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

To the extent that X ever was the “public square” of the internet, it is clearly no longer such a place. The platform—known as Twitter until it was rechristened in 2023 by Elon Musk—has become an echo chamber for extremist conspiracy theories and hate speech—or, depending on what you’re looking for, a porn site.

Even before this transformation, however, years of research suggested that Twitter and other social media apps were vectors of misinformation and propaganda, including from fossil fuel interests. In 2015, oil and gas companies were active on Twitter during international negotiations over the Paris Agreement to limit global warming, promoting the incorrect notion that Americans did not support taking action on climate change.

More recent research has shown similar industry messaging in the lead-up to climate negotiations in Glasgow and Dubai, and one multiyear analysis of more than 22,000 tweets from ExxonMobil-funded think tanks and industry groups found that they have frequently disseminated the ideas that climate change is not threatening and that former president Joe Biden’s energy plans hurt economic growth.

Oil and gas companies see plastics as a “plan B” for their industry amid the transition to clean energy.

Other branches of the fossil fuel industry—including plastic producers and agrichemical companies, both of which depend on oil and gas and their byproducts—have also taken to social media to discourage actions to reduce the use of their products. In a new paper published last week in the journal PLOS Climate, researchers suggest that climate communications from these three sectors—oil and gas, plastics, and agrichemicals—are “aligned and coordinated…to reinforce existing infrastructure and inhibit change.” 

“They were all talking to each other,” said the study’s lead author Alaina Kinol, a public policy doctoral candidate at Northeastern University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities in Boston.

According to the authors, the study represents the first attempt to characterize the network of misleading climate communications from these three distinct but connected nodes of the fossil fuel industry. They said the connections between these sectors are often underappreciated, even among those advocating for a fossil fuel phaseout. “You don’t want to look only at energy, which is where a lot of the attention goes,” Kinol said. Oil and gas companies see plastics as a “plan B” for their industry as policymakers try to transition to clean energy, and the agricultural sector is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for everything from fertilizers to pesticides.

Kinol and her team downloaded more than 125,000 tweets posted between 2008 and 2023 by nine Twitter accounts—one industry association per sector, plus two of each sector’s largest corporations—and then conducted a two-part analysis, first examining the connections between the accounts (“who’s ‘at-ing’ who,” as Kinol put it) and then analyzing the content of the tweets.

The network analysis revealed that companies and their trade groups across all sectors were frequently tagging each other, with accounts owned by ExxonMobil, the chemical company Dow, and the trade group the American Petroleum Institute among the most mentioned.

For the contextual analysis, Kinol read every single tweet to identify common themes. With the 12,000 tweets that related to five selected categories—the economy, the Environmental Protection Agency, pipelines, sustainability, and water—she categorized them using a framework she dubbed “discourses of climate obstruction,” which builds on existing research to describe the way the industry groups either deny the existence of climate change or downplay the possibility and importance of responding to it. The framework includes eight types of arguments—four that represent outright climate denial and four that represent a more nuanced form of “climate delay.”

1. The “it isn’t happening” rhetoric denies the existence of climate change—or, more subtly, fossil fuels’ contribution to it. Kinol said she observed that companies usually didn’t claim outright that climate change isn’t happening, but rather implied that the use of hydrocarbons isn’t causing an increase in global temperatures. One tweet by Chevron alleges that natural gas benefits the environment.
2. In the “it isn’t that bad” approach, fossil fuel companies argue that climate change is not severe enough to merit a policy response. This particular tweet repeats the headline of a 2011 article in The Hill describing the American Chemistry Council and other industry groups’ request that US House members oppose provisions of a spending bill that would allow the EPA to set stricter greenhouse gas emissions standards for some polluting facilities.
3. The “it isn’t us” technique may acknowledge the reality of climate change and even fossil fuels’ contribution to it, but argues that fossil fuel companies should not be held responsible for the climate impacts of their products and that they may in fact be part of the solution. Kinol and her co-authors noted that the approach “is echoed across the sectors as the organizations provide cover to each other.” Here, the American Chemistry Council commends ExxonMobil for ostensibly helping to reduce emissions, without acknowledging the company’s continued role in causing climate change.
4. The “it’s taken care of” rhetoric, also referred to as “dismissal,” holds that climate change is not a crisis because human ingenuity is adequately addressing it—no further regulations are needed. The PLOS Climate paper describes the argument as “the smart people are on it.”

The four types of denial rhetoric argue that climate change is either not happening, not that bad, or not caused by humans, or that it’s being adequately taken care of—arguments that have become all too familiar to those tracking the history of fossil fuel obstructionism. The tweets that promoted delay either redirected responsibility for climate change, advocated for nontransformative solutions, emphasized the downsides of climate regulations, or “surrendered” to the idea that solving climate change isn’t feasible.

According to Jennie Stephens, a co-author of the report and a professor of climate justice at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, talking points about delay and denial were happening together in concert between 2008 and 2023. “There was climate denial—like, ‘It’s not really a problem,’” she said—“but also delay, which was, ‘We’re already reducing emissions,’ to promote the notion that they don’t need to be regulated to further reduce emissions or fossil fuel use.

“It all connects back to this overarching strategy of trying to control the narrative…reinforcing this sense that there’s no way we’re ever going to phase out fossil fuels, no matter how bad the climate crisis gets,” she added. (Editor’s note: Stephens was selected as a Grist New England Fixer in 2019.)

1. The “redirection” technique deflects responsibility for climate change away from petrochemical companies and onto individuals, often by promoting consumer choices instead of government regulations or other levers for systemic change.
2. The “nontransformation” approach focuses on solutions that are unlikely to jeopardize continued petrochemical use, often relying on technologies that are unproven or that only address problems on a surface level. Stephens and Kinol said this type of rhetoric was particularly prevalent among the tweets they analyzed. For energy companies, this often meant the promotion of carbon capture technology that remains prohibitively expensive, and that has been used by fossil fuel companies to justify ongoing fossil fuel extraction and burning. For plastic companies, it was recycling, despite its well-documented failure to manage more than 10 percent of the world’s plastic waste. This tweet by the American Chemistry Council highlights recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis, instead of more systemic measures to reduce plastic production.
3. The “downside emphasis” tactic suggests that the drawbacks of climate and environmental regulations outweigh the benefits. For instance, this 2016 tweet from the Farm Bureau—a group that lobbies for agribusiness interests and whose state-level members have fought climate science and regulation—stresses the tradeoffs of renewable fuel standards, or RFS, which require that transportation fuels contain a minimum amount of fuel that’s deemed “renewable,” like fuel made out of plants.
4. Surrender: This rhetorical device “surrenders” to the idea that climate change mitigation is not feasible. It’s reflected here in the American Petroleum Institute’s claim that pollution limits are too burdensome to be implemented.

The study also found that the nine companies and trade groups frequently mentioned schools and universities, which the authors interpreted as “a focused effort to shape or at least interact with teaching and learning at all levels.” Stephens said this finding was “striking” and that it reinforced other research showing how fossil fuel companies have been “very strategically investing in education as a way to normalize and demonstrate their beneficial contributions to society.”

In response to Grist’s request for comment, a spokesperson for the American Chemistry Council said “chemistry plays a vital role in the creation of innovative products that make our lives and our world healthier, safer, more sustainable, and more productive.” Mike Tomko, communications director of the Farm Bureau said, “I can’t speak to a tweet that’s almost a decade old, but I can tell you that we’ve contributed positively to developing voluntary, market-based programs that are advancing climate-smart farming and helping America reach its sustainability goals.”

Six of the other organizations—the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, Corteva, Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil, and FMC Corporation—did not respond to questions. DuPont declined to comment.

Jill Hopke, an associate professor of journalism at the DePaul University College of Communication, was not involved in the new study but has done her own research on climate-related misinformation on Twitter. She praised the PLOS Climate study as “innovative” and grounded in prior research, although she said she’d be interested in further analysis of how the relative proportions of obstructive tactics—delay vs. denial, and nuances within those categories—have changed over time, and of the fraction of tweets that were promoted as ads. 

“You can’t do everything in one paper,” she conceded.  

Irena Vodenska, a professor of finance at Boston University who has experience researching climate misinformation on Twitter, agreed that the PLOS Climate paper was “comprehensive in its approach,” although she suggested additional analysis is needed to confirm whether the organizations in question really intended to obstruct climate action. This constitutes the difference between misinformation and disinformation, the latter of which refers to intentionally disseminated falsehoods and is usually much harder to prove—though it could be possible by looking at more accounts on X and across social media platforms, she suggested.

Vodenska also noted that the transition from Twitter to X has brought changes in algorithms and content moderation policies that could complicate the extraction and analysis of future data. 

Kinol readily acknowledged this. “This paper was written in a previous era, when Twitter was sort of the central meeting place of the world,” she said. “That’s changed, but social media is still part of a major communications strategy [from industry groups] to use various methods of denial and delay to prevent the implementation of successful climate policy.”

Despite the rapidly changing social media landscape, Kinol is confident companies are still using the same strategies to minimize the need for climate action. “We’re at the stage of climate change where it’s all hands on deck, and I hope that our paper is helpful as a tool to combat this denial and delay,” she continued. “If you’re aware that something’s happening, it’s a lot easier to push back against it.”

A few hours after taking the Oath of Office on Monday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order purporting to redefine “male” and “female” by fiat.

The order, with the cumbersome title “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” instructs all executive agencies—including those governing education, health, housing, and employment—to use new definitions of “male” and “female” in every aspect of their work:

(d)  “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.

(e)  “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.

The order is scant on details about how the new definitions will be applied, nor does it explain how sex will be measured for the policy purposes it does outline, such as determining which gender marker appears on a person’s passport or separating incarcerated people by sex. But the lack of specificity in no way limits its potentially dire consequences for transgender people, who face extremely high rates of discrimination and violence, including sexual violence in prison. Having a passport that matches one’s gender identity or expression, for instance, is a crucial safety measure when applying for jobs, crossing a border, or even showing ID in a grocery store line.

Yet Trump’s new sex definitions affect not only transgender people, whose gender identity will no longer be acknowledged by executive branch agencies, but also everyone else who may soon find themselves classified according to whether they were destined at conception to produce an egg or a sperm.

“The potential implications and scope of this executive order are limited only by our imagination,” says Kellan Baker, executive director of the Whitman-Walker Institute for Health Research & Policy, a leading LGBTQ health organization. “It seeks to define women according to the functions of their bodies, and regulate how all people, not just transgender people, move through the world and their interactions with federal government entities, or federally supported entities.”

For one thing, lawyers fighting for the rights of pregnant people say the executive order’s definitions of male and female advance an anti-abortion agenda by defining sex as starting “at conception.” This is the language of “fetal personhood“—a favorite theory of the anti-abortion movement that maintains an embryo is a person with full legal rights from the moment of fertilization when egg meets sperm. The theory has been used in efforts to end access to IVF, prosecute people who have miscarriages for manslaughter, and ban certain forms of birth control.

“By defining a male or female as a person starting at conception, this administration is normalizing the extreme notion that embryos, even fertilized embryos, have the same rights as you and I.”

“This executive order is essentially a Trojan horse for embryonic and fetal personhood,” says Kulsoom Ijaz, senior staff attorney at Pregnancy Justice. “They are smuggling this ideology into federal policy. By defining a male or female as a person starting at conception, this administration is normalizing the extreme notion that embryos, even fertilized embryos, have the same rights as you and I.”

Agencies have been ordered to report back on their progress in implementing the new sex definitions within 120 days. Much remains unknown about what policies they’ll produce, whether they’ll target pregnant people as well as trans people, and how the courts will rule on the various legal challenges sure to be filed each step of the way.

But to begin to understand the vast potential consequences of the White House’s new definition of sex, I wanted to start with the basics. So I called Kathryn Clancy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, whose research examines the biology and culture around menstruation, pregnancy, and sexual harassment—topics all founded on a scientific understanding of sex, and the differences between us.

Let’s start with a straightforward question: How do scientists define sex?

There is no one definition of sex. For scientists, the way you might choose to define it can and should vary based on your research question. Some people will define sex around gamete size—do we produce larger gametes [eggs] versus smaller gametes [sperm]? That means there are more than two groups, because where do we put people who don’t produce gametes?

Then there are sex chromosomes. It’s not just XX and XY. There are a whole bunch of categories. Another one that people look at is neurotypicality. [Some] say there’s such a thing as a male brain and a female brain, and you’re going to get way different boundaries on those sex categories. One definition that is starting to shift right now is around typical hormone ranges. [For instance, people with] polycystic ovary syndrome can end up having androgen levels that are very different from those of most people that we might put in the sex category of female.

Genitals aren’t one of the common ways of defining sex. But the problem we come across is we often collect information on sex with a little form that says, “What sex are you?” What that’s typically asking a person is not “What’s your gamete size? What sex chromosomes do you have? What hormone levels are typical for you?” It’s asking about sex assigned at birth—a completely different way to measure sex that is based on baby genitals.

OK, so how good a proxy are baby genitals for all these other ways of measuring sex?

It doesn’t work for lots of people. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say several percent. There are lots of intersex conditions that, because of some developmental differences or chromosomal differences, a person’s genitals might appear very clearly within the realm of what we’d call female genitalia or male genitalia, and that person might have other sex categories that don’t fit.

As you know, the new executive order defines two types of people, female and male, by whether, at conception, they will produce a sperm or an egg. Does this mean they’ve picked one of the measures—gamete size—as the way to measure sex?

Yes. But the way it’s worded is really confusing because you’re not producing any gametes yet at conception.

So how would anyone know whether an embryo belongs to a sex that produces eggs or sperm at conception?

Anti-abortion rhetoric defines conception as happening at fertilization. [The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the leading US authority on reproductive health, defines “conception” as happening when a fertilized egg implants in the uterus.] We’re not even a multi-celled embryo yet at fertilization. At that moment, does an embryo have sexed chromosomes? Yes. Are they knowable with our current technology? No. In IVF, for people who do pre-implantation genetic testing, we typically wait until at least day three, if not day five, until the sex chromosomes are even measurable. And is it a point at which the embryo is even producing gametes? No. That’s still months away.

But the executive order says these definitions should be used to determine which sex marker should go on a passport, or whether a prisoner should be incarcerated in a men’s or a women’s prison.

This is what’s so stupid about it, but also what’s so dangerous. What is the enforcement plan? Are we going to test people’s gonads to see what type of gametes they produce? Because if the obsession is at the level of gametes, the tests are much more invasive than a sex chromosome test.

Nor will there be an actual way to logically enforce it, because it’s an illogical order. I think what will happen is it will be basically about punishing people in the worst way possible, treating people as poorly as possible, and creating as much discord and mayhem as possible.

“I think what will happen is it will be basically about punishing people in the worst way possible, treating people as poorly as possible, and creating as much discord and mayhem as possible.”

This is mostly going to be around one sex category: The female sex category. They will only be doing this towards anybody who might fall into the woman category or might self-report as being in the woman category. I think Trump, in whatever terrible language is available to him, is trying to control women and control people he perceives to be in the woman category. A lot of this is keeping the category of women pure—and also, obviously, about doing immense harm to trans people.

There’s also a very racial, white supremacist thing going on here with this “defending women.” It’s a very old idea—it appears in travelogs, early writings of Europeans, as well as in the United States when they started encountering North American indigenous folks, and the way that they thought about enslaved peoples. There was this belief that in the “lower races,” men and women were less different and that in the “higher races,” there were more differences between women and men. This was about saying men and women are differentiated, clear, non-overlapping categories because that makes us a more evolved people.

The title of the executive order describes it as “restoring biological truth to the federal government.” The idea seems to be that if we could just look at someone’s physiology or their cells, we can put them in the male or female bucket, and that’s what matters for policy purposes. But the way you’re describing the real “biological truth” sounds way more complicated.

It is. That’s not to mention the fact that most people are at least a little mosaic, meaning that when we’re formed as embryos, we often have some funky cells in there, and some of them persist. Depending on how someone collects cells from you, they could get different DNA and sometimes even different sex chromosomes. [Some people are] chimeric, which is when you have the cells of another person: either a vanishing twin or your own offspring. If you have ever been pregnant, DNA from the embryo or fetus breaks off and enters our circulation and embeds in our tissues all over our body for the rest of our lives.

Hang on, so someone who gives birth to a child with XY chromosomes will have XY cells in their body that show up in testing?

They’re in your blood during the pregnancy. Then, for the rest of your life, they go and find cool places to hang out. They live in your brain. They live in your liver. They’ve been found in every tissue in your body.

You wrote in American Scientist that many scholars have ditched a sex classification system based primarily on gametes. Why is that?

Some people will never produce a gamete. Intersex people are one clear example. There are some intersex conditions where, developmentally, you are not making organs that are going to lead to gamete production. So what is the sex category of a person who does not have organs, does not have gonads, that will lead to any type of gamete production?

Another example is infertility. The reason I know so much about IVF is my husband is a two-time cancer survivor. He doesn’t make sperm, and he probably hasn’t since he had radiation when he was one—which is not even when you’re making sperm yet. His sex category, I’m pretty sure, would be comfortably considered male across a couple of different axes. But no gametes. So, what sex category does he fall into?

Reporting on the rise of anti-trans politics, one of the arguments I often hear from conservatives is that intersex people can just be considered male or female, part of the binary, just with something gone “wrong.”

I think it’s weird and unfortunate that we’d call these developmental and chromosomal differences “wrong,” as opposed to interesting and beautiful human variability. A lot of people talk about the social construction of gender, but sex is also socially constructed. We’re seeing it take place right now with these executive orders, where they are trying to impose their own definition—an ahistorical, a-scientific definition of supposedly a scientific phenomenon. You see the same thing with “intersex.” Folks who we now put in that category have always existed, but we didn’t always have a name for that category.

As a biological anthropologist—someone who considers not just physiology but the meaning we make of it—what was your reaction to the executive order defining male and female?

The scientist in me is in disbelief at how stupid it is. How can you so fully misunderstand basic human biology, and then legislate about it?

My next reaction is just incredible distress. There are some very intentional wordings here that are completely untethered from reality but clearly are signaling particular things: Protecting the purity of the female category and trying to lay claim to personhood and sex as early in the existence of a human as possible. That really says something about how big a step this executive order is trying to take—they’re trying to make it as all-encompassing and as absolutely draconian as possible.

The word I keep thinking of is constricting. We have all this variety, all this diversity, whether it’s in our hormones, chromosomes, genitalia, gametes—and yet it’s all sort of shoved into one bucket or another. And our destiny is based on that bucket.

When you try to define a person at the stage of a fertilized egg, and you think you’re doing them a favor by defining their personhood and sex early, what you’re actually doing is stripping them of all the potential and possibility of what their life might be.

There’s this term in life history theory called the “reaction norm.” Take height for example. Your height is at least 50 percent heritable, and then there are all sorts of things that are going to happen in your life, choices—exposures, eating, exercising, that then play a role in what your final height is. The reaction norm is that full range of variability—the full possibility of what your adult height may end up being. What they’re trying to say is, “No, I’ve already said your adult height is 5’10”.”

Maybe for height that doesn’t matter so much, but when it comes to gender, or gender expression, or sex, or any number of other categories that vary over time and have all sorts of different political and personal meanings, to be prescriptive that early is to rob them of the chance to learn enough about themselves, to decide who it is they want to be, and where they are going to fit along that full range of who they might turn out to be.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Federal diversity, equity, and inclusion employees are set to be placed on paid administrative leave by the end this afternoon as part of President Donald Trump’s executive order to put a stop to DEI programs in government agencies. 

According to a Tuesday memorandum from the US Office of Personnel Management, agencies are required to send a plan for “executing a reduction-in-force action”—in other words, layoffs—for their DEI employees. 

A separate but related executive order—titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity”—argues that DEI programs violate civil rights laws by illegally enforcing “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences” that “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement.” The White House also claimed that these policies are discriminatory because they select based on “how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.”  

The Trump administration memo also seeks to coerce federal employees into informing on their agencies and colleagues. It instructs agency heads to tell employees via email: “We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024 to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances…within 10 days.” The email template warns that any “failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.”

But Trump isn’t content with just targeting federal employees. In a section of his executive order labeled “Encouraging the Private Sector to End Illegal DEI Discrimination and Preferences,” the president calls on the attorney general to submit “specific steps or measures to deter DEI programs or principles…that constitute illegal discrimination or preferences” within 120 days. 

This comes as companies like Meta, Walmart, and McDonald’s have scaled back DEI initiatives in the wake of Trump’s reelection and several conservative-backed lawsuits, which cite the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling curtailing affirmative action in college admissions. 

The right’s attacks on DEI programs is nothing new—anti-DEI activists like Christopher Rufo have been pushing against such initiatives since Trump’s first term. The backlash has also appeared in places like Project 2025, which argued that a 60-year-old anti-discrimination executive order should be rescinded because it improperly enables the government to force private employers to comply with “novel anti-discrimination theories (such as sexual orientation and gender identity theories) that Congress had never imposed by statute.” Trump revoked that landmark executive order—enacted by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965—on Tuesday. 

“This attack on DEI is part of a larger backlash against racial justice efforts that ignited after the 2020 killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor,” Leah Watson, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU, wrote in February 2024 in response to dozens of bills from the right targeting DEI in higher education. According to Watson, DEI programs are necessary to “repair decades of discriminatory policies and practices” harming underrepresented individuals and communities.

Trump is clearly unmoved by such arguments. “This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life,” he said in his Monday inauguration address. “We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.” But the important question remains: merit-based for whom?

On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed around 10 executive orders to restrict immigration to the United States. “With these actions, we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense,” he said during his inauguration speech. “It’s all about common sense.”

The promises, many pushed by top advisor Stephen Miller, were striking. Trump vowed to declare a “national emergency” and “send troops” to the US-Mexico border (even though border crossings have reached a low point at the end of the Biden administration), among other major actions. Asylum seekers and refugees will feel the consequences. And the executive orders are bound to get caught in legal fights.

Here’s a recap of Trump’s day-one executive orders on immigration: 

Birthright Citizenship

True to his campaign promise, Trump did issue an order to go into effect in 30 days to deny citizenship to certain US-born children if the mother does not have legal status or is on a temporary visa at the time of birth and the father is not a US citizen or legal permanent resident. That may sound complex. But the reality is simple: If Trump gets his way, no longer does being born in the US mean you’re a citizen.

It didn’t take long for immigrant rights groups and several states to file lawsuits challenging the executive for violating the 14th Amendment of the constitution—and more than a century of legal precedent—that guarantees birthright citizenship. (We have written about the long crusade to kill birthright citizenship before.)

Refugees and Asylum Seekers

Trump signed a blanket suspension on the resettlement of refugees until it “aligns with the interests of the United States.” That suspension will go into effect on Monday, January 27 and last at least four months. It also mandates that states and local jurisdictions should have a larger role in the resettlement process. Alongside the suspension, Trump is bringing back the so-called “Remain in Mexico” policy: forcing tens of thousands of asylum seekers and migrants to wait in dangerous US-Mexico border towns as their cases go through the backlogged immigration courts. His administration also ended the use of the Biden-era CBP One phone application for asylum seekers to present at the border lawfully. (Appointments were canceled as a result, leaving thousands of people stranded.) Finally, he cited extraordinary presidential authorities to declare an “invasion” at the border and allow government officials to “repel, repatriate, or remove” migrants, including asylum seekers.

Family Separation

As part of an executive order to protect “the American people against an invasion,” Trump revoked several presidential actions taken during the Biden administration. That includes an executive order that established a Department of Homeland Security task force to work on the reunification of families that had been separated at the border during the first Trump administration. As of March 2024, the task force had helped 795 children reunite with their parents. As I have reported, many families are still separated seven years later.

Mass Deportation

Many of Trump’s executive orders boost the detention and deportation apparatus his administration would need to conduct mass deportations. That includes the US military. Trump has declared a “national emergency” at the southern border in an effort to unlock federal authorities and additional resources and called on the Armed Forces—including reserves and the National Guard—to help the Department of Homeland Security with immigration enforcement. It also instructs the Department of Defense to provide support in the form of detention space and transportation airplanes. 

Alien Enemies Act

Trump is moving to designate drug cartels and certain gangs—such as MS-13 and Tren de Aragua—as foreign terrorist organizations. This action prepares the terrain for Trump to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expedite detentions and deportations without due process. During his inauguration speech, the president said he would use this wartime statute to unleash the “full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement” against what he calls an “invasion.” 

Despite the breadth and depth of these presidential actions, this is just the beginning. The Trump administration is also upending the immigration system in hard-to-track ways: He has already fired several top officials in charge of the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review that oversees the immigration courts, where there are an estimated 3.7 million pending cases. Trump also revoked a policy by the Biden administration discouraging US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from arresting immigrants “in or near protected areas” such as schools, hospitals, and churches. 

The federal government is on the attack. The administration has further signaled it will attempt to defund sanctuary cities and deny grants to organizations offering services to immigrants. It will also double down on cooperation agreements between ICE and local and state sheriffs and police departments. States and local authorities can still stand up to Trump’s mass deportation plans. That will require key Democratic officials to take a stance. Notably, New York Mayor Eric Adams attended Trump’s inauguration and later sat down for an interview with Tucker Carlson, instead of fighting back.  

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

On his first day in office, President Trump has signed a slew of executive orders that will set the United States on a radically different environmental path from the Biden administration. The executive orders and memoranda take the first steps to fulfilling many of Trump’s promises from the campaign trail: withdrawing the US from the Paris Agreement, drilling more oil and natural gas, and repealing multiple Biden-era environmental directives and departments.

While Trump’s day-one executive orders are far-reaching, it’s not yet clear how they will be implemented or how quickly they will be felt. Executive orders direct government agencies how to implement the law, but they can be challenged by courts if they appear to violate the US Constitution or other laws, as happened with Trump’s travel ban executive order in January 2017.

Trump’s executive orders do, however, send a clear signal about his administration’s environmental priorities: extracting more fossil fuels, weakening support for green energy, and stepping away from global climate leadership.

Goodbye, Paris Agreement

This executive order instructs the US Ambassador to the United Nations to submit formal notification that the US is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Paris Agreement, signed in 2016, commits countries to reduce greenhouse emissions and submit five-yearly updates on their climate plans to reach agreed goals on reducing emissions.

In his first term, Trump also withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, although the terms of the agreement meant that the withdrawal did not take place until November 2020. In one of his very first acts as president, Joe Biden had the US rejoin the Paris Agreement. It will take at least a year for the US to leave the agreement.

“This short-sighted move shows a disregard for science and the well-being of people around the world, including Americans, who are already losing their homes, livelihoods, and loved ones as a result of climate change,” says Jonathan Foley, executive director of the climate charity Project Drawdown.

The executive order also rescinds the US International Climate Finance Plan—a Biden administration increase in international climate finance that reached over $11 billion a year by 2024. “Essentially it’s the world’s richest country turning its back on the the poorest countries at the time when they are suffering the most,” says Bob Ward, policy director at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change the the Environment.

Drill, Baby, Drill

President Trump dedicated three executive orders to making it easier for the US to exploit its vast fossil fuel reserves. On the campaign trail Trump consistently promised to “drill, baby, drill,” and in his first day as president he underscored this sloganeering with orders to remove Biden-era regulations and environmental rules that restrict fossil fuel exploration.

One executive order focuses specifically on Alaska, which has vast fossil fuel reserves and was the location for Willow—a controversial oil and gas project approved by the Biden administration in 2023. Trump’s executive order opens the doors wide open to other projects, calling for the US to “expedite the permitting and leasing of energy and natural resource projects” in Alaska and the revocation of any regulations passed by the Biden administration that may hinder this aim. It also specifically rescinds the cancellation of leases within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and withdraws an order from the Secretary of the Interior that temporarily paused oil and gas leasing in the refuge.

A second executive order declared a national energy emergency, stating that the US energy production was “far too inadequate to meet our Nation’s needs.” The order instructs the heads of government agencies to use emergency authorities in order to identify, lease, and exploit domestic energy resources.

A third executive order under the title “Unleashing American Energy” covers a wide range of policies, including encouraging energy production on federal land and waters, making the US the leader in non-fuel miners, including rare earth miners, and terminating state-level emissions waivers and subsidies for EVs. The order also promises to “safeguard the American people’s freedom to choose” lightbulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, gas stoves, and other appliances, in an apparent nod to the controversy over New York’s law banning natural gas stoves in new homes and buildings.

“The US will no longer be in a leadership position on these issues. It’s going to have real economic consequences for the US that will come back to bite President Trump before the end of this term,” says Ward, adding that the US will lose ground to China particularly in terms of electric vehicles and political leadership on climate change.

“China will be the one now seen as being the world leader on this and will be able to establish lots of economic and diplomatic links with other countries at a time when the US will look to be completely hopeless on this issue.”

Wind Falls

In an executive memorandum, Trump suspended all new leasing for offshore wind farms, citing “growing demand for reliable energy” and “impacts on ocean currents and wind patterns.” The memorandum temporarily prevents the consideration of wind farm leases in areas on the US outer continental shelf—parts of the ocean floor that lie beyond state coastal waters.

Executive memoranda are similar to executive orders, but they are not required to cite the President’s legal authority, and the Office of Management and Budget is not required to issue a “Budgetary Impact Statement” as is the case with executive orders.

“Worthless Fish”

In another memorandum, Trump picked up a policy from his first administration—a plan to route water from the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state. This plan was signed-off by Trump in 2020 but was challenged in court by California governor Gavin Newsom and the state of California. Trump has repeatedly blamed this delay on “worthless fish,” arguing that environmental rules have slowed the building of water infrastructure in California.

The memorandum—titled “Putting People Over Fish”—explicitly calls out “radical environmentalism,” which Trump implies is behind the delay to his infrastructure project. “This catastrophic halt was allegedly in protection of the Delta smelt and other species of fish,” the text of the memorandum reads.

In the same executive order that “unleashed” US fossil fuel exploitation, Trump revoked Biden-era executive orders and actions that set up new organizations to tackle climate change. This includes Executive Order 14008, which established a National Climate Task Force, most recently chaired by National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi.

President Donald Trump is demanding an apology from Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington after Budde urged him in Tuesday’s inaugural prayer service to show compassion for the marginalized.

“She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that referred to Budde as a “so-called Bishop” and a “Radical left hard line Trump hater.”

“She failed to mention the large number of illegal migrants that came into our Country and killed people,” he continued before demanding a public apology from Budde and “her church.”

Trump wasn’t the only one worked up over the sermon, which saw Budde looking directly at Trump as she pleaded with him to “have mercy” on immigrants and the LGBTQ community. Shortly after the service, Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) called for Budde to be added to a federal list of people the Trump administration should consider deporting.

The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list. pic.twitter.com/d7a2z1CM6s

— Rep. Mike Collins (@RepMikeCollins) January 21, 2025

So what exactly sparked Trump’s ire?

“I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” Budde said while looking directly at the president.” “There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives.”

“The vast majority of immigrants are not criminals,” she continued. “They pay taxes and are good neighbors…May I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away?”

After the service, Trump told reporters that he didn’t appreciate it, claiming, “They could do much better.” But he reserved his sharpest criticism for his social media platform.

The clash comes as Trump’s plans for mass deportations have already begun to take shape. On Monday, he signed a plethora of executive orders, including one to abolish birthright citizenship, though it’s crucial to point out that even with Trump’s EO, the 14th Amendment still exists. Still, the threat of sweeping raids and cruel immigration policies, have already turned cities like Chicago into “ghost towns.”

On Tuesday, NBC broke the story of sworn testimony from the ex-sister-in-law of Pete Hegseth, President Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense. In an affidavit, which was released for senators to review ahead Hegseth’s confirmation hearing this week, Danielle Hegseth alleged that Hegseth’s former wife Samantha Hegseth had often feared for her safety. Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) said in a press release that the affidavit alleged that Samantha Hegseth “had an ‘escape plan’ that involved texting a ‘safe word’ to friends and family to urgently request assistance without putting herself in more danger with Mr. Hegseth.”

Buried toward the end of Reed’s press release was another eye-opening detail: Pete Hegseth allegedly believed that “women should not vote or work and that Christians needed to have more children so they could overtake the Muslim population.”

Even as Hegseth has repeatedly called for an end to women serving in combat roles in the military, the extreme nature of those remarks might seem astonishing for a candidate slated to assume one of the highest leadership roles in the US government. But in the religious movement that Hegseth is connected to, beliefs about the subservient role of women are widely held.

As I noted at the time that Trump nominated Hegseth:

Hegseth attends a Tennessee church in the denomination founded by Wilson.

Leaders in Wilson’s movement believe that women are called by God to obey their husbands. “Elevate women to positions of civil authority or save the lives of babies,” Joel Webbon, a Texas-based pastor and leader in the TheoBros movement, wrote on X in September. “A nation cannot do both.” In a 2023 post, Wilson alluded to “something called the patriarchy—that which, according to our soi disant and lisping political theorists, must be smashed. Only they say something like thmasth.”

He isn’t the only prominent figure to endorse the patriarchal notions of the TheoBros. During his campaign, Vice President JD Vance took heat for a clip in which he referred to working women as “childless cat ladies.” Like Hegseth, Vance has traveled in the same circles as the TheoBros.

Hegseth and his ex-wife have denied the claims in the affidavit. The Senate will vote Thursday on whether to confirm Hegseth as defense secretary.

There were plenty of troubling moments during the string of inauguration events for the second presidency of Donald Trump. These include the multiple times Trump lied during his inaugural address and other appearances (including when he insulted the courageous firefighters in California by claiming the LA fires were burning “without even a token of defense”), Elon Musk’s Nazi-or-Nazi-ish salute, Proud Boys marching in Washington, DC, and the presence of the tech overlords on the stage in the Capitol Rotunda sucking up to Trump. (Did you see Jeff Bezos waving at Trump?) But one of the most disturbing displays of Trumpism came at the start of his “victory rally,” held on Sunday at the Capitol One arena in downtown Washington, DC.

After tens of thousands of Trump fanatics stood on line in rain and sleet for hours and failed to gain entry—thousands of seats were reserved for Trump donors and VIPs—the event opened with a prayer from Angela Halili and Arielle Reitsma, two Hollywood actors (with middling resumés) who host a Christian podcast called Girls Gone Bible. (The two, who preach sobriety and modesty, have drawn criticism for posting sexy snaps of themselves.)

It’s hardly unusual for a Trump rally to begin with a Christian invocation. But this introduction had a sharp Christian nationalism vibe. Halili shouted, “Thank you, Jesus, for today. Seriously!” Then she reworked the Lord’s Prayer to include Trump: “Your kingdom come, Lord. Your will be done on Earth, as it is in heaven. In America, as it is in Heaven. In the life of President Donald Trump, as it is in heaven.” This rewrite rankled some, including Jenna Ellis, the former Trump campaign attorney, who retweeted a social media post that accused Halili of butchering the classic prayer and that added, “YIKES. Welcome to North Korea.”

Reitsma then weighed in, thanking God for “choosing President Donald Trump as a vessel for your nation.” As is customary in such instances, she beseeched God to look out for Trump: “I pray that you will protect his mind and guard his heart. I pray that you will place a shield around our president, his family, and upon this nation.” She added, “That when opposition comes his way, may you provide angelic protection.” That seemed close to suggesting that God ought to intervene if critics or opponents seek to challenge Trump.

Reistma also pleaded with God to whip up a “revival in this nation” so we “get back to the heart of the matter and that is you, Jesus… May that be the very foundation of this nation.”

Halili had a similar request. “Lord,” she said, “I ask that you will unleash your power upon this nation. I pray this country be washed by your blood, your precious blood. I pray that a holy fire will rain down.” She prayed for people to “provide for the poor, care for the sick,” and she delivered an abridged version of Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 25: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was a stranger and you invited me in. Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” She did not acknowledge she was speaking to a crowd of people who worship a man who vowed to enact mass deportation and to end refugee assistance programs.

The kicker came when Halili closed their invocation by returning to the notion that God ought to stand against Trump’s enemies: “So President Trump, we set the name of the Lord upon you, and we declare that no weapon formed against you will prosper. That every tongue that rises up against you in judgement will be condemned. And if God be for you, who can be against you?”

That was harsh stuff, the rhetoric of Christian nationalism and fundamentalism. Anyone who dares speak against Trump ought to be condemned by God. It’s one thing to pray for the safety and well-being of the president and to ask God to keep an eye out for the guy and grant him wisdom. It’s quite another to declare a president the extension of God and to call on the Lord to smite those who criticize the fellow.

The audience cheered.

Next up at the rally was Kid Rock, the rocker-rapper who once wrote a song with this line: “Young ladies, young ladies, I like ’em underage see. Some say that’s statutory. (But I say it’s mandatory).”

Two hours after the Girls Gone Bible gals blessed the event—and pleaded for all people to become more loving of one another—Trump appeared and delivered one of his long and rambling addresses filled with divisive language, falsehoods, and derisive attacks on his detractors and political opponents. When he was done, he and the crowd danced to “YMCA,” the gay anthem.

On Monday, Cecile Richards, the former head of Planned Parenthood and founder of the women’s political action group Supermajority, died at age 67 of brain cancer. In a press release about her passing, Planned Parenthood chronicled her career, recounting how over the 12 years she was in charge, Richards “led us through fights that transformed the reproductive health and rights landscape.” Richards, the group said, was “an indomitable force.”

Even with the inauguration of President Donald Trump dominating the news, tributes to Richards flooded social media. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote on X, “Her legacy will be the countless lives she touched and the generations of women she inspired to follow in her footsteps.” Former Vice President Kamala Harris noted on X, “Cecile Richards was a fighter and a force to be reckoned with.”

But not everyone was heartbroken about her passing. In some corners of social media, anti-abortion right-wing activists implied that her death was divine retribution for her activism on abortion rights.

To her nearly half-million followers on X, Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative podcaster and author of a new book about how our culture suffers from a surfeit of empathy, wrote: “All I’ll say is that I’m thankful we serve a God of justice, who avenges the blood of the innocent. Cecile Richards, who cheerfully presided over the murder of millions of innocent babies, now understands that full well.”

Sean Davis, founder of right-wing publication the Federalist, echoed that sentiment. “Cecile Richards was a demonic, baby-killing monster who, absent repentance to and acceptance of Christ, is now reaping the eternal reward for the evil she committed on this earth,” he blasted to 539,000 followers on X. “God’s mercy is perfect, and so is His vengeance.”

“Cecile Richards was a demonic, baby-killing monster who, absent repentance to and acceptance of Christ, is now reaping the eternal reward for the evil she committed on this earth.”

Then there were the sentiments from Dusty Deevers, an Oklahoma state senator, who posted to his 25,000 followers on X that Richards’ death was evidence that “all who promote and profit from wickedness will one day stand before His throne.”

To some, the timing of her death, on the day Trump was inaugurated, seemed to bolster their hypothesis that her illness and passing were punishments from God.

Sean Feucht is a Christian musician and leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, a loose network of charismatic Christians who believe that Christians are called to take over the government. In a video Monday, Feucht, who has spent the last year leading prayer rallies at state capitals, called Richards’ death “crazy prophetic.” The video also featured Seattle-area pastor Russell Johnson, who told viewers, “We just saw on the news, to coordinate with the historic inauguration that’s happening in Washington, DC, the president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, passed away today.” He continued, “I think, just reflecting on all of what President Trump has done for the pro-life movement, with the selection of pro-life Supreme Court judges and the overturning of Roe v. Wade…this is a real significant and prophetic moment.”

Another group of Christian nationalists, the TheoBros, also appeared to celebrate Richards’ passing. Brian Sauvé, a pastor at a church in Ogden, Utah, told his 62,000 followers on X that he had recently dedicated the “imprecatory” portion of his sermon to the leaders of Planned Parenthood. “I asked that God would cut them off and show them no mercy,” he wrote. “Praise God.”

One commenter suggested that Sauvé’s taking credit for Richards’ death might be a bit much, to which Sauvé responded: “God is responsible for his yes or no to all prayers. Try to think clearly, ma’am.”

When Donald Trump first took office, the streets of Washington, DC, and cities around the country, erupted in protest and resistance. The 2017 Women’s March, held the day after his inauguration, was heralded at the time as the biggest protest in U.S. history. This year, the crowds only measured in the thousands. Other day-of gatherings appeared similarly small, perhaps due to the blisteringly cold temperatures that drove the pageantry inside. The spontaneous panic that once gripped the mobilized masses seemed diluted.

Instead, Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes found vocal resistance in a historic place of protest that has endured many disappointing election results across decades: inside a Black church.

Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network hosted a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event, which coincided with the inauguration, and used it as an opportunity to challenge Trump and embolden attendees. “We shed too much blood. We spent too many nights in jail to think that Trump can turn us around,” he said. “We are right here. We are not going back.”

Hayes also spoke to attendees. One, Alexa Donaphin, was wearing a sequined MLK Jr. shirt and described herself as a veteran defender of civil rights for the vulnerable.

“Even though I’m not gay, I’m not trans, I’m not poor, I’m not an immigrant, I’m not a migrant—I’m none of those things, but those people matter, and their rights matter,” she said. “I’ve been fighting since my hair was a different color than it is now,” she said, noting her gray hair.

“My whole life, I grew up in the segregated South. I know what it’s like to drink from a colored water fountain,” she continued. “I know how it feels to be othered. I know how it feels to be marginalized, and I can’t sit by idly and do nothing while that continues and, in fact, escalates.”

“If America is to survive the next four years,” Hayes concludes, “it could probably stand to take some notes.”

Leave it to Ron DeSantis to use an emergency weather advisory to showcase his unending allegiance to President Donald Trump.

In a Monday state executive order warning Floridians of a fast-approaching winter storm, the governor referred to the Gulf of Mexico, as it has been referred to for at least 353 years, as the “Gulf of America.” The usage made Florida the first state to fall in line with Trump’s plans to rename the ocean basin.

“An area of low pressure moving across the Gulf of America, interacting with Arctic air, will bring widespread impactful winter weather to North Florida beginning Tuesday, January 21, 2025,” the order read.

According to the New York Times, Florida’s emergency order came even before Trump had signed an executive making the rebrand official.

Trump’s desire to rename the Gulf of Mexico comes against a slew of expansionist plans. As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote, Trump has spent the past month pushing for the US to buy Greenland, take back the Panama Canal Zone, and rename Denali, the tallest mountain in North America, to Mount McKinley—all sentiments he reiterated in his inauguration speech on Monday. (Trump didn’t technically mention Greenland in his speech, but brought up controlling the country for international security purposes while signing executive orders.)

After signing an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico, federal agencies have 30 days to update their records accordingly.

As president, Trump does indeed have the authority to rename the gulf. But critically, other countries are not obligated to recognize it. There also might be pushback from the International Hydrographic Organization, the 100-member authority that aims to “ensure that all the world’s seas, oceans, and navigable waters are surveyed and charted.” (We’ve reached out to the IHO for comment.)

Of course, there was no such pushback among Florida Republicans. Since Florida’s weather advisory, GOP lawmakers celebrated the rebrand, including Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) who tweeted this charming map.

New map just dropped, and the GULF OF AMERICA has never looked better off of Florida’s shores! pic.twitter.com/jXmlVTnHs1

— Rick Scott (@SenRickScott) January 21, 2025

After President Donald Trump issued late-night pardons and commutations to every one of the 1,600 rioters who carried out the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, police officers who were there that day, and their loved ones, are calling out Trump’s betrayal. 

Aquilino Gonell, a former Capitol Police sergeant who earlier this month recounted in a New York Times essay being “beaten and struck by raging rioters all over my body with multiple weapons until I was covered in my own blood,” posted on X on Sunday: “The law and order dude is about to pardon those who assaulted the police. Collectively more than 40 rioters attacked me that day.”

When Gonell testified before the House Select Committee that investigated the attacks, he described how he and his colleagues were “punched, pushed, kicked, shoved, sprayed with chemical irritants, and even blinded with eye-damaging lasers by a violent mob who apparently saw us law enforcement officers, dedicated to ironically protecting them as US citizens, as an impediment in their attempted insurrection.” He added he had sustained injuries all over his body that required surgeries.

Michael Fanone, a former DC police officer who previously testified about being “grabbed, beaten, tased, all while being called a traitor to my country” on Jan. 6, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday night: “I have been betrayed by those that supported Donald Trump. Whether you voted for him because he promised these pardons or for some other reason, you knew that this was coming, and here we are.”

He added that Trump’s pardons would free six of the people who attacked him on Jan. 6. “My family, my children, and myself are less safe today because of Donald Trump and his supporters,” Fanone told Cooper, echoing the concerns of those who turned in attackers to law enforcement, now worried that Trump’s pardons will prompt retaliation against them.

"I have been betrayed by my country": Former DC police officer Michael Fanone talks to Anderson after President Trump pardons more than 1,000 convicted of committing crimes during the January 6 attack on the Capitol. pic.twitter.com/fhN3dhqbPz

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) January 21, 2025

“I think that Republican Party owns a monopoly on hypocrisy when it comes to supporting or their supposed support of law enforcement, because, tonight, the leader of the Republican Party pardoned hundreds of violent cop assaulters,” Fanone said.

And Craig Sicknick, the brother of Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer who died a day after the Jan. 6 attack, reportedly of natural causes, told ABC News the pardons were “a betrayal of decency.”

“The man doesn’t understand the pain or suffering of others. He can’t comprehend anyone else’s feelings,” Sicknick told ABC. “We now have no rule of law,” he added. (The Capitol Police say Brian Sicknick was assaulted by rioters, including by being attacked with pepper spray. The medical examiner who determined his cause of death later told the Washington Post, “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”)

Trump’s pardons, and law enforcement’s condemnations of them, are especially rich considering that Trump has claimed to be “the law and order candidate.” As a reminder, the insurrectionists injured approximately 140 law enforcement officials on Jan. 6, 2021, including about 80 from the Capitol Police and about 60 from the Metropolitan Police Department, according to the Department of Justice. And five police officers who had been at the Capitol died, including four who died of suicide in the days and months after.

Spokespeople for Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Tuesday.

Former President Joe Biden’s last-minute, preemptive pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci had an obvious and clearly stated purpose: protecting the elderly scientist from Biden’s successor.

For Donald Trump and much of the right wing, Fauci, who directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the peak of the Covid pandemic, has come to be a living symbol of what they see as the evils of the scientific establishment and the U.S. response to the virus. But the final-hour pardon is also being interpreted among Covid conspiracy theorists and in some corners of the mainstream right as an admission of guilt. In turn, that generated fresh calls for Fauci to be: “hunted down,” in the words of New Age conspiracy peddler David Avocado Wolfe, “and brought to justice.”  

A pardon might protect Fauci from Trump, but it doesn’t remove him from conspiracists’ pantheon of suspicion.

In the last moments of his presidency, Biden pardoned Fauci, members of his own family, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, people who worked on Congress’ January 6 committee, and police officers who testified before it. None of them have been accused of criminal wrongdoing, but all had reason to fear retaliation from Trump or those in his orbit.

In a statement to Politico, Fauci thanked Biden for the move, but stressed that “I’ve committed no crime and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me.” That said, he wrote, the “mere articulation of these baseless threats and the potential that they will be acted upon, create immeasurable and intolerable distress for me and my family.” 

Conservatives, most notably Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have persistently accused Fauci of supporting so-called gain-of-function research into viruses, suggesting that such research ultimately caused Covid-19 to be created and accidentally released from a lab. While a Republican-controlled congressional committee has insisted that Covid was likely created in a lab, any lab leak theory continues to be hotly contested. Most scientists still believe that Covid’s origins were natural, generated from sick animals at a wet market. The latest evidence shows that none of the viruses stored at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where some believe the virus to have originated, closely resembled SARS-CoV-2.

Biden’s Fauci pardon was greeted by many in the vast and chaotic world of Covid suspicion as proof the scientist and retired public health official had been guilty of some poorly-defined crime all along. It also demonstrated how closely mainstream Republicans are aligned with the deepest reaches of the Covid conspiracy pool.

“There is now zero doubt that Fauci is a criminal,” tweeted Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok,  “guilty of crimes against humanity.” 

Paul struck virtually the same note, tweeting, “If there was ever any doubt as to who bears responsibility for the COVID pandemic, Biden’s pardon of Fauci forever seals the deal. As Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee I will not rest until the entire truth of the coverup is exposed.” 

In a text message to NBC journalist Kristin Welker, Trump called the Biden pardons that included Fauci “disgraceful,” adding, “Many are guilty of MAJOR CRIMES!” His son Donald Trump Jr. specifically weighed in on Fauci, tweeting, “He doesn’t have to accept the pardon. If he did nothing wrong, be a man and turn it down… But you know he won’t because everyone knows he’s guilty of so much.”

Some online figures also suggested that, despite the pardon, something bad would befall Fauci, and that he’d be punished for his supposed crimes with death. On Telegram, QAnon figure Dustin Krieger, who uses the name Dustin Nemos online, called Fauci “a serial murderer,” adding, “Sooner or later God will cut him down.” 

As that invective makes clear, a pardon might protect Fauci from the worst excesses of the new Trump administration, but it doesn’t remove him from conspiracists’ pantheon of suspicion. He’ll always be at risk of other kinds of retaliation, from people who have been encouraged to view him as a murderer.

Going forward, the new administration and its empowered allies in Washington will only foster that view. Take Mary Holland, who is CEO of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, which was founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. She suggested in an Inauguration Day press release that Congress and Paul would continue their war against Fauci:

“One of the things that’s positive here is that because he has been preemptively pardoned, he will not be able to assert a 5th Amendment protection in Congress when he is going to be investigated,” she said. “There’s no question that Senator Rand Paul, in particular, has every intention of going forward to investigate this man.” 

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.

President Donald Trump on Monday granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people who joined in the January 6 attack on Congress that he himself caused.

Hours after returning to office, Trump announced he was giving “full, complete and unconditional” pardons to nearly all “individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

Trump also announced commutations of prison sentences for the handful of January 6 convicts not given full pardons—14 top members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia and Proud Boys—freeing them from lengthy prison sentences.

These actions mean that Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader who was sentenced to 18 years in prison following his conviction for seditious conspiracy and other crimes for planning violence on January 6, is a free man.

Trump also freed Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader who was serving a 22-year sentence following his conviction for seditious conspiracy and other crimes for his role in planning the violence on January 6.

Tarrio was the “the ultimate leader, the ultimate person who organized, who was motivated by revolutionary zeal,” US District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, said in sentencing Tarrio in 2023 after applying an enhancement for terrorism.

Trump himself faced felony charges for allegedly conspiring to use a fake elector scheme as a means to remain in power in 2021. His election victory in November caused special counsel Jack Smith to drop that case to comply with a Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president.

In pardoning or commuting the sentences of his insurrectionist supporters, Trump has used his newly restored power to extend to his followers the impunity the presidency gives to him. More broadly, Trump is using the clemency authority to try to erase the stain of his botched self-coup attempt as he continues to insist that he actually won in 2020.

In informal, rambling remarks that followed his mostly scripted inaugural speech Wednesday, Trump picked up where he left off four years ago. He called the 2020 election “totally rigged,” claimed the January 6 attack was largely nonviolent, and called the people prosecuted for their role in it “patriots” and “hostages.”

That language signaled that Trump’s clemency grants, more than just a legal effort, are part of a renewed campaign to force government institutions and the American public to accept his false and self-serving version of reality.

Trump’s sweeping actions Monday seemed to be a rejection of suggestions by advisers that he deny clemency to rioters who were convicted of violent acts and that he consider clemency applications on a case-by-case basis.

The pardons came after an inaugural speech in which Trump promised to restore “law and order” in American cities.

Earlier on Monday, Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons to public figures who Trump has threatened to use the Justice Department to target. These included former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, Dr. Anthony Fauci and members and staffers of the House January 6 committee, as well as Washington, DC, and Capitol police officers who testified before the committee about the attack. Minutes before leaving office, Biden also issued pardons for members of his family: his brothers James and Frank, his sister Valerie, and their respective spouses. Those pardons follow Biden’s widely criticized pardon last month of his son Hunter, who was convicted last year of lying about his drug use and, through a guilty plea, of tax evasion.

“My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me—the worst kind of partisan politics,” Biden said in a statement released Monday while Trump’s inauguration ceremony was underway. “Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.”

Trump—who, during his first term, engaged in a historically unprecedented effort to use his pardon power to reward supporters and to undermine investigations into his own alleged crimes—had the chutzpah to crticize Biden’s pardons on Monday.

Taylor Budowich, Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff, tweeted that Biden’s pardons “will go down as the greatest attack on America’s justice system in history.” (Budowich personally earned nearly $20,000 from helping to organize protest activity on January 6, I reported last year.)

Trump seemed especially irked that Biden’s pardons covered the two Republican lawmakers who served on the January 6 committee, both of whom he described as tearful. Former Rep. Liz Cheney is a “crying lunatic,” Trump said, adding that former Rep. Adam Kinzinger “is always crying.”

Trump repeated a false claim that the January 6 committee had destroyed evidence gather in its investigation. The committee’s final report, transcripts of hundreds of depositions and other investigative material remain available online—a reminder that Trump, for all his powers, cannot erase the history of January 6. His clemency actions, in fact, deepen his connection to that event.

Donald Trump launched a multibillion-dollar meme coin just days before taking office and instantly saw his net worth balloon. But then, as the initial excitement passed, the value plunged and occasionally spiked again through the first roller-coaster hours of Trump’s second presidency. Despite the optimism of some crypto enthusiasts that the $TRUMP coin’s debut Friday heralded a new era of automatic crypto riches, the value of the coin had plummeted to around half of its weekend high of $72.62 by the time Trump was sworn in Monday.

Meme coins have no intrinsic value or particular usefulness as a currency but serve more as a cultural signifier. They usually are based on an internet joke, such as the internet’s fascination with the doge dog (Dogecoin), or make use of a celebrity’s image. While real money can be made riding the speculative highs and lows of meme coin trading, it’s also one of the sectors of the crypto world most prone to bubbles and subsequent collapses.

If the new $TRUMP coin is more of a way for crypto enthusiasts to signal their support for Trump—which might be the most coherent explanation for a type of crypto product that doesn’t have any point to it at all—the timing of this new Trump product was propitious. After announcing the coin’s creation Friday night at a party for the crypto industry to celebrate Trump’s inauguration, the price spiked to as high as $72.62. A total of 1 billion coins were created in an instant, so Trump’s ownership of an estimated 800 million of the new $TRUMP coins meant that his wealth almost instantly blew up from a bit less than $7 billion to possibly as much as $65 billion on the eve of his presidency.

But then the price started falling, and in the minutes shortly before Trump’s official inauguration, the price had fallen to just under $50. Following his inauguration at noon, the price plunged below $40, before rebounding slightly.

In theory, that’s still worth about $33 billion for Trump, but the volatility is a good indicator of how reliable of a source of wealth the coin really can be. With this product, no matter what the price, Trump’s holdings will have some value because there was no expense for him in creating it—and that value will be based on nothing but consumers’ interest in buying something (digital) with his name on it.

On Monday, the Trumps announced that first lady Melania Trump had also created her own meme coin, $MELANIA, which hit a high of $13.05 but by early afternoon on Inauguration Day had fallen to $5.27.

Not everyone was thrilled with the creation of the memes—ethics expert Norm Eisen told the Washington Post that the coin was “the single worst conflict of interest in the modern history of the presidency.” Even some in the crypto community bristled at the idea, calling it a “horrible look” and “predatory,” noting that meme coins are generally speculative and essentially worthless.

Trump has promised to remake the US economy in the image of crypto, and his children have started a decentralized finance company—a platform for making financial transactions using crypto instead of a traditional banking institution—that Trump benefits from. However, as the websites for both $TRUMP and $MELANIA coins make clear, these are not serious investment vehicles.

“Trump Memes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol ‘$TRUMP,’” a disclaimer on the $TRUMP coin website reads, “and are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type.”

The Melania Memes website puts it even more bluntly: “Melania Memes are intended for collecting and entertainment purposes only. They are not financial instruments or investments. Always do your own research and never invest more than you can afford to lose.”

Over the weekend, TikTok very briefly died in the United States before being reborn some 12 hours later, bearing a jaunty new banner. 

“As a result of President Trump’s efforts,” it read, in part, “TikTok is back in the U.S.”

The biggest tech and social media companies have consolidated behind Trump.

Trump was not yet president on Sunday, when TikTok began restoring U.S. access despite a Supreme Court ruling Friday upholding a law meant to ban it. But the deeper message was unmistakable: the Chinese-owned company ByteDance and its CEO Shou Zi Chew would do anything to placate Trump and keep its most profitable app online for American users. Trump also said on Sunday that he’d issue an executive order delaying the implementation of TikTok’s ban in the U.S.

As many pointed out, it was a long way from 2020, when Trump vowed to ban the app “immediately” as a threat to national security. On TruthSocial, Trump even suggested a deal to keep TikTok online that would involve the U.S. gaining “a 50% joint ownership” position. TikTok hasn’t yet responded to idea, but the Chinese government has signaled it wouldn’t object.

A day after the app’s American resurrection, Chew came to Washington for Trump’s inauguration, along with two other social media giants, Twitter/X owner Elon Musk, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Also present was Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook. Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world and a booster of both Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was also in the room.

All of this, of course, points to one simple fact: the total consolidation of the biggest tech and social media companies behind the new president. “What this effectively means is that every social media platform, mass social media platform in the United States, has been taken over by the right wing,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said in a Sunday video posted—ironically, but unavoidably—to Meta-owned Instagram.

The conciliatory approach social media companies have taken to Trump caps a long process of retreat from the social media companies playing an active role in policing deceptive speech and false information, including Twitter’s rollback of enforcing rules around disinformation and continuing with Meta’s recent decision to replace fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes. Trump and conservative leaders have long claimed that such initiatives censored right-wing views. 

Besides its laudatory banner, on Sunday night TikTok also hosted the Power 30 Awards inauguration party, which paid tribute to conservative influencers who use the platform as the company handed out TikTok-branded swag and chocolates. Spotify and Google also hosted parties over the weekend celebrating Trump’s return to power.

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.

On Monday, moments before Donald Trump’s inauguration, President Joe Biden commuted the life sentence of American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier, who has been in prison for nearly 50 years, from two life sentences to home confinement. In a press release, Biden said: “This commutation will enable Mr. Peltier to spend his remaining days in home confinement but will not pardon him for his underlying crimes.”

An internal FBI memo from 1972 showed that the agency planned to target AIM activists, referring to them as “violence-prone individuals.” In 1977, Peltier, a member of the Lakota tribe who was a prominent activist for Native American rights, was convicted of killing two FBI agents, Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, and given two life sentences. The agents died as the result of point-blank gunshots to their heads, which Peltier and his supporters have insisted that he was not responsible for.

Peltier’s imprisonment over the years has become, as Mother Jones reported in 2016, “an international symbol of the mistreatment of Native Americans by the US criminal justice system.” As we wrote then, Peltier detailed the following in a petition for clemency that was sent to then-President Barack Obama’s Justice Department in 2016:

After the FBI agents came on to the private property, “I heard shooting, grabbed my rifle, and ran towards a residence where there were women and children, but quickly ran in another direction because my presence had attracted additional gunfire to the area.” He says the area was surrounded by more than 100 FBI agents, SWAT team members, Bureau of Indian Affairs police, and members of the GOON squad.

“Along with many other American Indians who were present that day, I fired shots in the direction of men whom I later learned were federal agents,” Peltier notes in the petition. “At the end of extended gunfire, three men lay dead.”

Over the years, human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, have urged that Peltier be released. In July, the organization sent a letter to Biden urging that the now-80-year-old be granted clemency, writing that “there are serious and ongoing concerns about the fairness of trial and conviction.” Amnesty International also noted that “the former US Attorney whose office handled the prosecution, James Reynolds, has since called for clemency.”

“Retribution seems to have emerged as the primary if not sole reason for continuing what looks from the outside to have become an emotion-driven ‘FBI Family’ vendetta,” a former FBI agent told the Guardian in 2023 of the FBI blocking Peltier’s release in the past.

Peltier has also continued to speak about Indigenous rights while behind bars, saying in 2023: “Although we have made many gains and won some victories in the courts, we are still fighting against the large corporations for the theft of our lands and minerals.”

“It took nearly 50 years to acknowledge the injustice of Leonard Peltier’s conviction and continued incarceration,” Kevin Sharp, who represented Peltier for five years, said in a press release, “but with the President’s act of mercy Leonard can finally return to his reservation and live out his remaining days.”