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Chaos, Harassment, and Unpaid Bills: Inside Elon Musk’s War on USAID

Early in the morning of January 29, a few dozen US government employees and their families, clutching pets, small children, and whatever they could fit in a carry-on, left their homes in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and began an exhausting evacuation—by van, boat, and two planes—back to the United States. 

Staffers at the mission had spent the first week of the Trump administration grappling with a series of confusing and debilitating new directives from Washington. They struggled to get answers to basic questions, like how to wind down programs they had been ordered to stop, and what kinds of work, if any, they were allowed to pay for. But the USAID workers in Kinshasa now had more pressing issues. The previous afternoon, demonstrators had attacked embassies in the city, and overrun the home of a USAID employee. Staff had been given an hour to pack their things.

When they landed at Dulles International Airport 48 hours later, State Department and USAID employees did their best to make the arrivals feel welcome. People were on hand with food, clean clothes, and balloons. But while the evacuees spent the weekend recovering at a Marriott near the airport, the message from the highest levels of the government was far less inviting. Staffers who had left almost all of their possessions behind and were scrambling to find housing and schools for their kids followed the news in horror, as Elon Musk bragged about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper” and called the agency’s civil servants “radical-left Marxists who hate America.”

“We’ve given up everything to serve our country overseas,” one evacuated USAID employee recalled thinking, “and we’re being maligned by the richest asshole in the world.”

Musk’s attacks have been working. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio has offered a softer tone in discussing the agency he now oversees, vowing to save, not destroy, foreign aid, nearly a dozen employees and contractors at USAID—who spoke on condition of anonymity, given the hostility they now face—told Mother Jones that directives from the new administration have already inflicted short- and long-term damage to the government’s ability to administer aid work and development programs. Musk’s threats and conspiracy theories have undermined their mission, while the demands of the Trump-ordered spending freeze have interrupted life-saving projects and shattered the foundations of the entire humanitarian aid industry. Above all, their experiences—working in what they describe as a culture of fear and mass confusion—reflect a world in which the complaints about waste and inefficiency have become self-fulfilling. DOGE was sold as a plan to fix bureaucracy. The story of USAID offers a glimpse of how to break one.

Career employees at USAID are used to dealing with new administrations and adjusting to their priorities. But they were caught off guard by the ferocity with which Trump and Musk moved to undo their work. On his first day in office, the president ordered a 90-day administrative review of all foreign-aid programs, followed not long after by internal instructions to stop work on ongoing projects. Then came DOGE. 

While his team gained access to the agency’s books, Musk spent days spreading conspiracy theories about its work. He charged that the USAID was secretly underwriting Politico. He falsely accused the agency of starting the Covid-19 pandemic. In some cases, staffers noted, the White House has even blamed USAID for programs that were instead run by the State Department.

“I don’t have the adequate words,” a veteran USAID official wrote to their team. “Please just know that your work was good, and it mattered.”

The blitzkrieg, magnified by Musk’s own social media platform, blindsided people in development circles. “We always joke that you come armed to an interagency knife fight with a spreadsheet,” said a former USAID employee who worked, until recently, as an agency contractor. “We’re like, ‘but the data say,’ and ‘the evidence shows.’”

Musk, on the other hand, was lobbing accusations at their work while stripping them of the tools to defend themselves. Much of the agency’s senior leadership had been put on leave early on—ostensibly for “insubordination.” The USAID website has been down for nearly two weeks. Many employees couldn’t even respond to their emails. “We can’t even fact-check,” complained one foreign service officer, who has worked in missions in multiple African countries. 

In fact, the administration’s gut renovation has hampered the agency’s ability to prevent actual malfeasance. On Monday, USAID Inspector General Paul Martin released a report indicating, among other things, that reductions in available staff had left the agency “susceptible to inadvertently funding entities or salaries of individuals associated with U.S.-designated terrorist organizations.” Trump fired Martin the next day without explanation. (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.)

Musk’s stated goal was to destroy the agency, and he came pretty close. Last week, not long after Trump announced that the agency would be absorbed into the State Department, a Trump appointee at USAID—following directions from Rubio’s office—informed staff that all but 290 members of the 14,000-person bureau, including almost all of those stationed abroad, would be placed on administrative leave.

“I don’t have the adequate words,” a veteran USAID official wrote to their team that week, in an email announcing that the agency’s entire Africa Bureau was being reduced to just 12 people across two continents.

“Please just know that your work was good, and it mattered.”

Hours before staffers were set to go on leave on Friday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, blocking the purge, and restoring thousands of employees to full-time work. But the threat was emblematic of the chaos that the new administration’s efforts have unleashed. 

The stereotype of bureaucracies is that it is easy to get lost in them. Indeed, the firehose of acronyms and elongated titles at USAID can sound, to the uninitiated, like a different language entirely. A long set of rules and procedures, though, is easier to make sense of than the absence of any. The reality of the Trump takeover of USAID is that it has produced the sort of mismanagement that his administration promised to roll back. 

A trash bag is covering the USAID sign at the agency's DC headquarters. A poster in front says "RIP USAID."
Tributes are placed beneath the covered seal of USAID at its headquarters in Washington, DC. President Trump has called for USAID to be shuttered, escalating his unprecedented campaign to dismantle the humanitarian agency. Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

DOGE has created a corner of government in which simple things don’t work. Several employees said they had scrambled to put in reimbursement requests before they lost access to the system—but their requests could not be processed because the people whose job it was to approve them were already on administrative leave. In one African country, housing for American workers abroad is running on a generator because funds haven’t come through to pay utilities. One employee in DC told Mother Jones she was locked out of her email without ever being informed she was on leave; even HR couldn’t say for sure what was happening.

The team from Kinshasa was stuck in a particularly cruel loop. Even as the State Department advised US citizens to “safely depart while commercial options are available,” USAID employees received guidance from Washington that in order to ensure compliance with the administration’s new spending dictates, the acting administrator would need to approve a waiver to cover the costs of their evacuation, according to an affidavit filed in federal court on Tuesday; by the time the waiver was approved, “the evacuation had already begun.” Upon arrival in the US, evacuees were instructed to find temporary housing in the DC area, in order to comply with a Trump order mandating that employees work at the office—but their office was closed, and they were about to be put on leave. All the while, they have been paying out of pocket for lodging the government is supposed to foot the bill for.

Staff in other foreign postings, many with pets or small kids, were kept in suspense for days, with no guidance about whether and how they would be asked to relocate if they were placed on leave, and what they might bring. While Rubio had said, prior to the injunction, that the agency’s recall would work to accommodate overseas staffers with extenuating circumstances, the disruptions have already hit workers hard. In an affidavit filed as part of a lawsuit challenging the purge, a pregnant foreign service officer in her third trimester identified as “Beth Doe” explained that the new directives forced her to find a new hospital in a different city, and “left us searching for high schools that will admit our children.”

The threats from the new administration instilled a fear bordering on paranoia. It felt like “psychological warfare,” said one person. Employees described a never-ending campaign of harassing emails, sometimes sent in the middle of the night, asking them to quit. “It’s just like Retire! Retire! Retire! Do this!” said a USAID staffer who works on food assistance programs. “Oh you missed the ‘Fork in the Road’ email? Well, now we updated it with FAQs that don’t make sense!” When the staffer who was placed on leave without notification finally returned to work, she discovered the “Fork in the Road” emails had kept coming, even while she’d been locked out of the account.

The chaos has been just as debilitating for the work itself. At USAID, the people breaking stuff don’t seem to understand how and what they’re breaking. Take the “stop-work” orders. In aid and development work, staffers emphasize, you can’t just bring a program to an immediate halt; it has to be wound down, and in such a way that it can eventually be restarted at the end of the review period. For both legal and ethical reasons, partners have to be paid and services might have to be maintained. If you are transporting food or medication, it has to go somewhere. At the same time, a USAID employee who had been working at a mission in Africa said, staffers were given contradictory instructions to “not incur any cost whatsoever.”

“There was mass confusion about this in my office, in my bureau, across the agency, about what those guidelines and restrictions were,” another official said. “That also included things like, ‘Okay, so you’re telling us we have a stop work order, but does that mean that partners should fire all staff to help us implement these programs? Or is it just a pause?’”

DOGE has pushed hard to end programs outright. At least 350 USAID programs have been canceled permanently, says a USAID worker who has seen the lists. The staffer adds that managers were never given a chance to justify their programs’ existence. Some colleagues questioned whether DOGE simply did a keyword search for terms Musk doesn’t like—a tactic the administration has deployed at other federal agencies. “No one knows what the rhyme or reason is,” the staffer says about the canceled programs.

“I really think they think we just fly around in helicopters dropping packages on villages in the jungle.”

While their marching orders were perplexing, staffers did their best to follow them. “An analogy I’ve heard a few times is nobody wanted to be the tallest blade of grass,” one employee in Washington, DC, said. “Everyone was trying to lay low, thinking, ‘Okay, if we actually go through this review process, and this is in earnest, maybe we can get back online.’ And I think it’s very clear a lot of that was a farce. There is no review process.”

The consequences on the ground from all this chaos have been profound. The New York Times reported last week that children receiving experimental malaria vaccinations were no longer being monitored for adverse side effects. Millions of dollars of agricultural products have been wasting away in bins, and bednets for malaria prevention have been in limbo, presumably stuck in a warehouse somewhere. 

Rubio has insisted that USAID’s work will go on, and has announced that he’s granting waivers for food aid and health programs such as PEPFAR, the George W. Bush–era program that has saved millions of lives by supporting HIV prevention and treatment programs. So far those have mostly been empty promises. One problem, agency insiders explained, was that there was a cumbersome process to obtain a waiver, and many of the links in that chain were now missing. Even if a waiver was approved, the work on the ground had to be restarted. In Sudan, where hundreds of thousands of citizens rely on assistance, aid was cut off for weeks, before a pause on World Food Program aid was lifted on Sunday.

To the extent that the Trump administration eventually allows more USAID operations to resume, there will be immense costs. People have to be rehired. Programs have to be restarted. Supplies have to be repurchased. Relationships have to be repaired. 

“Everything that’s happening at the top fundamentally misapprehends how any of this works,” said the staffer who was evacuated from the DRC. “I really think they think we just fly around in helicopters dropping packages on villages in the jungle.”

Bureaucratic delays are deadly. In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, challenging the administration’s authority to pause and redirect congressionally approved funding, eight contractors and nonprofits alleged that $150 million worth of medical supplies were awaiting shipment, and $89 million more health products were already in transit to USAID sites that can’t distribute them. Without logistical support, medications risk expiration, damage, and theft. The complaint stated that “[n]ot delivering these health commodities on time could potentially lead to as many as 566,000 deaths from HIV/AIDS, malaria, and unmet reproductive health needs, including 215,000 pediatric deaths.”

USAID contractor Democracy International had to stop providing medical care to hundreds of children in Bangladesh who were seriously injured in protests last year, according to Tuesday’s lawsuit. Human rights workers that track the persecution of Christians in Burkina Faso face increased risk of violence because Democracy International can no longer provide them food and shelter.

Some contractors whose work involved planning for PEPFAR’s supply chain lost their jobs weeks ago. Instead of working on one of the government’s flagship public health programs, one worker spent nine hours last week at the dentist—scrambling to get any necessary work done before their benefits expired.

It’s not just USAID on the chopping block. An entire line of work is at risk. The government effectively backstops the global development sector, comprising roughly 40 percent of all funding. Now it’s backing out of those commitments, while trying to lay off thousands of people who work in these fields. The administration has “destroyed basically the entire development industry,” as one staffer put it. By refusing to pay outstanding invoices—dating as far back as November—the government is already forcing some companies to shutter operations.

The global development company Chemonics had to furlough 600 employees as it awaits payment on $104 million worth of unpaid invoices from 2024, according to court filings. 

“We’re one of the few that have been able to hang on this long,” said the former USAID employee, whose firm was expecting to furlough staff this week because the contractor can no longer make payroll. “The US government is not paying its bills just because some people arbitrarily decided they didn’t want to.”

Like late fees on cable bills, the US government’s nonpayment to contractors will likely lead to higher expenses down the road. “Class action from NGOs, from implementing partners, from staff, from people who have not gotten paid by the government—that is all going to cost massive amounts of taxpayer money,” a current USAID staffer said.

“The 60 years of goodwill that USAID has built around the world is gone. We no longer have that in two and a half weeks.”

Musk and his allies haven’t just blown up existing programs. They have poisoned the well for future ones. By spreading conspiracies about what USAID does, staffers believe the new administration undermined the country’s capacity for development projects for the foreseeable future, and undermined the national-security goals of their work.

USAID isn’t just a charity. It is the government’s mechanism for establishing symbiotic partnerships with nations that can later help us. “The nature of our work was to seek winning situations for both countries,” says one of the many laid-off USAID workers. “It’s through that sort of win-win relationship building that we gain real allyship with countries in the face of national security risks.”

It took decades to build up enough trust with partner countries before their citizens were open to accepting, for example, vaccines for their children.  

“The 60 years of goodwill that USAID has built around the world is gone,” said one foreign service officer. “We no longer have that in two and a half weeks.”

In the meantime, USAID employees who are not on leave are still without a place to work. The few dozen employees who showed up at the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington on Monday were turned away by security. USAID didn’t have a lease there anymore, they were informed. Black plastic bags had been draped over agency signage, and the windows inside had been papered over.

The space “will be repurposed for other government needs,” a Government Services Agency spokesperson told Mother Jones, but declined to say what might take its place. But USAID staffers who stuck around on Monday discovered a prospective new tenant was already eyeing the complex. It was an agency better suited to the administration’s relationship with the rest of the world: Customs and Border Protection.

Chaos, Harassment, and Unpaid Bills: Inside Elon Musk’s War on USAID

Early in the morning of January 29, a few dozen US government employees and their families, clutching pets, small children, and whatever they could fit in a carry-on, left their homes in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and began an exhausting evacuation—by van, boat, and two planes—back to the United States. 

Staffers at the mission had spent the first week of the Trump administration grappling with a series of confusing and debilitating new directives from Washington. They struggled to get answers to basic questions, like how to wind down programs they had been ordered to stop, and what kinds of work, if any, they were allowed to pay for. But the USAID workers in Kinshasa now had more pressing issues. The previous afternoon, demonstrators had attacked embassies in the city, and overrun the home of a USAID employee. Staff had been given an hour to pack their things.

When they landed at Dulles International Airport 48 hours later, State Department and USAID employees did their best to make the arrivals feel welcome. People were on hand with food, clean clothes, and balloons. But while the evacuees spent the weekend recovering at a Marriott near the airport, the message from the highest levels of the government was far less inviting. Staffers who had left almost all of their possessions behind and were scrambling to find housing and schools for their kids followed the news in horror, as Elon Musk bragged about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper” and called the agency’s civil servants “radical-left Marxists who hate America.”

“We’ve given up everything to serve our country overseas,” one evacuated USAID employee recalled thinking, “and we’re being maligned by the richest asshole in the world.”

Musk’s attacks have been working. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio has offered a softer tone in discussing the agency he now oversees, vowing to save, not destroy, foreign aid, nearly a dozen employees and contractors at USAID—who spoke on condition of anonymity, given the hostility they now face—told Mother Jones that directives from the new administration have already inflicted short- and long-term damage to the government’s ability to administer aid work and development programs. Musk’s threats and conspiracy theories have undermined their mission, while the demands of the Trump-ordered spending freeze have interrupted life-saving projects and shattered the foundations of the entire humanitarian aid industry. Above all, their experiences—working in what they describe as a culture of fear and mass confusion—reflect a world in which the complaints about waste and inefficiency have become self-fulfilling. DOGE was sold as a plan to fix bureaucracy. The story of USAID offers a glimpse of how to break one.

Career employees at USAID are used to dealing with new administrations and adjusting to their priorities. But they were caught off guard by the ferocity with which Trump and Musk moved to undo their work. On his first day in office, the president ordered a 90-day administrative review of all foreign-aid programs, followed not long after by internal instructions to stop work on ongoing projects. Then came DOGE. 

While his team gained access to the agency’s books, Musk spent days spreading conspiracy theories about its work. He charged that the USAID was secretly underwriting Politico. He falsely accused the agency of starting the Covid-19 pandemic. In some cases, staffers noted, the White House has even blamed USAID for programs that were instead run by the State Department.

“I don’t have the adequate words,” a veteran USAID official wrote to their team. “Please just know that your work was good, and it mattered.”

The blitzkrieg, magnified by Musk’s own social media platform, blindsided people in development circles. “We always joke that you come armed to an interagency knife fight with a spreadsheet,” said a former USAID employee who worked, until recently, as an agency contractor. “We’re like, ‘but the data say,’ and ‘the evidence shows.’”

Musk, on the other hand, was lobbing accusations at their work while stripping them of the tools to defend themselves. Much of the agency’s senior leadership had been put on leave early on—ostensibly for “insubordination.” The USAID website has been down for nearly two weeks. Many employees couldn’t even respond to their emails. “We can’t even fact-check,” complained one foreign service officer, who has worked in missions in multiple African countries. 

In fact, the administration’s gut renovation has hampered the agency’s ability to prevent actual malfeasance. On Monday, USAID Inspector General Paul Martin released a report indicating, among other things, that reductions in available staff had left the agency “susceptible to inadvertently funding entities or salaries of individuals associated with U.S.-designated terrorist organizations.” Trump fired Martin the next day without explanation. (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.)

Musk’s stated goal was to destroy the agency, and he came pretty close. Last week, not long after Trump announced that the agency would be absorbed into the State Department, a Trump appointee at USAID—following directions from Rubio’s office—informed staff that all but 290 members of the 14,000-person bureau, including almost all of those stationed abroad, would be placed on administrative leave.

“I don’t have the adequate words,” a veteran USAID official wrote to their team that week, in an email announcing that the agency’s entire Africa Bureau was being reduced to just 12 people across two continents.

“Please just know that your work was good, and it mattered.”

Hours before staffers were set to go on leave on Friday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, blocking the purge, and restoring thousands of employees to full-time work. But the threat was emblematic of the chaos that the new administration’s efforts have unleashed. 

The stereotype of bureaucracies is that it is easy to get lost in them. Indeed, the firehose of acronyms and elongated titles at USAID can sound, to the uninitiated, like a different language entirely. A long set of rules and procedures, though, is easier to make sense of than the absence of any. The reality of the Trump takeover of USAID is that it has produced the sort of mismanagement that his administration promised to roll back. 

A trash bag is covering the USAID sign at the agency's DC headquarters. A poster in front says "RIP USAID."
Tributes are placed beneath the covered seal of USAID at its headquarters in Washington, DC. President Trump has called for USAID to be shuttered, escalating his unprecedented campaign to dismantle the humanitarian agency. Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

DOGE has created a corner of government in which simple things don’t work. Several employees said they had scrambled to put in reimbursement requests before they lost access to the system—but their requests could not be processed because the people whose job it was to approve them were already on administrative leave. In one African country, housing for American workers abroad is running on a generator because funds haven’t come through to pay utilities. One employee in DC told Mother Jones she was locked out of her email without ever being informed she was on leave; even HR couldn’t say for sure what was happening.

The team from Kinshasa was stuck in a particularly cruel loop. Even as the State Department advised US citizens to “safely depart while commercial options are available,” USAID employees received guidance from Washington that in order to ensure compliance with the administration’s new spending dictates, the acting administrator would need to approve a waiver to cover the costs of their evacuation, according to an affidavit filed in federal court on Tuesday; by the time the waiver was approved, “the evacuation had already begun.” Upon arrival in the US, evacuees were instructed to find temporary housing in the DC area, in order to comply with a Trump order mandating that employees work at the office—but their office was closed, and they were about to be put on leave. All the while, they have been paying out of pocket for lodging the government is supposed to foot the bill for.

Staff in other foreign postings, many with pets or small kids, were kept in suspense for days, with no guidance about whether and how they would be asked to relocate if they were placed on leave, and what they might bring. While Rubio had said, prior to the injunction, that the agency’s recall would work to accommodate overseas staffers with extenuating circumstances, the disruptions have already hit workers hard. In an affidavit filed as part of a lawsuit challenging the purge, a pregnant foreign service officer in her third trimester identified as “Beth Doe” explained that the new directives forced her to find a new hospital in a different city, and “left us searching for high schools that will admit our children.”

The threats from the new administration instilled a fear bordering on paranoia. It felt like “psychological warfare,” said one person. Employees described a never-ending campaign of harassing emails, sometimes sent in the middle of the night, asking them to quit. “It’s just like Retire! Retire! Retire! Do this!” said a USAID staffer who works on food assistance programs. “Oh you missed the ‘Fork in the Road’ email? Well, now we updated it with FAQs that don’t make sense!” When the staffer who was placed on leave without notification finally returned to work, she discovered the “Fork in the Road” emails had kept coming, even while she’d been locked out of the account.

The chaos has been just as debilitating for the work itself. At USAID, the people breaking stuff don’t seem to understand how and what they’re breaking. Take the “stop-work” orders. In aid and development work, staffers emphasize, you can’t just bring a program to an immediate halt; it has to be wound down, and in such a way that it can eventually be restarted at the end of the review period. For both legal and ethical reasons, partners have to be paid and services might have to be maintained. If you are transporting food or medication, it has to go somewhere. At the same time, a USAID employee who had been working at a mission in Africa said, staffers were given contradictory instructions to “not incur any cost whatsoever.”

“There was mass confusion about this in my office, in my bureau, across the agency, about what those guidelines and restrictions were,” another official said. “That also included things like, ‘Okay, so you’re telling us we have a stop work order, but does that mean that partners should fire all staff to help us implement these programs? Or is it just a pause?’”

DOGE has pushed hard to end programs outright. At least 350 USAID programs have been canceled permanently, says a USAID worker who has seen the lists. The staffer adds that managers were never given a chance to justify their programs’ existence. Some colleagues questioned whether DOGE simply did a keyword search for terms Musk doesn’t like—a tactic the administration has deployed at other federal agencies. “No one knows what the rhyme or reason is,” the staffer says about the canceled programs.

“I really think they think we just fly around in helicopters dropping packages on villages in the jungle.”

While their marching orders were perplexing, staffers did their best to follow them. “An analogy I’ve heard a few times is nobody wanted to be the tallest blade of grass,” one employee in Washington, DC, said. “Everyone was trying to lay low, thinking, ‘Okay, if we actually go through this review process, and this is in earnest, maybe we can get back online.’ And I think it’s very clear a lot of that was a farce. There is no review process.”

The consequences on the ground from all this chaos have been profound. The New York Times reported last week that children receiving experimental malaria vaccinations were no longer being monitored for adverse side effects. Millions of dollars of agricultural products have been wasting away in bins, and bednets for malaria prevention have been in limbo, presumably stuck in a warehouse somewhere. 

Rubio has insisted that USAID’s work will go on, and has announced that he’s granting waivers for food aid and health programs such as PEPFAR, the George W. Bush–era program that has saved millions of lives by supporting HIV prevention and treatment programs. So far those have mostly been empty promises. One problem, agency insiders explained, was that there was a cumbersome process to obtain a waiver, and many of the links in that chain were now missing. Even if a waiver was approved, the work on the ground had to be restarted. In Sudan, where hundreds of thousands of citizens rely on assistance, aid was cut off for weeks, before a pause on World Food Program aid was lifted on Sunday.

To the extent that the Trump administration eventually allows more USAID operations to resume, there will be immense costs. People have to be rehired. Programs have to be restarted. Supplies have to be repurchased. Relationships have to be repaired. 

“Everything that’s happening at the top fundamentally misapprehends how any of this works,” said the staffer who was evacuated from the DRC. “I really think they think we just fly around in helicopters dropping packages on villages in the jungle.”

Bureaucratic delays are deadly. In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, challenging the administration’s authority to pause and redirect congressionally approved funding, eight contractors and nonprofits alleged that $150 million worth of medical supplies were awaiting shipment, and $89 million more health products were already in transit to USAID sites that can’t distribute them. Without logistical support, medications risk expiration, damage, and theft. The complaint stated that “[n]ot delivering these health commodities on time could potentially lead to as many as 566,000 deaths from HIV/AIDS, malaria, and unmet reproductive health needs, including 215,000 pediatric deaths.”

USAID contractor Democracy International had to stop providing medical care to hundreds of children in Bangladesh who were seriously injured in protests last year, according to Tuesday’s lawsuit. Human rights workers that track the persecution of Christians in Burkina Faso face increased risk of violence because Democracy International can no longer provide them food and shelter.

Some contractors whose work involved planning for PEPFAR’s supply chain lost their jobs weeks ago. Instead of working on one of the government’s flagship public health programs, one worker spent nine hours last week at the dentist—scrambling to get any necessary work done before their benefits expired.

It’s not just USAID on the chopping block. An entire line of work is at risk. The government effectively backstops the global development sector, comprising roughly 40 percent of all funding. Now it’s backing out of those commitments, while trying to lay off thousands of people who work in these fields. The administration has “destroyed basically the entire development industry,” as one staffer put it. By refusing to pay outstanding invoices—dating as far back as November—the government is already forcing some companies to shutter operations.

The global development company Chemonics had to furlough 600 employees as it awaits payment on $104 million worth of unpaid invoices from 2024, according to court filings. 

“We’re one of the few that have been able to hang on this long,” said the former USAID employee, whose firm was expecting to furlough staff this week because the contractor can no longer make payroll. “The US government is not paying its bills just because some people arbitrarily decided they didn’t want to.”

Like late fees on cable bills, the US government’s nonpayment to contractors will likely lead to higher expenses down the road. “Class action from NGOs, from implementing partners, from staff, from people who have not gotten paid by the government—that is all going to cost massive amounts of taxpayer money,” a current USAID staffer said.

“The 60 years of goodwill that USAID has built around the world is gone. We no longer have that in two and a half weeks.”

Musk and his allies haven’t just blown up existing programs. They have poisoned the well for future ones. By spreading conspiracies about what USAID does, staffers believe the new administration undermined the country’s capacity for development projects for the foreseeable future, and undermined the national-security goals of their work.

USAID isn’t just a charity. It is the government’s mechanism for establishing symbiotic partnerships with nations that can later help us. “The nature of our work was to seek winning situations for both countries,” says one of the many laid-off USAID workers. “It’s through that sort of win-win relationship building that we gain real allyship with countries in the face of national security risks.”

It took decades to build up enough trust with partner countries before their citizens were open to accepting, for example, vaccines for their children.  

“The 60 years of goodwill that USAID has built around the world is gone,” said one foreign service officer. “We no longer have that in two and a half weeks.”

In the meantime, USAID employees who are not on leave are still without a place to work. The few dozen employees who showed up at the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington on Monday were turned away by security. USAID didn’t have a lease there anymore, they were informed. Black plastic bags had been draped over agency signage, and the windows inside had been papered over.

The space “will be repurposed for other government needs,” a Government Services Agency spokesperson told Mother Jones, but declined to say what might take its place. But USAID staffers who stuck around on Monday discovered a prospective new tenant was already eyeing the complex. It was an agency better suited to the administration’s relationship with the rest of the world: Customs and Border Protection.

Everything Elon Musk Touches Is a Conflict of Interest

In early February, President Donald Trump threatened to cut off “all future funding” to South Africa, alleging that the government was “treating certain classes of people very badly” by passing a law allowing for the expropriation of privately owned land in certain cases. Right-wingers in both countries have framed the law as a discriminatory attack on white citizens, who comprise seven percent of the population but hold 70 percent of privately owned land. When President Cyril Ramaphosa defended the policy on X, Elon Musk, the Pretoria-born tech billionaire who is currently leading the White House’s efforts to eliminate most forms of foreign aid, shot back.

“Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?” he asked.

Musk, who also spoke by phone with Ramaphosa last week, is not just a critic of South African ownership laws. One of his companies is actively working to get around them. Starlink, a subsidiary of SpaceX that provides phone and internet service via low-Earth-orbit satellites, has been trying for years to expand to Musk’s birth country. But he has been stymied by a post-apartheid law that requires telecom providers to be at least 30-percent owned by “historically disadvantaged groups”—namely, Black South Africans. Musk’s company, suffice it to say, is not. Starlink and Musk have reportedly lobbied for Ramaphosa’s government to change the requirement or consider a workaround—for instance, by granting an exemption as part of a deal for a Tesla battery plant. According to Bloomberg, Musk personally discussed Starlink with Ramaphosa at a meeting in New York last fall.

Would he be so interested in funding the UK Reform Party if the ruling Labour party hadn’t snubbed him from an investment conference? Is he feuding with half of Europe right now because their leaders have caught the “woke mind virus” or because the European Union has been investigating X since 2023 over violations of its Digital Services Act?

A top government official backing punitive measures against a foreign country he’s simultaneously negotiating a business deal with represents a major conflict of interest. For Musk, it is only one of many. With a net worth of around $400 billion, Musk brings to Washington the wealth of a nation-state, and the geopolitical entanglements of one too. He provides internet access to more than 100 countries. His cars are available across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. He gets raw materials from four continents; feuds with sovereign wealth funds; backchannels with heads of state; sends their satellites into space; censors communications at their request; and, increasingly, throws his support behind those who share his interests and attempts to remove from office the ones who don’t.

Civil servants and elected officials are often bound by tight disclosure requirements and ethics guidelines designed to curb conflicts of interest and prevent bureaucrats from profiting from their work. Michael Punke, the author of the book that was adapted into the Oscar-winning motion picture, The Revenant, was famously prohibited from even promoting the book while serving as US ambassador to the World Trade Organization.

Musk, who is operating as a “special government employee,” has not divested from his vast holdings. He has not stepped down from his companies. On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Musk’s conflicts would be handled on something like an honor system: “If Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing…Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.” The sheer scope of Musk’s interests, though, means that everything that happens, anywhere in the world, is a potential conflict.

Take Starlink, a product so ubiquitous that according to a New York Times analysis, it accounts for more than half the satellites in the sky. Although South Africa’s ownership law is a unique product of the country’s Black Economic Empowerment program, Musk has frequently been stymied by local ownership requirements and licensing processes—particularly in Africa and Asia. In Vietnam, for instance, 2023 negotiations with Starlink fell apart over a law requiring telecom providers to have majority domestic ownership.

When Starlink users have circumvented national bans by taking advantage of roaming plans, governments have responded by seizing devices and ordering the company to cease and desist its service. In some cases, they have even argued that the service threatens their own national security interests. The Sudanese government, for instance, complained in 2024 that a militia group accused of crimes against humanity was able to bypass a government internet blackout by using Starlink roaming plans to conduct its operations. Meanwhile, many Sudanese citizens rely on food and medical programs from USAID —an agency that Musk has promised to send “into the woodchipper.”

Fights over telecom regulations slowed the company’s growth. Now things are looking up. Musk’s new role in the White House has made it “harder for some governments to resist Starlink,” Bloomberg recently reported. After three years of discussions, Chad granted approval one week after the November election. The effort in South Africa began picking up steam. Musk recently spoke with the president of Nepal about relaxing that country’s ownership laws. Everyone wants to meet with him now.

Part of what makes Starlink such a minefield of conflict of interests is that it’s so difficult to tell where Musk’s private interests end and his policy-making ambitions begin. The extra-special government employee who joined Trump on a post-election call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy owns the satellite network that country is counting on to fight Russia. (Incidentally, some of the funding for those satellites came from USAID.) Musk has also held private phone calls with Russian president Vladimir Putin—who, according to the Wall Street Journal, discussed blocking Starlink in Taiwan as a favor to China. Taiwan, for its part, so distrusts Musk that it has already banned Starlink and is building its own network. In a post-election talk with an Iranian government official, Musk reportedly discussed the possibility of investing in the country. He has previously promised on X that he would seek an exemption from Treasury Department sanctions to bring Starlink to Tehran. Now he effectively controls the Treasury Department.

Tesla is another area where Musk’s interests are too vast to disentangle from his government work. He has sourced materials and parts for his cars from China, Indonesia, Mozambique, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, New Caledonia, Australia, Canada, the US, and Japan, among other places. He builds them in China, the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and Germany. The list of places where he has looked into getting lithium or nickel, at setting up a plant, or at distributing Teslas is vast. Musk’s business depends on a lot of things happening a certain way across the world. A SpaceX supplier recently shifted operations from Taiwan to Thailand because of the geopolitical pressure on the former nation. Musk was forced to find a new source of aluminum after sanctions forced him to cut ties with a company controlled by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

If Musk has a stake in the rest of the world, the rest of the world also has a stake in Musk. Investors in X have included Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and Saudia Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Al Saud, as well as the prince’s investment house Kingdom Holding, which is partially owned by the country’s sovereign wealth fund. Kingdom Holding and Qatar—along with the sovereign wealth fund of Oman—are also backers of Musk’s AI startup, xAI. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund holds a 1 percent stake in Tesla. (Musk cancelled a visit to Oslo last year after the fund manager voted against a $56 billion compensation package for Musk twice; Musk then complained that the fund manager had leaked his angry texts, although they were in fact disclosed under public records laws.) 

Then there’s China, which has banned X and does not permit Starlink to operate, but where Tesla has thrived with the blessing of the authoritarian state. Musk makes cars and sells cars there and has benefited enormously from a rule Tesla pushed for that allows the company to sell emissions credits, just as it does in California. Musk, meanwhile, has parroted the government’s talking points on Taiwan and defended its treatment of the Uyghurs. This has been a lucrative relationship for Musk, but also a very fragile one, as Tesla is increasingly caught between American protectionism and the growth of a rival electric-vehicle industry in China. You don’t have to imagine a scenario in which Musk pressures Trump and Congress to tank legislation that would hurt his interests in the country; he already did that last year. 

With his hands-on control of X, Musk has demonstrated a willingness to throttle political speech when censorship benefits friendly leaders—Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, Narendra Modi of India, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel—while using his platform to foment a global right-wing movement. Over the last two years, Musk has backed right-wing leaders in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, El Salvador, Germany, Israel, and Italy. Musk has been demanding the release of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a far-right fraudster and stalker who goes by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, and who was jailed for contempt of court last year after repeating claims about a Syrian refugee that had already been found to be defamatory. Musk’s platform provided fuel for anti-immigrant riots in the UK. He encouraged UFC fighter Conor McGregor to run for president of Ireland. And in recent weeks, Musk has aggressively promote the far-right German AfD party, whose membership he implored to set aside their “guilt” about the nation’s past.

Perhaps no one in American history has combined this many conflicts of interest across the globe with this much state power—legally authorized or not. Dick Cheney was chairman and CEO of Halliburton and later vice president of the United States, but he was not both at the same time. And these are merely his foreign entanglements; the inherent conflict in a major government contractor taking control of the federal government’s contracting process is almost too obvious to note.

For every Musk political stance, there’s a personal interest not far away. Would he be so interested in funding the UK Reform Party if the ruling Labour party hadn’t snubbed him from an investment conference? Is he feuding with half of Europe right now because their leaders have caught the “woke mind virus” or because the European Union has been investigating X over alleged violations of its Digital Services Act? Is he inserting himself into German politics because of his admiration for “German tribes” in the days of Julius Caesar, or because he makes a ton of cars there and is tired of fighting with his workers? Does he want USAID to to “die” because he thinks it’s wasteful or because its programs are a bulwark against the overseas autocracies he works with?

For that matter, does Musk want the government to replace its workers with artificial intelligence because it will improve service or because he’s in the AI business? Does he think that “regulations, basically, should be gone” because of some fine-tuned understanding of bureaucratic machinery or because regulators have penalized him and his companies for improperly transporting hazardous materials; improperly managing hazardous waste; violating the Clean Air Act; failing to control erosion; illegal dumping; pumping wastewater into wetlands; exaggerating the range estimates on his cars; refusing to cooperate with an anti-child-abuse law; securities fraud; failing to comply with safety regulations on a rocket launch (which SpaceX has appealed); improperly operating a conveyor belt, leading to a worker getting pinned to a car (which Tesla has appealed); forcing workers to walk through muck filled with chemical accelerants (which the Boring Company has appealed); and securities fraud (which Musk and Tesla settled with no admission of wrongdoing in 2018).

For years, Musk has paired an extraordinary degree of international influence with a defiance bordering on arrogance in the face of civil authorities. He once said that regulators who complain about Starlink operating in their country “can shake their fist at the sky.” These days, anyone who’s upset with Washington can shake their fist at him. When Trump briefly imposed tariffs on Canada last week, Ontario premier Doug Ford added his own addendum to the national government’s retaliatory actions. The province would be “ripping up” its $100 million deal with Starlink, Ford announced, if the Trump and Musk administration went through with its threat. If operating from outer space gave him a sense of being untouchable, operating from inside the White House, as a shadow secretary-of-state and everything-czar, has heightened both his power and his exposure: Musk is the state now, and L’État, c’est Musk.

Everything Elon Musk Touches Is a Conflict of Interest

In early February, President Donald Trump threatened to cut off “all future funding” to South Africa, alleging that the government was “treating certain classes of people very badly” by passing a law allowing for the expropriation of privately owned land in certain cases. Right-wingers in both countries have framed the law as a discriminatory attack on white citizens, who comprise seven percent of the population but hold 70 percent of privately owned land. When President Cyril Ramaphosa defended the policy on X, Elon Musk, the Pretoria-born tech billionaire who is currently leading the White House’s efforts to eliminate most forms of foreign aid, shot back.

“Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?” he asked.

Musk, who also spoke by phone with Ramaphosa last week, is not just a critic of South African ownership laws. One of his companies is actively working to get around them. Starlink, a subsidiary of SpaceX that provides phone and internet service via low-Earth-orbit satellites, has been trying for years to expand to Musk’s birth country. But he has been stymied by a post-apartheid law that requires telecom providers to be at least 30-percent owned by “historically disadvantaged groups”—namely, Black South Africans. Musk’s company, suffice it to say, is not. Starlink and Musk have reportedly lobbied for Ramaphosa’s government to change the requirement or consider a workaround—for instance, by granting an exemption as part of a deal for a Tesla battery plant. According to Bloomberg, Musk personally discussed Starlink with Ramaphosa at a meeting in New York last fall.

Would he be so interested in funding the UK Reform Party if the ruling Labour party hadn’t snubbed him from an investment conference? Is he feuding with half of Europe right now because their leaders have caught the “woke mind virus” or because the European Union has been investigating X since 2023 over violations of its Digital Services Act?

A top government official backing punitive measures against a foreign country he’s simultaneously negotiating a business deal with represents a major conflict of interest. For Musk, it is only one of many. With a net worth of around $400 billion, Musk brings to Washington the wealth of a nation-state, and the geopolitical entanglements of one too. He provides internet access to more than 100 countries. His cars are available across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. He gets raw materials from four continents; feuds with sovereign wealth funds; backchannels with heads of state; sends their satellites into space; censors communications at their request; and, increasingly, throws his support behind those who share his interests and attempts to remove from office the ones who don’t.

Civil servants and elected officials are often bound by tight disclosure requirements and ethics guidelines designed to curb conflicts of interest and prevent bureaucrats from profiting from their work. Michael Punke, the author of the book that was adapted into the Oscar-winning motion picture, The Revenant, was famously prohibited from even promoting the book while serving as US ambassador to the World Trade Organization.

Musk, who is operating as a “special government employee,” has not divested from his vast holdings. He has not stepped down from his companies. On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Musk’s conflicts would be handled on something like an honor system: “If Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing…Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.” The sheer scope of Musk’s interests, though, means that everything that happens, anywhere in the world, is a potential conflict.

Take Starlink, a product so ubiquitous that according to a New York Times analysis, it accounts for more than half the satellites in the sky. Although South Africa’s ownership law is a unique product of the country’s Black Economic Empowerment program, Musk has frequently been stymied by local ownership requirements and licensing processes—particularly in Africa and Asia. In Vietnam, for instance, 2023 negotiations with Starlink fell apart over a law requiring telecom providers to have majority domestic ownership.

When Starlink users have circumvented national bans by taking advantage of roaming plans, governments have responded by seizing devices and ordering the company to cease and desist its service. In some cases, they have even argued that the service threatens their own national security interests. The Sudanese government, for instance, complained in 2024 that a militia group accused of crimes against humanity was able to bypass a government internet blackout by using Starlink roaming plans to conduct its operations. Meanwhile, many Sudanese citizens rely on food and medical programs from USAID —an agency that Musk has promised to send “into the woodchipper.”

Fights over telecom regulations slowed the company’s growth. Now things are looking up. Musk’s new role in the White House has made it “harder for some governments to resist Starlink,” Bloomberg recently reported. After three years of discussions, Chad granted approval one week after the November election. The effort in South Africa began picking up steam. Musk recently spoke with the president of Nepal about relaxing that country’s ownership laws. Everyone wants to meet with him now.

Part of what makes Starlink such a minefield of conflict of interests is that it’s so difficult to tell where Musk’s private interests end and his policy-making ambitions begin. The extra-special government employee who joined Trump on a post-election call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy owns the satellite network that country is counting on to fight Russia. (Incidentally, some of the funding for those satellites came from USAID.) Musk has also held private phone calls with Russian president Vladimir Putin—who, according to the Wall Street Journal, discussed blocking Starlink in Taiwan as a favor to China. Taiwan, for its part, so distrusts Musk that it has already banned Starlink and is building its own network. In a post-election talk with an Iranian government official, Musk reportedly discussed the possibility of investing in the country. He has previously promised on X that he would seek an exemption from Treasury Department sanctions to bring Starlink to Tehran. Now he effectively controls the Treasury Department.

Tesla is another area where Musk’s interests are too vast to disentangle from his government work. He has sourced materials and parts for his cars from China, Indonesia, Mozambique, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, New Caledonia, Australia, Canada, the US, and Japan, among other places. He builds them in China, the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and Germany. The list of places where he has looked into getting lithium or nickel, at setting up a plant, or at distributing Teslas is vast. Musk’s business depends on a lot of things happening a certain way across the world. A SpaceX supplier recently shifted operations from Taiwan to Thailand because of the geopolitical pressure on the former nation. Musk was forced to find a new source of aluminum after sanctions forced him to cut ties with a company controlled by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

If Musk has a stake in the rest of the world, the rest of the world also has a stake in Musk. Investors in X have included Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and Saudia Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Al Saud, as well as the prince’s investment house Kingdom Holding, which is partially owned by the country’s sovereign wealth fund. Kingdom Holding and Qatar—along with the sovereign wealth fund of Oman—are also backers of Musk’s AI startup, xAI. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund holds a 1 percent stake in Tesla. (Musk cancelled a visit to Oslo last year after the fund manager voted against a $56 billion compensation package for Musk twice; Musk then complained that the fund manager had leaked his angry texts, although they were in fact disclosed under public records laws.) 

Then there’s China, which has banned X and does not permit Starlink to operate, but where Tesla has thrived with the blessing of the authoritarian state. Musk makes cars and sells cars there and has benefited enormously from a rule Tesla pushed for that allows the company to sell emissions credits, just as it does in California. Musk, meanwhile, has parroted the government’s talking points on Taiwan and defended its treatment of the Uyghurs. This has been a lucrative relationship for Musk, but also a very fragile one, as Tesla is increasingly caught between American protectionism and the growth of a rival electric-vehicle industry in China. You don’t have to imagine a scenario in which Musk pressures Trump and Congress to tank legislation that would hurt his interests in the country; he already did that last year. 

With his hands-on control of X, Musk has demonstrated a willingness to throttle political speech when censorship benefits friendly leaders—Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, Narendra Modi of India, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel—while using his platform to foment a global right-wing movement. Over the last two years, Musk has backed right-wing leaders in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, El Salvador, Germany, Israel, and Italy. Musk has been demanding the release of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a far-right fraudster and stalker who goes by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, and who was jailed for contempt of court last year after repeating claims about a Syrian refugee that had already been found to be defamatory. Musk’s platform provided fuel for anti-immigrant riots in the UK. He encouraged UFC fighter Conor McGregor to run for president of Ireland. And in recent weeks, Musk has aggressively promote the far-right German AfD party, whose membership he implored to set aside their “guilt” about the nation’s past.

Perhaps no one in American history has combined this many conflicts of interest across the globe with this much state power—legally authorized or not. Dick Cheney was chairman and CEO of Halliburton and later vice president of the United States, but he was not both at the same time. And these are merely his foreign entanglements; the inherent conflict in a major government contractor taking control of the federal government’s contracting process is almost too obvious to note.

For every Musk political stance, there’s a personal interest not far away. Would he be so interested in funding the UK Reform Party if the ruling Labour party hadn’t snubbed him from an investment conference? Is he feuding with half of Europe right now because their leaders have caught the “woke mind virus” or because the European Union has been investigating X over alleged violations of its Digital Services Act? Is he inserting himself into German politics because of his admiration for “German tribes” in the days of Julius Caesar, or because he makes a ton of cars there and is tired of fighting with his workers? Does he want USAID to to “die” because he thinks it’s wasteful or because its programs are a bulwark against the overseas autocracies he works with?

For that matter, does Musk want the government to replace its workers with artificial intelligence because it will improve service or because he’s in the AI business? Does he think that “regulations, basically, should be gone” because of some fine-tuned understanding of bureaucratic machinery or because regulators have penalized him and his companies for improperly transporting hazardous materials; improperly managing hazardous waste; violating the Clean Air Act; failing to control erosion; illegal dumping; pumping wastewater into wetlands; exaggerating the range estimates on his cars; refusing to cooperate with an anti-child-abuse law; securities fraud; failing to comply with safety regulations on a rocket launch (which SpaceX has appealed); improperly operating a conveyor belt, leading to a worker getting pinned to a car (which Tesla has appealed); forcing workers to walk through muck filled with chemical accelerants (which the Boring Company has appealed); and securities fraud (which Musk and Tesla settled with no admission of wrongdoing in 2018).

For years, Musk has paired an extraordinary degree of international influence with a defiance bordering on arrogance in the face of civil authorities. He once said that regulators who complain about Starlink operating in their country “can shake their fist at the sky.” These days, anyone who’s upset with Washington can shake their fist at him. When Trump briefly imposed tariffs on Canada last week, Ontario premier Doug Ford added his own addendum to the national government’s retaliatory actions. The province would be “ripping up” its $100 million deal with Starlink, Ford announced, if the Trump and Musk administration went through with its threat. If operating from outer space gave him a sense of being untouchable, operating from inside the White House, as a shadow secretary-of-state and everything-czar, has heightened both his power and his exposure: Musk is the state now, and L’État, c’est Musk.

Ro Khanna’s DOGE Dream Is Dead

When Donald Trump formally announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would be chairing a newly created Department of Government Efficiency in December, many Democrats panned the idea. Not Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). A progressive whose district includes Tesla’s Fremont assembly plant, Khanna argued in a post on X, and later in a series of op-eds and interviews, that Democrats should “work with” Musk and the new agency to “cut spending.” While he would oppose any efforts to cut Social Security or Medicare, Khanna believed there was ample room for common ground in the bloated Department of Defense budget, and followed up with a cheat sheet on where DOGE could start.

Musk has not taken his advice, nor is he merely producing a blue-ribbon report as originally proposed. Instead, DOGE has taken over the gears of government on a mission to belittle federal workers, stop payments, destroy the United States Agency for International Development, and expose what Musk has decided is a massive decades-long conspiracy to rig elections and control the media. With Democrats in Washington slowly waking up to the oligarch in their backyards, how does Khanna feel now about his offer of cooperation? We spoke this week about the Constitutional crisis, his relationship with Musk, and the path forward for DOGE.

You said in December that Democrats should not write off DOGE, and that they should work with Musk on it. Do you still believe that?

Well, I believe that we need to be vociferously opposed to any effort by Elon Musk to stop payments at Treasury or get access to sensitive information, confidential information, of Americans. What I had said is that in terms of the principles—going after wasteful spending—the Defense Department is one where we can do that, and there are areas that we should propose cutting in defense. That I still believe, but that has to be done by Congress. You can’t have an extra-Constitutional effort to stop funding, including Defense, where I think there could be some cuts. I mean, that’s Congress’ authority.

What do you make of what he’s done so far? Right now he’s calling on USAID to “die.”

Well, it’s unconstitutional, it’s wrong, and it’s immoral. I mean, there are millions of children who could die because people are calling for USAID to “die.” Those programs fund anti-malaria sprays that can’t even be paused. They fund AIDS drugs. They fund medical supplies for people who most need it, and it’s less than 1 percent of the federal budget. It’s not even going after the parts of the federal budget, like Defense, where most of the spending is in the discretionary budget. That’s appalling.

So what did you expect DOGE to look like? From the reports that I’ve seen, it sounds like he’s kind of doing the same thing that he’s done before at Twitter.

I didn’t have any sense of what DOGE would be. I just, I mean, I said I strongly oppose any cuts on Social Security, Medicare, the CFPB, so I didn’t join the DOGE Caucus. But I said the Democrats need to not let Musk dictate the terms of debate, and to say that we also believe that government should be effective and we also understand that there’s wasteful spending, and if you’re really serious about this, focus on the Department of Defense and the Pentagon and let’s work there. Obviously the Democrats have to oppose with every fiber of our being unconstitutional efforts to stop payments at Treasury. You can’t have coders determining what payments are made. 

Tesla has been a constituent of yours. Have you talked to Elon Musk about what he’s doing, or have you reached out to him?

I have not, but I don’t think it—you know, I mean, he knows I’m opposed. The last kind of correspondence, he was very disappointed about my vote on Laken Riley and made certain public statements criticizing me. That’s the last correspondence we’ve had. [After we spoke, Khanna missed a House Oversight Committee vote to subpoena Musk, but wrote on X that he would have voted “yes” if he had made it. “Don’t be a dick,” Musk responded.]

Did you see this coming from him? You know, this turn where he’s just kind of taking over an agency and kind of declaring that it’s got to go?

No, because I thought—I think it’s naive. I think he’s going to get struck down in the courts and is causing a lot of heartache and panic, and obviously running Twitter is very different than trying to run the federal government. So I thought that he would try to make recommendations to Congress, but this is just unconstitutional.

You’re saying Democrats need to fight this. What is the response to this? As a minority party, what can you do? 

We need to be very clear that this is unconstitutional, we need to be very clear that this is threatening programs that people rely on on a day-to-day basis, whether it’s Medicare, Medicaid, school lunches, school funding, and we need to go and be aggressive in the courts and make it clear that there’s no compromise here. There’s no room for collaboration on an unconstitutional effort. I mean, look, if he had recommended certain cuts, and some Democrats had a view that those cuts weren’t reasonable, that’s part of the debate. But this is a question of, Do you believe someone who’s unelected can defy the will of Congress? And the answer to that is a clear no.

Ro Khanna’s DOGE Dream Is Dead

When Donald Trump formally announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would be chairing a newly created Department of Government Efficiency in December, many Democrats panned the idea. Not Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). A progressive whose district includes Tesla’s Fremont assembly plant, Khanna argued in a post on X, and later in a series of op-eds and interviews, that Democrats should “work with” Musk and the new agency to “cut spending.” While he would oppose any efforts to cut Social Security or Medicare, Khanna believed there was ample room for common ground in the bloated Department of Defense budget, and followed up with a cheat sheet on where DOGE could start.

Musk has not taken his advice, nor is he merely producing a blue-ribbon report as originally proposed. Instead, DOGE has taken over the gears of government on a mission to belittle federal workers, stop payments, destroy the United States Agency for International Development, and expose what Musk has decided is a massive decades-long conspiracy to rig elections and control the media. With Democrats in Washington slowly waking up to the oligarch in their backyards, how does Khanna feel now about his offer of cooperation? We spoke this week about the Constitutional crisis, his relationship with Musk, and the path forward for DOGE.

You said in December that Democrats should not write off DOGE, and that they should work with Musk on it. Do you still believe that?

Well, I believe that we need to be vociferously opposed to any effort by Elon Musk to stop payments at Treasury or get access to sensitive information, confidential information, of Americans. What I had said is that in terms of the principles—going after wasteful spending—the Defense Department is one where we can do that, and there are areas that we should propose cutting in defense. That I still believe, but that has to be done by Congress. You can’t have an extra-Constitutional effort to stop funding, including Defense, where I think there could be some cuts. I mean, that’s Congress’ authority.

What do you make of what he’s done so far? Right now he’s calling on USAID to “die.”

Well, it’s unconstitutional, it’s wrong, and it’s immoral. I mean, there are millions of children who could die because people are calling for USAID to “die.” Those programs fund anti-malaria sprays that can’t even be paused. They fund AIDS drugs. They fund medical supplies for people who most need it, and it’s less than 1 percent of the federal budget. It’s not even going after the parts of the federal budget, like Defense, where most of the spending is in the discretionary budget. That’s appalling.

So what did you expect DOGE to look like? From the reports that I’ve seen, it sounds like he’s kind of doing the same thing that he’s done before at Twitter.

I didn’t have any sense of what DOGE would be. I just, I mean, I said I strongly oppose any cuts on Social Security, Medicare, the CFPB, so I didn’t join the DOGE Caucus. But I said the Democrats need to not let Musk dictate the terms of debate, and to say that we also believe that government should be effective and we also understand that there’s wasteful spending, and if you’re really serious about this, focus on the Department of Defense and the Pentagon and let’s work there. Obviously the Democrats have to oppose with every fiber of our being unconstitutional efforts to stop payments at Treasury. You can’t have coders determining what payments are made. 

Tesla has been a constituent of yours. Have you talked to Elon Musk about what he’s doing, or have you reached out to him?

I have not, but I don’t think it—you know, I mean, he knows I’m opposed. The last kind of correspondence, he was very disappointed about my vote on Laken Riley and made certain public statements criticizing me. That’s the last correspondence we’ve had. [After we spoke, Khanna missed a House Oversight Committee vote to subpoena Musk, but wrote on X that he would have voted “yes” if he had made it. “Don’t be a dick,” Musk responded.]

Did you see this coming from him? You know, this turn where he’s just kind of taking over an agency and kind of declaring that it’s got to go?

No, because I thought—I think it’s naive. I think he’s going to get struck down in the courts and is causing a lot of heartache and panic, and obviously running Twitter is very different than trying to run the federal government. So I thought that he would try to make recommendations to Congress, but this is just unconstitutional.

You’re saying Democrats need to fight this. What is the response to this? As a minority party, what can you do? 

We need to be very clear that this is unconstitutional, we need to be very clear that this is threatening programs that people rely on on a day-to-day basis, whether it’s Medicare, Medicaid, school lunches, school funding, and we need to go and be aggressive in the courts and make it clear that there’s no compromise here. There’s no room for collaboration on an unconstitutional effort. I mean, look, if he had recommended certain cuts, and some Democrats had a view that those cuts weren’t reasonable, that’s part of the debate. But this is a question of, Do you believe someone who’s unelected can defy the will of Congress? And the answer to that is a clear no.

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.

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.

Actually, the 14th Amendment Still Exists

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday declaring that the federal government would no longer recognize the US-born children of undocumented immigrants as American citizens. It’s a move that has been brewing for years. The Washington Post described the order as an effort to “reinterpret the 14th Amendment of the Constitution,” and sure enough, the text includes a few paragraphs of legalese purporting to do just that.

The order itself goes into effect in 30 days, and specifically prohibits federal agencies from issuing citizenship documents (such as passports) to the—to be clear—citizens in question. It was part of a slate of executive orders Trump enacted on his first day in office, many of which were completed at a choreographed ceremony at DC’s Capital One Arena, in a display of strength meant to impose his will on national politics from day one.

You cannot simply blot out the Constitution. Laws still exist.

The executive order, which excludes anyone whose parents were not legal permanent residents, is an act of intimidation and a preview of a nativist crackdown to come. But I think it’s important to say what else it is: complete horseshit. The federal government cannot simply stop recognizing the citizenship of US-born children of undocumented immigrants, because those people are US citizens under the 14th Amendment, full stop. The president does not get to unilaterally “reinterpret” Constitutional amendments, and there is no compelling basis for doing so in this case, even if he could. Any attempt to implement the order would be an unconstitutional violation of American citizens’ civil rights. You cannot simply blot out the Constitution. Laws still exist.

Trump wants to do a lot of bad things as president, and in his first 24 hours he’s already accomplished quite a number of them—narrowing the definition of who matters in this country while signaling an era of decadence, corruption, and environmental degradation. But there are a lot of things he can’t just do. Sometimes he’ll be blocked. Sometimes he’ll be sued. And he will often lose, even with a judiciary that’s several degrees beyond pliant. If he wants to get rid of birthright citizenship, he has to do more than issue a press release; he will have to get the law of the land changed—or get the highest court in the land to effectively do the same for him. I wouldn’t bet against anything in the Trump era. But with the clock running on a lame-duck term, the last thing anyone should do is give him a victory before he’s earned it.

The Stagecraft That Ushered in the Trump Oligarchy

You could learn most of what you needed to know about the tone and tenor of Donald Trump’s second inauguration by the people who showed up to watch it. It was a perfectly 2025 mixture of influencers, fighters, billionaires, and bootlickers. Conor McGregor, a UFC star who was recently found guilty of sexual assault by an Irish jury, traveled to the ceremony in a party bus with the comedian Theo Von, influencer brothers Jake and Logan Paul, and “Nelk Boys” YouTuber Kyle Forgeard. Joe Rogan snagged a seat in the rotunda a few seats away from Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Gianni Infantino—friend to dictators and president of soccer’s international governing body, FIFA—seemed to be lurking in the background of every shot.

In the floor seats in front of the president-elect, you could find a who’s who of conservative luminaries and favor seekers. There was Rupert Murdoch, the News Corp baron whose company paid a $787 million settlement in a defamation case after Fox News accused voting-machine manufacturer Dominion of stealing the 2020 election, and Tucker Carlson, the onetime Fox News host who once said of Trump, “I hate him passionately.” Crypto billionaire Brock Pierce, a former child actor who now resides in Puerto Rico, was skulking around somewhere. His good friend, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who is seeking to get on Trump’s good side—and perhaps win a pardon—snagged a photo with the Pauls. So did Sam Altman, the billionaire CEO of OpenAI.

But the image that will define the day, and perhaps this entire era of politics, was the rows of seats behind Trump. The front row was simple enough—that was reserved for past presidents and vice presidents and their families, and the Trump and Vance clans. In the back were members of his future cabinet (the wealthiest collection of bureaucrats ever assembled). Sandwiched between them was a pastiche of American oligarchy—a demonstration of both the influence and subservience of wealth in Trump’s second term.

The inclusion of Elon Musk (estimated net worth $449 billion) and Vivek Ramaswamy (about $1 billion) was no surprise. Their “Department of Government Efficiency” is, after all, a centerpiece of the new administration. But the world’s richest man, and the maybe future governor of Ohio, were joined by a selection of moguls who a few months, or a few years ago, might have avoided such an alliance with Trump. The world’s second-richest man, Jeff Bezos ($245 billion), joined the world’s third-richest man, Mark Zuckerberg ($217 billion), behind Trump’s right shoulder. They sat near Apple CEO Tim Cook ($2.2 billion), Google CEO Sundar Pichai (about $1 billion), and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin, the world’s seventh-richest man ($163 billion). TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, whose company rang in the Trump presidency a full day early, attended church with the Trumps and his fellow tech titans on Monday morning. Isaac Perlmutter, the billionaire former chairman of Marvel, sat near Musk.

These billionaires were propped between former heads of state and future cabinet officials, like benighted stewards of the American system—a special fourth branch of government.

It wasn’t just tech, of course. Over Trump’s left shoulder—just in front of the Clintons—sat Miriam Adelson ($34.6 billion), the pro-Israel widow of Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who gave $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign, alongside the hedge funder John Paulson ($3.8 billion) and UFC CEO Dana White—a tycoon in his own right whose company may soon enter into a deal with the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. Behind them was the fifth-richest man in the world, French billionaire Bernard Arnault (estimated net worth: $188 billion), along with his son Alexandre.

The concentration of wealth sitting behind Trump was staggering. If you add Trump’s roughly $10 billion cabinet to the people I just named, it adds up to a little more than $1.3 trillion. Trillion with a t. It was not just about the riches they brought to the table—and in some cases, brought to Trump’s campaign—but the symbolism of their presence. These billionaires were propped between former heads of state and future cabinet officials, like benighted stewards of the American system—a special fourth branch of government. At the same time, it was an unmistakable and ominous display of contrition. 

The lasting image I’ll have of the event is of Bezos, owner of a newspaper that brought down a president, waving meekly at the president-elect, hoping for a bit of extra credit. After Trump spent his first term, and his four years out of power, seeking retribution against tech billionaires that he believed had stood in his way, he has seemingly offered to cut Silicon Valley’s titans in on his governing agenda in exchange for fealty. Their presence articulated more neatly the message the president, in so many words, laid out in his address: There’s a price to challenging his power. This time, they’re not willing to pay.

The Stagecraft That Ushered in the Trump Oligarchy

You could learn most of what you needed to know about the tone and tenor of Donald Trump’s second inauguration by the people who showed up to watch it. It was a perfectly 2025 mixture of influencers, fighters, billionaires, and bootlickers. Conor McGregor, a UFC star who was recently found guilty of sexual assault by an Irish jury, traveled to the ceremony in a party bus with the comedian Theo Von, influencer brothers Jake and Logan Paul, and “Nelk Boys” YouTuber Kyle Forgeard. Joe Rogan snagged a seat in the rotunda a few seats away from Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Gianni Infantino—friend to dictators and president of soccer’s international governing body, FIFA—seemed to be lurking in the background of every shot.

In the floor seats in front of the president-elect, you could find a who’s who of conservative luminaries and favor seekers. There was Rupert Murdoch, the News Corp baron whose company paid a $787 million settlement in a defamation case after Fox News accused voting-machine manufacturer Dominion of stealing the 2020 election, and Tucker Carlson, the onetime Fox News host who once said of Trump, “I hate him passionately.” Crypto billionaire Brock Pierce, a former child actor who now resides in Puerto Rico, was skulking around somewhere. His good friend, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who is seeking to get on Trump’s good side—and perhaps win a pardon—snagged a photo with the Pauls. So did Sam Altman, the billionaire CEO of OpenAI.

But the image that will define the day, and perhaps this entire era of politics, was the rows of seats behind Trump. The front row was simple enough—that was reserved for past presidents and vice presidents and their families, and the Trump and Vance clans. In the back were members of his future cabinet (the wealthiest collection of bureaucrats ever assembled). Sandwiched between them was a pastiche of American oligarchy—a demonstration of both the influence and subservience of wealth in Trump’s second term.

The inclusion of Elon Musk (estimated net worth $449 billion) and Vivek Ramaswamy (about $1 billion) was no surprise. Their “Department of Government Efficiency” is, after all, a centerpiece of the new administration. But the world’s richest man, and the maybe future governor of Ohio, were joined by a selection of moguls who a few months, or a few years ago, might have avoided such an alliance with Trump. The world’s second-richest man, Jeff Bezos ($245 billion), joined the world’s third-richest man, Mark Zuckerberg ($217 billion), behind Trump’s right shoulder. They sat near Apple CEO Tim Cook ($2.2 billion), Google CEO Sundar Pichai (about $1 billion), and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin, the world’s seventh-richest man ($163 billion). TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, whose company rang in the Trump presidency a full day early, attended church with the Trumps and his fellow tech titans on Monday morning. Isaac Perlmutter, the billionaire former chairman of Marvel, sat near Musk.

These billionaires were propped between former heads of state and future cabinet officials, like benighted stewards of the American system—a special fourth branch of government.

It wasn’t just tech, of course. Over Trump’s left shoulder—just in front of the Clintons—sat Miriam Adelson ($34.6 billion), the pro-Israel widow of Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who gave $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign, alongside the hedge funder John Paulson ($3.8 billion) and UFC CEO Dana White—a tycoon in his own right whose company may soon enter into a deal with the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. Behind them was the fifth-richest man in the world, French billionaire Bernard Arnault (estimated net worth: $188 billion), along with his son Alexandre.

The concentration of wealth sitting behind Trump was staggering. If you add Trump’s roughly $10 billion cabinet to the people I just named, it adds up to a little more than $1.3 trillion. Trillion with a t. It was not just about the riches they brought to the table—and in some cases, brought to Trump’s campaign—but the symbolism of their presence. These billionaires were propped between former heads of state and future cabinet officials, like benighted stewards of the American system—a special fourth branch of government. At the same time, it was an unmistakable and ominous display of contrition. 

The lasting image I’ll have of the event is of Bezos, owner of a newspaper that brought down a president, waving meekly at the president-elect, hoping for a bit of extra credit. After Trump spent his first term, and his four years out of power, seeking retribution against tech billionaires that he believed had stood in his way, he has seemingly offered to cut Silicon Valley’s titans in on his governing agenda in exchange for fealty. Their presence articulated more neatly the message the president, in so many words, laid out in his address: There’s a price to challenging his power. This time, they’re not willing to pay.

What the History of American Expansion Can Tell Us About Trump’s Threats

The president-elect—who pushed for an invasion of Mexico during his first term—has spent the month leading up to next week’s inauguration posting about inviting Canada to join the United States, refusing to rule out using military force to coerce Denmark into selling (or giving away) Greenland, and pledging to take back the Panama Canal Zone—which the United States gave back as part of a 1979 treaty. Republicans and their allies have quickly fallen in line. Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr. recently took a day trip to Greenland. Some conservatives have likened the threatened acquisitions to the Alaska and the Louisiana Purchase. 

Is this just a tired throwback to the country’s empire-building past, or a recognition of something new? To understand Trump’s recent rhetoric, I spoke with Daniel Immerwahr, a professor of history at Northwestern University, whose 2019 book, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States told the story of America’s imperial past and present.

What did you think when you saw President-elect Trump announce that he was thinking of trying to acquire—somehow—Greenland? 

Here we go again. We’ve literally gone through all of this. We’ve gone through it in the US—presidents used to be quite interested in acquiring strategically relevant bits of land, and there’s a long history of that. We’ve also gone through it with Donald Trump, because he did that during his first term: He threatened to acquire Greenland. Historians were consulted: “Has this happened? When was the last time this happened?” It was a lot of bluster then, or at least I think it was a lot of bluster; I didn’t get the sense that the US military was poised to do anything dramatic, and I didn’t get the sense that the Danish government was interested in selling. So the question remains right now: Is this a new historical moment where new things are possible? (And there’s some reasons to think that perhaps, yes it is.) Or is this Trump doing what Trump does so well, which is winding up liberals by proposing outrageous things.

Before Trump, was Greenland on the radar of American imperialists?

Greenland got much more interesting to the United States in the age of aviation, because if you draw the shortest plane routes from the continental United States to, for example, the Soviet Union, you’ll find that some of them passed near or over Greenland. So Greenland was an important Cold War site. 

The United States stored nuclear weapons there. It also overflew weapons over Greenland:What that means is that planes would be kept aloft and ready to scramble into action in case the alarm was sounded. The film Dr. Strangelove has footage of such planes over Greenland. 

There’s also a history of nuclear accidents on Greenland.

Nuclear accidents?

Three planes in the 1950s made emergency landings on Greenland while carrying hydrogen bombs. Something went wrong and the planes sort of skidded into a stop. In 1968 a B-52 flying over Greenland with four Mk-22 hydrogen bombs, didn’t land, it just crashed at more than 500 miles an hour, leaving a trail of debris five miles long. Jet fuel ignited and all of the bombs exploded. What happened in these cases is the bombs were destroyed in the process, but did not detonate. However, it was a near miss, and it is thinkable, given how bombs were constructed, that crashing into the ice at 500 miles an hour would have detonated bombs. You can see why [having nuclear weapons on the island] was a dangerous proposition for Europeans, and particularly for people in Greenland.

One of the other big announcements recently was Trump promising to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” You wrote in your book that the term America only really came into vogue as a shorthand around the time of Theodore Roosevelt. What’s the connection between that name and this sense of empire?

There was some—not a huge amount, but some—discussion in the early republic of what should the shorthand be. Columbia was a literary term that people used and showed up in a lot of 19th century anthems. Freedonia was tried out, as “the land of free,” but what’s interesting is that, from our perspective, the obvious shorthand—“America”—was not the dominant shorthand to refer to the United States throughout the 19th century. One reason for that is that leaders in the United States were fully aware that they were occupying a part of America and that there were other parts of America too. There were other republics in the Americas.

It’s not until the very end of the 19th century that you start seeing “America” as the dominant shorthand. A big reason for that is that right at the end of the 19th century, the United States started acquiring large, populous overseas territories, such that a lot of the previous shorthand—the Union, the Republic, the United States—seemed inaccurate descriptions of the political character in the country.

So “America” is an imperialist turn in two senses. One is that it suggests that this one country in the Americas is somehow the whole of the Americas—as if Germans decided that they were going to be henceforth “Europeans” and that everyone was going to have to be an English-European or French-European or Polish-European, and only Germans were “Europeans.” It’s also imperialist in a sense that it arose at a time when people were questioning what the political character of the United States would be, and were questioning whether the addition of colonies made the United States no longer really a republic, a union, or a set of states.

Trump said recently he was going to “bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it.” How does what he’s doing—and the way that he talks about what he’s doing—compare to what William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt were saying and doing in the late 19th century?

In one way, it compares cleanly, because there was a long era in US history—and it wasn’t just McKinley and Roosevelt; it was up until them and a little bit after—where, when the United States got more powerful, it got larger. Power expressed itself in the acquisition of territory. The United States annexed lands—contiguous lands from the Louisiana Purchase, and overseas lands; the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and so forth. That’s the history that Trump is invoking, and he’s imagining himself participating in. 

The age of US overseas colonization was also a time when other “Great Powers” were colonizing overseas territories in Africa and Asia. It’s just not clear to me that we are in the kind of moment where we’re going to start seeing the most powerful countries snapping up colonies, as they used to do. Trump is pointing to that moment, but it’s not clear to me, for example, how many in his base are really strongly motivated by this. It’s not clear how many other Republicans care about this beyond caring about loyalty to Trump’s whims. So it’s not obvious that this is a social movement so much as a way to wind up Trump’s opponents and possibly distract them.

Is there a lesson for Trump and the Trump administration in how that era of expansionism wound down, and the backlash to it?

There’s two things that made empire of that colonial nature much rarer by the later 20th century. One was a global anti-colonial revolt that started in the 19th century but climaxed after World War II, and just made it much harder for would-be colonizers to hold or take new colonies. The other is that powerful countries, including the United States, sought to find new pathways for the projection of power that would not involve the annexation of territories—in part because they realized that a world where every country in order to guarantee its security and express its power by annexing territories would create a situation where large countries would clash with each other. 

So the two lessons, I would say, from the Age of Empire are that it’s extremely cruel to those who are colonized because they’re subject to a foreign government which usually doesn’t have their interests in mind. And it’s extraordinarily dangerous because it sets large powers against each other in a way that can quickly lead to war. And if the wars in the early first half of the 20th century were extraordinarily bloody wars, at least, they did not involve both sides’ nuclear exchanges as 21st-century versions of those wars might involve.

The Trump administration in the first go-around seemed to run up against another piece of this, which was that it didn’t really like having to deal with Puerto Rico. It didn’t like having to fund the reconstruction of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. In fact, you had people referring to Puerto Rico as a different country. Is that part of this turn away from empire—not wanting to have to deal with the people you’ve colonized?

There’s always been an argument, even among imperialists, about whether the burdens of empire are worth the advantages. Racism has sometimes acted as a break on empire. You’ll find moments, including in US history, where expansionists would like to, for example, end a war between the United States and Mexico by taking a huge part of Mexico, and then racists will say, “Oh no, no, no; if we take more of Mexico, we will therefore take more Mexicans.” And that kind of debate happened again and again in the 19th century in the United States, and in the early 20th century. 

You can see it playing out in Trump’s mind, because on the one hand, he is at least dispositionally an expansionist, and he threatens to march US borders over various other places in the Western Hemisphere. On the other hand, Trump clearly imagines the United States as a contiguous place that you can build a high wall around. And he is quite hostile to foreigners. 

When he talks about Puerto Rico during the first administration, we have reports from within the Trump administration saying that Trump wanted to sell Puerto Rico off. So those are, in some ways, the two warring impulses in Trump’s minds, and they actually match pretty well some of the dominant impulses in the 19th and early 20th century US leaders: On the one hand, a desire to create more territory; on the other hand, a deep worry about incorporating more people, particularly non-white people, within the United States. 

I would love to say that that is a past predicament, and that we are far beyond it, because we no longer have the annexation desires nor the exclusionary racism that drove it. But Trump seems to be at least instinctively resurrecting both. 

Did you see the map that he shared on Truth Social? 

I’m looking at it now. So let’s talk about this map. This is a map of the United States that imagines that its borders extend to Canada and encompass Canada, but also imagines that the United States’ borders do not include Puerto Rico. So it’s a vision of a larger United States and a whiter United States. And it gets at the contradiction of empire—both a desire among imperialists to expand territory, but also a desire to curate populations within that territory. And you can see this as the ambition of Trump to have a larger United States, but also a smaller United States.

You’ve used the term “pointillist” to describe what the US empire looks like now—with a series of military bases and small territories spread across the world. There’s been an acceptance within the US government of the convenience of that arrangement. How much of this is just a way of talking about strength, separate from an actual plan to do anything?

Trump has often terrible political judgment, but he has interesting political instincts, and he’s often able to see possibilities that other politicians have rejected—to see things that seem outrageous but actually might secure a voting base. A huge question about all of this jingoism that Trump has been delivering is whether it’s just another one of his provocations and just another one of his idiosyncrasies, or whether he’s responding to something real. 

If you were making the case that Trump is responding to something real—that the actual conditions and possibility have changed, and we might indeed be entering a new age of territorial empire, where power is expressed through annexing large swaths of lands, not even just controlling small dots—you would point to Ukraine, and you would point to China’s ambitions to seize Taiwan. You might say that we are entering a new age of annexations, and that Trump senses this and often admires the kind of strength that expresses itself in semi-colonial annexations, and sees that as a potential future for the United States. 

I’m struck by that, because politicians in both parties like to say that we’re not an empire, which means, at least, that we don’t like to think of ourselves as an empire. And Trump’s sort of saying, actually, maybe we do, and there’s this undercurrent where people do want to think of themselves as such.

Basically, since William McKinley, nearly every President has said some version of “the United States is not an empire; we have no territorial ambitions, we do not covet other people’s territory.” President after president, Democrat and Republican—they all say some version of that. Except for Trump. That’s a liberal piety held not just by Democrats, but Republicans as well, that Trump seems to have no investment in. And I think on that score, he’s correct, because when presidents have said that we’re not an empire, they have always been speaking from a country that has colonies and has territories. So Trump is correct in not going down that pathway, although I think it’s quite dangerous that he sees the denial of empire as not just something to be scoffed at, but something to be rejected defiantly by the pursuit of territorial ambitions.

Monster of 2024: Joe Biden

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

When was the 2024 presidential election really lost? 

Maybe you’d argue (though I would not) that it was the rubber-stamp nominating process for Vice President Kamala Harris. You could point, on a symbolic level, to Trump’s fist pump after surviving an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. For a time, it seemed like the clearest answer to this was the first debate, when President Joe Biden melted down on stage. But I think if you want to pinpoint when things went irreversibly downhill, you have to go back further—to the aftermath of the midterms two years ago, when a then-80-year-old Biden moved ahead with his plan to run for a second term.

Biden had always insisted that he was never planning on being a one-term president. Still, he tried to allay concerns about his age that dogged him even in 2020 by referring to himself as a generational “bridge,” and behind the scenes, aides offered context for his public denials. “He’s going into this thinking, ‘I want to find a running mate I can turn things over to after four years, but if that’s not possible or doesn’t happen, then I’ll run for reelection,’” an aide told Politico in 2019. “But he’s not going to publicly make a one-term pledge.” After a strong showing in the midterms against a predicted red wave, any notion of a smooth transition to the next in line—or a competitive primary—went out the window. Democrats shuffled around their primary calendar to warn off challengers. And that was that. Biden was dead set on running, he argued, because the stakes were too high and he was the best candidate for the job. 

That was, in hindsight, sort of the opposite of the case. Biden only got more and more unpopular, and it was hard to separate the general public anxiety about his advancing age from the general national malaise that was bringing him down. The line from the Democrats was that there was something ageist and unfair about all of this—if you can do the job, you can do the job. That was a bit cynical: Biden’s own aides reportedly thought he could do his job best between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and internal rumblings about his stamina dated back to the early months of the administration. The disastrous debate finally put an end to the facade, even if the complaints that this was all a vast media conspiracy persisted in some corners.

It would perhaps be more forgivable if it were just denial. But Biden, who positioned himself as the defender of the nation’s “soul,” continued to act as though only he could win the election, when in reality, he was tanking the Democratic brand so severely that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had to stage an intervention.

By staying long past his expiration date, Biden did more than ease Trump’s path to victory; he was the apotheosis of an entire gerontocracy that brought us to this point. (He came back to win the nomination in 2020 only after the party closed ranks to stop the even-older Bernie Sanders.) As Semafor’s Dave Weigel recently observed, you could tell the recent history of the party through the people who didn’t quit when they should have. Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death threatened to blow up the Affordable Care Act. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, after she declined to retire when Democrats could still replace her, likely cemented several decades of right-wing dominance on the Supreme Court. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s refusal to quit hampered Democrats on the judiciary committee. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin is 80; Schumer is a sprightly 74. Nancy Pelosi, 84, who led the House Democratic Caucus for nearly two decades, demonstrated her unique gifts when she adeptly nudged Biden out of the race—but she was still out there after the election, working behind the scenes to block New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from defeating Virginia’s Gerry Connolly (74) for ranking member of the oversight committee.

The Biden reelection bid was, above all, uncomfortable; he was a walking reminder of our own mortality.

Every piece about Biden since the election has also included a few sentences like the ones that follow. His record, domestically, was pretty good, especially when you consider the sorts of people the rest of America sent to work with him. I can rattle off the policies that everyone of my general persuasion always does—his belief in industrial policy, his efforts to link climate change adaptation to a growing green economy, his embrace of labor unions. Biden’s team dramatically reshaped the government’s approach to corporate monopolies. His management of the post-Covid global economic crisis ultimately left the United States in a far better place than it might have otherwise. But it is hard to convince people things are getting better when the messenger himself kept looking worse and worse. The Biden reelection bid was, above all, uncomfortable; he was a walking reminder of our own mortality.

When it took the form of a halting gait or an on-camera freeze-up, that weakness could be as humanizing as it was politically damaging. There has always been an emotional heaviness about the man. When that weight took the form of foreign policy, it produced a historic moral abdication. Biden’s legacy will be more than a year of virtually unchecked Israeli carnage as the so-called “rules-based international order” he championed dissolved into nothing. There was seemingly no line Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not cross. Not the clear “red line” on Rafah. Not Netanyahu’s invocation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a defense of his flattening of Gaza. Not thousands of dead kids. Not a clearly stated desire to bulldoze the United States government’s official preference for a two-state solution. Not the attacks on journalists and aid workers or even the death of American citizens. Biden seemed like the only person in the whole situation who didn’t realize that Netanyahu, a right-winger from Philadelphia, was just dog-walking him to get to a president he likes better. 

“To answer the question on everyone’s minds: No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs,” senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates wrote on X earlier this year, during a press conference on foreign policy in which the president referred to Harris as “Vice President Trump.” “He’s just that fucking good.”

Well, sometimes even honorary PhDs need a refresher course. The last photo I saw of Biden before I started writing this was of the president leaving a bookstore in Nantucket, clutching a copy of Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. It felt like a haunting epitaph for an entire era of liberalism—stopping in to do some Black Friday shopping while staying at David Rubenstein’s estate and walking away with a book that the author himself said Biden should have checked out years ago. Biden stuck around past the point that he could deliver for the people who needed him to. And now the world is stuck with the consequences.

Monster of 2024: Cars, Again

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

When you start walking around a city with a small child, you notice two things about cars. One is that a lot of drivers suddenly seem a lot more considerate. They yield at crosswalks. They stop at stop signs. They lay off the horn. People are fully capable of driving normally, in other words—when they want to. But the other thing that jumps out is that a significant number of drivers don’t seem affected at all: They just keep rolling through those stop signs; they inch forward as you cross; they honk when the car in front of them has stopped, like an absolute dipshit, to yield for some guy pushing a stroller. 

It is always a little jarring to know how little you matter. A few centimeters of metal and plastic is enough to reduce anyone outside of it to nothing. Driving, whatever the commercials say, isn’t very good for the soul. It’s not all that great for democracy, either.

The 2024 election was full-on car-brained. “Pain at the pump” is an old standby at this point, and Donald Trump’s campaign was all too eager to add gas to the long list of necessities that had gotten more expensive while Democrats controlled the White House. But it seeped into the ether in other ways. 

After falsely asserting that Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats, JD Vance also tried to link them to rising auto insurance rates. He argued that the newcomers’ inability to drive responsibly was harming the community and making car ownership more difficult for working people. This narrative got so out of hand on the right that at one point, the New York Post even sent a reporter to stand at an intersection in Springfield to watch traffic for a while—eventually producing a breathless dispatch about a minor fender-bender.

Vance also tapped into genuine fears about the risk traffic violence poses to kids. In 2023, a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus in Springfield, killing one child and injuring more than 20 others. Republicans talked about the incident so often that the victim’s family pleaded with them to stop. But this was not a Haitian problem. NBC News reported that there were 6,089 crashes involving a school bus over a recent four-year period in Ohio alone. Traffic violence, like gun violence, is something that the United States excels at by design. In any given year, upward of 40,000 Americans will die in a car crash, and the only time I’ve ever heard a candidate for higher office acknowledge it is either to downplay the roughly equal toll of gun violence or as justification for mass deportation.

“Haitians” are not the reason car insurance rates have gone up across the country in recent years, either. As Marin Cogan explained at Vox, that rise is attributable to inflation, the increasing amount of tech in cars (another thing that sucks!), and a shift for the worse in driving behavior that dates to the pandemic. But that narrative fit into the broader story Vance and Trump told about how the things that make you identifiably American were getting harder and harder to attain. 

For all the talk of the freedom of the open road, Vance and his allies were seizing on the latent anxiety that a car-dependent culture imposes on citizens and the real damage it causes. One of the biggest drags on household finances is a machine that might someday kill you—and you’re surrounded all the time by other people who might do the same. That stress lends itself to reactionary politics. When you are driving, you are constantly pathologizing other drivers. 

The primacy of car culture shaped how Democrats campaigned and governed, too. In June, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul paused New York City’s long-awaited congestion pricing toll on car traffic in the southern half of Manhattan, days before the policy was set to go into effect. Hochul has denied that there was any political calculation to the decision (which she reversed almost immediately after the election was over), but the electoral subtext was obvious—the toll would affect a small minority of commuters in a few key suburban districts that Democrats were targeting in their effort to win back the House. 

It was a bad electoral calculation—in the end, Democrats barely flipped one seat in the New York City area—but I’m sympathetic, at least, with one aspect of the analysis: There was no telling how vengeful car owners would become. After this year’s election, one angry real estate broker told the San Francisco Standard that the practice of daylighting—that is, requiring cars to leave a buffer before a crosswalk so that pedestrians can see oncoming traffic—was why Democrats lose. I don’t know if it’s true with that degree of specificity (daylighting? really?), but car-brain feeds into the sort of social erosion that does. Driving makes us angrier, poorer, less healthy, and more isolated. Of course, it makes people resentful, too.

One of the most striking Republican ads I saw this year was a spot from a group called Election Freedom Inc. It starts with a Latino man clutching a hard hat. “You worked hard,” a narrator says. “You bought your truck.” While you toiled, Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen and Kamala Harris, the ad said, were giving away millions of dollars to illegal immigrants in benefits and funding sex change operations in prisons:

This is a damn good ad guys. This is really good creative. pic.twitter.com/QEZQbRIRTz

— Mike Madrid (@madrid_mike) October 24, 2024

It was jarring to see the dynamic laid out like that. It was like someone made the Jesse Helms “Hands” ad about a Ford-250. But that was what the election was all about, in a way; Trump asked people to choose between their immediate material circumstances and their neighbors. Anyone who’s tried crossing a busy intersection on foot recently knows how that one goes.

Monster of 2024: Cars, Again

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

When you start walking around a city with a small child, you notice two things about cars. One is that a lot of drivers suddenly seem a lot more considerate. They yield at crosswalks. They stop at stop signs. They lay off the horn. People are fully capable of driving normally, in other words—when they want to. But the other thing that jumps out is that a significant number of drivers don’t seem affected at all: They just keep rolling through those stop signs; they inch forward as you cross; they honk when the car in front of them has stopped, like an absolute dipshit, to yield for some guy pushing a stroller. 

It is always a little jarring to know how little you matter. A few centimeters of metal and plastic is enough to reduce anyone outside of it to nothing. Driving, whatever the commercials say, isn’t very good for the soul. It’s not all that great for democracy, either.

The 2024 election was full-on car-brained. “Pain at the pump” is an old standby at this point, and Donald Trump’s campaign was all too eager to add gas to the long list of necessities that had gotten more expensive while Democrats controlled the White House. But it seeped into the ether in other ways. 

After falsely asserting that Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats, JD Vance also tried to link them to rising auto insurance rates. He argued that the newcomers’ inability to drive responsibly was harming the community and making car ownership more difficult for working people. This narrative got so out of hand on the right that at one point, the New York Post even sent a reporter to stand at an intersection in Springfield to watch traffic for a while—eventually producing a breathless dispatch about a minor fender-bender.

Vance also tapped into genuine fears about the risk traffic violence poses to kids. In 2023, a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus in Springfield, killing one child and injuring more than 20 others. Republicans talked about the incident so often that the victim’s family pleaded with them to stop. But this was not a Haitian problem. NBC News reported that there were 6,089 crashes involving a school bus over a recent four-year period in Ohio alone. Traffic violence, like gun violence, is something that the United States excels at by design. In any given year, upward of 40,000 Americans will die in a car crash, and the only time I’ve ever heard a candidate for higher office acknowledge it is either to downplay the roughly equal toll of gun violence or as justification for mass deportation.

“Haitians” are not the reason car insurance rates have gone up across the country in recent years, either. As Marin Cogan explained at Vox, that rise is attributable to inflation, the increasing amount of tech in cars (another thing that sucks!), and a shift for the worse in driving behavior that dates to the pandemic. But that narrative fit into the broader story Vance and Trump told about how the things that make you identifiably American were getting harder and harder to attain. 

For all the talk of the freedom of the open road, Vance and his allies were seizing on the latent anxiety that a car-dependent culture imposes on citizens and the real damage it causes. One of the biggest drags on household finances is a machine that might someday kill you—and you’re surrounded all the time by other people who might do the same. That stress lends itself to reactionary politics. When you are driving, you are constantly pathologizing other drivers. 

The primacy of car culture shaped how Democrats campaigned and governed, too. In June, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul paused New York City’s long-awaited congestion pricing toll on car traffic in the southern half of Manhattan, days before the policy was set to go into effect. Hochul has denied that there was any political calculation to the decision (which she reversed almost immediately after the election was over), but the electoral subtext was obvious—the toll would affect a small minority of commuters in a few key suburban districts that Democrats were targeting in their effort to win back the House. 

It was a bad electoral calculation—in the end, Democrats barely flipped one seat in the New York City area—but I’m sympathetic, at least, with one aspect of the analysis: There was no telling how vengeful car owners would become. After this year’s election, one angry real estate broker told the San Francisco Standard that the practice of daylighting—that is, requiring cars to leave a buffer before a crosswalk so that pedestrians can see oncoming traffic—was why Democrats lose. I don’t know if it’s true with that degree of specificity (daylighting? really?), but car-brain feeds into the sort of social erosion that does. Driving makes us angrier, poorer, less healthy, and more isolated. Of course, it makes people resentful, too.

One of the most striking Republican ads I saw this year was a spot from a group called Election Freedom Inc. It starts with a Latino man clutching a hard hat. “You worked hard,” a narrator says. “You bought your truck.” While you toiled, Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen and Kamala Harris, the ad said, were giving away millions of dollars to illegal immigrants in benefits and funding sex change operations in prisons:

This is a damn good ad guys. This is really good creative. pic.twitter.com/QEZQbRIRTz

— Mike Madrid (@madrid_mike) October 24, 2024

It was jarring to see the dynamic laid out like that. It was like someone made the Jesse Helms “Hands” ad about a Ford-250. But that was what the election was all about, in a way; Trump asked people to choose between their immediate material circumstances and their neighbors. Anyone who’s tried crossing a busy intersection on foot recently knows how that one goes.

Trump’s Billionaire Cabinet Is Unprecedented 

Let’s just get it out of the way upfront: Donald Trump is assembling a government of billionaires, the likes of which the United States has never seen. The president-elect has tapped five reported billionaires for cabinet posts: North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for interior secretary, hedge funder Scott Bessent for treasury secretary, Cantor Fitzgerald chief Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary, wrestling magnate Linda McMahon for education secretary (I know, just roll with it), and former Sen. Kelly Loeffler—wife of New York Stock Exchange Chairman Jeffrey Sprecher—for small business administrator.

But those appointments are almost normal compared to the billionaires Trump’s installing everywhere else. After Elon Musk spent a quarter-billion dollars to get him elected—$40.25 billion, if you count the in-kind acquisition of Twitter—Trump made the world’s richest man co-chair (with maybe-billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy) of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. There, one of the government’s largest contractors will be tasked with trimming about $2 trillion from the federal budget. Or maybe they’ll just harass civil servants until they quit; it’s not really clear what DOGE will be, beyond a dead joke about an internet meme from 2013.

They’re joined in the administration by Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks, whom Trump announced would serve as his “AI and Crypto Czar”—whatever that means. Steve Witkoff, a New York City real estate billionaire who’s deeply enmeshed in the sovereign wealth funds of Gulf petro-states, will be Trump’s Middle East envoy. Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman—a Musk ally who moonlights as a commercial astronaut on SpaceX flights and holds the distinction of being the first person to place a bet on a professional sporting event from space—will run NASA. Private equity mogul Stephen Feinberg, whose firm owns the company that trained journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s killers, is Trump’s pick for deputy secretary of defense. Fiserv President Frank Bisignano (worth just shy of $1 billion—for now—according to Axios) is on deck to run the Social Security Administration. Massad Boulos, who is slated to be a Middle East adviser and is also Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, was frequently described in the press as a billionaire until a New York Times story revealed that he actually just ran a Nigerian trucking business and once tried to sell a kind of “erotic” energy drink called Tantra Beverages.

It’s a bit more commonplace to hand out ambassadorships to ultra-wealthy allies, but even by that measure, it is rare to send someone overseas who is barred from practicing law in New Jersey. Charles Kushner, Trump’s pick for ambassador to France, is family, though, and it’s hard to say at this point that the crimes of the father—which included hiring a prostitute to help blackmail his brother-in-law to avoid a conviction for tax evasion and illegal campaign contributions—do not, on some deeper level, represent the United States with some accuracy. Arkansas billionaire Warren Stephens, Trump’s choice for ambassador to the United Kingdom, is by those standards fairly anonymous—but it’s notable that he’s filling the seat held in the first term by another billionaire, Woody Johnson. Meanwhile, private equity mogul and Trump business associate Tom Barrack—who was recently acquitted of charges of illegally lobbying for the United Arab Emirates—will be the president’s man in Turkey.

All told, there are 15 reported billionaires slated for jobs in the administration—16 if you count the Big Guy himself. And then there are the billionaires with no formal role who have nonetheless been invited to advise the incoming president behind the scenes, or who have been widely reported as having Trump’s ear. Guys like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a cheerleader for “effective accelerationism,” who, I feel required to point out, is currently trying to build a new model city from scratch in California; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale; and hedge funder John Paulson. This is an incomplete list. Every time I set out to compile it, a new name would percolate—some mogul you’ve never heard of who’s tied up in useless tech and worth more than Rhode Island.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump, wearing a red "Make America Great Again" cap, talk while walking side by side.
Elon Musk greets U.S. President-elect Donald Trump ahead of the launch of the sixth test flight for the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024, in Brownsville, Texas.Brandon Bell/Getty

It’s hard to overstate just how unprecedented it is to have this many ultra-ultra-wealthy figures working inside an administration. Overall, Axios projected that the net worth of the cabinet—just the immediate cabinet—was about $10 billion, which would make it roughly 100 times richer than President Joe Biden’s cabinet—and more than three times richer than Trump’s first-term cabinet, which was itself so historically wealthy that people couldn’t stop writing articles about it.

Prior to the first Trump administration—which featured both McMahon as Small Business Administration chief and billionaire Betsy DeVos as education secretary—only a handful of billionaires had ever received major non-ambassadorial jobs in an administration, even adjusting for inflation. Penny Pritzker, scion of the Hyatt hotel dynasty, spent one term as Barack Obama’s secretary of commerce. Henry Paulson, the George W. Bush treasury secretary who got down on his knees to beg then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pass a bank bailout during the 2008 financial crisis, would have passed for a billionaire in today’s dollars. And at the time Gerald Ford tapped Nelson Rockefeller to be his vice president, after Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the New York governor was worth a little more than $1 billion in today’s dollars based on his own assessment of his wealth.

Rocky’s confirmation process speaks to how unusual the prospect of a billionaire in the White House (or at least the Old Executive Office Building) really was. It was not viewed as normal; it was viewed, in some corners, as a possible threat to the national interest. Although he had already spent years in public service, Congress spent four months poring over and debating the extent of his wealth and the layers upon layers of conflicts it might present. This was a guy who had given Henry Kissinger a $50,000 check as a gift, who had showered friendly politicians with cash over the years, and who had a vast family fortune tied up in an industry—oil—that was vital to the nation’s future.

There is a tendency to say that we are in the middle of a new Gilded Age…But whereas the robber barons really did make a lot of stuff, many of the ultra-wealthy moguls meddling in politics today are caught up in a sort of negative creation, burning through vast sums of energy in pursuit of fake money and AI slop.

“It begins to seem easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Vice Presidency of the United States by way of the 25th Amendment,” the New York Times quipped as the congressional proceedings dragged on. One California Democrat put the question at hand simply: “Can Nelson Rockefeller serve two masters—the public and his own interests?” But Rockefeller’s supporters had the votes, and a sense of righteousness of their own; one Republican congressman even argued that opposing Rockefeller on the grounds of his wealth violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The 14th Amendment applied to plutocrats, too.

You can find a few more inflation-adjusted billionaires in key posts if you go back further. A MarketWatch piece from 2013 dredged up Averell Harriman, the railroad heir who served as Harry Truman’s commerce secretary, and also Jesse Jones, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s final commerce secretary. FDR’s choice to helm the Securities and Exchange Commission would have been a billionaire, too—Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who is, of course, the grandfather of Trump’s worm-eaten choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services. But these were scattered appointments; there was no real pattern there. It was nothing, in other words, like today.

There is a tendency to say that we are in the middle of a new Gilded Age. I recently argued as much in a Mother Jones cover story. But whereas the robber barons really did make a lot of stuff, many of the ultra-wealthy moguls meddling in politics today are caught up in a sort of negative creation, burning through vast sums of energy in pursuit of fake money and AI slop. If only they built railroads. This is an age, above all, of hustlers and their henchmen, and to find a parallel for this particular combination—this sense of opening the doors of the government to both big business and a whole lot of people who might flunk a background check—you have to go back to a different era. I’m talking about Warren G. Harding and the Republicans who ran Washington throughout the 1920s.

The Harding administration had it all. There were sleazy billionaires (again, I’m using today’s dollars) looking for sweetheart deals on public assets—guys like oilmen Harry Sinclair and Ed Doheny, the model for Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. There was, in Interior Secretary Albert Fall, a militant border hawk with a wealth of personal conflicts of interest who assumed office despite rumors that had once had a political rival whacked back in New Mexico. The attorney general, Harry Daugherty, chosen for his personal loyalty, was a crook who kept his own bagman as a special assistant. William J. Burns, Harding’s pick to run the Bureau of Investigation (today’s FBI), used his power to spy on and intimidate political rivals while covering up the personal transgressions of the president and his inner circle. (Laton McCartney’s 2009 book on the Teapot Dome scandal described one particularly grisly Justice Department cleanup job: Harding and Daugherty both attended a party at the home of the Washington Post publisher in which drunken guests killed a “chorus girl” by throwing kitchen implements at her.) Harding’s Veterans Bureau director was on the take for private contractors. His commerce secretary was a millionaire from the Bay Area. 

How, you might ask, did Harding’s cabinet make it through the confirmation process? They didn’t. Per McCartney, Harding colluded with a friendly Senate leader to skip advise-and-consent entirely. So men like Fall were approved without hearings, via one big acclamation vote—not too unlike Trump’s nixed plan to sneak unqualified nominees in via recess appointment.

At the center of it all was the richest man ever to serve in a presidential administration—financier Andrew Mellon, who built a fortune so vast his dilettante grandson, Timothy, could one day spend nine figures to elect Trump. Mellon, who held the job of treasury secretary over three successive Republican administrations, embodied the ethos of the era, of a party of, for, and by big business. As Matt Stoller explained in his 2019 book, Goliath, Mellon took the job after his bank had loaned Harding’s campaign $1.5 million, and he had so many financial conflicts that his appointment was “probably illegal.” In office, he weaponized the Bureau of Internal Revenue to investigate critics while delivering huge bonuses to corporations and their leaders—including himself. This is what you got when you put a one-man nation-state in charge of the national economy:

Mellon could also see to it that his industrial empire flourished in the era through other mechanisms. He blocked antitrust action against [his aluminum company] Alcoa. The FTC didn’t bother to look into Gulf Oil, or any of Mellon’s other vast holdings. Mellon didn’t just ward off attacks, but negotiated with foreign leaders for oil concessions for his own oil company, both in Colombia and in Kuwait. And the great tax reductions he pushed through Congress, which slashed his own tax bill, ended up slashing into the stock market, pushing up the value of the stocks he held.

The Harding administration did not, in the end, work out particularly well either for most of the men who sought to weaponize it or for the nation caught up in its chaos. The president had a heart attack and died while his wife was in the middle of reading him a positive press clipping. The interior secretary went to prison, along with one of his billionaire patrons. The attorney general barely avoided it. The Bureau of Investigation director resigned in disgrace. The commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover, eventually became president himself and watched the entire global economy collapse at his feet. Republicans would lose control of Congress for most of the next 60 years. And eventually, after the stock market crash, Mellon was driven from office, too, exiting just ahead of impeachment proceedings into his decade of oligarchic corruption.

Republicans learned then what they may come to understand once again: It was no way to run a country—but for a beautiful moment in time, they created a lot of value for shareholders.

How Ruben Gallego Defeated Election Denier Kari Lake in Arizona’s Senate Race

In the race for Arizona’s open US Senate seat, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego has defeated the state’s most vociferous election-denier, Republican Kari Lake. His win gives Democrats 47 Senate seats to the Republicans’ 53.

Gallego’s win should not come as a shock if you’ve been paying attention. He had led Lake in polls consistently for the last year, usually running well ahead of the Democratic presidential ticket over the same period. But Democrats’ fourth consecutive Senate victory in a row in Arizona wasn’t exactly preordained either. Gallego’s victory statewide, after 10 years representing the state’s safest blue congressional district, was a testament to his own ability to adapt to Arizona’s purple electorate—and the far-right conspiracy theorist’s insistence on digging in her MAGA-red heels.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema opting not to run for re-election as an Independent in the general election also helped clear the way for Gallego to build a winning coalition. Of roughly 4.4 million registered voters in Arizona, a little more than a third are Republicans; a third are not affiliated with either party; and a slightly smaller cohort, about 30 percent, are Democrats.

Gallego consolidated his base at the outset by running as the anti-Sinema—a Democrat who wouldn’t abandon the party’s economic agenda or cozy up to millionaires at Davos. As he laid the groundwork for a Senate campaign, Gallego emphasized his progressive record in the House, where he was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus for many years.

His 2024 Senate campaign didn’t abandon Democrats’ meat-and-potatoes issues. Gallego was still decisively in favor of abortion rights, LGBTQ issues, passing voting rights legislation, and acknowledging climate change. But to beat Lake in the general election, in a state that has voted for the GOP candidate in the last five of six presidential elections, much of Gallego’s messaging had to evolve. So did the feelings of a small but impactful cohort of moderate and conservative Arizona voters. 

While Lake became a devotee and instigator of the Big Lie—falsely claiming she won her gubernatorial race in 2022 and that Trump won his race in 2020—Gallego was especially proactive in trying to thwart election denialism. 

A Marine veteran who saw combat in Iraq, Gallego became one of the heroes of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. As his colleagues were panicking about the rioters seeking entry to the House floor, Gallego showed them how to use gas masks. As we reported in the May-June issue of Mother Jones, he also handed Rep. Eric Swalwell a pen to use for self-defense, should the California Democrat be attacked. This imagery undoubtedly inspired Democrats, but Republicans largely wanted to forget the day’s events ever happened.

Though Democrats lost the support of some Hispanic voters in other states, Gallego’s support hovered closer to what the party has won in recent elections, and he ran particularly strong among men. He met those voters where they were; earlier in the campaign, he even rented out a boxing gym to hold a watch party for a big boxing match. And his campaign embraced Gallego’s potential to become the first Latino senator from a state with one of the largest Latino populations in the United States, kicking off the final weekend of the race with a Mexican rodeo, where volunteers handed out Lotería cards featuring Gallego as “El Senador” and Lake as “La Mentirosa,” or liar. It reminded him, he said, of the rodeos he’d gone to growing up, when visiting his father’s family in Chihuahua. But his appeal was about far more than his identity. It was rooted in aspirational working-class politics that could reach even the sorts of voters who have recently drifted to Trump.

“We’re sending people to Washington, DC, that don’t understand how hard it is to work,” he said at that rodeo. “They don’t understand what it means to put 40 hours away. They don’t understand what it means to actually struggle and still believe the next day it’s going to be better.”

Gallego was comfortable talking about border security, too. Far from the open-border policies Lake accused Gallego of promoting, he often advocated for more border patrol agents and physical structures in high-impact regions, and he highlighted how Republican senators blocked a $20 billion border security package earlier this year, at Trump’s behest. 

There’s a common refrain in politics that losing candidates tend to fight the last war. Lake turned that line into performance art.

As the child of two immigrants, Gallego emphasized the need to reform the process of migrants coming to the US legally. Migrants are “doing all these illegal or abusive things because they want to get here and we’re not making it easier,” he told Mother Jones over the summer, “and we do need people to come work.”

But the race was as much about Gallego’s ability to adapt his messaging to a broader audience as it was Lake’s complete inability to do the same. For the former local TV news anchor, election denial was both a ticket to stardom and a trap. Lake resigned from her job at Fox 10 Phoenix not long after publicly questioning Fox News’ decision to call the state for President Joe Biden four years ago, and she rocketed to stardom on the far-right as one of the most vocal proponents of the stolen-election narrative in a state with no shortage of them. Her insistence that Trump actually won the state, and her promise to prosecute election administrators—including Democratic secretary of state Katie Hobbs—earned her Trump’s endorsement during her 2022 run for governor. For a time, people were even talking about her as a future running mate.

In 2022, Lake’s election denial, and her attacks on the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, may have cost her a race in which a significant number of Republicans cast their votes, instead, for Hobbs. But Lake didn’t see it that way. In fact, she wouldn’t even admit that she lost. It wasn’t just that Lake was being a sore loser—she went to court to challenge the results, and to argue that she should be installed in the governor’s mansion. She wrote in her memoir—last year—that she was the “lawful governor” of Arizona and traveled the state whipping crowds into a frenzy about the race that had been stolen from her. Her attempts to overturn that election did not wind down when she began to campaign in earnest for a different office. They are still ongoing. There’s a common refrain in politics that losing candidates tend to fight the last war. Lake turned that line into performance art.

If Gallego’s message was a reminder to Democrats of how they win in Arizona, Lake’s offered a sampler of the myriad ways in which MAGA candidates have found to lose. She spent a bizarre amount of time out-of-state, mostly at Mar-a-Lago. Earlier this year, Lake forced the state Republican party chairman to resign after secretly recording a conversation in which he suggested she sit out the Senate race. She went back and forth and back again on the state’s territorial abortion ban, which—before it was repealed—outlawed all abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest.

Lake, who is being sued by Maricopa County’s Republican recorder for defamation for her assertions that he helped rig the vote against her, had a tendency to clam up when she was asked about her election denial during the campaign. “Why are we looking backward?” she asked CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “I’m looking forward.”

But she couldn’t resist one last glimpse over her shoulder. On election eve, at a rally on the courthouse steps in Prescott, a heavily Republican enclave two hours north of Phoenix, Lake was joined by a who’s who of election deniers, including Wendy Rogers, who previously called for the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to be thrown in prison, and Abe Hamadeh, who continued to contest his 280-vote loss in the 2022 attorney general’s race even as he ran for Congress. When it was her turn, she thanked Hamadeh for challenging the results. “When they did to us what they did to us in 2022 and everyone else ran and hid,” she complained. “Guess who stood with me and said, ‘Damn it, we’re going to fight’?” 

“We have elections that are run so horribly,” Lake complained. She wanted the crowd gathered in the chilly November night to “give the people running our elections whiplash” by making the result “too big to rig.”

Campaign season didn’t end for Lake on election day, though. On Thursday, she got one last piece of bad news: The state supreme court rejected Lake’s final appeal in her attempts to overturn her 2022 defeat. Her Senate dreams are over. Her campaign for governor finally is too.

I Spent Last Night With Arizona Dems As Their World Fell Apart

The problem with holding a election-night watch party in the mountain time zone is that by the time people start to roll in, the night will have already taken a turn. After racking up historic wins during the Trump era, Arizona Democrats entered the 2024 election hoping to keep the positive results coming. But at the party’s official celebration at an upscale hotel and conference center in north Phoenix on Tuesday, the mood started off anxious.

When I asked Mary Kuckertz, a mental-health professional from Tempe, how she was feeling, she used a term that to seemed to capture the spirit of the Democratic electorate: “Nauseously optimistic.”

At that point in the night, Vice President Kamala Harris’ path to victory was narrowing but still possible, and Kuckertz, a mental-health researcher, was thinking about what a second Trump term would mean. “So much funding got cut when Trump was president—all of these really phenomenal programs that we’re bringing these mental health services to children and families who really needed it, so many of those services have totally gone by the wayside,” she said. “I can’t handle more trans kids not getting access to basic human care.”

Arizona Dems getting nervous as the hour gets later at the watch party.Cassidy Arai

Arizona was the epicenter for the popular front against Donald Trump and his allies, and the people in the room were a reminder of what this coalition of moderate Republicans, Native Americans, Black and Latino voters, and college-educated whites had accomplished over the last eight years. Attendees heard from Gov. Katie Hobbs, who defeated election-denier Kari Lake two years ago; and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who defeated election denier Mark Finchem that same year; and Sen. Mark Kelly, who defeated Peter Thiel acolyte Blake Masters in 2022 and Trump-backed Rep. Martha McSally two years before that. The volunteers and organizers in the room had flipped a Senate seat in 2018 and knocked Sheriff Joe Arpaio from office in 2016. And on Tuesday, when almost everything else was looking grim, they had delivered a historic policy win—passing Prop 139, a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to an abortion in the state to the point of viability. It wasn’t particularly close.

These were major accomplishments—the product of years or organizing and tactical ticket-splitting. There was another possible silver lining, too: Lake could lose again, this time to Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who predicted victory in a speech last night, but cautioned supporters that it might take time for the race to be called. (It still hasn’t been.) Gallego, a Marine veteran who was raised by a single mother, would be the state’s first Latino senator, and he ran well ahead of the presidential ticket—particularly among Latino men. He succeeded less through any sort of anti-Trump messaging than through an aspirational pitch for the American Dream and working-class economic priorities.

The longer things went on, though, the more dissonant it seemed to hear Harry Styles and “Mr. Brightside” blaring over the speakers while Steve Kornacki pointed at an increasingly crimson map. (Pick a state—it didn’t seem to matter.) The crowd dwindled, and people started to hit the cash bar with a bit more purpose. 

When I asked Denise Deubery, who was watching the MSNBC feed, how she was feeling, she told me “the best way to put it is nauseously optimistic.”

Breaking down the setup at the watch party on Election Day at the Hilton Phoenix Resort at the Peak in Phoenix.Cassidy Arai

The phrase was apparently catching on. But the meaning was a little different. The nauseous part was obvious, of course, but as the networks prepared to call more states that would narrow Harris’ path to victory even more, why was Deubery optimistic? It wasn’t about Harris’ chances, she said, but about the work that had brought them all there.

“I’ve never been amongst more encouraging individuals that I’ll probably never meet again in my life,” she said. She’d been volunteering since September. The fight gave her hope. It was the type of thing you could build on. “I’ve never been more of a proud American.”

By the time Fontes spoke, to officially wind the ceremonies down, there were more photographers than partisans on floor. “Wipe that frigging sourpuss face off of your face,” he implored anyone listening. Determined to put a positive spin on things, he noted the high number of outstanding ballots to count in Maricopa, and asked Democrats to be patient as results trickled in over the coming days.

“The last thing in the world I want to see out of my Democratic Party is a lot of pearl-clutching, a lot of hand-wringing, and a lot of naysaying,” he said. He wanted them to “continue moving forward with joy, whether or not you feel good about what Jake Tapper and the rest of those folks are saying on TV tonight.” Come morning, it was time to start curing ballots.

But there was no point in denying the obvious. 

“Lastly let me say this: If you’re going to drink: good—get an Uber or Lyft when you go home,” he said. “I want y’all to be safe, because we got a lot of work to still do.”

I Spent Last Night With Arizona Dems As Their World Fell Apart

The problem with holding a election-night watch party in the mountain time zone is that by the time people start to roll in, the night will have already taken a turn. After racking up historic wins during the Trump era, Arizona Democrats entered the 2024 election hoping to keep the positive results coming. But at the party’s official celebration at an upscale hotel and conference center in north Phoenix on Tuesday, the mood started off anxious.

When I asked Mary Kuckertz, a mental-health professional from Tempe, how she was feeling, she used a term that to seemed to capture the spirit of the Democratic electorate: “Nauseously optimistic.”

At that point in the night, Vice President Kamala Harris’ path to victory was narrowing but still possible, and Kuckertz, a mental-health researcher, was thinking about what a second Trump term would mean. “So much funding got cut when Trump was president—all of these really phenomenal programs that we’re bringing these mental health services to children and families who really needed it, so many of those services have totally gone by the wayside,” she said. “I can’t handle more trans kids not getting access to basic human care.”

Arizona Dems getting nervous as the hour gets later at the watch party.Cassidy Arai

Arizona was the epicenter for the popular front against Donald Trump and his allies, and the people in the room were a reminder of what this coalition of moderate Republicans, Native Americans, Black and Latino voters, and college-educated whites had accomplished over the last eight years. Attendees heard from Gov. Katie Hobbs, who defeated election-denier Kari Lake two years ago; and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who defeated election denier Mark Finchem that same year; and Sen. Mark Kelly, who defeated Peter Thiel acolyte Blake Masters in 2022 and Trump-backed Rep. Martha McSally two years before that. The volunteers and organizers in the room had flipped a Senate seat in 2018 and knocked Sheriff Joe Arpaio from office in 2016. And on Tuesday, when almost everything else was looking grim, they had delivered a historic policy win—passing Prop 139, a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to an abortion in the state to the point of viability. It wasn’t particularly close.

These were major accomplishments—the product of years or organizing and tactical ticket-splitting. There was another possible silver lining, too: Lake could lose again, this time to Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who predicted victory in a speech last night, but cautioned supporters that it might take time for the race to be called. (It still hasn’t been.) Gallego, a Marine veteran who was raised by a single mother, would be the state’s first Latino senator, and he ran well ahead of the presidential ticket—particularly among Latino men. He succeeded less through any sort of anti-Trump messaging than through an aspirational pitch for the American Dream and working-class economic priorities.

The longer things went on, though, the more dissonant it seemed to hear Harry Styles and “Mr. Brightside” blaring over the speakers while Steve Kornacki pointed at an increasingly crimson map. (Pick a state—it didn’t seem to matter.) The crowd dwindled, and people started to hit the cash bar with a bit more purpose. 

When I asked Denise Deubery, who was watching the MSNBC feed, how she was feeling, she told me “the best way to put it is nauseously optimistic.”

Breaking down the setup at the watch party on Election Day at the Hilton Phoenix Resort at the Peak in Phoenix.Cassidy Arai

The phrase was apparently catching on. But the meaning was a little different. The nauseous part was obvious, of course, but as the networks prepared to call more states that would narrow Harris’ path to victory even more, why was Deubery optimistic? It wasn’t about Harris’ chances, she said, but about the work that had brought them all there.

“I’ve never been amongst more encouraging individuals that I’ll probably never meet again in my life,” she said. She’d been volunteering since September. The fight gave her hope. It was the type of thing you could build on. “I’ve never been more of a proud American.”

By the time Fontes spoke, to officially wind the ceremonies down, there were more photographers than partisans on floor. “Wipe that frigging sourpuss face off of your face,” he implored anyone listening. Determined to put a positive spin on things, he noted the high number of outstanding ballots to count in Maricopa, and asked Democrats to be patient as results trickled in over the coming days.

“The last thing in the world I want to see out of my Democratic Party is a lot of pearl-clutching, a lot of hand-wringing, and a lot of naysaying,” he said. He wanted them to “continue moving forward with joy, whether or not you feel good about what Jake Tapper and the rest of those folks are saying on TV tonight.” Come morning, it was time to start curing ballots.

But there was no point in denying the obvious. 

“Lastly let me say this: If you’re going to drink: good—get an Uber or Lyft when you go home,” he said. “I want y’all to be safe, because we got a lot of work to still do.”

❌