On Sunday afternoon, when Donald Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, comedian and podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe opened the big show with a string of racist jokes. He referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean,” made a crude remark about Latinos and sex, and joked about carving watermelons with a Black person for Halloween. Some in the packed arena laughed. It was the start of hours of MAGA extremism that included a speaker who called Vice President Kamala Harris “the Antichrist” and one who described Harris’ advisers as “pimp handlers.” The shindig culminated in one of Trump’s most inflammatory speeches.
Throughout the hours-long program, no one on the line-up—including Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, JD Vance, Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Melania Trump, Dr. Phil, and Tucker Carlson—called out Hinchcliffe.
Nor did Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
When it was his turn on the stage, the former Democrat, who this year ran an unsuccessful independent campaign for president, praised Trump to the hilt, claiming that Trump, if elected, would “restore the moral authority” of the United States, “protect” the Constitution and free speech, and “rebuild the middle class.” He also proclaimed that Trump would “stop dividing this country along racial lines.”
Kennedy’s silence about Hinchcliffe’s foul racism was more significant than that of his fellow Trumpers, for he once had a strong bond with Puerto Rico.
In 2001, he was arrested and sentenced to 30 days in prison for trespassing as a participant in a series of protests that aimed to stop the US Navy bombing exercises on Vieques island. The protesters contended the bombing was damaging the island’s environment and harming its 9,100 residents. The arrested demonstrators included actor Edward James Olmos, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Kennedy ended up serving a short stint in prison. He was so emotionally invested in this protest that he gave the middle name Vieques to one of his children.
So what did Kennedy make of Hinchcliffe’s racist gags?
On Monday morning, I reached Kennedy on his cell phone and asked why he hadn’t said anything at the rally about those comments. Kennedy requested we go off the record. Really? He would have to go off the record to discuss this? I replied that I preferred for this conversation to be on the record. He assented and said, “I was unaware of Tony Hinchcliffe’s, uh, uh, statement when I spoke or I would have addressed it.” He stopped talking, as if that was enough of a response.
“Well, what do you think of it now?” I asked.
“I think it was unfortunate,” he said. He paused and then added, “And that’s all I’ve got to say.”
Merely unfortunate? Nothing stronger?
I tried to press Kennedy for more, but he hung up.
His response was far weaker than the statement the Trump campaign had issued when it realized Hinchcliffe’s disastrous performance had tainted Trump’s campaign finale: “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”
Other Republicans were more outspoken. Florida Sen. Rick Scott tweeted, “This joke bombed for a reason. It’s not funny and it’s not true. Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans!” Recently imprisoned Trump adviser Peter Navarro called Hinchcliffe “the biggest, stupidest asshole that ever came down the comedy pike.”
Hinchcliffe’s comments quickly drew harsh criticism from the Harris campaign, and, at the same time, prominent Puerto Ricans, including Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricky Martin expressed their support for Harris. Within hours of Hinchcliffe’s Madison Square Garden appearance, Harris’ team released a video and social media posts assailing his racist cracks and promoting the veep’s plans for Puerto Rico.
In a 1963 speech as attorney general, Robert Kennedy, declared that one of the “overriding moral drives” of the nation was to combat racism and “to do everything possible to eliminate racial discrimination.” And during his speech at the Trump event, RFK Jr. hailed his father and his uncle, President John Kennedy, for having led a party that was committed to civil rights. Yet by hooking up with Trump, who has a long record of racism, Kennedy has not lived up to that standard his father called for. (He has also promoted racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories.) His unwillingness to sharply criticize the brazen racism present at the Trump rally where he was a headliner suggests Kennedy is a politician driven more by opportunism than his family’s legacy.
At a Sunday campaign rally, former President Donald Trump promised, if re-elected, to let anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and failed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “go wild on health.” Kennedy has previously signaled his desire to join a second Trump administration, after dropping out of the race and endorsing Trump—who himself has wild ideas about health—in August.
Trump tonight on RFK Jr:
“I'm gonna let him go wild on health. I'm gonna let him go wild on the food. I'm gonna let him go wild on the medicines." pic.twitter.com/tBVXrou1YQ
Trump’s pledge alarmed public health professionals, including Dr. Jerome Adams, his own surgeon general. Unlike many other top officials appointed by Trump, Adams was actually qualified: he was praised by colleagues for successfully limiting an HIV outbreak in Indiana by establishing a needle exchange program, among other public health successes.
On Monday, Adams spoke at a conference of the American Public Health Association—which endorsed his 2017 nomination as Surgeon General—on his concerns about Kennedy, especially his anti-vaccine stances, as New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote on X.
Trump's surgeon general, @JeromeAdamsMD warns RFK would hurt America's health:
"If RFK has a significant influence on the next administration, that could further erode people's willingness to get up to date with recommended vaccines, and I am worried about the impact that…
Adams has been a strong supporter of the development and distribution of Covid vaccines, and others, including by testifying at a 2021 House hearing on how to encourage Covid vaccine uptake. Kennedy, on the other hand, has promoted the debunked, dangerous theory that vaccines cause autism. It definitely does not—but polio and measles do cause people to develop disabilities.
As my colleague David Corn wrote for Mother Jones in July, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism could potentially be linked to the deaths of children in Samoa who contracted measles. (Kennedy denied fault.)
During the stretch in which the vaccination coverage was dropping in Samoa, Kennedy visited the nation in June 2019 and gave a boost to anti-vaxxers there who had used the death of those two infants to help cause the drop in vaccination rates…Public health experts complained Kennedy’s visit to Samoa helped amplifly anti-vax voices.
During his speech, Adams also directly appealed to Republicans, asking them to not play a role in “allowing vaccine confidence to continue to be eroded, and for us to go backwards on one of the number-one public health achievements made in the last 50 to 75 years in this country.”
Joe Scott, a West Point graduate with an MBA and a background in finance, ran for Broward County elections supervisor in 2020. At the time, he thought his previous stints as an account manager for a technology company and a facilities administrator at a health care firmwould make him a “good fit” for a job that would ostensibly preoccupy him with a mélange of humdrum desk-work.
He was surprised, however, to find how much his military experience in Iraq would come in handy.
With an unhurried demeanor, a lanyard, and a warm smile, Scott comes across more like a beloved social studies teacher moonlighting as a football coach than a soldier. But in the late-2000s, he was an Army captain embedded with the Iraqi military during some of the country’s earliest democratically run elections. In an effort to prepare for hotspots of unrest, the Iraqi leadership of Scott’s battalion pitched going door to door to ask locals how they planned to vote; Scott had to explain to the officer that having uniformed and armed Iraqi military members interrogate locals about their voting plans was “not a good look.”
“It was a different world,” he says of the Middle Eastern country’s shaky, fledgling democracy. “Although,” he adds, “America is kind of moving that way.”
The day after Scott was sworn in as Broward’s elections supervisor, in January 2021, election deniers—incited by Trump’s lies about a stolen election—stormed the US Capitol. He called his wife to ask if she was watching the news. “The Handmaid’s Tale is going down right now,” he recalls telling her. “This is real, right?”
He realized then that in the fleeting moments between the end of his campaign and first week of his new role, the job of “being an election official really changed.”
In the months and years since Trump turbocharged election angst, Scott has had to deal with politically motivated actors spreading misleading information about voting procedures and conspiracy-slinging citizens, some of whom have made physical threats against him and his staff. His experience is not the exception but the norm among the people who have taken up this line of work.
Nearly 40 percent of local election workers have experienced harassment or abuse, according to a recent survey conducted by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. Dozens of threats have been so serious as to warrant full FBI investigations, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, which noted these threats were concentrated in the states Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020. Multiple election officials have even been victims of “swatting,” a dangerous hoax in which a caller reports a fake crime with the intention of triggering a substantial law enforcement response at the home or workplace of their unsuspecting target. These tactics don’t only put election workers at risk, they also intimidate voters. A year after the January 6 attack, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism asked Americans whether they felt safe at voting locations. Fewer than half said yes.
But if elections are becoming increasingly unhinged, election officials are also making significant efforts to improve their institutions and the public’s trust in them. Clerks and supervisors are fortifying their physical structures with bulletproof glass and GPS-tracked ballot bags and dedicated power supplies and motion detectors. They’re collaborating with law enforcement, and with one another, about how to prepare for and respond to threats in the first presidential race since Donald Trump and his most fervent supporters tried to overturn the 2020 election’s results. This time around, officials like Scott are hoping for a more tranquil transition period. But they’ve also prepared for the worst.
Scott recently showed me around his new election headquarters, which serves as a processing center for vote-by-mail ballots, the recount site for elections that are within half a percentage point, and the place where paper ballots are scanned into Broward’s auditing system. With security guards, a gated parking lot, badge-entry doors classified by clearance level, and windows for inquisitive (or incredulous) civilians to watch over ballot processing, the $103 million building was hardened to withstand both Category 5 hurricanes—and the growing ranks of election conspiracists. Scott notes the building’s design was an exercise in balancing the public’s desire for election transparency with everyone’s need for physical safety. He had managed similar dynamics before.
“Part of my tour in Iraq was preparing for and making sure that those elections went off without any major security things happening,” Scott tells Mother Jones about his service, which earned him a Bronze Star Medal and a Combat Action Badge. “We wanted to make sure people felt safe going to the polling places.”
Nearly 20 years later, that’s exactly what he and fellow US election workers are doing domestically.
Last month, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold was the intended recipient of a package intercepted by a postal center. Its contents included an unknown powder; its return address was labeled “United States Traitor Elimination Army.” The FBI is investigating its origins.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold was the intended recipient of a package with an unknown powder—its return address was labeled “United States Traitor Elimination Army.”
She said the package was in addition to more than 1,000 threats she received since last September. pic.twitter.com/i7C84mQdEd
Griswold, who chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said the package was in addition to more than 1,000 threats she has received since last September. One extremist made a threat to her life while she was in the hospital having a C-section; other threats have been sexual in nature. But rather than panic about potential election-related violence, Griswold has channeled her efforts into preventing it.
The 40-year-old has worked to reform Colorado’s election landscape, including championing the passage of state election laws, among them one that made it a felony to compromise voting equipment. That was something former Colorado election worker Tina Peters did in 2021 when she allowed an unauthorized person to access data from election machines, images from which were eventually posted on conspiracy-riddled websites. (Peters was recently sentenced to nine years in prison.) Other new regulations Griswold has backed have made it illegal to retaliate against election workers and to have guns near election sites.
Since 2020, Griswold has made available at least $5 million in grant money for more physical security at election sites, which has allowed counties to take measures such as installing bulletproof glass or having Narcan on hand in case fentanyl is deployed as a chemical weapon. “We are in this scenario where election officials like myself have to plan for really unnecessary disasters,” she tells me. “There is no reason we should have to be planning for these domestic conspiracies and the effect it has on our elections, but we have to.”
Election officials elsewhere have been similarly proactive. In St. Charles County, Missouri, the only thing that separated in-person absentee voters from elections staff in 2020 was a row of desks. Kurt Bahr, the county’s Republican director of elections, recently installed a full wall with a locking door and customer service windows to provide a barrier so his employees “feel more secure in case any voter is overly agitated.”
Sante Fe, New Mexico’s clerk has installed GPS tracking devices on all traveling ballot bags. In case someone alleges fake ballots were introduced into the closed system, clerk Katharine Clark can say, “Au contraire. I have this dashboard, and that shows me exactly where my ballot bags are.”
Clark, a Democrat, has also added an accelerometer that measures vibration inside her county’s ballot tabulator to decipher if anyone improperly touched it overnight. Further, her county is issuing personal alert devices for all presiding judges and has hired additional security that will “have eyes and ears on all the public sites.”
One of the remaining challenges election officials face is deciding when a disturbance reaches a threshold that requires the help of law enforcement. “It’s kind of like the definition of pornography,” says Bahr of Missouri. “You know it when you see it.”
Tina Barton has made it her mission to foster coordination between law enforcement and election officials. She learned the importance of this when she became the target of conspiracy-crazed election deniers in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
On Tuesday, November 10, 2020, she walked into her fluorescent-light filled office at Rochester Hills, Michigan City Hall, where she had served as the city’s election clerk for eight years. She saw a blinking light on her desk line. It was a voicemail from an unknown caller.
“Ten million plus patriots will surround you when you least expect it, and your little infantile Deep State security agency has no time to protect you…We’ll fucking kill you,” said the voice, which also threatened bringing a knife to Barton’s throat. “You will fucking pay for your fucking lying-ass remarks…We will fucking take you out. Fuck your family, fuck your life.”
The culprit was eventually identified as Carmel, Indiana’s Andrew Nickels, who has since been sentenced to 14 months in prison; but the victim of the call was effectively hand-selected by the Republican National Committee. After Michigan was called for Biden, then–RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel claimed that fraud had abounded in the state, and case in point were the “2,000 ballots that had been given to Democrats but were Republican ballots,” said McDaniels at a press conference on November 6. “And this took place in Rochester Hills.”
There was a minor issue in Rochester Hills, but it was discovered and corrected well before Nickels left the voicemail. Around 1 a.m. the day after the election, Barton—who had at that point worked more than 18 hours straight—noticed that the county’s website showed a handful of absentee precincts from her county were not showing up. She informed the county, whose officials said they had not received one of Barton’s files. She ran a report and discovered the file was not missing, but saved under the wrong name.
The county advised Barton that the solution was to purge the old file and rerun the absentee precincts, then save that information under the correct file name. But within 24 hours of that step on Wednesday, it was discovered that both files had somehow been added to the county’s total. Immediately, before noon on Thursday, the incorrect file was removed from the system.
Even if the issue was not corrected—it was—Biden won the state by more than 150,000 votes: roughly double the number of people who live in Rochester Hills. An audit led by Republican state legislators would later confirm, in June 2021, that Michigan’s elections were lawfully run, and that temporary mishaps didn’t affect final outcomes. All the while, Barton was perpetually on edge. At the grocery store, she’d think, “Did that person walk too close to me? Why are they everywhere that I’m going?” she tells me. “You become hyper-vigilant about every single thing, and start to view every single thing in person as a possible threat. And that can be really overwhelming.”
While investigators were still working to identify her aggressor, a group called the Center for Safe and Secure Elections (CSSE) was forming in response to threats against election officials like Barton. It was founded in 2022 by a cross-partisan group of current and former national, state, and local election officials, members of law enforcement, as well as nonprofits across the political spectrum. Barton, a Republican who has since left her election clerk role, is now a vice chair.
Over the last two years, she’s convened nearly 150 CSSE training sessions across more than 35 states, bringing together thousands of election workers, members of law enforcement, facilities managers, hazmat teams, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and more to help the various stakeholders preemptively form lines of communication among themselves in preparation for what used to be extraordinary complications: Reports of mysterious substances, menacing phone calls, open-carry demonstrations outside polling sites, accusations of non-citizens voting, bomb threats, and more.
Barton and her co-instructor, former Sheriff for Larimer County, Colorado, Justin Smith, travel to various jurisdictions, pose hypotheticals emergencies such as these, and break the attendees into randomized groups to strategize best practices. “Then we’ll take that opportunity after we’ve heard what they’ve said to see if we have some more things to either challenge them on, or to push their thinking on,” Barton says. CSSE has also made instructional videos and guides for groups and officials who can’t facilitate in-person training.
Election workers, many of whom have already been threatened, are usually eager to accept CSSE’s guidance. But in the beginning, it was sometimes a harder sell to law enforcement personnel, who generally feared engaging in anything political and didn’t realize how rampant election-related intimidation had become. Smith would help convince them by comparing the need for police engagement in election settings with the need for police in school settings.
There were school shootings before Columbine, but the 1999 tragedy was an “awakening period” during which both law enforcement educators realized they needed to work together to prevent future catastrophes. Similarly, Smith says, “2020 was not the first time we were having problems in elections,” but the scale of chaos from that cycle was a turning point requiring groups like CSSE to help bridge the divides between the various relevant parties.
Barton and Smith’s work is just one part of a growing movement in which individuals are collaborating across professions and party lines to prevent chaos-mongers from affecting people’s constitutional right to vote in 2024. Another nonpartisan organization, the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions PLEJ was founded in 2022 to facilitate engagement between election officials who share challenges and, with PLEJ’s help, solutions.
Joe Scott of Broward County is a member of PLEJ, as are 89 more of the largest local election jurisdictions across 33 states. Collectively, the group’s members administer elections for 40 percent of the US electorate. At a September PLEJ panel hosted in Washington, DC, Republican and Democratic election officials from eight states came together to talk about their security plans and structures. Carolina Lopez, the executive director of PLEJ and a member of CSSE, says that the officials often invite each other to their sites to trade tips. “Instead of every little fiefdom building something, we’re putting all of our resources together,” says Lopez.
The fraternization may never have happened so quickly—or at all—if Trump hadn’t repeatedly claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him, provoking people like Andrew Nickels to assail local bureaucrats like Tina Barton. CSSE and PLEJ didn’t exist then, and they do now.
Unfortunately, so do new threats. “I’m actually really hopeful as we go into the 2024 general election,” says Barton. “I’m also cautious.”
Nearly half of states accept mail-in ballots that were mailed by Election Day, but arrive sometime after it. No court has ever questioned this practice, which is squarely within the purview of states’ election authority. But in an attempt to throw out possibly thousands of mail-in ballots, the Republican National Committee launched a challenge to the practice in Mississippi. And in a stunning opinion released late Friday, an ultra conservative panel of three Trump-appointed appellate judges agreed.
Georgetown professor Steve Vladeck called the opinion “nuts on its face.” UCLA election law expert Rick Hasen called it “bonkers.” Legal reporter Chris Geidner explained that the opinion is the logical equivalent of Swiss cheese: “It’s a ruling that has to write around all of the laws that allow the receipt of ballots before Election Day, the federal laws that allow the receipt of ballots after Election Day, and all other practices that could contradict with such a strict definition of Election Day.” .
At oral argument, the three judges actually appeared circumspect of the RNC’s arguments, chief among them how to square early voting with the idea of an Election Day that proscribes a single day for casting ballots. Observers predicted that even this far-right panel wouldn’t throw out decades of unquestioned election law. And yet, on Friday evening, all three judges did just that.
And when you think about it, that was always going to be the outcome.
The 5th Circuit judges who heard the case—James Ho, Andrew Oldham, and Kyle Duncan—were all appointed by Trump and have significantly shifted the appeals court not just to the right, but by putting it in service of a Trumpian agenda that rules in favor of Republicans and against the federal government. All three have appeared use their position as part of an ongoing audition for an appointment to the US Supreme Court. And a vital step of the interview is happening right now.
Donald Trump may be only a few months from re-taking office and replacing Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who are reportedly looking to retire under a Republican president. With the possibility of the ultimate promotion so close, there’s no room for squishiness. This is the time for ambitious lower court judges to make their case. As long as one of the three is willing to throw out thousands of ballots to help Trump, then of course the others will join in.
If there is any sign of restraint, it’s that they did not put their decision into effect. Instead, they sent it back to the district court in Mississippi to decide the next steps. So it is likely that this ruling will not directlyaffect the 2024 election. While the Supreme Court could promptlytake up the issue directly on appeal, it’s unlikely that the justices will use the case throw out ballots that lawfully arrive after Election Day, now that mail voting has already begun and people are making decisions based on laws as they currently stand. The Supreme Court, by its own doctrine, is not supposed to change the rules mid-game.
But by keeping the issue alive and casting doubt on the legality of ballots that arrive after Election Day, the 5th Circuit may have provided grist to those who wish to sow doubt about the election outcome after November 5. Whereas the panel’s decision injects some uncertainty into the 2024 election, its most obvious impact, beyond the career prospects of Ho, Oldham, and Duncan, is on future elections. If the Republican Party continues to believe its best long-term interests lie in disqualifying mail-in ballots, then it is likely this issue will rise to the US Supreme Court under the next president. If the court follows this panel’s logic, it will bar thousands of ballots from being counted in the future.
This year, former President Donald Trump’s central campaign pledge has been to conduct the “largest deportation operation in American history.”
In his first term, Trump couldn’t deliver mass deportation. This waspartially a result of his administration’s haphazard policy implementation, but also because a mass deportation campaign would require an almost unimaginable amount of resources: Removing one million people from the country a year would cost an estimated $88 billion annually, according to the American Immigration Council.
Still, Trump’s potential second administration wants to try again, even if it appears they only have concepts of a plan for how to do carry out mass removal without bankrupting the economy and likely harming millions of immigrants and many more US citizens in the process.
On Sunday, Tom Homan, the one-time cop and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump, appeared on 60 Minutes to sell the plan as not potentially catastrophic. Homan, the “architect” of family separation who said he didn’t “give a shit” about being sued over the infamous practice, has been defiantly positioning himself as the man to get the job done.
“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he said at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC, in July. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
But when asked by CBS’s Cecilia Vega how feasible—or humane—the rollout of a mass deportation proposal would be, his answers inspired little confidence.
“Let me tell you what it’s not going to be first,” Homan said. “It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all, it’s ridiculous.” Instead, he claimed, there would be “targeted arrests.” But, as I’ve reported before, that’s quite different from the actual plans Trump’s hardline adviser Stephen Miller has been publicly laying out:
When asked by the hosts of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton radio show how the mass deportations project would be realized, Miller said it would require a “switch to indiscriminate or large-scale enforcement activities.” Miller described going to every place where there are known congregations of “illegals” and taking people to federal detention.
To detain immigrants before carrying out their deportations, Miller said the Trump administration would build massive holding facilities that could accommodate between 50,000 to 70,000 people at any given time. Such an undertaking, he said, “would be greater than any national infrastructure project we’ve done to date.”
In an exercise of semantics, Homan went on to say he doesn’t use the term “raids,” but that “worksite enforcement operations” would be necessary. When Vega pressed him on how the agency would prioritize immigration enforcement against national security and public safety threats, he left no room for doubt that anyone would entered the United States unlawfully would be a potential target. “So you’re carrying out a targeted enforcement operation,” Vega said, “grandma is in the house. She’s undocumented. She gets arrested too?”
“It depends,” Homan said. “Let the [immigration] judges decide. We’re going to remove people that the judges order deported.”
As a retired government official, Homan has making the rounds of conservative media to declare an “invasion” at the southern border. And he has made an enterprise out of it by launching the nonprofit Border911 Foundation, Inc. and traveling across the country spreading fear-mongering about migrants.
When asked on 60 Minutes how many people would be deported under Trump’s proposed mass deportation operation, Homan said “you can’t answer that question” because it would depend on how many enforcement agents they would have. Currently, ICE has about 6,000 deportation officers. Arresting and removing the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, most of whom have been in the country for more then a decade, would require hiring hundreds of thousands of government employees.
“If there’s no memo, if there’s no plan, is this fully baked?” Vega asked.
“We’ve done it before,” Homan said, presumably referencing the less than successful slur-named militaristic “Operation Wetback” from the Eisenhower administration that Trump has repeatedly invoked as a model. But historians agree that campaign not only led to far fewer deportations than the federal government claimed, but also ensnared US citizens.
A mass deportation of the scale Trump and Homan have been touting would likely have the same result. And as immigration experts have noted, such a plan would negatively impact mixed-status households, potentially tearing families apart. To that, Homan offered an alternative. “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” Vega asked. “Of course there is,” Homan said. “Families can be deported together.”
This story was originally published by ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
A key ally to former President Donald Trump detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the Environmental Protection Agency and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a series of previously unreported speeches that provide a sweeping vision for a second Trump term.
In private speeches delivered in 2023 and 2024, Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, described his work crafting legal justifications so that military leaders or government lawyers would not stop Trump’s executive actions.
He said the plans are a response to a “Marxist takeover” of the country; likened the moment to 1776 and 1860, when the country was at war or on the brink of it; and said the timing of Trump’s candidacy was a “gift of God.”
ProPublica and Documented obtained videos of the two speeches Vought delivered during events for the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank led by Vought. The think tank’s employees or fellows include Jeffrey Clark, the former senior Justice Department lawyer who aided Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election result; Ken Cuccinelli, a former acting deputy secretary in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump; and Mark Paoletta, a former senior budget official in the Trump administration. Other Trump allies such as former White House adviser Steve Bannon and US Reps. Chip Roy and Scott Perry either spoke at the conferences or appeared on promotional materials for the events.
Vought does not hide his agenda or shy away from using extreme rhetoric in public. But the apocalyptic tone and hard-line policy prescriptions in the two private speeches go further than his earlier pronouncements. As OMB director, Vought sought to use Trump’s 2020 “Schedule F” executive order to strip away job protections for nonpartisan government workers. But he has never spoken in such pointed terms about demoralizing federal workers to the point that they don’t want to do their jobs. He has spoken in broad terms about undercutting independent agencies but never spelled out sweeping plans to defund the EPA and other federal agencies.
Vought’s plans track closely with Trump’s campaign rhetoric about using the military against domestic protesters or what Trump has called the “enemy within.” Trump’s desire to use the military on U.S. soil recently prompted his longest-serving chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, to speak out, saying Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”
Other policies mentioned by Vought dovetail with Trump’s plans, such as embracing a wartime footing on the southern border and rolling back transgender rights. Agenda 47, the campaign’s policy blueprint, calls for revoking President Joe Biden’s order expanding gender-affirming care for transgender people; Vought uses even more extreme language, decrying the “transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions” and referring to gender-affirming care as “chemical castration.”
Since leaving government, Vought has reportedly remained a close ally of the former president. Speaking in July to undercover journalists posing as relatives of a potential donor, Vought said Trump had “blessed” the Center for Renewing America and was “very supportive of what we do,” CNN reported.
Vought did not respond to requests for comment.
“Since the Fall of 2023, President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement. She did not directly address Vought’s statements.
Karoline Leavitt, his campaign’s national press secretary, added there have been no discussions on who would serve in a second Trump administration.
In addition to running his think tank, Vought was the policy director of the Republican National Committee’s official platform committee ahead of the nominating convention. He’s also an architect of Project 2025, the controversial coalition effort mapping out how a second Trump administration can quickly eliminate obstacles to rolling out a hard-right policy agenda.
As ProPublica and Documented reported, Project 2025 has launched a massive program to recruit, vet and train thousands of people to “be ready on day one” to serve in a future conservative administration. (Trump has repeatedly criticized Project 2025, and his top aides have said the effort has no connection to the official campaign despite the dozens of former Trump aides and advisers who contributed to Project 2025.)
Vought is widely expected to take a high-level government role if Trump wins a second term. His name has even been mentioned as a potential White House chief of staff. The videos obtained by ProPublica and Documented offer an unfiltered look at Vought’s worldview, his plans for a Trump administration and his fusing of MAGA ideology and Christian nationalism.
A Shadow Government in Waiting
In his 2024 speech, Vought said he was spending the majority of his time helping lead Project 2025 and drafting an agenda for a future Trump presidency. “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”
Vought laid out how his think tank is crafting the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Washington Post previously reported the issue was at the top of the Center for Renewing America’s priorities.
“We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do,’” he said. Vought held up the summer 2020 unrest following George Floyd’s murder as an example of when Trump ought to have had the ability to deploy the armed forces but was stymied.
Vought’s preparations for a future Trump administration involve building a “shadow” Office of Legal Counsel, he told the gathered supporters in May 2023. That office, part of the Justice Department, advises the president on the scope of their powers. Vought made clear he wants the office to help Trump steamroll the kind of internal opposition he faced in his first term.
Historically, the OLC has operated with a degree of independence. “If, all of a sudden, the office is full of a bunch of loyalists whose only job is to rubber-stamp the White House’s latest policy directive, whose only goal is to justify the ends by whatever means, that would be quite dangerous,” said an attorney who worked in the office under a previous Republican administration and requested anonymity to speak freely.
Another priority, according to Vought, was to “defund” certain independent federal agencies and demonize career civil servants, which include scientists and subject matter experts. Project 2025’s plan to revive Schedule F, an attempt to make it easier to fire a large swath of government workers who currently have civil service protections, aligns with Vought’s vision.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
“We want to put them in trauma.”
Vought also revealed the extent of the Center for Renewing America’s role in whipping up right-wing panic ahead of the 2022 midterms over an increase in asylum-seekers crossing at the U.S.-Mexico border.
In February 2022, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich released a legal opinion claiming the state was under “invasion” by violent cartels and could invoke war powers to deploy National Guard troops to its southern border. The legally dubious “invasion” theory became a potent Republican talking point.
Vought said in the 2023 speech that he and Cuccinelli, the former top Homeland Security official for Trump, personally lobbied Brnovich on the effort. “We said, ‘Look, you can write your own opinion, but here’s a draft opinion of what this should look like,’” Vought said.
The nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight later obtained an email in which Vought pitched the “invasion” framework to Brnovich.
Brnovich wrote in an email to ProPublica that he recalled multiple discussions with Cuccinelli about border security. But he added that “the invasion opinion was the result of a formal request from a member of the Arizona legislature. And I can assure you it was drafted and written by hard working attorneys (including myself) in our office.”
In the event Trump loses, Vought called for Republican leaders of states such as Florida and Texas to “create red-state sanctuaries” by “kicking out all the feds as much as they possibly can.”
“Nothing Short of a Quiet Revolution”
The two speeches delivered by Vought, taken together, offer an unvarnished look at the animating ideology and political worldview of a key figure in the MAGA movement.
Over the last century, Vought said, the U.S. has “experienced nothing short of a quiet revolution” and abandoned what he saw as the true meaning and force of the Constitution. The country today, he argued, was a “post-constitutional regime,” one that no longer adhered to the separation of powers among the three branches of government as laid out by the framers.
He lamented that the conservative right and the nation writ large had become “too secular” and “too globalist.” He urged his allies to join his mission to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.”
And in one of his most dramatic flourishes, he likened the 2024 election to moments in America’s history when the country was facing all-out war.
“We are here in the year of 2024, a year that very well [could]—and I believe it will—rival 1776 and 1860 for the complexity and the uncertainty of the forces arrayed against us,” Vought told his audience, referring to years when the colonies declared independence from Britain and the first state seceded over President Abraham Lincoln’s election. “God put us here for such a time as this.”
Vought said that independent agencies and unelected bureaucrats and experts wield far too much power while the traditional legislative process is a sham. He extended that critique to agencies like the Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve, whose independence from the White House had long been protected by both political parties.
“The left in the U.S. doesn’t want an energetic president with the power to motivate the executive branch to the will of the American people consistent with the laws of the country,” he said in the 2024 speech. “They don’t want a vibrant Congress where great questions are debated and decided in front of the American people. They don’t want empowered members. They want discouraged and bored backbenchers.”
He added, “The all-empowered career expert like Tony Fauci is their model, wielding power behind the curtains.” Fauci was one of the top public health experts under Trump at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and a key figure in coordinating the national response.
What sets Vought apart from most of his fellow conservative activists is that he accuses powerful organizations on the right of being complicit in the current system of government, singling out the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, the conservative and libertarian legal network co-chaired by activist Leonard Leo. The society is widely seen as an instrumental force in cultivating young conservative lawyers and building a bench of future judges whose embrace of legal theories like originalism and textualism have led to decisions overturning abortion rights, environmental protections and social welfare policies.
Yet in his 2024 speech, Vought accused the Federalist Society and “originalist judges” of being a part of the problem, perpetuating the “post-constitutional structure” that Vought lamented by not ruling more aggressively to weaken or dismantle independent regulatory agencies that Vought and his allies view as illegitimate or unconstitutional.
It was “like being in a contract quietly revoked two decades ago, in which one party didn’t tell the other,” he said. “At some point, reality needs to set in. Instead, we have the vaunted so-called Federalist Society and originalist judges acting as a Praetorian Guard for this post-constitutional structure.”
Echoing Trump’s rhetoric, Vought implicitly endorsed the false claim of a stolen 2020 election and likened the media’s debunkings of that claim to Chinese Communist propaganda.
“In the aftermath of the election, we had all these people going around saying, ‘Well, I don’t see any evidence of voter fraud. The media’s not giving enough [of] a compelling case,’” he said. “Well, that compelling case has emerged. But does a Christian in China ask and come away saying, ‘You know, there’s no persecution, because I haven’t read about it in the state regime press?’ No, they don’t.”
Vought referred to the people detained for alleged crimes committed on Jan. 6, 2021, as “political prisoners” and defended the lawyers Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman, who have both faced criminal charges for their role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Federal law enforcement agencies, he added, “are keeping political opponents in jail, and I think we need to be honest about that.”
The left, Vought continued, has the ultimate goal of ending representative democracy altogether. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” he said, “in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us. And they are going to continue to aim it until they no longer have to win elections.”
When Democrats called Trump an “existential threat to democracy,” they were not merely calling for his defeat at the ballot box, he said, but were using “coded language the national security state uses overseas when they are overthrowing other governments” to discourage the military from putting down anti-Trump protests should he win.
“They’re making Trump out to be a would-be dictator or an authoritarian,” he said. “So they’re actively working now to ensure, on a number of levels, that the military will perceive this as dictatorial and therefore not respond to any orders to quell any violence.”
Trump, Vought insisted, has the credibility and the track record to defeat the “Marxist” left and bring about the changes that Vought and his MAGA allies seek. In his view, the Democratic Party’s agenda and its “quiet revolution” could be stopped only by a “radical constitutionalist,” someone in the mold of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. For Vought, no one was in a better position to fill that role than Trump.
“We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country,” Vought said. “He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country.
“That,” he added, “is nothing more than a gift of God.”
National newspaper endorsements probably don’t make much of a difference in presidential elections (local ones are a very different story). So in terms of the outcome on November 5, the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and LA Times spiking endorsements of Kamala Harris that their respective editorial boards had already drafted probably won’t move the needle. But in terms of what we can expect from America’s media moguls in the face of a growing authoritarian movement, this was a lights-flashing-red moment—and it should mobilize everyone who cares about democracy.
Because this is not just about LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong and WaPo owner Jeff Bezos. It’s about whether we can afford a press dependent on billionaires and corporate bean-counters; a press whose courage (or spinelessness) depends on how the owner is feeling that day.
Here’s just a sample of who controls our major newsrooms right now. The five biggest newspaper chains in America are owned by a hedge fund, a private equity fund, another hedge fund, a billionaire family, and another billionaire family. Among major television news networks, owners include the Murdoch family, Disney, Comcast, Paramount, and Warner Brothers Discovery.
Will these owners respect journalistic independence? We don’t have to guess. Soon-Shiong was previously in the headlines for pushing to kill LA Times coverage involving a friend of his and his dog. (His editor in chief ultimately resigned.) Lewis, the publisher Bezos hired for the Post, reportedly pushed his team to stop investigating his role in a British eavesdropping scandal. NBC head Cesar Conde put a powerful documentary about Trump’s child separation policy on ice until after the election. And let’s not even talk about Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, whose platforms profit from pumping out disinformation while suppressing actual news.
But the newsroom pressures of the past may be child’s play compared to what could happen under a second Trump administration. Already, simpering executives are lining up to make nice with a president whose vengeance could punish and whose whim could reward them.
(Not that a non-endorsement will save anyone from Trump’s wrath: The only thing that satisfies him is Fox News-style bootlicking, and even that network isn’t allowed to get out of line for a minute. But maybe Bezos is betting that he can pull a Mark Zuckerberg, who after calling Trump “badass” was patted on the head for “staying out of the election.”)
We can’t look into Bezos’ or Soon-Shiong’s hearts to see whether their decisions were driven by “anticipatory obedience,” by hopes of drawing conservative readers—whom Bezos, according to the New York Times, has identified as a growth market—or by fears for their bottom line (on the day that the Post publicly spiked its Harris endorsement, executives from Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, which has millions in government contracts, met with Trump). It’s possible, too, that they just didn’t want the hassle: Bezos might not have wished to defend an endorsement at his next birthday bash and Soon-Shiong might have had Thanksgiving dinner in mind. But such nonchalance certainly doesn’t inspire confidence that they’ll show any spine when authoritarians knock on their newspapers’ doors.
Depressing? Yes. But let’s not end the story there, because billionaires and corporations are not the only players in the media business. There are thousands of newsrooms all over the country that are independently owned or nonprofit organizations, including Mother Jones (and our parent organization, the Center for Investigative Reporting). No one owns us, and no one ever will. We’re accountable only to you, our audience. Seventy percent of our budget comes from individual supporters, and this is the place where I say, as loudly and urgently as I can, that I hope you’ll join them. That’s what gives us the independence to investigate oligarchs instead of cowering before them.
Want to do more? There is a non-corporate newsroom in pretty much every community of the country (and also many that specialize in particular issues, from criminal justice to climate change to reproductive rights). Find yours. These journalists are incredibly hard-working, efficient, and fearless—I know because we often partner with them. And they—all of us—are chronically starved for money. I can speak from experience at Mother Jones, where this time of the year means losing sleep because I don’t know how we’ll put together a budget for the following year to maintain a newsroom full of the bravest, toughest reporters anywhere. (In total, our budget for a year is a smidge under what Jeff Bezos earns in four hours.)
But here’s what we have that is worth more than all the superyachts and megamansions in the world: The knowledge that when we are ready to publish, no one can tell us not to. Thanks to you. Please join our team of supporters (you can also subscribe to our award-winning print magazine) and help us finish this election cycle strong.
Two years after the US Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion, tens of millions of Americans will go to the polls this November hoping to protect access to the procedure—whether their lawmakers like it or not. Ten states— some already with robust protections, others with near-total bans—have measures on their ballots to enshrine abortion rights in their constitutions. The expected outpouring of voters, including in key swing states, could help determine control of the White House, Congress, state legislatures, and state supreme courts.
Reproductive freedom has proved to be one of the strongest currents shaping the outcome of American elections since 2022. So far, voters in seven states have reacted to the end of Roe v. Wade by passing ballot measures aimed at restoring, and even expanding, Roe’s protections. In a few of those states, the voter-initiative process empowered the public to bypass GOP-dominated legislatures and supersede decades-old restrictions. Reproductive rights organizers are hoping to continue that winning streak on November 5.
But faced with the broad appeal of abortion initiatives in GOP-led states such as Ohio, Republican officials have gone to sometimes extreme lengths to undermine the latest measures. In Florida, for example, Gov. Ron DeSantis has waged a multifront war on Amendment 4, threatening television stations that air ads favoring the measure and issuing a 348-page report accusing the Floridians Protecting Freedom campaign of “widespread petition fraud.”
While most of this year’s measures have a common objective—protecting reproductive access—they take very different approaches to reaching that goal. Here is a rundown of what’s on the November ballot, which we will update as election results become available.
Arizona
In anticipation of the end of Roe, Arizona Republicans passed a 15-week abortion ban in early 2022. But they also left in place an 1864 statute that outlawed nearly all abortions and threatened providers with jail time—a “zombie” law that was moot as long as Roe was in effect. This past April, the Arizona Supreme Court revived that Civil-War era ban by a 4–2 vote. The GOP-controlled legislature quickly repealed the old law, but many Arizonans were outraged at what the court had done, and the campaign to put Proposition 139 on the November ballot exploded. Prop 139 would enshrine a fundamental right to abortion in the Arizona Constitution and prohibit the state from restricting or banning abortion until the point of fetal viability—about 24 weeks. Abortions would be allowed later in pregnancy to save the mother’s life or to protect her physical or mental health. The amendment would also protect anyone who helps another person obtain an abortion.
A coalition of reproductive rights groups certified more than 575,000 signatures this past summer—the most ever validated for a citizens initiative in the state’s history, supporters said. In a New York Times/Siena College poll in late September, Prop 139 was ahead among likely voters by a resounding 58 percent.If it passes, Prop 139 could be used to challenge almost 40 abortion laws on Arizona’s books, including the existing 15-week ban, a prohibition on telehealth abortions, and a parental consent requirement for teenagers.
Colorado
Long before the Dobbs decision, Colorado legislators passed numerous lawssafeguarding access to abortion. But after Dobbs, reproductive health advocates in the state concluded that even the strongest statutes weren’t strong enough—Colorado needed to enshrine those protections in its constitution. The measure they put on the November ballot, Amendment 79, wouldn’t just establish a right to abortion; it would repeal a 40-year-old constitutional provision that prohibited the use of state dollars to fund abortion. Sponsored by a coalition called Coloradans for Protecting Reproductive Freedom, the measure needs 55 percent of votes to pass.
Surrounded by states with bans or heavily restrictive laws, Colorado is a crucial abortion access point for the West. With no gestational limits, the state is also a haven for anyone seeking an abortion later in pregnancy, as it is home to one of four clinics in the US that offer third-trimester procedures. Repealing the ban on state funding would allow Colorado to use its state Medicaid dollars to pay for abortions, making the procedure more accessible for low-income patients.
Florida
Florida’s Amendment 4 would enshrine in the state’s constitution the freedom to seek an abortion before fetal viability, and after viability if a medical provider determines that the procedure is necessary to preserve a patient’s health.
If the measure passes, it would dramatically improve access to reproductive care in Florida, which since May has banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Before that, the state permitted abortions up to 15 weeks, and before Dobbs, until 24 weeks. The impact of the Florida vote will be felt throughout the Southeast: Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Kentucky all have near-total abortion bans; Georgia and South Carolina have six-week bans, and North Carolina’s 12-week ban is made more burdensome by a 72-hour waiting period.
The stakes for passage are high, and so are the barriers. Over the last several election cycles, Florida has turned out more conservative voters than liberal ones. While reproductive rights are popular across the political spectrum, the state has a 60 percent threshold to approve constitutional amendments; the other red states that have passed abortion-protective measures since Dobbs—Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio—only required simple majorities. Meanwhile, Gov. DeSantis and his GOP administration have done everything they can to sabotage the amendment—including sending “election police” to the homes of people who signed the petitions, ostensibly to root out fraud. If the measure passes, DeSantis and his allies are widely expected to fight just as hard to overturn the results.
Maryland
Maryland’s Question 1, which was placed on the November ballot by the state legislature, does not mention “abortion”—much to the chagrin of supporters and opponents alike. Instead, the amendment broadly establishes the constitutional right to “reproductive freedom,” including the freedom to decide whether to continue or end a pregnancy. It needs a simple majority to pass.
Maryland already has some of the least restrictive abortion laws in the country: There is no gestational limit, state Medicaid covers the procedure, and a shield law protects patients who travel from states with abortion bans. This has made the state a critical access point for abortion seekers further along in pregnancy, as well as people traveling from the South. Abortion protections are widely popular in the state; in a recent poll by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 69 percent of respondents said they plan to vote for Question 1.
Missouri
Missouri’s near-total abortion ban took effectmere minutes after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022—making it the first state in the nation to broadly prohibit abortion.Abortion-rights advocates soon set about crafting a ballot initiative to end the ban, inspired by wins in other states. Now, with Amendment 3, voters will decide whether they want the right to “reproductive freedom”—defined as the ability to make and carry out one’s own decisions about contraception, abortion, and healthcare during pregnancy. If approved by a simple majority, the amendment would set up a legal battle to overturn the current ban and challenge the many other Missouri laws that regulated abortion providers nearly out of existence even when Roe was still in effect.
Amendment 3’s proponents, a coalition known as Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, have traveled a rocky road just to get the measure before voters. They’ve overcome blatant obstruction by top state GOP officials, multiple legal challenges, and deep internal divisions over whether the initiative should allow the state to ban abortions after fetal viability. The final text protects abortion rights until viability, and permits later abortions if needed to protect the life or health of the pregnant person.
Montana
Constitutional Initiative 128 establishes the right to make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy, including abortion. If passed, it would allow the state to regulate abortion after fetal viability, so long as those restrictions don’t prevent abortions that health care providers deem medically necessary. The amendment, which requires more than 50 percent of the vote, would also prevent the government from criminalizing patients and anyone who helps a person exercise her abortion rights.
If top Republican state officials had it their way, the measure would not even be on the ballot. State courts intervened at multiple points; the Montana Supreme Court overruled Attorney General Austin Knudsen’s initial rejection of the proposed amendment, nixed Knudsen’s drafted ballot language saying the amendment “may increase the number of taxpayer-funded abortions,” and threatened Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen with a contempt charge because she refused to hand over the sample ballot petition to the campaign behind the amendment, Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights. After abortion rights supporters submitted nearly double the required 60,000 signatures, Jacobsen even tried changing the rules to throw out the signatures of inactive registered voters, until a district court ordered her to stop.
Thanks to the state supreme court, abortion is currently legal in Montana until fetal viability, despite the best efforts of Republican state legislators to restrict access. Montanans have already brushed off one GOP attempt to stigmatize abortion; in November 2022, 52 percent of voters rejected a legislature-initiated statute that would have made it a felony for doctors to not provide care to infants born aliveafter induced labor, a cesarean section or an “attempted abortion.” (The law wasn’t necessary since Montana, like every other state, already makes infanticide a crime.)
Nebraska
Nebraska voters will see dueling abortion amendments on their November ballots. Initiative 434restricts abortion rights, banning the procedure after 12 weeks of pregnancy with limited exceptions. That’s essentially the same law already on the state’s books—but the measure would enshrine it as a constitutional amendment, making it much harder to repeal. And because the amendment doesn’t protect abortion before the 12-week mark, state politicians could always go further and pass a complete ban, as Republican Gov. Jim Pillen has pledged to do.
By contrast, Initiative 439expands abortion rights, creating a “fundamental right to abortion until fetal viability, or when needed to protect the life or health of the pregnant patient.” In practice, the amendment would roughly double the length of time for pregnant people in Nebraska to get an abortion. Crucially, it would block lawmakers from passing a total ban.
If the double initiatives sound confusing, well, that’s the point. Anti-abortion activists have repeatedly tried to muddy the waters about which ballot initiative is which, as Rachel Cohen at Voxhas reported. They’ve also tried to get the pro-abortion initiative thrown off the ballot on a technicality, but the Nebraska Supreme Court shot them down.
Nevada, one of the swingiest states in the 2024 election, has its own version of the Equal Rights Amendment, passed by voters in 2022. But it didn’t explicitly mention protections for abortion.Question 6 constitutionally enshrines the right to abortion until fetal viability or for the health or life of the mother, as determined on a case-by-case basis by health care providers. Any pre-viability restrictions must be directly related to promoting the health of the pregnant person and “consistent with accepted clinical standards of practice.” This year’s vote is just the first step in a multiyear process; assuming a simple majority of voters approve it, the measure must be passed again in 2026 to become part of the constitution.
Thanks to a law passed in 1973, abortion has been legal in Nevada until 24 weeks. Because voters passed a referendum on that law in 1990, it can only be changed by a direct ballot measure. Protections for abortion are very popular in Nevada; a University of Maryland poll conducted over the summer found that about 70 percent of state voters oppose criminalizing abortion at any stage of pregnancy. The campaign behind the amendment, Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, has raised nearly $10 million since January, according to campaign finance reports; the Coalition for Parents and Children PAC, which successfully sued to block an initial version of the amendment that covered reproductive healthcare more broadly, hasn’t raised or spent any money.
The proposal is a broad version of the Equal Rights Amendment, the long-running feminist effort to guarantee women’s rights in state and federal constitutions. Right now, New York’s constitution only forbids government discrimination on the basis of race and religion. Prop 1 adds more protected categories to that list: disability, age, ethnicity, national origin, and sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. Those types of discrimination are already banned under state law, but by enshrining protections in the constitution, Prop 1 would make them harder for legislators to attack in the future—for example, if New York politics keep trending rightward.
Here’s where abortion comes in: The amendment also bans discrimination based on “pregnancy status, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health care and autonomy.” Not only does that definition go farther than any other state, it leaves little room for judges to interpret in ways that might limit abortion access, according to Katharine Bodde, of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Yet while New York Democrats initially viewed Prop 1 as a surefire way to boost voter turnout, their right-wing opponents have seized on transphobic messaging to great effect—making this blue-state fight unexpectedly close.
South Dakota
South Dakota’s current abortion ban is one of the most extreme in the country, with all abortions banned except when needed to save a pregnant person’s life. Amendment G, backed by a group called Dakotans for Health, would replace that law with a trimester-based system allowing increasing restrictions on abortion as a pregnancy progresses.
In the first trimester, the state would be banned from interfering with “a woman’s abortion decision and its effectuation.” In the second trimester, the state could restrict abortion in ways “reasonably related to the physical health of the pregnant woman.” Third-trimester abortions could be banned, except when necessary to preserve a pregnant person’s life or health. The amendment needs a simple majority to pass.
Planned Parenthood and other abortion-rights groups aren’t supporting Amendment G, which they’ve said doesn’t go far enough. But the conservative Republicans who dominate state politics are still so terrified of the measure that they passed an emergency law to let voters revoke their petition signatures—then opponents of the measure led a phone banking effort to dupe signers into pulling their support. Why are state Republicans spooked? “If you can do it in South Dakota, it will strike fear into the hearts of every red-state legislature in the country,” Dakotans for Health co-founder Adam Weiland told the American Prospect.
Madison Pauly, Abby Vesoulis, Julianne McShane, and Nina Martincontributed reporting. This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Top image photo credits: Octavio Jones/AFP/Getty; RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post/Getty; William Campbell/Getty; Rachel Aston/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Getty; Getty(3)
This story was originally published by Gristand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
The morning temperature is nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit as Keith Seaman sweats beneath his bucket hat, walking door to door through the cookie-cutter blocks of a subdivision in Casa Grande, Arizona. Seaman, a Democrat who represents this Republican-leaning area in the state’s House of Representatives, is trying to retain a seat he won by a margin of around 600 votes just two years ago. He wants to know what issues matter most to his constituents, but most of them don’t answer the door, or they say they’re too busy to talk. Those that do answer tend to mention standard campaign issues like rising prices and education—which Seaman, a former public school teacher, is only too happy to discuss.
“We’ll do our best to get more public money into education,” he tells one man in the neighborhood, before turning to the constituent’s kindergarten-age daughter to pat her on the head. “What grade are you in?”
“Why are you at our house?” the girl asks in return.
Seaman has knocked on thousands of doors as he seeks reelection this year. While his voters are fired up about everything from inflation to abortion, one issue doesn’t come up much on Seaman’s scorching tour through suburbia—even though it’s plainly visible in the parched cotton and alfalfa fields that surround the subdivision where he’s stumping for votes.
That issue is water. In Pinal County, which Seaman represents, water shortages mean that farmers no longer have access to the Colorado River, formerly the lifeblood of their cotton and alfalfa empires. The booming population of the area’s subdivisions face a water reckoning as well: The state has placed a moratorium on new housing development in parts of the county, as part of an effort to protect dwindling groundwater resources.
Over the past four years, Arizona has become a poster child for water scarcity in the United States. Between decades of unsustainable groundwater pumping and a once-in-a-millenium drought, fueled by climate change, water sources in every region of the state are under threat. As groundwater aquifers dry up near some of the most populous areas, officials have blocked thousands of new homes from being built in and around the booming Phoenix metropolitan area.
In more remote parts of the state, water-guzzling dairy farms have caused local residents’ wells to run dry. The drought on the Colorado River, long a lifeline for both agriculture and suburbia across the US West, has forced further water cuts to both farms and neighborhoods in the heart of the state.
Arizona voters know that they’re deciding the country’s future—the state is one of just a half-dozen likely to determine the next president—but it’s unclear if they know that they’re voting on an existential threat in their own backyards. The outcome of state legislative races in swing districts like Seaman’s will determine who controls the divided state legislature, where Democrats are promoting new water restrictions and Republicans are fighting to protect thirsty industries like real estate and agriculture, regardless of what that means for future water availability.
“Everybody’s running for reelection,” said Kathleen Ferris, who crafted some of the state’s landmark water legislation and now teaches water policy at Arizona State University. “Nobody wants to sit around the table and try to deal with these issues.”
For these lawmakers’ voters, topics like abortion, the economy, and public safety are drawing far more attention than the water in their taps, and it will be these issues that drive the most people to the polls. But for the state officials who win on election day, their most consequential legacy may well be what they decide to do about the future of water in Arizona.
“They keep saying, ‘Well, water is nonpartisan,’” Ferris added. “That’s not true anymore. It’s really not true.”
It’s not hard to see why hot-button issues like immigration and the cost of living are on the minds of Arizona voters: The state sits on the US-Mexico border and has experienced some of the highest rates of inflation in the country over the past few years. Meanwhile, its Republican-controlled state legislature has cut public education funding and allowed a 19th-century abortion ban to remain in effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The state is at the center of almost every major political debate—“the center of the political universe,” in Politico’s words—and its nearly evenly divided electorate makes its swing votes key to determining who controls both the White House and Congress.
Even when the temperature doesn’t top 115 degrees F, the resulting campaign frenzy can make an out-of-state visitor lightheaded. Lawn signs clutter gas station parking lots, highway medians, and front yards; virtually every other television commercial is an ad for or against a candidate for Congress, the presidency, or some state office. A commercial slamming a Democratic candidate as a defund-the-police radical will frequently air right after an ad condemning a Republican as a threat to democracy itself. Mailers and campaign literature clog mailboxes and dangle on doorknobs.
This avalanche of campaign advertising seldom mentions water. During a week reporting in the state, I saw exactly one ad that focused on the issue. It was a billboard in Tucson announcing that Kirsten Engel, the Democratic candidate for a pivotal congressional seat, supports “Protecting Arizona from Drought”—not exactly the most substantive engagement with the issue.
The reason for this avoidance is simple, according to Nick Ponder, a vice president of government affairs at HighGround, a leading Arizona political strategy firm. He said that while many voters in the state rank water among their top three or four issues, most don’t have a detailed understanding of water policy—meaning it’s unlikely that they’ll vote based on how candidates say they’ll handle water issues.
“They understand that we’re in a desert, and that we have water challenges—in particular groundwater and the Colorado River—but I don’t think that they understand how to best manage that,” he told Grist.
And how could they? Understanding Arizona water policy involves a maze of acronyms—AMA, GMA, INA, ADWR, CAWS, DAWS, DCP, CAP, and CAGRD are just the entry-level nouns—and complex technical models that track water levels thousands of feet underground. Even many elected officials on both sides of the aisle aren’t well versed in the issue, so they defer to the party leaders who have the strongest grasp on how the state’s water system works.
One upshot of this confusion — as well as the state’s bitter partisan divide — is that, even as Arizona’s water crisis has gained national attention, state lawmakers have failed to pass significant legislation to address the deficit of this critical resource. Over the past two years, the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, has been unable to broker a deal with the Republicans who control both chambers of the state legislature. Hobbs has put forward a series of proposals that would reform both agricultural water use in rural areas and rapid development in the suburbs of Phoenix, but she has come up a handful of votes short of passing them. Republicans have put forward their own plans—which are friendlier to the avowed water needs of farmers and housing developers—that she has vetoed.
Once you cut through the thicket of reports and acronyms, it’s clear that this year’s election is pivotal for breaking this gridlock and determining the future of water policy in the state. Republicans hold one-vote majorities in both chambers of the legislature, so state Democrats only need to flip one seat in each chamber in order to gain unified control of the government. If that happens, Hobbs will be able to ignore the objections of the agriculture and homebuilding industries, which have kept Republicans from signing on to her plans.
Hobbs and the Democrats want to limit or prohibit new farmland in rural areas, while simultaneously making it harder for homebuilders around Phoenix and Casa Grande to resume building new subdivisions. This would slow down, but not reverse, the decline in water levels around the state — and it would likely diminish profits for two industries that are pillars of the state’s economy. If Republicans retain control of the legislature, they would reopen new suburban development and roll out more flexible rules for rural groundwater, giving a freer hand to both industries but incurring the risk of more groundwater shortages in decades to come.
Legislators came close to reaching agreement on both issues earlier this year. Republicans passed a bill that would relax development restrictions on fallow farmland where housing tracts could be developed—a compromise with theoretical appeal to both parties’ desire to keep building housing for the state’s booming population—but Hobbs vetoed it, saying it lacked enough safeguards to prevent future water shortages. At the same time, lawmakers from both parties made progress on a deal that would allow the state to set limits on groundwater drainage in rural areas, but the talks stalled as this year’s legislative session came to a close.
“We had so many meetings, and we’ve never gotten closer,” said Priya Sundareshan, a Democratic state senator who is the party’s foremost expert on water issues in the legislature. “Now we’re in campaign mode.”
In Seaman’s district of Pinal County, where water restrictions have created difficulties for both the agriculture and real estate industries, many of those who are engaged on water issues see a stark partisan divide. Paul Keeling, a fifth-generation farmer in Casa Grande, framed the shortage of water on the Colorado River as a competition between red Arizona and blue California.
“We’re supposed to be able to get a part of that water, and now we can’t,” he told Grist. “It’s all going to California, to the f***ing liberals and the Democrats.”
Keeling has had to shrink his family’s cotton-farming enterprise over the past few years, because he’s lost the right to draw water from the canal that delivers Colorado River water to Arizona. It’s one reason among many that Keeling said he’s supporting former President Donald Trump this year, as he has in the past two elections.
The Republican leadership of Pinal County has sparred with Governor Hobbs and state Democrats on housing issues as well, albeit in far less animated terms. In response to studies showing the county’s aquifer diminishing, the state government placed a moratorium on new groundwater-fed development in the area in 2019. Homebuilders and developers pinned their hopes on Republicans’ proposed reform allowing new development on former farmland, but Hobbs’ veto dashed those dreams.
Stephen Miller, a conservative Republican who serves on the county’s board of supervisors, told Grist that he views the Democrats’ opposition to new Pinal County development as motivated by partisan politics. The Republicans legislators who represent the area voted in favor of the bill that would restart development, but Seaman, the area’s lone Democratic representative, voted against it.
“We’re just sitting back watching because the makeup of the House and the Senate will determine what happens here,” Miller said. “If they’re both taken over by the Democrats, I think there’s probably very little we can do [to relax the development restrictions].”
As Miller sees it, the restriction on new housing is part of a ploy by the state’s Democratic establishment to suppress growth in a conservative area—or even repossess its water.
“It shouldn’t be a partisan thing at all,” he said. “You’d think that they’d all want to pull this wagon in the same direction. But all they want Pinal County for is to stick a straw in here and take our water.”
Another reason for the relative campaign silence on water issues is that the regions where water is most threatened—areas where massive agricultural groundwater usage has emptied household wells and caused land to crack apart—tend to be represented by the politicians who are most dismissive of water conservation efforts, and vice versa.
Cochise County, where an enormous dairy operation called Riverview has residents up in arms over vanishing well water, backed Trump by almost 20 points in 2020; La Paz County, where a massive Saudi farming operation has drained local aquifers, backed the former president by almost 40 points. The state representatives from these areas are almost all Republicans opposed to new water regulation; many have direct ties to the agriculture or real estate industries.
Meanwhile, the majority of pro-regulation Democrats in the state legislature represent urban areas that have more diverse sources of water, stronger regulations, and more backup water to help them get through periods of shortage.
The state legislature’s two leading voices on water exemplify this divide. Democratic state senator Priya Sundareshan represents a progressive district in the core of Tucson, where city leaders have banked trillions of gallons of Colorado River water, all but ensuring that the city won’t go dry—and can even continue to grow as the river shrinks.
Sundareshan’s chief adversary is Republican Gail Griffin, a veteran legislator from Cochise County who chairs the lower chamber’s powerful natural resources committee. Griffin, a realtor, has blocked nearly all proposed water legislation for years, preventing even bills from members of her own party from getting a vote. Other legislators and water experts often cite her as the principal reason the state has not moved any major bills to regulate rural water usage—even though the county she represents faces arguably the most acute water crisis of them all. (Griffin did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.)
Sundareshan, for her part, admits that it’s awkward that urban legislators are trying to set water policy for the rural parts of the state. But she says that Republicans have stalled on the issue for too long.
“It doesn’t look great,” she said. “But right now, rural legislators are setting policy for urban areas. That’s why that’s why legislators like me are stepping up to say, ‘Well, we need to actually solve these issues.’ Water is water, right? And the lack of availability of water in a rural area is going to impact the availability of water in our urban areas.”
The backlash to unsustainable groundwater pumping is not just coming from urban progressives, though—it’s also coming rural Republicans’ own constituents. In 2022, Cochise County voters approved a ballot proposal to restrict the growth of their water usage. (The strictness of the new rules is still being debated.) Even so, there’s no sign that any of these areas will endorse a Democrat. When Hobbs held a series of town halls in rural areas facing groundwater issues last year, she and her staff faced significant blowback from attendees who didn’t want the state meddling in their water usage. This year, elections in these areas are not even close to competitive. Griffin, the legislature’s strongest opponent of water regulation, is running unopposed.
This means that the future of the state’s water policy depends on voters in just a few swing districts that straddle the urban-rural divide: suburban seats on the outskirts of Phoenix and Tucson, where new subdivisions collide with vestigial farmland and open desert. For many voters in these purple districts, Arizona’s water problems are far from a motivating political issue—and likely won’t be for decades to come, as aquifers silently diminish underground. Voters might hear about water issues in other parts of the state, or wince when they see their water bills, but the disappearing water under their feet is all but invisible, and may remain so for the rest of their lives.
This dissonance is best exemplified by the 17th state legislative district, perhaps the most pivotal swing seat in the legislature. The district extends along the northern edge of Tucson, roping in a mix of retirement communities, rural houses, and cotton farms that may soon be replaced by new tract housing. Many of the new developments in these areas, such as the sprawling Saddlebrooke neighborhood, rely on finite aquifers and get water delivered by private companies. To comply with Arizona law, developers have to prove that they have enough water to supply new homes for 100 years, but even that doesn’t guarantee that the aquifers won’t continue drying up.
It’s difficult to interest voters in a groundwater decline that is happening out of view, in a crisis that almost nobody is talking about publicly. The best that local Democrats can do is make a general pitch that water security is a common sense, bipartisan problem that they are committed to solving—without needing to explain how they would resolve complex questions about the interplay between water regulation and economic growth, among other nuances.
John McLean, a former engineer who is running against a conservative legislator in an effort to flip the 17th district, has sought to position himself as a straight-down-the-middle moderate. His campaign literature tends not to mention his party affiliation, but it does tout water as one of his three key policy issues, along with public education and abortion access. The campaign pamphlet he’s been leaving in the doorways of homes in Saddlebrooke argues for a “commonsense approaches to secure our water future” and declares that “we must stop foreign and out-of-state corporations from pumping unlimited water out of our state”—something that has happened in the conservative, rural parts of Arizona, but nowhere near Saddlebrooke and the 17th district.
When I joined him as he knocked doors in Saddlebrooke, McLean told me that he’s found that almost every voter he meets agrees with him on the need for sensible water regulations—a far cry from lightning-rod issues like public safety, abortion, and inflation.
“Everybody is really serious about water independence, and I think that they’re concerned about partisanship,” he said. “I don’t think there’s really much of a partisan difference among citizens when it comes to water.”
That apparent consensus, however, does not extend to the state’s elected officials.
“My Republican opponent voted to relax groundwater pumping restrictions,” McLean,referring to a bill that would have eliminated legal liability for groundwater users whose water usage compromised nearby rivers or streams. “So he was on exactly the wrong side of that one.”
In August, political science professor Ashley Moraguez started the fall semester at the University of North Carolina Asheville with “grand plans” for engaging students on electoral politics. As the director of UNC Asheville Votes, a nonpartisan student-run group, Moraguez planned for fall to be the “Semester of Civics”—including voter registration tabling events, meet-and-greets with local candidates, and a “Party at the Polls” in Reed Plaza with food and live music.
For students, an age group with historically low turnout, these efforts weren’t an abstract exercise: North Carolina is a crucial swing state that will likely be won by a razor-thin margin. Donald Trump won the state by less than 75,000 votes in 2020 and now leads Kamala Harris there by about 1 percentage point, according to recent polls. In other words, every vote in North Carolina matters.
Then in late September, Hurricane Helene hit. The storm dumped nearly 14 inches of rain on Asheville, causing roads and neighborhoods to flood and killing nearly 100 people statewide. UNC Asheville, a campus of 2,900 undergraduates, lost electricity and running water. Students and faculty relocated.Classes were canceled and will be held virtually for the rest of the semester.
Now, after Helene, getting to the polls—or getting a hold of an absentee ballot—got even harder for college students in western North Carolina.
This has made Moraguez’s work more challenging, and also much more important. With the campus closed, the university relocated its early voting site from the student union to the edge of campus, at a health center. Moraguez and UNC Asheville Votes pivoted to providing virtual resources—a website, Instagram page, and email address where students could ask voting-related questions. “I’m really heartened by how many students, amidst everything they’re dealing with, have been reaching out with questions so that they’re making sure that their ballots do count,” she says.
Still, she says, it’s hard to know who, or how many, the group is reaching. Parts of western North Carolina still don’t have utilities, electricity, or wifi. And many students, understandably, have more pressing issues than figuring out how to vote. “They’ve lost their homes and their loved ones,” Moraguez says. “And they’re just trying to figure out how to survive right now.”
As a political science professor and voting leader in Asheville, Moraguez is uniquely positioned to explain the challenges this key demographic faces post-Helene. And she, at least in part, understands what they’re going through: When I spoke to her earlier this month, on the first day of early voting in North Carolina, she had no reliable internet or potable water at her home in Asheville and had spent the previous weeks “bouncing around” and staying with family in other parts of North Carolina and Georgia.
Here’s an edited and condensed version of our conversation:
With the university on hiatus and then switching to remote classes, there’s almost an echo to what happened when Covid broke out. Did the pandemic help prepare you for this? Does it feel familiar?
Yes and no. In the 2020 election cycle, we had to completely rethink how we did voter engagement on campus. I’ve learned a lot since 2020 about how to engage people remotely.
Students taught me how to use social media more effectively. We figured out how to communicate better about complex electoral information over email through trial and error. We had the website ready to go. We had the Instagram page ready to go. We didn’t have to start those from scratch, as we did in 2020. So in that respect, despite these really unfortunate and tragic situations, we were ready to pivot our electoral engagement efforts much more quickly than in the past.
The challenge is that I still don’t have reliable internet at my home. I don’t have potable water at home. Will I be able to teach online? Do I go stay with family? My students are going to have utility and infrastructure issues. Those issues are more severe than I remember from 2020.
What do you mean when you say students helped you learn to navigate social media better?
When I was in college, Facebook was the social media of choice. I graduated from college in 2009. I wasn’t super familiar with Instagram Stories, and I don’t think I fully recognized the extent to which young people do get some of their information and news from social media.
Students really taught me how to more effectively convey useful information on social media in a way that’s palatable to young people, and how to make things more aesthetically pleasing, more likely to get attention. I don’t primarily get my news from social media, and so it was really helpful for me to have students leading this. I’ve learned just as much from them as they have from me.
What are your biggest challenges right now in getting-out-the-vote efforts?
It’s hard to know who we’re reaching. I fear that in our campus outreach efforts— since they all have been online—that we’re missing some potential voters in western North Carolina who are most affected by these storms.
Our State Board of Elections and our state legislature have adopted a slate of emergency measures to help voters in western North Carolina have better access to the polls, but those changes are only effective in so far as voters are aware of them.
And there are some people who just have much more pressing issues on their plate right now than thinking about the election. They’ve lost their homes and their loved ones, and they’re just trying to figure out how to survive right now. And you know, their votes matter, their voices matter. And I think right now, especially, we want to hear from people who are having those experiences, but they might not be getting the information they need or have the capacity to vote right now.
I was in college during the 2016 election. I requested an absentee ballot from Florida, which is where I grew up and where I was hoping to vote. It never came. And I just never followed up on it and never voted. Is there a concern that, at the end of the day, these are teenagers or young adults in their early 20s and we’re asking a lot of them to stay on top of voting?
It’s undoubtedly true that young people—which I’m defining as 18 to 25, roughly—have lower voter turnout rates than other demographic groups. But I think there’s a couple reasons why that is and why it’s unfair to compare young voters to older groups.
Political science research shows us that voting is habitual. It’s a habit that you develop over time, and once you get into that habit, you are going to almost certainly be a reliable voter for the rest of your life. And so how can we expect first-time voters to have those habits when they haven’t been legally allowed to engage in those habits?
There’s also a narrative out there about young people being really apathetic and not caring about issues, and that is just not what I observe in working with young people in or outside of the classroom. Instead, I tend to see it as an issue of access. It’s just hard to get involved. There’s a lot of rules and deadlines and barriers in place, regardless of where you live. There’s just a big startup cost to getting involved. And so if there isn’t someone there to help you navigate that, it can be really disincentivizing to vote or to get engaged in politics otherwise, because you just don’t know where to start.
For students who are studying at UNC Asheville from out of state, will they be able to access the absentee ballots sent from their home states?
Overwhelmingly, our students are North Carolina residents. I think this year, about 13 percent of our student body is an out-of-state US resident. So that would equate to about 300 to 400 students. Of those students, it’s hard to know how many of them would be registered in North Carolina versus in their home state.
For those students who were on campus and had requested an absentee ballot before the storm hit, it is possible [they] had to evacuate before they received their ballot. It’s hard to know how many students this is affecting, but almost certainly, it is affecting some voters.
The advice we’ve been giving those voters is to contact their local or county elections office as soon as possible and request a reissuance of their ballot.
Historically, after severe hurricanes, you often see a decline in voting. Has disaster-related voter suppression come up in your classes at all?
I teach courses on US elections. We talk about barriers to voting, not just devices or laws in place that could make it easier or more difficult for people to vote, but also socioeconomic factors that can make it harder for some groups of people to vote than others. I’ve never spoken with my students specifically about how natural disasters and recovery efforts could affect the dynamics, but rest assured that we will be once our classes pick back up.
In a Sunday morning media blitz, vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) tried to clean up former President Donald Trump’s disturbing comments about his domestic political opponents being “the enemy within.”
Trump has made such comments multiple times. Earlier this month, he told Fox host Maria Bartiromo, “We have the outside enemy and then we have the enemy from within—and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.” Trump added that he considers California Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff among those enemies. And in a podcast interview with Joe Rogan on Friday, Trump said the “enemy from within” was more dangerous than North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
Tapper, host of CNN’s State of the Union, pressed Vance on those comments from the very start of their interview, as well as John Kelly’s characterization this week of Trump as a fascist who admires Hitler. Vance said Kelly’s comments about Trump were inaccurate. At one point, Vance said, “I believe Donald Trump is the candidate of peace.” Later in the interview, Vance said Trump was reserving his threats to send the military after “people rioting after the election” rather than all Americans.
At another point, Tapper reminded Vance that Trump shared a social media post saying Liz Cheney—now among the Republicans campaigning for his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris—should be put before a war tribunal. “None of that sounds fascistic to you at all?” Tapper asked. “No, of course it doesn’t,” Vance responded, before alleging Tapper was taking Trump’s statements out of context.
.@jaketapper: "Liz Cheney, [Trump] said, should be put before a war tribunal. None of that sounds fascistic to you at all?"@JDVance: "No, of course it doesn't." pic.twitter.com/3YuiEI3MGH
When Welker, of NBC’s Meet the Press, asked Vance if he agreed with Trump that Pelosi and Schiff “are more dangerous than Russia and China,” he dodged. “Well, I think what Donald Trump said is that those folks pose a greater threat to United States’ peace and security, because America’s strong enough to stand up to any foreign adversary,” Vance replied.
In his interview with Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, he gave a slightly clearer answer. While she didn’t ask specifically about his response to Trump’s comments about “the enemy from within,” Brennan did ask Vance, “What price should Moscow pay for trying to manipulate American voters?”—referring to a Friday announcement by the FBI that Russia was behind a fake video of mail-in ballots being destroyed in Pennsylvania.
“A lot of countries are going to try to manipulate our voters. They’re going to try to manipulate our elections. That’s what they do,” Vance replied. After Brennan pressed him, Vance condemned Russia’s actions, but said he would not commit to how the US should or would respond.
As my colleague Inae Oh and I have tracked, Trump has indeed threatened to prosecute, or called for the prosecution of, a long list of political opponents, including Harris, Cheney, President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former President Barack Obama, and a slew of others. So—contrary to Vance’s assertions—Trump has given us ample reason to take his threats seriously.
When I arrived outside the arena just before 11 a.m.—six hours before Trump was to take the stage inside, and an hour before doors opened—the line of MAGA hat-wearing supporters wrapped around the block.
The choice of New York as the location for a massive Trump rally, just over a week from Election Day, is confounding: In 2020, President Joe Biden won87 percent of votes cast in Manhattan. And just a few miles south of the midtown block where the crowd gathered Sunday are the courthouses where, earlier this year, Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts in his hush-money case and ordered to pay $355 million in a civil fraud case brought by state Attorney General Letitia James. Add to that that New York has not voted to elect a Republican president since 1984, when Ronald Reagan, the incumbent, beat Walter Mondale.
But the ex-president—who was born and raised in Queens—has never been deterred by facts. “We are going to win New York,” he has said on the campaign trail. His supporters who showed up Sunday were similarly defiant. “I’m voting for the felon,” yelled one man standing near the line, “and I can’t wait.”
That man, who gave his name as George D. and said he lives on Long Island and works in Manhattan, was holding a flag with Trump’s mugshot emblazoned over the Stars and Stripes. He was one of several supporters who told me he thinks Trump will win the election, despite his apparent tie with Vice President Kamala Harris in the polls. (A new ABC News/Ipsos poll out Sunday shows Harris restoring a lead, polling at 51 percent to Trump’s 47 percent.)
“Neck and neck means Trump’s ahead,” George said. “I wear this MAGA hat every day, and I feel the pulse in the streets,” he added. “I went from getting middle fingers to getting thumbs up.”
Like several supporters I spoke to, George preferred Trumpian talking points to my fact-checks, and characterized his candidate as unfairly persecuted by the left. The “lamestream media,” he claimed, is “building a lie” about Trump’s chances of winning. “The only way to beat him is to lock him up or try to assassinate him,” he said, adding that he thinks the attemptedassassinations of Trump were “an inside job.” (Trump, Vance, and Trump’s sons have also falsely claimed, without evidence, that Democrats were behind the assassination attempts; threat assessment experts have told my colleague Mark Follman that this could fuel more retaliatory violence.)
The shootings were on his fans’ minds. When I asked a woman in line named Dana about Trump’s shot at winning, a man behind her cut in: “Don’t say ‘shot’!” The group laughed. Dana turned back to respond to my question about whether Trump could win: “100 percent,” she said, unblinking.
She knew, though, that she was something of an oddity in an election that has arguably become as much about gender as about policy: The most recent ABC/Ipsos poll shows Harris with a 14-point advantage among women voters, while Trump has a 6-point advantage among men. Dana, who is from New Jersey, was wearing a pink “Women for Trump” hat. She pointed to it: “I can’t wear this hat when I drop my kids off at school.”
Dana believes women are flocking to Harris due to reproductive rights (fact check: true), but she doesn’t believe Trump actually decimated those rights—he left them to the states. And she doesn’t think he’ll sign a national abortion ban, despite the fact that Trump twice refused to commit to not doing so during the debate (earlier this month, he said in a social media post he would veto it if Congress passed it). “I vote on policy,” Dana said, adding that she was voting for Trump due to his stances on immigration, the economy, and inflation. Under Biden, someone nearby claimed, bacon now costs $12. “I want to eat more bacon!” Dana exclaimed.
A bit behind Dana and her friends, I met a Dutch woman named Gabriëlle Kok who showed up not because she supports Trump, but because she wanted to see who does. The only thing she seemed to have in common with Dana was believing Trump has a shot at reelection. “I think he’s a very dangerous man—for everybody, but especially for women,” Kok said. The Netherlands recently installed its first far-right government, whose leader, Geert Wilders, is known as the ‘Dutch Donald Trump.’ “I think they look up at Trump and Trumpism,” Kok said of the Netherlands’ new government. “There’s inspiration to be gotten for them.”
But Luis Rodriguez, who I met towards the end of the line, feels differently: He sees Trump as a bulwark against the socialism of Cuba, which he emigrated from in 1961, just after Fidel Castro came to power, he said. “I’m much more aware of how fragile democracy is,” Rodriguez, who lives in Manhattan, told me, adding that he’s a registered independent who voted for Obama in 2008.
He had just voted early, before showing up to the rally, he added. “I always get emotional when I vote,” Rodriguez said. “It’s like going to church.” (Trump and his acolytes, of course, still refuse to admit he lost the 2020 election, and are preemptively sowing doubt about this year’s race.)
Rodriguez thinks 2020 was a “troubled election,” he said, and finds the comparisons of Trump to Hitler and other fascists absurd. “Hitler is the cheapest trope you can throw out at someone to shut them up,” he said, adding that the Democrats’ messaging has “become ‘abortion’ and ‘Trump is Hitler.'” He was exasperated. “I’m a Hispanic, immigrant, and I’m gay. I get told I’m supporting a racist, a xenophobe, and an anti-gay bigot.”
His friend Gary Mirkin, of Long Island, was wearing an “I’m Voting For the Felon” t-shirt. He chimed in: “I’m conservative and Jewish, and people tell me I’m voting for Hitler.” Just then, someone in a MAGA cap walked by with a bullhorn, chanting, “F Joe Biden” and “Let’s Go Brandon!”
But these were the theatrics Rodriguez appeared tired of. “Can we discuss the policy?” he asked. Like Dana, Rodriguez said he was voting for Trump based on issues around immigration and the economy. (The ABC/Ipsos poll shows Trump leading Harris on both of those issues, by 12 points and 8 points, respectively.)
He also added that the Obama administration built cages to detain immigrant children—which is true, though it did not maintain a policy of systemically separating families, as the Trump administration did. That policy has, as of earlier this year, still left more than 1,300 kids separated from their parents, according to a Department of Homeland Security report.
Regardless, Rodriguez trusts Trump: “I think he’s the only one that has the grit and wherewithal” to confront the “corrupt establishment,” he said. So what happens if Harris wins? “Obama will pull her strings,” Mirkin said, adding that he had signed up to be a poll watcher. (The GOP has recruited 200,000 poll watchers to “establish the battlefield” to challenge the results of the election, should Trump lose.)
But he and Rodriguez weren’t too worried. “Tied,” Mirkin said, “means he’s winning.”
A large majority of people tell pollsters they support renewable energy. But when ordinances and projects come before local governments, opponents show up more often than supporters.
Greenlight America, a new national nonprofit, wants to change this. I spoke with its co-founders this week in one of their first interviews about their mission and strategy.
The group launched last year, has raised $5 million and has a staff of about 20. It is incorporated in Washington, DC, with employees all over the country.
Matt Traldi, CEO and co-founder, said he takes inspiration from the way the labor movement prioritizes local voices and focuses on organizing. He was a co-founder of Indivisible, an advocacy group formed to counter the policy agenda of Donald Trump, and previously he spent a decade working for labor unions.
“There’s a lot of support out there for clean energy projects,” he said. But he found that supporters sometimes “don’t know when and where to show up.”
The stakes are high. The United States needs to add vast amounts of renewable energy to be able to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and avoid the worst effects of climate change. Local opposition has slowed or canceled many projects.
Greenlight America aims to alert local groups and people of the issues in their communities, and foster greater participation by people who support a shift to cleaner energy. “The reality is that most people aren’t reading agendas or minutes of their local government proceedings, and most organizations in the nonprofit space aren’t focused at the local level,” said Ari Appel, chief program officer and co-founder.
He previously ran campaigns for environmental and renewable advocacy organizations, such as Building Back Together, which seeks to support the implementation of President Joe Biden’s climate and clean energy legislation.
Ethan Todras-Whitehill, chief communications officer and co-founder, said Greenlight wants to give renewable energy supporters “the information and the training they need to feel comfortable going up there and standing up in front of their town council.”
He previously founded Swing Left, which works to elect Democrats in state legislatures.
While the co-founders have deep ties to groups that support Democrats, they emphasized that Greenlight is nonpartisan. Public opinion research, such a 2023 report from Pew Research Center, shows that support for renewable energy is strong across partisan lines.
And yet opponents of renewable energy projects are often highly organized at the local level to the point that supporters of projects feel ostracized and are reluctant to speak.
People fight renewable energy for a variety of reasons. The most common one I’ve observed is concern about how a project will change the look and feel of a place, which is something I can sympathize with, especially for people who live closest to the site. The benefits of development—for the environment and the local tax base—get talked about much less.
One way to think about Greenlight is as a counterweight to groups that oppose renewable energy, such as Virginia-based Citizens for Responsible Solar.
“We’re very much students of the opposition,” said Traldi, the CEO. He compared this to how Indivisible took lessons from how the Tea Party movement organized against President Barack Obama.
But it would be an oversimplification to say Greenlight is a pro-renewables version of groups that oppose the projects. Opposition organizations tend to focus on disseminating misleading information to make people fear renewable energy. A common message is to say or imply that solar farms are a threat to human health—which isn’t true.
In contrast, Greenlight views itself as more of an organizer and convener, and won’t necessarily get into the specifics of what is discussed in local campaigns.
An example is how the group participated in a debate this year in Erie County, Pennsylvania: The County Council was considering revisions to its solar ordinance that contained a provision saying a project needed to have an interconnection agreement with the regional grid operator to be able to apply for a building permit.
The provision would essentially shut down new permits because the grid operator is working through a years-long backlog of processing applications for interconnection. In most other jurisdictions, a developer would get their building permit at the same time they are waiting in a queue for grid access.
It’s not clear to me whether the proposal was a deliberate attempt to hinder development. Regardless, Greenlight learned of it and then got in touch with groups that typically support renewable energy to speak to the County Council.
Records from council meetings show that local representatives from Solar United Neighbors and PennFuture, nonprofits that support renewable energy development, spoke about what the proposal would do and urged the council to remove the provision. The council followed this advice.
“A coalition came together really quickly,” said Jenny Tomkins, a PennFuture clean water campaign manager, who is based near Erie.
The ability of local and national groups to collaborate was essential and Greenlight helped to bring the parties together, she said.
“Local folks provide firsthand knowledge of the proposed projects, community concerns and tight-knit relationships with local elected officials,” she said. “The statewide and national groups bring lessons learned from other communities, relationships with the solar industry and legal and policy expertise.”
Greenlight’s agenda overlaps with that of renewable energy developers, but it doesn’t take money from developers. This is an important distinction because opposition campaigns like to say supporters are acting out of financial self-interest.
Success for the organization means local people show up to participate, and this helps to nudge officials. Don’t expect Traldi or his colleagues to stand up to speak in your town. But if Greenlight can find ways to fill seats and dockets, it could change the dynamics of local debates.
Every Monday morning, the staff of the Abortion Fund of Ohio’s intake line starts fresh, answering calls, following up on voicemails, and doling out cash to people who can’t afford to go to their abortion appointments. The team of three fields as many financial requests as they can until the money allotted for the week runs out. Lately, that’s been by Tuesday. Sometimes they can stretch the funds until Wednesday.
The Ohio Fund, one of the largest abortion funds in the United States, didn’t always operate this way. When I first spoke with the fund in August 2023, it didn’t even have monthly caps on the amount of money it gave callers. Back then, even though the wave of “rage donations” that followed the end of Roe v. Wadehad receded, there was still enough money to pay for patients’ medical costs, travel, and child care.
But as costs of care—and daily life—have risen, so, too, has demand for the fund’s services. Ohio’s relatively new constitutional protections for abortion—the result of a ballot measure approved last year—have made it a destination for needy patients from nearby states where onerous restrictions remain in place. When national abortion rights organizations suddenly announced this summer that they would be slashing the amount of money they devote to defraying patients’ medical costs, the financial problems escalated.
To put all this in perspective: In July 2023, the Ohio Fund spent about $100,000 helping 300 or so people get abortions. This past July, they fulfilled twice as many requests for help with half as much money—and the number of calls has continued to rise. People who might once have been able to pay for their own abortions are now begging for assistance, and people who always would have needed financial assistance are begging for more.
“The first word that comes to my mind is helpless,” says Taren Holliman, the Ohio Fund’s program manager. “It feels very helpless when you are not able to fully bridge the gap, or help bridge the gap, in a way that actually allows a person to access the health care that they deserve.”
It’s not just the Ohio Fund that is struggling to meet callers’ needs. Every abortion fund I spoke with, from the East Coast to the Great Plains to the Deep South, is in varying stages of crisis, with many taking unprecedented measures to ward off looming disaster. As the abortion issue dominates the 2024 elections, from Kamala Harris’ campaign to the battle for the Senate to ballot measures in a record 10 states, the frontline groups that have taken on the lion’s share of the post-Dobbs burden—the clinics that provide abortions, and the funds that get people to their appointments—are barely able to keep their doors open and phones on the hook.
Just days after the state’s voter-approved constitutional amendment officially took effect in December 2023, the Ohio Fund closed shop until February due to a lack of money. That was despite a record-breaking year for the fund, during which it almost doubled the money it doled out, to $1.5 million, and nearly quadrupled the number of abortion seekers it helped.
As Ohio’s courts begin implementing the ballot measure, the financial strains are likely to grow. With its six-week ban permanently struck down, and its 24-hour waiting period and restrictions on medication abortion temporarily blocked, the state is poised to become an even more vital access point for abortion patients from neighboring states with near-total bans, including Kentucky, West Virginia, and Indiana.
Ohio’s abortion-rights measure has been a model for many of the ones on the ballot. But the nationwide lack of abortion funding infrastructure presents a stark reminder of the post-November reality, even if Harris wins: Protecting the right to abortion is very different from ensuring that patients, particularly low-income ones, can access abortion care. Draconian laws, stigma, and a lack of buy-in from large donors and local and state governments have produced a funding catastrophe that has been decades in the making—and is unlikely to be solved anytime soon. Dr. Diane Horvath, director of an independent abortion clinic in Maryland, a state with robust abortion laws and an abortion-rights amendment on the November ballot, put it bluntly: “What I’m seeing looks like the collapse of the abortion care system.”
For low-income women in particular, access to abortion has long depended on the benevolence of donors. For nearly 50 years, the Hyde Amendment has prohibited federal funds from going toward abortions except when a woman’s life is threatened or in cases involving rape or incest. Many states implemented their own versions of Hyde, barring state Medicaid funds from being used for abortions; some states also passed laws banning private insurers from covering abortions in their states.
Despite the promises of Roe, abortion remained far from accessible—and unnecessary regulations on abortion providers and mandatory waiting periods that delayed care only exacerbated the access problem. Grassroots funds, mostly funded by small, individual donations, cropped up in communities across the country to offer financial assistance and, crucially, stigma-free emotional support to people seeking abortion care.
In 1993, an alliance of 22 local organizations in 14 states established the National Network of Abortion Funds to better connect abortion seekers to help and advocate for abortion rights. Now made up of almost 100 funds, the network gave out more than $18 million in grants last year, tax filings show. The fall of Roe produced a swell of “rage donations” to national organizations and local funds alike, enabling some funds to expand their staff, service areas, and funding amounts. But those donations have since dried up.
For years, and especially since Dobbs, local abortion funds and the people they serve have relied on two big national organizations to help defray the medical costs of procedures for patients who meet financial eligibility requirements: Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation. Planned Parenthood funds abortions at its own clinics, and NAF funds abortions at NAF-member independent clinics.
Local abortion funds fill in the gaps, helping pay for things like plane fares, motels, and babysitters; many, like the Ohio Fund, do not have income limits or other eligibility requirements that cut some pregnant people off from national assistance. Although NAF has a limited fund for non-appointment expenses like travel and child care, the overwhelming burden of practical support falls on the shoulders of local organizations.
Immediately after the US Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion, NAF and Planned Parenthood committed to funding up to half of patient medical costs, and NAF offered additional assistance to patients in emergencies. Before the Dobbs decision, NAF spent, on average, $50,000 a month to defray abortion costs, president and CEO Brittany Fonteno says. In the two years after Dobbs, it spent $6 million a month.
But this past July 1, NAF cut its abortion funding in half; going forward, it would only cover 30 percent of qualifying patients’ appointment costs. Fonteno says the decision was difficult but necessary to ensure the organization’s future. “Our funding has not been able to keep pace with the need,” Fonteno tells me. “We were set to run out of funds by fall if we had continued to fund at the pace that we were funding at previously.”
Planned Parenthood, meanwhile, joined a campaign called Abortion Access Now that aims to pass federal abortion protections in the next decade. On the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, the campaign launched with $100 million from national groups including the ACLU, National Women’s Law Center, and the Center for Reproductive Rights. A week later, Planned Parenthood’s patient appointment funding cuts, which mirror NAF’s, went into effect.Planned Parenthood did not provide comment by publication time.
Local organizations like the Ohio Fund felt the impact immediately; they were inundated with more patients needing more money, even as their own donations were drying up. “It actually feels repulsive to offer someone $200 who has a $1,500 appointment cost and says that they can’t afford to eat or pay their rent,” says Lexis Dotson-Dufault, the Ohio Fund’s executive director. “What do we do? Because if we cover your whole appointment cost, that’s our budget for the day.”
And big institutional donors, like foundations, haven’t stepped in to help. Dotson-Dufault pointed out to me that when large donors decide to fund reproductive rights, they usually pour their money into national organizations. Planned Parenthood, for instance, which has over $330 million in net assets (despite losing nearly $68 million last year), received a $275 million donation in 2022 from billionaire MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to increase abortion access nationwide.
More than 30 local abortion funds went public with their frustrations in an open letter published in August in The Nation. “Abortion funds exist because governmental and political systems have failed our communities—primarily Black, Indigenous and Native, immigrant, rural, and low-income—and abandoned us in times of need,” the letter reads. “It is disheartening to be engaged in this work and, in moments of political crisis, to witness groups that should be our partners in the fight—uplifting, investing in, and centering our expertise and critical role—fail us, too.”
The leaders behind national groups counter that local abortion funds are partly to blame for the low cash flow. An anonymous organization leader working on abortion ballot campaigns in multiple states told Vox in September that local funds’ visions for the future—for example, making abortion (and all health care) free and eliminating parental consent laws—alienate more mainstream would-be donors. “If you’re only communicating in very extreme messaging about abortion access, you’re not broadening your base of donors, you’re just talking to the 12 people who already agree with you,” the anonymous source said. “A lot of people who would love to donate to funds and probably don’t understand the need are turned off before they even get in the door by the language and behavior.”
Dotson-Dufault offers a different perspective. She attributes the lack of institutional funding to deeply rooted stigma around abortions, which large donors share and are continuing to perpetuate. “I think a lot of people want to say that they’re supporting abortion,” she tells me, “but not go as far as paying for the abortion itself.”
The thing about abortion is that it is inherently time-sensitive. And with each week that passes, the procedure gets significantly more expensive.
In Ohio, the cheapest option—medication abortion—costs about $650, and it’s only available until 12 weeks’ gestation. Costs for an in-clinic procedure, which is legal until 22 weeks, range from $735 to over $1,600, depending on how far along the pregnancy is. Just delaying care for a week—for example, to secure money from an abortion fund—raises the cost by several hundred dollars. That’s because patients having later-term abortions require more complex care; what can be completed in one appointment in the first trimester requires multiple days and pricey anesthesia in the second or third trimester.
And for nearly all people whose pregnancies are beyond the point of viability, getting an abortion requires travel and a lot of time. There are just four clinics in the US that offer third-trimester abortions, and three of them are in the DC metropolitan area. The Brigid Alliance, which helps cover travel costs for patients beyond 15 weeks’ gestation, spends an average of $2,300 per client on non-medical expenses. Between plane tickets, childcare and multiple-day hotel stays, the costs for some clients can approach $10,000, says The Brigid Alliance’s Sarah Moeller. That’s on top of costs for the procedure itself, which can exceed $15,000 in the third trimester.
Abortion patients have always relied on local funds to fill the funding gap, especially low-wage patients who can’t afford to take time off from work, much less pay for travel and child care. But those gaps are increasingly urgent—and nearly insurmountable. “Something that’s become more common is people are coming to us with these gaps the day before or the day of their appointment,” says Alisha Dingus, development director at the DC Abortion Fund. Patients are calling the fund needing as much as $10,000, sometimes from inside the clinic waiting room. In the months after Dobbs, such last-minute requests were something the DC Fund, one of the most well-resourced local funds in the country, used to be able to cover without a second thought. Not anymore.
Now, it’s not unusualfor the DC Fund to put out emergency requests for donations on social media. It’s not a policy change that came lightly; the DC team had decided against such callouts before. “We don’t want to create this sense of panic across our community, because we are such a critical fund,” Dingus says. “The other funds say, ‘Oh, if DCAF is in trouble, then what’s going to happen to callers who need care after 28 weeks?’”
We have two callers with appointments on Tuesday with a $8,300 gap. We are calling on this community to dig deep & show up to close this gap. We have seen y’all do it before & we hope you can again We keep us safe! https://t.co/IWBAHrRgG3
The answer, increasingly, is that the independent providers who offer the costliest and least accessible abortion care are operating at a loss so as not to turn patients away. Even in states like Maryland, which has no gestational limits on abortion, Planned Parenthood does not offer third-trimester abortions. So later-pregnancy abortion care falls to a handful of independent clinics, many of which don’t have years of savings to dip into when patients come in crisis.
The DuPont Clinic in DC, for example, spent about $100,000 to offset patients’ funding gaps in the first two months after the NAF cuts, Karishma Oza, the clinic’s care coordination director, says. DuPont is often a clinic of last resort; by the time someone ends up there, they’ve likely been turned away from other providers that can’t afford to subsidize their medical care. “Every week, our case management team has to reassure patients to come to their appointments despite not having all their funding together,” Oza tells me.
It’s a similar situation at Partners in Abortion Care, a clinic in Maryland that provides abortions up to 34 weeks’ gestation. Since opening after Dobbs, Dr. Diane Horvath, its medical director and co-founder, says the clinic has always helped cover medical costs for patients. But since NAF slashed direct patient subsidies, women are coming in with significantly greater funding gaps. Partners in Abortion Care, like many independent clinics, relies on block grants from NAF to offer emergency financial help. With its own grant cut in half, the clinic now shoulders the bulk of patient medical costs.
“We’re operating at a loss,” Horvath told me in September. She and the clinic staff want to give people the care they need, “but we are in a position where, if things don’t change, if we’re not able to find alternative sources of funding, then we will have to close.”
Even in states with strong abortion protections, abortion providers and funds don’t often receive local or state government support. Horvath’s clinic receives no grant from Maryland, for instance. Many abortion funds told me they rely on small donations from community members for the bulk of their money supply. As costs rise, and demand for funds’ help alongside it, small donations aren’t enough.
Faced with increased need and a declining cushion of cash, the DuPont Clinic in DC has formed The Lavender Fund to beef up its emergency reserve of money for patients who can’t afford their appointments. Meanwhile, many funds, like Ohio’s, have implemented monthly or weekly funding caps or have slashed limits already in place. It’s not just money funds are worried about; they are trying to balance a drastic rise in demand with their workers’ and volunteers’ emotional wellbeing.
Many of the people who volunteer or work at abortion funds—especially those who staff call lines—have themselves had abortions. The Ohio Fund’s Holliman, for instance, became involved in reproductive justice after facing barriers to her own abortion care while in college. It’s not just passion that drives the people who operate local abortion funds; it’s the intimate knowledge of everything that impedes care, from appointment fees to confusion about laws to a lack of support—and what it means if a fund cannot make up a person’s outstanding cost.
“You’re literally looking at a crossroads of two completely different futures in front of you,” Holliman says. “As much as I hate to say it, there are going to be people who are not able to access the care that they need.”
The text came from a fellow journalist. I was driving and glanced at it at a red light. It was a forward of an X post by @realDonadTrump. “You see this!?” my friend had written.
As I glanced at it, I saw the back of a police car and what looked like two legs covered in white. There were black shoes, the toes pointing skyward.
Memory jarred me seconds later. That was a 17-year-old photo of murdered journalist Chauncey Bailey lying dead in the street. From Trump? What the hell? I pulled over and discovered that what I had thought was a photo was the opening image of a video. I hit play.
“This is a journalist named Chauncey Bailey,” a disembodied voice said. “We can’t show you his face. It was blown away by this man’s .12-gauge shotgun,” the narration continued as a photo of a dark-eyed young man came on the screen with the caption “Repeat criminal D. Broussard.” It was followed by a re-creation of Bailey’s 2007 killing, an actor playing a masked gunman firing a shotgun twice.
“Unfortunately, the murderer never should have been there. He should have been in jail,” the narrator continued. “Broussard was previously convicted of brutal assault. San Francisco’s liberal DA Kamala Harris”—the narrator, like Trump, mispronounces Harris’ first name as a photo of her is shown—“put him back on the street instead of in jail. Now, Harris has blood on her hands.”
Then, an all too familiar voice: “I am Donald J. Trump and I approved this message.” A photo of Broussard also appears in a second Trump ad over which a narrator says, “As San Francisco DA liberal Kamala Harris let killers go free.”
The ads were designed by a Trump-controlled Super PAC, Maga Inc. that’s painting Harris as a pro-criminal leftist radical who’s soft on crime. It has spent at least $75 million in swing states, including Georgia and Pennsylvania, according to published reports and Federal Election Commission records. Neither campaign responded to questions about the ads.
As first reported by the non-profit news site The Oaklandside, the ad that shows Bailey’s corpse is as rank with Trump’s utter hypocrisy as it is factually inaccurate in claiming Harris is somehow responsible for his death.
From his mocking of disabled Wall Street Journal reporter Serge Kovaleski in 2015 to his repeated use of the Stalinesque “enemies of the people” in his attacks on the media, to urging crowds at his rallies to undertake physical aggression against reporters, Trump’s seemingly endless contempt for a free press is ubiquitous. Campaigning this year, he’s said if elected he would jail reporters who refused to reveal sources, in his words making them go “bye-bye.” He’s repeatedly called for overturning the landmark unanimous Supreme Court decision on libel in Times vs. Sullivan and probably would also support overturning the court’s ruling on prior restraint in the Pentagon Papers case.
Trump’s contempt for journalists long predates his time in national politics. As a newspaper reporter in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the 1990s, I frequently encountered Trump. He owned three casinos at the time and often attacked my reporting on his long casino-development war with rival Steve Wynn, calling me “a fucking twerp,” “a moron,” “an asshole,” and other names. But Atlantic City was a small stage, and most of those remarks were in phone calls and interviews. And all that was years before Bailey’s murder, which shocked and scared journalists in California and nationally.
Within days I was assigned to cover the killing full time, working with others on what became known as the “Chancey Bailey Project.” It was an assignment that lasted nearly five years involving daily stories, as well as deeply reported investigative stories showing the depths of the Bey’s cult, and police indifference and incompetence. The work culminated in a book I wrote in 2012 with the overarching message that you can’t kill a story by killing a journalist. And there also was an element of self-preservation. As the great investigative reporter Robert W. Greene of Newsday noted, when he led a similar effort following the 1976 car-bombing death of reporter Don Bolles, such work is like “buying life insurance” for journalists. The response must be to create more journalism about the matter that the killer was trying to censor than the target ever could have achieved alone.
Trump’s new, horrid misappropriation of a journalist being gunned down in the street is blatantly public. The facts of Bailey’s death are straightforward. The Trump campaign ad claims are not.
Bailey, 57, was shot dead on August 2, 2007, as he walked to work at the Oakland Post, a weekly paper that serves Oakland’s large Black community. He was a lifelong newspaperman having previously worked for The Hartford Courant, The Detroit News, and had recently left the Oakland Tribune for the Post.
It was publication day. He was hurrying to his office to get the paper out, stopping only to buy an unhoused man a cup of coffee. Among the stories Bailey was wrestling with was one he’d written himself about an Oakland business called Your Black Muslim Bakery, which had become a front for wide-ranging criminal enterprises. It had fallen into the hands of its late founder’s 20-year-old son, Yusuf Bey IV and had recently filed for bankruptcy. Baily had a source telling him of a string of violent and financial crimes being committed by young Bey’s cult-like followers. Bailey wanted to publish ASAP, perhaps as soon as that afternoon.
Just then a tall, skinny man, dressed in all black with a ski mask over his face and carrying a pistol-grip .12-gauge shotgun ran up on him. The gunman fired twice into Bailey’s torso at point-blank range. Bailey fell, dead almost instantly. The killer started to run to a waiting white mini-van, then remembered his orders to shoot three times to ensure Bailey’s death. He turned back, leaned over the prone body, a load of buckshot ripping into Bailey’s face.
The gunman, Devaughndre Broussard, 19, who weeks earlier had also killed another man with an assault rifle, jumped into a tattered white mini-van, where wheelman Antoine Mackey waited. They sped off. As they tore through Oakland streets, Mackey grabbed his cell phone and dialed their shot caller. The day before Bey had told the young men, “We gotta take him out before he writes that story.” Now Mackey told him they had.
Harris comes into the story because Broussard was from San Francisco, where she was District Attorney from 2002 to 2011. Trump’s ad stems from Broussard’s arrest for an assault that happened on Halloween night in 2005. He and two friends beat and robbed an art student on the San Francisco subway, taking $60, and an iPod.
With the victim lying on the car floor bleeding as the train lurched into a station, Broussard looked up, directly into the lens of a security camera. He had a magic marker in his pocket and used it to try to color over the lens. It didn’t help. Police arrested him two weeks later for assault with a deadly weapon, battery, and robbery. Broussard’s two friends were also arrested. Both were 17. Their cases were assigned to juvenile court; the outcomes were sealed.
Given his life story, eventually facing incarceration seemed inevitable for Broussard. He barely knew his father. His mother, Audra Dixon, “had an anguished life,” a lawyer representing her in one of her many criminal cases during her son’s childhood once told a judge. Broussard ended up in a home for emotionally troubled youth, where he developed a bad stutter that plagued him into adulthood.
With Dixon in prison, Broussard lived for a while across San Francisco Bay in the city of Richmond with a man who’d fathered a daughter with Dixon. The man became the boy’s Foster parent. Broussard called him dad. At Richmond High School, Broussard did well enough that a teacher helped get him into a summer camp at UC Berkeley’s Hass School of Business, where he designed a mock investment scheme that won him a $100 Savings Bond. Then Dixon got out of prison and wanted Broussard back.
She and her mother were running a drug house in San Francisco, both selling and providing users with a place to fix. But the older woman had AIDS and needed money for care. Dixon told Broussard to quit school and get a job. But he disappeared for days, eventually getting arrested as a juvenile in a city south of San Francisco. Dixon’s drug house was soon raided by police. Days later, on October 11, 2005, Broussard turned 18. His next interaction with the law would be as an adult.
He had no hope of making bail for the assault and robbery on the train. As the wheels of justice inched along, at least he had food and a roof over his head.
Eventually, his court-appointed lawyer began talks with the district attorney’s office about the inevitable plea deal. “This certainly wasn’t the kind of case that would have gotten the attention of the elected district attorney,” said Stanford University Law School Professor Robert Weisberg, a leading authority on criminal procedure. Weisberg said he didn’t like the phrase “run of the mill,” but said that’s what the case was.
Under California law, the Probation Department in a county where the crime in question occurred makes a sentencing recommendation to the judge. Such documents are considered confidential and sealed by the court, but in 2007, the Chauncey Bailey Project, a consortium of journalists, including me, who worked together to report on and investigate Bailey’s killing, won a motion to have Broussard’s report unsealed.
Broussard’s “participation in the present offense is deserving of a stiff consequence. The senseless act of violence is totally unacceptable and concerns the undersigned officer greatly,” Probation Officer Germaine McCoy wrote in the report.
McCoy added that a prison sentence was contemplated, but “due to the defendant’s young age, probation will be recommended in hopes that the defendant will use the opportunity to turn his life around.”
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Charlene Mitchell, an appointee of former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, sentenced Broussard on February 24, 2006, after he pleaded guilty to assault, court records show.
Mitchell followed McCoy’s exact recommendations. She gave Broussard three years in state prison, but immediately suspended that sentence in favor of three years of supervised probation. She ordered Broussard to serve the first year of probation in county jail, giving him credit for 103 days he’d been locked up since his arrest. Assistant DA Gregory Mendez, didn’t object to the sentence, records show. Mendez, now in private practice, declined to discuss the case. There is no indication in court papers that Harris had any role in it. Court records do not indicate the victim gave a statement at sentencing or was present in court.
The case fell “within a fairly regular pattern by which cases get processed in the American judicial system, especially for a first-time offender,” Weisberg said. “These things are not the result of long, deliberated, adjudication because the system does not have the resources to allow for that.”
Later, when Broussard was charged with killing Bailey, the assault victim’s father, an attorney, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “Blame Kamala Harris.” Broussard “should have gone to state prison,” he said. “My kid suffered blurred vision and a fractured nose.”
In her office’s only public statement on the case after Bailey’s death, Harris’ Chief Assistant DA Russ Giuntini said prosecutors agreed to Broussard’s plea because it was unclear which of the three assailants committed exactly what injuries to the victim.
The father’s claim Broussard should have been in prison and Trump’s echo of it now is “something which the system could never tolerate,” Weisberg said. It would be “long-term preventive detention based on imagining the most extremely severe, unlikely things that anybody could do if he’s not incarcerated for a long, long time,” he said.
The victim’s father did not respond to a request for an interview
A journalism advocacy group ripped the Trump ad. “Chauncey Bailey died for his journalism,” The Northern California Chapter of The Society of Professional Journalists (full disclosure, I am a member) said in a statement.“ His memory deserves better than to be twisted into self- serving political lies.”
When Broussard’s jail sentence ended, he hit the streets with something he had never before borne in his life—thousands of dollars of debt. He’d been ordered to reimburse the victim for his medical bills, plus an additional 10 percent in administrative costs. Then there were court fees and booking fees. He had to pay for the probation department’s report to the judge. He had to pay $50 monthly to the county probation department.
He had no high school diploma and no job skills. His stutter remained a drawback. Police soon saw him in areas of San Francisco known for street-level drug dealing. He told his probation officer he was living on the street.
A friend had made vague references to a bakery in Oakland known for hiring young Black men in circumstances like his. He gave Broussard Yusuf Bey IV’s phone number.
Your Black Muslim Bakery was a strange place. There were long sessions of military-like close-order drills. Lots of guns. Mandatory religious training where Bey would give sermons based on the original dogma of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam: Whites were devils, created 6,000 years ago by a scientist called “Big Headed Yakub” in “grafting” experiments that went awry. That god orbited the earth in a giant “mother plane” planning Armageddon, which would elevate Blacks to control of the world. (Bey was not officially affiliated with The Nation of Islam).
But Broussard had food to eat and a bed to sleep in. He left once, skeptical of Bey, but returned when he found nothing else. When he was later charged with Bailey’s murder, he was described as a handyman. But he told police he was “a soldier.” Last year, he told a state parole board that he went to the bakery with an understanding he would be “a hitter” and “a kind of enforcer,” according to hearing transcripts.
In earlier statements to authorities, he said the incentive was purely financial. Bey promised to school him in the ways of financial fraud using fake and stolen identifications and forged documents to get rich. Broussard could even get a house, Bey told him.
“I grew up with a lack of fear,” Broussard told the parole board. With it, came a willingness “to do whatever you need to do to get some money. If it is selling drugs, you sell drugs. If it is stealing, you steal.” Broussard, who is on a prisoner fire-fighting team in the high Sierra, was denied early release by the board largely because he had been recently been caught with a cell phone.
The day of his arrest, Broussard first admitted to killing Bailey after Bey promised to pay for a lawyer who would get him acquitted. But when no lawyer from the Beys materialized, he recanted.
He eventually flipped, telling a Grand Jury that Bey ordered the shooting to stop the story Bailey was working on about the bakery. “Mr. Broussard is coming clean. He’s been living in hell,” his lawyer said.
He also admitted to the killing of another man who was the uncle of a gunman who killed Bey’s brother Antar at a gas station. Prosecutors, under intense media pressure to get to the bottom of Bailey’s killing, gave Broussard a 25-year determinate sentence in exchange for his testimony. With good-behavior credits, he could be discharged next year.
Bey and Mackey were convicted at the end of a long trial in 2011 in which Broussard was the star witness, and each was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Bey was also convicted of ordering two other men killed, including the man Broussard shot with an assault rifle. Mackey was convicted of the other killing Bey ordered—a man they saw walking alone late at night. Broussard testified they bragged of killing the man because he was white.
Ironically, law-enforcement incompetence did contribute to Bailey’s death, but it wasn’t in San Francisco. It occurred in Oakland, didn’t involve Harris, and it seems extremely unlikely to ever become election fodder.
It turned out that police had been investigating the bakery for several months before Bailey’s death. They had accumulated evidence of multiple serious felonies and had planned to raid the building in the early morning hours of Aug. 1, 2007. It was a massive operation, involving more than 100 officers. Police trained for days. Snipers were to be deployed on neighboring rooftops. Ambulances were staged nearby in case of casualties. A judge signed search warrants. All the lights were green. Then they weren’t.
At the last minute, Oakland Police Chief Wayne Tucker learned that two SWAT commanders were on vacation. He wouldn’t go without them, ordering a 48-hour stand down. Cops balked, claiming the delay was unneeded. But Tucker, a former administrative officer at the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office who street cops sometimes called “granny,” didn’t budge.
So, on August 2, 2007, Broussard and Mackey slipped away around 6:00 a.m. to hunt down their prey. The delay cost Bailey his life. When other journalists and I reported Tucker’s decision a year later, relying on whistleblowers and internal police documents, Tucker at first dug in, but resigned after City Council members scheduled a no-confidence vote on him.
Bailey’s sister, Lorelei Waqia was incredulous that the raid that would have saved her brother’s life was botched. Oakland “police just fumbled everything,” she said. “They caused the death, really. If they had moved on it, my brother would still be alive.” Now, she said, seeing the Trump ad was “devastating.” She lives in Georgia where it has appeared on TV. “[It] took the murder out of context by taking bits and pieces and forming a lie,” she added. “How dare they use my brother’s death to benefit them?”
Billionaire-troll Elon Musk is dumping untold millions of his $240 billion fortune into helping Donald Trump regain the White House. In the final sprint of the campaign, he’s doling out (perhaps illegally) $1 million checks to registered voters in swing states who have signed a petition sponsored by America PAC, which he created and funded with at least $75 million. It’s possible he’s contributed additional millions through untraceable donations to pro-Trump dark money groups (which he has done in the past). And there’s another way Musk is boosting Trump: He’s essentially providing him tens of millions of dollars’ worth of social media posts for free.
Every day, Musk, who tweets and retweets dozens of posts on X, the social media site he bought two years ago for $44 billion. (It’s now estimated to be worth $9.4 billion). In recent weeks, many of his X posts have been about the 2024 election and have avidly promoted pro-Trump messages. With Musk’s 202 million followers (more than twice the number of Trump’s followers on X) and with an algorithm Musk asked to be rigged to boost his own tweets, these posts have racked up a large number of impressions—the number of times a tweet is seen by a user on the platform. Each of his posts can draw tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, or tens of millions impressions. That’s a lot of reach.
I examined Musk’s timeline for several days this month (October 19, 21, and 22) and focused on tweets that explicitly advocated the election of Trump or that advanced pro-Trump themes—and that each drew at least 1 million impressions. These were posts that could have served as Trump campaign ads. This group totaled 54 tweets.
The posts in this subset covered various aspects of the election. Musk reposted a tweet that declared that if the Democrats win in 2024, there will be no “meaningful elections in the future” (17 million impressions). Another featured video of him saying the media was manipulating the government to help the Biden-Harris administration (23 million impressions). In one, Musk called for people to put up Trump yard signs and wear MAGA merchandise (38 million impressions). He retweeted former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard proclaiming a Kamala Harris victory will be “the end of democracy in the United States” (53 million impressions). One post exclaimed, “Kamala hates Christians” and amplified the baseless claim that she had disparaged rally attendees because these disrupters shouted “Jesus is Lord” (43 million impressions). Another featured video of Musk at one of his pro-Trump events in Pennsylvania (28 million impressions). A post spread the false assertion that Michigan had more registered voters than eligible voters (32 million impressions). In another, Musk shared a meme stating that the Republican platform included multiple issues—such as free enterprise, secure borders, honest elections, real journalism, and moral standards—and the Democratic platform had only one: “Hate Trump” (79 million impressions).
One popular Musk post featured an AI image of Donald Trump as a beefed-up Pittsburgh Steeler (83 million impressions). He retweeted a meme showing a Venn diagram for “[Jeffrey] Epstein’s Guest List” and “Diddy Guest List,” with the overlap labelled as “All the celebrities coming out to support Kamala Harris” (97 million impressions). He put up a photo of him, Trump, and a Tesla race car (75 million). He boosted a post with a chart predicting a Trump win (65 million impressions). In one post, Musk urged people to vote early (25 million impressions). He retweeted a post that assailed Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz (18 million impressions) and one claiming the Democratic criticisms of Trump are “all basically lies” (24 million impressions).
During these days, Musk also posted regularly about about many contentious issues and subjects—government spending and regulation, abortion, woke-ism, censorship, the media, vaccine skepticism, and transgenderism—in a manner that would bolster the case for Trump. As Bloomberg reported recently, Musk is now X’s “biggest promoter of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories” and “debunked theories of undocumented voters swaying the US election.”
What might be the financial value of all Musk’s tweeting for Trump?
Let’s start with the impressions Musk received for his posts. The 54 election-related tweets that each collected over a million impressions during these three days—and there were many other posts concerning the election that drew fewer impressions—totaled 1.273 billion impressions.
How much would it cost someone to obtain so many impressions? There are two ways for an X user to buy impressions. You can purchase ads or you can pay X to promote a post.
Ad rates may vary, depending on the customer and the nature and size of the advertising campaign. But there is a good point of comparison, and it involves Musk’s own PAC.
From early July through October 1, America PAC purchased 59 ads on X targeting swing states for more than $166,000, according to the social media platform’s political ad disclosure data. These ads yielded 32,058,424 impressions. Based on these figures, one can calculate that it costs about $5,000 to score a million impressions with a political ad. (Impressions will also be affected by how many users repost or engage with them.) This, of course, is a rough estimate. It’s possible that Musk’s super PAC got a family-and-friends discount or, on the other hand, that X charged it top dollar in order to transfer funds into the financially-challenged company.
There’s another way to calculate the cost of a million impressions. X offers users the opportunity to boost the reach of an individual post. You may have seen the “Promote” button that is attached to some tweets. When I recently clicked on it, I was informed that for $5,000 that particular post—which had political content—could be zapped to between 55,000 to 1.3 million people over the course of one day. That’s quite a spread, and the fine print read, “Estimated reach is approximate. Actual reach can’t be guaranteed.” But it seems that if I wanted to come close to placing my tweet in front of a million pairs of eyeballs, I’d have to part with $5,000. (Per the caveat, I might end up with far less.)
With these two calculations, it appears X views the monetary value of 1 million impressions as about five thousand smackers. X, which no longer responds to requests from journalists, did not reply to an email inquiring about this and Musk’s posts.
If that figure is approximately correct, the 1.2 billion impressions Musk’s posts gathered over those three days were worth about $6 million. Assuming these were normal days for Musk the tweeting-maniac, he’s putting up about $2 million worth of posts a day to help elect Trump. (That number would be much higher if you factored in the posts on the election that didn’t exceed a million impressions and the posts related to issues that are a boon for Trump.) Add this up over the entire election—Musk endorsed Trump in July—and the value of Musk’s pro-Trump tweets could top $100 million. It might even reach double that and approach a quarter of a billion dollars.
Media tycoons have always been able to assist their preferred candidates with endorsements and favorable coverage. (See Murdoch, Rupert.) What Musk is doing is of a different nature. He’s posting multiple endorsements a day and promoting disinformation that bolsters Trump on a site that claims to have no editorial or political position. While he once proclaimed Twitter should be politically neutral, his excessive, nonstop rah-rahing for Trump has tilted its playing field. Musk has also permitted prominent extremists, conspiracy theorists, and purveyors of disinformation once bounced from Twitter to return to the site, and this band of posters skews dramatically pro-Trump.
Musk’s posts are not technically ads or campaign donations. Nor are the millions of election-related posts tweeted by X’s users (myself included), which depending on their salience or creativity, might garner many impressions. And neither are the commentaries of cable news hosts or newspaper columnists who may favor or oppose a particular candidate. But Musk’s relentless posting for Trump—amplified by the algorithm of the platform he controls—functions as an ad campaign. In a way, he has turned X into his personal plaything, and he has been using it to influence the presidential race to benefit Trump, who has vowed to put Musk in charge of government cost-cutting and regulatory review if he wins the White House. This is oligarchy in action.
Musk is a fortunate fellow. He has the bucks that have allowed him to become one of the biggest donors of the 2024 campaign. The money he has poured into America PAC is financing what are supposed to be extensive get-out-the-vote operations for Trump in swing states. And there’s no telling whether Musk—a major government contractor who yearns for a federal government that will eviscerate regulations that affect his companies—is also slipping big amounts of dark money to other pro-Trump endeavors. Meanwhile, Musk is acting like Trump’s running-mate, leaping about at rallies and holding his own campaign events, as if he were on the ticket. He has broken new ground in American politics, for he has shown us what it might be like for a political candidate (or the backer of one) to control an entire social media platform. (Trump, with his flailing Truth Social site, doesn’t count.) In doing so, Musk has supplied Trump tens of millions of dollars—maybe much more—in free messaging. It might well be one of the biggest gifts in the history of US politics. Or is it more of a payment for future services?
Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Space X and Tesla, and the world’s richest man, is convinced that immigrants who have lived and worked in the United States without legal authorization are destabilizing American democracy. It sounds like another conspiracy theory from a man who spouts a lot of them. But on Saturday, the Washington Post reported on one such figure, hiding in plain sight:
Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by the Washington Post.
As the Post story laid out, Musk was working for his first company, an online business and city directorycalled Zip2, while living in the United States, officially, as a student. But he never actually took classes at Stanford University—a precondition for staying in the US. A former board member, Derek Proudian, supplied the story’s money quote. The mindset within the company at the time, he told the paper, was “we don’t want our founder being deported.”
Musk has been cagey about his immigration status during his first years as an entrepreneur, but as the story makes clear, his brother, Kimbal, has often made light of it, describing himself and his very famous siblingin public forums as “illegal immigrants.”
It’s tempting to call this a big bunch of hypocrisy. Musk has, after all, spent more than $100 million to elect a candidate who promises the mass deportation of immigrants who have overstayed their visas. But I think thatoverlooks both what’s driving his demands for immigration restrictions and misreads his vision for the world. Musk does not really have a problem with South African computer programmers skirting the rules. He, like Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, has a problem with the specific kinds of migrants coming from specific kinds of places. In a2023 response to an antisemiticX user who claimed that Western Jews deserved no sympathy because they invited “hordes of minorities” to their countries, Musk wrote, “You have said the absolute truth.”
What makes migrants undesirable, to the people demanding these crackdowns, is not their status but who they are and why they’re here. It’s why Vance can say that Haitians with legal status are “illegals” anyway. Asa proponent of scientific racism, Musk believes migrants from the Global South are being imported as part of a massive plot to reshape the country’s demography and elect Democrats forever. This is delusional in so many different ways—not the least of which is its ignorance of the long-term voting patterns of immigrant groups themselves—but it is not hypocritical any more than it is hypocritical to embrace restrictions on speech in support of Palestinians and Turkish dissidents but to reject restrictions on the speech of right-wing Brazilians. The animating principle is not supposed to be consistent and objective. His positionmerely reflects the animus and preference of a red-pilled bigot. What does the oligarch want? He wants what he wants.
With a little more than a week to go before Election Day, the presidential race is expected to come down to just seven states—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. But the two biggest campaign events this weekend weren’t scheduled for any of them. On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris rallied with Willie Nelson and Beyonce in Houston, where early voting is already underway. And on Sunday, former president Donald Trump is set to appear at Madison Square Garden with his disbarred attorney and a long list of the weirdest people you know.
Trump is on a bit of a blue-state swing. He appeared at the Nassau Coliseum onLong Island in September promising to win New York. Earlier this month, he went to Coachella, in Southern California, where he introduced supporters to the vital concert-festival experience of “waiting for shuttle buses that never show up.” Last week he went to a barber shop in the Bronx.
None of these visits lack immediate value. Both New York and Texas have big races that matter a lot to the national parties—six races in New York could determine control of the House; Texas’ Senate race could determine control of the Senate, and the state is close enough on paper that it may well be a part of Democrats’ presidential strategy sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, Trump’s visit to reliably blue California could affect the down-ballot races that could swing the House. Getting control of Congress is half the battle; the candidates for president want to actually be able to do things as president, after all.
And to both Trump and Harris, these dips into enemy territory serve their larger messages: Texas, on the one hand, and New York and California, on the other, represent the sort of outcomes they’re promising to steer the nation away from. The Houston event was organized around the theme of protecting reproductive rights, using as its backdrop a state that has—thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court justices—now criminalized abortion with no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. If you want to see what Trump’s policies get you, just take a look at a state where, according to a study released in January, 26,000 women who have been impregnated by a rapist since the Dobbs decision have been left without access to care that was once their right. For his part, Trump uses his blue-state hosts to paint a picture of American Carnage 2.0—buildings taken over by Venezuelan gangs; rampant homelessness; crime crime crime.
But in doing so, Trump in particular has made clear something that should be obvious but which a lot of observers on both sides often don’t acknowledge:He has a ton of supporters in these places, albeit almost certainly not enough to win either state. Still, he received more votes in NYC alone than he did in 16 states in 2020—eight of which he won—and his popularity has, according to the polls, ticked upwards over the last few years. A New York Times poll this week showed a 14-point shift in the city since the last presidential election. He got more votes in the five boroughs than he did in the entireswing state of Nevada, while more California voters supported him than in any other state. One of the reasons the national popular vote appears to be so close this year is that Trump is more popular in the places that aren’t nominally competitive.
Of course, we don’t have a national popular vote, as much as Tim Walz might wish otherwise. But Trump’s tactic exposes the absurdity of the Electoral College, and it does so in so flagrant a manner that perhaps even the people who have benefited from that system might start to notice. It was one thing when candidates only focused on the key Electoral College states, where every vote counts. But he is spending the last days of the campaign, speaking to people whose votes mean very little to the Electoral College, in the hopes that it might redound to his benefit somewhere else. Once you accept that the people in these states matter—or at least some of the people in these states—and that you’re going to be campaigning there anyway, it’s harder to argue that their votes shouldn’t.
After Joe Biden’s debate debacle and Donald Trump’s near-assassination, the 2024 election looked like it could be a GOP blowout. Then Biden dropped out, Kamala Harris stepped up, the Democrats raised $1 billion-plus, the Republicans went full fascist … And here we are, a week before what feels like (another) Most Momentous Election of Our Lifetimes, and—if you believe the polls—no one has a clue who will win.
Much depends on the outcome of the vote in seven states—the same ones that mattered in 2016 and 2020. This week on Reveal, my Mother Jones colleagues turn their attention to two of the swingest states of this election cycle, while I dig through my reporting archives to unearth a never-before-broadcast interview from 2013 that provides an intriguing glimpse into what makes Harris tick.
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First, national correspondent Tim Murphy goes to Arizona, where flag-waving, gun-toting protesters swarmed outside the Maricopa County election center in 2020, insisting the election had been stolen from Trump. Since then, dozens of court cases across the US have found those claims to be a big fat lie. Yet threats and harassment against Arizona election workers continue to be so common, Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder, told Tim, that top election officials in the state “have been turning over at the rate of a lunch shift at Taco Bell.”
Richer, a Republican who voted for Trump in 2020, has spent much of the past four years trying to dispel the election lies Trump helped create. To see how it’s going, Murphy visits the recently fortified Maricopa County election center, where Richer’s staff are on a mission to demonstrate to voters that the election process is free and fair and deserving of their trust.
Meanwhile, in Georgia, where Trump and his minions have been indicted for their attempts to find enough votes (11,780, to be exact) to undo Biden’s victory in 2020, new MAGA-friendly members of the State Election Board have been trying to rewrite the rules to favor the former president this time around. Mother Jones national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman explains the fight to control election results in this crucial 2024 battleground and how it mirrors similar efforts in other swing states.
For the show’s final segment, I travel back almost 12 years, to when Harris was California’s attorney general—the first woman and first African American ever elected to that job—and I was an editor and reporter covering San Francisco. By then, Harris was a rising star in national Democratic politics, and editors at New York-based DuJour magazine wanted their readers to understand why. I jumped at the assignment.
I’d written about Harris a couple of times before; I’d even interviewed her mother. So when we reconnected in 2013, Harris was comfortable in my presence—far more so than with some of the journalists who’ve interviewed her in recent years. We spent about an hour together—an unimaginably generous amount of time in the current political climate—talking about many of the same substantive issues (the housing crisis, gun control, prosecuting sex crimes, and tech privacy and regulation) at the center of her campaign today. After my profile was published, I stored the audio on my laptop’s hard drive and forgot about it—until Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket and reporters started complaining about how few interviews she was granting.
Listening back to our conversation, I’m struck by the similarities between Harris then and now—and not just when it comes to policy priorities. When she ran for AG in 2010, very few people—even in her own circle—thought she could win. Her Republican opponent Steve Cooley, the district attorney of Los Angeles County, was extremely popular with the tough-on-crime types who had long dominated California criminal justice circles, not to mention he was older and white. “A lot of people thought it couldn’t happen,” Harris told me then. “What motivated me was I really wanted the job. I felt that I could do it well.” She campaigned hard in communities that were not her obvious constituencies. “I never foreclosed any group or constituency as being off limits,” she explained. “Everything and everybody is on the table, and I’m not going to accept that that door is not open to me.” On Election Night, Cooley declared victory—and many Harris supporters assumed she would concede. But she didn’t.
Three weeks later, in one of the closest elections in California history, Cooley was the one to finally concede, and Harris became the new attorney general.
The big unknown, of course, is whether she can do it again—this time against a Republican opponent who refuses to believe that he will lose and a disinformation machine intent on making sure he doesn’t. Here’s what Harris told me then: “I’m an eternal optimist. I really am. I’m a realist and an optimist. I think that those two can coexist, and they do in me.”