A late-night memo announcing a freeze on federal grants—and subsequent failures by the Trump White House to clarify the details of the funding pause—plunged the country into chaos on Tuesday, with reports of Medicaid portals getting abruptly shut down amid the widespread confusion.

The blocked Medicaid access appeared to concern both healthcare providers and patients. An Indiana Medicaid recipient, who said that they had been able to access a patient-side portal two days ago, told Mother Jones that the site was under maintenance Tuesday. In some states, such as Maryland, Medicaid portals appeared to be working as of Tuesday afternoon.

NEW: My staff has confirmed reports that Medicaid portals are down in all 50 states following last night's federal funding freeze. This is a blatant attempt to rip away health insurance from millions of Americans overnight and will get people killed. https://t.co/6cqzQpyOoz

— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) January 28, 2025

The alarming reports came as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in her first briefing at the podium, repeatedly struggled to answer questions regarding an order from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget temporarily pausing—”to the extent permissible under applicable law”—”all federal financial assistance.” Though the order made clear that Social Security and Medicare would not be affected, it failed to provide significant details, including which programs, such as SNAP food assistance, would be halted.

Amid the confusion, OMB issued a second memo Tuesday afternoon that said the freeze would not affect “assistance provided directly to individuals”—such as SNAP and Medicaid—a claim Leavitt repeated from the podium. But when pressed for specifics, Leavitt either sidestepped or appeared unable to answer.

“Are you guaranteeing here that no individual now on Medicaid would see a cut-off because of the policy?” a reporter asked.

“I’ll check back on that,” Leavitt responded.

Shortly after the briefing, Leavitt wrote in a social media post that the White House was aware of “the Medicaid website portal outage.”

Together, the two memos, as well as the back-and-forth at Tuesday’s press briefing, demonstrated the sheer bludgeoning effect of Trump’s blitz of executive orders since returning to office last week—regardless of their questionable legality. Meanwhile, as states scramble to sue the Trump administration over the federal grant pause, the consequences for many have already arrived.

“The uncertainty right now is creating chaos for local Meals on Wheels providers not knowing whether they should be serving meals today,” a spokesperson for the non-profit said on Tuesday. “Which unfortunately means seniors will panic not knowing where their next meals will come from.”

Just got off the phone with a medical provider who accepts Medicaid. Because they are shut out from the Medicaid portal, they might not be able to make payroll. They exclusively serve low-income Floridians.

— Maxwell Alejandro Frost (@MaxwellFrostFL) January 28, 2025

Donald Trump has signed an executive order targeting transgender members of the armed services.

In 2017, President Trump banned transgender Americans from the military, though with an exception for those already serving. His new order, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” goes much further—it bans all transgender service members, stating that the “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”

The order also asserts that Pentagon “standards for troop readiness” are not compatible with “with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria” and “shifting pronoun usage.”

Alaina Kupec, president and founder of the transgender advocacy group GRACE, served as a Navy intelligence officer in the 1990s. She says “the wording of the Executive Order is shocking and alarming” to her and “should be for all Americans,” calling the order a mistake—especially for military readiness.

“Trans people have always served in the military. We have troops that are serving across the globe who are transgender,” says Kupec, “This is going to have an immediate and direct impact on commands around the globe. It’s going to make our military less ready to fight.”

Transgender people are twice as likely to serve in the military—with an average 12 years’ service.

“The trans ban was wrong in 2019, it’s wrong now, and so [is] every other attempt to discriminate against minority populations who want to serve and protect our country,” said Rachel Branaman, the executive director of the Modern Military Association of America, an advocacy group for LGBTQ service people.

The order comes on the heels of the confirmation of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary, who has called to fire any military leadership “involved in any of the DEI woke shit,” and a little over a month after Biden signed the most recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which barred coverage of healthcare for transgender children of military service members.

Kupec realized she was transgender while in the Navy. “I had to make a decision to leave the Navy because I couldn’t continue to serve knowing that I was transgender,” she said. “It was heartbreaking, because I loved what I did in the Navy.”

Kupec was good, too: “I had two Navy achievement medals for leadership as the lowest-ranking officer in my squadron.” Her choice to leave the military, which at that time didn’t allow for transgender service members, came out of a desire to protect the country. “I lived my life with integrity. I could not live in fear of not being able to pass a polygraph, or somebody trying to blackmail me [for being transgender], and then potentially compromise my ability to defend our country.”

The most recent survey available, from 2018, estimates that there are approximately 15,000 transgender service members, making up 0.7 percent of the active military. Transgender people are twice as likely as cisgender people to serve in the military, and have an average of 12 years of service.

A fact-sheet about the order elaborates on the administration’s concerns with gender affirming care and military readiness: “It can take a minimum of 12 months for an individual to complete treatments after transition surgery, which often involves the use of heavy narcotics. During this period, they are not physically capable of meeting military readiness requirements and require ongoing medical care. This is not conducive for deployment or other readiness requirements.”

Kellan Baker, executive director of the Institute for Health Research & Policy at Whitman-Walker Health in Washington, DC, says that the idea that transgender service members face lower standards is false. “Transgender service members have to meet the same deployability standards as anyone else. Thousands of transgender service members have successfully met these standards and proven themselves in service over the last four years.”

“Many transgender people don’t need surgeries at all,” Baker says. “Hormone therapy is much more common.”

“As an expert in transgender health,” Baker added, “I am unaware of any surgery with a recovery period even remotely approaching 12 months. Typical recovery times are two to four weeks and do not involve any type of unusual or extended pain management protocols.”

The Modern Military Association also rebuts the idea that gender-affirming care is an obstacle to military readiness: “Transgender service members are fully deployable, even during transition,” said a spokesperson for the group. “For those who do get surgery, it’s not different from knee or shoulder surgery commonly undergone by service members during downtime. It doesn’t interfere with deployments.”

Kupec calls the ‘military readiness’ reasoning “pure ignorance from people who just don’t know what it’s like to go through a gender transition.”

Other critiques have aimed at the financial cost of health care for trans troops. “Statistically speaking,” notes the Modern Military Association, “healthcare for transgender service members is about the same as for any other service member.”

Kupec also cites widespread medical support for gender-affirming care and its benefits: “We’re not listening to the medical experts right now. We’re listening to religious extremists.”

“We see these policies turn our nation into one that only values a secular extremist version of Christanity, in spite of our founding fathers’ clear mandate separating state and religion,” says Kupec. “As someone who is Catholic and has as strong faith in God, I ask all Americans how this dehumanizing and marginalization of transgender people is consistent with their Christian values.”

Kupec argues that those in the Trump administration who are pushing for a trans military ban “don’t know the first transgender sailor, soldier, marine or airman. Some of the best and brightest people serving our country are transgender, on active duty right now, and have been serving for 10 to 20 years,” she says. “To remove them based only on their gender doesn’t demonstrate our values of liberty and justice for all.”

In November 2020, President Donald Trump, citing national security risks, barred Americans from investing in firms designated as having ties to China’s military. Barely four years later, Trump’s 2025 inaugural committee accepted $250,000 from an American subsidiary of one of those companies.

Syngenta—an agribusiness giant that produces seeds, pesticides, and other farming technology—donated to the inaugural effort on December 31, joining a long list of businesses taking part in a display of corporate fealty widely criticized as an effort to buy goodwill from the new administration. Syngenta’s donation was disclosed in a lobbying filing the company made last week.

Unlike high-profile Trump inaugural donors such as Meta and Amazon, Syngenta is foreign-owned. It is a US-based subsidiary of a Swiss multinational that is ultimately controlled by the Chinese government. Syngenta was purchased in 2017 by China National Chemical Corporation, or ChemChina, which merged in 2021 with Sinochem, a company headquartered in Bejing that describes itself as a Chinese “state-owned” enterprise.

The first Trump administration allowed Syngenta’s sale to ChemChina. But in late 2020, amid a mounting trade war and recriminations over the spread of Covid, Trump issued an executive order barring Americans from investing in ChemChina and 30 other Chinese firms. The order followed a Defense Department finding that the companies support China’s military and intelligence activities.

The Pentagon issued an updated version of that list on January 7, including ChemChina as one of dozens of what it labels as “Chinese Military Companies Operating in the United States.”

Federal laws bar foreign people and corporations whose “principal place of business [is] in a foreign country” from donating to presidential inaugural committees and other other political committees. That law does not appear to prohibit the Syngenta Corporation—which is incorporated in Delaware as a US subsidiary of a global company—from donating. But accepting the funds from a Chinese-owned outfit arguably undermines the “America First” president’s confrontational rhetoric about China as he threatens a renewed trade war and escalated military competition with Beijing.

A spokesperson for the Trump inaugural committee did not respond to questions about the donation, including whether the committee knew of the Syngenta’s Chinese ownership.

But connection is not hard to make.

In 2023, former Trump press secretary and current Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders drew headlines when she launched an attack on Syngenta over its Chinese ties. Sanders, who supported Trump’s 2024 bid—and at the time was working to sidestep controversy over a $19,000 lectern she’d purchased with state funds—ordered Syngenta to sell 160 acres of land it owned in the state. She also fined the company $280,000 for failing to timely report foreign ownership.

“This is about where your loyalties lie,” Sanders said at the time. “We simply cannot trust those who pledge allegiance to a hostile foreign power.”

Republicans in the Washington have expressed similar concerns. In 2021, 16 GOP members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said Syngenta’s Chinese ownership raised concerns due to China’s “long history of engaging in economic espionage and agriculture-related intellectual property theft.” (A committee spokesperson didn’t respond Monday an inquiry about the company’s inaugural donation.)

“ChemChina’s acquisition of Syngenta has raised valid questions as to how Beijing…will then treat U.S. farm products,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), now Trump’s secretary of State, said in 2016.

 (Another ChemChina-owned company, solar panel maker REC Americas, in 2018 hired the firm Ballard Partners—which at the time employed now-White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles—to lobby the Trump administration, unsuccessfully, for an exemption from tariffs that Trump imposed on solar panels. Ballard’s lobbying disclosers did not initially disclose REC’s Chinese ownership, but after an inquiry by Mother Jones, the firm filed paperwork noting that the “People’s Republic of China” was among foreign entities with an interest in the lobbying work.)

A spokesperson for Syngenta said on Tuesday that the US-based company is “independent” and that its donation to the inaugural committee had no link to China.

“We are not a Chinese military company, nor do we have any association with the Chinese military,” the spokesperson said. “This is a corporate contribution from Syngenta Corporation.”

The company, however, has plenty of domestic reasons for seeking goodwill from Trump. Syngenta faces a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission and 10 states accusing it and another pesticide maker, Corteva, of artificially jacking up prices on farmers by improperly blocking competition from firms selling generic alternatives to its products. Sygnenta also appears to be one of the four major companies most likely to be hurt by a Biden administration initiative to curb the effects of consolidation in the seed industry. It’s not clear yet if the Agriculture Department will continue that policy under Trump.

Syngenta’s donation to the Trump inaugural committee follows substantial donations by the company’s corporate PAC to US lawmakers. In the 2024 election cycle, it donated $405,000, about 80 percent of which went to Republican candidates. The company spent about $380,000 lobbying in Washington last year, most of it in the early fall.

“We congratulate President Trump and the new administration and look forward to working with it to advance American agriculture,” Syngenta’s spokesperson said in a statement to Mother Jones. “Like many other companies, Syngenta Corporation has a history of engaging in public policy discussions, working with both sides of the aisle, and supporting candidates to advance the priorities of American farmers, particularly on issues aligned with our core values.”

Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee faced a federal criminal investigation into its fundraising, with prosecutors examining whether the committee accepted foreign money funneled through American donors. Though prosecutors never alleged that inaugural officials knowingly took illegal donations, a few inaugural donors were eventually convicted of secretly steering money linked to Emirati and Ukrainian officials to the inaugural effort.

It is not clear what steps, if any, the 2025 Trump inaugural committee—which greatly outraised the 2017 version—may have taken to prevent foreign interests from again helping to bankroll the inauguration.

In December, the Los Angeles County Public Health Department reported that five house cats had died after drinking raw milk. Four of their bodies subsequently tested positive for H5N1, the bird flu virus. But Cindy, a sleek gray tabby, is feeling fine, according to Mark McAfee, founder and CEO of Raw Farm, the farm where Cindy spends her days.  

While Raw Farm does produce raw milk and cheese—including the milk allegedly given to the dead cats—the Fresno-based dairy has gone beyond retail to position itself as one of the biggest players in the raw milk universe, intent on proving its health benefits, spreading its gospel, and firing back against its detractors. 

The dead cats are hardly the first time McAfee’s products have been linked to the spread of disease.

These are heady times for McAfee. Raw milk is an intensely visible part of the online ecosystem, with influencers singing its praises and downplaying the risks of unpasteurized dairy. In natural and holistic health spaces, it is viewed not just as a holy grail product, but also as a symbol of how many of its drinkers would like to see themselves: rugged, unafraid, and not averse to owning the libs. In November, raw milk fan Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who McAfee says is a longtime customer, was tapped by Donald Trump to run the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Food and Drug Administration. If Kennedy’s nomination goes through, McAfee may serve a role in shaping the country’s raw milk policy. 

McAfee has an obvious passion for his work, a missionary zeal, and an ability to quickly cite studies that he claims prove raw milk’s miraculous benefits. He likes, for instance, to point to research suggesting that kids living on farms in Europe develop lifelong protective mechanisms against asthma. (The FDA says raw milk advocates have long “misused” the study and are conflating raw milk with farm milk, a conclusion McAfee and the experts he cites disagree with.) Moments after we first connected on the phone, he said raw milk “makes asthma go away,” something he also told Mother Jones in 2012. I asked him if he was making a medical claim about his products, as the FDA has told Raw Farm not to do on its labels or social media.

“I can make a medical claim on your platform,” he replied serenely. “Not on mine.”

But for all McAfee’s talk of health benefits, the dead cats are hardly the first time his products have been linked to the spread of disease and endured government scrutiny. 

The cases stretch back to when Raw Farm was called Organic Pastures. (The company changed its name in 2020, it says, “to reflect our RAW values and standards.”) In 2008, McAfee and Organic Pastures resolved a federal criminal case by pleading guilty to two misdemeanor counts related to the interstate sale of misbranded food. According to their agreement with prosecutors, McAfee and the company admitted to shipping products labeled as “pet food” despite knowing they were for human consumption. In the summer of 2023, Raw Farm entered into a consent decree with federal prosecutors to resolve charges that the company had violated an order stemming from the case prohibiting it from shipping milk intended for human consumption across state lines. Until at least 2028, the settlement allows the FDA to make unannounced inspections and imposes audits and outside review of Raw Farm’s claims on its products and on social media.  

McAfee says the farm has “been fully compliant” with the FDA’s interstate commerce rules, but still complains about what he views as unfair targeting by the agency. 

“The consent decree and this entire thing puts me under their thumb,” McAfee says, “so that I get specialized treatment that nobody else gets.”

Since the 1930s, most milk sold across the country has been pasteurized, especially after it was discovered that raw milk could transmit tuberculosis. The roots of today’s raw milk cause go back about as far, to a dentist named Weston A. Price, who traveled the world on a self-styled study of traditional food cultures. “Price made a whirlwind tour of primitive areas,” explains one critical physician, “examined the natives superficially, and jumped to simplistic conclusions”—broadly, that Indigenous people were healthy because they didn’t eat a Western diet composed of flour, sugar, and pasteurized foods.

The fight over whether raw milk was better and healthier, particularly for children, continued to crop up in American life. A 1950 pamphlet from an outfit calling itself the National Nutrition League held that “protective qualities” in raw milk were stripped in the pasteurization process—functionally the same argument that McAfee and other raw milk proponents make today. “In the best interest of every child, infant and adult the first requisite is pure raw milk,” the pamphlet added, “carefully supervised as to bacterial count.” 

In 1987, a new FDA regulation formally prohibited the interstate sale of raw milk. In the wake of the agency’s action, the libertarian “health freedom” movement, which advocates for fewer government regulations in food and medicine, also took on the restrictions.

Nonprofits and special interest groups sprang up to promote the cause: In 1999, a nutrition enthusiast named Sally Fallon Morell founded the Weston A. Price Foundation, which says it supports “wise traditions in food, farming, and the healing arts.” In practice, that has meant advocating for the legalization of raw milk, greater consumption of animal fats, and a ban on soy infant formula. (In furthering its agenda, the organization has also sometimes pushed pseudoscience: Fallon Morell wrote in 2022 that she believed she contracted Covid after exposure to wifi and 5G technology; another article in the group’s house publication Wise Traditions calls Covid vaccines “bioweapons.”)   

Raw milk advocacy has been incredibly successful, with sales legal in 43 states.

On the Fourth of July in 2007, Fallon Morell began forming a new legal architecture to advance raw milk, helping found the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which provides legal advice to farmers and which set a goal, she wrote, “to make raw milk sales legal in every state.” In 2011, Liz Reitzig, who helped popularize raw milk buying clubs as a way to help members make purchases despite legal restrictions, took part in launching the Farm Food Freedom Coalition, which sponsored the Raw Milk Freedom Riders, a caravan of self-described frustrated mothers who wanted the repeal of federal raw milk laws. 

All this advocacy has been incredibly successful. Raw milk is now legal to sell in some way in 43 states, and every time a raw milk advocate faces trouble, a huge fundraising and legal apparatus comes to their aid. Take Amos Miller, a Pennsylvania Amish farmer whose farm was raided in January 2024, a decade after the farm was linked by the FDA to a deadly listeria outbreak, after which he refused to obtain state permits to sell raw milk. As Miller’s fight continues, he was greeted with a huge show of support from both the raw milk community and right-wing and libertarian figures; he’s also raised more than $300,000 on the Christian fundraising platform GiveSendGo.  

In the fall of 2006, Mary McGonigle-Martin walked into a natural foods store in Temecula, California, and saw a dairy aisle banner advertising Organic Pastures. At the time, her son Chris, who was 7, was grappling with ADHD and head congestion that wouldn’t go away. She didn’t want to put him on “stimulant medication,” she says; from her own time working at a vitamin store in her 20s, she trusted solutions that felt more natural. 

“I went, ‘Oh, that’s right, raw milk is healthier,’” she says. “I would’ve never gone looking for this.” 

McGonigle-Martin says she bought raw milk for Chris just three times, but the third bottle was contaminated with E. coli. Soon, he was very sick, developing, as a subsequent lawsuit detailed, a blood and kidney condition called hemolytic uremic syndrome. 

Today, McGonigle-Martin, a retired school counselor who co-chairs the board of an organization called Stop Foodborne Illness, has an in-depth PowerPoint presentation that she shows to journalists and advocacy organizations to underscore how food poisoning is, she says, “not just vomiting and diarrhea.” 

It begins with photos of Chris on a ventilator in a pediatric intensive care unit, his blond hair matted and hands tied to the bed so he couldn’t pull a nasogastric tube out of his throat. For five days, “he was on death’s door,” his mother says. He was given Versed and morphine to calm him and keep him from ripping out the tubes; every time he woke, his eyes would widen into a panic as he tore at them. “He was also suffering from acute pancreatitis,” McGonigle-Martin says, “and couldn’t eat for two months.” 

Chris was in the hospital at the same time as an 11-year-old girl sickened by the same outbreak; McAfee, McGonigle-Martin recalls, took a small private plane to visit both kids’ families. “He flew down to the hospital and waited outside the pediatric intensive care unit to talk,” McGonigle-Martin says. When she and McAfee met in the hallways, “I hugged him and said, ‘I can’t imagine how worried you are about all this.’” (McAfee says that he made a visit in his Volvo and that Chris was out of the ICU when he arrived.)  

“I can support RFK Jr. on all of this stuff. But raw milk is in a different category.”

The spirit of collaboration did not last: McGonigle-Martin and the family of the other child both sued Organic Pastures, eventually settling out of court; all parties have declined to discuss the terms. Asked today about whether he believes his products could have sickened the children, McAfee replies, “We don’t know, but our insurance company settled the issue in 2007.” He went on to claim that an outbreak linked to lettuce spread similar pathogens around the same time and that “a pathogen was never found in any of our products” by state investigators.

Chris ultimately made a full recovery and is now a healthy young adult. But he and his mother were both traumatized by his hospitalization. Chris’ experience also turned McGonigle-Martin into an activist. 

“He is a miracle,” she says. “He should not be in the shape he’s in. That’s always given me the energy to speak out and tell my story so another parent wouldn’t make the same mistake. I support health food. I eat organic. I can support RFK Jr. on all of this stuff. But raw milk is in a different category.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s belief in raw milk runs deep. Not only is he a drinker, but he’s also been a keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Kennedy’s own 2024 VP pick, tech entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan, made a campaign stop at Raw Farm and praised its cleanliness while denouncing the “constant media attack and regulatory scrutiny” the company is under. According to the Guardian, McAfee has said members of Kennedy’s transition team have asked him to apply for a federal “position advising on raw milk policy and standards development.” 

Such a job would allow him to advance his near-messianic belief in raw milk’s abilities, at a time when avian flu threatens to contaminate the industry’s products. But McAfee is exceedingly dismissive of bird flu—he calls it a “huge scam” pushed “by pharma to create fear and produce a new vaccine…after Covid closed up.”

“Trace the money,” he wrote in an email, in which he also denied bird flu could be a threat to his business or his customers’ health.

“We don’t think avian flu causes things to be unsafe,” he explains. “You may think I’m some kind of crazy person. But show me one person who’s ever gotten sick from raw milk with avian flu.” 

“Viruses,” he says, “don’t exist in raw milk. They die off quickly.” 

“Fearing viruses is ridiculous,” he says; he holds that only people lacking “strong microbiomes” and good immune systems need worry. Of Covid, for instance, he says: “I got it and it was mild. I’m a raw milk drinker. It didn’t hardly faze me.”

“We’re always going to have a new threat. We’re ignoring the blueprints of life, which is raw milk,” he told me. “Inflammation and chronic disease are rampant. The solution is whole-food nutrition.” 

McAfee also insists that Raw Farm’s safety standards are top of the line, boasting of his “on-farm pathogen lab,” which can deliver “results in 20 hours so that we don’t have to wait four days.” 

“We can find the needle in the haystack,” he says. McAfee is also the founder of a nonprofit, the Raw Milk Institute, which offers certifications and safety training for other farmers. Farmers who want to become RAWMI-certified, he says, have to adhere to the same high standards he boasts of at Raw Farm.

But the idea that there’s any way to make raw milk as safe as pasteurized milk is simply not true, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.

Under Trump, “you may see…a lack of enforcement, a lack of inspections.”

“I appreciate the fact that he’s tried to distinguish his business from less scrupulous raw milk providers,” she says, “and has all these standards that he’s tried to put in place. But the fact is you can have the cleanest cow udders in the world and take all this care with your milking equipment and do this monitoring, but if you’re not pasteurizing your milk, you’re always going to be at risk of these more common foodborne pathogens.”

In general, virtually every major public health body—both in the US and in Europe—agrees raw milk contains unavoidable risk. (The European Food Safety Authority, for instance, recommends it be boiled.) 

Rasmussen tracks the ways that false ideas about disease, viruses, and “wellness” spread online, and since Kennedy endorsed Trump in late August, she’s seen raw milk become a tenet of the Make America Healthy Again bible. If Kennedy is confirmed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, “he’s mentioned it by name as something that he’s going to deregulate or make more available to people,” she points out. 

RFK and his fellow advocates, Rasmussen says, have extended their philosophies about health and liberty beyond vaccines, looking for more things to hold out as “alternatives” to mainstream concepts of health and wellness, freedom, and safety. “It looks like raw milk is one of those things,” she says. 

Bill Marler is a Seattle-based food poisoning attorney who has repeatedly sued Raw Farm, representing McGonigle-Martin and other parents who claimed their children were sickened by his products. “He’s a really interesting cat,” Marler says of McAfee, not without a kind of respect. “He has a bit of the religious fervor of a proselytizer. He woos a lot of people. He’s a very charismatic character. He’s found his niche where the hippies and the preppers converge.” 

Under Trump and Kennedy, Marler says, the government could step back and give raw milk merchants like McAfee more latitude to operate. “What you may see is a lack of enforcement, a lack of inspections,” Marler says. “You may not necessarily see it in publications that there’s an increase or decrease in food poisoning cases. They may stop counting.” 

Bird flu could offer an early test of this Trump-era regulatory framework. In December, after the virus was found in samples of Raw Farm milk being sold and headed for store shelves, the company agreed to a voluntary recall and was barred from shipping new product under a state quarantine that lasted until January 10. After it was lifted, McAfee sent me an email: “The joy is palpable,” he wrote, with his “consumers driving 3 hours to the farm with ice chests because they could not wait for deliveries to stores in LA.”

The cows powering those sales, he claimed, “are producing H5N1 antibodies in their raw milk. Just like nature provides.” Similarly, the first time I spoke with McAfee, when Raw Farm was under quarantine, he insisted no one—not even cats—should be able to contract bird flu from his milk by the time it reached the region’s store shelves, claiming “bioactives” inside it would neutralize the virus. (Rasmussen points out that some of the antiviral compounds raw milk advocates claim as a health benefit are “also present in pasteurized milk” without the risks; either way, studies involving influenza haven’t found meaningful antiviral effects.)

At this point, it’s simply not clear whether avian flu can be transmitted to people through raw milk. But the concern from health agencies is substantial—and the deaths of the house cats is another data point adding to it. 

When I asked McAfee about the cats’ deaths, he emailed me several photos of Cindy, the Raw Farms barn cat, looking hale. Cindy’s good health, McAfee says, is due in no small part to all the fresh raw milk she drinks—and living proof of the unjustified war the FDA is waging against him and against the life-changing benefits he insists raw milk provides. 

“The FDA is lying to consumers, saying that pasteurization does not change milk,” he wrote in an email. “It does, radically. Our consumers know this is a lie and don’t trust the FDA at all.”

But the makeup of the FDA could soon change, and the long dispute that McAfee has had with the agency could end. As Kennedy’s confirmation hearing looms, McAfee is pinning his hopes on the man he says is a loyal customer taking charge of the agency that’s targeted Raw Farm and offering relief, vindication, and stable ground to keep building his raw milk empire. It all, he says, hinges on Kennedy.

“If RFK doesn’t make this, I don’t see making it,” McAfee said. 

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

From crusading against showers he feels don’t sufficiently wash his hair to reversing protections for a small fish he calls “worthless,” Donald Trump’s personal fixations have helped shape his first environmental priorities as president.

While withdrawing the US from the Paris climate accords and declaring an “energy emergency” were among Trump’s most noteworthy executive orders on his first day in office, both were further down a list of priorities put out by the White House than measures to improve “consumer choice in vehicles, shower heads, toilets, washing machines, lightbulbs, and dishwashers.”

Meanwhile, a separate Trump executive order titled “Putting People Over Fish” instructs federal agencies to divert more water from Northern California to the southern part of the state, which has been ravaged by drought and wildfire. The order blames the “catastrophic halt” of water due to protections for the delta smelt, a small endangered creature that Trump recently called an “essentially worthless fish.”

While Trump has long complained about poor water pressure in home appliances and has repeatedly attacked California for its water policies, experts said that trying to further these grievances through the presidency will hit inconvenient roadblocks.

“Consumers generally like their efficient products now. The president may be operating on some out-of-date information.”

“It was very striking that the White House memo included toilets and shower heads as a presidential priority. It really was something,” said Andrew deLaski, executive director at the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. “But I think Donald Trump’s concerns are somewhat out of date, to tell you the truth, and backsliding on federal standards for appliances would be illegal.”

When he last was president, Trump scrapped stricter energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs and created loopholes for less efficient appliances such as dishwashers and showers. These moves, which were later reversed by President Joe Biden, followed years of complaints by Trump over water pressure.

“You know, I have this gorgeous head of hair. When I take a shower, I want water to pour down on me,” Trump said in 2023. “When you go into these new homes with showers, the water drips down slowly, slowly.” He separately claimed in 2019 that “people are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once” because of a lack of water pressure.

Under federal law, the Department of Energy has to review appliance standards every six years to improve or maintain—but not degrade—efficiency benchmarks. Proponents of the rules say they have helped save Americans money through less wasted energy and water, as well as help lower planet-heating pollution. Polling shows the standards are broadly popular with the public.

But Trump, some Republicans, and gas and homebuilding lobbyists have cast the rules as overreach, and unified Republican control of Congress and the White House could see rollback of the standards, or at least eliminate the tougher rules put in place by Biden.

“No doubt some people don’t like their shower heads and there is a nostalgia for old things, but testing shows there is a broad array of product choices that work very well while saving energy and water,” said deLaski.

“There were some performance problems with some products but that was back in the 1990s. Consumers generally like their efficient products now. The president may be operating on some out-of-date information and I’m sure there are very good showers in the White House.”

The disastrous wildfires in Los Angeles, meanwhile, have resurfaced Trump’s animus towards the delta smelt, which he said is being lavished with water that should be rerouted to southern California to fight the blazes. “Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it,” Trump said on Tuesday. “All they have to do is turn the valve.”

A group founded by the billionaire Koch brothers is on a mission: to extend the massive tax cuts Trump instituted in his first term, and to convince working-class Americans that those cuts benefit them, too—despite ample evidence to the contrary.

According to an eight-page memo obtained by the Guardian, Americans for Prosperity (AFP)—a dark-money group founded in 2004 by Charles Koch and his brother David, who died in 2019—is trying to preserve and expand the $1.5 trillion Republican tax cuts from 2017, many of which are supposed to expire at the end of this year. “We will be seeking a further reduction in corporate taxes,” the AFP memo to donors states, noting that domestic corporate revenue increased 41 percent, to $420 billion, from 2017 to 2023.

The group is also trying to pressure members of Congress to use the Congressional Review Act—which gives Congress 60 days to overturn agencies’ proposed new rules—to undo regulations implemented at the end of Biden’s term focused on the technology and energy sectors (the memo does not offer further details on the specific regulations they’re targeting).

The memo does not state the total estimated cost of AFP’s lobbying efforts, but the Guardian reports a figure of $20 million.

Its aims are audacious, considering that there is already evidence that the 2017 tax cuts did not benefit working-class Americans, but the ultra-wealthy. As my colleague Hannah Levintova wrote in 2018:

In the year since the GOP Congress helped Trump push through his $1.5 trillion in cuts in less than two months, businesses have not, as promised, overwhelmingly given their extra profits back to the people. Instead, they’ve saved billions in taxes, using the money for stock buybacks aimed at further enriching the company’s executives and shareholders, driven the federal debt to a level unseen since the years immediately after the Great Recession, and overwhelmingly kept any plans for spending their massive tax savings a secret.

And as my colleague Michael Mechanic noted back in October, the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy released an analysis of whom Trump’s most recent tax proposals would benefit. Their findings? The proposals would lead to tax increases for all but the richest 5 percent of Americans, with the poorest Americans seeing the largest increase. Another analysis conducted in May 2023 by the same group found that making the provisions permanent (through a bill proposed by Republicans that year) would cost $288.5 billion next year alone—two-thirds of which would go to the richest Americans, with the poorest fifth receiving only 1 percent of the spoils.

But AFP seems undeterred by existing evidence—and, instead, is committed to producing its own.

The memo reported by the Guardian says the group will rely on a three-pronged strategy to achieve its goals: Spending at least $10 million to build a “national narrative” focused on “telling the success story of tax cuts” and countering what it calls “inevitable class-warfare arguments” against them; carrying out a lobbying campaign in Washington; and “lighting a grassroots fire back home” to persuade lawmakers in the House and Senate to act.

Some of these efforts will specifically target Latino voters, given the gains Trump made with them in the November election, according to the memo—which adds that a self-described center-right New Mexico nonprofit called the LIBRE Initiative, part of the wider Koch network, is launching a “national grassroots program to rally Latino Americans to support the extension of the tax cuts along with the repeal of recent costly Biden Administration.” That effort already appears to be underway: The group has shared infographics praising the 2017 legislation to its tens of thousands of social media followers and launched a website directing people to send letters to their members of Congress demanding that they expand the tax cuts.

Another key player in the strategy will apparently be Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which the memo describes as “as a real opportunity to cut over-regulation and waste.” (As Michael Mechanic outlined last month, while the DOGE proposals include eliminating the National Institutes of Health, veterans’ health benefits, and Pell Grants, there are a variety of tax breaks the government could roll back if it were actually concerned with cutting wasteful spending.)

The AFP group points to its success getting the 2017 bill passed, and their “door-to-door, phone, and digital lobbying efforts” to get Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—confirmed to the bench as proof of their ability to rally support. “At a time when many Senators were under intense pressure from progressives to cave,” they write, “AFP activists were the critical counterweights to outside progressive influences.”

One person who definitely will benefit if the tax cuts are extended? Charles Koch. In 2018, the liberal group Americans for Tax Fairness estimated that the tax cuts would save the Koch brothers an estimated $1 billion a year in income taxes.

It seemed poetically fitting that my trip to Auschwitz would take me through Vienna, Austria, the starting point of my great-grandparents’ journey. Robert and Paula Stricker’s path was significantly more circuitous than mine: They were shuffled from Vienna to Dachau in Germany, to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, and finally to Auschwitz in Poland, where they were murdered along with approximately 1.1 million other souls. 

My voyage to Krakow, Poland, began with the same spirit and, perhaps, the same words as my great-grandparents’ death march did—“grüß Gott,” said the Austrian Airlines gate agent, which translates roughly as, “May God greet you!” I suppose it is only a matter of time before we all have our own chance to greet God. Some of us may get to do so under peaceful circumstances. Others, like my relatives, inside the fiery furnaces of an ungodly regime.

For reasons I still don’t fully understand, I have decided to undertake this pilgrimage to Auschwitz on January 20. Perhaps it is to pay my respects. Or maybe it is to give myself some perverse reassurance that no matter how bleak the current state of humanity appears, it could be much worse.

My in-flight reading material comes in the form of a 1,051-page PDF I have downloaded from the Center for Jewish History, clinically entitled, “Stricker, Robert, 1879-1944.” Over the years, I have reviewed it many times, and by the time I’m at 30,000 feet, I am once more taking the well-worn journey through the macabre digital flipbook documenting the tribulations of my great-grandparents. It begins with tender, reassuring correspondence from the early 1940s, always beginning with “Liebe Kinder!”—“Dear Children!”…

From there, it grows progressively more ominous, with the mail envelopes bearing stamps denoting that they were preopened by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the Nazis’ Armed Forces High Command.

Before long, the flipbook goes from inquisitiveness…

To alarm…

To despair…

Before abruptly transitioning to mourning.

After that, the remainder of the flipbook turns to justice, in the form of my grandfather’s role at the Nuremberg trials, where he spent months looking into the eyes of his family’s murderers.

That Bavarian city was selected as the location of the trials in an attempt to create a round trip for the Nuremberg Laws—the hateful, antisemitic, and racist legislation born there in 1935. My grandfather and the rest of the Allies hoped it would be a fitting place for the execution of the Nazi ideology, along with 13 of the 24 defendants who received the death penalty. Some, like Hermann Göring, who ordered the development of the “Final Solution” against Jews, used a potassium cyanide capsule the night before he was to be hanged to implement the final solution on himself.

I have made it through almost all of the dossier by the time I land in Krakow. Back home, the United States is getting ready for the inauguration of the 47th president, who used a 2019 speech to the Israeli-American Council to Jewsplain to attendees: “A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers. Not nice people at all. But you have to vote for me; you have no choice.” I try to avert my eyes from the TV news monitors throughout the airport.

Six months prior, I had to abandon plans to visit in the springtime. Afterward, Cameron, my friend since elementary school, reassured me, “The time to go to Auschwitz would be in the dead of winter.” As soon as I exit the airport, I realize that Cameron was right. It is a little after 6 p.m. and almost pitch black, with a thick, damp fog and a persistent wind that makes the 22°F temperature feel significantly colder. I am bundled from head to toe and yet feel the bite of the frosty conditions. Millions of Jews, along with Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, Afro Germans, the disabled, homosexuals, POWs, ethnic Poles and other Slavs, religious dissidents and political opponents—all of them were subjected to this weather. Dressed in nothing more than flimsy striped pajamas. 

The taxi from Krakow to my hotel in Oświęcim takes less than an hour, and after a hearty dinner of assorted pierogi, I sleep in a warm, soft bed. If Elie Wiesel were looking down on me, he would agree that I am, as he described in Night, “far from the crucible of death, from the center of hell.” 

Describing Auschwitz in words is an attempt to put language to the ineffable. I obey the English humorist Douglas Adams, who said, “Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.” But before I eff it with a few details that are difficult to fully fathom unless you are physically present at Auschwitz, I must underscore the significance of the hallowed testimonies that remain required reading. There’s Wiesel’s Night. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Or Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, Eddy de Wind, Tadeusz Borowski, Ruth Klüger, or, or, or, or. 

Standing on the vast grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp defies comprehension. At nearly 350 acres in size, it’s about three Vatican Cities. Or two Forbidden Cities. Or two Disneylands. I guess twice the Happiest Place on Earth equals one Arbeit macht frei. In all, the 10 miles of barbed wire encircled 300 barracks and other buildings that held, at its peak, about 125,000 human beings. That’s roughly the population of Hartford, Connecticut. Or Topeka, Kansas. Or the attendance at the Burning Man festival—actually, nearly two Burning Mans.

What struck me about the civil engineering marvel that is Auschwitz is that it was born of the need to not just commit mass murder, but hide the evidence. The Nazis didn’t try to conceal the prison camps, but they went to tremendous lengths to deny that they were actually death camps. Had they wanted to flaunt their genocidal practices, they could have built a mountain of carcasses or filled valleys with corpses. But while mass graves existed, they were quite the exception.

In physics, there exists a conundrum known by the sweet and almost quaint name “the three-body problem.” Before it became better known as the title of Liu Cixin’s sci-fi novel and subsequent Netflix adaptation, it was understood as the challenge of predicting the motion of three objects interacting with each other through a force, such as gravity. While two bodies interacting can have rather predictable outcomes, once three bodies (or more) are at play, foreseeing the effects becomes virtually impossible. At Auschwitz, murdering a person was something of a two-body problem. Covering it up became a million-body problem. 

The need to erase the evidence of 1.1 million bodies put into motion one of the most diabolical Rube Goldberg machines in the history of humankind. Its architect was Karl Bischoff, who designed Auschwitz by working backward from his estimate of the maximum incineration capacity at the crematoria:

Bischoff’s figure of 4,756 bodies in a 24-hour period included down time for cleaning and maintenance and concluded that a total of five crematoria were needed to meet those targets. Those limits meant that only so many people could enter the gas chambers at a given time. And that in turn meant that the vast majority of Auschwitz’s prisoners would have to be placed in a holding pattern. But unlike airplanes that can simply circle until they have been cleared for landing, Auschwitz’s prisoners needed to be stored somewhere, necessitating the construction of miles upon miles of barracks. Auschwitz’s constant backlog of mortals renders it, in many ways, a monument of human arrears. 

The Nazis were exceptionally thorough in their coverup. While the SS took many pictures of Auschwitz, their photography did not include the gas chambers or crematoria. When they communicated about their murderous acts, they employed euphemisms, most notably Sonderbehandlung (“special treatment”), more commonly used in its abbreviated form, S.B. They went to great lengths to dispose of the tons of human remains in nearby rivers, fields, and marshes. And in the final days of Auschwitz, the SS detonated crematoria and gas chambers as they retreated.

One exception to their thoroughness came in what was for me one of the most unexpected places. Inside a display on the second floor of Block 4 is an exhibit of the hair shorn from prisoners upon arrival at the camps—and on departure. Two tons of it. It is impossible to describe the living testament of those braids, locks, payots, and ponytails, each existing in suspended animation of a life not lived. If the Nazis were so fastidious about hiding their tracks, why keep all the hair? 

Business. 

As with so many of Auschwitz’s side hustles, the hair was harvested and sold. It was repurposed in Nazi uniforms, military-issue socks, and stuffing for mattresses so the living could sleep comfortably at night. German companies bought bales for 20 pfennig per kilogram. 

The victims’ remains were even weaponized—literally. Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was allowed to live by working as an assistant to the infamous “Angel of Death,” Dr. Josef Mengele. In Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, he described the cruel upcycling in which these locks gained a lethal second life:

Hair was also a precious material, due to the fact that it expands and contracts uniformly, no matter what the humidity of the air. Human hair was often used in delayed action bombs, where its particular qualities made it highly useful for detonating purposes. So they shaved the dead.

Zyklon B, the poisonous gas used in the gas chambers, was yet another of the infernal Rube Goldberg inventions born of the Million-Body Problem. The constraints placed on the Nazis’ killing apparatus included not exposing their own soldiers to too much bloodshed (too traumatizing) and not using bullets (too expensive). The solution to the Million-Body Problem had to entail maximum lethality for minimum cost.

Hydrogen cyanide was developed in California in the 1880s, where it was used to fumigate citrus orchards. It existed essentially as Zyklon A. After some tinkering, the Nazis packaged it in sealed canisters bonded to adsorbents, such as diatomaceous earth. These Zyklon B pellets were then dropped through small openings in the roof of the otherwise sealed gas chambers. The pellets then vaporized, so long as the temperature was 81°F or higher. The Nazis economized and preheated the gas chambers as little as necessary, relying on the innocents’ body temperatures to ensure that the Zyklon B activated. More than a million people were murdered in Auschwitz using their own 98.6° body heat. 

Until I came to Auschwitz, I believed that its gas chambers were, like at Dachau, filled with fake shower heads, out of which the gas poured like exhaust from an automobile tailpipe. One grisly similarity to an actual shower room was that prisoners were ordered to disrobe and told to remember the numbered hooks where they left their clothing so they could retrieve them “afterward.” 

I stand before this monument of mutilated dreams, and I cannot help but think, eight decades after the liberation of Auschwitz, how much has humankind actually changed?

I had also believed that victims perished almost instantaneously. But it usually took more than 20 minutes for people to die a painful death of asphyxiation. And of the hundreds crammed into the gas chamber, there would inevitably be some who did not die from the Zyklon B gas. Those provisional survivors were then singled out and shot. 

As I look into the crumbled remains of the gas chambers where my great-grandfather and great-grandmother perished, I shudder at their final moments of terror, pain, and suffering. Near the end of his life, Wiesel wrote in Open Heart: “I have already been the beneficiary of so many miracles, which I know I owe to my ancestors. All I have achieved has been and continues to be dedicated to their murdered dreams—and hopes.” 

The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp is divided near its center by the “death road”—the path down which my great-grandparents likely walked immediately upon their arrival due to their age, joined by children and babies for the same reason. At the end of that road is the International Monument to the Victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp, which features plaques translated into 23 languages. They read:

For ever let this place be

A cry of despair

And a warning to humanity

Reading these words prompts the umpteenth stream of tears down my cheeks, this time because of the grace and mercy at the epicenter of such mercilessness. These are also tears of gratitude for our predecessors, who sent a warning etched in steel about the danger of leaving unrestrained our darkest, basest tendencies. 

I have tears of gratitude for Poland, which has embraced IMBYism to harbor this former hell on Earth. It has allowed the name of its town, Oświęcim, to be eclipsed by “Auschwitz,” the German title assigned by the vanquished invaders. 

At the same time, these tears are tears of profound disappointment. I think of the self-help saying, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years.” I stand before this monument of mutilated dreams, and I cannot help but think, eight decades after the liberation of Auschwitz, how much has humankind actually changed? The wealthiest man in the world has just greeted inaugural supporters by shooting his arm diagonally upward, palm facing down. Twice. He has taken to the social media platform he owns to provide reassurance to his 200 million followers with a series of Nazi-themed puns. Meanwhile, just over 500 miles from Auschwitz, Ukrainians fight a tyrannical invader, while back in the United States, the leader of the free world is signing a slew of executive orders as part of his “dictator on day one” presidency.

Here we are, fellow Homo sapiens. 

As I exit the camp’s gates—a privilege not afforded to my great-grandparents or more than a million others—a group of teenagers from a Warsaw high school are concluding their tour with me. Their next stop is 20 minutes away at Energylandia, an amusement park containing 19 roller coasters. Perhaps a few rides on the Frutti Loop Coaster is what a teen needs as a proper salve for a severe day. I would not have been capable of metabolizing this place at 14. I am still not able to today. 

Gabriel Stricker, a member of Mother Jones’ board of directors, was previously the chief communications officer of Twitter, and is currently an adviser to the Cancer Research Institute.

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

World leaders, senior ministers and key figures in climate diplomacy have, one by one, reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris agreement this week, in response to the order by Donald Trump to withdraw the US from the pact.

The prospect of the world keeping temperatures to 1.5 Celsius above preindustrial levels, as the treaty calls for, was damaged by the incoming US president’s move. Hopes of meeting the target were already fast receding, and last year was the first to consistently breach the 1.5 C limit, but the goal will be measured over years or even decades and stringent cuts to emissions now could still make a difference.

Along with withdrawing from the Paris agreement, Trump abolished many of the limits and incentives to reduce fossil fuel use, and signalled his intention to continue to back Big Oil. The US is the world’s leading exporter of gas, and oil production rose to record levels under President Joe Biden. These factors could counter the progress made with renewables across the country in recent years, in part owing to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Adair Turner, the chair of the Energy Transitions Commission think tank, said Trump’s actions could add about 0.3 C to global heating and spur other countries to dial back on their carbon-cutting efforts.

However other countries have made progress without, or even in spite of, the US before. After all, Trump also began the process of withdrawal during his last presidency, although it only took effect as he was leaving office. Before that, international agreement on climate action was held up for years under George W Bush’s presidency.

The US now joins only a handful of failed or war-torn states, including Libya, Iran and Yemen, in rejecting the 2015 accord. While the US has long been one of the world’s top two biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions—along with China—its significance has diminished as developing countries rapidly increase their share of global carbon output.

So how has the world reacted to Trump’s move, and what does it mean for global climate diplomacy?

The EU
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos: “The Paris agreement continues to be the best hope for all humanity. So Europe will stay the course, and keep working with all nations that want to protect nature and stop global warming.”

Wopke Hoekstra, the EU’s climate commissioner, wrote on social media that Trump’s decision was “a truly unfortunate development” but that “despite this setback, we remain committed to working with the US and our international partners to address the pressing issue of climate change…The Paris agreement has strong foundations and is here to stay.”

The UK
Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy security and net zero secretary, told a committee of the House of Lords on Tuesday he would “try to find common ground” with Trump, and that it was still in the US’s “national self-interest” to seek to tackle the climate crisis. “We are strong supporters of the Paris agreement,” he said. “I believe this transition [to clean energy] is unstoppable.”

The recent Cop29 summit in Azerbaijan had demonstrated that, he added. “Countries believe their national self-interest remains in the Paris agreement. The dangers to them are in not moving forward. [The transition] is not happening fast enough, but it is unstoppable.”

William Hague, the former foreign secretary, wrote in the Times of London: “For a country that has just experienced the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, and faces ever more terrifying hurricanes, to abandon the Paris climate agreement and remove all limits on fossil fuel use is to live in denial.”

Kim Darroch, the former UK ambassador to the US, and John Ashton, the UK’s climate envoy from 2006 to 2012, wrote to the newspaper calling for those in the US still committed to climate action to work with international partners. “Climate failure will impoverish us all and make our tinderbox world yet more insecure. We must now work with those in the US and elsewhere who understand the imperative of bringing the age of fossil energy to the earliest possible end.”

Canada
Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, told journalists: “It is deplorable that the president of the US has decided to pull out of the Paris agreement. It is unfortunately not the first time. The Paris agreement is bigger than one country, it is 194 countries who have collectively continued to fight climate change despite the absence of the US. Despite the fact that the federal government no longer seems interested in fighting climate change, we see a lot of support from US states and the private sector. It is ironic that the president would do that when California is going through the worst forest fire season in its history.”

Canada was “fully committed to its obligations under the Paris agreement”, he later told the Guardian in a statement. “By continuing to work together, Canada and the US can achieve far more in driving green growth and creating economic opportunities which also address climate change and protect lands and oceans.”

African Ground of Negotiators
In a joint statement, the climate change group said: “This decision is a direct threat to global efforts to limit temperature rise and avert the catastrophic impacts of climate change, particularly for the world’s most vulnerable nations. The US, one of the world’s largest carbon emitters, bears a historical responsibility to lead in climate action.

By abandoning its commitments under the Paris agreement, the US undermines years of hard-fought progress and sends a dangerous signal to the international community. For Africa and other developing countries, the implications are severe. Africa, already on the frontline of the climate crisis, faces escalating droughts, floods, and extreme weather events that threaten lives and livelihoods, exacerbate food insecurity, and destabilise economies. The withdrawal of US leadership diminishes the critical financial and technical support required to adapt to these challenges, leaving vulnerable nations to bear an unjust burden.”

The chair of the Least Developed Countries group, Evans Njewa, said on X: “We deeply regret USA plans to exit from #ParisAgreement (PA). This threatens to reverse hard-won gains in reducing emissions & puts our vulnerable countries at greater risk. The PA remains a vital climate pact & we must protect it for the future of our planet & generation.”

China
China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Guo Jiakun, told a news conference: “Climate change is a common challenge faced by all of humanity. No country can remain unaffected or solve the problem on its own. China will work with all parties to actively address the challenges of climate change.”

Brazil
Marina Silva, the environment minister for Brazil, which will host the Cop30 talks in Belem in November, said: “[Trump’s decisions] are the opposite of policies guided by evidence brought by science and common sense, imposed by the reality of extreme weather events, including in his own country.”

Update, Jan. 27: Late Sunday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that the Colombian government had “agreed to all of Trump’s terms,” including the return of deportees on military planes. Meanwhile, a notice from the office of the Colombian president said the ambassador and foreign minister were traveling to the U.S. to implement an agreement, and that Colombia would “continue to receive Colombians who return as deportees, guaranteeing them dignified conditions as citizens with rights.” The government said it had the presidential plane ready to facilitate the return of deportees and did not make mention of military planes.

On Sunday morning, President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, claimed in an interview that aired on ABC that international leaders would not reject the Trump administration sending migrants back to their home countries.

“Oh, they’ll take them back,” Homan told host Martha Raddatz after she asked about how the administration would handle countries that refused to accept deportees. “We got President Trump coming into power,” Homan added. “President Trump puts America first.”

“My success is gonna be based on what Congress give us. The more money, the better I’m gonna do.”

Trump's "border czar" Tom Homan said he's "being realistic" and acknowledged that the mass deportation plan's success will require funding from Congress. https://t.co/TXBuO4BMhg pic.twitter.com/KQFtg1osFY

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 26, 2025

But only a few hours before that interview aired, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, proved Homan wrong: In a post on X, Petro said he would not accept American planes deporting migrants back to his country until the US establishes “a protocol for the dignified treatment of migrants.”

Research has shown that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens do.

“The US cannot treat Colombian migrants as criminals,” Petro wrote in his post. In another post, Petro seemed to suggest the problem was the migrants being sent back on military planes, writing: “We will receive our fellow citizens on civilian planes, without treating them like criminals.” (Research has shown that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens do.)

Trump promptly clapped back, writing in a post on Truth Social on Sunday afternoon that because Petro had refused to accept two flights already, Trump was taking a series of “urgent and decisive retaliatory measures,” including a travel ban; visa sanctions for members of the Colombian government and its supporters; and “emergency 25 percent tariffs” on Colombian goods coming into the US, which he said will be raised to 50 percent in a week. “These measures are just the beginning,” Trump wrote.

A notice from the president’s office posted just a few minutes after Trump’s Truth Social message said that Petro was sending the presidential plane “to facilitate the dignified return” of migrants who were supposed to return earlier. The notice also said the Colombian government was working on internal protocols “that ensure the dignified treatment of deported Colombians, guaranteeing that the procedures respect the human rights and integrity of each person,” and that it was also working with the American government to establish such processes. Later Sunday, Petro said he was imposing a retaliatory increase in tariffs, to 25 percent, on imports from the US. “The ministry should help direct our exports to the whole world other than the US,” Petro wrote. “Our exports should be expanded.”

There were 190,000 unauthorized Colombian immigrants living in the US as of 2022, according to the Pew Research Center. Far more immigrants without documentation come from Mexico—about 4 million, according to the Pew data. On Thursday, Mexico reportedly denied entry to a US plane transporting migrants, NBC News reported. A White House official told NBC it was an “administrative issue” that was “quickly rectified.” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and members of her Cabinet said prior to Trump’s inauguration that they did not agree with plans for “unilateral deportations” of Mexicans from the US, but said they would welcome them regardless.

As my colleague Isabela Dias reported, Trump issued a flurry of executive actions targeting immigration during his first week in office. They included seeking to end birthright citizenship (that’s unconstitutional, as a federal judge ruled on Thursday, temporarily blocking the order from taking effect) and sending 1,500 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, even though border crossings were at a four-year low at the end of Biden’s term. “It’s sending a strong signal to the world, our border’s closed,” Homan told Raddatz in the ABC interview, adding that the troops would help coordinate deportation flights and build infrastructure at the border. The New York Times also reported on Sunday that immigration raids were beginning in Chicago.

But for all of Trump’s bluster, even Homan conceded in the ABC interview that he could not commit to deporting every undocumented immigrant in the country, despite Trump’s pledge to enact the largest deportation operation in US history. “I’m being realistic,” Homan told Raddatz.

Update, Jan. 26: This story has been updated to include details of Petro’s response to Trump.

Because Elon Musk apparently did not create enough controversy for his liking this week, the tech billionaire also made a virtual appearance on Saturday at a rally for the extremist, right-wing, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party ahead of the country’s snap elections next month.

Musk told the crowd that he considers the party to be the “best hope” for Germany. The rally reportedly consisted of about 4,500 people, including the party leader, Alice Weidel, in the city of Halle.

“It’s okay to be proud to be German,” Musk said. “This is a very important principle. It’s okay, it’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”

He also said that the country needed to “move on” from “past guilt,” interpreted by many as referring to the Holocaust. “Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk said. Confusingly, Musk—a South African tech billionaire—also lamented “too much control from, sort of, global elite” in German affairs, adding, “There should be more determination by individual countries.”

In addition to those hypocrisies, Musk also peddled at least one straight-up falsehood: He claimed Germany is “an ancient nation, [that] goes back thousands of years”—but the German Empire was founded in 1871.

Elon Musk‘s great speech at our party convention! Make America & Germany great again! pic.twitter.com/XHtMIBfOYh

— Alice Weidel (@Alice_Weidel) January 26, 2025

He concluded by claiming “the future of civilization could hang on this election,” before leaving the cheering crowd with the three words Trump yelled after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania: “Fight, fight, fight!”

Unsurprisingly, Musk’s latest comments led to widespread condemnation. Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, said in a post on X: “Contrary to @elonmusk advice, the remembrance and acknowledgement of the dark past of the country and its people should be central in shaping the German society. Failing to do so is an insult to the victims of Nazism and a clear danger to the democratic future of Germany.” Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland, said: “The words we heard from the main actors of the AfD rally about “Great Germany” and “the need to forget German guilt for Nazi crimes” sounded all too familiar and ominous. Especially only hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz,” referring to the 80th anniversary, which falls on Monday.

Sen. Lindsey Graham: “I’m worried that 80 years on, we’re rewriting history here.”

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told host Dana Bash, “What he said does bother me,” also referencing the upcoming anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation. “I’m worried that 80 years on, we’re rewriting history here,” Graham added. “I want every German child, every American child, to know what happened and that it’s true, not a lie, and we never do it again.”

“What he says does bother me… I'm worried that 80 years on, that we're rewriting history here."@LindseyGrahamSC reacts to Elon Musk telling a right-wing political party in Germany that there's “too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that.” pic.twitter.com/E9qjL9YOTV

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) January 26, 2025

As my colleague Alex Nguyen has written, AfD is controversial even among Europe’s nationalists:

In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitler’s paramilitary organization. 

The party is also, like Trump, a fan of mass deportations of immigrants, which they term “remigration,” as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote about last year. (Weidel also used the word at the rally on Saturday.) As Mother Jones contributor Josh Axelrod, a Berlin-based reporter, wrote for us last month:

The AfD’s central pledge is to counteract the so-called Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that claims white Europeans or Americans are the victims of a plot by nonwhite immigrants to “replace” them and poison their societies. It was the inspiration for shooters to take up arms and target Muslim victims in Christchurch, Jews in Pittsburgh, Black people in Buffalo, and gay people in Bratislava.

“It’s the thing that brings together the far-right in multiple countries,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Mother Jones. 

Musk’s virtual appearance at the Saturday rally is just his latest show of support for the party, which has also included publishing an op-ed in support of them in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers last month, as I wrote then. He also interviewed Weidel, the party leader, on X earlier this month.

The party is still polling in second place, at 20 percent. But the resistance to their rise is also strong: The Associated Press reported that tens of thousands of Germans protested the AfD in Berlin and other cities on Saturday.

This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

Twelve years ago, Army 1st Lt. Alivia Stehlik walked the parade route for President Obama’s second inauguration, making sure everything would go smoothly. Stehlik spent weeks planning for the Army’s role in the inaugural parade, training troops, and instructing a group of high-ranking generals and admirals on marching in step.

Six-foot-two, with a West Point pedigree, a Ranger tab, ramrod straight posture, and an infectious smile, Stehlik was an ideal instructor. As a ceremonies officer stationed at the Army’s Old Guard in Washington, DC—which guards the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, conducts military funerals at Arlington, and serves as the president’s ceremonial escort—Stehlik was an expert in marching. The generals and the admirals, on the other hand, needed some refreshers.

Once, Stehlik was training a female admiral who asked why there were no women in the Army’s honor guard. Back then, Stehlik presented as a man. She would transition years later after the military allowed transgender troops to start serving openly.

Stehlik had wondered about the admiral’s question too—other services’ honor guards were mixed gender. But the Old Guard’s ceremonial company pulled exclusively from Army infantry, and women weren’t allowed in the infantry until 2016.

“Ma’am,” Stehlik told the admiral, “that’s way above my pay grade.”

Today, Stehlik, now a major, is waiting for another decision from far above her pay grade about who has the right to serve.

President Trump made transgender issues a centerpiece of his campaign, promising to “stop the transgender lunacy” and “get transgender out of the military.” During his first term, Trump banned transgender people from serving in the military, though ultimately troops who had already transitioned—like Stehlik—were grandfathered in.

That may not be the case this time.

On Monday, in his inaugural address, Trump proclaimed that the government recognizes “only two genders: male and female.” Later that day, he repealed an executive order by President Biden allowing transgender people to serve. Now, Stehlik and thousands of other troops, stationed from Connecticut to Kentucky to California, are bracing to see if Trump orders a new trans ban.

While the wait—and weight of the decision—may be agonizing, there is little transgender service members can do to make their case. Like any good soldier, Stehlik, now an Army physical therapist, went to work at Fort Campbell in Kentucky on the frigid morning after Trump’s inauguration. 

“I actually don’t spend time speculating about it,” she said. “I’m just trying to be good at my job.”

“Being perfect means not standing out.”

The lessons carried over from the Old Guard, where everything was drilled to perfection: every footstep in lockstep, every uniform exactly tailored. Nothing could be out of place.

“There was no allowance for, ‘We messed up this time.’ There was no lexicon for that in the Old Guard,” Stehlik said. “Being perfect means not standing out.”

When Stehlik first transitioned in 2017, she worried about standing out.

“I was the only six-foot-two chick with a Ranger tab,” she said.

But these days, there are other female Rangers who wear the revered badge, other transgender soldiers in uniform. She has deployed to Afghanistan and traveled with the Army to Jordan, the UAE, Lebanon. She has treated thousands of soldiers.

Today, she is the director of holistic health and fitness for the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell. She lives about an hour south of base in Nashville with her partner and a wildly affectionate dog named Mozzie. She rides her motorcycle, plays keyboard and piano, guitar and bass, and browses bookstores on the weekend. Despite the growing political tension over trans issues, life is normal most of the time. She does not feel much like she stands out anymore; she does not want to talk about standing out.

Instead, she wants to talk about her job. On Tuesday, the day after the inauguration, there was a quarterly brigade training briefing and a suicide prevention planning meeting. A peer-reviewed paper on optimizing women’s performance in sports demanded attention on her desk at home, where an Army Ranger flag hangs above the squat rack in her garage.

In 2022, an opportunity came up for Stehlik to travel to the Middle East as a physical therapist. As a trans soldier, she needed a medical waiver to go. Nobody in her unit knew the correct protocol for that, so Stehlik cold-emailed the US Central Command surgeon asking for permission.

“She’s top notch,” said Becky Wagner, a former active duty Army physician’s assistant who served with Stehlik during her deployment to Afghanistan. “She’s just a good soldier.”

When you’re a good soldier, Stehlik says, you stay out of politics.

“That’s kind of a fundamental part of being a soldier,” she said.

Thousands of transgender service members serve in the military, though the exact number is unclear. Estimates from two research centers, the Williams Institute at UCLA and the now-defunct Palm Center have put the figure around 15,000, but the Pentagon does not publicly track the number.

Data from UCLA also shows that transgender Americans sign up to serve their country at a rate twice that of cisgender people. Most transgender servicemembers have more than 12 years of service, said Rachel Branaman, the executive director of the Modern Military Association of America, which advocates for LGBTQ service members.

Any talk of a ban “harms readiness,” Branaman said.

Removing thousands of long-serving troops, she said, represents “a lot of specialized training that essentially costs billions of dollars and creates an operational gap.”

Transgender soldiers and sailors were first explicitly banned from military service in the 1960s. But things started changing after the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the policy that had prohibited gay and lesbian troops from serving openly. In 2013, the Army permitted Cpt. Sage Fox, a transgender woman, to return briefly to active duty, and by 2015, the military branches had made it difficult to dismiss service members for their gender identity. In 2016, the Obama White House officially ended the ban on transgender service members.

But in July 2017, amid a growing backlash among conservatives, Trump tweeted that he was reinstating the ban.

“After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the US Military,” he wrote. “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.”

Stehlik grew up the eldest child of an Army officer, a West Point graduate, and from her earliest memories, she wanted the same life for herself. She remembered the tanks from her father’s early career—the “real” Army, she says—before he settled into a more sedate second act in operations research at the Pentagon.

She spent much of her childhood and teenage years in northern Virginia, where her mother homeschooled her and her four younger siblings. In what would have been her senior year of high school, she took classes at a local community college, and then got an appointment to West Point, arriving in the summer of 2004. It was years before Stehlik realized she was transgender, but she felt at home in the Army.

From the beginning, she knew she had been right: The life of a soldier was the life for her. Even during West Point’s notoriously difficult first year, she loved it—fellow cadets called Stehlik the “happy plebe.”

“I think I felt seen, I felt valued for the things that I could do,” Stehlik said. “I like doing hard things. I just find intrinsic value in soldiering and being around soldiers.”

So when Stehlik graduated from West Point, she chose to be a soldier’s soldier, commissioning as an infantry officer. It was 2008, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were in full swing, and it would be nearly eight years before women would be permitted to serve in combat roles, like the infantry. But Stehlik had not yet come out as transgender. Like any good soldier, she wanted to be where the action was.

Stehlik graduated from the Army’s grueling Ranger school course and then was stationed at Camp Casey in South Korea, where she served as an infantry platoon leader. Her plan had been to apply from there to the 75th Ranger Regiment. But she was newly married and worried the intensive training and deployments would take a toll on her relationship.

So instead, she accepted orders to the Army’s storied Old Guard. She still tears up when she thinks about greeting the caskets of fallen troops coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan.

“There’s not a lot that you can compare to having to give a flag to somebody’s surviving family,” she said. “How do you do right by the people who are willing to give their lives for this idea of what we’re doing here in America, this idea of our country, and of freedom and opportunity?”

Stehlik began her transition at Fort Carson in 2017, not long after she graduated from physical therapy school at the Army’s medical training program at Baylor University.

Even then, anti-trans sentiment and legislation were growing across the country. By 2017, legislators in Texas, where Baylor is located, had started introducing bills seeking to regulate which bathrooms trans people could use. Anti-LGBTQ bills under consideration across the country have swelled in recent years, from 81 in 2020 to more than 530 in 2024, according to the ACLU.

In Kentucky, where Stehlik is currently stationed, lawmakers in 2023 overrode a veto to pass a law restricting discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in schools and requiring most transgender minors to detransition, among other things. That same year, at a conservative conference, the political commentator Michael Knowles called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated from public life … for the good of society.”

When Trump tweeted that he was going to ban trans soldiers, Stehlik was stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado.

At first, she missed the news. Her first patient of the day came in and told Stehlik with conviction, “I don’t care what anybody says, I want you to be my therapist.”

“I was like, ‘OK…cool. Yep, I’m your therapist,’” Stehlik said.

But then her sister texted, asking if she was all right, and explained what had happened.

Trump’s tweet reportedly took the Pentagon by surprise, and it took two months for Defense officials and the White House to hash out what exactly it meant. Ultimately, military policy prohibited new transgender troops from enlisting and active-duty service members from transitioning, but it did not remove transgender servicemembers from duty, nor did it prohibit them from re-enlisting.

Stehlik said she just kept doing her job. Shortly after taking office in 2021, President Biden signed an executive order rescinding the ban.

Stehlik had moved into physical therapy because she loved helping people stay fit and saw the field as a way to directly help soldiers on the front line, keeping them deployable and supporting the mission.

But she worried how troops would react to being treated by a transgender therapist, especially as she prepared to go to Afghanistan. She was concerned her fellow soldiers might feel uncomfortable, closed off to her, which could make providing care more difficult.

But that wasn’t the case, she said.

“People were way more vulnerable with me than I expected them to be. Even these young hotshot infantry and Special Forces guys that are out there, the last thing I expected was higher levels of vulnerability from them about how they were actually doing. But I got that way more often than I expected.

“And I think it was because I just exist as myself. I’m really unapologetically who I am. And I think that gives other people the freedom to be that too.”

Other soldiers who have served with Stehlik said they saw the same thing.

“I’ve brought in some of the oldest, crustiest Green Berets that I know,” said Lt. Col. Dan Brillhart, an Army physician who has run medical training exercises with Stehlik. Initially, he said, some of them were uncomfortable about working alongside Stehlik.

“They inevitably, universally fall under her spell,” Brillhart said. “They’re like, ‘She’s amazing…When I come back next year, I want to work with Alivia.’”

He wasn’t the only one who spoke about a sort of magic she brought to her work.

“I used to call her the brigade healer,” said Col. Jon Post, who worked with Stehlik at the security forces assistance command, providing support to partner countries in the Middle East. “She is incredibly emotionally intelligent.”

“Her thing was always: Be a better human,” said Staff Sgt. Logan Haller, who served as her physical therapy tech during her deployment to Afghanistan. “She sat me down and said, ‘OK, Logan, where do you want to go with your life, with your career? … As a soldier, she was awesome.”

Haller remembered one soldier who kept calling Stehlik “sir” instead of “ma’am,” kept saying “he” instead of “she.” Stehlik, he said, corrected him from time to time. But Haller finally pulled the soldier aside.

“I told him, ‘Hey, either get it right or get out. Find somebody else to take care of you,’” he said.

He reminded the soldier of a core Army value: “You treat everyone with dignity and respect.”

“He figured it out after that,” Haller said.

A Quinnipiac poll from the time of Trump’s first military trans ban found that nearly 70 percent of Americans supported transgender troops being permitted to serve openly. A 2020 study found a similar level of support among active-duty service members.

But throughout his second run for the White House, President Trump talked about reinstating the ban. In December, he promised to “sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation, get transgender out of the military, and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools.” The new head of the Defense Department, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has railed against the military being overrun by “woke” policies that he claims have demoralized service members and weakened our fighting force. Other Republican lawmakers have claimed that caring for trans troops is costing the military too much money.

Between 2016 and 2021, the Pentagon spent about $15 million on healthcare for transgender troops, the vast majority of that on therapy visits, many of which are mandated by military policy on transgender service members and not necessarily requested by troops themselves. By comparison, in 2014, as the military began to consider allowing trans people to serve openly, it spent more than $80 million on erectile dysfunction drugs.

Experts who spoke with The War Horse were hesitant to speculate on what a new ban might look like. But they said it could span a range of possibilities, from merely not allowing new transgender enlistees to discharging thousands of active-duty troops.

“I think everybody is just waiting to see what’s coming,” Branaman said.

She and other experts said that the more extreme possibility—removing active-duty transgender troops—could be logistically very difficult for the military branches.

“There’s going to be administrative chaos,” Branaman said.

“Who’s going to join the military from Gen Z or Gen Alpha if you can’t bring your gay friend or your trans friend?”

Sue Fulton, a senior advisor to SPARTA Pride, an association of active-duty transgender military members, said that “trying to implement some sort of new ban would be a mess and a problem for commanders.”

Typically, service members who are removed from active duty for nonpunitive reasons are discharged either administratively or through a medical route. Both processes can be time-consuming and burdensome, with various policies spelling out procedures for required hearings, boards, and potential appeals. It can be more complicated to separate people in certain critical specialties or service members who are close to retirement.

When the military discharges a service member for medical reasons, it can take anywhere from six months to more than a year. Speeding things up would likely require changes to other military policies.

Luke Schleusener, the head of Out in National Security, a nonpartisan nonprofit for queer national security professionals, said that those sorts of changes would be “kind of capricious.”

“It’s going to say to a population that has been serving pretty much continuously that you are suddenly not eligible, not because you no longer meet requirements, but because we’ve changed requirements to specifically expel you.”

He and other experts also highlighted concerns about recruiting goals, which the military branches have struggled to meet in recent years. A 2024 study from the Public Religion Research Institute found that 30 percent of Gen Z identifies as LGBTQ.

“Who’s going to join the military from Gen Z or Gen Alpha if you can’t bring your gay friend or your trans friend?” Schleusener said.

Twelve years ago, after weeks of training and preparation, Stehlik watched the inaugural parade from CNN’s press box, on hand to provide expert commentary on parade protocols. This Inauguration Day, she was at home in Nashville.

It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so she had the day off, although her boss had already emailed her with a work question. She kept half an eye on her phone, waiting to see if any more messages from her boss came in, while playing around on a keyboard in an upstairs spare bedroom.

Stehlik has played the piano since she was seven. She says it’s the thing she’s done the longest in her life. The thing she’s done the second longest is serve in the Army.

At West Point, in Eisenhower Hall, a nine-foot Steinway grand piano sits in a ballroom. Stehlik remembers when she first played it, framed by floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson River.

“I assumed that it wouldn’t be there when I came back,” she said. It seemed out of place; she thought it must usually be stored somewhere else. But when she next went back to the ballroom, months later, the Steinway was still there.

She got in the habit of playing it, walking down the hill from the barracks to the ballroom whenever she needed a break from the grind of cadet life.

On Inauguration Day in Nashville, Stehlik did not want to talk about politics; the inauguration seemed political. But she talked about West Point, where she began her life in the Army.

“I am as optimistic and idealistic as West Point is,” she said. “Sometimes it feels naive to be idealistic, but I just am. I am a hopeful, optimistic human.”

Whenever Stehlik goes back to West Point, she makes it a point to walk down to Eisenhower Hall to play the piano.

“Sometimes it’s hiding in a back corner behind curtains, and sometimes it’s out in the middle of the ballroom.”

But, she said, “That piano is always there.”

This War Horse story was reported in Nashville by Sonner Kehrt, edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

Photos for the story were provided through a partnership with The 19th, an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy.

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

Days before President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office and took actions to stall the transition to clean energy, a disaster unfolded on the other side of the country that may have an outsize effect on the pace of the transition.

A fire broke out January 16 at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in California, one of the largest battery energy storage systems in the world. The fire raged through the weekend, forcing local officials to evacuate nearby homes and close roads.

Battery storage is an essential part of the transition away from fossil fuels. It works in tandem with solar and wind power to provide electricity during periods when the renewable resources aren’t available. But lithium-ion batteries, the most common technology used in storage systems, are flammable. And if they catch fire, it can be difficult to extinguish.

This month’s fire is the latest and largest of several at the Moss Landing site in recent years, and I expect that it will become the main example opponents of carbon-free electricity use to try to stop battery development in other places. “This is really a Three Mile Island event for this industry,” said Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church at a January 17 news conference.

He was referring to the 1979 incident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. The partial meltdown led to panic across the region and helped to cement the idea that nuclear power was unsafe.

“There are some real challenges in protecting batteries in indoor installations.”

I’ve been to enough local public hearings on energy projects to know that I’m going to spend years hearing Church’s quote used to oppose any battery project, even ones that have little in common with Moss Landing in terms of design and technology.

My initial reaction is that Church is justified in being upset that the operator of the plant, Vistra Corp., has been unable to prevent this string of safety incidents. I don’t want to minimize the disruption, damage, and constituent fears to which he is responding. (Vistra, based in Texas, didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The battery storage facility is on the site of a closed power plant, and it’s right next to a natural gas power plant that is still operating. The storage facility was built in three phases, the first two going online in 2021 with a combined capacity of 400 megawatts, and the third phase going online in 2023 with capacity of 350 megawatts. The batteries are built to run for up to four hours before needing to be recharged.

The problems at Moss Landing could be used to boost safety fears about battery storage in general, with grave consequences for the energy transition. Or officials could look specifically at what aspects of Moss Landing’s design contributed to its fire risk, and use those lessons to make existing and future projects safer.

To get a better sense of what can be done, I spoke with Matthew Paiss, a technical advisor for battery materials and systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He advises on safety issues, but it’s a second career for him: He spent most of his adult life as a firefighter. “I have a really strange background,” he said.

He knows the Moss Landing plant well, having seen it inside and out as part of his work at the lab. He lives in Santa Cruz, close enough to Moss Landing that he could see flickering light in the sky last week as the fire burned.

He began his description of the fire risk by explaining “thermal runaway,” a self-heating process in which a lithium-ion battery is damaged or misused and triggers a chemical reaction that releases highly flammable gases and lots of heat.

If there is a spark or other flame, the gases can serve as fuel for a fire that can spread from one module to entire racks of batteries. Sprinkler systems may be able to help in an early stage, but many of these fires are too powerful and burn too hot to be suppressed.

So how do system designers reduce the chances of thermal runaway?

A big factor is the system design. Many, if not most, battery storage systems being built today look like rows of shipping containers that sit outdoors. These “cabinets,” as they’re called, can help to reduce the chances of large fires because flames would need to burn through the container’s shell and then leap across an outdoor space and burn through the shell of a nearby container. That’s not easy and it rarely happens.

In contrast, the systems that have now caught fire multiple times at Moss Landing are indoor installations, set up inside the shell of a building left over from the natural gas plant that used to be on the site. The project is an unusually large example of repurposing an old building for energy storage.

“There are some real challenges in protecting batteries in indoor installations,” Paiss said.

“I like making decisions based on data, and I encourage others to do the same.”

He said that writers of safety codes have been reluctant to prohibit indoor installations, but he thinks there is a growing body of evidence that designers of these systems need to take steps to offset the potential for higher fire risk. One strategy would be to have greater separation within the buildings, so there are hard barriers to reduce the spread of fire. This would also allow a portion of the facility to continue to operate even while another part is damaged and offline.

Another significant fire risk factor is battery chemistry. The part of Moss Landing that caught fire housed lithium-ion batteries that used a nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) technology. This kind of battery has high energy density, which is good in terms of the amount of energy that can be stored, but has downsides in terms of heat tolerance. “The higher the energy density, the spicier” it can be when damaged, Paiss said.

NMC batteries have lost market share in favor of lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, a chemistry that has lower energy density. Among the other tradeoffs is that LFP can produce more flammable gas than NMC, although the severity of the fires is often less.

“One consistent thing you can say is when you go down in energy density, you increase in safety,” Paiss said. “It’s safer because it can tolerate higher temperatures, and that’s a good thing. And when it does fail, it doesn’t necessarily produce a lot of arcing and sparking in flames right away.”

I asked what he wanted to still learn about this most recent fire.

“I like making decisions based on data, and I encourage others to do the same,” he said. “I think one of the most important datasets that we need to see is whether or not there was any toxic emissions that were actually measurable, either airborne as far down the smoke column as could be measured or where people were, as well as any surface contamination.” (The US Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday that its air monitoring of the site during and after the fire showed “no risk to public health” from the incident, based on testing for hydrogen fluoride and particulate matter.)

Just like I expect this fire to be a topic at public hearings about proposed systems across the country, Paiss expects it to be a topic at gatherings of officials and experts who set safety codes. “I think that the question that will be on a lot of discussions in upcoming code meetings is, should they be allowed indoors? Should we look closer at that and would limiting the installation indoors be an undue burden on electrifying our grid?” he asked.

A group founded by the billionaire Koch brothers is on a mission: to extend the massive tax cuts Trump instituted in his first term, and to convince working-class Americans that those cuts benefit them, too—despite ample evidence to the contrary.

According to an eight-page memo obtained by the Guardian, Americans for Prosperity (AFP)—a dark-money group founded in 2004 by Charles Koch and his brother David, who died in 2019—is trying to preserve and expand the $1.5 trillion Republican tax cuts from 2017, many of which are supposed to expire at the end of this year. “We will be seeking a further reduction in corporate taxes,” the AFP memo to donors states, noting that domestic corporate revenue increased 41 percent, to $420 billion, from 2017 to 2023.

The group is also trying to pressure members of Congress to use the Congressional Review Act—which gives Congress 60 days to overturn agencies’ proposed new rules—to undo regulations implemented at the end of Biden’s term focused on the technology and energy sectors (the memo does not offer further details on the specific regulations they’re targeting).

The memo does not state the total estimated cost of AFP’s lobbying efforts, but the Guardian reports a figure of $20 million.

Its aims are audacious, considering that there is already evidence that the 2017 tax cuts did not benefit working-class Americans, but the ultra-wealthy. As my colleague Hannah Levintova wrote in 2018:

In the year since the GOP Congress helped Trump push through his $1.5 trillion in cuts in less than two months, businesses have not, as promised, overwhelmingly given their extra profits back to the people. Instead, they’ve saved billions in taxes, using the money for stock buybacks aimed at further enriching the company’s executives and shareholders, driven the federal debt to a level unseen since the years immediately after the Great Recession, and overwhelmingly kept any plans for spending their massive tax savings a secret.

And as my colleague Michael Mechanic noted back in October, the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy released an analysis of whom Trump’s most recent tax proposals would benefit. Their findings? The proposals would lead to tax increases for all but the richest 5 percent of Americans, with the poorest Americans seeing the largest increase. Another analysis conducted in May 2023 by the same group found that making the provisions permanent (through a bill proposed by Republicans that year) would cost $288.5 billion next year alone—two-thirds of which would go to the richest Americans, with the poorest fifth receiving only 1 percent of the spoils.

But AFP seems undeterred by existing evidence—and, instead, is committed to producing its own.

The memo reported by the Guardian says the group will rely on a three-pronged strategy to achieve its goals: Spending at least $10 million to build a “national narrative” focused on “telling the success story of tax cuts” and countering what it calls “inevitable class-warfare arguments” against them; carrying out a lobbying campaign in Washington; and “lighting a grassroots fire back home” to persuade lawmakers in the House and Senate to act.

Some of these efforts will specifically target Latino voters, given the gains Trump made with them in the November election, according to the memo—which adds that a self-described center-right New Mexico nonprofit called the LIBRE Initiative, part of the wider Koch network, is launching a “national grassroots program to rally Latino Americans to support the extension of the tax cuts along with the repeal of recent costly Biden Administration.” That effort already appears to be underway: The group has shared infographics praising the 2017 legislation to its tens of thousands of social media followers and launched a website directing people to send letters to their members of Congress demanding that they expand the tax cuts.

Another key player in the strategy will apparently be Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which the memo describes as “as a real opportunity to cut over-regulation and waste.” (As Michael Mechanic outlined last month, while the DOGE proposals include eliminating the National Institutes of Health, veterans’ health benefits, and Pell Grants, there are a variety of tax breaks the government could roll back if it were actually concerned with cutting wasteful spending.)

The AFP group points to its success getting the 2017 bill passed, and their “door-to-door, phone, and digital lobbying efforts” to get Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—confirmed to the bench as proof of their ability to rally support. “At a time when many Senators were under intense pressure from progressives to cave,” they write, “AFP activists were the critical counterweights to outside progressive influences.”

One person who definitely will benefit if the tax cuts are extended? Charles Koch. In 2018, the liberal group Americans for Tax Fairness estimated that the tax cuts would save the Koch brothers an estimated $1 billion a year in income taxes.

It seemed poetically fitting that my trip to Auschwitz would take me through Vienna, Austria, the starting point of my great-grandparents’ journey. Robert and Paula Stricker’s path was significantly more circuitous than mine: They were shuffled from Vienna to Dachau in Germany, to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, and finally to Auschwitz in Poland, where they were murdered along with approximately 1.1 million other souls. 

My voyage to Krakow, Poland, began with the same spirit and, perhaps, the same words as my great-grandparents’ death march did—“grüß Gott,” said the Austrian Airlines gate agent, which translates roughly as, “May God greet you!” I suppose it is only a matter of time before we all have our own chance to greet God. Some of us may get to do so under peaceful circumstances. Others, like my relatives, inside the fiery furnaces of an ungodly regime.

For reasons I still don’t fully understand, I have decided to undertake this pilgrimage to Auschwitz on January 20. Perhaps it is to pay my respects. Or maybe it is to give myself some perverse reassurance that no matter how bleak the current state of humanity appears, it could be much worse.

My in-flight reading material comes in the form of a 1,051-page PDF I have downloaded from the Center for Jewish History, clinically entitled, “Stricker, Robert, 1879-1944.” Over the years, I have reviewed it many times, and by the time I’m at 30,000 feet, I am once more taking the well-worn journey through the macabre digital flipbook documenting the tribulations of my great-grandparents. It begins with tender, reassuring correspondence from the early 1940s, always beginning with “Liebe Kinder!”—“Dear Children!”…

From there, it grows progressively more ominous, with the mail envelopes bearing stamps denoting that they were preopened by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the Nazis’ Armed Forces High Command.

Before long, the flipbook goes from inquisitiveness…

To alarm…

To despair…

Before abruptly transitioning to mourning.

After that, the remainder of the flipbook turns to justice, in the form of my grandfather’s role at the Nuremberg trials, where he spent months looking into the eyes of his family’s murderers.

That Bavarian city was selected as the location of the trials in an attempt to create a round trip for the Nuremberg Laws—the hateful, antisemitic, and racist legislation born there in 1935. My grandfather and the rest of the Allies hoped it would be a fitting place for the execution of the Nazi ideology, along with 13 of the 24 defendants who received the death penalty. Some, like Hermann Göring, who ordered the development of the “Final Solution” against Jews, used a potassium cyanide capsule the night before he was to be hanged to implement the final solution on himself.

I have made it through almost all of the dossier by the time I land in Krakow. Back home, the United States is getting ready for the inauguration of the 47th president, who used a 2019 speech to the Israeli-American Council to Jewsplain to attendees: “A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers. Not nice people at all. But you have to vote for me; you have no choice.” I try to avert my eyes from the TV news monitors throughout the airport.

Six months prior, I had to abandon plans to visit in the springtime. Afterward, Cameron, my friend since elementary school, reassured me, “The time to go to Auschwitz would be in the dead of winter.” As soon as I exit the airport, I realize that Cameron was right. It is a little after 6 p.m. and almost pitch black, with a thick, damp fog and a persistent wind that makes the 22°F temperature feel significantly colder. I am bundled from head to toe and yet feel the bite of the frosty conditions. Millions of Jews, along with Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, Afro Germans, the disabled, homosexuals, POWs, ethnic Poles and other Slavs, religious dissidents and political opponents—all of them were subjected to this weather. Dressed in nothing more than flimsy striped pajamas. 

The taxi from Krakow to my hotel in Oświęcim takes less than an hour, and after a hearty dinner of assorted pierogi, I sleep in a warm, soft bed. If Elie Wiesel were looking down on me, he would agree that I am, as he described in Night, “far from the crucible of death, from the center of hell.” 

Describing Auschwitz in words is an attempt to put language to the ineffable. I obey the English humorist Douglas Adams, who said, “Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.” But before I eff it with a few details that are difficult to fully fathom unless you are physically present at Auschwitz, I must underscore the significance of the hallowed testimonies that remain required reading. There’s Wiesel’s Night. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Or Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, Eddy de Wind, Tadeusz Borowski, Ruth Klüger, or, or, or, or. 

Standing on the vast grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp defies comprehension. At nearly 350 acres in size, it’s about three Vatican Cities. Or two Forbidden Cities. Or two Disneylands. I guess twice the Happiest Place on Earth equals one Arbeit macht frei. In all, the 10 miles of barbed wire encircled 300 barracks and other buildings that held, at its peak, about 125,000 human beings. That’s roughly the population of Hartford, Connecticut. Or Topeka, Kansas. Or the attendance at the Burning Man festival—actually, nearly two Burning Mans.

What struck me about the civil engineering marvel that is Auschwitz is that it was born of the need to not just commit mass murder, but hide the evidence. The Nazis didn’t try to conceal the prison camps, but they went to tremendous lengths to deny that they were actually death camps. Had they wanted to flaunt their genocidal practices, they could have built a mountain of carcasses or filled valleys with corpses. But while mass graves existed, they were quite the exception.

In physics, there exists a conundrum known by the sweet and almost quaint name “the three-body problem.” Before it became better known as the title of Liu Cixin’s sci-fi novel and subsequent Netflix adaptation, it was understood as the challenge of predicting the motion of three objects interacting with each other through a force, such as gravity. While two bodies interacting can have rather predictable outcomes, once three bodies (or more) are at play, foreseeing the effects becomes virtually impossible. At Auschwitz, murdering a person was something of a two-body problem. Covering it up became a million-body problem. 

The need to erase the evidence of 1.1 million bodies put into motion one of the most diabolical Rube Goldberg machines in the history of humankind. Its architect was Karl Bischoff, who designed Auschwitz by working backward from his estimate of the maximum incineration capacity at the crematoria:

Bischoff’s figure of 4,756 bodies in a 24-hour period included down time for cleaning and maintenance and concluded that a total of five crematoria were needed to meet those targets. Those limits meant that only so many people could enter the gas chambers at a given time. And that in turn meant that the vast majority of Auschwitz’s prisoners would have to be placed in a holding pattern. But unlike airplanes that can simply circle until they have been cleared for landing, Auschwitz’s prisoners needed to be stored somewhere, necessitating the construction of miles upon miles of barracks. Auschwitz’s constant backlog of mortals renders it, in many ways, a monument of human arrears. 

The Nazis were exceptionally thorough in their coverup. While the SS took many pictures of Auschwitz, their photography did not include the gas chambers or crematoria. When they communicated about their murderous acts, they employed euphemisms, most notably Sonderbehandlung (“special treatment”), more commonly used in its abbreviated form, S.B. They went to great lengths to dispose of the tons of human remains in nearby rivers, fields, and marshes. And in the final days of Auschwitz, the SS detonated crematoria and gas chambers as they retreated.

One exception to their thoroughness came in what was for me one of the most unexpected places. Inside a display on the second floor of Block 4 is an exhibit of the hair shorn from prisoners upon arrival at the camps—and on departure. Two tons of it. It is impossible to describe the living testament of those braids, locks, payots, and ponytails, each existing in suspended animation of a life not lived. If the Nazis were so fastidious about hiding their tracks, why keep all the hair? 

Business. 

As with so many of Auschwitz’s side hustles, the hair was harvested and sold. It was repurposed in Nazi uniforms, military-issue socks, and stuffing for mattresses so the living could sleep comfortably at night. German companies bought bales for 20 pfennig per kilogram. 

The victims’ remains were even weaponized—literally. Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was allowed to live by working as an assistant to the infamous “Angel of Death,” Dr. Josef Mengele. In Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, he described the cruel upcycling in which these locks gained a lethal second life:

Hair was also a precious material, due to the fact that it expands and contracts uniformly, no matter what the humidity of the air. Human hair was often used in delayed action bombs, where its particular qualities made it highly useful for detonating purposes. So they shaved the dead.

Zyklon B, the poisonous gas used in the gas chambers, was yet another of the infernal Rube Goldberg inventions born of the Million-Body Problem. The constraints placed on the Nazis’ killing apparatus included not exposing their own soldiers to too much bloodshed (too traumatizing) and not using bullets (too expensive). The solution to the Million-Body Problem had to entail maximum lethality for minimum cost.

Hydrogen cyanide was developed in California in the 1880s, where it was used to fumigate citrus orchards. It existed essentially as Zyklon A. After some tinkering, the Nazis packaged it in sealed canisters bonded to adsorbents, such as diatomaceous earth. These Zyklon B pellets were then dropped through small openings in the roof of the otherwise sealed gas chambers. The pellets then vaporized, so long as the temperature was 81°F or higher. The Nazis economized and preheated the gas chambers as little as necessary, relying on the innocents’ body temperatures to ensure that the Zyklon B activated. More than a million people were murdered in Auschwitz using their own 98.6° body heat. 

Until I came to Auschwitz, I believed that its gas chambers were, like at Dachau, filled with fake shower heads, out of which the gas poured like exhaust from an automobile tailpipe. One grisly similarity to an actual shower room was that prisoners were ordered to disrobe and told to remember the numbered hooks where they left their clothing so they could retrieve them “afterward.” 

I stand before this monument of mutilated dreams, and I cannot help but think, eight decades after the liberation of Auschwitz, how much has humankind actually changed?

I had also believed that victims perished almost instantaneously. But it usually took more than 20 minutes for people to die a painful death of asphyxiation. And of the hundreds crammed into the gas chamber, there would inevitably be some who did not die from the Zyklon B gas. Those provisional survivors were then singled out and shot. 

As I look into the crumbled remains of the gas chambers where my great-grandfather and great-grandmother perished, I shudder at their final moments of terror, pain, and suffering. Near the end of his life, Wiesel wrote in Open Heart: “I have already been the beneficiary of so many miracles, which I know I owe to my ancestors. All I have achieved has been and continues to be dedicated to their murdered dreams—and hopes.” 

The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp is divided near its center by the “death road”—the path down which my great-grandparents likely walked immediately upon their arrival due to their age, joined by children and babies for the same reason. At the end of that road is the International Monument to the Victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp, which features plaques translated into 23 languages. They read:

For ever let this place be

A cry of despair

And a warning to humanity

Reading these words prompts the umpteenth stream of tears down my cheeks, this time because of the grace and mercy at the epicenter of such mercilessness. These are also tears of gratitude for our predecessors, who sent a warning etched in steel about the danger of leaving unrestrained our darkest, basest tendencies. 

I have tears of gratitude for Poland, which has embraced IMBYism to harbor this former hell on Earth. It has allowed the name of its town, Oświęcim, to be eclipsed by “Auschwitz,” the German title assigned by the vanquished invaders. 

At the same time, these tears are tears of profound disappointment. I think of the self-help saying, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years.” I stand before this monument of mutilated dreams, and I cannot help but think, eight decades after the liberation of Auschwitz, how much has humankind actually changed? The wealthiest man in the world has just greeted inaugural supporters by shooting his arm diagonally upward, palm facing down. Twice. He has taken to the social media platform he owns to provide reassurance to his 200 million followers with a series of Nazi-themed puns. Meanwhile, just over 500 miles from Auschwitz, Ukrainians fight a tyrannical invader, while back in the United States, the leader of the free world is signing a slew of executive orders as part of his “dictator on day one” presidency.

Here we are, fellow Homo sapiens. 

As I exit the camp’s gates—a privilege not afforded to my great-grandparents or more than a million others—a group of teenagers from a Warsaw high school are concluding their tour with me. Their next stop is 20 minutes away at Energylandia, an amusement park containing 19 roller coasters. Perhaps a few rides on the Frutti Loop Coaster is what a teen needs as a proper salve for a severe day. I would not have been capable of metabolizing this place at 14. I am still not able to today. 

Gabriel Stricker, a member of Mother Jones’ board of directors, was previously the chief communications officer of Twitter, and is currently an adviser to the Cancer Research Institute.

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

World leaders, senior ministers and key figures in climate diplomacy have, one by one, reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris agreement this week, in response to the order by Donald Trump to withdraw the US from the pact.

The prospect of the world keeping temperatures to 1.5 Celsius above preindustrial levels, as the treaty calls for, was damaged by the incoming US president’s move. Hopes of meeting the target were already fast receding, and last year was the first to consistently breach the 1.5 C limit, but the goal will be measured over years or even decades and stringent cuts to emissions now could still make a difference.

Along with withdrawing from the Paris agreement, Trump abolished many of the limits and incentives to reduce fossil fuel use, and signalled his intention to continue to back Big Oil. The US is the world’s leading exporter of gas, and oil production rose to record levels under President Joe Biden. These factors could counter the progress made with renewables across the country in recent years, in part owing to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Adair Turner, the chair of the Energy Transitions Commission think tank, said Trump’s actions could add about 0.3 C to global heating and spur other countries to dial back on their carbon-cutting efforts.

However other countries have made progress without, or even in spite of, the US before. After all, Trump also began the process of withdrawal during his last presidency, although it only took effect as he was leaving office. Before that, international agreement on climate action was held up for years under George W Bush’s presidency.

The US now joins only a handful of failed or war-torn states, including Libya, Iran and Yemen, in rejecting the 2015 accord. While the US has long been one of the world’s top two biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions—along with China—its significance has diminished as developing countries rapidly increase their share of global carbon output.

So how has the world reacted to Trump’s move, and what does it mean for global climate diplomacy?

The EU
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos: “The Paris agreement continues to be the best hope for all humanity. So Europe will stay the course, and keep working with all nations that want to protect nature and stop global warming.”

Wopke Hoekstra, the EU’s climate commissioner, wrote on social media that Trump’s decision was “a truly unfortunate development” but that “despite this setback, we remain committed to working with the US and our international partners to address the pressing issue of climate change…The Paris agreement has strong foundations and is here to stay.”

The UK
Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy security and net zero secretary, told a committee of the House of Lords on Tuesday he would “try to find common ground” with Trump, and that it was still in the US’s “national self-interest” to seek to tackle the climate crisis. “We are strong supporters of the Paris agreement,” he said. “I believe this transition [to clean energy] is unstoppable.”

The recent Cop29 summit in Azerbaijan had demonstrated that, he added. “Countries believe their national self-interest remains in the Paris agreement. The dangers to them are in not moving forward. [The transition] is not happening fast enough, but it is unstoppable.”

William Hague, the former foreign secretary, wrote in the Times of London: “For a country that has just experienced the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, and faces ever more terrifying hurricanes, to abandon the Paris climate agreement and remove all limits on fossil fuel use is to live in denial.”

Kim Darroch, the former UK ambassador to the US, and John Ashton, the UK’s climate envoy from 2006 to 2012, wrote to the newspaper calling for those in the US still committed to climate action to work with international partners. “Climate failure will impoverish us all and make our tinderbox world yet more insecure. We must now work with those in the US and elsewhere who understand the imperative of bringing the age of fossil energy to the earliest possible end.”

Canada
Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, told journalists: “It is deplorable that the president of the US has decided to pull out of the Paris agreement. It is unfortunately not the first time. The Paris agreement is bigger than one country, it is 194 countries who have collectively continued to fight climate change despite the absence of the US. Despite the fact that the federal government no longer seems interested in fighting climate change, we see a lot of support from US states and the private sector. It is ironic that the president would do that when California is going through the worst forest fire season in its history.”

Canada was “fully committed to its obligations under the Paris agreement”, he later told the Guardian in a statement. “By continuing to work together, Canada and the US can achieve far more in driving green growth and creating economic opportunities which also address climate change and protect lands and oceans.”

African Ground of Negotiators
In a joint statement, the climate change group said: “This decision is a direct threat to global efforts to limit temperature rise and avert the catastrophic impacts of climate change, particularly for the world’s most vulnerable nations. The US, one of the world’s largest carbon emitters, bears a historical responsibility to lead in climate action.

By abandoning its commitments under the Paris agreement, the US undermines years of hard-fought progress and sends a dangerous signal to the international community. For Africa and other developing countries, the implications are severe. Africa, already on the frontline of the climate crisis, faces escalating droughts, floods, and extreme weather events that threaten lives and livelihoods, exacerbate food insecurity, and destabilise economies. The withdrawal of US leadership diminishes the critical financial and technical support required to adapt to these challenges, leaving vulnerable nations to bear an unjust burden.”

The chair of the Least Developed Countries group, Evans Njewa, said on X: “We deeply regret USA plans to exit from #ParisAgreement (PA). This threatens to reverse hard-won gains in reducing emissions & puts our vulnerable countries at greater risk. The PA remains a vital climate pact & we must protect it for the future of our planet & generation.”

China
China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Guo Jiakun, told a news conference: “Climate change is a common challenge faced by all of humanity. No country can remain unaffected or solve the problem on its own. China will work with all parties to actively address the challenges of climate change.”

Brazil
Marina Silva, the environment minister for Brazil, which will host the Cop30 talks in Belem in November, said: “[Trump’s decisions] are the opposite of policies guided by evidence brought by science and common sense, imposed by the reality of extreme weather events, including in his own country.”

McDonald’s superfan Donald Trump reclaimed the White House soon after vowing to “get toxic chemicals…out of our food supply” and “make America healthy again” (MAHA). How on earth did this junk-food junkie manage to woo voters concerned about the dangers of the American diet?

The Democrats almost certainly played a part. For decades, their position on our food system has reflected two contradictory impulses. The first, represented most publicly by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.)—call it the Kale Caucus—seeks to rein in the ills of industrial agriculture and policies to support healthy eating. The other, embodied by Tom Vilsack, the former Iowa governor who ran the Department of Agriculture during the Obama and Biden administrations, favors the status quo.

Rather than pushing food production in a healthier direction, Kennedy’s ascent could bolster the status quo.

The Kale Caucus won some cultural cachet, but it never built enough clout to challenge the hegemony of the Vilsackian Agribusiness Brigade. This power imbalance has created a void through which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has barreled, seizing the banner as the nation’s predominant food system critic.

Now that Trump has tapped him to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, my fear is that Kennedy’s reckless anti-vaccine stances, conspiracy theorizing, and love of some of the internet’s most unhinged “wellness” bunkum will make legitimate critiques of the ways we grow and process food appear equally crackpot—affirming a narrative that Big Ag and Big Food have promoted for decades. In this way, rather than pushing food production in a healthier direction, Kennedy’s ascent could bolster the status quo.

Vilsack, while careful to pay lip service to the virtues of healthy eating and environmentally conscious farming, supported an entrenched system wherein the federal government pumps billions of dollars in subsidies to ever-larger farms that produce titanic amounts of pesticide-goosed corn and soybeans. He said little about the resulting erosion and water pollution in the Midwest, and even less about the poor quality of the foods engendered by overproduction of these crops. More than half of the calories we consume come from these foods, which have been linked with diabetes and high blood pressure—conditions that affect nearly half of American adults.

Booker spent much of the Biden years pushing against these trends, but, in a shift few saw coming, his Kale Caucus was utterly drowned out by Kennedy’s MAHA movement. During Kennedy’s brief presidential bid and subsequent alliance with Trump, he joined forces with fringe alternative medicine enthusiasts and wellness influencers to deliver fair critiques of the food system amid lots of conspiratorial nonsense about vaccines, infectious diseases, and fluoride. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, meanwhile, largely ignored food-system issues. 

Perhaps Democrats feared that taking on Big Ag would cost them votes in farm country. But here’s what they might be missing: During the last competitive Democratic primary, in 2020, candidates Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) vowed to break up the seed, pesticide, and meat conglomerates that dominate US agriculture, and push farm policy away from blind support for commodity-crop production. This agenda seemed to resonate with Democrats in the quintessential rural state Iowa. Together, Sanders and Warren claimed nearly half of Iowa’s delegates—more than three times the haul of Biden, whose gentler approach to corporate farming was in line with the wisdom of Vilsack, his top rural adviser, who’d told one podcaster that the bust-’em-up approach wasn’t a “winning message” because of the “substantial number of people hired and employed by those businesses here in Iowa.” (In reality, Big Ag generates big money, but it’s so mechanized that it sustains relatively few jobs.)

Big Ag generates big money, but it’s so mechanized that it sustains relatively few jobs.

Vilsack may have miscalculated. Trump beat Biden by 8 percentage points in Iowa that year—even though Barack Obama had won the state handily in 2008. In 2024, Trump’s bear hug of the agribusiness-hating Kennedy didn’t stop him from increasing his margin to 13 points. Toeing the agribusiness line by no means guarantees political success in Iowa.

The next time Democratic leaders court food-focused voters, maybe they should ignore Vilsack’s counsel in favor of Booker’s. “We need to refocus federal incentives so that they are targeted to farmers growing fruits and vegetables” and start investing a lot more in local and regional food systems, Booker told me in an email. “I believe this is an example of where good policy would also be good politics.”

Update, Jan. 27: Late Sunday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that the Colombian government had “agreed to all of Trump’s terms,” including the return of deportees on military planes. Meanwhile, a notice from the office of the Colombian president said the ambassador and foreign minister were traveling to the U.S. to implement an agreement, and that Colombia would “continue to receive Colombians who return as deportees, guaranteeing them dignified conditions as citizens with rights.” The government said it had the presidential plane ready to facilitate the return of deportees and did not make mention of military planes.

On Sunday morning, President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, claimed in an interview that aired on ABC that international leaders would not reject the Trump administration sending migrants back to their home countries.

“Oh, they’ll take them back,” Homan told host Martha Raddatz after she asked about how the administration would handle countries that refused to accept deportees. “We got President Trump coming into power,” Homan added. “President Trump puts America first.”

“My success is gonna be based on what Congress give us. The more money, the better I’m gonna do.”

Trump's "border czar" Tom Homan said he's "being realistic" and acknowledged that the mass deportation plan's success will require funding from Congress. https://t.co/TXBuO4BMhg pic.twitter.com/KQFtg1osFY

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 26, 2025

But only a few hours before that interview aired, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, proved Homan wrong: In a post on X, Petro said he would not accept American planes deporting migrants back to his country until the US establishes “a protocol for the dignified treatment of migrants.”

Research has shown that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens do.

“The US cannot treat Colombian migrants as criminals,” Petro wrote in his post. In another post, Petro seemed to suggest the problem was the migrants being sent back on military planes, writing: “We will receive our fellow citizens on civilian planes, without treating them like criminals.” (Research has shown that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens do.)

Trump promptly clapped back, writing in a post on Truth Social on Sunday afternoon that because Petro had refused to accept two flights already, Trump was taking a series of “urgent and decisive retaliatory measures,” including a travel ban; visa sanctions for members of the Colombian government and its supporters; and “emergency 25 percent tariffs” on Colombian goods coming into the US, which he said will be raised to 50 percent in a week. “These measures are just the beginning,” Trump wrote.

A notice from the president’s office posted just a few minutes after Trump’s Truth Social message said that Petro was sending the presidential plane “to facilitate the dignified return” of migrants who were supposed to return earlier. The notice also said the Colombian government was working on internal protocols “that ensure the dignified treatment of deported Colombians, guaranteeing that the procedures respect the human rights and integrity of each person,” and that it was also working with the American government to establish such processes. Later Sunday, Petro said he was imposing a retaliatory increase in tariffs, to 25 percent, on imports from the US. “The ministry should help direct our exports to the whole world other than the US,” Petro wrote. “Our exports should be expanded.”

There were 190,000 unauthorized Colombian immigrants living in the US as of 2022, according to the Pew Research Center. Far more immigrants without documentation come from Mexico—about 4 million, according to the Pew data. On Thursday, Mexico reportedly denied entry to a US plane transporting migrants, NBC News reported. A White House official told NBC it was an “administrative issue” that was “quickly rectified.” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and members of her Cabinet said prior to Trump’s inauguration that they did not agree with plans for “unilateral deportations” of Mexicans from the US, but said they would welcome them regardless.

As my colleague Isabela Dias reported, Trump issued a flurry of executive actions targeting immigration during his first week in office. They included seeking to end birthright citizenship (that’s unconstitutional, as a federal judge ruled on Thursday, temporarily blocking the order from taking effect) and sending 1,500 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, even though border crossings were at a four-year low at the end of Biden’s term. “It’s sending a strong signal to the world, our border’s closed,” Homan told Raddatz in the ABC interview, adding that the troops would help coordinate deportation flights and build infrastructure at the border. The New York Times also reported on Sunday that immigration raids were beginning in Chicago.

But for all of Trump’s bluster, even Homan conceded in the ABC interview that he could not commit to deporting every undocumented immigrant in the country, despite Trump’s pledge to enact the largest deportation operation in US history. “I’m being realistic,” Homan told Raddatz.

Update, Jan. 26: This story has been updated to include details of Petro’s response to Trump.

Because Elon Musk apparently did not create enough controversy for his liking this week, the tech billionaire also made a virtual appearance on Saturday at a rally for the extremist, right-wing, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party ahead of the country’s snap elections next month.

Musk told the crowd that he considers the party to be the “best hope” for Germany. The rally reportedly consisted of about 4,500 people, including the party leader, Alice Weidel, in the city of Halle.

“It’s okay to be proud to be German,” Musk said. “This is a very important principle. It’s okay, it’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”

He also said that the country needed to “move on” from “past guilt,” interpreted by many as referring to the Holocaust. “Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk said. Confusingly, Musk—a South African tech billionaire—also lamented “too much control from, sort of, global elite” in German affairs, adding, “There should be more determination by individual countries.”

In addition to those hypocrisies, Musk also peddled at least one straight-up falsehood: He claimed Germany is “an ancient nation, [that] goes back thousands of years”—but the German Empire was founded in 1871.

Elon Musk‘s great speech at our party convention! Make America & Germany great again! pic.twitter.com/XHtMIBfOYh

— Alice Weidel (@Alice_Weidel) January 26, 2025

He concluded by claiming “the future of civilization could hang on this election,” before leaving the cheering crowd with the three words Trump yelled after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania: “Fight, fight, fight!”

Unsurprisingly, Musk’s latest comments led to widespread condemnation. Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, said in a post on X: “Contrary to @elonmusk advice, the remembrance and acknowledgement of the dark past of the country and its people should be central in shaping the German society. Failing to do so is an insult to the victims of Nazism and a clear danger to the democratic future of Germany.” Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland, said: “The words we heard from the main actors of the AfD rally about “Great Germany” and “the need to forget German guilt for Nazi crimes” sounded all too familiar and ominous. Especially only hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz,” referring to the 80th anniversary, which falls on Monday.

Sen. Lindsey Graham: “I’m worried that 80 years on, we’re rewriting history here.”

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told host Dana Bash, “What he said does bother me,” also referencing the upcoming anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation. “I’m worried that 80 years on, we’re rewriting history here,” Graham added. “I want every German child, every American child, to know what happened and that it’s true, not a lie, and we never do it again.”

“What he says does bother me… I'm worried that 80 years on, that we're rewriting history here."@LindseyGrahamSC reacts to Elon Musk telling a right-wing political party in Germany that there's “too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that.” pic.twitter.com/E9qjL9YOTV

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) January 26, 2025

As my colleague Alex Nguyen has written, AfD is controversial even among Europe’s nationalists:

In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitler’s paramilitary organization. 

The party is also, like Trump, a fan of mass deportations of immigrants, which they term “remigration,” as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote about last year. (Weidel also used the word at the rally on Saturday.) As Mother Jones contributor Josh Axelrod, a Berlin-based reporter, wrote for us last month:

The AfD’s central pledge is to counteract the so-called Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that claims white Europeans or Americans are the victims of a plot by nonwhite immigrants to “replace” them and poison their societies. It was the inspiration for shooters to take up arms and target Muslim victims in Christchurch, Jews in Pittsburgh, Black people in Buffalo, and gay people in Bratislava.

“It’s the thing that brings together the far-right in multiple countries,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Mother Jones. 

Musk’s virtual appearance at the Saturday rally is just his latest show of support for the party, which has also included publishing an op-ed in support of them in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers last month, as I wrote then. He also interviewed Weidel, the party leader, on X earlier this month.

The party is still polling in second place, at 20 percent. But the resistance to their rise is also strong: The Associated Press reported that tens of thousands of Germans protested the AfD in Berlin and other cities on Saturday.

This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

Twelve years ago, Army 1st Lt. Alivia Stehlik walked the parade route for President Obama’s second inauguration, making sure everything would go smoothly. Stehlik spent weeks planning for the Army’s role in the inaugural parade, training troops, and instructing a group of high-ranking generals and admirals on marching in step.

Six-foot-two, with a West Point pedigree, a Ranger tab, ramrod straight posture, and an infectious smile, Stehlik was an ideal instructor. As a ceremonies officer stationed at the Army’s Old Guard in Washington, DC—which guards the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, conducts military funerals at Arlington, and serves as the president’s ceremonial escort—Stehlik was an expert in marching. The generals and the admirals, on the other hand, needed some refreshers.

Once, Stehlik was training a female admiral who asked why there were no women in the Army’s honor guard. Back then, Stehlik presented as a man. She would transition years later after the military allowed transgender troops to start serving openly.

Stehlik had wondered about the admiral’s question too—other services’ honor guards were mixed gender. But the Old Guard’s ceremonial company pulled exclusively from Army infantry, and women weren’t allowed in the infantry until 2016.

“Ma’am,” Stehlik told the admiral, “that’s way above my pay grade.”

Today, Stehlik, now a major, is waiting for another decision from far above her pay grade about who has the right to serve.

President Trump made transgender issues a centerpiece of his campaign, promising to “stop the transgender lunacy” and “get transgender out of the military.” During his first term, Trump banned transgender people from serving in the military, though ultimately troops who had already transitioned—like Stehlik—were grandfathered in.

That may not be the case this time.

On Monday, in his inaugural address, Trump proclaimed that the government recognizes “only two genders: male and female.” Later that day, he repealed an executive order by President Biden allowing transgender people to serve. Now, Stehlik and thousands of other troops, stationed from Connecticut to Kentucky to California, are bracing to see if Trump orders a new trans ban.

While the wait—and weight of the decision—may be agonizing, there is little transgender service members can do to make their case. Like any good soldier, Stehlik, now an Army physical therapist, went to work at Fort Campbell in Kentucky on the frigid morning after Trump’s inauguration. 

“I actually don’t spend time speculating about it,” she said. “I’m just trying to be good at my job.”

“Being perfect means not standing out.”

The lessons carried over from the Old Guard, where everything was drilled to perfection: every footstep in lockstep, every uniform exactly tailored. Nothing could be out of place.

“There was no allowance for, ‘We messed up this time.’ There was no lexicon for that in the Old Guard,” Stehlik said. “Being perfect means not standing out.”

When Stehlik first transitioned in 2017, she worried about standing out.

“I was the only six-foot-two chick with a Ranger tab,” she said.

But these days, there are other female Rangers who wear the revered badge, other transgender soldiers in uniform. She has deployed to Afghanistan and traveled with the Army to Jordan, the UAE, Lebanon. She has treated thousands of soldiers.

Today, she is the director of holistic health and fitness for the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell. She lives about an hour south of base in Nashville with her partner and a wildly affectionate dog named Mozzie. She rides her motorcycle, plays keyboard and piano, guitar and bass, and browses bookstores on the weekend. Despite the growing political tension over trans issues, life is normal most of the time. She does not feel much like she stands out anymore; she does not want to talk about standing out.

Instead, she wants to talk about her job. On Tuesday, the day after the inauguration, there was a quarterly brigade training briefing and a suicide prevention planning meeting. A peer-reviewed paper on optimizing women’s performance in sports demanded attention on her desk at home, where an Army Ranger flag hangs above the squat rack in her garage.

In 2022, an opportunity came up for Stehlik to travel to the Middle East as a physical therapist. As a trans soldier, she needed a medical waiver to go. Nobody in her unit knew the correct protocol for that, so Stehlik cold-emailed the US Central Command surgeon asking for permission.

“She’s top notch,” said Becky Wagner, a former active duty Army physician’s assistant who served with Stehlik during her deployment to Afghanistan. “She’s just a good soldier.”

When you’re a good soldier, Stehlik says, you stay out of politics.

“That’s kind of a fundamental part of being a soldier,” she said.

Thousands of transgender service members serve in the military, though the exact number is unclear. Estimates from two research centers, the Williams Institute at UCLA and the now-defunct Palm Center have put the figure around 15,000, but the Pentagon does not publicly track the number.

Data from UCLA also shows that transgender Americans sign up to serve their country at a rate twice that of cisgender people. Most transgender servicemembers have more than 12 years of service, said Rachel Branaman, the executive director of the Modern Military Association of America, which advocates for LGBTQ service members.

Any talk of a ban “harms readiness,” Branaman said.

Removing thousands of long-serving troops, she said, represents “a lot of specialized training that essentially costs billions of dollars and creates an operational gap.”

Transgender soldiers and sailors were first explicitly banned from military service in the 1960s. But things started changing after the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the policy that had prohibited gay and lesbian troops from serving openly. In 2013, the Army permitted Cpt. Sage Fox, a transgender woman, to return briefly to active duty, and by 2015, the military branches had made it difficult to dismiss service members for their gender identity. In 2016, the Obama White House officially ended the ban on transgender service members.

But in July 2017, amid a growing backlash among conservatives, Trump tweeted that he was reinstating the ban.

“After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the US Military,” he wrote. “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.”

Stehlik grew up the eldest child of an Army officer, a West Point graduate, and from her earliest memories, she wanted the same life for herself. She remembered the tanks from her father’s early career—the “real” Army, she says—before he settled into a more sedate second act in operations research at the Pentagon.

She spent much of her childhood and teenage years in northern Virginia, where her mother homeschooled her and her four younger siblings. In what would have been her senior year of high school, she took classes at a local community college, and then got an appointment to West Point, arriving in the summer of 2004. It was years before Stehlik realized she was transgender, but she felt at home in the Army.

From the beginning, she knew she had been right: The life of a soldier was the life for her. Even during West Point’s notoriously difficult first year, she loved it—fellow cadets called Stehlik the “happy plebe.”

“I think I felt seen, I felt valued for the things that I could do,” Stehlik said. “I like doing hard things. I just find intrinsic value in soldiering and being around soldiers.”

So when Stehlik graduated from West Point, she chose to be a soldier’s soldier, commissioning as an infantry officer. It was 2008, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were in full swing, and it would be nearly eight years before women would be permitted to serve in combat roles, like the infantry. But Stehlik had not yet come out as transgender. Like any good soldier, she wanted to be where the action was.

Stehlik graduated from the Army’s grueling Ranger school course and then was stationed at Camp Casey in South Korea, where she served as an infantry platoon leader. Her plan had been to apply from there to the 75th Ranger Regiment. But she was newly married and worried the intensive training and deployments would take a toll on her relationship.

So instead, she accepted orders to the Army’s storied Old Guard. She still tears up when she thinks about greeting the caskets of fallen troops coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan.

“There’s not a lot that you can compare to having to give a flag to somebody’s surviving family,” she said. “How do you do right by the people who are willing to give their lives for this idea of what we’re doing here in America, this idea of our country, and of freedom and opportunity?”

Stehlik began her transition at Fort Carson in 2017, not long after she graduated from physical therapy school at the Army’s medical training program at Baylor University.

Even then, anti-trans sentiment and legislation were growing across the country. By 2017, legislators in Texas, where Baylor is located, had started introducing bills seeking to regulate which bathrooms trans people could use. Anti-LGBTQ bills under consideration across the country have swelled in recent years, from 81 in 2020 to more than 530 in 2024, according to the ACLU.

In Kentucky, where Stehlik is currently stationed, lawmakers in 2023 overrode a veto to pass a law restricting discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in schools and requiring most transgender minors to detransition, among other things. That same year, at a conservative conference, the political commentator Michael Knowles called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated from public life … for the good of society.”

When Trump tweeted that he was going to ban trans soldiers, Stehlik was stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado.

At first, she missed the news. Her first patient of the day came in and told Stehlik with conviction, “I don’t care what anybody says, I want you to be my therapist.”

“I was like, ‘OK…cool. Yep, I’m your therapist,’” Stehlik said.

But then her sister texted, asking if she was all right, and explained what had happened.

Trump’s tweet reportedly took the Pentagon by surprise, and it took two months for Defense officials and the White House to hash out what exactly it meant. Ultimately, military policy prohibited new transgender troops from enlisting and active-duty service members from transitioning, but it did not remove transgender servicemembers from duty, nor did it prohibit them from re-enlisting.

Stehlik said she just kept doing her job. Shortly after taking office in 2021, President Biden signed an executive order rescinding the ban.

Stehlik had moved into physical therapy because she loved helping people stay fit and saw the field as a way to directly help soldiers on the front line, keeping them deployable and supporting the mission.

But she worried how troops would react to being treated by a transgender therapist, especially as she prepared to go to Afghanistan. She was concerned her fellow soldiers might feel uncomfortable, closed off to her, which could make providing care more difficult.

But that wasn’t the case, she said.

“People were way more vulnerable with me than I expected them to be. Even these young hotshot infantry and Special Forces guys that are out there, the last thing I expected was higher levels of vulnerability from them about how they were actually doing. But I got that way more often than I expected.

“And I think it was because I just exist as myself. I’m really unapologetically who I am. And I think that gives other people the freedom to be that too.”

Other soldiers who have served with Stehlik said they saw the same thing.

“I’ve brought in some of the oldest, crustiest Green Berets that I know,” said Lt. Col. Dan Brillhart, an Army physician who has run medical training exercises with Stehlik. Initially, he said, some of them were uncomfortable about working alongside Stehlik.

“They inevitably, universally fall under her spell,” Brillhart said. “They’re like, ‘She’s amazing…When I come back next year, I want to work with Alivia.’”

He wasn’t the only one who spoke about a sort of magic she brought to her work.

“I used to call her the brigade healer,” said Col. Jon Post, who worked with Stehlik at the security forces assistance command, providing support to partner countries in the Middle East. “She is incredibly emotionally intelligent.”

“Her thing was always: Be a better human,” said Staff Sgt. Logan Haller, who served as her physical therapy tech during her deployment to Afghanistan. “She sat me down and said, ‘OK, Logan, where do you want to go with your life, with your career? … As a soldier, she was awesome.”

Haller remembered one soldier who kept calling Stehlik “sir” instead of “ma’am,” kept saying “he” instead of “she.” Stehlik, he said, corrected him from time to time. But Haller finally pulled the soldier aside.

“I told him, ‘Hey, either get it right or get out. Find somebody else to take care of you,’” he said.

He reminded the soldier of a core Army value: “You treat everyone with dignity and respect.”

“He figured it out after that,” Haller said.

A Quinnipiac poll from the time of Trump’s first military trans ban found that nearly 70 percent of Americans supported transgender troops being permitted to serve openly. A 2020 study found a similar level of support among active-duty service members.

But throughout his second run for the White House, President Trump talked about reinstating the ban. In December, he promised to “sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation, get transgender out of the military, and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools.” The new head of the Defense Department, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has railed against the military being overrun by “woke” policies that he claims have demoralized service members and weakened our fighting force. Other Republican lawmakers have claimed that caring for trans troops is costing the military too much money.

Between 2016 and 2021, the Pentagon spent about $15 million on healthcare for transgender troops, the vast majority of that on therapy visits, many of which are mandated by military policy on transgender service members and not necessarily requested by troops themselves. By comparison, in 2014, as the military began to consider allowing trans people to serve openly, it spent more than $80 million on erectile dysfunction drugs.

Experts who spoke with The War Horse were hesitant to speculate on what a new ban might look like. But they said it could span a range of possibilities, from merely not allowing new transgender enlistees to discharging thousands of active-duty troops.

“I think everybody is just waiting to see what’s coming,” Branaman said.

She and other experts said that the more extreme possibility—removing active-duty transgender troops—could be logistically very difficult for the military branches.

“There’s going to be administrative chaos,” Branaman said.

“Who’s going to join the military from Gen Z or Gen Alpha if you can’t bring your gay friend or your trans friend?”

Sue Fulton, a senior advisor to SPARTA Pride, an association of active-duty transgender military members, said that “trying to implement some sort of new ban would be a mess and a problem for commanders.”

Typically, service members who are removed from active duty for nonpunitive reasons are discharged either administratively or through a medical route. Both processes can be time-consuming and burdensome, with various policies spelling out procedures for required hearings, boards, and potential appeals. It can be more complicated to separate people in certain critical specialties or service members who are close to retirement.

When the military discharges a service member for medical reasons, it can take anywhere from six months to more than a year. Speeding things up would likely require changes to other military policies.

Luke Schleusener, the head of Out in National Security, a nonpartisan nonprofit for queer national security professionals, said that those sorts of changes would be “kind of capricious.”

“It’s going to say to a population that has been serving pretty much continuously that you are suddenly not eligible, not because you no longer meet requirements, but because we’ve changed requirements to specifically expel you.”

He and other experts also highlighted concerns about recruiting goals, which the military branches have struggled to meet in recent years. A 2024 study from the Public Religion Research Institute found that 30 percent of Gen Z identifies as LGBTQ.

“Who’s going to join the military from Gen Z or Gen Alpha if you can’t bring your gay friend or your trans friend?” Schleusener said.

Twelve years ago, after weeks of training and preparation, Stehlik watched the inaugural parade from CNN’s press box, on hand to provide expert commentary on parade protocols. This Inauguration Day, she was at home in Nashville.

It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so she had the day off, although her boss had already emailed her with a work question. She kept half an eye on her phone, waiting to see if any more messages from her boss came in, while playing around on a keyboard in an upstairs spare bedroom.

Stehlik has played the piano since she was seven. She says it’s the thing she’s done the longest in her life. The thing she’s done the second longest is serve in the Army.

At West Point, in Eisenhower Hall, a nine-foot Steinway grand piano sits in a ballroom. Stehlik remembers when she first played it, framed by floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson River.

“I assumed that it wouldn’t be there when I came back,” she said. It seemed out of place; she thought it must usually be stored somewhere else. But when she next went back to the ballroom, months later, the Steinway was still there.

She got in the habit of playing it, walking down the hill from the barracks to the ballroom whenever she needed a break from the grind of cadet life.

On Inauguration Day in Nashville, Stehlik did not want to talk about politics; the inauguration seemed political. But she talked about West Point, where she began her life in the Army.

“I am as optimistic and idealistic as West Point is,” she said. “Sometimes it feels naive to be idealistic, but I just am. I am a hopeful, optimistic human.”

Whenever Stehlik goes back to West Point, she makes it a point to walk down to Eisenhower Hall to play the piano.

“Sometimes it’s hiding in a back corner behind curtains, and sometimes it’s out in the middle of the ballroom.”

But, she said, “That piano is always there.”

This War Horse story was reported in Nashville by Sonner Kehrt, edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

Photos for the story were provided through a partnership with The 19th, an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy.