Mother Jones

Voters are heading to the polls for this year’s midterms, but the electoral maps are shifting under their feet in real time. Last month, the Supreme Court narrowed a provision in the Voting Rights Act that allowed states to consider race when redrawing maps. That decision set off a mad scramble by GOP state legislatures to alter their maps ahead of November’s elections, a move that could disenfranchise Black voters. It’s also supercharged a redistricting fight that began when President Donald Trump urged states to change their maps to mitigate possible losses in Congress.

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Mother Jones national correspondent Tim Murphy describes the redistricting happening in Southern states as “a historic reversal of what the Voting Rights Act brought” and could lead to “homogenous white delegations to the South.”

Until recently, Democrats felt optimistic about their chances of taking back not only the House, but possibly the Senate. But they were dealt a major blow last week when their own redistricting efforts in Virginia were struck down by the state Supreme Court. Similarly, the US Supreme Court paved the way earlier this week for Alabama to revert to an electoral map with a single majority-Black district.

On this week’s More To The Story, Murphy and host Al Letson try to make sense of this unprecedented midterm season, gauge the Democrats’ chances of taking back Congress, and examine how Trump’s threats to the electoral system could play out in November.

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

Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense dream might seem like something out of science fiction, but it would cost real dollars, the Congressional Budget Office says—about $1.2 trillion over the next 20 years, according to a report the federal agency released today.

Trump has held the idea dear since his 2024 campaign, when he made  “A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY” to “PREVENT WORLD WAR III” one of his 20 core campaign promises. Later, he rebranded it as the “Golden Dome,” and about a dozen major American weapons manufacturers (and over 2,300 smaller companies) started to compete for the privilege of building a massive interceptor-missile system in the skies over the United States.

As I reported in 2024 and again in 2025, scientists have a lot of questions about how this will work. It would nominally be modeled after Israel’s Iron Dome system, which is designed to protect a very small geographic area (something the US does not have) from improvised missiles launched from within 40 miles (which is also not happening here).

Given those constraints, the administration quickly moved to include satellite-based missile interceptors on their vision board. Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein admitted to the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee in April that this Star Wars–esque setup might not be cost-effective, either.

Trump estimated last May that his Golden Dome would cost around $175 billion and be deployable by the end of his term in 2029. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, however, says that estimate was off by approximately one trillion, seventy-four billion dollars.

Even at that staggering cost—almost the entire proposed Pentagon budget this year—the system still wouldn’t block all missiles, the CBO wrote in their report. “The system could be overwhelmed by a full-scale attack mounted by a peer or near-peer adversary,” they said.

“It would not be an impenetrable shield or be able to fully counter a large attack of the sort that Russia or China might be able to launch,” the CBO wrote. “As a result, the strategic consequences of deploying an NMD system with the capacity considered here are unclear.”

Even if the Golden Dome never intercepts a single missile, companies like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Anduril are likely to profit: they’re among 12 companies that have already been awarded $3.2 billion in Golden Dome contracts.

President Donald Trump’s Food and Drug Administration commissioner Marty Makary resigned on Tuesday following political battles over health policy that angered anti-abortion activists and industry executives. 

Makary, who led the agency in charge of promoting public health through regulating food safety, medications, tobacco, vaccines, and more, stepped down after Trump pushed him to approve fruit-flavored vapes earlier this month. According to the Wall Street Journal, advisers told the president that flavored vaping was important to young MAGA voters. Makary resisted the idea, but last Friday, the FDA adopted a new policy that opens the door for tobacco and vape companies to sell the e-cigarettes anyway.

Makary also faced criticism from anti-abortion groups who demanded the FDA reverse their approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, which is used in most abortions, to be given out without requiring an in-person visit. A federal court ordered a nationwide in-person requirement earlier this month, and the Supreme Court is still reviewing the decision. Last week, it temporarily reinstated mifepristone access through telemedicine and mail.

This latest resignation opens up another hole in the Trump administration, which has not yet appointed a permanent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director and a surgeon general to Robert F. Kennedy’s health department. Trump has also axed other key officeholders for failing to do his bidding, like former attorney general Pam Bondi and former Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem.

Trump confirmed Makary’s exit on Tuesday afternoon ahead of his trip to China to speak with President Xi Jinping. “He was having some difficulty. He’s a great doctor. He’s going to go on and do well,” Trump told reporters. “Everybody wants that job.” 

Makary was perhaps an attractive FDA commissioner candidate to Trump due in part to his anti-abortion views and promise to quickly transform policy. As Julianne McShane wrote for Mother Jones when Makary was confirmed last March, the FDA commissioner has spread misinformation, including telling ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson that fetuses feel pain in utero several weeks before science indicates.

This was not enough for Trump and his far right supporters. 

Kyle Diamantas, a deputy commissioner within the FDA, will become the acting head of the federal agency, according to Politico, which first reported Makary’s resignation. Whether Diamantas—or whoever is confirmed next—follows the Trump administration’s lead remains to be seen.

By all accounts, President Donald Trump really, really did not want abortion to become a major issue this election year. But here we are, six months before the midterms, and abortion pills are back at the Supreme Court, as the state of Louisiana and abortion drug manufacturers ask to fast-track oral arguments in what is shaping up to be a blockbuster case. Conservatives are invoking the Comstock Act. And Trump’s Food and Drug Administration has been AWOL, while its top official has been forced to resign.

The swift escalation of the showdown between Louisiana and the FDA over telemedicine abortion highlights just how little control Trump has over the abortion issue—both in terms of the timeline and the outcome. Meanwhile, the case is sparking confusion, uncertainty, and dread among patients, providers, and advocates across the US.

Just to recap how we got to this point. On May 1, the right-wing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, siding with Louisiana, issued a nationwide order suspending FDA rules that allow the abortion drug mifepristone to be prescribed via telehealth and dispensed through the mail. A few days later, Justice Samuel Alito temporarily paused the order, and on Monday, he extended his stay until May 14.

The decision to take a few more days suggests that the full court is struggling to figure out its next steps in a case that could upend abortion access throughout the US—and possibly much sooner than many SCOTUS-watchers had thought likely.

All last week, justices were blasted with amicus briefs from parties with keen and conflicting interests in the outcome. Former FDA officials warned about the dire consequences of allowing states to upend drug regulations put in place years or even decades ago. Doctors and reproductive health advocates pointed to the mass of research from around the world showing that abortion pills are safe and effective, including via telemedicine.

“There’s a really long list of briefs, but nothing from the federal government. And in a case challenging the FDA’s authority, that’s remarkable.”

Conservatives, meanwhile, repeatedly brought up the Comstock Act, a 150-year-old anti-obscenity statute that hasn’t been enforced for decades. Named for the 19th-century anti-vice crusader who championed it, Comstock made it a federal crime to mail or ship “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion.” Reviving the law could end legal access to most abortions nationwide and possibly threaten other reproductive health care, such as IUDs. 

In its own brief to SCOTUS, Louisiana offered an audacious option: If justices don’t allow the Fifth Circuit suspension of mail-order mifepristone to take effect, they should put the case on the 2025-2026 docket and schedule oral arguments ASAP, so that a final decision could be made as soon as the end of June or the first days of July. Drug makers GenBioPro and Danco Laboratories also suggested the court should consider taking the full case on an expedited schedule. The current term already includes such hugely consequential issues such as birthright citizenship and Temporary Protected Status for asylum seekers.

The one interested party that did not weigh in was the one Louisiana sued in the first place: the FDA. Even though the Fifth Circuit’s order was directed at the federal drug agency, GenBioPro and Danco filed the emergency appeals asking the Supreme Court to pause the order.

As of Tuesday, the FDA remained radio silent. “There’s a really long list of briefs, but nothing from the federal government on this,” says Naomi Cahn, a law professor at the University of Virginia. “And in a case that’s challenging the agency’s authority, that’s remarkable.”

Abortion historian Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, sees the FDA’s failure to speak up as yet more evidence that the Trump administration has backed itself into a very uncomfortable corner, caught between voters who overwhelmingly support reproductive rights and abortion opponents who are furious the president hasn’t worked harder on their behalf. “It’s clear,” she says, “that the Trump administration still doesn’t know what to do about this issue politically.”

The anti-abortion movement expected that when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, abortions would plummet across much of the US. The opposite has happened: In the four years since the Dobbs decision, the number of abortions has risen nationwide, including in states where abortion is almost entirely banned.

As abortion opponents have strategized to stop the flow of pills, they have focused much of their energy on attacking Obama- and Biden-era FDA rule changes for mifepristone, one of two drugs that make up the gold-standard abortion-pill regimen. Approved by the FDA in 2000, mifepristone was subject to extremely strict rules and placed in a program—known as Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS—normally reserved for the most dangerous drugs. Starting in 2016, some of those rules were relaxed, including a requirement for in-person prescribing and dispensing that was finalized in 2023. Now, almost two-thirds of abortions in the US happen with abortion pills, and nearly 30 percent occur by telemedicine.

The first sweeping assault on the FDA rules, in a 2022 case that also originated in the Fifth Circuit, ended when the Supreme Court ultimately held that the plaintiffs—anti-abortion doctors and medical organizations—didn’t have standing to sue. But the justices made no determination on the underlying issue—the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone—and left the door open to other plaintiffs who might have standing.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill tried her luck with a narrower lawsuit last fall, arguing that the Biden administration’s decision to permanently ditch the in-person dispensing requirement was “arbitrary,” “capricious,” and “avowedly political.” It was not based on sound science, she argued, but on the Democrats’ determination to thwart the effects of the Dobbs decision that handed abortion policy to the states. Murrill claimed that the telemedicine rule interfered with Louisiana’s right to regulate abortion as it sees fit, while making it too easy for women to be tricked or coerced into having abortions they don’t want.

The FDA responded, not by defending the 2023 rules, but by pointing to its own ongoing review of mifepristone’s safety, which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and then-FDA commissioner Marty Makary announced last fall. At the time, Kennedy and Makary cited the Biden administration’s purported “lack of adequate consideration” before making the 2023 rules change; they also cited “recent safety concerns”—such as supposedly high rates of abortion pill complications—raised by the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center in a dubious study that has been widely debunked as junk science. In its court filings, the FDA argued that Louisiana’s lawsuit threatened to “short-circuit the agency’s orderly review” and should be put on hold. It also argued that Louisiana didn’t have standing to sue.

But the FDA study has been widely seen as a delaying tactic by a president reluctant to take a stand on abortion that might alienate voters. Trump has blamed many of his past political setbacks on abortion, and in his second term has avoided sweeping actions that would put the issue on the political front burner. For example, in defiance of the hopes of many conservatives, his Justice Department has declined to enforce the Comstock Act. His failure to take meaningful action to stop the flow of pills in the US has infuriated anti-abortion leaders. “Trump is the problem,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the influential president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Wall Street Journal last week. “The president is the problem.”

“They’ve been under a lot of pressure—threading this needle of defending the agency’s past actions [on mifepristone], while a lot of people within the Republican Party are upset about them.”

In the Louisiana case, the anti-abortion ideologues on the Fifth Circuit did what Trump officials have not. Using the FDA’s sham mifepristone review, and citing the statements by Kennedy and Makary about the Biden FDA’s “lack of adequate consideration,” they have set up the circumstances to potentially gut access to abortion pills. “You have the FDA conceding that there’s a question about whether they did this properly [on mifepristone],” says Sonia Suter, a law professor at George Washington University. “That only heightens the Fifth Circuit’s belief that the FDA had no authority to [get rid of the in-person dispensing rule] in the first place.” 

The FDA’s silence at the Supreme Court may well be construed to further bolster Louisiana’s case, Ziegler says. The state is arguing that the FDA’s actions—or lack thereof—show that the agency agrees that the 2023 rules change was problematic. “The court could easily use the FDA’s silence the way Louisiana is using it.”

But Makary’s resignation, or perhaps firing, on Tuesday—which abortion opponents and others have been pushing for some time—also highlights the agency’s wider “disarray,” says Drexel University law professor David Cohen. “They’ve been under a lot of pressure—threading this needle of defending the agency’s past actions [on mifepristone], while a lot of people within the Republican Party are upset about them.” Given the politics and the chaos, he says, “I wasn’t surprised they didn’t file anything.”

The central question raised by Alito’s extension of his stay against the Fifth Circuit is, why? “The court seems to be really struggling,” Suter says, “not so much with the legal questions, but with how what they do is going to affect the integrity of the court.” Battered by reporting about the court’s shadow docket, she says, justices “may be worried about looking like they’re rushing too much” to resolve the kinds of hugely consequential issues that the FDA case raises—not just about abortion, but also about the rights of states to second-guess federal drug regulation.

Yet Louisiana and mifepristone manufacturers have all indicated that they want SCOTUS to take the case on its merits, perhaps on an expedited schedule during the current term. “Basically, they’ve said, We know what the district court is going to ultimately rule,” Suter says. “We know what the Fifth Circuit is going to ultimately rule…Why wait?”

If the Supreme Court does take the case, conservative groups have made clear they plan to use the opportunity to push the justices on the Comstock Act. At least two justices—Alito and Clarence Thomas—have signaled they think the long-defunct statute remains the law of the land.

In one amicus brief filed last week, more than 100 Republican members of Congress accused the Biden-era FDA of flouting Comstock when it ended the in-person dispensing requirement. “The FDA cannot purport to authorize conduct criminalized under federal law,” the brief contends. “[T]hat would exceed its constitutional authority.”

The far-right nonprofit Advancing American Freedom, writing for dozens of other groups, argues that by failing to comply with Comstock, “the FDA has directly harmed Louisiana and undermined the exercise of its authority to prohibit abortion drugs.” 

Louisiana made similar arguments when it first sued the FDA last fall. But generally, Comstock has remained very much a background issue. The conservative briefs are aimed at “injecting” it back into the case, says Amanda Barrow, senior staff attorney at the UCLA Law Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. “It’s just an extremely anti-democratic argument,” she says. Reviving Comstock would give abortion opponents “a no-exceptions nationwide abortion ban that they could never convince modern voters to enact.”

The Trump administration has sent subpoenas to dozens of hospitals across the nation over the past year, demanding access to information about children receiving gender-affirming care and the doctors treating them.

Those efforts have mostly failed. At least eight separate Trump administration administrative subpoenas, which would force hospitals to release trans kids’ medical records, have been thrown out. Another massive slate of DOJ subpoenas against California hospitals was dropped in January.

Now, the US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas is trying a new tactic: Its prosecutors sent out a grand jury subpoena to NYU Langone Hospital seeking confidential information about patients under age 18, according to a statement released by the hospital May 11. As S. Baum of the newsletter Erin In The Morning wrote, this means the federal government is pursuing a criminal case:

[T]his is a dire escalation…this round of subpoenas entails a criminal case, meaning providers or hospital officials face risk of arrest and jail time. It does not appear to target parents of trans kids or trans patients. News of the subpoena also means the federal government has assembled a grand jury, an important step towards criminal proceedings.

“We understand that these developments may be concerning to our patients, providers, and others,” the hospital told its patients. “Please know that NYU Langone takes the privacy of your protected health information very seriously and we are evaluating our response to the subpoena.”

Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, called the subpoena “a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate medical providers based on the this administration’s ideological opposition to transgender people and to this healthcare.”

Since prior attempts to pressure hospitals into handing over patient information have been unsuccessful, Minter said, the Department of Justice is now trying to get that same information by pursuing federal criminal charges. And by doing so in Texas, he added, they’re attempting “to find a jurisdiction that would would likely be sympathetic to the administration’s goals.”

“It’s just an egregious abuse of federal power,” Minter said. “This is mafia-type behavior.”

This isn’t the first time NYU Langone has been targeted for its work with transgender patients. It’s the latest in a long back-and-forth between the hospital, its patients, and various government bodies. January 2025, the hospital stopped accepting new patients into its Transgender Youth Health Program following a Trump executive order which attempted to prohibit federally funded hospitals from providing gender-affirming care to minors. They were met with protests at the time. Then, just over a year later, the hospital announced it was ending that program altogether “due to the current regulatory environment,” and were met with more protests from trans kids and their families, many of whom scrambled to find care elsewhere.

In early March, New York Attorney General Letitia James ordered the hospital to resume care. On March 18, then-Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche sent a letter to James demanding that the hospital not reinstate trans youth care. Meanwhile, trans community advocates in New York have pressed the hospital, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, to do more to protect gender-affirming care for all New Yorkers.

In New York, patients and doctors are theoretically protected by a state-level “Shield Law,” which is designed to protect those seeking or providing gender-affirming or abortion-related healthcare from out-of-state retaliation. “New York has strong protections in place to protect the privacy of patient records,” a spokesperson for the New York Attorney General’s office told Mother Jones. “Every health care institution in New York should seek to protect both patients and providers.” New York’s shield law applies to criminal investigations, not just civil ones; many other state-level shield laws do not.

And there is little case law indicating how such protective legislation would hold up in the face of federal investigations—and this particular investigation is coming from a court with a track record of repeatedly ruling that trans people are not protected by federal anti-discrimination law. “This could turn out to be a very important battleground,” Minter said.  

More than 40 hospitals nationwide have terminated some form of gender-affirming care since Trump took office.

In a stunning act of political partisanship, the Roberts Court on Monday night discarded its own precedents to green-light a last-ditch effort by Alabama to use a gerrymandered congressional map for the 2026 midterms. The move, which comes less than two weeks after the court destroyed the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, will reduce Black representation.

Monday’s 6-3 order, divided along partisan lines, shows how Republican-controlled states can use the high court’s April 29 Callais decision as carte-blanche to shut Black representatives out of Congress. In Alabama’s case, precedent, court doctrine, and a damning lower-court ruling stood in the way of the state throwing out its current map containing two majority-Black congressional districts represented by Democrats. Monday night’s decision of the Republican-appointed justices to toss all that aside shows how the court has not only unleashed a new wave of racial and partisan gerrymandering, but is sweeping away any obstacles so that Republicans nab as many seats as possible this November—enough to potentially prevent Democrats from retaking the House.

“There’s something bizarre going on with the court making choices that seem to very heavily benefit one party.”

Since the 2020 census, the Republican-controlled Alabama legislature has been pushing for a map that would give Black voters, who comprise 27 percent of the state’s population, the ability to elect their candidate of choice in just one of the state’s seven congressional districts. But after Callais, Republican leaders of the state legislature have gone further and vowed to eliminate both of the state’s majority-Black districts, which would mean that the state that gave rise to the civil rights movement and was the home of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Rides, the Birmingham church bombing, and Bloody Sunday in Selma would have no Black representation in Congress. The court’s Monday intervention puts the 6-1 map into effect, but leaves open the door for the legislature to attempt a 7-0 map, if not in time for this year’s elections, then in plenty of time for 2028.

Just last week, Chief Justice John Roberts gave a speech where he insisted the justices were not “political actors,” but the court’s last-minute intervention in favor of Alabama violates every norm the court claims to follow. “The rank disrespect of the Chief Justice coming out and warning people that they shouldn’t assume that the court is partisan tests basic credulity,” says Kareem Crayton, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “I don’t think you have to have a law degree to recognize that there’s something bizarre going on with the court making choices that seem to very heavily benefit one party.”

Part of what makes Monday’s order effectively instituting Alabama’s preferred map so brazen is that the court had already rejected it—twice. Just three years ago, the court tossed an Alabama map with one Black majority district in Allen v. Milligan, ordering Alabama to create a second majority-Black district. It then reaffirmed Allen in the run-up to the 2024 election when Alabama Republicans attempted to evade the court’s order. After the Supreme Court’s intervention, a three-judge panel sitting in a federal court in Alabama found in 2025 that the state’s new map not only violated the Voting Rights Act, but was also shaped by intentional racial discrimination, which violates the Constitution.

In last month’s Callais decision, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the court had “not overruled” Allen, even though it had clearly sapped the decision of any meaning. For example, in Allen, the court affirmed its long-held methodology for evaluating vote dilution claims under the VRA, as well as Congress’ power under the 15th Amendment to prohibit discriminatory effects in redistricting. Callais discarded both of those promises. But overturning a decision with still-fresh ink on a highly political issue reeks of partisanship, so Alito crafted his opinion to give the majority plausible deniability that its sweeping ruling was anything but a mere tweak to current law.

Monday’s order puts the lie to Alito’s claim that Callais is a mere “update” that left Allen undisturbed. “Callais also insisted that this Court’s prior decision in Allen remains good law,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent to Monday’s order. “These cases are, of course, Allen. So if Allen is good law anywhere, then it must be good law here.”

But Allen wasn’t the only decision the majority discarded Monday night. Just as galling, the order discarded that three-judge panel decision finding that Alabama had engaged in intentional racial discrimination when it refused to create a second majority-Black district in 2023. Instead of drawing a new majority-Black district following the Supreme Court’s Milligan ruling, the state legislature drew a seat that was only 40 percent Black and would have been easily carried by Trump. “We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature—faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a remedial plan that provides an additional opportunity district—responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district,” the court wrote.

Alito’s opinion in Callais claimed that the Voting Rights Act and 15th Amendment still prohibit intentional discrimination in voting—in fact, Callais is silent on the type of 14th Amendment constitutional violation that the district court found in Alabama. Undeterred, the majority threw out the district court’s meticulous, 268-page opinion that had found deliberate discrimination against Black voters in Monday’s one-paragraph order without any basis for doing so in Callais.

“The worst version of naked partisanship.”

“Nothing in the District Court’s Fourteenth Amendment analysis is affected by this Court’s opinion in Callais,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “It said not a word about the standard for Fourteenth Amendment intentional-discrimination claims like the one that the District Court decided.”

“This is a pretty disrespectful end to a long case that produced a lot of evidence showing Alabama’s commitment not to abide by the terms of the Voting Rights Act,” Crayton said.

The use of Callais to wipe out a ruling on something Callais did not touch is particularly egregious. “There may be serious arguments for the Supreme Court to revisit the Alabama trial court’s decision as a normal appeal, via the regular appellate process,” Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Law School, wrote to Mother Jones shortly before the court released its Alabama order. “But an emergency order here with a drive-by ruling on an argument that wasn’t at issue in Callais would be the worst version of naked partisanship.” That’s exactly what happened.

As Levitt pointed out, the court’s method for tossing the finding of intentional discrimination—a single, unreasoned paragraph on the court’s emergency docket—is a middle finger to the hard work of the district court. It’s just one of many such recent examples, where the court majority weaponizes the oft-called shadow docket to vacate lower-court findings it dislikes. “Factual findings like discriminatory intent are reviewed for clear error, meaning that if a district court’s factual determination is ‘plausible’ in light of the full record,’ then that determination ‘must govern,'” Sotomayor reminded her colleagues Monday. But that was just another rule her colleagues threw aside.

It may seem like the GOP’s post-Callais push for districts is coming rather late in the year. Indeed, in Monday night’s decision unleashing Alabama Republicans, the court’s GOP appointees didn’t just wantonly discard precedent in Allen and Callais. There is also the so-called “Purcell principle,” which the justices have often invoked to urge lower courts not to intervene in voting-related disputes in the middle of an election season for fear of causing voter confusion. In December, the Supreme Court reinstated a Texas gerrymander that a lower court found had discriminated against Black and Hispanic voters. They argued that it was too close to the election to stop it, even though the lower court decision was issued when the primary was 15 weeks away.

But on Monday they sided with Alabama just one week before the state’s primary, after mail voting had already begun. That’s the second time in recent days that the court has violated this norm to help Republicans. In Callais, they struck down the creation of a second-majority Black district in Louisiana just three weeks before the state’s primary, when mail voting was already underway, and 42,000 voters had cast ballots. Moreover, instead of waiting roughly thirty days to certify its decision, as is standard practice, the Court put Callais into effect immediately, which gave a green-light to Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s effort to suspend the state’s House primary to give the legislature time to eliminate one or both of the state’s majority-Black districts.

The Callais decision has triggered a frantic rush by Southern states to undo decades of progress for Black voters and could ultimately lead to the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction. In a matter of days last week, Tennessee eliminated its lone majority-Black district. Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi are set to follow suit.

Republicans have regained a sizable advantage in the gerrymandering war started by Trump because of the Supreme Court’s decision to release the Callais opinion in the heat of the midterms. It’s clear that the court’s conservative justices have not had any second thoughts about what they’ve unleashed. The Republican appointees may claim to be apolitical, but they keep putting their foot on the gas to accelerate their party’s advantage, destroying whatever credibility the court still maintained in the process.

A new CNN poll on Tuesday found that 70 percent of Americans disapprove of how President Donald Trump is handling the economy.

Notably, Trump never reached a 50 percent disapproval rate over the economy during the entire duration of his first term, according to CNN. The Tuesday poll found that 77 percent of respondents—including a majority of Republicans—said that the president’s policies have increased the cost of living in their community.

The poll was conducted by Social Science Research Solutions, a survey and market research firm, and measured a random sample of 1,499 adults from April 30 through May 4. 

Trump's disapproval rating on the economy has hit a whopping 70% in the new @cnn poll.

It never even reached 50% in his first term. pic.twitter.com/wuouabqyyu

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) May 12, 2026

The economy and cost of living, clearly, is an important issue: 55 percent reported it as their most important concern. This share is more than double any other problem, with the state of democracy being the second issue at 19 percent. 

Thus, to develop policies that materially benefit Americans, numerous surveys suggest that government officials should concentrate on affordability. But, according to Tuesday’s CNN poll, the public is roughly evenly divided on which political party would better handle the economy.

Three-quarter said the US economy unjustly favors the desires of the elite. Conversely, nearly half of respondents said the government provides relief to too many people “who don’t deserve it”—almost 10 percentage points more than people who said the government is not helping enough people.

But there may be opportunity for Democrats in the lead-up to the midterms. If the votes really count, of course.

The seventh American killed in President Donald Trump’s ill-defined war on Iran was from Kentucky. Army Sergeant Benjamin N. Pennington, 26, died a week after he was injured during Iran’s March 1 missile attack on a US air base in Saudi Arabia. When his body arrived at Dover Air Force Base, Trump was not there. Two days later, the president did go to Kentucky for a rally; during the nearly two-hour event, he never mentioned the local hero.

Instead, he was there to attack a fellow Republican—a Republican who also happened to be one of the fiercest critics of the war. “Millions of Kentucky families will have more money in their pockets thanks to what we did with respect to tax cuts,” Trump claimed. “But every single Democrat in Congress voted against it…They want tax increases along with just one Republican. He is the worst person…His name is Thomas Massie.”

Massie, Trump fumed, has been “disloyal to the Republican Party. He’s disloyal to the people of Kentucky, and most importantly, he is disloyal to the United States of America. And he’s got to be voted out of office as soon as possible.” Trump urged voters to support his hand-picked challenger, former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, who jumped on stage to pump Trump’s hand and lead cheers of “USA! USA!”

What had the seven-term congressman done to become “the worst person”? First and foremost, he worked with Democrats to force the Justice Department to make good on Trump’s campaign promise to release the Epstein files— documents that exposed Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to some of the world’s ultrarich, notably Trump himself.

But that’s only part of it. Over the past year, the MIT-educated engineer has been the lone Republican in Congress willing to challenge a vengeful president. Now he’s locked in a nasty and expensive primary that has been framed as a referendum on Trump’s sinking popularity. But the results on May 19 may have as much to do with the conflict between Massie and his state’s Republican establishment. “He’s at the front lines of trying to define what kind of party it’s going to be,” said Stephen Voss, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky.

For decades, Kentucky politics was dominated by retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell, a traditional pork-barrel conservative who ruled Congress as the Senate’s top Republican, including a long stint as majority leader, for more than 15 years. Massie has worked to break McConnell’s machine and replace it with his libertarian acolytes, an enterprise that has bruised egos, deposed powerful state legislators, and left the losers fuming—but it has also earned him unlikely bipartisan fans.

That internecine battle over the future of the state GOP is now taking on new relevance with Trump’s involvement in the 4th District primary. “If Massie does pull this off,” said Trey Grayson, a former secretary of state and 2010 Republican Senate candidate in Kentucky, “I think we’re going to see a lot more Republicans standing up to Donald Trump.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) participates in a Joint Economic Committee hearing, titled “Fiscal Cliff: How to Protect the Middle Class, Sustain Long-Term Economic Growth, and Reduce the Federal Deficit,” in 2012.Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

Thomas Massie has always been a pain in the ass.

Even as a child, he had that engineer’s directness, an innate distrust of authority, and the gifted kid’s impatience with lesser mortals. “I was simultaneously the teacher’s pet and the teacher’s worst nightmare,” Massie, now 55, told me in one of several interviews over the past few months. “I would like to think I’ve become a lot more tactful, but I still won’t tolerate a wrong answer.”

He grew up in the foothills of Appalachia, what he calls Kentucky’s “hillbilly region.” The state’s public schools fully banned corporal punishment only in 2023, and Massie’s long history with it finally ended when he was in ninth grade. In an early lesson on the dangers of unchecked authority, his physics teacher was upset when he stood up to get a pencil out of his pocket. “A verbal tit-for-tat ensued,” he explained, “and she decided to have me paddled by the principal.”

“I would like to think I’ve become a lot more tactful, but I still won’t tolerate a wrong answer.”

On the far eastern edge of the state, Lewis County is the poorest of the 21 counties in the 4th Congressional District, which has a population of about 776,000 spread out across nearly 5,000 square miles. Its county seat is Massie’s hometown of Vanceburg, population 1,500. Situated near the banks of the Ohio River, Vanceburg is 30 miles from the closest Walmart. The nearest major airport is at least an hour-and-a-half drive away outside Cincinnati.

Alongside the railroad tracks that bisect Vanceburg’s small downtown is the old Denham Distributing Co., a now-abandoned red brick building where Massie’s maternal grandfather once ran the local icehouse before switching to a beer distribution business that Massie’s father eventually took over. A precocious kid, Massie spent his time taking things apart and putting them back together. Even in high school, Dennis Brown, publisher of the Lewis County Herald, told me, “he stood out early for his aptitude in engineering and problem-solving.”

A mural in Massie’s hometown of Vanceburg, KentuckyStephanie Mencimer

At 15, he built a robotic arm, declared himself the winner of his school’s (nonexistent) science fair, and advanced to the regional fair. His victory there led to the International Science Fair, where he won an award from NASA, propelling him to MIT. Once there, the former high school valedictorian earned two degrees, in electrical and mechanical engineering. He developed a virtual reality technology that allowed users to “feel” what they could see on a computer screen, which he patented with a professor—the first of two dozen patents he would eventually hold.

In 1993, Massie married his high school sweetheart, Rhonda Howard, a mechanical engineer who was two years behind him at MIT. Together, they started a successful company called SensAble to market the technology he’d created in college. It eventually employed some 70 people.

For about a decade, they lived in the “Live Free or Die” state, but even New Hampshire was not free enough for Massie. In 2003, when the eldest of their four children was in first grade, the couple sold their company and moved back to “the Shire,” as Massie calls their 1,200-acre farm in Garrison. About 10 miles outside Vanceburg, the farm had been in Rhonda’s family since the 1950s, and she’d grown up there.

Massie bought a sawmill, a backhoe, and a bulldozer and, using timber from their property, spent two years framing what would become a 4,400-square-foot house, held together with old-fashioned wooden pegs. He installed solar panels and later connected them to a battery he harvested from a crashed Tesla. The only utility bill he’s paid in 20 years has been for Starlink internet. They planted 15 varieties of peach trees and raised chickens and cattle. He planned, as he often says, to “farm until the money runs out.” But December 2011 found a ruddy-cheeked Massie, then 40, standing at a podium inside a barn at a meeting of the Lawrenceburg Tea Party, explaining how someone who had returned to the country because he wanted to be left alone went into politics.

The Tea Party movement was in full swing, with angry grassroots activists warning about the growing budget deficit and excessive government spending and ready to toss out the old guard of the GOP. Massie was their kind of guy. A few years after he’d returned to Kentucky, Massie said, he learned that the county commission was planning to impose a tax to support the construction of a federal research facility. With his 12-year-old daughter, Massie met with the judge executive, the county’s chief administrative officer, and told him, “I’m gonna fight this.”

In a letter to the editor opposing the tax, Massie invited county residents to attend the next commission meeting. Much to his surprise, he said, many did, and the commission eventually abandoned the plan. Soon, he was encouraged to run for office, and in 2010, he was elected Lewis County judge executive, a position that is responsible for managing county budgets and daily operations. He spent his first days in office demanding to know such things as: Why was the county paying 14 different electric bills, like $50 a month to power an old bank sign that had been torn down six years earlier? Eventually, he found enough savings to cover his own salary.

“Every time, I’ve done what I thought was right, even though I thought it might cost me my job. I end up keeping the job.”

Massie’s constituents might have appreciated his investigations, but his elected colleagues didn’t. Especially after he dug into the county contracts, discovered officials who had been profiting off sweetheart deals, then aired all the dirty laundry. The resulting uproar could have meant a single term, he told the Lawrenceburg audience. Instead, those Tea Partiers helped catapult him into Congress a year later. “Every time, I’ve done what I thought was right, even though I thought it might cost me my job,” he told me. “I end up keeping the job.”

In Congress, Massie became known as “Mr. No” for his opposition to most government spending bills. But he wasn’t just a budget hawk. He pushed a libertarian agenda and worked with civil liberties groups to fight government surveillance of Americans under the Patriot Act. Fiercely antiwar, he opposed all foreign aid, including to Israel, and refused to take campaign money from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby—one reason why pro-Israel donors have poured money into defeating him. The Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund spent $3 million on the race just in the first three months of this year.

Massie’s libertarian bent initially relegated him to the congressional backbench. But then Trump got elected. In 2020, when the pandemic broke out, Massie made national headlines for slowing down the passage of the Trump-backed $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill by forcing Congress to vote in person during the lockdowns. The same pain-in-the-ass approach that got him paddled in school drew bipartisan criticism. Trump declared him a “third-rate grandstander” and called for Republicans to boot him from the party. Former Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) tweeted, “Breaking news: Congressman Massie has tested positive for being an asshole.”

The dustup between Trump and Massie blew over, and in 2022, Trump endorsed him for reelection—and in 2024, Massie endorsed Trump for president in the general election. Meanwhile, Massie inspired a bit of a cult following, particularly among young men who were attracted to his quirky politics. In 2023, Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder who was assassinated in Utah last year, declared Massie “one of my favorite members of Congress. He loves the Constitution, he loves liberty. He’s honest and he’s tough…Thomas Massie [is] just terrific.” That same year, then–Ohio Sen. JD Vance told the New York Times, “I absolutely love Massie.”

His life off the grid appeals to right-wing preppers, MAHA anti-vaxxers, and crunchy environmentalists, and his nerd cred remains intact. He invented the smart badge he wears on his lapel that shows the growing US debt in real time. He built a solar-powered robotic chicken coop, dubbed the “Clucks Capacitor,” to tend to his flock when he leaves the Shire for the “Mordor” of DC.

During an interview last June with podcaster Theo Von, Massie described spending two years living in a congressional parking lot in a camper he installed on the back of his F-250. In the summer, it got “hotter than the hinges of hell,” he said, so he ran a 50-foot extension cord to an electric car charger to power AC. “I gotta mix my medical margaritas and keep my raw milk cold,” Massie told a delighted Von. Eventually, he covered the truck’s roof with solar panels and put in a mini-split. This is not because Massie cares about climate change—his Tesla sports a “Friends of Coal” license plate. Living off the grid liberates him from utility bills and political pressures.

“I’d be perfectly happy going back to my farm,” he told me. “If I were to lose, my blood pressure would go down, and my quality of life would go up, so I’m okay with that fate. I think so many of my colleagues just so desperately want the job that they couldn’t imagine doing a single thing that would endanger having the job.”

Massie (center) speaks alongside Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif., left) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga., right) during a news conference on the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November 2025.Daniel Heuer/AFP/Getty

In September, Massie joined Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and victims of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein for a press conference at the US Capitol. Despite his campaign promise, Trump had refused to open the government’s investigative files on his old friend and disparaged the scandal as a “Democrat hoax.”

At the event, Massie insisted: “This is not a hoax…There are real victims to this criminal enterprise, and the perpetrators are being protected because they’re rich and powerful and political donors to the establishment here in Washington, DC.”

He urged members of Congress to sign the discharge petition he’d engineered to force a House vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act—a legislative maneuver that can circumvent House leadership’s effort to prevent a vote but almost always fails. But guided by someone who’d served on the House Rules Committee, this time, it succeeded, and Trump was forced to save face by signing the bill. The Justice Department eventually released 3 million records that included shocking revelations about Epstein’s connections to the world’s rich and powerful, including the president. The documents, for instance, showed that Trump was lying when he said in a 2024 social media post that he “was never on Epstein’s Plane.” In fact, according to flight records cited by prosecutors in the files, Trump had flown on Epstein’s private jet at least eight times in the 1990s.

The Epstein victory that so embarrassed Trump made Massie a household name. In fact, the brief truce between Trump and the rogue Republican had ended long before. Trump was only two months into his second term when he first threatened to have Massie primaried. “I will lead the charge against him,” Trump pledged on Truth Social after the congressman had refused to vote for a short-term spending bill. Massie didn’t seem too worried. “He’s going after Canada and me today,” he told reporters. “The difference is Canada will eventually cave.” Massie went on to be one of only two House Republicans to vote against the president’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill, calling it a “debt bomb.”

For Trump, the final straw came in June last year, when Massie worked with Khanna to try to block the president from attacking Iran without congressional approval. When Trump joined the Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Massie criticized Trump directly. “I feel a bit misled,” Massie told Fox News Digital. “I didn’t think he would let neocons determine his foreign policy and drag us into another war.”  

Trump was furious. “MAGA should drop this pathetic LOSER, Tom Massie, like the plague!” Trump fumed. Shortly afterward, he deployed his best campaign operatives to try to unseat the Kentucky Republican. Chris LaCivita, Trump’s 2024 co-campaign manager, set up MAGA KY PAC to fund a primary challenge, underwritten almost solely by three pro-Israel billionaires: Miriam Adelson, widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, and hedge fund titans Paul Singer and John Paulson. Together or through their PACs, they contributed $2.975 million to unseat Massie.

Ads attacking Massie on Kentucky TV started appearing in July. All that was missing was a candidate. Several people the Trump team approached declined to challenge Massie. Finally, in October, Trump announced he would be endorsing Gallrein, a 67-year-old former Navy SEAL, fifth-generation farmer, and one-time state Senate candidate who hadn’t even filed the paperwork yet.

Gallrein has never won an election and has no appreciable platform aside from his fealty to Trump. Fundraising emails from “Team Gallrein” often don’t even mention the candidate. “Confirm your Trump Approval Record,” one suggested. Others warned that if Gallrein loses by “<1%,” Trump could be impeached. And the candidate was not ready for primetime. When he appeared with Trump, he earned a healthy dose of online mockery when his voice cracked in his brief comments. He refused to debate Massie and ducked out of public appearances where he might have to field questions. Gallrein’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment, but he told a local media outlet Thursday that “I’m debating him every day. Please look at the social media.”

But LaCivita has a strong track record of ousting Republicans who are insufficiently loyal to Trump. If Massie’s race were a “lost cause,” LaCivita told me in January, “we wouldn’t be spending money.” He made his name in politics almost two decades ago when his infamous Swift Boat Veterans campaign tanked Sen. John Kerry’s presidential aspirations by attacking his military record. “He is a brass-knuckle brawler who understands what moves voters better than almost any operative I have ever known on either side of the aisle,” his friend Mo Elleithee, a former Democratic operative who directs Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service, told me in 2024. “And he pulls no punches.”

LaCivita’s dark arts emerged in full force shortly after the Kentucky Derby earlier this month, when the MAGA KY PAC put out a deep fake ad that claimed Massie was “caught in a throuple.” It used AI-generated images of Massie holding hands with Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and checking into a hotel, as the narrator accuses Massie of voting with “the Squad” against border wall funding and other parts of Trump’s agenda. “It’s a complete and total betrayal of President Trump and Kentucky conservatives,” the narrator says.

Massie responded on social media, calling the ad “defamatory.”

Woke Eddie’s billionaire puppet masters are running this disgusting and defamatory ad now. It reeks of desperation, but they’re hoping the older generation won’t realize it’s an AI generated lie. Please help me fight back by donating to https://t.co/r10M5btnhD today. pic.twitter.com/ODO6qt9oIF

— Thomas Massie for Congress (@MassieforKY) May 4, 2026

“It reeks of desperation,” he wrote, “but they’re hoping the older generation won’t realize it’s an AI generated lie.”

Trump’s right-wing media sycophants have also launched an underappreciated stealth campaign against Massie that helps explain why GOP members of Congress so fear the president. As one of the most conservative members of Congress, Massie was a frequent guest on Fox News. According to data tabulated for Mother Jones by the nonprofit group Media Matters, he appeared on the network more than two dozen times between January 2021 and the end of 2023; 13 of those were friendly spots on Laura Ingraham’s show.

Things changed after he endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president in the GOP primary. And then in early February this year, after Massie helped gum up an effort by House Speaker Mike Johnson to block future votes on Trump’s tariffs, Ingraham tweeted: “It’s obvious: Massie’s only goal in Congress is hurting the President…Massie needs to go.”

He hasn’t been a guest on Fox since March 2025, when Trump first threatened to primary him. Massie acknowledged that the media blackout has been damaging. “Fox is the biggest source of information about this race,” Massie said, “given the viewing habits of people in my district.” (A Fox spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)

Still, Trump’s campaign against him seems to have only emboldened Massie. In February, he became one of six House Republicans to vote to end Trump’s tariffs on Canada, which also hurt Kentucky’s bourbon industry. His insubordination has helped his fundraising. In early March, Massie reported on social media that “the President’s trip to Kentucky generated a fundraising record—we received $109,388 online in just 2 days!”

A super-PAC funded by libertarian billionaire Jeff Yass has bolstered Massie’s campaign. And his loyal donors seem to be sticking with him. For years, Massie’s biggest individual contributor has been Chris Rufer, founder of a California tomato processing company. A lifelong libertarian, he’s given Massie’s campaign $7,000 this cycle. “Thomas is standing up for what he believes in,” he told me. There’s a big difference between Massie and most Republicans, Rufer said: “If he’s not a congressman, he can make a living.”

Massie’s confrontations with Trump also earned him support from another unlikely quarter: blue-state liberals. Massie’s donors include people like Rory Gates, son of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who gave more than $900,000 to Kamala Harris’ campaign in 2024. He gave $7,000 to Massie this cycle.

“I think these people just don’t know who Thomas Massie is,” Western Kentucky University political science professor Jeff Budziak marveled about Massie’s liberal donors. “He wants to cut Social Security.”

That’s not all. Massie has pushed to abolish the federal Department of Education and withdraw the US from NATO. In 2024, he co-sponsored a bill to attempt to deny citizenship to people born to undocumented immigrants. For Christmas in 2021, he posted a photo of his family in front of their tree holding guns, with the caption: “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo.”

Merry Christmas!
ps. Santa, please bring ammo. pic.twitter.com/NVawULhCNr

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) December 4, 2021

He’s also a bit of a conspiracy theorist. Long before the Epstein files—a real scandal wrapped in an array of implausible conspiracy theories—he called the investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election a “hoax.” Last year, Massie co-sponsored then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill to ban supposed weather modifications like “chemtrails.” More recently, he has promoted the debunked theory that a US Capitol Police turned CIA officer planted two pipe bombs in DC the night before the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. (In December, the FBI arrested Brian J. Cole Jr., who confessed to planting the bombs, but Massie thinks they got the wrong guy.)

“I vote with Republicans 91 percent of the time. And the 9 percent I don’t, they’re taking up for pedophiles, starting another war, or bankrupting our country.”

Normally, someone like Massie would be toxic to Democrats. But these aren’t normal times. “The US Congress would be a much better place if the Republican caucus were made up of just Thomas Massies,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told me. “Most of the Republicans are just behaving like sheep and responding to whatever Donald Trump asks them to do.”

He compares Massie to people like former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), an arch-conservative hawk who was one of only two Republicans to join the House committee that investigated the January 6 riot. Of course, Cheney lost her seat to a Trump-endorsed primary challenger. Progressives, Raskin said, “don’t agree with a lot of the substance of their politics but support them for their fidelity to the Constitution.”

As liberals have come to his aid, some MAGA supporters have peeled off. In early March, the Turning Point USA PAC posted a clip from Trump’s Kentucky rally calling Charlie Kirk’s favorite congressman a “RINO.” “Trump haters are on notice,” it warned.

Massie insists he is not a Trump hater. “I’ve never attacked the president,” Massie said. “I’m supporting the platform he campaigned on. He’s the one who deviated from that.” And while he’s worked with Democrats, that doesn’t mean he is one. “I vote with Republicans 91 percent of the time,” he told a minion of online provocateur Laura Loomer, who had ambushed him at the Capitol to question his party loyalties. “And the 9 percent I don’t, they’re taking up for pedophiles, starting another war, or bankrupting our country.”

Massie wears a self-designed national debt counter on his jacket pocket.Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post/Getty

On a frigid Friday night in February, Kentucky political candidates gathered in a local community center for the Oldham County Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Day dinner. On the far western edge of Massie’s district, Oldham is Kentucky’s richest county and a stronghold for Sen. Mitch McConnell’s establishment Republicans. Massie had invited me to meet him there for an interview.

When I walked in, Massie was grip-and-grinning, so I looked for Gallrein. Tall and commanding, he was flanked by a long line of admirers. At the back of the line, I encountered Jerry Smith, a good-natured financial planner with a highball glass in his hand who said his wife had “drugged him here.”

Smith can’t stand Massie. “I don’t give a shit about Epstein,” he volunteered. “I do every damn thing I can to get him out.” The one thing he can’t do, however, is vote against him. Smith lives in Louisville, outside Massie’s district. Smith’s situation epitomizes a key feature of Massie’s nationalized race: Many people have strong feelings about it, but most can only throw rocks or roses from the sidelines.

Denise Graham had already gotten her face time with Gallrein and was happy to gush about him. She is the first vice president of the Oldham County Republican Women’s Club, where Gallrein had appeared in January. “Overall, I was extremely impressed with the man,” she said, calling him “very humble.” Massie, who doesn’t come to her meetings, has “been a thorn in Trump’s side,” she said. “There’s a lot of us in the club who are just over him.”

Does she care about the Epstein files? “Not really,” she confessed. “We have so many other important things going on,” like “the border and girls’ sports.” She thinks there should be justice for the victims, but “should it be the focus, preoccupation of voters for this primary? No.”

She steered me through the crowd to meet the club’s president, Deborah Graham, who immediately radiated hostility from her white pinstriped power suit. Despite having “ridden in his Tesla,” she intensely dislikes Massie and demanded that I leave. When I said that Massie had invited me, she retorted, “He’s not in charge of this dinner.” I needed to buy a ticket, she added. But when I got out my wallet, she got flustered and told me to wait while she consulted the party chair.

The private event was sold out, Graham said when she returned. She declared that I had to go—and that I couldn’t write about it. “I’ll be watching,” she warned. When I told her that I would absolutely write about the event, she lunged forward and tried to grab my notebook. I held onto it but agreed to leave. (Deborah Graham did not respond to a request for comment.) While I waited to retrieve my coat, I asked some of the young Massie volunteers in the lobby to let the candidate know I’d been booted. One who had witnessed the scene shook his head. “Wow,” he said, “they almost make you want to become a liberal.”

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only person manhandled by a party official that night.

After a long list of speakers, Massie took the podium. He recounted his recent accomplishments in Congress, including a bill to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports that had recently passed out of committee. He then detoured to a personal issue that has dogged him throughout the campaign.

In June 2024, Massie announced on social media that his wife, Rhonda, “the smartest, kindest woman I ever knew,” had died unexpectedly at 51. But he didn’t explain the cause. Into that vacuum bloomed the conspiracy theories: that AIPAC was involved, the Mossad killed her, she died from the Covid vaccine. In response to the ghoulish chatter, Massie posted, “The only credible conspiracy I can offer is a gorgeous girl who was a literal genius conspired to make a congressman, who would be steerable by no one but her, out of an awkward nerd.”  

Spurred by grief and concerns for his own health, over the next year, the “awkward nerd” quietly underwent another transformation. He took up running and lost 25 pounds in four months. In the glow-up, the glasses disappeared, and a new beard covered his cherubic dimples. In November 2025, Massie, then 54, announced he had married Carolyn Grace Moffa, a 36-year-old former staffer for fellow Kentucky libertarian Sen. Rand Paul.

“Fun facts about our wedding,” Massie wrote on social media. “Of course we served raw milk with the wedding cake and margaritas made with frozen peaches from our farm!” In the post, Massie said that he’d known Moffa for a decade and that she’d even visited him and Rhonda at the farm. Internet trolls seized on the disclosure.

“How did @RepThomasMassie’s wife die?” Loomer posted on X in response to the wedding news. “Why is this such a mystery?…I find it to be so bizarre, and I always have. Now there’s a much younger woman in the picture.”

Rhonda Massie’s tragic death wasn’t a mystery. Massie simply wanted to respect his wife’s privacy. According to a coroner’s report, she had suffered from multiple autoimmune disorders for nearly two decades. One week, she and her family were touring Mount Rainier, and a week later, she was gone. Officially, she died of respiratory complications from chronic autoimmune myopathy.

In February, as more shocking revelations from the Epstein files continued to dog him, Trump turned his fury on Massie again, this time with a new target. Moffa, he suggested, was a “Radical Left ‘flamethrower’” who might be the reason Massie “became a Liberal.”

After generally ignoring such comments, Massie chose to address them at the Lincoln Day dinner because Gallrein had recently retweeted Trump’s attack. “I feel like a woman needs defending,” Massie told the audience, “and I’m going to defend her here tonight.”

He ran through Moffa’s résumé, from her volunteer work as a teenager for Republican candidates to her five years on staff for Paul. “Does that sound like a flame-throwing lefty?” Massie asked. As he was trying to finish his comments—having run over the five-minute limit—Kentucky House Speaker David Osborne stepped in and yanked the mic away from him. “I work for you!” Massie yelled as he was ushered off the stage.

The next morning, Massie called me from a Cracker Barrel, where he was meeting with one of “his mayors.” Far from being upset, he dubbed the now-viral video of the event “the best eight minutes money can buy.” He explained that the House speaker “is upset with me” because he had backed primary challenges against several powerful GOP incumbents. “They were reliable soldiers for him in the state legislature. Now they’re gone, and now they have more people like Thomas Massie and Rand Paul.”

For the past four years, Massie has backed an upstart crop of “liberty Republicans” who are known around the state as Massie’s Nasties. Among the most prominent is Kentucky state Rep. T.J. Roberts, who was a plaintiff in a 2020 lawsuit against Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, successfully challenging his ban on in-person worship services during the pandemic. With Massie’s endorsement, at 26, Roberts became one of the youngest people ever elected to the Kentucky legislature in 2024.

Roberts, who last year proposed naming a Kentucky highway after Trump, has said he considers Massie a mentor and shares many of his political stances. But as with many conservative young men, he is also a shitposter who has allegedly flirted with antisemites and white nationalists, including once meeting with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. In November, a woman emailed Roberts opposing a bill he’d proposed to allow local law enforcement to work with ICE. He responded by sending her an AI-generated video that superimposed his face over Trump’s in a clip of the president telling a female reporter, “Quiet, piggy.” Teri Carter, a liberal opinion columnist for several Kentucky newspapers, wrote a piece calling out Roberts’ sexism. Roberts responded by announcing that he’d bought a new gun and named it after her. (He did not respond to requests for comment.)

Carter told me that while she doesn’t often agree with Massie, she respects him because he doesn’t “blow with the wind” and she finds him “to be genial and pleasant.” His acolytes? “I’m kind of shocked by their extremism.”

While the primary may test Trump’s power over the GOP, it will also test whether Massie’s Nasties have enough juice to help him survive Trump’s attacks. Their informal organization, the KY Liberty Movement, told me in a statement that they have expanded Massie’s base and successfully delivered turnout for him in previous races. Labeling them “extreme,” they said, “is a tired establishment talking point that contradicts the reality of election results.”

But 2026 may present new challenges.

“Thomas Massie has put himself on such an island politically,” noted state Rep. Matthew Lehman, a Democrat who ran against Massie in 2022. He said traditional GOP-aligned groups like the Farm Bureau and Chamber of Commerce have been at odds with Massie for a long time. “He’s been a frustrating representative to have,” he said. People tend to expect their member of Congress to focus on things like “infrastructure, education funding, making sure your district is getting its fair share of federal resources,” Lehman noted, “and that’s just not what he’s interested in doing.”

Plus, Massie refuses to meet with any people affiliated with companies that have a vaccine mandate, effectively ruling out anyone in healthcare, where employees are often required to be inoculated against hepatitis and other infectious diseases. “When somebody asks to meet with my office,” Massie explained, “there’s really only two types of rejections: That’s if you’re a foreign lobbyist or if you have a vaccine mandate on your employees.”

“His very first vote in Congress, he voted against [GOP Rep. John] Boehner for speaker. The man doesn’t understand or care about loyalty.”

Adam Koenig spent 16 years in the state legislature until he became one of three Northern Kentucky committee chairmen successfully targeted by Massie’s operation. “His very first vote in Congress, he voted against [GOP Rep. John] Boehner for speaker,” Koenig told me. “The man doesn’t understand or care about loyalty.”

He recounts the now-legendary story of how Massie emerged from a seven-way GOP primary to first get elected to Congress in 2012. He got an improbable boost from a 21-year-old college student who’d seeded a libertarian PAC with nearly $900,000 he had inherited from his grandfather. The PAC poured $542,600 into ads backing Massie. “No one else was able to raise that kind of money,” Koenig said. Massie was “the only person on TV and he won. He hasn’t had a legitimate primary challenge since then.”

As far as Koenig is concerned, Massie’s current moment in the spotlight nationally belies his popularity at home. “His support is not even a mile wide and no more than an inch deep,” he said.

Massie may not spend a lot of time hobnobbing with the horsey set in Oldham County, but he did help Larry Pancake get elected. Pancake is a singer and songwriter from the far eastern part of Massie’s district that has produced country-western stars like Loretta Lynn and Billy Ray Cyrus. In 2022, the former Greenup County deputy sheriff challenged the incumbent county jailer in the GOP primary. Massie anted up $500 for Pancake’s winning campaign—a decent sum in a state where few people ever make political contributions.

“It’s kind of a libertarian idea that if you’re going to put people in cages, that person should be responsible to the public,” Massie explained, noting that Kentucky is the only state that elects its jailers. But his donation to Pancake wasn’t an outlier. Since entering Congress, Massie has liberally supported local candidates, and they form the backbone of his support. “I’ve given to sheriffs, jailers, commissioners, judges, county executives, state representatives, even state judges,” he said. “I’ve given about a quarter of a million dollars because I felt it was more effective than giving to the Mitch McConnell–dominated state party.”

That’s one reason why local officials who’ve worked with Massie paint a different picture of a politician so unpopular with the Chamber of Commerce crowd. Jessica Fette is the Republican mayor of Erlanger and owner of a local restaurant called The Hive. “He’s always been extraordinarily responsive to me,” she said of Massie. “He even came to my restaurant on opening day.”

The largest city in Massie’s district is the Democratic stronghold of Covington, with a population of about 40,000. Joe Meyer, a former state legislator, retired as the mayor in 2024. “None of the Republicans around here send me Christmas cards,” he told me, but he has a “very close working relationship” with Massie.

After Meyer first ran for mayor, a veteran who’d run in the primary died by suicide. Meyer organized a suicide awareness event and invited Massie. “I still remember him talking about the nation’s venture into foreign wars,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘This guy is a hell of a lot more antiwar than I am.’” The former mayor said Massie has a good rapport with his constituents. “He goes down and sits with the guys around a potbelly stove and plays a banjo,” Meyer said.

And despite his reputation as a deficit hawk, Massie has brought home some bacon. Meyer told me that after Massie voted to uphold the results of the 2020 election, Democrats rewarded him with “a significant sum of money he could allocate in his district.” He earmarked a few million dollars of it to convert a couple of Covington’s one-way streets back to two-way. But later, Meyer said, “a guy from Kentucky, I think his name was McConnell, helped pull all the earmarks out of that budget, including the one for Covington.” Undeterred, Massie turned around and successfully lobbied the state for funding, and the road was completed last year. “He has been doing a terrific job for the city of Covington.”

The Ark Encounter is a $100 million creationist tourist attraction in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District.Stephanie Mencimer

One day in February, I walked past fake camels grazing in the snow-covered grass in rural Williamstown, as Noah’s Ark appeared on the horizon. The $100 million Ark Encounter is supposedly an exact replica of the original—depending on how you define the biblical measurement of a “cubit.” As I entered, sounds of a thunderstorm roared from speakers overhead. Exhibits described how Noah and his family tended to more than 7,000 animals during the great flood.

Lifelike automatons lounging on rugs or working on ladders gave the impression that the ark was a pretty chill place, aside from the dinosaurs. They may have died out millions of years before humans evolved, but “up to 85 kinds of dinosaurs were on the ark,” a sign explained. Midship cages held fearsome-looking replicas.

A popular tourist attraction in Massie’s district, the ark was created by Australian Christian fundamentalist Ken Ham as a companion to his Creation Museum in the western Cincinnati suburbs. Massie visited shortly after it opened in 2016, declaring it “amazing,” Ham wrote in a blog post. The day before the ark was scheduled to open its live animal exhibit, Massie described calling “some bureaucrat in Georgia to shake the paperwork loose” to secure the USDA permit his constituents needed to bring in real camels.

The Ark Encounter’s displays include replicas of dinosaurs that were supposedly on Noah’s Ark.Stephanie Mencimer A sign at the attraction claims “up to 85 kinds of dinosaurs were on the ark.”Stephanie Mencimer

The ark’s version of history may conflict with what Massie learned in school—he grew up digging for fossils—but as a Christian and a libertarian, he’s respectful of other perspectives. “I don’t judge anybody for having a religion or a lack of it,” he told me.

The Ark Encounter also helps explain Massie’s political survival. The MIT-trained tech entrepreneur/libertarian/anti-vax conspiracy theorist/banjo-playing gentleman farmer almost perfectly embodies the wildly diverse constituencies that make up his idiosyncratic district, where the ark and Boone County Distilling peacefully coexist within 30 miles of each other. “If there’s any place a rogue Republican with a liberty message could hold out against the president’s wrath,” posited the University of Kentucky’s Stephen Voss, “Massie’s district would be a great candidate.”

“If there’s any place a rogue Republican with a liberty message could hold out against the president’s wrath, Massie’s district would be a great candidate.”

Home to the Cincinnati airport, Kentucky’s northern “bump” is the fastest-growing part of the state and a hub of national commerce along the Ohio River. It includes two railroads, three locks and dams, and three major interstates that funnel $1 billion worth of goods a day from Michigan to Miami. DHL, Amazon, and UPS all have a big presence in Massie’s district—one reason Massie has made sure to secure a spot on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. “That I-71 corridor is like a day’s drive from half of America,” said Trey Grayson, the former secretary of state.

And yet, the district’s biggest population center suffers from chronically low voter turnout. “A whole lot of people moved into Northern Kentucky from Cincinnati because it’s cheaper,” Grayson explained. “They’re not as clued in to Kentucky politics.”  

In 2024, just over 50,000 people—about 15 percent of registered Republicans— voted in the 4th District GOP primary. “If you go to the Walmart and ask people about the race, you’re going to have to talk to 12 people before you find one who’s even going to vote,” Massie told me. “The race is about reaching those 50,000 people.”

Some of the more motivated voters in the district are Catholics who became Republicans because of abortion politics. And now, Grayson said, a lot of ultraconservative Catholics have been migrating to the area because of the Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Walton, about 20 miles north of the Ark Encounter.

The church’s sanctuary, built in 2010, holds more than 400 people. It was packed when I arrived for high Mass one Sunday. Nuns in habits filled the pews, along with women wearing mantillas. A flock of altar boys with closely cropped hair waved incense burners. The church, which conducts traditional Latin Mass, is part of the Society of St. Pius X, which opposes the liberalizing reforms of Vatican II. From the pulpit, a young priest promised to continue the fight against a Catholic Church going soft on such sins as “self-abuse,” adultery, and the blessing of homosexual unions.

The church and its school are part of the fiefdom of local solid waste magnate Jim Brueggemann. Brueggemann has donated $3,500 to Massie’s campaign, and his Bavarian Waste landfill down the road from the church proudly displays a Massie campaign sign at the entrance. Some of Massie’s staunchest supporters worship at Assumption, including Bill Kunkel, who in 2019 sued the state after it banned his unvaccinated son from playing basketball during a chickenpox outbreak at the church’s school.

Kunkel, known in Northern Kentucky as the “sign guy” for conservative candidates, has put up campaign signs for Massie in every election since 2012. He put up 160 this cycle before his wife got sick. Kunkel told me that he voted for Trump all three times and had a Trump sign on his truck, but now, “all I can do is apologize.” He is deeply unhappy with Trump’s second term, both because of the Iran war and his attack on Massie. “He’s trying to tear down the last great representative that we have.”

After Mass, I went to a nearby Starbucks and ran into a family I’d seen at church. Scott Velarde, the father, asked how I’d liked the service. I asked him about the election. He was a Massie supporter. “I feel he’s got a lot of values that align with mine,” especially his fiscal conservatism, antiwar positions, and opposition to abortion. (Massie isn’t Catholic, but like Rand Paul and his famous father, Ron, he hails from the anti-abortion wing of libertarianism.)

Velarde, who works at a nearby Toyota plant, said that while people loved Trump “for his maverick element,” they aren’t just blindly following him in the Kentucky primary. “I support Massie, and I also support Trump. I’d wish they’d stop fighting.”

At the end of April, the US Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could result in near-immunity for pesticide manufacturers from 100,000 lawsuits filed by people who may have been sickened by their chemicals. Massie was outside, addressing a crowd of Make America Healthy Again protesters fighting the chemical companies—and the Trump administration. “They want ‘get out of court free’ cards,” he told them. “We’re not going to give it to them.”

In February, Trump issued an executive order to protect the manufacturing of the potentially carcinogenic chemical glyphosate, better known as the weed killer Roundup. Massie has introduced legislation with Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) that would block the order. He also teamed up with Pingree to strip language from the farm bill the House passed in late April that would have immunized pesticide makers from lawsuits. He plans to continue this work if he survives his primary, using some of the strategies he learned in freeing the Epstein files.

But his victory is anything but assured. Recent polling puts him ahead by only single digits. Looking at betting markets that put his victory odds at 70–30, he said, “there’s a 1 in 3 chance I’m gonna lose.”

The results will all depend on turnout. Massie said he’s blowing Gallrein “out of the water” in every age group except the 65-and-older crowd, but they are the likeliest voters. Regardless of the outcome, Massie thinks Trump’s primary challenge against him that’s likely to cost $30 million may damage the party, particularly in this fall’s midterm elections.

“People are already starting to question the wisdom of this cleansing effort,” Massie told me. “By the time we get to November, we’re going to have a hell of a problem when they realize they’ve alienated a third of the people who got [Trump] elected—MAHA, libertarians, young people.” But if he prevails, “it will be very easy for me to be a gracious winner,” he said. “I haven’t resorted to personal attacks, ever. When [Trump] called me a moron at the prayer breakfast, I told people I was glad I was in his prayers. All of my disagreements have been on policy, not personality. I don’t have anything to apologize for.”

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

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in northern Michigan. 

Flooding across northern Michigan last month pushed rivers to record levels, testing the limits of the state’s aging dams so severely that officials in one city nearly ordered evacuations as water threatened to spill over the top of a key barrier—a close call that highlights the growing risk that intensifying storms pose to similar infrastructure around the country.

Nationwide, the average dam is 64 years old and most were built for rainfall patterns that no longer reflect today’s changing climate. Thousands are classified as high hazard, meaning their failure could result in the loss of life. Dam safety experts say inspections are uneven and improvements often underfunded.

About 18 percent of the roughly 92,000 dams in the United States are considered high-hazard. 

More than half of Michigan’s dams are beyond their 50-year design life, and the risks became clear as snowmelt and weeks of heavy rain swelled rivers. Rising water came within 5 inches of flowing over Cheboygan Dam in Cheboygan, a city of about 4,700 people, on April 16. In Bellaire, officials deployed about 1,000 sandbags to shore up a century-old dam.

“This needs to be considered not the worst we can experience. This needs to be considered as typical of the future,” said Richard Rood, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan who studies climate change.

There are about 92,000 dams in the United States. About 18 percent are considered high-hazard. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimates repairing all of these aging structures will cost more than $165 billion. In Michigan, that estimate is $1 billion.

Communities facing these risks are left with difficult choices. Given the cost of repairing and upgrading dams to withstand stronger storms, removing them is often cheaper. That can reduce long-term risk and restore rivers to a more natural state. But it often faces resistance from property owners and communities with economies built around the reservoirs those dams created.

As floodwaters recede across Michigan, local leaders, dam safety advocates, and experts are renewing calls to bolster safety regulations and deal with aging dams.

Bob Stuber, executive director of the Michigan Hydro Relicensing Commission, considers the April flooding a wake-up call and believes the solution is clear: upgrades where feasible and removal where it makes sense. “I think every opportunity we have to remove an aging dam, we should take advantage of it because it’s not going to get better,” he said. “It’s just going to get worse.”

Officials in Traverse City came to that conclusion in 2024 and removed the Union Street Dam along the Boardman-Ottaway River as part of a decades-long restoration project that includes FishPass, which will allow key species to pass while blocking harmful invaders like sea lamprey. Engineers said that removal and upgrade most likely reduced flooding impacts when waters surged to near-record levels last month, falling just short of a 500-year flood.

Many communities are reluctant to give up the lakes and waterfronts dams create: “There’s this emotional attachment.”

“Upstream would have been under 2 more feet of water, which would have been quite devastating,” said Daniel Zielinski, a principal engineer for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. “We actually had a really great stress test of the system. It functioned really well.” 

Removals are increasing across the country, according to data from American Rivers. Since 2000, more dams have come down than gone up, and that pace is accelerating as aging infrastructure, safety concerns, and environmental benefits reshape how communities weigh their value. 

In northern Michigan, conservation groups like Huron Pines help dam owners make that decision. It has managed nine removals in the last 13 years and has seen growing interest after the recent flooding, said Josh Leisen, a senior project manager for the organization. Removal reconnects river ecosystems and eliminates the need for expensive upkeep of aging structures, he said.

“There are costs associated with repair and there are risks associated with having a dam,” Leisen said. “Even if it seems to be in good condition, you get extreme weather events like we just had.”

Removing dams is not always straightforward. Beyond the technical challenges, many communities are reluctant to give up the lakes and waterfronts those structures create. “There’s this emotional attachment to that impoundment,” said Daniel Brown, a climate resilience strategist at the Michigan-based Huron River Watershed Council.

In other cases, dismantling isn’t practical. Some dams provide electricity or drinking water, linking them to local economies and infrastructure. Removal “is not really something that’s on the table because they are connected in this very practical way,” Brown said.

Still, Brown said, there are limits to how much aging structures can be adapted to a warming world. “[A dam] is this very long-term, huge, expensive infrastructure that you’ve put on the landscape that’s going to stay there. And that is not how climate change or nature or rivers behave,” Brown said.

Dismantling dams, like upgrading them, can come with steep costs. The Boardman-Ottaway River project—which removed three dams in the largest removal effort in state history—cost $25 million. Huron Pines is managing the removal of Sanback Dam in Rose City next month, at an estimated cost of $4 million.

Half of the expense is funded through a grant program from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, launched in response to the 2020 Edenville Dam failure which overwhelmed the downstream Sanford Dam. The twin catastrophes forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 residents, destroyed thousands of homes, and flooded ecosystems in a disaster that investigators later found was avoidable. The $44 million state program funded several dam removals, upgrades, and engineering studies before it ended last year.

Federal funding is available through programs administered by agencies such as FEMA or U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But those resources fall short of the estimated $165.2 billion needed to address the issue, and some are at risk of elimination.

State governments regulate roughly 70 percent of the dams in the United States, with the federal government regulating hydropower dams and providing funding and guidance. This means inspection standards, regulations, enforcement, and resources can vary widely.

In Michigan, about 1,000 dams fall under state oversight, while 99 hydroelectric dams are overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The remaining 1,500 are smaller barriers that don’t fit the criteria for state regulation, according to the Michigan Dam Inventory.

[Dams] are either going to have to be removed or reengineered. Or they’re going to become a set of slowly unfolding failures.”

Now, state officials are renewing calls for more money and stronger regulations. “Dam safety may be an issue that isn’t partisan,” said Phil Roos, director of EGLE.

Proposed state legislation would bolster inspection rules, address private ownership, update design standards, and create more funding opportunities for upgrades or removals. “It’s so important to our state that we can come together, and whether it’s passing the legislation that was proposed, or improving procedures, or ultimately funding,” Roos said.

Michigan state Senator John Damoose has expressed concern about private dam ownership since the close call at Cheboygan Dam, which is under both state and private control. About 75 percent of the dams Michigan regulates are privately owned.

“Somebody made a point, ‘Well, we can’t have private companies owning these things.’ I tend to believe in private ownership but they might be right,” Damooose said during a Traverse City roundtable discussion on dam safety.

It’s not just a Michigan issue. Most dams in the United States are privately owned, meaning responsibility for maintenance, upkeep, and potential failure falls on individuals, not governmental agencies, according to the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. 

Climate change is expected to bring more frequent and intense storms. As the world warms, the atmosphere holds more moisture, fueling more intense precipitation, according to Rood at the University of Michigan.

Recent flooding “has shown an incredible vulnerability,” he said. “[Dams] are either going to have to be removed or reengineered. Or they’re going to become a set of slowly unfolding failures.”

Luke Trumble, chief of dam safety for Michigan, said the state is already dealing with conditions that many dams were never designed to withstand. “It’s a little bit of a misconception that if we fix the dam issue, there’ll be no more flooding,” he said. “There’s still going to be flooding on rivers whenever we get rain like this, or rain on snow.

“What we can do with dam safety legislation is help ensure that flooding is not made worse by a dam failure,” Trumble said.

President Donald Trump’s energy secretary shrugged when asked on Sunday whether gas prices could rise to $5 per gallon and offered no clear plan to address the affordability predicament the administration has forced upon Americans. 

“I can’t predict the price of energy in the short term or even the medium term,” Chris Wright told Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. And regarding potential solutions, he said, “we are constantly looking for different ideas.”

As Welker pointed out, in March, Wright said that it was “very possible” that gas prices would drop below $3 a gallon before the summer. He also told CNN’s Jake Tapper in April that “prices have likely peaked and they’ll start going down.”

According to the US Energy Information Administration, the price of regular gas in the US has increased more than 40 cents per gallon since Wright’s April statement. 

So now Wright is backtracking his predictions, instead claiming during his Sunday interview that the US is in a “tremendous position,” as it is “by far the largest producer of oil” and “by far the world’s largest producer of natural gas.” 

“Gasoline and diesel prices are up, and they’ll remain up while this conflict is in place,” Wright said, but after the war, “they’ll come back down lower than they were before.” 

Wright’s claims come as the US and Iran remain locked in negotiations over a new ceasefire proposal. According to a Sunday report from the Associated Press, Iran wants to end the war on all fronts—including Israel’s strikes on Lebanon—and secure safe shipping in the region amid a US blockade of their ports. Iran’s leadership said it would discuss the latest US proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and scale back its nuclear program at a later time. 

In other words, it does not look like the war will end any time soon. And even if transit through the Strait of Hormuz resumes to pre-war levels, it will take months to get oil and gas flowing due to the devastating strikes across the region.

On Mother’s Day, the US Department of Health and Human Services launched a website that promotes pro-life pregnancy centers for new and expecting mothers.

The federal government’s new site, Moms.gov, “offers guidance and information to support the health and well-being of mothers and their families,” according to a Sunday press release by HHS. The website also prominently features a link to find local pregnancy centers at Option Line. The pregnancy help contact center attempts to dissuade people from considering abortion, including by advising them to ask about the risk of physical harm from the procedure and by urging them to remember “it’s OK to change your mind.”

Decades of scientific research demonstrate that abortion is a safe way to end a pregnancy.

In addition to pregnancy centers, Moms.gov includes resources for nutritional guidance and links to set up $1,000 “Trump accounts” for children—all amid widespread cuts by Republicans to family support.

“Moms.gov delivers critical tools and support to help parents foster healthy pregnancies, strengthen young families, and create brighter futures for their children,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said in the press release. This is how you Make America Healthy Again.” 

Option Line’s locator tool provides a list of their “participating pregnancy centers” that offer “peer counseling and accurate information about all pregnancy options.” Many of the facilities that Option Line recommends are crisis pregnancy centers, according to Crisis Pregnancy Center Map, a national directory led by Drs. Andrea Swartzendruber and Danielle Lambert, two professors from the University of Georgia’s College of Public Health. 

Crisis pregnancy centers portray themselves as legitimate reproductive health care clinics but instead attempt to deter people from accessing abortion care and even some contraceptive options, according to the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists. 

“As part of a pro-life, pro-family administration, HHS is committed to delivering critical tools to help parents foster healthy pregnancies, strengthen young families, and create brighter futures for their children,” HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard told Mother Jones on Sunday regarding the agency’s promotion of Option Line.  “The pregnancy centers and Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) [which receive federal funding to provide primary care for underserved communities] listed on the website provide supportive services to expecting mothers.”

As my colleague Julia Métraux wrote last month, HHS has long pushed these crisis pregnancy centers, directly giving at least $34 million to 16 facilities between 2018 and 2024. In April, the Trump administration proposed plans to dismantle its Title X family planning program, switching from promoting contraception use and instead urging providers to concentrate on “optimal health (defined as physical, mental, and social wellbeing), not just medical intervention.”

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Justin Smarsh and his family used to kayak a few times a year on the rivers and creeks near their home in Cherry Tree, Pennsylvania. High on the Appalachian Plateau, northeast of Pittsburgh, he spent hours in the woods and taught his two sons to hunt. Today, Smarsh said, he gets “suffocated just walking.” He has a constant dry cough, and he loses his breath if he bends down to tie his shoes. 

A few years after he graduated from high school and got married, Smarsh went to work in a coal mine in his home county, just as his father and grandfather had. “It was the best-paying job around,” he said. “It still is.” Now Smarsh, 42, has progressive massive fibrosis—the most severe form of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, or black lung.

There is no cure for Smarsh’s condition. He tries to slow the progression with “piles of meds,” he said, but things will eventually worsen, potentially to the point of heart failure. In patients with advanced disease, a flu or common cold can lead to a kind of drowning as the lungs fill with fluid. Smarsh’s doctors say he won’t live to see 50. 

“Most people think coal mining is a thing of the past,” said Deanna Istik, CEO of Lungs at Work, a black lung clinic in Washington County, Pennsylvania. “Meanwhile, we see more people being diagnosed with black lung disease than we ever have before.” 

Black lung clinics are seeing more and more patients like Smarsh, who’ve gotten sick in their 30s and 40s.

Coal mining has always been a hazardous occupation. But today’s miners face a new danger because they’re inhaling something worse than the coal dust that settles in lungs, triggering immune cells to form nodules, masses, and scarified black tissue. Most of the large coal seams in the mountains of Appalachia are gone now. To reach smaller seams, miners must cut through much more rock with high levels of quartz, which gets pulverized into crystalline silica.

When tiny particles of silica are inhaled, they act like minute shards of glass, leading to severe tissue scarring and inflammation and eventually to progressive massive fibrosis. Researchers from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) estimate the disease now afflicts one in 10 working miners who have worked in mines for at least 25 years. Rising rates of the disease have led to stark increases in lung transplants and mortality. Between 2013 and 2017, hundreds of cases of progressive massive fibrosis were identified at three Virginia clinics alone, leading NIOSH to declare a renewed black lung epidemic. Black-lung-associated deaths, which declined between 1999 and 2018, rose between 2020 and 2023.

Randy Lawrence, president of the Kanawha County Black Lung Association, stands outside his home near Cabin Creek, West Virginia, on October 13, 2025. Carolyn Kaster/AP

The disease is on the uptick at a time when the Trump administration is calling for the expansion of coal production. Last fall, the US Department of Energy announced it was investing $625 million in coal projects, and this month, President Trump signed an executive order reaffirming coal as essential to national security, a move that will direct billions of dollars in federal funding to the industry. But while the administration is calling for more coal, it is simultaneously delaying implementation of new regulations that would protect miners from deadly silica. 

In the United States, black lung was officially acknowledged as a workplace-related illness only in the late 1960s, after a highly publicized disaster at a West Virginia mine killed 78 coal miners. Subsequent strikes and protests led to the passage of the 1969 Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, which mandated federal safety inspections of mines, set fines for violations, and established a benefits program to compensate miners with black lung. 

Rates of the disease dropped almost immediately, and by the end of the 20th century, thanks to the implementation of those standards and a strong union presence in mines in Pennsylvania and across Appalachia, black lung was nearly eradicated. 

In the last two decades, US coal production has fallen precipitously. It peaked in 2008 at more than 1,170 million tons, according to the US Energy Information Administration; in 2023, production was 578 million tons, a drop of more than 50 percent. But in Pennsylvania, says Istik, “this is not a dead industry. We’re still cutting coal.” A 2024 report by the Pennsylvania Coal Alliance counted more than 5,000 mining jobs generating some $2.2 billion in economic output. Nationwide, there are still close to 40,000 coal workers. 

Black lung diagnoses continue to mount. Doctors and miner advocates say the condition is underdiagnosed, as many miners are reluctant to undergo testing for fear of losing their jobs should their employer find out. “I think there’s always going to be that fear of retribution,” said Istik. But eventually, she added, the symptoms become debilitating. Smarsh, a patient of Lungs at Work, didn’t see a doctor about his labored breathing until his wife, Alicia, insisted he had no choice. 

“Respirators are really the last line of defense,” but silica is such a small particle—it still comes through.”

Black lung clinics are seeing more and more patients like Smarsh, who’ve gotten sick in their 30s and 40s. In earlier generations, miners might have needed decades of coal dust exposure to develop serious disease, if they got sick at all. “My dad and my pap were both miners, and they didn’t get it,” Smarsh said. “So, I thought, ‘Who says I’m going to?’” But today’s workers, who are breathing a much higher proportion of silica, can develop a disabling illness in much less time.

Smarsh worked mostly as a roof bolter—the person responsible for installing supports to prevent cave-ins—drilling up into rock. He spent eight years underground before his lung condition made it impossible for him to work, or to walk across his own backyard without using an inhaler. 

Left to right: Healthy lung tissue, simple black lung disease, complicated black lung disease. NIOSH

Experts have understood the dangers of silica dust for decades. In the 1970s, NIOSH suggested regulations that would limit exposure to 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air, averaged over a 10-hour workday in the mine. In 2016, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) adopted the 50-microgram silica standard for other occupations, like construction and manufacturing. But in 2017, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA)—which is mandated to conduct quarterly inspections of underground mines and enforce safety standards—responded to industry pressure and set the limit for mining at 100 micrograms over an eight-hour workday. 

After a negotiation process that spanned years and multiple administrations and involved mining industry lobbyists, legal groups, and scientists from NIOSH and other agencies, MSHA announced in 2024 that it would issue a new rule reducing the silica exposure limit in mines to 50 micrograms, with enforcement to begin in April 2025.

The new rule would require operators to use “engineering controls,” such as improved ventilation systems, as the primary means of meeting the standard. Those tools could be supplemented, when necessary, by “administrative controls,” such as clothing decontamination and avoidance of especially dusty areas, to keep miners from breathing unacceptable amounts of silica.

The National Mining Association and other industry groups mounted a legal challenge, arguing that when ventilation systems aren’t enough to bring respirable silica levels below the 50-microgram standard, operators should be able to require miners to use respirators to achieve compliance.

But “respirators are really the last line of defense because they aren’t foolproof,” Istik said. “Silica is such a small particle; it still comes through.” 

Smarsh wore a respirator some of the time when he was underground. But there were other times, he said, when it was too difficult to see or breathe through it. “Anytime you’re underground, you see dust,” he said. “But it’s not the dust you see that gets you. It’s the little stuff you don’t see.” 

While respirators are important safety equipment, it should not be the coal miner’s responsibility not to get black lung, said Erin Bates, communications director of the United Mine Workers of America. It is the company, she added, that must ensure a safe work environment for its employees.

“If the Trump administration actually cared about protecting coal miners from black lung, we’d have a strong silica rule in place.”

When the Trump administration came into office, it cut MSHA’s budget and staff. The agency had already been operating at a disadvantage: According to data from the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, MSHA’s coal mine enforcement staff has been cut in half over the last decade. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) reported that another 7 percent of the agency’s full-time workforce accepted the Trump administration’s “Fork in the Road” buyout last year, and 90 newly hired mine inspectors had their job offers rescinded.

There were concerns among black lung experts and advocates about the diminished agency’s ability to implement the new silica exposure rule. The loss included people “we desperately needed,” Carey Clarkson, who represents Labor Department workers for the AFGE, told NPR at the time. “I can’t image how many years of experience we lost.” 

A few days before the April 2025 enforcement date, the rule hit two different roadblocks: the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals granted an emergency stay of the rule in response to a petition led by another industry group, the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association, and MSHA itself announced it would delay implementation to give operators more time to “come into compliance.” 

The litigation has remained in limbo. Last November, MSHA moved to have the legal proceedings paused as it “reconsiders” parts of the rule, and earlier this month it announced the delay would continue “indefinitely” pending judicial review. The agency did not respond to a request for comment.

Bates said the union is disheartened. The agency “was literally created for the health and safety of coal miners, but they don’t want to take that into consideration,” she said.

Rebecca Shelton, director of policy for the Appalachian Citizen’s Law Center, which has been advocating for a new silica rule since the late 2000s, said her organization had hoped to see the rule implemented under the Biden Administration “because we were concerned about challenges it might face.” The process was slowed by intense lobbying, she said, and MSHA’s need to study the rule’s impact across diverse mining industries. 

“If the Trump administration actually cared about protecting coal miners from black lung, we’d have a strong silica rule in place right now,” she said in a statement issued by the center after MSHA announced the indefinite delay. “Instead, they are hiding behind a ridiculous legal process to delay action while miners get sick and die.”

Smarsh said his 19-year-old son wants to work in the coal mines. “Me and my wife tell him all the time, you see what I’m going through? All the good coal that was around here is gone. Now there’s nothing but rock and silica.” Gone too, Smarsh said, is any trust he once had in a coal company to keep miners safe. 

“All they’re worried about is ‘you better have that black gold,’” he said. “They say they care about miners, but you go underground, you’re taking the risk, for you to get nothing but sick, and to fill their pockets full.”

As Mother’s Day approaches, a group of senators are raising the alarm about the “appalling and horrific treatment” of pregnant and nursing people in immigration detention. On Thursday, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Mazie K. Hirono (D-Hawaii), and Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) wrote to Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin demanding information about the treatment of this vulnerable group, and urging the agency to release pregnant women from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.

“There are virtually no legal safeguards for pregnant women in federal custody.”

Their letter comes on the heels of new legislation introduced this week by Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) that would establish care standards for federally incarcerated pregnant people—including those jailed in ICE and Customs and Border Protection facilities. The bill builds on one that the House already passed in 2022, which only applied to those in Bureau of Prison’s custody. 

It’s hard to know how many pregnant people are in federal custody, and what percentage of those are immigrants. In 2023, more than 700 incarcerated mothers gave birth in prison, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. Between January 1, 2025, and February 16, 2026, 363 pregnant, postpartum and nursing immigrants were deported, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Sixteen miscarriages were recorded during those six weeks. As of March, there were an estimated 126 pregnant women still being held in detention, according to the senators’ letter.

The care those who are pregnant in detention receive—or don’t receive—varies widely depending on the state they’re in, or even the individual facility. Federal guidelines are sparse: There are no federal rules on prenatal nutrition for incarcerated mothers, and some facilities still reportedly shackle pregnant inmates, even around their bellies. Some mothers are separated from their newborns only moments after birth. These practices can put mothers’ lives in danger, and can lead to miscarriages, psychological, and physical trauma. 

Kamlager-Dove’s Pregnant Women In Custody Act would mandate adequate prenatal healthcare in federal prisons, jails, and ICE detention centers. It would prohibit the use of shackles during labor, and improve health-related data collection in federal facilities. 

“It’s unacceptable that there are virtually no legal safeguards for pregnant women in federal custody, and this bill aims to right that wrong by ensuring healthier, safer futures for mothers and babies,” Rep. Kamlager-Dove wrote in a statement.

The senators who wrote to Secretary Mullin about the issue also wrote to two private contractors—Acquisition Logistics, LLC and Amentum Services, Inc.—which contracted with DHS to operate Camp East Montana, an ICE detention facility in El Paso, Texas. As the New York Times reported in March, there is no doctor onsite at that facility, yet pregnant women are held there. “When one experienced vaginal bleeding and requested medical care she was reportedly given only water, prenatal vitamins, and a temperature check,” the senators wrote.

“We write today with deep concern about the callous indifference with which this Administration appears to be mistreating this extremely vulnerable population,” they wrote in their letter to Mullin, adding: “We urge you to immediately resume the commonsense practice of presumption of release of pregnant women from ICE custody.”

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

For decades, the US Forest Service has actively managed public lands to reduce wildfire risks by clearing underbrush and trees, or employing prescribed burns—something Indigenous nations have practiced for centuries. Scientists have generally lauded the ecological benefits of what is also known as “fuel treatment.” Now, they say there’s another reason to support this approach: It saves money. 

According to a study published today in the journal Science, every dollar that the agency spent on such tactics avoided $3.73 in smoke, property, and emissions harm. “A lot of people have suggested that there could be potential economic benefits,” said Frederik Strabo, the lead author of the paper and an economist with University of California, Davis. “But it’s been a pretty understudied area.”

The study analyzed high-resolution data from 285 wildfires across 11 Western states between 2017 and 2023 that burned through areas where the Forest Service had reduced the fuel load. On average, the treatments decreased the total area burned by 36 percent and cut the amount of land burned at moderate to high severity by 26 percent. Researchers then modeled the economic benefits of those reductions. 

The paper estimated that fuel treatments prevented $1.4 billion in health and workforce productivity losses tied to wildfire smoke, $895 million in structural damage, and $503 million in carbon dioxide emissions. Overall, that amounted to an average savings of about $3.73 for every dollar the government spent. The research also found that larger treatments—those covering more than 2,400 acres—were the most cost effective. 

This research “provides further evidence that the administration’s current policy of full suppression in Western wildfire situations is misguided.”

“It’s a significant number, but when you compare it to the total cost of wildfires it’s small,” caveated Strabo, noting that the cost of the worst disasters can reach hundreds of billions of dollars. But he also said the boon could be even greater than calculated. The research didn’t, for example, examine any savings or benefits for the multibillion dollar outdoor recreation industry. “We’re only capturing a specific subset of benefits.”

Morgan Varner, the director of fire research at the conservation nonprofit Tall Timbers, called the work “the missing link for a lot of fuels treatment research,” and said that data like this can be extremely helpful in guiding decision-makers. “Studies like this round out the story and provide more evidence for the benefits of these treatments.” 

David Calkin, who until last year was a Forest Service research scientist, also applauded the analysis, calling it “novel.” But he does not find the math entirely convincing, and questions the notion that such an intangible public good can, or should, be assigned a monetary worth. “A lot of the values of fuel management are non-market,” said Calkin, who wasn’t involved in the study. Ecological benefits, for instance, can be hard to quantify, as can things like public recreation access. 

“I’m not trying to reduce the importance of fuel management and the value of it. It’s just highly uncertain,” he said. “I worry about trying to monetize the value of treatments on public lands.”

One issue Calkin notes is that such work on federal lands may not significantly mitigate the costliest fires, which ignite near communities and destroy homes and buildings. “The best way to protect a structure is at the structure itself,” he explained. That means the study could be overestimating the amount of property damage that clearing and prescribed burns avoid.

Strabo disagrees, saying that an unpublished portion of the analysis found that fires that interacted with fuel treatments accounted for a disproportionately large share of structure losses and suppression costs. “That suggests [those fires] were often among the more economically consequential wildfires,” he said, pointing to the 2021 Caldor Fire near Lake Tahoe as an example. “The fire still caused substantial damages, but treatments helped prevent it from becoming even more catastrophic.”

One thing the paper explicitly didn’t account for was the smoke and carbon dioxide emissions that intentional fires produce. “We’re finding that’s not a nontrivial amount in our research,” said Mark Kreider, a Forest Service researcher. Because wildfire is unpredictable, he explained, you inherently have to treat more of the landscape than will actually encounter flames. How to best factor those emissions in is part of Kreider’s ongoing work, but he says it could potentially even flip an analysis like the one in Strabo’s paper. Still, he said, that doesn’t undermine the core point that fuel treatments are effective.

“It’s very clear,” he said, “that on the whole they are very beneficial.”

Not everyone supports such tactics. Critics argue they can harm ecosystems, disproportionately target larger trees, and open forests to logging under the guise of fire prevention. Some opponents also contend that this approach is less effective against extreme fires, while others question whether public funds would be better spent hardening homes and communities.

The federal government’s approach to forest management has shifted since President Donald Trump returned to office. In 2022, the Forest Service released a 10-year wildfire plan that increased forest management and prescribed burns. The Trump administration, which has announced plans to radically remake the agency, has placed greater emphasis on fighting wildfires than preventing them. According the Forest Service, in 2025, the agency reduced vegetation on about 1 million fewer acres than in 2024.

A Forest Service spokesperson attributed most of that decline to elevated wildfire activity in the Southeast. The agency also called 2025 “one the most successful wildfire years in recent history.” But critics worry it is moving away from proactive forest management.

“The takeaway that I really got from this article was that it provides further evidence that the administration’s current policy of full suppression in Western wildfire situations is misguided,” said Heather Stricker, a climate and lands analyst with the Sierra Club. While that approach might sound protective, she said a large body of research shows that it can often backfire. “This paper reiterated a lot of that previous research, but then took it a step further to quantify the cost savings.” 

The Trump administration has also announced plans to increase logging on federal lands. This has added to longstanding fears from environmental groups that instead of thoughtful, well-managed fuel treatment, the government could resort to clear-cutting. Even the paper notes this resistance. “Public pressure and risk aversion,” it reads, “skew wildfire management resources toward fire suppression rather than prevention.”

Strabo is hopeful that by adding to the range of evidence supporting forest management, his paper could help guide policymakers. “We could have these economic and ecological benefits if we scaled it up,” he said. “It’s a critically underfunded public good.”

Over the past four days, bettors on the prediction platform Polymarket have wagered nearly $3 million on whether we’ll see a hantavirus pandemic this year. A cluster of cases of a particularly deadly strain of the virus erupted on a cruise ship last month, killing three people out of eight suspected cases linked to the vessel. Though the news has stoked fears, the World Health Organization currently classifies the risk of a full-blown pandemic as low. 

But Polymarket users are spending big across several hantavirus-related propositions—including whether a vaccine will be developed this year and whether or not officials will tie the cruise ship outbreak to a “lab leak.” Polymarket declined to comment on hantavirus betting. 

“I want to be unequivocal here. This is not the start of a Covid pandemic,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, director of epidemic and pandemic management at the WHO, at a Thursday press conference. “This is not Covid, this is not influenza. It spreads very, very differently.”

Because outbreaks of this hantavirus strain have occurred before, infectious disease experts already know that the virus requires close contact to spread between people, and a person with the virus is only infectious for about a day. Just as those metrics allow public health officials to calibrate their response, they also inform how some online gamblers are placing their money.

Online gambling has been on the rise since sports betting was legalized by the Supreme Court in 2018, but the Covid pandemic gave it a huge boost. In 2020, sports betting revenues jumped up 69 percent over the previous year, though not too many sports events were happening.

But there were other bets to be placed, like how many people would die from Covid-19, a topic some people wagered on as early as April 2020. At the time, those bets were illegal, the subjects of online betting being more strictly regulated. But a 2024 court ruling took the rails off of websites known as prediction markets. Now, on mega-platforms like Polymarket and Kashi, users can bet on almost anything—including public health crises.

“Anybody who’s betting on a viral spread, I’m going to…guess that they have an addiction problem when it comes to gambling,” says John W. Ayers, a public health professor at University of California, San Diego. “If someone is very addicted to gambling, they’re more likely to find themselves interacting with these more fringe things you could possibly bet on.”

For several years, public health experts have been concerned that gambling addictions are on the rise, though the exact numbers are hard to pin down. A study Ayers led that came out last year found that Google searches seeking help for gambling addiction jumped 23 percent nationwide since the legalization of sports betting. Other researchers estimate about 10 percent of men ages 18 to 30 have a problematic relationship to gambling. 

Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket grow based on use, helping the range of niche bets to multiply—and since taking off during the Covid pandemic, the prediction-market industry has multiplied in size many times. By 2030, it’s been estimated, prediction markets could  grow to $1 trillion in annual trading volume.

That gambling is a public health issue in itself, Ayers says. Gambling addiction is correlated with other forms of addiction that are significant sources of premature deaths in the US. Financial stress isn’t great for your health, either. 

“Culturally, it’s normalized, and now we give it this veneer of, ‘Oh, it’s not gambling. It’s a prediction market.’ Doesn’t matter,” Ayers says. “The harm still exists. Call it a prediction market or a sports book, you’re still losing money, and the house always wins on these bets.”

Unlike many other forms of addiction, gambling problems can often be invisible before someone hits rock bottom, especially now that most of these transactions are happening in an app. It is possible to regulate prediction markets and place barriers on addictive behaviors—some countries place limits on how many bets a person can take, restrict the use of credit cards, or institute mandatory rest periods between bets—but right now, the US more or less doesn’t. Instead, we bet on everything: viruses included.

“The fact that people will gamble on these things indicates to me the larger societal problem—everything becomes an opportunity for monetization,” Ayers says.

Or as Donald Trump put it earlier this year, “the whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino…it is what it is.”

When the FBI showed up at a warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize hundreds of boxes of 2020 election records this past January, County Commissioner Dana Barrett thought it looked less like a criminal investigation and more like political theater. 

It’s been more than five years since the election, the results already had been investigated multiple times, and the ballots had been counted, recounted, and recounted again.

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The lie that the 2020 election was stolen has persisted. And the “Stop the Steal” movement’s most ardent believers now hold unprecedented positions of power, including on the once-sleepy State Election Board in the important swing state of Georgia. A lawyer known for his willingness to take on long-shot election cases has gone from a little-known private practice attorney to a role in the White House, overseeing the country’s election integrity effort—despite being sanctioned by a court for making “unequivocally false” assertions around voting. And everyday members of the movement are trying to change what they fervently believe is a broken system—at the risk of actually breaking it in the process.

This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporter Abby Vesoulis and Reveal’s Najib Aminy examine how the long shadow of doubt over the 2020 elections is being weaponized and what it means ahead of the 2026 midterms.

35-year-old Benjamin Moore has lived in Mountain Meadows Mobile Home Park, outside Bozeman, Montana, since he was 17. This month, for the first time, he’s withholding his rent.

On May 1, Moore received a rent bill for $947, up 11 percent from the month before, and the second hike in nine months—the product of the park’s sale to an undisclosed buyer. 

Moore hung a sign on his trailer that says “RENT STRIKE.” He and his neighbors in Mountain Meadows and nearby King Arthur Park, organized with the citywide group Bozeman Tenants United, are collectively withholding over $50,000 a month from their landlord. 

Historically, trailer parks have been a relatively affordable housing option—a third of trailer park residents in America live below the poverty line. But on average, their cost of living has risen 45 percent over the past decade. By unionizing, the Bozeman trailer park tenants believe they might be able to fight the most recent rent hike—especially given the state of their housing. 

For years, tenants say, the maintenance hasn’t been attended to: tree limbs hang perilously over trailers, and water shutoffs are a regular occurrence. “I cannot recall a time in the past 20 years where we had three straight months of water and power working all day, every day,” Moore said. 

Shauna Thompson, another resident, calls the water “atrocious…like a Milky Way, like you’re drinking skim milk. It’s very nasty and turned off all the time, without any notice.” And tenants allege that they’ve experienced retribution for maintenance requests, punitive eviction attempts, and unsafe conditions. 

Members of Bozeman Tenants United, including Benjamin Moore and Shauna Thompson, rip up their rent increase notices. Jered McCafferty

“It’s really hard on people here,” Moore said. Some residents are “already paying their entire Social Security check for rent. It’s a very poor neighborhood. We’ve got old folks. We’ve got young families. We’ve got working-class people who can’t afford anything else.”

For the past four decades, a group called Oakland Properties has owned both trailer parks. When they learned about the sale, tenants were scared that their parks would be bulldozed, or that their rent would be increased even further, forcing them to move. 

The tenants attempted to buy the parks themselves, but were decisively outbid. The winning bidder demanded an NDA. The transaction should be finalized next month, park owner Gary Oakland said, but residents still don’t know who’s going to own the land they live on.

This month’s rent hike, Oakland acknowledged, was “part and parcel” of the sale. But for tenants, it’s a catastrophe. On top of the $947 lot rent—more than double the national average—many residents also pay off home loans on their trailers, as well as insurance and utilities costs.

Oakland calls claims of broken utilities “nonsense”: “If it was such a bad place to live, why would the homes be selling for such high dollars?” he said. The rent strike, Oakland points out, is “just a group of people not paying their rent.”

Some people are rationing their medication to make ends meet, Moore said. “There’s one person who canceled Life Alert. It’s either Life Alert or rent, and if you don’t pay rent, they evict you and throw you in the streets.” 

Many of the tenants of King Arthur and Mountain Meadows parks rely on a fixed income to pay their rent.Jered McCafferty

Tenant organizers across the nation have found a foothold in recent years organizing against individual landlords, and Bozeman’s tenant union, situated in one of the fastest-growing communities in the state, is no exception. Tenant unions from Los Angeles to Kansas City to New York have organized to win rent freezes, maintenance, and security in their homes.

Mobile home parks—increasingly private-equity-owned and uniquely at-risk in the face of climate disasters—are organizing, too: a group of trailer park residents in Columbia, Missouri, unionized in February. In Montana, as Rebecca Burns recently wrote for In These Times, mobile homes were already once a site of tenant organizing: buoyed by the state’s miners unions, the first Bozeman-area mobile home tenants’ union won an agreement with their landlord in 1978.  

Oakland says park residents “have been terrorized by the union,” and plans to evict the strikers. The strikers say they’ve retained a lawyer and will fight to stay in their homes.

“I wish none of this was happening,” Moore said. “Your utilities should work. Your place should be safe. You should be able to get in and out of it. These are the absolute basics, and they just haven’t kept them up. And if you call them on it, they threaten you.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently tried, unsuccessfully, to feed cinnamon Altoids to a Park Police horse. Also, Burgum enjoys artificial intelligence, in particular “AI Teddy,” a planned exhibit at a new facility scheduled to open on July 4 at Theodore Roosevelt National Park. And, it seems, he likes the band Creed.

Those are among the idiosyncratic pieces of information communicated by Burgum during an 88-minute address Wednesday at an “All-Hands” meeting held for around 70,000 Interior Department employees.

In many ways, the Interior Department seems to be struggling. The Trump administration is working to slash the budget and workforce of department components like the US Geological Survey and National Park Service.
Meanwhile the department is racing to open federal lands to mining. And Interior is hurling billions of dollars and no-bid contracts toward what critics call “vanity projects” tied to Trump’s plan for MAGA-style celebrations of America’s 250th anniversary. Those festivities will include a UFC fight at the White House on the president’s 80th birthday and an Indy Car race around the National Mall.

But Burgum on Wednesday touted the department’s “administrative efficiency.” And, in often discursive remarks wending through DOI programs, he made various calls for reducing “red tape” and “redundancies.”

I watched video of Burgum’s remarks and heard from Interior Department employees, who, on the condition of anonymity, provided fact-checking, and mockery, of the secretary’s address.

Some pointed out the irony of Burgum causing thousands of federal employees with more pressing tasks to sit through a hour-and-a-half harangue on operating efficiently. It’s not clear how many DOI employees attended event in person or virtually. The department’s press office didn’t respond when asked how many people were on the call.

Employees pointed out that the first half of Burgum’s speech—organized around slides touting the words, “Gratitude,” “Humility,” Curiosity,” and “Courage”—largely repeated remarks Burgum made about a year ago at a previous departmental all-hands meeting. One department employee said that Burgum had even repeated some of the same anecdotes from the prior year. Employees also noted that for the second year in a row, as the meeting concluded, the Creed song “Higher” played in the auditorium.

Among notable asides was Burgum’s description of his encounter with Sibbell, a US Park Police horse that eats Altoids. Burgum informed the Interior Department that he had encountered the mare during a recent event celebrating plans for the NFL to hold its 2027 draft on the National Mall. “I pull out the Altoids, my favorite…cinnamon Altoids,” he said. “And she did not even blink. It was like: ‘I could care less about your cinnamon Altoids.'”

The upshot of the anedote was that Sibbell (like many horses) prefers mint-flavored candy. But it was also part of lengthy celebration of the Park Police, one component of Interior Department that is receiving more money under Trump. Burgum said that was due to that agency helping the Interior Department to play “a massive part” in the president’s effort to “get DC safe and beautiful.”

That is a euphemistic reference to the deeply unpopular occupation of Washington, DC that Trump began last year. As part of that effort, Burgum deputized immigration agents—who are part of the Department of Homeland Security—to accompany Park Police officers patrolling National Park land in DC. The Park Police helped ICE agents by conducting traffic stops on federal roads and property in the district, in what critics charge was racial profiling.

Park Police also helped carry out Trump’s push to remove homeless encampments in DC. Burgum said Wednesday the agency had “eliminated 82 homeless camps.” And he claimed that occurred without “a front page story and barely a back page story in the Washington Post. It wasn’t even covered.”

In fact, the Post and other outlets reported extensively on the homeless camp removals in stories that noted, contrary to Burgum’s claims Wednesday, that many of the people ousted from tents on federal land did not receive services, or beds in local shelters. Large numbers remain unhoused and some appear to have returned to their former camps.

But the secretary did not tarry on on such wrinkles. In his remarks, he touted Rwanda’s and Ecuador’s park management as worthy of US emulation. “If you’re an American and you wanted to go see the gorillas in Rwanda, or you want to go to the Galapagos Islands, get ready to pay about $800 a day,” Burgum said, in a justification for new fees on foreigners at national parks that critics argue are hurting tourism.

On Burgum’s instructions, the department is removing hundreds of signs and exhibits about American history and science from federal sites to comply with a Trump order to ensure placards are “uplifting” and free of “improper ideology.” As I’ve reported, the purge includes a sign at Fort Laramie in Wyoming about a funeral the US Army held for the daughter of a Lakota chief; signs at Glacier National Park about wildfires, wolves, and the use of dams to support agriculture; and placards at Big Bend National Park about fossils and geology.

But the Park Service is planning to open a new library at an entrance to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Burgum’s home state of North Dakota as part of the 250th anniversary celebration. And Burgum on Wednesday sounded especially jazzed that the library plans to give visitors the chance to play “that parlor game, which figure in history would you like to have dinner with?”

An “AI Teddy,” Burgum said, will answer questions using words Roosevelt wrote or spoke during his lifetime. It’s unclear whether that will include racist statements Teddy made about Black people (“inferior to the whites”) or Native Americans (“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every 10 are”).

Burgum, who last year signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Arab Emirates to collaborate on artificial intelligence, touts the technology as a way for the department to improve efficiency. “If you’re concerned about AI taking your job, then I would just say learn how to use AI and, and, and your job will get better,” he said Wednesday.

Amid the DOGE-driven firing of thousands of National Park Service employees, that agency had lost nearly a quarter of its workforce by mid-2025. Much of the department faces new proposed budget cuts. For a number of remaining employees—many of whom say they feel overworked and beset by ill-advised initiatives from the Trump administration—Burgum’s touting of “administrative efficiency” landed poorly.  

Burgum “has implemented 1,700 bureaucratic hurdles on everything we do,” one DOI employee wrote. “No exhibits or social media posts without approval. No travel without approval. Credit card limits…This is the main dissonance of his entire message.”

The all-hands event included awards to department employees who had excelled at cutting “red-tape,” and a QR code for “Interior’s Innovation & Red Tape Reduction Survey.” That form allows agency employees to identify inefficiencies “in the context of mission delivery at Interior…that, if solved, could result in demonstrable improvements in your daily work life and in benefits to industry or the American public.”

The form is publicly accessible, and the Resistance Rangers, a group  of current and former National Park Service employees, this week asked its followers to weigh in and send Burgum a message: “fund our parks and stop censoring science and history.”

On Wednesday, the White House released a new “United States Counterterrorism Strategy,” the first such directive since a 2021 Biden-era memo emphasizing the need to combat white supremacist violence, which has now been scrubbed from the White House website.

Wednesday’s document, masterminded by White House “counterterrorism czar” Sebastian Gorka, does not mention far-right violence at all. It identifies “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” as a security threat of equal severity to “Legacy Islamist Terrorists” and “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs.” The administration will now apparently “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

In a bizarre but familiar turn, the document also blames transgender people for the shooting of Charlie Kirk. “Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”

The Heritage Foundation has also worked to connect being trans with terrorism, campaigning for the FBI to designate trans advocacy as violent extremism. 

Gorka told reporters at a press conference Wednesday that the administration would “crush” any threat, “whether it is the cartels, the jihadists or violent left-wing extremists like antifa—and like the transgender killers, the nonbinary, the left-wing radicals who killed my friend, Charlie Kirk, we will take them on, head on.”

In 2023, Trump claimed falsely that there had been an “incredible rise” in the number of transgender shooters, claims that now resurface whenever shootings occur. 

But the document reads less like a plan than a list of targets. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the House Committee on Homeland Security’s ranking Democrat, noted in a press release that the document left out the far right—the group most likely to commit violent acts against civilians on US soil—“despite years of data proving that right-wing extremism has presented the most persistent and deadly threats to Americans for decades.”

Instead, Thompson said, the White House had produced “a document full of fake administration counterterrorism ‘achievements,’ including mass deportations and more than 40 unauthorized and deadly military strikes on vessels in the Western Hemisphere. There are zero strategic objectives, lines of effort, or agency assignments.”

Counterterrorism itself is a politicized term that came into common use following the September 11 attacks and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It formed part of the language of the policing apparatus that targeted Muslim and Arab Americans and legitimized surveillance of those communities as “terrorist threats.” That same language is now being applied to transgender people. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has called Kirk’s death a “domestic 9/11.” The Heritage Foundation, too, has done its best to connect being transgender with the idea of terrorism, campaigning last year for the FBI to designate trans advocacy as violent extremism. 

“We will…identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally,” the document says. 

Donald Trump and his family have added billions to their net worth since Inauguration Day, with much of that new wealth coming from a dizzying array of crypto projects. But some of those gains are under threat, thanks to the crypto sector’s recent struggles. The latest blow is a second consecutive reported loss for Eric Trump’s American Bitcoin Corp, a wind-powered bitcoin mining company. The $82 million loss, from the first quarter of 2026, is largely due to the continued slump in bitcoin prices. It follows the same pattern as Trump Media and Technology Group—the parent company of the president’s Truth Social platform—which has lost $1.1 billion since its founding, almost entirely due to losses on bitcoin.

Both companies are using what’s known as a bitcoin treasury strategy—a relatively simple business plan wherein a firm just acquires as much bitcoin as possible. As long as the price of bitcoin goes up, the company gets more valuable. The problem is, the plan only works if the price of bitcoin goes up, and for the last seven months, the price of Bitcoin has mostly been down. The price of one bitcoin peaked late last year at $126,198, then collapsed all the way to $64,856 in February. Since the end of the first quarter, it has partially rebounded to around $80,000.

The strategy was first pioneered by investor Michael Saylor, who has used his company Strategy to acquire more than 813,000 bitcoins. It was a system that served his company’s stock price well, helping it rocket from around $50 in January 2024, to more than $405 a share last July. Saylor has been something of an evangelist for this strategy, and for bitcoin generally; Eric Trump has repeatedly cited Saylor as a model for his own ambitions.

But Saylor’s stock price has crashed, its down to around $181, and the company’s bitcoin supply has plummeted in value as well. Saylor’s company posted a $12.5 billion loss in the first quarter, and he has suggested he will begin “actively managing” the company’s bitcoin hoard, rather than simply accumulating more and more.

The good news for Eric Trump and his father is that if the price of bitcoin continues to bounce back, the strategy can become highly profitable again. And the federal government, a branch of which Donald Trump controls, may soon be stepping in to give the price of bitcoin a nice goose.

There are two major opportunities for the Trump administration to do something positive for the price of bitcoin in the coming weeks:

• Passage of the CLARITY Act: One of the most unsettling things about crypto for a lot of investors is the lack of regulatory certainty. Trump has vowed to make the United States the “crypto capital” by passing landmark legislation, the CLARITY Act, which is supposed to establish cryptocurrency as a legitimate, if somewhat lightly-regulated, investment tool. The legislation has been stalled in Congress for much of the last year, in part due to Democratic opposition over conflict-of-interest concerns involving Trump. But a compromise was reached this week in the House, and now the bill needs to pass the Senate; Trump is aiming to sign it by July 4. Just based on the news that it had passed the House, the price of bitcoin jumped over $80,000 for the first time in months this week.
• US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve: The US government already owns a lot of bitcoin, mainly thanks to the seizure of digital currency in criminal cases. Last March, Trump issued an executive order directing the US government to do essentially what Trump Media and Technology Group and American Bitcoin are doing: intentionally build as big a pile of bitcoin as possible. Trump hasn’t given any real specific reasons why the US government should do this—he has generally alluded to the need to beat China—but it would be a boon for bitcoin, a full-throated endorsement by the US government of the idea that bitcoin is a valuable thing that should be accumulated. There hasn’t been a ton of action on this plan, but in late April, an administration crypto adviser said that a “big announcement” is coming soon.

Neither move would necessarily return bitcoin’s price to last year’s stratospheric levels. But if the Trump administration’s efforts boost the price even a little, it will be a major win for the First Family’s bottom line.

JUST IN: White House Executive Director says there will be a "big announcmentvin the next few" weeks regarding a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve pic.twitter.com/ZmCOfxuJaD

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) April 27, 2026