Mother Jones
Chrystal Starbird, a cancer researcher at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, had been preparing to serve on her first National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant review panel at the end of January. On Wednesday, to her surprise, that meeting was abruptly canceled. These NIH panels, or “study sections,” typically involve a group […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was a top White House official during Trump’s first term. After exiting the White House in 2021, Kushner launched a new private equity firm, Affinity Partners, and announced he was seeking to raise $7 billion. […]
Mother JonesThe Trump administration has snuffed out a plan to ban menthol cigarettes, handing a victory to the tobacco industry after it waged a massive and at times deceptive lobbying campaign. The FDA proposed banning menthol cigarettes in 2022, amid pressure from groups including the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the American Lung Association, and the NAACP, which […]
Mother JonesThe anti-abortion movement has launched a pressure campaign urging President Donald Trump’s administration to take steps toward a nationwide ban on medication abortion, the method used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions nationwide. On Wednesday, 30 leading anti-abortion activists sent a pair of letters to the acting heads of the Department of Justice and the […]
Mother JonesOn Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aiming to restrict immigration, titled “Protecting The United States From Foreign Terrorists And Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.” It has been described as a revival of his first-term Muslim “travel ban,” making good on a campaign promise to bring back the controversial rule. Buried […]
Mother JonesIn early January, the Republican majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court blocked the state board of election from certifying the victory of Democratic Justice Allison Riggs after she led by 734 votes following two recounts. Riggs’s Republican opponent, Jefferson Griffin, asked the court to overturn the election by throwing out more than 60,000 ballots. […]
Mother JonesThe United States has been trying to annex Greenland for centuries. The massive island in the Artic—which is home to 56,000 people and holds vast oil and mineral reserves—is currently an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. In 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward planned to purchase Greenland, but it fell apart; in […]
Mother JonesDonald Trump’s inauguration was a bacchanal of wealth and power attended by the first-, second-, third-, fifth-, and seventh-richest men on the planet. And the celebration displayed Trump’s uncomfortable mingling of his business and political empires, for among the VIPs rubbing shoulders with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sergey Brin were a cadre of Trump’s […]
Mother JonesDonald Trump’s inauguration was a bacchanal of wealth and power attended by the first, second, third, fifth, and seventh richest men on the planet. And the celebration displayed Trump’s uncomfortable mingling of his business and political empires, for among the VIPs rubbing shoulders with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sergey Brin were a cadre of […]
Mother JonesThe foundational myth of Donald Trump is that everything is a deal. “Deals are my art form,” he wrote in—of course—The Art of the Deal. “Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals. Preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” This image has been enormously profitable to […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. During the heat of the presidential campaign in September, then-candidate Donald Trump made an extraordinary threat. He vowed that if California suffered a wildfire during his presidency, he’d withhold disaster aid from the state unless Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a document […]
Mother JonesThe Founding Fathers, having recently helped throw off the yoke of British colonial rule, were understandably concerned about foreign governments meddling in domestic affairs, which is why they wrote guardrails into the Constitution to stave off corruption and place limits on any future leader, including Donald John Trump, who might lack an intrinsic ethical compass. […]
Mother JonesFor years, powerful right-wing figures have pushed a plan: Have states call a convention to amend the Constitution. It now has more momentum than ever, in part because it would allow a path for proponents of ending the 14th Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. A provision in Article V […]
Mother JonesIn the four years since Donald Trump set off an insurrection at the US Capitol, the Department of Justice and the FBI conducted one of the largest federal criminal investigations in history. Among the nearly 1,600 people charged, the DOJ successfully prosecuted scores of Trump supporters whose crimes on January 6, 2021, included vicious attacks […]
Mother JonesCongress put rules in place ages ago to ensure that federal appointees and employees (including judges) don’t use their jobs to enrich themselves. The Office of Government Oversight vets those officials for conflicts of interest and can compel them and their spouses and minor children to dispense with assets deemed likely to create a conflict. […]
Mother JonesIt’s been two weeks since the outbreak of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires that have burned more than 40,000 acres and killed at least 28 people. While significant progress has been made in containing the Palisades and Eaton fires, the two most destructive wildfires to ever hit LA—72 and 95 percent contained, respectively, compared to […]
Mother JonesA federal judge in Washington state dealt the first blow to President Donald Trump’s aspirations of rewriting the Constitution and throwing away a century-old legal precedent in his quest to eliminate birthright citizenship. On Thursday, Judge John C. Coughenour issued a four-page temporary restraining order blocking Trump’s day-one proclamation denying automatic citizenship to children born […]
Mother JonesBefore Pamela Hemphill stormed the Capitol with thousands of other insurrectionists on January 6, 2021, she posted a photo of herself on Facebook in her living room holding a giant, plastic firearm. “Happy New Year!” the post read. “On my way to Washington DC January 6th!” Once there, Hemphill wandered the halls of the Capitol […]
Mother JonesThe barrage has begun. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders aimed at reshaping immigration to the United States. He took various actions on top of the orders, too—impacting a wide range of aspects of the US immigration system, from indefinitely suspending refugee resettlement to summoning the […]
Mother JonesWhen FBI agents investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol searched the Florida property of Jeremy Brown, they found a small arsenal. An AR-15-style rifle and a sawed-off shotgun, both unregistered, and two fragmentation grenades turned up in the search, prosecutors said. The Justice Department later alleged that Brown—an Army special forces […]
Mother JonesFor all the talk of a new class-conscious GOP, the Republican Party sounded much like its old self when, in December, Vivek Ramaswamy laid out the mission of the nascent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security,” Ramaswamy complained. “The dirty little secret is that many of those entitlement dollars aren’t even going […]
Mother Jones“I was like, Oh, my God, look at her. She’s like me; she speaks Spanish, and she has an accent like my mom.” That’s how Mathia Vargas describes the first time she remembers seeing a Latina in an American movie: Salma Hayek in the 1997 romantic comedy Fools Rush In. “I grew up, and we’d […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. To the extent that X ever was the “public square” of the internet, it is clearly no longer such a place. The platform—known as Twitter until it was rechristened in 2023 by Elon Musk—has become an echo chamber for extremist conspiracy theories and hate speech—or, depending on what you’re […]
Mother JonesA few hours after taking the Oath of Office on Monday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order purporting to redefine “male” and “female” by fiat. The order, with the cumbersome title “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” instructs all executive agencies—including those governing education, health, housing, […]
Mother JonesFederal diversity, equity, and inclusion employees are set to be placed on paid administrative leave by the end of Wednesday afternoon as part of President Donald Trump’s executive order to put a stop to DEI programs in government agencies. According to a Tuesday memorandum from the US Office of Personnel Management, agencies are required to […]
Mother JonesOn his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed around 10 executive orders to restrict immigration to the United States. “With these actions, we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense,” he said during his inauguration speech. “It’s all about common sense.” The promises, many pushed by […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On his first day in office, President Trump has signed a slew of executive orders that will set the United States on a radically different environmental path from the Biden administration. The executive orders and memoranda take the first steps to fulfilling many of Trump’s promises […]
Mother JonesPresident Donald Trump is demanding an apology from Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington after Budde urged him in Tuesday’s inaugural prayer service to show compassion for the marginalized. “She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that referred to Budde […]
Mother JonesOn Tuesday, NBC broke the story of a sworn testimony from the ex-sister-in-law of Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s pick for the US Secretary of Defense. In an affidavit, which was released for senators to review in advance of Hegseth’s confirmation hearing this week, Danielle Hegseth alleged that Hegseth’s former wife, Samantha Hegseth, had often feared […]
Mother JonesThere were plenty of troubling moments during the string of inauguration events for the second presidency of Donald Trump. These include the multiple times Trump lied during his inaugural address and other appearances (including when he insulted the courageous firefighters in California by claiming the LA fires were burning “without even a token of defense”), […]