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Donald Trump and the Return of Ransom-Note Politics

24 January 2025 at 14:30

The foundational myth of Donald Trump is that everything is a deal. “Deals are my art form,” he wrote in—of course—The Art of the Deal. “Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals. Preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” This image has been enormously profitable to Trump personally, forming the basis for his real-estate empire, television persona, and career in politics. It has also, at times, provided his supporters a means to process and defend the things they’d rather not. All those nasty things he says? All those destructive ideas? It’s called bargaining. There’s a bit of slack built into everything when you’re known as the guy who does deals. It is preferable, in any event, to being known as a guy who committed sexual assault.

The art of the deal is a useful lens for understanding how Trump ended up with his own line of steaks, but it’s an incomplete framework for thinking about his presidency. Haggling over air rights and residuals is different than attempting to acquire a canal, in general, but particularly when one of the interested parties controls a nuclear arsenal. A deal implies a degree of mutual consent. The salient feature of Trump’s governing style is the power and menace he brings to the table, and his willingness to use both to secure what he wants. With Trump, everything is not a deal. It is a hostage negotiation.


America’s titans of industry, no stranger to dealmaking and negotiation, have demonstrated with their checkbooks and fawning statements a clear-eyed recognition of the new rules. They’d rather not find out what happens to people who don’t pay up.

Just consider his handling of one of the federal government’s core responsibilities—emergency assistance after natural disasters. During his 2024 campaign, Trump promised to hold future disaster relief for California hostage, telling supporters, shortly before they were abandoned without transportation at a Coachella Valley ranch, that the money would only be released if Governor Gavin Newsom changed the state’s water management policies to divert more resources to agriculture. “We’re going to take care of your water situation,” he said. “We’ll force it down his throat, and we’ll say, ‘Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving you any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the forest fires that you have.’” 

It’s not an idle threat. His administration did reject California’s request for disaster relief after a series of 2020 fires. It never approved a request for wildfire aid from Washington state that same year. Following the 2018 fires in Orange County Trump was reportedly so unwilling to assist people he considered political enemies that a staffer on the National Security Council had to provide data on the number of Republicans who lived there to change his mind. Trump balked at sending more money to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. “It was very much a business deal,” that same NSC staffer told E&E News. “Like, ‘This a lot of money. What are we getting in return for it?’”

This way of thinking has filtered down to his party’s rank-and-file. In early January, in response to the fires that have destroyed whole neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles, causing $250 billion in damage, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) told Fox News that, “If they want the money, then there should be consequences.” There is a sadistic glee at work in this kind of bargaining, like a Bond villain dangling the last vial of antidote in exchange for the encryption code. Give us what we want or the kid gets it.

This ransom-note politics is everywhere. Trump has talked a lot, in recent weeks, about the prospect of annexing Greenland (which is currently an autonomous territory of Denmark) and the Panama Canal Zone (which the United States returned to its namesake nation under the terms of a 1979 treaty). There is no good-faith haggling to be done there—you cannot simply buy things that are not for sale. Instead, Trump has talked about forcing a deal by refusing to rule out using the military to acquire both territories. At the same time, he’s threatening to blow up NATO unless member nations begin spending a significantly higher share of their GDP on defense. Fire money takes many different forms.

As with disaster funding, such threats are a continuation of his first-term m.o. Trump’s promise to hold military support hostage unless the Ukrainian government manufactured dirt on Joe Biden was the impetus for Trump’s first impeachment. Mike Pence was, for a time on January 6, 2021, almost literally his hostage. And the threat of violence, from the state he controls then and now or the supporters he easily manipulates, hangs over every demand he puts forth. (One Republican senator privately cited Trump’s capacity to sic mobs on critics as their reason for voting against conviction after the Capitol riot—the hostage mentality stuck, even after the insurrectionists left.) Some of these threats are more serious than others, but they all follow from the same ethos—that you get what you want by holding a gun to the things other people hold dear. It’s a Trumpian twist on an old adage: Never let another person’s crisis go to waste.

There are signs that hostage politics is already delivering major returns. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted last fall on corruption charges, seems to believe he can secure a pardon, or call off the prosecution, if he assists Trump’s immigration crackdown. (He’s publicly committed to not criticizing the president’s action.) CBS is reportedly considering settling a frivolous $10 billion defamation suit—in which Trump argued that the network committed “election interference” in its routine editing of a Kamala Harris interview—because ownership believes it might help them secure support for an unrelated merger.

After Trump spent years threatening the world’s second-richest man, Jeff Bezos, and the companies he owns, Bezos has now waved a white flag, helping to foot the bill for the inauguration, offering to work with the president in his second term, and paying $40 million to make a documentary about Melania Trump. The world’s third-richest man, Mark Zuckerberg, whom Trump previously said should go to jail, has likewise fallen in line. It was more convenient to pay the ransom than keep up the facade of resistance.

You could call this “driving a hard bargain.” Policymaking is rife with cajoling, with carrots and sticks. Picture, for a moment, Lyndon Baines Johnson. But negotiations over spending bills don’t typically center around punitive threats, even in the House. 

For Trump, this simple power dynamic is built into his central policy proposal this year: crippling tariffs against Canada, China, Mexico, and any other country that crosses him. For rank-and-file citizens, tariffs represent a threat to their cost of living, by potentially jacking up the price of just about everything. But to large corporations, the arrangement is more straightforward: It’s basically a ransom demand. In theory, tariffs apply to everyone in a given sector, but the government can issue exemptions. Who gets exemptions? Who do you think? A recent study in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis found a correlation between political support and the granting of tariff exemptions—and conversely, that companies that had politically opposed the administration were more likely to have their requests denied. 

There is no shortage of cowardice at work here, from people with no compunction about wielding power against workers or rivals. For Trump’s strategy to work, it requires a lot of people who do have agency choosing not to use it. But America’s titans of industry, no stranger to dealmaking and negotiation, have demonstrated with their checkbooks and fawning statements a clear-eyed recognition of the new rules. They’d rather not find out what happens to people who don’t pay up.

Donald Trump and the Return of Ransom-Note Politics

24 January 2025 at 14:30

The foundational myth of Donald Trump is that everything is a deal. “Deals are my art form,” he wrote in—of course—The Art of the Deal. “Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals. Preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” This image has been enormously profitable to Trump personally, forming the basis for his real-estate empire, television persona, and career in politics. It has also, at times, provided his supporters a means to process and defend the things they’d rather not. All those nasty things he says? All those destructive ideas? It’s called bargaining. There’s a bit of slack built into everything when you’re known as the guy who does deals. It is preferable, in any event, to being known as a guy who committed sexual assault.

The art of the deal is a useful lens for understanding how Trump ended up with his own line of steaks, but it’s an incomplete framework for thinking about his presidency. Haggling over air rights and residuals is different than attempting to acquire a canal, in general, but particularly when one of the interested parties controls a nuclear arsenal. A deal implies a degree of mutual consent. The salient feature of Trump’s governing style is the power and menace he brings to the table, and his willingness to use both to secure what he wants. With Trump, everything is not a deal. It is a hostage negotiation.


America’s titans of industry, no stranger to dealmaking and negotiation, have demonstrated with their checkbooks and fawning statements a clear-eyed recognition of the new rules. They’d rather not find out what happens to people who don’t pay up.

Just consider his handling of one of the federal government’s core responsibilities—emergency assistance after natural disasters. During his 2024 campaign, Trump promised to hold future disaster relief for California hostage, telling supporters, shortly before they were abandoned without transportation at a Coachella Valley ranch, that the money would only be released if Governor Gavin Newsom changed the state’s water management policies to divert more resources to agriculture. “We’re going to take care of your water situation,” he said. “We’ll force it down his throat, and we’ll say, ‘Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving you any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the forest fires that you have.’” 

It’s not an idle threat. His administration did reject California’s request for disaster relief after a series of 2020 fires. It never approved a request for wildfire aid from Washington state that same year. Following the 2018 fires in Orange County Trump was reportedly so unwilling to assist people he considered political enemies that a staffer on the National Security Council had to provide data on the number of Republicans who lived there to change his mind. Trump balked at sending more money to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. “It was very much a business deal,” that same NSC staffer told E&E News. “Like, ‘This a lot of money. What are we getting in return for it?’”

This way of thinking has filtered down to his party’s rank-and-file. In early January, in response to the fires that have destroyed whole neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles, causing $250 billion in damage, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) told Fox News that, “If they want the money, then there should be consequences.” There is a sadistic glee at work in this kind of bargaining, like a Bond villain dangling the last vial of antidote in exchange for the encryption code. Give us what we want or the kid gets it.

This ransom-note politics is everywhere. Trump has talked a lot, in recent weeks, about the prospect of annexing Greenland (which is currently an autonomous territory of Denmark) and the Panama Canal Zone (which the United States returned to its namesake nation under the terms of a 1979 treaty). There is no good-faith haggling to be done there—you cannot simply buy things that are not for sale. Instead, Trump has talked about forcing a deal by refusing to rule out using the military to acquire both territories. At the same time, he’s threatening to blow up NATO unless member nations begin spending a significantly higher share of their GDP on defense. Fire money takes many different forms.

As with disaster funding, such threats are a continuation of his first-term m.o. Trump’s promise to hold military support hostage unless the Ukrainian government manufactured dirt on Joe Biden was the impetus for Trump’s first impeachment. Mike Pence was, for a time on January 6, 2021, almost literally his hostage. And the threat of violence, from the state he controls then and now or the supporters he easily manipulates, hangs over every demand he puts forth. (One Republican senator privately cited Trump’s capacity to sic mobs on critics as their reason for voting against conviction after the Capitol riot—the hostage mentality stuck, even after the insurrectionists left.) Some of these threats are more serious than others, but they all follow from the same ethos—that you get what you want by holding a gun to the things other people hold dear. It’s a Trumpian twist on an old adage: Never let another person’s crisis go to waste.

There are signs that hostage politics is already delivering major returns. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted last fall on corruption charges, seems to believe he can secure a pardon, or call off the prosecution, if he assists Trump’s immigration crackdown. (He’s publicly committed to not criticizing the president’s action.) CBS is reportedly considering settling a frivolous $10 billion defamation suit—in which Trump argued that the network committed “election interference” in its routine editing of a Kamala Harris interview—because ownership believes it might help them secure support for an unrelated merger.

After Trump spent years threatening the world’s second-richest man, Jeff Bezos, and the companies he owns, Bezos has now waved a white flag, helping to foot the bill for the inauguration, offering to work with the president in his second term, and paying $40 million to make a documentary about Melania Trump. The world’s third-richest man, Mark Zuckerberg, whom Trump previously said should go to jail, has likewise fallen in line. It was more convenient to pay the ransom than keep up the facade of resistance.

You could call this “driving a hard bargain.” Policymaking is rife with cajoling, with carrots and sticks. Picture, for a moment, Lyndon Baines Johnson. But negotiations over spending bills don’t typically center around punitive threats, even in the House. 

For Trump, this simple power dynamic is built into his central policy proposal this year: crippling tariffs against Canada, China, Mexico, and any other country that crosses him. For rank-and-file citizens, tariffs represent a threat to their cost of living, by potentially jacking up the price of just about everything. But to large corporations, the arrangement is more straightforward: It’s basically a ransom demand. In theory, tariffs apply to everyone in a given sector, but the government can issue exemptions. Who gets exemptions? Who do you think? A recent study in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis found a correlation between political support and the granting of tariff exemptions—and conversely, that companies that had politically opposed the administration were more likely to have their requests denied. 

There is no shortage of cowardice at work here, from people with no compunction about wielding power against workers or rivals. For Trump’s strategy to work, it requires a lot of people who do have agency choosing not to use it. But America’s titans of industry, no stranger to dealmaking and negotiation, have demonstrated with their checkbooks and fawning statements a clear-eyed recognition of the new rules. They’d rather not find out what happens to people who don’t pay up.

Actually, the 14th Amendment Still Exists

21 January 2025 at 02:51

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday declaring that the federal government would no longer recognize the US-born children of undocumented immigrants as American citizens. It’s a move that has been brewing for years. The Washington Post described the order as an effort to “reinterpret the 14th Amendment of the Constitution,” and sure enough, the text includes a few paragraphs of legalese purporting to do just that.

The order itself goes into effect in 30 days, and specifically prohibits federal agencies from issuing citizenship documents (such as passports) to the—to be clear—citizens in question. It was part of a slate of executive orders Trump enacted on his first day in office, many of which were completed at a choreographed ceremony at DC’s Capital One Arena, in a display of strength meant to impose his will on national politics from day one.

You cannot simply blot out the Constitution. Laws still exist.

The executive order, which excludes anyone whose parents were not legal permanent residents, is an act of intimidation and a preview of a nativist crackdown to come. But I think it’s important to say what else it is: complete horseshit. The federal government cannot simply stop recognizing the citizenship of US-born children of undocumented immigrants, because those people are US citizens under the 14th Amendment, full stop. The president does not get to unilaterally “reinterpret” Constitutional amendments, and there is no compelling basis for doing so in this case, even if he could. Any attempt to implement the order would be an unconstitutional violation of American citizens’ civil rights. You cannot simply blot out the Constitution. Laws still exist.

Trump wants to do a lot of bad things as president, and in his first 24 hours he’s already accomplished quite a number of them—narrowing the definition of who matters in this country while signaling an era of decadence, corruption, and environmental degradation. But there are a lot of things he can’t just do. Sometimes he’ll be blocked. Sometimes he’ll be sued. And he will often lose, even with a judiciary that’s several degrees beyond pliant. If he wants to get rid of birthright citizenship, he has to do more than issue a press release; he will have to get the law of the land changed—or get the highest court in the land to effectively do the same for him. I wouldn’t bet against anything in the Trump era. But with the clock running on a lame-duck term, the last thing anyone should do is give him a victory before he’s earned it.

The Stagecraft That Ushered in the Trump Oligarchy

20 January 2025 at 20:21

You could learn most of what you needed to know about the tone and tenor of Donald Trump’s second inauguration by the people who showed up to watch it. It was a perfectly 2025 mixture of influencers, fighters, billionaires, and bootlickers. Conor McGregor, a UFC star who was recently found guilty of sexual assault by an Irish jury, traveled to the ceremony in a party bus with the comedian Theo Von, influencer brothers Jake and Logan Paul, and “Nelk Boys” YouTuber Kyle Forgeard. Joe Rogan snagged a seat in the rotunda a few seats away from Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Gianni Infantino—friend to dictators and president of soccer’s international governing body, FIFA—seemed to be lurking in the background of every shot.

In the floor seats in front of the president-elect, you could find a who’s who of conservative luminaries and favor seekers. There was Rupert Murdoch, the News Corp baron whose company paid a $787 million settlement in a defamation case after Fox News accused voting-machine manufacturer Dominion of stealing the 2020 election, and Tucker Carlson, the onetime Fox News host who once said of Trump, “I hate him passionately.” Crypto billionaire Brock Pierce, a former child actor who now resides in Puerto Rico, was skulking around somewhere. His good friend, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who is seeking to get on Trump’s good side—and perhaps win a pardon—snagged a photo with the Pauls. So did Sam Altman, the billionaire CEO of OpenAI.

But the image that will define the day, and perhaps this entire era of politics, was the rows of seats behind Trump. The front row was simple enough—that was reserved for past presidents and vice presidents and their families, and the Trump and Vance clans. In the back were members of his future cabinet (the wealthiest collection of bureaucrats ever assembled). Sandwiched between them was a pastiche of American oligarchy—a demonstration of both the influence and subservience of wealth in Trump’s second term.

The inclusion of Elon Musk (estimated net worth $449 billion) and Vivek Ramaswamy (about $1 billion) was no surprise. Their “Department of Government Efficiency” is, after all, a centerpiece of the new administration. But the world’s richest man, and the maybe future governor of Ohio, were joined by a selection of moguls who a few months, or a few years ago, might have avoided such an alliance with Trump. The world’s second-richest man, Jeff Bezos ($245 billion), joined the world’s third-richest man, Mark Zuckerberg ($217 billion), behind Trump’s right shoulder. They sat near Apple CEO Tim Cook ($2.2 billion), Google CEO Sundar Pichai (about $1 billion), and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin, the world’s seventh-richest man ($163 billion). TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, whose company rang in the Trump presidency a full day early, attended church with the Trumps and his fellow tech titans on Monday morning. Isaac Perlmutter, the billionaire former chairman of Marvel, sat near Musk.

These billionaires were propped between former heads of state and future cabinet officials, like benighted stewards of the American system—a special fourth branch of government.

It wasn’t just tech, of course. Over Trump’s left shoulder—just in front of the Clintons—sat Miriam Adelson ($34.6 billion), the pro-Israel widow of Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who gave $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign, alongside the hedge funder John Paulson ($3.8 billion) and UFC CEO Dana White—a tycoon in his own right whose company may soon enter into a deal with the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. Behind them was the fifth-richest man in the world, French billionaire Bernard Arnault (estimated net worth: $188 billion), along with his son Alexandre.

The concentration of wealth sitting behind Trump was staggering. If you add Trump’s roughly $10 billion cabinet to the people I just named, it adds up to a little more than $1.3 trillion. Trillion with a t. It was not just about the riches they brought to the table—and in some cases, brought to Trump’s campaign—but the symbolism of their presence. These billionaires were propped between former heads of state and future cabinet officials, like benighted stewards of the American system—a special fourth branch of government. At the same time, it was an unmistakable and ominous display of contrition. 

The lasting image I’ll have of the event is of Bezos, owner of a newspaper that brought down a president, waving meekly at the president-elect, hoping for a bit of extra credit. After Trump spent his first term, and his four years out of power, seeking retribution against tech billionaires that he believed had stood in his way, he has seemingly offered to cut Silicon Valley’s titans in on his governing agenda in exchange for fealty. Their presence articulated more neatly the message the president, in so many words, laid out in his address: There’s a price to challenging his power. This time, they’re not willing to pay.

The Stagecraft That Ushered in the Trump Oligarchy

20 January 2025 at 20:21

You could learn most of what you needed to know about the tone and tenor of Donald Trump’s second inauguration by the people who showed up to watch it. It was a perfectly 2025 mixture of influencers, fighters, billionaires, and bootlickers. Conor McGregor, a UFC star who was recently found guilty of sexual assault by an Irish jury, traveled to the ceremony in a party bus with the comedian Theo Von, influencer brothers Jake and Logan Paul, and “Nelk Boys” YouTuber Kyle Forgeard. Joe Rogan snagged a seat in the rotunda a few seats away from Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Gianni Infantino—friend to dictators and president of soccer’s international governing body, FIFA—seemed to be lurking in the background of every shot.

In the floor seats in front of the president-elect, you could find a who’s who of conservative luminaries and favor seekers. There was Rupert Murdoch, the News Corp baron whose company paid a $787 million settlement in a defamation case after Fox News accused voting-machine manufacturer Dominion of stealing the 2020 election, and Tucker Carlson, the onetime Fox News host who once said of Trump, “I hate him passionately.” Crypto billionaire Brock Pierce, a former child actor who now resides in Puerto Rico, was skulking around somewhere. His good friend, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who is seeking to get on Trump’s good side—and perhaps win a pardon—snagged a photo with the Pauls. So did Sam Altman, the billionaire CEO of OpenAI.

But the image that will define the day, and perhaps this entire era of politics, was the rows of seats behind Trump. The front row was simple enough—that was reserved for past presidents and vice presidents and their families, and the Trump and Vance clans. In the back were members of his future cabinet (the wealthiest collection of bureaucrats ever assembled). Sandwiched between them was a pastiche of American oligarchy—a demonstration of both the influence and subservience of wealth in Trump’s second term.

The inclusion of Elon Musk (estimated net worth $449 billion) and Vivek Ramaswamy (about $1 billion) was no surprise. Their “Department of Government Efficiency” is, after all, a centerpiece of the new administration. But the world’s richest man, and the maybe future governor of Ohio, were joined by a selection of moguls who a few months, or a few years ago, might have avoided such an alliance with Trump. The world’s second-richest man, Jeff Bezos ($245 billion), joined the world’s third-richest man, Mark Zuckerberg ($217 billion), behind Trump’s right shoulder. They sat near Apple CEO Tim Cook ($2.2 billion), Google CEO Sundar Pichai (about $1 billion), and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin, the world’s seventh-richest man ($163 billion). TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, whose company rang in the Trump presidency a full day early, attended church with the Trumps and his fellow tech titans on Monday morning. Isaac Perlmutter, the billionaire former chairman of Marvel, sat near Musk.

These billionaires were propped between former heads of state and future cabinet officials, like benighted stewards of the American system—a special fourth branch of government.

It wasn’t just tech, of course. Over Trump’s left shoulder—just in front of the Clintons—sat Miriam Adelson ($34.6 billion), the pro-Israel widow of Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who gave $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign, alongside the hedge funder John Paulson ($3.8 billion) and UFC CEO Dana White—a tycoon in his own right whose company may soon enter into a deal with the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. Behind them was the fifth-richest man in the world, French billionaire Bernard Arnault (estimated net worth: $188 billion), along with his son Alexandre.

The concentration of wealth sitting behind Trump was staggering. If you add Trump’s roughly $10 billion cabinet to the people I just named, it adds up to a little more than $1.3 trillion. Trillion with a t. It was not just about the riches they brought to the table—and in some cases, brought to Trump’s campaign—but the symbolism of their presence. These billionaires were propped between former heads of state and future cabinet officials, like benighted stewards of the American system—a special fourth branch of government. At the same time, it was an unmistakable and ominous display of contrition. 

The lasting image I’ll have of the event is of Bezos, owner of a newspaper that brought down a president, waving meekly at the president-elect, hoping for a bit of extra credit. After Trump spent his first term, and his four years out of power, seeking retribution against tech billionaires that he believed had stood in his way, he has seemingly offered to cut Silicon Valley’s titans in on his governing agenda in exchange for fealty. Their presence articulated more neatly the message the president, in so many words, laid out in his address: There’s a price to challenging his power. This time, they’re not willing to pay.

What the History of American Expansion Can Tell Us About Trump’s Threats

15 January 2025 at 16:13

The president-elect—who pushed for an invasion of Mexico during his first term—has spent the month leading up to next week’s inauguration posting about inviting Canada to join the United States, refusing to rule out using military force to coerce Denmark into selling (or giving away) Greenland, and pledging to take back the Panama Canal Zone—which the United States gave back as part of a 1979 treaty. Republicans and their allies have quickly fallen in line. Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr. recently took a day trip to Greenland. Some conservatives have likened the threatened acquisitions to the Alaska and the Louisiana Purchase. 

Is this just a tired throwback to the country’s empire-building past, or a recognition of something new? To understand Trump’s recent rhetoric, I spoke with Daniel Immerwahr, a professor of history at Northwestern University, whose 2019 book, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States told the story of America’s imperial past and present.

What did you think when you saw President-elect Trump announce that he was thinking of trying to acquire—somehow—Greenland? 

Here we go again. We’ve literally gone through all of this. We’ve gone through it in the US—presidents used to be quite interested in acquiring strategically relevant bits of land, and there’s a long history of that. We’ve also gone through it with Donald Trump, because he did that during his first term: He threatened to acquire Greenland. Historians were consulted: “Has this happened? When was the last time this happened?” It was a lot of bluster then, or at least I think it was a lot of bluster; I didn’t get the sense that the US military was poised to do anything dramatic, and I didn’t get the sense that the Danish government was interested in selling. So the question remains right now: Is this a new historical moment where new things are possible? (And there’s some reasons to think that perhaps, yes it is.) Or is this Trump doing what Trump does so well, which is winding up liberals by proposing outrageous things.

Before Trump, was Greenland on the radar of American imperialists?

Greenland got much more interesting to the United States in the age of aviation, because if you draw the shortest plane routes from the continental United States to, for example, the Soviet Union, you’ll find that some of them passed near or over Greenland. So Greenland was an important Cold War site. 

The United States stored nuclear weapons there. It also overflew weapons over Greenland:What that means is that planes would be kept aloft and ready to scramble into action in case the alarm was sounded. The film Dr. Strangelove has footage of such planes over Greenland. 

There’s also a history of nuclear accidents on Greenland.

Nuclear accidents?

Three planes in the 1950s made emergency landings on Greenland while carrying hydrogen bombs. Something went wrong and the planes sort of skidded into a stop. In 1968 a B-52 flying over Greenland with four Mk-22 hydrogen bombs, didn’t land, it just crashed at more than 500 miles an hour, leaving a trail of debris five miles long. Jet fuel ignited and all of the bombs exploded. What happened in these cases is the bombs were destroyed in the process, but did not detonate. However, it was a near miss, and it is thinkable, given how bombs were constructed, that crashing into the ice at 500 miles an hour would have detonated bombs. You can see why [having nuclear weapons on the island] was a dangerous proposition for Europeans, and particularly for people in Greenland.

One of the other big announcements recently was Trump promising to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” You wrote in your book that the term America only really came into vogue as a shorthand around the time of Theodore Roosevelt. What’s the connection between that name and this sense of empire?

There was some—not a huge amount, but some—discussion in the early republic of what should the shorthand be. Columbia was a literary term that people used and showed up in a lot of 19th century anthems. Freedonia was tried out, as “the land of free,” but what’s interesting is that, from our perspective, the obvious shorthand—“America”—was not the dominant shorthand to refer to the United States throughout the 19th century. One reason for that is that leaders in the United States were fully aware that they were occupying a part of America and that there were other parts of America too. There were other republics in the Americas.

It’s not until the very end of the 19th century that you start seeing “America” as the dominant shorthand. A big reason for that is that right at the end of the 19th century, the United States started acquiring large, populous overseas territories, such that a lot of the previous shorthand—the Union, the Republic, the United States—seemed inaccurate descriptions of the political character in the country.

So “America” is an imperialist turn in two senses. One is that it suggests that this one country in the Americas is somehow the whole of the Americas—as if Germans decided that they were going to be henceforth “Europeans” and that everyone was going to have to be an English-European or French-European or Polish-European, and only Germans were “Europeans.” It’s also imperialist in a sense that it arose at a time when people were questioning what the political character of the United States would be, and were questioning whether the addition of colonies made the United States no longer really a republic, a union, or a set of states.

Trump said recently he was going to “bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it.” How does what he’s doing—and the way that he talks about what he’s doing—compare to what William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt were saying and doing in the late 19th century?

In one way, it compares cleanly, because there was a long era in US history—and it wasn’t just McKinley and Roosevelt; it was up until them and a little bit after—where, when the United States got more powerful, it got larger. Power expressed itself in the acquisition of territory. The United States annexed lands—contiguous lands from the Louisiana Purchase, and overseas lands; the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and so forth. That’s the history that Trump is invoking, and he’s imagining himself participating in. 

The age of US overseas colonization was also a time when other “Great Powers” were colonizing overseas territories in Africa and Asia. It’s just not clear to me that we are in the kind of moment where we’re going to start seeing the most powerful countries snapping up colonies, as they used to do. Trump is pointing to that moment, but it’s not clear to me, for example, how many in his base are really strongly motivated by this. It’s not clear how many other Republicans care about this beyond caring about loyalty to Trump’s whims. So it’s not obvious that this is a social movement so much as a way to wind up Trump’s opponents and possibly distract them.

Is there a lesson for Trump and the Trump administration in how that era of expansionism wound down, and the backlash to it?

There’s two things that made empire of that colonial nature much rarer by the later 20th century. One was a global anti-colonial revolt that started in the 19th century but climaxed after World War II, and just made it much harder for would-be colonizers to hold or take new colonies. The other is that powerful countries, including the United States, sought to find new pathways for the projection of power that would not involve the annexation of territories—in part because they realized that a world where every country in order to guarantee its security and express its power by annexing territories would create a situation where large countries would clash with each other. 

So the two lessons, I would say, from the Age of Empire are that it’s extremely cruel to those who are colonized because they’re subject to a foreign government which usually doesn’t have their interests in mind. And it’s extraordinarily dangerous because it sets large powers against each other in a way that can quickly lead to war. And if the wars in the early first half of the 20th century were extraordinarily bloody wars, at least, they did not involve both sides’ nuclear exchanges as 21st-century versions of those wars might involve.

The Trump administration in the first go-around seemed to run up against another piece of this, which was that it didn’t really like having to deal with Puerto Rico. It didn’t like having to fund the reconstruction of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. In fact, you had people referring to Puerto Rico as a different country. Is that part of this turn away from empire—not wanting to have to deal with the people you’ve colonized?

There’s always been an argument, even among imperialists, about whether the burdens of empire are worth the advantages. Racism has sometimes acted as a break on empire. You’ll find moments, including in US history, where expansionists would like to, for example, end a war between the United States and Mexico by taking a huge part of Mexico, and then racists will say, “Oh no, no, no; if we take more of Mexico, we will therefore take more Mexicans.” And that kind of debate happened again and again in the 19th century in the United States, and in the early 20th century. 

You can see it playing out in Trump’s mind, because on the one hand, he is at least dispositionally an expansionist, and he threatens to march US borders over various other places in the Western Hemisphere. On the other hand, Trump clearly imagines the United States as a contiguous place that you can build a high wall around. And he is quite hostile to foreigners. 

When he talks about Puerto Rico during the first administration, we have reports from within the Trump administration saying that Trump wanted to sell Puerto Rico off. So those are, in some ways, the two warring impulses in Trump’s minds, and they actually match pretty well some of the dominant impulses in the 19th and early 20th century US leaders: On the one hand, a desire to create more territory; on the other hand, a deep worry about incorporating more people, particularly non-white people, within the United States. 

I would love to say that that is a past predicament, and that we are far beyond it, because we no longer have the annexation desires nor the exclusionary racism that drove it. But Trump seems to be at least instinctively resurrecting both. 

Did you see the map that he shared on Truth Social? 

I’m looking at it now. So let’s talk about this map. This is a map of the United States that imagines that its borders extend to Canada and encompass Canada, but also imagines that the United States’ borders do not include Puerto Rico. So it’s a vision of a larger United States and a whiter United States. And it gets at the contradiction of empire—both a desire among imperialists to expand territory, but also a desire to curate populations within that territory. And you can see this as the ambition of Trump to have a larger United States, but also a smaller United States.

You’ve used the term “pointillist” to describe what the US empire looks like now—with a series of military bases and small territories spread across the world. There’s been an acceptance within the US government of the convenience of that arrangement. How much of this is just a way of talking about strength, separate from an actual plan to do anything?

Trump has often terrible political judgment, but he has interesting political instincts, and he’s often able to see possibilities that other politicians have rejected—to see things that seem outrageous but actually might secure a voting base. A huge question about all of this jingoism that Trump has been delivering is whether it’s just another one of his provocations and just another one of his idiosyncrasies, or whether he’s responding to something real. 

If you were making the case that Trump is responding to something real—that the actual conditions and possibility have changed, and we might indeed be entering a new age of territorial empire, where power is expressed through annexing large swaths of lands, not even just controlling small dots—you would point to Ukraine, and you would point to China’s ambitions to seize Taiwan. You might say that we are entering a new age of annexations, and that Trump senses this and often admires the kind of strength that expresses itself in semi-colonial annexations, and sees that as a potential future for the United States. 

I’m struck by that, because politicians in both parties like to say that we’re not an empire, which means, at least, that we don’t like to think of ourselves as an empire. And Trump’s sort of saying, actually, maybe we do, and there’s this undercurrent where people do want to think of themselves as such.

Basically, since William McKinley, nearly every President has said some version of “the United States is not an empire; we have no territorial ambitions, we do not covet other people’s territory.” President after president, Democrat and Republican—they all say some version of that. Except for Trump. That’s a liberal piety held not just by Democrats, but Republicans as well, that Trump seems to have no investment in. And I think on that score, he’s correct, because when presidents have said that we’re not an empire, they have always been speaking from a country that has colonies and has territories. So Trump is correct in not going down that pathway, although I think it’s quite dangerous that he sees the denial of empire as not just something to be scoffed at, but something to be rejected defiantly by the pursuit of territorial ambitions.

Monster of 2024: Joe Biden

26 December 2024 at 11:00

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

When was the 2024 presidential election really lost? 

Maybe you’d argue (though I would not) that it was the rubber-stamp nominating process for Vice President Kamala Harris. You could point, on a symbolic level, to Trump’s fist pump after surviving an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. For a time, it seemed like the clearest answer to this was the first debate, when President Joe Biden melted down on stage. But I think if you want to pinpoint when things went irreversibly downhill, you have to go back further—to the aftermath of the midterms two years ago, when a then-80-year-old Biden moved ahead with his plan to run for a second term.

Biden had always insisted that he was never planning on being a one-term president. Still, he tried to allay concerns about his age that dogged him even in 2020 by referring to himself as a generational “bridge,” and behind the scenes, aides offered context for his public denials. “He’s going into this thinking, ‘I want to find a running mate I can turn things over to after four years, but if that’s not possible or doesn’t happen, then I’ll run for reelection,’” an aide told Politico in 2019. “But he’s not going to publicly make a one-term pledge.” After a strong showing in the midterms against a predicted red wave, any notion of a smooth transition to the next in line—or a competitive primary—went out the window. Democrats shuffled around their primary calendar to warn off challengers. And that was that. Biden was dead set on running, he argued, because the stakes were too high and he was the best candidate for the job. 

That was, in hindsight, sort of the opposite of the case. Biden only got more and more unpopular, and it was hard to separate the general public anxiety about his advancing age from the general national malaise that was bringing him down. The line from the Democrats was that there was something ageist and unfair about all of this—if you can do the job, you can do the job. That was a bit cynical: Biden’s own aides reportedly thought he could do his job best between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and internal rumblings about his stamina dated back to the early months of the administration. The disastrous debate finally put an end to the facade, even if the complaints that this was all a vast media conspiracy persisted in some corners.

It would perhaps be more forgivable if it were just denial. But Biden, who positioned himself as the defender of the nation’s “soul,” continued to act as though only he could win the election, when in reality, he was tanking the Democratic brand so severely that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had to stage an intervention.

By staying long past his expiration date, Biden did more than ease Trump’s path to victory; he was the apotheosis of an entire gerontocracy that brought us to this point. (He came back to win the nomination in 2020 only after the party closed ranks to stop the even-older Bernie Sanders.) As Semafor’s Dave Weigel recently observed, you could tell the recent history of the party through the people who didn’t quit when they should have. Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death threatened to blow up the Affordable Care Act. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, after she declined to retire when Democrats could still replace her, likely cemented several decades of right-wing dominance on the Supreme Court. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s refusal to quit hampered Democrats on the judiciary committee. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin is 80; Schumer is a sprightly 74. Nancy Pelosi, 84, who led the House Democratic Caucus for nearly two decades, demonstrated her unique gifts when she adeptly nudged Biden out of the race—but she was still out there after the election, working behind the scenes to block New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from defeating Virginia’s Gerry Connolly (74) for ranking member of the oversight committee.

The Biden reelection bid was, above all, uncomfortable; he was a walking reminder of our own mortality.

Every piece about Biden since the election has also included a few sentences like the ones that follow. His record, domestically, was pretty good, especially when you consider the sorts of people the rest of America sent to work with him. I can rattle off the policies that everyone of my general persuasion always does—his belief in industrial policy, his efforts to link climate change adaptation to a growing green economy, his embrace of labor unions. Biden’s team dramatically reshaped the government’s approach to corporate monopolies. His management of the post-Covid global economic crisis ultimately left the United States in a far better place than it might have otherwise. But it is hard to convince people things are getting better when the messenger himself kept looking worse and worse. The Biden reelection bid was, above all, uncomfortable; he was a walking reminder of our own mortality.

When it took the form of a halting gait or an on-camera freeze-up, that weakness could be as humanizing as it was politically damaging. There has always been an emotional heaviness about the man. When that weight took the form of foreign policy, it produced a historic moral abdication. Biden’s legacy will be more than a year of virtually unchecked Israeli carnage as the so-called “rules-based international order” he championed dissolved into nothing. There was seemingly no line Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not cross. Not the clear “red line” on Rafah. Not Netanyahu’s invocation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a defense of his flattening of Gaza. Not thousands of dead kids. Not a clearly stated desire to bulldoze the United States government’s official preference for a two-state solution. Not the attacks on journalists and aid workers or even the death of American citizens. Biden seemed like the only person in the whole situation who didn’t realize that Netanyahu, a right-winger from Philadelphia, was just dog-walking him to get to a president he likes better. 

“To answer the question on everyone’s minds: No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs,” senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates wrote on X earlier this year, during a press conference on foreign policy in which the president referred to Harris as “Vice President Trump.” “He’s just that fucking good.”

Well, sometimes even honorary PhDs need a refresher course. The last photo I saw of Biden before I started writing this was of the president leaving a bookstore in Nantucket, clutching a copy of Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. It felt like a haunting epitaph for an entire era of liberalism—stopping in to do some Black Friday shopping while staying at David Rubenstein’s estate and walking away with a book that the author himself said Biden should have checked out years ago. Biden stuck around past the point that he could deliver for the people who needed him to. And now the world is stuck with the consequences.

Monster of 2024: Cars, Again

20 December 2024 at 15:46

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

When you start walking around a city with a small child, you notice two things about cars. One is that a lot of drivers suddenly seem a lot more considerate. They yield at crosswalks. They stop at stop signs. They lay off the horn. People are fully capable of driving normally, in other words—when they want to. But the other thing that jumps out is that a significant number of drivers don’t seem affected at all: They just keep rolling through those stop signs; they inch forward as you cross; they honk when the car in front of them has stopped, like an absolute dipshit, to yield for some guy pushing a stroller. 

It is always a little jarring to know how little you matter. A few centimeters of metal and plastic is enough to reduce anyone outside of it to nothing. Driving, whatever the commercials say, isn’t very good for the soul. It’s not all that great for democracy, either.

The 2024 election was full-on car-brained. “Pain at the pump” is an old standby at this point, and Donald Trump’s campaign was all too eager to add gas to the long list of necessities that had gotten more expensive while Democrats controlled the White House. But it seeped into the ether in other ways. 

After falsely asserting that Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats, JD Vance also tried to link them to rising auto insurance rates. He argued that the newcomers’ inability to drive responsibly was harming the community and making car ownership more difficult for working people. This narrative got so out of hand on the right that at one point, the New York Post even sent a reporter to stand at an intersection in Springfield to watch traffic for a while—eventually producing a breathless dispatch about a minor fender-bender.

Vance also tapped into genuine fears about the risk traffic violence poses to kids. In 2023, a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus in Springfield, killing one child and injuring more than 20 others. Republicans talked about the incident so often that the victim’s family pleaded with them to stop. But this was not a Haitian problem. NBC News reported that there were 6,089 crashes involving a school bus over a recent four-year period in Ohio alone. Traffic violence, like gun violence, is something that the United States excels at by design. In any given year, upward of 40,000 Americans will die in a car crash, and the only time I’ve ever heard a candidate for higher office acknowledge it is either to downplay the roughly equal toll of gun violence or as justification for mass deportation.

“Haitians” are not the reason car insurance rates have gone up across the country in recent years, either. As Marin Cogan explained at Vox, that rise is attributable to inflation, the increasing amount of tech in cars (another thing that sucks!), and a shift for the worse in driving behavior that dates to the pandemic. But that narrative fit into the broader story Vance and Trump told about how the things that make you identifiably American were getting harder and harder to attain. 

For all the talk of the freedom of the open road, Vance and his allies were seizing on the latent anxiety that a car-dependent culture imposes on citizens and the real damage it causes. One of the biggest drags on household finances is a machine that might someday kill you—and you’re surrounded all the time by other people who might do the same. That stress lends itself to reactionary politics. When you are driving, you are constantly pathologizing other drivers. 

The primacy of car culture shaped how Democrats campaigned and governed, too. In June, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul paused New York City’s long-awaited congestion pricing toll on car traffic in the southern half of Manhattan, days before the policy was set to go into effect. Hochul has denied that there was any political calculation to the decision (which she reversed almost immediately after the election was over), but the electoral subtext was obvious—the toll would affect a small minority of commuters in a few key suburban districts that Democrats were targeting in their effort to win back the House. 

It was a bad electoral calculation—in the end, Democrats barely flipped one seat in the New York City area—but I’m sympathetic, at least, with one aspect of the analysis: There was no telling how vengeful car owners would become. After this year’s election, one angry real estate broker told the San Francisco Standard that the practice of daylighting—that is, requiring cars to leave a buffer before a crosswalk so that pedestrians can see oncoming traffic—was why Democrats lose. I don’t know if it’s true with that degree of specificity (daylighting? really?), but car-brain feeds into the sort of social erosion that does. Driving makes us angrier, poorer, less healthy, and more isolated. Of course, it makes people resentful, too.

One of the most striking Republican ads I saw this year was a spot from a group called Election Freedom Inc. It starts with a Latino man clutching a hard hat. “You worked hard,” a narrator says. “You bought your truck.” While you toiled, Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen and Kamala Harris, the ad said, were giving away millions of dollars to illegal immigrants in benefits and funding sex change operations in prisons:

This is a damn good ad guys. This is really good creative. pic.twitter.com/QEZQbRIRTz

— Mike Madrid (@madrid_mike) October 24, 2024

It was jarring to see the dynamic laid out like that. It was like someone made the Jesse Helms “Hands” ad about a Ford-250. But that was what the election was all about, in a way; Trump asked people to choose between their immediate material circumstances and their neighbors. Anyone who’s tried crossing a busy intersection on foot recently knows how that one goes.

Monster of 2024: Cars, Again

20 December 2024 at 15:46

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

When you start walking around a city with a small child, you notice two things about cars. One is that a lot of drivers suddenly seem a lot more considerate. They yield at crosswalks. They stop at stop signs. They lay off the horn. People are fully capable of driving normally, in other words—when they want to. But the other thing that jumps out is that a significant number of drivers don’t seem affected at all: They just keep rolling through those stop signs; they inch forward as you cross; they honk when the car in front of them has stopped, like an absolute dipshit, to yield for some guy pushing a stroller. 

It is always a little jarring to know how little you matter. A few centimeters of metal and plastic is enough to reduce anyone outside of it to nothing. Driving, whatever the commercials say, isn’t very good for the soul. It’s not all that great for democracy, either.

The 2024 election was full-on car-brained. “Pain at the pump” is an old standby at this point, and Donald Trump’s campaign was all too eager to add gas to the long list of necessities that had gotten more expensive while Democrats controlled the White House. But it seeped into the ether in other ways. 

After falsely asserting that Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats, JD Vance also tried to link them to rising auto insurance rates. He argued that the newcomers’ inability to drive responsibly was harming the community and making car ownership more difficult for working people. This narrative got so out of hand on the right that at one point, the New York Post even sent a reporter to stand at an intersection in Springfield to watch traffic for a while—eventually producing a breathless dispatch about a minor fender-bender.

Vance also tapped into genuine fears about the risk traffic violence poses to kids. In 2023, a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus in Springfield, killing one child and injuring more than 20 others. Republicans talked about the incident so often that the victim’s family pleaded with them to stop. But this was not a Haitian problem. NBC News reported that there were 6,089 crashes involving a school bus over a recent four-year period in Ohio alone. Traffic violence, like gun violence, is something that the United States excels at by design. In any given year, upward of 40,000 Americans will die in a car crash, and the only time I’ve ever heard a candidate for higher office acknowledge it is either to downplay the roughly equal toll of gun violence or as justification for mass deportation.

“Haitians” are not the reason car insurance rates have gone up across the country in recent years, either. As Marin Cogan explained at Vox, that rise is attributable to inflation, the increasing amount of tech in cars (another thing that sucks!), and a shift for the worse in driving behavior that dates to the pandemic. But that narrative fit into the broader story Vance and Trump told about how the things that make you identifiably American were getting harder and harder to attain. 

For all the talk of the freedom of the open road, Vance and his allies were seizing on the latent anxiety that a car-dependent culture imposes on citizens and the real damage it causes. One of the biggest drags on household finances is a machine that might someday kill you—and you’re surrounded all the time by other people who might do the same. That stress lends itself to reactionary politics. When you are driving, you are constantly pathologizing other drivers. 

The primacy of car culture shaped how Democrats campaigned and governed, too. In June, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul paused New York City’s long-awaited congestion pricing toll on car traffic in the southern half of Manhattan, days before the policy was set to go into effect. Hochul has denied that there was any political calculation to the decision (which she reversed almost immediately after the election was over), but the electoral subtext was obvious—the toll would affect a small minority of commuters in a few key suburban districts that Democrats were targeting in their effort to win back the House. 

It was a bad electoral calculation—in the end, Democrats barely flipped one seat in the New York City area—but I’m sympathetic, at least, with one aspect of the analysis: There was no telling how vengeful car owners would become. After this year’s election, one angry real estate broker told the San Francisco Standard that the practice of daylighting—that is, requiring cars to leave a buffer before a crosswalk so that pedestrians can see oncoming traffic—was why Democrats lose. I don’t know if it’s true with that degree of specificity (daylighting? really?), but car-brain feeds into the sort of social erosion that does. Driving makes us angrier, poorer, less healthy, and more isolated. Of course, it makes people resentful, too.

One of the most striking Republican ads I saw this year was a spot from a group called Election Freedom Inc. It starts with a Latino man clutching a hard hat. “You worked hard,” a narrator says. “You bought your truck.” While you toiled, Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen and Kamala Harris, the ad said, were giving away millions of dollars to illegal immigrants in benefits and funding sex change operations in prisons:

This is a damn good ad guys. This is really good creative. pic.twitter.com/QEZQbRIRTz

— Mike Madrid (@madrid_mike) October 24, 2024

It was jarring to see the dynamic laid out like that. It was like someone made the Jesse Helms “Hands” ad about a Ford-250. But that was what the election was all about, in a way; Trump asked people to choose between their immediate material circumstances and their neighbors. Anyone who’s tried crossing a busy intersection on foot recently knows how that one goes.

Trump’s Billionaire Cabinet Is Unprecedented 

18 December 2024 at 15:17

Let’s just get it out of the way upfront: Donald Trump is assembling a government of billionaires, the likes of which the United States has never seen. The president-elect has tapped five reported billionaires for cabinet posts: North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for interior secretary, hedge funder Scott Bessent for treasury secretary, Cantor Fitzgerald chief Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary, wrestling magnate Linda McMahon for education secretary (I know, just roll with it), and former Sen. Kelly Loeffler—wife of New York Stock Exchange Chairman Jeffrey Sprecher—for small business administrator.

But those appointments are almost normal compared to the billionaires Trump’s installing everywhere else. After Elon Musk spent a quarter-billion dollars to get him elected—$40.25 billion, if you count the in-kind acquisition of Twitter—Trump made the world’s richest man co-chair (with maybe-billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy) of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. There, one of the government’s largest contractors will be tasked with trimming about $2 trillion from the federal budget. Or maybe they’ll just harass civil servants until they quit; it’s not really clear what DOGE will be, beyond a dead joke about an internet meme from 2013.

They’re joined in the administration by Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks, whom Trump announced would serve as his “AI and Crypto Czar”—whatever that means. Steve Witkoff, a New York City real estate billionaire who’s deeply enmeshed in the sovereign wealth funds of Gulf petro-states, will be Trump’s Middle East envoy. Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman—a Musk ally who moonlights as a commercial astronaut on SpaceX flights and holds the distinction of being the first person to place a bet on a professional sporting event from space—will run NASA. Private equity mogul Stephen Feinberg, whose firm owns the company that trained journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s killers, is Trump’s pick for deputy secretary of defense. Fiserv President Frank Bisignano (worth just shy of $1 billion—for now—according to Axios) is on deck to run the Social Security Administration. Massad Boulos, who is slated to be a Middle East adviser and is also Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, was frequently described in the press as a billionaire until a New York Times story revealed that he actually just ran a Nigerian trucking business and once tried to sell a kind of “erotic” energy drink called Tantra Beverages.

It’s a bit more commonplace to hand out ambassadorships to ultra-wealthy allies, but even by that measure, it is rare to send someone overseas who is barred from practicing law in New Jersey. Charles Kushner, Trump’s pick for ambassador to France, is family, though, and it’s hard to say at this point that the crimes of the father—which included hiring a prostitute to help blackmail his brother-in-law to avoid a conviction for tax evasion and illegal campaign contributions—do not, on some deeper level, represent the United States with some accuracy. Arkansas billionaire Warren Stephens, Trump’s choice for ambassador to the United Kingdom, is by those standards fairly anonymous—but it’s notable that he’s filling the seat held in the first term by another billionaire, Woody Johnson. Meanwhile, private equity mogul and Trump business associate Tom Barrack—who was recently acquitted of charges of illegally lobbying for the United Arab Emirates—will be the president’s man in Turkey.

All told, there are 15 reported billionaires slated for jobs in the administration—16 if you count the Big Guy himself. And then there are the billionaires with no formal role who have nonetheless been invited to advise the incoming president behind the scenes, or who have been widely reported as having Trump’s ear. Guys like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a cheerleader for “effective accelerationism,” who, I feel required to point out, is currently trying to build a new model city from scratch in California; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale; and hedge funder John Paulson. This is an incomplete list. Every time I set out to compile it, a new name would percolate—some mogul you’ve never heard of who’s tied up in useless tech and worth more than Rhode Island.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump, wearing a red "Make America Great Again" cap, talk while walking side by side.
Elon Musk greets U.S. President-elect Donald Trump ahead of the launch of the sixth test flight for the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024, in Brownsville, Texas.Brandon Bell/Getty

It’s hard to overstate just how unprecedented it is to have this many ultra-ultra-wealthy figures working inside an administration. Overall, Axios projected that the net worth of the cabinet—just the immediate cabinet—was about $10 billion, which would make it roughly 100 times richer than President Joe Biden’s cabinet—and more than three times richer than Trump’s first-term cabinet, which was itself so historically wealthy that people couldn’t stop writing articles about it.

Prior to the first Trump administration—which featured both McMahon as Small Business Administration chief and billionaire Betsy DeVos as education secretary—only a handful of billionaires had ever received major non-ambassadorial jobs in an administration, even adjusting for inflation. Penny Pritzker, scion of the Hyatt hotel dynasty, spent one term as Barack Obama’s secretary of commerce. Henry Paulson, the George W. Bush treasury secretary who got down on his knees to beg then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pass a bank bailout during the 2008 financial crisis, would have passed for a billionaire in today’s dollars. And at the time Gerald Ford tapped Nelson Rockefeller to be his vice president, after Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the New York governor was worth a little more than $1 billion in today’s dollars based on his own assessment of his wealth.

Rocky’s confirmation process speaks to how unusual the prospect of a billionaire in the White House (or at least the Old Executive Office Building) really was. It was not viewed as normal; it was viewed, in some corners, as a possible threat to the national interest. Although he had already spent years in public service, Congress spent four months poring over and debating the extent of his wealth and the layers upon layers of conflicts it might present. This was a guy who had given Henry Kissinger a $50,000 check as a gift, who had showered friendly politicians with cash over the years, and who had a vast family fortune tied up in an industry—oil—that was vital to the nation’s future.

There is a tendency to say that we are in the middle of a new Gilded Age…But whereas the robber barons really did make a lot of stuff, many of the ultra-wealthy moguls meddling in politics today are caught up in a sort of negative creation, burning through vast sums of energy in pursuit of fake money and AI slop.

“It begins to seem easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Vice Presidency of the United States by way of the 25th Amendment,” the New York Times quipped as the congressional proceedings dragged on. One California Democrat put the question at hand simply: “Can Nelson Rockefeller serve two masters—the public and his own interests?” But Rockefeller’s supporters had the votes, and a sense of righteousness of their own; one Republican congressman even argued that opposing Rockefeller on the grounds of his wealth violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The 14th Amendment applied to plutocrats, too.

You can find a few more inflation-adjusted billionaires in key posts if you go back further. A MarketWatch piece from 2013 dredged up Averell Harriman, the railroad heir who served as Harry Truman’s commerce secretary, and also Jesse Jones, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s final commerce secretary. FDR’s choice to helm the Securities and Exchange Commission would have been a billionaire, too—Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who is, of course, the grandfather of Trump’s worm-eaten choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services. But these were scattered appointments; there was no real pattern there. It was nothing, in other words, like today.

There is a tendency to say that we are in the middle of a new Gilded Age. I recently argued as much in a Mother Jones cover story. But whereas the robber barons really did make a lot of stuff, many of the ultra-wealthy moguls meddling in politics today are caught up in a sort of negative creation, burning through vast sums of energy in pursuit of fake money and AI slop. If only they built railroads. This is an age, above all, of hustlers and their henchmen, and to find a parallel for this particular combination—this sense of opening the doors of the government to both big business and a whole lot of people who might flunk a background check—you have to go back to a different era. I’m talking about Warren G. Harding and the Republicans who ran Washington throughout the 1920s.

The Harding administration had it all. There were sleazy billionaires (again, I’m using today’s dollars) looking for sweetheart deals on public assets—guys like oilmen Harry Sinclair and Ed Doheny, the model for Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. There was, in Interior Secretary Albert Fall, a militant border hawk with a wealth of personal conflicts of interest who assumed office despite rumors that had once had a political rival whacked back in New Mexico. The attorney general, Harry Daugherty, chosen for his personal loyalty, was a crook who kept his own bagman as a special assistant. William J. Burns, Harding’s pick to run the Bureau of Investigation (today’s FBI), used his power to spy on and intimidate political rivals while covering up the personal transgressions of the president and his inner circle. (Laton McCartney’s 2009 book on the Teapot Dome scandal described one particularly grisly Justice Department cleanup job: Harding and Daugherty both attended a party at the home of the Washington Post publisher in which drunken guests killed a “chorus girl” by throwing kitchen implements at her.) Harding’s Veterans Bureau director was on the take for private contractors. His commerce secretary was a millionaire from the Bay Area. 

How, you might ask, did Harding’s cabinet make it through the confirmation process? They didn’t. Per McCartney, Harding colluded with a friendly Senate leader to skip advise-and-consent entirely. So men like Fall were approved without hearings, via one big acclamation vote—not too unlike Trump’s nixed plan to sneak unqualified nominees in via recess appointment.

At the center of it all was the richest man ever to serve in a presidential administration—financier Andrew Mellon, who built a fortune so vast his dilettante grandson, Timothy, could one day spend nine figures to elect Trump. Mellon, who held the job of treasury secretary over three successive Republican administrations, embodied the ethos of the era, of a party of, for, and by big business. As Matt Stoller explained in his 2019 book, Goliath, Mellon took the job after his bank had loaned Harding’s campaign $1.5 million, and he had so many financial conflicts that his appointment was “probably illegal.” In office, he weaponized the Bureau of Internal Revenue to investigate critics while delivering huge bonuses to corporations and their leaders—including himself. This is what you got when you put a one-man nation-state in charge of the national economy:

Mellon could also see to it that his industrial empire flourished in the era through other mechanisms. He blocked antitrust action against [his aluminum company] Alcoa. The FTC didn’t bother to look into Gulf Oil, or any of Mellon’s other vast holdings. Mellon didn’t just ward off attacks, but negotiated with foreign leaders for oil concessions for his own oil company, both in Colombia and in Kuwait. And the great tax reductions he pushed through Congress, which slashed his own tax bill, ended up slashing into the stock market, pushing up the value of the stocks he held.

The Harding administration did not, in the end, work out particularly well either for most of the men who sought to weaponize it or for the nation caught up in its chaos. The president had a heart attack and died while his wife was in the middle of reading him a positive press clipping. The interior secretary went to prison, along with one of his billionaire patrons. The attorney general barely avoided it. The Bureau of Investigation director resigned in disgrace. The commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover, eventually became president himself and watched the entire global economy collapse at his feet. Republicans would lose control of Congress for most of the next 60 years. And eventually, after the stock market crash, Mellon was driven from office, too, exiting just ahead of impeachment proceedings into his decade of oligarchic corruption.

Republicans learned then what they may come to understand once again: It was no way to run a country—but for a beautiful moment in time, they created a lot of value for shareholders.

How Ruben Gallego Defeated Election Denier Kari Lake in Arizona’s Senate Race

12 November 2024 at 12:04

In the race for Arizona’s open US Senate seat, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego has defeated the state’s most vociferous election-denier, Republican Kari Lake. His win gives Democrats 47 Senate seats to the Republicans’ 53.

Gallego’s win should not come as a shock if you’ve been paying attention. He had led Lake in polls consistently for the last year, usually running well ahead of the Democratic presidential ticket over the same period. But Democrats’ fourth consecutive Senate victory in a row in Arizona wasn’t exactly preordained either. Gallego’s victory statewide, after 10 years representing the state’s safest blue congressional district, was a testament to his own ability to adapt to Arizona’s purple electorate—and the far-right conspiracy theorist’s insistence on digging in her MAGA-red heels.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema opting not to run for re-election as an Independent in the general election also helped clear the way for Gallego to build a winning coalition. Of roughly 4.4 million registered voters in Arizona, a little more than a third are Republicans; a third are not affiliated with either party; and a slightly smaller cohort, about 30 percent, are Democrats.

Gallego consolidated his base at the outset by running as the anti-Sinema—a Democrat who wouldn’t abandon the party’s economic agenda or cozy up to millionaires at Davos. As he laid the groundwork for a Senate campaign, Gallego emphasized his progressive record in the House, where he was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus for many years.

His 2024 Senate campaign didn’t abandon Democrats’ meat-and-potatoes issues. Gallego was still decisively in favor of abortion rights, LGBTQ issues, passing voting rights legislation, and acknowledging climate change. But to beat Lake in the general election, in a state that has voted for the GOP candidate in the last five of six presidential elections, much of Gallego’s messaging had to evolve. So did the feelings of a small but impactful cohort of moderate and conservative Arizona voters. 

While Lake became a devotee and instigator of the Big Lie—falsely claiming she won her gubernatorial race in 2022 and that Trump won his race in 2020—Gallego was especially proactive in trying to thwart election denialism. 

A Marine veteran who saw combat in Iraq, Gallego became one of the heroes of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. As his colleagues were panicking about the rioters seeking entry to the House floor, Gallego showed them how to use gas masks. As we reported in the May-June issue of Mother Jones, he also handed Rep. Eric Swalwell a pen to use for self-defense, should the California Democrat be attacked. This imagery undoubtedly inspired Democrats, but Republicans largely wanted to forget the day’s events ever happened.

Though Democrats lost the support of some Hispanic voters in other states, Gallego’s support hovered closer to what the party has won in recent elections, and he ran particularly strong among men. He met those voters where they were; earlier in the campaign, he even rented out a boxing gym to hold a watch party for a big boxing match. And his campaign embraced Gallego’s potential to become the first Latino senator from a state with one of the largest Latino populations in the United States, kicking off the final weekend of the race with a Mexican rodeo, where volunteers handed out Lotería cards featuring Gallego as “El Senador” and Lake as “La Mentirosa,” or liar. It reminded him, he said, of the rodeos he’d gone to growing up, when visiting his father’s family in Chihuahua. But his appeal was about far more than his identity. It was rooted in aspirational working-class politics that could reach even the sorts of voters who have recently drifted to Trump.

“We’re sending people to Washington, DC, that don’t understand how hard it is to work,” he said at that rodeo. “They don’t understand what it means to put 40 hours away. They don’t understand what it means to actually struggle and still believe the next day it’s going to be better.”

Gallego was comfortable talking about border security, too. Far from the open-border policies Lake accused Gallego of promoting, he often advocated for more border patrol agents and physical structures in high-impact regions, and he highlighted how Republican senators blocked a $20 billion border security package earlier this year, at Trump’s behest. 

There’s a common refrain in politics that losing candidates tend to fight the last war. Lake turned that line into performance art.

As the child of two immigrants, Gallego emphasized the need to reform the process of migrants coming to the US legally. Migrants are “doing all these illegal or abusive things because they want to get here and we’re not making it easier,” he told Mother Jones over the summer, “and we do need people to come work.”

But the race was as much about Gallego’s ability to adapt his messaging to a broader audience as it was Lake’s complete inability to do the same. For the former local TV news anchor, election denial was both a ticket to stardom and a trap. Lake resigned from her job at Fox 10 Phoenix not long after publicly questioning Fox News’ decision to call the state for President Joe Biden four years ago, and she rocketed to stardom on the far-right as one of the most vocal proponents of the stolen-election narrative in a state with no shortage of them. Her insistence that Trump actually won the state, and her promise to prosecute election administrators—including Democratic secretary of state Katie Hobbs—earned her Trump’s endorsement during her 2022 run for governor. For a time, people were even talking about her as a future running mate.

In 2022, Lake’s election denial, and her attacks on the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, may have cost her a race in which a significant number of Republicans cast their votes, instead, for Hobbs. But Lake didn’t see it that way. In fact, she wouldn’t even admit that she lost. It wasn’t just that Lake was being a sore loser—she went to court to challenge the results, and to argue that she should be installed in the governor’s mansion. She wrote in her memoir—last year—that she was the “lawful governor” of Arizona and traveled the state whipping crowds into a frenzy about the race that had been stolen from her. Her attempts to overturn that election did not wind down when she began to campaign in earnest for a different office. They are still ongoing. There’s a common refrain in politics that losing candidates tend to fight the last war. Lake turned that line into performance art.

If Gallego’s message was a reminder to Democrats of how they win in Arizona, Lake’s offered a sampler of the myriad ways in which MAGA candidates have found to lose. She spent a bizarre amount of time out-of-state, mostly at Mar-a-Lago. Earlier this year, Lake forced the state Republican party chairman to resign after secretly recording a conversation in which he suggested she sit out the Senate race. She went back and forth and back again on the state’s territorial abortion ban, which—before it was repealed—outlawed all abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest.

Lake, who is being sued by Maricopa County’s Republican recorder for defamation for her assertions that he helped rig the vote against her, had a tendency to clam up when she was asked about her election denial during the campaign. “Why are we looking backward?” she asked CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “I’m looking forward.”

But she couldn’t resist one last glimpse over her shoulder. On election eve, at a rally on the courthouse steps in Prescott, a heavily Republican enclave two hours north of Phoenix, Lake was joined by a who’s who of election deniers, including Wendy Rogers, who previously called for the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to be thrown in prison, and Abe Hamadeh, who continued to contest his 280-vote loss in the 2022 attorney general’s race even as he ran for Congress. When it was her turn, she thanked Hamadeh for challenging the results. “When they did to us what they did to us in 2022 and everyone else ran and hid,” she complained. “Guess who stood with me and said, ‘Damn it, we’re going to fight’?” 

“We have elections that are run so horribly,” Lake complained. She wanted the crowd gathered in the chilly November night to “give the people running our elections whiplash” by making the result “too big to rig.”

Campaign season didn’t end for Lake on election day, though. On Thursday, she got one last piece of bad news: The state supreme court rejected Lake’s final appeal in her attempts to overturn her 2022 defeat. Her Senate dreams are over. Her campaign for governor finally is too.

I Spent Last Night With Arizona Dems As Their World Fell Apart

6 November 2024 at 20:10

The problem with holding a election-night watch party in the mountain time zone is that by the time people start to roll in, the night will have already taken a turn. After racking up historic wins during the Trump era, Arizona Democrats entered the 2024 election hoping to keep the positive results coming. But at the party’s official celebration at an upscale hotel and conference center in north Phoenix on Tuesday, the mood started off anxious.

When I asked Mary Kuckertz, a mental-health professional from Tempe, how she was feeling, she used a term that to seemed to capture the spirit of the Democratic electorate: “Nauseously optimistic.”

At that point in the night, Vice President Kamala Harris’ path to victory was narrowing but still possible, and Kuckertz, a mental-health researcher, was thinking about what a second Trump term would mean. “So much funding got cut when Trump was president—all of these really phenomenal programs that we’re bringing these mental health services to children and families who really needed it, so many of those services have totally gone by the wayside,” she said. “I can’t handle more trans kids not getting access to basic human care.”

Arizona Dems getting nervous as the hour gets later at the watch party.Cassidy Arai

Arizona was the epicenter for the popular front against Donald Trump and his allies, and the people in the room were a reminder of what this coalition of moderate Republicans, Native Americans, Black and Latino voters, and college-educated whites had accomplished over the last eight years. Attendees heard from Gov. Katie Hobbs, who defeated election-denier Kari Lake two years ago; and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who defeated election denier Mark Finchem that same year; and Sen. Mark Kelly, who defeated Peter Thiel acolyte Blake Masters in 2022 and Trump-backed Rep. Martha McSally two years before that. The volunteers and organizers in the room had flipped a Senate seat in 2018 and knocked Sheriff Joe Arpaio from office in 2016. And on Tuesday, when almost everything else was looking grim, they had delivered a historic policy win—passing Prop 139, a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to an abortion in the state to the point of viability. It wasn’t particularly close.

These were major accomplishments—the product of years or organizing and tactical ticket-splitting. There was another possible silver lining, too: Lake could lose again, this time to Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who predicted victory in a speech last night, but cautioned supporters that it might take time for the race to be called. (It still hasn’t been.) Gallego, a Marine veteran who was raised by a single mother, would be the state’s first Latino senator, and he ran well ahead of the presidential ticket—particularly among Latino men. He succeeded less through any sort of anti-Trump messaging than through an aspirational pitch for the American Dream and working-class economic priorities.

The longer things went on, though, the more dissonant it seemed to hear Harry Styles and “Mr. Brightside” blaring over the speakers while Steve Kornacki pointed at an increasingly crimson map. (Pick a state—it didn’t seem to matter.) The crowd dwindled, and people started to hit the cash bar with a bit more purpose. 

When I asked Denise Deubery, who was watching the MSNBC feed, how she was feeling, she told me “the best way to put it is nauseously optimistic.”

Breaking down the setup at the watch party on Election Day at the Hilton Phoenix Resort at the Peak in Phoenix.Cassidy Arai

The phrase was apparently catching on. But the meaning was a little different. The nauseous part was obvious, of course, but as the networks prepared to call more states that would narrow Harris’ path to victory even more, why was Deubery optimistic? It wasn’t about Harris’ chances, she said, but about the work that had brought them all there.

“I’ve never been amongst more encouraging individuals that I’ll probably never meet again in my life,” she said. She’d been volunteering since September. The fight gave her hope. It was the type of thing you could build on. “I’ve never been more of a proud American.”

By the time Fontes spoke, to officially wind the ceremonies down, there were more photographers than partisans on floor. “Wipe that frigging sourpuss face off of your face,” he implored anyone listening. Determined to put a positive spin on things, he noted the high number of outstanding ballots to count in Maricopa, and asked Democrats to be patient as results trickled in over the coming days.

“The last thing in the world I want to see out of my Democratic Party is a lot of pearl-clutching, a lot of hand-wringing, and a lot of naysaying,” he said. He wanted them to “continue moving forward with joy, whether or not you feel good about what Jake Tapper and the rest of those folks are saying on TV tonight.” Come morning, it was time to start curing ballots.

But there was no point in denying the obvious. 

“Lastly let me say this: If you’re going to drink: good—get an Uber or Lyft when you go home,” he said. “I want y’all to be safe, because we got a lot of work to still do.”

I Spent Last Night With Arizona Dems As Their World Fell Apart

6 November 2024 at 20:10

The problem with holding a election-night watch party in the mountain time zone is that by the time people start to roll in, the night will have already taken a turn. After racking up historic wins during the Trump era, Arizona Democrats entered the 2024 election hoping to keep the positive results coming. But at the party’s official celebration at an upscale hotel and conference center in north Phoenix on Tuesday, the mood started off anxious.

When I asked Mary Kuckertz, a mental-health professional from Tempe, how she was feeling, she used a term that to seemed to capture the spirit of the Democratic electorate: “Nauseously optimistic.”

At that point in the night, Vice President Kamala Harris’ path to victory was narrowing but still possible, and Kuckertz, a mental-health researcher, was thinking about what a second Trump term would mean. “So much funding got cut when Trump was president—all of these really phenomenal programs that we’re bringing these mental health services to children and families who really needed it, so many of those services have totally gone by the wayside,” she said. “I can’t handle more trans kids not getting access to basic human care.”

Arizona Dems getting nervous as the hour gets later at the watch party.Cassidy Arai

Arizona was the epicenter for the popular front against Donald Trump and his allies, and the people in the room were a reminder of what this coalition of moderate Republicans, Native Americans, Black and Latino voters, and college-educated whites had accomplished over the last eight years. Attendees heard from Gov. Katie Hobbs, who defeated election-denier Kari Lake two years ago; and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who defeated election denier Mark Finchem that same year; and Sen. Mark Kelly, who defeated Peter Thiel acolyte Blake Masters in 2022 and Trump-backed Rep. Martha McSally two years before that. The volunteers and organizers in the room had flipped a Senate seat in 2018 and knocked Sheriff Joe Arpaio from office in 2016. And on Tuesday, when almost everything else was looking grim, they had delivered a historic policy win—passing Prop 139, a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to an abortion in the state to the point of viability. It wasn’t particularly close.

These were major accomplishments—the product of years or organizing and tactical ticket-splitting. There was another possible silver lining, too: Lake could lose again, this time to Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who predicted victory in a speech last night, but cautioned supporters that it might take time for the race to be called. (It still hasn’t been.) Gallego, a Marine veteran who was raised by a single mother, would be the state’s first Latino senator, and he ran well ahead of the presidential ticket—particularly among Latino men. He succeeded less through any sort of anti-Trump messaging than through an aspirational pitch for the American Dream and working-class economic priorities.

The longer things went on, though, the more dissonant it seemed to hear Harry Styles and “Mr. Brightside” blaring over the speakers while Steve Kornacki pointed at an increasingly crimson map. (Pick a state—it didn’t seem to matter.) The crowd dwindled, and people started to hit the cash bar with a bit more purpose. 

When I asked Denise Deubery, who was watching the MSNBC feed, how she was feeling, she told me “the best way to put it is nauseously optimistic.”

Breaking down the setup at the watch party on Election Day at the Hilton Phoenix Resort at the Peak in Phoenix.Cassidy Arai

The phrase was apparently catching on. But the meaning was a little different. The nauseous part was obvious, of course, but as the networks prepared to call more states that would narrow Harris’ path to victory even more, why was Deubery optimistic? It wasn’t about Harris’ chances, she said, but about the work that had brought them all there.

“I’ve never been amongst more encouraging individuals that I’ll probably never meet again in my life,” she said. She’d been volunteering since September. The fight gave her hope. It was the type of thing you could build on. “I’ve never been more of a proud American.”

By the time Fontes spoke, to officially wind the ceremonies down, there were more photographers than partisans on floor. “Wipe that frigging sourpuss face off of your face,” he implored anyone listening. Determined to put a positive spin on things, he noted the high number of outstanding ballots to count in Maricopa, and asked Democrats to be patient as results trickled in over the coming days.

“The last thing in the world I want to see out of my Democratic Party is a lot of pearl-clutching, a lot of hand-wringing, and a lot of naysaying,” he said. He wanted them to “continue moving forward with joy, whether or not you feel good about what Jake Tapper and the rest of those folks are saying on TV tonight.” Come morning, it was time to start curing ballots.

But there was no point in denying the obvious. 

“Lastly let me say this: If you’re going to drink: good—get an Uber or Lyft when you go home,” he said. “I want y’all to be safe, because we got a lot of work to still do.”

The Oligarch Election

5 November 2024 at 15:43

It feels strange to suggest that the second-most memorable thing that happened on a stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, this year was the former president of the United States getting shot in the face. But if Donald Trump wins the presidential election, the image that will be seared in my mind is that of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, jumping around the same stage a few months later—eyes weirdly vacant, a black MAGA hat splayed awkwardly on his head, his legs and arms outstretched in the shape of a knotted and overgrown X.

Musk had been a public Trump supporter since the summer, and a not-so-subtle conservative sympathizer for far longer. He was already pouring tens of millions of dollars into an unusual and untested field campaign in key swing states. And he had hosted a glitchy and uncomfortable conversation with Trump on X. But the appearance at that rally of a defense contractor who controls half the satellites in the night sky, the electric-vehicle charging network, and quite possibly the social media network where you found this article, felt like something ominous and new. 

Tim Walz—who told a crowd a few weeks after Musk’s appearance in Butler that the tech mogul was “skipping around like a dipshit”—was only trying to get one over on his counterpart when he called Musk Trump’s “running mate.” But it was not entirely wrong. It was Musk who lobbied Trump to put JD Vance on the ticket. Musk was the one funding the get-out-the-vote effort. Musk was the guy who turned one of the world’s biggest social media platforms into a black hole of anti-immigrant agitprop. Musk was the guy who was going to be given the keys to the domestic discretionary budget, federal budget, to find $2 trillion in cuts from just $1.7 trillion in discretionary spending. Vance was the headliner at a rally in Scottsdale over the weekend, but Musk was a star in absentia, the name people kept bringing up on their own. He was “hilarious,” a voter told me. He was a “genius.” (He was also: “Not a very good speaker.”) Musk’s organizers swarmed the line outside to collect data for Musk’s PAC so that he could—well, it’s not really clear what the point of that was. That felt kind of Trumpian too.

From the start of the primaries, it was almost impossible to separate what was happening on stage from what some of the richest people alive were doing off it.

It is hard to say anything new about 78-year-old Donald Trump. Nine years after his first campaign event in Manhattan, even the ex-president himself seemed to be running out of steam sometimes, forgetting names and places, missing door handles, and eschewing his entire stump speech entirely to dance—if that’s the word—to a Sinéad O’Connor cover of a Prince song from 1985. But Musk did offer something different, if not in any of the things he had to say—the inevitable race science and disinformation and faux-heterodox drivel of someone discovering conservative message boards for the first time while also playing Starcraft—than in the relationship between money and power he represented. This was the oligarch election. And Musk was the richest and most powerful oligarch of them all.

One of the simpler explanations you often heard about Trump’s rise was that the electorate had been primed for someone like him. The conditions were all there for the right kind of demagogue—we had bad trade deals, scam culture, reality television, and the Electoral College. You could say the same about Musk and the billionaires whose spending set the terms for how the election would be conducted and what it would be about.

In Musk’s case, the work was made possible by landmark Supreme Court decisions more than a decade ago, which opened the floodgates to an ever-growing and frankly horrifying gusher of often untraceable cash into the political system. The rules on what those outside groups can and cannot do, and how closely they can coordinate, have become a little more toothless every cycle since. For one person to gain this much influence, a lot of other kinds of people and institutions have to lose it. Musk’s power has been enabled by the monopolistic growth of the internet economy, and the not entirely unrelated collapse of much of the hard-news media industry, online and off, and by a tax and regulatory climate that has allowed a small subset of people in Silicon Valley to grow not just rich, but nation-state rich.

But the oligarch election was not just about Musk. From the start of the primaries, it was almost impossible to separate what was happening on stage from what some of the richest people alive were doing off it. Rep. Dean Phillips’ primary challenge to Joe Biden was funded in large part by billionaire investor Bill Ackman. (Phillips even changed his campaign’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policy after Ackman complained.) Sen. Tim Scott’s primary challenge to Trump was supposed to be bankrolled by Larry Ellison, but the money never materialized. And then there was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose campaign, while it lasted, was an almost wholly-owned subsidiary of Timothy Mellon, grandson of Andrew. Mellon, who was, at one point, the largest contributor to both the RFK Jr. and Trump campaigns, was sort of Musk, inverted—a scion of Gilded Age wealth who spent part of his share of family fortune on a fruitless search to find Amelia Earhart’s plane at the bottom of the sea.

(An aside: Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, who was chosen for the ticket largely because of her perceived ability to fund it, once allegedly had an affair with Musk while married to Sergey Brin. According to a recent New York Times story, Musk once offered her his sperm, as part of his obsession with populating the world with children who share his genes. During the campaign, Musk similarly offered to father a child with Taylor Swift, following the pop star’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.)

Last month, Jeff Bezos unilaterally stopped his newspaper from publishing an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris… It was hard to view the timing as anything less than a weak surrender, from a man whose rocket company would be competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for contracts in a potential Trump second term.

Musk’s former partner at PayPal, Peter Thiel, did not give as much money this cycle as he has in the past. But he also didn’t really need to. His contribution to the race was merely a vice presidential nominee—his former employee, Vance, with whom Thiel shares some unusual ideological influences. Vance got to the Senate because Thiel personally introduced him to Trump at Mar-a-Lago and spent $15 million to get him elected. He’s on the ticket now, in part, because Thiel, like Musk, urged Trump personally to pick him.

All this money, and the people throwing it around, often defined the terms of the debate. Trump said so explicitly at a fundraiser early in the campaign, promising fossil-fuel executives a host of goodies—including eliminating the electric vehicle mandate—if they ponied up $1 billion to support his bid. He supported a ban on TikTok in the United States. Then he changed his mind after a meeting with the Pennsylvania billionaire—and TikTok investor—Jeff Yass, who has given Republican outside groups and candidates upwards of $50 million. Incidentally, Yass was a shareholder in a company that merged with Trump’s media venture this year.

The money sloshing around, in pursuit of tax cuts and government contracts and something called “pronatalism,” has real consequences on real people. If there was a defining issue on the Republican side, it was the continuing attack on transgender athletes who compete—in astonishingly small numbers—in high school and college sports. It is impossible to overstate how much this issue dominated the airwaves of competitive Senate races.

Who was funding this onslaught? A peek at the disclosures of Senate Leadership Fund, a leading Republican outside group in Senate races, offered a revealing look. Leading the way was billionaire Ken Griffin, the Florida-based hedge-funder who once told his local paper that ultra-wealthy elites have “insufficient influence” in American politics. His $27.5 million was followed by $20 million from Paul Singer, a hedge-funder who grew his fortune by squeezing poor countries for debt repayments, and who appeared in the news most recently for flying Samuel Alito to Alaska on his private jet. Another top contributor was Stephen Schwarzman ($9 million), the private-equity mogul who once compared President Barack Obama’s efforts to close the carried interest loophole to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Marc Andreesen, the Silicon Valley mogul, chipped in a more pedestrian but still respectable $375,000—perhaps enough to buy a starter home someday in the new model city he’s trying to build from scratch in California. Throw in a few million from several different Waltons, and a big check from Rupert Murdoch, and SLF was flush.

I’ve mostly focused on Trump and his allies, and not Democrats, because this election in particular was asymmetrical. Donors were contributing to Republican super-PACs at a roughly 2-to-1 clip. No one on the left is fusing government business with high-dollar donations and media manipulation like Musk.

The election was defined not just by the oligarchs who participated but by those who sat it out. .

But the Democratic campaign was shaped by the power of ultra-wealthy donors too. Conservatives talked incessantly about George Soros not just because of the subtext but because of the plain text—he gave $60 million to a super-PAC that supports Democrats earlier this year, while seeding left-of-center political organizing efforts across the country. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has spent $50 million. So has Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder whose philanthropic efforts have given him vast influence over the future of public health and education. The right-wing populists and the demagogues might be full of shit. But their punches often land for a reason.

In the three-week interregnum between President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate and his eventual departure from the race, some of the most important voices were the megadonors—the shadow party within the party. And in the punch-drunk weeks that followed, as Harris set out to define what her candidacy would be about, everyone from Mark Cuban to Barry Diller to Reid Hoffman came forward with the same suggestion—that perhaps Harris could replace Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, who has been the tip of the spear of the current administration’s anti-trust enforcement. When the people funding the campaign are naming the bureaucrats they want fired, that’s oligarchy, too.

But the election was defined not just by the oligarchs who participated but by those who sat it out. 

When I mentioned Musk’s donations to a voter at the Vance rally in Scottsdale, she was nonplussed.

“Look at what Zuckerberg is doing on the left with his money,” she said.

But seriously, look at what Mark Zuckerberg is doing with his money: Not very much! A former supporter of immigration reform efforts, who helped pay for poll workers across the country a few years ago, Zuckerberg has largely given up on political activism, the New York Times reported recently. He has made peace with Trump, who has said Zuckerberg should face “life in prison” for taking down Covid misinformation during the pandemic. After Trump was shot, Zuckerberg called the former president a “badass.” They even spoke by phone. 

In seemingly abandoning any efforts to maintain a functioning online space, and actively throttling real political news, Zuckerberg created a vacuum that other powerful actors could fill. Facebook no longer really cares about politics or moderation or the appearance of impropriety now. The company is happy to take huge amounts of money from Musk for misleading advertisements that pretend to be coming from Harris.

Last month, Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, unilaterally stopped his newspaper, the Washington Post, from publishing an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, on the grounds that he believed newspaper endorsements contributed to a declining trust in news media. And while few people will miss one more sternly worded editorial about Donald Trump, it was hard to view the timing as anything less than a weak surrender, from a man whose rocket company would be competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for contracts in a potential Trump second term. It fit into a pattern of elite timidity. The Times recently reported that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon—like a number of other prominent business titans—quietly supported Harris, but were afraid to say so publicly. The billionaires aren’t going to save us. They might not even try.

Arizona’s Election Deniers Say to Trust the Process—For Now

4 November 2024 at 16:33

When Tim Stringham arrived at a “Veterans for Harris” canvassing launch on Sunday in a Phoenix shopping center alongside Sen. Mark Kelly and Rep. Ted Lieu of California, the 35-year-old first-time candidate took a moment to acknowledge the obvious.

“You know that times are strange when the candidate for recorder gets to come up here and speak with a US Senator and a United States congressman,” he told the 30 or so volunteers who had packed into the narrow room for the start of a critical afternoon of knocking on doors.

Stringham, a former JAG attorney, is the Democratic candidate for Maricopa County recorder, an office that’s responsible for maintaining voter rolls and mailing out ballots in a county of more than 4 million people. In a normal year, it’s one of those vital but mostly anonymous jobs, like assessor or auditor, that voters are only aware of—if they’re aware of it at all—from yard signs. But Maricopa’s elections, as Kelly pointed out a few moments later, have not been normal for quite a while. The fight for a few downballot races like Stringham’s will determine the future of the democratic process in a county that in recent years has become ground zero for election denial.

“Before I talk about the presidential election, I want to talk about the county recorders race,” the former astronaut told the canvassers in Phoenix. “The guy we had, Steve Richer, the Republican, did a fantastic job. And nothing against Tim here…but he did a really good job, and we actually owe him a lot. He sort of, like, maybe saved democracy.”

Stephen Richer, as I reported for a recent story and an episode of Reveal, drew national praise for standing up to election deniers in the aftermath of the 2020 and 2022 elections, while working to make his county’s voting process more transparent. But he was vilified by members of his party, including the 2022 Republican gubernatorial nominee—and 2024 US Senate nominee—MAGA loyalist Kari Lake, who blamed him for their losses that year. In July, right-wing state representative Justin Heap defeated Richer easily in the primary. While Heap has not outright said that he believes those recent elections were stolen, he welcomed the backing of Lake and other prominent election deniers. 

“He lost to a right-wing MAGA sycophant for Donald Trump,” Kelly told the volunteers getting ready to knock on doors. Stringham “has to win—make sure you tell them that it’s really important that they get to that part of the ballot where they vote for Tim. Otherwise, we might have an issue here, once we get to when folks get sworn in for those positions.”

And it’s not just about the recorder race. Not far away, at another canvassing event on Sunday, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs helped get out the vote for Daniel Valenzuela, a former firefighter who is running for the Maricopa Board of Supervisors. The Republican-controlled board, which basically is the county’s governing council, “is in 50 plus lines” of business, Valenzuela explained, from education to public safety. But board members have drawn the ire of the far right for their handling of elections, where they’re responsible for Election Day voting and tabulation. Two Republican supervisors who have drawn the ire of election deniers for certifying the last two elections, Bill Gates and Clint Hickman, chose to retire this year. Another, Jack Sellers, was defeated in his primary by an election denier. 

“I mean, these are solid supervisors regardless of party, sensible supervisors,” Valenzuela told me. “Two of them decided not to run for re-election, and one of them lost in his primary, and it wasn’t close. And so what is the common thread there?” Now he was running for Gates’ old seat, in part, as a check against the anti-democratic impulses on the right.

With just a few days left until Election Day, Stringham had more or less stopped trying to find and persuade undecided voters and was trying to track down known supporters and Democrats who hadn’t yet voted, to remind them of the importance of picking candidates for every option on the county’s two-page ballot. But reaching crossover voters was a huge part of his campaign—as it has been for every Democrat who’s won elections statewide or in Maricopa County in recent years. And Stringham believes that defending the election process in Maricopa is a winning issue. 

“I think the truth is that most Arizonans actually like our election system,” he said. “We get a lot of complaints about things like the mail being slow, or, ‘Why hasn’t my ballot arrived yet?’ There really aren’t a lot of people who say, ‘We want vote by mail to go away.’ That really doesn’t exist.”

His comments were a dig at Heap, who joined Republicans in the legislature in an unsuccessful effort to do just that. One way Stringham can tell his argument resonates? Republicans seemed to be trying to steer away from election denial as a campaign issue in the final stretch.

“Turning Point right now is out there encouraging everybody to vote early,” he said, referring to the political action committee, founded by Charlie Kirk, which is responsible for much of the Trump campaign’s ground game in the state. “They’re doing the same thing we just did—rustling up ballots. So they’re believing in the system, right?”

Stringham believed that the GOP has realized their “election denial strategy has failed, and they’re trying to pivot away from it.” He pointed to their avoidance of any questions about election denial, and how it has been abandoned as a talking point. His opponent is a perfect example of this new dynamic. “He not only voted early, but he literally is sending out text messages that say he’s running to make voting elections boring. He just took Richer’s tagline!” Stringham said. “So they’re sort of just trying to forget the world that happened in the last two, three, four years.”

That is not to say that the election deniers have given up. Lake is still appealing her loss in the 2022 governor’s race—in fact, the state supreme court will take another look at her arguments in the case on November 6. There is no shortage of “Stop the Steal” candidates on the ballot, and Republicans are laying the groundwork to contest the results across the country should Trump fall short once again. But Stringham was on to something. For now, at least, Republican leaders are trying to get their voters to trust the process, not reject it.

At a Trump rally on Saturday in Scottsdale, Charlie Kirk leaned into the message that Republicans control their own destiny. All they had to do was “chase” the 400,000 Republican ballots that had not yet been turned in. At one point, he asked people in the crowd to take a look at the small, hangar-like space in which he was speaking. “This seating section right here has about 280 people,” he said. “Our Attorney General in this state became Attorney General by 280 votes. And there were 200,000 Republicans that got ballots that did not submit them in the midterm election.”

“We easily could have found 400 more votes. It’s easy to complain, but we can only complain if we collapse on the finish line, everybody.”

The Democratic AG, Kris Mayes, drew boos from the crowd when Kirk mentioned her recent announcement that she was instructing her criminal division to investigate Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney. “She’s trying to investigate the speech of Donald Trump, but you know what? That’s our fault, not her fault, because we didn’t turn out the vote,” he said. “We easily could have found 300 more votes. We easily could have found 400 more votes. It’s easy to complain, but we can only complain if we collapse on the finish line, everybody.”

There was the usual chatter about making the election, as Donald Trump Jr. put it, “too big to rig.” But on an individual level, the voters I spoke with felt encouraged by their experiences with the system. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that almost everyone had voted by mail, something Republicans like Kirk have been pushing hard since 2022—in contrast to Trump’s past assertions that it was just a way for Democrats to steal elections. Some of them said they were encouraged by the text alerts they’d received from the county recorder’s office, which, per the county, updates voters when their ballot has been “prepared, mailed, received, verified and counted.” An added benefit to voting early is those voters were spared the sorts of Election Day annoyances—like overheating printers or long lines—that Republicans in the past have cited as proof of a plot against them.

Then again, there may be a simpler reason to explain this sudden sunniness about the process: Most recent polls show Donald Trump ahead in the state. If those results hold, no one will need to conjure conspiracy theories to explain the results—they’ll happily accept them.

Arizona’s Election Deniers Say to Trust the Process—For Now

4 November 2024 at 16:33

When Tim Stringham arrived at a “Veterans for Harris” canvassing launch on Sunday in a Phoenix shopping center alongside Sen. Mark Kelly and Rep. Ted Lieu of California, the 35-year-old first-time candidate took a moment to acknowledge the obvious.

“You know that times are strange when the candidate for recorder gets to come up here and speak with a US Senator and a United States congressman,” he told the 30 or so volunteers who had packed into the narrow room for the start of a critical afternoon of knocking on doors.

Stringham, a former JAG attorney, is the Democratic candidate for Maricopa County recorder, an office that’s responsible for maintaining voter rolls and mailing out ballots in a county of more than 4 million people. In a normal year, it’s one of those vital but mostly anonymous jobs, like assessor or auditor, that voters are only aware of—if they’re aware of it at all—from yard signs. But Maricopa’s elections, as Kelly pointed out a few moments later, have not been normal for quite a while. The fight for a few downballot races like Stringham’s will determine the future of the democratic process in a county that in recent years has become ground zero for election denial.

“Before I talk about the presidential election, I want to talk about the county recorders race,” the former astronaut told the canvassers in Phoenix. “The guy we had, Steve Richer, the Republican, did a fantastic job. And nothing against Tim here…but he did a really good job, and we actually owe him a lot. He sort of, like, maybe saved democracy.”

Stephen Richer, as I reported for a recent story and an episode of Reveal, drew national praise for standing up to election deniers in the aftermath of the 2020 and 2022 elections, while working to make his county’s voting process more transparent. But he was vilified by members of his party, including the 2022 Republican gubernatorial nominee—and 2024 US Senate nominee—MAGA loyalist Kari Lake, who blamed him for their losses that year. In July, right-wing state representative Justin Heap defeated Richer easily in the primary. While Heap has not outright said that he believes those recent elections were stolen, he welcomed the backing of Lake and other prominent election deniers. 

“He lost to a right-wing MAGA sycophant for Donald Trump,” Kelly told the volunteers getting ready to knock on doors. Stringham “has to win—make sure you tell them that it’s really important that they get to that part of the ballot where they vote for Tim. Otherwise, we might have an issue here, once we get to when folks get sworn in for those positions.”

And it’s not just about the recorder race. Not far away, at another canvassing event on Sunday, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs helped get out the vote for Daniel Valenzuela, a former firefighter who is running for the Maricopa Board of Supervisors. The Republican-controlled board, which basically is the county’s governing council, “is in 50 plus lines” of business, Valenzuela explained, from education to public safety. But board members have drawn the ire of the far right for their handling of elections, where they’re responsible for Election Day voting and tabulation. Two Republican supervisors who have drawn the ire of election deniers for certifying the last two elections, Bill Gates and Clint Hickman, chose to retire this year. Another, Jack Sellers, was defeated in his primary by an election denier. 

“I mean, these are solid supervisors regardless of party, sensible supervisors,” Valenzuela told me. “Two of them decided not to run for re-election, and one of them lost in his primary, and it wasn’t close. And so what is the common thread there?” Now he was running for Gates’ old seat, in part, as a check against the anti-democratic impulses on the right.

With just a few days left until Election Day, Stringham had more or less stopped trying to find and persuade undecided voters and was trying to track down known supporters and Democrats who hadn’t yet voted, to remind them of the importance of picking candidates for every option on the county’s two-page ballot. But reaching crossover voters was a huge part of his campaign—as it has been for every Democrat who’s won elections statewide or in Maricopa County in recent years. And Stringham believes that defending the election process in Maricopa is a winning issue. 

“I think the truth is that most Arizonans actually like our election system,” he said. “We get a lot of complaints about things like the mail being slow, or, ‘Why hasn’t my ballot arrived yet?’ There really aren’t a lot of people who say, ‘We want vote by mail to go away.’ That really doesn’t exist.”

His comments were a dig at Heap, who joined Republicans in the legislature in an unsuccessful effort to do just that. One way Stringham can tell his argument resonates? Republicans seemed to be trying to steer away from election denial as a campaign issue in the final stretch.

“Turning Point right now is out there encouraging everybody to vote early,” he said, referring to the political action committee, founded by Charlie Kirk, which is responsible for much of the Trump campaign’s ground game in the state. “They’re doing the same thing we just did—rustling up ballots. So they’re believing in the system, right?”

Stringham believed that the GOP has realized their “election denial strategy has failed, and they’re trying to pivot away from it.” He pointed to their avoidance of any questions about election denial, and how it has been abandoned as a talking point. His opponent is a perfect example of this new dynamic. “He not only voted early, but he literally is sending out text messages that say he’s running to make voting elections boring. He just took Richer’s tagline!” Stringham said. “So they’re sort of just trying to forget the world that happened in the last two, three, four years.”

That is not to say that the election deniers have given up. Lake is still appealing her loss in the 2022 governor’s race—in fact, the state supreme court will take another look at her arguments in the case on November 6. There is no shortage of “Stop the Steal” candidates on the ballot, and Republicans are laying the groundwork to contest the results across the country should Trump fall short once again. But Stringham was on to something. For now, at least, Republican leaders are trying to get their voters to trust the process, not reject it.

At a Trump rally on Saturday in Scottsdale, Charlie Kirk leaned into the message that Republicans control their own destiny. All they had to do was “chase” the 400,000 Republican ballots that had not yet been turned in. At one point, he asked people in the crowd to take a look at the small, hangar-like space in which he was speaking. “This seating section right here has about 280 people,” he said. “Our Attorney General in this state became Attorney General by 280 votes. And there were 200,000 Republicans that got ballots that did not submit them in the midterm election.”

“We easily could have found 400 more votes. It’s easy to complain, but we can only complain if we collapse on the finish line, everybody.”

The Democratic AG, Kris Mayes, drew boos from the crowd when Kirk mentioned her recent announcement that she was instructing her criminal division to investigate Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney. “She’s trying to investigate the speech of Donald Trump, but you know what? That’s our fault, not her fault, because we didn’t turn out the vote,” he said. “We easily could have found 300 more votes. We easily could have found 400 more votes. It’s easy to complain, but we can only complain if we collapse on the finish line, everybody.”

There was the usual chatter about making the election, as Donald Trump Jr. put it, “too big to rig.” But on an individual level, the voters I spoke with felt encouraged by their experiences with the system. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that almost everyone had voted by mail, something Republicans like Kirk have been pushing hard since 2022—in contrast to Trump’s past assertions that it was just a way for Democrats to steal elections. Some of them said they were encouraged by the text alerts they’d received from the county recorder’s office, which, per the county, updates voters when their ballot has been “prepared, mailed, received, verified and counted.” An added benefit to voting early is those voters were spared the sorts of Election Day annoyances—like overheating printers or long lines—that Republicans in the past have cited as proof of a plot against them.

Then again, there may be a simpler reason to explain this sudden sunniness about the process: Most recent polls show Donald Trump ahead in the state. If those results hold, no one will need to conjure conspiracy theories to explain the results—they’ll happily accept them.

Trump Supporters Love Elon Musk. They’re a Little Confused About His PAC.

4 November 2024 at 11:00

Elon Musk’s $150 million pro-Trump super-PAC is one of the biggest campaign-finance stories in years—maybe ever. It’s the first time a presidential campaign has completely outsourced much of its get-out-the-vote operation to an outside group. And so far, it has been more X than SpaceX.

Musk has overhauled his staff at least once, been sued by the city of Philadelphia, and taken criticism from Republicans who fear that putting a billionaire novice in charge of turnout operations in a nailbiter election just might cost former President Donald Trump the whole thing. The early returns are, as he might say, concerning. The Guardian reported last month that 24 percent of all door-knocks in the state had been flagged as fraudulent by the PAC; in one case, according to the report all 796 door-knocks attributed to one now-fired canvasser had been faked. According to a recent story in Wired, it’s not even clear if some of the people working for the PAC know they’re working to elect Trump.

“It was reported in the New York Times yesterday, I don’t know if anybody saw the article, but there was a canvasser here who was knocking on doors for Donald Trump, and simultaneously managed to be on a golf course 7,000 miles away,” Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly told a room full of volunteers at a Democratic field office in Phoenix on Sunday. “So that’s their operation.”

Unlike most field campaigns, Musk’s mercenaries don’t hold big canvassing launches with coffee and donuts and VIPs, so I wasn’t sure if I’d even encounter them on the ground in Arizona. But it turns out you don’t have to go looking for Musk’s PAC; at Trump campaign events, they’ll come to you.

Almost as soon I slipped into line for J.D. Vance’s rally on Saturday, at the offices of a Scottsdale weapons manufacturer, I encountered a pair of tablet-toting America PAC organizers, walking up and down the line asking people for their information. It was the biggest canvassing day of the entire cycle—all across Maricopa County, groups of volunteers were fanning out into subdivisions for one last push. But these people with tablets were after something a bit more banal. 

“Hey guys,” asked a man in a Smokey the Bear t-shirt and a safari hat, “Have we signed the bill to protect the First and Second Amendment?”

Behind me, a woman started to fill out the survey, but stopped when it asked for her phone number, even though she was assured it would only be used to confirm she was who she said she was.

“Anybody else interested in signing the petition that’s for the freedom of speech and the right to bear arms?” the man with the tablet asked.

He turned to a guy in a baseball cap: “Hey man, can we get you to sign as well to support the First and Second Amendment?”

The voter couldn’t—he was still registered to vote in Tulsa, and the petition is limited to residents of the seven most competitive swing states.

When the organizer walked away, the Oklahoman turned to the woman who had declined to give her phone number. “He seems fishy,” he said of the organizer.

The woman did her best impression of the signature-gatherer. “Where are you from? Where are you from?”

Many people I talked to at the rally were in the same boat: The operation by the PAC, which was not formally connected with the event, seems a little sus. These voters didn’t want to be rushed into signing something on the spot. “I wasn’t sure if it was just a way for them to get our information,” one woman told me. Which, to be fair, it is.

But attitudes toward Musk himself were a lot more favorable. In fact, voters almost invariably brought him up on their own, as someone who had given the campaign, and the prospect of a second Trump term, a new dimension. “He isn’t a very good speaker,” Alan Travis told me, as we waited in line, but it “makes a big difference” to have him on board, because of what he perceived to be a cross-partisan appeal.

Stacie Boucher, a California transplant who says she fled liberal policies, empathized with Musk’s relocation to a more conservative state—in his case, Texas. While the billionaire has spent much of the final stretch in Pennsylvania, where he also has business interests, Musk’s long shadow was felt on stage and off in Scottsdale.

“How would you like to let Elon Musk loose on the bureaucracy?” Donald Trump Jr. asked the crowd in his warmup address for Vance.

When Vance later promised to fire bureaucrats, someone in the crowd behind me shouted simply, “Elon!”

After the event, I saw no sign of the people with tablets. But if the petitions—and the $1 million lottery they fuel—do not serve an obvious benefit to the campaign at this point, they’ve certainly presented an opportunity for entrepreneurially minded Trump supporters. Just past the exit, a woman named Chere Oliver, wearing a white hat that identified her as a “Trump Force Captain,” had set up a folding table surrounded by yard signs—some from the campaign, and some more original creations. Voters could pose for a photo next to a sign that said “Gang Members for Harris” and an Avengers-style poster that said “Team Unity”—featuring Trump as Captain America, and Musk just over his left shoulder, between Vivek Ramaswamy and RFK Jr. For $10, you could buy a Trump yard sign that featured dogs and cats in front of waving American flags.

Trump rallies are a festival of such knick knacks. But Oliver’s biggest hustle was there on the table. While the official campaign signs were free for anyone to take, she was asking everyone who did to sign the America PAC petition too—and to make clear that she was the one who’d referred them. For convenience, she’d included her phone number and email address; anyone in a hurry should just scan a QR code for the petition and take a photo of her information. Because the PAC was offering $47 for each referral, the Trump volunteer stood to make a lot of money if enough fellow supporters abided by her honor system. Oliver had recently lost her job and was banking on this to help cover expenses. She said she’d referred hundreds of people already. So far, she told me, she’d only received $94 for her efforts, which she chalked up to delays in the verification process. 

Her goal was to get 10,457 signatures, she said—Biden’s margin of victory in the state in 2020.

Trump Supporters Love Elon Musk. They’re a Little Confused About His PAC.

4 November 2024 at 11:00

Elon Musk’s $150 million pro-Trump super-PAC is one of the biggest campaign-finance stories in years—maybe ever. It’s the first time a presidential campaign has completely outsourced much of its get-out-the-vote operation to an outside group. And so far, it has been more X than SpaceX.

Musk has overhauled his staff at least once, been sued by the city of Philadelphia, and taken criticism from Republicans who fear that putting a billionaire novice in charge of turnout operations in a nailbiter election just might cost former President Donald Trump the whole thing. The early returns are, as he might say, concerning. The Guardian reported last month that 24 percent of all door-knocks in the state had been flagged as fraudulent by the PAC; in one case, according to the report all 796 door-knocks attributed to one now-fired canvasser had been faked. According to a recent story in Wired, it’s not even clear if some of the people working for the PAC know they’re working to elect Trump.

“It was reported in the New York Times yesterday, I don’t know if anybody saw the article, but there was a canvasser here who was knocking on doors for Donald Trump, and simultaneously managed to be on a golf course 7,000 miles away,” Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly told a room full of volunteers at a Democratic field office in Phoenix on Sunday. “So that’s their operation.”

Unlike most field campaigns, Musk’s mercenaries don’t hold big canvassing launches with coffee and donuts and VIPs, so I wasn’t sure if I’d even encounter them on the ground in Arizona. But it turns out you don’t have to go looking for Musk’s PAC; at Trump campaign events, they’ll come to you.

Almost as soon I slipped into line for J.D. Vance’s rally on Saturday, at the offices of a Scottsdale weapons manufacturer, I encountered a pair of tablet-toting America PAC organizers, walking up and down the line asking people for their information. It was the biggest canvassing day of the entire cycle—all across Maricopa County, groups of volunteers were fanning out into subdivisions for one last push. But these people with tablets were after something a bit more banal. 

“Hey guys,” asked a man in a Smokey the Bear t-shirt and a safari hat, “Have we signed the bill to protect the First and Second Amendment?”

Behind me, a woman started to fill out the survey, but stopped when it asked for her phone number, even though she was assured it would only be used to confirm she was who she said she was.

“Anybody else interested in signing the petition that’s for the freedom of speech and the right to bear arms?” the man with the tablet asked.

He turned to a guy in a baseball cap: “Hey man, can we get you to sign as well to support the First and Second Amendment?”

The voter couldn’t—he was still registered to vote in Tulsa, and the petition is limited to residents of the seven most competitive swing states.

When the organizer walked away, the Oklahoman turned to the woman who had declined to give her phone number. “He seems fishy,” he said of the organizer.

The woman did her best impression of the signature-gatherer. “Where are you from? Where are you from?”

Many people I talked to at the rally were in the same boat: The operation by the PAC, which was not formally connected with the event, seems a little sus. These voters didn’t want to be rushed into signing something on the spot. “I wasn’t sure if it was just a way for them to get our information,” one woman told me. Which, to be fair, it is.

But attitudes toward Musk himself were a lot more favorable. In fact, voters almost invariably brought him up on their own, as someone who had given the campaign, and the prospect of a second Trump term, a new dimension. “He isn’t a very good speaker,” Alan Travis told me, as we waited in line, but it “makes a big difference” to have him on board, because of what he perceived to be a cross-partisan appeal.

Stacie Boucher, a California transplant who says she fled liberal policies, empathized with Musk’s relocation to a more conservative state—in his case, Texas. While the billionaire has spent much of the final stretch in Pennsylvania, where he also has business interests, Musk’s long shadow was felt on stage and off in Scottsdale.

“How would you like to let Elon Musk loose on the bureaucracy?” Donald Trump Jr. asked the crowd in his warmup address for Vance.

When Vance later promised to fire bureaucrats, someone in the crowd behind me shouted simply, “Elon!”

After the event, I saw no sign of the people with tablets. But if the petitions—and the $1 million lottery they fuel—do not serve an obvious benefit to the campaign at this point, they’ve certainly presented an opportunity for entrepreneurially minded Trump supporters. Just past the exit, a woman named Chere Oliver, wearing a white hat that identified her as a “Trump Force Captain,” had set up a folding table surrounded by yard signs—some from the campaign, and some more original creations. Voters could pose for a photo next to a sign that said “Gang Members for Harris” and an Avengers-style poster that said “Team Unity”—featuring Trump as Captain America, and Musk just over his left shoulder, between Vivek Ramaswamy and RFK Jr. For $10, you could buy a Trump yard sign that featured dogs and cats in front of waving American flags.

Trump rallies are a festival of such knick knacks. But Oliver’s biggest hustle was there on the table. While the official campaign signs were free for anyone to take, she was asking everyone who did to sign the America PAC petition too—and to make clear that she was the one who’d referred them. For convenience, she’d included her phone number and email address; anyone in a hurry should just scan a QR code for the petition and take a photo of her information. Because the PAC was offering $47 for each referral, the Trump volunteer stood to make a lot of money if enough fellow supporters abided by her honor system. Oliver had recently lost her job and was banking on this to help cover expenses. She said she’d referred hundreds of people already. So far, she told me, she’d only received $94 for her efforts, which she chalked up to delays in the verification process. 

Her goal was to get 10,457 signatures, she said—Biden’s margin of victory in the state in 2020.

How Ken Paxton Built the Foundation for the New Big Lie

3 November 2024 at 12:00

It started, according to court filings, with a tweet. On August 18, Maria Bartiromo, the Fox News Host, alerted her 1.4 million followers on X to a development that might not, at first glance, seem like news: She was hearing troubling reports of lines at the DMV. The information had come to Bartiromo fourth-hand. The wife of a friend of a friend had recently taken her 16-year-old to three different offices to get a driver’s license, which in Texas is administered by the Department of Public Safety. At the first two, she encountered “a massive line of immigrants getting licenses” inside, and “a tent and table outside…registering them to vote.” The post blew up on X, where it has been viewed 2.3 million times. 

There was plenty of reason to be cautious about this particular game of telephone. A local Republican Party chair investigated Bartiromo’s source’s source’s wife’s claims himself and found no evidence they were true. A local election administrator also found the allegations unfounded. Nothing described in the tweet, on its face, was even illegal. But fears of renegade registrars would not die. The next day, an investigator working for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton arrived at a DPS facility outside San Antonio for an undercover operation. “I was notified that voter registration was possibly occurring in or about the area surrounding the driver’s license office,” the officer wrote in his formal report.

As a test, the investigator asked the young man registering voters—a volunteer deputy registrar with a non-profit called Jolt, which promotes civic engagement among Latinos in the state—if he could bring a form home to his daughter. (He made positive identification of “cards I have encountered multiple times in the execution of my duties,” the investigator confirmed, sounding as if he had just unearthed a stash of fentanyl, “which I recognize to be voter registration cards.”) The registrar said he could not—Texas has strict rules about handling such applications. Instead, he suggested that the investigator fill out a form on her behalf. The officer declined and walked away. The registrar’s advice, he concluded, was “not only incorrect, but illegal” 

This, Jolt would later argue in a lawsuit in federal court, was also wrong. The undercover agent could have registered his daughter on the spot, as long as she was eligible and he had her permission—both of which he would have been assenting to under penalty of perjury. It was all right there in the county’s training video. But the attorney general’s office was undeterred. Two days later, Paxton announced that there was an open investigation into possible unlawful efforts to register non-citizens to vote. And on August 30, after Jolt protested that Paxton was interfering with their work, he sent the group a formal request to open up its books or face the consequences. In court filings, the agency would later credit the initial tip to reporting from an “award-winning journalist.”

MAGA leaders charged that NGOs, backed by shadowy left-wing funders, were facilitating the mass migration to help the Democratic Party win elections. Evidence of such a conspiracy has been lacking. Creating the illusion of such evidence has fallen to men like Paxton.

The Jolt investigation fit a years-long pattern. Four years ago, citing massive fraud but no evidence, Paxton carried water for Trump’s Big Lie by filing a lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to strip four states Joe Biden won of their electors, so that Republican legislatures could appoint them instead. Now, the state’s top law enforcement official has used the powers of his office to spin a new election conspiracy. Wielding dubious tweets and flimsy pretexts, he has used the myth of large numbers of non-citizens voting to intimidate aid groups on the border, interfere with voter-registration efforts, and purge real citizens from the rolls. For a man who has spent much of his nine years in office under a cloud of personal and professional scandal, his headline-seeking ploy has offered a chance at redemption—and perhaps even an inside track at a promotion.

Paxton and other Texas Republicans have long sought to use fears of election malfeasance to their advantage. His predecessor as attorney general, the current Gov. Greg Abbott, once led an investigation into alleged voter fraud that involved spying on a woman in her own bathroom. In the runup to the 2020 election, the Houston Chronicle reported, Paxton’s office spent 22,000 hours to root out fraud that Trump and his allies claimed was rampant, but only produced 16 prosecutions, none of which resulted in jail time. But you could trace the start of Paxton’s current crusade to the spring of 2022, when Paxton was locked in a bitter runoff primary and still managing fallout from his efforts to overturn the election. 

On May 6 of that year, the State Bar of Texas sued Paxton’s top deputy over his role in the Electoral College case, charging that he had violated ethics rules by participating in a knowingly frivolous lawsuit. (The bar would eventually sue Paxton too; both cases are still ongoing.) A few hours later, Paxton shot back with major news of his own: He was investigating the bar’s charitable foundation, for “possibly aiding and abetting the mass influx of illegal aliens.”

The announcement was part of a pattern—a complaint from a prominent conservative served as a pretext for Paxton to go after his perceived opposition. In this case, the AG’s office said it was acting off a complaint from Republican Rep. Troy Nehls, a former sheriff of Fort Bend County in the Houston suburbs who voted to overturn the 2020 election results. The issue was that the nonprofit had donated to legal-aid organizations that work with immigrants—which, in the AG’s phrasing, meant that it was possibly “providing grants to organizations that support, fund and encourage illegal immigration.” That investigation was followed by an announcement of more probes, targeting three immigrant-rights nonprofits that the bar foundation had supported, again alleging that their work was possibly “aiding and abetting the invasion of illegal aliens.” 

Paxton’s go-to weapon in those investigations was a consumer-protection tool called a Request to Examine, which allows the office—with limitations—to gain access to the books of corporations and nonprofits in the state. In February, his office sent an investigator to surveil Annunciation House, a 50-year-old Catholic shelter network in El Paso that offers food, clothes, and educational services to migrants, and then hand-delivered a request to examine its records, demanding it comply within 24 hours. After the organization asked for more time and clarification as to what it was actually obligated to produce, Paxton filed a lawsuit to try to shut the group down. His office argued that by providing aid services, the organization was operating a “stash house” and engaging in “human smuggling.”

It is not actually a great mystery why Catholics devote themselves to assisting those who need help. But Paxton’s legal campaign tapped into a conspiracy that has become almost an article of faith on the right, spread by figures such as Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and JD Vance. The Biden administration hadn’t just mismanaged the border-security apparatus. These MAGA leaders charged that NGOs, backed by shadowy left-wing funders, were facilitating the mass migration of people to the United States to help the Democratic Party win elections through some combination of massive fraud and demographic shifts. It is a plot to steal not just one election, Musk has argued, but every future election—because once this imagined conspiracy goes into effect, Democrats will be unstoppable. Evidence of such a conspiracy has been lacking. Creating the illusion of such evidence has fallen to men like Paxton.

The new election lie began on the border and expanded outward from there. In April, two brothers from Long Island, operating under the moniker of American Muckrakers, posted a photo of a flier they claimed to have found inside an outhouse in Matamoros, reminding migrants in the Mexican border city to vote for Joe Biden. The flier, which bore the name of a local migrant aid NGO, appeared to have been translated into Spanish via an app and featured an outdated phone number, according to the New York Times. The NGO called it a hoax. But the story traveled fast. After the Heritage Foundation’s Project Oversight posted it, the story was picked up by Musk and Fox News. The flier was flown to Washington, where Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) wielded it during the impeachment proceedings against Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. And within a few days, Paxton—citing the evidence of right-wing social media influencers—began investigating three more migrant aid organizations, one of which was operated in El Paso, and two in the Rio Grande Valley.

For Paxton, these kinds of announcements were all in a day’s work. But to the groups that find themselves on the receiving end, they’ve invited threats and harassment, and added new obstacles to fulfilling their mission. In a statement that she said she had been cleared by her lawyers, Andrea Rudnik, director of Team Brownsville, one of the nonprofits Paxton has sought records from, said that the campaign had “made it more difficult to do our work, advocate for our clients, and freely express ourselves. It has also instilled a greater sense of fear in us that people in need won’t be able to get basic assistance.” The investigation, she said, was not just “an abuse of power,” but “it shows a lack of empathy.” She worried about who would do the work should they close.

“He’s gone after a lot of these organizations that are very, very small, and he’s using it for nefarious purposes to sow distrust in our electoral system by pushing a lie in order to create distrust in our elections.”

The courts have mostly rejected Paxton’s efforts. A judge blocked Paxton’s attempts to depose Rudnick in August. In El Paso, he received a more stinging rebuke. A federal judge threw out his subpoena of Annunciation House and accused the AG of merely seeking “a pretext to justify its harassment of Annunciation House employees and the persons seeking refuge.” Paxton’s behavior, he said, was “outrageous and intolerable.”

Paxton was embarking on a cynical “fishing expedition,” says Rochelle Garza, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, which is representing Team Brownsville and Las Americas, another border group that has been targeted by the AG. (She was also Paxton’s 2022 Democratic opponent.) 

“He’s gone after a lot of these organizations that are very, very small, and he’s using it for nefarious purposes to sow distrust in our electoral system by pushing a lie in order to create distrust in our elections.”

Paxton has not exactly run away from that assertion. “The reality is, the plan from the beginning [was to] get these people here as fast as possible and get them voting,” he said in a June interview with—who else?—Maria Bartiromo. It was the only thing that would make Democrats competitive this fall: “This is the biggest threat to our democracy, our republic, that I think we’ve seen since who knows when.”

If targeting Catholics and retired teachers prepping meals on the border was the foundation of Paxton’s new election conspiracy, the next logical step was to target groups, like Jolt, that actively register voters in the state’s larger metro areas—again, under the pretense that they were enabling illegal non-citizen voting. The AG’s case has been sloppy. Paxton’s attorneys asserted in court, for instance, that they launched their investigation in response not just to Bartiromo’s Ferris Bueller tweet, but also a viral video posted on X by a self-described “Alpha MAGA Male,” who filmed himself asking a Jolt registrar if “illegal aliens” could vote. That’s not just flimsy, but also impossible—the video was posted after the AG’s office dispatched its investigator to Universal City.

“As best I can tell,” says Mimi Marziani, an adjunct professor at the University of Texas and prominent civil rights litigator who is representing Jolt in the case, “he is abusing the power of his office to do something that is promoting his own interest, and his allegiance to former President Trump.”

It wasn’t just Jolt. Paxton has gone after a wide swath of groups that organize Latino communities in the state. In August, he filed a lawsuit to shut down a Houston-based non-profit called Familias Inmigrantes y Estudiantes en la Lucha, or FIEL, ostensibly on the grounds that the group had violated rules on political speech by nonprofits by criticizing Abbott and Trump, as well as a new state law empowering law enforcement to arrest people they suspect of having entered the country illegally. That same month, his office initiated a series of early-morning raids that his office said was in response to allegations of vote-harvesting by a local political operative. 

As part of that investigation, armed law enforcement agents showed up at the homes of elderly members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a century-old civil rights organization that runs voter registration drives and had filed a lawsuit against SB1, a restrictive new voting statute Abbott signed into law in 2021. Among the people whose home was raided was Cecilia Castellano, a Democratic candidate for state representative in an open South Texas seat that Republicans are trying to flip. According to the Texas Tribune, the raid stemmed from an investigation that began in 2022. Castellano has not been charged with any crime, nor has anyone else.

Later that summer, Paxton’s office went to court to stop three of the state’s biggest counties—Bexar (San Antonio), Travis (Austin), and Harris (Houston)—from using their offices to run voter-registration drives. They had approved plans, or (in the case of Harris were considering proposals), to send voter registration forms and other information to voting-age citizens the county had deemed eligible. Filling out a form was only the first part of the process. A county office would then have to verify the information. Then the Texas secretary of state’s office—part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration—would have to verify it too. Nonetheless, Paxton tried to stop them, arguing that informing people of their constitutional rights in such a manner could lead to fraudulent registrations from non-citizens.

“As best I can tell, he is abusing the power of his office to do something that is promoting his own interest, and his allegiance to former President Trump.”

“[A]s you are aware, the Biden-Harris administration’s open border policies have saddled Texas—and the entire country—with a wave of illegal immigration that has resulted in ballooning noncitizen populations across our State,” Paxton wrote in a September letter to Bexar County officials. “It is more important than ever that we maintain the integrity of our voter rolls and ensure only eligible voters decide our elections.”

But the capstone to Texas Republicans’ big push—and Paxton’s years-long campaign to argue that immigrants, with the help of sinister left-wing forces, were poised to spoil the election through massive fraud—was the voter rolls themselves. Here he was tapping into an infamous tradition. In 2019, the Abbott-appointed secretary of state David Whitley resigned after an attempted voter purge incorrectly flagged at least 25,000 eligible voters as potential non-citizens. This summer, the governor announced that the state had found 6,500 non-citizen voters on the rolls and was referring 2,000 people to Paxton’s office for prosecution for having voted as non-citizens. A subsequent investigation by the Texas Tribune and Pro Publica found that the actual number of people identified by the secretary of state was 581—not 6,500—and that at least some of the people on the list had documents proving their citizenship.

Paxton aimed a bit higher. In September, he sent the federal government a list of 450,000 voters who did not include a Texas driver’s license number on their voter registration forms, and asked Washington to cross-reference this list with immigration databases. 

“This list is essentially anyone who doesn’t have their driver’s license number memorized or doesn’t have an ID—which we know is disproportionately people of color—but there’s no indication that people are non-citizens or that they have improperly registered to vote,” says Ashley Harris, a staff atttorney with the ACLU of Texas, whose group urged the federal government not to comply with Paxton’s request. “It’s just people that register with their Social Security number, or, in some cases, older voters who have been registered to vote for so long that it predates the federal requirements.”

The immigration check would have opened up still more problems—for instance, that it might flag people who have been naturalized as citizens. And anyone caught up in this purge would have to “jump through extra hoops to preserve their voter registration” with just days or weeks left before the deadline. Ultimately, the Biden administration declined to cooperate, but Paxton still got what he wanted: He has cited the standoff as evidence that Democrats are willfully enabling massive fraud “by enabling non-citizens to illegally vote.”

In waging legal battle after legal battle with small nonprofits and community groups, and spreading fears about a stolen election that hasn’t yet transpired, Paxton is helping not just his party but also himself. Paxton’s subservience to Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election may have got him in trouble with the state bar, but it might have also saved his job, as he survived a bitter primary and then an impeachment trial in successive years. Now, his willingness to do the bidding of Trump and his allies has earned him a possible seat at the table in a future Republican presidential administration. Trump said in May that he’d even consider Paxton to be his next attorney attorney general.

In the campaign’s final days, Paxton has remained at the beck and call of conservative activists. Last week, after the Department of Justice ordered Musk to halt his $1 million daily lottery for Trump-supporting registered voters in swing states, the attorney general shot back. 

He was filing a Freedom of Information Act Request, he announced, to “investigate the federal agency’s intimidation” of the world’s richest man, by “selectively targeting Elon Musk’s voter registration drive.”

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