On Thursday, President Donald Trump once again found it acceptable to use the r-word, directing it towards Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, in a Truth Social post which also attacked Somali immigrants in the state.

“The seriously [r-tarded] Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both,” Trump posted.

For Republican Indiana State Senator Michael Bohacek, Trump’s most recent use of this anti-disability slur was “the final straw” in his decision not to support Indiana redistricting in support of Republicans winning more seats. On Friday, Rep. Bohacek posted the following on Facebook:

Many of you have asked my position on redistricting. I have been an unapologetic advocate for people with intellectual disabilities since the birth of my second daughter. Those of you that don’t know me or my family might not know that my daughter has Down Syndrome. This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences. I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.

In a Facebook comment, Bohacek’s wife, Melissa, said she supported her husband, writing, “for families like ours, hearing the same mocking, derogatory language from our president isn’t abstract. He didn’t almost say or do something hurtful, he did.”

According to the Indy Star, the Indiana State House of Representatives is set to meet on December 1 to discuss a redistricting map, and the Indiana State Senate is supposed to vote on the map on December 8.

As I’ve previously outlined, Trump has a long history of making ableist statements and holding deeply harmful ideas about disability. In October 2024, at a dinner for Republican donors, Trump referred to then-Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris the r-word. He also has a pattern of referring to people he doesn’t like as “intellectually disabled” in a negative way, underlining his ableist views.

The National Down Syndrome Society also condemned Trump’s latest use of the r-word, writing that “as the language used by our leaders carries significant weight in shaping actions and societal attitudes toward individuals with disabilities, we are dismayed and disheartened that President Trump used this harmful term in a recent social media post.”

After teasing a plan by President Donald Trump to extend Affordable Care Act premium subsidies—currently on track to end within weeks—the White House has indefinitely delayed the announcement under pressure from congressional Republicans, MS NOW reported on Monday.

The last-minute change of plan signals the GOP’s priorities: the party has fought to cut or repeal the ACA since it entered law in 2010, and was uncompromising in opposing the subsidies during the record-breaking government shutdown that ended earlier in November.

“I don’t see how a proposal like this has any chance of getting majority Republican support,” an anonymous House Republican told MS NOW. “We need to be focused on health care, but extending Obamacare isn’t even serious.”

Unless a deal is reached, Affordable Care Act tax credits expanded during the Biden administration are set to expire at the end of 2025, which would lead to the largest-ever annual spike in ACA premiums. The enhanced credits led to more signups for health insurance through the ACA marketplace: Nearly 25 million Americans in 2025, more than double the roughly 11 million who used it in 2020, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The last thing Republican elected officials want to see, the Center for American Progress’ Bobby Kagan posted on social media Monday, is a deal that protects ACA subsidies.

“That’s why they didn’t extend them in OBBBA, and that’s why they kept calling them a ‘December problem’ even though open enrollment began on November 1,” Kagan, the group’s senior director for federal budget policy, wrote.

It’s because congressional Republicans want the enhanced subsidies to expire. That’s why they didn’t extend them in OBBBA, and that’s why they kept calling them a “December problem” even though open enrollment began on November 1.

[image or embed]

— Bobby Kogan (@bbkogan.bsky.social) November 24, 2025 at 10:36 AM

Extending the enhanced ACA credits does have support among everyday Republicans: A November poll by KFF found that, among Republican and Republican-leaning independents, 72 percent who didn’t identify with MAGA—and almost half of MAGA supporters—wanted ACA tax credits to continue.

If Trump doesn’t sign legislation by December 15 to extend ACA tax credits, millions of Americans will be forced to pay far more—often several hundred dollars a month—for health insurance, or forgo it altogether.

Back in February, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) went to great lengths to justify his decisive vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary.

Cassidy, a physician and chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, demanded, among other things, that if confirmed, Kennedy would ensure the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website did not edit a webpage stating that vaccines do not cause autism.

Of course, under Kennedy’s leadership, the CDC did just that this week, as my colleague Kiera Butler covered:

Among other dubious assertions, [the new webpage] informed readers, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” Also, it asserts, falsely, “Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”

Despite Kennedy’s flagrant flouting of this apparent agreement with Cassidy, the senator still cannot seem to directly criticize him, or own up to the fact that he played a key role in elevating a conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic with no medical training to head the country’s health agencies.

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Cassidy refused to face the facts when host Jake Tapper said, “Dr. Cassidy, he lied to you.” Instead, Cassidy doubled down on the very message that Kennedy is undermining: “Vaccines are safe,” he insisted. “That’s the most important message.”

After Tapper pressed him, asking if he was worried about the impact the CDC website could have on Americans’ decisions whether or not to vaccine, Cassidy conceded that the messaging was a problem, but still refused to name Kennedy as its source or express regret over confirming him. “Anything that undermines the understanding, the correct understanding, the absolute scientifically based understanding that vaccines are safe and that, if you don’t take them, you’re putting your child or yourself in greater danger, anything that undermines that message is a problem,” Cassidy said.

Tapper: "You were the deciding vote that allowed RFK Jr. to ascend to the role of HHS secretary…You just said that you've never met anybody other than pediatricians who read the CDC website, but back then you were talking about the important of the CDC website. Did you give RFK… pic.twitter.com/EQXkxml6BO

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) November 23, 2025

He proceeded to downplay the importance of the website, claiming that he has “never met any parent who wasn’t a pediatrician as well who actually reads the CDC website”—even though, as Tapper pointed out, Cassidy made it a condition of Kennedy’s confirmation that he would not edit the website. After more tough questioning from Tapper, Cassidy conceded: “[The changes to the website] are important, because you need to send the consistent signal that vaccines are safe.” He then pointed to an asterisk that remains on the site, which says: “The header ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ has not been removed due to an agreement with [Cassidy] that it would remain on the CDC website.”

So, in case you’re confused about all this hair-splitting: Yes, the updated webpage now dismisses the claim that vaccines do not cause autism—contradicting the site’s own (correct) heading. This is apparently the extent to which Cassidy managed to reign Kennedy in.

Changes to the CDC website were not the reason Kennedy made even more headlines this week. There was also the heartbreaking essay from his cousin, Tatiana Schlossburg, published by the New Yorker on Saturday, in which she revealed her terminal cancer diagnosis and excoriated Kennedy for defunding cancer research and clinical trials and attacking vaccines and medications she benefitted from. The 35-year-old mother of two and daughter of former Ambassador Caroline Kennedy—who last year urged the Senate not to confirm Kennedy as HHS Secretary—wrote that she “watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government.”

TAPPER: RFK Jr., according to his own family, is causing real damage to the health of the United States of America. You don't seem willing to criticize him by name at all, unlike members of his family.

CASSIDY: So, Jake, clearly, clearly, this conversation, you want me to be on… pic.twitter.com/tm44jalKWZ

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) November 23, 2025

Faced with Schlossburg’s unflinching criticism of her own family member, Cassidy still refused to directly criticize Kennedy. “Clearly, this conversation, you want me to be on the record saying something negative,” he told Tapper.

“I know it’s titillating,” Cassidy said later, “but I think we need to move beyond the titillation and actually what matters to the American people.”

Someone may want to tell him that includes protecting vaccines.

Earlier this month, the House Oversight Committee released a flotilla of Epstein emails—more than 20,000 in total. The revelations created a tidal wave of news. In perhaps the most famous email, Jeffrey Epstein claimed Trump “knew about the girls.” Epstein also called Trump “the dog that hasn’t barked” and alleged that Trump had once spent “hours at my house” with a sex trafficking victim.

A trove of that size would ordinarily be difficult and time-consuming to sort, but this digital dump was especially cumbersome: packaged in oddly titled folders, and tossed with a random assortment of unsearchable detritus and system files.

What if you were able to just… read them like emails?

That’s the simple premise behind “Jmail,” a re-skinning of the documents programmed to look and feel like an everyday Gmail account, with all the design details impeccably parodied and emails displayed in sequential chains, just like your own inbox. It even includes a working search function. Its release this week created it’s own internet storm.

It's at https://t.co/bA2ikCiWjz. Made by @lukeigel and me

— Riley Walz (@rtwlz) November 21, 2025

The uncanny execution—a boon to journalists, but so realistic it can leave you disturbed, as if slipping directly into Epstein’s life—was created by two Bay Area internet wizards.

The San Francisco Standard identified the duo as Luke Igel, an AI engineer, and Riley Walz, whom they describe as the city’s “favorite internet rascal.” Before Jmail, he was famous for, among other pranks, creating a website showing the exact locations of the city’s parking police by reverse-engineering the municipal ticket system to reveal, in almost real time, where tickets were being issued (an endeavor that worked for just four hours, according to The New York Times—enough to cement Walz’s internet stardom).

“Many people have made fun of how weird and quirky the whole delivery method was,” Igel told The A.V. Club, describing the Congressional email release. “Someone made an amazing indexed database of those emails using Google Journalist Studio. Problem is that once you click on this beautifully indexed document, it’s really hard to read a PDF. So we just decided to do that, to fix that.”

As The A.V. Club recounts:

To fix it, Igel and Walz used an LLM to convert the plain text in the PDFs back into an email format. Then, once the data was prepped, they used an app called Cursor, which, according to Igel, is an ‘amazing tool that allows you to use AI to code really, really fast,’ to ape Gmail’s aesthetics for a web app.

The two creators selected a list of commonly occurring senders and listed them on the site of their web app: Michael Wolff, Larry Summers, Steve Bannon, and Ken Starr among them. The inclusion of a “Random Page” button sweeps you into a random portion of the chronology.

While we wait for exactly what gets released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which the president signed into law this past week, you can check out Jamil here. And of course, don’t forget Mother Jones’s investigation in which Leland Nally called everyone in Epstein’s notorious “little black book.”

What will Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) do after her shock resignation from Congress in January, announced on Friday? Good question.

President Donald Trump, for one, already seems to be reversing course on their breakup. Not long after (again) calling her a “traitor” on Truth Social on Saturday, the president told NBC News he would “love to see” her revive her career in politics. (Ever one to put the feelings of others ahead of his own, Trump first advised, “she’s got to take a little rest.”)

But Greene is aggressively shutting the rumors of her return down. In response to a Time story claiming that Greene was considering running for president in 2028, the congresswoman wrote today on X: “I’m not running for President and never said I wanted to and have only laughed about it when anyone would mention it. If you fell for those headlines, you’re still being lulled everyday into psychosis by the Political Industrial Complex that always has an agenda when it does something like this.”

“Running for President requires traveling all over the country, begging for donations all day everyday to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, arguing political talking points everyday to the point of exhaustion, destroying your health and having no personal life in order to attempt to get enough votes to become President all to go to work into a system that refuses to fix any of America’s problems,” Greene continued. “The fact that I’d have to go through all that but would be totally blocked from truly fixing anything is exactly why I would never do it.”

Ever prone to seeing conspiracies everywhere—despite her recent mea culpas—Greene also said she doesn’t believe she would be allowed to ascend to the pinnacle of American political power even if she tried to: “The Political Industrial Complex has destroyed our country and will never allow someone like me or you to rise to power and actually solve the crises that plague all of us,” she wrote. “That would go against its business model.”

Earlier this year, Greene appeared to be considering a Senate run. But Trump claimed, in one of his break-up texts, he had dissuaded her from doing so, which Greene denied last week on CNN’s State of the Union. “I don’t want to have anything to do with the Senate,” she said last week. “I think the past two months of the government shutdown should have shown America exactly why I would never want to be there.”

For now, this is Greene’s story—that she’s done with politics—and she and her allies are sticking to it. A person close to Greene told NBC News: “It’s safe to say she’ll probably take a step back and be a private, normal person again.”

Time will tell.

Remember the horrifying text messages that caught a Border Patrol agent bragging about shooting someone in Chicago last month?

Well, it seems that those texts—and the looming release of even more potentially damaging messages—are now prompting federal prosecutors to move to dismiss their charges against the woman, who prosecutors had accused of assaulting an officer.

A bit of a refresher on the case: On October 4, Charles Exum, a supervisory Border Patrol agent, shot Marimar Martinez, a US citizen, multiple times and accused Martinez of ramming her car into his vehicle. Martinez was part of what the government alleged was “a convoy of civilian vehicles” that had been trailing the federal agents during their immigration enforcement operations. A lawyer for the government said Martinez had been broadcasting the incident on Facebook Live for a couple of minutes before the shooting.

As I wrote earlier this month:

When Exum got out of the car, Martinez allegedly drove her car “at” him, and the officer then fired five shots at her.

Martinez has pled not guilty, and contests the government’s allegations. In her account, Exum sideswiped her car, and fired the five gunshots at her “within two seconds” of exiting his vehicle, according to court documents filed by her lawyer. After driving about a mile from the scene, Martinez took an ambulance to a hospital, where she was treated for gunshot wounds and later arrested. She has been released from custody on $10,000 bond; a jury trial is scheduled for February.

This all occurred as federal officials were conducting immigration raids in the Chicago area, as part of an action dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Soon after, court documents revealed Exum expressing pride over the shooting. As I wrote:

In one exchange, the agent sent an article from the Guardian describing the shooting, adding, “5 shots, 7 holes.” In another, he clarified that he was explaining his pride of his abilities as a marksman: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” (Reuters reported that, when asked about these messages at a court hearing on Wednesday, Exum said: “I’m a firearms instructor and I take pride in my shooting skills.”)

In other messages, Exum wrote: “I’m up for another round of ‘fuck around and find out’” and “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.”

According to CNN, Martinez’s lawyer, Christopher Perente, asked Exum about another text, in which Exum wrote about the incident: “I have a MOF amendment to add to my story.” Exum explained ‘MOF’ meant “miserable old fucker,” a term meant to refer to someone trying to one-up others, per CNN’s account. Exum explained the text by saying: “That means illegal actions have legal consequences.”

Following that explosive hearing, a federal court directed the government’s lawyers to provide the agent’s unredacted texts to the judge for her private review. Then, on Monday, the judge told the government’s lawyers they needed to provide the texts to Martinez’s lawyer, which would wind up making them public. But rather than do that, the government on Thursday moved to dismiss the case entirely, just hours before another hearing was scheduled to take place.

So what do those additional texts say? For now, we don’t know. Neither the lawyer representing Martinez nor spokespeople for the Department of Justice and Border Patrol immediately responded to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Thursday afternoon.

But for the government to drop the case entirely, there’s a good chance they are even more embarrassing for Exum than the previous texts were. And they likely add to a disturbing trend our reporting has repeatedly revealed: The federal agents the government claims are helping the supposedly terrified residents of American cities are, in fact, posing a danger to residents themselves. And sometimes, they’re even bragging about it afterwards.

After months of MAGA infighting and an unusual Republican break with President Donald Trump, the GOP-controlled House on Tuesday is expected to overwhelmingly pass a bill seeking to force the Justice Department to release a huge trove of files related to Jeffrey Epstein.

The bill’s passage—now seen as a foregone conclusion—appears to mark a rare legislative loss for Trump, who, after months of efforts to kill the measure, reversed course this weekend. Faced with certain defeat, he attempted to save face by directing House Republicans to back the bill after all. “Sure,” he even said when asked if he’d sign the legislation should it pass both chambers of Congress.

But Trump’s sudden acquiescence, as he stares down yet another humiliating news cycle tying him to a notorious pedophile, seems little more than a facade. The president’s own comments, just hours before the vote, betrayed significant anger.

“Quiet! Quiet, piggy,” Trump snapped at a female reporter on Monday when asked about the Epstein files. (The official White House transcript, which does not appear auto-generated, appears to skip the Epstein question, while leaving out “piggy” in Trump’s response.) Trump’s rage, wrapped in characteristic cruelty after failing to convince even his most loyal House supporters not to back the bill, was clear; this was not a man at peace.

“Quiet! Quiet, piggy,” Trump snapped at a female reporter on Monday when asked about the Epstein files.

Today, the GOP-controlled House is expected to overwhelmingly pass a bill seeking to force the Justice Department to release a huge trove of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. pic.twitter.com/h9NEkKKT3K

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 18, 2025

A similar frustration animated Mike Johnson this morning, when the House speaker announced that he, too, would support the Epstein bill. “The move is a remarkable pivot for Johnson, who had urged Republicans to reject the effort,” is how Axios characterized it. That’s true, from one angle. But the hostility with which Johnson announced his reversal reveals, like Trump, a man still seething. Hours before the vote, Johnson once again blamed Democrats for “forcing a political show vote” that his own caucus overwhelmingly backs. He also released a memo outlining the alleged legal problems with the discharge petition, including privacy concerns for Epstein’s victims, even though the bill explicitly addresses such concerns.

With the bill likely careening toward the Senate, Johnson’s comments could be seen as a potential blueprint should Majority Leader John Thune wish to prevent the files from being released. As for Trump’s “piggy” remarks, they once again reveal the anger of a man on the eve of a vote that could potentially reveal more ties to the notorious pedophile who was once Trump’s close friend.

President Donald Trump, who ran in 2024 on the promise to bring down prices “on day one,” has finally admitted that his tariffs do the opposite.

On Friday, the Trump administration announced that it would exempt a broad array of groceries—including staples like beef, coffee, and bananas—from the tariffs the president proudly implemented in April. While Trump, of course, did not concede outright that his tariffs have helped stoke sticker shock, the tariff reversal is a clear bid to ease the high prices currently plaguing American consumers. 

More than half of Americans said food costs were a “major source of stress.”

The Trump administration appears to be scrambling for an affirmative economic message in the wake of the GOP’s recent stinging electoral losses. Earlier this month, Republican candidates were defeated in not only the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, but also in a string of local races. Meanwhile, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani surged to victory in the New York City mayoral race on an affordability agenda. 

On November 5, the day after the elections, Trump discussed affordability on Fox News, claiming that it was a “new word” being pushed by Democrats. While he insisted his administration has brought prices “way down,” he also said that Republicans don’t talk enough about affordability. That evening, he rehashed his argument on Truth Social: “AFFORDABILITY is a Republican Stronghold. Hopefully, Republicans will use this irrefutable fact!”

While inflation has come down from its Biden-era 2022 peak, federal data from September shows that grocery prices have risen since the start of Trump’s presidency, with costs climbing at the quickest annual pace since 2022. (October’s data has not been released, with the Trump administration saying its publication is unlikely after the government shutdown impaired collecting statistics.) In an August poll by AP-NORC, more than half of Americans said that grocery costs were a “major source of stress” in their lives.

Despite warnings from most economists and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Trump has repeatedly claimed that his tariffs do not raise prices. But if tariffs had no impact on consumer prices, then Trump would not now find the need to roll them back.

“We just did a little bit of a rollback on some foods, like coffee as an example, where the prices of coffee were a little bit high. Now they’ll be on the low side in a very short period of time,” Trump admitted to reporters on Friday. (Over the last year, coffee prices increased 19 percent. Much of the US’s coffee comes from Brazil, which Trump slapped with a 50 percent tariff citing, among other reasons, an ongoing court case against former President Jair Bolsonaro over his attempted coup.)

An October CNN poll found that less than a third of Americans believe Trump has lived up to his affordability promises. More than 60 percent said he’s made this country’s economic conditions worse.

For months, President Donald Trump begged America to forget about Jeffrey Epstein. But this week a House committee released a trove of the late sex offender’s emails, and Trump’s name was all over them. Now, he’s suddenly once again very interested in figuring out who enabled or even partook in Epstein’s prolific sexual abuse of underage women—as long as the only people being investigated for crimes are Democrats.

“It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out.”

On Friday, Trump directed the Department of Justice, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to “investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them.” Bondi quickly hopped on the case, announcing on X that she had assigned a prosecutor to “pursue this with urgency and integrity.”

Trump, a friend of Epstein for many years, has strenuously denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. But his Friday directive reversed the Trump administration’s previous stance that there was nothing left to see in the Epstein case: In July, Bondi’s DOJ and the FBI released a memo claiming it had exhausted all of the evidence in the government’s possession and determined that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” That move was itself a stunning reversal, angering many of Trump’s supporters who believed he would fulfill his campaign promise to release all files from the government’s Epstein investigation. After the July announcement, Trump blasted his supporters who felt betrayed as “stupid” and “foolish” for still believing in the “Jeffrey Epstein hoax.”

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers emerged to push for the full Epstein files. Following the long-awaited swearing in of Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva on Wednesday, a Democrat whose support was needed to advance the release, the House will soon vote on a bill that could compel the DOJ to release what it has. 

The emails made public on Wednesday by the House showed that Epstein once referred to Trump as “the dog that hasn’t barked” and alleged that Trump had once spent “hours” at his house with a sex trafficking victim.

But Trump would rather that you not pay attention to any of that. Instead, he ordered the government’s law enforcement apparatus to target former president Bill Clinton and his treasury secretary Larry Summers, who were also mentioned in Wednesday’s document release, along with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a major Democratic donor. It has been widely speculated that his administration could cite the newly-launched investigation in a coming battle with Congress to forestall making any further information public.

Trump’s about-face on releasing the full Epstein files has infuriated Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R-Ga.), once a staunch ally of the president. Their public feud escalated on Friday, with Trump calling Greene a “ranting lunatic” on Truth Social and announcing he would be “withdrawing his support and endorsement,” suggesting he would back a primary challenger to her if the “right person runs.”

Greene issued a lengthy response on X, claiming that it was their split over the Epstein files that “sent [Trump] over the edge.”

“It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out,” she wrote.

A joyous, mocking menagerie of frogs, axolotls, and at least one giant pink hippo made its way down Seventh Avenue in Manhattan on Saturday, alongside thousands of others, in a defiant protest that formed part of the nationwide “No Kings” rallies.

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With limited visibility inside hot inflatable suits, the marchers’ steps were sometimes ginger. Amphibious, reptilian, and fantastical alike were repeatedly stopped by fellow protesters, photographers, and journalists like me—making progress slow and a bit hapless, adding to the general air of absurd exuberance.

“Solidarity with Portland!” said Denise Cohen, a 59-year-old dog groomer and podcaster from upstate New York who was peering out from inside a unicorn costume, alongside her husband Marty (in a dinosaur outfit.) “I wanted frogs, but nobody had frogs,” she said, referencing the original protesters who donned the inflatables in Portland in recent months.

“I tried to get a Portland frog outfit and they were sold out until November,” said Oscar Hernandez, 58, from Weehawken, New Jersey, dressed in a giant pink rhino costume and shuffling (or perhaps dancing—hard to tell) down the street. “You know, this is fun! This is, this is America. This is not a hate America rally,” he said, referring to how Trump and his team have been representing the mass gatherings.

Rather than wearing an inflatable, financial analyst Christopher Hardwick, 46, appeared in hastily constructed drag, clutching a McDonald’s coffee, and adorned with black and yellow accessories “to make it look a little Proud Boy-y.” His goal was to reclaim the word “antifa” from the Trump administration. “I’m a big antifa girl now!”

Keith Whitmer, 70, wanted to do the same. “I really don’t want the right-wing Republican Party to take antifa—the word antifa—and make it mean something bad, because it’s actually what we’ve been doing since the 1940s.”

Last summer, vying for the White House, Trump hailed himself as “the best president for the Black population.” A little more than a year later, this claim has become downright unbelievable, precisely because of what he’s done.

In this video, I highlight this week’s Washington Post report on the Trump administration’s decision to remove Black historical images and markers from national parks and museums. As someone who has covered the rise of Black support for MAGA extensively, it hit me hard: Where are those voters now that Trump is wiping this history from the books?

Watch:

When it passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in June, Congress handed nearly $75 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some $30 billion of that money will be spent on enforcement and deportation—hiring spree incoming—and another $45 billion will go toward new detention centers, including 50 by the end of the year.

The OBBB immediately supercharged President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which already had been terrorizing immigrant communities and sending asylum seekers to a hellish prison in El Salvador. But an important part of the detention state ramp-up has flown under the radar: ICE’s increased cooperation with local law enforcement agencies.

At the end of the Biden presidency, ICE had just 135 287(g) deals in place; now there are 1,001—a 641 percent increase.

On Friday, ICE hit a new milestone: The agency has now signed more than 1,000 so-called 287(g) agreements nationwide. These agreements, which deputize local police and jails to perform certain immigration enforcement functions, have exploded under Trump. At the end of the Biden presidency, ICE had just 135 287(g) deals in place; now there are 1,001—a 641 percent increase.

About half of these agreements are what ICE calls task force agreements, which allow state and local cops to essentially act as immigration agents while fulfilling their regular police duties. If these sound familiar—and familiarly problematic—it’s because they were discontinued in 2012, following a Department of Justice investigation the year before that found widespread racial profiling by Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, then led by the notorious Joe Arpaio. The Trump administration brought task forces back this year, and ICE has signed more than 500 of these particular agreements across 33 states.

As my colleague Laura C. Morel wrote in July, Florida has led the way in signing 287(g) agreements, as part of its larger push to be a leader in Trump’s deportation efforts (see also: the Alligator Alcatraz tent city). In fact, state legislators even passed into law a bill that requires county jails and the sheriff’s offices running those facilities to participate in 287(g). Local advocates told Laura they were worried about what all this would mean for immigrant communities across Florida:

Growing cooperation between ICE and police in Florida will affect the day-to-day lives of immigrant families. “It’s not just about [an immigrant asking]: ‘What happens if I have to have an interaction with a police officer in some sort of criminal context?’” Greer says. “Living your life and existing in this community is now an extreme risk to being able to come home and see your kids, being able to come home and see your family. It is incredibly frightening.”

State cooperation with federal immigration authorities can lead to “rippling harm” on the communities that police are meant to serve and protect, says Shayna Kessler, director of the Advancing Universal Representation Initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice. “It increases distrust in law enforcement. It increases fear in immigrant communities, it decreases the ability of immigrants to take care of their families, to support the economy, and to be strong and stable members of their communities.”

The federal government is already pumping billions of dollars into Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown, unleashing masked agents all across America. But in many places, undocumented immigrants will now also have to worry that any encounter with a police officer could lead to their deportation.

Subtlety is not one of Stephen Miller’s strong suits. Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, who alternately has been called the administration’s “attack dog” and “the president’s id,” has a well-known penchant for the kind of breathless, overheated language that would make the hackiest of hacks blush. Scroll through his X feed and you’ll find some real doozies, everything from “The entire Democrat party is now operating in service of a single issue and objective: unlimited mass third world migration” to “We are living under a judicial tyranny” to “The days of China pillaging America are over.”

So it came as no surprise that he went The Full Miller in the wake of the killing of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk earlier this week. As conservative leaders, right-wing influencers, and even the federal government promised retribution on the left for its supposed complicity in and celebration of Kirk’s shooting, Miller ratcheted up the rhetoric in his own uniquely toxic way.

On Thursday morning, the day after the shooting at Utah Valley University, Miller tweeted:

There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless. It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth. Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul. It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence — violence against those uphold order, who uphold faith, who uphold family, who uphold all that is noble and virtuous in this world. It is an ideology whose one unifying thread is the insatiable thirst for destruction.

We see the workings of this ideology in every posting online cheering the evil assassination that cruelly robbed this nation of one of its greatest men. Postings from those in positions of institutional authority — educators, healthcare workers, therapists, government employees — reveling in the vile and the sinister with the most chilling glee.

The fate of millions depends upon the defeat of this wicked ideology. The fate of our children, our society, our civilization hinges on it.

Now we devote ourselves, with love and unyielding determination, to finishing the indispensable work to which Charlie bravely devoted his life and gave his last measure of devotion.

We’ve come to take this sort of demonization and incendiary language for granted. But: It is not, in any way, normal. As Current Affairs wrote in a June piece titled, “The Brainless Propaganda of Stephen Miller,” “Even by the standards of right-wing rhetoric, Miller’s public statements are uncommonly shameless. He treats his audience as stupid and gullible.”

Miller’s tweet, though, was just a warm-up. Appearing on Fox News on Friday night, he threatened “all the domestic terrorists in this country spreading this evil hate”:

Stephen Miller: "The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. That was the last message that he sent me … we are… pic.twitter.com/j0Gumd9V5i

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 13, 2025

The message here is clear: No matter the motives and political leanings of the suspected shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, Miller and the White House see Kirk’s death as an opportunity to go on the offensive against their perceived enemies.

How wide a net will they cast? For now, it’s still unclear. But a tweet on Saturday morning suggests Miller sees foes in every corner of American society:

In recent days we have learned just how many Americans in positions of authority—child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov’t workers, even DOD employees—have been deeply and violently radicalized. The consequence of a vast, organized ecosystem of indoctrination.

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) September 13, 2025

It was a week of so much losing.

Over the past week, President Donald Trump and his authoritarian agenda have sustained one loss after another in the courts. Putting all of them together reveals a stunning legal rebuke, and unsurprisingly, Trump World has been erupting with anger and petulance. Let’s review:

• Last Friday, a federal appeals court ruled that Trump’s reciprocal tariffs were basically illegal, as my colleague Inae Oh covered. (On Truth Social, Trump alleged the court was “Highly Partisan,” adding, “If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country.”)
• The same day, a federal judge ruled that the administration could not fast-track deportations of people detained far from the southern border. (White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called the ruling a “judicial coup.”)
• Last Sunday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration from deporting hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children. (Miller alleged the “Biden judge” was “effectively kidnapping these migrant children.”)
• On Tuesday, an appeals court upheld a lower court’s ruling requiring Trump to rehire fired Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. That prompted the administration to ask the Supreme Court to allow the firing to proceed.
• The same day, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles was illegal, alleging that the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.” (White House spokesperson Anna Kelly characterized the ruling as “a rogue judge…trying to usurp the authority of the commander in chief to protect American cities from violence and destruction.”)
• On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that the administration broke the law when it froze billions of dollars in research funds to Harvard. (White House spokesperson Liz Huston called the decision “egregious.”)
• On Thursday, an appeals court ruled that Trump could not cancel billions of dollars in foreign aid without getting approval from Congress. (The administration already appealed the decision.)
• And on Friday, a federal judge blocked Trump from revoking the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Venezuelan immigrants. (A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the ruling “delays justice,” adding, “unelected activist judges cannot stop the will of the American people for a safe and secure homeland.”)

On top of all this, as my colleague James West covered, a new NBC poll out today shows that the majority of Americans—57 percent—disapprove of the job Trump is doing.

We may not be able to rely on the Supreme Court to keep Trump in check, but based on the last week or so, it seems we can trust the lower courts to step in where the high court will not.

After his announcement this week that he would seek to eliminate “all vaccine mandates,” Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, made one thing clear: This decision was based on no science, just vibes.

In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday morning, Ladapo told host Jake Tapper that officials did not undertake any analysis to determine how many new cases of  hepatitis A, whooping cough, and chickenpox would arise after the ending of vaccine mandates. “There’s this conflation of the science and sort of, what is the right and wrong thing to do?” Ladapo said, before proceeding to claim that the whooping cough vaccine is ineffective at preventing transmission. (Research has shown the whooping cough vaccine is safe and effective; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the protection they provide “decreases over time.”)

He continued: “This is an issue very clearly of parents’ rights. So do I need to analyze whether it’s appropriate for parents to be able to decide what goes into their children’s bodies?”

"Absolutely not." @FLSurgeonGen admits he didn't study impact before calling to lift vaccine mandate pic.twitter.com/bJCo0aNvk0

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) September 7, 2025

In fact, as my colleague Kiera Butler explained when Ladapo announced his decision this week it is an issue of public health—not “parents’ rights”:

If successful, such a move could have broad implications for workers across state government sectors. Most significantly, it could allow many more unvaccinated children to attend school, putting others at risk of acquiring highly contagious and potentially deadly diseases such as measles and polio.

Under Ladapo’s leadership, Florida’s rates of routine childhood vaccination—shots that protect against catastrophic diseases like polio and tetanus—have already declined. Today, the immunization rate for kindergartners is 90 percent, the lowest it’s been in a decade, and below the threshold required to prevent the spread of some serious illnesses. The rate of families seeking religious exemptions to school vaccine requirements has increased over the past few years.

All this is part of why, as Tapper mentioned, experts ranging from Ladapo’s predecessor, Scott Rivkees, to major medical groups including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have voiced their opposition to the plan.

A Washington Post-KFF poll conducted in July also found that more than 80 percent of Florida parents said public schools should require vaccines for measles and polio, with some health and religious exceptions. A new NBC News poll out today shows that nearly 80 percent of Americans strongly or somewhat support vaccines. Even President Donald Trump seems skeptical of Ladapo’s decision, telling reporters in the Oval Office this week: “I think we have to be very careful. We have some vaccines that are so amazing… I think you have to be very careful when you say that some people don’t have to be vaccinated.”

Even President Trump gets it right once in awhile.

Vaccines are safe and effective. They have saved millions of lives.

Sadly, Sec. Kennedy disagrees.

We need an HHS Secretary who believes in science, not conspiracy theories.pic.twitter.com/14D0Gnet11

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) September 6, 2025

Later in the CNN interview, Ladapo seemed to slightly revise his argument, claiming that officials did not do any projections ahead of killing off vaccine mandates because they already recognized that outbreaks would, in fact, be inevitable: “We don’t need to do any projections. We handle outbreaks all the time. So there’s nothing special that we would need to do. And, secondly, again, there are countries that don’t have vaccine mandates, and the sky isn’t falling over there.”

So, buckle up, Florida. Your surgeon general just admitted that outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease are coming.

NBC is out with a new poll this morning showing Americans continue to dislike Trump and the things he’s doing—including the things he said he was really good at, like fixing the economy. Respondents to the NBC News Decision Desk Poll reported weak approval across a range of signature issues, including tariffs, and mass deportations, while expressing overwhelming support for vaccines—a sharp contrast to the turmoil inside the administration over vaccine policy.

The topline approval rating remains in negative territory, with 57 percent saying they disapprove of the president’s job and 43 percent saying they approve—a similar result to the previous poll in June, NBC says. The results largely follow other polling tracked by The Economist, which uses a weekly YouGov survey to put Trump’s approval ratings significantly lower than both Biden’s and Obama’s at similar points in their presidencies, revealing it only took two months for his ratings to fall below zero, where they have remained. He’s currently languishing with a net approval rating of -14, according to The Economist. The average of a set of polls tracked by Nate Silver also puts him in negative territory at -6.9 net approval.

As my colleague Julianne McShane previously reported, Trump registered the lowest 100-day approval rating of any president in the past 80 years.

The headline in NBC’s poll today is that Americans of all political stripes really like vaccines—78 percent of all respondents said they support their use. Large majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents agree. That comes as turmoil has erupted under Robert F. Kennedy’s leadership of the country’s top health agencies, including the decapitation of leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—a conflict that came to a boil during a heated marathon hearing on Thursday before the Senate Finance Committee. As my colleague Kiera Butler documented, Kennedy appeared to promote flat-out lies. In recent weeks, he has canceled mRNA vaccination research and stocked an important vaccine advisory panel with vaccine critics. A letter released this week and signed by 1,000 former HHS employees called for his resignation.

Americans are giving Trump poor marks on other issues too, with just 43 percent approving of his mass deportation regime (though he scores slightly higher on the broader issue of border security, at 47 percent). On trade (41 percent) and inflation (39 percent), Americans continue to view Trump dimly.

Meanwhile, the survey took the nation’s emotional temperature as well, showing nearly 70 percent of Democrats are either “furious” or “angry” at Trump’s actions. A smaller proportion of Republicans—45 percent—say they are either “thrilled” or “happy.”

Read the full results of the poll here.

As Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who made history last month with his stunning victory in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, continues to rake in powerful endorsements, he made a scheduling announcement: He’s on a brief trip to celebrate his February nuptials with “family and friends.”

Such bland news wouldn’t normally require the creation of an entire social media video. But it was the trip’s destination—Uganda, where Mamdani was born and lived for seven years before moving to the United States—that Mamdani highlighted to cheekily skewer his critics head-on.

In the clip, Mamdani played on the explosion of racist attacks telling him to “go back” to Africa. He also prepared a string of pun-heavy headlines for the conservative-leaning New York Post.

“UGANDA MISS ME.”

“HE AFRI-CAN’T BE SERIOUS.”

The clip once again underscored the Mamdani campaign’s ability to use social media videos to engage with everyday New Yorkers in ways that are widely praised as authentic, a crucial ingredient to his success. In turn, Mamdani’s opponents, Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams, have used Mamdani’s social media savvy to attack him. “Let’s be clear: They have a record of tweets,” Adams said last month when he launched his independent campaign.

Good morning! I'm in Uganda to visit family and friends.

But depending on your perspective, don't worry or I'm sorry: I'll be back by the end of the month.

See you soon, NYC. pic.twitter.com/fIOf5NcZqy

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) July 20, 2025

The Uganda trip follows a much-maligned New York Times story on Mamdani’s 2009 college application to Columbia University, in which Mamdani identified as both African-American and Asian. The leaked info used by the Times came from a right-wing eugenicist, whom my colleague Noah Lanard later reported once wished a happy birthday to Adolf Hitler, and used a racial slur when saying those who are attracted to Black people should kill themselves.

Since stunning the country with his victory last month, Mamdani has worked to charm his detractors, including powerful figures in the business community, with direct meetings. On Friday, he scored the powerful endorsement of a local health care union, which had previously backed Mamdani’s opponent, Andrew Cuomo, who told an audience at a Hamptons fundraiser hosted by Gristedes billionaire John Catsimatidis this weekend that he would move to Florida if Mamdani becomes mayor.

As President Donald Trump’s bitter feud with Elon Musk spilled into public view last month, aides to the president reportedly launched a behind-the-scenes effort to carry out Trump’s threats to terminate Musk’s contracts with the federal government. Those threats marked an alarming willingness by the president to take his wrestling match with Musk to a potentially new level of lawlessness.

Ultimately, aides to the president, the Wall Street Journal reports, concluded that SpaceX contracts were too critical to operations at the Defense Department and NASA, once again underscoring the federal government’s heavy reliance on Musk’s technologies. But it’s the review itself, that it happened at all, that should cause considerable alarm, even if it involves an unsympathetic character such as Elon Musk.

As my colleague Jeremy Schulman wrote: “In a democracy, politicians simply cannot be allowed to punish dissent by threatening to destroy the businesses of people who cross them—whether those businesses are media companies, law firms, or a defense contractor run by the world’s richest man.” Of course, such concerns can be identified nearly everywhere throughout Trump’s second term, as he uses the enormous powers of the federal government to target his perceived enemies: top law firms, cultural institutions, Biden officials, civil servants, and more. Just look at the bogus “investigation” into a renovation at the Federal Reserve as Trump openly considers firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

With SpaceX, Trump may have been thwarted. But that might only be temporary. As the WSJ reports, the review remains ongoing, and aides are sure to be looking into other areas of retribution against Musk as he continues pouring gasoline over their feud. (Musk, who earlier appeared to suggest that Trump may be named in the Epstein files, is now one of several prominent MAGA characters to claim a full-blown “coverup” by the president.) Whatever you might think of the billionaire, that should frighten you.

Everything is a conspiracy theory if you don’t know how anything works, and that seems especially so when you take stock of the disinformation swirling in the aftermath of the deadly Texas floods.

The Independence Day floods in Texas Hill Country have killed at least 121 people, with scores still missing. Yet even as the increasingly desperate search continues, some are pointing fingers—not at policy or failed leadership—but at a familiar punch list of conspiracy theories about weather manipulation. From HAARP and DARPA to the Deep State and Democrats, influencers and partisans are sowing distrust and misinformation by labeling the disaster anything but natural.

The tragic irony? There’s no need for a conspiracy theory when the truth is this plain: Texas floods often—and it’s getting worse as part of the growing climate crisis, arguably abetted by the very politicians now scrambling to defend the state’s preparedness.

On Monday, the Boston Globe reported that the Senate version of New Hampshire’s two-year budget bill contains language that “would prohibit public entities from supporting any program designed to improve the lives of people with disabilities.” The reason? An attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion by state House and Senate Republicans.

“The Senate’s anti-DEI provisions would prohibit state and local government entities from supporting any program related to efforts to improve ‘demographic outcomes’ for people with physical or mental disabilities,” writes Boston Globe reporter Steven Porter.

Disabled people already face challenges in hiring, both due to biases of companies and some people just needing more assistance. DEI-focused hiring programs and trainings—both for disabled people and people of color—help this problem.

The House version of the bill is also an anti-DEI attack, though it does not specifically go after disability as heavily as the Senate version of the budget. The House bill goes after race-conscious practices in hiring, which still would hurt disabled people of color. Karen Rosenberg, policy director for the Disability Rights Center, told Porter that the bills are “mostly the same, and they’re both terrible.”

As Porter writes, the curtailing of disability programs in the state can also affect disabled children.

Louis Esposito, executive director of ABLE NH, an advocacy group for people impacted by disability, said there have been so many additional pressing concerns—including a disagreement between the House and Senate over a proposed cut to Medicaid provider rates—that the implications of the anti-DEI provisions in the state budget legislation haven’t garnered as much attention as they warrant.

Esposito said the proposals could have far-reaching ramifications in education. If a school offers a training session on neurodiversity, for example, would that be deemed a DEI violation? School leaders who are unsure might avoid such topics, at the expense of equity and inclusion for students with disabilities, he said, especially since the proposals would direct the state’s education commissioner to withhold all public funding from schools deemed noncompliant.

The House and Senate will have to come to an agreement and pass a two-year budget bill before July 1.