department remains: A Justice Department carrying out the president’s personal revenge plots is ultimately an untrustworthy institution.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Of all the rot that flowed from Pam Bondi’s tenure leading the Justice Department under Donald Trump’s second term, the one that will be remembered beyond this political moment is likely to be her February 2026 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

It was there that the attorney general, now former, approached congressional oversight like a vulgar cage fight.

“You’re a washed-up, loser lawyer,” Bondi told Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee. “You’re not even a lawyer.”

Coming from the highest law enforcement officer in the country, the taunt was absurd, the stuff of reality television theatrics intended to please our reality television president. And it was easy to see why. Bondi was testifying before Congress about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files, a source of abject rage for the president. And Bondi, who angered both Democrats and Republicans with her conduct over the files, couldn’t afford a bad performance. So there she was, effectively punching her way through a congressional hearing.

“They are trying to deflect from all the great things Donald Trump has done,” Bondi snarled in another moment from the February hearing.

None of which ended up boosting her favorability. On Thursday, two months after the hearing, Trump fired Bondi anyway, claiming in a Truth Social post that she was relocating to an “important job in the private sector.” The ouster comes almost exactly one month after the president fired Kristi Noem, another fierce loyalist, after the former Homeland Security Secretary reportedly pissed him off with her own congressional performance. Together, the firings once again underscored a singular Trumpian truth: that you’re useful to Donald Trump until you’re not. That this is a man who does not hesitate to discard anyone, no matter how much they’ve contorted themselves for the job.

For Bondi, those contortions came in the form of constant debasing, both of herself as a seasoned law enforcement official, and the Justice Department, where, in little over a year, she politicized the department to the point of transforming it into the president’s personal law firm. All while shredding her already thin credibility—she did, after all, serve in Trump’s defense team during his 2020 impeachment hearings—in the process. And for what? An “important job in the private sector,” it turns out.

“You’re about as good of a lawyer today as you were when you tried to impeach President Trump,” Bondi told Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) at the February hearing. It turns out that in Trumpworld, you’re only as good as your least bad congressional performance.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Last week, President Donald Trump did what roughly one in three American voters have done in recent elections: He voted by mail.

But while Trump personally used that method to cast his vote in a Florida special election, he also signed an executive order Tuesday night aimed at dramatically tightening restrictions on mail voting for everybody else. Experts and state election officials say the order is plainly unconstitutional and will face court challenges.

“We’ll see the president in court,” says Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who is coordinating with her counterparts in other states on a legal response to the executive order.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, who serves as the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, tells Mother Jones he expects a lawsuit will be filed in “days.”

“The Constitution is very clear, in plain language, that the state has the responsibility to run elections,” Aguilar adds.

Aguilar is referring to Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution—often called the Elections Clause. “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof,” the 238-year-old document reads. Congress, the Constitution says, can also contribute to election procedure by passing laws.

But Trump’s new executive order, titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” runs afoul of that language. His executive order instructs the Department of Homeland Security to create lists of eligible voters in each state, which the US Postal Service would then use to identify voters who can receive mail ballots marked with special barcodes for tracking purposes. The executive order also grants the attorney general the power of “withholding Federal funds from noncompliant States and localities.”

Bellows says she recently mailed Trump a copy of the Constitution. “Clearly, he needs to read it,” she says. “You don’t have to be a lawyer to understand the states—not the president—are in charge of elections.”

She is far from the only top state official or expert who says Trump does not have authority over how elections are run.

“Where the Constitution might need interpretation in some areas and might be vague in other areas, on elections, it’s extraordinarily clear the President has zero power with regard to elections,” says David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, and a former senior trial attorney in the DOJ’s voting section.

Purportedly, Trump signed the executive order to reduce voting fraud. “The cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It’s horrible what’s going on,” Trump said Tuesday, repeating false allegations that he and other Republicans have made for years. Data resoundingly supports that mail voting is extremely secure. A 2025 report by the Brookings Institution, for example, found that the prevalence of mail-voting fraud is forty-three millionths of one percent. In other words, fraud was discovered in roughly four cases out of every 10 million ballots cast by mail.

Tuesday’s executive order is just the latest instance of Trump’s incessant efforts to assert control over election procedures in a clear effort to give his party the upper hand.

His strategy to “take over” elections, as he put it a couple of months ago, includes ongoing efforts by the Department of Justice to collect voter rolls from all 50 states. The DOJ has sued more than 25 states for these lists in an effort to create what effectively constitutes a national voter roll, which could be used to wrongly purge eligible voters from the rolls. Courts have thus far entirely sided with the states refusing to hand over their files, which contain voters’ private information, such as Social Security numbers and party affiliation.

Meanwhile, the Trump-supported SAVE Act—which would, among other things, require proof of citizenship to register to vote and would effectively end mail and online voter registration—is currently stalled in the Senate. Trump has so far been unsuccessful in convincing Republican senators to eliminate the 60-vote filibuster threshold in order to pass the SAVE Act along partisan lines.

Previous efforts by Trump to change election rules include his failed March 2025 executive order requiring proof of citizenship on federal voting forms. A federal judge shot that down, citing the same constitutional provision—the Elections Clause—that would apply to this new executive order.

“Because our Constitution assigns responsibility for election regulation to the States and to Congress, this Court holds that the President lacks the authority to direct such changes,” District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in her opinion.

Becker says he is “100 percent confident” that courts will rule similarly on the new executive order. “Courts will block this. It not only violates the express terms of the Constitution; it violates existing federal law, where Congress has spoken clearly. It violates the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits people from being removed from voter lists within 90 days of a major election. It violates the Help America Vote Act, which has similar provisions.”

If Becker, Aguilar, and Bellows are correct in their predictions that courts will quickly and unequivocally block the executive order, the tens of millions of voters who opted to vote by mail in 2024 will have that choice again in the 2026 midterms.

Voting by mail is a “popular, trusted method of voting,” says Molly McGrath, director of national democracy campaigns at the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the Administration over its 2025 executive order. “These are voters from red states, blue states, purple states.”

That, of course, includes Trump himself.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Last week, Mother Jones published firsthand accounts of children and parents detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the nation’s only family detention center. The stories, which came from sworn oral declarations given to legal aid groups between July 2025 and February of this year, painted a bleak picture of life at the facility: wormy food, dangerously lacking medical and mental health care, water that makes children sick, nearly impossible sleeping conditions, and intimidating treatment by guards.

Now, dozens more sworn declarations included in a recent 361-page court filing reveal new details about life in the facility from January, February, and March of this year.

Detainees repeatedly said that guards threatened or intimidated them for participating in protests or filing grievances, in some cases destroying children’s letters and confiscating their art supplies.

Many of the detainees, whose declarations were translated into English by sworn interpreters, discussed the same issues that we highlighted in our first story. But they also talked about another trend: As media and political scrutiny of Dilley has increased—particularly since the arrival of 5-year-old Liam Ramos in January—so have threats of retribution against those who speak out. Detainees repeatedly said that guards threatened or intimidated them for participating in protests or filing grievances, in some cases destroying children’s letters and confiscating their art supplies. They recounted being hidden away from congressional delegations visiting the facility, or, conversely, receiving special treatment on the days that politicians and lawyers visited.

The Department of Homeland Security and CoreCivic, the private prison company that operates Dilley, have consistently said that the facility is a safe, family-friendly place where detainees have access to high-quality medical care, meals, clean water, and educational opportunities. DHS didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story, but in the past has said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not destroy letters or confiscate art supplies. In an email, CoreCivic said that the facility has been the target of “baseless allegations” that “undermine the public-service centric work” of their staff.

We went through the detainees’ recent declarations and pulled out some particularly telling parts.

On Christmas they treated us so cruelly. They brought an ICE official in a Santa Claus outfit here, but he brought no toys or sweets, and the kids all did not understand why Santa did not bring them anything. Young children went up to hug Santa, but he would push them away. It was so cruel. They clearly did it as a photo opportunity to use us to pretend they were treating us humanely. It left the kids all upset.

—41-year-old mother of a 17-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl*, on their 74th day at Dilley (January 14)*

The holidays at Dilley were awful. On Christmas, they told us they were going to have a special Christmas event for the children. They said they would put a good movie on, and they even had flyers at the gym about it. They had all the kids come into the gym and sit in the chairs. Then they put on a video clip of the Grinch movie. After a few minutes, someone came in the gym dressed like Santa. The children were excited and started to gather around him. Staff yelled at them all to sit down, and then the Santa just gave the children who were sitting a bag of chips. Then the staff took a picture of the kids with Santa, turned the video on for another few minutes, and told the kids the activity was over. It was humiliating and frustrating to be treated this way; it was worse than doing nothing actually.

—Parent of a 9-year-old girl, on their estimated 113th day at Dilley (January 15)

When we took part in a peaceful protest here, one guard here told us that they were going to charge all of us with crimes for obstructing the law and then separate all the fathers and send them to a prison if we ever did another protest. They also said they were going to use the cameras to identify who was participating in the protests. After hearing these threats, we felt overwhelmed with fear.

—33-year-old father of a four-year-old girl, on their 49th day at Dilley (February 11)

A couple weeks ago, when the congresspeople were here, the staff enclosed us in our room from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. At 12 p.m., they let us go to eat with guards flanking us on both sides to make sure we didn’t talk with the congressmembers.

That day, they passed around a list for people to sign up and talk with the congressmembers. We all wrote our names down, but staff only allowed two people from our hallway to talk with the congressmembers. We think they were punishing the people who were filing the most grievances by preventing them from speaking with them.

On that day, they didn’t even let my three children go outside to get medicine. Instead, they brought the medicine to our room. The nurse who came to our room said that [the] medical wing was closed for the day. She said, “This is the result of you guys for doing protests; this is the punishment…”

A few days ago, the officials here found out that I have spoken with reporters, and the staff have taken reprisal steps against my children and me.

For the past couple of days, my children and I have been locked down in our room. They put us on lockdown after a staff member pushed my daughter and took all of her coloring materials away.

This week, my young daughter wrote “liberty” on a piece of paper. One of the officers found me in the laundry room and told me that I needed to come to the recreation area with that paper. When I went there, a man named Officer __ took the paper and ripped it up. He said you cannot have papers that say this. Then, he threw it away. I told him I did not know that the children were not allowed to express themselves in writing. He told me that our family could have a report made against us for this. So, I apologized.

—31-year-old mother of 7-year-old boy, 9-year-old girl, and 15-year-old girl on their 49th day at Dilley (February 12)

Some families did a protest a few weeks ago. After the protest, the staff started searching our rooms. My 2-year-old had some crayons that another family had given her. CoreCivic staff confiscated her crayons and threw them away. She was crying. They said they were throwing away the crayons for our security and so the children would not write more letters about the conditions at Dilley. They also threw away our Tylenol, Advil, and VapoRub. They probably would have taken my daughter’s letters, too, but I keep them in a folder with all of our legal documents. I keep these documents with me at all times. A picture of two of my daughter’s letters are attached to this statement. They speak for themselves.

In the letter on the left, a 9-year-old writes, “Please help me get out of here. I want to study, I want to be free with my sister,” with the words “freedom” and “help” above her drawing. On the right, she writes, “We’ve been here four months but for me and my sister it seems like a year.”

—34-year-old mother of two kids, ages 9 and 2, who had been at Dilley for more than 125 days (February 12)

I never got to see the little boy, Liam, when he was here, but I saw him on the news. I was happy when he was released, but I couldn’t help but think, “What about the rest of us?”

—33-year-old parent of children ages 14, 11, and 7, on their 53rd day at Dilley (March 11)

My 2-year-old has been having a severe medical issue. She has a swollen gum and an infected tooth, and has a fever anytime she isn’t taking ibuprofen from this infection. This has been going on since we arrived at Dilley, over 20 days ago. The top of her tooth is green at the root. I think the nerve there has been hit or opened…

When Congressmen Castro was here this past Monday, we begged for his help. He tried to advocate for us, Dilley ended up sending us to a hospital 15 minutes away. My husband went with my sick daughter. I had to stay here with my two other daughters.

Unfortunately, the hospital could not help. They just checked her blood pressure. The nurse at a hospital said this is not a dental clinic. They couldn’t help her.

The staff here think and say that I am beating my daughter, and that is why she cries so much. I tried to explain to them the toothache, but they threatened to separate us. They said if she keeps crying, we will take her away from you.

—22-year-old mother of 2-year-old, 1-year-old, and 10-month-old girls, on their 23rd day at Dilley (March 12)

The food here is really bad, but whenever reporters or congresspeople come they give us better food that they would never give us otherwise, like roast chicken, cakes, pizza, and ice cream. But that is just ICE hiding how it is the rest of the time to the outside world…

I have to pay to call my dad. There are times when we have Facetimed my dad and tried to explain what is happening and ICE cut the signal, like when we tried to tell my dad that they had locked us in our rooms because the congresspeople had come. This happened another time when we had a call with a reporter as well. I think they do not want us to share critical things about our experience here and interfere with these calls. The guards also completely change how they act anytime an outside congressperson or reporter comes. The guards start being kind to us and saying, “Hi,” which is something they would never do when they are not being watched…

If I stay in the US, I want to be an advocate for people who are innocent to get out of jail. I want to do whatever I can to make sure that more children do not get brought to places like this, because they are going to suffer.

—13-year-old child on their 86th day at Dilley (March 12)

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Second Lady Usha Vance is normal and relatable, actually.

Or, at least she said as much on Sunday in an NBC interview promoting her new podcast show Storytime with the Second Lady, where she brings on a guest to read a children’s book.

“It’s a podcast that really is just for children,” Usha Vance explained. “We will have someone come in—a special reader, we’re calling them—read a fun book, have a very short little conversation about things related to the book, maybe about their career.”

Three episodes were released on YouTube Monday morning, with the first show featuring Vance reading The Tale of Peter Rabbit solo and the next two featuring former racing driver Danica Patrick and author and Paralympian Brent Poppen.

“[We] then invite children to pick up books on their own. It’s sort of just an advertisement for reading,” Vance continued.

The second lady’s launch comes as her husband and other officials in the Trump administration terrorize and inflict brutal violence on children and families around the world—the remainder of the discussion hammered home an awkward whitewashing attempt.

Vance’s young children helped make the podcast set, including building a Lego cherry blossom tree and even has a Costco membership! But when NBC News’ Kate Snow asked her simple questions about her politics and thoughts on the Trump administration, the second lady largely shied away from answering. While Vance doesn’t agree with her husband on every issue, she is “not involved in this in any professional sense,” so she can have “open-minded” and “very productive” conversations with him when his work becomes “important personally.”

As much as she tries to present the contrary, she is a person with influence within the Trump administration.

“I do feel very comfortable in that no one has ever asked me to engage in any kind of litmus test on anything,” Vance said when asked about her stark political shift from being registered as a Democrat until at least 2014. “What I’ve found is that I was myself in 2014. I can be myself today. And I feel very comfortable in that world.”

Q: In 2014 you were a registered Democrat. Do you feel fully comfortable in the universe you're in now?Usha Vance: Sometimes I have thoughts that fit very comfortably into one side or another, sometimes I have views that are idiosyncratic pic.twitter.com/yDThevAr5M

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) March 30, 2026

The second lady is comfortable in a government that’s trying to replace educators with AI robots while it detains and deports young children, reportedly kills over a hundred elementary school students by missile strike, and starves families in Cuba of basic living essentials.

It’s all normal and relatable as long as you don’t ask too many questions.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose President Donald Trump’s war in Iran. Those numbers go even higher when the prospect of boots on the ground is included. The war has even repelled some of Trump’s biggest supporters in the MAGA world, who thought he was serious when he promised during his 2024 campaign that he wouldn’t engage in foreign wars if elected.

But none of those schisms were on display Saturday at CPAC, the nation’s oldest conservative political convention, when Reza Pahlavi took the stage. The son of the last shah of Iran was given rock star treatment and greeted with roars of approval from an audience filled with Iranian-Americans who back Trump’s attack on Iran.

“Can you imagine Iran going from death to America to God bless America?” he asked the raucous crowd. “Well, I, too can.” He pitched Trump’s war as an opportunity for Iranians to finally throw off 47 years of oppressive theocratic rule, and offered up himself as the chosen one who would lead the country through its transition to freedom.

A button worn by supporters of Reza Pahlavi at CPACStephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

“Unlike the regime that worships death and destruction, the Iranian people celebrate life and liberty,” he said. “That’s why I can imagine an Iran that exports engineers instead of extremists, startups instead of suicide bombers, energy instead of hatred.” With echoes of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” motto, Pahlavi said, “I can imagine in the Middle East where Iran is no longer a source of chaos, but an anchor of stability that does not fear its people, doesn’t threaten its neighbors, doesn’t isolate itself from the world. Imagining this is not difficult, because this is exactly what Iran once was, and what it can be again.”

The moment was surprisingly moving. Hundreds of exiled Iranians, many with children in tow, were clearly longing for Pahlavi to deliver change for the good. Yet the crown prince’s future—as well as exiles who hope to return to Iran—rests almost entirely on Trump, which seems like risky business. After all, Trump has the attention span of a gnat, and already he’s facing a revolt from his own party over the war.

Media stars like Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan have been openly breaking with Trump for betraying his campaign promises. At CPAC, where most speakers seemed largely supportive of the war, former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) sounded a discordant note, saying, “A ground invasion of Iran will make our country poorer and less safe. It will mean higher gas prices, higher food prices. And I’m not sure if we would end up killing more terrorists than we would create.”

Some Republicans in Congress like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) have joined with Democrats to try to pass a war powers resolution that would limit the president’s ability to wage war in Iran. Gas prices are skyrocketing as Iran continues to strangle the critical Strait of Hormuz, an outcome that seems to have taken Trump by surprise.

Faced with increasing opposition at home to the war, Trump has suggested that “me and the Ayatollah” might jointly oversee the operation of the strait, a partnership that would seem anathema to Iranian exiles in the US.

At CPAC, Pahlavi seemed to recognize the limits of America’s support for regime change in Iran through military action. “What we ask of America now is simple: Stay the course,” he pleaded. “Pave the way for the Iranian people to finish the job.”

The crown prince framed himself as the leader of an Iranian MAGA movement, and his supporters openly pined for the restoration for the shah. In that sense, they seemed much like American conservatives imagining a better past that never was. After all, Iran wasn’t exactly a model of democracy before the 1979 Iranian revolution. While he may have been a modernizing force, Pahlavi’s father was an authoritarian monarch who oversaw a one-party state that also engaged in torture and human rights abuses. Many of the Iranians I met at CPAC were far too young to remember life under the shah, and they seemed to view pre-revolutionary Iran with sepia tones.

“Iran, as it was before 1979, you know, we had a great country,” Sara Paras told me. “We were progressing. But now with the Ayatollah and Islamic regime, they are just destroying our country.” Paras, 29, is an enthusiastic backer of Pahlavi. “He is the representative of the people of Iran. He wants the same thing that the Iranian people want, too. They want freedom.”

A T-shirt spotted on a supporter of Reza Pahlavi at CPACStephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

While Pahlavi seems to have a large following of Iranians inside the US, Trump and his aides have reportedly called him the “loser prince” because they don’t believe he has much support inside Iran, a country the suburban Maryland resident hasn’t visited in 50 years. At CPAC, however, Pahlavi pushed back on such criticism. “I have unified a broad coalition of dissidents, republicans, and monarchists, left and right,” he said. “Men and women of all ages, religions, and ethnicities. Even people who were former political opponents have joined the movement to free Iran under my leadership.”

One thing Pahlavi didn’t promise to deliver in Iran: immediate elections—though he has said that those will happen eventually.

“The Iran story is not yet finished,” he said, concluding his speech. “Great civilizations outlast even the most vicious occupiers. With your help and with the courage, sacrifice and heroism of Iran’s greatest youth, our best latest chapter is being written right now. When it is done, a free and democratic Iran will stand alongside the United States as a partner, ally, and a friend. President Trump is making America great again. I intend to make Iran great again.”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Former Vice President Al Gore delivered a blistering rebuke of President Trump’s war on Iran this week in his first wide-ranging comments on the escalating crisis, calling Trump’s lack of planning “an astonishing mistake” born of arrogance and corruption. “I never would have believed that any president would do even one-tenth of the atrocious things Donald Trump has done,” he said.

In an exclusive sit-down with Reveal host Al Letson for an upcoming episode of More To The Story, a visibly angered Gore linked the war to Trump’s climate recalcitrance and a slew of broken promises.

As the Pentagon prepared to send about 2,000 paratroopers to Iran, Gore argued that the president had brushed aside decades of war planning for just such a scenario. The energy crisis unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz has “been the number one question for all the war games and plans for 50 years almost,” Gore told Letson. “President Trump said, ‘Don’t worry about it. They’ll surrender before that comes into play.’ Well, that was an astonishing mistake of the kind that you really do not want the president of your country to make because it has put us in a terrible situation.”

“Could he be just as wrong about that as he has been in attacking Iran without a plan for the Strait of Hormuz?” Gore added. “Could he be just as wrong about that as he was when he threatened to invade Greenland?”

Elsewhere in the interview, Gore launched another broadside against a series of back flips and failed promises from the president: “He told us prices were going to come down. He told us we would not get into any more foreign ‘forever wars.’ He told us inflation was going to subside. He told us the economy was going to really boom. None of those things have come true.”

“This is the most corrupt administration.”

“This is the most corrupt administration, not only in American history, but more corrupt than I could ever have imagined a president would be able to get away with to the extent that he has,” Gore said. “It’s shocking to me.”

This is one clip from a series we’ll be posting in the coming days, ahead of our longer interview with the former Vice President soon, in which he discusses climate action, religion, and what’s giving him hope. Stay tuned.

And in the meantime, subscribe to Reveal on Apple Podcasts so you don’t miss the latest.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

President Donald Trump already has signed more executive orderssince January 2025 than during his entire first term—and more than many presidents signed during their tenures in office. But one order has gone far beyond the others in reshaping the ecosystem of information the government and so many others, rely on.

“EO14168 has been overwhelmingly responsible for driving changes to federal forms and survey data,” says Melanie Klein, an analyst with the federal monitoring organization DataIndex who has been tracking these alterations. Although Trump signed EO14168—better known by its title “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”—on his first day in office, data experts are still getting a sense of its far-reaching scope.

Of more than 500 federal databases affected by Trump’s myriad executive orders, nearly three quarters were revised because of the Defending Women order alone. Most of the cases involved removing trans-inclusive gender identity options from survey forms, leaving people to choose between male or female.

These change have affected “really critical programs like the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline or data collections about runaway and homeless youth,” Klein says. These have been among the removals that, over the past year, have garnered widespread concern because trans people are known to experience higher rates of suicide and homelessness than others—crises that have grown worse as a result of the administration’s anti-trans policies and rhetoric. “Without the data, disparities don’t just magically disappear, but they do become more difficult to document and address,” says Caroline Medina, a senior advisor for data policy at the Movement Advancement Project (MAP).

But the erasures are far more sweeping than that. “The breadth and diversity of the removals is really quite astounding,” Medina told me. According to a recent report from the Williams Institute, Trump’s order has affected some of the government’s most frequently used forms, including citizenship and passport applications and the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

Compared to the erratic erasures of webpages during the first few weeks of the administration, which left more visible digital scars, most of the datasets in question were amended quietly. When agencies modify a survey or database, they have a few options for how to record the revision, and “a lot of the changes that we’ve seen fall into two buckets,” Medina says.

A handful were revised under a lengthy protocol that invites public oversight. But another recent MAP report found that 83 percent went through a so-called non-substantiative review process. “This allows agencies to really quickly and swiftly remove questions with limited public visibility,” says Klein, who spent the last year tracking alterations to federal data collections.

This more obscured pipeline is usually reserved for “technical tweaks,” Medina adds, but “I would argue that these are meaningful changes.” If the modifications are classified as “substantiative” revisions, they would have been posted for public comment, something Trump has spent the last year skirting. Whatever value the administration places—or doesn’t—in public feedback, collecting that input remains valuable for things like future litigation, Medina says: “It’s a really important accountability tool—still.” (Trump’s order has spawned dozens of lawsuits already.)

But more surprising than the secrecy around the changes is the sheer number of them, given how little data on gender the government collects to begin with. A few national surveys—mainly focused on gender-based discrimination, health disparities, and violence—had asked about gender identity for a decade or so, but the majority of resources scrubbed were part of a far more recent push to improve federal data on gender.

The Census Bureau, the government’s statistical powerhouse, only started testing questions on gender identity in its American Community Survey in late 2024. Had that barely launched trial not folded under the second Trump administration, it might have been a stepping stone to including gender questions on the census itself, which has only ever asked whether respondents are male or female.

Such efforts were spurred by a few executive orders under the Biden administration that Trump rescinded on his first day in office. “Those were big milestones, that are now unfortunately being dismantled,” Medina says.

Nowhere is that more true than in Health and Human Services, which accounted for nearly half of all data deletions from the Defending Women order. A thorough scrubbing of HHS datasets is not surprising given how, under RFK Jr.’s leadership, the department has taken aim at trans people time and time again.

However, previously, “HHS was a real hub for data and research on LGBTQ people,” Meghan Maury-Fox, a senior advisor for data policy in the Biden White House, wrote in an email. The department was among the first to collect any data on gender and sexuality, initially in assessments of HIV risk, homelessness, and other health concerns known to disproportionately affect queer and trans communities.

These health disparity measures were among the data collections altered or discontinued, alongside others pertaining to a wide range of health issues, from reports on food-borne illness to forms used to record the deaths of patients with end-stage kidney disease.

According to Maury-Fox, the breadth of the HHS revisions stems from past efforts to ensure that federal health programs didn’t neglect the unique needs of queer and trans populations. Under the Obama administration, HHS hired one of the first federal staff members to focus on gender and sexuality. (They only recently left.) The department also housed one of the few government offices dedicated to incorporating those populations into research—which the National Institutes of Health began dismantling in December 2024, well before Inauguration Day, figuring the new Trump administration would finish it off.

Now HHS, along with several other federal agencies, has even exceeded what the Defending Women executive order asked for. In at least 60 instances, the government removed data on people’s sexual orientation, which the order did not cover. “There is a sense of over-complying,” Klein says. And though the rate of removals has slowed as agencies run out of gender-related data to target, “there are still requests coming in to carry out the implementation of that executive order.”

Trump’s minions, that is, have kept up the search, sometimes circling back to further scrub massive datasets involving civil rights complaints and clinical trials. At this point, though, even the experts are not entirely sure how much gender data remains for the administration to sniff out. We may not know until it’s gone.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Surprise! Just one day before Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are supposed to be deployed to airports around the country to help reduce long lines caused by the partial government shutdown and spring break crowds, the Trump administration appears to have no coherent plan for what they will do.

Following Donald Trump’s announcement that ICE agents will be sent to airports starting on Monday to fill in for Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees who have been on the job without pay for more than a month, administration officials gave conflicting statements about what exactly this would entail.

Officials at ICE were caught off guard by the president’s directive and have been rushing to create a plan, CBS News reported.

White House border czar Tom Homan, who Trump said would be in charge of the operation, told CNN on Sunday that ICE agents will be assigned to jobs like securing exit gates, allowing trained TSA officers to focus on checkpoints and reducing wait times.

“I don’t see an ICE agent looking at an X-ray machine because they’re not trained in that,” Homan said.

But when CNN host Dana Bash asked for confirmation about whether ICE agents would be posted at security screening lines, Homan responded, “Those discussions are going on now.” He said the administration hoped to have a plan “by the end of today.”

BASH: Are ICE agents going to move into American airports starting tomorrow?HOMAN: Yes. I'm currently working on the plan. We'll execute tomorrow.BASH: Are ICE agents even remotely trained to handle security at airports?HOMAN: ICE agents receive high-level training.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-03-22T13:40:22.724Z

Meanwhile, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy contradicted some of Homan’s statements on Sunday, telling ABC News that ICE agents could work on airport security lines because they “run those same type of security machines at the Southern border.”

“We have ICE agents who are trained and can provide assistance to agents,” Duffy continued.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees TSA as well as ICE, says more than 400 TSA workers have quit since a partial government shutdown starting on February 14 left them working with no pay. On Saturday, almost 12 percent of TSA employees didn’t come to work, the highest rate since the shutdown began, according to ABC News.

The Trump administration blames the government shutdown and TSA shortages on Democrats. As Mother Jones’ Michael Mechanic has pointed out:

Democrats [have] refused to provide more funds until Republicans agree to various reforms related to deployment, training, and management of ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. . .

Democratic lawmakers also seek to curtail ICE’s rampant use of surveillance technology and ensure the rights of states and lawmakers to investigate alleged human rights abuses at the immigrant detention centers the administration has set up.

But on Saturday, every single Republican voted against the latest Democratic bill to fund the TSA while the negotiations continue over DHS reforms. “This is the seventh time Republicans have blocked pay for TSA,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York posted on Bluesky. “Seven. Times.”

The funding impasse does not directly affect ICE, Mechanic noted, but the shutdown has frozen other DHS activities, including the processing of paychecks for TSA staff, who are considered essential employees.

It remains unclear whether ICE agents will simply carry out the same tasks as TSA employees or if they will make airports another hub for violence under the guise of “immigration enforcement.”

Trump posted on Truth Social on Saturday that ICE agents would “do Security like no one has ever seen before, including the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants.” In his post, he singled out immigrants from Somalia, who he claimed have “totally destroyed” Minnesota—a narrative that he and his administration used to justify the ICE crackdown in Minneapolis this winter.

Referring to the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis in January, House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) responded on Sunday, “The last thing the American people need is for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports across the country potentially to brutalize or to kill them.”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

In a blow to the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against a free press, a federal judge on Friday ruled in favor of the New York Times in its December suit against the Pentagon’s restrictions on news outlets.

Senior US District Judge Paul L. Friedman, a Clinton-appointee, ruled that a policy the Defense Department established in October, saying the Pentagon could revoke press credentials of any reporter who asked for information the department didn’t want to release was unconstitutional.

“A lot of things need to be held tightly and secure,” Friedman wrote. “But openness and transparency allows members of the public to know what their government is doing in times of peace and, more important, in times of war and upheaval.” The United States ongoing war against Iran, the judge said in his ruling, makes it “more important than ever that the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government is doing.”

In the wake of the Pentagon’s restrictive decree, dozens of reporters—including seven Times journalists—turned in their access badges in protest instead of bowing to the new policy. Five major broadcast networks, too, announced that they weren’t going to comply with the Pentagon’s new rules, writing in a joint statement that the “policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections.” NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and CNN signed on, along with Fox News Media, where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used to work before heading up the world’s biggest military operation.

In the absence of these journalists, the Defense Department filled in the ranks with pro-Trump commentators and influencers. Friedman noted in his ruling that the policy rewarded those “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.” On Friday, he tossed out the policy for all journalists covering the Pentagon and ordered the DOD to restore the press passes of the seven Times journalists.

In a social media post, Sean Parnell, chief spokesman at the Pentagon, said it is “pursuing an immediate appeal.”

Friday’s ruling is a key win for press freedom in the administration’s ongoing legal battles against media organizations he views as unfriendly. Trump is currently embroiled in legal battles against the Wall Street Journal and News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch, the New York Times (in a different case), the British Broadcasting Company, the Des Moines Register and veteran pollster Ann Selzer, the Pulitzer Prize board, Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward and his publisher Simon & Schuster, along with media giant Paramount, and CNN.

While some organizations—like Paramount Global and ABC News—have settled with the President, others, like the Times, have pushed back on Trump in court—and won.

On the whole, these legal attacks represent an unparalleled offensive on press freedom from a figure who has been raging against news organizations and individual journalists for decades. During his first term and beyond, on social media and face-to-face, he has attacked the media relentlessly as the “enemy of the people” and incited followers to harass reporters covering his rallies. He calls journalists treasonous and says they should be jailed.

According to a US Press Freedom Tracker database, from the moment Trump announced that candidacy in 2015 to early 2021, he posted negatively about the media more than 2,490 times on Twitter. He often reserves his most biting personal insults for women—since Trump was re-elected he has called female reporters “stupid,” “nasty,” “ugly,” “piggy,” and “maggot.” He also criticized CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for not smiling—a misogynistic trope—as she was asking him a question about Jeffrey Epstein.

Following Judge Friedman’s ruling on Friday, a spokesman for the Times wrote that the decision “reaffirms the right of The Times and other independent media to continue to ask questions on the public’s behalf.”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Cops failed spectacularly at using the courts to clamp down on a critic this week.

That critic was the rapper Afroman, who created music videos mocking sheriff’s deputies who raided his home in August 2022 with a warrant for drug trafficking and kidnapping. Afroman was neither charged nor arrested, and he was not compensated for damages to his family’s Ohio home. But he’s also come under fire for homophobic jokes and possibly backing Donald Trump.

If you missed the details of the case, here’s some brief background: Afroman’s home security cameras captured armed cops breaking down his door and terrifying his wife and children, who were in the house at the time. During the raid, which discovered no evidence of wrongdoing, deputies flipped off security cameras, damaged various belongings, and seized cash that Afroman said was returned short.

According to a VICE interview released in 2023, the rapper, who blew up with the 2000 comedic song “Because I Got High,” said he lost gigs due to the raid, but funneled his anger and feelings of powerlessness at the incident into making viral music videos, including “Will You Help Me Repair My Door” and “Lemon Pound Cake.” Afroman’s videos incorporate his security camera footage, with the latter making fun of one cop who glances down at a cake on the family’s kitchen counter: “They found no kidnapping victims / Just some lemon pound cake.”

In response, seven Adams County deputies captured in the security camera footage sued Afroman in 2023, claiming that he defamed them, used their faces in videos without permission, and caused them to receive death threats and suffer “humiliation, ridicule, mental distress, embarrassment and loss of reputation.”

While there have been countless ridiculous clips of the subsequent court testimony going around, a few struck me as powerful. In one, a lawyer asks Afroman whether he saw one of the officers’ depositions and noted how upset she was about a music video that targeted her.

“She knew I was upset when she was standing in front of my kids with an AR-15 with her hand around the trigger,” Afroman responds, after acknowledging the officer’s hurt feelings. “So I’m sorry for being a victim. Let’s talk about the predators.”

— Solomon (@solomonmissouri.bsky.social) 2026-03-18T13:31:14.965Z

Another comes from a podcast interview of Afroman last month, where the rapper explains that as long as cops are not often held accountable for their actions, they will continue to abuse their authority. “It’s my job to give [police officers] a penalty for violating me,” Afroman says. “It’s not their court’s job, it’s not their peers.”

Put together, these two clips demonstrate a power imbalance where it is up to the “victim” to raise the mere possibility of those in power, like cops, being held accountable for their actions. And in this instance, Afroman has a leg-up on most: the police raid made the news because the rapper has an established audience and access to media and legal resources.

The trial began earlier this week. In the lead-up, he released more music videos about the raid. After singing the title in “Randy Walters Is A Son Of A Bitch,” Afroman delivers the bar “that’s why I fucked his wife and got filthy rich” and dances in front of what appear to be photos of one of the sheriff’s deputies involved in the raid and his wife. As of March 20, the music video currently has over 1.1 million views on YouTube.

The rapper’s lawyers argued that the satirical music videos were free speech protected by the First Amendment and that it was unreasonable to believe that the jokes were factual. After less than a day of deliberation, the jury sided with Afroman on Wednesday.

While the case may help enhance legal protections for people who criticize law enforcement, it also has sparked discourse about Afroman as a person, resurfacing discussions of his possible support for Donald Trump and drawing criticism of homophobic lyrics in a video about the raid. Can the outcome be positive if the subject behind it isn’t necessarily?

Regarding Trump, Afroman told Newsweek in 2024 that he wanted to perform a Hunter Biden–themed parody of his hit song “Because I Got High,” with lyrics altered to mock the former president’s son’s drug use and legal controversies, at Trump rallies in the lead-up to the presidential election. Afroman later posted a photo of himself shaking hands with Trump at the Libertarian National Convention and wrote that they laughed together at the fact that they both were raided by police and had “a lot in common” (Afroman also ran for president in 2024).

And one of Afroman’s music videos in response to the raid targets Deputy Lisa Phillips, the same officer whom Afroman acknowledged was visibly upset during her deposition, is blatantly homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic. The nearly 14-minute video, titled “Licc’em Low Lisa,” features lyrics like “I noticed her voice is a few octaves lower” and “She might whoop out somethin’, somethin’ that’s bigger than mine.” During the latter bar, the music video shows an actor portraying Phillips sitting down and holding what appears to be a large pipe.

But Afroman, whose real name is Joseph Foreman, does not need to be an undeniably good person for people to embrace the outcome of the case: a measure of accountability for institutional wrongdoing. When victims are forced to speak out to try to spotlight abuses against them, the onus does not fall on them to represent any moral standard. Law enforcement officers already benefit from qualified immunity, which allows them to avoid personal consequences unless they violate “clearly established” law, and which, according to the Legal Defense Fund, means in practice that lawsuits must refer to precedents with “nearly identical facts on the record.”

As Afroman said, “Let’s talk about the predators.”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Tennessee teenagers are suing Elon Musk’s company xAI over allegations that its artificial intelligence tool Grok undressed photos of them as minors—the latest challenge against the wealthiest living person’s chatbot.

The three plaintiffs, two of whom are currently minors, are seeking damages after AI-generated images of them spread across Discord and Telegram and were eventually used as bartering tools for users to obtain other child sexual abuse material, according to the complaint detailed in new Washington Post reporting.

“xAI—and its founder Elon Musk,” the complaint reads, “saw a business opportunity: an opportunity to profit off the sexual predation of real people, including children.”

One of the plaintiffs said she received a link to a Discord server “which contained images and videos of at least 18 other minor females, many of whom Jane Doe 1 recognized from her school,” the lawsuit alleges.

Some of the images stemmed from her homecoming or yearbook photos.

The lawsuit comes after months of backlash against Musk’s chatbot after the company allowed Grok to undress people nonconsensually using the “Imagine” tool. The complaint argues that a “model that can create sexualized images of adults cannot be prevented from creating CSAM of minors.” According to earlier reporting from the Post, Grok’s previous leniency towards fulfilling users’ sexually explicit requests was a marketing technique, meant to increase the popularity of the chatbot.

Activist group ‘Everyone Hates Elon’ placed this anti-Musk and X poster in a bus stop on January 14, 2026, in London.Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images

Musk and his company didn’t respond to the Post in their coverage of the Tennessee lawsuit. Musk has repeatedly placed responsibility onto the individual users requesting such content and has held that Grok “will refuse to produce anything illegal,” despite the chatbot itself, in at least one instance, posting that its actions might have violated the 2025 TAKE IT DOWN Act, legislation criminalizing the nonconsensual publication of intimate images, including AI-generated deepfakes.

According to an investigation by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Grok generated approximately 3 million sexualized images in just an 11-day period, from December 29 to January 8. Around 23,000 of those, according to researchers, appeared to depict children. In a January 14 post, Musk claimed that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero.”

Later than month, 35 state attorneys general penned a letter to xAI demanding the company “take all necessary measures to ensure that Grok is no longer capable of producing” this kind of nonconsensual sexual imagery and child sexual abuse material. The European Union and regulators in the United Kingdom and California have launched investigations into Grok.

Related### Grok Deepfaked Renée Nicole Good’s Body Into a Bikini

In January, following rising international ethical and legal objections to the mass spread of nonconsensual sexual imagery, some of Grok’s Imagine image generation features were limited to paid X users. Yet Grok image tools are still seemingly offered for free on the standalone website and application. And even if restricting elements of the service to paying users could limit the quantity of material, introducing a nominal fee for those hoping to create nonconsensual sexual imagery of people, including minors, doesn’t answer a key legal question: Will Grok be meaningfully changed to protect women and girls from this kind of digital abuse?

The Tennessee teens are just some of the scores of girls and women impacted by Grok’s undressing, reportedly including at least one woman who Musk knows personally.

Ashley St. Clair, a conservative content creator who has a child with Musk, said that Grok created nonconsensual sexual imagery of her. Some of the images, according to an interview she did with NBC News, were from when St. Clair was a minor.

Annika K. Martin, the lead counsel in the suit, had a question for Musk as a father:

“Your child’s voice on video screaming. Can you imagine that as a parent?” she asked. “Can you imagine that for your child and feel okay with what you’ve done?”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Joe Kent has resigned as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of President Donald Trump’s ongoing war against Iran. Kent, a twice-failed Washington congressional candidate aligned with the isolationist MAGA right, is the highest-ranking Trump official to quit because of the war.

But Kent didn’t portray the president as the real villain in the lengthy resignation letter that he posted on X on Tuesday. That distinction goes to Israel and its supporters in the United States. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote, “and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

Kent went on to argue that in the letter “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” launched a “misinformation campaign” early in Trump’s current term that undermined his America First agenda. Writing directly to Trump, Kent argued that this “echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States.” He added the Israelis had used the same approach to “draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.”

Trump, of course, is the president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the world—not some hapless victim of Israeli deception. He willingly joined Israel to initiate the current war, despite the apparent reservations of some of his senior advisers. It was his responsibility to determine what was in the best interests of the United States, and he failed spectacularly in that task.

It is certainly true that Israel played a major role in pushing Trump towards war. Netanyahu has wanted the United States to attack Iran for decades, and he finally found a willing accomplice in the second-term version of Trump. It was not for nothing that a New York Times article headlined “How Trump Decided to Go to War” began with Netanyahu walking into the Oval Office in February determined to keep Trump “on the path to war.” The Israeli leader was particularly concerned that the Trump administration’s efforts to reach a diplomatic solution with Iran would prevent the battle he longed for.

After the war began, Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but admitted that the United States had been dragged into the war by its ally. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” he explained on March 2.

Still, Trump could have easily said no to that pressure. He chose not to.

On a political level, Kent’s resignation is one of the most significant public splits thus far over Israel among the president’s supporters. In one camp are traditional neoconservative hawks like Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas). In the other is a more isolationist faction that includes Tucker Carlson and, at times, antisemitic figures like Nick Fuentes.

The energy within the GOP base—particularly among younger voters—is clearly with Carlson, who is known for being close to Vice President JD Vance. Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s recent decision to respond to criticism from hawkish conservative commentator Mark Levin in notably crude terms is another sign of how things have turned. Where that leads remains to be seen. But it is increasingly clear that should Trump’s second term turn out to be a bust, much of the far right is prepared to make Israel a convenient scapegoat for the president’s own incompetence. Some, like Fuentes, will no doubt extend the blame to Jewish Americans.

For Kent, seeing the United States launch itself into another poorly planned war has a deeply personal dimension. As I reported in a 2022 profile, Kent is a former Green Beret who did 11 combat deployments in the wake of 9/11. Serving in what came to be called the Global War on Terror was a radicalizing experience. “Was it worth it for our nation?” Kent said in a 2020 interview. “Was it worth it in terms of what we gained? It’s just hard to justify.”

Most tragically, Kent’s wife Shannon, a Navy cryptologist and the mother of his two boys, was killed by an ISIS suicide bomber in 2019. As I reported, Kent later said that he and fellow veterans lost so many comrades that putting their names on memorials became “one big numb.” He continued, “It’s still very surreal that Shannon is now one of those.”

In his resignation letter, Kent blamed Israel for drawing the United States into Iraq two decades ago. That contrasts with a 2024 interview he gave to the podcaster Shawn Ryan, in which he did not single out Israel when assigning responsibility for the senseless wars in which he served. “Where do you think the big push came from?” Ryan asked Kent about the Iraq War. Kent blamed “moneyed interests in Washington, DC,” before citing Vice President Dick Cheney’s ties to Halliburton. Iraq, as he put it, was “good for business.”

Kent’s populist anti-interventionism was always the area where he was most likely to overlap with some on the left. On domestic politics, though, there was far less common ground. As I wrote after Trump picked Kent last year:

The Black Lives Matter and antifa protests in Portland during the summer of 2020 triggered fears for him that the United States could similarly implode. Everything, he felt, was crumbling. He and his two young boys quickly left the city for rural Washington.

“We need to treat antifa and BLM like terrorist organizations. We need to use the tools of the federal government, the FBI, the US Marshals—go after them like organized criminals and terrorists,” Kent said in a 2021 conversation with the podcaster Tim Pool about the group’s leaders. “So, when we start arresting these guys and charging them with federal terrorism charges, that’s going to take away a lot of the incentive to go out and riot.”

That is part of what makes putting Kent in charge of the National Counterterrorism Center so unsettling. He is a trained counterinsurgent who is now far more attuned to threats from within than those from overseas.

Last May, the Times reported that Kent had pushed intelligence officials to rewrite an assessment of the relationship between the Venezuelan government and the criminal organization Tren de Aragua. The move came after Trump sent more than 200 Venezuelans to an infamous Salvadoran prison based on the false premise that they were all members of Tren de Aragua, and that the group was controlled by the Venezuelan regime.

Referring to Trump and his boss, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Kent wrote, “We need to do some rewriting” and an additional analysis “so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS.” In essence, Kent was pushing to twist intelligence to justify the indefinite detention of innocent men in horrific conditions. Unlike the Iran war, that, apparently, wasn’t a red line.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

In the world’s waters, fish are making a quiet, biological retreat. The once simple rules of the ocean—grow larger than potential predators—are being rewritten as temperatures reach record highs. Desperate to survive, fish are hitting the fast-forward button on life in a biological shift that will soon impact what ends up on dinner tables globally.

“There are simply no real winners here.”

Fish are getting smaller and dying at higher rates as they adapt to warming waters, researchers warn in a report released Thursday in the journal Science. This evolutionary change will reduce global fish yields by one-fifth under current warming predictions, and up to 30 percent in high-emissions scenarios.

This will trigger potentially irreversible evolutionary processes, shaking up entire ecosystems and food webs, with consequences for the billions of people who rely on seafood for protein—a demand expected to increase.

“What I found frightening about this work was that it was difficult to identify winners and losers—there are simply no real winners here,” said Craig White, the study’s co-author and an evolutionary physiologist at Monash University in Australia. “The combination of warming and evolution was always bad for fisheries.”

Fish mortality rates have already been rising as waters warm. Although fisheries management often assumes fish are evolutionarily inert when it comes to overcoming such environmental changes, this is false. Instead, fish are maturing at a younger age and at a smaller size to improve their chances of surviving long enough to reproduce, according to the report.

Fishery yields were already expected to reduce by 14 percent when global temperatures reach 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. However, when incorporating evolutionary impacts, the researchers’ new model predicts this reduction worsens to 22 percent.

For the Alaska pollock—a key species for human consumption in North America—this would equate to a reduction of half a million metric tons harvested per year.

“This is a loss of over 1.1 billion meals of high-quality protein per year as a consequence of the effects of global warming on just one species,” said David Reznick, a professor of evolutionary ecology at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved with the study but co-wrote a new piece about it in Science. “Climate change represents an immediate threat to the earth’s capacity to sustain human life.”

Decades of decreases in size, age at maturity and abundance in species like Atlantic salmon and Baltic cod appear to validate the model’s predictions. In total, the life histories of nearly 3,000 species of fish were tested to corroborate the model’s accuracy.

“What we can’t do is assume that species will evolve their way out of trouble in a way that suits us.”

Researchers noted impacts will vary by geography. Freshwater systems are predicted to warm more than oceans and will therefore see the most severe size reductions.

There will also be consequences beyond harvesting. “Much of what happens in the ocean in terms of who eats whom is based on body size: Big things eat smaller things,” said Joseph Travis, a biologist and former dean of Florida State University’s College of Arts & Sciences. If the size of harvested species decreases, they will become vulnerable to predation by other fish, said Travis, who co-wrote the Science piece about the study.

“The entire ecosystem could be thrown into an alternative configuration as the system moves past its tipping point,” said Travis, highlighting the example of the reconfiguration of Canada’s western Scotian shelf in the late 20th century. Here, the average size of 53 top predators—like cod and haddock—dropped 40 percent in 40 years. As a result, former prey increased by 300 percent as they became predators for young cod.

Increases in fish death frequency from disease, deoxygenation, or overfishing will only add further pressure. “If people try to compensate for smaller fish and less revenue per fish by harvesting more fish, then the problem worsens quickly,” said Travis, warning of potential stock depletion. “The net effect, in the long run, will be less protein available.”

“If humans, as predators, cause the fish to evolve, as do predators in natural ecosystems, then they also cause changes that will not spring back to their former state,” said Reznick. Indeed, as fish decrease in size, populations are losing the genetic variations that encode large bodies. And, as ecosystems shift, populations might be locked into new food chain states they cannot reverse.

“What we can’t do is assume that species will evolve their way out of trouble in a way that suits us,” said White, highlighting that effective climate policy could preserve roughly 18 million metric tons of fishery yields each year.

His message to policymakers is clear: While fish can adapt to survive, the only way to protect people who rely on fisheries for their protein and their livelihood is to reduce warming.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Following the US-Israeli strikes on Iran beginning in late February, Iran has effectively halted all traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint in the Persian Gulf through which about 20 percent of global crude oil and natural gas flows. Many Americans are now experiencing the effects: skyrocketing gas prices. That’s not likely to change any time soon.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) shared his observations on social media Tuesday that the Trump administration had “no plan” on how to respond.

Did the Trump administration ever really have a plan? To try to answer that question, and its ramifications, I spoke with Jeff Colgan, a political science professor and Director of the Climate Solutions Lab the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University. He’s written extensively about the role of oil in international politics and war, and how it impacts energy and the environment.

What is the Strait of Hormuz?

The Strait of Hormuz is the most important chokepoint in the world, particularly for oil and natural gas. So this is absolutely the nightmare scenario that many risk analysts have been worrying about for decades.

Although this region has seen a lot of warfare over the decades, the tanker flows [to transport crude oil] have managed to continue. Often, the combatants on both sides want the flow of oil to continue because at least one of the sides are profiting from it.

So this does put us in uncharted waters where the Strait of Hormuz gets bottled up in a modern context.

Why is the Strait of Hormuz bottled up right now?

Because the US attacked Iran and Iran has no viable counter strategy to strike back at the US. In some sense, this is an extreme step by Iran, but they feel like they have no other choice. Their leadership is wiped out, and they’re fighting for their lives.

So in this war, unlike others, they are using their full capacity to lash out in every direction, including all of the US military bases that are located in the region—in Bahrain, UAE, and Qatar especially. Iran was also in a difficult “use it or lose it” situation with their missiles because the US bombing campaign was directed toward destroying missiles to make sure they couldn’t use them.

Iran has long avoided closing the Strait of Hormuz because Iran’s own oil has flowed through it and they don’t want to cut off their only revenue source. But their backs are to the wall.

It seems like the Trump administration started the war in Iran without a plan for the Strait of Hormuz. What are your thoughts on the administration’s handling of the situation?

It is shocking and, frankly, appalling how little planning and foresight the White House has brought to the situation. The poor planning of the war appears to be on many issues, including many Americans who are in Gulf countries, munitions, etc.

It’s striking because it seems like they have tried to walk back from the situation on Monday and say, “We’re going to wrap this war up quickly.”

How do you see the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz from a historical perspective?

I have been writing for a couple months now about the Trump administration’s return to what I call “petro-imperialism”—the idea that the US, prior to 1973 would intervene in global oil markets in support of American oil companies and use force like the 1953 coup in Iran backed by the CIA when Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized oil.

This happened in multiple countries: “We’re going to select your political leader, and if you don’t pick the right one, we’re going to get rid of them.”

In Trump’s rhetoric, with regard to Venezuela, especially, but also with Iran, we see echoes of that.

What do you think is the immediate impact on oil and trade?

One thing we saw in the 1980s was the so-called Tanker War between Iran and Iraq. Tankers are resilient to being hit by missiles so it is possible to keep the flow of oil going during the war. But this warfare has changed. Drone technology [in Iran] is untested waters.

It’s striking to see how even oil markets reacted very strongly on Monday, bringing the oil price way back down, because the president signaled that we wanted to keep the war from getting out of hand. But it’s not like oil markets always get it right either.

There’s real uncertainty on how long it will take to restore the flow of oil when statements like the one today from Saudi Aramco [the national oil company of Saudi Arabia] saying that if the situation doesn’t stop very soon, the effects will be “catastrophic.”

On Tuesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright made an announcement on X that the US Navy escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. In response, oil prices plunged and stocks jumped. But shortly after, the post was deleted. Is this mixed messaging something you’ve come across before?

The fog of war is a problem for all wars, where you have misinformation and uncertainty. On the other hand, the Trump administration has far more inconsistency and incoherence than a typical US administration. There are probably multiple reasons why they are more incoherent, but we can observe how President Trump himself has said conflicting things about the war—that it’s pretty much complete and then demanding unconditional surrender in the next breath.

As someone trying to absorb everything going on in Iran, is there something key that you think we should understand?

We have choices about how we consume energy, and what isn’t spiking right now is the price of sunshine and wind. We should be thinking, as consumers, about the choices that [the U.S. government is] making and the energy security, economic security, and national security consequences. No energy source is perfect and there’s always trade-offs, but renewables have a significant national security advantage in situations like this, where the basic fuel source of fossil fuels can be interrupted by political events. It’s not only wars, but also embargoes, as we saw with Russia and Ukraine and the negotiations with Europe about various flows of fossil fuels. What kind of energy we consume does matter.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Two veteran journalists set out to document Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health care system: hospitals attacked, medical workers killed, doctors detained and held for long periods without criminal charges. The BBC had commissioned the film.

But their Palestinian sources in Gaza and the West Bank were skeptical.

“We really had to try and persuade them…to talk to us because they didn’t—and don’t—trust the BBC,” says reporter Ramita Navai.

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

One source doubted the BBC would air the film. “And I was quite shocked he felt that way,” says reporter Ben de Pear. “But actually, he was 100 percent right.”

Over the last couple of years, big media organizations have been criticized—from the left and the right—about their coverage of the war in Gaza. But it’s rare to get the chance to peel back the curtain to see what exactly was happening inside one of those organizations to learn whether political pressure played a role in journalistic decision-making.

This week on Reveal, we’re partnering with the KCRW podcast Question Everything to tell the story of a film the BBC wouldn’t air and what it says about the future of journalism.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday criticized news outlets for highlighting the deaths of six US service members in Iran’s retaliatory strikes, suggesting the coverage was unfair because “the press only wants to make the president look bad.”

“This is what the fake news misses,” Hegseth said during a Pentagon briefing on the escalating US and Israeli campaign against Iran, which he claimed has already secured control of the country’s airspace and waterways. “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news.”

Iran launched the drone attack Sunday, striking a US command center in Kuwait in retaliation for US and Israeli strikes that began the day before. At least six American service members were killed.

Hegseth’s remarks underscored the partisan tone surrounding the military campaign. During the briefing, he called on just ten reporters—including representatives from the Daily Wire, LindellTV, and the Daily Caller, outlets founded by far-right commentators Ben Shapiro, Mike Lindell, and Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel.

Several questions echoed administration talking points, including one about the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei—described in the briefing as “the leader of the group who was trying to assassinate President Trump” —and another about Tehran’s claim that it could outlast US missile defenses. Hegseth dismissed the idea.

Hegseth: This is what the fake news misses. We've taken control of Iran's airspace and waterways without boots on the ground, But when a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it's front page news. I get it, the press only wants to make the president look bad. But try… pic.twitter.com/LNMuKuutTR

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 4, 2026

Still, the deaths of six US service members—and the growing civilian toll in Iran—are difficult to ignore. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reported Wednesday that 1,097 civilians have been killed in Iran since Saturday, including 181 children under the age of 10.

At the briefing, Hegseth signaled that the US is preparing for a deeper military engagement.

“We are accelerating, not decelerating,” he told reporters. “More bombers and more fighters are arriving just today.” He added that the US would be deploying a “nearly unlimited” supply of 500-, 1,000-, and 2,000-pound bombs.

America’s Gold Star Families, a nonprofit supporting families of service members killed in the line of duty, issued a statement Tuesday mourning the losses.

“The recent escalation of military conflict between the United States and Iran and the heartbreaking news of U.S. service members killed in action have profound consequences for our nation,” the group said. “But the heaviest burden is borne by the families who now face a chair that will forever stay empty.”

President Donald Trump struck a very different tone. After reports Sunday that three service members had died, he said: “Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is.”

A day later, after a fourth death was reported, Trump suggested the war could last weeks—or longer.

“Right from the beginning, we projected four to five weeks,” he said. “But we have capability to go far longer than that.”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land*. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.*

During his very loud and very long demagogic State of the Union speech, President Donald Trump railed about fraud in Minnesota, claiming members of the Somali immigrant community had “pillaged an estimated $19 billion.” That number, no surprise, was way off: Estimates for fraud in the state’s Medicaid program and other social welfare operations range between $1 billion and $9 billion over a number of years.

Announcing a “war on fraud,” Trump said he had tapped Vice President JD Vance to lead this effort. He also insisted that his administration could “find enough of that fraud” to “actually have a balanced budget overnight.” That was absurd. The deficit that Trump has helped to supersize is $1.8 trillion. Even if there were the same level of fraud in every state as Minnesota and every dime of the fraud were captured and sent to the federal treasury, the US government would be lucky to bank about $50 billion a year. That’s less than 3 percent of the deficit. Trump is not good at math.

But putting Vance in charge of this initiative is a smart move for Trump because no GOP politician does a better job of blending economic populism and racism. It’s Vance’s specialty.

Powerful interests, Vance says, deploy false accusations of racism to prevent people—white people, that is—from complaining about the economic hardships they face and from challenging the well-heeled who are playing them for suckers.

Look at his acceptance speech at the 2024 GOP convention. Vance praised the people of eastern Kentucky, his family’s ancestral home. It’s one of the poorest regions in the United States, but he hailed its residents as “very hardworking” and “good” people: “They’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back even if they can’t afford enough to eat.” He added, “And our media calls them privileged and looks down on them.” Vance maintained that these folks have been screwed over by ruling elites who have pushed economic policies that benefit the well-off and harm working-class families. (He must have forgotten Donald Trump’s first-term tax cut that heavily favored the wealthy.)

But back to “privileged.” Who refers to the low-income families of Appalachia as privileged? Vance did not explain this. But this sentence was something of a dog whistle and a callback to demagogic rhetoric that Vance has been slinging for years. He meant they are called “privileged” because they are white—as in “white privilege.”

As he has done before, Vance was merging working-class resentment and white racial grievance. In various venues, he has charged that plutocrats (whom he doesn’t name) are conspiring with the woke crowd (whoever they are) to silence Middle America. These powerful interests, Vance says, deploy false accusations of racism to prevent people—white people, that is—from complaining about the economic hardships they face and from challenging the well-heeled who are playing them for suckers. The elites are using woke-ism to economically exploit white working-class Americans.

This is how Vance put it in a 2021 interview with conservative talk show host Bill Cunningham:

Here’s what the elites do. When they say that those people are white privileged, they shut them up. ‘Look, you’re unhappy about your job being shipped overseas? You’re worried that a lawless southern border is going to cause the same poison that killed your daughter to also affect your grandbaby? Don’t you dare complain about that stuff. You are white privileged. You suffer from white rage’…What they do is use it as a power play so they can get us to shut up. So they can get us to stop complaining about our own country. And they get to run things without any control, without any pushback from the real people.

This is deft demagoguery. Two years ago, I described it this way:

Vance conflates legitimate concerns about economic power with racist paranoia. It’s much more sophisticated than the usual GOP playing of the race card. Instead, Vance fuses toxic culture wars to bread-and-butter issues. Look at how he weaved all this together when a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, [in 2023 and sparked a chemical fire]. Vance blamed Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his Department of Transportation’s racial equity initiatives for the catastrophe: “I’ve got to say, the Secretary of Transportation…talking about how we have too many white male construction workers instead of the fact that our trains are crashing…This guy needs to do his job.” So the good (white) folk of East Palestine were victimized supposedly because Buttigieg was spending too much time trying to help Black people.

His message: Wokeness is a tool of the wealthy to repress hardworking and decent white folks.

Now Trump is tying fraud to his anti-immigrant and racial bigotry. He has repeatedly targeted racist rants at Somali immigrants, exclaiming they are “garbage” and “destroying” Minnesota. “We don’t want them in our country,” he bellowed. In December, he said, “These Somalians have taken billions of dollars out of our country”—a baseless claim, even considering the fraud investigations in Minnesota. And for years he has race-baited Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who was born in Somalia. “She shouldn’t be allowed to be a congresswoman,” Trump said in one of his many outbursts directed at her.

This is a perfect opportunity for Vance: He can tell white working-class Americans pissed off by the economy, high prices, and government dysfunction that the problem lies with fraudster immigrants.

After getting elected by falsely asserting Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating dogs and cats, Trump switched to race-bashing the Somalis of Minnesota. And the fraud scandal—a true and troubling scandal in which most of the convicted perps so far are Somali immigrants—has supplied him and Vance plenty of ammunition.

Now the pair can readily associate an immigrant community with serious fraud, while raising questions about the value and effectiveness of safety net programs. (Why fund them if the money is being stolen?) Trump can signal to his MAGA base that the United States would somehow be more prosperous—it would not have this yawning deficit—were it not for these people of color ripping off government programs.

Vance is much experienced in delivering such a false and hate-infused narrative. He can tell white working-class Americans pissed off by the economy, high prices, and government dysfunction that the problem lies with these fraudster immigrants. Dump the blame on those shifty migrants who are cheating salt-of-the-earth Americans and stealing their tax dollars. This is a perfect opportunity for Vance. When it comes to exploiting racism to pose as a phony populist, he’s the best.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Kristi Noem faced frustration from some Republicans during a Senate oversight hearing Tuesday over how she’s handling her job as secretary of homeland security.

During the nearly five-hour hearing, Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and John Kennedy (R-La.) criticized Noem for refusing to take responsibility for the killings of two U.S. citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents in Minnesota, and for allegedly stalling investigations into the Department of Homeland Security while spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on agency ads.

“We’re beginning to get the American people to think that deporting people is wrong,” Tillis said about Noem’s job as DHS secretary. “It’s the exact opposite. The way you’re going about deporting them is wrong.”

The probes into both cases are led by Homeland Security Investigations, an agency within the DHS, and the Office of Professional Responsibility, while excluding local authorities. The Justice Department, which would typically be involved, is not investigating the killing of Renée Good but has initiated a civil rights probe into the killing of Alex Pretti.

“One of the reasons why ICE officers are having threats…is because you’ve cast the pall on them by acting like we should investigate things differently,” Tillis told Noem. “Officer-invovled shootings have a formula that we should go through every time.”

Tillis later mentioned a letter from the Office of Inspector General, saying “10 different instances under Ms. Noem’s leadership where they’ve been misled and not allowed to pursue investigations.” Last month, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) sent a letter to Noem saying she learned that DHS general counsel told the investigators multiple times that Noem could kill their investigations.

after absolutely eviscerating Kristi Noem and calling for her resignation, Tillis is applauded. He thens threatens to hold up nominees if she doesn't stop stonewalling him. My God.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-03-03T17:55:14.620Z

Tillis vowed to put a hold on all “en bloc” nominations, a procedure allowing the Senate to confirm nominees as a group, if he didn’t get a response from Noem to questions he sent a month ago about federal agents in Minneapolis’ use of force. Tillis also criticized DHS for its reliance on administrative warrants to detain citizens.

While Tillis has a long track record of criticizing Noem, including calling for her resignation in January, Kennedy does not.

Kennedy went after Noem for starring in $220 million worth of taxpayer-funded DHS ads.

Kennedy: How do you square that concern for waste when you have spent 220 million dollars on commercials that feature you prominently? Noem: It would be helpful to know how effective it has been.Kennedy: They were effective in your name recognition. It puts the president in a… pic.twitter.com/XBryVTezsT

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 3, 2026

He suggested that the videos “were effective in [Noem’s] name recognition” rather than promoting the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement.

Kennedy also cited reports that the department sidestepped competitive bidding rules. One of the largest contracts went to Safe American Media, a company created just days before it won the deal. The company is run by the husband of Noem’s former chief spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, who also worked on ads for Noem during her time in Congress and as governor of South Dakota.

The hearing came as many Republicans urged Democrats to approve funding for the Department of Homeland Security, citing the need to strengthen protections against possible retaliatory terror attacks after US and Israeli strikes on Iran that began Saturday.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

When Donald Trump announced the launch of his war on Iran in a videotaped message, he declared he was “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” If there were indications that Tehran was about to strike American targets, that would have been reflected in US intelligence reports. Yet a member of the House intelligence committee, Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.), says that no such intelligence was shared with the committee and that the Trump administration for months had refused to provide intelligence on Iran to the committee. “We were kept in the dark,” he notes.

In an interview with Mother Jones, Gomez contends that there is no reason to believe Trump’s claim of an imminent threat, and maintains that Trump was just spinning the nation into a war of choice. He also notes that if the Democrats win control of the House in the coming midterm elections, the House intelligence committee is likely to mount an investigation of the pre-war intelligence, as well as Trump’s use and possible misrepresentation of intelligence regarding other national security matters, including the attack on Venezuela: “We not only have an obligation but we do have a right to conduct these investigations. We have to see if intelligence was politicized…We have to know what really happened….I’m looking forward to holding them accountable.”

Gomez adds, “There are things we have to look at that people don’t even know about, and they’ll never know about.” That sounds ominous.

The Trump administration, he says, “never came to show us the evidence there was an imminent threat to the United States.” The flow of intelligence was shut down after media reports noted intelligence assessments of Trump’s air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June did not back up Trump’s claim the sites had been “obliterated.” And, according to Gomez, the Republicans on the House intelligence committee have not pushed for more access to Iran intelligence. “Now that they have a Republican president, the oversight is not as robust as it was during the Biden administration,” he says.

“There’s no way people should trust what the administration is saying,” he comments. “They’re trying to find facts on the ground to justify whatever goal they have.” Gomez points out that though Trump has said Tehran posed an immediate danger to the United States due to its ballistic missile program, the Defense Department has concluded they are ten years away from developing missiles that can strike America.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Donald Trump used a Medal of Honor ceremony on Monday, meant to honor three Army soldiers, to gush about the drapes he will add to his new ballroom in the White House’s East Wing.

“I picked those drapes in my first term—I always liked gold,” Trump said. “I believe it’s going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world.”

He later joked about the constant loud hammering, which apparently runs from 6am to 11:30pm: “When I hear that beautiful sound behind me, it means money, so I like it,” the president said. “But my wife isn’t thrilled.”

Trump: "See that nice drape? When that comes down right now you see a very very deep hole, but in about a year and half you're gonna see a very very beautiful building. In fact, it looks so nice I think I'll leave it and save money on the doors. I believe it will be the most beautiful ballroom."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-03-02T17:01:48.409Z

As John Jay College art historian Erin Thompson told my colleagues at Reveal, Trump’s renovations are “a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not.”

“The style choices that he’s making are very congruent with his political message, in that he’s appealing to a vision of the past” as “greater than the present,” Thompson continued.

In the remainder of Trump’s opening remarks, he gave his first public comments on US and Israeli strikes on Iran—bombings that reportedly killed over 100 schoolchildren in Minab, a city in southern Iran. The fighting has resulted in the deaths of four US service members, following Iran’s initial attacks in response to the strikes on Saturday. The president mentioned again during the ceremony that military operations were projected to last four to five weeks but sounded open to a “far longer” conflict.

Trump justified the illegal strikes with old talking points, many of which contradict the federal government’s official assessments and those of nuclear policy experts, including the idea that Iran could soon develop nuclear weapons that threaten allies and could soon reach the US itself—at odds with the administration’s own claims, including a June White House release titled “Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated—and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News.”

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