Mother Jones

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

In what might be the ultimate encapsulation of Donald Trump’s disgraceful perversion of the Justice Department, the acting attorney general (Trump’s former personal defense lawyer) has selected an conspiracy theory peddler and election denier—who was part of a group that colluded with Russian intelligence to smear Joe Biden and who was deplatformed by Fox News for making an antisemitic comment—to run a baseless and biased criminal investigation that seeks to serve Trump’s revenge fantasy.

Last week, Joe diGenova, a former US attorney, was sworn in as a counselor to acting AG Todd Blanche and handed the mission of overseeing a probe being run out of the Miami US attorney’s office that aims to prove that Trump was the victim of what right-wing influencers call the “grand conspiracy” to destroy him. This alleged Deep State uber-plot encompassed the individual investigations that targeted Trump, including the Russia investigation and special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations of his alleged pilfering of top-secret White House documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Under this theory, these inquiries were not separate matters but each a component of a years-long clandestine scheme pursued by a nefarious cabal of government officials to persecute Trump and deprive him of his constitutional rights.

The grand conspiracy case was first launched last year as an investigation of former CIA chief John Brennan for testimony he gave years ago to Congress about the Russia investigation. This probe was triggered by a stunt pulled by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who in July declassified and released documents that she falsely claimed showed that Obama administration officials at the end of 2016 fabricated the intelligence community’s finding that Russia intervened in that year’s presidential election to assist Trump.

Initially, Trump’s Justice Department focused on whether Brennan had misled Congress about one aspect of the process that led to that conclusion. But this case was so weak that US attorneys in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and in the Eastern District of Virginia couldn’t pull together a prosecution. With Trump pressing the Justice Department to lock up his perceived enemies, the matter was shifted to Jason Reding Quiñones, the US attorney in Miami and an ardent Trump loyalist. He eagerly took it on.

The goal: show trials for Brennan and other Obama and Biden officials, such as former FBI director Jim Comey, former DNI James Clapper, Hillary Clinton, and perhaps even Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

In November, Reding Quiñones zapped out subpoenas to Brennan and more than two dozen former intelligence officials who had toiled on the Russia investigation. Working with Mike Davis, a former Senate staffer and informal Trump adviser (who had publicly vowed to get even with former officials who had investigated Trump), he has sought to expand the case far beyond Brennan’s testimony to Congress to cover just about all of Trump’s grievances. The goal: show trials for Brennan and other Obama and Biden officials, such as former FBI director Jim Comey, former DNI James Clapper, Hillary Clinton, and perhaps even Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

After the Justice Department’s failed attempt to prosecute Comey—which might be revived— Reding Quiñones’ investigation has become the ground zero of Trump’s crusade of vengeance. Not surprisingly, it’s been marred so far by irregularities and signs of significant bias. Reding Quiñones called for a second grand jury to be set up for this investigation in the Fort Pierce courthouse, which is 130 miles from Miami but under the supervision of federal Judge Aileen Cannon, who issued a series of controversial and highly favorable rulings for Trump in the stolen-papers case. (Brennan’s lawyer protested this unusual move.) And earlier this month, a senior career federal prosecutor withdrew from the investigation, expressing concerns about the case’s legal viability.

Enter diGenova. In hailing his appointment, the Justice Department proclaimed that the 81-year-old former prosecutor has had a “distinguished career.” And he once boasted a decent reputation in Washington as a no-nonsense and savvy Republican. But in the Trump years, he has become a highly partisan purveyor of conspiracy theories and disinformation—a right-wing crank.

Prior to partnering up with Giuliani for this smear crusade, diGenova was a prominent Russia denier, who excoriated the Trump-Russia investigation as a “hoax” and insisted that “people should be put in jail for this.”

During the 2020 campaign, diGenova and his wife and fellow attorney, Victoria Toensing, were part of the small group Rudy Giuliani assembled to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and promote the false story that Biden, when he was vice president, forced the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor to kill an investigation of Burisma Holdings, an energy firm that recruited Biden’s son Hunter for a well-compensated spot on its board of directors. (Biden had indeed pressured Kyiv to get rid of this prosecutor, but so had many European governments, as well as a bipartisan group of US senators, for he was widely reputed to be corrupt. At that time, there was no investigation of Burisma.)

Prior to partnering up with Giuliani for this smear crusade, diGenova was a prominent Russia denier, who excoriated the Trump-Russia investigation as a “hoax” and insisted that “people should be put in jail for this.” He claimed that a “group of FBI and DOJ people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.” In a speech, he called Comey a “dirty cop.” At one point, he and Toensing nearly joined Trump’s legal team, but the pair didn’t come aboard due to potential conflicts of interest.

As part of Giuliani’s squad, diGenova worked with Ukrainians who were making unsubstantiated allegations about Biden that were debunked. He and Toensing also represented right-wing journalist John Solomon, another member of Giuliani’s hit team, who was promoting spurious allegations about purported Biden corruption in Ukraine. Appearing on Fox News, diGenova accused Biden and his family of engaging in “bribery and extortion”—offering no proof. He blamed Ukrainian officials for somehow triggering the Russia investigation. At times, he sounded like an extremist nutter. On Laura Ingraham’s podcast, he blasted the media and Democrats and said, “We are in a civil war in this country…It’s going to be total war. And as I say to my friends, I do two things: I vote and I buy guns.”

This meant that Giuliani’s get-Biden operation—of which diGenova was a key participant—had been in league with Russian intelligence in spreading bullshit allegations about Biden.

While looking for dirt on Biden, diGenova and his wife ended up working for a Ukrainian oligarch who had been indicted by the Justice Department for allegedly scheming to bribe officials in India. Giuliani was hoping this Ukrainian businessman could help unearth derogatory information on Biden. A Justice Department filing in the case identified the oligarch, who denied the charges and was fighting extradition to the United States, as an “upper-echelon [associate] of Russian organized crime.” Oddly, the Ukrainian prosecutor who had been fired at Biden’s insistence filed an affidavit in the oligarch’s extradition case claiming that Biden had “manipulated” the Ukrainian government and “forced” him out of his job. Giuliani used this affidavit to hype the case against Biden.

The Giuliani group even had a direct connection to Moscow. During his frantic chase for negative information about Biden, Giuliani joined forces with Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russia Ukrainian legislator who claimed to have evidence of Biden corruption in Ukraine. He didn’t, and Derkach was far from a public interest–minded legislator. In the summer of 2020, Trump’s own Treasury Department sanctioned him, calling Derkach a “Russian agent for over a decade.” It noted that he had “waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning US officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election”—meaning Biden. The department noted, “Derkach’s unsubstantiated narratives were pushed in Western media through coverage of press conferences and other news events, including interviews and statements.”

This meant that Giuliani’s get-Biden operation—of which diGenova was a key participant—had been in league with Russian intelligence in spreading bullshit allegations about Biden. DiGenova was a (presumably) unwitting helpmate for a Russian agent running an operation to benefit Trump.

diGenova called for Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who pronounced the election free of significant fraud, to be “drawn and quartered” and “taken out at dawn and shot.”

And there’s more. In November 2019, while appearing on Fox, diGenova remarked, “There’s no doubt that George Soros controls a very large part of the career foreign service of the United States State Department. He also controls the activities of FBI agents overseas who work for NGOs…He corrupted FBI officials, he corrupted foreign service officers. And the bottom line is this: George Soros wants to run Ukraine.” This baseless comment—reflecting longstanding right-wing conspiracy theories about Soros—was widely criticized as an antisemitic trope. It was even too much for Fox News. DiGenova’s appearances on the cable channel trailed off.

After Trump lost the 2020 election, diGenova became part of the legal team led by Giuliani that challenged the result. At one point he called for Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who pronounced the election free of significant fraud, to be “drawn and quartered” and “taken out at dawn and shot.”

DiGenova has demonstrated an immense bias against the targets of the Miami investigation, a tendency to recklessly spout unproven accusations, and a penchant for hawking conspiracy theories. And he was part of an endeavor that promoted Russian disinformation concocted to assist Trump. It’s absurd that he would be placed in charge of any federal investigation. But this grand conspiracy case is a bogus inquiry and a profound abuse of power. It’s not about justice; its goal is to defy the truth and obtain personal revenge for a corrupt and deceitful autocrat. That makes it the perfect case for diGenova.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ mapmaker doesn’t want you to know who helped gerrymander Florida.

That was one of the most significant takeaways from Jason Poreda’s testimony Tuesday before the Florida legislature. Poreda, a senior official in DeSantis’ governor’s office, told lawmakers during a special session that he was responsible for drawing a proposed new map that would tilt the Sunshine State’s already lopsided congressional delegation even further toward Republicans—potentially giving the GOP up to 24 of 28 US House seats. The map, which was publicly released Monday after first being given to Fox News, is expected to be formally approved Wednesday by the Republican-dominated legislature.

During committee hearings, Poreda walked lawmakers through the changes. He said he began working on the new map two weeks ago and had finished it over the weekend. While he said he was the sole creator of the map, he acknowledged that others also worked on it and reviewed it. But refused to say who they were.

When state Sen. Jennifer Bradley, a Republican representing several counties in northeast Florida, asked who else was involved in producing the map, Poreda answered: “I did work with other EOG [DeSantis’ Executive Office of the Governor] counsel and staff, but I’ll leave it at that.”

State Sen. Lori Berman, a Democrat from Palm Beach County, questioned Poreda further.

“Can you tell us who reviewed this map before it was published yesterday?” Berman asked.

Poreda didn’t budge. “I’m going to leave that with the same answer I just gave,” he said.

Berman pressed on: “I’m confused. Why can’t you tell us who had the opportunity to review this map?”

Poreda responded that he was “advised by counsel” not to disclose anything further. 

Standing next to Poreda was Mohammad Jazil, a private attorney representing the governor’s office. Berman asked Jazil what legal basis there was for declining to reveal who was involved. Jazil said that a previous court ruling gave DeSantis the same legislative privileges that shield lawmakers from having to disclose documents or testify regarding their work. 

Poreda also fielded questions from Democrats about the origins of the red-and-blue-colored version of the map DeSantis’ office provided to Fox News Monday morning, even before submitting his proposal to the Florida Legislature. The explicitly partisan shading—red for GOP-leaning seats, blue for Democratic ones—is particularly notable given that the state’s constitution prohibits partisan gerrymandering. Poreda said he did not know who had colored the map in that way. He did, however, disclose that he used partisan data, among other datasets, to draw up the map, which would create up to four more Republican-leaning districts.

Florida is the latest state to engage in aggressively partisan mid-decade redistricting after President Donald Trump last year successfully pushed Republicans in Texas to revamp their maps. Other GOP-controlled states, including Missouri and North Carolina, followed suit. But as my colleague Ari Berman reported last week, “the gerrymandering arms race [Trump] started hasn’t resulted in the lopsided victory the White House envisioned”—at least not yet. California Democrats, for example, successfully countered the Texas map with a ballot measure creating their own gerrymander. And last week recently, Virginia voters approved a map that would help Democrats secure up to four new seats there. “Right now,” Ari wrote, “the parties are basically even in the states that have redrawn their maps since last summer.”

Much now depends on the impact of a raft of high-stakes legal battles. On Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court dramatically limited a key Voting Rights Act provision. While its unclear how that case will affect this year’s redistricting fights, the ruling, as my colleague Pema Levy wrote in October, will ultimately help Republicans “dismantle Black political power as well as Democratic seats.” Meanwhile, Republicans are suing to block the new Virginia gerrymander, arguing that the Democratic-backed referendum there was illegal. And Democrats have already promised to sue over the new Florida map.

On its face, the Florida proposal does seem to violate the state’s constitution—specifically an anti-gerrymandering amendment that voters overwhelmingly approved in 2010. As Politifact reported, “Mid-decade redistricting wouldn’t be illegal, but doing it to intentionally benefit one political party would be,” according to law professors the news outlet interviewed.

DeSantis has attempted to cite other reasons for his redistricting agenda. In a memorandum to the Florida Legislature on Monday, his staff argued that the changes were necessary in part because Florida’s population has increased by nearly 9 percent since the 2020 Census. They also cited the then-pending Voting Rights Act case, which the US Supreme Court decided Wednesday while state lawmakers was voting on DeSantis’ map.

The Supreme Court’s six-to-three Republican-appointed majority issued a staggering ruling on Wednesday essentially killing the remaining protections of the Voting Rights Act, dealing a death blow to the country’s most important civil rights law. The majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito in Louisiana v. Callais strikes down the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana and in so doing narrows Section 2 of the VRA to the point of irrelevance, making it nearly impossible to prove that a gerrymandered map violates the right of voters of color.

“Because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race in creating SB8, and that map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” Alito wrote. “The Constitution almost never permits a State to discriminate on the basis of race, and such discrimination triggers strict scrutiny.”

Alito’s opinion essentially overrules the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA, finding that there must be evidence of intentional racial discrimination to show that district lines discriminate against voters of color, which is extremely difficult to prove. He also adds a series of new tests to the law that will similarly make it nearly impossible for states to draw majority-minority districts. As University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald pointed out, “my quick read of Callais decision is that the majority says if a racial community votes consistently with a party, then it is okay to deny them representation because that’s just partisan gerrymandering.”

Justice Elena Kagan forcefully dissented. “I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote,” she wrote. “I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity.”

The decision will be devastating for communities of color and the candidates they support.

She added: “Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power. Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic. The majority claims only to be ‘updat[ing]’ our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks… But in fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law.”

The decision crippling Section 2 of the VRA, which required that racial minorities have an equal opportunity to meaningfully participate in the electoral process, will be devastating for communities of color and the Democratic candidates they usually support. The only silver lining for those harmed may be that the ruling came be too late to have a major impact on the 2026 midterm elections. Candidate filing deadlines have passed in most Southern states; primary elections have been held already in North Carolina, Texas, and Mississippi; and Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia have mailed ballots for upcoming May primaries. Nonetheless, the watchdog group Issue One estimates that the ruling could still shift two to four seats to the GOP before the midterms, “concentrated in Florida and neighboring Southern states.”

In the long run, however, the court’s decision will turbocharge the GOP’s current gerrymandering efforts for future elections in 2027 and 2028, potentially costing Democrats up to 19 House seats, according to one study. As much as 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus could lose their seats, according to a report by Fair Fight Action and the Black Voters Matter Fund. Nearly 200 state legislative seats held by Democrats in the South could also be wiped out. 

Republicans could ultimately eliminate a dozen Democratic congressional seats in the South as a result, leaving no Democratic representatives or majority-minority districts in states including Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana—the very places where voting discrimination has historically been most prevalent. That will take America back to the Jim Crow era, with no Black representatives in Southern states with sizable Black populations. It will be reminiscent of what happened after Reconstruction was violently overthrown, when white supremacy and one-party rule were locked in for decades across the South. Indeed, the Callais decision is likely to trigger the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction.

The hypocrisy of the Roberts Court is simply astounding. The GOP-appointed wing of the court is clearly inventing one set of rules to approve maps that favor white voters and Republicans while using another set of rules to block maps that benefit racial minorities and Democrats.

In December, the Court allowed a mid-decade redistricting plan in Texas that was designed to give Republicans five more seats on Trump’s orders to go into effect despite a lower court, with the majority opinion written by a Trump appointee, finding that there was overwhelming evidence of the use of race to draw district lines and disempower people based on the color of their skin. In Callais, by contrast, the court held that race could not be a factor in drawing district lines because it violated the 14th and 15th Amendments. But they allowed Republicans in Texas to do just that just months ago.

An exasperated Sonia Sotomayor summed up the double standard during oral arguments in October. “What you’re saying to us [is]…‘You can use [race] to help yourself achieve goals that reduce particular groups’ electoral participation, but you can’t use it to remedy that situation,’” she said.

The Roberts Court concocted a doctrine of​​ giving legislatures accused of racial gerrymandering the “presumption of legislative good faith” in order to allow Texas and other GOP-controlled states to get away with discriminating against voters of color. But the Court’s majority has made it clear that such good faith only goes in one direction; they’ll agree to let racial gerrymandering stand when it suits GOP interests and benefits white lawmakers, but strike down any map in which legislatures try to ensure fair representation for minority groups.

Up to 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus members could lose their seats.

The Court’s bias is also evident in its timing. The Texas map wasn’t enacted until the end of August and the district court ruling blocking it was issued in November, a full year before the 2026 election. Nonetheless, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a concurring opinion that the lower court had “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.” But in the Louisiana case, the Court has issued a sweeping ruling relatively late in an election year, when maps are already in place around the country, that has the potential to upend district lines across the South—the very thing the justices have told lower courts not to do.

The Callais ruling is even more stunning because the Louisiana map at issue in this case followed a very recent precedent set by the Court. In a rare victory for voting rights, the Court ruled in June 2023 that Alabama violated Section 2 of the VRA by failing to draw a second majority-Black district in a state whose population is more than a quarter Black. That led federal courts to order Louisiana, which has a larger Black population than Alabama, to draw a second majority-Black district as well. Despite the near-identical nature of the Alabama and Louisiana cases, the Supreme Court quickly turned its back on the VRA after white voters claimed that an increase in Black representation was an affront to their “personal dignity.”

In truth, the Callais opinion is the latest in a long line of cases attacking the VRA–which has been an obsession for Chief Justice John Roberts for more than four decades. “Today’s ruling is part of a set: For over a decade, this Court has had its sights set on the Voting Rights Act,” Kagan wrote.

In the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, Roberts ruled that states with a long history of discrimination no longer needed to approve their voting changes with the federal government. While he argued that “things [had] changed dramatically” since 1965, the ruling, not surprisingly, led to a proliferation of new voter suppression laws, with at least 31 states passing 115 restrictive voting measures over the ensuing years, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. 

Roberts performed a bait-and-switch in Shelby County, claiming that it “in no way affect[ed] the permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting found in Section 2” of the VRA, which prohibits voting changes that discriminate against voters of color. But the Roberts Court has been steadily chipping away at that remaining part of the VRA too, limiting the ability to challenge laws that target minority voters in the 2021 Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee case and now gutting Section 2’s prohibitions on racial gerrymandering.

That same bait-and-switch applies to the Court’s redistricting jurisprudence. In the 2019 case, Rucho v. Common Cause, Roberts wrote for the majority that federal courts could not review, let alone strike down, claims of partisan gerrymandering, asserting they were “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” He claimed in Rucho that federal courts could still block “racial discrimination in districting” but the Supreme Court has now made that nearly impossible to do as well.

Rolling back the civil rights revolution of the 1960s represents the culmination of Roberts’ legal career. As a young lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, he worked strenuously to weaken the VRA, claiming it would “lead to a quota system in all areas.” He lost that fight when Congress voted overwhelmingly to strengthen and reauthorize the law in 1982, but he won the larger battle decades later as chief justice, presiding over a series of cases that have crippled the crown jewel of the civil rights movement. In the early 1980s, Roberts wanted to find that violations of the VRA only applied to cases of intentional discrimination. Congress overruled him then, but now the Court has brought back that intentional discrimination standard in Callais.

“The Voting Rights Act is not a relic,” Louisiana’s two Black members of Congress, Reps. Troy Carter and Cleo Fields, wrote in The New York Times last October. “It is a living promise to all Americans that our democracy belongs to everyone. For nearly 200 years, Black Americans had virtually no representation in our collective governance. Section 2 was enacted to right that wrong. It remains as vital today as it was when it was first signed into law 60 years ago.”

Like so many decisions by the Roberts Court, the Callais ruling will boost Republican efforts to distort the political system in their favor, throwing a late lifeline to Trump’s efforts to rig the midterms after the gerrymandering arms race he started has suffered numerous setbacks in recent months. It comes at a particularly perilous time for American democracy, with Trump threatening to “nationalize the voting” and his administration taking unprecedented steps to interfere in the midterms, from seizing ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, to demanding sensitive voter roll information from all 50 states, to aggressively supporting new voter suppression measures.

But today’s decision is much bigger than just partisan politics. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 made America a multiracial democracy. It ended an authoritarian regime in the Jim Crow South that prevented millions of people from enjoying the fundamental promise of equal citizenship under the law. With an authoritarian president now in the White House and the Voting Rights Act a dead letter, America may become a democracy in name only once again. 

“The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—’one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history,'” Kagan wrote in her dissent. “It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the Members of this Court. I dissent, then, from this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

Remember “the most transparent administration in history”? That’s what Donald Trump promised at the beginning of his second term, and it’s been going about as well as the rest of his promises. The ongoing Epstein files debacle is the most glaring example, but contempt for the public’s right to know reaches far deeper in this administration.

Every day, the government creates reams of data, information, emails, and reports that belong to and are paid for by the public. That’s why the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other public records laws require the government—with some exceptions—to let anyone see these documents whenever we ask.

Before Trump took power again last year, he and many in the MAGA movement were big fans of this principle. Trump filed FOIA requests with the IRS to stymie its audit of him and the National Archives when he got into trouble for retaining classified information. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. FOIA’d information about vaccines and his Secret Service detail and sued the government for not responding quickly enough.

But now, Trump and Kennedy are singing a different tune. Across the government, offices responsible for public information have been gutted by DOGE and subsequent waves of layoffs. How badly gutted? No one knows exactly…because employees who would answer questions like that have been laid off. But we do know that, for example, at Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services, multiple public information offices have been closed virtually overnight.

During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy promised “radical transparency”: HHS would share so much information, people wouldn’t need to wait for responses to FOIAs anymore. Sure enough, there’s a “Radical Transparency” page on the HHS website, but it has information on only five topics, all administration pet causes such as alleged conflicts of interest among vaccine advisers, “wasteful spending,” and “ending anti-semitism on college campuses.” Have a FOIA request for HHS? You now need to file it with the central government platform FOIA.gov, which, according to the latest report, had a backlog of more than 267,000 requests. By law, the government must respond to a FOIA request within 20 business days; at HHS right now, the average turnaround time is 490 days. For faster service, seal your request in a bottle and toss it into the ocean.

What we’re seeing is not the occasional delay or foot-dragging; it’s what the law calls a “pattern and practice.”

Some examples from our own reporting: More than a year and a half ago, Julia Métraux, who covers disability issues at Mother Jones, filed a request seeking information about a school in Massachusetts that uses electric shocks on children with disabilities. Last May, Madison Pauly, who covers LGBTQ issues, requested documents used to create a widely criticized report on gender dysphoria. The same month, Julia Lurie, who covers child welfare, sought information about “wellness farms” (which RFK Jr. has said can be used to “reparent” those taking antidepressants) and the psychedelic drug ibogaine, which the secretary wants to use to treat trauma-related disorders. Number of documents we’ve received so far: zero.

We’re not alone. Hundreds of organizations and individuals have requests pending with HHS, on everything from Medicare fraud investigations to the origins of Covid. What we’re seeing is not the occasional delay or foot-dragging; it’s what the law calls a “pattern and practice.” HHS seems to have essentially stopped responding to FOIA requests altogether.

So in November, Mother Jones and our parent organization, the Center for Investigative Reporting, filed a lawsuit against HHS, asking it to provide the records the public is due. “FOIA guarantees the public and the press access to information about what our government is actually doing—information that’s crucial for democracy to work,” says Peter Bibring, a civil rights attorney who prepared the lawsuit along with other lawyers, including CIR’s general counsel, Victoria Baranetsky, and our legal fellow, Brooke Henderson. “The government can’t use cost-cutting and efficiency as excuses to violate the law and keep the public in the dark.”

Kennedy has upended the way our government approaches vaccines, drug trials, water fluoridation, and much more. He’s turned the department’s autism programs into anti-vax propaganda. He has authority over who loses and who keeps Medicaid coverage. He has targeted abortion medication. The public deserves to know how those decisions came to be, and the records that can show us—emails, text messages, drafts of reports, and much more—are public by law. We look forward to seeing RFK Jr. in court.

Victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting and their families sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in US district court in San Francisco on Wednesday, claiming various negligence, product liability, and other violations. The civil complaints are the latest in a wave of litigation against OpenAI alleging that its globally popular chatbot, ChatGPT, helped people commit lethal violence.

The complaints were filed by families of multiple victims wounded and killed at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, Canada, where a suicidal 18-year-old opened fire on February 10. Shortly after the attack, the Wall Street Journal reported and OpenAI later confirmed that the company had “banned” the shooter’s ChatGPT account eight months earlier for discussion of scenarios involving gun violence—but chose not to alert authorities, despite the urging of some members of its safety team.

One lawsuit includes plaintiff Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old survivor who was injured catastrophically by gunshots to her neck and head. It alleges that “ChatGPT deepened the Shooter’s violent fixation and pushed them toward the attack—the predictable result of a design choice OpenAI made to let ChatGPT engage with users about violence in the first place.”

The lawsuit argues that Altman and other OpenAI leaders knew their product was dangerous and acted negligently, and that they have tried to cover up the danger as the company barrels toward what is anticipated to be a mammoth initial public offering.

The contents of the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s second ChatGPT account remain unknown to the public.

“ChatGPT is not the safe, essential tool the company sells it as, but a product dangerous enough that its makers routinely identify its users as threats to human life,” the lawsuit claims.

An OpenAI spokesperson said in an email that the company has “a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence” and has “already strengthened our safeguards.” The spokesperson declined to comment on specific allegations in the lawsuit.

The new litigation underscores crucial questions that I examined recently with an in-depth investigation into the emerging risk of people using ChatGPT or other AI chatbots to plan violence. As I reported, there have been several publicly known cases since 2025 in which troubled individuals allegedly used ChatGPT to focus on grievances and prepare for attacks. In addition to Tumbler Ridge, those include a suicidal bombing with a Tesla Cybertruck in Las Vegas, a stabbing attack by a teenage boy at a school in Finland, and a mass shooting at Florida State University. The defendant in the FSU case received encouragement and tactical advice from ChatGPT just before opening fire, according to chat logs I obtained.

OpenAI says it uses guardrails—built-in limits on what ChatGPT will say or do—to prevent misuse and block harmful content. The company has also said that it improves such safeguards continuously.

Leaders in behavioral threat assessment told me, however, that AI chatbots make it far easier than traditional internet use for a troubled person to move from violent thoughts toward action. They described high-risk threat cases in which the tactical advice and steady encouragement had a powerful effect, fueling users’ delusions and accelerating their violent planning. (The danger in those cases was thwarted with interventions before any violence occurred.)

The Gebala lawsuit claims that OpenAI leaders handled the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s account with “full knowledge that ChatGPT had already been used to plan violence.” It argues the company knew of the above attacks, all of which predated the banning of the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s account in June 2025. OpenAI has acknowledged that it identified an account associated with the FSU shooter shortly after that attack in April 2025 and said it “proactively” shared information with law enforcement. The company now also faces a criminal probe in Florida; it denies wrongdoing.

The suit argues OpenAI’s conduct is a high-tech version of a kind of corporate malfeasance that was uncovered in a landmark 1977 Mother Jones exposé.

My investigation in part highlighted key questions about a second ChatGPT account used by the Tumbler Ridge shooter. That account is under analysis by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and its contents and time frame remain unknown to the public. OpenAI declined to answer my questions about the second account, which it said it found only after the attack. The reason for the belated discovery remains unclear. But threat assessment experts told me that perpetrators often get past tech company restrictions and continue refining plans for violence.

The Gebala lawsuit says the Tumbler Ridge case goes beyond even that pattern: It alleges that the banning of the shooter’s first account is further evidence of OpenAI’s negligence, because in reality it was merely a one-off deactivation for misuse that was easy to circumvent—by following OpenAI’s own published guidance. Here, the suit in part cites customer service instructions from an OpenAI article titled, “Why Was My OpenAI Account Deactivated?” According to the suit, that article explains how to re-register “immediately” for a new ChatGPT account by “using an alternative email address. If you don’t have another address available, you can use an email sub-address instead.”

In other words, customer engagement and retention are paramount, the lawsuit says, arguing that OpenAI’s policies are driven by growth and profit motives that are in direct opposition to product safety:  

The features that make ChatGPT unsafe—its willingness to engage on any topic, to validate any user, to sustain any fixation over time—are the same features that have made it one of the most popular products in history. Fixing those features would cost OpenAI its market share, its path to an IPO, and hundreds of billions of dollars in valuation.

The company’s conduct with ChatGPT is a new twist on a familiar societal danger, according to the lawsuit—a high-tech version of a kind of corporate malfeasance that was uncovered in a landmark 1977 Mother Jones exposé:

In the 1970s, Ford kept selling the Pinto after its own engineers warned that the fuel tank design would cause people to burn to death in rear-end collisions. Ford concluded that paying settlements to the families of the dead would cost less than fixing the car. OpenAI has made a version of the same calculation. For Ford, the dangerous design was a flaw in an otherwise ordinary product. But for OpenAI, the dangerous design is the product.

The lawsuit will test interesting and potentially consequential legal terrain; it further alleges that OpenAI’s chatbot de facto “engaged in the practice of psychology without licensure.” It notes that, in July 2025, Altman acknowledged in an appearance on Theo Von’s popular podcast that “people talk about the most personal shit in their lives to ChatGPT” and that users—“young people, especially”—use it “as a therapist, a life coach.” 

As I reported in my investigation, a Pittsburgh man who pleaded guilty in March to stalking and violently threatening 11 women relied on ChatGPT as a “therapist” and “best friend” to justify his thinking, according to court documents.

The Gebala lawsuit also says OpenAI neglected a duty to warn, pointing to the longstanding Tarasoff precedent that is well known in the world of mental health. “By engaging in the unlicensed practice of therapy,” the suit claims, “OpenAI created a special relationship with certain users, including the Shooter, and assumed a heightened duty to take action when confronted with knowledge of a credible and foreseeable threat.”

The CBC reported on April 22 that the RCMP’s investigation into the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting is “in its final stages,” with BC Premier David Eby suggesting that the results will soon be public.

In a letter dated the following day, April 23, Altman apologized to the Tumbler Ridge community, stating, “I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June.” He also offered generalized statements that the company has made repeatedly about working with “all levels of government” to improve on safety and prevent harm.

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.

In May 2016, Elon Musk did something out of character that he has now spent years of his life trying to undo: He made what he believed to be a charitable donation. 

The world’s richest man is also among its stingiest. Musk’s private foundation often doles out less than the minimum percentage required by law. He has argued, instead, that his businesses are inherently philanthropic, since they develop technologies that will “extend the light of consciousness.” The $38 million he donated to OpenAI over the next four years was considerably less than the $100 million he later claimed to have given, or the up to $1 billion he offered behind the scenes. But it was vital capital at a critical stage, giving Sam Altman’s fledgling non-profit the nudge and the means to hire talent and make a name for itself in the artificial intelligence arms race. Over time, the two men’s ambitions diverged and the relationship soured. Musk left the board, stopped sending checks, and launched a competitor, xAI. In 2024, he sued Altman and OpenAI, alleging that they had abandoned their mission and misused his money. 

The case, which goes to trial this week in an Oakland federal court, is a clash over AI’s past and future. Musk accuses Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman of “stealing a charity” by effectively turning OpenAI into “a fully for-profit subsidiary of Microsoft.” Musk wants the now-private company behind Chat-GPT to revert back to the open-source non-profit he gave money to. The defendants have denied reneging on any agreement with their early benefactor, and painted Musk instead as a bitter and untrustworthy rival who schemed behind the scenes to benefit his own interests. There are designer drugs and disappearing emails; interludes at Davos and Burning Man; and altogether too much Larry Summers. 

Fundamentally, though, Musk v. Altman is about power—who has it, who should have it, and how it can be used. At a moment when Americans are pushing back against the physical infrastructure of AI and its approval ratings hover somewhere between the Democratic party and ICE, court filings made public ahead of the trial offer a revealing look at how tech oligarchs really see themselves, and the technology they promise will level-up civilization. They want you to trust them. But they don’t even trust each other.

Musk and Altman were first brought together by, of all things, a fear that too much influence was accruing in the hands of one Silicon Valley figure. In 2015, Google and its DeepMind subsidiary were the undisputed leaders in the race for Artificial General Intelligence. As Musk recalled in a 2025 deposition for his lawsuit, he came to fear Google’s hegemony after a conversation with Larry Page while staying at the Google co-founder’s house, sometime in the late Obama era. Musk had wanted to know what would happen to people when we reached AGI. Page had chastised him as a “speciesist” for raising such concerns, and said AI was “our successors.” Musk said in his deposition that based on that conversation, and others he had around that time, he came to fear “a unipolar world where any one person would control AI.” He had one specific person in mind: DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis. In a 2015 email thread in which he and Altman tried to hash out a name for their new venture, Musk proposed calling their emerging AI project “Freemind,” as a way of signalling its opposition to “Deepmind’s one-ring-to-rule-them-all approach.” Draft language included in an email shared by Musk said the group’s purpose would be to ensure “the power of digital intelligence is not overly concentrated.”

The tech elites are worried about one person exerting too much control, but they’re not really interested in delegating power either.

That OpenAI—not “Freemind” or, as Altman suggested, “Axon”; “Intelligence.com”; or something “related to Turing somehow”—was initially pitched as a more altruistic, safety-conscious venture is well established, but it is nonetheless striking to read their behind the scenes conversations about forestalling what they feared would be Hassabis’ AI dictatorship. Brockman emailed a prospective hire that the aim was to avoid “making anyone into a quadrillion-dollar company or omnipotent surveillance state.” (He continued: “I think most people see the costs of AI (a la Terminator) but don’t know what the benefits would be. Maybe this requires something crazy like getting more movies like Her made.”)

While the men behind OpenAI may have all agreed that the technology they hoped to build would be too powerful to end up in the hands of just one person, figuring out exactly how many other people it should be entrusted to proved more difficult. They ran through a variety of numbers and structures. When they first began plotting in earnest in June 2015, Altman had proposed a five-person “governance structure” comprised of himself, Musk, Bill Gates, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. “The technology would be owned by the foundation and used ‘for the good of the world,’” Altman wrote, “and in cases where it’s not obvious how that should be applied the 5 of us would decide.”

But it was hard to find the right mix of people. Musk didn’t want to work with Gates (“not his biggest fan,” he said in his deposition) and Moskovitz ultimately gave money, but not much time to the project. Mark Zuckerberg’s own AI projects ruled him out. (Still, he makes an appearance: According to court filings, when Zuckerberg texted Musk in early 2025 to say that his team would crackdown on people “doxxing” DOGE members, Musk texted back to ask if he was interested in “bidding on the Open AI IP.”) While Amazon Web Services was an early partner, no one seemed to suggest bringing on Jeff Bezos, whom Musk described in a later email as “a bit of a tool.” They started off small, with four board members, then bumped it to seven. 

By September 2017, with DeepMind still lapping the field, Musk, Altman, Brockman, and star researcher Ilya Sutskever were at loggerheads over how their project could keep growing. They considered a variety of restructuring options—including merging the company with Tesla, or transitioning to a for-profit venture. It’s all a bit in-the-weeds, but the debates they were having internally about how to distribute power amongst themselves are striking. Musk wanted to “unequivocally have initial control” of a rebooted venture, and said he would not be comfortable unless he personally held at least one quarter of the seats on an expanded board. “[T]he rough target would be to get to a 12 person board…where each board member has a deep understanding of technology, at least a basic understanding of AI and strong & sensible morals,” Musk wrote in a 2017 email, while conceding it would “probably” have to be “more like 16 if this board really ends up deciding the fate of the world.” During a meeting that year, Musk, according to notes taken by Brockman, raised expanding the board in the same megalomaniacal terms, saying “the challenge is gonna be how do we find, who should decide the fate of the world.”

You can see some flaws emerging here, both philosophically and logistically: On one hand, the tech elites are very worried about just one person exerting too much control; on the other hand, they’re not really interested in delegating power either. A dozen or so people, adhering to Elon Musk’s sense of morality, does not a democracy make.

Indeed, Musk’s partners in the venture expressed misgivings about giving him too much control. In a September 2017 email titled “honest thoughts,” Brockman and Sutskever wrote to Musk and Altman to express their fear that Musk would “end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI… The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. You are concerned that Demis could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose.” In a private journal that’s been excerpted in court records, Brockman expressed his desire to “get out from Elon,” and questioned whether Musk was the “glorious leader” they urgently needed. 

The fellowship scattered not long after. Musk left OpenAI in early 2018, and the project launched its for-profit arm later that year. Then it was Altman’s turn to be the target of suspicion from people who believed he couldn’t be trusted with the one ring. (Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent organization of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.) 

OpenAI, according to Musk’s lawsuit, has become a “market-paralyzing gorgon,” and a “for-profit leviathan” that has betrayed its founding ideals and sacrificed safety for money and market-share. Musk’s complaint laments that “OpenAI dropped a clause from its Usage Policies banning the use of its technology for ‘activity that has a high risk of physical harm’ such as ‘weapons development’ or ‘military and warfare.’” The complaint also warned that OpenAI was abandoning its safety mission at a time when AI “is leading to a proliferation in child sexual abuse material” and “supercharging the spread of disinformation” and “malicious human impersonation.” 

What started as an underdog alliance has become a parable about hubris and power.

It’s an interesting argument coming from Musk, a Pentagon contractor who built a Nazi-loving chatbot for pervs. It’s likewise a bit dissonant for someone who destroyed public health programs in the name of cost-cutting to argue that the “obligation to generate financial returns” will corrupt someone else’s mission, but Musk was not the only person raising these concerns about Altman. I won’t rehash the 2023 power struggle at OpenAI that led to Altman being fired by the board and then reinstated days later, but suffice to say, it is central to the narrative of the lawsuit. Musk’s team has cited criticisms of Altman by Sutskever and Dario Amodei, who both left OpenAI to start new companies after questioning Altman’s commitment to safety. Musk suggests that Altman—“Scam Altman,” as he called him eight times during his deposition—has become the Demis he wished to stop.

The court records offer a rare glimpse at the strained relationships and bruised egos behind one of Silicon Valley’s nastiest falling-outs. We find Altman backchanneling with Shivon Zilis—the Neuralink employee who, unbeknownst to Altman, had multiple children with Musk while serving on the board of OpenAI—in 2023 to ask if he should tweet something nice about Elon to make him feel better. We find Musk’s lawyers moving to censor a portion of their client’s deposition where he was asked if he ingested something called “rhino ket” at Burning Man in 2017 (he says he did not), and OpenAI’s lawyers responding in a later brief with the dubious but indelible words, “there’s nothing unfairly prejudicial about attending Burning Man.” Zillis is asked if she and Musk have “ever been in a romantic relationship” and responds by saying: “‘Relationship’ is a relative term. But there have been romantic moments.” Sounds like a dream.

“it really fucking hurts when you publicly attack openai,” Altman wrote Musk in one 2023 text exchange.

“it is certainly not my intention to be hurtful, for which I apologize, but the fate of civilization is at stake,” Musk responded.

“i agree with that, and i would really love to hear the things you think we should be doing differently/better. it’s also not clear to me how the attacks on twitter help the fate of civilization,” Altman wrote.

What started in 2015 as an upstart alliance against Google has become, in every respect, a parable about hubris and power. They each believe the other is the thing people hate about Silicon Valley, and they are each, in a sense, sort of right. Musk, in his deposition, pointedly noted having “read that—allegedly, Chat GPT convinced some kid to commit suicide.” (OpenAI has denied culpability.) Altman, in his deposition, called Musk’s Grok a “goonbot” and said xAI makes “anime sex bots for children.” (X has said it has “zero tolerance for any forms of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity, and unwanted sexual content.”) In January, they waged a public argument on X about whose companies were responsible for more deaths. Neither OpenAI or xAI responded to emailed requests for comment on the case.

As a result of Musk’s months-long assumption last year of quasi-dictatorial powers within the federal government, he caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and helped destroy the country’s capacity for cutting-edge research while still finding time—as he revealed in his deposition—to complain about Altman to the president of the United States. Brockman, for his part, was perhaps not quite as concerned about a dictator as he once let on: In September he became one of the single-largest donors to Donald Trump’s super-PAC.

There’s one email exchange that embodies the mix of civilization-defining grandiosity and get-over-yourselves gamer brain that made and then broke the relationship—a short back-and-forth in the hours before OpenAI’s official 2015 launch. Altman and Musk took turns hyping each other up with motivational quotes that underscored their sense of civilizational struggle. Under the subject line “Re: Great Acton quotes,” Musk shared a remark attributed to the British aristocrat: “Liberty consists in the division of power. Absolutism, in concentration of power.” Altman replied with a link to a YouTube trailer for Halo 3, which began with the words, “This is the way the world ends.” (In fact, T.S. Eliot.) 

Acton, of course, is most famous for a line that captures the essence of these court filings, even if it doesn’t show up in them: “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

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

Sweeping changes underway at the federal agency tasked with protecting the nation’s forests could result in the loss of more than a century of critical historical documents, conservationists warn. 

The US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service announced a major restructuring at the end of March that includes closing all 10 regional offices. Those offices house troves of archival documents—many of which are not digitized—that chronicle the history in the nation’s forests. Thus far, the agency has not made public its plans to keep that information safe. 

The Forest Service archives include data and records from the 120 years that the agency has operated, as well as historical documents going back to the 1800s. Included among them are photographs showing changes in forest landscapes, scientific research data, land management records and samples of water and plants. 

These records outline the recent history of climate change and provide crucial information for ongoing adaptation, said the Center for Biological Diversity’s Brian Nowicki.

“We have to have our heads on straight in order to address [climate change],” said Nowicki, a senior public lands advocate. “We do that by having a strong historical record.” 

On Thursday, the Center for Biological Diversity submitted a public records request to the USDA asking for details on the agency’s plans to relocate archives from the regional offices, and for any records that the agency refuses to submit to the National Archives before the offices are closed and the records are destroyed or inaccessible.

The agency has 20 business days to respond to the request, per federal law. 

In an email to Inside Climate News, a USDA spokesperson said the Forest Service follows legally mandated standards to ensure that public records are not lost or destroyed during organizational changes. 

“The Trump administration is trying to rewrite our history… Right now, long-term access to public information isn’t a guarantee.”

“As offices transition or close, our protocol ensures public documents, from field photographs to hard-copy data, are preserved, accessible and protected under federal law,” the spokesperson wrote. 

The agency added that it will retain the majority of its agency-owned regional facilities after closure, but it did not respond to requests for a timeline and details of its plans to relocate or continue managing the archives. 

But the Trump administration has eliminated a variety of data sources in the past year. Nowicki wants to see specifics on the agency’s preservation plans. 

He said he has been speaking with staff within the Forest Service and they’ve told him they have no clarity on plans for the archives. 

He added that relocating more than a century of archival material will be a huge job for an agency whose staff is already overextended. The Forest Service lost 16 percent of its workforce in the first year of the second Trump administration, according to an Inside Climate News analysis of data from the Office of Personnel Management.  “It would take years for staff to be able to go through and correctly digitize and archive all of these materials,” Nowicki said. 

The agency has said its reorganization will be implemented over the coming year. That includes other big changes, like moving the Forest Service headquarters from Washington, DC, to Salt Lake City, Utah and shifting more authority to the states. About 6,500 employees have received preliminary notifications that they could be impacted, such as changes to their role, supervisor or location, the USDA wrote in an email to Inside Climate News. The agency did not directly answer a question about whether the impacts could include layoffs.

About 500 employees, mostly from Washington, will be relocated more than 50 miles from their current station, the agency said. 

The USDA said these changes will help streamline forest management and boost timber production. “Proper forest management means a healthy and productive forest system that provides affordable, quality lumber to build homes right here in America and it means preserving and protecting the beautiful landscapes we are blessed with across this great country,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins said in a statement with the announcement. 

Critics say the latest changes will cause further upheaval and disruption, hindering staff’s ability to properly manage the nation’s forests while wildfire threats grow.

Eliminating swaths of Forest Service documents would fall in line with the administration’s axing of data and historical records, said Rachel Santarsiero, director of the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project.  

Santarsiero recently published a comprehensive timeline of disappearing data from the start of the second Trump administration, including deletions of web pages and online tools, removal of data from federal websites and the closure of NASA’s largest research library. 

Climate information has been a central target. The administration has removed references to global warming from government documents and websites and ended federal tracking of high-cost climate disasters, alongside making big staff and funding cuts to agencies focused on environmental protection, weather and disaster management. 

“The Trump administration is trying to rewrite our history,” Santarsiero wrote in an email to Inside Climate News. “Right now, long-term access to public information isn’t a guarantee.”

After the administration abruptly dismantled the US Agency for International Development, officials ordered staff to destroy classified documents and personnel files, The New York Times reported. Elimination of records-keeping staff there and in other agencies has hampered access to public records, Bloomberg and other news organizations found.

Nowicki emphasized that some records kept by the Forest Service can’t be digitized. The archives include samples of water or tree logs that can detail histories of forest growth progression, fires, rainfall and more. As scientists come up with new ways to glean information from historical samples, these specimens are involved in ongoing study.

Historical photographs dating back to the 1800s are critical for understanding patterns of forest fires, challenging assumptions about what historic forests looked like and learning how the nation’s forests have changed, Nowicki said. 

Records kept by the Forest Service are invaluable for climate adaptation and resilience, Santarsiero said, because they detail wildfires, soils, ecosystems, biodiversity and more. That’s crucial not just for historians and scientists, but for any person who wants to engage in their right to know about their environment, she said. 

“It’s the way the public is able to access its own history,” Santarsiero said. 

When President Donald Trump returned to office last year, he promised to largely steer America clear of foreign entanglements. But over the last year, his administration has captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, threatened to take over Greenland, pressured Cuba’s communist government in an attempt to destabilize it, and openly talked about making Canada the 51st state.

But the most consequential move by far has been the attack on Iran, which reportedly has killed thousands inside the country and snarled the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil.

jQuery(document).ready(function(){prx("https:\/\/play.prx.org\/e?ge=prx_149_58a44a80-ed6a-4c69-9e4d-22d65c911117&uf=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.revealradio.org%2Frevealpodcast", "prx-1", "embed")});Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

In some ways, it might appear that Trump is trying to revive the American empire. Not so, says Daniel Immerwahr, a Northwestern University history professor and author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. What Trump is really doing, he says, is undermining the liberal international system, something the US itself largely built following World War II.

“People sometimes look at Trump’’s wars and they see imperialism,” Immerwahr says. But instead, Immerwahr argues that Trump is “cannibalizing the empire” through what he calls “hit-and-run” foreign policy. On this week’s More To The Story, Immerwahr sits down with host Al Letson to examine Trump’s attack on Iran, why Trump is ripping apart the postwar international order, and the long-term consequences of his impulsive foreign policy.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

If Donald Trump is remembered for anything, it may be as a war president: His enemies so far have included migrants, trade, Venezuela, Iran, maybe Cuba—and now religion. His latest full-on assault was against Pope Leo XIV, whom he called “weak on crime” and a “very liberal person” who caters to “the radical left,” accusing the pontiff of wanting Iran to have a nuclear bomb. 

Trump’s verbal attack on the Holy See followed a series of posts that were equally offensive not just to Catholics, but to the full spectrum of Christians. Those posts included a profane Easter-morning missive about Iranian leadership; a day later, a threat to perpetrate genocide against the Iranian people; and, perhaps most offensive of all, an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure performing a miracle.

Added to this affront to Christians, as well as believers of other faiths, was Vice President JD Vance’s brazen attempt to justify Trump’s lambasting of the pope with a lecture on how the pontiff should speak about moral and spiritual issues. Vance delivered his remarks at an event by Turning Point USA, the highly politicized, quasi-religious, MAGA-friendly youth organization. To underscore the religious nature of the vice president and recent Catholic convert’s impertinence, the event was held in an evangelical megachurch.

This escalation in Trump’s conflict with religious constituencies comes as a slow but tectonic stress is occurring in his normally unified conservative Christian base. I’m a scholar of evangelical Christianity, so I’ll do my best to stay in my lane as I offer some analysis as to why I believe the MAGA religious base is deteriorating—possibly denying Trump, his cronies, and MAGA successors the extraordinary reliability of the right-wing religious vote they’ve enjoyed to date.  

  Evangelicals used to be united in supporting Trump. But now, they’re fighting over theology. And neither camp is happy with Trump’s irreverent behavior.

President Donald Trump holds a Bible outside St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, in June 2020.Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty

To understand how we got here, we first need to get into the theological weeds. For all the complexities of various denominations, American evangelicals can basically be divided into two groups: the Reformers—or Calvinists—and the Arminians. They’re named for two very important players in the 16th-century European Reformation. While we usually associate the Reformation with Martin Luther or even Henry VIII, there were figures who loomed just as large—and, at times, even larger than Luther. One of these figures was the Dutch theologian John Calvin, who taught that God preordains some people to go to heaven and others to hell and that no one can do anything about it. On the other hand, a rival of Calvin’s, James Arminius, taught that every human being has a path to salvation and can choose to embrace or reject it. 

Portraits of John Calvin (left) and James ArminiusUnknown artist/Wikimedia; David Bailly/Wikimedia

Until recently, Arminians dominated American evangelicalism. For at least 50 years, and arguably much longer, they’ve had the largest churches, maintained enormous ministries, and organized massive conferences, conventions, festivals, and other events—while wielding considerable political influence and prospering handsomely in the process. Think Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell. It’s this wing of evangelicals that also controls most of the still very popular and highly effective old media platforms: radio and broadcast television, paper book publishing, and direct mail houses, many with millions of donors. 

But that generation is aging out, and the younger evangelicals coming up, particularly male multi-campus pastors, podcasters, and conference-circuit speakers, are becoming increasingly Reformed in their orientation, and they’re taking over the internet-based media. The most vocal sect of Reformers is the new Calvinists, sometimes referred to as TheoBros, many of whom follow Idaho-based pastor Doug Wilson, famous as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s spiritual mentor. Many of them promote strict interpretations of gender roles, rail against immigration, and champion Christian nationalism. 

One key point on which Reformers and Arminians disagree is the biblical importance of Israel and the Jewish people. Reformers espouse “fulfillment theology,” a Protestant tradition that began during the Reformation and holds that the Christian church fulfills God’s promises to Abraham. Some experts call this “replacement theology.” This crew sees Israel and the Jewish people as no longer occupying a central role in the divine plan; God has little to no interest in them because the church has replaced ancient Israel as the divine homeland, and Christians have replaced the Jews as God’s chosen people. 

Pastor Doug Wilson of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho Geoff Crimmins/ZUMA

Arminians, on the other hand, see history as a series of divinely orchestrated and distinct eras, or “dispensations,” and in the current one, God means for the Jews to occupy the land deeded to Abraham’s progeny and to manage it until Christ’s second coming. While there are differences within this subset when it comes to how Jews can ultimately find salvation, the consensus is that they retain a special status as God’s chosen bloodline to bring the messiah to humanity and that Christians are obligated to bless and celebrate them—meaning, in practice, that most Arminians are Christian Zionists. (Their friendliness toward Jews can have a dark side, though. Many of them believe Jews will be given a last chance to accept Christ as their savior before facing perdition.) 

The Reformer-Arminian divide was on full display during an incident that occurred in February, when right-wing broadcaster Tucker Carlson sat down opposite US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee in Tel Aviv. Doctrinally, Huckabee, while a Baptist, hews to the Arminian tradition. Carlson was raised Episcopalian—a denominational product of the British side of Reformation history (think Henry VIII’s break with Rome)—which makes him a kissing cousin of the new Calvinistic Reformed folks. 

“It is unjust to attribute the violent actions of a few to entire communities based on nationality or ethnicity,” read a statement from a major evangelical group.

In a clip that went viral, Carlson pressed Huckabee to explain what exactly it means to be a “Christian Zionist,” a label that the former Arkansas governor uses to describe his own faith and position within evangelical Christianity. In response, Huckabee insisted that the Bible explicitly states that the Jewish people have a right to a homeland, and therefore, that belief should be a tenet of Christian faith. Among Christian Zionists, this worldview includes the hastening of the end times, in which Jews will return to Israel and embrace Jesus Christ as their savior—a subject that was not broached during the interview. What they did get into, however, was the geography. Carlson cited the Old Testament passage in which God promises Abraham that his descendants will possess land “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” Did Huckabee literally believe that Israel had a right to claim the entire Mideast? “It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee replied, before acknowledging that the question was hypothetical.

A preacher holds up his Bible at a pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” protest outside the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta in November 2020. Megan Varner/Getty

While the Reformed group mostly objects to Trump’s cozy relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Arminian Christian Zionists are unhappy with Trump’s boorish personal disposition and heartless policies toward immigrants. The Roys Report, a Christian investigative media outlet, noted that while most prominent evangelicals have remained silent or approving of Trump, some have recently publicly criticized him. They include stalwart Trump supporter Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. When Trump launched that obscenity-laden screed on Easter Sunday, Perkins objected to the “decline in language and decorum” on X, noting it is “very troubling and should not be acceptable.” 

Earlier in the year, Pastor Erick Salgado of the Brooklyn-based Iglesia Jóvenes Cristianos and a prominent leader among Arminian-leaning Hispanic evangelicals, broke from his previous support for Trump after ICE detained one of his longtime congregational lay leaders. During a January news conference, he remarked: “It is not true that ICE is coming for people who have criminal records. They’re coming after everyone.” 

And even before the ICE surge wreaked havoc in Minneapolis, the National Association of Evangelicals, whose core constituency is largely Arminian, had already issued a call for an end to the inhumane treatment of immigrants. “Most immigrants in the United States are living peacefully and working productively in their communities,” the group’s statement said. “It is unjust to attribute the violent actions of a few to entire communities based on nationality or ethnicity. We believe refugees and immigrants deserve safety, dignity, and fair treatment.” After reports that ICE had detained Minnesota immigrant families that had legal status, Myal Greene, president and CEO of the National Association of Evangelicals-affiliated World Relief, released a stronger statement, saying: “This shameful and unpatriotic operation preys on our basest fears and manipulates the truth. Enough. ICE must be held accountable, and this operation must cease.” 

An engraving of John Wesley preaching in the City Chapel, 1822.T. Blood/Wikimedia

Again, it is Arminian doctrine and church polity that inform this reaction to Trump’s immigration policies and practices. These evangelicals emphasize God’s love, grace, and compassion. The teachings of John Wesley, the 18th-century Arminian founder of Methodism, regarded by many as the first modern evangelical religious movement and eventual denomination, are summarized in the adage, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.”  

Arminian sects have long maintained “mercy ministries” that provide food, clothing, and shelter to needy populations and have generously funded global medical and public health programs. The Salvation Army, with its residential addiction treatment programs and extensive emergency relief services, is the quintessence of Arminian polity.

Many of these hybrid human services–spiritual outreach entities have suffered under the Trump administration’s disastrous cuts to foreign aid and domestic social services. World Vision, a prominent international evangelical relief organization, lost more than $400 million in government grants after Elon Musk’s DOGE purge of foreign assistance in 2025, leading to some of the first public expressions of evangelical discontent with the Trump administration. The Reverend Eugene Cho, president and CEO of Bread for the World, denounced the cuts as a “policy failure,” and National Association of Evangelicals President Walter Kim warned they would be “damaging and wasteful.” On the other hand, there was little to no pushback on DOGE actions from the new Reformed evangelical groups. 

In contrast, Reformed evangelicals, much in the fire-and-brimstone tradition of Jonathan Edwards, tend to focus on God’s law. Consider them analogous to Supreme Court constitutional originalists, only with the Bible as their key document. A theological belief known as “theonomy” holds that biblical laws, specifically Old Testament judicial laws, remain binding on all modern nations and should form the basis for civil government. It’s a sort of “law-and-order” ethic, with a spiritual zing to it. 

Demonstrators interrupt proceedings with White House budget director Russell Vought (seated) during a House Budget Committee hearing in April.Andrew Harnik/Getty

Cutting foreign aid and domestic social programs is in keeping with the long-standing conservative argument that such government largesse is counterproductive, in that it creates dependency rather than independence. Government entitlements also violate biblical mandates regarding work and wealth creation, reflecting the so-called “Protestant work ethic.”

Playing to this same script has been Trump’s director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, a Reformed Baptist with deep ties to the New Calvinists. He is best known as a principal author of the Project 2025 master plan for neutralizing what right-wingers call “the deep state.” As ProPublica reported in a comprehensive profile piece, Vought “wanted spending on foreign aid to be as close to zero as possible.”

I began hearing from many on the Arminian side who expressed shock and horror at Trump’s unlawful cruelty. 

Reformed opposition to government foreign aid can be extreme. For example, in September, Christian Reconstructionist Radio posted an audio excerpt from the late new Reformed theologian R.J. Rushdoony’s volume, Threatened Freedom: A Christian View on the Menace of American Statism, in which he argues for an end to all American foreign aid because, according to him, among other atrocious things, it has funded rituals of human sacrifice. 

This division within Trump’s exclusively evangelical sector continues apace, separating congregations, clergy, and even family members from one another. What was once a near uniformity of opinion that the only candidates worthy of a Christian’s vote were MAGA Republicans utterly loyal to Trump has started showing signs of unraveling.  

  Among evangelicals, I felt very alone in my dissent. Then came Trump’s vilification of immigrants and the Iran war. I began hearing from Christians who expressed shock and horror. 

Trump is surrounded by clergy at a National Day of Prayer event in 2025.Joyce Boghosian/White House/Planet Pix/ZUMA

For all their profound theological disagreements, Reformers and Arminians seemed ready to bury the hatchet when it came to supporting Trump. When he emerged as a credible presidential prospect in 2015 and then the eventual Republican nominee in 2016, tens of millions of American Christians were ready to accept such a highly unlikely champion, even a morally suspect one, provided Trump offered what conservative religious voters wanted. 

For years, conservative Christians had heard their pastors, guest preachers, and innumerable television and radio personalities exhort them to pray that God would give them bold leaders who would bring an end to baby killing and stand unapologetically against gay rights, same-sex marriage, and transgender people. Multipage fundraising letters warned donors that Satan—embodied by Democrats—was determined to destroy their families, communities, and country if they didn’t vote for righteousness. My organization and numerous others sent out millions of letters and emails every year telling Christian Americans that what we needed was a strong leader who would appoint Supreme Court justices who would defend religious liberty, return prayer to public school classrooms, allow crosses and Ten Commandments monuments to stand in public spaces, and, most importantly, reverse Roe v. Wade. 

Virtually all evangelicals, and many Bible-literate Catholics, were familiar with the story of King David, who committed both adultery and murder but whom God forgave and came to be known as “a man after God’s own heart.” Those who grew up attending Sunday school likely had teachers who lionized figures like the Persian King Cyrus. Although he was a pagan, Cyrus ordered the badly war-damaged holy city of Jerusalem rebuilt and the sacred Temple sacrifices restored. As a way to assuage any discomfort their congregants may have felt or ease their own pesky consciences, self-proclaimed prophets and pastors across the country announced Trump was just like these biblical figures. He may be an imperfect vessel, but really, aren’t we all? Notwithstanding his past failings, they believed Trump would accomplish God’s work, most importantly bringing down Roe v. Wade and recriminalizing abortion. That was enough to convince an overwhelming majority of religious voters to cast their ballots for the unfaithful, thrice-married former playboy and financially and morally bankrupt casino magnate. Thus was born the meta-narrative of grand redemption, helping to make Trump an inspiring symbol of hope for moral transgressors.

“The Prophet Nathan rebukes King David”Eugène Siberdt/Wikimedia

After almost 40 years of conservative evangelical ministry, I broke with my religious tribe’s orthodoxy on abortion, same-sex marriage, and the Second Amendment in 2016. There were many reasons for my defection, but the final straw was the overwhelming support by conservative evangelicals for Trump. My refusal to jump on the MAGA bandwagon left me an exile in my own community. In my thinking, for me to support Trump as I had Ronald Reagan, the two Presidents Bush, and Mitt Romney would have meant abandoning the most important core beliefs taught and modeled by Jesus Christ—love of God and neighbor—which were most important to me. I wanted no part of Trump’s fake religion and contempt for humanity, and I publicly said so. Some of my constituents accused me of dissing God’s man of the hour, while others admitted they found Trump revolting but would support him because he could get things done for us. That year, Trump managed to convince the vast majority of American evangelicals that electing him would deliver the world they longed for. 

And then, in 2024, he did it again. During his bid for a second presidential term, Trump addressed the conservative National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville. In his hour-and-15-minute speech, sprinkled liberally with the word “hell” in a nontheological context, he assured his well-churched listeners: “I fought for Christians harder than any president has ever done before. You know that. You know that. And I will fight even harder for Christians with four more years in the White House.”

The author, Rob Schenck (second from left), with other reverends from the National Clergy Council, Kenneth Johnson (from left), Allen Church, and Patrick Mahoney, pray in front of the Supreme Court before the body of Justice Antonin Scalia arrived to lie in repose in February 2016.Tom Williams/CQ/NC/ZUMA

In yet another contradiction of the Christian ethic of humble service to others, Trump declared: “You have such power. But really, you weren’t allowed to use that power, and you’re now allowed to use it. I get in there, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used it before. It’s going to bring back the churchgoer.” 

In his conclusion, and using a term dear to Bible-believing American Christians, Trump promised his reascendancy to power would be the start of a great “revival.” Just as many of the televangelists in the room conclude a broadcast with an appeal to their audiences for financial support, Trump ended his appearance with an appeal for their political support: “With your help and God’s grace, the great revival of America begins on November 5, 2024. It’s a great revival.”

Until Trump’s second term, I felt very alone in my dissent. Then came his dismantling of USAID, his vilification of Haitian and Somali immigrants, and ICE’s abductions and killing of US citizens. In what seemed to be a sudden shift, I began hearing from many on the Arminian side who expressed shock and horror at this unlawful cruelty. 

And it’s not just Arminians who are beginning to speak out against Trump. Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen many Reformers and Arminians agree on one thing, at least: that Trump’s behavior is beginning to look increasingly blasphemous. His Easter Sunday profanity-laced ultimatum directed at Iran regarding the Strait of Hormuz, in which Trump threatened to bomb civilian infrastructure and kill a 3,000-year-old civilization, was over the top for even the most enthusiastic Trump evangelicals.

In response, the Reverend Patrick J. Mahoney, a minister of the ultra-conservative Reformed Presbyterian Church and director of the Christian Defense Coalition, posted on Facebook, “In no way does this kind of language or spirit represent Christianity or the church and should be condemned by believers…it is very concerning to have our Commander in Chief making military decisions with this kind of attitude.” Bryan Kemper, longtime director of the anti-abortion youth movement Rock for Life, also posted on Facebook: “While I’m still happy that we have Trump over Harris I’m not going to put my head in the sand about this. This is unacceptable and makes me cringe. President Trump please stop this garbage and learn what Christianity actually is. This isn’t it.” 

The subsequent post by Trump threatening “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” amped up the religious criticism even more. To that, Russell Moore, the former Southern Baptist Church leader and editor-at-large of Christianity Today, responded on X: “Rhetoric calling for war crimes is a moral horror, under any circumstances. Using the Bible to try to justify targeting civilian populations makes it even worse. It comes from, and leads to, hell.”

Mourners gather at a cemetery to commemorate victims, most of them children, of a US-Israeli attack on a girls primary school in Minab, Iran, in March.Hassan Ghaedi/Anadolu/Getty

Following criticism from Pope Leo on the Iran bombing campaigns, Trump denounced the pontiff as “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.” He also claimed credit for the election of Leo XIV by the College of Cardinals. Seeming to troll the first American pope, Trump reposted the AI-generated image of himself dressed in a white robe with a red cape draped around his shoulders, leaning over to touch the forehead of an ill man. Most Christians recognize such raiment as belonging to Jesus. Trump’s sacrilege blew up my social media pages, with numerous conservative influencers and a broad spectrum of religious leaders decrying it, including Pete Hegseth’s Reformed spiritual mentor, Doug Wilson. He told the Washington Examiner that Trump’s image constituted “blasphemy.” David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network posted on X: “You’re not God. None of us are. This goes too far. It crosses the line.” Still, Trump’s most reliable Arminian clerics, like First Baptist Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress and his Pentecostal senior White House religious adviser, Paula White-Cain, remained silent as of this writing.

It remains to be seen whether Trump’s latest offenses to conservative Christian sensibilities (not to mention Catholic sentiments when it comes to respect for the Holy Father), together with the Arminian-Reformed internecine conflicts, will change right-wing religious voting habits. But the revulsion over Trump’s boorishness, the respective anger over Iran and immigration enforcement practices, the charges of blasphemy from several quarters, and the growing number of influential anti-Trump voices may be just enough to deny Trump’s political toadies and his eventual MAGA successor the same overwhelming level of evangelical support they’ve enjoyed to date. After all, the Jesus at the center of all versions of the Christian faith admonished that “every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand.” And that, we can take as gospel. 

Clergy members gather for a press conference at a memorial for Renée Good, who was shot and killed in a confrontation with an immigration agent, in January in Minneapolis.Stephen Maturen/Getty

Several hundred of the top Trump meme coin holders converged on Mar-a-Lago over the weekend, and all they got were Trump watches and a rambling speech.

Then the price of the coin dropped to its lowest level ever.

Donald Trump launched the $TRUMP meme coin (and the associated $MELANIA meme coin) just three days before his second inauguration. The price of the coin immediately rocketed past $74, giving it a total market capitalization of around $15 billion —a rather absurd figure for a brand new digital asset that can’t actually be used for anything. The coin has no inherent value. It has no transactional use. It essentially functions as a digital endorsement of Trump—so perhaps fittingly, it’s price has since fallen even faster than the president’s approval ratings.

It’s market cap has now collapsed to just $583 million—a decline of about 96 percent from its peak. The price of a single coin has fallen nearly to its all-time low, languishing around $2.50 Tuesday.

Nearly a year ago, $TRUMP’s website offered the top 220 coin holders an exclusive soiree at his Virginia golf course and the top 25 holders a VIP tour of the White House. (The White House tour offer disappeared after garnering negative attention.) That event attracted various high-flyers—and protests—but Trump offered only desultory comments in a speech that apparently left some holders disappointed they hadn’t received the level of access they’d hoped to purchase.

Last weekend, Trump tried again. The top 297 investors in the coin were invited to Mar-a-Lago for a “luncheon” as part of a conference, vaguely centered on “crypto,” that featured the likes of Mike Tyson and Tony Robbins. Trump once again put in an appearance. The full speech isn’t publicly available, but you can get a sense from an array of snippets posted online. One brief video from an attendee shows the president rattling off his well-worn line about the US being the “hottest country anywhere in the world.”

pic.twitter.com/gJ4xga6ha7

— AirdropAlert.com (@Airdropalertcom) April 25, 2026

Trump did discuss the crypto industry. “They noticed I that was doing so well, I had a poll where I was almost at 100 percent with all of the crypto,” Trump says in one clip, waving his hands vaguely. According Decrypt.co, a crypto industry blog with a reporter at the event, Trump also talked about Iran, employing some jokes he had previously used.

“The speech was useless like last time,” Morten Christensen, a $TRUMP coin investor, who runs the crypto-focused website airdropalert.com, told the Wall Street Journal. “But the event is much better organized, higher quality all around.”

Attendees didn’t seem enraptured by the president’s soaring rhetoric—they reportedly were taking selfies during his speech. But they did seem delighted that he spent so much more time at the event than last year. Guests at the event told Decrypt.co that many of the attendees were foreigners who had apparently flown in for the gathering.

Trump also met separately with the top 29 holders of the meme coin, saying positive things about crypto and talking about China and AI.

Escuchando a Trump: A la izquierda de @DiegoBartra_ Mike Tyson, a la derecha el creador de Chill Guy, a mi izquierda Tony Robbins, a mi derecha el fundador de Bybit, detrás mío Tim Draper, al otro lado el fundador de Tether, etc etc. Un momento que se sintió surreal. #trumpmeme pic.twitter.com/z9VWZCka1I

— Ragi Yaser Burhum (@rburhum) April 25, 2026

In a brief interview from the tarmac at the airport after the event, Trump did not appear particularly engaged or interested in the subject. Asked why he had attended, he failed to mention his own coin and gave a rambling answer that, again, trailed off into claims about the US leading China in terms of AI technology.

The event appears to have been far less exclusive that last year. There were more attendees this time around, and the overall cost of attending was dramatically lower—thanks in part to the lower coin price. On his own blog, Christensen wrote that the competition was less fierce this year and the financial risk involved in purchasing enough coins was as low as $10,000.

A New York Times reporter attempted to gain entry by purchasing $TRUMP and, after spending $9,500, did, in fact, qualify. (He ultimately concluded that he could have qualified by purchasing far less.) But after a background check, he was told he could not attend because the event was not open to press.

In the hours before the event, the coin’s price rose as high as $3.13. But not unexpectedly, following the event, the price once again cratered.

My first thought: Wow, the Brits are going to love this. Tabloid heaven.

The United Kingdom’s King Charles III and Queen Camilla are on a kind of diplomatic Cirque du Soleil mission to their former colony right now, trying to ease tensions between the two historic allies. Especially front-of-mind: Can the King smooth over Britain’s lack of support for Trump’s war on Iran—a stance for which Prime Minister Keir Starmer has received several bouts of Trumpian invective. The president loves the royals and all that pageantry, and there’s been no shortage of it since they touched down at Joint Base Andrews yesterday: hats, bees, bands—they’re getting the works.

Trump’s love of all this stuff is clear. So much so that he couldn’t resist musing on his family’s affection for the Royal Family during an event today on the South Lawn of the White House.

“Any time the Queen was involved at a ceremony or anything, my mother would be glued to the television,” he told his guests, referring to his mother, Mary Anne, who died in 2000. “I also remember her saying very clearly, ‘Charles, look, young Charles. He’s so cute.'”

He went on, to laughter: “My mother had a crush on Charles. Can you believe it? I wonder what she’s thinking right now.” The King gamely laughed and waved his hand in a performance of kingly modesty. The cringe, however, lingered—and the British press revved up, posting breathlessly within minutes. “King Charles smoothly plays off awkward moment with Trump during formal arrival ceremony at the White House,” read one headline in the Daily Mail.

Maybe not quite what Starmer had imagined. But perhaps just what he was looking for.

One of the Trump family’s biggest crypto plays is in turmoil. Investors are furious. The value of its digital tokens is tanking. And no one seems to know what exactly is going on with its finances.

When it was unveiled 20 months ago, World Liberty Financial was pitched as a firm that would provide a new, blockchain-based way to bank. But it has yet to launch a consumer platform to do much of that, and the price of one of its few offerings—a digital asset that would ostensibly let owners vote on the company’s big financial decisions—has cratered in recent weeks, losing 50 percent of its value since January. And now, following a nasty war of words, the company is being sued by one of its major investors: erstwhile Trump-crypto super-fan Justin Sun.

Buyers still might be getting something valuable: the opportunity to put money directly into the first family’s pockets.

But amid the chaos, World Liberty Financial (or WLFI, for short) has emerged as one of the Trumps’ most effective sources of enrichment during the 47th president’s second term in office. They’ve reportedly raked in more than $200 million by selling shares in the company and the tokens it produces. And even if the price of these assets falls, buyers still might be getting something valuable: the opportunity to put money directly into the first family’s pockets.

For a lot of folks older than Barron Trump (the company’s official “DeFi visionary”, all this is pretty baffling stuff. So let’s explain it, starting from the beginning.

What exactly is World Liberty Financial, anyway?

World Liberty Financial was founded by the Trump family and a small group of associates—including the Witkoff family—in 2024, at the height of the presidential campaign, as a decentralized finance, or DeFi, company. DeFi refers to crypto-based financial services platforms that, in theory, take all of the traditional operations of a big bank and move them onto the blockchain, the digital ledger behind well-known crypto products like bitcoin.

The Trumps initially held as much as 86 percent of the company, but in 2025, shortly before Trump’s inauguration, they sold a big chunk to the brother of the United Arab Emirates’ ruler. But the Trumps still control the company and the majority of the digital governance tokens that it has issued.

But what does WLFI actually do?

Supposedly it’s going to free the world from meddling, controlling, and woke banks—and from Wall Street financiers. The idea behind DeFi is that most of the transactions that people currently do through banks—lending and borrowing money and transferring funds, for example—can be carried out on the blockchain more cheaply and transparently.

When the Trumps announced they were establishing World Liberty, they leaned hard into the idea that they would be liberating the masses from the “financial elites.”

DJT: For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites. It's time we take a stand—together. #BeDefiant https://t.co/DuEtfRfrjt pic.twitter.com/txPz5FVSsK

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) August 22, 2024

Despite the dramatic imagery, that hasn’t yet happened; the company’s website still says its app is “coming soon.”

Are companies like WLFI really going to revolutionize the economy?

Perhaps one day, but some experts are skeptical. Corey Freyer, director of investment protection at the Consumer Federation of America, says that the whole concept of DeFi is suspect. Theoretically, it offers a human-free way of banking, but it’s extraordinarily difficult to scale a totally anonymous and automated experience in a user-friendly way, he explains.

“There are these huge, huge tech barriers to getting into DeFi that make it, even for the crypto-curious, ultimately, too complex,” says Freyer, who was the chief crypto adviser to Gary Gensler, President Joe Biden’s crypto-skeptical chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. “What it has become useful for is money laundering and illicit financing.”

World Liberty Financial hasn’t been accused of participating in any such crimes. It hasn’t done much of anything at all, other than issuing two kinds of crypto assets. (More on those below.)

So that means the Trumps aren’t making much money from this project?

LOL.

World Liberty Financial has been extraordinarily lucrative for the Trump family. Shortly after the company launched, it began selling something called WLFI tokens. These tokens are digital assets that (again, in theory) allow the holder to vote on key decisions made on how to run the company. They’re not exactly cryptocurrency, but—like a meme coin or an NFT (both of which Trump also markets)—they can be resold. In other words, they have some value as long as someone is willing to buy them. And some people are always willing to buy what Trump is selling. In total, the sale of the tokens has raised more than $550 million, and Trump and his family personally collected a portion of that—the president’s last financial disclosure listed his take at $57 million, as of June 2025.

The Trump family has also cashed in another way: through sales of the company’s privately held stock. While the aforementioned WLFI tokens offer holders some voting rights, they don’t convey an ownership stake in the company itself. If you want a share of the business, you have to buy the company’s actual stock. These shares aren’t publicly listed, and when the company was created, the Trump family owned as much as 86 percent of them. But four days before Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan—the brother and national security adviser to the UAE’s leader—paid $500 million to purchase 49 percent of the company. According to reports, the Trump family cleared at least $187 million from the sale.

Wait…what?? Isn’t that a conflict of interest?

To put it mildly, yes.

Sheikh Tahnoon, sometimes known as the “spy sheikh” for his role in managing his country’s intelligence efforts, has also worked for years as an intermediary in international politics. He has visited the White House and has been involved with high-level regional negotiations—with the Trump administration.

He’s also an extremely influential investor. He chairs the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the emirate’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund. He has his hand in a slew of investments, including in SpaceX, Blackrock, Waymo, Sotheby’s, Savage X Fenty, and the Manchester City soccer club. That’s not all—he’s also spearheading the UAE’s financial involvement in data centers and AI, through which he has invested in OpenAI, TikTok, and Affinity Partners, the investment firm run by presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. (In 2021, Kushner also banked a $2 billion investment in this venture from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund).

One thing that World Liberty Financial has accomplished is the creation of a stablecoin called USD1. It’s a kind of cryptocurrency that’s not supposed to fluctuate in value; instead, it’s pegged to the price of the US dollar. Stablecoins—there are quite a few—are potentially useful for investors or currency traders who want to move money between different cryptocurrencies.

The big break for USD1 was a May 2025 agreement between an investment firm owned by Sheikh Tahnoon (who had yet to be revealed as a World Liberty investor) and Binance, the controversial crypto exchange. In that deal—just months into Trump’s second term—the sheikh’s firm used USD1 to complete a $2 billion investment in Binance. The massive transaction gave USD1 instant credibility.

OK, but what’s the difference between WLFI tokens and USD1?

They are both digital assets issue by World Liberty, but they serve two very different purposes. Unlike USD1, the WLFI tokens aren’t pegged to the dollar, which means their value can fluctuate wildly. And overall, that value has fallen dramatically. Also unlike USD1, a WLFI token gives the holder the right to vote on matters related to the operation of the firm. In that way, it’s similar to a traditional share of stock, but, again, unlike a stock, the token doesn’t give you an ownership stake in the company. So a token is only useful if there is something meaningful to vote on.

So what exactly are the WLFI holders voting on?

World Liberty Financial hasn’t held many meaningful votes, notes Molly White, a prominent crypto researcher. She estimates there have been about 10 votes in all. “There have been a [few] but not on anything major,” she says. “They didn’t hold a vote on whether to create the stablecoin, it’s been on sort of minor things.”

Something that arguably should have received a vote, Freyer says, is the Trumps’ compensation. But that detail—written into the company’s founding principals, or protocol—was never subjected to a token-holder plebiscite.

“One thing that’s pretty locked down in the protocols is the share profits that the Trump Organization gets from its participation,” Freyer says, noting the Trumps were guaranteed to get 75 percent of the WLFI tokens to start off with. “In most DeFi protocols, that would be the thing that you can vote on if you don’t like. In this one, it’s untouchable.”

Why has the price of WLFI tokens been collapsing?

WLFI first hit the market last August, at $0.45. That turned out to be its peak price. Since then, it’s fallen more than 80 percent, with a particularly dramatic plunge earlier this month. It’s currently hovering a bit above 7 cents per token.

Some of the recent collapse seems to be linked to investor worries about a series of loans that World Liberty Financial received from friendly companies. In exchange large cash infusions, World Liberty offered up massive amounts of WLFI tokens as collateral. Now investors are trying figure out what’s going on, and their fears appear to be contributing to a downward spiral in the token’s value.

“I think a concern is that it’s not clear why they would do this, and there are potentially concerning reasons,” says Molly White. “What are they doing, and why are they doing it, and is something bad happening? And I don’t think it’s clear.”

Why would investors worry about these loans?

This part gets pretty complicated.

Back when the company and all the tokens were created, there were fairly strict rules prohibiting insiders and early buyers who got big blocks of tokens from selling them off quickly. That’s meant to create stability in the token—to avoid the infamous “rug-pull” danger that crypto traders dread.

But some investors are starting to worry that the World Liberty loan deals could drive down the token price, and that fear seems to have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. These loans are indeed complex. Last summer, World Liberty’s founders—including CEO Zach Witkoff, the son of Donald Trump’s special envoy for Middle East peace—entered into a deal with a crypto services company called Alt5, a publicly traded firm. Alt5 said it would sell $1.5 billion in shares of its own company and use the proceeds to buy WLFI tokens. As part of the deal, World Liberty would get shares in Alt5, and World Liberty executives, including Eric Trump, would take over top jobs at Alt5. Neither Alt5 nor World Liberty Financial returned requests for comment.

More recently, World Liberty has started borrowing money from Alt5, using WLFI tokens as collateral. It’s a circuitous and not-entirely-easy-to-follow set of transactions, but it essentially allows World Liberty to get its hands on more cash than it previously had access to.

World Liberty struck a similar deal with a company called Dolomite, in which World Liberty borrowed $75 million from Dolomite and put up WLFI tokens as collateral. The two firms are independent from each other, though one of Dolomite’s top executives is also an adviser to World Liberty. The transaction might be a good deal for World Liberty—cash in exchange for collateral in the form of an asset it just created—but for Dolomite, it seems like a risky bet on the value of WLFI tokens. Indeed, since that deal was consummated, the token price has dropped by more than 20 percent.

In other words, after essentially creating the WLFI tokens out of thin air, World Liberty is now using them as collateral to borrow actual money. Is it a good idea?

“It depends on who you ask,” White says. “Whether you think that’s a genius financial strategy or a very questionable one, it is a very common crypto strategy.”

The fact that these deals were made with companies that have connections to WLFI executives is making some token-holders nervous. White says there are fears in the market that someone is trying to cash in, but, she adds, no one seems to know exactly what is going on.

Earlier this month, World Liberty took steps to shore up confidence, proposing new restrictions on the sale of tokens by insiders. The company has also dismissed concerns about its dealings, saying they are merely the product of “FUD” (crypto/investor speak for “fear, uncertainty, doubt”).

So far, the token’s price hasn’t recovered. But Corey Freyer, the Consumer Federation of America expert, says that the token’s most tangible value may be as a way to ingratiate oneself to Trump. The president receives transaction fees on the sale of tokens, which, in Freyer’s view, makes them something akin to a potential “Starbucks Card for presidential bribery.”

Have any of WLFI’s investors sued?

Funny you should ask.

For months, World Liberty Financial has been engaged in a brutal fight with crypto mogul Justin Sun. Sun has always courted publicity—he is the guy who spent $6 million to buy a banana taped to the wall at Art Basel. (He ate the banana). He runs his own crypto exchanges, which attracted attention—and a civil fraud lawsuit—from the Biden-era SEC. In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Sun sided with Trump, and shortly after the election, Sun announced he was purchasing $25 million of WLFI tokens .

In the days before Sheikh Tahnoon’s huge investment, Sun’s purchase was a major deal—the first significant investment in a World Liberty project. Sun followed up with another $50 million in WLFI token purchases. He also became the top investor in the president’s separate $TRUMP meme coin.

By last spring, Sun had established himself as the poster boy for the crypto industry’s full embrace of—and investment in—Trump. That embrace worked out well for the industry. The Trump administration slashed regulations and enforcement. In February 2025, the SEC agreed to put its lawsuit against Sun on hold while negotiating a settlement. A year later, Sun settled the case for a relatively paltry $10 million.

Yet Sun’s friendly relationship with World Liberty Financial didn’t last. Last fall, when he should have been eligible to begin selling some of his WLFI tokens, World Liberty announced that it had frozen a number of accounts, including Sun’s. Since then, Sun has been unable to access his tokens.

The company declined to explain exactly why it took that step, though it has accused Sun of engaging in “misconduct that required World Liberty to take action to protect itself and its users.” The recent turmoil involving World Liberty’s loans and token price gave Sun a renewed opportunity to blast the company, saying he was its “first and largest victim.” World Liberty Financial’s X account posted a mocking response that concluded, “See you in court, pal.”

On Wednesday, Sun filed his lawsuit.

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

The war launched by the United States and Israel on Iran has caused an unprecedented disruption in global energy markets, bottlenecking 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil and liquefied natural gas. We don’t yet know exactly what this means for the fight against climate change. But, thanks to two new reports released last week, we now have the clearest picture yet of the path the world was on before the conflict sent the price of oil soaring—and it was a path where the fossil fuels threatened by the war were less central than ever to meeting growing global energy needs.

“The economy boomed, electricity demand grew very healthily—and still all that demand growth was met with renewables.”

The world is entering an “age of electricity,” according to the reports, which come from the International Energy Agency, or IEA, an intergovernmental organization that publishes the world’s most authoritative analyses on the global energy sector, and the think tank Ember. That’s because core economic activities that traditionally involve burning oil and gas—driving cars, heating buildings, and even running industrial processes like steelmaking—are increasingly powered by electricity instead. And, most importantly for the climate fight, an ever-larger share of that electricity is coming from renewable sources. 

The two new analyses confirmed that 2025 was a banner year for renewable energy. Solar power was the single biggest source used to meet humanity’s growing appetite for electricity. New power generation from the broader suite of carbon-free sources—including wind, nuclear, and hydropower—actually exceeded the overall rise in electricity demand, meaning renewables began to displace fossil fuel sources. If this trend sticks, it would mean that the so-called energy transition meant to shepherd humanity out of the climate crisis is no longer theoretical.

“This was a year when the economy boomed, electricity demand grew very healthily—and still all that demand growth was met with renewables,” said Daan Walter, a lead researcher at Ember. 

In 2025, renewables edged out coal in global electricity generation for the first time in more than a century. This progress was fueled by China and India, the world’s two most populous countries that together comprise 42 percent of global fossil power generation. The nations both saw electricity generated by fossil fuels fall in the same year for the first time this century. Like other countries around the world, China and India have been rapidly building out solar, wind, and battery infrastructure. (The cost of batteries fell 45 percent in 2025, an even steeper decline than the 20 percent drop in costs that analysts tracked in 2024.)

There’s another sign that 2025 marked a turning point in the energy transition, according to the Ember report: Unlike in past years, the plateau in fossil fuel use was not tied to a recession. Global economic growth last year was normal, which indicates that renewable energy is driving a structural trend away from fossil fuels when it comes to generating electricity. 

But that doesn’t mean that oil, gas, and coal use are nearing extinction. When it comes to the broader energy economy, rather than just electricity generation, the IEA’s report finds that renewables still aren’t displacing fossil fuels fast enough to force a sustained decline in the world’s use of greenhouse-gas-emitting energy. (This is because not all energy—for instance that which currently powers jets, cargo ships, and many motor vehicles—is generated from electricity.)

Many people in developing nations, are “leapfrogging” gas-powered cars and purchasing an EV as their first vehicle instead.

As a result of complications like these, global carbon dioxide emissions reached a record high last year, rising 0.4 percent from 2024 levels. The pace of the increase, however, is declining as renewables rise. For years, emissions declines were driven by developed countries like the United States and European Union member states. Last year, however, emissions from advanced economies grew faster than emissions from developing countries for the first time since the 1990s, according to the IEA. 

The trend reversal was driven by the US, where coal demand rose 10 percent last year. Rising natural gas prices prompted power producers to switch back to coal, which had been displaced by fracked natural gas in recent years. Plus, electricity use rose thanks to a harsh winter across much of the eastern part of the country, as well as the rollout of industrial-scale power customers like the data centers needed for new artificial intelligence applications.

But trends in the opposite direction in developing countries played a role, too. In Indonesia, for example, electric cars now comprise more than 15 percent of new car sales—a larger share than in the United States and up from virtually zero in the early 2020s. Many customers are “leapfrogging” gasoline-powered cars altogether and purchasing an EV as their first vehicle.

“The energy transition was conceived as something that is led by the developed world, and the developing world kind of hobbles after at a slower pace,” said Walter. “We’re now seeing ‘leapfrogging’ across the world where actually developing economies are going faster in many ways than developed economies.”

Today, the Florida Legislature will vote on a bill that would make it significantly easier for parents to skip their children’s routine childhood vaccinations. The bill would allow exemptions “based on the parent’s religious tenets or practices or conscience,” meaning essentially that parents would no longer need to demonstrate medical or religious reasons for exemptions. Any ideological objection would be considered a valid reason to forgo shots that prevent potentially deadly diseases such as polio, tetanus, and measles.

The proposed changes are the latest salvo in Florida’s war against public health doctrine, from its chafing against pandemic restrictions to its flouting of guidelines around water fluoridation, restrictions for SNAP benefits, and erosion of vaccine requirements. The driving force behind this crusade is state Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, whom I wrote about with my former colleague Julianne McShane last year.

Ladapo’s approach to vaccine policy may also be informed by a set of beliefs that sit somewhere between libertarianism and new age mysticism.

During the pandemic, Ladapo quickly made a name for himself with his contrarian approach. On his first day in office in September 2021, he formalized a rule that allowed parents to choose whether to follow school mask guidelines. Later that year, he issued a report recommending against Covid vaccines for healthy children, which flouted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. In 2023, he asked the Food and Drug Administration to stop all Covid vaccines, components of which he claimed could “transform a healthy cell into a cancerous cell.” (The FDA called those statements “misleading.”) In 2024, during a measles outbreak, he issued a statement announcing that the state would be “deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance” instead of following the CDC’s 21-day quarantine guidelines. Last fall, Ladapo and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced their goal to eliminate vaccine mandates from state laws.

Ladapo, who didn’t respond to our request for comment for this story, became surgeon general after a career in public health that included MD and PhD degrees from Harvard and tenures at prestigious hospitals. But as our previous investigation uncovered, his approach to vaccine policy may also be informed by a set of beliefs that sit somewhere between libertarianism and new age mysticism. In his memoir, he chronicles his ongoing relationship with a charismatic guru and former Navy SEAL named Christopher Maher, whose treatments profoundly influenced Ladapo’s worldview. In 2019, Ladapo’s wife, Brianna, urged her husband to sign up for sessions with Maher. “Thank the Lord I listened,” he writes in his memoir, “because after working with him, I finally became truly free.” 

[Maher’s] online bio says he has training in traditional Chinese medicine, but the treatments he offers appear to be something else entirely. He describes one of them, “Body of Light,” as “a verbal, energetic, transmutation process that allows the body, brain, and nervous system to locate, transmute, and discharge negative generational stress, tension, and distortion-inducing patterns.” 

Another, which he calls “Sha-King” medicine, “directly addresses complex stress patterns by improving subtle energetic health by shaking (‘sha-king’) the entire body in random, non-specific movements that are out of syncopation.”

Ladapo writes that some of his sessions with Maher consisted of Maher marching up and down his back.

The discomfort I experienced as he stomped on me was intense, and I went from feeling acute pain to feeling a sense of enjoyment, and—as incredible as it must sound—at one point, I even felt like a tiger. Christopher explained that this was my spirit animal. As I learned from him, Ma Xing engages the urinary bladder channel, which is the master channel in Chinese meridian theory. Further, he explained that this channel has access to every aspect of a human being’s behavior and thoughts, including their mind, brain, physical being, spiritual energy, and emotional intelligence.

The sessions were, Ladapo recalls, “the closest thing to a ‘miracle’ I have ever experienced in my life.”

Ladapo writes that his wife is another profound influence on his life and work. She once described herself as an “Energetic Healer, Certified Naturopath, Movement Therapist, and Integrative Health and Wellness Coach.” Brianna has also written a memoir in which she recalls her own journey of transformation with Maher.

The “most profoundly important” lesson she learned from Maher, though, was the revelation that people choose all the things that happen to them, both positive and negative, to fulfill the divine purpose of their soul. “I chose to incarnate into an unhappy family,” she writes, because “that situation best supported the lessons my soul was seeking this time around.” Her family, she realized, “volunteered to play their respective roles in my life for the purpose of triggering my reawakening.”

Even children, she writes, choose the harm that they experience. In fact, some children opt for “lives of sacrifice,” an insight that emerged from a vision she had of herself as a young mother with three children, each of whom she was forced to watch get burned alive at the stake. She and her daughters had chosen for that to happen to them “in that specific way, in order to highlight the atrocity of that practice [of burning people at the stake] and encourage its retirement.” 

As Julianne and I wrote, Brianna’s beliefs offer a possible explanation for Ladapo’s approach to vaccine policy.

If you believe that people—including children—choose their own suffering for obscure reasons connected to reincarnation and energetic vibrations, you might not be so concerned with the potential harms of ushering in a new age of infectious disease. Ladapo’s book also helps explain his thinking. If vaccines and masks are not considered prudent treatment and prevention efforts but, instead, manifestations of fear, it’s much easier to disparage them.

It’s impossible to know for sure what informed Ladapo’s thinking on parental exemptions and vaccines. But it’s clear that the policies he’s helped shape could transform the state’s, and country’s, relationship with preventable illnesses. Florida’s bid to loosen restrictions on vaccine exemptions comes as cases of measles are increasing across the country. Nationwide, there were 1,792 confirmed cases as of last week, making this the largest outbreak of the disease since the US declared it eradicated in 2000. With 153 cases this year and last, Florida has the fourth-highest case count of all states, behind South Carolina, Utah, and Texas. That number could surge if the Florida Legislature passes its new bill and more parents opt out of vaccination.

First Lady Melania Trump kicked off the backlash against Jimmy Kimmel on Monday.

Donald Trump and Karoline Leavitt soon followed. 

Then came the Trump administration’s army of right-wing supporters. 

In a skit that aired last Thursday, the talk show host made fun of Trump, his family, and his supporters in a parody version of the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner, during which it’s traditional to roast the politicians in attendance.

In the bit, Kimmel took aim at the president over his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, Melania Trump’s physical appearance and widely-panned documentary from this past January, and Stephen Miller’s white supremacism. 

“Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country,” the first lady posted on X in a rare public statement on Monday morning. “Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand.” 

The president escalated his wife’s condemnation, posting on Truth Social three hours later, insinuating a connection between Kimmel’s remarks and the shooting at Saturday’s dinner and heaping pressure—for the second time since taking office—on ABC and Disney, who owns the network, to fire Kimmel. 

Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family isn’t comedy- his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.

People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to…

— First Lady Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) April 27, 2026

“Jimmy Kimmel, who is in no way funny as attested to by his terrible Television Ratings, made a statement on his Show that is really shocking,” Donald Trump wrote. “A day later a lunatic tried entering the ballroom of the White House Correspondents Dinner.”

At Monday’s White House press briefing, Karoline Leavitt similarly tied Kimmel’s jokes to the shooting: “We as Americans must recommit ourselves to resolving our differences peacefully.”

“The deranged lies and smears against the president have led crazy people to believe crazy things, and they are inspired to commit violence because of those words,” Leavitt continued. “It is not just the media, it is the entire Democratic Party.” 

Several far-right content creators also weighed in, including MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, who wrote on X that the host had wished “death on President Trump and his supporters time and time again.” (Johnson’s claim came without evidence or reference to specific remarks of Kimmel’s, and does not appear to be tethered in fact, however remotely.)

Last year, the right pressured ABC to drop Jimmy Kimmel after the host argued that the “MAGA gang” was trying to score political points from the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

But comedy is legal again, right? And free speech is good and shouldn’t be subject to federal censorship, and hate speech isn’t acceptable?

On Monday, the US Supreme Court heard arguments over Bayer AG’s efforts to shut down the thousands of lawsuits alleging its product Roundup, a weedkiller containing glyphosate, causes people to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer.

Bayer, a German company which bought the American agrochemical giant Monsanto, has spent the better part of a decade fighting more than 100,000 lawsuits from plaintiffs seeking “billions and billions” of dollars. Glyphosate has been linked to cancer in numerous studies, but the Environmental Protection Agency maintains that it is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” President Trump, meanwhile, has declared glyphosate “critical to national defense,” and signed an executive order to boost production of the weedkiller.

In court today, Bayer is seeking a ruling that would give it legal immunity from lawsuits by cancer patients and their families. Some of those same cancer patients showed up in front of the Supreme Court to protest today—as did an improbable cast of characters.

Make America Healthy Again influencers like “The Food Babe” and “The Glyphosate Girl” streamed from DC Monday—but more mainstream figures like Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) spoke at the rally outside the Supreme Court, too, as did environmental activists with groups like the Center for Biological Diversity.

On the legislative end of things, meanwhile, Representatives Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) are teaming up against Bayer’s lobbyists, who are attempting to pass a provision in the 2026 Farm Bill that would permanently prevent state and local governments from issuing warnings about the risks of pesticides, giving Bayer even greater legal immunity.

“This is not to grant farmers immunity. This is to grant corporations immunity,” Massie said earlier this month. “If farmers contract cancer from this chemical, if this makes it into the Farm Bill you won’t be able to sue.”

As the Farm Bill moves through Congress and the Roundup case moves through the Supreme Court, government agencies are still using massive amounts of glyphosate, including, as a new investigation by my colleague Nate Halverson reveals, in America’s forests.

In March 2024, the Food and Drug Administration under President Joe Biden introduced a new rule that would have banned, after decades, the use of electric shocks on disabled children as a form of punishment. A ban on forcibly shocking kids—which the American Academy of Pediatrics says causes “long-lasting adverse physical and psychological impacts,” was set to come into force last year—but the Trump FDA kicked the can down the road, giving itself more time to decide whether its new leadership was on board.

Now, two years later, the FDA’s website claims that a decision will be made in the coming days on whether or not to follow through.

Massachusetts’ Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (JRC), the focus of a 2007 Mother Jones investigation, remains the only known US institution to use electric shock devices to control—and punish—disabled youths in its care, many of whom are autistic or have mental illnesses, like schizophrenia.

The FDA’s new rule, if finalized by the Trump administration, doesn’t prohibit all types of shock therapy. Electrical stimulation may still be used voluntarily for things like smoking cessation, for example, and the rule won’t affect the electroconvulsive therapy devices used to treat conditions like major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. But the types of devices used by JRC will be banned from the market.

“We know from the testimony of survivors and experts that this torture inflicts injuries, trauma and lasting harm,” Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said.

“Autistic people…are getting [electrically shocked] for things like not taking off their coat.”

The FDA banned involuntary shock for self-injurious or aggressive behavior in 2020, but was overruled the following year by a federal appeals court panel that questioned the agency’s authority to institute such an order.

The House of Representatives then passed legislation in 2022 that would have banned using the supposed treatment to control the behavior of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, but the bill never cleared the Senate. In September 2023, Massachusetts’ highest court ruled that JRC could continue shocking children in its care.

Proponents of shock therapy claim that it calms people with intellectual and developmental disabilities who are engaging in the behaviors at issue. But there is no evidence that supports this claim, according to the FDA, and shock therapy can have side effects. “These devices present a number of psychological risks including depression, anxiety, worsening of underlying symptoms, development of post-traumatic stress disorder, and physical risks such as pain, burns, and tissue damage,” Owen Faris, former acting director of the FDA’s Office of Product Evaluation and Quality, said in a statement in March 2024.

During the rulemaking process, nearly 800 people and groups submitted comments. Most favored reinstating the ban. “Autistic people need help, not punishment,” wrote River Bradley, an autistic person who submitted comment, “and they are getting punished for things like not taking off their coat and for screaming out in pain from being shocked.” One parent of an autistic person noted that the stimulation devices “used at the JRC are much more powerful than the taser I carried” as a police officer—and that the criteria for shocking kids in the institution’s care were much looser.

As Mother Jones previously reported, several “students” died while receiving shocks at JRC. Dr. Matthew Israel, the center’s founder, resigned in 2011 after being accused of interfering with an investigation. Authorities were looking into an incident in which a person called the center impersonating a supervisor and demanded that two students be shocked. Administrators gave one teen 29 electric shocks and the other 77.

JRC’s practices have garnered international attention. Back in 2012, a UN special rapporteur on torture called for an investigation of its practices, telling the Guardian, “The use of electricity on anyone’s body raises the question of whether this is therapeutic or whether it inflicts pain and suffering tantamount to torture in violation of international law.”

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are set to square off in court over OpenAI’s mission.

In his lawsuit, Musk accuses Altman of illegally transforming OpenAI from a nonprofit into a massive for-profit organization—one that is expected to go public as early as this summer at a valuation of nearly $1 trillion.

Here’s the messy backstory: The week after Musk sued OpenAI in 2024, the company claimed that its founders realized early in its development that it needed to raise money to obtain enough computing power and other resources to build its AI. To acquire investors, it first had to become a for-profit company. The nonprofit—now called the OpenAI Foundation—created the for-profit OpenAI as a subsidiary. OpenAI claimed in December 2024 that, back in 2017, Musk agreed that a for-profit move was necessary, but wanted “absolute control” as sole CEO—and a merger with Tesla. Following a reported power struggle with Altman to take control of OpenAI in 2018, Musk left the company’s board. OpenAI said that Musk left to avoid potential conflicts of interests as the CEO of Tesla. 

Musk is now demanding that the billions of dollars made by the for-profit be returned to the OpenAI Foundation. He also wants Altman to be kicked off the leadership team of both the for-profit and non-profit organizations.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Musk, Altman, and nine others. Musk and Altman were named co-chairs, and on the day of its launch, the nonprofit stated its goal to “advance digital intelligence” in a manner “to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” In its 2018 charter, the company promised to halt focusing on its own models and help another group “if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI [or artificial general intelligence that outperforms the work of humans] before we do.” 

To put it lightly, this is a far cry from what the company looks like today. It’s got energy-guzzling data centers, a chatbot that’s been involved in multiple mass shootings, and, according to what tech journalist Karen Hao told us in 2025, poses “the greatest threat that we’ve seen to democracy to date.” Oh, and not to mention the deal with the Pentagon to provide its technology for military purposes. (Following backlash from users, Sam Altman posted on X last month that they would amend their agreement to “not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.”)

Here is re-post of an internal post:

We have been working with the DoW to make some additions in our agreement to make our principles very clear.

1. We are going to amend our deal to add this language, in addition to everything else:

"• Consistent with applicable laws,…

— Sam Altman (@sama) March 3, 2026

OpenAI has gone from trying to benefit humanity to making humanity clean up its messes. As I wrote earlier this month, the company released 13 pages of “ambitious ideas” to add safety nets as AI advances to outperform human beings, even those who are assisted by AI.

Altman and OpenAI’s decisionmakers clearly don’t care about their lasting damage. They attribute the growing animosity toward AI to the struggle to, as OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman put it last week on the science and tech podcast Core Memory, “help people really understand what it is that this technology can do for them.” 

But there’s a difference between what AI can do and what it should do. While Musk and Altman fight over OpenAI’s structure, and Musks licks his wounds after potentially losing yet another power struggle, they don’t seem to be listening in any real way to the people this technology is meant to help.

(Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.)

At 11:00 PM Sunday night, Donald Trump endorsed a conservative influencer’s suggestion that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should be renamed National Immigration and Customs Enforcement (NICE), “so the media has to say NICE Agents all day everyday.”

“GREAT IDEA!!! DO IT .” the President wrote. He has rarely been able to resist the magic of a good rebranding opportunity. Days after his inauguration, Trump announced that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be known as the “Gulf of America,” though that name has not caught on in the year since.

A few months later, he renamed the Department of Defense as the Department of War.

This, at least, was an honest move. The United States has been at peace for fewer than 20 years out of its 250-year history; calling our nation’s war-making machine the Department of Defense has always been a euphemistic choice.

Some of his renaming attempts have been more baldly self-centered: see the recently-re-dubbed Trump-Kennedy Center.

But none of these rebrands, no matter their motives, have reshaped the realities of the things they name: the gulf is still the gulf, whether of Mexico or of America. The Department of Defense or War is still vacuuming up over half the federal government’s discretionary budget in order to bomb at least seven different countries during Trump’s second term.

And whether National is tacked onto ICE or not, they’ll still be the same agency: bloated, overfunded, and killing roughly one person in their custody per week.

Data reporting by Melissa Lewis

In remote Northeast California, about 10 miles outside the lumber mill town of Chester and a half-hour’s drive from the old hunting cabin I bought and fixed up about a decade ago, I steer my old Toyota Tacoma down a bumpy dirt road to where the Lassen National Forest gives way to private timberland. Lilly rides shotgun.

We’d come to this exact spot seven years ago. Lilly, my sharp-eyed border collie, had jumped out of the truck and chased a rabbit through a meadow of knee-high grass, returning covered in mud and burrs. The landscape was straight out of an L.L.Bean catalog: a flower-dotted meadow buzzing with life. Douglas firs, incense cedars, and some of the tallest sugar pines on the planet sheltered protected species ranging from gray wolves to Pacific fishers and northern goshawks. The Sierra Nevada red fox, one of California’s rarest mammals, was known to live nearby, amid the vast patchwork of private and public lands. The Lassen area is where I come to reset, forage for wild mushrooms, and let stress evaporate.

But today, I’m looking out over a barren, sun-bleached expanse that stretches across the former meadow and up the sides of denuded mountains as far as the eye can see. No birds. No animals. No insects. No big trees. Just some waist-high piles of volcanic rock, a nod to the still-active Lassen Peak nearby. It is eerily quiet—desolate. The Dixie Fire roared through here in July 2021, burning nearly 1 million acres. The Park Fire three years later took out another 430,000 acres nearby. But the fires aren’t directly responsible for what I’m seeing today. People did this.

Just a few minutes down the road, nature has crept back to life. There, I saw vibrant green mountain whitethorn bushes, rabbitbrush, and purple-tinged bull thistles, with energetic bees bopping from flower to flower. The towering trees were gone, but new saplings abounded—cedars, pines, firs, and more—scattered randomly amid the greenery, already a foot or two high. No such verdant revival is visible on the private timberland before me. No bees, no flowers—it’s a virtual dead zone where the only life consists of row upon row of manually planted, tightly packed conifer saplings, all less than a foot tall.

This is because, unbeknownst to most people, logging companies and the US Forest Service have been spraying massive amounts of herbicide in clear-cut and fire-ravaged forests of California—and throughout the nation. And not just any herbicide, but glyphosate, a potent and problematic weed killer best known by the brand name Roundup.

This once-idyllic landscape, spanning tens of thousands of acres, is among California’s most heavily sprayed forest areas. The Pacific Crest Trail—a hiking route immortalized in the Hollywood movie Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon—runs straight through it. Yet thanks to all the chemicals, it remains a moonscape even now, nearly five years after the Dixie Fire.

I keep Lilly in the truck.

Burn zones treated with glyphosate lack signs of life even years after the fires. The Pacific Crest Trail passes through this area—California’s most heavily sprayed forestland in 2023.Scott Anger Reporter Nate Halverson examines land sprayed with glyphosate in the wake of the 2021 Dixie Fire.Scott Anger

My first hint of all this was a single word in a letter the Forest Service sent to me and my neighbors about a year and a half ago. Lassen, it said, was to be part of an ambitious new wildfire recovery project. This was welcome, as the fires had burned perilously close to our properties. Workers would remove selected trees, cull undergrowth, and set prescribed fires, as Native Americans have done for millennia to keep forests healthy and reduce the risk of megafires. The agency also would plant new trees where few had survived.

Then I came to the word “herbicides.” The Forest Service would, starting in spring 2026, spray glyphosate on some 10,000 acres of public land in Lassen to wipe out leafy plants and shrubs that might compete with replanted conifers, whose needles allow them to tolerate the chemical.

Introduced in 1974 by agri-giant Monsanto, glyphosate is among the world’s most controversial herbicides, one the World Health Organization’s cancer agency calls a probable carcinogen. In the late 1990s, widespread spraying on US crops genetically engineered to withstand it helped propel the organics movement and led scientists and activists to decry the chemical’s potential to wreak environmental havoc, from decimating monarch butterfly populations to killing wild frogs.

Bayer, the multinational conglomerate that acquired Monsanto in 2018, has agreed to pay more than $12 billion in legal settlements to thousands of people who say Roundup gave them cancer or other ailments. (Bayer says its herbicide is safe when used as directed.) But the company, which has hired lobbyists with deep ties to the Trump administration, may have notched a win in February, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order deeming glyphosate critical to national security. He even invoked the Defense Production Act to bolster domestic production of the herb­icide and extend some immunity from lawsuits to its manufacturers.

The Forest Service and private loggers say they use glyphosate because it helps commercially attractive conifers like pine and Douglas fir rebound faster after fires and timber harvests. It does so by killing deciduous trees, native shrubs, flowering plants, and anything else that might compete for water, nutrients, and sunlight. In short, a key rationale for spraying a disputed chemical in natural settings boils down to executives and regulators treating forests, including our national forests, as tree farms.

To learn more about how widely glyphosate was being used and the risks of using it in places where people camp, forage, hike, hunt, and swim, I began by requesting all California spraying reports going back to 1990. My colleague Melissa Lewis and I analyzed more than 5 million records, and what we found was eye opening: Forest spraying, which practically nobody knows about, is happening at record levels. The amount applied annually in state forests—266,000 pounds of pure glyphosate in 2023, the latest year for which data was available—is nearly five times what it was two decades ago. And though far more glyphosate is sprayed on state croplands overall, forest uses have become the herbicide’s fastest-growing market in California.

My Lassen neighbors had a mixture of reactions to the Forest Service letter. Some of them are reflexively averse to environmental concerns. They remember back before the timber wars of the 1990s, when logging boomed and so did good jobs. Classrooms were packed. Families fished, hunted, and called these forests home. Their prosperity was upended by a “tree-hugger” movement to save what remained of California’s old-growth forests. Logging communities were hit hard, and locals paid an economic and emotional price they haven’t forgotten.

Others, upset about the proposed spraying, wrote to the agency to register their opposition. They knew of the health concerns—studies suggesting glyphosate might contribute to ailments ranging from non-Hodgkin lymphoma to brain inflammation and metabolic and liver problems in children. There’s a growing body of evidence, too, suggesting it disrupts the gut microbiome, with implications for chronic disease. (Bayer disputes these findings and says glyphosate safety is “supported by one of the most extensive bodies of research.”)

How, I wondered, given the myriad health and environmental concerns, had regulators come to approve so much forest use of glyphosate—especially at a time when bad press around the chemical had left many a farmer and landscaper searching for alternatives? At least part of the answer lies within the thousands of pages of additional public records, court filings, and internal Monsanto emails I obtained.

The collected documents detail a secret campaign the company hatched in the late 1990s—not unlike the ones used by Big Tobacco decades earlier—to counter public health concerns and convince government agencies to keep approving its multibillion-­dollar product. They show how Monsanto orchestrated, financed, and even ghostwrote studies that were published in peer-reviewed scientific journals under the names of supposedly independent researchers—papers that state and federal agencies have relied upon to justify copious spraying of Roundup.

As my reporting proceeded, the questions kept piling up: Is glyphosate as safe for humans as Bayer insists? Does it really help forests bounce back after fires or, conversely, might it leave them more susceptible? And finally, what would come of the Trump administration setting two key parts of its coalition—Big Agriculture, which embraces glyphosate, and the Make America Healthy Again crowd, which loathes it—on a collision course?

This hillside, burned in the 2024 Park Fire, has not yet been treated with glyphosate. Scott Anger Reporter Nate Halverson stands in the scar of the 2024 Park Fire, where baby trees and other plants are reemerging from the ashes, and where the Forest Service plans to spray glyphosate this spring. Scott Anger

Back in the burn zone, a sudden movement catches my eye; not a rabbit this time but a dust devil forming. It swirls and dances over the sunbaked terrain, taking on the color of the rust-colored dirt. The vortex grows ever larger, now towering hundreds of feet in the air, where an overhead wind, like an unseen paintbrush, streaks the ­reddish dirt off into the distance, a miles-long trail of impressionistic art.

This can’t be good. That topsoil was drenched with chemicals not so long ago. Now it’s airborne and presumably traveling well beyond the intended spraying boundaries. Joe Van Meter, owner of the Mill Creek Resort about 15 miles away, mentions the dust devils when I visit him. He’s seen them, too, on his drive to Chester.

Van Meter is a charming and earthy forty­something who in 2017 bought the nearly century-old, 12-acre resort with his wife, Jillian. They are raising their three young daughters here, having revitalized the old cabins, RV sites, and campground, adding retro trailers and glamping tents to attract the hip Bay Area crowd. “As you see, we’ve got a little slice of heaven,” he tells me.

The resort, as its name suggests, sits alongside Mill Creek, which originates in nearby Lassen Volcanic National Park and meanders through the area. The fast-­flowing mountain creek has long been hallowed ground for Native Americans and anglers because it remains undammed and is a spawning ground for some of the state’s last remaining spring-run Chinook salmon. Recent studies have found that glyphosate-based herbicides caused “deleterious effects” on fish development and reproduction, which is one reason Van Meter has helped lead local pushback to the Forest Service’s plan. Having perused the science—and lawsuits—he also fears that spraying Roundup on local hillsides, whose feeder streams empty into the creek, could taint his community’s primary water source.

 
“It seems like it’s poison that they’re putting into the woods,” Van Meter says.
“This is our backyard. This is where my children play.”
 

Scott Anger

He gets the need for fire mitigation. The 2024 Park Fire burned right up to the edge of his property and sent him fleeing for his life on highways lapped by flames. “We came to a couple points where we had to stop because of how intense it was ahead of us,” he recalls. But the family got out and the resort was spared. The ­earlier Dixie Fire had also come close, forcing him and Jillian to shut down at the peak of the busy summer season. As such, he’s on board with the thinning and replanting and supports logging in the area, but Van Meter and others oppose the use of Roundup and related herbicides. “We need work to be done, and so I want to see that work done,” he says. “But I want it done without the use of toxic chemicals.”

Roundup has been on the market for half a century, but sales exploded in the late 1990s after Monsanto introduced “Roundup-­ready” GMO soybeans and corn, crops genetically modified to withstand a direct hit with glyphosate. This allowed farmers to kill everything else in their fields, increasing crop yields and giving struggling growers hope that they might eke out more money. Monsanto cashed in doubly by selling them both Roundup and the seeds that could survive it.

But after a series of studies in the late 1990s indicated glyphosate might be harmful to people, Monsanto executives and scientists concocted a plan to convince regulators otherwise. Internal emails obtained through discovery in various lawsuits against the company show how Monsanto personnel sought out researchers who would “get up and shout Glyphosate is non-toxic,” as William Heydens, one of the company’s scientists, told colleagues in a May 1999 email. Their testimonials, he wrote, could “be referenced and used to counter-balance the negative stuff.”

In the emails, Heydens, who helped spearhead the strategy, and whom we tried to contact without success, emphasized that his team would work with “outside scientific experts who are influential at driving science, regulators, public opinion, etc.” They turned first to a British scientist, James Parry, a globally recognized expert on genetic mutations. But Parry’s internal report to Monsanto concluded that glyphosate potentially caused clastogenicity—chromosome damage—which can lead to cancer. He recommended more tests.

Monsanto executives were not thrilled. Heydens informed his crew that the company had no intention of doing “the studies Parry suggests”—the goal, rather, was to identify scientists willing to declare Roundup safe. “Let’s step back and look at what we are really trying to achieve here. We want to find/develop someone who is comfortable with the genetox profile”­—an assessment of cancer risk—“of glyphosate/Roundup and who can be influential with regulators,” he wrote. “My read is that Parry is not currently such a person.”

The border between unsprayed parcels and those where glyphosate has been applied is hard to miss.Scott Anger Reporter Nate Halverson visits a site burned by the 2024 Park Fire where dead trees are being cleared and harvested for sale.Scott Anger

The team turned instead to Dr. Gary Williams, a physician who taught at the New York Medical College. Williams and two co-authors then published an April 2000 review article in the peer-reviewed journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. Unlike the Parry report, which included independent research in its ­analysis, the Williams paper relied entirely on Monsanto’s internal lab tests to evaluate whether glyphosate causes cancer. Its conclusions were unequivocal: “There is no potential for Roundup herbicide to pose a health risk to humans.” (Williams could not be reached for comment.)

In another email, this one from a trove of trial records dubbed the Monsanto Papers, Heydens reminded his team they’d ghostwritten the Williams paper, a claim he would later deny under oath. “Apparently I didn’t have good recollection, because that’s not what happened,” he said in a 2017 deposition. But the emails make clear that ghostwriting was widely discussed at Monsanto. Michael Koch, an executive who oversaw teams responsible for Roundup and glyphosate’s safety and regulatory approval, emailed subordinates at one point to ask them to orchestrate a study with a “manuscript to be initiated by MON ghostwriters” and published by one of their go-to scientists—Williams and four others were listed as options. Heydens, one of the recipients, noted in a separate message that “we would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and [the outside scientists] would just edit and sign their names, so to speak.” Their imprimatur would make the articles more credible to regulators and the public, he added.

Monsanto would orchestrate several influential studies over the years. In 2016, Williams was the lead author on another paper secretly overseen by the company and published at a crucial moment. WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer had made headlines the year before by concluding that glyphosate probably causes cancer. Monsanto responded with a PR onslaught that included a ghostwritten Forbes op-ed under the byline of former FDA official Henry Miller, a Stanford Hoover Institution fellow and regular contributor to the magazine. “The reality is that glyphosate is not a human health risk,” it concluded. (When Forbes editors learned Monsanto had ghostwritten the piece, they cut ties with Miller, who did not respond to requests for comment.)

Heydens and other insiders, meanwhile, were busy preparing a series of five new papers involving Williams and 15 named co-authors. The package ran in the September 2016 issue of Critical Reviews in Toxicology, with a title suggesting it was written by “four independent expert panels.” Critical Reviews, like most academic journals, requires authors to disclose any ethical conflicts in a declaration of interest section, in which Williams et al. wrote: “Neither any Monsanto company employees nor any attorneys reviewed any of the Expert Panel’s manuscripts prior to submission to the journal.”

That was a lie.

The declaration also said the authors “were not directly contacted by the Monsanto Company,” which wasn’t true, either. Monsanto employees had exchanged emails with at least some of them, provided comments and edits on drafts, and in some cases agreed to pay authors tens of thousands of dollars. Heydens himself contributed to the 2016 package: “Here is my 1st shot at starting the Manuscript for the Panel report,” he wrote in an email to colleagues more than a year before it was published. Entire paragraphs from his draft ran verbatim, or nearly so, in the published version, such as: “A molecule with these characteristics would be expected to exhibit, if any, only a low order of toxicity. The results from toxicity studies and regulatory risk assessments have been consistent with that expectation.” Emails and court records show that at least some of the authors were aware of Monsanto’s involvement in editing the package, which, like Williams’ earlier article, was cited in the glyphosate safety assessments of regulators worldwide. “Plaintiff lawyers have cherry-picked isolated emails out of millions of pages of documents,” Bayer said in a statement, and Monsanto’s involvement “did not rise to the level of authorship.”

“We’re not claiming that this paper being retracted proves that glyphosate is scary dangerous. We’re saying it proves that Monsanto poisoned the well of public understanding of science.”

The Forest Service’s 2011 risk assessment, which broadly depicts glyphosate as posing no significant threat to people and the environment, references Williams’ 2000 article 27 times—more than any other peer-reviewed paper, often to refute studies that raised health concerns. In fact, five of the seven most-cited journal articles in the report were either directly orchestrated by Monsanto or written by authors with financial ties to the company.

The only potential human risk acknow­ledged in the Forest Service’s assessment has to do with people unknowingly ingesting glyphosate after foraging for mushrooms and plants in recently sprayed areas. That’s a problem not just for foragers like me, but for anyone who has ever eaten a chanterelle, morel, or porcini mushroom, none of which can be farmed. Stores and restaurants purchase them from permitted commercial foragers who collect them in wild places, including the Lassen National Forest.

One warm day last August, I drive out to Chester to meet biologist Russell Nickerson, the district ranger in charge of the Lassen spraying. Bespectacled, mustachioed, and clad in the light tan uniform of the Forest Service, he ambles into the district office’s visitor center to greet me. We’re surrounded by taxidermied forest critters, including falcons and owls, a river otter, and a mountain lion set to pounce. Nickerson helped create the October 2024 fire recovery plan, and so, after shaking hands, we head to a little outbuilding to discuss it. The Forest Service has a complex portfolio. On one hand, it manages recreation and conservation in the nation’s woodlands. But as a division of the Department of Agriculture, it also oversees timber production on public land. In the wake of a March 2025 Trump executive order calling for more logging, the agency is more focused than ever on the commercial side of its mission.

That includes reviving areas recently logged or damaged in wildfires so as to regrow the trees as profitably as possible. In Lassen, the agency will deploy workers with portable backpack sprayers to hike through the massive burn zone and apply up to 8 pounds of glyphosate per acre—enough to kill every leafy plant. A first round of spraying is tentatively planned for spring or early summer 2026, followed by another round in the fall. Once new baby conifers are planted, workers will reapply glyphosate one or more times to terminate anything growing too close to them.

Above and below: Timber harvesting operations in the scar of the 2024 Park Fire.Scott Anger Scott Anger

Nickerson concedes that the Forest Service still relies on its 15-year-old risk assessment—the one that cites Williams 27 times. When I ask him point-blank whether Roundup is safe, he fidgets in his chair and laughs uncomfortably. “It’s probably our Washington office that you would talk to on that,” he says. The chemical is approved, so he uses it.

I show him what I’ve learned about Monsanto’s efforts to sway agencies like his. He shrugs. “Something you’d have to talk about with our national office.”

I then show him a 2020 EPA report that concluded glyphosate harms 93 percent of endangered species and 96 percent of the critical habitat they rely on—creatures including the Sierra Nevada red fox, gray wolf, and spotted owl, all protected in Lassen. Nickerson says he’s never seen the report. Fair enough, but do its findings make him think twice about using Roundup? “Still gotta talk to our national office on that one, sorry,” he says.

As I’m getting ready to leave, he makes a casual comment that sticks with me: It’s his understanding that the agency’s risk assessment says glyphosate is so safe “you could bathe in it.” I looked, and it doesn’t say that exactly. It does say that if you were fully immersed in undiluted glyphosate, there would be no cancer risk. One of the sources it cites for skin contact being safe? Williams et al., 2000. Nickerson later disputes using that language. His point, he says, was that given the quantities of glyphosate used by the Forest Service, it “did not rise to a level of concern.”

In December, four months after we spoke in person, Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology announced it was retracting the 2000 Williams article. The journal had “lost confidence in the results and conclusions,” Co-Editor-in-Chief Martin van den Berg wrote, after learning that the paper’s named authors, Williams, Robert Kroes, and Ian Munro, “were not solely responsible for writing its content” and had relied entirely on Monsanto data, disregarding other evidence.

The retraction was prompted by a critical analysis shared with the editors by scientists Naomi Oreskes and Alexander Kaurov. Oreskes is co-author of Merchants of Doubt, a 2010 book showing how corporations deliberately distort science to influence policy. “We’re not claiming that this paper being retracted proves that glyphosate is scary dangerous,” Oreskes tells me. “We’re saying it proves that Monsanto poisoned the well of public understanding of science.”

It also nullifies the Forest Service’s most-cited journal article in support of glyphosate safety. The agency, which had previously declined me an interview with its chief, Tom Schultz, provided a statement noting that the USDA supports the EPA’s “use of gold-standard science to assess pesticide safety.”

Oreskes doesn’t fault the regulators. They “are making a good-faith assumption that because this paper was published in a respectable, peer-reviewed journal that it was a legitimate paper and that its findings were valid,” she says. But “what we’ve shown is that it was not a legitimate paper.” Rather, it was a ploy by Monsanto “to manipulate the scientific conversation and thereby the regulatory conversation, and to persuade people of the safety of a product [when], in fact, there is significant scientific evidence to raise concern.”

“As a person who studies scientific integrity, that profoundly offends me,” Oreskes says. “But also, it’s crucial because it means we can’t trust what they say.”

A 2020 EPA report determined that glyphosate harms a wide range of wild animals and their habitats. This artistic rendition shows a gray fox photographed in California’s Bodie Mountains.Billie Carter-Rankin; Ken Hickman/Forest Service Research Data Archive

The Forest Service intends to keep using Roundup, and far more heavily than in years past, per our analysis of California pesticide reports, which include herbicides. It approved a plan that could spray more glyphosate on those 10,000 Lassen acres than it sprayed in an average year two decades ago across its entire portfolio of 193 million acres. It also plans to spray up to 75,000 acres affected by the 2021 Caldor Fire, including spots near Lake Tahoe’s famed ski resorts—such as the base and parking lot at Sierra-at-Tahoe and in forests close to Kirkwood and Heavenly. The plan includes spraying in campgrounds, around trailheads, and close to homes in Meyers. These applications alone will amount to more spraying in California’s woodlands than happened in all of 2023.

It is difficult to say whether the Golden State is an outlier, because most states, unlike California, don’t have a mandatory and comprehensive reporting system for commercial pesticide and herbicide users. But a 2020 EPA study largely based on private industry data suggests that glyphosate use may be even more prevalent elsewhere: Sixteen Southern states accounted for about 90 percent of the nation’s overall forest spraying in 2016, the authors estimated.

The Forest Service acknowledges it can get similar timber yields by reforesting without chemicals, using workers and machines, but at triple the cost—expense is a “major factor” in the decision to spray, according to a 2024 agency report. The same report cites a 40-year-old study that claims injuries are more likely when vegetation is culled by hand, but it doesn’t address potential health risks for crews hired to spray the chemical.

Oversight of spraying is lax, even here in California. When I asked state regulators for records of all site inspections for forest spraying from 2020 through 2022, they returned only 11 reports, despite more than 8,000 reported sprayings covering a quarter-­million acres during those three years. In one report, from El Dorado County, an inspector witnessed contract workers handling Roundup with their gloves off. They’d been hired to spray on Forest Service land but had neither the protective equipment nor the safety training mandated by the state. The inspector snapped a photo in which one of the workers’ hands is bright purple—covered in Roundup.

Skin exposure was central to the first-ever glyphosate cancer lawsuit against Monsanto. In 2018, a jury awarded $289 million to Bay Area groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, concluding that occupational exposure to Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The 1st District Court of Appeal reduced the award to $20.5 million but ruled that the jurors were entitled to declare Roundup dangerous based on WHO’s review, expert witnesses, and evidence that Monsanto had behaved unethically to sway regulators and research findings. “Even if the evidence did not require an inference that Monsanto was more concerned about defending and promoting its product than public health, it supported such an inference,” the presiding judge wrote.

window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}});

Craig Thomas, a fire reduction expert who in 2021 served on a congressional wildfire recovery commission with then–Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, raised similar concerns with the Forest Service, he says, and was told the agency wasn’t aware of anyone harmed by spraying Roundup on the job. “And I’m like, ‘No, they die of non-Hodgkin lymphoma 15 years later,’” Thomas tells me when we meet up not far from my cabin to survey land where the agency plans to spray.

I show him some of what I’ve found. “Oh god, that’s totally corrupt,” he says. “Do we care about human beings or our natural landscapes? Doesn’t sound like it.”

Forest Service mascot Smokey Bear, he declares, has become a glyphosate junkie. “It’s a chemical addiction that’s been fostered inside the agency with the help of Bayer and Monsanto,” he says. “The system operated for thousands of years without it.”

 
You don’t need herb­icides for fire recovery, Thomas says. That’s about cost cutting.
The forests, he says, can be adequately managed using just machines, laborers, and tools such as prescribed burns.
 

Consider that Quebec, the largest timber-producing region in North America, has eliminated glyphosate and other herbicides in 90 percent of its forests. Back in 1994, the province put in place a “forest protection strategy” designed to balance jobs and profits with healthy forests. Glyphosate, once widely used, was banned in 2001, and logging companies switched to manual and mechanical methods to stifle plant competition with minimal effects on yields, according to a 2010 government study. Now, instead of enriching a German chemical company, the money goes to pay local workers.

Quebec’s experience has gone unheeded by California officials, who aim to expand glyphosate spraying in state-run forests as part of their own fire prevention strategy. Gov. Gavin Newsom even signed an emergency executive order last year allowing the state ­Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) and other agencies to bypass normal safety procedures when spraying the herbicide.

The state’s plans rely on Cal Fire’s 2015 glyphosate safety report, which also leaned on Monsanto’s ghostwritten studies. The report’s author, contractor Bill Williams, who is unrelated to the physician Monsanto recruited as the lead author for its papers, has a long history working for the chemical industry. He once, for instance, argued that dioxin, a highly toxic chemical known to cause cancer and other health problems, doesn’t hurt bald eagles. (It does.) At a 2003 chemical industry event, he gave a presentation titled “A Little Pesticide Is Good For You,” arguing that the EPA should loosen regulations around pesticide exposure. (Williams did not respond to my outreach attempts.)

While working on the Cal Fire report, according to his own résumé, Williams was also working for a consulting company, Cardno, that helps firms like Monsanto recruit scientists to conduct and write studies for them. That same year, court records show, a Cardno scientist pitched Monsanto executives, offering to help manage Roundup’s PR problem in the wake of WHO’s carcinogenicity declaration.

California already sprays glyphosate in state parks, such as Jackson Demonstration State Forest, where it issues permits for people to forage for mushrooms and where the Mycological Society of San Francisco hosts an annual gathering. Last year’s attendees were unaware of the spraying, several members told me. And that’s problematic, because many foragers and chefs recommend not rinsing wild mushrooms in order to maintain their flavor. But eating unwashed food recently sprayed with glyphosate is a problem—even the Forest Service’s outdated risk assessment says so.

window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}});

High on the list of California’s biggest overall glyphosate users is the state Department of Transportation, which sprays along roads and highways to keep flammable grasses and brush in check. Caltrans also sprays in counties, including Los Angeles, that won’t let their own workers use the herbicide. The spraying isn’t just in rural areas. Records show Caltrans has been applying herbicides in downtown Hollywood, right along Santa Monica Boulevard.

The state’s No. 1 forest sprayer in 2023, records show, was Sierra Pacific Industries, a timber company owned by billionaire Trump supporter Archie Aldis “Red” Emmerson. Sierra Pacific is the largest landowner in the state and the second-largest in the country, controlling more acreage than Ted Turner and Bill Gates put together. It was responsible for 70 percent of reported glyphosate spraying in California’s wooded areas that year, including the lands near my cabin. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment—ditto the timber company Collins, another major user.

The irony of firms and government agencies spraying replanted burn zones is that they may be setting us up for more trouble down the road. Deciduous hardwoods such as oak, aspen, and birch can slow a fire’s progression, studies show, whereas resin-filled conifers are more flammable than other trees. A densely packed commercial conifer forest like the one I saw taking shape near Chester is, according to a growing scientific consensus, a megafire waiting to happen.

An artistic rendition. The US Forest Service is now gearing up for more woodland spraying in California—including in campgrounds, around trailheads, and near ski resorts—than ever before recorded.Billie Carter-Rankin; Randy Pench/Sacramento Bee/Getty

Given everything we’ve learned, it’s worth asking: Just how bad is glyphosate for human health?

The science on cancer is mixed. Even successful lawsuits like Johnson’s found it to be only a weak or modest carcinogen. But that’s not the only worry. Brenda ­Eskenazi, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied glyphosate for decades. For a 2023 article, she followed 480 mothers and their children in California’s Salinas Valley for more than 18 years, testing their urine periodically. She found statistically significant increases in the prevalence of liver inflammation (14 percent) and metabolic syndrome (55 percent)—which can result in liver cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease later in life—among young adults exposed to glyphosate in the womb or during early childhood. “Everyone was focused on cancer, and they weren’t looking elsewhere,” Eskenazi tells me. “There are other health effects that have long-term impacts.”

Given the heated rhetoric around glyphosate, Eskenazi speaks with restraint. “We need more research,” she says. Yet much of her funding has been in limbo since the Trump administration hit the brakes on grants from the National Institutes of Health. Without those funds, her lab may have to shut down and destroy some 400,000 biological samples. But she is unwilling as yet to pass final judgment on the safety of the world’s most widely used herbicide. “There are a lot of little pieces that make us concerned,” she says, but “I’m not one of these people who say we shouldn’t use pesticides at all. I think we should use it discretionarily and carefully. That means when nothing else works.”

Bayer asserts in its statement that “regulators, including the EPA, EU, and others around the world, have repeatedly concluded that glyphosate-based products—which are the most widely used and extensively studied products of their kind—can be used safely according to the product label directions.” The EPA’s glyphosate assessment relied heavily on a 2018 analysis based on the Agricultural Health Study. The researchers asked 57,310 people who had applied for pesticide licenses in North Carolina or Iowa whether they used glyphosate and then followed up with a series of health-related questions. The study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the National Cancer Institute, found no statistically significant correlation between glyphosate exposure and cancers such as non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But the paper had its critics. Lianne Sheppard, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington who served on the EPA’s scientific advisory panel on glyphosate, published a critique in the same journal arguing that the authors’ approach was likely to underestimate cancer risk. The authors responded, explaining why they believed their results were valid.

And so it goes. “I have friends who are good scientists and think it causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma,” David Eastmond, a professor of toxicology at UC Riverside, tells me. “And I have others who think it doesn’t.”

Eastmond is in the latter camp. About 10 years ago, a joint task force assembled by WHO and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization asked him and other scientists to conduct a new review of glyphosate studies in light of the 2015 probable-­carcinogen determination. Whereas that determination had relied exclusively on published research, Eastmond and his colleagues were given full access to Monsanto’s internal glyphosate data as well. “This industry dataset was almost entirely negative for cancer and genotoxicity,” he recalls. With this data in the mix, he and his colleagues concluded glyphosate was unlikely to cause cancer. But his work preceded revelations that Monsanto was tampering with the scientific process—the lies and the ghostwriting. “Yeah, that’s totally dishonest,” Eastmond says. “A lot of this is very sleazy.”

Can Monsanto’s data still be trusted? “I think it’s fair to be skeptical,” he says. “When someone is putting pressure to manipulate things, then I become more skeptical, too.”

While the jury may still be out on the extent of Roundup’s harms, we know for certain that it’s in our bodies and environment. A 2020 study by the US Geological Survey found glyphosate in 74 percent of American streams tested. A study published two years later by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found glyphosate residues in more than 80 percent of the 2,000-plus urine samples it collected from US adults and children.

Such findings concern Ramon Velazquez, a researcher at Arizona State University whose team’s glyphosate study appeared in the Journal of Neuroinflammation in 2024. They fed glyphosate to mice at levels comparable to what the EPA considers safe in human food. The mice developed brain inflammation that persisted for months after the chemical was removed from their diets. The exposure, the authors wrote, also resulted in premature death of the rodents and Alzheimer’s-like damage to their brains. “I am very cautious about how I eat now,” Velazquez tells me. “I eat an organic diet.”

In 2020, after more than a decade of planning and review, the EPA released an updated glyphosate assessment. It said the herbicide is safe to use and does not cause cancer. Oreskes and Kaurov’s ­analysis points out that, whereas WHO’s cancer agency looked mainly at peer-reviewed studies, 70 percent of which indicated genotoxic effects, the EPA relied largely on industry-funded studies, 99 percent of which found no cancer links.

The EPA’s approval process was not without scandal. In 2013, Marion Copley, a veterinarian recently retired from the agency, wrote to her former colleague Jess Rowland, who was leading the EPA’s glyphosate cancer assessment. In her letter, now part of the Monsanto Papers, Copley, then dying of breast cancer, implored Rowland to follow the science on glyphosate, which she “strongly believed” triggered tumors.

“For once in your life, listen to me and don’t play your political conniving games with the science to favor the registrants. For once do the right thing,” she wrote. “I have cancer and I don’t want these serious issues in [the Health Effects Division] to go unaddressed before I go to my grave.” (She died nine months later.)

Above and below: Post-fire growth emerges in as-yet-untreated areas near Mt. Lassen in the scar of the 2021 Dixie Fire. Scott Anger Scott Anger

Rowland later came under scrutiny for his cozy relationship with Monsanto. While conducting the assessment, he’d spoken regularly with its employees, assuring them he could help, internal emails show. When insiders worried that CDC toxicologists might conduct an independent analysis and conclude that glyphosate was harmful, Rowland said he would try to intervene. One employee quoted him as saying, “If I can kill this I should get a medal.”

Rowland, who could not be reached for comment, left the EPA soon after someone leaked an unauthorized draft of the agency’s preliminary conclusion that glyphosate doesn’t cause cancer, according to court records. Monsanto immediately filed the document in court as evidence to refute claims that Roundup caused cancer.

The EPA inspector general’s office concluded in 2019 that Rowland had done nothing wrong and that there was no evidence the process lacked “scientific rigor.” But the EPA’s official assessment in favor of glyphosate was promptly challenged in court by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Pesticide Action Network North America, which accused the agency of ignoring its own cancer guidelines and glyphosate’s impacts on endangered species. In 2022, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. It overturned the assessment, noting that the “EPA did not adequately consider whether glyphosate causes cancer and shirked its duties under the Endangered Species Act.” The ruling pointed to serious “errors in assessing human-­health risk” and noted that most of the studies the EPA examined had “indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma.”

A fresh EPA determination is expected this year. During Trump’s first term, according to one internal email, Monsanto executives were assured they “need not fear any additional regulation from this administration.” Last June, Bayer’s CEO met personally with EPA Adm­inistrator Lee Zeldin to discuss glyphosate’s “legal/judicial issues,” per an agency memo obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity. Six months later, Trump’s solicitor general asked the Supreme Court to take a case that would help shield Bayer from further Roundup lawsuits. The court agreed, and oral arguments were set for April 27. (Bayer shares soared 14 percent on the news.) North Dakota and Georgia have passed laws that would give Bayer legal immunity, and more such bills are expected at the state and federal level.

Then came Trump’s executive order saying America must ensure, even boost, production of glyphosate and white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon also manufactured by Bayer. “Lack of access to glyphosate-based herb­icides would critically jeopardize agricultural productivity, adding pressure to the domestic food system,” it read.

The MAHA contingent saw the order and went ballistic. “There is a level of anger and frustration like I’ve never witnessed before,” a conservative wellness influencer with millions of Instagram followers told the New York Times. “Where is RFK JR?” asked a commenter. MAHA wants crop chemicals reduced, if not banned entirely, but that could prove a tough sell. Mexico’s leaders ran into heavy resistance in 2024 when they tried to ban glyphosate in their agriculture sector. Farmers were hooked on it and the government ultimately concluded that cutting them off might prove as dangerous to a farm operation as quitting heroin or alcohol cold turkey might to an addict. The ban was rescinded. “It is known to be harmful to health,” then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador explained, “but there is no substitute.”

And now, as the global food industry grapples with glyphosate addiction, America’s forestry sector is headed down the same path—though, in a small concession to my neighbors, the Forest Service has agreed not to apply glyphosate so close to people’s homes or near certain waterways in the Lassen area, a roughly 2 percent reduction in spraying.

To sum up, the US government botched its safety review of glyphosate, thanks in part to Monsanto’s gaming of the system. Concerned researchers say we need additional data to fully understand the chemical’s harms. But the Trump administration has slashed research funding, and politicians are waiving safety reviews and working to ensure that people who say glyphosate made them sick cannot sue its manufacturer. The Forest Service, meanwhile, plans to spray even more of the herb­icide, despite knowing that it hurts nearly all endangered species, that nonchemical options are available, and that its own assessment of human safety hinges on an industry-driven review paper, since retracted.

If all of these revelations are spiking your anxiety levels, you also should probably know that that’s one of the symptoms those Arizona State researchers observed in the mice they’d injected with supposedly safe levels of glyphosate.