Trump’s Shutdown Hits the Skies

The knock-on effects from the government shutdown, now the longest in US history, continue apace, with the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) cuts to air traffic at 40 of the nation’s busiest airports now officially in effect.

The mandate, which kicked off on Friday with an initial 4 percent reduction, has already cancelled more than 1,700 flights this weekend alone. Though disruptions were said to be limited on Friday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned that cuts could rise to as much as 20 percent by Thanksgiving weekend, one of the busiest travel periods of the year, if the shutdown drags on.

Since announcing the unprecedented plan, Duffy has insisted that such reductions are necessary to keep air travel safe, while some air traffic controllers and airport screeners go without pay. But prior to the FAA’s flight cuts, there had been little evidence to suggest that staffing shortages from the shutdown had been creating widespread disruptions, prompting some to accuse the Trump administration of weaponizing air travel as leverage aimed at getting Democrats to bend on the shutdown standoff.

That impasse is about healthcare, with Democrats refusing to vote for a spending bill that allows Obamacare subsidies to expire—a move that would cause the cost of health insurance for millions of Americans to skyrocket.

Duffy has denied the assertion that Republicans are needlessly using air travel as political leverage. Yet some Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz, have made a point of hanging blame for the flight disruptions on Democrats, accusing them of “flirting with disaster.”

Democrats are flirting with disaster. They have kept the government shut down for 36 days, forcing more than 50,000 TSA agents and 13,000 air traffic controllers to go without pay. Millions of Americans are already dealing with flight delays and cancellations because of the… https://t.co/MJlA1Iqhec

— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) November 5, 2025

The blame game comes as Republicans rejected a new offer by Democrats to end the shutdown on Friday that proposed a one-year extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies.

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Trump’s War on the Hungry Continues With Supreme Court Stay

President Trump’s vehement refusal to make full SNAP benefits available to the nearly 42 million Americans who rely on the food aid program scored a temporary win at the Supreme Court, after Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson temporarily allowed the federal government to continue withholding $4 billion in SNAP funding.

Friday’s late-night order came hours after the Trump administration rushed to the Supreme Court to block a lower court’s order requiring it to use emergency funds to pay out SNAP aid while the government remains shut down. In it, US District Judge John McConnell accused the government of defying a previous order to make at least partial paymentsand required that the government complete full payments by Friday night. McConnell pointed to Trump’s own words on social media earlier this week, which, if interpreted by their plain meaning, signaled the president’s intention to defy multiple court orders to make the SNAP benefits available to low-income families. The administration then turned to a federal appeals court to ask it to undo McConnell’s order.

Jackson’s temporary stay, then, merely gives the appeals court time to rule on that request. Critically, it did not rule on the legality of the Trump administration’s efforts to resist payments, which ramped up over the last week after SNAP lapsed on payments for the first time in its 61-year history. The lapse came as the Trump administration argued that it is barred from using emergency funding to make the payments because of the government shutdown, even though previous administrations in similar impasses have done so.

Two federal judges, both of whom admonished the administration for needlessly plunging SNAP into crisis, rejected that argument. And what quickly followed was a full-throated crusade by Trump to continue withholding funding and thereby using hungry Americans as a political weapon in a government shutdown. In the meantime, the lapse in SNAP has sparked a surge in demand nationally to food banks, with lines growing and some pantries being unable to keep up with demand.

The appeals court now has 48 hours to weigh in. Meanwhile, deep uncertainty for SNAP beneficiaries—39 percent of whom are children—continues.

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Election Day Was a Win for the Climate

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

Tuesday was a great day at the ballot box for the planet, with climate-friendly initiatives and candidates winning nationwide.

In races from New York to Georgia to Washington, voters backed funding renewables, reining in energy costs, and building out mass transit—and the people promising to deliver those policies. On the whole, the results suggest Americans are pushing back against President Donald Trump’s efforts to roll back climate action.

“This election was a decisive rejection of the Trump Administration’s ban on clean energy, multimillion-dollar taxpayer bailouts for expensive dirtier energy sources like coal, and other ineffective proposals that will make costs go even higher,” Sara Schreiber of the League of Conservation Voters said in a statement.

“I think yesterday was a repudiation of the idea that Americans don’t care about energy or climate and these are losing issues.”

One of the day’s biggest wins came in New York City, where Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral race in a landslide victory called just 35 minutes after polls closed. More than two million New Yorkers voted, the most in a mayoral race since 1969. Although Mamdani, who at 34 will be the city’s youngest mayor in more than a century, made affordability the predominant focus of his campaign, he garnered an endorsement from the youth-led climate organization Sunrise Movement. Many saw his campaign promises, which included calls for free mass transit and the greening of public schools, as the seeds of a populist climate movement.

“Zohran was talking about climate action in a way people could understand, and people were able to see the impacts of this climate action in their everyday lives,” Denae Ávila-Dickson, Sunrise’s communications and political manager, told New York Focus.

Dan Jasper, of the nonprofit group Project Drawdown, said Mamdani’s transit proposal “is not as sexy as something like solar. But these are the exact type of policies we’re going to need to actually address climate change, because it addresses people’s standards of living.”

Mamdani’s challenge will be assembling the coalition needed to make those policies happen. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who has also promoted a municipal green new deal agenda, may not have similar difficulty. Yesterday, Wu’s City Council allies retained their seats, giving her a fighting chance at success.

As far as statewide elections go, Georgia was a point of contention: There, electricity prices were on the ballot. Democrats won two of the five seats on the Public Service Commission, a regulatory agency that oversees utilities and has approved six rate increases in three years.

Democrats have not held a seat on the board since 2007, but clean energy consultant Peter Hubbard and anti-poverty advocate Alicia Johnson tapped voter outrage over climbing prices and notched upset victories over Republican incumbents, who had embraced fossil fuels and backed away from clean energy at a time when demand for power is rising.

“I think for a lot of folks who have felt powerless over rising utility bills, especially in a state like Georgia where they’ve gone up for the average household by more than $500 in just the last couple of years, they can finally breathe a sigh of relief knowing that potential change is coming,” said Charles Hua, founder of the utility advocacy nonprofit PowerLines.

Rising energy bills emerged as a top issue in other races, too, including the governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia. For political scientist Leah Stokes, who studies public opinion around climate change, Tuesday’s results weren’t unexpected.

“I think yesterday was a repudiation of the idea that Americans don’t care about energy or climate and these are losing issues, which is what all of these pundits have been going on and on about for about 9 months now. That’s really wrong,” Stokes said on Wednesday. “Everyday people understand that clean energy is cheap energy—they can easily make those connections.”

“‘Climate action equals affordability’ seems to be the winning message of the day.”

In New Jersey, governor-elect Mikie Sherrill vowed to declare “a state of emergency on energy costs” on her first day in office. She plans to roll out expanded generation capacity, including rooftop solar and battery storage, and “immediately develop plans for new nuclear capacity.”

In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger won the governor’s seat on a platform that included data center operators paying for their own electricity costs in a region that currently hosts over 13 percent of the world’s data center capacity. Her “Affordable Virginia” plan included calls to expand wind and solar power, promote home weatherization to ease power consumption, and streamline permitting and other requirements for expanding generation.

To the west, California voters approved Proposition 50, which will allow the state’s Democratic majority to sidestep the statewide redistricting commission and redraw congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The move was designed to give Democrats as many as five more seats in Congress in an effort to, among other things, combat further dismantling of climate and environmental policy. Governor Gavin Newsom and a slate of prominent Democrats nationwide championed the proposal as a counterbalance to Republican-led redistricting in states like Texas, where a similar effort earlier this year carved out 5 new seats for the GOP.

In a speech Tuesday night, Newsom said California voters approved the measure “to send a message to Donald Trump. No crowns, no thrones, no kings. That’s what this victory represents. [It] is a victory for the people of the state of California and the United States of America.”

Climate-friendly policies—those centering on transit, in particular—won on a local scale, too. Voters in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, which includes the city of Charlotte, handily approved a 1 percent increase in the sales tax to finance nearly $20 billion in transportation improvements. Although 40 percent of the additional revenue will be allocated to roads, some of that funding will support new bike lanes and sidewalks. Another 40 percent will go toward rail, and the remainder will be dedicated to buses and microtransit. In Ellensburg, Washington, 65 percent of voters approved a permanent 0.2 percent sales tax to fund the municipal bus system.

Across the country, one thing was clear: Wallet-friendly climate policies—and candidates presenting themselves as helping people pay their bills—won. “Climate change isn’t at the forefront of every election, but at this point, every election is a climate election,” Jasper of Project Drawdown said. “‘Climate action equals affordability’ seems to be the winning message of the day.”

Emily Jones contributed reporting.

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The Deputies Who Tortured a Mississippi County

When Andrea Dettore-Murphy first moved to Rankin County, Mississippi, she didn’t believe the stories she heard about how brutal the sheriff’s department could be when pursuing suspected drug crimes.

But in 2018, she learned the hard way that the rumors were true when a group of sheriff’s deputies raided the home of her friend Rick Loveday and beat him relentlessly while she watched.

A few years later, Dettore-Murphy says deputies put her through another haunting incident with her friend Robert Grozier. Dettore-Murphy was just the latest in a long line of people who said they witnessed or experienced torture by a small group of deputies, some of whom called themselves the “Goon Squad.”

For nearly two decades, the deputies roamed Rankin County at night, beating, tasing, and choking suspects in drug crimes until they admitted to buying or selling illegal substances. Their reign of terror continued unabated until 2023, when the deputies were finally exposed.

“Rankin County has always been notorious,” says Garry Curro, one the Goon Squad’s many alleged victims. “They don’t follow the laws of the land. They make their own laws.”

This week on Reveal, reporters Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield with Mississippi Today and the New York Times investigate the Goon Squad, whose members have allegedly tortured at least 22 people since the early 2000s.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in March 2025.

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Democrats Collapsed Here Last Year. How’d Zohran Do?

At this point last November, Zohran Mamdani was a largely unknown state assemblyman, and the Democratic Party’s brand in New York City was at rock bottom.

In the 2024 election, President Donald Trump picked up about 100,000 more votes in the city than in 2020; Kamala Harris fell more than half a million votes shy of Joe Biden’s total. And some of the most dramatic shifts in the entire country could be found in immigrant neighborhoods in Mamdani’s home borough of Queens. The party’s outer-borough collapse mirrored the party’s national crack-up; as it spent millions to court college-educated voters in the suburbs, Democrats were losing ground with the sorts of working-class, non-white voters in blue cities who traditionally helped form the backbone of the party. The term you kept hearing over and over was “realignment.”

When we chatted with residents and elected officials this spring, in the Queens neighborhoods of Jackson Heights and Corona, we found deep-seated frustrations with Democratic governance—and concerns about crime, immigration, sex-workers, poor services, and the cost of living. Many people brought up the pandemic, which had hit the area hard and damaged people’s faith in the social contract.

“The former governor, Andrew Cuomo, never stepped foot in Corona, even during the pandemic,” Democratic state assemblywoman Catalina Cruz told us. “I had to fight him to get a vaccination site in my district because while we were the epicenter, because my community was undocumented and immigrant, we were the last ones to get help.” Corona, she said, was what you get “when the government ignores its community.”

Mamdani’s victory on Tuesday over Cuomo was the product of a relentless campaign that united a broad multi-racial coalition with a focus on affordability. But it was also a test of how well the Democratic Party was recovering in the places where it has suffered the most. This outer-borough collapse, clustered most intensely in working-class Latino and Asian communities, loomed over the New York City mayoral race from the start. Mamdani soft-launched his candidacy by talking to Trump voters and non-voters in outer-borough neighborhoods about what it would take to win them back.

So: How’d he do?

Comparing off-year races with presidential elections can be a little difficult, but Mamdani’s vote total—the highest for a winning mayoral candidate since the 1960s—offered some clear takeaways. Although 700,000 fewer people voted in the city this November compared to last, Mamdani actually earned more votes than Harris in a few notable areas.

In parts of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, home to many young and left-leaning voters, overall turnout matched or exceeded 2024 totals, and nearly all those votes went to Mamdani. That’s a major achievement for an off-year election, and a reflection of the mayor-elect’s appeal among younger Americans who opposed Trump and were unenthusiastic about the Democratic Party.

In one heavily Bangladeshi precinct on Hillside Avenue, Mamdani ended up winning more raw votes than Harris on Tuesday—despite 14 percent fewer people showing up.

But Mamdani also ran well ahead of Harris in another, much different area: along parts of Hillside Avenue in Queens. This is one of the two neighborhoods Mamdani visited last November to talk to residents about the presidential election. In the now-famous video, voters expressed their frustration with the Democratic Party’s appeasement of Israel and their sense that politicians had done little to address the high cost of living. In one heavily Bangladeshi precinct on Hillside Avenue, Mamdani ended up winning more raw votes than Harris on Tuesday—despite 14 percent fewer people showing up.

The story was similar in other pockets of the city with large South Asian and Muslim populations, and where Democratic support lagged in 2024. Mamdani, despite running against a prominent Democratic former governor, scored a 24-percent improvement on Harris’ vote total in one precinct in Brooklyn’s “Little Bangladesh”—where turnout was just as high as last year.

Mamdani’s energetic emphasis on affordability, his implicit and explicit rejection of unpopular Democratic figures like Cuomo and Mayor Eric Adams, and his unique appeal as one of the city’s first major-party Muslim mayoral candidates helped him make up ground that Democrats had recently lost.

On Tuesday, a few hours before polls closed, we returned to the Queens neighborhoods we profiled earlier this year for Reveal, to see how Mamdani’s pitch had gone over. What we found was backed up by the numbers. It would be wishful thinking to call Mamdani universally beloved, but there were signs that his message of affordability resonated with voters who had been on the fence about Democrats, and that Trump’s 2024 coalition was beginning to fracture.

In conversations with about two dozen voters, we heard firsthand from people who voted Democratic after rejecting Harris last year, and from voters—particularly young voters—who were drawn to Mamdani by his emphasis on issues that affected their lives on a daily basis.

“I don’t take buses because I don’t trust them—I pay for the bus, it just, like, skips my stop or something,” said a young Elmhurst voter named Diego. Another voter outside the precinct said he voted for Trump as “the lesser evil” in 2024, but felt that Mamdani offered a new direction and saw promise in his plans to make the city “affordable.”

“The free bus thing, I think, is great,” he said. “A lot of the time people don’t want to pay for the bus anyway. That’s a good incentive, and honestly, I’d rather if we all paid a little more tax and make the MTA free.”

Beyond Mamdani convincing some Trump voters, there were signs of dissatisfaction in the Republican electorate, too. More than one voter mentioned that they voted for Trump—and not for Mamdani—but were disappointed by the administration.

A senior citizen in Jackson Heights who voted for Cuomo because of his emphasis on public safety told us that he and his wife had both voted for Trump last November.

“He promised a lot of things [were] going to change,” he said.

“But nothing’s changed,” his wife added.

Mamdani had some of his strongest performances in Jackson Heights, an extraordinarily diverse neighborhood with large South Asian and Latino populations. In one heavily South Asian voting district in the neighborhood, Mamdani ran 20 percentage points ahead of Kamala Harris and netted more votes overall.

Outside a polling site in the neighborhood on Tuesday, Abdul Aliy said that he left the presidential line blank last November. “I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for Harris, [and] obviously I wasn’t gonna vote for Trump, so there wasn’t really an option I saw,” he said. But he told us he voted for Mamdani enthusiastically, because the democratic socialist’s platform aligned with his own values: “Free transit, free buses,” he said, rattling off the campaign promises that resonated. “He has this idea of a public market that will stabilize the prices of certain goods—I like that idea.”

Outside of P.S. 89Q in nearby Elmhurst, Rina Hart, a 32-year-old user interface designer, said that she and her family were long-time New Yorkers who had voted for Cuomo in the past. Hart initially thought she would do so again in the primary. But she was turned off by the former governor’s campaign and the wealthy donors backing him. “I was concerned about Mamdani’s experience,” she explained, “but at least he has integrity.”

Her parents ended up voting for Cuomo in the primary, while she and her brothers went for Mamdani. There was no generational divide in the general election: They all backed Mamdani. Hart explained that her mom, who is South Asian, had been alienated by the racist videos promoted by Cuomo’s backers.

“It’s been a really tough time to be a Democrat. And you’re kind of seeing why we didn’t win,” Hart said about Mamdani’s rise in the wake of recent Democratic losses. “It’s been really hopeful.” She now wants the party to move on from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who did not endorse the mayor-elect.

“That’s the only way we can get out of this MAGA cycle that we’re in,” Hart said.

Glacel, an Ecuadorian immigrant who has worked at one of the original Equinox gym locations for the past 31 years, went with Cuomo.

She said she didn’t vote in last year’s presidential election because of the local crime and disorder. It was the worst she’d ever seen things get in Queens, and she blamed the decay on Democrats not dealing with the migrant crisis. “Disgusting. Filthy. Messy,” she said. “Ecuador is better than here.”

Another Elmhurst voter, an Argentine immigrant named Miguel Mendez, described himself as a sometime-Democratic voter. He opposed Trump during his first election and had once been curious about Bernie Sanders, but came around to the Republican nominee by 2024. He believed the neighborhood was deteriorating and that Democrats were more interested in pushing their ideology than in fixing it up.

“If it wasn’t the Salvadorans, the MS-13—it was the Tren de Aragua, or even cartels,” he said. “I mean, you can ask anyone over here where the gangs are. You can go to Roosevelt, you see what I mean. The prostitution, it’s everywhere.

Mendez chose Curtis Sliwa. (His girlfriend, he said, told him he couldn’t back Cuomo.)

Despite voting for Trump, he wasn’t happy with how things were playing out in Washington. The second Trump term had been “a big disappointment for me, because I was begging him to talk about all the weird drones that came in New Jersey and New York,” he said. “He said that he was gonna bring that out, same thing with the Epstein names, a bunch of stuff that he’s not doing—so that makes me think that no matter what party the guy who’s in office, they just have to follow an agenda.”

Further along Roosevelt Avenue, in the heavily Latino parts of Queens that swung heavily toward Trump in 2024, the picture was mixed. Turnout in Corona, a working-class Latino neighborhood, was up dramatically from the last mayoral election, but still well short of a presidential year. Among those who voted, data from the New York Times shows Mamdani winning the neighborhood by 11 points.

Ana, a 58-year-old Democratic voter in Corona from the Dominican Republic, said she voted for Cuomo after backing Kamala Harris last year. Like other voters in Corona, the problems along Roosevelt Avenue, which she also blamed on more recent immigrant arrivals, were front of mind.

“I like the Democrats because they’re humanitarians but as a result they’re hurting us,” Ana said. She lamented that her own Democratic representatives had not done enough when it came to immigration.

That included her own member of Congress, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). But Ana stillmostly liked her congresswoman, who unlike Mamdani, she thought had enough experience.

Ana was skeptical about the feasibility of Mamdani’s plans to make the city more affordable. Free buses won’t make her daily 4 am subway commute to a restaurant job at Google’s Manhattan campus any cheaper. Nor would his proposed rent freeze for stabilized units cover her market-rate apartment.

“You can’t offer free things in New York,” Ana explained in Spanish. “Even looking at something here costs something.” Then she laughed with a sigh of resignation.

Mamdani now has four years to prove voters like her wrong.

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Racial Justice Campaigners Were Prop 50’s Army in the Field

On Tuesday, California voters passed Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s congressional redistricting proposal in response to Texas Republicans’ gerrymandered map, by a sweeping 28-point margin.

As I reported in October, high-profile Democratic politicians—including former President Barack Obama—were front and center in an advertising blitz to pass the measure, which would tilt five seats in the House of Representatives towards Democrats.

But on the ground in California, often with less media coverage, were legions of campaigners with civil rights and racial justice organizations, many of which tirelessly championed Prop 50 in the final weeks before the election—and are now celebrating its passage as a small step in the long fight for Black political representation.

“We understood that it was critical to counter what Donald Trump was trying to do in Texas.”

“There has been a long and steady march to kind of erode our voting rights,” said Phaedra Jackson, NAACP’s vice president of unit advocacy and effectiveness, reflecting on the conservative Supreme Court’s continuing attacks on the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2013, the Court eliminated the formula for preclearance, the mechanism by which the VRA prevented certain states and localities from passing discriminatory election laws; six years later, another ruling enabled partisan gerrymandering on a hugely expanded scale.

In the years since, the turnout gap between white voters and voters of color has grown—and it’s done so nearly twice as fast in counties that were previously subject to preclearance, according to the progressive nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.

“A lot of folks have framed this as a partisan issue,” Jackson said. “We see it [as] an attack on the ability for Black folks and folks of color to actually have representation.”

“You see what’s happened in Missouri, in Texas,” she added, pointing to states where minority representatives, such as Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and Texas Reps. Marc Veasey, Jasmine Crockett, and Joaquin Castro, all Democrats, were drawn out of their districts, and where the voting power of Black and Latino communities is being diluted. While local chapters of the organization continue to challenge the constitutionality of those maps in court, its goal in California “is to be a counterbalance.”

That’s what led the NAACP, in the weeks leading up to the election, to become one of the measure’s biggest direct supporters, including by door-knocking and deploying hundreds of poll monitors across the state.

The California Black Power Network, a coalition of 46 grassroots organizations across 15 counties, entered the fray later in the cycle.

“We understood that it was critical to counter what Donald Trump was trying to do in Texas,” said Kevin Cosney, the coalition’s chief program officer. But the group waited until it could review the proposed new map—and judge its impact on Black voter representation—before entering the campaign.

Although Proposition 50 would mean 48 of California’s 52 House seats would now likely go to Democrats, the geographic and racial representation of its map is similar to the previous one drawn by the state’s independent redistricting committee, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

When it was convinced that Black voter representation and seats historically held by Black representatives were secure, the coalition’s members reached a consensus to support the measure through phone banking, canvassing, community events and ads.

For Newsom, and many of the measure’s backers in Sacramento, Prop 50’s massive success means it’s time to chalk a win. For racial justice campaigners like Jackson, it’s just “triaging a hemorrhaging situation”—even now, the Supreme Court is considering a Louisiana case that’s likely to further erode voting rights—that needs “long-term systemic fixes” like the decade-old John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which was reintroduced in Congress this summer.

Cosney echoed the need for systemic change. While Prop 50 “sets the stage for what is potentially possible,” he said, “we still have to organize and do the work … to make sure that those districts that have been built out are filled by folks who have our best interest in mind.”

“This was the kind of first opportunity that Californians really had to swing back,” said Cosney. “But it’s not the last.”

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Respectfully, Bill Gates Needs to Shut Up

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

Last Tuesday, as the strongest Atlantic storm in 90 years slammed the western coast of Jamaica with 185-mph winds, Bill Gates was downplaying climate change.

In a lengthy blog post published on his personal website, Gates purported to offer some “tough truths about climate” ahead of next week’s UN climate conference. Railing against a “doomsday outlook” stemming from “much of the climate community,” the author of 2021’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster claimed that there’s “too much” emphasis on “near-term emissions goals” as opposed to addressing “poverty and disease.” (The straight line between climate disasters from higher temperatures and the acceleration of both poverty and disease went unnoted.)

The inherent tension Gates posits between “quality of life” and “lowering emissions” is simply false.

While Hurricane Melissa—whose ferocity was supercharged by ocean waters heated by carbon-emissions absorption, as well as increased atmospheric moisture—laid waste to much of Jamaica, Gates followed up with a CNBC interview, excusing Microsoft’s fossil-fueled AI-construction surge and reiterating that global warming “has to be considered in terms of overall human welfare.” (He didn’t touch on the many ways artificial intelligence itself has damaged human welfare.)

The billionaire does not appear to have publicly addressed the disaster in Jamaica, which extended throughout the Caribbean, with Melissa having killed dozens across Cuba, Haiti, the Bahamas, and the Dominican Republic. And his overall point, frankly, does not hold up to scrutiny.

Gates isn’t alone; climate change has slipped down the world’s priority list in the past few years—and it shows. Governments and corporations are shelving emissions goals, budgets are being redirected from climate initiatives to warfare, the media is pivoting away from climate journalism, and even activists are urging a softer, more “hopeful” tone. It all signals a vibe shift in how we talk about climate change, reframing it from the existential risk it actually poses to a less urgent, peripheral issue—even as the floodwaters reach our front doors.

Gates, whose climate nonprofit Breakthrough Energy laid off dozens of staffers earlier this year, is not incorrect to point out that “we’ve made great progress” in fostering climate solutions, and that agriculture and land use should be an especially urgent area of focus. But the person he’s targeting with his post—a government official cutting health and aid funding and redirecting it toward emissions reduction—doesn’t really exist, certainly not at this particular moment.

As the US pulls back on all foreign aid and health funds, to devastating and fatal effect across the Eastern Hemisphere, other rich nations are not filling in the gap but instead following suit, cutting back on climate, health, and development.

In the climate realm in particular, wealthier countries are trimming not just their budgets (e.g., clean-energy exports, startup financing) but even their assistance with long-term adaptation to a warming Earth—something Gates now prizes above mitigation. This despite the fact that the UN secretary-general warns that it is “inevitable” the world will overshoot the decade-old Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius—as an explicit means of preventing worst-case scenarios that will require more money and resources to address.

The world order that once notched international climate agreements isn’t just retreating from that fight; it’s pulling back from any globally minded responsibility altogether.

The inherent tension Gates posits between “quality of life” and “lowering emissions” is simply false—and it’s a favored talking point of climate denialists. The most odious exemplar of this may be the pro–fossil fuel activist Alex Epstein, whose books (which I’ve reviewed critically) frame the transition from oil and gas to renewables as an “anti-human” endeavor. These days, Epstein is deeply embedded with congressional Republicans, pushing behind the scenes for the debilitating dents in US clean-energy subsidies that have been effected through this year’s budget bills.

Setting climate action as antithetical to human flourishing is plainly false; the devastated Caribbean citizens now rebuilding from Hurricane Melissa’s destruction would not be in this predicament had carbon emissions not overheated the ocean and messed with wind cycles.

As for finances, the climate is the economy: Skyrocketing insurance and resource costs in the region, along with depleted agricultural yields, are not incidental to climate effects but a direct consequence of their fallout.

At our current level of 1.3 degrees Celsius of warming above preindustrial levels, we see the crushing effects everywhere. It will not be any easier for island nations to recover as more extreme weather comes for their homes (and ours), and as nations of means shirk their mandated responsibilities to those spewing far fewer emissions, yet taking the biggest direct impacts.

The good news is, there are many folks on the ground working independently to advance climate solutions and their own welfare at the same time. Countries like Pakistan and Rwanda have put cheap solar-panel imports to great use—even to help with growing food. In the Caribbean, some of the hospitals treating the wounded will be powered by solar panels and battery storage, insulating them from the ongoing electricity outages. The US government planes that have been monitoring Melissa’s path are flown by pilots who aren’t being paid to do so, thanks to the government shutdown. These are the types of admirable missions led by people who understand the situation at a far more intimate level than Bill Gates ever will.

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A Border Patrol Agent Bragged About Shooting Someone, Texts Show

An immigration enforcement officer who shot a US citizen in Chicago last month bragged about the incident in texts afterwards, according to court documents filed in federal court on Wednesday. It’s just one of the latest examples of how, contrary to the Trump administration’s own narrative, the agents helping the supposedly terrified residents of American cities are posing a danger to residents themselves.

The texts were released in court at a hearing requested by the lawyer for the woman, Marimar Martinez, who is facing federal charges of assaulting an officer. According to the government’s account, Martinez allegedly rammed her car into a vehicle driven by Charles Exum, a supervisory Border Patrol agent, on October 4 in Chicago. When Exum got out of the car, Martinez allegedly drove her car “at” him, and the officer then fired five shots at her.

Martinez has pled not guilty, and contests the government’s allegations. In her account, Exum sideswiped her car, and fired the five gunshots at her “within two seconds” of exiting his vehicle, according to court documents filed by her lawyer. After driving about a mile from the scene, Martinez took an ambulance to a hospital, where she was treated for gunshot wounds and later arrested. She has been released from custody on $10,000 bond; a jury trial is scheduled for February.

This all occurred as federal officials were conducting immigration raids in the Chicago area, as part of an action dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The texts released Wednesday provide insight into how Exum addressed the incident in its aftermath. In one exchange, the agent sent an article from the Guardian describing the shooting, adding, “5 shots, 7 holes.” In another, he clarified that he was explaining his pride of his abilities as a marksman: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” (Reuters reported that, when asked about these messages at a court hearing on Wednesday, Exum said: “I’m a firearms instructor and I take pride in my shooting skills.”)

In other messages, Exum wrote: “I’m up for another round of ‘fuck around and find out'” and “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.”

According to CNN, Martinez’s lawyer, Christopher Perente, asked Exum about another text, in which Exum wrote about the incident: “I have a MOF amendment to add to my story.” Exum explained ‘MOF’ meant “miserable old fucker,” a term meant to refer to someone trying to one-up others, per CNN’s account. Exum explained the text by saying: “That means illegal actions have legal consequences.”

Spokespeople for ICE and Border Patrol lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. Martinez’s lawyer did not respond to comment.

Expect more receipts to drop soon: The court ordered the government to turn over the agent’s unredacted texts by the end of day Thursday, records show.

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In New Jersey, Offshore Wind Notches a Win—and Dodges a Bullet

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

US Rep. Mikie Sherrill won the governor’s race in New Jersey on Tuesday, running on a platform of keeping electricity prices down. Environmental groups see Sherrill’s election as a triumph for the Garden State’s struggling offshore wind sector.

Sherrill, a four-term Democrat and a US Navy veteran, arrived on the political scene in 2017 and advocated for offshore wind projects on Capitol Hill. As a gubernatorial candidate, she was one of only three Democrats who explicitly endorsed offshore wind on campaign websites early in the race.

Her Republican opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, ran on a promise to ban future offshore wind development. His campaign website sells ​“stop offshore wind” tote bags, t-shirts, stickers, and beverage koozies. Sherrill handily beat Ciattarelli, winning 56 percent to 43 percent at press time.

“In-state produced power through offshore wind and other renewable technologies is the only path forward to ensure carbon reduction while prioritizing price stability, economic growth, and resource adequacy,” said Paulina O’Connor, executive director of the New Jersey Offshore Wind Alliance, an advocacy group whose work is funded in part by wind developers.

Sherill’s promise to quickly freeze utility rates and push back on federal overreach signifies a willingness to come out fighting.

Sherrill will take office next year without any offshore wind projects operational or under construction along the state’s roughly 130 miles of coastline. That’s in stark contrast to the other East Coast states that, like New Jersey, have incentivized offshore wind development through tax breaks and have planned grid and clean-energy goals around the sector’s growth. Massachusetts, Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island all have installations completed or currently underway.

New Jersey’s incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy, also a Democrat, was once a fierce proponent of offshore wind, but has ostensibly distanced himself from the sector in recent months as President Donald Trump’s war on offshore wind proved, in some ways, insurmountable for a lame-duck governor.

The Trump administration has frozen the permitting pipeline for all of New Jersey’s earlier-stage offshore projects. Atlantic Shores, the state’s only fully approved wind farm, had one of its federal permits revoked in March by the Environmental Protection Agency. Shell, the project’s codeveloper, officially withdrew from the project last week.

As governor, Sherrill’s ability to counter federal anti-wind policies will be limited. But she can make sure the state remains a player in the industry, which is still advancing in nearby New York. In that state, one project, South Fork Wind, is fully operational, and another, Empire Wind, is under construction.

Sherrill, for example, could expand funding for programs that train workers for wind jobs. She could increase legal pressure against the Trump administration for obstructing certain projects, as Rhode Island and Connecticut have done. New Jersey’s Attorney General Matthew Platkin, along with 17 other attorneys general, is already suing the Trump administration over its broad-reaching executive order that froze federal permitting for wind power.

Her campaign promise to freeze New Jerseyans’ utility rates through a State of Emergency declaration on Day 1 and to push back on federal overreach signifies a willingness to come out fighting.

“Governor-elect Sherrill campaigned on the need for bold action to reduce family energy costs. [The American Clean Power Association] welcomes the Governor-elect’s recognition that clean power is key to meeting demand and keeping costs low,” said Jason Grumet, CEO of the trade group, in a statement released shortly after Sherrill’s acceptance speech.

In January, Sherrill will take the reins from Murphy, who set New Jersey on a path to building a zero-emissions power grid by 2035 but ultimately failed to generate any new offshore wind power. New Jersey voted on Tuesday for a candidate who aims to keep the state’s climate ambitions alive. The long-held vision of offshore wind turbines being central to these goals endures—for now.

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My Night With Sliwa Superfans

The number one thing everyone at the Curtis Sliwa election night watch party could agree on was loving Curtis Sliwa. The number two thing was hating Andrew Cuomo. Aside from that, it was kind of a mixed bag.

Last night, dozens of Sliwa supporters packed into the basement of Arte Cafe, an old-school Italian haunt on the Upper West Side, to mark the end of a historic New York City mayoral race. Sliwa—the cat-loving, red-beret-sporting Republican nominee for mayor, best known for founding the vigilante crime-fighting group the Guardian Angels in 1979—was always a long shot for Gracie Mansion. Still, he stayed in the race until the bitter end, resisting repeated calls (and, he claims, offers for up to $10 million) to drop out.

The day before the election, President Donald Trump urged his supporters to hold their nose and cast a ballot for former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, claiming that a vote for Sliwa was a vote for “Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani.”

Sliwa supporters in the room decried socialism but couldn’t muster as much hate for Mamdani as they have for Cuomo.

Partygoers at Arte were unfazed by Trump’s Sliwa snub. Supporters bought “Our Heart Beats for Curtis” T-shirts at the merch table. Former Republican Gov. George Pataki showed up, swarmed by news crews and fans. And somedanced jubilantly by the bar before the results rolled in. (Not everyone enjoyed this decision: “This is an election party, not a dancehall,” one onlooker grumbled.)

At first, the event felt like a portal to the recent past: an idealized vision of a big tent Republican Party, pre-MAGA takeover. A man in a navy suit tapped my arm to thank me for helping him identify Pataki. “Thanks to you, I was able to get a selfie with him,” he said. The man told me his name was George, and he’d canvassed for Sliwa in Queens.

George wasn’t concerned about his candidate’s likely loss, because, he said, he was a Christian and he voted his conscience. “We need to be concerned about the poor, the homeless, regular people—not just billionaires and millionaires,” he said.

George, like several people I chatted with at the party, wasn’t a fan of Trump.

“He’s doing bad shit, like shooting up boats that he says got drugs on them,” a man named Brad in a God Bless America baseball cap told me. “Like you can’t do that. What if they’re just fishermen or something?”

Others said that they didn’t like Mamdani but were disappointed by Trump’s last-minute endorsement; they could not fathom voting for “Killer Cuomo” who “lost his own primary.” (There were plenty of red berets, but not a red MAGA hat in sight.)

Related

I Checked in With Curtis Sliwa. He Still Doesn’t Care What You Think.

Still, some attendees sported idiosyncratic merch. I saw a shirt that said “Anti Mamdani Social Club” and a red yarmulke with Trump’s face on it. Akiva Mandel, a 30-year-old accountant from Beverly Hills who is now based on the Upper East Side, told me he’d purchased the latter item in Israel. He was “scared shitless” of Mamdani and his supposed threat to Jews in New York City, because the democratic socialist has said he’d arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes if he visits.

Mandel admitted that he did not know much about Sliwa’s policies. But his father, a native New Yorker, had instructed him to vote for anyone but Mamdani. Still, he just couldn’t bring himself to turn that into supporting Cuomo.

“One of my best friends happens to be an African American woman. Her father was in a nursing home,” Mandel said. “Her father was unfortunately literally killed because of Andrew Cuomo.” (Cuomo has maintained that he followed federal guidelines when responding to the Covid-19 pandemic. New York’s Attorney General found that his administration undercounted nursing home deaths by several thousand.)

Mandel called himself a “die-hard” Trump fan, but said he would “call [Trump] out when [he doesn’t] like what he does”—like when the president said there were “some very fine people” on both sides of the white supremacist Unite the Rally in 2017.

I asked Mandel if he’d heard about Mamdani’s pledge to increase funding to combat hate crimes.

“Anti-hate? This dude is full of hate,” Mandel said. “He doesn’t like gay people. He doesn’t like Black people.”

I was confused. I asked Mandel what Mamdani had said about Black people. He turned to his friend, Russell Miley, who is Black. “You wanna get this one?,” Mandel asked. “Because I don’t remember.”

Miley also didn’t remember.

“Okay, fine, never mind,” he said. “I’m not Black, so I can’t comment.”

I eventually pieced together that Mandel and Miley were part of a sizeable cohort of people at Sliwa’s watch party who knew each other from counterprotesting at pro-Palestine events and drag queen story hours. Some had been arrested alongside Sliwa at the anti-migrant shelter protests in 2023; Brad, who didn’t agree with the Venezuelan boat strikes, told me he’d tried to stop the migrant buses from arriving in New York City because they were filled with people who he believed to be rapists and criminals.

Many of the counterprotesters were introduced to each other through a woman named D’anna Morgan, who was at Sliwa’s event, too. When I met her, she enthusiastically complimented my bangs and I was later disturbed to discover that she’d been arrested in 2022 for breaking into the apartment building of a New York City councilmember and vandalizing his office building with homophobic messages.

Former Gov. George Pataki made a surprise appearance.Schuyler Mitchell

As I spoke to supporters, a guy from Infowars circled the room like a vulture. I saw a man in a Hot Wheels baseball cap chat with a blonde woman wearing red leather fingerless gloves, blue eyeliner, and a fur-trimmed jacket. A second person complimented my (normally unremarkable) bangs. Then, I was suddenly pulled into a three-way conversation with Shery Olivo—director of membership of the Washington Heights–based Dominican American Republican Club—and an energy healer named Marilyn, who was holding a chihuahua in a little red coat.

Olivo told me she’d helped start the club to give a voice to the conservative members of her community and demonstrate, “You’re not born a Democrat or Republican. These are decisions you make based on your values.” I asked her to describe those values.

“First of all, we believe there’s two genders,” Olivo said. “We don’t believe in all these genderologies.” She told me she supports Trump because of his policies on immigration. “I won’t allow the Dominican Republic to open its borders to Haiti,” she said, by way of explanation. Then her brash demeanor shifted, becoming more somber. “I lost my nephew eight months ago to gun violence, due to illegal immigrants that crossed the border and are in New York,” she told me. “The people that killed him are out there committing other crimes, while my sister cries every day.”

In light of all this, I asked Olivo how she felt about Trump endorsing Cuomo. “At the end of the day, it’s all politics. Whatever the president does, why he betrayed his party, I have no idea,” Olivo told me, adding that, “Trump is smart, and instead of having a communist, he would’ve preferred Cuomo.” So, I pressed her on whether she ever considered voting for Cuomo herself, if she feared having a so-called communist in City Hall.

“Absolutely not. I am a woman that respects herself. I know my worth,” she said. Marilyn nodded along. “I would never vote for a man who disrespects women. I have no respect for a man who doesn’t know where his hands belong.”

I asked her about the allegations that Trump has also disrespected women—to put it lightly—and how she feels about the Jeffrey Epstein stuff.

“Those are all distractions,” Marilyn chimed in.

“Distractions from what?” I asked.

“Whatever the agenda is,” said Marilyn. “There’s forces behind Trump, and there’s forces behind Mamdani. These are just faces.”

“But what are the forces?” I asked.

Marilyn gave me a knowing look.

“At the end of the day, Trump’s agenda is a national agenda,” Olivo explained, and with that she stalked off in her eggshell pantsuit to strike up a conversation with someone else nearby.

In the end, Sliwa’s exit from the race looks like it would not have made up the difference. Mamdani defeated Cuomo by nearly nine points, and with more than 50 percent of the vote, in an election that saw the highest voter turnout since 1969.

Sliwa began his concession speech ahead of schedule, at 9:24 p.m., when most major news outlets had not yet called the race for Mamdani. During his address to us, he spoke highly of the record-breaking voter turnout and railed against unnamed figures for trying to bribe him out of the race.

“From the time I declared my candidacy, the masters of the universe—the billionaires—decided that I should not have the right to represent all of you,” a teary-eyed Sliwa proclaimed. He recounted how someone had told him, “‘C’mon Curtis, everyone has a price.’” But he reiterated his commitment to representing the people that make up his movement: First on the list were “animal lovers,” which were then followed by “people who’ve been disenfranchised, people who have been pushed to the side, whose voices have not been heard, the homeless, the emotionally disturbed, the veterans, the people who ride the subways.”

Here was his version of the Republican Party as a big tent.

A man attempted to hand out his custom stickers to the crowd, explaining they depicted a “gay reaper” because mayoral-elect Zohran Mamdani is “from Uganda.”Schuyler Mitchell

It’s hard not to find Sliwa’s eccentric delivery, and his old-school New York bonafides, a little endearing. Sliwa did not name Mamdani, but he noted, “I wish him good luck, because if he does well, we do well.” Still, before I could start feeling too warm and fuzzy, Sliwa issued a warning: “If you try to implement socialism, if you try to render our police weak and impotent … we are mobilizing and we will become the mayor-elect and his supporters’ worst enemy.”

Those threatening words didn’t really match the vibe of many Sliwa supporters in the room, who decried socialism but couldn’t muster as much hate for Mamdani as they have for Cuomo. Even Miley and Mandel, of the far-right counterprotest crew, conceded to me that Mamdani is “polished” and “a good-looking dude.”

“He dresses well, he’s slim. I’ll give him credit,” Mandel said. “But he’s an asshole and an antisemite.”

In the end, Mamdani told NY1 that he didn’t get a congratulatory call from either Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams last night.

But he got one from Curtis Sliwa.

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On Tariffs, the Supreme Court’s GOP Justices Appear Ready to Save Trump From Himself

After Wednesday’s oral arguments at the Supreme Court, it appears that a majority of the justices will vote to halt Trump’s imposition of sweeping tariffs under a 1977 emergency powers act. But a loss for Trump will, in fact, be doing him a favor. And the GOP-appointed justices—who have spent the past 10 months giving Trump virtually everything he wants—surely know this.

An anti-Trump turn is a problem not just for the president, but also for the Republican-appointed justices.

Beginning in February, Trump imposed sweeping and ever-changing tariffs on nearly every nation in the world. The Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to levy tariffs and taxes. But Trump claims an unlimited tariff power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law that authorizes the president to respond to “any unusual and extraordinary threat” from abroad. This includes the power to “regulate… importation or exportation of…property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.” The word “regulate,” Solicitor General John Sauer argued on Wednesday on behalf of Trump, must be read to include “tariff regulation,” which he called “the quintessential, most historically-tested method of regulating imports.”

The response from the small businesses challenging the tariffs, as their lawyer Neal Katyal put it during arguments, is that this reading is nonsensical. “It’s simply implausible that in enacting IEEPA, Congress handed the president the power to overhaul the entire tariff system and the American economy in the process, allowing him to set and reset tariffs on any and every product from any and every country at any and all times,” he said.

The three liberal justices seemed to agree, and were joined by several Republican appointees who also showed serious doubts—likely enough to count to at least a five-vote majority to knock down Trump’s tariffs. Chief Justice John Roberts, who has used his position to do Trump a lot of favors, noted that Trump’s use of IEEPA to claim an unlimited tariff authority ran up against the separation of powers. Tariffs are “taxes on Americans, and that has always been the core power of Congress,” he said. Justice Neil Gorsuch, likewise a reliable pro-Trump vote, worried that gifting Trump a vast power to impose tariffs would be a “one-way ratchet toward the gradual but continual accretion of power in the executive branch and away from the People’s elected Representatives.” (This is not a worry Gorsuch expressed when he and other GOP appointees voted to exempt the president from criminal laws Congress wrote, or when they let Trump withhold funds appropriated by Congress, fire commissioners protected by Congress, gut agencies enacted by Congress, and ignore other statutes passed by Congress.) Something about taxes seems to reignite the GOP justices’ appreciation for democracy.

Near the end of Wednesday’s hearing, Justice Sonia Sotomayor voiced the same basic concern: “What we’re forgetting here is a very fundamental point, which is the Constitution is structured so that if I’m going to be asked to pay for something as a citizen, that it’s through a bill that is generated through Congress. And the President has the power to veto it or not, but I’m not going to be taxed unless both houses, the executive and the legislature, have made that choice.” She continued: “The president threatened to impose a 10 percent tax on Canada for an ad it ran on tariffs during the World Series. He imposed a 40 percent tax on Brazil because its Supreme Court permitted the prosecution of one of its former presidents for criminal activity. The point is, those may be good policies, but does a statute that gives, without limit, the power to a president to impose this kind of tax, does it require more than the word ‘regulate?’”

It seems likely that a majority will agree that “regulate” is not enough to transform the world economy and bestow on Trump the kind of erratic and unbound power Sotomayor described to impose tariffs whenever it strikes his fancy.

But in knocking down Trump’s attempt to impose tariffs under IEEPA, the justices who have been so solicitous of his desires would be doing Trump another favor. Of course, the president, whose one consistent policy preference in life has been for protectionism, is unlikely to see it that way. Trump has weaponized tariffs as a means of control, not just over other countries, but as a tool to punish and reward loyalty from powerful Americans. But in doing so, he will make prices go up and employment go down. Those are not the conditions that a winning political party presides over.

It was likely not lost on the justices that hours before oral arguments, Democrats won sweeping victories in off-year elections. In the New York City mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won a resounding victory in what began as a long-shot campaign focused on the soaring cost of living. Democrats likewise won gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey by focusing on affordability and won voters who said the economy was their foremost concern. As Trump builds a ballroom while withholding food aid, voters are increasingly skeptical of the idea that he is putting their wellbeing first.

As their discontent grows,an anti-Trump turn is a problem not just for the president, but also for the Republican-appointed justices, who may see their own majority on the court dismantled if Democrats return to power in 2028. Moreover, the Republican justices are firmly embedded in the larger project of elevating the interests of the GOP’s wealthy, white, and conservative Christian stakeholders. They have gone to bat for these interests again and again, including in their embrace of Trump. Letting Trump go wild with tariffs might, ultimately, help unravel that project.

One of the keys to cementing authoritarianism is to preserve a sense of normalcy while consolidating control. The way to do this—to allow most Americans to go about their days as they did before—is to make sure the economy stays on track. But Trump’s predilection for tariffs, and the levers of power they give him, make him an economic menace. Reining in Trump’s ability to issue tariffs in such a disruptive manner would ease his immediate economic impact, while still allowing him to impose some tariffs under other authorities. Roberts and some of his fellow conservatives on the Court may understand that to win the war, Trump must lose the battle.

There is another element to the GOP wing’s political calculus. The ultra-wealthy donors who have spent millions create the court’s conservative 6-3 majority oppose these tariffs. The Koch network and its allies lean libertarian, and groups they support to pursue deregulatory and anti-labor agendas have signed on to represent the anti-tariff position in this case. Given that, a potentialloss for Trump should not be takenas a simple win for liberals or the separation of powers, but primarily as a win for the plutocrats that the Roberts court has empowered and enriched for 20 years. They aren’t opposed to Trump, but they want to curb his anti-capitalist impulses. If they win, it will show they retain significant sway in the Republican firmament.

But if instead, after all the skepticism the justices showed for Trump’s tariffs, they grant him sweeping tariff power under IEEPA, it will demonstrate just how much sway he has over the justices—despite their better judgment.

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Maine Voters Approve New Law to Prevent Suicides and Mass Shootings

Though it was hardly a national focal point of the 2025 elections on Tuesday, Maine became the twenty-second state to adopt a “red flag” law for regulating guns, with the approval of nearly 59 percent of voters. Starting in January, Maine will allow families to petition a judge to remove firearms temporarily from a family member who appears to pose a threat to themselves or others. It’s a notable development in a state with a strong gun and hunting culture, where even the Democratic governor, Janet Mills, opposed the measure.

The new policy stands as a clear response to the devastating mass shooting that took place in Lewiston, Maine, in October 2023 at the hands of a profoundly troubled man, whose worsening condition had long alarmed those around him. As I reported previously:

Army reservist Robert Card, the 40-year-old suicidal perpetrator who killed 18 people and injured 13 others at a bowling alley and a bar on October 25, displayed numerous warning signs far in advance. His erratic behavior going back months included complaints he was hearing voices, angry and paranoid claims about being smeared as a pedophile, punching a colleague, and threatening to shoot up the Army base where he worked. Some of his family members and supervisors sounded the alarm. After a two-week stay and a psychiatric evaluation in July at an Army hospital, Army officials directed that Card should not possess a weapon or handle ammunition.

Despite the fact that people close to Card felt he was becoming dangerous, they had little possible recourse; at the time, the state had a weaker “yellow flag” law in place that allows only law enforcement to seek removal of guns—and only after the person of concern has been given a medical evaluation. As Card’s case showed, though, that is a high bar to taking action. A few weeks before the massacre, as I further reported, “the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office, which had communicated with family members and Army authorities since May, attempted a wellness check at Card’s residence.” Unable to locate him, they alerted other agencies that he was “armed and dangerous” and should be approached with “extreme caution” based on his reported behaviors.

In other words, opportunity for intervention at an earlier stage of Card’s downward spiral, flagged by family members and others, was already gone. An investigation later published by the New York Times revealed that Card had suffered from serious brain injury connected with his military service.

As red flag laws have spread throughout the country in recent years, research in California and beyond has shown that they can be effective for preventing suicide and mass shootings. (A majority of mass shootings culminate with the perpetrators ending their own lives.) California led the way with the policy in the aftermath of a 2014 mass killing near University of California, Santa Barbara. During my recent two-year investigation into that notorious case, violence prevention experts at the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office told me that in the decade since,the state’s red flag law has become “a key tool in a lot of, if not most of, the threat management cases that we’ve worked.”

Evolving policy nationally on gun regulations and violence prevention remains a mixed picture, particularly since Donald Trump returned to the White House. He quickly issued executive orders aimed at rolling back years of progress on red flag laws, “ghost guns,” and more, and he has gutted key violence-prevention programs within the federal government.

Some Republican allies of Trump at the state level have moved in a similar direction, including in Texas. That state has suffered several of the worst gun massacres in recent memory, from a Walmart in El Paso to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, but nonetheless, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the state GOP’s Anti-Red Flag Act into law in June. In stark contrast to Maine’s new policy, the use of such violence-prevention strategies—once backed even by Abbott himself—is essentially no longer an option in Texas.

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I Checked in With Curtis Sliwa. He Still Doesn’t Care What You Think.

When Curtis Sliwa called me on Wednesday afternoon, the failed New York City Republican mayoral candidate sounded chipper, even a bit boastful.

“Everybody loves Curtis,” Sliwa told me. “It’s just a question of getting them to vote for you.”

But everybody does not, in fact, love the red beret–wearing subway vigilante turned mayoral candidate. His unusually optimistic stance, despite his resounding loss to democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, came amid a sustained fury against him from those who see Sliwa as directly responsible for Andrew Cuomo’s loss. That includes Republicans turned reluctant supporters of the former New York governor and conservatives who claim Sliwa siphoned votes from Cuomo.

There was disgraced ex-Rep. and recently commutated felon George Santos, who wrote on X: “Fuck you [Sliwa] I HATE YOU, your dumb wife, that stupid Beret of yours and all your fucking cats!”

“You fucking sold out like fucking Judas sold out fucking Jesus,” David Rem, former failed mayoral and congressional candidate and a self-described “childhood friend” of President Donald Trump, was also recorded shouting at the Cuomo watch party.

But Sliwais, in a word, unbothered. He dismissed Santos as “the most corrupt of all of our recent electeds—and that’s saying a lot.” As for the allegations that he split the anti-Mamdani vote, Sliwa resents the implication he should have stepped aside for the man he repeatedly called “the Prince of Darkness.”

When I asked if he really believed he had a chance at winning, Sliwa replied emphatically: “Of course!”

As Sliwa, who took home about 146,000 votes, compared to Cuomo’s approximately 855,000, and many political pundits have pointed out, even if he had dropped out and all his votes went to Cuomo—an unlikely prospect in itself—the tally would still fall at least 35,000 votes short of Mamdani’s 1,036,000. To Sliwa, that’s because Cuomo ran a minimal ground game. “He was entitled, and he didn’t run a race,” Sliwa said. “He doesn’t run races, do retail politics. I treat the public like a mosh pit. I was down in the subway every day.”

“Friends or foes, I love people,” he continued. “I’m a happy warrior. Cuomo thinks he’s above it all.”

For Sliwa, such pompous thinking could be attributed to Cuomo’s heavy backing by “the most powerful people in the world”—namely, the billionaire Bill Ackman, who reportedly backed Cuomo to the tune of nearly $2 million as of late last month.

“He’s a hedge fund guy,” Sliwa said, referring to Ackman. “They always hedge. This guy lives in Chappaqua. He doesn’t know anything about the streets.”

Then, there are the wealthy Cuomo backers whom we don’t know. When I asked about his previous claim to the New Yorker that he had received seven bribes trying to get him to drop out, Sliwa painted a picture of a rather dramatic bidding war. “Each offer would be topped by another offer until it capped out at 10 million, and that’s when I basically put everybody on blast and said, ‘This better stop, because this sounds criminal to me.'”

Sliwa still refuses to identify who offered the alleged bribes—”I’m a man of honor…they spoke to me in confidence”—but he claimed that they were from childhood friends dispatched by the Cuomo campaign.

“This is classic Cuomo,” Sliwa said. “He is a muckraker. He is nefarious.” In a statement provided to Mother Jones, Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi called Sliwa “a liar, a fool, and a clown. New Yorkers saw it for themselves, which is why his voters deserted him in droves.”

So, what does Sliwa think comes next for Cuomo? “He is like Napoleon. He will return to his island of Elba, called the Hamptons, to his billionaire friends, and he will spend every day plotting a return one way or the other. That’s all he does.”

As for Mamdani, Sliwa says he plans to be “the loyal opposition.” “The problem that I know is going to come about is the fantasy of everything he advocated,” he said. “All sounds good, but the money ain’t there.”

For now, though, Sliwa plans to lie low. “Every mayor is entitled to a grace period.” Mamdani, he added, “won a mandate.” (Sliwa was the only candidate to call Mamdani to concede, the mayor-elect said.)

But for all his critiques of Mamdani, Sliwa can’t help but sound like him sometimes. “I’m a populist Republican representing the working-class people,” he continued. “This was people power, democracy in full effect. The people united will not be defeated. You don’t hear those words from a Trump Republican.”

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Dems Won. Cue the Far-Right Crash-Out.

Democrats won big on Tuesday night, with victories in high-profile races across the country, including that of 34-year-old Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral race, centrists Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill in, respectively, Virginia’s and New Jersey’s gubernatorial races. On Wednesday, Dems celebrated their victories on social media, while Republicans grappled with their losses. Some chalked up their defeat to strategic errors, blaming their party for overemphasizing culture war issues and failing to address voters’ affordability concerns. President Donald Trump [insisted][6] on Truth Social that the government shutdown was to blame, as well as the fact that he was not on the ballot. But the far-right had some different takes.

First up, the [TheoBros][7], a network of mostly millennial self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastors and influencers who have fashioned themselves as the shock jocks of X. One of the most outspoken, Texas pastor Joel Webbon, had this to say:

The reason we lose elections is simple:

1. We imported millions of foreigners, replacing the native population from 90% White to 59% White.

2. We let women vote. https://t.co/eGNkpqIDw2

— Joel Webbon (@rightresponsem) [November 5, 2025][8]

In recent weeks, Webbon, who whines regularly about the 19th Amendment, has been [responding][9] to women who challenge his views with the kind of pie he thinks they should be baking—instead of speaking.

Webbon isn’t the only TheoBro perturbed about the enfranchisement of those pesky women. In response to a post about how women’s votes contributed to Democrats’ wins, Brian Sauvé, a podcaster and pastor in Ogden, Utah, tweeted to his 74,000 followers:

Repealing the 19th is the moderate position at this point. https://t.co/OEHrsnqNBS

— Brian Sauvé (@Brian_Sauve) [November 5, 2025][10]

But women were not the only GOP headache for Christian Nationalists and the far right. Others waxed melancholic about the Great Replacement, the conspiracy theory that blames the US government for deliberately allowing white Americans to be replaced by immigrants. Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, [tweeted][11] to his 1.6 million followers, “Understand what our immigration system has done to us.”

Arizona pastor Dale Partridge, author of a book titled The Manliness of Christ, offered:

This is worse than NYC electing a tranny.

This is the initiation of an Islamic colony in America’s largest city that will take generations to undo.

This is how Europe fell. It’s happening here. https://t.co/aIwdvvfsjT

— Dale Partridge (@dalepartridge) [November 5, 2025][12]

Auron McIntyre, who hosts a show on the rightwing network The Blaze, [told][13] his 236,000 followers on X, “Really need the GOP to understand that Mamdani did not win because he won the argument, because he convinced people that communism works,” he continued. “He won because NYC is flooded with immigrants who don’t care about fleecing the country they came to.”

“Really need the GOP to understand that Mamdani did not win because he won the argument, because he convinced people that communism works. He won because NYC is flooded with immigrants who don’t care about fleecing the country they came to.”

William Wolfe, a Christian Nationalist who served in the first Trump administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon and Director of Legislative Affairs at the State Department, blamed immigrants for Mamdani’s win. “Due to intentional mass replacement immigration, New York City is now a third-world metropolis wearing the Big Apple as a skin suit,” he [posted][14] to his 82,000 followers. “Americans didn’t elect Mamdani, foreigners did.” Kevin Dolan, convener of the pronatalist conference NatalCon, posited that the remarkable upset victory in New York could portend the same for Texas, where he lives:

Republican politicians want to frame the problem as sectional ("those damn Californians") because they don't want to talk about replacement migration

Texas is on the same trajectory as NY, with Greg Abbott's enthusiastic consent https://t.co/Ek6PulSMSK

— Bennett's Phylactery (@extradeadjcb) [November 5, 2025][15]

Could American foreign policy be the reason for the dismal election outcomes? Calvin Robinson, an Anglican pastor in Michigan with 445,000 followers on X who was [defrocked][16] after he gave an apparent Nazi salute last year, certainly thinks so. “Republicans should study this before the next election,” he [tweeted][17]. “If you cannot put America first, you may well lose to a commie Mohammedan implementing Taqqiyah,” the Muslim principle of concealing one’s faith in times of danger. Clint Russell, host of the far-right podcast Liberty Lockdown, posted a clip of “groyper” extremist Nick Fuentes talking about the importance of “America First” foreign policy. “My message to every MAGA Inc talking head who ignored what the America First people have been saying,” he [posted][18] to his 268,000 followers. “Oh, you got swept tonight? Good. Keep ignoring us at your peril.”

For Fuentes, on the other hand, the Democrats’ victories were not a cause for reflection or casting blame. Riding the high from his wildly antisemitic [discussion][19] with rightwing broadcaster Tucker Carlson, Fuentes took to the far-right platform Rumble, where he has 477,000 followers, to [portray][20] Republicans’ loss as an opportunity for groypers to win over MAGA loyalists. “Approval ratings in the toilet, Epstein files covered up, blue Wave just happened,” he said. “But the groypers are jubilant.”

“Don’t say the word ‘Jewry,’” he said. Instead, he advised, “Put on your mask and conceal yourself.” He instructed groypers to use the growing divisions within the MAGA movement as wedges to further infiltrate the Republican party and American institutions. “Charm them, kill them with kindness, endear yourself to them, make yourself indispensable and always, always conceal what you’re really about,” he said. “And then get into the damn Capitol.”

[6]: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/115494873923565600 “TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,” according to Pollsters. [7]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/09/theobros-jd-vance-christian-nationalism/ [8]: https://twitter.com/rightresponsem/status/1986062919248068683?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw [9]: https://x.com/rightresponsem/status/1984809598411555068 [10]: https://twitter.com/Brian%5FSauve/status/1986087756867789277?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw [11]: https://x.com/StephenM/status/1985855401393344728 [12]: https://twitter.com/dalepartridge/status/1985911935704187195?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw [13]: https://x.com/AuronMacintyre/status/1985906166178750905 [14]: https://x.com/William%5FE%5FWolfe/status/1985902792813277647 [15]: https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1986088252466741420?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw [16]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/30/michigan-priest-salute [17]: https://x.com/calvinrobinson/status/1986071405545623962 [18]: https://x.com/LibertyLockPod/status/1985932802206929334 [19]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/tucker-carlsons-lovefest-with-a-white-nationalist-nick-fuentes-just-blew-up-the-christian-right/ [20]: https://rumble.com/v718mss-america-first-ep.-1591.html?e9s=src%5Fv1%5Fucp%5Fa

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Voters Soundly Reject Trump’s Plot to Rig the Next Election

Donald Trump’s unprecedented attempt to rig the midterm elections through mid-decade gerrymandering, voter suppression, and weaponizing the legalsystem took a massive hit on Tuesday. Democrats struck back with their own redistricting efforts, defeated GOP attempts to make it harder to vote, and protected Democratic judges who haveruled against Trump’s election subversion schemes.

The biggest anti-Trumpvictory came in California, where voters overwhelmingly approved Prop. 50, enshrining a new congressional map through 2030 that could give Democrats five new US House seats in the next election. Beyond the significance of offsetting Texas’ Trump-inspired mid-decade gerrymander, Democrats hope the momentum from Prop. 50 inspires other Democratic states to take similar action. In his victory speech, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called on Virginia, Maryland, New York, Illinois, and Colorado to adopt new maps in response to the GOP’s gerrymandering efforts.

“I hope it’s dawning on people the sobriety of this moment, what’s at stake,” Newsom said on Tuesday night. “We can de facto end Donald Trump’s presidency as we know it.”

OtherDemocratic states do appear to be getting off the sidelines in the redistricting wars. Virginia Democrats are moving forward with a new redistricting plan that is similar to California’s Prop. 50 and would need to be approved by the state’s voters. That effort received a boost on Tuesday when Virginia Democrats elected Abigail Spanberger as governor and flipped 13 seats in the state’s House of Delegates. That is likely to add momentum to the redistricting push there, which could make it possible for Democrats to win up to four more seats.

Also on Tuesday, Maryland’s Democratic governor, Wes Moore, announced his own redistricting bid, though the Democratic head of the state Senate still opposes that effort. Meanwhile, Kansas Republicans announced on Tuesday night that they were dropping their plan to hold a special session to eliminate the seat of Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids. While Democrats remain behind in the overall gerrymandering arms race, these combined developments put them much closer to parity.

Voters also rejected GOP attempts to restrict access to the ballot. Maine voters overwhelmingly defeated a ballot initiative that would have required voter ID for in-person and mail-in ballots and would haveadded a number of new hurdles to casting a mail-in ballot. It’s only the second time, following a failedMinnesotameasure in 2012, that voters have rejected a voter ID initiative at the polls.

“Once again, Maine people have affirmed their faith in our free, fair, and secure elections, in this case by rejecting a direct attempt to restrict voting rights,” Gov. Janet Mills (D) said of the result. “Maine has long had one of the highest rates of voter turnout in the nation, in good part due to safe absentee voting—and Maine people tonight have said they want to keep it that way.”

Finally, voters in Pennsylvania thwarted an attempt to oust three Democratic state Supreme Court justices, likely keeping a Democratic majority on the state’s top court through the 2028 election. The result has major significance for voting rights—the Democratic justices struck down a GOP gerrymander in 2018, rejected Trump’s attempts to overturn the election in 2020, and upheld no-excuse mail-in voting in 2022. It was also another rebuke of the GOP’s efforts to buy the courts; Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, a top Trump supporter, spent $3.5 million to oppose the three Democratic justices, but they retained their seats with at least 61 percent of the vote each.

In response to these defeats, Trump is certain to double down on his authoritarian tactics. During a speech to GOP senators on Wednesday morning, he called on Republicans to “terminate the filibuster…Then we should pass voter ID, we should pass no-mail-in voting. We should pass all the things that we want to pass to make our elections secure and safe, because California’s a disaster. Many of the states are disasters.”

As Trump and his GOP allies become more unpopular, we can expect his attempts to manipulate the electoral system in his favor to grow even more extreme.

After California Republicans passed Prop. 50, California Republicans quickly filed suit against the map in federal court on Wednesday, claiming that it was drawn “specifically to favor Hispanic voters,” even though the new map has the same number of majority-Latino districts as the one drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission after the 2020 census. Trump threatened a “very serious legal and criminal review” of the vote on Tuesday, so it’s likely the DOJ will intervene in this lawsuit or file its own.

“They’re gonna try 5x harder to sabotage the midterms after tonight,” Indivisible c0-founder Leah Greenberg wrote on Bluesky Tuesday evening, “and we’re gonna have to organize on a literally historic scale to stop them.”

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Don’t Tell Donald Trump, but Texas Is Deep Into Wind and Solar Power

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

Texas’ independent grid is meeting a large portion of the state’s rising electricity demand through its growing fleet of solar facilities, wind power generators and batteries, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

In the first nine months of 2025, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) saw record demand on the grid compared with the same period in previous years.

The Texas grid also had the fastest electricity demand growth among US electric grids between 2024 and 2025, a trend expected to continue through next year. ERCOT is tracking more than 200 gigawatts of large load interconnection requests—large energy users like data centers and industrial facilities looking to connect and buy power from Texas’ wholesale electricity market.

Utility-scale solar has led the growing number of renewable energy sources helping ERCOT meet its skyrocketing demand. Together, wind and solar generation met more than one third of ERCOT’s electricity demand in the first nine months of this year, according to the EIA.

“It wouldn’t be happening if they weren’t also reliable and cost effective.”

Solar power has generated 45 terrawatt hours of electricity so far this year—50 percent more than the same period in 2024 and nearly four times more than the same period in 2021.

The availability of solar generation in ERCOT also has reduced the need for gas-fired generation during midday hours, according to the EIA. This energy production comes despite attempts by some Texas lawmakers earlier this year to restrict renewable development across the state.

For Dennis Wamsted, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, ERCOT’s growing share of renewables shows that it’s the preferred resource type when an energy market is open, like Texas’ deregulated market.

“People are going to build solar and wind, and now battery storage, essentially as quickly as they possibly can,” Wamsted said. “It’s economic—it is what customers want.”

ERCOT has become the place to build power projects quickly in the US. Because it’s the grid with the fastest interconnection process, developers are able to get projects online within a few years.

The friendly regulatory environment has made it the norm for some generators to not only sell to the ERCOT market, but to also sell their power privately to companies through power purchase agreements. It allows both the generator and the company to lock in a price, offering them both cost security for years from an otherwise shifting ERCOT market. These options make ERCOT the grid to build renewables in bulk, Wamsted said.

“It wouldn’t be happening if they weren’t also reliable and cost effective,” Wamsted said of renewables. “Nobody’s running out to build something that’s overpriced and can’t be counted on.”

Throughout the next five years, supply should be able to keep up with the quick pace of demand coming to ERCOT, said Nathalie Limandibhratha, BloombergNEF’s US power analyst. But BloombergNEF’s forecasts show that in 10 years, Texas’ supply will no longer be able to keep up. There will be an imbalance if demand continues to march on at the same pace, said Limandibhratha.

While solar and storage are expected to maintain similar growth rates, part of the supply shortfall is due to the decline of thermal energy additions after 2030, Limandibhratha said. Meanwhile, in the last year, BloombergNEF’s forecast for solar and storage was revised upward significantly as the market moves quickly, she said.

While natural gas remains the largest source of electricity within ERCOT, meeting 43 percent of 2025 demand, its generation has flattened in recent years, according to the EIA. In the first nine months of 2023 and 2024, natural gas powered 47 percent of the state’s electricity.

Wind generation this year through September totaled 87 terrawatt hours, up 4 percent compared to the same period in 2024 and 36 percent since 2021. This growth comes despite political headwinds against the resource type. In the first days of his second term, President Donald Trump pledged to end new developments of wind energy, and his administration has since taken numerous steps to block projects.

Even with those disruptions and the influx of solar and storage, ERCOT continues to be a leader in securing new wind interconnections, according to a joint report from Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association published last week. But it’s expected that the Midwest will lead wind installations in 2027 and 2028, surpassing Texas.

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I Study Fascism. I’ve Already Fled America.

Jason Stanley isn’t afraid to use the F-word when talking about President Donald Trump. The author of How Fascism Works and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future is clear: He believes the United States is currently under an authoritarian regime led by a fascist leader.

At a time when the Trump administration is putting increasing pressure on private and public universities to conform or lose funding, Stanley recently left his position at Yale University and moved his family to Canada, where he’s now the Bissell-Heyd chair in American studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The move, he says, has allowed him to talk about the US in a way that wouldn’t have been possible if he remained in the country.

“I knew that if I stayed at Yale, there would be pressure not to bring the Trump administration’s wrath onto Yale,” he says. “I knew that Yale would try to normalize the situation, escape being in the press, urge us to see the fascists as just politically different.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Stanley traces the recent rise of fascist regimes around the globe, and explains why he describes what’s happening in the US today as a “coup” and why he thinks the speed and scope of the Trump administration’s hardline policies could ultimately lead to significant pushback from those opposed to the president.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: So your new book, Erasing History, focuses on what you call the rise of global fascism and specifically on the role of education in authoritarian regimes. Tell me about that.

Jason Stanley: It’s really a prequel to my 2018 book, How Fascism Works. So I’m a philosopher first and foremost, so what I’ve been doing, really, I envisage a kind of trilogy eventually with the third book being what to ho, how to stop this, but How Fascism Works is about fascist politics, how a certain kind of politics works to catapult people into power when they use it as a practice, whether they might be ideologically fascist or not. I think everybody accepts that whatever the Trump machine believes behind the scenes, they’re employing techniques familiar from the Nazis. It’s the same set of scapegoats except not the Jews, but immigrants, LGBTQ citizens, opposition politicians, et cetera.

So for fascist politics to be maximally effective, you need a certain kind of education system that tells people that their country is like the greatest ever. And as I show in the book, Hitler is extremely clear about this in Mein Kampf, he speaks in very clear terms about education and the necessity of having an education system where you promote the founders of the nation, the great Aryan men who founded the German nation as great exemplars and models, and you base the education around that.

And hey, in the United States we already had an education like system like that. So if that is your background education system, then you can set up great replacement theory. You can say America’s greatness is because it had these great white Christian men. And so if you try to replace those men, if you try to replace white Christian men in positions of power by non-whites or women, or non-white women most concerningly from this perspective, then that’s an existential challenge to American greatness.

Just for basis of this conversation, can you give me your definition of fascism?

Many countries have fascist, social, and political movements, and have them in their history. The United States certainly does: eugenics, the immigration laws that Hitler so admired. And in the United States, in the black intellectual tradition you consider Jim Crow a fascist social and political movement. And Jim Crow, the second Ku Klux Klan was, ideologically very similar to German fascism particularly.

But whereas in Europe you had–and this is what we think of when we think of fascism–you had a cult of the leader. So I would go with something like a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ citizens, feminists, and leftists. Jim Crow South did not have a cult of the leader, wasn’t organized around a Trump figure, but what we now have in the United States is something that looks a lot closer to German fascism.

You consider President Trump a fascist?

Oh, yeah. And even more… I mean, if you think of fascism as a set of tactics and practices, yes. What President Trump has in his heart, I don’t know.

Do you feel like America is living in an authoritarian state?

Of course. I think right now, the Trump regime has decided it has enough of the levers of power that they don’t need to have public support anymore. And it is not clear to me whether or not they’re correct on that. They might be wrong. They might have just misstated the moment, and in fact, there will be civil resistance. The institutions will see that they have to unify. That might happen. Civil society is not, I think, buying the propaganda line of the regime. So I’m not saying by any means that things are lost. And in fact, the rapidity by which this has happened might actually work against this coup that is now happening.
But the problem is the Supreme Court is nothing but a far-right Trump loyalists, nothing but, so everything they’re going to do, they rule almost entirely in favor of Trump. They’re not minds on that court for the most part, the conservative majority, they’re only there for the purposes of keeping Trump in power and whatever far-right machine replaces him. And things are moving quickly, they’re seizing the levers of power. But I do not think they have popular support, and I think they will have even less popular support as this proceeds.

You just used the word coup. Do you think that a coup is happening in the United States?

Yes, a coup is happening in the United States.

Walk me through that. Why do you think it’s a coup, in the sense of, I mean, these guys were elected? I’m just curious why you use that word, that’s all.

Right, let’s look at what’s happening with the boats that they’re blowing up and now in the Pacific, first in the Caribbean, now in the Pacific, they’re just simply assassinating people for no reason whatsoever. It’s completely illegal. In fact, what it now means is that Trump could just kill anyone anywhere just by saying they’re a terrorist. The way it’s going to work is they’re going to say, “Okay, these narco traffickers are terrorists. Oh, the immigrants are terrorists. Anyone protesting ICE now is a terrorist. If you’re against us blowing up boats without any legal justification or evidence, or if you are against ICE brutalizing little kids, you are a terrorist. The Democratic Party are terrorists.” So they’re trying to illegalize the opposition.

What they’re doing is so far beyond what’s legal, so there’s no legality anymore. Everybody who supports Trump gets pardoned. Trump tells people, tells the military the real enemy is within, namely the opposition. The Democratic states and Democratic cities will have the military, the National Guard, the red states are essentially invading the blue states. All of this is an overthrow of the Democratic order, and it’s already happened.

So you’ve been studying this for a long time. You’re watching America change or maybe kind of realize the destiny that’s kind of always been under the surface because I would argue that what we’re seeing now was set up long time ago. And it just took a little while for it to come to the surface. In seeing all that, was that a part of why you decided to leave the United States?

I knew when I made the decision in March that people were going to be harshly critical. Somebody yelled at me the other day, they were like, “You are safe, you’re a Yale professor.” I just didn’t want to deal with the whole structure. I knew that if I stayed at Yale, there would be pressure not to bring the Trump administration’s wrath onto Yale. I knew that Yale would try to normalize the situation, escape being in the press, urge us to see the fascists as just politically different, and talk about polarization, which is just fascism. All the people talking about polarization are just fascism enablers. They’re almost worse than the fascists because they’re just like, “Hey, how do I keep getting money in power?” I’ll say the fascists are normal.

And so I was just like, “Okay, I have this great opportunity.” And I thought that without that pressure, because I do love Yale, and so I love my time there. I love my colleagues, I love my students, I love the institution as a home to do my work, and I just felt I would be torn. I couldn’t hit hard in the way that I’m hitting hard now with you and I’m hitting hard when I go on TV and I’m hitting hard when I write my op-eds, I can say whatever I want in Toronto about the United States and about global fascism, and I’m building an institute here to create fellowships for journalists from all around the world to figure out what’s going on and how to respond to what’s going on. And I don’t think I could have done that in a university in the United States.

So the Trump administration is targeting funds for private universities in hopes of pushing them into a more conservative agenda. And as of this recording, it’s closing in on a deal with the University of Virginia. You’ve called this a war. So how would you advise other universities, given where we are in the world, but also the desire within those universities to protect the institution?

Everyone has to say fuck you. I mean, it’s the only way to… I mean, you could say Yale predates American democracy, which is true, but a university in a democracy is a core democratic institution. That’s why they attack universities first and the media. They’ve taken the court. Obviously, the Supreme Court is taken. So unfortunately, what you have to do, every single democratic institution has to band together and defend each other.

And we’ve already had that total breakdown because starting in 2015, we had this Coke-funded movement creating a moral panic about universities, and the New York Times piled on this moral panic. You couldn’t open the New York Times for years without reading another op-ed about hysterical moral panic about leftists on campus. All the while it was a total fiction that the whole time the right-wing press from Turning Points USA’s Professor Watchlist, originally Breitbart, Campus Reform, there was this massive attack on progressives and universities where progressive professors were terrified of being targeted by the conservative students and universities completely. So the media viciously attacked universities and set the groundwork for Trumpism. So that has to stop, and the both-siderism has to stop. The whole stuff about polarization, that’s just enabling fascism.

Yeah, explain that to me because you don’t like when people talk and say polarization, because the polarization, the idea that things are more toxic than they’ve ever been, and people are choosing sides, and all of that. Specifically, why don’t you like that?

Because one side is led by fascists. I mean, it’s like saying the Civil War, the problem with the Civil War was polarization. It’s literally like that. History will look back at this time at figures who talk about polarization exactly like history looks back on people who called John Brown a crazy person or who said, “Oh, it’s too early for abolition. It’s, oh, terrible, polarized time.” One group thinks that slavery is good, and the other group thinks it’s bad, terribly polarized. Or Nazi Germany. One group thinks Jews should be killed, the other one thinks they’re okay, it’s Polarized. It’s nonsensical. It’s just fascism enabling.

Let me ask you this: do you think Benjamin Netanyahu is a fascist?

Oh, well, of course, more so than Trump even.

You’ve said in the past that Jews in particular need to speak out about what’s happening and how history will look back at this time period. Why do you think it’s so important for Jewish people to speak up at this time?

Well, first of all, because the genocide is being perpetrated in our name, there’s a long tradition of European Jews from which I come who do not accept, from my father’s side. My mother’s Polish Jewish and has very different views about Israel than I do, and I’m not questioning, I don’t know what it means to question the existence of a state as Israel’s there, nobody should be killed in Israel, nobody should be moved away from Israel, it’s there, but Israel should stop the practice of apartheid. Obviously, they should not commit a genocide, and it’s the first televised genocide in human history.

Jan Karski spent… of the Polish Home Army spent… deeply risked his life visiting the Warsaw Ghetto, infiltrating the death camp system to spread word of what was happening in Poland with the death camp, with the Nazi death camps, and no one… Roosevelt didn’t believe him. Now we’ve got it all on social media. So Jews have to speak out about that. We have to say this is not in our name, and we have to do that in a way that makes it clear that we’re not calling for the end of… for anyone to be thrust out of Israel. Palestinians and Jews should have equal rights, and apartheid has to end. And then Jewish people have suffered fascism.
I mean, Russians have suffered fascism too, but they’re still awfully fascist, so that’s what we learned from Israel as well. But my Judaism, my version of Judaism is the tradition of liberalism. And we Jews did represent liberalism, the idea that a nation cannot be based on an ethnicity or a religion, the idea that if you are in a place, that is your home, and it doesn’t matter what your religion or ethnicity is, that’s why we were killed and why we were targeted.

What is it about this moment in time that we are seeing fascist movements all over the planet happening and gaining power? What is it at this moment that we’re seeing all this?

Well, one thing I think is essential to see is the global nature of this. You cannot investigate Trumpism just by looking at the United States. Now we’re seeing Trump offer $20 billion to Argentina to support their far-right leader. I mean, that’s a crazy amount of money. And they’re saying, “Well, you better keep them in power.” So these are connected movements.

I’ve been thinking about writing about this for months, but now it’s getting more attention now that Homeland Security has tweeted it, but remigration. It’s very clear there are powerful links between Germany’s fascist party, Alternative für Deutschland, and the Trump regime since the Munich Security Conference at least. Vance went over and met with the head of AfD and not with the Chancellor of Germany who’s a conservative. And then there was all this stuff about Germany threatening to ban AfD. That became central to the Trump regime. So when Homeland Security tweets remigration, which is not a word in the English language. It’s a word created by Martin Zellner who intended it to mean taking citizenship away from non-white, from Muslims.

Right. When we look back on moments like Nazi Germany and wonder why people didn’t do something about these atrocities faster, do you think that people just at some point become complacent?

Yeah. I mean, people just don’t get that under fascism or virtually any kind of authoritarianism, you can still go to the club, there are still raves, there are restaurants, there are bars. They’re like, “How could it be fascism because I can go to the restaurant and complain about the government to my friends?”

So it’s like what you’re saying, a large chunk of the population are still living their regular routine, going to work, coming home, taking care of their kids, all of that, but they’re oblivious to… or they’re tuning out what’s happening to people in the margins?

Yeah. I mean, we’re creating large concentration camps for immigrants. Lawyers can’t get into these places. Congress people are being blocked from their oversight role. So we now have concentration camps in the United States. We have people in masks kidnapping people off the streets. I don’t even like to say, “Oh, now it’s going to go to protesters,” which it obviously will, but because it’s bad enough that little kids are watching their parents snatched away in immigration courts, that’s bad enough. And all the people who are enabling this, all the people who are normalizing this, I don’t myself believe in hell, but I think there’s a lot of people out there who are patting their wallets, getting that extra attention by normalizing this, by saying, “Oh, maybe we need to really… This cruelty is okay, it’s part of… It’s just you disagree with it. We’re polarized.”

Yeah. Well, I think that we have, in many ways, been dehumanized by the media we consume. When you look back at the civil rights struggle, when those images came on TV, it made change…

Exactly.

… because we were in a different place.

Now, the reaction is when young people rise up, when they see images on the screen or they see what’s happening to immigrants or they’re seeing what’s happening to democracy, heads are getting cracked or they’re threatening to crack heads. I mean, I think this is what I was saying before, I’m not sure they’re going to be successful on this because I think civil society is really pushing back, and they’ve threatened people if they showed up at the No Kings demonstrations, but people still showed up, so it kind of didn’t work.

What do you see for the near future for the United States?

Well, I’m actually heartened by certain things, I’m heartened by the… I see that the regime has… So the regime is going hog wild. They’re soaking themselves in cruelty and corruption and illegality, and their justifications for this are not playing with the American people. Most Americans are starting to get that we’re facing a dictator, an out of control dictator. I think that what you’re going to see as people see the American Republic being cracked apart and sold for parts to the tech fascists, to anyone really. Basically, Trump is saying, “Line up behind my corruption, line up behind my brutalization of immigrants, my targeting of domestic opponents, and you’ll profit, you’ll get that $50,000 signing bonus for ICE, you’ll profit, you’ll get the government contracts, the courts will rule in your favor.”

But I think it’s becoming clearer and clearer to many Americans what’s going on. The problem is fascism and dictatorship, and the regime went over its skis. So that’s where I see the hope here, that I think they went too fast. So it’s a bad time, but I think that there is a lot of civil society reaction, and so we just don’t know what’s going to happen right now.

Yeah. Jason Stanley, thank you so much for taking your time to talk to me, man. This was great.

Yeah, great conversation in difficult times.

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Dems Win Major Victory Against Trumpism as Prop. 50 Passes in California

California voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50 in a race called by the Associated Press before a single ballot was counted—a reflection of decisive support in a victory that significantly boosts Democratic chances of retaking the House of Representatives next year. The ballot measure establishes a new congressional map through 2030 that could help Democrats win five additional seats, offsetting a mid-decade gerrymander passed by Texas Republicans over the summer.

“The folks who were on the sidelines, who felt like redistricting would be too difficult or unpopular to do, may now feel differently once California voters pass Prop. 50.”

Prop 50 represents Democrats’ first significant victory against President Donald Trump’s unprecedented plan to rig the midterms by pressuring as many GOP-controlled states as possible to redraw their maps before the 2026 elections. The hastily assembled California plan, championed by DemocraticGov. Gavin Newsom, asked voters to temporarily set aside the congressional maps drawn four years ago by the state’s independent redistricting commission and approve new maps passed by the legislature that were designed to maximize Democratic representation.

Though the independent commission remains popular in California, Democrats successfullyconvinced a majority of voters that urgent action was needed to hold Trump accountable and restore fairness to the race for the House.

“Voters have been able to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time, which is that they support independent redistricting but they also believe we’re in an existential crisis where something has to be done,” says Paul Mitchell, a California-based redistricting expert who drew the new congressional map.

Supporters of Prop. 50 hope that the ballot measure’s passage inspires other Democratic states to act. Even if California Democrats ultimately pick up five seats to counter the Texas map, other Republican-controlled states, including Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, have since redrawn their maps to give the GOP additional House seats—with morered states, like Indiana and Florida, potentially still to come. That means Democrats could ultimately start an additional six-to-10 seats behind in the race for the House.

Virginia Democrats are moving forward with a remap that is similar to California’s plan and would ultimately need to be approved by that state’s voters. On Tuesday, Maryland’s Democratic governor, Wes Moore, announced a redistricting bid, as well—though the Democratic head of the state Senate opposes the effort. National Democrats are pressuring Illinois lawmakers to redraw that state’s maps, too.

“The folks who were on the sidelines, who felt like redistricting would be too difficult or unpopular to do, may now feel differently once California voters pass Prop. 50,” Mitchell told me.

Though California Republicans failed to generate significant resistance to the ballot measure, the Trump administration has sought tocast doubt on the validity of the election, previewing the strategies it might use to contest the midterms.

The Justice Department announced that it was sending election monitors to five counties in the state with large Latino populations, which Newsom called “voter suppression, period.” Trump also claimed the vote would be “totally dishonest” and said the DOJ would sue to challenge the map. The DOJ lawsuit hasn’t materialized, but lawsuits by California Republicans and GOP members of Congress to block the measure failed in state and federal court. On Tuesday, Trump escalated his attack on the ballot measure, calling the vote “unconstitutional” and threatening a “very serious legal and criminal review.”

“I’m certainly concerned about it as a model for what they’re going to do in other places,” Sara Sadhwani, a former Democratic member of the state’s redistricting commission who supported Prop. 50, said before the vote. “It appears that they are trying to test-run intimidation tactics on our special election in 2025 and perhaps in preparation for 2026.”

But if the Trump administration sought to deter voters from supporting Prop. 50, it didn’t work, with early voting turnout almost reaching presidential election levels.

While many supporters of Prop. 50 were uncomfortable with partisan gerrymandering and would like to ban it at a federal level, they believed that unilateral disarmament in the redistricting wars was not an option.

“Our current president and his administration is explicitly saying that we want to change the rules of the game midstream in order to insulate ourselves from the people’s judgement,” former President Barack Obama said on a livestream with Newsom on October 22. “The people of California are saying stop. This is not how American democracy is supposed to operate. And that’s what Prop. 50 is about.”

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“He’s One Of Us”: Muslim New Yorkers Greet Mamdani’s Victory With Pride

Timothy Rodriguez has lived in New York all his life. But the notion of a Muslim mayor never entered the realm of possibility for him.

That changed Tuesday when Zohran Mamdani’s victory made him New York’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor-elect.

“It’s a big win for New York City, of course, it’s a big win for Muslims,” Rodriguez, 35, told me after news of Mamdani’s win broke on Tuesday night. “I’m happy to see change and that these things are possible.”

I first met Timothy a few hours earlier, in downtown Brooklyn, outside the Al-Farooq Mosque. It sits on a block of Atlantic Avenue, home to two Middle Eastern grocery stores and shops selling goods such as spices, Islamic decorative arts, and clothing. When we spoke, he and his sister, Ally, 33, had just wrapped up the Asrprayer, one of the five daily prayers for observant Muslims. Neither had voted yet, but they both hoped to see Mamdani elected.

“A lot of Muslims don’t feel like they have a place here,” Timothy said. He hopes that, like former President Barack Obama, Mamdani can “inspire” other Muslim New Yorkers to run for office and help “break the stigma that Muslims aren’t good people.”

The siblings cited Mamdani’s relentless focus on affordability for their support. “Prices are high, rent is high,” Timothy said.

“Especially food,” Ally chimed in, her young daughter hoisted on her hip. The fact that Mamdani is also Muslim, she said, was merely “a bonus.”

Throughout his historic campaign, Mamdani has been outspoken about his faith. According to the New York Times, the 34-year-old democratic socialist visited more than 50 mosques on the campaign trail, with members of his campaign visiting nearly 200. Mamdani has also addressed Islamophobia head-on, in visits to city mosques and online, detailing his and his family members’ experiences with racist attacks after former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo laughed at a conservative radio host’s suggestion that Mamdani would be “cheering” in the event of another 9/11. “That’s another problem,” Cuomo added. (Cuomo later rejected allegations of Islamophobia, claiming that Mamdani was trying to “divide people” by making an issue out of the radio exchange.)

But the comments by Cuomo were only the latest in a series of escalating attacks, which started in earnest on the night of Mamdani’s primary upset back in June. As I wrote at the time:

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Donald Trump Jr., Laura Loomer, and Charlie Kirk were among the right-wingers who fired off Islamophobic smears about Mamdani and Muslim New Yorkers to their millions of followers after Cuomo’s surprising concession. The posts come days after reports that Mamdani has faced threats and attacks prompting an investigation by the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force.

Since then, others have piled on. Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa baselessly accused Mamdani of supporting a “global jihad.” Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams also decried the rise of “Islamic extremism” in Europe. Even on Tuesday, as New Yorkers headed to the polls, NBC News reported that a pro-Cuomo super PAC was running a last-minute ad depicting Mamdani in front of the Twin Towers on 9/11, accompanied by a quote from leftie streamer Hasan Piker, saying “America deserved 9/11.” (The Cuomo campaign has sought to tie Mamdani to those comments, even after Mamdani disavowed them as“objectionable and reprehensible.”)

“What a lot of this anti-Muslim rhetoric and Islamophobia has done for a lot of people in the city is that people feel like they have their Muslim identity on the sidelines,” Saman Waquad, president of the Muslim Democratic Club, of which Mamdani is a member, told me.

Though Waquad said that the racist attacks “put a target on all of our backs,” she was encouraged by Mamdani’s decision to stand proud in his identity as a Muslim New Yorker. “When we see Zohran show up as a Muslim and not shy away, it gives people more courage to come out for him,” she added. “In many ways, he’s one of us.”

Noting that the city is home to an estimated one million Muslims, Waquad added: “That’s a lot of folks that are going to feel seen.”

Tazul Islam, a 40-year-old office manager from Queens, whom I also met outside the Al-Farooq Mosque on Tuesday afternoon, told me he hopes Mamdani remains proud of his faith once he is officially sworn in as mayor.

“Hopefully, he can fix some of the misunderstandings and myths about the religion,” Islam said. The faith, he added, “has a lot more to do with making the world a more beautiful place than the scare tactics we hear.”

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Virginia’s GOP Went All In on Voter Suppression—And Still Got Wrecked

Despite years of voter suppression efforts by the state’s Republican Party, Virginians have spoken: It’s time for GOP gubernatorial candidate Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears to “go somewhere and sit down.”

Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat who represented the state’s 7th District in Congress until this year, defeated Earle-Sears in a highly anticipated race to become the first female governor in the Commonwealth’s centuries-long history.

VA Voter: Spanberger. She out there doing what she's supposed to do. That other lady? She needs to go somewhere and sit down. pic.twitter.com/72dNcvPWCT

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 4, 2025

Spanberger beat Earle-Sears by a staggering 12-point margin with close to 80 percent of votes counted, according to Associated Press projections. The 56-44 win—representing well over 300,000 votes—comes at a precarious time for the Democratic Party, with Virginia serving as a critical bellwether for the country’s feelings on President Donald Trump before national midterm elections next year.

For years, Virginia Republicans have been working overtime to suppress the state’s Democratic voters, including a blatantly illegal voter roll purge in 2023 orchestrated by then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin. In 2024, the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc ruled in Youngkin’s favor, forcing nearly 1,600 voters to fight for their registration to be reinstated. A year later, shortly after Trump’s re-election, the Justice Department voluntarily dismissed a lawsuit originally brought forth by the Biden administration that once again challenged the purge.

Spanberger’s victory is a promising sign for Virginia’s effort, alongside other Democratic-led legislatures, to redraw district lines after states like North Carolina and Texas were subjected to extreme gerrymandering by Republican legislators that functionally disenfranchised a huge swath of their voters. Alongside the governorship, all 100 seats in Virginia’s House of Delegates, the lower chamber of its state legislature, are also up for reelection—which will determine the GOP’s chances of leaving Democratic redistricting dead in the water.

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Zohran Mamdani Drags the Democratic Party Into the Future

Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City on Tuesday, defeating former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo for the second time in five months and capping a stunning rise from obscurity to the helm of the nation’s largest city. A 34-year-old state democratic socialist assemblyman from Queens, Mamdani became the city’s first ever Muslim mayor—and the first immigrant mayor in half a century—with an obsessive and inimitable focus on “affordability.” In the process, he ushered in a new era of city politics and slammed the door shut on an old one.

Mamdani’s platform, his ubiquity, his alliances and relationships, and his identity helped him build a new winning coalition.

The throughline of Mamdani’s campaign was a willingness to meet people where they were, in physical and ideological ways. For a democratic socialist, that meant trading dogma for a slate of unavoidable policies tied to unavoidable things: Free childcare, a rent freeze, fast and free buses, and city-owned grocery stores. His hopes and policy prescriptions were things that every voter deals with, or knew someone struggling with. The message was so unavoidable that Democrats everywhere else in the country kept going off-message to argue with it.

Mamdani was the most relentlessly disciplined Democratic nominee for anything that I’ve seen in years. He was conversant in the language of the city, and also its literallanguages. (It was a good sign when Mamdani was falsely accused of using AI to film an ad in Spanish; it was a better sign when the candidate’s team promptly published an equally compelling set of outtakes.) You could accuse Mamdani of pandering, of course. But this is politics—the point is to pander in a way that makes voters feel seen and heard.

Heading into the primary, there was a common suspicion (shared by me) that for all of Cuomo’s weaknesses and Mamdani’s strengths, the coalition politics just weren’t there for a lefty challenger in New York City. But the returns then, and now, revealed a different story. Mamdani’s platform, his ubiquity, his alliances and relationships, and his identity helped him build a new winning coalition.

The DSA members in “the People’s Republic of Astoria” formed an organizing base that sustained him during the primary, but his campaign was equally at home in outer-borough neighborhoods like the two he featured in his launch video—working-class and home to large numbers of South Asian and Muslim communities whose residents had never been courted or seen to such a degree by a mayoral campaign. He won the primary convincingly, thanks in part to an alliance with the favorite son of North Brooklyn yuppies, the progressive Jewish comptroller Brad Lander. Mamdani’s coalition was historically young—this was the election where millennials finally seized control of the levers of power. But had crucial back-up from old-school leaders like US Rep. Jerry Nadler (who endorsed him immediately after the primary) and the Rev. Al Sharpton (who joined Mamdani at a rally in the final days).

Soccer fans were the Mamdani Coalition in a nutshell: a young, diverse, polyglot group that united immigrant communities and yuppies.

The videos and debate moments got all the attention, and the army of volunteers helped carry him across the finish line, but the nature of his coalition and of his unique style of campaigning was captured quite neatly, to my mind, by Mamdani’s attention to a subject candidates have traditionally ignored. A few weeks before the election, Mamdani held a soccer tournament on Coney Island with teams of varying skill sets from all over the city. Not long before that, he watched an Arsenal match with Spike Lee. He held a press conference to demand that FIFA make World Cup tickets available at a discount for New York City residents (again with the affordability), and reached out to a popular British soccer podcast to make the case to their listeners, too. No one has campaigned so thirstily for the votes of soccer fans in an American election, but soccer fans were the Mamdani Coalition in a nutshell: a young, diverse, polyglot group that united immigrant communities and yuppies.

This was a local race with national implications. I know that because national Democrats couldn’t stop offering unsolicited advice about what to do about Mamdani. The fact that the Democratic party’s brand tanked worse in New York City last year than basically anywhere else in the entire country is the type of thing that you might think would cause Democrats to perk up and take seriously a young and energetic challenger. Instead, a lot of powerful people whose job is to ostensibly think about the long-term health of the party argued that voters should rally behind a bully and a creep who helped tank the party’s brand in the first place.

But it’s instructive that while Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader from Park Slope, kept his distance, and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader from Bed-Stuy, offered the most tepid of endorsements, Mamdani nonetheless did receive advice from another underdog candidate that Bill Clinton once tried to stop. President Barack Obama called to congratulate him after the primary, the New York Times reported, and spoke with Mamdani for half an hour on Saturday. Obama is better at politics than everyone else in his party, but also someone who knows from experience what it means to promise change in a party that doesn’t really want to. Sometimes, to build the future you want, you first have to shake free of the past.

As much as the race was a validation of Mamdani’s efforts, though, it also marked perhaps the final chapter for the man he twice defeated. In the days and weeks after that June defeat, Cuomo allowed that he may have miscalculated. Borrowing from Mamdani’s color settings, if not his charm, he filmed a soft-focus video walking through a Manhattan park, and sought to portray himself as an amiable ex-gov who fixed up strangers’ cars. His face contorted into a mechanical smile. The theory behind Cuomo’s second campaign was that Republicans would join more conservative Democratic factions in uniting behind him, while he spoke more deliberately about affordability, and made the case for why he could succeed and Mamdani would fail.

I don’t know that someone as damaged as Cuomo could have truly seized a second chance, but the candidate barely even tried. Throughout the campaign, the man who resigned in disgrace after a state attorney general’s report found that he had sexually harassed nearly a dozen women insisted that his biggest regret was leaving office. (He continues to deny any wrongdoing.) Asked at a debate what he had learned from his first rejection at the polls, he said he regretted not being better at social media.

The man who resigned in disgrace after a state attorney general’s report found that he had sexually harassed nearly a dozen women was asked if he had any regrets. He said he regretted not being better at social media.

Aside from a call for more cops and the obvious quest for redemption, you’d be hard-pressed to say what Cuomo was running for office to do. His stickiest policy proposal was that Mamdani should not be allowed to live in a rent-stabilized Queens apartment anymore—a situation that Mamdani will soon resolve by moving into an 18th-century mansion in Manhattan. That fight was instructive, both in its weirdly personal nature and the ignorance of everyday life in New York City it displayed. Cuomo alleged that Mamdani was taking housing from “a poor person.” But only a very rich person would think that a poor person should be paying $2,300-a-month for a one-bedroom in Astoria.

It was in the home stretch where the former governor’s true colors really showed. Cuomo ran a grim, miserable campaign rooted in cynicism and fear. He laughed at the idea that his Muslim opponent might cheer on the 9/11 attacks. He suggested that the dual-citizen who emigrated as a child “doesn’t understand the New York culture, the New York values, what 9/11 meant.” His campaign released an AI-generated video featuring Mamdani eating with his hands and a Black man thanking the Democratic nominee for allowing him to commit crimes. His spokesman shared a comment from a pro-Trump influencer calling Mamdani a “terrorist.” His top surrogate in the final days—the disgraced sitting mayor—evoked the spectre of “Islamic exstremist” in Nigeria and said that a vote for Mamdani would turn the city into Europe. At a debate, Cuomo explicitly appealed to Sunni Muslims to reject a Shiite candidate whose views, he said, were “haram.”

In the final hours of the race, Cuomo even tacitly welcomed the endorsement of Trump himself (while also, with characteristic forthrightness, denying he was doing so) by asserting that the best way to avoid an authoritarian crackdown would be to vote for the candidate the authoritarian preferred. To the end, he never learned to say his opponent’s last name.

Mario Cuomo, the candidate’s father, famously said that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. But that, as it happens, is a false choice. An epitaph can be both.

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The Moment That Made Mamdani

A little more than four years ago, Zohran Mamdani announced from a lectern in Manhattan’s City Hall Park that he was about to go on hunger strike. He hoped that, by doing so, he would push politicians to provide debt relief for New York City cab drivers. “I will be on strike for as long as it takes,” Mamdani said. “We are going to be moving all of my meetings. All of my calls. All of my office duties. I will be taking them from this protest site.”

As I stood in the park that day, it wasn’t clear just how long “as long as it takes” might mean. Or if it would be enough at all. Mamdani had been an Assemblymember representing Astoria, Queens, for less than a year at that point. Fresh off a birthday, he was only three days clear of his twenties.

But when I spoke with Mamdani and taxi driver Richard Chow a few minutes after both stopped eating, there was uncommon resolve and humility. “What I will go through pales in comparison to what Richard is going to go through and what so many other of the drivers are going to go through,” Mamdani told me. “The face of this hunger strike are people who have ruined their bodies for the city. Sitting in a chair for up to 16 hours a day.”

Taxi workers dancing in 2021 to celebrate their victory following the 15-day hunger strike pic.twitter.com/736WtAvcV5

— Noah Lanard (@nlanard) November 4, 2025

Looking back, all the key elements of Mamdani’s mayoral campaign were there. Debt relief for taxi drivers who’d been the victims of financial schemes was, in many ways, a fight for a more affordable city. Then there was the already obvious charisma. The specific knowledge of New Yorker’s struggles. The message discipline. The moral core of solidarity rooted in leftist organizing. The contagious optimism. And, most importantly, the belief that he could win.

Five days later, Mamdani had traded his suit for jeans and a New York Taxi Workers Alliance sweatshirt. In an act of civil disobedience, he and other New York elected officials then sat down to block traffic in Lower Manhattan. With cameras watching, NYPD officers lifted them to their feet, zip-tied their hands, and loaded them into a waiting police van.

Mamdani being placed into a NYPD van following an act of civil disobedience.

The next time I returned was Day 13. Chow, then 63 and living with diabetes, had started using a wheelchair. “We don’t have a choice,” he’d told me nearly two weeks before. “I don’t know how long I can stay here. This is our last moment to fight.” The fight was one tinged with tragedy for him. In 2018, Chow’s brother had died by suicide after purchasing a medallion for more than $750,000 and ending up deeply in debt.

It was not clear then, but the end was in sight. Two days later—on Day 15 of the hunger strike—the taxi drivers won.

Reversing course, Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed to a deal that capped debt loads at $170,000 and monthly payments at about $1,100. At the protest site, Mamdani took the bullhorn. “This is just the beginning of solidarity,” he shouted. “We are going to fight together until there is nothing left in this world to win.”

Moments later, Mamdani, Chow, and other hunger strikers broke the fast as they bit into halves of avocados. Chow stood briefly, then returned to his wheelchair—a fist raised in solidarity. Others celebrated with unrestrained joy.

Years later, in May 2025, I ran into Chow and his fellow taxi drivers again. This time, at a Williamsburg music venue, as they waited for Mamdani to take the stage at the first major rally of the campaign.

Mamdani was still the underdog at that point, but they’d seen him overcome the odds before. And soondid so again when Mamdani beat former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the primary.

On Thursday night, as his campaign came to a close, Mamdani was back where he began—with members of the Taxi Workers Alliance.

“Hello, Mr. Mayor Mamdani,” Chow said as they embraced. “I love you. We miss you.”

“I miss you, too,” Mamdani replied.

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Trump Sure Seems Eager to Starve the Poor

As the government shutdown slouches toward a historic milestone for the longest in US history, the high-stakes battle over SNAP—the country’s largest and most critical food aid program—once again devolved into chaos on Tuesday after the president issued his latest social media rant.

“SNAP BENEFITS, which increased by Billions and Billions of Dollars (MANY FOLD!) during Crooked Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office (Due to the fact that they were haphazardly ‘handed’ to anyone for the asking, as opposed to just those in need, which is the purpose of SNAP!), will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!” he declared on Truth Social.

At first, the post appeared to be a stunning reversal of what had transpired almost exactly 24 hours earlier: On Monday, the Trump administration had said that it would comply with federal court orders to send at least partial payments to SNAP beneficiaries—after missing scheduled payments this weekend for the first time in the program’s 61-year history. (The administration, however, refused to use additional sources of funding that could provide full payments to the nearly 42 million Americans—39 percent of whom are children—who depend on the program.) Two judges last week found the government’s claim that it could not use any emergency funds to keep SNAP benefits flowing amid the shutdown to be meritless, with one ordering the government to draw up plans by noon on Monday for how it would restore payments.

So did Trump’s Tuesday social media post indicate that his administration was again reversing course and would now defy multiple federal judges? Asked to clarify on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the administration still intended to “fully comply” with the court order. Leavitt said that she had spoken with the president and that—contrary to the plain meaning of his words—he was actually referring to future SNAP benefits once the contingency funds are exhausted.

One could argue that Trump’s Truth Social post was yet another effort to sow confusion, or that the president of the United States was once again posting without control—that it was harmless incompetence, even worth ignoring.But look closer and it distills the degree to which Trump and his Republican allies have been talking out of both sides of their mouths, as they lambast SNAP and its beneficiaries with misleading and often racist attacks, while arguing that it’s Democrats who are to blame for the pain.

Trump’s post also appears to evince his central stance in the fight over SNAP—that he is unwilling to help those in the greatest need purely because of politics, even when he is legally required to do so and when his own administration has already agreed to comply. That amid horrendously long lines at food banks around the country, the president is willing to let Americans go hungry.

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Dick Cheney and the Big Lie That Should Never Be Forgotten

In the final years of his life, Dick Cheney earned praise for breaking with his beloved Republican Party and defying Donald Trump, warning that Trump was a “threat to the republic.” That was commendable—and something of a counter to the efforts he made during his vice presidency to increase the power of the commander in chief and lay the foundation for the imperial presidency that Trump now seeks to establish. But Cheney, who died at the age of 84 on Monday, never addressed the worst transgression of his decades in politics and government: his deployment of lies to grease the way to the Iraq invasion that led to the deaths of more than 4,400 US soldiers and 200,000 or so Iraqi civilians.

There’s been much debate in the past two decades over whether Cheney and President George W. Bush, in the aftermath of the horrific 9/11 attack, lied to the public when they asserted that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had built up an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, was in league with Al Qaeda, and, thus, posed an imminent threat to the United States. Their defenders have long insisted that they merely relied on and conveyed bad intelligence produced by the intelligence community. But that case doesn’t hold up.

As Michael Isikoff and I showed in our 2006 book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, Bush and Cheney repeatedly made false public statements about Saddam and the danger he presented that were unsupported by intelligence, and they routinely ignored the intelligence that raised questions about Saddam’s WMDs and his ties to Al Qaeada—which each turned out to be nonexistent. Cheney instructed his lieutenants within the national security establishment to cherry-pick bits of intelligence—often unconfirmed or contradicted—that supported the claims he and Bush were spewing. For instance, he cited Saddam’s possession of certain aluminum tubes as compelling evidence the Iraqi tyrant was enriching uranium for nuclear weapons—even though government scientists disputed this conclusion.

Whenever the question of Bush and Cheney’s selling of the war arises, their loyalists try to pin the blame on the CIA and others for the missing WMDs debacle. Langley, perhaps too eager to give Bush and Cheney what they craved, did, to a large extent, screw up the job. But Cheney was the guy who set that all in motion.

When assessing Cheney’s dishonesty, it’s only necessary to start at the beginning.

In the summer of 2002, as the first anniversary of 9/11 approached, the Bush-Cheney White House launched a campaign to persuade the American public that a war against Saddam was necessary. At the time, that was not a consensus view on Capitol Hill or among Americans. In fact, in mid-August, Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-La.) called Cheney and told him that he believed public opinion was not yet with Bush and Cheney and that he himself didn’t believe the “predicate” for war had been established.

“Don’t worry,” Cheney told Lott, according to Lott’s memoir. “We’re about to fix all that.”

A short time later, on August 26, 2002, Cheney delivered a speech at a national convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville, Tennessee, which was loaded with hair-raising rhetoric. “The Iraqi regime,” he declared, “has in fact been very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents.” He proclaimed, “We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons… Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.” He professed that nuclear weapons inspections would be pointless. He cut to the chase: “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

No doubt. The veep said, no doubt. But he was lying. There was plenty of doubt.

Sitting on the stage for that speech was General Anthony Zinni, a former commander in chief of US Central Command who at the time was a special envoy to the Middle East. He later recalled,

It was a shock. It was a total shock. I couldn’t believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program. And that’s when I began to believe they’re getting serious about this. They wanna go into Iraq.

Over the previous year and a half, top national security officials had repeatedly stated publicly and testified to Congress that Iraq was not a serious WMD threat to the United States. In March 2002, Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Iraq was not among the five most pressing “near-term” security concerns for the United States that he listed. Wilson noted that UN sanctions and the American military presence in the region had succeeded in “restraining Saddam’s ambitions” and his military had been “significantly degraded.” He told the senators that Saddam might have “residual” amounts of weapons of mass destruction but no growing arsenal. He made no reference to any nuclear program or any ties Saddam might have to al Qaeda.

In his VFW speech, Cheney stated with no ambiguity that Saddam had assembled oodles of WMDs to use against the United States. The US government had no clear evidence of that. The iffy intelligence that Bush and Cheney would later cite was still to come. But this speech makes clear Cheney’s intent. He was willing to exaggerate and dissemble to get his war. He aimed to scare and bamboozle the American public with lies.

Cheney, who had been defense secretary for President George H.W. Bush during the first Gulf War, was hell-bent on launching this invasion to finish off Saddam. And like his boss, W., he did little to prepare for what would happen after US troops stormed into Iraq and toppled the Saddam. That was as big a transgression as the false sales pitch for the war. From the get-go, this was an enterprise of recklessness and deceit.

Cheney, as has been widely noted since his death was announced, had a remarkable career. He was a White House chief of staff (the youngest ever), a congressman, a Cabinet member, and a vice president, as well as the CEO of Halliburton. He did much to affect the world. (He encouraged the United States to engage in torture.) But the Iraq war was his most consequential action. It caused death, suffering, and loss for so many and created instability in the region that resonates to this day. It was a colossal miscalculation, one of the worse in US history. But more than that, it was one big lie. It was Dick Cheney’s lie.

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If the Trump Administration Wants More Babies, It Shouldn’t Let Poor Families Go Hungry

The Trump administration is thinking about your family.

This may come as a surprise, given that dozens of states and a coalition of nonprofits, local governments, and religious groups had to sue to compel the Department of Agriculture to release funding Congress set aside to keep food assistance (SNAP benefits) flowing to America’s poorest during a crisis, like the ongoing shutdown. (The agency now says it will comply, if only partially.)

Yes, this administration is thinking about your family—but in ways that are largely unhelpful and somewhat creepy.

Republican administrations have long obsessed over the integrity of the conventional nuclear family. From Ronald Reagan to Bush 43, presidents have engaged in quixotic (and expensive) campaigns to boost the marriage rate. The Trumpists, with Vice President JD Vance taking the lead, have a slightly different focus: They want to convince us to make more babies. Never mind that they aren’t taking care of the children we already have.

The pro-natalist movement is neither new nor restricted to conservatives, but the current iteration is a logical product of the Trumpian flirtation with blood-and-soil nationalism. The administration seeks to promote a culture of motherhood, educate women on how to get pregnant, and take one more shot at increasing the marriage rate—all in an attempt to counter leftist cultural changes that conservatives claim are responsible for smaller families and declining birthrates. It’s all red meat to the Great Replacement theorists in the GOP base.

Trump’s big bill will reduce the after-tax income of the bottom income quintile—the poorest fifth of American households—by an estimated 3 percent.

This push for natalism includes scattershot economic components. The administration has sought to prioritize funding for roads in places with higher birth rates, and to reserve a portion of federally funded scholarships such as the Fulbright for parents. More importantly, it intends to compensate mothers for giving birth.

The wildly unpopular One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), which Trump signed into law in July, guarantees each newborn a $1,000 “Trump account” and encourages parents to contribute up to $5,000 a year until the “baby” turns 18—at which point it changes into something like an individual retirement account. The law also increases the child tax credit and indexes it to inflation. Such initiatives are broadly popular and have at least some bipartisan appeal. (Democrats pushed for an expanded child credit under President Joe Biden last year, but Senate Republicans, who aimed to portray their rivals as, to quote Vance, “anti-family and anti-child,” killed the bill to deny the Democrats a win. Subsidies for college and retirement savings have proved popular with both parties, even though the benefits flow overwhelmingly to the rich.)

The average cost of raising a child in the United States is well over $15,000 a year, so every little bit helps. Still, as sociologists and coauthors of the recent book Thanks for Nothing: The Economics of Single Motherhood Since 1980, we were underwhelmed by the giveaways in Trump’s big bill, which takes a lot more than it gives—a fact underscored by the administration’s eagerness to withhold those food stamp benefits.

The baby bonds and child tax credit are weak sauce when held up against the bill’s drastic cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, which are to be accomplished largely through work requirements. Beneficiaries with children 14 or older are now required to work or volunteer at least 80 hours a month. And while that may sound reasonable, the real purpose, as Mother Jones has documented, is to impose new bureaucratic hurdles—think bewildering web portals and DOGE-decimated tech support conjoined by red tape—so onerous that tens of millions of otherwise eligible Americans will simply give up. When the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said as much in its analysis of the legislation, Trump and his congressional allies predictably responded by attacking the messenger.

The Republicans’ justification of work requirements to ensure that only the “truly needy”—the deserving poor—get government support, harks back to the Reagan-era war on government support for families. During the 1980s, bloviation about “welfare queens” and “government dependency” helped shift the political rhetoric away from economic policies that actually improve the lives of families with children—who make up more than one-third of SNAP recipients. (Curiously, neither the OBBB nor the shutdown has imperiled WIC, a separate program that provides limited additional assistance to new mothers.)

While government assistance has become less important for single mothers overall, it is a lifeline for those at the bottom.

The GOP’s supposed pro-natalist policies, meanwhile, grievously fail to account for the broader needs of families with children. The Yale Budget Lab calculated that Trump’s big bill will cost the bottom income quintile—the poorest fifth of US households—about 3 percent of their after-tax income when you factor in lost Medicaid and SNAP benefits. Those families will owe a little less tax on earned income but lose a lot more thanks to the spending cuts.

In addition, the Trump tariffs, which amount to a regressive sales tax, will fall hardest on families struggling to make ends meet, costing those bottom-quintile families about $1,000 more per year, according to the budget lab’s latest estimates.

Contrary to the pro-natalist rhetoric, the administration’s policies will wreak particular havoc on the lives of single mothers, who raise almost a quarter of the nation’s children. In the book, we show that family structure has a deep and abiding relationship to poverty. Not all single-parent families are poor, of course, but incomes within the single-mother category have grown increasingly unequal. This isn’t because a new, large class of uber-rich single moms has emerged, but rather because our nation has created a new underclass of uber-poor ones.

Federal policy has much to do with this. In the wake of Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform legislation, many women successfully transitioned from government aid into the booming job market of the late 1990s, abetted by an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which gives cash back to low- and middle-income workers.

But wealth and income inequality, accelerated by decades of Republican “trickle-down” tax cuts, became even more pronounced as the bull economy petered out with the recessions of the 21st century. And although some single mothers thrived in the workforce, others didn’t earn enough to qualify for the EITC, and could no longer count on federal cash welfare. Now, with the passage of Trump’s signature legislation, many won’t qualify for Medicaid or food assistance either.

Why would any politician who claims to care about families support this? Well, Congress has taken Trump’s side in an ideological war over how the US government approaches its obligation to America’s children. The administration’s position is that it’s the government’s job to encourage people to have more kids, preach the merits of marriage (between an actual man and an actual woman), and give couples a little cash to start a family. Pro-natalism will, they believe, lead to economic growth and prosperous families that are solely responsible for their children’s welfare—if families are struggling, it’s because the parents aren’t working hard enough.

When it comes to alleviating poverty, offering tax cuts to families who don’t earn enough to benefit from them won’t cut it.

This theory of prosperity supplants the older social democratic ideal: that the purpose of family policy is to guarantee all children a minimum quality of life, and to help ensure they can achieve their potential in a capitalist society that inevitably leaves some families behind. Hardly a leftist, Benjamin Disraeli, who served two stints as Britain’s prime minister during the 1800s, articulated this ideal when he wrote that “power has only one duty: to secure the social welfare of the People.”

As we demonstrate in Thanks for Nothing, many single mothers do manage to make it in the labor market. Today mothers have more job experience and are more likely to work even when they have young children. They also have more education, and thus better jobs. Yet a subset of single mothers have fallen behind, especially the increasing proportion who have children out of wedlock. Surveys show that many would like to be married, but that’s just not always a viable option in communities of unemployed and under-employed men.

The median income for never-married mothers has remained essentially stagnant over the past 40 years, while the bottom 10 percent of this group has seen shrinking incomes and today basically has zero work income. While government assistance has become less important for single mothers overall, it is a lifeline for those at the bottom. The level of support was never great, but it provided essential subsistence. The bill Congress passed in July will make the lives of these women and children even worse, and the administration has made clear that it will make no effort to remedy that.

Mitigating family poverty requires federal action, not just reliance on the labor market as it’s currently constituted. The conversation lawmakers should be having involves debating which policies might actually make a difference. A universal basic income? The wage subsidies proposed by conservative think tanker Oren Cass? Or perhaps the refundable child tax credits proposed by then-senator Mitt Romney in 2019?

Reagan was not wrong when he praised the effectiveness of the EITC as an anti-poverty tool, but it’s clear that the labor market has failed many single mothers and their children. Offering tax cuts to families who don’t earn enough to benefit from them won’t cut it. Until the government can muster up real, honest discussions on how to support all American families, it’s hard to imagine the Trump administration’s policies moving anyone, except maybe MAGA trad wives, to procreate.

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The Tariffs Case Is About Power and Loyalty on the Right

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over President Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on almost every nation on earth, in ever-changing amounts, whenever he feels like it. Legally, this is a case about any number of complicatedquestions and legal doctrines, including the president’s ability to declare emergencies under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, the court’s novel major questions doctrine, its dormant non-delegation doctrine, the proper venue for challenging the tariffs, and the proper statutory interpretation of IEEPA.

“This is not just a battle over tariffs.” It’s a battle over just who is in charge of the GOP.

But these questions will almost certainly be window-dressing on a decision driven by how Chief Justice John Roberts and the other five Republican appointees navigate between the two stakeholders in this case: the powerful billionaires and business interests behind the challenge to the tariffs and Trump’s desire to transform the economy into an arm of his personalist rule.

“This is not just a battle over tariffs,” explains Evan Bernick of the Northern Illinois University College of Law. “It is a battle between competing political economies within the American right. And how it works out will speak to just who ultimately has hegemony, who… is shaping the law of the United States.” While Bernick expects the businesses and states challenging the tariffs to prevail, “if they do not,” he says, “that tells me things about the relative power of these competing factions that I did not previously know.”

In February and again in April, Trump cited IEEPA when imposing his sweeping—and sometimes very high—tariffs, some of which he went on to pause. Whilethe Constitution grants Congress the power to impose tariffs, Trump claimed his actions were a legitimate use of that 1977 law, which gives presidents power to respond to “any unusual and extraordinary threat” from abroad, even though IEEPA doesn’t specifically name tariffs as an available tool. The court is hearing two consolidated cases brought by multiple small businesses. Some of the companies’ challenges were brought with support from ideologically conservative and libertarian nonprofits funded by wealthy Republican-allied donors, most notably the Koch network.

For decades,the Kochs and their fellow-traveling tycoons, along with the religious right, channeled millions of dollars into a project to capture the Supreme Court, successfullycreating a loyal 6-3 conservative majority. Beginning in 2005 with Roberts’ nomination, the Federalist Society vetted Republican nominees and their allies helped win their confirmations with lots of money. As Lisa Graves, who leads the judicial watchdog group True North Research and has published a new book on Roberts, recently told me, “Roberts is really the beneficiary of the first billionaire-backed campaign to capture the US Supreme Court.” He’s spent the last 20 years implementing their agenda.

The Roberts Court consistently rules for the interests of this small set of billionaire politicaldonors, whose money flowed to the Federalist Society and other activist groups that helped each of the Republican-appointed justices reach the high court. Further, under Roberts, these members of the court have increased the political power of the GOP and its wealthiest patrons. For example, the court has been dismantling the Voting Rights Act to the benefit of the GOP, a project they will likely finish in the next few months. It has alsocut the power of labor unions, and, by overturning the long-held practice of courts deferring to agency expertise, declared open season on federal regulations that industry dislikes. In its stead, the justices invented the major questions doctrine to justify striking down executive regulations the court decides are “major” and that don’t have clear authorization from Congress, and created increasingly radical interpretations of the unitary executive theory that have weakened agency independence so that partisan politics can destroy industry regulation.

This clear preference for moneyed interests was detailed by employment lawyer Scott Budow in a 2021 law review article on how the Roberts Court has changed labor and employment law. He discussed 15 cases in which the justices cast a collective 134 votes. “There is no unifying judicial philosophy—such as originalism or textualism—that neatly explains why conservative justices would reliably vote in one manner and liberal justices in the opposite manner for these cases,” he concluded. “Yet, if all one knew was that conservative justices favor employers and liberal justices favor workers, that person would have correctly predicted 132 of the 134 votes cast.” That is 98.5 percent of the time.

“Trying to interpret or anticipate what’s going to happen in cases involving Trump inside the four corners of legal reasoning will fail, and hasn’t really explained almost anything the Robert’s court [has done] for the last 20 years,” says Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO. “Instead, if you step back and think about the interests that elevated the six of them to the court, then that is really very clarifying.”

This case has big business going up against the president.

In their2022 book The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and attorney Jennifer Mueller breakdown not only the story of how a small handful of rightwing families and groups channeled millions to put allies on the court, but how they also fund an array of legal outfits to bring cases and file amicus briefs—filings that help to signal to the justices which way their benefactors hope they will rule. As Whitehouse and Mueller write, between 2014 and 2020, 16 rightwing foundations gave nearly $69 million to 11 groups that filed amicus curiae briefsurging thecourt to hobble the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which guards against predatory financial industry practices, as well as more than $33 million to the Federalist Society. These groups include the Washington Legal Fund, the Pacific Legal Foundation, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, and the Liberty Justice Center—all of which have used Koch money to challenge labor unions and weaken government regulations. Repeatedly, the GOP wing of the court has handed theseorganizations, and their donors, major victories.

Those same four legal groups that worked so hard to disempower unions and destroy the regulatory state are now before the court with a new request: stop Trump’s arbitrary tariffs. They have a strong case, at least under the Roberts court’s precedents—after all, the justices have created a brand new doctrine, the major questions doctrine, and used it tostrike down regulations without clear statutory authorization that industry doesn’t like. Tariffs on nearly every nation are by every measure “major” actions that can make or break businesses and reshape both the US and world economies.

But unlike in other major questions doctrine cases, when industry was pitted against Democratic priorities like environmental regulations or student debt relief programs that the six conservative justices struck down, this case has the business community going up against the president.

Trump, too, has been on a winning streak before the six GOP justices, who have repeatedly used their emergency or shadow docket to greenlight the president’s agenda, from slashing the federal bureaucracy to detaining suspected immigrants based on the color of their skin. As of last month, Trump had won some 21 emergency appeals to the court. The Republican wing even restricted lower courts’ authority to grant relief from Trump’s policies. The logical conclusion is that the justices are either on board with Trump’s authoritarian project, protective of his political coalition, or possibly also afraid to cross him for fear he disobeys their orders.Perhaps it is a combination of these factors, but the result is a court that contorts itself—or remains completely silent—in order to repeatedly rule in Trump’s favor. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissent in August, analogizing her colleagues jurisprudence to a make-believe game from Calvin and Hobbes: “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”

But this time, the administration is up against the court’s other preferred client, and one of their winning streaks must come to an end. One view of what’s coming starts with the solid premisethat while ultrawealthy business interests don’t agree with all of Trump’s agenda, they prefer him to a Democrat. If we presume that Roberts and the court’s other Federalist Society recruits similarly view Trump as an essential—even if often misguided—element of their project, then they will try to limit his tariffs without strongly rebuking him. “I think the calculus that they’re going through is basically, ‘Would trying to stop him there lead to electoral defeat, or not? Is it too damaging to them?’” says Podhorzer, who also expects the court “at a minimum” will “do something that trims or constrains” Trump’s claimed tariff powers.

“It’s important to look at whatever they end up doing as a reflection of where that business community is right now,” he adds. A decisive victory for Trump might signal that big business will tolerate a tariff regime in which they write multi-million dollar checks to Trump’s ballroom project in exchange for waivers—although they don’t seem to be there yet because, after all, they did helpbring this challenge in the first place. A big Trump win could also signal that the justices themselves sense a fundamental shift in where power lies on the right, from the moneyed interests that created the court to the openly authoritarian MAGA movement.

Legally, there are a lot of ways the justices could resolve this case. But it will be more illuminating to think of the Republican wing not as judges weighing arguments but as mediators seeking a compromise between two competing factions of the same team.

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For at Least One Small Iowa Rancher, This Shutdown May Prove the Final Straw

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

Last June, record flooding swept through the rural town of Rock Valley, Iowa. As the wall of water began to overtake Chelsie Ver Mulm’s 10-acre plot of land, she rushed into action, rapidly evacuating her family’s gaggle of cows, sheep, chickens, pigs, horses, and goats to higher ground. When the floodwaters receded, Ver Mulm returned to find much of her family’s farm, equipment, and pasture destroyed. In the days and weeks that followed, more than a dozen animals died from stress and diseases contracted from the flood.

From there, the costs of rebuilding continued to climb. Because the flood had ravaged the surrounding areas, Orange Creek Farms also lost many of its customers, who were grappling with damages of their own and could no longer afford to buy local food. All the while, Ver Mulm kept applying to emergency USDA loans and disaster relief programs—only to be denied again and again as the tiny operation confronted burdensome application issues and eligibility restrictions.

Because of the steep costs of recovery, the farm has fallen behind on its bills, and caring for a bigger herd became too expensive. Now, Orange Creek Farms is down from 40 cattle to just four. All told, the flood put the business in a “really, really bad spot,” according to Ver Mulm.

So in April, almost a year after the flood, she made a last-ditch effort to turn things around, applying for a USDA Rural Development grant that she was hoping could help them offset their losses and keep the business afloat.

When the government shutdown began more than a month ago, the USDA furloughed the vast majority of the remaining workforce and brought most services to a sudden halt. Ver Mulm still hadn’t heard back about her application—and now the waiting is itself becoming the problem.

As the shutdown nears a historic, yet grim, milestone, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it has already created financial losses of at least $7 billion for the US economy. Battling some of the most consequential impacts of these losses are those who grow and sell the food we eat—especially the farmers and ranchers also dealing with the compounding effects of extreme weather and an eroding federal safety net.

Approximately 20,000 Department of Agriculture staffers have lost their jobs this year—a rapid and radical transformation of the agency resulting in administrative struggles, overworked employees, and significant delays in processing of payments and financial assistance applications.

This summer, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins released a controversial reorganization plan that experts expect to result in further staff reductions and a skeleton workforce. The USDA announced last week that approximately 2,100 county-level USDA Farm Service Agency offices would be reopened beginning Thursday, October 23, with two staffers reinstated per office, to help farmers get access to $3 billion in aid from existing programs, though further details about what programs, payments, and services will be resumed and to what extent remain unclear.

All the while, small farmers and ranchers have spent the last 10 months facing off against mounting pressures wrought by major administrative changes to food and agriculture policy that have exacerbated the nation’s exceedingly volatile farm economy.

The impact on producers, whose businesses require advance planning—in a time of the year normally filled with finalizing future growing plans, buying seeds and other resources, and shoring up winter reserves—will only grow the longer the shutdown persists.

And so will the broader economic and societal ripple effects unfurling nationwide: The Trump administration initially declared that it would not tap into billions of dollars in emergency funding that Congress set aside to maintain the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program during times of crisis. Without that funding, the USDA said that SNAP benefits, used by nearly 42 million Americans who struggle to afford groceries, would be suspended on November 1. (SNAP is also a crucial source of income for many small farmers.)

Last week, after more than two dozen states—and, separately, a coalition of local governments, nonprofits, and religious groups—sued the USDA, two federal courts ruled that the department must tap into those contingency funds to cover at least some of the SNAP benefits for November. On Monday, the Trump administration said it would comply, but would not fund the program further—and that there would be only partial payments this month.

Prior to the rulings, Secretary Rollins blamed Democrats for the shutdown and possible loss of benefits for millions of Americans, while stating (falsely) that the department did not have the legal authority to distribute the agency’s contingency funding. In a Friday press conference, she criticized SNAP, remarking that the shutdown exposed a program that, under the purview of the Biden administration, became “so corrupt.”

The USDA did not immediately respond to Grist’s request for comment.

Meanwhile, Hill policymakers have continued to sling accusations across the aisle in their budget standoff over federal healthcare. Trump has urged congressional Republicans to unilaterally end the shutdown by getting rid of the filibuster, an unprecedented move by the president, though many GOP senators remain in support of the rule. If Congress is still at an impasse come early next week, it would mark the longest shutdown in US history.

Every day of delay brings more prolonged uncertainty to farmers like Ver Mulm. Even if lawmakers manage to vote to reopen the government in the near future, the second-generation Iowa farmer worries that the backlog USDA staffers will be facing after all the time spent furloughed, compounded by the already-strained workforce, will translate to further bottlenecks.

Over the last year, Ver Mulm has drained her savings to stave off having to sell the farm, living off of credit cards. Now, her credit score is shot, and Orange Creek Farms is on the cusp of insolvency. And with each day that passes with the government remaining in limbo, the small window to save their farm gets smaller. Ver Mulm is emotionally preparing herself for what’s to come—a growing likelihood that her family will soon need to close the chapter on feeding their community. “We’ve exhausted all of our options,” she said. “This grant is our last chance to keep the farm going. It’s our last lifeline.”

This story was updated from the original version to reflect the latest news related to the emergency SNAP funding.

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What Tuesday’s Elections Mean for the Future of Abortion Access

Abortion may not technically beon the ballot in Tuesday’s off-year state elections, but in the post-Roe v. Wade era, abortion is always on the ballot. Since the US Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling that ended the federal right to abortion, statewide elections have become opportunities for reproductive rights supporters and opponents alike to expand or limit access to care by voting on the politicians who create the laws, the judges who enforce them, and, sometimes, on the laws themselves.

When voters have had the opportunity to weigh in directly on ballot measures enshrining abortion protections, those measures have mostly won, even in red states. When the vote is indirect—that is, for people rather than policies—the results are much more mixed. Just consider what happened in 2024,when states that approved abortion-rights measures also went for anti-abortion judges and Donald Trump. This week’s elections are the first time that large numbers of voters can express their feelings about the country’s radical change in direction under Trump 2.0. In five states, the results will also have major statewide and even national implications for access to reproductive care.

CALIFORNIA

California’s Proposition 50, the blockbuster redistricting measure designed to stop Republicans from rigging next year’s midterm elections, will affect all kinds of democratic rights, including reproductive autonomy. Prop 50 would temporarily suspend California’s current congressional maps, which were drawn by an independent citizens commission, and allow the Democratic-controlled legislature to create new maps that would remain in place through 2030. Governor Gavin Newsom and his allies got the idea after Texas lawmakers, buckling to Trump’s demands, redrew their congressional map to elect more Republicans—potentially enough to keep the US House of Representatives under GOP control in 2026 and beyond. If approved by voters, Prop 50 could sufficiently alter the partisan makeup of California’s House delegation—currently 43 Democrats and nine Republicans—to effectively negate the Texas redistricting effort. Polls show that California voters are very much on board.

Republicans currently have a slim six-seat majority in the House; a wider margin could empower them to unleash all manner of new legislative horrors on the country, including, potentially, an extension of this year’s temporary defunding of Planned Parenthood and even a national ban on abortion after 15 or 20 weeks of pregnancy. A Democratic majority, on the other hand, would bring the GOP legislative machine in Congress grinding to a halt. With so much at stake, total spending by both sides is well north of $175 million. During a press call, Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, described the GOP efforts to further gerrymander red states as “a naked attempt to steal congressional seats” and “an emergency for our democracy.” Prop 50, addedJohn Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, is “a defensive shield for our democracy and for reproductive rights.”

NEW JERSEY

New Jersey voters will pick a new governor and all 80 members of the General Assembly. With Democrats currently holding a 52-to-28 majority there—and a 25-15 margin in the state Senate—most of the attention has been on the tight race between Democratic congresswoman Mikie Sherrill and Republican ex-assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli, to replace termed-out Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy. Recent polls show Sherrill—a former Navy helicopter pilot and onetime federal prosecutor—narrowly ahead. But Ciattarelli, who nearly ousted Murphy in the 2021 race, is hoping he can ride Donald Trump’s 2024 coattails to victory on Tuesday. (Trump didn’t win the state but made huge gains compared to 2020.) New Jersey’s pattern of flip-flopping between Democratic and Republican governors may be another factor in Ciattarelli’s favor: No party has held the office for three consecutive terms since 1961.

Months before Roe was overturned, New Jersey lawmakers passed the Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act, enshrining protections for abortion care into state law; Sherrill would go further, adding these protections to the state constitution. Ciattarelli, by contrast, would ban abortion after 20 weeks (currently there are no gestational limits), end coverage under state Medicaid, and require parental consent for minors. A Democratic legislature, however, would thwart any efforts to put those policies in place.

But Ciattarelli would be able to stop new reproductive protections from becoming law—for example, potential legislative efforts to strengthen the state’s shield laws that protect abortion providers who care for out-of-state patients. Reproductive rights advocates point to what happened during the tenure of Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who was in office from 2010 to 2018, during which he repeatedly vetoed funding for family planning. “We’ve been here before, and we know what we could expect under a Ciattarelli governorship,” Kaitlyn Wojtowicz of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund of New Jersey told the New Jersey Monitor. “It would be devastating for public health.”

PENNSYLVANIA

For decades after Roe v. Wade became the law of the land, Pennsylvania activists and politicians led the fight to narrow its reach—if not overturn it altogether. These days, despite Roe’s reversal, Pennsylvania continues to allow abortion through 23 weeks of pregnancy, albeit with significant restrictions, including a 24-hour waiting period, bans on Medicaid coverage, and a parental consent requirement for minors. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court demonstrated last year just how much the state has shifted, ruling that the 42-year-old Medicaid ban is a form of sex-based discrimination under the state’s Equal Rights Amendment. The decision suggested that courts might be open to throwing out other abortion restrictions that lawmakers—with Republicans controlling the Senate and Democrats holding a single-seat majority in the House—seem unlikely to repeal anytime soon.

On November 4, the Democratic justices responsible for that ruling—Kevin Dougherty, Christine Donohue, and David Wecht—will come before voters in a retention election with enormous consequences not just for abortion, but for next year’s midterm elections and the 2028 presidential election in a crucial swing state. This is the same court, after all, that struck down Pennsylvania’s congressional map in 2018 as an unconstitutional gerrymander and rejected complaints about election monitoring by Trump’s 2020 campaign.

The three justices were first elected in 2015, in a sweep that flipped the court to Democrats. If they win on Tuesday—and in the state’s history, only one justice has ever lost a retention vote—they will serve for up to another 10 years. If they lose, only two Democrats and two Republicans will remain, and the next judicial election will not take place until 2027. Political infighting in the meantime would hamper efforts by Democratic governor Josh Shapiro to appoint temporary replacements—a situation that Justice Donohue told the Associated Press could lead to “chaos.” Spending in the races is expected to exceed $15 million—far surpassing previous retention elections—as Democrats try to blunt Republican efforts to retake the court.

TEXAS

Texas parentshave long had the right to oversee their children’s education and health care and direct their upbringing. Those protections got a lot stronger this year, with the passage of Senate Bill 12—the “Texas Parents Bill of Rights”—which, among other things, requires schools to obtain parental consent before students can receive health services, including counseling, or participate in school clubs and organizations. But that bill—and a slew of other new laws that make it easier for parents to challenge the policies and curricula in schools that they don’t like—still weren’t enough for Texas’s parental-rights extremists. Lawmakers also approved Proposition 15, a constitutional amendment on Tuesday’s ballot that would enshrine a parent’s rights “to exercise care, custody, and control of the parent’s child, including the right to make decisions concerning the child’s upbringing. ” It would also enshrine a parent’s responsibility “to nurture and protect [their] child.”

Supporters claim the constitutional amendment is needed to ensure that parents’ rights can’t someday be repealed. Opponents say the amendment would make it even harder for minors to access contraception and sex education, and for LGBTQ kids to navigate an ever-more-hostile political environment. Prop 15’s vagueness and allusions to parental “responsibility” are also concerning. The measure would “open the door for another parent’s personal beliefs to strip rights from other people’s children and their families,” the reproductive justice group Avow Texas warns, and could lead to “delays in young people getting care, censorship in schools, and increased family policing.”

Opponents’ other big fear is that Prop 15 will inspire conservative lawmakers in other red states to pass copycat bills. Denise Rodriguez of the Texas Equal Access Fund says the ballot measure is “about perpetuating the culture wars” and conservatives’ desire to crush dissent: “They want to do everything that they can to control the way that people live.”

VIRGINIA

Virginians will choose a new governor to replace Republican Glenn Youngkin, who is barred from running for a second consecutive term, as well as a new lieutenant governor, attorney general, and members of the 100-seat House of Delegates. According to recent polls, Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer and three-term congresswoman, is leading her Republican opponent, current Lieutenant Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, in the race to become the state’s first female governor. That comes as a relief to abortion rights supporters, given Earle-Sears’s past statements equating abortion to “genocide” and supporting a six-week ban. Virginia is the only Southern state that hasn’t restricted abortion in the post-Dobbs era; the procedure remains legal through 21 weeks of pregnancy, which has made it a destination for patients from around the South who can no longer obtain care where they live.

The real battle over the fate of abortion in Virginia is taking place in legislative races. Democrats now control both chambers of the General Assembly—the House of Delegates by a 51-48 margin and the state Senate by 21-19. That narrow majority allowed Democrats to pass a proposed ballot amendment this past winter that could let voters decide whether to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution. But under Virginia law, legislators must pass the amendment again during the 2026 session; then voters will get the final say next November. Republicans are targeting a few key races in Tuesday’s election in hopes of flipping control of the House and derailing the constitutional amendment. (The next elections for the state Senate take place in 2027.)

The House of Delegates races alsocould affect two other proposed constitutional amendments passed by lawmakers this year. One would restore voting rights for people with past felony convictions. The other would remove a ban on same-sex marriage from the state constitution—a now-defunct “zombie” law that could potentially be revived if the Supreme Court were to overturn its 2015 ruling that gave gay couples the right to marry. It’s a lesson Democrats learned after the Dobbs ruling: Counting on the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority to protect existing rights is dangerous. Especially when some of the same conservatives who worked so hard to overturn Roe are now gunning for gay marriage.

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Report: ICE Shot a US Citizen Trying to Help Kids

For the second time in a little over a week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers reportedly shot someone in Los Angeles, California. This time, it was a US citizen who ICE officers shot from behind while he was driving a car, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times.

“He was telling them, ‘Excuse me. Can you guys please, you know, please wrap this up.’ And immediately, the masked agent pulls out a gun.”

The victim was a 25-year-old named Carlos Jimenez, who is a father of three. He was shot after getting out of his car to tell ICE agents, who had pulled over a vehicle, that children would soon be gathering in that spot for the school bus, his lawyer, Cynthia Santiago, told the newspaper. The agents’ cars had blocked a southern lane on the road and jutted into a second lane, according to the LA Times. “He was telling them, ‘Excuse me. Can you guys please, you know, please wrap this up.’ And immediately, the masked agent pulls out a gun and exchanges some words,” Santiago told the newspaper.

The lawyers allege that Jimenez then got in his car, reversed because he was afraid, and was shot in the back of his right shoulder, where a bullet remains lodged. “Use of deadly force is to be used as a last resort,” Santiago said. “Coming out to communities with guns drawn is the opposite.”

ICE, for its part, has offered a more sinister characterization of the events. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), told the LA Times that Jimenez “attempted to run officers over by reversing directly at them without stopping” and that the shots were “defensive.” Jimenez was charged in federal court with assault on an officer and released on bond Friday.

In the ICE agent’s criminal complaint, filed in federal court on Friday, he claims Jimenez “engaged in a verbal altercation with the officers” and that the complaining officer then told Jimenez to leave and grabbed his pepper spray. As this unfolded, the complaint claims, Jimenez pulled his car forward and to the left, and then apparently turned and “rapidly accelerated in reverse.” One of the officers at the scene apparently “feared that the [Jimenez’s car] would hit [the officer]” and the car they had previously pulled over.

There does not yet appear to be any publicly available video of the incident. Jimenez’s condition was not immediately clear.

There have been other recent reports of immigration officers shootings. Between August and October, ICE officers reportedly shot into four cars—one in LA less than two weeks ago; two in Chicago, including one that was fatal; and one in San Bernardino.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, told the LA Times that the latest incident is “another example of the threats our ICE officers are facing day in and day out as they risk their lives to enforce the law and arrest criminals.”

But what it more likely indicates is even more proof that, as my colleague Noah Lanard wrote last week, ICE seems to pose a far greater danger to civilians than the other way around—contrary to the agency’s claims that they require the National Guard’s protection.

As he wrote:

A Mother Jones review shows that there is little evidence that ICE agents face such severe and widespread danger compared with other law enforcement agencies that they need military personnel to come to their aid or to break from centuries of public accountability by hiding behind masks.

The Trump administration has provided almost no information to back up its statements about rising assaults, which makes its claims hard to assess. But details about ICE officers who’ve died on the job are readily available on the agency’s website.

Those records show that none of ICE’s agents have ever been killed by an immigrant in the agency’s more than two-decade history. Instead, the leading cause of death by far among ICE officers is COVID-19.According to ICE’s data, the second leading cause of death is cancer linked to 9/11. (The pandemic and cancers connected to the September 11 terrorist attacks account for 75 percent of the deaths in ICE’s history.)

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Trump Brags He Could Invade Your City Whenever He Wants

In a wide-ranging Sunday night interview on CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” President Donald Trump put his desire for unchecked power on full display.

He bragged to correspondent Norah O’Donnell that, thanks to the Insurrection Act of 1792, he can invade your city whenever he wants. He said immigration raids—including acts of police violence such as using tear gas in residential neighborhoods, throwing people to the ground, and breaking car windows—”haven’t gone far enough.” And he said the government shutdown will last until Democrats in Congress bend to his will—or until Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) agrees to eliminate the filibuster, which Thune, so far, has rejected.

Here are some of the biggest takeaways from Trump’s comments on domestic policy:

Trump blamed the shutdown on the Democrats

As the federal government shutdown enters its fifth week—on pace to be the second-longest in history after the one that stretched from December 2018 into January 2019—O’Donnell had a straightforward question for Trump: “What are you doing as president to end the shutdown?” His answer? Blaming the Democrats.

“The Republicans are voting almost unanimously to end it, and the Democrats keep voting against ending it,” Trump said. “They’ve lost their way,” he added. “They become crazed lunatics.” Senate Democrats have said they will vote to reopen the government if the legislation includes an extension of Obamacare subsidies; without those, the health policy think tank KFF has estimated, average monthly premiums on people who get their insurance through the ACA marketplace would more than double.

Trump also claimed Obamacare is “terrible,” adding, “We can make it much less expensive for people and give them much better health care.” But, yet again, he failed to outline his alternative. (Remember his “concepts of a plan“?)

What is President Trump doing to end the government shutdown?

“What we're doing is we keep voting. I mean, the Republicans are voting almost unanimously to end, and the Democrats keep voting against ending it,” says Trump. pic.twitter.com/f6smwqi8Jn

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 3, 2025

He defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s violent tactics

Citing videos of ICE officers tackling a mother in court, using tear gas in a residential neighborhood in Chicago, and smashing car windows, O’Donnell asked Trump if some of the raids have “gone too far?” Trump gave what may have been his most direct answer of the interview: “No, I think they haven’t gone far enough,” he said. “We’ve been held backby the judges, by the liberal judges that were put in [the federal courts] by Biden and by Obama.”

“You’re okay with those tactics?” O’Donnell pressed.

“Yeah, because you have to get the people out,” he replied.

"I think they haven't gone far enough," says President Trump, defending ICE raids. In one case, ICE tackled a young mother and in another tear gas was used in a residential neighborhood. pic.twitter.com/b7tEYqWyUv

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 2, 2025

He bragged that he can send the military into any city, at any time

O’Donnell asked Trump what he meant when, at a speech in Japan last week, he said: “If we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard.” Trump has already sent guardtroops into Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Portland, Ore.; Chicago; and Memphis, Tenn.

Trump seemed delighted to remind O’Donnell and viewers of what he sees as his vast power: “Well, if you had to send in the Army, or if you had to send in the Marines, I’d do that in a heartbeat. You know you have a thing called the Insurrection Act. You know that, right? Do you know that I could use that immediately, and no judge can even challenge you on that. But I haven’t chosen to do it because I haven’t felt we need it.”

“If you had to send in the Army or if you had to send in the Marines, I'd do that in a heartbeat,” says President Trump. He has ordered the National Guard to five major U.S. cities. https://t.co/GAtK4KJNAf pic.twitter.com/Yx0SoiGDFQ

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 3, 2025

This is not the first time Trump has threatened to use the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to override federal law that prohibitsthe military from acting as law enforcement, in order to “suppress rebellion.” But the law has not been used in more than three decades and is widely seen by legal experts as having a frightening potential for abuse.

“So you’re going to send the military into American cities?” O’Donnell pressed. “Well, if I wanted to, I could, if I want to use the Insurrection Act,” Trump responded. “The Insurrection Act has been used routinely by presidents, and if I needed it, that would mean I could bring in the Army, the Marines, I could bring in whoever I want, but I haven’t chosen to use it. I hope you give me credit for that.”

He claimed he has been “mild-mannered” when it comes to political retribution

In only nine months, Trump has made good on his long-running promise to prosecute his political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. “There’s a pattern to these names. They’re all public figures who have publicly denounced you. Is it political retribution?” O’Donnell asked.

Trump promptly played the victim: “You know who got indicted? The man you’re looking at,” he replied. “I got indicted and I was innocent, and here I am, because I was able to beat all of the nonsense that was thrown at me.” (He was, indeed, found guilty in New York last year on 34 felony counts in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case.)

“I think I've been very mild-mannered. You're looking at a man who was indicted many times, and I had to beat the rap,” says President Trump after the recent indictments of high-profile figures who have publicly denounced him. https://t.co/XHoIr77Eh1 pic.twitter.com/tLH0fxW2wI

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 3, 2025

Despite posting a Truth Social message in September demanding that Attorney General Pam Bondi speed up the prosecutions, just days before Comey was indicted and a couple weeks before Bolton and James were, Trump insisted he did not instruct the Department of Justice to pursue them. “No, you don’t have to instruct them, because they were so dirty, they were so crooked, they were so corrupt,” he said, proceeding to praise the work of Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.

“I think I’ve been very mild-mannered,” Trump continued. “You’re looking at a man who was indicted many times, and I had to beat the rap, otherwise I couldn’t have run for president.”

He think he’s “better looking” than Zohran Mamdani

Trump insisted that the frontrunner in New York City’s Tuesday mayoral election, 34-year-old self-described Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, is a “Communist.” When O’Donnell asked Trump what he makes of comparisons between himself and Mamdani—”charismatic, breaking the old rules,” as O’Donnell put it—Trump replied: “I think I’m a much better-looking person than him.”

He then reiterated his threat to withhold federal funding from his home city if Mamdani wins over ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “It’s going to be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York, because if you have a Communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there,” Trump said.

He claimed that he is “not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other,” but added, “If it’s going to be between a bad Democrat and a Communist, I’m going to pick the bad Democrat all the time, to be honest with you.”

Some have called Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic socialist front-runner for New York City mayor, a left-wing version of President Trump.

"I think I'm a much better looking person than him," says Trump, after calling Mamdani a "communist." pic.twitter.com/p9FDWNcoGs

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 2, 2025

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