On October 26th, Donald Trump promised that “WHEN I’M PRESIDENT THE MCDONALD’S ICE CREAM MACHINES WILL WORK GREAT AGAIN!” But it is Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who, earlier today, announced she had actually done something about it. 

The day before Trump’s proclamation, the United States Copyright Office announced a new copyright exemption that will grant some small business owners and franchisees—such as those operating the 13,000 McDonald’s in the United States—the “right to repair” the machinery within their own shops. Back in March, the FTC submitted a comment to the US Copyright Office asking to extend the right to repair certain equipment, including commercial soft-serve equipment. 

The saga is in miniature a good example of how to potentially combat Trumpism. There is a problem: To many, the McDonald’s soft-serve extruders of this great nation seem perpetually broken (a fact that McDonalds itself has acknowledged). Trump vaguely promised to do something about it. Khan—on the vanguard of a new class of anti-monopolistic Democrats—moved aggressively to try to push a change unpopular with business interests, solve the problem, and get you ice cream more easily.

The new ruling could be a game-changer for drive-through employees, too. They often contend with rageful customers over broken devices. “Victory is sweet,” wrote Elizabeth Chamberlain of iFixIt. “This is a big win—and we’ll be celebrating with ice cream!—but copyright law still needs fixing before we’re free to fix everything we own.”

McDonald’s soft serve machines are manufactured by the Taylor Company. Since 1956, those soft-serve machines could only be legally repaired by Taylor Company licensed technicians—and if anyone without that license attempted to repair the machines, they voided the warranty. That, the FTC said, squashes competition for replacement parts and for repair technicians.

It shows Khan’s knack for proving the government can do things to help make life suck less. And it is a window into how Khan has used the FTC to respond to American grievances.

In 2020, an independent developer scraped data from delivery apps to create a constantly updating map of broken and unbroken ice cream machines. (Called McBroken, it showed that 32 percent of all McDonald’s soft serve machines were out of order at the time of this writing.) In 2021, the FTC launched an inquiry that showed that the broken ice cream machine memes populating the internet contain a grain of truth. When they asked franchisees about the issue, they called the devices overly complicated and hard to fix. In 2023, iFixit, a DIY-focused website and tools retailer, published a breakdown of the machine’s “easily replaceable” parts which frequently break, and which McDonald’s workers were nonetheless forbidden to replace themselves. It seems simple and unspectacular when you lay it out, but the basics are here: hear about a problem, ask why it’s happening, try to find a solution.

Khan has earned a reputation for big moves. She has introduced sweeping crackdowns against companies the FTC considers to be monopolies, such as Amazon, and pushed for consumer-protection interventions like the “click to cancel” rule, designed to make the process of canceling unused gym and magazine subscriptions less arcane. On October 31st, the House Oversight Committee called for her to be replaced, claiming that she is infecting the agency with “left-wing ideology.” Elon Musk tweeted today that “[Khan] will be fired soon.” (Under Musk’s plan for a $2 trillion cut to the federal budget, it’s possible that the FTC would be eliminated entirely.) 

Even some Harris-aligned figures, such as billionaires Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman, have publicly jostled for a less active FTC and to potentially replace Khan.

The ice cream saga may prove why her ways of running the FTC are so valuable.

If Donald Trump becomes president again, it looks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will have his say over who gets which vaccines: Trump said at a rally last weekend that he would let RFK Jr. “go wild” on health should he win the White House. RFK Jr. said Trump promised him control of the Department of Health and Human Services, where the CDC and FDA are housed; Trump’s campaign seemed to suggest that wasn’t set in stone.

A world where an anti-vax advocate would play a large role in shaping vaccine policy is kind of terrifying. While RFK Jr. does make extremely off-the-cuff comments, including about Covid-19 vaccines, some of Kennedy’s specific claims about vaccines may not be apparent unless you go looking for them.

Well, I went looking for them. Here are some of RFK Jr.’s claims about various childhood vaccines throughout the decades, most of which are usually required if you go to public schools. What’s perhaps the most disturbing underlying factor of all his vaccine conspiracy theories is the suggestion that a dead child—vaccines save a lot of lives—is better than an autistic or chronically ill one, conditions he claims vaccines cause.

Measles, Mumps, and Rubella 

In a 2005 Rolling Stone article, RFK Jr. suggests that a rise in childhood vaccines was tied to an increase in kids being diagnosed with autism.

Before 1989, American preschoolers received 11 vaccinations—for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of 22 immunizations by the time they reached first grade. As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded.

RFK Jr. was not the first person to suggest a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Andrew Wakefield’s retracted Lancet study linking the two, which was total nonsense, should take a lot of the blame. But RFK Jr. still promoted the conspiracy theory that the measles vaccine was linked to autism in a 2021 Fox News interview, and in his 2023 co-written book Vax Unvax, Kennedy also suggests that the measles vaccine is linked to Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis (and Haemophilus Influenzae B)

In the same Rolling Stone piece, RFK Jr. essentially claimed that Americans had been poisoning their kids with vaccines that contained thimerosal, which is no longer in routine childhood vaccines, except some versions of the flu vaccine.

Tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within 24 hours of birth, and 2-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.

The FDA says that the thimerosal in vaccines has “significantly declined due to reformulation and development of new vaccines—not that the tiny amount of it in vaccines was linked to autism or other health issues. Kennedy also claimed that receiving multiple DTP vaccines raised infant mortality (the 2004 study which Kennedy and Brian Hooker, his cowriter, cite has not been replicated).

Hepatitis B

In a 2017 interview with Stat News, RFK Jr. said that the Hepatitis B vaccine hadn’t received enough testing. He seemed to find a new argument as to why the treatment wasn’t when thimerosal was removed:

The hepatitis B vaccines that are currently approved had fewer than five days of safety testing. That means that if the child has a seizure on the sixth day, it’s never seen.

Also, people can report an adverse event at any point.

Rotavirus

Back to the infamous 2005 Rolling Stone piece: RFK Jr. seems to suggest that people should not trust the rotavirus vaccine because of financial conflicts of interest in its advocacy.

The House Government Reform Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisors who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine “had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.” Offit, who shares a patent on one of the vaccines, acknowledged to me that he “would make money” if his vote eventually leads to a marketable product. But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist’s direct financial stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment. “It provides no conflict for me,” he insists. “I have simply been informed by the process, not corrupted by it.”

In a 2023 Substack post, Paul Offit, the doctor RFK Jr. referred to in that excerpt, debunked both Kennedy’s claims about himself, and the shoddy science he relied on.

Polio

Type I diabetes is a serious illness—one that Kennedy stokes fears of in his book Vax Unvax. The book claims that Type I diabetes appears in about 21 of 100,000 kids vaccinated against polio, more than double the rate for those who were not vaccinated, according to research performed between 1990 and 2000. Kennedy and Hooker cite a single study to support their claim that the typical polio vaccine given until the year 2000 was dangerous. But most other research refutes this claim. Vax Unvax claims to want to “let the science speak,” per its subtitle, but doesn’t mention how polio can lead to permanent paralysis.

Influenza

As you can probably tell by now, Kennedy likes picking single studies to back his narrative. In Vax Unvax, Kennedy and Hooker point to one study that claims that kids who have gotten the seasonal flu vaccine are almost four times more likely to be hospitalized.

Kennedy’s strategy on childhood vaccines is to instill fear backed by lone studies, claiming they can make kids sicker, in opposition to decades of research that show that childhood vaccines stop kids from getting sicker—and let them avoid preventable long-term health effects.

When Wendy Davis wanted to get birth control as a teenager in the 1980s, she went to her local Planned Parenthood in Fort Worth, Texas, with a friend. “There is absolutely no way I would have asked my mother for her permission to do that,” says Davis, the former Texas state senator who famously filibustered an anti-abortion bill for 11 hours in a pair of pink sneakers. “That’s just not something that’s possible for many, many, many teenage girls.” 

Forty years later, with abortion banned in wide swaths of the country, access to reliable contraception is more important than ever. Yet for Texas teens, getting prescription birth control is arguably harder now than it was when Davis was an adolescent. Over the past two years, federal courts—including the notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit—have ruled that minors must have parental consent to obtain prescription birth control from Texas clinics subsidized by a federal family planning program known as Title X. Flush with victory, Texas Republicans have made it clear: They have no intention of stopping there. In late July, Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit to overturn a new federal rule that reaffirmed teens’ ability in other states to get contraception without their parents’ consent. “The Biden Administration continues to prove they will do anything to implement their extremist agenda,” Paxton said in a press release.

To anyone paying even a modicum of attention, the far-right’s plans to limit access to birth control have long been hiding in plain sight. When the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion in the Dobbs decision in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court “should reconsider” other rulings with similar legal principles, including Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision establishing a right to contraception (and, more fundamentally, a constitutional right to privacy). The ultra-conservative strategists behind Project 2025— including Roger Severino, longtime anti-abortion movement lawyer, and Russell Voght, an avowed Christian nationalist—have spelled out a plan for how a Republican-led White House could gut or rewrite key federal birth-control regulations, building on efforts that began during the first Trump administration. (While Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, even claiming he doesn’t know who wrote it, at least 140 members of Trump’s team, including Severino and Voght, had a hand in drafting it.)

But what has escaped many Americans is that these threats aren’t just terrifying what-if-this-happens scenarios. As the Texas lawsuits show, in some parts of the US, that scary future has already arrived. States have been passing laws allowing pharmacies to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions based on moral objections, or proposing legislation that unscientifically classifies emergency contraception and IUDs as “abortifacients.” Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch has found that since 2021, at least 21 states have directed a total of $513 million to religiously affiliated crisis pregnancy centers and “alternatives to abortion” programs that actively spread misinformation about birth control and discourage its use.

And though contraception is supported by around 90 percent of voters, when Congress had the chance earlier this year to pass a law protecting access to birth control, Republican senators blocked it, claiming it was unnecessary.

The Biden administration has repeatedly pushed back—most recently, with a new proposed rule under the Affordable Care Act to require private insurance to cover 100 percent of the cost of over-the-counter birth control and offer patients more choices for prescription contraception. In a statement, Vice President Kamala Harris described the move as “the largest expansion of contraception coverage in more than a decade.” But the regulations won’t be finalized until after the presidential election, and the new rules are virtually certain to be challenged in GOP-packed federal courts even if Harris wins. 

And what if she doesn’t?

A new Trump administration and its right-wing allies are expected to escalate attacks on contraception on a multitude of fronts, including appointing extremists to key government positions. Rather than outright bans, we should expect more subtle incursions—regulatory changes, limits on insurance coverage, and funding reductions for family planning, as well as rules like the parental consent requirement for teens, according to reproductive health policy experts interviewed by Mother Jones. “It would be cleaner if there was some direct attack on the right to contraception that opponents of reproductive healthcare were pursuing,” says Kelly Baden, vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute. “They’re not. It is much more behind-the-scenes, around the margins. And yet, the impact is still potentially devastating.”

“It would be cleaner if there was some direct attack on the right to contraception that opponents of reproductive healthcare were pursuing. They’re not.”

“That’s what happened to abortion,” adds Amanda Stevenson, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder who studies the impact of family planning policy. “Death by a thousand cuts.”

Here are four key strategies we can expect under a new Trump administration intent on undermining access to contraception:

Doubling Down on False Claims that Birth Control Causes Abortion

One of the most common attack lines against contraception is the claim that certain methods—notably IUDs and morning-after pills—are abortifacients, which is to say they cause abortion, purportedly by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. In fact, decades of research show that these methods block fertilization from ever happening—by preventing the release of eggs, for instance, or stopping sperm from reaching them. Yet the belief that IUDs and emergency contraception, like Plan B and Ella, end pregnancies rather than preventing them has become distressingly common, thanks in part to rampant misinformation spread by the anti-abortion movement—including appointees in the first Trump administration.

The falsehoods have made their way into Food and Drug Administration policy, with decades-long repercussions for reproductive health. Back in the early 2000s, when the FDA was trying to decide whether Plan B should be sold over the counter, it relied on an advisory committee that included several abortion opponents. Over the objections of their colleagues, those committee members persuaded the agency to include language in Plan B’s packaging that stated the drug “may also work” by preventing implantation. Not until 2022 did the FDA finally update the Plan B label to clarify the drug “does not terminate a pregnancy.” But anti-abortion groups could challenge that update in a second Trump administration.

Meanwhile, since 2015, the “abortifacient claim” has inspired lawmakers in at least seven states to vote to cut off funding for contraception or block bills to protect access to it, USA Today found in a recent investigation. Project 2025 also continues this line of attack, describing Ella as a “potential abortifacient” and proposing to wipe out mandatory insurance coverage for it. Some anti-abortion organizations, including the influential Students for Life, even falsely claim that the daily birth control pill is an abortifacient. As my colleague Kiera Butler has written, it’s all part of a growing right-wing movement to persuade women that hormonal contraception is just plain bad for them. If Trump wins, his appointees are likely to bring those arguments with them to the agencies they oversee, further threatening birth control access.

Rewriting Title X

Attacking government subsidies for contraception has been part of the GOP playbook for decades. A favorite target is Title X, a federal safety-net program that underwrites free reproductive health services—birth control, cervical cancer screenings, and STI screening and treatment, but not abortion—for low-income and uninsured people. Planned Parenthood clinics, a common provider of these services, receive about 20 percent of Title X funds.

No surprise: Texas has led the way in attacking the federal program since 2011, when the legislature slashed state funding for reproductive health care and redirected Title X money to primary care providers. The changes that year—designed to kneecap Planned Parenthood—forced scores of reproductive health clinics to close, and others to reduce hours, charge patients new fees, or ration the most effective (but expensive) forms of contraception, such as IUDs. As a result of the changes, the number of clients served by Texas family planning organizations fell by more than half, and the teen birth rate rose an estimated 3.4 percent. “It shredded the safety net for women’s health care in our state,” says Davis, now a senior adviser to Planned Parenthood Texas Votes. “Tens of thousands of women literally lost the only health care they had ever known, overnight. It was devastating, and slowly, we’ve been building our way back.”

“Tens of thousands of women literally lost the only health care they had ever known, overnight.”

Trump’s first-term appointees, following Texas’ lead, set about dramatically reshaping the entire Title X program. The administration’s “gag rule,” first proposed under Ronald Reagan but never fully implemented, which forbids any clinics that took Title X money from referring patients to abortion providers. It also required them to keep separate books and separate facilities from their abortion services, if they offered them—a logistical nightmare. Some 1,300 reproductive health facilities, including 400 Planned Parenthood clinics, withdrew from the program rather than withhold abortion referrals from patients who wanted them, and roughly 1.6 million patients lost access to federally subsidized birth control. “It was a very difficult time in the program,” says Clare Coleman, president of the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association. “Of course, the numbers plummeted.” What happened to the freed-up Title X money? The Trump administration sent some of it to a chain of Christian “crisis pregnancy centers” that refused to provide contraception or even referrals for birth control, as my colleague Stephanie Mencimer found in a 2019 investigation.

When Joe Biden took office, his administration promptly revoked the Trump rule, and the Title X network started rebuilding. But Vice presidential candidate Ohio Sen. JD Vance has already signaled that a second Trump administration would try again to defund Planned Parenthood—code for attacking Title X. Project 2025 urges the next president to “quickly” reissue the gag rule. It also advocates that Title X be “reframed with a focus on better education around fertility awareness”—a less-reliable method of cycle tracking favored by anti-abortion activists and wellness influencers—with grants opened up once again to anti-abortion religious organizations.

In anticipation of a Trump win, Coleman’s organization has been working with reproductive health clinics to prepare for the old gag rule to be reissued and even expanded soon after Inauguration Day. Not only could the next version of the rule pick up on Texas’ efforts to require parental consent for teenagers, Coleman warns Trump appointees are also likely to attack gender-affirming care. (Title X does not explicitly fund such care but some providers offer those services separately, just as they do abortion.) “They may say, if you take Title X, you can’t provide any of that care,” Coleman speculates. “We are quite concerned about them trying to enforce not only a gender binary—because we also do see men in the Title X program—but to recast it as: ‘This is a program about biological sex.’”

That’s if Title X survives at all: House Speaker Mike Johnson’s budget bill in September 2023 would have defunded the program entirely.

Gutting the Affordable Care Act

Before the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, birth control accounted for around a third of women’s out-of-pocket healthcare expenses, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Monthly copays deterred women from getting the Pill, while an IUD could have an up-front cost of $1,000.

The ACA changed all that for over 62 million women. Starting in 2012, the law classified contraception as a form of preventive care and made it mandatory for private insurance to cover a wide range of prescription birth control at no cost to consumers. Last year, responding to the fallout from Dobbs, the Biden administration directed agencies to find ways to strengthen the contraception mandate and make sure insurers follow it; last month’s announcement on coverage of over-the-counter contraception follows that effort.

Fighting the contraception mandate has been one of the key ways conservatives and religious groups have sought to erode access to birth control. In 2014, the Supreme Court’s infamous Hobby Lobby ruling blew a crater in the ACA’s contraception mandate in the name of protecting religious freedom. There had always been a religious exemption for churches and houses of worship. But Hobby Lobby expanded that exemption to include 90 percent of US businesses—letting them deny coverage for birth control in employee insurance plans if the owners had a religious objection.

Trump broadened the exemption even further in his first term, allowing employers to decline to provide birth control based on moral, not just religious, objections. “It opens the door wide for any employer that provides health insurance to pick and choose what kind of contraception they would like to cover,” says Dana Singiser, cofounder of the Contraceptive Access Initiative.

Of course, there’s always the chance that a Republican White House and Congress would wipe out the ACA altogether, as Trump tried to do in 2017. Trump has since made conflicting statements about whether he would try again for a repeal or impose “concepts of a plan” to replace it. In late October, Speaker Johnson promised a “massive reform” of the ACA if Trump is elected.

Even with the ACA still on the books, experts say Trump could do significant damage, bypassing Congress by issuing new regulations or guidance from executive-branch agencies. Project 2025 leans in on this idea, urging the next president to make regulatory moves that would hobble the contraceptive mandate. “It’s not flashy,” says Lauren Wallace, senior counsel for reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center. “Every administration is allowed to put out proposed rules, put out guidance. So those are the ways this coverage can be stripped.”

“Every administration is allowed to put out proposed rules, put out guidance. So those are the ways this coverage can be stripped.”

The Biden administration is currently finalizing a replacement to Trump’s rule allowing moral objections to the contraceptive mandate; it’s safe to say that Trump would block or revoke it. He could also issue other regulations to make the contraceptive mandate “unworkable,” Wallace says. He could give insurers more agency to make rules around which types of birth control they choose to insure or require patients to try certain methods, before covering more expensive ones.

Project 2025’s authors, of course, have their own ideas about which forms of birth control are preferable. Their blueprint urges the next president to require the Department of Health and Human Services to issue new regulations about what is covered by the ACA contraceptive mandate. In: “fertility awareness” methods. Out: male condoms and Ella.

Shrinking Medicaid While Increasing Surveillance

Back to Texas.

Over the past decade or so, at the same time the state was attacking family planning clinics, it found a way to mess with the most common way people pay for birth control: Medicaid. And Davis sees what it did as a potential model for other states should Trump win.

First, the state passed a law banning abortion providers and their affiliates from participating in the state’s Medicaid-funded family planning program. The law conflicted with a federal rule allowing Medicaid patients to choose any “willing” provider. That meant Texas had to apply to the Obama administration for a waiver of the rule. “They got into a standoff,” Davis recalls. “The Obama administration said, ‘We’re going to remove all of your funding if you do this.’ And Texas said, ‘Fine, do it.’”

For the next few years, Texas ran a shrunken version of the program using state funding. Then Trump appeared, installing a National Right to Life Committee lobbyist to oversee national family planning policy. Texas applied for the Medicaid waiver again—and this time, received it. The Trump administration also gave the state permission not to cover emergency contraception in its Medicaid-funded program.

Davis predicts that other states will use the same maneuver to sever Planned Parenthood from Medicaid, should Trump return to office. Tennessee, which bans virtually all abortions, and South Carolina, which bans them at six weeks, have already applied for similar waivers. And Missouri recently enacted a law to ban all Medicaid reimbursements for abortion providers and their affiliates—even though the state’s abortion ban means they now only provide services like contraception and cancer screening.

Project 2025 proposes making federal Medicaid family planning funding conditional on states participating in a frighteningly detailed abortion surveillance system. “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism,” the blueprint says, “HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders.” The database would include the gestational age at which the abortion was performed, the method, and the reason for it.

The proposal would force states to make an “impossible choice,” says Madeline Morcelle, senior attorney at the National Health Law Program. Participating in that “weaponized program,” she says, “would likely be used to criminalize pregnant people,” particularly immigrants, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, young people, and people with disabilities. But dropping out would likely mean losing federal funding for vital Medicaid services affecting millions of those same low-income people.

Davis, in Texas, says she knows that predictions about losing access to birth control can sound exaggerated. She’s heard such criticisms before—from people who believed that Roe would never fall. “There are those out there who believe that this is hyperbole,” she says. But as a Texan who has witnessed how what appears radical becomes normalized, she has no illusions about the potential dangers. “I don’t think it’s unlikely at all that as Republicans become more and more extreme, and governed in a more and more extreme way by their rightward flank, that we are going to see these things become a reality.”

Correction, October 31: An earlier version of this story misstated which funds Project 2025 suggests withholding from states that don’t participate in an expanded abortion surveillance program.

In the days leading up to the election, the firehose of lies, half–truths, dumb memes, inflammatory political claims, and private obsessions emanating from Elon Musk’s Twitter account has grown ever more pressurized, with the world’s richest man posting in a frenzied effort to elect Donald Trump.

Musk’s own attempts to sway the election are drawing legal scrutiny.

Musk has returned to a set of ideas he’s been preoccupied with for much of the year: the threat of voter fraud, the necessity of voter ID laws, and his persistent concern that “non-citizens” will somehow vote. The timing of this push to build outrage over alleged illegal election activity might strike some observers as ironic, given that the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office has just sued Musk for running his own “illegal…scheme” to entice conservative leaning voters with the prospect of cash.

The lawsuit follows Musk’s unveiling of two election-related cash giveaways, both through America PAC, the super PAC he recently created to support Trump. First, he promised to pay $100 to registered voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who sign a petition supporting free speech and the right to bear arms. Second, he committed to select one registered voter who signs the petition each day to receive $1 million.

While exchanging money for votes is illegal, it’s safe to say that Musk and his lawyers intended to design a system that sidesteps such restrictions. But on Monday, Philadelphia’s DA Larry Krasner filed a civil suit against Musk calling the giveaway an “unlawful lottery.” Musk and America PAC haven’t responded publicly to the suit, and awarded another million dollar winner in North Carolina on Monday. 

At the same time Musk’s own actions to sway the election are drawing legal scrutiny, he has been tweeting intently about supposed illegal voter fraud. Musk posted on X many times throughout October that voter ID “should be required nationwide” and claiming that “almost every country on Earth” requires it. On Wednesday, for instance, he proclaimed that new voter ID requirements “should be implemented.” (Thirty-six states already have some form of voter ID law on the books. But those laws have been found to disproportionately disenfranchise elderly, poor and non-white voters, and to be an ineffective means of reducing fraud. What’s more, concerns about voter fraud can lead to the suppression and disenfranchisement of qualified voters.) 

On Wednesday, Musk also tweeted in support of Virginia winning a Supreme Court ruling allowing it to remove alleged non-citizen voters from the polls, calling it “insane” that the “Democratic party”—which he put in scornful scare quotes—“was suing to allow non-citizens to vote.” In fact, legal opposition to the move came from Justice Department lawyers and civil rights groups, who argued eligible voters were at risk of erroneously being kicked off the rolls.

As Musk continues making unfounded claims of voter fraud, X has established an “Election Integrity Community,” a crowd-generated feed sharing usually-unverified claims, reports, and complaints of purported election malfeasance. In all, Musk seems intent on using his megaphone to depict the United States as rife with a certain kind of fraud committed by a certain kind of illegal, non-citizen voter. The irony of Musk’s obsession with the issue is rich, given that he worked illegally in the U.S. while launching his first company. While Musk has since claimed he had a student visa allowing him to work, in a 2013 joint interview, his brother Kimbal described them both as “illegal immigrants.”

On October 8, about two dozen conservative activists gathered in the rotunda of the Georgia State Capitol, where a meeting of the state election board was taking place. A US Army veteran named Richard Schroeder, from Hall County, in the northeastern part of the state, led the group in prayer. Schroeder, who testified that day, was a regular presence at the board meetings, where he has spread debunked claims about election security and once identified himself as a poll worker in charge of tabulating votes. 

Schroeder first asked God for forgiveness for allowing the “evil” of migrants and transgender people to permeate the country. Then he turned to voting machines. 

“Nobody’s got more votes than President [Donald] Trump ever in the world,” Schroeder said. He and other members of the prayer circle wore shirts that read “IYKYK dvscorp08!,” referring to an alleged password to Georgia’s voting machines that was obtained by right-wing election deniers and spread online. 

“Our votes have been stolen,” he continued in prayer. “The Dominion voting machines have taken our God-given dominion and have been selecting winners—not electing winners.”

“Amen,” responded David Hancock, a member of the Gwinnett County board of elections. 

The activists were part of a small but influential network of election deniers who had successfully convinced the board’s pro-Trump majority to launch probes into unfounded claims of election fraud. They also persuaded the board, which issues guidance to county election officials and investigates problems with the voting process, to pass a series of controversial rules in the runup to the November election that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox recently deemed “illegal” and “unconstitutional.” In August, Trump had touted the trio of sympathetic board members by name at a campaign rally, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” 

The rules would have led to the spread of misinformation and could have been used as a justification not to certify results, Democrats and voting rights advocates warned. The changes also would have slowed the counting of votes, according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “Everything we’ve been fighting for since 2020 has been to give the voter quicker response, quicker results,” Raffensperger said on October 14, noting that one of the board’s rules, requiring a hand count of ballots on Election Day, could have delayed the reporting of results into the wee hours of the morning. “Really, that just becomes a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.” 

Democrats and election watchdogs breathed a sigh of relief when Georgia courts blocked the Trump-inspired rules, including two that would have given local election officials more power to attempt to block certification. But they should not rest easy, as significant peril still remains. At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state. And over the past four years, Trump-aligned election deniers have asserted their power throughout local GOP organizations, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog.

Together, these MAGA Republicans could throw the election in Georgia—and thus the nation—into disarray. Officials at the county level, for instance, could still attempt to refuse to certify the results if Kamala Harris carries Georgia, while the state election board could amplify false allegations and launch bogus investigations supporting Trump’s inevitable claims of a stolen election. And those are just a couple of the nightmarish scenarios that could unfold next week.

Whatever transpires in the November 5 election, the radicalization of the board into a nakedly partisan arm of Trump’s election denial machine shows that our democratic system rests on a knife’s edge. What took place in Georgia can—and is—happening throughout the country. The takeover of much of Georgia’s election apparatus offers a distressing vision of the future if Trump returns to the White House, one in which the federal government is run by zealots whose only qualification is their fealty to Trump. 

“That’s exactly what Project 2025 is all about,” says Sara Tindall Ghazal, the state election board’s lone Democrat. “It is about replacing the bureaucrats within the federal government with political employees whose sole requirement for the job is loyalty to the president.” Tindall Ghazal points out that some of those people “don’t understand and don’t care about what the law requires. They’re completely unconstrained in their actions.”

The path to this troubling reality began on election night 2020, when Republican activists began spreading claims of widespread voter fraud. Believing that Trump ballots had been thrown out, a crowd gathered at an election office in Griffin, the seat of Spalding County, an hour south of Atlanta. Led by a county commissioner who filmed election workers through the glass, some in the crowd eventually climbed into a dumpster to find the supposedly discarded ballots. In Marietta, an Atlanta suburb, Salleigh Grubbs, the Cobb County GOP chair, chased a truck she believed contained shredded ballots. In an Atlanta ballot-counting facility, plastic bins under a folding table were labeled the infamous “suitcases full of ballots” that supposedly flipped the election in favor of Joe Biden. In the small town of Douglas in south Georgia, a county election board official claimed that voting machines had flipped votes. The state became ground zero for election fraud claims. 

None of it proved true. The dumpster in Griffin contained no ballots—just empty ballot envelopes that had been thrown away by election workers. The truck in Marietta did not have shredded ballots, Grubbs eventually discovered. The boxes under the table in Atlanta didn’t hold ballots for Biden that were double-counted to seal his victory over Trump. Instead, they just held regular ballots that were opened when workers were told by the secretary of state’s office to stay late and count more votes. The Dominion voting machines Grubbs and others prayed over never actually flipped votes—in Douglas or anywhere else—but they were broken into by local officials and attorneys working on behalf of Trump.

At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state.

From these debunked origins, the claims of a stolen election grew, spreading to include other outlandish allegations of a plot that supposedly involved Italians and Venezuelans hacking voting machines and the forgery of untold thousands of ballots that were placed in drop boxes by “mules.” 

Top Georgia election officials repeatedly discredited claims of a stolen election, as did multiple legal proceedings and court judgments. Three separate counts of ballots reaffirmed Biden’s 2020 victory. Voting-machine companies won major settlements against Fox News and Newsmax for airing false claims about their machines. A Fulton County judge threw out a lawsuit filed by DeKalb County Republicans challenging the security of the state’s voting machines. Two Georgia poll workers in Fulton County won a $148 million defamation judgment against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for spreading the myth of “suitcases” of ballots. Jenna Ellis, another top lawyer for Trump, took a plea agreement in a wide-ranging election interference case and admitted she made false statements about illegal ballots being counted. 

Nonetheless, Trump-aligned Republicans throughout the state and nation began amplifying these claims and calling for investigations. They also got to work making sure “the steal” couldn’t happen again, beginning at the local level, where influential figures like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn were encouraging Trump supporters to take over local election boards. In 12 counties, local representatives in the state legislature passed laws that remade county election boards in favor of Republicans. One of the bills, HB 769, transformed the Spalding County board of elections from a mundane government body on which Black Democrats held a majority to an activist board controlled by white Republicans who amplified Trump’s election lies. 

When Spalding County officials first heard about HB 769 in the spring of 2021, they were confused. Typically, when the county’s representatives in the state legislature introduce a bill that affects the county, local officials are part of the process. But that wasn’t the case with this measure, which changed how the members of the board of elections were chosen. The board had always been essentially split between the parties—Democrats got two appointments and Republicans got two, with the foursome then choosing a fifth member to serve as chair. But HB 769 changed that—the board’s fifth member would now be chosen by local judges in a closed-door process and secret vote. In May 2021, the judges chose Republican Jim Newland, giving election deniers control over the board. 

Two of the new Republicans—Ben Johnson and Roy McClain—believed Trump had rightfully won the election. Johnson is a Trump-supporting QAnon fan and Elon Musk aficionado who frequently posts on Facebook about various right-wing culture war grievances and conspiracies, including that voting machines were subject to hacking and fraud. McClain has pushed for automatic hand recounts of all elections and in 2023 made a public showing of his refusal to certify results while privately signing off on certification, fulfilling his legal duty while maintaining his MAGA bonafides. Both Johnson and McClain were involved in a brief but failed effort in August 2021 to hire an Atlanta law firm to help them access voting machines in their hunt for evidence of election fraud. The plan was nixed when Raffensperger’s office warned them that it would be illegal to allow a third party to access election equipment.

Even in counties where election boards weren’t overhauled to favor Republicans, election deniers still had a presence. In Fulton County, home to Atlanta, two election deniers sit on the election board. Boards in the Atlanta metro counties of Cobb, DeKalb, Floyd, and Gwinnett also include skeptics who, while not holding a majority, frequently amplify misinformation about elections. By early 2024, at least 21 election deniers were in place on election boards in nine counties.

As election deniers won seats on election boards, they also gained power in local GOP chapters. In Spalding County, Republicans who refused to go along with Trump’s claims of a stolen election were pushed out of the local party. There and elsewhere, Republicans refused to give campaign funds raised from donors to Gov. Brian Kemp for his unwillingness to toe the line on Trump’s lies about election fraud, said Mary Braun, a Republican in Spalding County who told Mother Jones that Johnson and some local party members had a “vendetta” against her for opposing the false claims spread by her colleagues. (Johnson and other members of the Spalding County election board, along with its election supervisor and county attorney, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers set their sights on perhaps the biggest prize of all, the state election board. In March 2021, the GOP-controlled legislature tucked a provision into a sweeping new voter suppression bill that removed Raffensperger as chair and a voting member of the board, a previously obscure body of appointed officials whose meetings were scantly attended and typically mundane. Raffensperger had become a leading target of election deniers for defending the legitimacy of the 2020 election and refusing Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory. In addition to removing Raffensperger, Georgia lawmakers gave the state election board the authority to investigate the secretary of state for his handling of the 2020 investigation—and virtually anything else the board dreamed up. 

“This was punishment for him not obeying the president and revealing that conversation,” Tindall Ghazal, the Democratic member of the board, said of Trump’s infamous phone call to Raffensperger, pressuring him to overturn the 2020 election.

After ousting Raffensperger, influential state Republicans continued to remake the board in Trump’s image by pushing out establishment Republicans and replacing them with election deniers. In 2022, the Georgia GOP used its appointment to place Dr. Janice Johnston on the board. (Each party gets an appointment to the five-member board, both chambers of the legislature pick a member, and the legislature chooses the chair unless it is out of session, in which case the governor appoints the chair.) A former obstetrician, Johnston served as a poll watcher in Fulton County in 2020 alongside Julie Adams, an election denier who currently sits on Fulton’s election board. Johnston began frequently attending Fulton County board meetings after the election, spreading false claims about the 2020 vote count. 

In January 2024, the state Senate appointed Rick Jeffares, a former GOP state senator, to replace a well-regarded conservative election attorney Matthew Mashburn, who had opposed investigating Raffensperger. Jeffares was handpicked by his neighbor, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a fake elector for Trump in 2020, who said Jones urged him to “be strong” on the board. (Jones did not respond to a request for comment.) Jeffares had spread memes on social media questioning the outcome of the 2020 election, including false claims that dead people had voted by mail, and had few obvious qualifications for the job. The owner of three wastewater treatment companies, Jeffares went on to solicit a director position at the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration through a campaign intermediary while serving in his role on the State Election Board, which Democrats said raised ethical questions about his independence on the board. 

At that point, election deniers were one vote short of a majority on the board. So they began to pressure Edward Lindsey, a lawyer and former Republican member of the state House, who had also voted against bogus investigations into the 2020 outcome, to resign. Lindsey’s term was up in May 2024, but he told Republican House Speaker Jon Burns that he was willing to serve through the election to maintain continuity on the board. 

“I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.”

At a board meeting in February 2024, Johnston introduced a resolution asking the legislature to repeal no-excuse absentee voting, which MAGA Republicans blamed for Trump’s defeat in 2020, and to limit mail voting to those who were disabled, over 75, or out of town. Lindsey voted against it, blocking the resolution from passing. “We should not as a board, only a few months before the 2024 election…start to limit the ability of people to vote, particularly people who find it most difficult to stand in line because of certain life situations,” he said.

That infuriated Trump, who privately told Georgia Republicans that Lindsey had “got to go,” according to Rolling Stone. Local GOP chapters called on Lindsey to step down. In May 2024, Lindsey voted against referring officials in Fulton County to the attorney general for prosecution over their handling of the 2020 election. Election deniers who packed the state board meeting responded with jeers and carried signs that said, “Time to Go Ed!”

A few weeks after that vote, and just days before Georgia Republicans met for their state convention, the House speaker announced he was replacing Lindsey with Janelle King, a conservative media personality with no election experience who was married to a Republican candidate who lost the 2022 GOP primary for US Senate to Herschel Walker. King tweeted on election night in 2020 that she had “questions!!” about the “vote counting process” and later said on her podcast that she opposed no-excuse absentee voting. 

The MAGA takeover over the board was complete. “I believe when we look back on November 5, 2024, we’re going to say getting to that 3–2 election integrity–minded majority on the state election board made sure that we had the level playing field to win this election,” Georgia Republican Party Chair Josh McKoon said at the party’s convention after King was appointed to the board. 

The takeover of the state board went mostly without notice until August, when Trump praised Johnston, Jeffares, and King during his Atlanta rally, saying they were “on fire” while going on a 10-minute tirade against Kemp for refusing to overturn the 2020 election. Johnston sat in the second row and stood and waved to the crowd when Trump name-checked her. (Johnston, Jeffares, and King declined to comment for this article.)

With mainstream Republicans out of the way, the board’s pro-Trump majority quickly got to work. State election board meetings became election denial symposiums, where conspiracy theorists spoke for hours about their demands for investigations and rule changes. Anyone can introduce a rule to the board, but in recent months, almost all of the new rules proposed have come from the network of election skeptics that includes some of the people who held a prayer vigil at the state Capitol in October. Between September 2022 and May 2024, no new rules were introduced. Since then, election denial activists and officials have introduced 31 rules for the board to consider. Of those, 15 have passed or are under consideration by the board. 

Days after Trump’s August visit to the state, the board passed its first controversial rule change. It came from Adams, the Fulton County election board member who served as a poll watcher with Johnston in 2020 and had refused to certify the state’s May primary election. Adams works with the Tea Party Patriots, which helped organize the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection. She also serves as regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump attorney who worked to overturn the 2020 election and was on the call in which Trump demanded Raffensperger reverse Biden’s victory. Finally, Adams is a member of a state network of activists and officials called the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition. The rule Adams introduced, which was eventually blocked by a state court, could have allowed local officials to refuse to certify election results if a “reasonable inquiry” determined that fraud had occurred. The rule did not spell out what a “reasonable inquiry” entailed, and voting rights advocates warned that it could be used as a pretext by GOP officials not to certify the results if a Democrat won Georgia. 

At another contentious board meeting a few weeks later, Grubbs, the GOP chair of Cobb County, introduced a rule that allowed county election board members to request a virtually unlimited amount of records and documents relating to voting machines and vote tabulation before certifying results—what became known as the “examination” certification rule. The measure, which passed 3–2, was a welcome addition to officials like Adams in Fulton County and David Hancock in Gwinnett County, both of whom had demanded scores of records before refusing to certify results in recent years. 

In abstaining from a vote to certify the results of both a May primary and a runoff election in June 2024, Adams said she had not received election records and documents she wanted to inspect for evidence of fraud. Cathy Woolard, at the time the Democratic chair of the Fulton County board, said Adams had received extensive records and documents related to the collection and tabulation of votes.

“Julie asked for these things with great authority, but she has no idea what she’s looking at,” Woolard told Mother Jones. “When she gets the records, she goes outside in the hallway and calls somebody. I can’t quite figure it out; the only thing I can come up with is, they just want to be right. They want to be right for Trump so they can say, ‘See, I told you guys, you cheated.’ Nothing of the sort happened.” (Adams did not respond to a request for comment.) This has led Democratic officials and voting rights groups to allege that Adams and her fellow election deniers at the local level are coordinating with national Republicans to enact skewed rules that could rig the state for Trump. Adams continues to push for more power to refuse to certify results as part of a lawsuit she filed with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. 

“Here’s what I think they really want,” Woolard says. “I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.” 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario. I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.”

Finally, in late September, just weeks before early voting began, the state election board approved another rule that would have required poll workers to “reconcile” the number of ballots cast on Election Day with the number of voters who checked in at every precinct in the state. This time-consuming task—referred to as a hand count—would have slowed the tallying of returns throughout the state, Raffensperger said. He accused the board of engaging in “activist rulemaking” and, along with Attorney General Chris Carr, also a Republican, said the board was both acting outside of its authority and passing rules that were in direct conflict with Georgia election law. 

The board’s MAGA majority had overstepped the law. Amid a national outcry, its rule changes were blocked by Fulton County judges as early voting began. The Republican National Committee appealed, but the Georgia State Supreme Court declined to reinstate the rules before November. 

Trump supporters throughout Georgia denounced the state Supreme Court’s decision. McKoon, the state GOP chair, called the rules “common sense” on X, claiming they would enhance election security. He blamed “Democrats and their allies” for the court’s ruling, even though the court is composed solely of conservative justices. 

But court rulings can do only so much to restrain a movement that has already shown how far it will go to undermine democratic norms. 

Hancock said in an email that Gwinnett County had passed its own ordinance requiring the release of a lengthy list of documents that he and other election board members could inspect before certifying results in November. 

“Even if the policy is somehow revoked, I will still be looking at these documents,” Hancock vowed in the wake of a judge’s decision that the “examination” certification rule conflicted with Georgia election law. (He did not respond to a request to explain his comments.)

Despite a separate court ruling in October reaffirming that election certification is mandatory for county officials, Tindall Ghazal worries that some counties under the sway of pro-Trump activists could still attempt to refuse to certify results “in a bad-faith way.”

A nightmare scenario in which numerous county election board members refuse to certify results could require Carr, the attorney general, to step in, filing court orders known as writs of mandamus to force officials to certify. Carr has tried to have it both ways when it comes to pro-Trump election deniers, his critics say. He sent a letter to the State Election Board saying many of its rules were illegal, including the hand-counting rule. But an attorney in Carr’s office also defended the state election board in a separate lawsuit over the certification rules that were challenged by Democrats. Moreover, Carr shielded Kemp from responsibility over the board when Democrats alleged ethics violations on the part of Johnston, Jeffares, and King in a lawsuit. In a motion to dismiss the suit, Carr wrote that Kemp didn’t have the authority to consider removing the members. 

“He’s less solid” than Raffensperger, state Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat, said of Carr. “He’s not an election denier, however, he’s planning to run for governor and has to contend with that base who believes the election was stolen.”

Widespread certification refusals could cause Kemp to miss a crucial federal deadline on December 11. That’s the day Kemp will have to certify slates of presidential electors for whoever wins Georgia’s popular vote. Unlike in 2020, when Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to defeat Biden, it could be Kemp, who has backed Trump’s presidential bid despite the abuse he has received from the former president, getting a call from Trump urging him not to certify Harris electors. 

Missing the December 11 deadline is one of the scenarios that might allow congressional Republicans to reject certification of a Harris win—and install Trump regardless of how Americans voted, according to US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), an election law expert and former member of the congressional January 6 committee. 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario,” Raskin said in an interview. “I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.” If Georgia misses the deadline to certify its electoral votes, depriving either candidate of a majority in the Electoral College, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, where a majority of House delegations, not a majority of members, choose the winner. Because Republicans control a majority of those delegations, that could allow them to install Trump as president in a disputed election. 

Courts have dulled the Georgia election board’s fangs for the moment. But in the longer term, the threats to fair elections continue. The trio of Johnston, Jeffares, and King appear to be laying the groundwork to potentially take over election administration in Fulton County, the epicenter of past and ongoing election lies. The board could also pressure Georgia’s General Assembly to enact more voter suppression laws or give them the power to certify election results instead of the secretary of state. Recently, Johnston was voted vice chair of the board.

“Despite a judge blocking their unconstitutional rules changes, the MAGA board members continue plotting ways to plunge our election into chaos,” said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a progressive voting rights organization. 

Johnston has already sown distrust about the results in Fulton County, questioning the legitimacy of a monitoring team that is overseeing election administration there as part of the county’s punishment for erroneously double-counting ballots in 2020. (About 3,600 ballots were double-counted in Fulton County in 2020 but were found not to have changed the results of the election.) Johnston had proposed her own monitoring team that would oversee elections in Fulton, what Flugrath called an attempt to “force partisan monitors onto the county, with the ultimate goal of undermining confidence in the election, to provide Trump fodder to claim fraud if and when he loses.”

Instead, the county chose a monitoring team that includes Ryan Germany, a former staffer in Raffensperger’s office, who is a frequent target of election deniers because he defended the legitimacy of the 2020 election and debunked conspiracies about ballot counting in Fulton. “Will the Ryan Germany Monitoring Team account for all absentee ballots?” Johnston posted on X.

Perhaps most importantly, the board could amplify disinformation spread by Trump and his MAGA allies, like US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has falsely claimed that voting machines “switched” votes during the state’s early voting period. In reality, the incident Greene referenced happened as a result of a Republican voter who made an error on her own ballot, but Greene’s post on X went viral nonetheless, garnering nearly 4 million views.

Election deniers at the county level—influenced by the likes of Greene and members of the state board—could use false claims of fraud to refuse certification in defiance of the law, furthering the distrust of the election process that Trump’s movement has weaponized so successfully. 

“The only reason not to to certify is to provide fodder for an election challenge and for the disinformation grist mill,” Tindall Ghazal says. “Disinformation is what led to January 6.” 

Correction: The original version of this story misidentified a member of the prayer circle gathered at the Georgia capitol.

Earlier this month, the Lincoln Project rolled out an ad centered on abortion rights featuring a chilling line uttered by the narrator, a young woman, in a monologue addressed to her Trump-voting father: “You knew his politics would end my freedom, my rights, my life,” she says. “You chose hate over me.”

The ad, which depicts a woman dying in agony as she suffers complications while giving birth, was produced by the Lincoln Project to swing a demographic group they’ve dubbed “Dobbs Dads”—a group of men open to voting to protect or restore their daughters’ access to abortion—who just might be the downfall of Trump. 

There’s evidence of such a shift in a recent Marist poll that showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump by 20 points among college educated white men—a 5 point improvement over Biden’s 2020 margin with the same demographic. 

“We call them Dobbs Dads,” tweeted Joe Trippi, a veteran Democrat strategist who works with the Lincoln Project. “And they are breaking to Harris. One [of] our most important target groups.” 

The Dobbs Dads moniker, of course, comes from the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling where the justices, led by three Trump appointees, effectively ended the federal right to access abortion. In the wake of that decision, 13 states have outright banned abortion, mothers have died due to lack of abortion access, maternal deaths in Texas doubled, infant deaths rose nationally, and Idaho’s legislature disbanded committees designed to investigate causes of maternal deaths, obscuring public understanding of how that state’s abortion ban has impacted mothers. With nearly two thirds of the U.S. public believing abortion should be legal, including 61% of men according to Pew research, the fast changing legal regime has made abortion rights one of the election’s top issues. 

Lincoln Project says it has identified roughly 680,000 Dobbs Dads in swing states.

According to Stuart Stevens, another Lincoln Project advisor, pregnancy related medical trauma has left more men open to voting against Trump, who has refused to rule out signing a federal abortion ban, and for Harris, who would work to restore abortion rights. Those men include, as Stevens recently told MSNBC, “voters who are more conservative than not, many of whom would check a box to say they are anti-abortion. But they are appalled by the specter of these tragedies.”  

“These are men who really have prided themselves as being the defenders of their daughter,” explains Trippi, “They suddenly are looking at what that means in terms of the Dobbs decision as they think about their daughter’s future and the world she’d live in.”

The Lincoln Project says its Dobbs Dads strategy is based on research conducted by a sister organization, the Lincoln Democracy Institute. An April 2023 LDI survey of over 17,000 voters helped their team zero in on two voting groups they considered ripe for persuasion: Dobbs Dads, and another they dubbed Red Dawn Republicans—older GOP voters who prioritize traditional international alliances, particularly in opposition to Russia.

Alex Shashlo, who helps run the Lincoln Project’s digital campaigns, said their “super targeted talking to dads approach on abortion” led them to choose female narrators for “Daisy”—the nightmarish ad set in a delivery room—and another similar spot, “This Year.” The strategy was partially inspired by a viral video clip of Taylor Swift speaking with her father about taking a political stand ahead of the 2018 elections. “If Taylor Swift said, ‘Hey, talk to your dad’, to all her followers, that would be a pretty powerful thing,” Trippi said. LDI’s research confirmed that the concept of daughters having conversations about abortion with their fathers could be effective in reaching men.

In a close election, the targeted campaign could make all the difference. The Lincoln Project says it has identified roughly 680,000 Dobbs Dads in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In a recent podcast, Trippi also mused on the demographic’s potential to “surprise people in these Senate races like in Florida, in Texas, maybe Montana.”

“There is an opportunity here,” he said.

This story was produced in partnership with the National Catholic Reporter.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, every state-level campaign to limit abortion has failed. But that hasn’t stopped Catholic organizations from stepping into the fight again this election year.

Catholic organizations are bankrolling campaigns against abortion-rights measures, spending more than $1.9 million so far in five of the 10 states where such measures are on the ballot, according to a joint investigation by National Catholic Reporter and Mother Jones.

In Florida alone, dioceses and bishops have spent more than $1.1 million, and church entities in South Dakota have recently ramped up spending as the election nears. In other states, the church’s hierarchy may be sitting out financially, but wealthy individuals with well-established associations with the Catholic Church, or church-affiliated groups—like local parishes and Knights of Columbus chapters—have stepped into the fray. 

The fight in Florida over Amendment 4—a ballot initiative to add the right to an abortion in the state constitution—has become a political lightning rod, so it may not be surprising that the high-profile battle has attracted heavyweight donors from across the country. Florida requires 60 percent voter approval to amend the state constitution.

Abortion-rights groups have raised at least $60.7 million, swamping the $9 million raised by anti-abortion groups—both sides flooding the airwaves with ads. The majority of the money pouring in on the abortion-rights side is from major national groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood. Catholics for Choice has contributed just $10,378 to the fight in Florida. (Searches in other states turned up no other donations from Catholics for Choice.)

With the appearance of a showdown between the powers on each side of the national debate, it may be fitting that the Miami Archdiocese has given the most money of any church organization in the country this year—three donations totaling $384,000 to a political action committee called Florida Voters Against Extremism.

The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops has donated another $271,000, and the Catholic dioceses of Venice, Palm Beach, and St. Petersburg gave $100,000 each. Dioceses in Orlando, St. Augustine, and Pensacola also donated.

Various Florida Catholic dioceses and the state’s bishops’ conference have stepped in, financially, during previous ballot initiative fights, but never on this scale— prior to 2024, they had given just $198,000.

The church in Florida has made these donations, a representative from the bishops’ conference said, because “it would be unconscionable not to defend against this threat to the sanctity of unborn life and the dignity of pregnant women.”

The money comes from diocesan and individual contributions to the conference’s general operating funds, said Michele Taylor, associate director for communications. “Dioceses and the conference observe Florida election and campaign finance laws and so there have been no special collections for the defeat of Amendment 4,” she said.

Diocesan donations in other states were substantially smaller, but so is the overall size of the ballot initiative fights. In South Dakota, for instance, the Sioux Falls Diocese has donated $340,000 to two separate anti-abortion PACs fighting to block a ballot initiative to create a similar protection for abortion rights in the state constitution. 

The one abortion-rights group raising money to support the ballot initiative’s passage had only raised $298,000 in September and October. The Sioux Falls Diocese’s donation included an in-kind donation of $40,000 for polling work. All of the diocese’s donations have been made since September 25.

Similarly, in Colorado, despite a heavily funded abortion-rights PAC filling the airwaves with ads in support of Amendment 79, another effort to install a right to abortion in the state constitution, the Catholic Church had seemed to be uninterested—at least in terms of financial donations—in the fight until very recently. 

But on September 11, the Denver Archdiocese sent a $50,000 check to the Pro-Life Colorado Fund, and it sent a second much larger check for $175,000 to the same group on October 22.

In Missouri, by contrast, the St. Louis Archdiocese, four other dioceses around the state, and the state bishops’ conference all donated $5,000, but earlier in the year and only to the effort to block an abortion ballot initiative from ever getting on the ballot. Since the initiative was approved for the ballot, the dioceses haven’t donated again.

Some Missouri pro-life groups had hoped the fight against the constitutional amendment for abortion rights would attract more national money, said Jamie Morris, executive director of the Missouri Catholic Conference, the church’s public policy agency in the state. He believes the focus on the presidential race, and ones in the Senate or House, put the financial focus elsewhere.

Losses in previous amendment battles, as in Ohio and Kansas, also may have dissuaded funders, Morris said. “I do think ours is tighter than Ohio’s ended up,” he said. “It would seem ripe for someone to come in and at least get some messaging and funding out there to push it over the top.”

Polling shows more than half of Missourians favoring the amendment, with 34 percent opposed. The Ohio abortion-rights measure was approved 57 percent to 43 percent in 2023.

In some states, spending from groups or individuals closely associated with the church has dramatically augmented or, arguably, eliminated the need for church spending.

In South Dakota, for example, where diocesan spending has been heavy, the national Knights of Columbus organization, based in New Haven, Connecticut, contributed $200,000 to a group opposing that state’s constitutional amendment on abortion. In Missouri, where the dioceses have spent only $25,000, the state Knights of Columbus chapter has chipped in $75,000.

In Nebraska, two ballot initiatives—one seeking to block abortion rights, the other to add it as a constitutional right—have attracted millions in spending, but none from that state’s dioceses. But two families of prominent Nebraska Catholics have contributed more than $6.6 million of the total $7 million donated to anti-abortion committees in the ballot initiative fight. 

Marlene Ricketts, the wife of TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, and her son, Sen. Pete Ricketts (R), Nebraska’s junior senator, have contributed $5.1 million. The Ricketts family are prominent Catholics, and Joe Ricketts has given millions to the Catholic Church in Nebraska, including spending an estimated $34 million on the creation of a Catholic religious retreat. 

Two members of another family, the Peeds, who have recently become prominent donors in conservative political and Catholic circles, chipped in another $2 million. Family matriarch Rhonda Peed has said faith drives the family’s charitable giving, including some $1.8 million to the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, in the past two decades.

In Missouri, prominent conservative and anti-abortion attorney John Sauer has contributed roughly $757,000 to the fight over abortion. Sauer, a former solicitor general of Missouri, has represented anti-abortion groups in the past and successfully defended a Catholic priest accused of sexual abuse.

In January, Sauer represented former President Donald Trump in his successful claim before the US Supreme Court claiming broad presidential immunity. Missouri state campaign finance records show that this year Sauer gave $500,000 to Missouri Right to Life, which was spent to oppose an abortion-rights ballot initiative, and $257,000 to a political committee set up specifically to oppose the initiative as well.

Representatives from the Sioux Falls Diocese and the Denver Archdiocese did not respond to interview requests.

In all 10 states with abortion ballot measures, Catholic groups and dioceses are working to oppose abortion-rights amendments with mailings, bishops’ statements, videos, prayers and other resources in English and Spanish. Says Morris of Missouri: “It’s kind of an all-of-the-above approach.”

Yet, the effectiveness of church attempts at persuasion are questionable. A recent poll of Catholic voters in seven battleground states found that the hierarchy’s influence on voters in their flock is extremely limited. Only 32 percent said bishops were very or somewhat influential in voting decisions, and 37 percent said priests were, according to the poll, which was conducted by the National Catholic Reporter.

Political strategies, like funding statewide anti-abortion initiatives, is only a part of conservative Catholics’ “long game,” according to Mary Jo McConahay, author of Playing God: American Catholic Bishops and the Far Right. 

Legal activist Leonard Leo, for example, has turned his attention from the US Supreme Court to a web of Catholic organizations aimed at instilling traditionalist values in the broader culture.

“I think ultraconservative Catholic intellectuals are leaning now in the direction of changing culture itself to achieve their various goals, including demonizing—or criminalizing—abortion, homosexuality, transgender people, etc., which also would move the country closer toward Christian nationalism,” McConahay said. “As long as the majority of the voting population is pro-abortion, Catholic money may start to go to this kind of longer-term effort, rather than fighting ballot measures.”

This story has been updated to reflect additional donations.

There are more than 45 million people with student loans, and many more who are gearing up to go to college at a time when tuition is at record highs: The average annual cost of a private university hit nearly $60,000 in 2024.

The next president will have the power to either ease that financial burden or aggravate it. And while Donald Trump’s bluster on the campaign trail has not included a lot of clarity on his policy plans, his public statements, along with the actions of his previous administration, set out a roadmap for the many ways he will try to gut the affordability of higher education for future students—while sinking those who already have student debt into a deeper financial hole.

What’s more, the agenda authored by the conservative Heritage Foundation for a future Republican administration, known as Project 2025, also offers a blueprint. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but because it was written by some of his closest allies, it is likely that, should Trump win in November, pieces of the project will become policy priorities.

Here’s what a second Trump term could mean for student debt:

Defunding and closing the Education Department could decimate college affordability for low-income students: At a rally in Wisconsin last month, Donald Trump said that he wants to shut down the Department of Education should he return to the Oval Office. “I’m dying to get back to do this,” he said. “We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education.” 

As president, Trump proposed cutting nearly $4 billion from the Pell Grants reserve fund—and redirecting half to NASA for space exploration: “So that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!”

Trump couldn’t close the Education Department singlehandledly: it would require an act of Congress. But defunding the department would have far-reaching implications for education funding. A key one: The department administers $39 billion of Pell Grants, scholarships awarded to students from low-income backgrounds. About half of Pell Grants go to students whose families earn less than $20,000 per year. Without the department, it’s unclear who would distribute and oversee Pell Grants; if they’re thrown into chaos, low-income students will have little choice but to take on additional student loans. Trump has shown a willingness to compromise this crucial source of financial aid in the past: During his presidency, he proposed cutting nearly $4 billion from the Pell Grants reserve fund—and redirecting half of that to NASA for space exploration: “So that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!” Trump tweeted at the time.

Ending Public Service Loan Forgiveness: Signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007, the PSLF program promises to cancel the remaining debt for public servants, from police offices and prosecutors to public defenders, who have made 10 years of payments on their loans. In the last four years, the Biden-Harris administration has awarded $74 billion in student debt relief to public servants who’ve met PSLF’s payment requirements.

But when the first wave of borrowers qualified for relief in 2017, Trump’s Education Department rejected 99 percent of applicants. His administration then proposed a 2021 budget that would have nixed PSLF entirely. That did not pass, but the goal remains: Project 2025 includes an explicit recommendation to terminate PSLF should there be a Republican president.

Hampering other forms of student debt relief: In June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s attempt to cancel up to $10,000 of student debt for low- and middle-income borrowers. Trump called the decision a “massive win” that halted an “unconstitutional student loan gimmick.”

In the wake of this decision by the Supreme Court, the Biden-Harris administration sought to provide relief another way: They launched the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan, an income-driven repayment program that would lower required payments for many borrowers, and forgive the remainder of their debt after somewhere between 10 and 25 years, depending on the original loan balance. Within months, more than a dozen Republican-led states had sued to shut down the program. Those lawsuits are ongoing. And it is safe to say that a Trump-Vance administration would do little to stop them: In June, Trump called Biden’s latest student debt relief efforts “vile,” while Vance has encouraged Republicans to fight student loan cancellation “with every ounce of our energy of power.” Plus, Project 2025 suggests that a future Trump administration should end all existing income-driven debt repayment plans because they are too generous.

Weakening debt relief for borrowers defrauded by for-profit schools: When Betsy DeVos served as Trump’s education secretary, she rewrote an existing department rule that discharges the loans of students who attended fraudulent colleges. Her version shrunk the amount these loans could be canceled, limiting them to just three cents for every dollar spent on their degrees. Congress passed a bipartisan resolution to overturn DeVos’s rule, but Trump vetoed it, leaving her restrictions in place until Biden undid them upon taking office. Should Trump return to the White House, this relief for borrowers would very likely be on the chopping block.

Causing some student loans to accrue more interest: In 2018, the Trump administrations budget proposed ending subsidized Stafford loans, which don’t accrue interest while undergraduate students are in school. This change would lead to thousands of additional dollars of debt for borrowers, many of whom are also from low-income families—about 70 percent of subsidized loan borrowers also qualify for Pell Grants. In 2018, the Center for American Progress estimated that an end to subsidized loans would saddle nearly 6 million students with an additional $2.8 billion in costs each year.

This story is part of an ongoing investigation into disinformation in collaboration with The War Horse, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mother Jones.

Just as former president Donald Trump told Fox News last week that he wanted to use the US military to “handle” what he called the “enemy from within” on Election Day, an obscure military policy was beginning to make the rounds on social media platforms favored by the far right. 

The focus? Department of Defense Directive 5240.01. 

The 22-page document governs military intelligence activities and is among more than a thousand different policies that outline Defense Department procedures.

The Pentagon updated it at the end of September. Although military policies are routinely updated and reissued, the timing of this one—just six weeks before the election and the same day Hurricane Helene slammed into the Southeast—struck right-wing misinformation merchants as suspicious.

They latched onto a new reference in the updated directive—“lethal force”—and soon were falsely claiming that the change meant Kamala Harris had authorized the military to kill civilians if there were to be unrest after the election.

That’s flat-out not true, the Pentagon and experts on military policy told The War Horse.

“The provisions in [the directive] are not new, and do not authorize the Secretary of Defense to use lethal force against US citizens, contrary to rumors and rhetoric circulating on social media,” Sue Gough, a Department of Defense spokesperson, said Wednesday night.

But as Trump doubles down on his “enemy from within” rhetoric, DOD Directive 5240.01 continues to gain traction among his supporters as ostensible proof that Harris, not Trump, wants to use the military against American citizens.

By early last week, “5240.01” began to spike on alt-tech platforms such as Rumble, 4chan, and Telegram, as well as on more mainstream platforms like X, according to an analysis by The War Horse and UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center. 

On Ron Paul’s Liberty Report, a YouTube show, the former Texas congressman told viewers that the policy meant that the country is now a “police state.” Republican Maryland congressman Andy Harris told Newsmax host Chris Salcedo last Wednesday that he was concerned the Defense Department was pushing through policies without congressional oversight.

“This is exactly what the Democrats said Trump would do. And they’re doing it,” he said. “This means that after an election, they could declare a national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.”

Former Trump national security adviser and retired Army Lieutenant Gen. Michael Flynn tweeted the policy update out to his 1.7 million followers, just as he shared the week before a video suggesting the military had manipulated the weather to focus Hurricane Helene’s deadly fury on Republican voters in the South.

On Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. got into the act in a tweet criticizing Kamala Harris’ response to a story that Trump wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had”:

“It’s particularly ironic since Biden/Harris have just pushed through DoD Directive 5240.01 giving the Pentagon power—for the first time in history—to use lethal force to kill Americans on US soil who protest government policies.”

By that evening, his post on X had 5.6 million views.

Joseph Nunn, a lawyer with the Liberty & National Security program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, and a leading expert on domestic uses of the military, had a clear response to the social media storm.

“There’s nothing here. People like Michael Flynn should know how to read a DOD directive.”

“There’s nothing here,” he said. “People like Michael Flynn should know how to read a DOD directive.”

(Click here to read DOD Directive 5240.01.)

Contrary to claims online, DOD Directive 5240.01, which last had been updated in 2020, does not grant any new powers to the military. That’s not how military directives work. Like them or not, all military policies are subject to US law; they do not create new legal authorities. 

Directive 5240.01 has a narrow focus: It only addresses military intelligence, and the section that has circulated online specifically deals with intelligence assistance to civilian law enforcement. 

The paragraph that contains the term “lethal force” refers to a requirement that the Secretary of Defense—the highest level of the Defense Department—must now authorize military intelligence assistance to civilian law enforcement when lethal force might be involved.

“This is not an independent source of authority,” Nunn said. “We really should look at this as an administrative safeguard that is being put in place.” 

Military intelligence has long been authorized to provide assistance to federal law enforcement agencies, as well as state and local law enforcement when lives are endangered, under limited circumstances. That could include providing technical expertise or helping with international anti-terrorism or counter-narcotics operations, for instance.

“A reference to lethal force in a directive like this doesn’t mean they’re planning to have snipers on rooftops in covert ops,” said Nunn, who has written on limiting the role of the military in law enforcement. “The nature of law enforcement will sometimes involve the use of lethal force.” 

In its response to The War Horse, the Pentagon said the directive’s update was “in no way timed in relation to the election or any other event.” 

“Reissuing 5240.01 was part of normal business of the Department to periodically update guidance and policy,” the DOD’s Gough said.

The Defense Department has issued or revised 10 other directives and instructions since it updated “5240.01” at the end of September, ranging from a policy on space-related military activities to guidance on public affairs’ officers use of military vehicles.

“It’s not unusual to update DOD regulations,” says Risa Brooks, a political science professor at Marquette University and a former senior fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute. “It doesn’t signal some nefarious agenda.”

The update to “5240.01” brings the policy in line with other Defense Department directives. One of those is known as DOD Directive 5210.56—an entirely different Defense Department directive than the one updated last month. It lays out rules when troops across the military can use lethal force outside of military operations, limiting it to “imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm” or to protect critical national security assets. 

Posts online, including the one that Flynn shared, claim that Directive 5240.01 runs afoul of a legal statute known as posse comitatus. The Posse Comitatus Act, which dates back to Reconstruction, generally forbids military troops from acting as domestic police. Civil liberty experts consider it an important civil rights protection against possible military overreach. 

Despite the conspiracy claims spreading online, the directive clearly states that military intelligence units assisting civilian police must consider the Posse Comitatus Act.

“The updated issuance remains consistent with DoD’s adherence to the Posse Comitatus Act, commitment to civil rights, and support of other safeguards in place for the protection of the American people,” Gough said.

Spreading misinformation about the military can be particularly damaging “to the relationship between the military and the public,” Brooks told The War Horse.

“This sort of politicization, this idea of sowing mistrust in the military in order to gain partisan advantage, is really corrosive,” Brooks said. “There’s a motive. There’s something to be gained by spreading these rumors.”

Ironically, however, Rep. Harris, the Republican congressman, was right about one thing when he claimed that if Kamala Harris wins, she “could declare national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.” That’s because any president, regardless of party, has the power to mobilize military troops against American citizens in certain circumstances. Only one candidate—Trump—in this year’s presidential election has outright suggested it. 

But that presidential power isn’t granted by a random military policy. It’s granted by the Insurrection Act.

A law nearly as old as the country itself, the act gives a president essentially unilateral authority to temporarily suspend the Posse Comitatus Act and call on military troops to suppress domestic rebellions. The law effectively leaves it up to the president to decide what constitutes a rebellion.

“There are essentially zero procedural safeguards in the Insurrection Act,” Nunn says.

During his first administration, Trump and his allies reportedly considered invoking the Insurrection Act both during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and again after he lost his re-election bid. And legal experts say that any follow through on Trump’s increasingly frequent threats to use the military domestically, including against “radical left lunatics,” would likely come through an invocation of the Insurrection Act.

Republicans are saying that the real misinformation is being peddled by Democrats. They claim the Harris-Walz campaign is taking out of context Trump’s comments from his October 13 interview with Fox News Maria Bartiromo, with some suggesting he was referring to undocumented migrants or to only deploying the military in a national security crisis.

Here is the full quote from Trump when Bartiromo asked if he “expected chaos on election day” from “outside agitators,” including “Chinese nationals,” “people on terrorist watch lists,” “murderers,” and “rapists”:

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people who have come in, destroying our country—and by the way, totally destroying our country, the towns, the villages, they’re being inundated.

“But I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of Election Day. I think the bigger problem are the people from within, we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics.

“And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

On Wednesday, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s decision to remove nearly 2,000 registered voters from the state’s rolls, after two lower federal courts deemed the purge illegal. At least 1,600 voters will now have to fight to get reinstated—with less than a week to Election Day.

“It was a lawless decision in which the Supreme Court did not explain its decision or rationale,” said Anna Dorman, counsel with voting rights advocacy group Protect Democracy.

Two months ago, Youngkin filed an executive order to purge Virginia’s voter rolls, ostensibly in a quest to prevent “noncitizens” from casting ballots. Since then, his administration has unceremoniously kicked thousands of actual citizens off the rolls, an outcome that advocates and election officials warned Youngkin about before he initiated the program. According to Dorman, most people have had their registration revoked due to simple clerical errors on DMV paperwork.

“There has been no prosecutions of any noncitizen for voting in Virginia in the last 20 years, despite Gov. Youngkin’s Election Integrity Unit searching high and low,” Dorman said. “But if there was, this program wouldn’t stop it. Those people can still just sign an affidavit and vote. So the only people actually being hurt by this are eligible US voters who are confused about whether they’re allowed to vote.”

As I reported last week, a judge with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Youngkin’s purge violated the National Voter Registration Act, a law that stops states from removing ineligible voters from the rolls within 90 days of the election. On Sunday, an appeals court rep9ortedly upheld that decision, according to the Washington Post.

However, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has tossed out those rulings, allowing the governor to remove as many voters as he pleases with little to no explanation of the legal reasoning.

Voting rights advocates warn that the court’s actions tie into Donald Trump’s bigger plan to undermine the results of the 2024 election. As my colleague Pema Levy reported, the conspiracy theory surrounding noncitizens voting in the 2024 election was stoked by Trump’s right-wing donors:

So who’s behind the push to make baseless claims of non-citizen voter fraud a bogeyman? According to a new report, the money funding the groups pushing the lie comes from the same stew of rightwing donors backing Trump, his authoritarian agenda, and the judges who enable him.

The non-citizen voting myth, in other words, is coming from the same activists who may seek to weaponize the lie for political gain this November. 

“This is just another attempt to launder conspiracy theories and lies in the public consciousness,” said Doman. “They’re repeating these lies so many times that even if people don’t necessarily believe any specific instance, they have a generalized sense that there is something amiss in order to deny the election results, if they don’t go their way.”

If you’ve been removed from Virginia’s rolls, all hope is not lost. Because the state allows same-day voter registration, anyone affected can reinstate their registration before voting, either during the early voting period or on Election Day. All they’d have to do is sign an affidavit confirming their citizenship at their polling location.

However, they must cast those votes in person. If you’re one of the many folks who rely on absentee ballots, then your voting options in Virginia’s elections are nonexistent.

“Anyone who wanted to vote absentee has been who has been purged under this program has been disenfranchised,” said Dorman. “That impacts college students, that impacts disabled individuals, that impacts people who just can’t get time off from work. And I think that that is contrary to the purpose of the National Voter Registration Act, which is the law that we sued under here.”

When Wendy Davis wanted to get birth control as a teenager in the 1980s, she went to her local Planned Parenthood in Fort Worth, Texas, with a friend. “There is absolutely no way I would have asked my mother for her permission to do that,” says Davis, the former Texas state senator who famously filibustered an anti-abortion bill for 11 hours in a pair of pink sneakers. “That’s just not something that’s possible for many, many, many teenage girls.” 

Forty years later, with abortion banned in wide swaths of the country, access to reliable contraception is more important than ever. Yet for Texas teens, getting prescription birth control is arguably harder now than it was when Davis was an adolescent. Over the past two years, federal courts—including the notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit—have ruled that minors must have parental consent to obtain prescription birth control from Texas clinics subsidized by a federal family planning program known as Title X. Flush with victory, Texas Republicans have made it clear: They have no intention of stopping there. In late July, Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit to overturn a new federal rule that reaffirmed teens’ ability in other states to get contraception without their parents’ consent. “The Biden Administration continues to prove they will do anything to implement their extremist agenda,” Paxton said in a press release.

To anyone paying even a modicum of attention, the far-right’s plans to limit access to birth control have long been hiding in plain sight. When the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion in the Dobbs decision in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court “should reconsider” other rulings with similar legal principles, including Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision establishing a right to contraception (and, more fundamentally, a constitutional right to privacy). The ultra-conservative strategists behind Project 2025— including Roger Severino, longtime anti-abortion movement lawyer, and Russell Voght, an avowed Christian nationalist—have spelled out a plan for how a Republican-led White House could gut or rewrite key federal birth-control regulations, building on efforts that began during the first Trump administration. (While Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, even claiming he doesn’t know who wrote it, at least 140 members of Trump’s team, including Severino and Voght, had a hand in drafting it.)

But what has escaped many Americans is that these threats aren’t just terrifying what-if-this-happens scenarios. As the Texas lawsuits show, in some parts of the US, that scary future has already arrived. States have been passing laws allowing pharmacies to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions based on moral objections, or proposing legislation that unscientifically classifies emergency contraception and IUDs as “abortifacients.” Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch has found that since 2021, at least 21 states have directed a total of $513 million to religiously affiliated crisis pregnancy centers and “alternatives to abortion” programs that actively spread misinformation about birth control and discourage its use.

And though contraception is supported by around 90 percent of voters, when Congress had the chance earlier this year to pass a law protecting access to birth control, Republican senators blocked it, claiming it was unnecessary.

The Biden administration has repeatedly pushed back—most recently, with a new proposed rule under the Affordable Care Act to require private insurance to cover 100 percent of the cost of over-the-counter birth control and offer patients more choices for prescription contraception. In a statement, Vice President Kamala Harris described the move as “the largest expansion of contraception coverage in more than a decade.” But the regulations won’t be finalized until after the presidential election, and the new rules are virtually certain to be challenged in GOP-packed federal courts even if Harris wins. 

And what if she doesn’t?

A new Trump administration and its right-wing allies are expected to escalate attacks on contraception on a multitude of fronts, including appointing extremists to key government positions. Rather than outright bans, we should expect more subtle incursions—regulatory changes, limits on insurance coverage, and funding reductions for family planning, as well as rules like the parental consent requirement for teens, according to reproductive health policy experts interviewed by Mother Jones. “It would be cleaner if there was some direct attack on the right to contraception that opponents of reproductive healthcare were pursuing,” says Kelly Baden, vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute. “They’re not. It is much more behind-the-scenes, around the margins. And yet, the impact is still potentially devastating.”

“It would be cleaner if there was some direct attack on the right to contraception that opponents of reproductive healthcare were pursuing. They’re not.”

“That’s what happened to abortion,” adds Amanda Stevenson, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder who studies the impact of family planning policy. “Death by a thousand cuts.”

Here are four key strategies we can expect under a new Trump administration intent on undermining access to contraception:

Doubling Down on False Claims that Birth Control Causes Abortion

One of the most common attack lines against contraception is the claim that certain methods—notably IUDs and morning-after pills—are abortifacients, which is to say they cause abortion, purportedly by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. In fact, decades of research show that these methods block fertilization from ever happening—by preventing the release of eggs, for instance, or stopping sperm from reaching them. Yet the belief that IUDs and emergency contraception, like Plan B and Ella, end pregnancies rather than preventing them has become distressingly common, thanks in part to rampant misinformation spread by the anti-abortion movement—including appointees in the first Trump administration.

The falsehoods have made their way into Food and Drug Administration policy, with decades-long repercussions for reproductive health. Back in the early 2000s, when the FDA was trying to decide whether Plan B should be sold over the counter, it relied on an advisory committee that included several abortion opponents. Over the objections of their colleagues, those committee members persuaded the agency to include language in Plan B’s packaging that stated the drug “may also work” by preventing implantation. Not until 2022 did the FDA finally update the Plan B label to clarify the drug “does not terminate a pregnancy.” But anti-abortion groups could challenge that update in a second Trump administration.

Meanwhile, since 2015, the “abortifacient claim” has inspired lawmakers in at least seven states to vote to cut off funding for contraception or block bills to protect access to it, USA Today found in a recent investigation. Project 2025 also continues this line of attack, describing Ella as a “potential abortifacient” and proposing to wipe out mandatory insurance coverage for it. Some anti-abortion organizations, including the influential Students for Life, even falsely claim that the daily birth control pill is an abortifacient. As my colleague Kiera Butler has written, it’s all part of a growing right-wing movement to persuade women that hormonal contraception is just plain bad for them. If Trump wins, his appointees are likely to bring those arguments with them to the agencies they oversee, further threatening birth control access.

Rewriting Title X

Attacking government subsidies for contraception has been part of the GOP playbook for decades. A favorite target is Title X, a federal safety-net program that underwrites free reproductive health services—birth control, cervical cancer screenings, and STI screening and treatment, but not abortion—for low-income and uninsured people. Planned Parenthood clinics, a common provider of these services, receive about 20 percent of Title X funds.

No surprise: Texas has led the way in attacking the federal program since 2011, when the legislature slashed state funding for reproductive health care and redirected Title X money to primary care providers. The changes that year—designed to kneecap Planned Parenthood—forced scores of reproductive health clinics to close, and others to reduce hours, charge patients new fees, or ration the most effective (but expensive) forms of contraception, such as IUDs. As a result of the changes, the number of clients served by Texas family planning organizations fell by more than half, and the teen birth rate rose an estimated 3.4 percent. “It shredded the safety net for women’s health care in our state,” says Davis, now a senior adviser to Planned Parenthood Texas Votes. “Tens of thousands of women literally lost the only health care they had ever known, overnight. It was devastating, and slowly, we’ve been building our way back.”

“Tens of thousands of women literally lost the only health care they had ever known, overnight.”

Trump’s first-term appointees, following Texas’ lead, set about dramatically reshaping the entire Title X program. The administration’s “gag rule,” first proposed under Ronald Reagan but never fully implemented, which forbids any clinics that took Title X money from referring patients to abortion providers. It also required them to keep separate books and separate facilities from their abortion services, if they offered them—a logistical nightmare. Some 1,300 reproductive health facilities, including 400 Planned Parenthood clinics, withdrew from the program rather than withhold abortion referrals from patients who wanted them, and roughly 1.6 million patients lost access to federally subsidized birth control. “It was a very difficult time in the program,” says Clare Coleman, president of the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association. “Of course, the numbers plummeted.” What happened to the freed-up Title X money? The Trump administration sent some of it to a chain of Christian “crisis pregnancy centers” that refused to provide contraception or even referrals for birth control, as my colleague Stephanie Mencimer found in a 2019 investigation.

When Joe Biden took office, his administration promptly revoked the Trump rule, and the Title X network started rebuilding. But Vice presidential candidate Ohio Sen. JD Vance has already signaled that a second Trump administration would try again to defund Planned Parenthood—code for attacking Title X. Project 2025 urges the next president to “quickly” reissue the gag rule. It also advocates that Title X be “reframed with a focus on better education around fertility awareness”—a less-reliable method of cycle tracking favored by anti-abortion activists and wellness influencers—with grants opened up once again to anti-abortion religious organizations.

In anticipation of a Trump win, Coleman’s organization has been working with reproductive health clinics to prepare for the old gag rule to be reissued and even expanded soon after Inauguration Day. Not only could the next version of the rule pick up on Texas’ efforts to require parental consent for teenagers, Coleman warns Trump appointees are also likely to attack gender-affirming care. (Title X does not explicitly fund such care but some providers offer those services separately, just as they do abortion.) “They may say, if you take Title X, you can’t provide any of that care,” Coleman speculates. “We are quite concerned about them trying to enforce not only a gender binary—because we also do see men in the Title X program—but to recast it as: ‘This is a program about biological sex.’”

That’s if Title X survives at all: House Speaker Mike Johnson’s budget bill in September 2023 would have defunded the program entirely.

Gutting the Affordable Care Act

Before the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, birth control accounted for around a third of women’s out-of-pocket healthcare expenses, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Monthly copays deterred women from getting the Pill, while an IUD could have an up-front cost of $1,000.

The ACA changed all that for over 62 million women. Starting in 2012, the law classified contraception as a form of preventive care and made it mandatory for private insurance to cover a wide range of prescription birth control at no cost to consumers. Last year, responding to the fallout from Dobbs, the Biden administration directed agencies to find ways to strengthen the contraception mandate and make sure insurers follow it; last month’s announcement on coverage of over-the-counter contraception follows that effort.

Fighting the contraception mandate has been one of the key ways conservatives and religious groups have sought to erode access to birth control. In 2014, the Supreme Court’s infamous Hobby Lobby ruling blew a crater in the ACA’s contraception mandate in the name of protecting religious freedom. There had always been a religious exemption for churches and houses of worship. But Hobby Lobby expanded that exemption to include 90 percent of US businesses—letting them deny coverage for birth control in employee insurance plans if the owners had a religious objection.

Trump broadened the exemption even further in his first term, allowing employers to decline to provide birth control based on moral, not just religious, objections. “It opens the door wide for any employer that provides health insurance to pick and choose what kind of contraception they would like to cover,” says Dana Singiser, cofounder of the Contraceptive Access Initiative.

Of course, there’s always the chance that a Republican White House and Congress would wipe out the ACA altogether, as Trump tried to do in 2017. Trump has since made conflicting statements about whether he would try again for a repeal or impose “concepts of a plan” to replace it. In late October, Speaker Johnson promised a “massive reform” of the ACA if Trump is elected.

Even with the ACA still on the books, experts say Trump could do significant damage, bypassing Congress by issuing new regulations or guidance from executive-branch agencies. Project 2025 leans in on this idea, urging the next president to make regulatory moves that would hobble the contraceptive mandate. “It’s not flashy,” says Lauren Wallace, senior counsel for reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center. “Every administration is allowed to put out proposed rules, put out guidance. So those are the ways this coverage can be stripped.”

“Every administration is allowed to put out proposed rules, put out guidance. So those are the ways this coverage can be stripped.”

The Biden administration is currently finalizing a replacement to Trump’s rule allowing moral objections to the contraceptive mandate; it’s safe to say that Trump would block or revoke it. He could also issue other regulations to make the contraceptive mandate “unworkable,” Wallace says. He could give insurers more agency to make rules around which types of birth control they choose to insure or require patients to try certain methods, before covering more expensive ones.

Project 2025’s authors, of course, have their own ideas about which forms of birth control are preferable. Their blueprint urges the next president to require the Department of Health and Human Services to issue new regulations about what is covered by the ACA contraceptive mandate. In: “fertility awareness” methods. Out: male condoms and Ella.

Shrinking Medicaid While Increasing Surveillance

Back to Texas.

Over the past decade or so, at the same time the state was attacking family planning clinics, it found a way to mess with the most common way people pay for birth control: Medicaid. And Davis sees what it did as a potential model for other states should Trump win.

First, the state passed a law banning abortion providers and their affiliates from participating in the state’s Medicaid-funded family planning program. The law conflicted with a federal rule allowing Medicaid patients to choose any “willing” provider. That meant Texas had to apply to the Obama administration for a waiver of the rule. “They got into a standoff,” Davis recalls. “The Obama administration said, ‘We’re going to remove all of your funding if you do this.’ And Texas said, ‘Fine, do it.’”

For the next few years, Texas ran a shrunken version of the program using state funding. Then Trump appeared, installing a National Right to Life Committee lobbyist to oversee national family planning policy. Texas applied for the Medicaid waiver again—and this time, received it. The Trump administration also gave the state permission not to cover emergency contraception in its Medicaid-funded program.

Davis predicts that other states will use the same maneuver to sever Planned Parenthood from Medicaid, should Trump return to office. Tennessee, which bans virtually all abortions, and South Carolina, which bans them at six weeks, have already applied for similar waivers. And Missouri recently enacted a law to ban all Medicaid reimbursements for abortion providers and their affiliates—even though the state’s abortion ban means they now only provide services like contraception and cancer screening.

Project 2025 proposes making Medicaid and other federal health funding conditional on states participating in a frighteningly detailed abortion surveillance system. “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism,” the blueprint says, “HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders.” The database would include the gestational age at which the abortion was performed, the method, and the reason for it.

The proposal would force states to make an “impossible choice,” says Madeline Morcelle, senior attorney at the National Health Law Center. Participating in that “weaponized program,” she says, “would likely be used to criminalize pregnant people,” particularly immigrants, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, young people, and people with disabilities. But dropping out would likely mean losing federal funding for vital Medicaid services affecting millions of those same low-income people.

Davis, in Texas, says she knows that predictions about losing access to birth control can sound exaggerated. She’s heard such criticisms before—from people who believed that Roe would never fall. “There are those out there who believe that this is hyperbole,” she says. But as a Texan who has witnessed how what appears radical becomes normalized, she has no illusions about the potential dangers. “I don’t think it’s unlikely at all that as Republicans become more and more extreme, and governed in a more and more extreme way by their rightward flank, that we are going to see these things become a reality.”

In the days leading up to the election, the firehose of lies, half–truths, dumb memes, inflammatory political claims, and private obsessions emanating from Elon Musk’s Twitter account has grown ever more pressurized, with the world’s richest man posting in a frenzied effort to elect Donald Trump.

Musk’s own attempts to sway the election are drawing legal scrutiny.

Musk has returned to a set of ideas he’s been preoccupied with for much of the year: the threat of voter fraud, the necessity of voter ID laws, and his persistent concern that “non-citizens” will somehow vote. The timing of this push to build outrage over alleged illegal election activity might strike some observers as ironic, given that the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office has just sued Musk for running his own “illegal…scheme” to entice conservative leaning voters with the prospect of cash.

The lawsuit follows Musk’s unveiling of two election-related cash giveaways, both through America PAC, the super PAC he recently created to support Trump. First, he promised to pay $100 to registered voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who sign a petition supporting free speech and the right to bear arms. Second, he committed to select one registered voter who signs the petition each day to receive $1 million.

While exchanging money for votes is illegal, it’s safe to say that Musk and his lawyers intended to design a system that sidesteps such restrictions. But on Monday, Philadelphia’s DA Larry Krasner filed a civil suit against Musk calling the giveaway an “unlawful lottery.” Musk and America PAC haven’t responded publicly to the suit, and awarded another million dollar winner in North Carolina on Monday. 

At the same time Musk’s own actions to sway the election are drawing legal scrutiny, he has been tweeting intently about supposed illegal voter fraud. Musk posted on X many times throughout October that voter ID “should be required nationwide” and claiming that “almost every country on Earth” requires it. On Wednesday, for instance, he proclaimed that new voter ID requirements “should be implemented.” (Thirty-six states already have some form of voter ID law on the books. But those laws have been found to disproportionately disenfranchise elderly, poor and non-white voters, and to be an ineffective means of reducing fraud. What’s more, concerns about voter fraud can lead to the suppression and disenfranchisement of qualified voters.) 

On Wednesday, Musk also tweeted in support of Virginia winning a Supreme Court ruling allowing it to remove alleged non-citizen voters from the polls, calling it “insane” that the “Democratic party”—which he put in scornful scare quotes—“was suing to allow non-citizens to vote.” In fact, legal opposition to the move came from Justice Department lawyers and civil rights groups, who argued eligible voters were at risk of erroneously being kicked off the rolls.

As Musk continues making unfounded claims of voter fraud, X has established an “Election Integrity Community,” a crowd-generated feed sharing usually-unverified claims, reports, and complaints of purported election malfeasance. In all, Musk seems intent on using his megaphone to depict the United States as rife with a certain kind of fraud committed by a certain kind of illegal, non-citizen voter. The irony of Musk’s obsession with the issue is rich, given that he worked illegally in the U.S. while launching his first company. While Musk has since claimed he had a student visa allowing him to work, in a 2013 joint interview, his brother Kimbal described them both as “illegal immigrants.”

In the days leading up to the election, the firehose of lies, half–truths, dumb memes, inflammatory political claims, and private obsessions emanating from Elon Musk’s Twitter account has grown ever more pressurized, with the world’s richest man posting in a frenzied effort to elect Donald Trump.

Musk’s own attempts to sway the election are drawing legal scrutiny.

Musk has returned to a set of ideas he’s been preoccupied with for much of the year: the threat of voter fraud, the necessity of voter ID laws, and his persistent concern that “non-citizens” will somehow vote. The timing of this push to build outrage over alleged illegal election activity might strike some observers as ironic, given that the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office has just sued Musk for running his own “illegal…scheme” to entice conservative leaning voters with the prospect of cash.

The lawsuit follows Musk’s unveiling of two election-related cash giveaways, both through America PAC, the super PAC he recently created to support Trump. First, he promised to pay $100 to registered voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who sign a petition supporting free speech and the right to bear arms. Second, he committed to select one registered voter who signs the petition each day to receive $1 million.

While exchanging money for votes is illegal, it’s safe to say that Musk and his lawyers intended to design a system that sidesteps such restrictions. But on Monday, Philadelphia’s DA Larry Krasner filed a civil suit against Musk calling the giveaway an “unlawful lottery.” Musk and America PAC haven’t responded publicly to the suit, and awarded another million dollar winner in North Carolina on Monday. 

At the same time Musk’s own actions to sway the election are drawing legal scrutiny, he has been tweeting intently about supposed illegal voter fraud. Musk posted on X many times throughout October that voter ID “should be required nationwide” and claiming that “almost every country on Earth” requires it. On Wednesday, for instance, he proclaimed that new voter ID requirements “should be implemented.” (Thirty-six states already have some form of voter ID law on the books. But those laws have been found to disproportionately disenfranchise elderly, poor and non-white voters, and to be an ineffective means of reducing fraud. What’s more, concerns about voter fraud can lead to the suppression and disenfranchisement of qualified voters.) 

On Wednesday, Musk also tweeted in support of Virginia winning a Supreme Court ruling allowing it to remove alleged non-citizen voters from the polls, calling it “insane” that the “Democratic party”—which he put in scornful scare quotes—“was suing to allow non-citizens to vote.” In fact, legal opposition to the move came from Justice Department lawyers and civil rights groups, who argued eligible voters were at risk of erroneously being kicked off the rolls.

As Musk continues making unfounded claims of voter fraud, X has established an “Election Integrity Community,” a crowd-generated feed sharing usually-unverified claims, reports, and complaints of purported election malfeasance. In all, Musk seems intent on using his megaphone to depict the United States as rife with a certain kind of fraud committed by a certain kind of illegal, non-citizen voter. The irony of Musk’s obsession with the issue is rich, given that he worked illegally in the U.S. while launching his first company. While Musk has since claimed he had a student visa allowing him to work, in a 2013 joint interview, his brother Kimbal described them both as “illegal immigrants.”

On October 8, about two dozen conservative activists gathered in the rotunda of the Georgia State Capitol, where a meeting of the state election board was taking place. A US Army veteran named Richard Schroeder, from Hall County, in the northeastern part of the state, led the group in prayer. Schroeder, who testified that day, was a regular presence at the board meetings, where he has spread debunked claims about election security and once identified himself as a poll worker in charge of tabulating votes. 

Schroeder first asked God for forgiveness for allowing the “evil” of migrants and transgender people to permeate the country. Then he turned to voting machines. 

“Nobody’s got more votes than President [Donald] Trump ever in the world,” Schroeder said. He and other members of the prayer circle wore shirts that read “IYKYK dvscorp08!,” referring to an alleged password to Georgia’s voting machines that was obtained by right-wing election deniers and spread online. 

“Our votes have been stolen,” he continued in prayer. “The Dominion voting machines have taken our God-given dominion and have been selecting winners—not electing winners.”

“Amen,” responded David Hancock, a member of the Gwinnett County board of elections. 

The activists were part of a small but influential network of election deniers who had successfully convinced the board’s pro-Trump majority to launch probes into unfounded claims of election fraud. They also persuaded the board, which issues guidance to county election officials and investigates problems with the voting process, to pass a series of controversial rules in the runup to the November election that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox recently deemed “illegal” and “unconstitutional.” In August, Trump had touted the trio of sympathetic board members by name at a campaign rally, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” 

The rules would have led to the spread of misinformation and could have been used as a justification not to certify results, Democrats and voting rights advocates warned. The changes also would have slowed the counting of votes, according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “Everything we’ve been fighting for since 2020 has been to give the voter quicker response, quicker results,” Raffensperger said on October 14, noting that one of the board’s rules, requiring a hand count of ballots on Election Day, could have delayed the reporting of results into the wee hours of the morning. “Really, that just becomes a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.” 

Democrats and election watchdogs breathed a sigh of relief when Georgia courts blocked the Trump-inspired rules, including two that would have given local election officials more power to attempt to block certification. But they should not rest easy, as significant peril still remains. At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state. And over the past four years, Trump-aligned election deniers have asserted their power throughout local GOP organizations, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog.

Together, these MAGA Republicans could throw the election in Georgia—and thus the nation—into disarray. Officials at the county level, for instance, could still attempt to refuse to certify the results if Kamala Harris carries Georgia, while the state election board could amplify false allegations and launch bogus investigations supporting Trump’s inevitable claims of a stolen election. And those are just a couple of the nightmarish scenarios that could unfold next week.

Whatever transpires in the November 5 election, the radicalization of the board into a nakedly partisan arm of Trump’s election denial machine shows that our democratic system rests on a knife’s edge. What took place in Georgia can—and is—happening throughout the country. The takeover of much of Georgia’s election apparatus offers a distressing vision of the future if Trump returns to the White House, one in which the federal government is run by zealots whose only qualification is their fealty to Trump. 

“That’s exactly what Project 2025 is all about,” says Sara Tindall Ghazal, the state election board’s lone Democrat. “It is about replacing the bureaucrats within the federal government with political employees whose sole requirement for the job is loyalty to the president.” Tindall Ghazal points out that some of those people “don’t understand and don’t care about what the law requires. They’re completely unconstrained in their actions.”

The path to this troubling reality began on election night 2020, when Republican activists began spreading claims of widespread voter fraud. Believing that Trump ballots had been thrown out, a crowd gathered at an election office in Griffin, the seat of Spalding County, an hour south of Atlanta. Led by a county commissioner who filmed election workers through the glass, some in the crowd eventually climbed into a dumpster to find the supposedly discarded ballots. In Marietta, an Atlanta suburb, Salleigh Grubbs, the Cobb County GOP chair, chased a truck she believed contained shredded ballots. In an Atlanta ballot-counting facility, plastic bins under a folding table were labeled the infamous “suitcases full of ballots” that supposedly flipped the election in favor of Joe Biden. In the small town of Douglas in south Georgia, a county election board official claimed that voting machines had flipped votes. The state became ground zero for election fraud claims. 

None of it proved true. The dumpster in Griffin contained no ballots—just empty ballot envelopes that had been thrown away by election workers. The truck in Marietta did not have shredded ballots, Grubbs eventually discovered. The boxes under the table in Atlanta didn’t hold ballots for Biden that were double-counted to seal his victory over Trump. Instead, they just held regular ballots that were opened when workers were told by the secretary of state’s office to stay late and count more votes. The Dominion voting machines Grubbs and others prayed over never actually flipped votes—in Douglas or anywhere else—but they were broken into by local officials and attorneys working on behalf of Trump.

At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state.

From these debunked origins, the claims of a stolen election grew, spreading to include other outlandish allegations of a plot that supposedly involved Italians and Venezuelans hacking voting machines and the forgery of untold thousands of ballots that were placed in drop boxes by “mules.” 

Top Georgia election officials repeatedly discredited claims of a stolen election, as did multiple legal proceedings and court judgments. Three separate counts of ballots reaffirmed Biden’s 2020 victory. Voting-machine companies won major settlements against Fox News and Newsmax for airing false claims about their machines. A Fulton County judge threw out a lawsuit filed by DeKalb County Republicans challenging the security of the state’s voting machines. Two Georgia poll workers in Fulton County won a $148 million defamation judgment against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for spreading the myth of “suitcases” of ballots. Jenna Ellis, another top lawyer for Trump, took a plea agreement in a wide-ranging election interference case and admitted she made false statements about illegal ballots being counted. 

Nonetheless, Trump-aligned Republicans throughout the state and nation began amplifying these claims and calling for investigations. They also got to work making sure “the steal” couldn’t happen again, beginning at the local level, where influential figures like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn were encouraging Trump supporters to take over local election boards. In 12 counties, local representatives in the state legislature passed laws that remade county election boards in favor of Republicans. One of the bills, HB 769, transformed the Spalding County board of elections from a mundane government body on which Black Democrats held a majority to an activist board controlled by white Republicans who amplified Trump’s election lies. 

When Spalding County officials first heard about HB 769 in the spring of 2021, they were confused. Typically, when the county’s representatives in the state legislature introduce a bill that affects the county, local officials are part of the process. But that wasn’t the case with this measure, which changed how the members of the board of elections were chosen. The board had always been essentially split between the parties—Democrats got two appointments and Republicans got two, with the foursome then choosing a fifth member to serve as chair. But HB 769 changed that—the board’s fifth member would now be chosen by local judges in a closed-door process and secret vote. In May 2021, the judges chose Republican Jim Newland, giving election deniers control over the board. 

Two of the new Republicans—Ben Johnson and Roy McClain—believed Trump had rightfully won the election. Johnson is a Trump-supporting QAnon fan and Elon Musk aficionado who frequently posts on Facebook about various right-wing culture war grievances and conspiracies, including that voting machines were subject to hacking and fraud. McClain has pushed for automatic hand recounts of all elections and in 2023 made a public showing of his refusal to certify results while privately signing off on certification, fulfilling his legal duty while maintaining his MAGA bonafides. Both Johnson and McClain were involved in a brief but failed effort in August 2021 to hire an Atlanta law firm to help them access voting machines in their hunt for evidence of election fraud. The plan was nixed when Raffensperger’s office warned them that it would be illegal to allow a third party to access election equipment.

Even in counties where election boards weren’t overhauled to favor Republicans, election deniers still had a presence. In Fulton County, home to Atlanta, two election deniers sit on the election board. Boards in the Atlanta metro counties of Cobb, DeKalb, Floyd, and Gwinnett also include skeptics who, while not holding a majority, frequently amplify misinformation about elections. By early 2024, at least 21 election deniers were in place on election boards in nine counties.

As election deniers won seats on election boards, they also gained power in local GOP chapters. In Spalding County, Republicans who refused to go along with Trump’s claims of a stolen election were pushed out of the local party. There and elsewhere, Republicans refused to give campaign funds raised from donors to Gov. Brian Kemp for his unwillingness to toe the line on Trump’s lies about election fraud, said Mary Braun, a Republican in Spalding County who told Mother Jones that Johnson and some local party members had a “vendetta” against her for opposing the false claims spread by her colleagues. (Johnson and other members of the Spalding County election board, along with its election supervisor and county attorney, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers set their sights on perhaps the biggest prize of all, the state election board. In March 2021, the GOP-controlled legislature tucked a provision into a sweeping new voter suppression bill that removed Raffensperger as chair and a voting member of the board, a previously obscure body of appointed officials whose meetings were scantly attended and typically mundane. Raffensperger had become a leading target of election deniers for defending the legitimacy of the 2020 election and refusing Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory. In addition to removing Raffensperger, Georgia lawmakers gave the state election board the authority to investigate the secretary of state for his handling of the 2020 investigation—and virtually anything else the board dreamed up. 

“This was punishment for him not obeying the president and revealing that conversation,” Tindall Ghazal, the Democratic member of the board, said of Trump’s infamous phone call to Raffensperger, pressuring him to overturn the 2020 election.

After ousting Raffensperger, influential state Republicans continued to remake the board in Trump’s image by pushing out establishment Republicans and replacing them with election deniers. In 2022, the Georgia GOP used its appointment to place Dr. Janice Johnston on the board. (Each party gets an appointment to the five-member board, both chambers of the legislature pick a member, and the legislature chooses the chair unless it is out of session, in which case the governor appoints the chair.) A former obstetrician, Johnston served as a poll watcher in Fulton County in 2020 alongside Julie Adams, an election denier who currently sits on Fulton’s election board. Johnston began frequently attending Fulton County board meetings after the election, spreading false claims about the 2020 vote count. 

In January 2024, the state Senate appointed Rick Jeffares, a former GOP state senator, to replace a well-regarded conservative election attorney Matthew Mashburn, who had opposed investigating Raffensperger. Jeffares was handpicked by his neighbor, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a fake elector for Trump in 2020, who said Jones urged him to “be strong” on the board. (Jones did not respond to a request for comment.) Jeffares had spread memes on social media questioning the outcome of the 2020 election, including false claims that dead people had voted by mail, and had few obvious qualifications for the job. The owner of three wastewater treatment companies, Jeffares went on to solicit a director position at the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration through a campaign intermediary while serving in his role on the State Election Board, which Democrats said raised ethical questions about his independence on the board. 

At that point, election deniers were one vote short of a majority on the board. So they began to pressure Edward Lindsey, a lawyer and former Republican member of the state House, who had also voted against bogus investigations into the 2020 outcome, to resign. Lindsey’s term was up in May 2024, but he told Republican House Speaker Jon Burns that he was willing to serve through the election to maintain continuity on the board. 

“I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.”

At a board meeting in February 2024, Johnston introduced a resolution asking the legislature to repeal no-excuse absentee voting, which MAGA Republicans blamed for Trump’s defeat in 2020, and to limit mail voting to those who were disabled, over 75, or out of town. Lindsey voted against it, blocking the resolution from passing. “We should not as a board, only a few months before the 2024 election…start to limit the ability of people to vote, particularly people who find it most difficult to stand in line because of certain life situations,” he said.

That infuriated Trump, who privately told Georgia Republicans that Lindsey had “got to go,” according to Rolling Stone. Local GOP chapters called on Lindsey to step down. In May 2024, Lindsey voted against referring officials in Fulton County to the attorney general for prosecution over their handling of the 2020 election. Election deniers who packed the state board meeting responded with jeers and carried signs that said, “Time to Go Ed!”

A few weeks after that vote, and just days before Georgia Republicans met for their state convention, the House speaker announced he was replacing Lindsey with Janelle King, a conservative media personality with no election experience who was married to a Republican candidate who lost the 2022 GOP primary for US Senate to Herschel Walker. King tweeted on election night in 2020 that she had “questions!!” about the “vote counting process” and later said on her podcast that she opposed no-excuse absentee voting. 

The MAGA takeover over the board was complete. “I believe when we look back on November 5, 2024, we’re going to say getting to that 3–2 election integrity–minded majority on the state election board made sure that we had the level playing field to win this election,” Georgia Republican Party Chair Josh McKoon said at the party’s convention after King was appointed to the board. 

The takeover of the state board went mostly without notice until August, when Trump praised Johnston, Jeffares, and King during his Atlanta rally, saying they were “on fire” while going on a 10-minute tirade against Kemp for refusing to overturn the 2020 election. Johnston sat in the second row and stood and waved to the crowd when Trump name-checked her. (Johnston, Jeffares, and King declined to comment for this article.)

With mainstream Republicans out of the way, the board’s pro-Trump majority quickly got to work. State election board meetings became election denial symposiums, where conspiracy theorists spoke for hours about their demands for investigations and rule changes. Anyone can introduce a rule to the board, but in recent months, almost all of the new rules proposed have come from the network of election skeptics that includes some of the people who held a prayer vigil at the state Capitol in October. Between September 2022 and May 2024, no new rules were introduced. Since then, election denial activists and officials have introduced 31 rules for the board to consider. Of those, 15 have passed or are under consideration by the board. 

Days after Trump’s August visit to the state, the board passed its first controversial rule change. It came from Adams, the Fulton County election board member who served as a poll watcher with Johnston in 2020 and had refused to certify the state’s May primary election. Adams works with the Tea Party Patriots, which helped organize the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection. She also serves as regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump attorney who worked to overturn the 2020 election and was on the call in which Trump demanded Raffensperger reverse Biden’s victory. Finally, Adams is a member of a state network of activists and officials called the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition. The rule Adams introduced, which was eventually blocked by a state court, could have allowed local officials to refuse to certify election results if a “reasonable inquiry” determined that fraud had occurred. The rule did not spell out what a “reasonable inquiry” entailed, and voting rights advocates warned that it could be used as a pretext by GOP officials not to certify the results if a Democrat won Georgia. 

At another contentious board meeting a few weeks later, Grubbs, the GOP chair of Cobb County, introduced a rule that allowed county election board members to request a virtually unlimited amount of records and documents relating to voting machines and vote tabulation before certifying results—what became known as the “examination” certification rule. The measure, which passed 3–2, was a welcome addition to officials like Adams in Fulton County and David Hancock in Gwinnett County, both of whom had demanded scores of records before refusing to certify results in recent years. 

In abstaining from a vote to certify the results of both a May primary and a runoff election in June 2024, Adams said she had not received election records and documents she wanted to inspect for evidence of fraud. Cathy Woolard, at the time the Democratic chair of the Fulton County board, said Adams had received extensive records and documents related to the collection and tabulation of votes.

“Julie asked for these things with great authority, but she has no idea what she’s looking at,” Woolard told Mother Jones. “When she gets the records, she goes outside in the hallway and calls somebody. I can’t quite figure it out; the only thing I can come up with is, they just want to be right. They want to be right for Trump so they can say, ‘See, I told you guys, you cheated.’ Nothing of the sort happened.” (Adams did not respond to a request for comment.) This has led Democratic officials and voting rights groups to allege that Adams and her fellow election deniers at the local level are coordinating with national Republicans to enact skewed rules that could rig the state for Trump. Adams continues to push for more power to refuse to certify results as part of a lawsuit she filed with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. 

“Here’s what I think they really want,” Woolard says. “I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.” 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario. I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.”

Finally, in late September, just weeks before early voting began, the state election board approved another rule that would have required poll workers to “reconcile” the number of ballots cast on Election Day with the number of voters who checked in at every precinct in the state. This time-consuming task—referred to as a hand count—would have slowed the tallying of returns throughout the state, Raffensperger said. He accused the board of engaging in “activist rulemaking” and, along with Attorney General Chris Carr, also a Republican, said the board was both acting outside of its authority and passing rules that were in direct conflict with Georgia election law. 

The board’s MAGA majority had overstepped the law. Amid a national outcry, its rule changes were blocked by Fulton County judges as early voting began. The Republican National Committee appealed, but the Georgia State Supreme Court declined to reinstate the rules before November. 

Trump supporters throughout Georgia denounced the state Supreme Court’s decision. McKoon, the state GOP chair, called the rules “common sense” on X, claiming they would enhance election security. He blamed “Democrats and their allies” for the court’s ruling, even though the court is composed solely of conservative justices. 

But court rulings can do only so much to restrain a movement that has already shown how far it will go to undermine democratic norms. 

Hancock said in an email that Gwinnett County had passed its own ordinance requiring the release of a lengthy list of documents that he and other election board members could inspect before certifying results in November. 

“Even if the policy is somehow revoked, I will still be looking at these documents,” Hancock vowed in the wake of a judge’s decision that the “examination” certification rule conflicted with Georgia election law. (He did not respond to a request to explain his comments.)

Despite a separate court ruling in October reaffirming that election certification is mandatory for county officials, Tindall Ghazal worries that some counties under the sway of pro-Trump activists could still attempt to refuse to certify results “in a bad-faith way.”

A nightmare scenario in which numerous county election board members refuse to certify results could require Carr, the attorney general, to step in, filing court orders known as writs of mandamus to force officials to certify. Carr has tried to have it both ways when it comes to pro-Trump election deniers, his critics say. He sent a letter to the State Election Board saying many of its rules were illegal, including the hand-counting rule. But an attorney in Carr’s office also defended the state election board in a separate lawsuit over the certification rules that were challenged by Democrats. Moreover, Carr shielded Kemp from responsibility over the board when Democrats alleged ethics violations on the part of Johnston, Jeffares, and King in a lawsuit. In a motion to dismiss the suit, Carr wrote that Kemp didn’t have the authority to consider removing the members. 

“He’s less solid” than Raffensperger, state Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat, said of Carr. “He’s not an election denier, however, he’s planning to run for governor and has to contend with that base who believes the election was stolen.”

Widespread certification refusals could cause Kemp to miss a crucial federal deadline on December 11. That’s the day Kemp will have to certify slates of presidential electors for whoever wins Georgia’s popular vote. Unlike in 2020, when Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to defeat Biden, it could be Kemp, who has backed Trump’s presidential bid despite the abuse he has received from the former president, getting a call from Trump urging him not to certify Harris electors. 

Missing the December 11 deadline is one of the scenarios that might allow congressional Republicans to reject certification of a Harris win—and install Trump regardless of how Americans voted, according to US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), an election law expert and former member of the congressional January 6 committee. 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario,” Raskin said in an interview. “I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.” If Georgia misses the deadline to certify its electoral votes, depriving either candidate of a majority in the Electoral College, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, where a majority of House delegations, not a majority of members, choose the winner. Because Republicans control a majority of those delegations, that could allow them to install Trump as president in a disputed election. 

Courts have dulled the Georgia election board’s fangs for the moment. But in the longer term, the threats to fair elections continue. The trio of Johnston, Jeffares, and King appear to be laying the groundwork to potentially take over election administration in Fulton County, the epicenter of past and ongoing election lies. The board could also pressure Georgia’s General Assembly to enact more voter suppression laws or give them the power to certify election results instead of the secretary of state. Recently, Johnston was voted vice chair of the board.

“Despite a judge blocking their unconstitutional rules changes, the MAGA board members continue plotting ways to plunge our election into chaos,” said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a progressive voting rights organization. 

Johnston has already sown distrust about the results in Fulton County, questioning the legitimacy of a monitoring team that is overseeing election administration there as part of the county’s punishment for erroneously double-counting ballots in 2020. (About 3,600 ballots were double-counted in Fulton County in 2020 but were found not to have changed the results of the election.) Johnston had proposed her own monitoring team that would oversee elections in Fulton, what Flugrath called an attempt to “force partisan monitors onto the county, with the ultimate goal of undermining confidence in the election, to provide Trump fodder to claim fraud if and when he loses.”

Instead, the county chose a monitoring team that includes Ryan Germany, a former staffer in Raffensperger’s office, who is a frequent target of election deniers because he defended the legitimacy of the 2020 election and debunked conspiracies about ballot counting in Fulton. “Will the Ryan Germany Monitoring Team account for all absentee ballots?” Johnston posted on X.

Perhaps most importantly, the board could amplify disinformation spread by Trump and his MAGA allies, like US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has falsely claimed that voting machines “switched” votes during the state’s early voting period. In reality, the incident Greene referenced happened as a result of a Republican voter who made an error on her own ballot, but Greene’s post on X went viral nonetheless, garnering nearly 4 million views.

Election deniers at the county level—influenced by the likes of Greene and members of the state board—could use false claims of fraud to refuse certification in defiance of the law, furthering the distrust of the election process that Trump’s movement has weaponized so successfully. 

“The only reason not to to certify is to provide fodder for an election challenge and for the disinformation grist mill,” Tindall Ghazal says. “Disinformation is what led to January 6.” 

Correction: The original version of this story misidentified a member of the prayer circle gathered at the Georgia capitol.

Earlier this month, the Lincoln Project rolled out an ad centered on abortion rights featuring a chilling line uttered by the narrator, a young woman, in a monologue addressed to her Trump-voting father: “You knew his politics would end my freedom, my rights, my life,” she says. “You chose hate over me.”

The ad, which depicts a woman dying in agony as she suffers complications while giving birth, was produced by the Lincoln Project to swing a demographic group they’ve dubbed “Dobbs Dads”—a group of men open to voting to protect or restore their daughters’ access to abortion—who just might be the downfall of Trump. 

There’s evidence of such a shift in a recent Marist poll that showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump by 20 points among college educated white men—a 5 point improvement over Biden’s 2020 margin with the same demographic. 

“We call them Dobbs Dads,” tweeted Joe Trippi, a veteran Democrat strategist who works with the Lincoln Project. “And they are breaking to Harris. One [of] our most important target groups.” 

The Dobbs Dads moniker, of course, comes from the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling where the justices, led by three Trump appointees, effectively ended the federal right to access abortion. In the wake of that decision, 13 states have outright banned abortion, mothers have died due to lack of abortion access, maternal deaths in Texas doubled, infant deaths rose nationally, and Idaho’s legislature disbanded committees designed to investigate causes of maternal deaths, obscuring public understanding of how that state’s abortion ban has impacted mothers. With nearly two thirds of the U.S. public believing abortion should be legal, including 61% of men according to Pew research, the fast changing legal regime has made abortion rights one of the election’s top issues. 

Lincoln Project says it has identified roughly 680,000 Dobbs Dads in swing states.

According to Stuart Stevens, another Lincoln Project advisor, pregnancy related medical trauma has left more men open to voting against Trump, who has refused to rule out signing a federal abortion ban, and for Harris, who would work to restore abortion rights. Those men include, as Stevens recently told MSNBC, “voters who are more conservative than not, many of whom would check a box to say they are anti-abortion. But they are appalled by the specter of these tragedies.”  

“These are men who really have prided themselves as being the defenders of their daughter,” explains Trippi, “They suddenly are looking at what that means in terms of the Dobbs decision as they think about their daughter’s future and the world she’d live in.”

The Lincoln Project says its Dobbs Dads strategy is based on research conducted by a sister organization, the Lincoln Democracy Institute. An April 2023 LDI survey of over 17,000 voters helped their team zero in on two voting groups they considered ripe for persuasion: Dobbs Dads, and another they dubbed Red Dawn Republicans—older GOP voters who prioritize traditional international alliances, particularly in opposition to Russia.

Alex Shashlo, who helps run the Lincoln Project’s digital campaigns, said their “super targeted talking to dads approach on abortion” led them to choose female narrators for “Daisy”—the nightmarish ad set in a delivery room—and another similar spot, “This Year.” The strategy was partially inspired by a viral video clip of Taylor Swift speaking with her father about taking a political stand ahead of the 2018 elections. “If Taylor Swift said, ‘Hey, talk to your dad’, to all her followers, that would be a pretty powerful thing,” Trippi said. LDI’s research confirmed that the concept of daughters having conversations about abortion with their fathers could be effective in reaching men.

In a close election, the targeted campaign could make all the difference. The Lincoln Project says it has identified roughly 680,000 Dobbs Dads in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In a recent podcast, Trippi also mused on the demographic’s potential to “surprise people in these Senate races like in Florida, in Texas, maybe Montana.”

“There is an opportunity here,” he said.

This story was produced in partnership with the National Catholic Reporter.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, every state-level campaign to limit abortion has failed. But that hasn’t stopped Catholic organizations from stepping into the fight again this election year.

Catholic organizations are bankrolling campaigns against abortion-rights measures, spending more than $1.9 million so far in five of the 10 states where such measures are on the ballot, according to a joint investigation by National Catholic Reporter and Mother Jones.

In Florida alone, dioceses and bishops have spent more than $1.1 million, and church entities in South Dakota have recently ramped up spending as the election nears. In other states, the church’s hierarchy may be sitting out financially, but wealthy individuals with well-established associations with the Catholic Church, or church-affiliated groups—like local parishes and Knights of Columbus chapters—have stepped into the fray. 

The fight in Florida over Amendment 4—a ballot initiative to add the right to an abortion in the state constitution—has become a political lightning rod, so it may not be surprising that the high-profile battle has attracted heavyweight donors from across the country. Florida requires 60 percent voter approval to amend the state constitution.

Abortion-rights groups have raised at least $60.7 million, swamping the $9 million raised by anti-abortion groups—both sides flooding the airwaves with ads. The majority of the money pouring in on the abortion-rights side is from major national groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood. Catholics for Choice has contributed just $10,378 to the fight in Florida. (Searches in other states turned up no other donations from Catholics for Choice.)

With the appearance of a showdown between the powers on each side of the national debate, it may be fitting that the Miami Archdiocese has given the most money of any church organization in the country this year—three donations totaling $384,000 to a political action committee called Florida Voters Against Extremism.

The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops has donated another $271,000, and the Catholic dioceses of Venice, Palm Beach, and St. Petersburg gave $100,000 each. Dioceses in Orlando, St. Augustine, and Pensacola also donated.

Various Florida Catholic dioceses and the state’s bishops’ conference have stepped in, financially, during previous ballot initiative fights, but never on this scale— prior to 2024, they had given just $198,000.

The church in Florida has made these donations, a representative from the bishops’ conference said, because “it would be unconscionable not to defend against this threat to the sanctity of unborn life and the dignity of pregnant women.”

The money comes from diocesan and individual contributions to the conference’s general operating funds, said Michele Taylor, associate director for communications. “Dioceses and the conference observe Florida election and campaign finance laws and so there have been no special collections for the defeat of Amendment 4,” she said.

Diocesan donations in other states were substantially smaller, but so is the overall size of the ballot initiative fights. In South Dakota, for instance, the Sioux Falls Diocese has donated $340,000 to two separate anti-abortion PACs fighting to block a ballot initiative to create a similar protection for abortion rights in the state constitution. 

The one abortion-rights group raising money to support the ballot initiative’s passage had only raised $298,000 in September and October. The Sioux Falls Diocese’s donation included an in-kind donation of $40,000 for polling work. All of the diocese’s donations have been made since September 25.

Similarly, in Colorado, despite a heavily funded abortion-rights PAC filling the airwaves with ads in support of Amendment 79, another effort to install a right to abortion in the state constitution, the Catholic Church had seemed to be uninterested—at least in terms of financial donations—in the fight until very recently. 

But on September 11, the Denver Archdiocese sent a $50,000 check to the Pro-Life Colorado Fund, and it sent a second much larger check for $175,000 to the same group on October 22.

In Missouri, by contrast, the St. Louis Archdiocese, four other dioceses around the state, and the state bishops’ conference all donated $5,000, but earlier in the year and only to the effort to block an abortion ballot initiative from ever getting on the ballot. Since the initiative was approved for the ballot, the dioceses haven’t donated again.

Some Missouri pro-life groups had hoped the fight against the constitutional amendment for abortion rights would attract more national money, said Jamie Morris, executive director of the Missouri Catholic Conference, the church’s public policy agency in the state. He believes the focus on the presidential race, and ones in the Senate or House, put the financial focus elsewhere.

Losses in previous amendment battles, as in Ohio and Kansas, also may have dissuaded funders, Morris said. “I do think ours is tighter than Ohio’s ended up,” he said. “It would seem ripe for someone to come in and at least get some messaging and funding out there to push it over the top.”

Polling shows more than half of Missourians favoring the amendment, with 34 percent opposed. The Ohio abortion-rights measure was approved 57 percent to 43 percent in 2023.

In some states, spending from groups or individuals closely associated with the church has dramatically augmented or, arguably, eliminated the need for church spending.

In South Dakota, for example, where diocesan spending has been heavy, the national Knights of Columbus organization, based in New Haven, Connecticut, contributed $200,000 to a group opposing that state’s constitutional amendment on abortion. In Missouri, where the dioceses have spent only $25,000, the state Knights of Columbus chapter has chipped in $75,000.

In Nebraska, two ballot initiatives—one seeking to block abortion rights, the other to add it as a constitutional right—have attracted millions in spending, but none from that state’s dioceses. But two families of prominent Nebraska Catholics have contributed more than $6.6 million of the total $7 million donated to anti-abortion committees in the ballot initiative fight. 

Marlene Ricketts, the wife of TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, and her son, Sen. Pete Ricketts (R), Nebraska’s junior senator, have contributed $5.1 million. The Ricketts family are prominent Catholics, and Joe Ricketts has given millions to the Catholic Church in Nebraska, including spending an estimated $34 million on the creation of a Catholic religious retreat. 

Two members of another family, the Peeds, who have recently become prominent donors in conservative political and Catholic circles, chipped in another $2 million. Family matriarch Rhonda Peed has said faith drives the family’s charitable giving, including some $1.8 million to the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, in the past two decades.

In Missouri, prominent conservative and anti-abortion attorney John Sauer has contributed roughly $757,000 to the fight over abortion. Sauer, a former solicitor general of Missouri, has represented anti-abortion groups in the past and successfully defended a Catholic priest accused of sexual abuse.

In January, Sauer represented former President Donald Trump in his successful claim before the US Supreme Court claiming broad presidential immunity. Missouri state campaign finance records show that this year Sauer gave $500,000 to Missouri Right to Life, which was spent to oppose an abortion-rights ballot initiative, and $257,000 to a political committee set up specifically to oppose the initiative as well.

Representatives from the Sioux Falls Diocese and the Denver Archdiocese did not respond to interview requests.

In all 10 states with abortion ballot measures, Catholic groups and dioceses are working to oppose abortion-rights amendments with mailings, bishops’ statements, videos, prayers and other resources in English and Spanish. Says Morris of Missouri: “It’s kind of an all-of-the-above approach.”

Yet, the effectiveness of church attempts at persuasion are questionable. A recent poll of Catholic voters in seven battleground states found that the hierarchy’s influence on voters in their flock is extremely limited. Only 32 percent said bishops were very or somewhat influential in voting decisions, and 37 percent said priests were, according to the poll, which was conducted by the National Catholic Reporter.

Political strategies, like funding statewide anti-abortion initiatives, is only a part of conservative Catholics’ “long game,” according to Mary Jo McConahay, author of Playing God: American Catholic Bishops and the Far Right. 

Legal activist Leonard Leo, for example, has turned his attention from the US Supreme Court to a web of Catholic organizations aimed at instilling traditionalist values in the broader culture.

“I think ultraconservative Catholic intellectuals are leaning now in the direction of changing culture itself to achieve their various goals, including demonizing—or criminalizing—abortion, homosexuality, transgender people, etc., which also would move the country closer toward Christian nationalism,” McConahay said. “As long as the majority of the voting population is pro-abortion, Catholic money may start to go to this kind of longer-term effort, rather than fighting ballot measures.”

This story has been updated to reflect additional donations.

There are more than 45 million people with student loans, and many more who are gearing up to go to college at a time when tuition is at record highs: The average annual cost of a private university hit nearly $60,000 in 2024.

The next president will have the power to either ease that financial burden or aggravate it. And while Donald Trump’s bluster on the campaign trail has not included a lot of clarity on his policy plans, his public statements, along with the actions of his previous administration, set out a roadmap for the many ways he will try to gut the affordability of higher education for future students—while sinking those who already have student debt into a deeper financial hole.

What’s more, the agenda authored by the conservative Heritage Foundation for a future Republican administration, known as Project 2025, also offers a blueprint. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but because it was written by some of his closest allies, it is likely that, should Trump win in November, pieces of the project will become policy priorities.

Here’s what a second Trump term could mean for student debt:

Defunding and closing the Education Department could decimate college affordability for low-income students: At a rally in Wisconsin last month, Donald Trump said that he wants to shut down the Department of Education should he return to the Oval Office. “I’m dying to get back to do this,” he said. “We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education.” 

As president, Trump proposed cutting nearly $4 billion from the Pell Grants reserve fund—and redirecting half to NASA for space exploration: “So that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!”

Trump couldn’t close the Education Department singlehandledly: it would require an act of Congress. But defunding the department would have far-reaching implications for education funding. A key one: The department administers $39 billion of Pell Grants, scholarships awarded to students from low-income backgrounds. About half of Pell Grants go to students whose families earn less than $20,000 per year. Without the department, it’s unclear who would distribute and oversee Pell Grants; if they’re thrown into chaos, low-income students will have little choice but to take on additional student loans. Trump has shown a willingness to compromise this crucial source of financial aid in the past: During his presidency, he proposed cutting nearly $4 billion from the Pell Grants reserve fund—and redirecting half of that to NASA for space exploration: “So that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!” Trump tweeted at the time.

Ending Public Service Loan Forgiveness: Signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007, the PSLF program promises to cancel the remaining debt for public servants, from police offices and prosecutors to public defenders, who have made 10 years of payments on their loans. In the last four years, the Biden-Harris administration has awarded $74 billion in student debt relief to public servants who’ve met PSLF’s payment requirements.

But when the first wave of borrowers qualified for relief in 2017, Trump’s Education Department rejected 99 percent of applicants. His administration then proposed a 2021 budget that would have nixed PSLF entirely. That did not pass, but the goal remains: Project 2025 includes an explicit recommendation to terminate PSLF should there be a Republican president.

Hampering other forms of student debt relief: In June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s attempt to cancel up to $10,000 of student debt for low- and middle-income borrowers. Trump called the decision a “massive win” that halted an “unconstitutional student loan gimmick.”

In the wake of this decision by the Supreme Court, the Biden-Harris administration sought to provide relief another way: They launched the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan, an income-driven repayment program that would lower required payments for many borrowers, and forgive the remainder of their debt after somewhere between 10 and 25 years, depending on the original loan balance. Within months, more than a dozen Republican-led states had sued to shut down the program. Those lawsuits are ongoing. And it is safe to say that a Trump-Vance administration would do little to stop them: In June, Trump called Biden’s latest student debt relief efforts “vile,” while Vance has encouraged Republicans to fight student loan cancellation “with every ounce of our energy of power.” Plus, Project 2025 suggests that a future Trump administration should end all existing income-driven debt repayment plans because they are too generous.

Weakening debt relief for borrowers defrauded by for-profit schools: When Betsy DeVos served as Trump’s education secretary, she rewrote an existing department rule that discharges the loans of students who attended fraudulent colleges. Her version shrunk the amount these loans could be canceled, limiting them to just three cents for every dollar spent on their degrees. Congress passed a bipartisan resolution to overturn DeVos’s rule, but Trump vetoed it, leaving her restrictions in place until Biden undid them upon taking office. Should Trump return to the White House, this relief for borrowers would very likely be on the chopping block.

Causing some student loans to accrue more interest: In 2018, the Trump administrations budget proposed ending subsidized Stafford loans, which don’t accrue interest while undergraduate students are in school. This change would lead to thousands of additional dollars of debt for borrowers, many of whom are also from low-income families—about 70 percent of subsidized loan borrowers also qualify for Pell Grants. In 2018, the Center for American Progress estimated that an end to subsidized loans would saddle nearly 6 million students with an additional $2.8 billion in costs each year.

This story is part of an ongoing investigation into disinformation in collaboration with The War Horse, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mother Jones.

Just as former president Donald Trump told Fox News last week that he wanted to use the US military to “handle” what he called the “enemy from within” on Election Day, an obscure military policy was beginning to make the rounds on social media platforms favored by the far right. 

The focus? Department of Defense Directive 5240.01. 

The 22-page document governs military intelligence activities and is among more than a thousand different policies that outline Defense Department procedures.

The Pentagon updated it at the end of September. Although military policies are routinely updated and reissued, the timing of this one—just six weeks before the election and the same day Hurricane Helene slammed into the Southeast—struck right-wing misinformation merchants as suspicious.

They latched onto a new reference in the updated directive—“lethal force”—and soon were falsely claiming that the change meant Kamala Harris had authorized the military to kill civilians if there were to be unrest after the election.

That’s flat-out not true, the Pentagon and experts on military policy told The War Horse.

“The provisions in [the directive] are not new, and do not authorize the Secretary of Defense to use lethal force against US citizens, contrary to rumors and rhetoric circulating on social media,” Sue Gough, a Department of Defense spokesperson, said Wednesday night.

But as Trump doubles down on his “enemy from within” rhetoric, DOD Directive 5240.01 continues to gain traction among his supporters as ostensible proof that Harris, not Trump, wants to use the military against American citizens.

By early last week, “5240.01” began to spike on alt-tech platforms such as Rumble, 4chan, and Telegram, as well as on more mainstream platforms like X, according to an analysis by The War Horse and UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center. 

On Ron Paul’s Liberty Report, a YouTube show, the former Texas congressman told viewers that the policy meant that the country is now a “police state.” Republican Maryland congressman Andy Harris told Newsmax host Chris Salcedo last Wednesday that he was concerned the Defense Department was pushing through policies without congressional oversight.

“This is exactly what the Democrats said Trump would do. And they’re doing it,” he said. “This means that after an election, they could declare a national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.”

Former Trump national security adviser and retired Army Lieutenant Gen. Michael Flynn tweeted the policy update out to his 1.7 million followers, just as he shared the week before a video suggesting the military had manipulated the weather to focus Hurricane Helene’s deadly fury on Republican voters in the South.

On Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. got into the act in a tweet criticizing Kamala Harris’ response to a story that Trump wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had”:

“It’s particularly ironic since Biden/Harris have just pushed through DoD Directive 5240.01 giving the Pentagon power—for the first time in history—to use lethal force to kill Americans on US soil who protest government policies.”

By that evening, his post on X had 5.6 million views.

Joseph Nunn, a lawyer with the Liberty & National Security program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, and a leading expert on domestic uses of the military, had a clear response to the social media storm.

“There’s nothing here. People like Michael Flynn should know how to read a DOD directive.”

“There’s nothing here,” he said. “People like Michael Flynn should know how to read a DOD directive.”

(Click here to read DOD Directive 5240.01.)

Contrary to claims online, DOD Directive 5240.01, which last had been updated in 2020, does not grant any new powers to the military. That’s not how military directives work. Like them or not, all military policies are subject to US law; they do not create new legal authorities. 

Directive 5240.01 has a narrow focus: It only addresses military intelligence, and the section that has circulated online specifically deals with intelligence assistance to civilian law enforcement. 

The paragraph that contains the term “lethal force” refers to a requirement that the Secretary of Defense—the highest level of the Defense Department—must now authorize military intelligence assistance to civilian law enforcement when lethal force might be involved.

“This is not an independent source of authority,” Nunn said. “We really should look at this as an administrative safeguard that is being put in place.” 

Military intelligence has long been authorized to provide assistance to federal law enforcement agencies, as well as state and local law enforcement when lives are endangered, under limited circumstances. That could include providing technical expertise or helping with international anti-terrorism or counter-narcotics operations, for instance.

“A reference to lethal force in a directive like this doesn’t mean they’re planning to have snipers on rooftops in covert ops,” said Nunn, who has written on limiting the role of the military in law enforcement. “The nature of law enforcement will sometimes involve the use of lethal force.” 

In its response to The War Horse, the Pentagon said the directive’s update was “in no way timed in relation to the election or any other event.” 

“Reissuing 5240.01 was part of normal business of the Department to periodically update guidance and policy,” the DOD’s Gough said.

The Defense Department has issued or revised 10 other directives and instructions since it updated “5240.01” at the end of September, ranging from a policy on space-related military activities to guidance on public affairs’ officers use of military vehicles.

“It’s not unusual to update DOD regulations,” says Risa Brooks, a political science professor at Marquette University and a former senior fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute. “It doesn’t signal some nefarious agenda.”

The update to “5240.01” brings the policy in line with other Defense Department directives. One of those is known as DOD Directive 5210.56—an entirely different Defense Department directive than the one updated last month. It lays out rules when troops across the military can use lethal force outside of military operations, limiting it to “imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm” or to protect critical national security assets. 

Posts online, including the one that Flynn shared, claim that Directive 5240.01 runs afoul of a legal statute known as posse comitatus. The Posse Comitatus Act, which dates back to Reconstruction, generally forbids military troops from acting as domestic police. Civil liberty experts consider it an important civil rights protection against possible military overreach. 

Despite the conspiracy claims spreading online, the directive clearly states that military intelligence units assisting civilian police must consider the Posse Comitatus Act.

“The updated issuance remains consistent with DoD’s adherence to the Posse Comitatus Act, commitment to civil rights, and support of other safeguards in place for the protection of the American people,” Gough said.

Spreading misinformation about the military can be particularly damaging “to the relationship between the military and the public,” Brooks told The War Horse.

“This sort of politicization, this idea of sowing mistrust in the military in order to gain partisan advantage, is really corrosive,” Brooks said. “There’s a motive. There’s something to be gained by spreading these rumors.”

Ironically, however, Rep. Harris, the Republican congressman, was right about one thing when he claimed that if Kamala Harris wins, she “could declare national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.” That’s because any president, regardless of party, has the power to mobilize military troops against American citizens in certain circumstances. Only one candidate—Trump—in this year’s presidential election has outright suggested it. 

But that presidential power isn’t granted by a random military policy. It’s granted by the Insurrection Act.

A law nearly as old as the country itself, the act gives a president essentially unilateral authority to temporarily suspend the Posse Comitatus Act and call on military troops to suppress domestic rebellions. The law effectively leaves it up to the president to decide what constitutes a rebellion.

“There are essentially zero procedural safeguards in the Insurrection Act,” Nunn says.

During his first administration, Trump and his allies reportedly considered invoking the Insurrection Act both during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and again after he lost his re-election bid. And legal experts say that any follow through on Trump’s increasingly frequent threats to use the military domestically, including against “radical left lunatics,” would likely come through an invocation of the Insurrection Act.

Republicans are saying that the real misinformation is being peddled by Democrats. They claim the Harris-Walz campaign is taking out of context Trump’s comments from his October 13 interview with Fox News Maria Bartiromo, with some suggesting he was referring to undocumented migrants or to only deploying the military in a national security crisis.

Here is the full quote from Trump when Bartiromo asked if he “expected chaos on election day” from “outside agitators,” including “Chinese nationals,” “people on terrorist watch lists,” “murderers,” and “rapists”:

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people who have come in, destroying our country—and by the way, totally destroying our country, the towns, the villages, they’re being inundated.

“But I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of Election Day. I think the bigger problem are the people from within, we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics.

“And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

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?