Four years to the day that Donald Trump incited a violent attack on the US Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results, Congress certified his Electoral College victory as the 47th president of the United States.

As required of her role presiding over the Senate, Vice President Kamala Harris oversaw the ceremony, which marked her own defeat. In doing so—and in a process rife with irony—Harris was addressed as “Madam President,” referring to her role as president of the Senate, as the electoral results of each state were announced. The final tally: 312 to 226.

In a video posted to X Monday morning, Harris drew an implicit contrast to Trump’s approach to his election loss: “This duty is a sacred obligation—one I will uphold guided by love of country, loyalty to our Constitution, and unwavering faith in the American people.”

Some Republicans appeared less high-minded, instead peddling revisionist history and suggestions that the label of “insurrection” to describe Jan. 6 was overblown. In an especially absurd example, Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) falsely claimed in a post on X that the insurrectionists were made up of “thousands of peaceful grandmothers” who took “a self-guided, albeit unauthorized, tour of the U.S. Capitol building.” Adding to the misinformation was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.,) who told a reporter: “January 6th was not an insurrection. I’m completely sick and tired and fed up of the Democrats’ narrative, the media narrative, and it’s a total lie.”

As my colleague Mark Follman has chronicled, January 6, 2021, was indeed a heavily armed insurrection that saw 140 police officers injured, the deaths of four participants, and five police officers who had been at the Capitol. More than 1,200 people have been charged for their actions on Jan. 6, according to the Department of Justice—and Trump has promised to pardon them.

Democrats on Monday went to great lengths to emphasize that they were doing what Trump and his allies did not: accepting an election loss and facilitating a peaceful transition of power. They also reminded Americans of what actually happened on Jan. 6.

“Today, Congress will do its constitutional duty once again to certify the election results—a great contrast from Republicans who sought to deny the election 4 years ago,” Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) wrote on X Monday morning.

Several Democratic members of Congress also shared photos of their destroyed offices and damage sustained to the Capitol four years ago. “The horrific videos and images from the January 6th insurrection against our Capitol reaffirm as much as ever: The power of the people must always matter more than the people in power,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) wrote, alongside photos of broken glass and overturned furniture.

4 years ago.

The horrific videos and images from the January 6th insurrection against our Capitol reaffirm as much as ever: The power of the people must always matter more than the people in power. pic.twitter.com/awY7Md49NI

— Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) January 6, 2025

Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.) shared a photo of what he said was Capitol Police barricading his office doors and windows “to protect my staff and I from the violent mob that was just outside my window.”

In an op-ed published in the Washington Post on Sunday, President Biden warned of the importance of preserving the facts of the “assault” of January 6 for the history books: “An unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite—even erase—the history of that day. To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes. To dismiss concerns about it as some kind of partisan obsession. To explain it away as a protest that just got out of hand. This is not what happened…We cannot allow the truth to be lost.”

Biden also called for “remembering Jan. 6, 2021, every year. To remember it as a day when our democracy was put to the test and prevailed. To remember that democracy—even in America—is never guaranteed.”

Of course, such warnings to remember what happened on January 6 were absent from Trump’s communications. Early Monday morning, he wrote on Truth Social: “CONGRESS CERTIFIES OUR GREAT ELECTION VICTORY TODAY — A BIG MOMENT IN HISTORY. MAGA!”

In the immediate aftermath of the New Year’s truck attack that killed 14 people and injured dozens in New Orleans, President-elect Donald Trump baselessly—and, it turns out, falsely—suggested that the Biden administration’s immigration policies were to blame.

“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” Trump wrote on Truth Social just after 10:45 a.m. on New Year’s Day. (Later in the post, he added: “Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department.”)

While the attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar—who died in a shootout with police—had proclaimed his allegiance to ISIS, according to the FBI, he was, in fact, a US citizen who grew up in Texas and served in the US Army. Trump has yet to clearly correct the record. In posts the following day, he faulted authorities for failing to protect “Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself,” and he argued: “With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”

When I asked if Trump would more directly correct his original false statement, the incoming president’s communications director, Steven Cheung, said I was “too big of a moron to actually comprehend what he was posting about.” Cheung suggested that Trump was referring to the broader problem of violent criminals and “radical Islamic terrorism” crossing the border.

Top members of the GOP have also spread version’s of Trump’s claim, attempting to connect Biden’s border policies to the attack. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) did so on Fox News on Thursday, saying congressional Republicans “have been ringing the alarms” about “terrorism and the wide open border, the idea that dangerous people were coming here in droves and setting up potentially terrorist cells around the country.” Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) also posted on X, linking news of the attack to border and immigration policies. A spokesperson for Crane said Sunday that his post “simply says that our open border and legal immigration system create additional vulnerabilities to Americans, so there’s nothing to correct.” Spokespeople for Greene and Johnson did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones.

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., echoed his father’s falsehoods in a New Year’s Day post on X, writing: “Biden’s parting gift to America — migrant terrorists.”

As Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on This Week Sunday: “The assailant who perpetrated the terrorist attack in New Orleans was born in the United States, raised in the United States, and served in our armed forces. It is not an issue of the border.”

“The assailant who perpetrated the terrorist attack in New Orleans was born in the United States, raised in the United States and served in our armed forces. It is not an issue of the border,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says. https://t.co/rRMUv9vl3M pic.twitter.com/CdxBxDH9S1

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 5, 2025

The GOP, however, seems largely unwilling to back down. Instead, they continue to show they’re willing to sacrifice immigrants at the altar of Trump.

Jeff Bezos and his companies have seemingly been doing everything they can to get into Donald Trump’s good graces before he returns to the Oval Office.

This includes: donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration via Amazon; dining with Trump and Elon Musk recently at Mar-a-Lago; and, of course, spiking an editorial endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris slated to run in the Washington Post, which Bezos also owns—a decision that reportedly cost the Post as many as 300,000 subscribers who canceled in the immediate aftermath.

As of this weekend, there appear to be new additions to this list. First off, the Washington Post killed a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize–winner Ann Telnaes that satirized the slate of tech and media billionaires practically prostrating themselves at Trump’s feet. The cartoon included sketches of Bezos; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Meta, which also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee; Sam Altman of OpenAI, who made a $1 million donation; Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times, who killed that paper’s endorsement of Harris; and the Walt Disney Company, owner of ABC News, which recently made the controversial decision to pay $15 million to settle a defamation suit brought by Trump.

The Washington Post’s editorial page editor, David Shipley, said in a statement provided by the paper’s spokesperson that he killed the cartoon because the Post had recently run a column on the same matter and had another scheduled for publication. “Not every editorial judgement is a reflection of a malign force…,” he said. “The only bias was against repetition.” (The paper has also run several columns criticizing the decision to kill the Harris endorsement.)

.@AnnTelnaes resigned after the Washington Post editorial page killed her cartoon. It’s worth a share.

Big Tech executives are bending the knee to Donald Trump and it’s no surprise why: Billionaires like Jeff Bezos like paying a lower tax rate than a public school teacher. pic.twitter.com/xv6e5dJVf4

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) January 4, 2025

In a Substack piece announcing that she was quitting the Post in protest of the decision, Telnaes called the episode “dangerous for a free press.”

“Owners of such press organizations are responsible for safeguarding that free press—and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press,” Telnaes wrote.

The board of directors for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists backed Telnaes up, saying in a statement: “Editorial cartooning is the tip of the spear in opinion, and the Post’s cowering further soils their once-stellar reputation for standing up and speaking truth to power. We weep for the loss of this once great newspaper.”

The Post isn’t the only Bezos media company in the news this weekend. Amazon Studios is reportedly helping bring to life a documentary focused on soon-to-be-First-Lady and conspiracy theorist Melania Trump. Fox News reports that Amazon Prime licensed the documentary, expected to be released in theaters and on streaming in the second half of this year. Filming began last month, and Melania is an executive producer, Fox reports.

Keep in mind that given the content of her eponymous memoir—not to mention the well-worn phenomenon of celebrities producing documentaries about themselves as a PR tactic (remember the 6-hour Harry and Meghan Netflix special?)—the odds of this documentary actually providing “an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look” at Melania, as Amazon claims it will, seem low. Representatives for Amazon did not respond to questions from Mother Jones, including about the extent of any involvement from Bezos and whether Melania will have any control over the film’s editing.

This is a great time to remember, as our CEO Monika Bauerlein put it: Billionaire-owned newsrooms are not our only option.

In the immediate aftermath of the New Year’s truck attack that killed 14 people and injured dozens in New Orleans, President-elect Donald Trump baselessly—and, it turns out, falsely—suggested that the Biden administration’s immigration policies were to blame.

“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” Trump wrote on Truth Social just after 10:45 a.m. on New Year’s Day. (Later in the post, he added: “Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department.”)

While the attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar—who died in a shootout with police—had proclaimed his allegiance to ISIS, according to the FBI, he was, in fact, a US citizen who grew up in Texas and served in the US Army. Trump has yet to clearly correct the record. In posts the following day, he faulted authorities for failing to protect “Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself,” and he argued: “With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”

When I asked if Trump would more directly correct his original false statement, the incoming president’s communications director, Steven Cheung, said I was “too big of a moron to actually comprehend what he was posting about.” Cheung suggested that Trump was referring to the broader problem of violent criminals and “radical Islamic terrorism” crossing the border.

Top members of the GOP have also spread version’s of Trump’s claim, attempting to connect Biden’s border policies to the attack. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) did so on Fox News on Thursday, saying congressional Republicans “have been ringing the alarms” about “terrorism and the wide open border, the idea that dangerous people were coming here in droves and setting up potentially terrorist cells around the country.” Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) also posted on X, linking news of the attack to border and immigration policies. A spokesperson for Crane said Sunday that his post “simply says that our open border and legal immigration system create additional vulnerabilities to Americans, so there’s nothing to correct.” Spokespeople for Greene and Johnson did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones.

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., echoed his father’s falsehoods in a New Year’s Day post on X, writing: “Biden’s parting gift to America — migrant terrorists.”

As Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on This Week Sunday: “The assailant who perpetrated the terrorist attack in New Orleans was born in the United States, raised in the United States, and served in our armed forces. It is not an issue of the border.”

“The assailant who perpetrated the terrorist attack in New Orleans was born in the United States, raised in the United States and served in our armed forces. It is not an issue of the border,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says. https://t.co/rRMUv9vl3M pic.twitter.com/CdxBxDH9S1

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 5, 2025

The GOP, however, seems largely unwilling to back down. Instead, they continue to show they’re willing to sacrifice immigrants at the altar of Trump.

Jeff Bezos and his companies have seemingly been doing everything they can to get into Donald Trump’s good graces before he returns to the Oval Office.

This includes: Donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration via Amazon; Dining with Trump and Elon Musk recently at Mar-a-Lago; and, of course, spiking an editorial endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris slated to run in the Washington Post, which Bezos also owns—a decision that reportedly cost the Post as many as 300,000 subscribers who canceled in the immediate aftermath.

As of this weekend, there appear to be new additions to this list. First off, the Washington Post killed a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ann Telnaes that satirized the slate of tech and media billionaires practically prostrating themselves at Trump’s feet. The cartoon included sketches of Bezos; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Meta, which also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee; Sam Altman of OpenAI, who made a $1 million donation; Patrick Soon-Shiong of the LA Times, who killed that paper’s endorsement of Harris; and the Walt Disney Company, owner of ABC News, which recently made the controversial decision to pay $15 million to settle a defamation suit brought by Trump.

The Washington Post‘s editorial page editor, David Shipley, said in a statement provided by the paper’s spokesperson that he killed the cartoon because the Post had recently run a column on the same matter and had another scheduled for publication. “Not every editorial judgement is a reflection of a malign force…,” he said. “The only bias was against repetition.” (The paper has also run several columns criticizing the decision to kill the Harris endorsement.)

.@AnnTelnaes resigned after the Washington Post editorial page killed her cartoon. It’s worth a share.

Big Tech executives are bending the knee to Donald Trump and it’s no surprise why: Billionaires like Jeff Bezos like paying a lower tax rate than a public school teacher. pic.twitter.com/xv6e5dJVf4

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) January 4, 2025

In a Substack piece announcing that she was quitting the Post in protest of the decision, Telnaes called the episode “dangerous for a free press.”

“Owners of such press organizations are responsible for safeguarding that free press—and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press,” Telnaes wrote.

The board of directors for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists backed Telnaes up, saying in a statement: “Editorial cartooning is the tip of the spear in opinion, and the Post’s cowering further soils their once-stellar reputation for standing up and speaking truth to power. We weep for the loss of this once great newspaper.”

The Post isn’t the only Bezos media company in the news this weekend. Amazon Studios is reportedly helping bring to life a documentary focused on soon-to-be-First-Lady and conspiracy theorist Melania Trump. Fox News reports that Amazon Prime licensed the documentary, expected to be released in theaters and on streaming in the second half of this year. Filming began last month, and Melania is an executive producer, Fox reports.

Keep in mind that given the content of her eponymous memoir—not to mention the well-worn phenomenon of celebrities producing documentaries about themselves as a PR tactic (remember the 6-hour Harry and Meghan Netflix special?)—the odds of this documentary actually providing “an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look” at Melania, as Amazon claims it will, seem low. Representatives for Amazon did not respond to questions from Mother Jones, including about the extent of any involvement from Bezos and whether Melania will have any control over the film’s editing.

This is a great time to remember, as our CEO Monika Bauerlein put it: Billionaire-owned newsrooms are not our only option.

Homelessness in America reached the highest level on record last year, according to new data released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development—and it will likely only get worse, in light of both a Supreme Court decision issued in June and President-elect Donald Trump’s forthcoming presidency.

The annual report—which estimates the number of people staying in shelters, temporary housing, and on the streets on a single night—found more than 770,000 people experiencing homelessness on a single night this past January, up 18 percent from a night in January 2023. The increase in the rate of families experiencing homelessness was even steeper, rising 39 percent from 2023 to 2024. And there was a 33 percent increase in children experiencing homelessness, bringing the amount recorded earlier this year to nearly 150,000 kids. (Experts say the numbers are likely an undercount.)

HUD attributes this rise to “significant increases in rental costs, as a result of the pandemic and nearly decades of under-building of housing,” as well as natural disasters—such as the deadly August 2023 Maui wildfires—that destroyed housing. Other factors include “rising inflation, stagnating wages among
middle- and lower-income households, and the persisting effects of systemic racism [that] have stretched homelessness services systems to their limits,” the report says. (Black people remain overrepresented, accounting for 12 percent of the US population but 32 percent of those experiencing homelessness, according to the report.) California and New York had the highest numbers of people experiencing homelessness.

Some of the nationwide increase, the report notes, was also due to “a result of [communities’] work to shelter a rising number of asylum seekers.” In New York City, for example, asylum seekers accounted for almost 88 percent of the increase in sheltered homelessness. HUD points out that the counts were conducted after Republicans in Congress blocked a bipartisan Senate deal that would have funded border security and before President Joe Biden’s border crackdown via executive action—a reference Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) aimed to use to his advantage.

Biden administration admits #BidenBorderCrisis resulted in more homelessness.

Migrants and End of Covid Restrictions Fuel Jump in Homelessness https://t.co/zyslrZau2j

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) December 28, 2024

Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, responded on X that this was a “misdiagnosis of its causes,” adding that he has a report forthcoming on “this easy scapegoating of migrants for the homelessness crisis.”

Despite the bleakness of the data, there were some signs of progress: Homelessness among veterans dropped to the lowest number on record: 32,882—an 8 percent decrease from 2023. The report also spotlights a few places (Dallas, Los Angeles, and Chester County, Pennsylvania) that saw significant decreases in people experiencing homelessness thanks to targeted efforts to increase the availability of housing and other supportive services.

Still, it’s hard not to see the data as an indictment of one of the world’s wealthiest nations, where basic necessities—housing, food, and healthcare—are out of reach to many low- and middle-income families. And, as the report intimates, it is likely that people experiencing homelessness will face even greater challenges in light of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the June Supreme Court decision that essentially greenlit the criminalization of homelessness. (As I have reported, domestic violence prevention advocates expect the ruling will be catastrophic for survivors, given the role abusive relationships can play in driving victims to homelessness.)

Ann Olivia, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said in a statement she hopes the data will spur lawmakers “to advance evidence-based solutions to this crisis.” (Vice President Kamala Harris made new housing construction a key part of her campaign.) Some Democrats agree that politicians have to act—and fast:

This is the richest country on earth.

770,000 Americans should not be homeless, and 20 million more should not be spending over half their incomes on rent or a mortgage.

We need to invest in affordable housing, not Trump’s massive tax breaks for billionaires. https://t.co/MOiMOZHthw

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) December 27, 2024

“As housing prices increase, homelessness increases,” Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) posted in response to the same AP article. “Homelessness is a housing problem.”

But don’t hold your breath: Trump’s acolytes have signaled their desires to slash the social safety net and enact mass deportations of undocumented people, which experts have said will likely exacerbate the housing crisis given the role immigrants play in the construction industry. The closest his budding administration has come to offering a solution is VP-elect JD Vance’s claim that mass deportations will solve the housing shortage by freeing up units.

Homelessness in America reached the highest level on record last year, according to new data released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development—and it will likely only get worse, in light of both a Supreme Court decision issued in June and President-elect Donald Trump’s forthcoming presidency.

The annual report—which estimates the number of people staying in shelters, temporary housing, and on the streets on a single night—found more than 770,000 people experiencing homelessness on a single night this past January, up 18 percent from a night in January 2023. The increase in the rate of families experiencing homelessness was even steeper, rising 39 percent from 2023 to 2024. And there was a 33 percent increase in children experiencing homelessness, bringing the amount recorded earlier this year to nearly 150,000 kids. (Experts say the numbers are likely an undercount.)

HUD attributes this rise to “significant increases in rental costs, as a result of the pandemic and nearly decades of under-building of housing,” as well as natural disasters—such as the deadly August 2023 Maui wildfires—that destroyed housing. Other factors include “rising inflation, stagnating wages among
middle- and lower-income households, and the persisting effects of systemic racism [that] have stretched homelessness services systems to their limits,” the report says. (Black people remain overrepresented, accounting for 12 percent of the US population but 32 percent of those experiencing homelessness, according to the report.) California and New York had the highest numbers of people experiencing homelessness.

Some of the nationwide increase, the report notes, was also due to “a result of [communities’] work to shelter a rising number of asylum seekers.” In New York City, for example, asylum seekers accounted for almost 88 percent of the increase in sheltered homelessness. HUD points out that the counts were conducted after Republicans in Congress blocked a bipartisan Senate deal that would have funded border security and before President Joe Biden’s border crackdown via executive action—a reference Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) aimed to use to his advantage.

https://twitter.com/JohnCornyn/status/1872996093543522435

Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, responded on X that this was a “misdiagnosis of its causes,” adding that he has a report forthcoming on “this easy scapegoating of migrants for the homelessness crisis.”

Despite the bleakness of the data, there were some signs of progress: Homelessness among veterans dropped to the lowest number on record: 32,882—an 8 percent decrease from 2023. The report also spotlights a few places (Dallas, Los Angeles, and Chester County, Pennsylvania) that saw significant decreases in people experiencing homelessness thanks to targeted efforts to increase the availability of housing and other supportive services.

Still, it’s hard not to see the data as an indictment of one of the world’s wealthiest nations, where basic necessities—housing, food, and healthcare—are out of reach to many low- and middle-income families. And, as the report intimates, it is likely that people experiencing homelessness will face even greater challenges in light of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the June Supreme Court decision that essentially greenlit the criminalization of homelessness. (As I have reported, domestic violence prevention advocates expect the ruling will be catastrophic for survivors, given the role abusive relationships can play in driving victims to homelessness.)

Ann Olivia, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said in a statement she hopes the data will spur lawmakers “to advance evidence-based solutions to this crisis.” (Vice President Kamala Harris made new housing construction a key part of her campaign.) Some Democrats agree that politicians have to act—and fast:

https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1872743695721828828

“As housing prices increase, homelessness increases,” Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) posted in response to the same AP article. “Homelessness is a housing problem.”

But don’t hold your breath: Trump’s acolytes have signaled their desires to slash the social safety net and enact mass deportations of undocumented people, which experts have said will likely exacerbate the housing crisis given the role immigrants play in the construction industry. The closest his budding administration has come to offering a solution is VP-elect JD Vance’s claim that mass deportations will solve the housing shortage by freeing up units.

Elon Musk is nothing if not shameless.

He proved that again this weekend, when he published an op-ed in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers, Die Welt, doubling down on his earlier support for the racist, far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD).

In the op-ed—reportedly published online Saturday and in print Sunday—Musk writes that the AfD is “the last spark of hope for this country” and, essentially, that his vast wealth makes his politics a matter of public interest.

“As someone who has made significant investments in Germany’s industrial and technological landscape, I believe I have the right to speak openly about its political orientation,” Musk writes, according to a Google translation of the text. As the country approaches a snap election on February 23, following the November collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government, AfD is polling second, at 19 percent, behind the center-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany.

Musk outlines five areas in which he claims AfD reigns supreme:

• “Economic revival” — Musk praises the party’s focus on de-regulation, writing, “Its approach of reducing government over-regulation, cutting taxes, and deregulating the market reflects the principles that made Tesla and SpaceX successful.”
• “Immigration and national identity” — Here Musk calls for “the preservation of German culture and security” in the face of globalization and immigration.
• “Energy and independence” — Musk lambastes the current German government’s decision to “phase out nuclear power and instead rely heavily on coal and imported gas, as well as volatile wind and solar power.”
• “Political realism” — Musk lauds the party for eschewing “the political correctness that often obscures the truth” (sound familiar?) and argues that the AfD can’t possibly be far-right because its leader, Alice Weidel, “has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!” (Yes, he actually wrote this.)
• “Innovation and the future” — Musk claims AfD “advocates for educational reforms that encourage critical thinking instead of indoctrination and supports the technology industries that represent the future of global economic leadership.”

His op-ed was published alongside a rebuttal from editor Jan Philipp Burgard, who writes that “Musk’s diagnosis is correct, but his therapeutic approach that only the AfD can save Germany is fatally wrong.”

Burgard notes that the AfD wants to remove Germany from the EU, which he says would be a “catastrophe” given the nation’s reliance on exports and the reliance of German citizens on the EU single market. He further argues that AfD’s isolationist focus could harm its relationship with the US in particular—and “doesn’t Elon Musk want to see many Teslas rolling along Germany’s highways in the future?” And, Burgard points out, Musk’s claims that the party isn’t so bad ignore the reality that Björn Höcke, another AfD leader, has been convicted—twice—of using banned Nazi slogans.

The publication of Musk’s op-ed elicited immediate internal backlash. Die Welt‘s opinion editor, Eva Marie Kogel, announced on X on Saturday that she’d resigned after it posted online.

Musk’s piece was meant to expand upon Musk’s December 20 X post that “only the AfD can save Germany.” (The party thanked him with a public video from party leader Weidel.) But as my colleague Alex Nguyen wrote, AfD is even controversial among Europe’s nationalists.

In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitler’s paramilitary organization. 

When you dig more into the priorities of AfD leaders, it makes sense that they’re on an island of their own—and why Musk is trying to court them. Some party officials, like Trump, have been clear about their desire to carry out mass deportations. As Mother Jones contributor Josh Axelrod, a Berlin-based reporter, wrote recently:

The AfD’s central pledge is to counteract the so-called Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that claims white Europeans or Americans are the victims of a plot by nonwhite immigrants to “replace” them and poison their societies. It was the inspiration for shooters to take up arms and target Muslim victims in Christchurch, Jews in Pittsburgh, Black people in Buffalo, and gay people in Bratislava.

“It’s the thing that brings together the far-right in multiple countries,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Mother Jones. 

As Burgard put it in his Musk rebuttal: “Even a genius can be wrong.”

Elon Musk is nothing if not shameless.

He proved that again this weekend, when he published an op-ed in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers, Die Welt, doubling down on his earlier support for the racist, far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD).

In the op-ed—reportedly published online Saturday and in print Sunday—Musk writes that the AfD is “the last spark of hope for this country” and, essentially, that his vast wealth makes his politics a matter of public interest.

“As someone who has made significant investments in Germany’s industrial and technological landscape, I believe I have the right to speak openly about its political orientation,” Musk writes, according to a Google translation of the text. As the country approaches a snap election on February 23, following the November collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government, AfD is polling second, at 19 percent, behind the center-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany.

Musk outlines five areas in which he claims AfD reigns supreme:

• “Economic revival” — Musk praises the party’s focus on de-regulation, writing, “Its approach of reducing government over-regulation, cutting taxes, and deregulating the market reflects the principles that made Tesla and SpaceX successful.”
• “Immigration and national identity” — Here Musk calls for “the preservation of German culture and security” in the face of globalization and immigration.
• “Energy and independence” — Musk lambastes the current German government’s decision to “phase out nuclear power and instead rely heavily on coal and imported gas, as well as volatile wind and solar power.”
• “Political realism” — Musk lauds the party for eschewing “the political correctness that often obscures the truth” (sound familiar?) and argues that the AfD can’t possibly be far-right because its leader, Alice Weidel, “has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!” (Yes, he actually wrote this.)
• “Innovation and the future” — Musk claims AfD “advocates for educational reforms that encourage critical thinking instead of indoctrination and supports the technology industries that represent the future of global economic leadership.”

His op-ed was published alongside a rebuttal from editor Jan Philipp Burgard, who writes that “Musk’s diagnosis is correct, but his therapeutic approach that only the AfD can save Germany is fatally wrong.”

Burgard notes that the AfD wants to remove Germany from the EU, which he says would be a “catastrophe” given the nation’s reliance on exports and the reliance of German citizens on the EU single market. He further argues that AfD’s isolationist focus could harm its relationship with the US in particular—and “doesn’t Elon Musk want to see many Teslas rolling along Germany’s highways in the future?” And, Burgard points out, Musk’s claims that the party isn’t so bad ignore the reality that Björn Höcke, another AfD leader, has been convicted—twice—of using banned Nazi slogans.

The publication of Musk’s op-ed elicited immediate internal backlash. Die Welt‘s opinion editor, Eva Marie Kogel, announced on X on Saturday that she’d resigned after it posted online.

Musk’s piece was meant to expand upon Musk’s December 20 X post that “only the AfD can save Germany.” (The party thanked him with a public video from party leader Weidel.) But as my colleague Alex Nguyen wrote, AfD is even controversial among Europe’s nationalists.

In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitler’s paramilitary organization. 

When you dig more into the priorities of AfD leaders, it makes sense that they’re on an island of their own—and why Musk is trying to court them. Some party officials, like Trump, have been clear about their desire to carry out mass deportations. As Mother Jones contributor Josh Axelrod, a Berlin-based reporter, wrote recently:

The AfD’s central pledge is to counteract the so-called Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that claims white Europeans or Americans are the victims of a plot by nonwhite immigrants to “replace” them and poison their societies. It was the inspiration for shooters to take up arms and target Muslim victims in Christchurch, Jews in Pittsburgh, Black people in Buffalo, and gay people in Bratislava.

“It’s the thing that brings together the far-right in multiple countries,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Mother Jones. 

As Burgard put it in his Musk rebuttal: “Even a genius can be wrong.”

Trump’s mass deportation agenda is already taking shape—for a second time—in coastal Oregon.

A racist letter reportedly circulating through Lincoln County, which has a population of about 50,000 people and is located on the state’s western coast, encourages residents to surveil and report “brown illegals…who you suspect are here in our country on an illegal basis” to the Department of Homeland Security.

The letter implores white locals to help facilitate “the largest round-up of brown illegals in our history,” referring to Trump’s pledge to begin mass deportations of approximately 11 million people, and promises white residents a chance to seize the victims’ homes.

In starkly racist language, it proceeds to outline a dystopian vision for surveillance of people of color everywhere from churches to schools and grocery stores:

Sit in your church’s parking lot and write down the license plate [number] of brown folks. This is extremely important if you attend a catholic church—many brown folks are catholics!! Shopping, again if you see a bunch of brown folks getting in a car—write down the plate [number]. Schools, as you wait in line to pick up the kiddos or the grandkiddos—if you see brown folks—record the plate [number]. Your neighborhood—you know where the brown folks live in your neighborhood—again record the plate [numbers]. If you see a construction crew and/or a landscaping crew who have brown folks—write down the name of the company and a phone [number].”

This is the full letter being distributed around Lincoln County Oregon pic.twitter.com/VlvbzFldzZ

— Rachel Bitecofer (@RachelBitecofer) December 20, 2024

Perhaps most disturbing are the ways that the letter directly echoes some of the Trump administration’s own anti-immigration talking points: Attacks on sanctuary cities, promises of detention, and allegedly solving the housing crisis through mass deportations, which the letter compares approvingly to Japanese internment.

The letter claims Oregon’s status as a sanctuary state makes it especially fitting for its perverse anti-immigrant demands: “We have received information brown folks, who are currently in Idaho and Montana, are planning to move to our state, because they believe it will be ‘safer’ for them. So don’t limit the license plate to just Oregon—brown folks from any state will be able to be reported to the Department of Homeland Security.”

And it outlines Trump’s vision for how deportations will be enacted, writing, “the brown folks will remain [in county jails] until the camps are completed in Texas—then these folks will be transferred there,” referring to the detention camps that, as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported, Trump’s acolytes plan to build.

“When the brown folks are rounded up,” the letter continues, “their properties will be confiscated just like the properties belonging to the Japanese in California were during World War II. So, within a short term, there will be a whole lot of homes on the market for us white folks to purchase and with the inventory so high—the prices will be very low and affordable.” (Again, experts say otherwise.)

It is unclear how many people have received the letter, but the recipients included local lawmakers in the city of Toledo, including its mayor, who received a copy in the mail, Portland NBC affiliate KGW reported. He, and other local officials, have publicly condemned the letter: In a Facebook post, Lincoln County Sheriff Curtis Landers characterized it as “harmful, divisive, and inconsistent with the values we uphold as public servants and community members.”

“We strongly advise against engaging in activities such as those outlined in this letter, including collecting or sharing information about individuals based on their demographic or perceived immigration status,” Landers added. His post also notes that state law “generally prohibits the inquiry or collection of an individual’s immigration or citizenship status, or country of birth,” and that the sheriff’s office “does not inquire about, document, or share such information with” ICE. The sheriff could not immediately be reached for comment on Sunday.

Oregon’s Democratic Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum also condemned the letter. ABC affiliate KATU of Portland reported that the FBI’s Oregon office is aware of the letter, and encouraged “community members who feel they are being physically threatened” to report concerns to local law enforcement.

In a statement provided to Mother Jones Monday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said: “Racism has no place in Oregon or anywhere else, and I’m proud to add my voice to the chorus of state and local officials denouncing this cowardly and cruel letter.” Oregon’s other Democratic Senator, Jeff Merkley, does not appear to have publicly commented on the letter, and his office did not respond to a request for comment. Spokespeople for the Trump transition team did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday afternoon.

The letter is reminiscent of the racist texts, now the subject of an FBI investigation, sent to Black people in the days after the election, demanding they “pick cotton,” as my colleague Anna Merlan reported at the time; other texts also targeted Hispanic and LBGTQ people. Anna also reported on a theory of where they originated:

Researchers at the Bridging Divides Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank at Princeton that studies and attempts to mitigate political violence, wrote in a rapid response analysis that the language of the texts appears to have been drawn from 4chan and from a now-deleted subreddit that was removed by Reddit’s moderators.

“An individual or individuals likely copy-pasted the text and used virtual phone numbers to send out the texts, selecting recipients based on their demographic profile,” the researchers wrote. “The recipient phone numbers could have been obtained via a data broker or a pre-existing data breach.” 

While the identities of the senders of those texts, and the letter in Oregon, may be unknown, one thing is clear: Right-wing racism is gaining steam.

Update, Dec. 23: This post was updated with a statement from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

President Joe Biden has officially surpassed president-elect Donald Trump’s record of judicial appointed to federal courts—by one single judge.

On Friday, the Senate Judiciary Committee, tasked with carrying out the confirmations of Biden’s appointees, announced that it had confirmed Biden’s 235th judge—one more than Trump during his term in office, when he blitzed the courts with white, male, right-wing judicial activists. “We just beat Donald Trump’s judicial confirmation record,” the committee announced in a post on X. “Our 235 judges confirmed under President Biden are diverse, fair, qualified, and will be a frontline of defense on attacks against our democracy.”

The judges will be “a significant protection for our civil rights and civil liberties to preserve our democracy” in Trump’s next term, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the committee, told reporters on Friday. As I have reported, the judges—who are appointed for life—play a significant role in deciding cases focused on reproductive rights, among many other issues of major importance to Americans; it was Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas, for example, who issued the anti-science ruling last year that paved the way for anti-abortion activists to bring an ultimately unsuccessful case to the Supreme Court challenging the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in a medication abortion.

The sheer amount of cases federal judges take on also contributes to their power: “The power of lower court federal judges is immense,” David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, told me last month, “because the Supreme Court only deals with such a limited number of cases.”

The courts are also expected to play a particularly significant role in light of the threats posed by Trump, who has threatened to prosecute his political enemies, and the ultra-conservative Supreme Court that has enabled political corruption, as my colleague Pema Levy recently wrote.

“The rule of law, which we used to take for granted, is under enormous stress, and is really threatened,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said Friday, “and the importance of what we did is that we have 235 jurors who are committed to the rule of law—and that includes a respect for judicial restraint, a respect for the proper role of the legislative branch, and a willingness to step in when there’s overreach, either by the legislature or the executive branch.”

According to the committee, the confirmed judges include 187 district court nominees, 45 circuit court nominees, one Supreme Court nominee—Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the high court—and two Court of International Trade nominees. About two-thirds of the judges confirmed under Biden are women and about two-fifths are women of color—both records, the committee says.

“Judges shape our lives,” Biden said in a post on X, announcing the record-setting confirmation. “I’m proud of those who heeded the call to serve, and of the legacy I’ll leave with the men and women I’ve appointed.”

“These exceptionally qualified individuals are dedicated to upholding the rule of law,” added Vice President Kamala Harris, “and they reflect the diversity of America.”

Trump does not appear to have publicly commented on Biden beating his record—but he may be glad to know that there are still 36 judicial vacancies he can fill in the federal courts, all but 2 in the district courts. (A couple of Biden’s nominees did not wind up being confirmed after he reportedly did not formally submit their nominations to the Senate in time.) Republicans are already preparing to squash Biden’s newly-established record: “On January 20 of 2029, Trump’s going to brag about having 240,” incoming Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told NBC News.

To Cohen, the law professor from Drexel, the news is more nuanced than either Democrats or Republicans would like it to be. “Multiple things can be true at the same time,” he told me Sunday. “It’s fantastic they confirmed so many judges to counterbalance the Trump cadre of judges. But also, there should be zero vacancies remaining.”

Trump’s mass deportation agenda is already taking shape—for a second time—in coastal Oregon.

A racist letter reportedly circulating through Lincoln County, which has a population of about 50,000 people and is located on the state’s western coast, encourages residents to surveil and report “brown illegals…who you suspect are here in our country on an illegal basis” to the Department of Homeland Security.

The letter implores white locals to help facilitate “the largest round-up of brown illegals in our history,” referring to Trump’s pledge to begin mass deportations of approximately 11 million people, and promises white residents a chance to seize the victims’ homes.

In starkly racist language, it proceeds to outline a dystopian vision for surveillance of people of color everywhere from churches to schools and grocery stores:

Sit in your church’s parking lot and write down the license plate [number] of brown folks. This is extremely important if you attend a catholic church—many brown folks are catholics!! Shopping, again if you see a bunch of brown folks getting in a car—write down the plate [number]. Schools, as you wait in line to pick up the kiddos or the grandkiddos—if you see brown folks—record the plate [number]. Your neighborhood—you know where the brown folks live in your neighborhood—again record the plate [numbers]. If you see a construction crew and/or a landscaping crew who have brown folks—write down the name of the company and a phone [number].”

This is the full letter being distributed around Lincoln County Oregon pic.twitter.com/VlvbzFldzZ

— Rachel Bitecofer (@RachelBitecofer) December 20, 2024

Perhaps most disturbing are the ways that the letter directly echoes some of the Trump administration’s own anti-immigration talking points: Attacks on sanctuary cities, promises of detention, and allegedly solving the housing crisis through mass deportations, which the letter compares approvingly to Japanese internment.

The letter claims Oregon’s status as a sanctuary state makes it especially fitting for its perverse anti-immigrant demands: “We have received information brown folks, who are currently in Idaho and Montana, are planning to move to our state, because they believe it will be ‘safer’ for them. So don’t limit the license plate to just Oregon—brown folks from any state will be able to be reported to the Department of Homeland Security.”

And it outlines Trump’s vision for how deportations will be enacted, writing, “the brown folks will remain [in county jails] until the camps are completed in Texas—then these folks will be transferred there,” referring to the detention camps that, as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported, Trump’s acolytes plan to build.

“When the brown folks are rounded up,” the letter continues, “their properties will be confiscated just like the properties belonging to the Japanese in California were during World War II. So, within a short term, there will be a whole lot of homes on the market for us white folks to purchase and with the inventory so high—the prices will be very low and affordable.” (Again, experts say otherwise.)

It is unclear how many people have received the letter, but the recipients included local lawmakers in the city of Toledo, including its mayor, who received a copy in the mail, Portland NBC affiliate KGW reported. He, and other local officials, have publicly condemned the letter: In a Facebook post, Lincoln County Sheriff Curtis Landers characterized it as “harmful, divisive, and inconsistent with the values we uphold as public servants and community members.”

“We strongly advise against engaging in activities such as those outlined in this letter, including collecting or sharing information about individuals based on their demographic or perceived immigration status,” Landers added. His post also notes that state law “generally prohibits the inquiry or collection of an individual’s immigration or citizenship status, or country of birth,” and that the sheriff’s office “does not inquire about, document, or share such information with” ICE. The sheriff could not immediately be reached for comment on Sunday.

Oregon’s Democratic Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum also condemned the letter. ABC affiliate KATU of Portland reported that the FBI’s Oregon office is aware of the letter, and encouraged “community members who feel they are being physically threatened” to report concerns to local law enforcement.

In a statement provided to Mother Jones Monday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said: “Racism has no place in Oregon or anywhere else, and I’m proud to add my voice to the chorus of state and local officials denouncing this cowardly and cruel letter.” Oregon’s other Democratic Senator, Jeff Merkley, does not appear to have publicly commented on the letter, and his office did not respond to a request for comment. Spokespeople for the Trump transition team did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday afternoon.

The letter is reminiscent of the racist texts, now the subject of an FBI investigation, sent to Black people in the days after the election, demanding they “pick cotton,” as my colleague Anna Merlan reported at the time; other texts also targeted Hispanic and LBGTQ people. Anna also reported on a theory of where they originated:

Researchers at the Bridging Divides Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank at Princeton that studies and attempts to mitigate political violence, wrote in a rapid response analysis that the language of the texts appears to have been drawn from 4chan and from a now-deleted subreddit that was removed by Reddit’s moderators.

“An individual or individuals likely copy-pasted the text and used virtual phone numbers to send out the texts, selecting recipients based on their demographic profile,” the researchers wrote. “The recipient phone numbers could have been obtained via a data broker or a pre-existing data breach.” 

While the identities of the senders of those texts, and the letter in Oregon, may be unknown, one thing is clear: Right-wing racism is gaining steam.

Update, Dec. 23: This post was updated with a statement from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

President Joe Biden has officially surpassed president-elect Donald Trump’s record of judicial appointed to federal courts—by one single judge.

On Friday, the Senate Judiciary Committee, tasked with carrying out the confirmations of Biden’s appointees, announced that it had confirmed Biden’s 235th judge—one more than Trump during his term in office, when he blitzed the courts with white, male, right-wing judicial activists. “We just beat Donald Trump’s judicial confirmation record,” the committee announced in a post on X. “Our 235 judges confirmed under President Biden are diverse, fair, qualified, and will be a frontline of defense on attacks against our democracy.”

The judges will be “a significant protection for our civil rights and civil liberties to preserve our democracy” in Trump’s next term, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the committee, told reporters on Friday. As I have reported, the judges—who are appointed for life—play a significant role in deciding cases focused on reproductive rights, among many other issues of major importance to Americans; it was Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas, for example, who issued the anti-science ruling last year that paved the way for anti-abortion activists to bring an ultimately unsuccessful case to the Supreme Court challenging the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in a medication abortion.

The sheer amount of cases federal judges take on also contributes to their power: “The power of lower court federal judges is immense,” David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, told me last month, “because the Supreme Court only deals with such a limited number of cases.”

The courts are also expected to play a particularly significant role in light of the threats posed by Trump, who has threatened to prosecute his political enemies, and the ultra-conservative Supreme Court that has enabled political corruption, as my colleague Pema Levy recently wrote.

“The rule of law, which we used to take for granted, is under enormous stress, and is really threatened,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said Friday, “and the importance of what we did is that we have 235 jurors who are committed to the rule of law—and that includes a respect for judicial restraint, a respect for the proper role of the legislative branch, and a willingness to step in when there’s overreach, either by the legislature or the executive branch.”

According to the committee, the confirmed judges include 187 district court nominees, 45 circuit court nominees, one Supreme Court nominee—Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the high court—and two Court of International Trade nominees. About two-thirds of the judges confirmed under Biden are women and about two-fifths are women of color—both records, the committee says.

“Judges shape our lives,” Biden said in a post on X, announcing the record-setting confirmation. “I’m proud of those who heeded the call to serve, and of the legacy I’ll leave with the men and women I’ve appointed.”

“These exceptionally qualified individuals are dedicated to upholding the rule of law,” added Vice President Kamala Harris, “and they reflect the diversity of America.”

Trump does not appear to have publicly commented on Biden beating his record—but he may be glad to know that there are still 36 judicial vacancies he can fill in the federal courts, all but 2 in the district courts. (A couple of Biden’s nominees did not wind up being confirmed after he reportedly did not formally submit their nominations to the Senate in time.) Republicans are already preparing to squash Biden’s newly-established record: “On January 20 of 2029, Trump’s going to brag about having 240,” incoming Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told NBC News.

To Cohen, the law professor from Drexel, the news is more nuanced than either Democrats or Republicans would like it to be. “Multiple things can be true at the same time,” he told me Sunday. “It’s fantastic they confirmed so many judges to counterbalance the Trump cadre of judges. But also, there should be zero vacancies remaining.”

Something is missing from the new Trump-backed year-end spending bill that Congress has to pass by midnight on Friday to prevent a government shutdown: Support for critical services for abused women and children.

As I have reported for Mother Jones, there is a funding crisis facing the Crime Victims Fund, a pot of federal money established by the 1984 Victims of Crime Act that supports domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, and child advocacy centers nationwide. The money comes from financial penalties levied in corporate criminal cases, and as federal prosecutors have collected less money, deposits into the Crime Victims Fund have shrunk massively, from about $6.6 billion in 2017 to $2.5 billion this year. (Because of caps set by Congress since 2000 to manage fluctuations in the fund, the amount of money disbursed has been even lower.)

Those cuts have trickled down to programs that provide lifesaving services for women and children in the aftermath of abuse. As I chronicled in a months-long investigation published in October, the declining funds—which are distributed to states based on their population size, and then to programs—have had ripple effects across the country, put multiple hotlines catering to domestic violence survivors at risk and imperiling legal advocacy services for survivors, among other impacts. As Judge Shelley Santry, a family court judge in Louisville, told me: “The consequence [of losing those services] may be death.”

The declining funds have also been disastrous for child advocacy centers: One center in rural northern Wisconsin that provided trauma-informed forensic interviews to about 50 kids annually for free—to gather the facts of their abuse to support criminal prosecutions and facilitate the kids’ healing—shuttered in October due to the funding cuts. Advocates in four other states told me the funding declines forced them to cut personnel or left them unable to fill vacant positions, leading to longer wait times for children and burnout for existing staff. Lynn Scott, executive director of the Alabama Network of Children’s Advocacy Centers, told me further funding cuts “would really close some doors” in her state—likely at a half-dozen or so centers in rural areas, she estimated.  

Lawmakers introduced a bill in Congress earlier this year that promised to help fix the funding crisis and seemed to have sweeping, bipartisan support: The CVF Stabilization Act would divert additional funds collected through the False Claims Act, which penalizes defrauding of the government, through 2029. It attracted more than 200 co-sponsors in the House, and a half-dozen in the Senate. Advocates said that while it would not permanently solve the the crisis, it could play an important role in helping to restore the funds: Since fiscal year 2017, according to the DOJ, $1.7 billion from the False Claims Act has gone into the General Fund of the Treasury—money that could otherwise go into the Crime Victims Fund if the new bill was passed.

Despite a big push from advocacy groups to get the bill passed before the end of the year, it failed to get any committee hearings or floor votes. (Spokespeople for the House and Senate Judiciary Committees chairs Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who also co-sponsored the Senate bill, did not return requests for comment. Neither did spokespeople for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-.N.Y.) or House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).)

Its exclusion from the spending bill is the final nail in the coffin, at least for this session of Congress. “We tried hard to get it included in the [spending bill], but right now, there’s not an agreement on anything,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), a cosponsor of the CVF Stabilization Act. “It is very clear to me that Congress has got to do better job of prioritizing crime survivors.”

There are other measures Congress could take that it hasn’t: Biden has recommended a $7.3 billion infusion into the Crime Victims Fund to account for the historic decline, but Congress has yet to act on it. Advocates are hoping that when the next budget does pass next year, Congress will include $1.9 billion in appropriations for the Crime Victims Fund. While the draft Senate appropriations bill meets the request for $1.9 billion, the draft House bill is so far only offering $1.5 billion.

“Survivors and programs cannot continue to wait in limbo for the funding they desperately need.”

In letters to Congress earlier this year, more than 700 prosecutors and 42 state attorneys general urged members to bolster the funding source in both the short and long-term to support survivors. “Millions of victims, including abused children and battered women, will be left without access to safety, justice and healing,” the prosecutors wrote.

Dingell said she doesn’t think her colleagues don’t care about supporting survivors of crimes, but rather that they don’t understand how dire the funding crisis actually is. “I think it’s a matter of peoples’ priorities,” she said. “If they don’t talk to [survivors] like I do, they don’t understand they’re going to be left without assistance and nothing—nothing—to help them navigate the aftermath of crime.”

Advocates fear what further funding cuts will bring. “Survivors and programs cannot continue to wait in limbo for the funding they desperately need,” Stephanie Love-Patterson, president and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, said in a statement Thursday. She added that the organization remains “encouraged by the overwhelming bipartisan congressional support of the bill” and hopeful that the bill would pass in the next Congress.

But Claire Ponder Selib, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Advocacy, is less optimistic. “I’m personally quite concerned about the possibilities of this being passed next session,” she told me, adding that it’s “very disappointing” the text of the legislation is absent from the spending bill. Steve Derene, former executive director of the National Association of VOCA Assistance Administrators, is also skeptical: “I’m sort of cynical about it getting past the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the incoming chair of that committee, has not signed onto the Senate bill and would be key to it getting a committee hearing. Grassley has not been entirely opposed to replenishing the Crime Victims Fund: He was an initial co-sponsor of the VOCA Fix Act, a 2021 law that diverted revenue from deferred and non-prosecution agreements to the Crime Victims Fund, and earlier this year said Congress should appropriate “the highest possible obligation limit [to the CVF] to help provide resources to crime victims.” But Grassley has also questioned the DOJ about why the VOCA Fix Act has been inadequate to restore the funds, and supported amendments to the False Claims Act—the new proposed source of revenue for the Crime Victims Fund in the latest bill—to bolster support for whistleblowers. (The only organized opposition to the CVF Stabilization Act appears to have come from whistleblowers, who allege that the legislation would siphon funds from people who report government fraud; advocates of the bill say it would preserve payments for whistleblowers.)

A spokesperson for Grassley said in a statement that he “will continue his oversight of the DOJ next Congress to ensure the agency complies with the law and the CVF is filled.” The spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether he would give the CVF Stabilization Act a hearing in the next session.

Dingell, for her part, said she’s undeterred. “I’m gonna work my butt off,” she said. “And I refuse to say there’s no chance.”

Something is missing from the new Trump-backed year-end spending bill that Congress has to pass by midnight on Friday to prevent a government shutdown: Support for critical services for abused women and children.

As I have reported for Mother Jones, there is a funding crisis facing the Crime Victims Fund, a pot of federal money established by the 1984 Victims of Crime Act that supports domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, and child advocacy centers nationwide. The money comes from financial penalties levied in corporate criminal cases, and as federal prosecutors have collected less money, deposits into the Crime Victims Fund have shrunk massively, from about $6.6 billion in 2017 to $2.5 billion this year. (Because of caps set by Congress since 2000 to manage fluctuations in the fund, the amount of money disbursed has been even lower.)

Those cuts have trickled down to programs that provide lifesaving services for women and children in the aftermath of abuse. As I chronicled in a months-long investigation published in October, the declining funds—which are distributed to states based on their population size, and then to programs—have had ripple effects across the country, put multiple hotlines catering to domestic violence survivors at risk and imperiling legal advocacy services for survivors, among other impacts. As Judge Shelley Santry, a family court judge in Louisville, told me: “The consequence [of losing those services] may be death.”

The declining funds have also been disastrous for child advocacy centers: One center in rural northern Wisconsin that provided trauma-informed forensic interviews to about 50 kids annually for free—to gather the facts of their abuse to support criminal prosecutions and facilitate the kids’ healing—shuttered in October due to the funding cuts. Advocates in four other states told me the funding declines forced them to cut personnel or left them unable to fill vacant positions, leading to longer wait times for children and burnout for existing staff. Lynn Scott, executive director of the Alabama Network of Children’s Advocacy Centers, told me further funding cuts “would really close some doors” in her state—likely at a half-dozen or so centers in rural areas, she estimated.  

Lawmakers introduced a bill in Congress earlier this year that promised to help fix the funding crisis and seemed to have sweeping, bipartisan support: The CVF Stabilization Act would divert additional funds collected through the False Claims Act, which penalizes defrauding of the government, through 2029. It attracted more than 200 co-sponsors in the House, and a half-dozen in the Senate. Advocates said that while it would not permanently solve the the crisis, it could play an important role in helping to restore the funds: Since fiscal year 2017, according to the DOJ, $1.7 billion from the False Claims Act has gone into the General Fund of the Treasury—money that could otherwise go into the Crime Victims Fund if the new bill was passed.

Despite a big push from advocacy groups to get the bill passed before the end of the year, it failed to get any committee hearings or floor votes. (Spokespeople for the House and Senate Judiciary Committees chairs Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who also co-sponsored the Senate bill, did not return requests for comment. Neither did spokespeople for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-.N.Y.) or House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).)

Its exclusion from the spending bill is the final nail in the coffin, at least for this session of Congress. “We tried hard to get it included in the [spending bill], but right now, there’s not an agreement on anything,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), a cosponsor of the CVF Stabilization Act. “It is very clear to me that Congress has got to do better job of prioritizing crime survivors.”

There are other measures Congress could take that it hasn’t: Biden has recommended a $7.3 billion infusion into the Crime Victims Fund to account for the historic decline, but Congress has yet to act on it. Advocates are hoping that when the next budget does pass next year, Congress will include $1.9 billion in appropriations for the Crime Victims Fund. While the draft Senate appropriations bill meets the request for $1.9 billion, the draft House bill is so far only offering $1.5 billion.

“Survivors and programs cannot continue to wait in limbo for the funding they desperately need.”

In letter to Congress earlier this year, more than 700 prosecutors and 42 state attorneys general urged members to bolster the funding source in both the short and long-term to support survivors. “Millions of victims, including abused children and battered women, will be left without access to safety, justice and healing,” the prosecutors wrote.

Dingell said she doesn’t think her colleagues don’t care about supporting survivors of crimes, but rather that they don’t understand how dire the funding crisis actually is. “I think it’s a matter of peoples’ priorities,” she said. “If they don’t talk to [survivors] like I do, they don’t understand they’re going to be left without assistance and nothing—nothing—to help them navigate the aftermath of crime.”

Advocates fear what further funding cuts will bring. “Survivors and programs cannot continue to wait in limbo for the funding they desperately need,” Stephanie Love-Patterson, president and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, said in a statement Thursday. She added that the organization remains “encouraged by the overwhelming bipartisan congressional support of the bill” and hopeful that the bill would pass in the next Congress.

But Claire Ponder Selib, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Advocacy, is less optimistic. “I’m personally quite concerned about the possibilities of this being passed next session,” she told me, adding that it’s “very disappointing” the text of the legislation is absent from the spending bill. Steve Derene, former executive director of the National Association of VOCA Assistance Administrators, is also skeptical: “I’m sort of cynical about it getting past the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the incoming chair of that committee, has not signed onto the Senate bill and would be key to it getting a committee hearing. Grassley has not been entirely opposed to replenishing the Crime Victims Fund: He was an initial co-sponsor of the VOCA Fix Act, a 2021 law that diverted revenue from deferred and non-prosecution agreements to the Crime Victims Fund, and earlier this year said Congress should appropriate “the highest possible obligation limit [to the CVF] to help provide resources to crime victims.” But Grassley has also questioned the DOJ about why the VOCA Fix Act has been inadequate to restore the funds, and supported amendments to the False Claims Act—the new proposed source of revenue for the Crime Victims Fund in the latest bill—to bolster support for whistleblowers. (The only organized opposition to the CVF Stabilization Act appears to have come from whistleblowers, who allege that the legislation would siphon funds from people who report government fraud; advocates of the bill say it would preserve payments for whistleblowers.)

A spokesperson for Grassley said in a statement that he “will continue his oversight of the DOJ next Congress to ensure the agency complies with the law and the CVF is filled.” The spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether he would give the CVF Stabilization Act a hearing in the next session.

Dingell, for her part, said she’s undeterred. “I’m gonna work my butt off,” she said. “And I refuse to say there’s no chance.”

The next ranking member of the House Oversight Committee will reportedly be nine-term Democrat Gerry Connolly of Virginia.

Connolly, 74, beat out his competitor, 35-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), 131-84 at a closed-door meeting on Tuesday, the Associated Press reports. The current Oversight ranking member, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), is vacating the post to replace Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) as ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, as my colleague Pema Levy reported last month. The Oversight Committee—which is now controlled by Republicans and chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.)—played a key role in holding President-elect Donald Trump and members of his administration accountable during his first term.

The news comes as Democrats have been grappling with how to move forward in the face of their losses of both the White House and the Senate last month, and their failure to recapture the House. While some pundits, and Democrats themselves, have called for a generational change in leadership—and some younger Democrats have indeed managed to oust their elders from committee leadership roles—that did not seem to have been enough of a concern to propel AOC to victory here. Lawmakers told Axios that while Connolly—who revealed last month he was recently diagnosed with esophagus cancer—campaigned on his experience, AOC emphasized her far-reaching platform and her role as an effective communicator for the party.

“Tried my best,” AOC wrote in a post on Bluesky after the vote. “Sorry I couldn’t pull it through everyone—we live to fight another day.”

“I think my colleagues were measuring their votes by who’s got experience, who is seasoned, who can be trusted, who’s capable and who’s got a record of productivity and I think that prevailed,” Connolly reportedly told journalists after the vote.

Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) told Axios she was “disappointed” by the outcome, adding, “I know Gerry will do a great job. But there’s no substitute for having someone in that position that literally has millions of Americans following her [on social media].” (AOC has 12.8 million followers on X and 8.1 million on Instagram; Connolly has just over 87,000 followers on both platforms combined.)

“I think that the seniority issue in this building gets in the way,” Balint added. “Our people back home, they don’t care about seniority.”

After being released from prison in October, Steve Bannon seemingly did everything in his power to get Donald Trump back in the White House. Now he appears interested in helping the president-elect remain in the Oval Office—even beyond what is constitutionally allowed.

At an event hosted by the New York Young Republican Club on Sunday, Bannon reportedly floated the idea of a third Trump term, which if attempted, would be in direct violation of the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution. But to Bannon, that seems to be a mere technicality to overcome.

“I don’t know, maybe we do it again in ’28. Are you guys down for that?” Bannon asked the crowd which cheered in response. “Trump ’28!”

According to Bannon, GOP lawyer and Trump defender Mike Davis had told him that because the Constitution “doesn’t actually say ‘consecutive,'” Trump may be able to run for a third term.

BREAKING: Steve Bannon calls for Trump 2028 pic.twitter.com/bcPHFsNobu

— RSBN (@RSBNetwork) December 16, 2024

It may be tempting to dismiss such remarks as Bannon being Bannon. But Trump himself has also pointed to the possibility of staying in power beyond another four years. At a July event hosted by the conservative political nonprofit Turning Point Action, Trump told the Christian audience that if he won reelection, “you won’t have to vote anymore,” as my colleague Arianna Coghill covered at the time. A few days later, he declined to walk back or clarify those comments, even doubling down on them in an interview with Fox News.

Bannon also has a record of accurately characterizing Trump’s moves. As I reported last month, just after Trump’s reelection, Bannon on his War Room podcast promoted a social media post from right-wing podcast host Matt Walsh that said, “Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol.” After reading the post on air, Bannon chuckled, saying, “Fabulous. We might have to put that everywhere.” Trump would eventually confirm as much. In an interview with Time Magazine published just last week, Trump told the magazine, “I don’t disagree with everything in Project 2025, but I disagree with some things.”

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions on Monday afternoon about whether Bannon speaks for Trump or whether the president-elect will commit to vacating office at the end of his next term in accordance with the Constitution.

Davis, the lawyer Bannon claimed proposed the idea that a third Trump term was possible, tried to dismiss the comments as a joke. “Steve Bannon is obviously trolling,” he wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Only Obama gets a third term, with his puppet Biden.”

ABC News will pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit that president-elect Donald Trump brought against the network, centered on incorrect comments that anchor George Stephanopoulos made about the civil lawsuit against Trump brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.

The details of the settlement are concerning for anyone who cares about press freedom in the next Trump administration. And, in particular, it shows again how New York state’s definition of “rape”—that has since been changed—has allowed Trump to wiggle out of criticism for sexual assault allegations.

The lawsuit focused on a March 10 interview that Stephanopoulos conducted on the network’s Sunday morning show, “This Week,” with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.). In that interview, Stephanopoulos confronted Mace—who has said she’s a rape survivor—about her endorsement of Trump, falsely noting that “judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape, and for defaming the victim of that rape.”

Stephanopoulos was referring to the lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll, who alleged that Trump raped her in 1996 in the dressing room of a New York City department store; as my colleague Russ Choma reported, while the jury found that Carroll’s attorneys did not prove the rape allegation, they did agree that Trump forcibly sexually abused and defamed her, and ruled that Trump had to pay Carroll $5 million.

Still, it is even more complicated than that. As my former colleague Katie Herchenroeder reported, the judge in the Carroll case went to great lengths to clarify that while Trump was not found liable for “rape” under New York’s strict definition—vaginal penetration by a penis—his alleged actions of forcible penetration with his fingers meet the definition of what many people broadly understand as “rape.”

As Katie wrote:

That the jurors did not find that Carroll had proven rape, [Judge Lewis] Kaplan explained, “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” “Indeed,” he continued, “as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.” 

Federally, rape is defined as “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” This broader explanation, while still dependent on penetration, would include assaults using fingers. 

Lawyers for ABC and Stephanopoulos referenced this context from the judge’s statements in their unsuccessful motion to dismiss the lawsuit they filed earlier this year, court records show.

As Katie wrote, New York wound up passing a law that expanded the law to include nonconsensual anal, oral, and vaginal sexual contact. When she signed the bill into law, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) recognized Carroll “for her courageous efforts to make sure justice was done.”

As part of the settlement, ABC will pay the $15 million to the Trump presidential library—which currently only exists online—plus another $1 million in Trump’s attorney fees, court records show. The network also added a note to the online story about the interview, noting that both ABC and Stephanopoulos “regret” the comments.

Mace—who accused Stephanopoulos of “shaming” her during the original interview—celebrated the ruling on Saturday, writing in a post on X: “Let this be a warning to all haters: Defamation is real, and your free trial of badmouthing just expired.” In another post, she wrote: “2025 will be the year of [mainstream media] apologies.”

Media scholars and experts have been sounding the alarm about journalists’ and media companies’ capitulation to Trump—who just last month said he would be ok with someone shooting through a crowd of journalists—ahead of his second term.

And they have good reason to be worried: While Trump has claimed he now believes a free press is “vital,” there are fears that he and his acolytes could use baseless lawsuits to go after journalists whose coverage is unfavorable to him—particularly after Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) this week blocked a federal shield bill that, if passed, would protect journalists from being forced to reveal their confidential sources.

Devin Nunes, the ex-California congressman and current head of Trump’s struggling social media platform, Truth Social, is getting his prize for being the next president’s long-serving yes-man.

On Saturday, Trump announced that he would appoint Nunes as chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, a group of up to 16 private citizens who get high-level security clearance to advise the president on “the effectiveness with which the [intelligence community] is meeting the nation’s intelligence needs.”

In his Truth Social post announcing the news, Trump said Nunes would assume the role “while continuing his leadership of Trump Media & Technology Group,” the company that runs Truth Social. The role reportedly does not require Senate confirmation.

As my colleague David Corn has reported, as former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Nunes attacked the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election as a baseless partisan smear by Democrats—which, in Trump’s eyes, made him uniquely qualified to receive top-level security clearance.

“Devin will draw on his experience as former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and his key role in exposing the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, to provide me with independent assessments of the effectiveness and propriety of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s activities,” Trump wrote in the announcement.

Nunes will draw on a robust track record of foot entering mouth. He compared homeless people to a “zombie apocalypse”; created a fake news site that insisted male privilege doesn’t exist; sued both the Fresno Bee, a local newspaper in California’s Central Valley, and a satirical Twitter account purporting to be his cow.

The Bee famously once called him “Trump’s stooge.” That seems to be the main qualification needed for the next admin.