The Teamsters union has decided not to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election—reflecting a growing political rift within one of the country’s most powerful labor organizations and delivering Trump a political victory.

The union announced its decision on Wednesday afternoon, shortly after releasing the results of a poll conducted of members after both parties’ conventions. Almost 60 percent of members supported Donald Trump while 34 percent supported Kamala Harris. (A sample size was not provided.) The results show a significant shift from the union’s straw polling earlier this summer, completed prior to President Joe Biden’s announcement that he would not seek reelection, in which 44 percent supported Biden and 36 percent supported Trump.  

“The union was left with few commitments on top Teamsters issues from either former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris—and found no definitive support among members for either party’s nominee,” the Teamsters union said in a press release. 

With 1.3 million members, the Teamsters are one of largest unions in the United States, and they have supported Democrats in the recent past—endorsing against Trump twice. But the union also has a history of being out-of-step with the labor movement’s embrace of Democrats: they were the only major union to back Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and George H.W. Bush in 1988. 

The Teamsters are an outlier among other influential labor unions, who have largely rallied behind Harris. The UAW, AFL-CIO, and NEA all endorsed Harris shortly after she stepped up as the Democratic nominee. 

Trump was quick to claim the poll results as a win. His campaign wrote in a press release that the “vast majority of rank-and-file working men and women in this important organization want President Donald Trump back in the White House.”

Labor unions are no longer the “behemoth” political forces they were in the 20th century, said David Macdonald, a political science professor at University of Florida. Still, their endorsement in the presidential race can influence undecided members in key swing states.

Teamster president O’Brien had spent several months courting Trump despite the former president’s staunch anti-labor record, a decision which drew public outcry from some members, including vice president at-large John Palmer. O’Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention in July, praising Trump’s “backbone.” Though O’Brien said that he had requested a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention, he was conspicuously absent from the podium. 

Harris met with union leaders on Monday, an encounter which the New York Times reported was “sometimes tense.” Palmer told the Times that the vice president said, “I want your endorsement, but if I don’t get it, I will treat you exactly as if I had gotten your endorsement.”

Drug overdose deaths have been on the rise for years, devastating communities nationwide. But as National Public Radio reported on Wednesday, that trend may be changing—so much so, said one expert who spoke to NPR, Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta of the University of North Carolina, that he anticipates as many as 20,000 fewer annual overdose deaths in coming years. Overall, in the twelve months beginning April 2023, the United States saw a decrease in drug overdose deaths of more than 12 percent—marking the first year since 2020 that overdose deaths have fallen.

The exact causes of the decrease are not yet completely clear to experts. Dr. Nora Volkow of the National Institute on Drug Abuse said that “expansion of naloxone,” which is used to quickly reverse the respiratory depression associated with opioid overdoses, and other opioid medications, are among the strategies that have worked.

Previous data from the National Institute on Drug Abuse has shown that, since 2015, more people have died from opioid overdoses than from any other drugs. Research shows that making Narcan—naloxone’s trade name—available at syringe sites reduces deaths by around 65 percent.

The fall in overdose deaths does vary by state. For example, according to the CDC, North Carolina saw a 40 percent decrease in drug overdose deaths—but others, such as Alaska, saw an equal increase. Alaska’s case is particularly alarming, as the state has the highest proportion of Indigenous people in the county, whom CDC data shows are more likely to die from drug overdoses.

Even in areas where drug overdose deaths are increasing, as the NPR report highlights, investigating which strategies work should lead to more effective measures throughout the country. "If interventions are what's driving this decline," Dasgupta said, "then let's double down on those interventions."

Another open letter from Republicans endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris‘ presidential bid just dropped.

This one, first reported by the New York Times, is signed by 111 former national security and foreign policy officials who worked under former presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush—and, yes, Trump himself.

The blistering letter characterizes Trump as “unfit to serve,” alleging that he “cannot be trusted” to uphold the Constitution. The signatories include onetime Republican stalwarts such as Charles Boustany, the Louisiana congressman who gave the party’s rebuttal to former President Obama’s speech to Congress about healthcare reform; William Cohen, Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration and former Senator from Maine; General Michael Hayden, CIA and National Security Agency director under Obama and George W. Bush; and Miles Taylor, former chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump.

The group writes that they “firmly oppose” Trump’s reelection, alleging that “as President, he promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests, and betrayed our values, democracy, and this country’s founding documents.” The letter also states that “by inciting the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and defending those who committed it, he has violated his oath of office and brought danger to our country.”

Like Harris mentioned in last week’s debate, the supporters also write that Trump is susceptible “to flattery and manipulation by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping,” and that that, along with his “contempt for the norms of decent, ethical and lawful behavior” and “chaotic national security decision-making,” are “dangerous qualities.”

By contrast, they write, “Vice President Harris has demonstrated a commitment to upholding the ideals that define our nation freedom, democracy, and rule of law,” citing her experience as Vice President, Attorney General of California, and serving on the Senate Intelligence Committee. (The letter also cites some of Harris’ promises that have rankled some on the left, including her pledges to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force
in the world”; to “always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself”; and to support the border security package that would hire 1,500 new Customs and Border Protection personnel.)

The group acknowledges that while they have concerns “about some of the positions advocated by the left wing of the Democratic party…any potential concerns pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s demonstrated chaotic and unethical behavior and disregard for our Republic’s time-tested principles of constitutional governance.”

Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said in a statement that the signatories “are the same people who got our country into endless foreign wars and profited off of them while the American people suffered. President Trump is the only President in the modern era not to get our country into any new wars.”

As I have written, hundreds of other high-ranking onetime Republican officials—including ex-Reagan, Bush, Romney, and McCain staffers—have also publicly endorsed Harris over Trump, and urged other Republicans to follow their lead when they cast their votes. The Harris campaign has also been actively courting Republicans in what it calls “a campaign within a campaign.” This concerted effort to reach across the aisle is likely part of why a slate of new polls out today bring good news for Harris, showing her leading in the swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan and gaining a six-point lead over Trump since the debate.

Trump, meanwhile, has continued baselessly blaming Democrats for the latest assassination attempt against him.

At the center of the two biggest controversies of JD Vance’s short political career have been cats. The first came from his attacks against the “childless cat ladies” on the left. More recently, the Republican vice presidential candidate has been spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets.

One possible conclusion to draw from these missives is that he is an angry man who spends too much time on the internet. Another is that he is a liar. But there is much more to what Vance is doing than mere trolling. 

Vance’s cat rhetoric is a purposeful attempt to simplify Great Replacement hysteria—hoping to convince voters that their fears of a migrant invasion and childless women are an existential threat. The controversies derive from two fixations: the number of children American women are having and the rate at which foreigners are coming to the United States. Vance wants a United States where the birth rate is high and the immigration rate is low.

In championing low immigration, mass deportation, and an increase in fertility, Vance is aligning himself with white nationalists who were once shunned by the Republican establishment. These days, he is spending less time openly espousing his ideas than he used to on podcasts. Instead, Vance—as he has explained is part of his project—is finding uncomplicated ways to get his points across (whether they are factual or not). “I do think that political rhetoric is fundamentally [about] dealing with people at their particular level,” he said earlier this year. “I think you get too deep into the theory, you actually miss a lot of the truth.” On Sunday, he went further, telling CNN’s Dana Bash during an exchange about Springfield, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Lying about Haitian immigrants eating cats and attacking childless cat ladies is a perfect example of this plan. Vance thinks he can sell what critics have called “blood and soil nationalism”—invoking the Nazi slogan—with dumb memes.

Vance has not hidden his influences for this theory of change. “I read this book when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan,” Vance said during a 2021 podcast appearance. “And that was a really influential book for me.” Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Republican presidential candidate, was not subtle about his white nationalism in the Death of the West. When it came to immigration, he accused Mexican Americans of waging a “reconquista” of land they’d lost to the United States. He spoke of declining birth rates in extreme terms—claiming that “Western women” were committing an “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” by having too many abortions.

It is not hard to trace the line between Buchanan’s fears and Vance’s anxieties about “childless cat ladies.” The subtitle of Buchanan’s book cuts to the heart of Vance’s current preoccupations: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.

Buchanan’s worldview was rooted in a paleoconservatism that rejected the view that America is an idea and instead saw America as a people. In doing so, he embraced a framework that justified exclusion and a permanent white majority. 

Vance has been emphasizing the claim that Americans are a “people” for much of this year. During a speech to the hard-right group American Moment earlier this year, Vance made a point of bringing up “this thing that increasingly bothers me, which is the concept that American is an idea.” Vance made the same point about Americans as a people in July at the National Conservatism Conference in which he railed about the influx of Haitian migrants in Springfield. But the clearest explanation of this obsession, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, came during the Republican National Convention: 

America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.

Vance went on to talk about the cemetery plot in Kentucky that he hopes that he; his wife, Usha, the child of Indian immigrants; and, eventually, their kids will be buried in. (Her family came on “our terms” in this formulation.)

“There will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky,” Vance said. “Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”

Vance was born in Ohio. It was his grandparents who came to the state in search of economic opportunity in the 1940s. His kids would likely be buried in the family plot in Kentucky sometime around 2100—roughly 160 years after any of their paternal ancestors lived there. But for Vance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He believes his blood is connected to that soil. That is what it means for him for America to be a people.

Behind the silly memes of Donald Trump running with cats is a much darker story. Vance sees a rapid demographic shift that is being forced upon the American “people” through immigration and childless women. Vance is determined to stop it. If he has to talk about cats along the way, he will. 

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

Liam Fitzpatrick’s was packed on a Tuesday in November, and all eyes in the suburban Orlando, Florida, pub were glued to the TVs behind the bar. Fitzpatrick’s usually had sports on, but this was Election Eve 2020, and Republican state Senate candidate Jason Brodeur watched nervously as the results trickled in. This was his election party. Brodeur’s campaign had spent millions of dollars running him for an open seat against the Democratic nominee, a labor attorney, and the race was neck and neck.

But his backers had a secret weapon. Just before the filing deadline, a substitute teacher named Jestine Iannotti had joined the race as an unaffiliated third-party candidate. A political unknown, she didn’t even campaign. The central Florida district was then carpeted with misleading mailers that appealed to liberal values and voters’ distaste for partisan politics—one included a stock photo that seemed to imply that Iannotti, who is white, is a Black woman. If she siphoned off votes from his Democratic rival, Brodeur stood a better chance.

Iannotti was a “ghost candidate,” one with no hope of winning who runs—or is run—specifically as a spoiler. Ghost candidates are legal in Florida—sort of. Any eligible person can run for public office, but the covert financing of ghost campaigns sometimes runs afoul of even that state’s famously lax election laws. State prosecutors would eventually conclude that Iannotti and another ghost candidate who ran in 2020—along with their political consultants—had broken quite a few. (Brodeur claimed ignorance of the scheme, and has faced no legal action as a result, though a local tax collector on trial for unrelated charges would later testify that Brodeur was well aware of it.)

Also at Fitzpatrick’s that night was then-47-year-old Frank Artiles, a burly, foul-mouthed ex-Marine and former Republican state senator. Artiles, who is Cuban American, had resigned his Senate post in disgrace in 2017 after using racial slurs in front of two Black colleagues during a drunken rant. He, too, was fixated on Brodeur’s returns, as well as the results of an even tighter state Senate race in south Miami-Dade.

The latter contest was a slugfest between one of Florida’s highest-profile Democratic lawmakers, José Javier Rodriguez, and Republican Ileana García, founder of Latinas for Trump. It, too, hinged on a ghost candidate: Alex Rodriguez, a down-on-his-luck salesman of used heavy equipment, whose shared surname with the incumbent was no coincidence. Like Iannotti, Rodriguez hadn’t campaigned. He, too, was boosted by a flood of misleading mailers. 

As the final tallies came in, the mood at Fitzpatrick’s turned electric. Brodeur ended up winning his seat by about 7,600 votes. (Iannotti drew nearly 6,000.) In south Miami-Dade, Garcia, the Republican, edged out incumbent José Rodriguez by fewer than 40 votes. Artiles was jubilant. “That was me!” a partygoer recalls him yelling. “That’s all me!”

At a criminal trial this week in Miami, the prosecution may ask the jury to interpret Artiles’ outburst as an admission of guilt. Four months after the election party, the Miami-Dade state attorney charged him and ghost candidate Rodriquez with multiple campaign finance–related felonies. Among other charges, Artiles stands accused of conspiracy, making excessive campaign contributions, and “false swearing” in connection with voting or elections. If found guilty on all counts, he faces up to five years in prison.

In Central Florida, prosecutors issued a multi-count indictment against Iannotti and the two operatives (Eric Foglesong and Ben Paris, chair of the Seminole County Republican Party) who’d arranged for her to run. (A ghost candidate Artiles had recruited for a third state Senate race—a spa owner whose wife regularly waxed Artiles’ back—was not charged.) In 2022, a jury found Paris guilty of interfering in an election by means of an illegal campaign donation—the state recommended 60 days in jail; the judge gave him a year of probation, community service, and a fine. Foglesong, charged with felony and misdemeanor election crimes, avoided possible jail time by pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges, and Iannotti pleaded no contest last month to a pair of first-degree misdemeanors. Artiles maintains his innocence.

And all of the above might have been just another colorful tale of shady politics in the Sunshine State were it not for a spat between political consultants.

Indeed, after the leaders of Matrix LLC, a high-powered political consulting firm whose CEO helped finance the ghost campaigns, started feuding, the story took on a new life, offering something rarer and more consequential: a glimpse, oddly enough, into the political meddling of one of America’s largest power companies.

The source of the leak was never clear, but as the consultants squabbled, thousands of pages of Matrix’s internal documents made it into the hands of Florida news outlets. The revelations therein, and reporting on discovery materials generated by the various prosecutions, would culminate in the abrupt January 2023 retirement of Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy, triggering a single-day, $14 billion drop in the company’s market value.

FPL is a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, one of the nation’s largest utility conglomerates in terms of homes and businesses served. And although its parent is a major producer of renewable energy, FPL is among Florida’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitters. The leaked documents, in any case, showed that FPL was enmeshed in a covert campaign of media manipulation, surveillance, and what one federal securities lawsuit calls electoral “dirty tricks,” all in the name of maximizing profits.

Investigations by Floodlight and other Florida news outlets would reveal that the ghost candidates were bankrolled with some $730,000 in dark money, $100,000 of which was channeled through a prominent Republican operative into a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that Artiles controlled. (Artiles’ attorney, Frank Quintero, disputes that any of that money ever made it to ghost candidate Rodriguez: “The prosecutor can say whatever the fuck he wants, but the reality is different than what he wants it to be.”) The remaining $630,000 made its way through a daisy chain of opaque nonprofits partially overseen by the CEO of Matrix, which was then working for FPL.

From the utility’s perspective, expanding the state Senate’s Republican majority—by whatever means—would help fulfill its legislative priorities. Those priorities included escaping liability for damages related to power outages in the wake of Hurricane Irma; ousting J.R. Kelly, the state’s long-serving (unsympathetic) consumer utility watchdog; and winning approval from the Senate-confirmed Public Service Commission for Florida’s largest-ever hike in electricity rates. The defeat of Sen. Rodriguez had the added benefit of kneecapping one of the state’s most prominent backers of rooftop solar, which reduces carbon emissions and lowers utility bills—and against which FPL had waged a decade-long counterinsurgency campaign.

FPL, which declined to comment for this article, prevailed on all counts.

The company has steadfastly denied wrongdoing, although it does not dispute hiring Matrix. “They did good work,” then-CEO Silagy told me in June 2022. During the same interview, he admitted to authoring a January 2019 email about Sen. Rodríguez, wherein Silagy ordered his minions “to make his life a living hell”—a directive that was immediately relayed to Matrix.

The utility claims that two outside law firms, whose investigations FPL commissioned but has never made public, have cleared it of election-related liability or wrongdoing, despite reporting that suggests otherwise. The Orlando Sentinel, for example, reported that Silagy sometimes used an email pseudonym (Theodore Hayes) when communicating with Jeff Pitts, then CEO of Matrix. And a 2022 Federal Election Commission complaint accused five nonprofits linked to Pitts of “direct and serious violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act.”

The complaint, dismissed earlier this year after the partisan six-member commission deadlocked on a party-line vote, cites a memo Pitts sent to Silagy laying out how FPL could channel money covertly through a series of nonprofits and, ultimately, a super-PAC, to fund “‘political activities’ on both the state and federal level.” The complaint alleges that “the effect of this scheme would be to illegally hide the identities of the true source or sources of contributions.”  

“Unfortunately, partisan gridlock and dysfunction has become routine at the FEC, which has only opened four investigations this year,” says Stuart McPhail, senior litigation counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the nonprofit that filed the complaint. “That means many complaints, even those for which the FEC’s nonpartisan expert staff recommends an investigation, end in partisan gridlock. That’s exactly what happened with our complaint.”

The scenes to follow are based on thousands of pages of documents and more than 50 interviews with various players. In addition to setting the stage for Artiles’ long-delayed trial, they offer a window into how some utility monopolies have chosen to flex their political power, pushing legal boundaries for financial gain, and sometimes thwarting America’s transition to clean energy in the process.

On a Friday evening in late February 2017, 32 NASCAR race-truck drivers squinted under the Daytona International Speedway’s 2,000-watt lights. Their eyes were fixed on state Sen. Frank Artiles, who sported a suede jacket emblazoned with the NextEra logo. He waved a green flag to kick off the 250-mile race, sponsored by NextEra Energy Resources, another NextEra subsidiary, but just two laps in things went awry—a 17-vehicle pile-up that resulted in one of the trucks getting completely totaled.

Your high school English teacher would call this foreshadowing.

Artiles was then serving his first term in the Florida Senate and chairing its energy committee. That is to say, the elected official who controlled the fate of state bills related to energy and the environment was accepting the red-carpet treatment from a utility holding company that routinely had business before his committee.

Such potential conflicts of interest are not unusual in the utility realm. Investor-owned power companies specialize in charming and lobbying legislators and regulators. A captured regulator might approve a higher profit margin for a power company than an adversarial one would. A friendly legislator is more likely to pass favorable laws. Across the nation, utilities are the most active lobbyists on state environmental bills.

Our system “gives utilities incredible incentive to build out massive, sophisticated, elaborate, sometimes clandestine political influence machines.”

What makes the situation especially irksome is that utilities are not normal companies. The firms that provide gas and electricity and send monthly bills to homeowners and businesses are state-sanctioned monopolies. They don’t make money from selling power per se. Rather, like a waiter with guaranteed tips, their profit margins are pre-determined by regulators based on how much they invest in their infrastructure. The more plants and poles and substations a utility builds, the bigger its guaranteed return, which averages about 10 percent nationwide. (FPL’s have run as high as 11.8 percent.) Politicians and regulators, at least in theory, are supposed to act on behalf of consumers and prevent utilities from running up the tab.

The way the system is set up “gives utilities incredible incentive to build out massive, sophisticated, elaborate, sometimes clandestine political influence machines,” says David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a nonprofit utility watchdog. “No matter how you slice it,” he adds, “they are among the biggest spenders on political influence generally.”

The numbers are staggering. According to the Institute for Local Self Reliance, an energy think tank, investor-owned utilities have given more than $130 million to federal candidates over the past decade and have spent more than $294 million on state political races between 2014 and 2023.

FPL alone donated at least $42 million to Florida lawmakers between June 2013 and June 2023, according to a Floodlight analysis. And that’s just reported donations. Across the nation, from 2014 to 2020, power companies pumped at least $215 million more into politics via 501(c)(4) nonprofits that don’t have to reveal their donors—which is why these funds are referred to as “dark money.”

Utility influence operations have led to a generational resurgence of fraud and corruption in the sector. A recent Floodlight analysis of three decades of corporate prosecutions and federal lawsuits describes malfeasance that has cost electricity customers at least $6.6 billion over the past 10 years. The costs to the environment and the energy transition are also steep. Utilities in Ohio struck a corrupt bargain with prominent state lawmakers—some of whom were convicted and sentenced to prison—to prop up failing coal and nuclear plants. Utilities in Arizona were investigated by the FBI for using dark money to elect energy regulators who slashed rooftop solar incentives, though no charges have been filed.

Artiles’ Daytona junket didn’t break any laws, but the optics weren’t great. He’d flown in on a private plane that belonged to his campaign treasurer—an FPL lobbyist. The night of the NASCAR race, he took in $10,000 in contributions at a fundraiser in his honor, where he rubbed shoulders with Keanu Reeves. The next day, he visited Disney’s Epcot Center as the guest of John Holley, FPL’s top in-house lobbyist. “It was an honor to be there,” Artiles told the Miami Herald after the news got out. “I’m not going to lie to you. It was cool.”

After returning to Tallahassee, Artiles fast-tracked two bills coveted by FPL.

But like the truck totaled during that second lap at Daytona, the freshman senator’s tenure would be short-lived. About a month after the FPL junket, Artiles got into an argument with two Black fellow senators at a private club near the state Capitol, berating them and using the n-word. The Senate president made Artiles stand and apologize to his colleagues, after which Artiles walked straight out of the chamber and into a gaggle of reporters, shedding his conciliatory tone like a football player doffing sweaty pads. This prompted the legislative Black caucus to demand his expulsion. Artiles resigned two days later.

He was out of the Senate, but not the game. In October 2017, Artiles was invited to a lunch meeting with Ryan Tyson, then a leading Republican operative for Associated Industries of Florida, a powerful trade group to which FPL had donated millions. Tyson, a pollster, had done work on issues critical to FPL, and was executive director of Let’s Preserve the American Dream—a nonprofit that would play a key role in the ghost candidate scandal. Alex Alvarado, Tyson’s protégé, set up the lunch, which Tyson says he does not recall attending. Starting that same month, and continuing into 2021, Artiles would receive $5,000 monthly payments from Tyson for “research services” related to Hispanic voters.

After the 2020 election, Tyson and his group came under the scrutiny of the prosecutors. “We waived all privileges and co-operated with the government in its investigation,” he told me recently. “They couldn’t explain to us what they were looking for, but we were nonetheless cooperative.” (Tyson was never charged with wrongdoing.) “This is crazy that this is how law-abiding tax paying cooperative citizens are treated,” he said.

Chuck’s, a fish house in suburban Birmingham, Alabama, was bustling on the evening of October 26, 2021, when a former Pat Buchanan staffer named K.B. Forbes arrived for what he thought was dinner with Jeff Pitts, who until recently had been CEO of Matrix.

A few months earlier, Joe Perkins, Matrix’s founder, had sued Pitts, his longtime employee and erstwhile protégé. The suit, which had FPL and two of its executives as “fictitious” (unnamed) co-defendants, basically accused Pitts of running his own firm within the firm, stealing Matrix’s clients and cash, operating a clandestine network of dark money groups, and working for FPL without Perkins’s knowledge. (Pitts, in legal filings, denied all of these claims.)

At first, their split had seemed like an amicable, if unexpected, business divorce. “Joe Perkins flew Jeff Pitts down on his plane to meet with me personally to let me know that they had come to an agreement that they were going to part ways, and it was okay,” Silagy said during our 2022 interview. “And then apparently, somewhere along the way, Jeff and Joe got sideways.”

This much was clear: For a decade, Matrix had been the servant of two masters, working both for Southern Co., the nation’s second-largest utility holding company, and NextEra Energy. But as the partners’ acrimony grew, so did the friction between the energy giants. Forbes, who publishes a blog critical of Alabama Power, a Southern Co. subsidiary, told me he had gone to Chuck’s in the hope of obtaining damaging information about Alabama Power’s CEO, Mark Crosswhite. But the vibe was off, and the conversation awkward.

Pitts “was a nervous wreck,” Forbes recalled. “That’s why, on my blog, I call him Jittery Jeff.”

The lawsuit came at a difficult time for Pitts. His new firm, Canopy Partners, less than a year old, was already drawing law enforcement interest. The Miami-Dade Public Corruption Task Force had obtained sworn testimony from Abigail MacIver, one of Pitts’ co-founders, in exchange for limited immunity from prosecution in the ghost candidate scandal. MacIver laid out how she, Pitts, and a contractor had channeled money from a nonprofit operated by Tyson into political committees controlled by Alvarado, Tyson’s associate, by way of a tax-exempt group Pitts controlled. Those committees paid for the ghost candidate mailers.

Reporting from the Sentinel also tied Pitts’ dark-money network to an FPL-funded campaign to defeat a ballot initiative that would have introduced competition into state energy markets and broken FPL’s monopoly. Tyson worked as a pollster on the campaign to counter the initiative. (Neither Pitts nor any Canopy Partners associates have been charged with crimes.)

Pitts is a dapper guy in his early 50s who brings to mind Fred Astaire. He was one of the first employees at Matrix in 1995 and became the director of its Birmingham office in 2009. He enjoys the good life, according to former associates: steak dinners, private flights, expensive wine. But by the time he met with Forbes, his life had grown complicated. “He could not look me in the eye,” Forbes told me, and Pitts wouldn’t stop rubbing the back of his head with his left hand during their dinner: “He was twirling his hair in circles.”

“These are types of allegations and scandals that shatter the belief that this publicly regulated utility is a safe, secure, and non-volatile investment.”

Matrix began consulting for NextEra, FPL’s parent, in the early 2010s. Pitts took extraordinary care to conceal his—and FPL’s—involvement in Florida elections. He obscured the money trail by creating multiple layers of subcontractors, shell companies, and 501(c)(4) nonprofits. In one case, he listed the brother of a Matrix subcontractor as the head of several nonprofits in his network, which he registered in faraway states. He preferred in-person conversations to texts or phone calls and hired expensive tax attorneys to advise him on his moves.

FPL was kept apprised of the work. Flight records show that the Matrix company jet made frequent visits to Palm Beach, where the utility is headquartered, and the leaked documents contain lively text and email correspondences between Pitts and its executives. FPL’s public affairs VPs were forwarded drafts of political ads slated to run against candidates they hoped to defeat. The Matrix document trove also included emails between Pitts and Silagy wherein Pitts lists names of dark money nonprofits and political committees to which Silagy could donate. There was also a Matrix invoice seeking reimbursement for incorporating a nonprofit that helped fund the ghost candidate campaigns.

A generation ago, power companies were forced to disclose the names of their consultants and attorneys, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the industry, did away with the rule in 2002. Jon Wellinghoff, FERC’s chairman from 2009 to 2013, told me he regrets not reinstating it. “We didn’t reverse that when I was chairman,” he said, “And we should have. All that should be disclosed. All that should be open to the public and available—information right down to the $100 contribution.”

Pitts didn’t end up staying for dinner at Chuck’s. He got takeout instead, Forbes says, and never forked over the dirt on Alabama Power’s CEO. Neither did Pitts’ attorney, with whom Forbes kept corresponding until he grew too frustrated: “I was livid. I was like, ‘This is a waste of my time.’”

It was opening day of the 2023 session of the Florida Legislature, and the capitol was abuzz. House Speaker Paul Renner presided over his chamber’s opening ceremonies, introducing a dozen former members in attendance. Among them was Frank Artiles, who, despite his legal troubles, had maintained close ties with some of Florida’s Republican power brokers. He would register as a lobbyist that session—for a construction company that paints traffic lanes.

Twenty-nine months had passed since the Fitzpatrick’s election party, and two years since Artiles’ arrest and indictment. Pitts and Perkins had by this time settled their lawsuit, and Silagy had recently taken his leave from FPL.

The utility’s veil of secrecy had been pierced—at least temporarily. Weeks after the meeting between Pitts and Forbes, the first batch of Matrix records arrived at the offices of the Sentinel in an envelope with no return address. The intel consisted of a heavily redacted copy of a nearly 200-page report Perkins had sent to NextEra’s board of directors in November 2021. It detailed Pitts’ allegedly secret work for FPL, efforts ranging from municipal to congressional campaigns, funded by millions in utility cash.

In 2018 alone, the report revealed, Pitts had participated in campaigns against a South Miami mayor who supported rooftop solar, ran ghost candidates against both a Miami-Dade commissioner critical of an FPL nuclear plant and a progressive state Senate candidate in Gainesville, and moved millions of dollars to help defeat Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum, who lost to Ron DeSantis that year by a razor-thin 0.4 percent margin.

Pitts’ work, the report showed, went beyond elections and into acquisitions. In 2019, Pitts had aided in FPL’s failed attempt to acquire the Jacksonville Electric Authority, a city-owned utility whose territory it coveted. His contributions included hiring a private detective to follow a reporter who’d written critically of the proposed sale, running a front group that championed the sale, and enlisting a contractor to offer Garrett Dennis—a Jacksonville councilman seen as unlikely to support the sale—a $250,000-a-year job with the same dark money group, Grow United, that distributed the ghost candidate funds to the other nonprofits. Accepting the position would mean giving up his council seat. (Dennis didn’t bite.)

The leaked records also detailed how Matrix and Pitts had paid at least $900,000 to six pay-to-play news outlets in Florida and Alabama between 2013 and 2020. The outlets, with more than 1.3 million combined monthly viewers, attacked critics and enemies of Southern Co., FPL, and other Matrix clients, though all of them deny that the payments influenced their coverage.

“These are types of allegations and scandals that shatter the belief that this publicly regulated utility is a safe, secure, and non-volatile investment,” the attorneys in a federal securities suit filed against NextEra in December 2023 wrote of the revelations. It was one of at least two class-action suits filed against the company since Silagy’s resignation alleging political impropriety.

The proceedings in the shareholder suit have been telling, though perhaps not in the way the plaintiffs would prefer. At a hearing this past May, federal district court Judge Aileen Cannon asked their attorneys to clarify the case against NextEra. “Just so I understand,” she said, “has there been any finding of liability…We talk about, sort of, allegations of wrongdoing and criminality. Can you just pinpoint exactly what would be the crime and has there been any finding of such a crime?”

“Artiles is the victim in this case!” his lawyer told me. “He’s the one that quote got fucked on fake scams, on fraudulent business deals that didn’t exist.”

Plaintiffs attorney Jeffrey Block responded in the negative.      

“So, I guess, what exactly is wrong that was allegedly done?” Cannon said.      

Her question, albeit unwittingly, broaches a bigger issue, with ramifications far beyond Florida. The IRS and the FEC have generally failed to enforce nonprofit and election laws effectively. At the state level, regulatory boards are easily influenced—and their penalties for breaking the rules, to the extent they are imposed, are often too small to discourage bad behavior.

It is a system that practically invites monopoly power companies and their consultants to exploit every loophole to maximize political leverage and profit—and even, in some cases, to spend money collected from power consumers to lobby for actions that run counter to those ratepayer’s interests. “It’s ludicrous on its face that state-granted monopolies that provide an essential service are allowed to lobby at all. It ought to be unthinkable,” energy expert David Roberts noted during a 2023 discussion of utility corruption on his podcast, Volts.

The notion of a monopoly utility launching a secret effort to field bogus candidates and trick voters would seem all the more unthinkable, and the fact that a federal judge feels compelled to ask what the company is actually alleged to have done wrong is telling.

Back in January, public corruption prosecutor Tim VanderGiesen told Cannon he intended to follow the money, although it’s not clear how far up the chain he intends to go. “It’s the money, the payment, that makes this illegal, judge,” he asserted then. The state’s position is, look at all the trouble that they were going through to run…ghost candidates.”

As for Artiles’ alleged ghost candidate activities, “It’s my opinion that this case is politically motivated,” defense attorney Quintero told a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge during a hearing earlier this year. “It’s not just one party that does it. It’s both parties and it’s perfectly legal. Period. End of story.”

The state’s star witness this week is none other than ghost candidate Alex Rodriguez, who agreed to plead guilty to some charges and testify against Artiles to avoid a possible prison sentence. The defendant’s legal team is attempting to impugn Rodriguez’s character and portray the money that changed hands between the two men as a con. “Artiles is the victim in this case!” Quintero told me. “He’s the one that quote got fucked on fake scams, on fraudulent business deals that didn’t exist, on loans, on a car Rodriguez sold to him that didn’t exist.”

The jury is expected to decide on the guilt or innocence of Frank Artiles by the end of September. Yet after all the courtroom dramas, feuding consultants, and exposés about the financial subterfuge that enabled the ghost candidates, it remains unclear when, and whether, and to what extent, anyone will ever hold NextEra accountable.

“The system is on trial, because the system enables this kind of conduct,” Dave Aronberg, the Palm Beach County state attorney, told me of Artiles’ trial. “In a fully functioning democracy, this kind of scandal would result in real changes to campaign finance laws. But Florida doesn’t have a fully functioning democracy.”

In the waning days of the Trump presidency, Russell Vought, the outgoing director of the Office of Management and Budget, had a request.

After years in Washington, DC, soaking in the minutiae of policy, Vought had come to both know and loathe the bureaucracy. A rare voice in an administration committed to “draining the swamp” who had actual Beltway experience, he found in the Trump era he could put his expertise to use.

On November 20, 2020, Vought wrote to the head of the Office of Personnel Management for approval to reclassify dozens of career civil servant jobs within his agency. A few weeks before the 2020 election, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a new category of at-will employees—so-called Schedule F positions—which would be exempt from the rules designed to protect civil servants from partisan hatchetmen.

Despite Trump’s loss, Vought pushed to recategorize scores of OMB roles. To an outsider, this might have seemed like a technical adjustment. But in practice, reassignment would have stripped 415 employees—68 percent of the agency’s personnel—of work protections, effectively making it easier for political appointees to fire them. Vought called it “another step to make Washington accountable to the American people.”

In the end, Vought couldn’t get it done by inauguration. But this combination of lofty public rhetoric and ruthless behind-the-scenes gamesmanship has become his trademark. By the tail end of Trump’s turbulent four years in the White House, the OMB director had turned into one of the president’s most trusted and obsequious officials—an acolyte with a knack for making the half-formed schemes from his boss achievable.

As Trump runs for a second term, Vought’s years of faithful service haven’t gone unnoticed; his name has been widely floated for chief of staff, and he is a key policy adviser. One of the masterminds behind Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s presidential transition blueprint to overhaul the executive branch and usher in an ultraconservative agenda—Vought, an avowed Christian nationalist, is the man best positioned to realize Trump’s visions.

A wonk with a neatly trimmed beard and tortoiseshell glasses, Vought, 48, looks like a generic bureaucrat. He has referred to himself as the “boring budget guy” and to his coterie of paper pushers as a group of “propeller heads.” He can be self-effacing, claiming that if he can get the job done, anyone can. But this modesty belies his strategic ability to bend the mechanics of government to the president’s will.

“What makes Vought especially dangerous is he combines ideological extremism with a familiarity and comfort with Washington’s political processes,” says Katherine Stewart, author of the forthcoming book Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. “He knows how to undermine agencies, how to create new bureaucratic forces, how to block funding, and how to engage with other practical features of our political system.”

For the 920-page Mandate for Leadership policy playbook from Project 2025, Vought wrote a chapter that exults in the “enormous power” of the president and previews how a conservative administration would radically subjugate the federal government. He has also crafted a 180-day battle plan to arm an incoming president with hundreds of ready-to-go executive orders, regulations, and secretarial memos. Although the details remain secret, he has hinted at pre-plotted ways to enact Trump’s mass deportations, reclaim federal agencies’ independence, and deploy the US military domestically to police migrants (and, conceivably, quash protests).

“[Trump] has never had an army of people that could serve in government, believe fully in what he believes in, and can execute it with enemy fire that’s coming over the target,” Vought said in June on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, where he is a frequent guest. “We will give this next term [the potential for] something that the country has never seen before.”

Every president makes a mark on the civil service with the political appointees they select to lead government agencies. But Vought nurtures a far more expansive—and alarming—ambition: to institute a new governing paradigm predicated on unrestrained presidential authority. With Vought as the architect, Trump could take his “dictator” on “day one” aspirations beyond words, prosecuting political opponents while avoiding accountability for his own crimes.

In a second term, Trump—and Vought—would complete unfinished business, like the OMB shake-up. Trump left office before the agency could implement Schedule F, and the Biden administration rescinded the executive order. Former staff and experts warned it would have undermined institutional knowledge in favor of blind allegiance. Stuart Shapiro, who worked at OMB from 1998 to 2003 and is the author of Trump and the Bureaucrats: The Fate of Neutral Competence, still describes this first attempt to upend the agency as “a significantly traumatic event.”

Vought and the rest of the Project 2025 administration-in-waiting plan to revive Schedule F—and take it beyond the budget office. Potentially, 50,000 federal workers could be affected, their expert roles open to partisan MAGA loyalists ideologically vetted to ensure little resistance to Trump’s project for an imperial presidency. “It’s going to be groundbreaking,” Vought told Heritage President Kevin Roberts on a podcast last year.

For Vought, politics is downstream from religion. He sees a strong presidency as a way to bring forth a Christian nation. Vought opposes abortion and has referred to transgender identity as a “contagion.” He has suggested migration policy should be rooted in Judeo-Christian principles, with immigrants tested on their readiness to “assimilate.” If Trump wins, Vought wants to infuse the next conservative administration with the values of Christian nationalism—the conviction that the United States is bound to the teachings of Christ, from which all else follows.

“Vought could be one of the key figures leading us into a new and violently authoritarian future.”

Since leaving government, Vought has worked from the outside toward this goal. He founded the Center for Renewing America, part of the “nerve center” of MAGA groups laying the groundwork for Trump’s return. With the stated mission to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God,” CRA is a player in a coalition advising Project 2025.

As much as Trump has tried to distance himself from the initiative in recent months, Vought’s prominent role in it—and his clear ties to the campaign—tell a different story. In May, the Republican National Committee picked Vought to be the policy director of their official 2024 platform. In a secretly recorded interview, Vought—thinking he was talking to prospective donors—told the British nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting that Trump’s public disapproval of Project 2025 amounted to “graduate-level politics.” He also left no room for doubt as to his motivation for helping Trump get back to the White House: “I want to be the person that crushes the deep state.”

“Vought is maybe the most centrally connected hub in the wheel of what a second Trump administration would look like,” says Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan who has been closely following Vought’s moves. In return for their service, Moynihan says, Vought and others in Trump’s orbit see him as “a destabilizing force that would allow them to fundamentally change much of America as a society—starting with American government.”

The youngest of seven children, Vought grew up in Trumbull, Connecticut. His father was an electrician and his mother a schoolteacher whom he credits with leading him “to the Lord” at the age of four. Vought attended Christian summer camps and later studied at Wheaton College, a private Christian school in Illinois. “Ever since college,” Vought said on the Founders Ministries’ podcast in January 2023, “I’ve been pouring into political theory, policy.”

In his senior year, Vought discovered German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was imprisoned by the Nazis for his opposition to Hitler and died in a concentration camp shortly before the end of the war. Vought pored over Bonhoeffer’s letters and papers, borrowing from his thoughts on personal responsibility as an act of freedom in response to God’s call. Vought began to view politics as a necessary instrument of Christian morality. God did not want his followers to just melt into “armchair criticism” of the world, Vought said he learned from reading Bonhoeffer; instead, one should be “sitting and engaging and making mistakes [while] being willing to accomplish all that you can because that moment has been given to you by God.”

After graduating in 1998, Vought went to work on Capitol Hill. As a fiscal hawk staffer for GOP Sens. Dan Coats of Indiana and Phil Gramm from Texas, he immersed himself in legislative procedure and federal budget policy. Vought describes working for Gramm—an unbending free-market advocate known for his antagonistic style—as a “seminal experience.” Gramm, like Vought, took joy in combining technocratic arcana with conservative fundamentalism.

While serving as policy director for Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, Vought assisted in forging a federal budget overhaul bill lauded by conservatives as the “gold standard” for such a proposal. It called for slashing entitlement programs—including veteran and retirement benefits—by $1.8 trillion. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted at the time the cuts would have represented the most severe in modern US history. Vought, Hensarling said, showed “unwavering devotion to the conservative principles.”

In 2004, Vought got a JD from George Washington University as a prelude to a steady rise through leadership positions. He worked in the House Republican Study Committee, the bulwark of right-wing strategy in Congress, then chaired by Indiana Rep. Mike Pence. For the caucus, Vought helped craft Operation Offset, a deficit-reduction plan proposal for Hurricane Katrina relief that would have cut billions of dollars in assistance programs for low-income families, including Medicaid. He defined the job as being the “aide-de-camp in [Congress members’] legislative skirmishes.”

Still, by 2010, Vought had grown frustrated. There was an unwillingness, he believed, among Republican establishment figures to really embrace ideological fights. He transitioned from apparatchik to rebel, joining Heritage Action for America, the foundation’s lobbying arm.

Operating from what the group called a “frat house” in Washington, Vought kept tabs and scorecards on Republicans in Congress based on their conservatism. He helped build a program to train conservative activists and campaigned to repeal the Affordable Care Act. When Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee supported the arms reduction treaty with Russia, Vought angrily led a public charge against him as a RINO. Vought ranted about the cost of food stamp programs and opposed a Republican-sponsored highway bill, saying, “Long-term success of transformational conservative reforms is won and lost in trenches such as these.”

This time outside the government allowed him to speak honestly. Vought, it became clear, saw compromise as a sign of betrayal, fiscal clashes as power struggles, and conflict as opportunity for change. “We need elected officials free of calcified political assumptions of what is possible that reveal only their own level of accommodation with the liberal welfare state,” he wrote on the right-wing website RedState. “And we need officials with the courage to actually shape public opinion with urgency in favor of the policies that are necessary to bring the nation back from the brink.”

Vought quickly earned a reputation as a political brawler. A former Heritage colleague described him to the Washington Post as “ideological in the extreme.” (Vought and CRA did not respond to questions from Mother Jones.)

For some, his unflinching religious zeal might have proved disqualifying. But it was an asset to his former boss, Pence, an evangelical Christian who was now headed to the White House as Trump’s vice president. In the spring of 2017, with Pence’s endorsement, Trump tapped Vought to be deputy director of OMB, the epicenter of policy influence in the executive branch.

At Vought’s Senate confirmation hearing, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) grilled him over a 2016 blog post in which he defended his alma mater’s decision to put a professor on administrative leave for stating that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology,” Vought had written, they “stand condemned” for rejecting Jesus Christ. Vought—confirmed with a tiebreaking vote from Pence—later called that confrontation with the Vermont senator a “warning shot to Christians across the country.” After almost a year as the confirmed second-in-command at OMB, Vought became acting director in 2019 just after Trump chose then-Director Mick Mulvaney to be his chief of staff.

Inside the Trump administration, Vought came across as fiercely dedicated to the America First cause, even if it meant a colossal increase in the federal debt. Trump was prone to outbursts, but to Vought that aggression equaled power. Vought made it his mission to weaponize OMB on behalf of the president, who had long perceived the civil service bureaucracy as an obstacle to his haphazard rule. “We view ourselves as the president’s Swiss Army Knife,” he once said. “How do you come up with options that work and then talk through the pros and cons?” Vought interpreted his job as being inside Trump’s head—a “keeper of ‘commander’s intent.’”

“They’re going to push forward the boundaries of executive authority as far as it can go.”

This was a somewhat radical departure from the norm of OMB. Part of the Executive Office of the President, the agency’s 500 or so career civil servants pride themselves on acting as impartial advisers on policy, budget development and execution, and federal regulations. The work requires a tough balancing act between carrying out the administration’s vision and mitigating the risk of bad decisions. Under Vought, the agency’s culture of serving the presidency—not one particular president—was put to the test. “Vought was seen as valuing political support far more than the competence,” Shapiro writes in his book. OMB employees Shapiro interviewed describe leadership willing to push the boundaries of legality and ignore precedent with “budget gimmicks.”

“A lot of what [Trump] wanted to do and how…was contrary to all the traditions, past practices, and sometimes the law,” Sally Katzen, who served at OMB during the Clinton administration, says. “Trump’s political appointees didn’t want to hear [that] from [civil servants]. It’s like in so many different agencies when Trump was president: The people who knew anything were shut out of the process.” Katzen says Trump’s people “didn’t like hearing ‘no, you can’t; no, you shouldn’t.’”

Vought has made this frustration public. He criticized recalcitrant political appointees as “unwilling to think creatively” and harbored special contempt for career civil servants who worried about violating the law. “The nature of the bureaucracy is that if it isn’t status quo, it must be impossible,” Vought said in 2019. “However, most of the time, when we actually dig into the ways to do what the president wants, we find a way to accomplish it.” He views his legacy at OMB as reining in the broken bureaucracy and “pioneering the type of government that is necessary for an America-first, populist administration.”

Such willingness led Trump to ask Vought for help at key junctures. When rolling out an anti–critical race theory executive order barring anti-racism trainings for federal workers, Trump went to Vought, who dismissed internal resistance as activism to be beaten down. Vought was also behind Trump’s national emergency declaration to unlock billions of dollars in funds from the Pentagon to build the border wall without congressional approval; the office did so despite objection from White House counsels, whom Vought called his number-one adversary in the administration. (An appeals court later ruled the move illegal.)

“He very much knows how to use the executive office to push their policies,” says former Trump White House aide Olivia Troye, who describes Vought as one of Trump’s main enablers. “I think he’s also learned a lot of lessons from the first time around of how to go about doing things.”

These edge-of-the-envelope workarounds (or, as Vought put it, “innovative ways”) put OMB at the center of Trump’s first impeachment over the freezing of congressionally appropriated security assistance to Ukraine as part of a reelection bid to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into investigating the Biden family. Vought helped provide a legal rationale for the hold, ignoring concerns from national security and Department of Defense officials and, ultimately, in violation of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act (ICA) limiting the president’s authority to withhold funds appropriated by Congress. When subpoenaed to testify in the House impeachment inquiry, Vought declined and called it a “sham process.”

Now, Vought and his colleagues at CRA have been making a case for a future Trump administration to exert even more control over the federal budget. They claim the ICA, which Vought has characterized as “an albatross around a president’s neck,” is unconstitutional and should be overturned. In a second term, Trump has vowed to challenge the 50-year-old law and “squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy.” By overriding spending decisions enacted by Congress, Trump would be more empowered to terminate agency programs he disagrees with.

“We are in an era where presidents already are too powerful,” Daniel Schuman, executive director of the American Governance Institute, wrote of Trump’s plan to seize control of impoundment power. “They’re going to push forward the boundaries of executive authority as far as it can go,” he tells me, adding, “They want a president to be like a king.”

Vought launched CRA in 2021, with Trump’s blessings and fundraising support, as a government-in-exile. The venture included other former Trump officials like ex–Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli and Jeffrey Clark, the Department of Justice attorney involved in the plot to subvert the 2020 election. (At a CRA event this year, Bannon praised Cuccinelli and others in the organization as “madmen.”) A sister entity of the deep-pocketed Conservative Partnership Institute, CRA boasted of raising $4.75 million from undisclosed donors last year.

Vought sees himself and CRA as the tip of the spear in a counterrevolution against the left. Everything from the FBI to the Department of Education has been gripped by a “post-constitutional order” imposed by “a corrupt Marxist vanguard.” In this view, wokeism has ruined America, and it’s incumbent on them to correct course. That means going even more on the offensive on cultural battles—pushing anti-CRT model legislation for school districts in several states and urging Republican governors to circumvent federal immigration law by declaring an “invasion” at the southern border.

It also requires wielding budgetary austerity to defund and bring to heel agencies conservatives believe have gone rogue. “I love to cut spending wherever it is,” Vought told the New Yorker, “and I like to cut spending the most in the bureaucracy.” What excited him most, he said, was “cutting the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education.”

As the budget guru for House Republicans, Vought recently played a pivotal role in the debt ceiling showdown, displaying his acumen for budget-cutting power plays. Throughout the crisis, Vought pushed the insurgent Freedom Caucus to stand their ground and extract concessions for the conservative cause. Career disrupters like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) had in Vought a key ally. He “understands strategy and leverage as well as anyone in Washington, DC,” Gaetz said with delight. The battle culminated in the ousting of Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

At CRA, Vought has merged the culture battle of the new right with the old right’s love of small government. It was Vought who planted the original idea for what would become the House subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. And it was Vought’s organization that put forward a 2023 budget model outlining $9 trillion in spending cuts that reads like a list of grievances, from supposed “neo-racism and gender theory” programs to “climate extremism” policies. “America cannot be saved unless the current grip of woke and weaponized government is broken,” Vought wrote in his budget’s introduction. “That is the central and immediate threat facing the country.”

The document also offers a look into how Vought and his allies hope to manipulate federal agencies. When it comes to the FBI, the group would take away resources from counterintelligence and other areas “not salvageable due to a willful and repeated pattern of partisan lawfare waged against Americans.” At the same time, the budget proposed channeling more funding to the criminal investigative division to “thwart the increasing societal destruction caused by progressive policies at the state and local levels.”

In papers and legal memos, Vought and his associates have articulated a vast array of dubious maneuvers to remake American democracy, from ending the Department of Justice’s independence from the president to allowing federal troops to act as domestic law enforcement. Their plans to remove checks and balances and challenge long-established constraints on executive overreach, if realized, would unleash a Trump presidency battle-tested to turn gripe into policy.

If Trump returns to the White House, says Stewart, the author of Money, Lies, and God, “Vought could be one of the key figures leading us into a new and violently authoritarian future.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has lost no time blaming former President Donald Trump for the death of a single mother in Georgia after hospital doctors, working under the constraints of an abortion ban, delayed treating her catastrophic infection.

The story of Amber Nicole Thurman’s death in August 2022—and its connection to the six-week abortion ban enacted in Georgia the month before she died—was first reported by ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana. While doctors, patients, and reproductive justice advocates have long warned that abortion bans were causing profound disruptions and delays in healthcare for pregnant women, Thurman’s is the first death to come to public attention.

“This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school,” Harris said in a statement reported by the Associated Press. “Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again. Survivors of rape and incest are being told they cannot make decisions about what happens next to their bodies. And now women are dying.”

“This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school.”

“These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions,” Harris added.

Later on Tuesday, during a interview moderated by the National Association of Black Journalists and WHYY public radio station in Philadelphia, Harris once again drew a link between Thurman’s death and Trump. “Over 20 states have passed what I call ‘Trump abortion bans,’ because I understand how we got here,” Harris told an audience of journalism students from historically Black colleges and universities. “The former president handpicked three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention they would undo the protections of Roe v. Wade. They did as he intended, and in state after state, laws have been passed criminalizing health care providers.”

The doctors who delayed Thurman’s care were operating under these laws, Harris pointed out. “It appears the people who should have given her health care were afraid they’d be criminalized after the Dobbs decision came down,” she said.

According to ProPublica, Georgia’s ban on abortions after six weeks affected Thurman in multiple ways. When Thurman discovered she was pregnant with twins in July 2022, she was just over the gestational limit. Because the 28-year-old medical assistant could not get an abortion near where she lived, she had to drive four hours with a friend to North Carolina. Then, stuck in traffic, she missed her appointment for a surgical abortion using a technique called dilation and curettage (D&C), so the clinic instead gave her medication to end her pregnancy and sent her home. The distance meant that days later, when Thurman began experiencing a rare complication from the medication abortion—her body hadn’t expelled all the fetal tissue, putting her at risk of a dangerous infection—she couldn’t go back to the provider for a free D&C. Only when her condition deteriorated did she end up going to a hospital outside Atlanta.

There, her blood pressure falling and organs failing, Thurman was diagnosed with “acute severe sepsis.” But physicians waited 20 hours to operate. The hospital and doctors did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. But the delays mirror many other stories about abortion bans leading to dangerous disruptions in pregnancy care since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Physicians afraid of being prosecuted have raised alarms about the laws’ hard-to-interpret exceptions: How close to death does a pregnant patient have to be in order for them to perform emergency abortion?

Thurman ultimately died in the operating room. A Georgia state committee tasked with reviewing maternal deaths found that the delay in providing the D&C had a “large” impact on her death, and they deemed it “preventable,” according to ProPublica.

Harris’ attention to Thurman’s story is no surprise given her reputation as a forceful defender of abortion rights on the campaign trail and in her debate against Trump. But her attention to pregnancy-related deaths—which are far more common in the United States than in other high-income countries—dates back years. In the Senate, Harris focused on reducing maternal mortality for Black women like Thurman, who are 2.6 times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than white women, according to 2022 CDC data. In 2018, she sponsored a resolution recognizing “Black Maternal Health Week” and introduced the Maternal CARE Act to create a grant program to address racial bias in obstetrics and gynecology. As vice president, she pushed efforts to expand postpartum Medicaid coverage from 60 days to 12 months.

“For years, I have worked to make sure our country treats maternal mortality as the national crisis it is,” Harris wrote in 2022, prefacing a 50-point plan to use government agencies to lower maternal deaths. “I am proud to lead our Administration’s efforts to address this issue.”

On Monday,  JD Vance wrote a more than 1,200 word post on X in response to a second apparent assassination attempt targeting Donald. In it, Vance said the “threat of violence is disgraceful,” called on people to “reject political violence,” and said he admired President Joe Biden for “calling for peace and calm.”

Vance’s rejection of political violence would be more persuasive had he not recently endorsed a book that celebrates right-wing political violence and dictators who committed some of the most notorious atrocities of the 20th century. Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) by Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and coauthor Joshua Lisec, a professional ghostwriter, was published in July with a forward by Steve Bannon. As my colleague David Corn reported in July, Vance wrote a blurb used to promote the book: 

In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.

Even by today’s standards, Unhumans is extreme, transparently authoritarian, and evocative of Nazi propaganda in its insistence on the complete dehumanization of political opponents. The thesis of the book is that the right is up against “unhumans” intent on destroying civilization. It defines unhumans broadly—saying that the label applies to communists, socialists, leftists, and so-called progressives. In summarizing their argument, they write: 

This is a book about unhumans, and this is what they do: With power, unhumans undo civilization itself. They undo order. They undo the basic bonds of society that make communities and nations possible. They destroy the human rights of life, liberty and property—and undo their own humanity in the process by fully embracing nihilism, cynicism, and envy.

Vance and Posobiec appear to be close. During a speech in March to the hard-right group American Moment, the Ohio senator began began by shouting out “good friends” in the audience like fellow Peter Thiel acolyte Blake Masters and “Jack P,” an apparent reference to Posobiec, who was in the audience that night. Vance’s blurb appeared a few months later. 

But it is really in their account of 20th century politics that the full extent of their revisionism comes into view. A section dealing with the Spanish Civil war comes with the subhead: “Fransciso Franco, a Great Man of History.” 

“Ironically, for being remembered in the West as a fascist dictator,” the authors claim, “the eventual [sic] victorious general Franco—the self-proclaimed caudillo, or leader, of postwar new Spain—didn’t actually do a lot of fascism or dictating.” This will come as news to the Spaniards whose ancestors’ remains are still being identified in mass graves that Franco was responsible for. 

As I read their paeon to Franco, who took power as a result of a military coup, I remembered Mother Jones co-founder Adam Hochschild’s book on Americans who fought against Franco, Spain in Our Hearts. In it, Hochschild describes how Franco’s troops boasted about having Moorish soldiers rape Spanish women who opposed them. Franco’s Nationalist troops, he writes, celebrated raping perceived enemies by scrawling on walls: “Your women will give birth to Fascists.” Hochschild continues: 

Beyond the rapes, in town after town, women whose only crime was to be supporters of Popular Front parties had their heads shaved. In a practice borrowed from Italian Fascists, they were then forcefed castor oil (a powerful laxative) and paraded through the streets, sometimes naked or half naked, to be jeered as they soiled themselves.

Posobiec and Lisec take a different view of Franco. They suggest that the Spanish civil war is rarely described as what it is: “a righteous, justified war for the sake of the cross—that is, for the honor and glory of Jesus Christ.” 

Elsewhere in the book, Posobiec and Lisec celebrate Augusto Pinochet, who came to power in a CIA-backed coup that deposed Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende. One of the defining atrocities of Pinochet’s dictatorship were the “death flights” in which political dissidents were killed and forcibly disappeared after being dropped from the air into the ocean or mountains. Posobiec and Lisec write that the “story of tossing communists out of helicopters hails from Pinochet’s elimination of communism.” They continue approvingly, “Wherever Pinochet was, there was no communism.”

Other subjects of the author’s adulation include Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Joseph McCarthy. In closing, they argue that “Great Men of Means,” which they effectively define as dictators, are one of the best ways to crush their subhuman opponents. Supporting such a strongman is depicted as all but the opportunity of a lifetime. “You’ll know them when you see them,” the authors explain, “as they attract all the literal and metaphorical firepower of the enemy.”

Vance may abhor some political violence. But his endorsement of Unhumans raises questions about how he feels about the kind directed at his political enemies.

Trump told many lies at last week’s debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. One, it seems increasingly clear, is the stumbling claim—meant to shore up his support of in vitro fertilization, or IVF—that he is “a leader on fertilization.”

On Tuesday, Senate Republicans provided even more evidence of Trump’s lie, by voting—again—to block a floor vote on a bill that would protect IVF access nationwide. Introduced by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who said she used IVF to give birth to her two daughters, the legislation would prevent states from enacting restrictions on fertility treatments.

Trump has done far more to impede IVF access than protect it. He is, in fact, the reason it’s in the news at all: Trump appointed three of the five conservative Supreme Court justices who overruled Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, imperiling IVF access in states like Alabama. (The state’s Supreme Court ruled in February that frozen embryos, often discarded in the IVF process, could be considered children under state law.)

Leading reproductive rights and fertility groups called on senators to support the bill, but the Republicans have made it clear they are not interested. With 60 votes needed to move forward, the “Right to IVF Act” failed to advance, with only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) joining Democrats in their affirmative votes. This marked Republicans’ second sabotaging of the bill, which they also blocked from moving forward in June. (That same month, they also blocked a bill to protect contraception at the federal level.)

“The reality is that [Trump] is the reason that IVF is at risk in the first place,” Duckworth said on the Senate floor after the vote. “The Dobbs decision is what led us to today’s nightmare, taking the power to decide how and when to start families from us women, and handing it to politicians in statehouses across the country.”

Duckworth slams Trump on IVF, saying “he is the reason that IVF is at risk in the first place,” before imploring to her GOP colleagues: “Today's vote is your chance to put your vote where your mouth is.” pic.twitter.com/8i7fVmRaa8

— POLITICO (@politico) September 17, 2024

On a call with reporters Tuesday morning, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said if Trump was serious about protecting IVF he would have been conferring with Senate Republicans on how to move forward. “Where is he now?” she asked. “Where is he in the middle of all of this?” (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Republicans called the measure a show vote. GOP legislators have offered counter proposals to enshrine IVF. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) in May introduced a bill that would revoke Medicaid funding from states that ban IVF—but also not require any organizations to provide IVF, and allow states to regulate “health and safety standards” around it.

Leading reproductive rights and fertility groups called that bill—only 3 pages long, to Duckworth’s sixty-four page legislation—”phony,” saying it would not go far enough in protecting fertility care from restrictive state policies, and urged senators to support Duckworth’s bill instead.

A spokesperson for Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who was not in DC for Tuesday’s vote, accused Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) of playing “political games.” Vance and Trump “fully support guaranteed IVF access for every American family,” the spokesperson said. (Trump also claimed that, under his watch, the government or insurance companies would pay for it—which reportedly baffled even his advisers.)

On the Senate floor Tuesday, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Cruz’s bill “does nothing to meaningfully protect IVF from the biggest threat from lawmakers and anti-abortion extremists.” She also highlighted the far more insidious threat that blocking these protections poses: It creates a potential pathway for Republicans to get closer to enshrining “fetal personhood” in the law.

As I have written, fetal personhood would ban abortion nationwide by granting full citizenship and rights to fetuses. Anti-abortion leaders have admitted that is their goal. (As Murray pointed out, Cruz signaled his support for a fetal personhood amendment to the Constitution during his 2016 campaign; Vance has also signaled his support for fetal personhood and a federal abortion ban in the past, as I have covered.)

Cruz’s bill, Murray said, “is silent on fetal personhood, which is the biggest threat to IVF,” adding that it is also “silent on whether states can demand that an embryo be treated the same as a living, breathing person, or whether parents should be allowed to have clinics dispose of unused embryos, something that is a common necessary part of the IVF process.”

“That uncertainty is at the core of the bans that Republicans have caused,” she added.

Another way of looking at it is that the uncertainty may be the point. Republicans have been desperately trying to obfuscate their true goals for a second Trump term: They explained their plans—to ban medication abortion nationwide and eliminate the Department of Education, among others—in the 900-page Project 2025 playbook, and then Trump tried to distance himself from it, despite Trump’s and Vance’s documented connections to the initiative. The GOP has tried to promote the narrative they have “softened” on abortion despite reality proving otherwise.

And today, despite Cruz trying to paint the Democrats as anti-IVF and anti-family, it was the Republican party that tanked this vote—just like it was the Republican party that killed the expanded child tax credit.

Vance may want to remember this the next time he tries to claim this country makes it too difficult to have families.

As Vice President Kamala Harris said in response to the Senate vote: “You can’t say you care about families and then not care about this.”

Donald Trump’s abortion bans jeopardized IVF access for families across America.

Today, his Republican allies in Congress once again voted against protecting IVF.

They can’t say they care about families if they don't care about this. pic.twitter.com/Hrr5cxRbcQ

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 18, 2024

Update, Sept. 18: This post was updated with comments from Vice President Kamala Harris.

In the week following the presidential debate, Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene have all tweeted in support of a thinly sourced rumor claiming that a “whistleblower” at ABC News came forward to reveal that the event was rigged in favor of Kamala Harris.

The notion has taken on increasingly farcical dimensions, with some sources claiming that the whistleblower died in a car accident soon after revealing his secrets, and others, including Ackman and Musk, circulating a typo-riddled “affidavit” from said whistleblower that is obviously not real.

Fake news peddlers claimed Harris was given debate questions in advance.

Now, thanks to a curious bit of unwitting help from Google News, the name of a real person who recently died—a Virginia plumber and pipefitter who has no connection to ABC—is being tied to the story.

Following Donald Trump’s uninspired performance last Tuesday against Kamala Harris, prominent Trump supporters and fake news peddlers alike began claiming without evidence that the ABC News-hosted debate had somehow been rigged in Harris’ favor or that she’d been given the debate questions in advance. This isn’t new: Trump spent much of 2016 arguing the presidential debates would be rigged against him, claims he repeated in 2020 in regards to his first debate with Joe Biden. 

This time, however, the idea has taken on new contours, spread by Twitter users who claim to be independent journalists and researchers. One central player has been a person calling himself Black Insurrectionist, a Trump partisan who specifically says he’s not a journalist, but who claims to get inside information from figures in conservative politics. He’s also paid for his account, @DocNetyoutube, to be verified, meaning his replies and visibility are boosted on the site.

Two days after the debate, Black Insurrectionist claimed to have access to an affidavit from an ABC News whistleblower, outlining the ways in which Harris was given an upper hand. 

“I have just signed a non-disclosure agreement with the attorney of the whistleblower,” he wrote. “The affidavit states how the Harris campaign was given sample question [sic] which were essentially the same questions that were given during the debate and separate assurances of fact checking Donald Trump and that she would NOT be fact checked.” He added that he would release the affidavit after the attorney redacted the whistleblower’s name.

A few days later, he did so, producing a clumsily redacted, typo-filled, strangely-formatted document, dated September 9. The affidavit claimed that Harris was promised she wouldn’t be questioned about the health of Joe Biden or her tenure as “Attorney General in San Francisco”—a position that doesn’t exist.

When people pointed out a range of such shortcomings, Black Insurrectionist took to feuding with those arguing the document appears to be obviously fake. After claiming that the document was sent to Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson in unredacted form, he signaled a retreat. “I have gone as far with it as I can,” he tweeted on Monday morning. “The rest is up to the whistleblower and Congress.” 

None of this makes a lot of sense, and as ABC News told Mother Jones in a statement, “ABC News followed the debate rules that both campaigns agreed on and which clearly state: No topics or questions will be shared in advance with campaigns or candidates.”

Nonetheless, the affidavit story was quickly picked up by a variety of sources, including, as the Daily Beast first pointed out, a fake news site called Leading Report, whose tweet about the affidavit has been viewed nearly two million times. Other people who shared the affidavit include former Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, who did a brief prison stint in 2018 for lying to the FBI, and Republican commentator and plagiarist Benny Johnson, who worked as a commentator for Tenet Media, the company that the DOJ alleges was secretly funded by employees of the state-backed Russian media company RT. (Johnson and other commentators have said they didn’t know about RT’s role.)

Another person promoting the affidavit is hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who tweeted it at Disney CEO Bob Iger on Sunday evening. (Disney is ABC News’ parent company.) “I find the allegations credible as written,” Ackman wrote, adding that he “strongly encourage[s]” Iger to investigate them. “Our democracy depends on transparency, particularly with regard to events which can impact the outcome of the presidential election. I ask on behalf of all voters that you treat these allegations with the seriousness they deserve.” Elon Musk was among those who retweeted Ackman’s post, which has now been viewed 5 million times. Musk also commented “Woah!” to another person sharing images from the supposed affidavit. (By Tuesday, Ackman had declared he planned to alert the SEC about ABC’s supposed debate misconduct.) 

As word of the supposed affidavit picked up steam, so too did a tale about the untimely death of the person purportedly behind it. On Sunday, Rep. Taylor Greene tweeted, “The ABC whistleblower who claimed Kamala Harris was given debate questions ahead of the debate has died in a car crash according to news reports.”

Those “reports” appeared to be a WordPress blog whose URL is “County Local News,” but whose homepage title reads “Bgrnd Search.” The site, which seems to be running malware, ran a gobbledygook story claiming that the unnamed whistleblower died in a car accident on September 13 outside Bethesda, Maryland.

Because of an unfortunate twist of Google News’ algorithms, the car-crash story is being given an unwitting boost. Searches for the words “ABC whistleblower” bring up an article about an unrelated 64-year-old person who died in a car accident on September 11 in Virginia. That story appears to be coming up because it links to another story about whistleblower lawsuits filed against the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) authority.

There’s no indication whatsoever that any ABC News “whistleblower” even exists, and even less that this Virginia man was him. But Google’s algorithm has helped create a link where none exists—at least one fake news site has named the deceased 64-year old as the whistleblower, although most others haven’t followed suit.

A Google spokesperson confirmed that the article on the car crash was likely appearing in unrelated news results because it contained similar keywords. The spokesperson said that in such situations, the company will typically look for ways to improve their algorithm to prevent future occurrences, rather than take immediate action.

While Greene, on the other hand, has since tweeted that the car crash story “appears to be false,” she still doubled down on repeating the earlier unproven claim that gave rise to it: “We need a serious investigation into the whistleblower’s report that Kamala Harris was given debate questions ahead of time from ABC!” 

In a wide-ranging interview on Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris was faced with a series of questions about her position on Israel’s war on Gaza, and specifically, whether her administration would see a shift in US policy.

But pressed for specifics at an event hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists, Harris repeatedly declined, opting largely to stick to familiar talking points that expressed support for a two-party solution and deals to secure the release of Israeli hostages and a ceasefire. In other words, Harris stuck closely to the party line—appearing in some moments slightly frustrated with follow-up questions from moderators, like this exchange with Politico‘s Eugene Daniels:

“You’ve gotten a lot of credit for emphasizing the humanity of Palestinians. But what I often hear from folks is that there is no policy change that either you or President Biden said you would do. Is there a policy change as president that you would do in our helping of Israel in this war?”

“We need to get this deal done,” Harris replied, “and we need to get it done immediately. And that is my position. And that is my policy.”

Daniels followed up. “But in the way that we send weapons and the way we interact as their ally, are there specific policy changes?”

Harris said that she was “entirely supportive” of the Biden administration’s decision to pause a shipment of weapons. She then quickly turned back to a need for a ceasefire agreement.

The line of questioning was the toughest Harris has faced on the issue, which remains a source of deep frustration among some Democratic voters over what they see as the party’s effort to push Gaza into the margins of political discourse. Harris’ answers on Tuesday, which relied heavily on boilerplate campaign points, are unlikely to quell that criticism.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to elaborate on how he would “end the migrant invasion of America.” The candidate for president—who has repeatedly vowed to conduct the largest mass deportation campaign in US history—exhumed the usual laundry list: He would “stop all migrant flights,” do away with the Biden administration’s Customs and Border Protection mobile app, and halt refugee resettlement. None of these proposals are new or surprising coming from the Trump campaign.

But one part of the GOP nominee’s weekend post stood out. “[We will] return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration),” Trump wrote. Former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller reposted it, saying “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!”

What did Trump and Miller mean by “remigration”? Even seasoned immigration policy analysts had to look the term up:

Trump here uses the phrase "remigration." I was unfamiliar with the term, so I googled it.

Wikipedia describes it as a "far-right and Identitarian political concept" largely used to describe the mass deportation of non-white immigrants and their descendants from Europe. https://t.co/i8K5yK0sPk pic.twitter.com/vECWjE1DVK

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

“Remigration,” as a 2019 article about the rise of extreme anti-immigrant language in Europe from the Associated Press explains, is the “chilling notion of returning immigrants to their native lands in what amounts to a soft-style ethnic cleansing.” The word stands in for a policy that entails the forced repatriation or mass expulsion of non–ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship. With little fanfare, Trump seems to be hinting at bringing an even more radical idea into his immigration proposals (to Miller’s all-capped cheers) that goes further than the mass deportation of the undocumented population.

“He knows what he is doing,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history who studies fascism and authoritarianism, said of Trump’s statement. “He chooses his words carefully.”

The value-neutral term “remigration” has been employed in anodyne ways—for instance, in the context of Jews returning to Germany after World War II. But the word has been co-opted by far-right groups, mainly in European nations, and is synonymous with these movements now.

In France, one-time far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour proposed the creation of a “remigration ministry.” Speaking at the National Conservatism conference in Brussels this April, Zemmour denounced the “Islamization of the continent” as an existential threat to the European civilization.

Most notably, “remigration” has gained a stronghold in Germany. In 2023, a jury of linguists in the country elected remigration the “non-word” of the year for its “deliberately ideologically” appropriation as an euphemism for the forced expulsion of people to “achieve cultural hegemony and ethnic homogeneity.”

“The seemingly harmless term remigration is used by the ethnic nationalists of the [Alternative for Germany] AfD [party] and the Identitarian Movement to conceal their true intentions: the deportation of all people with supposedly the wrong skin color or origin, even if they are German citizens,” one guest juror said.

Last November, members of the far-right AfD, neo-Nazis, and businesspeople reportedly gathered in Potsdam to discuss plans for mass deportation, including of “unassimilated citizens” with non-German ethnic backgrounds. The man behind a master plan to relocate asylum seekers, foreigners with lawful status, and some Germans of foreign origin to a so-called “model state” in North Africa was the Austrian identitarian activist Martin Sellner. (Even French far-right leader Marine Le Pen took issue with the secret meeting, expressing “total disagreement” with the remigration discussions.)

More recently, according to local reports, an AfD candidate in Stuttgart campaigned with the slogan “Rapid remigration creates living space,” a nod to the concept of Lebensraum used by the Nazis to justify the genocidal expansion into Eastern Europe.

Trump’s mention of remigration didn’t go unnoticed. Sellner, who has been barred from entering Germany and the United Kingdom and had his visa-free travel permit canceled by US authorities in 2019 over suspected links to the Christchurch shooter, appeared to celebrate on X the former US president’s “calls for remigration” as a victory.

According to Cécile Alduy, a French expert on the political uses of language at Stanford University whose works touches on issues of nationhood and the mythology of national and ethnic identities, remigration is “flagship far-right lexicon.” The word, which is the same in French, is a neologism, she explained in an email. “The far right is fond of creating new words, such as ‘immigrationism’ or ‘remigration’ or ‘francocide’ or the concept of ‘big replacement’ because they argue that only them can see the new reality, and that this new reality needs a new vocabulary to shake people’s mind into more awareness of the dangers at play.”

As I’ve written about here, anti-immigrant sentiment has been at the center of the revival of the right globally, including in the United States. At the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC, this summer, speakers repeated some of the very beliefs animating the notion of remigration, from an emphasis on assimilation to the characterization of multiculturalism as “anti-Western,” and calls to “decolonize America.” One anti-immigration hardliner floated the idea to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.

The use of this kind of language fits the context of an escalation in dangerous rhetoric about immigrants in the United States. Lately, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has played a key role in disseminating false rumors about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, abducting and eating pets, which Trump repeated on the debate stage. The lies have resulted in bomb threats and unleashed fear in the community. (They are also seemingly deliberate. When pressed by CNN’s Dana Bash on why he continues to perpetuate the debunked claims, Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”)

If given the opportunity, Trump and his acolytes could turn hateful discourse into expulsion policies targeting all immigrants. Last week, the former president said he would start the mass deportation operations in Springfield and Colorado’s Aurora, two cities caught in the vortex of right-wing anti-immigrant conspiracy theories. Most Haitian migrants in the United States have received legal status under the Temporary Protected Status program or a Biden administration humanitarian parole initiative and are authorized to work.

But that would mean little to Miller, who has boasted of a potential second Trump presidency’s move to take away people’s citizenship. “We started a new denaturalization program under Trump,” he posted on X in October of last year. “In 2025, expect it to be turbocharged.”

Michael Clemens, an economics professor at George Mason University who studies international migration, noted on the social media platform, “It is not about who should get US citizenship—it is about some US citizens illegitimizing other US citizens.”

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

By now, you probably don’t need any more mastication about the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. This was an event that required little after-the-fact explication. Harris deftly maneuvered Trump into displaying his worse qualities and unfitness for office. If you want to see how I weighed in, you can check this out. But it was troubling that two polls taken following the debate that captured the obvious—a majority believed Harris had won—showed that about a third of the viewers said Trump had triumphed. (CNN put the number at 37 percent for debate watchers; YouGov placed it at 31 percent for registered voters.) This gives us a good idea of how many Americans are either part of the Trump cult or susceptible to its pull. It’s not a majority or a plurality, but it’s a large slice.

Looking at these numbers, I thought of a recent New York Times column by David French, a Never Trumper conservative who has had to bear particularly cruel attacks from far-righters for his anti-Trump views. He reported that on a recent trip to Chicago he passed by the Trump tower there, and this triggered a thought:

I was reminded once again that Donald Trump is a singular figure in American politics. There is no one like him, and that means that no one can replace him. While it’s always perilous to make predictions about American politics—or anything else—here’s one that I’m almost certain is correct: If Trump loses in 2024, MAGA will fade. He is the irreplaceable key to its success.

French pointed out to his readers that after a recent column in which he said he was voting for Harris in order “to save conservatism from MAGA,” the MAGA response “was, in essence: You’re fooling yourself. Trump or no Trump, we own the party now.” No, he retorted in this offering: “If Trump loses, MAGA will fade. It will not go away, of course. Reactionary populism is a permanent fixture of American politics, but don’t believe MAGA’s hype. Its national success depends on one man.”

Of course, it is premature to ponder the fate of the GOP and the radical right should Trump lose the election (even after this week’s thrashing). But columnists have to column-ize. (Ditto for newsletter-ists.) And it struck me that French was, in a way, peering through the wrong end of the telescope.

You cannot have selling without buying. You cannot have a con without a mark who wants to believe the con.

Indeed, Trump is an unparallelled politician: a celebrity reality TV star and billionaire full of braggadocio and personality disorders who somehow convinced tens of millions of angry Americans he is their hero. He does possess unique characteristics—including malignant narcissism and profound dishonesty—that have helped him trounce all GOP rivals and seize control of the party and the MAGA movement, as he has tossed the bloodiest of red meat to our Republican neighbors. Yet at issue here is not supply but demand.

I explained this in my recent book, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy. You cannot have selling without buying. You cannot have a con without a mark who wants to believe the con. Since Trump became a political figure on the right with his championship of the racist birther conspiracy theory, he has been a carnival barker peddling grievance, culture war, hate, bigotry, and paranoia—the same way he has pitched luxury apartments, steaks, vodkas, ties, tea, books (about himself), a board game (about himself), Trump University (a fraud), casinos (that failed), an airline (that failed), a social media platform (that is failing), and, more recently, sneakers, Bibles, pieces of his clothing, NFTs, trading cards, and, yes, crypto.

He has usually found an audience for his junk and his bunk. As I pointed out in American Psychosis, before he entered politics, the conservative movement and the GOP base had been radicalized for decades by an assortment of its leaders and outfits, from Joe McCarthy to Barry Goldwater to Richard Nixon to the New Right and the Religious Right to Ronald Reagan to Pat Robertson to Sarah Palin to the tea party. Repeatedly, significant figures on the right made common cause with extremists to push the crass politics of hate and othering. The basic message has been that liberals, Democrats, progressive activists, civil rights and social justice advocates, feminists, environmentalists, academics, the media, and that entire ilk are all godless commies conspiring to destroy the real America—and they must be annihilated.

Republican voters had long been encouraged to cultivate a taste for demonization. Trump saw how easy it was to feed this beast and ride it to glory.

Over recent decades, conservatives with big megaphones—think Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and subsequently much of Fox News—have pressed increasingly harsh and divisive rhetoric. Bill and Hillary Clinton were murderers. Barack Obama was a secret, born-in-Kenya socialist with a plot to destroy the economy so he could take over as a dictator. A feedback loop was established. Conservative thought leaders dished out the swill, riled up voters, were rewarded with lucrative gigs or votes, and, subsequently, intensified the poison. The impulse to exploit and boost the worst fears of right-leaning voters was incentivized and rewarded.

Trump saw this market opportunity and rushed in with his wares of rage and all his lies. Republican voters had long been encouraged to cultivate a taste for demonization. Trump saw how easy it was to feed this beast and ride it to glory. That is, self-glory. Canny as he can be, he realized there was a demand for Trumpism.

What happens to this demand should he lose? Part of that might depend on what occurs after such a defeat. Will he again generate chaos, chicanery, conflict, and violence? Let’s assume that he does go (somewhat) quietly—granted, a huge assumption. What becomes of MAGA? Without the pitchman, French believes, it withers. He notes that there is “no ready heir to his MAGA crown,” observes that MAGA candidates, such as Kari Lake in Arizona, have not fared well in recent elections, and says MAGA is generally a hot mess of weirdness and scandal (see JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene).

Will the craving for Trump’s politics of cruelty, carnage, conspiracy, and contempt evaporate? There may be no obvious successor. Yet with Trump gone, the radicalized base of the GOP will still be here. Certainly, there might be disruptive battles within the party among those who desire to claim the throne and no quick and clear resolution. (Tom Cotton versus Ted Cruz!) But the 30 percent or so of Republicans who believe the QAnon conspiracy theory that the government, media, and financial worlds are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation—a bonkers idea that Trump has legitimized and amplified—are not going away. Nor are the more than half of Republicans who still buy Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election. And their yearning for that red meat of hate and demonization may well remain.

MAGA was not a break from the GOP’s past; it was an evolution. Many anti-Trump right-wingers can’t come to terms with that.

I understand why French and other anti-Trump conservatives want to view MAGA as an anomaly and tie its dominance on the right to the machinations and success of just one extraordinary man. Get rid of that guy and the GOP has a shot at becoming once more a normal party. This absolves French and other lifelong conservatives of having spent decades within a party as its base was guided by GOP leaders and influencers into its extremism of today. MAGA was not a break from the GOP’s past; it was an evolution. Many anti-Trump right-wingers can’t come to terms with that. (One who has is Stuart Stevens, formerly Mitt Romney’s chief strategist, who acknowledged his own role in the GOP’s devolution in his book, It Was All a Lie.)

Trump is not the cause of the disease that ails French and the rest of us. He sussed out how to capitalize on dangerous sentiments that have been brewing and nurtured for years. He is just the symptom. It’s pretty to think that one election can rid the body politic of this virus. Preventing Trump from returning to power is a first step, but stronger and longer treatment will likely be necessary to cleanse this system of Trumpism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson has a tenuous relationship with the word “hope.” The marine biologist, policy expert, teacher, and author is too much of a pragmatist to rely on something so passive. Hope as a noun is defined as having an expectation of a positive outcome. To Johnson, that’s not in line with reality. In a chapter near the end of her new book, What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures, she writes, “Fuck hope. Where’s the strategy? What are we going to do so that we don’t need hope?”

“Fuck hope. Where’s the strategy? What are we going to do so that we don’t need hope?”

Later in the chapter she concedes that active hope—“catalytic hope” as she calls it—is the type of thing she could get down with. A hope that allows people to exist on auto-pilot could be disastrous. But a hope that inspires people to act could be revolutionary.

What If We Get It Right?, which hit shelves Tuesday, offers some of this inspiration. The book features Johnson’s interviews with a wide swath of people about how we as a society are going to get ourselves out of the climate mess. She talked to the likes of Indigenous rights activist Jade Begay, screenwriter Adam McKay, film executive Franklin Leonard, climate justice advocate Ayisha Siddiqa, and writer and activist Bill McKibben, among others, on topics ranging from how to facilitate a truly just transition to how to design neighborhoods for a warmer, more dangerous world. 

Standing apart from the technocratic and economic-oriented solutions literature, What If We Get It Right? focuses on nature-based and justice-oriented strategies. For instance, Johnson interviewed farmer and author Leah Penniman about the role of reparations in regenerative agriculture. While regenerative agriculture has become increasingly buzzy—the USDA is even making massive investments to support it—Penniman highlights that giving farmland back to its rightful owners, including dispossessed Indigenous and Black communities, is just as important as eliminating industrial methods of farming because regenerative practices are derived from those communities.

In fact, the book seems to say, much of the wisdom about how to conquer climate change is already at our fingertips—we just need to do a better job of actually putting those solutions into practice, whether by strengthening our disaster recovery systems, finding new ways of building cities, or covering climate change better in the news. Everyone has gifts to help in the fight. A mass movement to tackle climate change through art, design, science, policy, and justice is our best bet.

Ahead of the book’s release, I spoke with Johnson about her writing process, the plethora of climate solutions out there, and what to do to avoid spiraling about climate change. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

Why did you want to write this book?

I actually don’t know that I wanted to write this book, but it was like the book that I wanted to read and I couldn’t find it. I was feeling like there was a gap in the literature of books helping us see the way forward, or more broadly than books, I guess just culture. 

“We have so much media about climate apocalypse—but not a lot about how we have the climate solutions we need, and what would happen if we just did them?”

We have so much media about climate apocalypse, so many films, so much news about disasters—but not a lot about how we have the climate solutions we need, and what would happen if we just did them? I was wishing for that to be the climate conversation, to shift more to a solutions focus, and not in a techno-utopian kind of way, but in a grounded in nature and justice sort of way.

How do you want a reader to approach this book? Do you want it to be a Project Drawdown thing, where they’re like, “Oh, let me just read one of these chapters, and then, like, go live my life and come back.” Or do you want people to read it completely from start to finish?

I don’t want it to feel like a textbook. I mean, that’s why it took me so long to write the book, because I couldn’t crack the code of how to structure this so that it would feel readable. And my editor had been coming to this event series that I curate and host at Pioneer Works, an arts institution in Brooklyn, and he was like, “This is the book. It’s you telling us who we should be listening to and helping us understand what they’re saying.”

Writing the book, did it make you feel better?

I don’t know that I felt bad when I started. I think the broad strokes of climate science and where we’re heading—unless we rapidly, dramatically change our ways—have been known for decades. That’s still the case. 

Everyone has some way they can contribute to climate solutions. I feel better now that this book exists, because it’s like the best I could do.

I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about the writing process. Where did you write this book and what was helpful for you to get it across the finish line?

I started writing this book at my family farm, my mom’s, in my bedroom there and at the kitchen table that’s described in the introduction of the book. And I moved to Maine almost two years ago now, and the book was written almost entirely here. I moved here because I needed more green in my life, right? And the opening line of the last chapter is: If we get it right, the world is a lot more green. I just wanted to skip ahead to living in that world.

After the last debate, are you feeling hopeful about the future of climate action?

Hope is not really my jam. I’m not an optimist. As a scientist, I find that to be a sort of unscientific position, but I also, you know, just the assumption it’ll be okay in the end—I don’t harbor that, but I do know that there’s also a scientific fact that there are many different possible futures. And my job, as I’ve embraced it, is to help make sure we have the best possible one. 

“There are many different possible futures. And my job, as I’ve embraced it, is to help make sure we have the best possible one.” 

And that didn’t change after the debate. I mean, I’m still like, “Wow, we have a lot of work to do.” We clearly need a much stronger climate electorate so that politicians feel like they have to talk about their climate plan, so that the debate organizers and moderators feel like they need to ask those questions, not just one at the end, but acknowledge that climate is the context within which all of our other policies and challenges as a country are unfolding.

What’s a good first step for someone who wants to work toward climate solutions but doesn’t even know where to start because they’re so overwhelmed? 

I would just say, I get it: It’s the biggest thing humanity has ever faced. Feeling anxious, overwhelmed, depressed about it is a reasonable and very human response. So there’s nothing wrong with that, per se. 

But of course, I do hope that people will find a way to leverage that energy into finding a way to contribute to solutions, because we really do have the solutions we need. I think that’s sort of the open secret: We know what to do. We know how to shift to renewables. We know how to green buildings. We know how to improve public transit. We know how to improve agriculture. We know how to protect and restore ecosystems. None of this is a secret. You don’t need to wait for a magical new technology. It’s just a matter of building the cultural momentum, unlocking the political will, pressuring a shift in financing. 

Obviously, I know it’s not simple, but I do think it’s important for people to understand that we’re not lacking for solutions. We’re lacking for people working on them.

A few months ago, a man crawling along a rooftop in Pennsylvania tried to murder Donald Trump at a campaign rally. Hours later, press releases started to circulate, from analysts, think tanks, politicians, and pundits, all offering to cut through the swell of confusion and misinformation. 

One of the people who washed up in my inbox was Ben Swann, whom a New York–based PR team presented as a journalist, and a source “to separate the conspiracy theories from the facts behind Trump’s assassination attempt.” 

This was curious for several reasons, the main being that Swann is himself an energetic conspiracy theorist, who first attracted notice in 2017 by touting Pizza­gate, a lurid conspiracy about child trafficking, while working for Atlanta’s CBS affiliate. Swann was ultimately fired, but quickly launched a new career as a star of the most conspiracy-addled corner of the online universe, posting to his website Truth in Media. He also began accepting millions of dollars in funding from a Kremlin-backed broadcaster to produce pro-Russian propaganda, according to disclosure forms he filed with the federal government when registering as a foreign agent. 

While Swann has prospered by confidently and cynically presenting himself as a force for truth, legitimate researchers of disinformation—the kind he’s spread for much of his professional life—are struggling. Over the last several years, the field has undergone a broadscale attack from politicians, right-wing media, and tech industry giants. As a result, research has been curtailed, people have been laid off, and academics working in the space even fear talking to one another, lest it leave them open to charges of “conspiring” by their adversaries.

Who is trying to kill their industry and why are their attacks working so well?

The timing of the crisis could hardly be worse. In January, the World Economic Forum highlighted dis- and misinformation as a top global threat over the next few years, citing concerns about increasingly sophisticated AI and the ways that disinformation could be used to destabilize consequential elections—including here in the United States, but also in the UK, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mexico, and India. With our campaign season in full swing, the political implications of the battle over disinformation are obvious: Identifying fake news and misleading narratives is both a core part of the researchers’ work and routinely attacked as a political project.

The question that has begun to bedevil these disinformation researchers—used to recognizing patterns and ferreting out the source of influence operations—is, who is trying to kill their industry and why are their attacks working so well? Some see strong similarities to corporate-backed assaults on climate scientists in the 1990s, where oil and gas groups teamed up with conservative politicians to push back against the scientific consensus that human beings were causing climate change. Others see echoes of Cold War paranoia.

“The Red Scare came for academia also,” one researcher said recently, with exasperation. “How do we not see the historical parallels?”

There are, to be clear, still some cops on the beat. At the University of Washington, for instance, the Center for an Informed Public does rapid response on electoral rumors. Other academic institutions like Clemson University and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard continue to publish peer-reviewed research, like Shorenstein’s Misinformation Review, which looks at global misinformation. But no one disputes that the environment for doing this work has gotten much, much worse.

Led by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the Trump loyalist who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, Republicans in Congress have mounted an onslaught of harassing investigations and legislative attacks, accusing the field of colluding with the Biden administration to silence conservatives. Jordan and his committee investigators have grilled disinformation researchers from both Clemson and the University of Washington, where Dr. Kate Starbird, co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public, has been under sustained attack. The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), which spent the last five years studying misinformation and misuse of social media platforms, has been gravely weakened after lawsuits brought by conservative pundits and anti-vaccine activists alleging it was promoting censorship. One was filed by America First Legal, the organization run by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who bragged it was “striking at the heart of the censorship-­industrial complex.” 

Stanford has denied that SIO is ending its work, saying it is simply facing “funding challenges.” But its founder, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos, has left, as has its star researcher Renée DiResta, who warned in a June New York Times op-ed that her field was “being dismantled.” Disinformation scholar Joan Donovan recently filed a whistleblower complaint against Harvard, alleging the university dismissed her to “protect the interests of high-value donors with obvious and direct ties to Meta.” (Harvard said her departure was due to her research lacking a faculty sponsor, and insisted “donors have no influence” over its work.)

The conservative legislative onslaught against disinformation shows very little sign of slowing. In May, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky introduced a bill that would ban federal funding for “disinformation research grants, and for other purposes.” The right-wing Cato Institute applauded and praised Massie for fighting back against “censorship.”

Arguments over truth, and the role of the government and academia in safeguarding it, aren’t new.

Some blows have been self-inflicted. The industry had become, as researchers Chico Q. Camargo and Felix M. Simon put it in a 2022 paper, “too big to fail” without reckoning with its rapid growth or establishing enough “methodological rigor.” In a passage that inadvertently echoes conservative attacks, the paper, sponsored by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, cautions against the field’s “unique position,” given that whatever it determines “counts as mis-/disinformation will likely be regulated as such.”

Arguments over the nature of truth, and the role of the government and academia in safeguarding it, aren’t new. Before misinformation, disinformation, and fake news became phrases in America’s political lexicon, a similar storm wracked climate science. Beginning in the 1990s, climate researchers faced attacks from politicians and private groups alike, who contested their widely accepted finding that human activity was causing climate change. Fossil fuel–funded organizations like the Heartland Institute began loudly promoting scientists willing to attack the consensus while hosting a series of lavish conferences devoted to promoting alternative climate facts. In 2009, a hacker stole emails between climate researchers, helping launch a scandal, known as Climategate, sustained by false claims that the messages documented scientific misconduct.

One target of the hack, and of climate change deniers throughout this period, was Dr. Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climatologist best known for his 1998 “hockey stick” graph, which showed sharply rising temperatures over the past century. Mann told me he sees “parallels between the politically and ideologically motivated attacks on climate scientists, public health scientists, and now disinformation researchers…including common actors (e.g. plutocrats and Republican politicians).” Mann ultimately sued some of his most strident critics for defamation, two conservative authors who published pieces for National Review and the libertarian think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute; one called Mann’s research “fraudulent,” while the other wrote that he “could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.” After more than a decade of delay, this winter a jury awarded Mann a $1 million judgment. 

“The only solution to the larger problem of ideologically motivated antiscience is to go after the bad actors behind it,” Mann says, not just through such lawsuits, but by voting out Republican politicians involved in the attacks. In 2022, GOP state officials filed a suit against the Biden administration that alleged the government’s requests that social platforms take down Covid misinformation were unconstitutional. The case, thanks to the arch-conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, made it to the Supreme Court, where it was dismissed for a lack of standing, but not before contributing to the chill cast over the broader anti-disinformation field.

At the same time fighting disinformation has become a political battleground, it has also shown to be a problem on which Big Tech has been all too eager to throw in the towel. After Elon Musk bought Twitter, it stopped policing Covid misinformation in November 2022. Since then the site and Musk in particular have energetically amplified disinformation; one calculation found that his posts sharing election and immigration disinformation have been seen more than 1 billion times. Mass layoffs at companies like Meta have made it harder to set and establish standards around misinformation, including election fraud or dangerous pseudomedical advice. On the whole, the platforms have prioritized gathering eyeballs and profit over safeguarding an informed public.

So, for industrious conspiracy peddlers, conditions are a dream: confused, acrid, and with the powers that be seemingly convinced that combating disinformation is more expensive or more trouble than it’s worth. From now on, if you need help, you might be on your own.

One of the most oft-quoted sentences ever penned by a philosopher is George Santayana’s observation that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In 2024, this aphorism is practically a campaign slogan. Donald Trump, seeking to become the first former president since Grover Cleveland to return to the White House after being voted out of the job, has waged war on remembrance. In fact, he’s depending on tens of millions of voters forgetting the recent past. This election is an experiment in how powerful a memory hole can be.

In March, Trump posted this all-caps question: “ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?” A realistic answer for most would be, hell yeah. Four years prior, the Covid pandemic was raging, the economy was cratering, deaths were mounting, and anxiety was at a fever pitch. Trump responded erratically, downplaying the threat, pushing conspiracy theories, and undermining scientific officials and public health recommendations. (Bleach!) In the final year of his presidency, more than 450,000 Americans died of Covid; a Lancet study concluded that 40 percent of those deaths could have been averted had Trump handled the crisis responsibly.

Yet his question—a rip-off of a line used by Ronald Reagan in 1980—assumed many voters would not recall the horror of 2020; he was encouraging them to focus on the sentiments (and high prices) of now, not the mortal dread of then. And to regain the White House, Trump needs to cover not just the pandemic but a lot else with the mists of time, including his attempt to overturn an election and his incitement of January 6’s insurrectionist attack, a trade war with China that cost the US hundreds of thousands of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in GDP, his love affairs with dictators like Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin, his broken vows to boost infrastructure and to replace the Affordable Care Act with a better and cheaper program, his two impeachments, and nine years of chaos, scandals, and mean-spirited, racist, and ignorant remarks.

That’s a lot of forgetting to rely upon, and the fact that Trump still has a good shot at victory is a sign that he can successfully stuff much of this history into the mental recesses of the electorate. Fortunately for him, the nature of human memory plays to Trump’s favor—even, perhaps especially, when it comes to a pandemic.

Historians have long observed how quickly the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, which killed 50 million worldwide and nearly 700,000 in the United States, vanished from public conversation. As George Dehner, an environmental historian at Wichita State University, observed in his book Influenza: A Century of Science and Public Health Response, “the most notable historical aspect of Spanish flu is how little it was discussed,” resulting in “a curious, public silence.”

“Humans are really good at compartmentalizing things in the past, and Americans appear to be especially good at that. That’s a nicer way of saying we don’t keep track of history very well,” Dehner tells me, explaining Trump is “counting on, and his supporters are cultivating, this tendency to compartmentalize unpleasant associations from the past.”

Guy Beiner, a professor of history at Boston College who edited a 2021 collection of essays called Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten ‘Spanish’ Flu of 1918-1919, notes that today “there is plenty of social forgetting generated in regards to Trump’s presidential term, in particular the mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic. It could be argued that such forgetting is typical of post-­pandemic societies.”

In August, Weill Cornell Medical College psychiatrists George Makari and Richard Friedman argued in the New England Journal of Medicine that a “collective inability among many people in the United States to remember and mourn what was endured during the pandemic” could help explain why, in early 2024, half of Americans told pollsters they were no better off than they had been “at the height of the deadliest epidemic in the country’s history.” They likened the finding to classic studies by German social psychiatrists that explored how many post–World War II­­­­­ Germans “had seemingly lost the ability to acknowledge the atrocities.” Makari points out that chronic trauma and stress can inhibit memory—and the pandemic yielded much of both. “In addition,” he says, “psychologically this loss of memory is compounded by defenses against helplessness. Finally, socially this is all made worse by collective amnesia. No one wants to remember how terrifying that first year was, before tests, before vaccines. I can barely recall…So from biological, psychological, and social points of views, we grow hazy.”

In a way, this is a mechanical issue. The basic function of memory allows for—or even facilitates—such forgetting, says William Hirst, a New School for Social Research psychology professor. “When you recall the past, you do so selectively,” he explains. “Trump people do that selectively with his agenda in mind.” As Hirst puts it, a narrative that leaves out information “induces forgetting of the unmentioned material.”

“You might think that normally if you don’t mention something, it slowly fades,” he says. “It’s much more dynamic than that.” Talking about other parts of the story actively leads people to forget what is not discussed. So when Trump brags about how wonderful his presidency was and, of course, doesn’t mention the horrors of Covid or the violence at the Capitol, memories of these events become suppressed—but only, Hirst adds, for “in-group members” who see Trump as a legitimate conveyor of information.

“We seem to have a brain that is designed to build a collective memory around collective remembering and collective forgetting,” he explains. “Why? It’s adaptive. We’re social creatures oriented toward our in-group and away from out-groups. Memory is designed to reinforce our in-group membership.”

When Trump falsely says no one was killed during the January 6 riot—which he doesn’t call a riot—and calls the marauders victims and patriots, this shapes the memories of his supporters, according to Hirst, and recollections about brutal facts of that day are smothered. Trump’s repetition—a cornerstone of propaganda—boosts this process. “Each time they hear his account of that day,” Hirst remarks, “the negative part—the breaking-in, the broken windows, the violence—becomes less accessible. And once you suppress the memory image of people breaking in, it’s easier to impose the false memory of protesters having been invited in. There’s no longer a competing memory. So Trump creates this collective forgetting to establish the groundwork for another narrative that is not accurate.”

Certainly, all politicians want voters to forget the negative and remember the positive. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris do not often discuss 2021’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Because of that, their supporters may have weaker memories of that event and stronger recollections of the accomplishments Biden and Harris tout.

Trump’s attempts to ride a wave of pandemic amnesia may have been aided by the Harris team’s choice to keep her campaign rollout future-focused. But the foundation was laid long before that, in our lack of any collective narrative about the era. As Makari and Friedman wrote, “Nearly everything about the Covid-19 pandemic is contested: its origins, what could have been done to stop its spread, how politics affected various outcomes, the performance of public health sentries, vaccine science, and the appropriate balance between personal liberties and public health demands. Debates about these issues are often marked by misinformation, tribal allegiances, and rage.” After the pandemic, there was no bipartisan, blue-ribbon panel established—like the 9/11 Commission—that could derive a consensus account of what occurred during that crisis and how it was handled by the Trump administration and others.

Trump is in a unique position for a non-incumbent presidential candidate. He has a record as the nation’s chief executive. And to win, he needs to shape how millions of voters remember that time. Whether he realizes it or not, the human mind affords him much opportunity. How we recall the past, Hirst says, “is a real memory hole, and it can become so deep it’s difficult to get out of…It’s not a pleasant story, but it’s what we are as humans.”

Dehner wonders if accurate memories might end up prevailing in this election, but he is not sure: “In the quiet of the voting booth or just in thinking about it, will voters revisit what it was really like during the previous administration? These personal memories remain, and I suspect there will be a certain unease about how one portion of the candidate pool is seeking to portray that past. As an academic, I’m curious about how this all will turn out; as a citizen, I’m quite disturbed.”

Top image credits: Photo illustration by Alma Haser; Bill Pugliano/Getty; Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty; Kevin Dietsch/Getty (2); Anna Moneymaker/Getty; Rebecca Noble/Getty; Chip Somodevilla/Getty (2); Emily Elconin/Getty; Spencer Platt/Getty

Reproductive justice advocates have been warning for more than two years that the end of Roe v. Wade would lead to surge in maternal mortality among patients denied abortion care—and that the increase was likely to be greatest among low-income women of color. Now, a new report by ProPublica has uncovered the first such verified death. A 28-year-old medical assistant and Black single mother in Georgia died from a severe infection after a hospital delayed a routine medical procedure that had been outlawed under that state’s six-week abortion ban.

Amber Nicole Thurman’s death, in August 2022, was officially deemed “preventable” by a state committee tasked with reviewing pregnancy-related deaths. Thurman’s case is the first time a preventable abortion-related death has come to public attention since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, ProPublica‘s Kavitha Surana reported.

Now, “we actually have the substantiated proof of something we already knew—that abortion bans kill people.”

Now, “we actually have the substantiated proof of something we already knew—that abortion bans kill people,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of the abortion-rights group Reproductive Freedom for All, during a call with media. “It cannot go on.”

Thurman is almost certainly not the only person to have died as a consequence of an abortion ban, even if her case is the first to be officially confirmed. As ProPublica noted, that’s because investigations of maternal deaths often don’t happen until years later:

Committees like the one in Georgia, set up in each state, often operate with a two-year lag behind the cases they examine, meaning that experts are only now beginning to delve into deaths that took place after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.

Earlier this year, the New Yorker reported on the story of Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, a 29-year-old woman in Texas who died in July 2022 from complications of a high-risk pregnancy. In that case, medical records did “not suggest any discussion of the fact that an abortion could have alleviated the additional strain that the pregnancy placed on her heart,” the New Yorker reported.

According to ProPublica, Thurman had decided to get an abortion after learning she was pregnant with twins. But the very day she passed the six-week mark of her pregnancy, Georgia implemented a ban forbidding abortion after six weeks’ gestation—as the Supreme Court allowed states to do when it overturned Roe earlier that summer. So Thurman traveled four hours to an abortion clinic in North Carolina, where abortions were then allowed past 20 weeks. There she was given mifepristone and misoprostol, a two-drug regimen used to end pregnancies.

A few days after she took the pills, Thurman’s pain became excruciating, and she was bleeding through a pad every hour. Complications from abortion pills are rare, but sometimes patients require a procedure called dilation and curettage, or D&C, to remove remaining fetal tissue from the uterus that could lead to life-threatening sepsis. The North Carolina clinic would have performed the D&C for free if Thurman lived closer, ProPublica said. Instead, after vomiting blood and passing out at home, Thurman was brought to the hospital in the Atlanta suburbs, where doctors noted signs of an infection. According to ProPublica,

The standard treatment of sepsis is to start antibiotics and immediately seek and remove the source of the infection. For a septic abortion, that would include removing any remaining tissue from the uterus. One of the hospital network’s own practices describes a D&C as a “fairly common, minor surgical procedure” to be used after a miscarriage to remove fetal tissue.

But because D&Cs can be used to perform abortions, physicians operating under an abortion ban can be slow to provide them even for miscarriages and other emergency situations, as illustrated in a recent report on post-Roe disruptions to pregnancy care in Louisiana. Not until 2 p.m. the day after Thruman entered the hospital was she brought for surgery. She died in the operating room. The Georgia maternal mortality review committee found that if a D&C had been performed earlier, there was a “good chance” her death could have been prevented, ProPublica reports.

“These devastating bans did not only block Amber, and many others, from accessing abortion care in her state, they also delayed the routine life-saving care she later needed, leaving her to suffer and die,” Timmaraju said during the press call on Monday.

While every state abortion ban contains exceptions to save the life of the pregnant person, uncertainty among medical providers over exactly when doctors can step in without fear of being prosecuted has led to delays in medical care for pregnant woman across the country, with devastating consequences.

On the call with reporters, leaders of reproductive justice organizations pointed to the way bans and delays in emergency medical care for pregnant people disproportionately impact Black women. Black women are about 2.6 times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Reproductive justice is not just about abortion access, but also about the broader right to quality, comprehensive, full-range, culturally humble care, life saving health care for all of us,” said KR Redman, executive director of SPARK, a reproductive justice group in Georgia. “Amber’s case is just an example of the ongoing systemic negligence that continues to claim the lives of Black folks.”

In the early afternoon on Sunday, a suspected gunman got within several hundred yards of former President Donald Trump at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida. The suspect was shot at by a Secret Service agent, fled the scene in a black SUV, and was quickly apprehended by police. Over the next 24 hours, Trump and his allies unleashed a deluge of blame against Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats for what the FBI said was being investigated as an assassination attempt against Trump, the second in just over two months.

As of Monday, the motive of the suspect, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, remained unclear. His social media history indicated that he voted for Trump in 2016 but turned against him later. Routh was critical of Trump’s Putin-friendly policy on Ukraine; in 2022, he’d gone on an unsuccessful quest to help recruit foreign fighters to join the battle against the Kremlin’s invasion. He also donated to a Democratic PAC in the 2020 election cycle. On Monday, authorities announced two federal gun charges against Routh, with additional charges possibly to come.

Whatever Routh’s motive may have been for allegedly targeting Trump with an AK-47-style rifle, law enforcement authorities have cited no evidence that his actions were connected to or caused by the rhetoric of top Democrats, who have long emphasized the rejection of political violence. But that has not stopped Trump and his allies from moving immediately to exploit the disturbing near-miss in Florida for political gain—just as they did after a gunman wounded Trump in a horrific attack at his July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Shortly after the news broke about the danger on Sunday, the Trump campaign sent out an email to supporters with a statement from Trump linking to his fundraising page and saying he was safe and well. “But there are people in this world who will do whatever it takes to stop us,” the Republican presidential candidate said in the statement. “I will Never Surrender!”

“He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump said, providing no evidence to support that claim. 

On Monday morning, Trump declared in an interview with Fox News Digital that Routh’s alleged actions were caused by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, his 2024 opponent for the White House.

“He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump said, providing no evidence to support that claim. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country—both from the inside and out.” Trump added that Biden and Harris are “the enemy from within,” according to Fox News Digital. “They are the real threat.”

Biden and Harris both put out statements on Sunday expressing relief that Trump was unharmed and denouncing political violence. Biden also said that he had directed his team “to continue to ensure” adequate protection for Trump from the Secret Service.

Trump added to his partisan blame with a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday: “The Rhetoric, Lies, as exemplified by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan ABC Debate, and all of the ridiculous lawsuits specifically designed to inflict damage on Joe’s, then Kamala’s, Political Opponent, ME, has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust. Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!”

Top surrogates piled on the partisan attack. Trump’s son, Donald Jr., railed on social media about telling “my 5 young children about [a] radical leftist trying to kill their grandfather.”

“The incitement to hatred and violence against President Trump by the media and leading Democrats needs to stop,” posted billionaire supporter Elon Musk, in response to Don Jr.’s comments.

Since the Trump shooting in Pennsylvania, the ex-president and his allies have carried out a sustained, coordinated effort to promote baseless conspiracy theories and smear Trump’s political opponents.

Longtime Trump advisor and right-wing media commentator Steve Cortes called his former boss “the most persecuted public figure in American history” and said that the danger to Trump’s life both in Pennsylvania and Florida was caused to a great extent by “the corporate media” disparaging the ex-president.

The deluge of partisan messaging adds a whole new layer to an ongoing effort to cast unfounded blame for violence on Biden, Harris and the Democrats. As I’ve been documenting in the two-plus months since the Trump shooting in Pennsylvania, the ex-president and his allies have carried out a sustained, coordinated effort to promote baseless conspiracy theories and smear Trump’s political opponents with such blame. Participants have included Trump’s running mate, JD Vance; his sons, Don Jr. and Eric Trump; his wife, Melania Trump; and a multitude of Republican congressional members, including Cory Mills, Eli Crane, Ryan Zinke, Marjorie Taylor Green, and Mike Collins.

This propaganda effort, as I first reported in early September, now also involves backers of Project 2025.

During the presidential debate on ABC News on Sept. 10, watched by 67 million people, Trump reiterated baseless blame for the shooting at his rally in Butler.  “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” he inveighed, pointing at Harris. “They talk about democracy, I’m a threat to democracy—they’re the threat to democracy.”

These efforts may be intended in part to distract from Trump’s own incitement of violence. He has used the tactics of stochastic terrorism, as national security experts call the method, for many years. This has continued apace with his incessant demagoguery on the campaign trail against migrant “invaders.” Most recently that has included the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio—falsely smeared by Trump, Vance, and their allies for supposedly stealing and eating other residents’ pets. Schools and government offices in Springfield have since been under siege with bomb scares and other threats of violence.

Several threat assessment and law enforcement leaders have told me since this summer that Trump’s incitement is a top concern when it comes to potential political violence during the election season. According to these sources, the rhetoric from Trump and his allies about the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania—and now with the apparent close call in Florida—is deepening that danger.