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

A hulking steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, is the city’s economic heartbeat as well as a keystone origin story of JD Vance, the hometown senator now running to be Donald Trump’s vice-president.

Its future, however, may hinge upon $500 million in funding from landmark climate legislation that Vance has called a “scam” and is a Trump target for demolition.

In March, Joe Biden’s administration announced the US’s largest ever grant to produce greener steel, enabling the Cleveland-Cliffs facility in Middletown to build one of the largest hydrogen fuel furnaces in the world, cutting emissions by a million tons a year by ditching the coal that accelerates the climate crisis and befouls the air for nearby locals.

In a blue-collar urban area north of Cincinnati that has long pinned its fortunes upon the vicissitudes of the US steel industry, the investment’s promise of a revitalized plant with 170 new jobs and 1,200 temporary construction positions was met with jubilation among residents and unions.

“It felt like a miracle, an answered prayer that we weren’t going to be left to die on the vine,” said Michael Bailey, who is now a pastor in Middletown but worked at the plant, then owned by Armco, for 30 years.

“America needs “a leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s green new scam and fights to bring back our great American factories,” Vance said.

“It hit the news and you could almost hear everybody screaming, ‘Yay yay yay!’” said Heather Gibson, owner of the Triple Moon cafe in central Middletown. “It showed commitment for the long term. It was just so exciting.”

This funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the $370 billion bill to turbocharge clean energy signed by Biden after narrowly passing Congress via Democratic votes in 2022, has been far less thrilling to Vance, however, despite his deep personal ties to the Cleveland-Cliffs plant.

The steel mill, dating back to 1899 and now employing about 2,500 people, is foundational to Middletown, helping churn out the first generations of cars and then wartime tanks. Vance’s late grandfather, whom he called Papaw, was a union worker at the plant, making it the family’s “economic savior—the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class,” Vance wrote in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

But although it grew into a prosperous All-American city built on steel and paper production, Middletown became a place “hemorrhaging jobs and hope” as industries decamped offshore in the 1980s, Vance wrote. He sees little salvation in the IRA even as, by one estimate, it has already spurred $10 billion in investment and nearly 14,000 new jobs in Ohio.

When campaigning for the Senate in 2022, Vance said Biden’s sweeping climate bill is “dumb, does nothing for the environment and will make us all poorer,” and more recently as vice-presidential candidate called the IRA a “green energy scam that’s actually shipped a lot more manufacturing jobs to China.”

America needs “a leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s green new scam and fights to bring back our great American factories,” Vance said at the Republican convention in July. “We need President Donald J. Trump.”

Republicans in Congress have repeatedly attempted to gut the IRA, with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint authored by many former Trump officials, demanding its repeal should Republicans regain the White House.

Such plans have major implications for Vance’s hometown. The Middletown plant’s $500 million grant from the Department of Energy, still not formally handed over, could be halted if Trump prevails in November. The former president recently vowed to “terminate Kamala Harris’s green new scam and rescind all of the unspent funds.”

“The soot covers everything, covers the car, I have to Clorox my windows…It gives you an instant headache.”

Some longtime Middletown residents are bemused by such opposition. “How can you think that saving the lives of people is the wrong thing to do?” said Adrienne Shearer, a small business adviser who spent several decades helping the reinvigoration of Middletown’s downtown area, which was hollowed out by economic malaise, offshored jobs, and out-of-town malls.

“People thought the plant was in danger of leaving or closing, which would totally destroy the town,” she said. “And now people think it’s not going anywhere.”

Shearer, a political independent, said she didn’t like Vance’s book because it “trashed our community” and that he had shown no alternative vision for his home town. “Maybe people who serve with him in Washington know him, but we don’t here in Middletown,” she said.

Climate campaigners are even more scathing of Vance. “It’s no surprise that he’s now threatening to gut a $500 million investment in US manufacturing in his own hometown,” said Pete Jones, rapid response director at Climate Power. “Vance wrote a book about economic hardship in his hometown, and now he has 900 new pages from Trump’s dangerous Project 2025 agenda to make the problem worse so that Big Oil can profit.”

Local Republicans are more complimentary, even if they differ somewhat on the IRA. Mark Messer, Republican mayor of the neighboring town of Lebanon, used the vast bill’s clean energy tax credits to offset the cost of an upcoming solar array that will help slash energy costs for residents. Still, Vance is a strong running mate for Trump and has “done good for Ohio,” according to Messer.

“My focus is my constituents and doing what’s best for them—how else will this empty floodplain produce $1 million for people in our town?” Messer said. “Nothing is going do that but solar. I’m happy to use the IRA, but if I had a national role my view might be different. I mean printing money and giving it away to people won’t solve inflation, it will make it worse.”

Some Middletown voters are proud of Vance’s ascension, too. “You have to give him credit, he went to [Yale] Law School, he built his own business up in the financial industry—he’s self-made, he did it all on his own,” said Doug Pergram, a local business owner who blames Democrats for high inflation and is planning to vote for Trump and Vance, even though he thinks the steel plant investment is welcome.

This illustrates a problem for Democrats, who have struggled to translate a surge of new clean energy projects and a glut of resulting jobs into voting strength, with polls showing most Americans don’t know much about the IRA or don’t credit Biden or Harris for its benefits.

Ohio was once a swing state but voted for Trump—with his promises of Rust belt renewal that’s only now materializing under Biden—in the last two elections and is set to do the same again in November. Harris, meanwhile, has only fleetingly mentioned climate change and barely attempted to sell the IRA, a groundbreaking but deeply unsexy volume of rebates and tax credits, on the campaign trail.

“Democrats have not done well in patting themselves on the back, they need to be out there screaming from the rooftops, ‘This is what we’ve done,’” said Gibson, a political independent who suffers directly from the status quo by living next to the Middletown facility that processes coke coal, a particularly dirty type of coal used in steel production that will become obsolete in the mill’s new era.

“The air pollution is horrendous, so the idea of eliminating the need for coke, well, I can’t tell you how happy that makes me,” said Gibson. The site, called SunCoke, heats half a million short tons of coal a year to make coke that’s funneled to the steel plant, a process that causes a strong odor and spews debris across the neighborhood. Gibson rarely opens her windows because of this pollution.

“Last year it snowed in July, all this white stuff was falling from the sky,” Gibson said. “The soot covers everything, covers the car, I have to Clorox my windows. The smell is so bad I’ve had to end get-togethers early from my house because people get so sick. It gives you an instant headache. It burns your throat, it burns your nose. It’s just awful.”

“Somewhere in there, JD changed. He’s allowed outsiders to pimp him. This guy is embarrassing us. That’s not who we are.”

The prospect of a cleaner, more secure future for Middletown is something the Biden administration tried to stress in March, when Jennifer Granholm, the US energy secretary, appeared at the steel mill with the Cleveland-Cliffs chief executive, union leaders and workers to extol the new hydrogen furnace. The grant helps solve a knotty problem where industry is reluctant to invest in cleaner-burning hydrogen because there aren’t enough extant examples of such technology.

“Mills like this aren’t just employers, they are anchors embedded deeply in the community. We want your kids and grandkids to produce steel here in America too,” Granholm said. “Consumers are demanding cleaner, greener products all over the world. We don’t want to just make the best products in the world, we want to make sure we make the best and cleanest products in the world.”

Lourenco Goncalves, chief executive of Cleveland-Cliffs, the largest flat-rolled steel producer in North America, followed Granholm to boast that a low-emissions furnace of this size was a world first, with the technology set to be expanded to 15 other company plants in the US.

Republicans elsewhere in the US have jumped onboard similar ribbon-cutting events, despite voting against the funding that enables them, but notably absent among the dignitaries seated in front of two enormous American flags hanging in the Middletown warehouse that day was Vance, the Ohio senator who went to high school just four miles from this place. His office did not respond to questions about the plant or his plans for the future of the IRA.

Bailey, a 71-year-old who retired from the steel plant in 2002, said that as a pastor he did speak several times to Vance about ways to aid Middletown but then became alarmed by the senator’s rightward shift in comments about women, as well as his lack of support for the new steel mill funding.

“JD Vance has never mentioned anything about helping Middletown rebound,” said Bailey, who witnessed a “brutal” 2006 management lockout of workers during a union dispute after which drug addiction and homelessness soared in Middletown. “He’s used Middletown for, in my view, his own personal gain.”

“Somewhere in there, JD changed,” he added. “He’s allowed outsiders to pimp him. This guy is embarrassing us. That’s not who we are.”

Do you have $100 million? I don’t. Heck, I don’t even have $50 million! Which is why I’m not worried about the likes of President Joe Biden and maybe-president Kamala Harris and Rep. Barbara Lee and Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Bernie Sanders—all of whom have proposed various levies on excessive wealth over the past five years—taxing my unrealized capital gains.

I do have unrealized capital gains. Maybe you do, too. My wife and I bought our house in Oakland, California, almost 20 years ago, and it’s worth more now than when we bought it. We also own shares of some stock funds that have appreciated over the years. Those paper gains are “unrealized” because we haven’t sold the assets. Unless they are sold, and the profits “realized,” they won’t be taxed under current law.

This gives America’s richest families a convenient way to avoid income tax. If you, like our thousand-ish billionaires, have vast stock holdings, you can have your tax lawyers and accountants arrange your affairs so as to minimize your realized income. Then, instead of selling long-held assets to fund your lavish lifestyle—and paying a capital gains tax of 20 percent plus a 3.8 percent surcharge known as the Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT)—you simply borrow against your holdings at a few percent interest, tops.

Guys like Bezos and Bloomberg and Buffett (who needs first names?) take advantage of this tactic, which is why ol’ Warren can accurately say he pays a lower overall tax rate than his secretary does. Per ProPublica‘s analysis, the wealth of the 25 richest Americans totaled $1.1 trillion at the end of 2018, but their combined 2018 tax bill? A scant $1.9 billion.

Several of the aforementioned wealth tax proposals, including Biden’s (which Harris generally supports), aim to shrink our obscene wealth gap by taxing the unrealized gains of the super-rich. But the $100 million Biden-Harris cutoff means that fewer than 10,000 people would be affected.

TikTokkers are having fun with this...

@mayagouliard

They arent talking about us. The capital gains tax has nothing to do with us. Aside from trying to reign in the uber greed of the already mega wealthy in our country. Trickle down economics failed. #harriswalz #capitalgainstax #taxtherich #99percent

♬ original sound – theshamingofjay

The TikTok dad below, Dean, sums up the situation nicely: Taxing unrealized gains “sounds really ridiculous, and it’s very, very complicated,” he says. “But the key thing everyone needs to know, which is why I don’t care about it,” he says, is the cutoff: “I’d love to have this problem. It means I’m freakin’ worth $100 million!”

@alexisanddean

Should we be worried about the proposed capital gains tax by Kamala Harris? #capitalgains #capitalgainstax #kamalaharris #harris2024 #tax #taxes #capitalgains #uspolitics #politics #trump #trump2024 #taxcuts #taxpolicy #economics #useconomy #ustaxes #taxation #econ101 #fintok #finance #finance101 #financialfreedom #financialliteracy #financialeducation #financetiktok #invest #investing #investor

♬ original sound – Alexis and Dean

The people who are freakin’ worth $100 million oppose such a tax, of course. The New York Times reports that a group of venture capitalists calling themselves VCs for Kamala has been whispering in her ear to dissuade her from trying to tax unrealized gains. In a survey, 75 percent of the group’s members reportedly agreed that doing so would “stifle innovation.”

Bob Lord, a tax attorney who advises Patriotic Millionaires, a group of affluent people seeking fairer tax policies, isn’t buying it. Wouldn’t that innovation-stifling argument “apply equally to their realized gains? And to their tax rates?” he asks in an email. “The logic would justify them having a negative tax rate, so we could spur innovation.”

“As I see it,” adds Lord (who helped write Rep. Barbara Lee’s Oligarch Act of 2023, and who has contributed to this publication) “any tax on the ultra-rich is significant to them only for how it impacts their wealth. Taxes don’t impact their spending decisions, their career decisions, college affordability, retirement decisions, or whether a spouse needs to work full time.” 

Those taxes also won’t affect you if you have the following issue:

@dadified

Just a quick PSA #capitalgains #taxes #kamalaharris #repairs

♬ original sound – Freddie

VCs for Kamala did not respond to questions I sent via their media contact, but those rich kids may not have to worry either. Congress has thus far been unwilling to touch unrealized gains, in part because, as Dean noted, it sounds ridiculous—even un-American—when applied to ordinary people.

I know. These aren’t ordinary people. But remember how, when Congress passed $80 billion in funding so the IRS would finally have sufficient resources to go after wealthy, sophisticated tax cheats? And remember how Republican lawmakers, including Donald Trump, widely (and falsely) shrieked that the Biden administration was hiring 87,000 new IRS agents to fan out and harass regular people just like you? Yeah, that was hogwash. But it was politically effective hogwash that helped set the stage for the GOP to claw back tens of billions of that funding as part of a subsequent debt ceiling deal.

Something similar would almost certainly happen if Congress got close to imposing a tax on unrealized gains. It’s simple politics: “We don’t feel in general that it’s fair to tax people when they don’t have the ability to pay,” explains Harvey Dale, an attorney who advises ultra-wealthy clients on tax matters. “Suppose I am a farmer. My family has owned this 1,000-acre spread for four generations, and in a good year I make $30,000 farming. But the land, wow, that could be worth $10 million now.”

(Note: That farmer, lacking $100 million in assets, would be unaffected by the Harris plan.)

The Supreme Court “is all but certain to strike down a tax on wealth, and the wealth transfer tax system we have has effectively been neutered through avoidance strategies.”

One could, of course, write exceptions into the law, “as long as you could figure out what all of those kinds of issues are,” Dale says. Or you could take a different approach: “Why don’t you say, in general, we won’t tax unrealized gains, but we’ll make exceptions and tax them—for example, if the asset in question is freely marketable, like securities, and we won’t do that for people below a certain level of wealth or income.”

As things stand, investors already get a sweetheart deal. When you profit from the sale of an asset today, you pay a far lower tax rate than you would if you made the money by working. Sometimes you pay no tax at all: Uncle Sam, for instance, lets a married couple pocket the first $500,000 in gains from the sale of their primary residence. (Sorry, renters.)

Stock is different. If you sell shares you’ve held at least a year, any profits are taxed at a rate based on your overall income. For 2024, a couple making up to about $94,000 pays no capital gains tax. From there up to $583,750, the rate is 15 percent plus that 3.8 percent NIIT on incomes north of $250,000. Families raking in even more pay 20 percent—23.8 percent with the NIIT.

That’s a great deal for people whose incomes derive largely from investments. It means that a couple with wage income of $1 million in 2024 owes the IRS about $321,000, whereas a couple with $1 million in investment income owes only $181,000. (These simple figures ignore tax credits, deductions, etc.)

Why structure our tax code this way? Some people say it’s to incentivize investment, but I’m skeptical. As long as the government isn’t taking 90 percent of your profits, people will keep investing. What else are you gonna do—shove your excess cash under the mattress? Bury it in the yard?

Another rationale, says Dale, who has taught tax at New York University’s law school for decades, involves “bunching.” If my job pays $100,000 a year and I work for five years, I pay 22 percent annually to the federal government. But suppose capital gains were taxed the same as wages. If an investor who’s held a bunch of stock for four years then sells that stock the fifth year for a $500,000 profit, their income is the same as mine, but because it came all at once, their tax rate would be closer to 28 or 29 percent. “So if you want the theoretical justification, it is to average out the bunching,” Dale told me.

For people who make more than $1 million a year, Biden has proposed taxing capital gains at the same top rate as ordinary income—currently 37 percent. Last week, Harris softened that proposal, saying she’d only raise the rate to 28 percent. She and Biden also both seem to support raising the NIIT to 5 percent on incomes north of $400,000. Which means wealthy investors would pay a total of 33 percent on realized gains.

But you don’t make $1 million a year, so never mind.

Trump hasn’t specified his plan for capital gains—maybe, as with health care, he only has a “concept of a plan.” But Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint created by conservatives from Trump’s first administration, proposes cutting the top rate to 15 percent and eliminating the NIIT. If that happens, America’s one-percenters will pay a tax rate on investment profits that’s less than half the rate they pay on their salaries. And it means wealthy families whose income comes largely from investments will pay a lower tax rate than workers who bring home the nation’s median pay: roughly $60,000 a year.

For hectomillionaires, people with $100 million or more, the Biden-Harris plan would impose a minimum tax of 25 percent on all income, realized and unrealized. But that faces long odds, because even if Congress passes it, the Supreme Court might slap it down.

As the Tax Policy Center’s Steven Rosenthal has written, in the case of Moore v. United States, four of the justices “expressly declared that realization is a constitutional requirement” for taxation. If either Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Brett Kavanaugh joins with their fellow conservatives, most of those wealth tax proposals would be in trouble.

Lawyers specializing in trusts and estates have long been engaged in “an ongoing, very complicated game to reduce the taxes paid by the wealthy.”

Tax attorney Lord sees a window: “The court is all but certain to strike down a tax on wealth, and the wealth transfer tax system we have has effectively been neutered through avoidance strategies,” he says, “so that leaves a tax on true economic income [including unrealized gains] as the only plausible option.” 

Dale says he likes the Harris plan, and “it’s not clear that SCOTUS would declare unconstitutional a 25 percent tax on unrealized gains of people whose net worth is over $100 million, but it’s also not clear that SCOTUS would approve or sustain such a tax.”

That uncertainty, he adds, will affect how Congress views the proposal: “At least some senators and representatives would decide to vote against it because of its possible unconstitutionality. Others in Congress will vote against it because they will dislike such a tax.”

Dale’s NYU colleague, former Biden Treasury official and tax expert Lily Batchelder, is more optimistic about the Supreme Court sustaining a minimum income tax for extremely high-wealth individuals: “The majority in Moore expressed concern about how the petitioners’ arguments would deprive the government and the American people of trillions of dollars in tax revenue by eliminating a vast array of existing provisions, including multiple provisions that already tax unrealized income,” she notes in an email. “I think the case educated the justices about the ‘blast radius’ that would result if they read some sort of realization requirement into the Constitution.”

It’s always been somewhat of a challenge to effectively tax the superwealthy, who wield political power and guard their hoards as jealously as Smaug, the Tolkien dragon. But Congress isn’t without options. It could, as Sens. Wyden and Angus King have proposed, restrict abusive trusts that allow billionaires to transfer massive sums to their heirs without paying a dime in tax. And lawmakers could cap federally subsidized retirement accounts to prevent wealthy retirees from taking excessive government handouts.

They also could do away with carried interest once and for all and strengthen the rules for Roth IRAs—retirement accounts meant for the middle class—that have famously allowed Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel to parlay a $1,700 retirement fund contribution into billions of tax-free dollars.

And they could, as Biden has proposed, eliminate the socially corrosive “step-up in basis” rule: Suppose your father bought $5,000 worth of stock in 1960 and now it’s worth $5 million. If he dies and leaves it to you, under today’s rules, the “cost basis” of the stock—what it cost him originally—resets to the current market value. Boom! Your family just sidestepped taxes on almost $5 million in investment profits.

His estate wouldn’t have to pay any tax on that transfer, either: As of 2024, the IRS lets a couple give their kids up to $27.2 million, free of any gift or estate tax. This generous exemption is yet another rule that Congress could target. In fact, it’s set to revert to half that amount at the end of 2025, so I guess we’ll see whether our lawmakers will stand up to the oligarchs.

“There are $5 trillion of offsets in the president’s budget that raise revenue exclusively from large corporations and individuals earning more than $400,000 in income,” Batchelder points out. “Every member of Congress has different views about which of these options are most appealing, so the most doable reforms will depend on who are the marginal votes in Congress after the election, but there are many, many options.”

Dale figures the best way to shrink the wealth gap is to target inheritances—closing loopholes, restricting trusts, and generally strengthening the rules on intergenerational wealth transfers, which are taxed at only about 2 percent overall, per Batchelder’s 2020 analysis. The wealth industry will find workarounds, and you’ll never get a perfect system, he says, but you could make inheritance taxes harder to circumvent.

“A nontrivial portion of my practice was estate planning,” a field that has long engaged in “an ongoing, very complicated game to reduce the taxes paid by the wealthy,” Dale says. “It would be sweet, I suppose, to say, here is one simple thing that could be done that your readers can understand. But the loopholes are very, very sophisticated. If I tell you that the right thing to do is to repeal 664(c)(1), your eyes would glaze over. But there are trillions of dollars in that simple thought.”

Vice President Kamala Harris just showed why she is a better candidate on abortion than President Biden ever was.

In a blistering response to former President Donald Trump’s rambling about his ever-shifting stance on abortion—which included appointing three of the five Supreme Court justices who overruled Roe v. Wade—Harris put the ex-president on blast for what she has been calling the “Trump abortion bans” now present in over a dozen states.

“One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government and Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” Harris said.

Kamala Harris’ full response on abortion pic.twitter.com/QEVkM5WjkR

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 11, 2024

And when Trump repeated his false claim that “every legal scholar” wanted Roe overruled, Harris promptly laid out the devastating consequences of the Dobbs decision.

“Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she is bleeding out in a car in the parking lot—she didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that,” Harris said.

“A 12 or 13 year old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term—they don’t want that,” she continued. Harris pledged to sign legislation restoring Roe into law if Congress passed it during her presidency—and noted that Trump could very well sign a national abortion ban if reelected, as Project 2025 recommends.

“Understand, in his Project 2025, there would be a national abortion monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages,” she said. “I think the American people believe that certain freedoms—in particular, the freedom to make decisions about one’s own body—should not be made by the government.”

Tonight, Harris showed exactly why abortion rights advocates see her as their ideal messenger: In clear and forceful language, she described the health care apocalypse Trump helped create, and the first-hand experiences of pregnant people bearing the brunt of it. When Biden talked about abortion during the first debate, on the other hand, it was a garbled, confusing mess that ended with him talking about immigration.

But in fairness, Trump was also clear about his stance on abortion: When asked two different times, he refused to answer whether he would veto a federal abortion ban if Congress passed one.

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

Following the release of a major climate report last year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the “climate time bomb” was ticking. Standing behind a podium emblazoned with the United Nations symbol of a globe encircled by olive branches, Guterres declared, “Our world needs climate action on all fronts—everything, everywhere, all at once.”

That call to action (possibly inspired by the movie of the same name) turns out to be a decent summary of what it takes to tackle rising carbon emissions. According to a new study out Thursday in the journal Science, countries have managed to slash emissions by putting a price on carbon, but the biggest cuts came from adopting a combination of policies. Seventy percent of the instances where countries saw big results were tied to multiple actions that generated “synergy.”

“There really isn’t a silver bullet,” said Felix Pretis, a co-author of the study and an economics professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. “That goes a bit against the conventional wisdom that economists have been saying that carbon pricing is the one thing we should push for.”

“I feel like there’s so much gloom and doom around climate policies, that nothing really happens, but actually, we’ve made a fair amount of progress.”

Pretis and researchers in Germany, France, and the UK looked for big drops in countries’ emissions and compared those results against the policies that had been adopted. Using machine learning, they analyzed 1,500 policies across 41 countries between 1998 and 2022, and found just 63 instances in which countries substantially slashed emissions. In total, these cuts added up to between 600 million and 1.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. 

“I feel like there’s so much gloom and doom around climate policies, that nothing really happens, but actually, we’ve made a fair amount of progress,” Pretis said.

Part of the reason that the study only found 63 success stories is because it set a high bar in terms of emissions reductions, Pretis said. “But at the same time, we also see lots of policies having been implemented that don’t really bite.”

Governments are falling short of their climate targets set in the 2015 Paris Agreement by about 23 billion metric tons of CO2. The problem isn’t just caused by a lack of ambition, the study says, but a lack of knowledge in terms of what policies work in practice.

Carbon pricing, whether through a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program, was “a notable exception” in that it sometimes led to large emissions cuts on its own, the study says, and worked particularly well for emissions from industry and electricity. However, “it works even better if you complement and package it up as a policy mix,” Pretis said.

The study doesn’t capture policies “that would have been wildly successful but didn’t pass precisely because they would have been so effective.” 

For example, the United Kingdom saw a 19 percent drop in emissions from the electricity sector between 2012 and 2018 after the European Union introduced a carbon price for power producers. Around the same time, the UK had implemented a host of other steps, including stricter air pollution standards, incentives for building solar and wind farms, and a plan to phase out coal plants. Similarly, China cut its industrial emissions by 20 percent from 2013 to 2019 through a pilot emissions-trading program, but also by reducing fossil fuel subsidies and strengthening financing for energy-efficiency investments.

To cut emissions from transportation and buildings, the study shows that it’s an even better idea to pair together multiple tools. Regulation is the most powerful policy for reducing emissions from transportation, and it can work well alongside carbon pricing or subsidies. The study also stresses that different policies might be effective in different contexts. The researchers found that carbon pricing was less effective in developing economies, places where regulations to limit pollution and investments in green technologies might be a better fit.

Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, said the study shows what measures to curb carbon emissions have been politically possible, but it shouldn’t necessarily serve as a guide for future policymaking. “It doesn’t capture policies that never passed—including those that would have been wildly successful but didn’t pass precisely because they would have been so effective.” 

Because of the bounds of the study, it also missed some of the most significant climate policies, Wagner said, pointing to the carbon taxes Sweden’s government passed in the early 1990s and the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Joe Biden in 2022. The United States’ landmark climate law invests hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy and tax credits toward low-carbon technologies like heat pumps. The law is estimated to cut emissions by 40 percent by 2030, compared to 2005 levels.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if this exercise gets repeated five, 10 years from now, the Inflation Reduction Act would show up” as causing a big drop in emissions, Wagner said.

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

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed exactly two years ago, was pitched as a policy that puts the “middle class first.” But the spending bill’s residential tax credits have so far disproportionately benefited wealthy families, new data indicates.

That’s a major challenge for the efforts to decarbonize the US economy in time to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis. “If going green is just a niche lifestyle choice for the upper middle class, it won’t move the needle on emissions at a societal level,” said Matt Huber, a geography and environment professor at Syracuse University and the author of the 2022 book Climate Change is Class War.

A Treasury Department report published this month shines a light on the use of two IRA renewable energy tax credits: one that helped Americans boost the energy efficiency of their homes by installing heat pumps, electric water heaters, efficient windows and doors, or other upgrades; and another that helped households install small-scale renewable energy production—most commonly rooftop solar panels.

Households living paycheck to paycheck “do not have the savings or credit to buy a new heating/cooling system…even with a complicated incentive to do so.”

In 2023, about 3.4 million households, representing 2.5 percent of all tax filers, took advantage of at least one of these two subsidies, both of which were expansions of pre-existing incentive programs. That represents a 30 percent rise in the use of efficiency and clean energy tax credits over 2021 levels.

Nearly half of those who claimed at least one of these credits last year had incomes lower than $100,000. Yet roughly 75 percent of tax filers had incomes lower than $100,000 in 2023, and a closer look at the use of the credits by households within that bracket shows that wealthier Americans more frequently adopted both tax credits.

Of all filers making less than $100,000, just 0.7 percent claimed the clean energy tax credit, and just 0.9 percent claimed the efficiency incentive. In the over-$100,000 bracket, those percentages rose to 1.6 percent and a stunningly high 4.0 percent.

This dynamic, said Huber, was predictable. Tax credit programs can be difficult to navigate, especially for families who can’t afford to hire tax accountants, he said.

Further, though tax credits can make upgrades more affordable, they may not bring them into reach for Americans with lower incomes, especially because the programs come with spending caps for each household. “Most working-class Americans, living paycheck to paycheck, do not have the savings or credit to buy a new heating/cooling system…even with a complicated incentive to do so,” he said.

The tax incentives also favor those with higher tax burdens. If an upgrade is eligible for up to $2,000 in credits, for instance, filers must owe that amount or more in taxes to receive the full incentive amount.

This marked a substantial change from earlier proposals, which would have made the incentives available even for those with no tax burden. Lew Daly, a senior fellow with the climate justice group Just Solutions, said this was “a tragic political error” that should be changed by Congress.

“Without refundability, most of our country’s millions of moderate- and low-income homeowners are intentionally being excluded from the clean energy transition and its benefits in their everyday life, even as we are giving a massive fortune of tax dollars to big corporations and affluent households through the energy credits program as codified,” he said.

Instead of creating individual incentives, “why not work with utilities on a program that would aim to install heat pumps in every household for free.”

The two credits also require Americans to pay the up-front cost of home upgrades and wait until tax season to recoup costs—an option some households cannot afford.

It’s a major problem for lower-income Americans who are grappling with rising utility bills and a “threadbare social safety net,” said Daly. “The exclusionary design of the energy credits program is just piling on to create a future of worsening inequity.”

Despite these issues, when compared with similar tax incentives that pre-dated the IRA, the distribution of these credits has been more even, said James Sallee, energy economist at the University of California, Berkeley. One study showed 60 percent of benefits went to the top 20 percent of households from 2006 to 2020.

“But, the benefits are still regressive,” Sallee said. “In every income category, the more money you make, the more money on average people are claiming per tax return.”

The IRA does include provisions aimed at promoting equal distribution. The renewable energy tax credit, for instance, can be used to enroll in community solar—a helpful arrangement for renters and apartment dwellers who tend to have lower incomes than house-owners.

The bill also includes point-of-sale rebates for efficient appliances and upgrades, though their rollout has been slow because they are being distributed locally. Only two states have yet to offer rebates, though others could launch their programs within months.

Other changes could help change the distribution of tax credits, said Sallee. One of them: placing income caps on eligibility.

But ultimately, said Huber, to create green benefits that are easier for all Americans to access, they should be universal rather than means-tested.

“Instead of putting out incentives for individual households, why not work with utilities on a program that would aim to install heat pumps in every household for free,” he asked. “That might sound outlandish, but if we see solving climate change [as] critical to the public good, there’s no reason why decarbonization shouldn’t be seen as a core public service like healthcare or education.”

Less than a month ago, President Joe Biden was still the Democratic nominee and Donald Trump and his allies all but assumed they would easily carry the 2024 presidential election in November. But since Biden’s historic decision to step out of the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, the dynamics of the race have dramatically changed. Democrats seem reenergized and Trump and his campaign now have reasons to worry. And recent polling numbers show why. 

According to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, Harris entering the race has shaken up the political map and made crucial Sun Belt states competitive again. In Arizona, for example, Harris is now leading Trump 50 to 45 percent. She also has a narrow advantage in North Carolina, a state Trump carried in 2020. The GOP nominee is still heading in Georgia and Nevada, but the two candidates are essentially tied across an average of those four Sun Belt states. An earlier Times/Siena poll also showed Harris edging Trump in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

“A dead heat is a big deal today,” Nate Cohn, the Times‘ chief political analyst writes. “It represents a huge shift from earlier in the cycle, when Mr. Trump’s relative strength over Mr. Biden among young, Black and Hispanic voters had propelled him to a surprising lead across these relatively young and diverse states.” It also spells bad news for Trump, he argues, “who may need to take all three of Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona to win in November.”

Kamala Harris puts the Sun Belt back in play, with the race tied across AZ, NC, NV, GA
AZ: Harris 50, Trump 45
GA: Trump 50, Harris 46
NV: Trump 48, Harris 47
NC: Harris 49, Trump 47https://t.co/IGTZftpHUJ

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) August 17, 2024

Ahead of the Democratic National Convention next week, Harris on Friday made a campaign stop in North Carolina, where she unveiled her economic policy agenda. It includes a ban on grocery price gouging, eliminating medical debt for millions of Americans, and tackling the housing affordability crisis.

“There’s a choice in this election: Donald Trump’s plans to devastate the middle class, punish working people, and make the cost of living go up for millions of Americans,” Harris said, “and, on the other hand, when I’m elected president, what we will do to bring down costs, increase the security and stability financially of your family, and expand opportunity for working- and middle-class Americans.”

Although Democrats haven’t won North Carolina since Barack Obama did so in 2008, some are feeling more optimistic about Harris’ chances. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, whose name had been floated as a potential vice president pick for Harris, told the Times he hasn’t felt “felt this much excitement” since Obama’s win. The new Times/Siena poll shows 85 percent of Harris voters are at least “somewhat enthusiastic” about voting.

It also indicates Harris is fairing better than Biden among key Democratic constituencies. Harris, who would make history as the first woman president of the United States, has stronger support among Black voters in North Carolina and Georgia, as well as among Hispanic voters in Arizona and Nevada. She also has a 14-percentage point lead with women in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. “Mr. Trump, in turn, is maximizing his support among white voters without a college degree, winning 66 percent support from them across the four Sun Belt states,” the Times reports.

On Friday, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released an update that one would think would please Republicans decrying a Joe Biden-made “border crisis.” The number of migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border in July was the lowest in almost four years. Last month, CBP apprehended 56,408 migrants along the border, a 32 percent decline in comparison to June and the lowest since September 2020. It marked the fifth consecutive monthly drop, according to CBS News.

The decrease in migrant crossings follows the implementation of a border crackdown policy by the Biden administration. In June, the White House announced a sweeping executive order, based on an authority previously invoked by the Trump administration, allowing border officials to temporarily suspend some asylum processing and swiftly return certain migrants to neighboring Mexico and their countries of origin at times when crossings reach a certain threshold. 

Since June, the CBP announcement states, the agency has removed or returned more than 92,000 people to 130 countries, including via at least 300 deportation flights. “July’s total numbers between ports of entry are also lower than July 2019,” the agency says, “and lower than the monthly average for all of 2019, the last comparable year prior to the pandemic.” Increased enforcement by the Mexican government also explains the lower numbers.

But these record-breaking statistics have not deterred Republicans from advancing their narrative of a “Biden border crisis” or trying to blame Vice President Kamala Harris for it. In response to the newly released CBP numbers, Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, issued a statement saying, “the unprecedented border crisis the president and his ‘border czar’ have created continues to rage on.” As I previously explained here, Harris, now the Democratic nominee, was never appointed “Border Czar” or put in charge of managing migration:

As vice president, Harris was tasked with attacking the “root causes” of migration from Central America to the United States. Those drivers are not only complex, but long-standing—and deeply tied to America’s Cold War politics and imperialism. Harris had the (potentially impossible) job of trying to understand, and fix, over half a century of US meddling in the region—in addition to country-specific dynamics of that meddling—that has boomeranged into a migrant crisis.

Former Trump senior adviser and anti-immigration hardliner Stephen Miller took to X to distort the border numbers. “CBP just issued a press release admitting that Border Czar Harris has quietly smuggled nearly 1M illegals aliens into the US using a fast-pass entry phone app,” he claimed in reference to the 765,000 migrants the agency says have lawfully followed the Biden administration’s rules and sought appointments through the CBP One mobile app since January 2023.

If Republicans don’t want to buy into CBP data, perhaps they should look at another indication that the numbers at the border have been in decline. A recent investigation by NBC News found that fewer border crossings are having an impact on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing program, which has transported thousands of migrants to cities across the country, from Denver to New York. Officials from cities that have previously received busloads of migrants from Texas told NBC News that they hadn’t gotten any buses since January.

While the Biden administration is claiming the border crossing slowdown as a win, migrants with legitimate asylum claims are being turned away at the border, potentially facing harm and danger as a result. Since the June executive order, which also released CBP agents from the mandate of asking migrants coming to the border if they had a reason to ask for asylum, referrals for “credible fear” interviews (a first step in the screening process) have fallen by 90 percent, according to the American Immigration Council.

In early June, the Biden admin implement a new regulation telling Border Patrol agents they no longer had to ask migrants if they were seeking asylum. With that safeguard eliminated, credible fear referrals have dropped over 90% in two months, falling below 2,000 total in July. pic.twitter.com/skx3PxZz0h

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) August 15, 2024

Less than a month ago, President Joe Biden was still the Democratic nominee and Donald Trump and his allies all but assumed they would easily carry the 2024 presidential election in November. But since Biden’s historic decision to step out of the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, the dynamics of the race have dramatically changed. Democrats seem reenergized and Trump and his campaign now have reasons to worry. And recent polling numbers show why. 

According to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, Harris entering the race has shaken up the political map and made crucial Sun Belt states competitive again. In Arizona, for example, Harris is now leading Trump 50 to 45 percent. She also has a narrow advantage in North Carolina, a state Trump carried in 2020. The GOP nominee is still heading in Georgia and Nevada, but the two candidates are essentially tied across an average of those four Sun Belt states. An earlier Times/Siena poll also showed Harris edging Trump in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

“A dead heat is a big deal today,” Nate Cohn, the Times‘ chief political analyst writes. “It represents a huge shift from earlier in the cycle, when Mr. Trump’s relative strength over Mr. Biden among young, Black and Hispanic voters had propelled him to a surprising lead across these relatively young and diverse states.” It also spells bad news for Trump, he argues, “who may need to take all three of Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona to win in November.”

Kamala Harris puts the Sun Belt back in play, with the race tied across AZ, NC, NV, GA
AZ: Harris 50, Trump 45
GA: Trump 50, Harris 46
NV: Trump 48, Harris 47
NC: Harris 49, Trump 47https://t.co/IGTZftpHUJ

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) August 17, 2024

Ahead of the Democratic National Convention next week, Harris on Friday made a campaign stop in North Carolina, where she unveiled her economic policy agenda. It includes a ban on grocery price gouging, eliminating medical debt for millions of Americans, and tackling the housing affordability crisis.

“There’s a choice in this election: Donald Trump’s plans to devastate the middle class, punish working people, and make the cost of living go up for millions of Americans,” Harris said, “and, on the other hand, when I’m elected president, what we will do to bring down costs, increase the security and stability financially of your family, and expand opportunity for working- and middle-class Americans.”

Although Democrats haven’t won North Carolina since Barack Obama did so in 2008, some are feeling more optimistic about Harris’ chances. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, whose name had been floated as a potential vice president pick for Harris, told the Times he hasn’t felt “felt this much excitement” since Obama’s win. The new Times/Siena poll shows 85 percent of Harris voters are at least “somewhat enthusiastic” about voting.

It also indicates Harris is fairing better than Biden among key Democratic constituencies. Harris, who would make history as the first woman president of the United States, has stronger support among Black voters in North Carolina and Georgia, as well as among Hispanic voters in Arizona and Nevada. She also has a 14-percentage point lead with women in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. “Mr. Trump, in turn, is maximizing his support among white voters without a college degree, winning 66 percent support from them across the four Sun Belt states,” the Times reports.

On Friday, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released an update that one would think would please Republicans decrying a Joe Biden-made “border crisis.” The number of migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border in July was the lowest in almost four years. Last month, CBP apprehended 56,408 migrants along the border, a 32 percent decline in comparison to June and the lowest since September 2020. It marked the fifth consecutive monthly drop, according to CBS News.

The decrease in migrant crossings follows the implementation of a border crackdown policy by the Biden administration. In June, the White House announced a sweeping executive order, based on an authority previously invoked by the Trump administration, allowing border officials to temporarily suspend some asylum processing and swiftly return certain migrants to neighboring Mexico and their countries of origin at times when crossings reach a certain threshold. 

Since June, the CBP announcement states, the agency has removed or returned more than 92,000 people to 130 countries, including via at least 300 deportation flights. “July’s total numbers between ports of entry are also lower than July 2019,” the agency says, “and lower than the monthly average for all of 2019, the last comparable year prior to the pandemic.” Increased enforcement by the Mexican government also explains the lower numbers.

But these record-breaking statistics have not deterred Republicans from advancing their narrative of a “Biden border crisis” or trying to blame Vice President Kamala Harris for it. In response to the newly released CBP numbers, Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, issued a statement saying, “the unprecedented border crisis the president and his ‘border czar’ have created continues to rage on.” As I previously explained here, Harris, now the Democratic nominee, was never appointed “Border Czar” or put in charge of managing migration:

As vice president, Harris was tasked with attacking the “root causes” of migration from Central America to the United States. Those drivers are not only complex, but long-standing—and deeply tied to America’s Cold War politics and imperialism. Harris had the (potentially impossible) job of trying to understand, and fix, over half a century of US meddling in the region—in addition to country-specific dynamics of that meddling—that has boomeranged into a migrant crisis.

Former Trump senior adviser and anti-immigration hardliner Stephen Miller took to X to distort the border numbers. “CBP just issued a press release admitting that Border Czar Harris has quietly smuggled nearly 1M illegals aliens into the US using a fast-pass entry phone app,” he claimed in reference to the 765,000 migrants the agency says have lawfully followed the Biden administration’s rules and sought appointments through the CBP One mobile app since January 2023.

If Republicans don’t want to buy into CBP data, perhaps they should look at another indication that the numbers at the border have been in decline. A recent investigation by NBC News found that fewer border crossings are having an impact on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing program, which has transported thousands of migrants to cities across the country, from Denver to New York. Officials from cities that have previously received busloads of migrants from Texas told NBC News that they hadn’t gotten any buses since January.

While the Biden administration is claiming the border crossing slowdown as a win, migrants with legitimate asylum claims are being turned away at the border, potentially facing harm and danger as a result. Since the June executive order, which also released CBP agents from the mandate of asking migrants coming to the border if they had a reason to ask for asylum, referrals for “credible fear” interviews (a first step in the screening process) have fallen by 90 percent, according to the American Immigration Council.

In early June, the Biden admin implement a new regulation telling Border Patrol agents they no longer had to ask migrants if they were seeking asylum. With that safeguard eliminated, credible fear referrals have dropped over 90% in two months, falling below 2,000 total in July. pic.twitter.com/skx3PxZz0h

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) August 15, 2024

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) said a lot of wild things during his Sunday morning media blitz. But one of his comments has received far less attention than the others: Vance described a federal program that has distributed nearly $2 billion to mostly Black farmers who experienced discrimination as “disgraceful,” suggesting that it is racist against white people.

And now, the head of the largest group of Black farmers across the country is condemning Vance’s assertions.

“He owes us an apology,” John Boyd, Jr., founder and president of the National Black Farmers Association, told me. The remarks, Boyd added, were “disgraceful, deplorable, dumb, degrading, and disrespectful to the nation’s Black farmers, the oldest occupation in history for Black people.”

A spokesperson for Vance also did not respond to questions from Mother Jones beyond requesting that we include the senator’s full remarks, which came during an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, during which Vance was asked about the racist attacks against his wife, Usha Vance. After condemning them, he added:

I frankly think that unfortunately, a lot of people on the left have leaned into this by trying to categorize people by skin color and then give special benefits or special amounts of discrimination. The Harris Administration, for example, handed out farm benefits to people based on skin color. I think that’s disgraceful. I don’t think we should say, you get farm benefits if you’re a Black farmer, you don’t get farm benefits if you’re a white farmer. All farmers, we want to thrive, and that’s certainly the President Trump and JD Vance view of the situation.

But Vance’s assertions here are an inaccurate portrayal of the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program, the federal program established through the Inflation Reduction Act. Contrary to Vance’s claim, applicants were not limited to Black farmers; Any farmer who had experienced discrimination by the US Department of Agriculture—including based on sexual orientation or gender identity, religion, age, or disability—was eligible to apply. Last month, the USDA announced it had distributed payments to more than 43,000 people in all 50 states through the program, which Congress allocated $2.2 billion for.

While the USDA has not released data on the racial breakdown of farmers who received money through DFAP, Boyd said 85 percent of the funds went to Black farmers “because it’s obvious we were treated the worst.” The history of the government’s discrimination against Black farmers specifically is well-documented, including in Mother Jones‘ recent award-winning investigation, “40 Acres and a Lie“—done in collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity and Reveal—which documents how the federal government stole land it gave to Black farmers following the Civil War. Black farmers also faced barriers to receiving loans, credit, and support compared to white farmers.

Still, that hasn’t stopped some white people—including Vance and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)—from trying to claim federal aid to Black farmers perpetuates “reverse racism.” White farmers have also filed lawsuits against promised debt relief for Black farmers that Congress approved in 2021, claiming it discriminated against them.

Supporting the Trump-Vance ticket was now “off the table,” Boyd said in response to Vance’s remarks. Though he called Vice President Kamala Harris a “breath of fresh air,” Boyd called on Harris to commit support to Black farmers before the election—specifically, through debt relief for Black farmers. The Harris campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

In the meantime, Boyd is still waiting for an apology from Vance—but he’s not holding his breath. “We got the money,” Boyd said. DFAP, he added, was “a huge victory for Black farmers.”

On Thursday, the Biden administration announced that—after months of negotiations—it had finally struck a deal with prescription drug companies to slash the prices of some of Medicare’s most expensive medications, prescriptions for which currently cost the federal government some $56 billion last year.

“It’s a relief for the millions of seniors that take these drugs to treat everything from heart failure, blood clots, diabetes, arthritis, Crohn’s disease, and more—and it’s a relief for American taxpayers,” President Biden said in a statement. 

“Kamala and I both get it. We know it isn’t just about health care,” he added, appearing alongside Vice President Kamala Harris for their first joint event since she gained the Democratic presidential nomination. “It’s about your dignity.”

Starting in 2026, ten prescriptions for ailments ranging from diabetes to blood cancer will have their costs drastically lowered—by up to 79 percent of their manufacturers’ list price. These cuts will save taxpayers $6 billion and seniors and beneficiaries alone more than $1.5 billion, according to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The action was reportedly made possible by the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened the door for changes to Medicare with the aim of “expanding benefits, lowering drug costs, and improving sustainability.” The deal is only phase one of the administration’s plan to make Medicare more affordable: The Department of Health and Human Services will be allowed to select another set of 15 drugs for price negotiations next year.

On July 28, millions of Venezuelans went to the polls to vote in the country’s highly anticipated presidential election. For the first time in years, there was hope that the opposition would unseat the long-ruling antidemocratic leader Nicolás Maduro and restore a sense of future post-Chavismo—late President Hugo Chávez’s populist political project of a “socialist revolution” that has slid into authoritarianism—to a once-prosperous nation wrecked by prolonged economic collapse, political repression, and a massive exodus of people that has had repercussions across the region.

But in the wake of the vote came terror. The electoral authority—controlled by a pro-government majority—declared Maduro, the political successor of Chávez, the winner, despite questions about the integrity of the process. The opposition disputed Maduro’s claim with evidence that their candidate, little-known former diplomat Edmundo González, had won by a wide margin. (The United States government agreed.) The Carter Center, which sent an expert group to Venezuela to observe the election, said it “did not meet international standards” and couldn’t “be considered democratic.”

The fraudulent election has sharpened the focus on the utter collapse of what used to be the richest nation in South America. Deadly antigovernment protests have since erupted across Venezuela, and several countries have pressured the Maduro government to present verifiable proof of his reelection to no avail. “Venezuelans are ready to throw off the dictatorship,” the popular leader of the opposition, María Corina Machado, who was barred from running and backed González, wrote in an op-ed. “Will the international community support us?” Back in 2023, Machado had predicted two possible outcomes for the election: “landslide victory or an obscene fraud.”

Venezuela’s fate is not restricted to South America but has been bound up in the US election this year. With the southern border as a central issue, much has been made of the spike in migration from Venezuela to the United States during the administration of President Joe Biden. On the right, the surge has been played up as a way to hit the left twice: a socialist government in Latin America failed; the poor policies of a Democratic administration led to the border being overrun. At the Republican National Convention in July, Donald Trump suggested Venezuela—as well as El Salvador—was sending “criminals” to the United States.

But that misses a far more complex story, one that ranges from the long history of US involvement in the region to the specifics of the Trump era, when, as the Washington Post recently reported, despite warnings that it would cause massive migration, President Donald Trump pushed devastating sanctions onto Venezuela. (Trump also appointed Elliott Abrams, who played a role in the Iran-Contra affair and was linked to a failed coup attempt against Chávez in 2002, as the special envoy to Venezuela.)

“I said the sanctions were going to grind the Venezuelan economy into dust and have huge human consequences, one of which would be out-migration,” Thomas Shannon told the Washington Post.

The results of years of economic mismanagement, exacerbated by US policies cracking down on the country, have been dramatic. One poll suggested as many as one-third of Venezuela’s population was considering migrating if Maduro, who has been president for more than a decade, held onto power for another six years. They would join the more than 7.7 million Venezuelans who have already left the country of fewer than 30 million since 2014. Most have fled to neighboring countries such as Colombia and Brazil, but thousands of others have made their way through the treacherous Darien Gap to the US-Mexico border. Many have been bused to cities like New York and Denver, where politicians have turned them into political pawns.

Since fiscal year 2021, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has registered more than 837,000 encounters with Venezuelan nationals. (The number of migrant apprehensions at the border has fallen significantly as of late in part as a result of increased enforcement by the Mexican government.) There are also currently 242,000 Venezuelans in the United States who benefit from Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and hundreds of thousands more who, according to the Department of Homeland Security, are potentially eligible based on “Venezuela’s increased instability and lack of safety due to the enduring humanitarian, security, political, and environmental conditions.”

Given all these factors, how did one of the region’s most prosperous and stable nations fall apart? The answer is more complicated than “extreme socialism,” as Elon Musk tweeted.

Once Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world. By 1970, it had a higher income per capita than many European nations. But during the last quarter of the 20th century, Venezuela entered a period of economic contraction.

“There were a number of things that happened during that very long period,” says Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan professor at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies and author of the forthcoming book The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012-2020. “Mostly they had to do with the country not being able to adopt reasonable economic policies and policy reforms because of conflict between its elites.”

Home to the most proven oil reserves in the world, Venezuela enjoyed a boom from exporting its oil. But then global prices plunged, going from $100 a barrel in 2014 to less than $30 two years later. Chávez, who led Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, directed oil revenue to massive social spending programs that benefited the poor. But heavily dependent on that commodity, the country hadn’t sufficiently saved or invested and fell into debt. After Maduro took over in 2013, the economy went into free fall.

In the years since, Venezuela has experienced some of the highest inflation rates worldwide—with a staggering 130,060 percent in 2018. Compounding the crisis for Venezuelans has been a devastating shortage of basic goods, food, and medicine. An estimated 80 percent of the population lives in poverty and the monthly minimum wage of 130 bolivars is equivalent to about $3.60 in the United States. A survey in 2017 found that 75 percent of Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds due to lack of nutrition. Between 2012 and 2020, the economy contracted by 71 percent—more than any other country in modern history not in war and more than double the magnitude of the Great Depression. Crude oil production by the state-owned company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) also plummeted, reaching a 75-year low during the pandemic.

Adding to the economic downward spiral was government mismanagement and corruption. As Marcela Escobari, who served as assistant administrator for USAID’s Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, explained, years of “expropriations, underinvestment in the oil industry, massive foreign indebtedness, and the gradual undermining of institutions overseeing government expenditures” have hurt the economy badly.

A US government watchdog report concluded that sanctions “likely contributed to the steeper decline of the Venezuelan economy, primarily by limiting revenue from oil production.”

But so did the various sanctions imposed by the United States over almost 20 years. While the Obama administration resorted to targeted sanctions against Maduro’s allies, Trump opted for a “maximum pressure” strategy. He broadened economic sanctions in response to escalating human rights abuses and corruption by the Maduro government. In 2018, Maduro secured a second term after what was generally considered illegitimate elections. Dozens of countries, including the United States, recognized Juan Guaidó as interim president. In late 2022, amid waning support for Guaidó, Venezuela’s opposition National Assembly voted to dissolve the shadow government. Guaidó went to exile in Miami, while an unpopular Maduro has stayed in power and replicated his 2018 response to the 2024 elections.

Starting in 2017, Trump barred the Venezuelan government from borrowing from financial markets, blocked assets, and prohibited US businesses from dealing with PDVSA, the state’s largest source of revenue. At the time, then–national security adviser John Bolton said the measures were necessary to mitigate “the poverty and the starvation and the humanitarian crisis.” But the United Nations human rights chief warned even then that the sweeping sanctions would more likely have the opposite effect and harm the most vulnerable groups.

“It’s one thing to sanction certain regime officials and not let them travel internationally and freeze their bank accounts in the United States,” Rodríguez, who estimates sanctions have contributed to around half of Venezuela’s economic contraction, says. “It’s another thing to hurt the Venezuelan economy because if you hurt the Venezuelan economy, you are hurting ordinary Venezuelans. You’re not hurting Maduro.”

According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration had been warned that sanctions could heighten Venezuela’s economic and social crises and incentivize more migration, including potentially to the United States. “This is the point I made at the time: I said the sanctions were going to grind the Venezuelan economy into dust and have huge human consequences, one of which would be out-migration,” Thomas Shannon, undersecretary of state for political affairs under Trump, told the Post.

Just how much the sanctions have pushed Venezuela to the brink is a subject that continues to be debated. Some analysts have argued that even before the 2017 sanctions, the economic recession, living conditions, and oil production in Venezuela were already on a negative trend and that pre-sanction underlying factors played a greater role in contributing to the country’s collapse than sanctions. As researchers with the Brookings Institute and the Harvard Center for International Development wrote, “Rather than being a result of US-imposed sanctions, much of the suffering and devastation in Venezuela has been, in line with most accounts, inflicted by those in power.”

Others argue that even if true, sanctions have only exacerbated existing problems. In a country heavily dependent on oil—accounting for 90 percent of all exports—the sanctions have been linked to a decline in production “of a dimension seen only when armies blow up oil fields,” one report about the human consequences of economic sanctions by the Center for Economic and Policy Research states. Diminished oil exports have had a negative impact on the country’s revenue and ability to import food and other essential goods with foreign exchange.

A US government watchdog report concluded that sanctions “likely contributed to the steeper decline of the Venezuelan economy, primarily by limiting revenue from oil production.” The UN Special Rapporteur found that no “strata of society has been untouched” by the negative impact of unilateral sanctions.

In a 2019 paper titled “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela,” Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot argued that the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration “reduced the public’s calorie intake, increased disease and mortality (for both adults and infants), and displaced millions of Venezuelans.” By making it nearly impossible to stabilize the economy, they wrote, sanctions contributed to “an estimated more than 40,000 deaths” from 2017 to 2018.

In the months before Venezuela’s presidential election, the Biden administration offered conditional energy sanctions relief in a stated effort to pressure Maduro into committing to a free and fair electoral process. But the White House later reinstated the sanctions because the Venezuelan government failed to uphold their end of the bargain on a deal that included allowing top opposition candidates to run in the presidential race.

“The [Biden] administration has thought of sanctions relief as a ‘switch’ that could increase Venezuela’s economic prospects and keep people in place,” says Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That strategy has failed, he adds, and lifting sanctions “would be to reward Maduro for what is being called the mother of all electoral frauds in Latin American history.”

For some observers, the path forward is a transition to democracy that allows for the normalization of relations with other countries and economic recovery—without sanctions. There have been some fragile signs of improvement. Inflation, while still high, was down to 190 percent last year and Venezuela’s oil exports increased by 12 percent. Luis Oliveros, an economist at the Universidade Metropolitana in Caracas told El Pais that oil production can continue to increase if sanctions stay flexible.

But uncertainty remains as Maduro tightens his grip on power despite the will of voters, blaming the unrest on “North American imperialism and the criminal fascists” and saying he wouldn’t “hesitate to summon the people to a revolution.” Rodríguez at the University of Denver sees one possible scenario where the pariah Maduro regime collapses in the face of mass protests. But more likely, he says, the “viable way out to avoid the consolidation of a full-fledged autocracy” is through a power-sharing agreement. Meanwhile, the US government has reportedly discussed extending Maduro a pardon offer to convince him to step down.

“The polls showing that large numbers of Venezuelans will migrate if Maduro remains in power prove that it isn’t about the economic situation so much as it is about Maduro,” Berg says. “That is to say, it’s about regime type. Without a change in government, Venezuelans will lose hope and migrate. Absolutely nothing changes in Venezuela until Maduro leaves.”

Have you seen any of those clips from Donald Trump’s rambling press conference this past Thursday? If not, count yourself lucky. Standing at a Mar-a-Lago podium, Trump did what he always does: equivocated, meandered among subjects, spoke in half-sentences full of non sequiturs, and lied relentlessly. Challenging questions were in short supply—a media fail. Then again, maybe just showing up was the bigger fail, given Trump’s inability to engage honestly.

But one has to try. Calling Trump out is our professional responsibility. The women who grilled him onstage at the National Association of Black Journalists conference—Harris Faulkner, Kadia Goba, and Rachel Scott—set a good example.

Apparently not enough of the Mar-a-Lago journalists got the memo.

Their questions weren’t mic’d, so they were barely audible in the video. But I cranked up the volume and listened carefully, transcribing as accurately as I could. Trump took roughly 40 questions. Most were uncritical softballs. Here’s a sampling, paraphrased:

• Does he consider Kamala Harris more talented than Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton?

• Does he think Harris is worse than Biden?

• What does he think about Harris not picking Josh Shapiro for her VP?

• Is he worried about the size of Harris’ crowds?

• Has he followed this whole thing about Harris dating Willie Brown?

• Is his ear fully recovered? Is there a scar?
• Could he talk about his upcoming interview with Elon Musk?

• Was Steve Bannon’s imprisonment politically motivated?

• Would he consider pardoning Hunter Biden?

There was a smattering of policy questions—which is fine, but lightweight. Some examples (these are semi-verbatim; watch the video for Trump’s full answers):

• “Harris supports rescheduling marijuana and says no one should go to prison for marijuana. Do you agree with that?” (“As we legalize it, I start to agree a lot more.”)

• “Do you support continuation of tax credits for EVs?” (“They want everybody to have an electric car. We don’t have enough electricity.”)

• “What do you make of reports that Harris said she might consider an arms embargo on Israel?” (“I’d be against that.”)

• “Did the use of an AR-15 gun by your would-be assassin change your view on people’s access to that weapon?” (“No.”)

• “How will you vote on the Florida amendment [that would codify abortion rights in the state constitution?]” (“I don’t want to tell you now.”)   
• “There are other things the federal government can do, not just a ban [on abortion]. Would you direct your FDA, for example, to revoke access to mifepristone?” (“You could do things that would supplement, absolutely…But you have to be able to have a vote.”)

Only a handful of questions were at all confrontational:

• “Kamala Harris’ father is Jamaican. She went to a historically Black college. How has she only recently decided to be Black?” (Trump equivocated and doubled down—again.)

• “What is your response to President Biden when he says he fears there wouldn’t be a peaceful transfer of power if you lose?”

In his response, Trump misleadingly claimed there had been a peaceful transfer of power “last time.” Another reporter, I believe it was Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, came back to that:

• “You think the last time was a peaceful transfer of power?” (No, Trump replied, because the January 6 protesters “were treated very unfairly.”)

• Also Haberman: “When you were president, you pardoned [inaudible] drug dealers and violent felons, including one man who told a rabbi, “I am going to make you bleed.” How is that different from [inaudible]? (“We had commissions…They would recommend to me certain pardons for certain people.” In fact, as Mother Jones has reported, Trump threw the standard clemency process out the window.)

Here are 22 questions—I could easily come up with 22 more—that journalists should be asking this candidate, or at least asking of him. Granted, it might be the last time Trump ever took a question from you, but it’d be worth it.

Partisan divisions
A Pew analysis shows voters are about evenly split in favor of Democrats and Republicans. Yet you’ve called Democrats “treasonous,” “un-American,” “crazy,” “loco,” “rage-filled,” and “the party of crime.” You retweeted a video in which a supporter said, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” You regularly use “us vs. them” rhetoric. Why should voters support a candidate who seeks to divide Americans?

Migrant crime
You’ve gone around claiming that nations are emptying out their jails, prisons, and, in your words, “insane asylums,” sending “millions” of criminals and mental patients across our southern border. That’s a pretty outrageous lie, and your claim that undocumented migrants are driving a crime wave is demonstrably false. Why do you insist on repeating these falsehoods?

School vaccinations
You’ve said that you will defund any school with a vaccine mandate. Are you only talking about Covid vaccines, or also the routine childhood immunizations that prevent catastrophic illnesses such as polio and measles?

Stochastic terrorism
The FBI says it has found no evidence that the man who shot you and others in Pennsylvania was politically motivated. He was, in fact, a registered Republican voter. But you and your campaign surrogates, including your sons, keep saying the Democrats tried to kill you in Pennsylvania—a baseless claim that experts have told Mother Jones will fuel political violence. Why do you and your surrogates keep making this false claim?

January 6
You’ve said you would pardon people who participated in the US Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, using words like “patriots” to describe members of a mob that beat police officers with hockey sticks, flagpoles, and fire extinguishers; crushed cops in doors; and sprayed them with bear spray. How can you then say you are pro-police and pro-law-and-order?

Taxing tips
You’ve proposed to eliminate income tax on tips. How is that fair to untipped low-wage workers like grocery store clerks and delivery drivers? Would you also support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been stalled at $7.25 an hour since 2009? (Harris, who embraced Trump’s proposal on Saturday, favors raising the minimum wage.)

Dehumanization of immigrants
Your own businesses have knowingly employed undocumented workers over the years for everything from landscaping and maintenance to modeling and hospitality services. Why must you now go around claiming these people you depended upon are “poisoning the blood of our country”?

Mass deportations
Economists question your plan to deport 11 million undocumented people, including otherwise law-abiding families who have been in the US for decades, working, owning homes, and paying taxes. They say mass deportations would shrink the US economy 6 percent over 20 years and cost US workers about 968,000 jobs. We’d lose almost $100 billion a year that those families pay in taxes. The agriculture, construction, and hospitality industries rely on their labor, and migrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. Why do you think uprooting established families is a good policy?

Border policy
Congress recently put forth a bipartisan border bill that gave Republicans much of what they’d long been asking for. It was a huge policy victory for your party, but you put the kibosh on it because, as you admitted, you wanted to use the border issue against Biden. How do you justify putting your campaign ahead of your party’s hard-fought goals?

Family separations
Illegal immigration has bedeviled presidents of both parties. Yet on your watch, migrant parents were forcibly separated from babies and young children, an astonishingly cruel policy with lasting effects on good families. How does showing up on the border, or even crossing illegally, justify such a heartless response—and why does its architect, Stephen Miller, remain in your circle of advisors?

Clean energy
You have vowed to claw back clean energy funding passed under the Biden administration. But that funding has sparked a domestic manufacturing boom in red states. The southern “battery belt” is booming. Shouldn’t a Republican candidate celebrate that?

Dirty energy
You approached oil executives asking for $1 billion in campaign contributions, saying, if elected, you would lower barriers to drilling and make them tons of money. Americans are not blind. Climate change is real and causing increasingly worse storms, fires, droughts, and floods like the ones in the Southeast this week. It’s driving home insurance prices through the roof. How can encouraging more oil extraction be a sensible policy given the disastrous result of burning fossil fuels?

Corruption
The mantra during your 2016 campaign was “drain the swamp.” But your cabinet picks—people like EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, a man openly hostile to environmental protections—were objectively swampy. You and an unprecedented number of your associates have been investigated, charged with crimes, and in many cases convicted. How can you speak of draining the swamp when your administration embodied it?

Project 2025
You flew on a private jet with Kevin Roberts, the architect of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and praised him—and the project—at a Heritage conference. Some 140 people from your administration, including six of your cabinet chiefs, worked on Project 2025. How could you claim you knew nothing about it and that it won’t affect your presidential agenda?

Abortion
By saying abortion should be left to the states, you are in effect supporting the harshest restrictions any state imposes. Some don’t allow exceptions for rape and incest, and even in states with exceptions for a mother’s health, doctors are delaying emergency abortions until their patients are near death. How do you propose to protect these women?

Race
Following up on the earlier race question, Kamala Harris has always identified both as Black and South Asian. You asked, well, “Is she Indian or is she Black?” Don’t you think this “either or” language might be insulting to the 9 percent of American adults who identify as multiracial?

Pandering to Christian voters
At a recent conference, you urged Christians to get out and vote, saying they wouldn’t have to vote anymore after that. “It’ll be fixed,” you said. What will be fixed? Abortion? Elections? Please explain your meaning.

Nicknames
You’ve called your opponent “Laughin’ Kamala,” but it seems like many people appreciate her joyfulness. Do you see laugher as negative? Separately, I’d like to know why you think it’s okay to call her “Kamabla.”

Military service
JD Vance and others in your inner circle have targeted Tim Walz over his military service, but Walz volunteered and served for 24 years. You took multiple deferments from the Vietnam draft, claiming bone spurs based on a diagnosis the doctor’s daughters now say was phony—a favor for your father. You dodged your duty, so how can you justify going after Walz?

Economy
The Biden administration has bested yours on several key economic measures: He’s overseen lower unemployment, more robust wage growth, more new jobs, more domestic manufacturing, higher household incomes, lower child poverty, and fewer uninsured Americans. His big problem has been inflation, but that was also a global problem triggered by the pandemic, supply chain disruptions, price-gouging, and soaring energy prices from Russia’s war on Ukraine. Economic growth was about the same during your two administrations. So how can you say yours was the “greatest economy” while Biden has done a “poor job”?

Foreign influence
How can voters expect you to deal even-handedly with the Saudis when they provided $2 billion in financing to your son-in-law?

Mendacity
Voters are not naïve. Every politician bends the truth and some lie on occasion. But the nation’s fact-checkers can barely keep up with you. You’ve been lying this entire press conference. Why are we even here?

In his first interview since dropping out of the election last month and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden said he believes Trump is a threat to democracy whether he wins or loses in November.

“If he wins this nomination—excuse me, this election—watch what happens,” Biden told Robert Costa of CBS News. “He’s a genuine danger to American security.”

“There’s little regard by the MAGA Republicans for the political institutions,” Biden said later in the interview.

President Biden says former President Donald Trump is "a genuine danger to American security" if he wins the election.

"There’s little regard by the MAGA Republicans for the political institutions. That's what holds this country together. That's what democracy's about. That's… pic.twitter.com/2b52P48gja

— CBS Sunday Morning (@CBSSunday) August 11, 2024

That also includes democratic elections. As we reported, many Trump VP hopefuls—including the winner, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio)—openly repeated the disproven election myths that Trump has stubbornly clung to since his 2020 loss.

“He means what he says—we don’t take him seriously. He means it. All the stuff about, ‘If we lose, it’ll be a bloodbath.'”

“If Trump loses,” Biden told Costa, “I’m not confident at all” that there will be a peaceful transfer of power, he said. “He means what he says—we don’t take him seriously. He means it. All the stuff about, ‘If we lose, it’ll be a bloodbath.'” (Trump has also said: “If this election isn’t won, I’m not sure that you’ll ever have another election in this country.”)

“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden added. The president proved that with his decision to drop out of the race to give Democrats the best chance of “maintaining this democracy,” as he described it on Sunday. “We must, must, must defeat Trump,” Biden added in the interview. Of Harris and running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), he said, “I think it’s a hell of a team.”

The Republican nominee, on the other hand, has already proven he’s a threat to American democracy whether or not he’s in the White House.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In his first interview since dropping out of the election last month and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden said he believes Trump is a threat to democracy whether he wins or loses in November.

“If he wins this nomination—excuse me, this election—watch what happens,” Biden told Robert Costa of CBS News. “He’s a genuine danger to American security.”

“There’s little regard by the MAGA Republicans for the political institutions,” Biden said later in the interview.

President Biden says former President Donald Trump is "a genuine danger to American security" if he wins the election.

"There’s little regard by the MAGA Republicans for the political institutions. That's what holds this country together. That's what democracy's about. That's… pic.twitter.com/2b52P48gja

— CBS Sunday Morning (@CBSSunday) August 11, 2024

That also includes democratic elections. As we reported, many Trump VP hopefuls—including the winner, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio)—openly repeated the disproven election myths that Trump has stubbornly clung to since his 2020 loss.

“He means what he says—we don’t take him seriously. He means it. All the stuff about, ‘If we lose, it’ll be a bloodbath.'”

“If Trump loses,” Biden told Costa, “I’m not confident at all” that there will be a peaceful transfer of power, he said. “He means what he says—we don’t take him seriously. He means it. All the stuff about, ‘If we lose, it’ll be a bloodbath.'” (Trump has also said: “If this election isn’t won, I’m not sure that you’ll ever have another election in this country.”)

“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden added. The president proved that with his decision to drop out of the race to give Democrats the best chance of “maintaining this democracy,” as he described it on Sunday. “We must, must, must defeat Trump,” Biden added in the interview. Of Harris and running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), he said, “I think it’s a hell of a team.”

The Republican nominee, on the other hand, has already proven he’s a threat to American democracy whether or not he’s in the White House.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Salma Hamamy and Zainab Hakim are no strangers to disruption. 

Over the last few months at the University of Michigan, the two have loudly called for the school to officially divest from Israel and its ongoing military offensive in Gaza. They were involved in their school’s Gaza solidarity encampment and briefly took over their campus administration building for about eight hours (before the police department pepper sprayed, removed, and arrested them). 

But they never expected their action at Vice President Kamala Harris’ Detroit rally this week—in which they loudly yelled for a ceasefire, prompting Harris’ scorn—would gain so much attention. 

Related
Uncommitted Voters Had Hope for Harris’ Gaza Policy. It’s Fading.

The two shouted, “Kamala, you need to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. We demand an arms embargo and a free Palestine.” Then, they chanted: “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide.” (Such actions have been common at President Joe Biden’s events for months.)

The vice president was both stern and direct in her response. “If you want Donald Trump to win, say that,” Harris commanded from the stage. “Otherwise, I’m speaking.” 

Her supporters at the rally roared in applause, drowning out both Hamamy and Hakim, who were escorted out of the rally.

Following the Hamamy and Hakim protest, Phil Gordon, an adviser to Vice President Harris posted on social media that her position has been clear. “She will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups. She does not support an arms embargo on Israel,” Gordon wrote. “She will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and to uphold international humanitarian law.” (The Harris campaign did not respond to questions in time for publication.)

The two activists spoke with Mother Jones about their protest, what they make of the vice president’s response, and the implications it has for the upcoming election.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Why did you interrupt Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech, and what were you hoping to achieve?

Hamamy: If she is expecting to come to Michigan—because it is such a crucial swing state in the election—she must understand that there is a primary issue for Michigan voters. And it is the entire reason as to why we are in this predicament in the very first place and to why she’s actually running and why Biden dropped: It is because of the approach to Palestine. 

And if she’s not going to take any crucial steps forward—or at least take a moral position—then there will be a movement that she must face. And she will face it through the protesters attending and disrupting and making it very clear where we stand.

How did you think she would react?

Hakim: I guess the closest thing that I had imagined is that we we would be told we weren’t interested in dialog and we were just interested yelling and that’s maybe what I imagined she would say.

And what do you make of the vice president’s retort? “If you want Donald Trump to win say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” Do you want Donald Trump to win?

Hamamy: No, of course not. 

I think it’s a really interesting response. And a questionable response to people who are saying, we want an end to the genocide. The fact that her first response is: Oh, so you want Donald Trump to win. It just shows her inability to understand what constituents are saying. 

“That is not a good way to act with people who have directly lost family members due to the ongoing genocide.”

When people are demanding a ceasefire and arms embargo and an end to the genocide and you say that we want Donald Trump to step in—it just shows a lack of accountability. It shows a lack of leadership, a lack of responsibility, and a lack of ownership.

There was a mix of reactions to her response online. I think some were applauding the vice president for being so direct—and shutting all of it down (like there was the head nod, the stare). And there were others who were far more skeptical, kind of realizing the Harris campaign is jeopardizing a win in Michigan by potentially alienating the large Arab-American community with that kind of response.

What did you make of how everyone reacted?

Hamamy: For the people who were applauding her body language or saying, “Oh, she shut those protesters up.” I was disturbed by them thinking that that was a good stance to take when someone is calling for a ceasefire. When someone’s calling for an end to weaponry shipments being sent overseas, that is not a good way to interact with constituents. That is not a good way to act with people who have directly lost family members due to the ongoing genocide.

Hakim: Obviously, I knew that this was going to be important. But I definitely did not process nearly how much attention it was going to get. 

I think that the genre of response that was most surprising to me is the people who are like: Oh, well, this has changed people’s mind; and this is showing people who Kamala Harris really is—and she’s losing Michigan because of this.

I think what was most surprising to me is the idea that this one sentence of hers—as opposed to her consistent, decades-long support for Israel—could be the thing for someone to feel like, yeah, maybe Kamala Harris isn’t a good person.

There was even some discourse around this idea of interrupting a woman of color, particularly a woman of color in this case, and there’s a lot to unpack there. But do you think that’s a fair critique of your particular protest?

Hakim: I thought that was just bullshit, the whole interrupting a woman of color thing.

It’s important to remember that this disruption was obviously about Harris and about election-related stuff. But that’s not the message to take from this. The message isn’t that this is going to have consequences on the election. The message is that Kamala is a bad person for supporting the genocide of Palestinians.

Anyone reading this might ask, okay, but when the other candidate in this race is Donald Trump, who has used the term Palestinian as an insult, does this not hurt the cause that you are advocating for in the long term?

Hamamy: In the long term, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have basically taken the same approach and same stance on the issue of Palestine. They are both pro-Israel in the same way. Primaries are both bought by AIPAC; they are both taking money from Zionist organizations. The only difference is just how they try to appeal to their voters, to make it seem like they care about human life. 

Related
How We’ve Failed the Promise of Making “Genocide” a Crime

So to me, as someone who keeps track of the ongoing issues in Palestine, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are one and the same on this. And for them to constantly keep saying that we need to vote a Democratic member in and not the Republican Party, because they’re the lesser of two evils—and because one just has a less intense version of genocide (which I actually don’t find that to be true considering that the genocide is being aided by the Democratic Party right now). They just seem so concerned about a hypothetical genocide when there is an actual genocide that is happening in the current moment.

Often, people do not realize there are different strains of those protesting. That this is a diverse group of people who have internal disagreements, too, about how to push for a change. It’s not all one movement. Are you part of the Abandon Biden camp? Are you part of the Uncommitted movement? Like, where do you and the broader student protest movement stand across Michigan—are you all in one camp versus the other?

Hamamy: I am not in the Abandon Biden movement or the Uncommitted campaign, both of them have done amazing work. I do think there are some differences in approach at times in comparison to the student movement. The student movement is primarily focused on the fact that these politicians will never save us. 

Communication is never going to get through their head. Us, you know, praying and hoping that they’re going to implement a ceasefire simply because we say that we have family members being killed—that is never going to happen. If the scenes and the video footage and the literal depiction of actual death, murder and slaughter—at one of the highest rates ever—coming out is not going to shake them enough to call for a ceasefire, then our words will never do that.

So what needs to happen is us withholding our vote and withholding any positive affiliation that we would give to the Democratic Party or to the Republican Party—or to whoever is perpetuating this genocide. And that is one of the main ways that I think the student movement goes forward. It is through continuous disruption and creating a social crisis throughout; to say that we will not operate as business as usual, so long as our tax dollars are funding a genocide that is killing so many people in Palestine.

Leaders of the Uncommitted Movement met with Vice President Harris before the rally and asked for another meeting—hoping to discuss an arms embargo and a permanent ceasefire. And we reported that she expressed openness to a meeting. Then, at the rally, there was the retort to you all. Is this a one-step forward, one-step back situation for the Harris campaign, or considering the ongoing Israeli offensive in both Gaza and the suffering currently in the West Bank, do you see it as no movement at all?

Hamamy: Kamala very clearly shared her words of sympathy with leaders of the Uncommitted campaign because of her worry about them not mobilizing the community to vote for her. She says one thing to one person and changes the moment she gets on stage, and there are several cameras around—it was very clear. And to me, what I’m going to prioritize is what her policies stand for, and what she said to the entire crowd and to the entire audience when she was challenged and when we said we’re not going to vote for genocide, as opposed to what her response would be to people on the side in private. So, to us, her response was one step forward in making the general population understand that she’s no different.

“The message isn’t that this is going to have consequences on the election. The message is that Kamala is a bad person for supporting the genocide of Palestinians.”

Hakim: In regards to Uncommitted: I definitely appreciate them for making clear the fact that Arab Americans and Muslim Americans are a significant voting bloc—and have power to sway the election whichever way, and I think that’s really important work that the committee did. But I also think that it’s important for all of us to remember that none of these options are gonna free Palestine or end the genocide and that appealing to Kamala Harris is not a solution in any way, shape, or form. 

What people seem to be forgetting is that she’s not just like some random person who decided to run for president. She has been the vice president for all 300-plus days of this genocide, and could have said something in all of that time. She deliberately chose not to do that.

If the Harris campaign called and tried to hash this out and have a conversation, would you take that call?

Hamamy:  If she wanted to hash this out, she needs to go to the Israeli government and say: We’re cutting off all military funding. There’s nothing to hash out with the voters. What needs to be hashed out is with the people who are committing genocide right now.

Salma Hamamy and Zainab Hakim are no strangers to disruption. 

Over the last few months at the University of Michigan, the two have loudly called for the school to officially divest from Israel and its ongoing military offensive in Gaza. They were involved in their school’s Gaza solidarity encampment and briefly took over their campus administration building for about eight hours (before the police department pepper sprayed, removed, and arrested them). 

But they never expected their action at Vice President Kamala Harris’ Detroit rally this week—in which they loudly yelled for a ceasefire, prompting Harris’ scorn—would gain so much attention. 

Related
Uncommitted Voters Had Hope for Harris’ Gaza Policy. It’s Fading.

The two shouted, “Kamala, you need to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. We demand an arms embargo and a free Palestine.” Then, they chanted: “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide.” (Such actions have been common at President Joe Biden’s events for months.)

The vice president was both stern and direct in her response. “If you want Donald Trump to win, say that,” Harris commanded from the stage. “Otherwise, I’m speaking.” 

Her supporters at the rally roared in applause, drowning out both Hamamy and Hakim, who were escorted out of the rally.

Following the Hamamy and Hakim protest, Phil Gordon, an adviser to Vice President Harris posted on social media that her position has been clear. “She will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups. She does not support an arms embargo on Israel,” Gordon wrote. “She will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and to uphold international humanitarian law.” (The Harris campaign did not respond to questions in time for publication.)

The two activists spoke with Mother Jones about their protest, what they make of the vice president’s response, and the implications it has for the upcoming election.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Why did you interrupt Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech, and what were you hoping to achieve?

Hamamy: If she is expecting to come to Michigan—because it is such a crucial swing state in the election—she must understand that there is a primary issue for Michigan voters. And it is the entire reason as to why we are in this predicament in the very first place and to why she’s actually running and why Biden dropped: It is because of the approach to Palestine. 

And if she’s not going to take any crucial steps forward—or at least take a moral position—then there will be a movement that she must face. And she will face it through the protesters attending and disrupting and making it very clear where we stand.

How did you think she would react?

Hakim: I guess the closest thing that I had imagined is that we we would be told we weren’t interested in dialog and we were just interested yelling and that’s maybe what I imagined she would say.

And what do you make of the vice president’s retort? “If you want Donald Trump to win say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” Do you want Donald Trump to win?

Hamamy: No, of course not. 

I think it’s a really interesting response. And a questionable response to people who are saying, we want an end to the genocide. The fact that her first response is: Oh, so you want Donald Trump to win. It just shows her inability to understand what constituents are saying. 

“That is not a good way to act with people who have directly lost family members due to the ongoing genocide.”

When people are demanding a ceasefire and arms embargo and an end to the genocide and you say that we want Donald Trump to step in—it just shows a lack of accountability. It shows a lack of leadership, a lack of responsibility, and a lack of ownership.

There was a mix of reactions to her response online. I think some were applauding the vice president for being so direct—and shutting all of it down (like there was the head nod, the stare). And there were others who were far more skeptical, kind of realizing the Harris campaign is jeopardizing a win in Michigan by potentially alienating the large Arab-American community with that kind of response.

What did you make of how everyone reacted?

Hamamy: For the people who were applauding her body language or saying, “Oh, she shut those protesters up.” I was disturbed by them thinking that that was a good stance to take when someone is calling for a ceasefire. When someone’s calling for an end to weaponry shipments being sent overseas, that is not a good way to interact with constituents. That is not a good way to act with people who have directly lost family members due to the ongoing genocide.

Hakim: Obviously, I knew that this was going to be important. But I definitely did not process nearly how much attention it was going to get. 

I think that the genre of response that was most surprising to me is the people who are like: Oh, well, this has changed people’s mind; and this is showing people who Kamala Harris really is—and she’s losing Michigan because of this.

I think what was most surprising to me is the idea that this one sentence of hers—as opposed to her consistent, decades-long support for Israel—could be the thing for someone to feel like, yeah, maybe Kamala Harris isn’t a good person.

There was even some discourse around this idea of interrupting a woman of color, particularly a woman of color in this case, and there’s a lot to unpack there. But do you think that’s a fair critique of your particular protest?

Hakim: I thought that was just bullshit, the whole interrupting a woman of color thing.

It’s important to remember that this disruption was obviously about Harris and about election-related stuff. But that’s not the message to take from this. The message isn’t that this is going to have consequences on the election. The message is that Kamala is a bad person for supporting the genocide of Palestinians.

Anyone reading this might ask, okay, but when the other candidate in this race is Donald Trump, who has used the term Palestinian as an insult, does this not hurt the cause that you are advocating for in the long term?

Hamamy: In the long term, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have basically taken the same approach and same stance on the issue of Palestine. They are both pro-Israel in the same way. Primaries are both bought by AIPAC; they are both taking money from Zionist organizations. The only difference is just how they try to appeal to their voters, to make it seem like they care about human life. 

Related
How We’ve Failed the Promise of Making “Genocide” a Crime

So to me, as someone who keeps track of the ongoing issues in Palestine, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are one and the same on this. And for them to constantly keep saying that we need to vote a Democratic member in and not the Republican Party, because they’re the lesser of two evils—and because one just has a less intense version of genocide (which I actually don’t find that to be true considering that the genocide is being aided by the Democratic Party right now). They just seem so concerned about a hypothetical genocide when there is an actual genocide that is happening in the current moment.

Often, people do not realize there are different strains of those protesting. That this is a diverse group of people who have internal disagreements, too, about how to push for a change. It’s not all one movement. Are you part of the Abandon Biden camp? Are you part of the Uncommitted movement? Like, where do you and the broader student protest movement stand across Michigan—are you all in one camp versus the other?

Hamamy: I am not in the Abandon Biden movement or the Uncommitted campaign, both of them have done amazing work. I do think there are some differences in approach at times in comparison to the student movement. The student movement is primarily focused on the fact that these politicians will never save us. 

Communication is never going to get through their head. Us, you know, praying and hoping that they’re going to implement a ceasefire simply because we say that we have family members being killed—that is never going to happen. If the scenes and the video footage and the literal depiction of actual death, murder and slaughter—at one of the highest rates ever—coming out is not going to shake them enough to call for a ceasefire, then our words will never do that.

So what needs to happen is us withholding our vote and withholding any positive affiliation that we would give to the Democratic Party or to the Republican Party—or to whoever is perpetuating this genocide. And that is one of the main ways that I think the student movement goes forward. It is through continuous disruption and creating a social crisis throughout; to say that we will not operate as business as usual, so long as our tax dollars are funding a genocide that is killing so many people in Palestine.

Leaders of the Uncommitted Movement met with Vice President Harris before the rally and asked for another meeting—hoping to discuss an arms embargo and a permanent ceasefire. And we reported that she expressed openness to a meeting. Then, at the rally, there was the retort to you all. Is this a one-step forward, one-step back situation for the Harris campaign, or considering the ongoing Israeli offensive in both Gaza and the suffering currently in the West Bank, do you see it as no movement at all?

Hamamy: Kamala very clearly shared her words of sympathy with leaders of the Uncommitted campaign because of her worry about them not mobilizing the community to vote for her. She says one thing to one person and changes the moment she gets on stage, and there are several cameras around—it was very clear. And to me, what I’m going to prioritize is what her policies stand for, and what she said to the entire crowd and to the entire audience when she was challenged and when we said we’re not going to vote for genocide, as opposed to what her response would be to people on the side in private. So, to us, her response was one step forward in making the general population understand that she’s no different.

“The message isn’t that this is going to have consequences on the election. The message is that Kamala is a bad person for supporting the genocide of Palestinians.”

Hakim: In regards to Uncommitted: I definitely appreciate them for making clear the fact that Arab Americans and Muslim Americans are a significant voting bloc—and have power to sway the election whichever way, and I think that’s really important work that the committee did. But I also think that it’s important for all of us to remember that none of these options are gonna free Palestine or end the genocide and that appealing to Kamala Harris is not a solution in any way, shape, or form. 

What people seem to be forgetting is that she’s not just like some random person who decided to run for president. She has been the vice president for all 300-plus days of this genocide, and could have said something in all of that time. She deliberately chose not to do that.

If the Harris campaign called and tried to hash this out and have a conversation, would you take that call?

Hamamy:  If she wanted to hash this out, she needs to go to the Israeli government and say: We’re cutting off all military funding. There’s nothing to hash out with the voters. What needs to be hashed out is with the people who are committing genocide right now.

After being wrongfully detained by Russian security forces for more than a year on bogus espionage charges, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been released following a massive prisoner swap, the Journal confirmed on Thursday.

The swap—which also reportedly includes two dozen prisoners total from six countries, including former US Marine Paul Whelan and Russian-American Radio Free Europe editor Alsu Kurmasheva—comes as a major win for the Biden administration and advocates of press freedoms. The WSJ in particular kept Gershkovich’s wrongful detention front and center in the media throughout his detention, reminding the world that journalism is not a crime. Among those efforts were the hashtag #IStandWithEvan and a front page dedicated to Gershkovich on the first anniversary of his detention. The page was largely blank with the headline, “His story should be here.”

In a statement, President Biden called the exchange “a feat of diplomacy,” adding, “Some of these women and men have been unjustly held for years. All have endured unimaginable suffering and uncertainty. Today, their agony is over.”

Gershkovich’s family, and the families of some the other American hostages, joined Biden at the White House on Thursday afternoon to celebrate the news. “This is a very good afternoon,” Biden told reporters. He added that he and the families who joined him in person had just spoken to the newly-released Americans by phone from the Oval Office. “I told them, ‘welcome almost home,'” Biden said.

Evan Gershkovich's family is at the White House as Biden announces their release. pic.twitter.com/KGMf5XJGvi

— Julianne McShane (@JulianneMcShane) August 1, 2024

Biden added that Russia released 16 prisoners as part of the deal—including four Americans, five Germans, and seven Russian citizens who were political prisoners—and that eight Russians being held in the West were also being released.

In March 2023, members of Russia’s Federal Security Service—the country’s intelligence agency, also known as the FSB—detained Gershkovich while he was on a reporting assignment in the city of Yekaterinburg, according to the Journal. Gershkovich, whose parents fled the Soviet Union in the 1970s, had full press credentials from Russia’s foreign ministry and had reported from Moscow for Agence France Press and the Moscow Times before joining the Journal in January 2022. His arrest marked the first time an American journalist has been held on such charges in Russia since the end of the Cold War.

Russian officials never publicly presented evidence of their espionage claims against Gershkovich. Nonetheless, a Russian court last month sentenced him to 16 years in a Russian penal colony following what American officials described as a sham trial.

The Journal‘s editor-in-chief, Emma Tucker, celebrated the news in a post on X, calling Gershkovich’s release “a day of great joy and relief for Evan, his family, WSJ colleagues, and all those who campaigned so hard for his release. It is also a great day for press freedom.”

Tears of joy at the @WSJ newsroom, as Evan Gershkovich has been freed. Paul Beckett, former DC bureau chief, has ensued all the interns have champagne. pic.twitter.com/fSp8PcX8Kv

— Terell (@TerellWright2) August 1, 2024

Tucker and Almar Latour, publisher of the Wall Street Journal Publisher and CEO of Dow Jones, credited “broad advocacy for his release around the world” for Gershkovich’s freedom. Gershkovich’s mother, father, and sister also thanked supporters in a statement, writing, “it’s hard to describe what today feels like. We can’t wait to give him the biggest hug and see his sweet and brave smile up close.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists CEO Jodie Ginsberg said in a statement that Gershkovich and Kurmasheva had been “detained and sentenced on spurious charges intended to punish them for their journalism and stifle independent reporting.”

“Their reported release is welcome,” Ginsberg continued, “but it does not change the fact that Russia continues to suppress a free press.” There are still over a dozen other journalists detained by Russia, according to the CPJ’s tracker, and, as of last December, more than 300 journalists are imprisoned around the world.

The Wall Street Journal did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

President Joe Biden called for a series of major reforms to the Supreme Court on Monday that would counteract the unchecked power of its conservative supermajority. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, which was followed by a speech at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library that afternoon, Biden proposed an 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices and a binding code of ethics, along with a constitutional amendment that would reverse the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision giving presidents “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for official acts in office.

“What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms,” Biden wrote in the Post. “That’s why—in the face of increasing threats to America’s democratic institutions—I am calling for three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy.”

Under Biden’s plan, a president would appoint a Supreme Court justice every two years to an 18-year term, which would make it more difficult for one party or president to gain overwhelming control of the court, as is the case now. “The United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court,” Biden wrote. He would also require justices “to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest.” Finally, the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment” proposed by the president “would make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, said she supported these reforms. “There is a clear crisis of confidence facing the Supreme Court as its fairness has been called into question after numerous ethics scandals and decision after decision overturning long-standing precedent,” she said in a statement.

Pro-democracy groups praised Biden’s proposals—and said they were long overdue. “The White House’s endorsement is a crucial first step toward holding this MAGA Court in check and restoring Americans’ trust in the judiciary,” said a statement from a coalition of national advocacy groups that included Indivisible, MoveOn, and People for the American Way. Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of Take Back the Court Action Fund, called the announcement “a massive sea change in the fight for court reform.”

As I’ve extensively reported for Mother Jones and in my new book Minority Rule, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority has been a key driver of the democratic crisis facing the country.

Five of six conservative justices on the Supreme Court were appointed by Republican presidents who initially lost the popular vote and were confirmed by senators elected by a minority of Americans. That conservative supermajority, in turn, has made the country less democratic in several shocking ways.

They have gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, upheld extreme partisan and racial gerrymandering, and flooded the political system with dark money. They have issued radical, precedent-shattering decisions that were directly at odds with public opinion on issues like abortion and guns. They have green-lit former president Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, insulating him from facing any legal challenge before the election—or possibly ever—for inciting the insurrection.

And the justices themselves have often acted like they too are above the law; Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have accepted gifts and trips from top GOP donors who have spent millions to reshape the judiciary in a more conservative direction. Meanwhile, they have also refused to recuse themselves from major cases involving January 6 even though both their wives publicly supported the “Stop the Steal” movement. Ginni Thomas sent nearly 30 texts to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows urging him to overturn the 2020 election.

For all these reasons, advocates of Supreme Court reform have been urging Biden to embrace their cause for years. But he resisted calls to change the composition of the court while running for president in 2020. He then appointed a commission of scholars to study the issue after he was elected but did not act on the 294-page report they submitted in December 2021. He only made the issue a major priority now, during the final months of his administration.

His current proposals are likely too little, too late. Republicans in Congress will block any measures reforming the current court, and Biden’s constitutional amendment faces even steeper odds, requiring the support of two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of states. No major Constitutional amendments have been adopted in the past fifty years.

Nonetheless, Biden’s call for Supreme Court reform could energize Democrats to go to the polls in November, much like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to block President Barack Obama from filling Antonin Scalia’s vacancy motivated Republicans to vote for Trump in 2016. It could also lay the groundwork for Vice President Harris to make Supreme Court reform a major legislative priority if she’s elected with a Democratic majority in Congress.

As Biden said at the LBJ Library Monday afternoon, “the court’s being used to weaponize an extreme and unchecked agenda.”

This post has been updated.