Political News

Donald Trump’s latest attempt to weasel his way out of paying E. Jean Carroll involved a bold-faced lie to a federal judge.

In a legal filing submitted Tuesday, Trump’s attorneys asked Judge Lewis Kaplan not to release some of the funds he owes to the beleaguered columnist on the basis that the president’s petition for a new hearing was still pending before the Supreme Court. The only hiccup: The Supreme Court had rejected Trump’s petition filing.

By Wednesday, though, the SCOTUS docket had been updated to reflect that the nation’s highest court was anticipating a corrected petition from the president’s team.

Carroll has a long and grim history with the president. Trump was found liable by a jury in May 2023 for having sexually abused her in the mid-1990s, for which she was awarded $5 million in damages.

Trump lost his defamation case against her the following January, when Kaplan ruled that Trump had continued to defame the advice columnist by denying the rape on the basis that she wasn’t his “type,” and by accusing her of making up the sexual assault allegations against him for the benefit of her book. A jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in that case.

But Carroll hasn’t yet seen a dime from either of her legal victories. In May, a federal appeals court allowed Trump to continue staving off his payments until the Supreme Court decided whether to pick up the case. The high court did so last week, rejecting Trump’s challenge and allowing the verdict to stand.

Late last month, Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan asked a judge to implement an expedited payment schedule for the sum that Trump owes Carroll (Kaplan is not related to the New York–based judge of the same name). She referred to a June 2023 filing in which both parties agreed that Carroll could collect if the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

Kaplan added that, by this point, the $5 million sum had accrued an additional $779,783 in interest, raising Trump’s debt in the initial case to nearly $5.8 million.

“This is the end of the line,” Kaplan wrote in a June 30 filing. “It is time for him to pay Carroll.”

This story has been updated.

President Trump made two glaring mix-ups Wednesday while speaking to the press at a NATO summit in Turkey.

“We had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan. They were shot at the aircraft carrier,” Trump said, inventing a new government and confusing Japan with Iran.

Trump: "We had 11 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan" pic.twitter.com/FUOFLVZiKh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 8, 2026

A few minutes later, sitting alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and pointing to him directly, Trump asked reporters, “You have a question for President Putin, please?” The assembled press chuckled, and some tried to correct Trump, who then tried to spin his mistake by claiming that’s what he meant.

“Do you have a question for President Putin, not Zelenskiy, Putin?” Trump said, again pointing to the Ukrainian leader on his right. “What would you like to ask him, because I’m going to ask him that question.”

Trump repeatedly refers to Zelenskyy as "President Putin" pic.twitter.com/zbTzfMc5EI

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 8, 2026

These kinds of mistakes are becoming all too common with Trump. By now, it’s obvious to anyone who regularly watches the president that he’s experiencing some kind of cognitive decline. Zelenskiy brushed it off because he’s seen it before and can’t afford to even mildly antagonize Trump, as he needs the president’s support for U.S. military aid. For the rest of us, though, it raises the question of whether Trump has the mental acuity to be president, and how long the octogenarian can keep going on like this.

In Michigan’s Democratic race for U.S. Senate, state Senator Mallory McMorrow was caught in the middle of—and ultimately squeezed out by—centrist Haley Stevens and progressive populist Abdul El-Sayed. Now, with McMorrow having suspended her campaign on Sunday, Stevens and El-Sayed are both vying for her supporters ahead of the August 4 primary—a head-to-head contest that reflects the growing division between the party establishment and the left. “The battle for the Democratic Party that we see nationally has come to Michigan,” said David Dulio, a professor of political science at Oakland University.

So far, McMorrow has not endorsed either candidate for the seat. One Michigan political organizer shared a text conversation with The New Republic in which McMorrow confirmed she had no plans to endorse. Kelly Neumann, the former financial co-chair of McMorrow’s campaign, has the same impression. “I think she wants the people to make their own decision,” she said about McMorrow’s plans. “I think everybody knows in their heart where, where she would vote,” Neumann added. McMorrow didn’t respond to an inquiry.

“Whoever wins this primary on August 4th will have my full support,” McMorrow wrote in a statement on X announcing her withdrawal from the race.

El-Sayed, a former state public health official and TNR contributor in 2021–22, is running on a platform that includes Medicare for All and getting corporate PAC money out of politics. He’s picked up a number of progressive endorsements, including the likes of Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the United Auto Workers.

Stevens is backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, and the EMILY’s List PAC, which endorses pro-choice women running for office. She’s focused on her legislative experience, having been a member of the U.S. House of Representatives since 2018.

In a debate between the two on Tuesday night, they pushed each other on the role of money in politics. El-Sayed asked Stevens about the money her campaign has received from AIPAC, while Stevens pushed El-Sayed to release his tax returns. The two also sparred over energy costs. Both bemoaned that Michiganders have experienced power outages and high utility bills, but El-Sayed pointed out that Stevens has received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Detroit Edison, the major utility company in southeastern Michigan; its PAC contributed $35,000 to Stevens’s campaigns for House, as well as $10,000 to a PAC associated with her.

In their closing statements, they made their priorities clear. El-Sayed hammered on his economic populist message. “We need to take on oligopolies and billionaires,” he said. “We need to guarantee health care through Medicare for All.” He invited people to join his campaign, saying, “It’s the many versus the money.” Stevens made the pitch that she’s the right candidate to take down Republican Senator Mike Rogers in the general election: “I am fed up and fired up. Let’s go beat Mike Rogers, send him back to Florida a second time, and make sure that Michigan shines at the lawmaking table.”

El-Sayed is hoping for a windfall of McMorrow supporters, writing on Sunday: “I welcome her supporters to our movement to stand up against money in politics, to put money back in pockets, and pass Medicare for All.”

In a statement, Stevens praised McMorrow but didn’t explicitly ask McMorrow’s supporters to join her campaign. “Anyone who raises their hand to serve the people of Michigan and puts forward thoughtful ideas for how they would lead earns my respect,” she wrote. Caitlin Legacki, a spokesperson for her campaign, told me, “Now that it’s a two-person race, we have a chance to really go out and consolidate Haley’s voters, which includes Mallory’s remaining supporters who we’re all working really hard to try and woo.”

Some Michiganders say that, anecdotally, McMorrow’s decision to drop out of the race has been a boon for El-Sayed. “We’re getting a lot of new Mallory people coming to the group,” said Wanda Hammoud, the board chair for One Fair Wage Action, about a pro-El-Sayed Facebook group she started. The group has over 21,000 members, and Hammoud said it jumped by 2,000 in just one day this week.

“I’ve been pretty much an establishment Democrat, quite honestly,” said Neumann. Despite that, she said, “right off the bat, I knew immediately when I received the news that [McMorrow] was going to suspend her campaign that I was going to go to Abdul El-Sayed. I just knew that’s where I had to go. I’m looking for change.”

El-Sayed has led in most polls since April. Most recently, a late-June Quantus Insights poll surveyed 433 likely voters and found 41 percent supporting El-Sayed, 36 percent supporting Stevens, 8 percent supporting McMorrow, and 16 percent undecided.

“If endorsements from this point pretty much break equally, the tie goes to Abdul, because he was already leading in the polls,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “He just needs to keep the dynamics the way they were.”

Since McMorrow dropped out, El-Sayed has received endorsements from Representative Analilia Mejia, Michigan state Senator Stephanie Chang, and Representative Maxwell Frost. On the day McMorrow left the race, Stevens received an endorsement from Attorney General Dana Nessel. Green expects more endorsements to come this week. He specifically has his eyes on Senator Elizabeth Warren, who endorsed McMorrow, and Jewish politicians like Andy Levin, who Green says could help draw Jewish voters to El-Sayed. Stevens, backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has called herself a “proud pro-Israel Democrat.” Meanwhile, El-Sayed is critical of Israel’s government and outspoken about the genocide in Gaza.

If Warren endorses El-Sayed, Green said, “that would be a very high-profile, newsworthy signifier that McMorrow world is going Abdul’s direction.”

U.S. passports featuring President Donald Trump’s miserable mug are available now, but only if you want to race to the passport office in Washington, D.C Yes, for those who have been waiting with barely controlled anticipation since April, when the news first dropped that you could have the privilege of Trump’s face glowering at you every time you traveled abroad, their time has come.

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Text under cartoon: Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon…

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If Republicans are really looking for election fraud, they might want to check on their own party members.

In Massachusetts, the State Ballot Law Commission ruled last week to disqualify Republican candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general from the state’s primary election after they submitted allegedly forged signatures to get their names on the ballot.

Adam Roof, executive director of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, had filed objections to the veracity of the signatures collected by the campaigns of Anne Manning Martin, who is running for lieutenant governor, and Michael Walsh, who is running for attorney general.

Candidates needed to gather 10,000 signatures to appear on the primary ballot. The commission invalidated 1,279 of Martin’s 10,692 signatures and 1,021 of Walsh’s 10,677 signatures.

In Martin’s case, signature gatherer Joe Bronske allegedly used a list of registered Republican voters to forge hundreds of signatures. The allegedly forged signatures were first noticed by another Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, who had also hired Bronske and found he’d collected signatures from deceased voters. When deposed by an attorney for Shawn Oliver, one of Martin’s opponents, Bronske repeatedly pleaded the Fifth Amendment, suggesting he had “something to hide,” according to the ruling.

In Walsh’s case, a handwriting expert determined that many of the signatures from certain towns were “more likely than not written by the same person,” according to the commission’s ruling.

Thousands of miles away in Florida, five people, including three elected officials, have been charged in connection with a scheme to allegedly create and distribute a fake voter guide.

Ahead of the 2024 general election, residents in St. Johns County received flyers that listed the Republican Party’s “official 2024 membership-approved endorsements”—but included a very different list of candidates from the one the party actually supported.

St. Johns County Commissioners Sarah Arnold and Christian Whitehurst, St. Augustine Beach city commissioner and former Mayor Dylan Rumrell, and Jamie Lynn Johnson each face two misdemeanor counts for conspiracy and producing a false voter guide.

Brianna Jordan, Whitehurst’s campaign manager, was also charged with tampering with physical evidence. She allegedly tried to destroy the voter guides after the scheme was discovered.

It shouldn’t be all that surprising that the recent instances of alleged voter fraud are coming from the Republican Party, the same party that idolizes a county clerk found guilty of tampering with voting machines, celebrates a rule-skirting billionaire, and bows at the altar of an election denier and alleged fraudster.

The Great American State Fair seemed to attract dozens of attendees ahead of America’s 250-year Fourth of July celebration. Now, it’s attracting no one.

Meghan McCain, the daughter of late Arizona Senator John McCain, hosted the “Race 2 Win” quiz show at the sprawling semiquincentennial celebration Tuesday. But a picture of the game stage, as shared by McCain herself, illustrated that nobody had shown up to her event. Instead, McCain’s voice rang out to an empty field, speckled by just a few lonely chairs.

“So cool to host @2waytvapp new game show ‘Race 2 Win’ at The Great American State Fair today!” she wrote on X.

But even McCain couldn’t be bothered to show up to the event. The pundit’s image was broadcast onto large screens on the enormous stage while she remained in an assumedly climate-controlled room, speaking with participants over Zoom.

The event technicians overseeing the show couldn’t be bothered by its technicalities, either. Instead, they streamed McCain’s show as-is on the two vertical monitors that bordered the stage, mangling the image while cutting off the text of a trivia question about the building materials used to construct the Capitol dome due to the altered aspect ratio.

Practically every component of Donald Trump’s wildly expensive plan to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary has turned out to be a dud. The $15 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool failed to rid the iconic monument of algae; a multi-week lineup of music acts had to be cancelled after practically every artist pulled themselves from the program; and a fleet of buses carrying a contemporary retelling of American history have failed to make a splash in their journey across the country.

The Great American State Fair was supposed to be the centerpiece of the Trump administration’s America 250 celebration, yet even it is more of a potemkin village than a sincere homage.

The booths, which offered space for each state to represent its heritage and culture (pet a replica of a bison at the North Dakota pavilion, or walk away with a bag of chips from Maine), were ideologically pitted against the seismic presence of the federal government and Trump’s authoritarian expansion (banners featuring his grim face flank the event, while a small-scale replica of his proposed “Triumphal Arc” sits center stage).

The fair also suffered from power outages and dangerous technical failures that included large stage equipment falling behind dancers during rehearsal. But the extreme heat that consumed Washington over the weekend seemed to be the final blow to the expansive celebration: even the thin crowds that did appear to watch the world record-shattering fireworks display were forced to leave the area for several hours due to an unprecedented weather advisory.

President Trump went on a sprawling, rambling rant Wednesday at the NATO summit in Turkey, in which he called Iranian leadership “scum” and announced that the ceasefire was over, called for an end to all trade with Spain, threatened to colonize Greenland, and continued to attack NATO for not doing exactly what he tells it—all while NATO Secretary Mark Rutte heaped praise on him.

Here were the worst moments:

While you were sleeping, Trump had a complete meltdown at the NATO summit in Turkey, ranting and raving that "Spain is a wasted cause" led by "bad people," claiming "Greenland is a big problem for us" and the US should've kept it after World War 2, and adding that Iran is led by… pic.twitter.com/65RNL7Hphf

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 8, 2026On Iran

“We attacked, very powerfully last night, the very dangerous people from Iran. They’re sick. There’s something wrong with them. We said, ‘Go and do your funeral stuff,’ and instead of that, they start shooting rockets at ships,” Trump said. “So we hit them very hard last night, very hard. I would say 20 to one … I told them every time you hit, we hit.… They’re a bunch of scum. You want to know that? They’re scum. So we don’t like them, I don’t like them, and they’re evil people.”

Trump also called Iranian officer Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. strike in Trump’s first term, the “father of the roadside bomb.”

“He was an evil genius, but a bad guy, and he was the father of the roadside bomb. The roadside bomb is a bomb that goes on when you’re driving your little vehicle around, and it goes on, and you have no legs, no arms, and no face,” Trump said.

He was later asked about the status of the ceasefire, given both Iran and the U.S. had resumed aggression.

“It’s a very interesting question. To me? I think it’s over,” he replied. “They’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.”

On Spain

The president attacked Spain for being “a terrible partner in NATO,” going as far as to demand the U.S. cease all future trade with the nation.

“Spain is a wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore. By the way,” he said. “Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. They don’t participate, they don’t pay. I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, including visits.… Watch them, watch them come running back. Oh, they’ll come running back.

“We’ll see how hostile they remain when they call [me] up, and they, ‘Please, please, we want to trade with you, sir,’” Trump continued, using a high-pitched begging voice to mock Spain. “‘We want to trade with you, sir.’ They make so much money with us, and we’re going to see that they make a lot less. I want no business with them.”

On Greenland

Trump again took time to attack Greenland, one of his most constant targets for potential takeover in his second term.

“I’m not happy with NATO because of what they did with Greenland, and I’m not happy with NATO because of the fact that they didn’t want to help us with the number one state sponsor of terror; that’s Iran. They were unwilling to help us,” he said. “Greenland is very important for the United States, but it’s not important for Denmark. In fact, when Denmark was overrun by the Nazis in less than one day—Hitler beat them out in one day, took over—they asked us to take care of Greenland.

“In fact, we took Greenland, and then stupidly we gave it back. We shouldn’t have given it back to them, because we’re the ones that need it. We need it for protection of the world, not just the United States. And it’s very important. It doesn’t help Denmark, but it helps us, and it’s very important for us.”

This was a textbook crashout from a president who has done more damage to U.S. alliances than perhaps any other president this century. Focusing on his petty gripe with NATO payments, restarting the war with Iran, and rekindling rumors of annexing Greenland, all while sitting next to the NATO secretary general, is just a routine Wednesday for Trump.

For what it’s worth, Rutte did absolutely nothing to push back on any of Trump’s drivel, only chiming in to applaud him for keeping Israel, Europe, and “the region” (the Middle East) “safe” by downgrading Iran’s ballistic missile capabilites—even as that success is highly questionable.

A Trump administration official tried to take foreign policy into his own hands and caused turmoil within the State Department.

Axios reports that in two instances, Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau gave wrong information about U.S. policy to foreign countries over exiled Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado and her plans to return to the country.

Immediately following Venezuela’s June 24 earthquakes that killed over 3,500 people, Machado sought to return to the country to help with relief efforts, despite the fact that she doesn’t have a valid Venezuelan passport. Administration officials thought this was a bad idea, calling it “gross political opportunism” that could in fact hurt relief and recovery efforts.

Machado tried again by reaching out to Landau, suggesting that she could go back to Venezuela via Curaçao, a Caribbean island controlled by the Netherlands. Landau advocated Machado’s plan with the Netherlands’ ambassador to the U.S., Birgitta Tazelaar, without approval from Rubio. The Dutch signed off on the plan, giving Machado the necessary permission since she had no passport.

“This is U.S. policy, and it’s supported by Secretary Rubio,” Landau reportedly told Tazelaar. Machado planned to stay in U.S. Consul General Ramón Negrón’s residence in Curaçao.

On June 25, the next day, Tazelaar was confused because it seemed that the U.S. didn’t want Machado to go to Curaçao. She called the U.S. assistant secretary for the Western Hemisphere, Mike Kozak, who told her that the administration wasn’t helping Machado return to Venezuela. The Dutch then removed their permission while Machado was in the air, and her plane had to return to the U.S.

A shocked Machado quickly called Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who explained actual U.S. policy to her. Landau told Rubio that he had been misunderstood and didn’t explicitly say he supported Machado’s plans. But that wasn’t Landau’s only slip-up, according to Axios. He then reportedly told Panamanian Foreign Minister Javier Martínez-Acha in a text message exchange that the U.S. was making arrangements for Machado to return to Venezuela.

“I understand that your country will make arrangements so that this person can enter Venezuela,” Martínez-Acha texted at 9:21 p.m. June 26 to Landau, who replied, “Perfect description of our position.”

On June 28, Machado was in Panama and tried to fly to Venezuela on Copa Airlines from there, only to be rejected when U.S. and Venezuelan officials communicated their disapproval.

A source inside the State Department told Axios that “There’s a widespread belief that Landau went rogue, and the evidence supports that belief.” Another source said “Marco isn’t happy” with Landau.

Machado has gone out of her way to curry favor with President Trump, gifting him her Nobel Peace Prize after Trump arrested Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. But Trump hasn’t included her in his plans for the country, and even when she thought she was getting help, it was from a rogue official. Now, Landau is in trouble and Machado has nothing.

A MAGA Republican was met with loud boos at a town hall meeting as he attempted to defend President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Speaking at a town hall Tuesday, Nebraska Representative Mike Flood flailed when asked what he would do to provide insurance benefits for people with disabilities.

“Well, under the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’ we protected—” Flood started to answer, only to be drowned out by boos from the audience.

“We protected a system that if it had gone unchecked it would not have been long-term available for the people that are the most vulnerable,” Flood continued.

“We protected Medicaid in a bipartisan, commonsense way,” he added, as the audience’s jeers continued.

WATCH: Mike Flood gets drowned with boos for his Big Beautiful Bill vote and falsely claims "we protected Medicaid." #NE01 pic.twitter.com/NnhVCOhUyb

— American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) July 7, 2026

In reality, Trump’s behemoth budget bill will cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid funding over the next 10 years, causing hospitals to shutter and benefits to disappear, hurting all Americans—especially people with disabilities and the elderly.

This isn’t the first time Flood has downplayed his decision to support Trump’s move to gut Medicaid. Last year, he admitted that many rural hospitals would need to prepare to adopt “an emergency room model”—meaning they would be stripped of essential services and benefits.

Cuts to Medicaid will force rural hospitals, which already operate on razor-thin margins, to absorb skyrocketing rates of uncompensated care. The continued strain will force them to cut services and personnel, and eventually possibly close. More than 45 percent of rural hospitals in the United States operate with negative margins, and as a result of Flood’s vote, more than 300 rural hospitals are at risk of closing.

President Donald Trump didn’t know what “groceries” were until just a few years ago. Which makes sense, given that he’s almost certainly never set foot inside a grocery store. He even called the word “groceries” “such an old term.” Now he’s discovered another amazing concept: discounted sale prices. And because he’s Donald Trump, he assumes they’re about him. “Great news!

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The Iran deal is dead, according to the U.S. president.

Donald Trump bitterly referred to Iran’s leadership as “scum” during a NATO summit presser in Ankara, Turkey, on Wednesday, telling reporters that he believes peace negotiations—and the regional ceasefire—are “over.”

“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum. Do you know what scum is?” Trump said. “They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re vicious, violent people, and if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s over. I’ll speak to our negotiators, they’ll want to negotiate, they’re good people. Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, but they’ll have to come back to me. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them.

“They’re liars. We make a deal—if I make a deal with him, we have a deal, and it goes out and he talks,” Trump said, briefly gesturing to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. “We make a deal, everyone’s agreed, no nuclear weapons. We make a deal. They go outside, talk to the press, they say we never even talked about it.

“There’s something wrong with them, they’re cuckoo,” he added.

Q: Is the ceasefire over? Is the MOU dead?

TRUMP: I think it's over. I don't want to deal with them anymore. They're scum. Do you know what scum is? They're led by sick people. They're vicious, violent people. They're liars. They're cuckoo pic.twitter.com/fGlomtlSrz

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 8, 2026

The White House and Tehran preemptively signed a drafted memorandum of understanding, or MOU, in June, initiating a 60-day negotiation process. The mutual willingness to draw up a peace plan spurred hopes that the violence and economic barricades could soon come to an end, but the two nations began exchanging strikes again this week.

U.S. Central Command confirmed on Tuesday that the military had “completed” a new round of strikes on Iran, hitting “over 80 targets with precision munitions” over a four-hour period. The strikes were “in response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels that were transiting the Strait of Hormuz,” CENTCOM said in a statement. Washington has also reimposed sanctions on Iranian oil sales.

In retaliation, Tehran said it had launched strikes on 85 U.S. military targets in Bahrain and Kuwait, reported Al Jazeera. Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs strongly condemned the “aggressive attacks and gross violation” of the MOU.

The office added that Iran’s armed forces “will not hesitate in defending Iran’s territorial integrity, national sovereignty, and national security against U.S. military aggression in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter, and will target the source and origin of the aggression.”

Oil prices surged as a result, with the price of Brent crude—the international oil benchmark—rising more than 3 percent on Wednesday.

Trump, meanwhile, is planning to extend the violence.

“We’ll probably hit them hard again tonight,” he told reporters.

Ballot measures seeking to restrict transgender student-athletes’ participation in school sports will appear before voters in Arizona, Colorado and Washington state. By Brooke Migdon for The 19th Legislatures in left-leaning states have consistently rejected bills that would bar transgender student-athletes from participating in sports in line with their gender identity.

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

In brief remarks to reporters Monday at the White House, President Donald Trump noted that he was shocked to learn how much energy developing artificial intelligence requires and said his administration is now approving plans for energy facilities to power data centers in “a matter of weeks.” 

After first describing his investment accounts for children, Trump responded to a question on cryptocurrency and said Big Tech leaders racing to develop artificial intelligence have told him they need access to double the country’s existing energy capacity in order to advance technologies and outpace foreign competitors. 

Trump also said that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin had told him tech companies weren’t taking advantage of the administration’s promise to get fast approvals for private power plants supporting AI development. 

“An industry of the future should not be chained to dirty fuels of the past.” 

Trump said he then called Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk to ask why they hadn’t submitted plans for power plants alongside their data center developments. 

“They thought we were kidding,” Trump said Monday. “They can’t believe it, that they’re approved in a period of a matter of weeks.” 

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about how the administration is approving power plant plans in a matter of weeks. 

While the administration has sought to waive environmental protections, expedite permits, and loosen construction rules for gas plants and data centers, there are a slew of state and local requirements both power plants and data centers must satisfy that even in the fastest permitting environments take months. 

Although Trump said it was his idea to allow tech companies to build their own “behind-the-meter” generating units on site to power data, it’s a mainstream practice to ensure they always have access to power. Dedicated power plants for data centers have only grown in popularity as companies race to get the facilities online. 

The president said tech companies can use whichever type of energy they want to use—he specifically mentioned only nuclear, oil and gas—except wind. “We don’t allow wind,” Trump said. “Wind is terrible, it just doesn’t work.” 

Trump has sought to end wind energy, the resource that generates a tenth of the electricity generated in the US, according to the US Energy Information Administration. 

The race to develop AI, which requires data centers to handle the energy-intensive computing, has resulted in plans for 74 new or expanded methane gas plants across the US, according to a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project, a national nonprofit founded more than 20 years ago by a former director of the EPA’s civil enforcement office.  

These proposed gas-fired plants, which would be dedicated to serving data centers, are expected to generate 143 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power the state of California nearly three times over, according to the report. 

Of those 74 gas plants, 32 are in Texas, 10 are in Ohio, and seven are in Pennsylvania. 

The power plants would also release nearly 662 million tons per year of greenhouse gas pollution, according to the report, which equals the emissions of Australia. This wave of power plants for data centers could also release air pollutants that contribute to smog and lung damage.

Data centers have become very unpopular, prompting some politicians to try and distance themselves from the industry.

Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said in a statement that “an industry of the future should not be chained to dirty fuels of the past.” 

“While data centers may be needed to accommodate shifts in technology, the public has a right to transparency and accountability, clean air, and common sense controls to protect water supplies, especially in areas already struggling with water shortages,” Duggan said. Data centers can use copious amounts of water to keep servers cool.

As the data center industry seeks rural parts of the US to roll out the supercomputer warehouses, and the fossil fuel power plants and generators accompanying them, the facilities have quickly become highly unpopular in communities across America. 

Some lawmakers have long been vocal with their concerns about data center construction. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation in March proposing a moratorium on all new data center construction until AI safeguards, including worker and environmental protections, are in place.

Other politicians, who have responded to protests from their constituents with the midterm elections approaching, are seeking to distance themselves from the industry. 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, called for blocking new data center developments in rural parts of the state during a campaign stop in East Texas last week. It’s a step further than his recent calls for data centers to pay for their own infrastructure costs, reuse their water, add new power generation to the state’s independent electric grid and other measures aimed at limiting the impact on residential communities. 

The New York State Legislature passed a one-year moratorium in June on data center permits. If Gov. Kathy Hochul signs the bill, New York would become the first state to restrict data centers in such a way. But Hochul, a Democrat who is up for re-election this year, has said that she believes it should be left up to municipalities.

Monterey Park, California, and Ashville, Ohio, are among the US communities that have passed temporary bans or pauses on new data centers.

The Trump administration announced last month that it would not set nationwide environmental requirements or recommendations for the data center industry. 

While there are technologies and practices that reduce air pollution and water usage, states and communities know what works best for them, EPA chief Zeldin said at a Politico energy summit in June.

By not enforcing federal regulations, said Clara Vondrich, senior policy counsel with Public Citizen’s Climate Program, the EPA gave Big Tech the green light to build polluting power plants and water-intensive facilities without any environmental protection enforcement. 

“Big Tech executives have lobbied hard to ingratiate themselves into the Trump administration’s orbit,” Vondrich stated. “Zeldin made clear that their investment was money well spent.”

When Lucy found out she was pregnant in the summer of 2025, she might have been delighted. Instead, the news added to the uncertainty she’d been facing since that February, when she was among the first crop of federal workers fired by the Trump administration.

Her old bosses at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to rehire her, but human resources offered nothing in writing, and given how the administration had treated her already, she just couldn’t trust the proposal. (She would eventually return as a contractor, hence her request that I use a pseudonym—one former colleague, after all, had been fired for putting up a protest sign.)

The survey of fired federal workers “came from me not being okay and wanting to see if other people were as not okay as I was.”

President Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly that the career workers his minions drove out—roughly 317,000 were fired, quit, or took a buyout since he returned to the White House—are “getting private sector jobs” and making “twice as much money, three times as much money.” Even the judge who ruled those early firings illegal was under that impression. The workers “have moved on with their lives and found new jobs,” he stated last fall. “Many would no longer be willing or able to return to their posts.”

That wasn’t Lucy’s experience. She’d applied for at least 80 positions, resulting in just two dead-end interviews, though her PhD and ample work experience had made her well-qualified. By the time she knew she was expecting, she’d accepted a retail gig without health insurance. Similar stories abounded among her former colleagues.

I, too, left a job at the NIH last year—voluntarily, having seen the writing on the wall. My old workmates and I keep in touch via a group Signal chat, which, in addition to hand-drawn protest signs and pictures of pets, has been populated with tips for job seekers, mutual aid info, and countless employment postings.

Lucy, whom I hadn’t met prior to reporting this story, figured she wasn’t an outlier in terms of her difficulties finding suitable work. As the anniversary of the so-called Valentine’s Day Massacre approached, the members of one of her Signal chats began talking about designing a survey to assess how ejected workers were really faring.

Among the laid-off workers were plenty of people skilled in collecting and analyzing data—including Lucy, an epidemiologist, who raised her hand to help. “It came from me not being okay and wanting to see if other people were as not okay as I was,” she says.

“I’ve done a lot of different analysis projects, worked with a lot of data. I’ve never done something that was personal like this,” says Christa Reynolds, another fired NIH employee who helped crunch the numbers. “In one way, it was validating. In another way, it just was terrible.”

The data they collected—300 responses across 14 federal agencies and nearly every state—suggested that the fired workers had not, by and large, settled into high-paying private sector jobs. Many struggled to find work, with about 40 percent searching for at least six months. A year after Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut them loose, almost 17 percent remained unemployed.

“Probationary sounds like they’re just out of college,” said a former IRS chief, but “a lot” of the fired workers had “very sophisticated backgrounds.”

And not for lack of trying. Brier Ryver, who also helped design the survey, said they applied to at least 110 jobs after getting fired as a park ranger for a federal wildlife refuge in Florida. Wildlife conservation “is an extremely competitive field,” Ryver told me. Most of their applications were for local government positions, in dozens of states.

“Every single county government and every single state government and every single university has a different website to apply through, so I had to create accounts for every single one,” Ryver says. “I’d stay up till 3 a.m. applying and overthinking and making my materials look as good as I can.”

Seasonal work was a nonstarter—at first. “I need benefits in some way, shape, or form,” Ryver explains. But as rejections piled up, their expectations grew more flexible: “I’m going to take little money over no money.”

In the survey, more than two-thirds of the workers who had found jobs reported taking a pay cut. One interpretation might be that federal salaries were “bloated,” as House Republicans misleadingly put it in a 2024 proposal to slash benefits for civil servants. But a fairer interpretation is that they took what they could get in a hostile job market—even if overqualified. “There are a lot of families who are two-fed households, one was probationary and the other was RIFed,” Lucy notes, using the acronym for “reductions in force,” a.k.a. layoffs.

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The survey focused on probationary employees, whom the administration went after first. Legally, they were easier to terminate because they’d been in their roles less than two years, though many were longtime contractors or seasoned civil servants transferring from other positions. “Probationary sounds like they’re just out of college,” former IRS chief John Koskinen told one of my Mother Jones colleagues as DOGE hit his agency. “A lot of them came with very sophisticated backgrounds…They weren’t 25-year-olds. They were filling important positions.” 

Either way, many of the fired workers shouldered financial risks for the opportunity to serve the public. “I uprooted my life and moved across country to take this new position to a place where I had no community,” one of them, a single mother, wrote in her survey response. Another said their spouse had quit their job to enable the move. Nearly a third of the surveyed workers reported financial losses related to moving or housing instability. Some drew down their retirement savings—nearly one in six took out a loan.

The Federal Harms Tracker, a project of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, estimates that Trump’s layoffs have cost taxpayers more than $70 billion, and that’s not even counting the inevitable fallout when the country’s largest employer sheds more than 7 percent of its personnel. Nearly half of respondents in the probationary workers’ survey said they’d delayed major life events, like getting married or buying a home. “It’s comparable to the pandemic,” notes Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the Brookings Institute who tracks economic indicators in the DC area to study the layoffs’ impacts.

Trump’s firings have been terribly wasteful. “They lost all this money that they spent training us and recruiting.”

A recent report by Loh and her colleagues found that home prices in DC, which boasted the nation’s highest unemployment rate in 2025, have dropped by a quarter compared to 2019, and inflation-adjusted rents have plummeted, though “no tenant feels like the rent went down.” Housing remains expensive relative to incomes, and as fired federal workers tightened their belts, the researchers saw declines in all types of spending.

But the majority of federal workers resided outside the capital, and unemployment spiked in states where they had the biggest presence. Locales with strong federal ties were also vulnerable. Ryver, for example, worked at the only wildlife refuge designated for the protection of Florida’s manatees: “The local economy was very based on manatee tourism.”

Ryver managed the commercial permits that allowed tour groups to operate, and assessed buildings, boardwalks, and other facilities to ensure they were safe for public use. The refuge was understaffed even before DOGE came along. “We were already drowning in work and deferred maintenance,” Ryver says.

Beyond the inevitable deterioration of government services, the firings have been terribly wasteful—a serious brain drain. “They lost all this money that they spent training us and recruiting,” Reynolds explains, and rehiring fired workers as contractors, which happens a fair bit, is generally more costly—and less stable. “I don’t feel secure,” Lucy told me. “I feel like any day they could pull my contract.”

“There can be people who, of course, get new jobs, and they can look fine from the outside, and they can feel better, but the nervous system is really changed,” says Rosalyn Beroza, a therapist who specializes in trauma. “It’s a state where none of the givens held, and you can draw a line between before and after—nothing feels the same afterwards. That’s what has happened to federal employees.”

Beroza, a DC local and daughter of a government scientist, has spent her entire life around civil servants. And so, in early 2025, she began assembling a network of therapists willing to offer free or low-cost therapy to departing federal workers. “The demand was huge,” she says. “I got so many people wanting help, and it was so sad.”

The mass firings were “essentially a natural disaster, because you lose everything. You lose finances, but you also lose your identity, your sense of purpose.”

Russell Vought, director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, had promised to put federal workers “in trauma” and the data suggest he succeeded: In the survey Lucy and her colleagues designed, 95 percent of the fired employees reported new mental health symptoms, including nervousness, insomnia, difficulty concentrating, and thoughts of self-harm. “If it weren’t for my family, if it weren’t for my friends, my community around me, I would not be here,” Lucy says.

When I reached out to Reynolds, the mental health stats were the first thing she wanted to talk about, but she wasn’t sure the public would care. “I’ve heard other people be like, ‘Oh, well people lose their jobs every day,’” she says. “It’s hard to explain. Like, this is not a normal job loss.”

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Beroza agrees. “It’s not an overreaction, because of the way that these firings took place,” she says. “It’s essentially a natural disaster, because you lose everything. You lose finances, but you also lose your identity, your sense of purpose, your sense of the future.”

If there were any guardrails, federal workers no longer trust them. “I expected some bad things to happen, but I thought that they would follow laws,” Reynolds recalls. If not, she figured Congress or the courts would step up. But Congress demurred and the courts were too little, too late.

Another survey, conducted last year by the Federal News Network, suggested that 95 percent of federal employees who stayed on have experienced increased anxiety and depression since Trump came back to office. More than four out of five considered quitting for mental health reasons.

In a recent analysis, the Government Accountability Office classified more than three quarters of last year’s federal departures as voluntary. But though opting into the deferred resignation program—Musk’s notorious “fork in the road”—was technically a choice, it wasn’t much of one. “Many people did that because they were told that their jobs were going to be eliminated, so how voluntary is that?” Loh, the economic analyst, asks.

I can relate. A few weeks after Trump returned to office, my government-supplied laptop wouldn’t let me log in. It turned out to be a technical issue, but for 30 minutes I thought I’d been fired. Colleagues had already been placed on administrative leave, articles and educational materials I’d worked on were scratched off federal websites, and I’d been all but prohibited from doing my job.

A third of the fired employees, including people with chronic diseases, said they had delayed medical care. “My life was in danger,” wrote one.

Once my first colleague was axed, I’d been jumpy at every email and increasingly nauseous every day I clocked in. When the password to my work computer was suddenly defective, I mostly felt relief. I put in my resignation a few days later. On paper, my departure was voluntary, though I wouldn’t have left if not for the hostility Musk, Trump, Vought, and the rest leveled at dedicated civil servants.

Like Lucy, despite countless applications, I spent more than six months unemployed, resorted to gig work to pay my bills, and (like one in four fired workers surveyed) began taking a psychiatric medication—in my case to deal with new heights of anxiety. It helped, but that period still haunts me.

Roughly 90 percent of the survey respondents reported that mental health symptoms triggered by their job losses were still affecting them a year later. Ryver recalls “some skill regression” as a result. “It erodes your cognitive abilities, your problem-solving abilities, to have to operate at such high levels of activation,” says Beroza, the trauma therapist.

Many fired federal workers say they wouldn’t go back to working for the government. Lucy, who did so out of necessity, can understand that. Her reinstatement process, too, was anxiety inducing. It lasted half a year, for most of which she couldn’t reach anyone in human resources and had nothing in writing—and no functional health insurance.

Which is why she had to find an obstetrician willing to see uninsured patients. During her first appointment, the doctor couldn’t detect a fetal heartbeat, and Lucy was told to schedule a followup. “Those were the longest two weeks of my life,” she remembers.

Her pregnancy, it turned out, wasn’t viable, which threatened to become a financial blow in addition to an emotional one. Lucy required a procedure the doctor’s office said would cost $5,000 out of pocket. She and her partner hit the phones and eventually learned she could get the same treatment at Planned Parenthood for $650—which still wasn’t easy. “That time would have been a lot less stressful if I had insurance,” she recalls.

In the workers’ survey, a third of the fired employees said they had delayed medical care. Those with chronic diseases reported worsening symptoms, one writing, “My life was in danger during that time.”

DOGE officially came to an end on July 4, according to the executive order that created it. The passing of this expiration date feels weirdly anticlimactic—perhaps because Musk and his underlings haven’t been active in the onslaught for some time now, or because some parts of the government are showing signs of returning to normalcy, at least on paper. Hard-hit agencies, including the IRS, are now hiring, sometimes at rates surpassing the earlier layoffs. Health and Human Services, where Lucy and Reynolds both worked, is looking to add 12,000 workers—20 percent more than it shed.

Agencies are recruiting former federal workers for many of the roles, but the vast majority of those workers are wary—if not shellshocked. When the Partnership for Public Service surveyed more than 11,000 remaining federal workers last fall, 58 percent said they were “less engaged” than a year earlier, and only 10 percent trusted the political leadership—which, as Reynolds points out, has “been upfront about not respecting us and not caring for our work.”

Reynolds doubts the damage this administration has wrought—on institutional knowledge and the trust and dedication of career employees—is reversible. “It gets beyond that personal feeling of hurt for being fired,” she says. Because even if federal agencies are repopulated, it’s hard to be confident they’ll adhere to the public-facing missions that once motivated Reynolds and other civil servants. “The long-term effects” of the layoffs, she says, “are definitely one of the more stressful things for me.”

Last summer, I noticed a shift: I was calmer and happier than I’d been in years.

This was puzzling, since my life didn’t look particularly calm. I was planning a solo cross-country move, and my days were full of bubble wrap and goodbye dinners and Craigslist alerts. But as I packed up boxes in Boston, and then adjusted to life in San Francisco, I marveled at the ­little changes. Feeling content, rather than lonely, on nights cooking a new recipe by myself. Pausing to chat with baristas instead of rushing to order a latte. I couldn’t remember crying out of happiness before, but there I was on a morning walk, eyes welling at the way the sun hit a cypress tree. Friends and family said I seemed lighter. As the summer progressed, I wrote journal entries like, “felt relaxed/happy a lot of the day for no particular reason” and “surprised by how ok I am.”

Since I was a teenager, I’ve grappled with a tangle of anxiety, depression, and insomnia: feeling a knot at the base of my ribs, weeping in the fetal position for no obvious reason, waking up in the middle of the night, simultaneously exhausted and wired. Over the years, I have, as therapists like to say, amassed the tools in my toolbox. I’ve spent countless hours with psychiatrists and therapists, gravitating toward cool grandma types, taking their advice to cultivate a mindfulness practice. I’ve talked to my actual grandma, a vivacious 102-year-old psychologist who has a way of asking pointed questions over ­breakfast. (On insomnia: “Does sex help?”) I’ve tried Prozac and Zoloft and Ambien. I run a few miles every day after work—the best mood booster I’ve found so far. I’ve even tried some of the more out-there stuff, like working with a coach to ask my stomach why it’s so tense.

But when the knot and the crying jags and the inexplicably wired nights persisted, I came to think of them as just how I was built. In the same way that I have dark hair and brown eyes, I thought, I was a person with a low hum of anxiety and bouts of depression.

So it was particularly noticeable when things shifted. It wasn’t that I suddenly transformed; rather, it felt like the temperature of the anxiety came down, and sadness became a feeling that passed rather than a state of being. My Oura ring told me that the quality of my sleep was “Fair” or “Good,” and not the dreaded “Pay attention.”

It took a couple of months for me to realize that these changes dovetailed with another event: the removal of my IUD.

Like many millennial women, I’ve been on hormonal contraceptives for most of my adult life. I got my first intrauterine ­device after graduating from college. I loved that I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant or bother with taking a pill every day. I loved that, like many women with hormonal IUDs, I didn’t get my period. And I loved that, with the exception of when I had to replace it every so often, I didn’t think about having an IUD much at all for the next 14 years.

“I think this is a real thing. I don’t think it was just in your uterus or just in your head,” said Dr. Tamar Gur, adding: “Your experience, unfortunately, is very common.”

One morning last August, I decided to do some digging into whether my newfound equilibrium was related to going off birth control. I’d heard that the pill could cause mood changes for some users, but what I found shocked me: For years, research in well-respected scientific journals has found that people on hormonal contraceptives—especially those using non-oral contraceptives, like IUDs—are much more likely to experience depression, suicidality, anxiety, insomnia, and other psychological effects rarely discussed by the doctors who prescribe them. While the likelihood of ­severe mood changes from hormonal contraceptives is relatively low, even a small increase in risk can have profound consequences when a group of products is used by more than 300 million women worldwide.

“There are subsets of women who are ­exquisitely sensitive to hormonal shifts,” says Dr. Tamar Gur, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who directs the women’s health research program at Ohio State University. “I think this is a real thing. I don’t think it was just in your uterus or just in your head,” she told me, adding: “Your experience, unfortunately, is very common.” Like many doctors I spoke with, Gur often paused midsentence to rephrase what she was saying. “I just want to be so careful with my words, because I don’t want someone out there who would benefit from hormonal contraception to feel scared of it or feel like they’re doomed to experience it.”

Indeed, some important caveats are in order. Again and again, scientists stressed to me that, while some women on ­hormonal contraceptives experience dramatic mood effects, the vast majority do not. Some, in fact, report feeling happier on contraceptives than off them. On top of that, the potential consequence of not using birth control—namely, unplanned pregnancy—can have immense psychological repercussions. And finally, the large studies are observational, meaning they show correlation, not causation. It’s challenging, for ethical reasons, to do randomized, controlled studies on the effects of birth control by placing some participants on placebos, and the science is complicated by the fact that there are hundreds of formulations of contraceptives and little funding to study drugs already on the market. Even my story isn’t exactly linear: My college years were by far my most depressed, and I wasn’t on contraceptives most of that time.

And yet it’s an undeniably jarring experience to realize, at 36, that I may be a significantly calmer and happier person than I thought I was. Did my IUD contribute to or prolong my depression and anxiety? And of the many mental health specialists I saw over the years, why didn’t anyone ask about my birth control?

I’ve been mulling this at a time when birth control is under attack. In October, the Department of Health and Human Services laid off the staff administering Title X, which provides contraceptives and other family planning services to millions of low-income Americans annually. The agency recently released guidance on ­family planning projects it expects to fund in the coming year—with the goal of reducing “overmedicalization” and promoting “natural family planning” approaches.

On social media, misinformation about contraceptives is rampant, with videos on TikTok—generating billions of views—leading some women to come off birth control in favor of “natural” alternatives. Turning Point USA podcaster Alex Clark has called hormonal birth control “poison.” Candace Owens calls it a “Machiavellian, evil design to keep you stupid.” Celebrities from Gwyneth Paltrow to Joe Rogan and Elon Musk have used their platforms to suggest birth control is dangerous.

At virtually every gathering where the subject came up, at least one woman—and often many—told stories of stopping or changing birth control because of the side effects.

At a time when abortion is unavailable to many and contraceptives could be next on the chopping block, it can feel like there are only two camps: those who champion birth control, warts and all, and those who criticize it with hopes of making it go away. But there is a quieter third camp: scientists, doctors, and public health researchers who are scrutinizing birth control not to get rid of it, but to make it better.

I hadn’t appreciated just how much support there was for this last group until I started telling women in my life that I was working on this story. Nervous that friends would think I’d gone off some sort of Goop–ey deep end, I came to dinner parties and book clubs prepared to rattle off study stats and assure them that real scientists said this was a thing. I needn’t have worried. At virtually every gathering where the subject came up, at least one woman—and often many—told stories of stopping or changing birth control because of the side effects. I learned of friends who went off hormonal contraceptives after thoughts of harming themselves, or having thoughts of harming others, or spiraling in anxiety. This shouldn’t have surprised me: Roughly a fifth of women stop using birth control or switch methods within the first year because of side effects, many of them mood-related.

While researchers know that some women will suffer from dramatic reactions, they’re still learning who and why. “We’re in the murky middle,” said psychology professor Adriene Beltz, who studies the cognitive effects of sex hormones at the University of Michigan.

Beltz was among the many experts I spoke with who worried, in this political climate, that their research would be weaponized. It can feel, she said, like “you’re either gaslighting the experiences of folks or you’re limiting folks’ options at a time when options are already limited.”

This isn’t altogether a new challenge. When Beltz started her research more than a decade ago, people would ask what she would do if she discovered something negative about contraceptives. Her response: “I would say, ‘Women deserve to know all possible risks and benefits.’”

Vanessa Saba

In June 2011, when I was 21, I showed up to my gynecologist’s office in Minneapolis to discuss contraception. My medical records note that I was leaning toward a Mirena IUD. “Had a tough year depression/anxiety-­wise and is concerned about mood effects with hormonal contraceptives,” the records say. Still, after a discussion about pros and cons, I elected to have it inserted that day.

I don’t doubt any of this, but I also have no recollection of this appointment. It was the summer after I graduated from college, and I’d talked to friends who had IUDs and liked them. My understanding of the devices was that they operated locally, without the far-reaching effects of oral contraceptives. At the time, Bayer, which makes the Mirena, explained on its website that the IUD “delivers small amounts of hormone directly to the uterus.”

The fact that the insertion of an effective, long-acting contraceptive was so unremarkable to me was, in its own way, extraordinary. For millennia, women in ­ancient societies had gone to extreme lengths to prevent pregnancy: inserting acacia gum or crocodile dung in Egypt, cervical sponges made of bamboo tissue paper in Japan, wads of wool in Greek and Islamic cultures. Starting in the 1900s, douches containing Lysol were marketed as “feminine hygiene” products to get around laws limiting the sale of contraceptives.

All of which made the first-ever birth control pill, which hit the market in the summer of 1960, such a game changer. Here was the “magic pill” that reproductive rights crusaders like Margaret Sanger had been dreaming of. Sex before—and after—marriage became less fraught. Women could study and pursue careers without fear of unplanned pregnancy. The pill suppressed ovulation by supplying a constant dose of synthetic estrogen and progesterone (called progestin)—the sexual hormones that rise and fall with each menstrual cycle. Within five years, it had become the most popular form of birth control in the country.

Plenty of women “were happy to have the choice, but they were unhappy that this great new thing came with so many downsides,” said historian Judith Houck, “and that they were told, ‘You should be happy.'”

But as its popularity soared, concerns among patients and doctors grew about troubling complications, from blood clots to strokes and depression. As it turns out, the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the pill had been based on a study of low-income women in Puerto Rico—17 percent of whom reported dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and headaches and three of whom died without further investigation. So strong were the side effects that Dr. Edris Rice-Wray, who oversaw the trial, concluded that while the pill protected against pregnancy, it “causes too many side reactions to be acceptable generally.” Her concerns were dismissed by the male heads of research.

When Congress held a series of hearings about the pill’s potential dangers in 1970, doctors testified about its extreme psychological effects on some of their patients, describing how these women became psychotic or suicidal. One doctor said he was fielding calls from husbands, saying, “Do something about my wife—my God, she’s just turned into a bitch.” No women were invited to speak about their personal experiences, prompting feminist protesters to persistently interrupt the proceedings, calling out questions like, “Why are 10 million women being used as guinea pigs?”

Plenty of women “were happy to have the choice, but they were unhappy that this great new thing came with so many downsides,” said Judith Houck, a historian of women’s health at the University of ­Wisconsin, Madison, “and that they were told, You should be happy.”

The hearings, together with feminist ­organizing, helped push the FDA to require drug manufacturers to include possible side effects in the pill’s packaging. In the following years, drugmakers introduced oral contraceptives with significantly lower doses of hormones and fewer risks. Meanwhile, nonhormonal IUDs, including copper versions, arrived in the ’60s and ’70s, but the disastrous Dalkon Shield—linked to infections, infertility, sepsis, and death—turned Americans away from them for years to come.

Starting in the 1900s, douches containing Lysol were marketed as “feminine hygiene” products to get around laws limiting the sale of contraceptives.

In many ways, that’s how things stayed for the next three decades in the United States. Research into new contraceptives stalled. Pharmaceutical executives concluded that the litigation risks were too high, the products too politically charged. They seemed to assume—correctly—that many women would simply put up with the side effects in exchange for reproductive autonomy. The number of American women on the pill steadily climbed; in 1987, 4 out of 5 women in their mid-30s had used oral contraceptives. By 1990, all but one of the large American pharmaceutical companies that had previously been doing research on new contraceptives had stopped.

“The outlook for new contraceptive development is bleak,” Dr. Luigi Mastroianni, a University of Pennsylvania professor of obstetrics and gynecology, said in 1990. While some Europeans could choose from a variety of implants, injectables, pills, IUDS, and sterilization techniques, “we in the United States make do with the same range of options available 30 years ago.”

That changed in 2000, when the nation’s first hormonal IUD hit the market. The Mirena was a small, T-shaped piece of plastic, inserted into the uterus in a quick outpatient procedure. Like the pill, it offered a steady dose of synthetic hormones—in this case, only progestin. But unlike the pill, patients didn’t have to think about it daily or refill prescriptions. That helped make it far more effective: The rate of unplanned pregnancy in the first year of typical use with a Mirena was 0.2 percent, compared with 9 percent for women on the pill.

Bayer sponsored promotional parties featuring a nurse practitioner passing around a Mirena—the nation’s first hormonal IUD—and a presentation by a fashion stylist.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the field’s leading professional group that issues clinical guidance, soon embraced IUDs. In a 2005 bulletin, ACOG said they “should be considered for all women who seek a reliable, reversible contraceptive that is effective ­before coitus,” adding that side effects were “minimal.” This stamp of approval came despite the fact that the package insert noted that “5 percent or more” of users experienced abdominal pain, back pain, decreased libido, depression, nervousness, or a host of other side effects.

By 2011, ACOG’s guidance was even more effusive, saying that “almost all women are eligible for implants and IUDs.” The logic was simple: IUDs are exceedingly effective at preventing unplanned pregnancy. Doctors often ranked contraceptives in terms of efficacy, with IUDs and other long-acting methods in the top ­category. (ACOG later acknowledged that this approach failed to consider the broader needs and values of the patient, including concerns about side effects.)

After the Mirena, Bayer came out with IUDs with lower doses of progestin, each sounding like a sperm-slaying goddess of war: the Skyla in 2013, the Kyleena in 2016. The company marketed them as a convenient option for busy moms. Bayer sponsored promotional parties featuring a nurse practitioner passing around a Mirena and a presentation by a fashion stylist. “How would you categorize yourself?” the nurse practitioner was coached to ask attendees. “Hot and sexy with a lot of spontaneity or too tired with little time to be intimate?”

In some cases, doctors promoted IUDs with enthusiasm that bordered on overzealousness. In a 2017 study, public health researchers interviewed a dozen primary care providers at clinics in the Bronx. They found that when patients requested to have their IUDs taken out because of side effects, providers often pushed back.

“I never want to have anyone remove their IUD unless they want to have a planned pregnancy and they’re ready for it,” one physician told the researchers. “Every other case, I feel like they should keep it in if they can, obviously.”

Around 2013, epidemiologist Charlotte Wessel Skovlund heard from a friend who’d become depressed after having an IUD inserted. At the time, Skovlund was the data ­manager for Dr. Øjvind Lidegaard, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Copenhagen. For years, Lidegaard had been studying the effects of hormonal contraceptives on rates of heart attacks and stroke. Skovlund approached Lidegaard with a research question: Was it possible, she wondered, that her friend’s IUD and her depression were connected?

Lidegaard was intrigued. The existing research was inconclusive, but over the years, he’d had patients who would return weeks after he’d prescribed hormonal contraceptives, saying their moods had changed and they needed an alternative. “We have always known that some women feel that way,” he told me, “but we have generally considered it to be a little minority of women.”

Teens using progestin-only IUDs were three times more likely than non-users to be diagnosed with depression and to be prescribed antidepressants.

In Denmark, as in several other ­European countries, a national registry tracks residents’ anonymized medical histories, enabling large observational studies. Skovlund, Lidegaard, and a team of scientists decided to embark on a multiyear research project, examining the records of more than a million women between 1995 and 2013.

Their landmark study, published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2016, found that most common hormonal contraceptives were ­associated with higher rates of depression and antidepressant prescriptions—with particularly high rates among those using progestin-­only contraceptives, those who started as teenagers, and those using non-oral contraceptives, like IUDs. At gravest risk were teenagers using progestin-only IUDs like the Mirena, who were three times more likely than non-users to be ­diagnosed with depression and to be prescribed antidepressants.

After the study came out, Lidegaard received “not hundreds, but thousands of emails” from women around the world about their own experiences. One that stuck with him was from an 18-year-old American who had no history of ­mental health problems, but, two days after starting the pill, found herself on the Brooklyn Bridge, about to jump. She was dissuaded by an onlooker. Eventually, she stopped taking the pill at a family ­member’s suggestion and hadn’t experienced depression since. “It’s of course an extreme ­example,” Lidegaard said, “but it illustrates that the sensitivity to these things are so different. For some women, it can be an almost overnight change.”

Lidegaard is quick to note that depression rates among people using hormonal contraceptives, while elevated, are still quite low overall. The Mirena’s package insert today estimates that 6.4 percent of users experience depression as a side effect; similarly, Lidegaard said about 7 percent of women stop using hormonal contraceptives within the first few weeks because of psychological side effects.

On the flip side, contraceptives are used by so many people that a small increase in depression risk can have dramatic impacts. In Denmark, according to Lidegaard’s math, hormonal contraceptives are responsible for more than 1,200 episodes of depression among teenage girls each year.

More studies followed. In 2017, the ­Danish team found that women using hormonal contraceptives—or who even recently used them—were about twice as likely to attempt suicide compared with those who’d never used them. Studies using medical data banks from the United Kingdom found progestin IUDs to be associated with higher rates of anxiety and sleep problems compared with nonhormonal IUDs, and users of oral contraceptives to have higher rates of depression compared with those who’d never taken them.

Critics often note that observational studies should be taken with a grain of salt. It could be that there’s something about the lifestyle of contraceptive users that is ­causing them to be depressed—or to seek medical intervention for depression—rather than the birth control itself. (One scientist joked with Lidegaard that women on contraceptives were probably more depressed because they were more likely to be interacting with men.)

“What maybe the companies would like you to believe is: Oh, it’s just totally local. Nothing is getting out of that uterus,” said Dr. Andrew Novick. “In reality, there is systemic exposure.”

But a 2024 study led by Skovlund suggests that progestin has something to do with it. The researchers looked at the ­depression rates of hormonal IUD users only, separating participants into groups based on which IUDs they used. They found that depression rates were significantly higher among those using contraceptives with the largest dose of progestin. (This is echoed by the package inserts of Bayer’s three IUDs: As the hormonal doses go up—from Skyla to Kyleena to Mirena—so too do the reported depression rates.)

These findings fly in the face of a longtime selling point of IUDs: that they operate locally and therefore their effects should be more confined.

“What maybe the companies would like you to believe is: Oh, it’s just totally local. Nothing is getting out of that uterus,” said Dr. Andrew Novick, a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Anschutz who studies the impact of reproductive hormones on the brain. “In reality, there is systemic exposure.” Women with non-oral birth control may be more susceptible to mood changes than those on the pill because of the differences in the way the hormones are processed—namely, the pill is filtered by the liver, whereas progestin in IUDs and other non-oral contraceptives makes its way directly into the bloodstream. From there, it binds with hormone receptors in cells across the body, including those in the brain. (A recent Bayer training guide instructs healthcare providers to tell patients that “only small amounts of hormone enter your blood,” though a Bayer spokesperson told Mother Jones that the company consistently has noted the systemic hormonal exposure in IUDs’ product information.)

What happens next is still murky, but some studies suggest that hormonal birth control changes the body’s stress response. Those on contraceptives have blunted cortisol responses to individual stressors, but higher cortisol levels overall—an effect similar to what’s seen in individuals under chronic stress, Novick said.

Additional studies have found that women with a history of depression are more likely to experience mood-related side effects. Also at higher risk are women who start contraceptives as teenagers. That’s notable, since nearly a fifth of American teenage girls use hormonal contraception—often for reasons other than pregnancy prevention, like treating acne or heavy periods.

“Children are not small adults,” said Gur, the Ohio State researcher. They have “wildly different central nervous systems, and so it’s not surprising to me, just as a scientist, that they might respond differently.”

Search “birth control” on TikTok, and you’ll see clip after clip of women bemoaning hormonal contraceptives and suggesting natural alternatives. In a video with 1.6 million likes, a “holistic nutritionist” who posts under the handle “beingwellis­hot,” and who, indeed, has perfect skin and doe eyes, suggests that eating papaya seeds can induce your period to avoid pregnancy. Some influencers promote the oil from neem plants as a natural contraceptive. (“Kills sperm in 30 seconds tops,” promises one.) Others suggest seeds from wild carrots: “You might have birth control growing in your backyard!”

Prominent conservatives, from the late Charlie Kirk to podcaster Alex Clark, have suggested that birth control causes fertility problems. “If you want women to be feminine again, and soft again, and beautiful,” Clark said last year in a conversation with anti-abortion internet personality Seth Gruber, “women need to be ovulating.”

The top 100 TikTok videos about reproductive health received nearly 5 billion views in a single month in 2023.

It’s no secret that what’s so pernicious about misinformation is that it’s often nestled among kernels of truth. The claims above lack evidence, but they’re alongside reels about well-documented birth control side effects: women in crop tops showing weight they’ve gained; teary women talking to the camera; women laid up with back pain.

Birth control TikTok is hugely influential; the top 100 videos about reproductive health received nearly 5 billion views in a single month in 2023, and only 10 percent of them came from medical professionals. A KFF survey the following year found that 1 in 7 women between 18 and 25 made a change to their birth control, or considered making a change, based on something they saw on social media.

In an ideal world, one could turn to medical professionals to separate the signal from the noise. And indeed, in 2024, ACOG unveiled a website aimed at combating misinformation about contraceptives. But rather than diving into the nuance, the organization took a different approach.

On the subject of weight gain, ACOG’s site said “there is no causal link” between birth control and weight gain, with the exception of hormonal injections. Claims about changes in mood or libido, meanwhile, were branded “myths” and “misinformation.”

This all struck me as odd, considering that pharmaceutical companies themselves list changes to mood, libido, and weight as possible side effects for many brands of birth control—disclosures feminists fought for back in the ’70s.

When I asked ACOG about the effects of contraceptives on mental health, I was connected with Dr. Rachel Jensen, a ­gynecologist and ACOG fellow focusing on complex family planning. On average, she said, birth control “has not been shown to cause significant mood changes.” If a patient reports a shift in demeanor after starting contraceptives, Jensen makes sure the cause isn’t something “more severe,” like anemia or thyroid disorders. “I’m all for discontinuing [birth control] or taking a break, but I can’t guarantee that that will fix whatever is going on, because the research that we have doesn’t tell us that birth control would necessarily be causing that,” she said.

On social media, influencers warn about the dangers of contraceptives and promote “natural” alternatives, from carrot seeds to papaya.

When I asked why the group lists mood changes from contraceptives as a “myth,” she acknowledged that some IUDs are known to be associated with depression. “I think our goal here is to talk about the aggregate,” she said. “Most people do not experience mood changes based on the studies that we have.”

A few days after our conversation, an ACOG spokesperson emailed to say that our interview had sparked an internal discussion; the group, she said, had decided to remove changes in mood and libido from the list of birth control myths. “As the statement is written, it does not feel patient-­centered or inclusive of experienced symptoms that may not be borne out in the data,” she wrote in mid-November.

The “relentlessly positive framing” of birth control by medical organizations can come off as “medical gaslighting,” says biological anthropologist Kathryn Clancy.

Two months later, the website was indeed updated—but not by much. According to the new language, it was no longer a myth that birth control leads to mood changes; rather, it was a myth that birth control “routinely” causes mood changes. These myths “frighten people away from well-studied, clinically proven, safe, and effective choices that can improve their health and their lives.”

The “relentlessly positive framing” of birth control by medical organizations may come from a desire to protect access to contraceptives, but this “toxic positivity” can come off “as medical gaslighting,” said Kathryn Clancy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois who wrote ­Period: The Real Story of Menstruation. “What I don’t think sometimes these doctors realize is how it reads to a patient who has had a negative experience—which is a very large number of people who’ve been on hormonal contraception,” she told me. When they feel dismissed by mainstream medicine, she said, many flock to the internet for birth control advice. Charlatans on social media are “stepping into a place where there is medical mistrust,” she said, “and until we address those, there will always be people who take advantage and then come up with bananas things.”

So, how should doctors talk with patients? Dr. Aaron Lazorwitz, a gynecologist and pharmacogeneticist at Yale who studies how genetic differences shape patients’ responses to birth control, stresses the importance of transparency. “The biggest thing is being open and honest about what we know and what we don’t know,” he said. “‘Here are the potential side effects you could ­experience. I can’t tell you what you’re going to experience beforehand, unfortunately. We have to closely monitor how you do, and if it’s not going well, I need you to tell me.’ That’s the biggest thing.”

This sounds basic enough, but it’s not particularly common. One survey in 2021 and 2022 found that 83 percent of women said their provider never mentioned the possibility of psychological side effects during contraceptive counseling.

There are signs of change. Lazorwitz said he hears more mentions of mood and contraceptives on social media. Reporters are asking him about it. He likens the issue to pain during IUD insertion—a topic that was rarely discussed by doctors until a surge of complaints about it on social media and in news stories prompted ACOG to release new pain management guidelines last year. The groundswell “really forced providers who weren’t talking about it to start talking about it more,” Lazorwitz said. “I imagine that something like that may be coming up with mood symptoms and birth control as well.”

Vanessa Saba

When I spoke with Dr. Neill Epperson, chair of psychiatry at the University of Colorado Anschutz, I started with my own story. She laughed a knowing laugh.

“Yeah, the good old progesterone IUD,” she said. Then she told a story about a patient who was stable, got an IUD, and came back to her office with suicidal ideation. “And I said to her, ‘You need to take it out,’” Epperson recalled. “‘I know you just put it in, but you need to take it out.’ And within days, it was resolved.”

Some medical disciplines may downplay the mental health effects of contraceptives, but reproductive psychiatry, the emerging subspecialty that Epperson helped pioneer, is the exception. Reproductive psychiatrists focus on how the dramatic hormonal fluctuations across women’s lifespans can affect ­mental health—including mood changes from menstruation, pregnancy, the postpartum period, and menopause. (­Notably, women are about twice as likely to ­experience depression as men.)

Hormonal contraceptives are psychotropic medicines, Epperson said, because they affect your brain. Too often, doctors don’t treat them as such—and don’t even ask patients whether they’re on birth control when asking for lists of medications. “I think that’s wrong,” she said. “I think you’re really ­remiss in your evaluation of that patient.”

We don’t quite know how the menstrual cycle affects mood, a former senior NIH official said, let alone when you add contraceptives to the mix.

Epperson’s interest in the subject was sparked in the early 1990s, when she was one of the only female psychiatry residents in her program at Yale. She was referred a patient who, she was told, had postpartum depression—a condition that Epperson admits she “knew nothing about.” The symptoms didn’t fit Epperson’s limited understanding of the disorder; the patient was having intrusive thoughts of harming her kids and was so distressed that she was spending less time with them. Epperson started wondering whether hormones were having a more complicated impact on patients’ mental health than she’d learned in her training.

Epperson was stepping into a research void. Until the ’90s, reproductive-age women were mostly banned from clinical studies, and until 2016, female animals were routinely left out of preclinical studies—in part because scientists worried that hormonal fluctuations would complicate scientific findings. The result is that scientists know little about the impact of hormonal changes in women. Public funding structures have compounded the research gap. A recent National Academies report found that many women’s health conditions are not prioritized by any of the 27 branches of the National Institutes of Health—leading the authors to call for a new institute dedicated to women’s health.

The basics that remain unknown are myriad: We still don’t know what triggers a pregnant woman’s body to deliver a baby. We’re not entirely sure why hormonal IUDs work. (Bayer says it’s “most likely” by thickening cervical mucus, inhibiting sperm movement, and thinning the uterine lining, but “it is not known exactly how these actions work together to prevent pregnancy.”) When I asked a former senior NIH official about the safety of contraceptives, she told me to back up: We don’t quite know how the menstrual cycle affects mood, she said, let alone when you add contraceptives to the mix. This information gap has ramifications far beyond reproduction. A 2024 ­Nature study, for example, suggests that breast cancer treatment may be more effective during certain parts of the ­menstrual cycle.

Reproductive psychiatry is still a relatively young field, with fewer than 20 fellowship programs across the country. I didn’t know it existed until I started reporting this story, and I’ve since wondered if my life would have been different if I’d talked to someone like ­Epperson years ago. Was it possible that my mood improved because my IUD was removed?

“Yes,” she said. “That is quite, quite possible.”

I had my IUD taken out last summer on something of a lark, after learning from a friend that she uses Natural Cycles, the first app cleared by the FDA to be used as contraception. It works by tracking basal body temperature—in my case, using my Oura ring—to identify fertile periods.

This is, to be clear, far from a full-throated endorsement for using fertility awareness apps. They’re not as effective at preventing pregnancy as hormonal contraceptives—with failure rates between 2 and 23 percent—in part because they rely on the user consistently wearing a temperature-­tracking device, remembering to check their fertility status before sex, and using protection during potentially fertile periods, which happen to be when women’s sex drives are at their peak. They’re also pricey: I paid $499 for my Oura ring, in addition to annual fees for Oura and Natural Cycles.

When I signed up for 28, the Peter Thiel–backed fertility awareness app, it promised me fewer PMS symptoms and a “sexier body” in 90 days.

Despite all this, fertility awareness technology is booming. About 1 in 5 women ages 18 to 25 reported using menstrual tracking methods like Natural Cycles as contraception in 2024. The menstrual health app market, already worth $1.7 billion in 2024, is expected to triple by 2030. The apps appeal to a wide and eclectic range of users, from wellness influencers to MAHA supporters and women who are simply sick of the side effects of other contraceptives.

Chelsea Polis, a principal scientist at the reproductive think tank the Guttmacher Institute, said fertility awareness apps, while not as effective as other options, can be a tool to avoid pregnancy. The problem is, they’re supported by lots of people who want to get rid of the other tools, too, from hormonal contraceptives to abortion.

For some proponents—think free birthers, trad wives, and anti-vaxxers—womanhood means living as “naturally” as possible, rejecting not just hormonal contraceptives, but also other trappings of modern medicine. A period-tracking app backed by Peter Thiel, called 28, recommends cycle-­based health plans and sells an herbal supplement, Toxic Breakup, to help women discontinue hormonal ­contraceptives. The app features close-ups of dewy, bikini-­clad models meditating on the beach. (When I signed up, it promised me fewer PMS symptoms and a “sexier body” in 90 days.) Brittany Hugoboom, the ­conservative influencer who co-created 28, has said, “We wanted users to feel like a fertility goddess.”

Screenshots from 28, the Peter Thiel–backed fertility wellness app.

“There are so many other things that are being stripped away and constricting choice and wellbeing, and this is being thrust forward,” Polis said, “like, ‘Here’s your choice for contraception, this is what you should use.’”

But what she’s hoping for—innovation in contraceptives—is slow-moving at best.

The pharmaceutical industry continues to have little appetite for investing in new forms of birth control. Typically, pharmaceutical companies spend around 20 percent of their sales revenue on the research and development of new products, but for contraceptives, that figure is just 2 percent. There were only about 25 industry-funded clinical trials for new contraceptives between 2017 and 2020—in comparison, there were more than 60 clinical trials for hair thinning.

One big reason for the discrepancy: ­liability. Traditionally, pharmaceutical companies develop drugs to treat a medical condition. But contraceptives aren’t necessarily treating an illness—rather, they’re temporarily stopping the reproductive cycle. “What you’re doing with a contraceptive is suspending a function that is very important to people and trying to guarantee that you will give it back,” said Heather Vahdat, a public health researcher. “If your job is purely risk analysis, that’s crazy cakes.” There’s a pervasive sense, she said, that the products are good enough and women should quit their complaining: “That’s where the misogyny starts to eke in a little bit.”

As public funding has remained stagnant and private investment has fallen, philanthropy has filled the gap. The largest donations have come from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which made up an estimated 44 percent of all contraceptive research and development in 2022—far more than the NIH and three times more than industry. Last year, the foundation announced plans to spend $2.5 billion on women’s health by 2030. About a fifth of that will go toward research into new hormonal and nonhormonal contraceptives, though they’ve estimated that the latter is likely decades away.

And then there’s the Male Contraceptive Initiative, which, as the name suggests, supports innovation in birth control for men. The products furthest along in the clinical trial process include a hormonal gel that men rub on their shoulders and a polymer that is injected into the vas deferens, with an effect similar to a temporary vasectomy. (MCI funds the latter.) Vahdat, who directs the initiative, said the products could be on the market in about five years, though she’s hesitant to make any promises. “They’ve been saying male birth ­control is around the corner for like 50 years, so there’s a lot of exhaustion,” she said.

What if men across the globe took contraceptives that caused some of them to experience bleeding, pelvic pain, back pain, and headaches? And what if some small but meaningful fraction of those men experienced depression?

Research has found that there’s overwhelming interest across the globe in male contraceptives, not just from disgruntled women, but from men, too. Vahdat recalled men whom she’d talked to over the years: the husband in a Delhi slum who said he wished he could take a pill so his wife wouldn’t have to; the Bay Area high schooler who wished he could take something to protect himself from the ramifications of an unintended pregnancy; the man in the Frankfurt airport who, seeing Vahdat’s shirt reading “Male Birth Control Now,” came up and hugged her. 

It’s not a new thought experiment, but a telling one all the same, to imagine what might happen were the gender roles ­reversed. What if men across the globe took contraceptives that caused some of them to experience bleeding, pelvic pain, back pain, and headaches? And what if some small but meaningful fraction of those men experienced depression?

A version of this thought experiment played out in an actual experiment, between 2008 and 2012, during a male contraceptive clinical trial. More than 300 men across the world received hormonal injections every eight weeks. The injections were overwhelmingly effective at preventing pregnancy, and overall, men were satisfied with them—more than 4 out of 5 participants said they’d use the product if it were available. But the injections caused frequent side effects, like acne, muscle pain, increased libido, and emotional changes. Nearly 5 percent of the participants reported mood swings, and nearly 3 percent reported depression. One man attempted suicide. After that, the scientific review panel cut the study short, determining that the risks outweighed the benefits.

This concern over participant side effects draws a sharp contrast to the early birth control studies for women. “I think there’s a case to be made,” Vahdat said, “that I don’t know that female contraception would pass through today’s drug development.”

I’m still surprised by the lightness I’ve felt since my IUD was removed—still half-­convinced that this version of myself is a yearlong aberration rather than my baseline. My period has come back, and with it, PMS: when progesterone is peaking and, I’ve learned, I’m far more likely to feel down and anxious and to wake up wired in the small hours.

I mean this in a purely matter-of-fact way, not a woo-woo, Fertility Goddess–worshipping one: There’s something ­reassuring about getting my period. I like being able to anticipate and understand my moodiness, rather than constantly searching my psyche for an underlying cause. For now, this system works for me, but given the failure rate of fertility awareness tracking, I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it or ­eventually try something else.

Some of the experts I spoke with—women who’ve spent years studying the effects of contraceptives on the brain—were similarly lost when it came to their own birth control use. Without more clinical research to guide them on which contraceptive might suit them best, they had taken to testing the available options on themselves, like reluctant guinea pigs in their own tiny experiments. One postdoctoral research psychologist said she’s tried seven or eight different contraceptives to see how they would affect her. “Because I’m a ­researcher, I’m interested in trying out that kind of thing,” she said. “But, man. That’s a process to go through, right?”

A public health expert who recently switched to an IUD said she’s thrilled that she doesn’t have the bleeding that she had on other forms of contraception, but she’s been worried about her own mood. “The bar is so low,” she said, that she finds herself thinking, “Well, I’m not bleeding out my eyeballs, so this is a great method.”

One epidemiologist told me that she recently came off contraceptives and was shocked at how much better she felt. Now she doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t want to get pregnant, but she also doesn’t want to feel depressed. “I feel so good,” she said, “and I’m terrified of screwing something up.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 8 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump thinks he has a new way to force Republicans to pass voter suppression legislation in time for the midterms. In a late-night tirade, Trump demanded that Republicans pass the so-called SAVE Act by attaching it to a must-pass defense spending bill. This comes as Republicans are getting more nervous about losing the Senate this fall, and some reportedly fear that Trump is setting them up. If they don’t pass the SAVE Act, they fear he’ll blame them for any midterm fiasco that takes place.

We think it’s premature to rule out the possibility of Republicans actually passing this thing. It’s a high-stakes moment that’s passing largely under the radar. So we’re talking to congressional scholar Norm Ornstein, one of our go-to people for decoding the congressional GOP. Norm, nice to see you.

Norm Ornstein: Good to see you too, Greg.

Sargent: So Donald Trump and MAGA are pressuring Republicans to pass the SAVE Act, which is this disgusting piece of voter suppression legislation. It can’t pass the Senate, so Trump is demanding that Republicans end the filibuster to pass it, which they don’t want to do or can’t do.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson is looking for a way to pass something that he can call the SAVE Act to placate all the hardliners allied with Trump. Norm, what exactly is Mike Johnson trying to pass, and what’s he trying to pull off here?

Ornstein: So first let me note, Greg, that John Thune has been as loyal a leader to a president, and certainly to Donald Trump, as anyone could have wished. And now he’s taking all of this abuse. But for Mike Johnson—many of his members, and they’re of course in very real danger of losing the House—they’re talking, and he’s talking to Trump, about using every voter suppression measure possible.

But they really, really, really want this SAVE Act, because so many of the districts that are vulnerable to them are in blue states. Red states are going to do a lot, including a lot that’s already in the SAVE Act. Florida’s talking about passing their own version, Texas and others.

But he needs something, and the SAVE Act includes a whole series of measures that would limit votes, suppress votes, make it difficult for people to vote at a time when Republicans are worried about a surge in voting—requiring that everybody provide proof of citizenship.

And even if you’re registered, you have to go back to the office to re-register with that proof of citizenship, which has to be either a passport or passport card or a birth certificate—but not just any birth certificate. It has to be one that’s embossed, not a copy. And of course, as we know, if you are a woman who got married and changed your name, you have to jump through additional hoops.

Sargent: The SAVE Act, as Trump wants it to pass, would include both the proof of citizenship requirement and also basically an end to mail voting, among a bunch of other stuff as well.

What Mike Johnson seems to be trying to do is put aside the piece that would end mail voting, because Republicans who aren’t crazy actually know that they need mail voting for themselves as well. So Mike Johnson wants to put that aside and pass the proof of citizenship piece, correct?

Ornstein: Exactly so, Greg. And let’s note here that Mike Johnson has a couple of reasons for wanting to do this. He is desperate to get something done. The fact is, many of his own members—and it’s particularly true of Mike Lee in the Senate and a couple of the others—are agitating publicly for this over and over again. There is a fear on the part of Johnson and other House Republicans that if they don’t pass something that has the name “the SAVE Act” attached to it, it will demoralize a portion of their base, who will say, you’re not doing what you need to do. That’s one reason.

The other, as we’ve discussed, is suppressing what they believe will be votes for Democrats. And the proof of citizenship, which is a poll tax, which ought to be unconstitutional and illegal, is the core part of it. But he wants to take out the mail-in voting, not just because it can hurt Republicans a lot—they use mail-in voting plenty—but also because he needs to get something through and then blame the Senate. Because frankly, if Mike Johnson had to choose one house to go over to the Democrats, he of course would rather have it be the Senate.

Sargent: Right. And so Mike Johnson thinks that he can essentially have slightly more of a chance of passing a SAVE Act that doesn’t have the mail voting piece. So in this context, at 12:58 a.m., Trump unleashes a tirade on Truth Social, calling our military “the strongest and the hottest in the world” and so forth—never mind the Iran fiasco, which is ongoing.

Then Trump says this: “When Congress returns, we must pass Reconciliation 3.0. The SAVE America Act, paired with the full funding of our great Department of War, can be passed very quickly, ensuring that the United States of America stays FREE for generations to come.”

Norm, let’s break this up into two pieces. What exactly does Trump want here? It seems that he wants Republicans to attach as much of the SAVE Act as they can to defense funding and pass the entire thing via reconciliation, which would then be able to pass the Senate on a simple majority due to that process, correct?

Ornstein: That’s exactly what he’s trying to do. And he wants to make the defense bill, which normally would be handled separately, as part of a separate appropriations along with a separate authorization, folded into a third reconciliation bill.

They’ve already done two. It’s unprecedented, or close to it, to have a third one. But it’s basically blowing up norms and rules to try and jam this through, even though the rules make it clear that it’s not allowable.

Sargent: Why can’t Republicans end the filibuster? Is it just that they don’t have enough Republican votes to do that?

Ornstein: Look, one part of it is a belief that if they do this first, then Democrats are going to take advantage of it if and when they end up with majorities in the House and Senate and a president, and they will dismantle everything that Republicans have done—not just during the Trump era, but going back to previous Republican presidents.

Sargent: Right. But Norm, if Republicans wanted to end the filibuster, could they do it?

Ornstein: They could with a majority. But there’s another deeper reason why some Republicans don’t want to do this. They know that there are lots of things that would be deadly for them and the country, devastating, that they don’t want to do—crazy radical stuff, stuff that moves us even more towards a police state, stuff that could blow up their own economies and their own workforces.

And they’re able to avoid doing that by saying, we would have voted for it, but we don’t have 60 votes. So the filibuster actually gives a number of them who are not the crazy radical rightists—there are few who are—even if they all vote the same way, who understand that the filibuster gives them protection.

Sargent: Norm, let me underscore that just so people really get it. Republicans know that if the filibuster were done away with, all of a sudden they’d be able to pass whatever Trump and MAGA want with a simple majority in the Senate. And they don’t want that state of affairs, because that would fuck the country and fuck the Republican Party in essence. So keeping the filibuster for them is kind of like a way to crazy-proof themselves against Trump and MAGA, more or less, right?

Ornstein: That’s exactly right.

Sargent: If Mike Johnson were to send some version of the SAVE Act over to the Senate, can they pass it with reconciliation, or would the Senate parliamentarian kick that out?

Ornstein: There is no doubt that every part of the SAVE Act is inadmissible under budget reconciliation rules in the Senate. They have something called the Byrd Rule, which is named for Robert Byrd when he was the Senate leader. And it is basically that the fundamentals of everything in the budget reconciliation bill have to be fiscal. It has to involve spending and/or taxes. And it has to not add to the deficit or debt after a 10-year period. But they’ve always relied on what the parliamentarians said.

However, the way they’ve relaxed their rules in the past is through this kind of maneuver. The parliamentarian rules that this is out of order. Somebody appeals the ruling of the chair. A simple majority can overrule the chair.

And so what would happen here is, the parliamentarian would say, no SAVE Act, no portion of the SAVE Act, not allowable under the rules. Somebody—Tom Cotton, Mike Lee, any of the others—would appeal the ruling of the chair. Fifty Republicans would vote to overrule the chair, and then it would pass.

It would be wrong. It would be illegal under the Senate rules. What would stop it from being signed by the president? Nothing. What would stop it in the courts? There’s no way the courts would intervene.

So they can do this through the back door. But they also know that doing it that way is going to open up the floodgates for all kinds of actions that they would not like. And if they do it this way, then every radical, crazy Freedom Caucus right-wing proposal under the sun, they’re going to jam into reconciliation and use this as a precedent.

Sargent: And then overrule the chair. Well, I just want to move on to another thing. NBC had this really striking report on what’s going on inside the Republican Senate caucus. The report says, “Some Republican strategists worry the party’s chances of holding the Senate are dwindling.”

And the report also suggests Republicans are shocked and baffled that Trump keeps prioritizing the SAVE Act over showing that the party cares about costs, which is voters’ top issue. Republicans think, in short, that this is screwing them—Trump is screwing them, essentially.

One GOP operative says, “Poll after poll shows affordability is the top issue, but his mind is elsewhere.” Norm, you’ve been around a long time. Have you ever seen a GOP Senate caucus quite this angry with a Republican president?

Ornstein: No, I have not seen a Republican caucus in the Senate this angry with one of their own presidents. But let’s also keep in mind, Greg, that that anger, which is expressed for almost all of them privately—occasional exceptions—Thom Tillis talks a good game, and then they vote for what he wants.

Now, they may not do it in this case, because it cuts too close to home. But two things are involved here. They’re pissed because he’s putting pressure on them to do something they don’t want to do, and it’s a distraction, and it undermines their standing at home, because some of their own base voters are going to say these guys are disloyal—because they’re cultist voters. At the same time, they’re right that what people care about is first and foremost their own lives and affordability.

And it’s not just, let me note, that Trump is just talking about the SAVE Act. Look at some of the things he’s said recently. “They make up this word ‘affordability,’ those Democrats. There’s no such thing”—which does not resonate with their own voters, with working-class voters. And he said, we’ve got a war to fight, we can’t fund Medicare or Medicaid or education or housing or any of these other things.

And when they were able to pass a bipartisan housing bill to deal with a key component of affordability, he said, I’m not going to sign it—after promising that he would. The bait and switch. So he’s undermining them at every front. But it’s still a cult, Greg, and we cannot rule out that when he pushes hard, they’ll go along, because they’re afraid.

Sargent: Well, there’s another striking thing in the NBC report. Republicans say they fear Trump is setting them up to take the blame for midterm losses. One GOP senator says Trump “will blame it on us and the fact that we didn’t pass the SAVE Act.”

The senator adds: “He likes to dominate people, and he’s a bully, and he’s fucked things up as fast as he can, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

Norm, that’s amazing stuff. Republicans created this guy every step of the way. He’s fucked them in every which way. His unpopularity is the reason that they’re cratering potentially this fall. And now they’re saying—now all of a sudden they’re angry at him? What do you make of that?

Ornstein: I think there’s frustration. And part of the frustration is that they’ve come to realize that the rash acts that he’s taken—this insane war with Iran and the way it’s playing out, the tariffs in and out and up and down, the inability to deal with major problems facing the country. The fact that—because he’s not just blown up green energy, he’s paying billions of taxpayer money to stop wind projects that are almost completed.

And as a result, we’re likely to have more energy shortages and stoppages during the worst summer weather, that will hurt them as well. There is a growing awareness that this monster that they’ve created is creating problems for them and not just for others.

You know, at the same time, they are unwilling to push back on the horrible things that ICE and the Border Patrol are doing. And what they’re realizing in states, including like Texas, is that the Hispanic votes that went to Republicans in 2024 are leaving them in substantial numbers, because of the policies that Trump is pursuing and their unwillingness to try and put a brake on any of them.

Sargent: A hundred percent. Well, to wrap this up: we’ve got Donald Trump demanding that they pass the SAVE Act, Republicans fearing that his obsession with the SAVE Act and refusal to focus on costs and everything else are putting them at risk. What’s going to happen?

There are several stages here where this could kind of fall apart, on liberals really. Number one, they could just end the filibuster—Republicans could end the filibuster and pass the SAVE Act. Number two, they could try to pass it via reconciliation, and if the parliamentarian throws it out, they could take the steps you outlined to overrule the parliamentarian. So is one of those things going to happen? Are they going to pass the SAVE Act, Norm?

Ornstein: I think there is a 40 percent chance that they will. And the reason, in the end, is—well, two reasons. One is the relentless pressure from Trump and the fear that by failing to do so, their own voters will turn against them. The second is the fear that they could lose the Senate, and they’ll do anything, including long-shot stuff, to make it happen.

Now, there’s one caveat I would offer out there. The Constitution has banned poll taxes. This goes back to the Jim Crow era, where Southern segregationists blocked African American votes—blocked poor people’s votes—by putting a poll tax. You had to pay to vote. And the Constitution says you can’t do that in federal elections. Law says you can’t do it in state and local elections.

Requiring a passport or an embossed birth certificate is a poll tax. It costs $170 to get a passport if you don’t have one. And you have to provide proof of citizenship. Every state has some kind of a fee for an official birth certificate. Many of them are not available. So it’s at least possible that that part of the SAVE Act could be blocked in the courts as unconstitutional—although this Supreme Court, God knows what they would do.

Sargent: Right. And that’s critical, because it looks like the mail piece won’t pass—the banning of vote by mail won’t pass, because Republicans want to keep that. Just to really clarify this: you think there’s a 40 percent chance that Republicans either end the filibuster or overrule the parliamentarian to pass the SAVE Act?

Ornstein: Yeah. And I think it’s far more likely that they would do it by overruling the parliamentarian, so that they could then claim, we didn’t take away the filibuster.

Sargent: Well, if that happens, Norm, all bets are off—but I really just don’t know whether that actually helps them. It could potentially help Democrats more. Norm Ornstein, thanks so much for coming on. That was a really, really great roadmap for us. We really appreciate it.

Ornstein: Always happy to do it with you, Greg.

Last month, the Supreme Court issued a number of landmark opinions involving transgender rights, campaign finance, executive power, and immigration. Those decisions were issued in the traditional way many of us recognize: pages and pages of arguments and citations, with each justice on the record voting yea or nay. But over the last decade, the court—led by Chief Justice John Roberts—has increasingly relied on a fast-track way of making decisions that was once rarely used. It’s known as the shadow docket.

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Few reporters have done more to shine light on the shadow docket than New York Times investigative journalist Jodi Kantor. Along with her colleague Adam Liptak, Kantor recently published a number of previously undisclosed memos detailing the shadow docket’s unprecedented expansion under the Roberts court.

“So many major decisions about presidential power are being made on the shadow docket,” Kantor says. “And the question for the Supreme Court is why they’re doing business in this way and why in a lot of these decisions they are not writing opinions.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Kantor talks to host Al Letson about what’s driving the Roberts court to bypass the traditional ways of issuing decisions and how that’s affecting public trust in the court. Plus, Kantor looks back at her Pulitzer Prize–winning reporting on sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein that helped set off the #metoo movement and argues that obituaries for the movement almost 10 years later are dead wrong.

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

The most important part of any Supreme Court ruling today is the majority opinion, for that is what the law is. The second-most-important part is whatever Justice Clarence Thomas writes separately, for that is what the conservative legal movement would like the law to be.

Thomas has long carved out a reputation for frequent and idiosyncratic opinion writing. He pens more concurring and dissenting opinions than any of his colleagues on the high court. (Chief Justice John Roberts, by comparison, has not written separately in the last two terms.) This year alone, in a wide range of cases, Thomas sketched out a stunningly broad view of executive power—and, simultaneously, a sharply narrowed view of congressional power—that verges on the monarchical.

This can manifest in both historic cases and less closely watched ones. In Monsanto v. Durnell, for example, the court was asked to decide whether a federal law on insecticides could preempt state-level lawsuits against the makers of Roundup. The court’s answer was “yes,” with which Thomas agreed. But he then went further, in a concurring opinion, to “call attention to some of the underlying constitutional infirmities in the [Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide] Act.”

In his view, the law exceeded Congress’s powers under the commerce clause. “This power allows Congress to regulate ‘selling, buying, and bartering’ across state lines,” he wrote, quoting from a concurring opinion that he wrote in 1995. “It does not allow Congress to regulate ‘agriculture’ or ‘manufacturing,’ activities entirely ‘separate’ from ‘commerce.’”

Huh? It is somewhat absurd to treat “agriculture” or “manufacturing” as distinct from “commerce,” as if farmers grow crops and factories make goods for recreation instead of economic reasons. Thomas’s own phrasing of the commerce clause is much narrower than its actual text, which gives the legislature the power to regulate “commerce … among the several states.” Thomas’s interpretation, if adopted by the high court, would demolish most federal statutes that regulate the economy.

In Learning Resources v. Trump, the Supreme Court struck down the “Liberation Day” tariffs imposed by Trump last April. The court concluded that the Cold War–era law invoked by Trump did not allow him to impose tariffs via its permission to “regulate importations.” Some of the court’s conservative members disagreed with this interpretation, including Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh.

Thomas also disagreed with the majority’s holding but, as usual, opted to take it one step further. He argued that Congress could delegate, and had broadly delegated, its power to levy tariffs to the presidency. Thomas claimed that the nondelegation doctrine, which generally forbids one branch of government from ceding its power to another, did not apply here.

“Because the Constitution assigns Congress many powers that do not implicate the nondelegation doctrine, Congress may delegate the exercise of many powers to the President,” Thomas wrote. “Congress has done so repeatedly since the founding, with this Court’s blessing. The power to impose duties on imports can be delegated.”

This seemed to baffle some of Thomas’s usual allies, such as Justice Neil Gorsuch, who has frequently called for a stricter interpretation of the nondelegation doctrine. “It’s a sweeping theory,” he wrote, while disputing Thomas’s argument at length. “One that would require us to reimagine much of our case law addressing Article I’s Vesting Clause. And one that presents difficulties of its own.”

Thomas drew on medieval and early modern English sources to argue that the presidency could, in fact, wield broad powers like those of the British king. “In Great Britain, the King had no unilateral legislative power, but he had much unilateral power over foreign commerce,” the justice argued, quoting from the English jurist Lord Blackstone. “His power over foreign commerce included the power to ‘govern foreign trade,’ and to ‘prohibit any of his subjects from leaving the realm.’”

Gorsuch could barely hide his astonishment at this line of argument. He noted that, to the extent it was relevant, the arc of English history was one of Parliament wrestling away revenue raising from the Crown. More relevantly, he noted, the Boston Tea Party ran counter to Thomas’s thesis. “Are we really to believe that the patriots that night in Boston Harbor considered the whole of the tariff power some kingly prerogative?” Gorsuch asked.

Thomas’s view of executive power went even further in the court’s presidential-removal cases this term. In two separate cases, Trump v. Cook and Trump v. Slaughter, the justices weighed when and how the president could fire Senate-confirmed executive branch officials despite Congress’s protections for for-cause removal.

In Slaughter, the court’s conservative majority held that the president could fire commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission at will, overturning a nearly century-old precedent to the contrary. But in Cook, the court held that Trump could not remove a member of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, even with a pretextual for-cause rationale. Thomas enthusiastically supported the former ruling but dissented at length from the latter.

“Today’s decision is an unprecedented incursion on the executive branch,” Thomas wrote. “Neither the parties nor the court can point to a single time in American history that this court has upheld an injunction against the president’s removal of an executive officer. In the 237-year history of our Constitution, this court has, by all accounts, never done so.”

Roberts, writing for the court in Cook, concluded that the Federal Reserve could maintain its independence because it fit within the historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States, which operated at arms’ length from the federal government of that era. Thomas found the comparison to be ahistorical and argued for absolute presidential control over the nation’s central bank.

“Regardless of whether unaccountable executive officers like Cook would better govern the economy, the Framers rejected such a ‘promised land of technocratic governance,’” Thomas wrote. “They instead chose government by the people. As a court, our duty is not to second-guess that decision, but to uphold it.”

Thomas’s invocation of “the people” here is revealing. The executive and legislative branches are often described as the “elected branches,” in comparison to the life-tenured appointees to the federal bench. But only one of those two branches was elected from the start. The Framers always intended for Americans to choose their own representatives in the House, even if they circumscribed in practice who actually got to cast a vote.

The presidency, on the other hand, is not and has never been directly elected by the American people. The Framers inserted the Electoral College as a buffer between the popular will expressed by American voters and state legislatures and the nation’s executive power. While some states allowed voters to cast ballots for slates of presidential electors, this did not become the norm until after the founding generation had passed out of public life in the 1820s and 1830s.

Congress, on the other hand, was always meant to be the branch that channeled the popular will into law and policy. Part of that “government by the people” is Congress’s decision to create a central bank with a healthy degree of independence from the president’s day-to-day influence. If the American people wished to change course, they could elect representatives to Congress who would change it for them. They have not done so because, broadly speaking, it is good financial policy to not let the president personally set interest rates.

Thomas’s monarchical tendencies are strongest when it comes to immigration and foreign policy. Mullen v. Al Otro Lado involved a challenge by immigrants rights groups to a federal immigration policy that prevented asylum-seekers from applying for asylum at U.S. ports of entry by physically preventing them from stepping foot on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the policy, interpreting the statute’s defining of “arriv[ing] in the United States” to mean literally setting foot on U.S. soil.

Thomas joined the majority opinion but also wrote a concurring opinion where he went even further to criticize the lower court that had initially ruled in favor of the immigrants. “The relief that the district court provided may well have unconstitutionally infringed on the president’s inherent authority to exclude aliens from the country,” Thomas wrote.

Under the high court’s precedents, Congress and the executive branch have absolute discretion to determine which foreign nationals—whether they be immigrants, asylum-seekers, temporary visa holders, or whatnot—can or can’t enter the country. Thomas took this reasoning an additional step to argue that this power actually rests with the executive branch, not with Congress.

Thomas previously argued, in the Muslim travel-ban case during Trump’s first term, that the president “has inherent authority to exclude aliens from the country,” a remarkable theory given that Congress has the explicit Article 1 power to regulate immigration and naturalization. But Thomas disagreed with that approach on two levels.

First, he claimed, the president inherited such a power from the English monarchy. “For example, William Blackstone explained that the King could send alien friends ‘home whenever the king sees occasion,’” he wrote. “And, at the time of ratification, [the] Framers of the Constitution argued that the President would have the same power.”

Second, he argued that Congress’s power over immigration was much narrower than the legal consensus assumed over the past 150 years. “Congress, for its part, has no enumerated power to require the President to bring certain aliens into the country,” he wrote. “The Constitution grants Congress the power to ‘establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization.’ But, the class members in this case are not naturalized or even on the path to naturalization.”

To the extent that this is true, it is because the executive branch literally denied them the ability to request asylum at a U.S. port of entry. But to Thomas, this does not matter. “Any statute that forced the president to allow aliens to cross the border against his will would appear to exceed Congress’s enumerated powers, and a court could not enforce it against the President,” he claimed.

If the court were to adopt this position, it would gut much of federal immigration law. Holding a green card would be pointless if the president, on a whim, could deport you back to the country from which you originally came. Statutory protections for refugees, asylum-seekers, and temporary visa holders would be meaningless. A broad swath of people lawfully present in the United States would suddenly find themselves at the president’s personal mercy, even if Congress wished to protect them.

Thomas’s concurring and dissenting opinions, by nature, are not law. They can nevertheless prove to be highly influential in conservative legal circles. Lower court judges routinely cite them when challenging or disputing Supreme Court precedents. Some of those judges can be former Thomas clerks themselves: The Trump administration has drawn heavily from his acolytes to staff the federal bench. While Thomas’s opinions are rarely the law today, they can be a telling indicator of the world in which the conservative legal movement hopes to one day make us live.

You can sort of tell the White House’s Domestic Policy Council knew it had a dud when it released its condemnation of the National Museum of American History over a holiday weekend. “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage” is a failure even when judged against the standards of the genre. It lacks the bitchy grandeur of a Joseph Epstein hit piece and the wacky verve of a Donald Wildmon sermon. More fundamentally, the report doesn’t have the goods. It’s the fruit of a “monthslong investigation,” according to the executive summary, but like much of President Donald Trump’s commemoration of the nation’s semiquincentennial—the blue sealant peeling from the $15 million renovation of the Reflecting Pool, that hunk of the Freedom 250 stage that fell and nearly killed rehearsing dancers on the National Mall—it’s a work of shoddy craftsmanship. 

Happily for the report’s authors, it was nearly impossible in the immediate aftermath of the report’s release to check its findings against the reality of the museum itself. It took me nearly an hour after I got off the subway on July 6 to get inside the building because Trump’s Great American State Fair, it turns out, runs through July 10. Not that many people were making their way into it, but the Mall itself was surrounded by fencing and Army trucks—this state fair looks more like an internment camp—and National Guard personnel patrolling the perimeter gave contradictory information about how to get around it. 

When finally I staggered into the National Museum of American History, I remembered my mixed feelings about the place. These objections have nothing to do with any evangelical leftism that the White House claims to have found there. Rather, I can’t square the museum’s mishmash of genuinely stirring artifacts (the Star-Spangled Banner, Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat, the short-handled hoe that wrecked the backs of generations of California farmworkers until Cesar Chavez got it banned) with its pop-culture kitsch (Judy Garland’s ruby slippers, R2DT from Star Wars). The latter items really belong in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles or the Paley Center for Media in New York (though let’s keep Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet). Plus there’s all those terminally boring First Lady gowns. For as long as I can remember, NMAH has been over-anxiousness to please the masses. The masses are not pleased by lefty virtue-signaling, so you won’t find much there.

Reading the White House report, one realizes as early as Page 2 that the authors’ evidence-gathering will fall short. The sentence announcing this is: “One of the most significant findings in this report concerns what is missing.” No self-respecting polemicist ever begins this way; you save the null-set argument for last, after you’ve flattened your opposition with devastating particulars. In this philippic, though, “what’s missing” is the very first item listed under the heading, “Key Findings.”  You can practically hear Domestic Policy Council director Vince Haley—a former speechwriter to Newt Gingrich—shout from his rostrum, “I got nothing.”

What exactly “is missing” from the National Museum of American History? The Founding Fathers! The report explains:

[A] visitor to the Museum today will find no major exhibit dedicated to America’s Founding era, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, other Founding Fathers, the Continental Congress, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or major moments of the American Revolution, such as Washington’s crossing of the Delaware.

I’m going to spend the rest of this essay demonstrating how very untrue that is. 

As we enter NMAH the very first thing to catch our eye is a monumental Horatio Greenough statue of a bare-chested and toga-clad George Washington. The work’s homoeroticism embarrassed many people at its unveiling at the U.S. Capitol in 1841 (Charles Bullfinch: “I fear this statue will only give the idea of entering or leaving a bath”), prompting its eventual removal to the Smithsonian. But Haley and his coauthors know that a bathhouse-dwelling George Washington can’t be blamed on today’s LGBTQ lobby, so they leave Greenough alone.  

Instead, the White House gripes about a “didactic” (i.e., a text panel accompanying an artwork; I thought Haley was being snide but that’s what museums actually call these) describing a frieze on Washington’s chair that shows Hercules battling a snake. This symbolizes, the didactic says, “the perceived courage of the American people.” If you can’t see what’s wrong with that phrasing, congratulate yourself for being sane. The offending word is “perceived.” Such distancing, the report complains, “refuses to affirm the exceptional courage of the American people.”

Are the American people courageous? Some are, certainly. But to me, the great revelation over the past 18 months has been discovering how many of our leaders are not.

When the first thing you see on entering the National Museum of American History is a gigantic half-naked George Washington, in what sense does that give short shrift to the Founders? Well, Haley might reply, a statue is not a “major exhibit.” So let’s step around our first president and enter “American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith,” an exhibit on permanent display since 2017. “More than just waging a war of independence, American revolutionaries took a great leap of faith,” reads a wall text, “and established a new government based on the sovereignty of the people. It was truly a radical idea that entrusted the power of the nation not in a monarchy but in its citizens. Each generation since continues to question how to form ‘a more perfect union’ around this radical idea.”

Inside the exhibit, what I first notice is an original copy of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Okay, Paine’s not the right’s favorite Founder (too left), but they like Thomas Jefferson, right? Here’s a handsome reproduction of Jefferson’s portable desk (the real one is on loan to the Smithsonian Castle, across the once-traversable National Mall), which (of course) Jefferson designed himself. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence on that desk. And here’s a print of the Declaration of Independence made from a copper-plate facsimile commissioned in 1823 by John Quincy Adams, when he was secretary of state. And here’s the document box that George Washington used at the Constitutional Convention, which may be the single most exciting object in NMAH’s collection. Incidentally, I see here no didactics that tattle on Washington for being an enslaver (though probably there’s one someplace around here because—sorry Parson Weems—he was). What I see instead is the following, which I quote in its entirety:

“Father of His Country”

Admired in his time for courage, integrity, and leadership, George Washington became an icon after his death—a man to be emulated and venerated in monuments, celebrations, and epic stories, both real and myth. While Washington can seem a distant figure to 21st-century Americans, and modern scholarship focuses on the fallible man rather than the marble hero, his image is still used for inspiration, patriotism, and commercial gain. Now joined by modern heroic figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., George Washington continues to hold a place for many as a symbolic “father” of the country.

Note that we see here no hedging on Washington’s courage (unlike that of the American people, it’s indisputable). I’m not crazy about the word “icon” (more here), and I suppose Haley might work up a head of steam over putting the word father inside quotation marks, but that’s too weak a complaint even for the White House report. Another didactic similarly omits Washington’s slaveholding and says he “spent his life in service to the nation.” Not perceived service to the nation. Service to the nation.

Continental Congress? Check. Pilgrims? Check. Puritans? Check. Revolutionary War? Check. I didn’t see anything about Washington crossing the Delaware, but it’s possible I missed it (and anyway, who gives a shit; if you want to see the Emanuel Leutze painting visit the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art). 

I did glimpse the gunboat Philadelphia, “part of a small fleet that against all odds stalled a British invasion intent on ending the American Revolution,” per the didactic. “Today conservators are preserving this iconic vessel, stabilizing its timbers and iron fittings. And historians are making new discoveries about the people who built it and fought aboard it.” 

Hooray. Let’s hope White House budget chief Russell Vought doesn’t cut their funding.