As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

It was no surprise. Instead, call it the October reveal.

In the final days of the 2024 election, ugly rhetoric from Donald Trump’s campaign drew major national attention when a speaker made a racist joke about Puerto Rico as part of the ex-president’s Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Garden. The event was an inevitable culmination for the Trump campaign, a six-hour pageant of divisiveness and bigotry that featured multiple speakers launching racist and misogynistic attacks on Kamala Harris. It concluded with Trump at the podium delivering the same demagoguery he has used in dozens of rallies this year: painting a wildly exaggerated picture of national decay, promoting baseless conspiracy theories, and stoking fear and anger about an alleged “invasion” of America by murderous migrants.

Such themes have been at the dark heart of Trump’s politics ever since he entered the presidential race nearly a decade ago. As he has taken these tactics to new extremes over the past few months, law enforcement and national security sources I’ve spoken with have warned about a growing danger of far-right political violence inspired by Trump’s messaging.

This is not theoretical. It’s based on a lengthy history of violence associated with Trump’s rhetoric, which by 2021 led a bipartisan group of top national security experts to take the extraordinary step of labeling Trump, effectively, a terrorist leader—the de facto head of a violent extremist movement within the United States.

Given that another central tactic of Trumpism is to try to cover up the truth and push anything damaging down the memory hole, the time is ripe to revisit some of the major violence coinciding with Trump’s incitement. I’ve been documenting these grim events for more than six years.

As I reported in an investigation begun in summer 2018, white supremacist attacks grew deadlier during Trump’s tenure in the White House. The violence unfolded amid a surge in far-right plots and threats, according to law enforcement sources I spoke with then. That included a wave of menace specifically targeting journalists, who Trump and his allies smeared repeatedly as “the enemy of the American people.” Two devastating mass shootings—one at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and another at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas—involved perpetrators who were focused on a migrant “invasion,” a core theme also emphasized back then by Trump. The echoes of Trump’s rhetoric in the El Paso case were particularly stark, as I detailed again recently:

The gunman had driven to the border city from 650 miles away. In custody, he told police he’d come to kill Mexicans. Some writings he’d posted online said his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and that his mission was “defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” He cited an extremist ideology known as “The Great Replacement.”

These were not obscure ideas. The gunman wrote that he agreed with a recent mass shooter in New Zealand who had espoused them. He also knew some of these themes were being championed at the time by President Donald Trump. With help from Fox News pundits, Trump was whipping up fear and hatred of an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border—the message was central to Trump’s reelection campaign in 2019, a focus of his ads and speeches warning ominously of a national demise.

At the end of the shooter’s screed posted online, he sought to validate his attack with a pseudo-clever twist, suggesting that his views predated Trump in the White House. “I know that the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric,” he wrote. Then he used Trump’s own rhetoric as supporting ammo: “The media is infamous for fake news.”

Notably, Trump backer Tucker Carlson, who has long pushed Great Replacement themes, alluded to the ideology again in his caustic speech at the Madison Square Garden rally. And Trump’s biggest financial backer, Elon Musk, has also been emphasizing it down the campaign homestretch.

Most infamously, of course, Trump’s incitement provoked the brutal insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The former president and his allies have spent the years since then trying to erase the truth about Trump’s indelible role in motivating that unprecedented attack on American democracy.

Numerous Republican Party leaders have consistently helped deny, justify, and cover up Trump’s incitement of political violence, and some have since adopted his tactics. Others, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have just played dumb. As one national security source told me recently, “Silence is its own form of participation.”

Trump continues to weave his virulent strands of demagoguery into a grand conspiracy theory alleging the election will be “stolen” from him. As I reported in late October, the further escalation of his extreme rhetoric has been accompanied by a rise in violent threats reflecting his messaging. With the 2024 voting results imminent, the question now is where this defining feature of Trumpism may take us next.

On May 10, 2017, President Donald Trump hosted two special guests in the Oval Office: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. The meeting was curious. It was closed to American media. No American journalists were allowed to witness it or take photos or video of the meeting. But a Russian photographer was permitted to shoot a few pics, and the Russian government posted them.

There was much else odd about this get-together. Only a few months earlier, the US intelligence community had released a report confirming that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had mounted a covert operation against the United States to help Trump win the 2016 election. The Kremlin’s clandestine warfare had included the cyber-swiping and dissemination, via WikiLeaks, of Democratic emails and documents and a secret social media campaign that sought to sow discord in the United States and boost Trump’s chances of claiming the White House. The hack-and-leak op fomented conflict at the Democrats’ convention and then, in the final month of the race, impeded Hillary Clinton’s campaign by releasing, nearly on a daily basis, internal documents that prompted negative news stories about her and the Democrats. Throughout all this, Trump and his top aides denied Russia was intervening, essentially aiding and abetting Putin by providing cover for him.

Though there were numerous factors that contributed to Clinton’s defeat, the Russian operation was clearly one of them.

After the election, the Kremlin’s intervention and the ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow were the subjects of a federal investigation and congressional inquiries. Trump, though, kept denying Russia had meddled in the race and repeatedly called the whole thing a hoax and a witch hunt. (At the time, it was not yet publicly known that during the campaign his top aides met with a Russian emissary who was introduced to them as a participant in a secret Kremlin project to help Trump win or that Paul Manafort, the chair of the Trump campaign, regularly huddled with a former business associate who was a Russian intelligence officer and shared internal campaign data with him.) Irate about the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, Trump, on May 9, 2017, fired the bureau’s director, James Comey.

The following day—with the Comey dismissal dominating the news—Trump warmly greeted the two Russians at the White House. The photo that the Russians released showed the three of them yukking it up. Here was Trump with representatives of a foreign adversary that had attacked an American election, and they appeared to be having a jolly time. And the public wasn’t told what they discussed.

A few days later, the Washington Post reported that during the meeting Trump had revealed highly classified information about a possible Islamic State plot and jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on this terrorist group. According to the newspaper:

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State.

One intelligence official noted that Trump had “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.” Intelligence officials were shocked by this breach.

More about this meeting continued to come out. The New York Times soon reported that Trump had told the Russians that by dismissing Comey he had gotten himself out of a jam: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” The Times noted how bizarre this was: “The comments represented an extraordinary moment in the investigation, which centers in part on the administration’s contacts with Russian officials: A day after firing the man leading that inquiry, Mr. Trump disparaged him—to Russian officials.”

But there was even more to the meeting that the public wouldn’t learn about for more than two years. In September 2019, the Washington Post revealed that Trump had told Lavrov and Kislyak that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s intervention in the 2016 election and that this assertion had caused alarmed White House officials to limit access to the memo chronicling the conversation.

The Trump White House had fretted about this part of the discussion becoming public. According to the newspaper, the “memorandum summarizing the meeting was limited to a few officials with the highest security clearances in an attempt to keep the president’s comments from being disclosed publicly…White House officials were particularly distressed by Trump’s election remarks because it appeared the president was forgiving Russia for an attack that had been designed to help elect him.”

By the time this part of the conversation was disclosed, Trump was mired in his first impeachment for having pressured the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and to find information discrediting the Trump-Russia scandal. And this revelation, like so many about Trump, quickly faded from the national discourse.

It had taken over two years for Americans to learn that Trump had told the Russians he didn’t care about their efforts to subvert a US election. But it was obvious as soon as that original photo was released that Trump had no interest in holding Putin accountable for messing with the election—and for helping him reach the White House.

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Five years ago, Donald Trump told Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan to go ahead and invade Syria—an unexpected capitulation to personal pressure from the Turkish strongman that upended US policy, allowing Turkish attacks on Kurdish fighters seen as staunch US allies.

Trump’s green light to Erdogan during an October 6, 2019, phone call forced US troops in Syria to hastily flee from posts near the Turkish border and shocked Washington, drawing bipartisan condemnation of the president’s decision.

The Turkish troops who invaded went on to display “shameful disregard for civilian life, carrying out serious violations and war crimes, including summary killings and unlawful attacks that have killed and injured civilians,” Amnesty International charged. News reports said at least 70 civilians were killed while hundreds of thousands of people were displaced by the invasion.

The okay to invade was one of various ways that Trump helped Erdogan while in office. Trump intervened with the Justice Department to aid a Turkish national bank, Halkbank, which was accused of helping Iran evade US sanctions. Prosecutors have argued the bank helped to finance Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The case against the bank implicated allies of Erdogan, who had authorized the sanctions-evasion scheme, a witness in the case said. Under personal pressure from Erdogan, Trump also pressed his advisers, including DOJ officials, to drop a case against the bank built by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, according to accounts of former Trump administration officials.

Geoffrey Berman, at the time the US attorney in Manhattan, later said in a book that he received pressure from acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker in 2018 and that Whitaker’s successor, Bill Barr, pressed him to settle the case on terms favorable to Halkbank. Berman charged that Barr urged him to grant immunity to Turkish officials with ties to Erdogan and suggested hiding those deals from a federal court—a step Berman said would be illegal. Berman and Barr did not respond to requests for comment.

Turkey’s invasion of Syria, oddly, caused problems Halkbank. The criticism Trump faced for allowing Erdogan to invade appeared to embarrass the US president. He responded by attempting to reverse course. In a bizarre public letter, he threatened to “destroy” Turkey’s economy. “Don’t be a tough guy,” Trump wrote. During this spat, Trump and his advisers, including Barr, dropped their opposition to indicting Halkbank. Berman later recounted that Trump’s “falling out” with Erdogan resulted in a “green light to indict Halkbank. And we did it within 24 hours.”

Trump’s approval of Turkey’s invasion of Syria, and his reaction to the criticism it drew, has received limited attention during the 2024 campaign. But it highlights several of Trump’s weaknesses in managing US foreign policy.

Though he casts himself as an effective negotiator, in office Trump consistently accommodated autocrats, offering concessions without winning concomitant benefits, former aides said. “He would interfere in the regular government process to do something for a foreign leader,” John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, told the Times in 2020. “In anticipation of what? In anticipation of another favor from that person down the road.”

Bolton wrote in a book that Trump in 2019 told Chinese President Xi Jinping that his decision to detain Uighur Muslims in concentration camps was “exactly the right thing to do” and urged Xi to “go ahead with building the camps.” In another meeting that year, Bolton wrote, Trump “pleaded” with Xi to help Trump’s electoral prospects by purchasing US soybeans and wheat. Trump apparently hoped the trade would win him votes in rural states hurt by his trade war with China.

This tendency to appease autocrats who flatter him is part of Trump’s personalization of foreign policy, a tendency to make diplomacy about his own interests, rather than those of Americans.

Then there are the conflicts of interest. Trump, in late 2015, acknowledged that “I have a little conflict of interest” in dealing with Turkey, due to his licensing deal that paid him for his name to appear on two glass towers in Istanbul. The 2020 leak of some of Trump’s tax returns revealed that he had in fact received at least $13 million, including at least $1 million while he was the president, through the deal. A man who helped broker Trump’s licensing deal later lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Turkish interests.

If he is elected again, Trump’s business interests will result in similar conflicts with Vietnam, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, among others. Through his family, he would also have business-related conflicts with Albania, Qatar, Serbia, and Saudi Arabia, which has paid $87 million to a fund set up by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

It is not clear to what extent financial interests—as opposed to flattery or a wish for the approval of autocrats—influences Trump. The problem is that Americans don’t know what interests he follows.

But it is likely that Erdogan expects Trump will be accommodating if he wins, perhaps starting with Halkbank. A federal appeals court recently ruled that the bank’s prosecution can proceed, following the bank’s effort to claim sovereign immunity.

Turkish interests allegedly spent heavily to corruptly influence New York Mayor Eric Adams, who is accused of ordering that Turkey’s 36-story consulate be allowed to open despite safety concerns. If Adams would help fix a fire code issue, what might Trump do for Erdogan?

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Donald Trump has said that if he is elected president again, he will use the Justice Department to prosecute political enemies. We should believe him, because he attempted to do just that in his first term, with some success. And he will be better prepared to execute his plans if he returns to the White House.

NPR recently tallied more than 100 times Trump called for the prosecution or jailing of his perceived foes. His stated targets include Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and his family, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, James Comey, Bill Barr, John Kelly, Mark Zuckerberg, federal prosecutors, election officials, journalists, and pro-Palestinian protestors. He reportedly wanted retired military officers who criticized him, Admiral William McRaven and General Stanley McChrystal, called back to active duty so they could be court-martialed. He suggested that Mark Milley, who previously served as Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserved to be executed.

The frequency of those threats makes them seem silly. Trump probably isn’t going to sic prosecutors on all those prominent people. But his record suggests he is serious about using the power of his office against many critics. Contrary to the claims of defenders like J.D. Vance—who said recently that Trump “didn’t go after his political opponents” while in office—Trump made sustained public and private efforts while in the White House to order up probes into critics and political opponents. Trump succeeded in numerous cases in having foes investigated, media reports and accounts of former aides show.

Lock Her Up

After calling for Hillary Clinton’s prosecution on the campaign trail, Trump, despite briefly disavowing the idea, pushed throughout his presidency for Clinton’s prosecution. This campaign came in public tweets and private pressure on aides, and was mounted alongside his anger over investigations into his campaign’s contacts with Russian agents in 2016. Trump pressured all three of his attorneys general to open or advance investigations targeting Clinton. They partly resisted but substantially complied.

Many people recall Trump’s fury at Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from matters to the 2016 election—which led the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. But despite that pledge, Sessions partly appeased Trump by instructing the US attorney for Utah, John Huber, to reexamine Clinton’s use of a private email server and allegations about the Clinton Foundation. Sessions’ order came amid Trump’s repeated public calls for him to look into Clinton’s “crimes.” After firing Sessions in 2020, Trump privately urged acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to push Huber to be more aggressive, the Washington Post reported. When Huber’s investigation ended in 2020 without finding wrongdoing by Clinton, Trump publicly attacked the prosecutor as a “garbage disposal.”

But by then, Trump’s third AG, Bill Barr, had appointed John Durham, the Connecticut US attorney, to launch an investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. Barr named Durham on heels of misrepresenting Mueller’s report, which found that the Trump campaign “expected to benefit” from secret Russian help in 2016. The Durham appointment also came after reports that Trump and his advisers were seeking revenge against his investigators.

Durham’s effort floundered legally, with the acquittal of two of the three men charged with crimes related to the investigation. But the probe, which lasted four years, fared better as an exercise in arming Trump with talking points. Durham appeared to consider that part of his job, though he has publicly disputed that. When the Justice Department’s inspector general in 2019 issued a report that found no evidence the FBI’s Trump investigation was politically motivated, Durham, in consultation with Barr, issued a strange statement disagreeing, without offering any evidence for why.

Durham decided to charge Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who worked for Democrats in 2016, with lying to the FBI, despite evidence so thin two prosecutors quit in connection with the charge. Sussmann was acquitted in 2022, but through filings in the case, Durham publicly aired allegations about Clinton campaign efforts to advance the Russia story, details that did not appear necessary to his case. Right-wing news outlets in February 2022 jumped one such-Durham motion to falsely report the Clinton’s campaign had spied on Trump White House servers. In his final report in 2023, Durham extensively cited material he acknowledged was dubious possible Russian disinformation in an effort to suggest Clinton had helped drive the FBI probe into Trump.

FBI

After firing James Comey as FBI director in 2017, which resulted in Mueller’s appointment, Trump pressed for the Justice Department to prosecute Comey for mishandling sensitive government information by allegedly orchestrating leaks that were damaging to Trump. According to the New York Times, this pressure led to “two investigations of leaks potentially involving” Comey. The DOJ declined to charge Comey.

Other former FBI officials who drew Trump’s ire—former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, and Peter Strzok, originally the lead FBI agent on the Russia investigation—faced DOJ probes after Trump railed against them. Sessions fired McCabe the day before his 2018 retirement, in what appeared to be a deliberate act to deny him a pension and benefits. Prosecutors in 2019 tried to charge McCabe for allegedly lying to FBI officials about media contacts, but in an unusual move that suggests a weak case, a grand jury declined to return an indictment.

John Kerry

In a March 2019 press conference, Trump said former Secretary of State John Kerry, who negotiated the 2015 deal freezing Iran’s nuclear weapons development, could be prosecuted for violating the Logan Act, a 1799 law barring private US citizens from negotiating with foreign governments in disputes with the United States. Trump was irked at Kerry’s ongoing contacts with Iranian officials and by past threats by Mueller’s team to charge former national security adviser Michael Flynn with violating the act. Trump told reporters that Kerry should be charged, but “my people don’t want to do anything,” adding, “Only the Democrats do that kind of stuff.

False. Trump’s public and private efforts had by then already secured DOJ scrutiny of Kerry. Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton told the Times he’d witnessed Trump demand Kerry’s prosecution “on at least a half dozen occasions” in 2018 and 2019. Trump also made the case in tweets and public statements. Days after one of Trump’s tweets, in May 2018, a top DOJ official had told prosecutors in Manhattan to investigate Kerry’s contacts with Iranians, according to the Times. Geoffrey Berman, at the time the US attorney in Manhattan, wrote in a 2022 book that the Kerry probe appeared to result from Trump’s edict. “No one needed to talk with Trump to know what he wanted,” Berman wrote. “You could read his tweets.”

Trump succeeded in sparking investigations into his critics and political foes by continually pressing subordinates to deliver actual prosecutions, as former aides like Kelly, Bolton and White House counsel Don McGahn have revealed. In some cases, the resulting probes appear to have been solutions settled on by officials attempting to manage Trump’s pressure with partial measures.

But in a new term, Trump will surely be more aggressive and even less restrained, as his public threats make clear. The Supreme Court’s July declaration that the president has absolute immunity from prosecution for many types of official conduct will leave him with few worries about facing legal consequences for his own actions. And the aides who partly restrained him before will be gone, replaced by more sycophantic enablers.

As Trump pledges to pervert presidential power to prosecute critics, Americans have to take him at this word. If he wins, who is going to stop him?

This week, the Guardian published a pre-election bombshell alleging that Donald Trump sexually assaulted a model in 1993—the latest in a string of dozens of similar accusations dating back decades. Stacey Williams, now 56, claims that Trump groped her during a visit to Trump Tower, in an encounter she said was orchestrated by Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased financier and convicted sexual predator, whom she had been dating. Williams told the Guardian that Trump felt up her breasts, waist, and buttocks. “I just had this really sickening feeling that it was coordinated,” she later told CNN. “I was rolled in there like a piece of meat in some kind of weird twisted game.” Williams also told her story during a public “Survivors for Kamala” Zoom call on Monday night. The Trump campaign denied the accusations.

With the election less than two weeks away, Trump’s treatment of women is now back in the spotlight, at the same time as his harsh disparagement of immigrants has taken on an increasingly dark and vitriolic air. “This election cycle,” wrote my colleague Isabela Dias, “former President Donald Trump has made mass deportation his foremost campaign promise.” It is a long-standing promise, Isabela reported, as she recapped Trump’s 2016 pledge to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants; his sweeping worksite raids; his Muslim-ban; and brutal family separations. As Isabela showed, Trump’s plans for a second term would escalate these policies significantly: He has pledged “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

These two big themes of Trump’s presidency—his treatment of women and his far-right immigration policies—first fused for me in reporting I did during Trump’s 2016 campaign. At the time, my investigation revealed that models working for his prized firm, Trump Model Management, were brought into the United States on tourist visas that did not allow them to work. Former Trump models told me they were encouraged to mislead federal officials and instructed to lie on customs forms. Once here, they were housed in a cramped, basement apartment, charged sky-high rent, and levied with dizzying fees and expenses, leaving many in debt and in legal precarity. “It is like modern-day slavery,” one model told me. Another said in a lawsuit she “felt like a slave.”

Here’s a video recap of the media storm that ensued after publication:

As Trump ramps up “zero tolerance”, don’t forget the foreigners Trump’s own company had zero issues with letting into the US to work without authorization: models at his NYC agency @TrumpModels. Here’s a video reminder my 2016 @MotherJones campaign exposé https://t.co/R5bvuhBdkF pic.twitter.com/KfVl6sFn6i

— James West (@jameswest2010) July 7, 2018

My investigation—eight articles over eight months in all—became a potent example of Trump’s duplicity. And it foreshadowed his double standards, as Trump mixed his business practices with the presidency. The story created an instant shockwave through the campaign, albeit briefly during what was a scandal-plagued race to the White House. Models began fleeing Trump Model Management, with insiders attributing the firm’s rapid decline to Trump’s increasingly controversial public persona. The once-celebrated Trump brand, they said, had become tainted.

Ultimately, after my reporting, Trump Models joined the list of defunct Trump ventures, alongside Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Airlines, and Trump Magazine—yet another shuttered firm run by the man who continues to tout himself as an expert businessman who, alone, can fix everything.

Read my original investigation here.

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Abby Mahler blames Donald Trump and Elon Musk for the challenges faced by people who need hydroxychloroquine for lupus. In the early days of the Covid pandemic, both Trump and Musk promoted the drug as a possible Covid treatment, helping lead to widespread shortages that made it difficult for people like Mahler to obtain the medication she needed. “What Trump did could not have happened without Elon,” Mahler told Mother Jones.

For nearly four years, Mahler, who is based in Los Angeles, has been using TikTok to address misinformation about hydroxychloroquine, which was originally created to prevent and treat malaria, and can be used for a range of autoimmune disorders, including lupus, vasculitis and Sjogren’s syndrome. When they heard that hydroxychloroquine was being prescribed to patients with Covid-19, they were not concerned at first. A drug they already needed and used could also treat Covid-19?

“I remember very vividly joking with my friends,” Mahler said. “Like, ‘Ha ha, I’m going to live forever.'”

On March 16, 2020—just days after Trump declared Covid-19 a nationwide emergency—Musk tweeted a link to a Google Doc which claimed that HCQ, as it’s often known, and a related drug called chloroquine could help fight Covid-19. The Google Doc itself noticeably did not contain any notable statistics. “Maybe worth considering chloroquine for C19,” Musk wrote on Twitter, adding the following day: “Hydroxychloroquine probably better.” (In what turned out to be a darkly accurate bit of foreshadowing, Musk posted another tweet warning that “if we over-allocate medical resources to corona, it will come at expense of treating other illnesses.”)

Days later, a different study was published as a pre-print, meaning it had not yet been peer-reviewed. From a scientific standpoint, the evidence in that study was slim: The paper said that 12 patients benefited from HCQ after seven days, out of the 26 studied (not including the control group), after being diagnosed with Covid-19. The researchers also admitted that five of the patients had to stop taking HCQ after their health symptoms worsened.

Hydroxychloroquine, experts later concluded, wasn’t actually useful for preventing or treating Covid. But as infectious disease specialist Michael Saag wrote in a JAMA Network editorial in November 2020, desperation in the face of an unfolding pandemic had helped create a perfect storm in which the early HCQ research gained traction:

These findings suggestive of possible benefit, along with the desperation of clinicians who were providing care for patients with a potentially fatal disorder for which there was no treatment, undoubtedly contributed to increased use of hydroxychloroquine for patients with COVID-19, despite lack of rigorous evidence for efficacy.

The sudden demand spike for HCQ came alongside a price increase for a key ingredient in the drug. Within a week of Musk’s tweet, Mahler had to try several pharmacies in order to get her HCQ, and had to pay $60, instead of her usual $15. Unlike many other people with lupus, she didn’t have to go without, but she did have to ration over the next few months, occasionally taking a half-dose to cope with the shortage.

Gregory Rigano, an attorney who was one of the authors of the Google Doc Musk promoted, appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program the very day Musk tweeted it out. Ingraham herself would later to Trump about how great HCQ was for Covid-19 in a private meeting in early April. (Trump’s campaign team and Musk did not respond to recent requests for comment from Mother Jones.) As Saag wrote:

On April 4, the US president, “speaking on gut instinct,” promoted the drug as a potential treatment and authorized the US government to purchase and stockpile 29 million pills of hydroxychloroquine for use by patients with COVID-19. Of note, no health official in the US government endorsed use of hydroxychloroquine owing to the absence of robust data and concern about adverse effects. 

As Stat News reported at the time, Trump even stopped Anthony Fauci, then chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, from answering a question on the drug’s efficiency at a White House briefing. In May 2020, Trump proudly announced that he was taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent Covid-19, despite an FDA statement weeks earlier that it should not be used for Covid-19 outside of hospitals or clinical trials.

But in a “twist of irony,” Saag wrote, when Trump really did contract—and was hospitalized for—a serious case of Covid, he “did not receive hydroxychloroquine.”

That makes good medical sense: Trump’s praise for HCQ never included a disclosure that it can have serious side effects, like cardiac issues and changes to eyesight. Many patients on hydroxychloroquine, including myself, have to be tested regularly for HCQ-related vision issues. It’s hard to know just how widespread complications were in 2020.

“As soon as Trump started talking about, it became very obvious that things were gonna get bad quick,” Mahler said. In mid-May, they also had to argue with their health insurance company to avoid paying more than $100 for the medication, which had previously been quite inexpensive.

A survey by the Lupus Research Alliance found that a third of lupus patients reported difficulties filling HCQ prescriptions between March and May 2020. That can mean severe complications, including hospitalization—a frequent area of Covid transmission. Trump’s claims about hydroxychloroquine weren’t just another case of buffoonery, Mahler says, but a source of real harm in people’s lives.

@babs_zone Time to hold some shills accountable. #HCQRewind #HerStory #CrowdCheers #hydroxychloroquine #DisabilityJustice #lupus #hcq #disabilitytiktok #fyp ♬ Drive Forever – Remix – Sergio Valentino

Even outside the US, HCQ shortages became more common. A February 2021 study found new anxieties among lupus patients in Europe about such shortages during the first year of the pandemic.

I’m now on hydroxychloroquine myself, and though I wasn’t at the time, I remember watching in fear as rumors spread that the anti-inflammatory colchicine, which I was taking, would be Trump’s next proposed Covid treatment. I remember asking my then-rheumatologist if she was concerned that would happen. She told me that there’s no evidence it would help, but there wasn’t much evidence that HCQ would help either. Trump never embraced colchicine, but hydroxychloroquine shortages struck a nerve.

In mid-June 2020, the FDA ended its study on HCQ and Covid—results showed it wasn’t helping. Weeks later, Trump called hydroxychloroquine “a cure for Covid” and a reason not to wear a mask. Trump was very much wrong, and high quality masks do help prevent the ongoing spread of Covid-19.

As Saag, the infectious disease expert, concluded:

The clear, unambiguous, and compelling lesson from the hydroxychloroquine story for the medical community and the public is that science and politics do not mix. Science, by definition, requires diligence and an honest assessment of findings; politics not so much.

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Steve Bannon was indicted in 2020 for allegedly helping defraud Donald Trump fans who donated to a nonprofit that promised to privately fund a border wall. The other defendants in the plot went to prison. But in the final hours of his presidency, Trump pardoned Bannon, reportedly over the objections of various advisers, due to what the Washington Post described as Bannon’s “vociferous support” for Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election.

Trump doled out pardons and commutations throughout his presidency, culminating in a deluge of clemency during his final weeks office. He pardoned service members accused of war crimes whose cases were promoted on Fox News; Lil Wayne; most of the Republican congressmen convicted of federal felonies this century; the ex-husband of an unctuous Fox News host; and a former Dick Cheney aide whose pardon might irk former FBI chief James Comey. He even pardoned some people who probably deserved it.

But many of his pardons, like the one he gave Bannon, were clearly corrupt—a misuse of power to benefit his supporters and please his allies. Trump may have acted legally in exercising his constitutional pardon power, but that doesn’t make his actions any more defensible. He granted pardons in apparent exchange for political support, to campaign donors, and to clients of lawyers charging small fortunes for access to him. He dangled the possibility pardons for potential witnesses who might testify about his campaign’s ties to Russia.

This orgy of transactional clemency was a preview of the authoritarian powers Trump has promised to wield without restraint in a second term. Trump has pledged to pardon people charged with crimes connected to January 6 and, if he wins, he’s expected to claim power to order the DOJ to drop the two federal cases against him. And he appears prepared to use his power to block federal charges against federal officials who commit alleged crimes in service of his goals.

Here is a non-complete list of some of Trump’s most outrageous pardons.

Friends and Family of Jared

Trump’s process for assessing pardon pleas in his final days in office was reportedly chaotic, with little involvement from the DOJ office tasked with assisting federal clemency efforts. Instead, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, oversaw the process. Many people with connections to Kushner won pardons, most notably his father, real estate developer Charles Kushner, who was convicted in 2005 of crimes that included hiring a prostitute to film herself having sex with his sister’s husband, a way to punish her for cooperating in a federal investigation. Trump’s pardon announcement did not mention what role Jared may have played in helping his dad. A Kushner spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Kushner-connected pardon recipients include 27 people with ties two Orthodox Jewish organizations that had worked with Kushner on criminal justice reform, the New York Times reported. Several of those hired pro-Trump attorney Alan Dershowitz, who advised Kushner on Middle East policy and represented Trump during his first impeachment trial, to help them seek pardons.

That group includes Jonathan Braun, a Staten Island man whose 10-year sentence for drug dealing Trump commuted even as Braun was under investigation for his role in a loan-sharking scheme in which the defendants were accused of repeatedly threatening violence. A federal judge fined Braun for $20 million in February. In August, Braun was arrested and charged with assaulting his wife and her 75-year old father.

Another Dershowitz client who won a commutation was Eliyahu Weinstein, who Trump freed eight years into a 24-year sentence for running a ponzi scheme. Weinstein was indicted last year for allegedly running a new, similar scheme, that prosecutors said he launched “soon after” his release.

Ken Kurson, a close friend of Kushner’s, received a pardon for charges that he had cyber-stalked and harassed three people. In 2022, Kurson pleaded guilty to cyberstalking his ex-wife.

Anyone Who Might Support Him

Trump has mostly pardoned Republicans, but he did help a few Democrats. He pardoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted of attempting to sell a Senate appointment and who had appeared on “The Apprentice” in 2010. Since the pardon, Blagojevich has supported Trump. Trump in 2021 also commuted the 28-year prison sentence that former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick received for extensive corruption. Kilpatrick is now campaigning for Trump, explaining that he is “grateful” for Trump’s help.

In 2019, Angela Stanton, who was convicted in 2004 for her role in a car theft ring and later supported Trump’s foray into criminal justice reform, appeared on a Fox News panel of Black voters as a Trump supporter. In 2020, Trump pardoned Stanton.

Alice Johnson, a woman whose decades-long sentence for cocaine distribution Trump commuted in 2018, appeared in a 2020 Trump campaign ad that aired during the Super Bowl. Johnson also spoke in support of him at during the Republican National Convention that year. Trump granted her a full pardon the next day.

Celebrities

Trump’s 2021 pardon of Lil Wayne came after the rapper, whose real name is Dwayne Carter, endorsed him (and hired a lawyer who previously had appeared on the “Apprentice” in 2004). Kodak Black, another rapper, who was freed from prison when Trump pardoned him, released a pro-Trump song in August. Trump also pardoned Casey Urlacher on charges of helping run a massive gambling ring, after meeting months earlier with Urlacher’s brother, former Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher. The former All-Pro endorsed Trump in September and cut an ad for him.

Medicare Fraudsters

Trump’s cross-aisle pardons included Salomon Melgen, a Florida eye-doctor who was a financial backer and friend of former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.). A hung jury in 2017 helped Menendez avoid conviction on charges that he did political favors for Melgen in exchange for financial benefits. (Menendez was convicted in July 2024 in a different corruption case.)

Unlike Menendez, Melgen was convicted in 2017 on 67 counts related to bilking Medicare out of at least $73 million by persuading numerous elderly patients to undergo tests and get treatment for diseases they did not have. Trump’s pardon of Melgen, which came after a request from Menendez, is one of at least five the former president granted to people convicted of defrauding Medicare or Medicaid, the Washington Post noted in March. Such pardons coexist uneasily with Trump’s claim that he would cut federal spending on those programs by cracking down on fraud.

Of particular note, Trump pardoned Philip Esformes—who had been sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in stealing more than $1.3 billion from federal programs via fraudulent billing at nursing homes he owned—after his father gave $65,000 to a Kushner-linked charity. Esformes was recently arrested on felony charges related to domestic violence.

People With Connected Lawyers

Trump’s willingness to grant pardons created a robust market for people claiming they had the president’s ear. Former Trump lawyer John Dowd reportedly earned tens of thousands of dollars securing a pardon for a Las Vegas gambler, William Walters, sentenced to prison in 2017 for insider trading. That’s nothing compared to Matt Schlapp, the head of the American Conservative Union, who disclosed receiving $750,000 to lobby for pardon for man named Parker Petit, who was convicted in 2020 of accounting fraud—even though Petit didn’t get a pardon. Rudy Giuliani has denied multiple claims that he requested $2 million to help pardon-seekers get Trump’s attention. Bradley Birkenfeld, a man convicted of fraud in 2008, told the Atlantic in 2021 that former Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski had demanded $500,000 to meet with Trump about a pardon and $1 million more if Trump granted it. Lewandowski denied that claim.

Russia, Russia, Russia

Trump’s attraction to revenge pardons and personal interest combined in his wiliness to undo charges against those caught in investigations into his campaign’s connections to Russia.

Trump pardoned even minor figures convicted of crimes in the scandal, such as George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who a Trump aide dismissed in 2017 as mere “coffee boy.” Trump pardoned Paul Erickson, a marginal Republican operative best known for dating convicted Russian agent Maria Butina. In a statement at the time, Trump said Erickson’s conviction “was based off the Russian collusion hoax.” In fact, Erickson pleaded guilty to defrauding would-be real estate investors in North Dakota in a scheme unrelated to the Russian matter.

Trump pardoned longtime adviser Roger Stone, who was convicted in 2019 of lying to Congress about his role in helping Trump benefit from Democrats’ emails hacked by Russian agents. Stone was “covering up for the president” when he lied to the House Intelligence Committee, Judge Amy Jackson Berman said while sentencing him. Trump’s pardon of former national security adviser Michael Flynn similarly appeared to reward loyalty. Flynn in 2017 pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russia. Just before Flynn’s plea, Dowd, the Trump lawyer, left a voicemail for a Flynn attorney in which he asked for a “heads up” if there was any “information that implicates the president.” Dowd added: “Remember what we’ve always said about the president and his feeling toward Flynn, and all that still remains.” Dowd has denied that he was dangling a pardon. Flynn later attempted to reverse his plea. And he never did implicate Trump in wrongdoing.

Nowhere did Trump use his pardon power more successfully than with Paul Manafort. As special counsel Robert Mueller’s team prosecuted Manafort over his secret lobbying for Ukraine’s former pro-Russian president and untaxed payments Manafort received, Trump “made it known that Manafort could receive a pardon,” Mueller later reported. Manafort did eventually plead guilty to some charges and signed a cooperation agreement. But prosecutors later determined he had likely lied to them. He even funneled information on the investigation to Trump’s lawyers, in an apparent effort to remain in line for the pardon Trump finally delivered in 2020.

While working for Trump’s campaign in 2016, Manafort met secretly with a suspected Russian agent to discuss winning Trump’s support for a plan to settle the conflict then occurring in eastern Ukraine by essentially handing control of the region to Moscow. It’s unclear what if anything Manafort said to Trump about this supposed peace plan at the time. But eight years later, following Russia’s full-scale invasion, Trump says he has a solution that would end the war in Ukraine immediately. His new plan sounds something like the idea Manafort discussed back in 2016.

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Six years on, families remain separated. The Trump administration’s so-called “zero tolerance” policy of splitting families at the border to deter migration is not just a shameful chapter of US history but an ongoing disaster. To this day, the Biden White House is still scrambling to clean up the mess. Some families may never reunite.

It was previously unthinkable: a government program for immigration deterrence predicated on babies and toddlers being ripped from their parents’ arms.

The cruelty of that policy defined the first Trump term. Images of separated children held in Walmarts converted into shelters sparked comparisons to the detention of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. Audio obtained by ProPublica and released in June 2018 underscored the brutality: Guards joked, over the sounds of children wailing and calling for their moms and dads while in custody of Customs and Border Protection, “Well, we have an orchestra here, right? What we’re missing is a conductor.”

The idea of family separation as an immigration deterrence strategy had floated around before during the Obama administration. But it wasn’t until Donald Trump came into office that hardliner senior adviser Stephen Miller pushed to implement it. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in May 2018 when making the zero-tolerance policy public, months after Trump’s Department of Homeland Security had already started tearing families apart. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.” (Sessions even invoked the Bible to defend the policy.)

The unspeakable—and previously unthinkable—horror of a systematic government policy predicated on babies and toddlers being ripped from their parents’ arms was such that even Donald Trump seemed chastened. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” he said in 2018 upon signing an executive order ending the practice. 

But it was too late. By then, more than 2,000 children had already been taken from their parents and potentially condemned to a lifetime of trauma and negative health outcomes. Ultimately, around 5,000 children were separated and, as of earlier this year, 1,360 hadn’t been reunited with their parents or legal guardians, according to a progress report by the Family Reunification Task Force launched by the Biden administration.

Lawyers and advocates working on the reunification process have witnessed heartbreaking instances of children who were so young when the separation happened that they no longer recognized their parent. “A lot of children who were separated felt abandoned by their parents and so there was resentment when they reunited,” Nan Schivone, the legal director of the migrant rights group Justice in Motion, told me earlier this year.

Even in face of the irreparable harm done to thousands of children and their parents, the Trump campaign won’t rule out bringing back family separation in a potential second term.

“Well, when you have that policy, people don’t come,” Trump said during a CNN town hall last year. “If a family hears they’re going to be separated, they love their family, they don’t come.” When pressed further about whether he would reinstate the policy, Trump added: “We have to save our country, all right?”

All these years later, some of the children victimized by family separation are now speaking out. “The worst thing about being [in the shelter] was at night because I always dreamed about my mother and that she was with me,” one unnamed teen says in a video posted on an X account called Same Story, “but when I woke up she wasn’t there.” In another, Billy describes being separated from his father: “I couldn’t speak English. I couldn’t do nothing at all but just sit back and watch my dad be taken away from me.” Reuniting with his father, he says, “was the best moment in my life because it was the first time that I finally felt like I was secure and I was safe.”

Families belong together and free. In 2018, Billy was separated from his dad when they immigrated to the United States in 2018. Now that he’s reunited with his family, he hopes that no family ever has to experience the same story. Share his story because #FamiliesStillBelong. pic.twitter.com/j9Ban3Uye3

— Same Story (@samestoryvoices) September 24, 2024

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Donald Trump has all sorts of odd grievances. He’s complained about low water pressure and toilets, magnetic elevators, a lack of Christmas cheer in advertisements, tiny windows, tiny fish, Abraham Lincoln’s negotiation skills, “the world” generally, and more. But perhaps his favorite thing to hate? Wind turbines.

In more than 100 social media posts over the last 12 years, he’s claimed that wind turbines are “ugly” and “disgusting looking,” “inefficient,” “unreliable,” “noisy,” “neighborhood-destroying,” “bird-killing” “monstrosities” that “cause tremendous damage to their local ecosystems.” (It’s true wind turbines kill birds—but not nearly as many as cars, buildings, and cats.) It’s a weirdly specific vendetta: It’s not as if Trump has some sort of personal, financial stake in blocking this one form of renewable energy. (Oh wait, he does.)

But as president, Trump went full wind-spiracy. At a Republican fundraiser in 2019, Trump claimed that wind turbines cause cancer. “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value,” he said. “And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay?”

Following the event, several outlets fact-checked the president. For one, there’s no reason to think wind turbines would cause a decrease in property value anywhere near 75 percent. As FactCheck.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan fact-checking organization, reported at the time, most studies on the issue “indicate small or no changes to property values.”

And, critically, there is no known link between wind turbines and cancer. The American Cancer Society said at the time it was “unaware of any credible evidence linking the noise from windmills to cancer.” Nor is there any reason to think so, according to FactCheck.org:

Cancer, or what scientists think of as uncontrolled cell growth, is at heart a genetic disease because it starts when a cell has or acquires a mutation in its DNA that allows it to grow unchecked, as the National Cancer Institute explains…

Sound waves, however, aren’t thought to mutate DNA or to cause cancer in any other way. In fact, some sound waves help diagnose cancer, and they might even fight off the disease, researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research outside London have found.

The only plausible way wind turbines might contribute to even a small amount of cancer risk is by increasing stress or disrupting sleep. But it hasn’t yet been demonstrated that those problems do contribute to cancer risk, or that they are caused by turbine noise. Trump’s claim is baseless.

Trump’s wind tales continued after his time in office. Last year, Trump blamed wind power for rising energy costs (wind is the cheapest source of new energy in the country) and said wind turbines have made whales go “crazy” and die. (Just to be clear—there is no evidence of this.)

“They are washing up ashore,” he said, adding, “You wouldn’t see that once a year—now they are coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They are driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

President Donald Trump was lying profusely about his administration’s most notable achievement, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), even as he sat down to sign the bill into law in 2017, a few days before Christmas.

“As you know, we had the largest tax cuts in our history just approved,” he remarked at the “rush-job” Oval Office signing ceremony, from which the usual gaggle of fawning Republican legislators was excluded—the souvenir pens were instead offered to the lucky few reporters on hand. “This is bigger than, actually, President Reagan’s.”

Uh, not even close—though it was the biggest corporate cut. Thanks to his tax bill, Trump went on, corporate America was already “making tremendous investments. That means jobs; it means a lot of things. And we’re very happy. So that’s AT&T, Boeing, Sinclair, Wells Fargo, Comcast, and now many other companies.”

The rich are feasting on America’s economic pie. Republican tax cuts have set them on a steep upward wealth trajectory, far and away from the “little people.”

The executives sure were happy. The legislation slashed corporate income taxes dramatically, from 35 percent to 21 percent. Not surprising, given that, according to the nonprofit Public Citizen, more than 7,000 lobbyists—on behalf of a who’s who of Corporate America—helped hammer out the bill’s details. That’s 13 lobbyists per lawmaker.

And what did these joyful companies do with their windfall? Build new factories? Hire more workers? Raise wages? Stimulate economic growth? There was some of that, sure. But the cuts came “nowhere close to paying for themselves,” the New York Times later reported, and have added more than $100 billion a year to the deficit.

Just about every Republican president since Reagan has relied on the same debunked theory to advance tax cuts for corporations and wealthy Americans. It’s called supply-side (or “trickle-down”) economics. The idea is that if we give rich folks more money, they’ll invest, build companies, and create good jobs. The economic benefits will then trickle down to what the late New York heiress Leona Helmsley—whom the press nicknamed “Queen of Mean”—allegedly called the “little people.” (That fun fact emerged during testimony at her 1989 trial for tax evasion—where she was found guilty. Helmsley died in 2007, famously leaving $12 million to Trouble, her pampered little dog, but nothing to two of her four grandchildren.)

Trump’s corporate cuts, predictably, trickled not down but up. As I wrote in my 2021 book, Jackpot, the first instinct of executives and board members after Congress passed the TCJA was to enrich themselves:

S&P 500 firms spent a record $806 billion in 2018 buying back their own shares on the public markets. The Harvard Business Review notes that senior executives, paid largely in stock and stock options, use buybacks to manipulate share prices “to their own ben­efit” and the benefit of “investment bankers and hedge-fund manag­ers” who are further enriched “at the expense of employees, as well as continuing shareholders.”

Buybacks are indeed marvelous for executives and Wall Street bankers. By reducing the number of outstanding shares on the market, they drive up the stock price to the benefit of major shareholders. But they’re bad news for workers, who have traditionally benefitted from excess corporate profits and their reinvestment in operations and equipment, which tends to strengthen the business and bring new jobs. Buybacks also can be bad for long-term investors, because they encourage a short-term mindset in the C-suite and can be used to mask a firm’s underperformance.

Notably, every one of the firms Trump praised by name during the signing ceremony notched major buybacks soon afterward: Sinclair’s board greenlit $1 billion in the months to follow. Boeing’s board approved $19 billion, and numerous reports have blamed the company’s aircraft safety fiascos in part on its lust for buybacks. (Late last week, the company announced it would lay off roughly 17,000 people, or 10 percent of its workforce.)

On Trump’s watch, Congress doubled the gift and estate tax exemption. A rich couple can now leave their kids $27.2 million without paying one dime in tax.

AT&T repurchased $692 million worth of its stock in 2018 amid reports that it had been laying off workers and closing call centers—and completed nearly $2.5 billion in buybacks the following year. Wells Fargo was in for almost $41 billion, and Comcast shelled out $8.4 billion for buybacks and dividends (which it juiced by 10 percent).

“We give stock to corporate managers to convince them to create the kind of long-term value that benefits American companies and the workers and communities they serve,” Robert Jackson Jr., who then served on the Securities and Exchange Commission, declared in a June 2018 speech. “Instead, what we are seeing is that executives are using buybacks as a chance to cash out their compensation at investor expense.”

Even when wealthy businesspeople are incentivized to “create value,” results may vary. “A friend of mine, Bob Kraft, called me last night, and he said this tax bill is incredible,” Trump remarked at the signing.

“He owns the New England Patriots,” Trump said, “but he’s in the paper business too. And he said, based on this tax bill, he just wanted to let me know that he’s going to buy a big plant in the great state of North Carolina, and he’s going to build a tremendous paper mill there.”

I looked up that “tremendous” paper mill. Trump, as usual, botched the details. The plant is in Catawba, South Carolina. Kraft’s company, New-Indy, took it over in September 2018, after which it became a total nightmare for the community—generating more than 47,000 complaints of noxious odors “similar to rotten eggs, dirty diapers or other foul smells,” including from people in North Carolina.

The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy released an analysis of whom Trump’s new tax proposals would benefit. Guess what: It probably isn’t you!

Another big deal, Trump said, were the estate tax changes in the tax bill: “Something very important to me,” he said (if you can imagine anyone not named Trump being important to Trump), were “the family farmers and small-business owners who lost their business because of the estate tax. Most of them won’t have any estate tax to pay. It will be a great thing for their families. You can leave your farm to your family. You could leave your business, your small business to your family—not even so small, because the numbers are pretty big here.”

They are big! The TCJA doubled the gift and estate tax exemption and pegged it to inflation, which means, as of 2024, a well-heeled couple can leave $27.2 million to their heirs without paying one dime in tax.

But that won’t save any “family farms.” That’s a well-worn Republican talking point that amounts, fittingly enough, to a heap of cow manure. Back in 2017, a researcher with the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) pointed out that only 50 small farms or businesses would be on the hook for federal estate tax that year (a “small” business can have up to $40 million in annual revenues and 1,500 employees), and most would likely have other assets, such as stock, that could be liquidated if need be to cover the tax. Existing law, she also pointed out, allows estates “to spread their payments over a 15-year period at low interest rates.” America’s farmers were never in danger.

The Reagan tax cuts enacted in 1981 and 1986 added up to biggest break for wealthy Americans since 1920. The top marginal rate owed in 1981 on the uppermost income tier of the nation’s highest earners—anything exceeding $215,400 for a couple (about $760,000 in today’s dollars)—was slashed dramatically, from 70 percent when Reagan took office to 28 percent the year he left. Congress also reduced the gift/estate tax, more than tripled the lifetime exemption—the amount parents can leave their offspring tax-free—and trimmed taxes on capital gains and corporate profits.

And what was the outcome of all this largesse? Another snippet from Jackpot:

In 2012, a researcher at the nonpartisan Congres­sional Research Service sought to determine whether the Reagan cuts and other reductions in marginal income tax rates over the prior sixty-five years had benefited the overall economy. He came up short. The tax cuts did not appear to be correlated with more robust saving, investment, or productivity growth. They did, however, appear to be associated with rich people making a lot more money than before. There was no evidence that the cuts expanded America’s economic pie, the report noted, “but there may be a relationship to how the eco­nomic pie is sliced.”

You might even say the very rich pigged out on the pie. The Reagan cuts set America’s most affluent citizens on a steep upward wealth trajectory, soaring them far and away from the “little people.”

Supply-side economic arguments would later enable George W. Bush to slash taxes further. Among other provisions, the 2001 and 2003 bills he signed reduced the top income tax rate, then 39.7 percent, to 35 percent—lower even than today—and began phasing out the estate tax, which Congress briefly repealed in 2010, only to reinstate it the following year.

“High-income taxpayers benefitted most from these tax cuts, with the top 1 percent of households receiving an average tax cut of over $570,000 between 2004-2012,” explains a CBPP analysis. By 2010, the report notes, the Bush cuts resulted in a 1 percent bump in annual after-tax income for the poorest fifth of US families, whereas the top-earning 1 percent enjoyed a 6.7 percent increase.

Unfair? Sure. But did the Bush cuts ever deliver the economic results supply-siders promised? Nope. “Evidence suggests that they did not improve economic growth or pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt and contributed to a rise in income inequality,” notes the CBPP.

Fast forward to 2024, when Trump told a crowd of “rich as hell” donors he’ll give them more tax cuts if elected to a second term. They cheered! Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders made a Facebook video.

Trump has said he wants to cut the corporate income tax further, too—to 15 percent. (Kamala Harris proposes raising it to 28 percent, still well below the pre-Trump rate of 35 percent.) And he keeps introducing new, ill-conceived, tax proposals on the campaign trail—mostly regressive—adding to a haphazard plan that the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects will cost the federal government, depending on economic conditions, anywhere from $1.5 trillion to $15.2 trillion over a decade. (The Harris plan, the group projects, would cost between zero and $8.1 trillion.)

On October 7, the nonpartisan Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy released an analysis of whom Trump’s tax proposals would benefit.

It’s probably not you.

Love it or hate it, at least now you better understand the Republicans’ dirty little secret: Supply side economics, cutting taxes on the wealthy, doesn’t work. It has never worked. It’s complete bullshit. But alas, it’s the sort of bullshit that refuses to be composted.