Where’s Obama, you ask? The better question may be, where’s Trump? Former President Barack Obama spent Saturday supporting Democratic candidates in three of the most consequential races of this week’s elections. President Donald Trump, on the other hand, spent the weekend partying and golfing at Mar-a-Lago—a reflection of what has been his uncharacteristically reserved approach to Tuesday’s vote. Obama delivered speeches in support of two congresswomen-turned-gubernatorial candidates: Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. In both, he lauded the candidates, criticized their opponents—former state assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli and current Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, respectively—and characterized votes for the Democrats as acts of resistance against the Trump administration. “If you meet this moment, you will not just put New Jersey on a better path,” Obama said at the Newark rally for Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor who currently represents the state’s 11th Congressional district. “You will set a glorious example for this nation.” In Norfolk, Virginia, he delivered a similar message about Spanberger, a former CIA officer who served three terms in Congress: “If you believe in that better story of America, don’t sit this one out. Vote. Vote for leaders like Abigail who believe it too. Vote for leaders who care about your freedoms and who will fight for your rights.”  > Trump, meanwhile, spent Friday night hosting a Great Gatsby–themed Halloween > party at Mar-a-Lago, just hours before tens of millions were set to lose > access to food stamps. Also on Saturday, the former president called New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani—again—to wish him luck on election day and offer to be a “sounding board” in the future, the New York Times reported, citing two people familiar with the call. According to the Times: > Mr. Obama said that he was invested in Mr. Mamdani’s success beyond the > election on Tuesday. They talked about the challenges of staffing a new > administration and building an apparatus capable of delivering on Mr. > Mamdani’s agenda of affordability in the city, the people said. > > […] > > Mr. Obama spoke admiringly about how Mr. Mamdani has run his campaign, making > light of his own past political missteps and noting how few Mr. Mamdani had > made under such a bright spotlight. > > “Your campaign has been impressive to watch,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Mamdani, > according to the people. According to the Times, Mamdani told Obama that his 2008 speech on race inspired the mayoral candidate’s own recent speech on Islamophobia in response to comments made by his main opponent, ex–New York governor Andrew Cuomo. If he is elected, Mamdani would be the city’s first Muslim mayor—a fact that his critics, especially those on the right, have used as the basis for an onslaught of Islamophobic attacks against him for months now. Mamdani and Obama also reportedly discussed meeting in Washington DC at some point in the future. Dora Pekec, a spokesperson for Mamdani, said in a statement to the Times that the candidate “appreciated President Obama’s words of support and their conversation on the importance of bringing a new kind of politics to our city.” The former president first called Mamdani back in June, after his primary upset, the Times reported. Trump, meanwhile, spent Friday night hosting a Great Gatsby–themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, just hours before tens of millions of low-income Americans were set to lose access to food stamps due to the ongoing government shutdown and Republicans’ refusal to use contingency funds used to keep the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) operating in the interim. And on Saturday, Trump golfed and ranted on his Truth Social platform—but made no mention of Tuesday’s elections. While Trump endorsed Ciattarelli in the spring and participated in a telephone rally for him this week, he only voiced support for Earle-Sears last month and has yet to formally endorse her. Spokespeople for the White House did not respond to questions about Trump’s activities this weekend and why he has not more strongly backed the Republican candidates. But polls may provide the answer: The Democrat candidates are leading in both Virginia, which is set to elect its first female governor regardless of who wins, and New Jersey, where the current Democratic governor is term-limited and no party has held the office for three consecutive terms since 1961.

If you had to describe the last decade or so of political life in America, the list would likely include the following: The Black Lives Matter movement. The death of George Floyd. America’s first Black president. The rise of the MAGA movement. The election and reelection of Donald Trump. A resurgence of white nationalism. An erasure of Black history. America in these last 10 years has experienced generational political upheaval, clashes over race and identity, and a battle over the very direction of the country itself. Few writers have charted these wild swings better than staff writer for The New Yorker and Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb. And for Cobb, it all started when he was asked to write about an incident that was just beginning to make national news: the death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black 17-year-old in Florida. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “At the time, I thought of Trayvon as this particularly resonant metaphor. But I didn’t understand that he was actually the start of something much bigger,” Cobb says. “I’m still kind of hearing the echoes of that moment.” Cobb recently released Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012–2025, a collection of essays from more than a decade at The New Yorker, that all begin with that moment of national reckoning over Martin’s death. On this week’s episode, Cobb looks back at how the Trayvon Martin incident shaped the coming decade, reexamines the Black Lives Matter movement and President Obama’s legacy in the age of Donald Trump, and shares what he tells his journalism students at a time when the media is under attack. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: Tell me about that time when you started writing and reporting on Trayvon’s death and how it’s evolved into where it is today. Jelani Cobb: That was a really striking moment, I think, partly because of the contrast. There was a Black president. We had seen circumstances like Trayvon’s, decades and centuries. We had never seen that in the context of it being an African-American president. The first thing that I ever wrote for The New Yorker was a piece called Trayvon Martin and the Parameters of Hope, and it was about exactly that contradiction. The fact that we could be represented in the highest office in the land, that we could look at Barack Obama and see in him a barometer of our progress, even though lots of things people agree or disagree with about him politically, but the mere fact that he could exist was a barometer of what had been achieved. And at the same time, we had this reminder of the way in which the judicial system can deliver these perverse outcomes, especially when there are cases that are refracted through the lens of race. At the time I thought of Trayvon as this particularly resonant metaphor, but I didn’t understand that he was actually the start of something much bigger, because Black Lives Matter is an outgrowth. The phrase, the framing, that language, Black Lives Matter, came out of the aftermath of the verdict that exonerated George Zimmerman, who is the man who killed Trayvon Martin. And in a weird kind of bizarro world response, Trayvon Martin’s death was also cited as the impetus for Dylann Roof, who three years later killed nine people in the basement of the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and he said he had been radicalized by the Trayvon Martin case. And it went from there. Really both of those dynamics, those twin dynamics of this resurgence of white nationalism and this kind of volatile Christian nationalism and this very dynamic resonant movement for black equality or for racial equality, and almost the kind of crash the path that those two were put on in that moment. Yeah. Three or More Is a Riot, is a collection of your past essays. After you were finished putting all this together, I’m just curious. What did you learn about the things that you had written, and also what did you learn about yourself? Because I think when I look back at old writing that I did I see myself in where I was, versus where I am today. Yeah, I think writing is either intentionally or unintentionally autobiographical. You’re either putting it out there and saying, this is what I think at this moment about these things, or time does that for you. If you come back, you can go, oh wow, I was really naive about this, or I really saw this very clearly in the moment for what it was. When I was combing back through these pieces, one conversation came to me, which was a discussion I had with my then editor, Amy Davidson Sorkin at The New Yorker. After I’d filed the first piece on Trayvon Martin, she said, “Why don’t you just stick with the story and see where it goes?” In effect, I’m still doing that. I’m still kind of hearing the echoes of that moment. There are 59 pieces in this collection, some of them short, some of them lengthy, but in looking at each of these pieces, I started to plot out a path. And that’s why the subtitle for the book is Notes on How We Got Here: 2012 to 2025, because I started to plot out a path seeing the rise of Trumpism and the MAGA movement, seeing the backlash to Barack Obama, the mass shootings, the racialized mass shootings in El Paso and Pittsburgh and Buffalo, all of which I had written about, and the way that these things were culminating into a national political mood. Yeah, yeah. I’m curious. I can remember when Obama was elected, I was volunteer/working with young black men, or boys at the time. Now they’re all grown up. But I was mentoring a group of black kids that were in a very poor neighborhood, and they were struggling to get by. The parents were. A lot of them had single parents, not for the reasons that most people prescribe. A lot of them had single parents because their other parent had passed away, and they were just trying to get by. I remember when Barack Obama was elected, I felt like this sense of hope, and also a little bit of relief because I’d been telling these boys that they could be anything they wanted to be. And deep down inside, I felt like I had been selling them a lie, but I’d been selling them a lie for a higher purpose, like for them to reach for something bigger. And when Barack Obama got elected, I felt like, okay, I’m not lying anymore. This is a good thing. I felt hopeful. Over his first term, though, what I began to realize with working with these young men is that nothing in their life was changing. Nothing at all. Everything that was changing in their lives happened because of what they were doing, but nothing changed when it came to national politics or what the president can do. I guess the question I have in saying all of that is how do you look back at the Obama years? Do you feel like in this weird way that it was a dream that never was really actualized, or was it a dream that was actualized? Did we see progress through that? You know what’s interesting, and I hate to be this on the nose about it, but I actually kind of grapple with that question in one of the essays called Barack X. It’s a piece I wrote in the midst of the 2012 election because he was running for reelection, which didn’t have the same sort of resonance because we already knew that a black person could be elected president. We had seen that. And that motivation was different, and it was this question of whether or not people would stay the course, whether people would come out. Incumbency is a powerful advantage in American politics, but there’s also, even at that point, you could see these headwinds forming around Obama. In that piece, I grapple with the question of not only what Obama had done, but I think more substantively what it was possible for him to do in that moment. It became this question for history I think. It takes 25 years after he’s left office to have a fair vantage point on what he reasonably could have done versus what he actually did. And the reason I say that is substantively, I think a lot of us felt that way, that things weren’t changing, that we were still grappling with the same sort of microaggressions at work, sometimes even worse. We were dealing with police who were behaving in a way that they were, and at the same time, this is the President of the United States who was called a liar while addressing Congress. This is a person who got stopped and frisked essentially, and had to show his birth certificate to prove that he was eligible to vote in the election he actually won. Not the question of whether he was eligible to be president, it was a question of whether or not it was even legal for him to vote in that election if he wasn’t a citizen. And so when you stacked all of those things up, and you saw the entrenched opposition that had determined that their number one objective from the time that he was elected was for him to be a one-term president. That’s what Mitch McConnell said. That’s what the other kind of aligned forces in the Republican Party. Where the standard thing is, even if it’s just boilerplate, even if it’s just kind of standard political speech that they say, well, we’ll work with the president where we can, but we’ll stand by our principles, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s not what they said. Yeah, normally they’re just like, well, we’re going to work for the good of the American people, and if the president lines up with us, we will be happy to work for him. Yes, yes. Exactly. Mitch was very clear. That’s not what they said about him. And so balancing those two things, figuring out what the landscape of possibilities actually was, and then inside of that, what he achieved or failed to achieve relative to those things. So when Barack Obama was running for election, I just didn’t believe it was going to happen, until the day it happened. I was in disbelief. I was shocked. On the flip side, all the black lash that we have gotten ever since his presidency ended, and during his presidency really, all the black lash, I was completely, yeah, that’s par for course with America. It’s so unsurprising to me. You can just look back to Reconstruction and see how all that ended to kind of understand where we’re going. One of the things that Obama did in his political rhetoric period, was that he frequently denounced cynicism. He didn’t talk about racism very much, but he talked about cynicism a lot. And in fact, he often used the word cynicism in place of the word racism, that someone would do something racist, and he would say it was cynical. And it made sense because as the black president, you can’t be the person who’s calling out racism left and right. It just won’t work to your advantage politically. At the same time as his presidency unfolded, the people who he had called cynical, or at least people who were skeptical or maybe even pessimistic, began to have an increasingly accurate diagnosis of what he was up against. I like to think that before he was elected, Barack Obama knew something that nobody else in black America knew, which was namely that the country was willing and capable of electing a black man to the presidency of the United States. But after he was elected, I think black America knew something that at times it seemed like Obama did not, which is that people will stop at no ends to make sure that you are not successful. My father grew up in Jim Crow, Georgia, and he had the standard horror stories that everyone who grew up in Jim Crow had. And the message that he would give me is never be surprised by what people are willing to do to stop you as a black person, especially if you make them feel insecure about themselves. And it seemed like as the Obama presidency unfolded, that sentiment that he had dismissed as cynical became more and more relevant as the backlash intensified, as he was denied the unprecedented denial of a Supreme Court appointment, which was astounding. The tide of threats against his life that the Secret Service was dealing with. All of those things, when you pile all up together, it begins to look like a very familiar pattern in the history of this country, especially as it relates to race. I was definitely taught those same lessons. Definitely. My father is a Baptist preacher who loves everybody, but was also very clear. You’ve got to work harder, you’ve got to be better, and don’t be surprised. And I feel like that is the thing that has stuck with me all these years. It’s interesting, the right-wing political commentator, Megyn Kelly, recently said that basically that everything was good, and then Obama came and kind of broke us. Oh, yeah. And I just thought it was such a telling statement. Well, it’s a very cynical statement to borrow a line from Obama. Yes, it was a very cynical statement, and kind of telling on herself in the sense of, I think that that’s where the backlash is coming from, the idea that we had this black man as president, and now we have to get this country right. Yeah. Well, the other thing about it, there was a kind of asymmetry from the beginning. There was this congratulation that was issued to white America or the minority of white America that voted for a black presidential candidate. And on the basis of this, people ran out and began saying, which is just an astounding statement to even think about now, they ran out and said, this was a post-racial nation. Yeah, I remember that. But the fact that it was, and I would point this out. A minority of white voters in 2008 and in 2012 voted for a presidential candidate who did not share their racial background. In short, a minority of white voters did, but the majority, the overwhelming majority of black voters had been doing since we’ve been allowed to vote. Since we had gotten the franchise in our newly emancipated hands, we had been voting for presidential candidates that did not share our racial backgrounds. No one looked at black people and said, oh, they’re post-racial. They’re willing to look past a candidate’s skin color to vote for someone. In fact, it was more difficult for African-American presidential candidates to get support from black voters than it was for white candidates to do so, which is the real kind of hidden story of Barack Obama’s success. One of the lesser kind of noted things was that Barack Obama won the South Carolina primary with an overwhelmingly black electorate, but he won it after Iowa, after he had demonstrated that he had appealed to white voters. And I’ve long maintained that if those two primaries had been reversed, had they had been South Carolina first and then Iowa, he might’ve still won Iowa, but it is doubtful that he would’ve won South Carolina. So the Black Lives Matter movement, it was like the rebirth of the civil rights movement, so to speak. But right now, we’re living in an era where Black Lives Matter signs are literally being demolished and black history… I’m a Floridian. I’m talking to you from Florida right now, and I could tell you the assault on black history specifically in schools is real. Do you feel like Black Lives Matter as a movement failed? Do you see us coming back from this as a country, like being able to really talk about the history of this country, because it feels like we’re just running away from it now? There’s an essay that I’m going to write about this, about what black history really has been, and what Black History Month really has been, and why Dr. Carter G. Woodson created what he then called Negro History Week in 1926 and became Black History Month in 1976 to mark the 50th anniversary. But they had very clear objectives, and these were explicitly political objectives that they were trying to create a landscape in which people would spend a dedicated amount of time studying this history for clues about how to navigate through the present. That first generation of black historians went through all manner of hell to produce the books, to produce the scholarly articles, to produce the speeches, to create a body of knowledge that redeemed the humanity of black people, and specifically made a case against Jim Crow, against disenfranchisement. They understood that history was a battleground, and that people were writing a history that would justify the politics of the present. And so when you saw that black people had been written out of the history of the country, that slavery had been written out of the history of the Civil War, that the violent way in which people were eliminated from civic contention, had been whitewashed and airbrushed, and that what you saw in the day-to-day was segregation, poverty, exploitation, the denial of the franchise, the denial of the hard-won constitutional rights, there’s a reason, for instance, that the first two black people to get PhDs from Harvard University, and those two were W.E.B Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, they both got their doctorates in history because they were trying to create a narrative that would counterbalance what was being done. When I look at the circumstances that this field came into existence under, I’m less concerned about what’s happening now. I should say that what’s happening now is bad, but I think that we have a body of scholars. Now there are people who every spring a new crop of PhDs in this field is being minted, and people are promulgating this history in all kinds of ways and so on. And so I think this is a battle that has to be contested and has to be fought and ultimately has to be won, but I don’t lament about the resources and our ability to tell these stories. You’re on faculty at Columbia University and the last couple of years it’s been center stage not only for protests- Yeah, complicated. Yeah, complicated. How do you manage that in the classroom? I have to say that as a journalism school, there’s a very easy translation because the question is always, how do we cover this? What do we need to think about? What are the questions that need to be asked at this moment? After October 7th, when the wave of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations and the kind of solemn memorials on either side, I said to my students repeatedly, if I said it once, I said it 20 times, which is that you lean on your protocols at this point. You question yourself. You question your framing. You question how you approach this story. What is the question the person who disagrees with how you feel? What is the question that person would ask? And is that a fair question? And you relentlessly interrogate. And that’s also the job of your editors to relentlessly interrogate where you’re coming from on this story. I kind of jokingly said to them, I said, “We have told you from the minute you got here to go out and find the story, and we forgot to tell you about the times that the story finds you.” Yeah. How did you feel about Columbia’s administration’s response to the Trump threats? The only thing I can say is that it was a very complicated situation. As a principal in life, I have generally been committed to not grading people harshly on tests that they never should have been required to take in the first place, if that makes sense. Yeah. There was a lot that I thought was the right thing. A lot of the decisions I thought were the right decisions to make. There were other decisions that I disagreed with, some that I disagreed with strongly. But the fundamental thing was always framed in the fact that the federal government should not be attacking a university. That was what my overarching kind of statement was. But I will say that also the journalism school has tried to navigate this while maintaining fidelity to our principles and our support of free speech and support of the free press. Yeah. I think there’s a lot of hand-wringing among journalists right now. Fact-based reporting is being drowned out by misinformation and disinformation. What do you tell your students? How do you teach them in a time when journalism itself is under such threat? Well, the thing that we teach is that this is indicative of how important journalism is. Powerful people don’t waste their time attacking things that are not important. And so we’re able to establish kind of narratives. And granted, we’ve lost a few rounds in this fight, that people not only have less trust in us, but they have more trust in people who are sometimes outright charlatans, or people who are demagogues, and that is a real kind of difficult circumstance. But I also think that it’s reminiscent of the reasons that Joseph Pulitzer founded this school in the first place. The school was established in 1912 with a bequest from Joseph Pulitzer’s estate. Pulitzer understood at the time journalism was a very disreputable undertaking, and he had this vision of it being professionalized, of journalists adhering rigorously to a standard of ethics and thereby winning the trust of the public. And that was part of the reason that people actually did win the trust of the public over the course of the 20th century. Now we’ve had technologies and cultural developments and some other changes that have sent those numbers in the opposite direction, which I also will say this is not isolated. People distrust government; they distrust corporations; they distrust the presidency; they distrust all of these institutions that used to have a much higher degree of public trust. My approach to this has been we should not ask the public to trust us. We should not anticipate ever regaining the level of trust we had once enjoyed. But I think that the alternative is that we now just show our work to the greatest extent possible. Sometimes we can’t because we have sources who can only give us information anonymously, but we should walk right up to the line of everything that we can divulge so that we say, don’t trust us. Read for yourself what we did. If you wanted to, you could follow up Freedom of Information Act and get these same documents that we are citing in this reporting. Or we should try to narrow the gap between what we’re saying and the degree to which people have to simply take us at our word. America has obviously changed over the last 10 years. How have you changed? Oh, what’s really interesting is that, and this is the kind of unintentional memoir part of it, I think that I’m probably more restrained as a writer now than I was 10 years ago. Keeping my eyebrow raised and kind of like, hmm, where’s this going? I try to be a little bit more patient, and to see that what the thing appears to be may not be the thing that it is. And at the same time, I’m probably more skeptical than I was 10 years ago. I haven’t given up on the idea of there being victory, of it being a better tomorrow, but I also think that it will exact a hell of a cost for us to get to that place.

On Wednesday, former President Barack Obama joined California Gov. Gavin Newsom in a livestream for volunteers in support of Proposition 50, the governor’s redistricting measure, and the sole question on the ballot in the November 4 special election. As I reported last week in a story on the almost unprecedented spending around the measure: > Prop 50 is part of a larger redistricting fight unfolding across the country, > as Democrats seek to retake the House of Representatives and Republicans try > to retain their narrow majority in next year’s midterm elections. It all began > in June, when President Donald Trump nudged Texas Republicans to redraw the > state’s voting maps mid-decade, off the usual 10-year schedule, to swing five > seats in the national party’s favor. “This is in reaction to something unprecedented,” Newsom said at the start of Wednesday’s call. Proposition 50, Newsom said, is his attempt to counter Republican efforts to redraw congressional lines at the president’s behest, not just in Texas but in other states—like Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina—with GOP-run legislatures.  Obama, the highest-profile of many Democratic political notables to throw their weight behind the measure, joined midway through the call to drive home Newsom’s message.  “The problem that we are seeing right now,” Obama said, is that Trump and his administration are brazenly saying that they want to “change the rules of the game midstream” to “give themselves an advantage.”  “This is not how American democracy is supposed to operate. And that’s what Prop 50 is about,” he added, noting that the measure “has critical implications not just for California but for the entire country.” “As a consequence of California’s actions, we have a chance at least to create a level playing field in the upcoming midterm elections,” he said.  This comes days after Obama featured in the Yes on 50 campaign’s latest ad, and the same day that the Washington Post released a report about how the former president has been advocating for the measure behind the scenes since the summer.  As part of Saturday’s No Kings demonstrations, thousands of Bay Area protesters at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach showed their support for the proposal and opposition to Trump’s authoritarian policies by forming a human banner that read, “NO KINGS,” and below that, “YES ON 50.”

“It’s all gas, no brakes.” For David Hogg, a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, there’s little time away from politics right now, especially considering his $20 million campaign to disrupt his own party.  Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, and gun control advocate, is looking to oust what he calls “asleep at the wheel” incumbents in primaries around the US through his political action committee, Leaders We Deserve. It’s a strategy that has won him admirers and detractors, especially from the Democratic establishment, who say he shouldn’t be meddling in primaries, considering he’s now a party boss. So far, Hogg isn’t backing down. But he argues that it might get him kicked out of the DNC altogether. The party is set to vote June 9 to decide whether to redo Hogg’s election. Just seven years ago, Hogg was a high school senior in Parkland, taking speech and debate classes and prepping for college. But all that changed when a former student entered his building and committed the largest mass shooting at a US high school. Hogg quickly co-founded the student-led organization March For Our Lives and became one of the nation’s most prominent gun control activists. Today, he’s the first member of Gen Z to be a vice chair at the DNC and, through Leaders We Deserve, is aggressively challenging the party’s status quo to generate “an attitudinal shift.” “What we’re trying to do is say, across the board, Democrats need to stand up and fight harder,” says Hogg, whose PAC is trying to recruit a fresh slate of young candidates. “And if there’s somebody that feels nervous about potentially being challenged as a member of Congress, they should ask themselves why that is ultimately.” On this week’s More To The Story, Hogg discusses why he’s ruled out running for office himself and how the anger he felt after the shooting in Parkland still drives him today. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Arlie Hochschild, an award-winning author and sociologist, has spent years talking with people living in rural parts of the country who have been hit hard by the loss of manufacturing jobs and shuttered coal mines. They’re the very people President Donald Trump argues will benefit most from his sweeping wave of tariffs and recent executive orders aimed at reviving coal mining in the US. But Hochschild argues that Trump’s policies will only fill an emotional need for those in rural America. She should know. In 2016, Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land was a must-read for anyone who wanted to better understand the appeal of Trump and his ascent to the White House. She spent time in Louisiana talking with Tea Party supporters about how they believed women, minorities, and immigrants were cutting in line to achieve the American Dream. But in her latest book, Stolen Pride, Hochschild shifted her focus to Pikeville, Kentucky, a small city in Appalachia where coal jobs were leaving, opioids were arriving, and a white supremacist march was being planned. The more she talked to people, the more she saw how Trump played on their shame and pride about their downward mobility and ultimately used that to his political advantage. “A lot of people in this group have felt that neither political party was offering an answer,” Hochschild says. “And they have turned instead to a kind of charismatic leader.” She argues that the secret to Trump’s charisma among his supporters has to do with “alleviating the shame of that downward mobility.” On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks with Hochschild about the long slide of downward mobility in rural America and why she thinks Trump’s policies ultimately won’t benefit his most core supporters. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app.

The Internal Revenue Service, as the New York Times reported this week, is mulling Donald Trump’s request to revoke the tax-exempt status of Harvard University after Harvard refused to cave in to the president’s demands for a sweeping right-wing overhaul. The Times also reported, just yesterday, that a Treasury official had emailed a high-level official at IRS to find out whether Mike Lindell, a wealthy supporter of the president and spreader of Trump’s Big Lie, was “inappropriately targeted” for an audit. John Koskinen is appalled. As the tax agency’s commissioner from 2013 through 2017, he understands, more than most, the importance of an independent IRS, and that no president has the right to weaponize the agency to curry favor or settle grudges. We haven’t witnessed this sort of nonsense since, well, Richard Nixon—and look how well that worked out for him. > “This has to be the worst time for the agency I can remember.” Harvard was just the latest salvo. Republicans have waged an all-out war on the IRS since 1994, calling for its abolition and slashing its budgets—which is not how you behave if you are legitimately concerned about deficits and the national debt. Koskinen, appointed by President Barack Obama, has been hauled before Congress to defend his agency and its employees against an onslaught of tea party–fueled attacks. House Republicans even tried to impeach him, albeit unsuccessfully. But what he’s seeing now is on another level. Trump is gutting the IRS workforce without congressional consent, and has grown increasingly brazen in his attempts to have the agency do his bidding. IRS is now sharing taxpayer information with Homeland Security to aid in Trump’s deportation efforts, a breach of privacy and independence Koskinen never would have abided. Now 85 and (finally) retired—”I’ve flunked retirement a couple times,” he says—Koskinen was appointed commissioner at a time when federal agencies were, for the most part, still run by competent and experienced people, and not, to quote Thomas Friedman, “knuckleheads.” Over a long and illustrious career, he has served under mayors, senators, judges, and presidents. He was a high level staffer for the Kerner Commission, ran the US Soccer Foundation, and chaired the 1994 World Cup host committee. He held a high position in President Bill Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget and chaired Clinton’s council on the “Y2K problem,” so successfully that nothing happened—which was the point. As the deputy city administrator of Washington, DC, from 2000 to 2003, “I was there for 9/11, for anthrax, for the sniper,” he told me. “I thought, ‘People are gonna think this guy’s got a black cloud, like Joe Btfsplk in the old Andy Capp comic.'” He also spent decades in the private sector as a fixer, working to get tottering entities such as the Penn Central company, Levitt and Sons, and the Teamsters Pension Fund, back on track. One of his retirement “flunks” came about in 2009, when he was tapped to chair Freddie Mac—in the midst of a global mortage meltdown. (Black cloud indeed.) As for who runs the IRS now, well, what day is it? Commissioner Daniel Werfel, a Biden appointee, stepped down shortly after Trump’s inauguration and well before the end of his five-year term. To replace him, Trump tapped Billy Long, a former congressman from Missouri who has yet to be confirmed by the Senate. Acting Commissioner Doug O’Donnell, a career employee, quit after about a month on the job, when he was asked to share IRS data with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. He was replaced by Melanie Krause, who pledged to cooperate with DOGE, only to resign after Homeland got its mitts on private taxpayer information—a development that prompted the exodus of a number of other IRS officials with “chief” in their titles, who probably didn’t want to be associated with whatever came next. The speed and scope of the staff cuts, tens of thousands to date, could well make the next tax season a “disaster,” Koskinen says. And while Republicans often say that the government should be run like a business, what company in its right mind would deliberately alienate customers, encourage cheating, and undermine its own ability to collect revenue? “A lot of these people come out of the private sector; you would think they would understand that,” Koskinen says. “Instead, they are barreling ahead. And the only explanation is that they think it’ll be good for them—they won’t get audited. It really is nonsensical if you’re concerned about the deficit.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The IRS has been under siege for decades, including on your watch. Does what’s happening now feel fundamentally different? Yes, this feels more like a total frontal attack, and not only the budget—it’s the attempt to get access to protected data. And from the president suggesting that Harvard’s tax-exempt status ought to be reviewed, it’s just a small step to start ordering audits, even though that’s illegal, and we start moving back toward the Nixon “enemies list.” It also seems that this is an attempt to make the IRS less effective. And this is one federal agency with a positive return on investment. It’s never been disputed that if you give money to the IRS, you get more money in return. It goes the other way, too. If you take money away from the IRS, you lose multiples of whatever it is you think you’re saving. In my days, even the Freedom Caucus never disagreed with that. The New York Times reports that about 22,000 IRS employees accepted a buyout. What happens when you eliminate so many people so quickly? I am confident that includes a significant number of very experienced managers and executives. Over 30 percent of the IRS has always been eligible for retirement, but they don’t retire, because they’re committed to the mission. When, literally overnight, you lose that many people, you’re losing leadership. You’re losing guidance and mentoring. You really are disabling the IRS. What people don’t understand is the IRS starts preparing for the next tax season in June or July. There’s a tremendous amount of reprogramming that has to go on. And then you have to make sure it works. And the underfunding? A lot of that money is coming out of IT. What do the mass resignations tell you about agency morale? Well, it has to be a problem. My theory has always been, if you want to know what’s going on in an organization, go talk to the people doing the work. When I was there, I went to two large IRS offices a week for three and a half months, holding town halls and lunches, and was just delighted with the level of [commitment]. > “If the money is short, that’ll be a good reason to cut social programs—’We > just don’t have the funds.‘” The IRS was under tea party attack and people’s primary concern—these were employees, not managers—was how to get the work done with fewer people. We lost about 20,000 in the four years I was there because of the budget cuts, but that happened over time; we just didn’t replace people who left. Now, with the rattling of the cage that’s gone on, and the demeaning of government workers and attacks on the IRS, it’s not nearly as much fun to work there. This has to be the worst time for the agency I can remember. Do you think Trump’s people will succeed in making the IRS a tool of his retribution? They’re trying. I mean, they started out wanting access to all sorts of information about taxpayers, and they got pushback from the interim commissioners. So then we got [the shareable information] down to a narrower category. But even that is a broad category, and nobody seems to have paid attention to the documents: It’s criminal prosecutions and those under criminal investigation—without any explanation of what that means or how they’re measuring it. Everybody is subject to being under criminal investigation as a way of getting access to your tax materials. As for Harvard, that’s just the first step. This is an administration priding itself on revenge, and the FBI director and the Department of Justice people are out there saying, in effect, “We’re going to get our opponents.” They’re talking about investigating every member of Congress on the January 6 panel. It’s one thing to have the agency not collect taxes well enough. It’s another if the administration doesn’t like me or my views, so the next thing I know I could be audited. And even if I don’t have any problem, being audited takes time and money, and you need a CPA or a lawyer or somebody to represent you. They’ll make your life hell. Yeah, and the threats to law firms and the press will be designed to intimidate people. You know George Orwell, right? You intimidate lawyers, you intimidate the press, and you intimidate universities. You try to make it so people do what you want, so their view of life is yours. Then the administration can put out facts and information and there’s nobody to disagree. The head of HHS can say, well, we really do think autism is caused by vaccines, and people will say, Gee, if I object, I’ll lose my contract or grant or I’ll get audited. This is not beanbag anymore. What do you mean? This is not kid’s play. This is serious—a threat to the country and the democracy as we know it. What do you hear from current IRS staffers? It’s interesting. I hear from almost no one because they are so ingrained to protect taxpayers and their returns and the agency. Even at the executive level—and I know a lot of those people extremely well—they’ve all been very careful not to send me emails or complain or reveal anything. It’s to their great credit. Michael Lewis just published a book called Who Is Government? Hes says that’s a default trait of federal employees: They aren’t clock-watchers. They tend to work obsessively, for low pay, and never seek credit. It’s just so different from the picture painted by guys like Elon Musk and Russell Vought. And Republican lawmakers, too. When Biden was working to boost IRS funding, they unleashed a propaganda campaign falsely claiming the agency would hire 87,000 new agents—basically jack-booted thugs—to harass ordinary people and small business owners. They were going to come and get everybody! Yeah, it was just a stunning exaggeration. The overwhelming majority of the layoffs to date have been probationary employees—Biden hires. Many of them actually had special skills, right? Yes. They were easier to terminate. But probationary sounds like they’re just out of college. A lot of them came with very sophisticated backgrounds and experience in technology and tax law management. They weren’t 25-year-olds. They were filling important positions. When you lose them, that’s not good. The Washington Post said almost half of the planned job cuts would come from the compliance division, which oversees audits and criminal investigations into tax fraud and money laundering. What message does that send? As I used to say, “It’s a tax cut for tax cheats.” I mean, you encourage people not to file, because they’re not going to get caught. You encourage people to take deductions they aren’t eligible for—they figure, well, the worst that happens if I ever get audited, which I probably won’t, is they charge me interest or a penalty. About 85 percent of Americans try to be compliant, because if you aren’t, the IRS will get you. If word starts to spread—and it will spread first among wealthy people with sophisticated CPAs and attorneys—that the audit rate has gone down by 80 percent, a lot of people are going to try to take advantage of that. Say more about who benefits, and who pays the price. When revenue agents and revenue officers were cut by 30 percent or 35 percent while I was there, large partnerships basically didn’t get audited. Everybody knew who was involved in those: usually wealthy investors and Wall Street types advised by sophisticated counsel. And those people knew the audit rate had to be cut. You can’t just go after rich people—even though you’d get more money that way—because you need to encourage compliance across the board. So ultimately you lose billions of dollars in collections. Then at some point the politicians raise taxes, and the compliant people pay for the taxes not paid by wealthy people. Or…the politicians use the lower revenues to justify more budget cuts. That exactly! If the money is short, that’ll be a good reason to cut social programs—we just don’t have the funds. Do you think that’s the administration’s end game? I don’t know whether they started out that way, but that’s clearly where it’s going to end up. A number of these people, historically, have thought the best government is no government. Is there anything about these cuts you’ve found surprising? The scope of them has surprised me. The irony is, those of us who have spent a lot of time in the government would say you can always find—and it’s important!—ways to be efficient and effective. The administration has missed a great opportunity to do that appropriately. Having spent 20 years doing turnarounds of large, failed enterprises, the last thing I ever thought was, well, let’s starve the revenue arm. The salespeople—cut them back! No, your goal was to maximize revenues to give them the running room to do what was needed. The IRS is easy to scapegoat, because Americans are kind of conditioned to hate the agency and hate paying taxes. What would you say to change their minds? I would say the vast majority of people rely on social programs, some of which they don’t even realize are funded by the federal government. All of those are at risk. When you cut park rangers, suddenly there are long lines trying to get into a park. People are gonna say, “I didn’t mean get rid of a program I rely on.” > “If you cut the IRS by 40 percent, you’re at a minimum going to cut revenue > collection by $500 billion a year.” At the IRS, my approach was to be available and transparent and to try to get people to understand that we spent a lot of time and money trying to help people be compliant. If you had financial difficulties, we could arrange payment systems. You could do offers and compromise. If you’re trying to be compliant, I used to say, we’re here to help you. If you’re trying to cheat or not file or not pay your fair share, then I’m happy to chase you to the ends of the Earth. I would hope that more people would understand you’ve got to protect the agency, because it’s how the government funds itself and it’s a way of making sure everybody pays their fair share. I don’t want to pay my fair share and have rich guys get away with not paying. Speaking of helping people, the IRS recently rolled out free online tax filing. But now Trump, who took a $1 million inaugural donation from Intuit, which makes the TurboTax software, reportedly aims to kill it. DirectFile is a good example of the government providing an important service, allowing people to file at no cost. Since most people aren’t thrilled about paying taxes, making it as easy and inexpensive for them as possible was a great goal. It’s a shame that this option has been arbitrarily taken away from them.   Another blow for compliance. Even when they get through disabling all these agencies, they won’t have dealt with the deficit problem significantly, especially if they’re collecting less revenues. Just the undocumented immigrants pay almost $70 billion a year in taxes—or they did. Now that Homeland Security has negotiated [with IRS] to find out who they are, where they live, the estimate is half of that money is not going to get paid. And that’s a tiny slice of what won’t be coming in. Yes, there are estimates that, if you cut the IRS by 40 percent, you’re at a minimum going to cut revenue collection capacity by 10 percent—$500 billion a year. And encourage cheating. Yeah. There are people today who don’t file because they think the chances getting caught haven’t been large for the last 15 or 20 years. So, does it worry you to see the DOGE kids mucking around in IRS systems? It certainly does. These are people have no idea about how the place runs. Somebody told me that they had decided on Monday, the day before the tax filing deadline, to fiddle around with the website, and parts of it either had bad spelling or didn’t work. Who in their right mind would touch anything in the last week—or month—before the filing season ends? You really are fixing the plane while you’re flying it. You can’t just shut down for a couple months and say nobody can file. Filing season ended on Tuesday, but a lot of people filed extensions and there’ll be returns, and the system will have to operate through October 15—and by then they’ll be testing the system to get ready for January 1. After cutting so many people, I gather it would take quite a while to put things right. Yes. Part of the problem is Trump’s people have no background in government and how things operate, and they tend to come from the private sector. They think, Well, they’re all fungible. We’ll cut them and then, if we need them, we’ll hire some new people back. But the level of complexity of these programs and agencies is such that you just can’t hire people off the street who, like people at the IRS, understand the IT systems and the processes for dealing with complicated tax situations and dealing with things internationally. When you lose experienced people, you can’t replace them overnight. They are going to destroy the efficiency of agencies, and it’ll take years to build it back. Too bad we don’t all know someone who works there, to put a face on the IRS. When I was talking to these thousands of employees, I’d say I understand how, when people ask what you do, you say, “I work for the government.” And where in the government? “Well, the Treasury Department.” And where in the Treasury Department? “Well, I actually work for the IRS.” > “They are going to destroy the efficiency of agencies, and it’ll take years to > build it back.” I’m not saying you should wear an IRS hat to the grocery store, but people know you personally through the PTA or church or the soccer team, and they know you’re a good person. And if you work for the IRS and like it, it must be okay. We needed 80,000 ambassadors to say, “I work at the IRS and I love it!” Reminds me how Harvard people would always say, Oh, I went to college in Boston. Well, I went to law school at Yale. I’ve never been a Harvard guy, but you’ve got to hand it to them that they took the position they did. It’s like with the law firms caving. There’s strength in numbers, and if you get picked off one at a time, it’s hard to fight back.

This story is a partnership with the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit news organization. The newly renovated convention center was lined with booths offering flyers and merchandise; the upstairs conference rooms were hosting a series of information sessions about housing, education, and health care services, and a couple of bouncy castles had been set up as part of the provided child care.  The daylong event called Res-Con, held on a sunny Saturday in April, was meant as a community resource fair, aimed at connecting residents with vital services. But the event was mostly empty. The front door traffic never amounted to much more than a trickle, and few of the upstairs talks had more than a handful of people in attendance.  Among those wandering the convention floor was 67-year-old Cece Brown, who over the last decade has become one of the state’s well-known proponents for addiction treatment and recovery services following the death of her 27-year-old son, Ryan.  By then, the boy who had loved Little League and played the cello had spent years battling the addiction he’d developed in college and struggled to find health care while working food service jobs that did not offer benefits. Then, in early 2014, millions of uninsured Americans were offered a lifeline when, as part of the Affordable Care Act, states were given the ability to opt-in to an expansion of Medicaid eligibility. But, for Ryan, it came too late. In April, he received his health care card in the mail. Three days later, he fatally overdosed on heroin.  > “I can’t say that he would have lived. But I can say that it would have given > him a chance.” “I can’t say that he would have lived,” Brown said of an alternative history in which her son had access to health care sooner. “But I can say that it would have given him a chance.” President Obama’s signature effort to improve access to health care, which came to be known as Obamacare, issued an “individual mandate” requiring all citizens to have health insurance or pay a fine, created a government-ensured marketplace of health care plans, and restricted insurance companies from denying care for those with preexisting conditions, among other reforms. The 800-page bill was, at the time, deeply unpopular, especially in deep red states like West Virginia. Just two years later, Donald Trump would ascend to the presidency—with the support of nearly 69 percent of voters here in West Virginia—in part by promising to overturn the law, which at the time a Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed was seen favorably by just 43 percent of Americans.  “They didn’t even understand that they were benefiting from Obamacare in so many cases,” said Kim Jones, who became a health care advocate in West Virginia after struggling to find medical care for her daughter’s diabetes, and who recounted a spirited local town hall in which proponents and opponents of the law angrily clashed. “I stood in the back, at one point, and realized that everybody…was saying exactly the same thing: that they wanted their families to be safe, and they wanted to be able to afford health care.” While the ACA remains a political battleground, its popularity improved dramatically once its benefits became available. Today, it’s seen favorably by 62 percent of Americans. “We should all be proud of the enormous progress that we’ve made,” Obama declared from the stage at the Democratic National Convention in August. “And I’ve noticed, by the way, that since it’s become popular, they don’t call it Obamacare no more.” In West Virginia, the rate of uninsured residents dropped more than half between 2013 and 2021, thanks to the ACA. And residents continue to sign up for the benefits it has provided in droves: In 2023, West Virginia saw the highest year-over-year enrollment in marketplace plans of any state in the nation. “If any major changes were to happen [to the ACA] it could be devastating,” Brown said. That potential for devastation in communities that have loyally supported him has not prompted Trump to abandon his vows to scrap the ACA. Last November, he declared that the program’s cost was “out of control” and promised that he was “seriously looking at alternatives” before adding that Republicans “should never give up” their efforts to overturn the health care law. While there is little likelihood such proclamations will undercut his campaign in places like West Virginia—a MetroNews West Virginia poll found in August that Trump had the support of 61 percent of likely voters, compared with just 34 percent supporting Kamala Harris—a successful repeal would take health care benefits from some of his most ardent supporters.  “The repeal of the ACA would make [access to health care]…just catastrophically worse in our state,” said Rhonda Rogombé, an analyst at the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. “It would mean that hundreds of thousands of people lose coverage overnight. And within the recovery population, it would just decimate their access to treatment.” Even as they acknowledge that attacks on the ACA remain potent political rhetoric, health care experts question whether, at this point, it would even be possible to extract the benefits, reforms, and services provided by Obamacare from the rest of the American health care system. “It’s like trying to repeal the interstate highway system,” said Timothy Jost, a policy expert and emeritus law professor at Washington and Lee University. “It’s there. And I mean, there’s no way you could repeal the entire statute.”  “The Affordable Care Act is so entangled in the fabric of our lives. I don’t know how the healthcare system would survive if the entire ACA was repealed,” added Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, who administers the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in an interview. Yet even if a second Trump administration is unlikely to fully repeal the ACA, it could take further steps to undermine its services. In 2017, Republicans were able to reduce the penalty for not having health insurance to zero, effectively eliminating the individual mandate, something Trump mentions on his campaign website. And under Trump, federal funding for “navigator programs,” which help citizens figure out how to enroll and take advantage of ACA services, was slashed from $63 million a year to just $10 million.  “All week they had been trying to do away with the Affordable Care Act in Congress,” Brown recalls of a September 2017 trip she took to appear at the White House alongside first lady Melania Trump and other families that had suffered amid the opioid epidemic.  When each person at the roundtable was asked to share suggestions, Brown told Ryan’s story, including how he received his Medicaid card just before he died, thanks to the ACA. Unbeknownst to her, her response was recorded and ended up being broadcast by the local news.  “I was glad for that, because I thought, you know, people need to hear what kind of a difference having healthcare through the Affordable Care Act can bring,” Brown said. “Because it just makes such a difference in the lives of people, or even giving them life.” If repeated during a second Trump presidency, such cuts could upend programs like the West Virginia navigator program run by First Choice Services, said Jeremy Smith, the program director, who has worked with the program since its inception in 2013. In 2016, the state’s three navigator programs received a combined $600,000 in funding. By the last year of Trump’s presidency, two of those programs had been forced to close due to underfunding, with the remaining office getting just $100,000.  “We wanted to continue to do whatever work we could to help the community since we’d already been doing it for so long. So, you know, we hung in there and made it work,” Smith said. “But it definitely changed things as far as how much help we could provide.”  Under the Biden administration, which has focused much of its outreach on trusted messengers programs, funding for navigator programs has surpassed pre-Trump levels. Last year the administration provided $80 million in navigator grants, just over a million of which went to First Choice Services in West Virginia. Health care providers credit such funding, as well as other Biden-era subsidies that drove down costs, with helping propel the spikes in ACA marketplace enrollments in states like West Virginia. Under the Trump administration, Smith said, his group was lucky if they could manage 50 events each year. In 2024, they held more than 30 events during each of the first three months of the year. The work, they acknowledge, can be difficult.  But even sparsely attended events, like the Res-Con convention center fair in April, can lead to crucial connections. “We’ll meet a lot of people where they are by handing out literature and talking to them, you know, just telling the community, and that seems to make a big difference,” explained Smith. “We really think it’s making…a healthier population.”