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.

I have always thought the music-for-charity genre was irredeemably corny. “We Are the World”? Far from “the greatest gift of all”—sorry! Band Aid’s, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” I hope they don’t know it’s Christmastime at all, because I’m returning this gift. Let’s not even get into that hauntingly bad celebrity cover of “Imagine” from the darkest days of March 2020. 

Music for charity is, often, just bad. And it can read as patronizing, frivolous, and a useless effort by out-of-touch celebrities who could help needy masses a lot more by giving money directly to everyone as opposed to donating a song. 

But this year, two different albums were different. In 2024, the Charity Compilation was good. 

Transa, a Red Hot release from November, is a four-hour, hundred-artist behemoth. Often heavy on the ambient, you should expect tons of reverb, harp, and flute. At its core, the record isn’t so much about being transgender as it is about loving trans people. Sade’s standout hymn to her trans son, “Young Lion,” distills that spirit. (So do the samplers from the New York City Trans Oral History Project included on the album, as does André 3000’s 26-minute instrumental track, with the unwieldy title, “Something Is Happening and I May Not Fully Understand But I’m Happy to Stand for the Understanding.”) 

Producer Dust Reid and artist and activist Massima Bell started developing the album in 2021. Since then, things for trans folks in America have gone from bad to worse. Twenty-six states have passed bans on gender-affirming care for young people. Adults are rationing hormones, and some are rushing through legal name and sex changes before President-elect Donald Trump comes to power again. Just last week, a provision banning gender-affirming care for the children of military families passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, which caused a friend to text me, baffled, “What does that even have to do with defense?” 

It would be naive to suggest that music can do much to solve anti-trans law or even really counteract the reactionary wave we’re now caught up in. Transa won’t stop America from throwing people under the bus. But here’s the reason it’s important: This is good music. And good music matters. It tells the listener, we survived. We are still here, and we are making something beautiful.

Another mammoth compilation album released this year proves the same point. Cardinals at the Window, a 10-hour Bandcamp exclusive released 12 days after Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina. The record—well over 100 tracks long, with over 100 artists pitching in—admittedly lacks the sonic cohesiveness of Transa. Instead, it sounds like a jam session among old friends meeting up after the storm passes. Thus far, the album has raised over $340,000 for organizations like Holler Harm Reduction and BeLoved Asheville, bringing tangible help to a region too often neglected. (North Carolina is still very much recovering from Helene: Some survivors are turning to yurts and tents for winter housing after their homes were destroyed.) 

Other musical aid efforts this year merit a mention, too. From cramped house shows to sold-out arenas, artists have raised money for the people of Gaza and Sudan—often at a cost to their careers. (One surprise: Macklemore, of “Thrift Shop” fame, has reinvented himself as a protest artist.) 

I can’t find a non-trite way to write about how music keeps us human when our worlds collapse around us. But I do know that from now on, I will not be disregarding Charity Compilation Albums. These artists aren’t heroes in the sense of saving lives, really, but I think that those who give us little moments of joy and hope in cataclysmic times deserve hero status, too.

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.

For those of us who would be described in HR packets at progressive workplaces as “gender nonconforming” or “of non-normative gender presentation,” it can sometimes be really hard to get a haircut.

The places where one might get one are usually gender-segregated zones, where cisgender people go for what one might call gender-affirming care—that is, cosmetic care toward redeclaring their man- or womanhood. Still, enough gender studies papers have been written about the barbershop as a masculine space and the hair salon as the center of an all-women’s social world. I, frankly, don’t want to get into all of that.

But my point here is, in the expensive coastal cities where broke queer and trans people congregate for safety and community, it can be difficult to find an affordable haircut. When I moved to New York City, I was inundated with ads for queer-affirming barbershops. But these were all promoting places where haircuts cost $120—not, for me, a particularly affirming price tag. For a while, I resorted to making my friends cut my hair with drugstore scissors. 

Then I met Ruth Boirie. Ruthie’s been cutting hair for 44 years, and she charges a flat rate of $30 cash for haircuts in her small barber-slash-woodshop (yes, woodshop). In late December, she’ll be 77 years old. 

Ruthie has seen it all. Once upon a time, she cut hair for $3.50, in a room she rented for $15 a month. Now, she pays just over a thousand dollars per month for her studio, with “RUTHIE’S NEIGHBORHOOD BARBER SHOP—EVERYONE WELCOME” lovingly hand-painted in gold on the window. 

I found out about Ruthie through a friend of a friend: She’s been handing out her business cards, adorned with clip art of a palm tree on a beach, at the lesbian bar down the street from her home for decades. She scouts the bar for people who might be in need of her services: “I get my cards every day over there, and…when I see the short haircuts, I say, Do you live in the neighborhood? Well, here’s my card, if you’d ever like to try me out.” 

“I want them to feel my heart, you know, when I come in and the way I greet them, and that right away, I open their hearts up from the warmness I give them when I shake their hand, because a lot of barbers don’t do that with them,” Ruthie said in a New York LGBT oral history interview back in 2022. “Every person that comes into my shop, I ask them, ‘What’s your name? How are you doing?’ and I shake their hand.” 

“Every person that comes into my shop, I ask them, ‘What’s your name? How are you doing?’ and I shake their hand.” 

When I walked into Ruthie’s barbershop on a freezing December night, she was cutting the hair of someone she described as an “old lady,” a client she’s been seeing since she opened the store in 1996. She finished up her work—a simple short style, like most of us get there—and ushered me into her chair. I settled in for more or less the same haircut. 

Ruthie’s Neighborhood Barber Shop is cluttered with 20 years of knickknacks. Little dolls and vintage action figures in the window entertain the neighborhood children, a few of whom came in out of the cold in their puffer coats for a piece of candy from Ruthie’s bowl as I sat. Even the physical structure of the shop is Ruthie’s own. After each cut, she sweeps hair off the floorboards she laid herself.

“I made the benches,” Ruthie told me. “Something to make it look neat enough for people to want to walk in and feel comfortable.”

Her haircuts take a long time: She’s obsessively precise, and she’s also certain to take a break anytime someone from the neighborhood stops in. And that’s the thing: Everybody stops in. A man with a bulldog grabs a treat for the dog and says hi to Ruthie; a young dad with a wiggly baby in his arms struggles to wave at Ruthie and keep ahold of the baby at the same time. 

Ruthie keeps posters of the neighborhood as it was when she was young, streetcars and all. And she keeps sepia-toned pictures of her mother—elbow-length gloves and a wedding gown, age 23—which she eagerly shows customers. “Hey, Mama,” she asks the portrait sometimes, “how you doing?”  

When Ruthie was left with unexpected bills after her mother’s death, the neighborhood banded together to raise enough to get her back on her feet. But now, almost a decade later, that love might not be enough to save the shop. Lately, Ruthie said, the clientele at the bar has changed. Not as many customers have been coming through her door.

As she cut my hair, Ruthie told me that, at 77, she’s applying for jobs—using the computer is hard for her, but she’ll fold laundry and keep things neat at a laundromat if they’ll have her. She has a social worker but isn’t sure whether that social worker can help her with much beyond getting EBT. 

A younger friend stopped in as Ruthie was adjusting and readjusting her clippers at the back of my head. They asked if they could help Ruthie fill out a job application on Indeed. They struggled to then explain to her what Indeed is—people who are 77 should not need to know that kind of thing.

Maybe the laundromat job will call back. Or maybe, as the weather gets warmer, customers will begin lining up at Ruthie’s door again.

Last week, Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Kevin Kiley (R-Calif) introduced federal anti-SLAPP legislation, in a bid to protect journalists, whistleblowers, and individual internet users from those who use lawsuits as an intimidation tactic.

SLAPP suits—formally, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation—are designed to prevent people from exercising their free speech. A common example is a person suing a media outlet after unfavorable coverage—attempting to bankrupt journalists from lawyers’ fees, even if, in the end, the outlet wins the case. Such suits are already illegal in 34 states. But, on the federal level, there’s no such legislation. 

Raskin and Kiley’s bill, the “Free Speech Protection Act,” would allow people being sued over speech acts to file a special motion to dismiss by classifying a lawsuit as a SLAPP. The party who filed the SLAPP suit would then be required to pay the respondent’s legal fees. 

There is a rush to implement the bill before the next presidency. Trump and his companies have sued a broad range of media companies for defamation, ranging from the New York Times to a local Wisconsin local TV station. Most recently, Trump filed a lawsuit against CBS over the editing of  Kamala Harris’ “60 Minutes” interview, asserting that the interview’s presentation was “consumer fraud.” (CBS is moving to get that lawsuit thrown out before Trump assumes the presidency.)

Nominees for Trump administration posts are following in the boss’s footsteps. Days after his nomination for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth was accused of sexual assault. Now, he’s saying he’ll sue his accuser for extortion if he is not confirmed for the post. Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, threatened to sue a former White House colleague for “defamatory statements,” after she asserted that he had a habit of lying. 

“I do think those threats are a good example of why it’s so important to have statutory protections like this federal bill,” ACLU litigator Vera Eidelman told me. “We shouldn’t have to be worried about having to defend against lawsuits, spending the time, the money, the stress to do that, just because we want to say something about a matter of public concern.”

Raskin introduced similar legislation in 2022, but it did not pass. Since then, however, more state-level anti-SLAPP bills have been signed into law. Advocates believe this time around they have a better chance. 

The coalition pushing the bipartisan bill includes organizations that often stand in opposition to one another: corporate accountability organizations are listed next to the Institute for Free Speech, which is well-known for promoting unlimited corporate spending in politics. David Keating, of the Institute for Free Speech, said that’s because “ they all know somebody or some organization that’s had to deal with these kind of frivolous lawsuits trying to shut people down.” 

On the state level, anti-SLAPP laws often pass near-unanimously. And, Keating said, about 60 percent of the US population is now covered by such a law. But people bringing these suits, he added, often do so in federal court. “Because a lot of the speech is on the internet they can try to claim that this is not a dispute between two people that are in the same state,” he said. 

After the PRESS act—a shield law for journalists—was blocked in the Senate by Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on December 10th, Raskin’s bill is one of the few options left to protect journalists against lawsuits from people much more powerful and moneyed than they are as Trump resumes power.

“There’s that old saying, you can sue a ham sandwich, right?” Keating said. “I mean, that’s kind of the way it is in federal court, anybody can bring a lawsuit, no matter how stupid.” 

After the Supreme Court ruled nine years ago that the Constitution protected same-sex marriage, far-right groups, in need of a new rallying cry, turned their attention to transgender people—in particular, kids. That strategic shift has met with devastating success: In recent years, 24 states have made it illegal for doctors to provide trans youth with puberty blockers and hormone therapy—treatments supported by virtually all leading US medical organizations—for the purpose of alleviating gender dysphoria. 

Although anti-trans groups frame their campaign as a “Promise to America’s Children,” their ultimate goal has long been apparent: ending gender transitions for all people, including adults. As Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, admitted last year, he and his allies were starting with children because that’s “where the consensus is.”

That agenda was front and center Wednesday morning when the Supreme Court heard arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a landmark case that could prove to be as consequential for trans rights as the Dobbs decision has been for abortion. The case focuses on Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming treatments for minors, passed last year. But throughout hearing, which lasted two and a half hours, lawyers repeatedly brought up the ramifications for adults as well.

A decision in Tennessee’s favor would pave the way for courts to uphold broader bans on gender-affirming care in the future. “There really is much more at stake,” says Katie Eyer, who teaches anti-discrimination law at Rutgers University, “including potentially the ability of people of any age to effectively get [gender] care in the United States.”

As I have reported, Skrmetti centers on the question of whether bans on gender-affirming care are a form of sex discrimination under the 14th Amendment, as the Biden administration, transgender kids, and their families have argued. If so, judges must closely examine lawmakers’ rationale and evidence for passing them (known as “heightened scrutiny”). If not, courts should rubber-stamp such laws when challenged (the so-called “rational-basis” standard).

Tennessee, of course, wants the rubber stamp. State Solicitor General J. Matthew Rice repeatedly argued on Wednesday that the 2023 ban does not treat people differently based on their sex, and thus does not merit closer scrutiny.

Under questioning from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Rice said that if the court rules Tennessee’s current ban doesn’t require heightened scrutiny, a law banning gender-affirming care for adults wouldn’t either. “Your Honor, we think that if we’re assuming a similarly worded statute, that there still would not be a sex- or a transgender-based classification.”

“You’re licensing states to deprive grown adults of the choice of which sex to adopt?” Sotomayor probed.

“Your honor, I don’t think that’s a fair—” Rice began.

“That’s what you’re telling me,” Sotomayor cut him off.

The debate over adult bans isn’t hypothetical. Florida is currently enforcing a ban on gender-affirming care for minors that also significantly restricts adult care—preventing nurse practitioners from prescribing hormone therapy, for example, and requiring appointments to be in person rather than via telehealth. Officials in Ohio and Missouri have tried to use regulatory powers to impose rules that limit adult transition care. Other states have targeted insurance coverage. South Carolina, for instance, bans the use of Medicaid and other public funds for gender-affirming care, regardless of the patient’s age.

“When you’re 1 percent of the population or less, [it’s] very hard to see how the democratic process is going to protect you. Blacks were a much larger part of the population, and it didn’t protect them. It didn’t protect women for whole centuries.”

Throughout the hearing, some conservative justices seemed to signal a desire to leave the legality of gender-affirming treatments for minors to states to decide—as the court purported to do when it overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022—citing the evolving nature of the scientific evidence. “The Constitution leaves that question to the people’s representatives, rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. Leaving the question to legislatures, rather than courts, would mean ruling that such laws get a lower level of scrutiny from judges.

In his exchange with Sotomayor, Rice seemed to argue that “democratic process” was enough to stop laws that are rooted in prejudice. “To the extent that a law dealing with adults would pass rational-basis review, that just means it’s left to the democratic process, and that democracy is the best check on potentially misguided laws,” he said.

Sotomayor, whose formidable presence anchors the court’s progressive wing, wasn’t buying it. “When you’re 1 percent of the population or less, [it’s] very hard to see how the democratic process is going to protect you,” she retorted. “Blacks were a much larger part of the population, and it didn’t protect them. It didn’t protect women for whole centuries.”

With the GOP set to take control of the White House and Congress in January, the “democratic process” could soon produce a nationwide ban on gender-affirming care for minors. If the Supreme Court decides to hold the Tennessee ban to a low bar, rather than requiring it to meet the higher level of scrutiny, its decision “would equally apply to a nationwide ban,” US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Biden administration, pointed out during the hearing.

At a rally outside the Supreme Court, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced that she was reintroducing just such a bill, claiming the support of incoming President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. “Those that worship evil are abusing our children, brainwashing our children to believe the lie that comes directly from Satan,” Greene declared.

To Ari, a 21-year-old trans college student from Tennessee who attended a rally in support of trans rights outside the courthouse on Wednesday, the question of whether the courts will protect transgender people from legislative attacks is a matter of life or death. Ari had joined the demonstration, they said, for the sake of the trans kids they’ve known who never made it to adulthood—including a high school friend who committed suicide.

“I think legislation like this only leads to more dead kids,” Ari said. “Tennessee, being one of the most poorly educated, most under-resourced states in the country, is ignoring its own problems in order to terrorize children and families who just want to support their kids.” 

After the Supreme Court ruled nine years ago that the Constitution protected same-sex marriage, far-right groups, in need of a new rallying cry, turned their attention to transgender people—in particular, kids. That strategic shift has met with devastating success: In recent years, 24 states have made it illegal for doctors to provide trans youth with puberty blockers and hormone therapy—treatments supported by virtually all leading US medical organizations—for the purpose of alleviating gender dysphoria. 

Although anti-trans groups frame their campaign as a “Promise to America’s Children,” their ultimate goal has long been apparent: ending gender transitions for all people, including adults. As Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, admitted last year, he and his allies were starting with children because that’s “where the consensus is.”

That agenda was front and center Wednesday morning when the Supreme Court heard arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a landmark case that could prove to be as consequential for trans rights as the Dobbs decision has been for abortion. The case focuses on Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming treatments for minors, passed last year. But throughout hearing, which lasted two and a half hours, lawyers repeatedly brought up the ramifications for adults as well.

A decision in Tennessee’s favor would pave the way for courts to uphold broader bans on gender-affirming care in the future. “There really is much more at stake,” says Katie Eyer, who teaches anti-discrimination law at Rutgers University, “including potentially the ability of people of any age to effectively get [gender] care in the United States.”

As I have reported, Skrmetti centers on the question of whether bans on gender-affirming care are a form of sex discrimination under the 14th Amendment, as the Biden administration, transgender kids, and their families have argued. If so, judges must closely examine lawmakers’ rationale and evidence for passing them (known as “heightened scrutiny”). If not, courts should rubber-stamp such laws when challenged (the so-called “rational-basis” standard).

Tennessee, of course, wants the rubber stamp. State Solicitor General J. Matthew Rice repeatedly argued on Wednesday that the 2023 ban does not treat people differently based on their sex, and thus does not merit closer scrutiny.

Under questioning from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Rice said that if the court rules Tennessee’s current ban doesn’t require heightened scrutiny, a law banning gender-affirming care for adults wouldn’t either. “Your Honor, we think that if we’re assuming a similarly worded statute, that there still would not be a sex- or a transgender-based classification.”

“You’re licensing states to deprive grown adults of the choice of which sex to adopt?” Sotomayor probed.

“Your honor, I don’t think that’s a fair—” Rice began.

“That’s what you’re telling me,” Sotomayor cut him off.

The debate over adult bans isn’t hypothetical. Florida is currently enforcing a ban on gender-affirming care for minors that also significantly restricts adult care—preventing nurse practitioners from prescribing hormone therapy, for example, and requiring appointments to be in person rather than via telehealth. Officials in Ohio and Missouri have tried to use regulatory powers to impose rules that limit adult transition care. Other states have targeted insurance coverage. South Carolina, for instance, bans the use of Medicaid and other public funds for gender-affirming care, regardless of the patient’s age.

“When you’re 1 percent of the population or less, [it’s] very hard to see how the democratic process is going to protect you. Blacks were a much larger part of the population, and it didn’t protect them. It didn’t protect women for whole centuries.”

Throughout the hearing, some conservative justices seemed to signal a desire to leave the legality of gender-affirming treatments for minors to states to decide—as the court purported to do when it overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022—citing the evolving nature of the scientific evidence. “The Constitution leaves that question to the people’s representatives, rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. Leaving the question to legislatures, rather than courts, would mean ruling that such laws get a lower level of scrutiny from judges.

In his exchange with Sotomayor, Rice seemed to argue that “democratic process” was enough to stop laws that are rooted in prejudice. “To the extent that a law dealing with adults would pass rational-basis review, that just means it’s left to the democratic process, and that democracy is the best check on potentially misguided laws,” he said.

Sotomayor, whose formidable presence anchors the court’s progressive wing, wasn’t buying it. “When you’re 1 percent of the population or less, [it’s] very hard to see how the democratic process is going to protect you,” she retorted. “Blacks were a much larger part of the population, and it didn’t protect them. It didn’t protect women for whole centuries.”

With the GOP set to take control of the White House and Congress in January, the “democratic process” could soon produce a nationwide ban on gender-affirming care for minors. If the Supreme Court decides to hold the Tennessee ban to a low bar, rather than requiring it to meet the higher level of scrutiny, its decision “would equally apply to a nationwide ban,” US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Biden administration, pointed out during the hearing.

At a rally outside the Supreme Court, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced that she was reintroducing just such a bill, claiming the support of incoming President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. “Those that worship evil are abusing our children, brainwashing our children to believe the lie that comes directly from Satan,” Greene declared.

To Ari, a 21-year-old trans college student from Tennessee who attended a rally in support of trans rights outside the courthouse on Wednesday, the question of whether the courts will protect transgender people from legislative attacks is a matter of life or death. Ari had joined the demonstration, they said, for the sake of the trans kids they’ve known who never made it to adulthood—including a high school friend who committed suicide.

“I think legislation like this only leads to more dead kids,” Ari said. “Tennessee, being one of the most poorly educated, most under-resourced states in the country, is ignoring its own problems in order to terrorize children and families who just want to support their kids.” 

There is a special relationship between a doting parent and his kid’s in-laws—machatunim in Yiddish, consuegros in Spanish. It doesn’t have a name in English. But, all the same, Donald Trump has elevated this unique extended-familial bond during his time in office. In particular, he has helped his daughters’ husbands’ dads.

On Saturday, Trump announced that Charles Kushner—father of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, husband of Trump’s daughter Ivanka—would be appointed ambassador to France. Then, on Sunday, he did it again: on Truth Social, he declared that his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law would also be given a job. 

Massad Boulos, a Lebanese businessman and current father-in-law, will be appointed Senior Advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs. Boulos comes from a Greek Orthodox family in Lebanon and spent much of his youth in Texas before moving to Nigeria to become an auto industry tycoon. He has contacts in several political parties in Lebanon, having reportedly run unsuccessfully for parliament. In the United States, Boulos was a major player in Trump’s Arab voter outreach program, painting Trump as a potential peacemaker in the Middle East.

So far, though, the nascent Trump administration doesn’t seem to be brokering that peace they promised. The ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, signed last week—according to the Washington Post the deal may have been a “gift” to Trump from Israeli officials after the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu staunchly supported the Republican candidate—has now been violated dozens of times by Israel and Hezbollah. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s foreign policy platform remains garbled. Like Biden before him, he’s certainly suggested wanting a ceasefire in Gaza. But on Monday afternoon, he said there will be “all hell to pay” if the remaining Israeli and international hostages held by Hamas weren’t released by his first day in office.

“Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. He didn’t mention a ceasefire or any other precondition for the hostages’ release. Boulos, in a Tuesday interview with French magazine Le Point, seemed to agree with his new boss, saying that “the war is practically over,” and therefore the hostage’s fate “should not be linked to other issues related to the Day After in Gaza.”

At least 44,000 people have been killed in Gaza over the past year of war according to official Health Ministry figures, though experts say that the complete death toll is almost certainly actually in the hundreds of thousands. The Israeli Defense Forces have also killed at least 3,000 people in Lebanon. The majority of Gaza’s infrastructure has been reduced to rubble, and almost all of Gaza’s population is facing active starvation. In that context, it is not clear what more “all hell to pay” could mean. 

Trump declared in early October that Gaza “could be better than Monaco.” Jared Kushner, son of the other in-law, has also discussed the idea of a razed and remade Gaza as a boon for industry. Appointing businessmen from his own family to administrative posts might be a step towards that vision of stopping the war, but it also continues to play close to Trump’s family money schemes in the Middle East. Trump’s appointments at least imply that if his administration is pushing for peace, it will not be a peace built in the interest of the people of Gaza, or Lebanon, or even Israel: it will be a peace for those who are his true constituency—real estate developers, business tycoons, and members of his very own family. 

There is a special relationship between a doting parent and his kid’s in-laws—machatunim in Yiddish, consuegros in Spanish. It doesn’t have a name in English. But, all the same, Donald Trump has elevated this unique extended-familial bond during his time in office. In particular, he has helped his daughters’ husbands’ dads.

On Saturday, Trump announced that Charles Kushner—father of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, husband of Trump’s daughter Ivanka—would be appointed ambassador to France. Then, on Sunday, he did it again: on Truth Social, he declared that his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law would also be given a job. 

Massad Boulos, a Lebanese businessman and current father-in-law, will be appointed Senior Advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs. Boulos comes from a Greek Orthodox family in Lebanon and spent much of his youth in Texas before moving to Nigeria to become an auto industry tycoon. He has contacts in several political parties in Lebanon, having reportedly run unsuccessfully for parliament. In the United States, Boulos was a major player in Trump’s Arab voter outreach program, painting Trump as a potential peacemaker in the Middle East.

So far, though, the nascent Trump administration doesn’t seem to be brokering that peace they promised. The ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, signed last week—according to the Washington Post the deal may have been a “gift” to Trump from Israeli officials after the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu staunchly supported the Republican candidate—has now been violated dozens of times by Israel and Hezbollah. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s foreign policy platform remains garbled. Like Biden before him, he’s certainly suggested wanting a ceasefire in Gaza. But on Monday afternoon, he said there will be “all hell to pay” if the remaining Israeli and international hostages held by Hamas weren’t released by his first day in office.

“Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. He didn’t mention a ceasefire or any other precondition for the hostages’ release. Boulos, in a Tuesday interview with French magazine Le Point, seemed to agree with his new boss, saying that “the war is practically over,” and therefore the hostage’s fate “should not be linked to other issues related to the Day After in Gaza.”

At least 44,000 people have been killed in Gaza over the past year of war according to official Health Ministry figures, though experts say that the complete death toll is almost certainly actually in the hundreds of thousands. The Israeli Defense Forces have also killed at least 3,000 people in Lebanon. The majority of Gaza’s infrastructure has been reduced to rubble, and almost all of Gaza’s population is facing active starvation. In that context, it is not clear what more “all hell to pay” could mean. 

Trump declared in early October that Gaza “could be better than Monaco.” Jared Kushner, son of the other in-law, has also discussed the idea of a razed and remade Gaza as a boon for industry. Appointing businessmen from his own family to administrative posts might be a step towards that vision of stopping the war, but it also continues to play close to Trump’s family money schemes in the Middle East. Trump’s appointments at least imply that if his administration is pushing for peace, it will not be a peace built in the interest of the people of Gaza, or Lebanon, or even Israel: it will be a peace for those who are his true constituency—real estate developers, business tycoons, and members of his very own family. 

It was clear from the outset that the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would not pass. The trio of bills, brought to a vote on Wednesday night, would have stopped $20 billion in weapons from being sent to Israel. Every single Republican in the Senate voted against Sanders, as expected. A majority of Democratic senators voted against the bills, too. 

But there has still been movement in favor of limiting military aid: About 40 percent of the Democrats present for the vote wanted to stop billions in arms sales to Israel, despite loud opposition from the White House, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Major figures in the Democratic Party—Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.)—voted for at least one of the resolutions. Nineteen senators backed at least a piece of Sanders’ call to limit aid, a historically high number showing explicit, public support for upholding American law as it applies to Israel.

Polls show that the majority of Americans support suspending offensive weapons to Israel until an end comes to the country’s yearlong bombardment of Gaza—in which, experts estimate, over 100,000 people have already been killed. But that majority view—endorsed even by some explicitly pro-Israel organizations, such as J Street—has not been reflected in the US government.

In fact, hours before Sanders brought his resolutions to the Senate floor, the United States vetoed another ceasefire resolution in the United Nations. It is the fourth such resolution since Israel’s war in Gaza—which United Nations agencies, independent experts, and several world governments have declared a genocide—began. (That resolution would have demanded the release of all hostages, and implemented Biden’s own ceasefire plan.)

On the Senate floor, Sanders spoke next to a large photo of a dead, emaciated Palestinian child. “Every member of the Senate who believes in the rule of law, that our government should obey the law, should vote for these resolutions,” he said. “The Foreign Assistance Act and the Arms Export Control Act are very clear. The United States cannot provide weapons to countries that violate internationally recognized human rights or block US humanitarian aid. That is not my opinion, that is what the law says.”

In mid-September, Biden administration leaders sent a letter to Netanyahu warning him of these specific provisions of US law, and saying Israel had 30 days to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza or face cuts to military aid. But 30 days came and went, Palestinians continued to starve, and the Biden administration refused to enforce its own deadline.

Joint Resolutions of Disapproval are not unheard of—they’ve previously been levied against Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for example—but this is the first time that this type of weapons-trade-restricting measure has been brought against Israel, which is by a far larger recipient of US weapons, having been given about $310 billion in military aid from the US since its founding.

Sanders recounted anecdotes from doctors who saw civilians shot in the head in Gaza, explained that per satellite imagery two-thirds of the buildings in Gaza are flattened entirely, and told fellow congresspeople that reporting showed almost no one in Gaza has had consistent access to electricity or clean water for nearly 14 months. 

“Fundamentally, [President] Joe Biden will not uphold the law,” Matt Duss, a former Sanders aide now at the Center for International Policy, said of the White House pressure campaign to vote against Sanders. Instead, it’s “purely ideological: [Biden] just believes that Israel is entitled to absolute total wall-to-wall support, no matter how catastrophic the impact on Palestinians or Lebanese.” 

“A lot of people wrongly thought that it was because of political considerations,” Duss continued. “But no, even after the election, [the administration] remains completely committed to ignoring US law and keeping the flow of weapons running, even with the knowledge that these particular weapons will not reach Israel for over a year.”

The first bill to be voted on Wednesday night concerned exploding tank shells. Cat Knarr of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights noted that these shells are thought to have killed 6-year-old Hind Rajab as she sat alone with the bodies of her family, pleading for help. Knarr’s group staged a protest the day before the vote at the Senate. “You’re either on the side of justice and stopping the weapons, or you’re on the side of arming a genocidal state, and you will go down in history for how you vote today,” she said. 

When opponents of the JRDs came to the floor, their talking points sounded like they were lifted directly from a White House memo circulated earlier that morning. As reported by Akbar Shahid Ahmed of the Huffington Post, the White House declared that those who would block weapons to Israel were aiding Hamas and prolonging the war.

Ted Budd (R-N.C.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are among the senators who seemed to speak from that playbook. “If you love peace you have to destroy those who hate peace,” Graham said. 

No one argued against Sanders’ fundamental point—that sending weapons to a nation blocking humanitarian aid is illegal. Instead, they said Israel needed to defend itself against a region in which it is the only reliable ally for the West. Senator John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) spoke vaguely of a world of evil people: “They hate Americans. They want to kill us and drink our blood out of a boot.” 

But the closeness of Israel and the West is showing signs of cracking.

The next day, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for using starvation as a weapon of war as well as “murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” This marked the first time the ICC has ever indicted a pro-Western official on war crimes charges—which means the United States is certain to push back. After 14 months of unabated carnage, opposition to arming Israel even within the United States is looking less fringe.

Correction, November 22: The article has been updated to more accurately reflect who Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) believes wants to kill Americans and “drink our blood out of a boot.”

The long, strange saga of the “nonprofit-killer bill” continues. The legislation—officially called HR 9495, or the “Stop Terror Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act”—would give the Secretary of the Treasury unilateral power to designate nonprofits as suspected “Terrorist Supporting Organizations,” taking away their tax-exempt status unless they are able to prove they are not terrorist supporting.

The bill was unable to meet the two-thirds majority vote it needed to make it through the House last week. But, today, with only a simple majority vote required, the legislation passed the House in a 219–184 vote. This time, it garnered far less Democratic support than it had only days ago.

In the bill’s original iteration, it was popular among both Republicans and Democrats, who saw it as an appealing way to police Palestinian rights organizations after protests last year. An earlier version, in April, passed the House easily, with only 11 votes against the bill. It didn’t make it through the Senate and was reintroduced in the House this fall.

One of those early no votes was Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who said on the House floor today, “This is going to be my third time voting against this bill, because I don’t care who the president is. This is a dangerous and an unconstitutional bill that would allow unchecked power to target nonprofit organizations as political enemies and shut them down without due process.”

Meet HR 9495: The nonprofit killer. pic.twitter.com/kN6X5Sypwm

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 20, 2024

When Tlaib was first voting against the bill, most Democrats disagreed with her. Since then, they have become concerned that a law they would have considered reasonable under a Harris administration would be dangerously applied under Trump.

This time, 183 Democrats and one Republican voted against the bill, and only 15 Democrats voted for it—down from 52 last week. Since then, there’s been a full-court-press civil society campaign to take down H.R. 9495. Nearly 300 organizations—including the ACLU, the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO, Planned Parenthood, and the NAACP—have signed a letter pointing out that Trump is likely to use this bill to silence any of his enemies, not just Palestinians and their supporters. As Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) pointed out, that could also include nonprofit news outlets.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) is one of the dozens of Democrats who flipped their vote on the bill since Trump’s election.

He gave a personal example of why. One of the organizations whose nonprofit status Trump wants to terminate, Doggett said, “has protested one of my speeches.”

“Protests are inconvenient,” he said. “The one I had was inconvenient.” Nonetheless, “America is stronger when we protect dissent in all its forms, as long as it is done in a proper way.” For Doggett, the bill itself is less of a concern than the man who could be utilizing it.

“There has been much made in this debate of the fact that some of us have been switching positions,” he said. “Well, we listen to our constituents.”

It was clear from the outset that the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would not pass. The trio of bills, brought to a vote on Wednesday night, would have stopped $20 billion in weapons from being sent to Israel. Every single Republican in the Senate voted against Sanders, as expected. A majority of Democratic senators voted against the bills, too. 

But there has still been movement in favor of limiting military aid: About 40 percent of the Democrats present for the vote wanted to stop billions in arms sales to Israel, despite loud opposition from the White House, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Major figures in the Democratic Party—Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.)—voted for at least one of the resolutions. Nineteen senators backed at least a piece of Sanders’ call to limit aid, a historically high number showing explicit, public support for upholding American law as it applies to Israel.

Polls show that the majority of Americans support suspending offensive weapons to Israel until an end comes to the country’s yearlong bombardment of Gaza—in which, experts estimate, over 100,000 people have already been killed. But that majority view—endorsed even by some explicitly pro-Israel organizations, such as J Street—has not been reflected in the US government.

In fact, hours before Sanders brought his resolutions to the Senate floor, the United States vetoed another ceasefire resolution in the United Nations. It is the fourth such resolution since Israel’s war in Gaza—which United Nations agencies, independent experts, and several world governments have declared a genocide—began. (That resolution would have demanded the release of all hostages, and implemented Biden’s own ceasefire plan.)

On the Senate floor, Sanders spoke next to a large photo of a dead, emaciated Palestinian child. “Every member of the Senate who believes in the rule of law, that our government should obey the law, should vote for these resolutions,” he said. “The Foreign Assistance Act and the Arms Export Control Act are very clear. The United States cannot provide weapons to countries that violate internationally recognized human rights or block US humanitarian aid. That is not my opinion, that is what the law says.”

In mid-September, Biden administration leaders sent a letter to Netanyahu warning him of these specific provisions of US law, and saying Israel had 30 days to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza or face cuts to military aid. But 30 days came and went, Palestinians continued to starve, and the Biden administration refused to enforce its own deadline.

Joint Resolutions of Disapproval are not unheard of—they’ve previously been levied against Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for example—but this is the first time that this type of weapons-trade-restricting measure has been brought against Israel, which is by a far larger recipient of US weapons, having been given about $310 billion in military aid from the US since its founding.

Sanders recounted anecdotes from doctors who saw civilians shot in the head in Gaza, explained that per satellite imagery two-thirds of the buildings in Gaza are flattened entirely, and told fellow congresspeople that reporting showed almost no one in Gaza has had consistent access to electricity or clean water for nearly 14 months. 

“Fundamentally, [President] Joe Biden will not uphold the law,” Matt Duss, a former Sanders aide now at the Center for International Policy, said of the White House pressure campaign to vote against Sanders. Instead, it’s “purely ideological: [Biden] just believes that Israel is entitled to absolute total wall-to-wall support, no matter how catastrophic the impact on Palestinians or Lebanese.” 

“A lot of people wrongly thought that it was because of political considerations,” Duss continued. “But no, even after the election, [the administration] remains completely committed to ignoring US law and keeping the flow of weapons running, even with the knowledge that these particular weapons will not reach Israel for over a year.”

The first bill to be voted on Wednesday night concerned exploding tank shells. Cat Knarr of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights noted that these shells are thought to have killed 6-year-old Hind Rajab as she sat alone with the bodies of her family, pleading for help. Knarr’s group staged a protest the day before the vote at the Senate. “You’re either on the side of justice and stopping the weapons, or you’re on the side of arming a genocidal state, and you will go down in history for how you vote today,” she said. 

When opponents of the JRDs came to the floor, their talking points sounded like they were lifted directly from a White House memo circulated earlier that morning. As reported by Akbar Shahid Ahmed of the Huffington Post, the White House declared that those who would block weapons to Israel were aiding Hamas and prolonging the war.

Ted Budd (R-N.C.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are among the senators who seemed to speak from that playbook. “If you love peace you have to destroy those who hate peace,” Graham said. 

No one argued against Sanders’ fundamental point—that sending weapons to a nation blocking humanitarian aid is illegal. Instead, they said Israel needed to defend itself against a region in which it is the only reliable ally for the West. Senator John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) spoke vaguely of a world of evil people: “They hate Americans. They want to kill us and drink our blood out of a boot.” 

But the closeness of Israel and the West is showing signs of cracking.

The next day, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for using starvation as a weapon of war as well as “murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” This marked the first time the ICC has ever indicted a pro-Western official on war crimes charges—which means the United States is certain to push back. After 14 months of unabated carnage, opposition to arming Israel even within the United States is looking less fringe.

Correction, November 22: The article has been updated to more accurately reflect who Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) believes wants to kill Americans and “drink our blood out of a boot.”

The long, strange saga of the “nonprofit-killer bill” continues. The legislation—officially called HR 9495, or the “Stop Terror Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act”—would give the Secretary of the Treasury unilateral power to designate nonprofits as suspected “Terrorist Supporting Organizations,” taking away their tax-exempt status unless they are able to prove they are not terrorist supporting.

The bill was unable to meet the two-thirds majority vote it needed to make it through the House last week. But, today, with only a simple majority vote required, the legislation passed the House in a 219–184 vote. This time, it garnered far less Democratic support than it had only days ago.

In the bill’s original iteration, it was popular among both Republicans and Democrats, who saw it as an appealing way to police Palestinian rights organizations after protests last year. An earlier version, in April, passed the House easily, with only 11 votes against the bill. It didn’t make it through the Senate and was reintroduced in the House this fall.

One of those early no votes was Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who said on the House floor today, “This is going to be my third time voting against this bill, because I don’t care who the president is. This is a dangerous and an unconstitutional bill that would allow unchecked power to target nonprofit organizations as political enemies and shut them down without due process.”

Meet HR 9495: The nonprofit killer. pic.twitter.com/kN6X5Sypwm

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 20, 2024

When Tlaib was first voting against the bill, most Democrats disagreed with her. Since then, they have become concerned that a law they would have considered reasonable under a Harris administration would be dangerously applied under Trump.

This time, 183 Democrats and one Republican voted against the bill, and only 15 Democrats voted for it—down from 52 last week. Since then, there’s been a full-court-press civil society campaign to take down H.R. 9495. Nearly 300 organizations—including the ACLU, the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO, Planned Parenthood, and the NAACP—have signed a letter pointing out that Trump is likely to use this bill to silence any of his enemies, not just Palestinians and their supporters. As Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) pointed out, that could also include nonprofit news outlets.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) is one of the dozens of Democrats who flipped their vote on the bill since Trump’s election.

He gave a personal example of why. One of the organizations whose nonprofit status Trump wants to terminate, Doggett said, “has protested one of my speeches.”

“Protests are inconvenient,” he said. “The one I had was inconvenient.” Nonetheless, “America is stronger when we protect dissent in all its forms, as long as it is done in a proper way.” For Doggett, the bill itself is less of a concern than the man who could be utilizing it.

“There has been much made in this debate of the fact that some of us have been switching positions,” he said. “Well, we listen to our constituents.”

Last Thursday, workers with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were told they would be laid off without severance and with little notice, according to the DNC’s union. The cuts included some longtime workers of the organization, the union said.

With the election over, the DNC intends to downsize from about 680 staff to fewer than 200. Some degree of seasonality is expected in political campaign jobs. But this degree is unusual—and has affected DNC staffers who’ve stayed with the organization across several campaigns, or even multiple decades, according to the union.

One former DNC union member, whose last day was Friday, said she was shocked. “For a lot of folks, this is life-altering,” said the laid-off employee, who spoke with Mother Jones on the condition of anonymity.

“Amongst the members that were laid off includes one deeply beloved union member who worked at the DNC for 38 years,” the staffer said. “So I push back against the claim that this is normal, because we have members who have been here for decades who are shocked and angry and trying to figure out how they’re going to survive this layoff.”

In a statement to the Washington Post, the DNC said that “while the DNC has met the terms of the union agreement negotiated by the CBA, we share the entire DNC family’s frustration and continue to provide resources to all members of the team to support them in this transition.”

A DNC official told Mother Jones that all workers were informed of the possibility of layoffs as early as September 13, and that 95 percent of those being let go had a post-election end date in their offer letter.

But one laid-off worker who spoke with Mother Jones said that she, like some other employees, felt pressured into leaving a full-time role for a temporary contract position prior to the election. 

“I was told in order to get a title change or a promotion or any raises, it would only be if I agreed to sign a contract that had an end date of November 15,” she said. The staffer said management had said an extension was expected.

“We tried to get answers about why this was happening, and we were stonewalled over and over again by management,” she said. DNC representatives would not comment on specific workers’ cases, but stated that all of the terms of the workers’ collective bargaining agreement are being upheld.

The DNC workers are not trying to get their jobs back. Instead, the union is organizing for a severance package, similar to what workers on the Harris-Walz campaign got. (Run for Something, a major Democratic campaign support PAC, also faced a wave of post-election layoffs in recent weeks, letting go off 35 percent of its staff—and well over half of its staff union.) A DNC spokesperson told Mother Jones that the DNC is in ongoing communication with SEIU Local 500, the union representing DNC workers.

Among those DNC employees who have not been laid off, the mood is uncertain, said one employee who was unaffected by the layoffs but requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the DNC. 

“One thing that has been a common thread during my employment has been that we’re trying to break the boom and bust cycle of democratic infrastructure. So I’d say this feels very antithetical to that,” she said. She plans to look for another job soon—but calls that decision “heartbreaking” as someone who’s spent years working in Democratic electoral politics. 

Workers said that DNC donors have reached out to them, concerned about how, exactly, the money the Harris campaign raised is being spent, if not to allow them severance pay. 

“We find it very cruel that DNC management is trying to claim that layoffs are just part of the job,” a DNC union member said. “And we feel strongly that losing an election has not absolved the organization of its responsibility to treat its workers with basic dignity.”

Correction, November 21: An earlier version of this article misstated the conversation between SEIU Local 500 and the DNC. They are in communication, not negotiations.

Last week, a bill that would give the Treasury Department power to designate a nonprofit as a “terrorist-supporting organization” for supporting pro-Palestine protests was narrowly voted down in Congress. But the saga is far from over. It could still be passed in the coming days.

Called the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, the bill initially was introduced with broad bipartisan support. But after Donald Trump’s reelection, many Democrats flipped, fearing the incoming administration would use the bill not to stop terrorism, but to kneecap Trump’s political enemies.

Funding terrorism is already illegal. Still, all but one Republican in the House backed the bill when it came to a vote last week. There were also 52 Democrats who supported the measure.

Nonprofits such as the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and NAACP came out against the bill in a letter in to House leaders. “These efforts are part of a concerted attack,” they wrote, “on civil society that is targeted at more than just groups involved in the campus protests regarding Gaza.”

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) has been particularly outspoken against the bill, which he believes could be applied beyond those opposed to Israel’s mass killings in Gaza to pretty much anyone opposed to Trump.

“A university has too many protests against Donald Trump? Terrorists,” McGovern said on the House floor Tuesday. “Environmental groups suing the administration in court? Terrorists. Think tanks that think differently than Donald Trump? Terrorists…Donald Trump says you’re a terrorist, so you’re a terrorist.” 

“This bill has been hijacked and turned into a vehicle to give the incoming administration the ability to revoke the nonprofit status of any advocacy group they want, simply by labeling them as terrorist sympathizers.”

Meet HR 9495: The nonprofit killer. pic.twitter.com/kN6X5Sypwm

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 20, 2024

As I wrote last week, the bill shows the ways in which the Biden-era crackdown on pro-Palestine activists sets up the possibility for Trump to take revenge on protesters.

Last week, a bill that would give the Treasury Department power to designate a nonprofit as a “terrorist-supporting organization” for supporting pro-Palestine protests was narrowly voted down in Congress. But the saga is far from over. It could still be passed in the coming days.

Called the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, the bill initially was introduced with broad bipartisan support. But after Donald Trump’s reelection, many Democrats flipped, fearing the incoming administration would use the bill not to stop terrorism, but to kneecap Trump’s political enemies.

Funding terrorism is already illegal. Still, all but one Republican in the House backed the bill when it came to a vote last week. There were also 52 Democrats who supported the measure.

Nonprofits such as the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and NAACP came out against the bill in a letter in to House leaders. “These efforts are part of a concerted attack,” they wrote, “on civil society that is targeted at more than just groups involved in the campus protests regarding Gaza.”

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) has been particularly outspoken against the bill, which he believes could be applied beyond those opposed to Israel’s mass killings in Gaza to pretty much anyone opposed to Trump.

“A university has too many protests against Donald Trump? Terrorists,” McGovern said on the House floor Tuesday. “Environmental groups suing the administration in court? Terrorists. Think tanks that think differently than Donald Trump? Terrorists…Donald Trump says you’re a terrorist, so you’re a terrorist.” 

“This bill has been hijacked and turned into a vehicle to give the incoming administration the ability to revoke the nonprofit status of any advocacy group they want, simply by labeling them as terrorist sympathizers.”

Meet HR 9495: The nonprofit killer. pic.twitter.com/kN6X5Sypwm

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 20, 2024

As I wrote last week, the bill shows the ways in which the Biden-era crackdown on pro-Palestine activists sets up the possibility for Trump to take revenge on protesters.

Donald Trump has made it clear that there are groups he’d like to punish.

Much attention has been paid to the president-elect’s planned crusades for his next term against immigrants and transgender people. But less discussed has been another group on the list: protesters. Building off the bipartisan crackdown on anti-war student dissent last year, Trump has made clear he hopes to discipline, and potentially prosecute, civil disobedience with increased force.

In May, he promised a group of donors that “any student that protests, I [will] throw them out of the country.” Trump hoped this would serve as a warning. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” he continued. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.” 

This is more than just bluster. Reuters reported that sources said Trump hopes to follow through on the promise on day one of his administration, by signing an executive order prioritizing deporting “international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas.” 

In Trump’s first term, “his instincts were to bring as much federal power as he could to bear on essentially peaceful protests,” Jamie Kalven, founder of Chicago’s Invisible Institute and a journalist who has studied First Amendment law for decades, told me. This time, there will be fewer guardrails. “It was complicated enough before Trump was elected. Now you’re going to have various demagogues in Congress and the Trump administration actually bearing down in various ways on universities and on university students, seeing it as the bastion of the enemy within.”

“Given how it’s been under Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do.”

Many of the plans for targeting protesters are taken from tactics employed by Democrats in recent years. For years, Palestinian-rights activists in the US—and Palestinians in the US, whether activists or not—have often been smeared as terrorists and threatened with deportation and imprisonment. In 2023, a wave of protest was met with a crackdown. The Department of Education pressured schools to stop pro-Palestine student organizing, as Mother Jones reported in September. Dozens of universities across the nation instituted strict new disciplinary codes prohibiting many forms of public assembly. Over 3,600 protesters were arrested.

Just months ago, Cornell University threatened PhD student Momodou Taal with revocation of his F-1 student visa—and, effectively, deportation—after Taal spent much of the previous year attending various pro-Palestine actions. On September 18, Taal and fellow students disrupted a career fair Cornell held that featured weapons manufacturer L3Harris. The university alleged that Taal had shoved police on his way in, a charge he denies.

After public pushback, Cornell backed down on deportation. But Taal has still been banned from campus and is no longer permitted to teach his classes. When we spoke the week of the election, he told me that he was still negotiating the opportunity to use library resources to write his thesis. (“I don’t want to budge on library access,” he said.) 

“Given how it’s been under [President Joe] Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do,” he said. “I think, if the position taken by the [Biden] administration was that these kids should be protected, there would be more of an outcry if Trump then did a clampdown. I think what Biden has allowed for is that the clampdown is made easier for Trump now because the groundwork has already been laid.”

One piece of potential infrastructure is the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act—a House bill designed to strip tax-exempt status from any nonprofit the Treasury Department designates a “terrorist-supporting organization.” A version of the bill was introduced last year with broad bipartisan support. But earlier this week, it was voted down on the House floor, as a majority of Democrats were concerned that the bill would hand undue power to Trump to silence his political enemies. 144 Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, voted against the fast-tracked bill. Nearly all Republicans—and dozens of Democrats—still supported it.

“All of us support stopping terrorism,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) told The Intercept. “[But] if he is on a march to make America fascist, we do not need to supply Donald Trump with any additional weapons to accomplish his ill purpose.” Doggett had initially supported the bill but changed course after Trump’s election.

The “nonprofit killer” bill, as critics have dubbed it, is not dead. It will go back for a vote next week. This time, with a simple majority, the bill will likely pass.

“I think we should anticipate something akin to the McCarthy era in terms of government being turned against certain categories of citizens,” Kalven said of this legislative trend.

The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing group behind Project 2025, has also given Trump a workable plan to stop pro-Palestine dissent. It is called Project Esther. Nominally a policy proposal to tackle antisemitism on the left, it reads instead as a blueprint for taking down pro-Palestine activists. It suggests deporting “foreign Hamas Support Organization members,” classifying anti-war nonprofits—like American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace—as members of a shadowy “Hamas Support Organization” network that is “attempting to lay siege to our education system, political processes, and government.”  

Attorney Zoha Khalili at Palestine Legal, an organization that has spent the past decade providing legal advice and support to Palestinian-rights activists, said Trump’s election gives universities a chance to change their role.

“[Now] it’s one of those situations where, you know, universities who have been repressing student activism might also now find themselves in this position where they have to care a bit more about their students,” Khalili said. “Because of the values that they claim to uphold—wanting diversity, not wanting to have their students deported for political purposes.” 

What worries Khalili most, though, is not so much Trump’s crackdown on protesters in the United States, but how his presidency will harm the people in Gaza on whose behalf Americans protest in the first place. 

“The broader question that is on my mind is: How is the Trump administration going to impact Palestinians on the ground?” she asked. Trump’s plans for the region are unclear—though he has expressed a desire for the war to end, he’s also said he wants to ban refugee resettlement from the Gaza Strip and looks to be stocking his administration with war hawks, including an evangelical end-times Zionist ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who has declared that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”

“How aggressively Israel is engaging in genocide also impacts the climate here for activists, who are increasingly desperate to try to save people’s lives,” Khalili said. “So the stakes are quite high at the moment.” 

Donald Trump has made it clear that there are groups he’d like to punish.

Much attention has been paid to the president-elect’s planned crusades for his next term against immigrants and transgender people. But less discussed has been another group on the list: protesters. Building off the bipartisan crackdown on anti-war student dissent last year, Trump has made clear he hopes to discipline, and potentially prosecute, civil disobedience with increased force.

In May, he promised a group of donors that “any student that protests, I [will] throw them out of the country.” Trump hoped this would serve as a warning. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” he continued. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.” 

This is more than just bluster. Reuters reported that sources said Trump hopes to follow through on the promise on day one of his administration, by signing an executive order prioritizing deporting “international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas.” 

In Trump’s first term, “his instincts were to bring as much federal power as he could to bear on essentially peaceful protests,” Jamie Kalven, founder of Chicago’s Invisible Institute and a journalist who has studied First Amendment law for decades, told me. This time, there will be fewer guardrails. “It was complicated enough before Trump was elected. Now you’re going to have various demagogues in Congress and the Trump administration actually bearing down in various ways on universities and on university students, seeing it as the bastion of the enemy within.”

“Given how it’s been under Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do.”

Many of the plans for targeting protesters are taken from tactics employed by Democrats in recent years. For years, Palestinian-rights activists in the US—and Palestinians in the US, whether activists or not—have often been smeared as terrorists and threatened with deportation and imprisonment. In 2023, a wave of protest was met with a crackdown. The Department of Education pressured schools to stop pro-Palestine student organizing, as Mother Jones reported in September. Dozens of universities across the nation instituted strict new disciplinary codes prohibiting many forms of public assembly. Over 3,600 protesters were arrested.

Just months ago, Cornell University threatened PhD student Momodou Taal with revocation of his F-1 student visa—and, effectively, deportation—after Taal spent much of the previous year attending various pro-Palestine actions. On September 18, Taal and fellow students disrupted a career fair Cornell held that featured weapons manufacturer L3Harris. The university alleged that Taal had shoved police on his way in, a charge he denies.

After public pushback, Cornell backed down on deportation. But Taal has still been banned from campus and is no longer permitted to teach his classes. When we spoke the week of the election, he told me that he was still negotiating the opportunity to use library resources to write his thesis. (“I don’t want to budge on library access,” he said.) 

“Given how it’s been under [President Joe] Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do,” he said. “I think, if the position taken by the [Biden] administration was that these kids should be protected, there would be more of an outcry if Trump then did a clampdown. I think what Biden has allowed for is that the clampdown is made easier for Trump now because the groundwork has already been laid.”

One piece of potential infrastructure is the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act—a House bill designed to strip tax-exempt status from any nonprofit the Treasury Department designates a “terrorist-supporting organization.” A version of the bill was introduced last year with broad bipartisan support. But earlier this week, it was voted down on the House floor, as a majority of Democrats were concerned that the bill would hand undue power to Trump to silence his political enemies. 144 Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, voted against the fast-tracked bill. Nearly all Republicans—and dozens of Democrats—still supported it.

“All of us support stopping terrorism,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) told The Intercept. “[But] if he is on a march to make America fascist, we do not need to supply Donald Trump with any additional weapons to accomplish his ill purpose.” Doggett had initially supported the bill but changed course after Trump’s election.

The “nonprofit killer” bill, as critics have dubbed it, is not dead. It will go back for a vote next week. This time, with a simple majority, the bill will likely pass.

“I think we should anticipate something akin to the McCarthy era in terms of government being turned against certain categories of citizens,” Kalven said of this legislative trend.

The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing group behind Project 2025, has also given Trump a workable plan to stop pro-Palestine dissent. It is called Project Esther. Nominally a policy proposal to tackle antisemitism on the left, it reads instead as a blueprint for taking down pro-Palestine activists. It suggests deporting “foreign Hamas Support Organization members,” classifying anti-war nonprofits—like American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace—as members of a shadowy “Hamas Support Organization” network that is “attempting to lay siege to our education system, political processes, and government.”  

Attorney Zoha Khalili at Palestine Legal, an organization that has spent the past decade providing legal advice and support to Palestinian-rights activists, said Trump’s election gives universities a chance to change their role.

“[Now] it’s one of those situations where, you know, universities who have been repressing student activism might also now find themselves in this position where they have to care a bit more about their students,” Khalili said. “Because of the values that they claim to uphold—wanting diversity, not wanting to have their students deported for political purposes.” 

What worries Khalili most, though, is not so much Trump’s crackdown on protesters in the United States, but how his presidency will harm the people in Gaza on whose behalf Americans protest in the first place. 

“The broader question that is on my mind is: How is the Trump administration going to impact Palestinians on the ground?” she asked. Trump’s plans for the region are unclear—though he has expressed a desire for the war to end, he’s also said he wants to ban refugee resettlement from the Gaza Strip and looks to be stocking his administration with war hawks, including an evangelical end-times Zionist ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who has declared that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”

“How aggressively Israel is engaging in genocide also impacts the climate here for activists, who are increasingly desperate to try to save people’s lives,” Khalili said. “So the stakes are quite high at the moment.” 

In mid-October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent a strongly worded letter to top Israeli officials. In the note, they made clear the United States was aware of Israel’s blocking of aid into the north of Gaza. They demanded that Israel improve humanitarian conditions by letting in 350 trucks of food aid per day, ending the forced evacuation of north Gaza, and opening more crossings into the territory. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United Nations ambassador for the US, said such moves were necessary to combat a “policy of starvation.” If Israel failed to do so within 30 days, Blinken and Austin threatened, the US would consider enforcing arms-transfer laws which prohibit sending weapons to nations that block humanitarian aid. 

“30 days are up, and all the metrics you put out don’t matter.”

Yesterday, thirty days later, Biden administration officials declared they would not be enforcing their own deadlines. Military aid to Israel will not end, despite the fact that even data from Israel’s own government finds the amount of aid entering Gaza decreased between September and November. 

In a November 12th State Department press briefing, officials were unable to answer reporters’ questions about whether or not Israel managed to hit that 30-day deadline. “We at this time have not made an assessment that the Israelis are in violation of US law,” department spokesperson Vedant Patel said. 

In their October 13 letter, Blinken and Austin said the Israeli government must reaffirm “that there will be no Israeli government policy of forced evacuation of civilians from northern to southern Gaza.” This, also, has not happened. Instead, an Israeli Defense Force general told the media last week that civilians who have fled the north will not be allowed to return to their homes. 

COGAT, the Israeli agency overseeing humanitarian aid in Gaza, told reporters Tuesday that “Israel allowed a daily average of 76 trucks over the past 30 days.” The United Nations stated that the number is closer to 50—far lower than the 350 the US said would be needed to stave off widespread starvation, and a minuscule fraction of the 500 aid trucks that entered Gaza every day prior to October of 2023.

Last week, Israel signed a $5 billion contract for 25 fighter jets produced in the United States.

On Tuesday, Reporter Matt Lee of the Associated Press asked State Department spokesperson Patel why the letter contained so many specific provisions if vague assurances of “improvement” in Gaza would be enough to satisfy the United States. 

“Why did you bother to put in 350 trucks a day if it didn’t matter?” Lee asked. 

“I’m not gonna speak to that,” Patel said. 

“We didn’t give the Israelis 30 days, you guys did,” Lee responded. “And now those 30 days are up, and all the metrics you put out don’t matter.” 

“We are not giving Israel a pass,” Patel said. “We want to see the totality of the humanitarian situation improve, and we think some of these steps will allow the conditions for that to continue to progress.” Some conditions, he said, are improving: a new border crossing was opened in central Gaza, and a limited number of people were allowed to move inland instead of being trapped on the beach in tents in winter. 

On that same day, though, eight humanitarian organizations issued a report demonstrating that, per aid workers and international observers on the ground, the Biden administration’s conditions for continuing military aid had not been reached.

“Israel not only failed to meet the US criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza,” the eight organizations, including Oxfam and MedGlobal, wrote. “That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago.”

Nonetheless, the State Department has not indicated that they will follow through on their threats to suspend arms shipments: and, in fact, just last week, Israel signed a $5 billion contract for 25 new fighter jets produced in the United States as part of continuing aid.

In mid-October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent a strongly worded letter to top Israeli officials. In the note, they made clear the United States was aware of Israel’s blocking of aid into the north of Gaza. They demanded that Israel improve humanitarian conditions by letting in 350 trucks of food aid per day, ending the forced evacuation of north Gaza, and opening more crossings into the territory. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United Nations ambassador for the US, said such moves were necessary to combat a “policy of starvation.” If Israel failed to do so within 30 days, Blinken and Austin threatened, the US would consider enforcing arms-transfer laws which prohibit sending weapons to nations that block humanitarian aid. 

“30 days are up, and all the metrics you put out don’t matter.”

Yesterday, thirty days later, Biden administration officials declared they would not be enforcing their own deadlines. Military aid to Israel will not end, despite the fact that even data from Israel’s own government finds the amount of aid entering Gaza decreased between September and November. 

In a November 12th State Department press briefing, officials were unable to answer reporters’ questions about whether or not Israel managed to hit that 30-day deadline. “We at this time have not made an assessment that the Israelis are in violation of US law,” department spokesperson Vedant Patel said. 

In their October 13 letter, Blinken and Austin said the Israeli government must reaffirm “that there will be no Israeli government policy of forced evacuation of civilians from northern to southern Gaza.” This, also, has not happened. Instead, an Israeli Defense Force general told the media last week that civilians who have fled the north will not be allowed to return to their homes. 

COGAT, the Israeli agency overseeing humanitarian aid in Gaza, told reporters Tuesday that “Israel allowed a daily average of 76 trucks over the past 30 days.” The United Nations stated that the number is closer to 50—far lower than the 350 the US said would be needed to stave off widespread starvation, and a minuscule fraction of the 500 aid trucks that entered Gaza every day prior to October of 2023.

Last week, Israel signed a $5 billion contract for 25 fighter jets produced in the United States.

On Tuesday, Reporter Matt Lee of the Associated Press asked State Department spokesperson Patel why the letter contained so many specific provisions if vague assurances of “improvement” in Gaza would be enough to satisfy the United States. 

“Why did you bother to put in 350 trucks a day if it didn’t matter?” Lee asked. 

“I’m not gonna speak to that,” Patel said. 

“We didn’t give the Israelis 30 days, you guys did,” Lee responded. “And now those 30 days are up, and all the metrics you put out don’t matter.” 

“We are not giving Israel a pass,” Patel said. “We want to see the totality of the humanitarian situation improve, and we think some of these steps will allow the conditions for that to continue to progress.” Some conditions, he said, are improving: a new border crossing was opened in central Gaza, and a limited number of people were allowed to move inland instead of being trapped on the beach in tents in winter. 

On that same day, though, eight humanitarian organizations issued a report demonstrating that, per aid workers and international observers on the ground, the Biden administration’s conditions for continuing military aid had not been reached.

“Israel not only failed to meet the US criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza,” the eight organizations, including Oxfam and MedGlobal, wrote. “That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago.”

Nonetheless, the State Department has not indicated that they will follow through on their threats to suspend arms shipments: and, in fact, just last week, Israel signed a $5 billion contract for 25 new fighter jets produced in the United States as part of continuing aid.

As the sun set over the New York Times building on election night, the Times Tech Guild—the union of workers that power the infrastructure for the company’s news, games, and cooking—closed out their second day on the picket line. Their strike, an attempt to push for a deal they’ve negotiated for over two years, might bring down tonight one of America’s most beloved and beloathed election-night prognosticators: the Needle. 

As reporter and polls expert Nate Cohn explained on X, the tech team “built and maintain the infrastructure that feeds [the Needle] data and lets [the Times] publish [it] on the internet.” As of the time of publication, the Needle is up. But it’s unclear if without the guild’s work it will last.

The Tech Guild wants pay equity, remote work protections, and—top of many minds on Tuesday night—protection from being arbitrarily fired, known as “just cause.”

The 173-year-old Times has over the past several years transformed into something more like a tech company with the news as a key, but not singular, component. Its games and cooking apps drive subscriptions; it has expanded into audio and sports. With that transformation has come a change in how workers organize at the company. Now, alongside their newspaper and advertising workers’ unions, the paper hosts one of the largest tech unions in the country. 

Kathy Zhang, unit chair for the New York Times Tech Guild, has had “probably hundreds of conversations” with her fellow workers leading up to this moment. I asked her about the picket line, the Needle, and why workers are striking.

What would you normally be doing on election day if you weren’t on the picket line? 

I am a senior analytics manager on the audience team at the New York Times, which means that I pull data around traffic trends, and I look at how people are listening to audio and engaging with our coverage.

This will be my third presidential election here. I’ve been at the Times for nine years. In 2017, on January 20th, inauguration day, I was the person who stayed up past 1 a.m. waiting for our data to come through to let our editors know what election traffic looked like. Election day is one day, but election season is a long time, and we spend a long time prepping for it. It’s unfortunate the management let it drag out this far. 

I know you all have been saying this could happen for some time, right? 

We have been bargaining for almost two and a half years. We started bargaining in July of 2022. It was September 10 when we passed a strike authorization vote with 95 percent support. We told management the very next day, we gave them two months in advance. We were in bargaining all last week, but on Sunday night, management decided to walk away from the table. So the ball is literally in their court. 

Online, I’ve seen right-wing media focusing in on some unusual concerns they claim you’re bargaining over stuff, like pet bereavement leave, trigger warnings on political topics, that kind of thing. 

The most important issues that are unresolved right now are just cause—meaning that we can’t be fired for no reason whatsoever—and flexible work, so that people who have caretaking responsibilities or live hundreds of miles away aren’t forced to come into the office. We’re a unit in which, you know, our members see a lot of inequity in how we’re paid. We want to be paid fairly. 

Management, instead of talking about the actual issues at play, has been seeding talking points to right-wing media. It’s actually pretty depressing coming from a newspaper that’s supposed to care about independent journalism; they’re putting misleading talking points out there. 

I saw a clip on Fox News that said we were looking for job security for illegals. Now, I’ve spent a lot of time working on the visas and immigration proposals that we have on the table. I don’t know what job security for illegals means, because it’s literally about people with visas, right? We care about people getting notice about whether they’re going to get their visas sponsored. 

I myself am an immigrant, I am a naturalized citizen, and I care about democracy—that’s why I’m out here in a union! It was a complete mischaracterization of our proposal. It brought up stuff that was maybe on the table two years ago, for maybe seven minutes, and hasn’t been talked about since. I think it’s really telling that the company would rather talk about things they think make us look like we are being unreasonable, rather than talk about the fact that this company has authorized $400 million in stock buybacks, which is money that goes directly into shareholders’ pockets, not to workers. 

It doesn’t do anything other than make rich people richer, and they’d rather threaten election night coverage than come to a fair deal with their workers. 

If this continues, how is the strike going to affect coverage during and beyond election night? 

There are so many interconnected systems that power what we work on, I couldn’t even tell you all the things that could go wrong or could maybe not go wrong. And there are systems that readers aren’t gonna see that will cause a lot of problems for us. 

But we have a lot of support from our colleagues in the newsroom and in advertising. They’ve written letters to management telling them that they need us. Our newsroom colleagues are the people who supplied our lunch today—some of them are on the picket line right now in their free time before their shift starts or after they’ve already worked a whole day.

This is the biggest tech-worker strike that I’m aware of in American history. What makes you all different from other tech unions? What’s helped you get this far?  

We are the largest “high-tech” union in the country with bargaining rights, but we had a lot of support and solidarity from other tech workers who have been unionized.

I think part of it is, that the New York Times is a newspaper company, but what other newspaper has six or seven hundred tech workers in the company? Sometimes, power comes down to the sheer number of people that you have. We have hundreds of people, and that’s hard to organize! But it also means that when people are standing together in solidarity, when we are out here fighting, we know that we can get through this. 

So, right now we’re fighting to make sure that we have more pay equity. We’re fighting to make sure that people just don’t get fired for no reason. That’s really all we’re fighting for. 

One of the most amazing things that I’ve seen is people that I knew voted against unionization and voted against the strike authorization vote, are on the picket line today. Because when it comes down to it, which side are you on, right?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.