Mother Jones

North Korea launched several ballistic missiles toward the Sea of Japan on Thursday, according to South Korea’s military—just a day after the North dismissed Donald Trump’s seeming attempt at appeasement by cutting back on joint military training with South Korea. 

“The provocative, aggressive nature of the drills won’t change even though their duration and size were reduced,” Kim Yo Jong, a top figure in North Korea’s ruling party and supreme leader Kim Jong Un’s sister, said on Wednesday, pointing to other military drills the US and South Korea carried out earlier this year and to South Korea accelerating its development of nuclear-powered submarines.

Before the drills began this week, North Korea said it would retaliate with “a new level of a deterrent.” North Korea had already fired at least two ballistic missiles into the sea earlier this month before the barrage on Thursday.

While Kim Yo Jong said relations between her brother and Trump are “still excellent”, she said she was “completely unaware” of any communications between the pair following Trump’s decision to scale back the joint drills this month by about half—a claim the US president made earlier this week. 

The back-and-forth between Kim Jong Un and Trump goes back to Trump’s first term, where peace negotiations between the pair collapsed in 2019 amid disputes over how much sanctions relief North Korea would receive for partial denuclearization. Kim has since sought to further militarize and cooperate with Russia, but he said last September that he would be open to resuming talks if the US dropped its “obsession” with eliminating North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

But Trump’s decision to cut military training with South Korea looks to have had only negative consequences, angering that country to the point of President Lee Jae Myung calling to retake full control of its military operations from the US—despite Trump both claiming that the move would keep countries like South Korea and Japan safe and pushing other countries in Asia to ramp up their own defense spending and look for new allies.

Ecto World, a Buffalo, New York–based company that distributes vape products and faces legal troubles, believed it needed an influential friend in Washington, DC.

Over the past three years, officials in New York state and New York City have accused the firm of illegal business practices. In March, police in New York state seized more than 28,000 pounds of illicit vape products linked to the firm, which operates under the name Demand Vape, and Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that an investigation had found that the company had been “illegally shipping massive quantities of vape products” across the state and that “criminal charges against Ecto World and its owner will be pursued” by local district attorneys. A year earlier, New York State Attorney General Letitia James sued Ecto World and other vape companies for illegally distributing, marketing, and selling addictive candy- and fruit-flavored disposable nicotine products, many produced in China, targeting sales to children and “fueling the youth vaping epidemic.”

New York City filed a similar lawsuit in 2023, claiming that Ecto World; an affiliate named Magellan Technology; Matthew Glauser, president of Ecto and Magellan; and two other Magellan executives violated “nearly every federal, New York State and New York City law applicable to the marketing, distribution, and sale of flavored e-cigarettes, the sales of which are prohibited under laws enacted by all three jurisdictions.”

“Roger has good relationships with people in the administration,” Glauser said, noting that Stone was “making sure they hear…our message.”

But as it has come under fire in New York, Ecto World has found a champion in the nation’s capital, one it has paid well for: Roger Stone, the longtime adviser to President Donald Trump, conspiracy theorist, and political provocateur who was convicted of lying to Congress and witness tampering in the Trump–Russia investigation, sentenced to 40 months in prison, and subsequently pardoned by Trump. Earlier this year, it retained Stone as a lobbyist and, as of the end of June, had compensated him at least $300,000 for his efforts, according to lobbying disclosure reports filed with Congress. The reports note that Stone would focus on the “Executive Office of the President” regarding the “regulation of e-cigarettes and related products.”

In an interview with Mother Jones, Glauser said, “Contrary to popular belief, we’re actually a responsible company,” and insisted that its goal is to “fix the broken regulatory system” governing e-cigarettes and vaping products. “The reason we brought Roger Stone on is to accomplish that,” added Glauser, a board member of the Vapor Technology Association, a trade group that has been criticized in right-wing media for not doing enough to stop the flow of illicit vaping products from China into the United States.

Trump’s return to the White House has been a tremendous boon to Stone, who not long ago was claiming he had been nearly bankrupted by legal fees and who, with his wife, was accused by the IRS of not paying nearly $2 million in taxes in a case he settled by agreeing to cover that amount plus interest and penalties.

Since Trump’s restoration, Stone’s lobbying firm, Drake Ventures, has signed up a variety of clients, including two Native American tribes, a rare-earth mineral company, a biotech firm developing vaccines, and Roger Ver, a cryptocurrency investor known as “Bitcoin Jesus” who was indicted on federal fraud and tax charges. Ver paid Stone $600,000 for his services. (In October, months after Stone was hired by Ver, the Justice Department settled the case; Ver paid nearly $50 million in back taxes, penalties, and interest, and the Trump administration dropped the charges against him.) Stone has pulled in over $4 million in fees for his lobbying efforts, according to congressional records.

Working with the DCI Group, a Washington, DC–based lobbying powerhouse, Stone has also been hired to peddle his influence by foreign states, including the governments of the Bahamas and Nigeria, as well as the military junta of Myanmar, which has been paying him $50,000 a month, according to Justice Department filings. Since mounting a violent coup in 2021 that overthrew a democratically elected government, the junta has been committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

During Trump’s second stint as president, vaping regulation has been a contentious issue—and a cause ripe for lobbyists. Vaping and tobacco companies have pushed for easing restrictions on e-cigarettes and vaping products. In his first administration, Trump imposed limits on flavored e-cigarettes that are widely seen as designed to target children. But in his 2024 campaign, he vowed to “save” vaping and has become an ally of the industry.

Nevertheless, in September, federal agents conducted nationwide raids to seize Chinese-made vape products—illicit Chinese imports comprise much of the vaping market in the United States—and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said this marked the beginning of a broader crackdown. “The Chinese are getting richer while our children get sicker, and we’re putting an end to that,” he proclaimed at a press conference.

In March, 71 GOP House members called on the Trump administration “to take decisive action to curb the influx of illegal, youth-oriented e-cigarettes that openly flout U.S. and Chinese law.” One of those congressmen, Rep. Brad Knott (R-NC), claimed the Vapor Technology Association has been “wrapped up” in a “scheme” mounted by China to flood the US market with vape products.

This year, though, Trump took action to help the domestic vaping industry and tobacco firms. He pressured Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary to approve flavored vapes.

Makary opposed doing so, fearing such products increase vaping among minors. But in May, the agency gave an okay to several flavors. A week later, Makary resigned. (Soon after the FDA decision, the New York Times reported that on April 30, tobacco company Reynolds American donated $5 million to a super PAC supporting Trump, and two days later, executives for Reynolds and another tobacco company had a lunch meeting with Trump and griped about the FDA. During the meal, Trump called Kennedy and Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and complained about the FDA’s regulation of e-cigarettes.)

Stone began lobbying for Ecto World at the start of this year. Was he involved in the decision to approve some flavored products? Glauser declined to say whom Stone was talking to or provide details on his lobbying for the vaping firm. “Roger has good relationships with people in the administration,” Glauser said, noting that Stone was “making sure they hear…our message.” A business associate of Stone, who asked not to be identified, said that Stone had advised Glauser to move away from “bubblegum” flavors and that Glauser was annoyed by that suggestion.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Stone was a prominent lobbyist in Washington, DC, working for the Republican-dominated firm Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. (The Manafort was Paul Manafort, who in 2016 chaired Trump’s campaign and was subsequently convicted of a bundle of financial crimes and other offenses, sentenced to seven and a half years in prison, and eventually pardoned by Trump.) In 1992, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, as well as several other DC influence-selling outfits, earned the nickname “the torturers’ lobby” for representing authoritarian regimes, dictators, and militant groups accused of human rights abuses. “After his sex scandal”—the National Enquirer in 1996 reported that Stone and his wife had placed ads in swingers magazines seeking sexual partners—“he couldn’t get corporate work,” the Stone business associate said. “Now his sex scandal seems tame, and he’s back to the stuff he did in the Black, Manafort, Stone days.”

Stone did not reply to a request for comment about his lobbying for Ecto World and a list of questions sent to him and to Grant Smith, an attorney listed on Stone’s lobby disclosure report as the contact for Stone’s firm. When a Mother Jones reporter called Smith’s phone number, identified himself, and asked to speak to Smith, the man who answered said, “He’s not available” and hung up. When Smith was later reached, he said: “I’m not talking. I have nothing to say.”

The legal actions filed against Ecto World and its associated companies, as well as other official investigations, have raised questions about the firm’s conduct and ethics.

When the 14 tons of products linked to Ecto World were seized by police in March, Hochul said the seizure was a “major” blow against “illegal operations that put our communities at risk.” In announcing her lawsuit against Ecto World and other vape companies, James blasted these firms for exploiting children: “They’re making nicotine seem cool, getting kids hooked, and creating a massive public health crisis in the process.” (Glauser said in a statement at the time that this lawsuit was “wasting New York taxpayers’ money and federal court time.”)

That lawsuit noted that Magellan Technology, the Ecto affiliate, “contracts with Chinese companies to manufacture certain e-cigarette brands in China, import them into the U.S., and then transfers the products” to Demand Vape, “who then sells and ships the products to other distributors.” Demand Vape, the filing charges, sold banned flavored e-cigarettes to New York distributors and retailers and “profited immensely from their illegal sales,” bringing in $389 million in revenue from its sales in New York from 2018 to 2024.

The suit alleged that Demand Vape “routinely accepted import shipments falsely labeled as ‘battery chargers,’ even though they were aware that the contents were flavored e-cigarettes” and had “long been aware that their commercial conduct is illegal.” It contended that Demand Vape has “targeted adolescents” for its flavored vape products.

The New York City lawsuit against Ecto World, Magellan Technology, Glauser, and others, which was filed in federal court, claimed, “So flagrant is Defendants’ law-breaking that Magellan-Demand Vape’s owner publicly admits…‘[to] ensur[ing] that retailers across New York can offer’ flavored e-cigarettes—despite the plain prohibition against sales enacted under federal, State and New York City law.”

“I don’t comment on active litigation, but we will have our day in court and we will be fine,” Glauser told Mother Jones. He did not respond to a list of detailed questions subsequently sent to him about Ecto World’s activities, the lawsuits it faces, and Stone’s lobbying on its behalf.

Ecto World and its affiliates have been subject to other government investigations. Earlier this year, the US International Trade Commission launched an investigation into Ecto World, Magellan Technology, and 14 other vape companies based in the United States or China for unfair trading practices. Ecto World and Magellan subsequently sought an order from a federal appeals court to terminate or stay the investigation; in June, their petition was rejected.

In December 2024, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, then the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, sent a letter to Glauser, noting, “The United States is currently experiencing an unacceptably high level of youth e-cigarette use, fueled in significant part by illegal tobacco products illicitly imported from the People’s Republic of China (PRC).” He pointed out that “it appears that your company openly distributes flavored disposable vapes made in the PRC which are marketed and sold in the U.S. without FDA authorization. These devices put millions of young Americans at risk for developing a lifelong nicotine addiction. During adolescence, exposure to nicotine through products like e-cigarettes can also harm brain development, particularly the parts of the brain related to attention, learning, mood, and impulse control. Sales of these unauthorized tobacco products are not only clearly prohibited, but also immensely harmful.”

Krishnamoorthi requested that Ecto World provide information on its business operations and its dealings with China. Glauser never responded, according to Krishnamoorthi’s office.

In 2021, the Department of Homeland Security opened an investigation into Magellan Technology for “suspected conspiracy to defraud the United States Government of revenue,” according to internal DHS documents obtained by Mother Jones. These investigative reports noted the agency “received information that Magellan Technology is undervaluing vape pens imported from China to evade 2.6% duty and 25% tariff.” Homeland Security Investigations conducted surveillance of the company’s office and a search of the office and a warehouse used by the firm.

The investigation, according to a DHS memo, “determined that Magellan Technology Inc. failed to pay millions of dollars in import duties.” The case concluded with Magellan cutting a check for $23 million in unpaid duties and penalties.

The lobbying disclosure form that Stone had to file regarding his representation of Ecto World included a question that asks, “Have any of the lobbyists listed on this report been convicted in a Federal or State Court of an offense involving bribery, extortion, embezzlement, an illegal kickback, tax evasion, fraud, a conflict of interest, making a false statement, perjury, or money laundering?”

Stone checked the yes box and added: “Obstruction of Proceeding, False Statements, Witness Tampering. Mr. Stone received a Presidential Pardon for all of these offenses in 2020.”

Asked whether Stone’s convictions for these crimes caused him any concern, Glauser said, “I don’t judge people by their past.”

Check out David Corn’s forthcoming book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, at HowRussiaWon.com.

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

Dominika Parry never stopped fighting for Jackson, Mississippi, residents even after the Trump administration terminated a multibillion-dollar program last year meant to help the Black city still reeling from a water crisis. 

For years, if water did flow out of Black households’ faucets in Jackson at all, it was often brown. It left elders and babies with rashes and caused a slew of health problems across the city.

Parry and other community leaders and organizations got some semblance of hope in 2023 with a federal grant. Yet, two years later—before any funds could be distributed—President Donald Trump entered office and terminated a $2.8 billion program meant to help mitigate the harm from climate change and environmental issues in Black, low-income, and disadvantaged communities. 

More than a year later, federal courts stepped in and rebuked the administration’s effort to dismantle climate funding. The case centers on the administration’s effort to roll back climate investments authorized by Congress under the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s cornerstone economic policy.

The administration, which shed a quarter of its EPA workers, now says the agency lacks the money and staff to implement the grant program.

Last month, a South Carolina federal judge ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to resume distributing funds designed to address environmental and health challenges in underserved communities.

The July ruling came just before the DC Circuit Court blocked the EPA from rescinding nearly $20 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund awards. That program is different from the environmental justice grants promised to Jackson and other overburdened communities. 

That means that over $22 billion meant for climate and environmental projects in disadvantaged communities may soon be distributed. 

Parry did not respond to requests for comment after the ruling, but Matt Sedlar, climate analyst at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said the outcomes of these lawsuits are “sending a message to the administration that the separation of powers exists and that it must follow the law.”

In 2023, a $20 million federal grant offered a life-saving chance for the Jackson’s poorest. The money was for a resilience hub that would offer year-round access to housing where the lights would stay on with clean drinking water in the time of disaster by funding a micro electric grid. It would also include backup generators, an independent water well, showers, and overnight shelter for up to 150 people at a time facing water issues in their home.

The goal was building “a place where people can come, stay overnight, have access to energy, be in healthy conditions,” Parry said last year. Parry founded the recipient group 2C Mississippi, a Ridgeland-based nonprofit focused on climate resilience in Mississippi.

Since February 2025, the billions made available through the Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program have languished as the Trump administration has moved to gut a historic number of environmental rules and protections. The Associated Press estimates that the EPA programs and rules cut were projected to prevent roughly 30,000 deaths per year, particularly in Black and disadvantaged communities. 

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was designed as a $27 billion national clean-energy financing program. Its goal was also to make clean-energy investments like home-energy upgrades, solar installations, and electric vehicles more accessible in low-income and disadvantaged communities that have historically been shut out of affordable green financing.

The Trump administration has already moved to appeal the judge’s ruling regarding the environmental and climate justice grant program, claiming that the EPA now lacks the money and staff to implement the program. (The Trump administration has fired 25 percent of EPA workers since 2024, bringing the agency to its lowest staff total ever.) 

Already, some of the programs that received the initial approval for funding in 2024 have ceased to exist, including a solar installation program for formerly incarcerated people in Houston. 

Last year, Leon Dillard, a formerly incarcerated man who was a part of the program before it was cut, said the climate-friendly work gave him a “sense of purpose.” 

“I really just needed to be a part of [the program], be a part of something,” he said. “You have to make a choice to take a chance, or your life will never change. But you need other people with you on that journey.”

It is likely that the administration will attempt to appeal the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund ruling as well. 

After prison, Leon Dillard participated in a solar installation program for formerly incarcerated people in Houston. The program no longer exists. Adam Mahoney/Capital B

Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program projects include: 

• More than $14 million to install wastewater systems in Alabama’s Blackbelt communities where failing septic systems and untreated sewage have long sickened Black residents.
• A $500,000 micro electric grid project in Gentilly, a historically Black New Orleans neighborhood that has faced chronic flooding, heat, and power-outage risk, particularly during hurricane season.
• A $20 million grant for four connected disaster hubs in Florida’s historically Black areas of Lee County. The hubs would include cooling centers and, during disasters, sites for electricity, communications, water and food distribution, and emergency health support. The project also included money for stormwater treatment, new shade trees, and workforce training.
• $500,000 for solar-workforce training for formerly incarcerated Texans, illegal-dumping cleanup, and environmental education in a Black community in Houston overburdened by pollution. 
• $20 million to weatherize, electrify, repair, and improve air quality in 500 homes in East Alabama and West Georgia. The plan also included 10 solar-and-battery resilience hubs for residents during outages and extreme weather. 

Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund projects include:

• Mississippi Solar for All: Hope Enterprise Corporation received $62 million to expand residential solar access for low-income and disadvantaged Mississippians.
• Arkansas Solar for All: Hope Enterprise Corporation received $94 million for a companion program bringing solar benefits to low-income households across Arkansas.
• Georgia BRIGHT Communities Coalition: Capital Good Fund received $156 million to expand access to clean energy and related jobs in Georgia.
• EnergizeNC: The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality received $156 million for its statewide low-income solar initiative.
• Industrial Heartland Solar Coalition: Growth Opportunity Partners received $156 million for a multistate solar effort serving Midwestern industrial communities.

President Trump hinted on Wednesday that his friendly relationship with North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong Un may owe a lot to the country’s strong nuclear capabilities.  

“He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons. Should have never allowed it to happen,” Trump told reporters outside the White House. “But he’s got them. I get along with him very well…As long as we have a smart president, he’s gonna be fine.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Trump said that having “a good relationship” with Kim makes nearby countries like South Korea and Japan safer—which may sound reasonable in itself. But by “good relationship,” Trump seemed to mean building a collaborative connection solely with Kim: “I didn’t like the fact that we’re doing these massive military exercises really against North Korea when I’m friendly with him.”

Trump: "I do have a good relationship with Kim Jong Un … I didn't like the fact that we're doing these massive military exercises really against North Korea when I'm friendly with him."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-19T19:39:50.979Z

Trump’s remarks came three days after he announced that he ordered the Pentagon to cut back on joint military training with South Korea, citing President Lee Jae Myung’s refusal to join his war against Iran.

On Monday, Trump further justified the cuts to joint military efforts—which led Lee to call for South Korea to retake full control of its military operations from the US—by saying that the drills “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea, a country that “has been unthreatening and respectful” during his presidency. Trump also said he plans to meet with Kim later this year. 

Q: Are you exchanging written letters with Kim Jong Un?

TRUMP: I can't tell you that. But I get along with him great. He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons. He's gonna be fine. pic.twitter.com/AfhVw6Hrwl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 19, 2026

Trump’s explanation sends a blunt message to Iran: If the country already had nuclear weapons, it may have had a paradoxically friendlier relationship with Trump—and been able to avoid an ongoing war that has killed thousands of civilians, which the Trump administration has justfied on the basis of halting Iran’s nuclear development. As Iranian historian Behrooz Ghamari told me earlier this year, Iran’s nuclear program is tied to its pursuit of greater sovereignty, following several decades of intervention in its economy and politics by countries like the US and Britain.

To any country watching Trump’s words, it now looks like one of the only paths to prevent conflict with the current administration is to militarize or even go nuclear—a warning South Korea may also be taking to heart.

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

The Trump administration said on Tuesday it plans to rescind the “roadless rule” that has protected old-growth forests in the US for 25 years, potentially opening up almost 45 million acres of national forests to road construction, drilling, and logging.

Conservationists had feared the announcement was coming since last summer after Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, targeted a rule brought in by Bill Clinton’s administration, describing it as “overly restrictive” and an “absurd obstacle” to development.

On Tuesday the US Forest Service, an agency inside the Department of Agriculture, formally announced it had filed the proposal to rescind in its entirety the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. Environmental groups immediately criticized the plan for rollbacks of protections to forests from Alaska to Oregon to North Carolina.

“[The rule] is the only thing preventing much of our wildest remaining national forests from industrial development. These forests offer critical habitat for wildlife, provide clean, fresh air and water for millions and contain vast swathes of the last remaining old-growth forests in the country,” said Alex Craven, forest campaign manager for the Sierra Club.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) appealed for submissions for the public comment period to “defend our forests from the administration’s chopping block.”

“These landscapes also support thousands of jobs and generate billions in economic activity each year.”

“Their scheme would open up tens of millions of acres of our national forests to destructive logging, drilling and road building—including iconic public lands from California’s Tahoe national forest to Alaska’s Tongass national forest to the Appalachian Trail,” the NRDC said.

The Trump administration said the move would remove obstacles to managing forests and fighting wildfires. “For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities,” Rollins said. “Today, we filed a proposal to restore authority to local forest managers who know the land best, removing the barriers that have kept them from doing the work the land demands.”

“Active forest management is not an option. It’s essential,” said Tom Schultz, the forest service chief. “More than 40 percent of inventoried roadless areas, primarily in the west, have high or very high wildfire hazard potential. And only 5 percent of those areas have received hazardous fuels reduction treatments since 2014.”

But Craven of the Sierra Club said: “The administration’s attempt to blame the roadless rule for worsening wildfire risk ignores both the facts and the rule itself. Roads generally lead to more ignitions and result in more wildfires—not fewer.

“And,” Craven added, “the roadless rule has always allowed for targeted actions to reduce hazardous fuels. What it does not allow is using wildfire as an excuse to open some of America’s most intact public forests to industrial exploitation and new road construction.”

Clinton had championed the roadless rule late in his second term as president after concerns grew around unsustainable logging of national forests. The biggest roadless area is the Tongass national forest in Alaska, which stores huge amounts of carbon and is home to brown and black bears, wolves, and bald eagles.

“America’s last great backcountry forests are not bargaining chips,” Emma Powell, government affairs manager at Alaska Wilderness League, said on Tuesday about the plan. “The Tongass and Chugach national forests are global treasures.”

“From fisheries to tourism and outdoor recreation,” Powell said, “these landscapes also support thousands of jobs and generate billions in economic activity each year.”

Concerns of environmentalists were especially focussed on logging. “It’s clear the processes required by the National Environmental Policy Act are being treated as merely boxes to check on the path to enacting an entirely political agenda to clear-cut the last remaining intact old-growth forests in America,” added Maggie Rabb, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council.

The public has until September 21 to comment on the plan.

“Trump is pushing for the largest evisceration of public lands protection in American history and against what Americans want,” said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Once you start bulldozing roads for commercial logging and industrial development, there’s no getting them back.”

Florida State Representative Angie Nixon just defeated Alex Vindman, the presumed frontrunner, in the state’s Democratic Senate primary—even though Vindman raised roughly sixteen times as much money as Nixon. 

Nixon, 42, helped lead the fight against Republican-led redistricting in Florida that disproportionately supports GOP voters, who are mostly white. According to the Miami Herald, 86 percent of Florida’s congressional districts will favor the GOP, even though only 41 percent of voters are registered Republicans. The three-time state lawmaker from Jacksonville protested the bill during an April legislative session and videos of her wielding a pink bullhorn and declaring “this is a violation of the constitution” went viral. Nixon also staged a sit-in at the governor’s office in May, where she was arrested and faces a jury trial on charges of trespassing and resisting an officer without violence in September. 

Despite Democratic opposition, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis approved the new map in May. In June, the state’s Supreme Court allowed the new map to stay in effect for the upcoming 2026 US House elections. 

Nixon ran on an affordability platform, pushing Medicare for All, free childcare and family leave, and a national rent freeze and moratorium on evictions. She touted endorsements from Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Maxwell Frost and—featured prominently on her website—the children’s content creator and activist Miss Rachel. 

“These things are not radical, they’re not extreme,” Nixon said during her primary victory speech on Tuesday night. “This is just basic human decency; it’s caring for our neighbors.”

Vindman, whose national public profile mostly centers on his role as a witness and director of European affairs for the National Security Council in the first Trump impeachment over the 2019 Ukraine scandal (and on his twin brother Eugene, who is a Virginia congressman), has never held elected office in Florida. Nonetheless, Vindman raised over $16 million for his campaign, according to FEC data, and polls pointed to his likely victory. He seemed sure he would win—so much so that he reportedly had a fundraiser in Nantucket scheduled for this coming week. He lost by 12 percentage points.

Nixon now faces an uphill battle in November. She’ll be facing off against DeSantis-appointed Republican incumbent Ashley Moody, who replaced Marco Rubio when he became Secretary of State. Moody is also a staunch proponent of President Trump’s voter-suppression efforts, including co-sponsoring the SAVE America Act. Florida hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2012, when former Senator Bill Nelson won his third term. 

In early 2007, newly reelected Republican Gov. Rick Perry pushed an innovative response to a problem that was killing about 35,000 Texans each year. The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, funded with $3 billion in public funds, would support groundbreaking work at the state’s leading research institutions, while ramping up prevention efforts across Texas. Perry boasted that year that the CPRIT would “put Texas on the path to becoming the world’s foremost leader in cancer research.”

In a state legislature often riven by partisan fights, CPRIT was an idea with broad bi-partisan appeal. The Republican state representative who introduced the measure that would become law called it “one of the most positive actions we can take this session, to cure cancer in our lifetime.” The legislation passed both chambers overwhelmingly that spring, and a constitutional amendment authorizing the program was later approved by 61 percent of Texas voters. 

But the measure had its doubters. About two dozen of the house’s 150 members voted against the idea, each time it came up for a vote. Among them: Ken Paxton, then a state representative from suburban Collin County. 

The current Texas attorney general, who is locked in a tight race for US Senate with Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, voted against the two bills that organized the institute and that placed it on the ballot as a proposed constitutional amendment. Paxton did not participate in any public debates, nor did he respond to a request for comment about his opposition to the state’s cancer moonshot. But two decades later, the project Paxton voted against has delivered major returns. According to the CPRIT’s annual impact reports, it has detected 58,507 cases of cancer, funded 282 child and adolescent cancer research projects, attracted an additional $12.5 billion in outside funding, and helped “save tens of thousands of lives.” And while the program has not been perfect (a grant-awarding scandal in 2012 led to hearings, a court case, and a new round of legislative tinkering) Texans like what they’ve seen: Voters approved a second $3 billion investment in 2019, by an even larger margin than before.

Perry originally proposed privatizing the state lottery to pay for what would become the CPRIT, but legislators rejected the idea and instead coalesced around an alternative that would allow the state to dole out $300 million-a-year over a 10-year period. As the bills made their way through the legislature, some lawmakers balked at the funding mechanism, arguing that allowing the state to issue bonds to pay for the program would saddle the state with debt. One Democratic representative proposed an amendment to pay for CPRIT out of the budget instead. Paxton voted against tabling that amendment, but when that effort failed, most legislators who supported it were unwilling to derail the launch of the institute over a funding disagreement. Not Paxton—he was one of just 26 “nays” on the bill proposing a constitutional amendment, and 24 votes against the bill organizing the institute.

CPRIT was not the only major cancer initiative Paxton opposed in 2007. In the same legislative session, Paxton voted to overturn another major Perry policy intended to reduce cancer rates in the state. He was a co-author of HB 1098, which barred the state from mandating the HPV vaccine for sixth graders—something Perry had tried to do by executive order. Conservative activists opposed the vaccine, in part by arguing that preventing the transmission of a sexually transmitted disease would encourage promiscuity. 

HB 1098 passed the legislature, and Perry chose not to veto it. The consequences have been severe. The vaccine’s ultimate purpose is to prevent cervical cancer, which is almost entirely caused by HPV. The vaccine is almost 97-percent effective at that goal, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Thanks to the widespread availability of the vaccine, cervical cancer rates have been declining dramatically in states that promoted vaccination. And Australia, which has paired mandatory vaccination with a robust screening process, recently boasted that it was “on track to become the first country to eliminate cervical cancer by 2035.” But thanks in part to Paxton and his colleagues, Texas’ HPV vaccination rate remains well below the national average.

Funding for cutting-edge medical research, vaccines, and treatment is shaping up to be a significant issue in this year’s elections, as voters face the pinch of spiraling costs and worsening access, and a dropoff in official support for investments that were once bipartisan. The sorts of policies that Paxton voted against in his previous life are now on the chopping block at the federal level. The Trump administration has slashed funding for cutting-edge medical research—including $500 million in mRNA research. The New York Times warned last fall that Trump “is shutting down the War on Cancer.” At the same time, the White House’s restrictive immigration policies have hurt universities’ ability to attract researchers, and made it harder to find doctors in underserved areas. And Trump’s signature domestic policy bill is poised to throw both patients and providers into crisis, thanks to massive cuts to Medicaid. 

Talarico drew attention to those cuts in July, when his campaign participated in a fundraiser for a South Texas woman who had been selling meals on the side of the road to pay for cancer treatment. “After the big ugly bill cut more than a trillion dollars from healthcare programs to fund tax cuts for the wealthy,” he said, the burden of health care costs is “only going to get worse.”

But Paxton has left little daylight between his own views and those of the White House. It was “an incredible moment for our nation’s future,” he wrote on X, after the bill that one study projected could lead to 1 million fewer cancer screenings passed the House last year. “President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is HISTORIC legislation that’s going to unleash economic growth.”

In February, an ICE agent directed Emilio, a Deaf man, to get onto a bus in southern Texas. By that point, Emilio had spent nine weeks in immigration detention and didn’t know what was going on. He asked for a sign language interpreter and told me he didn’t get one. It was only when he saw the Mexican flag that Emilio realized that he was not being deported to his home country of Venezuela; instead, he was entering a country where he had never lived.

“I don’t know people here,” said Emilio, who did not have his passport on him when he reached the border. 

The bus first dropped him off in Villahermosa, and he made his way to Mexico City thanks to the financial support of fellow Deaf people. He’s been stuck in Mexico ever since.

“DHS is supposed to ensure that you are able to access the immigration process equally to a non-disabled person.”

Emilio’s last name and the last name of the other Deaf person, Edgar, who spoke with Mother Jones about their deportations, are being withheld due to fear of retribution as they pursue potential legal avenues to return to the United States.

Emilio was working at Amazon when he was detained at a check-in appointment for his asylum case in December 2025. He had been living in Texas for close to four years and expected his appointment to be routine, like the four before it had been. By early August, Emilio was unsure whether his asylum case was officially closed. (“I’m not being informed of anything,” he emailed me in Spanish.) A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not respond directly to a question about why Emilio was detained at his asylum check-in.

The surge in deportations under the second Trump administration has, by most accounts, overwhelmed America’s immigration system. Serious questions have emerged about whether officials have overlooked red flags in hiring in order to meet President Donald Trump’s demands. Detainees have reported going days and weeks without adequate food, water, or medication. For Deaf detainees, these problems are compounded by language deprivation. There is no publicly available information on how often Deaf people are given interpreters at various parts of the immigration process, let alone in detention centers. 

Emilio didn’t know Mexican Sign Language when he arrived, which differs from Venezuelan Sign Language. Many countries in Latin America have their own forms of sign language, even if Spanish is a dominant language across the region.

Deaf immigrants also risk having poor-quality interpreters for sign languages other than American Sign Language during the deportation process, as the United States doesn’t recognize any certification process specifically for other sign languages. Interpreters are essentially taken at their word that they can interpret well in non-ASL forms of sign language.

More than 100 Deaf people who report sign language as their primary language have received deportation or removal orders since the beginning of 2026, according to data provided to Mother Jones from the nonprofit Mobile Pathways that was verified by our publication. This is likely an undercount of Deaf people who are deported, as this data is not by disability, but rather by people who count sign language as their primary language, which deaf people who use hearing devices like cochlear implants and hearing aids may not. Deaf people risk language deprivation while in ICE detention and in court proceedings. That deprivation has been the subject of lawsuits alleging violations of disability civil rights laws. In one such case, a Deaf Mongolian person detained in California did not have access to an interpreter for four months.

Historically, Deaf people in ICE detention have been able to seek remedies through DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. However, in March 2025, as I previously reported, the Trump administration laid off over 150 of its staff, leaving the office at that time with two full-time staffers. 

“The system is already draconian for all ICE detainees, and an extra layer of cruelty is added by also depriving communication access for deaf people,” Alina Engelman, a deaf California State University, East Bay, public health professor, told me. “Withholding communication access denies deaf people’s humanity.”

Regulations for the first disability civil rights law in the United States were enacted in 1977, following a federal sit-in by disabled people. This law, the Rehabilitation Act, protects disabled people’s right to reasonable accommodations in places that receive government funding. This includes ICE detention and court proceedings.

“DHS is supposed to ensure that you are able to access the immigration process equally to a non-disabled person,” Disability Law United attorney Laura Murchie told me. “Forcing someone to sign a self-deportation form without them fully understanding what’s happening is a violation of their due process.”

That’s what Edgar, another Venezuelan Deaf person, alleges happened to him.

Edgar, who had sought asylum like Emilio, found community among Deaf people living in Utah. 

Edgar told me via sign language interpreters from his mom’s home in Venezuela that he was detained by ICE in May after a court date for an incident in which he was pulled over for speeding. He was arrested for speeding, driving without a license, driving under the influence, and possession of a controlled substance by the Utah Highway Patrol, a DHS spokesperson said.

Edgar moved between a handful of detention centers, ending up in California. Edgar said he was being pushed to sign documents that he didn’t understand. Because his ability to read English is not great, he asked for an interpreter. Learning ASL, as Edgar was working on while living in the United States, is different than having proficiency in reading English, illustrating the need for sign language accommodations for Deaf people if given legal documents.

An interpreter never came. Overwhelmed, Edgar signed the papers. He said he was unaware that these were self-deportation papers for which a signature would state that he would voluntarily leave the United States. Edgar was eventually able to get on a video call with a friend, who told him that the paperwork he signed would likely give the US standing to deport him. 

“​​I wanted to be able to get the signature canceled because I didn’t know what had happened,” Edgar told me via sign language interpreters.

Octavio Cuenca Maldonado, president of the National Hispanic Latino Association of the Deaf, told me that experiences like Edgar’s are common. “Without effective communication, a Deaf individual may not fully understand their legal rights or that they can communicate with a family member or medical provider.”

Edgar wasn’t able to revoke his signature. He was deported to Venezuela in June after around 15 days in ICE detention. When we spoke in July, Edgar was still trying to figure out what was next for him.

A DHS spokesperson said communication with Edgar during processing was in written Spanish and did not deny that he was not given an interpreter as requested when he was given self-deportation papers.

Discrimination against disabled people in ICE detention is widespread, Murchie told me. One of Murchie’s clients, Ulises Peña López, says that his medical needs were not met while in ICE detention and that he was mocked by staff for his disabilities. Emilio told me he was laughed at while initially detained when he said he needed an interpreter and tried to gesture that he needed water during a period when he was shackled for hours.

Since January, Celena Ponce of Hands United has escalated her work trying to be a resource for Deaf people in ICE detention centers. She has supported around 20 Deaf people as of July in ICE detention centers, all of whom say they were forced to go long stretches without sign language interpreters. Her organization has also provided sign language interpretation for Deaf immigrants to tell their stories to reporters like me.

“ICE provides all detainees with a documented hearing disability with an effective method of communication, as is reasonably needed,” a DHS spokesperson said.

In addition to fears of being profiled shared by many Latinos, Cuenca Maldonado told me that Deaf Latino people have additional reasons to be concerned about communication with ICE officers, especially if they are wearing face coverings. 

“As a Deaf person, I rely heavily on visual communication, including facial expressions, lip reading when appropriate, written notes, or speech-to-text on my phone,” he told me. “If I cannot clearly see someone’s face or identify who they are, it becomes much harder to communicate.”

While some states have passed mask bans in response to ICE’s escalating tactics, these bans have been blocked by courts in California, Virginia, and most recently New York, leaving Deaf people still uniquely vulnerable in those areas.

There are also limited Deaf and disability-focused organizations actively working to help Deaf people in detention; Cuenca Maldonado told me he refers Deaf Latino people facing immigration problems to Ponce, as he trusts the work she is doing.

Emilio says he is still left wondering why he was targeted.  

“I’ve been doing good, I haven’t been ignoring any of the things that I was supposed to do,” Emilio told me toward the end of our conversation in July. “I just didn’t understand.”

Sen. Adam Schiff is often on the receiving end of President Donald Trump’s rage online. It should be no surprise.

Back in 2020, the California Democrat was the lead prosecutor during the first Trump impeachment trial as a member of the House of Representatives. Now a senator, Schiff has been laying out a different strategy for how Democrats might challenge the president if they reclaim Congress. Much of that strategy focuses on how the president has enriched himself in the White House—all at the expense, Schiff argues, of the American people.

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“The key to making corruption a powerful issue is by always bringing it back to the impact of that, the cost of his corruption,” Schiff tells host Al Letson. “Because the cost of his corruption is a president not focused on doing what he promised.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Schiff describes what it’s like to be an ever-present target of Trump’s ire, how the Israeli government has pushed longtime supporters like himself to criticize it more openly, and lays out his proposals for rebuilding America’s institutional guardrails in a post-Trump era.

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

Donald Trump will welcome the leaders of major cryptocurrency and prediction-market companies to the White House on Wednesday to discuss how they should be regulated—a potential make-or-break moment for nascent industries that have struggled to establish themselves as credible and legal.

As it happens, Trump himself is a crypto and prediction-market leader. The president and his adult children are major investors in both industries.

In the past, presidents have divested from their business interests while serving, or have taken pains to distance themselves from any involvement. During his second term, Trump has done essentially the opposite. And his hand in the regulation of two industries he’s directly involved with is merely one headline from this president’s Financial Conflicts News of the Week.

Consider World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm Trump co-owns, in which a senior government official from the United Arab Emirates acquired a $500 million stake just months before the administration, ignoring national security concerns, agreed to provide the UAE with America’s most advanced AI chips.

World Liberty Financial calls itself as a “de-fi” company—as in de-centralized finance, the idea that you can do most banking activities through the crypto blockchain rather than at a real bank. And as it happens, Trump’s company just got the greenlight from one of Trump’s regulators to be a bank.

Under the charter it was granted, World Liberty won’t do much in the way of traditional banking (no deposits or loans) but it will make it much easier, and profitable, for the firm to issue crypto tokens. That’s not a traditional use of a bank charter.

The ambiguity around what these crypto and prediction firms really do, how they should be regulated, and whether they should be treated differently than traditional banks, puts Trump’s business interests at the bleeding edge of the debate over these industries. These issues are essentially the agenda for Wednesday’s White House meeting and a subsequent regulatory meeting on Thursday.

Another example of a Trump business foray that would likely be scrutinized by regulators—if regulators are allowed to scrutinize the new crypto and prediction markets—is his meme coin ($TRUMP), an inherently worthless bit of digital branding that has netted him around $635 million while costing “investors” around $3.8 billion as its value fell to almost zero. It’s the kind of financial shenanigan into which, in a less corrupt administration, government regulators might be inclined to look.

Another major Trump asset is his stake in Truth Social, which has tethered itself to the crypto industry by acquiring lots and lots of Bitcoins—a strategy that has proved unwise, at least in the short term, as Bitcoin prices have declined more than 25 percent this year.

Trump has made no secret of his support for the prediction markets—he has publicly backed them in their fight to avoid state regulators who have tried to rein them in.

The White House did not return a request for comment, but its standard denial of Trump’s financial conflicts usually includes the claim that his adult sons, Eric and Don Jr., are in charge of his finances. If anything, those two are even more involved than their father in the crypto and prediction industries that Trump will determine how to regulate—or not regulate. In addition to helping manage his father’s crypto investments, Eric has his own crypto-mining company—American Bitcoin. Don Jr. is closely linked to the prediction industry: Kalshi gave him a stake that has become enormously valuable, and he sits on an advisory committee for Kalshi’s chief rival, Polymarket.

Wednesday’s meeting is a warm-up for the much more formal and significant meeting on Thursday, when the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, one of two major government agencies that regulate investments, holds the first meeting of a new committee that will determine how the government regulates the markets in question.

Trump is never all that predictable (he did once call crypto “a scam”), but it’s a good bet that the committee—which is stacked with crypto and prediction market reps, including Trump associates, many of whom will be at Wednesday’s event—will get a warm White House welcome.

In early August, ICE revealed plans to purchase $20 million worth of electric-shock gloves, manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies. The gloves work on direct contact with exposed skin and deliver a painful electric charge. Police departments, jails, and even school resource officers across the country have used the gloves for years—though human rights groups like Amnesty International say they’re “readily misused for torture.” Police officers, speaking on Compliant Technologies’ own YouTube channel, repeatedly stated that the shock gloves work because they are “less conducive to lawsuits” than other forms of physical force, and can cause pain but “leave no burn marks or scars.”

The GLOVE, or Generated Low-Output Voltage Emitter, is already in use in some public schools. Twenty-nine of 34 school police officers in Omaha, Nebraska have trained to use the GLOVE, and twice in the past year, officers have used the devices to shock students.

Omaha requested 40 pairs of the gloves for just under $66,000 in 2025, as Nebraska Public Media reported. (At that same price point, ICE’s $20 million would buy the agency at least 12,000 pairs of shock gloves.) The Omaha city council unanimously approved the purchase. But with the gloves now under increased scrutiny, students and parents are raising concerns. School board members, at a meeting on August 17, said they hadn’t been informed that the shock gloves were being deployed in their schools.

“I personally am sickened to learn our schools have been used as a test bed for a new law enforcement technology,” Omaha School Board member Gini Magnuson said, according to Nebraska Public Media. The GLOVE’s most recent user manual suggests that wearers avoid using it against “small children.”

Despite the manufacturer’s warning against shocking children, Omaha is not the only school district to use shock gloves. Compliant Technologies regularly exhibits its products at School Resource Officer conferences nationwide. In July of this year, they were listed as an exhibitor at both the Texas and Mississippi Associations of School Resource Officers’ annual “school safety” conferences.

“I wish the adults in the room would actually just pay attention to what the students are saying, and hopefully understand that hurting students, and using weapons against them, is not what teaching is about, and it’s not what school is supposed to be about,” Omaha Central High School student Lux Tipton said at this week’s school board meeting.

While students, parents, and politicians speak out against these weapons, White House border czar Tom Homan is defending their use. “It’s another device to help someone get compliant when they are not,” Homan said in an interview last week on Fox & Friends. The Department of Homeland Security may distribute thousands of pairs of the gloves as early as March 2027.

On Tuesday, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung reiterated his calls for the country to retake full control of its military operations from the US following Donald Trump’s order to cut back on annual joint training drills in preparation for North Korean threats two days prior. 

“A strong alliance makes the foundation of security stronger, and strengthening our own capabilities increases our value and necessity as an ally,” Lee said, framing the US-South Korea alliance and independent military control as ‌mutually beneficial.

Trump told reporters at the Oval Office on Monday that his decision to scale back military training with South Korea was due in part to Lee’s refusal to support the US war effort in Iran: “We can’t go around and protect all of these countries, especially when they’re not there to help us.”

And in that announcement reducing the joint training, Trump wrote on Truth Social that his move was also “based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un,” North Korea’s dictator and, oddly referring to himself in the third person, the drills with South Korea “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.”

Lee said in response on Tuesday that Seoul should immediately plan a transfer of control over the Combined Forces Command, which consists of both South Korean and US forces. According to the Korea Times, regaining wartime operational control, which takes effect during major conflict, is a key goal of Lee’s administration. South Korea ceded full control of its military during the Korean War in the 1950s, but has been trying to regain complete command for over two decades. The same Korea Times report said that South Korea’s joint training drills with the US are “essential for assessing Seoul’s readiness to lead the combined forces” in the near future and are symbolic of the country’s national sovereignty. 

Lee also signaled rearmament, which may increase tensions and threaten further military action from North Korea. He pushed for Seoul to accelerate building nuclear-powered submarines, signaling rearmament. Several NATO members have also ramped up spending on military development following Trump’s multiple threats to withdraw from the alliance.

Trump approved Seoul’s nuclear submarines last year, and Hegseth has praised South Korea for taking on more of its own defense. But burden-sharing was supposed to mean allies paying more for an arrangement Washington still runs. Lee is proposing something else: an ally that no longer needs to ask.

Just two days after finalizing a regulation to make sure trans kids from low-income families can’t afford puberty blockers or hormone therapy, the Trump administration has loosed another salvo in its bitter war against transgender people’s healthcare. On Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services published a report—authored largely by employees of right-wing advocacy groups—alleging that some hospitals are using incorrect codes to bill insurance for pediatric gender-affirming care. The report paints transgender healthcare as motivated by profit rather than medical necessity, calling the billing codes “potentially fraudulent.”

In a social media video, Vice President JD Vance announced he was referring roughly 150 healthcare organizations listed in the report to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation. The list includes over a dozen major children’s hospitals, pharmacies including Walgreens, and small doctors offices and clinics. Standing at Vance’s side, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. added that he, too, was referring the providers for investigation by his department’s inspector general.

“It’s an intimidation campaign.”

Yet advocates of transgender healthcare describe the HHS report released Thursday as part of a larger effort to shut down care. “This report is part of a broader pattern from this administration: Using the power of government to attack science and target health care providers instead of helping families get the care they need,” says Kellan Baker, senior advisor for health policy at the Movement Advancement Project. “It’s an intimidation campaign,” adds Jennifer Levi, the director of transgender and queer rights at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, pointing to ways the report might show up in future legal cases.

The HHS report—provocatively titled “Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of ‘Gender Medicine‘”—lambasts doctors’ use of two diagnostic codes when prescribing puberty blockers. One of them, “precocious puberty,” is generally used to describe early-onset puberty; the report argues that it’s improper to use the same code for children delaying puberty while they take time to explore their gender identity. The other, “endocrine disorder, unspecified,” has been openly described for years by some transgender healthcare providers as a way to avoid stigmatizing or using pathologizing language like “transsexualism” or “gender identity disorder.” According to a 2021 journal article, the “endocrine disorder, unspecified” code is “often used to bill for transgender services to avoid the stigma of labeling the person as transgender, because no [gender identity disorder] is present, and/or to avoid denials of payment.”

The report frames these billing practices as a kind of fraud. And while this theory hasn’t been fully tested in the courts, two recent settlements indicate it could be a successful angle of attack in the administration’s broader project to wipe out gender-affirming care for minors. Under pressure from the Trump administration over such billing practices, at least two hospitals—Texas Children’s Hospital and Cleveland Clinic—agreed to settlements this year. Tellingly, their settlement agreements involved much more than adjusting their use of billing codes: Both hospitals agreed to stop gender-affirming treatments for minors entirely (though their states had already outlawed such treatments). They also agreed to set aside money to treat people who detransition. (Despite the heavy emphasis on a small handful of detransition stories by activists who oppose all gender transitions, years of research have found regret rates of around 1 percent among adult recipients of gender-affirming surgery, and though there’s less research on pediatric patients, the existing studies likewise indicate low regret rates.)

Though it bears the imprimatur of the federal government, much of the “Wolves in White Coats” report contains material recycled from conservative policy groups like the Manhattan Institute and anti-trans activist groups like Do No Harm. Five of its 10 authors—including former White House senior policy strategist May Mailman, a close ally of Stephen Miller and the architect of the Trump administration’s gender-related executive orders—are employees of the Independent Women’s Forum, a faux-feminist conservative advocacy group often behind anti-trans messaging strategy. Another is Quentin Van Meter, past president of an old-school religious-right group of doctors that hold anti-LGBTQ positions and call themselves, misleadingly, the American College of Pediatricians. Also on the author list is Eithan Haim, a Texas doctor who previously faced federal charges for allegedly obtaining and leaking the private information of patients who weren’t under his care. (Once Trump took office, DOJ prosecutors dropped the charges against Haim.)

The actions of one author, Center for Christian Virtue president Aaron Baer—whose group advocates “for public policy that reflects the truth of the Gospel”—immediately suggested that the report could provide political ammunition in the midterms. Shortly after its publication, Baer took to X to demand that Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton and her running mate David Pepper comment on the Ohio healthcare providers flagged in the report. (Baer’s group might see Acton as a soft target, after she made a statement last month that misgendered trans girls as “boys” while saying she supported restrictions on their sports participation.)

But beyond its political utility, this report could turn out to be significant building block for the Trump administration’s multi-pronged legal attacks on providers of gender-affirming care. Despite Vance making a grand gesture on Thursday of referring providers for DOJ investigation, the department has already been investigating whether hospitals violated federal law by promoting off-label use of puberty blockers and hormones or by improperly billing the medications. As part of those investigations, the federal government has issued sweeping subpoenas for the private information of transgender children and teens receiving gender-affirming care.

The problem for the Trump administration is that federal judges have blocked these subpoenas almost universally. Last fall in Massachusetts, for example, federal district judge Myong Joun quashed a DOJ subpoena to Boston Children’s Hospital for the medical records and personal information—including home addresses and social security numbers—of all patients who have received gender-affirming care as well as the personnel files of over a thousand employees.

“It is abundantly clear that the true purpose of issuing the subpoena is to interfere with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ right to protect [gender-affirming care] within its borders, to harass and intimidate BCH to stop providing such care, and to dissuade patients from seeking such care,” Joun wrote in his order. “The Government seeks all this while not offering an iota of suspicion that BCH is actually engaging in fraudulent billing practices or off-label promotion in the first instance.”

The report issued Thursday appears designed to provide that missing “iota of suspicion”—potentially to allow the Trump administration to overcome the roadblocks it’s been hitting in court. “I think that’s DOJ’s plan,” says Levi, who has been involved in efforts to fight the subpoenas.

The report also calls on private attorneys to join the Trump administration’s efforts, urging them to file lawsuits accusing gender-affirming care providers of billing fraud, and raising the possibility of cash payouts to those who do.

Over half of states have outlawed gender-affirming medical care for minors in recent years, following a coordinated campaign by right-wing and anti-LGTBQ activists. But care remains legal in many states, some of which have passed laws protecting doctors.

Editor’s Note: When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. jumped on Donald Trump’s bandwagon in 2024, he brought with him the wellness-obsessed, vaccine-rejecting, food label-reading Make America Healthy Again voters who’ve been credited with helping Trump take back the White House. But there are signs that the MAHA–MAGA alliance is wearing thin, from squabbles over inaction to a tense standoff over regulating the herbicide glyphosate. In our MAHA and the Midterms series, a partnership between Mother Jones and the Food & Environment Reporting Network, we consider how MAHA is shaping the political landscape and upcoming elections.

“Do you fear you’ll be attacked as a liberal for bringing this up?” Tucker Carlson asked Iowa Republican gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn on his podcast in February, back when Lahn was still a long shot in the state’s primary race. After bonding over their love of God and distrust of the “wokeism”—a “mental disorder,” according to Lahn—the two men had gone deep on Lahn’s political vision, which he admitted could sometimes make him sound like a “hippie.”

Over the course of the interview, Lahn railed against “unchecked monopolies” and lambasted the Environmental Protection Agency for being captured by corporate interests and failing to acknowledge the links between the weed killer glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, and cancer. For Lahn, such traditionally crunchy, left-populist talking points are par for the course. In ad spots, he’s wandered through golden hour corn fields and promised to “tax the heck” out of Wall Street hedge funds. In stump speeches and podcast appearances, he’s praised organic farming and called agribusiness multinationals “cartels” that “have pillaged our state” and need to be broken apart with antitrust litigation (a position he shares with Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren). 

Lahn, “at his core, is an all-star, major league political operative.”

The crowds at his events often agree. “Bust ’em up!” someone shouted from the audience during Lahn’s victory speech, shortly after he secured the Republican nomination in June.

“Let’s gooooo!” Lahn shouted back with a grin.

Frustrated by Washington’s permissive attitude toward pesticides, food additives, and a slew of other health-related threats, the Make America Healthy Again movement is flexing its political power with its own slate of midterm candidates, several of whom have gone head to head against longtime incumbents or candidates endorsed by President Donald Trump. So far, the group’s breakout star has arguably been Lahn, one of the first candidates to be endorsed by MAHA Action, a nonprofit political organization founded by political activist and publisher Tony Lyons. 

A sixth-generation Iowan who’s never held elected office, Lahn made national headlines this summer when he dispatched Rep. Randy Feenstra in the Republican primary, even though Feenstra had years of political experience and Trump’s endorsement. That makes Lahn one of the few Republicans to beat a candidate the president had backed. Now, Lahn is running about 6 points behind his Democratic opponent, Rob Sand.

Zach Lahn, the Republican candidate for Iowa governor, speaks to residents during a meet-and-greet this month in Hampton, Iowa.Charlie Neibergall/AP

Lahn has achieved this by making Iowa’s political third rail the cornerstone of his campaign. As a Republican candidate in a red state that’s politically defined by agriculture, he frequently criticizes the ag industry and proposes traditionally progressive reforms to the problems it’s created. On the campaign trail, he presents himself as an outraged Iowa farmer and native son who doesn’t “even wanna be a politician,” as he said on the Shawn Ryan Show in March, but was called by God to become one. As he tells it, agribusiness is peddling unsafe pesticides and getting away with it, Iowa’s cancer rates are going up, and “we all know that something is terribly wrong.”

These MAHA talking points are a pivotal part of Lahn’s pitch. But for a long time, he was one of the last people you’d expect to believe them. He spent years working for political projects funded by the Koch family, which made some of its fortune in agribusiness and participates in the same monopolistic, polluting practices Lahn now rails against. (Lahn’s campaign declined our request for an interview.)

Perhaps he’s undergone an ideological transformation. But Lahn, “at his core, is an all-star, major league political operative,” says Austin Frerick, an expert on Iowa politics and agricultural antitrust policy and the author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry. Some Iowa insiders suspect Lahn’s simply one of the first to recognize MAHA’s political power in farm country and the edge it gives him.

Few politicians are willing to criticize Big Ag the way Lahn has. The agribusiness sector spent about $224 million on lobbying last year, and its spending often outpaces the defense and oil and gas industries. While MAHA’s anti-vaccine activists have secured major wins under the Trump administration, the branch of the movement that’s more focused on food safety has been foiled repeatedly. The nation’s top pesticide regulator and its undersecretary for food safety are both former Big Ag lobbyists, and Trump signed an executive order that declared the production of glyphosate critical to the United States’ national security. (In June, the Supreme Court also ruled that states cannot sue Bayer, the producer of glyphosate, over its failure to warn consumers of the herbicide’s alleged dangers, because federal agencies consider the product to be safe.)

These roadblocks have infuriated MAHA activists, who are credited with helping swing the election for Trump in the first place. “What’s frustrating is to have [Agriculture Secretary] Brooke Rollins saying that she’s a MAHA mom and then doing things to perpetuate the toxic agricultural system that will poison us all,” says Kelly “Glyphosate Girl” Ryerson, a longtime advocate for regenerative farming and a leader in the MAHA movement. “The machine [we’re up against] is just so big.”

That machine can run roughshod over farmers, consumers, and rural communities, and Iowa is a cautionary tale of what happens when it does. “We have hit a level of corporate control that we’ve never gone through before,” says Aaron Lehman, a fifth-generation corn and soybean farmer and president of the Iowa Farmers Union. Seeds, fertilizer, and other tools of the trade are controlled by multinational companies that gouge farmers on pricing, and the state’s farmland is also increasingly owned by out-of-state investors. As a result, the average farmer makes less than 15 cents on every food dollar paid by consumers. 

This corporate consolidation has also fueled a remarkable uptick in pollution. “Iowa is one of the most heavily modified ecosystems on the planet,” says Silvia Secchi, a professor and natural resources economist at the University of Iowa. The corn and soybean industry’s use of pesticides and high-nitrogen fertilizers, combined with the hog industry’s manure lagoons, has laced the majority of Iowans’ drinking water with unsafe contaminants. The state has the nation’s second-highest cancer rate, and it’s one of only three states where that rate is increasing, a trend the Iowa Environmental Council explicitly tied to agricultural pollution in a recent report.

“When you live in these [agricultural] areas, you’re living in a crisis,” Frerick says. And until recently, “neither party has tapped into it.”

In 2009, Lahn, then a University of Colorado student, asked President Barack Obama a pointed question during a healthcare town hall in Grand Junction, Colorado.Craig F. Walker/The Denver Post/Getty

Until recently, Lahn didn’t appear particularly worried about Big Ag’s machine—to some extent, he was closely associated with it. After going viral as a college student for challenging President Barack Obama to an “Oxford-style debate” at a town hall, Lahn worked in Republican politics for a few years, then was hired to direct the Montana branch of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers’ flagship right-wing advocacy group, in 2014. At the time, the group was waging a war of attrition against Obamacare, and Lahn urged Montana’s Republican legislators to vote against the state’s Medicaid expansion, then tried to run them out of office if they supported it. In the award-winning 2018 documentary Dark Money, Lahn is singled out by name as an example of just how Machiavellian the Kochs’ political operation can be. Americans for Prosperity was also busy campaigning for Republican candidates in Iowa who were friendly to Big Ag and corporate interests. While Lahn was not involved in the agricultural arm of the Kochs’ business, it is worth noting that Koch Ag & Energy Solutions is one of four companies that control 75 percent of the nation’s fertilizer market and that farmer advocacy groups have accused it of monopolistic practices in Iowa.

In 2018, Lahn co-founded a private school in Kansas with Annie Koch, the wife of Koch scion Chase Koch (who financed the project). Lahn still serves on the school’s board of directors. On a personal level, Lahn and the Kochs became even more entangled. In 2020, Chase Koch and Lahn got divorced from their respective wives within months of each other. Lahn filed for a marriage license with Annie 11 days after his divorce finalized.

The couple left Kansas and moved to the Lahn family’s farm in Belle Plaine, Iowa, which Lahn acquired with his first wife in 2014. When exactly they moved there is a point of contention. Lahn didn’t register to vote in Iowa until October 2024, barely meeting the state’s two-year residency requirement for gubernatorial candidates. And the Daily Beast recently reported that Lahn never claimed the Belle Plaine farm as his primary residence, suggesting that he might not live in Iowa at all. (Lahn says he moved to the farm in 2023.) Last summer, Lahn met with MAHA leader Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of health and human services, for the first time. (He says he now considers Kennedy a friend.) In July 2025, Lahn’s wife registered to vote in Iowa. Four months later, Lahn launched his campaign for Iowa governor from the front porch of his family’s farmhouse, and his wife assured voters that her husband has the “courage and grit and toughness” Iowans are looking for.

Lahn talks to voters about agriculture in Arlington, Iowa, this month.Hannah Fingerhut/AP

Today, Lahn presents himself as a regenerative farmer who grows organic oats on his great-great-grandfather’s homestead, some of which he’s transitioning back to its native prairie habitat. “We’re having this pride in our work—this pride in our land [and] the health of our people,” he told Carlson. (Lahn’s campaign declined to answer our questions about Lahn’s role in the farm’s day-to-day operations.) Lahn says Iowa’s agricultural pollution crisis is personal for him: His father was diagnosed with cancer after working for decades as a crop consultant (he’s now in remission). “Iowans are going to funerals for people dying at 60 whose parents lived to be 80,” Lahn said in his primary victory speech in June. “We have to find out what Big Ag and Big Pharma knew about the safety of their products and when they knew it.” If elected governor, he has promised to fight laws that shield agribusinesses from liability and implement programs that will help Iowa transition toward greener farming practices.

It’s hard to overstate how much of a departure this is from typical Iowa Republican rhetoric, but the political winds are changing and Lahn has received his fair share of support. In notable contrast with his Republican primary opponent, Feenstra, and the Democrat he’s now running against, Lahn did not fund his primary campaign with six- or seven-figure donations from Big Ag: He made a roughly $2.5 million donation to himself, and MAHA’s burgeoning political machine helped fill in some of the gaps. Sardar Biglari, CEO of Steak ’n Shake and a vocal MAHA acolyte, donated $25,000 to Lahn’s campaign earlier this year, and the political advocacy group MAHA PAC has initiated hundreds of thousands of get-out-the-vote calls and texts on his behalf.

Lahn hopes to capture a precious, and politically volatile, slice of the voter pool: MAHA voters may be among the only remaining swing voters in the country. “We know that we’re valuable,” says Ryerson, the MAHA activist.  Democrats, of course, would love to get these swing voters, too. “You know, some of [Lahn’s] positions are not very different from mine,” says Chris Jones, a retired water scientist and Democrat running to be Iowa’s next secretary of agriculture. Jones has spent decades fighting Big Ag’s pollution of Iowa drinking water, and among Iowa Democratic candidates, he and his politics are to the party’s left. Some party insiders are concerned that more centrist Democrats could cede agricultural pollution as a wedge issue to the GOP. The Democrats’ moderate candidate for governor, Sand, has also pledged to hold Big Ag accountable for its pollution. His wife is also the scion of a major agribusiness corporation, and she and her family poured over $11 million into his primary campaign.

But when it comes to attacking Lahn, Democrats still have plenty to work with. Much of Lahn’s “Iowa First” rhetoric revolves around restoring the state to an idealized past glory, so it’s not exactly a surprise that he’s paired his anti-corporate messaging with right-wing social positions, some of which might scare off moderate voters. In a nod to MAHA’s anti-vaccine wing, Lahn has vowed to pull mRNA Covid shots off the market and end school vaccine requirements. In ads and debates, he’s promised to drive “Marxists” from Iowa schools and push for a life-at-conception law, effectively eliminating Iowa abortion access. He accepted an endorsement from former Iowa Rep. Steve King, who lost his seat in 2020 after making a slew of racist comments, including questioning why the terms “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” were offensive.

Field organizer Mike Rupp carries campaign signs for Lahn before a meet-and-greet this month in Hampton, Iowa.Charlie Neibergall/AP

Then there’s Lahn’s portrayal of himself as an Iowa farmer. In May, the Des Moines Register reported that Lahn still flies to Kansas an average of once a week; the Iowa Democratic Party has portrayed him as a “Kansas carpetbagger” ever since. While Lahn often rails against out-of-touch, out-of-state owners of Iowa farmland, his critics note that he was one of those out-of-state landowners until recently. “It takes one to know one,” says Secchi, the University of Iowa natural resources economist.

The biggest question is whether Lahn’s transformation into an anti-corporate crusader is sincere—and whether he’s also willing to stand up for them on issues outside MAHA’s wheelhouse.

For some Iowa farmers, the biggest question is whether Lahn’s transformation into an anti-corporate crusader is sincere—and whether he’s also willing to stand up for them on issues outside MAHA’s wheelhouse. In the months since Lahn became the Republican nominee for governor, the party’s mainstream has rallied around him. A PAC associated with the Republican Governors Association recently contributed $5 million to his campaign, and Trump endorsed him as a “patriot.”

But Trump has not been a reliable friend to Iowa farmers, who are being crushed by tariffs and gutted by fertilizer costs, which have steadily risen as the war in Iran drags on. The Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts to USDA services and regenerative farming initiatives were brutal. So were the One Big Beautiful Bill’s cuts to Medicaid and SNAP benefits, which agricultural communities increasingly rely on. “We need a governor who will stand up for Iowa when our Iowa interests are being ignored,” one soybean farmer, who asked to go unnamed, told me—including, he added, by the president.

Top image: Illustration by Mark Harris; Lahn for Governor/Facebook; Getty (6)

This story was produced with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

On Monday morning, President Donald Trump issued a blunt warning to America’s erstwhile ally: “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” It was another one of his un-diplomatic jabs at a longtime friend—this time for the possibility that Oman might prove helpful to Iran in ending the war. But if Trump’s aggressive, crude attitude towards an ally isn’t confusing enough, it’s also another example of how Trump’s sprawling efforts at personal enrichment since he returned to office have only made US foreign policy more complicated.

Because, of course, Trump has a lavish golf course and real estate development deal, right in Oman, on the edge—literally, the cliff’s edge—of the Gulf of Oman, which is just a few dozen miles from the embattled Strait of Hormuz. And the incredibly lucrative terms of the deal—as is the case with most economic opportunities in absolute monarchies such as Oman—were granted to Trump and his business partners with the blessing of the Omani government and crown.

Will this business engagement actually deter Trump from bombing the oldest independent state in the Arab world? That’s unclear, if only because it’s so hard to distinguish Trump’s real threats when it comes to bombing from the empty ones. But the irrefutable fact that he has a large money-making opportunity in the same location where he proposes to bomb raises several questions about how he navigates his priorities as commander-in-chief and international developer.

As I’ve written before, Trump has a very good deal in Oman.

A livestream of the site shows a sun-drenched stretch of water, edged by brown desert rock outcroppings, where it’s easy to imagine minimalist boxy units, cantilevered 400 feet above the sea, starting at just $1 million.

Built by Saudi real estate developer Dar Global on land provided by the Omani government outside its capital city of Muscat, all those seaside views and quiet luxury could be a gold mine for the US president. In 2024, he earned $1 million in licensing fees from the deal. The project’s website boasts of its “ideal location.” It offers “easy access” to the Persian Gulf, which sits just a few hundred miles to the northwest via the Strait of Hormuz. Oman, the website notes, is “one of the safest countries in the world.”

But whatever conflicts of interest may be playing out in Oman are nothing new. It’s difficult to list all the places Trump’s personal business interests are intermingled with US national security interests. Even in South Korea—which Trump also lambasted recently—recently disclosed financial statements showed that Trump embarked on a new deal with some Korean developers.

Previous presidents simply have avoided conflicts of interest. But there is a special problem when it comes to Trump’s: Whether it’s in Oman, or Saudi Arabia, or the Korean peninsula, they’re all mostly licensing deals.

That means that Trump technically doesn’t own any property in Oman. The land on which the project will be constructed is owned by an Omani government entity joint partner on the project, and the project itself is owned by Dar Global, the Saudi development firm. But Trump gets paid for applying his name, managing the property, and selling luxury villas. In total, he has earned somewhere around $35 million on his licensing projects in the Middle East, most of which have been in partnership with Dar Global. In Oman alone, he appears to have earned $6.8 million—and that’s before the property has been built. It’s not clear from the livestream or any information on Dar Global’s website how far along the construction has progressed.

But for a president trying to negotiate Middle East peace or head off a nuclear threat, this is a uniquely bad conflict of interest. Not only are his personal money-making efforts located in the middle of conflict zones, but his chief way to make money is selling the image of success, luxury, and peace. And that’s something our enemies definitely know.

On Tuesday, Republican primary voters in central Florida will decide whether Rep. Cory Mills should once again be their party’s nominee for Congress. In doing so, they will weigh the value of the congressman’s “Complete and Total Endorsement” from President Donald Trump versus the reality of voting for a man whose past 18 months look like this:

• February 2025: Washington, DC, police nearly arrest Mills after a girlfriend calls 911 and accuses him of domestic assault; she recants the accusation after reportedly being pressured to do so by the congressman. 
• May 2025: Army veterans accuse Mills of obtaining a Bronze Star through stolen valor.
• August 2025: An ex-girlfriend—whom Mills was cheating on with the partner who accused him of abuse—seeks a restraining order against Mills after the congressman is accused of threatening to potentially share explicit videos recorded during their relationship.
• October 2025: A Florida judge grants the restraining order after finding that a key part of the congressman’s testimony in the “dating violence” case had not been “truthful.”
• November 2025: The House Ethics Committee establishes a subcommittee to investigate allegations against Mills.
• May 2026: The ethics committee reveals that it has authorized more than 20 subpoenas and obtained thousands of documents as part of its investigation into “serious and complex” allegations against Mills.
• July 2026: NBC News reports that Mills is under investigation by the Department of Justice; sources tell ABC News that the investigation is partly about his finances. Mills responds by saying there is no confirmation that he is under investigation.

The full list of Mills’ many controversies is much longer. If Mills wins on Tuesday, it will be a testament not only to the power of a Trump endorsement but also to a Republican Party that has turned the other way when it comes to allegations of egregious misconduct. From there, he will have to win a general election in a Republican-leaning district Democrats hope to flip this year. 

If Mills is defeated, he will become the fourth man in Congress this year to lose his job or retire early after being accused of misconduct against women. In April, Reps. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) resigned after facing potential expulsion. Earlier this month, Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) announced that he was ending his reelection bid after the ethics committee recommended that he be censured. Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) has so far refused to step down in response to groundbreaking reporting from my colleague Abby Vesoulis about allegations of domestic abuse by Miller.

Mills may become the first of these men to lose his job at the ballot box, rather than by resigning or retiring. Ryan Elijah, a former local TV news anchor, is in a strong position to potentially defeat Mills on Tuesday. He outraised Mills last month and received the endorsement of two of Mills’ GOP colleagues in Florida: Reps. Mike Haridopolos and Anna Paulina Luna. Mills, meanwhile, brought in only about $16,000 in July—an abysmal amount for a sitting congressman. (One of Mills’ biggest recent campaign donors is another Florida man who attracted the attention of the ethics committee: former Rep. Matt Gaetz.) 

Public polling in the race remains limited; a recent survey showed Mills leading by 6 points with 41 percent of voters still undecided. The share of undecided voters does not reflect well on Mills, who was first elected in 2022 and has had years to earn the support of his constituents. Trump’s advisers may also be trying to distance themselves; the president did not include Mills in a string of social media posts last week touting candidates he has endorsed in Florida. On Friday, Gov. Ron DeSantis added to Mills’ problems, saying “I have not endorsed Cory Mills, and I do not support Cory Mills.”

As he fights to stay in office, Mills has stuck to a Trumpian playbook of denial and deception. He has said that he was not involved in any criminal or civil proceedings when Trump endorsed him in February 2026. That is true but only barely: The restraining order placed on him in Florida by Judge Fred Koberlein Jr. had recently expired. Mills has also downplayed the restraining order by calling it a “social media injunction.” That is not accurate. Koberlein barred Mills from contacting his ex-girlfriend Lindsey Langston, and going within 500 feet of her home and place of work. As part of the order, the judge also banned him from directly referring to Langston on social media because he felt that doing so was necessary to protect her from additional “dating violence.”

An excerpt of Judge Koberlein’s 2025 decision.Mother Jones

In a similar vein, Mills has claimed that he has “never gone to any proceedings.” It’s true that he has never been criminally charged, but he spent hours in court proceedings during the restraining order case last year. He has also stated that “no one ever claimed” he committed domestic abuse. That is also false. Police body-camera footage obtained by the Washington Post and a police report obtained by NBC4 Washington show Sarah Raviani, the girlfriend who called 911, did accuse him of abuse.

Raviani later told the officer that “he wants me to say” that the bruises and marks on her body “were from our vacation and that I bruise easily.” The officer believed that she was talking to Mills on the phone at that time. Raviani went on to retract her allegations, saying that the bruising came from riding a camel during a trip to Dubai with Mills. 

One aspect of Mills’ biography that has attracted relatively little attention is his pattern of dating young women involved in Republican politics. Langston was in her early twenties and nearly two decades Mills’ junior when the two began dating in 2021. Sarah Raviani was 27 when she called 911 to report alleged abuse by the then-44-year-old congressman. Raviani co-founded a group called “Iranians for Trump”; Langston has served as a state committee member for the Florida GOP.

In 2023, Mills began dating a woman who had graduated from high school in 2022, according to reporting by the independent journalist Roger Sollenberger. The congressman was in his 40s at the time; she would have been 19 or 20 and working in Republican politics, according to public records.

I asked Mills via text message if he disputed dating the woman and whether he dated a 19-year-old while a member of Congress. Mills replied, “Mother Jones’ slanderous and misleading comments, combined with Roger Sollenberger’s continued false accusations from known leftist media, makes your request absurd.” 

He continued, “There’s nothing illegal about two consenting adults dating. The obsession over a man’s dating life is disturbing at best. I’ve been separated from my now ex-wife years prior to our divorce finalizing. Whether in office or as a private citizen, adults are entitled to date in their attempt to find their person. Sometimes you get lucky and find that immediately, but many are not so blessed. Feel free to run your new and slanderous hit piece.”

When I profiled Mills earlier this year, untangling the congressman’s many dubious claims took months of reporting. I ended up speaking with 18 people who have known Mills from his youth to the present day. The picture they painted was almost universally unflattering. 

As one former associate put it to me, Mills is a “human fucking trainwreck.” Others called him a “little bitch,” “repulsive and vile,” and a “schmuck bordering on being a douchebag.” Adam Ehrhardt, a medic who served under Mills in the Army, called his former sergeant a “pathological liar.”

Mills’ time testifying in the restraining order case last year raised more doubts about the congressman’s honesty. While on the stand, the congressman told Langston’s lawyer that he was not in divorce proceedings. Langston’s attorney then revealed that she was holding the paperwork from Mills’ ongoing divorce in her hand. “He lied in front of a judge,” Langston said in an interview with a Florida news outlet this month. “He lied under oath.” 

Judge Koberlein made a similar suggestion when assessing Mills’ claim that he no longer had access to intimate videos of Langston. As Koberlein put it in his decision granting the restraining order: “The Court, considering the totality of the testimony and circumstances, does not find [Mills’] testimony concerning the intimate videos to be truthful.”

An excerpt of Judge Koberlein’s decision in which he found that part of Mills’ testimony had not been “truthful.”Mother Jones

Mills has been similarly deceitful about his military record. He has claimed to have been a member of Joint Special Operations Command, the elite group that oversees much of US special operations forces. Service records for Mills released by the Army provide no evidence that he was part of US special forces. An Army official also told me that Mills “attended Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) in 2002 but did not complete the course.” Former military contractors who worked with Mills in Iraq and Afghanistan told me he claimed to have been an Army Ranger, an Army sniper, and a special forces qualified medic. None of that is supported by Mills’ service records. 

Most egregiously, Mills has been accused of obtaining a Bronze Star under false pretenses. To justify the Bronze Star, Mills has produced the official form used to nominate him for the award. The document, which was submitted about 18 years or more after the alleged heroic acts it describes, claims that Mills saved the lives of two comrades “while under intense enemy fire” in Iraq in 2003. One of those men, Joe Heit, has told me and NOTUS that Mills did not save his life. Heit said he has no memory of ever seeing Mills in Iraq. The other person whose life Mills supposedly saved is a former medic who was grievously wounded rushing to Heit’s aid. That soldier’s mother has said that he has no memory of the battle.

The Bronze Star form also claims that, during a different battle, Mills saved the life of a third soldier by bounding forward under “murderous enemy fire.” From there, it states that Mills subdued an “enemy insurgent” who had captured Sgt. First Class Joe Ferrand. Ferrand has written in a statement shared with congressional investigators that he “solemnly swear[s]” that the story is entirely made up. “The act never took place,” he wrote. “The event never happened.”

I asked Mills on Sunday if he stands by the claim that he saved Ferrand’s life. In response, he texted me an Army record that shows he received a Bronze Star, and said that there are “confirmed audits” and validation of his awards by the Army and the Department of War. The real question is whether the award was obtained through false claims of heroism. I asked Mills three times if he still claims to have saved Ferrand’s life; he responded to each of those messages without addressing the question.

A handwritten statement from Joe Ferrand refuting the claim that Mills saved his life.Obtained by Mother Jones

The full scope of Mills’ misrepresentations is much broader. He first ran for Congress by presenting himself as a successful businessman. Court records I reviewed make clear that his business, Pacem Defense, which specialized in selling grenades to foreign militaries, was falling apart when he first ran for office. Since entering Congress, he claims to have stepped away from Pacem Defense and related businesses by placing those assets in a “blind trust.”

Kedric Payne, vice president and general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, told me earlier this year the set up of Mills’ blind trust does not make sense because his financial disclosure forms list the share he owns in the companies that are in it. As Payne noted, “If you can see what your holdings are, it is not a blind trust.”

Late last year, Pacem indefinitely furloughed many of its workers as it was hounded in court for tens of millions of dollars in unpaid debt. Still, Pacem managed to keep money flowing to at least one company. A filing in another lawsuit filed against Pacem shows that it paid $12,000 per month in rent to a company called Pacem Estate Holdings during the period when its workers were furloughed. Mills owns 100 percent of Pacem Estate Holdings, according to his congressional financial disclosure. In short, Pacem stopped paying workers but apparently kept money flowing to a company wholly owned by Mills. 

Like many of Mills’ former associates, Florida primary voters who take the time to look into the congressman may similarly decide they want nothing to do with him. Or they could pull the lever for a congressman their president called a “Tremendous Champion for the Great People” of his district. 

President Trump spent the weekend turning on two US security partners. He ordered a cutback in joint military exercises with South Korea, citing his “very good relationship” with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator — and threatened to bomb Oman, one of the countries mediating between Washington and Tehran.

On Sunday, Trump posted on Truth Social that based on his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un” and the finances required, he ordered Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” annual joint military exercises with South Korea, designed to prepare against threats from North Korea. At the end of his post: “While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!”

Seoul is downplaying it. South Korea’s Defense Ministry said the exercises began Monday as planned, and President Lee Jae Myung said the two governments had “maintained close coordination” on joint training and would keep doing so.

But the reversal is abrupt. Just three months ago, as the Associated Press noted, Hegseth praised South Korea for raising defense spending and “assuming primary responsibility for the security of the Korean Peninsula” — a shift he called proof of “alliance burden-sharing that all of America’s partners would do well to follow.” It’s the same pattern the administration ran on NATO members who declined to back the war on Iran.

Regarding Oman, Trump told Fox News on Monday that “if Oman gets in the way [of US-Iran negotiations], we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” Oman is reportedly close to an agreement with Iran to restore commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the passageway that carried 20 percent of the world’s crude oil before the US and Israeli strikes on Iran began in February.

Trey Yingst: "I just got off the phone with President Trump … the president told Fox News that Iran should raise the white flag of surrender … the president said that if Oman gets in the way, 'we'll bomb the s**t out of them""

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-17T13:54:57.609Z

Oman is also a strategic partner of the US in the region and often acts as a diplomatic mediator between the US and Iran. The US holds a security agreement with Oman that allows it to access Omani airfield and port facilities for military purposes.

It looks like yet another time where Trump makes decisions built on personal squabbles rather than its critical security relationships.

When Florida congressional candidate John Strand introduces himself to potential voters, he starts with his criminal record. “I’m John Strand, patriot for Congress, the J6 hostage who went to prison on principle so that you don’t have to,” he said at a January debate hosted by the Women’s Republican Club of Naples Federated.

The former international underwear model spent about a year in federal prison after a DC jury convicted him of five criminal counts, including one felony, related to his participation in the January 6 assault on the US Capitol. In January 2025, Trump pardoned him, along with 1,500 people convicted of J6-related crimes. And now, Strand is using his J6 infamy to try to catapult into Congress in one of the weirdest GOP primaries in the country this year.

Of the 10 candidates currently running to fill a seat vacated by Rep. Byron Donalds, who is running to be the GOP candidate for Florida governor, Strand is actually one of two felons pardoned by Trump in the race. The other, former Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY), resigned from Congress in 2019 and pleaded guilty to insider trading and lying to the FBI. He was serving a 20-month prison sentence when Trump pardoned him at the end of his first term.

John Strand speaks during an event hosted by Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, June 13, 2023.Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/AP

Joining them is former Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), who lost his 2022 primary after being plagued by scandals ranging from sexual harassment allegations to carrying a gun through TSA—twice—and claiming he’d witnessed some of his House colleagues do a “key bump of cocaine” right in front of him. The frontrunner, Catalina Lauf, ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2020 and 2022—in Illinois. She lost the 2020 race to former Illinois state senator Jim Oberweis, who is also now running in Florida’s 19th.

To distinguish himself from the pack, Strand has leaned hard on his status as a J6 “hostage” while supplementing his rhetoric with the timeworn GOP campaign tactic of demonizing LGBT people.

“Hostage” is a bit of a stretch. After he was arrested in Beverly Hills a few days after the 2021 attack on the Capitol, Strand opted to go to trial rather than take a plea bargain, as did Simone Gold, the anti-vax doctor he accompanied into the Capitol. Gold was sentenced to only 60 days in prison as a result. Strand got 32 months after a jury found him guilty on all counts. The sentence included extra time for lying on the stand and fundraising off his “49 minutes of infamy” while a court-appointed lawyer represented him.

Strand likes to blame his prison sentence on an “openly biased DC jury,” but the evidence against him was overwhelming. After leaving the Capitol, he literally texted someone, “We stormed the Capitol. It was insane.” Video footage also showed him at the front of the mob, stepping over a fallen US Capitol Police officer on his way into the building with Gold.

As the crowd began to force their way into the Capitol building, Dr. Simone Gold and John Strand were part of the crowd that violently pushed/pulled an officer down the stairs.

I slowed down/highlighted the pair currently being sought by the FBI.
H/T: @Cineaste_C
: NyPost pic.twitter.com/nf7PGOqwJG

— 𝚃𝚘𝚡𝚒𝚌 𝚆𝚘𝚘𝚍𝚎𝚗 𝚆𝚘𝚖𝚊𝚗 (@Autre_Vierge) January 12, 2021

Strand has engaged in some revisionist history to spin this record into a selling point for his congressional candidacy. “I was innocent,” he insists on his campaign website and in ads. “The DOJ vacated every charge.” The judge, however, saw things differently. “This Order does not constitute a finding of innocence,” wrote US District Judge Christopher Cooper in an order dismissing Strand’s case after his pardon. “Nor does it affect the existence of probable cause for Defendant’s arrest and prosecution.”

Hard time clearly isn’t enough substance to drive a congressional campaign, especially in a race featuring more than one former felon. So Strand has adopted another popular MAGA strategy: attacking the LGBTQ community. Strand was homeschooled and raised in a conservative, Christian family. He has seamlessly supplemented his J6 story with Bible references and promises voters a return to “Judeo-Christian values.”

“The enemies of America—both foreign and domestic—are erasing truth, rewriting history, distorting gender, and sexually exploiting our children,” says his campaign website, where he’s portrayed as a “maverick” in a leather jacket like Tom Cruise in Top Gun.

In May last year, Strand joined in a protest in Naples, Florida, to support the city’s decision to ban a drag show from a public park during Pride week. In December, he testified before the Naples City Council to further support city action against Pride events by speaking “some hard truth” about what he learned while working in Hollywood.

“Pride,” he said, putting air quotes around the word, “is a very aggressive, explicitly sexual enterprise with a terribly destructive agenda, confusing, distorting and then destroying the natural and healthy design of human sexuality.” He claimed that the “Pride movement” was “eroding the health and strength of the family unit,” and called it a form of tyranny that features “deviant sexual behaviors.”

WOW: I challenge anyone in the nation to watch this—and ask yourself:

“Are any other candidates for Congress speaking truth like this?”

There is only one way to save our nation:
Confront evil head-on…and overcome it with good.https://t.co/MlXjx59P2i pic.twitter.com/Yxg9rH14sO

— John Strand (@JohnStrandUSA) August 4, 2026

Strand, 43, doesn’t always seem to have found the “Pride movement” so toxic. In his memoir, Patriot Plea: The J6 Journey of a Political Prisoner in the Divided States of America, he briefly recounts his years couch-surfing through West Hollywood as a struggling model. But he omits some critical details.

“I met him in a gay bar,” says Loran Morgan, who has known Strand for more than 15 years, speaking about that time. Morgan says back then, Strand had many gay friends. He even attended Morgan’s 2010 birthday party at The Abbey, the “world famous gay bar,” according to its website, where drag shows are a staple, and went back there with Morgan at least one other time, in 2014. Morgan says in 2011, he even secured Strand a job working in an Equinox booth during the Pride Festival in West Hollywood.

Florida congressional candidate John Strand working at the Equinox booth at the 2011 Los Angeles Pride Festival.Loran Morgan

Strand’s years modeling underwear also landed him in gay media. In 2012, for instance, he graced the cover of Sensitif, a French gay magazine, and inside, he poses virtually nude. He also modeled skimpy underwear for RUFSKIN, a gay California fashion label. (Strand did not respond to several requests for comment.)

No one I spoke with claims that Strand was gay or engaged in gay sexual acts, but they say he definitely associated with LGBT people and seemed supportive of the community. For about a year starting in August 2011, Strand and his now ex-wife lived with Amy Messigian, a Los Angeles lawyer who let them stay rent-free in her house in exchange for caring for her dog while she was at work. “His group of friends was predominantly gay,” she told me. “He would go out with his boys in West Hollywood. His wife would stay home.”

John Strand and Loran Moran at the Abbey, a gay bar in West Hollywood.Loran Morgan

Messigian had a group of old friends who would regularly meet up socially, and Strand and his wife would often join them. One of those friends, Richard Valois, who works in advertising in Los Angeles, says he and Strand once went out without the group. “He had a place he wanted to go to in West Hollywood because he knew the bartender. It ended up being a gay bar,” Valois told me, noting that he was surprised to end up there because their friend group didn’t go to gay bars. He was even more surprised by Strand’s choice of venue “because he had a wife.”

“He had no problem with gay people back then, so why is he doing that now?”

“I’m not saying he’s gay,” he emphasized. “But when we went there, he knew the bartender. He knew everyone.” He’s mystified by Strand’s current campaign against Pride events and trans rights. “He had no problem with gay people back then, so why is he doing that now?”

In Patriot Plea, Strand says he lost many of his Hollywood friends after he embraced Trump. “I torched my Hollywood career with a Maverick barrel roll into public support for MAGA,” he writes. But his former LA friends say they never knew him to care about politics. “He had this insatiable thirst for fame. All his social media was talking about being famous,” Valois says. “He would post his laps that he did in the pool. That was his whole persona. He was not a political person in any sense of the imagination.”

Strand was famous, they say, for being marginally employed, never paying for drinks, and always looking for a place to crash. (In his memoir, he mentions bouts of homelessness.) Even before his turn towards MAGA, he’d fallen out with many of these friends because they tired of him taking advantage of their goodwill. Messigian asked him to move out after she says he neglected her dog.

Morgan and Messigian both reported Strand to the FBI after seeing photos of him at the Capitol on January 6. They were furious when Trump pardoned him. January 6 was one of the most “horrifying moments in our history that I experienced,” says Messigian. “So any pass that he’s been given is unfortunate and undeserved.”

“I was like, dude, so many of the LGBTQ people had your back and took care of you the whole time you lived here, and now you’re going after them.”

Morgan, who is gay, feels doubly angry about Strand’s latest reinvention as a congressional candidate. “I still can’t believe he is even running for an office. In one video I saw, he was going off on trans rights and gay rights,” he told me. “I was like, dude, so many of the LGBTQ people had your back and took care of you the whole time you lived here, and now you’re going after them.”

It’s not clear whether Strand’s J6 narrative or his attacks on the LGBTQ community are winning him many votes. He has secured a few endorsements from MAGA world, including from Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Gen. Michael Flynn, and MyPillow guy Mike Lindell and talk show host Dennis Prager. But his campaign has failed to raise much money—little more than $100,000, with almost $20,000 of that coming from a personal loan from Strand himself. (Not even Simone Gold seems to have contributed, according to FEC records.)

Strand has made much of the fact that Turning Point USA, the conservative youth group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, had endorsed him. But the week before the primary, the group quietly unendorsed him and threw its weight behind one of his challengers, Catalina Lauf, who worked at the Commerce Department in the first Trump administration.

Strand had been fervently trying to win an endorsement from Trump. But the president doesn’t like to endorse losers, and a Victory Insights poll poll released August 7 showed Strand languishing at the bottom of the pack, with barely 3 percent support. On Friday, Trump endorsed Lauf.

A few years after her husband died, Sandie Slowey moved from Pennsylvania to a mobile home in Hernando, a small town in rural Citrus County, Florida, known for its open green spaces and pristine spring waters. Down the road from her home was a horse ranch, and Slowey enjoyed the serenity of her quiet retirement from her job as a nurse—strolling on lush walking trails and sitting outside in the afternoons to hear the birds sing. On chilly evenings, she sleeps with her windows open.

In February, on Valentine’s Day, a neighbor told Slowey that the Deltona Corporation, a Florida real estate developer, planned to construct an 800-acre data center next to their neighborhood. Then in March, Slowey noticed the horses were gone. When she checked tax records, she discovered that Deltona had bought the property. It also bought another lot next door.

Slowey was outraged. Friends back in Pennsylvania, who now live near data centers, had warned her about the constant noise, and she worried that the incessant humming would pierce through the thin walls of her home. As one among dozens of residents who spoke up against the project, she said as much at a county planning and development commission meeting in March. She joined with other residents and decided to form No Data Center Citrus and organized a community meeting that attracted many residents, some of whom voiced their concerns at commission meetings. Their efforts worked. “We had two overflow rooms full, and they had to stop people at the door because there was no room,” Slowey recalled. County officials ultimately rejected Deltona’s proposal and approved a one-year moratorium on any data center projects. 

The fight in Citrus County against data centers has played out in dozens of communities across Florida, and as residents in rural areas—already fed up with the encroachment of new development that has infiltrated much of the state in the last few years as its population has grown—feel threatened by the explosion of data center construction. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz reported in May, there are at least 268 local opposition groups across 37 states. The local resistance against data centers “draws on a current of populism—and suspicion of big companies, and fear of AI-prompted job loss—that goes beyond party boundaries,” Hurwitz wrote this month.

Voters’ rage at these construction projects has extended into Florida’s politics and splintered the Republican base. Many of these Floridians, some of whom are lifelong Republicans, are not voting for US Representative Byron Donalds, the leading GOP candidate running for governor to succeed Gov. Ron DeSantis, during this week’s primary election. Donalds has openly supported the technology infrastructure, provided regulations were in place. As Politico reported, he’s also accepted millions in campaign contributions from data center developers. “I’m not anti-data center. I’m pro having a plan,” Donalds said in February, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “Data centers are going to be a function of American life going forward.”

Although polls show he will win the Republican nomination, the data center issue likely will discourage many GOP and independent voters from supporting him, even leading them to cast ballots for his opponents. Slowey, a registered Republican, will vote on Tuesday for Jay Collins, the current lieutenant governor, who has vowed to put Floridians first before data centers, calling for stringent guardrails around the facilities.

I spoke to other residents who say they will vote for Bobby Williams, a grassroots conservative and third-generation Florida native who opposes data centers. It is unlikely he’ll win, according to polls, but the fact that he has amassed support in many communities outside bustling metro areas is one more example of a nationwide trend of how once-loyal voters are fed up with the current GOP establishment that takes money from large corporations at the expense of local concerns. 

“Most everybody that you talk to, everybody on Facebook, everybody that we talk to on the street, it’s all about the data centers.”

“Party labels are less important when it comes to our homes and way of life,” Slowey told me. “Everything for this election, for me, is based on the data centers at this point, and I think most everybody that you talk to, everybody on Facebook, everybody that we talk to on the street, it’s all about the data centers.”

If Donalds wins, come November’s general election, Slowey says she will throw her support behind David Jolly, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate. Jolly, a former Congressman who was once Republican, announced in July that he would enact a statewide moratorium on construction, citing environmental and economic concerns. Slowey suspects others in her community are making the same calculations. 

This past week, I spoke with residents in several Florida counties that have dealt with the data center issue—Marion, Citrus, Escambia, Palm Beach, and Sarasota—and asked them how this topic is influencing their votes. Some registered Republicans told me they would not support Byron Donalds and instead vote for Williams or other candidates in the primary. Other voters, like Slowey, told me they will support Jolly in the general election.

Susan McManus, a seasoned political analyst in Florida, called the governor’s race a “bloody primary,” a term used to describe infighting within a political party during an election cycle. Eleven different Republican candidates are competing in the primary for governor.

The challenge for Republicans will be that in these red, rural areas, residents are hostile to data centers and to candidates—like Donalds—who openly support them. But the central question for Democrats will be if voters in these conservative, heavily Christian communities can get past the way that “socialist” has become affixed to Democratic candidates, she said. “Maybe they won’t vote for the Democrat,” McManus said of Republican voters in the general election, “but they’ll stay home, which is equally bad.” 

The local government in the city of North Port, in Sarasota County, is grappling with the data center dilemma. Like much of the state, in recent years, the once sleepy town has now boomed into a city of nearly 100,000 with a younger population and lots of development. Robin San Vicente, an environmental and wildlife consultant, moved there in 1999 and has warily watched the growth. So when the city received an application for a data center construction project, San Vicente was among those who spoke out. Wearing a black tank top printed with the words NO DATA CENTERS, she told commissioners at a July 21 meeting, “It is extremely important that we take the time to accurately assess all of the data required to implement proper citywide protocols and guidelines in the name of public health and safety.”

Last month, she created the Facebook group, No Data Centers North Port FL, and in the last five weeks, it has attracted more than 900 members. They post news articles about data center moratoriums or videos of community meetings. Comments range from concerns about the data centers being close to wildlife preserve areas, the excess water usage, the thought of having a nuclear reactor, which many data centers use, in an area prone to hurricanes nearly six months out of the year. As one North Port resident wrote: “DO NOT VOTE for public officials who don’t put the residents of North Port FIRST.”

The North Port city commission is now considering an 18-month moratorium on data center projects. San Vicente, who is an independent voter, says she is considering David Jolly in the general election. “We don’t trust Byron at all. He is supported by Trump, and people are not trusting Trump anymore.” She added that many people had their eyes “opened” and realized that “what party you belong to doesn’t matter with this particular issue.”

In Citrus County, Slowey and the steering committee she’s a part of are now helping the commission draft ordinances to regulate any future data centers, including the regulation of water usage, as well as distance requirements from schools and churches. They hope the measures will be enacted before the one-year moratorium ends.

Still, the threat of a data center being erected in town lingers. Deltona, the developer, still owns the land close to Slowey’s home. “We won the battle,” she told me, “but we haven’t won the war.” 

Since Abdul El-Sayed’s win earlier this month to become the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s US Senate seat, the right has ramped up its attacks on him, condemning his past comments as evidence of him being a “terrorist” and “radical Islamist” or a “jihadist sympathizer” who is “infiltrating from within”. But it has also targeted El-Sayed’s family—including his wife, Sarah Jukaku, a psychiatrist, and his half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, a writer and assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

The same week as El-Sayed’s victory, President Trump posted a photo of himself and First Lady Melania Trump in formal attire next to a photo of the Senate nominee and his wife, who is wearing a hijab. “Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s [sic],” the post reads. 

More recently, media outlets like Fox News and the New York Post have dug into Abdelhadi’s past, citing her arrest last fall on a felony charge for allegedly spitting on an Illinois state trooper during a protest outside Broadview ICE Detention Center in Chicago next to a mugshot, remarks on Israel and Palestine, and criticism of American holidays like July 4th and Thanksgiving.

Socialist Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed's half sister is revealed to be a radical University of Chicago professor who was arrested last fall on felony charges for allegedly spitting on an Illinois state trooper during anti-ICE riots outside a detention facility in suburban… pic.twitter.com/kKU2oeEsmx

— Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) August 14, 2026

“Abdul loves his sister and also disagrees with her on a number of political positions and the rhetoric she’s chosen to use,” Sophie Pollock, a spokesperson for the El-Sayed campaign, told Fox News in response to its story on Abdelhadi’s arrest. “But Abdul is the one on the ballot and his record of public service and his platform is what matters to voters here in Michigan.”

El-Sayed had already addressed much of the right’s criticisms—and increasing concern from establishment Democrats—previously, distancing himself from his past support for the “defund the police” movement along with other progressives candidates looking to come across as more presentable in the lead-up to the midterms. 

But for the many on the right, backing down from past progressive rhetoric once, or even many times, will never be enough. It is those same folks on the right who dictate what is considered unacceptable and, in response, what many Democrats may worry is too radical or “woke” for potential voters leaning more toward the center.

Conservatives co-opted “woke” and its discourse. Democrats don’t have to fall in line with them.