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Meet The Guy Who Reportedly Told Trump To Buy Greenland

The United States has been trying to annex Greenland for centuries.

The massive island in the Artic—which is home to 56,000 people and holds vast oil and mineral reserves—is currently an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. In 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward planned to purchase Greenland, but it fell apart; in 1946, President Harry S. Truman tried to buy it for $100 million. He failed, too. 

The most recent attempt at grabbing Greenland came in President Donald Trump’s first term in office. As the New York Times journalist Peter Baker and New Yorker writer Susan Glasser reported in their book The Divider, an unexpected friend of Trump’s planted the idea: cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder (of Estée Lauder, the $29 billion makeup brand).

The billionaire reportedly pitched Trump on buying Greenland—though by 2019, Trump was claiming it as his own brainchild. According to the Times, Lauder “offered himself as a back channel to the Danish government to negotiate.”

The two men have a long relationship. Lauder and Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business together. Since 2016, Lauder has donated well over a million dollars to pro-Trump organizations. In 2022, he reportedly backed away from supporting Trump. Lauder’s donations on OpenSecrets show over $8000 sent to Nikki Haley’s campaign in October 2023. It seems things have been patched up since then. The billionaire, according to reporting from CBS News, attended Trump’s inauguration.

Lauder’s motives for introducing the idea of buying Greeland are unclear. As Trump told Baker and Glasser in 2021, the idea was “not so different” from his own approach to real estate development in New York City. “I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’ You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer, I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,” Trump explained. 

“I love maps,” the president continued. “And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’ ”

Lauder has not publicly commented on Trump taking credit for thinking of buying Greenalnd himself. (Lauder, who recently retired from Estée Lauder’s board, did not respond to a request for comment.) According to Baker and Glasser, the billionaire reportedly offered to go to Greenland and help facilitate the purchase himself. “A friend of mine, a really, really experienced businessman, thinks we can get Greenland,” Trump told an adviser at the time. 

Still, the cosmetics mogul—whose net worth is estimated at $4.7 billion—has a history of throwing himself and his money into various right-wing causes and campaigns in New York State. (He was, in this way, an early adopter of the au-courant embrace of the right-wing among American luxury fashion brands.)

Lauder has been one of the largest donors in New York politics for at least 20 years, a legacy which includes a failed self-funded bid for New York City mayor in 1989, in which he ran to the right of Rudy Giuliani. And this isn’t his first time involving himself in international affairs, either. A staunch supporter of the state of Israel, Lauder has aligned himself with the right-wing Israeli Likud party traditionally (stepping away to criticize the right in a rare move in 2018). When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was running for Prime Minister in the mid-1990s, Lauder allegedly helped bankroll that campaign, though he denied those reports at the time. Lauder is currently the head of the World Jewish Congress. In response to the University of Pennsylvania’s choice to hold a Palestinian literary festival in fall 2023, Lauder and other billionaires loudly withdrew donations from the university

Though Lauder’s exact reasoning on Greenland is not clear, current explanations for grabbing the island are varied and becoming talking points beyond backrooms in the State Department.

Both Democratic and Republican leaders have cast Greenland as potentially critical to national security in a warming world. The island hosted American nuclear weapons storage during the Cold War and is located on the shortest air route between the United States and Russia. And while its rare-earth mineral deposits are notoriously difficult and expensive to access, that hasn’t stopped American leaders from eyeing them. 

In Trump’s case, the initial motivation may have been the whim of a cosmetics billionaire. But he took it seriously enough that he assigned then-national security adviser John Bolton to head a committee investigating the matter. At certain points, he suggested taking federal money from Puerto Rico to fund the purchase, as reported in The Divider.

Then, as now, the people of Greenland were not interested. 90 percent of Greenland’s population is indigenous, and a majority of Greenlanders support independence from Denmark—to say nothing of the United States. Greenland’s Prime Minister, Múte B. Egede, spent much of January saying the same things Greenlanders said the first time around: that they are not simply a topic for theoretical discussion, but a people with their own economic and political interests. 

“We don’t want to be Americans,” Egede said Tuesday. “Greenland’s future will be decided by Greenland.” 

As reported in The Divider, Bolton essentially slow-walked the Greenland purchase idea until he resigned from his post in late 2019.

But, this time, Bolton is one of the people pushing the whole Greenland thing back into the mainstream. In an early-January interview with Bari Weiss, of the Free Press, he confirmed that to his knowledge, Lauder raised the idea initially. And then signed on to purchase the island, for more Bolton-esque, geopolitical reasons: “With global warming, that Northwest passage becomes a more viable maritime route,” he told the Free Press. In 2022, Bolton used similarly expansionist rhetoric—citing Chinese and Russian influence in the Arctic—as reason enough to force the annexation of Greenland. 

For some Republican senators, the reasons are less realpolitik and more morale-oriented. “Does anyone regret the Louisiana Purchase or the acquisition of Alaska?,” asked Congressman Mike Rulli (R-Ohio), in a press release attached to a bill sponsored by Congressman Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), titled the “Make Greenland Great Again Act.” 

Under international law, you cannot just buy a colonial territory. But Trump hasn’t ruled out the use of military force or aggressive tariffs—and the “Make Greenland Great Again Act” would formally authorize him to “enter negotiations” with the King of Denmark over Greenland.

The acquisition, Rep. Rulli said, would “restore national pride and optimism.” And it would do so by restoring explicit colonialism to the American people—something echoed in Trump’s inaugural address, in which he called for the United States to return to what it’s done for most of its history, and start conquering territory outside its borders again. 

“President Trump’s vision for Greenland is exactly what is needed to reignite the spirit of Manifest Destiny that once propelled Americans to greatness,” Rulli said. “A historic presidency deserves a historic beginning. Let’s Make Greenland Great Again!” 

In Trump’s mind, this Manifest Destiny, too, is “just real estate,” Bolton said. “He wants to put a Trump casino in Nuuk.” 

Trump’s Foreign Business Partners Are Showcasing Their Access to the President and His Rich Pals

Donald Trump’s inauguration was a bacchanal of wealth and power attended by the first, second, third, fifth, and seventh richest men on the planet. And the celebration displayed Trump’s uncomfortable mingling of his business and political empires, for among the VIPs rubbing shoulders with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sergey Brin were a cadre of Trump’s foreign business partners who have paid Trump millions to use his name and, once again, the reputation of the American presidency to make money at their properties around the globe.

His business partners and their families—some of whom attended his first inauguration—eagerly showcased their access on social media, and their role in Trump’s inaugural festivities highlighted the thicket of conflicts of interest we can expect from Trump’s second Oval Office stint.

Last week, Hary Tanoesoedibjo, an Indonesian magnate and politician who has built two luxury golf courses with Trump in that country (and bought a mansion from Trump in Los Angeles), flew to Florida with his family and mingled with the Trump family at one of their Florida resorts.

The Tanoesoedibjos got souvenirs signed and chatted with the president. They also got to meet New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who is facing charges he took bribes and solicited illegal donations from foreign business interests, but who Trump has suggested he might pardon.

During the first Trump administration, Tanoesoedibjo touted his level of access to the U.S. president.

“If other people have difficulty getting to him, I can do it easily,” he bragged.

On Saturday night, the Tanoesoedibjo family— Hary, his wife Liliana and two of their adult children—attended a posh pre-inaugural celebration at Trump’s Virginia golf course, where they mingled with other global elites and wealthy Trump supporters. In addition to being singled out by Trump for a handshake, Tanoesoedibjo posed for souvenir photos with Mukesh Ambani—the wealthiest man in Asia, estimated to be worth $119 billion, who lives in a 27-story mansion in Mumbai—and Masayoshi Son, a Japanese tycoon who runs Softbank.

The Tanoesoedibjo family documented their trip in Instagram posts, showing they spent time at the former Trump hotel in downtown Washington (now a Hilton-run Waldorf-Astoria) and turned up at the Starlight Ball, an official inaugural celebration designated for big-spending Trump donors. According to reports, donors had to contribute a minimum of $250,000 in order to receive two tickets. But based on a photo posted by Hary Tanoesoedibjo’s youngest child, Warren, showing off their entry passes, the family’s access was thanks to Eric Trump.

The photo also suggests that if not for the last-minute decision to move the inauguration indoors, the Tanoesoedibjos would have had even more access. Warren’s stack of access passes included entry to the west front of the Capitol for an outdoor ceremony and prime inaugural parade viewing spots. In 2017, Liliana Tanoesoedibjo posted a video to Instagram showing the couple riding down the Inaugural parade route, passing crowds lined up waiting for Trump to follow.

Hussain Sajwani, a billionaire from Dubai who has built several projects with Trump, also enjoyed VIP access over inaugural weekend. Sajwani, who Trump recently touted for his promise to invest $20 billion in US data centers, turned up at the Saturday mixer for elites at the Trump golf course in Virginia, where he posed for a picture with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

In 2017, just days before his inauguration, Trump said that he had turned down a $2 billion dollar offer from Sajwani to expand their partnership before taking office. This year, during his Sunday night pre-inaugural rally, Trump called out Sajwani’s company, DAMAC, by name, as an example of how he was already attracting new business to the United States.

Sajwani rounded out the weekend at the Starlight Ball, where he and his son, Abbas, posed with Google founder Sergey Brin.

Zaid El Chaar, the CEO of a Saudi real estate development company that has signed a deal with Trump to build Trump-branded properties in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, also attended the inaugural festivities—snagging a luxury box for the pre-inaugural rally—and enjoying the Starlight Ball, where he posted a photo of with Larry Glick, the executive vice-president of development at the Trump Organization. He captioned the photo, in an unintentional nod to the tangled worlds of Trump’s business and political interests: “The power behind the power.”

Donald Trump and the Return of Ransom-Note Politics

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Is Threatening to Hold Wildfire Aid Hostage. Can He Really Do That?

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

During the heat of the presidential campaign in September, then-candidate Donald Trump made an extraordinary threat. He vowed that if California suffered a wildfire during his presidency, he’d withhold disaster aid from the state unless Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a document that delivered more water to farmers in the state’s agriculture-rich Central Valley.

“If he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Trump said. “And if we don’t give him all the money to put out the fires, he’s got problems.”

In the wake of the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles, which have destroyed thousands of homes and killed dozens of people over the past two weeks, Trump’s threat to withhold aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency has surfaced again. As the fires raged, the new president rushed to blame them on Newsom’s water policies, repeating his disproven claim that the state’s policy of limiting water deliveries out of the Sacramento Delta to protect a species of endangered fish has hobbled firefighting efforts. He then appeared to repeat his threat on Truth Social: “NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA.”

“I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it would be really difficult for any administration to try to hold funds arbitrarily.”

As Trump prepares to visit Los Angeles this week, his allies in Congress are picking up the threat as they consider a supplemental bill that would provide billions of dollars in aid money to fire victims through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a representative from Louisiana, said that he believes there “should be conditions” on that aid.

“Obviously, there’s been water resource mismanagement, forest management mistakes, all sorts of problems,” he said in a comment to reporters last week. Even some California Republicans, such as Reps. Doug LaMalfa and Darrell Issa, agreed that Congress should consider limiting long-term aid.

But disaster experts say these threats aren’t likely to bear fruit—or at least will be harder to accomplish than many of the new president’s other climate-related policies. “I don’t know how you stop it so much as you just make it a pain in the butt,” said Craig Fugate, who led FEMA under President Barack Obama. 

The difficulty for Trump is that the FEMA recovery process in California has already begun. President Biden issued a disaster declaration just hours after the fires began, giving FEMA the legal authority to spend money on emergency response, rescue, and shelter efforts in Los Angeles, and to begin doling out money to victims who have lost their homes and belongings.

Even if Congress doesn’t send the agency any more money, FEMA has enough funding in the bank to address victims’ immediate needs. This is by design: When Congress set up FEMA in 1980, it gave agency officials flexibility to deploy money fast as new disasters happened. Lawmakers (usually) top up the agency’s budget before each disaster season takes place. 

But bigger costs are yet to come. FEMA itself doesn’t rebuild roads or water systems in disaster-affected areas. Instead, the agency reimburses states and cities for the money they spend on those rebuilding efforts. In order to get reimbursed, states have to submit cost estimates, and it’s far too early for California to assess the cost of recovery.

But once the state does submit those reimbursements, FEMA doesn’t have the authority to approve or deny them discretionarily, according to Fugate.

“I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it would be really difficult for any administration to try to hold funds arbitrarily,” he said. “It’s just like writing a check, it’s kind of hard to cancel it after you’ve already written.”

The most Trump could do would be to delay the aid process through bureaucratic channels. The federal Office of Management and Budget has to review all FEMA projects with values over $1 million, and Trump could order that office to quibble with the details of every request before approving them.

Later on this year, FEMA could also decrease the share of rebuilding costs it offers to pay, but it would still be on the hook for most of the money. Trump did not mention FEMA in his dozens of day-one executive orders this week, but he did sign an order seeking to revise federal policies for moving water out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, an issue he has inaccurately linked to LA’s recent fires. (The Trump transition team did not respond to requests for clarification on the president’s threat.)

Even if Trump does throw sand in the gears of reimbursement, California might be able to handle some delay. The state is the world’s sixth-largest economy, with a more than $300 billion budget, and lawmakers are already conferring about whether to pass supplemental state money to aid in the wildfire recovery. (California’s Office of Emergency Services did not respond to a request for comment.)

Wildfires also represent a lower share of FEMA’s disaster spending than do other disasters like hurricanes and floods. FEMA has spent an average of $345 million on infrastructure rebuilding per fire since 2015, compared to an average of almost $1 billion per hurricane, according to FEMA data compiled by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Fire victims account for just 1 percent of FEMA’s individual aid applications since 2015. 

That’s in part because most fires tend to strike less populated areas—and because insurance tends to cover a larger proportion of wildfire destruction, said Sarah Labowitz, a nonresident fellow at Carnegie and an expert in disaster funding. “It’s supposed to be a three-legged stool, where FEMA sits along insurance and private money,” she said. “For fires, typically people have some kind of fire insurance, so the level of uninsured loss could be lower than for a big water event.”

But given the scale of the loss in these urban fires, and the fact that many insurers have pulled away from places like Pacific Palisades, FEMA may have a larger tab this time than it has in past fires.

Rather than the new Trump administration, it’s Congress that California should be worried about. HUD has over the past two decades allocated tens of billions of dollars toward long-term disaster recovery with Congress’ blessing, including after blazes such as the 2018 Camp Fire. Many states use this federal money to aid in housing redevelopment; for instance, California used the largest share of its Camp Fire money to build and acquire new multifamily properties. 

This housing money will be essential in LA’s strained real estate market, where median rents are over $3,000 per month and an average single-family home goes for close to $1 million. But unlike FEMA, which can start spending money out of its main disaster fund as soon as the president declares a disaster, HUD needs explicit permission from Congress to start a recovery program for each new disaster. Speaker Johnson is now suggesting he would like to see California agree to “conditions” before he gives HUD the nod, telling reporters earlier this month that “we have to make sure there are safeguards on the precious treasure of the American people.”

Without this supplemental HUD money, it will be hard for California to pursue the kind of long-term recovery that experts believe is necessary after climate disasters like the Los Angeles wildfires. The state might be able to find money in its own coffers to make up for delays in critical aid money from FEMA, but it will be much harder to come up with cash to build new homes or stand up a workforce development program, as California has sought to do with the $1 billion in recovery aid it received from HUD for the 2018 Camp Fire. Not only is Los Angeles one of the most expensive places in the country to build a home, but California just finished closing a more than $50 billion budget deficit, leaving it with little money to spare.   

Labowitz says that Congress has dithered on passing HUD aid before. For instance, lawmakers took until December 2024 to give the agency authority to spend money on the Maui wildfires, which occurred in August of 2023. But despite the threats from Johnson and other Republicans, she said it’s likely that lawmakers will send aid money eventually, if only to ensure that Democrats don’t withhold it from disaster-prone states like Texas and Florida in the future.

“We have a federal infrastructure that finds a way to make itself work most of the time,” she said. “Usually for the biggest disasters, the system does find a way to work to deliver aid.”

“Incredibly Damaging”: the Fallout From Trump’s January 6 Pardons

In the four years since Donald Trump set off an insurrection at the US Capitol, the Department of Justice and the FBI conducted one of the largest federal criminal investigations in history. Among the nearly 1,600 people charged, the DOJ successfully prosecuted scores of Trump supporters whose crimes on January 6, 2021, included vicious attacks on law enforcement. Many of those convictions were straightforward, due to extensive video footage and other clear evidence documenting the violence.

Approximately 140 police officers were injured that day, some severely; as a source familiar with Capitol Police operations told me recently, some officers suffered permanent disfigurement, debilitating cases of PTSD, and other lasting trauma. At least four officers who responded that day subsequently took their own lives. The Jan. 6 attackers—many of whom had gone to the Capitol prepared for violence—used weapons including chemical sprays, tasers, baseball bats, hockey sticks, pipes, metal flagpoles, and allegedly even explosive devices.

On Jan. 20, immediately after being inaugurated as the 47th president, Trump granted clemency to them all.

Convicts he freed from prison included those who dragged a police officer down the Capitol steps and others who attacked law enforcement using batons and shields seized from officers. With his clemency order, Trump also put an end to scores of Jan. 6 criminal investigations that were still open, including alleged attacks on police.

“It’s incredibly damaging—this was a major task force, an unprecedented effort, and now it’s all being thrown out as some supposed political witch hunt,” a source with direct knowledge of the sprawling investigation told me. “People need to understand the gravity of this. We’re already living in a heightened threat environment and now a social contract has been broken. Where’s the line now? This is deterrence thrown out and politically motivated violence being countenanced.”

“Think of all the specific video evidence of those attacks on cops at the Capitol,” the source added. “It’s undeniable, and those offenders were convicted in a court of law. Respect for the law and law enforcement will be diminished by this.”

Trump cultivated ambiguity after the presidential election about how far he might take his long-running vow to pardon J6 convicts, even suggesting that he might not include violent offenders. (A week before inauguration day, JD Vance went so far as to say on Fox News that violent peperpetrators “obviously shouldn’t be pardoned.”)

But the fallout from Trump’s brazen decision is clear in multiple ways. As my colleague Dan Friedman reported, the sweeping clemency also unleashed legal chaos, muddying cases of violent suspects who also faced additional charges for illegal weapons, obstruction, and plotting to murder FBI agents.

“This is deterrence thrown out and politically motivated violence being countenanced.”

The blanket pardons—along with Trump freeing 10 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who were imprisoned for seditious conspiracy—are part of a broad effort by Trump to cement a false narrative of his political career after his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020. As national security expert Juliette Kayyem told me last month about the imminent pardons: “He wants to erase his election loss and what really happened on January 6.” These efforts by Trump and his allies give his extremist supporters a narrative of martyrdom, she said, “a really good way to rebuild right-wing terrorist organizations.”

“The attempted rewriting of history is astounding,” the source with knowledge of the FBI investigation said, concurring that the clemency from Trump “is emboldening in a big way” for violent extremist groups who supported him.

Shortly after Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was freed from prison, he went on Alex Jones’ show and disparaged the criminal justice process, calling for retribution against the federal prosecutors who put him and many others behind bars. “Now it’s our turn,” Tarrio declared, thanking Trump. “The people who did this, they need to feel the heat.” Stewart Rhodes, the head of the Oath Keepers who was released from prison, also touted Trump’s baseless narrative of January 6 and called for payback, talking up Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, and urging him to “clean house.”

Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, called the clemency “a pretty catastrophic moment for domestic counterterrorism.” Ware told the Washington Post that members of these groups now see “the return of battle-hardened leaders, who in addition to having a kind of real-life legitimacy due to having actually fought the government, will also have a strong sense of victimhood and martyrdom, which will further radicalize and fuel recruitment platforms.” He said that this will “make combating terrorism far more difficult, not just over the next four years as groups feel like they have an ally in the White House, but beyond that as well.”

As an emboldened Trump tests the limits of his renewed presidential power on this and other fronts, the political response to his Jan. 6 pardons has been grim in its own right. Apart from a few tepid and qualified comments of disapproval, Republicans in Congress have done virtually nothing to push back. Lawmakers from what was once known as the party of “law and order” even voiced support for Trump freeing the police assaulters and seditionists—echoing Trump’s unsupported claim that DOJ acted corruptly, or baselessly suggesting that Trump had a mandate from voters for what he did.

Two days after Trump’s inauguration and the mass clemency, GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson announced a new subcommittee whose purpose he claimed is to “expose the false narratives peddled by the politically motivated January 6 Select Committee.” Johnson was referring to the bipartisan House committee that collected and made public in 2023 a large body of evidence on how Trump incited, and then did nothing to stop, the insurrection.

In the days since Trump ordered the mass pardons, several federal judges who presided over January 6 cases used further court proceedings to reject Trump’s revisionist history.

“No ‘process of national reconciliation’ can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity,” one judge wrote.

The mass pardons, wrote another, “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake,” further saying of the January 6 cases: “The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning.”

Nailing Trump for Taking Illegal Foreign Cash Shouldn’t Be This Difficult

The Founding Fathers, having recently helped throw off the yoke of British colonial rule, were understandably concerned about foreign governments meddling in domestic affairs, which is why they wrote guardrails into the Constitution to stave off corruption and place limits on any future leader, including Donald John Trump, who might lack an intrinsic ethical compass.

The Constitution expressly forbids a president from accepting compensation other than his designated salary from the federal government or any state government. And without the consent of Congress, no federal officeholder can accept “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

You see the problem here. Trump’s financial conflicts of interest constitute a long list, and he has deep and longstanding financial ties to myriad foreign governments, who now have more ways than ever to try and curry favor and influence his administration’s decisions.

“We have a lot of laws that are difficult to enforce when you have a powerful person intent on getting away with everything.”

I broke down five areas of particular concern in a companion piece. And below, edited for length and clarity, it the interview it was based on. Noah Bookbinder became the president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington in May 2015, one month before Trump announced his first presidential bid. He had previously served in various government positions, including as a trial attorney with the Justice Department’s public integrity section, and he oversaw CREW’s 2017 lawsuits against Trump, accusing the president of taking illegal emoluments via foreign government patronage of his hotel in Washington, DC.

CREW’s legal actions, one of them a collaboration with the attorneys general of DC and Maryland, were upheld by appeals courts and on track for success—until Trump ran out the clock, a development Bookbinder deems “deeply frustrating.” His nonprofit is now busy triaging the most urgent priorities, including a lawsuit that challenges the activities of DOGE, Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

If domestic billionaires channel cash into Trump’s business interests to curry favor, that’s not emoluments, but something more like corruption, right?

That’s right. It can be a conflict of interest. It can be corruption. And there’s a separate emoluments clause in the Constitution, which says, essentially, that the president can’t take income from the federal or state governments beyond his salary. So if there are state pension funds contributing to the stock value of Trump Media or states making beneficial decisions for properties, things like that can be emoluments violations.

What’s your big-picture take on Trump’s conflicts of interest now versus then?

During Trump’s first presidency, he received significant payments and benefits. On the foreign side, the research we’ve done, combined with what the House did, suggest that more than $13 million—potentially much, much more—came to his businesses from foreign governments.

We should expect similar things [in Trump’s second term]: money coming into his properties and developments. But [now] there are factors that create the risk of emoluments at a much higher level. This really matters, because it is the potential for foreign governments and other powerful interests to impact decisions that could affect the safety of security and wellbeing of Americans.

One is Trump Media, the parent company for Truth Social. That’s a publicly traded company, and so anyone, whether it’s a wealthy individual or a foreign country, that buys a large number of shares is likely to push the stock value up, which immediately drives up Donald Trump’s net worth—and it could go much further than renting hotel rooms or planning an event at a Trump property. There’s also the threat that those interests could quickly sell off the stock, which would drive prices down and potentially tank Trump’s net worth, which gives them further leverage. So that’s a real risk.

Another one that he was talking about on Inauguration Day is a new crypto entity that he controls a lot of the value of. This “cryptocurrency” is not really a currency. There’s not anything behind it. It’s just a thing people can buy because they think at some point someone else will want to buy it for that much money or more—really sort of a hollow vessel for anyone, including foreign governments, to put money into, which puts money in Trump’s pocket.

I believe Trump has a financial interest in other cryptocurrencies, too, and now he gets to dictate how the Treasury Department regulates them.

That’s another major risk with him. He and his administration could be making major decisions that could really affect his businesses and his income. There’s likely a tremendous need for federal regulation, and if Trump has a lot of value in cryptocurrency, that could certainly affect whether it’s regulated, [such as] by looking out for regular people who are investing and whom we don’t want to get scammed. The same is true with social media companies [and rules] potentially looking out for the wellbeing of kids.

Have there been any legal tests for this stuff? Because there’s a lot of nuance with blockchain transactions that might not be enriching Trump directly.

That is a concern. We had litigation with Trump about emoluments violations during his first presidency, and there were some complicated questions there, and litigation delay is something at which he’s a master. So even though we won at various stages in federal appeals courts, those cases were still going after four years and ended up getting dismissed as moot by the Supreme Court.

There are certainly some new issues, particularly in the crypto and social-media areas, that I don’t think have been litigated in the emoluments context. But ultimately the core issues are pretty simple: He owns these business ventures and foreign governments may be putting money into them, which violates those constitutional provisions.

Are there any aspects of your 2017 cases that could be revived—or would you have to start over?

As a legal matter, it is as though they never existed. And so even those favorable appeals decisions don’t have any precedential value.

That must be terribly frustrating.

Yes. This was a clear violation of provisions intended to protect the public from corruption and from decisions being made in ways that might not be in the people’s interest, and it’s very, very hard, it turns out, to get courts to enforce them—or get anybody to enforce them. That’s deeply frustrating, and one more example of Trump finding ways to be lawless, and to take advantage of the fact that we have a lot of laws that are difficult to enforce when you have a powerful person intent on getting away with everything.

As far as CREW’s plans, we are still examining the facts and the current legal situation. When you had [Trump’s] DC hotel, which was a magnet for people trying to influence the president, it was pretty easy to establish who the competitors were, and who might have standing [to sue, claiming they were harmed by the unfair competition]. It can be a lot more complicated when you have a social media stock. Some of the legal and jurisdictional issues—it was not easy in 2017, but it’s trickier now. So it’s a question of, in a time of potentially greater need and limited resources, what are the most strategic and compelling actions to bring? That’s the calculus now.

And I guess the judicial landscape has changed a fair bit since 2017.

We did pretty well in the appeals courts the last time around. There’s no particular reason to think they would be less open to these kinds of cases. But we’ve seen an alarming trend of the US Supreme Court bending over backwards to accommodate Trump and to avoid holding him accountable for lawless behavior. And that is troubling for any decision about litigation to try to hold him to the laws and to the Constitution. That doesn’t mean you don’t do it.

You also have the Fifth Circuit to contend with.
That is true. There are certainly pockets that are really problematic, and questions about where a case like this could be brought.

If you go after Trump, wouldn’t he just run the clock again? It’s much easier for a president to delay than it is for a regular citizen to do so.

I think that’s right, and that’s a tactic that he used long before he was president. I certainly expect that with any kind of litigation. I hope that, to some extent, courts are maybe getting wise to that and will be a little bit less inclined to go along.

Another newer area of concern is the LIV Golf league. Say more about that.

Yeah. LIV Golf didn’t exist when Donald Trump was president the first time. It’s a league backed, indirectly at least, by the Saudi government, that has held several events at Trump’s properties and is already scheduled to hold one at one of his golf resorts in 2025. That seems like another clear emoluments violation. You’d have to show that the connection to the Saudi government is direct enough, and how the money is going to his companies. But when you take a step back, it’s clear what’s happening: This is a Saudi-backed enterprise bringing business to the president.

We saw in the first Trump term lots of cases where Saudi Arabia appeared to bring business to Trump. There was a time when one of the leading Saudi officials came to New York City, and the government had reserved essentially a floor at one of Trump’s hotels. There were a number of such instances, and this seems to be more of the same, potentially on a larger scale. We also saw Trump making decisions that seemed surprisingly positive toward Saudi Arabia, including essentially looking the other way when Saudi Arabia killed a US-based journalist.

Is CREW concerned about all the goods Trump is hawking—sneakers and watches and fragrances and bibles and guitars? I mean, it’s probably small potatoes for foreign emoluments—though certainly untoward for a president.

It is untoward. And it is problematic to have a president who appears to be, in a very direct way, using the presidency to make extra money. Sometimes the amounts don’t really matter. We saw that during the first Trump presidency, where people and companies who wanted to influence the president would show up at the Trump Hotel in DC and take a picture of themselves having a drink at the bar and put it on Twitter.

There were officials from T-Mobile during its merger with Sprint, which the administration was going to have to clear, that stayed at the Trump Hotel and put that very prominently on social media.

https://twitter.com/stevenjay/status/1085549023124226049

These aren’t [necessarily] big-money purchases, but it’s still a way of signaling that they’re paying respect and they’re hoping that he’ll return the favor. Do we think that the Saudi government is going to buy a Trump Bible? I mean, that doesn’t seem like the most direct way to influence him when you could put millions of dollars into Trump Media stock. But small symbolic steps can also work to gain influence. It’s all part of the same playbook.

Another issue is the business dealings of Trump’s family members. Eric Trump claims the Trump Organization is playing by the rules and that they hired an ethics lawyer to review new contracts over $10 million—which actually seems like a high threshold.

Yes, and to some extent it really doesn’t matter much. As far as we know, Trump is again putting his ownership of the Trump Organization into a trust. But it’s not a blind trust, it’s controlled by his son and the ownership will revert back to him when he’s done as president. He knows what his interests are. He knows that he benefits if Trump Media benefits. He knows he benefits if business comes to his resorts and his properties. And none of these steps do anything to address that.

His first presidency had stronger controls, because there were supposed to be no new foreign ventures. Yet there were constant conflicts of interest with foreign governments and wealthy individuals and companies—we documented over 3,700. So, there’s absolutely no reason to think the same kinds of measures, a little bit watered down, are going to do the trick.

It’s almost impossible to keep track. And then you have other transactional things, like CEOs donating millions for the inauguration or news executives settling defamation suits out of fear, or to protect their business interests. It feels like extortion. How does CREW view these developments?

You are seeing a lot of corporate America deciding, without being specifically prompted, that they have to get on Donald Trump’s good side to avoid bad things happening to them, which is why you see a lot of these million-dollar gifts. And that is corporate influence on politics, which is an old story, but also somewhat coerced corporate influence, where all of these folks seem to be afraid they’ll lose out in a major way if they don’t do this.

It’s a similar feeling with people reaching settlements on defamation cases that don’t seem merited or required by the law. And you have things that seem potentially related, like the pardons of all these January 6 defendants, which sends the message that that committing crimes on behalf of Trump is something you can get away with. I think that rightly intimidates people who worry about getting on Trump’s bad side.

Maybe it also sends a message to officials who get orders from Trump that they might view as unethical or illegal.

I think it does, yeah.

Do you have any hope this administration can be reined in? 

There’s a lot to be distressed about—a lot of conduct that appears to be either lawless or aimed at getting away with whatever the law or its enforcement will allow—or intimidating people. And we’ve seen the collapse of efforts over the years to hold Trump accountable. All of that is deeply troubling.

Where I am a little more hopeful, particularly with regard to corruption and self-enrichment, is that I think the American people don’t have much appetite for government officials getting rich off government positions, for millionaires and billionaires making all the decisions, and for money being thrown around to influence decision-making. If it really is reported on, there will be pushback, and that may make it possible to start putting the brakes on some of that conduct. It’s going to be a long process.

But we all knew who Trump was, and he got almost half of the votes! 

That’s right. But I think those parts of Trump’s presidency had faded from people’s minds, and I don’t think that was what they had in mind when they voted for him. My suspicion, based on the first time around, is that when people start to see this kind of influence and potential corruption, they’re not going to like it.

Trump Is Perfectly Poised to Cash in on His Presidency, Constitution Be Damned

Congress put rules in place ages ago to ensure that federal appointees and employees (including judges) don’t use their jobs to enrich themselves. The Office of Government Oversight vets those officials for conflicts of interest and can compel them and their spouses and minor children to dispense with assets deemed likely to create a conflict. For our purposes, all you need to know is that those rules don’t apply to the president, vice-president, or federal lawmakers—which is stupid, but whatever.

The Constitution, however, does place limits on elected federal officials. The president is entitled to a predetemined salary and that’s all. He is forbidden from taking anything further of value from the federal governments or any state government. Furthermore, without the consent of Congress, no federal officeholder may accept “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

This is not ambiguous. It means no foreign money, period.

Yet President Donald Trump’s affairs are awash in foreign money. (Domestic, too.) Among other problems, foreign governments have rented units at Trump Tower, booked rooms and events at his hotels and resorts, and approved his company’s overseas deals and developments—not to mention those of son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose private equity fund got a $2 billion investment from a Saudi sovereign wealth fund shortly after he left the White House, and whose new partnership with the Trump Organization opens a very problematic new can of worms.

Trump “received significant payments and benefits from foreign governments” during his first term, says Noah Bookbinder, the executive director since 2015 of Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW), which two years later sued Trump in an emoluments case that focused on Trump’s DC hotel, and served as outside counsel in a similar lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia. The hotel, operating out of a federal building, became a mecca for both foreign governments and American companies and CEOs who hoped to curry favor with the administration. “The research we’ve done, combined with what the House did, suggest that more than $13 million—potentially much, much more—came to his businesses from foreign governments,” Bookbinder told me.

These legal actions were upheld by federal appeals courts, but they dragged on and the Supreme Court declared them moot on January 25, 2021, as Trump was no longer in office. “As a legal matter, it is as though [our cases] never existed. And so even those favorable appeals decisions don’t have any precedential value,” Bookbinder says.

That was tough to stomach, and now Trump is back at the trough without any further guardrails—or consequences paid. He was in “clear violation of provisions intended to protect the public from corruption,” Bookbinder says, “and it’s very, very hard, it turns out, to get courts to enforce them—or get anybody to enforce them. That’s deeply frustrating, and one more example of Trump finding ways to be lawless.”

CREW is now in a triage process to determine its priorities, and which legal actions might stand a chance of success—such as the lawsuit it and other groups filed earlier this week to challenge the actions of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. In any case, Bookbinder says, the public can expect more influence-peddling during Trump’s second term, only now “there are factors that create the risk of emoluments at a much higher level.”

Prior to the election, CREW cited four primary areas of concern, not merely for conflicts of interest—that would be a very long list—but where Trump is likely in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses. And now there are five areas, because only days before he was sworn in, a Trump-controlled entity called World Liberty Financial launched a pair of “meme” cryptocurrencies: $TRUMP and $MELANIA.

Let’s consider those problem areas one at time. (Click here for my full interview with Bookbinder.)

Trump Media and Technology Group
Trump has a controlling interest in this publicly traded company—the parent of Truth Social—which didn’t exist during his first administration. It’s unprecedented for a president to hold such a position. The company is the product of a merger between Trump Media and a so-called Special Purpose Acquisition Company. According to Investopedia, SPACs, also called “blank check” companies, have “gained a reputation for being dubious operations, often likened to ‘scams,'” because their sponsors get special financial arrangements and small investors are often left holding the bag when things go south.

But the constitutional problem, Bookbinder says, is that “anyone, whether it’s a wealthy individual or a foreign country, that buys a large number of shares is likely to push the stock value up, which immediately drives up Donald Trump’s net worth—and it could go much further than renting hotel rooms or planning an event at a Trump property. There’s also the threat that those interests could quickly sell off the stock, which would drive prices down and potentially tank Trump’s net worth, which gives them further leverage. So that’s a real risk.”

Trump World Tower (New York City)
In 2019, Reuters reported that at least six foreign governments (Iraq, Kuwait, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, and Thailand—the EU makes seven) had been cleared by the State Department, without the congressional consent mandated by the Constitution, to rent luxury condos at Trump’s Manhattan tower—then his primary residence outside the White House. During Trump’s second term, according to CREW, public records indicate that “five foreign governments are expected to pay Trump’s business a total of nearly $2 million in monthly fees.”

LIV Golf
This, too, didn’t exist during Trump’s first term. A pro golf league backed by a Saudi investment fund, LIV Golf “has held several events at Trump’s properties and is already scheduled to hold one at one of his golf resorts in 2025,” Bookbinder notes. “That seems like another clear emoluments violation. You’d have to show that the connection to the Saudi government is direct enough, and how the money is going to his companies. But when you take a step back, it’s clear what’s happening: This is a Saudi-backed enterprise bringing business to the president.” During Trump’s first term, there were instances of the Saudis spending lavishly on Trump properties, Bookbinder points out, and “we also saw Trump making decisions that seemed surprisingly positive toward Saudi Arabia, including essentially looking the other way when Saudi Arabia killed a US-based journalist.”

Foreign Real Estate Developments
CREW writes: “Since 2021, the Trump Organization has signed three new agreements with an international developer for Trump-branded developments in Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. These projects may receive significant benefits from these governments during a potential second Trump presidential term.” At a hotel in Oman, a New York Times reporter witnessed “a team of sales agents…invoking Mr. Trump’s name to help sell luxury villas at prices of up to $13 million, mostly targeting superrich buyers from around the world, including from Russia, Iran, and India.”

$TRUMP Meme Coin
On Monday, my colleague Russ Choma reported that the value of the $Trump meme coin launched a few days earlier by World Liberty Financial—an entity controlled by the Trump family and in whose coins Trump and his male children reportedly hold a 20 percent stake—soared to just under $75, only to plummet to about half of that by the time Trump was sworn in.

World Liberty Financial also launched the $MELANIA coin, which peaked at $13.38 last Sunday and was trading for less than $3 late Thursday—was it the hat? In any case, the meme coin valuess are ethereal, and mercurial. “This ‘cryptocurrency’ is not really a currency. There’s not anything behind it,” Bookbinder says. “It’s just a thing people can buy because they think at some point someone else will want to buy it for that much money or more—really sort of a hollow vessel for anyone, including foreign governments, to put money into, which puts money in Trump’s pocket.”

World Liberty Financial also reportedly owns significant stakes in established cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum’s Ether coin—a potentially serious conflict given that Trump is now in a position to determine whether and how the crypto industry is regulated. “He and his administration could be making major decisions that could really affect his businesses and his income,” Bookbinder says.

The Big-Money Right-Wing Push to Upend the Constitution—and Kill Birthright Citizenship

For years, powerful right-wing figures have pushed a plan: Have states call a convention to amend the Constitution. It now has more momentum than ever, in part because it would allow a path for proponents of ending the 14th Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants.

A provision in Article V of the Constitution states that if a majority of state legislatures petition Congress, there will be a convention to propose amendments. This would allow states to shape federal policy. But an Article V convention could also open the floodgates for other sweeping changes to be proposed and potentially ratified by states. (Constitutional law observers and critics of this idea have long warned of the risk of a “runaway convention” that throws away the Constitution and rewrites it from scratch.)

This once-fringe idea is gaining purchase among politicians and interest groups hoping to bypass congressional gridlock and advance contentious causes. It has been spoken of by President Donald Trump’s inner circle and MAGA-aligned conservative groups.

“I say do it,” former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said of calling an Article V convention in an undated video shared in November by Convention of States Action, a dark money–fueled organization led by Tea Party veteran Mark Meckler that is pushing states to ask Congress for a convention. “It’s going to be good for the country. I don’t know what’s going to come out of it, but I think that is a space that allows us to have the conversation that I care about: What does it mean to be American today?”

Calling an Article V convention, Ramaswamy once told homeschooling champion Michael Farris, co-founder of Convention of States Action and former CEO of the Alliance Defending Freedom, “will have a useful function for the country.”

Ramaswamy was particularly interested in using the convention as a way to discuss birthright citizenship. On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order attempting to end that right. Called “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” if allowed by the courts, it would deny automatic citizenship to US-born children whose mother is unauthorized or on a temporary visa at the time of birth and whose father is neither a citizen nor a legal permanent resident.

As I’ve written before, the president can’t eliminate birthright citizenship through executive order without running afoul of the Constitution and more than a century of legal precedent. Indeed, the American Civil Liberties Union and other immigrant rights groups, as well as several states, already have filed lawsuits challenging the presidential action on constitutional grounds. On Thursday, a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”

If Trump’s plan to unilaterally reinterpret the Constitution with the stroke of a pen gets embroiled in or thwarted by protracted litigation—as it most likely will—a convention of states led by conservatives could serve as a fallback or a Hail Mary. “Birthright citizenship is enshrined in the Constitution,” says Stuart Richardson, research manager at the watchdog group Accountable.US. “We’re reaching a point where they’re becoming not unconstitutional, but anti-constitutional. They have to go so far as to amend the Constitution or completely throw it out and rework it because they can’t achieve their agenda based on even a layman reading of the Constitution.”

Ramaswamy has also reflected on the possibility of a free-for-all gathering to tinker the Constitution. In an interview with Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and one of the most popular podcasters in the country, he acknowledged the potential to “open Pandora’s box” and concluded, “I don’t think we’ve got to that point as a country yet.” Still, the project is increasingly closer to the mainstream and centers of power, having garnered support from some Trump Cabinet nominees, such as embattled defense pick Pete Hegseth and now-confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Convention of States Action is also a member of the advisory board for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 mandate for a Trump comeback.

Launched in 2013 by Farris and Meckler, Convention of States Action describes itself as a grassroots movement to “bring power back to the states and the people.” Its publicly stated vision is for a convention that would only allow for amendments that “limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, impose fiscal restraints, and place term limits on federal officials.” But observers like Georgetown University constitutional law professor David Super have noted that the language is vague enough that it could conceivably encompass a wide range of measures.

In early December, Convention of States Action appeared to test the waters of public opinion by posting on X a survey asking respondents to weigh in on Trump’s proposal to end birthright citizenship. More than 80 percent of 543 voters agreed with the idea. Prior to that, in March 2024, the group published a blog post titled, “How a Convention of States Can Help Solve Our Border Crisis.” It advocates for calling a convention to transfer authority over immigration enforcement at the border from the federal government to the states. Proposed amendments, the article reads, “could cover the wet-foot dry-foot policy, disallowing birthright citizenship, and other immigration issues, [and] would force the Federal Government to act. If, for some reason, they do not, then the states would be free to defend their borders as they see fit, with safeguards to prevent abuse by said states.”

Among the endorsers of the organization’s mission is disbarred Trump attorney John Eastman, a longtime supporter of ending birthright citizenship. In a 2021 appearance on Newsmax, Eastman said an Article V convention was “the only remedy available” to contain the uncontrolled expansion of the federal government. A senior adviser of the group, former US Sen. Rick Santorum, proposed eliminating automatic citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants as part of his 2016 presidential bid.

Convention of States Action didn’t respond to a request for comment about the group’s position on birthright citizenship or whether a convention of states could or should propose an amendment regarding that issue.

In 2023, Convention of States Action brought in around $10.6 million in revenue. About 30 percent of that—$3.2 million—came from one undisclosed donor, according to an audit report. Texas oil billionaire and Trump megadonor Tim Dunn sits on the board of directors of the organization. A friend of Meckler, Dunn is also a founding board member of its parent company, Citizens for Self-Governance, which has received significant contributions from donor-advised funds. (As I’ve written before, these funds distribute untraceable donations from anonymous sources and are a secretive catalyst for the money machine in politics.)

“When we started Convention of States and I was there at the beginning, I knew we had to have a spiritual revival, a Great Awakening, and a political restoration for our country to come back to its roots,” Dunn, a pastor who has built a powerful political machine in the Lone Star state to advance his theocratic agenda, said at the Convention of States summit in 2019. “What I did not expect is that Convention of States would be an organization that would trigger the Great Awakening, and that’s what’s happened, and it’s a miracle, and that is why we’re doing the Lord’s work if we go around it the right way.”

At a November event organized by the Dunn-backed Texas Public Policy Foundation, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts threw his support behind Convention of States Action’s mission. “There’s a whole bucket of longer-term objectives we need to be thinking about,” he said, “and we just need to keep as a tool in our toolbox some equally radical ideas that are very sound and legitimate, like the convention of states. Just because Trump and [JD] Vance won doesn’t mean that we should give up on that project.” Roberts described the Heritage Foundation as a “sponsor” of Convention of States Action.

“What are they trying to get out of this?” says Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US. “It’s imposing their agenda on the rest of America. That looks like taking away our rights.” For the billionaire class funding organizations like Convention of States Action, he adds, “there’s a short-term and long-term play. They have a friendly Congress and a friendly administration, but they’re also thinking about what 10 or 20 years look like down the road.”

Two-thirds of state legislatures—currently 34 states—must call for a convention for it to happen. (A proposed amendment would still have to be ratified by three-fourths of states.) To convince as many states as possible to join the cause, Convention of States Action has created a model resolution for state legislatures to adopt. So far, according to the group, 19 states have passed resolutions, with more like Republican-led South Dakota and Wyoming considering legislation.

Meanwhile, a Democratic state legislator in California is advocating for following in the footsteps of New York in withdrawing previous applications for a convention, including one focused on gun control, over fear of opening the door of a convention for a Republican-controlled Congress. “I do not want California to inadvertently trigger a constitutional convention that ends up shredding the Constitution,” state Sen. Scott Wiener told the New York Times.

Constitutional law experts and public interest groups argue that the Constitution doesn’t offer concrete guidelines—nor are there any precedents—to govern the workings of a convention. Indeed, a 2016 congressional research report enumerates several open questions about how it would play out, including whether a convention could consider any issue beyond the scope of states’ requests, how delegates would be chosen, and what role, if any, the president might have. As Richardson of Accountable.US puts it, “We’re in totally uncharted territory.”

New Wildfires Are Breaking Out in LA

It’s been two weeks since the outbreak of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires that have burned more than 40,000 acres and killed at least 28 people.

While significant progress has been made in containing the Palisades and Eaton fires, the two most destructive wildfires to ever hit LA—72 and 95 percent contained, respectively, compared to 17 and 35 percent a week ago, with far less damage since—there has been little time to celebrate the win. On January 22, two other fires around Los Angeles took off, bringing the total burned acreage above 50,000.

Firefighters were quick to action on the Sepulveda Fire off Interstate 405 near the Bel-Air neighborhood. “We were able to keep it only to 40 acres,” Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson David Ortiz told CNN. “The Santa Ana winds are blowing against this fire, so we had that in our favor.” The fire is now 60 percent contained.

But north of LA, near the city of Santa Clarita, the Hughes Fire burned 10,000 acres in less than 24 hours, expanding 50 times in size—from 100 to 5,000 acres—and putting more than 30,000 people under mandatory evacuation orders. It’s still just 24 percent contained, although county firefighters have managed to keep any structures from burning down. Sheila Kelliher, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Fire Department, compared that effort to the Palisades Fire, where wind gusts were up to 80 t0 100 miles per hour—which she called “like fighting a hurricane with a fire attached to it.”

Notably, a Los Angeles County jail, the Castaic complex, was within the evacuated area. While 476 incarcerated people were moved from the south facility to the north facility, 4,700 remained sheltered in place overnight in a mandatory evacuation zone. Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said the choice was made in consultation with the fire department.

The ACLU of Southern California put out a statement urging the evacuation of those in the complex, saying it had “long opposed the expansion of the jail system especially in dangerous fire zones,” and was “gravely concerned for the safety of people incarcerated in those jails.”

Melissa Camacho, of ACLU of Southern California, called the move highly unorthodox. “I certainly haven’t heard of a general plan,” she said, “either in LA County or anywhere else, that involves sheltering in place when there’s a mandatory evacuation.”

The only exception Camacho could think of was Pepperdine University, near Malibu, which has a long-standing shelter-in-place plan pre-reviewed by the fire department.

“Perhaps it was that they wouldn’t have been able to evacuate them in time and that that was the only reason it was safer to shelter in place,” Camacho said. The LA Times reports that a shortage of transport buses—a long-standing problem for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department—contributed to the logistical troubles.

“I’m not willing to lose one person at that facility,” Luna told the LA Times on January 22, saying extra support was given to protect it. The night passed without damage or fatalities, but Camacho emphasized that “if people had died, there is a whole host of laws that would have been broken” by choosing not to evacuate them.

Camacho said the family members she spoke to were “in the dark” about the safety of their loved ones at Castaic. “It’s something we’re going to see happen more and more, and it’s really not something that we as a society should accept.”

Meanwhile, more than a thousand of California’s incarcerated firefighters have been on the ground trying to contain the wildfires as they sweep through the area.

The Los Angeles branch of the National Weather Service has warned that better does not mean safe: “This is a DANGEROUS fire day TODAY,” it posted on social media Thursday. “Winds will continue to increase and expand this morning. Humidity is already extremely dry…Much of LA & Ventura Counties are at critical Red Flag levels. Any new fire can grow rapidly.”

No cause has been directly identified for any of the recent fires, but experts cite climate change as a key contributor. Research from the University of California, Los Angeles, found that human-caused climate change may be linked to about a fourth of “the extreme fuel moisture deficit when the fires began.” The dry fuels contributed to the intensity of the fire.

“When it’s that dry, wind has ultimate power,” UC Merced climatology professor John Abatzoglou told CalMatters.

“The fires would still have been extreme without climate change, but probably somewhat smaller and less intense,” the researchers wrote.

Meanwhile, President Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders targeting climate action—including one attempting to undo water regulations in California meant to save an endangered fish—and has also threatened to withhold FEMA funding from California.

“Blatantly Unconstitutional”: Trump’s Attack on Birthright Citizenship Is Off to a Bad Start

A federal judge in Washington state dealt the first blow to President Donald Trump’s aspirations of rewriting the Constitution and throwing away a century-old legal precedent in his quest to eliminate birthright citizenship.

On Thursday, Judge John C. Coughenour issued a four-page temporary restraining order blocking Trump’s day-one proclamation denying automatic citizenship to children born on US soil to immigrants without legal status or on temporary visas.

“I’ve been on the bench for four decades,” the Ronald Reagan-appointed Seattle judge said in a hearing about the case brought by the state attorney generals of Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon, “I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order. Where were the lawyers when this decision was being made?”

The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment establishes that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Although conservative scholars have long tried to make the case that the children of undocumented immigrants should be excluded from this provision, centuries of tradition, constitutional interpretation, and Supreme Court precedent guarantee automatic citizenship to anyone born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

In their lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, the states note that in 2022 more than 150,000 babies were born to both undocumented parents in the United States. “The individuals who are stripped of their United States citizenship,” they argued, “will be rendered undocumented, subject to removal or detention, and many will be stateless—that is, citizens of no country at all.”

The Department of Justice opposed the state’s request for a temporary order arguing they lacked standing to sue the federal government on the issue. On the merits of the case, the government stated that Trump’s executive order is “entirely consistent with the 14th Amendment’s text and history” and that “birth in the United States does not by itself entitle a person to citizenship.”

The DOJ also pointed to language in the Civil Rights Act of 1866—which predated the ratification of the 14th Amendment—that excluded from citizenship those “subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed” to offer an alternative read of the citizenship clause of the Constitution.

The government attorneys further tried to question a Supreme Court landmark ruling in the lesser-known Wong Kim Ark case from 1898 reaffirming the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. As I’ve written before, the justices delivered a 6-2 opinion determining that Wong Kim Ark, the San Francisc0-born son of Chinese immigrants was indeed a US citizen, regardless of his parents’ ancestry. Opponents of birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants claim the Supreme Court decision was wrongfully decided and only directly applied to the children of immigrants with lawful status.

The Seattle federal judge’s decision is an indication of the steep climb Trump’s assault on birthright citizenship will face. Several lawsuits have already been filed by immigrant rights groups and on behalf of expecting immigrant parents. But the Trump administration and opponents of birthright citizenship were probably anticipating that would be the case and they might even have a plan to take this issue back to the highest court in the land.

“We appreciated and wanted the challenges to this,” said GOP Rep. Brian Babin of Texas who recently sponsored a bill to codify Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. “So we can get it into the Supreme Court of the United States. This thing could take up to three years before it winds up on the high court and let’s see how they [rule].”

Meet the 71-Year-Old Insurrectionist Rejecting Trump’s Pardon

Before Pamela Hemphill stormed the Capitol with thousands of other insurrectionists on January 6, 2021, she posted a photo of herself on Facebook in her living room holding a giant, plastic firearm. “Happy New Year!” the post read. “On my way to Washington DC January 6th!”

Once there, Hemphill wandered the halls of the Capitol armed with a selfie stick, according to a court filing from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that included stills from surveillance footage.

Eight months later, law enforcement officials arrested Hemphill in Boise, Idaho. In January 2022, she pleaded guilty to a charge of violent entry and disorderly conduct on capitol grounds, and was soon after sentenced to two months in prison—which she served at the now-shuttered FCI Dublin in California—three years probation, and a $500 fine. 

Today, 71-year-old Hemphill does not recognize her insurrectionist self. “My dream is to meet the Capitol police officers,” she told me on Zoom on Thursday, “and give them a hug.” She is so appalled by her past actions, in fact, that she has rejected the pardons Trump issued to the insurrectionists on Monday—despite the fact that it would have ended her ongoing period of probation, which prevents her from leaving the state, owning a weapon, or returning to the Capitol. (Whether she can legally reject the pardon remains unclear. Her attorney declined to comment when reached by phone on Thursday.)

A retired substance abuse counselor who says she’s been sober for more than four decades, Hemphill likens her decision to abstain from the pardon to the process of recovery: “It’s by doing the right thing and accepting responsibility for your actions that’s going to bring you more peace than anything you could imagine,” she told me. 

I called up Hemphill—who said she voted for Kamala Harris in the last election—to discuss her path to insurrectionist, the consequences of her criminal conviction, and Trump.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.

How did you wind up at the Capitol on Jan. 6? 

My brother had called and said, “Hey, how would you like to go there as a Christmas gift? It’ll be the last time we may be able to see Trump.” I said, “Oh, I’d love that,” because two weeks after I was going to start chemotherapy [for breast cancer], so I had a little window, and I thought, “this would be great.” I’d never been to Washington.

So by the time you got to DC on January 6, did you think that the 2020 election had been stolen?

I was on the fence. But I was believing if [Rudy] Giuliani’s out there and Trump and all those other very famous people, they wouldn’t be lying to the country.

Can you talk about the violence you saw that day? 

[The insurrectionists] pushed the barriers. They pushed the officers. They ran up to the steps, they pushed me down, stepped on my head, pulled my shoulder, cut my knee. I couldn’t breathe. The police officers pulled me up and saved my life. I would be dead because they were walking all over me.

So how does it feel to know that some of these people who perpetrated acts of violence against these police officers have now been pardoned and released from prison?

I’m so disgusted. How could they ever have been released? I mean, they’re the most dangerous criminals, and a lot of them had committed crimes before. I’m just still so disgusted and so angry. And that’s why I won’t take a pardon—because it would be a slap in the face to the Capitol Police, the rule of law, and to our nation.

Do you know of anyone else who was convicted for what they did on January 6 who also want to reject the pardons?

No, I wish. I keep asking people, journalists, and different people, “Do you know of anybody? I’d love to be able to talk to them.” You feel so alone. I can’t be the only one. 

When you were in prison, did you start to question the narrative of January 6 at all?

No, not at all. You’re just trying to focus. I was taking it an hour at a time. 

Once in a while when I was laying in my bunk, I would think it over, but I got so many letters saying I’m a hero, and “what you did was great.” And my gut said, “I don’t think so. I broke the law.” I would go back and forth with myself. 

When I got out and went to see my therapist that I had been seeing for years—because I still suffer from childhood PTSD issues—he looked at me, he heard my little back-and-forth denial. He says, “Miss Hemphill, come on, you’re not a victim. You had a choice. You were a volunteer.” And I got mad, and said, “I’m never gonna go back and see that therapist.” 

I got home that night, and because I’ve been sober for 45 years, one of the steps in recovery is, “When you’re wrong, properly admit it.” I realized: “Oh, he’s right. I had a choice. I’m not a victim.” And that started turning my thinking around.

Hemphill on the steps of the Idaho Capitol in 2020, in her insurrectionist era.David Staats/Idaho Statesman/ZUMA

What message do you think Trump is trying to send by issuing these pardons? And what message do you think he’s actually sending? 

In my opinion, the message is the DOJ is weaponized against him. He’s so evil. He needs his little own militia out there on the streets. He’s sending a message to the DOJ: “We know that you came after me like a witch hunt, and I did nothing wrong, and neither did the J6ers.” It’s the best gaslighting campaign I’ve ever seen.

You use the word “militia.”  Are you worried that the people who have been released from prison could go on to more political violence? What do you think they’re capable of going forward? 

Everything they were capable of doing on January 6. Nothing’s changed. They haven’t taken any responsibility for what they did at all. I mean, nobody forced them to break a window or hit an officer. In fact, it’s empowered them more. So, yes, I’m afraid that there will be more violence. 

Why don’t you want to accept this pardon? Is rejecting it even legally possible? 

According to what I’ve researched, yes.

I told my probation officer and I think she’s probably waiting for paperwork. But whatever I have to do to sign that thing I will, and then I’m going to frame it. 

The reason I’m not accepting it is because it would just contribute to their gaslighting and their lying about what happened on January 6—that it was okay, that we’re innocent. I don’t want to be a part of their continued rewrite of history. I broke the law. I know it would be difficult if you are in prison, looking at a ten-year sentence, but I’m sure I would still do this. Because you got to live with you, not anybody else. I have to live with Pam and my God that I believe in. So it’s the right thing to do, for no other reason.

I’m curious, does your background as a substance counselor and the steps that you have taken toward recovery, does that impact how you think about this?

Yeah, because it’s not just saying, “I’m sorry.” That’s easy. 

Making amends means to make it right. You can’t make January 6 right. But at least by speaking out, trying to reach out to others that are confused and lost family members in the MAGA cult, maybe I can say something to help them get through this. Or maybe—hopefully—somebody, a J6er or another criminal, might sit back and give it some thought and say, “you know, I was wrong that day. I need to take accountability.” 

You never know. We just plant the seeds.

Has your conviction had any ongoing consequences to your life and to opportunities you’ve sought after getting out of prison? If so, has that made you question at all whether you should take the pardon?

The consequences are troubles of my own making. I put myself there; I didn’t leave. I have to take the consequences that come with it. You don’t do things that are wrong and then think everything in your life’s going to be ok now. 

There’s been some consequences. I lost my Social Security. A relationship of 12 years left when I moved away from the MAGA cult. Lost my counseling license.

Ex-Capitol and DC police officers who were attacked that day now say they feel betrayed that Trump issued these pardons. Meanwhile, Trump has insisted he’s a “friend to police.” What’s your response to this? 

I’m so angry. Congress approved the plaque for the Capitol police officers and they have not put it up. It’s the least our nation could do for the Capitol police. 

Right now it’s real important to give them all the support that they could get to let them know that we know they were the heroes that day, and to thank them and let them know that we’re behind them. 

Trump ain’t a friend to nobody. He’s a narcissist; he’s a dangerous narcissist. 

He plays both sides, all the time. You never know what he’s going to do, and he lies about everything. 

What is your message to Trump and to other people who were convicted who are now taking solace in these pardons? 

It’s hard to say what you would say to Trump because he wouldn’t even let you say anything. 

To the others, since I was honest with myself, I sleep well at night. I have peace of mind. I didn’t like doing it. I wanted to stay a victim. When I changed and started realizing that Trump was a cult leader, I went through a lot this last year and a half. It’s not like if you do recognize you were wrong, don’t be thinking that it’s going to be easy, because it’s not. But you’re going to feel good, personally, inside. 

The Trump Administration Has Killed Asylum at the US-Mexico Border

The barrage has begun. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders aimed at reshaping immigration to the United States. He took various actions on top of the orders, too, affecting a wide range of aspects of the US immigration system, from indefinitely suspending refugee resettlement to summoning the military to perform border enforcement.

It has been hard to keep track of the already-chaotic push to end immigration as we know it. Trump ended the use of the Biden administration’s CBP One app and took away thousands of appointments for migrants and would-be asylum seekers. Flights for refugees already vetted and cleared to come to the United States have also been canceled, leaving many in limbo and even stranded in transit countries.

Among these, perhaps the most notable and disturbing development has been an aggressive, and seeming illegal, crackdown on access to asylum.

This week, the Trump administration has taken steps to effectively seal the southern border by declaring an “invasion” and invoking Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the president to, under certain circumstances, deny entry to foreigners if “detrimental to the interests” of the country. In one executive order titled “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion,” Trump references that authority to suspend “the physical entry of aliens involved in an invasion into the United States across the southern border until I determine that the invasion has concluded.”

“There is now no such thing as asylum at the US-Mexico border.”

The proclamation also bars migrants “posing threats to public health, safety, and national security,” preparing the terrain for a future travel ban. As a result, CBS News reported that Customs and Border Protection agents have been instructed to summarily deport migrants—including families with children—without allowing them the opportunity to ask for protection in the United States. “It’s like Title 42, but for everybody,” Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, said in reference to the pandemic-era public health order the Trump administration previously relied on to shut down the border for most migrants.

Mother Jones spoke with Isacson about Trump’s executive orders and their impact on the asylum system and beyond.

On day one, Donald Trump signed about 10 executive orders related to immigration. What stood out to you from the bunch?

The first thing that jumped out at me was they are closing the border and refusing to process anybody who’s undocumented. I don’t think it will stand, but it is an enormous deal. Between the existing Biden administration rule from June and this new closure of the border—which, of course, includes the cancellation of the CBP One app—there is now no such thing as asylum at the US-Mexico border. Section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act might as well not exist. They have all but repealed it for the time being, pending challenges. People who need protection now just simply cannot get it.

Wrapped in with that is the restart of the “Remain in Mexico” program and the closure of the humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, which leaves more people in limbo. There’s also a deployment of 1,500 active-duty soldiers and Marines on their way to the border. The United States has a 150-year-old tradition of not using its military for law enforcement duties on US soil, but we’re about to really part with that and give the military, perhaps like we’ve already seen happen under Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s command, the ability to confront civilians domestically.

Some of these executive orders invoke an authority under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to essentially bar any migrant and asylum seeker from entering the country by claiming an “invasion.” Can you explain what that authority is and how the Trump administration is trying to use it?

It’s an incredibly broad authority, and it gives the president power to just deny or prohibit the entry of broad classes of foreign citizens. Trump used it for his famous Muslim ban, and [Joe] Biden has used it for his asylum ban on everybody who crosses improperly between ports of entry. One reason the Biden administration waited so long to implement that asylum ban was because the 9th Circuit [Court of Appeals] had ruled that the 212(f) ban does not cancel out the right to asylum once you’re on US soil. You can prevent people from entering, but if they’re actually physically here and they say, “I fear returning to my country,” 212(f) doesn’t let you just kick them out.

The way that the [Trump] executive order is squaring that illegality of kicking out asylum seekers who are on US soil is by claiming there’s an invasion. It seems like an all-purpose, break-the-law free card if they get away with it. This is [also] almost certainly laying the groundwork for a larger travel ban—not giving visas to [certain] countries, not letting people into airports. You could see this administration targeting Muslim-majority countries like it did in the past. You could also see them targeting countries whose governments don’t allow a lot of deportation planes to land, like China and India, if they want to play hardball.

How do you see the courts responding to this “invasion” argument? 

The use of the Constitution’s article for invasion language to justify what they’re doing is incredibly broad and incredibly vague. It’s a legal theory that came out of a couple of Republican attorneys general and people in the Heritage Foundation orbit only around 2021 or 2022. Now they’re trying to claim that leaderless, stateless people with humanitarian needs are somehow the equivalent of an invading army. That is an incredibly wild legal theory. If courts actually defer to them and say the president gets to decide whether we’re under invasion or not, then the suspension clause of the Constitution lets them suspend habeas corpus, and they could just start arresting us if they don’t like us, without charge, because there’s an “invasion.”

In the nightmare, outlandish, worst-case, red team scenario, they can say that these 47,000 migrants coming to the border every month constitute an invasion. I don’t think they’ll try it, but it’s the same way [with] the Insurrection Act in the name of an invasion or just a disturbance of the public order, a president can bring in the military. If there’s future George Floyd-type protests, they can use combat-trained soldiers who have no law enforcement background to use maximum force against those protesters.

Those are two very big loopholes that could affect our basic freedoms anywhere, and in both cases, [you can see them] using the situation at the border as a pretext.

Does this strikes you as different from Trump’s first term?

They’re deliberately flooding the zone to keep us off balance, and they’re going for as much as they can get right off the bat. I imagine [they are] expecting to lose a lot of ground in court and in reality, but they’re trying for everything right now. They’re doing this at a time when Border Patrol apprehensions are way down. So it’s like they’re coming late to the emergency.

The Trump administration of the first couple of years, you had people like Stephen Miller and [former Acting Homeland Security Secretary] Chad Wolf running around, but you also still had General [John] Kelly and Kirstjen Nielsen, who was a career government person. You had some more grown-ups. Near the end of the Trump administration, from George Floyd to January 6, the lunatics really had taken over the asylum and it was getting a lot scarier. This is like that latter phase, but on steroids.

Trump’s January 6 Pardons Unleash Legal Chaos

When FBI agents investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol searched the Florida property of Jeremy Brown, they found a small arsenal. An AR-15-style rifle and a sawed-off shotgun, both unregistered, and two fragmentation grenades turned up in the search, prosecutors said. The Justice Department later alleged that Brown—an Army special forces veteran and member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia—had driven to Washington with those grenades and other weapons as part of the Oath Keepers’ preparations for violence aimed at helping President Donald Trump retain power.

In 2023, a federal judge in Florida sentenced Brown to more than seven years in prison on weapons charges. He also faced charges in Washington, DC, for disorderly conduct and entering a restricted building.

“It should relate, because everything was the fruit of the poisonous tree.”

Trump’s grant of clemency Monday to every single person “convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” wiped away Brown’s DC charges, along with those of about 1,600 other people allegedly involved in the January 6 attack.

But Trump’s broadly worded pardon might also affect the sentences of Brown and other alleged extremists facing separate charges that arose in part from the investigations into their January 6 conduct.

Carolyn Stewart, an attorney who represents Brown, said Tuesday that she is preparing to argue that Brown’s Florida conviction is covered by Trump’s pardon because the search that turned up his weapons resulted from the January 6 probe. Stewart contends that his conviction was, in the words of Trump’s pardon declaration, “related” to the events of January 6.

“It should relate,” Stewart said, “because everything was the fruit of the poisonous tree.” Stewart said she is unsure how that argument will fare in court and noted that she is also hoping Trump will issue an additional pardon specifically clearing Brown, who remains imprisoned in the Florida matter.

A spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in Tampa, which prosecuted Brown, declined to comment on whether the office believes Trump’s pardon applies to Brown’s Florida case. The Justice Department in Washington did not answer questions about the case.

Trump’s sweeping and almost entirely indiscriminate clemency announcement freed hundreds of people convicted of using or plotting violence in an effort to help Trump seize the power that voters had denied him in 2020. Trump, whose November 2024 election victory helped him avoid his own trial on January 6-related charges, pardoned people who used bear spray, metal barricades, flag poles, police shields, Tasers, fists, and other weapons to attack police officers defending the Capitol. Trump freed Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, along with other members of their groups who were convicted of seditious conspiracy, a crime that entails conspiring to overthrow the US government.

Rhodes promptly showed up Tuesday outside a DC jail where many January 6 defendants have been held. On Wednesday, he appeared on Capitol Hill, where he said he was lobbying lawmakers for Brown to “be given a pardon also.”

The blanket clemency has the potential to complicate the cases of an indeterminate number of defendants like Brown, who have been charged or convicted on separate, but arguably related, crimes that go beyond the specific events of January 6.

It is not clear if that was Trump’s intent. Trump and his advisers, who reportedly did not attempt to review specific January 6 cases individually, appear to have given little thought to the complications of determining which convictions are “related to” January 6. That task now falls to defense attorneys, Justice Department lawyers, and judges.

Axios reported Wednesday that Trump decided shortly before his inauguration to skip a case-by-case review and instead quickly pardon as many January 6 defendants as he could. “Trump just said, ‘Fuck it, release ’em all,’” a Trump adviser told the outlet.

The White House and Justice Department press office did not respond to questions from Mother Jones about the pardons.

The breadth of the pardons could even affect cases like that of Edward Kelley, a Tennessee man convicted in November of plotting to kill FBI agents and other federal employees who investigated him over his involvement in the January 6 attack. Trump’s pardon means Kelley escaped punishment for a separate conviction for assaulting law enforcement officers—including throwing a Capitol police officer to the ground—while storming the Capitol on January 6.

But could Kelley now argue that his Tennessee conviction is sufficiently “related” the attack on the Capitol and seek release? A former Justice Department attorney critical of Trump’s pardons, who asked not to be named, said the vague wording makes such arguments at least plausible, regardless of whether they ultimately succeed.

An attorney for Kelley did not respond to inquiries. A spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Tennessee, which prosecuted Kelley, referred questions to the US attorney’s office in Washington, which ran the massive January 6 investigation that Trump shut down upon taking office. A spokesperson for that office said questions should go to local US attorney’s offices.

One Justice Department official, however, speaking on the condition of anonymity, pointed to the arrest Wednesday of Daniel Ball, which came just one day after Trump’s pardon freed him. Ball had been charged with throwing an “explosive device” at police in a crowded tunnel on January 6, and he had been held under a pretrial detention order in Washington until Trump freed him.

Ball was then rearrested Wednesday on charges stemming from the May 2023 search of his home in Florida during which FBI agents said they found a loaded rifle, ammunition, and “multiple commercially produced explosive devices” that appeared to be the same style of device Ball allegedly threw at officers on January 6. Ball was charged with illegally possessing a firearm due to past felony convictions, which include a domestic violence charge for “battery by strangulation.”

The Justice Department official argued that Ball’s arrest indicates that federal prosecutors are indeed willing to proceed with separate, though arguably related, cases against violent January 6 offenders pardoned by Trump.

On Thursday, Ed Martin, interim US Attorney in DC, said in a filing that the office is not dropping charges against siblings Joseph Hutchinson and Olivia Pollock over their alleged failure to appear to face January 6 charges, even as Martin moved to dismiss their charges for assaulting officers and other crimes on January 6.

Another January 6 criminal whom Trump pardoned Monday was Guy Reffitt, a member of the far-right Three Percenters militia, who, according to prosecutors, intimidated and impeded officers outside the Capitol while wearing body armor and armed with a loaded revolver. Prosecutors said Reffitt played a “central role in leading” the attack. “We’re all going to drag them motherfuckers out kicking and screaming,” he told others in the crowd that day. “I just want to see [Nancy] Pelosi’s head hit every fucking stair on the way out.”

Reffitt was sentenced to seven years in prison on charges that included obstruction of justice for threatening to shoot his son and daughter if they reported his January 6 actions to law enforcement. “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor, and traitors get shot,” Reffitt told his children, according to his son, Jackson Reffitt, who testified during his father’s 2022 trial. Reffitt is also charged in Texas with possession of an unregistered silencer that FBI agents found when they arrested him in 2021.

It is not clear whether Trump’s pardon applies to Reffitt’s obstruction charge. Federal prosecutors on Thursday had not dismissed Reffitt’s case, as they have for those of other January 6 defendants. But in a motion filed in federal court in Texas on Tuesday, Reffitt’s attorney indicated the charge had been erased. “Reffitt no longer is serving a prison sentence and is ordered released by Executive order for his case in the District of Columbia,” the filing says. The motion also asked the presiding judge in Texas to drop a standing detention order in a step that could free Reffitt. The judge scheduled a January 30 hearing on that request.

Jackson Reffitt said the prospect of his father’s release has left him fearing for his life. “I’m terrified,” he told CNN on Monday. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

New Wildfires Are Breaking Out in LA

It’s been two weeks since the outbreak of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires that have burned more than 40,000 acres and killed at least 28 people.

While significant progress has been made in containing the Palisades and Eaton fires, the two most destructive wildfires to ever hit LA—72 and 95 percent contained, respectively, compared to 17 and 35 percent a week ago, with far less damage since—there has been little time to celebrate the win. On January 22, two other fires around Los Angeles took off, bringing the total burned acreage above 50,000.

Firefighters were quick to action on the Sepulveda Fire off Interstate 405 near the Bel-Air neighborhood. “We were able to keep it only to 40 acres,” Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson David Ortiz told CNN. “The Santa Ana winds are blowing against this fire, so we had that in our favor.” The fire is now 60 percent contained.

But north of LA, near the city of Santa Clarita, the Hughes Fire burned 10,000 acres in less than 24 hours, expanding 50 times in size—from 100 to 5,000 acres—and putting more than 30,000 people under mandatory evacuation orders. It’s still just 24 percent contained, although county firefighters have managed to keep any structures from burning down. Sheila Kelliher, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Fire Department, compared that effort to the Palisades Fire, where wind gusts were up to 80 t0 100 miles per hour—which she called “like fighting a hurricane with a fire attached to it.”

Notably, a Los Angeles County jail, the Castaic complex, was within the evacuated area. While 476 incarcerated people were moved from the south facility to the north facility, 4,700 remained sheltered in place overnight in a mandatory evacuation zone. Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said the choice was made in consultation with the fire department.

The ACLU of Southern California put out a statement urging the evacuation of those in the complex, saying it had “long opposed the expansion of the jail system especially in dangerous fire zones,” and was “gravely concerned for the safety of people incarcerated in those jails.”

Melissa Camacho, of ACLU of Southern California, called the move highly unorthodox. “I certainly haven’t heard of a general plan,” she said, “either in LA County or anywhere else, that involves sheltering in place when there’s a mandatory evacuation.”

The only exception Camacho could think of was Pepperdine University, near Malibu, which has a long-standing shelter-in-place plan pre-reviewed by the fire department.

“Perhaps it was that they wouldn’t have been able to evacuate them in time and that that was the only reason it was safer to shelter in place,” Camacho said. The LA Times reports that a shortage of transport buses—a long-standing problem for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department—contributed to the logistical troubles.

“I’m not willing to lose one person at that facility,” Luna told the LA Times on January 22, saying extra support was given to protect it. The night passed without damage or fatalities, but Camacho emphasized that “if people had died, there is a whole host of laws that would have been broken” by choosing not to evacuate them.

Camacho said the family members she spoke to were “in the dark” about the safety of their loved ones at Castaic. “It’s something we’re going to see happen more and more, and it’s really not something that we as a society should accept.”

Meanwhile, more than a thousand of California’s incarcerated firefighters have been on the ground trying to contain the wildfires as they sweep through the area.

The Los Angeles branch of the National Weather Service has warned that better does not mean safe: “This is a DANGEROUS fire day TODAY,” it posted on social media Thursday. “Winds will continue to increase and expand this morning. Humidity is already extremely dry…Much of LA & Ventura Counties are at critical Red Flag levels. Any new fire can grow rapidly.”

No cause has been directly identified for any of the recent fires, but experts cite climate change as a key contributor. Research from the University of California, Los Angeles, found that human-caused climate change may be linked to about a fourth of “the extreme fuel moisture deficit when the fires began.” The dry fuels contributed to the intensity of the fire.

“When it’s that dry, wind has ultimate power,” UC Merced climatology professor John Abatzoglou told CalMatters.

“The fires would still have been extreme without climate change, but probably somewhat smaller and less intense,” the researchers wrote.

Meanwhile, President Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders targeting climate action—including one attempting to undo water regulations in California meant to save an endangered fish—and has also threatened to withhold FEMA funding from California.

“Blatantly Unconstitutional”: Trump’s Attack on Birthright Citizenship Is Off to a Bad Start

A federal judge in Washington state dealt the first blow to President Donald Trump’s aspirations of rewriting the Constitution and throwing away a century-old legal precedent in his quest to eliminate birthright citizenship.

On Thursday, Judge John C. Coughenour issued a four-page temporary restraining order blocking Trump’s day-one proclamation denying automatic citizenship to children born on US soil to immigrants without legal status or on temporary visas.

“I’ve been on the bench for four decades,” the Ronald Reagan-appointed Seattle judge said in a hearing about the case brought by the state attorney generals of Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon, “I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order. Where were the lawyers when this decision was being made?”

The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment establishes that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Although conservative scholars have long tried to make the case that the children of undocumented immigrants should be excluded from this provision, centuries of tradition, constitutional interpretation, and Supreme Court precedent guarantee automatic citizenship to anyone born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

In their lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, the states note that in 2022 more than 150,000 babies were born to both undocumented parents in the United States. “The individuals who are stripped of their United States citizenship,” they argued, “will be rendered undocumented, subject to removal or detention, and many will be stateless—that is, citizens of no country at all.”

The Department of Justice opposed the state’s request for a temporary order arguing they lacked standing to sue the federal government on the issue. On the merits of the case, the government stated that Trump’s executive order is “entirely consistent with the 14th Amendment’s text and history” and that “birth in the United States does not by itself entitle a person to citizenship.”

The DOJ also pointed to language in the Civil Rights Act of 1866—which predated the ratification of the 14th Amendment—that excluded from citizenship those “subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed” to offer an alternative read of the citizenship clause of the Constitution.

The government attorneys further tried to question a Supreme Court landmark ruling in the lesser-known Wong Kim Ark case from 1898 reaffirming the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. As I’ve written before, the justices delivered a 6-2 opinion determining that Wong Kim Ark, the San Francisc0-born son of Chinese immigrants was indeed a US citizen, regardless of his parents’ ancestry. Opponents of birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants claim the Supreme Court decision was wrongfully decided and only directly applied to the children of immigrants with lawful status.

The Seattle federal judge’s decision is an indication of the steep climb Trump’s assault on birthright citizenship will face. Several lawsuits have already been filed by immigrant rights groups and on behalf of expecting immigrant parents. But the Trump administration and opponents of birthright citizenship were probably anticipating that would be the case and they might even have a plan to take this issue back to the highest court in the land.

“We appreciated and wanted the challenges to this,” said GOP Rep. Brian Babin of Texas who recently sponsored a bill to codify Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. “So we can get it into the Supreme Court of the United States. This thing could take up to three years before it winds up on the high court and let’s see how they [rule].”

Meet the 71-Year-Old Insurrectionist Rejecting Trump’s Pardon

Before Pamela Hemphill stormed the Capitol with thousands of other insurrectionists on January 6, 2021, she posted a photo of herself on Facebook in her living room holding a giant, plastic firearm. “Happy New Year!” the post read. “On my way to Washington DC January 6th!”

Once there, Hemphill wandered the halls of the Capitol armed with a selfie stick, according to a court filing from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that included stills from surveillance footage.

Eight months later, law enforcement officials arrested Hemphill in Boise, Idaho. In January 2022, she pleaded guilty to a charge of violent entry and disorderly conduct on capitol grounds, and was soon after sentenced to two months in prison—which she served at the now-shuttered FCI Dublin in California—three years probation, and a $500 fine. 

Today, 71-year-old Hemphill does not recognize her insurrectionist self. “My dream is to meet the Capitol police officers,” she told me on Zoom on Thursday, “and give them a hug.” She is so appalled by her past actions, in fact, that she has rejected the pardons Trump issued to the insurrectionists on Monday—despite the fact that it would have ended her ongoing period of probation, which prevents her from leaving the state, owning a weapon, or returning to the Capitol. (Whether she can legally reject the pardon remains unclear. Her attorney declined to comment when reached by phone on Thursday.)

A retired substance abuse counselor who says she’s been sober for more than four decades, Hemphill likens her decision to abstain from the pardon to the process of recovery: “It’s by doing the right thing and accepting responsibility for your actions that’s going to bring you more peace than anything you could imagine,” she told me. 

I called up Hemphill—who said she voted for Kamala Harris in the last election—to discuss her path to insurrectionist, the consequences of her criminal conviction, and Trump.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.

How did you wind up at the Capitol on Jan. 6? 

My brother had called and said, “Hey, how would you like to go there as a Christmas gift? It’ll be the last time we may be able to see Trump.” I said, “Oh, I’d love that,” because two weeks after I was going to start chemotherapy [for breast cancer], so I had a little window, and I thought, “this would be great.” I’d never been to Washington.

So by the time you got to DC on January 6, did you think that the 2020 election had been stolen?

I was on the fence. But I was believing if [Rudy] Giuliani’s out there and Trump and all those other very famous people, they wouldn’t be lying to the country.

Can you talk about the violence you saw that day? 

[The insurrectionists] pushed the barriers. They pushed the officers. They ran up to the steps, they pushed me down, stepped on my head, pulled my shoulder, cut my knee. I couldn’t breathe. The police officers pulled me up and saved my life. I would be dead because they were walking all over me.

So how does it feel to know that some of these people who perpetrated acts of violence against these police officers have now been pardoned and released from prison?

I’m so disgusted. How could they ever have been released? I mean, they’re the most dangerous criminals, and a lot of them had committed crimes before. I’m just still so disgusted and so angry. And that’s why I won’t take a pardon—because it would be a slap in the face to the Capitol Police, the rule of law, and to our nation.

Do you know of anyone else who was convicted for what they did on January 6 who also want to reject the pardons?

No, I wish. I keep asking people, journalists, and different people, “Do you know of anybody? I’d love to be able to talk to them.” You feel so alone. I can’t be the only one. 

When you were in prison, did you start to question the narrative of January 6 at all?

No, not at all. You’re just trying to focus. I was taking it an hour at a time. 

Once in a while when I was laying in my bunk, I would think it over, but I got so many letters saying I’m a hero, and “what you did was great.” And my gut said, “I don’t think so. I broke the law.” I would go back and forth with myself. 

When I got out and went to see my therapist that I had been seeing for years—because I still suffer from childhood PTSD issues—he looked at me, he heard my little back-and-forth denial. He says, “Miss Hemphill, come on, you’re not a victim. You had a choice. You were a volunteer.” And I got mad, and said, “I’m never gonna go back and see that therapist.” 

I got home that night, and because I’ve been sober for 45 years, one of the steps in recovery is, “When you’re wrong, properly admit it.” I realized: “Oh, he’s right. I had a choice. I’m not a victim.” And that started turning my thinking around.

Hemphill on the steps of the Idaho Capitol in 2020, in her insurrectionist era.David Staats/Idaho Statesman/ZUMA

What message do you think Trump is trying to send by issuing these pardons? And what message do you think he’s actually sending? 

In my opinion, the message is the DOJ is weaponized against him. He’s so evil. He needs his little own militia out there on the streets. He’s sending a message to the DOJ: “We know that you came after me like a witch hunt, and I did nothing wrong, and neither did the J6ers.” It’s the best gaslighting campaign I’ve ever seen.

You use the word “militia.”  Are you worried that the people who have been released from prison could go on to more political violence? What do you think they’re capable of going forward? 

Everything they were capable of doing on January 6. Nothing’s changed. They haven’t taken any responsibility for what they did at all. I mean, nobody forced them to break a window or hit an officer. In fact, it’s empowered them more. So, yes, I’m afraid that there will be more violence. 

Why don’t you want to accept this pardon? Is rejecting it even legally possible? 

According to what I’ve researched, yes.

I told my probation officer and I think she’s probably waiting for paperwork. But whatever I have to do to sign that thing I will, and then I’m going to frame it. 

The reason I’m not accepting it is because it would just contribute to their gaslighting and their lying about what happened on January 6—that it was okay, that we’re innocent. I don’t want to be a part of their continued rewrite of history. I broke the law. I know it would be difficult if you are in prison, looking at a ten-year sentence, but I’m sure I would still do this. Because you got to live with you, not anybody else. I have to live with Pam and my God that I believe in. So it’s the right thing to do, for no other reason.

I’m curious, does your background as a substance counselor and the steps that you have taken toward recovery, does that impact how you think about this?

Yeah, because it’s not just saying, “I’m sorry.” That’s easy. 

Making amends means to make it right. You can’t make January 6 right. But at least by speaking out, trying to reach out to others that are confused and lost family members in the MAGA cult, maybe I can say something to help them get through this. Or maybe—hopefully—somebody, a J6er or another criminal, might sit back and give it some thought and say, “you know, I was wrong that day. I need to take accountability.” 

You never know. We just plant the seeds.

Has your conviction had any ongoing consequences to your life and to opportunities you’ve sought after getting out of prison? If so, has that made you question at all whether you should take the pardon?

The consequences are troubles of my own making. I put myself there; I didn’t leave. I have to take the consequences that come with it. You don’t do things that are wrong and then think everything in your life’s going to be ok now. 

There’s been some consequences. I lost my Social Security. A relationship of 12 years left when I moved away from the MAGA cult. Lost my counseling license.

Ex-Capitol and DC police officers who were attacked that day now say they feel betrayed that Trump issued these pardons. Meanwhile, Trump has insisted he’s a “friend to police.” What’s your response to this? 

I’m so angry. Congress approved the plaque for the Capitol police officers and they have not put it up. It’s the least our nation could do for the Capitol police. 

Right now it’s real important to give them all the support that they could get to let them know that we know they were the heroes that day, and to thank them and let them know that we’re behind them. 

Trump ain’t a friend to nobody. He’s a narcissist; he’s a dangerous narcissist. 

He plays both sides, all the time. You never know what he’s going to do, and he lies about everything. 

What is your message to Trump and to other people who were convicted who are now taking solace in these pardons? 

It’s hard to say what you would say to Trump because he wouldn’t even let you say anything. 

To the others, since I was honest with myself, I sleep well at night. I have peace of mind. I didn’t like doing it. I wanted to stay a victim. When I changed and started realizing that Trump was a cult leader, I went through a lot this last year and a half. It’s not like if you do recognize you were wrong, don’t be thinking that it’s going to be easy, because it’s not. But you’re going to feel good, personally, inside. 

The Trump Administration Has Killed Asylum at the US-Mexico Border

The barrage has begun. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders aimed at reshaping immigration to the United States. He took various actions on top of the orders, too, affecting a wide range of aspects of the US immigration system, from indefinitely suspending refugee resettlement to summoning the military to perform border enforcement.

It has been hard to keep track of the already-chaotic push to end immigration as we know it. Trump ended the use of the Biden administration’s CBP One app and took away thousands of appointments for migrants and would-be asylum seekers. Flights for refugees already vetted and cleared to come to the United States have also been canceled, leaving many in limbo and even stranded in transit countries.

Among these, perhaps the most notable and disturbing development has been an aggressive, and seeming illegal, crackdown on access to asylum.

This week, the Trump administration has taken steps to effectively seal the southern border by declaring an “invasion” and invoking Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the president to, under certain circumstances, deny entry to foreigners if “detrimental to the interests” of the country. In one executive order titled “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion,” Trump references that authority to suspend “the physical entry of aliens involved in an invasion into the United States across the southern border until I determine that the invasion has concluded.”

“There is now no such thing as asylum at the US-Mexico border.”

The proclamation also bars migrants “posing threats to public health, safety, and national security,” preparing the terrain for a future travel ban. As a result, CBS News reported that Customs and Border Protection agents have been instructed to summarily deport migrants—including families with children—without allowing them the opportunity to ask for protection in the United States. “It’s like Title 42, but for everybody,” Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, said in reference to the pandemic-era public health order the Trump administration previously relied on to shut down the border for most migrants.

Mother Jones spoke with Isacson about Trump’s executive orders and their impact on the asylum system and beyond.

On day one, Donald Trump signed about 10 executive orders related to immigration. What stood out to you from the bunch?

The first thing that jumped out at me was they are closing the border and refusing to process anybody who’s undocumented. I don’t think it will stand, but it is an enormous deal. Between the existing Biden administration rule from June and this new closure of the border—which, of course, includes the cancellation of the CBP One app—there is now no such thing as asylum at the US-Mexico border. Section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act might as well not exist. They have all but repealed it for the time being, pending challenges. People who need protection now just simply cannot get it.

Wrapped in with that is the restart of the “Remain in Mexico” program and the closure of the humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, which leaves more people in limbo. There’s also a deployment of 1,500 active-duty soldiers and Marines on their way to the border. The United States has a 150-year-old tradition of not using its military for law enforcement duties on US soil, but we’re about to really part with that and give the military, perhaps like we’ve already seen happen under Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s command, the ability to confront civilians domestically.

Some of these executive orders invoke an authority under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to essentially bar any migrant and asylum seeker from entering the country by claiming an “invasion.” Can you explain what that authority is and how the Trump administration is trying to use it?

It’s an incredibly broad authority, and it gives the president power to just deny or prohibit the entry of broad classes of foreign citizens. Trump used it for his famous Muslim ban, and [Joe] Biden has used it for his asylum ban on everybody who crosses improperly between ports of entry. One reason the Biden administration waited so long to implement that asylum ban was because the 9th Circuit [Court of Appeals] had ruled that the 212(f) ban does not cancel out the right to asylum once you’re on US soil. You can prevent people from entering, but if they’re actually physically here and they say, “I fear returning to my country,” 212(f) doesn’t let you just kick them out.

The way that the [Trump] executive order is squaring that illegality of kicking out asylum seekers who are on US soil is by claiming there’s an invasion. It seems like an all-purpose, break-the-law free card if they get away with it. This is [also] almost certainly laying the groundwork for a larger travel ban—not giving visas to [certain] countries, not letting people into airports. You could see this administration targeting Muslim-majority countries like it did in the past. You could also see them targeting countries whose governments don’t allow a lot of deportation planes to land, like China and India, if they want to play hardball.

How do you see the courts responding to this “invasion” argument? 

The use of the Constitution’s article for invasion language to justify what they’re doing is incredibly broad and incredibly vague. It’s a legal theory that came out of a couple of Republican attorneys general and people in the Heritage Foundation orbit only around 2021 or 2022. Now they’re trying to claim that leaderless, stateless people with humanitarian needs are somehow the equivalent of an invading army. That is an incredibly wild legal theory. If courts actually defer to them and say the president gets to decide whether we’re under invasion or not, then the suspension clause of the Constitution lets them suspend habeas corpus, and they could just start arresting us if they don’t like us, without charge, because there’s an “invasion.”

In the nightmare, outlandish, worst-case, red team scenario, they can say that these 47,000 migrants coming to the border every month constitute an invasion. I don’t think they’ll try it, but it’s the same way [with] the Insurrection Act in the name of an invasion or just a disturbance of the public order, a president can bring in the military. If there’s future George Floyd-type protests, they can use combat-trained soldiers who have no law enforcement background to use maximum force against those protesters.

Those are two very big loopholes that could affect our basic freedoms anywhere, and in both cases, [you can see them] using the situation at the border as a pretext.

Does this strikes you as different from Trump’s first term?

They’re deliberately flooding the zone to keep us off balance, and they’re going for as much as they can get right off the bat. I imagine [they are] expecting to lose a lot of ground in court and in reality, but they’re trying for everything right now. They’re doing this at a time when Border Patrol apprehensions are way down. So it’s like they’re coming late to the emergency.

The Trump administration of the first couple of years, you had people like Stephen Miller and [former Acting Homeland Security Secretary] Chad Wolf running around, but you also still had General [John] Kelly and Kirstjen Nielsen, who was a career government person. You had some more grown-ups. Near the end of the Trump administration, from George Floyd to January 6, the lunatics really had taken over the asylum and it was getting a lot scarier. This is like that latter phase, but on steroids.

Trump’s January 6 Pardons Unleash Legal Chaos

When FBI agents investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol searched the Florida property of Jeremy Brown, they found a small arsenal. An AR-15-style rifle and a sawed-off shotgun, both unregistered, and two fragmentation grenades turned up in the search, prosecutors said. The Justice Department later alleged that Brown—an Army special forces veteran and member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia—had driven to Washington with those grenades and other weapons as part of the Oath Keepers’ preparations for violence aimed at helping President Donald Trump retain power.

In 2023, a federal judge in Florida sentenced Brown to more than seven years in prison on weapons charges. He also faced charges in Washington, DC, for disorderly conduct and entering a restricted building.

“It should relate, because everything was the fruit of the poisonous tree.”

Trump’s grant of clemency Monday to every single person “convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” wiped away Brown’s DC charges, along with those of about 1,600 other people allegedly involved in the January 6 attack.

But Trump’s broadly worded pardon might also affect the sentences of Brown and other alleged extremists facing separate charges that arose in part from the investigations into their January 6 conduct.

Carolyn Stewart, an attorney who represents Brown, said Tuesday that she is preparing to argue that Brown’s Florida conviction is covered by Trump’s pardon because the search that turned up his weapons resulted from the January 6 probe. Stewart contends that his conviction was, in the words of Trump’s pardon declaration, “related” to the events of January 6.

“It should relate,” Stewart said, “because everything was the fruit of the poisonous tree.” Stewart said she is unsure how that argument will fare in court and noted that she is also hoping Trump will issue an additional pardon specifically clearing Brown, who remains imprisoned in the Florida matter.

A spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in Tampa, which prosecuted Brown, declined to comment on whether the office believes Trump’s pardon applies to Brown’s Florida case. The Justice Department in Washington did not answer questions about the case.

Trump’s sweeping and almost entirely indiscriminate clemency announcement freed hundreds of people convicted of using or plotting violence in an effort to help Trump seize the power that voters had denied him in 2020. Trump, whose November 2024 election victory helped him avoid his own trial on January 6-related charges, pardoned people who used bear spray, metal barricades, flag poles, police shields, Tasers, fists, and other weapons to attack police officers defending the Capitol. Trump freed Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, along with other members of their groups who were convicted of seditious conspiracy, a crime that entails conspiring to overthrow the US government.

Rhodes promptly showed up Tuesday outside a DC jail where many January 6 defendants have been held. On Wednesday, he appeared on Capitol Hill, where he said he was lobbying lawmakers for Brown to “be given a pardon also.”

The blanket clemency has the potential to complicate the cases of an indeterminate number of defendants like Brown, who have been charged or convicted on separate, but arguably related, crimes that go beyond the specific events of January 6.

It is not clear if that was Trump’s intent. Trump and his advisers, who reportedly did not attempt to review specific January 6 cases individually, appear to have given little thought to the complications of determining which convictions are “related to” January 6. That task now falls to defense attorneys, Justice Department lawyers, and judges.

Axios reported Wednesday that Trump decided shortly before his inauguration to skip a case-by-case review and instead quickly pardon as many January 6 defendants as he could. “Trump just said, ‘Fuck it, release ’em all,’” a Trump adviser told the outlet.

The White House and Justice Department press office did not respond to questions from Mother Jones about the pardons.

The breadth of the pardons could even affect cases like that of Edward Kelley, a Tennessee man convicted in November of plotting to kill FBI agents and other federal employees who investigated him over his involvement in the January 6 attack. Trump’s pardon means Kelley escaped punishment for a separate conviction for assaulting law enforcement officers—including throwing a Capitol police officer to the ground—while storming the Capitol on January 6.

But could Kelley now argue that his Tennessee conviction is sufficiently “related” the attack on the Capitol and seek release? A former Justice Department attorney critical of Trump’s pardons, who asked not to be named, said the vague wording makes such arguments at least plausible, regardless of whether they ultimately succeed.

An attorney for Kelley did not respond to inquiries. A spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Tennessee, which prosecuted Kelley, referred questions to the US attorney’s office in Washington, which ran the massive January 6 investigation that Trump shut down upon taking office. A spokesperson for that office said questions should go to local US attorney’s offices.

One Justice Department official, however, speaking on the condition of anonymity, pointed to the arrest Wednesday of Daniel Ball, which came just one day after Trump’s pardon freed him. Ball had been charged with throwing an “explosive device” at police in a crowded tunnel on January 6, and he had been held under a pretrial detention order in Washington until Trump freed him.

Ball was then rearrested Wednesday on charges stemming from the May 2023 search of his home in Florida during which FBI agents said they found a loaded rifle, ammunition, and “multiple commercially produced explosive devices” that appeared to be the same style of device Ball allegedly threw at officers on January 6. Ball was charged with illegally possessing a firearm due to past felony convictions, which include a domestic violence charge for “battery by strangulation.”

The Justice Department official argued that Ball’s arrest indicates that federal prosecutors are indeed willing to proceed with separate, though arguably related, cases against violent January 6 offenders pardoned by Trump.

On Thursday, Ed Martin, interim US Attorney in DC, said in a filing that the office is not dropping charges against siblings Joseph Hutchinson and Olivia Pollock over their alleged failure to appear to face January 6 charges, even as Martin moved to dismiss their charges for assaulting officers and other crimes on January 6.

Another January 6 criminal whom Trump pardoned Monday was Guy Reffitt, a member of the far-right Three Percenters militia, who, according to prosecutors, intimidated and impeded officers outside the Capitol while wearing body armor and armed with a loaded revolver. Prosecutors said Reffitt played a “central role in leading” the attack. “We’re all going to drag them motherfuckers out kicking and screaming,” he told others in the crowd that day. “I just want to see [Nancy] Pelosi’s head hit every fucking stair on the way out.”

Reffitt was sentenced to seven years in prison on charges that included obstruction of justice for threatening to shoot his son and daughter if they reported his January 6 actions to law enforcement. “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor, and traitors get shot,” Reffitt told his children, according to his son, Jackson Reffitt, who testified during his father’s 2022 trial. Reffitt is also charged in Texas with possession of an unregistered silencer that FBI agents found when they arrested him in 2021.

It is not clear whether Trump’s pardon applies to Reffitt’s obstruction charge. Federal prosecutors on Thursday had not dismissed Reffitt’s case, as they have for those of other January 6 defendants. But in a motion filed in federal court in Texas on Tuesday, Reffitt’s attorney indicated the charge had been erased. “Reffitt no longer is serving a prison sentence and is ordered released by Executive order for his case in the District of Columbia,” the filing says. The motion also asked the presiding judge in Texas to drop a standing detention order in a step that could free Reffitt. The judge scheduled a January 30 hearing on that request.

Jackson Reffitt said the prospect of his father’s release has left him fearing for his life. “I’m terrified,” he told CNN on Monday. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

DOGE Is a New Way to Talk About an Old GOP Aim: Attacking the Poor

For all the talk of a new class-conscious GOP, the Republican Party sounded much like its old self when, in December, Vivek Ramaswamy laid out the mission of the nascent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security,” Ramaswamy complained. “The dirty little secret is that many of those entitlement dollars aren’t even going to people who they were supposed to.”

There it is again: “entitlement” reform. Drawing from his own presidential campaign pitch, Ramaswamy urged Donald Trump to deploy DOGE as a beachhead in a war on spending, arguing for using executive powers to slash “wasteful” federal expenditures without congressional approval. (Although Ramaswamy has since departed—reportedly rather messily—as co-lead to run for Ohio governor, President Trump officially established the temporary entity within the White House on Monday through one of his many day-one executive orders.)

DOGE apes the language of a Silicon Valley slide deck, but it has so far presented little more than a memeified version of well-trodden right-wing austerity politics.

Ramaswamy and Elon Musk—now DOGE’s sole leader—have pushed cuts in the corporate speak of “efficiency.” But what they offer makes little sense. Musk has talked of slashing $2 trillion. How would such a change not destroy programs Trump has promised not to kill? The billionaire does not have an answer, later backtracking his goal to consider $1 trillion to be “an epic outcome.”

“Entitelements” originally had a much different meaning.

Musk has offered the same logic that undergirded past calls for cuts: Tough love is good for the poor. He agreed in an October town hall on X that Trump’s policies would deliver “temporary hardship” but “ensure long-term prosperity.” Here, he sounds much like former House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose Path to Prosperity budgets proposed scaling back Medicare and Medicaid and repealing the Affordable Care Act to offset tax cuts for the wealthy, and like former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who said in 2023 that he did not “think hard-working Americans should be paying for all the social services” of “couch potatoes.”

Entitlements originally had a different meaning. When Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted Social Security in 1935, the program was pitched as “social insurance,” one that Americans “earned” and were “entitled” to. But Republicans have flipped that meaning by associating these programs with notions of dependence: lazy people asking for handouts—an “entitled” culture.

This argument traces back centuries, but the core of the discourse came during the New Deal and its aftermath. In the 2019 book Free Enterprise: An American History, professor Lawrence B. Glickman recounted how Roosevelt’s critics divided the country into “productive makers” and “unproductive takers.” As opposed to the early labor movements of the 1800s, wherein “makers” were workers and “takers” were business owners, free-market proponents “turned an image of class warfare on its head.” In this view, anti–New Dealers claimed taxation as theft. “The affluent declared themselves the victims” who were forced to support welfare, Glickman wrote.

The 1960s solidified anti-entitlement ideas amid a backlash to the civil rights movement, notes Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “By 1967, most of the stories about welfare and the poor were illustrated with pictures of Black people,” she told me. This laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan to huff in 1987 that “millions of Americans became virtual wards of the state” through government assistance.

The party has continually found rhetoric to suggest poor people are to blame for each new crisis. When the Tea Party took over the GOP, a key frustration was that “taxpayers” were supporting a population of the unworthy. Mitt Romney almost rode a similar “47 percent” sentiment to the White House.

This “free enterprise” mindset has assumed strange textures as venture capitalists take the vanguard of the GOP. Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen pointed to the New Deal as Roosevelt’s “personal monarchy.” We need a Caesar-like CEO in Trump, he said, to undo FDR’s grasp.

Given the upper crust’s latest New Deal backlash, the left’s challenge goes far beyond lawsuits against DOGE—it is how to revert “entitlements” back to its original meaning. In Williamson’s view, mainstream liberals have failed to show how government is good. Progressives, she says, need to start promoting a different version of government “efficiency.” Namely, the adoption of policies that better the lot of regular people and protect them from the excessively rich and self-entitled DOGE boosters.

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