At a rally Saturday in Gastonia, North Carolina, Donald Trump thanked God for an October jobs report that showed a slow-down in job growth due in part to the recent hurricane that decimated the western part of the state.
“How good was that?” Trump asked the crowd. “To get those numbers four days before the vote was…” Trump said, trailing off. Then he paused and looked upward, presumably to God, who he told: “Thank you very much sir. Thank you.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the US economy added just 12,000 jobs in October. Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su attributed the slow growth to “significant impacts from hurricanes and strike activity.” That’s a reference to Hurricanes Helene and Milton and an ongoing strike by Boeing machinists. Noting the unemployment rate remains at 4.1 percent and inflation is falling, Su said the jobs report “reflects an atypical month rather than a shift in the broader economic outlook.”
Trump’s jobs remarks were hardly the worst thing he said this weekend. He labeled journalists covering his rally “monsters,” mocked trans people, and called his opponent a product of political correctness and “stupid,” with a racist and sexist subtext hard to miss. He defended his racist Madison Square Garden rally. On Friday night in Milwaukee he inexplicably expressed frustration with audio issues by pretending to perform fellatio on a microphone stand.
But the reaction to the jobs report was revealing in the gusto with which Trump embraced bad news for Americans as good for him. To be fair, he did describe the numbers as “bad news” during his Friday address. But in North Carolina on Saturday, hecelebrated thepolitical benefit he claimed to be getting from the new report—without mentioning the hurricane economists say helped slow hiring by causing catastrophic flooding and hundreds of deaths, including more than 100 in the state he spoke in.
“I mean, how good is that if you happen to be running against the people that did that?” Trump, referring to the jobs report.
This wasn’t the only time he seemed to be rejoicing in doom. Elsewhere in the speech, Trump celebrated, as he generally does at his rallies, an increase in border crossings that followed his exit from office. He has consistently made few bones about his belief that problems at the border are good for him. Early this year, Trump successfully lobbied to jettison a bipartisan bill aimed at toughening security on the Mexican border. Trump’s push was widely understood as an effort to stop Congress from trying to solve a problem that he wanted to use to attack Democrats. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who was a key author of the bill, has said that critics of the measures argued: “We don’t want President Trump to lose that issue.”
Vice President Kamala Harris has faulted Trump’s opposition to the measure, calling it evidence that “he’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
Nothing in Trump’s remarks Saturday refuted that criticism.
Donald Trump is amplifying attacks on the media in the final days of the campaign, broadly threatening retaliation against the industry for coverage critical of him.
“To make America great you really have to get the news shaped up,” Trump told Fox News Saturday morning.
During a rally in North Carolina later that day, Trump called journalists covering the event “monsters,” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people.”
During the Fox News interview, Trump attacked several outlets. He called ABC News “corrupt,” renewing his gripe that the network’s David Muir during a September debate had correctly noted that that FBI data shows violent crime declining, contradicting Trump’s erroneous claims that it was “through the roof.”
Trump isn’t just going after the media with words. On Thursday, the former president sued CBS News for $10 billion, alleging that the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris “amounts to a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 US Presidential Election.” The lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of Texas where the sole judge is Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee known for partisan pro-GOP rulings. Even so, the suit has little chance of success. TV networks routinely edit interviews (including those featuring Trump, who backed out of appearing on “60 Minutes” last month.) My colleague Pema Levy wrote more about this lawsuit and its chances for success here.
Trump’s suit is “without merit” a CBS spokesperson said last week. “The interview was not doctored; and 60 Minutes did not hide any part of the vice president’s answer to the question at issue…60 Minutes fairly presented the interview to inform the viewing audience, and not to mislead it.”
Trump has also said that CBS should lose its license to broadcast news due to the Harris interview. That’s one of many such threats. CNN recently noted that Trump in the last two years has called for every major American TV news network, including Fox News, to be punished for coverage he deemed unfair. Trump has also vowed that if he wins back the White House, he plans to seize greater control of independent regulatory agencies, including the FCC.
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The pattern is clear: Trump’s extreme rhetoric is deliberate.
As president, Trump tried to punish media outlets that criticized him. His administration tried to block AT&T acquisition of CNN’s parent company and to deny a cloud computing contract for Amazon, which was founded by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.
Trump has also threatened to jail journalists who report information he contends has national security implications. (Trump himself, of course, has been indicted for illegally retaining highly sensitive national security documents he removed from the White House.) In 2022, NPR recently noted, Trump repeatedly said the prospect of prison rape would cause reporters to disclose sources. “When this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that was,'” Trump said at a Texas event.
All these statements amount to an ongoing threat that, if elected, Trump will use his power to curb speech critical of him. That’s a direct challenge to the First Amendment, and hence not likely to fully succeed, even among increasingly partisan judges.
But Trump could still made life difficult for media outlets, and his threats already appear to have had a chilling effect. Amid attacks from Trump and his allies over his philanthropic efforts to help register voters in 2020, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has tried to extract himself from politics, including by limiting what the company deems political content on its platforms. The Washington Post editorial page’s scuttling of an endorsement of Harris has been widely read as an attempt by Bezos to avoid angering Trump, though Bezos disputes that. The Los Angeles Times also drew fire for declining to endorse a candidate this year.
The Post‘s move didn’t appease Trump. The former president ripped the paper during his Fox call-in Saturday, even suggesting the 250,000 lost subscriptions and high-profile resignations the paper suffered due to the non-endorsement was connected to his gripes with the paper. Why is the Post facing these problems? According to Trump, it’s “because they don’t have credibility.”
Donald Trump has an enemies list. The Sierra Club has an allies list—some 259,000 Pennsylvanians who could decide the election.
They have demonstrated concern for the climate crisis, the clean energy transition, and the environment—but they are young, or newly registered, or do not regularly vote. “These voters can be critical,” says Sarah Burton, the Sierra Club’s national political director. “But they often need extra pushes to get out and actually vote.”
So the Sierra Club is enlisting a vast cadre of volunteers to turn them out. People are gathering in dining rooms across the state and in zoom calls nation-wide to write postcards and make phone calls. As of Thursday, they’d contacted about 100,000 people on the club’s list.
“The only thing that defeats Trump and MAGA Republicans is collective action, and in my mind, specifically collective action on climate. There is such a potential there. I think it’s really exciting,” Burton says.
The Sierra Club is far from alone. Across the state, I met organizers from a wide range of green groups tapping into environmental concerns to get people to the polls. In a 2023 poll by The Nature Conservancy-PA, a whopping 86 percent of Pennsylvania union households say addressing climate change is a priority. Even the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) finds that their members are eager to hear how Harris and Walz will secure well-paid union jobs while building the green energy economy. People are hosting block parties, knocking on doors, and doing everything else they can think of to reach voters in the state.
The message can seem out of sync with the Harris-Walz campaign, which has emphasized an “all-of-the above” energy strategy and made clear its opposition to a national fracking ban—things that are largely anathema to many of these same voters. But that’s all the more reason to show up, says Maria Andrews, movement politics director with Pennsylvania Stands Up, a group working with low-income BIPOC communities across the state and mobilizing a massive get out the vote effort.
“If Trump wins, he’s made it clear he will do the bidding of fossil fuel corporations and billionaires,” Andrews says. “If Harris wins, we can better organize for more,” she says.
In Pittsburgh, I went to a block party organized by Black Voters Matter, the ACLU, and the NAACP, part of a “Climate Revival Tour.” The smell of barbecue filled the air and DJ QRX played dance music, as Jacquea Mae and Lauren Lynch-Novakovic sat contentedly beneath a shade canopy. They told me of dangerously polluted air in their neighborhoods, and how that intersects with the need for civil and women’s rights. Mae had already proudly cast her ballot for Harris. Lynch-Novakovic hadn’t yet—she longs for more action for peace in Gaza and the Middle East. But in the end, Lynch-Novakovic says, she’ll vote for Harris, finding the alternative just too unthinkable.
Grammy-nominated recording artist and actor Antonique Smith—she played Mimi in the original production of Rent—took the stage. “I implore you to vote on climate,” Smith says. “It’s voting for love. Because loving your neighbor as yourself [means] we don’t want pollution in our neighborhoods and we don’t want it in anyone else’s,” and it is this same fossil fuel pollution, she stresses, which is also causing the climate to change. She then sang “a love song to the earth.”
Then Reverend Lennox Yearwood, Jr., President and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, joined Smith, wearing a silver sequined blazer that complimented her shirt and shoes. Smith and Yearwood formed Climate Revival with the goal of mobilizing Black faith communities and getting out the environmental vote. Yearwood dismissed the promise of jobs made by the fossil fuel industry. Fracking accounts for barely 0.32 percent of jobs in Pennsylvania, and Yearwood was quick to point out how the Biden-Harris administration had made the nation’s largest-ever investments in climate action and environmental justice. “How do we fix climate change?” he asks the crowd. “It’s to vote. That’s the first solution.”
Over 300 miles away in Philadelphia, Jason Shedlock, Regional Organizer and Secretary Treasurer of Laborers’ Local 327 and president of the Maine Building Trades Council, wears a hunk of coal attached to a chain around his neck. A descendant of coal miners, his great grandfather died in a cave-in and a grandfather died from black lung. “This is really personal for me,” he says.
He’s in Philly to canvas with hundreds of other LIUNA members as part of the AFL-CIO’s get out the vote effort. The AFL-CIO is part of the Blue-Green Alliance, uniting labor and environmental groups across Pennsylvania and the nation. LIUNA supports “all of the above” energy, but its members also know better than to be left behind. As they go door-to-door talking to their own members and workers from a broader AFL-CIO labor list, they describe how Trump promised an infrastructure bill for five years, but it was Biden and Harris who made the single largest investment in infrastructure in US history and delivered on jobs. Shedlock likes to stress that Biden and Harris are closing the huge wage gap that has existed between the pay to build a pipeline and the pay to construct a wind farm. “These folks don’t need to be environmentalists,” Shedlock says. When they are offered pay that enables them to provide for their families and policy that supports their union, “they start to like wind and solar quite a bit,” he adds.
Beth Ahearn also came from Maine, where she’d been the state political director of the Maine League of Conservation Voters. As we walked through a quiet neighborhood in Downington, a borough in Chester County about 30 miles west of Philly, she knocked on doors and was greeted warmly by several residents, some with children on their hip. If they had not yet voted for Harris, Ahearn made sure they had a plan to do so.
So perhaps it is no surprise that of late, Harris has begun to insert more pro-climate messaging in her speech, recently telling voters in Pennsylvania, “I love GenZ, these young leaders, they’re clear eyed, they’ve only known the climate crisis… they’re so wonderfully impatient…They’re ready to get in there. Let’s invest in them!”
I never paid much attention to America’s criminal justice system until I, unexpectedly, got into serious trouble. Being labeled a criminal felt to me as unlikely as someone finding Kool-Aid on Jupiter. I was the rarest of things, an honestdealer among the myriad elegant sharks and scumbags in the veryprestigious realm of high-end art sales. Or so I thought. But desperate to keep my gallery afloat, I had to juggle some money and payments. I began lying about my receivables, paying Paul while putting off Peter—until I couldn’t pay him either. This was unsustainable and, it turned out, illegal. My assistant and my business partner lawyered up, distanced themselves from me, and ratted me out. I was arrested, charged, convicted of wire fraud, and sentenced to 18 months in a minimum-security federal prison.
As another convicted felon, former President Donald Trump, has pointed out, America has a two-tiered justice system. Trump just refuses to publicly acknowledge what that really means and the fact that he’s in the top bunk, so to speak. But should he lose and end up serving time, there’s a good chance that my experience might shed light on what he would be likely to face. You see, as scary as it is to be prosecuted, my experience was a dream compared to the plight of some others I knew.
I wrote this story to dispel certain myths, but also to give you an idea of what a white-collar prosecution and incarceration is like and how much of one’s experience hinges on wealth and connections, both of which Trump has in spades. As a billionaire ex-president, the strings he could pull would be far more influential than those of a merely well-connected art dealer from New York. But whatever strings exist, they matter—a lot.
Having the cash to hire a good lawyer, and not having to rely on an overburdened public defender, is the first step toward a better outcome. As you know, it often seems as though a lawyer has a professional obligation to fight harder for a client who is paying a ton of money. But what you may not know is that the conditions of your incarceration also depend, often quite a bit, on your position in the financial and social hierarchy. And the horrific Hollywood depictions of prison life for people who are not wealthy and connected can be pretty close to the mark. Consider this snippet from a Marshall Project report on conditions at an Illinois penitentiary:
In stories that echoed with the same visceral details, dozens of men said they lived under the pressing threat of violence from cellmates as well as brutality at the hands of staff. Specifically, many men reported being shackled in cuffs so tight they left scars, or being “four-pointed” and chained by each limb to a bed for hours, far beyond what happens at other prisons and in violation of [Bureau of Prisons] policy and federal regulations.
Let’s just say that nothing like that ever happened to me. Yet just because I had it easier—easy even—doesn’t mean that incarceration isn’t life altering. Being a member of the elite (more or less) and enjoying some privilege (more or less) won’t save you from the consequences of a not-so-bad incarceration. Notably, your family, career, and social standing are generally ruined forever. Your relationships that survive may end up stronger, but many will wither and die. And if you think you will ever reach the pinnacle of whatever it was you did before you went away, well, you won’t.
I know what I’m talking about.
“Do you want good news or bad news?” my no-nonsense criminal attorney, Danny Parker, asked me one bleak morning in December 2017. The weather may have been beautiful, but all days felt bleak then. At least Danny gave me an option. His news was normally just bad.
“Bad news first,” I replied. “Always.”
“There’s a warrant out for your arrest,” he said.
I struggled to breathe. I hadn’t thought this would happen so soon, even though I’d known I was in serious trouble for about a month and a half. But the justice system works in secrecy, and as I quickly learned, you never know what’s coming.
“The good news: It’s federal.”
Until that moment, I was ignorant as to the vagaries of the criminal justice system. As it turns out, the state system is more chaotic, a bit cruder, and uneven. There are 50 disparate jurisdictions, each with its own rules, characters, and, let’s call it, charm. The Bureau of Prisons tends to be better funded than state prison systems. It also has clearer standards and is a bit more humane. And the federal system prosecutes far fewer criminals than the states do overall—about 10 percent of the total. So in a perverse way, it’s a more exclusive social group.
The prisons themselves, though still awful, are generally less so than state and private prisons. At the state level, prisoners tend to have more options for getting sentences reduced, but the federal facilities are safer and their inmates less violent. Also, the food is better.
If I were to be found guilty—and I was guilty—I would likely serve my time in a minimum-security camp. Federal security classifications range from minimum (think Trump lieutenant Peter Navarro) to supermax (El Chapo). Only about 15 percent of federal prisoners end up in minimum security. But landing in one of the nicer facilities, like Otisville or Pensacola, is exceedingly difficult. As with exclusive Ivy League schools, it usually requires hiring a consultant who can lobby public officials to improve your odds of admission.
Shocked? I sure was. I learned from my lawyers that these consultants, much like college counselors, also advise prospective, uh, freshmen on which campus would suit them best. (This applies only to nonviolent criminals. If you’re a murderer or serial rapist, all bets are off.) Once you narrow down your list of prospective prison camps, like Tom Wambsgans in Succession, your consultants pull strings to try to get you your preferred choice. And once you’re accepted, they’ll advise you on what to expect.
When it became clear I would be doing time, I called prison consultant Joel Sickler, who boasts an 80 percent success rate in landing people the facility of their choice. Given my level and type of offense (felony, wire fraud), he was confident he could get me into Otisville—which we, the cognoscenti, call OTV. Roughly half of its clientele consists of white-collar criminals: disgraced executives, unscrupulous lawyers, careless politicians, and wayward rabbis. Most of the rest are in for more serious offenses, like nonviolent drug crimes, or because good behavior at a higher-security facility earned them an upgrade. Otisville is the clubbiest of Club Feds, the Harvard of the Catskills, the yeshiva of misconduct. The best possible option for the worst part of your life.
It likely helped that I’m Jewish because OTV is viewed as the Jewish prison. For years, advocacy groups had lobbied federal officials to develop a lockup with accommodations for religiously conservative Jews. As such, Otisville has a real Torah, a kosher kitchen, and a huge Hebrew library. It makes accommodations for the High Holidays. (I’m basically an atheist, but I would take all the help I could get.) You’d have to be a fool, Sickler told me, to cause trouble and get yourself transferred out of this promised land. “Keep your head down and don’t mess around,” he advised.
But before you book a stay, let me dispel your preconceived notions about Club Fed’s reputation for being cushy and how white-collar felons get undue perks. Much of that is exaggerated. Maybe it sounds better than that cruise you took with your in-laws, but minimum-security prison is still prison. I figured that much out pretty quickly.
Danny called me into his office one day for a horrible conversation. The US attorney was offering a deal, he informed me. If I admitted to my crimes, which are not uncommon, as I once wrote, in my profession, I could expect a lenient sentence: 51 to 63 months—4¼ to 5¼ years! He then gave me the best legal advice I’ve ever received: Take the deal without counteroffers or complaints.
This is the dirty little secret of the federal system: Once indicted, you will almost certainly lose. Plead guilty should you ever find yourself in such a mess. I know many people who tried to fight, and they all got longer sentences. Guilty or innocent, you’re fucked at that point, so you might as well accept your fate. My only consolation was that I knew I was guilty and had no desire to pretend otherwise.
After carefully researching the various bridges in downtown Manhattan—they’re all about the same height, turns out—I drew up a list of “mitigating factors” to convince the court I was still basically a good guy despite my monumental fuckup. I stressed my remorse and said I would take my punishment like a man. For this, the judge rewarded me.
Sentencing took place in 2018, on a Thursday in September, and the judge put me away for 18 months. Two weeks later, I received my assignment in the mail: I was to self-surrender at Otisville on the last day of November. (I got in! I got in!) This gave me ample time to put my affairs in order.
I couldn’t believe my luck.
To enter Otisville, you first pass through the adjacent medium-security prison. Here, the guards questioned me about every aspect of my life and then led me into a small room with shelves containing uniforms, either green or tan. “What’s your waist?” a guard asked. He then instructed me to take off my clothes and put them in a bin nearby. I had heard about this part: the strip search. I would get used to it eventually.
Front. Back. Squat. Cough. Lift your right foot. Now your left. Turn back around.
“Up,” he said, and, when I looked puzzled, he motioned to my groin. I lifted my scrotum.
“Okay,” he tossed me a green uniform. When I pointed out the pants were loose, he assured me: “You’ll get a new uniform. Don’t worry.”
After my fingerprinting and a mug shot, the officer was joined by another guard. Rosado was loud and funny and perhaps a bit scary. He locked me up in an actual cell for several hours before giving me a bedroll, taking me out to the quiet parking lot, and pointing to the top of a winding road, where I would meet my new friends.
“This is weird,” I thought as I walked, unaccompanied, up the hill.
The camp at Otisville is very different from the prison it surrounds—a spartan enclave in the mountains of upstate New York. There are only two buildings. One is a dormitory that houses 100 men in a maze of 50 cubicles with 6-foot-tall cinderblock walls. No doors. Each two-man cubicle contains a metal bunk bed, two metal cabinets, and two plastic stools. The smaller administration building has offices for the “counselor,” who oversees the camp, and the case manager, who advises and advocates for inmates. It also has classrooms, a chapel, a dorm for 20 more men, and a visiting room with all the charm of a Greyhound terminal. One of the former inmates I’d spoken with in advance captured the vibe perfectly: “It’s like going to a shitty summer camp in the ’70s—in Alabama.”
Walking into the dormitory for the first time, I was full of trepidation. In the movies, the new guy is always a target. But when I entered my 8-by-9-foot cube—home for the next several months—I was immediately welcomed by several mild-mannered, middle-aged guys. They gave me a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and even new shoes. I arrived with nothing, and they gave me everything I needed. It was a Friday evening. Within an hour, I found myself at a full-fledged Shabbat service and dinner, replete with prayer books, brisket, and babka. Mickey, the de facto head of Otisville’s Jewish community, gave the following speech:
“As we know, this is the Sabbath of Unity. We are all reminded that in here, we are brothers, united in our shared experience. No matter how religious anyone is or from what background, we are all Jews. The Jews of Otisville…welcome to the Sabbath of Unity.”
Where the fuck am I?
Waking up at OTV for the first time was weirdly serene. There was barely any schedule and little to do, but also little to fear. I witnessed no violence during my time there. The camp is small, and with everyone in our green uniforms, it felt like being in the Army, only without drills and commanding officers. There’s neither reveille in the morning nor a specified bedtime. You can watch TV all night, play cards, or hang out and talk. I realized I’d be having plenty of interesting conversations, as I had in the dorms back in college.
I was genuinely shocked by how accomplished, educated, intelligent, and, dare I say, normal nearly everybody was—a far cry from the cartoon villains I’d imagined. Most of the prisoners were simply average (or above-average) men who’d screwed up, misjudged, gotten too ambitious or desperate, and were turned in by someone they trusted. Just like me!
The only major drama was the occasional abrupt shakedown, during which staffers would kick us out of the buildings and rifle through our belongings, looking for drugs, booze, cellphones, and other contraband. These raids usually followed a tip that someone had brought something in, like Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival infamy, who smuggled in a phone and a recording device—stupid transgressions that led to me and some others getting strip-searched again. Spoiler alert: None of us had an iPhone up his butt.
But mostly, we just wiled away our days doing the mindless “jobs” we were assigned; working out; and playing chess, poker, Scrabble, or tennis. There was lots of free time to talk, laugh, and bond. If Trump loses the election and eventually lands at Otisville or a comparable place, I can predict how his bluster might be received. Prison, even pampered prison, is a great equalizer. The uniforms, the demeaning jobs like cleaning toilets, the standing up to be counted several times a day, the inane “programming”—one class was called “Doing Time With the Right Mind”—strip away one’s individuality and dignity. Whatever fame or fortune you had in real life means little here. As your fellow inmates will tell you, “In here, you’re no better than me.”
That sentiment was expressed to the likes of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen (in for tax evasion, making false statements, campaign finance violations), Jersey Shore’s The Situation (tax evasion), and former New York state Sen. Dean Skelos (bribery, extortion, corruption). All of them managed to check their egos at the gate. Could Trump? A prisoner who acts as though he deserves special treatment tests the patience of his peers. And running afoul of their expectations can make for an isolating experience.
Thriving at a place like Otisville also requires a very non-Trumpian trait: selflessness. Inmates, despite their meager possessions, are usually quick to share their coffee hoard or shaving cream with peers who have run out. Commissary comes but once a week, and strict spending limits guarantee that everyone will be short of something at some point. There are also small indulgences from the outside that get shared on the inside—books and magazines are traded frequently; Cohen would give me his “cryptic” crossword from the Financial Times. Then there’s the shared intellectual property, knowledge, and expertise, and the legal, financial, or personal advice, whether good or not. Nobody expects anything in return. In fact, the long stretches of idleness and the need to coexist peacefully means that most of the guys look forward to helping a fellow inmate. Could Trump manage that?
He’d have to learn.
An age-old question about penal systems is whether they are designed to rehabilitate or simply to punish. America focuses on the latter. Formal punishment at Otisville ranges from relatively benign (cleaning the latrines) to harsh (a stint in the “Special Housing Unit,” or SHU, a.k.a. solitary confinement). But a big part of the punishment at any prison, even OTV, is the crushing boredom. Every inmate faces an immediate and severe demotion of self-worth and confidence. By the time you enter, you’ve lost everything you most value. Minimum-security prison may be a respite from the ferocity of prosecution, but once you’re in, boredom becomes your enemy.
The most insidious epidemic in prison—though I got out before Covid hit—is mental illness. Most of the inmates I knew seemed to experience almost constant depression and despair. In many cases, their pre-prosecution lives were filled with substance abuse, anxiety, paranoia, OCD, ADHD, and other mental issues that contributed to their extreme behavior. I don’t know, for instance, what might cause a successful financial adviser to gamble away tens of millions of dollars of his clients’ money, but it can’t be psychologically healthy. According to the New York State Bar Association, an estimated 70 percent of incarcerated people show symptoms of mental illness, and up to 1 in 3 have serious diagnoses such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. The comparable figure for the free world is about 1 in 10.
I reached out to Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, an associate professor of population health sciences at Duke University who focuses on incarceration, to ask about this. Given our insufficient public investment, “who ends up treating mental health? Well, jails and then prisons, primarily,” she told me. “Because there are no community alternatives. It’s a sort of perfect storm of people who are under-resourced and then traumatizing them further.”
Even OTV’s most noteworthy inmates—formerly hotshot lawyers, esteemed doctors, and titans of industry—struggled with their alienation from society. If you thought Club Fed would offer adequate psychological support, think again. There were no therapists on hand beyond the one who managed care for the broader facility, including the medium-security prison, and she was rarely at the camp. Even accessing our prescriptions was a challenge. I had to lobby hard for my Wellbutrin after the medical team initially refused to give me my prescribed dose. When the doctor asked what I thought would happen if I switched meds, I replied, “suicide,” which apparently was enough of a magic word to change their stance.
One antidote to the boredom, however, was the revolving door of new enrollees. Before Trump pardoned him, his disgraced former campaign manager Paul Manafort did some time in a Otisville-esque facility in Pennsylvania. Trump adviser Steve Bannon, ineligible for minimum-security status on account of a superseding state fraud indictment, was just released from Danbury, a decidedly harsher low-security federal institution in Connecticut. Trump’s loyal accountant Allen Weisselberg was in the unenviable position of doing state time at Rikers Island, but with two sentences that didn’t even add up to a year, he survived. Trump himself could wind up in Otisville one day if convicted of federal crimes, but I hope not.
We have our standards.
I hereby interrupt this story to offer a quick cheat sheet of my own selected wisdom for indicted Trump officials and others who end up serving time—even at Club Fed:
Time flies: Your days will seem to drag on forever, but the months and years move fast. And both for the same reason: Nothing much happens in prison. After a while, time becomes irrelevant. One new year blends into the next, and though you don’t feel it, you can sense the time zooming by and leaving you and your fellow inmates behind.
Everyone hates a rat. Yes, just like on TV.
Don’t expect any privacy: With more than 100 guys under one roof, there’s a good chance someone is watching you all the time.
Remorse either: The idea that contrition will miraculously appear for those who sit and think deeply about the crimes they committed is just not a thing. When prisoners ponder their actions, it is usually to justify them. Admitting one’s faults is not only difficult but unnatural. People can’t walk around all day believing they are assholes. Denial, minimization, pride, and forgetfulness are essential to moving on. The rare person, like me, who is remorseful in prison probably came in that way.
Enablers are everywhere: “It’s not like you killed anyone,” is a reassuring sentiment I heard a million times at Otisville. But I brushed it off. Because it was guilt and remorse that liberated me from the bitter feeling that I got screwed by the system. Blaming myself actually made me feel better.
America needs to make its prisons less hellish. The relatively humane conditions at OTV should be much closer to the norm. We were all appalled when Vladimir Putin treated Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny so harshly in prison. Are we so far behind? People who commit crimes are still human, and they need a modicum of dignity. Some of them offered no mercy to their victims, so they don’t deserve any, the logic goes. But do we really want to be as bad as the bad guys at their worst?
Now back to the story.
Perhaps the most surprising thing I learned at OTV was that prison can catalyze a positive change in a person’s life. After a period of adjustment, including plenty of self-flagellation and disbelief at my stupidity, something began to shift. Nothing spiritual, but rather, I felt unexpectedly motivated by the trauma of confinement. I began writing, dreaming, making friends, and having deep conversations. I read all the books I’d previously only pretended to have read, got myself fit, and laughed my ass off. I later found out I was experiencing a phenomenon called post-traumatic growth (PTG) that was identified in the 1990s by psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun and which psychologists and behavioral scientists have analyzed in depth.
PTG is experienced by a small percentage of people who endure something awful and unforeseen. Just as an actor might repurpose stage fright into the energy needed to perform, a person with PTG uses trauma to become a better and more productive person.
Lucky, right?
You bet. Now that I’m out, I am as happy as I was as a child. I’m less interested in money or success and more interested in just reducing stress and being with my girlfriend, kids, and friends—the real ones, not the jerks who populated my life before. I found that most of the guys I met at OTV were top-grade individuals and are some of the very few people from whom I experience no judgment. I’m happy I have them in my life. In prison, my entire world fit into a cubby. By comparison, a small apartment in Manhattan feels like a gift. Simply walking to the Hudson River as I write this article on my phone is a luxury.
Everything in life is.
Not that being a former felon is easy. Society cares little about the former part. We retain some rights, like voting (in most states) and paying taxes, but anyone ever convicted of a serious crime will face great difficulty keeping bank accounts or credit cards, getting loans, landing jobs, and having a normal online presence. Like substance abusers risking relapse, most former felons can never shake their odious tag. Thus, their incarceration reverberates throughout their families and communities for years.
I have charmed many a person with my intellect, my irrepressible modesty, and winning personality, only to be ghosted after what I assume was a little Googling. But that’s nothing compared to the plight of underprivileged former inmates who aren’t even eligible for public housing. Where are they supposed to live? Do we have enough underpasses to house all the formerly incarcerated in this country?
People who have served long stints have difficulty fitting back into society and are further stigmatized as they struggle to adapt. “When you are stripped of your agency for so long, you often feel unable to traverse these kinds of labels that have been put on you,” the Duke scholar Brinkley-Rubinstein told me. “Your power is gone, and you have to figure out how to get that power back. Often, people do get stuck in these systems, stuck in these stigmatizing categories, in part because the dehumanization continues after people get out.”
My criminal friends and I can at least take heart, I suppose, that a former—and perhaps future—president is one of us. Many of our fellow citizens are even treating him with respect and adulation! Is this our turning point? Will we finally be accepted again as equals?
I met recently with my wealthy and connected former business partner—the one who turned me in—in the hope of settling a lawsuit between us. Yes, it wasn’t enough that I paid for our company’s sins and served time, he then sued me for the last of my assets. But during our lunch, face to face after all these years, it was clear he felt bad for doing his best to ruin my life. He even apologized. Not only that, he extended a generous peace offering.
“If Trump gets elected,” he said, “I’ll ask him to pardon you.”
He actually knows Trump, who granted clemency to some pretty unsavory characters at the end of his first term. My billionaire cousin, who had already completed his sentence, received a pardon. I’m sure now he can enjoy his new unit adjacent to his giant apartment at Trump Tower in peace. Another guy I know from OTV, Jonathan Braun, also received a pardon and immediately went back to his day job as a predatory lender. Eventually, New York state barred him from working in the industry, and a federal judge stepped in and imposed a nationwide ban on him. In a telephone interview with reporters from the New York Times, Braun said the only way he could explain his pardon was, “God made it happen for me because I’m a good person and I was treated unfairly.” Braun is considered an undeserving thug by many—you can Google videos of him threatening his borrowers and assaulting his wife and father-in-law—but in the short time we overlapped, he was nice to me. (Editor, please don’t omit the latter pandering sentence. I need all the friends I can get.)
Speaking of pardons, through my ex-wife, I happen to know President Joe Biden’s son-in-law. He’s a truly great guy, and after Biden was elected, I asked my ex whether she could float the idea with him. She adamantly refused. (We liberals do not approve of special treatment.) I was out of luck.
I am no longer rich enough to buy influence, alas, much less a pardon. All I can do is make my political voice heard through my vote. But my former business partner’s offer does raise a question I had never thought to ask:
With the election on everyone’s mind, it’s a good moment to revisit a consequential election from the past. No, we’re not talking about 2016. Let’s go way further back—to what’s considered the only successful coup d’etat in US history.
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In the late 1800s, Wilmington, North Carolina, was a city where African Americans thrived economically and held elected office. This did not sit well with white supremacists, who during the election of 1898 used violence to intimidate voters and overthrow the elected government.
The leader of the coup, a former Confederate colonel named Alfred Moore Waddell, gave a speech in which he told white people: “If you see the Negro out voting tomorrow, tell him to stop. If he doesn’t, shoot him down. Shoot him down in his tracks.”
This week, the team at Reveal looks back at that coup and its consequences. After the overthrow, North Carolina legislators passed laws segregating white and Black people in housing, trains, schools, libraries, and other public spaces. Those laws were copied in states across the South, sowing the seeds of the Jim Crow era and much of the structural racism that continues today.
Glen Harris, a history professor at UNC Wilmington, sees a direct line of connection between this white supremacist uprising and events like George Floyd’s murder in 2020. “How Blacks are treated in American society is not a one-off event,” says Harris on the episode. “Part of the problem is that to suppress it, you look at these as one-off events.”
Also on this episode: Just after the Civil War, the US government made its famous “40 acres and a mule” promise to formerly enslaved people. Most Americans assume the promise of land was never kept, but over a two-and-a-half-year investigation, journalists at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed records that prove freed people had, and lost, titles to tracts of land that once were part of plantations.
The idea that women might vote differently from their husbands made Fox News star Jesse Watters’ brain melt live on air this week.
Referring to his current wife, Watters, with his trademark smirk, told his colleagues on The Five, “If I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair.” This, from a man who admitted to his employer in 2017 that he was in a relationship with a colleague 14 years his junior—something that reportedly led to his divorce from his first wife. “What else is she keeping from me?” Jesse mused, prompting guffaws from his fellow panelists.
Beyond hypocrisy, Mother Jones creator Kat Abughazaleh argues that Watters’ reaction reveals the fierce undercurrent of sexist resentment coursing through this year’s campaign, typified by Donald Trump, who just this week ominously vowed to protect women, “whether the women like it or not.”
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Dear Jesse Watters: Why would your wife be afraid to tell you what she really thinks?
It’s an issue that Democrats and their anti-Trump allies have been eager to highlight, including former congresswoman and top Harris campaigner Liz Cheney, who told CBS’ Face the Nation on Wednesday, “I think you’re going to have, frankly, a lot of men and women who will go into the voting booth and will vote their conscience, will vote for Vice President Harris.”
“They may not ever say anything publicly,” she added, “but the results will speak for themselves.”
After all shouting and debating, all the billions in ads, and all the fury, the 2024 election will determine whether this nation remains committed to its imperfect democracy or slides toward fascism, whether the politics of hate, grievance, paranoia, fear, and racism triumphs or those of community and inclusion, whether women’s freedoms are curtailed or protected, whether climate change is ignored or addressed, whether the privilege of plutocrats is enhanced or challenged, whether millions of Americans are deported or granted a path forward. But the election will also determine whether Americans live in a world of facts or one of false narratives. It will tell us if America is reality-based.
Donald Trump, as a politician, is a creature of reality television. And reality TV is not real. It is designed to convey the impression of verisimilitude. But the story lines are concocted. The editing is manipulative. The goal is to orchestrate human interactions that can then be turned into compelling, don’t-touch-that-dial stories. They need not be true; they often aren’t. The trick is to fool the viewer into believing they are—or at least to persuade the audience go along with the ruse.
That’s what happened with Trump and The Apprentice, the NBC show he starred in for 14 years. Prior to its appearance, Trump was in a slump as a businessman, having gone bust in Atlantic City as a casino owner and moving from the development of large real estate projects to licensing his name as a brand. The show created a new reality for Trump, depicting him as a hyper-successful billionaire with razor-sharp intuition.
John Miller, a former marketing executive for NBC, recently noted that the network forged a “false narrative for Donald Trump as a big businessman.” Explaining this, he said, “Clearly we had to make something bigger than it was.” That something was Trump. He added, “If people think that he’s the person [to best handle the economy] because he was a great businessman, that is a false narrative. We did it for the show. But it became very dangerous now for the country.”
As Bill Pruitt, one of the producers of The Apprentice, pointed out earlier this year, deceit is at the heart of reality TV: “What actually happens is the illusion of reality by staging situations against an authentic backdrop… Although very few programs are out-and-out fake, there is deception at play in every single reality program. The producers and editors are ostensibly con artists, distracting you with grand notions while we steal from you your precious time.” Think of Trump pretending to work at a McDonald’s.
Trump entered the political world as this reality TV monster-celebrity. Millions of Americans saw him as the Trump of that show. The lesson for Trump, who had for decades devoted much energy and conniving to cultivating his image as a successful developer and glamorous playboy, was obvious: He could present a false personal tale and keenly exploit it.
Trump’s deep faith in hornswoggling was also enhanced by the close association he developed with professional wrestling. In the mid-2000s, he became a WWE fixture, and he and Vince McMahon, the WWE cofounder, cooked up a phony rivalry that they played out at high-profile wrestling matches. Trump enthusiastically adhered to what’s known in professional wrestling as kayfabe: the maintenance of a false reality in which staged events and rivalries are presented as genuine. Trump was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013.
Ever since he descended the golden escalator in 2015—surrounded by extras who he had paid to show up and act like supporters—and announced his presidential candidacy, Trump has relied on deceit. He has inaccurately touted his own assets while lying about his opponents. As president, he declared that he knew how to deliver a better and cheaper healthcare system and sparkling infrastructure. That was a fraud. His claim that he was handling the Covid pandemic magnificently—another fraud. And he pitched a bogus story about his political foes in 2020: They were Marxists and communists in league with antifa, BLM, and other radicals in a plot to destroy America. Then came the Big Lie that he had won the election but it had been stolen from him.
Trump was always pushing disinformation, going back to years before he entered presidential politics, when he promoted the racist birther theory about Barack Obama and insisted his so-called investigators had unearthed evidence the 44th president had been born in Kenya. (Narrator: They had not.) But in this election, Trump turned the volume of his disinformation up to 11. His campaign to regain the White House—nearly four years after he incited the insurrectionist mob that attacked the US Capitol—has been largely based on utterly untrue narratives designed to exploit voters’ fears, anxieties, and prejudices.
In stump speeches, Trump has sought to portray the United States as a crime-infested hellscape on the verge of collapse where migrant gangs run amok and terrorize good-hearted and law-abiding Americans. And you, dear viewers, ought to be afraid, very afraid.
He and his partner-in-slime, JD Vance, have pushed baseless and dangerous allegations about legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets. Trump has asserted over and over that foreign thugs armed with military weapons have taken over Aurora, Colorado, and conquered other parts of the Midwest. He has claimed that America is being flooded with immigrants released from prisons and “insane asylums” in “the Congo” and elsewhere—and that the Biden-Harris administration has purposefully allowed these brutes to enter the country in order to ruin it. He charged that President Joe Biden “stole” disaster relief funds and handed the money to illegal migrants rather than use it to assist the victims of the recent Hurricane Helene. He has ranted that it is impossible to cross the street to buy milk without getting violently assaulted or raped. And Trump insists the Democrats are evil “scum” who allow the executions of infants after they’re born and who permit schools to conduct gender-affirming medical operations on students without the consent of parents.
None of this is true. These lies go far beyond his usual falsehoods: The economy during his presidency was the best ever, the current economy is the worst ever, the rest of the world is laughing at the United States, Kamala Harris is “low IQ,” a “communist,” “mentally disabled,” and so on. These falsehoods are designed to convey a fake reality—a catastrophe that only can be remedied by the election of Donald Trump. He is trying to create a reality TV horror show.
Simultaneously, Trump advances happy-ever-after magical thinking, often a selling point of reality TV. (Winners of The Apprentice got to work for Trump for a year—supposedly a ticket to success and the high life.) He proclaims that he can bring about prosperity by introducing extreme tariffs, deporting millions, decreasing taxes on the wealthy (and workers who collect tips, Social Security recipients, and overtime employees), and placing Elon Musk in charge of cutting the federal budget. (Musk absurdly says he can cut $2 trillion from the federal budget of $6.75 trillion.) Many economists point out that Trump’s plans will lead to inflation and a much larger national debt. He also boasts he will develop visionary infrastructure projects, such as whole new cities and airports of the future. (He couldn’t even pull off a single Infrastructure Week when he was president.) Trump’s grandiose ideas tend to be general, lacking specifics. The thrust of his pitch is what he said at the Republican convention in 2016: I alone can fix it. He’s not championing policy details. (To call his policy platform bare-boned is generous.) He’s presenting himself as the answer. It’s all reminiscent of the PR campaign for The Apprentice.
Trump’s characterization of present-day America is a false narrative. His sales pitch for himself is a false narrative. His demonization of Harris as a mentally deficient radical leftist and enemy of the United States is a false narrative. He has led the tens of millions of Americans who buy his bunk into a false universe.
This is how reality TV works. Fake good guys. Fake bad guys. Fake plots. As Pruitt described it, “We scammed. We swindled.” Trump is also a peddler of fake science and fake history. He insists climate change is a hoax. And, of late, he’s been falsely citing the 1890s as a time of plenty when “our nation was probably…the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs.” Yet during this era, when robber barons ruled, there was a severe economic depression that’s widely attributed to the harsh protective tariffs implemented. His history lesson is another fairy tale unmoored to the actual facts.
As Election Day approaches, Trump has been endeavoring to construct a new false narrative—or the extension of an old one. He has started issuing claims of Democratic electoral cheating before votes are tallied. Without evidence, he and his crew began flinging unsubstantiated charges that an election was again being rigged against Trump. The ploy was obvious: to establish a foundation for Trump to once more declare himself the victor regardless of the vote count. His goal is to redefine reality to his benefit and for a second straight election beset the nation with turmoil and chaos as part of a brazen and anti-democratic power grab.
In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind, writing about the George W. Bush White House, recalled a conversation he had two years earlier with a senior adviser to the president. This unnamed aide dismissed what he called “the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” He told Suskind, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” This squib prompted a ruckus within the politerati, with much harrumphing about a hubristic gang that believed it was above facts and did not have to abide by truth and facts. Two decades later, such outrage seems quaint.
Trump has been engineering his own counterfeit reality for years. The media and the political system have each collectively failed to thwart him and prevent him from convincing millions across the country of the uber-fakery about himself and the world in which we live. He has turned the entire nation into a reality TV show with (so far) three acts: His initial surprise victory in 2016, his expulsion from the White House (due to the worst-ever chicanery waged by assorted miscreants and nefarious forces) in 2020, and his gallant effort at restoration and redemption in 2024. The results of this election will establish whether the biggest con in American history continues and whether an electoral majority resides in Trump’s fantasy cosmos or a universe of facts and authenticity. Much is at risk, including the future of America democracy and reality itself.
In early April, Trex Proffitt opened his mail-in primary ballot and saw that no Democrats were running for state senate in Pennsylvania’s 13th district.
It made sense: The district, which covers the city of Lancaster and its surrounding suburbs, has been represented by Republicans for over a century. The incumbent, Scott Martin, is vocally anti-abortion and the sponsor of a bill banning instruction around gender identity and sexual orientation in elementary schools. Martin won a decisive eleven-point victory against a well-funded challenger in 2020. The odds for Democrats have likely gotten slimmer after the district was redrawn in 2022 to include more rural areas.
But Proffitt, a 56-year-old history teacher at a small Quaker school, still felt something could be done. He decided to run against Martin, winning a write-in campaign to become the Democratic nominee for state senate. After a personal tragedy, Proffitt wanted to center LGBTQ rights in his campaign—even in a reliably Republican district.
In 2019, Proffitt’s son George, who was transgender, died at the age of 20 from a drug overdose. George loved folk punk music and was active in the local LGBTQ community. He had struggled for years with depression and suicidality, but he seemed to be doing better before his death.
In the years since, Proffitt has watched anti-transgender rhetoric become increasingly visible in his community, as a national backlash towards trans people amplified and enabled sentiment that was already “endemic” to Lancaster, he said. As my colleague Kiera Butler has reported, Lancaster County is home to a burgeoning Christian nationalist movement.
In his free time, Proffitt had been walking for long stretches around Lancaster as part of a fundraiser for the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that supports LGBTQ rights. Though he had raised a good chunk of money, he said, “it didn’t feel like I had done enough.”
It was in the wake of the suicide of another trans young person in the area, that he saw no one running against Martin. At the time, he told me, the death left him “looking for something more to do in my life.”
Since then, he has campaigned fiercely on transgender rights, an unusual pitch against a conservative incumbent. But, Proffitt hopes, it will show Democrats they do not have to back away from talking about people like his son.
Transgender rights remain a “third rail” in politics, he told me. “Don’t talk about it. Everybody just—wink wink—somehow knows you’re pro-LGBT+,” Proffitt said. “I don’t think that’s working.”
When I droveout to Lancaster in late October, Pennsylvania was the center of the political universe and campaign signs dotted every intersection. Proffitt met me at a Whole Foods, having just come from a union event. Soft-spoken and a bit world-weary, he described his campaign as a “scrappy grassroots effort.” His wife, Beth, who works as an administrator at Franklin & Marshall College, was Proffitt’s campaign manager in the early days. Now, they have a small staff and “try really hard to get the word out with frugal means.”
Campaign finance reports show that Proffitt has around $100,000 on hand while Martin has $790,000. There has been only marginal support from the state Democratic party, which has focused its resources on closer races. “This area has gone through periods of neglect from Democrats,” Proffitt told me. “People aren’t used to coming out because there is a tradition of always losing this race.”
Though the 13th district includes the city of Lancaster, its population of 58,000 is outweighed by the suburban and rural areas. Proffitt’s team is the only Democratic presence in some of the deep-red portions of the county, going where the Harris campaign doesn’t seem to send volunteers. He told me that it can lead to outright hostility, particularly because some campaign memorabilia prominently features queer and trans pride flags.
In Lancaster, as in many other places, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric has become commonplace in local politics and public life. This March, bomb threats led to the cancellation of a drag queen story hour at the library. Several school districts in Lancaster County have signed contracts with Independence Law Center, a conservative Christian law firm associated with the Family Research Council. One district, Penn Manor, just passed two policies written with the help of the law firm: one mandates that students play sports aligned with the sex they were assigned at birth and the second says parents must approve changes to students’ names and pronouns.
“The actions that are happening in many school districts and county governments have really created a sense of trauma amongst transgender people and, in particular, transgender youth,” Corinne Goodwin, the executive director of the Eastern PA Trans Equity Project, told me.
Advocates say that, over the course of the last year, a handful of transgender young people have died of suicide in Lancaster County.
While some Democrats have decided that transgender rights are too complicated and controversial to focus on, Proffitt has decided to talk about them for precisely that reason. As a teacher, coach, and parent of a trans child, Proffitt says he is in a “good position” to tackle the misinformation and panic around transgender issues.
That misinformation is increasing. Former president Donald Trump and other national Republicans have honed in on anti-transgender rhetoric in the final weeks of the election. Between August and early October, Republicans spent over $65 million on anti-transgender ads in more than a dozen states according to a New York Timesanalysis. Though surveys have shown that transgender issues are not top-of-mind for many voters, Republican strategists say that it is a potent wedge issue, particularly among women—a group that the party has lost traction with over abortion. The messaging has even trickled down to the congressional race in Pennsylvania’s 10th district.
Brandon Wolf, press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, told me that “this is a tired playbook,” and one that hasn’t worked in previousraces.
Still, with some notable exceptions—vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz recently gave a full-throated defense of trans rights on Glennon Doyle’s podcast—Democrats have been reluctant to address anti-transgender rhetoric head-on.
This has been visible in the closely-watched senate races in Texas and Ohio, where Republicans are accusing Democrats of allowing boys to play girls’ sports. Texas Rep. Colin Allred and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown have both responded by insisting that they don’t support doing so, to the dismay of some advocates. The trans writer Erin Reed argued in her Substack that Allred and Brown’s messaging “risks reinforcing Republican framing” around the validity of transgender identity.
Proffitt told me that he’s not particularly disappointed in how national Democrats have dealt with the issue—“you have to pick which thing you’re going to seize upon in the short run”—even though he’s made a markedly different decision.
Despite the narrow odds, Proffitt said that he’s hopeful they can close the gap and show that Martin’s stances are the extreme ones. He told me that he’s had productive conversations about LGBTQ issues while door-knocking, “because we don’t shy away from that.”
People might be taken aback initially, but Proffitt says they tend to appreciate the opportunity to ask questions. (A 2023 survey found that only 30 percent of likely voters personally know someone who is trans.) He said that he often tries to appeal to people’s “fundamental values”—framing transgender rights as a matter of civil liberties and privacy.
When I followed along while Proffitt canvassed in Lancaster’s West End, a dense neighborhood of townhouses and alleyways, the opportunity didn’t always present itself. Except for some stray cats and kids on bikes, it was quiet around dusk on a Saturday. Our handful of conversations with voters were mostly in line with national surveys: most were worried about affordability and none brought up LGBT issues unless asked. Still, I could see that anti-trans rhetoric had filtered through.
Latisha Butcher, a 36-year-old home health aide, told me that, despite the dire shortage of workers in her industry, her pay and benefits were “not great.” After I asked, she told me that she had heard anti-transgender rhetoric, particularly around trans youth. “Let them live their life—whatever makes them happy,” Butcher told me.
Afterward, Proffitt went to a team dinner with the campaign, and I started on my drive home. I was struck by the enormity of the task that Proffitt had given himself: not just to win the race, but also to change the conversation around transgender rights. It meant that, day in and day out, he had to rehash a difficult and deeply personal issue, often with complete strangers. When I spoke to Proffitt on the phone a few weeks after my visit, he told me that “it’s been tough every day since” George’s death in 2019.
“But I don’t mind talking about it,” Proffitt said, “because people need to know that trans kids experience adversity at higher rates, and adding to their existing difficulties is simply inhumane and unfair.”
The family dedicated a bench to George’s memory in 2022. He was a big fan of Les Misérables, and the plaque quotes Victor Hugo: “What more could one want? A little garden to wander, and infinite space to dream.”
After Proffitt told me about George, he seemed worried that he hadn’t painted a full picture of his son. “Is that enough to work with?” he asked.
This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.
It was 2:30 in the morning on November 6, 2014, when flames engulfed the New Orleans home of political consultant Mario Zervigon. Someone had lit his cars on fire, and the flames spread to his house. Zervigon and his family barely made it out of the three-unit building alive. Multiple cats didn’t.
Law enforcement deemed it arson and investigated whether the fire was related to Zerivigon’s campaign work. (They would ultimately close the case without naming a suspect.) The night before, Zervigon had celebrated the primary election victory of one of his clients for a seat on Louisiana’s Public Service Commission (PSC), a down-ballot position with vast power over the state’s oil, gas, and utility companies.
The candidate, Forest Bradley-Wright, was running as a Republican on a reform platform. He had rejected donations from companies the PSC oversees—a rarity in Louisiana. But the firebombing rattled his campaign. Zervigon took a leave of absence, Bradley-Wright’s fundraising flagged, and another candidate, who had received generous support from the companies in question, eked out a 1.6 percent win in the general election.
Bradley-Wright now says he believes the firebombing was an act of “political terrorism” meant “to intimidate or at least cripple my campaign.” He argues the incident is worth revisiting because it shows just how high the stakes can get in the election of regulators charged with making, in some cases, billion-dollar decisions and shaping a state’s energy policies.
“Public utility commissions—especially in the context of climate change—are really important institutions that most people aren’t even aware exist,” said Jared Heern, a Brown University researcher who studies the relationship between the commissions and the industries they regulate.
But fossil fuel companies and electric utilities, and their lawyers and consultants, are well aware of their importance.
A new Floodlight analysis of campaign finance data in nine of the 10 states that elect their commissioners found that more than a third of their campaign contributions of $250 and up came from fossil fuel and electric utility interests—more than $13.5 million in all. The analysis covered contributions to the 54 commissioners elected in the 10 years ending on December 31, 2023.
On Tuesday, voters will choose among 33 candidates vying for utility commission seats in eight of those states.
The states examined were Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. Nebraska, which elects its commissioners but has no private electric utilities, was excluded. (In the remaining 40 states, utility regulators are appointed by governors and/or legislative leaders.)
Topping the influence list is Alabama, where commissioners get almost 55 percent of their financial support from fossil fuel and utility interests. Louisiana is second, with nearly 43 percent. Overall, those sources contribute more than twice as much as the renewables industry does to elect commissioners they believe will be friendly to their interests. The renewables donations accounted for only $5.1 million, or 13 percent, of the roughly $39 million analyzed.
These findings suggest that the electoral influence of fossil fuel and utility contributors may be interfering with some states’ ability to decarbonize, with consequences for consumers and the environment alike.
Indeed, a number of the states are located in the sun belt, making them ideal for solar energy development, yet their commissioners’ decisions have ensured that only a tiny fraction of their power mix comes from the sun. In some cases, commissioners appear openly hostile to the adoption of renewables, far more of which will be needed to limit the catastrophic effects of climate change.
This failure to adapt is a bad deal for homeowners and businesses. Residential energy bills in Alabama, for example, exceed the national average by $32 a month, and bills in Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi have increased faster than the national average over the past five years, according to data from Findenergy.com. This year in Arizona, power bills spiked amid the state’s hottest summer on record. And in Oklahoma, commissioners approved so many fracking applications that the state briefly led the country in earthquakes.
“It's kind of ludicrous on its face,” said journalist David Roberts, who hosts an energy policy podcast called Volts, “that commercial entities directly regulated by these people are allowed to give these people money.”
In fact, laws in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi prohibit regulated utilities from making direct campaign contributions to commissioners. But in all of those states, Floodlight’s analysis found, contractors, attorneys, or political action committees closely aligned with the utilities keep the money flowing. “(When) the people regulating the utility are essentially propped up by the utility itself, it's problematic,” said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law initiative at Harvard University. “I think everybody can recognize that as a conflict of interest.”
It also turns out that the commissioners who get a large share of their campaign cash from sources linked to fossil fuel firms and utilities tend to stay in office longer than their colleagues.
Nationwide, utility commissioners serve 5.9 years on average. In states where they are elected, these officials became more entrenched, serving 7.4 years—and a whopping 9.2 years in states where fossil fuel and utility interests account for at least 30 percent of their campaign contributions, according to Floodlight’s analysis of data provided by Heern.
Consider Alabama PSC member Jeremy Oden. During his 12 years in office, Oden, a Republican, received about $1.3 million, roughly 80 percent of his campaign funds, from sources with links to fossil fuel companies and utilities.
While Alabama commissioners cannot take money directly from the companies they oversee, our analysis and leaked records revealed that Oden’s top donors were political action committees operated by accountants with long-standing ties to consultants for Alabama Power, the state's largest utility.
Oden did not respond to requests for comment. Tim Whitt, a principal of the campaign committee to elect Oden, provided a written statement. “All of his campaign contributions have been received and reported in accordance with Alabama law,” it stated, adding: “Commissioner Oden has not received any campaign contributions from regulated utilities.”
The cash flowing into Oden’s campaign coffer has come in handy for tight races, like the first round of the Republican primary in May 2022. If he won the primary, Oden, already in office for a decade at the time, would be certain to win the general election in deep red Alabama.
The three Republicans running against him were calling for more renewable energy and cheaper bills. Alabama, a state with strong solar potential, generates less power from rooftop solar than even low-potential states such as Maine and Michigan. It also has very little utility-scale solar, and saddles utility ratepayers with some of the nation’s highest electric bills.
So what did Oden do? He took to the airwaves, appearing in TV ads dressed in hunting gear and wielding a shotgun. Calling himself “a Christian conservative pro-Trump Republican,” who “would always fight and defend our God-given Second Amendment rights,” the bald, bespectacled commissioner took aim, but not at his opponents: “With your help, I’ll shoot down Biden’s Green New Deal and keep the left from jacking up our energy prices,” Oden narrated over footage of him downing clay pigeons.
Bolstered by his advertising budget, he won 34 percent of the vote in the four-candidate field before going on to clinch the primary runoff, and later, the general election.
As a commissioner, Oden has taken aim at clean energy, imposing steep fees on families who install home solar panels, making it a bad investment choice even though those households were using far less utility-generated power than before. And he voted for a series of rate increases that have led to Alabama having the Deep South’s second highest energy prices.
Oden and his fellow commissioners have also blocked utility-scale solar and battery storage projects, even some requested by Alabama Power. Such moves—raising the cost of electricity while preventing customers from generating their own—benefit the shareholders and top officials of the utilities Oden is charged with regulating.
“The influence of money in [utility commission] elections is very high because in a vacuum of information, whoever has the most money gets their message out the best,” said Joshua Basseches, an assistant professor at Tulane University who studies energy and climate policy. “In theory, the elected commissioners would be less susceptible to regulatory capture, because they would have to face the voters,” but "in practice, what happens is that these are very low-visibility elections.”
Voters, in other words, have little to go on.
Utility commissions, writ broadly, are charged with overseeing the complex activities and fielding the demands of massive energy conglomerates that the state has granted regional monopoly powers. Commissioners vet new projects, monitor utility financials, and evaluate rate hike requests. The companies, meanwhile, are ensured a guaranteed return on investment, which averages about 10 percent nationally.
Though each commission is different, their basic mission is the same: to ensure a safe and reliable grid and affordable energy for consumers. But sometimes the relationship between regulator and regulated gets a little too cozy, a phenomenon economists call “regulatory capture.”
“Investments in political candidates—and particularly for economic regulators like a utility commissioner—there's no better market return,” said Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at Public Citizen, a consumer-advocacy nonprofit . “The amount of benefit that a utility can get, that a fossil fuel interest can get, from a friendly regulator, is better than anything that the stock market can provide.”
Regulatory capture can be costly to consumers. Since 2017, electricity bills in Georgia have increased by about $45 a month, more than double the national average, according to data from FindEnergy.com. Electricity rates, which constitute just a portion of the bill, have kept pace with the national average. Most of the increase is due to surcharges to pay for the $35 billion buildout of a nuclear generating station originally forecast to cost $14 billion.
Back in 2012, when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave Georgia Power permission to build two new reactors at Plant Vogtle, the state’s utility commissioners were receiving 70 percent of their campaign support from companies or people that stood to benefit financially, or not, from their decisions, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Over the next decade, the five commissioners approved $3.2 billion in cost overruns. ”This nuclear expansion does not make sense. It’s way over budget, way behind schedule,” Jennette Gayer, director of the nonprofit Environment Georgia, told Floodlight.
Although Georgia law bars utilities from donating in PSC elections, nearly one-third of the campaign contributions to its commissioners since 2014 have come from fossil fuel and utility interests. Among the donors are Georgia Power executives, regulatory attorneys with business before the commission, and construction companies that specialize in utility work.
Thanks to a series of legal battles, Georgia hasn’t held elections for its PSC since 2020, and sitting commissioners have not had to disclose their campaign contributions since 2021. “The commissioners follow all campaign finance laws,” said PSC spokesman Tom Krause. “This includes disclosure of all donors and donated amounts as required by state and federal law.”
Critics have also pointed to Oklahoma as a place where commissioners’ close relationships to the companies they oversee might be harming residents. Members of the state Corporation Commission (utility commissions go by various names) have taken in more than $1 million—nearly 35 percent of donations of $250 or more over the last decade—from sources linked to fossil fuel firms and utilities.
In 2022, the commission rapidly approved a plan for ratepayers to shoulder historic increases on their gas bills. The decision followed 2021’s Winter Storm Uri, which depleted the state’s gas reserves, forcing utilities to purchase gas on the spot market at exorbitant prices. The $3 average cost for 1,000 cubic feet of gas skyrocketed to $1,200 for a brief time, saddling the utilities with $3 billion in extra costs.
The companies wanted to pass that loss along to their ratepayers. After the Legislature passed a bill allowing them to issue bonds to finance the debt, the corporation commissioners gave the utilities exactly what they wanted. “We paid more for natural gas in three days than we do in a year,” said Nick Singer, a leader with VOICE Oklahoma, a civic engagement coalition. “And they just created a debt instrument to put it on the backs of ratepayers for the next 25 years. And they did it in a couple months.”
This spring, Oklahoma’s attorney general filed a pair of lawsuits against gas pipeline firms, alleging they helped bid up prices to historic highs during the storm. Commissioner Bob Anthony was the only one of the state’s three commissioners to vote against securitization. In a July op-ed in the Oklahoman, he called the panel’s vote “the largest fleecing of the Oklahoma ratepayer in the history of the state.”
Asked why his fellow commissioners voted the other way, Anthony, who is serving his final term, told Floodlight: “Follow the money, that’s the heart of it.”
“Correlation does not necessarily determine causation,” Trey Davis, a spokesman for the commission responded in an email, “and, while you might want to argue a majority decision is analogous to some form of quid-pro-quo, you do not appear to have provided any substance in support of what is tantamount to a spurious and seemingly subliminal allegation.”
Almost all of the states that elect their commissioners are led by Republicans—only Arizona has a Democratic governor. The Deep South states in particular stand out for their dearth of renewable energy.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi all derive less than 1 percent of their electricity from solar despite ample solar potential in those states. (Utility-scale solar is the cheapest form of energy currently available.) That’s less than one-quarter of the national average.
In Mississippi, where PSC members got 12 percent of their campaign cash from fossil fuel interests, commissioners are openly dismissive of calls to improve the state’s 37th-place solar energy ranking. During an August “solar summit,” two commissioners abruptly cut off public discussion and ended the session early after pro-solar representatives stood up to speak.
“What’s the result of all this fossil fuel industry money in commission elections?” said Daniel Tait, research and communications director for the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog. “Very little renewable energy, and in some cases, like Alabama and Mississippi, overt hostility.”
One state recently switched how it picks energy regulators. New Mexico, a Democratically controlled state with a powerful oil and gas industry, transitioned from electing commissioners to appointing them in 2023. The state law governing the transition also required commissioners to have degrees in fields related to energy.
Its fresh slate of appointed commissioners has since approved a rate increase for the primary utility, the Public Service Company of New Mexico—but the amount was only about a quarter of what the utility requested. They also ordered PNM to return some $115 million in excess profits to its ratepayers. (The utility has appealed the latter decision to the state Supreme Court.)
One energy activist now says she preferred the elected commissioners, because campaign finance data made utility influence easier to trace—and counteract. “I think that the elected commission was more democratic, even though PNM spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to elect the commissioners they wanted,” said Mariel Nanasi, executive director of New Energy Economy, a renewable energy nonprofit. “That backfired for them, and their preferred candidates—at least in more recent times—lost because [their campaign spending] was exposed.”
The patchwork nature of campaign finance record-keeping and disclosure laws in the United States also can make it difficult to track industry money flowing into state utility commission elections.
In Mississippi and South Dakota, for example, Floodlight journalists had to manually enter into a database thousands of campaign contributions from records that were handwritten or kept in unsearchable formats.
The money also can also come through supposedly independent groups—like political committees and 501(c)(4) (dark money) groups that don’t have to reveal their donors—making it harder to trace. These groups are allowed to support (or oppose) particular candidates but are not legally allowed to coordinate with any candidate’s campaign.
Arizona is the only one of the nine states analyzed that makes tracking independent campaign spending easy. For example, the dominant utility, Arizona Public Service, donated nearly $4.2 million in 2016 to the Arizona Coalition for Reliable Electricity, a political action committee that then spent nearly that exact amount to support the company’s preferred commissioners. (Arizona also provides commission candidates with public financing, which was not included in our analysis.)
Over the past decade, several utilities in Arizona and Alabama have been caught making large, unreported, and difficult-to-trace dark money contributions to support PSC candidates.
Clearly, utilities and fossil fuel interests are not donating to lawmakers and energy regulators out of the goodness of their hearts. But campaign donations, to be fair, don’t always predict how a legislator or regulator will act. Oklahoma commissioner Anthony received 65 percent of his donations from such sources, and he has often been a lone dissenting voice on the commission against policies that he says put consumers on the hook for the utilities’ mistakes.
Bob Burns, an Arizona Corporation Commission member, got 41 percent of his donations from industry sources. Yet in 2016, he used his position to crusade for campaign finance transparency from the holding company that owns Arizona Public Service, which stood accused of using millions of dollars of dark money to support its preferred commissioner candidates. (Under pressure from the commission, the company eventually acknowledged its tactics.)
At least one energy regulator told Floodlight he struggled over whether to take donations from the companies he oversees. “I went through the process of trying to figure out from whom do I accept a donation?” said Gary Hanson, who sits on the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission. His conclusion: “I’m either going to accept donations from everyone or from no one—you either accept from everyone or you don’t accept from anyone.”
He took the money.
Floodlight reporter Kristi E. Swartz contributed to this story.
I never paid much attention to America’s criminal justice system until I, unexpectedly, got into serious trouble. Being labeled a criminal felt to me as unlikely as someone finding Kool-Aid on Jupiter. I was the rarest of things, an honestdealer among the myriad elegant sharks and scumbags in the veryprestigious realm of high-end art sales. Or so I thought. But desperate to keep my gallery afloat, I had to juggle some money and payments. I began lying about my receivables, paying Paul while putting off Peter—until I couldn’t pay him either. This was unsustainable and, it turned out, illegal. My assistant and my business partner lawyered up, distanced themselves from me, and ratted me out. I was arrested, charged, convicted of wire fraud, and sentenced to 18 months in a minimum-security federal prison.
As another convicted felon, former President Donald Trump, has pointed out, America has a two-tiered justice system. Trump just refuses to publicly acknowledge what that really means and the fact that he’s in the top bunk, so to speak. But should he lose and end up serving time, there’s a good chance that my experience might shed light on what he would be likely to face. You see, as scary as it is to be prosecuted, my experience was a dream compared to the plight of some others I knew.
I wrote this story to dispel certain myths, but also to give you an idea of what a white-collar prosecution and incarceration is like and how much of one’s experience hinges on wealth and connections, both of which Trump has in spades. As a billionaire ex-president, the strings he could pull would be far more influential than those of a merely well-connected art dealer from New York. But whatever strings exist, they matter—a lot.
Having the cash to hire a good lawyer, and not having to rely on an overburdened public defender, is the first step toward a better outcome. As you know, it often seems as though a lawyer has a professional obligation to fight harder for a client who is paying a ton of money. But what you may not know is that the conditions of your incarceration also depend, often quite a bit, on your position in the financial and social hierarchy. And the horrific Hollywood depictions of prison life for people who are not wealthy and connected can be pretty close to the mark. Consider this snippet from a Marshall Project report on conditions at an Illinois penitentiary:
In stories that echoed with the same visceral details, dozens of men said they lived under the pressing threat of violence from cellmates as well as brutality at the hands of staff. Specifically, many men reported being shackled in cuffs so tight they left scars, or being “four-pointed” and chained by each limb to a bed for hours, far beyond what happens at other prisons and in violation of [Bureau of Prisons] policy and federal regulations.
Let’s just say that nothing like that ever happened to me. Yet just because I had it easier—easy even—doesn’t mean that incarceration isn’t life altering. Being a member of the elite (more or less) and enjoying some privilege (more or less) won’t save you from the consequences of a not-so-bad incarceration. Notably, your family, career, and social standing are generally ruined forever. Your relationships that survive may end up stronger, but many will wither and die. And if you think you will ever reach the pinnacle of whatever it was you did before you went away, well, you won’t.
I know what I’m talking about.
“Do you want good news or bad news?” my no-nonsense criminal attorney, Danny Parker, asked me one bleak morning in December 2017. The weather may have been beautiful, but all days felt bleak then. At least Danny gave me an option. His news was normally just bad.
“Bad news first,” I replied. “Always.”
“There’s a warrant out for your arrest,” he said.
I struggled to breathe. I hadn’t thought this would happen so soon, even though I’d known I was in serious trouble for about a month and a half. But the justice system works in secrecy, and as I quickly learned, you never know what’s coming.
“The good news: It’s federal.”
Until that moment, I was ignorant as to the vagaries of the criminal justice system. As it turns out, the state system is more chaotic, a bit cruder, and uneven. There are 50 disparate jurisdictions, each with its own rules, characters, and, let’s call it, charm. The Bureau of Prisons tends to be better funded than state prison systems. It also has clearer standards and is a bit more humane. And the federal system prosecutes far fewer criminals than the states do overall—about 10 percent of the total. So in a perverse way, it’s a more exclusive social group.
The prisons themselves, though still awful, are generally less so than state and private prisons. At the state level, prisoners tend to have more options for getting sentences reduced, but the federal facilities are safer and their inmates less violent. Also, the food is better.
If I were to be found guilty—and I was guilty—I would likely serve my time in a minimum-security camp. Federal security classifications range from minimum (think Trump lieutenant Peter Navarro) to supermax (El Chapo). Only about 15 percent of federal prisoners end up in minimum security. But landing in one of the nicer facilities, like Otisville or Pensacola, is exceedingly difficult. As with exclusive Ivy League schools, it usually requires hiring a consultant who can lobby public officials to improve your odds of admission.
Shocked? I sure was. I learned from my lawyers that these consultants, much like college counselors, also advise prospective, uh, freshmen on which campus would suit them best. (This applies only to nonviolent criminals. If you’re a murderer or serial rapist, all bets are off.) Once you narrow down your list of prospective prison camps, like Tom Wambsgans in Succession, your consultants pull strings to try to get you your preferred choice. And once you’re accepted, they’ll advise you on what to expect.
When it became clear I would be doing time, I called prison consultant Joel Sickler, who boasts an 80 percent success rate in landing people the facility of their choice. Given my level and type of offense (felony, wire fraud), he was confident he could get me into Otisville—which we, the cognoscenti, call OTV. Roughly half of its clientele consists of white-collar criminals: disgraced executives, unscrupulous lawyers, careless politicians, and wayward rabbis. Most of the rest are in for more serious offenses, like nonviolent drug crimes, or because good behavior at a higher-security facility earned them an upgrade. Otisville is the clubbiest of Club Feds, the Harvard of the Catskills, the yeshiva of misconduct. The best possible option for the worst part of your life.
It likely helped that I’m Jewish because OTV is viewed as the Jewish prison. For years, advocacy groups had lobbied federal officials to develop a lockup with accommodations for religiously conservative Jews. As such, Otisville has a real Torah, a kosher kitchen, and a huge Hebrew library. It makes accommodations for the High Holidays. (I’m basically an atheist, but I would take all the help I could get.) You’d have to be a fool, Sickler told me, to cause trouble and get yourself transferred out of this promised land. “Keep your head down and don’t mess around,” he advised.
But before you book a stay, let me dispel your preconceived notions about Club Fed’s reputation for being cushy and how white-collar felons get undue perks. Much of that is exaggerated. Maybe it sounds better than that cruise you took with your in-laws, but minimum-security prison is still prison. I figured that much out pretty quickly.
Danny called me into his office one day for a horrible conversation. The US attorney was offering a deal, he informed me. If I admitted to my crimes, which are not uncommon, as I once wrote, in my profession, I could expect a lenient sentence: 51 to 63 months—4¼ to 5¼ years! He then gave me the best legal advice I’ve ever received: Take the deal without counteroffers or complaints.
This is the dirty little secret of the federal system: Once indicted, you will almost certainly lose. Plead guilty should you ever find yourself in such a mess. I know many people who tried to fight, and they all got longer sentences. Guilty or innocent, you’re fucked at that point, so you might as well accept your fate. My only consolation was that I knew I was guilty and had no desire to pretend otherwise.
After carefully researching the various bridges in downtown Manhattan—they’re all about the same height, turns out—I drew up a list of “mitigating factors” to convince the court I was still basically a good guy despite my monumental fuckup. I stressed my remorse and said I would take my punishment like a man. For this, the judge rewarded me.
Sentencing took place in 2018, on a Thursday in September, and the judge put me away for 18 months. Two weeks later, I received my assignment in the mail: I was to self-surrender at Otisville on the last day of November. (I got in! I got in!) This gave me ample time to put my affairs in order.
I couldn’t believe my luck.
To enter Otisville, you first pass through the adjacent medium-security prison. Here, the guards questioned me about every aspect of my life and then led me into a small room with shelves containing uniforms, either green or tan. “What’s your waist?” a guard asked. He then instructed me to take off my clothes and put them in a bin nearby. I had heard about this part: the strip search. I would get used to it eventually.
Front. Back. Squat. Cough. Lift your right foot. Now your left. Turn back around.
“Up,” he said, and, when I looked puzzled, he motioned to my groin. I lifted my scrotum.
“Okay,” he tossed me a green uniform. When I pointed out the pants were loose, he assured me: “You’ll get a new uniform. Don’t worry.”
After my fingerprinting and a mug shot, the officer was joined by another guard. Rosado was loud and funny and perhaps a bit scary. He locked me up in an actual cell for several hours before giving me a bedroll, taking me out to the quiet parking lot, and pointing to the top of a winding road, where I would meet my new friends.
“This is weird,” I thought as I walked, unaccompanied, up the hill.
The camp at Otisville is very different from the prison it surrounds—a spartan enclave in the mountains of upstate New York. There are only two buildings. One is a dormitory that houses 100 men in a maze of 50 cubicles with 6-foot-tall cinderblock walls. No doors. Each two-man cubicle contains a metal bunk bed, two metal cabinets, and two plastic stools. The smaller administration building has offices for the “counselor,” who oversees the camp, and the case manager, who advises and advocates for inmates. It also has classrooms, a chapel, a dorm for 20 more men, and a visiting room with all the charm of a Greyhound terminal. One of the former inmates I’d spoken with in advance captured the vibe perfectly: “It’s like going to a shitty summer camp in the ’70s—in Alabama.”
Walking into the dormitory for the first time, I was full of trepidation. In the movies, the new guy is always a target. But when I entered my 8-by-9-foot cube—home for the next several months—I was immediately welcomed by several mild-mannered, middle-aged guys. They gave me a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and even new shoes. I arrived with nothing, and they gave me everything I needed. It was a Friday evening. Within an hour, I found myself at a full-fledged Shabbat service and dinner, replete with prayer books, brisket, and babka. Mickey, the de facto head of Otisville’s Jewish community, gave the following speech:
“As we know, this is the Sabbath of Unity. We are all reminded that in here, we are brothers, united in our shared experience. No matter how religious anyone is or from what background, we are all Jews. The Jews of Otisville…welcome to the Sabbath of Unity.”
Where the fuck am I?
Waking up at OTV for the first time was weirdly serene. There was barely any schedule and little to do, but also little to fear. I witnessed no violence during my time there. The camp is small, and with everyone in our green uniforms, it felt like being in the Army, only without drills and commanding officers. There’s neither reveille in the morning nor a specified bedtime. You can watch TV all night, play cards, or hang out and talk. I realized I’d be having plenty of interesting conversations, as I had in the dorms back in college.
I was genuinely shocked by how accomplished, educated, intelligent, and, dare I say, normal nearly everybody was—a far cry from the cartoon villains I’d imagined. Most of the prisoners were simply average (or above-average) men who’d screwed up, misjudged, gotten too ambitious or desperate, and were turned in by someone they trusted. Just like me!
The only major drama was the occasional abrupt shakedown, during which staffers would kick us out of the buildings and rifle through our belongings, looking for drugs, booze, cellphones, and other contraband. These raids usually followed a tip that someone had brought something in, like Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival infamy, who smuggled in a phone and a recording device—stupid transgressions that led to me and some others getting strip-searched again. Spoiler alert: None of us had an iPhone up his butt.
But mostly, we just wiled away our days doing the mindless “jobs” we were assigned; working out; and playing chess, poker, Scrabble, or tennis. There was lots of free time to talk, laugh, and bond. If Trump loses the election and eventually lands at Otisville or a comparable place, I can predict how his bluster might be received. Prison, even pampered prison, is a great equalizer. The uniforms, the demeaning jobs like cleaning toilets, the standing up to be counted several times a day, the inane “programming”—one class was called “Doing Time With the Right Mind”—strip away one’s individuality and dignity. Whatever fame or fortune you had in real life means little here. As your fellow inmates will tell you, “In here, you’re no better than me.”
That sentiment was expressed to the likes of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen (in for tax evasion, making false statements, campaign finance violations), Jersey Shore’s The Situation (tax evasion), and former New York state Sen. Dean Skelos (bribery, extortion, corruption). All of them managed to check their egos at the gate. Could Trump? A prisoner who acts as though he deserves special treatment tests the patience of his peers. And running afoul of their expectations can make for an isolating experience.
Thriving at a place like Otisville also requires a very non-Trumpian trait: selflessness. Inmates, despite their meager possessions, are usually quick to share their coffee hoard or shaving cream with peers who have run out. Commissary comes but once a week, and strict spending limits guarantee that everyone will be short of something at some point. There are also small indulgences from the outside that get shared on the inside—books and magazines are traded frequently; Cohen would give me his “cryptic” crossword from the Financial Times. Then there’s the shared intellectual property, knowledge, and expertise, and the legal, financial, or personal advice, whether good or not. Nobody expects anything in return. In fact, the long stretches of idleness and the need to coexist peacefully means that most of the guys look forward to helping a fellow inmate. Could Trump manage that?
He’d have to learn.
An age-old question about penal systems is whether they are designed to rehabilitate or simply to punish. America focuses on the latter. Formal punishment at Otisville ranges from relatively benign (cleaning the latrines) to harsh (a stint in the “Special Housing Unit,” or SHU, a.k.a. solitary confinement). But a big part of the punishment at any prison, even OTV, is the crushing boredom. Every inmate faces an immediate and severe demotion of self-worth and confidence. By the time you enter, you’ve lost everything you most value. Minimum-security prison may be a respite from the ferocity of prosecution, but once you’re in, boredom becomes your enemy.
The most insidious epidemic in prison—though I got out before Covid hit—is mental illness. Most of the inmates I knew seemed to experience almost constant depression and despair. In many cases, their pre-prosecution lives were filled with substance abuse, anxiety, paranoia, OCD, ADHD, and other mental issues that contributed to their extreme behavior. I don’t know, for instance, what might cause a successful financial adviser to gamble away tens of millions of dollars of his clients’ money, but it can’t be psychologically healthy. According to the New York State Bar Association, an estimated 70 percent of incarcerated people show symptoms of mental illness, and up to 1 in 3 have serious diagnoses such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. The comparable figure for the free world is about 1 in 10.
I reached out to Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, an associate professor of population health sciences at Duke University who focuses on incarceration, to ask about this. Given our insufficient public investment, “who ends up treating mental health? Well, jails and then prisons, primarily,” she told me. “Because there are no community alternatives. It’s a sort of perfect storm of people who are under-resourced and then traumatizing them further.”
Even OTV’s most noteworthy inmates—formerly hotshot lawyers, esteemed doctors, and titans of industry—struggled with their alienation from society. If you thought Club Fed would offer adequate psychological support, think again. There were no therapists on hand beyond the one who managed care for the broader facility, including the medium-security prison, and she was rarely at the camp. Even accessing our prescriptions was a challenge. I had to lobby hard for my Wellbutrin after the medical team initially refused to give me my prescribed dose. When the doctor asked what I thought would happen if I switched meds, I replied, “suicide,” which apparently was enough of a magic word to change their stance.
One antidote to the boredom, however, was the revolving door of new enrollees. Before Trump pardoned him, his disgraced former campaign manager Paul Manafort did some time in a Otisville-esque facility in Pennsylvania. Trump adviser Steve Bannon, ineligible for minimum-security status on account of a superseding state fraud indictment, was just released from Danbury, a decidedly harsher low-security federal institution in Connecticut. Trump’s loyal accountant Allen Weisselberg was in the unenviable position of doing state time at Rikers Island, but with two sentences that didn’t even add up to a year, he survived. Trump himself could wind up in Otisville one day if convicted of federal crimes, but I hope not.
We have our standards.
I hereby interrupt this story to offer a quick cheat sheet of my own selected wisdom for indicted Trump officials and others who end up serving time—even at Club Fed:
Time flies: Your days will seem to drag on forever, but the months and years move fast. And both for the same reason: Nothing much happens in prison. After a while, time becomes irrelevant. One new year blends into the next, and though you don’t feel it, you can sense the time zooming by and leaving you and your fellow inmates behind.
Everyone hates a rat. Yes, just like on TV.
Don’t expect any privacy: With more than 100 guys under one roof, there’s a good chance someone is watching you all the time.
Remorse either: The idea that contrition will miraculously appear for those who sit and think deeply about the crimes they committed is just not a thing. When prisoners ponder their actions, it is usually to justify them. Admitting one’s faults is not only difficult but unnatural. People can’t walk around all day believing they are assholes. Denial, minimization, pride, and forgetfulness are essential to moving on. The rare person, like me, who is remorseful in prison probably came in that way.
Enablers are everywhere: “It’s not like you killed anyone,” is a reassuring sentiment I heard a million times at Otisville. But I brushed it off. Because it was guilt and remorse that liberated me from the bitter feeling that I got screwed by the system. Blaming myself actually made me feel better.
America needs to make its prisons less hellish. The relatively humane conditions at OTV should be much closer to the norm. We were all appalled when Vladimir Putin treated Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny so harshly in prison. Are we so far behind? People who commit crimes are still human, and they need a modicum of dignity. Some of them offered no mercy to their victims, so they don’t deserve any, the logic goes. But do we really want to be as bad as the bad guys at their worst?
Now back to the story.
Perhaps the most surprising thing I learned at OTV was that prison can catalyze a positive change in a person’s life. After a period of adjustment, including plenty of self-flagellation and disbelief at my stupidity, something began to shift. Nothing spiritual, but rather, I felt unexpectedly motivated by the trauma of confinement. I began writing, dreaming, making friends, and having deep conversations. I read all the books I’d previously only pretended to have read, got myself fit, and laughed my ass off. I later found out I was experiencing a phenomenon called post-traumatic growth (PTG) that was identified in the 1990s by psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun and which psychologists and behavioral scientists have analyzed in depth.
PTG is experienced by a small percentage of people who endure something awful and unforeseen. Just as an actor might repurpose stage fright into the energy needed to perform, a person with PTG uses trauma to become a better and more productive person.
Lucky, right?
You bet. Now that I’m out, I am as happy as I was as a child. I’m less interested in money or success and more interested in just reducing stress and being with my girlfriend, kids, and friends—the real ones, not the jerks who populated my life before. I found that most of the guys I met at OTV were top-grade individuals and are some of the very few people from whom I experience no judgment. I’m happy I have them in my life. In prison, my entire world fit into a cubby. By comparison, a small apartment in Manhattan feels like a gift. Simply walking to the Hudson River as I write this article on my phone is a luxury.
Everything in life is.
Not that being a former felon is easy. Society cares little about the former part. We retain some rights, like voting (in most states) and paying taxes, but anyone ever convicted of a serious crime will face great difficulty keeping bank accounts or credit cards, getting loans, landing jobs, and having a normal online presence. Like substance abusers risking relapse, most former felons can never shake their odious tag. Thus, their incarceration reverberates throughout their families and communities for years.
I have charmed many a person with my intellect, my irrepressible modesty, and winning personality, only to be ghosted after what I assume was a little Googling. But that’s nothing compared to the plight of underprivileged former inmates who aren’t even eligible for public housing. Where are they supposed to live? Do we have enough underpasses to house all the formerly incarcerated in this country?
People who have served long stints have difficulty fitting back into society and are further stigmatized as they struggle to adapt. “When you are stripped of your agency for so long, you often feel unable to traverse these kinds of labels that have been put on you,” the Duke scholar Brinkley-Rubinstein told me. “Your power is gone, and you have to figure out how to get that power back. Often, people do get stuck in these systems, stuck in these stigmatizing categories, in part because the dehumanization continues after people get out.”
My criminal friends and I can at least take heart, I suppose, that a former—and perhaps future—president is one of us. Many of our fellow citizens are even treating him with respect and adulation! Is this our turning point? Will we finally be accepted again as equals?
I met recently with my wealthy and connected former business partner—the one who turned me in—in the hope of settling a lawsuit between us. Yes, it wasn’t enough that I paid for our company’s sins and served time, he then sued me for the last of my assets. But during our lunch, face to face after all these years, it was clear he felt bad for doing his best to ruin my life. He even apologized. Not only that, he extended a generous peace offering.
“If Trump gets elected,” he said, “I’ll ask him to pardon you.”
He actually knows Trump, who granted clemency to some pretty unsavory characters at the end of his first term. My billionaire cousin, who had already completed his sentence, received a pardon. I’m sure now he can enjoy his new unit adjacent to his giant apartment at Trump Tower in peace. Another guy I know from OTV, Jonathan Braun, also received a pardon and immediately went back to his day job as a predatory lender. Eventually, New York state barred him from working in the industry, and a federal judge stepped in and imposed a nationwide ban on him. In a telephone interview with reporters from the New York Times, Braun said the only way he could explain his pardon was, “God made it happen for me because I’m a good person and I was treated unfairly.” Braun is considered an undeserving thug by many—you can Google videos of him threatening his borrowers and assaulting his wife and father-in-law—but in the short time we overlapped, he was nice to me. (Editor, please don’t omit the latter pandering sentence. I need all the friends I can get.)
Speaking of pardons, through my ex-wife, I happen to know President Joe Biden’s son-in-law. He’s a truly great guy, and after Biden was elected, I asked my ex whether she could float the idea with him. She adamantly refused. (We liberals do not approve of special treatment.) I was out of luck.
I am no longer rich enough to buy influence, alas, much less a pardon. All I can do is make my political voice heard through my vote. But my former business partner’s offer does raise a question I had never thought to ask:
Back in June, during the CNN debate, former president Donald Trump said something very important: He promised to accept the results of the 2024 race in November if it is a “fair and legal and good election.”
How does Trump define those terms? In 2020, he felt the election was not legitimate because he did not win. This year, he seems to have a similar calculus, saying he wants his victory to be “too big to rig.” But unlike the last presidential cycle, in which Trump’s camp filed 60-plus lawsuits asserting widespread fraud in hopes of overturning the results after the election was over, the strategy in 2024 is not haphazard and reactive. Spearheaded by the Republican National Committee, it has involved dozens of pre-election lawsuits that seem largely designed to generate voter distrust.
“At the end of the day, these lawsuits are PR campaigns in legal wrapping paper. They don’t reflect real legal concerns. They’re designed to create chaos,” says Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the pro-democracy group States United. “After the fact, when the results come in—if they don’t like the results—they have an easier time undermining them.”
As I reported in the September-October issue of Mother Jones, the RNC has laid the groundwork this year to say the election was not properly conducted by filing a deluge of lawsuits alleging illegal voting and illicit election schemes. Experts fear the RNC and far-right groups will point to their pre-election lawsuits as proof they warned the election was rigged before it even started—opening the door for even more lawsuits challenging the results that could eventually make their way to a sympathetic court.
“It’s a little bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall—kind of like everything everywhere, all at once,” says Lydgate, who formerly served as the chief deputy attorney general of Massachusetts. Plaintiffs can file lots of similarly dubious claims in the courts and then, Lydgate says, “see if they can get anyone, any judge, to validate them after the fact.”
While both political parties have filed pre- and post-election lawsuits on procedural matters over the years, many of the new claims conservatives are filing “really feel like they’re of a different ilk,” says Nora Benavidez, a civil rights and free speech attorney. Citing court cases that aim to challenge voter statuses, Benavidez says this crop of lawsuits is an attempt to “narrow opportunities for people to vote” while also insinuating that the process “needs to be shored up to fight corruption.”
Lawsuits challenging voter eligibility have repeatedly been dismissed by state and federal judges. Some of the cases about voter rolls were even launched after the statutory 90-day window before an election closes, at which point states can’t alter voter rolls. Some of the suits aren’t even seeking immediate relief, begging the question of why the lawsuits were filed at all.
Danielle Lang, senior voting rights director at Campaign Legal Center, says the agenda is obvious: “I have no doubt that those who are trying to sabotage or undermine an election might use any number of talking points to do so, including pointing it to frivolous lawsuits that they filed way too late.”
Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), isn’t hiding the ball here. In an October interview with the New York Times, Vance bragged that the RNC has “filed almost 100 lawsuits at the RNC” to ensure votes are counted correctly. They define “correctly” differently than experts do.
Republicans in multiple states have tried to challenge procedures for handling ballots from military members and other voters who live abroad. In Pennsylvania, a lawsuit from six GOP members of Congress sought to impose additional checks on the eligibility and identity of overseas military members and expat citizens. (Since 2016, overseas citizens make up a bigger share of the combined cohort than overseas military members and their families; this may lead Republicans to think the overseas population favors Democrats.) A federal judge threw out the lawsuit Tuesday and criticized the congressional members for filing the suit so close to Election Day. The plaintiffs “provide no good excuse for waiting until barely a month before the election to bring this lawsuit,” the judge wrote. Other judges dismissed comparable lawsuits in Michigan and North Carolina about overseas voters within the last month.
In both Nevada and Michigan, the RNC has claimed that voting rolls are glutted with ineligible voters, who may cast ballots on Election Day that dilute the opinions of genuine voters. Those cases were dismissed in October, but a similar case challenging voter rolls was filed in Arizona by the 1789 Foundation, a right-wing group run by a lawyer known for lawsuits opposing vaccine mandates. On October 30, well after the 90-day window to remove voters passed, the group alleged Arizona is allowing up to 1.2 million ineligible voters to remain on its rolls illegally. That case is ongoing.
While unlikely to work on a broad scale, this legal onslaught can still have an impact. By filing lawsuits alleging improper voter roll maintenance or unlawful election procedures, the plaintiffs are necessitating that already-overburdened election officials spend time proving that the lawsuits are meritless.
The lawsuits also give the conspiracy of systemic election fraud a false sense of credibility. People not incredibly familiar with the legal system may be inclined to believe a legal complaint has merit just because it was filed in court, and not understand that people can claim almost anything in lawsuits.
It’s also not implausible that the plaintiffs could find a court that accepts their theories, no matter how legally flawed or politically motivated.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court suggested it is open to questionable arguments, when it overturned decisions from two lower courts and allowed Virginia’s Republican leaders to proceed (at least temporarily) with efforts to purge 1,600 people from its voter rolls. This is seemingly at odds with the 90-day window before elections in which federal law bars states from changing these lists.
The Supreme Court did not provide justification for its decision, from which the court’s three liberal justices dissented.
It’s unlikely the presidential campaigns will be fully settled when the polls close Tuesday. If the legal blitz is anything like 2020—and there’s ample evidence to suggest it may be worse—courts will get an opportunity to vote on election matters, too.
There’s one line in the sprawling, 900-hundred page document known as Project 2025 that sketches out a plan to eliminate hundreds of millions dollars of federal money meant to help protect some of the most disadvantaged people in the country from pollution and the effects of global warming.
Project 2025, crafted by the conservative-think tank the Heritage Foundation, is widely acknowledged to be a blueprint for a potential Trump presidency—despite his efforts to distance himself from it. The line proposes halting “all grants to advocacy groups” and reviewing “which potential federal investments will lead to tangible environmental improvements.” This almost certainly targets initiatives passed under President Joe Biden that seek to serve communities disproportionately affected by climate change or legacy pollution, also known as environmental justice communities.
The Inflation Reduction Act appropriated an estimated 1.2 trillion in federal dollars to fund a variety of programs, most of of which were focused on climate change. It represents the biggest investment in climate action taken by the United States to date. On top of this, Biden’s Justice 40 initiative aims to ensure that 40 percent of federal climate-related funding goes towards marginalized communities.
A portion of existing funds from the IRA are administered through the Environmental Protection Agency and are meant for advocacy groups, which often partner with state and local governments to help get money to the country’s neediest people. A subset of advocacy groups that receive federal funding are environmental justice groups, which advocate for climate change mitigation and increased access to a pollution-free environment for residents in low-income and BIPOC communities, which are often disproportionately located near sources of pollution.
If it followed Project 2025’s proposal, a Trump EPA would almost certainly put an end to such programs. The Heritage Foundation has previously targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in public and private institutions, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote earlier this year. (Though it’s worth noting that race is not a factor that the Justice 40 initiative considers when deciding what constitutes a disadvantaged community.)
Mandy Gunasekara, a former EPA chief of staff under the Trump administration whoworked for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee under the late Republican Senator James Inhofe, penned the chapter on environmental policy for Project 2025. She says that targeting grant programs to advocacy groups was part of a plan to reassess how the agency spends its dollars. “It’s part of a recommendation to review any pending grants to ensure they go to tangible environmental improvements and not political purposes,” she says. When I asked how would they make the distinction between grants that go to political purposes and grants that support environmental purposes, she didn’t answer.
She’s previously accused environmental grantees of being secret Democratic party supporters. In 2023, she told RealClear Investigations,“These groups are political front groups that are simply created to funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to Democrat campaigns under the guise of doing something good.”
An EPA spokesperson says that, on the contrary, the agency reviews applicants based on their ability to tackle climate change, environmental justice issues, and bring benefits to disadvantaged and low-income communities. “We’re meeting the needs of all Americans,” says Zealan Hoover, senior advisor to the EPA administrator and director of implementation. “Regardless of political, socio-economic, or geographical boundaries.”
Access to solar power can be a matter of life or death.Alexia Leclercq, policy director for PODER, an environmental justice organization based in East Austin, TX, saw that with her own eyes a few years ago. “During the winter storm,” she says, referring to 2021’s Winter Storm Uri, which killed 246 people, “the lack of not having power led to people dying.”
Residents across the state were surprised by the cold snap, which plunged the normally balmy temperatures down into the single digits in Austin. The surprise storm overwhelmed the state’s utility companies, who hadn’t planned for this eventuality. As a result, 69 percent of Texans lost power at some point during the week of the storm. People with solar power wouldn’t have needed to rely on the grid to warm their homes.
Unfortunately, solar is still really expensive and inaccessible,” says Leclercq. Her organization was the beneficiary of the IRA’s Solar for All Program to try and help community members in the predominantly Latino East Austin install and use solar power.
Like other smaller environmental justice organizations, PODER didn’t always apply for federal grants because they didn’t have the capacity to deal with federal reporting requirements, says Leclercq. But a new stream of hired contractors from the EPA meant to assist community groups and increase applicants’ knowledge of the granting process was a huge help. “Last year was actually the first time we ever were part of applying for federal funding,” she says.
Leclerq says that while the Biden Administration has tried to rectify past oversight of environmental justice communities by ensuring that they get the funding and grant-assistance they need, the IRA’s grants have been an imperfect fix. She thinks the administration could be doing more to make the details of the program clearer.
“It’s really confusing, to be honest,” Leclercq says. “A lot of people, they’re like, ‘Where do I find the grant? How do I know it’s aligned with my program? How do I know the deadlines?’” She also notes that there’s often “insider info” not widely available about real-life deadlines compared to the publicly listed ones.
Mijin Cha, a professor of environmental studies at University of California, Santa Cruz, also says that the current grant structure is too onerous and inefficient, often routing money through different groups to provide those benefits to underserved people. “The federal government gives money to a third party, and then that third party distributes the money,” says Cha. “Is it not more efficient to just have that be a direct investment?”
Despite its flaws, many grantees feel that the Biden administration’s attempt to account for the historic discrimination that saddled communities of color with legacy pollution or made them more vulnerable to climate change is a step in the right direction. The EPAhas already funneled $234 million to environmental justice groups to help remedy these issues. Many other groups like PODER are benefiting from the $27 billion dollars allocated to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which is the umbrella program for Solar for All.
As for the allegation that grantees might be political front groups? “It’s unethical and harmful that people are outwardly spreading misinformation and lies regarding Justice40,” Leclercq says. “If they don’t want to fund climate solutions they should just own it.”
Even if Trump were to win the election and carry out Project 2025’s plan to eliminate these federal grants, the funding stream wouldn’t stop any time soon. There are many safeguards in the federal granting system, says Hoover. “Our grant agreements are legally binding agreements between the federal government and a grantee with robust legal protections,” he says.
Hoover told me that most of the IRA’s funding has already been committed, meaning the federal government is legally obligated to pay it out. But awarded money doesn’t last forever; in the case of most of these programs, it lasts from 3 to 5 years. A Trump president could possibly cut those programs as soon as funding runs out.
For the time being, Hoover says that the EPA is focused on making sure to document the IRA’s environmental justice benefits. “We’re confident that the strongest defense for these programs is going to be the tangible impact in these communities and the people who are healthier and safer today than they were four years ago,” he says.
On a multispectral satellite image of the West Bank, Ramón Bieri, an analyst at SITU Research, shows me how to watch the vineyards. A box in the bottom right-hand corner displays the year, beginning in 1984. As the map moves forward in time, orange and yellow spots, inside the blue outlines, shift to deep green and eventually spill out beyond their squiggly boundaries.
Bieri explains to me the variegated colors represent vegetation signatures and the time-lapse displays olive groves, and other untended land, transforming into neatly rowed vineyards. The underlying map, he says, shows areas of the West Bank where Israeli settlers have forcibly taken over Palestinian villages. The colors I am watching are not simply a record of agricultural planning. It is, SITU Research Director Brad Samuels claims, empirical evidence of apartheid.
Prosecuting the crime of apartheid is tricky in any context, but especially in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. SITU believes this novel technology could finally unlock legal cases that have long eluded activists in the West Bank.
In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered an advisory opinion declaring the Israeli military’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza illegal and suggesting that its policies and practices amounted to a system of apartheid. Organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Al-Haq, and B’tselem—not to mention Palestinian activists themselves—have drawn similar conclusions. As HBO’s John Oliver recently pointed out, even prominent Israelis, including former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, as well as a former Mossad chief and a former IDF general, have deployed the term “apartheid” when describing the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Some find apartheid a harsh characterization. In a recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein said the term was “appropriate” but worried the label would “shut some people’s minds down.” It leads the conversation, Klein worried, into the “technical.” The “technical” minutiae of definition may be ill-suited to the conversation Klein hopes to have, but it is fundamental to the legal mechanisms of proving and prosecuting apartheid in international courts.
Over the past few years, a growing chorus of states, human rights organizations, and international legal bodies have applied an apartheid legal framework to the Israeli occupation, hoping to seek justice. Yet no one has successfully prosecuted allegations of Israeli apartheid in any jurisdiction.
Samuels, along with collaborators from Israeli human rights organizations Yesh Din and Bimkom, and researchers at Princeton University’s Department of Geosciences, hope to change that. In his West Bank investigation, Samuels is one of many researchers attempting to actually prove the existence of a widespread, systematic regime enforcing one group’s dominance over another in a way that could be accepted by legal systems.
For the past nine months, the team used remote sensing methodologies and satellite imagery to document three hallmarks of apartheid in the West Bank: land dispossession, restriction of access, and forced displacement.
To Samuels, the body of evidence they have amassed so far is moving “towards an evidentiary file” for prosecutors everywhere. It’s a proof of concept, one that he and his collaborators hope will encourage apartheid litigation across domestic and international jurisdictions.
The project began in the summer of 2023. Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer and activist with Yesh Din, met up with Samuels in New York while on an advocacy trip in the United States. The two had known each other since 2009, when Sfard enlisted Samuels to help him with the case of Bassem Abu Rahma, an unarmed Palestinian man attending a nonviolent protest in the West Bank whom the Israeli military killed with a tear-gas canister.
Over breakfast, the two discussed a legal opinion Sfard had published on apartheid. As a litigator, Sfard could easily point to evidence of apartheid in law books and testimony. But Samuels, an architect and visual investigator, was curious whether apartheid in the West Bank had any spatial representations. In other words, how can we see apartheid?
Spatial representations of apartheid aren’t new: photographer Johnny Miller’s famous drone footage, for example, shows the legacy of South African apartheid and segregation through stark aerial images of wealthy, verdant neighborhoods on one side of an invisible line, and crowded plots of shacks on another. But the legal fight has been more complex.
No one has ever been prosecuted for apartheid—not even in South Africa. As international law scholars Gerhard Kemp and Windell Nortje wrote, “There remains a significant accountability deficit pertaining to this crime against humanity.”
Defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, apartheid is not only specific but multilayered. It is “inhumane acts…committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
These specific elements can put successful litigation of the crime out of reach even for skilled prosecutors in favorable jurisdictions. “You have to prove things like a special intent of domination by one racial group over another,” Kemp told me, “which is more difficult than, say, using the same facts to prosecute war crimes.” Then there’s the added challenge of collecting evidence under an occupation that limits outside access and keeps Palestinian institutions weak—all in the midst of war.
Sfard told Samuels that even with dossiers of testimony evidence, it can be nearly impossible to get remedies for their Palestinian clients in domestic Israeli courts. “Justice for Palestinians whose lands were taken does happen—but at the rate of miracles,” Sfard said. “It’s not a neutral court. We’re not in the Hague. We’re not in some Swiss Tribunal. It’s the court of the occupier.”
For decades, legal systems have grown more skeptical of subjective human accounts in general, as scientific approaches and forensic evidence became the “evidentiary holy grail,” said Sfard. This is especially true of Palestinian testimony in Israeli courts. To prove apartheid in court, Sfard explained, this meant olive groves could be key. In the West Bank, settler expansion is all about land. “When settlers take over Palestinian land, they uproot it and plant their own stuff,” Sfard said. “And I told Brad this is, for example, one thing we can see.”
There are exceptions, but typically Palestinian farmers cultivate olive groves using traditional methods, and settlers build industrially irrigated vineyards. Samuels and Sfard hypothesized that this distinct cultural approach to agriculture could serve as a reliable proxy for land dispossession—one of the essential components of the apartheid system—and that remote sensing technology could detect these changes over time from space.
Documenting this is not as simple as firing up Google Earth Pro. Satellites can produce imagery with a resolution high enough to make out neat rows of grape leaves versus patches of olive trees. But this documentation only dates back a few years—long after the point in the late-1970s when the settler land grab dramatically increased. Other restrictions, such as the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, also limited the quality and availability of US satellite imagery over Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories from 1997 until the law was repealed in 2020.
Samuels and his team brought the puzzle to Adam Maloof, a professor in Princeton University Department of Geosciences, and Ryan Manzuk, a researcher who recently obtained his PhD from Maloof’s department. Though access to satellite imagery with high spatial resolution was limited, they realized that one particular US government satellite called Landsat provided free access to high spectral resolution imagery, which uses colors and wavelengths undetectable to the human eye. With Landsat’s Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), the team could track differences in vegetation health and lushness over time, allowing them to differentiate vineyards from olive groves in areas of the West Bank dating back to Landsat’s launch in 1975.
Landsat had another advantage: evading the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment restrictions. “It’s a blind spot,” Samuels said. “The government scrambled US space agency satellites that had high spatial resolution, but not high spectral resolution, probably because they didn’t perceive Landsat as a threat.”
The team then narrowed their investigation to three villages that illustrated different aspects of apartheid: land dispossession, restriction of access to land, and forced displacement. “There are all different kinds of ways in which settler expansion presents itself,” Samuels said. “And the fact that we focused on three really was a function of time, resources, and fit, in terms of remote sensing.”
When Samuels and his team presented their initial analysis to Sfard and Yesh Din, there was a long silence. “This is remarkable,” Sfard remembered a colleague finally saying. “This is science fiction come true.”
Still, he could not help but feel the remarkable dissonance between believing Palestinians and having to show it on a map: “We already know all of this,” he said. The maps could corroborate testimony in a scientific, clinical way. “It was like a new set of glasses was placed on our eyes, and we suddenly saw more,” he said. But, with it, there was still a realization that Palestinian voices would not be believed without overwhelming evidence.
Sfard hopes that with this new tool, the courts, both Israeli and non-Israeli, will also start to see more—or at least differently. Now, when alleging that the Israeli government declared a parcel of land as state property and allocated it to settlers, “it’s not just the head of the village that is telling you this and making this allegation,” Sfard said. “We have scientific proof that this is the history of it.”
Apartheid has been firmly established as a crime against humanity for decades. And some hope to expand it, including new distinctions like gender apartheid. “But the difficulty,” Kemp explained, has been “to apply the legal standard to the facts on the ground. And this is where the project comes in.” Kemp said that SITU and Yesh Din may make it possible for prosecutors to secure the first apartheid conviction in history.
The ultimate goal is for prosecutors to apply this new approach in courtrooms, but the project faced its first test in a German museum. On October 8—just a day after the one-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks—the project premiered as one of several case studies in a new exhibition called “Visual Investigations: Between Advocacy, Journalism, and Law” at the Architekturmuseum der TUM in Munich. SITU’s corner of the exhibition centers around a giant map of the West Bank, sprawled across a 25-foot long wall, with time lapses of land dispossession, archival photographs of olive groves and Palestinian farms, videos, and a lengthy methodology section.
“I wanted to make clear that this is a super-focused, very specific, and rigorous unpacking of the question of the manifestation of apartheid,” Samuels said. “And not just an ideological rant.”
After Samuels walked a crowd through the findings and dense methodology on opening day, an Israeli student who had concerns about the project during its planning phase approached him. In an emotional exchange, she expressed her gratitude over the fairness and rigor with which Samuels and his collaborators approached the investigation.
Exchanges like that one make Sfard hopeful about the investigation’s potential, but he is careful not to let forensic analysis eclipse the human element.
“Palestinian accounts of the crimes committed against them are of utmost importance,” he said. “While I’m ecstatic about the project, and I think that its fruits are extremely important, they do not replace the direct Palestinian account. I hope that this project will not only allow us to prove in a court of law that certain land was dispossessed, but will also give Palestinians a stage to tell their story.”
A video purporting to show recently arrived Haitian immigrants illegally voting in Georgia for Kamala Harris was produced by a Russian government-backed disinformation unit, according to US authorities. Three agencies—the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—said in a joint news release Friday that the video, which circulated widely on Twitter/X, was manufactured by “Russian influence actors.” The same group, they wrote, was also behind “a video falsely accusing an individual associated with the Democratic presidential ticket of taking a bribe from a U.S. entertainer.”
Though the agencies didn’t specifically name a particular source for the videos, disinformation experts, including Darren Linvill of Clemson University, pointed out that the voting video strongly resembles earlier ones produced by Storm-1516, a Russian government-backed propaganda unit that has been targeting the Harris-Walz campaign for months. In the voting video, a man declares that he and others emigrated from Haiti, were given citizenship, and are now driving around to multiple counties to cast ballots for Harris. “Yesterday, we voted in Gwinnett County, and today we’re voting in Fulton County,” he says. “We have all our documents, driver’s license. We invite all Haitians to come to America and bring families.” He also displays four different drivers licenses with four different signatures.
The agencies didn’t not identify the “U.S. entertainer” named in the faked video, but a site Linvill says is run by Storm-1516 recently posted footage depicting someone with a blurred face alleging that Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff were bribed by Sean “Diddy” Combs for “tipping him off” ahead of a raid on his homes this spring.
The group is also believed to be behind a fake video from earlier this month which purported to show mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania. It is also believed to have helped spread false sexual abuse claims against Minnesota Governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz. (Those claims were initially promulgated in part by a U.S.-based person, a Twitter account calling himself Black Insurrectionist, who the Associated Press revealed last week is a white upstate New York man named Jason G. Palmer.)
Even before the U.S. intelligence agencies issued their statement, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had already called on X and other social media sites to take the video down, saying it was clearly part of a disinformation campaign while suggesting Russian involvement. “We have discussed this with State and Federal authorities,” he wrote on X. “This is obviously fake, and likely it is a production of Russian troll farms. As Americans we can’t let our enemies use lies to divide us and undermine faith in our institutions—or each other.”
One of the Twitter users whose post containing the video was widely shared goes by “AlphaFox78,” a verified Twitter user who pays to use the service, and whose posts and replies are therefore boosted in visibility by the site. While AlphaFox78’s post has been deleted, screenshots of the video are still spreading widely on X.
“This Russian activity is part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election and stoke divisions among Americans,” the intelligence agencies wrote. “In the lead up to election day and in the weeks and months after, the IC expects Russia to create and release additional media content that seeks to undermine trust in the integrity of the election and divide Americans.”
The latest alleged foreign influence efforts echo domestic disinformation about migrants that abounded throughout this campaign season. A key element of GOP-allied efforts to generate distrust ahead of another Trump possible loss has been to gin up unsubstantiated concerns about non-citizen voting. And in September, both Donald Trump and JD Vance repeated racist lies about Haitian people in Ohio eating household pets.
If Kamala Harris is elected, we’re in for a climate catastrophe.
As she swears the oath of office, we’ll find ourselves facing a magnitude of climate chaos and ecological unraveling never before experienced by humanity. We can say that with confidence, because we’re in that crisis now, already. We just don’t talk about it all that much, mostly because we don’t like to admit what it means.
It means the climate crisis is an era, not an issue. It’s the context for every decision humanity makes, and—whether we like it or not—it will set the defining challenge for a Harris presidency.
President Harris is set up to fail in that challenge. Not because she lacks leadership, intelligence, or character, but because these are deeply entrenched problems rooted in decades of climate denialism and predatory delay.
Even if President Harris throws federal climate action into its highest realistic gear—extending the progress of the Biden administration’s huge expansion of clean energy and electrification programs—the US will continue emitting climate pollution for years. Her campaign commitments to expand oil and gas production extend the deadline. Every ton of CO2 we emit in the meantime makes the crisis more dire—in largely irreversible ways. That means we’ll very likely watch climate chaos worsen for the rest of our lives.
We’re still only in the early years of this crisis, and it can be hard to contemplate the chaos coming our way. Many of us recognize on some level that we’ve moved into a world of superstorms and rising seas; droughts and failed crops; deluges and floods; megafires and orange skies full of gagging smoke; life-threatening heat waves and blackouts; invasive insects spreading infectious diseases, and the loss of native ecosystems. We may try to tune it out, but we know it’s bad.
But what hasn’t sunk in is that we built this country for physical conditions that no longer exist. We’ve experienced a discontinuity with the past, a threshold where what used to work no longer does, and what we used to know makes less sense. Once-sturdy systems will break more frequently. Once-safe places will find themselves disaster zones. No aspect of our lives will go untouched. And while it’s true some places are safer than others, nowhere is immune, and even communities like Asheville, North Carolina, can find themselves walloped by extreme weather.
Hundreds of millions of Americans are about to have an unexpected collision with planetary reality. We’re already seeing the impact on insurance and finance. Insurance depends on the ability to accurately price risk, to accurately measure future value. And the truth is, a big chunk of America is way riskier than we thought it was, and seriously overvalued.
A conservative estimate of the homeowner insurance gap is $1.6 trillion in uncovered risks. That’s mostly being borne by people who are relatively poor or live in acknowledged flood and fire zones. Everyone in the insurance industry expects that gap to grow, as risks metastasize and are priced into policies. Insurance eventually becomes too expensive for many to afford, even if it’s still available. For homeowners, skyrocketing premiums are too high. But insurers worry they can’t charge enough to keep up with increasing risk. From society’s perspective, these imperatives are increasingly incompatible. The climate crisis is, in effect, rendering entire communities and even regions uninsurable.
Uninsurable properties are also often un-lendable. Getting a mortgage depends on the bank agreeing that the house they’re loaning you money to buy will hold its value for 30 years. Millions of American homes won’t. Homes you can buy only with cash (or with shady commercial loans) are homes set to see a huge drop in value. This is as true in mountain towns surrounded by flammable timber as in cities on the floodplains of the Mississippi or beachside communities on the Gulf.
This pricing of unacknowledged risk into our communities will be a watershed event that extends into nearly every kind of real estate and local industry. Ignored climate brittleness—the quality of being easily broken by weather extremes but hard to fix—is being exposed. And brittleness revealed means value lost.
A 2023 study in the journal Nature Climate Change found that the overvaluation of homes measured only by their exposure to floods alone was as high as $237 billion. When we factor in all of the combinations of risks that communities face, we could easily be talking about trillions of dollars in overvaluation. The scale of known risks, magnified by future uncertainties, is so massive that a Treasury committee called it a “threat to the financial stability of the United States.”
Sooner or later the brittleness shoe will drop. Both destruction and discontinuity will erode the capacities of many communities and local governments to respond to these challenges, creating a spiral of risk, loss, and partial recovery—until there’s not much left of value in the most vulnerable places.
Already, folks are realizing they have no option but to leave. Some will be directly displaced by fire or flood (as we’ve seen in California and Texas). Many more will simply find life in a declining community untenable. Others are getting out while the market still slumbers. There is some evidence that rising home prices in the safer communities in the Great Lakes and Northwest are starting to be driven by (largely wealthier) newcomers relocating away from climate change.
If millions of Americans do start to flow out of the most battered communities, we may well see a climate squeeze on housing in relatively safe communities. Rising costs could trigger secondary dislocation, where less advantaged locals find themselves pushed out, victims of climate displacement. The only thing that might check that new housing crisis is construction on a scale we haven’t seen in a generation.
I don’t believe America still has the option of an orderly transition. We’re going to have to fight like hell for rapid decarbonization while we reckon with the challenges of a climate-changed America and continue to contend with intergenerational problems of poverty and oppression. The next decade is going to be messy.
If elected, Harris could declare a climate emergency and launch a national climate response. We could invest heavily in climate science, foresight capacities, and worker upskilling. We could forge a national insurability strategy—one that combines tax breaks for household adaptation measures with local disaster readiness and a major investment in stabilizing insurance costs in places that are still insurable. We could undertake wartime-scale efforts to build out clean energy, harden critical infrastructure, and defend relatively safe places from their worst demonstrated threats. We could invest in widespread managed retreat (especially on the coasts) with supported mass relocation for those living in the communities we cannot possibly save. We could lay the groundwork for equitable growth, making sure those moving away from climate chaos find places to live, with functioning roads and water systems and with schools, hospitals, and social services ready to meet a great increase in need. We could go all in, and make this catastrophe the spur for building the stronger bones of a better country.
Let’s be honest: Harris hasn’t laid out much of a climate plan, much less proposed mobilizing a nation for a crisis many of its citizens still loathe to acknowledge. In a polarized country, with razor-thin margins for victory, it doesn’t make for good ads.
But if elected, Harris might yet build on the massive accomplishments of the last four years by placing the crisis at the center of our national debate, acknowledging our nation’s situation with clarity, honesty, and shared purpose.
That is not what we’re in for if Donald Trump retakes the White House.
The Trump crowd has already shown they don’t see acceleration of the climate chaos as a problem—they see it as an opportunity.
Yes, there’s still rabid climate denial in the Republican Party, but that’s not the real driver here. Trump is backed by domestic Big Oil and Russia’s petro-dictator Putin. In a second Trump presidency, climate policy would be set by the people profiting off perpetuating the problem. Dirty industries will realize hundreds of billions in profits they would have forgone if America had made an honest effort not to melt the ice caps.
Trumpists’ ambition is fueled by extending the predatory delay that’s been so profitable for polluting interests to what we might think of as predatory reaction. As the New York Times’ Jennifer Szalai wrote, Trump’s backers have “learned to treat the Trump presidency like a natural disaster: an eruption of volatility to prepare for and exploit.”
After a Trump victory, the first thing we’d see (if we can rip our attention away from the promised concentration camps and military tribunals) is our existing climate capabilities spraying out of the back chute of a wood chipper.
Pulling out of the Paris climate accords would only be the beginning. Every oily-fingered fossil fuel executive, cash-in-a-bag sprawl developer, and corner-cutting factory owner in America is already lining up for a jamboree of lawlessness and impunity. Project 2025 has identified hundreds of regulatory and administrative targets to destroy. A society crashing from one incompetently managed disaster to another offers ample opportunities for corruption, graft, and profiteering. Corrupt incompetence remains the one deliverable Trump has actually reliably produced.
Any effective climate response demands three basics: evidence-based decision-making, capable institutions, and public trust. You have to know what to do, have the means to do it, and be able to cooperate with the public to get it done effectively.
Trump already came for all three in his first stay in the White House. With the power of the presidency unchecked, a submissive Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, and an army of acolytes in governors’ mansions and state legislatures—not to mention thousands of thugs in the streets—Trump will be in a position to do far, far worse this time around.
Don’t expect a national media that has lagged far behind in its climate reporting to suddenly make clear the growing climate peril we’re in. MAGA pundits already have a well-developed strategy for preventing accurate coverage of reality—as Steve Bannon said, “to flood the zone with shit.” Expect all manner of crazy nonsense.
Forget nationally funded climate science and research on solutions, too. Expect universities to be under extreme pressure to toe the line or face defunding. Instead, look for all sorts of major institutions to decide that climate work is no longer essential in an atmosphere of denial and retribution. As with the media, many are already showing signs of being willing to, as historian Timothy Snyder puts it, “obey in advance.”
Trump will then be in a position to eviscerate federal regulations all across the board, punish uncooperative bureaucrats, withhold support to resistant states, block public access to information, and spew official disinformation at the American people.
A main goal will be to further destroy public trust in institutions through induced hopelessness. As Lincoln Steffens quoted a corrupt politician saying almost a century ago, “We know that public despair is possible and that that is good politics.” And of course, they didn’t have Truth Social, YouTube, or 8kun in the 1920s. Getting people to give up is easier than it looks.
Disaster victims are, of course, even more easily manipulated. Antisemitic weather control conspiracy theories? Rumored FEMA shakedowns of local communities? Warnings that disaster first responders are looting and robbing? People whose brains are broken by loss and fear of exploitation are often ready to believe crazy things. The irony is that by believing these things, they’ll be ready to be exploited on a whole new level.
There are fortunes to be made from corrupt disaster relief and recovery, shoddy infrastructure repair and utility privatization, scammy insurance and exploitative credit offers. If you liked the privatization of prisons, you’ll love the privatization of disaster response under a Trump administration. Imagine a vast new climate response apparatus, but one rife with denial, implemented by political appointees, executed through corrupt deals, and only nominally held accountable. How many billions can be siphoned off? I shudder to think.
The scams won’t stop there. Parasites thrive in muddy water, and there will be plenty of chances to leech away whatever money is left in hard-hit communities, before a process of unofficial abandonment takes hold. In collapsing places, corporations can grift via security contracts and private emergency services.
A broken and paranoid America—splintered by the incapacity to agree on observable facts, or trust the institutions we depend on to solve major problems—tumbling into the worst version of a climate catastrophe: that’s a future almost too grim to contemplate.
It may be the future we get. We’ll know in four days.
Top image credits: Scott Olson/Getty; Chip Somodevilla/Getty; Hugo Borges/AFP/Getty; Getty
The contrast between the intentions of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on reproductive rights could not be clearer—no matter how much Trump tries to suggest otherwise.
Trump appointed three of the five Supreme Court justices who overruledRoe v. Wade and has famously flip-flopped on his stances on abortion. Back in 2016, for example, he briefly floated the idea of punishing women who get abortions, but then, following public outcry even from some anti-abortion groups, his campaign walked that back. At his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris last month, he twice refused to say whether or not he would veto a federal abortion ban if Congress passed one—and then claimed earlier this month that he would. And in August, Trump appeared to suggest he would vote to expand abortion rights on the ballot measure in Florida, where he maintains his Mar-a-Lago estate and where abortion is currently banned at six weeks’ gestation; just a day later,he reversed course following backlash from the anti-abortion crowd.
Harris, on the other hand, has consistently campaigned as a vocal supporter of abortion rights. She has highlighted the fallout of the overruling of Roe for women in need of abortion care, and warned about the likelihood of Republicans’ passing a national abortion ban if Trump is reelected. In her presidential campaign, she has promised voters her administration would pass a law that would “restore reproductive freedom.”
But there’s a problem, even should she win. Any hope for such a law depends on Democrats winning control of Congress, which looks unlikely. (When confronted about this, Harris has called for ending the filibuster to make it easier for such legislation to pass.) For some advocates, the promises Harris makes also lack any details of what protections she would support and how her policies would move beyond Roe—if at all.
Roe was “the ultimate floor, and not the ceiling, of what we need for making abortion affordable and accessible for all who need it,” Nourbese Flint, president of the advocacy group All* Above All, told me. Under Roe, states were still permittedto restrict abortion access after the point of so-called fetal viability, and it did not protect women from criminalization over their pregnancy outcomes, including when they used abortion pills to end their pregnancies without supervision from a doctor.
Even if Republicans do win Congress, as president, Harris would still have options to protect and expand abortion access—options that appear on a reproductive freedom wish list supported by hundreds of advocates. Several told me that they are still waiting to see more specific details on abortion access and justice policies Harris would support—and they are hoping those details would go beyond restoring Roe. “That is not a useful campaign slogan, to say we’re going to restore the bare minimum,” said Renee Bracey Sherman, author of the new book Liberating Abortion.
(A spokesperson for the Harris campaign did not respond to questions from Mother Jones for this story.)
Despite President Joe Biden’s reluctance as a devout Catholic to express full-throated support for abortion rights, legal experts say his administration has gotten behind measures that have prevented some of the most extremeRepublican efforts to further criminalize abortion. Biden’s Department of Justice, for example, issued guidance in December 2022 saying that the Comstock Act—a 19th-century anti-obscenity law—cannot be marshaled to ban the mailing of abortion pills, as Project 2025 and anti-abortion Republicans argue it can.
Rachel Rebouché, Dean of Temple University’s law school and an expert in reproductive rights laws, notes that if right-wing judges—including those on the Supreme Court—ruled that Comstock should be applied to criminalize the mailing of medication abortion, a Harris-run DOJ could simply refuse to prosecute such cases. This is a place, she says, where Harris potentially “has the most power.” Meanwhile, Project 2025 explicitly recommends that the DOJ prosecute those who provide and distribute the pills under a Trump presidency.
Her administration could also continue, and even strengthen, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services attempts to require hospitals—even in states with bans—to provide emergency abortion care when necessary to save the parent’s life or protect their health. Legal challenges took that case to the Supreme Court earlier this year, where the justices ultimately punted on interpreting the federal law’s applicability to abortion care in emergency situations. Project 2025, on the other hand, claims that “EMTALA requires no abortions” and says HHS should stop investigating hospitals that have failed to comply with its interpretation of the law.
Under Biden, the Food and Drug Administration made the two pills used in medication abortion—mifepristone and misoprostol—easier to access by repealing restrictions that required them to be picked up in person. They now can be ordered online and delivered by mail. (As I have reported, this method now accounts for about 1 in 5 abortions nationwide). Under Harris, the FDA could remove even more restrictions that remain on medication abortion—including limits on who can prescribe them—according to Elisa Wells, co-founder of Plan C, a resource that provides information on how to access abortion pills. “All of them need to go,” Wells told me.
While anti-abortion Republicans have baselessly alleged the pills are dangerous, more than 100 scientific studies have confirmed they are overwhelmingly safe and effective—including when they are prescribed virtually and mailed. The FDA, Wells said, should “update the approval to reflect science and not politics.” Project 2025 recommends the exact opposite: It says the FDA should immediately re-instate the in-person requirement to access the pills and in the longer term should revoke approval of the drugs entirely. But the FDA and HHS would likely face continued legal challenges if they did try to enact these protections—and the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo earlier this year, in which the justices vastly limited the power of federal agencies, could make it harder for those agencies to enact regulations protecting abortion rights, as my colleague Nina Martin has reported.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing abortion access is the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortion with minimal exceptions, leaving millions of low-income people on Medicaid without insurance coverage for abortion. (Paying for an abortion out of pocket can cost upwards of $500, or far more in the second trimester, according to KFF.) This year and since 2016, the Democratic Party platform has called for the repeal of Hyde, and it was one of the campaign promises Harris made the first time she ran for the presidency in 2020.Biden, too, has repeatedly excluded Hyde from his proposed federal budgets over the last few years, but it has always reappeared in the finalized budget passed by Congress. Still, Rebouché says, Harris “could refuse to sign the budget until Hyde is gone.” Conversely, Project 2025 calls for strengthening Hyde and codifying it into law.
Flint, from All* Above All, which has campaigned to overturn Hyde, said the policy shows the ways that abortion can be inaccessible even if it’s technically legalized, as it was under Roe. “If we do not figure out how to get government funding,” she told me, “we are on the precipice of another crisis, where there’s going to be a lot of folks not being able to get abortions, regardless of whether it’s legal or not.”
Perhaps one of the most significant ways in which a Harris presidency could alter the reproductive rights landscape is one of the most obvious. “She could shape a Supreme Court that is not the Dobbs court,” Rebouché notes. Three of the current justices—including two conservatives, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—are in their 70s, and could potentially retire during the next president’s term. As Rebouché sees it, it’s likely that a future liberal-leaning court shaped by Harris could one day undo Dobbs. “We should continue to talk about Dobbs just the way Alito described Roe: ‘Egregiously wrong’ and ‘erroneously’ decided.” The significance of Harris’ ability to pave the way for undoing Dobbs becomes all the more clear when one, again, looks at Project 2025’s plans: “The Dobbs decision,” it says, “is just the beginning.”
This summer, more than 380 reproductive rights and justice organizations and activists—including Flint’s All* Above All—signed onto a 17-page memo called “Abortion Justice, Now: Protecting Abortion At the Federal Level.” The brief primarily calls for passing federal legislation that abolishes the so-called viability line established in Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. “We know that viability is directly connected to fetal personhood, which is directly connected to the criminalization of pregnancy,” Jenni Villavicencio, a practicing OB-GYN and one of the primary authors of the brief, told me. “We really want to call attention to anybody making policy, including a possible future Harris administration, that is unacceptable to enshrine any sort of limit” for abortion access.
Two pieces of legislation—both introduced last year—are highlighted as model policies that could help expand access. The first is the Abortion Justice Act, sponsored by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), which would establish a federal right to abortion without limits, provide $350 million in annual grant funding to support abortion access, and increase the number of abortion-providing facilities. The EACH Act, introduced by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) would effectively repeal Hyde. Spokespeople for both politicians said that they, or their colleagues, plan to re-introduce some version of the legislation in the next session of Congress.
Majormedicalgroups also support abolishing gestational limits from abortion policy, and in August, more than 400 physicians also signed onto a letter, spearheaded by the group Physicians for Reproductive Rights, asking Biden and Harris to support “moving beyond the legal framework created by Roe,” in part by supporting abortion access later in pregnancy. But the issue of gestational limits has long divided the reproductive rights movement, which hasstruggled to balance where to compromise in its quest for broad abortion rights, as my colleague Madison Pauly has reported. Notably absent from the signatories of the memo, for example, are some of the largest abortion rights groups, including Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Reproductive Freedom For All. (Spokespeople for those groups did not respond to requests for comment.)
For Democrats, this has long been a tough needle to thread. The anti-abortion right has argued that Democrats support abortions later in pregnancy or, as Trump has insisted without basis, “even after birth.” But more than 90 percent of abortions nationwide take place within the first trimester, according to CDC data, and many Democrats, including Harris, have said they support the viability limit that existed under Roe, with later-term exceptions for emergency complications. Harris reiterated that at her debate with Trump, when he repeated his lies about Democrats supporting infanticide.
As Bracey Sherman, author ofLiberating Abortion, points out, many of the tragic cases the Harris campaign has highlighted—in which people with wanted pregnancies had miscarriages, nonviable pregnancies, or other health emergencies requiring abortion—may not have had different outcomes under Roe. “There is no evidence that those people would be helped because they would still be stuck with the same viability line and the exception line,” she said. “We need to be pushing for abortion access at any time, for any reason, for anyone, anywhere in this country.”
Villavicencio, for her part, says she recognizes the necessity of compromise in policymaking. “What we patently reject,” she adds, “is compromise when it is for people who are the most marginalized”—specifically the young, low-income people, and people of color, many of whom struggled to access abortion care under Roe. Under Harris, she and other advocates see a possibility for a fresh start. As Flint, of All* Above All, says, “We have an incredible opportunity in the ashes ofRoe v. Wade to build the thing that our community needs.”
But that all depends on who wins on Tuesday.
Update, Nov. 1: This story has been updated to clarify the Biden administration’s interpretation that EMTALA requires hospitals to provide abortion care to protect patients’ health—not just their lives.
Donald Trump has promised to prosecute his political opponents should he retake the White House. He’s planned to remove the firewall that has traditionally existed between the White House and the Justice Department, and harness federal prosecutors into political dirty work.
But Trump isn’t waiting for Inauguration Day, or even Election Day, to get something similar going—and his first target is the press: In the last 24 hours, Trump has filed legal complaints against two news organizations with frivolous charges. Whether they succeed might be beside the point, because they are a warning shot for what is coming if he wins.
On Thursday, Trump sued CBS News over its October “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. In the suit, Trump argues that the interview was edited to make Harris look good, amounting to election interference. “To paper over Kamala’s ‘word salad’ weakness, CBS used its national platform on 60 Minutes to cross the line from the exercise of judgment in reporting to deceitful, deceptive manipulation of news,” the complaint alleges. He is asking for $10 billion in damages.
The suit is legally ludicrous, according to experts. “It’s ridiculous junk and should be mocked,” Harvard professor Rebecca Tushnet told CNN. But the fact that it was filed in Amarillo, Texas, is a sign that Trump means business. The only logical reason to file the suit in this division is to secure a friendly judge, a practice known as judge-shopping. And in Amarillo, the only federal judge happens to be one of the most ideologically-driven conservative judges in the country: Matthew Kacsmaryk. Kacsmaryk has shown a willingness to go beyond the bounds of the law to advance lawsuits he agrees with. Most famously, he eschewed long-held legal doctrine to block the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug Mifepristone. (The Supreme Court overruled him.)
There is also a political reason to file the suit, which follows weeks of Trump complaining in public about CBS’s editing of the interview. Being able to point to a lawsuit alleging media bias furthers his argument to supporters that the press is the enemy and is working for the other side.
It’s one thing for Trump to sue CBS as a citizen. But if he wins, Trump could make sure this type of suit comes from the Justice Department. It’s a warning shot to the media that any coverage Trump deems unfavorable, including an interview with a rival, could land them in court opposite the US Government.
Media organizations are well aware of the risks of crossing Trump, and some already look to be backing down. Exhibit A are the last-minute decisions by the billionaires who own the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to block their papers’ editors from making Harris endorsements at the last minute. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post, has billions in government contracts that could be nullified in retribution under a Trump presidency.
Trump is already targeting the Post. On Thursday, the campaign submitted a complaint to the Federal Election Commission alleging that, by paying to boost stories critical of Trump, the Washington Post illegally donated to the Harris campaign. Clearly, Bezos’ decision not to endorse Harris hasn’t appeased Trump.
These attacks on both the Post and CBS should sound alarm bells. They also follow Trump’s efforts to punish CNN for its coverage during his first term, and his repeated calls for every major television broadcaster to lose its broadcasting license. Whether Trump could pull off such a feat is unclear—for one thing, local affiliates hold the licenses—but the message Trump is broadcasting is being heard loud and clear: If Trump wins, he will retaliate against the press.
In August, former President Donald Trump called the billionaire Elon Musk “a super genius guy.” That “super genius” and his new America PAC have now taken over much of the Trump campaign’s swing-state ground game in the final weeks before the election. Since creating the PAC in April, Musk has infused it with nearly $120 million to try to get out the vote for Trump. But, as it turns out, winning a presidential election may not be as simple as colonizing Mars or wrecking Twitter—especially for a political neophyte.
Musk offered people money to register to vote and then subsequently got sued by the Philadelphia district attorney and warned by the Justice Department that the scheme is likely illegal. He hired an army of canvassers only to see many of them game a GOTV app to make it seem as if they had knocked on hundreds of doors, when, in fact, they may have been just sitting at Starbucks. And in late August, he made a $1 million donation to a political action committee founded by Scott Presler, a man who even the Republican National Committee has declined to employ because in 2016 he was allegedly caught having sex in an office the RNC shared with the Virginia GOP and posting photos of the encounter on Craigslist.
Over the past two years, Presler has been a fixture at local Republican party events across the country, where he often conducts voter outreach training. He was among the MAGA activists who helped depose Ronna McDaniel as chair of the Republican National Committee earlier this year for not doing more to hire people like…Scott Presler. When the former president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump took over as RNC co-chair in March, one of her first moves was to announce her intention to bring on Presler to help with the party’s GOTV efforts.
Presler “is an amazing vote registerer,” Trump told Benny Johnson, host of the Tenet Media show In The Arena. (Tenet turned out to be a vehicle for Russian disinformation and has since disbanded.) “I think he’s fantastic. I want him on our legal ballot harvesting division.” Five days later, after old stories about Presler’s tenure with the Virginia GOP resurfaced, the RNC issued a statement saying that he would not be joining the party payroll and would remain “focused on his nonprofit.”
The founder of Early Vote Action, Presler moved to Pennsylvania earlier this year to flip the crucial swing state for Trump. He has been registering Republican voters among groups he believes are untapped reservoirs of Trump supporters like the Amish, truck drivers, and gun owners who just need a push. In early October, when Trump returned to the same Pennsylvania venue where he’d been nearly assassinated in July, Presler was awarded a speaking slot at the rally. The 6 foot 5 inch former head of “Gays for Trump” and QAnon conspiracy promoter told the assembled crowd, “To our beautiful Amish in Lancaster and across the state: we will protect your raw milk, your dairy, your farming, your school choice, your religious freedom … your ability to afford to have 10 beautiful children per family.”
Musk appears to be a committed Presler fan. He has amplified Presler’s social media posts, including some that featured conspiracy theories about the election. At an October town hall event in Pennsylvania, an audience member asked Musk if, as an adviser to Trump, he’d hire Presler in the next administration. “Absolutely, yes,” Musk said.
Musk’s donation to Early Vote Action was a pittance for someone who wasted more than $40 billion buying a chronically unprofitable social media site. But the million dollars was more than three times what Presler had previously raised for the PAC since its inception in December 2022. Federal elections records show that by the end of June this year, Early Vote Action had raised less than $350,000. Its largest donor at that point was the $50,000 contributed by Fight Like a Flynn PAC, started by Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
The second-largest contribution of $20,000 came from Margaret Topper, a Florida woman who has been a regular donor to candidates who denied the results of the 2020 election, like Colorado’s former secretary of state Tina Peters, who was recently sentenced to nine years in prison for election interference. Presler was a prominent figure in the “Stop the Steal” movement in 2020. On January 6, he was outside the US Capitol, where he tweeted a video of the mob, calling it “the largest civil rights protest in US history.”
With an active online presence, Presler extensively documents his efforts to register voters on Trump’s behalf. Posts show him in the field, working booths at gun shows and county fairs, tossing his long, Fabio locks back as he announces his latest haul of voter registrations. Every week, he has posted new numbers showing that voter registrations in various Pennsylvania swing counties were trending red. But it’s unclear whether his curated social media narrative reflects real influence on the election in Pennsylvania.
Before receiving money from Musk, Early Vote Action’s biggest expenditures weren’t for campaigns or candidates but for fundraising and media consultants. The PAC paid about $50,000 to a Vermont-based fundraising company called Information Cataloging Strategies, and $30,000 to a media consultant named Roma Daravi who worked in the first Trump White House as the deputy director of strategic communications. Those same two vendors account for the biggest chunk of the new spending from Early Vote Action since receiving Musk’s donation.
The consultants seem to be doing their job in one regard: Presler has become a regular presence on right-wing media, which has been happy to endorse his work. And his fundraising has picked up as a result. His PAC has now raised nearly $3 million, including the donation from Musk. But whether all that media and money is moving any votes is still an open question. For instance, in late September, Presler declared that Republican voter registrations had overtaken those of Democrats in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. “IT IS DONE!” he declared on all his social media channels. “We flipped Luzerne County, Pennsylvania…This is monumental, earth-shattering, ground shaking news.”
But Presler’s efforts in Luzerne County may have no meaningful impact on the election. That’s because lots of registered Democrats in Luzerne County have long been pulling the lever for Republicans, especially for Trump. The former president crushed President Joe Biden in Luzerne County in 2020, 56 percent to 42 percent. The spread was even bigger in 2016 when Luzerne County voters went for Trump over Hillary Clinton by more than 20 points. Luzerne County “was voting that way for a while,” says Thomas Shubilla, chair of the Luzerne County Democrats. “There were people that were Democrats a long time ago that switched to Republican. It’s quite a purple county.”
When I told Shubilla that Musk had given Presler $1 million, he was shocked. “I don’t know what he’s done with it,” he told me. Shubilla says that he is out knocking on doors almost constantly in the county and he has seen very little evidence of any sort of Trump ground game there. “Very very very rarely do I see Trump literature anywhere” at the houses he visits that might indicate that a canvasser had stopped by and left some materials, he told me.
In Luzerne County, Presler can point to at least one specific success: gumming up the works at the local election board. For weeks, he’s complained online that the board had a huge backlog of unprocessed voter registration forms. He has urged his supporters to contact the board to complain about the log jam and also to pester staffers with unfounded claims that massive numbers of undocumented immigrants are registered to vote in the county. Presler has appeared at least twice at county election board meetings to demand answers to these questions, and then he posted the videos of his grandstanding before the board to his more than 2 million followers on social media.
Yet County Election Director Emily Cook told the local paper the Times Leader in late September that many of thenew voter registration applications her office is receiving are either duplicates from people already registered or others who simply wanted to change their address or party affiliation. Cook also said that the understaffed board’s work had been slowed by an onslaught of people calling the office, many from outside the county, asking “scripted” questions about the registration backlog, immigrants, and whether the board had enough paper for the election. (In 2022, Luzerne County ran out of paper for ballots on Election Day.)
“These script questions are designed to take bureau employees away from processing applications to sow those seeds of doubt and create those problems they want to find,” Cook told the Times Leader.
Presler did not respond to a request for comment for this story, but Shubilla says Presler’s laser focus on voter registration, whilea fine civic exercise, isn’t likely to have much of an impact. “What I’m doing is making sure our voters are voting on Election Day, returning their mail-in ballots by Election Day,” he said. “And that’s what’s going to win the election.”
That’s not just the view of the local Democrats. A longtime GOP political consultant who wished to remain anonymous told me that voter registration drives are notorious for collecting forms from people who are already registered. That’s because 30 years ago Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the “Motor Voter” law that allows people to register at the same time they apply for a drivers’ license or public assistance. Even the Post Office now asks people who are submitting a change of address form if they want to register to vote.
“Everybody’s registered now because you can’t go anywhere without them sticking a voter registration form in your face,” the consultant said. And that includes the Amish, he noted. “A lot of them, they’re all registered,” he told me. “The question is turning them out. And what turns voters out is being motivated and excited about your candidate.”
Voters in the past two presidential elections have been pretty motivated, on both sides. The 2020 election had the highest turnout—66 percent—of any national election since 1900, and that figure was even higher in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, where almost 70 percent of the registered voters cast a ballot. Moving the needle, as the polls show, will require a lot more than a few voter registration changes.
Meanwhile, Musk’s Early Vote Action donation suggests that he’s failed to understand the most basic feature of Republican politics, namely its well-developed pool of sharks just waiting to take advantage of unsophisticated rubes with a lot of money. Musk wouldn’t be the first rich guy to get “taken to the cleaners” by opportunistic politicos, says the GOP consultant. “He’s a rookie. He’s gotta make rookie mistakes.”
A few days before the start of early voting, Michelle Vallejo, a 33-year-old Democrat, was greeting a dozen or so supporters in a shady corner of a municipal park in Edinburg, Texas, when she received a visit from an old friend. The volunteers, who had shown up to grab walk lists and water bottles for a pre-election canvass, were filling her in on the latest developments in their ongoing efforts to protect yard signs from being defaced and removed. Vallejo, who is challenging first-term Republican Rep. Monica de la Cruz in a rematch of one of Texas’ closest US House races last cycle, listened politely, in a blue t-shirt that featured her name between a pair of exclamation marks, and running shoes embossed with the Texas flag.
The guest was US Rep. Sylvia Garcia, who now represents a safely Democratic seat in the Houston area but was raised in the district in rural Jim Wells County. The 74-year-old Garcia has served as both surrogate and life-coach during Vallejo’s short political career. They recently spent three hours together raising money for Vallejo’s campaign over Zoom. Vallejo calls her “My tía, my godmother, my political mom.” Garcia says, “She’s grown as a candidate—you know, like all candidates, she listens to some of my advice, and sometimes she doesn’t.” Today, Garcia had brought a gift—a pink-and-white t-shirt that said “Comadres con Kamala.”
“Comadres love to talk,” Garcia told the volunteers a few minutes later, using an affectionate term for old friends or godmothers. “They love to chisme”—gossip. She urged them to hit the doors with that same energy. Bug family members. Text friends from the carpool pickup line. Check in on ex-boyfriends. “We’ve got to make her campaign and Kamala’s campaign the big chisme for the next 20 days.”
The 15th district, which stretches like a rusty fishhook from the Rio Grande, a few miles south, to the city of Seguin northeast of San Antonio, is a big district with even bigger stakes. Democrats are hoping to flip the seat as part of their quest to take back the House of Representatives this fall. But to do that will require coming to terms with why the district has become so close. Democrats routinely won the area by double digits until 2020, when, thanks to huge swings among Tejano voters, Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez barely held on against an underfunded Republican, de la Cruz. The shifts in the district were stunning: Trump improved his showing in Hidalgo County (which includes Edinburg and McAllen) by 24 points. In rural Brooks County, voters delivered a 34-point improvement to the GOP. Jim Wells went red for the first time since 1972.
Conservatives hailed a historic demographic realignment in South Texas, and redrew the maps to make the district slightly more Republican. Gonzalez promptly migrated to a neighboring district that is safer but still competitive. With the party on the defensive in 2022, national Democrats triaged Vallejo’s race, and de la Cruz defeated Vallejo by 12,000 votes. But it wasn’t exactly a red wave either. After spending big, Republicans managed to flip just one of the three races they targeted. This cycle, the DCCC believes Vallejo can win, and the campaign has received support on the airwaves from an affiliated outside group, House Majority PAC. The group recently released a survey showing Vallejo just three points behind—within the margin of error.
The election in the Rio Grande Valley offers a glimpse of just how much the debate over border security has shifted during the Trump years. Criticism of Joe Biden’s border policies have been a potent political issue in the district. And Vallejo, who ran as progressive in her first campaign, has sought to project a tougher image in her second run. It is a test of whether Democrats’ have found a message that works in a border region that, as much as anywhere else, embodies the evolution of both political parties in the Trump era.
From the moment Trump delivered his first remarks of the 2015 campaign, the border—and the wall he planned to build along it—was the symbolic heart of the MAGA movement, and the backlash it engendered. It was a “racist” wall, Texas Rep. Colin Allred said during his first run for Congress, promising to help tear it down himself. It was an “immorality,” said former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Hillary Clinton called it “useless.” Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Hakeem Jeffries, and Kamala Harris called it “Medieval.” Activists, and even candidates, talked about abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and of halting the growth of the Border Patrol itself.
But that rhetoric largely ended with Trump’s first term. “We saw the shift as soon as Biden was in office,” says Michelle Serrano, a co-director of Voces Unidas RGV, a non-profit that opposes border “hyper-militarization.” With a Democrat in the Oval Office, many of the policies stayed the same, but the resistance to those policies seemed to fade. “It felt like crazy town,” she told me. “Like nobody was talking about it, even though we were talking about it.”
Now, in Trump’s final campaign, Democrats have completed their transformation. At a recent CNN town hall, Harris mocked the former president for only building “2 percent” of the wall he promised. (Trump built 458 miles, often replacing far less obtrusive earlier barriers with 20-foot steel slats.) Like many Democrats on the ballot this fall, she now touts her support for a Republican-drafted bill that Trump killed, which decoupled border-security funding from comprehensive immigration reform and included $650 million funding to continue wall construction. Harris’ campaign has produced ads touting her tough-on-the-border credentials. One spot even featured footage of the wall that Trump’s administration built.
Vallejo, who was raised in the district and co-owns a popular flea market with her family in Mission, Texas, ran for the seat last cycle as an unabashed progressive, after being endorsed early on by the political wing of La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), which was founded by United Farmworkers leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and now organizes on behalf of residents of border colonias. She promised to fight for Medicare for All and campaigned with Bernie Sanders in the final weeks of the campaign. During that race, Vallejo “attacked the border wall as a failure,” Michelle Garcia reported for Mother Jones that year.
Today, no one would necessarily confuse Vallejo with Henry Cuellar, the now-indicted conservative Democratic congressman from Laredo who has spent decades beating a drum for more border-security projects. But her rematch with de la Cruz offers a glimpse of how candidates with more progressive backgrounds are navigating a set of issues that have nudged some Hispanic voters inside and outside the district to the Republican Party. In August, she released an ad saying that “our community is being overwhelmed by the chaos at the border, and it’s time to get serious. I’ll work with Republicans and Democrats to add thousands of new Border Patrol agents—and take on the cartels and human trafficking.”
It ends with her standing on the Rio Grande. “We’ve had enough talk,” Vallejo says. “It’s time to secure the border.”
After the ad came out, Politicoreported that some longtime supporters were furious at the law-and-order rhetoric, and that board members of LUPE Votes were even considering pulling their endorsement. The group stuck with her, and has been turning out voters on her behalf.
“There was a response online, but also what we saw at the doors and what we saw among our voters is that it allowed us to take leadership on this issue,” Vallejo told me, after the canvassers had received their instructions and begun to trickle out. “It allowed us to have that conversation about what we actually can do, and we know that you could do both. You could secure the border and also work to implement legislation that’s based on humanity and the reality of what people are experiencing here in our communities. We are a border region. We’re always going to be a border region, and it’s important that we modernize our legislation so that there’s a timely, legal, humane way for people to access citizenship and what they’re seeking when they come asking for help.”
She expresses support for Republican Sen. James Lankford’s bill which would have increased Border Patrol funding and allocated millions of dollars for wall construction. Another ad running in the district, from House Majority PAC, features aerial footage of the border wall while boasting that Vallejo will work with both parties to secure more resources for border protection. When I asked Vallejo what she meant by the phrase “secure the border,” she talked about “the flow of fentanyl and drugs and human trafficking through our ports of entry,” and the need for technology and manpower to “stop the flow of those harmful things into our homes.”
But Vallejo also emphasizes the need to make the judicial process work for immigrants—to “clear up the backlog of people who’ve been living in the shadows for, if not decades, their entire lifetime,” and for “improving access to legal representation.” Unlike some Democrats, she still talks a lot about a “pathway to citizenship” for people who currently lack legal status.
That message resonates with supporters like Florentino Guerrero, who is now retired after working for 20 years as a customs officer. “I’ve just seen the mess that Trump and even [Vallejo’s] opponent have done here on the border,” he told me. “I started with Bush, right after 9/11. There was no problem on the border. Then eight years with Obama there was more immigrants going back than coming. Then we got Trump and it was chaos—separating families and all that stuff. And he had the majority in Congress to change the immigration laws and he didn’t do it.”
Vallejo’s message is that in all the politicization, the actual needs of her community are given short shrift. And it’s not just about immigration politics. Foremost among those is health care, which she often discusses in personal terms, as someone whose family often traveled across the border for medical attention. Vallejo does not call for “Medicare for all” like she did in her first campaign, but now floats lowering the age of the program to expand coverage described her position as “access to affordable healthcare any way that we could get it.” The campaign, and its backers, have placed a huge emphasis on protecting abortion rights, rejecting old assumptions that Democrats in the region are too socially conservative to be moved by such appeals.
“My own OBGYN told me this year that all of her residents are no longer with her, and that she’s very alarmed for her patients and the women and families that she cares for, because the care just isn’t there anymore,” Vallejo said.
One Vallejo ad features a testimonial from Lauren Miller, a Texas woman who had to flee the state for health care because one of the two twins she was expecting was non-viable.
Eventually, Garcia, Vallejo’s congressional mentor, wandered over to the picnic bench where we were sitting to join the conversation with her newly appointed comadre. Her big thing was that they needed to “knock and drag”—that is, ”we just have to do a better job of dragging people out of their homes or work and to making the time to actually vote.” Even with the new national investments in the race—Democratic groups have outspent Republicans by a more than two-to-one margin—she was “a little disappointed that I didn’t see the heightened activity that I would have wanted.”
“Quite frankly, and I know this will piss off some of my national friends, I just don’t think that they get South Texas,” Garcia complained. She’d spent the previous two days campaigning with Cuellar—who is, improbably, cruising to re-election—and Gonzalez, who faces an expensive rematch with former Republican Rep. Mayra Flores. “You know, they focus so much on New York and California, sometimes maybe Chicago. But what’s good in New York doesn’t necessarily work well here in South Texas.”
When her colleagues did come to the area, it was for one or two days, and their focus was often on “the whole border discussion.” She wanted politicians to pay attention to the way people actually lived and worked in the region, and to understand the value of immigration. Vallejo, who chose her words carefully during our interview, opened up.
“I think that there is a missing voice in the conversation about what is the most effective path forward—immigration challenges, border challenges, they’re not something that you could fix with a tagline, they’re not something that you could fix with a talking point,” Vallejo said. “It’s going to take discussion and it’s going to take nuance to be able to drive forward the solution that we need to serve our families. Our communities are dynamic. They are multi-generational. They’re experiencing many challenges economically, like Congresswoman Garcia said, that are not understood. And that’s why I feel very strongly that we need voices like mine speaking on behalf of my community. Who knows what it’s like to work with our immigrant communities, our multi-generational communities. I myself am a daughter of Mexican immigrants, very proudly, and I know that my family hasn’t been met in the place that they’re at with what we need from our own government, whether that’s local, state or national.”
“And I’m sure she’s going to sponsor my DREAM Act,” Garcia said, jumping in, referring to the long-stalled effort to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented residents who came to the US as children.